The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  The organism waited: first cold, then stiff, then increasingly hot and stiff. Waited without caring, because they knew they were the best in the world and because today was a celebration of the fact. Waited without caring, because they knew they had been brought to that peak of professionalism, and brought to this narrow strait of sea, for a glorious purpose. Waited without caring, because he was coming.

  In the distance, on the Paris road, rose a cloud of dust and the faint sound of cheering. Once detected, the tumult swept rapidly closer to the perfect horde laid out on the plain. Ears strained under bearskins to pick out the cheering, and eyes flicked furtively sideways in the rigid faces as they glimpsed the dust.

  At the junction on the edge of the city where the Paris road turned and began to drop down to the harbour, a rare flash of official humour had added a new signpost. The wooden finger pointed straight out over the city towards the sea. It read simply: ‘To England’.

  ‘Tom Roscarrock.’

  Dimly, heavily, still fighting up through the waves.

  ‘Your name is Tom Roscarrock.’

  Great fat mounds of water shouldering him down into the darkness.

  ‘You are Tom Roscarrock.’

  Far, far above him: moonlight on the water, a flickering promise of heaven, but he was so cold now, so deeply and permanently cold.

  ‘Listen to me: you are Tom Roscarrock.’

  His own arms wallowing uselessly around him in the dark heavy sea, head straining and aching.

  ‘Tom—’

  Then the huge smack of a beam thrown against his head by the waves, a fat jolt of dumbness that staggered his mind. ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. You are Tom Roscarrock, and you are a dead man.’

  In the autumn of 1769, a second son was born to a minor member of the gentry of the island of Corsica, a backward wasteland of boulders and bandits that its French masters viewed with a mix of superiority and distaste. A year earlier, the boy wouldn’t even have been French, but Louis XV had just acquired the island, so French he was. He went to religious school in France and then military academy, where his fellow students laughed at his accent and his spelling. He was thought likely to make a good sailor, and considered applying to the British Royal Navy, but went on instead to an unremarkable career as an artillery officer in the royal army of France.

  Then the country collapsed in revolution and Napoleon, son of Carlo Buonaparte, returned to Corsica to fight for liberation from Paris. But allegiances were mobile and opaque in those unsteady times, even on the rocks of Corsica: Napoleon got himself promoted to Captain in the French army, despite having led a riot against it as a Corsican Lieutenant-Colonel; he broke with his nationalist friends, had to escape back to France, published some revolutionary writing, made influential acquaintances. Then, when the port of Toulon revolted against the Revolution, it took the eye of the young artillery scholar to spot the critical piece of ground that dominated the city and turned the battle. From the Cairo hill, with the cannon soot thickening the blood of those who had fought for the summit, the military legend of Napoleon was launched.

  Now the Corsican gunner was an emperor, emerging through the slaughter of the Revolution to the greatest power, and the greatest triumph, that any Frenchman – perhaps any man in the history of the world – had ever known. He’d transformed the chaos into disciplined victory. He’d transformed social disintegration into a national pride never before seen. Now, on the Boulogne plain, the dust cloud coughed out a figure in white, and the trumpeters of all the regiments of this undefeated army barked their acclaim.

  He rode like a soldier in the exhilaration of triumph, not trotting sedately to a review but charging across the plain impatient for new glory. Two thousand drummers began the insistent musket chatter of the call to arms as their Emperor raced to the sea. Three hundred picked horsemen galloped with him, his personal escort, the elite of France. They rode as bodyguard, but in truth their greatest claim to honour was being deemed worthy to follow most closely the little man who had transfixed Europe.

  The plain erupted in smoke as the cannon roared their respect into the sky, each one belching out its powder and staggering back on its wheels under the recoil, a hundred plumes of smoke and fire that billowed out towards the sea, one after the other in perfect synchronization. The plain rang with the frantic pealing of all Boulogne’s church bells. At last the Emperor’s party reached the centre of the parade, a new tumult of dust swarming up as three hundred horses stuttered to a halt and turned in the heart of the human amphitheatre, and with one final explosion of sound the whole army came to the salute in front of their living god.

  From the edge of some barren, primaeval dream came sound, waves washing and crashing in the darkness, and then somehow sharpening into the harsher noise of human voices.

  ‘Welcome back, Mr Roscarrock.’

  The other voices were muffled, distant – outside.

  ‘I thought we might have lost you after all. You’re a stubborn body, aren’t you?’

  This voice was sharper, nearer, needling him in the pinched, dull accents of a Lowland Scot.

  ‘Come along, Mr Roscarrock. Are you with us now?’

  The voices outside were shouting – shouting something, what? – and then roaring a mob’s approval.

  ‘Come along now.’

  His eyes flicked open suddenly, large and brown and staring up at the source of the words. Standing over him, appraising him, was a tall man in his fifties. Dark eyes were set hard into the gnarled old face like slate on the sand, and they widened in interest at the new sign of life beneath them.

  ‘There you are, Mr Roscarrock.’

  His eyes closed in a heavy frown, and his head sank deeper on the pillow. ‘I’m not – you keep saying that, but my name’s not Roscarrock.’ The hoarse assertion came out doubtful, a headache in his drowned mind.

