Pallamaglio

Chapter 1 · The Commission

The porter at the Admiralty gate knew Scott by sight and let him through without a word. A stranger asking for Sir Hugh Ravenscroft at that hour of the morning would usually have been asked his business twice and kept waiting in the anteroom beside the weather clock. Scott was shown up directly. He had made the walk often enough over the years not to need a guide.

The staircase was narrow and badly lit, the banister polished by the hands of forty generations of clerks. On the top floor, five flights up, the building opened into a long corridor that ran behind the Board Room, where the great men did their official business under paintings of sea battles nobody now remembered. Ravenscroft kept his rooms at the far end, where the corridor bent toward the courtyard and the light was poorer. A brass plate beside the door read only Sir Hugh Ravenscroft, Bart. Nothing was marked Naval Intelligence anywhere in the Admiralty. The work had other names in other rooms and none of them were painted on doors. Among insiders the whole business was known as Divinity, a name with the old Admiralty cloak — Maritime Surveys Division — buried in it, half reverence and half blasphemy.

Scott waited in the anteroom for three minutes by the mantel clock. A young clerk he did not recognise was copying out a return. The coal fire was freshly lit and smoking a little, the draught in the chimney unsettled by the season. On a side table a decanter of sherry stood beside two glasses, one used, one not. Ravenscroft had seen someone already this morning. Scott wondered who, and then stopped wondering, because that was the habit that Ravenscroft fed upon.

The inner door opened.

“Reverend Scott. Come in.”

Ravenscroft half rose to meet him, the courtesy of a man who had long ago decided which motions were required and which were not. He was tall, angular, sharp as a cutlass, his beard grey as polished steel. The office was smaller than the outer room and lined with bookshelves crammed to the ceiling with files tied in pink tape. A globe stood in the corner, the varnish yellowed, a thin crack running like a fracture line across the Southern Ocean. The window looked out onto the parade ground, where the rain had left the stones dark and the flag on the Horse Guards hanging limply against its pole.

“Sit,” Ravenscroft said, and went round to his own chair.

Scott sat. He laid his hat on his knee.

“Reverend,” Ravenscroft began. “I shall not waste your time. Some of what I have to ask today goes beyond what I have asked before.” He leaned forward, elbows on the polished surface of the desk.

With Nelson, espionage had been a gentlemanly pursuit. Listening here, translating there, nothing too distasteful. Scott had interpreted enemy despatches from Spanish and Dutch ships, met informants in the back rooms of Genoese coffee-houses, and written out the disclosures of captured French prisoners. All produced in the clean English copperplate the Admiralty preferred. Under Ravenscroft’s hand, the shadows loomed closer and darker, and the tasks dipped into murkier waters.

“There is first a small matter,” Ravenscroft said. “You have had a letter from Balfours.”

It was not a question.

“I have.”

“A guardianship. A Foundling Hospital boy of twelve, Twitchett by name. An anonymous benefactor’s offer to meet your expenses and fee. Two hundred guineas. Is that still the figure?”

“It is.”

“You have not accepted.”

“Not yet.”

“Accept it.”

Scott did not reply immediately. The fire spat once in the grate. Ravenscroft had not offered sherry.

“May I know why?”

“Because it suits me, Reverend. Your parochial duties aboard Victory will be more easily maintained with the wardship of a boy sailor. A chaplain who carries a charity upon his shoulders has reasons to be observant on all decks in every dark corner. That is a convenience to me. It is also, I am told, a benefit to the boy, who — though a Simple Simon — has demonstrated unusual faculties. Take him. Regard him as your cover. If he proves troublesome at sea, you may dispose of him as other men dispose of servants.”

“He is a child.”

“I am aware.”

Scott turned his hat a quarter-turn on his knee and did not look at the fire.

“Now,” Ravenscroft said, “to matters of greater import.”

He lowered his voice.

“The Admiralty harbours growing unease about Vice-Admiral Nelson’s state of mind. I trust you are aware of his latest tactical inclinations?”

“Pell-mell. Two columns breaking the enemy line. He has spoken of nothing else since June.”

“A reckless strategy. Ships in a line, nine-tenths of his guns useless, bearing down at right-angles to an enemy abreast in a grand battery. A dubious tactic, rarely successful. It invites the raking of his own sails and steering, with no broadside to answer, and the whole design glaringly obvious to the Allied Fleet a league before he closes with it.”

“His strategies were vindicated at St Vincent, at the Nile, at Copenhagen,” Scott said. “The Navy and the Government celebrate them still. Perhaps his detractors lack his imagination, or envy his success.”

“There is some truth in that.” Ravenscroft inclined his head a fraction. “But his recent actions are more than troubling. Last week he visited his coffin-maker in London, making alterations to the coffin hewn from L’Orient’s mast.”

