JAMES McGEE

Rebellion

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © James McGee 2011

James McGee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007320240

Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007320257

Version: 2016-02-15

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part III

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part IV

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Keep Reading

Historical Note

Also by James McGee

About the Publisher

PART I

Chapter 1

He heard the rattle of musket fire and ducked instinctively. The horse grunted and stumbled and for one heart-faltering second he thought it had been hit; but the animal had only lost its footing on a rock loosened by the previous night’s storm. Ahead of him, he saw Leon fighting to control his own mount as it scrambled for purchase on the treacherous, water-soaked terrain.

It was still raining, but the heavy downpour that had turned mountain stream into raging torrent and earthen track into quagmire had finally abated; transformed into a steady, and persistent drizzle. The easing of the weather, however, had not eliminated the risk of injury from a carelessly placed hoof. All he could do was hang on, trust in his steed, and pray that the ground remained firm beneath them.

Dawn had broken half an hour before but there was neither warmth to the day nor any evidence of sunrise, only a low ceiling of slate-tinted cloud. A gunmetal pall hung across the landscape, drenching the customary ochre-coloured hills in gloomy shades of grey.

Leon yelled a warning, indicating the crest of a ridge a quarter of a mile ahead and a row of figures outlined like stone statues on a balustrade; French infantry. At that range their blue jackets were unmistakable. A foraging party, he guessed. They were shouting and gesticulating wildly, waving their hats in the air. Some were crouched down and he assumed it was from those men that the shots had originated. Their cries carried like excited bird chatter and he realized they were yelling directions to the dragoons emerging at a gallop from the village behind them. He was immediately conscious of his own scarlet jacket and white breeches. Despite their grubbiness and the poor light, in contrast to Leon’s grey coat, clay-coloured trousers and black bandana, they made a tempting target. He hunched down in his saddle, tightened his grip on the reins and drove his boots into the mare’s flanks. Another fusillade sounded. It would have been a miracle if any of the musket balls had found their mark, even allowing for the downward trajectory, but it didn’t stop him spurring his horse on even faster.

There was very little cover. What there was consisted of thorn bush and sharp outcrops of rock with olive trees dotted in between which, with their trunks stunted by the wind, had the look of old men bent and wizened with age.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. The dragoons were crouched low over their horses’ necks; a couple had drawn sabres. They were not that far behind, and gaining ground rapidly. Beyond the knot of green-clad riders, he could see the village clinging like a limpet to the side of the hill. Idanha-aNova; it wasn’t much of a place – a small church with a thin, square tower rising above a spiral of whitewashed houses – but it had provided a welcome respite from the storm. They had been fed and watered by their local contact and he’d slept comfortably, until rudely awakened with the news that a French patrol was searching houses at the other end of the street, which had resulted in their frantic and undignified dash for freedom.

He looked back and hope flared in his chest as his eyes settled on the sweep of wooded slopes that had appeared through the murk. He followed Leon’s lead and turned his horse towards them. The trees would provide a guard against musket fire and grant them a chance to give their pursuers the slip, allowing them time to make their escape to a more permanent hiding place; providing the gods remained on their side.

The gods, however, appeared to have other plans.

His heart sank as he realized the wood was composed of dwarf oaks which were neither tall nor dense enough to shade them completely. The trees would probably mask their flight from the dragoons but not from the soldiers on the summit who would have the advantage of height and thus a clearer view of their passage through the thickets. But they were better than no trees at all.

Sure enough, no sooner had they reached the first line of oaks than the calls from the onlookers on the high ground intensified. Even the hoof-beats couldn’t mask the cries of the infantrymen as, stirred by the thrill of the chase being enacted below them, they encouraged their mounted compatriots to greater effort.

They reached the wood. By this time the enemy riders had closed the gap to less than three hundred yards. He felt an immediate wave of relief as the oaks closed in around them. Branches whipped at his face and snagged at his clothing as he steered his horse deeper into the trees. He could feel the dampness seeping through the lining of his jacket and the thighs of his breeches. He could feel his heart, too, beating like a drum.

He scanned the ridge through the overhanging limbs. The soldiers were still signalling madly. He looked away, concentrating on the path. To his consternation, the gaps between the trees were narrowing. Their progress was being hampered. The gods were definitely against them.

Without warning, Leon reined in his mount. He twisted in the saddle and spoke urgently in Spanish. “We stand a better chance on foot.”

He hesitated and then decided it made sense. On foot they’d be less visible to the troops on the high ground. He nodded and they both dismounted. Pointing the animals in opposite directions, they slapped them hard on the rump to set them moving. Then they ran.

He was content to let Leon lead the way. The Spaniard was lightly built with tousled black hair curling away from the nape of his neck. A neat goatee framed his jaw. His brown eyes were bright and intelligent and set in a face scorched brown by the sun. A scar, part-hidden by the beard, ran from the corner of his chin to a centimetre below his left ear. Despite the disfigurement, he was a handsome man whose looks suggested he’d be quick to smile and share a jest; though not this morning. In the sullen light, Leon’s normally animated face was set in a grim mask of determination as he concentrated on the task in hand: keeping them safe.

The sword at his hip was becoming a menace, but the weapon had been a staunch ally to him over the years and he was not about to discard it like an old shoe. He unhooked the scabbard from his belt and, holding the sabre like a baton, picked up his pace. His ears caught the jangle of metal; the dragoons were in the trees. Unless it was their own mounts doubling back towards them. That would be ironic, he thought.

A small clearing came into view. They sprinted across it, keeping low. A musket ball, even from the higher elevation, would never reach that far but he still felt the hollowness in his throat knowing how exposed they both were, though he also knew the French would want to take him alive. He was more valuable to them alive. Dead meant he couldn’t be exchanged for one of theirs. Dead, he wasn’t worth a damned thing, except perhaps a reason for the Duke or even Marmont to raise a silent glass and for someone to carve a notch into the hilt of his sword.

They cut left. The trees thinned suddenly and they were out in the open once more. He could hear the dragoons thrashing through the foliage behind them. They would have to dismount, too, and that would give him and Leon the edge. The ground rose before them in a series of small terraced fields bordered by dry stone walls. Two enclosures away another patch of woodland beckoned: more oak trees. Up on the ridge, the infantry were running, keeping pace.

His chest was hurting now; so were his legs. He spent more time in the saddle than he did on foot and it was beginning to tell on his lungs. Leon, despite his wiry frame, also looked and sounded as if he was struggling. And the gradient wasn’t helping. They came to the first wall and clambered over it. By the time they had negotiated the second one, the dragoons had emerged from the trees.

And they were still on horseback. Somehow, they had found a way through. Realizing from the tracks that their quarry was now on foot, they had known that by remaining mounted they’d have the upper hand once they were clear of the wood. Baying like hounds, the scent of victory in their nostrils, the dragoons dug in their heels.

He tried to ignore the burning stitch in his side.

As they reached the last barrier of stone before the woods began again, a volley of shots came from their right. He heard the crack as a projectile struck the wall a few inches from his arm. There was movement to his left; more riders, approaching fast. They were close enough for him to see their scarlet-edged epaulettes and the diamond motif on their helmets. Directed by the troops on the hill, the dragoons had split their force in two, with one party having circled the wood in a bid to cut them off while the other had remained to the rear, driving them forward, like gamekeepers beating grouse before them into the trap.

God-damned Frogs! he thought, acknowledging that the French had played the game well. Then he was over the wall and clawing his way towards the shelter of the next stand of oaks.

He could hear Leon trying to suck in air. The Spaniard was labouring. His face was streaked with rain and sweat. As they hauled themselves into the trees, the dragoons were less than a hundred paces away. The drumming of hooves was as loud as thunder and he could feel the earth vibrating beneath his feet.

The Spaniard drew a pistol from his bandolier and a knife from the sash at his waist. “Run!” he urged. “Save yourself!” His features contorted.

“No, we go together!” As if a pistol and a knife would have made a difference, anyway, he thought.

They staggered on, shoulder to shoulder.

Leon was the first to go down. One moment he was in motion, the next it was as if the Spaniard’s legs had turned to porridge. The transition was almost leisurely, bordering on comical; as if someone had slipped him a slow-acting sleeping draught. He managed to keep going for another dozen steps before his legs finally gave way and he collapsed on to his knees, chest heaving.

They had separated and he was ten paces in front when Leon fell. He heard the Spaniard’s exclamation of defeat and turned back in time to see the first of the dragoons explode into view, followed swiftly by half a dozen more.

Leon raised his pistol. A shot sounded and he fell back clutching his shoulder, the pistol dropping from his hand.

“NO!”

Running back, he started to pull the sword from its scabbard and found himself confronted by a semi-circle of plume-helmeted horsemen, their carbines aimed unerringly at his head.

He halted and gazed back resignedly at the look of triumph on their faces. It was over. There was nowhere else to run, nowhere to hide. He slid the sword into its scabbard and waited as the dragoon lieutenant got down from his horse and held out his hand. He handed the sword over. The lieutenant took it, nodded wordlessly then walked over to Leon, who had raised himself to a sitting position. His face had lost its colour. Blood from his wound was oozing from between his fingers. He let the knife drop to the ground.

The lieutenant stared down at the Spaniard.

“Cretin!” he spat and withdrawing the sword he drove the blade down through Leon’s throat. Leon’s legs kicked convulsively and then stilled. The dragoon placed his boot on Leon’s chest, freed the blade and wiped it on the Spaniard’s jacket before returning it to its scabbard and calmly remounting his horse.

It took a second for the shock to sink in.

“You utter shit! God damn your eyes, you bastard! He was no threat to you!”

He screamed the words in English.

The dragoons made no attempt to stop him as he ran to the body. Other figures were hurrying towards them through the trees; the infantry from the ridge had arrived.

He sank to his knees, ignoring the wetness soaking into his breeches, and gripped Leon’s hand in his own. He stared down at the man who had been his friend and at the blood-stained, rain-dampened moss beneath the ruined throat. He heard footsteps approaching from behind.

A voice spoke in English, with a marked French accent.

“Get up, Major.”

The rage bloomed in his chest. He started to turn.

“Get up, Major.” The order was given again.

And his eyes opened.

“Time to get up, Major.”

The hand was still on his shoulder as he reached for the pistol beneath the saddle he’d been using for a pillow, forgetting, not for the first time, that the weapon had been taken from him. The memory caused his face to harden. He moved his arm and felt for his sword. At least they had left him that. He traced the hilt reassuringly. The gesture did not go unnoticed by the man gazing down at him.

Dressed in the uniform of chasseur, the insignia at collar and cuff indicated he held the rank of captain. He was young, in his early twenties, with dark hair and soulful eyes. He looked concerned at having interrupted his charge’s sleep.

“There’s coffee by the fire. It’s still hot.” The captain, whose name was Fosse, gave a small, almost boyish smile. “But I apologize in advance. The taste is execrable.”

Pushing the blanket aside, he watched the officer walk away and thought about the dream. It wasn’t the first time it had come to him and he doubted it would be the last. He’d relived the nightmare a lot over the six weeks since his capture. During that time the anger he’d felt at Leon’s death had not diminished.

They had returned his horse. It had been caught by one of the foragers on their way down from the ridge. He’d been allowed to mount up, only to have a sergeant of dragoons take the reins. Then, leaving Leon’s corpse where it had fallen, they’d escorted him out of the woods. The infantry had returned to their foraging. The dragoons and their red-coated charge had retraced their path towards the village before turning north. He’d known immediately where they were taking him.

Sabugal.

Marmont’s headquarters; the army commander whose manoeuvres he and Leon had been tracking for the past two months. It occurred to him that Leon would have found that amusing.

The forty-mile ride along rutted, water-logged tracks, through wooded hills and valleys and across tarns swollen by rainfall, had been hard going. He’d travelled most of the way in silence, wrapped in his cloak, fighting the chill in his bones brought on by the weather, his grief at Leon’s murder and an increasing awareness of the gravity of his situation.

When he arrived at Sabugal he’d discovered that word of his capture had preceded him. A small crowd had gathered; mostly officers who knew of his work and who, despite his being the enemy, had been anxious to make his acquaintance; to be able to say that they had shaken his hand.

The French were billeted in the citadel; a Moorish castle, the ramparts of which had been visible from miles away, long before he and his escort crossed the old stone bridge and entered the town. There he’d been questioned; first by Marmont’s bloated, bad-tempered chief of staff, de la Martinière, and then by the marshal himself. He’d given them nothing, other than his name and rank; which they’d known anyway.

De la Martinière had wanted him shot as a spy. Marmont, an urbane man with a liking for the finer things in life and, fortunately, the antithesis of his subordinate, had asked him for his parole.

There was no doubt that both of them believed he’d been engaged in spying activities, but Marmont, unlike his foulmouthed general and in adherence to the articles of war, had been unprepared to execute a British officer in uniform, accepting his word that he was not a spy but a field intelligence officer, a fine distinction but one which, nevertheless, reflected the acceptance of the code that existed between the two opposing armies.

He’d given his parole willingly for the advantages it allowed. Parole meant he’d still be a prisoner, but at least he would enjoy some freedom of movement so long as he agreed not to attempt to escape, not to pass intelligence to the British army or its allies, nor to serve against the armies of France, until such time as he had been exchanged, rank for rank. The agreement didn’t say anything about gathering intelligence during his captivity and passing it on later.

It transpired, however, that the marshal’s idea of parole bore little resemblance to the accepted interpretation of the term, for he had been granted no freedom or privacy beyond that accorded to a regular prisoner. Instead, they had secured him in a room and placed a sentry on permanent duty outside his door.

Well, he’d thought, two could play at that game. If the French commander was prepared to ride roughshod over their agreement then surely that invalidated his pledge not to pass on intelligence. In his mind he was therefore free to relay as much information as possible back to Wellington’s headquarters.

The opportunity to do that had arisen when Marmont and his staff, with their British parolee in tow, had transferred their headquarters to Salamanca. There were British agents in Salamanca, notably one Dr Patrick Curtis, Rector of the Irish College and regius professor of astronomy and natural history at Salamanca University. Curtis had been running an intelligence organization from the college for years. Stretching all the way from Gibraltar to the Pyrenees and beyond, it was composed for the most part of priests and alcaldes, all linked by a spider’s web of runners. And it had been providing Wellington with information since the outbreak of the war.

Even the officers assigned to guard him had expressed disgust at their commander’s decision to deny their captive the privileges allowed under the terms of parole, one of which was the right to receive visitors. They had viewed it as a stain on their honour and in defiance of their orders had turned a blind eye to members of the local populace who wanted to pay their respects.

Curtis and his agents had made contact two days after his arrival.

It hadn’t taken Marmont long to suspect that messages were being passed between his prisoner and the wily old Irishman, and he’d summoned Curtis for questioning. He’d even considered placing him under arrest and imprisoning him, but he had no proof and Curtis was well respected in the city, particularly within the church’s hierarchy, so Marmont had had little option but to give the priest the benefit of the doubt and let him go. But the incident had been enough to convince the marshal to take prompt remedial action against his prisoner.

“You’re to be transferred,” Marmont had told him. “I’ve two companies of infantry returning to France. They’ll escort you as far as Bayonne. From there you’ll be taken north, to the prison depot at Verdun, where you will be assigned a place of internment, there to await an offer of exchange.”

The march across Spain through Valladolid, Burgos, Vitoria and San Sebastian had taken nearly three weeks. Now they were on the home stretch. The previous night they’d made camp outside Biriatou, a small village nestling among the Pyrenean foothills. It was their last day on the road.

The captain was right, he thought. The coffee was atrocious. It tasted as if it had been made from acorns. There was some bread, too; a slice of cold bacon and a wedge of gritty cheese. The captain had apologized for the quality of the food, but now that they were over the border and back in their own country, he’d been assured it would be easier to pick up supplies.

He finished the coffee and tipped the grounds on to the ashes of the fire. The troops were breaking camp around him. He rolled up his bedroll, buckled on his sword and picked up his saddle. They would be in Bayonne by nightfall.

They were two miles north of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, with the mounted troops leading the two infantry companies, when the chasseur captain broke away from the head of the column and fell in beside him. Leaning over from his saddle, the captain lowered his voice, “We have to talk, Major.”

He waited for the captain to continue. It had turned into a glorious day. They were high up and the views were stunning. To his left, looking out over the green-clad hills, he could see the reflection of sun on water: the Bay of Biscay. There were ships, he saw. They were some way off the coast and it was hard to make out their flags at that distance. The French didn’t have that much of a navy left. From her lines, he thought one of them might have been American.

“You look like a man with a weight on his mind, Captain,” he prompted, speaking in French.

The chasseur bit his lip. “I think it would be better if we conversed in English, my friend.”

An odd response, as was the use of the word “friend”. He stared at the captain, trying to read the expression on the young officer’s face. “As you wish.”

The chasseur captain cleared his throat awkwardly. “I regret to say, Major, we’ve not been entirely truthful with you.”

“How so?” He frowned.

“My orders, as you know, were to escort you to Bayonne.”

“Indeed, and you’ve been splendid company. I’ll miss our conversations around the fire.”

“As will I, Major. Fate has declared us to be on different sides and yet I feel there is a strong bond between us and it is for that reason that I must warn you that you have been severely misled.”

“By whom?”

“That whore’s son, de la Martinière!” The captain spat and then recovered as he collected his thoughts, before adding just as vehemently, “And, it grieves me to say it, by Marshal Marmont also.”

It was plain to see why the captain had requested they spoke in English. He hadn’t wanted anyone else in the column to hear his outburst against his superiors.

“I’m not with you, Captain. In what way?”

“Upon your arrival at Bayonne, you are expecting to be met by another escort who will take you to Verdun, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Not so. The marshal sent a dispatch shortly after your arrival in Salamanca. It was to Paris, for the attention of the Duke of Feltre. It was in the marshal’s name, but it was composed and signed by de la Martinière. The general told me that himself.”

He felt a stirring in his gut. The Duke of Feltre, he knew, was Bonaparte’s Minister of War. Before he could comment, the captain’s mouth twisted with disdain. “The dispatch gave details of your capture and the papers that were taken from you.”

“Papers?”

“The notes you made on the composition and strength of our army, our ordnance and our troop movements.”

There had been no papers. He knew better than to carry such incriminating evidence on his person. Whatever intelligence he accrued during his missions as an exploring officer was always kept in his head.

“What else?”

“Notification that you were captured in uniform and that you gave your parole but that you were not to be trusted and that you should be watched at all times . . .”

The captain’s voice tapered off. He looked uncomfortable.

“And?” The unpleasant feeling that had started in his belly began to spread through him.

“And that upon our arrival in Bayonne, my orders are to take your sword and deliver you into the hands of the Bureau Secret – Savary’s men. You’re to be placed in restraints and taken to Paris for interrogation.”

The secret police. His stomach knotted.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m a soldier, Major, not a police lackey. I heard that the Emperor once said if he told Savary to murder his own wife and children, he knew the order would be obeyed without a moment’s hesitation. I’ve no desire to hand you over to his people.” The captain hesitated, then said, “And neither have my officers. We’ve been three weeks on the road together. Even before we swapped stories around the fire, your exploits were well known to us. We knew you to be a brave and honourable man. You’re no spy, Major, despite what General de la Martinière would have us believe. Spies skulk in the shadows. You wear your scarlet uniform with pride. You’ve never made an attempt to disguise yourself. You make no secret of the fact that you are gathering information. It’s been our misfortune, until now, that you’ve always had the better of us.” The young officer allowed his face to lighten and he said sheepishly, “I gave chase after you once, you know. I never told you that. It was about four months back, on the road to Huerta. You led us a merry dance.”

“I had a good horse.”

Fosse eyed the mare speculatively. “You still have, Major.” There was a catch in the chasseur’s voice.

A movement in the sky overhead caught his eye. A flock of buzzards was circling the summit of a nearby hill. Something had died or was dying on the slopes, he guessed. The birds were circling for the kill. Perhaps like Savary’s thugs.

“You’re suggesting I break my parole and make a run for it?”

The Frenchman ran a hand over his horse’s neck. His face remained neutral. “I’m merely suggesting you may wish to consider your options in the light of our conversation. Besides, I doubt an officer of your experience would be foolish enough to attempt an escape in broad daylight, in the open, flanked by two companies of armed infantry and a detachment of chasseurs. I would have little option but to order my men to hunt you down. I doubt you’d get very far. You’d be seen for miles.”

The captain stood in his saddle and looked out towards the bay. “The view is quite splendid, is it not? Though not the sort of countryside I’d like to traverse at night, I venture. Which reminds me, we must press on. The likelihood is that we will not arrive in Bayonne until after sunset.” The captain turned and looked at him. “You’ll forgive me, Major. I must rejoin my men. Enjoy the rest of your journey.”

With a brief salute, he was gone.

As he watched the captain ride off towards the head of the column, he pondered on the chasseur’s words. He recalled how, back in Salamanca, in contravention of their general’s orders, his guards had busied themselves with other duties whenever visitors were in the offing. Was it his imagination or had Captain Fosse just intimated that he and his men would avert their gaze at an opportune moment also? He had, he suspected, until Bayonne to decide.

It was dusk when the column finally reached the outskirts of the town. To the west, the last rays of sunset had finally given way to a dark aubergine sky. Although the coast was still three miles distant, the smell of the sea, carried inland along the river from the estuary, hung in the air like a sharp bouquet.

They entered one of the town’s squares, and halted.

“My men and I will try and find somewhere for us to bed down for the night,” Fosse told him as they dismounted. “I suggest you remain here while we go and look. I regret I don’t know the town that well. We may be gone for some time.”

The captain held his gaze for several seconds before giving a brief nod of farewell.

He watched Fosse and his men walk away. The rest of the column were paying him no heed. They had become used to his closer association with the chasseurs rather than the infantry and they were too busy attending to their own requirements. He retrieved his knapsack and the cloak from his saddle bag and slipped it on. He stroked the mare’s neck and she whickered softly. They’d travelled many roads together and survived numerous adventures. If her disappearance was noted as well as his own, it was likely the alarm would be raised a lot quicker than if he alone was seen to be absent.

He knew she’d be well looked after. Fosse would see to that. He owed the young captain a debt of gratitude. Some day, he hoped he would be able to repay him. He drew his cloak around him, adjusted his hat low on his brow, slipped the knapsack over his shoulder, and without a backward glance walked purposefully into the rapidly descending twilight.

He wondered how long he had before the alarm was raised. His fate lay in the chasseur captain’s hands and he knew there was a time limit on how long Fosse would wait before he started shouting. The captain might have been willing to offer him a way out, but it was unlikely he’d jeopardize his career any more than he had to. He had, he estimated, an hour, perhaps two at the most, before the alert was sounded. And then they would come after him.

It was a guaranteed certainty that when they discovered him missing, they’d assume he’d try to head south towards the mountains. They’d know he had allies within the guerrilleros who would be only too happy to escort him through the high passes and back into Spain. The French would search the town and then they would scour the countryside in the direction of the frontier.

