The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  ‘This is fantastical.’

  ‘Isn’t it? But what’s really fantastical is the idea that a whole fleet could be created and crewed and supplied and steered without a single documented reference. You know better than anyone how complicated it is to send even a single ship to sea.’

  Folliott sat back in his chair suddenly. ‘But – one moment – that’s nonsense: we’ve—’

  ‘You’re going to tell me, I suppose, that the sails of this fleet have already been spotted. How many ships of the line? How many warships, Captain? None so far, I imagine. Just a few, sketchy reports of sails. And London are now so panicked about the new threat that they’re diverting ships from the blockade squadrons on the basis of those reports alone.’ Folliott was silent. ‘Those sails are all sloops and schooners, one- and two-masters, and they’re not even French. They are irregular ships of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, sailing under corrupted Captains.’

  Roscarrock breathed out, trying to read Captain Folliott’s face.

  ‘There is no way you can believe all this on the word of a complete stranger. So you should suggest to the Admiralty that a reconnaissance be made of this new fleet before a single ship is diverted from the blockade of the French invasion forces. Those that have already been diverted must go no further. If I’m wrong, you can throw me over the side and no harm done. Frankly, I could do with the rest.’

  ‘If you’re wrong, they’ll have lost precious time in stopping that damned fleet. Once it moves, it could get anywhere.’

  ‘That’s a better risk than leaving the French army uncovered. One other thing: I don’t know who to trust anymore; your message must be sent on regular Royal Navy channels, as personal for the First Lord of the Admiralty. Mention my name if you want.’

  ‘The First Lord of the Admiralty has heard of you?’

  ‘I saved his life last week.’

  Captain Folliott drummed his fingers on his chart table, for what seemed to Roscarrock like an age, and his eyes neither moved nor blinked.

  Eventually he said, ‘What happened on that sloop, Mr Roscarrock?’

  The question surprised Roscarrock. He considered the Captain’s face for one crucial moment. ‘I destroyed it,’ he said quietly, eyes fixed on the Captain. ‘The Comptrollerate-General equips its ships with time-delay mines: gunpowder with a simple fuse mechanism, for offensive use or in case they’re being captured, I presume. I killed an Irishman – a rebel, a murderer and a betrayer of the common man, though he’d probably say much the same about me. I killed the sloop’s Mate – he’d killed his Captain as part of this plot a few days before, but otherwise I’d nothing against him.’ Folliott frowned slightly: treason was one thing, but discipline at sea was sacrosanct. ‘I killed perhaps a dozen crewmen, corrupt men who’d spent most of their lives drifting on the wrong side of the law – along with most other English sailors I’ve ever met. And I killed a woman…’ – his gaze broke now, and he searched for the words – ‘a creature of great beauty, who thought that if one had no real loyalty, one could never really be a traitor. Part of me wishes she was right.’ He looked at the Captain again.

  The Captain was staring at him still. He started drumming his fingers again. Then suddenly he took a breath, and called, ‘Marine!’ There was immediately movement outside the cabin door.

  ‘That’s an unattractive truth, Mr Roscarrock, or an unnecessary falsehood. Either way.’

  The door was open, there was a thump as boots and musket-butt stamped to attention, and Roscarrock could feel the expectant presence behind his shoulder.

  Folliott glanced up, then back to the strange man opposite him. ‘Marine! Send for Mr Ancombe, now. I shall be on deck in thirty seconds, sending a signal of the highest priority.’ The door closed.

  Roscarrock breathed out very slowly. The gaunt face watched him.

  ‘You’re a man of the sea I think, Mr Roscarrock.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But not of the Service.’

  He shook his head. ‘The sea is my country, Captain. I haven’t the discipline for your service, nor the certainty for your rank. I admire you, but even if I had your qualities I couldn’t give my loyalty as you do – absolutely, and to an indifferent master.’

  The Captain’s eyes narrowed. ‘I have Scottish blood in me, Roscarrock. I need no homily on the deceptions of the British Empire.’

