A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

on the back and pinched each other’s arms. This was a wonderful joke; they’d never seen so great a fool as the young man who stood before them.

The oldest of the seafarers was sitting near the fire. His face was as gnarled and brown as a walnut, and the others had cleared a space for him respectfully. The young man surmised he was a captain—perhaps the owner of his own ship.

“You’ll not get a man at Ostend to bear you across the channel tonight, lad,” the elder said sternly. “The sea is the mistress of a sailor, and tonight she’s wilder than a jilted woman. You’ll not find a man at Ostend who’d put his head on her bosom, with the mood she’s in tonight!”

The others laughed at that, and someone had a pitcher of brew sent around. Each man took a healthy drink from it, as if to wash away the thought of putting out to sea in such weather. But as they laughed and drank, the captain looked with a clear eye upon the stranger, and thought he might hear more.

“What business is it that takes you to London?” he asked.

“It’s a matter of gravest urgency,” the young man replied, sensing he’d found an attentive ear. “I must cross the channel tonight. It will take none but a man of soul, spirit, and courage to get me there.”

He looked at each man in the room until his eyes rested again upon the old captain.

“But heed the danger—”

“I must cross the channel tonight.”

“You will surely die—a boat cannot get off the dock with waves such as these.”

“I must cross the channel tonight,” he said again, in a voice so soft and steady that the sailors stopped their laughter and, one by one, turned to stare at the mud-caked stranger in their midst. No one had ever seen a man so calmly announce his own death.

“Look here,” said the captain at last, “if you must, then it’s a thing worth more than life to you, for the sea will rise up and kill you, as sure as sure.”

The young man stood there, his pale hair and skin transparent against the firelight, his eyes—not leaving those of the old man for a moment—as colorless and cold as the winter sea.

“Ah—it is the evil eye!” whispered the old man, and spat upon the floor to ward it off.

The rain smashed against the shuttered windows and doors. A piece of wood cracked and leaped off the hearth, and a few of the men jumped. They glanced about nervously as if a ghost had entered; but no one spoke.

The stranger broke the silence. His voice was soft and low, but each man in the room heard precisely what he said.

“I am prepared to pay five thousand French livres—in gold, and now—to the man who will bear me across the channel tonight.”

A shock ran through the room; there wasn’t a ship lashed to the piers outside that was worth so great a sum, unless fully laden with the finest goods. The price he’d stated might buy two ships outright.

The seamen tamped their pipes and looked into their tankards. He knew they were thinking of their families, how rich their wives and children would be with so much money, more than any man among them could earn in a lifetime. They were thinking it through, and he gave them time to do it. They were casting the odds—reviewing how their luck had been running of late and calculating the risk, whether any man might run the channel tonight and make it across alive.

“I tell you”—the captain cut the silence, his voice a bit too loud—“that if any man goes out in the channel on a night like this, it’s suicide. Only the devil would tempt a Christian seafaring man this way—and no Christian would sell his soul to the devil for five thousand livres!”

The pale young man placed his brandy glass upon the mantelpiece and walked to the large oak table at the center of the room, where all could see him clearly.

“Then what of ten thousand?” he said softly.

He tossed a bag upon the table, and it broke open. The sailors watched in silence as the coins spilled across the table and clattered to the floor.

In London, a light mist was falling.

When the doors of the stock exchange opened and its members filed in to take their places for the day’s trading, a pale young man with cold blue eyes was among them. He removed his cape and left it and his gold-handled walking stick with the porter. Shaking hands with a few fellow members, he took his place.

Trading was erratic as British consols—war bonds—were being offered at large discounts. News of the war was bad. It was said that Blücher had been cut from his horse—his army had fallen to the French at Ligny—and that Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was holed up in a miserable rain at Quatre-Bras, unable to pull his heavy artillery from the mud.

Things looked bad for the allies—for if the British under Wellesley fell as quickly as the Prussians had, Napoleon would be firmly entrenched in Europe again, just three short months after his escape from Elba. And the British consols that had again been drafted to finance a costly war would not be worth the paper they were printed on.

But one man in the room had fresher news. The pale young man stood quietly at his post and bought all the consols he could lay his hands upon. If his judgment proved wrong, he and his family would be ruined. But his judgment was based upon information, and information was power.

At Ghent, he had watched the messenger arrive from the battlefield at Waterloo and kneel before a tall, heavyset man as if he were regent. That simple gesture signified that the outcome of the war was in the hands of the British—not the French as everyone supposed. For the name of the tall man at Ghent was