Clash of Empires

by Brian Falkner

  The sails are mostly furled; just enough are aloft to maintain steerage. It is still more canvas than would be usual in these conditions, but she is towing a heavy load. Sails flap in the gusts and ropes slap against the masts and stays. The sound of the wind through the rigging is a ghoulish shriek.

  Waves batter the sides of the ship, erupting over the gunwales and drenching everyone and everything. The air is filled with spray and Thibault can taste salt. Occasionally the island to their right solidifies, breaking through the clouded mist. To larboard, white water breaks furiously against rocks. It seems close, too close.

  “Safety lines, fore and aft,” the captain instructs, and a moment later the sailing master shouts the same command. The ship plunges deep into furrows, lifting a moment later on huge swells of water. The passage is dangerous even in the calm; in these seas it could soon turn deadly.

  There is a crack from overhead and Thibault looks up to see a spar broken and dangling. Ropes hang loose and sails flap uselessly.

  “Two points to starboard,” the captain says, and the helmsman moves the wheel just so.

  There are more instructions, and sailors are climbing the rigging, tossed and buffeted by the wind and the waves that reach well up the mast. Thibault watches as hatchets slam into loose ropes and the dangling, broken spar collapses. The final rope is cut and it disappears into a whirlwind.

  “Four points to starboard,” the captain orders.

  The rocks to their left seem even closer now. The ship is being driven toward them, despite bearing well away from them.

  “The barge is pulling our stern around. It is dragging us sideways.” The captain’s deep voice comes from close behind Thibault and he turns. Dandy or not, the captain is resolute in the storm, standing on the heaving deck as steadily as if it was dry land, unbothered by the rain and the driving waves that hurl themselves over the sides of the ship.

  “If we cannot make way toward the center of the Channel, we may have to cut the barge loose!” The captain has to shout above the howling of the rigging.

  “I would first cut you loose,” Thibault says without emotion.

  “If it drags us onto the rocks the ship will founder!” the captain shouts. “We will all be lost, along with your precious dinosaur.”

  “Then see that it doesn’t,” Thibault says.

  The captain turns and storms off, without a word or a bow. He barks commands at the deck officers. Sailors run to carry out their orders. The helmsman works the wheel, fighting against the winds and the currents, but now the captain replaces him, his face a rigid mask as he feels his way through the turbulent sea.

  More sails are unfurled by riggers high on the spars. A sudden gust of wind and the ship sways. There is a scream from above and a body falls, stopped only at the end of a safety rope.

  The rigger spins and swings wildly at the end of the rope. The mast swings back, whipping the man through the air, smashing him against the mizzenmast. His struggles stop and he hangs limply at the end of the rope. Again and again the winds whip him back and forth, painting the mast in broad bright strokes of red before finally, mercifully, the rope breaks and he is gone over the side.

  Thibault hears a crunch from behind, the sound carried on the wind. He is immediately afraid that it has come from the barge, but he turns to see it safe, if wallowing badly in the seas behind them. The crunch has come from another of the ships, its mainsails torn, at least one spar hanging loose. Its hull is broached on an unseen rock. It is leaning, almost horizontal, and men are falling from the rigging and the deck into the ocean.

  “The Sceptre,” the captain says. “She is lost!”

  “The Sceptre is a troop ship, is it not?” Thibault asks.

  “It is,” the captain says.

  “Those men must be rescued,” Thibault says. “Signal the following ships.”

  “That would endanger those ships also,” the captain says. “The seas are too rough.”

  “Captain, that ship carries over a thousand soldiers of the Imperial Guard,” Thibault says. “Men who marched with Napoléon in Russia. Who held their ground against cavalry charges at Waterloo. Who defeated the famed Swiss Army at Zurich. Not to mention the officers and their wives.”

  “A terrible loss,” the captain says. “But foolish action will only lose more lives. Sir, you are a soldier; I am a sailor. Trust me when I tell you that to attempt this rescue will cost more ships. We will lose more of your men, and more of mine.”

