by Killigrew
‘I fell in love with the idea of someone who looked like her.’
Aurélie sighed. ‘You men! If a woman has a nice shape, you forget about the important part: what is up here.’ She tapped her temple.
Killigrew slumped against the wall and sank down to sit on the cold floor, feeling sick at heart. A beautiful, graceful woman of incomparable talent, whose life had been snuffed out as if it had been nothing. He wondered why he had really accepted this mission: to save lives, or for revenge? He remembered telling Strachan at Araminta’s graveside that the Russians would need more than two graves to tidy up after he’d claimed his revenge, but the death of Anzhelika Orlova was one death too many, even if she was an enemy spy. In the end, he had become no better than the men who had murdered Araminta.
‘She had to be killed,’ said Aurélie, seeming to read Killigrew’s mind. ‘You would have tied her up until after you completed your mission, yes? And then what? You let her go? She goes straight to Nekrasoff and tells him about Nils, Hjorth and Fru Gyllenhammar, and he arrests them and executes them along with Stålberg and Lindström.’
‘What mission?’ Killigrew asked her bitterly. ‘We’re finished. Lindström was right: there’s no way into Sveaborg. Now the Grand Duke is here, they’ll send the Sea Devil out tonight, and his Imperial Highness can watch and applaud as the Duke of Wellington sinks and eleven hundred seamen are sent to a watery grave. The British fleet will probably withdraw, the war will drag on another year or two, and thousands more will die… all because I was foolish enough to think I could take on the Third Section and win.’
The trap door at the top of the ladder opened again. Killigrew, Nordenskjöld and Aurélie all looked up sharply, but it was only Hjorth. He took in the scene illuminated by the guttering flame in the oil lamp. ‘What happened? There were soldiers at Stålberg’s house when I got there. Lucky I saw them before they saw me.’
‘They’ve arrested Stålberg and the major,’ Nordenskjöld explained hoarsely. The light made his eyes look hollow. ‘She betrayed us,’ he added, indicating Anzhelika’s bloody corpse.
Hjorth nodded. ‘I guessed as much.’
‘My own damned fault,’ said Killigrew. ‘I’m sorry.’
Hjorth shook his head. ‘We all knew what we were getting into when we formed the Wolves of Suomi. Herre Stålberg and the major knew the risks. Who could have guessed that a ballerina of Mam’selle Orlova’s stature would be working for the Third Section?’
‘Wojtkiewicz warned me that anyone could be an informer for the Third Section; so did Mam’selle Orlova herself, come to think of it. I should have heeded them.’
‘No use crying over spilled milk.’ Hjorth sighed. ‘Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.’ He gazed levelly at the corpse. ‘We’ll have to shift her,’ he decided. ‘Before she stinks up the place.’ He climbed back up through the trap door to reappear a moment later carrying a large roll of tissue paper. ‘Help me wrap her in this so we don’t get blood all over ourselves carrying her out of here,’ he told Nordenskjöld. ‘We’ll take her to the forests outside the city and dump her body.’
Killigrew did not have the stomach to help as Hjorth and Nordenskjöld wrapped the corpse in paper and manhandled it up through the trap door. He heard wickerwork creak as it was dropped in one of the hampers.
Hjorth thrust his head through the open trap. ‘You two wait here,’ he told Killigrew and Aurélie. ‘We’ll be back in a couple of hours. There’s nothing you can do now anyhow. When it gets dark, I’ll take you to Mattby. My cousin’s fishing boat is there, he can take you out to the fleet.’
Killigrew nodded wearily, and Hjorth closed the trap once more, leaving him alone with Aurélie. ‘This is a dirty, filthy business,’ he said, his voice full of self-loathing.
‘Yes. But it is necessary.’
‘Is it? Sometimes I wonder…’
* * *
‘Sending wooden ships to attack granite batteries is folly,’ Captain Sulivan began without preamble once the junior officers were seated in the great cabin of the Duke of Wellington. ‘So said Nelson, and it would be a brave man who would disagreed with anything he had to say on the subject of naval tactics. And I have no pretensions to courage.’
