The Price of Glory (31 page)

A horseman came galloping up from the palace to report another attack, from the north, this time, on the Rue Saint-Honoré. And so it went on, throughout the morning. Dashing from place to place, fighting fire with fire. And always the little general was there.

“It is necessary to be seen to be in command,” Nathan heard him say to Junot at one point. “Or the rogues won't fight for you.”

It seemed to work. The rogues seemed more than happy to fight for him. Nathan saw the grins they gave him when he came running up with his long hair flapping about his shoulders, his spaniel's ears. The little corporal, they called him, which puzzled Nathan until Junot explained that a corporal was always in the front line with the men, whereas a general invariably stayed at the rear, giving orders. But it seemed to Nathan that the besiegers lacked any enthusiasm to push their attacks home, especially when they saw the cannon. They had no appetite for grapeshot and he did not blame them. He sometimes wondered if his own men would have faced it on the decks of the
Unicorn,
if there had been anywhere to run to. He sometimes wondered it about himself.

Towards midday he found himself in a little street off the Rue Saint-Honoré, a cul-de-sac with a church at the far end which someone told him was called the Saint-Roch; the Royalists were said to be using it as a stronghold. It looked to Nathan more as if they were using it as a sanctuary or a suitable place to die. Two or three hundred of them were gathered on the church steps, some in the uniform of the National Guard, others in their shirtsleeves or flapping coat-tails. About a hundred men came pouring out of the Convention building, members of the “patriot battalion,” representatives for the most part, fired with the expectation of victory. They charged down the narrow cul-de-sac—and came racing back when the enemy opened fire.

When the smoke cleared, Nathan observed a man in a white shirt with a red bandana tied round his head who appeared to be organising the Royalists into ranks on the steps of the church. He seemed vaguely familiar but there was still too much smoke to see him clearly. Then Buonaparte came riding up on a white horse someone had found for him. Nathan remembered what the general had said to him in the Procope: “If the king had mounted upon his horse and shown himself their leader, the day would have been his.”

But there were disadvantages in showing oneself too prominently. Rallied by the man in the red bandana, the dissidents were advancing down the street, firing as they came. Either the horse was hit or it slipped on the cobbles and went down. And Buonaparte with it.

The horse was up in an instant but in a blind panic, running towards the church and the advancing enemy, dragging the little general with it, his boot caught up in the stirrup.

Nathan ran forward. It was the first opportunity he'd had to knock him on the head. Instead, he grabbed the horse by the trailing reins and held it by the bit, doing his best to calm it. He did not know why. Possibly it was instinctive. As he would have helped any man who had fallen off his horse shortly after they had boThenjoyed a good dinner. A shot took off his hat and another hit the horse in the head taking it down for good. Then Junot was there with a squad of regular soldiers and the enemy falling back towards the church.

Five minutes later, Buonaparte brought up six cannon and blew them to pieces.

Nathan stood at the end of the little street, watching. It seemed, apart from holding Buonaparte's map and his horse, that this was all he had done during the entire course of the battle. Watching while the Royalist cause was dashed to death on the cobbled streets of Paris. The counter-Revolution, it appeared, was over, the 30,000 men of the sections melting away into the shadows of the city, taking their muskets and their uniforms with them.

The victors were gathering about their hero, patting his shoulders, shaking his hand. He broke free and came over to Nathan, seized him by the ear and pinched it hard. Nathan stared at him in astonishment. Was this an admonition or some strange Corsican ritual? But the general was smiling.

“I told you, you are my lucky star,” he said.

He moved on, to better things, more important people.

“All it took” Nathan heard him say, “was a whiff of grapeshot.”

Junot came up, also grinning. “A glorious victory,” he said.

But to Nathan it was more like a slaughter. He walked towards the little church where the dead and the dying were piled up on the steps. Among them was the man in the red bandana and Nathan saw, with a shock of surprise, that it was Bennett.

