The Emperor's Gold Read online

  In a field behind a dairy in Islington he was pointed to a bay horse by a small man with an earring and a face scarred and tanned like a walnut, who watched him make two circuits of the field at trot and canter. As he walked the horse back, Roscarrock saw the man murmuring to Jessel, but the visit was otherwise without words.

  ‘Untutored, but you sit easily, apparently,’ Jessel said as they walked back to their own horses in the dairy yard.

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘It means you’ll do, for most work. Nothing fancy, but you’ll do.’

  In a windowless yard south of Fleet Street, Roscarrock was put in front of another stranger, a man of perhaps fifty, who wore breeches and an open shirt that showed the muscles of someone much younger, and a pinned sleeve in place of a left arm. The man stared at Roscarrock’s face for a moment, then looked carefully down and up the six feet of him. Then he turned away and picked up two swords, one of which he threw to Roscarrock.

  ‘Now come at me.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Attack me, man! Come on.’

  Roscarrock swung casually towards the one-armed man, who parried the stroke with a vicious flick of his blade and a scowl of impatience, both of which stung. Roscarrock started at him with new concentration, his opponent initially withdrawing a pace and then gradually pushing him back with light movements and skilful blows. They fenced for two minutes, Roscarrock spurred by the skill and by irritation that the man was so clearly gauging him at the same time as fighting. Eventually the man contrived another sharp parry that by timing alone sent Roscarrock’s sword arm wide and left him off balance and open, and barked a bored ‘Enough’.

  He punched Roscarrock lightly on the shoulder with his sword hilt. ‘All right, lad. Well done.’ Then, to Jessel, watching in amusement from the doorway: ‘Give him an axe or a pitchfork, nothing finer. But he’s fit, and he’s got a body quick enough to match his intelligence. He tried to follow on with his shoulder and his elbow once or twice, and they don’t teach that in the schools. A fighter, not a fencer. He’ll do.’

  They headed east along the river, the shouts of the boatmen and the gulls rising from the undergrowth of masts and oars.

  ‘Jessel, Lord Hugo mentioned an Irishman, a tailor and a fleet.’

  Jessel was silent for a moment. Roscarrock took in the madness of boats, masts and sails, the woven shouting of birds and men, the mixed stench.

  ‘The Irishman is called James Fannion. That’s the name we have, anyway. He was responsible for every kind of evil in Ireland – inciting unrest against the Government, stirring up arson, attacks on individual officials and priests. He was involved in the rebellion of ’98, but he was too clever to get caught and hanged. He’s certainly a man of violence – Dublin knows at least three murders committed by him – and he brings hatred and unrest like a rat with a plague.’ They crossed through the rattle of carriages and headed down towards the river. ‘Unfortunately, our people in Ireland lost track of him. He made himself unpopular even among his own kind, and he escaped from Dublin three weeks ago. All we know is this: firstly, wherever he goes he will carry the possibility – say the likelihood – of violence; if he could co-ordinate with radicals in England he could cause chaos, and if he could get to France, which God forbid, we’ll have war from two sides, because the Irish will rebel sooner than take a piss in the morning and Napoleon will exploit the confusion.’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘He’s here. Somewhere in England.’

  In a private room in a coffee house by the old bridge, Roscarrock found himself opposite a heavy man who sniffed down his wine-blasted nose at Roscarrock’s inferiority of dress and breeding, and then addressed him in simple French. Roscarrock replied with the same. The large man winced at his accent, and continued with increasingly sophisticated sentences until Roscarrock dried up. The man said, ‘No Spanish, I suppose? No Italian?’ Roscarrock shook his head. The man started to gabble at him regardless, and smiled through apparent pain as his pupil floundered for meaning.

  Roscarrock was given a drink, and the stranger relaxed his bulk back against his chair and rolled his head around towards Jessel. ‘He’s no linguist, of course, but he’ll muddle through with that peasant French of his. He’ll do. The mind’s quick enough, believe me.’ Back to Roscarrock, examining rather than addressing him: ‘Such a pity. I do wish they’d either educate people or leave them on the farm to do something useful.’

