The Barbed Crown

Chapter 23





The French masts combed the sky like a line of dead timber, backlit by lanterns on the hills of Boulogne. The British ships were entirely dark, and we ghosted to attack on a light midnight breeze, planning to win the war not with blazing line of battle but secret weapons. The captains and sailors I met thought we inventors were eccentric at best and bound for bedlam at worst, but they were under orders to let us try.

Our mission was to set ablaze the line of ships guarding Boulogne, and then all the invasion craft inside the harbor. Our plan was to attack first with Fulton’s torpedoes, and then with volleys of Congreve’s rockets.

My job was to get things off to a rousing start.

It had taken nine agonizing months since returning to England to prove myself, lay new plans, and train for this mission, all the while with no word of my wife and son. I was wildly impatient to search for them, but Smith kept a close eye on me, and two warring nations stood in my way. So maybe this inventive warfare could end the conflict. My separation from Astiza had stretched to an eternity, but perhaps this night eternity would have an end.

Fulton built two pontoons connected by thwarts, with a long cylinder slung beneath that was packed with gunpowder. This was the torpedo. Each component floated, but lead sank this “catamaran” so that the top of the twin pontoons was barely above the surface of the water and the torpedo itself was entirely submerged to protect it from gunfire. Pasques and I straddled each pontoon like riders on horses, dressed in black with our faces coated with polish. Once released from our mother ship, we were to paddle with the tide to reach the anchor cable of a moored French naval vessel, tie on the torpedo, and paddle away.

“All that’s required is pluck and genius to reach the anchor cable undetected and set the clock ticking under the very eyes of the enemy,” Fulton told me after the catamaran was lowered over the side of the Johnstone’s Phantom, clunking ominously against its hull. “Having first landed and then escaped from France, you’ve demonstrated the skulking skills necessary. And your French companion there has strength.”

“I didn’t accomplish a thing. Pasques is helping out of desperation.”

“That’s because you didn’t have the aid of modern science, except for sympathetic ink. Now American ingenuity is on your side. We live in an age of invention and experimentation, and you’ve been chosen by fate to pioneer its wonders.”

Smith, who’d been rowed over from the flagship to witness our launching, seconded this endorsement by pumping my hand. “This time you have the chance to crush the entire invasion and write Nelson about how you did it, Gage. He’ll be wild with jealousy.” Smith and Nelson respected each other as warriors but were inevitable rivals for public acclaim. Nelson thought Smith a flamboyant and impractical dreamer, while Smith thought Nelson vain and annoyingly lucky, even though the admiral had lost an eye, a limb, his marriage, and any ounce of fat he’d once possessed.

“And why aren’t you paddling, Robert?” I asked the inventor.

“I’m the bow and you’re the arrow, Ethan. The quickest way back to Astiza is through the French fleet.” He pointed, as if I didn’t know which direction my renewed enemy was. “Start your lethal clockwork for love.”

So Pasques straddled one pontoon to prove himself to English service, and I straddled the other to end the damned war. If the invasion scheme could be foiled, Napoleon somehow toppled, Catherine captured, and peace returned, I could find my family without interference.

“Are you ready, Pasques?”

“More than you know, my friend.”

Once we got under way we said not a word, knowing how sound can carry across water. I pointed at a particularly promising dark shape, Pasques nodded, and we aimed our awkward craft at the warship’s anchor cable, which curved from its bow down into the dark sea. The French ships were anchored bow to stern to form a wall of cannon-studded wood. French land batteries flanked each side.

Our first problem was that the tide threatened to carry us past the intended anchor hawser, and only by digging in my paddle to pivot our ungainly craft at the last moment did I manage to snag the rope. Our stern kept swinging, so Pasques, who remained a poor swimmer, had to slide himself carefully forward to grasp the weedy cable in his big paws, holding us so we didn’t drift down on the enemy ship. I glanced up at the looming bluff of its bow. There was a knob up there that might be a sentry’s head, but no alarm was given. It was a cloudy night, and we were blotted out against a sea of ink. Or so I hoped.

It was eerie to rest there a moment. I could hear the creak of tackle, the mutter of French voices, and the slap of waves against hulls. I took quiet breaths as if it might make a difference. We hung just under the stern of the next ship in line, its stern windows a great bank of mullioned glass and the top of its rudder like the fin of a whale.

The rope to attach the torpedo to the ship’s cable was at the front of our contraption, so Pasques tied it off while I pried off a cover and set the timer.

“Have you set the fuse?” he whispered.

“It’s ticking.”

We had three minutes to escape.

When we pulled the pins to release each hull from the torpedo, they squealed.

“Qui est là?” a lookout challenged.

Our catamaran came apart. The torpedo floated by itself. In theory, the line at its nose was just long enough to let it drift down on the ship. We backed with our paddles, my pontoon accidentally banging the explosive-filled coffer and making me wince. This was not as easy as it looked on Fulton’s diagrams.

A lantern lit. “Anglais!”

There was a boom, and a foretop blunderbuss erupted, spraying an ark of musket balls at the shadow we made. Waterspouts sprang all around us, some bullets pinging off our lead-covered hulls.

“Merde,” Pasques muttered.

Miraculously, we’d not been hit, but we were in it now. Shouts and bells sounded up and down the French line. Gunport doors lifted like lion mouths, and muzzles trundled forward to aim at British ships that couldn’t be seen yet. Muskets fired blindly into the dark, the stabs of light trying to find us. I dared not shout to my companion, but he was digging his paddle into the water as furiously as I was, both of us driving our separated pontoons that were as maneuverable as soggy logs. It felt like Napoleon’s entire navy and army were trying to take a bead on us.

The clockwork kept ticking.