The bandana was red from the blood that had soaked into it from a head wound. More serious was the great hole torn in his stomach. He probably had minutes to live but he recognised Nathan when he knelt down beside him and he writhed his mouth into a parody of the familiar mocking grin.

“So you chose the winning side this time,” he said. “Unlike me.”

He coughed up blood.

“I will find you a doctor,” Nathan told him, wondering where he could even begin. Perhaps Buonaparte could help if he could find him.

Bennett moved his head wearily from side to side. “I am a dead man,” he said. He seemed quite calm about it. Nathan looked about him, at the bodies piled up on the steps of the church and all along the little cul-de-sac. “Why did you join them?” he asked wonderingly.

“Wrong place, wrong time. I have never been able to say no.” Nathan raised the man's head from the cobbles. He tore off his stock and wiped the blood from his mouth and chin.

“Thank you.” Bennett caught Nathan's hand. “There is something I have to tell you. The hostages … One of them was your countess.”

Nathan did not know what he meant at first. Then he remembered what the American had told him when they were walking in the Luxembourg Gardens: about certain hostages that had been taken at Quiberon who would suffer if he played false with his new masters of the
Sûreté
.

“She escaped. I heard last night. Before all this.”

“Escaped?” Nathan stared at him. “From where? The Châtelet?”

“No.” Bennett ran his tongue over his dry lips and Nathan wished he had water for him. “From Auray. With some others.”

“But how do you know?”

That parody of a smile again but his voice was a rasping saw, a death rattle in his throat. “There are others who love her. Besides you.”

“Charette?”

“Charette is dead. By firing squad.”

“How can I find her?”

“She will head south. For Provence. Where she came from. She told you that.”

How in God's name could he have known that? Was he another of those unhappy men who loved her?

“There is something else … Gillet. He will kill you. You have to leave Paris.”

He choked and a gush of blood came out of his mouth on to the cobbles. Nathan felt him die in his arms. He laid his head down gently and stood up, wiping his hands on the bloodied stock. Then he saw Ouvrard. The banker had a musket in his hands and a bandolier around his chest, but if he had been in a battle it had not left its mark on him.

“Someone you knew?” he said.

“A fellow American.” There was no point in hiding it. “God knows how he got caught up in this.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. It's not
my
blood.” Nathan looked down at the dead man at his feet. “I would like to make sure he gets a decent burial,” he said.

“Let him be buried with the men he chose to die with,” said Ouvrard. It sounded callous but he was probably right. Besides, how was Nathan to arrange a funeral? “Here.” Ouvrard passed him a hip-flask. The brandy caught at his throat and he felt its fiery heat reaching deep into his stomach.

“You saved Buonaparte's life,” said the banker.

How did he know that?
It was not a story Nathan wished to have repeated. “I just stopped his horse from running away with him.” He passed the flask back and wiped his mouth. He needed to get away from here. He needed to get away from Paris. He began to walk back towards the Convention building hoping to leave Ouvrard behind him but the banker fell in step beside him.

“It is good to have credit with a great man,” he said. “You never know when you might need it.”

Nathan smiled grimly. “So he is a great man now?” he said.

The lobby where Nathan had arrived barely twelve hours ago had been turned into a field hospital. Here were plenty of doctors, if a little too late for Bennett; even nurses.

“The wives and daughters of our representatives,” Ouvrard informed him. “Come to tend their wounded heroes.”

The ones who had not been wounded were already making speeches in the Conference Hall. Buonaparte, looking more raga-muffin than ever, was standing beside Legendre on the Presidium.

“Yesterday they would not even give him a uniform,” murmured Ouvrard. “Now he can have anything he wants.”

“Barras promised him the Army of Italy,” said Nathan.

“Well, he might have to wait a bit for that,” said the banker. “There is still some clearing up to be done here in Paris.”

“But then?”

“Oh, then I think it is safe to say he will be heading south. And the Genovese may wish they had been more obliging. So, my friend,” he clapped Nathan on the shoulder and gave him a shrewd look, “you can go back to London and tell Imlay to buy as much of America as he can afford. Tell him the Republic is back in business and soon we will have money in the bank—even if it is not ours.”

