‘The first thing we must do is get you bathed. We cannot have you making dirty pictures.’

  *

  The fleet sailed a week later. Paul had thought that sharing a tent with eight other men in the army had been cramped, but that was like the Palace of Versailles compared to life at sea. The flagship, the mighty Orient, was more crowded than a cattle market. Her regular crew of a thousand men had been joined by two thousand soldiers and another two hundred officers and other hangers-on. At mealtimes Paul and Lefebvre ate at a table set for two hundred and fifty men, so tight one could hardly lift food to one’s mouth without clashing elbows.

  It was still better than life in the army. As a new member of the Commission of the Sciences and Arts, Paul was no longer treated as a private: he was a gentleman. He had no chores, no duties and no discipline. He was free of Sergeant Bastiat, who had been assigned to one of the other transports.

  He began to draw. He sketched the officers in their fine cocked hats and dashing uniforms. He drew the sailors, working the ship or off duty, smoking their pipes and dancing their jigs. He sold some of his pictures: a sou each for the sailors and a franc for the officers, because, after all, the revolution had not yet made men completely equal. He drew Bonaparte, standing on the poop deck staring at the horizon. He captioned it L’homme du Destin – the Man of Destiny. When Bonaparte saw it, he exclaimed with delight and put it on his cabin wall.

  ‘But where are we going?’

  It was the subject they always came back to, their endless speculation unhindered by hard fact. This time, the question had come from an engineer named Gaillard, sitting at supper one evening.

  ‘You should know,’ said a major of dragoons across the table. ‘You’re a savant.’

  There was widespread laughter. The ‘savants’ was the nickname the men of the Commission had been given: ‘the experts’.

  ‘Ask Lefebvre,’ said Gaillard. Lefebvre was the head of the Commission. ‘He knows, but he won’t tell.’

  All eyes along the crowded table turned to Lefebvre. Paul, sitting next to him, shrank into the bench. His colleagues were eminent men, erudite, quick-witted and impeccably mannered. Paul felt lumpen in their company. He let them ignore him, for fear of what they might say if they took notice of him.

  Only Lefebvre paid him attention. For reasons Paul didn’t understand, he had adopted Paul as his protégé. He complimented his drawings, tousled his hair and always sat next to him at meals.

  Lefebvre looked around conspiratorially.

  ‘Happily, the general has permitted me to reveal all. We are bound . . .’

  He let the silence deepen until every man was hanging on his next word. Then he thrust his knife upwards, where the night sky glimmered through the open grating.

  ‘For the moon! Bonaparte means to conquer the stars themselves.’

  His companions clapped and cheered. They raised their glasses and drank toasts to the moon and the stars. Paul joined in, glowing with the good humour and camaraderie in the room. One of the savants, an astronomer, stood up and began to sing a ribald song about a peasant girl who took a walk under a full moon.

  Paul felt a nudge at his elbow. Lefebvre was holding out his fork with a morsel of beef on the end of it. He put it in Paul’s mouth to bite off.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Paul was squeezed so tightly he could barely lift his fork to feed himself. Not that he cared. The food was weevil-infested biscuit, rotten beef, and vegetables pickled in so much vinegar they made him gag. After every meal, there was hardly space along the side of the ship for all the men emptying their stomachs.

  Lefebvre wiped a spot of gravy from the corner of Paul’s mouth.

  ‘Come to my cabin after dinner.’

  *

  As head of the Commission, Lefebvre enjoyed the ultimate luxury: a cabin to himself. It was still no bigger than a hen coop. Lefebvre was sitting on the small bed when Paul arrived, with a sketch pad on his knee and a row of pencils lined up beside him.

  He poured two glasses of brandy and gave one to Paul.

  ‘I want to draw you.’

  ‘Me?’ Paul was flattered.

  ‘As a life model.’

  It took Paul a moment to understand what he meant.

  ‘Undressed?’

  Lefebvre nodded. Paul felt uncomfortable, but he supposed it was not an unusual request. Artists drew female nudes all the time, so why not men as well? He knew little of such things. The brandy had loosened his inhibitions.

