* * *
Rear Admiral Michael Seymour arrived at the Admiralty in a common hansom. This, he felt, was hardly befitting a man of his importance and dignity, but his carriage was broken – something to do with a cracked axle, according to his damn’ fool of a coachman – and it would take hours to repair; and Seymour had a very important appointment with the First Lord that he could not afford to miss.
The cab pulled up in front of the main entrance and Seymour waited for the cabbie to climb down and open the door for him.
The cabbie did not move from his seat. ‘This is it, Capting,’ he announced, as if Seymour had never seen the building before. ‘The Admiralty.’
‘I’m well aware of that.’ Seymour sighed. Apparently he was expected to open the door for himself. He got out. A thick snowfall was blanketing London, and two of the Admiralty’s ‘messengers’ – as the general-purpose flunkeys there were known – were brushing snow from the cobbles in front of the building.
Seymour turned back to look up at the cabbie, who was thickly muffled in greatcoat and comforter. ‘What do I owe you?’
‘Four shillings and ninepence, guv’nor.’
‘Daylight robbery,’ grumbled Seymour. He drew some change from his pocket and gave the cabbie five shillings. The cabbie looked at the coins in contempt, then pocketed them and made to whip the horse on.
‘Hold on a minute!’ protested Seymour. ‘What about my change?’
‘What, thruppence?’ the cabbie exclaimed derisively. ‘What about my tip?’
‘I’ll give you a tip: if you want to receive a gratuity, I suggest you learn to distinguish rank. I’m an admiral, not a captain.’
‘Bleedin’ skinflint!’ The cabbie tossed him a sixpence. ‘There’s half a grunter for you. You obviously need it more’n I do!’ He whipped up the horses and drove away.
Seymour had almost made it to the main entrance of the Admiralty when something knocked his cocked hat from his head. Cursing, he stooped to retrieve it, and a second snowball exploded against the seat of his trousers. He straightened sharply and whirled in time to see a couple of street urchins running off down Whitehall, laughing.
‘You damned ragamuffins!’ he called after them, shaking his fist while brushing snow from his posterior with his other hand. ‘Count yourself lucky I don’t call for a police constable!’
He entered the Admiralty. In his early fifties, Rear Admiral Michael Seymour was one of the youngest flag officers in the navy – having been promoted to post rank at the tender age of four-and-twenty – a tall man with a patrician face and greying hair swept back from his temples, iron-grey side-whiskers creeping across his prominent cheekbones like cant hooks.
He stepped into the marble-floored entrance hall, unbuttoning his coat to reveal his full-dress uniform with its wealth of gold piping. A flunkey hurried to greet him: one of the ‘messengers’ who safeguarded their lordships’ appointment books and wangled expertly for bribes.
‘I’ve an appointment with Sir James,’ Seymour explained in response to the messenger’s enquiry as to his business at the Admiralty.
‘And you are?’ the messenger asked politely.
The admiral glowered at him. ‘Seymour. Rear Admiral Michael Seymour.’
‘Very good, sir. Sir James is waiting for you in the boardroom.’
Seymour shrugged off his coat and handed it to the messenger before heading upstairs. It was a pity the incident with the obnoxious cabbie and the ragamuffins had spoiled what promised to be a red-letter day, and he tried to dismiss them from his mind. He had a pretty good notion what the First Lord of the Admiralty wanted to see him about.
When the Baltic Fleet had returned to Portsmouth back in December, Vice Admiral Sir Charles Napier had gone at once to meet the First Lord, Sir James Graham. No one else had attended the meeting, so exactly what had passed between the two men was known only to them, but since it had resulted in Napier hauling down his flag as commander-in-chief of the Baltic Fleet, it could be safely assumed there had been a full and frank exchange of views.
Napier and Graham had been friends once, which was presumably one of the reasons why the vice admiral had been appointed commander-in-chief the previous year in spite of his reputation for being a loose cannon. Napier’s orders had been to keep the Russian Northern Fleet bottled up in the Baltic and to ‘look into the possibility of doing something in the Åland Islands’. Napier had carried out his instructions to the letter: the Russian ships had not dared emerge from behind their maritime fortresses to face the Anglo-French fleet, and the ‘something’ he had done in the Åland Islands had been to reduce the fortress at Bomarsund and capture the archipelago from the Russians.
