Cadiz treated what should have been a triumphal procession like a funeral. Churches were jammed with families saying prayers for loved ones. At Iglesia del Carmen, so many tried to crowd inside that people were admitted in relays. At the High Altar of the Oratorio de San Felipe Nerei, Archbishop Utrera spent an entire day on his knees. As men were rowed to their vessels, tradeswomen, laundresses, and prostitutes who’d visited the ships were transferred back ashore, and, as they passed the men, they joined the lamentation. Whores counted their money as if it might be their last.
None of this gave me confidence.
Being chained on the main gun deck, peering at the world through a gunport, gave me time to think carefully about my own wretched chances. Villeneuve seemed a decent chap, obedient but not terribly imaginative, and thus a lamb for Nelson’s lion. The Bucentaure would be the English admiral’s primary target in hopes of decapitating the command of the Combined Fleet. It was likely to be in the thick of the fighting and to take a terrible pounding.
Unless I could contrive a way to hide in the hold, I needed a safer ship.
CHAPTER 28
At first I had no chance. The fleet hoisted its yardarms and unfurled topsails, laboriously hauled anchor, and worked its way out of Cadiz harbor, the ship’s boats swinging sluggish bows and preventing warships from accidentally drifting down on each other. The ships crawled past the fort at Puntal to the outer Gulf of Cadiz and looked ready to break into the Atlantic. But before they could do so the wind shifted as the Spanish had predicted, and the ships were forced to reanchor, this time in uncomfortable swells. For the next ten days a gale howled from the west, exactly where the Combined Fleet needed to go. Was this a reprieve?
A British frigate tantalizingly patrolled a few miles offshore to report our movements, but my pleas for a return, or a return to land, were ignored. Day after day crawled by with me still a thousand miles from my family. Beyond on the horizon was a second English frigate to relay any signals the first might make, and then presumably a third and fourth and so on out to wherever Nelson’s fleet was patrolling. Should Villeneuve ever break free, the English commander would know within two hours.
So we rocked uneasily at anchor, neither in harbor where we could resupply or at sea where we could fight. The dice of fortune finally came to rest for me as the gale began to die, Villeneuve got a shock, and I got a worse one. I was kicked awake at dawn.
“The wind is shifting,” said a French ensign of fourteen who unlocked my irons, hoisted me to my feet, and pushed me toward the admiral’s great cabin. “Soon we’ll be too far to sea for you to swim.”
“Can I stroll the deck?” I still might make a last-minute dive for shore.
“You’re unchained only to see Admiral Villeneuve. He’s had a letter.”
“Orders from Paris?”
“Details are not shared with ensigns, monsieur.”
“Might I tidy up first?”
“No need, if we’re hanging you.” So he pushed me again, and I was marched to the ship’s great cabin, stiff, grimy, and apprehensive. French marines ushered me inside. The admiral was seated at a writing table looking pensively at correspondence marked with the broken red seals of official communication. He surprised me by looking at me not as a prisoner, but as if we were comrades.
“Mail has come for both of us, Monsieur Gage.”
“A reprieve?” Might as well sound optimistic. Napoleon might free or condemn me, Nelson might bargain me loose, or I could get more bad news from the barristers I’d consulted in London.
“I’m afraid it’s about your wife. Given the demands of war I was obliged to read your correspondence before sharing it with you. The letter comes from a woman whom I assume is a friend of yours, but the news is not good.” Grimly, he handed it over.
“Dearest Ethan,” the missive began. It was on fine paper, the calligraphy elegant, and it smelled of perfume. For a moment my heart hammered, eager that it be from Astiza, but then I recognized the hand of Catherine Marceau. “It was a pity that things turned out so awkwardly at the coronation, and a tragedy that you were separated from your family. None of that was intended; we still had use for you. But you and your wife panicked. In the long months