#
“I doubt sending the Third Regiment of Foot to camp on the shores of Dover can be useful.” Durham stared at Halsey across his own desk. Pitt sat beside him. “Halsey, face it. We need twice as many soldiers for that plan of yours.”
Halsey shook his head. His friend was being stubborn, and to win over the prime minister, they had to form a firm front on this matter. “Then let’s get them.”
“We would need twice the money to pay them all!”
“Can you afford to have Bonaparte laugh at our little army?” Halsey argued. “We must make our numbers look stronger.”
“Are you impressing the Austrians and Prussians with these so-called numbers?” Durham asked him.
“Yes! Why not?” Halsey had devised a plan to use a regiment, and with earthworks and supplies, to make it appear as if it were three regiments camped on the southern English coast. But convincing Pitt and Rafe was a bigger challenge than he had anticipated. “Bonaparte faked his attack on us, posting his army in Boulogne for two years, shouting at us, scaring thelocals half to death. Why don’t we terrorize him? Now that he is gone from the Atlantic coast, he is vulnerable there, no matter the blockade. His navy is a little fish in the waters we control.”
“No!” The prime minister swept a hand through his thinning hair, strode to the window, and looked out on the street. “I cannot send such a prize as the third from its quarters in Canterbury to the shore for a ruse like that.”
Halsey fumed, but kept his anger. Pitt did not care for vitriol. “Then give me a different regiment. I don’t care which one. Give me home guard, if it comes to that. I must increase the numbers if Carlisle’s and my plan is to succeed. And we must begin now.”
“You think Bonaparte cares about what we do?” Pitt challenged him.
“Of course he does!” Durham was out of the chair by Halsey’s desk. “He has decided not to invade us for now—and turned the other way. He is mad to defeat the Austrians. But if he wins against them, never doubt that he will turn his sights back to us once more. We have not the army strength here to fight him off. We did not when he had his Grand Army in Boulogne last summer, and we don’t have it now.”
“But we have sent rumors abroad that we have doubled our army, trained them well, too,” Halsey pressed his friends. “Plus, we won at sea at Trafalgar and deterred him from crossing the Channel.”
Halsey had private knowledge of how the Earl of Carlisle’s new wife, Giselle, had been instrumental in ensuring that Bonaparte’s efforts to cross the Channel would fail. He knew because he had helped Carlisle rescue Giselle from French agents who knew what she had done. Giselle had achieved a miraculous ruse, drawing false landscapes that were fed to the French and the architects of the fleet.
Though he had talked with Scarlett Hawthorne about Giselle’s work, as had Carlisle and Durham, he had not asked if she worked for the lady who ran her own espionage network. To ask was not what one did. Agents kept their own knowledge. Inference and accident aided Halsey and his group of men to understand Scarlett’s. She had told him what was necessary and that was all. Giselle, the lady implied, had worked for Scarlett, who had paid her to feed drawings through Scarlett’s group across the Channel and into the hands of French shipwrights and admirals.
The deception was the most successful feat of the year. The French—who may have suspected the drawings they received were false—had stopped building amphibious landing vessels. Whether they had learned that the calculations they used to build those vessels were wrong was the cause, he did not know. No one did.
But the current threat of the Austrians to Bonaparte’s hold on Rhinish German principalities had persuaded Bonaparte to pull his Grand Army from the Channel coast in Boulogne and send his two-hundred-thousand-strong army east. As of this week, agents had informed Halsey, the French army marched toward the Austrian border.
Still, Halsey would not tell the prime minister that the British were safe from French invasion. Never was it so or could be. Bonaparte held a special bitterness toward the British. He would never stop looking at them with envious eyes. So Halsey would never allow William Pitt, the Younger, to believe that they were all safe behind the blockade of the Royal Navy.
He had to build another ruse to scare the French into dividing their soldiers into smaller segments so that he could more easily fight and defeat them.
But that seemed to be a victory for another day. Pitt left the meeting with Durham, both saying only they would think on the matter.
Halsey sighed. Enough work for today. He was going to a reception where his darling Inès was in attendance.
His day would not be complete until he saw her smile at him once again.
#
Halsey arrived late.
His mother and two sisters had already departed. Only a few guests remained.
“The party is nearly done.” Inès greeted him at the salon door and looped her arm through his.
“I was sorry to miss it.”
“I was sorry you missed me at the fortepiano. I wanted to impress you.”
“For that, ma chérie,” he said in low and decadent tones, “you need nothing but your lovely self.”
“You turn my head with every word.”
He grinned down at her and patted her hand on his arm. “I like to succeed in all my efforts.”
