The Flag of Freedom (18 page)

‘From Toulon?'

The Governor sighed. ‘All we know is that some major enterprise is being prepared. Troops and artillery are making their way in large numbers down to the Mediterranean coast. A great quantity of supplies and munitions are also being assembled. But there are a number of possible destinations besides Britain herself. Sicily has been mentioned, or Portugal. However, you can see why their lordships might wish to send an observer – a
trusted
observer – to the region. A man who could be relied upon to take accurate soundings, as it were.'

‘And yet they did not find my last soundings particularly accurate.'

Nathan thought about it. All his instincts urged him to refuse. He would be sailing into uncharted waters, almost literally, for he could not call to mind any reliable charts of the coast of Tripoli. And he had much less reason to trust Imlay than he did the charts.

On the other hand, if he did turn it down, and insisted on returning to England, would he ever be given another ship?

‘There is one thing that confuses me,' he began.
One thing?
‘If I am to assume this command, what flag will I be sailing under?'

‘The American flag,' Imlay replied instantly. He looked to O'Hara for confirmation.

‘Well, you cannot very well sail under a British flag,' the Governor conceded, ‘not while the fleet is still locked out of the Med. You would inevitably be taken by the French – or the Spanish.'

Nathan might have disputed this, but he had sailed under a false flag before, and there was a more serious issue to be resolved.

‘So, am I under the command of their lordships of the Admiralty – or Mr Imlay?'

‘Neither,' said O'Hara.

‘Both,' said Imlay.

‘Neither and both?'

‘The matter is very simple.' O'Hara reached for the decanter again, though the colour of his complexion and a tendency to slur his words suggested he had already imbibed considerably more than was good for him. ‘You are to take command of a private ship-of-war sailing under the American flag. With Mr Imlay here as the repre … as
the repre …' He gave up. ‘As the agent of the ship's owners. You are to convey him to Tripoli where he is to go about his business. But as a loyal subject of King George you are to report whatever you see and hear to their lordships of the Admiralty upon your return. Come, sir, this is your opportunity to prove yourself in the right all along – and their lordships very much in the wrong.'

Despite the drink he had a clear grasp of Nathan's priorities. But Nathan was a long way from admitting it, or of accepting the assignment.

‘And what is this “ship” that you have hired?' he enquired of Imlay.

‘She is called the
Jean-Bart
,' replied Imlay, looking particularly pleased with himself. ‘She is the ship you brought back from your previous mission – to Venice.'

Nathan gazed at him in frank disbelief. ‘You have hired her from the Admiralty?' He looked to O'Hara to see what he made of this, but the Governor only inclined his head as if to indicate that their lordships, like the Lord Himself, worked in mysterious ways. It was not uncommon to hire out a King's ship, or even sell it, when the nation was at peace, but Nathan had never heard of such a thing at a time of war, when the Navy needed every piece of flotsam capable of carrying a gun or two.

‘Well, perhaps “hired” is not the right word,' Imlay prevaricated. ‘For they pointed out that they might never get her back.'

Nathan overlooked this possibility for the moment. ‘So you have bought her outright?'

It was as hard to get a straight answer from Imlay as milk from a Billy-goat.

‘I suppose I have, although …'

‘How much for?'

‘They wanted twenty thousand but I knocked them down to sixteen,' reported Imlay with modest satisfaction. ‘And they said they'd buy her back from me if I returned her in one piece.'

Nathan sniffed. Pirates ain't in it, he thought. But he kept his counsel.

‘So where is she now?'

‘She is anchored just off the harbour mole,' replied Imlay. ‘Why do you not come out with me at first light and run your eye over her? No commitment, mind. But I think I may promise you a pleasant surprise.'

S
he stood off the South Mole in the light of the rising sun. Sails furled, gunports closed, not a sign of life on her decks or on the yards above; the morning mist rising from the placid waters of the bay so that she appeared to be floating on cloud. A ghost ship. The
Jean-Bart
.

