by Jan Needle
‘Oh, another thing,’ said Arthur. ‘This Lord Cochrane, he has Brazil behind him, and Peru, and all their money too. If we need anything he’ll provide it, and in extremis there’ll be a seventy-four to save us from all pain. How about another drain of tea then, Mistress? Oh, isn’t it a lucky man that has a wife!’
Tom Johnson’s safe and secret spot, it transpired, was an abandoned barge moored close into the river bank, which was as roomy as a vault inside and had a workshop, forge, and shipwright’s tools. Alongside this hulk, over nobody knew how many months or years, he had made a basin that could be pumped out nearly dry.
The two submarines, lodged tight into this dock and covered by thick undergrowth, were a marvel of the modern age that made Samson Armstrong’s eyes pop out. In the cabin of the Tamarind, after a tour of them, the company sat down to a meal that was a feast. Arthur Preece was a demon cook among his other attributes, it turned out. Amidst the plates and jugs and glasses, paper and plans were laid out to be pored over.
The bigger craft, Tom told them, was a hundred tons and eighty foot in length, by nearly twenty foot in beam. She had two steam engines of the latest type, giving out a power of forty horse. This craft was called the Eagle, to sail in company of the Etna, of forty foot by ten, and of burthen twenty tons. They needed thirty seamen, and four engineers. But they also had masts and sails, which would collapse and stow in a twinkling.
‘They sound a thought unwieldy,’ the Sea Wolf said. ‘I have experience of steam engines, as you know. If the submarine must go beneath the sea for danger reasons, how quickly can the fires be withdrawn?’
He looked round the cabin table.
‘Fire eats not only coal but air,’ he added gravely. ‘If you go below with the fires still alight, all men will suffocate in moments.’ He smiled at Eliza. ‘It is no respecter of women, either. No special dispensation!’
Tom Johnson said, ‘Both boats are armed to keep attackers at a distance. We have guns to fire on the surface as well as torpedoes. By the time a sudden enemy got near, the fires would be drawn. We have been at it several years, my lord. It is a scientific system.’
Cochrane seemed satisfied. They would make the voyage on the surface anyway, by sail and steam, until close to St Helena; then be submerged and hidden during daytime, to rise up and sail at night. Near the island they would not use the engines at all, because of smoke.
‘And what are these torpedoes, pray?’ Eliza’s head was angled to one side. ‘It is a word that I have never heard.’
‘It is a sort of bomb,’ said Arthur Preece. ‘You go below the surface, you attach it to the enemy, you set the time-clock, you withdraw. Then fingers in the ears, and listen for the bang!’
‘Enough destruction between the Eagle and the Etna to reduce twenty ships to merely ruins,’ Johnson said. ‘You of all people, Lord Cochrane, will know the efficacy of such scientific arms.’
The Sea Wolf nodded, but he did not wish to boast. In the year of Trafalgar he had won a Navy competition for a revolutionary convoy lamp, the following year he had designed a fighting galley that could be transported on a bigger ship, and he was au fait on steam propulsion, bombardment vessels, fireships and poison gas.
‘I know a little of the subject,’ he conceded. ‘But assuming we can get Bonaparte down off his mountain, what comes then? How do we get him clear when there’s a half a dozen ships out to destroy him?’
‘A sailor thing, this one,’ Tom Johnson said. ‘St Helena is a rock in essence, two thousand feet or more of dead volcano. But the landing places are well studied, and my Etna is fortified with fenders made of cork. I will land upon the rock carrying a mechanical chair of my own design, which will hold Napoleon on its seat, while I perch on a footboard at his back. What we might call a bosun’s chair.’
‘And me the bosun,’ Arthur laughed. ‘I do the pulley-haul as usual! We have two thousand and five hundred feet of patent whale line and my muscles. Thank the Lord I come from Galway!’
‘If the cliff’s two thousand feet to start with,’ Samson said. And Johnson cut him off.
