The Price of Glory Read online

  Young Warriors

  NELSON & NAPOLEON

  Learn the Art of War & the Cost of Fame

  NATHAN PEAKE charts a perilous course into the dangerous waters of post-Revolutionary Paris. There he encounters two of the most beautiful and scandalous courtesans in history and their playmate—laughingly dubbed Captain Cannon—who is about to win enduring fame as Napoleon Bonaparte. Returned to the command of the Unicorn, Peake joins another young glory-seeker, Captain Horatio Nelson, in a bid to wreck Bonaparte’s plans for the invasion of Italy. But Peake has his own private agenda—to find his lost love amid the chaos of war—and as the fighting spreads from the mountains to the sea, he discovers that glory comes at a higher price than he thought.

  Other Nathan Peake novels by Seth Hunter

  The Time of Terror

  The Tide of War

  Published by McBooks Press 2011

  First published in Great Britain by Headline Review,

  an imprint of Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette UK company, 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Seth Hunter

  This McBooks Press edition of the work has been revised from the original U.K. edition by the author’s request.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover illustration © 1971yes, licensed from Shutterstock.com, 2010

  Cover and interior design by Panda Musgrove.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunter, Seth.

  The price of glory : a Nathan Peake novel / Seth Hunter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59013-625-6 (alk. paper)

  1. Great Britain. Royal Navy--Officers--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.U59P75 2011

  823’.92--dc23

  2011030524

  The e-book versions of this title have the following ISBNs: Kindle 978-1-59013-643-0, ePub 978-1-59013-644-7, and PDF 978-1-59013-645-4

  Visit the McBooks Press website at www.mcbooks.com.

  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Elesa

  PROLOGUE

  the Throne of Death

  YOU WILL FEEL NO PAIN,” they said. “It is like the tickle of a feather or a lover’s kiss.”

  They had cut her hair and torn her chemise to expose her neck and breasts. To make her ready, they said, like a bride for her groom.

  “He is waiting for you,” they told her, “in the Place du Trône.”

  They were drunk, which was not uncommon when they had a new cargo to prepare for the machine, but there was uncertainty in their eyes, verging on fear, for rumours of unrest were circulating among the people, rumours of conspiracy in high places. And on the way through the city, a mob surrounded the carts shouting that it was all over, that the tyrant Robespierre was overthrown and the executions must stop. But the guards did not heed them.

  And now they were here and there it was, waiting for them, the Scientific and Humane Execution Machine. The cure for all ills. Dr. Guillotine.

  Some of the prisoners began to weep and wail; others sang hymns or songs of love.

  “Courage, my friend.” Sara felt the soft breath in her ear and the strong fingers at her wrist, tugging at the rope that bound her. She turned and met the eyes of the stranger sitting beside her in the cart. She had told Sara she was the Princess of Monaco but she was probably mad. They had their share of madwomen in the cart. There was one who said she was Queen Marie Antoinette and another who spat upon her and said she was the late King’s mistress and the only woman he had ever loved. Yet another who claimed to be the bride of Satan, three who said they were nuns, and two confessed whores.

  But then they were all whores to the people who had sent them here. Nuns were whores of God. Marie Antoinette was the Austrian whore. And Sara was a noble whore. Sara de la Tour d’Auvergne, Countess of Turenne. And they would all die together in the Place du Trône.

  But she must not think of that, the unthinkable that. So she turned her head away and having no future, she thought of the past.

  She had been born not too far from Monaco. In the mountains above the coast, near the border between France and Genoa. Her father was one of the local seigneurs, Scottish by birth, and a soldier. But he was an old man by then and on market days, having nothing better to do, he would take her into Tourettes-de-Vence and they would sit at a café in the square, the old man and his little girl, and the patron’s wife would bring them drinks: wine for the seigneur, lemonade for his daughter, and little golden cakes made of oranges, and they would sit together in the shade of an umbrella pine and watch the world go by.

  The guards were letting down the sides of the carts and helping the prisoners to descend, for they had their hands tied behind them and it would not do to let them fall and hurt themselves at the foot of the machine. But Sara’s hands were loose now. One tug and they would be free—much good it would do her. Save to seize a bayonet from one of the guards and slit her throat. And cheat Dr. Guillotine at the last.

  She began to tremble, her whole body shaking in the sweating air.

  “Courage, my friend.” Those words again; the soft breath at Sara’s neck.

  Like the tickle of a feather or a lover’s kiss.

  She had a lover. An Englishman. The love of her life. But where was he now? And she had a son, a little boy.

  But she must not think of this.

  They lined them up, facing the guillotine. This was not right. They should be facing the other way, so they would not see the full horror that awaited them up there on the scaffold. As if they could not imagine it. But still, it was not right. They knew the rules. It was spoken of all the time in the prisons. People even rehearsed for this moment, the crowning moment of their lives. In the Place du Trône.

