by Hunter, Seth
“Very good. Colonel Hollis will arrange for you to embark a contingent of marines at Portsmouth, to reinforce those presently aboard the Unicorn. You may find them of use.”
Nathan kept his face carefully composed but he wondered how many there were and how he was supposed to accommodate them aboard a small barque. This was of minor concern, however, compared to Chatham’s next instruction.
“You will also embark a certain gentleman in the capacity of political adviser. I believe you are already acquainted with him from your activities in France. His name is Imlay.”
“Imlayl”
Chatham arched his brow. “I trust this is not disagreeable to you. You did not encounter any problems working with him in France?”
Nathan was lost for words. Imlay had been the American shipping agent in Le Havre, though Nathan had reason to believe he was much more than that. Where his true loyalties lay was still something of a mystery to him—and possibly to a great many other people. “A man of many parts,” as he had informed Nathan: soldier, adventurer, explorer and author of A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America. The man who had brought him news of Sara’s death on the guillotine.
He was aware both men were observing him curiously.
“But … but I understood Imlay was in France,” he stammered.
It was the colonel who replied. “Mr. Imlay has recently arrived in London,” he said, “and has agreed to assist you in your mission. I believe you will find him most helpful. He speaks excellent Spanish, even one or two of the local Indian tongues. He has spent several years in New Orleans and the Floridas and has a great many contacts among the American settlers there.”
“Excellent,” beamed the First Lord, clearly anxious to paper over such cracks as he was aware of. “Well, then, was there anything else?” He contemplated Nathan as if surprised to see him still sitting there.
Nathan collected his scattered thoughts. “Only, my lord, that you mentioned certain ‘circumstances’ …”
“Circumstances?” He frowned.
“Possibly connected with the previous captain of the Unicorn?” Nathan prompted him carefully.
“Ah. Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. Captain Kerr.” He shot a look at Hollis who was gazing studiously at the map. “I mentioned that he had died?”
“No, my lord, I do not believe you did, but I imagined that something of that nature might have occurred.”
“The news came to us from the British consul in the Havana. According to his report the Unicorn arrived there in the first week of August with the news that Captain Kerr was missing.”
“Missing?”
“Quite. Missing, one ship’s captain. Missing, one ship’s cutter. That was the tenor of the first lieutenant’s report, as conveyed to us by the British consul in the Havana. Be assured that if we knew more of the situation, you would learn of it. The first lieutenant, Mr. Pym, stated that he had sent a confidential report of the precise circumstances to Admiral Ford. Doubtless there was a need for discretion—the French maintaining a great many spies in the Havana—and his full account will be conveyed to us in due course. However, a few days later, the consul was informed that a body in the uniform of a captain in the British navy had been recovered off the coast of the Floridas and conveyed to New Orleans in a barrel of rum.”
“Rum?” Nathan exclaimed. Though why he should express himself astonished at this particular detail, rather than any other, was as much a mystery to him as it possibly was to my lord Chatham.
“It is as good a preservative as any, I believe,” the earl commented with a frown, “though brandy, perhaps, would have been more fitting to his rank.”
Nathan nodded to himself a little as if this made perfect sense and neither he nor the First Lord were lunatics in Bedlam conducting an amusing conversation for the benefit of the paying visitors.
“There was no indication of how he might have died?”
“Oh yes. Did I not say? His throat had been cut.” Chatham stood up to indicate the interview was at an end. “The Second Secretary has your written orders. I believe you may just have time to provide yourself with a new uniform before you leave London.” He extended his hand. “And may I wish you joy of your commission, Captain.”
CHAPTER 3
Heroes and Whores
NATHAN STOOD AT THE HEAD of the stairs and tried to collect his scattered wits. His brain felt as if it had been shattered into a million pieces, all flying in different directions but amid this spinning, colliding cosmos one bright star remained constant, solid and unmoving. He was made post captain.
The hall porter was looking at him strangely. Nathan pulled himself together and put on his hat, a semblance of order that would have worked better had he put it on the right way round. He corrected this deficiency and descended the stairs. He had sent away his chaise so the horses would not be left standing in the heat but it was only a short walk across St. James’s Park to his mother’s house.
“I expect you will read of it in the Gazette sooner or later”—he addressed the porter with a carelessness that would have fooled no-one, least of all a gentleman who had seen it all before, many times—”but I have been made post.”
“I am very pleased to hear it, sir,” said the porter with a surprisingly avuncular grin. “Permit me to be one of the first to congratulate you.”
“Thank you. You are very kind. Perhaps you will take a glass of something with your colleagues to wish me luck.”
He slipped him a guinea.
“Be very glad to, sir, and I am sure we wish you all the very best.”
Nathan walked across St. James’s Park in a continuing state of bewilderment. Post captain. He was made post captain. The captain of a 32-gun frigate. He should be pleased, exultant and yet … His commanding emotion, now that it had sunk in, was one of grief. A terrible sadness. As if the news of his promotion had triggered the same alchemy of feelings as the news that Imlay had brought him on the Queen’s Stairs in the Palace of the Tuileries. That Sara had died on the guillotine.
