Tested by Fate

by David Donachie

  “Thank you, no, Mrs Nisbet. I fear my head is swimming enough with what I have taken in.”

  He was only aware then that he had been staring hard at her, giving a double entendre to his words that was unintentional. She blushed and dropped her eyes. He took the opportunity to admire the slim figure beneath the light muslin dress she wore.

  “I must say I like your boy,” Nelson stammered.

  She gave an engaging and musical laugh. “Not half as much, sir, as he esteems you. I cannot thank you enough for the kindness you have shown him. He insists that you are the only person to whom he would issue an invitation if the right lay with him.”

  “Then perhaps a turn in the garden, Mrs Nisbet, to see how he and Mr Hardy are faring.”

  He held out an arm, which she accepted and they made their way out into the warm evening air.

  Chapter Four

  THE GARDEN was like the house, exquisite in the way each of the plants, shrubs and trees had been placed to provide gentle promenades. They soon came upon Josiah, who had persuaded Hardy to push him on the swing, the cry of “Higher!” repeated several times. Nelson felt her tense beside him as Hardy responded positively to the request, sending her son so far in the air that the tension broke on the ropes.

  “Have no fear for him, Mrs Nisbet,” he said reassuringly. “Observe the grip of his hands. Josiah has clapped on like a true topman and nothing will dislodge him.”

  “I cannot pretend to share your faith,” she replied with a slight gasp.

  Nelson inclined his head towards hers, enjoying the gentle aroma of her lemon verbena scent. “That is, dear lady, because you have never yourself been aloft in a gale of wind. I do assure you he is in no danger.”

  The tiniest squeeze she administered to his forearm as she replied to that was as pleasing as the sentiment she expressed. “I must accept your word, Captain. Josh wouldn’t thank me for interfering in a situation that his father would have let stand. I cannot tell you how the boy needs a man to help raise him.”

  “Mr Hardy,” he called, aware that the authority he was about to show was designed to impress.

  “Sir,” the midshipman replied, standing to attention then skipping smartly sideways to avoid a blow from the returning swing.

  “I would request that you ease up on young Master Josiah. Not that I believe him at any risk, but it does no good to worry his mother.”

  “Mamma,” Josiah wailed.

  “It is my injunction, young man,” Nelson said, coming closer. “Though I expect your mother to be worried she has made no move to interfere.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” said Fanny Nisbet, softly.

  “I fancy you for a future sailor, sir,” Nelson continued, “like Mr Hardy here. Should you be lucky enough to be accepted into a King’s ship, I hope the first thing you would learn is that good manners towards the gentler sex are of primary importance. Is that not so, Mr Hardy?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  A gong rang out from the hallway to announce dinner. Nelson escorted Josiah’s mother back into the house, bowed to both Miss Martha and Miss Parry, then took up his place at Herbert’s right hand, several places up the table from Fanny. But as he ate and listened to Herbert, he watched her carefully. Fanny Nisbet was younger than Mary Moutray and pale of complexion, a tribute to the care she took to stay out of the fierce Caribbean sun. She had fine, if quiet manners and a cultivated mode of speech, peppered with enough French to let any listener know of her fluency in the tongue. The linen napkins they were using had fine embroidery at the edges, all Fanny’s handiwork, according to her uncle.

  “I can’t think how I would manage without her, Nelson,” he insisted, after both ladies and youngsters had withdrawn, and his guest had alluded to her capabilities. “Montpelier is never run half as well in her absence, which I cannot help but notice as I am dragged away from some task to deal with domestic disputes. I swear she’s dearer to me than my own daughter.”

  “I believe I have already said I can see ample cause for your esteem.”

  “Then, sir, we shall drink to the lady, you and I.”

  “Most heartily, sir,” Nelson replied, his mind suddenly a turmoil of future possibilities. Fanny Nisbet was not only attractive as a person, she was in all respects sensible. And as a favoured niece of a rich man, the lack of funds that had restrained him from proposals of matrimony in the past might be removed.

