Blown Off Course Read online

  From San Fiorenzo to Bastia was no great distance as the crow flies, but the pavé road ran through high mountains and the upward leg had been hellish. At least now they were on the downward slopes, heading for the coast on which the city lay. It was fully expected this was the day they would meet the enemy and, unable to sleep, the youngster was awaiting the dawn with trepidation.

  Sat by a blazing fire, his cloak wrapped tightly around him and staring into the flames, he had taken to listing those people whom he saw as inimical to his well-being, one that seemed to grow longer the more he considered the matter. Hotham, Ralph Barclay and John Pearce only headed the growing roll, which extended in his present mood to include his own family, who had failed to see on his last visit home that he did not want to be in the navy at all, never mind stuck halfway up a mountain pass with a party of seamen who showed him scant respect.

  In order to hold that view it was, of course, very necessary for him to forget his one-time enthusiasm for sea service, the way he had persuaded his parents to badger a newly acquired uncle – Ralph Barclay had married his Aunt Emily – to give him a place in his midshipman’s berth. What a shock that had been! There was no romance below decks on a man-o’-war, no glory; there was filth, thievery, bullying of a kind he had hoped to have left behind when he departed his school, added to a severe risk of being maimed or killed in action, the first of which had seen him wrecked on the shores of France. He had returned to Somerset after only a few months of service as a supposed hero, finding it impossible, under such a burden, to let those so proud of him know of either his unpleasant experiences or of his very real fears.

  ‘Not asleep, Mr Burns? Surely you of all people have no dread of action today?’ The voice of Lieutenant Driffield had him shoot to his feet: the fellow might only be a marine officer but he was in all respects his superior. What followed was an emollient apology for so startling him. ‘Please, young fellow, there’s no need to jump to attention. We are, after all, in the field.’

  ‘You caught me deep in thought, sir.’

  ‘I daresay you were plotting ways to confound the enemy.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Burns replied, automatically, as Driffield stood rubbing and warming his hands.

  ‘Well, never fear, you will soon have action to get your blood flowing. I have asked permission of the bullocks that my marines and I be allowed to partake of any assaults on the enemy bastions blocking the road to Bastia. No point in coming all this way and not seeing action, what? Be assured, should you wish to accompany me, I would be honoured to include you and I know my men would be inspired by your presence.’

  Having turned away from the fire, the cold air helped to fix the features on Toby Burns’s face, which enabled him to avoid reacting to this terrifying hyperbole. The last thing he wanted was to ‘partake’, he did not want to even be where he was now! His heart’s desire, which he feared to articulate, was to be back in rural Somerset and even at school, perhaps applying himself in a way he had not done previously to his books, so as to qualify for an occupation that would keep him safely ashore, perhaps as a curate or an articled clerk of law.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Burns,’ Driffield insisted, doing so himself. There was a short pause before the marine lieutenant spoke again, and it was with a sideways glance at the midshipman. ‘I know, young sir, for I have been told, that you are reticent in the matter of your exploits, modest to a fault, in fact. But here we are, with dawn not yet upon us and with time to kill. If it would not put you out, at all, it would pass some of that if you were to entertain me with the tale of your heroics. I refer, of course, to the events in Brittany.’

  Staring into the flames again, Toby Burns was thinking if Jesus Christ had his Calvary, he was not alone: Brittany and what happened there was his. The whole ‘exploit’, just like his supposed heroism, was founded on a lie and one he feared would eventually be exposed, but he was not going to be the source of that. Obliged many times to repeat the untruths and seeming trapped into doing so now, the words came with an ease born of much repetition, larded, of course, with very necessary modesty regarding his own role. No matter how many times he told the story, it provided for him no crumbs of personal comfort.

  ‘It will not surprise you, sir, that naval officers are sometimes lacking in the very basic needs of their profession.’ Driffield nodded at that, perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically, marine officers being much condescended to by their naval counterparts. ‘In Lieutenant Hale of HMS Brilliant we had one who was not only deficient in that, but deaf to boot, and it was because of his affliction, his inability to hear the heavy crashing of waves on jagged rocks, we found ourselves cast ashore on the French coast, lucky not to be drowned in the maelstrom.’

  The tale rolled out, of Hale drowning, he being the only blue coat to survive and because of his midshipman’s status, in charge of a party of boneheaded seamen, he was forced, despite being a mere thirteen years of age, to take command, to concoct a plan to get back aboard his Uncle Ralph’s frigate. As he spoke, to a silent and admiring marine, the sky took on a grey tinge, slate rather than any hint of blue, and soon, all around them under the heavy clouds, bugles blew and soldiers stirred from their tents to begin to heat their breakfast, both men by the fire brought theirs by Driffield’s servant.

  By the time Toby Burns, in his story, had got back to England, to be hailed as the first hero of the new war, the trumpets were starting to blow for the troops to assemble, so he was spared the need to recount the way his family had reacted to his supposed success, had failed to discern what he couldn’t bring himself to tell them – his desire to forgo sea service.

  ‘A fine tale, Mr Burns, and one you should be more than proud to relate. It says something for a boy of your years, as well as for the service of which we are both a part, that you should be able to command men so much older. I am surprised you did not have a mutiny on your hands when you ordered them to risk their lives.’

