Free The Angry Tide by Winston Graham Page A

Cornwall that week of a raid that had been carried out on Bruges. Locks, it was reported, had been totally destroyed in the port, the canal and basin drained dry, buildings had been blown up, invasion barges destroyed. Weak behind her defensive moat, England could still make the effective gesture of defiance. The young cleric, Sydney Smith, declared that he now considered war between the English and the French no longer a temporary quarrel but the expression of a natural antipathy between the races such as existed between the weasel and the rat. He did not specify which in his view was which.
    In February the Directory had instructed General Buonaparte to inspect the invasion fleet with the hope that he might lead it against Eng land, but, having observed Hoche 's failure of the year before, and, being aware of what had happened to the combined fleets of Spain and Holland when they met the British last year, Buonaparte had turned it down as too much of a gambler's throw. Instead he had gone south again, no one in England for a while knew where. But just before Ross left London, news had come in that the General was in Marseilles assembling a fleet and an army.
    Now, a secret report reached England that a great fleet had left Marseilles with the General on board, that the fleet consisted of 180 ships and that it carried 1,000 guns, 700 horses, and 17,000 of France's best troops. It so happened that the recently promoted and recently knighted Admiral Nelson was in command of a fleet which had been sent to the Mediterranean last autumn even though invasion fears were then at their height, a bold, indeed rash, move which had been opposed by the admirals but decided on by Lord Spencer at the Admiralty, who overruled them. It could now be a fortunate decision, always supposing that the two forces should encounter each other somewhere in the wide reaches of the Mediterranean. A frigate had been dispatched to tell the admiral of the enemy's move.
    This information, while it allayed some immediate fears of invasion in Cornwall, did not remove them; for Hoche was still somewhere about, and France had the forces to mount two expeditions at the same time. While he was in London Ross had been to observe the preparations to meet an invader in Sussex and Kent. If the French landed drastic measures would at once be taken there to remove or destroy anything they might capture. Ross felt that in Cornwall not enough preparations of this sort had been made and set himself to put this point of view to the local Volunteers and Vigilantes.
     
    In June a council of another sort was held - this in the Warleggan family. Nicholas, George's father, had been in indifferent health for some time and spent more and more time at his country seat. As a consequence the management and direction of Warleggan interests had fall en wholly to George. His uncle C ary was immersed in day to day administration and took a greater active part in the affairs of the business: George usually decided policy.
    It was a grey, warm, damp day when Truro, lying among its rivers and its mists, was at its most enervating, that Nicholas chose to limp into the main office of the bank and try to pick up the reins he had dropped a year ago. George gave him an account of what had been happening while Cary, sweating thinly under his skullcap, provided details and extra figures if Nicholas wanted them.
    Presently Nicholas, staring at the great ledger in front of him, said: 'You've been making heavy personal drawings, George. Eighteen thousand pounds in the last three weeks. May we know what enterprise you are favouring?'
    George smiled: 'Not so much an enterprise, Father, as an investment for the future. My future.'
    Cary hunched his shiny coat round himself and said: 'Very dubious investment, Nicholas. Very dubious indeed. An investment in self-aggrandisement, if one may venture to put it that way.'
    George looked at his uncle dispassionately, as if seeing him without any sense of blood