“Do you actually think he’d listen?” Massena snorted. “Christ, you’d think . . . does a woman wish a lover, she’d go for a real man, not that primping mannequin. Cavalry! Shit!”
“At least a real cavalryman . . . like Murat, then,” Augereau opined. “Or do you think . . . ?” He leered like a starving fox.
“Too fair,” Massena countered, snagging them two fresh glasses of wine from a passing server. “Note how she goes for the short and the dark. Lieutenant Charles . . . that other willowy fop, that artist Antoine Gros, she fetched along. They’re more her type. Poor little bastard. I don’t think he does know. Yet. God, it makes me want to spew! We finally get ourselves a great general, and he’s saddled with a whore like her. Makes him look like a turnip. Once he finds out, he’ll be destroyed, I tell you! And then where’ll we be?”
“Take a turn on her, open his eyes so to speak. Or make sure Lt. Hyppolyte Charles goes back to his goddamned First Hussars. With a David’s writ . . . like Uriah, the Hittite,” Augereau suggested. “A hero’s death . . . nose to nose with the foe.”
“That could be arranged,” Massena calculated, rubbing his chin in thought. “Won’t matter, though. Once we’re back in the field, it’s certain she’d just find herself another. As for the other idea . . . ?”
“Mmm?” Augereau asked softly.
“Frankly, I wouldn’t stick your dick in it,” Massena said with a laugh.
° ° °
“It’s narrow, but vital,” General Bonaparte expounded over one of his many maps to several officers. Murat was there, along with Lieutenant Charles. Josephine was foisted off on some Italian ladies, bored beyond tears by how provincial even royal Italians could be, by how crude was their command of French, the only elegant and civilised tongue!
“Come right down and relieve Mantua.” Murat frowned.
“Never,” Napoleon said, chuckling. “We move forward to Brescia, use that as our new base of operations. Wurmser must advance against it, down the Brenner Pass. Lake Garda sits between, to divide his forces. Does he use the Adige Valley, to the east, there is still Lake Garda. I command the square between—Lonato, Castiglione, Brescia, free to move against his every advance. Either way, he must muffle himself in one of the river valleys—Adige, Chiesa, Mincia or Po—to get down to Mantua. Wurmser will try to relieve the siege, not destroy me. I know how he thinks. The old way. Lift the siege, drive us back. Not destroy us. Mantua I use as bait for him. Let him come.”
“I see, sir.” Murat beamed.
“Ah, yes,” Lieutenant Charles sighed, stifling a yawn and turning to look over his shoulder for a brief second, to exchange sympathetic and intriguing looks with the “incomparable Josephine,” for both were bored rigid by their separate company.
“Most especially do I wish General Wurmser to consider Rivoli as an easy approach-march route,” Bonaparte said, tapping the map with his pencil. “I’ve seen the ground, and it’s heavenly. Easy-rolling, flat and even, and fairly open, where I could really manoeuvre. Where our guns could be positioned to best effect. Massed batteries, hein, cher Murat? All our guns, and the ones we’ve captured, massed into three or four gigantic, death-dealing batteries. Then let him send an avalanche against me, a tidal wave of Austrians, and I’ll break him like coastal cliffs break even the mightiest waves. And with massed batteries for bulwarks, like miniature fortresses, I use the rest of the infantry as foot-cavalry. Quick, and fast, and smash his nose, no matter where he sticks it in. Blunt his every move, and confound him. Oui. Oui, this could happen.”
“He supposedly has fifty thousand sir,” General Berthier reminded him from across the map-table. “We, but forty-five thousand. And ten thousand of ours tied up in the siege at Mantua.”
“Then I’ll bludgeon every thrust he makes, from every mouse-hole pass in the Alps. He cannot march his entire army through merely one. He will divide, sure that he can regroup once he’s below Lake Garda.” Napoleon snorted. “But I’ll not let him. Ever, Berthier. Ah, then. You will excuse me, but I must go rescue Josephine. She has so little Italian, I’m sure she’s uneasy with the Milanese ladies.”
“Allow me to accompany you, sir,” Lieutenant Charles offered.
“Yes, do, Lieutenant.” Bonaparte nodded. “Do. We must do our best to amuse my darling. Camp life can be so stultifying.”