  His lips compressed, Thibault regards him for a moment.

  “Is there nothing that can be done?” he asks.

  “You could pray for their souls,” the captain says.

  * * *

  Only when the rocks of the passage are behind them and the ship has reached the safety of the open sea does Thibault again go belowdecks. His wife is in bed, a wooden bowl cradled in front of her. As he enters she quickly turns her face toward the window.

  The ship’s surgeon stands at her bedside, but leaves quickly at a glance from Thibault.

  “How are you, my love?” Thibault asks.

  “At the door of death,” she says. “My stomach churns and my head spins. How long must I endure this torture?”

  “A few days only,” Thibault says. “And it will be much less arduous once this weather passes.”

  “It had better,” she says. “I feel as though one of your creatures has laid its spawn inside me and it is trying to escape through my gullet.”

  “It is just the seasickness,” Thibault says. “It will pass as soon as the ship steadies. A small sacrifice, my love, on the road to greatness.”

  “I am pleased for you, husband,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the window.

  It is as if she cannot bear to look upon his scarred and blackened face.

  His anger flares.

  “Then look at me,” he says.

  “I am ill,” she says.

  “And looking at me turns your stomach?” he asks.

  “I cannot lie to you. It does,” she says. He draws breath but before he can retort she says quietly, “And yet I am here.”

  “Why are you here?” he asks, anger still coloring his voice.

  “Yours is not the face of the man I married,” she says. “But you are still the man I married. The man I love. In the depths of my illness and misery allow me to turn away from you and listen to your voice, and thus see you as you still appear in my memory.”

  The anger dissipates immediately and he crosses to the bed and takes her hand in his.

  “The road we are on is the path to our greatness,” he says.

  “I would rather it were you, not Napoléon, who was to lead the main attack,” Nicole says.

  “You do our emperor a grave disservice,” Thibault says. “He is a brilliant tactician. Our landing will take the British by surprise. And that will open the front door to England.”

  “You speak admiringly of the man you plan to kill,” she says.

  “Napoléon is a military genius,” Thibault says. “Even now, though he is old, tired, and unwell, I need his brain to conquer England. After that, he will hold no further use for me. He will be remembered as a hero and I will be hailed as emperor.”

  “And I will be the empress of France,” Nicole says.

  “Of the world,” Thibault says.

  NIGHTMARE

  Willem wakes with a scream, unsure if it is aloud or confined within his own skull. He prays it is the latter. The walls of the officers’ quarters are thin, and he often hears night murmurings, coughs, and snoring from the rooms on either side. For the British officers to hear him scream even once would be embarrassing. But this dream and the scream that follows happen nearly every night.

  In the dream he is back in Gaillemarde, and everyone is still alive: Monsieur Lejeune; Father Ambroise; Madame Gertruda; the mayor, Monsieur Claude, and his stout wife. Everyone.

  And the beast is back. The immense saur with the snout of a crocodile. The one that he and his friend
Jean killed. But in the dream they do not kill it. As in real life, he freezes, but in the dream there is no Héloïse to break him from his rigidity. He is an observer, nothing more. In that frozen moment the dinosaur takes both Cosette and her father with a single bite as they cower amid the gravestones. The stone angel above them is misted red with blood.

  The monster moves on to the church, where it feasts on the children who hide there and on the women who try to protect them. After that it turns to the rest of the villagers, one after another, who, like Willem, seem frozen in place, merely waiting their turn to disappear into the gaping maw, victims of the creature’s insatiable appetite. Only then, when just Jean and Willem are left, does it turn toward them and those great teeth take Jean and now there is only Willem and that is when he screams. Because now the leaping flames from burning houses light up the great beast and he can see that it wears the uniform of the French general: Thibault.

  Then he always wakes and in the first twilight daze of consciousness he remembers that Jean really is dead.

  And so is almost everybody else.

  Willem stands up from his bunk, shivering in the cold September night air. He lights a candle, which pushes back the darkness, and some of the demons that lurk there, but does nothing about the cold.

