Under False Colours

by Richard Woodman

  'I do beg to differ, M'sieur Thiebault,' said Gilham sarcastically, 'it is hard to view midnight abduction at pistol point as anything other than sinister.' Gilham leaned forward and Drinkwater shot out a hand to restrain him.

  'I think M'sieur Thiebault has problems of his own, Gilham. I think we are taken not merely as guarantors against the arrival of the other ships, but as hostages ...'

  'Hostages, by God!'

  'Hold hard, sir!'

  Thiebault, clearly compromised and, judging by his obvious anxiety, preoccupied with plans of his own that took precedence over any consideration, real or pretended, shot Drinkwater an unguarded look of pure astonishment.

  Drinkwater seized upon his obvious advantage. 'Who has arrived in Hamburg, M'sieur Thiebault, to compel you to take this extreme action, eh?'

  Thiebault's mouth opened, then closed. He offered no explanation, and Drinkwater knew his question had found its mark.

  'You see, Gilham,' he went on, never taking his eyes off the French official, 'I believe that we are hostages to be delivered up to this person if M'sieur Thiebault here has to clear his name from any charge of trafficking with the British. Is that not so, M'sieur?'

  Thiebault let his breath out with an audible hiss.

  'Well?' Gilham persisted, 'what d'you say to that?'

  'Yesterday,' said Thiebault resignedly, 'the Prince of Eckmühl arrived in Hamburg.'

  'And who in the name of Beelzebub might he be?' asked Gilham sharply.

  'Marshal Davout, gentlemen,' said Thiebault, adding under his breath, 'le marechal de fer ...'

  CHAPTER 11

  Sugar

  January 1810

  Captain Gilham had never heard of Davout, and the muttered soubriquet — evidence of Thiebault's fear of the marshal — made no impression upon him. Instead he raged against the Frenchman's perfidy, subjecting Thiebault to a tirade of abuse until Drinkwater silenced him, to Thiebault's obvious relief.

  'Where are you taking us?' he asked.

  'To a property of Herr Liepmann's, Captain Waters, where you will be quite safe.'

  Drinkwater suppressed a smile. It was clear to him that Thiebault's action was on his own account, or at least on the account of those engaged in illegal trade. Drinkwater knew little about Marshal Davout, but what he did know was enough to make him sympathetic to Thiebault's plight. Davout's Third Army Corps had held the main body of the Prussian army at bay at Auerstadt while Napoleon thrashed the remainder at Jena, accomplishing in a single day the destruction of the Prussian army. He was reputed to be unswervingly loyal to the Emperor, incorruptible and humourless, a man of ruthless severity and no private weaknesses. It was no surprise that Thiebault had been driven to the extremity of seizing the two masters of the British ships just then lying in the Elbe. It was bitterly ironic, Drinkwater thought, that by exchanging positions with Littlewood, he had thus compromised himself.

  'I did not wish to disturb the safe despatch of your ships, gentlemen,' said Thiebault, 'that is why I left Captain Littlewood in charge as your — what do you say? Comprador?'

  'Supercargo,' offered Drinkwater.

  'Ah, yes ...'

  The carriage jerked to a halt and rocked on its springs for a moment before the door was opened. Thiebault hoisted himself from his seat. 'No trouble, gentlemen, I beg you.'

  They descended into a dark, cobbled alley, barely wider than the coach. On either hand tall buildings rose and the air was filled with strange, exotic smells. Drinkwater knew at once that they were among warehouses.

  In the Stygian gloom a blackness opened beside them with a creak and they were ushered into a cavernous space filled with a sweet, sickly smell. Then followed the crash of the closing door, the click and tumble of catch and lock, and the knock of a heavy cross-timber being put in place. A moment later the snick of flint on steel, and a flicker of light.

  'Follow me, gentlemen,' Thiebault commanded, holding up the lantern.

  As they made for a ladder between stacks of bales and cases, Drinkwater looked in vain for evidence of the boots or greatcoats that had come from either the Galliwasp or the Ocean. At length they ascended several flights of wooden stairs and found themselves in a small room, boarded with tongue-and-groove deals in the manner of a magazine.