  Roscarrock smiled, acknowledging the point, and the two weary pairs of eyes watched each other, and something relaxed on the Captain’s mouth.

  Again silence, and then again, softly, the fingers began to drum on the table.

  ‘What on earth are you, Mr Roscarrock?’

  ‘Someone I hope you’ll forget, Captain.’ Roscarrock suddenly felt the weeks of tiredness. ‘I’ll save that Empire today, with your help, and once I’m done I want nothing more to do with any of it. I have a life that I’m anxious to restart.’

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

  And what of Fouché’s great deception, and of dear Villeneuve? On the 14th of August we are still pushing north. The English Channel and the English coast are closer every moment. But on the 14th it all changes. We meet a Danish ship. The Captain is brought before me that I may interrogate him. A surly fellow. It is the second time in a day that he has been stopped and interrogated.

  Oh! Who else is in these parts? An English ship? Now I am on my mettle, of course. I seek to learn something of the English movements. But it had been but one English ship, and what I learn is more significant. This Danish Captain tells me of the news that is passing from ship to ship through the Royal Navy.

  A man has escaped from a shipwreck with an extraordinary story and a message. There had been rumours of a new French fleet, but now it is confirmed that these were precisely rumours and nothing more. Perhaps there had been a few ships, but they were small and of little consequence, and perhaps they have been destroyed now by some of your British frigates.

  Are these details being signalled by your midshipmen? I do not think so. Somehow this story is spreading on the currents. Sailors are great tellers of tales. But my unhappy Danish Captain tells me of the one formal message that is indeed spreading by flags across the English Channel and the eastern Atlantic: all of His Majesty’s ships are to remain at their present station.

  That is all I need to hear. It is clear that Fouché’s so-brilliant plan has failed. His phantom fleet, created in rumours and false reports spread by traitors in British intelligence, has not distracted the Royal Navy. Your ships will maintain their complete blockade of their invasion force at Boulogne, and all of the other blockades too. I, poor Villeneuve, will have no assistance and I must risk attack for every league that I sail closer to the Dover Strait and then I must fight my way in to the Emperor and then fight my way out again with his army. Is this sensible? Of course, I order the fleet immediately to cease sailing north.

  What happened to those ghost ships, my friend? Ah, a little shrug. They disappeared into the fog again, I think. They must have realized very quickly that they were not distracting any significant Royal Navy fleet, and they began to slip away. [Interjection: two were tracked by Royal Navy frigates, but they escaped. Individual men were traced.] Ah, and those men, they suffered a little, I think. And then perhaps they had accidents. Or perhaps their employment was renewed with greater stringency. The sailors, well, a sailor is a sailor, and if you captured any of the sailors of this ghost fleet, your press gangs will have been grateful. But only two ships and some individuals? The rest, they vanished into the forgotten coves of your south-western shores, or into the infinity of the Atlantic, did they not? For a time they were English ships, and for a time they were French ships, and then they were gone again.

  The French navy, we were busy too in those uncertain days. Our spies in Fouché’s Ministry of Police were most active. Quickly they confirmed the failure of the scheme, and so Decrès knew of this within hours. With lightn
ing speed a message was travelling to me at sea, in French navy code. Clearly there was no success, no glory, to be found in those crowded waters, not even one single chance of it. Just one more failure for the Emperor’s unloved and untrusted navy. Within a week, I had our fleet back safe in Spain, and the Emperor’s last dream of invasion ebbed with me.

  [SS G/1130/20]

  In his office above Fitzsimmons’s Coffee House, adjacent to the room of pigeon-holes, Mr Pewsey was working methodically through a column of figures in a ledger when one of his clerks knocked and entered.

  ‘Mr Pewsey sir, beg pardon.’

  ‘Baines?’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a lad here with a delivery. For one of our gentlemen.’

  ‘Well? Have it brought up.’

