Tide of War

by Hunter, Seth

  Published by McBooks Press 2010

  First published in Great Britain by Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette

  UK company, 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Seth Hunter

  This McBooks Press edition of the work has been revised from the original U.K. edition by the author’s request.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover image and design by Stephen Mulcahey.

  Interior design by Panda Musgrove.

  The hardcover edition of this book was cataloged as:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunter, Seth.

  The tide of war : a Nathan Peake novel / Seth Hunter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59013-509-9

  1. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.U59T53 2010

  823’.92--dc22

  2010022132

  The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs: Kindle 978-159013-600-3, ePUB 978-1-59013-601-0, and PDF 978-1-59013-602-7.

  Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com.

  for Pat Kavanagh

  PROLOGUE

  New Orleans,1794

  THE BODY HAD BEEN BROUGHT UP from the coast in a hogshead of rum and at the Governor’s request they fished it out for him and laid it out on a tarp, the head lolling horribly in the glare of the new oil lamps from Philadelphia. Several of the spectators crossed themselves and the Governor turned his head and held a lace handkerchief to his patrician nostrils.

  Another problem. As if he did not have enough with the French and the Americans … And the Indians and the bandits and the Negroes and the spies and all the other little pleasantries that New Orleans had to offer.

  He observed the young officer with dislike.

  Why did you not bury it, he thought, or throw it back in the sea? But oh no, he had to pollute a perfectly good barrel of rum and take it on a three-day journey through the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Delta just to add to the miseries of a colonial governor in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain.

  “I have brought something I think you will want to see, Excellency.”

  Wrong, Teniente, you smirking son of a Havana whore, this is not something I want to see. What I want to see is the snow falling on a frozen lake in Flanders or the mist rising from a field of barley on a midsummer morning with the poppies in bloom. What I want to see is a neat, ordered landscape: a land of windmills and canals and ploughed fields and gentle rivers of clear water and silver fish: rivers that know their place and stick to that place and do not constantly move about like the muddy rivers of Louisiana. And good, honest peasants that know their place and are content to abide there without complaint and are not forever promising to split your skull with a cutlass or a tomahawk or whatever other vile piece of weaponry comes to hand in this armpit of the Spanish empire.

  Baron Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet, Knight of Malta, Governor-General of Louisiana and West Florida, native of Flanders …

  Who Died Far from His Home in the Service of the King of Spain.

  Whenever he signs his name of late he sees the inscription on his tomb. If he should be so lucky as to possess such a luxury.

  “Did I not do the right thing, Excellency?” A frown of concern on the officer’s bovine countenance as it dawns on him that his initiative might not be appreciated in this instance, might not provide a secure route to promotion.

  Carondelet gazed over the capital of his province, easily visible from the levee now that the new street lamps had been installed. Eighty of them, his latest innovation, purchased and maintained by a chimney tax in the teeth of fierce opposition from the cabildo, that self-serving, money-grubbing gaggle of merchants and bandits that passed for a town council, God rot them. Already murders were down by half for the time of the year. He could have wished, of course, that the streets they illuminated had been more elegant, the population more deserving, but New Orleans was a frontier town, a sanctuary for the riff-raff and renegades of the Americas, the repository of five thousand souls long since sold to the Devil.

  And now this.

  The Governor sighed. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was found floating near the shore, Excellency, near the mouth of the Rigolets.”

  The Rigolets. The Gutter. A winding channel from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain: the back door to New Orleans. There was a possibility that the body had been washed up from way out to sea, and the death might be blamed on pirates or the French, but only a faint one, given the predators native to these waters.

  From over to his right, among the taverns of the waterfront under the black bulk of the eastern redoubt, came a raucous blast somewhat between a bellow and a roar of fiendish laughter which the Governor identified as the sound of a conch, known locally as boca del Diablo, the mouth of the Devil, and normally used by the crew of a small riverboat, caboteur or goelette, to announce their arrival in this city of sin—and the certain prospect of custom for the innkeepers and whores who infested it. In its wake came an even more hellish sound, at least to the Governor’s ears, a strident verse of “La Marseillaise,” the anthem of the French revolutionists, which he had succeeded in banning from the streets and the theatres but not, alas, from the taverns. Not yet.

  Only last night, he had written to the Duke of Alcudia, Secretary of State in Madrid, assuring him that the recent report conveyed by one of his agents was misleading and alarmist. He recalled his exact words:

  By extreme vigilance and sleepless nights, by scaring some and punishing others, by banishing those who were debauching the people with their republican teaching, by intercepting letters and documents suspected of being incendiary, I have done better than I expected and the province is now quite orderly and quiet.

  Another blast from the Devil’s mouth, mocking his illusions.

  “You do not think I have seen enough corpses in my time here?” he enquired sardonically. “You think perhaps I am desirous of adding to the collection?”

  “Yes, Excellency. I mean, no, Excellency. But this one … I thought …” He made a gesture at the object at his feet. “I thought exceptional.”

  He was right, of course, for all the inconvenience it would cause.

  Exceptional it most certainly was.