  'There is water here, gentlemen, and food will be brought to you twice daily. I will return soon. I do not think that you will be compelled to remain here above a week or ten days.' Thiebault gestured at the straw-filled palliasses that presumably furnished accommodation for a watchman. 'I regret, however, to tell you that escape is impossible. Herr Liepmann maintains a pair of hounds to guard against intruders. They were removed during our arrival. When I leave, they will be returned.' Thiebault paused. 'Also, I should advise you that there are many troops in the city.'

  Thiebault made to leave them, but Drinkwater said, 'One thing I do not understand, M'sieur Thiebault.'

  'What is that, Captain?'

  'If you are so anxious to discharge the cargoes of the Ocean and the Galliwasp and want them to drop downstream by dawn for fear of discovery by Marshal Davout, why are you so anxious that the other ships come in?'

  'That is no concern of yours!'

  'What the deuce d'you make of all that?' rasped Gilham as the door closed behind Thiebault. 'I hope to heaven Littlewood's been paid.'

  Drinkwater flung himself down on the nearer palliasse.

  'I must say you seem damnably cool about this predicament, Waters. Ain't you worried about your cargo, man?'

  'To be frank, sir, no.' Drinkwater propped himself up on one elbow. 'I don't think that Herr Liepmann will leave us here unattended, Gilham, so pray simmer down and let us do some thinking.'

  'Or some praying,' said Gilham seriously.

  'As you wish.'

  Whatever the arrangements that Thiebault had made with Liepmann, it was inconceivable that the Jew should ignore the two British shipmasters held in his warehouse. Further ramifications of the affair occurred to Drinkwater as he lay in the cold and nursed the ache in his shoulder.

  Thiebault was clearly heavily implicated in the illegal traffic passing through Hamburg. As a senior officer of the Imperial Customs Service he would be in an incomparable position to feather his own nest. But he would need to distance himself from his contacts, the merchants with whom he dealt, men like Liepmann who must never be left in any doubt that if Thiebault himself was ever threatened with Imperial retribution, he would strike them down first before they were able to lay evidence against him.

  The presence, therefore, of his hostages in Liepmann's property, fully implicated the Jewish merchant. If Davout gave the slightest hint that he suspected Thiebault of collusion, Thiebault only had to order his own officers to apprehend Liepmann, together with two British shipmasters, to ingratiate himself with the marshal and prove his own zeal, efficiency and trustworthiness.

  'If we can but make contact with Herr Liepmann,' Drinkwater reassured Gilham, 'I do not think we have much to worry about.'

  'I hope you are right.'

  Shortly after dark they heard the snarling bark of dogs below. The sound faded to whimpering and was followed by the noise of feet upon the stairs. A moment or two later a young man entered the watchman's hutch bearing a basket of food. Laying out cold sausages, bread and a bottle of wine on a napkin, he smiled and withdrew. As the two Britons bent to help themselves to the food they were aware of a tall man in the doorway. Drinkwater rose to his feet.

  'Herr Liepmann?'

  The man bowed gravely. Like Isaac Solomon he wore the long hair of Orthodox Jewry. 'Ja, mein English ist not goot. You are Kapitan Waters, ja?'

  'At your service, sir.'

  'Goot. I know somet'ing of you from Herr Solomon ...'

  Drinkwater turned slightly so that his back was towards Gilham, and making a negative gesture with his right index finger held close to his breast, he then pointed it at his chest, indicating Gilham's ignorance.

  'Ach ...' Liepmann's head inclined i
n an imperceptible nod of understanding.

  'Herr Thiebault is a very clever man, Herr Liepmann,' Drinkwater said slowly. 'I understand he must hold us hostage against your good behaviour.' Drinkwater accompanied this speech with a deal of gesturing and was rewarded by more nodding from Liepmann.

  'Ja, ja.'

  'Why does he want to bring in more English ships, the ships now at Helgoland? We know he is frightened of Marshal Davout ...'

  Liepmann looked from one to the other. His tongue flickered over his lips and a faint smile followed.

  'Ze scheeps at Helgoland have guns, no?'

  Drinkwater nodded.

  'Marshal Davout he like guns. Herr Thiebault vill get guns. Make money and pleez Marshal Davout. You understand?'

  Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes.'

  'Damned if I do.'

  'It is ver' dangerous for you here. You must not stay ...'

  Liepmann had his own game to play, Drinkwater thought, but it was essential that Galliwasp and Ocean escaped from the river before Drinkwater or Gilham made an attempt at getting out of Hamburg.

