by Hunter, Seth
“No, Mother,” he assured her. “I did my best but they are looking for virgins. I will try again later when they are not so particular.”
She shook her head at him dutifully but with no loss to her composure or the arrangement of her curls. His mother was not easily shocked.
“So why are you in London,” she inquired as she entered the room, considerately shutting the door behind her, “and not striding the main brace or splicing the quarterdeck or whatever it is you do when you are at sea? My God, what is that?”
She had stubbed her toe on his canvas bag.
“A cannonball,” he told her.
She observed it with caution. “And what is it doing here?”
“I brought it back from France,” he informed her, “to show the Admiralty.”
“Why, Nat, have they none of their own? And what were you doing in France?”
“Oh, making a fool of myself as usual,” he sighed. “I suppose you have heard we are at war.”
She settled herself in an armchair by the fire, after first turning it round to observe his ablutions.
“Well, I do not expect you to agree with me, of course,” she began, “but it is a very sad day for England when she elects to make common cause with the Prussian and Austrian tyrants in the suppression of liberty and equality.”
Fraternity was clearly accorded a lower status in his mother’s notion of Utopia.
Lady Catherine Ann Peake—known to her friends as Kitty—had been born in New York of an American father and a French mother, which made her wholly cannibal in the view of civilised society and went some way to explaining the more bizarre aspects of her nature. She and Nathan’s father had lived apart for some years—since he retired from the service, in fact, and expressed the intention of farming sheep in Sussex. She was a woman of forty-three, which was not the first information she would have disclosed to an inquisition even when shown the instruments of torture, and was generally regarded by her admirers as being in her prime. Her critics, who enjoyed a substantial majority, were less complimentary but even they were inclined to find more fault with her opinions than her appearance which they conceded to be striking. But then, as they invariably added, the same had been said of Messalina. Her admirers were rather more disposed to compare her to Cleopatra whom “age could not wither nor custom stale of her infinite variety”—as Kitty was fond of repeating—and though Nathan winced at such comparisons, he could appreciate why his mother might attract similar extremes of emotion.
While her enemies castigated her as a scheming hussy, her friends extolled the virtues of a generous spirit, a flawless complexion and a superior intellect, though the latter was understood to be a mixed blessing in a woman. By such means and the assistance of a modest fortune, Lady Catherine had succeeded in placing herself in a position of some eminence among a particular segment of society. Her salon in St. James’s—just across the park from the King’s London residence—attracted the most vociferous of his critics. As these had at one time included the Prince of Wales and the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, this had not necessarily detracted from her standing in fashionable society. The perceived iniquities of the French Revolution, however, had caused many a faint-hearted liberal to recoil in horror from the taint of progressive politics, with the result that Chez Kitty had become the refuge of only the most hardened radicals and revolutionaries, though in Nathan’s view most of them were “all talk.”
It was dangerous talk, however, and he was not best pleased when his mother informed him that she was entertaining some guests that evening whom he was sure to find “interesting.”
“If by interesting you mean expressive of opinions that are almost certainly treasonable,” Nathan began but was interrupted by an expression of disdain and a brief exposition on the nature of treason.
“Besides, how can it be treason if they are French?” she concluded plausibly.
Nathan scrutinised her for signs of levity. There were none.
“French?” he repeated incredulously, though he supposed she might mean some of those émigrés forced to flee the oppression in Paris. This hope was promptly dashed.
“I have decided to give a small party for some of my friends in the French Embassy,” she confided, “before they are obliged to quit the country.”
“Mother, they have just declared war on us.”
“Nonsense. You must not believe everything you read in the press, my dear. The British declared war on them. It will be instructive to hear their views on the subject.”
Nathan groaned and placed the flannel over his face. Since adolescence he had always refused to take sides in his parents’ conflicts but if he stayed with either one for much above an hour he was very much inclined to see the other’s point of view.
“So,” his mother continued, “do not lie there like a great white whale—I observe that you are putting on weight, by the by—but see if you can struggle into some of your old clothes and prepare yourself for an occasion. But not naval uniform. It would not be appropriate.”
“I fear I may not be good company,” Nathan protested, removing the flannel. “I have had a bad day at the Admiralty.”
“Nonsense,” she said again. “Besides, you do not have to say anything; only listen and you may learn something to your advantage. But how wonderful it is to see you, my darling, and still in one piece.”
She planted a kiss upon his forehead, gave his cheek a pinch as if he were a two-year-old and left him to attempt drowning.
He was moved, however, by a certain curiosity that not only compelled him to prolong his life on this occasion but obliged him to present himself at the appointed hour to greet his mother’s guests. They turned out to be the usual gang of freethinkers, republicans and revolutionaries—and only two Frenchmen among them: one a minor official from the Embassy who had been sent to present the Minister’s apologies. He and his staff were entirely occupied in preparations for departure, he explained, and regretted they would be unable to take a proper leave of their friends in London. The other was more interesting, being a diplomat from Paris lately arrived in England as head of what he called a “peace mission.” This had been rendered superfluous by the declaration of war and he had expressed himself horrified at the execution of King Louis and had petitioned to stay in England. He now awaited the verdict of the authorities.
