Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

  The Time of Terror

  a novel

  Seth Hunter

  McBooks Press, Inc.

  www.mcbooks.com

  Ithaca, New York

  Published by McBooks Press 2010

  First published in Great Britain by Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette UK company, 2008

  Copyright © 2008 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 by Peter Zaharov.

  Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey.

  Interior design by Panda Musgrove.

  The hardcover edition of this title was cataloged as:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunter, Seth.

  The time of terror / by Seth Hunter.

  p. cm. -- (Nathan Peake series ; bk. 1)

  Summary: “Nathan Peake, an officer in the British Royal Navy, fights against the French during the French Revolution”--Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-59013-485-6

  1. Great Britain. Royal Navy--Officers--Fiction. 2. France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.U59T56 2010

  823’.92--dc22

  2010004802

  The e-Book versioons of this title have the following ISBNs:

  Kindle 978-1-59013-487-0, ePub 978-1-59013-488-7, and PDF 978-1-59013-489-4

  www.mcbooks.com

  If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. —Thomas Paine

  I—GERMINAL

  the Time of the Seed

  PROLOGUE

  a Death in Paris, January 1793

  It was a time when you could not leave home and know that you would return alive and in one piece. You might die in an act of random violence, butchered by the fanatics on the streets, or by the dubious legal process favoured by the authorities which was slower but every bit as bloody. It was pointless to stay in because they knew where you lived and if they didn’t the neighbours would tell them. Your best friend could be an informer, your landlord a patriot who would report you for lack of revolutionary zeal, especially if you were behind with the rent. The city was in a state of siege, the prisons full, the shops empty. It was a daily struggle to obtain enough food and fuel to stay alive. Medicines cost a fortune on the black market and were probably fake. You had better not be ill or pregnant or old.

  Or a king.

  She watched from her window as his carriage went by taking him to his trial at the Palais de Justice. A hired carriage and a shabby one at that with a clapped-out old nag and the drummers walking ahead beating the step. The streets were otherwise quite empty—people had been told not to stand and stare—and most of the windows were shuttered.

  They found him guilty of course; there was never any question of that. And then they killed him. She did not go to watch though many did; they said the crowd was unusually solemn and that he died with quiet dignity.

  She snorted at that. You wouldn’t catch me dying with quiet dignity, she said. I’d be screaming and shouting all the way. Make it hard for the bastards. Let them know what they’re doing to you, the swine.

  The horror of it.

  She imagined what it must be like to mount those steps with your hands tied and your neck bared and your legs turning to jelly and that Thing waiting for you at the top. The guillotine. Or the Humane and Scientific Execution Machine as the Revolutionists called it, without apparent irony.

  That night, as she sat reading she saw eyes staring at her through the window, hands pressed on the glass, wet with blood. It might have been her imagination—she had terrible dreams lately—but it could well have been real with what was happening in the streets.

  “I wish I had kept the cat with me,” she wrote. “I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy . . . For the first time in my life I cannot put out the candle.”

  Her friends thought it would mean war with England. They were Americans living in Paris, writers like herself, and they found the prospect both alarming and exciting. She pooh-poohed the idea.

  “What, to avenge the death of a French king? I think not,” she said.

  But privately she was not so sure. Men could always find reasons to go to war.

  It was the night of January 21st, 1793 . . .

  Chapter 1

  the Black Lugger

  A black night and cold, even for the first month of the year with a chill wind whipping across the Channel from France. A night to be indoors by a good fire with a mug of hot punch, not gadding about off the Sussex Downs in support of the Revenue service fighting a futile war against the smugglers. Nathaniel Peake, master and commander of the brig sloop Nereus, bent his bum against the nearest of her sixteen guns with his coat collar turned up and his chin thrust deep into his muffler and cast an anxious eye at the familiar hump of Seaford Head off the larboard bow. Even on such a dirty night, with a scrap of a moon dodging in and out of ragged clouds, he could make out the line of surf at its foot. He had the sailor’s healthy respect for a lee shore and in his mind’s eye he saw the rocks where in times past he had clambered with his shrimp net when the tide was out.

  “We must hug the coast and take them by surprise,” he had been instructed by the Revenue Collector, Mr. Swales, who had joined them at Shoreham: a stout burlesque of the breed with an opinion of his own competence that Nathan was inclined from sheer prejudice to doubt.

  It was a coast Nathan knew well. Beyond the headland was Cuckmere Haven where he had first set foot in salt water, bawling not in fear—as he was later told—but for his nanny to loose her hold upon him so that he might venture farther. Here, too, he had sailed his first boat and set a course for America till a slack wind and a stern tutor recalled him to his responsibilities. And one summer’s night when the household thought him safe in bed he had crouched at the top of the cliff and watched the smugglers landing contraband: the fleet of small boats in the haven and the long line of ponies and tub-men straggling along the Cuckmere with their illicit booty.

