Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  No, stop yourself, you damn fool! he chid himself sternly. She is married. So am I. And not a “grass widow,” put out to pasture once the heirs were born, and a bored husband off with a mistress for sport.

  And Sir Malcolm’s so perishin’ big! he reminded himself. Not of the “understanding” sort of fast-livers, or the City aristocrat circle, who’d stand aside or tolerate weekend “country house” games. Not the kind, Lewrie thought, who’d partake of a mistress on the side, either. One of those “all or nothing” gentlemen, in such decent love.

  He’d have his fetchin’ little wife all to himself, Lewrie realised, or put both of ’em in the cold, cold ground and be satisfied with the nothing. Made enough of a fool of myself, anyway, with Phoebe Aretino, and I’ll not make that mistake again!

  And certainly not with a married woman, not a married English lady. Mean t’say, damme . . . there are rules! ’Less both parties are amenable—that’s the way it’s always worked! But for a man to intrude into a reasonably happy marriage, well. . . that, he’d always held, was a caddish deceit.

  Now, Zachariah Twigg trots Claudia Mastandrea ’cross my hawse again, he mused as Aspinall refilled his wineglass and he took a sip to cool his blood . . . or I cross some fetchin’ mort’s hawse . . . hmm. A night or two of “puttin’ the leg over,” four thousand miles and nigh on two years away from home, well . . . no harm in that. Long as it’s foreign mutton . . . a mort I don’t know. A decently amusin’ courtesan . . . not a street whore . . . o’ the commercial persuasion . . . ?

  But not Lucy. Definitely not! he swore to himself. And no matter how temptin’ the bait she offers. Swear it, God. Swear it on a stack o’ Bibles!

  He put his left hand out as if to make that oath that instant. Unfortunately, his hand came down upon the desk, half upon a pile of notes from the Ship’s Surgeon, Mr. Howse, and half upon Toulon’s rear, quite near his “nutmegs.” Lewrie glanced down. Howse’s notes were on the number of seamen treated with the Mercury Cure for the Pox, after their last stay in port, out of Discipline.

  He didn’t think that boded too well as an omen for that stern “resolve” of his.

  CHAPTER 8

  One in the morning, and he’d been called from his bed, a regal and welcoming-soft real bed, in the palazzio of Count Salmatori, after a brief, bone-weary and dreamless sleep since eleven, when the Piedmontese legates had arrived in Cherasco. And still, they tried to quibble, these Royalists, these trimmers, who thought war a game, and victories and defeats temporary intrusions into their elegant lives of luxuries and privilege, serenely hair-splitting to maintain a shred of Divine Right for their odious king, Victor Amadeus.

  Signores Salier de la Tour and Costa de Beauregard were both bland and vexingly obscure and sneaking. The general had had enough. Four days of marching almost without sleep, all across the foothills of the Appenines and the Alps, through narrow passes, along winding tracks in the mountains—horse, artillery and foot. And he’d fought battles so often, he’d lost count, though Berthier had it all written down. Won them all, routed them, stampeded them, slain them or took them prisoner. And still, Victor Amadeus the sleepy—called King of the Dormice for constantly nodding off in public—that vain bigot, champion of a new Bourbon monarch on the throne of France, that vicious old beast who’d revived the Inquisition against his own people, whinnied and shivered in dread of his folly, not a day’s march away, and tried to negotiate favourable terms for himself! As if doing France the favour!

  General Bonaparte yawned in their faces, then drew out his watch.

  “. . . so you see, Your Excellency, the terms are so harsh,” Signore Costa carped, pausing for a moment when he saw that this young Frenchman wasn’t listening. “To take the fortress of Cuneo, the key to our whole Alpine frontier, as well . . . along with the monetary demands—”

  “Since drawing the document of armistice up, Signore,” Bonaparte snapped in good Italian, “I’ve also captured Cherasco, Fossano and Alba. I’ve broken your army, broken your line at the River Tanaro and stand on the River Stura here at Cherasco. You ought to consider my demand moderate. It is now one in the morning, signores. I have ordered an attack across the Stura, to begin in one hour. At two, my armies,” he lied most plausibly, looking red-eyed, haggard and remorseless, as unkempt and grumpy as a fiend from Satan denied blood, “march. And then, with no forces worth the name to oppose me, I will be in Turin tomorrow night. Where there will be no negotiating.”

