Breaking the Line (27 page)

‘And if you overshoot,’ he told the captains, ‘never fear, for your ball will land among the soldiery.’

It was a hot day’s work, this improvised attack, with Nelson mostly in his boat being hauled back and forth, Giddings cursing and blaspheming under his breath as the enemy expended great effort to sink the man in command. At the same time he had to quell a trait in the boat crew from men who did not know of Nelson’s dislike of swearing.

Balls came close, showering them with great founts of seawater, and the sea round them was peppered with case shot if they came too close. In the thwarts, often standing, the men saw a fellow with one bright eye, who wore his hat across his head not fore and aft so that the enemy could observe his rank from the thickness of the braid. He seemed to delight in the danger to a crew, under the command of a
coxswain who reassured them that their admiral had luck in abundance. As the day wore on they came to believe him, because given what had been aimed at them, it was a miracle that nothing had struck a single man.

The water boiled around not only Nelson’s boat, but the bomb ketches too. Occasionally something struck a hull, to send splinters flying across the decks. Aboard
Medusa
Parker could look aloft to see shot holes in the rigging, a spar blown out of its chains, and duck his head as blocks and the like showered the deck. The French, as was their custom, were firing high in the hope of striking the masts and rendering the ship unmanoeuvrable.

For all that Nelson was busy giving orders and altering targets, he was also storing in his mind the dispositions of the various batteries and other defences. This was an
ad
hoc
attack, but it would precede a more planned one, because Nelson knew that the best way to prevent an invasion was to engage in endless disruption. The aim of this was twofold: to ensure no peace for a potential invading army, and to remind them that when they went on to the water, a powerful force was waiting to sink them.

The tally for the day was excellent. Half a dozen flat-bottomed boats sunk and another six severely damaged, an armed brig sent to the bottom, and another gunboat driven ashore, while the coastal batteries had much of their defensive revettes driven in. The enemy had been told that Nelson was on station, and that their serenity was no longer guaranteed. He broke off the attack in early evening and with a fair wind set off for the Downs, covering the thirty miles before dark.

Once back in his room at the Three Kings, with the surf gently breaking on the shingle outside his window, he could write to all and sundry, officials, superiors, friends and his lover, that he had done enough damage at Boulogne, especially to French morale, to lessen the chance of any invasion from there.

Emma was house hunting for a suitable gentleman’s residence, not in London but close enough to make a daily journey possible. There was no shortage of possibilities, the continuing war, and the iniquitous new-fangled income tax to pay for it, had had a deleterious effect on prosperity. The trouble was furniture. She and Sir William had left hers to the mob in Naples, while Nelson had only enough to furnish the cabin of a flagship, and that was of little use in a domestic setting. Curtains and carpets were easy, as these could be purchased ready made or knocked up in days. But beds took months to manufacture,
tables and chairs a year and anything heavier, like settles and wardrobes, up to half as much again.

London was surrounded by villages, and Emma looked at places in Harrow, Turnham Green, Richmond and Wimbledon. But anyone selling was moving to another house and taking their furniture with them, so it was on a house in Merton that she settled. The surveyor employed to look it over said it was the worst example of a supposed gentleman’s residence that he had ever viewed.

He could not see what Emma could. It was not just that Merton was furnished, she liked it. All the house lacked was access to light in its interior spaces. The surveyor saw a tree-choked channel in the stream called the Wandle, Emma saw it cleared, flowing and stocked with fish. When the man saw rooms poorly decorated and dingy interior spaces, Emma saw that glass doors would light them, that a lawn full of weeds could be made like a carpet, an overgrown garden cleared and planted to taste. In her mind she saw a fine, arched bridge over that stream, though the statuary in the garden, an attempt at the classical that would offend a connoisseur like Sir William, would have to go.

She wrote to Nelson to tell him she loved it, and asked him to come and give his opinion. He replied that if she loved it, he would love it too, and as long as it was a suitable place for his family and Horatia to visit then he was content. Though he did add two asides, one humorous, the other less so. He, who was charged with defending Britain, at present owned no house in the country. And that to buy one, the nation’s most successful sea officer would have to borrow two-thirds of the nine thousand-pound asking price.

But that money was forthcoming, from Davidson amongst others, and the process of purchase was put in train.