  They’d be there tonight if the information laid before the Collector was correct; some of the same men in all probability for it was only ten years since Nathan’s last sighting of them. He imagined sweeping them with grape or shot and shook his head at the absurdity of the notion. Yet not so impossible before the night was out.

  He crossed to the weather side of the little space he liked to think of as his quarterdeck—though the Nereus was flush-decked like all the vessels of her class—and gazed across the sea towards the black bank of cloud that masked the proper enemy to the south. France and England had been at war for much of the century and would be again before it was out, if you could believe what you read in the newspapers. Yet there had been peace for ten years, the whole time Nathan had been in the Navy, with precious few enemies to fight save some unfortunate aborigines in the South Seas and importunate pirates in the Caribbean . . . and of course the smugglers.

  There was a flash of lightning from the clear sky to the east and a thin crack that was a far cry from thunder. A moment’s pause and then a veritable barrage. Nathan came off the rail and arched his brow at Mr. Collector Swales as if to enquire if this was all part of his
plan, knowing full well that it was not. The gentleman relieved himself of an oath and stamped his feet upon the deck, possibly under the impression he was travelling post and could thereby induce a faster turn of speed. Nathan met the questioning eye of his first lieutenant, Mr. Jordan, and instructed him to beat to quarters though he was not impatient for battle with men with whom he was at least half in sympathy and had probably known since childhood, smuggling being a way of life on the Sussex coast. To his certain knowledge many of his own father’s labourers were employed in the trade, earning more in a few hours carrying tubs of contraband brandy and tobacco than they could earn in a week on the farm.

  Nathan made his way forward through the rush of men and took up a new mooring at the foremast shrouds so that he might see what was afoot the moment they cleared Hope Point.

  Not far now and closing fast. Their consort, the little Customs cutter Badger, was already turning, almost jibing as she rounded the point. Then she veered abruptly to windward so that she lay broadside to the shore with her own guns run out: four little 4-pounders that would scarce scare a bum-boat but might play the very devil on that open stretch of shore. Nathan could see it clear in his mind’s eye: the steep bank of shingle and the wide flat marshland beyond and the cliffs of the Seven Sisters sweeping down to Beachy Head . . .

  Then they were round the point, the moon suddenly clear of the scudding clouds and the white cliffs making a perfect reflector for the spectacle on shore. As great a shambles as Nathan could have predicted though it surprised him that the mistake was so elementary.

  The dragoons had come down on the wrong side of the river.

  Either that or the lookout—the spots-man—had signalled the incoming boats to switch the landing. Whatever the cause, the troopers were stranded on the west bank of the Cuckmere and the smugglers were on the east. Even in the dark Nathan could see them fleeing along the shore towards the gentle slope of Haven Brow: above a hundred of them and half as many ponies with the dragoons riding their horses into the river and blazing away with their carbines with not a hope in hell of hitting anything. And a fleet of small boats fleeing along the foot of the cliffs towards Beachy Head . . .

  And there, a mile or so farther to the east but silhouetted against the white backdrop of the Sisters, was the black lugger . . .

  “The Fortune,” cried the Collector, fairly dancing in his agitation and pointing. “There is our prize, sir.”

  The Fortune had been the main topic of his discourse since leaving Shoreham: a big, fast lugger with ten 6-pounders and a crew of more than a hundred which made her more than a match for any of the Revenue cutters on the station and was the main reason for a naval presence. She had been fitted out in Newhaven ostensibly as a privateer during the American War but was now known to be wholly engaged in smuggling (as in all probability she was then): her normal practice being to run the contraband over from one of the French Channel ports and transfer it to the tub-boats off the Sussex coast.

  In which occupation she had clearly been disturbed and was now fleeing out to sea with all the sail she could carry—and the little Customs cutter snapping at her heels. No chance of catching her of course, much less of engaging her as an equal, but if the lugger lost a single spar it would be enough for the Nereus to come up and make an end of it. Unhappily, her skipper was of the same opinion and as the Badger closed on him he came even farther into the wind and fired a rippling broadside on the roll with a greater approximation to thunder than anything Nathan had heard thus far.

  He had been staring straight at her and was momentarily blinded by the sudden eruption but when he could see again it was to observe the Badger taken aback with her topmast down and a shamble of headsails and rigging on her foredeck. Nathan had already brought the brig as close to the wind as she could sail but he had to fall off to avoid a collision and he came up on the cutter’s lee and called out did she need assistance. The skipper replied with a string of oaths indicating that Nathan would be better occupied with catching his assailant but a glance in the lugger’s direction suggested the contrary. Nathan had entertained some faint hope of crossing her stern and raking her from a distance but it was clear now that he would be lucky to come within a mile of her and thereafter their courses would be steadily diverging.

