The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  The sarcasm was delivered heavy and humourless, and the Admiral had no interest in a reaction. The great head leant forwards, eyes staring into Roscarrock’s from inches away. ‘I am obliged to imagine that shrivelled old Druid Kinnaird has chosen you with his unique eye for the unusually capable. You will oblige me by directing your wits against Napoleon, and not against the vagaries of British Government administration. Jessel!’

  Jessel stepped forwards. The point had been made, and the Admiral wasted no more time on it. ‘Obviously now that Mr Roscarrock is with us Napoleon will sue for peace more or less immediately. Just in case he doesn’t, I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress in finding me my Irishman, my tailor, or my fleet?’

  Jessel shook his head with a grunt. ‘Beating every bush, My Lord. Beating every bush.’

  The Admiral was still watching Roscarrock. ‘Take your time, Jessel. There’s really no rush.’

  A hand appeared on Lord Hugo Bellamy’s shoulder, a delicate creep of colour across the dull cloth. In the bland room, in the stolid masculinity of the conversation, the sudden frail beauty of the flesh and the glint of jewellery on the fingers was fresh air. Bellamy half-turned his head, the fingers flickered and withdrew, and Roscarrock followed the movement down the ungloved forearm to a lithe elbow and then up to a naked shoulder, and so on to an exposed throat, a strong jaw, a pair of parted red lips, a fine straight nose and a pair of blue eyes that were watching him in amusement.

  ‘Who is this, Lord Hugo?’ The voice affected lightness, but the eyes held strong and unblinking on Tom Roscarrock.

  Bellamy’s own glance flicked irritably back to Roscarrock. ‘No one, Lady Virginia.’

  The eyes hadn’t moved. ‘Mm. That’s a pity. Such a waste of a handsome face.’ The poised head, blonde waves pulled up artfully, addressed Bellamy’s ear. ‘One of these days, Lord Hugo, you must try to bring a someone.’ Then she was gone.

  Lord Hugo Bellamy scowled at his two employees.

  ‘Your survival in this world is defined by your utility, Roscarrock. I encourage you to be productive. Now be off.’

  Roscarrock ignored him, still watching the space left by the woman’s exposed neck and upper back. He switched his attention to Bellamy for a moment, nodded once, and turned away.

  Gabriel Chance watched his fingers moving over the page, bobbing up and back with perfect regularity and rhythm, threading the words into the paper. Chance was proud of his writing. Proud that he could write, proud of the fine strong letters. ‘My beloved Flora’: ‘beloved’ had three flowing upstrokes, framing the tidy little loops stitched into the page – a fine word to write. ‘Flora’ began with a strong downstroke, the extended and gently curving foot pulled towards the heart. The fingers holding the pen were strong. That’s why Chance wrote well: learning, patience, and strong fingers.

  This is why Gabriel Chance hated to write: his fingers were the needles he never seemed to use anymore. Soon there would be a machine for writing too, and it too would hiss and rattle in his waking dreams, so that even his head had become a choked and smoking manufacture, so that even his head was no longer free.

  He would liberate himself of this oppression. The words of a tailor would unleash a second flood and wipe England clean of the darkness.

  When he focused again the page, the beautiful letters, were crumpled in the strong fingers.

  Sir Peter Pilsom, His Majesty’s Justice of the Peace and Magistrate for Tiverton in the County of Devonshire, was an impatient man at the best of times. At ten tired minutes after midnight, after five days on the road, after an unnecessary overnight stay in a lice-infested inn because the imbecile coachman had taken a bridge too hastily and cracked a wheel, after his idle and possibly larcenous servants had fallen into some further misunderstanding by which the house had not been dried and warmed for his return, it was not the best of times. Sir Peter stood shivering in the mud outside his gate, rubbing life into his seat-sore backside with concentrated fervour and glaring at the man waiting anxiously near him. Then, as light began to flicker in the house ahead, he started to stamp towards his front door.

