The Flag of Freedom (36 page)

His eyes met Tully's and he saw the same baffled sense of wonderment. They looked again. In and out of the mist the great ships moved: three-deckers, two-deckers, frigates and sloops, transports – clumsy, lumbering beasts in a sea of blood, with here and there a flash of fire from the signal guns. And so many. They stretched away into the distance,
filling the vacuum between the
Swallow
and what should have been the horizon. Scores of them. Hundreds even. Not just a fleet but an armada, close-hauled on a course that would bring the first of them to Alexandria before dawn.

‘So you were right,' said Imlay, at his shoulder. ‘There is your proof.'

The invasion fleet. The very calamity he had warned against, and not an English ship within 2,000 miles of ocean that could stop them.

F
or two hours they watched the great fleet pass by, the nearest ships at a distance of about half a mile. And even when night fell, they saw the lights twinkling in the darkness, like a moving city in the sea. They had counted more than 200 sail, and Nathan reckoned that as many more must have passed by unseen.

‘What will you do?' asked Imlay. Perhaps he was thinking Nathan would insist on making straight for Gibraltar. But what was the point? It could take them a month to reach the Rock; longer still for Jervis to bring the fleet from Cadiz, even if he had the authority to quit his station.

‘There is nothing I
can
do,' Nathan told him, but it did not stop him thinking about it. All he could do was ensure they knew about it in England as fast as possible. Egypt did not matter, not to England. It would only matter if
Bonaparte used Egypt as a base to march overland to India. But he would not do that in a hurry. It had taken Alexander eight years. Even if Bonaparte marched in a straight line for 2,000 miles, even if he did not have to fight the Turks and the Persians every step of the way, it would take him at least six months, more like a year. Time enough to send a fleet and an army round Cape Horn if necessary, or at least to warn the Governor-General in Calcutta.

The more Nathan thought about it, the more he was inclined to continue with his journey northward – to Crete and then to Naples where he could report to Sir William Hamilton, the British Envoy there, and let him deal with it. If Hamilton sent a courier overland, travelling poste through Switzerland and Germany, the news could be in London within a fortnight.

But Nathan had sent the news of Bonaparte's intentions to England over a year ago and they had failed to act on it.

There was little satisfaction, Nathan discovered, in being proved right.

He lingered at the stern, looking back into the darkness towards the coast of Egypt. What a gamble, though, what an incredible roll of the dice. Four hundred ships, and God knows how many men – thirty or even forty thousand – launched across the sea to a distant shore, far from France, far from the main theatre of conflict. Only Bonaparte had the nerve for that – or the folly – or the vision. If he lost them, France would surely lose the war. But if he won …

He had done it before – in Italy. Nothing like as spectacular a gamble as this, but all the same … Two years ago, when he was appointed to command the
rag-tag Army of Italy, there were few in England, or Austria, or even in France, who believed he could get it to fight, much less take it across the Alps, win a half-dozen battles, conquer half of Italy and force the Austrians to make a humiliating peace for fear of losing Vienna. If he did the same in Egypt … Well, Billy Pitt might be compelled to throw in the towel. For if the British lost India, there was the end to Empire.

And that little man with his sallow complexion and his greasy locks would be the new Alexander – with the world at his feet. Who would have thought it? Certainly not Nathan, when he had first run into him in Paris in '95 – the little
chef de brigade
in his shabby uniform, looking for a job. And only Sergeant Junot to run his errands for him, and keep the wolves from the door.

Nathan turned away from the rail. He was exhausted. His eyes were red with sand and smoke, his legs like lead. Let Bonaparte have Egypt – he was welcome to it. He could have India, too. All Nathan wanted was his cabin and his cot and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. It was only as he stumbled down the companionway that he remembered: Miss Louisa Devereux of Virginia had his cabin, goddamn her – and goddamn Imlay for giving it to her. Wearily, he turned away and blundered down another deck to the gunroom to see what was available to him there.

For two days the wind served them well, blowing considerately and with some consistency from the south-south-east, and with sufficient force to move them along at a pace that even the impatient Imlay found acceptable.
Frequent castings of the log revealed that they were making between four and six knots from hour to hour – and in the right direction for once. The first day, from sunrise to sunrise, they covered a little over 120 miles, almost 150. Nathan remarked to Tully, with the usual caveats and cautions, that if the wind sustained them for a further twenty-four hours, he could not help ‘but think we might sight the mountains of Crete a little before sunrise upon the morrow'.

Unfortunately, this exchange was overheard by Mr Cathcart who, not being an officer, felt free to inform them, with a great air of scholarship, that the word
khamsin
in the Arabic meant fifty, because it was a wind that invariably blew for fifty days.

Although Nathan received the news with his usual courtesy, he wished Cathcart had kept it to himself. Winds, in his experi ence, being of a generally cantankerous nature, were wont to take any such prediction as an impertinence, and to demonstrate their wilfulness by doing the exact opposite of what was supposed of them. The khamsin proved no exception to this rule. Within a few hours of Cathcart's indiscretion it had dropped away to a mere zephyr and it proceeded to blow fitfully for the rest of the day. The following day it failed them completely and they lay becalmed for hours on end under the blazing sun.

