admiral’s victory against the Combined Fleet was even more decisive than at the Nile. I would eventually learn that seventeen French and Spanish ships had been captured. One had blown up. Britain didn’t lose a single ship. England’s greatest naval victory had been accompanied by the death of its greatest naval hero, and was about to be followed by one of history’s most terrible storms.
Swiftsure had taken its prize under tow, but Redoutable was settling. Across the water, I could hear the creak of pumps.
Dripping and shivering from my dunking, I took inventory of my new flagship, a sixteen-footer I christened Astiza. The fleets were scattering, the wind building. Of the seventeen captured prizes, fifteen were so wrecked by gunfire that they were being towed. Five damaged British ships had to be towed as well, and dismasted warships like Victory were barely under control. The storm was pushing the hulks toward the lee shore of Spain.
Was the emerald I’d pawned in London still exerting its Aztec curse? I’d tried to become rich and failed, tried to prevent war and failed, tried to save Nelson for his mistress Emma and failed, and tried to stay close to my wife and failed.
In each case I’d been dependent on others for any success.
Perhaps it was time to depend on myself.
Redoutable was slowly sinking by the stern, while tied to the laboring Swiftsure two hundred yards ahead. With the wind rising, waves dashed against the beak of the French ship as if against rocks on a shore. Men were chopping away wrecked rigging to try to save her. Two great hawsers led from bits on the foredeck to the English man-of-war. The ropes would slacken when the roll of swells briefly lessened the distance between the ships, and then snap taut when the rhythm went the other way, humming like harpsichord wire. At some point they’d snap.
It was time to cut my own puppet strings.
Since escaping the Caribbean and arriving to avenge the wife I thought dead, I’d ricocheted from one side to another, the spy and diplomat of both English and French. I’d been hired and used several times over, betrayed by Catherine Marceau whom I’d saved, sacrificed the safety of my family, and been nearly killed.
I’d also come away with a quest involving a fabled Brazen Head, with Catherine, Talleyrand, and Pasques after it, too, for their master, Napoleon.
How easy to avoid the traps of the present if you knew the future! Had Albertus Magnus crafted that power into an “android”? And had it been destroyed as evil, or hidden for rediscovery?
If my wife and son were still alive, the Brazen Head might lead me to them, or them to the Brazen Head.
I was done working my way for passage, done relying on London financial brokers, and done allowing policemen to separate me from my family.
As self-appointed captain, I took inventory. There were emergency stores of water, wine, and biscuit on the boat, plus a musket, two pistols, a cutlass, and two cloaks thrown in by French officers in hopes they’d be saved from bullet holes. I poked slits in one and lashed it to cover the front of the gig and help keep out spray in the coming storm. Then I erected the boat’s mast and tied on its sail, reefing it to not much more than a handkerchief.
I settled by the tiller, snugged in the second cloak, trimmed my scrap of canvas, and began to move, bubbles swirling in my wake. I sailed around the shattered stern of Redoutable, looking into a maw in which just a few survivors crept. A British officer who’d taken charge of the smashed prize finally challenged me from the battered taffrail on the poop. “You there! You can’t take that boat!”
“But I have.” The wind snatched my reply across the water.
“Are you mad? A storm is coming. You won’t get fifty yards!”
“More like five hundred. You can watch me flip and say, ‘I told you so.’”
He shook his head. We were all half-mad with sorrow and weariness.
As I steered onto a broad reach running south-southeast and the rudder bit, the little gig took off like a Congreve rocket. My hope was to run before the blow and make harbor near Gibraltar, bargaining for a bigger ship to Venice. When we’d left Cadiz, I’d felt imprisoned. Now, alone on a wild ocean, I was free.
I leaned against one side of the hull to keep the gig in balance, feeling the tiller dance like a live