The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  Jessel replaced the paper on the Admiral’s desk. ‘There’s even a chance the avengers hanged the wrong man.’

  Bellamy considered this for a moment, and his lips soured in distaste. ‘One desperate denial like another. His Majesty’s enemies are dangerous enough; it’s a pity that his protectors are so remarkably foolish. Watch this, Jessel.’

  ‘My Lord.’

  ‘And take a wash. Roscarrock too. You’re mixing with the quality tonight.’

  The barking snapped sudden and clear from the direction of the Tarn, and the instinct of Seth Colson’s twenty years in the Cumbrian hills turned his attention immediately towards it; the same instinct told him almost as immediately that it was not his dog. Wind-scoured eyes scanned the ground in front of him, and sure enough his Jess wasn’t quite thirty yards off in the opposite direction.

  Not his dog; not his business.

  But the bark called again from the Tarn hollow off to his right, and Jess’s ears were up, and Seth Colson wondered what dog, following what man, would be up on this same storm-seared slope of the highest peak of what they said was the highest range in the whole of England. A misstep in the white wilderness of winter up here was fatal, and a summer mist like this morning’s could be just as treacherous.

  He saw the dog and the dog saw him at the same moment, as he came over the slight rise that enclosed Red Tarn. Another bark, doubtful. The dog advanced a few steps towards him, then retreated as quickly to a bundle of rags that glared from the rocks and furze.

  The rags were clothes, bleached by sun and wind, and they fluttered like mourners’ veils over the memory of a man. The skeleton had been picked almost clean by the scavengers, the skull lolled back over a stone and stared up at the shepherd, and the bones had crept and hidden themselves among the pale brittle branches of the furze.

  Gabriel Chance found conversation elusive, unsettling. When others spoke, he seemed to hear between their words. When he spoke, he watched the confusion frowning back at him, felt the wariness rising. When Flora didn’t understand him, it made him hurt and angry. With others, he felt foolish and alone.

  But if people let him talk, if they had faith in him and he in the power of his words, they seemed to relax in the words, to understand and then to feel.

  Chance’s days were plain. He slept a little. Some evenings he talked – to apprentices, out-of-work men, Quakers, craftworkers, families entranced by his face glowing in the lamplight after supper. Mostly he walked: Manchester, and then Nottingham, and Peterborough; among metalworkers in Sheffield and free-thinkers in Leicester.

  When he walked, the crisp, gleaming duck-egg sky sang to him, a bright treble choir that lifted his face, his whole body, up by the ears. His spirit hummed to the rhythm of tidy villages against hillsides, swam in the dark earth and sheer, shining greenness of the world.

  On the 27th he saw smoke again, the smear of dirt across the crystal lens of the sky.

  He had to look at it: had to touch the hot iron, had to test the sharpness of the needle, the black agony of mechanical mill or pit piercing the brittle beauty of God’s tapestry, smoke bleeding across the sky through his fingers. The sun was behind him as he stepped cautiously up the slope, and the tree trunks were warm as his hands brushed over them.

  The chimneys rose up to meet him as he crested the slope. Two squat, bulbous brick obscenities, a pair of lungs belching out the corruption from somewhere deep inside the earth. Near them, fed by this eternal fever, was the wheel, its perpetual hiss and demonic, soul-sold energy audible under the clumsier clanging of the beast.

  The beast stood over the wheel, and its unceasing awkward momentum stupefied Chance. Up and down the beam swayed, see-sawing up and down, with the same ominous beat, up and down, chained to the darkness by its connecting rods, up and down forever. An irregularity, an uncertainty, would have suggested some human spirit in the machine. Up and down, up and down, up and down, with steady implacable hatred for the variable wondering souls of men. My arms do not swing like that, Gabriel Chance thought as he hid behind leaves, not if tortured to pull at those levers for eternity. My legs do not stride so even or so strong. My heart will not beat so steady or for so long.