  But the guards were nervous. The crowd was not with them for once; people were hurling insults at them, spitting and cursing. Others tried to reason with them. They said that as citizen soldiers—servants of the people—they should abide by the will of the people. And the will of the people, expressed in the National Convention, was that the executions must stop. But then Hanriot, commander of the Garde Parisienne came charging up on his horse, waving his sword and urging them to carry on and be damned to the lot of them. Sanson, the executioner, was already up there on the scaffold with his valets, checking that the ropes ran free in the runnels, chewing on a straw like a farmer going about his business—and behind the scaffold stood a large, low-slung farm cart with its interior painted red, waiting to take the bodies away when the job was done.

  They were buried in the catacombs, Sara had been told: the labyrinth of tunnels under the streets of Paris. All thrown together, the bones all jumbled up in the dark, with no stone to say who they were or how they had died. The only record was kept by the two huissiers, the officials appointed by the Revolutionary Tribunal who sat at a table beneath the scaffold, like waiting carrion, with their black robes and plumed hats, the silver chains of office around their necks and the death warrants in front of them. When they signed them on the back, the warrants became death certificates to be handed back to the Tribunal as proof that the sentence of the court had been carried out.

  And Sara’s would be among them.

  The executioner was nearly ready. He pulled a blood-stained smock over his head and signalled to his valets, who laid hold of the first victim and half-dragged, half-carried her up the steps. She was a woman Sara knew. They had spent several hours in the same cell, awaiting trial
at the Palais de Justice. She was a prostitute called Catherine Halbourg, nicknamed “Egle,” who had been arrested with one of her friends in the Rue Fromenteau just before the trial of the Queen—the real Queen, who the Revolutionists called the Austrian whore. The way Egle told it, some of the men from the Commune had suggested putting a couple of real whores in the dock with her, to make a point. But the idea was vetoed by a superior authority and Queen Marie Antoinette was tried and executed alone. Not that this helped poor Egle. They kept her in prison, not knowing what to do with her, and then someone decided to kill her anyway, for being an enemy of Virtue.

  “I am ready,” she had told Sara. “I have been rehearsing.”

  They had held mock executions in the prison, she said, practising with their hands tied behind their backs, laid out on a plank.

  And they held séances, when they conjured the Devil.

  “He is not like the priests say he is,” she had assured Sara earnestly. “He is very handsome and wise and rich. And he has chosen me as his bride. He has many brides in Hell but I am the only one that is French. ‘Believe in me,’ he said, ‘and you will be saved.’”

  But now she did not seem so sure of herself. She was shaking and crying and she ran around the scaffold like a hen in the farmyard but the two valets seized her, one by the arms and one by the feet, and threw her down on her belly along the plank, sliding it forward under the blade and clamping her neck in a vice. And then Sanson pulled upon his rope and it was all over.

  Sara, who had shut her eyes, heard a swish as the blade fell and then the thud.

  Like the tickle of a feather or a lover’s kiss.

  The crowd, that had held its breath for this moment, now broke into a new chorus of booing and yelling, calling the guards cowards and traitors, and surging almost to the foot of the scaffold. And the guards fell back and the drummer beat his drum and Hanriot waved his sword and the horse reared and plunged, foaming at the mouth where he had raked it with the bit, showing the whites of its eyes as it smelled the blood.

  And then it slipped.

  Horse and rider sprawling together on the blood-wet cobbles and the horse up first, panicking, wild with fear, and bolting straight into the line of guards.

  Who went down like wooden soldiers in a skittle alley.

  And the woman who called herself Princess of Monaco grabbed Sara by the arm and said: “Run!”

  They ran straight into the crowd and the crowd opened before them and let them through. There were shouts. Then shots. Sara fell, slipping in her wooden sabots, and the woman came back for her. The woman came back for her and reached out a hand and then went down herself and Sara saw the black, smoking hole in her chemise and then the blood. She pulled at her, regardless, trying to haul her up. But there were others pulling at Sara.

  “Run!” they said. “They have killed her. Run!”

  And Sara saw that it was true, and so she ran. And the crowd closed after her until she was running alone through empty streets; running she knew not where, but with one overriding thought: to put as much distance as possible between herself and the groom who was waiting for her on the Place du Trône. The machine with a lover’s kiss.

  And she was running still.

  PART ONE: THE DEADLY SHORE

  CHAPTER ONE

  the Fog of War

  THE BAY OF QUIBERON, off the south coast of Brittany, the 27th day of June in the Year of Our Lord 1795—or Year 3 of the Revolution, according to the system prevailing in these more enlightened climes: the month of Messidor, the day of Garlic.

  A day of fog, in fact, and the frigate Unicorn floating upon a flat calm, her people standing listless at the guns which had been run out as a precaution, so close to these hostile, bristling shores of France, though they had to take this in good faith from their captain and he from the sailing master, for the fog hung so heavily about the ship it was difficult to discern the forecastle from the quarterdeck and caused the lookouts in the tops to suppose they were cut off entirely from all human contact and become a species of ghoul that dwelt in clouds. A nasty, brutish, troublesome fog; a Republican fog. A wet blanket draped over history: the glorious day that was to turn back the tide of Revolution.

