The Barbed Crown (30 page)
So I treaded water, thinking. For the first time I was in the neutral ocean, not attached to either side. No one was trying to enlist me, no one was trying to extinguish me. I was without any cause but my own, exempt from imperial passion, floating between both fleets. And somewhere my family waited, possibly in prison.
The French vessel was an even greater wreck than the British, the main and mizzen entirely gone and foremast shorn short. The stubs gaped with yellow shards of wood erupted like prickly flowers. Cannon tilted at crazy angles. Its perforated hull was draped in shot-off sails like the skirts of a forlorn bride.
The sea was a mess of floating spars, smashed boats, and bobbing bodies. Eddies were still tinted pink from the downspouts of blood. Remembering the threat of sharks, I needed to make a decision. I could hear English shouts and cheers across the water as enemy after enemy lowered their colors.
All that regal beauty destroyed in an afternoon. The destruction, of course, made the splendor more poignant.
How we love war! People will elect men who promise it. Napoleon understood this, and had his crown.
No one tried to help me back aboard the
Redoutable
. Casualties were so heavy that she drifted like a ghost ship. Smoke steamed from her shot holes. Cries for help echoed from her ports. Shrouds and halyards hung into the heaving sea like lifelines, but warships no longer tempted me. I speculatively floated along the hull of the captured French warship to its stern and beyond, to the towrope holding the ship’s boats. I could hear the “crews” aboard, chickens clucking and sheep bleating.
I rotated in the water. Captain Lucas had surrendered to some British officers who were pointing to a longboat to take him off. A new ship, the
Swiftsure
, was hove to off
Redoutable
’s stern, and lines were being rowed to take the prize in tow. The freshening wind made cat’s paws on the sea, and what would happen to these battered fleets when the storm fully struck? The clouds were getting blacker.
I was tired of waiting for passage to Venice. It was time to pirate a boat of my own. One of the craft being towed behind
Redoutable
would do just fine.
I
swam along the line of boats and hauled myself into the captain’s gig, the smartest sailor of the lot. I moved aside two hen coops and used a boat’s knife tethered on a cord to cut the towline, slipping away from the rest of the chain of small craft. I tensed for an angry shot from
Redoutable
but didn’t get one; its marines were occupied with greater tragedies than the loss of a captain’s gig. Or the loss of Ethan Gage. Far from being missed, I’d likely be counted as dead, I realized. I could later resurrect myself, at least briefly, as whomever I chose.
I drifted, coming to grips with the beauty and horror of the day. Nelson dead, England triumphant, the Combined Fleet destroyed. Napoleon would never seriously threaten England with invasion again.
The admiral’s victory against the Combined Fleet was even more decisive than at the Nile. I would eventually learn that seventeen French and Spanish ships had been captured. One had blown up. Britain didn’t lose a single ship. England’s greatest naval victory had been accompanied by the death of its greatest naval hero, and was about to be followed by one of history’s most terrible storms.
Swiftsure
had taken its prize under tow, but
Redoutable
was settling. Across the water, I could hear the creak of pumps.
Dripping and shivering from my dunking, I took inventory of my new flagship, a sixteen-footer I christened
Astiza
. The fleets were scattering, the wind building. Of the seventeen captured prizes, fifteen were so wrecked by gunfire that they were being towed. Five damaged British ships had to be towed as well, and dismasted warships like
Victory
were barely under control. The storm was pushing the hulks toward the lee shore of Spain.
Was the emerald I’d pawned in London still exerting its Aztec curse? I’d tried to become rich and failed, tried to prevent war and failed, tried to save Nelson for his mistress Emma and failed, and tried to stay close to my wife and failed.
In each case I’d been dependent on others for any success.
Perhaps it was time to depend on myself.