  Somewhere within Roscarrock burnt a faint memory of a more innocent man, who had grown up in a society that knew little other than hardship but was able to move through that world freely and on his abilities. Those certainties and freedoms, and the innocence, had been washed away by the Atlantic. As he walked up the polished steps, Jessel chatting suavely beside him as a pair of footmen bowed to them, the challenges of the evening ahead and the unreality in which he swam crystallized in the simple realization that, for all his past freedom and experience, he had never walked through a doorway as grand as this.

  They were shown up a fine stone staircase inside, and Lord Hugo Bellamy was near the top of it. Jessel steered them in his direction, and caught the Admiral’s eye. Bellamy murmured a name that Roscarrock neither recognized nor quite caught, but Jessel responded to it and greeted the Admiral respectfully, before presenting Roscarrock as Mr Thomas Grey. The Admiral greeted Mr Grey with a polite disdain that seemed to Roscarrock the only real thing he’d experienced all day, and they stepped aside from the main movement of people.

  The Admiral scanned the new Roscarrock critically, and grunted.

  ‘Very well. What professional or manufacturing interest could you talk about for two minutes?’

  The odd question jolted him. ‘Ships.’

  ‘Good. You’re a shipbuilder – rather, you own a shipbuilding enterprise. Try not to give the impression you’ve ever got your hands dirty or wet. You could never pass for a gentleman, Roscarrock, but anyone seems to be able to get rich these days.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind, My Lord.’

  ‘You’ll forget it, Mr Grey,’ Bellamy said with what passed for levity. ‘I have other plans for you. Thus far you have lurked at the viler end of radicalism in this country. This evening you’ll see the other. Some of the most wealthy and illustrious in London, who through misguided conviction, foolishness, or sheer boredom, dabble in radicalism. Among them some of the French exile community, who may have found Paris too hot but haven’t forgotten the philosophical dreams that set it ablaze. Whatever the chatter of your friends in the taverns, a real threat to this country will need money and a link to Paris. Both are to be found here.’

  He half-turned and nodded formally to a new arrival at the top of the stairs. ‘Our hostess is the widow of a French intellectual; she came here when the Paris mob were concentrating more on equality than liberty or fraternity, and has got comfortable. She hankers for the salons, and time by time holds evenings like this. No one here would dream of doing anything revolutionary themselves, but the brains, and the backing – and the beneficiaries – of any threat to the Government will be found here. Some are just clever men and good conversationalists. Others are truly dangerous. Our hostess has invited the cream – radical politicians, reforming manufacturers, intellectual clergymen from across England.’

  ‘A vicar of Grantham?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Why?’

  Jessel got the point. ‘A broad-minded acquaintance of one of Sir Keith Kinnaird’s broad-minded contacts, My Lord – Forster, in Oakham. There was a Grantham vicar on our list, but we don’t think he’s left his parish.’

  The Admiral considered the point a second, and Roscarrock for longer. ‘You may be useful yet, Roscarrock. It goes without saying that anyone here could be an agent of Napoleon’s police, and I imagine that at least one or two certainly are.’ Another polite greeting over Roscarrock’s shoulder. ‘I am known in these circles as an idle dabbler, a man of limited intellect and some unimportant sinecure in the Admiralty, who fancies himself interested in reform. That reputation took me to Seldon House, and it will keep me here for the duration of one glass of wine. Serious politics is beyond me, and serious talk too dangerous. As the wine flows tonight, and the tongues loosen, and the more
serious players arrive, I shall find myself out of my depth and leave. You will stay. You will babble whatever half-baked ideologies you have learnt in the slums, you will listen to these people, and you will learn this world. I know what everyone here will say, but I’d like to know where they heard it and whom they’re saying it to.’

  Roscarrock nodded slowly, and turned away with Jessel.

  ‘Mr Grey.’

  Roscarrock stopped. ‘My Lord?’

  ‘How do you find us? Learnt anything useful yet?’

  ‘Nothing you couldn’t have got from the beggar on the corner. I frankly don’t understand why you need me.’

  ‘Let me judge that.’

  ‘I’m listening to gossip and having conversations that you or Kinnaird or any well-behaved schoolboy could have.’

