by David McDine
‘So the French haven’t been idle during the peace.’
‘No, as many of us feared, the peace was just an excuse for them to take a breather, build up their strength and begin preparations to invade England.’
‘And you have details of what they’re up to?’
‘I have been keeping my eyes open and my ears flapping all the time we have been in France, just as the faceless ones in Dover Castle had requested. Add what I know to what Hurel and his royalist friends have picked up, and between us we have a good deal of intelligence.’
‘So you’ll both need to debrief back at Dover Castle.’
‘We will.’
‘Very well, I was planning to tow your chaloupe into Portsmouth, but in view of the intelligence you’ve gathered and with this strong south westerly behind us it would make better sense to head for Dover and put you ashore there.’
*
Landing at Dover next day, Parkin and Pettiworth hired porters to carry the luggage and the whole party — including the Frenchmen — made their way somewhat wearily to the Ship Inn.
There Pettiworth bagged a seat on the next London mail coach and made his farewells, telling his fellow travellers: ‘Must get back to my counting house forthwith — there’s urgent business for me to transact on behalf of my new French contacts before the world and his wife wake up to the fact that we’re at war again!’
After making sure the rest were settled, Anson reported first to the port captain and then he and Hurel made their way up the hill to Dover Castle.
Colonel Redfearn was delighted to see them. ‘I feared you’d both be trapped in France, but I should have known that resourceful fellows like you would find a way out.’
‘When you have an hour or two to spare we could tell you the tale, sir. Our return was not without incident. The good news is that we bring much information about French preparedness, news of Robert Fulton’s terror weapon, and of a suspected British traitor we’ve scuppered.’
‘Splendid, splendid! Where did you sail from?’
‘Étaples.’
‘And were you able to see what types of invasion craft they’re gathering?’
Hurel smirked. ‘Better still, colonel, we ’ave brought one back for you, a chaloupe. It’s anchored ’ere in the ’arbour!’
Redfearn registered astonishment. ‘Great heavens!’
*
They disembarked from the Dover to London stage at the turning to Ludden and, leaving Parkins, Cassandra and the pile of baggage in the charge of Nat Bell, Anson set off on foot for the hall.
As he neared the house, the butler-coachman Dodman appeared, smiling broadly.
‘Welcome back, Mister Anson. I trust you haven’t left the master and Miss Cassandra in France!’
‘It was a close-run thing, I have to say, but no, we managed to make it back across the Channel, caught the London stage from Dover and they’re waiting at the cross-roads.’
‘Then I’d best get the horses tacked up and go down there and fetch ’em.’
‘Yes, quick as you can, Dodman. They’re bone weary after the journey which hasn’t exactly been without incident. Is all well here?’
‘It is, sir, but you’ve got visitors, over in the summerhouse.’
An educated guess proved right. It was Armstrong and Elizabeth, holding hands and sitting together far more closely than necessary, with no sign of his sister’s chaperone, the redoubtable Emily.
‘Ah, Anson, mon vieux — returned safely from your holiday in France!’
Elizabeth rose and pecked his cheek and Armstrong shook his hand vigorously.
‘Yes, Bonaparte wanted to clap us in irons and throw us into a dungeon, but we managed to evade his clutches. We’ve just arrived on the Dover stage and I’ve sent Dodman down to the crossroads with the coach to pick up the others.’
‘Splendid! When I heard that the peace had come to an end I feared that the Frogs would slam the door with all the English tourists on the wrong side of it.’
‘They tried, believe me, they tried. And you pair of...’ He was about to say ‘lovebirds’ but checked himself. ‘You managed to escape from the barbarous north? How is your father?’
‘Dead, but he lived long enough to meet Elizabeth and give us his blessing—’
Elizabeth interrupted. ‘He was such a kindly man, so brave and considerate of others right to the end. I’m so glad to have known him, albeit very briefly.’
‘I’m extremely sorry to hear of your loss, Armstrong.’
‘Thank you, but as you know yourself we sailors leave home so young to join the service that we’re already well used to being sea orphans, as it were, are we not?’
Anson nodded understandingly. ‘That’s very true. It’s hard to feel too deeply about families we haven’t seen for years on end.’
Elizabeth protested: ‘I do hope you didn’t mean to include me in that remark, Oliver. Oh, I must tell you: Northumberland is so beautiful, not an ugly place full of shipyards and mines like mother described it!’
Anson smiled faintly. ‘She’d never been there, of course. It was just the usual southern bias against anything north of London.’
His sister burbled on: ‘And Captain Armstrong is the heir to the estate, which is, well, huge!’
Clearly a trifle embarrassed, Armstrong attempted to rein her in. ‘Much of it unproductive moors, of course.’
