The Solitary Envoy (14 page)

The sun’s warmth was stronger now that they had left behind the ocean’s briskness. Erica raised her face to the light, shut her eyes, and wished she believed in God enough to ask for help.

She had held to the promise she had made her mother. Every morning she read a few lines of Scripture, then opened the prayer missal and silently said the day’s entreaty. But they were little more than words, read because she had said she would. In fact, the very act seemed to drive her even farther away from whatever shred of belief she might still hold. Questions would arise, things she could not answer. How could a benevolent God have permitted her father to die in such a brutal fashion? Where were the mercy and the reasons for thanksgiving in such a senseless act? She would then close the missal and go about her day, untouched by anything save regret. So many things she had once held dear had been stripped away. Childlike faith in an unseen Protector was merely one more entry in that sad ledger of loss. Yet she found herself unable to keep the words from rising within her.
Oh, God, if you do indeed exist, help me now
.

Erica opened her eyes to an unchanged vista. She felt vaguely ashamed, as though she had slighted her principles by begging for help in this manner. She straightened her shoulders and peered into the future. If only she did not feel so very alone.

All the pictures and all the books in all the world could not have prepared Erica for London.

Where the estuary narrowed and became a true river, a flotilla of small boats waited. Clusters of men stood by their oars and watched them pass with neither a word nor a gesture. Among the passengers still on board were two men who had made this journey before. They explained how when winds or tides made travel impossible under sail, these oarsmen would row the vessels upriver for a price.

The pastures and bleating animals and carefully tended farms of Essex had gradually given way to thicker clusters of buildings. Up ahead the blue sky was blanched by a hovering fog, one so thick that not even the southern wind could push it away. The buildings grew denser and larger. Canals powering great wooden wheels pulled away from the river itself. Smokestacks rose higher than any structure she had ever seen and belched great clouds into the air.

Then they rounded a bend and Erica stared open-mouthed at a scene unlike anything she could have imagined. A manor stood proudly upon the hill, its granite facade shining brightly in contrast to the red-brick houses that clambered up the slopes below. The river broadened and formed a semicircle about the hill’s base. Huddled there were perhaps two dozen ships, all arrayed in perfect symmetry. A whistle piped upon one deck, the sound drifting in the wind. Erica mused, “I never thought London would be this grand.”

One of the more experienced travelers guffawed. “This is naught but the village called Greenwich, lass.”

The village, as he called it, contained more people than Georgetown and Washington and Alexandria combined. Of that she was certain. “But surely that is a palace?”

He must have noticed her wonder, for he gentled his tone. “What you see upon yon hillock is the Naval Observatory. They study odd things there—maps and stars and time and such.”

She wanted to sound more sophisticated, but her desire to understand what she observed was not to be denied. “And the ships resting at anchor?”

“The Greenwich flotilla. There to protect the approach to London. Part of Nelson’s fleet. What Napoleon left afloat, that is.”

The other passengers became caught up in a discussion of Napoleon and the recently concluded wars. Every meal on board their ship since leaving Portsmouth had triggered further discussion of these events. Every step of the conflicts had been fought anew. Erica stepped away from the others. She would be pleased never to hear of war and battle again.

She studied the village and the convoy and struggled to accept what this meant. She counted twenty-seven ships of the line. Surely these could not be just “part” of anyone’s navy. She knew for a fact that the entire American fleet consisted of thirty-three ships. This casual display of gathered naval might left her weak.

“You all right there, lass?”

“Fine, thank you, sir.”

“You’ve gone all pale.”

“I can scarcely believe the voyage is almost at an end.”

It was just one bank, not the whole British Empire, that Erica had to face, yet she was struck anew with the realization that she was one lone woman from a backwater capital, without power or connections. How could she have ever imagined herself capable of taking on any such adversary and winning?

Gareth Powers, former major with the British fusiliers, found himself unable to remain still. He craned his neck out the carriage window and called up instructions. When the jostling throng halted his carriage’s progress yet again, he sprang out and climbed nimbly up to the driver’s bench, where he demanded, “Can’t we make swifter progress?”

“We might.” Daniel had remained his closest ally from the military days. “If a certain major would see fit to leave me to the task at hand.”

“No chance of that.” Gareth had asked Daniel countless times to stop referring to him as the officer he no longer was, but at this moment he chose to ignore the reference. He studied the crowd milling about on all sides. “I smell danger.”

“Rumors are all of strife and woe,” Daniel agreed. He was a huge man and held the long carriage whip as he would a child’s toy. “Pity your aunt’s vessel is docking on such a day as this.”

“Can’t be helped.” Gareth indicated the carefully prepared bales stacked upon the luggage bay. “Besides which, these really must get off with the next boat for France.”

