Ebb Tide (19 page)

'Why should she come upon her own account?'

'My dear, this is neither the time nor the place ...'

'Then let us discuss it elsewhere.' Elizabeth was suddenly brusque. 'Susan is busy and we should leave her to her task.'

Drinkwater shrugged and let his wife hustle him out of the parlour and into the drawing-room.

'Well, sir,' she said sharply, turning on him. 'You have something to tell me, I think. If she was coming here on her own account, and I cannot think, with the war over, that any other reason would move her, I wish to know it. Besides, you said just now that the last time you saw her was in April last. How many times had you seen her previous to that? Do you expect me to believe all this was related to Lord Dungarth's department? Tell me the truth, Nathaniel. And now, before you have a drink, sir.'

'Sit down, Bess, and rest easy,' Drinkwater smiled and eased himself into a chair, leaning forward to rake the fire and throw some billets of wood on it. 'I met her before our encounter last April in the house of a Jew named Liepmann, near Hamburg, and yes, it was all in some way connected with Lord Dungarth and the business of his Secret Department. After his death it fell to me, as you know, to carry on some of his work. Hortense had moved in high places. It was said she was the mistress of Talleyrand, until the Prince of Benevento ousted her in favour of the Duchess of Courland. Did you see her scar? She was badly burned at the great ball given by the Austrian Ambassador in Paris on the occasion of the marriage of the Archduchess Marie-Louise to Napoleon. There was a fire, d'you see ...'

'The poor woman.'

'Yes, she was much to be pitied.'

'And you pitied her?'

'A little, yes.'

'To the extent of ...' Elizabeth faltered.

'Of what? Come, say it ... You cannot, eh?' Drinkwater was smiling and stood up, crossing the room to pour two glasses of madeira as he spoke. 'Yes, I pitied her but not as you imagine. It would not be true to say I did not consider lying with her, she was extraordinarily beautiful and possessed a very great power over men.' Drinkwater handed Elizabeth a glass. 'I shall tell you frankly that I once embraced her.'

Drinkwater paused, sipping his wine as his wife held hers untouched, regarding him with a curious, suspended look, as if both fearful and eager to hear what he had to say.

'I pitied her certainly, for when I saw her last, she was much reduced in her circumstances. She asked me to arrange a pension, but', he shrugged, 'it was impossible that any minister would listen to me and I did not possess the influence of John Devaux.'

'So you made her a grant yourself of fifty pounds per annum.'

'You know!'

'I knew you were supporting someone. We have the wreckage of others here, Susan and Billie Cue ... I knew from an irregularity in our accounts that you had provided for someone else. It never occurred to me that it was a Frenchwoman.'

Drinkwater sighed. 'I had not wished you to know, lest the explanation be too painful, but I give you my word that nothing beyond that embrace ever passed between us.'

'Your bankers are indiscreet, Nathaniel,' Elizabeth said with a smile. 'But', she went on, her face sobering, 'she cannot surely have been coming here to see you about that, unless she wished for more. D'you think that was it?'

Drinkwater shook his head emphatically. 'No. She would never have asked for more. She wanted the means to live quietly, that is all. No,' Drinkwater frowned, 'it is very odd, but I was thinking of her only last night, wondering how she was surviving under the restored Bourbons...'

'She was your ghost?'

Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes, damned odd. She had, like almost all of her generation, sided with Bonaparte. Obscurity would have been best for her, but that may not have been possible for such a creature under the restored Bourbons. It strikes me therefore that there must have been two possible reasons for her coming here now. One might have been to solicit accommodation hereabouts, to appeal to our charity. The other, to bring me some intelligence.'

'And to sell it, perhaps?'

Drinkwater shrugged. 'Perhaps. Perhaps it was to do both, to sell the latter to gain the former. She would have been safe enough in England, heaven knows ...' He frowned. 'But...'

'But?'

'I don't know, but neither seems quite in keeping with so hazardous an undertaking as making passage in a lugger in such unpropitious circumstances ... And yet...'

'Go on.'