  Mr. Graham, the ship’s master and a loyal subject of King George, glared out upon it from under the battered brim of his hat, as if he would seize it by the throat and throttle the life out of it, or blast it into Kingdom Come with a double broadside.

  It had crept upon them in the dark and now they were halfway through the morning watch and still it would not lift, and they could be anywhere between Belle Isle and the wicked claw of Quiberon, with its shoal waters and its savage rocks and its treacherous tides.

  Not that the master would have admitted publicly to so imprecise a knowledge, for he knew that the captain had his eye upon him, and that it was a cold and speculative eye, for Mr. Graham was new to the ship, having joined her less than a week ago at Portsmouth upon her return from the Caribbean, and he had yet to win the confidence of either captain or crew.

  The Unicorn was a new ship, launched a little over a year ago: one of a new class of heavy frigates with thirty-two long guns, 18- pounders for the most part, and six 32-pounder carronades. But she had taken some hard knocks on her first commission, harder knocks than many an older ship. She had endured mutiny, hurricane, yellow fever and battle, losing many of her crew and most of her officers in the process, and the replacements who had come aboard at Portsmouth were as yet unproven, and in the case of Mr. Graham not popular. It was not only her captain who looked upon their new master with mistrust, for it had been observed on the lower deck that he had an eye for the young gentlemen and exorcised his demons with the bottle.

  Four bells in the morning watch, tolling in the muffled air like a funeral dirge in a country churchyard. And as if in reply, a distant keening away to starboard and then again, closer, off the larboard bow. Some of the newcomers, mostly landsmen taken by the press, looked wildly about them, fearing Sirens or other ill-intentioned spirits of the sea, and the older hands looked grim knowing it to be the shrill alarum of boatswains’ pipes from at least two other ships, warning the unwary to keep their distance.

  “I think we must shorten sail, Mr. Graham,” said the captain, “to be on the safe side. And let us sound a warning.” Then, raising his voice a little: “Mr. Holroyd there!”

  One of the young gentlemen came scurrying aft, eager with nervous importance for he had recently been raised to acting lieutenant, a promotion that more than compensated, to his mind, for the loss of an ear on their last commission. “Sir?”

  “Have some of your people line the rail with sweeps, if you will, Mr. Holroyd, and stand by to fend away.”

  A rush of feet along the decks and up into the forecastle. The gun crews fidgeting at their guns and the lookouts peering from the tops, questing for some substance to these eerie, spectral wails. The captain rejoined his first lieutenant at the rail.

  “I think we have found our squadron,” he mused.

  “Unless it be the French.”

  “We should smell them, surely.”

  “Of what does a Frenchman smell that is distinct from the human?”

  “I have not been able to elicit a precise account, but I am told you know it when you smell it.”

  There was irony in these remarks, for both men had a large dose of French blood in their veins, sufficient, as they said, to make one whole Frenchman between them. The captain was descended on his mother’s side from a distinguished line of Huguenots whilst his companion hailed from the Channel Isles—the illicit progeny of a fisherman and the daughter of a local seigneur. In fact, they shared rather more respect for the traditional enemy than was deemed natural or seemly in an officer of the King’s Navy, though they tended to keep it to themselves in company.

  The two men were roughly of an age, which was somewhat between twenty-five and thirty: one dark, one fair, both tall and personable if a little scarred here and there, as if th
ey had been in the wars—which they had. They wore identical tarpaulins buttoned up to the throat and might have passed for midshipmen, the lowest form of marine life to bear the king’s commission, had it not been for a certain authority in their bearing and from the way the true midshipmen that were about the quarterdeck kept their distance as if there was an invisible line drawn upon it—which there was.

  The captain, Nathaniel Peake, had attained these lofty heights on the untimely demise of his predecessor, who had suffered the indignity of having his throat cut by former members of the ship’s crew off the Floridas. The first lieutenant, Mr. Tully, had been assisted in his rise to greatness by the enemy, who had obligingly knocked his rivals on the head, one by one, in the waters of the Caribbean. Indeed, the two men had shared enough perils and privations to form a kind of friendship, inasmuch as that relationship could prevail between the captain of a King’s ship and a mere mortal.

  The sharp report of a cannon from somewhere off to starboard. A signal gun, in all probability, but the gun crews tensed and the captain cursed, betraying the unease beneath his banter, not so much at the prospect of an engagement as from the fear of a collision, for the tide was running swiftly enough to promise he would lose more than his dignity and his ship a little paint if such a misfortune were to occur. He had been ordered to join Sir John Borlase Warren off Quiberon “with the utmost haste,” but his great fear was that the Unicorn should prove too hasty and announce her arrival by running upon one of Sir John’s squadron in the mist, adding to a growing, if in his view unwarranted, reputation for recklessness.

  The signal gun again—and as if it had awoken Aeolus from his slumbers, they felt the first real breath of wind that morning: a mere zephyr that barely stirred the sodden canvas, and faded … only to return stronger and more confident, and the sails filled, flattened and filled, and the frigate shied like a colt so that Nathan was moved to utter another curse and instruct the sailing master to back the fore course.