The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’ll contact him now.’

  Wine arrived, and a large pie, and Jessel plunged into them while watching Roscarrock.

  ‘Maybe not. It looks like Fannion is looking after Chance’s movements now, so maybe he’s buried in some Irish slum room your people have never heard of. But maybe Chance is feeling lonely and lost, despite Fannion. Maybe he wants to make the most of his time in the city.’ He pulled Jessel’s fork from his hand and speared a lump of meat for himself. ‘I’ve heard Chance a couple of times, and he’s not going to find much stimulation in the average London tavern, is he?’

  Jessel was still chewing rapidly. He added a mouthful of wine, and nodded.

  ‘But Plummer is radical royalty. He’s enough of an old wizard to appeal to Chance’s mystical side. I can’t think of anyone else capable of impressing Chance or of offering him any meaningful sympathy.’

  Jessel shrugged, and tried to excavate something from his cheek with his tongue. ‘Fine. As good a waste of time as any other. I’ll check where Plummer lives.’

  The Three Kings Inn on Eastcheap did a brisk trade that evening, thanks to the presence in London of those marching, those who wanted to see the march, and those who were supposed to be stopping it. While the landlord beamed at the pennies crossing the counter and kept a close eye on the stumbling soldiers, James Fannion was upstairs enjoying the company of the man’s youngest daughter. She’d mischief in her eye and a trick or two in bed that belied her age, but she was girl enough to have fallen for the cheapest charms of the poet. Fannion lay back on her mattress, as she played with his hair and pushed her fresh peach of a body against his, and he smiled at the tomorrow he had created.

  He wasn’t worried about the landlord. He wouldn’t be sleeping here tonight or ever again, so what the landlord discovered or the daughter confessed wouldn’t touch him. A second luxurious tumble with the very healthy young woman beside him and he’d disappear into the night, first to look for a good supper and then to find Chance. The tailor had a call he’d wanted to make this evening, and that was all right by Fannion, but after that he needed the tailor to be alone. He’d told him not to sleep tonight – the danger of betrayal and discovery too much, look how close the authorities had come already, twice. By the small hours, he wanted Chance tired and lonely and wandering the unfriendly metropolis; he wanted him thinking too much, in the hours of the dead.

  There was a sudden nip at his ear, and Fannion’s head snapped round. The girl stared back at him, brazen. In the silent hours of the morning, he would find Gabriel Chance and stand him some drinks and talk to him some more and set him on the path to chaos. But now Fannion the predator grinned slow and hungry at the girl.

  It was late by the time Jessel got back with Sir Joseph Plummer’s address, and later still when they reached the narrow house on Fleet Street. Evening London had become night-time London, the happy constellations of lanterns replaced by gloom, the strollers and the seekers of entertainment replaced by tired streetwalkers and furtive beggars, the shadow world of the criminal and the desperate.

  Plummer himself answered the door. Roscarrock wondered whether democratic instincts or relative poverty made the old hawk do without servants; perhaps he’d just happened to be in the hall.

  For a moment he stared at the two men on his doorstep, arrogant and waiting. Then the face twisted in curiosity; ‘Mr… Grey, surely?’

  Roscarrock made to speak but Jessel was pushing towards the old man and past him. ‘Our apologies, Sir Joseph, but we must trespass on your privacy tonight.’ He strode into the hall, and his over-loud voice echoed up into the house. ‘Government business.’

  The calculating eyes hadn’t left Roscarrock. Now they sagged with the face, and a sigh of something like disappointment as they drilled into him. But then, wolfish, they heralded the faintest smile. Whoever was enjoying his hospitality this evening, and whatever it would cost him, Sir Joseph Plummer had another little victory.

  Now he turned to address them both. ‘You are welcome, gentlemen, of course. I am always willing to support the activities of a legitimate government. A glass of wine for you both, perhaps.’ Jessel and Roscarrock watched him, uncertainly. ‘But if it’s Gabriel Chance you were hoping to meet, gentlemen, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. He left me but half an hour ago.’

  Gabriel Chance wandered London alone, and as its streets grew darker and emptier, he assumed this was merely the imprint of his spirits on the world. He had been chosen, surely he had been chosen, but where was his glory? His life had become a gloomy alley, without exit. The further forwards he walked, the more he explored, the more the chilly night closed around him.

  He could turn and run. If he ran hard enough, perhaps he could find light again. He blinked the thought away. It was an illusion. The lights had whispered into extinction behind him. Behind him was the world of mediocrity and failure – the unprofitable products of his clumsy hands and the pity of his neighbours – and to return was a living death.

  Sometimes he could hear his wife’s voice. The memory of her seemed to glow at him. Surely Flora had not flickered out in the night sky. But she was too far behind him. He could not face her now. To have come so far, and to have to go so far back again, to go back to those two barren rooms with nothing, this was a final failure; to spend his eternity watching the hunger and sadness and futility reflected in Flora’s face, this was surely hell.

  He wanted to scream the world to destruction; he wanted to set his lungs on fire and explode in one endless cry that would shatter the darkness and flood the world with light.