  For it wore the uniform of a captain in His Britannic Majesty’s Navy—and despite the post-mortem attentions of beak and claw it was apparent that the original cause of its discomfort was the livid gash in the throat that came close to separating the head from the body and was almost certainly made by a knife or some such other sharp-edged instrument of human devising, making any subsequent violations entirely superfluous.

  CHAPTER 1

  On the Beach

  COMMANDER NATHAN PEAKE of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy stood up to his knees in water, bearded, browned by the sun, his canvas ducks rolled to the thigh and a straw hat upon his head: the very Neptune of his domain, save that instead of the traditional trident he carried a large net, this being considered a more suitable implement on the south coast of England for the hunting of that native delicacy, the prawn.

  A movement in the mud at his feet, the merest clouding of the pristine waters and he had it: a slender crustacean about the size and colouring of a grasshopper but by no means as pert, with twitching antennae as long as its body, and thin scuttling legs. They scuttled in vain. Into the bucket it went to join its five brothers—or sisters. All as one in t
he pot.

  “Encore! Et encore une fois!”

  Looking up, Nathan beheld the figure of a small boy who had scrambled to the top of a neighbouring rock with a large bucket clutched gingerly in both hands.

  “Vingt crevettes. J’ai gagne. Je suis le vainqueur, n’est ce pas?”

  He looked so happy Nathan did not have the heart to remind him to speak English, though the lapse into a foreign tongue—the tongue of their past and present enemy—would have called for a sharp rebuke in certain quarters not so very far from here.

  “Well done,” Nathan replied in the King’s English. “Yes, you are the victor, Alex—for I have but six.”

  “ça suffit, monsieur?”

  “Yes. It is enough. We will have a rare feast. Do you want to go home now?”

  The boy looked at him uncertainly and Nathan knew he was trying to guess what Nathan wanted to do. Or more to the point, what Nathan wanted him to do: to carry on splashing in the rock pools in the warm September sunshine or return to the dubious sanctuary of Windover House and the English lesson that was scheduled to start at five o’clock precisely.

  “If you wish it, sir,” said the boy, in a diplomatic, if heavily accented English, and with an expression that pulled on Nathan’s heartstrings.

  They clambered over the rocks together and dropped down on to the thin strip of sand exposed by the retreating tide. Over to the east, beyond the meagre outlet of the Cuckmere River, were the long line of cliffs known as the Seven Sisters, curving away towards the distant hump of Beachy Head. The sun bounced off their chalk-white faces and shattered into a billion gold pieces on the flat-iron surface of the sea, as empty as on the third day of Creation. But no, as Nathan shielded his eyes against the glare he could make out something of a later construct, a pair of triangular red sails about halfway between Beachy Head and the Cuckmere. It stirred a distant memory and for a moment, indeed, he imagined she was his old adversary, the Fortune, a big, heavily armed lugger owned by Mr. Williams of Shoreham, a notorious smuggler who had plagued the Revenue officers along the South coast for a decade or more. But this was not the Fortune. The haze had misled him. She was a smaller vessel—a fishing boat or coaster. But the sight brought a flood of memories and he stayed a while gazing out to sea while his mind wandered to other places, other adversaries.

  It was an encounter with the Fortune one dark night off the Cuckmere that had first sent him to France on his chequered career as a blockade runner and secret agent in the service of the King’s chief minister, William Pitt. He glanced down at the marks on his legs, stripes almost, like the markings on a tiger, save that they were a shameful red. There were more on his chest and back and buttocks from the flaying he had received in the Maison d’Arrêt in Paris. They would heal in time, he had been assured, and indeed they were much faded already. But there were other scars that would take longer, if they healed at all.

  “Monsieur? Nathan?”

  Alex tugged at his sleeve but even the voice, the accent and the way he pronounced it, Nat-Ann, reminded Nathan of Sara.

  Sara, Countess of Turenne, Nathan’s lover and Alex’s mother, who had died on the guillotine.

  Nathan had played his part in the coup that had consigned Sara’s killers to the same fate and that had promised an end to the dark days of what the French called the Terror. But the war continued and Nathan knew he should be a part of it: needed to be a part of it. He was still officially the master and commander of the Speedwell, an American barque in the King’s service, but he had been promised a captaincy and the command of a frigate by no less a personage than the Earl of Chatham, First Lord of the Admiralty. But the promise had yet to materialise and Nathan had no spirit to remind him of it. He knew this was a part of his grieving for Sara, as if a part of him, too, had died, and that the only cure for this affliction was action. But he was seized by a dreadful lethargy: a sense that nothing mattered and that in any case he could make little difference one way or another.

  And so he played nursemaid to Sara’s son. And played in rock pools. And rode the Downs for long hours alone or walked beside the meandering Cuckmere and the indifferent but curiously healing sea, comforted by the rhythms of the waves. Or at least drugged; numbed as if by some slow-acting opiate or belladonna released into his mind, calming his destructive rages, poisoning those parts of the psyche that betrayed a man to love.

  Perhaps in time he would become as indifferent as the sea.