Berthier helped the general’s secretary, Junot, roll up the map, to be returned to a better-guarded study. Berthier sighed with resignation, knowing by now that there would never be any purely social times for the Army of Italy or its commanding officers. On a whim, the spur of the moment, right in the midst of pleasurable, lighthearted salons . . . out would come the maps as General Bonaparte’s ever-active imagination got the better of him; as if he schemed and pondered martial musings every waking moment. Dreamed in his sleep the solutions to guarantee a victory! And then, sometimes upon a brilliantly inspired flash of genius, simply had to withdraw to his map-table, his reports. And wake up the rest, of course. Or draw them from their amusements.
Such as Berthier’s own, who waited for him across the salon, now amused by Massena and Augereau, by the gallant young Murat—the aristocratic and lovely younger Giuseppina Visconti. She flashed him a smile as he began to cross to them—quite eagerly, for Berthier was leery of those two raffish rogues and their intentions, though they’d made their own personal conquests of Italian ladies.
Massena cast him a glance—looking furtive and caught-out? the older Berthier could imagine. Was he feeling guilty, did he have something to feel guilty about? Berthier wondered, feeling a surge of anger?
But, no. Massena lifted an expressive brow and darted a significant look towards the settee beyond, on which Josephine sat, surrounded by her slim, dark sycophants, Lt. Hyppolyte Charles and the artist Gros. Their general stood by, like a servant waiting for orders, mute and clumsily inarticulate in the face of such glittering company, such easy and droll repartee.
Berthier cocked a weary brow himself, made a sad moue.
So clever, the general, he thought; in everything but Life. So observant towards all but his vexing wife!
Massena openly frowned, like an ill-tempered eagle who had just spotted a rabbit far below. A sardonic shrug, a theatrical lift of two gloved hands in despair was Augereau’s comment.
“Not even a handsome whore,” Berthier whispered to himself, and tried to put himself in a better frame of mind to rejoin his entrancing new mistress, to have her all to himself, apart from those “hot rabbits,” Massena and Augereau, who’d couple with a snake could they find hips. “The poor little bastard.”
“. . . winter, I am certain,” that “poor little bastard” was now saying, a firmly fixed expression of unwavering certainty on his face, as he made his prediction; not a boast, but a prediction. “By winter, my army will be on the Austrian frontiers. We’ll own all of Italy and even Venice, perhaps. And Austria will be beaten. I will beat them.”
Berthier shook his head again. What could one say to something like that?
CHAPTER 2
“Good charts,” Sailing Master Edward Buchanon opined gruffly. “Marvels f’r accuracy, sir, ’ese Venetian charts.”
“By God, they’d best be, hadn’t they, Mister Buchanon?” Lewrie replied, gruff with his own worries for Jester’s quick-work the past few days. “Very well, then, Mister Knolles. Round her up to the wind and bring-to. Prepare to anchor.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Knolles answered, almost hanging over the lee bulwarks for any sign of shoaling. He lifted his hat to swipe at his hair nervously before going to the helmsmen to issue his orders.
It was Leutnant Kolodzcy’s studied opinion that the very sort of Serb pirate they wished could be found in this netherland of coast controlled by no one, pretty much—this stretch of disputed or ignored shore between Venetian Spalato in the north and independent Ragusa to the south.
They’d been near their quest before without knowing it, when they’d sailed close to the large islands of Hvar
and Brac in pursuit of a prize. For this was where the claimed territory of the ancient and defeated Serbian princedoms came closest to the sea, shoved like a knife-blade between the Croatian or Venetian lands and the now-Muslim, Turk-ruled Bosnians.
South of Hvar, which ran east-west, lay other isles, some smaller and less important, where many displaced, rootless peoples sheltered. The large isles of Korcula and Mjlet, the long, narrow isle that paralelled the coastline—Peljesac—and lay within spitting distance but totally removed from anyone’s grasp. The smaller islets of Lastovo and Susak were farther out from the shore in deep water and favourably near the main shipping route for hostile merchantmen and smugglers. All, Kolodzcy assured them, were isolated, rarely visited by patrols of any local power, completely ignored by the greater powers, and the ownership up for grabs from one decade to another, depending on who’d put in for firewood and water last. And those grudging claims were forgotten by everyone involved once they’d sailed away.