Gareth had always seen himself remaining with the fusiliers his entire life. His father had been a colonel with the House Guards, his grandfather had served two kings, his great-grandfather had been granted a dukedom for his supremacy in combat. And so it should have been with him. Even now, when he felt himself blessed in almost every way, he missed his regiment and his friends and the ordered way of military life.

He had returned from the American conflict certain they had made a grave error in going there at all. Thankfully their foray onto American soil had been very swift. His regiment had been called home after only a few short weeks because Napoleon was a far greater threat. Gareth had fought the French from Oporto to Bayonne, been decorated nine different times, and was promised a colonelcy. His career seemed ready to outshine even the first duke’s. Then disaster had struck, and in the most unexpected of forms.

Gareth didn’t know what he had expected after the British forces were disbanded. A marching band would have been nice, a bit of bunting for the lads who had survived, a warm welcome from a grateful king. Instead, his men had been gathered upon a dusty plain outside Bordeaux. There the regimental colors had been furled and the company dismissed. No word of how they were to return home. No reward for having saved the British empire. Not even a receipt of back pay. His men made it home only because Gareth hired a vessel with his own purse. He had lost three wounded during the journey, due not so much to illness as to a loss of spirit, defeated by their own king.

They had returned home to find the nation in delirious joy, yet beneath the elation was misery of a shocking scale. Many disbanded soldiers had to beg their way back to homes and families. Gareth used his family carriage to transport the wounded. Upon the journey he saw just how his beloved homeland suffered. The land enclosures, the destitute, the mill hands, the miners, the suffering of children. He returned to London shaken to his core, only to learn that here as well the news was bleak. The king was ill, and in his place the land was ruled by the prince regent and his cronies. The regent was a wastrel who cared only for gambling and carousing. It was he who had caused the Treasury to treat Gareth’s men so badly.

Finally Gareth Powers had a focus for his ire.

He resigned his commission in disgust and traded his sword for a pen. The established press, or broadsheets as they were known, were all controlled by allies of the Crown. So Gareth had written his regiment’s tale and gone to a private printer.

He paid for the pamphlets himself, then used the printer’s runners to sell them at a halfpenny apiece.

In two weeks he had sold more than a hundred thousand copies—nearly the number of copies sold of the nation’s second most popular newspaper. He wrote a second pamphlet. And a third. By the time he penned the fourth, his pamphlets required the printer’s entire output to run right around the clock. He bought out the old man and the shops to either side, then sent word to his old military mates that work was available if they were willing. The sight of his old friends, and the state into which most had fallen, caused Gareth to weep.

The Powers Press became a voice recognized even by the Crown and the ruling Tories. Yet Gareth’s rage would carry him only so far. He had seen ahead and envisioned where he was going, gradually falling into bitterness and a cynicism that no triumph or achievement could overcome. He was terrified by his own helplessness, which seemed only to grow with his rising popularity.

At about that time a friend took him to church. Gareth had gone mostly because the church’s name appealed to him; they were called Dissenters, and no label had ever suited him so much. What he had found inside those simple unpainted doors of the church changed his life forever.

Now Gareth stared down at the swirling mass of humanity surrounding their carriage. “Remind me to ask my aunt not to make her next return from the Continent upon such an inauspicious day.”

Daniel studied the pair of speakers haranguing the crowd from a makeshift stand. “I smell trouble on the wind, I do.”

“Then we must not take a moment longer than necessary before starting our return. Soon as we arrive at dockside, you see to the offloading of these pamphlets. I will track down my aunt and cousin.” Gareth could scarcely make himself heard over the roaring crowd. “Can’t you draw a bit more speed from these nags?”

“It’s not the horses that are slowing our pace, sir.” Even so, Daniel cracked the whip high over the steeds’ heads. “Make way, there!”

The London docks formed the largest city Erica had ever seen. But it was not a city at all, simply a sprawling mass of people and ships and rowboats and wharves and warehouses. On and on the city sprawled, spreading across both sides of the river and completely overwhelming an island in the middle of the Thames. The Isle of Dogs, she heard it called, a wretched name for a miserable looking place. Two rowboats were now lashed to her ship’s bowsprit, and the rowers sang a horrid ditty as they hauled upon the oars. The ship berthed alongside a broad cobblestone lane. Along the shoreline people massed and struggled and shoved like human bees flooding about a great dirty hive. The other vessels were too many to count, far more than at Portsmouth, but of every conceivable size and shape. The noise and the stench were overpowering. Many of the other ladies held perfumed handkerchiefs to their faces. Erica’s eyes watered from an acrid smoke that drifted about in the still air. But she would not meet this new world with her face half hidden.