by Jan Needle
‘Shut up, you lily-liver! Shut up, you turd! My God, Preece, this is the last time! You are not worth seven shades of shit!’
Suddenly there was a click, and his voice changed. Tom, indeed, was very fond of Arthur, who was the best man he’d ever recruited for this dangerous trade. So what that he was frightened? Why should he not be, in fact? Not too deep down inside himself, Johnson was frightened, too. Maybe he’d go back to smuggling, after all. Though where, in that trade, would he find forty thousand for one jolly little beano?
They watched in satisfaction as the clockwork timer clicked into gear, confident it would strike sparks inside its waterproof compartment to ignite the fuse to set off the torpedo. A funny word, but a word Tom loved. Even though it had been Robert Fulton’s. Bloody American.
And then it changed. The current, moving faster than it should have been, snagged their light line on the big anchor warp somehow, dragging them sideways. Both men scrabbled in their unwieldy arm-tubes to clear it, but the weight of the vessel jammed it tight and tighter with the ebb. The Wee Hobgoblin, with a mind all of her own, began to roll to larboard, dipping alarmingly into the muddy murk.
‘Christ!’ yelled Johnson. ‘Slip it free, can’t you! I’ve set the clockwork off! If we don’t get out of here we’re conger bait. The petard’s about to blow.’
‘How long?’ said Arthur. ‘Tom, you said you’d set a short fuse for a good quick show. How long?’
They had five minutes, perhaps less by now, so Tom refrained from speaking. He dragged frantically at the line, cursing the stiffness of the cotton mittens encasing his fingers, cursing the lack of light, the lack of space, the rising tide of terror. What a way to go, blown up to smithereens or choked in tons of London’s liquid shit. Oh Christ, a glass of small ale in the Trinco Tavern!
‘We need a knife!’ Preece shouted.
‘To nick the canvas and drown us on the spot? Aye, champion! Pull! That way! Harder! Twist!’
‘How long?’ roared Arthur. ‘I’ve been married not a full month yet! Oh Tommy, what have you done to me?’
But Johnson had been pumping, and suddenly the vessel lifted and the rope moved up the cable, and then slipped free. Through the smeared and muddy glass they saw the petard give a little twirl or twist and slide towards its planned position.
‘Huzzah!’ yelled Tom. ‘Torpedo gone! We have two minutes left! Huzzah!’
Two minutes was not enough, but what to do? What else but seize the oar, and bless the ripping current, and trust in their dear lord? Within seconds the schooner hull had disappeared, the liquid blackness of the Blackwall Reach had swallowed them, and both men were at the pumps, moving like automata, moving like men of steam and steel.
‘If we can break the surface,’ Tom gritted, ‘then maybe we are saved. If the blast should take us underwater, then we are dead.’
‘I’m just three weeks a husband,’ Arthur wailed. ‘Captain, you have surely murdered me.’
‘Oh cease your lamentations,’ Johnson said. ‘They will avail you nought. And in any way, she was no —’
At which the bomb went up, as did the Wee Hobgoblin submarine. She cleared the surface of the Thames, in fact. Flew above the water, as she had swum under it. As she crashed back to the surface, her hatch burst open and she sank.
It was a marvel. Ballads were written on the subject. It was a great phenomenon.
Chapter Three
After the explosion came the fire. Despite her dereliction, the schooner was a mass of makeshift fuel. She was used for storing spars and canvas, old warps and cables, drums of paint and linseed, even bags of gunpowder well past their best from damp. The torpedo blast cut through her rotten planking, and despite the inrush of the filthy Thames, found instant kindling aplenty. She went up like the flames of hell.
Before Samson Armstrong had tripped and stumbled clear out of the Trinco’s taproom hearth, the conspirators had quit the tavern and emptied to the street. Ledru and the plum-voiced man were in the van, but half the scum of Blackwall seemed set to join the party, uninvited. From every alley, and from half the ships moored up along the quay, men streamed in every stage of drunkenness and half-undress. Some few whores also, delighted by the chance to ease the boredom of their trade. And maybe pick a careless pocket to the bargain.
