The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  In the middle of the crowd a few figures could be seen standing taller, on some cart or platform. Roscarrock felt the need for a telescope; Hodge he would recognize without difficulty, and he wondered if he’d be able to tell Chance the itinerant tailor, should Chance even appear.

  ‘… so no bursts of loyal enthusiasm tonight, Ralph,’ Jessel was saying. ‘No side bets, no unnecessary exercise for your troopers. Our objective is Gabriel Chance and Gabriel Chance only, and I don’t care if the rest of them are damning the King and singing the “Marseillaise”.’

  ‘All right, Dick,’ the Major replied patiently and without much attention. He did have a telescope, Roscarrock noticed, and suddenly it flicked up to scan the crowd. ‘I think I just about grasp the basics of intelligence work.’ He folded the telescope and replaced it in a pocket, suddenly looking down at Jessel more earnestly. ‘But I won’t be able to restrain my lads if the stones start flying. They’re not bad chaps and they naturally worship the ground I walk on, but they’re only human.’

  Jessel sighed theatrically. ‘And I’d had such confidence.’

  ‘This ain’t Horse Guards, Dick. A sympathetic dragoon won’t always start when you tell him to, and an angry one won’t always stop.’ The voice was low and intent.

  ‘That reminds me, Major.’ Roscarrock had stood, and now he stretched his shoulders and stepped in towards the other two men. ‘Question I had. Between ourselves, do your dragoons ever… do a bit of work on the side?’ He patted the neck of Royce’s horse, then looked up into the handsome face.

  Royce watched him for a moment, then nodded very slightly. ‘Yes, they do, and I can’t say I blame them. They’ll join a mob for a penny, and rough a man up for a shilling, and they won’t care who’s paying.’ He looked slowly around his troop in the gloom, then back down to Roscarrock and Jessel. ‘The King’s not that generous an employer. And not every dragoon has a lord for a father.’

  There was suddenly a faint, frail call from the centre of the meadow, instantly echoed in an immense roar from the crowd, and every eye in the shadows of the wood leapt up to see. Roscarrock was still watching the Major. Then he shifted his glance to the nearest dragoon, and nodded. ‘Makes sense.’ He moved quietly to the edge of the woods. From the centre of the great mass of people that single call had become a thin trail of words, reaching out across the evening in welcome and inspiration.

  ‘You off somewhere, Tom?’ Jessel’s voice was a hard murmur from behind him.

  Roscarrock looked back for a second. ‘Might see if I can find a closer view. If I get a better offer from the Revolution, I’ll let you know.’ He checked that the Bible page was still in his pocket, and began to walk along the shadows of the treeline away from the soldiers.

  The 30th July

  Monsieur,

  Do not expect early results in the County of Durham. I have made some preparation here – I am more firmly convinced that my method will achieve results here, and I have identified the routines and the men who will facilitate my (illegible word) of the destruction – so rest assured that we will have a success at this colliery soon. But I am now sure that I am watched, and I have determined to move temporarily to another district to elude pursuit and act more freely. Look for news of me in the County of Lancashire.

  Monsieur, my need for money is urgent and I beg you to act quickly. Send to our friends at the agreed place in Lancaster.

  [SS MF/SH/16/8 (THE SUTHERLAND HOUSE TROVE)

  DECIPHERED BY J.J., JANUARY 1806]

  By the time Roscarrock had drifted into the outer fringes of the crowd, Joseph McNamara had finished. His last soaring incitement had ebbed back over the dark, bobbing heads, and under the roaring of the crowd part of Roscarrock was hearing the echoes of his speech outside the Magistrate’s house in Tiverton. He began to work his way towards the centre of the crowd, ducking and slipping between shoulders and murmuring excuses as Henry Hodge stepped forwards and whipped up the roars with two waving fists.

  ‘The American colonists, my friends, they fought for their rights and they won them. They won against tyranny, they won bravely, and they won rightly.’

