For Our Liberty

by Rob Griffith

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I left the house on Rue Mazarine well before breakfast the following morning and made my way up to the Seine. The day was cool, fresh and clear after the previous night’s rain. I missed Fauche’s promised feast partly so that I could observe Fulton’s workshop before contacting him but mostly because I still couldn’t face any more food, despite my strenuous exercise in the coach. Brooke had told me that Fulton worked in a small boatyard near the Quai Bernand, which wasn’t far and on the very edge of the city. A bit of observation to check that he wasn’t being watched by any of the various secret police and I could make my approach. I was naïve enough to assume it would be that simple but I had taken the precaution of carrying my travelling pistols, and my sword-stick clicked on the all-to-infrequent paving as I headed along the left bank of the river past the scene of my impromptu river crossing the previous spring and down to the Quai Saint Bernard. The sun was shining and I was filled with the improbable optimism that Paris all too often engenders. Oh, what a fool I was.

  The city was waking and I had little trouble losing myself in the rapidly filling streets. I wove my way between hawkers, delivery boys, women with loaded baskets coming back from markets, and working men off to their employ. I left the white cliffs of the five story houses behind me and walked into the shadow of the towers that marked the point where the river stopped the march of the city walls. I walked under the twin arches of the Porte Saint Bernard and down to the river bank. The wide and muddy shore had been left alone here and not tamed as in other parts of the city. Wooden jetties, ramshackle and hazardous looking affairs, jutted out into the river’s flow. It seemed as though every kind of produce was being brought down the river to feed the appetites of the city, a fair portion bound for the Rue Mazarine, I thought. Pataches, wide and low river boats, piled with wood from the forests of Champagne queued in the river waiting to be unloaded. The air was heavy with the scent of over-ripe onions, rotting cabbage, butchered animals and other odours even less savoury. Any attempt my appetite was making to return was quickly thwarted.

  Half-naked labourers sweated as they carried sacks and barrels from barge to cart. Dapper merchants occupied half their attention on checking that their goods were being loaded with the minimum of thievery and the other half in keeping their well-polished shoes out of the filth and mud. Here and there, a uniformed douanier was harassing a barge-master for some duty or other and I had seen two municipal guards walking slowly through the throng keeping a sort of order, but nothing had yet shaken my optimism.

  I soon came to the boatyards. Long lines of flat-bottomed boats were dragged up on the mud, their sterns resting in the river and more were half completed, lying further up the wide banks and looking very like the ones I had seen in Boulogne. I noticed a soldier looking bored and scratching himself in front of a barrier ahead and guessed that the barges, destined for the invasion fleet, were being guarded against sabotage. This of course made it a logical location for Fulton to get up to his fanciful tricks. I knew that my masters in London took the threat from this American scientist seriously but I doubted then that his wild inventions could ever work. In my experience, if Americans achieved as much as they bragged about then they would be the most powerful nation in the world instead of us Britons.

  As my papers said I was a wine merchant I decided to plead to the guard that a barge to carry my wine was being built in an adjacent yard and that I had come to see if the delays that the boat-builder was claiming were true. The story was lent added weight by the proximity of the Halle aux Vins wine market. It took several minutes and a couple of coins to convince him to let me through, and I suspected that he would spend the money on another poxed whore as I left him scratching his groin with the fervour of a dog with fleas.

  The boatyard was a hive of activity. It was a temporary looking place with rough wooden shacks and tents making up the maze of workshops and smiths. Men were sawing, hammering and carrying wood all around me and I tried to look as though I knew where I was going. Fortunately, the workmen treated me with the disdain that men who earn their crust with their hands always treat those who don’t and they ignored me. I hunted for Fulton’s workshop and eventually found it near a tiny inlet of the river. It was no more than a couple of large sheds and I only knew I was in the right place because of the absence of any work being done. For some valuable river frontage not to be used to build Bonaparte’s precious barges must mean that something of equal importance was being done, or not done in this case. Two more very large clues that perhaps I had found my American engineer were tied up next to a small jetty. There was a long copper sheathed cylinder, of perhaps twenty feet in length and over six in width. A small barrel like protuberance had a metal hatch in it and there was a wooden rudder at the rear along with some strange shaped blades of its propelling apparatus rising out of the water. The copper was going green and the vessel had a sad, neglected feel about it along with a plaintive list to one side. Next to this strange craft was a more conventional wooden cutter of about seventy feet but in its centre was a chimney and some kind of boiler. On either side were large paddle-wheels. Both craft looked ridiculous so I knew I had found Fulton.