  He uses the chamber pot although he does not really need to, then climbs back into the bunk, sitting up and drawing the bedclothes around him. He stares at the candle for a few moments, letting the intensity of its glow imprint itself on his eyes. When he closes them he can still see it, but reversed. Dark against the inside of his eyelids.

  Facing the dinosaur at Gaillemarde was no dream. He and Jean slew the monster. But Jean is dead at the hand of his own cousin, and Willem knows that by himself he could never again face such a creature.

  Even the gentle, innocent eyes of the herbisaurs chill him, and the microsaurs that sometimes skitter around his feet in the wooded lands of the artillery barracks seem to grow in his mind until they too are the terrifying monster of Gaillemarde.

  He cannot return to the Sonian Forest.

  And yet he must.

  He pinches out the candle and darkness returns.

  But for a long time, sleep does not.

  BEDLAM

  “I was told that Bedlam was at St. George’s Fields,” Willem says. “Here on the south side of the river.”

  The morning is cold and the Thames is covered with fog, a winter fog, even though it is autumn.

  Willem, Frost, and Jack stand on the Woolwich jetty waiting for the ferry to return. Frost has requested Jack’s services again today, as a guide, although Willem suspects that the real reason is to keep Jack well away from Hew McConnell.

  “Héloïse resides at the old asylum,” Frost says. “At Moorfields on the north side.”

  “The old asylum?” Willem asks.

  Frost says. “The new building you refer to has only just opened at St. George’s Fields. However, most of the patients, including Héloïse, remain at the old asylum awaiting transfer.”

  Willem nods in understanding. He looks out across the river. He cannot see the ferry yet and only knows it is there because of the regular warning call of “Hoy!” from the ferry master, alerting other vessels to their presence. The ferryboat is invisible in the thick yellow fog that suffocates the river in this early part of the morning.

  Two oil lamps are suspended from poles at the end of the jetty. The sun has risen but the lamps are still lit, twin beacons to guide the ferry in the mist. Their light is dull and barely penetrates the fog. The new gaslights that illuminate many parts of London have yet to be installed here at Woolwich.

  Willem does not like the fog, which makes his breathing heavy. He can see no farther than the length of his arm, and tries not to dwell on the thought of what might lurk, unseen, in the mist around them. His hand strays to the hilt of his saber, and rests there for a while, as a comfort.

  The fog begins to glow and the regular splash of oars signals the imminent arrival of the ferry. A few moments later the blunt prow of the boat eases into the jetty.

  The ferry master checks their papers before letting them on board. There are no other passengers and soon the sound of the oars resumes. Within seconds the jetty has gone. Here in the middle of the river they drift in a world of murky yellow, as if everything else has ceased to exist.

  Willem becomes conscious of every sound. Every smell. The regular dip and splash of the oars. The sound of water moving past the boat. The voices of the guards on the jetty behind them. The ferry master’s warning call. The fog has a strange smoky smell. The river too has its own odor: a sickly blend of mud and decay. Willem can taste the air, bitter on his tongue. He can feel its clammy fingers on the exposed skin of his face and hands.

  He realizes this is what Frost’s world is like. A world of sound, smell, taste, and touch, but no sight. He looks at the lieutenant. If Frost is nervous he does not show it.

  Jack does. He looks as nervous as Willem feels. His eyes dart around like those of a rabbit or a bird.

  “When we get to the asylum,” Frost says, “do not be surprised and do not comment on anything you see.”

  “Of course,” Willem says, although he feels these words were intended for Jack’s ears.

  * * *

  A line of hackney carriages wait near the north-bank jetty as they disembark. Despite his lack of sight Frost seems aware of their presence and raises a hand. The first driver in line prods his horse forward until the carriage stops in front of them.

  “Is it a long walk?” Willem asks. He is unused to riding in such a vehicle.

  “More than two hours on foot,” Frost says as Jack helps him to the step. “We would not make it back to Woolwich for the rocket demonstration and the earl’s visit if we walked.”