‘Your man Napoleon won’t be at such a height, Captain Armstrong; and you stow your nonsense, Preece — your work is lowering, not hauling up. I’ll carry a ring-bolt and a well-greased block to the top while you’re lurking at the bottom with the Etna, and when I get there I’ll drive in a spike to secure it and drop the falls to you. Then I high-tail it off to Longwood to pick up the Emperor — by appointment, naturally. There is nothing can go wrong.’
Nobody cared to speak for some good while. Tom Johnson was a big man in much more than his frame. Even the Sea Wolf nodded his approval.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I must congratulate you. It will not be an easy ride, but my confidence grows by the minute. It is masterly.’
‘As a woman,’ put in Eliza, half-serious, ‘I take it Longwood is his home? Is it not guarded? Can you just walk in on him like that?’
‘Indeed you cannot,’ Johnson said. ‘But I have men there, naturally. A man called Louis Marchand, who poses as a body servant and a valet but is as strong as three men and as mobile as a monkey. Another man called Cipriani who has all the occult skills of the most desperate gutter rat of Naples, and who can also, at a pinch, pass off for his master.’
‘What,’ said Eliza, excitedly. ‘A double! Now, this is wonderful!’
‘Not quite a double, but he will pass,’ said Johnson. ‘But in the household there is another fellow who is close enough in features to fool Bonaparte’s own mother, so they say. He goes nowhere near the English on the island without a concealing scarf or wig on, and I assure you, gentlemen, he is a confident assassin also, whose favoured weapon is the stiletto. His name is Robeaud. He is our secret weapon.’
‘In what respect?’ the Sea Wolf said.
‘In this,’ said Johnson. ‘If there are guards around, or if there are traitors in the household, I will arrange it with Napoleon and the closest confidantes so that confusion will be king. Remember I am Irish. I deal not only with smoke, my friends, but with mirrors too. Boney himself will not be certain who he is when he comes down the mountain on that chair. As for his enemies — well pffffff!’
In later talks around the table, different men came to refine the plans, and haggle over money. Eliza and her husband costed out what they would need and cleared it with Cochrane and with Cockburn easily, but other members of the scheme were much more demanding. The money behind it all seemed endless, though, and anyone who expressed a doubt was defeated by that argument. Napoleon would escape, and money was no object or objection.
Rumours spread, however, up and down the bleak banks of the Thames, and a succession of adventurers and hopefuls began to turn up at the Tamarind. Many had walked miles, and many were encrusted in the filthy mud of what was almost an open sewer. Few indeed had anything to offer.
There was much of value to be stolen, though, and Arthur Preece came into his own again. He was a muscular, lumpy personage, who took a keen delight in violence, received or given. Eliza remonstrated sometimes, but in truth he proved his weight in gold, and the rule was established very quickly that any unknown person turning up on board was turned away again, no argument. No story in the world would gain a place. They were almost ready to sail. Nothing, no one, should stand in their way.
And then one afternoon Eliza Armstrong heard a woman weeping. She was at the bow of Tamarind and the tide was almost full. It took her some moments to locate where the noise was coming from, but she saw at last a little boat. It had no oars or paddles, but was drifting up the creek on the last vestiges of a rising current.
In it was a young woman in a cloak, lying on the bottom in a pool of water. Her tearful face was pale and beautiful, and she may have been not twenty. In her arms she had a swaddled bundle, which as Eliza watched she twitched open to reveal a child.
‘Help me,’ she said. ‘Please help me and my little boy. His father is Napoleon.’
Chapter Nine
The
girl had reached the brig by secret means, and the men who had delivered her had made certain she was there to stay. Captain Armstrong set deckhands to fish her out of her little coracle, and launched a boat to catch the vessel that had dropped her off to drift up to the Tamarind. No joy. The evening mists were rolling down, each minor creek was sheltered by trees and rushes. It had been masterly.
Back in the cabin, Eliza had become a nurse and mother. She had cleared out what men were present and made a nest on the big bed for the woman and the baby. She had boiled water, and found dry towelling and blankets. The woman had her own supply of nourishment for the child.
‘My name’s Eliza. My husband owns the ship, we bought her off the East India Company, it is all above the board, we are not pirates.’
The girl smiled wanly.