“Are you not well, sir? You look as one who has seen a ghost.”
Nathan started. There was a man standing a few feet in front of him, smiling.
“Thank you, sir. I am perfectly well,” he replied. “I had, for a moment, mislaid my direction.” He raised a hand in a deprecating gesture and made to move on but the man stood directly in his path. He was a short, thickset individual in shirt sleeves, wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and carrying a large canvas bag by a strap over his shoulder.
“And I have mislaid mine,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My direction. I am looking for Queen Anne’s Gate.”
Nathan hesitated. “As a matter of fact I am going that way myself,” he admitted. “If you would care to accompany me?”
“Happily,” said the man, “if you have now remembered where it is.”
He grinned widely to remove the possibility of giving offence. If he was not a simpleton, there was certainly something childlike about him, though he was well past his first youth. He had a snub nose and large brown eyes that had a look almost of rapture. Or mischief, it was hard to tell.
They walked on.
“Saint James’s Park,” said the man in a tone of mild bemusement as he gazed about his surroundings.
“Correct,” said Nathan. “You are a stranger to London?”
“Oh I have lived here all my life,” said the man. “I was born in Soho and now I live in Lambeth. I have walked from one end of London to the other many times but I have not walked in Saint James’s Park for many a long year. I find the lepers disconcerting.”
“The leopards?” Nathan looked for them in alarm. It was entirely possible they were a recent introduction. The park belonged to the Crown, though it had been open to the public since the days of the second Charles, and King George, in the present state of his wits, might readily conceive of leopards.
“Good gracious no!” The man laughed at the absurdi
ty of this notion. “Lepers.”
“Ah!” Nathan nodded understandingly, as if they were a nuisance to most Londoners from time to time.
“I saw them the last time I was here, down by the lake,” the lunatic assured him, “and it disturbed me a little. Though in truth, this was foolish.”
“Not at all,” Nathan corrected him politely. “Lepers should not be wandering around Saint James’s Park. They should be in a leper colony.”
“Oh, but it was a leper colony. Many years ago.”
“Truly?”
“In the reign of Edward the First.”
“Is that so?” Nathan’s mind was only partly fixed upon this conversation. The better part of it was still considering the import of his recent conversation at the Admiralty and in particular the information that Gilbert Imlay was in London. As an American, he could come and go as he liked of course, provided he could obtain transport. But what had induced him to leave Paris? And what of Mary and the child? Had he brought them with him—or left them in France?
“I saw Edward the First once. In his coffin.”
And what was his interest in the Caribbean? For surely he must have an interest. He could not have been motivated purely by the interests of His Majesty’s Government. Somewhere in the back of Nathan’s mind there was a clue to this conundrum—but he needed time and space to think on it. And here he was conversing with a madman.
“He had been dead for more than four hundred and fifty years.”
“That is a long time. And what did he look like?”
“Very old.”
Nathan laughed despite his unease.
“His face was dark brown, like chocolate, approaching to black. And so were his hands and fingers.” He furrowed his brow in concentration as if trying to recall the exact detail. “The chin and lips were entire but no beard. Both the lips were prominent, the nose short, as if shrunk, but the apertures of the nostrils were visible.”
Nathan glanced at him in surprise. Clearly, he was no ordinary madman.
“A quantity of black dust was visible in the folds of the neck and jaw but whether it had been flesh, or spices, could not be ascertained.”
“Spices?”
“Yes. He had been embalmed.”
“Where did you see this?” Nathan was genuinely curious now.
“In Westminster Abbey. When they opened his coffin. I was making drawings of the tombs.”
“Really?” Nathan began to perceive some sense in this. “You are a historian, perhaps?” A category of madman permitted to walk the streets, he recalled, being accounted harmless.
“No. But I have a great interest in history.”
They walked on in silence for a while and were nearing Birdcage Walk when the man spoke again.
“I hope you did not take it amiss, what I said to you when we first met?”
“What was that?”
“That you looked like a man who had seen a ghost.”
“Not at all.”
“It was not meant to be derogatory.”
“I am sure it was not.”
“I see ghosts myself, quite frequently. Though personally I do not use the expression. I think of them more as visions, or visitations, of what has been and what is to come. And then there are the angels, who have a different relationship with time.”
“And what form do they take, these angels?” Nathan enquired, more with a view to humouring him than from any genuine need for information on the subject.
“Oh many forms. But, in general, more human than not.” He beamed and tapped the side of his head. “It is in here,” he said. “In the mind. In the imagination.”
Nathan was relieved to know it. He smiled and nodded in apparent agreement. Thus encouraged, the stranger continued: “Though sometimes I wonder if there is more than one universe. And that there is another, perhaps many others, that exist beside our own—but in another dimension of time and space. And that sometimes some of us are permitted a glimpse, as if through a torn curtain. No.” He frowned again as if the comparison displeased him. “Not a curtain. More—a mist that suddenly parts and then closes again.”
They were approaching Queen Anne’s Gate.
“What number are you looking for?” Nathan asked him.
“Number 44. The house of Lady Catherine Peake.”
Of course. Nathan should have known.