The first time Nathan had seen her was in the Tyrrhenian Sea, on his way down to Naples. In a storm. He had been wedged into the crosstrees of the
Unicorn
's foremast, a good 100 feet above the deck, and the
Jean-Bart
a distant scrap of sail in the driving rain.

‘A large corvette, sir, almost as big as a frigate,' Mr Lamb had assured him, with the advantage of his young eyes. ‘She is in and out of the waves, sir, and I cannot see if she is flying any colours.'

Nathan was damned if he could see her at all most of
the time. A fresh north-easterly, known in those parts as the Tramontana, was blowing up the Devil of a brew and ‘in and out of the waves' was an accurate description. But he was less sure of the midshipman's confident assertion that she was a corvette, a type of vessel unknown in the British Navy, though common enough in the French service.

They had given chase but it was already late afternoon and they lost her as soon as the sky came down. Lamb had been right, though. The next time Nathan had seen her was from the back of a pony, while she rode at anchor in the Bay of Alipa off the west coast of Corfu. She was a French corvette of twenty-four guns. Twenty 9-pounders on her main gundeck and half a dozen 6-pounders on her forecastle and quarterdeck. In the British Navy she would have been called a large sloop or a small frigate. He discovered later that she had been built for the Neapolitan Navy at the start of the war when King Ferdinand had joined the coalition against Revolutionary France. But on her very first cruise she had been taken by a French squadron on one of their rare sorties out of Toulon.

Nathan had taken her back in Alipa Bay, cutting her out with the ship's boats from the
Unicorn
– a desperate hand-to-hand encounter in the moonlight in which almost thirty men had lost their lives on both sides, and as many wounded. He had put his friend Tully in command with a prize crew and left her off Ancona with the
Unicorn
when he set off on his fateful trip to Venice. The Navy had bought her into the service – for the bargain price of £14,000, a quarter of which had gone to Nathan and was now helping sustain his mother's extravagant lifestyle in Soho.

And now here she was in Gibraltar in the service of Gilbert Imlay – or whoever was paying his bills these days, for the one thing Nathan was sure of was that Imlay was not using his own money.

‘So may we go aboard?'

‘By all means.'

Imlay had the Port Admiral's barge at his disposal and they rowed the short distance to the sloop which, despite appearances, was clearly keeping a sharp lookout, for they were hailed within half a cable's length of her.

The coxswain looked enquiringly at Nathan.

‘
Unicorn
,' Nathan replied promptly, for it was customary to call out the name of a Captain's ship when he was being brought aboard, and as far as Nathan was concerned, he was still the Captain of the
Unicorn
, even if the French had her.

He noted with approval that they had the boarding nets rigged and hammocks piled in the tops to make a barricade for their sharpshooters – which was why he had not seen the lookout from the shore. So whoever had the charge of her was taking no chance of her being cut out by the Spaniards, even from under the guns of Gibraltar.

He was greeted by the drawn-out wail of the boatswain's call as he came aboard, and though there were no side boys in white gloves or a marine guard with sloped muskets and stamping feet, there was an officer, of sorts. Possibly the strangest-looking officer Nathan had ever seen.

He had the face of a bloodhound, or an out-of-condition mastiff, possessing several chins and more teeth than his mouth had room for; the narrow eyes almost buried in fat, his girth enormous, though to be fair, it was not easy to
see where the officer ended and the uniform began. Nor was it a uniform that Nathan had previously encountered on the deck of a British man-of-war, or of any other navy in the civilised world. There was blue in it, and white, as one might expect, and a quantity of tarnished gold, but unlike any other naval officer of Nathan's acquaintance, the man wore a kind of fur cape, or cloak, thrown loosely over his shoulders and trailing almost to his feet. There was a great red sash around his waist in lieu of a belt – possibly the belt had not been made that could circumnavigate such a girth – and under his tricorne hat, which he wore athwart rather than fore-and-aft in the modern manner, there appeared to be a pair of ear flaps, also of fur, rather like ladies wore while skating upon the ice.

