by Seth Hunter
The guards must have been posted at the door. They came crashing in with the Governor’s aide close behind. Nathan found himself in the ludicrous posture of standing on a desk while two Lobsters levelled their bayonets at him. Scrope climbed unsteadily to his feet. He pointed a shaking hand towards Nathan.
‘Do you see this man!’ It was clear that they did, even in the gathering gloom, for Nathan’s position was somewhat exposed. But the Commissioner repeated the question, his voice rising hysterically. ‘Do you see him? He tried to kill me!’
‘Nonsense. I intended only to teach you some manners.’ Nathan climbed down from the desk, taking care to avoid the bayonets.
‘Watch him!’ Scrope urged the guards. ‘Do not take your eyes off him for a moment. If he moves, kill him.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ Nathan appealed to the Governor’s aide, who looked at something of a loss.
‘What am I to do with him?’ he enquired of the Commissioner.
‘Take him back to the prison, and hold him under close confinement.’ Scrope was still tugging at his collar, his voice trembling.
‘On what charge?’ Nathan fought to keep his own voice steady.
‘Treason,’ declared Scrope, with all the considerable venom at his command. He flapped a hand in dismissal. ‘Take him away.’
Chapter Six
The Division of the Spoils
Caterina had played a great many parts in her life, but never a maiden in distress. Cleopatra was more in her line, or La Donna di Garbo in the play by Goldoni. The haughty beauty dangling her lovers on a string.
But vulnerability was not beyond her capabilities as an actor.
She took as her model St Catherine of Alexandria, her name sake in the famous painting by Caravaggio, leaning against the wheel they were about to break her upon. She did not have a wheel, but the chains helped.
She had been advised by her captor, Murad Rais, on what to expect.
‘They will call out your name,’ he said, ‘and the foreign consuls will have an opportunity to speak up on your behalf.’
He thought there was still a Venetian Consul in Tripoli. But if there was not, then as a woman of God – he smiled sardonically – she might appeal to the Catholic Fathers.
Caterina knew of the Catholic Fathers. They were one of the charities supported by her convent with the profits of their various commercial enterprises. They worked among Christian slaves on the Barbary Coast and raised money to buy their freedom if they had no resources of their own.
It would be only just for them to donate something on her account.
She did not possess the formal habit of a nun – it was not quite the style in the Convent of San Paolo di Mare – but she wore the most modest of her robes and ensured that the crucifix was displayed prominently on her bosom. She also carried her rosary, though not solely for the purposes of deception. They had taken her purse but the diamonds were still concealed beneath their black blobs of wax.
Louisa stood next to her, similarly attired. Caterina had considered casting her as a nun, or at least a novice, but as the entire crew and most of the passengers knew her as the American Consul’s daughter, one of them was bound to blab. And if her captors thought Louisa’s father had the means of paying a large ransom to have her restored intact, it might protect her virtue rather more effectively than the cloth.
She had intended to position both Louisa and herself in the front ranks of the prisoners where they could not fail to be seen, but she had not reckoned on the misguided honour of Captain Fry. This tiresome man, not content with having plunged them into this catastrophe in the first place, now ensured that the female passengers were corralled within a circle of his officers and crew, as if to protect them from the prurient eyes and grasping hands of the natives.
So to begin with she was hemmed in by broad male shoulders and obliged to crane her neck to see what was going on. She noted the foreigners, of course, by their distinctive dress. And the priests. Four of them, in a huddle near the back of the hall in their black cloaks.
When she heard the official call out her name, Caterina grabbed Louisa by the arm and began to force her way through the male phalanx, making judicious use of her elbows and dragging her chains after her.
She was about to make a direct appeal to the Catholic Fathers when she became aware that someone else had already appealed on her behalf. It did not take her more than a moment or two to realise that it was the French Consul.
Although the discussion was conducted in Turkish, she caught a few words of the translation that was afforded for the Consul’s benefit. He was apparently claiming that the Venetian passengers should be regarded as French citizens, on the grounds that the French Army was presently in occupation of the city and the new government had yet to be recognised. Initially, Caterina was inclined to favour this approach – for the French Consul in Tripoli was unlikely to know of her activities in Venice on behalf of his country’s enemies. But then she noticed the man standing next to him.
It was a considerable jolt. For she had last seen him at the head of a mob of Revolutionists on the Piazza San Marco.
His name was Xavier Naudé and he had been one of the leading French agents in Venice.
But what was he doing here – in Tripoli?
For a moment Caterina wondered if he had followed her here. But it was impossible. He had no means of knowing she had been taken by corsairs. Unless he had arranged it.
It said much for Caterina’s high opinion of herself – and of him – that she seriously considered this possibility.
For the last six months they had been deadly adversaries. Caterina on behalf of the Venetian Patriot Party, Naudé for the pro-French faction. He posed as a French diplomat but everyone knew he was a spy – an agent for General Bonaparte whose army was then sweeping through Northern Italy. She was not sure if Naudé knew of her own work as an agent for the British and the Austrians, but it had to be regarded as likely. And even if he did not, he knew her as a dedicated enemy of France.