Redoutable
was slowly sinking by the stern, while tied to the laboring
Swiftsure
two hundred yards ahead. With the wind rising, waves dashed against the beak of the French ship as if against rocks on a shore. Men were chopping away wrecked rigging to try to save her. Two great hawsers led from bits on the foredeck to the English man-of-war. The ropes would slacken when the roll of swells briefly lessened the distance between the ships, and then snap taut when the rhythm went the other way, humming like harpsichord wire. At some point they’d snap.
It was time to cut my own puppet strings.
Since escaping the Caribbean and arriving to avenge the wife I thought dead, I’d ricocheted from one side to another, the spy and diplomat of both English and French. I’d been hired and used several times over, betrayed by Catherine Marceau whom I’d saved, sacrificed the safety of my family, and been nearly killed.
I’d also come away with a quest involving a fabled Brazen Head, with Catherine, Talleyrand, and Pasques after it, too, for their master, Napoleon.
How easy to avoid the traps of the present if you knew the future! Had Albertus Magnus crafted that power into an “android”? And had it been destroyed as evil, or hidden for rediscovery?
If my wife and son were still alive, the Brazen Head might lead me to them, or them to the Brazen Head.
I was done working my way for passage, done relying on London financial brokers, and done allowing policemen to separate me from my family.
As self-appointed captain, I took inventory. There were emergency stores of water, wine, and biscuit on the boat, plus a musket, two pistols, a cutlass, and two cloaks thrown in by French officers in hopes they’d be saved from bullet holes. I poked slits in one and lashed it to cover the front of the gig and help keep out spray in the coming storm. Then I erected the boat’s mast and tied on its sail, reefing it to not much more than a handkerchief.
I settled by the tiller, snugged in the second cloak, trimmed my scrap of canvas, and began to move, bubbles swirling in my wake. I sailed around the shattered stern of
Redoutable
, looking into a maw in which just a few survivors crept. A British officer who’d taken charge of the smashed prize finally challenged me from the battered taffrail on the poop. “You there! You can’t take that boat!”
“But I have.” The wind snatched my reply across the water.
“Are you mad? A storm is coming. You won’t get fifty yards!”
“More like five hundred. You can watch me flip and say, ‘I told you so.’”
He shook his head. We were all half-mad with sorrow and weariness.
As I steered onto a broad reach running south-southeast and the rudder bit, the little gig took off like a Congreve rocket. My hope was to run before the blow and make harbor near Gibraltar, bargaining for a bigger ship to Venice. When we’d left Cadiz, I’d felt imprisoned. Now, alone on a wild ocean, I was free.
I leaned against one side of the hull to keep the gig in balance, feeling the tiller dance like a live thing as the boat climbed one side of the swells and then sledded down the other. The wind was brisk but fair. If I could keep from broaching and turning over it would be a sleigh ride to Gibraltar.
There was a crack. I looked back. The lines holding
Redoutable
to
Swiftsure
had snapped, and the French vessel’s stern was submerging in the waves, its shot-pocked bow rising. I could hear the last faint screams of terror from those still on board. A final British longboat was taking off its own prize crew and however many French could fit. The rest were doomed.
I made a broader survey. As far as the eye could see, the dismasted hulls of warships tossed on a gray horizon, some nearing the dangerous shore.
I learned from newspaper accounts months later that nine captured ships were wrecked in the storm, drowning 2,700 men. Five ships were burned and scuttled because they couldn’t be saved. Four more French ships would be captured by the British in the coming weeks, completing the Combined Fleet’s annihilation. Total French and Spanish dead and wounded were eight thousand, justifying the premonitory wails of the women of Cadiz.
Villeneuve’s attempt at personal honor had been purchased at high cost indeed. He’d retained command and led it to disaster. To survive this life, you have to understand that all men and women are fundamentally mad.
Eventually, the captured admiral would be exchanged for other prisoners and would then commit suicide in France, stabbing himself several times in a locked room rather than face Napoleon.
Lucas was also captured, but he survived imprisonment as a naval hero.
Those great events were a universe away. My world was a small stolen boat, the surrounding swells of an angry ocean, and a wind that blew me toward Astiza.