Nathan gazed at this apparition, deprived, for the moment, of the power of speech. The officer, too, appeared speechless, though he showed his terrible teeth in what might have been a grin or a snarl and touched his hand to his ridiculous hat. Imlay, however, addressed him fam iliarly enough, though not in a language Nathan understood or recognised. While they conversed, Nathan looked around the deck. About a dozen new members gazed back with a frank curiosity that bordered on insolence. Although they appeared to have no immediate task to hand, they were heavily armed with knives, cutlasses and pikes, as if they had been assembled to repel boarders, or in some strange notion of being a guard of honour.

Then Nathan saw the guns. Was this Imlay's surprise? For instead of the long guns that had been the corvette's main arma ment when the
Unicorn
had taken her as a prize, she had been fitted out with a couple of dozen
carronades – 24-pounders, by the look of them – shining with newness, as if they had just been taken out of their wrappings, straight from the Carron Ironworks.

Nathan regarded them with mixed feelings. Carronades. Short, fat and ugly, they were designed for close engagement; ‘smashers' was their more colloquial name in the Navy. They could pound a ship to death with their heavy roundshot and clear a deck with grape soon as look at you – but Nathan favoured them as a supplementary weapon, not as the main armament. The only long guns the
Jean-Bart
had been left were a half-dozen 6-pounders divided between the forecastle and the quarterdeck.

But the guns were not the real surprise. The real surprise was presently emerging from the companionway on the quarter deck, clearly roused from sleep and still fastening the buttons of his uniform coat.

‘Good God!' exclaimed Nathan. ‘Martin Tully!'

Tully looked as surprised as he was. He was rendered dead in the water for a moment and then came hurrying forward, his expression torn between delight and concern.

‘I am so sorry – I had no idea. If I had known …' He shot a glance at Imlay, who was grinning slyly.

‘Thought you would be surprised,' he said. ‘Just like old times, is it not?'

Nathan sincerely hoped not. They had taken Imlay out with them to the Caribbean in the role of political adviser, in which capacity he had betrayed them to the French, joined in the war against them, and then persuaded their lordships of the Admiralty that it was all in the King's interest. Tully knew him almost as well as Nathan did – if that was any kind of advantage to them both.

‘I am very glad to see you, Martin.' Nathan eschewed all formality and shook him by the hand. ‘But it is indeed a great surprise. I had been told she had been sold out of the service.'

‘So she has, sir, but they needed someone to bring her down to Gibraltar and hand her over to her new command. I had hoped to see you while we were here, but …' His eyes strayed almost of their own accord up towards the old Moorish castle sitting on top of the Rock where Nathan had been lately accommodated.

‘They have let me out,' Nathan assured him, in case Tully thought he had climbed over the wall. ‘And withdrawn all charges against me. No case to answer. All my eye and Betty Martin.'

‘Oh, I am so glad to hear it, sir. So glad. None of us believed a word of it, of course. No one. Not that we knew much about it.' He blushed through his dark tan for they both knew you could not lock up a Post Captain for three months without it being a talking-point throughout the fleet, and doubtless some of the speculations concerning his arrest had touched upon the fantastical.

Nathan regarded him keenly. Tully looked healthy enough but there was perhaps something lacking in his usual vivacity. They had known each other since their time on the
Nereus
together, just before the war, chasing smugglers on the south coast of England. Before that, Tully had been a smuggler himself, in his native Channel Isles. He had been pressed into the Navy as an alternative to prison, but had done well enough out of it, rising from assistant sailing master to lieutenant and making at least as much in prize money as he would from cheating the
Revenue Service. But you could usually see the smuggler in him, if you looked carefully enough, as if his time in the King's Navy was something of a joke, on both him and the King. He did not look at all amused now, though. Despite his obvious delight at seeing Nathan, he seemed abnormally anxious. Harassed even. More so than when they had been in battle together. Perhaps he had slept badly, or been hitting the bottle the night before. He had clearly been thrown by Nathan's unexpected arrival.