Chapter 9 The Trap at Portsmouth
Sophie arrived on a Sunday morning in December, carried off a fishing boat at Folkestone by a woman who had not slept in forty hours and deposited into the arms of Anne Gravière on the quayside bewildered but docile, having been told she was going on an adventure and had found the adventure cold, wet, and deficient in the matter of breakfast.
She was four. She had dark hair, her father’s mouth, and the gravity of a small person who has been moved between countries without being consulted.
She held a cloth rabbit in a blue dress — Madame Lapin, flattened by the crossing, one ear damp with salt water — and she did not cry.
She looked at her mother with the wide, assessing stare of a child determining whether this woman, who smelt of English soap and a hired carriage and not of the house in Boulogne, was the same woman who had left eight months ago.
Anne knelt on the wet stone of the quay. She said something in French. Sophie answered in French. Then Sophie placed one hand on Anne’s cheek, with the solemnity of a physician taking a pulse, and said, “Tu es froide, Maman.”
“Oui,” Anne said. “Je suis froide.”
Sophie considered this. She looked down at the quay, at her own shoes — leather, too thin for December, damp from the crossing — and then back at her mother’s face with the diagnostic attention of a child who had been promised an adventure and was assembling her assessment of it.
“The boat was not nice,” Sophie announced, in French. “It smelled of fish. And the lady said I must not stand, but I stood, because I wanted to see.”
“What did you see?”
“Water. Only water. And then — there.” She pointed at the harbour wall, the grey stone, the gulls. “Is this England?”
“This is England.”
“It is grey.”
“It is December.”
Sophie absorbed this distinction with the seriousness of a logician presented with a qualifying variable.
She turned to Mr. Gardiner, who stood three paces behind Anne with his hat in his hand and the careful stillness of a man who understood that this reunion was not his to direct but might, at certain junctures, benefit from gentle management.
“Monsieur,” Sophie said. “J’ai faim.”
Mr. Gardiner looked at Anne. Anne translated, though the meaning was plain enough — Sophie’s tone carried the universal authority of a hungry child addressing the nearest competent adult.
“She says she is hungry.”
“I gathered,” Mr. Gardiner said. He knelt, bringing himself to Sophie’s level with the practised ease of a man who had four children of his own and understood that negotiations with small people were best conducted at their altitude.
“Shall we find breakfast? There is an inn. I believe they have chocolate.”
Sophie looked at him. She looked at her mother. She looked at Madame Lapin, whose damp ear she adjusted with one finger.
“Chocolate,” she said, in English — the word offered like a key tried in a foreign lock. “Cho-co-lat.”
“Chocolate,” Mr. Gardiner confirmed.
Sophie took her mother’s hand. With her free hand she held the rabbit.
She walked between them toward the inn, her steps quick and certain on the wet stone, a child of four who had crossed the Channel in a fishing boat and arrived in a grey country without breakfast and intended to address both deficiencies in order.
Mr. Gardiner, who had waited at Folkestone since Friday, reported the details by express to Gracechurch Street.
Elizabeth read his letter on Sunday afternoon.
The handwriting was steady. The facts were spare.
The postscript read: The child asked for chocolate.
I found some. She drank it with both hands on the cup and did not spill.
Holt reports no pursuit. Marguerite did not board — she returned to the house.
We are at the inn at Ashford. I will bring them to London tomorrow. — E.G.
Elizabeth folded the letter and placed it on the bedside table beside the three sheets of the Portsmouth plan and the pencil she had been using since seven o’clock that morning to annotate the Colonel’s latest dispatch.
The extraction was complete. The child was in England.
The human debt that had governed every decision since Anne’s confession in this room — the reason Elizabeth had let Gravière step onto the balcony railing, the reason she had accepted his terms and then betrayed them, the reason she had spent two hundred pounds of Mr. Gardiner’s money on a fishing boat and a forged letter and a seal pressed from a captured ring — was paid.
She permitted herself ten seconds of something that was not relief, because relief implied surprise and she had not been surprised.
It was closer to the sensation of setting down a weight she had been carrying so long that the muscles had forgotten what it felt like to move unburdened.
