by Seth Hunter
Treachery, Nathan had learned within hours of his return, was as rife among the Royalists as Bennett had proposed. And the British were not without blame in this regard, for it transpired that the King’s chief minister, William Pitt, had ordered the release of over a thousand Republican prisoners to swell the Royalist ranks. Possibly he had imagined that they would uphold the allied cause out of simple gratitude. More likely, that complicated abacus of a brain thought only to save the expense of their accommodation in the prison hulks. Either way, it had been a disastrous decision, for most had waited only until the moment they were set ashore before deserting to the enemy while others, more cunning, had waited until they were installed at Fort Penthièvre before sneaking out after dark and leading the Republicans back along the shore at low tide to take the position where it was least defended. And now General Hoche had his foot firmly planted upon the neck of Quiberon, with the rest of the peninsula at his mercy—and all that were lodged upon it.
On that slender strip of land, barely eight miles long and less than three at its widest point, were huddled an estimated 30,000 souls: the émigrés landed from England, the Chouans who had joined them, and those locals who had reason to fear the Republicans’ revenge. Most without food, or water, or shelter. And all looking to God or the British fleet to save them.
From his present perspective Nathan had little faith in either.
“Mr. Holroyd’s respects, sir, and Pomone is signalling.”
Nathan followed the messenger across the canting deck to where Holroyd and Lamb were huddled, heads together over the signal book. Some short distance to leeward he could see the signals flying from the gaff halyard of the Pomone and he waited impatiently for the two officers to agree on a translation. It was not long in coming for the order was a simple one. He was to report aboard the flagship. Its execution, however, was another matter.
“How am I to report,” he complained peevishly to Tully, “when all our boats are out? Would he have me walk on water?”
“I expect he would be content if you were to swim,” Tully assured him and though he smiled his eyes expressed a lively concern, for the Chevalier de Batz was still confined below decks, no longer in chains, but with a marine sentry posted at the door—and there had been no reply, as yet, to Nathan’s report on the matter.
. . .
“Ah Captain Peake, here you are at last. I believe you have already met Mr. Finch.”
The commodore’s greeting was not so very different from when they had last met, but his appearance had changed very much for the worse. His hair hung lank and unpowdered, his jaw was unshaven and there was a hint of desperation in his eyes. Nathan was not at all surprised. Hardly a thing had gone right for him since the fog had lifted on the morning of the Unicorn’s arrival.
If Sir John Borlase Warren had thought to find glory in his appointment his hopes had been cruelly dashed—and he must surely fear that he would be held accountable for the failure of the enterprise. It occurred to Nathan that his main concern must be to spread the blame as generously as possible and indeed, the commodore’s next words confirmed him in this opinion.
“I have read your report on the venture into the Gulf of Morbihan. A pity. A great pity. Had we been able to hold on to Auray for a few days all this might have been avoided.” The commodore gestured vaguely towards the stern windows and the obscure view it provided of the chaos on the beaches. “However, it may not be too late to save the day, if we are prepared to put our duty before any other considerations. Now if I may draw your attention to the chart.” He returned his gaze to the object in question while Nathan considered how he might be held responsible for the fall of Auray. If there was a way, he was sure the commodore would find it. He was clearly out of favour with Mr. Finch, who had not bothered to rise from his chair at Nathan’s entrance or return his bow though now he looked more closely this appeared to be prompted by reasons other than discourtesy. Indeed, he rather thought the man was dead until he noted the sheen of sweat upon his pale countenance.
“Good day to you, Mr. Finch,” he greeted him cheerfully as he made his way over to the table, and was rewarded with a glazed eye and something very like a death rattle.
“Here is Penthièvre, or Fort Sans Culottes as the Republicans call it.” Warren indicated the fort at the narrow neck of the peninsula. “Its loss is a grave blow and I fear that until we receive the promised reinforcement from England we are in no position to take it back. Indeed, our main concern at present is that General Hoche will use the fort as a forward base to attack the Royalist lines here at Kerhostin.”
He drew an imaginary line with his finger across the peninsula at a point a little south of the fort. As imaginary as the Royalist lines, so far as Nathan was concerned, for he had seen no physical sign of them.
“I am assured by the Comte de Puisaye that he has sufficient men to mount a creditable defence,” the commodore continued, “and I have no reason to doubt his estimation.” Nathan blinked a little but said nothing in contradiction of this astonishing statement. “However, you will have noticed that at low tide a considerable amount of beach is exposed on the eastern side of the peninsula.” Nathan had. “The concern is that the French—the Republicans—will take advantage of this to outflank de Puisaye’s defences, just as they did at Penthièvre. And he has insufficient resource to extend his lines. So—we must provide cover from the sea.”
Which made some sort of sense—if there had been any sea. But at low tide, as Warren must know, it retreated some considerable distance from the land. And with the shoals and rocks it would be impossible to sail a vessel of any size, or weight of broadside, to within a mile of the coast in that vicinity. Add to that the difficulty of operating so close to shore in a near gale and the impossibility of firing the guns with any degree of accuracy … Nathan began to point out some of these difficulties to the commodore but had scarcely begun when he was tersely interrupted.