  He took off his clothes while Lefebvre readied his sketch pad and pencil. Lefebvre had trained as an architect, and it showed in his work. When he drew people, the images were brusque and functional, as though the people were blocks of stone. Paul found it slightly unsettling, though he would not presume to criticise his mentor.

  Lefebvre walked around him. He adjusted the angle of Paul’s head. He lifted Paul’s hand and put it on his bare hip.

  ‘Now move your right leg out – like so.’

  He grabbed Paul’s thigh and tugged it forward so firmly that Paul stumbled into him. For a moment the two men were locked in an awkward embrace. Lefebvre wrapped his hands around Paul’s waist and clutched his buttocks. Paul smelled the brandy on his breath.

  Paul pulled out of Lefebvre’s grip and resumed his pose. Lefebvre sat on the bed and took up his pencil. He studied Paul for a long moment, then jumped up again.

  Before Paul knew what was happening, he felt Lefebvre’s hand slip around his member. Paul was so surprised he didn’t know what to do. He froze. Lefebvre’s slim fingers encircled the shaft, tugging back and forth. Paul felt himself harden. He was embarrassed – he wanted to resist – but his body responded automatically. In an instant, his penis was standing proud and hard as a pistol barrel.

  Lefebvre drew back, admiring his handiwork.

  ‘This is how I want to draw you. The potent French hero.’

  Paul stood painfully still. The ship was alive with the sounds of men, ropes, spars and waves, but all he could hear was the scratch of the pencil. Lefebvre drew quickly, a flurry of sharp jabs and deft slashes, almost as if he were attacking the paper.

  When he was finished, he patted the bed beside him.

  ‘Sit here.’

  Paul did as he was told. Lefebvre spread the paper across his knees. His hand rested in Paul’s lap, trailing between his thighs.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Paul could hardly concentrate with Lefebvre’s hand touching him. But he did not like the picture. Lefebvre had drawn him with hard angles and sharp lines, geometric precision that somehow reduced him to an object. Lifelike, but without life.

  Lefebvre’s hand moved up Paul’s thigh and closed around his manhood once again.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Paul realised Lefebvre was no longer talking about the painting. A hundred thoughts confused his mind and left him tongue-tied.

  Endure anything. Become anything.

  ‘It is nice,’ he stammered at last.

  ‘Good,’ said Lefebvre, smiling. ‘Because there is something else I want to do with you.’

  He unbuckled his breeches and reached for a jar of pork lard sitting on his sea chest.

  *

  Paul left the cabin reeling. His body ached from the things Lefebvre had done to him; his mind was in turmoil. He was not ignorant. After three years in the army, he was aware that men did these things together. When Bastiat taunted him as a faggot, he knew what it meant.

  He had always thought such things were unspeakably wrong. Yet Lefebvre was his mentor, a man he trusted. He was good to him. How could he do anything bad to Paul?

  Lefebvre was also Paul’s superior. Bonaparte had organised the Commission along military lines and given every man a rank. Lefebvre was a general; Paul only a lieutenant. If Lefebvre took against Paul, he might demote him to a private and expel him from the Commission, send him back to his regiment. Whatever Lefebvre had done to Paul, it was still kinder than what Sergeant Bastiat would do.

  Paul took his place in his hammock, stacked three deep with a man above and another below. The snores and belches and farts of three thousand men made sleep almost impossible. It was hard to nod off with a man’s filthy body sagging six inches over your face.

  He lay there, his soul aching, until daylight seeped through the gunports.

  He told no one what had happened.

  *

  Every day the vast fleet of over a thousand ships sailed east, and still no one knew where they were going. Paul, raised on stories of the ancient myths, thought even the Greek fleet sailing to capture Troy could not have been more splendid. It was impossible to think that any force on Earth could challenge it.

  Yet the crew were nervous. The captain posted double lookouts, and was often on deck with his telescope. Even Bonaparte seemed uneasy.

  One afternoon, Paul eavesdropped on the conversation of two sailors he was sketching.

  ‘The English cannot be far away,’ said one.