Nelson had two concerns, the first to plan his attack on Boulogne, the second to prepare for the visit Sir William and Emma had proposed to make when Sir William returned from his estates in Pembrokeshire. This involved Edward Parker in the discreet renting of a small cottage in the town, a place where Nelson and Emma could be alone, since the Three Kings was too busy a hostelry for anything of that nature to take place under its roof.

Nelson was obliged to spend a great deal of time at sea, looking at defences that ran the whole length of the coastline from beyond Hastings to the ports north of the Thames estuary. It was depressing to find that in his volunteer force, the Sea Fencibles, which numbered some twenty-six thousand, less than four hundred felt
able to set foot in a man o’ war. These men of Kent and Essex were prepared to defend their homes, but they could not see, as he did, that the best way to do that was to take ship and destroy the enemy on his own soil.

At least he had reasonable intelligence from the Deal smugglers, and in one of their number, Yawkins, nicknamed Yellow Jack, he found a pilot of rare skill. He had rowed and sailed into every inlet and harbour on the opposite coast and carried in his head a chart of all his junkets. A regular visitor at the Three Kings, he looked a real ruffian. He had a jutting forehead with thick grey eyebrows, bright blue, unblinking eyes, a hooked and battered nose, yet a ready toothless smile that did much to remove the sense of menace he engendered.

He was a Deal boatman to his fingertips, gnarled affairs that lay at the extremities of a huge pair of hands. His taproom company was mainly boys and Yawkins made no secret of where his preferences lay, but that was not an exception in any seaport, and after Giddings had squared up to him so that he would know the Navy was here, he was introduced to Nelson. The Admiral cared only for competence, and finding it, the two got on like a house on fire.

With Yawkins aboard Nelson had not only an exceptional pilot but a man who showed evidence of a brain and some tactical skill, able to advance a notion of what would happen if a course of action was decided on. Nelson wished that one or two of his captains had that capacity, as they were wont to seek glory or profit and have him up half the night on wild-goose chases after French ships that never materialised.

Meanwhile, he was asked his views on the possibility that the army might land a force at Flushing to destroy the part of the invasion flotilla based there. He passed on to the Admiralty the local opinion of such a venture – which was in fact that of Yawkins – who reckoned it was an operation fraught with peril.

One-armed, Nelson could not take part in an attack with boats – he would be a liability to the crew rather than an asset, and they would worry for him – so he stayed aboard the
Medusa
and sent off his four little squadrons to do the work without him.

His plan, outlined to his officers, sounded simple but was intricate: to attack the harbour, destroy the flat-bottomed vessels and sink, burn or bring out the gunboats, thus demolishing any hope that troops could either be embarked there or ever feel safe. To do this they carried materials to set fire to ships, picks and axes to knock out
their keel timbers, as well as grappling irons to attach to those they could bring out. In addition, what shore defences had been erected should, if the opportunity arose, be broken down and the guns of the artillery spiked. The key to success was timing, and that meant that all four squadrons, fifty-seven boats in all, must attack simultaneously.

‘Do not, gentlemen, be content with a single prize. There must be no cessation until the task is complete.’

Standing on deck he watched as the signal lanterns were lowered over the offshore side of
Medusa
to set his squadrons in motion. With muffled oars they rowed under his stern for a slow pull of what would be three hours to get them into position, the point at which his bomb ketches would open fire, lobbing mortar shells into the line of defence.

The first orange flashes erupted at the appointed hour, and Nelson stood on the quarterdeck in the dark, restless and nervous because that was all he could see, even when a raft of blue lights sailed into the air to illuminate what was happening. The pop of muskets was barely audible, and if men were engaged, yelling as they attacked, screaming if they were wounded or dying, he was too far off to hear or see.

He was left imagining what would be happening if things went well: terrified French seamen abandoning their boats and rushing ashore, leaving his men in peace to carry out their tasks. But what if it all went badly? What would the butcher’s bill be for that? It was scant comfort to Nelson that he had taken as much care over this assault as he had at Copenhagen; at least there he had seen the effect of his instructions and altered his orders to cover eventualities.

