‘Smith is scheduled to be in the region then,’ Nelson noted.
‘And your own self-interest in doing this?’ Hardy asked me.
‘I have scores of my own to settle in Cairo. Then I’d like passage to a neutral port. After L’Orient, I’ve had enough of war.’
‘Three months before you report back?’ Nelson objected.
‘It may take that long for Bonaparte to react and form the new French plans.’
‘By God,’ objected Hardy, ‘this man served on the enemy flagship and now he wants to be put ashore? I don’t trust a word he says, ring or no ring.’
‘Not served. Observed. I didn’t fire a shot.’
Nelson thought, fingering my ring. Then he held it out. ‘Done. We’ve smashed enough ships that you hardly make a difference. Tell Boney exactly what you observed: I want him to know he’s doomed. However, it will take months for us to assemble an army to get the Corsican out of Egypt. In the meantime, I want you to make a count of his strength and gauge the mood. If there is any chance of surrender, I want to hear about it immediately.’
Napoleon is about as likely to give up as you are, Admiral, I thought, but I didn’t say that. ‘If you can get me ashore…’
‘We’ll get an Egyptian to put you on the beach tomorrow to erase any suspicion you’ve been talking to us.’
‘Tomorrow? But if you want me to notify Bonaparte…’
‘Sleep and eat first. No need to hurry, Gage, because I suspect the preliminary news has gone ahead of you. We chased a corvette that slipped into Alexandria just ahead of the battle, and I’m sure the diplomat on board had a rooftop view of our victory. He’s the kind of man to already be on his way. What was his name, Hardy?’
‘Silano, the reports said.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ Nelson said. ‘Some tool of Talleyrand named Alessandro Silano.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My first task, upon hearing this disturbing news, was to reunite with Talma, who likely assumed me dead once word of the explosion of L’Orient reached Alexandria. Silano here? Was that the ‘help’ that Bonaparte had hinted at?
The battered British fleet did not attempt to force the repaired forts at Alexandria’s harbour. Instead they began patrolling in blockade. As for me, an Arab lighter deposited me on the beach at Abukir Bay. No one took particular note of my landing, as dhows and feluccas were sweeping the water to salvage debris and rob the dead. French and British longboats were also retrieving bodies in a makeshift truce, and on shore, wounded men lay groaning under crude canvas shelters. I splashed up the beach looking as ragged as the rest, helped carry some wounded to the shade of a shell-pocked sail, and then joined a desultory procession of French sailors straggling toward Alexandria. They were sullen in defeat, quietly vowing revenge on the English, but also had the hopeless look of the stranded. It was a long, hot hike in a pillar of dust, and when I paused and looked back, I could see columns of smoke where some of the beached French ships were still burning. As we marched we passed the rubble of long-vanished civilisations. A sculpted head was toppled on its side. A royal foot as big as a table, with toes the size of pumpkins, peeked from debris. We were a ruin trudging past ruins. I didn’t reach the city until midnight.
Alexandria buzzed like a disturbed hive. It was by going from lodging to lodging, asking for news of a short, bespectacled Frenchman with an interest in miracle cures that I finally discovered that Talma had lodged in a dead Mameluke’s mansion that had been turned into an inn by an opportunistic merchant.
‘The sickly one?’ the proprietor responded. ‘He’s disappeared without taking his bag or his medicine.’
This didn’t sound good at all. ‘He left no word for me, Ethan Gage?’
‘You’re a friend of his?’
‘Yes.’
‘He owes me one hundred francs.’
I paid his debt and claimed Talma’s luggage as my own, hoping the journalist had rushed back to Cairo. Just to be sure he hadn’t sailed away, I checked the docks. ‘It’s not like my friend Talma to go off by himself,’ I told a French port supervisor worriedly. ‘He’s really not very adventurous.’
‘Then what is he doing in Egypt?’
‘Seeking cures for his ailments.’
‘Fool. He should have taken the waters in Germany.’
This supervisor confirmed that Count Silano had indeed arrived in Egypt, but not from France. Instead, he’d sailed from the Syrian coastline. He reportedly had disembarked with two enormous trunks of belongings, a monkey on a golden chain, a blonde mistress, a cobra in a basket, a pig in a cage, and a gigantic Negro bodyguard. If that were not conspicuous enough, he had adopted an Arab’s flowing robes and added a yellow sash, Austrian cavalry boots, and French rapier. ‘I am here to decipher the mysteries of Egypt!’ he’d proclaimed. With lingering gunfire still grumbling as the sun rose over the ruins of the French fleet, Silano had commissioned a caravan of camels and set off for Cairo. Could Talma have gone with him? It seemed unlikely. Or had Antoine trailed the count to spy?
I joined a cavalry patrol to Rosetta and then took a boat to Cairo. From a distance the capital seemed curiously unchanged after the apocalypse at Abukir, but I soon learnt that news of the disaster had indeed preceded me.
‘It’s like we’re clinging to a rope,’ said a sergeant who escorted me to Napoleon’s headquarters. ‘There’s the Nile, and this narrow band of green that follows it, and nothing but empty desert on either side. Fall into the sands and they kill you for your buttons. Garrison a village, and you might wake to a knife sawing your windpipe. Bed a woman, and you might find your drink poisoned or your balls gone. Pet a dog, and you risk rabies. We can march in only two dimensions, not three. Is the rope to hang us?’
‘The French have advanced to the guillotine,’ I quipped inanely.
‘And Nelson has already cut off our head. Here’s the body, flopping in Cairo.’
I didn’t think Bonaparte would like that analogy, preferring that the British admiral had cut off our feet while he, the brains, remained defiant. When I reported back to him at headquarters, he alternated between casting all blame on Brueys – ‘Why didn’t he sail for Corfu?’ – to insisting the essential strategic situation was unchanged. France was still the master of Egypt and within striking distance of the Levant. If India now seemed more remote, Syria remained a tempting target. Soon Egypt’s wealth and labour would be harnessed. Christian Copts and renegade Mamelukes were being recruited into French forces. A camel corps would turn the desert into a navigable sea. Conquest would continue, with Napoleon as the new Alexander.
Yet after repeating all this as if to convince himself, Bonaparte’s dark brooding couldn’t be hidden. ‘Did Brueys show courage?’ he asked me.
‘A cannonball took the admiral’s leg off but he insisted on remaining at his post. He died a hero.’
‘Well. There’s that, at least.’
‘So did Captain Casabianca and his young son. The deck was aflame and they refused to abandon ship. They died for France and for duty, general. The fight could have gone either way. But when L’Orient blew up…’
‘The entire Maltese treasure was lost. Damn! And Admiral Villeneuve fled?’
‘There was no way his ships could get into the fight. The wind was against them.’
‘And you lived, too.’ The observation seemed a bit sour.
‘I’m a good swimmer.’
‘So it seems. So it seems. You’re quite the survivor, aren’t you, Gage?’ He toyed with calipers and looked at me sideways. ‘I’ve a new arrival inquiring about you. A Count Silano, who says he knows you from Paris. He shares your interest in antiquities and has been doing his own research. I told him you were fetching something from the ship and he expressed interest in examining it as well.’
I wasn’t about to share information with Silano. ‘The calendar was lost in the battle, I’m afraid.’
‘ Mon dieu. Has nothing good come of this?’
‘I’ve also lost track of Antoine Talma, who disappeared in Alexandria. Have you seen him, General?’
‘The journalist?’