  “Signore general, Your Excellency,” Costa de Beauregard whined with his hands out in supplication. “Sacred honour was pledged, to the Austrians, the British . . . to stand by them—”

  “Yet where are they, to stand by you, hein?” Bonaparte sneered. “Hard to stand, on your knees, under a heavier yoke than this I offer. Your answer. Accept my terms now—or nothing later.”

  Salier bowed his head, almost in tears. Costa looked at him and nodded his sad assent, as well. “Very well, Excellency. We will sign.”

  “Bon!” Napoleon Bonaparte nodded with them, grunting a tired but satisfied sound. Yet he then sprang from his elegant gilded chair at once, calling for coffee, as if his bone-weariness had been a sham. He went to a farther, smaller salon where his maps had been set up.

  He allowed himself a wolfish smile, now his back was turned to those groveling Piedmontese envoys. Piedmont was his, just as he had schemed, their army and their will to fight crushed. The Austrian, Beaulieu, of the much-vaunted but slow-mincing “best army in Europe,” had been gulled into taking his bait. His demand for free passage in the Genoese Riviera had, naturally, been told to the Austrians by the Genoese, and Beaulieu had come too far south, dividing that mightier combined army into eatable pieces. And Bonaparte had whirled between them, outflanking, out-marching, bloodying their noses in turn, destroying the corps each had sent to aid the other. Now Beaulieu was scrambling, faithlessly abandoning his allies, rushing for fortified Alessandria, taking the fastest roads to end up, Bonaparte was mortal certain, at the Austrian Archduchy of Milan’s most powerful border fortress, that brooding monster at Pavia. Without having to enter Turin or force a crossing of the Stura, he could now wheel east and harry his rear and flanks before Beaulieu reached it. Send Massena, Augereau, or Serurier down to demonstrate before Pavia, and hoodwink him again!

  General Bonaparte had always loved maps, along with mathematics. Precise maps, over which he could feel he soared like an omnipotent bird of prey, feeling every rise, every defile, every spot where troops could be hidden behind a fold, every possible place of ambush, like an eagle might ride an updraft. Pavia was far too strong, would result in weeks of siegework, and he didn’t have the manpower or the time for such. A Royalist French Army had broken itself there long before, against an Austrian threat, and a French king, Francois I, had ended imprisoned. But there was a way across the Po River, at a place that would out-flank Beaulieu one more time, catch him wrong-footed, and let him threaten Milan itself. He ran his finger down the line of the Po to Piacenza. Maillebois’s French Army had crossed that far downstream, just there at Piacenza, in 1746. A day’s rest, a chance for his footsore army to loot more boots, grain and wine from the Piedmontese, and he would be off. Off on another lightning-quick march, and turn the Austrians’ flanks, force them off the Ticino River, out of Pavia . . . or lose the garrison they left behind, after he’d beaten the field armies.

  And the way was straight; the ground was good. Lovingly, his forefinger traced the topography, the turns in the roads, the rises of hills and the steep defiles of creeks that fed the Po. Few men had The Sight he knew he did. Very few commanders could form a vision of the ground from a map, as if they’d walked it from a common soldier’s level. Not many knew how steep and demanding a hill without ever first seeing it; could spot, as if inspired, where guns should go to support attack; or sweep the only route a foe would have for a counterattack. It was, to General Napoleon Bonaparte, such a simple, instinctive thing, to have this Sight. And he was sure after only a
few days’ manoeuvring that neither his opponent Marshal Beaulieu, nor any of his lesser corps commanders had it.

  “Excuse me, mon général,” Junot yawned. “They’ve signed. Piedmont is ours. And a courier has come from Commissioner Saliceti. He’s on his way and will arrive around dawn, the courier estimates.”

  “Hah,” Bonaparte grunted, abandoning his map, letting it curl back up like a loose sausage. “Saliceti.”

