Winds of Folly (39 page)

News now came thick and fast. The grenadiers had taken Monte Medolano. Leclerc had captured Solferino. Wurmser was falling back on the Mincio. Bonaparte ordered a general advance.

It was evening, the sun low in the sky but still hot. Smoke everywhere now, and the dead and the wounded, and the heat rising in waves from the scorched earth. They had ridden down to Borghetto, Bonaparte and the whole of his staff. The Austrians, it was said, were now crossing the bridge over the Mincio. Wurmser himself was there in person. Bonaparte was still shouting for his cavalry, where were the cavalry? Now was the time to smash the enemy, before they escaped over the river, but he needed his cavalry. Then someone came in with news that the Austrians were bringing up reinforcements from the south. ‘Where is Kilmaine?' Bonaparte was bawling. Kilmaine appeared to be what every army needed – a scapegoat.

Nathan turned his horse round and rode back through the smoke. He would never have a better chance, he thought. He had a fresh horse and his map. He pulled it out of his pocket. Even riding by easy stages he could reach the coast in two days. But first he would have to cross the river. Clearly it was
impossible to join the Austrian retreat and cross the bridge at Borghetto – but if he rode north to Peschiera by the lake, even if there was no bridge there he might find a boat. If anyone tried to stop him – anyone French, that is – he would say he had been sent to find Kilmaine and his cavalry. It seemed to serve for most.

But it was not the French he had to worry about. It was the Austrians. Suddenly he was among a confusion of gun limbers and shouting men. He asked an officer what was going on. The Austrians had broken out of Borghetto, the officer said. A desperate, last-ditch attempt, probably, to cover the retreat. Nathan was putting his map away when he saw them coming through the smoke: Austrian cavalry, Uhlans, cutting down everyone in their path. He wheeled his horse about and urged it into a gallop, back towards where he thought the French would be, but in the smoke and the confusion, he galloped the wrong way. He realised his mistake when he saw the glint of sunlight on the river and the Austrian bayonets; saw the long white column crossing the bridge and the others on the far side of the river winding back into the distance, a whole army in retreat. There were flames in the smoke and he heard the crash of musketry: they were firing back from across the river – and they seemed to be firing at him. Several rounds whined about his ears or struck dust from the ground.

Bending low over the horse's neck, he kicked his heels in its flanks, thinking to ride through them as he had at Bussolengo on the Adige. But this time his luck was out. He felt a tearing pain in his thigh and then a terrible blow to his chest. The force of it lifted him up out of the saddle but he was still clutching the reins and he was thinking he had to stay on the horse, he had to stay conscious. But then he saw the ground coming up to meet him and he stopped thinking anything.

T
hey told him he was an American called Turner. Nathaniel Turner – a New York Yankee fighting for the French – and that he had been wounded at the Battle of Castiglioni. He was a hero, they said. A hero of France.

‘Turner?' he repeated. ‘Nat-aniel Turner?' This meant nothing to him.

‘That is because you have lost your memory,' they said. ‘You fell off your horse and banged your head, and now you do not even know your name.'

This was not his only problem.

He had fallen off his horse because he had been shot. He had been shot in the chest and in the leg. He was lucky to be alive, they told him. Both shots had been fired at extreme range from the far side of the river and the musket balls had not penetrated very far. The surgeon had been able to dig the ball out of his leg without much trouble while he was still unconscious, but the ball in his chest had penetrated the ribcage, cracking one of his ribs, and had lodged close to his right lung. Too close for the surgeon to remove it. They were hoping it
would work its way to the surface, as often happened in such cases.

‘What if it does not?' he asked them.

They did not say, but he suspected that he would die.

He was quite lucid in his mind and in his speech. He could converse with them in French, but not Italian. His French was excellent, they said. He spoke it like a native. They would have taken him for a Frenchman if they had not been told he was American.

‘But are you sure?' he asked them.

‘Quite sure,' they said, smiling. An American sea captain, an adventurer, fighting for the French.

They were nuns. Or to be more accurate, they told him, sisters. Nursing sisters. The Hospitaller Sisters of St John of Jerusalem. Their hospital was on the shores of Lake Garda on the edge of the Veneto, the mainland territory of the Most Serene Republic of St Mark. For some reason this troubled him, but he was not to worry, they said, because he was under the protection of the French. More than that, he was a friend of General Bonaparte.

‘He has asked us to take especially good care of you,' they said. ‘He has said that if you die it will be on our heads so, you see, you must not die.'

‘Who is General Bonaparte?' he said.

His memory puzzled him. He knew who the French were but he had no memory of having been to France. He vaguely knew who the Americans were, and even the Austrians, but again, he had no memory of being to either of these countries or of having ever met an American or an Austrian. He had no memory of the battle they said he had been in, but he asked after his horse.

‘Your horse was shot at the same time as you were,' they told him. ‘It died.'

There was another hero of France in the hospital, they said. His name was Colonel Junot and he had been wounded in the head. He had not lost his memory and his wits were intact, as far as they could tell, but there were still some splinters in his skull and he suffered from headaches. He spoke very warmly of le Capitaine Turner. The Captain had saved his life, he said. He was in the next room. Soon, when he was feeling a little better, the Colonel would come and visit him.

There was one young nun who was from Ireland and she spoke to him in English which he found he understood as well as he did French. Her name was Sister Francesca and she had the face of an angel. She had been born in Dublin where her father was a doctor, but when she was eleven the whole family had gone to live in Rome. One day she brought a book for him.

‘It's about a sea captain,' she said, ‘the same as you.'