  I ducked behind a pile of barrels and began to keep watch. For the first hour I saw no one. Behind me I could hear the sounds of the boatyard but this little inlet was quiet enough for a coot to scud across the water from the shelter of some reeds and for four fat rats to emerge from under one of Fulton’s sheds. Eventually I heard a merry whistle coming along the path and a moment later a tall, smartly dressed man came around the corner, jumped down from the dock to the copper craft and then walked up a precarious looking plank on to the steamboat. He removed his somewhat garish red coat and hat, and then rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He knelt beside the boiler and began to take it apart.

  My position was cramped, damp and smelled foully of whatever seeped out of the barrels. Fulton spent an hour dismantling the boiler and then putting it back together. I don’t think that I have spent a duller hour before or since. No, that is not quite true, there have been those occasions when I have been dragged by women into all the emporiums of the Strand and Bond Street in a fruitless search for some item of apparel that they just had to have. The only high point was when he hit his hand with a hammer and I added a few Yankee curses to my vocabulary, something that seldom occurs on Bond Street. I should have watched until I was certain Fulton wasn’t being watched himself but I was getting cramp and the rats were getting overly inquisitive. I convinced myself that I’d seen enough and decided to act.

  I waited until he was looking the other way and then emerged from my hiding place. I limped towards Fulton, the blood slowly returning to my legs.

  “Good day,” I called in what I hoped was my best French accent. The last thing I wanted to be taken for was a foreigner. Fulton looked up irritably, wiping his brow and leaving a black oily smear across his forehead. “It is a pleasant day, is it not?” I continued, and instantly regretted it. Only an Englishman begins a conversation with a comment about the weather. Fulton put down his spanner and studied me for a few seconds. He had a long, plain, honest face with searching eyes and a soft mouth. He looked to be in his late thirties and his unruly brown hair had begun to leave his temples, a single wayward lock hung low in the middle of his high forehead.

  “What do you want?” he said, in English.

  “To talk,” I replied, in the same language.

  “About what.” he said, looking over his shoulder and then behind me.

  “Your work, perhaps,” I said gesturing at the two boats.

  “What about my work?” he asked, standing and carefully crossing from the cutter to the underwater craft and then to the shore. I walked up to him and held out my hand. He didn’t take it.

  “I have a letter from a potential employer,” I said.

  “I have an employer,” he frowned, wiping his hands on a rag and looking at me intently.

  “I have he
ard that your employer has little interest in your work,” I said, staring back at him.

  “That is not true. My ideas are radical, it will take time for them to gain acceptance, that is all,” he said, but I didn’t think either of us believed it.

  “I have heard that your masters have dismissed your ideas.”

  “They are not my masters,” he said, getting slightly riled.

  “The people that I represent would pay you well.”

  “I am not interested in money. I am a man of science,” he said emphatically. I had annoyed him so I changed tack.

  “Well then, my employers would see to it that you could complete your work. This letter will explain everything,” I said and took the packet out of my pocket and held it out to him. Fulton looked at it with alarm but also with a small hint of hope. He hesitated and then took it from me.

  “Why would I work for the English King, the enemy of my country? That is who you represent, is it not?” he asked, holding the letter as though it was something he found floating in the river and hadn’t yet identified.

  “Yes, the Navy has heard of your work,” I admitted. “We were your enemy once, but you rebelled for freedom. How much freedom do you see in France?”

