An Awkward Commission (17 page)

‘I would point out to you, Lord Hood, that all I seek from you is a just resolution to a clear case of law-breaking.’

‘And I would respond by saying that you are not the judge of what, and what is not, illegal.’

The threat, delivered without the admiral raising his voice, was potent nevertheless. Show more respect or you can whistle for any action in the matter of your impressment. The obvious thing to do was to knuckle under, to behave as any officer of his lowly rank would, and practically grovel to even be allowed into the great man’s presence. Was it his bloodline, his Celtic blood or his own contrary nature that meant he could not do it? Yet he knew he had to somehow soften the atmosphere, and the only thing he could think of was a touch of flattery.

‘Lord Hood, I am of the mind that your sense of justice will outweigh whatever you see as impertinence. And I would add that I do not mean to be that, merely to state the obvious. If you wish me to tell you in detail what was discussed I am happy to pass it on.’

‘I doubt there would be much in the way of difference, though I would like to know what they told you about Toulon?’

‘Only that they had received representatives from there, who were keen that the whole of Provence should declare
against the Jacobins. They asked for help, but they were told that none could be spared. It was more important to march on Lyon.’

‘Meaning?’

It was not really a question. ‘That they would have to act on their own.’

Hood nodded. ‘Did it not strike you that their information on Toulon was limited?’

‘I was given to understand that they were not entirely convinced by the confidence of the Toulon representatives. Marseilles being a commercial port has no organised body of sailors to question the actions of the town’s leading citizens. Apparently, and as luck would have it, Marseilles got rid of its zealots a year ago when the government cried danger. Five hundred of the more radical citizens went to fight on the Rhine and have not returned, so the internal threat is diminished. They are not sure that was the case in Toulon.’

‘Which leads us to what conclusion?’ asked Parker.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.’

‘Is it not obvious, Lieutenant Pearce,’ Parker insisted, ‘that we need more information.’

John Pearce was suddenly ahead of them; the allusion to his speaking French as well as he did, even perhaps his reputation, and that was without the fact that given his situation he was an officer they could part with, without loss to the fleet. Parker opened his mouth to speak again, only to be stopped by Hood’s hand.

‘I think, judging by your expression, Lieutenant, that you have a fair notion of what is coming next.’

‘You want someone to go ashore and find out the true state of affairs?’

‘Correct in nearly every respect except one, Lieutenant Pearce. We want you to go ashore and find out if Toulon is as ready to declare against Paris as Marseilles.’

Had Hood deliberately drawn him into impertinence, just so he could openly state that there was a
quid pro quo
for any action on Michael, Charlie and Rufus, never mind Barclay.

‘Is that going to be an order?’

‘That shows the degree of your ignorance, sir,’ said Parker

‘In what way?’

‘Lord Hood cannot order you to undertake such a duty, any more than I could myself. He may request that you undertake it, but you, as an officer, have the right to decline this commission.’

Pearce smiled, but it was a grim affair. ‘Without a stain on my character?’

‘I would not go that far, Pearce,’ Lord Hood, added. ‘But I could ask any lieutenant on the ship to volunteer for the duty, and they would jump at it, even if their knowledge of French was limited.’

‘They seek to impress you, Lord Hood, I don’t.’

Even as he said it, Pearce knew he was bound to accede. Not to do so would nullify his sole reason for being in the Mediterranean. Refuse and he would likely find himself on a ship bound for home, for Hood would have despatches going back to England, and to refuse was not, either, an option. He would be put aboard whether he liked it or not.

Hood slid a piece of paper across the table. ‘You would have to go in to Toulon by boat, and take a chance on not being intercepted. Then it would be necessary to find one of these men, at one of these addresses, which you must memorise before you leave.’

‘The men who went to seek help from Marseilles?’

‘Correct. They are delegates to the local assembly. It is to be hoped that they could then put you in touch with a sympathetic naval officer, who would be able to say what
is the sentiment of the fleet, its commander, officers and sailors.’

‘When do you expect to raise Toulon?’

Accepting that as tantamount to agreement, Hood replied. ‘At first light we should have made contact with the vessels sent ahead. I would say, if the conditions were right, no moon to speak of and some cloud cover, we could put you ashore tomorrow night.’