  Young, vibrant creatures were all very well, but a sober spouse might serve him better. He could see her as an admiral’s wife, able to entertain the very best of society with an ease born of long experience. And she had shown her fecundity in the production of a son already, so that his potent desire to be a father would be likely to be satisfied.

  “You would not, however, stand in the way of Fanny’s happiness, sir?”

  “Of course not, Nelson,” Herbert replied, seeking to relight his pipe.

  “Damn the man to perdition,” said Nelson, having read the latest letter from Admiral Sir Richard Hughes.

  He was looking through the casement windows of his cabin to the packed anchorage of St John’s harbour, Antigua, the busiest port in the Caribbean, scene of his own first landfall in these waters as a mere child. If he recalled it as welcoming then, it was less so now.

  He threw the letter aside. It was a reminder from on high that regardless of Nelson’s view on illicit trading into the islands, his commanding officer was not minded to act by ordering every ship in his squadron to intercept foreign vessels and seize their goods, nor to impound whatever they landed. The trouble was that Nelson had with him on his quarterdeck a whole posse of representatives from half a dozen islands, who wished to ensure that he followed the same course.

  “Our visitors, sir?” asked Lieutenant Millar, anxiously.

  In the silence that followed Millar reflected on the relations he had with Nelson, an intimacy he had never enjoyed with any other captain. No one had ever taken him into their confidence in a like manner, not just in a professional way but almost as a friend. Yet, while harbouring nothing but admiration for Nelson as a seaman, Millar often wondered if he knew what a fool of himself he made when he stepped ashore. This desire to take on the established order and turn it on its head was just one example. Right was only one of Nelson’s motivations, the other being an almost visceral need for conflict, a trait often to be found in men of small physical stature. Sir Richard Hughes disgusted Nelson, with his fiddle-playing indolence and his fear of confrontation, a man who would agree with the last person he spoke to, who was very often his wife. Yet he had the prestige of his office, powerful friends and supporters at home, and was a person it was unwise to cross.

  But that was as nothing to the Captain’s romantic attachments, Millar mused. Nelson had offered him many confidences for he saw the premier as a good and compliant friend. And Millar knew he would back him, even if it blighted his own career. He spoke to remind him of the need to act. “Sir!”

  “Hold them for just another minute.”

  “They have all said most forcefully that they have business to attend to, that they are civilians, and are not subject to the arbitrary power of the service.”

  Nelson didn’t reply. He wanted his minute to make up his mind as to what to do. His inclinations were to ignore the Admiral and continue. But for once he heeded the advice of others and, instead of charging like a bull at a gate, stopped to consider the consequences. Taking on Sir Richard meant taking on the entire West Indian establishment: planters, traders, corrupt officials, and even a number of his fellow naval officers, happy to accept gifts in lieu of action. The only help he could muster was an authority three thousand miles away, which was scant comfort, especially since Admiralty support was not guaranteed. Against that, though, he was faced with withdrawal from a position that was, without doubt, right. No matter what opposition he could imagine, nothing was worth that. He looked into his premier’s florid face, a man who had stood by King George when his countrymen wouldn’t, and
had lost everything because of it. How could he relent before such a man?

  “Send them in, Millar.” He turned to Lepée, who was already glassy-eyed and it was only ten of the clock. “Start pouring, man. When they hear what I have to say to them they’ll need strong liquor to stay upright.”

  It was a noisy, quarrelsome group who entered the great cabin of Boreas, yet they were overly polite in the way they gave precedence to each other, as if to underline to this upstart naval fellow that they were all men of position. Nelson looked hard for his host from Nevis, and was relieved to see that Herbert wasn’t present. He stood to greet them, indicating that Lepée was standing by with refreshments, and waited until they all had a glass in their hands before raising his own. “Gentlemen, the King!”

  “The King,” they replied in unison, drinking and talking noisily to each other. To their rear Lepée joined in the toast and downed another glass.

