The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Other business. The wretched American, Fulton, is still at us to try his torpedo mines.’

  ‘I’m cautious, My Lord.’

  ‘I’m downright leery, Gambier! But the damned fellow hooked Stanhope when Stanhope was in Holland, and now he has Pitt himself itching to see him blow things up.’

  ‘His true loyalty is to the old colonies, My Lord. Then he was in France, as you know. He trialled a secret underwater ship for the French. They employed him for some years, and I cannot say that they do not employ him still. His commitment to this country extends no further than his hand in our purses.’

  ‘All very well, Bellamy, but that’s an even stronger reason why we need to clasp him to ourselves now so he don’t go back again, I suppose.’

  ‘We have him under protection, of course, My Lord. If the French cannot have him, they may try to ensure that no one can.’

  ‘We’re stuck with the fellow, gentlemen, for now. I wouldn’t trust him with the spoons, let alone all the powder he asks. But we must let him play with his explosions, and see if he doesn’t do himself a mischief. If he starts drifting back to France we may have to end his wanderings permanently.’

  Their Lordships approved the payment of expenses to Mr Robert Fulton. Their Lordships approved regular expenditures to the pay account, to the shipyard account, to repair and maintenance of Admiralty property, and to Scrutiny and Survey.

  There being no further formal business, the Secretaries withdrew.

  ‘What now, Bellamy?’

  ‘My Lord, from Admiral Calder’s report, Villeneuve was withdrawing towards Spain. Knowing the man, he will take refuge there for the moment and repair and restock his ships after his months in the Atlantic and this engagement. But Napoleon will have him out again as soon as he can. I fear we are no further forwards. Meanwhile, My Lord, we have unconfirmed news that Admiral Allemand has escaped Rochefort and is loose at sea.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Four ship of the line, and lesser vessels.’

  ‘Damnit. Four more we’ve lost trace of? And no word of your missing French fleet?’

  ‘None. We are seeking every possible source of information in Paris.’

  ‘Hugo, can’t you manage a distraction of some kind? Make Napoleon look elsewhere?’

  ‘The Royalists in France won’t rise again, George, not after last time. That horse is blown. The one man who could inspire real unrest is an old Royalist General – Metz. He’d stir them. But no one’s even sure he’s alive anymore; if he is, he’s in hiding, and we can’t contact him. In any case, the money he’d need to attract and sustain enough followers would be astronomical. The gold that this Board prudently votes to Scrutiny and Survey will keep the Royalist networks alive in France. If we use it shrewdly, we can spread a little dissent. But no amount of gold can buy a victory at sea.’

  ‘You are no consolation, Bellamy. Gentlemen, our own ships are more scattered than before; the French fleets are all returned to Europe, and there are now two that we cannot easily locate. We chased a fleet to the Indies and it comes back hardly scratched, and we’re still waiting for Nelson to catch up. The danger of invasion is at least as great as before. Damn Calder!’

  CONVERSATIONS OF ADMIRAL P. C. J. B. S. DE VILLENEUVE, RECORDED 1ST DAY OF DECEMBER 1805

  Poor Calder. You English can afford to be careless with your heroes, perhaps. As Voltaire said of that Admiral you shot, whenever it was. I suppose that if you have a Collingwood and you have a Nelson, you may treat your Calders pretty casual, isn’t it so? He was a little cautious, I grant you. But then, who would not have been, with the fog on that wretched day, and your English Channel open behind him? Me, I would have done as Calder did. He bought you days, and days at this time were priceless, is that not so?

  [SS G/1130/10]

  FIELD REPORT, TAKEN THE 24TH DAY OF JULY 1805.

  4PK. Credit -. Names and violent intent (details attached)

  [SS X/27/91]

  Jessel and Roscarrock reached Hackney with the falling sun, sore and silent on their sluggish horses. Hackney had an inn, the Dolphin, and the Dolphin had a comfortable corner by the fire, and the two men looked hungrily at the large mugs of beer that loomed over them in the landlord’s fists and then settled on the table.