For days, Jester and Pylades had sailed these waters, no matter the shoals, feeling their way with lead-line, preceded sometimes by a cutter or launch to probe the depths. They’d anchored near poor seaside villages or hardscrabble harbours, shamming the need for firewood and water, fresh lamb or goat, eggs and butter; and paying liberally in solid silver for their purchases, too. They’d taken Kolodzcy ashore to negotiate, where he’d dropped hints that they were British, at war with the French and any who’d aid them; that there were many ships passing by far out to sea, laden with treasure, and that even the mighty Royal Navy might need help in taking all of them. Powerful as they were, they had only two ships and could not catch every vessel they espied.
Now, here—at the low-lying northernmost tip of Mjlet—they came to anchor once more, near a settlement that couldn’t quite aspire to be deemed a proper village at all. It looked to be a scattering of rude huts among rough clearings in the ever-present, brooding forest, clinging to the rocks above the muddy shoreline, where crude fishing boats rested half on the shore and half in the waters, bedraggled and abandoned.
There was no one to be seen, of course. Wherever they’d gone, the appearance of a real warship flying what was to these crude people a strange—alien—flag sent them tumbling inland, sure that they would be slaughtered. It would take hours, Lewrie thought wearily, to see even a few timorous watchers show their faces once curiosity, and the lack of activity on the part of the warships, got the better of them. He thought it much like what Captain Cook had experienced from the timid South Sea savages the first time he’d put Endeavour in some never-before-visited lagoon and given them a first sight of white men.
A quarter mile farther out, Pylades had already come to anchor in slightly deeper water.
Lewrie turned inboard as the heavy splash of Jester’s best bower drew his attention. He looked aloft to see topmen taking in the last of the tops’ls and t’gallants, strung out like beads on a string along the foot-ropes as they breasted over the yardarms to gather in canvas and gasket it. Blocks squealed as jibs and spanker deflated, rustled into untidy billows on the foredeck and the boom over his head above the quarterdeck. Men stood by under Cony’s supervision, who’d soon be at the halliards and jears to lower the yards to resting positions. A party below the quarterdeck nettings, in the waist, even stood by with quarterdeck awnings. But not anti-boarding nets.
“Christ!” was his sour comment. Should they find a pack of pirates, a damn large one, who proved too greedy to listen and swarmed Jester like they had that merchantman off Bar, the last patrol, they’d be defenceless! The pirates would be up and over the rails before anyone aboard could say “Knife!” And, he thought, casting another begrudging glance seaward to Pylades, there’d be little aid from that quarter, until it was too damn late!
“Anchored, sir,” Knolles reported. “Sail taken in, gasketed and furled.”
“Very well, Mister Knolles.” Lewrie nodded. Then, “Christ!” again. There was a boat coming from Pylades. And in the stern-sheets he could see Captain Rodgers, with that pestiferous Lieutnant Kolodzcy in all his overdone Austrian finery by his side!
“Ever and amen, sir,” Lieutenant Knolles softly sighed. “Alert your steward, Aspinall, sir? To uncork a half dozen o’ bubbly?”
“Best fetch his own, by God,” Lewrie spat. “It’s poor claret or nothin’, his palate bedamned. I’m savin’ it for a special time.”
“Such as, sir?” Knolles grinned.
“Bloody Epiphany, Mister Knolles. E-bloody-piphany.” Lewrie snickered, without much real mirth, though. “Very well, then. Stand down the hands, and set the harbour and anchor watch. Lookouts aloft, though. And Sergeant Bootheby and his Marines to stand-to, uniforms and muskets in proper order. Stand easy . . . but stand-to.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Ach, ad lasd!” Kolodzcy exclaimed, perhaps almost two hours later, as the lookouts reported movement in the seemingly abandoned village. A few braver souls had drifted down from the forest to stand out in the open, at the back of the clearings, though well short of the huts or shore. Men first—and Lewrie could see, even from a cable’s distance, how white-knuckled were their hands round their cudgels or farm implements. Next came children, whose curiosity was greater. At last came the women, clucking after the children, in concern for their safety, perhaps . . . to stand shaky-legged and marvel at this intriguing apparition tossed up from the sea.
“Zey heff to, you zee, ja!” Kolodzcy crowed. “Goat musd milk. Brot musd be baken, for supper. Dere hearthfires heff gone oud, unt id grows late. Curiozidy? Nein. Necessidy.”
“Deck, there!” A foremast lookout cried, shading his eyes and pointing down the eastern shore. “Boat! Three point orf th’ starb’d bows! Comin’ inta harbour . . . headed ’is way!”