“Sir Hugh,” Scott said, “surely you do not suspect —”

“His home life, unhappy and unconventional. Strained finances. Health failing. Many years since his last celebrated battle.”

Ravenscroft paused.

“Lady Hamilton.” Ravenscroft did not raise his voice. “A woman of the town, intimately indebted to the Prince of Wales, among several others. Nelson at sea pays for her London extravagances and also for the Bronte estate, managed by her creditors. I do not need you to dislike her, Reverend. I need you to accept that the Vice-Admiral’s household is not a happy one. It is an account, in every respect deeply in arrears, presented monthly to a man shot at for a living.”

Scott’s gaze fell to the carpet. Within the week, at Merton, he was to witness what Nelson had said in confidence would be a secret blessing ceremony, binding him to Emma. A confected ritual compounded of sacrilege, blasphemy, and bigamy. Nelson had spoken of it with a defiance that brooked no question. Should I die in battle, Alex, you must ensure Emma and Horatia become legacies to the nation. That compact, not yet sealed, was already a vulnerable secret adrift in Ravenscroft’s hostile waters.

“His health concerns are indeed troubling,” Scott said.

“Observe Nelson closely at sea. Any sign of the blue-devils, tedium vitae, or melancholia must be reported immediately.”

“Understood.” His hands, at his sides, had begun to tremble. He clasped them together on his knee.

“Vice-Admiral Collingwood has been discreetly informed,” Ravenscroft added, dropping almost to a whisper. “If you and he have any doubts about Nelson’s fitness to command, Collingwood is to relieve him forthwith.”

Scott’s mouth was dry. The task laid upon him was clear, yet the thought of betraying Nelson’s trust was a ballast he could not shift.

“He is my friend, Sir Hugh. I have known him these ten years and served beside him these two years of blockade and chase from Toulon to the Indies and back, with Villeneuve slipping out of one harbour into the next. I have prayed with him. I have held his hand through fever in Palermo. He took me into his household when no one else would have had me, and he has kept faith with me longer than any man I know.”

“I am not asking you to betray him, Reverend. I am asking you to protect him from himself.”

“Men have been hanged on that sentence, Sir Hugh.”

“Napoleon has one hundred and fifty thousand men encamped at Boulogne. If he crosses in October and our fleet is broken at Cadiz, there will be no army between him and London that can reach the coast in time. We are not arguing about a reputation. We are arguing about the protection of Britain’s islands. Tell me honestly, Reverend. If Nelson is not sound, would you prefer to know it in September or to learn it from Bonaparte in November?”

Scott did not answer at once.

The clock in the outer office struck the half-hour and was answered, more distantly, by the clock at the Horse Guards. Ravenscroft had not moved.

“I will watch him,” Scott said.

“And report through the usual coded channels?”

“Yes. Schooner and packet.”

Ravenscroft smiled. “Men talk too freely in foreign taverns. You have always had a knack for catching what they let slip. And with Nelson, your proximity affords you a perspective the Admiralty values. Remember, a chaplain’s ear is never only for confession.” Ravenscroft paused. “As for the boy, keep him useful, or discard him. Nelson is to know nothing of this meeting. Nor is Hardy, nor Pasco, nor Beatty, nor any other officer of the flagship.”

He rose.

“When do you join the flagship?”

“I am to be at Portsmouth on the fourteenth. Victory sails on the morning of the fifteenth.”

“Ten days, then. You have affairs to settle?”

“A visit to Merton. Then the Foundling Hospital. Then Portsmouth.”

“In that order?”

“On consecutive days.”

Something flickered at the corner of Ravenscroft’s mouth. It might have been amusement, or a man not quite able to suppress the knowledge that another man’s sentimentality was once more going to make the work harder than it needed to be. Ravenscroft said nothing of it. He merely inclined his head.

“Safe journey, Reverend.”

“Sir Hugh.”

Scott went out through the anteroom. The young clerk was still copying his return and did not look up. The corridor behind the Board Room was busier than it had been half an hour earlier. Two midshipmen waiting outside a door with papers, a clerk hurrying past with a ledger, the distant bell of the outer court. Scott went down the narrow staircase and out into the courtyard and stood a moment at the arch, the weight of Ravenscroft’s charge pressing in upon him.

In the street he watched the morning watch cross between the Horse Guards and the river, each man with an enviable clarity of purpose. For a wild moment he considered a fall on a stair, a hand caught in a door. Some small bone snapped, plausibly accidental, that might leave him in London while another chaplain took his place. He recognised the shape of the thought and was sickened by it. He set his hat. Fata viam invenient, he thought, the fates will find a way.

A hackney passed. He did not hail it. He preferred, today, to walk.