  Roscarrock continued to ease forwards, slowly and inconspicuously. Whenever he reached a particularly stubborn knot of arms and shoulders, he paused, listened, and waited for the natural eddies of the crowd to open a path again. Hodge spoke well, and his voice was a surprise. He had the volume Roscarrock had expected from his shape and manner, but there was a flow and a resonance that he had not expected.

  ‘Let us not forget, my friends, that those we call American colonists, those our Government called rebels and traitors, these men were freeborn Britons like you and me.’ The voice rose and fell in the sentences, making each a story in itself. ‘They were our cousins; they were our brothers; they were our children.’

  Rosscarock knocked too heavily into a shoulder and got a sudden glare.

  ‘They fought on the principle that they should not be taxed if they were not represented; that they should not be obliged to support a government if they were not allowed to vote for that government. Now tell me, my friends, are we not taxed?’

  Roscarrock was nearer the centre. Hodge’s face was clear and shining, catching the last of the light up on his cart while the crowd below him was in gloom, reciting his catechism of the various taxes oppressing the average man. The great scrum of people was packed more tightly now, here nearer the heart of the storm; on the margins they’d been looser, milling around, unwilling to add to the discomfort of hours of standing. Roscarrock had to catch what chances of progress he could, slipping forwards in the shudders of movement that went through the packed bodies.

  ‘You, sir! You are taxed, but do you have a vote? No! You, sir!’

  The crowd seemed thinner up ahead. The transformation in Hodge was remarkable. The genial, ponderous talker in St James’s Square had become a singing tempest of a man, conjuring the anger and excitement of the crowd and sailing on it.

  ‘Our so-called rulers tell us much of the evils of the French Revolution, but they are silent about the political progress it gave average men like you and me. We have hundreds of members of Parliament, and they represent but a handful of voters. We have no members of Parliament that represent the great mass of Britons gathered here tonight, and gathered around the country.’ Hodge had allowed a strain into his voice; he was feigning exhaustion as he built towards his conclusion. ‘Why did the citizens of ancient Greece, why did the citizens of revolutionary France, why do the citizens of free America, why do they all, I ask you, my friends, enjoy rights denied to freeborn Englishmen?’

  Roscarrock eased forwards in a shift in the crowd, and was suddenly face-to-face with a battered hulk of a man. He was an inch or two taller than Roscarrock, much bulkier, his shovel of a jaw emerging neckless from bull’s shoulders and the large, flabby nose and ears telling the story of every round of the prizefights that were obviously his livelihood. Hodge’s hoarse and resonant excitement was building – a march on London, a grand petition to be presented to the Government – but this great bruise of a man was giving no attention to him; he was staring out into the crowd, and right now he was staring at Roscarrock.

  Roscarrock smiled at him, and glanced left and right. The man’s arms were linked with the men either side of him, part of a ring of men, every one a fighter, a smith or just a damned big farm boy, and these men made a wall around the speakers.

  Hodge was finishing, building a link to the next speaker, and Roscarrock was being battered from side to side by the growing roars of approval from the men around him and their waving fists of agreement. He reached into his pocket and thrust the Bible page towards the face of the fighter. The big man stared back at him. Then he turned his head over his shoulder, called something, and a younger man – better dressed and sharp-looking – hurried over. He reached over the great hedge of linked arms, held the page by one corner and scanned it, then tapped one of the rocky shoulders and nodded. Roscarrock slipped through, a
nd the wall closed solid behind him.

  He was still a few yards short of the cart on which the speakers climbed to speak, and there were men around him looking up and listening to Hodge’s climax. But these men were spread out, and also better dressed. They were listening with less excitement than the mob behind them, but some were listening with more attention. Who were these men? Benefactors? Acquaintances of the better sort? Fellow radicals? Roscarrock looked at the faces around him. He’d no way of recognizing any of them. Was that one of the Parsons from St James’s Square, though? He had no way of cataloguing who was here.

  There was an explosion of noise from behind Roscarrock, and shouts of approval from the men around him. He’d got into the inner circle, but what did that mean? Even if they’d got lucky and Gabriel Chance was indeed coming to speak to the crowd, what was he going to do about it? He had no way of signalling to Jessel, and Jessel couldn’t have done anything about it even if he had. He himself couldn’t achieve anything by force, surrounded by two dozen of the largest, no doubt fight-hardened, citizens of East Anglia.