  ‘John Pearce would have started one.’

  ‘Pearce?’ asked Driffield.

  Toby realised he was weary, from worry as well as lack of sleep, that being a name he was not inclined to utter in another’s hearing, of a man who had become the bane of his entire life since the events he had just been describing. It was John Pearce who had taken command, not he, Pearce who had shown the leadership and skills he so conspicuously lacked, details of which his Uncle Ralph had suppressed. But he was obliged to respond, given the look on the marine lieutenant’s face.

  ‘A sailor who was one of the party I commanded, sir, and a true sea lawyer type.’

  ‘I met a fellow of that name at Toulon, a naval lieutenant.’

  ‘Different fellow, I’m sure,’ Toby Burns replied quickly, standing up to cover the blush of his lie: he had spent his entire time in Toulon seeking to avoid that very person on the very good grounds that, not only had he stolen the man’s glory, he had, on the way back to England, watched him pressed a second time when he could easily have intervened to prevent it.

  ‘Must be another person,’ Driffield agreed, rising also. ‘But if they share a name, young sir, they share other traits. The Pearce I met was a very wrong-headed fellow. He wanted me to abandon my guns to the enemy, damn him!’

  ‘Shocking,’ Toby Burns exclaimed, seeing it, in the expression of his companion, as the required response.

  Driffield puffed himself up to his full height then, pushing out the buttons on his red coat. ‘I confounded him, of course, and the enemy. Waited till he had scuttled off and did my proper duty.’

  ‘You must be very proud, sir.’

  Driffield’s reply was quite sharp considering how friendly he had been hitherto. ‘As I said, Mr Burns, I did my duty, no more, no less.’

  In a long line the column descended from the Pass of Teghime, the ground underfoot on the switchback road turning from frozen slush to the more slippery, brown-flecked kind, and finally to nothing but mud. But at least, going downhill, the oxen were not straining, the only hol
d-up caused by wheels dropping into the ruts of a poorly maintained surface. They could see, at times to their right, at others to their left, the Mediterranean – not blue but as grey as the sky it reflected – and between them and it the lower hills that hogged the coast where their enemies awaited them.

  That sight was soon lost once they descended further: above and below the sides of the roadway thick forests of pine, oak, chestnut and beech hemmed them in, and where there was a clear patch the earth was terraced, red and rock-filled, with straggling vineyards or olive groves, only very occasionally showing a peasant dwelling, one which was immediately raided by the soldiers. They emerged with whatever of value they could steal: not much from inhabitants who had fled, as country folk do at the approach of any force, hostile or friendly, taking their livestock, sheep and goats with them. On the lower slopes there were fewer trees, but instead they had to contend with the thick, near-impenetrable scrub that was a special feature of the island.

  Up ahead there was the occasional rattle of musketry as French skirmishers, using the dense undergrowth, sought to delay the column’s progress – pinpricks Driffield called them – though in time they passed one of the fatal results, a red-coated body by the roadside, which did nothing for the state of Toby Burns’s mind. Boots covered in mud, white breeches likewise spattered, the bottom of his cloak soaked, he lumbered along, occasionally issuing unnecessary commands to men who knew better than he what to do, receiving in return barely disguised looks of dislike covered by touched forelocks.

  Here was another reason to detest the King’s Navy: tars were generally indulgent of young midshipmen, he had seen it often enough. Sometimes, it was true, they joshed them into making fools of themselves, sending them to get things like sky hooks and long weights, but it was done, if not with pure kindness, with little malice. No sailor he had served with ever played upon him, benevolently or otherwise; they either ignored him or sought to thwart him in some way. So gloomy had he become, he even contemplated the thought that death would be preferable to his present cold condition – not a painful one, of course, but a demise of the kind where one goes to sleep and merely does not awake. That was until he considered divine retribution.

  Yet surely his lies would not count against him in the eyes of the Lord? Forces with which he could not contend had pressed them upon him, so the sin was surely theirs. His Uncle Ralph had known very well it was John Pearce who had led the party that recaptured the ship taken from his convoy, he who had sent him back to England with the despatch extolling his heroism. He had also inveigled him into telling lies at the court martial that had dished Pearce’s hopes of retribution, aided, of course, by that sly old bastard Hotham.

  No, he was an innocent in all this: should he expire in his sleep, surely he would not be denied celestial comfort, a place in heaven, for what were the transgressions of others. That he had not confessed them either in church or in life was not allowed to interfere with the outcome the youngster mentally desired. It was unfortunate then, that in contemplation, one of the faces to fill his mind was that of his Aunt Emily, estranged wife of his uncle and the one person who, in knowing the truth of what had happened, and being of a pure nature, might one day ditch him.

