Under false colours nd-10 Read online

  Under false colours

  ( Nathaniel Drinkwater - 10 )

  Ричард Вудмен

  In 1809, working undercover for the Admiralty's Secret Department, Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater goes ashore and mingles with the dregs of London's dockland. Disguised as a Merchant Marine shipmaster of low character, he encounters a known French agent in a brothel and advertises his plans to carry military cargo to Russia.

  Intended to drive a wedge between Napoleon and his new ally, Czar Alexander, Drinkwater's mission is disrupted by tempestuous weather and a lost escort — a gun-brig commanded by his friend and protege. Reaching the British-occupied island of Helgoland, Drinkwater takes great personal risk by resolving on a bold course of action that is not endorsed by the Admiralty.

  Richard Woodman

  Under False Colours

  For my father, who first mentioned the Northampton boots.

  PART ONE

  The Baiting of the Eagle

  'The British Islands are declared to be in a state of blockade.

  All commerce and all correspondence with the British Isles are prohibited.

  Every . . . English subject . . . found in coun­tries occupied by our troops . . . shall be made prisoners of war.

  The trade in English commodities is pro­hibited

  Napoleon

  Articles 1,2,4 and 6, The Berlin Decree, 21 November 1806

  CHAPTER 1

  Upon a Secret Service

  August 1809

  'God's bones!'

  Nathaniel Drinkwater swallowed the watered gin with a shudder of revulsion. His disgust was not entirely attributable to the loathsome drink: it had become his sole consolation in the weary week he had just passed. Apart from making the water palatable the gin was intended as an anodyne, pressed into service to combat the black depression of his spirits, but instead of soothing, it had had the effect of rousing a maddeningly futile anger.

  He pressed his face against the begrimed glass of the window, deriving a small comfort from its coolness on his flushed forehead and unshaven cheek. The first floor window commanded a view of the filthy alley below. From the grey overcast sky — but making no impression upon the dirty glass — a slanting rain drove down, turning the unpaved ginnel into a quagmire of runnels and slime which gave off a foul stench. Opposite, across the narrow gutway between the smoke-blackened brick walls, a pie shop confronted him.

  'God's bones,' Drinkwater swore again. Never in all his long years of sea service had an attack of the megrims afflicted him so damnably; but never before had he been so idle, waiting, as he was, above a ship's chandler's store in an obscure and foetid alley off Wapping's Ratcliffe Highway.

  Waiting ...

  And constantly nagging away at the back of his mind was the knowledge that he had so little time, that the summer was nearly past, had already passed, judging by the wind that drove the sleet and smoke back down the chimney pots of the surrounding huddled buildings.

  Yet still he was compelled to wait, a God-forsaken week of it now, stuck in this squalid room with its spartan truckle bed and soiled, damp linen. He glared angrily round the place. A few days, he had been told, at the most ... He had been gulled, by God!

  He had brought only a single change of small clothes, stuffed into a borrowed valise with his shaving tackle; and that was not all that was borrowed. There were the boots and his coat, a plain, dark grey broadcloth. He had refused the proffered hat. He was damned if he would be seen dead in a beaver!

  'You should cut your hair, Drinkwater, the queue is no longer de rigueur.'

  He had avoided that humiliation, at least.

  He turned from the window and sat down, both elbows on the none-too-clean deal table. Before him, beside the jug and tumbler of watered gin, lay a heavy pistol. Staring at the cold gleam of its double barrels he reflected that he could be out of this mess in an instant, for the thing was primed and loaded. He shied bitterly away from the thought. He had traversed that bleak road once before. He would have to endure the gristle-filled pies, the cheap gin and the choked privy until he had done his duty. He swung back to the window.

  The rain had almost emptied the alley. He watched an old woman, a pure-finder, her head covered by a shawl, her black skirt dragging on the ground where amid the slime, she sought dog turds to fill the sack she bore. Two urchins ran past her, throwing a ball playfully between them, apparently oblivious of the rain. Drinkwater was not deceived; he had observed the ruse many times in the past week. He could see their victim now, a plainly dressed man with obvious pretensions to gentility, picking his way with the delicacy of the unfamiliar, and searching the signs that jutted out from the adjacent walls. He might be something to do with the shipping lying in the Thames, Drinkwater mused, for his like did not patronize the establishment next door until after dark. He was certainly not the man for whom Drinkwater was waiting.