  In any case, these considerations were based on the faint possibility that Chance had even decided to come here, and Roscarrock was still scowling at the futility of his position when Hodge finally hushed the crowd and introduced his ‘brother in liberty, James Fannion of Ireland’, and a flame burst in Roscarrock’s face.

  They were lighting torches as the darkness gathered around the cart, and within a minute half a dozen men were holding them up towards the speakers. As Roscarrock’s eyes readjusted, he found himself two yards short of the cart and staring up into the handsome face of the Irishman that the whole British Government was supposed to be hunting. Fannion the murderer, Fannion the agitator who would set the country on fire, Fannion who’d been forgotten because they had a clue to Chance, was here tonight and almost within reach.

  James Fannion seemed to be staring back at him. But the eyes were closed under the dark curls and eyebrows. It was a delicate, indoor face, with an outdoor complexion. Then the eyes snapped open, eyes with an intense life in them, glaring down through Roscarrock and far beyond, and the head lifted and he began to speak.

  The crowd hadn’t been sure about an Irish speaker – the applause had been polite at best – and Fannion knew it. He began humbly, with a generous tribute to Hodge, and there was little of Ireland in his accent. Then he faced their doubts full in the face. ‘My friends’ – and he drew the word out with a kind of pain at the loss of friendship – ‘I know that many of you feel no cause to love the Irish. Perhaps your sons and your brothers have done military service in Ireland – and you wish them home as much as I do. Perhaps you’re afraid of the Irish threat to your constitution.’ It was clever stuff – this crowd didn’t give a damn about the constitution, and in reassuring themselves on that point they’d lose some of their vaguer fears of the wild Irish. ‘Perhaps you’re worried about the Irish taking your jobs in these desperate times.’ They weren’t particularly, not in this part of the country, but Fannion was only reinforcing his honesty and integrity.

  Roscarrock had never trusted oratory, had only seen it in half-drunk mutinous crewmen and village politicians – and this was why. Fannion was brilliant, and he was dangerous.

  ‘My friends, I have not come here to tell you to love the Irish. I have not come here to tell you that these are anything but desperate times. I have not come here to curse your British soldiers – like all of us, they are most of them simple men trying to earn a penny where they can.’

  Roscarrock remembered the report from Liverpool of the murdered Sergeant, Fannion the man most likely to have stabbed him.

  ‘We are all of us victims of the same oppression – the political oppression that tries to enslave us; the economic oppression that tries to starve us. I speak not as an Irishman, but on behalf of the great brotherhood of man that knows no borders or Empires. I speak – just as Mr Hodge speaks, just as you all speak – not with the surliness of slaves, but with the fellow-feeling natural to free men across the world. In your darkness, in your struggle, you are not alone.’

  Roscarrock had seen effective crews of honest men corrupted to chaos by mere words, and he was wary of words and of wordmen because of it. But there was courage in James Fannion, a hunted rebel and murderer who would travel through England and proclaim himself in the middle of a crowd, with dragoons waiting. And there was beauty in those dark, hunted eyes, and witchcraft in the words. Fannion spoke for no more than fifteen minutes, but in those fifteen he created a devastating picture of the depths of English suffering. His native accent getting stronger with every rolling phrase, he expressed over and over his sympathy, the sympathy of all people enslaved and free, for the English. He expressed his wonder that in the face of such oppression, the English people had kept their peace and paid for war against fellow sufferers in America, in Ireland and in France. Prudently, poetically, James Fannion was preaching rebellion, and Roscarrock saw only a predator’s face on the platform.