The fire was enormous. Over the months she’d lain there, the schooner’s sails — left furled to save the cost and trouble of removing them for storage — had worked loose and easy, plucked and buffeted by the raucous winds, as if in anticipation of a good strong spark to liven their existence. The flames ran up the rigging at alarming speed, found the canvas, wormed into the folds and flappings, then burst into an orgy. The flames melted the pitch and broke off shorter lengths of burning cordage, which dropped onto the waiting lumber on the decks. To the watchers on the shore it was glorious.
‘It will spread!’ said Ledru. ‘My good God, what a demonstration indeed! And nobody saw a thing! This boat that goes invisible is —’
For Ledru, Napoleon Bonaparte’s most trusted personal assassin, this was an unusual piece of indiscretion. It was compounded when one of the other conspirators, pushing past the plum-voiced man, responded even more loudly — and entirely in French. What he said was not the question. Even in the lowest of the docks people knew the accent, and that accent screamed out spy.
Ledru had the finest instincts of a killer. He shot a glance of fury at the loose-mouthed underling, then, as people moved in on both of them, pointed at him, his face contorted, and shouted — in a nearly perfect copy of an English accent — ‘He is a traitor! This man is French! He has set the ship ablaze!’
‘Non!’ screamed the man. ‘Mais —’
He saw Ledru’s knife because he knew his man. Before the great assassin could notch another kill, his assistant had thrown himself sideways into the crowd which — being English possibly — parted momentarily. It was a moment though, no more. As the man began to run, hands seized at him, blows were aimed. Confusion saved him in the first seconds, but as he rushed across the quay he had a crowd of followers, a growing, baying crowd.
‘He’s French! He’s French! They’re burning London down!’
Unfortunately for him, it was at this moment that Captain Armstrong emerged into the outside world. Dark though it was inside the Trinco Tavern, the light outside was more dangerous yet for him, because the quay was lighted by the flickering, flaring extravagance from Tom Johnson’s demonstration. And Samson looked just like an imp from hell.
‘There’s another one!’ the cry went up. ‘By Holy Christ and this one is a neger! He’ll kill us all! He’ll murder us!’
‘No!’ shouted Samson Armstrong. ‘Friends, I am a Londoner! My ship is —’
A neger? he thought. My God, what is this? They cannot think that I am black!
But in a brighter flare he was enlightened. He had come down the blasted chimney like a climbing boy who had not washed for half a year. His clothes were filth, his hands and face were ebony, his eyes were no doubt glaring in their sockets, crying to be gouged out. Samson was not a fool. He did not stay to open a dispute.
All round him as he ran, the crowd was thickening and the noise was growing. From over on the waterside he heard reports that could be gunshots, and then another mighty whoosh as a second ship went up. It had been moored alongside the schooner, another derelict. There were clanging bells all round him now, and people shouting to rouse out the watch. But many men had time to try and bring him down and kill him. Armstrong, who could swim, charged forward with his shoulder, roared a battle cry, and dived into the icy river.
Oh you bastard, he thought, as the cold clenched his chest and made him gulp down air and water mixed. Oh you bastard. But I wonder if cold Father Thames will make me white again! And I wonder where the nearest steps might be!
When his head broke the surface, Samson found the river busy with new craft. Two navy cutters had rushed in, packed with marines with muskets and long pistols, and they were
shooting every little thing that moved.
Soldiers, he thought. Soldiers are mad! They can’t see what they’re aiming at!
He had no idea himself, but he knew it must not be him, in any circumstance. At which a buzzing ball sang past his head and smack into the stone quay wall. As he ducked he almost felt another one part his hair. He had a vision of Eliza, lying in their bed. Oh Christ, she did not even know where he had gone. Christ, when will we meet again?
The realization of how he’d left her fired him anew. She was all alone not far down the wharf on board the Tamarind, and God knew, the noise and rioting must surely have awoken her. She would be frantic, she’d be bereft, he had not even left her with a pistol for protection. If these men from Bedlam spread along the shore in rape and pillaging, what would they do to her?