  “The revolution was founded on liberty, as was my own nation,” he said, but didn’t sound very convinced or convincing.

  “True, but what has been done with that liberty? I don’t think that all the people killed on the guillotine feel liberated. Bonaparte will make himself a king, just wait and see, and all the struggles of the people will have been for nothing.”

  “And England is better? England is free from tyranny?” he asked scornfully.

  “Maybe not, but we are willing to pay for your inventions and the French are not.”

  “Do you think I am a mercenary?” he shouted, throwing the rag to the floor.

  “No, I think that you are an engineer who wants his ideas proved correct,” I said, aware that I was raising my own voice.

  “Why would His Britannic Majesty’s Navy, the most powerful in the world, want to buy my plunging boat or my steam cutter?” he asked, his tone heavy with sarcasm.

  “Precisely because they are the most powerful Navy and wish to remain so. Britain is a country of scientists and engineers, even our Admirals look to the future. Look at the innovations that have been made in our manufactories, the discoveries of our scientists. What better home could you hope for?” I said. It was all absolute twaddle of course. The only future our Admirals looked to was their slow progression up the Navy list.

  “True,” Fulton said, “there are many members of your Royal Society that I would like to see again.” He put the letter in his coat and took out his watch, nervously flicking it open and shut. “I must get back to my work. I have an appointment at the Ministry of Marine tomorrow. If they do not want to continue to fund my work then I may consider your offer.”

  “Very well, meet me outside the Théâtre Montansier before the evening performance tomorrow night,” I said. “We’ll leave for England then, if you want to come.”

  He didn’t look persuaded and I hoped the letter was more compelling than I had been. What he would do when he realised that the British government was as disinterested in his ideas as the French and only wanted to make sure no other country had access to his unlikely craft would be someone else’s problem.

  “Agreed,” he said and finally shook my hand as he stepped back onto his strange craft. I left him to his tinkering, and tried to wipe the grease from my hands.

  I walked back through the boatyards with a skip in my step. Whatever Fulton decided, my job was almost done. All I had to do was to come back that night and sink the two boats. Since one of them was designed to sink I didn’t think that would be too difficult. I planned do it before I met him at the theatre. That way with his craft destroyed even if he didn’t agree to come with me his work would be put back months if not years, with luck the Ministry of Marine would lose interest in the whole thing if they hadn’t already. Hopefully Dominique would soon be finding out more from Duprez.

  I walked back along the quai and through the city gate. It must have been the relief at fulfilling the first part of my mission or perhaps thoughts of Dominique that made me miss the figure following me through the now crowded streets. My stomach had recovered its appetite and I stopped at a café in the Place de Greve. I sat at a table in the sun, looking across the river at the Ile de la Cité, and then I saw him. He was a small ferret-like man, his clothes worn and dirty, and when he took off his hat to scratch his head his scalp was bald and pink. I thought that I had seen him down on the quai, and as I thought about it perhaps in the boatyards as well. I instantly suspected that Fulton had been being watched but I had not seen the watcher. I practised my new yankee curses under my breath. The watcher stood idly at a street corner some fifty yards away and I waited for my food. Whatever I was going to do I felt sure that I would do it better with a full stomach and panicking now would only compound my many errors.

  My bread, cheese and wine came quickly but I took my leisure over my lunch, firstly because the bread was fresh and the cheese nicely ripe, and secondly because I needed time to think. If Fulton’s watcher had sent a report to his masters that some unknown gentleman had given him a letter then all was lost. If however he had followed me and not alerted anyone else then there was still hope that I could salvage something from the mess I was undoubtedly in, if I was careful. More careful than I had been up to then at least. I sipped the last of my wine and left a handful of coins on the table. I walked towards the Rue Saint Denis and the maze of alleys that came off it as it neared the Seine. I hoped that I walked as I had before, in a preoccupied and foolish manner. The ferret-like man followed me, keeping far enough behind me so that I sensed his presence rather than saw him. The streets were busy and I had to weave my way past rowdy hawkers and sullen beggars. Everybody in Paris wanted your money, one way or another. I kept my sword-stick at the ready.