  The army’s chief representative from the Directory was a criminal, a vainglorious coxcomb. His uniform was grander than Bonaparte’s, replete with red-and-white sash, bullion-trimmed, and he sported a hat so aswim in dyed feathers he could be seen from a newfangled kilometer away. Saliceti would come, like it was he who was the conqueror, with purse and saddlebags open to scoop up the loot that Bonaparte amassed for him. A part of it, the young general suspected, never made it to Paris’s coffers, but stuck to Saliceti’s grubby fingers, too! He’d not made things so harsh for the Piedmontese they’d keep their backs up, after all. He’d omitted to list specific paintings, statues and valuables from Victor Amadeus’s palace that Paris had wished “for the enjoyment of the French people.” Or so the Directory claimed. There was sure to be a row over those. Well, then, so be it. He had a war, his war, to fight—his way. Let the civilians squabble over the remains of his victories.

  “Anything from Paris?” Bonaparte asked hopefully.

  “Nothing, sir,” Junot had to admit. Nothing from the Directory, certainement; but that meant nothing for the general from his wife, the incomparable Josephine, either. Junot almost scuffed the toes of his elegant high boots in chagrin. The general wrote her daily, yet there were entire weeks between her replies.

  “Ah, well,” Bonaparte sighed, not showing his disappointment. “The envoys have their coffee?”

  “Oui, mon général.” Junot brightened. “Though they might have felt insulted. We only had the poor cups from your portmanteau, with the brass army spoons.”

  “A smaller equippage than when I was an artillery officer,” the young general said, feeling full of energy once more. “A tale to tell them, I think. I’ve made rough notes for the army’s movements in the morning. Flesh them out for Berthier to pass on. A requisition upon Cherasco for eight thousand rations, four thousand bottles of wine, and for every civilians’ boots. You must have it copied and passed to the town council at once. Along with the usual warning about resistance from the populace, in any form. Reissue my caution to the troops about rape, pillage or indiscriminate looting, of course.”

  “Oui, mon général,” Junot sighed, knowing he would be robbed of even a tiny nap the rest of the night and would slave far into a new day.

  “. . . clerks to copy the route-marches for the day after, with a map of the roads to Piacenza for each chief of division,” Napoleon rattled on, striding back towards the larger salon. “And invent for me a proclamation . . . to the people of Italy. Of Italy, mind, not the principalities, hein? Mention respect of property, of their religion and customs, and blahblah-blah. To placate them. And stir up those who dream of unifying the whole peninsula. Even if it will be unified under French rule, Junot.” Bonaparte snickered cynically. “Something about us, uhm . . . waging war with generous hearts, in there somewhere.”

  “Generous hearts, oui, mon général.” Junot scribbled hastily, pacing alongside his shorter bantam-roosterish commander.

  “. . . only against tyrants who seek to enslave us, not the common people . . . against all tyrants. That ought to stir up the shit-pot. Dash off something and show it to me before Saliceti arrives. I will be with these sheep-faced cowards ’til then. Sweetening their cup of gall we just forced them to drink, hein? And Junot?”

  “Oui, mon général?”

  “More coffee. A lot more coffee!” Bonaparte demanded, laughing out loud, for a rare change. “Ah, signores! A momentary delay, sirs. Now I may have some coffee with you, if you will permit? Sorry about the spoons and poor cups, but a soldier’s portmanteau . . . I now get along with less than when I was in the Royal artillery . . .”

  And he whirled away, instantly affable, as if he’d just had seven hours sleep, alert and filled with energy.

  To placate the vanquished.

  BOOK III

  Fuga sub terras, fuga nulla per aurus.

  Nec lacrime (ne ferte preces) superive vocati

  pectora nostra movent; aliis rex Iuppiter oris.

  Faxo Bebrycium nequeat transcendere puppis

  ulla fretum et ponto volitet Symplegas inani.

  No escape is there beneath the earth, none through the air

  My heart is proof against tears (no groveling prayers!)

  and appeals to heaven; ’tis elsewhere Jupiter counts for king.

  I shall see that no vessel sails Bebrycian waters

  and that the Clashers dance to and fro on an empty sea.