  Ahead, from somewhere inside the building, the maid stabbed the gloom with a single, biting shriek.

  MONSIEUR THE MINISTER OF POLICE MEETS WITH THE MINISTER FOR THE NAVY,

  PARIS, THE 21ST DAY OF JULY, 1805

  M. Fouché:

  I trust you have kept your visit a secret.

  M. Decrès:

  Even your spies could not tell you I have come.

  M. Fouché:

  The Emperor is impatient. He demands his invasion.

  M. Decrès:

  The Emperor understands less of the sea than I do of the moon. But of course I am at his service.

  M. Fouché:

  Our naval movements are now so closely related to wider national security activities that you and I must meet regularly to co-ordinate.

  M. Decrès:

  Do I understand that the Ministry of Police will be directing the Ministry of the Navy? Haven’t you enough to do hunting General Metz?

  M. Fouché:

  The Ministry of the Navy will have its full responsibilities. We are all subject to the direction of the Emperor.

  M. Decrès:

  I am sure that you will be prompt in relaying the Emperor’s directions to me.

  M. Fouché:

  The navy has proved incapable of giving the Emperor and his army the support required. I am arranging measures to increase the effect of the navy.

  M. Decrès:

  Naval measures?

  M. Fouché:

  No. But the navy must now be guided by more than the winds.

  M. Decrès:

  Does the Emperor understand that without the winds the navy cannot be guided, however brilliant the other measures?

  M. Fouché:

  Kindly remind me of the dispositions and intentions of the fleets.

  M. Decrès:

  Admiral Ganteaume is closely blockaded in the port of Brest. Admiral Allemand has a small force in Rochefort. Admiral Villeneuve is in the West Indies distracting the English and rendezvousing with a small fleet of Spanish ships. When Villeneuve returns he will be joined by Allemand and hopefully Ganteaume, and the combined fleet will be large enough to provide all possible support that the Emperor could wish. Together perhaps fifty ships.

  M. Fouché:

  If Ganteaume and Allemand can get out of port.

  M. Decrès:

  I am confident that your additional measures, whatever they are, will solve all difficulties.

  M. Fouché:

  The Emperor will be gratified by your confidence.

  M. Decrès:

  Do I understand that these arrangements are to your satisfaction?

  M. Fouché:

  They are entirely to the Emperor’s satisfaction, and should be continued unchanged.

  Afterwards, M. Fouché very open about the Minister for the Navy: he received his promotion for an embarrassing defeat; I do not mind him being a sailor, but I mind him being a bad one; I do not mind him being a nobleman, but I mind him being an imbecile. Still, even the navy cannot fail or interfere with what we have in train. The Emperor’s invasion barges will sail unhindered.

  [SS F/109/76]

  Richard Jessel leant closer to Roscarrock as they trudged through the night streets. ‘The prudent man should not let his mind wander,’ he said slyly.

  Roscarrock glanced at him. ‘You want me to be a monk as well as a martyr?’

  Jessel grinned. ‘Just saying don’t raise your hopes higher than your degree. Virginia Strong’s not for the likes of us.’

  ‘I don’t know. Seems just the sort for me.’ He smiled back at the man beside him. ‘Who is she?’

  EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF SIR JOSEPH PLUMMER

  Twenty-first of July, Seldon: the usual admixture of great men, average minds and foolish chatter. The Paris salons of the last generation were to our London houses as the tragedies of Aeschylus to
a Southwark alehouse bawdy. Men who think themselves intellectually as vast as Voltaire, and as committed as Marat, prattle like boys of schoolroom mischiefs. Fancying themselves dangerous, their women babble of radical ideas they do not understand, and dream of revolutions in nothing but dress and marital scruples. Sir George Wheen, who would die rather than see his stockings dirtied, talks of the benefit of war on a nation’s character. My Lady Pelham, who has I should imagine never clapped eyes on a single representative of ‘the people’, wonders with affected gravity at the virility of the revolutionary class. I am paraded before these painted philosophers like a performing bear, a freak show of radical thought to be prodded and marvelled at while their gilded world continues untarnished.