  Jack opens the carriage door and Frost steps up inside. Willem follows.

  “Where to, m’lud?” the driver asks.

  “Bedlam,” Frost says.

  The driver nods as if this is a common request, and the carriage growls forward over the cobblestones.

  “How did you know the carriages were there?” Willem asks. “I heard no sound that would give away their presence.”

  “I smelled the horses,” Frost says.

  The streets of London are narrow and the buildings are tall, topped by chimneys that claw away the sky. In places the brick walls rise so high on all sides that it does not seem real, but rather like the painted backdrop of a theater. The people seem no more than players in a convoluted drama on a busy stage.

  The fog adds to the air of unreality. It is thinner here away from the river but still swathes everything and everyone in a ghostly gauze.

  The roads are crowded in spite of the early hour. Chimney sweeps and charwomen jostle with flower sellers on the narrow pavements. Laborers wait on street corners. Vagabonds curl in doorways. Street sweepers are still at work, cleaning up the last of the dung of the previous day, dodging the carriages, delivery carts, and men on horseback that are already starting to fill the streets. The fresh fields of the artillery barracks seem like paradise compared to the grimy buildings of London. The air here is thick with the smell of soot and sewage.

  Two mounted constables, “Robin Redbreasts,” with their distinctive scarlet waistcoats under dark blue greatcoats, water their horses at a trough in front of a teahouse. One has dismounted, removed his top hat, and is energetically cranking the pump handle. The other glances idly at Willem as they pass.

  Spread along the road by a small park, a row of costermongers in their colorful kingsman neckerchiefs are selling fruit, breads, fish, and other goods from wooden carts, while their donkeys graze on the nearby grass. One of them, a squat, ugly man with a long mustache and no beard or sideburns, is arguing with a dour-faced woman over the payment she has given him. He holds his hand out showing a single copper, while she indicates with her fingers that she gave him two. Willem wonders who is lying. He suspects it is the woman. Even back in Gaillemarde, a ma
rket vendor was very careful to avoid being labeled a cheat.

  A little farther on, in dark alleyways running with rats and lined with straw to soak up the mud, Willem sees crawlers, old women who live on the street. They cannot, or perhaps choose not, to walk, and get around by crawling on their hands and knees. Willem thinks they look like animals, but he knows what his mother would say if she saw them. They are people too. They call out to the carriage as it passes and Willem tosses a few coppers from his purse, much to Frost’s disgust.

  “You should not encourage them,” he says. “More will fill these streets if they find easy pickings from such as you.”

  “And yet those coins, which matter not at all to me, may mean that some of those women eat today,” Willem says.

  Frost shrugs. “I suspect that you do not think very highly of London,” he says.

  “It is what it is,” Willem says. “I neither like nor dislike it. But it is vastly different to Gaillemarde.”

  That is an understatement. All his life, since he was old enough to remember, he had lived in a sleepy little village nestled on the bank of a river on the edge of the vast Sonian Forest. The houses were separate and scattered. The largest building was the church. Gaillemarde is a long way from London, in every possible sense.

  He cannot think about his old village without thinking about two of the survivors of Thibault’s massacre there, now held in Napoléon’s prison. Cosette and his mother.

  “You must help me convince Wellington to let me have my soldiers and my ship,” he says.

  “I doubt my word will carry more weight than yours,” Frost says. “But I will certainly use all my powers of persuasion when we meet him.”

  “He must not back down from his promise,” Willem says. When he closes his eyes all he can see is Cosette’s lips, arcing into a smile.

  Frost has an uncanny ability to read his mind. “Tell me about Cosette,” he says.

  “What is it that you wish to know?” Willem asks.

  “Is she pretty?” Frost asks.

  “She is,” Willem says.

  Even as he says it he feels guilty, suddenly conscious that prettiness is something the young lieutenant will never again experience. Lost to him forever are so many things, like the sight of a dancing field of flowers, the sun breaking over the hills at the start of a new day, or moonlight caught in the eye of a child.