But she cantered on. ‘Oh, and I learned that a haggis is not some creature, as Captain Armstrong led Emily and I to believe, but a kind of savoury pudding they eat over the border in Scotland. In fact, I’ve eaten one!’
‘Really? You never cease to astonish me, Elizabeth.’
‘And here’s the strangest thing. While we were at Captain, er, Amos’s home a letter arrived for me from our father, giving us his blessing. He could only have learned from you or Mister Parkin that we had gone to Northumberland.’
Anson could but confess. ‘Yes Elizabeth, I admit to having sent word to him that you’d gone north and what the circumstances were. I thought it best that he be told rather than getting the impression that you had eloped. So can I take it that you two have spliced the knot?’
Elizabeth blushed. ‘Oh no, Captain Armstrong was insistent that we should wait until we got back to Kent, so that we can be married in father’s church.’
Anson thought to himself that they might well have waited to tie the knot officially, but all the billing and cooing told him they were already lovers in every sense of the word.
‘I am delighted to hear your news and wish you both joy of it.’
He was genuinely delighted, of course, that his favourite sister was to be married to a brother officer he admired and was proud to call his friend. But a wedding at Hardres Minnis would mean he would have to bury the hatchet, at least temporarily, with his mother and brother Gussie, when, ideally, he would prefer to bury it in his priggish brother’s back.
What’s more, he knew his mother would insist that the awful Sir Oswald Brax, who had the advowson — the right to select the incumbent of the parish — must be invited. And that meant Charlotte and her oafish husband, Dickie Chitterling would be there.
He would sooner face the French in battle. But although the prospect of mingling with the Brax-Chitterlings and his own estranged family appalled him, he tried not to show it.
Smiling radiantly, Elizabeth announced: ‘Captain Armstrong has something more to tell you, haven’t you, Amos?’
‘I have. I’d very much like you to be my best man,’ Armstrong beamed.
‘Kind of you, and of course I’m flattered, but a family wedding in father’s church could prove a trifle awkward...’
The return of Parkin’s coach interrupted them and Elizabeth skittered off to welcome Cassandra back and no doubt enthuse all over her about her Northumbrian adventures and forthcoming marriage.
Armstrong hung back. ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Elizabeth, but Sergeant Hoover was here a few days since, looking for
you.’
‘Back from Woodhurst?’
‘Yes and unscathed. There’s been something of a battle and Hoover, Fagg and their makeshift militia have apparently seen off the smuggling gang that was threatening the village.’
‘Excellent news! Any casualties?’
‘Three of the smugglers dead, and one of ’em’s your former bosun and would-be assassin.’
‘MacIntyre?’
‘Yes, Black Mac himself.’
Anson nodded. ‘And very good riddance to him! I’ll go and see the boys and get the full story. But, changing the subject, there’s something that bothers me about your wedding.’
‘What is it, mon vieux? Are you unhappy about being my best man?’
‘No, of course not. I’d have been deeply offended if you’d asked someone else. As I was about to say before, it’s just that the rift with my family will make things a touch awkward, but for me, not the happy couple.’
‘We can steer through those troubled waters, mon vieux, and once I’m a member of the family perhaps we can pour some oil on them.’
Anson was unconvinced. ‘Perhaps, perhaps not, but there’s something else I wanted to ask. Now that you’ve inherited will you remain in the navy or go back to manage the family estate?’
‘Now that war’s broken out again? Of course I’ll stay in the service. In fact... well, first things first. There’s a most competent steward who’s been looking after the estate during my father’s illness. I’ve upped his salary and asked him to stay on indefinitely, so that’s not a problem.’
‘You were about to say something else?’
‘Yes, the fact is, when we returned via London I took the opportunity to call on the Admiralty...’
‘And you were not kept waiting too long, I trust?’ They both remembered only too well being left for what had seemed like infinity in the infamous waiting room where unemployed half pay officers were washed up from time to time.
‘Imagine — I was ushered straight in to see my appointer!’
‘And?’
‘To my astonishment, they’ve offered me command of a frigate! She’s laid up in some creek in mothballs at present, and I’ll have to see her through some refitting at Chatham, but that will mean Elizabeth and I can be together for a while after the wedding.’
Anson exclaimed: ‘Oh, very well done! A frigate, eh? And if the war carries on it’ll then be a ship of the line and in no time you’ll get your flag!’
But as he congratulated his friend, he did a quick calculation. This meant that there would be a vacancy for a new divisional captain for the Sea Fencibles. And he had been told that had it not been for the peace he would have been promoted anyway, so that must surely now be on the cards again.
However, Armstrong was clearly not thinking along the same lines.