  “Who is our anointed Sovereign, gentleman,” Nelson continued. “He has, through his ministers, instituted a series of laws known as the Navigation Acts.” That rendered the group silent and wary. “You know what these are so I won’t bore you with repetition. What I will say is this. That a laissez faire attitude to the landing of illicit cargoes falls without those laws. I will therefore see it as my duty to clap a stopper on such activity. From now on any foreign vessel claiming the need to land a cargo, may do so.”

  That made a few, the more foolish ones, nod. Other wiser minds were staring at him as though he was some kind of animal to hunt. “That cargo will be seized by His Majesty’s customs officials and destroyed. It will not be sold through the back door. Any customs officer colluding in such an act will end up in my cable tier, there to repent his sins.”

  The cabin erupted, each man shouting in an attempt to overcome his neighbour. Hughes was mentioned somewhere in that cacophony, as were justice, poverty, local rights, and the inadvisability of such high-handed tactics. Nelson stood in the face of this barrage, thinking it worse than cannon fire, until it began to subside.

  “The law rules in these islands, as elsewhere. If you wish it changed I suggest that my cabin is not the place to make your representations.”

  “You will regret this, Captain!” shouted one voice, exciting a general murmur of agreement.

  “How can I, sir, regret doing what is right?”

  “I cannot do other than agree with you, Captain Nelson,” said John Herbert, apprised of what had happened, though surprised to receive another visit so soon from Nelson, “though it is like to cost me dear.”

  They were walking in his gardens again, with Fanny Nisbet and Midshipman Andrews several paces to the rear, Josiah between them holding a hand of each. A sudden laugh from George Andrews caused the face of the boy’s sister to come to Nelson’s mind, which he suppressed quickly and guiltily. How long ago that seemed, St Omer and the beautiful Kate, yet it was only eighteen months.

  “I am grateful for that, sir,” Nelson said, aware that Herbert was expecting a reply.

  Herbert stopped, frowning, closing the gap between themselves and those bringing up the rear. “But you will struggle, Nelson, to persuade others of the rightness of what you do. You fail to understand the nature of the beast you attempt to control. As men they suffer from all the follies and vanities that are prevalent. They make vast sums after the harvest, yet spend even more to display the extent of their wealth. Every year most are obliged to mortgage their land to find the money to carry out planting, which they pay back from their crop before frittering the residue on outdoing each other once more. They drink heavily, gamble to excess, and purchase luxuries with an abandon that would shame a sultan.”

  “You do not fall into that trap, sir,” Nelson replied, with some feeling.

  “I have better land and I have husbanded my resources when times are lean. I must say, most of my fellow sugar planters do the opposite.”

  “I cannot lay aside the law to oblige the profligate.”

  “No. But do not think for one moment that reason will affect their opinions.”

  The group behind had caught up and, to Herbert’s annoyance, Nelson offered his hand in place of Andrews’s to swing young Josiah. He hadn’t finished lecturing his guest about the ways of the plantation fraternity.

  “I fear you have vexed my uncle, sir,” said Fanny. Andrews had moved on, as politeness demanded, to walk beside Herbert. “You leave him in the company of enthusiastic youth, in which he finds scant comfort.”

  “I would not upset him for the world, Mrs Nisbet, only for you.”

  That reply lost some of its gallantry through Josiah’s insistence on continued swinging. But the look in the grey eyes told Nelson he had struck home, that if he chose to pay attention to her it wouldn’t be unwelcome. They chatted happily, assessing each other’s antecedents in a way that caused no offence. He mentioned his Walpole relations and his father’s clerical lineage, while she alluded to her connection to the Scottish Earldom of Moray. Her late husband, from a good Ayrshire family, had qualified as a doctor, though he found practice in Nevis hard due to his propensity to suffer from sunstroke.

  Their sparring reassured her suitor. Nelson knew that she would not have volunteered such information without at least a passing interest in some future connection between them.

  Lieutenant Ralph Millar put as much emphasis as he could into his latest set of objections, though it signified little to the recipient, his captain, lost as he was in the throes of yet another romantic attachment.

  “Sir, how can you even consider such matters when you are confined to your ship and in danger of being clapped in gaol should you step ashore?”