But they would be looking in the wrong place, because he wasn’t going south; he was heading north.

The plan had been gestating in his mind long before the chasseur captain voiced his unhappiness at his general’s duplicity. The seed had been planted the day he and his escort left Salamanca.

Rumours that the Emperor was planning to invade Russia had been circulating for months. The troop movements he and Leon had observed on their sorties confirmed that the French were transferring an increasing number of men northwards, in particular contingents of the Imperial Guard. They were either being used to plug the gaps in the Empire’s home defences or else they were part of an impending invasion force. But were they really destined for Russia, or somewhere else? There had even been talk that Bonaparte had resurrected his plan to invade England. Which was it? It was his duty to find out, he had decided, and to accomplish that he’d have to travel into the heart of the Empire; to the last place they would think of looking for him.

He glanced around. The streets were quite busy and there were a lot of military personnel in evidence; not that unusual, given Bayonne’s proximity to the border, which made it one of the main staging posts for troop movements between France and Spain. In the poorly lit streets, however, one uniform looked much like any other. Nevertheless, he kept his cloak about him as he made his way towards the town centre.

As he drew closer to the main concourse, he spotted the entrance to a narrow alleyway and stepped into the shadows. He used the knife concealed in his boot to unpick the stitches on the inside of his jacket. It took but a few seconds to withdraw the bank notes and the two dozen guineas sewn into the lining. Then, stowing the knife and slipping the money into his pocket, he retraced his steps to the street. He kept his head bowed. All he needed was to run into Fosse and his men coming towards him from the opposite direction.

He struck lucky at his third port of call. The hotel concierge, taken in by his military cloak, weather-stained headgear and sword, was only too happy to help an officer he thought was part of the Grand Army.

In answer to his query, the concierge advised him that a public diligence was due to depart from the square outside the hotel very shortly and that one of the guests, General Souham, was booked on it. In fact, he was the only passenger.

He thanked the concierge and took a seat in the darkest corner of the lobby. General Souham! It wasn’t often you were about to introduce yourself to the Divisional Commander of the Army of Portugal. He bowed his head and pretended to doze. Just another battle-weary officer seeking rest and recuperation from the war.

It was twenty minutes before the general entered the lobby, accompanied by his baggage and a weary looking aide-de-camp. Even if he hadn’t been wearing his uniform, the general would have been an easy man to identify for he was very tall, well over six feet in height. Greying hair showed beneath the rim of his hat. In addition to his distinctive height, two other features marked him out: the livid scar, half visible on his temple, and the black patch that covered his left eye socket. He was also smoking a thin cheroot.

He waited until the aide had disappeared outside to supervise the loading of the general’s luggage before he made his move.

The general took a draw on his cheroot, savouring the taste. He looked like a man who was relaxed and at ease with himself. But then he could afford to be. He was a general and every other soldier within sight and earshot was his subordinate.

“Forgive me, sir, General Souham?” He spoke in French, as he had with the concierge.

The general’s head turned and he found himself perused through a spiral of cigar fumes. The general’s right eye searched for recognition and an indication of rank. “And who might you be?”

Some senior staff might have shown irritation at being approached unexpectedly by a lower ranked officer. On this occasion there was only curiosity.

“A fellow traveller, General, if you’ll permit.”

A frown creased the scarred brow.

It’s now or never, he thought.

“I understand from the concierge that you’re about to board the diligence and I wondered if you’d allow me to share your coach. I’ve been on attachment to Marshal Marmont’s staff and recently arrived from Salamanca, en route to Orleans. I’d be more than happy to share any expenses.”

The general’s right eyebrow lifted as he picked a shred of tobacco from his lip, not so much surprised by the request as intrigued.

“Your name again? I didn’t catch it.”

“My apologies, General. Major Hawkwood, 11th Regiment of Infantry.”

The general’s frown deepened. His eye moved to the patch of red jacket showing through the gap in the cloak. “Really? That’s an interesting name. You’d better explain, Major.”

“I’m an American, sir, as is my regiment. Assigned to the Imperial Forces by President Madison with the permission of Emperor Bonaparte. I’ve been serving at Marshal Marmont’s headquarters in a liaison capacity. The president is most interested in the Spanish campaign.”

“Ah,” the general said drily, as if everything suddenly made sense. “Is he now? That’s comforting. I’m sure we’ll all sleep easier in our beds. And when you make your report to your President Madison, what will you tell him?”

“That the Emperor probably needs all the help he can get.”

The general stared at him. “Well, your French is excellent, Major. If you hadn’t told me, I’d have taken you for a native. But I’ll say this: it’s a damned good thing you’re a soldier and not an ambassador. Diplomacy isn’t your strong point.”

“No, General. It’s probably why I’m still a major.”

The corner of the general’s mouth lifted. “And how is the Marshal?”

“He’s well, sir. Still complaining about the quality of the wine.”

“Sounds familiar. He always did appreciate his home comforts.”

The general’s aide appeared at the entrance. “Your baggage is loaded, sir.” The officer’s glance slid sideways.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll be there shortly.” The general paused, then said, “You can inform the driver there’ll be two of us. Major Hawkwood will be joining me. He’s an American, you know; come to offer us his support.”

“Very good, sir.” The lieutenant nodded. “You have luggage, Major?” There was no hint of suspicion or even surprise on the aide’s face, which suggested the lieutenant was well used to dealing with his general’s last-minute whims and would probably have been equally unabashed had the general introduced the newcomer as the Sultan of Rangoon.

“I regret I was separated from my valise. I’ve made arrangements for it to be sent on. I’m carrying all I need.” He indicated the knapsack.

If he asks for my papers, it’s all over.

“A pity the same couldn’t be said for our Marshal Marmont,” Souham said as his lieutenant disappeared once more. “Do his cooks still travel with him?”

He nodded. “All twelve of them, General.”

“A hell of a way to go to war.” The general parked the cheroot in the corner of his mouth and shoved his hands in his coat pockets.

The aide was back again, his message delivered. “The coach is ready, sir.”

Souham nodded. “Right, thank you, Lieutenant. You can relax. Go and get yourself a drink. And mind the bastards don’t serve you from the bottom of the cask.” He turned and removed the cheroot from his lips. “Shall we, Major?”

They left the hotel and the driver held the coach door open as he followed the general up the steps. It occurred to him, as he took his seat and the driver retracted the steps and closed the door behind him, that he hadn’t bought a ticket.

As if reading his mind, Souham smiled. “You can spread yourself out, Major. We have the vehicle to ourselves. Rank, as they say, has its privileges.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. It meant they weren’t likely to be disturbed until they’d reached their destination. He recalled then that Souham wasn’t only a general; he was also a count. He’d received the title after his victory at the battle of Vich; the same engagement that had cost him his eye.

There was a jolt as the driver released the brake and then the coach moved slowly off.

The general removed his hat and ran a hand through his thinning locks.

“So, Major, I’ve a cousin who served with Rochambeau during your war of independence. He tells me that America is a beautiful country.”

“Indeed it is, sir.”

Jesus, he thought.

He wondered how long he’d be able to maintain the charade. What he knew of America he’d gleaned only from his service in the West Indies, during conversations with American merchants in Dominica and St Christopher. He knew a little about the eastern side of the country. Everywhere else was a mystery.

“So you’ve never been there yourself, General?” he ventured.

Souham shook his head. “Sadly no.”

Maybe the gods are back with me, he thought.

A vision of the moments before his capture came into his mind. He saw the dragoon lieutenant raise the sword – his sword – and drive it home. As the light died in Leon’s eyes he felt the spark of anger deep within him; as if a tiny ember had burst into flame. Somehow, he would make them pay. He didn’t know how. But one day he would exact his revenge for the death of his friend.

The vision faded. He realized his fists were clenched and that the general was gazing at him with a quizzical expression.

“Forgive me, sir,” he heard himself say, while risking what he hoped was a rueful smile. “It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I’m a long way from home.”

Souham shook his head. “No need to apologize, Major. You’re not alone in that. We all are.”

From outside, above the noise of the coach in motion, there came the sound of hooves on cobbles as a body of horsemen entered the square. He heard voices, someone shouting orders, but the words were indistinct. Parting the blind, he looked out into the night, to where the riders were milling. Torches flickered. He could see dark uniforms and darker-coloured shakos.

Chasseurs.

As calmly as he could, he readjusted the blind and sat back.

“Your aide had better get a move on, General, if he wants to slake his thirst. There’s a unit of cavalry out there who look like they’re about to drink the town dry.”

The coach hit a pothole and bounced. The noise of the horsemen faded, drowned by the trundle of the coach wheels as they left the square behind. He felt his pulse begin to slow.

Across from him, General Souham’s right eye glinted with amusement. “I fear you’ve severely underestimated Lieutenant Bellac’s determination where alcohol is concerned.”

Taking another pull on the last inch of cheroot, the general smiled. “So, Major,” he said, settling himself back into his seat. “We’ve a ways to go. To pass the time, you can tell me all about America.”

As he watched the light of expectation steal across the general’s face, the thought struck him that this had all the beginnings of a very long night.

Chapter 2

Hawkwood waited for the attack. He knew it was coming and he knew it was imminent. Timing his retaliation would be crucial.

The inscrutable expression on his opponent’s face wasn’t helping matters.

It seemed to Hawkwood that Chen hadn’t moved a muscle for at least five minutes. It was as if the Chinaman was carved from stone. Neither did he appear to be breathing hard, which was just as disconcerting, but then in their brief association Hawkwood couldn’t recall a time when Chen had ever broken sweat.

While he, on the other hand, was perspiring like a pig on a spit.

It wasn’t as if the room was warm. In fact, it wasn’t really a room at all. It was a cellar and it was situated beneath the Rope and Anchor public house which sat in a grubby lane a spit away from Queen Street on the border between Ratcliffe and Limehouse. Tallow candles set in metal brackets around the walls and in a wagon-wheel chandelier suspended by a rope from the centre of the ceiling were the only sources of illumination.

The rest of the walls were bare save for a row of metal hooks by the door, from which were suspended Hawkwood’s coat and jacket and what looked like an array of farming implements and a selection of tools that would not have looked out of place in a blacksmith’s forge.

The cellar’s flagstoned floor was covered by a layer of straw-filled mattresses, thin enough so as not to hamper movement and yet of sufficient bulk to absorb the weight of the cellar’s occupants and to prevent injury were they to stumble and lose their footing. They were also there to dampen sound.

Aside from Hawkwood and Chen, the cellar was empty, though anyone entering who happened to glance over their shoulder towards one of the darkened corners would have been forgiven for thinking there was someone standing in the shadows watching proceedings. A closer inspection, however, would have revealed the figure to be merely a crude wooden effigy. Though even that description would have required a degree of imagination, for the effigy was in fact nothing more ominous than an oaken pillar into which had been inserted four limb-shaped spars. It had been constructed to represent a man’s body with arms extended, but to the uninitiated it looked more like a leafless tree trunk.

Chen launched his strike. He seemed to do it with a minimum of effort and without a noticeable change of expression. In fact he didn’t so much move as flow. Candlelight whispered along the blade as the knife curved towards Hawkwood’s belly.

Hawkwood stepped into the attack and drove the tipstaff against Chen’s wrist, turning the blade away.

Both men stepped back.

“Good,” Chen said softly, his face betraying no emotion. “Again.”

Unlike Hawkwood, Chen was wearing neither shirt nor breeches but a wide-sleeved, indigo-coloured tunic cinched about his middle by a black sash. The tunic reached to Chen’s thighs. Beneath it, he wore a pair of matching blue trousers, tucked into a pair of white leggings. His feet were shod in a pair of soft-soled, black canvas slippers.

Chen repeated his attack and once more Hawkwood countered.

“Again,” Chen said patiently.

They practised the sequence a dozen times, without pause, by which time the handle of Hawkwood’s tipstaff was slick with moisture from his palm. Chen, on the other hand, looked as if he’d just awakened from a refreshing afternoon nap.

Hawkwood had often wondered about Chen’s age. The man’s features were, like his skull, smooth and hairless. He could have been any age between thirty and sixty. It wasn’t as if the city was knee-deep in Chinamen that Hawkwood could make a well-informed judgement. Lascars there were a-plenty; many of them ensconced within the East India Company barracks along the Ratcliffe Highway. But Chinamen were still something of a rarity and could probably be numbered if not on the fingers of one hand then certainly in the low rather than the high hundreds.

Hawkwood and Chen’s paths had crossed three months before at, of all places, a horse fair on Bow Common.

Hawkwood had gone there with Nathaniel Jago who, to Hawkwood’s astonishment, had expressed interest in buying a horse. He had a hankering, he’d told Hawkwood, to invest in a carriage so that he and Connie Fletcher could take five o’clock drives around Hyde Park with the rest of the swells.

Connie Fletcher was a former working girl turned madam who ran a high-class bagnio off Cavendish Square. Jago and Connie had been keeping company for nearly a year which, by Hawkwood’s reckoning, had to be some kind of record. Hawkwood had tried to envisage Jago and Connie surrounded by the cream of London society all trying to cut a dash along the tree-lined avenues, and had failed miserably.

He suspected that the idea of riding in a carriage had been more Connie’s dream than Jago’s, in an attempt to garner some degree of respectability, for when they had served together in the Peninsula, his former sergeant’s aversion to anything even remotely connected with equestrian pursuits had been legendary, and that included, in some instances, cheering on the cavalry. Horses were good for just one thing, Jago had told him, and that was as a supplement to rations, and only then if chickens were in short supply and the beef had turned maggoty.

Hawkwood wondered if this new-found hankering was a precursor to an attempt by Connie to persuade Jago to make an honest woman of her. Now, there was a thought to keep a man awake at night.

In the event, neither of them need have worried, for the quality of horse flesh on offer had been nothing to write home about: scrub horses and sway-backed mules for the most part. So, with Jago grumbling that he’d have to wait until the Barnet Horse Fair to continue his search, they’d turned their attentions to the peripheral entertainments, one of which had been a boxing booth. Other than its size – it was considerably larger than either of its immediate neighbours – there hadn’t been much to distinguish the tent from the rest of the tawdry marquees with their fortune tellers, palm readers and freak shows, had it not been for the placard above the sagging entrance which, in florid and faded lettering, proclaimed: Billy Boyd – The Bethnal Green Bruiser – Challenges All Comers!

Against his better judgement Hawkwood had allowed Jago to drag him into the tent, where they’d been confronted by the reek of stale beer and even staler bodies and a roped-off square of canvas around which a couple of dozen rowdy onlookers had, over the course of the afternoon, watched a succession of rough-hewn labourers and jack-the-lads try their hand at pummelling another man senseless; their incentive being the three guineas on offer if they managed to remain upright for the duration of the three two-minute rounds, and a five-guinea purse if they succeeded in, as the booth owner put it in his sales pitch, knocking the champion on to his arse.

Not that any of them had stood a cat in hell’s chance. Boyd, a stocky, broad-bellied mauler with a balding scalp, broken nose and knuckles lined with calluses, had stood there knowingly, hands on his hips, watching as, one by one, his deflated opponents were carried from the ring in varying degrees of pain and disability, very few of them having managed to land so much as one decent punch. Looking on, it had been hard to fathom why any man in his right mind would have wanted to climb over the ropes and take him on in the first place.

It had been the late end of the afternoon. The number of prospective challengers had gradually dwindled away and the tout had been on the verge of calling it a day, when the slight built, strangely dressed figure stepped out of the audience and made his way to the ringside.

Someone close by had let go a snort of laughter. Hawkwood heard Jago say quietly and with some awe. “Well, now, this should be interestin’.”

Without doubt, it was the orange coat with its high collar buttoned up to the chin that had drawn the eye; as bright as a sunburst compared to the clothing worn by the majority of men in the tent. The coat wearer’s looks were just as arresting as his attire.

In the booth’s dim-lit interior, his skin had seemed to be infused with an almost ethereal saffron tint. Hawkwood had also been struck by the man’s uncannily symmetrical features, in particular his oval face, shaven head and deep brown, almond-shaped eyes. His demeanour had been odd, too. There had been a curious serenity in his gaze and a stillness in the way he’d held himself. He’d seemed oblivious to the reaction his arrival had caused, though he must have been aware of it.

“It’s a Chink!” a gravelled voice had offered helpfully.

“Well, ’e ain’t from bleedin’ Chelsea!” another wit had shouted.

“Either way,” Jago murmured in Hawkwood’s ear, “he’s a long way from home.”

The tout had looked back at his man, unable to keep the grin off his face. The response had been a dismissive shrug of the shoulders, as if to say, “He’s paid the entrance money, it’s his funeral.”

When Chen climbed into the ring, he’d done so in a hushed silence born out of the crowd’s curiosity and collective assumption that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Another challenger, who hadn’t even had the sense to remove his coat, was about to receive a sharp and painful lesson in the noble science.

“Not sure I want to see this.” Jago had been on the point of turning away. Hawkwood, though, stayed where he was. He wasn’t sure what prompted him to remain, other than the look in the Chinaman’s eyes, which had intrigued him.

At the sound of the bell, the champion had exited his corner with all the confidence of a seasoned fighter; a man prepared to give short shrift to any upstart – young or old – who had delusions of unseating him. The crowd was about to be treated not only to a contest between champion and the challenger but a pugilistic exhibition as well.

It hadn’t turned out that way.

Billy Boyd liked to toy with his opponents by allowing them a few opening punches to bolster their confidence, before returning a sequence of light, irritating taps to let them know they’d probably made the wrong decision. That was usually enough to incite the challenger into firing off a salvo of haymakers that had no hope of landing but which gave the champion legitimate rein to retaliate with increasing force. Boyd was more than happy to let the challenger think he was going to last the three rounds before finally moving in and disabusing him of such a foolish notion.

Faced with the Chinaman, Boyd, for the first time in his career, had found himself flummoxed, not least because his opponent made no attempt to attack or put up a protective guard. Instead, all he did was assume a peculiar stance not unlike some kind of strange, one-legged bird. Then, holding his right hand close to his waist in an inverted fist, he raised his left arm to shoulder height, palm open towards the champion, fingers hooked as if it were some kind of claw. Settled, features immobile, as if he had all the time in the world, he waited.

By the time Boyd realized he’d been duped, it was too late. Even as he stepped forward, drawn by this most unlikely of opponents to initiate contact instead of the other way round, some sixth sense must have triggered a warning. But by then he was already committed. Even as he aimed an exploratory jab towards the challenger’s torso, the Chinaman was moving.

Chen’s counter-attack, a set of lightning moves that enabled him to block the punch with ease, turn the champion’s arm away and drive the edge of his palm into Billy Boyd’s throat, was almost sinuous in execution and so fast the crowd had barely had time to follow it from start to finish.

It occurred to Hawkwood that he might have seen scorpions strike with less speed and ferocity; estimating later that it had probably taken Chen longer to climb over the ropes than it had for him to put the champion on his back.

To a stunned silence that could have been cut with a knife.

It had been hard to tell who was the most shocked: the crowd, the booth owner, or Billy Boyd.

“Jesus!” Jago’s whisper had echoed the reaction of every witness in the tent.

With Boyd still flat on the canvas, Chen had left the ring to claim his purse, only to discover that the tout was not prepared to relinquish the prize in the wake of a bout that had lasted barely ten seconds, even more so when the challenger had not even had the decency to engage in a fair contest. Especially, the tout had added, when he was a “bleedin’ Chinaman” to boot. Emboldened by the belief that he had the bulk of the spectators on his side, he’d told Chen to sling his hook.

But Chen had stood his ground.

By then, factions within the crowd had begun to argue, divided between those who agreed with the tout that the Chinaman had employed unfair tactics, typical of a bloody slant-eyed little heathen, and those who thought that landing Billy Boyd on his arse had been no bad thing and worth the entrance fee on its own.

Things had been on the verge of turning ugly when, with reluctance, Hawkwood had stepped in. Having Jago at his shoulder had helped, but mostly it had been his brass-crowned Runner’s baton and the magistrate’s warrant contained within it that had persuaded the tout that it might be in his best interest if he reconsidered his decision. It was either that, or notice would be issued to close down the booth and both the tout and the champion could spend the night reflecting upon their decision in the nearest police cell. It’d save a lot of bother, Hawkwood promised them, if they paid the Chinaman what they owed him. Then everybody could go home.

Muttering under his breath, the booth owner had handed over the five guineas. In the interest of public order, Hawkwood and Jago had escorted Chen from the tent and, in case any of Boyd’s supporters harboured thoughts of revenge, from the Common as well.

When they’d reached a safe distance, Chen had thanked them in halting English. Then he’d asked Hawkwood why he’d helped him.

There had been two reasons, Hawkwood told him. The first was because Chen had won the bout and the purse was therefore his.

The second was that Hawkwood wanted Chen to teach him to fight.

They had been using the cellar beneath the Rope and Anchor twice a week for three months. The owner, a former lighterman called Tully Robinson, owed Jago a favour. Jago had called in the debt and Tully had bequeathed one of the pub’s cellars, no questions asked. It even had its own entrance, approached via a dank, shoulder-wide passage with the appropriate name of Gin Alley.

The cellar became their training room. Hawkwood had been mystified by some of the additions, the sparring tree in particular. Only when Chen had given him a demonstration, using his hands, forearms and feet to attack the bare wooden figure had it begun to make sense, as had the ridges of hardened skin along the outside edges of Chen’s soles and palms. It was only after their second session together that Hawkwood noticed how compact Chen’s hands were; his fingers were uniformly short and almost of the same length. As a result, his fingertips, when held rigid, were as formidable as an axe blade and just as effective as the edge of his hand.

Chen had begun by teaching Hawkwood simple sequences of blocks and strikes. Hour after hour, he would take Hawkwood through the drills until the mantra became all consuming.

“Too slow. Again.”

Block, strike; block, strike.

“Too slow. Again.”

The techniques that Chen employed were not entirely new to Hawkwood. He’d served with a man during his time in Spain, a Portuguese soldier turned guerrillero, who’d plied his trade in the East and who’d picked up some interesting fighting skills along the way. He’d shared some of them with Hawkwood, telling him they’d originated among an order of Chinese holy men. Forbidden to carry weapons, they had devised their own form of combat using their hands and feet and whatever implements were available.

Hawkwood had remembered some of the elementary moves and indeed had used them on occasion. Watching Chen display the unexpected yet instantly familiar tactics against Billy Boyd had ignited the thought that maybe fate had presented him with an opportunity to widen his knowledge and improve upon those few basic skills he’d acquired from his Portuguese comrade-in-arms. Anything that would give him an edge over the sort of men he hunted had to be an advantage.

As the lessons progressed so did Chen’s command of English. From what Hawkwood had been able to glean, Chen had no family. He came from the south of China; a province with a strange name that was almost impossible to pronounce. More intriguing was Chen’s disclosure that he had indeed been a monk, a member of a religious order that had fallen foul of the authorities. A number of sacred sites had been desecrated, including Chen’s own monastery. The monks had retaliated and a price had been placed on their heads. Many of them had fled the country. Chen had arrived in England on board a British merchant ship, one of hundreds of anonymous seamen recruited abroad as cheap labour by the East India Company. As a result he’d found himself marooned, an orphan in a storm, unable to return home, for fear of imprisonment or death.

