The Price of Glory

by Seth Hunter

  Then there was silence. It seemed to go on for a long time compared to what had happened in the three or four seconds before. Nathan stood, stunned, half-deafened by the explosions in that confined space, the smoke hanging heavy in the candlelight and the acrid smell of gunpowder in his nostrils and his throat.

  Then Imlay crossed over to Gillet, picked up his pistol, and shot the corporal in the head.

  Nathan stared at him in shocked disbelief. He saw his lips move but he could not make out a word he said. Then Imlay spoke again and this time Nathan did hear him.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Imlay said. “This is all your fault.”

  Nathan looked down at Gillet. He lay on his back in a spreading pool of blood with half of his face shot away.

  Imlay was helping Sara up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I could not allow that.”

  “So now what?” Nathan heard his own voice but it seemed to be coming from a great distance.

  “Now what?” Imlay repeated wearily. He looked about the smoking vault. “You tell me.”

  Nathan still had the knife in his hand.

  “Whose side are you on?” he said. Even after what had happened he still did not know.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Imlay. “Get out of here and take her with you.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? It is a little late in the day for you to start worrying about me.” Imlay looked about him again, at the four bodies. “I expect I will blame it all on you,” he said. “I usually do.”

  Nathan reached out a hand for Sara but Imlay grabbed him by the wrist.

  “Tell me, is it true—about the gold?”

  Nathan sighed. “All I know is that is what the Grimaldis told me.” How many more would die, he wondered, before it was believed.

  Imlay looked down at Frederico’s corpse. “Well, he didn’t take it with him,” he remarked composedly. “I suppose you had better help me cover him up again.” But then he frowned and peered down into the darkness. “What is this?” He stooped and gingerly removed something from beside Grimaldi’s head. A small silver casket, richly engraved.

  He looked up at Nathan enquiringly. Nathan shook his head.

  Imlay took a clasp knife from his pocket and slid the blade under the lid and worked away at it until he had wrenched the casket open. He stared for a moment at what it contained. Then he set it hastily down on the floor and stood up, taking a step back, as if it might explode.

  “Christ Almighty!” he exclaimed. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Nathan peered into the casket. It was filled with broken glass.

  “I think it might be,” he said.

  “Dear God.” Imlay made the sign of the cross though he was not, as far as Nathan knew, a Papist. He had seen him like this once before, in the catacombs under Paris, when they had entered the crypt under the Luxembourg Palace and seen the Devil—and the figure of Christ hanging upside down from the cross.

  “What will you do with it?” Nathan asked him.

  “What will I do with it?” Imlay looked down at the object at his feet. “I want nothing to do with it,” he said.

  “But that is what you were looking for.” Nathan’s tone was ironic. “The Holy Grail. The last reserves of the Casa di San Giorgio.”

  Imlay lifted it up and placed it gingerly back where he had found it, at the head of Frederico Grimaldi. Then together they slid the stone back into place.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  the Sea

  THEY FOUND THE CAVALRY MOUNTS tethered in the courtyard at the rear of the abbey—five of them, of a mountain breed similar to English fell ponies. Nathan was tempted. It would make them more conspicuous if they rode down to the sea but they would make much better time and there was not a great deal of it left. The sun was alarmingly low in the sky and the floor of the valley already in deep shadow. He had told Duncan to leave for the rendezvous at sunset and the first lieutenant was not the man to disobey a direct order. He decided to take the risk.

  They followed the track in single file along the side of the valley, the ponies picking their way almost delicately among the roots of the trees, their hooves muffled by a thick carpet of pine needles. Nathan had his pistols ready loaded in the holsters on each side of the saddle, for Imlay had told them there were patrols out looking for the Grimaldis, and he strained his ears for the slightest sound of horses coming up the track toward them. But they made good time and within the hour they had emerged on to the ridge running down to the cliffs above the sea. And there in the distance were the two menof-war, hove to in the light of the setting sun. Nathan reined in for a moment, for he was confident now that they would reach the shore long before eight bells in the second dog watch and he was perfectly assured that Duncan would not leave a moment sooner.

  “There is my ship—the Unicorn. The bigger of the two, a little further out to sea.” He pointed her out to Sara, not without a note of pride, for she had been a little too fond of referring to him as a boy when they were in Paris, and he still had thoughts of the Chouan leader, Charette, in his mind. It would do no harm to remind her that he was the captain of a frigate.

  “The Unicorn,” she mused. “I like that. That is a good name for a ship. And the other?”

  “That is the Bonne Aventure. A privateer we took from the French.”

  “That is a good name, too,” she acknowledged. Then, after a moment: “Do you know it means a love affair as well as an adventure?”

  “I did not,” he admitted. “But that is how I will think of it in future.” He was about to move on when he saw the boat. It had just come into view from below the cliffs and he recognised it as the launch from the Unicorn, pulling back to the ship. And though he was too far to say with any certainty, he thought he could see two women in the stern. Whiteley’s party from the abbey ? He stood up in the stirrups, took off his hat and waved furiously, though there was little chance of being spotted at such a distance.