  Argonautica, Book IV, 217–221

  Gaius Valerius Flaccus

  CHAPTER 1

  It was Captain Charlton’s thinking that they’d barely gotten on-station to perform the duties they’d been assigned, and it would be the act of timid poltroons to “leg” it back to the shelter of the Fleet at the first setback. He left a letter with the British consul, to go by the next departing merchantman, for Admiral Jervis. But he sent them out to sea. Fillebrowne’s Myrmidon would accompany his Lionheart, to hunt off the Italian coast, near Brindisi, whilst Pylades and Jester would sail over to the Balkan side of the narrows and scout the seas nearer to Corfu and the other Ionian Isles, the coasts of Turk-ruled Greece—the Morea—and Venetian-held Albania, to scour the Straits of Otranto.

  As soon as they fetched the Balkan coasts, off the Istrian Peninsula and the port of Pola, Lewrie was enchanted. It was so unlike any shore he’d ever beheld, like sailing into some fantasy world. The coasts and isles were steep-to, with hardly any beaches to be seen at the foot, but a thin bearding of gravel. Rough, craggy coasts soared upward, rising dramatically from the brilliant blue waters, which now mirrored azure late-spring skies. And they were timbered . . . so lushly wooded in pines or gnarled oaks, right down to the sea, except where they were too steep for trees’ roots to cling, so steep that the hills were streaked here and there with vertical slashes of bare stone and skree-rock, as stark against the dark green forests as the striations of colour in a Venetian lady’s hair.

  There were coastal hillocks, folding and rolling like frozen waves, always upwards, always more impressive, until they merged in the misty distance with the true mountains, lightly shaded blue-grey and capped with snow and ice on the furthest, above grey granite and the immense forests.

  And that archipelago of isles and islets, that transplanted Bahamas, resembled the erect, dolmenlike islets of the Chinese shore, round the mouth of the Pearl River that led to Canton, as if someone had jammed gargantuan pilings, or whole mountains, into the sea quite recently. Though they were inhabited, for the most part, the woods and crags of the coastal cliffs hid their peoples from view, so that Lewrie could imagine, at times, that they were the first explorers, the very first humans at all, to lay eyes on them.

  And when they did stand close enough inshore to eye the coastal villages or towns that clung to the shoreline, they were mostly blank to the sea, walled right down to the water’s edge, with windows three floors or more above, crammed so tight together they formed fortified enclaves against invasion.

  Like his first sight of Naples a few years earlier, Lewrie’s impression of those towns was of dusty, mildewy antiquity, like a Greco-Roman history come to life. There were true walled fortifications he suspected must have been built when the Romans, the Byzantines, ruled this Illyrian province of their respective empires. Grecian, exotic and alien, as otherworldly as an ancient painted frieze atop temples now tumbled in ruin, or the red-black pottery of the Classic periods, with their paintings of awkward, stylised warriors, gods and nymphs.

  Some seemed very much like Venice—were Venice unwelcoming and unfriendly—as if a p
ortion of the Grand Canal palaces had been transported, with church steeples and campanile soaring above an unbroken wall of balconies and windows and private boat-landings along the ocean; though poorer, shabbier, and so very much older.

  The further they sailed south, though, the belltowers, the watchtowers, and the steeples of churches and cathedrals turned to slimmer, taller minarets, and the gilded onion domes of Eastern Orthodox churches, or Muslim mosques, dominated the towns’ toppings, like illuminations from a Byzantine or Arabic atlas.

  And the inhabitants of that coast . . . ! They were alien to English eyes, the way they dressed themselves; some in turbans or fezzes, and loose-flowing robes over scruffy pull-over tunics, some in Hindooish, baggy pyjammy trousers, belted jerkins and skullcaps, in sandals or in poor, plebeian bare feet, like the poorest of the poor crofters of Ireland or the wild moors. What few women they could see with the aid of their telescopes at long-distance were hooded, veiled, head-covered or over-smocked like Venetians or Muslims, or cowled or kerchiefed in rusty black or goat-brown, like so many old Italian crones or widows. It was the rare merchant or visitor they espied in anything near to Western apparel. Hungarian, Austrian, Greek or Ottoman, it didn’t signify—it was as if Europeans had flown by hot-air balloon to a distant planet to colonise it, but no matter how long or how hard they tried, a European hegemony would never take, not in a thousand more years! Even the cooking smells, the normal airborne effluents a tight-packed village or town produced, seemed otherworldly!