  She had gone back to England with her wounded husband; was she at this moment relating to his family the terrible lies he had told? The thought, which he tried to get out of his mind, would not go, making his misery even more acute. Silently, he imagined a prayer to send over the ocean to her, begging forgiveness, but more than that, her silence.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ensconced in a decent set of rooms just off Holborn, near the Inns of Court, her chest unpacked and her possessions put away, Emily Barclay had achieved that which she sought, the freedom to live as she wished without her marital vows impinging on her life. The note from her husband demanding she return to the family home she ignored, merely replying in the negative but suggesting he meet her on neutral ground to work out how they were to find a way of living as a married couple while never sharing the same roof, with the concomitant need to avoid a scandal that would harm Ralph Barclay’s career – necessary to support them both financially – and destroy her reputation.

  That it would require care by both parties was a given: the world in which they lived did not take kindly to separation or anything that fractured the marriage vows, so it was incumbent on Emily to somehow protect her estranged husband, to find a fiction that society would see as acceptable – not that anyone with half a brain would be fooled. But appearances were all: if he had a ship and was at sea pursuing his career, matters would be eased. Should he fail to find employment, a strong possibility given his missing arm, then things would be much more complex.

  She reflected less now on how she could have been so blind to Ralph Barclay’s manifest faults. Of course, she was junior to him by twenty years, he was a naval captain and, even lacking a ship, was thus seen as a catch. There had also been a degree of parental pressure due to the fact that the home into which she had been born and raised was entailed to the Barclay family and, due to death and inheritance, had he so chosen, Captain Barclay could have turfed them out and not been required to give a reason for doing so. With an ineffectual father and a single-minded mother the drift from intention, to engagement, then to nuptials had turned out, when she examined it in retrospect, to be seamless.

  How supine she had been! It was not hard for her to pin down the exact moment when that had been punctured and her spirit hardened. There had been that first day at Sheerness aboard HMS Brilliant, when following on from her own arrival had come those poor unfortunates her husband called volunteers, when she more than suspected, by their bruised and dispirited appearance, they were pressed men. Then he had hit the one called John Pearce for the mere act of looking at her. She had not known his name then, of course, but how much that man had impacted on her life since that first day. Her husband’s determination to subsequently flog him for a minor misdemeanour had led to their first disagreement and it had seemed the relationship went downhill from that moment, culminating in his lies about not meeting Pearce while she and Captain Barclay were prisoners in Toulon.

  The tap at the door took her mind off both and she opened it to find her widowed landlady, Mrs Fletcher, waiting to speak. ‘A gentleman to see you, Mrs Barclay.’

  ‘In uniform?’ Emily asked, suspecting it might be her husband, even if she had demanded he do not call.

  ‘No,’ she simpered, ‘an engaging young fellow, and very handsome he is too, waiting for you in the parlour.’

  Her heart had lifted at the thought it might be Heinrich Lutyens, to whom she had sent a note regarding her new address, but there was no way the one-time surgeon of HMS Brilliant, who had become her sounding board and many times acted as her conscience over this past year, could be described as handsome.

  ‘No name?’

  ‘He did not give one, but he says he carries an important message.’

  ‘Handsome you say?’

  The way Mrs Fletcher responded positively to that, almost coquettish, gave Emily a clue to who it might be, and if she was correct in her assumption, she knew she would have to steel herself for what was coming, given it was bound to be unpleasant.

  ‘I will come down presently.’

  When Mrs Fletcher left, Emily went to a chest of drawers and opened it, the scent of the perfumed liners rising to her nose. The papers she wanted were not hidden in any way and, taking them out, she unfolded and looked through the bundle, a copy she had made on the way to London, even though she knew very well what each page said. Selecting the one she thought the most damning, the bundle was returned to the drawer, yet she shuddered as she closed it. Much as you anticipate a confrontation and even when you know you hold all the cards, there is always a moment of anxiety: for all the certainties, matters might not go as you wish.

  He was standing, back to the door, looking out onto the street when Emily entered the room, but she knew, by the corn-coloure
d nature of his hair, even before he turned to face her, it was, as she had suspected, her husband’s clerk, Cornelius Gherson. The smile was the same one she recalled from previous encounters, a look that implied an amorous connection, and an intimacy, which certainly did not exist. If there was one man in the world she loathed without a measure of charity, it was this slimy toad.

  ‘Mrs Barclay, I come from your husband.’

  ‘He still employs you?’

  ‘He will have need of me when he gets his next command.’

  There was an attempt to keep anticipation out of her voice. ‘There is some hope of that, then?’

  Gherson’s smirk told her she had failed: it was as if he could see the workings of her mind. ‘He has made some very important connections of late; enough, I suspect, to get him a ship of the line. He had a very favourable interview this very day at the Admiralty.’

  ‘And the message is?’

  ‘Simply, that he declines to support you in your desire for independence.’

  The fact that Emily smiled threw Gherson only very slightly. ‘He does not consider I can support myself?’

  The look she got then, for there was one obvious way she could do that, was interesting. ‘He requires you to return to the marital home, his home, where he will join you at his convenience. He also bids me to point out to you that there are consequences attendant upon a refusal that encompass more than your own person. I refer, of course, to the remainder of your family.’

  ‘How typical of Captain Barclay to use the innocent to seek to punish those he sees as guilty.’

  ‘Then you admit guilt?’

  ‘If I am guilty of anything it is in being slow to see what a slug I married.’

  ‘Is that a word you would wish me to convey to him?’