“What of the Conquest—and the squadron you led into Morbihan?” Nathan looked at the chart again, noting the depths of water at the landward end of the peninsula.
“It might be possible,” he conceded. “If the weather abates somewhat and we can find a pilot who knows the shoals about that point.”
“And the pilot who guided you into the Morbihan?”
“I would have to enquire.” Nathan frowned, disadvantaged.
“Then please do, as soon as you feel ready to broach the subject.” Whatever he had lost in elegance, the commodore’s sarcasm was sharp as it ever was. “But I fear we cannot wait upon the weather, for I am persuaded General Hoche will permit himself no such luxury. You will have to put on your tarpaulin and your southwester and make the best of things.”
Nathan prepared to make his leave, but Warren had not finished with him yet.
“I understand from your report that you have a number of Chouans aboard.”
“Yes, sir. I thought they would be of more use here than in the Gulf of Morbihan.”
“Then let us make use of them. Put them ashore to reinforce de Puisaye. The Unicorn may provide support at whatever distance you consider will not put her at risk. We do not want you running aground again, as you did in the mouth of Morbihan.”
Nathan swallowed his anger and his pride.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“No, it is not all. Before you go, this business of the Chevalier de Batz …” Nathan braced himself. “Regrettable. Most regrettable.”
“Indeed, sir.” Nathan composed his features into a suitable expression of gravity.
“You know who he is, of course.”
“I was informed by his lieutenant, after the event, that he is cousin to the Comte de Puisaye.”
“Quite. And held in considerable regard by the count and his circle.”
Nathan chose his words with care. “I acted upon the spur of the moment, sir, with a pistol to my head, so to speak.”
The commodore raised his brow. “I understood, from your own repor
t, that the pistol was held to the head of the Chevalier de Batz.”
Nathan flushed. “It was a figure of speech, sir. However, he ordered his men to fire upon us—and I took such action as I deemed to be necessary at the time.”
“Indeed? You are quite sure he meant to launch an attack upon you and your men? Not upon the Republicans?”
“That was the impression I formed, sir. But even had he meant the Republicans, they were prisoners, in my charge. The officer had given me his sword.”
The commodore glanced at Finch to ascertain if he had any opinion on the matter. He did not.
“In the heat of battle, Captain Peake, could it not have been that the chevalier considered they were still a danger to his men, and indeed to yours?”
“I do not believe that was in his mind, sir.”
A heavy sigh. “Well, it is most unfortunate. There have been enough problems with our allies without this.” The sound of the ship’s bell recalled him to his other considerations. “I propose you send the chevalier over to the flagship and we will accommodate him here until such time as we can arrange a full enquiry into the matter.”
Nathan kept his expression carefully blank but this was not what he had wanted to hear. A full enquiry—in the wake of what looked like being one of the worst disasters to befall the Navy since Byng lost Minorca. And Byng had faced a British firing squad.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Yes, Captain, and let us hope you can render such assistance to the Comte de Puisaye as to make him feel obliged to you.”
It took Nathan the best part of an hour to assemble his scattered flotilla, and another to cover the short distance to Penthièvre for there was a very real danger they would be carried on to the shore at Carnac. He was obliged to lead them well out to sea and then come about and stand on the wind, close-hauled on the starboard tack under double-reefed topsails. Now they stood about a mile out from the shore, the Unicorn hove to with her main topsail to the mast and the gunboats working closer to shore with their sweeps, though he very much doubted if they could achieve much with the kind of sea that was running. The Conquest in particular was making such heavy weather of it, he did not think she would be able to open her gun-ports, much less fire her broadside. Which was probably just as well for she was rolling so badly the shot could go anywhere. The beach here was strangely empty after the crowds they had seen further along the peninsula. A beach of startlingly white sand, even under the cloudy sky, but while he was looking, hundreds of ragged, scuttling figures emerged from the dunes and ran toward the water’s edge, stretching out their hands imploringly.
Nathan sought out Tully on the weather rail to express his anguish: “How in God’s name are we to provide support with that lot in the line of fire? And support what? Where are the Royalist lines; can you see them? For I am sure I cannot.”
Tully was unable to enlighten him and Nathan went aloft in the hope of a better view but even braced against the topmast shrouds it was impossible to hold the glass steady enough for any detailed observation. He could see the fort plainly enough with his naked eye, a little over a mile to the north-west, but the Royalist lines the commodore had sketched so confidently on the map aboard the Pomone were nowhere to be seen. If they were there at all, they were well hidden among the dunes.
He wondered if it were possible to bring the frigate any closer to the shore. The wind had slackened somewhat and there was still a depth of water under her keel, but he was wary of performing what would necessarily be a complicated manoeuvre so close to the guns of Penthièvre, especially with Graham as his sailing master.
He looked again at the people on the beach.