“Lady Catherine is my mother,” he said. A collector of strays, dissidents, malcontents and madmen from many dimensions.
The man stopped and peered up at Nathan from under the brim of his hat. He was a good half a foot shorter.
“How very curious,” he said. “But then again, perhaps not.”
“My mother is expecting you?”
“Indeed. I have some things to show her.” The man indicated the bag on his shoulder.
What things? wondered Nathan in alarm. Bones, relics, the remains of an embalmed king? His finger, perhaps, or worse?
“Some engravings. A mutual acquaintance was good enough to recommend me to her.”
“You are an artist?”
“An engraver,” the man replied firmly. “As the world would know me. For though it is not widely valued as art, it provides a living for such a one as myself. ‘I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning. My heavens are brass, my earth is iron.’”
“I see.”
“And you, I perceive, are a naval man.”
“Indeed.”
“ Who has been in the wars, I think.”
“We live in troubled times,” Nathan remarked mildly.
“‘I, all drunk with unsatiated love, must rush again to war, for the virgin has frowned and refused.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No matter.”
They walked on, Nathan striving to shake off the superstition occasioned by the word “virgin.”
“Well, this is it,” he said as they reached the door of his mother’s house.
“Perhaps I should knock at the tradesman’s entrance,” said the man, with another smile, though Nathan did not think he considered the notion amusing.
“Nonsense,” he replied firmly. “Not at all.”
They mounted the steps together and Nathan rang the bell.
Phipps, his mother’s man, opened the door, greeting Nathan with a smile and a bow.
“How very good it is to see you, sir.”
“And you, Mr. Phipps. This gentleman has come to see my mother,” he added briskly, for he had noted the faintly raised brow. Phipps knew a tradesman when he saw one, and whatever the egalitarian principles espoused by his mistress, he was more than willing to direct him to the correct entrance. “And is expected.”
“Lady Catherine is in the withdrawing room,” Phipps replied, stepping back a pace.
It occurred to Nathan that it might not be such a good idea to greet his mother, after an absence of some months, with a stranger in tow.
“Perhaps, you would be good enough to show the gentleman into the library while I pay my respects,” he said.
His mother was sitting in the window with a book on her lap but she leaped up at sight of Nathan and flew to him like a young girl.
“My dearest, darling boy!” Nathan succumbed to an assault of muslin and scent. Too much scent and too little muslin.
“Mother!” He stepped back, and inspected her. “What are you wearing? Or should I say not wearing?”
“This? What on earth can you mean, sir? I assure you it is the very height of fashion.”
“It may very well be, madam,” he was about to add for a girl of seventeen but thought better of it. Nathan was very fond of his mother and quite proud of her at times, but at other times he wished she might be a little more dignified.
“And can it be,” he recoiled in pretended shock as he noticed another facet of her appearance, “that you are not wearing stays?”
“Fie, sir, and who wears stays, these days, that is under forty?”
Nathan made no comm
ent. It seemed a day for delusions.
“What a way to greet your mother,” she continued indignantly, “after an absence of however long it is. I’d a good mind to box your ears.”
“It is not permitted,” he informed her, “to box the ears of a post captain, especially when he is wearing the King’s uniform. I believe it is regarded as a crime of lèse majesté and you may be put in the stocks for it.”
She regarded him warily. “You? Post captain?” His mother had spent long enough as the wife of a naval officer to know the difference between a mere commander and a post captain and that it was very great. “But you are a mere child.”
“I am twenty-five, madam.”
“Nonsense. What would that make me?”
Nathan forbore to astonish her.
“ Well, I am very pleased for you, my little one,” she said, stretching her arms to reach around his neck for he was a little over six feet tall. “If only they send you back to me alive and in one piece. You will be an admiral before we know it, just like your father, though I will not disguise from you that while this dreadful war continues I would as soon you were with him in Sussex minding sheep.”
“You despise sheep,” he reminded her. “You have often remarked upon it.”
“Yes, but at least they have the sense to remain upon dry land and do not engage in wars, if I am not entirely misinformed on the subject. Have you seen your father lately?”
Nathan’s father and sheep being entirely associated in his mother’s mind.
“I have just come up from Sussex,” Nathan informed her with perfect truth, though he did not add that he had been there several weeks without paying her a visit. This was no mere churlishness on his part but he had been in too much pain and sorrow from his last visit to France. And besides, there was Alex to be considered. It had seemed to him that it was better for them to stay with his father in the country for a while. But not without regret. He wished he had been able to tell his mother about Sara. He would like to have introduced her to Alex. But this would have involved telling something of his secret work in France and invited a score of supplementary questions. Questions his father would never ask. Nathan knew his mother to be warm, generous and kind-hearted, a prey to every lame dog with a long face and a tall story. But she was famously indiscreet. Whereas his father rarely, if ever, revealed his feelings, much less spoke of them, his mother was of that gregarious faction that regarded a secret as of value only if it were shared with as many of her acquaintance as were in favour at the time. She was not a frivolous person—indeed she was at times too involved in politics and the serious business of the country for her own good—but she was more inclined to sensibility than to sense.