By now his nose alone pierced through the surface, and his whole frame was rattling with the cold. No more shots came at him, but the jetty stones beside his face were thick with foetid slime. The noises were not hopeful, either. Screams and cries of agony, whoops of hunting as the mad dogs had their fun. This part of Blackwall was dangerous for the watch at dead of night in normal times. This dead of night was abnormal in extreme…
But he had to go. His lungs and muscles were beginning the start of seizure, his hands too numb to even feel the water they were moving in. He let the ebb tide take him along the wall, checking himself at every fissure and obstruction in case it was a ladder or a step. Christ, it was cold. Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ. So cold.
And not three hundred yards away, a hasty shawl draped across her shoulders, Eliza Armstrong came on the deck of Tamarind to look for him. She had a lantern in her hand, which was a bad mistake. It threw no very useful light for her, but to any watchers she was revealed. Among the thick mist and the milling crowd, a big man stopped and looked, then moved towards the rail. The roar of fire from the schooner, the stench of smoke, clogged and blocked her lungs and choked her scream. Oh Samson. Oh my husband…
She ran back towards the cabin as he climbed on board. A big man, very big. And in his hand he had a pistol, which was also big, with double barrels.
Helpless, she tore at the cabin door latch. She was quite helpless.
*
Like Samson Armstrong, the spy Ledru’s spurned helper was another strong and healthy man; and it saved him for a while.
By dint of force and courage he broke from the first pack that tried to kill him, and went into the alleys behind the quayside like a hunted hare. He moved in circles, too, just like a hare, because he hoped to confuse them. A man in his position should have run like an arrow, fast and straight, until the half-starved London ruffians had tired themselves to death. He knew these people. They had had no revolution, no Napoleon, they lived on scraps and shit, detritus from the rich man’s groaning table.
But he also knew his London, or rather, he did not. He knew that this place, like every land of docks, was a warren inhabited by human rats, unmapped, unfathomable except by long usage and the ratlike instinct. If he ran in a straight line there would come a time that he was lost, a white rat in a land of black, a fat rat in a land of thin. Then they would fall on him, and kill him. They would eat up all the fat and leave the tail and gristle. Lucien Gauthier — such was his name — ran in a circle, like a hare.
He saw sights and sounds he hadn’t seen since Robespierre’s Great Terror. Corpses in the streets, part-dismembered or still alive to be gnawed at by the dogs, young women leaning against walls, semi-naked and wholly lost to reason, babies sucking gin from bottles, discarded beside their mothers grubby breasts. If Lucien had had a heart it would have broken. But Lucien, like his master Ledru, did not have a heart.
He came back to the chief assassin after half an hour, and although he was panting, he had shaken off his last pursuer. He came down a long alley back towards the Trinco quayside, and noted that the flames from off the water were dying down. There were still throngs, but they had thinned, and the gunshots had died away. His master, inevitably, like a wraith from out the sepulchre, was waiting for him where the alley opened out. Unlike Lucien, his breaths came normally. No signs of fear or effort.
‘Monsieur,’ said Lucien. ‘You waited.’
Ledru moved towards him with a smile.
‘And you,’ he said, ‘still speak in French. Will you never learn, espèce de con?’
And he slipped a long, sharp blade into the heaving stomach, twisted it, withdrew, and pushed his ex-assistant to the gutter to lie and die.
‘Give me lucky men,’ he muttered. It was, of course, a quote of his dear emperor. Well, almost.
In the water, Samson Armstrong had at long last found a ladder. He prayed to God he had the strength to use it. He was so cold; so cold.
Chapter Four
It was not cold on St Helena despite the height at which the two men stood, and in any case, Napoleon refused to feel such things. He had lost perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand men marching back from Moscow, betrayed by nothing but the snow and bad intelligence, but he had —
No, that was not all of the truth. Napoleon hated losing, but he valued honesty, when possible. The winter had been bad, his intelligence had been worse, but the Russians’ tactics had been what mastered him. He turned away from gazing at the rolling South Atlantic and back to Montholon, who was actually shivering.
