Swept Away (41 page)

“I am surprised they left the wine stores intact,” he mused.

“Only in deference to my command,” Landover assured him wanly. “The ship is...
was
due to be completely gutted and refitted a week next. But I do agree they were otherwise meticulous in their search and seizures. I dare say not a pannikin was left unturned in their efforts to deprive you of your ill-gotten gains. I’m told even your clothing was sold off in lots, the proceeds naturally going to the crown for the inconvenience.”

“Naturally.”

“Your charts were most impressive, I must say. I purchased two for my own use. Apart from that,” he waved a hand dismissively. “I confess to being somewhat surprised at the low profits to be made selling out your fellow countrymen.”

Emory let the captain savor his barb a moment then crossed over to the small brazier in the corner. He released the metal bolts that locked the splayed iron feet in place then, using towels to protect his hands from the heat, lifted the stove and set it to one side. He pried up two of the heat darkened floor planks and reached inside, turning his face away to close his eyes briefly in relief when his fingers brushed against metal. He dragged the heavy strongbox clear and handed it up into Seamus’s hands, from whence it was carried to the desk.

Smiling at the fading smirk on Landover’s face, Emory pulled the chain over his neck and slotted the key into the lock. The box was crammed with papers, several detailed charts, a second personal logbook, and four large canvas drawstring pouches that were spilling over with gold coins and loose gemstones.

Barrimore leaned forward, his expression mirroring the shock that now overcame the British captain’s face. “Have you no faith in banks, sir?”

“Would you trust an English bank that would accept French livres without questioning the source?”

“Still and all...you must have a small fortune there.”

“And another in a less inquisitive institution in Calais.” Emory spared a glance for Landover. “I was, in fact, very well paid for my misdeeds.”

He plucked the top sheet of folded, official looking documents off the pile, scanned it quickly and set it aside. The second was read and discarded; the third earned a small narrowing of his eyes, but in the end was rejected. There were nine documents bearing admiralty seals, and it was not until he had tossed aside the eighth that he drew and expelled a long breath, handing the last one across to Barrimore.

The marquis took it with a wry twist on his mouth. “My Lord Wessex would not be pleased to know you had kept these dispatches. He assumed, as per your original instructions, they would be immediately destroyed.”

Emory shrugged. “I was never one for taking instruction well.”

Barrimore frowned and tilted the page toward the wash of candlelight, recognizing the code at once. At his polite request, Landover vacated the chair and obliged him with the loan of his quill and a blank sheet of writing paper. It took the earl several minutes to decipher the code embedded in the seemingly frivolous recounting of events at a summer soiree, and long before he finished, there was no doubt he was extracting a specific set of orders meant for the rogue captain of the
Intrepid
. They acknowledged receipt of the notice that he had been approached by Bonaparte’s associates with the intent of hiring him and his ship to help the exiled general escape from Elba. Moreover, the instructions were quite specific in ordering Emory to go along with the ruse. He was assured the
H.M.S. Reliant,
a sixty-four gun ship-of-the-line would be waiting to intercept and, after offering a token resistance, he was to surrender. His passengers would be removed and transferred onto the warship, after which the
Intrepid
would be allowed to ‘escape’ with all hands.

“Wessex did not write these orders,” Barrimore murmured, not even bothering to read to the end. “Neither did I.”

“Are you certain?”

The marquis held the dispatch up to the light again. “By God’s grace, I will grant it is an excellent forgery--the signature is perfect, the code is set down correctly. In fact, if I was not looking for fault, I would not find any. But here--” the edge of the paper was almost touching the flame and Emory was about to reach out and snatch it away when Barrimore angled it in such a way as to allow both Althorpe and Turnbull to see the sheet illuminated from behind. “The watermark is wrong.”

“Watermark?” Seamus frowned. “It looks fair dry to me.”

“It is the manufacturers imprint left by the roller when the sheet of paper is initially pressed and formed. It can only be seen by holding the page up to the light--thus--and as you can plainly see, there is a stylized R in the center of the sheet.”

The two men still looked somewhat baffled--even Landover craned his neck forward to peer over their shoulders while Barrimore traced his finger around the faint shading of the R barely visible beneath the tight lines of script. “It should be a T with a cross through the stem,” he explained. “One of Wessex’s son in laws bought a pulp mill and began to supply him with paper a full year before Bonaparte escaped Elba. He used it exclusively for his most private and sensitive dispatches.”

“Who else knew that?”

“No one. Only myself and Wessex. But there were probably...oh, a half dozen or more who knew the codes we used and could have had access to the old stock of paper.”

Emory paced to the row of square paned windows and stared out at the fog a moment before turning back to Barrimore. “Then that proves I was not acting on my own initiative; that I did not sell out to France; that I was following specific orders that I believed came straight from Wessex’s pen!”

“I would be inclined to testify on your behalf if it came before the courts,” Barrimore agreed slowly, “though I could not, in faith, bear witness to your common sense for not questioning the logic of the orders. What would have been the point of sanctioning such an elaborate--and risky, I might add--scheme when Bonaparte was under lock and key already?”

“We wondered about that ourselves,” Emory acknowledged. “And came to the conclusion they had no intentions of taking him back to Elba when they recaptured him. Not alive, anyway.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

Seamus grunted. “We thought ye wanted an excuse to kill the bastard instead of keepin’ him like a king on his own wee island.”

“You mean murder him?” Landover insinuated himself in the conversation again, puffing up with indignation at the thought of what they were suggesting.

“If I had refused to accept the commission,” Emory added, returning to the topic at hand, “Cipriani would have found someone else. Someone they would have no means of contacting or controlling.”