He was a youngish man of thirty or so, and strikingly handsome. Perhaps she could appeal to his sense of honour. Honour among spies.
Better not. Better by far to put her trust in the
Church.
But the Church did not appear to be interested. There were mutterings among the four priests but no attempt to intercede for her. But then, of course, she remembered that they were a French Order and no doubt susceptible to the pressure of their countrymen, even since the Revolution. The Papacy itself had been forced to make peace with Bonaparte and pay an enormous tribute in gold and works of art to avoid occupation.
Caterina considered whether to throw herself at the feet of the Reverend Fathers and appeal for sanctuary. She was quite capable of doing so. The chains were somewhat of a hindrance but they could only add to the effect.
But now the Pasha had decided to intervene. He was in consultation with one of his officials. The Grand Keyha was invited to approach the throne.
Looking about the crowded room, Caterina caught the eye of her captor, Peter Lisle – or Murad Rais as his men called him. He looked troubled.
He had warned her about the Pasha. Not a man to be crossed, he had said. But at the same time he had told her that if she was to be taken into custody for a time, and this was almost a certainty, then the Pasha’s harem was not the worst place to be.
‘And what is?’ she had enquired coolly.
‘Well, it is a lot better than being farmed out to some Bedouin goat thief,’ he confided, ‘and spending the next few years in a tent or on the back of a camel.’
She agreed that this was not a future she could look forward to with any equanimity.
‘So your conscience would be at an ease, were I to end up as one of the Pasha’s concubines?’ she goaded him.
‘Who said I had a conscience?’ he retorted. ‘I just want you to fetch a good price. But no doubt the wives will see to it that you’re kept out of the Pasha’s clutches,’ he added
, puzzlingly.
Finally an announcement was made. Again it was in Turkish but this time a translation was given in French.
The Pasha would consult with the Divan, but his interim judgement was that when the Saratoga had sailed, the passengers had been citizens of Venice. The Doge having abdicated, the Republic no longer existed in its previous form and no treaty had been made with its successor. Therefore the passengers were prisoners of war and at the disposal of the Pasha. The men would be held in the dungeons under the castle, and the women and children would be housed in the Pasha’s own harem until a figure was agreed for their release.
It could, Caterina supposed, have been a lot worse.
Chapter Seven
The Prisoner of the Tower
They gave Nathan a room in the Tower of Homage. Four paces long and two paces wide with a single window, barred, through which he could see a small patch of sky.
And not so much as an ape for company.
Otherwise, as prisons go, it was not unbearable. There was a wooden pallet with a straw mattress, even a table and a chair, one bucket for washing, another for his more basic requirements. Some would call it luxury.
The first night there he thought about all the other prisons he had been in. A fair tally, given that he was still under thirty. A hardened criminal might have blushed. He rated them in order of preference, as some men rate inns, or the women they have known.
There was the Luxembourg in Paris, where he had spent three months during the Terror. Formerly the Luxembourg Palace, it had been built for Queen Marie de Medici early in the seventeenth century and still retained traces of its former grandeur; it even had a fountain in one of the courtyards where you could bathe or wash your clothes, and a theatre which had been turned into the prison store. You could buy most things there if you had the money, even the use of an old mattress and a few minutes with your loved one. The main problem with the Luxembourg was that for most of the prisoners, it was a staging post on the way to the guillotine, which tended to take the shine off things.
Even so, it was better than the Grand Châtelet, the ancient fortress on the river guarding the Pont au Change, where he had spent a few wretched nights shortly after his arrival in Paris, or the Maison d’Arret, where he had been hung in chains and flogged with a cane.
The Bridewell in Holborn, where he had whiled away a night after a duel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was hardly worth a mention. Nor was the cell in Fort Felipe in Cuba, where he had been detained by the rebel slaves known as the Army of Lucumi. But by far the worst was the Doge’s Prison in Venice, his last experience of prison life before this. He had been given one of the cells on the ground floor, below sea level, always damp and half-filled with water when the tide was in, sewer rats when it was not.
His present accommodation probably rated the best so far, had it not been for the charge of treason hanging over him.
And the loneliness. For he was allowed no visitors at all. Not even the prison chaplain. If Dr Moll had tried to see him, Nathan had no knowledge of it. During his time on parole, he had encountered other prisoners in the corridors or the courtyard where they were allowed to exercise – French or Spanish naval officers for the most part, awaiting an exchange. But not now. Now, in his new role as enemy of the state, he was held in total isolation, like a plague victim in the lazaretto. He must be held apart for fear of contagion. He was the prisoner in the tower.
The castle had been built by the Moors, back in the eighth century when Gibraltar was the springboard for the Moslem conquest of Spain. Over the 700 years of Moorish occupation it had grown into a vast fortress. But all that remained when the British took the Rock was the single ornate gatehouse, a few battlements and terraces – and the tower. The Tower of Homage.