  'We must wait, Herr Liepmann, until we hear from Helgoland that our ships are safe.'

  'Ja, ja,' the Jew nodded. 'It will be ver' dangerous for you stay here. Zis is best place. When time come we take you out of Hamburg mit ze sugar.'

  'Can you send a message to Helgoland,' Drinkwater asked, 'if I write it?' Liepmann nodded. 'Herr Nicholas has told me ...'

  'Ja,' Herr Nicholas tells me also.' Liepmann threw a glance in Gilham's direction and pointed at a ledger lying on a shelf. Inkpot and pen stood close by.

  'In English, Kapitan ...'

  Drinkwater exchanged glances with Liepmann.

  'It is safe?'

  Drinkwater took up the pen and wrote carefully in capitals:

  G AND W TAKEN OUT OF THEIR SHIPS BY FORCE BUT PRESENTLY SAFE ENJOYING HOSPITALITY OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. ARRANGEMENTS SET AWRY BY ARRIVAL OF MARSHAL DAVOUT. SHIPS DISCHARGED OUTWARD BOUND.

  He paused a moment, wondering how to sign himself, and then added: Baltic.

  Straightening up he handed the torn-out page to Liepmann. The Jew took the pen, dipped it in the inkpot and on another piece of paper began to write a jumble of letters, having memorized the crazy alphabet from Canto II of Dante. When he had finished the transliteration he opened the lantern and held Drinkwater's draft in the candle fiame. The incinerated ash floated lazily about the table.

  'There is one more thing, Herr Liepmann. You should understand that it was never intended that more ships would come, only that they would pretend to come. Do you understand?'

  'They not come?' Liepmann regarded Drinkwater with surprise.

  'No. They were to have gone only to Neuwerk ... to look as if they were coming into the Elbe.'

  'You do not wish to sell ze guns, nein?'

  'No, only the greatcoats and boots.'

  'Ach ... and ze sugar, ja?'

  'Yes,' Drinkwater said, matching the Jew's smile, 'and the sugar.'

  Liepmann had turned to go when Gilham, his mouth full of the food which he had been busy eating during this exchange, asked, 'Herr Liepmann, did you pay Littlewood?'

  Liepmann turned to Gilham, a look of mild surprise on his face. 'Ja. I pay him goot ... also for your scheep, ze Ocean, two thousand thalers ...'

  In the wake of Liepmann's departure Gilham grunted his satisfaction. With a wry look at his compatriot, Drinkwater helped himself to what was left of the sausages and bread.

  He felt better with food inside him, aware that the winter's day, short though it had been, had passed slowly and been full of the uncertainties that kept a man from feeling hungry until actually confronted with food.

  With a little luck they would be all right. A day or two lying low and then, when Galliwasp and Ocean were clear, Liepmann would smuggle them out of the city. Drinkwater was content to leave the details to the Jewish merchant. Davout would be settling in, receiving reports from the French officials and administrators, all of whom would be wary, and it would take even so dynamic a soldier as the marshal was reputed to be, a few days to decide upon what course of action to settle. There was no doubt that he had been sent to shut the gaping door that Hamburg had become in his master's Continental System.

  'You seem to know a deal of what's going on,' Gilham said, suddenly jerking Drinkwater from his complacency and reminding him that if his real identity or position were known, then capture meant certain death.

  He shrugged. 'It is not so very difficult to deduce,' he said with affected nonchalance, undecided as to whether to take Gilham into his confidence. 'D'you trust Littlewood?' he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  'I don't have much choice, do I?'

  It was bitterly cold in the watchman's room and Drinkwater slept fitfully, waking frequently, the knotted muscles of his wounded shoulder aching painfully. Beside him Gilham snored under a blanket with a full belly and the sailor's facility for sleeping anywhere.

  Drinkwater envied Gilham. He himself was desperately tired, tired of the burden Dungarth had laid upon him and tired of the interminable war. He had done his best and was no longer a young man. Now his shoulder pained him abominably.

  He thought of his wife, Elizabeth, and their children, Charlotte Amelia and Richard. He had not seen them for so very long that they seemed to inhabit another age when he was another person. He found it difficult to remember exactly what they looked like, and found all he could call to mind were the immobile images of the little portraits that used to hang in his cabin when he was in command of a frigate and not cowering under borrowed blankets in a Hamburg garret.