‘Yes, it’s early days to be talking about ships of the line and flag rank, but I’ll be back afloat at last, mon vieux. And there’s something else I should tell you. I’ve asked the appointers if I can have you as my first lieutenant!’
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Historical Note
In Lieutenant Oliver Anson’s day, naval officers drank toasts to ‘A bloody war or a sickly season’, as dead men’s shoes were the best chance they had of advancement.
Following his exploits during the 1797 naval mutinies, his escape from France after the St Valery-en-Caux cutting out expedition, the taking of the Normandy privateer and the part he played in Nelson’s Boulogne raids, Anson could now surely expect promotion.
But his career, like so many others, was interrupted by the cessation of hostilities known as the Peace of Amiens. It resulted in a great number of ships being placed in ordinary — mothballed — and many sea officers finding themselves beached on half pay.
Anson’s dreams of a sea-going appointment were put on hold yet again — and the disbandment of the Sea Fencibles meant that even the shore-based command of his oddball ‘Dad’s Navy’ detachment was binned.
However, all was not lost. The ‘faceless ones’ who oversaw intelligence-gathering from Dover and Walmer Castles on Kent’s invasion coast, still had tasks for him.
The peace — concertinaed somewhat in this story — was a mere interlude in the middle of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, enabling the warring nations to gather their strength for the next round. But it also gave the British, starved like Josiah Parkin and his party of continental travel, the opportunity to enjoy the delights of Paris. And it gave some, like Anson and his sometimes-annoying French royalist friend Hurel, the chance to engage in espionage.
As they discovered, the French used the peace to prepare for an invasion of England and were gathering a flotilla of troop-carrying vessels in ports from Dunkirk in the north to Le Havre in the south.
Extraordinarily, the story of Robert Fulton’s submarine, Nautilus, and the enigmatic smuggler-spy Captain Tom Johnstone is true and the intelligence Anson and Hurel gained could prove of enormous value to the Royal Navy, as will no doubt be revealed in the story of their next adventures.
Paris during the peace was a city full of intrigue. But it was also undergoing tremendous change as the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, exerted his now immense power to embark on massive slum clearance and rebuilding schemes, creating a new street plan, dramatically improving public services — and even remodelling the Louvre, stocking it with looted masterpieces from his campaigns.
When the peace ended the door was slammed shut and Bonaparte moved swiftly to detain all British male tourists between the ages of 18 and 60. Parkin’s party was fortunate to evade the authorities and escape. Many of those who did not spent many years as unwilling guests of the French.
Back in Kent, most of the smugglers Anson’s men came across — including some of his own Sea Fencibles — were merely trying to make a dishonest living out of what was euphemistically known as ‘free trading’. The majority sought no trouble, but others like Billy MacIntyre and his cronies were undoubtedly ruthless and violent criminals.
One such group was the Hawkhurst Gang that terrorised the uncooperative Kent village of Goudhurst in 1747. But a former army corporal, William Sturt, formed the villagers into a militia and when the smugglers attacked they were beaten off — much as the men trained and led by Tom Hoover and Sam Fagg saw off Black Mac’s ruffians half a century on.
That narrow gap between England and France can indeed be a cruel sea, as the author’s own maternal grandfather, Thomas Poile, well knew during his 30 years of cross-Channel ferry service in the old paddle steamer days. And it was something the author learned from personal experience many years later, enduring a storm-lashed Channel passage in a minesweeper and afterwards suffering the ignominy of handing his naval uniform jacket to the cleaners with the request ‘Please remove vomit stains’.
Thanks are due to Jeremy Speakman and Neil McDine for sharing their experience afloat in these waters. Like them, Oliver Anson, as distant kinsman many times removed of the great circumnavigator and reformer of the navy Admiral Lord Anson, is of course made of sterner stuff and will no doubt be itching to obtain a sea-going commission in his next adventure.
Ominously, shortly after the renewal of war, Bonaparte was writing:
We have the insults of six centuries to avenge... From the cliff at Ambleteuse I had a sight of the English coast. I could make out houses and movement. The thing is a ditch, and with a pinch of courage it can be jumped... At the end of February I shall be at Boulogne with 130,000 men. With a good wind we need the fleet for only 12 hours.
About the Author
David McDine, OBE, is a Deputy Lieutenant of Kent and a former Royal Navy Reserve officer and Admiralty information officer. He is the author of Unconquered: The Story of Kent and its Lieutenancy. His fiction output includes his humoro
us novels The Five Horseshoes and The Animal Man, and more recently his popular historic naval fiction series featuring Lieutenant Oliver Anson. The series prequel, Strike the Red Flag, and the follow-up adventures, The Normandy Privateer and Dead Man’s Island are all published by Endeavour Media and are also available as the Blood in the Water Trilogy.