  Lord Hugo Bellamy there. A stolid creature, paddling like the rest in the shallow waters of theory. But I fear him, for his foolish face frames a watchful eye, and his words never meander forth without that his mind has first considered the fruits of his watchfulness. Sometimes too some shrewd caution or insight in those words slips out, betraying a calculation at odds with his manner. Perhaps he is just one more of these timid dabblers, with greater control of his tongue than most. Somehow there is more to him. I have known Admirals who were royal tyrants and Admirals who were democratic radicals, but never an Admiral who was not in some way a politician. I wonder at Lord Hugo’s politics.

  Also Lady Virginia Strong. She is an extraordinary creature: the natural beauty of a Helen, the charms and carriage of a Cleopatra, and a mind perhaps sharper and clearer than any Englishwoman living, and most of the men. But again I fear a complete elasticity of principle. Her ideas are wholly the servants of her interests. She could summarize Sophocles in perfect Greek, if she thought it would secure her an audience with the King; she would with utter intellectual coherence preach social revolution, if her whimsy settled on the seduction of the stable boy. Strong she may be; her other two appellations I sincerely doubt.

  The hope of a true revolution in this country is not to be found in these people. And yet their chatter as much as their neck-cloths and hair-arrangements helps to set a fashion that others may follow more crudely. Their flirtations with radical ideas could yet lead to the impregnation of some stronger seed of upheaval in the belly of the people, a truly revolutionary offspring that would condemn its gross parents to their rightful obsolescence.

  [SS M/1092/1]

  22nd July 1805

  It was a sky for brutality, bland and sickly white and thick with humidity to come. It squatted over the parade ground, and already sweat was tickling the necks of the soldiers. They stood rigid in three blocks of three ranks, forming three sides of a square. The faces in the front ranks were blank reflections of the indifferent sky, careful to avoid further provocation. Faces in the second rank showed more life, flicking wary glances at the centre of the square. In the third rank they were active and angry, distilling to mutterings from the sides of clamped lips that went prudently unheard by the Sergeants.

  The fourth side of the square was formed by the long whitewashed glare of the officers’ accommodation, and the six men fresh from their breakfast who sat on horseback in front of it. The horses shifted uneasily, tails flicking and feet shuffling in the dust. Three of the officers glared into the square with contrived stone disdain; one had fixed a stare into the distance; two glanced around the ranks of men uneasily.

  In the whole complex of Colchester barracks, only one man was not in uniform, and not at attention. In the centre of the square, Private William Watkins stood tilted forward against a crude wooden triangle, arms outstretched and lashed above him, naked except for dirty white breeches.

  Indifferent to discipline, a fly abandoned its exploration of the puffy leather of an officer’s boot and darted into the square, conducting two inspection tours of the triangle and then settling successively on Private Watkins’s head, shoulder, and finally back. The naked shoulder blades twitched involuntarily.

  In the hands of an unsympathetic Sergeant, a single stroke of a leather whip across naked flesh will create an instant scald, immediately bright pink and subsequently swollen as the body tries to repair itself. Subsequent strokes across the same area will quickly break the skin, and blood will seep thick and dark from fine cuts along the length of the stroke. By ten strokes, the individual cuts will have been torn into a patchwork of larger open wounds. By twenty strokes, a human back will be a permanently damaged piece of lean meat, the nervous system reacting in increasing confusion to such wide and deep damage, and the body will be trying to drug the brain into unconsciousness. Soldiers know little of human physiology, but every man had seen a flogging and a few had felt them and watched with tears of remembered humiliation.

  The fly shuffled, jumped, and resettled, and again the shoulder blades twitched.

