There had been no trial, no preliminaries, only a short proclamation read by a grim-faced lieutenant. The charge was sedition: providing food and shelter to officers of the rebel army. Sentence to be carried out forthwith. There had been barely time to grasp the true terror of the unfolding events before the morning was split by the sharp bark of command from the sergeant in charge of the firing squad, followed less than a heartbeat later by the ragged rattle of musket shots that rolled across the surrounding meadows like a volley of hail against a window pane.
They had left the bodies where they had fallen, crumpled in the dust at the base of the wall, leaving two sounds for ever ingrained in Lee’s memory: the tramp of marching feet from the departing soldiers, and the shrill, keening cries of his mother as she had cradled the head of her son, the blood of the slaughtered boy soaking into the white of her apron.
In the beginning, unsurprisingly, Lee’s hunger for vengeance had been all consuming. His hatred of the British Crown had burned like a furnace in his breast and his desire for revenge had never diminished. Over the intervening years, however, as he had grown older and wiser, the heat of his anger had gradually given way to a low simmer and he had been content to wait, to bide his time until the opportunity presented itself. Thus there had been no strategy in Lee’s vow to his dead sibling, no deadline, just a silent oath that somebody, somewhere, would eventually pay the price.
And then, into his life had stepped Robert Fulton, artist, inventor, showman, philosopher and revolutionary. And only then, bonded by a mutual desire for justice and freedom, and fired by Fulton’s imagination and genius, had the awesome nature, scale and means by which he could exact his revenge revealed itself.
The distant clang of a ship’s bell jolted Lee from his uneasy reminiscence. He looked down at his hand, recalling the tremor as he had taken the tiny cylinder from the carrier pigeon’s leg and extracted the message telling him the waiting was over. A message from an emperor.
Although four weeks had passed since his meeting with Napoleon Bonaparte, it seemed like only yesterday.
It had been another early-morning rendezvous.
Touched by the pale light of dawn, with remnants of sea mist hanging low over the still water, the Seine estuary was a desolate place, inhabited only by mosquitoes and waterfowl. It was a perfect proving ground: hot and humid in high summer, windswept and icebound in winter, and cut off from the surrounding countryside by a latticework of muddy ditches and foetid marshland, the only means of passage through the region a spider’s web of decaying wooden causeways.
They had moored the gribane in the middle of the estuary. Sitting heavily on the water like some scaly weed-encrusted sea monster newly arisen from the deep, the squat Seine barge had certainly seen better days.
In a black, unmarked coach, bracketed by his chasseur escort, the Emperor had arrived accompanied only by his swarthy Mameluke bodyguard, Rustam, and his Minister of Marine, the short, stoop-shouldered admiral, Denis Decres. It had been Decres who had persuaded the Emperor to give Fulton’s device one more chance. It was well known that Emperor Bonaparte had small interest in matters nautical, but Decres was the man in charge of all invasion operations against Britain, so when the little admiral spoke, the Emperor listened.
The testing area had been guarded by a detachment of the imperial guard under the command of a one-eyed veteran of Bonaparte’s Italian and Egyptian campaigns, Major Jean Daubert. The major, Lee learned, had lost his eye during the siege of Acre, in a hard-fought, bloody skirmish with Turkish irregulars. He was one of the most arrogant men Lee had ever met.
While the major had fussed and fretted over the Emperor and his entourage, Lee and his two crewmen had boarded the submersible and taken her three hundred yards upstream.
From the shelter of a ruined barn close by the water’s edge, with the stocky greatcoat-clad Emperor waiting impatiently at his side, Admiral Decres had given Lee the signal and the vessel had submerged to launch its attack.
The destruction of the gribane had been sudden, spectacular and total, to the delight of Lee and his crew, the amazement of the Emperor and the alarm of every bird within a half-mile radius. The sound of the explosion had reverberated across the marshland with the force of a thunderclap.
Back on shore, with the barge split in two, driftwood scattered across the grey water, and wooden splinters piercing the surface of the mud flats like arrows, the Emperor had invited Lee to walk with him. There were important matters to discuss.
But that had been after the discovery of the interloper.
It had been in the aftermath of the attack on the barge when – unbeknownst to Lee and his crewman who were still aboard the submersible – all hell had broken loose.
Ironically, it had been the one-eyed Major Daubert who’d spotted the flash of sunlight glancing across the spyglass lens, spearing a warning into the major’s brain, igniting the realization that they were being observed. The major’s response, born of instinct, had been immediate.
Daubert had led the chase, sword drawn, barking orders at his men, galvanized by the sight of a man’s shape breaking from cover and disappearing around the far side of a high sand dune. At which point the chasseurs had joined the hunt, spurring their mounts forward, using their superior speed to cut off the fleeing figure’s line of retreat. It had been a foregone conclusion that the grenadiers and the mounted escort would run their quarry to ground. There was nowhere for him to go. Escape was impossible.
And so it had proved, but not before the bodies of two grenadiers lay dead in the sand, slaughtered by pistol ball and sword blade respectively.
That one man on foot should have wreaked such havoc should have given the major a degree of warning that this was not some local peasant out poaching for game and that it might have been wiser to apprehend the felon alive in order to question him about his origins and intentions.
The sharp crack of a chasseur’s carbine, however, had put paid to that possibility. The fleeing man had reached the water when the ball struck low on his left side, propelling him into the shallows. The major, seeing the quarry stagger towards the middle of the stream, had shouted at his men not to fire again. As the body disappeared beneath the surface, the major had spurred his men forward, but it had been too late. Dragged under by the current, the corpse had been swept away.
Or so it had been assumed.
They had found the discarded pistol close to the body of one of the dead grenadiers and had shown it to Lee upon his return to shore. Lee had immediately put paid to the major’s speculation that the man had been nothing more than an inquisitive local and the admiral’s suggestion that he may have been a would-be assassin sent by Bourbon exiles.
The pistol, Lee had revealed, was English-made; “York”, the city of manufacture, engraved on to the stock had been the giveaway. Probably naval issue, Lee had surmised, an officer’s sidearm.
Which meant what?
The British knew of the device, Lee had told the Emperor. It had been offered to them seven years before. They’d turned it down. However, it wasn’t outside the realms of possibility that they’d received fresh intelligence relating to the improvements in design. It would have been only natural for them to dispatch agents to investigate.
It’s what I would have done, Lee had admitted.
Which was when the Emperor had suggested they take a walk, and the mission had been born.
Lee had been surprised by the Emperor’s candour.
The war in Spain was going badly, the Emperor had admitted. Wellington was proving a formidable opponent. His victories were undermining the will of France’s allies. Allegiances were changing. It was not only the southern borders that were under threat. It had been hoped that Tsar Alexander’s support would remain steadfast, but doubts had been expressed. Severe measures might have