The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  ‘We also have an idea of his possible movements. The name is Chance – Gabriel Chance. He was known of in Lincolnshire a couple of weeks back, heading to Cambridgeshire; there was no doubt of his intention to aim for London eventually, and no doubt that he felt inspired to some act of greatness – inspired and greatness were the exact words.’

  Bellamy nodded, absorbing it all. ‘Very well, then. The challenge is the same. We know he’s serious, we know we need to find him quickly. Get to it, Jessel.’

  Jessel murmured acknowledgement and turned away. ‘Where did this come from?’ He turned back.

  Uncomfortably: ‘I don’t know, My Lord. I have a shrewd guess, but I don’t know.’ The confident flow had stumbled; he went on without waiting for the question. ‘It’s Roscarrock. He’s got the information somehow, and he’s… he’s not saying, My Lord.’

  The Admiral’s eyes flicked hard and wide. ‘He’s what?’

  ‘He just passed the information to me in the form of a new report, just as—’

  ‘Just as Kinnaird would.’

  Jessel stood silent; not a moment for wasted words. Bellamy ran a hand over his slab of a jaw. When it dropped again to the desk, it revealed a heavy and hungry smile. ‘He’s got awfully sure of himself awfully quickly, hasn’t he?’

  The glare roamed the room, and Jessel had the familiar sense of being something small hiding in the long grass.

  ‘Does Roscarrock know which side he’s on?’ Jessel’s eyebrows merely raised, accepting the question. ‘I don’t mind the side so much, as long as I know which it is. How would Kinnaird contact him, if he wanted to?’ The big chest gave out one boom of a laugh, grim and curt. ‘Keep at him, Jessel. Keep at him. I rather like the style of the man, but I need to know which way he faces.’

  The letter had come from the Reverend Henry Forster, using the route he normally used for his correspondence with Kinnaird. Roscarrock had read it three times before passing on the main points to Jessel, and he read it once more before burning it. After a sincere statement of affection to Roscarrock, the Vicar had added five lines of afterthought:

  Post scriptum: Tom, if you should happen to come across Gabriel Chance, I urge you to tread gently. Before you smile at my luxuriant sympathy for such a troublesome fellow, let me assure you that my concern is largely for you. Gabriel Chance might, after all, truly know the path to the promised land, and history would not look kindly on the man who hanged him before he could show us.

  Roscarrock was back at the coffee house nine hours later, with darkness to cover his activities and a strong knife to work at the locks. A minute’s observation from Fleet Street, when he’d left earlier in the day, had suggested how the courtyards had to be laid out. Sure enough, twenty yards down Shoe Lane from the main road he found a strip of complete shadow between two buildings that was in fact a narrow alleyway. Shoe Lane was gloomy enough, and a further thirty seconds tucked into the alley entrance fully adjusted his eyes to the darkness. He began to move further in with slow and cumbersome steps, feet slipping in the dust and slime and tapping their cautious way over the mess of stone, wood and who knew what other rubbish that littered the ground. From the smell, something once vegetable or indeed animal had been left to rot nearby.

  He reached the end of the alley, breathing shallow through his teeth, and relished the chance to open his shoulders, if not his lungs. The little courtyard was no more than ten feet square, but the amphitheatre of grimy windows reflected a little light down into the darkness, enough to help Roscarrock check the position of doors and windows. He glanced at his shoulders and hands, confirming that the light wouldn’t reveal him to anyone who happened to be awake in one of those windows, and moved quickly to the door he wanted.

  For a full minute he stood with his eyes closed and one straining ear pressed to the wood, seeking any sign of life inside. Then he eased his knife out and began to work at the lock, trying to feel its resistances and movements through the blade.

  The lock’s heavy click cracked into his sensitized brain, and he stood still for another full minute. Then he replaced the knife, turned the handle and stepped inside, teeth clenched in anticipation of a creak of door or threshold. Another pause. He was where he anticipated: in front of him the passage ran straight to the coffee house; immediately to his right the stairs led up. Light from Fleet Street and the windows at the top of the stairs picked out the skeleton of the building.

