Beneath the Aurora

by Richard Woodman

  ‘God’s bones,’ he muttered, tossing the paper on to the pile which covered the green baize on the desk-top and standing up with such violence than his chair overturned and, for a moment, he had to clutch at the desk to stop himself from falling.

  The dizziness passed, but left his brow clammy with sweat. He ran a forefinger round his neck, tugging at the constriction of his stock, swearing beneath his breath with forceful eloquence. He went to the window and leaned his head upon the cool glass. The sash vibrated slightly to the gale blowing outside, and rain fell upon the glass panes with a patter which occasionally grew to a vicious tattoo in the gusts. It was almost dark and he told himself it was the dusk which had brought on his tiredness, nothing more.

  He turned and, leaning against the shutter, stared back into the room. It was small, containing the baize-covered desk, his chair and a wicker basket which stood on a square of carpet to keep his feet from the draught that blew between the wide deal floorboards. The window was flanked on one side by a tall cabinet whose glazed doors covered shelves of guard books, on the other by a low chest whose upper surface was a plane table. It had a trough for pencil and dividers, beneath which a series of shallow drawers contained several folios of charts. On its top was a long wooden box containing a single deep and narrow drawer.

  The only other article of furniture in the room was a small, rickety, half-moon table set against the wall beside the door. Upon it were a pair of decanters, a biscuit barrel and four glasses. One contained a residual teaspoonful of maderia.

  On the wall opposite the window, above the grate and mantelpiece, hung a gilt-framed canvas depicting a moonlit frigate action. It had been commissioned by Drinkwater and painted by the ageing Nicholas Pocock, whose house in Great George Street was hard by Storey’s Gate into St James’s Park. The painting showed the frigate Patrician overhauling and engaging the French National frigate Sybille and Drinkwater had described the canvas to his wife Elizabeth as ‘a last vanity, m’dear. I shan’t fight again, now that I’ve swallowed the anchor.’

  The recollection made him turn to the window again, and stare down into the darkening street. Despite the weather, Whitehall was full of the evening’s traffic: a foot patrol of guardsmen, a pair of doxies in a doorway cozening the grenadiers, whose bearskins lost their military air in the rain, a dog pissing against a porter’s rest, and a handful of pathetic loiterers huddling out of the rain in the sparse and inadequate clothing of the indigent. Carriages came and went across his field of view, but he saw none of this. It depressed him; after the broad sweep of the distant horizon seen from the pristine standpoint of a frigate’s quarterdeck, the horse turds and grime of Whitehall were a mockery.

  He turned and, as abruptly as he had risen, closed the shutters against the night. Then he righted his capsized Windsor chair and sat in it. Picking up the paper he twisted round, held it to the flickering firelight and began to read out loud, as if by annunciating the ill-written words he would keep himself awake enough to assimilate their content.

  ‘Sir, further to my communications of December last and May of this year, in which there was little of an unusual nature to report, it is now common knowledge here . . .’ Drinkwater had forgotten the origin of the paper and looked at the heading. ‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured, ‘from Helgoland . . . last month, no, July . . .’

  He read on, ‘that a considerable quantity of arms for equipping troops have lately arrived in Hamburg and in expectation of their shipment, have been placed in a warehouse which is guarded by . . .’

  There was a knock at the door and Drinkwater paused. ‘Enter,’ he called.

  A slim, pinch-faced man with prematurely thinning hair appeared. He wore a black, waisted and high-collared coat. The points of his shirt poked up either side of his face, and a tight cravat in dark, watered silk frothed beneath a sharp, blue chin. The figure was elegant and, though daylight would have betrayed the threadbare nature of his dress, the candelabra he bore only enhanced the ascetic architecture of his skull.

  ‘Ah, Templeton, about time you brought candles.’

  ‘My apologies, Captain, I was delayed in the copy room . . .’

  ‘Scuttlebutt, I suppose.’

  ‘I wish it were only gossip, sir, but I fear the worst.’ Templeton’s words were so full of foreboding that Drinkwater was compelled to look up. Templeton’s head was bent askew in such a way that, though he stood, his eyes must of necessity look under his brow so that his whole demeanour bespoke grave concern.

  ‘Which touches me, Mr Templeton?’

