Tide of War (6 page)

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 comment. 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.

Unlike his father, as she frequently observed.

“And how is he?” she enquired now.

“He is very well. Indeed, I would say, hearty.”

“Hearty. Yes. It must be all that country air, and the company he keeps.”

Nathan glanced at her sharply. He wondered if she knew anything of his father's plans regarding Frances Wyndham. It would not have
surprised him. His mother maintained that gossip was merely a means of intelligence gathering and she was as good at it as any spy-master. He felt guilty that he could not share his information with her on this point, or his concerns. But it would only worry her and it would not have been fair to his father. And besides, he still hoped the latter might change his mind or find the unpleasantness involved too difficult to contemplate.

She reached a hand to his cheek.

“Poor Nat, I do not want you to have to choose between us. Look at you, a post captain at your age. Well, there must be something of your father in you for all that you do not at all resemble him. Do you still paint? I had hoped once that you would be an artist.”

Nathan rolled his eyes. “I had almost forgot. There is a gentleman waiting to see you. I met him crossing the park. He has some engravings to show you. I left him in the library.”

“Oh that will be Mr. Blake.” She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. “I told him to come at two. Mr. Flaxman recommended him to me. I will tell Phipps to send him away.”

“No, you will not,” Nathan instructed her firmly. “Not on my account. Let him show you his work. I will still be here when you get back.”

“And for some time after, I hope.” She raised her brow in what was both query and reproof. He did not respond. “Ring the bell and ask Phipps to bring you up some refreshment. You look as if you need it.”

Nathan did as instructed and was delivered in very little time with the best part of a chicken and a jug of cool ale. He took them over to the window seat where he could dine at ease while gazing out over the park. After a short time he observed his former companion trudging back the way he had come with his bag over his shoulder. Something in his gait advised Nathan that his visit had not been a success. His heart went out to him. And in that moment the man turned and appeared to look straight at him with a severe expression. Nathan raised a hand in greeting—unfortunately with a leg of the fowl still in it, which might be taken amiss. But either the man
did not see him or declined to return the salute. He turned again and continued on his way.

A moment later Nathan's mother returned.

“Well that was a waste of time,” she said. “But I knew it would be. I am too easily prevailed upon.”

“Nothing to your liking?”

“It may surprise certain of my acquaintance but I do not care to gaze upon pictures of naked, muscle-bound men. I do not know what John Flaxman can have been thinking of. God knows what people have been saying to him about me.”

This was not a subject Nathan could comment upon with any degree of complacency. “I should have come down with you,” he said. “I might have been more interested.”

“Really?” His mother arched her slender brows. “I had no idea you were so inclined. Indeed, there were some illustrations of the wanderings of Odysseus which, now I come to think on it, might have been somewhat to your taste, though the private parts were I recall veiled, when they were not being pecked at by harpies. Which reminds me, he begged me to give you a message. I was not sure that I would but as you are clearly taken with the man, he said to tell you that you will find what you have lost—but that you are to beware the Sirens, especially the one that plays the lyre.” Her tone was sardonic but she watched him carefully for a reaction.

“He said what?”

“Do you really wish me to repeat it?”

“‘I will find what I have lost.' What can he have meant by that?”

Nathan spoke lightly but he felt a prickling among the hairs of his neck.

“I really have no idea. Odious man. How I hate these self-proclaimed mystics and prophets who seek power over others by claiming to have the power to see what others cannot. Like those wicked children of Salem who did for your great-great-grandmother.”

Lady Kitty's mode of debate was famously erratic but for once Nathan knew precisely what she was talking about.

Nathan's great-great-grandmother, Sarah Good, had been hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, shortly before it went out of fashion, she and several of her neighbours having been accused of conjuring the Devil. They had shortly after been pardoned, their judges and accusers exposed to ridicule and retribution, but Sarah Good had not risen from the grave and Lady Catherine was disposed to harbour a grudge on her behalf.

“Have
you lost anything of late?” she quizzed Nathan, sharply raising her brow.

“No. Nothing of any importance,” he lied.

“Well, then,” she declared in triumph. “There you are. You must not allow yourself to be beguiled by charlatans, my pet. You are just like your father who was always touching wood for fear of some heedless word that would sink a ship at sea. He would have a seizure if one spilt a little salt upon the table and did not at once pick up every grain and hurl it over one's shoulder like a demented flagellant.”