The Moonless Night (2 page)

David dashed into the Hall to interrupt the taking of the posset, to his aunt’s dismay, but he never minded old Biddy. He had soon talked his father into being thrilled with the idea. “I wonder it wasn’t thought of before. An excellent notion. You are as long-headed as they come. A chip off the old block, heh heh.”

Long before the hour’s rest was up, the pair of them were driving into Plymouth to purchase a powerful telescope to be erected at Bolt’s Point, where men would be on duty from dawn to dark, looking out to sea, when they should be cutting hay and picking vegetables. Boltwood’s army was comprised entirely of Sir Henry’s own fieldhands.

Marie went along with them for something to do. It was hard getting the days in at Bolt Hall, and any diversion was welcome, particularly a diversion that featured so many strangers, many of them wearing the scarlet tunic and shako of the army lately stationed at Plymouth, and many more wearing the more familiar blue tunic of the navy. Accompanied by a father who looked considerably like a dragon, and a dashing gentleman who might have been a beau for all a stranger knew, she had very little entertainment other than looking at the young men. They greeted her with respect and reserve. She didn’t get so much as a nod from any of them.

David, who went to Plymouth with no thought of romance, had his mind jolted in that direction by the appearance of Madame Monet. This intriguing foreigner had reached Plymouth the week previously, when Bonaparte had been at Tor Bay. She was a French lady of doubtful background and uncertain years, though Biddy said certainly she was not under thirty. In any case, she wore the remnants of a handsome, lively face, and managed her eyes better than Bonaparte managed an army. She was a subject of consuming interest to the younger Bolts. David of course assumed she was a spy, come here for the purpose of freeing her lover, Napoleon. Marie would have liked to share this view, but had had dinned into her ears by Biddy that “the creature” was here for a quite different purpose, to land Sir Henry. As Madame’s forward behavior tended to support this claim, Marie was forced to put some faith in it.

On this occasion, Madame Monet wore her golden curls pinned up under a wide-brimmed bonnet of peacock blue, her full frame encased in a gown of similar color, and in her hand she carried a parasol to ward off the sun. Her eyes widened with interest as she spotted the Boltwood party, and she was soon rushing towards them, having scraped an acquaintance first with David—not difficult to achieve—and soon enlarged it to include the whole ménage.

“Sir Henry—
enchantée
to see you!” she smiled, revealing a set of teeth in good repair. “I had fear the humid weather would unsettle you.” She offered her hand, which Sir Henry accepted with diffidence. He was no stranger to the theory that Madame had designs on him, and while he was not averse to the sympathy of a pretty woman, he did not wish to make it a permanent feature in his life, so treated her with reserve.

“It takes its toll,” he admitted stoically.

“Ah, but you are pale like a ghost,” she complimented him.

“I have been leeched,” he informed her, and was congratulated on this wisdom.

“How do the preparations go on at Bolt Hall?” she asked, knowing what subjects were pleasing to him.

David slid a knowing glance to his sister.
Here is what she is really after
, it said. She was told about the telescope, and expressed such an interest in it that David had to interfere before she got herself invited up to the Point for a demonstration by his father. If anyone took her, it would be himself.

“Any news on the quay today?’ David asked, to change the subject.

“A rumor for every hour, each proved untrue in its turn. They have turned three hundred customers away at the inn where I stay, and raise the rates every day. They are trying to put an actress into my room with me!
Mon Dieu
, how I wish I had some acquaintances in the neighborhood to stay with. To be jostled and crowded by commoners is not at all
comme il faut
, not what I am accustomed to.”

“You would be wise to leave,” Sir Henry told her, his tough old heart completely in league with anyone who disliked a too close propinquity to commoners.

“But where to go?” she asked pathetically, hitting him with the full force of her large eyes, hinting at unshed tears. “Do you have many guests at Bolt Hall?” she asked next, making her aim quite clear.

The question went unanswered. “I meant leave the neighborhood entirely,” Sir Henry explained. “This is no place for a lady.”