  Where were those imperfect portraits now? Lost with his other personal effects when the Tracker foundered and poor Quilhampton died, together with Frey and Derrick.

  He tore his exhausted mind from horrible visions of his friends drowning, deliberately trying to recall the items of clothing, the books, charts and equipment he must have lost along with his sea-chest and the pictures of his family.

  There was his sword and sextant, his journals and the little drawing case Elizabeth had given him, pretending it came from the children ...

  Mentally he rummaged down through the layers of clothing in the chest. The polar bear skin, presented by the officers of His Britannic Majesty's sloop-of-war Melusine and there, at the very bottom, cut from its wooden stretcher, the paint cracked and flaking, another portrait, found when he captured the Antigone in the Red Sea, ten, eleven years earlier.

  Odd how he could recall that portrait in all its detail: the beautiful French woman, her shoulders bare, her breasts suggestively rendered beneath a filmy wrap of gauze, her hair a la mode, piled up on her head and entwined with a string of pearls. Hortense Santhonax, now widowed, though an unmarried woman when he had first seen her ...

  He closed his aching eyes against the moonlight that flooded in through the lozenge shaped window set high in the apex of the gable-end. It was all so long ago, part of another life ...

  Somewhere below him Liepmann's dogs stirred. Johannes, the young man who brought them their food and served as the Jew's watchman, was probably doing his rounds.

  The whining suddenly rose to a bark of alarm. Once, twice, the hounds yapped before shots rang out. The barking ended in a mewling whine.

  For a moment Drinkwater lay still, unable or unwilling to comprehend what was happening, then a muffled shout was followed by a curt, monosyllabic command.

  Drinkwater threw off his blankets and reached for his boots.

  'Gilham! Wake up!'

  He kicked the recumbent figure into consciousness.

  'What's the matter?' Gilham asked sleepily.

  'The bloody French are here!'

  Drinkwater pulled on his coat and kicked his blankets into the shadows. Feet pounded on the wooden ladders, the floor of their hideout shook. Gilham was on his feet, picking up the empty wine bottle from the table.

  'Get in the shadows, man, and keep quiet!' Drinkwater hissed, though his
own heart was pounding loud enough to be heard.

  The door to the watchman's room was flung open. Three dragoons, clumsy in their high jackboots, burst into the room. For a moment they froze, staring about them, the moonlight gleaming on the bronze of their high, crested helmets and the steel of their bayonetted carbines. Then a fourth, a sergeant holding up a lantern, shoved past them. Drinkwater was aware of more men on the landing outside and the terrified whimper of a young prisoner. They had already seized Johannes.

  The sergeant's lantern light swept the room, falling on the absurd gilt tassels on Drinkwater's hessian boots. A second later it played full in his face.

  'Qu'est ce que vous foutez là?'

  The lantern's light found Gilham, then the basket and utensils used to bring their supper, the pen and ink, the extinguished lamp and the torn pages of the ledger. A few black wisps of ash stirred in the air.

  The dragoons stepped forward and Gilham shattered the wine bottle and raised its broken neck with a defiant cry. The noise terminated in a grunt as he doubled up in pain. The nearest dragoon's toecap struck him in the groin and vomit splashed on to the floor.

  The dragoons secured their prisoners in a silence broken only by the rasp of Gilham's tortured breath. The sharp reek of spew filled the stuffy air. With cords about their wrists both Drinkwater and Gilham were pushed forward to join Johannes on the wooden catwalk that served as a landing from the topmost ladder.

  They stumbled downwards, the sergeant and his lantern ahead of them, the shadows of themselves and their escort leaping fantastically on the stacks of baled and cased goods piled on all sides. At ground level the sergeant paused, ordering his patrol into rough formation. The circle of lamplight illuminated his boots and the long tails of his green coat with the brass eagles securing the yellow facing of the turn-backs. It fell also on the corpse of one of Liepmann's watchdogs, the pink tongue lolling from its gaping jaw. The sergeant kicked it aside.

  'Ouvrez!' he ordered, and a blast of cold air struck them as the door was swung open. The sergeant lifted the lantern and walked down the line of his men, peering at the three prisoners pinioned between the double files. He said something in a low voice which made his men snigger, then he swung round and Drinkwater saw the sabre in his right hand. Holding up the lantern in his left, he let the beam play on the stack of bulging sacks beside them.