  From somewhere above him came faint, rhythmic breathing.

  Roscarrock, taking the steps one every fifteen seconds and at their very edge, had expected this. Kinnaird and the rest of the capital’s men of affairs, however legitimate their interests, would have wished them entrusted to something more than an old lock accessible to anyone with a strong knife or even boot. He took a breath, and eased one eye around the turn at the top of the stairs.

  The entrance to the correspondence room was half-blocked by a door; through the door, outline edged in the grim light from outside, a pair of legs were propped up on the counter. The faint breathing was now a clear and contented snore.

  Roscarrock edged forwards into the upper passage, feet finding the edges of the floor and eyes gripping the pair of legs. This would be much easier if the first of the doors on the passage was unlocked.

  The handle squealed as he turned it, and the door stayed firmly closed. His whole body tensed at the noise, the irritation, and the readiness for flight. The legs and the snoring had not changed. Roscarrock released a breath as silently as he could, and began to advance along the passage again.

  The second door opened smoothly and silently and, eyes flicking back to the legs, Roscarrock wondered as he stepped in what he would say if he found Pewsey wide awake and checking his books. But the room was dark and empty of life. What little light was in Shoe Lane peered through a small window into some kind of storeroom. He pushed the door to behind him, and again waited to adjust to the gloom.

  Whatever he threw, as long as it was innocent enough in itself, should prompt the guilty sleeper to make a brief inspection of the premises before returning to his chair. He rejected a book as too odd to find lying around, was wondering whether a ball of string would make enough noise as it bounced down the stairs, and then found a short length of wood that was probably used to prop open the sash window. He checked the snoring, half-moved into the corridor, and swung his arm. The piece of wood took a happy bounce at the top of the stairs, and was still rattling satisfactorily down them as Roscarrock slipped back inside, pushed the door closed and dropped behind a dusty desk in case the guard checked this room too.

  The guard checked the room. After a scraping and clumping through the wall, two heavy steps hit the passage floor, the door swung open and a lantern blared into the darkness. Roscarrock readied himself, one eye closed to preserve half of his night sight, for the faint chance that the guard would take his duties seriously enough to come into the apparently empty room.

  The door slammed closed, and the guard’s clumsy progress towards the front of the coffee house was reported by the floorboards, the locked door adjacent, and the stairs.

  The guard’s tour took him five times what Roscarrock needed to slip to the door, dart on dancing sailor’s feet into the room of the message boxes and make it safely back again, closing the door softly behind him and taking up position behind the desk.

  Sir Keith Kinnaird’s message box had been empty.

  Roscarrock forced himself to sit through twenty minutes of frustration, which he tried without success to turn into calculation, before he reckoned that the guard would be asleep again and felt comfortable in retracing his steps. As he slipped back out of the alley and into the limited civilization offered by Shoe Lane, he was still thinking hard, looking for a memory of Kinnaird rather than the city streets. He would not, in any case, have seen a shadow step out of the blackness of a doorway opposite the alley some time after he had gone, and the shadow resolve itself into the alert form of Philippe de Boeldieu. In dress, face a
nd manner, all trace of the salon fop of twenty-four hours before had gone, and his expression was all hard thought as he watched Roscarrock disappear into the London night.

  29th July 1805

  Tom Roscarrock shadowed by the tavern chimney breast, chewing slowly on an apple.

  His expression cold, fixed, he reviewed the faces of the past days: cheerful, mercurial Jessel, the hunter, and behind him the Admiral, aloof and magisterial. Then, by happy association, the vivid glimpse of Lady Virginia Strong, a seductive daydream, a siren for a drowning man. The parade of characters who populated his new world, the Magistrates and innkeepers and spies who spoke from the gloom, the writers and free-thinkers and men of business who shone in the salons. Reverend Henry Forster: a genuinely decent and moral man, applying a level of intellectual freedom and honesty that made him less rooted, less certain and less dependable than any of them. And somewhere, a half-remembered delirium of his fever, the vague and shifting face of Sir Keith Kinnaird.