  ‘Sir, we can’t, sir. The lad’s just here with a note from the docks. It’s… it’s a fishing boat, sir. French one.’ Pewsey’s eyes widened behind the round spectacles. ‘“Fishing boat, passengers and cargo. For Sir Keith Kinnaird, care of Fitzsimmons’s Coffee House.” That’s all he can say, sir.’

  Again the fields of Boulogne shuddered under hundreds of thousands of boots, but they were marching away now. The Army of the Ocean Coasts was a thing of history; it was the Emperor’s Grand Army now, heading south and east towards new and astounding triumphs. Behind them, the invasion barges slumped and rotted on the sand. The vast stores of food, of boots, of clothing, of supplies and equipment for armourers and engineers and cooks, were packed up again or burnt or sold or looted. The long, bright columns of men tramped up the hill and away, looking ahead into the Continent and never back at the sea. The little finger of wood promising to show the way ‘To England’ had disappeared, but few noticed. The citizens of Boulogne watched the soldiers disappear into the dust of Europe, waved cheerful or tearful goodbyes, began to reckon up – the profits and the spoils, the unpaid bills and the damaged furniture and the pregnant girls – and to pick through the debris. Another army had come to the coast, and gone. There would be others.

  From the tower on the cliff, Napoleon Bonaparte took a last look at the impassive wall of the sea, still pockmarked with English sails.

  He was searching for the next success; behind him, the Minister of Police was reciting with cold pedantry the last failure.

  ‘Elements of the plan miscarried, Excellency, and I have not slept for analyzing my shortcomings. But if Admiral Villeneuve had continued, there was still—’

  The Emperor turned; Fouché knew when to shut up.

  ‘Better is required, Fouché.’

  ‘Your disappointment is my shame, Excellency.’

  The walls of the tower’s high chamber, and the great table, were decorated with new maps now – central Europe, northern Italy, Austria – and the Emperor’s fingers moved over them like a blind man tasting a woman’s body.

  ‘Have we gained nothing?’ he asked absently.

  ‘We know more about the divisions in London, Excellency. At the very heart of the British establishment are men and women working actively for your victory – traitors in positions of authority. Their time will come again. Excellency, it remains my deepest ambition that – after victory in the east – you will turn again towards the west and that you will ride in triumph down Whitehall.’

  Napoleon looked up carefully into the pale eyes. He reached out a slow hand, and pinched his Minister of Police by the cheek; Fouché fought down his irritation. ‘Keep at it, Fouché. I have only begun to remake Europe.’

  The Emperor released the Minister, and turned away to stare into the maps.

  On the 19th of October 1805, Admiral Villeneuve would finally sail out of Cadiz harbour to face the destiny that he had long avoided. The Bucentaure was still his flagship, and the combined fleet of French and Spanish warships included the Santísima Trinidad, the most powerful ship then in existence. Two days later, Admiral Horatio Nelson and the British fleet caught up with Villeneuve off a Spanish headland called Cape Trafalgar. Nelson, on HMS Victory, surged into the line of French ships and engaged the Bucentaure personally. After two hours of devastation, which would see most of the French and Spanish ships destroyed or captured, Villeneuve surrendered.

  On that same afternoon of the 21st of October, as the cannonballs gouged clouds of splinter and flesh out of the English and Allied fleets, an explosion at Hebburn Colliery near Paisley killed thirty-five men.

  The Battle of Trafalgar made Nelson a legend and Villeneuve a prisoner. It guaranteed the British Empire for a century, and ensured that France would never be more than a Continental power. Villeneuve would spend some months as a captive in England; Comptrollerate-General records show some but not all of the conversations he had while in the hands of the British Government.

  Shortly after his return to France, Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve would be found dead in a Normandy hotel room, with multiple stab wounds to his chest. The verdict, given under the authority of the Minister of Police, would be suicide.