Nathan suspected from various signs that his mother had formed an attachment to this gentleman whom she described in an aside as “one of the most brilliant minds in Europe.” His mother was not infrequently attracted to brilliant minds though her preference in this instance surprised Nathan a little, not on account of the gentleman’s comparative youth, which had proved no impediment to her in the past, but rather on account of his looks, which were not pretty. He had a long, thin face, a sickly, almost cadaverous complexion and a pronounced limp, the overall effect being rather more sinister than sad. Nathan would not have been surprised to discover that he had been a police informer before the Revolution or possibly a highwayman forced into early retirement when a coach ran over his foot. In fact he said he had been a bishop and when he observed Nathan’s astonishment he laughed and said his own mother had been so outraged by the appointment she had written a letter of protest to the Pope. His name was Talleyrand, which held no especial significance for Nathan at the time though later he was to reflect that it might have caused a small shiver of apprehension at least.
“And your mission?” he stammered in confusion. “It was on behalf of the Church?”
This caused further amusement. Talleyrand, it appeared, had been excommunicated and his peace mission was on behalf of Georges Danton.
Danton was a more familiar name to Nathan. Indeed, he was notorious throughout Europe as the instigator of the attack on the royal palace of the Tuileries and was widely blamed for the massacres that had followed. Since then he
had become the most powerful man in Paris, successfully rousing the population to resist the foreign armies then closing in on the capital. Nathan ventured to suggest that his popular image was not widely associated with the search for peace.
“This is true,” conceded the diplomat, adopting a more serious aspect. “But Danton, he does not wish for the war with England. In fact, he does not wish for the war with anyone. But he is no more the force he is in the past. It is Les Enragés—the angry ones, the fanatics, who make now the policy.”
Lady Catherine was concerned for the safety of several of her friends in Paris: among them the writer Mary Wollstonecraft whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman was among her required reading—she had presented Nathan with a copy when he had gone back to sea. Mary, it appeared, had travelled to France to write a series of reports for the radical press in England, arriving just before war was declared.
“Poor Mary has scarcely a friend in Paris,” Lady Catherine lamented, “and for all her intellect has not the slightest idea of how to look after herself.”
Others demurred. Mary was quite capable of looking after herself, they argued, and if she ran into any difficulties there was always Thomas Paine.
Nathan winced a little for mention of Thomas Paine invariably set his mother off on one of her favourite stories—as it did on this occasion. When Nathan was seven, she avowed, he had overheard her extolling the merits of this worthy, who was then stirring up her American countrymen against King George. She had referred to him as the “Great Revolutionist,” and Nathan had quite naturally confused him with a gentleman he had seen at a travelling fair who revolved on a giant Catherine Wheel while another gentleman threw knives at him.
There was the usual laughter at Nathan’s expense and he smiled dutifully though privately considering that he had not been far wrong.
Nathan’s mother was a great admirer of Mr. Paine and claimed to have read both volumes of The Rights of Man—“all the way to the end”—unlike so many of her acquaintance who were unable to progress beyond the first few pages but kept the books lying around “for show.” Paine had been a regular visitor to the house while Nathan was living there as a half-pay lieutenant and they had enjoyed a number of animated discussions on a great many subjects without coming to any substantial agreement on a single one of them. But Nathan preferred him to many of his mother’s friends. “Mad Tom,” as he was dubbed in the popular press, had led an adventurous life as a seaman on a privateer called the Terrible under the unlikely command of a Captain Death and then as a customs officer in Sussex before taking himself off to America to fan the flames of rebellion and fight the British Army, for which iniquity he was held in the utmost loathing by all who considered themselves loyal subjects of King George. Yet at the end of the war he had returned to England with no apparent regard for his safety or his countrymen’s finer feelings and devoted himself to writing the book that would persuade them to follow the example of their American cousins and throw off the shackles of tyranny. The Rights of Man had proved an enormous literary success but prompted His Majesty’s Government to issue a warrant for the author’s arrest on a charge of seditious libel, obliging him to flee to France and assist in throwing off the shackles of tyranny there instead. He had promptly been made an honorary French citizen and elected to the new National Assembly. He had even been asked to help write a new constitution. According to Talleyrand, however, he had excited the wrath of the Jacobin Club by refusing to vote for the execution of the King and was now in some danger of losing his liberty, if not his life.
“For those who are not for them are said to be against them,” claimed the diplomat. He had the usual problem in getting tongue and teeth to agree upon the English “th” which detracted a little from the profundity of his remarks: for zose ’oo are not for zem are said to be against zem. “They regard such ones as suspect, which is not a very happy place to be since the Revolution.”