‘If you will take me to St Helena, mistress, I don’t care if you’re Barbary Corsairs,’ she said. ‘I am a beggar, I can only supplicate. My name is Lucy Balcombe, turfed out of that place by order of the government. I had to leave my lover there. Napoleon, the Emperor. This is his son, Jules. I beg you to believe me.’
Eliza Armstrong felt nothing else but lost. She’d heard so many bedlam stories in the last few months, she believed in flying pigs quite probably.
‘I believe you, yes I do. Napoleon is a man quite prone to marriage, so they say. And on an island in the wilderness, and you so beautiful, well…’
Miss Balcombe had not come for flattery. She burst into tears so violent that Eliza worried for the safety of the child. Living as she did bereft of female company, assailed morning and night by doubts about the way her life was hurtling, she found herself in tears as well, wrapped in a close embrace with Lucy and the baby.
It was then that Samson walked in, with the rangy Irishman. He took in the vision, turned Johnson straight around, and pushed him gently out onto deck again. Then, without a word, he checked the boil-can on the stove and made them all a drink. It was minutes before the women took theirs, during which time he said nothing. Samson was a man of many talents.
The story came out in dribs and drabs, but for Lucy it was never less than painful. Her father and mother had lived on St Helena since long before the prisoner had arrived, and at first had offered him refuge at their estate, the Briars, until Longwood House should be properly inhabitable. He had been a lonely man, she said, abandoned by his empress, forgotten by his children, entirely forlorn. Each time she spoke of love her eyes welled up, and despite her time away from him she lived only in the memory.
‘He never saw our own dear baby boy,’ she wailed. ‘He never saw his little Jules, who is the very spit of him. I swear his heart is breaking, and they will not even permit him to send me any letters. I have sent likenesses, locks of his baby’s darling hair, but I am sure they never reach him. The governor, a monster called Sir Hudson Lowe, waited till my condition was far gone before deporting us, hoping I would perish on the voyage. He is the devil. I want to see him burn in hell. Oh Lord, forgive me.’
Lord Cochrane, on a final visit to the Tamarind before setting sail to South America by fast schooner, agreed especially that Lowe was not an upright personage.
‘He took up the post after Admiral Cockburn, and he dismantled all the fine things that good man had done. He instigated a regime of surveillance morning noon and night, and his spies were forever creeping into Longwood House to be tossed out again. Sir Hudson Lowe, in fact, is the main reason I feel Napoleon must be rescued. His scheme for him is slow and cruel death.’
Nevertheless, Cochrane exhorted Armstrong and Johnson not to take the girl, and most of all, the baby. With Samson he hinted at strong doubts about the details of the story, but to the women he used a different tack.
‘It is a dangerous voyage with uncertain end, and he is not a strong child,’ he said on one occasion. ‘Even you must concede that, Mistress. Surely your parents —’
Less prone to it these days, the young mother nevertheless collapsed. Eliza defended her fiercely, and Lord Cochrane withdrew without another word. All knew that even if her tale were gospel, no family could have any more to do with her, in all propriety. Bad enough to have produced a bastard. Worse if it should be Napoleon’s. Worse still that it had cost their island home and livelihood.
But there were arguments.
‘If you will not carry Lucy with us,’ said Eliza to her husband, finally, ‘she becomes a dockland slut and dies. Without proper nourishment, dear little Jules will go before her. It shall not happen. It is against morality.’
‘But we do not know the certain truth of it! The maid —’
‘Comes with us, dear husband. Or I do not go.’
The wife had spoken.
*
As was the way with ships at sea, where a captain hardly ever sleeps, the two young women shared the big bed with the baby when the Tamarind set sail for open water, leaving Samson to get his rest upon a cot. Eliza had few secrets to tell, Lucy many. She had been fifteen years old when Napoleon first took her to his bed.
Eliza’s word for this, unthinkingly, was seduced — and Lucy was horrified by it. Had they not been like sisters now, cuddled up in bed against the North Atlantic gales the brig punched into, she would have been incensed.
‘It was not seduction, dear, never seduction! It was love!’
She protested quietly, as there were two more babies sleeping in the cabin (their favourite joke) but she was intense, and Eliza responded with conscious bravery.
