by Angus Donald
Major – Holcroft’s heart quickened slightly at the sound of his new rank. King William, rejoicing at his victory at the Boyne, had been lavish with his promotions. Holcroft had been recommended for the step by Brigadier Wolseley, who had praised him for his action at the bridge at Duleek, telling the King that without Blood’s gunnery, the French Brigade would have been able to escape unscathed. With the Duke of Schomberg dead – and no replacement yet as Master-General of the Ordnance – there had been no one to oppose the move and the ebullient King had been well pleased to raise Holcroft to his majority.
Holcroft was not the only combatant to be so honoured. Jacob Richards now gloried in the appellation Lieutenant-Colonel Richards and Francis Waters was raised to the dizzy heights of captain.
Captain Waters had also been given a new and covert role. He had been seconded from the fourth company of Tiffin’s Regiment of Foot and set to work in a secret government department in Dublin Castle. This was also the work of Brigadier Wolseley, whom he had impressed with his hard work in the intelligence outfit that he and Holcroft had set up in Inniskilling. Wolseley had asked if Holcroft wished to join the new Dublin Castle set-up but he had demurred and insisted that he wished to remain with the Board of Ordnance, with his beloved guns. Nevertheless, Francis treated Holcroft as his mentor and was often less than perfectly discreet with him about his work.
‘Are you ready, sir?’ asked Captain Waters.
‘Ready for what?’ said Holcroft.
‘You surely cannot have forgotten, sir – it is the ball tonight. I said I would come and collect you at six of the clock and that we should go along together.’
The ball. Holcroft had indeed forgotten it. Or perhaps he had deliberately blocked its hideousness from his mind.
The Grand Ball at Dublin Castle, given by the Governor of the City, was to celebrate the victory at the Boyne. King William would be the guest of honour. All those officers who had distinguished themselves at the battle were invited – particularly those who had received a promotion – and were expected to attend.
‘It is six now?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘I suppose I had better put on my coat.’
‘I think, Major Blood, that you might need a clean shirt and cravat. And perhaps some stockings that aren’t spattered with mud. Where’s your wig, sir?’
Captain Waters cosseted and bullied Holcroft into decent ball-going attire, placed the barely used wig on his cropped head, followed by his plumed hat, gave his court shoes a wipe with his silk kerchief and pronounced them smart enough to dance in. Then he led Holcroft from the tavern into Dame Street.
Before they left the Whale and Crow, Holcroft gave the errand boy his letter to Elizabeth, with a shilling and instructions to take it to the Post Office.
There! It is done, he thought. He was a free man. As they strolled along Dame Street, he gradually became aware that Francis was speaking about his secret business in the castle. He knew that he ought to tell the boy to be silent about such matters but curiosity got the better of him. He began to listen.
‘. . . Anyway, a large quantity of letters were found in the baggage which was captured after the battle. Letters to and from James and his officers sent by all sorts of people – some the strangest characters, great men who pretend to love William and Mary but who are also in regular correspondence with James, just to be on the safe side, in case his royal fortunes should suddenly change.’
‘Anyone I know?’ asked Holcroft. A group of three obviously drunken junior guards officers came towards them in the street, arm in arm, singing a bawdy ditty, and the two officers stepped aside to give them a wide berth.
‘Well, yes, actually,’ said Francis. ‘Which is why I bring the subject up. Your particular friend Lord Marlborough has been writing to James Stuart. He is discreet, of course, and never says what might be constituted as treason to King William, or even outright disloyalty. But he apologised several times for his betrayal in the Glorious Revolution. Makes excuses, talks about the good of the country and so on. But the very fact that he is in communication with our enemy is . . . well, it doesn’t make him look very trustworthy. And William has been informed of this. I thought that you might like to tell him that his letters have been read and, well, he should be careful not to anger the King.’