But the problem with having a reputation for exceeding orders was that after a while people expected it from you as a matter of course, and when the Allied fleet had not bombarded Kronstadt and landed in St Petersburg, public opinion in England had turned against the former hero. The war was going badly in the Crimea, and when everyone’s hope that it could be brought to a swift conclusion by a decisive blow against St Petersburg had been dashed, Lord Aberdeen’s Tory Government had needed a scapegoat. It had turned to the Admiralty, since the First Lord was a Whig, and Graham had quickly passed the blame on to his former friend Napier.
Seymour had been Napier’s second in command, Captain of the Fleet, so he was well aware of the difficulties the vice admiral had faced, exacerbated by the dilatory, contradictory and sometimes downright foolhardy instructions he had received from the Admiralty. But he had no sympathy for his former chief. As far as he could see, Napier was the victim of his own bombast. It was his own fault for making such vainglorious speeches about what he was going to achieve in the Baltic beforehand.
And now that Napier was gone, the Admiralty needed a new commander-in-chief for the Baltic Fleet.
Seymour smiled confidently as he advanced on the door to the boardroom. He had a good idea who the new commander would be. Since Napier’s dismissal just before Christmas, he had been hard at work in the clubs of London, distancing himself from his superior’s perceived failure with anyone of importance who would listen. ‘Poor old Napier – getting too old for that sort of thing – lost his nerve – needs someone younger, with a bit more “go” – someone with experience of campaigning in the Baltic.’ He licked a fingertip and smoothed his eyebrows.
‘Rear Admiral Michael Seymour, to see Sir James,’ he told the messenger standing at the door to the boardroom.
‘Very good, sir.’ The messenger opened the door and ushered him through. ‘Rear Admiral Seymour,’ he announced.
The First and Second Lords of the Admiralty – Sir James Graham, MP, and Rear Admiral the Honourable Richard Saunders Dundas, CB – rose to their feet to greet him.
‘Admiral Seymour!’ Graham said jovially. In his early sixties with thick black eyebrows above what would have been described on a woman as ‘come to bed eyes’, the First Lord of the Admiralty was one of those men who went through life with a hint of a crooked smile on his lips, as if life were a joke and he was one of the few people clever enough to get it. ‘Do take a seat.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’ Seymour joined them at the table.
‘As you know, we’ve been looking for someone to take command of the Baltic Fleet ever since Napier hauled down his colours in high dudgeon,’ said Dundas. He was a couple of years younger than Seymour, with wild salt-and-pepper hair receding from his high-domed forehead and crow’s-feet crinkling the corner of his eyes beneath thick, black brows.
‘We’re not going to make the same mistake we made with Napier,’ put in Graham. ‘We need a steadier pair of hands on the helm, as it were. Someone younger and more vigorous. But not someone without experience.’
‘Quite so, Sir James,’ said Seymour. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’
‘I did not have to look far for a suitable candidate.’
Seymour smiled. ‘Whomever you have decided to appoint, Sir James, I shall be more than h
appy to serve under,’ he said, with what he thought was suitably becoming modesty.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Dundas. ‘I know I’ll be able to rely on you, and the experience you gained of campaigning in the Baltic last year will be invaluable.’
‘You’re too kind, Sir Richard.’
‘So, let’s get down to brass tacks. How long do you think the ice in the Gulf of Finland will keep the Russians locked up in the harbours?’
‘Oh, at least until April, sir.’
Dundas nodded. ‘I thought we’d send the fleet out in two squadrons, an advance guard setting out in mid-March, while you and I follow in the Duke a week later with the rest of the fleet.’
‘Er… you intend to accompany the fleet, Sir Richard?’ Seymour asked in astonishment.
Dundas laughed. ‘But of course! I wouldn’t be much of a commander-in-chief if I stayed behind in England, would I?’
Seymour turned to Graham. ‘You mean… he’s the new commander-in-chief?’
‘But of course! Who did you think we meant?’
‘But… you can’t! I mean… he’s a member of the Board of Admiralty!’
‘Not any longer. He’s resigned in order to take up his new position as commander-in-chief of the Baltic Fleet.’