  Somewhere near him he heard movement, voices, or just grunts, a man and a woman. The Lord had promised a better world for these people, a way to the light. His life must mean more than failure and insignificance. His spirit, his certainty, the conversations he had alone in the fields, these told him he was meant for a purpose. He was the plough; he was the comet; he was the flood.

  Flora would tell him he must be realistic; Flora would tell him that she loved him for his visions, but that she loved him as a man just as much, in the tarnished world of day. He would be realistic, then. He would grapple with the world of the real, the world of the men and the women in the gloom. A man had come to him with a message; a man had come to him with a path. He, Gabriel Chance, could be the man to blow the trumpet and destroy the walls of the old world. The Lord offered the light, and he had chosen Gabriel Chance to clear the path to it.

  In this new day, Gabriel Chance would show the world who he was; he would show the way. The dawn was coming, and he was the dawn.

  Around him and ahead the buildings stretched up into the darkness.

  6th August 1805

  The events of Tuesday, the 6th of August 1805 are a matter of record. The summer night melted quickly, and London’s early skirmishers were busy in the dawn. The hawkers of oranges and pies took their first steps of the long day, enjoying the warmth of the morning and the easy feel of their still unladen trays; the peddlers of ribbons and religious tracts soon followed them, making for favoured haunts in the city or towards the fashionable west. The first songs and curses rang around the market streets, and already the roads from Surrey and Essex were delivering the goods that would fill the stalls. Men who had not slept, busy copyists and feverish invalids, watched the rising light with primitive wonder. Nightworkers – watchmen and thieves and lovers – slouched homewards, sour and sated. Sleepy, battered scraps of boys brushed the dung and debris from the better streets, and the last whores drifted away with the dust.

  In Battersea, just over the river from the palaces of King and Parliament, the soldiers of the West Suffolk Militia were bawled and kicked awake before six, heads aching and resentful, empty bellies lurching in anticipation. In a tavern in Lambeth, among a few dozy remnants of the night, an Irishman and a tailor sat in silence; the tailor, eyes lost, sipped mechanically at a cup, the Irishman close beside with head inclined as if waiting for inspiration from him. Periodically, t
he Irishman would mutter some prayer or other dredged from his childhood. Soon they would take a walk, just across the river, into the heart of the British Empire.

  The petitioners – the men of Suffolk, and those from neighbouring Counties they had gathered on their way – awoke in festive mood. Four or six to an unfamiliar room, among new friends, sure that the last of the days of trudging was behind them, the men were boys again and boisterous. Today was another day off work, wasn’t it? For most it was their first visit to London, and its sheer size awed and excited. The name itself, two mighty booms of a bell, told a vast permanence. The greatest city on earth, right enough, and more people and power and money than a man could imagine in his wildest fantasy. Could there be a better place for a holiday? Could a man feel more free?

  Soon after eight in the morning they had started to gather in the street, drifting and chatting and exchanging insults with the London men, wary at their differences in dress and wide-eyed at the height of the simplest house. At nine, Henry Hodge, the orator, appeared in a first-floor window. His words gave them nobility now as well; their cause was just, and they marched in the name of all men. Then someone from the London Corresponding Society: a welcome from their brothers in the greatest of reform movements, a request for the honour of marching beside the proud men of East Anglia. Then one of their own leaders, his words drowned by drums and jokes, and no one minded, and then shortly afterwards, with banners and music and shouting, the swarm of men began to move towards Whitehall, where the politicians and the soldiers waited.

  Two platoons of the West Suffolk Militia were on a convergent course with the marchers, but in truth they were soldiers no more. Their opportunity had come after an hour’s morning tedium: the rest of the regiment sent down the south side of the River Thames to be ready to cross Westminster Bridge to Whitehall if needed; a single Lieutenant left behind in charge; lots drawn, and a vengeful former pickpocket claiming the pleasure regardless; a distraction, a cosh, and the young officer was sprawled broken in the dust. They’d stood around wide-eyed then, their rebellion suddenly real. The passion could have ebbed at that moment of uncertainty. But voices of idealism and bravado had come from the ranks, faltering and then strong, and so instead the passion flowed. The old restraints were abandoned: neck stocks loosened, knapsacks thrown off, leaders elected from the ranks in the wave of enthusiasm that had swelled over the body of the Lieutenant. Now they were marching over Battersea Bridge, on the straightest line towards Whitehall, the petitioners and the centre of Government.

  In the madness of millions, there was no one to notice the silent, hobbling entry to the city of a French servant in the last stages of exhaustion. But as James Fannion slipped back across the river and set his face towards France, Joseph Dax completed his journey from Paris to London.

  The petitioners marched to the cheerful, chaotic rhythm of their pipers and drummers, who picked out tunes and beat according to their fancy. Some of their number straggled off as they stamped west through the city, and they picked up as many new recruits from the street boys, the idlers, the apprentices and the enthusiasts. They were a tiny number among London’s countless millions, but in their own noisy cockpit, crammed and jostling between the overstretching buildings, they felt themselves a multitude and they knew themselves popular. Their cause was right and their cause was general.

