The Tide Watchers (6 page)

St. Pancras Church, London, England

August 19, 1802

T
HE ARCHBISHOP'S GUMS
were
purple
.

The dentures were the latest innovation for the wealthy, made in porcelain instead of ivory, fixed into his head with gold screws that flashed when he smiled. The ousted Archbishop of Narbonne looked like a Botticelli cherub, with chubby cheeks, a sweet smile, and a halo of white hair, but those teeth—

“You must be wondering why I asked you to meet me, Commander.”

Click
—the top denture dropped as the archbishop spoke, then
clack
—it moved back into place. A piece of half-chewed meat stuck above the denture showed every time the teeth dropped
.
And as for his breath—when Duncan was a child, he'd seen a two-headed goat at a fair. Now, he felt the same horrified wonder mingled with a churning belly.

“Commander, did you hear me?” Narbonne's voice was cold.

Caught out mid-run.
He forced his gaze up to the old man's eyes and bowed—a swift, jerking movement, with none of the grace Eddie had taught him. “I beg your pardon,
Votre Éminence
.” If a man of the archbishop's exalted status requested a meeting in a tomb-cold church with underpriests stationed outside every entrance on the hottest day of the year, he must have vital news. Moreover, if he wore gentleman's attire rather than luxurious vestments of gold and purple, especially when inside the church he'd frequented since fleeing France, he must have information he didn't dare allow anyone else to overhear.

With a haughty nod, Narbonne forgave him. Duncan's jaw tight
ened, and his hands curled into fists. Oblivious, the old man waved his hand at the crypt and nave beyond. “This dates back a thousand years. So-called improvers with their gold leaf and plaster pots are fools.”
Click-clack-click. Meat and spittle.
“These things tie us to the faith of ages past. In the Revolution, so much beauty was lost to the world.”

Duncan suppressed a sigh. Elderly people liked to talk, and any informant of his standing expected and deserved a respectful hearing. But he wasn't saying anything that didn't happen during the Reformation, the Dissolution, the Wars of the Roses—name a war, or a country.

The silence stretched thin. It seemed Narbonne wanted an answer. “To lose your bishopric under the terms of the Concordat must have felt like betrayal.”

An irritable look settled on the archbishop's face. “Don't patronize me, boy. You—”

Duncan's stomach jerked.
You are nothing. You will live up to the name you've been given, boy!
Even with his eyes open he saw Annersley's hand lifting, the whip descending . . .

Halfway to his face, Duncan forced his hand down. The scars had been there so long he mostly forgot they were there.

The old man sat ramrod straight on the pew: a highbred bird with ruffled feathers, every inch as imperious and easily offended as the old bastard at Mellingham Hall. He knew what Narbonne expected, but damned if he'd grovel. When he'd run from Annersley the last time, he'd sworn never to cringe or bow before any man again.

Eddie had asked him to display patience. “I will refrain from patronizing you if you do the same for me. If I was a boy, or not from your class, I doubt you'd have agreed to meet me.”

Unexpectedly, Narbonne's lips twitched. “
Touché.
So which of your names do I use, the oh-so-English Commander Aylsham”—
click-clack
—“the equally French Monsieur Borchonne, or perhaps I should call you Tidewatcher?”

Duncan stiffened with the quiet use of his code name, given by the British Alien Office when he was given his first Continental assign
ment, back in '93. “Commander Aylsham will do.” He spoke with an edge of rigidity he couldn't control. “My ship leaves with the tide.”

A slight nod indicated Narbonne's second gracious acceptance of an apology Duncan refused to offer. He pointed to a pew seat and crossed to it without bothering to see if Duncan followed. The silken whisper of the episcopal slippers the comte's son wore with the best tailoring London could provide ground at Duncan's patience, which was never his strong point. Wily old hypocrite played the man of God when it suited him, but the latest in his string of mistresses was rumored to be his own niece.

Duncan spoke through a tight jaw. “The tide turns in an hour,
Votre Éminence,
and my mission is imperative.”