‘Naturally, I’ll keep you on as captain of the fleet,’ Dundas hurried to assure him.
‘You’re too kind,’ Seymour said again. Neither Graham nor Dundas noticed the sour note in his tone this time.
‘Splendid! Now, as I was saying, we’ll leave Portsmouth in two squadrons. Our main objective for the campaign ahead is to keep the Russian fleet bottled up in its harbours. The last thing we need is the Emperor Peter I sailing up the Thames to bombard the Palace of Westminster!’
‘You’ll need to achieve more than that if you’re to avoid the same disgrace as Napier did, though,’ Graham told Dundas. ‘You must attack Sveaborg at the very least. Perhaps even Kronstadt. Naturally, I’ll leave it to the two of you – in conference with your French opposite numbers, of course – to decide which of the Russian fortresses you decide to attack. But attack one you must. Public opinion demands victories, so a victory is what you must give them…’
Seymour listened with only half an ear as British public opinion – rather than strategic advantage – dictated their plans for the forthcoming campaign. He kept a smile pasted on his face, although inside he was seething. How dare Graham appoint Dundas over his head? True, Dundas had been promoted to rear admiral a year before Seymour and thus had seniority; but that was only because he had reached the rank of post-captain only nine years after joining the navy, and that thanks to the fact his father, Lord Melville, had been a former First Lord of the Admiralty. Why, the great war with France had been over by the time Dundas had joined the navy! At least Seymour had fought against the French. Hadn’t he boarded La Sultane when he had been a midshipman?
‘Well, I think that covers everything for now,’ said Graham, and Seymour snapped out of his bitter reverie to see that the First Lord was ringing a small glass bell to summon a clerk. ‘You’ll receive your written instructions as soon as you’ve hoisted your flag on the Duke,’ he told Dundas.
The clerk entered and started to tidy away the First Lord’s papers. ‘What’s my next appointment?’ asked Graham.
‘That’s the last one for today, my lord. Although there is a Commander Killigrew to see you.’
‘Killigrew, Killigrew… oh, yes, I remember. Met him when he returned from the Arctic after that Venturer débâcle. Does he have an appointment?’
‘No, sir.’
Graham looked pained. ‘Now really, Trench, you know better than that. I can’t see anyone without an appointment.’
‘I know, sir, but he was most insistent. He said it was a matter of the utmost importance and that he had to see you at once.’
‘It’s always a matter of the utmost importance.’ Graham sighed. ‘Tell him to make an appointment and I’ll see him when I can. And tell my coachman to bring my carriage to the door.’
‘Very good, sir.’ The clerk took Graham’s dispatch box and retreated from the boardroom.
Graham, Dundas and Seymour headed for the entrance hall.
‘You’re quite right not to see that fellow Killigrew,’ said Seymour. ‘Nothing but trouble, that one.’
‘You know him?’ asked Dundas.
‘Know him? Unfortunately! He’s Crichton’s second in command on the Ramillies… one of Napier’s creatures. The man’s nothing but a dangerous lunatic…’
‘Napier?’ said Graham. ‘Or Killigrew?’
‘Both of them,’ growled Seymour. ‘Napier sent Killigrew to negotiate Lord Bullivant’s release when his lordship’s yacht was captured by the Russians last year, and that fool almost got them all killed with his ridiculous antics. Tried to take on a Russian paddle-sloop with an unarmed yacht, had it sunk from beneath him, and ended up getting stranded on some uninhabited island.’ He laughed, making a snorting sound like a sow with asthma. ‘They’d all have been killed by the Russians if a French frigate hadn’t chanced by to rescue them.’
‘I wonder he wasn’t court-martialled,’ said Graham.
‘I was all for it, sir,’ said Seymour. ‘So was Lord Bullivant. But Killigrew was Napier’s blue-eyed boy.’
Graham, Dundas and Seymour made their way outside, where snow continued to fall in thick flurries. ‘I don’t suppose I could trouble either of you for a lift, could I?’ Seymour asked the others. ‘My carriage is laid up at present, and after the dreadful altercation I had with some ruffian of a cabbie, I’m not sure I want to trust myself to public transport.’
‘Where are you headed?’ asked Graham.