“No more was it in the days of the tyrants,” growled one of the company, a Scottish shoemaker called Hardy who had founded his own Jacobin Club at a pub in the Strand under the guise of a Corresponding Society. “And if you think we are free to express our opinion in England, you are very much mistaken, mon-sewer. Indeed, now that war is declared, you will see more repression, I believe, than you ever did in France.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the company.
“For now is a perfect opportunity for the government to crack down on dissent at home,” opined a brewer called Whitbread, who was one of the wealthier men present and thereby obliged to express some of the more extreme opinions, “and curb some of our most cherished freedoms.”
He claimed to have evidence that the Home Secretary Henry Dundas was funding newspapers like the Sun and the True Briton to campaign against reform and turn the people against honest reformers such as himself.
“They whip up the mob against us,” he complained, “so it is not safe for us to walk the streets.”
“Aye, it’s as well some people don’t have to,” growled Hardy, who was thought to have a chip on his shoulder, “and have fine carriages to go about in.”
But either Whitbread didn’t hear him or had trouble with his accent, for he continued regardless: “Wherever I go I am followed by government agents. They attempt to recruit my servants to spy against me and bribe my workers to withhold their labour.” He had even discovered a plan to water his beer, he revealed to general consternation, and thereby ruin his reputation.
He had succeeded in putting a dampener on the proceedings and Lady Catherine was forced to signal Philip to pour more champagne.
“I had a suspicion I was followed here,” confessed an Irish anarchist called Blood, looking over his shoulder and dropping his voice lest he had been followed indoors.
“I have no doubt you were,” Whitbread assured him complacently, “though it would be quite unnecessary as they have a hackney carriage parked outside for their informants to observe the comings and goings in reasonable comfort. I have told Kitty to write to the Home Secretary and suggest she keep a visitors book and hand it over to them every forenoon to save the expense.”
This drew some unconvincing laughter and a few nervous glances towards the windows which were draped against the dark and whatever government agents might be tempted to press their noses against them. Later, when supper was served, Nathan could not resist going over to take a look. Sure enough, there was the cab parked down the road, with a clear view of the front door and whoever entered or left by it.
“I fear you are now suspect, my friend,” commented a familiar, foreign voice at his elbow. “The British officer who meet with the enemies of the King in the very heart of Saint James. The associate of the revolutionists and the traitors and the French spies . . .”
To say nothing, Nathan reflected, of having Cleopatra for a mother.
“When the Lord of the Admiralty hear of it,” continued Talleyrand with his sardonic smirk, “he make of you the example, I think.”
Chapter 4
the Banker’s plot
John Pitt, second Earl of Chatham and First Lord of the Admiralty, was, at that precise moment, dipping his long nose into a glass of port wine at his brother William’s residence in Downing Street, just a short walk across St. James’s Park. Indeed, had Nathan glanced out of the back windows of his mother’s house and not the front, he might have observed the lights burning in the upstairs room where they held their conference.
Chatham, though the elder of the two, had long deferred to his brother’s genius, besides having a natural respect for his status as the King’s chief minister, and yet there were times when he wished they were back in the nursery and he could give him a good kicking.
This was one of them.
The earl had spent the hours since early morning in meetings with his colleagues at the Admiralty. They had appointed admirals to the command of f
leets; they had dispatched squadrons, ships and officers to the far corners of the world; they had attended to one thousand and one items they considered vital to the defence of the realm. It was not exceptional to be diverted from such duties by a summons from Downing Street but it would have been encouraging to find his brother in conference with the great officers of state. Instead of which Chatham had discovered him sharing a bottle of port wine with a seedy little man called Bicknell Coney who looked like someone you sent to collect the rents but was introduced as a director of the Bank of England. And his brother should know, Chatham reflected sourly, given the time he spent there counting the nation’s money and wishing it were his own.
The banker, though small of stature, had a lofty sense of his own importance and for ten minutes or more he had subjected the First Lord of the Admiralty to a condescending lecture on matters that were of little or no interest to him. Chatham strongly suspected that his brother had put him up to it, doubtless after explaining that despite his vital role in the nation’s affairs, the First Lord had no head for figures and would profit by a greater appreciation of the merits of a sound economy as compared to, say, an extra few ships of the line.
Now the fellow took out his pocket book, removed a large bank note and placed it reverently upon the table. It was to the value of ten pounds.
“This was printed during your father’s tenure at the Treasury,” he informed them, as if their father had been a piddling little bank clerk and not the First Lord of the Treasury and the greatest statesman of the age. “A temporary measure when specie was in short supply.”
He reached into his pocket book again.
“And this,” he said, displaying it to them like a conjuror who was about to make it disappear, “is a French assignat to the value of ten livres. There is however a considerable difference, and not only in design.”
He tapped the English note with a stubby forefinger.