Holcroft digested this intelligence. Damn Jack, why must he always be meddling in dangerous political waters? He suddenly wondered why Francis had told him this. He felt a sudden shaft of suspicion. If Jack were suspected of treason, it would be the height of stupidity to tip him off. And Francis was not stupid. Was this some ploy? Where they expecting him to reveal something – or do something – that would incriminate Jack? No, he did not believe it. That was the problem with intelligence work. There was always the suspicion of some dark ulterior motive. He realised that Francis had told him merely as a kindness. To help him to keep his friend out of serious trouble.
‘Thank you, Francis. I shall pass on what you say to Lord Marlborough.’
‘You know he has been lobbying to come to Ireland?’ Francis said. ‘He wants to bring a combined-arms force here to attack the Irish-held harbours.’
‘I know. He told me that he plans to come, if he can persuade the King.’
‘Well, tell him that this commerce with the enemy will not help his cause.’
Holcroft said nothing. They were entering the gatehouse of Dublin Castle, passing by the saluting sentries without comment, and coming out into a vast rectangular courtyard with dozens of carriages arriving at the main building and depositing their passengers, who joined a queue to enter the castle itself.
‘There is something else that I wanted to tell you, if I may,’ said Waters. ‘A number of the letters were written in code, and since you indicated you did not wish to be involved in these matters any longer, we sent a few of them to a retired mathematician in Cambridge, Professor Wallis, who has a reputation for this kind of work. And Professor Wallis was able to decipher the few we sent him remarkably swiftly, in a matter of hours – he is a very clever gentleman.’
Holcroft knew of John Wallis, an old man now who, in his youth, had broken codes for Oliver Cromwell during the civil wars, and later on for King Charles II. He was a very clever man – he was actually brilliant, to Holcroft’s mind. He had been impressed by Wallis’s musings on the subject of infinity.
‘The encrypted letters, it seems, were written by an agent of the enemy. A spy within our ranks, to put it bluntly. And they were all signed with the code name Agricola. Have you heard this name, sir?’
Holcroft admitted that he had not.
‘It is just that this spy was at Carrickfergus, it seems, during the siege. One of the letters makes a joke about Agricola revealing the location of the Duke of Schomberg’s tent. I thought that might interest you. It is possible that he may be an English or a Dutch officer. Can you think of anyone who might fit the bill?’
Holcroft shook his head. The two men had joined the queue to enter the castle, they were standing on the stone steps that led to the entrance. There were a dozen people around them: the men mostly in military finery, the women in peacock-splendid silks and satins, with wide fans and plunging necklines.
‘Have you any more information about this Agricola?’ Holcroft asked, keeping his voice low. ‘Who does he report to? Whom does he serve?’
‘We’ve sent the rest of the letters to Cambridge for Wallis to decode – a great mass of them – and we expect to have more information about this spy in due course. But we have discovered this: Agricola is the agent of your old enemy Henri d’Erloncourt, who is addressed in the letters simply as Narrey.’
*
Holcroft was drunk. He did not dance and he was bored with watching the elegantly dressed gentlemen and ladies circling each other in the minuet and making their graceful shapes on the dance floor. The ball was a rather subdued affair, in any case, and sparsely populated. The King had not attended, much to the Governor’s chagr
in, saying regretfully he must decline as he was deeply occupied with affairs of state. Everyone knew what that meant: news had been widely circulated about two catastrophic turns of events that put a dampener on the joy of the victory at the Boyne; indeed they made the whole bloody business seem no more than an unimportant skirmish in the context of the wider war.
A great sea battle had been fought off Beachy Head nine days earlier between the combined English and Dutch fleets and the French navy – and the men of Louis XIV had triumphed, sinking ten Anglo-Dutch ships for no loss of their own. With the Royal Navy thoroughly bested, there was much talk of a French invasion of England, which was expected imminently. As if that was not bad enough, news of the naval disaster came hard on the heels of a crushing defeat on land at the Battle of Fleurus, which took place in the Spanish Netherlands on the same day as the armies had been killing each other on the Boyne. The Duc de Luxembourg, commanding some forty thousand of King Louis’ finest troops, had routed the slightly inferior force of the Dutch field marshal Prince Waldeck, forcing him back to Brussels and conquering swathes of new territory. King William, it was said, was considering leaving Ireland and returning to England to deal with the situation personally. The result of this news and the attendant rumours meant that there was an undercurrent of gloom at the ball, which many tried to dispel with forced jollity and reckless drinking. The room was also too warm, lit with hundreds of candles – even a fire at one end – and was filled with the body heat given off by Dublin’s dancing gentlefolk.