  “Have we missed them?” Sara called out to him.

  “Yes, but they will come back for us,” he reassured her. “Still, we had better crack on.” Then he saw something else. A cloud of dust approaching along the coast road, about half a mile below them. And among it, the glint of steel.

  He led the ponies swiftly off the ridge, hoping to lie low among the scrub and the pines until the danger was past. But he realised almost at once that it would not do. There was no time. The sun was just about to slip below the western horizon—he saw its dying light gleaming on the dragoon helmets and the carbines. Their only hope was to cross the road ahead of them and race for the shore.

  He let Sara take the lead and they rode the ponies as fast as they dared down the slope of the ridge. The dragoons must have seen them, for several of them had pushed ahead of the main troop and were riding just as hard to cut them off. Nathan reached for one of the pistols in the saddle holster and then thought better of it as the pony almost lost its footing on the sandy track. The only thing to do now was to ride.

  They hit the road about a hundred yards ahead of the leading horsemen and plunged into the broom and the rocks on the far side. There was still a track of sorts but it was difficult to follow at any pace and the dragoons were firing at them now from above. Splinters flew up from the rocks and pines and Nathan’s mount stumbled and fell. They were both up at once but Nathan had lost the rein and the horse plunged away from him through the brush. He let it go and sprinted after Sara who was trying to turn her own horse back for him. Nathan caught it by the bit and ran with it for a while but the slope was too steep and all three of them went over. They reached the shore in an avalanche of earth and stones but miraculously without breaking their necks. Nathan ran to Sara and picked her up and they both ran together to the sea. He could see men pointing to them from the stern of the brig and they were swinging a boat out from the yards. But it would never reach them in time.

  “Can you swim?” he called out to Sara.

  “I can swim
in a river,” she said doubtfully. “But I have never tried the sea.”

  “It is just the same,” he assured her. “But you will have to take off your boots.”

  He looked back up the slope and saw the first of the dragoons burst through the pines further back along the shore.

  “Is it cold, the sea?” Sara asked him as she struggled with her foot-wear. He admired her composure, though forced to curb the first ignoble retort that sprang to mind.

  “No, not at all,” he replied, as if it they were about to take a leisurely paddle in Cuckmere Haven. “Not in the Mediterranean.”

  A shot smashed into the shingle, sending up a shower of stones and he felt a sting on his cheek and the warm flowing blood. He grabbed her by the arm and hustled her towards the water’s edge.

  She let out a yell when the first wave broke over her.

  “You lied!”

  “Wait until you are in Sussex,” he said. “That is what you might call cold. Now swim,” he shouted, as a fusillade of shots echoed around the little bay and the dragoons urged their horses towards them across the sloping shingle.

  And they struck out together for the Bonne Aventure.

  HISTORY

  In writing The Price of Glory I’ve combined fiction with historical fact, inasmuch as it is known, and readers might like to know where the battle lines are drawn.

  The events on the Quiberon Peninsula and in the Gulf of Morbihan are based on various accounts of the Royalist landings of 1795, though in real life the frigate Unicorn was not involved in the expedition. However, the campaign does seem to have been as chaotic and ill-planned as I have described. The divisions in the Royalist command, the failure to reinforce Auray and the collapse of the proposed uprising in Paris are all well documented. It is also true that William Pitt released over a thousand Republican prisoners to swell the meagre ranks of the émigrés, and that these men defected almost as soon as they were put ashore, betraying the defences of Fort Penthièvre to the enemy. The account of the gun brig Conquest accidentally firing on the column of refugees is based on a similar incident involving the corvette Lively.

  The events in London during Part Two are based in part on the love letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay, though I have juggled a little with the dates. Celebrated as a pioneer feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary went to France in 1792 to write about the Revolution. Here she met the American writer, Gilbert Imlay, and fell in love. They were married by the US ambassador—in a ceremony of dubious legality—and in May, 1794, Mary gave birth to their daughter, Fanny. Imlay then left her in Le Havre to pursue various interests in England and elsewhere, but when she joined him in London the following spring she found he was having an affair with an actress. She tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of laudanum; Imlay came back in time to save her.

  Despite her entreaties, however, he continued to see his actress and she made another attempt on her life, which I have described in the book—with some added details of my own, William Blake being one of them. Blake did, in fact, work with Mary on a book of fairytales—she wrote the copy, he did the illustrations—but I made up the story of his seeing her on the waterfront shortly before she jumped off Putney Bridge. And, of course, the presence of Nathan and his mother is entirely fictitious. But the rest of the story is based on the known facts—she was saved by a member of the newly created Royal Humane Society who happened to be at the pub at the time and had just learned how to perform artificial resuscitation. The suicide letter I quote is the real one she left at her lodgings.

  As for Imlay, I made up quite a lot about him, but then he made up quite a lot about himself. History knows him as an officer in Washington’s army during the American War of Independence, an explorer of the American frontier and the writer of A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America as well as a novel, The Emigrants. But he was much more than that. His own family thought he was a traitor—a British agent—but there is reason to suppose he was working secretly for General Washington: what we would now call a double agent.