  The dirty, slurred cackling of two departing drunks in the darkness, and the screech of an unseen, unloved name-board back and forth on its iron hooks, told Jessel he’d reached his lodging. His face screwed up as he took in the rotting wood, the indifferently whitewashed stone. It was a vile place, and he foresaw immediately the maggoty bread and the infested mattress that would take him through the next hours. But there was no alternative in the wretched little harbour village, and in the wretched little harbour village he had to be, again, for the morning would bring a climax.

  The inside was all that the outside had warned of. But among the mixed human smells Jessel caught malt and cooked meat; the basics might be well enough. The drunks had been the last of the customers; the two benches were empty, only the few drained mugs and the sodden, scuffled straw telling of previous trade.

  As Jessel closed the door behind him on its crude latch, a man turned around from the dying fire. The landlord, obviously: a big, shambling, bearded wreck, crude and rotten like his inn. Jessel saw it all in the hot, ravaged face and the way the man moved. First there was hostility; the inn was closing, a solitary drinker no compensation for disruption to the man’s indifferent and base existence. Then the dark, greedy eyes saw the glint of gold in the stranger’s fist, and the stranger smiled to himself at the trivial criminal sidelines that no doubt kept the man solvent.

  The beer was rough and the meat grey, but both were warm and welcome at the end of a long journey. The landlord mustered up some bonhomie for a promising guest, and stood nearby watching Jessel intently.

  ‘You have a name, landlord?’

  Instant wariness, and again Jessel smiled to himself. He wondered if he’d get the truth. But the man had relaxed, and continued to gaze at his guest.

  ‘Hillyard, sir. Henry Hillyard.’

  Jessel looked up at him, searching the coarse face for a second. ‘Hillyard? I seem to know the name.’

  ‘Do you, sir?’ The landlord picked up an empty mug and looked back at his guest. ‘Do you indeed?’

  The sun was climbing higher out of the sea now, and it created simple sweeps of colour: the endless dull blue of the water; the great expanse of yellow sand; the brown of the angry cliffs.

  Admiral Lord Hugo Bellamy hated the world outside London. He hated the lack of comfort and civility and conversation, he hated the brute simplicity of the people, the clumsy buildings whose lumps of wood and stone seemed to shape their inhabitants, the endless wastes of empty landscape, the wet, and the eternal, all-pervasive cold. Rural life meant only the chilly barbarities of his school, the isolated sterility of life with his provincial family, the endless wait for damp and disease to carry one off enlivened only, and not much at that, by the macabre and primitive festivals of the country people. For every fifty miles one travelled from London, one could reckon to step back a century of civilization. Which put him currently somewhere in the Dark Ages.

  Not for the first time, he cursed the name of Tom Roscarrock. Three bone-sore days in a coach, foul inns wit
h their grim staff and grey food and the weird noises of the night, a wind that blew sharp and constant from the north, had carried him to the far south-western extremity of England – and it felt like a different country. Then the trek across the sand this morning – fully half a mile? – to the wreck, as he had been instructed. Alone, as instructed. This wasn’t a different country, but a different world: he was floating somewhere between the land and the sea, adrift with only ghosts for companions.

  Next to him, the vast black fingers of the shipwreck clutched out of the sand, the timbers dank and crumbling. It didn’t take much imagination to see one’s own ribs rotting alongside them.

  He had the suspicion that his boots were leaking, moisture creeping in from the damp beach. This was the meeting place; but where was Roscarrock?

  Actually, there were benefits to being free of the city for a few days. Too much unintelligent tension, too much muttering and wondering as people waited dumbly for fate. Britain had avoided disaster by a hair, and so there were the lurches of hope and the certainty of another alarm and, like a man with the ague, the nation continued to sweat and to writhe. The conclusion was inevitable. The fever would never let up, until the inevitable crisis. One could only accommodate oneself to it. But he was tired now – tired of it all.

  A figure in the distance – a man walking – towards him across the sand – and eventually he recognized Roscarrock. Bellamy smiled slightly, wondered at the interview to come. If Roscarrock had survived, then Roscarrock must know a good deal.