Tide of War

Published by McBooks Press 2010

First published in Great Britain by Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette

UK company, 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Seth Hunter

This McBooks Press edition of the work has been revised from the original U.K. edition by the author's request.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

Cover image and design by Stephen Mulcahey.

Interior design by Panda Musgrove.

The hardcover edition of this book was cataloged as:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Seth.

The tide of war : a Nathan Peake novel / Seth Hunter.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59013-509-9

1. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6108.U59T53 2010

823'.92--dc22

2010022132

The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs: Kindle 978-159013-600-3, ePUB 978-1-59013-601-0, and PDF 978-1-59013-602-7.

Visit the McBooks Press website at
www.mcbooks.com
.

for Pat Kavanagh

T
HE BODY HAD BEEN BROUGHT UP
from the coast in a hogshead of rum and at the Governor's request they fished it out for him and laid it out on a tarp, the head lolling horribly in the glare of the new oil lamps from Philadelphia. Several of the spectators crossed themselves and the Governor turned his head and held a lace handkerchief to his patrician nostrils.

Another problem. As if he did not have enough with the French and the Americans … And the Indians and the bandits and the Negroes and the spies and all the other little pleasantries that New Orleans had to offer.

He observed the young officer with dislike.

Why did you not bury it, he thought, or throw it back in the sea? But oh no, he had to pollute a perfectly good barrel of rum and take it on a three-day journey through the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Delta just to add to the miseries of a colonial governor in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain.

“I have brought something I think you will want to see, Excellency.”

Wrong, Teniente, you smirking son of a Havana whore, this is not something I want to see. What I want to see is the snow falling on a frozen lake in Flanders or the mist rising from a field of barley on a midsummer morning with the poppies in bloom. What I want to
see is a neat, ordered landscape: a land of windmills and canals and ploughed fields and gentle rivers of clear water and silver fish: rivers that know their place and stick to that place and do not constantly move about like the muddy rivers of Louisiana. And good, honest peasants that know
their
place and are content to abide there without complaint and are not forever promising to split your skull with a cutlass or a tomahawk or whatever other vile piece of weaponry comes to hand in this armpit of the Spanish empire.

Baron Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet, Knight of Malta, Governor-General of Louisiana and West Florida, native of Flanders …

Who Died Far from His Home in the Service of the King of Spain.

Whenever he signs his name of late he sees the inscription on his tomb. If he should be so lucky as to possess such a luxury.

“Did I not do the right thing, Excellency?” A frown of concern on the officer's bovine countenance as it dawns on him that his initiative might not be appreciated in this instance, might not provide a secure route to promotion.

Carondelet gazed over the capital of his province, easily visible from the levee now that the new street lamps had been installed. Eighty of them, his latest innovation, purchased and maintained by a chimney tax in the teeth of fierce opposition from the
cabildo,
that self-serving, money-grubbing gaggle of merchants and bandits that passed for a town council, God rot them. Already murders were down by half for the time of the year. He could have wished, of course, that the streets they illuminated had been more elegant, the population more deserving, but New Orleans was a frontier town, a sanctuary for the riff-raff and renegades of the Americas, the repository of five thousand souls long since sold to the Devil.

And now this.

The Governor sighed. “Where did you find it?”

“It was found floating near the shore, Excellency, near the mouth of the Rigolets.”

The Rigolets. The Gutter. A winding channel from the Gulf of
Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain: the back door to New Orleans. There was a possibility that the body had been washed up from way out to sea, and the death might be blamed on pirates or the French, but only a faint one, given the predators native to these waters.

From over to his right, among the taverns of the waterfront under the black bulk of the eastern redoubt, came a raucous blast somewhat between a bellow and a roar of fiendish laughter which the Governor identified as the sound of a conch, known locally as
boca del Diablo,
the mouth of the Devil, and normally used by the crew of a small riverboat,
caboteur
or
goelette,
to announce their arrival in this city of sin—and the certain prospect of custom for the innkeepers and whores who infested it. In its wake came an even more hellish sound, at least to the Governor's ears, a strident verse of “La Marseillaise,” the anthem of the French revolutionists, which he had succeeded in banning from the streets and the theatres but not, alas, from the taverns. Not yet.

Only last night, he had written to the Duke of Alcudia, Secretary of State in Madrid, assuring him that the recent report conveyed by one of his agents was misleading and alarmist. He recalled his exact words:

By extreme vigilance and sleepless nights, by scaring some and punishing others, by banishing those who were debauching the people with their republican teaching, by intercepting letters and documents suspected of being incendiary, I have done better than I expected and the province is now quite orderly and quiet.

Another blast from the Devil's mouth, mocking his illusions.

“You do not think I have seen enough corpses in my time here?” he enquired sardonically. “You think perhaps I am desirous of adding to the collection?”

“Yes, Excellency. I mean, no, Excellency. But this one … I thought …” He made a gesture at the object at his feet. “I thought exceptional.”

He was right, of course, for all the inconvenience it would cause.

Exceptional it most certainly was.

For it wore the uniform of a captain in His Britannic Majesty's Navy—and despite the post-mortem attentions of beak and claw it was apparent that the original cause of its discomfort was the livid gash in the throat that came close to separating the head from the body and was almost certainly made by a knife or some such other sharp-edged instrument of human devising, making any subsequent violations entirely superfluous.

C
OMMANDER NATHAN PEAKE
of His Britannic Majesty's Navy stood up to his knees in water, bearded, browned by the sun, his canvas ducks rolled to the thigh and a straw hat upon his head: the very Neptune of his domain, save that instead of the traditional trident he carried a large net, this being considered a more suitable implement on the south coast of England for the hunting of that native delicacy, the prawn.

A movement in the mud at his feet, the merest clouding of the pristine waters and he had it: a slender crustacean about the size and colouring of a grasshopper but by no means as pert, with twitching antennae as long as its body, and thin scuttling legs. They scuttled in vain. Into the bucket it went to join its five brothers—or sisters. All as one in the pot.

“Encore! Et encore une fois!”

Looking up, Nathan beheld the figure of a small boy who had scrambled to the top of a neighbouring rock with a large bucket clutched gingerly in both hands.

“Vingt crevettes. J'ai gagne. Je suis le vainqueur, n'est ce pas?”

He looked so happy Nathan did not have the heart to remind him to speak English, though the lapse into a foreign tongue—the tongue of their past and present enemy—would have called for a sharp
rebuke in certain quarters not so very far from here.

“Well done,” Nathan replied in the King's English. “Yes, you are the victor, Alex—for I have but six.”

“ça suffit, monsieur?”

“Yes. It is enough. We will have a rare feast. Do you want to go home now?”

The boy looked at him uncertainly and Nathan knew he was trying to guess what Nathan wanted to do. Or more to the point, what Nathan wanted
him
to do: to carry on splashing in the rock pools in the warm September sunshine or return to the dubious sanctuary of Windover House and the English lesson that was scheduled to start at five o'clock precisely.