The Price of Glory (2 page)

“He is not like the priests say he is,” she had assured Sara earnestly. “He is very handsome and wise and rich. And he has chosen me as his bride. He has many brides in Hell but I am the only one that is French. ‘Believe in me,' he said, ‘and you will be saved.'”

But now she did not seem so sure of herself. She was shaking and crying and she ran around the scaffold like a hen in the farmyard but the two valets seized her, one by the arms and one by the feet, and threw her down on her belly along the plank, sliding it forward under the blade and clamping her neck in a vice. And then Sanson pulled upon his rope and it was all over.

Sara, who had shut her eyes, heard a swish as the blade fell and then the thud.

Like the tickle of a feather or a lover's kiss.

The crowd, that had held its breath for this moment, now broke into a new chorus of booing and yelling, calling the guards cowards and traitors, and surging almost to the foot of the scaffold. And the guards fell back and the drummer beat his drum and Hanriot waved his sword and the horse reared and plunged, foaming at the mouth where he had raked it with the bit, showing the whites of its eyes as it smelled the blood.

And then it slipped.

Horse and rider sprawling together on the blood-wet cobbles and the horse up first, panicking, wild with fear, and bolting straight into the line of guards.

Who went down like wooden soldiers in a skittle alley.

And the woman who called herself Princess of Monaco grabbed Sara by the arm and said: “Run!”

They ran straight into the crowd and the crowd opened before them and let them through. There were shouts. Then shots. Sara fell, slipping in her wooden
sabots,
and the woman came back for her. The woman came back for her and reached out a hand and then went down herself and Sara saw the black, smoking hole in her chemise and then the blood. She pulled at her, regardless, trying to haul her up. But there were others pulling at Sara.

“Run!” they said. “They have killed her. Run!”

And Sara saw that it was true, and so she ran. And the crowd closed after her until she was running alone through empty streets; running she knew not where, but with one overriding thought: to put as much distance as possible between herself and the groom who was waiting for her on the Place du Trône. The machine with a lover's kiss.

And she was running still.

T
HE
BAY OF
QUIBERON
, off the south coast of Brittany, the 27
^th
day of June in the Year of Our Lord 1795—or Year 3 of the Revolution, according to the system prevailing in these more enlightened climes: the month of Messidor, the day of Garlic.

A day of fog, in fact, and the frigate
Unicorn
floating upon a flat calm, her people standing listless at the guns which had been run out as a precaution, so close to these hostile, bristling shores of France, though they had to take this in good faith from their captain and he from the sailing master, for the fog hung so heavily about the ship it was difficult to discern the forecastle from the quarterdeck and caused the lookouts in the tops to suppose they were cut off entirely from all human contact and become a species of ghoul that dwelt in clouds. A nasty, brutish, troublesome fog; a Republican fog. A wet blanket draped over history: the glorious day that was to turn back the tide of Revolution.

Mr. Graham, the ship's master and a loyal subject of King George, glared out upon it from under the battered brim of his hat, as if he would seize it by the throat and throttle the life out of it, or blast it into Kingdom Come with a double broadside.

It had crept upon them in the dark and now they were halfway through the morning watch and still it would not lift, and they could be anywhere between Belle Isle and the wicked claw of Quiberon, with its shoal waters and its savage rocks and its treacherous tides.

Not that the master would have admitted publicly to so imprecise a knowledge, for he knew that the captain had his eye upon him, and that it was a cold and speculative eye, for Mr. Graham was new to the ship, having joined her less than a week ago at Portsmouth upon her return from the Caribbean, and he had yet to win the confidence of either captain or crew.

The
Unicorn
was a new ship, launched a little over a year ago: one of a new class of heavy frigates with thirty-two long guns, 18- pounders for the most part, and six 32-pounder carronades. But she had taken some hard knocks on her first commission, harder knocks than many an older ship. She had endured mutiny, hurricane, yellow fever and battle, losing many of her crew and most of her officers in the process, and the replacements who had come aboard at Portsmouth were as yet unproven, and in the case of Mr. Graham not popular. It was not only her captain who looked upon their new master with mistrust, for it had been observed on the lower deck that he had an eye for the young gentlemen and exorcised his demons with the bottle.