“I plan to return to France as soon as that Corsican villain is sent away,” she explained at once. “There I have many friends. My husband’s home, the Château de Ferville, was requisitioned by Napoleon, you must know. Hundreds of his soldiers desecrating its priceless walls. The Gobelin tapestries thrown on the floor for blankets or rugs. The paintings used for target practice, the silverplate for tools, and the
meubles, sans prix
, thrown into the grate for firewood. The only thing I managed to rescue was the Monet sapphires, worth a small fortune of course, and a few smaller jewels that I pawn from day to day to pay for the inn. I fear for my sapphires, at that inn with poor locks. But I always take them with me when I go out. I have them on me now, but it is impossible to show them to you,” she explained, patting her bosom to show their resting place. “I shall stay and see with my own eyes he is deported. They should kill him.”

This tale of awful behavior struck a responsive cord with Sir Henry, who was always happy to hear ill of a foreigner. To hear repeated his own theory that Napoleon ought to be killed went down even better. “Ought to be drawn and quartered,” he agreed.

“You should set up a petition to that effect. Mine would be amongst the signatures,” she told him, having heard in the streets of his fondness for a petition.

Somehow the idea of petitioning the Emperor’s death had not occurred to him. In truth, little did occur to him till it occurred first to another who told him of it. The notion appealed strongly to him at once. To be heading up another committee, dashing about from one illustrious home to another spouting off his ideas, having his name in the papers—it would have the parish board beat all hollow for distinction. They’d write it up in London. He thought of his racked constitution, hardly kept on his pegs by the ministrations of his sister, and wondered if he were up to it. But standing in the sweltering sun talking to a foreigner he was not up to, and soon was taking his leave.

“Do you have many guests at Bolt Hall?” Madame repeated, just before he got away.

“We are not set up for company at the Hall,” he answered.

She blinked her big blue eyes to hear a huge mansion, a castle really in all but name, with close to forty bedchambers and as many servants, was incapable of taking a single guest.

“Is no one at all with you?” she asked, stunned.

“No, no one. Good day, Madame,” Sir Henry said, bowed formally, and left. David cast one last suspicious glance at Madame, torn by the conflicting desires of keeping the spy out in the cold and getting her to Bolt Hall, where he could keep a sharper eye on her, and possibly be compelled, in the line of duty of course, to make love to her.

“You see what she’s up to,” he said to his father. “She wants to get into Bolt Hall to interfere with our preparations. I don’t doubt she’s in league with the set that plans to free Boney.”

Marie had mixed emotions. Madame was vulgar of course, and she had not the least desire to acquire her for a stepmother, but men followed in Madame’s wake in shoals. With this French fleur in the saloon, it would not long be empty of men. She placed little reliance on the story that Madame was in on the scheme, if there even was one.

There was no doubt allowed in the matter of the scheme’s existence so far as the men were concerned. The preparations at the Hall, the assembled yachts, the painting of the keel, the new telescope—all were founded on this hypothesis, and it was long established as fact. No man could call himself Sir Henry’s friend at such a time if he did not subscribe to the theory, and by talking it over with the converted it had gone beyond dispute that there was such a plot, but of so secretive and insidious a nature that they had not yet discovered anything about it.

Chapter 2

In a small, out-of-the-way corner within the labyrinth that is Whitehall, there is one office whose door bears no brass plaque, whose inhabitants, and they are only two, are not officially listed in the records of the Admiralty, to which department they are assigned. It would be easy to imagine the elderly gentleman who presides over his one employee there as a king’s pensioner, given a corner to grow old in in payment for some minor service to his country in times gone by. His nearest neighbor within the building, a very junior liaison man for the naval supplies department, smiles on him with great condescension and pity, and thanks his stars that he has an uncle who is married to a lady who is connected with Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, or he too might end up in such obscurity. The young liaison officer is not personally acquainted with his tenuous connection: Lord Melville, does not, in fact, recognize him when he sees him several times a month, come into this backwater of the building.