He’d managed to find a bed in one of the Lascar-run Shadwell boarding houses, using the last of his pitiful wages. When they ran out he’d resorted to begging; a legacy from his time as a monk, when the only way to obtain food had been to wander the streets with a bowl and cup. But he’d soon learned there was little sympathy shown to foreign beggars – there were enough home-grown ones – and his orange robe, which would have elicited charity in his own country, counted for nothing on the streets of London. Starvation looked a likely prospect, but he’d persevered. He’d known that the best pickings were to be found wherever crowds gathered, so he had followed the fair-goers to Bow Common. There he’d seen the illustrations on the outside of the boxing booth. He had sufficient English to understand what was required in order for him to walk away with enough money to cover three months’ lodgings. He’d watched Boyd through a gap in the back of the tent and even though he’d not used his fighting skills in many months, he knew he would beat him and that it would not take long.

And so it had proved.

In their training they would alternate roles and Hawkwood would take on the role of the aggressor, wielding his tipstaff or the knife in his boot or on occasion one of the tools hanging on the wall; the threshing flail, the hammer, the hand scythe or the axe. Invariably, Chen would disarm him with ease, no matter how quickly Hawkwood attacked or what weapon he favoured. Gradually, however, Hawkwood came to understand the principles Chen employed, how it was possible to defuse an attack using gravity, speed and leverage to unbalance his opponent and effect a counter strike and every now and then he found himself piercing Chen’s formidable defences. But not very often.

Chen transferred his weight to his left foot and thrust the knife towards Hawkwood’s throat. This time, Hawkwood was unarmed. He brought up his right hand, found Chen’s wrist, rotated it and, stepping to the left, brought the heel of his left hand against Chen’s braced elbow. Chen went down and Hawkwood released his grip.

Chen came off the mattress and nodded. “Better. You still slow, but better.”

“Better”, Hawkwood had learned, was the closest Chen ever got to awarding high praise.

They’d been in the cellar for two hours. Hawkwood’s shirt was soaked. Perspiration coated his skin and his arms and legs ached. He felt a perverse pleasure, however, at seeing for the first time the thin line of perspiration that beaded Chen’s temple. It meant he was probably doing something right.

In the lull, his ears picked up the faint sound of a tolling bell, signalling the change of shift at the timber yard over on Narrow Street. Chen’s ears had caught it, too. He straightened, faced Hawkwood and inclined his head. Some might have looked upon it as a bow of deference but Hawkwood knew it was Chen’s way of announcing that training was over for the day.

“We finish now,” Chen said.

Hawkwood hoped the relief wasn’t showing on his face; or the pain, for that matter. It had occurred to him during the sessions in the cellar that over the years he’d suffered enough hurt in the service of king and country and latterly as a police officer, without it seeming necessary to risk further injury to life and limb trying to master some obscure fighting technique. But then, it had also struck him that, had he mastered the techniques before he’d taken up soldiering and policing he might well have avoided some of the injuries in the first place. Life, he thought, as he wiped his face and neck with a drying cloth, probably wasn’t meant to be that complicated.

Though he couldn’t deny the exhilaration he felt every time he staunched one of Chen’s attacks, which more than made up for any discomfort suffered in the acquisition of bruised bones, scraped knuckles and the occasional bloody nose.

His thoughts were jolted by a hesitant knock on the cellar door; an unusual occurrence. Tully, true to his agreement with Jago, had rarely encroached upon his and Chen’s privacy before. Even Chen, a master of stoicism, turned his head at the interruption. He looked at Hawkwood for direction. Hawkwood nodded and reached for his coat. Chen opened the door.

Tully Robinson stood on the threshold. He was a heavily built man, with thinning hair and a hangdog look.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Captain. Told to give you this.” He threw Chen a wary glance and held out a folded note.

Hawkwood took the paper, broke the seal and read the contents.

“Who delivered it?”

“Didn’t catch the name. Small fella; bow legs and spectacles; wore a wig, dressed like a pox doctor’s clerk.”

Hawkwood didn’t react. “How long ago?”

“’Bout ’alf an hour. I knows you likes your privacy, so I waited. Then I got to figuring it might be important after all. You know ’im?”

Hawkwood nodded. “For my sins.”

Tully regarded Hawkwood’s tall frame with some apprehension, taking in the dark hair tied off at the nape of the neck, the scarred features and the blue-grey eyes. Tully had worked on the river most of his life and had known hard men, but this one, even if he hadn’t been a friend of Jago’s, was a man he knew he wouldn’t want to cross. He’d called him “Captain” because that’s how Jago had addressed him, but as to Hawkwood’s profession, he wasn’t prepared to hazard a guess. The small, bespectacled messenger had provided no clue. He’d simply described Hawkwood and asked that the message be passed on.

Tully stared at the Chinaman. He still couldn’t put his finger on what the two of them got up to in the cellar. The walls and door were thick enough to deaden most of the noise from within. All he’d ever heard in passing were dull thumps and grunts and clunks that might have been wood striking metal. He’d never plucked up the nerve to ask either Jago or his friend the captain what they used the room for; indeed, that was part of the arrangement. It hadn’t stopped him wondering, though. And as for the presence of a Chinaman, God alone knew what he was doing there. Tully didn’t like to think. Message delivered, he departed, no wiser than he’d been before he knocked on the door.

Hawkwood considered the note, imagining the look on Twigg’s face had he heard Tully’s description of him. He did not wonder how Ezra Twigg had tracked him down but accepted the fact with weary resignation. Twigg’s resources were both extensive and bordering on the mystical. Speculation would have been a waste of time.

Chen collected a hessian sack from a hook on the wall and slipped it over his shoulder. He did so in silence, his movements controlled and precise. Hawkwood suspected that Chen had very few possessions; a leftover, he assumed, from Chen’s former vocation as a monk, where a vow of poverty would have been a prerequisite. He had a feeling Chen also travelled without baggage for another reason; a man on the run, even so far from home, would not want to be weighed down by unnecessary encumbrances.

They let themselves out of the cellar. At the end of the alley, Chen bowed again and without pausing turned and walked away; a small, slight and innocuous figure among the grime of his surroundings. Hawkwood watched him go. Chen did not look back. He never did. Hawkwood guessed he’d be heading for the East India Company mission on Fore Street, which catered for Lascar and Chinese seafarers who found themselves in extremis. In exchange for a roof and a bed, Chen carried out odd jobs, most of them menial, such as cleaning and preparing meals. In all likelihood, given his history, he probably provided spiritual guidance as well. As foreigners on a foreign shore, the Asian seamen had learned early on that there was safety in numbers. Hawkwood wondered if Chen taught them how to defend themselves, as well. Still wondering, he turned. Leaving Queen Street behind, he strode west, towards Sun Tavern Fields and on to the city. If Tully Robinson’s laconic observation was accurate, he had an appointment with a pox doctor.

And it wouldn’t do to be late.

Arriving at Bow Street, Hawkwood made his way to the first floor. Halfway up the stairs, his ears picked up the harsh scratch of nib on paper. In the ante-room, Ezra Twigg was bent low over his desk, his small mouth pursed in concentration. A tatty grey wig hung on a stand behind him. From a distance it looked like some kind of dead animal. It wasn’t often the wig was discarded. Hawkwood could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d seen the clerk without it. Hanging alongside the wig was a black tricorne hat that had also seen better days.

“Why, Mr Twigg!” Hawkwood said breezily. “And how are we this fine morning? Enjoy your constitutional?”

Ezra Twigg did not look up, though the pen in his hand may have paused momentarily. “Most efficacious, Officer Hawkwood. Thank you for asking.” Light from the window behind the desk reflected off Twigg’s spectacles. He looked like a diminutive, slightly disgruntled owl awoken upon his nest.

The pen resumed its pedantic scroll across the document. The little man’s flaking scalp showed palely through his receding hair. The hunched shoulders of his coat were liberally sprinkled with flecks of fine grey powder. As well as the wig, the clerk had also forsaken his ink guards. The cuffs of his shirt were edged with dark, uneven stains.

“Should have waited for me, Ezra,” Hawkwood continued cheerfully. “It’s a nice day. We could have strolled back together.”

The clerk muttered under his breath.

Hawkwood cupped an ear. “Sorry, Ezra; didn’t catch that. Did you say something?”

Twigg sniffed. “Only that some of us have work to do.” Again, the clerk did not bother to look up, but added dolefully, “He said you were to go straight in.”

Hawkwood grinned and crossed the room. He took off his riding coat, draped it over a chair back and tapped on the door. Behind him, Twigg gave the coat a pained look and shook his head in resignation.

“Enter.” The order came crisply from within.

Hawkwood pushed the door open.

Chief Magistrate James Read looked up from his desk.

“Ah, there you are.” Read put down his pen. His eyes moved towards the longcase clock that stood like a sentinel in the corner of the dark-panelled room. If he was irritated by the time it had taken Hawkwood to respond to the summons, he chose not to show it, but got up from his desk and made his way to the fireplace where bright flames danced behind a large mesh guard. Standing with his back to the hearth, he raised his coat-tails. Dressed in coordinating shades of grey, he was a slim, fastidious-looking man, with silver hair combed neatly back from a strong, aquiline face.

Hawkwood stepped into the room and closed the door. And immediately found himself perused.

“So, Hawkwood, how are you? I keep meaning to enquire. On the mend after the Morgan affair?”

“Every breath is a victory, sir,” Hawkwood said.

Read accepted Hawkwood’s response with a flinty stare. “Wounds no longer troubling you?”

“I’m well, sir, thank you.” Hawkwood tried to keep the wariness from his voice. The Chief Magistrate wasn’t usually this concerned for his health; at least not to his face.

“Splendid. Plenty of exercise, I trust? My physician tells me that a diet of regular physical activity can be a great aid to recovery, providing one doesn’t indulge in over exertion, of course.”

The Chief Magistrate fixed Hawkwood with another penetrating look. If he’d been wearing spectacles like his clerk, he would have been regarding Hawkwood over the rims, as if daring him to contradict.

“An excellent idea, sir. I’ll bear that in mind the next time I’m stabbed or shot.”

The corner of Read’s mouth lifted. Lowering his coat-tails, the Chief Magistrate gazed towards the window to where the sounds of the city rose stridently from the street below, as a bewildering variety of vendors and costermongers attempted, without much success, to drown out the incessant cacophony of cart wheels and clattering hooves.

Hawkwood waited expectantly.

James Read turned back. “I’ve a job for you.” The Chief Magistrate paused and then said, “I’m placing you on secondment.”

Not something Hawkwood was expecting. The word carried a distinct sense of foreboding, though he wasn’t sure why.

“Secondment?” He tried to keep his voice calm. “With whom?”

“Superintendent Brooke.”

Hawkwood wondered if the name was supposed to mean something. It didn’t.

“Never heard of him. Who is he?”

Read’s eyebrows rose momentarily at the less than reverential tone in Hawkwood’s voice and then he sighed.

“I’d be surprised if you had heard of him, frankly. Superintendent Brooke prefers to keep to the – how shall I put it? – less well-lit side of the street. In fact, I doubt there’s a dozen people who have heard of him. Even within his own department,” Read added cryptically.

Which sounds even more bloody ominous, Hawkwood thought.

Warmed through, Read stepped away from the hearth and walked to the window. “The superintendent’s responsibilities fall within the remit of the Home Office.”

Was that supposed to mean something? Hawkwood wondered.

“So, what are my duties to be . . . sir?”

Read hesitated, looked thoughtful, and then said, “It’s best if I leave it to Superintendent Brooke to brief you.” The magistrate glanced towards the clock dial. “Talking of whom; you are to present yourself without delay. Number 20 Crown Street.”

Read stepped across to his desk and retook his seat. “Caleb’s waiting downstairs. He has instruction to convey you to the address.” Read picked up his pen and reached for some papers. “That is all. You may relay my respects to Superintendent Brooke.”

Dismissed, Hawkwood headed for the door. He was on the threshold and about to close it behind him when he thought he heard Read’s voice. He paused and looked round. “Sir?”

The Chief Magistrate, he saw, had his head down and was engrossed in a document. There was no outward sign that he’d spoken. He did not look up.

Must have been my imagination, Hawkwood thought, though he could have sworn he’d heard the Chief Magistrate whisper the words, “Bon chance.”

As he let himself out, he wondered why he found that idea disquieting.

Chapter 3

Whitehall was as busy as Smithfield on market day.

But then Whitehall was always busy. Every time he’d travelled down it, whether by carriage or on foot, Hawkwood had never known an occasion when it wasn’t. Though that was to be expected, he supposed, given the nature of the business conducted in the grand buildings sited along its broad expanse. That and the fact that the nation was at war; for a nation at war was always on the move. The decisions reached in the offices of state concealed behind the impressive façades affected the lives of every man, woman and child in the land. As a soldier in the service of the king, Hawkwood had been subject to the whims and vain posturings of statesmen more than most. As a police officer, too. It was a depressing fact that there didn’t seem to be any escape from officialdom, no matter who, where, or what you were. And this place was at the centre of it all; the heartbeat.

The road was thronged with carriages; most of them in motion, though a good few were parked, either awaiting the return of their passengers or else competing for fares. Pedestrians hugged the verges in a vain bid to avoid the mud, dust and dung that coated the road. Those who were bold enough to attempt a crossing did so at their peril for the oncoming traffic invariably showed no inclination to cede its right of way.

Carriages weren’t the only means of transport in view. There were plenty of people on horseback, too, a great many of them in uniform, including a phalanx of cavalry heading for the exercise ground. The troopers drew applause as they trotted past.

In the wide forecourt of the Admiralty building, anxious blue-coated naval officers scurried around the high porticoed entrance like ants. It was the same with the Horse Guards. The only difference lay in the cut and the colour of the uniforms. From this imposing building had been issued the orders dispatching Hawkwood and thousands like him to Spain, Portugal and South America and a score of other outposts scattered across the furthest reaches of the globe. He gazed up past the sentry boxes and wondered what new strategies were being hatched on the other side of the high windows.

The cab skirted the front of the Treasury and the defile that was the entrance to Downing Street. Crown Street lay a few yards further on, between Fludyer Street and Charles Street, tucked away from the noise and bustle of the main avenues. Here, the low-hanging sun was partially obscured by inconvenient rooftops, so corners of the narrow street still lay in chilly shadow, giving it a disquieting air of gloom. There were a few strollers about, but Caleb’s was the only carriage. The horses’ hooves echoed on the road like stones in a hollow log.

The cab halted. Hawkwood alighted and told Caleb there was no need to wait. Caleb touched two fingers to his cap and drove off.

From the outside, Number 20 looked to be as unremarkable as its neighbours, save for the small, unobtrusive brass plate that was positioned to the right of the door. On it were inscribed the words: alien office.

Hawkwood stared down at the plate.

So that was why Magistrate Read had been so evasive.

A middle-aged, lank-haired clerk with pockmarked skin and a lugubrious cast to his features answered Hawkwood’s summons on the bell and, after fixing him with a baleful stare and taking his name, instructed him to wait. When the clerk returned he was accompanied by a formally dressed and much younger man, who looked Hawkwood up and down with ill-disguised condescension. Unlike his colleague, his hair looked freshly barbered. Hawkwood’s nostrils detected the faint whiff of pomade.

“Officer Hawkwood? My name is Flint. This way, if you please.” He crooked a finger. Hawkwood resisted the urge to snap it off.

Moving primly, Flint led the way upstairs. Apart from the sound of their footsteps, the building seemed eerily quiet. If it hadn’t been for the nameless functionary on the ground floor, they might well have been the only two in the place. Leading Hawkwood to a door at the top of the stairs, Flint knocked twice, opened the door and stood aside.

Hawkwood found himself in a spacious, high-ceilinged room that resembled a library more than it did an office. Books were displayed on every wall. The areas of panelling that did not contain bookshelves supported an impressive gallery of maps; the majority of which appeared to cover Europe – France and the Peninsula mostly – though India and Egypt, Hawkwood noticed, were also represented. The autumn sunlight was admitted into the room through a pair of large windows, in front of which sat a hefty mahogany desk, containing more books and piles of documents secured in red and black ribbons. Leaning back against the desk, arms folded in repose, was a tall, sombre-looking man dressed in black.

“Officer Hawkwood?” The man straightened, unfolded his arms but did not extend his hand. “Henry Brooke. Welcome to the Alien Office.” He nodded towards Flint, hovering by the door. “Thank you, Stormont. You may leave us. I’ll ring if I have need of you. Oh, and perhaps you’d be kind enough to take Officer Hawkwood’s coat for him, there’s a good fellow.”

Hawkwood removed his coat and handed it over. Flint looked none too happy at being relegated to footman. He didn’t quite turn his nose up, but it was a close-run thing. He left the room with the coat held at arm’s length and the door closed softly behind him.

Brooke continued to regard the door, as though expecting it to spring back open. Eventually satisfied that wasn’t about to happen, he pushed himself away from the desk and regarded Hawkwood with calm appraisal.

“You’ve come direct from Magistrate Read? How is he? In sound health, I trust?”

“He asked me to convey his compliments,” Hawkwood said.

“How kind of him.” Unhurriedly, Brooke stalked around the desk and took his seat. The superintendent’s jacket and breeches were beautifully tailored. Hawkwood could see stripes of very fine gold thread running through them.

Hawkwood glanced towards the fireplace. The hearth was empty and despite the azure sky visible through the windows, the room was by no means warm. James Read’s office was a positive furnace in comparison. Perhaps Brooke had spent all his money on his wardrobe and had nothing left over for kindling. Hawkwood wondered if surrendering his coat had been a wise decision.

“So, Officer Hawkwood,” Brooke said, somewhat regally. “What has Magistrate Read told you? Anything?”

Hawkwood shook his head. “He told me he’d leave that to you, sir.”

There was no invitation to sit down, though there were two empty chairs in the room. Hawkwood had no doubt it was a deliberate ploy rather than an oversight. By keeping him standing, Brooke was effortlessly and effectively emphasizing his authority.

Brooke smiled indulgently. “Did he now? How convenient.” Leaning forward, he stared down at a sheaf of papers on his desk. His eyes roved across the page. “You were a soldier. The 95th Regiment of Foot, I see.”

Brooke looked up. The expression on his face was reassuringly benign. Interpreting the remark as a comment rather than a question, Hawkwood kept quiet. He assumed Brooke would continue, which he did.

“A fine regiment.” Brooke did not expand upon the statement but lowered his eyes and continued to read. Without looking up, he said, “From my conversations with him, I know that Magistrate Read holds you in extremely high regard. You should be flattered. He’s not one to award praise lightly.” There was a pause. “Though he also advises me you have what he calls an ambivalent attitude towards authority.” Casually, Brooke lifted his gaze. “I imagine that’s a polite way of saying you’ve a tendency to disregard it. I’d also hazard a guess it did not serve you well in your army career; would I be right in that?”

Hawkwood considered his response and decided it would probably be more prudent if he remained silent, though it didn’t prevent him wondering what was coming next.

“I suspect that rather answers my question,” the man at the desk said, looking and sounding mildly amused. “Though the Rifle Corps, from all I hear, does allow its men a degree more latitude than most.” The smile evaporated. “Tell me about Talavera and Major Delancey.”

Hawkwood felt his stomach muscles contract. What the hell was this?

Brooke moved the document aside as though it was no longer of consequence. He leant forward, steepled his fingers and rested his elbows on the desk. The dark gaze was unwavering. “You may speak freely.”

It struck Hawkwood that Brooke had exceptionally long fingers. It was impossible not to compare them with Chen’s stubby digits. The silence stretched, while Brooke, seemingly content to prolong the moment, remained resolutely mute. He looked, Hawkwood thought, not unlike a praying mantis about to pounce upon a moth.

“Major Delancey was a Guards officer,” Hawkwood said, “with a misguided opinion of his own abilities. He wanted to make a name for himself. He gave a bad order and a lot of good men died because of it. I told him it would have been no great loss if he’d been counted among them. He took exception and called me out. That was his second mistake.” He stared down at the man behind the desk. “But you already knew that, sir. Didn’t you?”

The seated man raised his eyebrows. “You don’t think a man’s entitled to make a mistake?”

Hawkwood shook his head. “Not at all. The trouble with Delancey was that he abused the privilege. Most men have the capacity for regret. They learn from the errors they’ve committed. Delancey didn’t have the wits for that.”

Brooke’s face hardened. “It’s war. Men die. Isn’t that the way of it?”

“Yes, it is,” Hawkwood said. “But they shouldn’t have to die because some tomfool officer is hell-bent on glory.”

There was silence, then Brooke said sternly, “You were an officer. A captain, no less. How many men died under your command?”

“Too damned many,” Hawkwood responded coldly. “But unlike Delancey, I valued the lives of my men, I could name every bloody one of them. Would you care to tell me why I’m here . . . sir.”

A flash of irritation showed on the superintendent’s face but it disappeared in the blink of an eye, to be replaced by a thin smile. He lowered his hands on to the desk. “Well, Magistrate Read warned me you were direct; and I must say you don’t disappoint. As for the reason you’re here; we’ll come to that shortly. The Delancey affair cost you, though, didn’t it? You lost your commission.”

There didn’t seem much point in either denying the fact or elaborating upon it.

“Yes.”

“You were cashiered.” Brooke pulled his notes towards him and glanced down at them. “Which should have seen you reduced to the ranks or sent home. Yet, instead, you took to the mountains and joined the guerrilleros. Most intriguing. Of your own volition, or was it really with the blessing of your commander?”

Brooke was undoubtedly referring to Wellington. Hawkwood suspected that, once again, the superintendent already knew the answer to his question. Brooke clearly had his military record to hand and seemed keen on letting him know it. Hawkwood decided there and then not to grant the man any further concessions. If Brooke wanted additional information he’d have to bloody well work for it.

“Your time in the Peninsula served you well,” Brooke went on. “You speak Spanish, yes?”

He appeared undeterred by Hawkwood’s reluctance to respond to the previous enquiry.

This time, Hawkwood nodded. Brooke seemed intent on changing course every five minutes. Sooner rather than later, Hawkwood supposed, the superintendent would get to the point.

“In fact,” Brooke continued, “you’ve quite a flair for languages. You’re fluent in French, as well, I hear?”

“I’ve been fighting the bastards for twenty years. There was a general once; he said you should know your enemy.” Hawkwood shrugged. “Learning the language seemed as good a place to start as any.”

Brooke’s eyebrows lifted. He looked genuinely startled by Hawkwood’s reply. “You’re a student of Sun Tzu?”

“Sun what?” Hawkwood said. He had no idea what Brooke was talking about.

Brooke sat back in his chair. “Not what; it’s a name. Sun Tzu – T, Z, U. He’s your general. He was Chinese. He lived over two thousand years ago. He wrote a book on military strategy known as The Art of War. It’s been used by military leaders down through the ages. He wrote: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’ They do say Bonaparte’s a devotee,” Brooke added, with what might have been a hint of admiration. Then, intrigued by the expression on Hawkwood’s face, his brow furrowed. “What is it?”