  They walked on, up the sloping shingle to the little cluster of fishing huts and upturned boats and net-drying sheds where the beach ended and the marshes began and where they had left their pony to graze while they scavenged among the rock pools. Now Nathan called her to them and harnessed her to the little trap, and they climbed in with their buckets at their feet and followed the raised track beside the Cuckmere, inland towards home.

  Nathan’s home, if not the boy’s. Not yet.

  But it was his fond hope that Alex, orphaned and in a strange land, would learn to love it as he did, or at least to make the best of it.

  Nathan had been much the same age when he had first come here from America with his mother and had spent the happiest days of his life here, running wild with a pack of lads and dogs as reckless and as reprobate as himself. He knew it as no other place on earth, and more of its secrets, and its villainies, than his father and his tutors would have wished.

  But for the moment he was content to show the boy its gentler nature, instructing him in the English names of the plants and wild flowers he knew as they plodded up from the beach.

  “Sea Aster”—pointing at a clump of mauve and yellow flowers that grew close by the shore—”and see there, that yellow plant, like a flame? We call it Toadflax. Toad. Crapaud. A toad. Because it is a weed—useless. Like Johnny Crapaud, that we call the French.”

  He grinned to soften the insult. The boy looked puzzled. The English sense of humour was still something of a mystery to him.

  “I am sorry; I must not tease you. Now here is another you should know, much more useful.” He pointed to the dark green plant growing by the river, a little browned here and there by the sun. “That is samphire, one of my favourites because you can eat it. L’herbe de Saint Pierre in French. I don’t know what you use it for, but we eat it with fish. It’s very salty but it will go very well avec nos crevettes.” He stopped the pony, jumped down and leaped along by the side of the river, plucking up a great handful of samphire and bringing it back to drop in the bucket with the sad-looking prawns.

  They plodded on, up through the marshland beside the placid river, past the indifferent herons stalking the shallows, and once they saw the flashing blue of a kingfisher. Up into the meadows below the deserted village of Exceat, wiped out by the Black Death four hundred years ago, its stone ruins hiding beneath fields of golden celandine and great white dishes of cow parsley and other more interesting of God’s creation, or the Devil’s.

  “See that?” Nathan pointed with his whip at a feathery plant with flat white flowers that grew in great profusion among the grasses on the river bank. “Its real name is yarrow but the locals call it Old Man’s Mustard—the Old Man being the Devil, do you see?”

  The poor boy’s frown suggested otherwise but Nathan continued regardless.

  “They say he uses it in his spells when he wants to harm. When I was younger and got in a scrap I’d use it to stop a nosebleed, but of course the folk around here, they always see the Devil in things.”

  Nathan had learned his botany—and much besides—from Old Abe Eldridge, his father’s head shepherd, highly spiced with legend and superstition.

  They crossed the river by the little stone bridge beyond Exceat and began to climb up into the Downs towards Littlington through clouds of gossamer seeds floating in the still air and hoards of Daddy Long Legs bowling through the sun-bleached grass as if they were off to a ball.

  “Beaucoup des papillons,” the boy pointed out. Then, struggling to correct himself: “So many butter-flea.
” Indeed the hillside seemed to be alive with them, an ephemeral lilac-blue haze floating above the grass but almost certainly the effect of the field scabious that grew here or vervain, or a mixture of the two.

  “Both are used in healing,” Nathan explained. “Scabious for the scabies or dandruff. Dandruff. Pour la tete”—scratching the boy’s head for his better understanding—”and vervain for almost anything—from itchy heads to sore bums. Because it was believed to grow on Calvary, do you see, and they used it to staunch Christ’s wounds when he was taken down from the cross, though as I explained to Old Abe, the ignoramus, ‘The dead don’t bleed,’ I said. And he said that was blasphemous and he would tell on me to the vicar, and I would be publicly denounced from the pulpit and get a beating from my tutor. But he didn’t in case I was in the right of it and he was wrong, ha ha.”

  On they climbed up through the woods, past a few lingering foxgloves—Dead Man’s Fingers in Abe’s grim lexicon—and out again, stopping once more for Nathan to point out a plant with a purple flower that was called the Carline Thistle, “Named after a King of France, Charlemagne, who prayed to God for help when his army was hit by the plague and an angel appeared and told him to shoot an arrow into the air, and whichever plant it landed upon, it would provide the cure.”

  “The King of France,” the boy nodded sagely, grasping at what little he had understood of this helpful anecdote.

  “Charlemagne,” Nathan repeated. “But the people here could not pronounce it as well as we scholars so they called it Carline. The Carline Thistle, wearing the purple of the King, do you see, or an Emperor.”

  “Is it he that is call Louis Capet,” enquired the boy, “that is make to die at the guillotine?”

  “No,” said Nathan quietly. “No, not that one.”

  The guillotine and the memory of another who had died upon it cast a shadow over their journey and they were quiet as the pony plodded on through Littlington and out again into the high Downland, with Windover Hill rising steeply to their right, peppered with Nathan’s father’s flocks.