  'You'll recognize him well enough,' Lord Dungarth had said, 'he has the look of a pugilist, a tall man, dark and well set up, though his larboard lug is a trifle curled.'

  There had been some odd coves in the alley below, but no one to answer that description.

  Drinkwater watched the two boys jostle the stranger from opposite sides, saw one pocket the ball and thumb his nose, saw the stranger raise his cane, and watched as the second boy drew out the man's handkerchief with consummate skill, so that the white flutter of its purloining was so sudden and so swift that it had vanished almost before the senses had registered the act. The two petty felons, their snot-hauling successful, capered away with a gleeful dido, the proceeds of their robbery sufficient to buy them a beef pie or a jigger of gin. The stranger stared after them, tapped his wallet and looked relieved. As the man cast a glance back at the trade signs, Drinkwater withdrew his face. A moment later the bell on the ship's chandler's door jangled and the stranger was lost to view. In the narrow ginnel a vicious squall lashed the scavenging pure-finder, finally driving her into shelter.

  Drinkwater tossed off the last of the gin and water, shuddered again and contemplated the pistol. He picked it up, his thumb drawing back each of the two hammers to half cock. The click echoed in the bare room, a small but deliberately malevolent sound. He swung the barrels round towards him and stared at the twin muzzles. The dark orifices seemed like close-set and accusing eyes. His hand shook and the heavy, blued steel jarred against his lower teeth. He jerked his thumb, drawing back the right hammer to full cock. Its frizzen lifted in mechanical response. It would be so easy, so very easy, a gentle squeezing of the trigger, perhaps a momentary sensation, then the repose of eternal oblivion.

  He sat thus for a long time. His hand no longer shook and the twin muzzles warmed in his breath. He could taste the vestiges of gunpowder on his tongue. But he did not squeeze the trigger, and would ever afterwards debate with himself if it was cowardice or courage that made him desist, for he had become a man who could not live with himself.

  In the months since the terrible events in the rain forest of Borneo, his duty had kept him busy. The passage home from Penang had been happily uneventful, blessed with fair winds and something of a sense of purpose, for Lord Dungarth had written especially to Admiral Pellew — then commanding the East Indies station — that Captain Drinkwater and his frigate were to be sent home the moment they made their appearance in the China Sea. The importance of such an instruction seemed impressive at a distance. His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician had arrived at Plymouth ten days earlier and Drinkwater had been met with an order to turn his ship over to a stranger and come ashore at once. Taking post, he had reported to the Admiralty. Lord Dungarth, head of the Secret Department, had not been available and Drinkwater's reception had been disappointingly
frosty. The urgency and importance with which his imagination had invested his return to England proved mistaken. Captain Drinkwater's report and books were received, he was given receipts and told to wait upon their Lordships 'on a more convenient occasion'.

  Angry and dejected he had walked to Lord North Street to remonstrate with Dungarth. He had long ago angered the authorities — in the person of John Barrow, the powerful Second Secretary — but had hoped that his destruction of the Russian line-of-battle ship Suvorov with a mere frigate would have mollified his detractor. Apparently he remained in bad odour.

  There had been more to fuel Captain Drinkwater's ire than official disapprobation. In a sense he had been relieved to have been summoned so peremptorily to London. He did not want to go home to Petersfield, though he was longing to see his children and to hold his wife Elizabeth in his arms again. To go home meant confronting Susan Tregembo, and admitting to her the awful fact that in the distant jungle of Borneo he had been compelled to dispatch his loyal coxswain Tregembo, whose tortured body had been past all aid, with the very pistol that he now held. The fact that the killing of the old Cornishman had been an act of mercy brought no relief to Drinkwater's tormented spirit. He remained inconsolable, aware that the event would haunt him to his own death, and that in the meantime he could not burden his wife with either himself or his confession.(See A Private Revenge)

  In such a state of turmoil and self-loathing, Drinkwater had arrived at Lord Dungarth's London house. A servant had shown him into a room he remembered, a room adorned with Romney's full length portrait of Dungarth's long-dead countess. The image of the beautiful young woman's cool gaze seemed full of omniscient accusation and he turned sharply away.