Hawkwood was thinking of Chen, recalling how the Chinaman had scrutinized Bruiser Billy Boyd disporting himself with his previous opponents, then swiftly defeated him. Hawkwood wondered if Chen had heard of this Sun Tzu. He’d have to ask him. He had the strong feeling that the answer would be in the affirmative. He shook his head. “I wasn’t aware of his name.”

“Then it appears we’ve both learnt something today,” Brooke said serenely. He studied his notes. “I see you fought alongside Colquhoun Grant.”

Another name; this one known, however. Although it was from the more recent past, it was not one that Hawkwood had been expecting to hear.

“Not exactly.”

“What?” Something approaching alarm showed in the super-intendent’s eyes. “Are you saying I’ve been misinformed?”

“I was in the mountains when Captain Grant joined Wellington’s staff. I reported to him when I delivered information back to the general’s headquarters. It was after I left Spain that the captain became Lord Wellington’s chief exploring officer. He inherited my informers and he was able to make use of the guerrilleros I’d been working with.”

“Ah, in other words, he was your successor,” Brooke said, sounding relieved.

Hawkwood nodded. “That would be a more accurate description, yes.”

“Well, you clearly made a favourable impression, whichever way it was. He provided the references that enabled you to join Bow Street, no?” Brooke threw Hawkwood another questioning stare.

“Captain Grant had friends in high places,” Hawkwood said.

“Had?” The reply came sharply.

“He was captured,” Hawkwood said heavily. “Six months ago. The French finally managed to track him down and Bonaparte ordered him hanged as a spy. Another thing that Corsican bastard has to answer for. Now, forgive me, sir, but would you mind telling me what I’m doing here?”

Brooke leant back in his chair, his face severe. He remained silent, as if pondering his decision. Finally, he gave a curt nod. “Very well. What do you know of this department?”

“According to Magistrate Read, you’re part of the Home Office.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Hawkwood said. “You hunt subversives.”

Brooke looked slightly taken aback by Hawkwood’s forthright response. Then he frowned. “Subversives? I do declare that’s a word I’ve not come across before. Though I must say it’s a good one, and remarkably apposite. From the French, possibly?” He regarded Hawkwood with renewed respect. “Is that all?”

Hawkwood hesitated.

When he’d seen the brass plaque to the side of the front door, the name “Alien Office” had triggered a faint memory that went deeper than his confessed store of knowledge. He wasn’t sure what it was a memory of, exactly, other than the vague remembrance of whispered conversations and rumours voiced in dark corridors about even darker deeds. It was probably best to claim ignorance. That way, at least, any information he did receive would be straight from the horse’s mouth.

“Perhaps you ought to tell me, sir.”

From the look in Brooke’s eye it was clear the superintendent suspected that Hawkwood was being deliberately obtuse.

The moment passed. Brooke nodded. “As you wish. Well, Magistrate Read was quite correct. We do indeed fall under the aegis of the Home Office, though we operate independently from it.”

“And what do you operate on, exactly?”

“Oh, all manner of things,” Brooke replied, showing his teeth. The effect was not so much jocular as disarmingly menacing. “You know it was your Chinese general who said that a hundred ounces of silver spent on intelligence can save a thousand spent on war. You might say it’s my duty to try and prove him right.”

“And how do you do that?”

“By spreading confusion among our enemies.”

Brooke pushed himself away from his desk and stood up. He shot his cuffs and began to pace the room, his hands clasped behind his back.

He looked over his shoulder. “As a police officer you are, no doubt, familiar with the workings of the Alien Act?”

Hawkwood nodded.

The act had been inaugurated in ’93, long before his arrival at Bow Street. It required all foreigners to register with the customs officials at the port where they landed or at a police office. Despite the latter stipulation, to Hawkwood’s knowledge there had been no direct impact from the legislation on his own duties as a Runner. Up until now, that was.

“I’m relieved to hear it,” Brooke said. Eyes front, he continued to pace. “However, what you may not know is that the Act was actually prepared in response to advice from the émigrés themselves. That was how this office came into being. The Prime Minister was becoming increasingly concerned by the number of refugees arriving on our shores, having fled the Terror. There was no knowing who we were letting through, no guarantee that some of them weren’t agents who’d smuggled themselves in to spread dissent among the populace.”

The superintendent performed an about turn. “The last thing this country needed was for the seeds of republicanism to start germinating on this side of the Channel. God forbid there should be a mob laying siege to the Tower! So, subversives, revolutionaries, agitators, spies – call them what you will – it was and is the Office’s task to root out the bad apples. And I’m happy to report that we have enjoyed considerable success in that regard.”

Brooke stopped pacing. He was standing before a map of Europe. He stared up at it, his eyes narrowing. “Then came the war.” The words were spoken softly, almost wistfully. It was as though Brooke was thinking aloud.

Collecting himself, he continued, “It was my predecessor, Wickham, who took the initiative. He decided it was time to give the French a taste of their own medicine. He proposed that we set up a web of correspondents throughout Europe, using our embassy in Berne as the collecting house for information.”

Brooke reached out and ran the flat of his hand over the map’s surface. “The intention was not only to gather intelligence about the revolutionaries on their own soil but also to find ways of discrediting them. The best way to do that, he believed, was to initiate contact with royalist sympathizers who’d infiltrated republican organizations in the hope of disabling the régime and restoring the Bourbon monarchy. We were already in league with the royalist government in exile over here, so it made sense for us to continue taking advantage of their expertise. It also helped that Wickham had been appointed our ambassador in Switzerland.” The superintendent tapped the map with the end of his forefinger.

“Dangerous work,” Hawkwood said, still wondering where all this was leading.

Brooke nodded. “You’re not wrong there. Needless to say, the damned Frogs kept putting pressure on the Swiss, with that worm Fouché pulling the strings. In the end, Wickham was forced to resign his post. He did uncommonly well though; managed to last right through until Amiens. He came home when the peace was signed.”

Brooke turned. “Nobody believed for a moment that was the end of it, of course. But we went through the motions. Our foreign correspondents were told to stand down, laid to rest if you like, and the office reverted to its domestic role. Wickham’s tenure ended and I received my appointment.” A thin smile split the aristocratic features. “I dare say some would regard it as the poisoned chalice”

Brooke returned his attention to the map on the wall. “As I was saying: we never for a moment thought it was all over. We knew as soon as Bonaparte appointed himself Consul for life he’d be looking for ways of expanding his damned empire. We heard from our royalist friends that he was already making plans, building up his forces, even as we were putting pen to the treaty. It didn’t take a genius to know that we’d be in his sights again. Only one thing for it; we had to rouse our correspondents from their slumbers and put them back into service. While our little corporal plotted to increase his military might, we chose to pursue a more surreptitious approach. You recall what I said about your Chinese general and the hundred ounces of silver?”

“Guile not guns?”

“You have it.” Brooke looked pleased that Hawkwood had remembered. “By the time war was re-declared, our correspondents were back in place and in stronger positions than before. They’ve been active ever since, burrowing their way into the heart of the Empire, like moles in a garden; keeping us abreast of events and Bonaparte’s intentions.”

Brooke’s face grew more serious. “Which brings us to the reason you’re here.”

Here comes the rub, Hawkwood thought.

“A situation has arisen,” Brooke said slowly. “We’ve received a communication from one of our correspondents which we feel merits serious and immediate attention. It concerns a proposal – I’ll call it no more than that – which, if acted upon, could well pave the way towards a cessation of hostilities. Magistrate Read and I have held various discussions on how we should proceed and your name was put forward. You have – how shall I say? – a number of talents that we believe could be relevant to the task.”

“Talents?” Hawkwood repeated cautiously. He’d no intention of querying why Brooke should have been consulting with James Read in the first place. Hawkwood was well aware that the Chief Magistrate’s responsibilities extended far beyond the confines of a small, dark-panelled office at 4 Bow Street. He’d long since ceased to be surprised at the influence James Read wielded within the serried ranks of the high and mighty.

Though that didn’t prevent another warning bell chiming inside his ear. A similar blandishment had been voiced prior to his last assignment, and he hadn’t long recovered from that bloody enterprise. James Read’s enquiry into his well-being suddenly started to make sense.

“Magistrate Read was kind enough to furnish me with some details of your previous undertakings, in particular the infiltration of the French community on the prison ship Rapacious. Most impressive. You posed as an American officer attached to a French infantry regiment.”

The job which James Read had termed the Morgan Affair. Hawkwood had been sent to investigate the fate of two Royal Navy officers who’d disappeared while trying to infiltrate a British smuggling ring specializing in helping French prisoners of war get back to France. Though there had been a satisfactory conclusion to the assignment, a not inconsiderate amount of blood had been spilt along the way.

Hawkwood said nothing.

Brooke pursed his lips. “Could you not have passed yourself off as a French officer?”

Hawkwood’s response was immediate. “No.”

Brooke’s head came up quickly, indicating it wasn’t the answer he’d been seeking. “Why not?”

“Because I’d’ve had to pretend I couldn’t speak English and that would have been impractical.”

“How so? I don’t follow.”

“The alternative would have meant trying to speak English with a French accent, and that would have been stupid and damned near impossible. They’d have been on to me the moment I opened my mouth. It made more sense to pass myself off as an American who could speak French.”

“Ah, yes, indeed. I see. Fair point.” There was a pause, then Brooke said, “What if there was no requirement to speak English? Could you pass yourself off as a French officer, then, do you think?”

“You mean to other Frenchmen?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Hawkwood asked, warily.

“Just humour me,” Brooke said. “Yes or no?” Caught in the light from the windows, the superintendent’s face was un naturally still. His raptor eyes were bright. Tiny dust motes tumbled and spiralled above his head.

The small distinct voice buried deep inside Hawkwood’s brain came to life again and hissed urgently, Say no, you damned fool! Say no!

“Probably,” Hawkwood said.

As soon as the word was out of his mouth, he felt the atmosphere in the room change. A nerve trembled along the superintendent’s jaw. The reflex was followed by what might have been a sigh. Though, like the last words he thought he had heard pass from James Read’s mouth, Hawkwood could well have been mistaken.

“I assume you’re about to tell me why that’s important,” Hawkwood said.

Brooke hesitated and then said, “We require someone to liaise with our correspondent to verify the feasibility of the proposal and, if it is at all viable, to assist in its implementation.”

“And that would be me?” Hawkwood said.

“That’s why you’re here.”

“You don’t have your own men?” Hawkwood asked.

“Oh, indeed I do, and very capable they are, too, but none of them have quite the qualifications that we’re looking for.”

“Which would be?”

“Let us say there are certain parameters attached to the enterprise which would require the involvement of someone with a military background. You clearly have proven expertise in that field. You are also fluent in French and you are no stranger to taking on an assumed identity. In short, you are uniquely qualified for this particular . . . assignment.”

“You want me to go to France and pass myself off as a French officer?” Hawkwood said.

“As a French citizen, certainly. As to the exact identity you would have to adopt, that has yet to be determined. It would depend on the prevailing circumstances. I’m afraid I cannot be more precise than that. Would you be willing to undertake such a task?”

“You’re giving me the option?” Hawkwood asked, surprised.

“Your attachment to this office is at my request but at Magistrate Read’s discretion. On that basis, he advised me that, given what befell you the last time you placed yourself in jeopardy, it would be unconscionable of me not to draw attention to the hazards and allow you the opportunity to make up your own mind as to whether you accept the undertaking, or return to your law-enforcement duties. In short, Officer Hawkwood; it will be your decision.”

“Based on what?” Hawkwood said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’ve hardly told me anything,” Hawkwood pointed out. “You’ve given me no specifics.”

Brooke shook his head. “Regrettably, at this juncture, nor can I. There’s the grave and overwhelming matter of secrecy. The essence of the assignment is such that it would not be wise to furnish you with all the details in case you’re apprehended by the French authorities. Were they to suspect you to be in league with this department, they would not be averse to employing coercion in order to extract information from you. There’s always the danger that, no matter how resistant to persuasion you believe yourself to be, you would still reveal our intentions. We cannot afford to take that risk.

“You’ll be provided with identity papers and travel document ation and a point of rendezvous from where you’ll be taken to meet with our correspondent, who will then familiarize you with the salient details of our . . . deception. All I can tell you at this stage is that this could be of paramount importance with regards to the course of the war. If the plan is successful, there is no question that a great number of lives will be saved. Naturally, there is a proviso.”

“There is?” Hawkwood said. “Who’d have thought it?”

Brooke ignored the remark. “If you were to be apprehended, this department would deny all knowledge of your existence. You would be on your own and left to your own resources. You comprehend me?”

“I’d say you’ve made that part of it perfectly clear,” Hawkwood said. “How long do I have?”

“How long?” Brooke echoed, puzzled. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“To decide.”

“Ah, perhaps I didn’t make that clear, either. Forgive me. I’d be obliged if you could let me know your decision before you leave this room.”

There was an uncomfortable silence before Hawkwood said, “That long? And there I was thinking you’d want to know this very second.”

Hawkwood turned and looked at the map.

“So, where is this correspondent of yours? That’s another thing you’ve neglected to tell me.”

Brooke followed his gaze. “Is it? That was remiss of me. He’s here –” Brooke reached out and stabbed the map with his finger.

And waited.

“Well, there’s a coincidence,” Hawkwood said softly. “I’ve always wanted to see Paris.”

Chapter 4

“Well, you were right,” Brooke said, raising the coffee cup to his lips. “He’s certainly a recalcitrant devil.”

“That’s been said before,” James Read responded wryly. Brooke took a drink and set his cup down.

“He achieves results,” Read said. He took a slow sip from his own cup. “That’s the main thing.”

“Set a fox to catch a rat, eh?”

“Indeed.”

The two men were seated at a table in the first-floor coffee room in White’s. They were by the end front window, through which they had an uninterrupted view over the narrow balcony down on to the northern end of St James’s Street. There were other club members around them but the tables on either side were unoccupied so both men were able to converse freely without the likelihood of being overheard.

“Y’know it was Sidmouth who first brought me here,” Brooke murmured absently as he gazed down the long room. “Just as well he’s a Tory. If he’d been a Whig I’d have ended up in that other place, which would have been rather amusing. Mind you, it would probably have guaranteed a decent table for supper.”Read acknowledged the remark with a polite smile. He didn’t have to look to know that the building being referred to sat almost diagonally across from them on the opposite side of the street. The premises housed a similar retreat called Brooks’s.

James Read was a private man and not, as a rule, a patron of gentlemen’s establishments. He found them somewhat claustro -phobic, though he acknowledged that they did provide a convenient forum in which to conduct business, especially business of a clandestine nature. The staff was uniformly efficient and discreet which, given both Brooke’s and Read’s professions, was a decided advantage and, despite his cynicism, the dining room could usually be called upon to produce an acceptable bottle of claret and a competent lamb chop at relatively short notice.

“An interesting fellow, though,” Brooke said, still musing. “What’s his full story? What was he doing before he took the king’s shilling? Do you know?”

“I’m not sure I’d consider that relevant,” Read said.

“But . . .?” Brooke pressed.

“You know, I was thinking that I may well stay on for luncheon,” James Read said, looking off towards the door to the dining room. “I hear the new chef serves a rather fine truffle sauce with the turbot.” He dabbed a napkin along his lips.

The superintendent, who was well aware of Read’s antipathy towards the surroundings, sighed. “All right, point taken.”

Brooke studied Read over the rim of his cup. “You knew he’d accept, though, didn’t you?”

“He responds to a challenge,” Read said. “It’s what drives him.”

“There’s no family, I take it?”

Read shook his head. “No.”

“Mmm, probably just as well, in the circumstances. Not many friends either, I suspect.”

“They’re few in number, but impressively loyal.”

“And demons? I’d hazard a guess he has his fair share.”

“Show me a man with twenty years of soldiering who hasn’t,” Read said.

“And I’ll wager those scars could tell a few stories,” Brooke said.

Read, refusing to rise to the bait, made no reply.

Brooke smiled, finally accepting defeat.

Both men took another sip of coffee.

“How much did you tell him?” Read asked.

“What we agreed. That we’d provide him with all document ation and a meeting point. After that he . . . they . . . are on their own.”

“Can I assume you did not reveal the correspondent’s identity?”

“You can. That omission was covered by the need for secrecy.” Read reached for the coffee pot, drew it towards him and proceeded to refill his cup.

“You look . . . worried,” Brooke said.

Read put the pot down. “Merely pondering upon their chances of success.”

“It sounds as if you’ve a soft spot for the fellow.”

“He’s a good officer. He’s my officer. I don’t relish placing any of my men in harm’s way if I can help it.”

“Well, he’s mine now, or at least for the duration. And the opportunity’s too good to pass up. We’d be fools if we didn’t try to take advantage.”

Read tried to quell the feeling of disquiet prompted by Brooke’s crass proprietorial comment. “I believe that’s what was said the last time this was attempted.”

“Ah, but the bugger was in Spain, remember. This time, he’s in Russia; not so close to home. It’s an entirely different kettle of fish.”

“Then let us hope it is to our advantage,” Read said. “Have you informed the Prime Minister, by the way?”

Brooke shook his head and used his fingertips to smooth a non-existent bump in the table cloth. “Not as yet.”

“Is it your intention to do so?”

“I’m of a mind to keep it between ourselves for the time being,” Brooke said. “Given that we’re still in the preparatory stages.” He favoured Read with an oblique glance. “Unless you have any objections?”

Read shook his head. “Whatever you think is appropriate.”

“I think it’s for the best,” Brooke said. “Besides, there’s no requirement for him to be privy to everything we do.”

“And our émigré friends?” Read asked.

Brooke shook his head again.

“Not even the Comité? Their collaboration’s proved of great benefit to us in the past.”

“Indeed it has, and my department is exceedingly grateful, but you can’t be too careful. We live in dangerous times. We must exercise caution, even where our so-called allies are concerned.”

Composed of émigrés drawn from the ranks of former government ministers, senior clergymen and a coterie of aristocrats all loyal to the French crown, the Comité Français was effectively the royalist government-in-exile. Its goal was the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

“Besides, they’ve been rather peppery of late,” Brooke added.

Brooke was referring to the rift between the heirs to the French throne: the Comte d’Artois and his brother Louis Stanislas. Having fled France in the wake of the Revolution, both were now resident in England. Although Louis was the next in line following the execution of his brother and the death of his nephew while detained in the Temple prison, it was the Comte d’Artois to whom the majority of the émigrés looked for guidance, a state of affairs that had led to deep mistrust between the two siblings.

“You’d have thought sharing a common foe would have put paid to the damned bickering,” Brooke said. “It makes you wonder why we continue to support them. It’s costing us a fortune. It’ll only take one slip for Parliament to get wind of our special donations and they’ll be at our throats. They’ve been looking for excuses to reduce our funding. If that happens, we’re all out of a damned job.”

“In that case, we must pray that Hawkwood and . . .” Read paused “. . . your correspondent . . . are successful in their endeavours.”

“Indeed,” Brooke said. He smiled silkily and raised his cup. “Here’s to good fortune.”

“When does he embark?” Read asked.

“Tonight,” Brooke said. “A private coach is transporting him to Dover. There’s a vessel waiting. If the weather’s kind to us, he’ll sail on the evening tide.”

“Then we should pray for calm seas, as well,” Read said. Brooke kept his cup raised.

“Amen to that,” he said.

Maddie Teague watched silently from the open doorway as Hawkwood rolled the spare shirts and breeches he had removed from his army chest and laid them on the bed next to a battered valise. The lid of the chest remained propped open. Inside it, a curved sabre lay sheathed atop a dark green tunic. Even though it was folded, it was obvious that the uniform jacket had survived many campaigns and had been repaired innumerable times. Next to the tunic was a pair of grey cavalry breeches and a waist sash the colour of dried ox blood. Below the tunic and breeches lay an officer’s greatcoat and under that, partly hidden, was a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth. One end of the oilcloth had worked loose, revealing the polished walnut butt and brass patch-box cover of an army rifle.

“Matthew?” Maddie said softly.

Hawkwood turned.

Maddie lifted her gaze from the contents of the chest. Her eyes held his. “Should I keep the room?”

Hawkwood found himself transfixed by her look.

“It was a jest,” she said, though her emerald eyes did not hold much humour.

Maddie was tall and slender. Her auburn hair, pale colouring and high cheekbones hinted at her Celtic roots, while her strength of character could usually be measured by the depth and force of her gaze. On this occasion, however, there was only concern on her face.

She continued to stare at him. “What are you thinking?”

Hawkwood shook his head. “Nothing.”

Maddie stepped forward and placed her right hand on his chest. “You’re a poor liar, Matthew Hawkwood.”

Hawkwood smiled. “I was thinking yes, you should definitely keep the room for me.”

Her face softened. She tapped his waistcoat with her closed fist.

“It’s my job, Maddie. It’s what I do,” Hawkwood said.

“I know.”

She rested her palm against his cheek. Her hand was cool to the touch.

He thought back to the first time they’d met. It was not long after his return to England from Spain. He’d been in search of a roof over his head and Maddie was the landlady of the Blackbird Inn, with two empty rooms in need of an occupant. The financial arrangement had suited both of them; Maddie in particular. Her husband had been a sea captain and he’d bought the inn to provide an additional source of revenue when he retired. But Captain Teague had perished when his ship had fallen prey to the storm tossed waters of the Andaman Sea, leaving his widow with a string of unpaid bills and a lengthening queue of creditors. Hawkwood’s timely arrival had kept the wolves from the door and given Maddie the time she’d needed to turn the Blackbird from a debt-ridden back-alley hostelry into the respectable establishment it had become.

It had taken some months before their business partnership developed into something more; for the trust between landlady and lodger to grow into a bond of friendship, and it had still been a good while after that when Maddie Teague had first visited Hawkwood’s bed. Neither of them had ventured to translate feelings into words and yet it had become clear over time that what existed between them had long since transcended the need for mere physical gratification. There had been dalliances along the way, on both sides, and yet the affection and the closeness had endured.

“If you don’t hear from me and you need help, go to Nathaniel,” Hawkwood said. “You know how to get a message to him?”

She removed her hand and nodded. “Yes.”

There was a silence, mirrored by the look in her eyes. “How long should I wait for news?”

“You’ll know,” Hawkwood said.

She absorbed that. “Does Nathaniel know where you’re going?”

“I’m not even sure I do,” Hawkwood said.

She lifted her hand again and ran a fingertip along the line of his cheek, below his eye, tracing the scars. “Your wounds have barely healed.”

“No rest for the wicked, Maddie,” Hawkwood said. “You should know that by now.”

Her green eyes flashed. “That’s what you said the last time.” She stepped back and folded her arms about her, as if warding off a sudden chill. “Just don’t expect me to cry myself to sleep. That’s all.”