‘A pity.’

‘Why?’ demanded Parker.

Pearce just shrugged. It seemed to be tactless to say he was hoping to avoid supper in the wardroom.

The naval uniform had to be discarded and even on a ship with a complement of 850 souls, finding anything approaching a civilian garment that both fitted and designated him as some kind of gentleman, was no easy matter. Appearance was important – he could hardly claim to be Hood’s representative dressed as a common seaman. In the end he had to settle for a black coat belonging to Hood’s second secretary, the fellow with the ink-stained hands, one that was long enough, but too tight on the chest and under the armpits, and since it looked ridiculous with a sword he exchanged that for a shorter weapon, a midshipman’s dirk. The hat was easier, tricorns being plentiful amongst the warrant officers’ shore-going rig. Funds were provided by Hood’s secretary, a decent purse of golden guineas, which apparently came from the secret fund and required no signature to account for their use.

The fleet made contact with Gould and HMS
Firefly
by mid-day but he had little to impart, having seen it as his duty to avoid contact with the enemy, and stay on the station in case a sighting was made or a signal came from HMS
Brilliant
. Hood had no such scruples; he made straight for the approaches to the French naval port and was close enough by the time he had his dinner to be sighted from Mont Faron. If they were still at anchor he wanted them to see his fleet in the offing, and if they had weighed to find out for himself.
The information from his lookouts, once they had got close enough, was satisfying. Admiral de Trogoff, pre-warned by his own patrols, had already began to warp his ships back into the Petit Rade, a place where they would be secure from attack by such things as fire ships. The only worry was that no sighting had been made of Barclay or his frigate.

Stood bareheaded on the ramparts of the Tour de Mitre, in the late afternoon, Ralph Barclay and his wife watched as the capital ships were towed by their boats through the channel that led to the Petit Rade. He could just see the topsails of his fellow-countrymen on the horizon, where he knew, as much as he wished it otherwise, they would stay. The offshore fleet needed sea room in case of a turn in the weather; being closer to shore would be, in the event of a southerly gale, fraught with peril. To come in even closer was worse; below his terrace they had already got the furnace going behind the battery of forty-two pounder cannon, to make red the shot that would be doubly deadly for a wooden vessel, not only smashing wood, but starting fires as well. Across the bay, at the bastion near the infirmary, they would be doing the same, indeed the shore of the whole outer roadstead was dotted with forts. Any ship sailing into the Grande Rade would be caught between multiple fire from guns heavier than their own, and that with no hope of getting at the enemy vessels in the inner anchorage.

‘What will happen husband?’

There was just a tinge of hope in Emily’s voice, hope that comfortable as their captivity was it would soon be over. He hated to dash that anticipation, but the truth could do nothing other than that. ‘The French will anchor a ship across the entrance to the channel below once all the rest are through, put a spring on her cable till she is broadside on, and effectively shut off the Petit Rade. In an extreme situation, they would sink her there.’

‘I meant as regards our ships, not theirs.’

‘Little, I fear. Hotham will blockade, staying just on the horizon to keep the French bottled up. Admiral de Trogoff must wait for a wind strong enough to blow our fleet off station, and then, if he wishes, he can put to sea on that same wind and either offer battle of try to evade them.’

There was no point in adding an even more depressing fact; that Toulon had been studied by many naval minds over the years, who had concluded that it could only be taken by soldiers, and then it was not a matter of siege and assault but of attrition. To even have a chance of attacking the port and the town any aggressor must first subdue the batteries surrounding the Grande Rade, but that only brought them to stout walls and even more cunningly placed artillery. The defences had been designed by the Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV’s master of the art of fortifications, to discourage an attack from the sea, his aim to make the naval base a nut too tough to crack. Success in such a venture was not impossible, but given the time it would take and the force it would require, Toulon could not be captured before the arrival of a relieving army, so that those invading would have to fight a land battle at the same time as trying to press home a siege.

‘What would you do if you were a Frenchman?’

‘I would only know that if I knew de Trogoff’s orders.’

Ralph Barclay declined to add anything about the Admiral obeying them, which was, if Captain d’Imbert was right, questionable. Thinking of that brought back the memory of that dinner, St Julien unashamedly paying court to his wife, and he had to suppress the feelings that induced, the belief that Emily had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Certainly she had failed to do what he, or rather Lutyens, had asked; any information about the state of affairs in the port had been gleaned by him, not her.

