Ричард Вудмен - Beneath the aurora

Drinkwater succumbed to the temptation to pour another glass and sat again, turning his chair so that it faced the dying fire. He was in no mood to return to a house empty of all except its staff. Bending, he stoked the fire into a final flaring, listening awhile to the boom of the gale across the massed chimney pots on the roof above while the tiny flames licked round the glowing coals, then subsided into a dull, ruby coruscation.

He brooded on his predicament. He was supposed to be a puppet-master, pulling strings at the extremities of which several score of agents danced, ceaselessly gleaning information for the British Admiralty. Templeton, his confidential cipher clerk, decoded their messages and entered their dispatches in the guard books. He was a genius of sorts, a man whose mind could disinter a hidden fact, cross-refer it to some other seemingly unrelated circumstance and draw a thread of logic from the process. Except, of course, when he disagreed, as at present. Then he could be monstrously stubborn. Drinkwater sometimes marvelled at the obscure man's abilities, quite oblivious of his own part in these deliberations and the confidence his personal imprimatur gave Templeton. He was more likely to see himself as a fish out of water, an ageing and foppish extravagant in his bottle-green coat and his increasingly affected mode of speaking. It seemed to him that he had reached this point in his life without quite knowing how he had got there, carried, like a piece of wood on the tide, into some shallow backwater and left grounded in a creek.

He had fondly supposed that he would see something of his wife, but Elizabeth and the children were almost a hundred miles away, in Suffolk, while he vegetated in the capital, choking on smoke and falling victim to the blue devils and every quinsy and ague coughed over him by London's denizens! Moira had implied he might mastermind a coup , insisting Dungarth knew him capable of executing some brilliant feat. But while Drinkwater had pored in fascination over the papers pasted in the guard books, prompted by a natural curiosity concerning the fate of Madame Santhonax, whose husband Drinkwater had killed in action, he had come to realize all such opportunities seemed to reside firmly in the past, and the distant past at that. [See Baltic Mission .]

His present duties seemed to entail nothing more than reading endless reports and dispatches, many of no apparent meaning, still less of significance, until he dozed over them, half asleep with inertia.

'God's bones,' he had snapped at Templeton one morning, 'what am I to make of this catalogue of stupefying facts? If they conceal some great truth then it passes over my head.'

'Patience, sir,' Templeton had soothed, 'gold is never found in great quantities.'

'Damn you for your philosophical cant, Templeton! Did Lord Dungarth never venture abroad, eh? Send himself on some mission to rouse his blood?'

'Yes, sir, indeed he did, and lost a leg if you recall, when his carriage was mined by Bonaparte's police.'

'You are altogether too reasonable for your own good, Templeton. If you were on my quarterdeck I should mast-head you for your impudence.'

'You are not on your quarterdeck, Captain Drinkwater,' Templeton had replied coolly, with that fastidious detachment which could either annoy or amuse Drinkwater.

'More's the damned pity,' Drinkwater had flung back, irritated on this occasion and aware that here, in the Admiralty, he was bereft of the trappings of pomp he had become so used to. It reduced the bottle-green coat to the uniform of a kind of servitude and his clipped speech to a pompous mannerism acquired at sea through the isolation of command. Neither consideration brought him much comfort, for the one reminded him of what he had relinquished, the other of what he had become.

Nevertheless, Drinkwater mused, leaning back in his chair and staring into the fire's dying embers, it seemed enough for Templeton methodically to unscramble the reports of spies while Drinkwater himself ached for something useful to do, instead of this tedious seeking of windmills to tilt at.

He was fast asleep when Templeton knocked on the door and he woke with a start as the clerk urgently shook his shoulder. Templeton's thin visage hung over him like a spectre.

'Captain Drinkwater, sir, wake up!'

'What the devil ...?' Drinkwater's heart pounded with alarm, for there was something wild in Templeton's eye.

'I have just received a message from Harwich, sir. Sent up post-haste by a Lieutenant Sparkman.'

'Who the devil is he?' Drinkwater asked testily, his eye catching sight of a folded paper in Templeton's hand.

'An Inspector of Fencibles…'

'Well?'

'He is holding a prisoner there, sir, a man claiming to be a colonel in the service of the King of Naples.'

'The King of Naples? Marshal Murat?'

'The same ...'

'Let me see, damn it!' Drinkwater shot out his hand, took the hurriedly offered note and read:

Sir, I have the Honour to Acquaint Their Lordships that I am just Arrived at Harwich and have in My Custody a Man just lately Arrived upon the Coast and claiming to be a Colonel Bardolini, in the Service of the King of Naples and Invested with Special Powers. I have Lodged him in the Redoubt here and Await your Instructions at the Three Cups Inn.

Sparkman, Lieutenant and Inspector of Sea Fencibles

Drinkwater turned the letter over and read the superscription with a frown.

'This is addressed to the Secretary…'

'Mr Croker is at Downing Street, Captain Drinkwater, and Mr Barrow is paying his respects to Mr Murray, the publisher.'

A wry and rather mischievous expression crossed Templeton's face. 'And it is getting rather late.' Templeton paused. 'I was alone in the copy room when the messenger was brought in...' The clerk let the sentence hang unfinished between them.

'A coup de hasard , is it, Mr Templeton?'

'Better than the coup de grâce for the Department, sir.'

'Perhaps.' Drinkwater paused. 'What d'you think it means? I recollect it was Murat's men who approached Colonel ... damn me, what was his name ...?'

'Colonel Coffin, sir, he was commanding Ponza and received overtures from Naples to Lord William Bentinck at Palermo,' said Templeton, already moving across the room to the long wooden box on the table from which he pulled an equally long drawer. It contained a well-thumbed card index and Templeton's thin fingers manipulated the contents with practised ease. After a moment he drew out a small, white rectangle covered with his own meticulous script. Holding it up to the candles he read aloud: 'Joachim Murat, born Lot 1767, trooper 1787, commissioned 1792, Italy, Egypt, assisted Bonaparte in his coup d'état , commanded Consular Guard, fought at Marengo and in operations against King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies…'

'Whom he has now despoiled of half his kingdom,' put in Drinkwater, 'and not in the manner of a fairy tale.'

'No, indeed,' Templeton coughed and resumed the card's details. 'Marshal of France 1804, occupied Vienna 1805, Grand Duke of Berg and Cleves 1808, Jena, Eylau, Madrid, King of Naples 1808. Commanded cavalry of Grande Armee in Russia, succeeded Bonaparte as C-in-C. Married to Caroline Bonaparte ...' Templeton paused, continuing to read in silence for a moment. Then he looked up, smiling.

'In addition to the communication opened with Coffin and Lord William, we have several references to him from captains of men-of-war off the Calabrian coast.'

Drinkwater knew that the card index, with its potted biographies, was but an index to the volumes of guard books, and the references to which Templeton referred were intelligence reports concerning Marshal Murat, husband of Caroline Bonaparte and puppet King of Naples.