The Price of Glory (4 page)

Tully's silence was eloquent.

“You think I would not do it?” Nathan demanded, considerably vexed. “The whole strategy is flawed, Martin. We are landing in the wrong part of France with soldiers I would not trust to tie their own bootstraps, and in the hope of support from men who are fighting their own war fifty miles from here and who are, according to the information
I
have received, already beaten.”

“You mean the Chouans?”

“That is exactly who I mean.”

“Why are they called that?”

“Ah, that is another thing. Mr. Finch would have us believe it derives from their practice of hooting like an owl as their signal for an attack. He is wrong. It comes from their leader in the early days of the rebellion, Jean Cottereau, who was known as Jean Chouan, after the local name for a screech owl, because he would often mimic its cry as it swoops upon its prey.”

“Why ?” enquired Tully with a frown.

“Why ?” Nathan gave it some thought. “Well, perhaps it amused him. I, as a child, used to make the sound of a cockerel when I was particularly pleased with myself. “

Tully regarded him with interest. “Really ?”

“Usually when I had put one over those who considered themselves in authority over me. I was much inclined to rebellion in my youth.”

“But you have stopped now? Making the sound of a cockerel that is.”

“Yes. I sometimes feel the inclination but I suppress it, in the interests of discipline.” Tully conceded the wisdom of this decision. “And of course, I am not so often pleased with myself. “ They brooded upon this in silence for a moment.

“Quite possibly he used it as a rallying cry,” Nathan reflected. “But I cannot believe it was in general use as a signal for a night attack—for once the story became widely known it would serve to warn the defenders, would it not, that they were about to come under attack.”

“This is true.” Tully acknowledged. “But perhaps that is why they were defeated.”

Nathan frowned. “My point is that Mr. Finch—like other political advisers of our acquaintance—does not know his arse from his elbow. Unless he deliberately seeks to misinform us as to the true situation.”

“Why should he wish to do that?”

Nathan shrugged. “Possibly because he is long accustomed to telling his masters what it is they wish to hear, not what they should rightly know.”

“And what is the true situation—as you have heard it described? Can we expect any support from the Chouans, or none at all?”

“Well, they are still active in the Vendée,” Nathan allowed. “But in small groups, I am told, fighting in the forests, like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The days when they could put a large army into the field are long gone. Jean Chouan was killed at Nantes in '92 and since then they have suffered a series of defeats. The government has sent death squads from village to village burning, raping, killing. The whole land has been laid waste from the Loire to the Charente.”

Tully gave him an odd look. “You appear to have made this your particular study,” he remarked lightly, but in a way that invited further confidence.

“I knew someone in Paris who fled to join them,” Nathan admitted cautiously.

He had never told Tully about Sara. It was too painful, too secret. Even now, a year later, there were some things he could barely bring himself to contemplate.

He had met her on his first visit to Paris, on a confidential mission for William Pitt. Sara de la Tour d'Auvergne, Countess of Turenne. Not that she called herself that, for it was the time of the Terror when even a minor title secured its holder the privilege of death by guillotine, and Sara had married into one of the noblest families in France. Her husband, a much older man, had died in exile with the French Royalists in Koblenz, and Sara lived quietly in Paris, with her young son, Alex. She used her own family name of Seton, which was sufficiently obscure to evade the attentions of the authorities or the local informers, though her father had been a noble of the sword, a Scottish soldier in the service of the King of France.

Sara. Nathan lapsed into an unhappy silence, lost in his memories, while Tully stood uneasily beside him. She was the only woman he had ever truly loved. He would have married her if he could. He had wanted to take her back with him to England. Even at the last, when they were both in prison, he had plotted and contrived to that end. Until her own brutal ending on the guillotine.

So he had taken her young son and gone to England without her.

In time the pain had lost its edge, replaced by a melancholy sadness that he knew he would carry with him to the grave. But then he had received the letter, telling him that Sara was still alive and had fled to the Vendée to seek refuge among the Chouans.

Nathan did not know if he could believe it—and there had been no way of checking. Until now.