The archbishop lifted his brows, holding his haughtiness to the end. “With the signing of the Concordat, France and the Church abandoned me. Still, French, Irish, and Catholic dissidents here believe I share their causes and tell me their secrets as if in the confessional. They are sacred, and I will not reveal them without strong reason.”

Click-clack. French. Irish.
Duncan expected Narbonne, with Irish nobility for parents, but born, raised, and ordained in France, to have divided loyalties. “I know the rules of the confessional,
Votre Éminence
.” When would the old man finally get to the point?

“But one I must tell. There is a plot to kill the king.”

Duncan stared at Narbonne.
Surely Eddie wouldn't recall me from France
for this old chestnut?
Poor old Farmer George, why so many people wanted to kill a harmless, half-mad king who liked to potter in his garden was beyond him.
The Irish or the Catholics,
he thought wearily.
It's always the same.
“If you find it a serious threat, take it to a government representative.”

Narbonne shifted on the pew, putting a cushion behind his back. “Sir Edward sent me to you. So don't waste my time, bo . . . Commander.”

Frozen inside, Duncan bowed again. “Why did Sir Edward pass this to me?”

Narbonne's lips pursed. “His wife is . . . ill.”

The ice inside Duncan broke into sharp pieces. If Eddie wouldn't
leave Caroline even long enough to hold this single meeting, but had recalled
him
from France, she must be seriously ill. That meant he'd have to waste more time bringing the girl home—
if
he could make her leave without her child. Damn it, it meant delaying the mission until he could find another woman. But where the hell would he find a lady of a similar age and the same perfect combination of ruin and innocence? “Can we please get to the point?”

Narbonne closed his eyes, as if asking God for patience. “As a French-born man of Irish nobility, and a displaced archbishop, I'm in a unique position to hear things. The plotters are not Jacobites or students preaching insurrection on the streets of London. Nor is it beer talk by the United Irishmen. These men lost titles and lands in Ireland and Scotland through ambitious men with social connections. The explosion is planned during the Opening of Parliament, which the king always attends, as do hundreds of those absentee lords raking in profits from their Irish and Scottish lands. A Colonel Despard is the ringleader—the former superintendent of Honduras, an Irishman with sufficient reason to want several men dead.”

“I read about the case.” The men in Honduras, who'd accused Despard of treason and had him imprisoned for their profit, had escaped perjury charges through connections to the king; but though he'd eventually been freed, Despard's life and reputation had been destroyed. “I don't see how they'd get close enough. Armed guards surround Whitehall—”

“They've emulated Guy Fawkes and unsealed a tunnel beneath Whitehall,” Narbonne interrupted. “I didn't dare ask for details, but from what one man said, I think they're using time-lock devices on naval barrel bombs, to give them time to escape. If they blow up the tunnel beneath Parliament . . .”

Duncan's stomach dropped. The tide must come and go without him. He had to find Windham, in whichever part of the British Isles his spymaster had gone in this inclement weather, and report this posthaste. “I'll look into this plot. That I promise you.”

“I'm not finished,” Narbonne said when Duncan stood. “What if
it's only the start of their revenge, and they destroy Buckingham Palace, London Bridge, or the Tower of London to begin a collaborative Irish-Scots uprising throughout Britain?”

Duncan closed his eyes. Given Irish history, and the brutal abuse of power the English had used against the Scots and their lands since Culloden, it was horribly plausible.

“. . . you've been scouring the Channel Coast. I want to know what you found there.”

Too late Duncan caught what Narbonne said, and he stiffened.

“Yes, I'm an Irish-French Catholic with an ax to grind.” Narbonne's voice turned gritty as he lay bare every reason for reticence on Duncan's part between them. “So I'll tell you what you found. There were soldiers everywhere stopping entry to Boulogne-sur-Mer. The area's flooded by spies of too many persuasions and plots. You suspect Bonaparte has more infantry—and possibly far more warships—than the Treaty of Amiens allows, and you need to find out why he's blocked off every approach to Boulogne by land and sea.”

Duncan leaned forward. “You have royalist spies inside Boulogne?” Narbonne's loyalties had been obvious from the moment he gave Duncan the information.