Hawkwood had always suspected Maddie Teague was too strong a woman for that, though in truth her comment made him wonder; was she still jesting, or not?

“Curious,” Hawkwood said. “That’s what I was going to say.”

She gave a wan smile and waited as he placed the shirts and breeches in the valise. Sensing her eyes on him, he turned.

“Take care, Matthew,” she whispered.

He nodded. “Always.”

Maddie lowered her arms and smoothed down her dress. “I’ll have Hettie find something in the kitchen for your journey. We don’t want you going hungry.”

“Perish the thought,” Hawkwood said.

She frowned. “Now you’re making fun of me.”

He shook his head. “I’d never do that.”

She gazed at him intently and took a deep breath. Then, without speaking, she leaned forward and kissed him fiercely before turning on her heel and exiting the room.

Leaving Hawkwood to his packing, alone with his thoughts.

There was something eerily familiar about her lines, even by moonlight, and as he drew closer Hawkwood saw why. She was a cutter. The long horizontal bowsprit, the sharply tapering stern and the preposterous size of her rig in proportion to her length and beam were unmistakable. The last time he’d boarded a similar vessel it had been at sea, in the company of Jago and the French privateer, Lasseur, and he’d been fully armed with a pistol and a tomahawk and screaming like a banshee. This time, his arrival was a lot less frenetic.

The journey from London had taken four changes of horses and the best part of the day, so it was late evening when the coach finally made its bone-rattling descent into the town; by which time Hawkwood’s throat was dry with dust, while his spine felt as if it had been dislocated by the constant jolting.

Even if it hadn’t been for the silhouette of the castle ramparts high above him and the lights clustered at the foot of the dark chalk cliffs, it would have been possible to gauge his proximity to the port purely by the miasma of odours arising from it; the most prominent being smoke, cooking fires and sewage, the unavoidable detritus of closely packed human habitation.

Dover was home to both an ordnance depot and a victualling yard, and keeping the navy armed, watered and fed was clearly a twenty-four-hour operation, if the number of people on the streets – both in uniform and civilian dress – was any indication. The town looked to be wide awake. The public houses in particular, to judge by the knots of men and women weaving unsteadily between them, were still enjoying a brisk trade.

The coachman, clearly adhering to prior instruction, steered the vehicle away from the main part of the town and into a maze of unlit cobbled alleyways leading down towards the outer harbour. After numerous twists and turns, the coach finally drew to a halt and Hawkwood, easing cramped muscles, stepped out on to a darkened quay.

The cutter had the dockside to herself, her tall, tapering mainmast and canvas-furled yards reaching for the moon like winter-stripped branches. Lantern lights were showing above the closed gun ports and Hawkwood spotted shadows moving around the deck. He turned his coat collar up.

The concoction of smells was even stronger here and he guessed they were within spitting distance of the navy supply stores, for the combined aromas of unrendered animal fats, stale fish, offal, baking bread and fermenting hops hung heavily in the night air alongside the more familiar dockyard scents of grease, cordage, tarred rigging and mildewed timbers. Though, he supposed, looking around, it could all have been just an exaggeration of Dover’s natural reek.

Noise always seemed magnified at night and the thudding of hammers and rasping of saws floated across the ink-black water from the surrounding jetties. At the same time, from the opposite direction, a stiff breeze was coming off the Channel, carrying with it a soulful requiem of creaking spars and clinking chains from craft moored along the outer harbour walls. To add to the lament, a watch bell clanged mournfully in the darkness.

Behind him, the coachman, satisfied that his passenger had been delivered safely, clicked his tongue and the coach trundled off into the night.

As Hawkwood neared the ship, he noted that the vessel wasn’t displaying a man-of-war’s standard colour scheme. Instead of the customary buff-painted hull, he saw that all the external timbers, from bowsprit to counter, were as black as coal. As his mind deciphered the significance, a slim, uniformed figure stepped nimbly from the cutter’s gangplank.

“Mr . . . Smith?” The speaker touched the brim of his hat. “I’m Lieutenant Stuart. Welcome aboard Griffin.”

He hadn’t taken Brooke all that seriously when the superintendent had given him his boarding instructions. Brooke’s explanation for the false name, when he’d seen the sceptical expression unfold across Hawkwood’s face, had been that it simplified the process and avoided prevarication. Hawkwood had been tempted to ask Brooke what the procedure was if there was more than one passenger per voyage and then had decided against it. Brooke, he’d suspected, wouldn’t have found the enquiry amusing.

As he took in Hawkwood’s appearance, the lieutenant’s head lifted, revealing more of his features. He looked, Hawkwood thought, disturbingly young to be in charge of his own ship; though as vessels went, Stuart’s command was unlikely to see an admiral’s pennant fluttering from her masthead any time soon. She was too small and too far down the lists for that. Nevertheless, from the serious expression on his boyish face it was plain her captain thought no less of her for that.

The lieutenant led the way on board. A second officer, and the only other man Hawkwood could see dressed in uniform, was waiting by the rail.

“Lieutenant Weekes,” Stuart said. “My second-in-command.”

There wasn’t that much difference in their ages, Hawkwood thought. Weekes may have been a year or two older, but that was all. Though it might have been his deep-set eyes and serious expression that made him appear so.

“Sir.” Weekes favoured Hawkwood with a brief nod before looking expectantly at his captain.

Stuart obliged. “Prepare for departure, Simon, while I take our passenger below.”

“Very good, sir.”

As his first officer turned away, Stuart turned to Hawkwood. “Just as well you arrived when you did. The tide’s already on the ebb. Another half an hour and we’d need deeper water beneath our keel. We’d’ve had to anchor her outside the walls and ferry you out in the jolly boat. I don’t think you’d have cared much for that.” The lieutenant threw Hawkwood an unexpected and surprisingly roguish grin. “I’ll show you to your quarters. I apologize in advance; there aren’t too many home comforts.”

The lieutenant took off his hat to reveal a mop of unruly dark hair, and led the way past the tied-down carronades towards the cutter’s stern and an open hatchway. Hawkwood noticed that none of the crew were paying much attention to his arrival. As he followed the lieutenant across the deck, he wondered if that meant they’d become used to passengers embarking in the dead of night.

The lieutenant drew Hawkwood’s attention to the top of the ladder. “Watch your step.”

Hawkwood, reminded of the last time he’d been below decks, nodded dutifully before following Stuart down the near vertical companionway.

Stuart said over his shoulder, “As you see, it can get a mite cosy at times. We’re not rigged to carry passengers. Though we’ve had our fair share,” he added conspiratorially. “Mind your head.”

It’s still not as bad as a prison hulk, Hawkwood thought, as he ducked below the beam, but he didn’t tell Stuart that.

Stuart opened the door to the cabin and stood aside to allow Hawkwood to enter, which he did, shoulders lowered.

“You’ll forgive me if I leave you to get settled,” Stuart said, remaining by the companionway. “I must return to my station.”

Without waiting for an answer the lieutenant, with another hesitant smile, turned and made his way topside. Hawkwood surveyed his quarters.

The lantern-lit space was just about large enough to accommodate the single narrow cot, table and locker. If he’d been of a mind to assume the crucifix position in the middle of the cabin, Hawkwood was quietly confident his palms would have touched the opposing bulkheads. Not that there was much space to stand upright, save for the square of deck immediately beneath the closed skylight. The thought struck him that if there was a cat on board, there’d be precious little room to swing it. The air smelled vaguely of bilge water, candle grease, tobacco and sweat.

Footfalls sounded throughout the ship as the crew made last-minute haste, stowing and making fast all items not required in getting the vessel underway. From somewhere – Hawkwood presumed it was the galley – there came the ringing clatter of a pot falling to the deck, followed by a sharp, one-word obscenity, quickly hushed.

A low call sounded from above and Hawkwood caught the order: “Let go forrard!”

The deck moved beneath him and the light in the cabin dipped as the lantern swung. As he held on to the side of the cot for support, he was reminded, not for the first time, why sea voyages failed to excite him.

And we haven’t even left the bloody harbour yet, he thought dismally.

A drawn-out groan came from close by and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled before he realized it was only the rudder turning below the transom on the other side of the bulkhead. Slowly, Griffin’s bow began to come around.

Another directive sounded from on high: “Let go aft!”

There were no stern windows in the cutter and thus no means of fixing upon either the horizon or an aligned point in order to counteract the movement of the ship, save for the deckhead lantern which continued to swing gently on its hook as though it had a mind of its own. Hawkwood had the sudden overwhelming desire to feel cool air against his cheek. Leaving his unopened valise on the cot, he left the cabin, closed the door behind him and made his way back up the companionway and on to the deck, in time to see one of the hands hauling in the last few feet of stern line.

Reliant on the momentum of the tide and the helmsman’s control of the tiller bar, the cutter continued her gradual revolution. The quayside, Hawkwood noted, looking over the rail, remained dark and empty, unlike the rest of the dockyard where random lights flickered like tiny glow worms. Hawkwood supposed that was why the Griffin had had the isolated mooring to herself. So that their departure would go unnoticed.

His gaze travelled beyond the quay, up over the congested, smoke-stained rooftops and on towards the Western Heights, the near vertical rock face that rose behind the port like the encircling tiers of a vast and moonlit amphitheatre.

“Found your sea legs, Mr Smith?” The enquiry came from Lieutenant Stuart, who was standing by his shoulder. “Chances are you’ll need them before the night’s out.”

“You’re expecting rough weather?” Hawkwood asked, his heart sinking at the prospect.

Stuart laughed. “It’s the English Channel and it’s October. What else would I be expecting?”

Hawkwood knew his expression must have reflected what was in his mind for Stuart said immediately, “Don’t worry, Griffin might not be the youngest or the largest cutter in the fleet, but she’ll get us there.” Stuart patted the high bulwark affectionately and looked over his shoulder. “You may ready the mains’l, Mr Welland.”

“Aye, sir.” The acknowledgement came from a burly man with long side whiskers and dark jowls, dressed in a pea jacket and dun-coloured breeches. The ship’s bo’sun, Hawkwood guessed. He looked older than his commanding officer, by at least ten years.

“All right, you idle buggers. You heard the lieutenant – stand by. That includes you, Haskins, if you’re not too busy.”

Hawkwood saw the corner of the lieutenant’s mouth twitch as the order was relayed.

There had been no raising of the voice, Hawkwood noted, as the crewmen readied themselves, and no tongue lashings. The order – even the aside to seaman Haskins – had been spoken rather than shouted and yet every word had carried the same quiet authority. The tone had been more reminiscent of a schoolmaster coaxing his pupils to open their text books than a hardened warrant officer demanding unconditional obedience. Hawkwood knew that only a man with many years of experience under his belt could draw that amount of respect. It also said a lot for the quality of the cutter’s crew that they were anticipating the commands before they were given and were reacting accordingly: with speed and efficiency and in relative silence. There was little doubt that they’d been well drilled.

“Volunteers?” Hawkwood said, taking a guess.

If Stuart thought the question surprising or impertinent he didn’t let on. Instead he looked faintly pleased and nodded. “Not a pressed man among them and locals mostly, save for the master. They know these English coastal waters like the backs of their hands. That’s not to say there aren’t a few former scallywags, but I’ve no interest in what mischief they might have got up to in their past lives. It’s how they conduct themselves on board that matters and, right now, I wouldn’t trade a single one of them.”

“Including Haskins?”

The lieutenant grinned. “Including Haskins. Not that I’d trust him with my sister, mind you.” The grin was replaced by a soft chuckle. “Or my mother, come to that.”

Stuart’s reply took Hawkwood back to his army days. He’d commanded soldiers with similar reputations; practitioners of every vice, from gamblers and horse traders to poachers, rustlers, bigamists and thieves, and some blackguards whose exploits would have made a tinker blush, but in a fight, for the honour of the regiment, there were no better men to have at your back. Stuart’s comment was proof that the maxim applied to the Royal Navy as well.

Welland’s voice cut into his reminiscences. “Hoist mains’l!”

A squeal came from the blocks as the huge four-cornered sail rose from the boom, followed by a sharp crackle of spreading canvas as Griffin completed her turn. He looked over the cutter’s long running bowsprit towards the entrance to the narrow passage that ran down between the port’s north and south piers and linked the inner basin to the harbour mouth.

Stuart turned towards his helmsman. “Steady as you go, Hodges.”

Hawkwood felt spray patter against his face. The breeze, forced along the funnel created by the converging pier walls, had found its teeth. The bite was not strong enough to impede the cutter’s progress, however. With infinite slowness, Griffin continued on towards the twin signal lights that marked each side of the gap in the harbour wall; through which Hawkwood could see only a funereal darkness.

He stared back over the taffrail. There was something strangely comforting in the huddled shapes of the lantern-lit buildings they were leaving behind. He wondered when, or even if, he would see them again.

The cutter’s bow lifted; the swell increasing the closer they got to the harbour entrance.

“Stand by fores’l halliard!” Welland’s voice again, encouraging, not strident.

Stuart addressed his helmsman once more. “All right, Hodges. Easy on the helm.”

“Hoist fores’l!”

Griffin’s crew sprang into action.

“Smartly does it, boys! Secure that halliard! Stand by braces!”

Gripping a stanchion to steady himself, Hawkwood watched the triangular sail unfurl like a great leaf, snap briefly and then continue to draw taut. A tremor ran through the hull. For a brief second the cutter hung suspended upon the uproll and then, like a hound loosened from the slips, she swept forward, out from the harbour mouth and on into the jet black waters of the English Channel.

Bound for France.

Chapter 5

“There,” Stuart said, sounding almost eager and jabbing the chart with the end of his forefinger.

They were in the cramped cabin. The chart was laid across the table, held down by a brace of glass paperweights, a set of dividers and two half-full mugs of scalding coffee, courtesy of Griffin’s cook.

Stuart continued. “That’s our destination. We’ll lay off shore and ferry you in using the jolly boat. There’s a small hamlet – Wimereux – not much more than a couple of dozen houses in all, but we’ve an agent there so you’ll be met. We’ll be landing to the north of the ville. There’s a cove, protected by cliffs, and a small headland called La Pointe aux Oies. It’s a place we’ve used before.”

Hawkwood stared down at the whorled lines and symbols that looked as though they’d been drawn by a battalion of inebriated spiders. It occurred to him that he was entirely in Lieutenant Stuart’s hands and in an environment that was as foreign to him as the far side of the moon, or even the coastline of France, come to think of it; a place he’d only ever seen as a dark smudge on a distant horizon.

“When we’re close, we’ll hoist French colours,” Stuart continued. “We’ve the advantage in that the Frogs have cutters too, so if they see us it’s likely it’ll take a while before we’re challenged. With luck, we’ll be in and out so fast that even if they do have doubts about the cut of our jib, you’ll be on your way and we’ll be homeward bound before they can do anything.”

“What about French ships?” Hawkwood said.

Stuart shook his head. “They’re unlikely to give us trouble. The Frogs don’t tend to patrol their Channel coast as we do. Their heavy vessels are either based further north, in Flushing, or to the west in their main dockyards at Brest and Rochefort, which give them access to the Atlantic or southwards and the Cape. That’s not to say there aren’t small fry darting about. The nearest danger will probably be the privateer base at Dunkerque. The others are Saint-Malo and Morlaix. But they’re irritants, nothing more. I doubt we’ll be bothered. We might spy a free trader or two trying to slip in under cover of darkness, but chances are they’ll be more interested in avoiding us than coming closer. The likelihood is they’d take us for a Revenue cutter and steer clear.” Stuart sighed. “Not that we haven’t had our run-ins with the beggars, mind you. When we’re not transporting you fellows to la belle France we lend assistance to the Waterguard. It’s what you might call the legitimate part of our business.”

Hawkwood wondered what Lasseur would have thought about being described as an irritant.

Stuart hadn’t finished. “As you were probably informed, from Wimereux you’ll be taken to Boulogne to board the diligence which will convey you to Paris. It’ll take you a few days –French coaches ain’t the speediest in the world, but they’re comfortable enough . . . or so I’m told.”

Hawkwood looked at him.

The young lieutenant smiled. “We run passengers both ways.”

“Are they called Smith, too?”

“Not all of them,” Stuart replied, the corner of his mouth lifting. “We do get the occasional Jones and Brown. Not to mention the odd Jacques and Pierre, when the need arises.”

Which, Hawkwood supposed, went some way to answering his question.

“Are you familiar with this part of the coast?” Stuart asked.

Hawkwood shook his head, bracing himself against the cot as the cutter drove down through a trough. “No.”

His mind went back four months, to the last time he’d set sail across the Channel, on board Lasseur’s ship Scorpion in an attempt to intercept the smuggling cutter, Sea Witch. The privateer’s speed had won the day. Sea Witch had been overtaken and boarded fifteen miles from the French port of Gravelines. Fifteen miles; it might as well have been five hundred for all the intelligence it had afforded him.

“By your answer, am I to assume that this is your first, er . . . intervention?” Stuart enquired, somewhat cautiously.

“Intervention?” Hawkwood said. “That’s what they’re calling it?”

Stuart smiled. “I confess you don’t look much like a Smith or a Jones.”

“Is that so? And what do they look like?”

“Actuaries and lawyers, for the most part.”

“And Pierre and Jacques?”

“Frog actuaries and lawyers.”

Hawkwood laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

“And if I may say so,” Stuart said, eyeing the scars on Hawkwood’s cheek, “you don’t look much like an actuary.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a look of mortification flooded the lieutenant’s face. “My apologies. That was impertinent of me. It is of course no business of mine what your profession might be. I spoke out of turn. I meant no offence.”

“None taken,” Hawkwood said. “From what I know of actuaries, I should probably be flattered. And you, if I may say so, look too damned young to be the captain of this ship.”

Stuart drew himself up. When he spoke the pride was back in his voice. “Griffin’s my first command.”

“How long?”

“Seven months. I was First Lieutenant on the Aurora. I had thought that my next promotion would be to a fourth rater, a third if I was lucky. I did not think I would be given my own ship and that she would be engaged upon special duties.”

“Someone once told me that those who seek advancement should be careful what they wish for,” Hawkwood said.

Stuart smiled. “I’m familiar with the saying, but I have no regrets. Indeed, I consider myself most fortunate. I’ve a sound ship, an able crew and a purpose to my endeavours. What more could I wish for?”

Before Hawkwood could respond there was another muted groan from the timbers and the deck listed once again. Both men made a grab for their drinks with one hand and the overhead beam with the other. The attempt was not entirely successful. Recovering his balance, and using his sleeve as a mop, Stuart wiped the chart where liquid had slopped over the rim of his mug.

“I’d settle for fair weather,” Hawkwood said. He risked a sip from his own salvaged drink. The liquid was strong and bitter and he could taste coarse coffee grounds at the back of his tongue.

“Ah.” Stuart looked almost apologetic. “I’m afraid in that regard, we must place our trust in the Almighty.” An expression of sufferance moved across the lieutenant’s face. “Though if you want my opinion, I’m not sure the English Channel pays deference to anyone, be they mortal or celestial.”

Hawkwood tried to ignore the queasy feeling that was beginning to worm its way through his insides. It had been a bad idea to take that last sip of coffee. He wasn’t sure eating the plate of cold beef provided by the galley had been a wise move either. He stared again at the chart. Wimereux lay in the Pas de Calais, on France’s northern coast. As the crow flew, it didn’t look much more than thirty or so miles from Dover, but Hawkwood knew that ships very rarely, if ever, travelled in straight lines. What Griffin’s eventual track might be was anyone’s guess.

“How long is this likely to take us?”

Stuart hesitated then said, “The Channel’s a fickle mistress at the best of times, particularly at night. The wind and tide are her henchmen and we’re at their mercy. They can be notoriously cruel . . .”

“So you’re telling me there’s no way of knowing?” Hawkwood said flatly.

The lieutenant pursed his lips, though he looked for the most part unflustered by Hawkwood’s less than ecstatic rejoinder. “The glass is dropping, the wind is increasing and there will be heavy rain before the night’s out. Our passage is unlikely to be a smooth one.”

“Not good then?” Hawkwood said.

“Nothing we haven’t met before,” Stuart responded.

Hawkwood wondered if the lieutenant was as confident as he made out. “You expect me to be reassured by that?”

Stuart drained his mug. “Admiralty orders. It’s my job to get you there, come Hell or high water.” He nodded towards the cot. “If I were you, I’d try and get some sleep. There may not be a chance later, if the weather worsens.” Swaying in rhythm with the ship, the lieutenant rolled up the chart and headed for the door.

“If?” Hawkwood said.

Stuart paused on the threshold and grinned at Hawkwood’s jaded expression. “There you go, Mr . . . Smith. I do declare we’ll make a seaman of you yet.”

A loud crash brought Hawkwood awake. For a brief second, he had no idea where he was and then the cabin tipped to one side and he heard the familiar grinding sound from the rudder behind his ear, and he remembered, and groaned.

He was still on the bloody ship. He’d been awakened by waves pounding against the outside of the hull.

He sat up quickly and held on to the edge of the cot as the deck pitched violently once more. His stomach churned and then steadied. Looking up at the skylight, he watched as spray sluiced across the glass. It was still dark – with little moon from what he could see – which told him that dawn had not yet broken. He could also hear a strange keening sound, which confused him for a moment until he realized it was the wind searching for a path through the ship’s rigging.

How long had he slept? He’d no recollection of dozing, no memory of any last-minute tossings and turnings before sleep had overtaken him. It was a measure, he supposed, of how tired he’d been following the journey down from London.

He’d been introduced to more of Stuart’s senior officers at the wardroom table; the acting-master, George Tredstow, a stout, ruddy-cheeked Cornishman; Lucas Mendham, Griffin’s quartermaster, a broad shouldered, former gunnery captain with a shock of sandy-coloured hair, and the purser, Miles Venner, a fair-skinned, donnish-looking man with startling blue eyes, who looked almost as young as his commander and who doubled as the ship’s clerk.

When he’d been introduced as Smith, the pronouncement had drawn subdued nods of welcome as well as, somewhat inevitably, the raising of more than one cynical eyebrow. The conversation had been polite and uninvolving and Hawkwood, accepting that he was the interloper, had expected nothing less. In that regard, Griffin’s wardroom was no different to an army mess. The rules of military and naval etiquette dictated that visitors were made welcome, but they would never be regarded as family.

Following dinner and armed with their coffee mugs, Hawkwood and the lieutenant had moved from the wardroom to the cabin, where Stuart had produced the chart and outlined his plan of campaign.

A small stub of candle was still burning. Hawkwood pulled on his boots in the lantern’s sickly light. Standing, he reached for his coat. The temperature in the cabin was bearable but he knew it would be a lot colder on deck. As he shrugged the coat on, a large drip from the corner of the skylight splashed on to his sleeve, warning him it was going to be considerably wetter out there, too.

The deck corkscrewed and he swore under his breath. Previous voyages he’d been forced to undertake on military transports came to mind, prominent among them being the passages to South America and Portugal; not one of which could have been described as pleasant. And judging from the creaks and moans coming from within the hull it sounded as if Griffin was voicing her own dissent at having to run the gauntlet of a worsening wind and tide.

