Matthew Hawkwood Thriller Series Books 1-3: Ratcatcher, Resurrectionist, Rapscallion. James McGee

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СКАЧАТЬ and stop him. By any means possible. There must be no quarter given. You understand what I’m saying, Hawkwood? I’m giving you carte blanche.”

      “Then we’d best get started,” Hawkwood said. “Come on, Nathaniel, there’s work to be done.” He turned to the Chief Magistrate. “Where will we find you, sir?”

      James Read considered the question. “I will proceed to Deptford. You may contact me there.”

      “You’ll warn the Prince?”

      “I’ll speak to his advisors, suggest to them that it would be better if His Royal Highness postponed his visit to the yard until the next launching. Now, off with you both.”

      As Hawkwood and Jago left the office, the Chief Magistrate and his clerk exchanged pensive looks.

      “I fear, Mr Twigg,” James Read murmured softly, “that desperate times are upon us.”

      Twigg nodded. Behind his spectacles, his eyes gleamed. The game was afoot and the little clerk scented blood.

      “Which means,” Read continued, “that we must now deploy all our resources. Return to your files, Mr Twigg. I want everything you have on Sir Charles Yorke, Admiral Bartholomew Dalryde, Inspector General Thomas Blomefield and Colonel William Congreve. There is treason afoot, Mr Twigg. Treason is a canker and it is my intention to find it and cut it out!”

      William Lee lowered his head towards the tin basin, closed his eyes, cupped his palms in the water and doused his face. He did it several times, gasping as the coldness stung his eyes. Finally he raised his head and ran his hands over his close-cropped hair. Water trickled down his cheeks and dripped from his chin. He reached for the drying cloth.

      Lee stared intently at himself in the mirror. He searched his face, studied the familiar lines, the grey at his temples, the stubble on his cheeks. Dabbing his face with the cloth, his eyes moved to the window and he stared out at the wide grey river.

      A recollection of childhood arose, unbidden, in his mind. His boyhood years had been spent on the family farm, close to the bank of another great river, the Delaware, and the small, pleasant town of Fort Penn, less than a day’s ride from the city of Wilmington. There, in the company of his friends, he had explored the local creeks, levees and inlets on foot and in birch-bark canoe.

      Until the horror.

      It had been early morning when the squad of redcoats had come calling, rousting the family from their beds, giving them barely enough time to dress before dragging his father, Samuel, and his elder brother, Robert, out through the smashed and splintered door and across the yard to the low stone wall that ringed the house.

      There had been no trial, no preliminaries, only a short proclamation read by a grim-faced lieutenant. The charge was sedition: providing food and shelter to officers of the rebel army. Sentence to be carried out forthwith. There had been barely time to grasp the true terror of the unfolding events before the morning was split by the sharp bark of command from the sergeant in charge of the firing squad, followed less than a heartbeat later by the ragged rattle of musket shots that rolled across the surrounding meadows like a volley of hail against a window pane.

      They had left the bodies where they had fallen, crumpled in the dust at the base of the wall, leaving two sounds for ever ingrained in Lee’s memory: the tramp of marching feet from the departing soldiers, and the shrill, keening cries of his mother as she had cradled the head of her son, the blood of the slaughtered boy soaking into the white of her apron.

      In the beginning, unsurprisingly, Lee’s hunger for vengeance had been all consuming. His hatred of the British Crown had burned like a furnace in his breast and his desire for revenge had never diminished. Over the intervening years, however, as he had grown older and wiser, the heat of his anger had gradually given way to a low simmer and he had been content to wait, to bide his time until the opportunity presented itself. Thus there had been no strategy in Lee’s vow to his dead sibling, no deadline, just a silent oath that somebody, somewhere, would eventually pay the price.

      And then, into his life had stepped Robert Fulton, artist, inventor, showman, philosopher and revolutionary. And only then, bonded by a mutual desire for justice and freedom, and fired by Fulton’s imagination and genius, had the awesome nature, scale and means by which he could exact his revenge revealed itself.

      The distant clang of a ship’s bell jolted Lee from his uneasy reminiscence. He looked down at his hand, recalling the tremor as he had taken the tiny cylinder from the carrier pigeon’s leg and extracted the message telling him the waiting was over. A message from an emperor.

      Although four weeks had passed since his meeting with Napoleon Bonaparte, it seemed like only yesterday.

      It had been another early-morning rendezvous.

      Touched by the pale light of dawn, with remnants of sea mist hanging low over the still water, the Seine estuary was a desolate place, inhabited only by mosquitoes and waterfowl. It was a perfect proving ground: hot and humid in high summer, windswept and icebound in winter, and cut off from the surrounding countryside by a latticework of muddy ditches and foetid marshland, the only means of passage through the region a spider’s web of decaying wooden causeways.

      They had moored the gribane in the middle of the estuary. Sitting heavily on the water like some scaly weed-encrusted sea monster newly arisen from the deep, the squat Seine barge had certainly seen better days.

      In a black, unmarked coach, bracketed by his chasseur escort, the Emperor had arrived accompanied only by his swarthy Mameluke bodyguard, Rustam, and his Minister of Marine, the short, stoop-shouldered admiral, Denis Decres. It had been Decres who had persuaded the Emperor to give Fulton’s device one more chance. It was well known that Emperor Bonaparte had small interest in matters nautical, but Decres was the man in charge of all invasion operations against Britain, so when the little admiral spoke, the Emperor listened.

      The testing area had been guarded by a detachment of the imperial guard under the command of a one-eyed veteran of Bonaparte’s Italian and Egyptian campaigns, Major Jean Daubert. The major, Lee learned, had lost his eye during the siege of Acre, in a hard-fought, bloody skirmish with Turkish irregulars. He was one of the most arrogant men Lee had ever met.

      While the major had fussed and fretted over the Emperor and his entourage, Lee and his two crewmen had boarded the submersible and taken her three hundred yards upstream.

      From the shelter of a ruined barn close by the water’s edge, with the stocky greatcoat-clad Emperor waiting impatiently at his side, Admiral Decres had given Lee the signal and the vessel had submerged to launch its attack.

      The destruction of the gribane had been sudden, spectacular and total, to the delight of Lee and his crew, the amazement of the Emperor and the alarm of every bird within a half-mile radius. The sound of the explosion had reverberated across the marshland with the force of a thunderclap.

      Back on shore, with the barge split in two, driftwood scattered across the grey water, and wooden splinters piercing the surface of the mud flats like arrows, the Emperor had invited Lee to walk with him. There were important matters to discuss.

      But that had been after the discovery of the interloper.

      It had been in the aftermath of the attack on the barge when – unbeknownst to Lee and his crewman who were still aboard the submersible – all hell had broken loose.

      Ironically, it had been the one-eyed Major Daubert who’d spotted the flash of СКАЧАТЬ