When Holcroft’s mind was deeply troubled, he often found in alcohol a soothing balm. He found the same tonight and had taken up a station beside the huge bowl of bright red gin punch, from which he helped himself freely as he watched the revellers. But he was not genuinely admiring the elegant gyrations of the dancers: he was thinking about the letter he had written to Elizabeth, and already regretting the haste with which he had composed and dispatched it. He was casting off his wife on the basis of gossip, a momentous decision that surely merited a little more sober reflection. But the letter had been dispatched and presumably was now in some post-rider’s satchel on its way to London.
The other emotion troubling him was grief, a river of painful sadness running under the surface of his mind, over the death of Enoch Jackson. He had not been a good friend to Jackson, although the old man had been a staunch supporter and ally since he first joined the Ordnance six years ago. He had barely spoken to him this year, except to give him orders. And he had never thanked him for his steadfast loyalty and all the times he had followed Holcroft’s wilder schemes, even when he knew it was against the rules. The business with the Humpty at Joymount House, for example. And now he was dead. He would never be able to tell the old man what his friendship had meant.
He dipped his crystal cup into the punch once more. He was not used to drinking gin and they had clearly not stinted on the newly fashionable Dutch spirit in the mix – but he was beginning to feel rather better. As he sipped his drink, he pondered the other matter that was exercising his mind. This spy Agricola – who could he possibly be? Holcroft looked at the reddened faces of the officers from William’s various legions as they whirled past him, somewhat blurredly, on the floor. Was Agricola perhaps here this night?
There was Claudius Barden grinning like a monkey as usual and dancing showily with a pretty red-headed girl. Holcroft wondered if she knew what an ass he truly was. Could Barden be the spy – no, surely he was too stupid to attract Narrey’s attention. And Holcroft could not imagine Barden keeping a secret of that magnitude for long. He would be sure to make a silly joke about it. There was the Quartermaster, Edmund Vallance – he was a venal brute, if ever there was one. If Narrey was offering his agent bright gold for their service, which was the Frenchman’s usual practice, Holcroft could imagine Vallance passing on all manner of secrets without the faintest qualm.
And what about Brigadier-General Wolseley – on the far side of the room, talking to Captain Francis Waters. Could Wolseley be the traitor? Unlikely, but who could know the secrets of a man’s heart? Perhaps he hated King William for some reason or was so horribly mired in debt that only French cash could keep him out of the sponging house. He had not been at Carrickfergus during the siege but he had been in Belfast – only twelve miles away. And somebody – most probably the spy Agricola – had told the defenders of Cavan that the Williamites were coming to attack them in February. They had plenty of notice of that attack – so much that they had time to be reinforced by the Duke of Berwick’s horse and foot. Was it William Wolseley himself who tipped them off? There was no way to tell. How about Captain Jan van Zwyk there – the tall, handsome commander of the Blue Guards at Cavan – had he also been at Carrickfergus? Holcroft had no idea. But he found he now thoroughly disliked all tall, handsome Dutchmen. It would be most satisfying if it was van Zwyk.
This was the problem with intelligence. After a while you looked at everyone, no matter how blameless they truly were, as if they might be a traitor.
Lieutenant-Colonel Richards whirled past his eyes – it could not be his friend Jacob, at least. He had been in the Duke of Schomberg’s tent and had been grievously wounded when the French had fired on it from the roof of Joymount House. No spymaster in his right mind would fire cannon at his own secret agent. And Agricola had apparently joked about the attack on the tent afterwards – which was not something that Jacob would very likely do.
