The Price of Glory (11 page)

“Then let us make use of them. Put them ashore to reinforce de Puisaye. The
Unicorn
may provide support at whatever distance you consider will not put her at risk. We do not want you running aground again, as you did in the mouth of Morbihan.”

Nathan swallowed his anger and his pride.

“Will that be all, sir?”

“No, it is not all. Before you go, this business of the Chevalier de Batz …” Nathan braced himself. “Regrettable. Most regrettable.”

“Indeed, sir.” Nathan composed his features into a suitable expression of gravity.

“You know who he is, of course.”

“I was informed by his lieutenant, after the event, that he is cousin to the Comte de Puisaye.”

“Quite. And held in considerable regard by the count and his circle.”

Nathan chose his words with care. “I acted upon the spur of the moment, sir, with a pistol to my head, so to speak.”

The commodore raised his brow. “I understood, from your own report, that the pistol was held to the head of the Chevalier de Batz.”

Nathan flushed. “It was a figure of speech, sir. However, he ordered his men to fire upon us—and I took such action as I deemed to be necessary at the time.”

“Indeed? You are quite sure he meant to launch an attack upon you and your men? Not upon the Republicans?”

“That was the impression I formed, sir. But even had he meant the Republicans, they were prisoners, in my charge. The officer had given me his sword.”

The commodore glanced at Finch to ascertain if he had any opinion on the matter. He did not.

“In the heat of battle, Captain Peake, could it not have been that the chevalier considered they were still a danger to his men, and indeed to yours?”

“I do not believe that was in his mind, sir.”

A heavy sigh. “Well, it is most unfortunate. There have been enough problems with our allies without this.” The sound of the ship's bell recalled him to his other considerations. “I propose you send the chevalier over to the flagship and we will accommodate him here until such time as we can arrange a full enquiry into the matter.”

Nathan kept his expression carefully blank but this was not what he had wanted to hear. A full enquiry—in the wake of what looked like being one of the worst disasters to befall the Navy since Byng lost Minorca. And Byng had faced a British firing squad.

“Will that be all, sir?”

“Yes, Captain, and let us hope you can render such assistance to the Comte de Puisaye as to make him feel obliged to you.”

It took Nathan the best part of an hour to assemble his scattered flotilla, and another to cover the short distance to Penthièvre for there was a very real danger they would be carried on to the shore at Carnac. He was obliged to lead them well out to sea and then come about and stand on the wind, close-hauled on the starboard tack under double-reefed topsails. Now they stood about a mile out from the shore, the
Unicorn
hove to with her main topsail to the mast and the gunboats working closer to shore with their sweeps, though he very much doubted if they could achieve much with the kind of sea that was running. The
Conquest
in particular was making such heavy weather of it, he did not think she would be able to open her gun-ports, much less fire her broadside. Which was probably just as well for she was rolling so badly the shot could go anywhere. The beach here was strangely empty after the crowds they had seen further along the peninsula. A beach of startlingly white sand, even under the cloudy sky, but while he was looking, hundreds of ragged, scuttling figures emerged from the dunes and ran toward the water's edge, stretching out their hands imploringly.

Nathan sought out Tully on the weather rail to express his anguish: “How in God's name are we to provide support with that lot in the line of fire? And support what? Where are the Royalist lines; can
you
see them? For I am sure I cannot.”

Tully was unable to enlighten him and Nathan went aloft in the hope of a better view but even braced against the topmast shrouds it was impossible to hold the glass steady enough for any detailed observation. He could see the fort plainly enough with his naked eye, a little over a mile to the north-west, but the Royalist lines the commodore had sketched so confidently on the map aboard the
Pomone
were nowhere to be seen. If they were there at all, they were well hidden among the dunes.

He wondered if it were possible to bring the frigate any closer to the shore. The wind had slackened somewhat and there was still a depth of water under her keel, but he was wary of performing what would necessarily be a complicated manoeuvre so close to the guns of Penthièvre, especially with Graham as his sailing master.

