The Old Vengeful

A—the word escapes me—but a lesson she would not forget, anyway.'

'A salutary lesson—'salutory'?' Aske smiled. 'So he dusted off de la Rousseliere's 1779 Plan for Portsmouth— was that the salutary lesson?' He glanced sidelong at Paul. 'And, of course, our dear Colonel Suchet himself had a nodding acquaintance with Portsmouth, didn't he! Mud-banks and dummy3

hulks, and all that . . . plus a well-founded dislike for the English, as a result—he'd be the ideal man to put his heart and soul into the project, obviously—' he came back to the Professor '—obviously?'

Paul frowned. 'What evidence have you for this?' He ignored Aske. 'Apart from circumstantial evidence?'

Belperron nodded. 'He withdrew all the Hamilton maps and the Rousseliere plans from the archives of the Ministry of Marine in the autumn of 1811, to the Ministry of War, where he had a small staff of officers working under him. It is my belief that these officers—and there were engineers and naval experts among them—that they were bringing the Portsmouth Plan up to date on the basis of fresh intelligence from England.' He nodded again. 'Also ... he solicited reports from Admiral Missiessy on the condition of the squadrons in the Channel and Atlantic ports, and on the construction programme—and from Count Emeriau and Admiral Cosmao on the numbers of trained seamen in Toulon and Genoa, who could be transferred north, to bring the crews of those ships up to strength.'

'But. . . except perhaps for those maps ... all this is still circumstantial,' said Paul. 'Is there any real proof that there was a new Portsmouth Plan, Professor?'

'Circumstantial... up to a point, Dr Mitchell. It is even true that the plans prepared by Hamilton and de la Rousseliere were not the only ones Colonel Suchet called for—indeed, all this I already knew, from other researches, though I must dummy3

confess that I never assembled it in this fashion until now . . .

for none of it came to fruition. Because in December—

December 1812—all the maps and plans and charts were returned to the Ministry of Marine, inevitably.'

'Why inevitably?' asked Elizabeth.

'The Russian disaster, Mademoiselle. For after that Colonel Suchet was no longer working to strengthen the fleet—he was stripping it of men for the army, in preparation for the European campaigns of 1813. The Portsmouth Plan perished in the snows of Moscow.'

'If there ever was a new Portsmouth Plan, Professor.' The retreat of the Grande Armee encouraged Aske to advance again.

But Professor Belperron smiled. 'Oh, there was a new Portsmouth Plan, I believe that now, even though I have not had time to prove it yet. Not conclusively . . .'

He had something else, thought Elizabeth. He had had it all along, and he had just been waiting for the right moment to let it out of the bag, to impress them.

Paul caught her eye, and grinned—Paul had come to the same conclusion, and that grin told her that he was quite prepared to be impressed if that gave him what he wanted.

He even kept the grin in place for the Professor. 'You know ... I don't think you've been quite straight with us, Professor,' he said.

The little man, who had been concentrating on Aske, now dummy3

frowned slightly at Paul. 'Pardon, Dr Mitchell?'

'What we want to know is why Colonel Suchet was so keen to get our fellows from the Vengeful back into the cooler—

which should also give us the answer why they were treated the way they were, and shunted off to the Lautenbourg, instead of to Verdun, or somewhere like that, where there were other prisoners.' Paul leaned forward again. 'Well, my old friend Bertrand Bourienne told me that you know more than any man alive about what was happening in France in Napoleon's time, and particularly the last five years of the First Empire—he said, if you didn't know, then no one knew, by God!'

For a moment Elizabeth was afraid that he was laying it on a bit too thick, but then she saw that the Professor was visibly disarmed by such confidence.

'Dr Mitchell... I fear your friend overrates me—'

'I don't think so. I think you know exactly what Suchet was after . . . Or, you've got a pretty damn good idea of it.'

Aske sniffed. 'Well, it's pretty damn obvious, I should have thought: somehow the poor devils had tumbled to this new Portsmouth Plan of his—it can hardly be anything else, can it?'

Belperron's eyes glinted behind his spectacles. 'Can't it, Mr Aske? Can't it?'

Aske opened his mouth, and then thought better of what he had been about to say, and said nothing at all.

dummy3

Belperron shook his head. 'To tell the truth, my friends, I do not know exactly what Suchet wished to suppress—I have had far too little time . . . only a matter of hours ... to look for the necessary confirmation of what I believe . . . All I have at this moment is another name—another name connected with Colonel Suchet—and the known facts about him ... a most interesting man . . .'

'What man—what name, Professor?' asked Paul, dutifully on cue.

'James Burns—no, I am sure you will never have heard of him, Mr Aske. James Burns, merchant—import- export, as we would say now . . . James Burns, of London, New York . . .

and Portsmouth, Mr Aske.'

'Another traitor?' Aske's mouth twisted. 'Or another renegade patriot?'