  The landlord turned away, and as they instinctively followed the movement they discovered that a pale man had been standing close behind him and was now scanning them with quick, careful eyes. The eyes snapped back to Jessel, and nodded impatiently towards Roscarrock.

  ‘This is Mr… Grey, Phil,’ Jessel said in answer. ‘Professional acquaintance.’

  ‘He don’t look like a Mr Grey.’ Again, to Roscarrock: ‘You don’t look like a Mr Grey.’

  ‘You don’t look like someone who needs to know,’ Roscarrock said politely.

  That got a yellow grin in the white face, but still Phil floated, looking another question. Jessel lifted his left hand off the table for a moment, revealing a stack of four coins.

  Another grin, and now Phil sat, pulling a stool against the wall so that he could watch movement in the room but have his face shadowed by the mantelpiece. ‘That’s the stuff, Mr Albert. Not sure that’s enough though, is it?’

  ‘I haven’t heard enough, Phil. Landlord!’

  Another drink arrived, and Phil held it two-handed in front of his mouth, taking it regularly with measured cat-sips.

  ‘You hear of a tailor, Phil?’

  ‘I heard of—’

  ‘Radical man, traveller.’

  The eyes were grey and constantly mobile. A check of the two faces watching him. ‘I’m pretty sure I have.’

  ‘And I’m pretty sure you haven’t. I’ll tell you when I want something made up, Phil. Now isn’t when.’

  ‘All right. I’ll keep an eye. Travelling tailor, eh?’

  Jessel nodded. ‘Reformer. Man with a mission. Perhaps coming your way. Might try to talk to some of your friends.’

  ‘I don’t got no friends, Mr Albert, you know that. No friends, Mr Grey, that’s me.’ He offered the fact with quiet professional pride.

  ‘I find that very hard to believe,’ Roscarrock said, and Phil scanned his neutral face. ‘Mr Albert said I’d learn from you about the reforming men hereabout.’

  Phil’s mouth shaped for another bit of patter, but his patrolling eyes found something in Roscarrock’s glance and he shifted suddenly into an unfamiliar earnestness. The chancer had disappeared, and he was the methodical sipper of beer again.

  ‘To them, I’m a carpenter from south of London, see? Only I lost my trade. There’s a little group of us meets now. Craftsmen, like me. Some young men, some family men. New man’s become more frequent, Mr Albert; Penny, Peter Penny.’ Jessel absorbed the name. ‘We drinks a little, and we talks a little. Political discussion, only none of us really knows enough to talk proper politics, so it’s just Napoleon this and prices that. We are generally for political reform and negotiated peace. That Ted Wass, Mr Albert, he says he wants to march on Whitehall and force the Cabinet to sign for new rights. The smith, he says he’s got some pikes stored, and Wass says maybe they could get some muskets off militiamen they know or get the militiamen with them. But Fenner, the weaver, this is all a bit strong for him. He says he wants a grand agreement of all groups like ours and he doesn’t want no violence.’

  ‘How many Wasses, how many Fenners?’ Roscarrock asked.

  A nod at the question; a sip. ‘Mostly Fenners. Family men. Family men enough to care, but too much to be desperate.’

  He shifted the beer mug to the side of his mouth, and his glance held on Jessel. ‘Want I should stir ’em up a bit, Mr Albert? See what they’re really made of?’ There was a flash of the chancer again. ‘Done some lovely burnings in the old days, Mr Grey. Reformers’ houses, that sort of thing. Times change, eh?’

  Jessel ran a hand through his blond hair, then shook his head decisively. ‘Doesn’t seem you’d make much of them, Phil. But watch them, you hear? Especial
ly your friend with the pikes.’

  Glancing at the room, he pushed the four coins across the table. Phil’s beer mug dropped in his hands and he watched the coins carefully. Another four joined them. He looked up.

  ‘Honest, Mr Albert, I need more. Not so much the risks, though they is as always considerable, but family stuff.’

  Jessel’s pale eyes gazed into him. Then he pulled a further two coins out. They watched Phil walk silently from the inn, head down. ‘Even the Government spies are starving,’ Jessel muttered.