  Walking north away from the river. ‘The tailor, the one Lord Hugo mentioned?’

  ‘The tailor is the kind of man Fannion, the Irishman, would like to link up with. We first got word from Manchester of a radical preacher – not a religious man, but a self-proclaimed philosopher who was spreading anti-Government ideas and addressing groups of workers and encouraging violence – burning machines and the new factories, that sort of thing. A failed tailor. Hardly unique, but Manchester reckoned he was something a bit different. All we had were fragments, but he was heading for London and he’d a particular purpose in mind, that’s all we knew. Then they lost him.’

  ‘Name?’

  Jessel shook his head. ‘A tailor from the north country, a travelling man who causes unrest wherever he goes. We need to find these men, Tom. Can’t have the country collapsing with Napoleon knocking at the door.’

  In a first-floor drawing room in Holborn, Roscarrock met the lawyer’s widow. When the middle-aged woman first walked noiselessly into the room, and Jessel nodded meaningfully towards her, Roscarrock was about to order a drink. Instead she sat down beside him and laid out several sheets of paper, covered with lists and tables of minute and beautiful lettering. She then delivered a five-minute lecture, apparently without drawing breath, on codes, ciphers and secret writing. It was black magic to Roscarrock, but he’d spent enough time around charts and the intricacies of navigation not to be uncomfortable with the detail or the logic. After a further ten minutes talking and testing him through a series of examples, the matron patted Roscarrock on the back of the hand, and nodded primly to Jessel, before floating away to another part of the house as inconspicuously as she had come.

  As a servant closed the door behind them, Roscarrock said wearily, ‘I’ll do?’

  ‘You’ll do.’

  Roscarrock grunted, and they began to walk south again towards the river. ‘And Lord Hugo’s fleet?’

  Jessel turned to him. ‘There I can tell you even less. Not my regular concern. The Admiral hopes that our English networks might turn something up, but it’s a damned faint hope. Two or three sketchy reports from France: somewhere, Napoleon has a whole fleet – we’ve no idea how many ships – five, ten, twenty – and we simply have no clue where it is. In the right place, at the right time, it would turn the war in a day.’

  The fifth stranger was in the cellar of an apparently empty house next to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Jessel had a key for the door, and led the way along corridors and down stairs of whitewashed plaster and dark wood, everything clean but barren, before using a second key to let them into the cellar room.

  ‘Music teacher? Dancing master?’ Roscarrock was saying as he followed him in, and Jessel nodded to the centre of the room and stepped forwards.

  The fifth stranger was lying on two wooden trestles, completely covered by a thick calico sheet, dead. Roscarrock knew he was dead, but Jessel pulled back the cloth just to prove the point, and they looked down at the grey, stupid face. As the skin had paled, so the hair seemed to have darkened, and the black eyebrows were pulled together in a faint frown. Death had come as a puzzle to this man, and so it would remain to him for eternity. The ultimate vulnerability made the face seem particularly young.

  ‘To answer your question,’ Jessel said quietly but with brutality, ‘he’s you. And me. He’s a fieldsman for the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey. And that’s almost certainly what killed him.’

  Roscarrock looked up from the waxy mask below him. ‘You make your point very effectiv
ely, but I’d already gathered the work wasn’t conventional.’

  ‘Good to know you don’t collapse in a faint, stagger to the door, or babble to go back to wherever Kinnaird found you.’

  ‘I’ll do.’

  Jessel nodded dully, and looked down at the corpse. ‘His name was Simon Conway. One of us, like I said. Good fellow. Been at it a bit too long, started seeing a Frenchman in every tree. But a good fellow. Found under a pile of straw in a barn in St Alban’s, stabbed from behind.’

  ‘What killed him?’

  ‘He didn’t exactly have time to send a report.’

  ‘I mean: what was he investigating?’

  ‘We’re trying to identify the regular stopping-points for radicals and insurrectionists on their way to London. What or whom he was investigating I don’t know. We all trot on a pretty long rein.’ Jessel looked down again, and patted the dark dead head softly.