On the return of the first boat he knew his attack had failed: half the crew were wounded and not one of them had set foot on an enemy plank. His four boat squadrons had arrived piecemeal, each attacking at a different time so that the enemy always had the numerical advantage. The French had set iron-tipped spikes pointing out to sea on the line of gunboats, with nettings hung in between which made getting close difficult and cutting through to the harbour impossible. Nor had the defenders panicked, as Nelson had hoped, when the mortars fell on them; they had stood fast and poured a withering fire into the attackers’ boats.

Whoever was in command of the French had put soldiers on his gunboat decks, and they, with their disciplined rate of fire, had exacted a terrible price from Nelson’s men. Parker, who had got there first with a crew of Medusas, had borne the very brunt of
resistance: his thigh had been shattered by a ball, the whole boat crew only saved when they were taken in tow by another officer. Those coming behind Parker ran into an enemy wide awake and waiting, while one division of boats had got so lost that they never came into action at all.

The fire they faced as they tried to set light to the enemy gunboats was not just from the decks: enfilading fire came from the shore, from a French commanding officer who cared not if his musket balls hit his own men, and in the overhead light from the flares these shore-based soldiers picked off anyone with the temerity to stand up and try to carry out their duty.

Langford was badly wounded, as well as Parker. But forty-four were dead and another hundred and twenty-six wounded. Back in Deal Nelson set up Parker and Langford in the front parlour of the house he had rented to be with Emma. There they lay, with a doctor in attendance, while Nelson went off to see to the other wounded men who had been taken to the hospital. Then he went to his room to write a grim despatch to St Vincent.

22

Fretting over his losses, Nelson was even more concerned about the state of Merry Ed Parker. Langford was on the mend but Parker was sinking. His shattered leg would not mend and there was talk of an amputation. Nelson had spent hours between their beds, writing letters, hatching schemes to confound the French, and asking that he be relieved of what was not really a vice-admiral’s command before the equinox came, and with it the cold north winds and heaving seas of the seasonal gales.

Nor could he see that an invasion was now possible. The period that might have seen it launched was fast passing, and the weather in the Channel, surely the most notorious sea in the world for a sudden, unheralded gale of wind, was bound to deteriorate as August passed into September. Bonaparte could not simply wake up one morning and launch his boats: it was far too large an enterprise – a week at least of preparation would be necessary to get everyone and everything in place for the final boarding.

He thought it a feint to apply pressure for peace, but he still had to act as if it was not, and it was unfortunate that the day Sir William and Emma chose to arrive he was off to Flushing. Here one of his officers, Captain Owen of HMS
Nemesis,
claimed a fleet of ships lay just waiting to be cut out. He took Yawkins as his pilot, gathered a squadron from Margate and set out for the Netherlands coast only to find that the supposed fleet consisted of a Dutch ship of the line, a couple of frigates and a smattering of gun brigs. They were well protected by sandbanks and could easily avoid action by retiring further upriver. He had the officer responsible in his cabin forthwith.

‘Captain Owen.’

‘Sir?’

‘I require an explanation. I think you spoke of a large fleet of ships.’

‘I saw more than appear to be here now, sir.’

Looking at him, Nelson reckoned he could see what Owen had espied, a chance for some glory. Small, rotund and with a pudding-like face and a waddle for a walk, he was not a very prepossessing specimen. He looked like a man unlikely to set the world on fire, one to indulge in a bit of wishful thinking. He was also probably of the type to think that Nelson would attack anything, regardless of the obstacles, and that to be there when he did would garner him some credit. Instead he received a rebuke.

‘Thirty sail of ships, Captain Owen; pilots, Mr Yawkins among them, and he is not a man who likes to be trifled with. Bomb ketches and artillery officers, enough to confound an enemy fleet, which would be fine if we had found one.’

‘Sir I …’

‘Please do not tell me what was here, Captain Owen, and please in future investigate thoroughly what you see. Do not take me on futile chases to find vessels that can retire up river at will. I should reprimand you in writing, but that would require a copy to the Admiralty. So I shall confine myself to a verbal warning, which will give you the chance to redeem yourself in my eyes. Now, be so good as to return to your ship.’

He was back in Deal within a day, to check that all was in order; that the rooms were suitable, that the bathing machine was in place, and that the man he had engaged to take Sir William sea fishing had made himself known. Langford – sitting with his leg up in the Three Kings parlour – informed him that Sir William was indeed afloat, and that Emma was with Captain Parker.