  ‘Indeed, sir, I fear so.’ A brief smirk passed across Templeton’s features, the merest hint of satisfaction at having conveyed the full import of his meaning with such admirable economy. It would have passed a less intuitive man than Drinkwater unnoticed.

  ‘Is this a secret of state, or merely one which is denied the Secret Department, Mr Templeton?’ Drinkwater asked with heavy irony.

  ‘The latter, Captain Drinkwater,’ Templeton replied, the corners of his thin mouth creeping outwards in a smile, hinting at the possession of superior knowledge.

  ‘Well, then, I am waiting. What is this gossip in the clerks’ office?’

  ‘I am afraid, sir, ’tis said this department is to be discontinued.’

  A feeling of something akin to relief flooded through Drinkwater. There were times in a man’s life when to submit to the inevitable meant avoiding disagreeable concomitances. He could never have explained to Elizabeth how constricted his soul was, cooped up in this tiny Admiralty office. He had accepted his appointment, half out of loyalty to his late predecessor, Lord Dungarth, half out of a sense of necessity.

  This necessity was harder to define, exposing as it did the infirmities of his character. A believer in Providence, he knew his posting to this obscure office was only partly the result of Dungarth’s dying wish. Fate had consigned him to it in expiation of his unfaithfulness to his wife, for his affaire with the Widow Shaw.*

  Now Templeton, his obsequious but able cipher clerk, a man steeped in the clandestine doings of the Secret Department, who possessed encyclopaedic knowledge of the letters pasted in the guard books resting behind the glass doors of the cabinet, brought him release from this imprisonment.

  ‘I see you are shocked, Captain Drinkwater.’

  ‘I am certainly surprised,’ Drinkwater dissimulated. ‘Upon what logic is this based?’

  ‘Cost, I believe,’ Templeton replied and added, rolling his eyes with lugubrious emphasis and pointing his right index finger upwards, though Drinkwater knew nothing but the attics were there, ‘and a certain feeling among those whose business it is to attend to such matters, that our continued existence is no longer necessary.’

  ‘The war is not yet over, Templeton.’

  ‘I entirely agree, sir.’

  Drinkwater realized Templeton awaited his reply as a matter of some importance. Indeed the clerk had confided in Drinkwater in order to rouse him to a defence of the Secret Department, not so much to contribute to ending the war by its continued existence, but to preserve Templeton’s unique position within the Admiralty’s bureaucratic hierarchy. Templeton was not the first to assume, quite wrongly, that Nathaniel Drinkwater was a man of influence. How else had he inherited this post of Head of the Secret Department?

  How indeed? It was a conundrum which obsessed Drinkwater himself. He knew no more than that he had received a letter signed by the Second Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, John Barrow, appointing him, and a visit from the Earl of Moira explaining that it had been the dying wish of Lord Dungarth that Drinkwater should take over the office.

  ‘Johnnie said you were the only man capable of doin’ the job, Captain, the only man with the nous. He was emphatic upon the point, wanted me to tell you about a bookseller fellow in Paris, and a Madame de Santon, or some such, but he slipped away, poor devil. He was in a deuce of a lot of pain at the end, despite the paregoric.’

  Moira had given him the key to the desk at which he
now sat, striving for some temporizing reaction to Templeton’s news.

  ‘Barrow has not mentioned the matter . . .’

  ‘It was only decided at Board this morning . . .’

  ‘You’re damned quick with your intelligence,’ Drinkwater snapped sharply. ‘So much for the confidentiality of the copy room!’

  ‘I believe Mr Barrow wished it to be known, sir, in this roundabout way.’

  ‘How obligin’ of him,’ Drinkwater muttered, knowing that in the past he had once crossed the Second Secretary and done himself no favour thereby. ‘You had better pour us both a glass, Templeton.’

  Drinkwater rose, aware that he had still not thoroughly read the dispatch from Helgoland. He moved towards the little half-moon table where the clerk poured the rich madeira. He caught sight of himself reflected in the glass doors of the cabinet. The bottle-green coat did not suit him, and was at odd variance with his old-fashioned queue with its clump of black ribbon nestling at the nape of his neck. He looked a damn fool!