  25th July 1805

  It was four in the morning, it was cold, the mist had turned to drizzle, and the wind was blowing onto the French coast. For the First Lieutenant of HMS Amethyst, bucking in the grey swell just a mile from that coast, everything was conspiring to ensure his maximum discomfort. Independence of command, even for the length of a watch during months of miserable blockade duty, was the proving ground of the young officer, the opportunity to show competence and perhaps excellence. It was also the opportunity to put the whole package onto a French reef. Captains thrown from their cots into the sea and then captured by the French did not produce favourable reports on the First Lieutenants who had allowed it to happen.

  For the thousandth time on this god-awful watch he checked the sails, frowning up into the drizzle with arm held over stinging forehead, and then the coast, cold telescope eye chilling his own.

  ‘Ketch on the port bow, sir!’ The shout came frail through the wind and the drizzle. ‘Making for the French coast!’

  ‘What flag?’ he called back into the grey morning.

  ‘No flag, sir!’

  ‘None?’ Most of the blockading squadron was held well out to sea, close enough to bring the French to action should they attempt to break out but far enough to limit the strain on the seamanship of exhausted crews. Only individual ships like the Amethyst were left to hug the coast, watching and hoping for the first sign of a French attempt to break the drenched stalemate, and trying not to run aground.

  ‘He’s just run one up, sir. Don’t recognize it, sir.’

  ‘Well check it, man!’ An unknown ship sneaking into the coast in the small hours of the morning meant smuggling. Smuggling was supposed to be bad for the British economy in some way, but it didn’t feel like a way that would justify rousing the cold and grumpy frigate to action before dawn.

  A Midshipman was beside him now with an open ledger, thin and weathered. The signal book was properly for officers only, and the freezing sixteen-year-old held it with reverence in his white fists. ‘It’s one of ours, sir, but I’ve never seen it before. It means Admiralty business.’ The pale open face looked up at the First Lieutenant. ‘What does that mean, sir?’

  The First Lieutenant was following the heaving and plunging of the ketch as she battered her way towards the grey outline of France. ‘It means you don’t want to know, Mr Ellis. It means forget you saw it.’ The boy looked over at the ship and back at the First Lieutenant with heightened awe. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Ellis. Probably someone in the Admiralty fancied a French tart for a change. Let it go.’

  The Midshipman smiled gravely at the adult joke, then hurried away to pass the order to maintain course.

  The First Lieutenant raised his telescope. Not hardly, he thought. An unflagged ship sneaking into the coast in the small hours of the morning under an Admiralty flag – which had now vanished, he noted – meant intelligence work. It meant some poor sod splashing ashore with a sack of gold and a prayer and not much else, hoping like hell that whatever recognition signal they’d glimpsed from the shore came from a Royalist, and not from a Royalist with a sentry’s musket in his ear.

  There was a solitary figure in the bow of the ketch, cloaked and hooded and watching the approaching coast. Well might they, the First Lieutenant thought from an HMS Amethyst that in this cold and lonely dawn suddenly seemed a more comfortable place in which to pass a morning and a war. In the course of the months on blockade he’d seen a few such ships pass in the shadowed hours between day and night, discussed them casually and quietly with the Captain when they were alone. A world with none of the distinctions of uniform and discipline, none of the clarity of combat. A world where death was nasty and alone and forgotten. A world where life depended on a ketch making another pinpoint and unseen landing on the grim French coast, and on the loyalty of a chain of people who were already betraying a whole country and could hardly be expected to care much for one foreign spy.

  A momentary change in the wind pulled the hood back from the figure in the ketch, and the First Lieutenant glimpsed the head beneath for the instant before the hood was snatched up again. The hair was longer and fuller than… Good God!

  ROYSTON IN THE COUNTIES OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE AND HERTFORDSHIRE,

  MAGISTRATE SIR MATTHEW CRIPPS, VISITED THE 25TH DAY OF JULY 1805.

  Nil

  [SS J/1144/17]

  ‘I’m glad to see you, gentlemen. Glad.’

  A frail, earnest young man, barely out of his twenties. A son brought early into his inheritance, Roscarrock decided, presumably by disease. Genteel poverty, described in the rotting windows, the cracked glasses, and the solitary servant who fulfilled all functions in the house. Drinks, the offer of food, lodging, thrust at them along with the pale face of their host, perched on the edge of his plain oak chair.