'It is just possible that news of sufficient importance might make the game worth the candle, and it would be entirely in keeping with her character to persuade the commander of an unemployed lugger-privateer to make the attempt.' He stood and refilled his glass.

'I see.' Elizabeth held out her own glass. 'She was an uncommon woman.'

Drinkwater nodded and poured more madeira. 'Not as uncommon as you, my darling, but remarkable, none the less.'

'Then we had better let her turbulent spirit go, and put her earthly remains within the old sanctuary'

Drinkwater bent and kissed his wife's head. 'I ought to see if Susan has found anything.'

But all Susan had found were twenty golden sovereigns sewn into the lining of Hortense's skirt. Drinkwater gave five to Susan, three each to Vane's men who had helped recover the bodies, five to Vane for the elm boards and his own trouble, and the remaining four to the clergyman who buried her under the great flint arch of the ancient priory.

In the days that followed, it occurred to Drinkwater that Hortense might have been motivated by some intrigue involving the delegates at the Congress of Vienna. But the idea of his being able to influence anything of such consequence was ridiculous. He was now no more than an ageing post-captain, superannuated on the half-pay of his rank, one of hundreds of such officers. The notion that he might cut any ice with the government was preposterous!

There was, nevertheless, something that still troubled him, and it seemed to offer the most likely explanation for Hortense taking so great a risk as to try and contact him in such weather. And ten days later it was Elizabeth herself who confirmed his worst fears. Vane had just ridden in from Woodbridge and had seen the mail go through with the news being shouted from the box.

Napoleon had escaped from Elba on 26 February. Hortense's body had been washed ashore on the 21st.

CHAPTER 7
The Letter

April 1815

Drinkwater, in common with every other superannuated officer in the British navy that spring, wrote to the Admiralty offering his services. He ended his letter with a
postscriptum.

If Their Lordships have no immediate Command for me, I would be Honoured to act in a Voluntary Capacity to Facilitate the Embarkation of the Army destined for Flanders from Harwich, if that was the Government's Purpose, or in any Other Capacity having regard for the Urgency of the Occasion. Should such Employment not be Consonant with the Board's wishes, I desire that Their Lordships consider that my Cutter-Yacht, Manned at my Private Expense, be made available for any Service which may Arise out of the Present Emergency. She would Prove suitable for a Dispatch Vessel, could mount Four Swivel Guns and is in Commission, in Perfect Readiness for Sea. I should be Happy to provide a Berth for Lieutenant G.F.C.Frey if Their Lordships so wished and that Officer could be placed upon Full Pay.

Drinkwater had acquired his cutter-yacht from a builder at Woodbridge who had laid her down as a 'speculation'. Drinkwater was certain this so-called speculation might have proved profitable had not the war ended the previous year and with it the immediate conditions favouring prosperous 'free trade'. Though in the event the peace was to prove but a temporary hiatus, the cessation of smuggling meant that the cutter was up for sale, and Captain Drinkwater's arrival in search of a pleasure yacht was regarded by the builders as providential. She was bought in the late summer of 1814 for the sum of seventy guineas, which amounted to the interest paid on some investments Drinkwater had made with the house of Solomon and Dyer. Drinkwater and his friend Lieutenant Frey had commissioned her in a short cruise out to the Sunk alarm vessel that autumn. Thereafter, they had contented themselves with a single pleasant jaunt upon the River Ore, entertaining their wives and making poor Harry Vane hopelessly sick, though they had ventured no further than the extremity of the river's bar.

Throughout the winter, the cutter had lain on a mooring in a creek which ran inland from the mouth of the Ore, a short ride from Gantley Hall. After his experience 'at sea', Vane refused to ship in her a second time, but he used her as a static gun-punt and, with the help of his cocker spaniel, loaded all their tables with succulent waterfowl for Christmas.

