The Iberian Flame

Chapter 2

The morning was clear and warm when Kydd and Persephone set out for Tavistock across the moors, a score of miles distant. They took it at a brisk canter, spelling their horses at the Goodameavy stables, where Kydd had once despaired of her feelings for him.

It was Thursday, the pannier market was in full swing and Kydd let the bustle of the town envelop them. Tavistock was inland, between Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor. Surprisingly, the town’s most famous sons were all mariners. The chief was Sir Francis Drake, whose seat of Buckland Abbey was close by. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the colonist and explorer lost at sea, would have had his last memories of home as Kydd was seeing it, and Grenville of Revenge was suzerain of Buckland at the time of his famous last fight. His cousin Sir Walter Raleigh had grown up nearby, and many more had found their calling upon the sea from the towns and villages on the road to Plymouth.

Sir Thomas and Lady Kydd wandered together among the stalls and booths, the produce and crafts of Devonshire on exuberant show, the hoarse cries of the stallholders mingling with the babble of market-goers, jostling good-naturedly and enjoying the delights of the day. Folk were of all stations in life: smock-clad farm workers, beefy merchants, gentlemen and their ladies.

The thick, pleasing odours of country life eddied about them, and Kydd mused that he couldn’t be further from the stern reality of the war at sea. With a beautiful woman on his arm and the day theirs, he would be pressed to bring to mind a heaving deck, taut lines from aloft, the menacing dark blue-grey of an enemy coast on the bow … This was another place, another world.

‘Oh, how quaint!’ Persephone exclaimed, admiring a pinafore extravagantly interwoven with lacework of a previous age, unusual on such a garment. She fingered it reverently, the seller, a man, watching her silently.

Kydd’s gaze wandered. There were many more attractions and they could easily-

Standing motionless not more than a dozen yards away, a gentleman in plain but well-cut attire was regarding him gravely.

Kydd didn’t know the man … or did he? The distinguished greying hair, the direct, unflinching hard gaze, the stern, upright bearing … Like the master of a ship …

It couldn’t be, but it was: the defeated captain who had met him on the deck of the last of the three frigates Tyger had overcome in her epic combat in the southern Baltic the previous year. Preussen, yes – a French-manned Prussian and commanded by one Marceau.

After a moment of shock at the sudden clash of worlds, Kydd gave a polite bow of recognition, which was solemnly returned. Clearly the man was not on the run and neither was he closely escorted.

He walked amiably up to Kydd and spoke in French. ‘Capitaine de vaisseau Jean-Yves Marceau,’ he offered, the eyes as Kydd remembered, cool and appraising. ‘Guest of sa majeste as a consequence of-’

‘Captain Sir Thomas Kydd, and the circumstances I do remember with the deepest of respect, sir,’ Kydd answered in French. So Marceau was a prisoner of war, and as an officer had no doubt given his parole to allow him this freedom. But an educated and polished gentleman of France in Tavistock?

Persephone regarded them curiously. ‘Oh, this is Lady Kydd, my wife. My dear, this is Captain Marceau whom I last met on the field of honour.’

The French captain lifted her gloved fingers to his lips. ‘Enchante, m’ lady.’

‘A singular place to meet you again, M’sieur le capitaine, if I might remark it,’ Kydd continued.

Marceau gave a small smile. ‘Having duly lodged my parole with your esteemed Transport Board I was assigned this town to reside, always within its boundaries, in something approaching comfort and refinement, here to wait out the present unpleasantness until it be over.’

‘A civilised arrangement, I’m persuaded,’ Kydd responded. Did captured English naval officers in France have the same privilege? But then a surge of compassion overtook him. This was a first rank sea officer, transported to captivity in the countryside of his enemy. Robbed of the graces and enlightenments of his patrimony, he was eking out his existence, probably of slender means and seldom to hear the language of his birth.

The man bowed, a glimmer of feeling briefly showing.

‘Yet a hard enough thing for an active gentleman,’ Kydd continued. ‘May you travel, sir, visit others at all?’

‘Should I stray further than the one-mile stone on any road away from Tavistock then I shall be made to exchange my present existence for that of the hulks,’ he replied evenly.

It was an imprisonment but of another kind, and Kydd impulsively warmed to the man – wryly recalling that it was his actions that had placed Marceau here.

An absurd thought surfaced and he found himself saying, ‘Then my invitation to your good self of a dinner evening at my manor must therefore be refused?’

Persephone looked at him sharply but he affected not to notice.

Marceau stiffened, then bowed deeply. ‘Your most gallant and obliging politeness to me is deeply appreciated, Sir Thomas, but in the circumstances I should look to be denied.’

‘I regret to hear this, sir.’

The Frenchman paused, looking at him directly. ‘Yet if I trespass further upon your good nature there is perhaps a means to that end.’

‘Say on, sir!’

‘The parole agent of this town may be approached and, for a particular occasion, has the power to grant licence, I’m told.’

Mr Nott was at first astonished, then gratified to make acquaintance of the famed frigate captain.

‘As your request is not unknown, Sir Thomas,’ he allowed, pulling down a well-thumbed book from the shelf above his desk, ‘but seldom granted, I fear.’

‘Why so, sir? I would have thought it a humane enough thing.’

‘Ah. Then you are not aware of the parlous state of affairs in the matter of the confining of prisoners of war in this kingdom.’

It cost Kydd nearly an hour’s listening to the man but it was a sobering and enlightening experience.

The arcane eighteenth-century practice of making such prisoners the responsibility of the Sick and Hurt Board of the Admiralty had been superseded by the equally obscure assigning of them to the Transport Board, known more to Kydd as the procurer of shipping for army expeditions. Captured enemy officers were offered parole or made to suffer incarceration in one of a number of prisons in Britain. Foremast hands had to endure the hulks or prison without the possibility of parole.

Kydd had shuddered at his first sight of the distant lines of hulks in the Hamoaze, and he remembered the Millbay prison louring across the bay from his previous lodging at Stonehouse.

Nott’s duties were to muster his charges regularly, to issue them weekly with the sum of one shilling and sixpence per diem in subsistence, and to handle private remittances, with all correspondence to go through him for censoring before it reached the post office. For their part the French found modest lodgings, which they undertook to return to by curfew, generally eight at night, and to refrain from activity that could be deemed in any way seditious.

He received little enough thanks, Nott complained, and there were increasing numbers absconding, breaking parole, and presumably finding their way back to their home country. It was a growing scandal, especially, as Kydd knew, it was a matter of a gentleman’s honour. The France of Napoleon was a different nation from that of earlier days.

‘Captain Marceau is still here,’ Kydd said pointedly.

‘How do you mean, sir?’

‘If he’d wanted to break his parole he’s had a year or more to do it. I fancy an evening entertainment will not see him inclined to run on its account.’

It cost Kydd a ten-guinea bond but Knowle Manor would know no less a personage than a French frigate captain as a guest to dinner.