  ‘Nothing unusual, Sir Matthew, just a passing—’

  ‘I’ve despatched the routine list on the petty sessions to you. I – I hope there’s been no difficulty with the mail coach.’

  ‘I’m sure—’

  ‘Frankly, gentlemen, I’m worried.’ The young pale face intense, the voice straining towards the businesslike. ‘These people… these people are desperate. Their homes are – are terrible places. And the food they eat, well – there’s nothing, there are people who are starving, actually starving.’

  Roscarrock watched with something like pity. This young man had had to grow up fast, into a world he’d never dreamt of, only yards from his door.

  ‘Some of them who come up before me for seditious comments are just drunks, or malcontents. But with some, there’s… there’s a hatred… or, or a despair that’s even worse. We had bad trouble five weeks ago, with Jenkins, one of the bigger farmers. A travelling pamphleteer, one of these… I don’t know – perhaps a man of ideals or just a troublemaker – anyway, over a few evenings in the inn he stirred up some of Jenkins’s men, and then the men started making demands, and refusing to work, and there were… threats, quiet threats. Jenkins had to whip one man, and he chased the troublemaker out of the area himself, and then some of his animals started being harmed.’ Sir Matthew shook his head rapidly, a little bird’s movement. ‘There’s no structure any—’

  ‘I don’t think you sent us the name of the pamphleteer, Sir Matthew.’

  ‘We never found it. You got what description we could manage.’

  Polite thanks and goodbyes. ‘Gentlemen,’ Sir Matthew said frailly on the threshold, ‘Gentlemen, I hope what I’m doing is useful.’ Polite thanks. ‘It would mean so much if my work was being… recognized – in London. One wants to – to get on, you know.’

  Outside, Jessel shook his head.

  ‘I don’t want to sound rude about my new employer,’ Roscarrock said, ‘but… these people: are they the extent of it?’

  ‘Disappointed?’ Jessel closed the gate behind them, and squatted down against a young oak. Behind him was the London road that so haunted Sir Matthew Cripps, and beyond it the fields sloped up towards a line of woodland on the crest. Jessel scratched the back of his neck against the tree with great concentration, then settled back on his haunches.

  ‘People like that one – magistrates, parsons – they’re what you might call the foot soldiers. They’re everywhere, we don’t have to pay them particularly, it’s part of their job in any case to keep an eye on people. They give us a lot of the background information – those lists, say. Nothing fancy, but it all builds up, and just occasionally you get a
diamond. Mostly it gives us the records to check against. That schoolmaster the other Magistrate told us about, for example: Pace.’

  ‘The education of the working man?’

  ‘Him. I checked, and we’ve come across him before – Magistrate’s records, you see? He’s turned up in a few other places, had a night or two in gaol when the inspiration got a bit carried away.’

  ‘But we’re not worried about him.’

  The angles of Jessel’s face wrinkled up. ‘He doesn’t smell like a problem. When Napoleon makes him king of liberated England, you can tell me I’m wrong. But he’s all ideas and no action. A schoolmaster, like my father.’ He flicked a glance of concern at the unfamiliar confidence. ‘A schoolmaster who got sick and couldn’t be a schoolmaster anymore. He does more begging than sedition.’

  Roscarrock had found an oak of his own, and settled down against bark and grass. ‘Sympathy for your father?’

  Jessel shook his head in slow and emphatic relish. ‘I hated him. No man ever had a fouler son. But no, the real troublemakers don’t hold open meetings in public bars on main roads. And we won’t find them by talking to innocent innkeepers and panicked magistrates.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Most likely one of Kinnaird’s specials, nothing less.’

  The difference between a hunted fugitive and a corpse in a gibbet is a good pair of ears, and James Fannion had survived long enough to trust his ears before his brain. There’d be time enough for thinking in the grave.

  As he stretched on the mattress in the attic, willing the passage of another empty morning, his ears heard knocking at the door far below. It was too trivial for his brain even to process, but the sound alone had him on his feet.