He looked again at the people on the beach.

“God help them,” he murmured under his breath, though there was none to hear him. It was scarcely a prayer. He had lost what little faith he had in Paris during the time of the Terror. And yet he was shaken by this fresh evidence, to his mind, of the sheer randomness of fate that could cast so many defenceless people adrift, abandoned to the tide of war and politics. Did they believe their God would save them? God or Virgin or whatever Papist saints they prayed to in their churches and at their roadside shrines? Did they believe the Bishop of Rome would intercede for them with his prayers?

And yet for all of that, for all his scepticism and his deeply in-grained pessimism, he still needed to believe there was a greater power than his own puny endeavours, a benign presence to ward off the evil eye, even if you called it luck.

He was a man much inclined to Order—a student of astronomy who found comfort in the slightest evidence of some pattern to the universe and in the supposition that the planets moved according to certain rules and regulations, that all was not Chaos, as it so often appeared on Earth. He could not entirely dismiss the idea that behind this Order there was a force for good: call it God, or the Supreme Being, as Robespierre had, or something else, something no-one had yet discovered in the configuration of the planets. The Great Regulator. The Supreme Clockmaker (the divine twin of Mr. Harrison who had invented the marine chronometer, perhaps; it was a comforting image). He was perfectly aware that this belief—or whimsy, for it could not be compared to faith—was sustained in part by the terrible fear that there was nothing there. Nothing and noone. That no amount of appeals to an unknown deity would make the slightest difference to the course of events, wherever they occurred.

Nathan had been led by his interest in astronomy to the work of a certain Persian astronomer, poet and mathematician called Omar Khayyam, translated by the English scholar Thomas Hyde who had travelled much in the East during the last century. Nathan had been much struck by a line of verse he had found in Hyde's translations:

The moving finger writes and having writ

moves on: nor all your piety nor wit

shall lure it back to cancel half a line;

nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

But if this was truth, need it be so cold? He longed for a more comforting philosophy, clung to the hope that the moving finger might pause a moment in its endless scribing and the divine hand soar from on high to pluck a single individual from the damned. Or in this case, the doomed horde that clung to the beaches of Quiberon like so many barnacles upon a rock. For surely Sara had not been saved from the guillotine only to die here on this wretched lump of rock and sand, while he looked helplessly on from his lofty perch.

He recalled another verse from a hymn often sung at his father's request at the family church in Windover. One of Cowper's, in fact, that reflected a more phlegmatic English philosophy than that of the Asian astronomer.

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

He could see his father belting it out now, with more heart than harmony, knowing full well that for all his professed piety, when it came to storms at sea the old admiral had more faith in preventer stays than prayer, though he might try both at a pinch. And Cowper, he had heard, had been torn all his life by doubt and pessimism.

He came down from the mast and sent for Bennett who came staggering aft, too long ashore to have found his sea legs yet, though his complexion was ruddy enough. Nathan took him in the shelter of one of the tarpaulins stretched in the weather rigging to provide a little respite from the wind. He still had to raise his voice but was spared the effort of shouting in his ear, which was as well for some diplomacy was required.

“I have been ordered to set your Chouans ashore,” he told him.

A diplomat might have put it better. Certainly it did not go down well with the man from Nantucket. His complexion grew a deal more flushed and his voice more heated.

“You might as well toss them overboard,” he observed bitterly.

“The commodore is of the opinion that they may be of more use ashore,” Nathan pointed out coldly. “Helping defend the women and children trapped upon Quiberon.”

“Though the commodore is not himself able to defend them.”

These were Nathan's sentiments precisely but they could not be expressed by a mere seaman.

“Bennett, if you cannot curb your tongue, we will have to see what a gag may achieve.”

“I am sorry if it was impertinent, sir, but what would it achieve to send more men to their deaths?”

“It may not come to that, if Puisaye can hold the line.”

Bennett regarded him evenly. “With your permission, sir, I would go with them.”

