Stephanie Barron: Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

“A beautiful and cunning creature I should not trust with a newborn kitten. I am hard on her heels — and but for this matter of death rites, should have subdued her long since.”

Whatever I might have feared — whatever I might have expected — it was hardly this. I was overcome, of a sudden, by foolish anger; hot tears started to my eyes.

“You asked that I dance attendance — cut short my nephews’ pleasure party, confound my friends, and be swung aboard your ship — so that you might boast of your conquests? Good God, sir! Have you no decency?”

“What a question for Jane to pose,” he replied brusquely. “You must know that I abandoned decency for necessity long ago. My every thought is bent upon Sophia. When you have seen her, you will comprehend why. She is magnificent — she is perilous — and I shall not rest until I have her in my grasp.”

I turned for the cabin door. “It is no longer in my power to remain, sir. Be so good as to summon a party of seamen to convey me to the Quay.”

“Have you heard of the Treaty of Tilsit, Jane?”

My hand on the latch, I stopped short.

“—the document forged last year between the Tsar of All The Russias, and the Emperor Napoleon? The treaty sets out, in no uncertain terms, the division of Europe between the two powers. It describes the destruction of England.”

“I have heard the name.”

“It is for Tilsit I was sent to Portugal. It is for Tilsit that good men have died — nay, shall yet die in droves — on the Iberian Peninsula. Are you not curious to learn more of such a potent subject?”

“My brother convoyed the English wounded from Vimeiro,” I said faintly. “He delivered French prisoners to Spithead as recently as September.” [5] The British army engaged the French at Vimeiro, Portugal, on August 21, 1808. It was the first British conflict on the Peninsula, and a decisive victory. — Editor’s note.

“It shall not be the last time.” Lord Harold’s voice was sharp with weariness. “Come away from the door, Jane. We have much to discuss.”

• • •

It is now nearly a twelvemonth since Napoleon Buonaparte placed his brother Joseph upon the throne of a unified Iberia — a move occasioned by the sudden descent of French soldiers on their trusted allies’ soil. At the close of last year, the Spanish king fled to Paris; and though the Portuguese crown declared war on England, Buonaparte pronounced the kingdom null and void regardless. The Portuguese royal family chose exile in Brazil, their fleet escorted by Britain’s Royal Navy — which did not care to see good ships fall into the Monster’s hands.

The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley, urged our current government to challenge the French on behalf of the Iberians. [6] Wellesley was thirty-eight years old in 1808, and would make his career in the Peninsular War. He was eventually created the Duke of Wellington, and confronted Bonaparte for the last time at Waterloo in 1815. — Editor’s note. The decision to invade was seconded by the Navy, which yearned to deny Buonaparte use of Lisbon’s deep-water harbour. Thirdly, the lives of British subjects were at issue, for the town of Oporto is overrun with Englishmen engaged in the Port wine trade. The idea that purveyors of domestic comfort — so vital, now that the wine from French vineyards is denied us — should be abandoned to the Enemy, aroused indignation in every breast.

Public sentiment on behalf of ports, Port, and the Portuguese ran so high that Sir Arthur sailed from Cork in July and touched first at Corunna and Oporto, where the British and natives alike regarded him as a liberator. I know this not merely from official accounts forwarded to London newspapers, but from my brother Frank, who escorted Sir Arthur’s troopships to the Portuguese coast.

By the first week in August, however, Wellesley’s fortunes were in decline. He found himself at the head of some thirteen thousand men, but short of cavalry mounts and supply waggons — and on the very eve of Vimeiro, superseded in his command by the arrival of no less than six superior generals, despatched by a nervous Crown. Frank’s ship, the St. Alban’s, stood out to sea off the heights of Merceira, and witnessed the French attack on the twenty-first of August. In the event, Sir Arthur proved too clever for Marshal Junot, who was thoroughly routed; but Generals Burrard and Dalrymple, Wellesley’s superiors, declined to pursue the retreating Enemy. As the St. Alban’s carried off the wounded English and the French prisoners, the British commanders signed a document of armistice, allowing the defeated Junot to send his men, artillery, mounts, and baggage back to France— in British ships . Public reaction to this infamy was so violent, that Dalrymple, Burrard, and Wellesley were called before a Court of Enquiry in September. King George censured Dalrymple; Parliament denounced the armistice. My brother fulminated for weeks against the stupidity of landsmen. Sir Arthur Wellesley, though protesting that he deplored the armistice, had signed the document — and thus shared his superiors’ disgrace. Nothing would answer the public outcry so thoroughly as a re-engagement on the Peninsula, with the Honourable General Sir John Moore, a celebrated soldier, at the head of a stout army. The General is presently encamped with twenty-three thousand men somewhere near Corunna; and we live in daily expectation of victory.

“Buonaparte has quit Paris,” Lord Harold told me, “and is on the road for Madrid. He intends to join Soult, wherever the Marshal is encamped.”

“I should not like to be in Sir John Moore’s shoes.”

“Of course not — your own half-boots are far more cunning, Jane, though they are black. But do not pity General Moore. There has not been such a command for a British officer since the days of Marlborough.”

“You believe, then, that we shall drive the French out of Portugal and Spain?”

“On the contrary: I hope that we are mired in the Peninsula’s muck for years to come. Only by forcing the Emperor to engage us on land, can we divert him from his mortal purpose — the destruction of England’s Navy, and with it, England herself.”

I laughed at him. “Do not make yourself anxious, my lord. The Royal Navy should never accept defeat.”

“Fine words, Jane. But you laugh at your peril. Buonaparte knows that he cannot prevail so long as England has her Navy; we know that England cannot survive so long as France possesses Buonaparte, and his Grand Armée. To defeat us, the Monster must seize or build more ships than we command: he cannot hope to destroy the Royal Navy with less than two vessels for every one of ours.”

“But Buonaparte thinks like a grenadier, not a sailor. Consider Trafalgar! French ships — aye, and Spanish, too! — routed, captured, or sunk!”

“Buonaparte has learned Nelson’s lesson. He will build more ships. Tilsit provides him with all that he requires: the timber of Europe — the labourers of a continent — and the command of every dockyard from Trieste to Cuxhaven. It is merely a matter of time before we fall to the French.”

I was silent an instant in horror. “But what is to be done?”

“Only the impossible. We must draw off the Monster — we must throw bodies into the Peninsula, into the maw of Napoleon’s cannon — to buy time for the Crown. We must bend all our energy towards outwitting the Enemy’s spies, by land or by sea. That is why I sailed to Portugal a year since — and why I am come tonight in haste to Southampton, in pursuit of a dangerous woman.”

The ship’s bells tolled the watch; a cavalcade of pounding feet outside the cabin door heralded the end of one crew’s vigil above decks, and the commencement of another’s. The brig rolled gently beneath my feet, a movement as mesmerising and soporific as Lord Harold’s voice. I had lost reckoning of time as surely as I had lost the will to leave him. My mother, Castle Square, the bereaved boys. . all had vanished, insubstantial as a whiff of smoke. Lord Harold moved to the cabin’s stern gallery, his gaze fixed on the lights of Southampton that twinkled now across the Water. When he spoke, it was as though to himself alone — or to some shadow present only in memory.