He entered the small pine-panelled room to find Emma holding one of Parker’s hands, reading to him. She stopped as he slipped through the door. Nelson was taken aback at her beauty, and her smile seemed to wrap itself around him, spreading its warmth through his body. It was with some difficulty that he recalled the other reason for his visit.

Merry Ed lay back with his eyes closed, his face white, hair matted and unkempt, a shadow of his former self. The look in Nelson’s eye, as he transferred from her to Parker, was familiar to Emma, though he bestowed it on few people.

It was one of his endearing traits, his concern for certain people, usually young men who had served with him as midshipmen then
risen in the service. He cared not only about their health, but how they behaved and presented themselves and he was not to be gainsaid by difficulties. Hardy was a case in point, a ship’s captain who should long ago have severed the umbilical cord that bound him to Nelson. Yet the Ghost hung on, partly, Emma suspected, from the fear of being without a guiding hand, but also because he had a regard for his admiral that transcended friendship. Parker was the same only more open in his affection. He adored his chief and made not the slightest effort to disguise it. Other officers shook their heads at what looked like grovelling, wondering why Nelson did not recoil from his homage.

‘Milord,’ croaked Parker, seeking to raise himself from his bed.

Nelson bade him lie still, seeing in the young man’s eye not adoration, but his continuing debilitating fever. Knowing Emma to be ten times better than him with the sick, he listened as, book put aside, she recalled happier times, like the day so recently when they had visited the house of Nelson’s late brother Maurice. They had played games in the garden, and amused the ‘widow’ with stories and listened to the tales of the old black butler that Maurice had taken in before he died, still there thanks to Nelson’s support.

Parker had played the fool to perfection: he was good clown Merry Ed, jester at the Nelson court, always decent enough to be abashed at his inability to pay his way, always a willing messenger or organiser. Emma prattled happily until Parker slipped into sleep, then held out her hand to Nelson, who kissed it, though not taking his eyes off the invalid.

‘I took this house for us, Emma, as a place we could be without being talked about.’ He squeezed the hand he had kissed. ‘You can have no notion of how I have missed you.’

If only Nelson knew how much they were talked about, but Emma was not going to tell him that. And she knew how much he missed her, since every note he sent told her so. She put her finger to her lips and led him out into the hallway and up the narrow stairs, to the only furnished bedroom.

Minutes later, below that room, Merry Ed Parker opened his eyes. It was an old dwelling, built in the time of Queen Anne, with creaking floorboards and oak beams that had seen much service. Those boards groaned now, gently but with increase, and Edward Parker managed, even through his pain, a knowing grin.

As soon as Emma described Merton in detail, Nelson named it ‘The Farm’. For years he had wanted a country retreat that would be self-sufficient
in everything, and as he and Emma lay side by side he talked of growing vegetables, flowers, fruit and meat for the board, and though Merton was nothing like that he insisted to Emma that he had plans to make it so. Laughing, they argued about that, since she had designs to make it a complete, if small, palazzo.

‘You will not plough up my lawns for your turnips, Nelson, nor will I suffer to be woken by the crowing of the cock.’

What made Emma laugh then was not the
double entendre,
but the way Nelson blushed at the thought he had obviously formed but was too shy to voice. Emma had that wonderful gift of seeing two meanings in almost everything she said. Nelson was quick enough to cotton on, but too restrained by his upbringing to let on that he had. Quickly, he moved on to safer ground, by asking about Horatia, once more in the care of Mrs Gibson.

Emma knew the feeling she had when talking about her daughter was not envy, because she had suffered from that and knew how to recognise it, but the enthusiasm Nelson evinced when he talked of his daughter was so fulsome and open she felt disquieted, removed, as she was, from the centre of his thoughts.

Also troubling was that she spent a limited amount of time with Horatia, because propriety and social engagements did not allow for it. When she was quizzed about the child’s behaviour it was with some difficulty that she answered, and was aware of borrowing incidents from her past that related to her elder daughter, Little Emma, now an adult nearing twenty, and not little Horatia.

There had been that day in Piccadilly when Nelson had called to find Little Emma there. She had been introduced as Emma Connors, and her mother had resisted the temptation to be open about her true birth. As far as Nelson knew, the girl was some kind of relative from Cheshire.