“Nonsense. You will return to your duties.”

“Sir, I am their leader, since you deprived them of de Batz. And, with respect, I fought at their side for over a year. They have risked their lives for me. How can I not go with them?”

“Bennett, you are not one of them. This is not your fight.”

“It is as much my fight as any man's that is not French. And they trust me. They would fight better if I was with them. And what use am I to you here?”

Nathan wavered.

“Set me ashore with them.” Bennett's eyes grew shrewd. “I will find La Renarde for you. And I swear to God, I will do my best to get her out of it.”

Nathan stared at him, torn by conflicting emotions. His first passion was outrage, with some embarrassment that he had revealed more of his interest in the matter of La Renarde than he would have wished. But then, inspired perhaps by the confused theology of his lonely sojourn in the top, he recalled that line of Cowper's. Benjamin Bennett seemed an unlikely godsend but, as he had so clearly indicated, he was precious little use as anything else.

“Very well, Bennett. I will put you ashore with them. But you will wear a proper uniform so that we may pick you out of the crowd and take you off the beaches if it should come to that. And it may save you from a hanging if you are taken prisoner by the French.”

Bennett frowned. “A proper uniform?”

“I mean a red coat. We have a stack of them in the hold to distribute to the Chouans. You may select your own rank, though you will have to apply to another authority for the pay,” he added hastily.

“I am sorry, sir, to give offence, but I cannot wear a red coat.”

Now Nathan, too, was frowning. “On what grounds?”

“I'd as soon not go into that, sir.”

“For God's sake, Bennett, you wear the King's uniform.”

“Even so, sir, it is not a red coat,” he insisted doggedly. “My father would never forgive me.”

Nathan shook his head. “Get out of my sight,” he told him, “before I change my mind.”

But Bennett had put another thought in his head and he was not to be shaken from it, not even by Tully's worried look when Nathan told him he was going ashore. It was his duty, he insisted, to ensure that the Comte de Puisaye had a proper line of defence before sending other men to join the chaos on the beaches.

He took Bennett, Whitely and six marines.

“Maintain your position as best you can,” he instructed Tully, casting a guilty eye aloft. “And it might be as well to rig the fore topmast staysail when the tide turns to keep the head offshore. Though I should be back well before that.” He was fussing unnecessarily, as Tully must surely be aware: the symptom of a troubled conscience for quitting the ship so close to a hostile shore but it was a virulent affliction and he could not help himself from glancing over towards the gunboats and adding: “And signal Mr. Balfour to give as close support as he is able.”

He was to regret those words later, as much as any words he had spoken in his life, but they seemed insignificant at the time and his mind had already shifted to the practical problems of getting ashore.

He directed his coxswain to land as near to the fort as they dared, for the beach was quite deserted at this point and he trusted that the combination of spray from the breakers and blinding rain would sufficiently dissuade the gunners from trying their luck with a long shot. In this at least his faith was not misplaced and they landed without incident, though thoroughly soaked by the surf and with some misgivings that they would invite a sortie from the fort, for it looked a great deal further to the dunes than it had from the main-top of the
Unicorn
.

Nathan took Bennett and Whiteley with him, and the six marines, instructing Young to cast off if they came under fire and pick them up further down the shore. Then they ran for the dunes.

They were a little under halfway when a distant report indicated that they had tested the restraint of the gunners beyond endurance. The first shot ploughed into the sand some twenty or thirty yards ahead of them. The second was closer. Nathan shouted for the men to spread out to present less of a target but it seemed to him that the gunners then concentrated their fire upon him, which was as unfair as it was unnerving. One ball hit the sand almost at his heels and he swore he felt the wind of another pass his head. He was not amused to note that a number of figures—Royalists, judging from their uniform—had appeared on the dunes ahead and a little to his left and appeared to be urging him on with broad grins and shouts of approval. Nevertheless he changed direction towards them and managed to reach shelter with nothing more serious to regret than the loss of his dignity.