‘If he can get the rest of his 74’s fit for service he would have an advantage in numbers, but that counts for little if his crews are not worked up, as ours must be. You will have observed aboard
Brilliant
that men need time to get to know their tasks and each other. If that is true of a ship, it is even more so of a fleet. New to operations, sails take longer to set and take in. Gunnery, the most vital element should it come to a fight, would be slow and poorly aimed, and that against men who have had months of training. If he has orders to get to sea, I would suspect he would try to avoid battle rather than invite it for that very reason.’

‘Not very noble, husband, but I must say, for all he has a title, the Admiral did not strike me as overly endowed with that quality. He seemed a timid little man.’

‘Unlike his second in command, perhaps?’

Emily did not respond; she knew how he felt, just as she knew to do so, to protest that it was just a bit of raillery, a pleasant diversion from being cooped up in a frigate with the same faces for months, would cut no ice and only lead to an argument. Instead she pointed up the long arm that enclosed the inner anchorage, to the point. ‘Is that our men returning?’

Ralph Barclay nodded as he looked towards the town and the Vieux Darse, where his crew had been put to work shifting quarried stone. Led by Sykes, escorted by an armed guard, the dusty and weary Brilliants were trudging back to their underground accommodation. He had visited them at their labours, to find them under the supervision of overseers with whips. A protest had had these removed, but it was a moot point as to whether National Guardsmen with muskets and prodding bayonets were any less an evil. Emily, already indoors, was tying on her apron before gathering the unctions and ointments gifted her by Lutyens. She had taken it upon herself, each evening, to treat what sores and blisters
the men had, and to insist on a transfer to the infirmary of any whom she deemed incapable of further exertion.

Ralph Barclay had accompanied her on the first two nights, but he wearied of endless attempts at reassurance, had a limited ability to look into sad, exhausted eyes concerned about the future and a limited fund of words to maintain the hope that all would be well; that either the war would end or that rescue or exchange would arrive in the form of a British fleet. The men might know that had happened this very day; let Emily be the one to confirm it, for he feared being asked the very same question she had posed, one to which, in terms of time in captivity, there was no answer.

‘Will you not visit Glaister and the others? They at least should be made aware of what has happened.’

‘Of course,’ Ralph Barclay replied, with some force, to cover for the fact that he had completely forgotten about them.

With the sun beginning to dip behind the hills to the west, the men on the ground floor had tallow stubs lit in the sconces, which did nothing to make pleasant what was a vista of dank stone walls and a bare earth floor. The news of the fleet lifted the gloom, cheering them immensely, which left their captain wondering how long that would last, though he indulged in a little necessary dissimulation when it was put to him that an exchange might now be arranged, given that officers stood a much better chance in that matter than seamen.

‘I am sure,’ he said, without any personal conviction, ‘that as soon as Admiral Hotham knows of our plight, he will send in a flag of truce for just that purpose.’

‘I thought Lord Hood might come out of his cabin to wish me luck.’

Pearce said this as he prepared to lower himself into the
waiting boat, bobbing below the entry port and crewed by men from
Victory
, now heaved to, each one in dark clothing with blackened faces. Ingolby, the premier, responded with an embarrassed cough and an intimation that, ‘The admiral, no doubt, had more important things on his mind.’

The man to whom this was addressed saw it differently; that for instance, the admiral saw him as expendable. The cloak he needed to hide his clothing was already in the cutter, he would use his hat to cover his face, for if he did get ashore, blackened features in daylight would attract attention. The midshipman in charge, a youngster called Trevivian, gave the order to shove off and, once clear, the men began to row in steady rhythmical fashion while above their heads the orders were issued to get under way. The dying sun lit them as they came out from the lee of the flagship, and being the Mediterranean, that soon turned to a full night in which the moon had yet to rise. Not that it was totally dark; above their heads the sky was carpeted with stars and it was only when a cloud obscured them that the men in the boat could feel any sense of security.

‘They won’t see us from the shore, your honour,’ said the midshipman, in a voice with a strong West Country burr. ‘We will be like a black dot, the trough of a wave to the eye if we stay mid-channel.’