“Aloft, there!” Lewrie shouted back, cupping his hands instead of taking the time to seize a speaking-trumpet. “Small boat?”
“Small two-master!” Was the equivocal answering hail.
“Doesn’t know we’re here, perhaps,” Rodgers fretted. “Might go about, once she sees us. Damme, another bloody day wasted.”
“Probably seen us already, sir,” Lewrie countered, filled with hope that they’d resolve their quest, one way or another, this morning, loath as he was about the entire business. “Low as this coast is hereabouts, they’ve probably seen our top-masts the last hour. And there is Pylades, anchored out in plain sight, too, sir.”
“Ja, herr Kapitan Rodgers,” Leutnant Kolodzcy concurred. “Comes nod de zimple fishink boat, I am thinkink. Comes nod de fearful willager to his anchorage. Dhere hess been time for frightened willagers to go find help, alert zomeone. I am thinkink only a brave man, one vit more guriosity dhan fear, comes. De seeraüber, berhaps? De pirades?”
“Or a damned fool,” Rodgers sighed, half to himself as he paced off his concerns, and his impatience.
Half an hour more, and the fishing boat was close enough to eye with their telescopes, though she seemed intent on passing by, sailing due North, slowly . . . a wary mile and a half off, out of gun-range from shore and the warships. She mounted two short masts and wore two fore-and-aft lateen sails—a typical Eastern Mediterranen, Ottoman craft, low to the water with scant freeboard, built with a high-pinked stern and long, tapering, squarish bow, like an ancient Egyptian dhow. Lewrie didn’t think her much over fifty feet long. Would she be built in Arabee fashion? he speculated as he watched her. Planked together with pegs and rope, and fragile as a porcelain teacup to gunfire? Or, this close to Venice and Europe, would she be more clinker-built, over ribs and beams, and more solid? Local construction . . . stolen . . . ?
And, most important, was she armed?
His telescope revealed perhaps no more than eight or nine hands aboard her, and he thought that too large a number for a simple fisherman returning to his village and fearful of entering. Most fishing boats they’d seen got by on two or three, at best. And, this dhow like boat was a touch too large, compared to the majority of the netters th
ey had come across. Much larger, of a certainty, than the poor gaggle of old single-masted boats that lay on the local shore, and too heavy to haul up in that fashion at night, too. As for artillery, there was none to be seen, yet swivels or 2-pounder boat-guns could be hidden . . .
“Haulin’ ’er wind, sir,” Buchanon grunted.
Abeam of Jester, the dhow like boat fell off the light Easterly breeze and began to stand in towards them, though still warily angled, as if to pass between Jester and Pylades, her lateens now winged out.
“Fair turn o’ speed, e’en off th’ wind, you’ll note, Cap’um.”
“Aye, Mister Buchanon,” Lewrie agreed.
Onward, she stood, halving the distance rapidly, coming within gun-range, until she was perhaps five hundred yards off Jester’s larboard stern before putting her helm over. Her crew sprang to the masts, to swing the lateen yards end-forend to gybe her to the opposing tack, in the blink of an eye.
“Oh, smartly done, I say!” Knolles allowed.
“Show-off,” Lewrie muttered.
Now the dhow angled in towards Jester on larboard tack, closing the distance until she was no more than two hundred yards off, aimed for a collision with Jester’s bows if she held her course.
“Smell like a fisherman to you, sir?” Rodgers enquired.
“Hard to tell, sir,” Lewrie replied quickly. “Over the stink of her crew. Well-dressed pack o’ scoundrels, hey?” he japed.
Several of the hands aboard her wore nothing but rough wool tunics or loose smocks over baggy, Hindoo- pyjammy- type knee-length trousers, or no trousers at all. A couple, including the helmsman or master aft by the tiller, had added goat-hair or goatskin vests, which even at that longish range reeked like wet badgers.
“Well, then.” Rodgers grimaced, drumming his fingers on the cap-rail of the bulwark. “They’re here, so speak ’em, somebody.”
Leutnant Kolodzcy stepped to the rails, cupped his hands about his lips and hallooed them in some local tongue. The helmsman cupped a hand at his ear and shook his head as if unable to hear or understand. Their liaison officer tried several other words, though clewing taut to one . . . which sounded like “Serpska.”
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