Authors: Rob Griffith
“That’s why I have to go back. Claude could be next to be betrayed. I have to be there.”
“Who do you think the traitor is?”
“I don’t know, but I will find out. I have to.”
The dragoons were close now and it was time for us to be going. I couldn’t let her stay. If I’d had a loaded pistol I would have, should have, forced her to come. I looked back out to sea. A boat was coming, the oars rising and falling amongst the waves.
“Dominique, I can’t…” I began but she silenced me with a fierce kiss. She held the reins of the horse with one hand and the back of my head with the other. I dropped the lantern and held her as tightly as I could. Perhaps if I didn’t let go she’d have to come with me, I thought. She broke the kiss, took her hand from my head and put it on my chest, pushing herself away. She was weeping silently.
“I can’t stay,’ I said.
“I can’t come,” she replied.
“I know, Dominique. I wish I could help but I have to go. I have to get these plans to London.” I kissed her lightly one last time on the cheek. “I’ll come back for you, when I can, I promise,” I whispered and then turned and walked into the surf. I heard her mount and then gallop away. I didn’t look back. I didn’t trust myself to.
A file of marines had deployed, thigh deep in the water, and fired a volley to discourage the dragoons who were just coming on to the beach. There was a figure amongst them in a cloak and round hat. It was too dark to see but I would have wagered that he wore grey. I waded out into the sea, not feeling the icy water, and climbed into the waiting boat without a word, just a nod to the naval Lieutenant in the bow. The sailors and marines clambered back in as the boat struggled back out through the surf. The seamen took up a steady beat to the tune the coxswain sang under his breath. A few carbine balls skimmed the water around us. Dominique was well down the beach, galloping along the edge of the surf. A few dragoons were chasing her but they wouldn’t catch her. The papers were secure in my pocket and I would be in London by the following night. I would be safe. I could go back to my life and forget anything had ever happened. Or I could be a fool and keep my promise to her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
June 1803
No doubt you will understand if I do not relate my journey across the Channel and thence to London with any degree of detail. To be truthful I remember very little of it, my mind being somewhat beyond a turmoil and more of a maelstrom. The frigate was called the Cerberus and the First Lieutenant, a redheaded Scot called Frazer, was kindness personified. A meal, a good tot of rum, a cabin and the minimum of questions were dispensed with quiet efficiency.
The Cerberus came into Dover harbour just after dawn. The cliffs were amber in the morning light and clouds of screaming gulls circled high above the grey walls of the castle. Frazer left me at the dockside with his best wishes and money for the post-chaise to London. I had an hour to wait for the coach but did not eat. The coachman looked me up and down with suspicion as I handed over the fare. I did not blame him. My coat and breeches were torn and stained. I was hatless, unshaven, bruised and red-eyed. My fellow passengers were a midshipman, who was older than I was, and the usual wheezing parson that coaching companies seem to employ to give their carriages character. That he was flatulent as well as consumptive was no doubt just an extra courtesy. Both attempted conversation with me but quickly abandoned the effort and soon left me to my blank staring out of the window.
The wooded hills and rolling farmland passed in a green blur before my eyes. I scarcely noticed when we went through Canterbury. It was a bright early summer’s day, such as is meant to warm the soul, but I took little notice of anything at all as the coach rattled and bounced its way across the countryside. However, a company of Fencibles caught my eye near Sittingbourne. Their uniforms were clean and their equipment shone but their marching betrayed a lack of training. The captain of the company had a dashing uniform but both the ageing major taking the review and I had to turn away in embarrassment when the young subaltern almost fell over his own sword, dangling as it was far too low to be practicable but at just the right height to impress the ladies. The blue-coated veterans I had seen on the other side of the Channel would hardly break their step as they bayoneted those foolhardy volunteers.
At Rochester I stretched my legs but did not engage in the frantic race to finish a tankard of ale or a beefsteak before the coach was ready to depart, a contest that was enthusiastically entered into by my two fellow travellers. Such hurried refreshments did little for the parson’s digestion.