  Templeton handed him the glass. ‘What are we to do, Templeton?’ he asked. ‘D’you have any bright ideas? If they want for money, we’ve no means of raisin’ revenue, and if they want value for what little they allow us, how in heaven’s name do we give it to ’em?’

  He was half-hearted in his complaint, but Templeton did not seem to notice. The truth was, the intelligence reports processed by the two of them contained little of significance now that the naval war on the coast of Europe was reduced to the tedious matter of blockade. There were the lists of Yankee ships slipping in and out of French ports, but as many were doing the same in Spain and the British were purchasing the supplies they brought to keep Wellington’s Anglo-Portuguese army in the field. As for the matter of their own funds, Drinkwater had learned that Dungarth had himself underwritten most of the department’s expenses, squandering his modest inheritance to the distress of his Irish tenants. His own finances would not extend so far.

  In so far as the Secret Department had achieved anything recently, Drinkwater could recollect only his pressing the Board to increase the strength of the blockade on the eastern coast of the United States. He had written an appreciation of the matter born out of his own experience of Yankee privateers rather than the coded missives of spies.

  ‘We appear to be redundant, Mr Templeton,’ he said with an air of finality.

  ‘I fear that may well be the case, Captain Drinkwater,’ Templeton said, sipping his wine unhappily.

  ‘You will retain a position within the Admiralty, surely.’

  ‘Oh, I daresay, sir, but not one of such gravity, sir, not one with such, er, such opportunities.’

  The emphasis on the last word reminded Drinkwater of the vital perquisites of office among these black-garbed jobbers. There were expenses to be written off, bribes to be paid and spies to be funded. Everything was reduced to money and everyone had their price, women as well as men.

  He thought of Moira’s ‘Madame de Santon, or some such’. Drinkwater knew her better as Hortense Santhonax, née Montholon. Dungarth’s key had revealed his secret dossier on Hortense and the small pension she received to keep open communications with the Emperor Napoleon’s former Foreign Minister, Talleyrand. He concentrated on the present. There was Liepmann in Hamburg, Van Ouden in Flushing and Vlieghere at Antwerp.

  ‘Well, Templeton, what have we received recently? There was the letter from Carlscrona reporting eleven of the line in ordinary . . .’

  ‘From the Master of the Lady Erskine, sir.’

  ‘Quite so . . .’

  ‘And the message from Antwerp about the current state of new building there, four ships and a frigate. A routine report, to be sure, but one which demonstrates the continuing ability and determination of the French and their allies to build men o’ war.’

  ‘Yes, and the encrypted dispatch from Helgoland spoke of arms being stored at Hamburg. There does not seem much of significance in that.’

  ‘No, no,’ Templeton agreed quickly, ‘Hamburg is a French fortress. Cavalry remounts, recruits, stores and so forth are all assembled there. The French Army Corps in North Germany draw their reinforcements from the Hamburg depot.’

  ‘And yet Liepmann thought it worth letting them know in Helgoland,’ Drinkwater reflected, adding, ‘Liepmann is in our pay, not that of the Foreign Office.’

  ‘You have great faith in Herr Liepmann, sir,’ said Templeton obliquely, knowing that Drinkwater had once met the Jewish merchant.

  ‘It would not surprise me if these arms are locked away in one of our Hebrew friend’s warehouses, Templeton. If so, he has probably learned of their purpose. Don’t you think it odd they may be secured in a warehouse, rather than in the possession of the French military authorities?’

  ‘That is mere conjecture,’ Templeton said dismissively.

  ‘True.’ Drinkwater was content to leave the matter there. He knew Templeton set great store by the intelligence from Antwerp. It was a regular dispatch, a long message in the cipher it was Templeton’s peculiar skill to disentangle and he had a proprietorial air towards it.

  But Templeton had become wary of his new master. The ageing post captain with his outmoded queue, lopsided shoulders and thin sword scar down his left cheek was a contrast after the huge, dropsical bulk of the one-legged Lord Dungarth. But, Templeton had come to learn, both had an uncanny knack of nosing out the obscure from the obfusc. The talent made Templeton nervous.

  ‘Your meaning is unclear, sir,’ Templeton prompted.

  ‘Mmm? You mean the significance of my conjecture is unclear?’ Drinkwater asked wryly.

