Winds of Folly (9 page)

‘Oh yes, sir,' replied Mr Lamb, his features creasing into a delighted grin.

Nathan summoned the Marine sergeant and informed him that the moment the young ladies emerged, he was to post two sentries at the door of the Captain's cabin, with fixed bayonets. Then he gave the signal to the waiting midshipman.

Mr Lamb vanished over the rail. Nathan paced the quarter-deck. He was aware that a significant number of the ship's company had been alerted to the stratagem and were awaiting the outcome with a covert but lively interest. Mr Lamb reappeared with the two empty cages. Together they awaited the crescendo of screams that would herald the stampede of seven scantily clad females to the upper deck.

There were screams, certainly. Then a series of loud crashes and bangs and a strange squealing noise. But not the expected stampede. Nathan met the midshipman's puzzled eye.

‘Thank you, Mr Lamb, that will be all,' said Nathan.

Time passed. The Marines were stood down. The convoy proceeded at its leisurely pace towards Cap Corse. The corsairs kept at a safe distance to windward. Nathan brooded on the quarterdeck.

At the end of the second dog-watch, he was approached by the Angel Gabriel.

‘Signora Correglia's compliments,' he stated formally, ‘and she requests the pleasure of the Captain's company at his earliest convenience.'

Stemming an angry retort, Nathan descended to his cabin. He was resolved to take a firm approach. The ship's discipline might well depend upon it.

He found the Signora presiding over her court. He bowed warily. She had been brought up in the slums of Genoa, he had once been told, and for all the elegance she had since acquired, she retained the robust and expressive nature of her class.

‘Ah,
Capitano
,' she greeted him, ‘we prepare the little dish for you – to thank for you that you give to us your little room.'

She stepped aside and Nathan saw the object simmering in the small silver chafing dish in which Gabriel normally prepared his nightly supper of toasted cheese.

‘I think you like,' the harlot crooned as her companions collapsed in hysterical laughter. ‘Spatch-a-Cock the Rat – with the bread sows. You take it away now, please, and if you like we make you another.'

N
athan spent the night on deck, wrapped in his boat cloak. He was comforted by the thought that he would have been obliged to do so anyway, given the constant threat of attack. There were now up to a dozen privateers stalking the convoy, hoping for the opportunity to slip between the escorts in the darkness –
Inconstant
and
Meleager
to windward,
Unicorn
bringing up the rear, with the lumbering transports spread out across a mile or so of ocean. But it was never that dark at this time of the year, especially on such a clear, cloudless night. The sky was full of stars, the moon shining a rippling path to the west, and scarcely a breath of wind to fill the sails. They cast the log at regular intervals but their speed never attained more than two knots and one fathom. A sluggish but steady progress towards Cap Corse.

Nathan sat in a canvas chair at the stern, hunched into the collar of his cloak, for even midsummer nights in the Mediterranean could be cool with the wind in the north. He was aware of a certain obstinacy in his manner, a dogged determination to suffer for his own perceived inadequacies. The first lieutenant
had graciously offered to give up his own cabin. The doctor, McLeish, less graciously offered him a cot in the sickbay. Nathan had declined them both. He did not see why others should be inconvenienced, he said, by his own exaggerated sense of honour – though honour was not what he privately called it. And because the Captain stayed on deck all night, so did most of his officers. Including the first lieutenant. Nathan appreciated the contrariness of this but decided there was nothing he could do about it. It was the way of the service.

As the night wore on, his self-contempt ebbed a little and he began to feel a strange kind of content. Or perhaps there was nothing strange in it, for it was as beautiful a night as he could remember, and if you could forget the continuing vexations of courtesans, corsairs and the French, all seemed right with the world. The sails flapping lazily against the masts, the ropes creaking a little in the blocks. The ship riding easy on the gentle swell.

And of course the stars. Nathan was tempted to climb into the tops and take his glass to them, but he felt too lethargic to make the effort – and despite the ingenuity of his cat's cradle it was always a trial to hold the glass steady on a particular object in the night sky. Far more pleasant to just sit back and take in the whole panoply with the naked eye, especially as the master of
Inconstant
had the duty of navigating the convoy safely to San Fiorenzo. He had rarely seen such stars, so bright and so apparently close to hand, as if the topmasts were moving delicately through them, the
Unicorn
a starship gliding through the Milky Way.

He wondered what Sara was doing now and whether she was gazing at the same celestial panoply. Perhaps she had reached England by now and had been reunited with her son Alex in Sussex.

England. It was such a strange concept for him now, after
so long an absence. But when he thought about it, it was always the same little patch of it, the England of his childhood – and Alexander's childhood now – an area of the south coast from the market town of Lewes to the village of Wilmington on his father's estate, bounded on one side by the rolling hillocks of the South Downs and on the other by the sea. It was strange to think of Sara there, in the place he had grown up. Walking along the same woodland paths, climbing the Long Man, gazing out over the rolling Downland to the sea. He wished he was there with her, to be her guide. To show her the places he had roamed as a child, the ancient woodlands that were a riot of primrose and bluebells in spring, foxgloves and sweet violet in summer, a shadowland of foxes and badgers and half-wild pigs and the mythic creatures of Faerie that had been as real to Nathan's immature mind and the country folk that helped groom it as anything in
The Book of British Mammals
. And the chalk Downs that hosted a myriad of wild flowers and insects and butterflies as well as the hundreds of thousands of sheep that gave it a more material worth to Nathan's father and his fellow landowners. The gentle, shaded rivers where he had fished, filled with their basking trout and bream, perch and dace; ponds full of frogs and newts and other creatures of that slimy netherworld between earth and water; and of course, the sea. The headlands and havens, the rock pools and shingle beaches, the smugglers' haunt of Cuckmere and the chalk-white cliffs of the Seven Sisters. This was the paradise land of Nathan's childhood and early youth before he went to sea, where he still spent the best part of his leave, when he had it, where he still went in his mind, whenever he had the inclination or the leisure.