“And this friend of yours, is she with them still?” enquired Tully, who could be disturbingly perceptive at times, for Nathan had noted his use of gender.

“I have no way of knowing,” he confessed. “The situation there has been worse than in Paris at the time of the Terror. Whole communities have been massacred, shot in the churches while at prayer. Sometimes, to save on ammunition they drive the people on to barges, shoot holes in the bottom and push them out into a river to sink. Or bind them in couples, a man and a woman, and throw them from a bridge—and call it a Republican wedding.”

He caught Tully's eye and detected a hint of disbelief.

“Well, that is what I heard,” he added defensively. Then, after a moment: “It may well be a biased view for my chief informant was a friend of my mother's.” Tully nodded understandingly. Many of Nathan's more surprising political insights were derived from friends of his mother, who kept a famous salon in London, though now in reduced circumstances. “He was a member of the Girondin party, forced to flee France during the Terror, and one would not expect him to speak favourably of those who have, in his opinion, betrayed the Revolution. However, we both know that when the Jacobins were in power there were terrible atrocities committed against those who did not share their own narrow view of progress. Unhappily, their excesses appear to have caused a general revulsion against any progressive movement, anywhere in the world.”

Tully offered no opinion on the matter. Politics, religion, and to some extent sex, were not proper subjects for discussion in the King's Service, even in the dubious privacy of the captain's cabin where the marine sentry at the door or an idle midshipman leaning over the stern rail might easily pick up a whisper of dissent. Contrary to the view propagated by the government and their hacks in the journals, not all officers in the King's Service were entirely devoted to the King's interest, or that of his Tory ministers. Many were Whigs, vaguely aligned to principles of liberty, reform and freedom of expression. A lesser number even believed in them. And although Nathan had not discussed it, other than in a passing aside, he suspected his friend and fellow officer shared opinions that would be considered dangerously radical by their superiors, had they known of them.

This was partly attributable to temperament; partly to their un-orthodox backgrounds. Though Tully had been raised as a gentleman in his grandfather's house on Guernsey, he retained many of the degenerate instincts of his fisherman father who, like every second man on Guernsey, supplemented his meagre income from fishing by running sought-after goods from France to England without troubling to cut the government in for a share of the profit. At the first opportunity Tully had run away to sea and allied himself to these free traders, as they called themselves, though the government, less tolerantly, called them smugglers and hanged them whenever they could, or packed them off to Botany Bay—or, in extreme circumstances, obliged them to join the Navy. This latter fate had befallen Tully and though he had profited by the move, he still favoured the independent spirit and opinions of the free traders, a notoriously dissident profession.

Nathan was infected by an even more deplorable heritage. His father was a good English Tory but his mother's family were French Huguenots—Calvinist dissenters—whose independent views had led to their persecution and exile to New York where, in the course of time, they had joined the rebellion against King George. While, as an Englishman, Nathan regretted the loss of the American colonies, he could not bring himself to deplore the birth of the United States and the values enshrined in their Constitution. Nor, indeed, was he opposed to the ideas advanced by the Revolution in France.

All of this combined to make him wonder, at times, quite what he was fighting for. Promotion and plunder were considerations, of course, and the prospect of Glory. As a schoolboy Nathan had been much exposed to the exploits of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, of Admirals Blake and Anson and Hawke. He craved the victor's laurels as much as any true Englishman, even one of his own dubious inheritance. His present difficulty was in reconciling his concept of Glory with his government's determination to restore the Bourbons to the throne of France with all the flies and hornets that buzzed around their honeyed court. There were worthier causes to fight and die for.

Then of a sudden, and in this most pessimistic of moods, it came to him.

“Why, that is it!” he exclaimed. “Major Howard has given us the answer.”

Tully gazed at him without comprehension.

“ ‘A hornet's nest,' “ he said, “ ‘best avoided.' But in Sussex, when I was a boy, they had a way of dealing with hornets.”

“I believe the major may be obliged to get his feet wet,” remarked Tully as he watched the first of the ship's boats ground on the shingle of the small cove.