  ‘Exactly so.’

  ‘Well, you are right. It is only conjecture, but Liepmann finds it necessary to tell us a quantity of arms has arrived at Hamburg. There is nothing unusual in that, we conclude, except that Herr Liepmann knows of it. Now I’ll warrant that there is nothin’ significant in replacement equipment arriving in Hamburg in the normal run of things, eh? Nor would one expect Liepmann to know of it. But Liepmann does know, and considers it worth lettin’ us know.’

  ‘But if the fact was of real significance then surely he would have amplified the matter. The message is in cipher. If these arms, whatever they consist of, are in his own warehouses, he would have given us more details. I don’t see it signifies anything.’

  ‘You have a point, Templeton. Perhaps my assumption was foolish. But suppose they are in the custody of a friend, an associate. Liepmann perhaps smells a rat. He sends us the information thinking it may be a piece of a larger puzzle.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t.’

  ‘You are not convinced.’ Drinkwater’s tone was flat, a statement, not a question. He shrugged, drained his glass and sighed. ‘So be it. Come, it is gettin’ late. It is time you went home.’

  Templeton put his empty glass down on the half-moon table. ‘Good-night, sir,’ he said, but he seemed reluctant to leave.

  ‘Good-night.’ Drinkwater turned to his desk, gathering the scattered papers, waiting for Templeton to go. When the clerk had finally gone, he locked them away. He turned then to the shutters and opened them. Throughout his interview with Templeton he had been aware of their faint but persistent rattle.

  He peered again through the window. For a moment, the full moon appeared from behind flying cloud and he thought of the strong spring tides its influence would produce and the ferocious seas which would be running in the Channel.

  ‘God help sailors on a night like this,’ he muttered to himself in a pious incantation. The brilliant moonlight and a clatter below briefly attracted his attention. He caught a glimpse of a horseman turning in off the street and entering through Nash’s screen wall, his mount striking sparks off the wet cobbles. Messengers were something of a rarity nowadays, he reflected, so sophisticated had the semaphore telegraph system become. It was capable of transmitting news with great speed from the standard on the Admiralty roof, along half a dozen arteries to the great seaports of Britain, even to such exposed outpo
sts as Yarmouth Road, on the coast of East Anglia. He wondered idly where the rider’s dispatches originated, then dismissed the thought and closed the shutters.

  Drinkwater succumbed to the temptation to pour another glass and sat again, turning his chair so that it faced the dying fire. He was in no mood to return to a house empty of all except its staff. Bending, he stoked the fire into a final flaring, listening awhile to the boom of the gale across the massed chimney pots on the roof above while the tiny flames licked round the glowing coals, then subsided into a dull, ruby coruscation.

  He brooded on his predicament. He was supposed to be a puppet-master, pulling strings at the extremities of which several score of agents danced, ceaselessly gleaning information for the British Admiralty. Templeton, his confidential cipher clerk, decoded their messages and entered their dispatches in the guard books. He was a genius of sorts, a man whose mind could disinter a hidden fact, cross-refer it to some other seemingly unrelated circumstance and draw a thread of logic from the process. Except, of course, when he disagreed, as at present. Then he could be monstrously stubborn. Drinkwater sometimes marvelled at the obscure man’s abilities, quite oblivious of his own part in these deliberations and the confidence his personal imprimatur gave Templeton. He was more likely to see himself as a fish out of water, an ageing and foppish extravagant in his bottle-green coat and his increasingly affected mode of speaking. It seemed to him that he had reached this point in his life without quite knowing how he had got there, carried, like a piece of wood on the tide, into some shallow backwater and left grounded in a creek.

  He had fondly supposed that he would see something of his wife, but Elizabeth and the children were almost a hundred miles away, in Suffolk, while he vegetated in the capital, choking on smoke and falling victim to the blue devils and every quinsy and ague coughed over him by London’s denizens! Moira had implied he might mastermind a coup, insisting Dungarth knew him capable of executing some brilliant feat. But while Drinkwater had pored in fascination over the papers pasted in the guard books, prompted by a natural curiosity concerning the fate of Madame Santhonax, whose husband Drinkwater had killed in action, he had come to realize all such opportunities seemed to reside firmly in the past, and the distant past at that.*