These thoughts filtered to Emma through Nelson’s sermon on how his daughter should be raised; education both religious and mathematical, and she must be taught languages from an early age so she did not grow up as deficient as her father. How to walk, how to talk – on and on until Emma decided he sounded like his father.

Sir William, back from his fishing with a basket of mackerel, had changed into dry clothes. He was informed by Emma’s Nubian maid, Fatima, that her mistress had gone to see Parker, and since he liked the young man, he decided to call himself on the invalid. It was Langford, still with his foot up in the parlour, who saved what might have been blushes by telling him that Nelson had gone there before
him. Sir William was obliged to root out Tom Allen, to go to the house and inform all there of his intention to call.

By the time he arrived Emma and Nelson were back at Parker’s bedside, and Emma was again reading to him. But a canny soul like Sir William was a master of atmosphere, and had no trouble in deducing what had been going on. He could not resist a little gibe.

‘Ah, my dear Emma, I swear that to see you baring your soul beside an invalid is to see you at your very best.’

Emma glared at him, while one-armed Horatio Nelson went bright red.

It remained their trysting place, with Merry Ed pleased at the time both Emma and his hero spent with him. He wanted more than anything for Nelson to be happy, and when an amputation was finally decided upon declared that he would lose ten limbs in the service of his admiral. Emma and Sir William, who had intended to stay two weeks, put off their departure for a few days. Nelson had written to Parker’s family and greeted a father, penniless, he said, from having been robbed of his wallet on the way through London.

The operation, performed by Dr Baird, was a horrid occasion, made worse by the flickering candles that surrounded the operating table. Nelson had witnessed amputations many times but it was not something he had ever got used to. Dosed with both laudanum and rum, young Parker, strapped to the table, was in the rolling-eyed state of the drunk, babbling away and laughing at his own incomprehensible sallies. His eyes continued to dance merrily as Giddings placed the leather strap between Parker’s teeth. At the same time Baird was busy with the ligature and wooden spike that, wound tight, would act as a tourniquet.

Baird sliced the flesh below where he would cut the bone, so that it could be folded over the stump and stitched. Watching, Nelson recalled his own amputation; the pain and the despair of knowing he would never be whole again. The knife went in deep further up, to dissect clean flesh above the corruption in the lower thigh. Pain seared through Parker’s drunken brain and the smile changed to a rictus, the back arched, and it took Giddings and two of the brawniest members of Nelson’s barge crew to keep the patient on the blood-drenched table.

Speed was all in these situations, so Baird worked quickly, ignoring Parker’s stifled grunts and the mucus that shot out from his nose to mingle with the saliva at his mouth. The flesh surrendered to the blade in half a minute, and swiftly Baird took his saw from his
assistant. If the pain of cut flesh was severe, that of the sinews of a bone was worse; the grinding sound of the saw sent a feeling of horror through Nelson. Parker was swearing to God and his mother through the muffling round his mouth as Baird, through the thighbone, tossed the leg aside and went to work with clean cloths to stem the blood enough for him to begin the work of repair.

One strip of hanging skin was folded under another, a third put in place before the suture, string attached, was sewn into the wound. When that string was pulled and caused no pain, when it came out easily and without a following of blood or pus, the doctor would know that the wound had healed.

It was over. Parker had passed out, and the barge crew, streaming with sweat, lifted the still comatose Parker back onto the bed.

At first Merry Ed seemed to rally, to recover some of his gaiety. But it didn’t last and with the smell of corruption wafting up from the stump he began once more to sink. The Hamiltons were gone when he died, with Nelson sitting by the bed, praying with his equally distraught father.

He had never told Edward Parker that he saw him as a son. Happy as he was with his daughter, his desire for a male heir was strong, and Josiah Nisbet had been such a disappointment. He felt now as he imagined his own father had felt as his offspring had expired. The first Edmund and Horatio, gone before he was born, Maurice, his sister Anne, a second Edmund, Suckling, and his younger sibling George, who had lasted less than a year, dying before Nelson went off to school.

Edward Parker was laid to rest in the cemetery of St George’s Church, so close to the sea that the faint sound of the surf on the shingle could just be heard through the narrow alleyways that led to Deal beach. And for what? The envoys had already crossed the Channel to discuss peace, and Nelson had been informed in a less than polite and public letter from Evan Nepean that any offensive action he contemplated must be put on hold. No French ship, no French port was to be touched.