The clang of a bell sounded from the forecastle. Hawkwood knew it was an indication of the time, but what hour the single note represented he had no idea. He wondered if it signified a change of watch as well. He tried to remember from his limited maritime experience what it might mean. Given that he’d probably managed at least a couple of hours’ sleep, it obviously heralded some god-forsaken early hour of the morning.

Mindful of his footing, he groped his way from cabin to companionway and emerged on to the cutter’s heavily slanted deck, where he was immediately struck by a barrage of cold spray as Griffin punched her way into an oncoming roller. Blinking water out of his eyes, he looked aft to where the cutter’s young commander was standing, legs apart, steadying himself against the binnacle as he watched Griffin’s bowsprit pierce the darkness ahead of them.

Hawkwood glanced heavenwards. There were no stars from what he could see and the moon, hidden behind clouds, was visible only as a wraith-like glimmer high in the ink-black sky.

He lowered his gaze. Griffin was running close hauled on a port tack. Her main and foresail were set fore and aft, her long boom braced tight so as to gather as much speed under her keel as the wind would allow. On either side, there was nothing to see except dark, roiling waves tipped with a frenzy of whitecaps that tumbled along the breaking crests like small avalanches. There were no lights visible that might have suggested the existence of other vessels; nor was there any sight of land.

There were perhaps a dozen or so crewmen in evidence, among them Lieutenant Weekes and the bo’sun, Welland. Most, like their commander, were clad in tarpaulin jackets and all looked wet through, some more bedraggled than others. As when he’d first come on board, none of them paid Hawkwood any notice, save for the bo’sun, who rewarded him with a brief nod of recognition.

Hawkwood slithered as the cutter lurched and then recoiled as a huge wave rose high above the starboard bulwark and cascaded in torrents along the steeply canted deck. With the ship leaning hard over he looked towards the lee scuppers and saw that the water was even forcing its way through the gaps around the edges of the sealed gunports.

As Griffin rose and then plunged down into yet another watery trench, her commander acknowledged Hawkwood’s arrival with a thin-lipped smile. “The glass is dropping fast. There’s a storm moving in.”

“Can we outrun it?” Hawkwood asked, and saw by the expression on Stuart’s face what the answer to that was.

“How far have we come?” Hawkwood asked, trying to steady himself and not let his apprehension show.

“Not far enough. By my reckoning Cap Gris Nez should be about two leagues off our port beam.” Stuart swayed and pointed. “Perhaps a little less.”

Hawkwood tried to picture the chart in his mind. If Griffin’s commander was correct in his calculations they were still some distance from their destination. Though he knew the gesture was useless he looked to where the lieutenant had indicated. All he could see were endless herds of white horses galloping away into the Stygian darkness.

“There’s nowhere we can run to?”

The lieutenant shook his head. His face serious, he looked up towards the great spread of canvas suspended above them like a vast Damoclean blade.

A bulky figure materialized from behind the upturned hull of the jolly boat that had been stowed amidships. It was Tredstow, the acting-master.

Rolling with the ship, the Cornishman made his way aft. “Time we came about, Captain.”

Stuart nodded. “Very good, Mr Tredstow.” The lieutenant, his dark hair ruffling, looked Hawkwood’s way. His voice rose in a warning. “Hold on and keep your head low, else you’ll lose it to the boom.”

Hawkwood looked to the side and saw that a second crew member had joined the man at the tiller bar. Neither of them was the previous incumbent, Hodges, indicating that there had indeed been a change of watch since Hawkwood was last on deck.

Stuart called to his helmsmen. “Bring her up two points!”

“Two points it is, sir!”

The lieutenant turned to his bo’sun. “Mr Welland!”

“Standing by, sir!”

Stuart’s hand swept down. “Helm-a-lee!”

Welland yelled, “Let go and haul!”

The helmsmen heaved the tiller over. The cutter’s bow lifted. The deck was a confusion of bodies, or so it seemed to Hawkwood as he watched Griffin’s crew fight to turn her through the eye of the wind. For a few chaotic seconds the ship yawed as the bow swept round, causing the mainsail to flap like a broken wing, then the whole world tilted in the opposite direction as the boom, braces slackened, catapulted across the deck. Hawkwood ducked instinctively and although the boom was set some way above his head he was shocked at the speed of the manoeuvre. He saw he wasn’t the only one taken unawares. Caught off guard, two crewmen also lost their footing. Soaked, jackets and breeches plastered to their bodies and looking faintly embarrassed, they clambered to their feet from the scuppers where they had fallen, still holding on to their ropes.

The ship slewed violently.

Stuart yelled at his helmsmen: “Hold her! Hold her!”

Hawkwood hung on grimly. As the bow came up and the mainsail was sheeted home, he straightened, bit back the sour taste that had surfaced at the back of his throat, and found he was sweating profusely beneath the coating of spindrift.

“How was that, Mr Smith?” The lieutenant, one hand thrust into his jacket pocket, the other still attached to the binnacle, gave one of his trademark grins, though Hawkwood thought it might have been a little forced. “Bracing enough for you?”

At that instant a white-hot bolt of lightning shot across the cutter’s starboard bow. In the space of a heartbeat night became day, followed a split second later by a colossal thunderclap that sounded as if the entire sky had split asunder.

Several of the cutter’s crew flinched; some ducked as though expecting an enemy broadside.

“Lord save us!” Tredstow exclaimed loudly. He stared heavenwards.

Hawkwood wasn’t certain if it was the reflection from the lightning that had turned the lieutenant’s face pale or if the blood had drained away of its own accord.

Griffin’s commander found his voice. His jaw tightened as he said hollowly, “It would seem the storm’s a lot closer than I’d thought.”

A profanity hovered at the tip of Hawkwood’s tongue. He swallowed it back quickly and let out his breath.

“Which places us in a dilemma . . .” Stuart continued. “We’ve still a fair distance to cover. In clement weather I’d raise more canvas, but with the storm upon us, I can’t risk it. I’ve no option but to reduce sail. We’ll do our best but it could be that our only option is to try and ride it out.”

The words had barely been uttered when the rain began to lance down.

It shouldn’t have come as a shock. Its arrival had been prophesied only a few hours before, but the sheer force of it took every man by surprise.

God really does have a sense of humour, Hawkwood reflected bleakly, as icy needles rattled against his face and shoulders with the force of grape shot.

“At least it’ll keep the Frogs at bay,” Stuart said, grimacing at the sudden inundation. “If they’ve any sense, they’ll still be a-bed.”

Which is where I should bloody well be, Hawkwood thought. On dry land, if possible.

“Perhaps you’d rather go below?” Stuart offered.

Hawkwood suspected that the lieutenant had made the suggestion not so much to keep him out of harm’s way as to prevent his one and only passenger from getting under everyone’s feet and jeopardizing the safety of the ship.

The prospect of returning to the cabin’s claustrophobic interior held little appeal. The combination of the ship’s gyrations and the odours below deck would more than likely result in him spewing his guts out the minute he lay down. Retreat, he decided, was not an option.

He shook his head. “If it’s all right with you, Captain, I think I’d prefer to remain upright.”

At first, Hawkwood thought the lieutenant was about to deny him the choice, but his feelings must have been evident in his expression for Griffin’s commander merely nodded. “Very well. In that case, I’d be obliged if you’d keep your movement about the deck to a minimum. We don’t want any accidents.” The lieutenant’s gaze shifted. “Stand by to reduce sail, Mr Welland, if you please!”

“Aye, sir!” Welland raised a hand in acknowledgement. From the speed of the response, it was clear the bo’sun had been waiting for such a signal. He yelled across the deck: “Stand by fores’l!” He turned and eyed his lieutenant expectantly.

Stuart nodded. “Now, Mr Welland!”

The bo’sun’s face streamed with spray. He turned back towards the men waiting by the ropes. “Take in fores’l!”

Blocks squealed like stuck pigs as the jib and bowsprit were hauled in. Hawkwood marvelled at the men’s skill. He stared up at the mast and yards and the huge mainsail and the spider’s web of rigging and pulleys radiating from them. It was a miracle, he thought, how anyone could tell one rope from another. Nautical jargon had never failed to confuse him, nor, if he were honest, had it held much allure. It was a language as foreign as any he’d encountered during his long army service.

And yet, he wondered, would it be any different for a sailor who found himself marooned on a battlefield? Was army slang any more intelligible to the uninitiated? Probably not, he decided. And, be he sailor or sapper, so long as every man knew what he was doing, what did it matter?

Hawkwood became aware that someone was leaning towards him. It was Tredstow. Water coursed in shiny rivulets down the seaman’s grizzled cheeks. He put his lips close to Hawkwood’s ear, while a hand gripped Hawkwood’s arm like a steel claw. “I were you, I’d hang on tight. This ’un’s going to be a right cow!”

Hawkwood had once been told that on clear days, depending on the location, it was possible to stand on an English clifftop and view the other side of the Channel. Sometimes, it was said, France looked close enough to touch.

Had he first heard that from one of Griffin’s crew, he’d have considered the man at worst a liar, at best an imbecile. Cloaked in darkness and dwarfed on every side by waves almost as high as the cutter’s main yard, the prospect of an imminent landfall looked an unlikely prospect. For all the headway she was making, Griffin might as well have been not two leagues from France but two hundred. But she was trying her best to get there.

Cutters, Hawkwood knew, were built for speed. It made them ideal for patrols and the carrying of dispatches. He did not know, however, how many men it took to crew one. If pushed, he’d have hazarded a guess and estimated about forty. From what he could see, every man jack of them appeared to be topside, including, he supposed, Purser Venner, though it wasn’t easy to make out features in the tumult and the darkness. Either way, every spare inch of decking looked to be occupied, with the men at their stations, ready to defend the ship against the elements; which they were doing, heroically.

From the moment of its opening salvo the storm had raged without let-up, increasing in strength with each passing minute. Under the relentless assault from wind, rain and waves the deck had become as treacherous as an ice sheet. All hatches had been battened down and it would have been a foolish man who tried to make his way from bow to stern unaided, so safety lines had been rigged, running fore and aft. With a dark and angry sea only too eager to ensnare its first victim, the men of the Griffin were clinging on for dear life.

Hawkwood knew that in the running of the ship he was no more than excess cargo. The knowledge didn’t sit well. He’d never been comfortable with the role of spectator. It was one thing to relinquish all responsibility for transporting him to his destination to the lieutenant, but to entrust his safety to another party made him distinctly uneasy. He needed to be doing something.

So he’d put his proposal directly to Griffin’s commander.

“I’m a spare body, Captain. Put me to work.”

The lieutenant had been about to dismiss Hawkwood’s offer out of hand but then, as before, the look on his passenger’s face had made him pause. After an exchange of meaningful looks with his second-in-command, he’d nodded, turning quickly to his two helmsmen.

“Fitch! You’ve a new volunteer! Bates, you’re relieved! Report to Mr Welland for new duties! Before you do, find Mr Smith a tarpaulin jacket.” To Hawkwood, he said, “It’ll be less cumbersome than that riding coat you’re wearing.” Adding, “Please do exactly as Fitch tells you. No more, no less. Is that clear? Anything happens to you, they’ll have my innards for garters!”

“He yells pull, I pull,” Hawkwood said.

Stuart nodded. “You have it. Tell me, Mr Smith, do you know your opera?”

Hawkwood stared at him.

“‘Heart of oak are our ships . . .?’ It’s something my father used to sing to me. I suspect we’re about to discover if the words hold true. Bates! Hurry up with that damned coat!”

The moment the helmsman, Fitch, moved along, allowing him room to grasp the tiller bar, Hawkwood discovered why it was a two-man job. Above him, Griffin’s mainsail still stretched between gaff and boom but under the lieutenant’s orders the sail had been reefed in tight, leaving just enough canvas aloft to enable the helmsmen to preserve some semblance of authority. Trying to maintain steerage-way, however, was like wrestling a bucking mule. It felt to Hawkwood as if his arms were being torn from their sockets. There was only one course of action: hang on, obey Fitch’s directions as best he could, and trust to salvation.

In times of adversity he’d often wondered whether death might not be some sort of merciful release. Inevitably, the feeling had always dissipated, but every now and then a new situation would arise when the notion reared its ugly head. This night was fast turning into one of them.

Fighting in the Spanish mountains, he’d known cold and rain, but nothing like this. The wind force hadn’t lessened either. If anything, it had escalated substantially, causing them to tack more times than Hawkwood could remember, with the inevitable drenching results. Despite the tarpaulin jacket, he’d never been so wretchedly wet in his entire life. Spray or rain, it made no difference. His hands were numb; he could hardly feel the ends of his fingers. He’d also lost all sense of time. The passing of the hours had become irrelevant. All that mattered was survival.

The sense of dread rose in his chest as, yet again, the cutter’s bow disappeared beneath another enormous wave. As the mass of water exploded over the forecastle it looked for one terrible moment as though the end of the shortened bowsprit had been sheared away. But then, ponderously, Griffin began to rise. At first, it was as though the sea was refusing to relinquish its grip until, with a supreme effort, she broke free, thrusting herself into the air like a breaching whale, the water running in gleaming cataracts from her forward rigging. Her bow continued to climb until it seemed she would fall back upon herself, such was the steep angle of her ascent. Finally reaching the vertex, Griffin hovered, but only for a moment before gravity took hold once more, drawing her back down into the seething well below.

The hull shuddered under the impact. A vivid streak of lightning zig-zagged across the sky. It was followed by another massive rumble directly overhead. As the echoes died away, it struck Hawkwood that if there was such a thing as the voice of God, it would probably sound a lot like that last roll of thunder.

And if thunder was a vocal manifestation of the Almighty’s wrath then the howling of the wind had to represent the grief of ten thousand souls trapped in purgatory. Which was why Hawkwood missed the warning shout. The first he knew something untoward had happened was when he saw a knot of seamen break apart as if a grenade had been tossed into their midst.

He heard Fitch bellow, “Keep hold, God damn it!” and as he hung on to the tiller he watched helplessly as the carronade broke free from its cradle and 10 cwt of cast-iron ordnance careered towards the lee bulwark, shedding slivers of twisted eyebolt from the damaged carriage in its wake, along with threads of pared cordage that were left whipping to and fro across the deck like decapitated sea serpents.

Gathering momentum, the carronade headed for the port scuppers, trailing mayhem as the more quick thinking among Griffin’s crewmen tried to grab on to the pieces of rope still attached to the metal barrel. The slippery conditions proved too much for them, however, and they found themselves dragged along by the weight, while others scrambled aside, slipping and sliding on the water-soaked planking, some falling full length as they tried to get out of the way. The sound of the carronade hitting the bulwark was loud enough to be heard over the storm. As was the scream.

The bulwark absorbed the brunt of the collision, the remainder was borne by the one crew member who’d been unable to scramble clear in time. Sent sprawling, he’d only been able to watch, paralysed with fright, as the heavy metal cylinder hurtled towards him. As the carronade hit the raised side of the ship it tipped, trapping the seaman beneath it, crushing his chest and shoulders and shattering his ribs and pelvis into matchwood.

It took eight men under the guidance of Lieutenant Weekes to pull the wreckage free and drag the body to one side, but by then it was too late. The crewman was beyond help. Even as they strove to gather up the corpse the rain and seawater were already rinsing the blood from the scuppers.

As the debris was cleared away and the dead man was carried below, Fitch turned and glared at Hawkwood over his shoulder. Despite the water teeming down the coarse face, there was no hiding the anger in the helmsman’s eyes. “By Christ, I hope you’re worth the bloody trouble!”

Hawkwood kept silent. There was nothing to be gained by responding to Fitch’s outburst. Had he been in the helmsman’s position he’d probably have come close to voicing the same sentiment and if he hadn’t put it into words, he’d likely have thought it. Seafaring men, much more than soldiers, were prone to superstition. Any break with routine that resulted in catastrophe was likely to be deemed portentous by the less rational members of a close-knit crew. He suspected the men of the Griffin were no different in that regard. They’d now lost one of their own and despite the death occurring while the ship was effectively on a war footing, it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that given the absence of both women and albatrosses, they’d place the blame for the freak accident squarely on the presence of a stranger. Which, Hawkwood supposed, was true, indirectly, though he’d had no personal hand in the man’s death. But suspicious minds had a habit of creating their own twisted brand of logic. The diplomatic thing to do, therefore, was remain silent, let Fitch vent his spleen and pray they didn’t lose anybody else.

For the storm showed no signs of weakening; unlike the cutter’s crew who, bruised and battered by the ordeal, were growing ever more weary.

Hawkwood wasn’t a religious man. Had he been, he might well have regarded the struggle being waged about him as some sort of fitting parable in which a gallant David was battling the storm’s fearsome Goliath. But Griffin was no David. There was no sling and no stone. Here, Goliath was in the ascendancy.

The wind had forestalled all efforts to gain headway. For Griffin’s crew, there was only one priority: to try and stay afloat. So far they were succeeding, but only just.

Then another spectacular streak of lightning stabbed across the sky, ripping the heavens in two and revealing, in that moment of incandescence, a dark shadowy mass, rising like a behemoth from the waters, less than a cable’s length off Griffin’s larboard beam.

Griffin’s commander turned with a stricken look on his face. “PORT HELM!”

Fitch gasped. Eyes wide with shock, his voice rose in a scream. “Pull! For the love of God, pull!”

The sighting had been so sudden and so fleeting that Hawkwood wondered if his eyes had deceived him, but the lieutenant’s warning, allied to Fitch’s frantic cry and the expressions on the faces of the men about him, confirmed that it was not some mythical sea beast that he’d seen rising half hidden behind the moving curtain of rain but the dark unbroken line of a sheer cliff face and waves exploding on to a rock-strewn foreshore beneath it.

There was no time to think; no time to reflect on the power of the storm or how it had managed to drive Griffin so close to land; no time for recriminations against an error of navigation, if such was the case. There was only raw panic.

Fitch threw himself against the helm like a man possessed, leaving Hawkwood no option but to dig his heels into the deck and follow suit. As spray burst over Griffin’s weather side and stampeded in glistening shards along the deck, Hawkwood knew that even with their combined strength bearing down, it was unlikely the two of them would be able to hold the ship steady. The pressure of the sea against hull and rudder was just too strong.

He was suddenly aware of a tarpaulin-jacketed figure clawing his way towards them. It was the quartermaster, Mendham. Thrusting himself between Hawkwood and Fitch, he clamped his hands around the helm.

Feet scrabbling, the three men hauled back on the tiller. Hawkwood glanced up towards the mast. It was vibrating like a bow stave and looked ready to snap.

But slowly and sluggishly, Griffin began to come round.

Only for her prow to rise, swept up by the sheer power of the water beneath her hull.

“Pull, y’buggers!” Mendham yelled. “Pu—!”

And almost as quickly, she was falling away again. The quarter -master’s voice was drowned out as Griffin plummeted once more into the abyss. As the sea smashed over the drift rail, the lee scuppers vanished under a rampaging tide of foam and swirling black water that raced along the deck, sweeping all before it. Hawkwood’s boots began to slide. He saw that a good number of the crew had been left floundering as their legs were taken from beneath them. Most were struggling to their feet. Others had found a stanchion or a stay to cling to, while a few fortunate ones were grabbed by their shipmates and pulled to safety.

But, momentarily, resistance against the rudder eased.

The other two felt it at the same time.

“Now!” Fitch yelled hoarsely. “Put your backs into it!”

Led by Fitch, Hawkwood and the quartermaster redoubled their efforts. Gradually, the starboard bulwark began to drop. Griffin was answering! Hawkwood sensed the cutter was returning to an even keel. Relief surged through him.

And then he looked out beyond the bow and a fist closed around his heart.

Mendham followed his gaze. The quartermaster’s face sagged. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

Hawkwood’s first thought was that some callous twist of fate had inadvertently caused them to turn the ship completely about, and that it was the same stretch of cliff he could see, lying in wait at the edge of the darkness. Disconcerting enough in itself, until he saw that the top of the cliff was in motion and growing in height and width and he realized to his horror that it was a wave, a huge black wave, far larger than anything that had gone before, and that it was bearing down upon them and gathering speed at an astonishing rate. He felt his insides contract.

For Griffin was still partially beam on and there was no time to turn her into the approaching threat. Fitch yelled again. Hawkwood didn’t catch the words; they were borne away by the shriek of the wind. He saw Griffin’s commander staring over the rail, head lifting as he took in the full significance of what he was seeing. The lieutenant spun round.

It was too late for a warning.

There was an awful inevitability in the way the mountainous wall of water was racing towards them; devouring everything in its path, like some ancient malevolence, risen from the deep to spread chaos upon the world. As Hawkwood watched, a skein of frothing whitecaps appeared, like pale riders cresting the brow of a hill; tentatively at first but then, as if gaining in confidence, they began to spread out across the wave’s rapidly swelling summit. It was, Hawkwood thought, like staring into a boiling cauldron. With her weather side exposed to the full might of the converging sea, Griffin stood no chance.

The wave broke across her with devastating force. The starboard bulwark vanished, swamped beneath the deluge which splintered the topsail yard like a twig, tore the gaff from its mountings, the forward hatch cover from its runners and more than a dozen crewmen from their stations. Their cries were cut short as the remains of the mainsail collapsed around them, sweeping them over the port bulwark and into the sea in a welter of spiralling limbs, broken spars and flayed canvas.

The force of the water wrenched the tiller from Hawkwood’s hands. He tried to grab on to it but there was nothing beneath his feet to give him purchase and it sprang out of his grasp as if on a coiled spring. The world became a maelstrom of sound and fury. He sensed rather than saw Fitch and Mendham being flung aside and then everything went dark. Bracing himself, he felt a stunning blow as his spine collided with the corner of the binnacle. Pain shot through him.

The backwash had barely receded before the sea crashed over them once more. The crewmen who’d survived the initial cataclysmic onslaught were given no chance to recover. All had tried to wrap themselves around what they had hoped were secure fixtures. The stronger ones hung on grimly only to see their more exhausted companions plucked from safety and into oblivion like sodden rag dolls.

Hawkwood, still dazed and smarting from his encounter with the compass box, was unprepared for the impact. Sent careening across the deck like an empty keg trapped in a mill race, he was finally brought up short at the base of the mast. Spluttering and coughing, tangled within a cat’s cradle of torn rigging and waterlogged canvas, he felt something grab his arm – a dis -embodied hand – and saw, through a blur of agony, that it was the helmsman, Fitch. The look in the seaman’s eyes as the reflux bore him away was one of abject terror.

The ship gave another violent lurch. A terrible rending sound came from deep within the hull as Griffin was slammed on to her larboard beam and Hawkwood, still coughing, found himself dislodged and adrift once more. He grabbed for the main hatchway grating and missed, then saw a strand of rope – one of the safety lines – and made a desperate lunge towards it, just as the port bulwark submerged. A strained voice yelled frantically from close by, “She’s going!” and before Hawkwood could advance his hold, the line jackknifed from his clutches. His link with the ship severed and with the cutter’s deck at a near vertical incline and still rotating, there was nothing he could do, except fall.