The lieutenants smiled at Sulivan’s self-deprecating humour. As captain of a surveying ship, he was certainly not in a position associated with great courage, except they all knew that he had taken considerable risks over the past few days in sounding the waters around Sveaborg in preparation for the forthcoming bombardment.
‘However, I would ask you to put his comment in context,’ Sulivan continued. ‘Nelson lived in a time before steam engines and shell guns became commonplace and, mark my words, those change everything. That puts us in a challenging situation: we can no longer rely on the received wisdom, so that means we have to make up the rules as we go along.’
Lieutenant Adare glanced around the faces of the other junior officers who had assembled in the great cabin of the Duke of Wellington to be briefed on Captain Sulivan’s plans for the forthcoming attack on Sveaborg. Until the previous evening, it had been anybody’s guess which of the Ramillies’ lieutenants would be put in charge of the blockship’s tender, Her Majesty’s gunboat Swiper, for the forthcoming attack. Of course, Adare had hoped and prayed it would be himself, but his wardroom colleagues must have done so too. During the past few weeks – pottering back and forth, up and down the Gulf of Finland, without ever really getting to grips with the enemy – Captain Crichton had allowed each of the Ramillies’ lieutenants a chance to command the Swiper.
Not that commanding the Swiper had been much fun: far too much of the task seemed to involve passing on to Captain Crichton the engineer’s excuses as to why the gunboat could not keep station with her mother ship. But they had all been aware that their captain’s eyes had been upon them, as he tried to decide which of them would be best suited to her command when it really mattered, during the bombardment of Sveaborg; and if the engine had proved unreliable, at least it had done so without favour, embarrassing all five of the lieutenants equally.
Quite why Crichton had selected Adare was a mystery to the lieutenant himself. If he had not disgraced himself while commanding the Swiper, nor had he been able to excel himself any more than his colleagues. He had the feeling that Crichton had only made his mind up moments before he had called Adare to his day-room: the old man had been so brusque and curt about it – a long way from his usual, genial self – that Adare had been given the feeling he had decided to press ahead with telling the second lieutenant before he could change his mind again.
‘Whether my thinking is correct will be up to yourselves – and the men under your command – to prove or disprove,’ continued Sulivan, standing next to a blackboard on an easel on which he had sketched a map of Sveaborg and the proposed dispositions for the fleet. ‘I most certainly hope it is the former.’
Although Sulivan was not a natural speaker, his tone had gained the smooth eloquence of a man giving the same speech to a different audience for the umpteenth time, without losing any of its customary intensity. Groups of junior officers who, like Adare, had been appointed to the command of the smaller vessels, had been going on board the Duke for these briefings since yesterday morning: first the officers commanding the mortar vessels, now the gunboat commanders.
‘Our primary objective is to minimise the risk to the liners of the fleet, and consequently to the men on board them. The liners will maintain their current position here, east of Skogskar…’ He indicated the spot at the bottom, left-hand corner of his plan. ‘Your job will be to keep the batteries occupied while the mortar vessels concentrate on bombarding the rest of Sveaborg. I dare say you reckless young fools will all be pleased to hear that we’re content to remain well out of range of the Russian batteries, and to leave the dangerous work to you.
‘By now the last of the mortar vessels should be in place, in a crescent, here, facing Vargon and Gustafvard from a range of thirty-three hundr
ed yards. They’ll be firing at extreme range, and they’ve anchored hawsers fore and aft so they can haul themselves in or out of range as necessity demands. They’ll be under the command of Captain Weymiss. Euryalus, Dragon, Magicienne and Vulture will act as supply ships, six hundred yards behind the line, making sure the mortar vessels are supplied with all the shells and powder they need.
‘You will be forward of their position, at a range of twenty-four hundred yards, relying on your superior manoeuvrability to keep you out of trouble. Mr Moriarty and I have already surveyed this area: it’s clear of infernal machines, and we’ve marked the location of the shoals on your charts, so pay particular attention to them. I do not – I repeat, do not – want any of you running aground. You’ll form four flotillas: two to the north-west of Abramsholm and two to the south-east. Magpie and Weasel will be here, on the north-west flank, while Badger, Biter, Pelter, Starling and Thistle will be between them and Abramsholm, bombarding the western batteries. The rest of the gunboats will manoeuvre south-east of Abramsholm, except for Stork and Snapper on the south-eastern flank, north-east by north of the Laghara Shoal: they’ll be supervised by Captain Hewlett, on account of his particular experience at firing Lancaster guns.
