The Price of Glory by Seth Hunter Page B

working closer to shore with their sweeps, though he very much doubted if they could achieve much with the kind of sea that was running. The
Conquest
in particular was making such heavy weather of it, he did not think she would be able to open her gun-ports, much less fire her broadside. Which was probably just as well for she was rolling so badly the shot could go anywhere. The beach here was strangely empty after the crowds they had seen further along the peninsula. A beach of startlingly white sand, even under the cloudy sky, but while he was looking, hundreds of ragged, scuttling figures emerged from the dunes and ran toward the water’s edge, stretching out their hands imploringly.
    Nathan sought out Tully on the weather rail to express his anguish: “How in God’s name are we to provide support with that lot in the line of fire? And support what? Where are the Royalist lines; can
you
see them? For I am sure I cannot.”
    Tully was unable to enlighten him and Nathan went aloft in the hope of a better view but even braced against the topmast shrouds it was impossible to hold the glass steady enough for any detailed observation. He could see the fort plainly enough with his naked eye, a little over a mile to the north-west, but the Royalist lines the commodore had sketched so confidently on the map aboard the
Pomone
were nowhere to be seen. If they were there at all, they were well hidden among the dunes.
    He wondered if it were possible to bring the frigate any closer to the shore. The wind had slackened somewhat and there was still a depth of water under her keel, but he was wary of performing what would necessarily be a complicated manoeuvre so close to the guns of Penthièvre, especially with Graham as his sailing master.
    He looked again at the people on the beach.
    â€œGod help them,” he murmured under his breath, though there was none to hear him. It was scarcely a prayer. He had lost what little faith he had in Paris during the time of the Terror. And yet he was shaken by this fresh evidence, to his mind, of the sheer randomness of fate that could cast so many defenceless people adrift, abandoned to the tide of war and politics. Did they believe their God would save them? God or Virgin or whatever Papist saints they prayed to in their churches and at their roadside shrines? Did they believe the Bishop of Rome would intercede for them with his prayers?
    And yet for all of that, for all his scepticism and his deeply in-grained pessimism, he still needed to believe there was a greater power than his own puny endeavours, a benign presence to ward off the evil eye, even if you called it luck.
    He was a man much inclined to Order—a student of astronomy who found comfort in the slightest evidence of some pattern to the universe and in the supposition that the planets moved according to certain rules and regulations, that all was not Chaos, as it so often appeared on Earth. He could not entirely dismiss the idea that behind this Order there was a force for good: call it God, or the Supreme Being, as Robespierre had, or something else, something no-one had yet discovered in the configuration of the planets. The Great Regulator. The Supreme Clockmaker (the divine twin of Mr. Harrison who had invented the marine chronometer, perhaps; it was a comforting image). He was perfectly aware that this belief—or whimsy, for it could not be compared to faith—was sustained in part by the terrible fear that there was nothing there. Nothing and noone. That no amount of appeals to an unknown deity would make the slightest difference to the course of events, wherever they occurred.
    Nathan had been led by his interest in astronomy to the work of a certain Persian astronomer, poet and mathematician called Omar Khayyam, translated by the English scholar Thomas Hyde who had travelled much in the East during the last century. Nathan had been much struck by a line of verse he had found in Hyde’s