  'Nathaniel, my dear fellow, a delight, a delight ...'

  His obsessive preoccupation had been interrupted by the entry of Lord Dungarth. Drinkwater had thought himself ready for the altered appearance of his lordship, for Admiral Pellew, sending him home from Penang, had told him Dungarth had lost a leg after an attempt had been made to assassinate him. But Dungarth had been changed by more than the loss of a limb. He swung into the room through the double doors on a crutch and peg-leg, monstrously fat, his head wigless and almost bald. The few wisps of hair remaining to him conferred an unkempt air, emphasized by the disarray and untidiness of his dress. Caught unprepared, shock was evident on Drinkwater's face.

  'I know, I know,' Dungarth said wearily, lowering himself into a winged armchair, 'I am an unprepossessing hulk, damn it, a dropsical pilgarlic of a cove; my only consolation that obesity is considered by the ton a most distinguished accomplishment.'

  'My Lord ... ?' Drinkwater's embarrassment was compounded by incomprehension.

  'The Prince of Wales, Nathaniel, the Prince of Wales; a somewhat portly adornment to the Court of St James.'

  'I see, my Lord, I had not meant to ...'

  'Sit down, my dear fellow, sit down.' Dungarth motioned to a second chair and regarded the drawn features, the shadowed eyes and the thin seam of the old sword cut down Drinkwater's hollow cheek. 'You are altered yourself; we can none of us escape the ravages of time.' He pointed to the Romney portrait: 'I sometimes think the dead are more fortunate. Now, come sir, a drink? Be a good fellow and help yourself, I find it confounded awkward.'

  'Of course.' Drinkwater turned to the side table and filled two glasses.

  'At least our imbroglio in the Peninsula has assured a regular supply of oporto,' Dungarth said, raising his glass and regarding Drinkwater over its rim, his hazel eyes as keen as they ever were. 'Your health, Nathaniel.'

  'And yours, my Lord.'

  'Ah, mine is pretty well done in, I fear, though the brain ain't as distempered as the belly, which brings me in an orotund way,' Dungarth chuckled, 'to my reasons for sending for you.' His lordship heaved his bulk upright. 'I'll come directly to the point, Nathaniel, and the point is Antwerp.

  'We've forty thousand men on Walcheren investing Flushing; forty thousand men intended to take Antwerp, but bogged down under the command of that dilatory fellow Chatham.'

  'The late earl,' Drinkwater joked bleakly, referring to Chatham's well-known indolence.

  'You've heard the jest.' Dungarth smiled as he rang for his servant. 'Where are your traps? We'll have them brought round here. And William,' he said as he turned to his valet, 'send word to Mr Solomon that he is expected to dine with us tonight.'

  'The point is,' Dungarth went on when the man had withdrawn, 'we are no nearer securing Antwerp than when we went to war over it back in 'ninety three, unless I am much mistaken. The expedition seems set to miscarry! We have expended millions on our allies and it has gained us nothing. We bungle affairs everywhere — I will not bore you with details, for their recounting does no one credit, but our fat prince is but a symptom of the disease ...'

  Dungarth's tone of exasperation, even desperation, touched Drinkwater. He had sensed in the earl's voice a war weariness, and the fear that all his services were to come to nothing.

  'Between us, Nathaniel, I am driven almost mad by blunders and folly. Furthermore, Canning holds the purse for my work at the Secret Department, and I fear to cross Canning at this delicate juncture.' Dungarth paused.

  'And this delicate juncture touches me, my Lord?'

  'Yes, most assuredly. D'you command a following on that frigate of yours? A lieutenant who can be trusted?'

  'I have a lieutenant who is dependent upon me, and a midshipman with an acting commission whom I would see advanced.'

  'You can depend upon the lieutenant, utterly?'

  'I can depend upon them both.'