“Or bearing the blame if it failed,” Barrimore mused. He looked down at the forged dispatch again, his brow furrowed. “You said there was another letter? One that Cipriani was eager to get back?”

Emory started to reach into the strongbox again, but a sound startled his hand back from the logbook and sent him reaching to his belt for his pistol instead. It was the sound of a gunshot, and even though it had been distorted by the fog and the thickness of the hull, he knew it could only have come from the vicinity of the jolly boat.

He tossed Seamus the key to the strongbox and ran for the door. “Stay here and don’t let that box out of your sight.”

Annaleah sat in shock, her both hands clapped over her mouth, her eyes watering from the cloud of acrid cordite that hung in the mist. The pistol was at her feet, drowned under the two feet of water that had collected in the bottom of the boat. It was the depth of the water, the fact that it was close to being swamped that had prompted her decision to abandon her post and follow the others up the ladder.

She had been sitting in the awful silence for half an eternity, imagining all manner of horrors coming at her through the fog. There were sounds against the hull, and sounds beneath the keel of the dinghy--slippery sliding sounds she had no desire to identify firsthand. She heard voices from other ships echoing off the water; some that sounded ten feet away and others a hundred. There was enough air stirring to create gaps in the shifting mist as well, and there were times it grew thin enough for her to see lights, even to distinguish the shape of another frigate standing several hundred yards off the bow.

She had no idea what was happening on board the
Intrepid
. She was cold, frightened, soaked through to the skin and she had no idea if Emory was alive or dead, if he had succeeded or failed, if they had forgotten about her down here below the whale’s belly, or if the first face she saw would belong to a scarlet clad soldier pointing a musket at her breast.

And the water in the jolly boat kept rising.

In all her years, she had never climbed a ladder save for the decorative wrought iron affair in her father’s library. She had never been on board a ship this size before; her knowledge was limited to the barges that ferried party goers from one bank of the Thames to the other, and small tassled gondolas that drifted on the lake while ardent suitors read bad poetry.

This was a
ship
. A
fighting
ship that bore the visible scars of beams gouged by cannonballs and scraped by boarding pikes. Although her gun ports were closed, Anna had counted fifteen on the middle deck and twelve on the upper plus an assortment of smaller guns mounted on her fore and aft rails.

With water lapping over the gunwale, she had no choice but to take hold of the thick ropes and take her first tentative step up onto a rung. She had checked the pistol was secure in her belt before she grasped the ladder, but a sudden rocking motion of the jolly boat had sent her swinging crazily against the hull. The gun had caught on the rope and been flipped free, and when it landed on the seat of the boat, the lock had snapped forward. The shot had discharged harmlessly into the side of the boat, but the sound of it had echoed like the booming thunder of a cannonade, startling Anna so badly she lost her footing and slipped into the gap between the boat and the ladder. She managed to stop herself from falling completely into the water, but her arms were jerked nearly out of the sockets and her hands skidded on the ropes, burning the palms. It was all she could do to reach over and clamber back on board the jolly boat, but by then, there were voices and shouts on the upper deck, heads poking over the rails and a sinister picket line of muskets pointing down over the side.

She clung to the ladder and clapped her hands over her mouth. Someone shouted at her, but she was still listening to the sound of gunshot reverberate around the bay, bouncing off the hull of every ship in port, amplified by the water, distorted by the mist.

The ladder scraped against the hull as someone climbed down it, and a moment later, Annaleah found herself staring into Emory’s worried face.

“Are you all right? What is it? What did you see?”

She shook her head. “It was nothing. It was stupid. It was a stupid mistake. I...the b-boat was sinking and...I t-tried...but the gun fell and...”

Standing half way up to his knees in water, Emory did not have to look down. Nor was there any time to either comfort or chastise her. The immediate silence that had followed the gunshot was now starting to fill with shouts as crews from one ship called to one another trying to pinpoint the source of the shot. Putting Annaleah before him, he guided her up the ladder where one of the crew was waiting to lift her up the last few steps and set her down on the deck.

“Quickly and quietly, gentlemen,” Emory commanded. “Haul in the anchor and get men into the tops. As soon as she is free of the muck on the bottom, I want all sails loosed and rigged out to catch whatever breeze there is about. Put the men with the sharpest eyes and keenest noses forward to guide us through this soup.”

He smiled and kissed her briefly on the crown of her head before beckoning to the ship’s cook, a crusty little Spaniard by the name of Juan Diego. “I’m going to take Miss Fairchilde below to my cabin and try to find her some dry clothing. In the meantime, I need to know how we lie for stores and fresh water, if we’ve enough to make a run down the Channel. Once we are free of the harbor, break out a cask of rum for the men if you can find one; they will no doubt have been deprived of their daily rasher while they’ve been guests of the king. Biscuits too, enough to tide them over until you can fill their bellies with beef. I plan to be back on deck before the anchor is on board, and I want to be able to smell brisket boiling when I do.”

“Aye
aye
, senor Captain-general! And...welcome back aboard.”

“It is damned bloody good to be back, Mr. Diego.”

CHAPTER 24

Seamus was waiting in the aftercabin with Barrimore and Landover. The strongbox had been locked and returned to its hidey hole in the floor, the stove was bolted back in place and fresh coal added to its belly. After a quick explanation of the gunshot, Emory hung the key around his neck again and sent Seamus topside to take charge of the deck until he returned. Barrimore left to escort the British captain forward with his men.

Emory helped himself to the contents of Landover’s sea chest and found a clean dry shirt and breeches. Annaleah took them with ice cold hands and was almost afraid to look up into his face, knowing there might be greater repercussions--at the very least a look of grave disappointment--now that they were alone.