“God help them,” he murmured under his breath, though there was none to hear him. It was scarcely a prayer. He had lost what little faith he had in Paris during the time of the Terror. And yet he was shaken by this fresh evidence, to his mind, of the sheer randomness of fate that could cast so many defenceless people adrift, abandoned to the tide of war and politics. Did they believe their God would save them? God or Virgin or whatever Papist saints they prayed to in their churches and at their roadside shrines? Did they believe the Bishop of Rome would intercede for them with his prayers?
And yet for all of that, for all his scepticism and his deeply in-grained pessimism, he still needed to believe there was a greater power than his own puny endeavours, a benign presence to ward off the evil eye, even if you called it luck.
He was a man much inclined to Order—a student of astronomy who found comfort in the slightest evidence of some pattern to the universe and in the supposition that the planets moved according to certain rules and regulations, that all was not Chaos, as it so often appeared on Earth. He could not entirely dismiss the idea that behind this Order there was a force for good: call it God, or the Supreme Being, as Robespierre had, or something else, something no-one had yet discovered in the configuration of the planets. The Great Regulator. The Supreme Clockmaker (the divine twin of Mr. Harrison who had invented the marine chronometer, perhaps; it was a comforting image). He was perfectly aware that this belief—or whimsy, for it could not be compared to faith—was sustained in part by the terrible fear that there was nothing there. Nothing and noone. That no amount of appeals to an unknown deity would make the slightest difference to the course of events, wherever they occurred.
Nathan had been led by his interest in astronomy to the work of a certain Persian astronomer, poet and mathematician called Omar Khayyam, translated by the English scholar Thomas Hyde who had travelled much in the East during the last century. Nathan had been much struck by a line of verse he had found in Hyde’s translations:
The moving finger writes and having writ
moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
shall lure it back to cancel half a line;
nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
But if this was truth, need it be so cold? He longed for a more comforting philosophy, clung to the hope that the moving finger might pause a moment in its endless scribing and the divine hand soar from on high to pluck a single individual from the damned. Or in this case, the doomed horde that clung to the beaches of Quiberon like so many barnacles upon a rock. For surely Sara had not been saved from the guillotine only to die here on this wretched lump of rock and sand, while he looked helplessly on from his lofty perch.
He recalled another verse from a hymn often sung at his father’s request at the family church in Windover. One of Cowper’s, in fact, that reflected a more phlegmatic English philosophy than that of the Asian astronomer.
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
He could see his father belting it out now, with more heart than harmony, knowing full well that for all his professed piety, when it came to storms at sea the old admiral had more faith in preventer stays than prayer, though he might try both at a pinch. And Cowper, he had heard, had been torn all his life by doubt and pessimism.
He came down from the mast and sent for Bennett who came staggering aft, too long ashore to have found his sea legs yet, though his complexion was ruddy enough. Nathan took him in the shelter of one of the tarpaulins stretched in the weather rigging to provide a little respite from the wind. He still had to raise his voice but was spared the effort of shouting in his ear, which was as well for some diplomacy was required.
“I have been ordered to set your Chouans ashore,” he told him.
A diplomat might have put it better. Certainly it did not go down well with the man from Nantucket. His complexion grew a deal more flushed and his voice more heated.
“You might as well toss them overboard,” he observed bitterly.
“The commodore is of the opinion that they may be of more use ashore,” Nathan pointed out coldly. “Helping defend the women and children trapped upon Quiberon.”
“Though the commodore is not himself able to def
end them.”
These were Nathan’s sentiments precisely but they could not be expressed by a mere seaman.
“Bennett, if you cannot curb your tongue, we will have to see what a gag may achieve.”
“I am sorry if it was impertinent, sir, but what would it achieve to send more men to their deaths?”
“It may not come to that, if Puisaye can hold the line.”
Bennett regarded him evenly. “With your permission, sir, I would go with them.”
“Nonsense. You will return to your duties.”
“Sir, I am their leader, since you deprived them of de Batz. And, with respect, I fought at their side for over a year. They have risked their lives for me. How can I not go with them?”
“Bennett, you are not one of them. This is not your fight.”
“It is as much my fight as any man’s that is not French. And they trust me. They would fight better if I was with them. And what use am I to you here?”
Nathan wavered.
“Set me ashore with them.” Bennett’s eyes grew shrewd. “I will find La Renarde for you. And I swear to God, I will do my best to get her out of it.”
Nathan stared at him, torn by conflicting emotions. His first passion was outrage, with some embarrassment that he had revealed more of his interest in the matter of La Renarde than he would have wished. But then, inspired perhaps by the confused theology of his lonely sojourn in the top, he recalled that line of Cowper’s. Benjamin Bennett seemed an unlikely godsend but, as he had so clearly indicated, he was precious little use as anything else.
“Very well, Bennett. I will put you ashore with them. But you will wear a proper uniform so that we may pick you out of the crowd and take you off the beaches if it should come to that. And it may save you from a hanging if you are taken prisoner by the French.”