  On the stairs, door locked behind them, ‘So, one of these days you’ll be bringing some youngster to come and look at me down here.’

  Jessel kept tramping up the stairs. ‘Oh, I don’t know. If it all goes terribly well for you, it might be me on the boards down there instead.’ At the top he stopped, and said with a kind of relish, ‘Comptrollerate-General’s not a place for long-term planners.’

  Out on the street, two deep breaths of real air. ‘Jessel: if I had fainted, run for it, said it had all been a terrible mistake?’

  Jessel walked a few steps before stopping, and turning with a grim smile. ‘Like they said: you’re quick enough. Few of us come into this with much of a choice. But once you’re in, to know even the little you know is to know too much.’ He started to walk again. ‘If the Essex marshes aren’t convenient, there’s always the Thames mud at low tide.’

  Roscarrock nodded balefully, and followed. ‘Right. Thanks. I’d better start enjoying myself, hadn’t I?’

  Jessel clapped him on the back and they continued to walk westward through the London streets, ignorance and innocence bustling earnest around them.

  Sir Peter Pilsom, the Tiverton Magistrate, had shown no desire to delay his sleep further, regardless of the presence on the premises of a murdered dragoon. But the coachman was sent back into the night, to inform the local Colonel of Militia that there was a dead soldier in the house of Sir Peter and that Sir Peter did not want it. The Colonel was himself jealous of his sleep, but thought it better to seem to act promptly on a matter involving the Magistrate. The Magistrate acknowledged, amidst a flow of slurred obscenity that had the servant retreating from the room before it was half-finished, that it would be better to respond hospitably to the arrival of the Colonel of Militia; one never knew when one might need them, after all.

  So it had been a pair of sleep-deprived and extremely irritable men who convened before cock-crow in the Magistrate’s hall to agree that there was indeed a dragoon lying ice blue and obscene on the flagstones. The Colonel, in as much of a uniform as would give the impression of professionalism and respect, felt instinctively that any fault or suspicion must logically settle around the Magistrate, but apologized in any case for the inconvenience. Sir Peter, slope-shouldered and shuffling in his dressing gown, felt that in some obscure way the military were careless in allowing their soldiers to be left around thus, and there was a kind of inefficiency in losing much-needed men at a time of heightened unease. He offered the Colonel a cart to have the body taken away the sooner, and the two men returned to their respective beds, heavy-eyed and grey-jowled and mumbling at the shortcomings of the other.

  Whether he’d dallied with a woman, or a man, or some criminal proceeding, it was clear to the Magistrate and the soldier that the dragoon was the one essentially at fault in the vexatious episode. But by the time the Colonel took possession of the body later in the day, he accepted that there was a murderer to be hunted.

  ‘How is Roscarrock?’

  ‘Quiet, quick, and sharp, My Lord. Sir Keith picks well.’

  ‘That I have never doubted. And who is he, Jessel?’

  ‘Hard to say yet, My Lord. He’s mentioned no family. He has the patience and watchfulness of a professional soldier, and the robustness of a farmer.’

  ‘Find out. I’d trust one of Kinnaird’s discoveries to be a good operative, but who knows for what side? This organization is a swamp of shadows and chancers. At every remove from myself I find greater ambiguity. Not a trivial point, Jessel. We need to know how useful he is, or how dangerous.’

  ‘My Lord.’

  ‘How useful and how dangerous, perhaps.’

  ‘Quite so, My Lord.’

  ‘Roscarrock: where’s that name from, for a start?’

  The sun never rose on the morning of the 22nd of July 1805; not in the eastern Atlantic, where winds from the Americas threw vast waves against the Spanish coast and harassed ships trying to manage the unwieldy passage between the Mediterranean and the North Sea. On the morning of the 22nd, the darkness of night dispersed to nothing better than a dense grey fog that hung like a heavy cold on fifteen British warships and their Captains. Vice-Admiral Robert Calder had woken to find himself the focus of the strategic ambitions and fears of all Europe, and unable to see beyond his own bowsprit.

  Now Calder stared balefully into the fog from his quarterdeck, the ship’s Captain uneasy beside him. ‘I suppose we must trust that the Admiralty have judged the business right, sir.’