Paddling as furiously as a Canadian voyageur, I seemed barely to budge a pontoon sheathed in metal and as easy to steer as a mule. I cursed that we hadn’t time to try this in England before our attack. The tide was carrying us down the French line even as we strove to work away from it. Our saving grace was that the current was so swift that the blind shooting was throwing up spouts of water well behind us now.

For an instant, I allowed myself hope. Maybe the crazy scheme would really work! I’d be a hero, Pasques would have a new country, and the British would send us on to look for Astiza, Harry, and a medieval artifact.

And then the Frenchman looked over his shoulder.

“The torpedo is following.”

I wrenched around. The bomb had somehow come loose from the anchor cable and was drifting merrily in our wake, almost keeping pace despite our furious paddling. It was only a hundred feet behind, as persistent as a duckling.

Ticking remorselessly.

“We need them to sink it!” I shouted in English. “Here! Shoot here!” I made a splash with my paddle.

“Imbecile!” my companion cried.

Cannon blasts erupted, the suck of their trajectory almost tipping me over. As a professional gambler, I was calculating that the torpedo was longer than my narrow silhouette and that such odds meant a cannonball might sink it before hitting me. There were slaps as several balls skipped off the waves. The French cannon flashes were answered by British ones. Both fleets lit up.

Sweet mother. We were caught in a crossfire.

I looked back. The torpedo was trailing as doggedly as a pet, a hundred and fifty feet back now but still drifting at a good clip. Huge plumes of water erupted around us. Lanterns and torches were being lit in the camps of Boulogne. I could hear bugles, bells, and the rumble of drums.

We’d got things off to a rousing start, but not in the way intended.

Then the torpedo blew up.

The ocean erupted. The explosion was gigantic, a geyser of water shooting upward as high as the French mastheads. The concussion sent out a clout of air that knocked both Pasques and me into the sea.

“Ethan!” The buffalo could barely float.

I could have abandoned him right then and struck out for the British, but that’s not my character. I’d recruited him to this madness and felt responsible for his carcass. So I swam in the policeman’s direction and found him thrashing, his pontoon lost in the dark. First Catherine Marceau, then the emperor, and now a floundering ox! I was becoming a regular Channel lifeguard. I came in behind so Pasques wouldn’t drown me with his flailing, reached across his shoulder to grasp his thick chest, and pulled him to me. I shouted in his ear. “I’ve got you! Lie still and I’ll float you!”

He kicked and thrashed instinctively. I half choked him. “Still, or you drown us both!” Finally, he quieted, floating sluggishly. Splashes continued to erupt all around us, metal screaming. Gunports flamed. Now what? The torpedo wasted, the French line intact, and the English fleet and Johnstone’s mothership half a mile of cold swimming away. If steering the catamaran had been awkward, towing Pasques was like dragging a barge.

The night was growing brighter. An ominous squadron of flaming English fireships bore down to engulf the French, but we’d failed to blast the hole they were intended to drift through. Flaming chips flew off the burning vessels as French cannonballs battered them. One, then two, began to sink. Behind, a flotilla of sloops, ketches, luggers, and longboats was sending up a barrage of Congreve rockets that drew scarlet arcs across the night. They were beautiful things, climbing into the sky and then scything down toward the French fleet like meteors. Hundreds of cannons were thumping in reply from the French shore. I could feel the beat of their blasts through the water.

The pontoons we’d been straddling had disappeared.

There was nothing we could do but swim for the French side. Maybe we could somehow slip by and sneak away on shore?

As we came between bow and stern of two thundering warships, Pasques waved his arm and exhaustedly shouted for help in French.

A péniche drifted to us, its crowd of anxious soldiers pointing their guns. My French companion reached and grasped its side. An officer peered at us.

“Gage? Is that you?”

General Duhèsme stared in disbelief at my exhausted face. Pasques floated like a bloated ox behind me.

“As a good double agent I’ve come to give warning,” I tried. “I’ve brought word from England that their savants are sending secret weapons against you.”

“That’s rather obvious, is it not?”

“Don’t listen to him!” Pasques said, coughing water. “It is I, Inspector Pasques, reporting to duty after sabotaging the British attack and capturing the notorious double agent and nefarious conspirator, Ethan Gage!”

“The devil you have. I just saved you.”

The policeman hung on the side of the péniche. “I cut loose the English torpedo from its attachment line while the idiot American wasn’t looking. I knew its explosion would toss us into the sea, and he’d be forced to rescue me. I’ve been looking to trap him since he kicked my balls in Notre Dame. Now I deliver you a turncoat and saboteur.”

Good heavens. The bastard switched sides as easily as I did, and looked smug about it, too. I suppose I should have been flattered by the imitation.

Duhèsme looked at us both in the water. “You’ve arrested Gage?”

“I brought him back from perfidious England.”

“It’s a sorry world when I’m more trustworthy than you,” I complained. “I deserve more loyalty, Pasques.”

“No, you don’t. The food was awful in Walmer Castle.”

The general looked from him, to me, and back again, finally shaking his head. “Excellent job, Inspector Pasques. And welcome back to France, Ethan Gage. While I enjoy your company, I suspect your treacheries have finally doomed you. You should have embraced one side, as I advised you.”

Rockets were crashing all around, most into the sea. Shouting French sailors were extinguishing those that hit a vessel. Their defensive line was holding.

I could hear rising cheers up and down the French line. The British must be drawing off. Our attack had failed.

Soldiers dragged me into the French boat, and the general regarded me with disappointment. “Don’t you know it is futile to oppose Bonaparte?”

“I wanted to go to Italy.”

“It is too late for that now.” The general glanced around as sailors beat at a score of fires. “So . . . would you rather be hanged, or shot?”