It was only when I saw the grey stain of smoke on the horizon as we got to Dartford that I began to emerge from my numbness. London was my home, and despite everything that had happened I could not help but feel something upon my return. It was not gladness, more a feeling that whatever the fates cared to throw at me here I could cope with it. The same could not be said for the rest of the globe, as I had learnt to my cost. As we passed the foot of Shooter’s Hill I somewhat optimistically promised to put the past behind me and look forward; a promise I had broken many times before.
The rattler deposited me at The George, on the east side of Borough Street, in Southwark. It was not an area that even I cared to frequent, notwithstanding my only having the remains of Frazer’s purse to lose. I quickly got the landlord to send a boy for a Hackney Carriage. I tossed a farthing to him when he returned and got in, asking the driver to take me to Crown Street and the Alien Office.
The driver turned to take me directly to Westminster but I shouted at him to take me across the river and along the north bank. I suppose I wanted to see something of the city, but perhaps I just wanted to delay letting go of my one link to Dominique. After I had handed over the papers to Henry Brooke I would be free of any duty or commitment. Free of everything apart from my promise to her. The driver muttered about the traffic at that time of day but took me across London Bridge all the same. I had always liked sitting in the back of a musty and stained London cab; weaving through the city streets being at once both part of the ebb and flow of the city and yet able to view with detachment the insignificant tableaux of London life.
I looked down the Thames past the forest of masts around the Custom House and towards the Tower. The river was as crowded as usual and I could have walked across it, jumping from ship to barge, to longboat to bumboat. I smiled to myself. Mudlarks waded thigh deep in the filth on the river’s black margins looking for anything of value. A fat East Indiaman drifted into the centre of the channel, its top-most sails unfurled smartly, and as the tiny figures scurried down the rigging I wondered what port they would see next and half envied them the journey.
We turned left into Upper Thames Street, past the warehouses, wharves, and the mass of evil-smelling manufactories. The grey dome of Saint Paul’s loomed up out of the palls of smoke. The roads were choked and I would have made better time on foot, but I sat on the hard, damp seat and watched the city I had grown up in pass by. The cries of the street hawkers, the hurried step of merchants, darting ten year old pickpockets, the curses of carters and the slash of the coachman’s whip warmed my soul far more than green fields and blue skies. Lumpers, lascars, seamen and porters trudged along the road carrying sacks or rolling barrels. A dirty pale-faced girl who could have been no more than twelve saw me looking at her and opened her threadbare shawl to reveal an undernourished body and shouted that she was mine for half a shilling. Bills for cockfights, pugilists, theatres and medicinal concoctions still plastered every spare wall or scaffold, as they had when I left, but now recruiting notices for all sorts of line, militia and volunteer regiments had joined them. The patriotic entreaties got no more notice than the sawbones’ potions.
We turned right into Bridge Street and then left in front of Fleet Prison. I gazed at the stone arches and high brick wall of the gaol and knew that if I had stayed in London all those months ago I might well have ended up as a permanent guest there. As it was I knew I would have to face my creditors soon, but I would not be running this time. I had nowhere to go.
Fleet Street stank of the ditch that gave it its name and I was glad when we reached the Strand and the familiar shops. I watched a young woman go into Bell’s bookshop, which Lucy and I had often frequented, and felt a pang of guilt as we passed Davenport and Gilpin; to whom I still owed ten pounds for the extra uniform I had bought before Egypt. After we passed Scott & Idle, the wine merchants, I stopped adding up how much I owed to the shopkeepers of the Strand.
The cab’s progress had slowed to a crawl and then suddenly ceased altogether. I sat back patiently for a few minutes and then leant out of the window to see what had delayed us. A crowd had gathered in front of Ackerman’s Repository of Arts and spilled out onto the road. I waited a few minutes more but nothing was moving so I paid the cabbie off and began to walk.
