the Navigator School, had confided to Angus before this journey began that Lady Grace St. Anthony was with child. “I wonder if Sir B will live long enough to see his son or daughter,” Able had commented on Angus Ogilvie’s last night in Portsmouth before he began his European skulk. “I hope he does.” Angus was not so certain he felt the same way.
That small-minded consideration generally ended the rattles in his head, at least for the evening, because Angus Ogilvie did have a conscience – not a huge one, but a conscience nonetheless. He reminded himself then of the business at hand, following Clause Pascal.
At Ambleteuse, Angus saw twenty bateux cannoniers, low-sided and fitted out with sweeps for rowing across the English Channel. What folly. He stopped long enough to estimate that each bateux might seat some one hundred soldiers, all of them likely to puke when they hit that channel chop. I fear you will not prosper, he thought, as he strolled past. Ogilvie knew better than to look back and keep counting, the mark of an amateur spy, which he was not.
He changed his mind at Boulogne, another coastal village which he had always known as an indifferent harbor. France could boast of few good harbors, and Boulogne was no exception, except that Ogilvie knew dredging scoops and shovels when he saw them.
The rumors were true. Napoleon was dredging a deeper harbor at Boulogne, and look, it was being widened, as well. He probably stared longer than he should have. Maybe it was the sight of all those workers that startled him. They swarmed like ants against the slopes, hauling dirt. At the harbor’s mouth, he saw capable masons slapping mortar on trowels to build a fortress guarding the entrance.
He faced seaward, noting the lengthy sandbank which kept frigates of the Royal Navy at bay. Yes, Boulogne was becoming a good port from which to launch an invasion fleet. He could imagine it filled with small craft by 1805.
The idea irritated him, so Captain Angus Ogilvie set fire to two drydocks before he left the city, giving himself great satisfaction. So did a wire necklace for Claude Pascal’s Boulogne connection, who thought he might withhold information about Pascal’s next port of call and still live. “Cádiz, is it? Merci, citoyen,” he told the corpse. “I like Cádiz.”
And here was Cádiz, a place the captain had enjoyed in years past, when active duty took his ships into the excellent harbor, not then under Napoleon Bonaparte’s greedy thumb. Cádiz, home of superior sea food and sultry women.
Either times had changed or he had changed. He settled for a humble bowl of fish soup in a taberna overlooking the harbor, and ignored a woman making eyes at him. She looked unclean, and Captain Ogilvie did have standards. What was this? A harbor full of Spanish ships, to be sure, but French ones, too, ships large and small, all bottled there by the Royal Navy blockade. Ogilvie had expected this, of course, but the proximity to so much fighting sail, all bent on England’s destruction, fair took away his breath.
Looking up now and then from his newspaper, he counted them, from the biggest – the Santísima Trinidad, largest ship in both fleets – to the smallest pinnace. As he admired the lovely lines of the Trinidad, he mourned the men who would die aboard her when the Combined Fleet came out and Admiral Horatio Nelson waited, ready to pounce.
He didn’t mourn long. He leaned back in his chair and thought about Able Six, that curly-haired, complicated fellow with the lovely wife, who had said they were in for another ten years of war, at least. He marveled at the ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte, a petty enough fellow to begin with, but enhanced by the revolution and allowed to strut upon a larger stage.
Ogilvie grudgingly admitted to himself that the Corsican upstart had some talent. Enough was enough, however. “You won’t take your war onto English soil,” he said under his breath. “Not while I can skulk and murder.”
Speaking of which, he looked across the taberna to a table in the even more dimly lit corner, where sat Claude Pascal with another of his informants. The two men leaned close together, then the informant leaned back in surprise and looked around, almost as if he wanted to be anywhere than with Claude Pascal. Ogilvie could appreciate that.
As he looked closer, Ogilvie squinted to make sure he was right. Well blow me down,