The Spoils of Conquest

by Seth Hunter

  ‘Light companies? Grenadiers?’ Harris finally managed to find his voice, though it was clearly under some strain. ‘But what of the march on Seringapatam? We could lose our best men.’

  ‘There will be no march on Seringapatam if we do not get our money back,’ Wellesley retorted. ‘I will leave the details to you, colonel, and we will discuss your further involvement later. I suggest we bring this meeting to an end. There is a great deal to be done. And not a word of this outside the walls of this room.’ He seemed to address this more particularly to Picket than to any of the others. ‘If the thing is to be done, it must be done with the greatest despatch and in the greatest secrecy. Or we can pack our bags and prepare our excuses for when we return to England.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Jonah and the Whale

  ‘This is madness,’ Picket hissed in Nathan’s ear as they left the governor’s house. ‘Utter lunacy.’

  Nathan maintained his policy of saying nothing, though privately he was in complete agreement. But if a king could go mad, so could a governor-general. Some might see it as a duty.

  ‘If they are not on their way back to the Île de France, they could be anywhere in the Indian Ocean,’ Picket persisted. ‘Why did you not protest?’

  ‘Me?’ Nathan considered one of a number of replies and settled on the most pragmatic. ‘Because it would have served no useful purpose,’ he declared, ‘other than to enrage him further. Besides, we will have the Shiva repaired, anything else we require, and a thousand soldiers at our disposal. If the French prisoners do decide to talk, at least we will be in a position to act upon it.’

  They drove into Madras with General Harris, along a road mired from the monsoon rains and clogged with military traffic – gun limbers and supply wagons, bullock carts, muleteers with strings of recalcitrant mules, even elephants and camels, wallowing in the filth and splashing through the puddles, cursing, bellowing and trumpeting their complaints, according to the facilities gifted them by the Almighty. And the fields about filled with tents, and ditches and latrines and horse lines … all the paraphernalia of an army under canvas. Twenty-six thousand men and twice as many animals with nowhere to go.

  ‘All ready and waiting to march – just as soon as the rains end,’ the general declared, rather more positively. And then, with a puzzled frown as he recalled the conversation in the governor’s house, ‘or as soon as may be.’

  He relapsed into a moody silence. Picket looked ready to weep. Nathan’s mind was filled with calculations. He wished he could see the charts Picket had taken from the Shiva. It was difficult to make any kind of plans without them.

  They pulled into the side of the road to let a squadron of cavalry ride past – 19th Light Dragoons, Harris said, in their Tarleton helmets and blue jackets, looking more like French cavalry than British, he complained sourly. Then there was a skirl of pipes and he cheered up a bit. The 77th Highlanders, he informed his audience, clansmen from the north of Scotland, in their tall black shakoes and swinging kilts, muskets at the shoulder. They looked happy enough, splashing through the puddles, but it could have been worse; they could have been in Stirling. All eyes turned to the right as they marched past their commander-in-chief in his stationary carriage, and Harris sat stiff-lipped and misty-eyed as he returned their salute, dreaming of leading them on the Tiger’s lair, no doubt, and hoping it would not remain a dream.

  They carried on into Madras, following the line of the River Cooum with the ramparts and redoubts of Fort St George extending for several miles on the farther side. The oldest British fortress in India, it had been built in on swampland granted to the East India Company by the local nayak in 1639, since when the port had grown into one of the greatest in Asia, but General Harris said it was a terrible place for the fevers and was forever flooding during the monsoon. In fact, the river looked close to bursting its banks and the bridge they crossed was barely a foot above water.

  They entered the fort through the western gate and dropped Nathan off at the hospital in Charles Street where he was to have his head examined by the city surgeon, Dr Sutherland. He saw no reason to cancel the appointment. Picket could deal with the Shiva and the dockyard, and they could leave the other arrangements to General Harris and Colonel Wellesley. But he asked Picket to send the charts over to the Pondicherry as soon as he returned to his ship.