The crowd around Ackerman’s comprised of merchants, footmen, fine ladies with their maids, shopkeepers, and hawkers. All were studying his latest collection of prints, proudly displayed in the windows of the emporium. However, I wasn’t hearing any of the guffaws that marked the release of Gilray’s latest satires of the great and the good. Nor were there the gasps of horror at Cruikshank’s or Rowlandson’s portrayal of the latest murder or hanging. Instead the crowd was almost silent, a few cursed and some even prayed. I made my way slowly to the front of the crowd to see what the prints depicted. Had the King gone mad again and committed some outrageous act? Was a new disease sweeping the city? I finally managed to squeeze my way between a coachman with breath like a latrine and a fat clerk who divided his attention between the prints and the meat pie held in his hands. I looked at the prints, and then laughed. Each print purported to depict one of Bonaparte’s evil schemes to invade England. One showed huge balloons carrying whole companies across the channel and given my own recent experience I felt that I knew enough about aerostation to be sure that this was pure fantasy. Another print showed an enormous raft capable of carrying thirty thousand men, according to the caption, and powered by windmills. The most feasible print showed French engineers tunnelling beneath the seabed with squadrons of French cavalry behind them ready to lay waste to Kent. They were all ludicrous. I laughed again.
It was a mistake. I should have kept my amusement to myself, and my trap firmly closed. The crowd turned on me in an instant. The fat clerk looked at me aghast.
“Sir, I do not consider the peril of the nation a source of hilarity,” he said.
“If these fantastical schemes are all Bonaparte has planned then we are hardly in peril,” I said, brushing bits of meat pie from my lapels.
“So you are a Bonapartist then?” cried a liveried footman.
“No, but I have just come from France…”
“From France? Then you be a French spy then?” This idiotic question came from a tall man with white hair and the clothes of a farmer come to town. I reined in my first thought that was to reply in the affirmative. This didn’t look like a crowd that would appreciate sarcasm.
“Listen,” I said, “I am a Lieutenant in the Light Dragoons, the British Dragoons. I have just escaped from France and I can assure you that there are no windmill-driven barges in Boulogne harbour. No flocks of balloons waiting to descend upon you…” I was wasting my breath. I was getting jostled and the crowd was turning angry. I tried to back away but my arms were grabbed from behind.
“He don’t look like no gentleman,” someone said and I mentally agreed with him.
“We’ve caught ourselves a Frenchie. Let’s string him up.” I don’t know who said that but as you can imagine it put the fear of God into me. They were frightened, and fear amongst a mob can do ugly things. I began to struggle but that only made things worse. I kicked and bucked but was dragged towards the nearest lamppost. If someone had managed to find some rope then my story might have ended there. Fortunately a single pistol shot into the air stopped the crowd dead.
“Now then, what’s going on here?” A Lifeguards officer edged his mount into the crowd, his pistol still smoking.
“We’ve caught a French spy and were going to hang him,” said a young lady’s maid with venom. The officer, a major, looked at me questioningly; the crowd fell silent.
“I am Lieutenant Benjamin Blackthorne of the Twelfth Regiment of Light Dragoons. I have come from France with vital intelligence for the Alien Office,” I said. I knew I was laying it on a bit thick but it didn’t seem to be the time for modesty.
“Who is your Colonel?” the Major asked.
“Archdall,” I said with relief.
“Were you in Egypt?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll know Captain Anderson, he was one of Sir John Moore’s ADCs?”
“Yes, I know Paul, he took a musket ball in the arm at Alexandria. His brother in the Forty-Second died that night.”
“Very well, that is sufficient. I suggest you attend to your business,” he said to me. “Release him,” he said to the mob. They did so, reluctantly and without apology.
I barged my way out of the crowd and down towards Whitehall, leaving their muttering indignation behind as quickly as I could. This was not the London that I knew. It was not the London where the only concerns of the poor were where to get the next meal from and where the only concern of the rich was what extravagance would next divert them from the tedium of their wealth. This was a scared and anxious city that I did not know and did not like.