  'Who are they?'

  'Lieutenant Quilhampton ...'

  'The cove with a wooden hand?'

  'The same, my Lord, and a man recently displaced by my removal from the ship.'

  'And the other?'

  'Mr Frey, an able fellow, well enough used to doing his duty now.'

  'How would they fare doing duty in a gun-brig on special service?'

  'Admirably, I shouldn't wonder.'

  Dungarth seemed to consider some secret design, then he looked up. 'Very well, since there seems no impediment ...'

  'Ah,' Drinkwater broke in, 'there is one matter to be taken into account: Mr Quilhampton is anxious to marry. The affair has been deferred before and I doubt his fiancee will consent to further delay.'

  Dungarth frowned. 'Then let him marry at once, or wait ...'

  'Wait, my Lord, for how long?'

  'How long is a rat's tail? Be assured this service will not last long. It must be accomplished before the ice forms in the Baltic —'

  'The Baltic ... ?' Drinkwater interrupted, but a distant bell diverted Dungarth's attention.

  'That will be Solomon, Nathaniel,' he said, ponderously drawing himself to his feet. 'He is to be trusted, despite appearances.'

  Dungarth's man announced the visitor and Dungarth performed the introductions. 'My dear Solomon, may I present Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater, lately arrived from the Pacific; Nathaniel, Mr Isaac Solomon, of Solomon and Dyer.'

  'Y'r servant, Mr Solomon,' Drinkwater said, taking the Jew's hand. He wore the shawl and skull cap of Orthodoxy and had a fine-boned, palely handsome face framed by long, dark hair.

  'Yours, Captain Drinkwater,' Solomon said, bowing slightly and regarding Drinkwater with an appraising eye.

  'You will not refuse a slice or two of cold mutton, Isaac?' Wielding his crutch, Dungarth led them into an adjacent room and they settled before the earl resumed. 'What we propose,' Dungarth said, drawing Drinkwater into the web of intrigue and indicating that the mysterious Jew was party to the plot, 'is to send you to Russia.'

  'To Russia!' Drinkwater frowned. ' 'Tis late in the year, my Lord ...' He began to protest but Dungarth leaned forward, his knife pointedly silencing the criticism.

  'A single cargo, Nathaniel,' he began, then threw himself back in his creaking chair, 'but Isaac, you elucidate the matter.'

  'I have no need to extol the effects
of the blockade of the European coastline by our naval forces, Captain,' Solomon said in a low, cultured voice, 'it is our chief weapon. But to oppose it the Emperor Napoleon has proclaimed a "Continental System", an economic interdiction of any British imports upon the mainland of Europe and Russia. Such a declaration was first thought to have been the phantasm of a disordered mind; alas it has proved remarkably successful.'

  Drinkwater watched the eloquent gestures of the Jew's hands, accurately guessing the man belonged to that international mercantile confraternity that overcame political boundaries and evaded belligerent obstacles whenever possible.

  'Two years ago we took Helgoland, both as a listening post with its ear close to the old independent Hanse city of Hamburg, and as an entrepot for our trade ...'

  'But a wider breach must be cut in Napoleon's wall of douaniers, Nathaniel,' Dungarth broke in suddenly, 'something that does more than merely discredit his policy but destroys it! A cargo to Russia, a cargo to Russia as one of many cargoes! Such a cargo, widely advertised in Paris, could not fail to sow seeds of mistrust between Napoleon and his vacillating ally, Tsar Alexander.'

  'You seek, if I understand aright,' Drinkwater said, 'to detach the Russian Tsar from his present alliance and reunite him with Great Britain?'

  'Exactly! And it is our only chance, Nathaniel, before we are ruined, our last chance.'

  'And this cargo, my Lord, has something to do with me, and Lieutenant Quilhampton?'

  'It does.'

  'Well, what is this cargo?'

  'A quantity of Northampton boots, Nathaniel.'

  'Boots?' Drinkwater's astonishment was unfeigned.

  Dungarth nodded, his face a mask of serious intent, adding, 'and yourself, of course, to be employed upon a most secret service.'

  CHAPTER 2