The Privateer's Revenge

announced that they had been honoured by the presence of the victorious captor. Kydd blushed and made a hurried escape outside to an unseasonably warm sun.

He strolled along the parade, nodding to respectful passers-by, and pondered the change in life's direction that had brought him so much. He recalled the smugness of Zephaniah Job at the wind-up meeting, the almost fawning attention of Robidou, the ledger figures that told of his restoration to fortune.

Then there was the respect he seemed to have won from Cheslyn and the crew of the privateer at paying-off time. He chuckled aloud to recall a bold and swashbuckling Pookie stepping ashore playing the corsair to the limit as she took home her plunder to present to her mother.

Would Renzi believe how things had changed? His friend's selfless toil in Jersey to keep him going was now no longer necessary. He would ask him to return but without telling him of his great change in fortune, simply say he was due for a surprise. Yes, he must write him a letter . . .

Kydd then remembered a promise, which he would soon be in a position to keep. He planned to take one of those grand and very comfortable mansions in Grange Road.

A celebration, a great dinner occasion—and the only ones invited would be those who had stood so nobly by him. As he hurried along to set it in train he imagined the room resounding to Richard Samson's Shakespearean declaiming, the extravagant gown that Griselda Mayhew would flaunt, the studied nonchalance of Carne, who would probably complain at the waste of a good flyman. It would be a splendid evening.

CHAPTER 16

RENZI WAS ON HIS WAY BACK to Guernsey and to Kydd. He had kept his word and stayed with d'Auvergne until it was obvious there was no more to be done, and then, accepting only what he was owed in wages, he quit the place.

It had been a catastrophe—not for want of courage: there had been every reason to expect a different conclusion but for the treachery of Querelle. The head of the secret police, Fouche, had moved rapidly and, with bloodshed and torture, the conspiracy to kidnap Bonaparte had been comprehensively crushed.

Georges had been taken after a gigantic struggle, the old soldier Pichegru dragged from his bed to the Temple prison. Troops had been sent across the Rhine to arrest the Duc d'Enghien and orders poured out of Paris for apprehending lesser names.

Bonaparte's vengeance was savage: arrests, trials and executions followed swiftly one on another. Georges was guillotined with eleven others, bellowing, 'Vive le Roi!' even as the blade fell. The Duc d'Enghien was imprisoned and put on trial for his life while Pichegru was found strangled in his cell with a stick and neckerchief, some said to prevent unwanted disclosures at the trial.

It had been a searing experience: Renzi knew he looked haggard and drawn, and that it would take some time to emerge from the darkness of tainted violence. To see his friend again was now all he asked; he remembered the last letter, the reference to his 'surprise,' and hoped it would allow some small leavening of Kydd's existence—what means he himself had been able to bring back was not as much as he had hoped.

St Peter Port was unchanged, the waterfront as active as ever. He checked the address on Kydd's letter. Off Fountain Street to the south: quite up to the fringes of respectability—was this his surprise? He found the house easily enough, a somewhat decayed dwelling but of some size.

'Oh?' The strikingly featured woman who answered the door seemed disconcerted at his appearance.

'Madame,' Renzi said, with an abject bow, 'I have no wish to intrude. My recent understanding is that Mr Thomas Kydd is in residence here.'

'Ah!' she said. 'You're naught but a bailiff come after the poor lamb!'

'Indeed I am not,' Renzi said, with the first smile for many weeks. 'I am his friend.'

'You're not Mr Renzi?' she said, incredulous.

'I am.'

She took him by the arm and said warmly, 'Why, do come in! I'm Rosie—he's not living here any more but you'll have such a surprise when y' hear what he's a-doing now.'

An hour later, warmed by a stiff tot and the odd group's open regard for him as a friend of Kydd, he stood in the street outside, bemused at the turn of events. Kydd was the talk of the town and, to a fair way of thinking, a rich man—a privateer captain of all things—still out on his third voyage but expected daily.

Renzi wandered down to the foreshore where they had last walked together. By all accounts Kydd's days of penury were well and truly behind him, and his own little contributions would no longer be needed—in fact, the new address he had been given was up on Grange Road, one of the imposing villas that looked down haughtily on the bustling seaport.

It would be a quite different man he would shortly be seeing. Their time together in Teazer was over, of course, however brief in the larger span of life. He'd wedge himself no longer in his tight little cabin, musing on mystical paradigms and vaulting theories while the sea tossed about their sturdy barque—and he would be so much the poorer to have to develop his thoughts in some dingy shorebound building.

Renzi shook off his selfish concerns. Now their ways would necessarily diverge, given their utterly different courses in life, and with Kydd busy amassing a fortune as a privateer captain there would be little point in lingering in Guernsey waiting for his infrequent returns.

No, it was time to part. The bleakness returned, threatening to become a desolation. He cast about for something to fasten on to. Was there anything perhaps he could give Kydd to show him how much he had appreciated his friendship? Given his circumstances, it would have to be a forlorn sort of present.

Then a thought struck. There was one last service he could do for his friend.

With the prospect of increasing wealth and Kydd's consequent high standing in society, there was little doubt that he would now see any resumption of his attempt to clear his name as irrelevant. Renzi had heard from Rosie of Kydd's naive plan to unbribe the perpetrators. It had no chance, of course, but if he himself by other means was able to get to the bottom of it, it would be a satisfying thing indeed to offer his friend.

*  *  *

Renzi strode purposefully along the Pollet to Smith Street and made his way up to the headquarters of the commander-in-chief. 'Renzi,' he snapped at the guard. 'Confidential secretary to Commodore d'Auvergne of the Jersey Squadron. If you please—Mr Jessop, high clerk to Sir James.'