I felt danger, but also strange calm. I had a fundamental conviction that I was at last steering where I was supposed to steer and that Astiza and Harry were alive and waiting, whatever Catherine claimed. The storm was wicked, but hadn’t I already threaded the rocky fangs of a reef with Johnstone? I was sailing to reunite with my loved ones and perhaps find the best treasure of all: a machine that could foretell the future.
As the last light faded on that storm day, a swell lifted me high on the undulating dunes of the sea. Faraway lanterns shone on imperiled ships, signaling futilely for rescue. Cape Trafalgar looked like a smudge of smoke on my port side. Somewhere directly ahead was the great mass of Africa. Spray blew off wave tops like whipping streamers of gray.
I settled back with bread and wine, toasting escape and determination.
Somehow I knew my family was waiting.
The puppet had cut his strings.
H
istory is life: complex, confusing, and inconclusive. Problems drag, personalities linger, careers meander, and love sometimes goes unconsummated.
The British naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar is so celebrated because it is so different. England’s greatest sea victory was accompanied by the death of its greatest naval hero. Triumph and tragedy in a single afternoon! The twin events hit Britain like a thunderbolt and have inspired poets and painters ever since. While reminiscences of the battle differ in detail, its course has been tracked almost minute by minute, blow by blow, and ship by ship. The combat of
Redoutable
and
Victory
described here is based on the historical record, with the exception that the French ship’s mizzen did not fall on the English flagship, delivering an American with it. Nelson’s dying words in this novel are an abbreviation of what he actually said. Such perfect drama seldom occurs.
Ethan Gage is not alone in his awe of the drama that was Trafalgar. Survivors testified to the grand majesty of the approaching fleets and the horrific slaughter that followed. Perfect grace produced hideous destruction.
It’s ironic, then, that historians can (and occasionally do) argue that the battle need not have been fought at all. Napoleon had abandoned his plan to invade England, and the French and Spanish fleets were deteriorating because Nelson’s quest for sea superiority had already been achieved by tedious blockade. After weeks of hesitation, Admiral Villeneuve led his unready ships to sea only because he’d been warned of his own replacement. Risking catastrophe became a matter of honor. Napoleon had goaded his commander to self-destruction.
Nelson’s victory at the earlier Battle of Copenhagen may also have been unnecessary since the murder of the Russian czar ended the coalition in which the Danish fleet might have been used against England.
But battles are harder to stop than start, and Trafalgar ensured that Bonaparte would never directly threaten Britain again. England’s domination of the sea would not be challenged until World War I.
Whether a physically deteriorating Horatio Nelson had a death wish—when he wore embroidered replicas of his medals while strutting exposed on his quarterdeck—is a psychological mystery that can never be resolved. He was killed from the mizzenmast platform of
Redoutable
as described in this novel, but a specific claim by French sergeant Robert Guillemard to have fired the fatal shot, made a quarter century after the fact, is considered a likely fabrication by most historians. There was so much battle smoke that it is possible, and even likely, that the fatal shot was blind.
Certainly Nelson’s quest for glory was a more rational calculation than it would be in today’s grimmer and robotic age. He was a rector’s son who rose to lordship and wealth through his prowess in battle. Sacrificing his arm and eye won him adulation, gifts, and Emma Hamilton. Admirals didn’t accumulate fame for avoiding battle, they got it by seeking victory, and Nelson stands upon his column in London’s Trafalgar Square precisely because he sought a battle of annihilation. He and Napoleon were not just heroes to their respective nations, but celebrities. Both commented that they recognized the extraordinary drama of their own lives. They were actors in a play they both suspected would have a tragic ending.
The history behind this novel is true. There were royalist conspiracies to overthrow Napoleon, an increasingly efficient French secret police to counter them, an increasingly ambitious British spy service, and imaginative schemes on all sides to win. French ideas for crossing the Channel included balloons, tunnels, and yes, dolphins. Robert Fulton and William Congreve did invent torpedoes and rockets and these new weapons were tried several times, anticipating modern war.