Four bells in the morning watch, tolling in the muffled air like a funeral dirge in a country churchyard. And as if in reply, a distant keening away to starboard and then again, closer, off the larboard bow. Some of the newcomers, mostly landsmen taken by the press, looked wildly about them, fearing Sirens or other ill-intentioned spirits of the sea, and the older hands looked grim knowing it to be the shrill alarum of boatswains' pipes from at least two other ships, warning the unwary to keep their distance.

“I think we must shorten sail, Mr. Graham,” said the captain, “to be on the safe side. And let us sound a warning.” Then, raising his voice a little: “Mr. Holroyd there!”

One of the young gentlemen came scurrying aft, eager with nervous importance for he had recently been raised to acting lieutenant, a promotion that more than compensated, to his mind, for the loss of an ear on their last commission. “Sir?”

“Have some of your people line the rail with sweeps, if you will, Mr. Holroyd, and stand by to fend away.”

A rush of feet along the decks and up into the forecastle. The gun crews fidgeting at their guns and the lookouts peering from the tops, questing for some substance to these eerie, spectral wails. The captain rejoined his first lieutenant at the rail.

“I think we have found our squadron,” he mused.

“Unless it be the French.”

“We should smell them, surely.”

“Of what does a Frenchman smell that is distinct from the human?”

“I have not been able to elicit a precise account, but I am told you know it when you smell it.”

There was irony in these remarks, for both men had a large dose of French blood in their veins, sufficient, as they said, to make one whole Frenchman between them. The captain was descended on his mother's side from a distinguished line of Huguenots whilst his companion hailed from the Channel Isles—the illicit progeny of a fisherman and the daughter of a local
seigneur
. In fact, they shared rather more respect for the traditional enemy than was deemed natural or seemly in an officer of the King's Navy, though they tended to keep it to themselves in company.

The two men were roughly of an age, which was somewhat between twenty-five and thirty: one dark, one fair, both tall and personable if a little scarred here and there, as if they had been in the wars—which they had. They wore identical tarpaulins buttoned up to the throat and might have passed for midshipmen, the lowest form of marine life to bear the king's commission, had it not been for a certain authority in their bearing and from the way the true midshipmen that were about the quarterdeck kept their distance as if there was an invisible line drawn upon it—which there was.

The captain, Nathaniel Peake, had attained these lofty heights on the untimely demise of his predecessor, who had suffered the indignity of having his throat cut by former members of the ship's crew off the Floridas. The first lieutenant, Mr. Tully, had been assisted in his rise to greatness by the enemy, who had obligingly knocked his rivals on the head, one by one, in the waters of the Caribbean. Indeed, the two men had shared enough perils and privations to form a kind of friendship, inasmuch as that relationship could prevail between the captain of a King's ship and a mere mortal.

The sharp report of a cannon from somewhere off to starboard. A signal gun, in all probability, but the gun crews tensed and the captain cursed, betraying the unease beneath his banter, not so much at the prospect of an engagement as from the fear of a collision, for the tide was running swiftly enough to promise he would lose more than his dignity and his ship a little paint if such a misfortune were to occur. He had been ordered to join Sir John Borlase Warren off Quiberon “with the utmost haste,” but his great fear was that the
Unicorn
should prove too hasty and announce her arrival by running upon one of Sir John's squadron in the mist, adding to a growing, if in his view unwarranted, reputation for recklessness.

The signal gun again—and as if it had awoken Aeolus from his slumbers, they felt the first real breath of wind that morning: a mere zephyr that barely stirred the sodden canvas, and faded … only to return stronger and more confident, and the sails filled, flattened and filled, and the frigate shied like a colt so that Nathan was moved to utter another curse and instruct the sailing master to back the fore course.