“Well, let us hope he knows how to light a fire,” Nathan replied a little tensely. He had watched the officer climb into the ship's launch and then, before the astonished gaze of the crew, spread a linen kerchief upon the sternsheets where he was obliged to sit. Nathan hoped this was mere affectation and not an indication of his fighting spirit. He consoled himself with the thought that he was accompanied by Lieutenant Whiteley, who commanded the thirty-four marines aboard the
Unicorn
.

“Look there!” exclaimed Tully, pointing toward the distant headland where a small troop of horsemen had appeared. Nathan inspected them through the glass. There were six of them, not enough to contest the landing, though there might be more hidden from sight beyond the ridge. But they looked more like artillery officers than cavalry and it seemed their purpose was strictly observational, for as soon as the marines began to advance across the beach they turned and cantered back in the direction of the fort. They could have seen little to concern them for it was designed to withstand an assault from either land or sea. It was in the shape of a diamond perched on the edge of the headland: the larger cannon ranged along the two walls facing the channel, but the walls on the landward side equipped with swivel guns and mortars and with loopholes for muskets. The garrison was probably small but a hundred men could have held it against ten times that number as long as they had suffi cient supplies and munitions.

Nathan lowered the telescope and addressed the sailing master whose glum expression reflected his disapproval of the entire enterprise. “Very well, Mr. Graham.”

There was a rush of men to the braces as Graham set sail on a course that would carry them parallel to the coast at a distance of a little over a mile, with the rest of the flotilla following at regular intervals, or as regular as their poor sailing qualities would allow.

Nathan joined the pilot, Monsieur Calvez, at the rail and addressed him in his native tongue. Or French, rather, for the man was a Breton, born and bred: “Well, sir, it is to be hoped your eddies do not fail us.”

The pilot rewarded this observation with a shrug, but he stood high in Nathan's estimation at present, having assured the war council hastily convened aboard the
Unicorn
that, although the tide could reach up to eight knots in the mouth of the Gulf, the very speed of the flow created powerful back-eddies—
tourbillons
—at either side so that, in effect, it flowed the opposite way at each of the points. Th is was vital information, if only it could be relied upon.

They would soon know. They were nearing the eastern point near the village of Port-Navalo. Now they could see the guns of the fort, a hint of dragon's breath coiling from the black muzzles.

“Keep your distance, Mr. Graham,” Nathan instructed him tersely, for the ship's head was drifting noticeably toward the shore.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Nathan wished he had more confidence in his own sailing master, but he always had to keep his eye upon him. He knew it made the man nervous, but there it was. The slightest error of judgement, the slightest delay in carrying out his orders, and they were lost.

There was a sudden eruption from the battery and the first shot came skipping over the waves towards them before sinking off their starboard bow.

Nathan caught Tully's eye. “We may see your fire engine in action before the day is out,” he remarked, lightly, knowing he did not fool Tully for an instant.

Tully was an admirer of all things mechanical and the fire engine had become his personal concern. It was standing by in the waist, just abaft the mainmast: a wonder of gleaming brass and canvas hose, ready to pump a stream of water over rigging and decks. But the wonder of the world would not save a ship composed almost wholly of timber, hemp and canvas once a fire took hold. Nathan saw the bows shift a trifle to windward, felt the movement through his feet and raised his voice to reach Lieutenant Holroyd on the gundeck.

“Stand by, Mr. Holroyd.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Holroyd had bound a bandana tight about his ears—or rather the one ear he had left and the hole that was the other, the missing organ having been detached by a cutlass on their first commission. He had persuaded the ship's doctor, McLeish, to sew it back on again but the graft had become infected and the ear had been cut off a second time, with surgical precision. Normally he let his hair hang unbound to cover the mutilation, but the bandana gave him a bold, buccaneering air, even without an earring. He had come on greatly since Nathan had first met him at the Havana nine months ago: a spotty-faced snotty, not yet twenty. But he had fought in three battles since and the spots had quite vanished from his complexion, though the loss of the ear was to be regretted.