Objectively, Lord Wilden judged, the death of the boy-king was an utter disaster for the Quiberon expedition’s prospects and for the entire royalist cause in France. It was easy to win sympathy for a ten-year-old child whose parents had been brutally executed and who existed entirely at the mercy of unscrupulous gaolers and the foul condition of a Paris prison. Louis the Seventeenth had been an ideal, a fantasy to be idolised, a blank slate upon which all the royalist factions, as well as those who wavered between support for a monarchy and a republic, might draw any image they liked of the sort of man and king he might grow into. But the Comte de Provence, now King Louis the Eighteenth in name, was thirty-nine years old. He was a known quantity, irrevocably associated with the Bourbon arrogance and extravagance that had characterised the reign of his guillotined elder brother. The waverers would consider him a man incapable of changing his ways, the emigrés and Chouans alike would pray he was exactly that.
Nonetheless, the appropriate formalities had to be observed. The requiem mass for the soi-disant Louis the Seventeenth, nominally King of France for two years, was ordered to be held on the beach at Carnac and conducted by the Bishop of Dol, the expedition’s de facto chaplain. That, at least, was the order that came down from the Comte de Puisaye. As it was, only the Loyal Emigrant Regiment, the one most closely attached to Puisaye, attended the service he ordered. The other troops that could be spared from immediate duty crowded instead into the church at Carnac by order of Hervilly, who found a nearly senile old local priest, so decrepit the local revolutionaries must have thought him unworthy of even their righteous republican wrath, to conduct a competing requiem. Two rival services in two different locations, presided over by two different priests at the behest of the two different generals who claimed to be the rightful commander-in-chief of the Catholic and Royal Army of France.
Such division reminded Wilden of the Welsh.
As a good Anglican, of course, he did not intend to attend either service. Instead he saw a sudden window of opportunity to do something that had been at the back of his mind since that day in Downing Street when William Pitt ordered him to accompany the invasion of France. Despite Wilden’s horrified reaction to the prospect, he had pored over maps and charts of Quiberon Bay and the regions adjacent when he returned to his quarters in Hill Street. One place name caught Ned Wilden’s attention, one that he had first heard in his childhood and had always intrigued him, one that could provide some consolation for being ordered from the comfort of his hearth to the manifold discomforts and perils of a full-scale invasion of France. There was an element of danger to it, but the French officers to whom he spoke in the days before the requiems for the dead king were held were categorical. The entire area was safe, they said. It had been wholly cleared of the Blue scum, they said. That being so, and with no significant military moves in prospect, what harm could there be in a brief diversion of antiquarian interest?
He broached the subject with Sir John Borlase Warren, who was aghast.
‘An excursion, my lord? To view stones?’
‘They are vast alignments, Sir John! They are said to be so considerable that they make our Stonehenge appear akin to mere children’s building blocks.’
Warren raised an eyebrow, and Wilden suddenly wondered whether the commodore had ever seen Stonehenge, or even heard of it. He was a sailor, after all, and sailors were not as other men.
‘I understand your interest, my lord,’ said Warren, his expression suggesting the opposite. ‘But really? You’d endanger yourself just for some stones?’
‘Our French friends will be making no moves while they hold their requiem, nor for some days to come, I think. The solemnity of the occasion has even brought a kind of truce between Hervilly and Puisaye, leaving aside the matter of the rival requiems. We have assurances from all of the emigrés and the Chouans that the countryside as far inland as Auray and Landévant is entirely clear of the enemy. General Hoche and the army he is assembling is no nearer than Vannes. Besides, Sir John, I will have my two splendid Marines to watch over me, so I will be perfectly safe.’
Warren shook his head.
‘I still advise against it, my lord.’
‘I’m told that the stones are no more than a mile from the landing beaches, Sir John! How can I be in any danger so near to the royal army and our own squadron, in countryside entirely royalist in sentiment and controlled by our Chouan friends? I pray you, Sir John, indulge me in this. I have a passion for all things antiquarian, and I cannot be so near such a unique and famous landmark without indulging my interest! I grant, Sir John, that you are the commodore of the British and naval elements of this expedition and if you wish to prevent me, you have ample force at your disposal. But you would have to clap me in irons to stop me going ashore!’
Warren inclined his head.
‘Far be it from me to deny the wishes of a lord of the Admiralty, my lord. We shall put you ashore again on the next boat.’
Edward, Lord Wilden was not easily moved, and despite his uncharacteristic sorrow over the death of Jack Kenton he would certainly not have counted himself an emotional man. But the age, the beauty, the sheer scale of the stones of Carnac moved him more than many of the human interactions he had experienced in his life. He walked through the silent rows, his thoughts running wild. Here were the mysteries of the ages, making the conflicts of his own time seem utterly insignificant. When a similar passage of time separated the moment he was experiencing from that new age, far off in the future, would men still remember the expedition of which he was part? Or would only these stones still endure, and he and Pitt, Puisaye and Hervilly, all be wholly forgotten? Would they long outlast the poisonous legacies of France’s bloody revolution, until some far distant day when that colossal upheaval of his own time no longer merited even one sentence in the histories? Would there even be men at all to look upon the stones, and to remember or forget everything that was playing out at Quiberon?
Marine Lynch turned sharply, raising his musket, and Jardine imitated him.
‘Get down, my lord!’ shouted Lynch, and Wilden fell to the ground.