He was wet already, but the coldness of the water drove the rest of the air from his lungs as effectively as a mule kick. As the weight of his tarpaulin jacket dragged him beneath the waves, his last comfortless thought was that he hadn’t expected it to end like this.

Chapter 6

Cannon fire; no doubt about it.

Howitzers, from the sound of them, or maybe six-pounders. Whatever they were, they were clearly raining hell down on some poor devils. Though he could tell they were a fair distance away; a couple of miles at least, perhaps more.

He lifted his head slowly and opened his eyes.

And wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved when he saw that it wasn’t cannon fire that he’d heard. No six-pounders or howitzers; in fact there was no artillery of any description. There was only the surf crashing on to the beach behind him, loud enough to wake if not the dead then certainly any half-drowned, shipwrecked soul who happened to be within earshot.

He remained prone, taking stock while his head cleared. There was daylight, and he was alive. For the moment, that was all he needed to know. Cautiously, he tried flexing his arms and legs. To his relief, all four limbs appeared to be in full working order, which had to be another kind of miracle, though there was enough residual pain in the small of his back to make him wince and think twice about making any sudden movements. There was blood, too, he saw, where his skin had been scraped down the inside of his forearms, which struck him as odd. The side of his skull was sore to the touch, as well. He flinched when his fingertips hit a tender spot beneath his hairline.

He continued the examination of his other aches and pains. Further probing confirmed he had no major injuries. Finally confident that he could get to his feet without falling over, he took a deep breath and pushed himself up. It still took a while. The involuntary coughing fit was a hindrance, though it did help to clear his lungs, as did the retching. When there was nothing left to expel, he straightened and looked about him.

A narrow, rock-strewn foreshore rose gently towards the foot of a sandy-coloured and heavily eroded cliff face. The beach wasn’t long, no more than a couple of hundred paces in length. A jumble of boulders littered the edge of the water at either end. He could see dunes and clumps of tussock grass in the distance where the cliffs flattened out. There were no signs of human habitation.

He spat out another clod of mucus and turned. The sea was a uniform grey and still rough, with high waves and strong swells, but the heart of the storm had moved eastwards leaving behind a grainy sky filled with dark, scudding clouds. There was no sign of the ship; an observation which afforded him neither surprise nor comfort. He shivered, not so much from his damp clothing but from a memory of the cutter’s final death throes.

An object lying a few yards away drew his attention. It was Griffin’s forward hatch cover. Hawkwood stared down at it. Proof, he thought, that saviours, whether by accident or divine intervention, came in all shapes and sizes. He realized the contusions along his arms had to be the result of his skin chafing against the wooden battens.

His mind went back to the panic that had gripped him as he fell and the terror that had turned his bowels to gruel when he entered the water, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that the next few minutes were to be his last.

It was the coldness of the water that had shocked him the most; the bone-numbing, blood-freezing chill that had him gasping for breath within seconds. Though there had been enough cohesive thought filtering through his brain for him to know that he had to rid himself of the tarpaulin coat. It’s weight had been pulling him down and shedding the thing hadn’t been easy, with the mast, shorn of its main yard and looming over him like an uprooted tree and the hull about to capsize at any second, not to mention he’d ingested enough sea water to float a frigate. But, somehow, he’d managed it, summoning a reserve of strength he hadn’t known he possessed, only to find himself at a distance from the ship that made retrieval impossible.

With every feeble thrash of his arms widening the gap between hope and despair, he’d almost been on the point of surrendering to the inevitable when the hatch grating that had been ripped away by the first rogue wave struck him a heavy blow on his right shoulder and he’d reached for it, knowing it was the only chance he had of remaining afloat. It was after he’d pulled himself on to it that things had become hazy.

Fortune, he’d heard, favoured the bold. It seemed it favoured the lucky, too. The circumstances that had almost driven the cutter on to the rocks, causing the crew to take evasive and disastrous action, had, in the end, been the saving of him. Had Griffin been struck further from land, Hawkwood knew he wouldn’t have been carried ashore; he’d be dead.

Though where he’d ended up was anyone’s guess. He looked towards the south. The land sloped more quickly in that direction. Knowing his first priority was to get off the beach, he set off, stumbling on the uneven surface, ignoring the hurt, shaking and windmilling his arms in an attempt to generate warmth. It occurred to him that anyone looking on from afar would probably take him for a complete half-wit; in other words, someone worth avoiding. He windmilled harder.

He’d travelled less than a hundred paces when he came upon the first body. It lay face down in a shallow tidal pool, at the base of one of the large boulders he’d seen earlier. He splashed his way towards it, causing small crabs to scuttle for cover.

Squatting, Hawkwood turned the body over. It wasn’t easy. The dead were never cooperative and his fingers were cold and when he saw the state of the face he wished he hadn’t bothered. The waves and the rocks had inflicted a lot of damage and sea creatures had already taken full advantage of a free meal. Hawkwood doubted the man’s own mother would have known him. Though she might have recognized the tattoos on the left forearm; a Union Jack and an anchor, under which was inscribed the word: Dido. The name of a ship, Hawkwood presumed, rather than a wife or sweetheart.

Despite the discrepancy, it was safe to assume this had to have been one of Griffin’s crew. He thought about the forty or so men that had made up the ship’s complement and looked to where the sea was pounding relentlessly against the edge of the rocks. Rising to his feet, still shivering, he scanned the broken shoreline.

The second body lay about fifty paces from the first, though he nearly missed seeing it. The black tarpaulin coat merged closely with the surroundings and, even as he drew near, Hawkwood thought it looked more like a dead seal than a man. It, too, rested face down. He hesitated before raising the head and was relieved to see that this one hadn’t taken as much of a battering as the first, though the lips and eyes showed clear evidence of nibbling from teeth and claw. There were enough of the features left to aid recognition but as Hawkwood hadn’t been introduced to the cutter’s entire crew, despite there being something vaguely familiar about the face, he wasn’t able to put a name to it.

With some difficulty he removed the coat. He felt no guilt at doing so. The dead man had no use for it and, though it had received a soaking it would help provide extra insulation on top of his shirt and waistcoat.

He was about to get up when he saw the remains of the boat. A stempost and four feet of splintered bow lay several feet away, wedged among the seaweed-encrusted rocks like shattered pieces of discarded bone. There were no markings to suggest what ship they might have come from. He looked around for more wreckage but couldn’t see anything and he knew it was probably pointless to continue the search. In any case, it was time to move on. Still finding his feet, he made his way back to the beach.

He looked up at the cliff face. The worn parts of it looked soft and crumbly. There had been recent slippage, he saw, which suggested that a good many of the boulders he was skirting were the results of landslides. Emerging from the debris, he placed that thought firmly at the back of his mind and headed for the dunes.

A distant, low-hanging smudge drew his gaze. Drifting wood smoke; which meant a dwelling of some sort, but the contours obscured his view so whether it was evidence of a village or town or a single isolated abode, it was too far away to tell. By-passing the place and proceeding on his way was one of the options open to him, but when he thought about it, that idea didn’t make much sense. Where was he proceeding to? Far better to find out where he was and then determine his next move. And the only way to accomplish that was either look for a convenient signpost, or ask somebody.

That was when he heard the groan.

He stopped dead and listened, his skin prickling. The noise came again, from close by; a low exhalation, as if someone was in pain. He turned towards the source and saw movement; a dark shape slinking behind a bank of grass close to the entrance of what looked to be a narrow gulley running between two dunes. There was something else, too, leading away from the gulley back towards the sea; shallow and uneven depressions in the sand; scuff marks, as if an animal had dragged its way ashore.

God’s blood! Hawkwood thought.

He moved swiftly and silently, keeping low, knowing it was still a risk, but driven by a feeling of expectation that was impossible to ignore. The hairs rose along the back of his neck when he saw the black jacket and the hunched shoulders of the figure that was trying desperately to burrow itself into concealment.

Sensing imminent discovery the figure stopped moving, but only for a second and not before Hawkwood had seen that it was favouring its left arm. As fear overcame caution, the prone man suddenly tried to rise and run, but the effort proved too much and he stumbled and fell to his knees, chest heaving. Hawkwood stepped forward. The man turned and looked up over his shoulder, resignation on his pale, pain-streaked face, which expanded into shock when Hawkwood said evenly, “Going somewhere, Lieutenant?”

He knelt quickly, just in time to allow Griffin’s commander to collapse into his arms.

There were livid bruises and abrasions on Stuart’s cheeks and forehead. His clothes were damp and encrusted with sand. He stared up at Hawkwood as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Good God, you’re alive!” he breathed hoarsely.

“I could say the same to you,” Hawkwood said, cradling the lieutenant’s shoulders. “Can you sit up?”

Stuart nodded. With his back propped against a stout tuft of grass, he swallowed and coughed. When he’d recovered, he stared at Hawkwood. “I still don’t believe it! We launched the boat but when we couldn’t find you, we thought you’d perished.” He cleared his throat again and with an expression of distaste wiped a loop of spittle from his chin.

Hawkwood looked at the lieutenant in amazement. “The bloody ship was turning turtle! How in God’s name were you able to launch the boat?”

To Hawkwood’s further astonishment, Stuart shook his head, wincing as he did so. “She didn’t sink.” And from somewhere, a wry smile appeared. “I told you she was a sound ship. It’d take more than last night’s blow to break her. Griffin lives to fight again.” Suddenly, the smile fell away, replaced by an expression of acute sorrow. “Though the cost was far greater than I would have imagined.”

“How many did you lose?” Hawkwood asked, thinking about the difficulties the crew must have endured just trying to get the boat into the water, let alone conducting a search in waves as high as a three-storeyed house.

The lieutenant hesitated and then said with despair in his voice, “Fifteen, including Marlow and Sheldrake.”

“The men in the jolly boat?”

Stuart looked at him, his brow furrowing. “How . . .?”

“I found their bodies,” Hawkwood explained.

The sadness remained etched on Stuart’s bruised face. His jaw tightened. “They were good men. When I asked for volunteers they were the first to step forward. But the waves proved too much for us. They carried us ashore but the boat foundered on the rocks. We were cast into the water and separated.”

Another of the Almighty’s cruel japes, Hawkwood thought bitterly. It had been the jolly boat, built for purpose, that had fallen victim to the fierce and unforgiving sea while he’d been transported to safety on what had amounted to little more than a piece of driftwood. He recalled Fitch and the wrath in the helmsman’s face when he’d voided his anger in the midst of the storm. Hawkwood hadn’t even reached his destination and already the mission had cost the lives of fifteen men.

Stuart emitted a grunt of discomfort as he shifted position. He continued holding his left arm close to his chest.

“Let me take a look at that,” Hawkwood offered.

It didn’t take a moment to confirm the arm wasn’t broken but the lieutenant’s wrist was badly sprained.

“We should get off the beach and find shelter,” Hawkwood said.

Stuart nodded and Hawkwood helped him to his feet. When they were both standing, he found that Stuart was gazing at him. Sorrow had been replaced by a kind of weary amusement.

“What is it?”

“I was thinking it’s true: the Lord does work in mysterious ways.”

“How so?”

“We’re alive when we’ve no right to be.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“On the contrary, I’m exceedingly grateful. I’ll make a point of telling Him so when we do finally meet.”

Hawkwood smiled. “Paradise over purgatory? You’re that certain you’ll be going up, not down?”

Stuart returned the smile with a tentative one of his own. “Well, if I wasn’t sure of it before, I am now. Why else would He have chosen to save a poor sinner?”

“You’ve a theory, I take it?” Hawkwood said drily.

The lieutenant tilted his head and threw Hawkwood a specul ative look. “Perhaps we’ve been delivered for a reason. Did it ever occur to you that you may have been put on this earth to serve a higher purpose?”

“Every God-damned day,” Hawkwood said, wondering if Stuart had expected him to give the enquiry serious consideration. “But I’ve learned to live with it. Now let’s get off this bloody beach, shall we?”

The lieutenant nodded firmly. “An excellent suggestion.”

“By the way,” Hawkwood said, tugging on the coat he’d taken from the dead seaman. “Where’s the ship? You never said.”

“I instructed Lieutenant Weekes to ride out the storm as best he could and if possible lay three miles off the point, out of sight and range of the shore battery.”

“Shore battery?” Hawkwood paused, the coat half-on and half-off his shoulder.

“Fort Mahon.” Stuart nodded towards the northern end of the line of cliffs. “At Ambleteuse, the next town up the coast. The fort guards the town and the mouth of the Selaque River. It was due to be one of Boney’s embarkation depots when he was planning his invasion back in ’05. Turned out that wasn’t such a good idea. There’s too much silt. It makes navigation a bugger. The winds along this coast don’t help either, as we found out. The garrison’s been reduced since then; reassigned to other districts. Now it’s us who’re doing the invading. There’s a kind of justice there, don’t you think?”

Hawkwood didn’t respond to that. The history of the place didn’t interest him. It wasn’t as if he was taking the Grand Tour. However, the proximity of a fort and a shore battery, irrespective of troop numbers, was relevant only in as much as it called for one thing: a rapid departure. He pulled the rest of the coat on and secured it. It was heavy and damp and a dry coat would have been far preferable, but the tarpaulin was still a welcome protection against the snappy sea breeze.

“Griffin will rendezvous later this evening and pick me up,” Stuart added.

Hawkwood gave him a sceptical look. “Your jolly boat’s wrecked. How do you propose to get out to her? Swim? I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Stuart shook his head. “Our agents will provide the necessary assistance. As fortune would have it, we’ve landed remarkably close to our intended destination. Wimereux’s not much more than a mile or so yonder.” Stuart indicated in the direction of the smoke, still visible beneath the overcast sky. “We should make our way there with all dispatch. The Frogs might not be too conscientious when it comes to maintaining seaborne surveil-lance of their coastline but they’ve an annoying tendency to send out shore patrols, so it doesn’t pay to be too conspicuous.” The lieutenant slid the wrist of his injured arm between two of the fastened buttons on his coat to form an improvised sling.

Amen to that, Hawkwood thought, though he wondered if the French would seriously expect anyone to have come ashore during the furore of the previous night’s storm and then felt infinitely foolish when it struck him that’s exactly what had happened, albeit at nature’s behest.

As if reading his mind, Stuart added, “The sooner we make contact with our friends, the better. There’s likely to be concern for our safety. They’ll be expecting word and in any case we need to send you on your way.”

The colour was gradually returning to the lieutenant’s face and there was a renewed confidence in his tone. Ten minutes ago, he’d been a shipwrecked mariner, alone and injured on a hostile coast with a third of his crew missing, presumed drowned. Now, his spirits lifted by the unexpected arrival of an ally, he appeared anxious to get back into the fray.

They left the beach behind. The dunes began to give way to an area of grassy hummocks freckled with clumps of wind-blown gorse. Further inland, the gorse merged into thickets of prickly, waist-high scrub. Beyond the scrub, Hawkwood could see pine trees. The smell of resin hung heavy in the damp morning air. Sandy, needle-strewn pathways weaved through the gaps between the thickets. They were criss-crossed with enough tracks to suggest it was an area well visited by humans and animals – mostly of a domestic kind, to judge by the amount of sheep and goat droppings that lay scattered about like fallen berries – which explained the shorn state of the turf, Hawkwood reasoned.

He glanced over his shoulder. The reward was a limited view over a choppy sea corrugated with heaving swells. He looked towards the horizon, but visibility was poor and there was no sign of land and then Hawkwood remembered that north lay on his right-hand side and he was, in fact, looking down the Channel towards its far western approaches. He felt an unexpected knot form in the pit of his stomach and wondered why that should be. God knows, he’d served his country and fought the king’s enemies in more foreign climes than most men could dream about and only rarely had he felt the tug of England’s green and pleasant pastures, and yet here he was, striving for a glimpse of a coastline not thirty miles distant and feeling bereft at his inability to catch so much as a whiff of familiar headland.

There was no sign of the ship, either, but as it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began, it would have been difficult to spot any vessel more than a mile or two from shore. In any case, Stuart had told him that Griffin was lying off the point and the curve of the coastline still hampered his view. And there was no telling if she had even survived the night.

Hawkwood looked towards where Stuart had told him the fort was located but the cliffs and vegetation blocked his line of sight that way as well. He turned back, in time to see Stuart tense and say suddenly and softly, “We have company!”

Hawkwood followed the lieutenant’s gaze and his pulse quickened as a blue-uniformed rider trotted his mount out from the edge of the trees. Half a dozen similar-hued infantry men materialized in a ragged line behind him. All the foot soldiers carried muskets.

It was too late to hide. The troops would have had to be blind not to have seen them.

Stuart swallowed drily. “Any suggestions?” There was a new-found fear in his voice.

“Don’t run’s the first one that comes to mind.”

Act like a fugitive and you’ll be treated like one, Hawkwood thought.

The soldiers – fusiliers from their dress – were perhaps two hundred paces away. A musket ball would be ineffective at that range but Hawkwood had yet to see a man outrun a horse; not that there was anywhere to run to. He wondered if his and Stuart’s appearance had come as a surprise to the patrol or whether they’d been under observation for a while. Best to assume the latter, he thought.

“How’s your French, Lieutenant?” Hawkwood asked.

“I’ve a fair understanding,” Stuart murmured. “But I ain’t fluent enough, if that’s what you were hoping.”

It was, but Hawkwood didn’t say so.

“Are you wearing anything likely to identify you as a British naval officer?” Hawkwood asked Stuart quickly, assessing the lieutenant’s garb. He was acutely conscious that both he and Stuart bore all the damp and bloodied evidence of their traumatic arrival, on their faces and in the condition of their clothing.

There was a pause. “No.” Then, his composure slipping, the lieutenant hissed feverishly, “We’ve no bloody papers. They’ll shoot us as spies!”

It was on the tip of Hawkwood’s tongue to point out that if their identities were discovered they were liable to be shot as spies anyway, whether they had papers or not.

“You men! Halt! Stay where you are!”

The command came from one of the foot soldiers, a corporal; Hawkwood could make out the chevrons on the sleeve.

Too late to take evasive action, anyway, Hawkwood thought. They’ve seen the state of us.

Led by the mounted officer, the patrol drew near, fanning out in a semi-circle, muskets levelled. Close to, Hawkwood could see that their uniforms – those of the foot soldiers at least – were not in the best of condition but rather well worn and with a grubby cast. The way they were hefting their weapons was also telling. Hawkwood had the distinct impression these were far from frontline troops and he recalled Stuart’s remark about the bulk of the garrison – presumably the more seasoned of the fort’s contingent – having been transferred. The way these men carried themselves seemed to bear that out for, despite the uniforms, the squad had all the deportment of a militia force rather than a detachment of regulars.

“Not a word,” Hawkwood said. “Let me do the talking.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Stuart murmured.

“One more thing,” Hawkwood said.

“What’s that?”

“Fall down.”

“Eh?” Stuart flashed him a look of alarm.

Hawkwood said. “You’re injured. Your ship’s foundered and you’ve just crawled ashore. You’re exhausted. Fall down. Do it now.”

Stuart’s collapse was rather more theatrical than Hawkwood would have liked and probably wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Drury Lane pageant, but anything that gave the patrol pause for thought and less reason to fix bayonets was all he was looking for.

With Stuart slumped on the ground, Hawkwood raised his hand and called out in French, “Help! Over here!” He gestured frantically and then knelt, as if he was trying to help a stricken comrade regain his sea legs.

“Not a word, Lieutenant,” Hawkwood said again, though he knew the warning was superfluous. He looked towards the oncoming troops, adopted what he hoped was an urgent expression, and called out once more: “We need help here!”

The officer reined in his horse. He was a gaunt individual with pale, sullen features. A thin moustache that looked as if it had been pasted on as an afterthought traced the line of his upper lip; a futile attempt to add character to an uncharismatic face. Late thirties, Hawkwood guessed, and rather old for his rank; suggesting a career path less distinguished than a man his age might have expected, or hoped for. Which could account for him being put in charge of a shore patrol, Hawkwood thought as he stood up, leaving Stuart screwing his face in agony and clutching his arm, giving a credible impression that his injury was worse than it actually was.

The lieutenant’s eyes took in Hawkwood’s matted hair, the torn clothing, the scars, the cuts and the stains and the man at Hawkwood’s feet.

“What’s going on here? Who are you men?”

“Lieutenant!” Hawkwood hoped he wasn’t over playing the relief in his voice. “By God, you’re a welcome sight!”

The lieutenant gestured his men to close in. “Identify yourselves.”

Hawkwood drew himself up. “Captain Vallon, 93rd Regiment of Infantry. And you are?”

The lieutenant’s eyebrows rose.

Hawkwood had dragged the name out of the air and awarded himself the promotion to circumvent the man on the horse from pulling rank. The ploy worked. Taken aback and not sure whether he should offer salutations to a senior officer whose dishevelled appearance was, to say the least, questionable, the lieutenant’s eyes moved back to the still wincing Stuart.

“I am Lieutenant Gaston Malbreau of the Mahon garrison. Where are you billeted, Captain? I wasn’t aware the 93rd was deployed in this district.” The lieutenant’s gaze lifted.

“It isn’t,” Hawkwood said, deflecting the question and uttering a silent prayer as he did so. Another snippet of information to be stored away.

The lieutenant frowned. “Then where have you come from?”

Hawkwood jerked his thumb seawards. “There.”

The lieutenant followed Hawkwood’s gesture and stared out towards the Channel’s murky horizon. His features twisted in puzzlement. He turned back. “I’m not with you, Captain. What are you telling me?”

“That I’m here by the grace of God and the efforts of this brave fellow,” Hawkwood said, indicating Stuart. “And I’d appreciate a couple of blankets and a canteen, Corporal. Sharpish, if you please. We’re thirsty and we’re bloody freezing.” Hawkwood held out his hand impatiently, indicating that the corporal didn’t have a choice in the matter.

The corporal blinked and looked to his lieutenant for authorization.

The lieutenant hesitated and then nodded curtly as if annoyed at having his chain of command usurped. As the corporal directed two of his men to hand over their bedrolls and a canteen, he addressed Hawkwood once again. “I’m still not following you, Captain. Are you telling me you’ve just come ashore?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Hawkwood’s enigmatic response drew an immediate frown. “I see no signs of a vessel.”

“No,” Hawkwood said drily. “You wouldn’t. She was lost in last night’s storm. We’re the only ones who made it. The rest of the crew went down with her. Between you and me, Lieutenant, I wasn’t so foolish as to expect a garland of flowers and a kiss on the cheek from the Emperor, but this wasn’t the way I wanted to return to the motherland, not after two years in a God-damned British prison ship.”

The lieutenant’s chin came up sharply. “Prison ship?”

A murmur ran through the rest of the patrol. Hawkwood draped one of the blankets around Stuart’s shoulders and held the canteen to the lieutenant’s lips. Stuart took the canteen with his good hand and gulped greedily. This time there was no fakery in his actions.