  I entered a narrow street and the noise of the crowds and the traffic faded behind me. I trod carefully to avoid the worst of the filth and hoped that the lack of any other people on the street would not mean that my shadow would feel the need to keep a greater distance between us. I made a show of slipping and steadying myself, cursing colourfully and glancing back behind me. He was still there. Washing hung over the alley blocking out what little sunlight dared to penetrate the gloom. There was a burnt out row of workshops on the right and I began to unbutton my breeches as I nipped behind a derelict wall. My shadow could not hope to catch me more unguarded than when I was answering a call of nature and so I was not surprised when I heard the soft crunch of ash to my rear. I continued to pretend to be occupied.

  I heard another step and turned, pulling the sword-stick blade out as I swung towards him. He had a knife in one hand and a look of shock on his face as my blade hovered over his Adam’s apple. He dropped the knife and looked into my eyes. He must have seen the hesitation. I should have killed him straight away and he knew it but I needed to know if he had told anyone about me.

  “On your knees,” I demanded, pushing the point of the blade into his neck to reinforce the order. He did as I asked and sank slowly to the ground. I kept the sword close to his skin so he could feel the cold of the steel, and circled around behind him.

  “Please,” he said, “don’t kill me.” His fear sounded genuine but I think we both knew we were each playing for time; me to get an answer and him for an opportunity to escape.

  “Who have you told?” I asked, prodding the sword into the back of his neck until a bead of blood formed on his fish-belly skin.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir. I am just…”

  He didn’t finish his sentence because I used the empty cane of the sword-stick to give him some incentive to tell the truth. He began to whimper and to hold his arm where I had hit him. I knew that every second I delayed in killing him raised the odds of someone seeing us, but whether they would d
o anything in this area of the city was doubtful. People would not live long here if they did not know to mind their own business. Still, I could not take the risk.

  “I will ask you again, for the last time, who have you told? Your life depends upon your answer.” I flicked the sword to draw blood on his cheek. I did not feel proud of myself bullying that sad example of mankind. He was emaciated and obviously poor. He would be watching Fulton because that was all the work he could get. Unfortunately it had become a case of him or me, but still I vacillated. I had killed before, in battle, but never in cold blood. I began to doubt that I could.

  “I swear to you, sir. I have told no one. Nor will I. Just let me go. I swear to God,” the passion in his voice and the pleading were compelling but just a ruse. In my weakness and indecision I let the sword drop, just a couple of inches but it was enough. He had grabbed a handful of ash when I had hit him before and now he twisted and threw it in my face. I saw him move in time to avoid being blinded entirely but I still lost valuable seconds spluttering and clawing at my face whilst his head cannoned into my stomach, doubling me over and making my sword fly from my hand.

  I beat him on the back with the cane of the sword-stick and we broke contact, he staggered up and came at me again. I swung once more with the stick but he grabbed it with a lightning quick hand. I pushed the stick at him and while he was off balance let go of it and kicked him in the crotch, but missed any vital organ. He attacked, swinging his fists wildly. This time Gentleman Jackson’s training came, unbidden, to me. I danced away from his blows and followed each one with a swift jab to his face or side. Each blow made him angrier, more desperate and his punches less accurate. He fell to the floor but rose again, this time with his knife. He stabbed at me but he was blown and breathing hard, clutching his ribs. I side-stepped easily enough and finished him off with a right to his jaw that sprayed teeth and blood on to the wall. I grabbed him and smacked his head into the bricks again and again until he fell to his knees, a smear of crimson marking his progress down the wall. He wasn’t moving and a pool of blood was spreading beneath his head but I couldn’t stop myself kicking him repeatedly. Anger and fear were eventually replaced by exhaustion and regret. I stopped kicking.