Page 173 of The Armor of Light

‘The bishop has taken his revenge. He has destroyed my rose garden.’

‘I’m so sorry!’

‘So am I.’ She shrugged. ‘But I’ve got you, and I’ve got Abe. I can do without roses.’ All the same, she looked sad.

Spade kissed Abe’s head. ‘It’s very strange,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘This little boy has caused a lot of trouble on his entrance into this world, and there’s probably more coming. But you and I hardly care. We’re both thrilled to have him, and we adore him. We’ll cheerfully dedicate our lives to taking care of him. It’s good – but it’s strange.’

‘Perhaps that’s the way God works,’ said Arabella.

‘Must be,’ said Spade.

PART FOUR

The Press Gang

1804 to 1805

26

IN THE AUTUMN OF1804 Amos took a barge from Kingsbridge to Combe. It was a leisurely journey downstream, though on the return the bargees would have to row against the current.

When he sailed into Combe harbour he had an unpleasant surprise. On the headland there was a new building: a squat, round fortress, shaped like a beer tankard with the bottom wider than the top. It was nasty-looking and scary, reminding him somehow of those boxers who offered to take on all comers at fairgrounds.

Hamish Law was with him. Now that the business was using fewer cottage workers and more mill hands, Hamish had less travelling to do, and he had become Amos’s assistant on the sales side. Kit Clitheroe played a similar role on the production side.

Standing on the deck next to Amos, Hamish said: ‘What the hell is that?’

Amos thought he knew the answer. ‘It must be a Martello tower,’ he said. ‘The government is supposed to be building a hundred of them all along this coast, to defend us against the French invasion.’

‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Hamish. ‘I just didn’t expect it to look so bloody ugly.’

Amos recalled what he had read in theMorning Chronicle.A Martello tower had walls eight feet thick and a flat roof with a heavy cannon that could be turned through a complete circle to fire in any direction. Each tower was staffed by an officer and twenty men.

For months Amos had been reading about the threatened Frenchinvasion. He had been worried in a general way when he read that the ruler of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, had mustered 200,000 troops at Boulogne and other ports and was assembling an armada to bring them across the English Channel. But the grim sight of a fortress guarding Combe harbour made the whole thing suddenly more real.

Bonaparte had plenty of money to pay for the invasion. He had sold to the United States a vast unprofitable territory the French had called Louisiane, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the Great Lakes on the Canadian border. President Thomas Jefferson had doubled the size of the USA at the cost of fifteen million dollars. Bonaparte was spending it all to conquer England.

Paradoxically, trade with the European continent went on, thanks to the Royal Navy, which patrolled the Channel. France was out of bounds, and the French had conquered the Netherlands, but ships from Combe could still sail to cities such as Copenhagen, Oslo and even St Petersburg.

Amos was bringing a consignment of cloth to Combe for onward shipment to a customer in Hamburg. He would be paid with a letter of exchange. His customer would pay the price of the cloth to a German banker called Dan Levy, and Amos would collect his money from Dan’s cousin Jonny, who had a bank in Bristol.

Meanwhile, back in Kingsbridge, Amos now had two mills. His business with the army had grown and his original mill had become overcrowded, so he had bought a second, called Widow’s Mill, from Cissy Bagshaw, who was retiring. Half a year ago he had made Kit Clitheroe manager of both mills. Kit was very young for the job, but he understood the machinery and got on well with the hands: he was easily the most competent deputy Amos had ever had.

The Combe waterfront was busy. Porters and carters came and went, and ships and barges unloaded and reloaded, in the never-ending process that made Britain the richest country in the world.

The bargees found the vessel Amos was looking for, theDutch Girl, and moored alongside. Amos went ashore and Hamish began to unload Amos’s bales of cloth. Kev Odger, master of theDutch Girl, appeared. Amos had known him for years and trusted him, but nevertheless they counted the bales together, and Odger opened three at random to check that they were white wool serge as specified in the manifest. They signed two copies of the bill of lading and took one each.

Odger asked him: ‘Are you staying overnight?’

‘It’s too late to head back to Kingsbridge today,’ Amos replied.

‘Then watch out for the press gang this evening. I lost two good men last night.’

Amos understood. Britain was in constant need of men for the navy. The militia, the home defence force, had no shortage, for it had the power to conscript men whether they liked it or not. There was no conscription into the regular army, but poverty-stricken Ireland supplied about a third of army recruits and the criminal courts accounted for most of the rest, for they could sentence an offender to military service as a punishment. So the biggest problem was the navy, which kept the seas free for British trade.