  After the war, Imlay became involved in various land speculations on the frontier. Then he disappeared for a while. Some believe he fled to the Spanish territory in the south-east to avoid his creditors; others that he became a Spanish agent in the Floridas and New Orleans. He may even have been continuing to work undercover for Washington, now President, who maintained his own secret service, answerable only to himself. I have seen documents in the National Archive in Havana including a confidential report from the Spanish governor of New Orleans to his superiors in Madrid.

  Then on the eve of the French Revolution, Imlay turned up in Paris. With France at war with most of Europe, he operated as a shipping agent, running goods past the British blockade—but he seems to have had many other interests. In the Paris Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Louisiane et Florides 1792-1803, there are two documents entitled “Observations du Capitain Imlay” and “Memoire sur la Louisiane” relating Imlay’s plans for the invasion and conquest of Spanish Louisiana and New Orleans, written during the time of the Terror and submitted to Lazarre Carnot, the military expert on the Committee of Public Safety. (This forms the basis for the plot of The Tide of War.)

  In the summer and early autumn of 1795, Imlay was definitely in London because we have the evidence of Mary’s letters to him there, but after that, he disappears again. His appearance in Provence in the spring of 1796 is, I am afraid, pure invention but it would not have surprised anyone who knew him. He had fingers in a lot of pies—in France, England, Scandinavia, Kentucky and Louisiana, Florida, New England and the Caribbean. He is buried, for some reason, in Jersey, on the Channel Islands. Or at least there is a grave there with his name on it.

  The activities of Napoleone Buonaparte in Paris in 1795 are almost as incredible, but most of what I have written is based on contemporary accounts. He arrived in the French capital, broke and unemployed, in the spring of that year and embarked on a series of bizarre adventures mainly directed towards finding a job and a wife. In the course of these endeavours he wrote a romantic novel and kept a notebook with his peculiar jottings—including the observations about great men with three testicles. The scandalous adventures of Thérésa, Rose and Fortune Hamelin are also well documented, though I have to admit there is a strong suggestion of the prurient about the accounts of their more outrageous activities—especially in the memoirs of Paul Barras. You could say the same for what I’ve written here, but in my defence it is a novel and I hope my admiration for all three women comes through strong and clear. Good luck to them. I wish they’d been more like Mary Wollstonecraft in their politics but you can’t have everything and they probably had a lot more fun.

  Which brings us to Nelson. The account of his relationship with Adelaide Correglia is recorded in detail by Thomas Fremantle in his diaries including the surprising information that she went to sea with him and acted as his hostess. Fremantle called her “Nelson’s dolly.” The fact that she doesn’t appear in most accounts of Nelson’s life is probably because she was overshadowed by his affair with Emma Hamilton—which was so public it could not be hidden. Also, I suppose if historians had included Signora Correglia in the story of Nelson’s rise to greatness, he might have come over as a serial philanderer, which would not have suited the Victorians at all. In fact, he was no better or worse than most naval officers of the time. Nelson’s “band of brothers” reflected the social and sexual mores of the Age of Scandal—but they were “cleaned up” for the more guarded, less open, period that followed. Significantly Fremantle’s diary was destroyed in the middle of the 19th century, when Nelson’s status as a national hero was positively godlike, but a copy had been made of part of it—and in any case the Signora is mentioned in despatches—or at least, letters, from Admiral Jervis.

  The remarkable story of the Casa di San Giorgio is based on various documentary sources. The bank played a secretive but key role in many of th
e events of early modern Europe, funding Columbus’s expedition to the Americas, the Spanish Armada, and much of the expansion of the Spanish Empire. In the process it established its control over the Republic of Genoa and built its own empire through the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Black Sea, even establishing colonies in the Crimea: an early example of a bank controlling a sovereign state. Certainly it was too big to fail and when it did, it brought down the Republic of Genoa with it. When Buonaparte occupied the city in 1797 the vaults were, indeed, found to be empty, but I have taken liberties with the story of the chalice.

  I have used an accurate account of its reputed history as the Holy Grail—it was found by Genoese soldiers during the First Crusade and belonged to the bank for many years—but it was taken from Genoa by the French much earlier. They were forced to restore it after Napoleon’s defeat but someone dropped it while packing it up for transport and it was discovered to be made of glass, not emerald. It was put together again, bound in silver filigree, and is now displayed in the Cathedral of Genoa.

  The story of the secret talks between France and Spain over the future of North America is true. The vast territories of Spanish Louisiana—the whole of the present-day USA west of the Mississippi and from Canada to Mexico (828,000 square miles) were ceded to the French but when Napoleon sent an army to take possession in 1801, it was defeated by a series of intrigues by Anglo-US agents (probably Imlay again). So Napoleon cut his losses and sold the whole area to the US for $22 million in 1802. Known as the Louisiana Purchase it was the biggest real-estate deal in history and now comprises fourteen US states and two Canadian provinces.