Holcroft’s eye was drawn by Jacob Richards’ partner, a slim, dark-haired woman, neat and graceful, obviously well trained in the dance, wearing a lovely sky-blue gown with a necklace of blue sapphires around her white neck.
It was Lady Caroline Chichester, of course.
Holcroft watched her for a while, entranced. What was she doing dancing with Richards? He was quite unsuitable – he was too dull for her and too poor. She was probably just being kind. Humouring him. Dancing out of duty. That was so like her. But she was encouraging him, which was unwise. He would take her a glass of gin punch when she next sat down and tell her so. She would surely appreciate his advice. He refilled his own crystal cup again, drank it off in one swallow and then filled two cups, ready to take some refreshment to the beautiful young lady when she finished her irksome chore.
But when the minuet came to its stately conclusion, Caroline did not sit down. She and Richards seemed to be laughing with each other, exchanging some pleasantries; then when the band struck up another tune, an allemande this time, Francis Waters approached her, bowed, seized her hand and they began to move in complement to each on the floor. Holcroft felt suddenly very foolish, standing alone with two cups of red punch in his hand. Of course, Caroline would be in demand at the ball. She was one of the most beautiful women there. And Holcroft did not care to dance. Why should she choose to sit and drink gin punch? Delightful as that would be for him.
As he watched her on the floor, he could not help but compare Caroline to Elizabeth. His wife was handsome, to be sure, but not elegant. Never elegant. She was a large-bodied woman, not fat but far from dainty. And she was loud. God, she was loud. Even when they were making love in Mincing Lane, trying for her longed-for baby, her voice had been like a trumpet blast in his ear. It had at times been difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. Caroline, he was sure, would not bellow at him like a sergeant-major, if they went to bed together . . .
Holcroft suddenly realised that he was standing at the edge of the floor and staring at Caroline as she danced. He took command of himself, drained both drinks, rid himself of the glassware and went to sit beside a large potted plant to wait out evolutions of this interminable allemande. The plant, some kind of extravagant fern, partly screened him from the rest of the room, and as he sat and leant his head back against the wall, he realised that he was extremely tired – the stress and exertions of the great battle, the deaths of so many of his friends, the heat of the ballroom, the gin punch warming his belly so very pleasantly. He closed his eyes, just for a moment or two . .�
�.
*
Holcroft woke with a start. The ball was over and the room was half empty. Servants were clearing away the detritus of the party, broken glass, plates of half-eaten food, dropped gloves and fans. There were other revellers who had also succumbed to the gin punch, it seemed; one officer in splendid scarlet and gold was snoring on the floor half under a table, using his wig for a pillow.
Holcroft got up – mouth like bone, tongue leathery – reached for a half-full glass of crimson punch on the table, thought better of it and grasped a jug of lukewarm spring water, which he poured gratefully into himself . . .
As he stumbled home in the milky light just before dawn, now feeling decidedly queasy, he thought about what the day ahead held for him. Nothing urgent. Nothing that could not be done from the inn or put off until tomorrow if he felt too indisposed to work. He had some paperwork to read and sign on his desk in the room concerning a shipment of black powder expected to arrive in Carlingford from England any day now, as well as some other reports about the state of the Ordnance, and he was supposed to be inspecting the new eighteen-pounders after noon, and getting the Train ready for the resumption of the war.
The battle at the Boyne had not ended the conflict in Ireland. Not by any means. King James might have fled to France but there were still large numbers of Jacobite troops in the south and west of Ireland, many of whom had not yet faced the hard men of King William’s armies, and were the braver for it. And they had no doubt been encouraged by the recent French successes on land and at sea. The Jacobites were strong in Connaught and were defending the line of the River Shannon in the west. And they held Cork and Kinsale and all of the wild lands on the south-western coast. The main force had retreated to Limerick, and he had heard they were fortifying the old medieval town and summoning their troops from across Ireland to defend it. It was thought that they had as many as twenty thousand men in arms in and around that city – the third largest in Ireland after Dublin and Waterford. Holcroft knew that there would be hard fighting before the war was over and the Jacobite cause put down for good.