  ‘What you think you remember is irrelevant now. Now you are Tom Roscarrock.’

  Into the silence came a single clear shout from outside – ‘Blood!’ – and the mob roared its agreement.

  Feebly: ‘What’s going on out there?’

  The old Scot shook his head dismissively. ‘Food riot. Three mangy labourers and a cow. They do these things better in town.’

  As if in protest at his scoffing, the crowd outside roared again at something.

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘No!’ The angular figure whipped round, grabbed a chair, pulled it forwards and folded itself down until their faces were only two feet apart. ‘We cannot have this conversation more than once. You have so much to learn, and so little time. The first, the most important, thing is this: everything you think you know… has gone. It does not exist.’ The bony shoulders relaxed, but the voice dropped lower and still more earnest. ‘You died in a shipwreck, young man. We have seen to that. As that dead man, you have no future; you must forget the past as well. For now, there is only Tom Roscarrock.’

  Not since Julius Caesar had brought his legions to this same beach, and pointed them across the English Channel to the same promise of glory, had the world seen an army like this of Napoleon. Born in the ferocious defence of revolutionary France, hardened in the campaigns into Holland and Switzerland and Italy, again and again into the patchwork of German states, and across the sea into Syria and Egypt, it was fired with a certainty and a unity that the world had not known before: these men weren’t fighting for pay, or for some distant king who despised them; they were fighting for the idea of a nation – their nation.

  The army was more than Frenchmen too. In its forays across Europe and into Africa, the army of France had gathered troops from half a dozen lands, Germans, Georgians and Greeks, and bright fierce Mamelukes from Egypt with turbans and evil scimitars. Now Napoleon had brought these exotic importations to the opposite end of the Continent, from the endless summer of the Mediterranean to the dour grey straits leading north. He distilled the experience and variety of all these men into a new army with a new name and a new idea:
this was the Army of the Ocean Coasts, and it was created with one intent.

  Today the Emperor had come to celebrate his creation. For this spectacular occasion he had devised a spectacular symbol: a new medal, a new brotherhood – the Légion d’Honneur – and two thousand men would receive it from the hands of the Emperor himself. Two thousand pairs of boots stepped forwards across that long day, some with capes and swords sweeping beside them, most tramping up the wooden stair with mud on their soles and a heavy musket at their side. Each one of these men, from the Marshals of France to the trembling foot soldiers, felt the pressure of the Emperor’s hand on his chest as the Légion was presented. Some – and it was more usually the grizzled Sergeant of the Guard than his young officer – heard private words from the great man, saw his dark eyes looking up into theirs, felt his arm on their shoulder, an affectionate pull of his fingers at their ear. ‘I’ve seen you, eh Sergeant?’ ‘We’ve come a way from Marengo, have we not, old friend?’ ‘Honour France with this, my son.’ Strong hard men with grey moustaches and often-wiped bayonets climbed down from the podium with tears pricking their weathered cheeks.

  This was not the launch of the invasion; this was merely a morning’s parade – but one of a scale and a grandeur never before witnessed.

  The people of Boulogne and its surrounding villages and farms turned out in their thousands to watch. The rich – dark-coated merchants and their crisp white wives – sat in carriages looking down onto the plain. The poor deserted their fields and milled around in wonder at the spectacle. The city’s shop owners, the innkeepers, the tailors and seamstresses, the speculators, the gamblers, the con men, the card sharps, the thieves and the washerwomen and the whores, all who prospered in the shadow of the army, came to give thanks. History had washed back and forwards over Boulogne with the Channel tides, and the city had known occupation and destruction from all sides, and every kind of language spoken in its streets and towers. But this new Emperor and his voracious army and their colourful triumph and noisy glory meant prosperity, no doubting it. Boulogne knew a good thing when it saw it.

  Every attempted movement sent spasms of pain across the muscles of his torso. Even shifting his eyes made his temples burn. He lay still under the sheet and the musty blanket, trying to feel and count his limbs between shallow breaths. His eyes probed cautiously around their bloodshot confinement.

  The shouting from outside penetrated most clearly from a single window high in one wall of the room. The room was bare – whitewashed, but a very long time ago. The room was unfurnished except for his bed, one table, and one chair. The room’s shape and the quality of the noise from outside suggested an attic. The only light came from a lantern. To the little window again: it was dark outside.

  His whole body was exhausted, every muscle stupid and spent. His brain was heavy and slow, and a faint nausea lurked in his gut.

  The gaunt Scotsman was still talking.

  ‘These are strange and unholy times, Mr Roscarrock. Desperate times. And desperate times need desperate men. That’s where you come in.’

  Outside, the single raised voice was building to an indistinct climax, and he nodded towards the sound.

  ‘I don’t mean these hotheads, with their penny-pamphlet liberties and their little groups of hungry followers. There’s deeper work than that for you. We’ll talk again.’ He stood up. ‘For now, just know that your world, your existence, has shrunk to this room and this strange man who stands before you talking madnesses. This is all that you are, Mr Roscarrock, and all that you will be.’