  Dr Sutherland was a Scot, of course. Most doctors in Nathan’s experience were Scots and came in two sizes – craggy or corpulent. Sutherland was one of the craggy sort, so craggy, indeed, that he more resembled a corpse than a surgeon, which could not have cheered his patients much. Not that cheering his patients seemed to be a priority with him. He pushed his long nose close to the wound and sniffed about like a dog smelling for truffles, tapped Nathan’s skull all over with a bony finger like a woodpecker drilling for beetles, and made him sit with his legs crossed so he could test his reactions to a small wooden mallet tapped sharply upon his knee. Then he exposed him to a series of mental tests similar to those that Halsey had contrived, save that he required him to name not only the present king but a great many of his predecessors.

  ‘Would it not be more pertinent to ask me some questions about navigation?’ Nathan enquired mildly.

  ‘Why should I do that, when I do not wish to go anywhere?’ the surgeon enquired tartly. ‘Kings and queens will do very well, thankee, unless you have a particular objection to them. You are not a Republican, I suppose.’

  Nathan rattled them off with confidence until the Wars of the Roses caused him to lose his bearings a bit, but then, as the doctor conceded, it had caused the kings and queens some confusion, too, and Henry VI himself cannot have been too sure when he was king and when he was not.

  ‘Well, I can find nought wrong with you,’ the doctor declared with some reluctance, ‘and you might live to be a hundred, if you leave the knocking of heads to others.’

  It was raining when Nathan emerged from the hospital, though rain was a totally inadequate means of describing the deluge that poured down from the vast black hole that passed for a sky. He felt unusually glad to be alive, in celebration of which he put on his cloak and hat and ran all the way to the coffee house where he was to meet Tully and Caterina, arriving thoroughly soaked but with his high spirits by no means dampened.

  ‘You look very nice,’ he told Caterina, though in truth he preferred her in a sailor suit. She had left that behind on the Pondicherry, however, and had assumed the more conventional attire of a respectable Englishwoman, or as respectable and English as Caterina would ever look. ‘You look nice, too,’ he assured Tully, shaking the rain from his hat and sitting down with them at the table.

  ‘I take it you will live,’ said Tully, correctly assessing his mood.

  ‘To be at least a hundred,’ Nathan reported, ‘if I do not drown or get knocked on the head by the French. But they collected the fee at the door to be on the safe side.’

  ‘And the governor-general?’

  ‘The governor-general was less obliging. He gave me three days.’

  ‘To live?’

  ‘To be ready for sea.’

  ‘Where … ?’ Tully began, but then snapped his mouth shut.

  ‘I will tell you later. What are we drinking?’

  ‘Well, as it is a coffee house …’

  ‘Sure it is,’ Nathan looked about him, as if he had at that moment become aware of it, ‘just like London.’

  ‘Save for the heat, and the flies – and the punkahwallas.’

  This was true. There were flies in the coffee houses of London, too, but not quite so many, and not usually of the bloodsucking variety, preferring to leave this facility to the paying customers. Madras had the same species – of merchant trader, if not of flies – bloated with a good morn ing’s feasting at the exchange. Nathan wondered if they knew about the lost silver. Almost certainly, he thought, for all the governor-general’s strictures about secrecy. You could keep very little from the men of money, and sailors wer
e a notoriously gabby bunch. There were a few of them here – though not from the squadron, as far as Nathan could tell – along with a scattering of military men. Caterina was the only woman, though, and was being ogled by every man in the room. She was, of course, quite impervious to it. Indeed, she seemed oddly subdued.

  ‘How are your lodgings?’ Nathan asked her politely. Her resumption of female apparel had made him more reserved.

  ‘Quite comfortable, thank you,’ she replied coolly.

  He wondered if male visitors were permitted, and whether the next three days would afford him the leisure for them to spend any time together. She would almost certainly be gone by the time he returned, if he ever did. She had stated her intention of taking passage on the next ship that was bound for England.