In similar circumstance, with a Navy crew, Nathan might have put them to the boats. Sooner or later, if the wind continued to fail them, he knew he would have to, for their water supply was now running dangerously low. But he held off as long as possible. The mood among the crew had taken a considerable turn for the worse since the
battle with the
Meshuda
. They were sullen and recalcitrant, particularly the Russians. Their beloved leader had been buried at sea, as soon as the khamsin permitted, along with the others who had died, and after a final outpouring of grief, his followers had relapsed into a collective illhumour, enlivened by several instances of drunkenness which Nathan felt obliged to ignore for the time being. It was impossible to reason or remonstrate with them, for they barely spoke a few words of English between them and nothing of any other language. The rest of the crew steered clear of them for fear of provoking a row, and the mood between the Russians and the Americans was especially bad. It was only a matter of time before there was a fight and then Nathan would be compelled to take action – though without two score Marines at his disposal he was not optimistic of the outcome. He longed for the voyage to end.

‘What are you going to do with them when we reach Gibraltar?' he asked Imlay.

But Imlay did not know.

‘As far as I can gather, they do not wish to return to Russia,' he said, ‘for they fear to be hanged as deserters. And I do not know where else they might settle.'

‘Then I think you will have them for life,' Nathan told him heartlessly.

He had no doubt what
he
would do with them. He would happily surrender them to the first British cruiser he encountered and let the Navy knock them into shape. He was not in the best of humours himself.

He paid several visits to the sickbay to see how the wounded did. Two of them had died: the one whose leg
Kite had amputated and another who had taken a bullet in the chest. Three others, who had suffered only slightly from splinter wounds, appeared well on the way to recovery. Mr Lamb continued to give concern.

Nathan visited him as often as he could – he was down to two officers now and obliged to keep a watch himself – but though the boy was putting a brave face on it, he was obviously in a bad way.

Kite said he feared that pieces of clothing had been carried into the wound and that it had become infected.

‘His only chance is to probe for the ball,' he confided to Nathan.

Nathan had heard this before, but he knew from hard experience that probing invariably led to death, even when carried out by someone other than Mr Kite. Unless a ball of lead was lodged in some vital organ, when death was in any case inevitable, it was far better to leave it inside a man. One thing he knew for certain, if he let Kite dig around with a knife, the boy would die – and in a great deal of pain.

On the morning of the third day, to his considerable surprise, he found Louisa Devereux in the sick bay, apparently attending to the wounded.

Nathan had not seen her since she came aboard and his enquiries had been met with Imlay's assurance that she was ‘getting her strength back' and must not be disturbed. Mr Qualtrough had taken her in a little food from time to time, but she spent the greater part of her time asleep. But here she was sitting beside Mr Lamb with a basin on her knee, applying a cold compress to his fevered brow.

‘She wanted to make herself useful,' Kite told him – somewhat resentfully, Nathan thought.

But at least Mr Lamb appreciated it.

‘She is an angel,' he informed Nathan, with a ghastly grimace of a smile.

Nathan smiled and nodded, while privately wondering if she might prove to be the Angel of Death, for the boy's con dition gave him considerable cause for concern. In appearance, too, she looked the part; she still wore the black Arab clothing they had found her in, and her face was as white as the boy's. But he was impressed that she was here at all.

‘We will soon be in Crete,' he assured Lamb before he left. ‘And the Greeks, you know, are noted for the excellence of their physicians. Hippocrates himself was one.'

But the wind, or rather the lack of it, continued to frustrate them. For two long days they barely moved at all. Tully did his trick with the awnings and the fire engine, and Nathan had a sail slung over the side to the depth of four feet so that the off-duty watch might bathe, even those that could not swim. Most preferred to put out lines and fish. They were down to salt beef and pork and Nathan was worried about their reserves of water, not to speak of alcohol.

On the fifth day, the wind picked up a little and partway through the forenoon watch the foretop lookout alerted them to an approaching sail two points off the larboard bow – the first they had seen since their encounter with the French off Alexandria. But this was no Frenchman. As the two ships converged, Nathan announced, to the great delight of Imlay and the other Americans, that she flew the Stars and Stripes.

‘T
he Flag of Freedom, by God! Well, I'll be damned, I have not seen that since the war with the British.'

Captain Hosanna Poe was a big, bluff New Englander in his fifties whose pleasure at meeting up with an American vessel so far from home was matched only by his astonishment that she was a ship-of-war. His own command was the
Algonquin
brig, out of Plymouth, Massachusetts – bound for Aleppo, he told them, with a cargo of grain and molasses.

‘We called it the Navy jack in those days,' he said, still gazing up at the flag. ‘But that was when we
had
a Navy. I can not conceal my satisfaction, gentlemen, to be standing aboard a fighting ship once more, manned by my own countrymen.'

Nathan did not trouble to correct him in this
presumption, and if the Captain had noted the preponderance of Italians, Portuguese, Russians and Englishmen among the crew he did not allude to it.