  The voice outside peaked in a single high call, and was met with cheering. Riding the noise, it began a rapid call and response, and with each question the mob bellowed a ‘No!’ with ever greater volume and excitement, until all the voices merged in one climactic roar of animal intent.

  The Scotsman turned his face towards the window, and cocked his head at the sounds of protest as if able to gauge their character and threat. Then he looked back to the bed.

  ‘I have strange and unholy work for you, desperate work.’ He smiled the same thin smile. ‘But first: get some sleep. You’re in no state to listen or to talk, certainly not to work. And work you must.’

  Painfully, from the bed: ‘I can’t walk.’

  ‘You’ve twenty-four hours to recover.’

  ‘Twenty—’

  ‘The protest’s breaking up. Things’ll quieten now, and you’ll not be disturbed. But they’re gathering again tomorrow, and it’s not safe for you to be in one place for long.’

  ‘Why—’

  ‘I’ll return at the same hour tomorrow. By then you must be rested and ready to move.’ He gestured to a mound under a cloth on the table. ‘There’s food enough for you, and water. Eat. Sleep. Build your strength now, mind.’ He turned away, and then back, and when he did one half of the leathered face twisted up. ‘I’m afraid I must lock you in for those twenty-four hours, Mr Roscarrock.’ The face hardened to stifle the protest from the bed, an attempt to rise that ended in a hiss of pain. ‘Not so much that you’d get out, but that others might find their way in.’ There was a thin smile now that didn’t touch the eyes. ‘Treat it as a period of experiment, by all means, Mr Roscarrock. You’ll be well enough to move soon, I’m sure, and no doubt you could find a way to draw attention to yourself or even break out of here.’ He stepped in towards the bed and his thin arm reached out slowly, followed by the fevered eyes from the pillow. The bony fingers extended, and gripped a shoulder through the sheet sharply enough to bring a gasp of discomfort. ‘But the chances are better than evens that you’ll die for it. And if you die, be sure that many others may die as well.’ The little eyes were fierce, glaring down at the pale bewildered face beneath them. ‘Rest, you hear, Roscarrock? You’ll need to.’

  Then he was gone, with quick and silent movement and the delicate click of the lock behind him. Outside, the shouting was dispersing into chattering, occasional harsh laughter, and movement away. From the bed, an arm rose in an instinctive animal desire to communicate, then fell again as the agony of the wrecked muscles flamed across shoulder, back and chest. There was a mute gasp of pain, and the eyes flickered, and soon there was unconsciousness again.

  Two millennia before, the fields of northern France had rumbled and rung with Roman leather and metal on Roman feet and arms. As the beaches grew busier with timber and axe, and small craft were knocked together and started to come and go from Boulogne with reports of the sea or cargoes of fish and apples from along the coast, the Romans built a lighthouse on the cliff above the town. Its flickering through the fog was the last glimmer of civilization over the shoulders of the legionaries setting out across the unfamiliar element for the barbarian island that marked the edge of the world.

  Now the tower had become its own memorial, one grey wall on a shaped mound, the rest of the stones borrowed over the centuries for roads and walls and houses. But this was still a place for a man to look across the strait and wonder, and some of the stones had found their way into the foundations of a new tower.

  After the elation of the day, the homage of the army that was his greatest achievement, the noise and the colour and the sheer power that was in his hand as it had been in no other man’s before, the Corsican rode up towards the clifftop in silence. Always, on his flank, was the sea. Before he would have seen it as a mere factor on a battlefield, would have gauged its potential for benefit or challenge as if it were a forest or a marsh or an approaching column of cavalry. Now it was an obstacle, a measureless wall, watching him as much as he watched it. And as the land rose, the sails of the English blockading squadron became visible.

  He dropped from his horse, dismissed his bodyguard and attendants without glancing at them, and stalked into his eyrie alone. Most of the structure was a single chamber, built high around a conference table, walled with maps of the sea and the English coast in every possible perspective and scale. Today the Emperor strode past them unseeing. In a corner of the room was a telescope on a tr
ipod, as tall as its owner and focused permanently on his enemy.

  He put his head down to the eyepiece, and the image of the English coast filled his sight as it so constantly and restlessly filled his mind.

  There was a cough behind him. The Emperor kept his head down over the telescope, and there was no further interruption to the silence.

  ‘I used to love the sea, Fouché,’ he said eventually, still bowed over the image of the English Channel.

  He stood straight suddenly, with a great hiss of in-taken breath. Through the window, the water was still there, and he continued to watch it. ‘I’m an islander. I grew up in boats. For a time, I wanted to be a sailor.’ He shook his head, almost a shiver. ‘Now, it opposes me. It mocks me.’

  He turned to face his silent listener. ‘Show me one face of a hill and I will describe to you its other; I will tell you everything about its soil and its rock and what a column of men or a squadron of horses may do on it. Show me a hill, with a forest on my other flank and a league of firm ground between them, and I will create a masterpiece. But this!’ – he gestured two or three times with an angry thumb over his shoulder, voice more shrill and echoing off the ceiling – ‘this… this great grey parade ground, wind and rain and nowhere for a man to stand steady, this is an element for gamblers, or for witches; not for a general.’ He gave another theatrical shiver.