  He sipped gloomily at his coffee. The best Ethiopian Mocha, almost certainly as good as anything to be had at the Turk’s Head, but it gave him little satisfaction. His good mood was quite gone already. Even if she planned to stay in England, it could be years before he was back there. And England had its own constrictions, so far as Nathan was concerned. Faced with a choice between Caterina and Sara, what was he to do? Marry one, keep the other as a mistress? One in Sussex, one in London? Who would be the wife, though? Sara, probably, she was more the wifely type. Caterina was definitely more of a mistress. But, no, it would not do. It would not do at all. He was by nature monogamous. Or rather, he was inclined to love only one woman at a time. Though he frequently regretted it.

  ‘Nathan?’

  He realised they were both regarding him with some concern.

  ‘I am sorry?’

  ‘Are you sure the doctor said you were quite recovered?’

  ‘Absolutely. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because Caterina has asked you twice how many lumps of sugar you would like,’ Tully informed him.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry, two please.’ She helped him from the sugar bowl and he stirred his coffee moodily. ‘They may wish to see you before you leave,’ he told her.

  ‘Who may wish to see me?’

  ‘The governor-general and his brother.’ Nathan dropped his voice. ‘They want to ask you about this Frenchman you overheard in Mangalore. Monsieur le Marquis.’

  ‘I can tell them nothing that I have not told you already,’ Caterina insisted. ‘I did not see the man, I only heard his voice.’

  ‘I think, perhaps, they want to make sure you were not mistaken.’

  ‘You mean lying?’

  ‘No, not at all. Just – they just want to meet you,’ he finished lamely

  She sniffed. ‘What are they like?’

  ‘“What are they like”?’ Nathan frowned. It was as if she were sizing them up as clients. ‘They are Irish,’ he said. ‘Or at least, born in Ireland. You do not want anything to do with them, more than you have to.’

  ‘But the governor-general – he is a lord, is he not?’

  ‘An Irish lord,’ he said. ‘It is not the same.’

  ‘And are not the Irish Catholics?’

  ‘Not when they are of the rank of the Wellesleys. They are what we call Anglo-Irish horse Protestants.’

  ‘Caterina is looking for a patron,’ Tully said by way of an explanation.

  I bet she is, Nathan thought. ‘I understood you were setting off for England,’ he said, ‘as soon as you could find a ship.’

  ‘Well, now I think I might stay,’ she said.

  This should have been cheering but certain things needed clarifying first.

  ‘But why? What is there for you to do in Madras?’

  ‘I am thinking to establish a convent here,’ said Caterina.

  Nathan smiled at the jest, but her expression appeared perfectly serious. He recalled with concern that her last convent had been judged the best casino in Venice – and some said the best bordello.

  ‘Is that wise?’ he cautioned. ‘The English are not quite so – permissive – as the Venetians.’

  ‘Not that kind of a convent,’ she assured him. She even had the grace to blush. ‘It will be to serve the poor.’

  Nathan stared at her. ‘The poor?’

  ‘The poor and the sick. There are a great many in Black Town.’ Black Town was the native quarter and the place where the Portuguese lived, as opposed to White Town where the English lived, and other Europeans of the Protestant persuasion.

  ‘But – what – why?’ Nathan was confused. He looked to Tully as if for an explanation. Tully said nothing, but Nathan judged from his expression he knew something Nathan did not.

  ‘Why me?’ Caterina finished for him. ‘I know.’ She shrugged. ‘But someone has to. And I feel it is what God wishes me to do.’

  Nathan could hardly believe he was hearing this. He wondered for a moment if he was being made game of, but if so she was making a very good job of it. Her expression remained perfectly grave.

  ‘It is like Jonah and the Whale,’ she said.

  ‘I am a little confused,’ Nathan admitted.

  ‘God wished to send Jonah to Nineveh,’ Caterina told him, ‘but Jonah had other plans. So he sailed off in a ship. But God caused a great storm to rise and the sailors threw Jonah into the sea and there was a sea monster—’

  ‘A whale. Yes, I know. Apparently, they had them in the Med in those days. And the whale swallowed him and spat him out in Nineveh. But it was not actually the story that was confusing me.’

  ‘That is what happens to me.’

  Nathan wondered if his wits were not quite as sound as the doctor had indicated. ‘Are we not in Madras?’ he asked Tully.

  ‘Madras is my Nineveh,’ Caterina assured him. ‘The place where the Lord wishes me to be.’