Nathan was in a cell near the top. If he pulled himself up by the single bar in the window – which he did at least twenty times a day, for exercise as much as for the view – he could look down into the courtyard, where he was permitted to take the air once a day in the company of two guards. His few comforts – the table, the chair, the buckets – were presumably by order of the Governor, in deference to their shared experience of the Luxembourg. He had even sent a couple of books: the King James Bible and Book Two of Newton’s Principles of Mathematics. Nathan would have preferred lighter reading, but they helped pass the time.
And there was a great deal of time.
For one who had spent a good part of his life on a ship-of-war, with more than two hundred people crammed into a few hundred feet of space, the loneliness was devastating. And though a ship-of-war was not unlike a prison at times, you had only to step out onto the upper deck, or climb into the crosstrees, to enter a world of vast horizons. Here, there were just the four walls and the window.
He felt as if he had been buried alive. The panic was like some great beast that shared his tiny cage and threatened to consume him. He had to resort to numerous mental and physical exercises to fight it.
He spent a lot of time thinking.
He thought a lot about Sara. Sara in Paris, Sara in Provence, the short time they had spent on the Unicorn together before she left for England.
What was she doing now – and who with?
He reflected that it was not just distance and circumstance that had separated them, but his own inability to come to terms with what she was, or had become. The truth was, he had great difficulty coping with a woman of her maturity and experience – the fact that she had been married before, to an older man who was a notorious roué, and that she had almost certainly been in love with someone else. He wished he could accept that. Dear God, there were worse things one had to accept. But the thought of it was a constant torment to him. A not uncommon failing in men. Which was why most men of his acquaintance chose virgins of unimpeachable reputation and good family, he reflected: young women in their teens, or barely out of them, who could be moulded into the dutiful and charming wives and mothers of their heart’s desire, studiously trained to manage a large household but with very little experience of the world outside it. No wonder Fremantle had fallen for Betsy Wynne, a young woman with just enough experience of foreign travel to be deemed romantic, but still, fundamentally, an innocent.
He thought about his own life, and where it had taken him, and what he had learned from it. He thought, time and again, of that conversation in the Veneto with Junot about Bonaparte’s plans. Could it be possible that Junot had known he was a British agent and had deliberately set out to deceive him? He could not believe it. It was just possible, he supposed, that someone had given false inform ation to Junot, knowing he would disclose it to Nathan. But then this someone – whoever it was – would have had to know that Nathan was a British naval officer.
He would drive himself mad thinking about it.
Christmas came and went. The Governor sent him a bottle of wine and half a capon.
And so he entered the New Year. 1798. The fifth year of war.
Soon the swallows would be back, flying northward now. He wondered if he would see them in his meagre patch of sky – hunting insects in the fading light of evening, or rising on the air, finding their bearings, if that is what swallows did, as they gathered for the next stage of their journey back to England. Sometimes he lay awake at night and he could have sworn he heard them – the flapping of wings overhead, hundreds of wings, as the birds set off on their journey. Not just swallows and martins, but every species that follows the sun, cleaving the air above his lonely tower. The warblers and flycatchers, nightjars and nightingales, the doves and the raptors, beating the wind with their strident wings, making their way northward, through the night, to England.
And then it would stop. And all he would hear was the silence.
This was his world.
He had attempted to enlarge it, converting his cell into a kind of planetarium, with the principal planets and constella tions scratched on the walls with a bone rescued from the Governor’s capon. It was executed from memory, for he was a ke
en astronomer and had, from adolescence, devoted a large proportion of his leisure time to the study of celestial bodies. He was much taken with Newton’s concept that their motion was governed by a set of natural laws; that everything moved in a precise and pre-ordained relationship to everything else; that this was also true of objects on Earth – and that an individual was as much governed by these laws as an apple on a tree.
Newton had believed in God. In a Master Creator. But Newton’s God was not an interventionist God. He was a God Who had designed the world along rational and universal lines. These principles could be discovered by application, by study, by experiment. They could enable people to pursue their own aims and ambitions in life. But you could not change them, even by prayer.
This had a natural appeal to Nathan, as a mariner, as a navigator, as the Captain of a ship. Sometimes he wondered if ‘God’ was just a word for the whole complicated system that Newton had defined, and that when he looked at the stars in the sky or in their cruder version on the walls of his cell, he was looking into the eye of God. Or even His brain.
A heresy, no doubt, a blasphemy, even by Newton’s standards.
But if Nathan believed in any kind of a Creator, it was in a Creator Who conformed to His own rules, and Who would not change those rules for the convenience or advantage of His creations. The best you could hope for – or pray for – was that you might understand them and use them to your advantage, much the same as the means by which you sailed a ship.
You could not change the ebb and flow of the tide, nor the currents of the sea, any more than you could change the direction of the wind, but you could trim your sails to that wind; you could choose your course; you could make choices based on what you knew of the elements that surrounded you – and hope, and pray, that they were the right ones.
As in sailing, so in life. There were no miracles, only choices.
His problem at the moment was that he had made the wrong choices – in his relationships and in his career. Dashing this way and that, blown by the wind, hither and thither, with no great objective in view, nor even a small one.