  Bellamy stared bleakly at him. ‘As ever your insights on my business astound me, Roscarrock. I have the faint hope that you may be in harmony with some of Kinnaird’s rarer fruit. Each man brings something unique to a conversation, and takes something unique from it.’

  ‘You either overestimate me or underestimate Sir Keith, Admiral.’

  ‘You may trust in my estimation, Roscarrock.’ The heavy head considered him for a moment. ‘I have my routine meeting with Sir Keith and some of our associates tomorrow, and you need not trouble yourself about my handling of it. Immerse yourself as I have directed, and let us see what you dredge up.’ He looked beyond them to the staircase. ‘Get on with it, then. Resist the urge to pocket the cutlery.’

  Jessel and Roscarrock stood together on the edge of the reception room, scanning the arena of gold and glass and glittering costume. Jessel smoothed back his hair and seemed to breathe deeply at the luxury. ‘Come on then, Shipbuilder,’ he said with quiet energy.

  Roscarrock glanced at him as he straightened a smart blue coat and fingered its shining buttons. ‘What are you supposed to be?’

  Jessel savoured his own inventiveness. ‘Richard Houghton is a gentleman of the middling sort, with the faint memory of class but no trace of money, forced to work at something in banking. I am estranged from my family, who cannot come to terms with the practical implications of their own penury.’ He gazed into the gold mouldings on the ceiling for inspiration. ‘I have recently been forced to shift lodgings, owing to dark suspicions on the part of my landlady following her niece’s unexpected pregnancy.’

  ‘You’re actually enjoying yourself.’

  ‘Well, it’s better than being a Government servant slogging from tavern to tavern on fools’ errands, isn’t it?’ He grinned, and leant in. ‘I used to be an actor, Tom. I lost the taste for poverty, but never for performance.’ They turned to face the room. ‘Why, aren’t you enjoying yourself?’

  I no longer know who I am, myself. How could I possibly enjoy myself?

  ‘I am a hard-headed man of business, interested only in ships and profits. I despise the hypocrisy and empty show of things like this.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  The French widow with the taste for dangerous talk lived well. St James’s Square was one of the three or four most desirable locations in London, its dukes indifferent to its former prime ministers, and she was renting a house on its best side. Over the bobbing sea of heads, sash windows fully two men high showed the last of the summer light falling over the square. In the rattling chaos of vehicles, the elegant carriages of fashionable dabblers jostled with the coaches of practical men of business and industry and the horses of radical politicians and Government agents.

  These men and women, the gleaming and the grey, tapped up the marble staircase and out past Roscarrock and Jessel into the drawing room that took up the whole polished width of the house. Squeals of exaggerated acknowledgement set off the underlying murmur of earnest conversation, and a rich soup of perfumes saturated the air.

  ‘Recognize anyone?’

  Jessel scanned the room. ‘A few names. No one – oh, there’s one to be careful of – older man in the corner, brown coat, looks like Father Time picking his next victim – that’s Sir Joseph Plummer.’

  ‘Heard of him. Thinker; writer.’

  ‘The great theorist of social revolution and the better world to come.’

  ‘Not one of ours, then.’

  Jessel grinned. ‘Even Kinnaird’s not that clever.’

  They stepped into the arena.

  The 27th July

  Monsieur,

  I am now returned from Scotland, but will go north of that border again. The successful explosion at the coal mine of Hurlet, by the town of Paisley, caused damage that has still not been made good, and convinced me that the more robust attitude of the Scottish miners to danger – or the greater callousness of the owners – allows much opportunity for our enterprise.

  I am observing again the pit of Ox-close, in the County of Durham. The intervention in April in this place did only slight material damage, but I am convinced that my knowledge of the place will make a greater destruction possible at the second attempt.

  I must report that I suspect a man to be following me. He is not of the local Magistrates, nor a secret employee of the colliery owners, because I know that type and I know the individuals who fulfil those functions in this district. I must suspect this man is an agent of that secret organization of which you spoke so warily. I will remain prudent while pursuing our aims.