  ‘Let them come,’ scoffed the other. ‘Bonaparte will give them a taste of French iron. He is unbeatable.’

  ‘On land, bien sûr. But at sea? The English admiral Nelson will have something to say about it.’

  The second sailor pointed at one of the twenty-four-pound cannons lashed to the bulwark.

  ‘This will take care of Nelson.’

  ‘It is not only Nelson. His captains are as fierce as he. There is a rumour – I heard it from a brothel-keeper in Toulon before we sailed – that Captain Courtney is with Nelson’s fleet.’

  ‘Putain,’ the second sailor swore. ‘I fought Courtney off Guadeloupe. Our two-decker against his frigate. We shot his ship from under him, but he kept coming at us until he had battered us to the waterline. The sharks would have taken me, if Courtney had not lowered his boats to rescue us. That man does not know when he is beaten.’

  Paul had stopped drawing. Spoken in French, the English name ‘Courtney’ and the French name ‘Courtenay’ did not sound similar. No one had noticed the resemblance between Paul’s false surname and this notorious British sea captain’s; if they had, they hadn’t thought it worth any comment.

  Paul had taken the name ‘Courtenay’ because he thought it had once been his mother’s – though she had never told him that. In the library of the château, aged about ten, he had found an English book among all the dusty French tomes: Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. The cover had fallen open, and on the inside, in a neat school-girlish hand, he had read, ‘This book is the property of Constance Courtney’.

  When he asked his mother about it, she told him Constance Courtney had died many years earlier. He had not pressed her. He was intelligent enough to know that his mother had many secrets. But the name had stuck in his memory, a solitary clue to a past he could only guess at. When he took it for his own, he had francised it to ‘Courtenay’ so it would not stand out.

  To hear the original spoken now, aboard ship, made him uneasy. He told himself it must be a common English name.

  ‘Where does this Captain Courtney come from?’ he asked the sailors.

  They looked at him in surprise. They hadn’t realised he was listening. Paul saw the first sailor readying a sarcastic response, before remembering that Paul ranked as an officer. He adapted his answer into something impeccably patriotic.

  ‘He comes from the Devil’s arse.’

  And that was all Paul found out.

  *

  Bonaparte’s famous luck held. Nelson did not find them, and nor did Robert Courtney. After three weeks, the fleet arrived in Malta, but only to reprovision. The Knights of Malta refused them access; Bonaparte responded with a furious twenty-four-hour assault that reduced the defenders to abject surrender. Another vestige of the old world swept away – another territory added to the might of France. Bonaparte was unconquerable. The army was invincible. Bonaparte at last revealed that the fleet was bound for Egypt, but even then his men whispered that this was not the final destination. Once he had conquered the land of the pharaohs, he would march across the deserts of Persia and Arabia to India itself, like Alexander the Great. He would seize the jewel of the British Empire and cut off the riches that funded her mighty navy. And after that, who knew? The world was at Bonaparte’s feet. In those heady days, who could doubt it?

  Paul never forgot his first sight of Egypt. He stood at the rail, jostling with every man aboard, until the captain ordered his marines to push them back for fear the ship would capsize. Paul had his sketchbook ready to capture the moment. He had imagined a skyline like some ancient oriental cityscape, studded with pyramids and obelisks and colossal statues of pharaohs, fringed with palm trees and graced by flocks of exotic birds.

  There was nothing to see. Just a shimmering ribbon on the horizon, as if someone had taken a paintbrush and drawn a white line where the blue sea met the blue sky.

  Paul drew a pencil line across the centre of his page. He licked his finger and smudged it. The starkest image imaginable, like the beginnings of a picture he had quickly abandoned. Yet it unsettled him. The line throbbed on the page: a border, a divide. As if by crossing it, he would be doing something transformative and irrevocable.

  Lefebvre squeezed beside him. He ran his hand down Paul’s back to the base of his spine.

  ‘You know what the Arabs do to the men they capture?’

  Paul shook his head.

  ‘A particular treatment for which the Orient is famed. But it is not so bad as men say.’ Lefebvre gave him a wink and a slap on his buttock. ‘I have heard some men even enjoy it.’