‘You are a milksop, sir. When I marched back from Moscow my soldiers killed their horses and used them as warm overcoats, but I did not, over a thousand miles. I’ve a mind to order you to take yours off.’
Montholon said daringly, ‘But it was hardly marching, was it? You rode a dozen horses quite to death, and sometimes took a carriage.’
‘You are but a marquis, sir, I am an Emperor. You would not have me walking like a common soldier, surely? And I only went on wheels when I was sleeping, to rebuild drained strength. If I had not rode I would have starved to death. True or false?’
It was true, and because of the tactic he so admired in his enemy. As the Russians had retreated east at first, before his Grande Armée, they had laid waste to every crop and berry, slaughtered every beast, and poisoned all the wells to boot. Filled each pond and stream with rotting corpses, animal and human.
‘You did everything you had to, Your Excellency, of that there is no doubt. One day, God willing, you will wreak your vengeance on the Russian Bear. Only you can do it.’
It was the right answer, in the right tone of voice. Montholon did not believe it any longer, and frankly did not care. Napoleon had done him harm enough, both before and after bringing him to this island as his aide, and done it quite devoid of ruth. Montholon suspected, but did not know, that he had made him a cuckold, also. If his wife’s expected baby came cooing Corsican, he told himself morosely, he would be sure. Much good that it would do him.
‘Near two thousand feet above the sea up here,’ said Napoleon, reflectively. ‘The wild Atlantic that every man’s afraid of, except for English sailors, they would claim, damn them. Ha! And it’s not even cold. I wonder what it’s like in London, Montholon. You know the date, don’t you?’
It was burned on both their minds. It was the date the Irish smuggler Tom Johnson had undertook to set the thing in motion, to suit the tides and phases of the moon. Hard to believe that over there in England it would be as cold as charity, with violent gales perhaps.
‘Indeed I do, Excellency. But forgive me if I do not share your confidence that it will happen as to plan. Johnson is Irish, after all.’
‘And a smuggler since twelve years old. He has made and lost some fortunes, and do not tell me it’s romance, Charles Tristan, for I met the man in Paris, along with Fulton the American, and saw their bateau invisible in action. Fulton has made such craft for many people, and Pitt himself has given him money for research. Great stores of money. A hundred thousand livres I have heard.’
Talking with Napoleon, like with any great dictator, was a game of skill. Montholon had his own ideas about the value
of these secret weapon stories, and he knew exactly when to argue. Not now. He smiled and pointed.
‘Look, Excellency. See there. A ship, a big one, coming up from the Cape, I suppose. Who knows, she might have your submarines on board!’
Napoleon said irascibly, ‘Even that skinny little bastard Nelson could not have made a ship arrive that fast. Whore-monger.’
‘Indeed, my lord. But surely it will not be very long, will it? If Captain Johnson has proved his worth today, Ledru will pay him the balance of our money and the other interested parties will do the same. Good God, sir, the weapons could be at sea tomorrow! And then how long? Six weeks? Two months? Communications are miraculously improved these days.’
‘You’re in the land of fantasy, Charles Tristan, but it is a pleasant realm. And we’ve been at this escape so long that something will go right one day, I’ll bet your life on it.’
Thank you indeed, thought Montholon. Your grace amazes me.
There had indeed been much energy expended since Napoleon had landed at James Town the October after Waterloo, and many pounds and many francs had been disbursed. An American privateer called the True Blooded Yankee had been set on by revolutionists in Buenos Aires to harry the English before the prisoner had even reached the island, and the Emperor’s brother Joseph still pledged solemnly he would spend his fortune to set him free. To many, Bonaparte was the only hope to finish urgent business.
Racked with misery and boredom on this ocean pimple, the Corsican himself clung to the dreams through thick and thin, egged on by many men for many reasons. Spies and mountebanks smuggled ideas and plans ashore, and the schemes they brought were legion. Steam vessels were suggested, tall Yankee ships with more canvas than a snow-clad mountain, even air balloons. The English responded with naval bases set up at Tristan da Cunha and Ascension Island, so far into the wastes of water that most considered them a jest.