His only complaint about Sister Francesca and her sisters was that they spoke to him as if he were a child.

The book was
Gulliver' Travels
by Jonathan Swift and she read it to him aloud in the hope that it would help to bring his memory back. So far it had not, but he liked her reading to him.

He had been here almost a month and his memory was no better than when he had first arrived. What's more, the wound in his chest was growing worse. They put hot poultices on it to draw out the poison but he grew weak and feverish. He drifted in and out of consciousness. He could not eat. He was wasting away.

‘They are bringing a famous physician from Milan,' Sister Francesca told him. ‘General Bonaparte has ordered it.'

The famous physician was called Dr Calvaresi. He was a small man of middling years and lugubrious expression. He looked more like an undertaker than a doctor to his patient
but there was often little distinction, and besides, Nathan was past caring: an undertaker seemed fairly appropriate to him. He began to care more when the doctor removed the dressing and started to poke around in his wound. He expressed himself fairly forcibly on the subject but the doctor, not a whit discomfited, declared that the ball had carried particles of clothing into the wound which had caused an infection; it would have to be extracted. There was no time to be lost, he said. The operation must be performed immediately.

The patient was stripped to the waist and laid on a wooden table with a cushion beneath his head. They also provided him with a leather gag to bite upon. The same surgeon who had removed the ball from Nathan's leg was in attendance, but his main function seemed to be to assist in holding him down. It was Dr Calvaresi himself who performed the operation. He explained the procedure. He would use a long metal probe, like a hollow tube, which would grip the musket ball and prevent it from penetrating to the lung. Then he would insert a device very like a corkscrew down the centre of the probe, which could be gently screwed into the soft lead of the ball and permit it to be drawn out through the tube. Then he would use a pair of tweezers to remove the cloth and any other foreign tissue. Once the wound had been thoroughly cleaned it would be irrigated with a mixture of turpentine and lime water and then packed with honey. This, though it seemed unduly eccentric, was not Nathan's prime concern. His prime concern was the probe.

In this he was entirely justified. The agony was beyond anything he had anticipated, and he had anticipated the worst. Despite the attentions of the surgeon and two stalwart nuns, his movement was such that they were obliged to strap him down. He exhausted his repertoire of abuse. Shortly after they resumed the operation, he passed out.

When he came to, he found himself back in his bed between clean white sheets with a bandage round his chest. There was a great deal of pain but it was not unbearable. Sister Francesca was there. She looked pale and frightened. The operation had been successful, she said. The doctor had removed the bullet and a piece of cloth from Nathan's shirt. The wound had been drained of pus and packed with honey. Now they could only wait and see.

The next day the fever came upon him. For almost a week he hovered between life and death. Sometimes it seemed as if he was already dead. He revisited places he felt he had been before in a previous life, though he had no real memory of them, only a vague feeling of familiarity. The sea figured largely in these places but also a city in which there were many churches but also a great deal of pain and squalor and suffering. He was conscious sometimes of the presence of Sister Francesca and other of the nurses. They bathed his face and even his whole body with cool, damp cloths. They changed his dressing. They gave him water to drink.

And then one night he woke up and knew who he was.

It was the middle of the night. Four bells in the middle watch. There was a narrow gap between the curtains, and the starlight penetrated the dark sanctuary of his room. He wanted to draw the curtains further back so he could look out at the stars, but he did not have the strength to rise from his bed. Otherwise he felt quite well, better than he had for a long time. Very much at peace but thirsty. He thought about who he was and was not entirely surprised. He had never been convinced about the man called Turner who was an American. But he knew why it had been necessary. He lay there for a long time taking pleasure in the return of his memory. Running through the names in his head. His mother, his father, the
Unicorn
. Tully and the Angel Gabriel. Sara. It was very satisfying for
him to remember these people whom he had loved and who were his friends. It felt like they were returning to him. He wondered vaguely if this was because he was about to die.

But he did not die. And when he woke up in the morning he announced to the nuns that he thought he could manage a slice of game pie with a little preserve on the side.

To his disgust they gave him bread and milk instead but greeted his completion of the feast with the applause due to a man who had consumed an entire bullock, horns and all.

He did not tell them who he was. He felt bad about this but he considered that it would only be an embarrassment to them. However, it was never as easy as that. He was obliged of necessity to elaborate upon his disguise: to invent an entire background for himself – as he had for the American Consul in Venice – and he felt even worse than he had on that occasion. He felt particularly bad about lying to Sister Francesca. He longed to tell her who he really was, but he knew that she would be obliged then either to confess it to her superiors or to commit a sin in hiding it from them.

Unfortunately, Sister Francesca possessed an insatiable appetite for stories, particularly stories about Mr Turner, and in search of the material for this fiction, Nathan found himself delving ever more wildly into the territory of a man who was possibly the most untrustworthy individual he had ever met.

And so in this new spectral form, Gilbert Imlay walked back into his life.

Nathan had first met Imlay in Paris at the time of the Terror. Imlay was an American who occupied a role which he described as ‘something between a diplomat and a shipping agent'. In reality, as Nathan subsequently discovered, he was a spy. He had at one time or another been a spy for the Americans, the British, the French and the Spanish, often when one or another of these governments harboured the illusion that he was
working exclusively for them. And his private life was no less complicated. Whilst in Paris, Imlay had encountered the English writer and feminist, Miss Mary Wollstonecraft, and subsequently married her – in a ceremony of doubtful legality – to save her, he said, from being imprisoned as an enemy alien. This act of selfless chivalry had not prevented him from getting her with child – and then breaking her heart by embarking upon an affair with an actress from a strolling theatre company.