Twelve hours later, the King's study was at the epicentre of a paper explosion. The high, trim room had become a contained갤that belonged purely to Art. Dozens of candles, some new, some reduced to puddles of spluttering wax, cast long, flickering shadows that made the towering stacks of ledgers appear like a mountain range of craggy rock in a barren planet. The room was thick with the scent of old paper, beeswax, and the acrid, chemical smell of Art's own sweat.
He had long since thrown off the tight, formal coat and tailcoat, left slumped in a chair like the uniform of a killed soldier. He was in his shirt sleeves, the thin linen crumpled and spattered with ink, his cravat loose and hanging sideways. He was a man possessed, carried by cold terror, righteous fury, and the bittersweet thrill of a puzzle beginning to fall into place.
He had not slept. Sleep was a luxury denied him when the interest in the national debt was accruing with every breath that he breathed. At morning, servants had crept in with a breakfast of cheeses, breads, and wine, abandoned on a side table where it went cold, untouched. They eyed their new king in awe and terror, whispering in the corridors about his odd, obsessive zeal. They eyed a man on the verge of lunacy; Art only eyed a task that had to be done.
His mental monologue was a stream-of-consciousness discussion of pure outrage. "It's a disaster. A wholesale, total shambles. There isn't even a central account ledger, no general fund, no concept of double-entry bookkeeping. It's all cash-basis, single-entry accounting. Every department—household, military, navy, royal works—has its own book, its own treasurer, its own system. None of them reconcile. It isn't an open invitation to fraud; it's a red carpet, a welcome amenity basket, and a free bottle of bubbly to every individual with sticky fingers and a minimal grasp of figures."
He'd spent the early morning at work on a bird's-eye view of the nation's finances, attempting to assemble a rough national balance sheet on several enormous pieces of parchment. He'd written down columns with a piece of charcoal—Assets, Liabilities, Revenue, Expenditures. The Asset column was disappointingly short. The Liability column extended onto a second page.
Now, though, he had changed his strategy. He could not draw the full audit on his own. He had to find a weakness, a soft spot that he could attack in order to prove the system was crooked. He evaded the enormous, attention-attracting spending for the time being; panning the Queen's fashion allowance or the military spending was politically suicidal now. He had to uncover something small, indisputable, and intolerable.
He homed in on the Royal Pensions list. It was a thick, harmless-looking book recording disbursements to the aristocracy and their relatives in compensation for services to the Crown long ago, a centuries-old tradition. It did not sound all that incriminating, yet Art, by virtue of his 21st-century experience, realized that payroll and benefits was still a fraudeur's paradise. It was a system of trust, waiting to be pilfered.
He began the dull, numbing work of cross-referencing. He had sent a cringing youngster to the palace records in search of other documents: service records of the Seven Years' War, royal birth and death certificates in the chapel register, even property deeds. No one in this era would imagine doing this. It was all too time-wasting, too bureaucratic. It was work for dozens of clerks, not a king. But Art had the obsessive, fastidious tolerance of a born auditor.
It was infuriating work. The handwriting of the quill pen changed, spiraling prettily on one page, worsening to a spidery handwriting on the next. There were three different versions of the name. Dates would be left out, or written as "the summer of the late King's illness."
In a flash of pure annoyance, his eyes aflame, he leaned back in his chair and said to himself, "Show me all the payments made to this blasted Marquis de Luneville."
The HUD flashed in his field of view, a chilly blue sanctuary through candle-lit confusion.
QUERY NOT CONDUCTED: DATA NOT DIGITIZED. PERIODICAL SEARCH
Art groaned, rubbing his temples. "Useless," he muttered to the empty room. He was beginning to understand that the supernatural talent had its limitations. The HUD was a barometer of politics, a simulator of socials. It would reveal to him the outcome of a decision, the political fallout of an accusation. It wasn't a browser, though. It couldn't call up information that wasn't in his own head or in immediate proximity. It couldn't do the legwork. The stack of paper would still need to be climbed on foot.
He sat down to the ledgers once more, his face grimly resolute. The hours bleared into one another. He found the account of the Marquis de Luneville and his absurd pension for "wit." Another of a Duke, paid a vast amount to bear the appointment of "Grand Master of the Royal Wardrobe," a sinecure that somehow involved the grave approval of the King's buttons. It was all gross, extravagant, yet not criminal. It was merely the way the system functioned. He wanted more. He wanted a crime.
And, deep at night, when the last candle began to flicker, he found it.
The name was innocuous: a Marquis de la Tour. The record was straightforward: an annual pension of 5,000 livres in celebration of his martial service in the Seven Years' War. Art froze. The name bothered a memory from somewhere in his notes. He rose to his feet, his joints creaking in resistance, and began rummaging through his piles of notes, his heartbeat starting to thud a little.
He found the cross-reference in the death registry of the chapel, a morbid book chronicling the death of every noble person within the reach of the court. And there it was, in the neat, stylized writing of a palace chaplain. The Marquis de la Tour, Charles-Auguste. Deceased, 17th of April, 1771. Cause of death: Consumption.
He sat facing the two books next to each other on the desk. The Marquis had died three years earlier.
He quickly ran through the records of the pension ledger for the following years. There it was. 5,000 livres in the year 1772. Another 5,000 in 1773. And he knew, with absolute confidence, that next month it was again to be paid.
A shot of cold adrenaline ran through him, clearing the haze of weariness from his mind. Now was the time. The thrill of the hunt, the plain, uncompromising beauty of the discovery of the lie. This wasn't waste. This wasn't some grey area of chivalric precedent. This was clear, simple, prosecutable deceit. Someone was living on a man long dead.
He knew now what he was looking for. His hunt focused in. He worked at wild-eyed speed, going through the lists of pensions for recognizable names from the death register. He found another. A dowager countess murdered by a fever five years previous, still receiving her widow's allowance. And another, a baron murdered in a fall from his horse two years previous. It wasn't an error the first time through. It was a pattern. A "Ghost Pension" racket, an old standby of the frausters' repertoire.
He had his smoking gun. He had three of them.
He was the King. He couldn't walk down to the treasury and start rounding up the clerks. The system would consume him. Vergennes and the others would portray him as a tyrant, a lunatic attacking loyal families in his demented interpretation of the accounts. He needed a weapon. A tool. He needed an ally familiar with the Byzantine game of French finances, a man who would take action based on his findings without sparking a political conflagration.
He knew all along whom it had to be.
He moved to the door, his disheveled appearance being in strong contrast to the cold, hard resolve in his eyes. He yanked the door open, surprising the guard outside.
"Summon the Director-General of Finance," he growled, his voice gruff through disuse but laced with authority. "Summon Minister Necker. Bring him out of bed if need be. I require him here. Now."