returned the smile with a tentative one of his own. “Well, if I wasn’t sure of it before, I am now. Why else would He have chosen to save a poor sinner?”
“You’ve a theory, I take it?” Hawkwood said drily.
The lieutenant tilted his head and threw Hawkwood a specul ative look. “Perhaps we’ve been delivered for a reason. Did it ever occur to you that you may have been put on this earth to serve a higher purpose?”
“Every God-damned day,” Hawkwood said, wondering if Stuart had expected him to give the enquiry serious consideration. “But I’ve learned to live with it. Now let’s get off this bloody beach, shall we?”
The lieutenant nodded firmly. “An excellent suggestion.”
“By the way,” Hawkwood said, tugging on the coat he’d taken from the dead seaman. “Where’s the ship? You never said.”
“I instructed Lieutenant Weekes to ride out the storm as best he could and if possible lay three miles off the point, out of sight and range of the shore battery.”
“Shore battery?” Hawkwood paused, the coat half-on and half-off his shoulder.
“Fort Mahon.” Stuart nodded towards the northern end of the line of cliffs. “At Ambleteuse, the next town up the coast. The fort guards the town and the mouth of the Selaque River. It was due to be one of Boney’s embarkation depots when he was planning his invasion back in ’05. Turned out that wasn’t such a good idea. There’s too much silt. It makes navigation a bugger. The winds along this coast don’t help either, as we found out. The garrison’s been reduced since then; reassigned to other districts. Now it’s us who’re doing the invading. There’s a kind of justice there, don’t you think?”
Hawkwood didn’t respond to that. The history of the place didn’t interest him. It wasn’t as if he was taking the Grand Tour. However, the proximity of a fort and a shore battery, irrespective of troop numbers, was relevant only in as much as it called for one thing: a rapid departure. He pulled the rest of the coat on and secured it. It was heavy and damp and a dry coat would have been far preferable, but the tarpaulin was still a welcome protection against the snappy sea breeze.
“Griffin will rendezvous later this evening and pick me up,” Stuart added.
Hawkwood gave him a sceptical look. “Your jolly boat’s wrecked. How do you propose to get out to her? Swim? I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Stuart shook his head. “Our agents will provide the necessary assistance. As fortune would have it, we’ve landed remarkably close to our intended destination. Wimereux’s not much more than a mile or so yonder.” Stuart indicated in the direction of the smoke, still visible beneath the overcast sky. “We should make our way there with all dispatch. The Frogs might not be too conscientious when it comes to maintaining seaborne surveil-lance of their coastline but they’ve an annoying tendency to send out shore patrols, so it doesn’t pay to be too conspicuous.” The lieutenant slid the wrist of his injured arm between two of the fastened buttons on his coat to form an improvised sling.
Amen to that, Hawkwood thought, though he wondered if the French would seriously expect anyone to have come ashore during the furore of the previous night’s storm and then felt infinitely foolish when it struck him that’s exactly what had happened, albeit at nature’s behest.
As if reading his mind, Stuart added, “The sooner we make contact with our friends, the better. There’s likely to be concern for our safety. They’ll be expecting word and in any case we need to send you on your way.”
The colour was gradually returning to the lieutenant’s face and there was a renewed confidence in his tone. Ten minutes ago, he’d been a shipwrecked mariner, alone and injured on a hostile coast with a third of his crew missing, presumed drowned. Now, his spirits lifted by the unexpected arrival of an ally, he appeared anxious to get back into the fray.
They left the beach behind. The dunes began to give way to an area of grassy hummocks freckled with clumps of wind-blown gorse. Further inland, the gorse merged into thickets of prickly, waist-high scrub. Beyond the scrub, Hawkwood could see pine trees. The smell of resin hung heavy in the damp morning air. Sandy, needle-strewn pathways weaved through the gaps between the thickets. They were criss-crossed with enough tracks to suggest it was an area well visited by humans and animals – mostly of a domestic kind, to judge by the amount of sheep and goat droppings that lay scattered about like fallen berries – which explained the shorn state of the turf, Hawkwood reasoned.
He glanced over his shoulder. The reward was a limited view over a choppy sea corrugated with heaving swells. He looked towards the horizon, but visibility was poor and there was no sign of land and then Hawkwood remembered that north lay on his right-hand side and he was, in fact, looking down the Channel towards its far western approaches. He felt an unexpected knot form in the pit of his stomach and wondered why that should be. God knows, he’d served his country and fought the king’s enemies in more foreign climes than most men could dream about and only rarely had he felt the tug of England’s green and pleasant pastures, and yet here he was, striving for a glimpse of a coastline not thirty miles distant and feeling bereft at his inability to catch so much as a whiff of familiar headland.
There was no sign of the ship, either, but as it was hard to tell where the sea ended and the sky began, it would have been difficult to spot any vessel more than a mile or two from shore. In any case, Stuart had told him that Griffin was lying off the point and the curve of the coastline still hampered his view. And there was no telling if she had even survived the night.
Hawkwood looked towards where Stuart had told him the fort was located but the cliffs and vegetation blocked his line of sight that way as well. He turned back, in time to see Stuart tense and say suddenly and softly, “We have company!”
Hawkwood followed the lieutenant’s gaze and his pulse quickened as a blue-uniformed rider trotted his mount out from the edge of the trees. Half a dozen similar-hued infantry men materialized in a ragged line behind him. All the foot soldiers carried muskets.
It was too late to hide. The troops would have had to be blind not to have seen them.
Stuart swallowed drily. “Any suggestions?” There was a new-found fear in his voice.
“Don’t run’s the first one that comes to mind.”
Act like a fugitive and you’ll be treated like one, Hawkwood thought.
The soldiers – fusiliers from their dress – were perhaps two hundred paces away. A musket ball would be ineffective at that range but Hawkwood had yet to see a man outrun a horse; not that there was anywhere to run to. He wondered if his and Stuart’s appearance had come as a surprise to the patrol or whether they’d been under observation for a while. Best to assume the latter, he thought.
“How’s your French, Lieutenant?” Hawkwood asked.
“I’ve a fair understanding,” Stuart murmured. “But I ain’t fluent enough, if that’s what you were hoping.”
It was, but Hawkwood didn’t say so.
“Are you wearing anything likely to identify you as a British naval officer?” Hawkwood asked Stuart quickly, assessing the lieutenant’s garb. He was acutely conscious that both he and Stuart bore all the damp and bloodied evidence of their traumatic arrival, on their faces and in the condition of their clothing.
There was a pause. “No.” Then, his composure slipping, the lieutenant hissed feverishly, “We’ve no bloody papers. They’ll shoot us as spies!”
It was on the tip of Hawkwood’s tongue to point out that if their identities were discovered they were liable to be shot as spies anyway, whether they had papers or not.
“You men! Halt! Stay where you are!”
The command came from one of the foot soldiers, a corporal; Hawkwood could make out the chevrons on the sleeve.
Too late to take evasive action, anyway,