Then, all of a sudden, the fog lifted. And there were the spectres that had haunted them: one, two, three stately ships of war, the nearest about a cable's length to leeward. Nathan could see the white ensign at her stern and the officers about her quarterdeck and he was about to touch his hat to them, with that nonchalance to which he always aspired, for he could see she was on a parallel course and posed no immediate threat, when an urgent commotion forward alerted him to the greater danger: a brute of a two-decker, dead ahead, and so close it seemed impossible they would not run aboard her. He was at the con in an instant with a stream of orders, the helmsmen frantically spinning the wheel. Slowly, slowly the bows came round. Nathan watched in an agony of helpless apprehension as the
Unicorn
's long lance of a bowsprit advanced upon the stern windows with all the jaunty confidence of a charging knight. He braced himself for the splintering, wrenching shock and the retribution that would surely follow … And then they were clear. Clear by a good six feet and drawing away, leaving an enduring memory of the double band of broad white stripes and the pale, astonished faces on the rail above and one, more ruddy and in the uniform of an officer, shaking his fist and bellowing a terrible curse.

“Captain Peake—so here you are at last. I had given you up for lost.”

Sir John Borlase Warren, the expedition commander, was seated in the day cabin of the flagship
Pomone
with a white cloth spread over his shoulders whilst his barber, or one of the many servants available to supply that function, applied an even sprinkling of powder to his ample brown locks. Behind him, through the stern windows, Nathan could see one of the three 74s of the squadron and beyond that, several of the fifty transports that made up the bulk of Sir John's command, the steam rising from their decks as the June sun mopped up what remained of the morning mist.

The commodore was in his early forties: keen-eyed and noblebrowed, possessed of a long straight nose, a firm chin and an excellent tailor. He had two claims to distinction, both of which made him an unusual member of the species of naval officer. He possessed a university degree—an MA from Emmanuel College, Cambridge—and he had entered the service as an able seaman. His admirers proposed that, by sheer energy and application, he had succeeded in combining a life upon the lower deck with the life of a Cambridge scholar; his detractors that he had contrived through the influence of friends in high places to have his name entered on the books of HMS
Marlborough,
then serving as guard ship on the Medway, in order to secure valuable years of sea time without the inconvenience of spending years at sea. He had compounded this crime, in the eyes of these cynics, by entering Parliament, within a year of gaining his degree, as the member for Marlow in Buckinghamshire, a constituency in the gift of his family. And though this imposed even fewer restrictions upon his time than a university education, he had not properly entered the service until the venerable age of twenty-seven. Two years later he had been made post captain of a frigate.

Nathan had reason to acknowledge the value of patronage but he had served as midshipman and lieutenant for ten years before his first command and he was not disposed to admire a man whose ambition had been considerably aided by his political connections.

Just as he resented the implication that he had taken his time getting here.

He felt obliged to point out, with respect, that he had left Portsmouth within a few hours of receiving the order and proceeded as fast as the winds would allow.

“Well, well, you are here now and no harm done,” conceded the commodore, “for we have given the French a bloody nose in your absence and have them bottled up in L'Orient.”

So Nathan had heard from the commander of a sloop he had encountered off Ushant, though he might possibly have disputed the use of the pronoun “we,” had he valued his career less than he did. Warren's convoy had been attacked by the French off the Île de Groix, but the rapid intercession of the Channel Fleet had caused the enemy to run for L'Orient with the loss of three ships of the line.

Nathan said that he was sorry to have missed it. And he meant it. The prize money would have been useful, for his circumstances were unusually straitened.

“Well, it has eased our situation somewhat,” agreed Sir John complacently. He considered his appearance in the mirror that was raised for his inspection before dismissing the menial with a languid hand. “And now all that is left for us to do is to put our eager fellows ashore with as much haste as we can muster.”