A
LIGHT
BREEZE
from the west-south-west wafted the frigate
Unicorn
gently along the rocky coast of Genoa under a full spread of sail that should, touching wood, bring her to her rendezvous with the British Mediterranean fleet shortly before nightfall. Almost as satisfyingly, a delightful smell of coffee, bacon and eggs rose from the galley to tease the olfactory senses of her captain who had not eaten, by his own reckoning, which was almost invariably accurate in such matters, for a little over ten hours.

Nathan had been up for the last two of them, pacing the weather side of the quarterdeck or gazing out over the lightening sea towards the distant coast of Liguria which lay under a slight haze off the lar-board bow. Twice he had taken his glass aloft for a better view and been rewarded, as the haze lifted, with a glimpse of snow upon the high peaks of the Alps, which swept down almost to the sea at this point, and, at a lesser distance, of a small fishing village with lime-washed houses clinging to the sharply-rising cliffs like so many barnacles. And the sea and the cliffs, the little houses and the mountains beyond, all bathed in the rising sun of a beautiful spring morning. He thought he had never seen such a pleasing or more peaceful coastline.

It was not likely to remain so.

All along the Côte d'Azur, between Saint-Raphael and Nice and up into the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes, the French Army of Italy was preparing for war. And heading south from Paris to take up his long-awaited command, if the intelligence was correct, was Nathan's impatient young friend, Captain Cannon.

He would not be unopposed. Somewhere among these mountains were 30,000 Austrian and Piedmontese troops, Britain's chief remaining allies in the war against Revolutionary France. And between these two opposing forces—the Serene Republic of Genoa, whose present neutrality in this war would not save it from the consequences.

It was very likely that Buonaparte would find Italy a tougher nut to crack than the Garde Parisienne. If the Allied troops did not beat him, the mountains would. Besides, in Nathan's considered if as yet unsought opinion, the main thrust of the French spring offensive would come much further north and from General Hoche's Army of the Rhine. Captain Cannon and his Army of Italy were small fry: a mere diversion. Not that this would make it any easier for the even smaller fry in their way.

Or for Nathan, whose role in this gathering storm was fraught with the usual complications.

His instructions from the Admiralty were punctuated with numerous caveats and preconditions and references to important if obscure individuals whose good opinion, unlike Nathan's, was very much valued by His Majesty, even if His Majesty was doubtless as much in ignorance of their existence as Nathan had been until his present commission.

A minor star in this galaxy was even now hovering upon the edge of Nathan's vision.

“Signor Grimaldi, come sta?”
Nathan greeted him, thus exhausting his command of the Italian tongue, though he comforted himself with the thought that in extremis he could probably get by with Latin. Not that it would be necessary in this case, for Grimaldi spoke perfect English, rather better in fact than most of Nathan's officers and crew, and Nathan's greeting had been in the nature of a jocular and faintly ironic welcome to his native land.

It was not as well received as he might have hoped.

“Good morning,” replied George Grimaldi, with a thin smile. He was a man of about thirty with saturnine good looks, impeccable dress and a considerable opinion of his own consequence. Though he had been born and raised in Genoa, and spoke fluent Italian, he had spent most of his life in England, where a branch of the Grimaldi family had been established since the reign of James II and where they had the honour—as Nathan had been loftily informed—of being kin to the Lords of Beaufort. Despite such pretensions, he had been groomed for a career in merchant banking, which had been the family business for some several hundred years, and he had been introduced to Nathan in London as a representative of the Casa di San Giorgio and the nephew of Frederico Grimaldi, a present director of the bank. But he had other, less well-defined links with the directors of the Bank of England. Certainly it was the ubiquitous Bicknell Coney who had prevailed upon the Admiralty to ship him to Genoa aboard the
Unicorn,
though the precise nature of his mission there had not thus far been disclosed to her captain.