The weight was down. The muscles remembered.
Then she returned to the plan.
The Portsmouth naval review was scheduled for Saturday, the sixteenth of December.
Admiral Lord Hartington — head of Channel operations, the man the conspiracy had marked for death — would inspect the Channel fleet at anchor in the harbour, review the marine garrison at the dockyard, and attend a formal dinner at the residence of the Port Admiral, the local Hampshire commander responsible for the dockyard, that evening.
The event was public in the way that naval reviews were public — announced in the Naval Chronicle, discussed in the coffee houses, attended by the local gentry and the officers’ wives and the kind of civilian who found the sight of warships at anchor a satisfactory way to spend a Saturday.
It was also, by its nature, the most exposed Hartington would be in months.
A harbour. An open quay. A man standing on a platform before a crowd, visible from three hundred yards in every direction.
Elizabeth’s plan occupied the three sheets she had drafted with Darcy on Friday morning, revised on Saturday afternoon with intelligence from the Colonel, and finalised on Monday evening after Mr. Gardiner’s return from Folkestone.
The plan was not elegant. Elizabeth did not trust elegance.
Elegant plans depended on precision, and precision depended on control, and the number of things she could control from a bed in Cheapside was smaller than the number of things that could go wrong at a dockyard in Hampshire.
The plan was, instead, redundant. It anticipated failure at every point and provided for it.
The architecture was this: Hartington would not attend the review.
A double — a retired captain named Marsh, selected by the Colonel for his height and the shape of his jaw, which at distance and under a cocked hat bore a passing resemblance to the Admiral’s — would stand on the platform, wear the Admiral’s coat, carry the Admiral’s baton, and receive the salute.
Hartington himself would remain at his London residence under guard, visible at no window, receiving no visitors, his absence from Portsmouth explained by a sudden indisposition communicated to the Port Admiral by private letter.
The letter was written by Elizabeth in Hartington’s hand, which she had studied from three samples of his correspondence provided by Sir Henry and reproduced with the painstaking accuracy of a woman who had spent two years learning that penmanship was not a decorative art but a weapon.
The double was the lure. The review was the ground. The trap was the observation.
Elizabeth’s intelligence — drawn from Georgiana’s transcript, the Colonel’s interrogation of Gravière, and Sir Henry’s Boulogne sources — indicated that Wickham’s network would make its final attempt at Portsmouth.
The method would not be poison. Gravière’s failure at the Admiral’s ball had closed that approach.
It would be a marksman, the Colonel believed.
A pistol or a rifle, fired from a fixed position overlooking the review platform, aimed at a man in an Admiral’s hat standing still on an open stage.
The dockyard offered positions: the ropewalk, the mast house, the upper storeys of the rigging loft.
A competent shot, with a military rifle, could kill from any of them.
The Colonel had mapped every line of sight.
He had visited Portsmouth on Tuesday — the salt air and tar and the stink of the mudflats, he said, were sufficient to discourage casual observation — accompanied by Briggs and two of his men, and returned on Thursday with a set of drawings that he spread on Elizabeth’s bed with the energy of three days’ stored tactical observations and needed a surface on which to deploy them.
The drawings showed the dockyard, the review platform, the harbour, and every building with a window or a rooftop that commanded the platform at a distance of less than four hundred yards.
“Fourteen positions,” the Colonel said. “Six in the ropewalk, three in the rigging loft, two in the mast house, two from the upper yard of the receiving ship, and one from the clock tower. I have eliminated the receiving ship — the angle is wrong, the platform is masked by the mainmast of the Bellerophon at her mooring. The clock tower is too exposed. That leaves eleven.”
“You cannot cover eleven positions with the men you have.”
“I can cover eleven positions with the marines I have requested from the Port Admiral. Sixty men, deployed in pairs, each pair assigned a building, with orders to search and hold every room above the ground floor from dawn on Saturday. The marines are under my authority for the day. The Port Admiral believes this is a precaution against French agents in the crowd — which it is, in the sense that all truths are contained within larger truths.”