The plan was to land him on the eastern shore of the Grande Rade, between a fort called La Malque and a hill called Pointe de Brun, which might, or might not, be home to another battery of cannon. To try to venture into the inner anchorage would be too perilous; crowded with shipping, it would be awash with guard boats. They would have those too in the Grande Rade, but in theory they would be less numerous and, given the area they were obliged to cover, easier to avoid.

Sitting silently, the only sound the heavy breathing of the
oarsmen, allowed Pearce’s imagination to run riot; he saw in the glimmer of the starlight endless chimeras that he took to be boats, even worse, when the cloud cover increased and in stygian darkness, his eyes played more tricks, which induced a longing for this boat journey to be over and for him to be on dry land. He had no doubt that he could pass himself off as a Frenchmen, and in a naval port his accent would not attract any attention from sentinels who must be from all over the country. But that feeling of certainty only applied ashore; at sea with a bunch of British tars, any close inspection would be fatal, which had him saying out loud, as the moon appeared for a brief moment, before slipping behind a cloud again, ‘What in the name of hell am I doing here?’

‘We all wonder that, sir,’ said one of the oarsman. ‘That be what we all feel, your honour, for if we is caught by the Johnnie Crapauds, it’ll be the galleys for the rest of our days.’

Pearce shuddered, not willing to add to his inadvertently spoken complaint, that for him it would be a firing squad, or if the wrong people were in charge in Toulon, a guillotine. As if to make real what was imagined, a gap appeared in the clouds, and a voice cut through the darkness, demanding the private signal for the night, and unshaded a lantern to show the bows of another cutter with a man standing peering into the gloom by the side of a small cannon. The
Victory
’s oarsmen immediately raised their sticks and the cutter glided to a halt. Pearce had formed in his mind the words ‘j’ai oublié le mot’, when another voice called out, ‘Suffren. La response?’

‘De St Tropez.’

Bobbing up and down slowly, oars still out of the water, Pearce and his rowers sat holding their breath, easier for him than those who had been exerting themselves. The
lantern was shaded again, with everyone in the British cutter looking at the sky, at slowly moving clouds tinged with silver edges, praying it would not clear. Pearce, without consulting Trevivian, gave the men an order to row hard and damn the noise, sure that each of the two boats who had exchanged the identification would assume the noise came from the other.

‘Christ, that was a stroke of luck.’

‘Remember those words on the way back to
Victory
, Mr Trevivian. Suffren and St Tropez.’

‘What do they mean, sir?’

‘You a sailor and you have you not heard of Suffren?’

‘I’d be obliged if you would tell me of him, sir.’

‘He was an admiral and a hero in the Marine Royale, his full title being le Bailli de Suffren de St Tropez, hence the signal.’ Then, thinking of the boy’s accent, and to make safe the journey back, he had him practising saying that and the French for ‘I have forgotten the words,’ all the way to the shore, only to conclude that he would perhaps get away with it if the guard boats thought him Swiss.

‘They got an accent then, these Swiss folk?’

‘I’ve only met one as far as I know, Mr Trevivian, a lady called Madame de Stael.’

‘A madam! God forbid, sir, I should sound like some bawdy house trollop.’

Pearce laughed. Thinking of Germaine de Stael in her Paris salon, the décor as glittering as the company, he wondered how a woman who prided herself on the sharpness of her mind and the acuity of her wit would take to being likened to a trollop. There was no salon now, no dazzling company. To avoid losing her head, rich and witty Germaine had been forced to flee to England, like so many others.

Thinking of her took Pearce back to a happier vision of Paris, in the days before those who had brought down
the power of the monarchy lost control of the Revolution. It had been an especially sweet time for him, a youth growing to manhood, taken everywhere by a favoured guest, his father. He recalled the city in high summer, could remember the festivals held in the Champ de Mars at which all the folk of Paris could mingle, to exchange greetings as citizens, regardless of previous rank, to kiss in amity and exchange flowers. The thought of kisses led on to those he had bestowed and received, and of those women in salons like that of Germaine de Stael, who had espied and seduced a young, handsome fellow, in the full knowledge of their compliant husbands. Happy times, indeed!