  In the shadow, Roscarrock smiled slightly, a smile that no one would see. He was caught up in it now, increasingly committed to this world of uncertain rules and unknown allegiances. The Scotsman had said he must sail with the wind, and that he could do, closer and stronger than most men.

  With an obscure pride, he felt in himself a stubborn intent to outdo these shape-shifters and loyalty-brokers. The loyalties I have are to dead men. The life that I would protect is drowned. I have less to lose than anyone.

  I am freer than any. I have crossed the bounds in my time.

  Inspector Gaston Gabin pulled the collar of the coat up around his neck. There was no warmth in the mean little cottage. He wondered whether the old woman lying in front of him would have had a fire during the day; would she have saved her wood for evening, or even rarer occasions? No – there were trees nearby and, whoever owned them, she’d have scrabbled enough furtive kindling for her needs. But there’d been a restraint about her, a correctness; she’d have had a tight view of what she considered extravagance. So: fire for one cooked meal a day and cold evenings only. The damn cottage leaked heat. He could hear the wind darting in from the blank morning sky through holes in every window and joint.

  She was like his own mother. His mother had been that type of peasant, further hardened by the Brittany winds: a little skeleton of standards to hold her up and protect her virtues, and no fat allowed. His father had been the other type: give the old man ten sous and he’d spend all ten that evening, and probably another five on account. Gabin smiled.

  The mother of Joseph Dax, the runaway spy, was dead and had known nothing. He’d tormented her a little, the cushion over her brittle bird-like face, but his heart hadn’t been in it. It was clear from his previous questions around the village, and his first deceptive questions to the old woman, that his quarry had not been to the cottage yet and that the mother did not know where he was or where he was going.

  Gabin had tested her a little, gathered a little innocuous background. And then the old woman had died. He still wasn’t sure whether he’d killed her deliberately, with one final irritated pressure on the cushion, or whether it had been an accident, or whether the old lady had finally decided to meet death herself, swallowing him in with one last airless mouthful.

  Joseph Dax had found no shelter here, and now he would find none again. The sentry and the patrols would see to that. It was still possible he’d come, of course. Gabin had built a little picture of his fugitive, and independence and brilliance of thought were no part of it. The servant spy was hunted and he would feel hunted, and so he would seek shelter. Always the emotions. The messages across the police networks, the patrols and the enquiries, they were the businesslike intellectual solution to keep the Minister happy. Gabin himself would explore little Joseph Dax’s soul.

  The Inspector had a last look around the room, searching for any unnoticed trace of character. Then he stood and, cheerful at the prospect of warmth, stamped towards the front door. The local police could tidy up here. He had other little avenues to follow now, including the old family that mother and son had served. But first, a hot breakfast.

  By the middle of the morning, the Reverend Henry Forster had finished his breakfast and was settled in his spartan study. The mornings he devoted to work – to reading, to preparing a sermon or writing letters. He enjoyed the company of his books, and he enjoyed the satisfaction that by his three hours’ studiousness he was justifying a whole afternoon’s walking or riding. A Bible lay open on the desk in front of him. His hands held a book on English tree varieties and their cultivation, and the book held his complete attention.

  He heard the first knock, and ignored it in the hope that he’d misheard or that whoever might be disturbing him would think better of it.

  But the knock was repeated. Cobb had cleared breakfast and gone for the morning; he’d have to answer the door himself.

  He opened the door to reveal a rough bundle of a man, standing in the porch and obscured from the road by its walls. The man was a mess of clothing: good boots, but tatty breeches and smock, and he had a sack of some kind pulled over his head. Was he carrying something, or had it been raining?

  ‘Yes?’ Then the Reverend tried to remember his calling and not the interruption; ‘Can I help you at all?’

  It wasn’t a face he knew – so far as he could tell, in the shadow.