  ‘I do not find myself able to share your confidence, Cumming. At their direction I have abandoned the blockade of two French fleets to pursue this illusion of an engagement, and already those ships may have escaped into the Channel. Someone in London fancies a glorious triumph for breakfast, and I must risk a disaster to try to deliver it.’

  Faintly, through the fog, came dim shouts of command from the nearest ship; intermittently, a twist of the fog would show a shadow in the gloom, a sail or a stern or a trick of the dark.

  ‘We have to stop Villeneuve returning to the Channel, sir. If we don’t—’

  ‘I intend to, Captain. But Villeneuve might be sailing under my stern as I stand here and I’d never know it, and meanwhile in my absence from Rochefort I may give the French navy the run of the Channel, and Napoleon free passage to Dover.’

  ‘The fog seems to be lifting over there, sir.’

  ‘The glass seems to be falling. Do all your men idle in that fashion, Cumming, or is that a special detachment of loafers?’

  ‘What do we know of Villeneuve’s fleet, sir?’

  ‘Perhaps twenty ship of the line to our fifteen, and a handful of frigates to our two.’ The Admiral sniffed. ‘Sporting odds, Cumming, and I’ll take them, except we can’t – there!’ The arm shot out, and Captain Cumming’s telescope snapped up and out to follow it. ‘Starboard quarter. Topsail in the fog. Quickly, man, what do you see?’

  The combined French and Spanish fleet of Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, returning to Europe from the West Indies with tired and hungry men and Admiral Nelson far behind, was sighted at eleven in the morning of the 22nd of July. Cumming’s HMS Prince of Wales barked out two speculative cannon shots before the fog covered the enemy fleet again.

  For six gloomy and tedious hours, Calder manoeuvred his fleet after the French, the ships tacking and advancing with painful lethargy in the indifferent wind. The fleets slipped gradually south and west, pulling further away from the English Channel and the waiting French army and the vital blockades. A flirt of the fog would give the two Admirals glimpses of each other, and as quickly veil the temptation. A hurrying of the wind would suddenly offer the possibility of attack, and then drop to nothing in the slow Atlantic swell.

  Sometime after five in the afternoon, Captain Hyde in HMS Hero found himself with the wind behind his stern and the French and Spanish line of ships over his bow and ordered the Hero’s guns run out ready for action, in a voice cracked with tiredness and thirst.

  ‘There’s another one. He lived when he should have died.’

  A raised eyebrow. ‘A
problem?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  A frown. ‘Well, whose side is he on?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. But more importantly, he doesn’t know himself.’

  A thin smile. ‘What to do, then?’

  ‘For now, we leave him in play. We have hopes. He could be useful.’

  A narrowing of the eyes. ‘And if and when he stops being useful?’

  ‘He dies. What’s one more dead foot soldier in the war of Empires?’

  A grunt.

  23rd July 1805

  The wind gusted suddenly, and a ripple of excitement hissed through the long grass that stretched to the horizon and down to the water’s edge. Out in the estuary, the rowing boat bobbed and the silence of the Kent morning cracked in a shrill male voice.

  ‘Oh, for the love of God! Cannot you people keep this boat still for one second?’

  The American accent was still strange to the two men at the oars, but they were well used to the tone. They shared a silent glance of irritation, and felt the boat stabilizing itself naturally.

  ‘Must I tell ya again what we’re dealing with here? You wan’ us all destroyed? You want them picking pieces of ya outta the trees?’

  The wind eased again on the Elmley Marshes. The grass shook, and subsided.

  Out on the water, the American continued working in silence. He’d been leaning over the side of the boat for half an hour now, and the thin mattress under him had ceased to offer much benefit to his aching chest and shoulders.

  To the north, the water opened out into the Medway basin and the marsh grasses curved away towards the fort at Sheerness. The main channel of the estuary, protected from the sea by the Isle of Sheppey, was a constant bustle of shipping of every class, from men-of-war to jolly boats stuffed with dry biscuit, all the noise and activity of a great fleet headquarters of a great maritime empire.