‘Some sort of love,’ she said — and got tapped firmly on the lips.
‘Best sort, the only sort Eliza, you are nothing but a shrew. His life was one of misery and degradation, he needed me. If anything, ’twas I that seduced him. And I love him, oh I love him. He needs me, he has nothing, nothing, else.’
The ships did not sail in convoy to begin with, Samson Armstrong having decided it would be safest to go first, if only to get clear of Johnson’s strange, unwieldy vessels in the creeks and estuary. The Irishman could not be persuaded to go out under sail like normal craft, either, although he did concede it would be less ostentatious.
‘To hell with canvas, Mr Honey,’ he said. ‘One day very soon all hulls will be driven by steam, and the Sea Wolf himself agrees with me. We have a bet on. One day we’ll arrange a fight between my latest underwater craft, and the best frigate he can lay his hands on. By night or day I will defeat him, and that will be the end of it. Out with the old, in with the new. Your brig is beautiful, but real beauty’s in utility.’
Samson was relaxed.
‘Your idea of beauty is so strange I must beg you to give my wife no more compliments, sir,’ he said. ‘But how beautiful will your Eagle or your Etna look when they are out of coal and rolling like a pair of bitches in the wild Atlantic? What price beauty then?’
‘You have filled your hold with coal for me, correct, for later stages of our ocean journey? And both my submarines have masts and sails? In this English Channel the wind blows westerly, and I have ordered a coaling ship to meet us off of Ushant, and under steam and sail I’ll be there first with ease. So no more talk of rolling bitches, eh? What think you of that?’
Armstrong was smiling still.
‘I think of beauty, sir,’ he said. ‘I think of beauty.’
Out in the Downs, which were choppy, he hove the Tamarind to so everyone could watch these unique new ships come out. They had a sort of something, he confessed, but certainly not beauty. Their masts were hinged, and laid along the decks, and their chimneys belched black smoke like volcanoes. It was a rare sight, very rare, but he enjoyed it.
‘Good God, Eliza, Tom Johnson may be right. There were no steamships just twenty years ago, and now there’s this. He’s going to get to St Helena and never mind the odds. In one way, it is wonderful.’
Lucy Balcombe stood by them on the quarterdeck. She was well swaddled but quite pale, and her baby was better off below. The wind was bitter and the flying spray was worse. She seemed lost in private thoughts.
>
But Eliza, her head close to her friend’s, heard her murmur: ‘My dear, my true Napoleon, I am coming with our baby to make your life complete. Mama has said you are not faithful but my mother is a witch. You love me true, Napoleon, as I love you. God willing, I will soon be in your arms.’
In all their confidences, Eliza had heard no hints like this before. She felt a cold hand clutch her heart, and it was not the wind. She offered up a small but fervent prayer.
Chapter Ten
Napoleon was in his bath when news was brought that Madame de Montholon wished to see him. His valet Cipriani entered the bathroom after a quiet knock. The bath was deep, and hot, the room was full of steam.
‘Your Excellency —’
‘No, I need no more. Are you trying to drown me, Jean-Baptiste, or make a lobster thermidor? I will get out soon, it’s been nearly an hour. Send in that rather pretty maid this time. Remind me of her name, though. Cathérina? Very toothsome.’
‘As well may be, your Excellency, but it is not she who’s outside here. It is Madame de Montholon, and she insists that she must see you.’
‘Well she cannot. Good God, has she no shame? I am in my bath! She is a married woman! She —’
Cipriani had closed the door behind him, but it opened in a swirl of cooler air. Madame de Montholon swept in like a battleship, pushed the valet to one side, and confronted the naked emperor.
‘I have shame, Monsieur, for it is the shame you planted in my person! You are in your bath, which many times you shared with me. Jean-Baptiste, you are a witness! Indeed, you have been our pander a thousand times!’
Napoleon, who loved warm baths inordinately, moved hair out of his eyes in mild exasperation.
‘Good God, Madame, you might at least have closed the door, I am getting cold. Cipriani, bring her ladyship some brandy in. I see it is that time of day again.’
