T.F. Banks - The Emperor's assassin

Smooth, elongated clouds began to drift across the stars, and the risen moon, three-quarters full, cast a pale light over the ocean. Its glow also lit for a few moments a dim whiteness in the face of the headland, before it passed again behind a cloud, illuminating it from within.

“They's Ram Cliff Point, the cliffs there,” Berman said quietly. “Statten's next. Bovisand Bay's beyond.”

They altered course and worked their way parallel to the invisible shore below the cliffs, surrounded entirely now by pitchy blackness. They looked constantly from larboard to starboard, on the one hand for signs of the beach, and on the other for any motion or sound coming from the direction of the Bellerophon , which had to be somewhere off in the obscurity to the west.

After some minutes, from that direction, they began to hear a steady, quiet splashing sound. Morton asked the others to put up their oars, and they all sat still, straining to hear. The sound continued low and steady, neither strengthening nor receding.

Finally Berman whispered, “Ah! That be the new breakwater.”

Morton drew breath, and they set off again. Twenty minutes later Berman muttered that they should come about now and head in.

Then it went more quickly, as they surged along with the low swell, all of them keeping very quiet. Out of the dark they soon saw emerging a horizontal ribbon of pale grey, and began to hear the surf. A minute later their keel grated on the shore. Morton and Berman silently leapt into the shallows and pulled the boat briskly up into the shelter of black, weed-slick rocks.

For a moment the four men stood on the strand, listening. But they heard only the breeze whistling softly around them and the low, hollow crash of each new wave on the beach, the slow moan as it retreated. A wavering line of foam stretched off both ways into the dimness.

“You have no part in this,” Morton said to Berman. “But I would be obliged if you would wait by the boat, which we might need to return.”

Berman nodded quickly and turned back to his boat, coiling the painter with quick, smooth motions. Morton thought he had the man's measure. The smugglers along this coast could be dangerous folk and were not averse to violence or even murder when their interests were at stake-as some of the customs officers had discovered to their woe. But Berman didn't want to be party to a murder that failed to serve his own advantage. These Bow Street men had not pressed him on his role in these doings, and as long as they didn't threaten his freedom, he would stay quiet. And ferry any man left standing to the destination of his choice-for a price.

Morton turned to Westcott and Presley. “There should be only three men here for us to contend with: d'Auvraye, Rolles, and the third who accompanies them.”

“But didn't Boulot say there are a dozen men out to fetch the Corsican? Three royalists against twelve, Morton.”

“Three armed men who have the element of surprise. And we don't know how fanatical these three might be. They might not care if they are killed themselves.” Morton could hardly make out the others' faces in the deep darkness, but Westcott was shifting from foot to foot.

“Morton,” the navy man said, “if they somehow manage to get Bonaparte off the ship, I think stopping him from coming ashore will be paramount. These royalists, we can pick them up at our leisure-or they can escape. It hardly matters. But Bonaparte…”

Morton shook his head. “I am here to arrest men who are suspected in five murders. Bonaparte is nothing to me. I'm a Bow Street constable, and my duties are clear.”

“But what of your duties as an Englishman?”

“If Bonaparte comes ashore, Captain, it will be a matter for my government to deal with.”

“Well,” Westcott said angrily, “our duties are not the same here.”

“Then you must do yours, Captain Westcott.”

With these cold words hanging in the air, the three men set out along the slippery stone beach.

Berman had promised that Bovisand beach was less than a mile to the north. After a few hundred yards Morton led the way up from the water and started to skirt the base of the bluffs, where rocks and projections of various sizes provided shadows and concealment. Their progress slowed as they peered cautiously ahead.

Several times black forms looked like men but turned out to be still, silent mounds of rock or the strange shapes of weathered wood cast up from the sea. Straining to look into the darkness, they moved forward with ever more hesitation. There was an unearthly silence and emptiness here, a world occupied with spectral forms, the uncanny shapes of imagination seeming to flit across the distant sands each time the lightening veils of cloud shifted briefly away from the face of the moon.

They were forced up a narrow path where the cliff met the sea, but the rise was small, and they were soon almost at the crest. Morton held them up with a gesture of his hand; he did not want the silhouettes of their figures to appear along the skyline, their motion detectable in the moonlight. Leaving the path, he scouted along the slope until he found a small depression that provided them a place to lie on their bellies and peer through the tufts of grass that grew raggedly along the ridge. Cautiously all three brought themselves into position, working their way just far enough forward on their elbows, and looked over. Below them, still and quiet, lay a dark curving beach, the pale line of surf just visible in the dim light.

For a long moment they all gazed.

“Bovisand Bay,” Westcott said.

“But no one's home,” Presley said.

But then halfway along the curve of the bay, a flame lifted up, wavered in the black, and began to spread outward. A shadow passed before the orange glow, and then another. The shapes of men, gathered near. Three men. And close.

The three watchers above studied the scene for another long minute, without speaking.

“Smugglers light signal fires for their friends out at sea,” Westcott cautioned.

“I'd be very surprised if those weren't our men,” Morton answered quietly. He drew himself back below the top, and the others followed suit. In a moment they were crouching together in the lee.

“How should we proceed, Morton?” Presley took out his pistol and nervously checked the priming. Morton and Westcott left their own weapons pocketed.

“It is dark, and their night vision will be spoiled by the firelight,” said Morton. “If we stay near the base of the cliff and go quietly, we can surprise them from behind.”

“We might be detected the moment we cross that ridge.” Westcott gestured upward with a nod of his head.

“A risk we must take, I think.”

“Let's at them,” Jimmy Presley muttered.

The two Runners started upward again. Morton was looking for someplace where they could easily slip over the space of greatest visibility and conceal themselves again against the darkness of the far hillside. As they hesitated just below the ridge-top, Westcott's voice, calm but somehow changed, spoke from behind.

“Morton?” The familiar sound of a pistol being cocked came to their ears. “Hold where you are, both of you.”

Neither Morton nor Presley moved nor turned around.

“I shall have your pistols, if you please,” Westcott said calmly.

“You can only shoot one of us, Captain,” Morton said. “But I doubt you are that much of a traitor.”

“I'm not a traitor at all,” Westcott said, a cold edge in his voice. “I will not see Bonaparte come ashore and make a mockery of England because of our own foolish laws! The man cannot be allowed to simply go free. Can you not see that? He will wait until the Bourbons have antagonized the people of France, and then he will cross the Channel one night, and it will all begin again. And you would allow that? Who is the traitor here?”