  ‘But – why would the Lord want you to come to Madras?’

  ‘To do His work. And the work of Saint Thomas.’

  ‘Saint Thomas?’

  ‘You know of Saint Thomas, Nathan,’ Caterina assured him firmly. ‘Everyone knows of Saint Thomas. The apostle of Christ who did not believe He rose from the dead. It is why we call him Saint Thomas the Doubter. Later, he came here to preach and he was made a martyr, on a small hill near here, by the pagans. The Portuguese have a shrine there and that is where I will build my convent.’

  Nathan struggled to come to terms with this. ‘But you have no money, no—’

  ‘I have money – much money – from what I did in Venice. It is with Coutts and Company in London. But they tell me I can draw upon it in Madras.’

  Nathan put a hand to his head. It had begun to ache again.

  ‘Did you know of this?’ he asked Tully.

  ‘She had just told me.’ Tully nodded. ‘She made a vow. When you were ill. And in danger of death.’

  ‘Captain!’ There was a flash of the old Caterina. ‘You said—’

  ‘I said nothing. I promised nothing.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Nathan groaned. ‘Caterina – it is such a waste.’

  ‘A waste!’ She said something in Italian, possibly vulgar. ‘What else am I to do with my life?’

  Marry me? Be my mistress? Better the first, in the circumstances. Nathan opened his mouth –

  ‘I am sorry for intruding, sir. Mr Blunt said I would find you here.’

  Nathan looked up. Lieutenant Joyce towered above him, respectfully touching his hat. Nathan regarded him as if he were an apparition, or a whale sent by God. ‘Is there a problem?’ he enquired.

  ‘No, sir, not a problem, as such.’ The lieutenant looked disconcerted by the intensity of Nathan’s expression. ‘It is just that – there is someone who would like to meet you.’

  ‘Meet me?’ Nathan was somewhat confused. ‘What, here?’ He peered around Joyce’s massive bulk but he appeared to be alone.

  ‘Not here, sir, but in Madras. If you can spare the time.’ He glanced helplessly at Tully. ‘He is – that is …’

  ‘Who is it, for God’s sake?’

  Joyce looked like an embarrassed schoolboy. ‘Well, that is to say – it is my brother, sir.’

  Ch
apter Twenty-four

  The Confidential Agent

  ‘My goodness, sir, I see you are the great man in the world. And it seems only yesterday I watched you kicking a ball in Saint James’s Park.’

  Neville Joyce – not Noel or Neil – had grown older and stouter since the days when he had been a fixture at Lady Peake’s house in St James’s and the red in his hair had mostly transferred to his face. What was left of Nathan’s earlier optimism vanished completely. It was always depressing to see one’s mother’s lovers grown old.

  ‘How do you do, sir?’ Nathan greeted him cordially enough, though he was still distracted by his encounter with Caterina. ‘What a small world it is.’

  ‘It is to be sure,’ Joyce Senior agreed, ‘and delighted I am that you are still a part of it. Brother William told me about your wound,’ he explained. ‘I trust you are quite recovered.’

  ‘Oh, entirely,’ Nathan assured him glumly. ‘I could name you all the kings and queens of England back to Henry the Fifth.’

  ‘Well, that is a wonder,’ Joyce acknowledged. ‘Your mother always said you were a sharp one, and quite wasted upon the Navy, though you seem to have done well enough by it. And how is your mother, by the by?’

  ‘Quite well, thank you, when I last heard from her,’ Nathan replied.

  Joyce had done well enough by himself, too, if his brother were to be believed. He had made his money in the law and had been elected a Member of Parliament, but he had lost his seat in the last election and had come to India with an organisation called the London Missionary Society, though in quite what capacity Nathan had yet to discover. He doubted very much if it was as a missionary, unless he had undergone a complete change of character, but then, after Caterina’s conversion, he supposed anything was possible. The first lieutenant had said something about an association with William Wilberforce and the Saints of Clapham, so maybe it was on their account; they had a facility for mixing religion with politics, though their current preoccupation was with slavery, and so far as Nathan knew, the East India Company had no interests in that line of trade.