Hawkwood took back the canteen and raised it to his own mouth. The water was warm and brackish but it tasted like nectar after the amount of salt water he’d ingested. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Eight hundred of us; kept like animals and fed on swill you wouldn’t feed to a goat. You ever tasted salted herring and turnips, Lieutenant? You wouldn’t like it, trust me. Two years was more than enough.”

“You escaped?”

Hawkwood nodded wearily. He handed the canteen back to the corporal and made a play of wrapping the remaining blanket around himself. The material was threadbare and in keeping with the rough state of the patrol’s uniforms. As a result there wasn’t a great deal of comfort or warmth in it, but beggars, Hawkwood reflected, couldn’t be choosers. “Damned right, I did.”

The patrol’s musket barrels, he saw, were beginning to droop.

Malbreau nodded towards Stuart, his face set. “And this man? He was also a prisoner?”

Hawkwood shook his head and placed his hand on Stuart’s shoulder. “No, he’s a British sea captain and if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t be talking with you now.”

The members of the patrol exchanged startled glances. The lieutenant stiffened. His eyes narrowed. “How so?”

“He’s a smuggler; what the English call a free trader. It was Captain Stuart’s ship that I took passage on. Cost me a fortune; four thousand francs, if you can believe it. Not what I’d call free trade. Not by a long shot! But I’ll say this for them: they’re damned well organized. Arranged my escape from the hulk, accommodation and all my transportation.”

Hawkwood gave Stuart a reassuring pat on the shoulder and wondered how much of the conversation Griffin’s commander had managed to follow. “So I want him taken care of until we can arrange his return home. His arm needs looking at. You’ve a medical officer back at the garrison, I take it?”

“Surgeon Manseraux.” It was the corporal who replied, to a tart look from the lieutenant, Hawkwood noted.

“Competent?” Hawkwood asked.

“He’s a bloody butcher.” The soldier grinned, showing teeth as yellow as parchment.

Hawkwood returned the grin. “Excellent. What’s your name, Corporal?”

Hawkwood had no interest whatsoever in the corporal’s name but he was following one of the first principles of military prudence: cultivate the non-commissioned men. Get them on your side and you could win wars.

The corporal straightened. “Despard, sir.”

“Then I thank you for your advice, Corporal Despard.” He turned to the man on the horse. “I regret I’m not too familiar with this part of the country, Lieutenant. How far are we from this garrison of yours? Mahon, did you say?” Hawkwood forged an expression that suggested he was trying to search his memory. “Wait, that would be . . . Ambleteuse, am I right?”

The lieutenant twisted in his saddle and jerked his chin towards a point over his shoulder. “Two miles up the coast beyond the dunes.”

Still very formal, though, Hawkwood noted. A warning bell began to tinkle.

“Good. Then we should proceed there without delay. The sooner I’m reunited with my regiment the better. Now that I’m home, I’m anxious to get back to the fight. But then, who wouldn’t be, eh?”

The lieutenant turned and drew himself up. “Quite so, Captain. Permit me to congratulate you on your safe return.” The lieutenant paused and his face took on a new severity. “My men and I will of course accompany you to the fort, though I regret we are required to escort you under arms.”

Malbreau flicked his hand at the corporal and his men, who responded with a look of surprise before taking a renewed grip on their muskets. “As you’ve been away for some time, you may not be aware that the Empire is still under considerable threat from Bourbon sympathizers. There have been a growing number of incursions by royalist agents disembarking from British vessels along our northern coasts and we’ve been warned to remain vigilant, so you’ll forgive me for taking precautions.”

In that one moment, the expression on Malbreau’s face told Hawkwood all he needed to know. He’d sensed his comment about wanting to return to the fight had hit a raw nerve. The lieutenant’s response confirmed it. At some time in his past, Malbreau’s army career had obviously been blighted, probably due to an indiscretion or a poorly judged command. As a result, despite the Emperor’s dire need for able troops to reinforce his eastern divisions, the lieutenant had been consigned to the doldrums: a small, once significant but now poorly manned coastal garrison miles from anywhere. Mahon was going to be the pinnacle of Malbreau’s army career, and he knew it and the inevitability of it consumed him.

And as with all such men, the lieutenant clearly placed the blame for his misfortune squarely on everybody’s shoulders but his own. The bitterness was engrained in every frown, shrug and thrust of his jawline. It oozed from his pores like sweat on a toad. As far as Lieutenant Malbreau was concerned, he was still a cut above everyone else, be they a general, a corporal or, more specifically, anyone holding the rank immediately above him, which on this occasion, turned out to be one Captain Vallon of the 93rd Regiment of Infantry: frontline officer, escaped prisoner of war and, therefore, in the hearts and minds of the Republic, a returning hero. In Malbreau’s eyes, targets of resentment probably didn’t come any bigger.

Hawkwood forced himself to nod in acquiescence and keep his voice calm. “Absolutely, Lieutenant. Quite right, too. For all you and your men know, we could well be subversives, come ashore to wreak havoc about the Empire. It wouldn’t do a lot for your career if you let someone like that slip through your hands without adequate investigation, now, would it?” Hawkwood added blithely.

A nerve moved along the lieutenant’s pale cheek. Hawkwood looked sideways and caught the corporal regarding him with what appeared to be a degree of embarrassment. In response, Hawkwood offered Despard what he hoped was a wry shrug. A corner of the corporal’s mouth lifted; silent affirmation that Lieutenant Gaston Malbreau wasn’t much liked by his own men either and that it was a friction that appeared to transcend the boundaries of rank. Possibly something worth exploiting, Hawkwood mused, should the need arise. He stored that thought away.

His authority sealed, at least in his own mind, Malbreau gripped the reins of his horse. “When we reach Mahon I’ve no doubt the garrison commander will be able to verify your particulars and arrange for your onward journey. Though it may take a while. The same goes for your . . . companion. Does he speak French, by the way?”

Hawkwood shook his head “A few words only and I’m no linguist, alas, so I can’t tell you much about him, other than his name. We were introduced at the beginning of our voyage. Since then, I’m afraid our exchanges have consisted mostly of pointing and waving our arms about. You know how it is.”

“I see.” Malbreau nodded. There was no warmth in his voice. He stared hard at Griffin’s commander and, in passable though heavily accented English, said. “You are Captain . . . Stuart? Is that correct?”

Christ! Hawkwood thought. If Stuart contradicts the story we’re dead men. He held his breath.

Stuart lifted his head. Slowly he got to his feet. Cradling his injured arm, he nodded. “Captain Jonathan Stuart at your service, Lieutenant.”

“What is the name of your ship?”

For a tiny second, Stuart hesitated. Then he frowned, as if deciphering the lieutenant’s pronunciation, and said, “The lugger Pandora, out of Rye. Or at least she was until the storm ripped her to pieces. I’d like to know who’s going to bloody pay for her.”

The lieutenant’s brow creased. “What do you mean?”

“What the hell do you think I mean?” Stuart replied hotly. “You think I was on my own time? I was working for you lot when she went down. Delivering the captain here to the bosom of his family. It wasn’t only my ship. I lost my living and my crewmates in that bloody storm. Like brothers to me, they were; with wives and children. They’re going to need recompense for a start. You going to arrange for me to speak to somebody about that?” Stuart glared hard at the lieutenant before throwing Hawkwood an equally accusatory look.

Hawkwood was struck by the emotion in the English captain’s voice. Stuart’s outburst had not been a piece of theatre; it had been genuine. Angry and distraught at the loss of the crewmen from the Griffin, he was letting anyone within earshot know it, Hawkwood included. Stuart was also, Hawkwood knew, sending him another message: that he’d understood the gist of his exchange with Malbreau.

Feigning incomprehension and bemusement at Stuart’s tirade, Hawkwood turned to the French officer. “What did he say?”

Malbreau gave a derisive snort. “The scoundrel’s only demanding compensation for the loss of his boat.”

“Is he indeed?” Hawkwood appeared to give the matter some thought. “Well, you can’t deny the fellow has a point. Seems only fair after the risks he’s taken. I’ve no doubt something can be arranged. Tell him, I’ll do my best to see he’s suitably reimbursed.”

Malbreau stared at Hawkwood askance.

Hawkwood raised an eyebrow. “What? You doubt the fellow’s claim? You do realize that without friends like the captain here, a lot of good Frenchmen are likely to be spending the rest of the war and possibly the rest of their days in British prisons. What do you think’ll happen if Captain Stuart returns home to tell the rest of his smuggling brethren that we didn’t see right by him? I’ll tell you, Lieutenant: there’ll be no one to give aid to our brave comrades; no one to provide them with shelter or arrange their safe passage across the Sleeve. From what I’ve heard, the war hasn’t been going at all well. France needs every able body. You wouldn’t want to deny experienced men the chance of returning home and answering the Emperor’s call, would you?”

Malbreau flushed. “No, of course not.”

“Damned glad to hear it,” Hawkwood said, turning the screw. “Then tell him what I said.”

Malbreau, after hesitating with his teeth clenched, did as Hawkwood instructed. Stuart listened to the grudging translation then turned to Hawkwood and, after fixing him with a calculating stare, gave a brief nod as though acknowledging the offer of restitution. Hawkwood nodded back. For Malbreau’s benefit, Hawkwood hoped, honour had been satisfied.

“So.” Hawkwood stroked the mare’s smoothly muscled neck. “That’s settled then.” He looked up. “Well, lead on, Lieutenant. The sooner we report to this garrison of yours, the sooner we can arrange Captain Stuart’s repatriation. That way, he’s out of our hair and ready to bring more of our men back. And if either of us drops by the roadside I’m sure Corporal Despard and his men will be only too happy to manufacture stretchers for the two of us.”

Unseen by Malbreau and the other members of the patrol, Hawkwood and Stuart exchanged another quick glance. It wasn’t hard to interpret the desperate query in Stuart’s eyes. Hawkwood didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that Stuart was asking him what the hell they’d got themselves into. And, more to the point, how the hell were they going to get themselves out?

As Lieutenant Malbreau wheeled his horse about, Hawkwood was asking himself the very same thing.

Chapter 7

They headed north.

Malbreau had told them it was only two miles to the fort. Two miles in which to come up with a plan of escape. Not far enough, Hawkwood calculated bleakly. To make matters worse, he was being herded further away from his destination: Wimereux and the diligence that was to transport him to Paris. So far, the mission was turning into an unmitigated disaster.

He thought about the consequences of their being taken to Mahon. There was a slim chance the subterfuge might work. Ultimately, their fate lay in the hands of the garrison commander, but if the latter was cut from the same cloth as his subordinate, they were in trouble. Hawkwood revised that thought. Deeper trouble. Just how deep remained to be seen.

The path wound its way through the pine trees, rising steadily before finally emerging on to a narrow road bordered to the east by scrubby heathland and to the west and north by a rolling landscape of grass-topped sand dunes which, Hawkwood presumed, sloped all the way back down to the sea. The path was heavily indented with cart tracks and hoof prints, many cloven, indicating it was a well-worn route for cattle as well as horses and probably a main drover road, linking settlements up and down the coast.

As if taking Hawkwood’s direction literally, Malbreau had chosen to ride ahead of them, guiding his horse along the ruts, maintaining point in haughty silence. Hawkwood wasn’t sure about the horse. He couldn’t recall if it was a requirement for a French officer of fusiliers to be mounted or whether it was a personal affectation. He suspected the latter. Either way, it was another facet of Malbreau’s style of command that distanced him from his men, which made Hawkwood wonder if that was why Malbreau had chosen it. Perhaps, Hawkwood thought cynically, the lieutenant considered it more convenient than having his men carry him around in a sedan chair.

Though, in truth, he was thankful for Malbreau’s lack of civility. Had the lieutenant been the garrulous type, anxious to discuss the course of the war or exchange tales of hearth and home, Hawkwood knew the journey to the fort would require constant vigilance on his part to ensure he didn’t say the wrong thing and inadvertently let something slip which would lay open his and Stuart’s deception. Malbreau’s unwillingness to engage in conversation had granted Hawkwood a useful respite in which to think. Or at least, that’s what Hawkwood had supposed when they’d set off.

Blankets over their shoulders, Hawkwood and Stuart made no attempt to communicate with each other, for obvious reasons. In that regard, Hawkwood had drawn the short straw for, as none of the patrol other than Malbreau understood English, Stuart had been left guarding his own thoughts. Unfortunately, this had left Hawkwood, not to his own devices, as he’d first hoped, but prey to interrogation by his new-found friend, Corporal Despard who, in the absence of supervision by his lieutenant, was most interested, almost to the point of sycophancy, in Hawkwood’s fictitious capture and flight from the bastard British and their infamous prison hulks.

It might have been wiser, Hawkwood knew, to have pulled rank and kept the corporal in his place from the outset, in keeping with his masquerade as a French officer. But with Malbreau having removed himself from conversational range, Hawkwood had revised his original thinking and reasoned that, if his disguise was to be believed, a prisoner of war newly restored to his own country would probably want to converse with a fellow soldier – irrespective of rank – if only to avoid marching in a strained silence, which would have made the journey to the fort smack even more of prisoners being transferred under escort. Which might have satisfied Lieutenant Malbreau, Hawkwood reflected, but it wouldn’t have been conducive to either his or Stuart’s sense of well-being. So, remaining alert, he’d given in to the corporal’s enquiries.

Fortunately, Hawkwood had been able to draw on his own experiences to satisfy Despard’s curiosity. The events that had taken place on the hulk, Rapacious, and his association with Lasseur were still vivid in his mind and the physical scars he bore added credence to his story. There had been no need to manufacture detail or events.

Also, as it turned out, the information had flowed both ways. By the time they crested the final rise to find the estuary and the coastline spread out before them, Hawkwood’s store of newly acquired knowledge included the troop numbers and disposition of the Mahon garrison, the calibre of the shore battery’s seven cannon, the proclivities of the garrison commander’s mistress and the name of the best inn and brothel in Ambleteuse. Admittedly not all the intelligence was strictly relevant, but as Hawkwood had learned over the years, one never knew when accumulated facts might prove useful.

The first thing that struck Hawkwood was that there wasn’t a great deal of town to see. What there was of it – a cluster of unexceptional buildings huddled behind a low sea wall on the estuary’s northern shore – lay a little under a mile distant and it didn’t look as if the place could support more than two or three hundred souls at the most. It was even doubtful whether Ambleteuse qualified as a town. Hawkwood thought back to what the corporal had told him. The place had likely been a quiet spot before the army arrived. Despard’s brothel probably hadn’t existed either until the soldiers decided they wanted another form of entertainment to complement their alcohol intake. In that regard the place was undoubtedly no different to any garrison town in England, or anywhere else for that matter. It was the same with soldiers the world over. When they weren’t marching to war they were either fighting among themselves, or whoring or drinking. The only difference lay in the languages they spoke and the colours they fought under.

The fort drew the eye immediately, though it wasn’t nearly as formidable as Hawkwood had been expecting. Neither was it situated in a commanding position on the high ground as so many garrison fortresses were. Instead, the squat, semi-circular construction was perched in lonely isolation on a rocky shelf at the mouth of the river. It looked not unlike a large wide-brimmed hat that had been washed up by the tide and deposited at the edge of the sand. The fort’s curved side butted into the Channel, its thick crenulated battlements forming a defensive barrier against the wind and waves. An oblong, grey-roofed blockhouse dominated the top of the keep. Smoke rose from the single chimney stack and a flag, buffeted by the breeze coming off the sea, flew stiffly above it. The fort was tethered to the shore by a concrete causeway and Hawkwood could see that, come high tide, the garrison would be completely cut off, leaving the troops stranded on their stone island. It didn’t look like anywhere he’d want to be posted in a hurry; which went a long way, he thought, to explaining Lieutenant Malbreau’s churlish disposition.

His gaze shifted to the mouth of the estuary and the jagged bend in the river directly behind it. His eyes moved upstream towards a low stone bridge. There were people in view; early risen townsfolk going about their business, some driving or pushing carts, a few herding livestock, either to market or fresh grazing land, Hawkwood presumed. He could see milking cows, a dozen or so sheep and a small flock of geese. It was a tranquil scene. What he couldn’t see were other fording places, which suggested the bridge was probably one of the district’s main crossing points.

“There she is,” Despard announced without noticeable affection and nodded towards the fort as if it had just materialized out of thin air.

Malbreau neither paused nor bothered to follow his corporal’s gaze but continued on towards the river with all the aloofness of the local squire returning home after a morning’s hack. The indifference, Hawkwood noticed, as they followed Malbreau down the track, appeared to be mutual. If any of the locals were curious at the sight of two civilians flanked by a patrol bearing weapons at shoulder arms, they gave no outward sign. The garrison had been there long enough to ensure that troop movements had become a daily normality; either that or familiarity really did breed contempt.

Approaching the bridge, Hawkwood glanced towards the sea and the fortress outlined against the low-hanging sky. Differing in size but with the same shade of tiles covering its summit, it bore a vague resemblance to the bastion that had guarded the entrance to the Medway and the Sheerness dockyard that had been the mooring place of Rapacious. As omens went, Hawkwood thought, it left a good deal to be desired.

A cry from the direction of the bridge cut into his thoughts. Following the sound, he saw that a cart had come to a skewed halt at the far end, with one of its wheels dislodged. A mule waited patiently between the cart’s shafts as the carter tried to untangle its harness. Half the cart’s produce had been spilled. Several empty wicker cages lay strewn across the road and a dozen squawking hens were making a valiant bid for freedom. Hawkwood wished them luck, though he didn’t think they’d get very far.

And then he saw that another catastrophe was about to ensue. A couple of drovers approaching from the opposite direction had failed to notice the damaged cart. Their half dozen or so head of cattle had obviously been blocking their view and they’d allowed them to get too far in front. With exquisite timing, the beasts had also decided it was time to pick up speed and a minor stampede was under way. On the bridge, the cart driver was too intent on rescuing his goods to have noticed the new threat bearing down upon him.

By the time Malbreau got there the bridge was milling with livestock and a heated altercation had broken out between cart owner and drovers. So much for tranquillity, Hawkwood thought.

Unflustered by the contretemps, however, Malbreau, shoulders erect, manoeuvred his mount slowly and surely through the small jostling herd and past the arguing trio without so much as a sideways glance. Neither did he try to avoid the carpet of fruit and vegetables lying squashed beneath his horse’s hooves. Not that there was much of anything edible left to salvage. The cattle had taken care of that.

By the time Hawkwood and the others arrived, Malbreau was some twenty horse lengths ahead of them and the row was still in full flow, raising grins from the corporal and his men, who wasted no opportunity in grabbing up several fruit that had survived the collision. They did not try to conceal the theft and laughed as they slapped the now docile cattle out of the way and tossed the purloined apples back and forth between them.

As the patrol passed by the spilled cart and the raised voices, Hawkwood saw Stuart’s eyes flicker to one side and widen. He followed the English captain’s look and was surprised to see that one of the drovers was a young woman, and an attractive one at that. Hawkwood found his attention drawn to a pair of cornflower blue eyes set above a pert nose, framed in an oval face. The auburn hair poking out from beneath the hat emphasized her pale complexion. One thing was certain: she bore little resemblance to the drovers he was used to seeing around any of the Smithfield pens. He was still thinking that when she broke off from berating the carter, drew a pistol from beneath her coat and with calm precision shot Corporal Despard through his right eye.

And all hell broke loose.

In the time it took the ball to exit the back of the corporal’s skull, Hawkwood was already moving, throwing the blanket aside and scooping up Despard’s musket before it hit the ground. As Despard’s corpse was flung against the parapet, Hawkwood swung the weapon up and smashed the butt into the shocked face of the next fusilier in line. From the corner of his eye he saw the girl turn and the second drover step back, sweep aside a basket of vegetables and snatch up the pistol that had been hidden beneath.

The pistol flashed, another loud report sounded and a third fusilier spun away, his chest blossoming red. A body thrust past Hawkwood and he saw it was Stuart, making a grab for one of the other discarded muskets.

The remaining fusiliers, caught between the decision to return fire or make a run for it, were left floundering; their dilemma made worse by the cattle who, already unnerved by their aimless rush to the bridge, were immediately driven into fresh and increased panic by the gunshots. The scene suddenly became a mêlée of terrified soldiers and bellowing livestock all trying to choose the safest direction in which to flee.

Hawkwood heard the girl call out and saw her point. He looked immediately for Malbreau and caught sight of him across the backs of the scattering herd. The lieutenant had wheeled his horse about. It occurred to Hawkwood, as he watched Malbreau draw his sabre, that what the man lacked in humility he made up for in grit.

There was a loud crack from close by and Hawkwood felt the wind of a musket ball as it flicked past his cheek. One of Despard’s surviving companions had decided to make a stand, but in the fusilier’s excitement he’d fired too soon. An ear-splitting clamour filled the air as the ball struck one of the milk cows. The animal went down as if poleaxed. Hawkwood had never heard a cow scream before. It was a terrible sound. A spinal shot, he thought instinctively as the beast continued to writhe in agony, legs thrashing in the dust.

He saw Stuart raise the musket he’d recovered from the dead fusilier. Somehow, with his good hand, the lieutenant had managed to haul back the musket’s hammer. Jamming the muzzle into the midriff of the soldier who’d loosed off the last shot, Stuart pulled the trigger. There was a vivid flash and a loud crack and Stuart’s features disappeared behind a cloud of smoke from the ignited powder. The fusilier fell back with a shriek, arms spread wide as he went over the side of the bridge into the water below.

Hawkwood didn’t wait for the splash but raised Despard’s musket to his shoulder, ignoring the yell as the less nimble of the two fusiliers who’d taken to their heels lost his footing and slipped beneath a frenzy of trampling hooves.

Another pistol shot rang out and Hawkwood saw the remaining fusilier throw up his hands and pitch forward on to his face.

Then he was concentrating.

It had been a while since he’d hefted a musket. Compared to the Baker rifle, the weight and balance were all out of kilter. The damned thing was over a foot longer, for one thing. As for the weapon’s accuracy; that didn’t bear thinking about. The Charleville was supposed to be the best musket in the world. From Hawkwood’s point of view, as a rifleman, it was about as much use as a pair of sugar tongs.

He drew back the hammer.

Malbreau was seventy yards away and coming in fast when Hawkwood fired.

He doubted it was a killing shot the instant he squeezed the trigger and thought he might even have missed the target, for as the musket slammed back into his shoulder he saw Malbreau’s horse stumble. The ball, however, struck Malbreau high on his right breast, plucking him backwards as if by an invisible hand. The sabre dropped from his grasp and he pitched sideways out of the saddle. As the weight on its back shifted, the horse veered sharply, the sudden movement causing Malbreau’s boot to catch in his stirrup, trapping him by the ankle and spinning him over. Frightened anew by the now unfamiliar object attached to it, the horse turned upon its tracks once more. As Malbreau’s body hit the ground, his shako came loose and fell away, tumbling like a drum across the dirt. The horse began to pick up speed and with Malbreau’s body flopping and twisting behind it like a blood-stained scarecrow it headed towards the fort.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.