  ‘I am only a guest here, my friends. I have no wish to provoke those horsemen in the trees there, with sabres in their hands and the King’s pennies in their pockets. Instead, I should congratulate them and their Government for the most brilliant deception. Like the Kings of France, they have convinced proud people to fight each other, instead of fighting together for the rights that are theirs. If I was the British Government, I should fear some great explosion from the people, but the British Government does not fear. The British Government has avoided the fury of the people, and for that I congratulate the Government. The British Government has avoided the liberty of the people – and this is a liberty that is not even theirs to offer or withhold, it is a liberty to which we are born, and still we do not feel its absence. Some radical men will tell you that this is a Ministry of fools; I say this is a Ministry of geniuses, for the meek acceptance of the British people is nothing short of miraculous.’

  Unlike McNamara’s call and response, unlike Hodge’s direct questioning and stirring of the crowd, Fannion was provoking no dramatic reaction. His words prompted growls and shouts of agreement, and now some grumbling anger. He had the power to make the crowd his ardent followers, and instead he was making them out to be fools. He could have made himself the head of a riot this evening, and Roscarrock couldn’t work out why he’d just made himself unpopular.

  ‘My friends, if you expect me to preach rebellion you will be disappointed. My respect for your Ministry and your dragoons is too great. If you burn Bury St Edmunds tonight, you will find you have achieved nothing in the morning. But I will say just this. Should the sleeping volcano of the English people burst forth in one devastating bid for freedom, I shall not be surprised. Should your just and peaceful petition to London be met with indifference, and soldiers, and the Riot Act, I shall not be surprised. Should your resentment and frustration be shared by the people of London, a city that loves liberty more than it loves kings and governments, I shall not be surprised. Should your protests provoke the over-reaction of the Ministry, I shall not be surprised. Should you decide, at last, that your liberty is the one thing you have left to give to your children, I shall not be surprised. Should you carry your burning desire for freedom right down Whitehall and hurl it against the muskets of the soldiers and the dead walls of your unelected Parliament, I shall not be surprised. And should all this create some natural explosion of the honest English people, I shall not be surprised. And I promise you, my brothers of the world, that should the English rise to reclaim their true liberty, the Irish would be beside them. We have shared your oppression; we share your dream of freedom; and we will share your glory.’

  He didn’t even produce a crescendo. The last empty word was hardly off his tongue when he turned and began to climb down from the cart.

  Now he saw it. In the half-hearted shouts and grudging applause, Roscarrock saw a bitterness that would not be dissipated in a night. Fannion could have roused a cheerful riot, and the crowd’s passion would have
burnt out by morning. Instead he had skilfully stoked an anger and a shame that would burn slow and long, and he’d done it without a word that could count as sedition.

  Roscarrock was trying to peer through the glare of the torches into the darkness on the other side of the cart. Hodge’s face he could make out, a troubled face, but where was Fannion? Was that him, replacing a shapeless, soft-brimmed hat on his head? There was another figure standing upright on the cart now, but Roscarrock ignored the words, another exaggerated introduction of another speaker. Would Fannion leave now?

  Of course he would. He had nothing to stay for – he had no interest in the thoughts of English radicals, he’d had the effect he wanted, and he’d get out while the dragoons were still watching the crowd. Then the man on the cart said how much pleasure he had in introducing Gabriel Chance, and Roscarrock swore aloud at his own impotence.

  When James Fannion had started to speak, the torches had glared oddly in the blue evening. Now the sky was black, and the orange blazes around the cart were the only light, flaring up to the speakers and splashing out to gild the first circles of the crowd. Weirdly lit from below, Gabriel Chance seemed small and frail and surprised. Looking up at his face, grotesque in the shadows, Roscarrock knew that his voice would have trouble reaching the ring of bodyguards, let alone spreading out into the night-muffled mob.

  Across five thousand men, there was silence. A flicker of wind rasped at the nearest torch.

  He had it all – everything Lord Hugo Bellamy wanted. Find me the tailor and find me the Irishman, the Admiral had said, and Roscarrock and Jessel and who knew how many others had been trawling England to hunt them. Now Tom Roscarrock only had to put out his arm to touch the tailor; and the Irishman was just a few steps away. But, becalmed in the vast and radicalized crowd, he was helpless – and if anyone there realized who he was, he’d be torn apart.