But it was a land under threat. Not from the French – the old enemy over the water, who would be dealt with one way or another – but from a young woman called Frances Wyndham,
whom his father wished to marry. Which would mean divorcing his wife, Nathan's mother.

This was the only cloud that disturbed Nathan's content. Not Bonaparte in the mountains, not the Directory in Paris, not the ghost of Robespierre or the irritation of sharing a portion of his prize money with the flag officer's secretary. Sometimes it was no more than a distant blot on the horizon, at other times it loomed large as a thundercloud. But whatever its proportion or distance, it was always there. He had warned Sara about it, before he had sent her off to join them, but she had scarcely turned a hair. He supposed it was nothing after all she had endured in France at the time of the Terror.

Nathan's father and mother had lived apart for many years, for the whole of his life almost, though only in the formal sense since his adolescence. Nathan's father, Sir Michael Peake, was a retired naval officer and landowner who now devoted his life to hunting, fishing and the improvement and maintenance of the breed of Southdown sheep. Nathan's mother, Lady Catherine – Kitty to her friends – was an American, born and bred in New York, who harboured views and aspirations not at all compatible with life in the English countryside. It was difficult to imagine what had ever attracted them in the first place. ‘We were young and foolish,' his mother had assured Nathan on more than one occasion, always with the same affected sigh, ‘and he was a handsome devil in those days.'

And she was an heiress and a beauty. It was enough for most people.

But now she lived in London where she pursued a certain notoriety as the friend and patron of dissidents and dissenters and Republicans. Men such as Charles James Fox, the leader of what was described without apparent irony as His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, the radical brewer Samuel Whitbread, and the out-and-out Revolutionists Thomas Hardy and Francis
Place, whilst her closest female friend was Mary Imlay, née Wollstonecraft, author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
. Mrs Imlay was undoubtedly a woman of genius but she was prone to alternate periods of melancholy and passion which made her, in Nathan's view, a most unsuitable companion for his mother, who tended to excitability when encouraged.

On Nathan's last visit to London, upon discovering Mr Imlay's attachment to an actress from a strolling theatre company, Mrs Imlay had thrown herself into the Thames from Putney Bridge, obliging Nathan to jump in after her in his uniform coat, and then challenge Imlay to a duel in Lincoln's Inn Field which had caused him no little embarrassment with the gentlemen of the Holborn Watch and their Lordships of the Admiralty.

Nathan loved his mother but he could understand why it might be impossible to live with her for any length of time. Divorce, however, was unthinkable. At least so far as Nathan was concerned. It obliged the parties concerned to utter the most ill-natured slanders, whilst exposing their private lives to the voyeuristic gaze of press and public. Reputations were ruined, friends and family were compromised, servants were called upon to give evidence of the grossest indecencies. All of which conjured up the picture of an England very different from the pastoral idyll of Nathan's fond imagining: an England very like one of Hogarth's more critical depictions – debauched, decadent, seedy and corrupt. An England of fat and frowsty lechers robustly indulging their vices in an atmosphere of shameless abandon.

Not that this did not have its attractions, of course, but it was not a
worthy
image; it was not an image of England to carry into battle; it was not an England to die for.

His thoughts turned to what they would do when they
reached Corsica. The British had seized the island from the French two years ago and installed a Viceroy in Bastia – Sir Gilbert Elliot. Presumably Sir Gilbert would have a say in what happened next, but his options were limited. With Admiral Jervis and the best part of the fleet occupied in the blockade of Toulon, Nelson's squadron was the only naval force available to him. One ship of the line and a handful of frigates to patrol the west coast of Italy from Genoa to Naples, protect British trade from the hordes of French privateers and Barbary pirates swarming the Med, and do what they could to support the Austrians on land.

There was no escaping it: the war was going very badly for the British – and the allies as a whole. Bonaparte was making fools of the Austrians and the bulk of the British Army was in the West Indies, dying of yellow fever and malaria. Every military expedition in Europe had ended in disaster. In fact, the capture of Corsica was the only victory of any note since the war had started – and that was largely due to the Navy. Nathan doubted if Elliot had more than 5,000 British troops on the whole of the island. And if they lost Corsica they would be left without a single base east of Gibraltar.

Would Bonaparte make it his next target? He had been born there, Nathan recalled – in Ajaccio – shortly after the island was ceded to the French, a quarter of a century ago. Bonaparte would have to cross seventy miles of ocean to get there, but for a man who had crossed the Alps with an army of starving peasants, nothing was impossible; Nelson's little squadron could not be everywhere at once.

Suddenly, Nathan became aware that he could no longer see the stars. It was as if his Divine Clockmaker had leaned down from His superior height and blown them out, like so many candles. Puzzled, Nathan looked to the officer of the watch, Mr Holroyd, to see if he had observed the same strange
phenomenon or whether it was gifted to him alone. Then the true culprit became apparent.

Fog. It had risen unseen from the still waters and within minutes it had masked not only the stars but everything else that mattered to a ship at sea:
Inconstant
and
Meleager
, the convoy itself and, of course, the wolf pack at its tail. Nathan could barely see beyond the
Unicorn
's bowsprit.