  [SS MF/Sh/16/7 (THE SUTHERLAND HOUSE TROVE)

  DECIPHERED BY J.J., DECEMBER 1805]

  Roscarrock made for the group around Plummer; at least he had a name to start with. No introduction was needed; Plummer was lecturing rather than conversing, and he was able to attach himself to the group unobtrusively.

  ‘I’m afraid, gentlemen, you’ll get no martyr’s insouciance from me. I’ve been to prison twice, and I cannot pretend it is anything other than a vile and dehumanizing experience. And I was as comfortable as it is possible to be, compared to some of the wretches with whom I shared the place.’

  Someone asked a question, but Plummer was continuing regardless. ‘My confinement is significant only as a signal. It demonstrates that this Government, and this system of government, will inevitably fall. Not because their attitude will provoke any great revenge, but because their attitude reflects an utter absence of imagination. This regime will be defeated not because it resists the pressure for reform, but because it does not understand it.’

  Sir Joseph Plummer was a man of average height in average clothes. But there was an ancient gauntness in his face that fascinated, a wild, knotted texture that was less human, more that of some desiccated tree. His bony body, supporting the clothes badly, made him seem taller in the same way that the roughened face made him seem older. He was somehow not quite of his time, and it made his words prophetic. ‘These Ministers, they think of radical reform as if it were a regiment of Bonaparte’s army, to be defeated as clearly and brutally as possible.’ He shook his head. ‘Radical reform is the grass growing from the natural soil of this land; it is the word on the tongue of the body of Britain. Reform is the natural emanation of all that we are, and it is unstoppable. The Ministers pretend that they are leading the majority against an upstart faction; instead it is they who are the minority, a handful of men trying to hold back the tide. The only choice we have is the role that we are to play: agent of progress, blind reactionary, or’ – predator’s eyes scanned the group – ‘gilded spectators.’

  It was no kind of conversation, and not even a debate. The old man was speaking as he would to a whole room of people, but engaging with none of them. Generally he locked his face and speech onto one member of his audience whom Roscarrock couldn’t see. But now the fierce gaze and a single stick of a finger, held close to the chest with miserly control, were sweeping around the group. Roscarrock realized that eye and finger had settled on him, and a high crackle of a voice stabbed at him. ‘You, sir, for example, what brings you?’

  Roscarrock looked straight back at the old man. ‘When there is such good talk, a pruden
t man is here to listen.’

  Plummer looked Roscarrock up and down once, and the wild old eyes pushed a fraction forwards. ‘Practical man? Business?’

  ‘Manufacture.’

  ‘Iron?’

  ‘Ships.’

  The eyes widened a fraction, and relaxed. ‘Men such as you, sir, must decide. You will be the steam engines of the new world, but if you refuse to move with that world, you will be caught in the machinery and destroyed. No doubt, sir, you could make a little fortune building ships for this whore of a war, but she will destroy you as well in time.’

  ‘Then, Sir Joseph, I am fortunate to have you as engineer.’

  There was nothing to be gained from Plummer in his public mode. Roscarrock drifted on through the crowd, trying to classify by dress and speech, trying to catch the thrust of conversations as he passed. Two noble financiers, English and French, speaking their shared language of gold and class, indifferent to the ignorants who could not. A pretty young Frenchwoman, long limbs making a rare success of the latest dress, trying to find something attractive in the face or conversation of a London pamphleteer. A radical journalist asking earnest questions of a reforming mill owner from Wales. Two younger men conferring furtively behind a barricade of meats and pies. Roscarrock glanced at them a second time – their earnestness, their energy. Not plotters, certainly; not politicians, either, but enthusiasts of politics, and as radical and fervent as the wine could make them.

  A small, neat man, every aspect of dress and voice meticulous, down to the quiet care with which his French accent tried to grapple the barbarous English vowels. ‘I understand, sir, that we might have something in common. I hear that you are in ships.’ The sibilants emerged so luxuriously that for a second Roscarrock didn’t recognize the word. ‘I too.’