‘The United Services.’
‘That’s all right: I’m on my way to the Reform Club.’ Graham’s footman jumped down from the back of his carriage to hold the door open for them. They climbed inside and sat down facing one another.
Graham turned to the footman. ‘Pall Mall, Whittingham.’
‘Very good, sir. Pall Mall, Mr Barrett!’ the footman called up to the coachman, swinging himself up on the back of the carriage. The coachman whipped up the horses and they rattled away up Whitehall.
‘Haven’t eaten at the United Services for a while,’ mused Graham. ‘How’s the food there these days?’
‘Not bad,’ said Seymour. ‘Not bad at all. Mind you, the wine cellar leaves a lot to be desired. Had a very ordinary bottle of St-Emilion the other day—’
‘Good evening, gentlemen!’ Killigrew said breezily, thrusting his head through the window to Seymour’s right. The rear admiral jumped as if stung. ‘Mind if I join you?’ Standing on the running board as they clattered into Trafalgar Square, the commander opened the door and swung inside, plumping himself down on the seat next to Seymour.
‘Killigrew!’ exclaimed the rear admiral, hurriedly moving to sit beside Graham. ‘How dare you, man?’
‘Yes, what’s the meaning of this intrusion?’ demanded the First Lord.
‘Please, gentlemen,’ pleaded Killigrew. ‘I beg you to forgive the unorthodox nature of my approach, but I really must speak to you both on what may be a matter of the utmost national importance.’ He fumbled inside his coat and took out what looked like some kind of technical drawing. ‘Would you mind taking a look at this, sir?’ he asked, handing it to Graham.
‘What the blazes is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ Graham echoed incredulously. ‘Is this your notion of a joke, Killigrew?’
‘No, sir. It could be some new secret weapon—’
Seymour groaned. ‘Oh, Lor’! Not another secret weapon!’
Graham handed the drawing to Seymour without glancing at it. ‘Killigrew, do you have any notion of how many dire warnings we’ve received about the secret weapons supposedly in the possession of the Russians?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘Infernal machines, asphyxiating shells, portable buoyant wave-repressors, repeating submar
ine cannon firing self-plugging lateral explosive shells… all fantasy, all the product of some opiate-swilling pamphleteer’s overheated imagination. Where did you get this one?’
‘Lieutenant Jurgaitis gave it to me, sir.’
‘Lieutenant Jurgaitis?’
‘Half-Livonian chap who resigned his commission in the navy to defect to the Russkis,’ explained Seymour.
‘Half-Lithuanian, sir,’ corrected Killigrew, earning himself a dirty look from the admiral. ‘But he wasn’t a traitor: he only pretended to defect to the Russians in order to gain access to their Admiralty as a spy. Vice Admiral Napier will confirm it: it was his idea.’
‘Napier!’ snorted Graham. ‘I’ve said everything I ever want to say to that pompous old fool. What do you make of it, Seymour?’
‘It’s very indistinct. What’s this brown stuff on it?’
‘Dried blood, sir,’ said Killigrew.
‘Eurgh!’ The admiral dropped the drawings on the floor.
Killigrew retrieved them and handed them back to Graham. ‘It’s obviously some sort of contraption, sir. Whatever it is, Jurgaitis must have thought it was important because he gave his life so that I could bring these drawings safely back to England. And the Russians must have felt the same way, because they went to a good deal of trouble to try to stop them from falling into our hands.’ Killigrew told them briefly about his mission to Finland, and the Russians’ attempts to reclaim the plans.
‘Secret weapons!’ Seymour snorted when he had concluded. ‘Woman spies! Ski chases! Brawling on the rooftops of moving trains! Is this your notion of naval service, Killigrew?’
‘I think we’ve heard quite enough of this nonsense.’ Graham hammered his cane against the ceiling. They pulled up on Pall Mall and the footman jumped down to hold the door open for Killigrew. ‘Of course, I shall want a full report of your activities from the moment you left the Ramillies to the moment you returned to England at your earliest convenience,’ Graham added in the same tone a schoolmaster might have instructed a pupil to write out ‘I must not waste the teacher’s time with tall tales’ ten thousand times.
Killigrew and the Sea Devil Page 4