  From a high window in Fleet Street, Sir Joseph Plummer watched them pass. He was nervy, unable to settle to his writing; his unnecessary bravado with the Government men the evening before had impressed the ghost of his younger self, at least, but it could put him back in prison by nightfall. Chance was mad enough for martyrdom, and Plummer thrilled at the faint possibility that the strange little village saint could somehow ignite a conflagration through London’s desiccated society. But the greater Chance’s effect, the greater the price for his associates. The old hawk took a parched breath into his throat, sickened by his own fear. Through the window, the last of the petitioners were passing beneath him, dogged and cheerful; futile and foolish, but who knew?

  The Admiralty Board convened at half past ten. No Secretaries were present because no formal business had been scheduled, but each of the participants would talk about the meeting for a long time afterwards, and so the broad thrust of discussion is known. Lord Barham opened by repeating his insistence that the Board should be together in case the wider security situation in London or the country required immediate decisions; the Prime Minister had welcomed the suggestion. Admiral Gambier questioned whether such a precaution was necessary. Sir Evan Nepean, who had seen trouble enough in a year in Ireland, said that he was happy to waste a morning if there was the slightest chance it would help to control a riot. Admiral Bellamy spoke gravely and effectively of the level of latent unrest across the nation, and the real tension at all levels of society in London. Lord Barham – who had fought his first sea action more than fifty years before – declared that he was determined that the Admiralty would provide a model of stability and reassurance for the rest of Government, and that they would not be found unready. ‘When the crisis comes,’ he said high and sharp, ‘whether it be from the French or from the mob, it will find me on deck and in command.’

  His subordinates on the Admiralty Board had nothing to say against that, and Gambier suggested that they took the opportunity to discuss the naval situation. In the distance, through the high sash windows of the Board room, they could hear the first faint approach of men and drums. No one mentioned it.

  The shouts, the squeal of the pipes and the chatter of the drums came clear to Jessel and Roscarrock, pacing fretfully in Whitehall, and soon the first of the crowd that had grown up around the petitioners appeared at the top of the road. With no trace of Chance or Fannion, they had spent the morning patrolling the environs of Government, making such preparations as they could for a threat that had no form, and snapping at each other.

  Now the crowd had turned at Charing Cross, in front of the King’s Mews, and was starting down Whitehall into the heart of the corruption they had sworn to challenge. They’d passed detachments of soldiers on the way, and the lack of trouble had relaxed them; at the same time the jovial support of London’s workless and work-skiving citizens inflated their spirits. Now the edifices of British Government soared around them: the Admiralty, and the Horse Guards building; then Downing Street, where even now the Prime Minister might be pondering their cause, and beyond that Westminster Hall and the British Parliament. That was their goal; that was the end of their trek. They would march right up to the door of democracy itself, bang on it and demand that at last their voices be heard, and then… no one knew what would happen then.

  The two rogue militia platoons were marching towards them, only a few hundred yards away, with similar, muddled anticipation. They’d drunk a little; some had drunk a lot. They marched erratic and with fragments of crude song. One of the Corporals had said they had an appointment at the Admiralty, and the angry, eloquent Private who’d been elected to lead them had said they would go in partnership with their brother democrats, the petitioners, and present their demands. Other words had been shouted among them, incoherent and intoxicating – warmongers, redress of grievances, revenge, arrest, tribunal of the people, republic – and they marched with the dumb collective enthusiasm that only groups of drunk men can know. Ahead they could see greenery and open sky.

  Roscarrock said, ‘Where else are we vulnerable?’

  Jessel shook his head. ‘There are guards everywhere, detachments of soldiers in case the crowd gets out of hand; Royce and his dragoons.’

  ‘Are you more worried about the mob, the French assassin, or Fannion and Chance?’

  ‘I’m just… Those idiots in Hackney – the meeting under the church – they were talking about the Admiralty, weren’t they?’

  Roscarrock nodded. ‘And we arrested the cousin who worked in the Admiralty, and he didn’t know anything, but he’s in gaol in any case.’

  ‘They were talking about somet
hing in the future, not something already arranged.’ Jessel’s face was still uncomfortable. ‘But…’

  ‘What hasn’t been checked?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll think of something.’ He glanced at the approaching mob of petitioners. ‘Don’t run off now.’

  The soldiers had reached the parade ground behind the Admiralty and Horse Guards, hearts wider and voices louder as the world opened up around them, trees and royal parkland spreading away to their left, the buildings of Government close on their right. Just on the other side of those buildings, marching south as the soldiers marched north, the petitioners had reached the centre of Whitehall and were bunching closer together as they neared the final yards of their journey and found themselves amid the overpowering architecture of authority. Tom Roscarrock was standing in the archway that ran through the Horse Guards building from Whitehall to the parade ground, watching the approaching petitioners in the former and now glancing round to see a group of soldiers on the other side, and Jessel was halfway to the Admiralty building when a dull terse rumble bloomed under it, and every one of the hundreds of people in the vicinity stopped dead. The sound had been so short and muffled; what had anyone actually heard? Then gusts of smoke swarmed up from the Admiralty basement and over the facade that guarded its courtyard.