‘Quite simply, you will play “Ring a Ring o’ Roses”, circling prow to stern, describing anticlockwise circles with a diameter of approximately five hundred yards. As your bows come to bear on the target, you will fire your primary ordnance; as you come broadside on to the target, you will fire your secondary ordnance. At six knots that will give you just under eight minutes to reload between shots: more than enough time, so there’s no need for your gun crews to rush. We’re relying on the higher trajectory of the mortars to do the most damage against the Russian bunkers. They’ll be using incendiary shells. Your job will be to keep the Russians’ heads down with a continuous rain of shells that will, we hope, frustrate their efforts to stop the fires from spreading. Cornwallis, Hastings and Amphion, meanwhile, will launch a diversionary attack against the south-east end of Sandhamn, while Arrogant, Cossack and Cruiser will engage the Russian troops positioned on Drumsio Island.
‘I expect the bombardment to commence tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp, gentlemen. The mortar vessels will start the shooting match and that will be the signal for the rest of you to join in. Yes, Mr…?’ he added when someone raised a hand.
‘Slater, sir, HMS Gannet. How long is the bombardment to last?’
‘The intention is to maintain it for forty-eight hours,’ Sulivan told him crisply.
The junior officers gasped.
Sulivan waved them to silence. ‘The key to this plan is maintaining a heavy and sustained fire. By now you should all know how short Baltic summers are: whether or not we succeed in reducing Sveaborg, we won’t have time for another major operation before autumn sets in, so we’re putting all our efforts into this one. Yes, Mr…?’
‘Adare, sir, HMS Swiper. With all due respect, it’s a little unfair to ask our boys to work the guns continuously for that amount of time, and frankly I doubt even our own guns will be able to maintain that rate of fire for so long.’
Sulivan smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr Adare, I was just coming to that point. The gunboats will be withdrawn some time tomorrow evening to give your crews a chance to rest; we’ll be sending in a flotilla of boats equipped with Congreve rockets some time after dark to keep up the pressure on the Russians. If all goes well, your gunboats will resume their bombardment at first light on Friday. I know it’s still going to be gruelling for you and your crews, and it’s a good deal to ask, but then there’s a great deal riding on this attack. If we can reduce Sveaborg, it will prove to the Tsar that even St Petersburg isn’t safe behind the granite batteries of Kronstadt. If not, well… I think we’ll be able to count ourselves lucky if the worst thing that happens is they throw rotten eggs at us when we sail back to Portsmouth…’
* * *
‘How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you, anyhow?’ Killigrew asked Aurélie while they waited in the cellar beneath Fru Gyllenhammar’s shop for Hjorth and Nordenskjöld to return. The two of them sat side by side with their backs to the whitewashed wall. Killigrew could not bear the silence any longer; needed to listen to her talk to muffle the sound of the ghastly rattle in Anzhelika’s throat as she had died, which still echoed in his ears.
‘The same way that you got involved in this,’ she replied.
‘Oh?’
She smiled wistfully in the gloom. ‘She falls in love.’
‘Ah. And what sort of Adonis caught your eye, then?’
‘A fisherman’s son. I was living with my parents in Marseilles at the time; they were failed colonists; we’d just moved back from Algeria, where our farm had gone bankrupt. My father was unemployed for the rest of his life; he drank himself to death a few years ago. I shed no tears when I learned he was dead: he used to beat my mother. We were very poor. Alors, one day my Adonis of a fisherman’s son was conscripted into the army. I was nineteen and in love, and distraught at the thought of being separated from my beloved. So I joined my lover’s regiment as a vivandière. My parents did not object; my father scarcely knew what day of the week it was most of the time, let alone what his only daughter was up to, and my mother… she knew they needed what little money I could send back. Our regiment shipped out for Algeria, but I did not care, for I was with the man I loved, and I knew he was so courageous he would soon be promoted to capitaine, and we would never want for money again… Then one day he went out with a patrol, and they never came back. I had lived in Algeria for nine years, and even as a child I knew what Abd el-Qadir’s men did to French soldiers when they captured them. So, I went crazy for revenge.’ She tapped Killigrew on the arm. ‘You see? I too have been where you are now.’