  *

  The fleet landed on the coast near Alexandria. The Mameluke cavalry charged them, but the brave desert warriors were no match for disciplined French troops. Another victory for the Republic. Alexandria fell, and Bonaparte took up residence in a house overlooking the ruined foundations of the great lighthouse, once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

  Two days later, the first battalions set out towards the Egyptian capital, Cairo. Bonaparte was impatient. The easiest route was to follow the Nile, where water was plentiful and boats could supply their advance. But the river meandered in disobliging loops that lengthened the route and offended Bonaparte’s efficient mind. Instead, he drove his army in a straight line across the desert. Flies, thirst and Arab raiders tormented the men. They burned by day and froze at night.

  Paul’s only consolation was that Lefebvre left him alone. He was too busy worrying about food to think about satisfying his carnal appetites.

  They were in the desert for almost three weeks. One night, they struck camp after midnight and marched across the moonlit sands, formed up for battle. As day dawned, they heard the cry of a muezzin’s call to prayer wailing through the mist across the river. The call was taken up by another, then ten more, then a thousand others.

  ‘Cairo.’

  The word went up and down the line in excited whispers. The air glowed as the sun rose. The parting mist revealed a city: a shimmering fabric of domes, towers, battlements and spires, piled up and almost too fabulous to be real. Paul grabbed his portfolio and sketched it quickly, soft inky lines blending into one another like a dream.

  Ahead, three peaks pricked the morning sky. They floated suspended above the desert haze, too high to be buildings. They had to be mountains, but when Paul drew them the lines were so undeviatingly straight they could not be natural.

  The sun rose higher, revealing them more clearly. The pyramids. Then the sun touched the ground of the plain, and Paul forgot his wonder. Stretched between the river and the pyramids, spanning nearly ten miles, was the enemy army.

  *

  The battle lasted for only two hours and confirmed – yet again – Bonaparte’s military genius. Paul spent the time cowering with the pack mules, trying to keep the animals from bolting. Afterwards, he sketched what he could remember.

  He drew the Mameluke cavalry parading like glorious tropical birds in their bright silk robes and turbans. Some had decorated their helmets with egret feathers. The sun burnished their helmets and scimitars, the points of their lances and their mail armour, so that they looked like a line of fire sweeping across the desert. Their horses were the finest Paul had ever seen, their weapons flashing with the inlay of gold and precious stones, as if the Arabian Nights and the Romance of King Arthur had all melded into one.

  He sketched them again an hour later, when their corpses lay heaped five or six deep. Dying horses thrashed their limbs, jerking the dead like puppets. Some of the Mamelukes were still on fire where spent musket wadding had set their fine silk robes alight.

  The battle was a victory for brutal mathematics over chivalry. The French infantry formed squares, so that every horse was opposed by at least nine muskets, and no amount of courage or daring by the Mamelukes could beat those odds. The cavalry dashed themselves against the infantry squares like rabid dogs. When their morale broke, the French soldiers executed a perfect evolution from square to column, and drove the Mamelukes back across their lines and into the river. Many drowned, weighed down by their splendid armour. Paul drew the French soldiers who swam out to the bodies to loot them. They had to compete with the crocodiles, who swarmed off the banks to devour the living and the dead indiscriminately. Several of the looters lost hands, or worse. Paul titled the picture Feeding Frenzy.

  The Mameluke commander, Murad Bey, escaped the battle and withdrew south, abandoning Cairo to her conquerors. Victorious soldiers rampaged through the city, stealing anything they could carry and debauching the women they found. Paul did not enjoy the victory. That night, Lefebvre found him. He stank of wine, and had a manic look in his eye.

  ‘Vive la république,’ he slurred. ‘Did you think I had forgotten you, my pet? Now we have something to celebrate.’

  Paul knew what was expected of him. Flushing with angry shame, he unbuckled his trousers and rolled onto his stomach, wondering if it would not have been better to be captured by the Bedouin after all.

  INDIAN OCEAN, 1806

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