Had he been at his door any time during the past four days he might, however, have recognized the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, for he had been presented to him at a ball once, and he would have recognized the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Eldon, as every public servant knew him and his nasty temper. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Vansittart, went in unrecognized, along with sundry less exalted personages attached to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The Prime Minister had not been to call, but it was not unknown for that elderly gentleman to meet with him in cabinet at Downing Street.

The traffic to and from the little office was not always heavy; sometimes no one came for days in a row, but recently there had been many comings and goings, ever since Napoleon had escaped from Elba, but more especially since he had been defeated at Waterloo. Between June nineteenth and twenty-second, Sir George had not been home at all. As chief of Admiralty Intelligence, he had been greatly occupied to discover the movements of Napoleon, and more importantly, his plans.

So efficient was Sir George’s operation that he knew within a hundred guineas how much property the lately deposed Emperor had amassed for his escape, including his stepdaughter Queen Hortense’s farewell gift of her diamond necklace, exchanged for his wedding ring. Gold, silverplate, books—all were inventoried. One could not but respect a man who worried about his books with his neck stretched so far out. He knew how many of his followers were with him at Rochefort—sixty-four, including Fouché and of course his loyal valet, Marchand. Knew as well that Rochefort, the most easily blockaded port in all of France, had been chosen by Fouché and Savary. With such friends, Boney had no need of enemies. He’d be dead by now if that pair had their way. The precise options open to Bonaparte were known, along with the persons who had proposed them, and the reasons why they had been rejected. Captain Philibert was for taking him to America in style and openly, but the safe conduct had not come through. Fat chance! Las Cases and his set were for smuggling him to America by means of a plan devised by Admiral Martin, a veteran
Seadog
. Slip him onto the frigate
Bayadère
, anchored in the Gironde, and hence across the sea to America. Yet another loyal follower, Besson, offered to run the English blockade and smuggle him to America with a cargo of cognac, hiding him in a cask if searched. But the Emperor—funny how one went on considering him an Emperor still—was too proud for that. His brother Joseph’s offer to pose as the Emperor at Aix while Napoleon made good his escape was likewise rejected. Faithful—he had a certain style, an integrity. He was not for saving himself at the cost of his friends and family.

Returning to Paris with Louis XVIII already in power was out. The solution found, foolish as it sounded, was to come to England, the oldest and most hated of his enemies. Here, in this bastion of personal freedom, he hoped to go free, and he would be disappointed. Thought he would set himself up as an English squire as his brother had been permitted to do in Worcestershire. But Lucien and Napoleon were two very different articles. If one thought for a moment Liverpool and Eldon would allow it, an accident might be arranged, but there was no danger. The English government officials were as one in not wanting him. Not one bloody toe would he set on English soil. Plymouth Harbor—that’s as close as he would get to England’s shores, and it was too close for comfort!

There was a tap at the door of Sir George FitzHugh’s oak-paneled office, and a tall young gentleman strolled in, nodded without smiling, and possessed himself of the stiffly uncomfortable settee lately used as Sir George’s bed. He threw one leg over the other, stretched his arms along the settee’s back and said in a bored voice, “Well, Fitz, let’s have it. You haven’t summoned me here…”

“
Invited
, my friend,” Fitz corrected.

“True, the message was worded as an invitation, but somehow you know, when one of your demmed clerks pulls me by the elbow as I strut down Bond Street—I wish you would ask him not to pull at one’s jacket—and shouts ‘Urgent,’ one feels the invitation to be—ah, peremptory.”

“Did he do so? Well I’m very sorry about the jacket, but the deuce of it is, it’s a bit of a rush affair this time.”

The gentleman gazed at a mote of dust on his Hessians and frowned. Receiving no further intelligence from his informer, he finally raised his dark eyes. “Do go on, Fitz,” he invited.

“Yes, a rush affair. Very hush hush, you know,” he continued in a low voice, his blue eyes peering about the room, as though the walls might have ears. Satisfying himself at length that he had only the one hearer, he announced in a voice of strained solemnity, “It’s Boney, you see.”

The guest jerked to attention. “He hasn’t got away!” he asked, in a voice much too loud to please Fitz. He was told by a finger to Sir George’s lips that his tone was to be lowered.