‘And how does a pretty little vivandière get revenge against the army of Abd el-Qadir?’
‘It started when we were posted to a fort in the desert. One day the Arabs attacked. We were almost overwhelmed… everyone was needed to man the walls, even les invalos from the infirmary. Naturally, I picked up a musket and began blazing away with mes copains; when it came to hand to hand fighting, I fixed the bayonet on my musket and fought with the others.’
Killigrew tried to imagine the pretty woman beside him at the parapet of a desert fort, thrusting her bayonet into the stomach of an Arab, and failed miserably.
‘They tell me I fought like a wild animal that day; I can remember little of it. But afterwards my colonel commended my courage, and a few weeks later I was called into his office. He had found out I spoke Arabic – I had learned it as a child – and with my dark complexion – my mother was a Catalan: in the sun, my skin turns as brown as any Arab’s -1 could easily pass for an Arab woman. He wanted me to go down the kasbah and pretend to be an Arab, to see what I could learn. Naturally, I agreed. I was still crazy for revenge.’ She shrugged. ‘Within six months, I was Abd el-Qadir’s lover.’
If Killigrew had been sipping a drink, he would have sprayed it across the room then. ‘No wonder the poor devil had to surrender back in ’forty-seven!’ he gasped, staring at her in astonishment.
‘I would like to think the intelligence I was able to pass back to headquarters contributed to our victory. Ah, but it was a bad war, that one. By the time it was over, I had learned not to hate the Arabs quite so much; our men were just as guilty of doing terrible things as they; and we were in their country; is it not so?’
‘You’re lucky you didn’t get your throat slit!’
‘It is true I was… what is the English expression? Ah, yes: “thrown in at the deep end”! But I learned fast. It seems I had an aptitude for dissimulation. And mon chef was sufficiently impressed with my work to ask me to work for military intelligence all the time.’
‘And you accepted? In spite of your misgivings about the way the war was fought?’
‘A good spy does not just win wars; she can sometimes prevent them too. Like the time your country and mine al
most went to war back in eighteen fifty-two.’
‘We didn’t come that close to war, did we?’
She smiled slyly. ‘How little you know. Mon chef saw to it that I learned many things. He taught me how to behave like a lady, so I could move freely in all the courts of the world, listening to the great statesmen of the world boast of the secrets they knew, little thinking that my pretty little head could do more than be impressed by them.’
‘Pillow talk, eh?’ grunted Killigrew, wondering if Aurélie was any better than Anzhelika; or if Anzhelika had been any worse than Aurélie.
She shook her head. ‘A professional woman spy never gives herself to the men she wishes to spy on; mon chef taught me that.’
‘Oh?’
‘A man will say many things to impress a woman if he is fool enough to think she will give herself to him because of it; and most of them are. But once he has had his way with her? Poof! No longer is he interested, and she had thrown away her advantage.’
‘So, what else did votre chef teach you?’
‘I learned many languages – English, German, Italian, Hungarian, Russian – and how to use many different kinds of guns, how to write in codes and ciphers, how to pick locks and break open safes, how to pass messages without being seen, how to withstand interrogation and torture, how kill a man with my bare hands, how to break into houses, how to shake off a tail, or tail a man without being shaken off, how to throw knives… but I imagine your Admiral Napier saw to it you received the same kind of education?’
‘You must be joking!’
‘No? You are… what is the English expression? Ah, yes: “pulling my legs”!’
‘God’s truth. They just gave me a new revolver and wished me the best of British before packing me off to St Petersburg.’
‘Ah, you English and your gentleman amateurs! It is a miracle you are still alive!’