Napoleon’s coronation went as described, except for the role played by the Crown of Thorns in this novel. That crown is real, stored in the Treasury of Notre Dame and still displayed monthly, but exactly why and how Bonaparte ignored rehearsed protocol and crowned his wife’s head and his own has never been adequately explained. Is it possible a renegade American played a mysterious role? For readers who doubt, go to the Louvre and study David’s painting of Napoleon’s crowning of Josephine at the coronation. If you look in the painted crowd to the left you will see the surprised face of an onlooker. He looks very much like Ethan Gage.
As in the other novels of this series, most of the characters in this book were real people, including the military officers and police officials (I have taken liberties with Pasques), smuggler Tom Johnstone, royalist conspirators such as Georges Cadoudal, and coronation participants such as Talleyrand and Cardinal Belloy. Catherine Marceau is fiction, but the agent Rose is inspired by a real-life Channel spy of that name. I’ve described events at Boulogne as they happened. Napoleon did foolishly order a naval exercise in the face of a gale and did try to save some of the men who drowned, his boat swamping in the process. He did lose his hat, which later washed ashore.
Legends of a Brazen Head or “android” are true. The Paris catacombs are real and can be visited today, if you want to keep company with six million dead. The details of Parisian life in that period are as accurate as I can make them, including anecdotes about personalities such as Talleyrand or Juliette Récamier.
Similarly, one can tour Walmer Castle, although its true Napoleonic-era role as spy headquarters goes unmentioned in the audio commentary. Nelson’s home at Merton no longer exists, but the description of its being crammed with his memorabilia is based on history. Nelson did order a coffin made from the mast of the French flagship
L’Orient
(after a battle Ethan describes in
Napoleon’s Pyramids
), did store the casket in his cabin at times, did supply it with funeral sheet music, and did relate that a Caribbean fortune-teller had told him in his youth that she saw no future for him beyond 1805. The children’s poem warning of a cannibalistic Napoleon was really recited as England braced for invasion.
It was common practice after sea battles to unceremoniously dump the dead overboard because there was no way to embalm them. Nelson anxiously asked that his body be preserved so Dr. Beatty put him in a barrel of brandy. The admiral was eventually buried with great ceremony in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Horatio and Emma never married, but did exchange rings before his departure for Trafalgar. Their secret ceremony was never recognized. His wife, Fanny, and Nelson’s relatives received pensions from the British government eventually totaling £200,000, but Emma was ignored, and she squandered what Nelson had left her. She died a lonely alcoholic at the port of Calais in France in January of 1815, between Napoleon’s first abdication and his final defeat at Waterloo. Horatia, increasingly estranged from her mother, married a vicar, gave birth to ten children, and lived to age eighty.
Because this novel follows carefully recorded historical events, I’m in debt to contemporary accounts and modern historians. At the necessity of leaving many out, I must acknowledge my regular reference to such scholars as Mark Adkin, Roy Adkins, John Elting, Christopher Hibbert, Christopher Lee, Tom Pocock, Jean Robiquet, and Napoleonic biographers such as Robert Asprey, Proctor Patterson Jones, Frank McLynn, and Alan Schom, all of whom help bring Bonaparte to life. Two valuable works from the early twentieth century are the 1906
The Enemy at Trafalgar
by Edward Fraser, which assembles narratives from the French and Spanish participants, and John Masefield’s
Sea Life in Nelson’s Time
, published in 1905. A number of even earlier historical works on such subjects as the Boulogne Camp, the royalist conspiracy, the French police, and Napoleon’s coronation have become more readily available as reprints in recent years. We even have
Indiscretions of a Prefect of Police
by Réal himself, though it is more a compilation of period gossip than a confession by the inspector. Recognizing what an extraordinary period they had lived through, many participants wrote memoirs, including Napoleon. All must be taken with a grain of salt. Memories are selective and calculating, and psychologists have found the more we remember something, the more we embroider it. But what tumultuous times their recollections record!