Narbonne whispered, “Not now. Nonresidents without official permission have been forcibly escorted outside Boulogne, and newcomers refused entrance. My man was killed.”

Duncan's innards were going through the Labors of Hercules today. Hell in a bloody handbasket, he'd tossed a raw recruit like Peebles into Boulogne alone. “Why? What's going on?”

Narbonne shrugged. “Any proofs I have, your government would want verified. My speculations are useless to a government that does not want to know what Bonaparte is up to. It is convenient to them to suspect my connections, and my religion,” he said in a wry voice.

Duncan waved that aside. Any Englishman with a brain in his head couldn't trust a French-Irish Catholic, especially one with a religious ax to grind. He wouldn't believe it now but for the evidence of his own eyes. “How long have you known of this?”

Narbonne's chubby face darkened until he was as purple as his gums. “I sent men across France after Bonaparte paid his thirty pieces of silver and the pope sold the faith there. Now Bonaparte gives bishoprics to his sycophants or those with gold enough to pay for his army!”

Narbonne didn't answer the real question. The Concordat had been proposed over a year ago, and a man of Narbonne's standing would have been warned early on from someone in the Vatican. Early enough to send spies throughout France to spike whatever guns Boney had set up. “You must have impeccable sources.”

“I do.” Grabbing Duncan's cravat, he pulled them face-to-face, blowing out the scent of rotting meat, and Duncan's stomach churned. “All Channel ports apart from Calais were closed this week. The coastal roads are guarded and blocked, and warships patrol all French waters from Jersey to Calais. I've heard whispers of a planned assassination of the first consul on the Channel Coast in late October. My sources say he's coming, but Bonaparte has no visit marked on his official agenda.”

With a chill, Duncan remembered the whispered
October twenty-ninth.
If royalist spies knew the date, it meant everyone in charge at the Alien Office also knew. Why hadn't he been told?

Narbonne spoke almost in a whisper. “So is this plot real, or is Bonaparte using the many previous attempts on his life to deflect us all from the truth?”

Duncan frowned hard. “Deflect us from what?”

The old man's gaze bored into his. “How do you hide a masked assassin?
Naturellement,
send him to kill during a masquerade,” he answered the question. “How do you mask a conspiracy so large it couldn't possibly be missed if it stood alone?”

Duncan's mind pitched and rolled like his stomach did on his first day returning to sea. Assassination, betrayal of church, and international conspiracy, all in an hour. “Lose it in a crowd of other plots.”

Narbonne nodded. “A hundred warships and a thousand soldiers surround Boulogne-sur-Mer. Bonaparte reads every dispatch he's given by day's end. He'd never go if he thought the assassination attempt was
real, unless the plot comes from him, or there's something in Boulogne that makes his visit imperative. Either way, your government needs to know what's happening.”

Narbonne's words churned in Duncan's mind amid a stormy sea of questions. Why kill a poor, silly king who spent half his life growing vegetables? Why was every entrance to Boulogne-sur-Mer blocked? Why was the entire Channel Coast manned by thousands of soldiers?

The scraps of conversation he'd overheard at the tavern . . . what did his enemies know that he didn't? How could he have missed the installation of a blockade while he'd been combing the Channel Coast—and how the
hell
had every member of his team missed it?

Answer: they couldn't have. One of his team was hand in glove with the French. God help them all if the rat was one of the semaphore signalers.

Semaphore . . . the message about Eddie's daughter.
If there was a mole, and he'd passed the message to the French, Delacorte might know they'd found her. Given what he knew, that boded very badly for Delacorte. How soon had the Frenchman known? Was
his
presence why she'd been attacked the first night?

“I'm afraid my usefulness ends here, Commander.” Narbonne's sigh sounded like an admission of defeat. “Bonaparte's setting empires ablaze, and God help those who try to stamp them out. I believe the answer to your questions lies in what he is hiding in Boulogne.”

The bow Duncan made this time was deep, filled with respect. “I would never have discovered this much on my own. Thank you,
Votre Éminence.
You spoke of speculations
.
I would hear them, if you'd care to share them with me.”