  ‘Parson Forster?’ The voice was low and hoarse; he couldn’t make out an accent or a class.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have a word with you, Reverend?’ It surely wasn’t one of the labouring men from the village, was it?

  The books were still open on his desk somewhere behind him; the fields ahead, beyond this shadow of a man, flashed the greens and golds of summer life at him.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. You’d better come in.’

  Fannion was moving towards the heart of England, by back rooms and barn lofts and hedgerows and hayricks. By the 29th of July he was south of Stratford, among villages too small even for one decent inn. Such places were also too small for him to reveal himself safely; there might be the occasional rustic firebrand who hated his King and his Government, but they hated strangers more.

  So he’d waited in a ditch until dusk had muffled the fields, and the farmers had had time for supper, and then he followed the maze of shadows to a barn.

  These fields had been the cockpit of the civil war, hadn’t they? Now that would be something. A king executed and the English blowing each other to hell for once. This whole plain sat under the escarpment where the Royalists had lined up for the first battle of the war. It had, quite literally, all gone downhill from there for them. One glorious cavalry charge, discipline out the window, and Cromwell and his kind had regrouped and never looked back.

  Perhaps some of Cromwell’s Irish-butchering troopers had slept in this same barn. It certainly stank enough to be that old. Sometimes he got the feeling that England was slowly poisoning him, with her vast, complacent history, the stubborn comfort of her citizens, and whatever damps and diseases infested her barns. Was there nothing clean and fresh and new in the whole damned country? Perhaps he’d set fire to the straw just before he left. A nice barn-burning, now: that would cover his escape and set the farmers against the workers very neatly.

  Fannion caught himself. He needed human company, soon. He needed a pretty girl, and good conversation. He stretched out. The straw was actually quite dry. He hadn’t come all this way to upset a few farmers and get pitchforked to death in a ditch by yokels too stupid to be rebellious. He turned up his collar to stop the blades of straw scratching his neck; it was a good coat too, and the real criminal had been whoever left it tucked under their saddle outside a roadside inn.

  Human company was definitely indicated. His destiny, and Ireland’s, was not advanced by him sinking into petty theft and vindictiveness. Tomorrow night he had to be in Bury St Edmunds for the meeting, which meant a bit of horse-stealing this morning. A useful conversation that had been, back in Birmi
ngham – they’d been good earnest fellows. Whoever was speaking at Bury would be honoured to have a real rebel with them on the stand, and he’d give them a little Cork poetry and something to think about. Then London.

  The letters that had summoned him from Dublin were long gone, of course – only a fool kept souvenirs of treason. A pity his departure had been forced forwards so dramatically, before a rendezvous could be arranged. But the instructions had been clear: if he moved in the right circles – if he joined the gatherings of radical men like the Bury meeting – certain loosely described ‘friends of reform’ would find him. And together they would arrange to set London afire. Bizarre, that right in the belly of this fat country were people who wanted radical change so much that they’d give up Ireland to get it. And these rich rebels would be able to arrange his transport to France too, and in France there were certainly people he could do business with.

  But first there must be breakfast somewhere, and a wash, and then he could take on the British Empire.

  Joseph stood for fully ten minutes watching his mother’s tiny cottage from the trees, lost in the aching, unattainable proximity of his youth, and because he stood and watched, he happened to see the sentry.

  He had inhabited these trees, the hedges and the paths and the clearings, long before he had known any kind of home. The empty cheerful games out near the marshes, the little animals trapped and carried proudly home, were what passed for childhood. Every other experience – of poverty, of service, of loss, of Paris, of the burden of adult transactions – was a bar in the cage shutting him out of that pure, lost time.

  The warmth of the cottage was a recent memory. The little dwelling had always been there – a series of large local women ready to halt his games with a slap or an apple – but when his mother had got too sick to work at the house, the old Master had let her move in. Then it became a kind of home for Joseph as well, an insight on a part of his mother he had never known, the crude wooden porch sheltering a doorway back in time.