  It was tiresome to have to move so soon after finding a comfortable lodging, but Fannion knew that he could risk no more than another night or two in the shopkeeper’s attic. The aftershocks of the onslaught by the Magistrates on their shops and slums were still rippling through the Irish community hereabouts, and his landlord’s wearying state of nerviness and faint hostility would shortly have him moving on even if the possibility of the soldiers didn’t. He knew the man’s type: more concerned by property than principle. Neither poor enough nor rich enough to be carefree: just enough money to have to worry about it. Liverpool seemed full of Irishmen like this, and there’d been not a few in Dublin as well.

  The wife was something else, though. She was turning comfortable and complacent – Fannion wondered why there were no children – but there was still a freedom in her movements and a liveliness in her eyes that made him guess at a country upbringing. She’d come to Dublin and sold her beauty to a decent man, because a decent man offered a stability and prosperity that her mother couldn’t have dreamt of. But there was a wildness in her still, and the heavy respectability of the cities only kept it smouldering. She hadn’t minded the arrival of the tall, dark poet from Cork. Fannion allowed himself a pleasurable daydream – and then a terse reminder that to a cautious respectable Irish shopkeeper the one thing more disagreeable than a rebel in the attic was a rebel in the attic with his wife.

  There’d been an intelligence to the soldiers’ sweep that he hadn’t expected. The rudeness of the men, the clumsy tactics in the houses they searched and the people they’d picked out, this had been no surprise. But there was something in the direction of the men, and something in the questions they’d been told to ask, that suggested there were bright men as well as bullies at work in England’s magistracy.

  There was something else, too. This worried trawling of its own back streets for ill-defined sins spoke of an uneasy Empire. If Liverpool’s Magistrates were confident of their stability and their soldiery, they wouldn’t be letting the militia loose to harass beggars and housewives. England was brittle: dried out and tottering, and she would burn more easily when a match was lit.

  A burning courthouse warmed the heart as well as the hands, but he had to restrain himself. He would have little difficulty in stirring up trouble as he travelled – a bit of political theory here, a little economic outrage there – Lord, what couldn’t he do among the Irish labourers in Liverpool docks? Perhaps he’d cause a couple of incidents after all, just to keep his hand in and the English off balance. But Irish freedom wouldn’t come from a few burning toll gates in Lancashire. A complete and permanent shock to the British Empire could only come from Napoleon, leaving English society to collapse under its own rottenness and the Irish free to seize their opportunity. That took co-ordination, with the French and with those who secretly wished them well. Come to England, that had been the invitation; our mutual interests would be advanced by an outrage in London, and you are the man to contrive it. Wasn’t he just?

  He had to focus on the destination. And for that, he had to be careful about lapsed Irishmen like the shopkeeper. The man would do nothing to bring discredit on himself in the Irish community, which was large in the
city and brought him most of his money, however much he liked to think otherwise. But he would do anything to avoid trouble, and when first introduced in the churchyard Fannion had seen immediately that the wide eyes viewed the poet-rebel as trouble personified. So he’d been gracious, polite and restrained, silent on politics and only quietly optimistic that this hospitality to a fellow countryman would no doubt be well-regarded by the community. Even so, there was a calculation and a caution in the shopkeeper’s eyes, and Fannion knew it wouldn’t take much for the man to decide that his interests were better served by an anonymous note to the Magistrate, and shortly afterwards, at a discreet distance from the house, Fannion would find himself surrounded by muskets.

  Sometimes he found himself loathing the Irish. They were a lot better in theory than they turned out in practice, scratching away wretched, diseased lives among the peat, or earning a pound and dreaming of being English. The shopkeeper had come from Dublin five years before, with a good coat and a hard-filled purse and a restless wife. Fannion could see them on the boat, cautious and compact, the tradesman masking his apprehension with piety and the wife not sure whether to look forward to the great smoke of the English port or back to the green hills from which she’d escaped. The tradesman had had patience, and prudence, and industry, and all the other virtues that had been used to distract and delude his people for so long, and he’d prospered in the English town with its English values. He’d worked himself into a solid and profitable reputation in the Irish community in Liverpool, and used it to buy the furnishings of English respectability.