  To Millar’s mind, Nelson replied like a spoilt child. “There is a lady on Nevis to whom I can only communicate by letter, while I have to stay here in St John’s harbour to ensure that these damned planters do not humbug me with the first enterprising American trader.”

  His premier wanted to mention Mary Moutray, not six months gone from the islands, who had so affected his captain that he had claimed to be unable to breathe. But then he recalled the way Nelson had talked about Kate Andrews, when they had first become close enough to share intimacies. And he had heard from others, mutual acquaintances, of his attachment to the Saunders girl in Québec. He just had to conclude that his commanding officer was an incurable romantic, a slave to his passions, inclined to fall in love at the drop of a hat, never having succeeded enough in any of his suits to be exposed to the unhappy consequences of his actions.

  The troubles he had now outweighed anything he had faced before, with the entire Leeward Islands establishment combining to sue him in their own courts for the cost incurred in his enforcement of the Navigation Acts. They claimed the loss of £100,000, and demanded that Nelson make redress. Millar had offered to take on some of the responsibility, even though he was as poor as his captain, only to be rebuffed with a reminder that Nelson’s rank demanded that it was he who had to face them down.

  How he was going to do that, with few means, wasn’t clear. He couldn’t afford the lawyers necessary to defend himself and was at present confined to Boreas for fear of arrest if he stepped ashore. Yet with all that hanging over his head it was hard enough to get him even to consider the subject, so taken was he with the idea of matrimony and the occupants of Montpelier.

  “Herbert is a man after my own heart, Millar, able to go against the herd. He offered to post bail for me to the value of ten thousand pounds. Ain’t that the finest thing?”

  “Of course, sir,” said Millar, who had met Herbert and found him a fussy old goat. “But does that mean he sees you as a future relative by marriage?”

  Nelson frowned. “I cannot read him. One minute he is all encouragement, the next as cool as a glacier. I have no real certainty that he is not toying with me.”

  Millar had another vision of the wistful Mary Moutray. “As long as the lady is not toying with you.”

  Nelson put his head in his hands. “I cannot believe
she is, though I admit that my letters have yet to receive a reply.”

  “Have you asked for one?”

  Nelson fixed Millar with a petulant stare. “I don’t see the need.”

  Millar might be half the sailor Nelson was, but when it came to the fair sex he had a better idea of procedure. He tried to keep his exasperation out of his voice. “She is a widow, sir, dependent on her uncle, who is stiff when it comes to doing what he perceives to be right, and mindful of the opinion of others. She cannot volunteer herself to you without you requesting it.”

  Nelson’s blue eyes opened wide with revelation, though inwardly he felt foolish. “I never saw that, Millar. How could I be so blind?”

  His premier denied himself the pleasure of telling him that in matters of the heart his blindness was as complete as it was when it came to his servant. Millar had often hinted that Nelson should remove Lepée, who grew more drunk and less respectful in equal measure. Nelson couldn’t see that the man who had nursed him down the San Juan river was not the same person now. He was a thieving rogue and rude with it. But this was no time to ruminate on that: there were more pressing matters to attend to.

  “That, at least, you can repair, sir, but I beg you to allow yourself time. The most pressing thing is to see off this suit from the planters.”

  “The most pressing thing is for you to take over here, Millar, while I have Giddings get the cutter rigged and head for Nevis.”

  “Nevis?”

  Again Nelson showed the petulance of a man who hated to be thwarted. “How can I be idle in such a matter?”

  “You’ll end up in a debtor’s cell.”

  Nelson brightened then, looking for all the world like a mischievous boy. “Only if they know I am ashore. But since I shall depart and return in the dark, I shall confound them.”

  John Herbert loved to worry and he did not confine his anxieties to his own cares. With Captain Horatio Nelson a frequent visitor in the last two months he had taken on the burden of his concerns too, though it didn’t take precedence over the care of his garden, which they were, at that moment, walking through. “It must be another several weeks yet, Nelson, before you can hope for any reply from London.”