Notwithstanding the superstitious notion that to use the name again might bring bad luck, Drinkwater had named the cutter
Kestrel
as a tribute to his old friend James Quilhampton who, like Drinkwater himself years before, had commanded a man-o'-war cutter of the same name. Lieutenant Frey, who had served with both Drinkwater and Quilhampton, had acquiesced, for he had married Quilhampton's widow Catriona. Frey, reduced to genteel penury on a lieutenant's half-pay, now occupied himself as a portraitist and had within a short time earned himself a reputation in the locality, being much in demand and receiving commissions from officers of both the sea and land services, many of whom wanted their exploits at sea or in the peninsula recorded with their likenesses. He therefore executed battle scenes as well as formal portraits. As a consequence of his assiduous industry, he had a busy studio and had rescued both himself and his wife from the threat of poverty.

Despite this activity, Frey was not averse to joining Drinkwater in offering his own services to the Admiralty, and when Drinkwater received a letter
requesting and requiring
him to submit his cutter for survey at Harwich
as soon as may be convenient,
he sent word to Frey. Their Lordships had fallen in with Drinkwater's suggestion that, provided he gave his services as a volunteer, Lieutenant Frey should notionally command the cutter, which would be taken up for hire provided she satisfied the surveyor resident at the naval yard at Harwich.

Neither Catriona nor Elizabeth greeted the news with enthusiasm, but Drinkwater's explanation that he doubted
Kestrel
would do much more than act as tender to the transports slightly mollified his own wife. Catriona, having lost her first husband, was less easily consoled, for she had conceived the notion that she might as certainly lose her second husband as she had the first in a vessel of the same name. Poor Frey, who was devoted to her, was clearly torn between the prospect of playing a part in the new campaign with the inducement of professional preferment or of continuing his work as a provincial artist. However, during March, a string of sittings were cancelled due to the flood of army officers returning to the colours, and this recession in trade and the prospect of full pay overcame Catriona's misgivings with the potent argument, traditionally attractive to a MacEwan, of sound economic sense.

Drinkwater took on two unemployed seamen at his own expense and, having laid in some stores, wood and water, sailed from the Ore to arrive at Harwich on 6 April. He presented himself the following morning to the naval commissioner of transports at the Three Cups, a local public house, where his deposition that the vessel was newly built dispensed with the inconvenience of a survey. Captain Scanderbeg, the commissioner, though senior to Drinkwater, had previously been employed ashore and was too hard-pressed to make an issue of such matters.

'Sir,' he had agreed civilly, 'if you say she is new-built and sound, I shall not detain you. The documents for a demise charter will be prepared by this evening.'

At sunset on 7 April 1815, the yacht
Kestrel
became a hired cutter on government service. However, the matter of an armament proved more difficult until the eager Frey discovered eight swivel guns which had been taken out of a merchantman then undergoing repairs at the naval yard. With a little judicious lubrication of palms and throats, he inveigled four of the small pieces out of the hands of the vessel's master, along with a supply of powder and shot. More powder and some additional bird-shot were a matter of requisition, to be supplied by the artillery officer in the Harwich Redoubt, a place already known to Drinkwater.

'Were we here at any other time, in any other circumstances, Frey, we should have found our path strewn with every obstacle known to the ingenious mind of man, but this', Drinkwater gestured at the bustle of the port as they stood on
Kestrel's
deck, 'almost beggars belief!'

Harwich Harbour was largely a roadstead with no wharfage beyond the slips of the naval yard. The town, dominated by the spire of its church of St Nicholas, the patron of sailors, stood upon a small, low peninsula, surrounded by river, sea and saltmarsh, and commanded the entrance to the haven formed by the confluence of the rivers Stour and Orwell with the guns of its newly built redoubt. A notable battle had been fought in the town's narrow streets in 1803 when the Impress Service decided to round up the greater part of its male population for His Majesty's service. The local inhabitants were, however, versed almost to a man in the ways of the sea, and the over-eager regulating officers soon discovered that they had miscalculated and found themselves imprisoned with their prisoners, while the doughty wives of their victims waved their gutting knives in the streets outside. In fear of their lives, the press-gang eventually released their unwilling recruits and retreated with a few 'volunteers', men whose absence from the town meant they avoided unplanned matrimony or a summoning before the misnamed justices for the illegal acquisition of game. It was after this, known locally as 'the Battle of Harwich', that Scanderbeg had arrived to tighten up the public service.