But it was only some roughly dressed peasant children, two boys and a girl, intently watching the three Britons from several hundred yards away. The two Marines relaxed, lowering their weapons. Wilden stood, waved to the children, and continued his perambulation of the stones, aware of the curious gaze of the silent youngsters. Every few minutes he took a sketchbook from the satchel he carried and quickly attempted to capture a scene or a notable feature that took his eye. He knew he was no Canaletto, but he flattered himself that he had a reasonable eye for proportion and perspective. Quite what his two Marine guards, or even the silent, staring Breton children, made of the English nobleman making sketches of old stones during a war was altogether a different matter.
He had little awareness of the passage of time. He could see Pomone’s topmasts in the distance, out in Quiberon Bay, and he knew he would have to return to her at some point, but there, amid the ancient stones of Carnac, it was as though time had simply stopped. His life was frantic. He stood on foreign soil – enemy soil – in the midst of a great war between religion, order and sheer decency on his side against fanaticism, atheism and mass murder on the other, yet here, at the heart of a mysterious landscape shaped by many millennia—
The peace was shattered by the sudden, unexpected, shocking sound of musket fire from the trees fringing the open ground where the stones stood. The first bullet struck Lynch in the shoulder, spinning him round. The second and third struck the Irishman’s torso at the same moment that the fourth blew off the left side of Jardine’s skull. Instinct made Ned Wilden throw himself to the ground once again. He was only a few feet from one of the stones. He had to reach it, to take cover behind it. If he stayed in the open he would surely die in the next few moments.
He used his elbows to haul himself across the ground. A peer of the realm impersonating a caterpillar – it was surely a ludicrous sight. But it was no time to worry about appearances. The enemy was still out there, and although there was a respite in their fire, they would surely be closing in.
He propped himself up behind the nearest stone, which provided him with at least a semblance of cover from the Blue troops who had to be somewhere in the woods. Wilden had no weapon other than a rapier that was largely for show and had never been drawn in anger. Warren had suggested he take pistols, but he had disregarded the advice. He had the protection of two sturdy Marines, he said, so what need had he of more? He did not betray the less confident truth behind his words, that he detested guns and was an appalling shot. But now his insouciance and unmartial inclinations would surely end in his death, kissing foreign soil like the nearby corpses of Jardine and Lynch.
There were no more shots, so he risked a glance toward the woods. No movement. No sign of the enemy. He thought of running, of making a dash for the safety of the beachhead and Pomone. No, Ned, he chided himself, patience mon brave. Perhaps in an hour or two, but the enemy would surely be watching and waiting for him to make exactly such a move. He imagined breaking cover, and the crack of musket fire being the last sound he would ever hear. But if he stayed, surely they would discover him anyway? All that would differ would be the means of his death. Every moment might bring a flash of blue around the side of the stone, then the fatal glint of a bayonet or a rapier—
‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ said a childish, seemingly amused voice to his left.
He turned in terror, expecting to see his nemesis and to meet his death. But it was not some burly republican infantryman with a bayonet fixed to his musket, about to plunge it into his throat. It was the girl who had been watching him from across the field. She was very small, grubby but round-faced and bright-eyed. She looked entirely different and belonged to a different sex, but somehow she reminded him of poor Midshipman Jack Kenton.
Careful, Ned. She may have appeared no more than an innocent child, but she was French. She could yet betray him to the republicans. On the other hand…
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ he whispered.
‘Je suis Melanie, monsieur. It’s all right, Englishman, the Blue soldiers have gone. They were only a small patrol, and they’ve gone to scout down toward the beach.’
Gone? But they must have seen that he was alone, the easiest target imaginable. It made no sense – no, of course, it made all the sense in the world. An outlying patrol deep in enemy-held territory… the Blues would surely expect to be surrounded and destroyed by emigré forces at any moment unless they kept moving and kept under cover. Kill the two heavily armed British Marines, most certainly, but an insignificant civilian making sketches was not worth a moment’s further risk.
‘You can’t sit behind this stone all day, Englishman,’ said the girl, and Ned Wilden felt a pang of shame. He was being lectured in courage by a child, and a girl child at that. ‘We’ll lead you back down to your positions. We know all the tracks, monsieur.’
It could still be a trap. These children could be a ploy to get him to show himself, to put him in the sights of the Blue patrol or to betray him to them. He knew he could not endure a French prison, a worse fate in his mind than the prospect of a bullet shattering his skull as it had poor, loyal, valiant Jardine’s.
But the girl’s features seemed wholly ingenuous, and he undoubtedly stood a better chance with these children than any adults who might come that way. He got to his feet once again, brushing the dust off his clothes as best he could. The girl beckoned her two reluctant-looking companions to join them.
‘This is Vincent,’ she said, ‘and this is Thierry. They’re ignorant fellows so they can only speak Breton.’
Wilden blinked. He was standing in a field in Brittany next to the still warm bodies of his Marine guards, yet this precocious child was making introductions as formally as a dowager at a palace ball and the two boys were executing bows so deep they might have been genuflecting before some exotic and mighty eastern potentate. Even so, introducing himself by his title seemed wildly inappropriate in that time and place.
‘Je suis Ned,’ he said.
The three children grinned and immediately formed a conspiratorial huddle, whispering to each other excitedly in a language that Wilden had never heard before. Then the girl, Melanie, turned to him again and said gravely, ‘By your pardon, monsieur, but just what sort of a name is Ned?’
‘Short for Edward,’ he said. ‘Edouard in this country.’
‘Très bon, Monsieur Edouard.’ She translated for the boys, then turned back to him. ‘But come, we’ll get you back to your people. Briskly now, Monsieur Edouard!’
The fifth Baron Wilden, Lord of His Britannic Majesty’s Admiralty, followed meekly as three unwashed and ragged Breton children captained by a small girl led him through the silent rows of ancient stones toward the distant mastheads of the British squadron.