The Price of Glory

Young Warriors

N
ELSON &
N
APOLEON

Learn the Art of War & the Cost of Fame

N
ATHAN
P
EAKE
charts a perilous course into the dangerous waters of post-Revolutionary Paris. There he encounters two of the most beautiful and scandalous courtesans in history and their playmate—laughingly dubbed Captain Cannon—who is about to win enduring fame as Napoleon Bonaparte. Returned to the command of the
Unicorn
, Peake joins another young glory-seeker, Captain Horatio Nelson, in a bid to wreck Bonaparte's plans for the invasion of Italy. But Peake has his own private agenda—to find his lost love amid the chaos of war—and as the fighting spreads from the mountains to the sea, he discovers that glory comes at a higher price than he thought.

Other Nathan Peake novels by Seth Hunter

The Time of Terror

The Tide of War

Published by McBooks Press 2011

First published in Great Britain by Headline Review,

an imprint of Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette UK company, 2010

Copyright © 2010 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 illustration © 1971yes, licensed from
Shutterstock.com
, 2010

Cover and interior design by Panda Musgrove.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Seth.

  The price of glory : a Nathan Peake novel / Seth Hunter.

      p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59013-625-6 (alk. paper)

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

  PR6108.U59P75 2011

  823'.92--dc23

2011030524

The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs: Kindle 978-1-59013-643-0, ePub 978-1-59013-644-7, and PDF 978-1-59013-645-4

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

Printed in the United States of America

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For Elesa

Y
OU WILL FEEL NO PAIN,
”
they said. “It is like the tickle of a feather or a lover's kiss.”

They had cut her hair and torn her chemise to expose her neck and breasts. To make her ready, they said, like a bride for her groom.

“He is waiting for you,” they told her, “in the Place du Trône.”

They were drunk, which was not uncommon when they had a new cargo to prepare for the machine, but there was uncertainty in their eyes, verging on fear, for rumours of unrest were circulating among the people, rumours of conspiracy in high places. And on the way through the city, a mob surrounded the carts shouting that it was all over, that the tyrant Robespierre was overthrown and the executions must stop. But the guards did not heed them.

And now they were here and there it was, waiting for them, the Scientific and Humane Execution Machine. The cure for all ills. Dr. Guillotine.

Some of the prisoners began to weep and wail; others sang hymns or songs of love.

“Courage, my friend.” Sara felt the soft breath in her ear and the strong fingers at her wrist, tugging at the rope that bound her. She turned and met the eyes of the stranger sitting beside her in the cart. She had told Sara she was the Princess of Monaco but she was probably mad. They had their share of madwomen in the cart. There was one who said she was Queen Marie Antoinette and another who spat upon her and said she was the late King's mistress and the only woman he had ever loved. Yet another who claimed to be the bride of Satan, three who said they were nuns, and two confessed whores.

But then they were all whores to the people who had sent them here. Nuns were whores of God. Marie Antoinette was the Austrian whore. And Sara was a noble whore. Sara de la Tour d'Auvergne, Countess of Turenne. And they would all die together in the Place du Trône.

But she must not think of that, the unthinkable that. So she turned her head away and having no future, she thought of the past.

She had been born not too far from Monaco. In the mountains above the coast, near the border between France and Genoa. Her father was one of the local
seigneurs
, Scottish by birth, and a soldier. But he was an old man by then and on market days, having nothing better to do, he would take her into Tourettes-de-Vence and they would sit at a café in the square, the old man and his little girl, and the
patron's
wife would bring them drinks: wine for the
seigneur
, lemonade for his daughter, and little golden cakes made of oranges, and they would sit together in the shade of an umbrella pine and watch the world go by.

The guards were letting down the sides of the carts and helping the prisoners to descend, for they had their hands tied behind them and it would not do to let them fall and hurt themselves at the foot of the machine. But Sara's hands were loose now. One tug and they would be free—much good it would do her. Save to seize a bayonet from one of the guards and slit her throat. And cheat Dr. Guillotine at the last.

She began to tremble, her whole body shaking in the sweating air.

“Courage, my friend.” Those words again; the soft breath at Sara's neck.

Like the tickle of a feather or a lover's kiss
.

She had a lover. An Englishman. The love of her life. But where was he now? And she had a son, a little boy.

But she must not think of this.

They lined them up, facing the guillotine. This was not right. They should be facing the other way, so they would not see the full horror that awaited them up there on the scaffold. As if they could not imagine it. But still, it was not right. They knew the rules. It was spoken of all the time in the prisons. People even rehearsed for this moment, the crowning moment of their lives. In the Place du Trône.

But the guards were nervous. The crowd was not with them for once; people were hurling insults at them, spitting and cursing. Others tried to reason with them. They said that as citizen soldiers—servants of the people—they should abide by the will of the people. And the will of the people, expressed in the National Convention, was that the executions must stop. But then Hanriot, commander of the Garde Parisienne came charging up on his horse, waving his sword and urging them to carry on and be damned to the lot of them. Sanson, the executioner, was already up there on the scaffold with his valets, checking that the ropes ran free in the runnels, chewing on a straw like a farmer going about his business—and behind the scaffold stood a large, low-slung farm cart with its interior painted red, waiting to take the bodies away when the job was done.

They were buried in the catacombs, Sara had been told: the labyrinth of tunnels under the streets of Paris. All thrown together, the bones all jumbled up in the dark, with no stone to say who they were or how they had died. The only record was kept by the two
huissiers,
the officials appointed by the Revolutionary Tribunal who sat at a table beneath the scaffold, like waiting carrion, with their black robes and plumed hats, the silver chains of office around their necks and the death warrants in front of them. When they signed them on the back, the warrants became death certificates to be handed back to the Tribunal as proof that the sentence of the court had been carried out.

And Sara's would be among them.

The executioner was nearly ready. He pulled a blood-stained smock over his head and signalled to his valets, who laid hold of the first victim and half-dragged, half-carried her up the steps. She was a woman Sara knew. They had spent several hours in the same cell, awaiting trial at the Palais de Justice. She was a prostitute called Catherine Halbourg, nicknamed “Egle,” who had been arrested with one of her friends in the Rue Fromenteau just before the trial of the Queen—the
real
Queen, who the Revolutionists called the Austrian whore. The way Egle told it, some of the men from the Commune had suggested putting a couple of real whores in the dock with her, to make a point. But the idea was vetoed by a superior authority and Queen Marie Antoinette was tried and executed alone. Not that this helped poor Egle. They kept her in prison, not knowing what to do with her, and then someone decided to kill her anyway, for being an enemy of Virtue.

“I am ready,” she had told Sara. “I have been rehearsing.”

They had held mock executions in the prison, she said, practising with their hands tied behind their backs, laid out on a plank.

And they held séances, when they conjured the Devil.