  He heard the Revenue man asking why they did not give chase and left it to the junior midshipman to explain in his superior way that the lugger, being rigged fore and aft could sail at least a point closer to the wind, do you see? While the brig, being square-rigged would have to beat to windward and tack. A futile course of action unless the wind changed or the lugger was taken aback. Nathan would be better employed rounding up the tub-boats still creeping along the foot of the cliffs in the hope that no one had noticed them. Yet he despised the notion of hauling in a few poor fishermen while the real culprit sailed safely back to France. Better to tack in the lugger’s wake, vain though it was, and hope the Revenue officer would not propose an alternative strategy until it was too late.

  He was about to give the order when he caught the eye of one of his junior officers. It was something of a speculative look, hedged with caution, and it caused Nathan to delay the manoeuvre for a moment or two while he considered what it might mean.

  Martin Tully was a Guernsey man who had joined the Nereus a month or two before Nathan. In his briefing the first lieutenant had explained that Tully, like every second man in the Channel Isles, was a former smuggler: the mate of a chasse marée taken off the Isle of Wight and her crew given the option of volunteering for the King’s Navy or facing the full fury of the law. He had been rated able seaman but swiftly raised to master’s mate by the previous commander of the Nereus. Nathan had formed no more than a sketchy assessment of Tully’s abilities but he found him agreeable enough and certainly competent, quietly spoken with the manners of a gentleman and none of the airs. He seemed wary of putting himself forward lest he be laid aback. Hardly surprising in view of his previous career as a smuggler. As to his social background, Nathan had overheard the two midshipmen whispering that he was the by-blow of a Guernsey seigneur, which might have been a myth he had perpetrated to win their respect for they were both the sons of gentlemen, of course, and deplorable snobs who would honour the bastard of a noble far more than the legitimate spawn of a tradesman or less. Yet he did not seem given to invention and there was something in his face and bearing that would have inclined them to respect, Nathan thought, whatever his breeding. Nathan had resolved to know him better but the opportunity had slid by—like so much else on his present commission. Now he joined Tully at the rail and after returning his salutation and contemplating the horizon for a minute or two he begged him for his opinion of the distant chase.

  “Well, sir,” said he, “for the moment I believe he is content to put as much space between us as is possible in as short a time—and so he will sail as close to the wind as he may.”

  “And then?” Nathan prompted.

  “And then I believe he will make for the Somme.”

  “The Somme?” Nathan knew it from the charts of course, though he had never been there: a wide estuary about halfway between Dieppe and Boulogne. But why the Somme? Dieppe, surely, was far more likely.

  Tully seemed to be considering the question, though it was hard to tell. His face lacked expression. There might be more knowledge locked in there than he deemed prudent to release.

  “She is the Fortune, I believe, of Newhaven?” he ventured.

  “She is.”

  Tully nodded. “Her captain is a man called Williams—or was when I last heard of him which were no more than a few months since. A Sussex man by birth and a privateer in the past, but he has a woman in St. Valéry and spends more time there than in any English port though his crew are mostly English and American.”

  St. Valéry. Again Nathan consulted his memory of the charts and located it on the south bank of the Somme very clo
se to the mouth. A smaller port than Dieppe or Le Havre, used mainly by fishing boats.

  “He will set his course for there, I think,” said Tully, “as soon as he believes we have abandoned the chase.”

  He spoke without any sense of conceit or consequence but in such a manner that Nathan was inclined to believe he knew exactly what he was about. The question was whether he wished to aid or hinder the chase.

  Nathan joined the first lieutenant who had been following their conversation from the weather rail, his face marked with suspicion or disapproval or both.

  “Mr. Jordan, I believe we will set a course for the Somme,” Nathan informed him with a cheerfulness that masked his own doubts, “and see what Fortune it may bring us.”

  Chapter 2

  the Somme

  The French coast lay off the starboard bow under the same black cloud as before but Fortune was playing hide and seek. Twice the Nereus had sighted her—or something suspiciously like her—but each time she had vanished into the witches’ brew of mist and rain to the west. Now they were halfway through the forenoon, hove-to off the French coast almost in the mouth of the Somme. A filthy morning battered with rainsqualls, sea and sky poured into the same grim pot and stirred about till there was no telling them apart.

  The wind had dropped considerably through the night but it still blew from the southwest with sufficient force to hold the Nereus against the flood with her yards braced by. And as long as the wind stayed there Nathan was confident he could come down on his quarry if she tried to slip past him into the Somme.

  If the Somme was where she was headed.

  The longer the day advanced the more he began to doubt. And it was a doubt shared by the majority of his officers if he did not mistake the looks passed between them. They did not trust him. He was new to command and still on trial so far as they were concerned. Their natural loyalty was to Jordan, the first lieutenant who had been passed over for promotion. And they had even less trust in a former smuggler who might be sending them on a wild goose chase to save an old acquaintance from the gallows.