A private revenge nd-9 Read online

  In this mood Drinkwater, tired though he was, finished his self-imposed task of writing up his private journal. As he did so his cabin was suddenly filled with the delicious bitter smell of what passed for coffee aboard His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician. Drinkwater looked up.

  'Coffee, sir?'

  Mullender poured from the pot he had brought from the pantry and Drinkwater sipped the scalding liquid gratefully. Mullender stood, balancing himself against the heave of the ship which was pronounced here, at the stern.

  'Hot food today, sir,' Mullender remarked. Such things assumed a rare importance on board a storm-damaged ship and Drinkwater looked keenly at his steward. How long had Mullender attended him? To his shame he had forgotten; and he had forgotten whether Mullender was married or had children. The man stood patiently, holding the coffee-pot, waiting for Drinkwater to ask for more, a grubby rag of a towel over his bare arm with its sparse flesh and pallid skin. Drinkwater caught the steward's eye and smiled.

  'That's good news, Mullender, good news . . .'

  'Aye, sir.'

  Mullender's impassivity, the expressionless look to his eyes and face struck Drinkwater, and it occurred to him that he had taken Mullender so for granted that he was guilty in some way he could not quite comprehend. He held out his cup and watched the brown liquid gurgle into it.

  'We have all been sorely tried, Mullender,' he said as he swallowed the second cupful.

  'Aye, sir.'

  Drinkwater handed the emptied cup back to the steward. 'That was most welcome, thank you.'

  He watched Mullender retreat to the pantry. Was there something odd about the man's demeanour, or was he himself mildly hallucinating from the effects of exhaustion? He did not know. What was important was to secure for them all a period of rest. Wearily he rose from the table and left the cabin.

  There was more to hearten him on deck, for it was one of the minor miracles of the sea-service that the sum of a ship's company's efforts could produce spectacular results from meagre resources. And Patrician and her people had indeed been sorely tried in the preceding months.

  She had taken a buffeting entering the Pacific by way of Cape Horn the previous year; she had been deliberately sabotaged by someone in her own company and refitted on the coast of California; and she had fought two actions, the second against heavy odds. The brutal combat with the Russian line-of-battle ship Suvorov had left her a battered victor with the added responsibility of prisoners amongst her own disaffected crew. Now, bruised by the long passage across the North Pacific and the terrible onslaught of a typhoon, it was still possible to set her to rights, to turn out of her hold sufficient material to make good the worst ravages of the elements, to rouse out of her sail-room enough spare sails to replace her rent canvas, or hoist from her booms a permutation of spars which allowed her to carry topgallants on all three masts. It was true she was no longer the lofty sail-carrier that had left the Nore amid the equinoctial gales of the autumn of 1807, but despite shortages of powder and shot, despite a desperate depletion of her stores and victuals, she remained a King's ship, an arm of British policy in these distant waters.

  'Good morning, sir.'

  Lieutenant James Quilhampton touched the forecock of his battered hat, his tall, gangling frame familiarly out-at-elbows, his wooden fist by his side and a wide grin upon his face.

  'Good to see a little sunshine, Mr Q,' remarked Drinkwater.

  'Indeed it is, sir. Frey told me you were active with sextant and chronometer an hour since, sir. Dare I presume a longitude?'

  'You may. And it crossed tolerably with yesterday's meridian altitude. If it remains clear, I shall get another at noon and be happy as a prentice-boy on pay-day.'

  It was another minor miracle, Drinkwater thought, that neither of his instruments had suffered damage in the typhoon. It was true there were two other quadrants on the ship, but the loss of the chronometer would have been catastrophic.

  'We shall have to maintain a masthead look-out, Mr Q, day and night, for we have passed the outer islands and are presently amid the reefs of the China Sea.'

  The two men exchanged glances. Both were thinking of the brig Hellebore and her wrecking on a reef in the Red Sea.

  'God forbid that we should be caught twice like that,' Quilhampton said fervently, expelling his breath with a shake of his head.

  Drinkwater caught the faint whiff of the lieutenant's breath and was reminded of another problem, for the unfortunate taint, increasingly common to them all, was an early sign of scurvy.

  'We must wood and water, and seek fresh fruit and vegetables, Mr Q. I've a mind to beat up for the China coast. There's the Portuguese colony of Macao, or the East India Company's establishment at Canton where we may also find word of the Juno. It is still possible that she has escorted Russian ships there from Alaska with the season's furs.'

  'Will you exchange our prisoners there, sir?' Quilhampton nodded forward to where, under a marine guard, a group of bearded Russians exercised round and round the fo'c's'le.

  'If I can. They are a damned liability on board.'

  'And their officers, sir?'

  It was Drinkwater's turn to expel breath, a signal of exasperation borne with difficulty. 'I doubt they'll go, God damn 'em. My only consolation is that I do not have to suffer them day and night.'

  The deaths of Lieutenant Mylchrist and the Master, Mr Hill, had left empty cabins aboard. Acting Lieutenant Frey had been ordered to stay in the gunroom while the cabins of the dead officers were turned over to the most senior of the Russians. At least Captain Prince Vladimir Rakitin did not have to share Drinkwater's own cabin, though he ate at his table. On such a long commission Drinkwater prized his privacy above all else.

  'Talk of the devil,' muttered Quilhampton, drawing himself up as officer-of-the-watch to give the paroled prisoners formal permission to exercise on the quarterdeck.

  'Good morning, Captain.'

  The tall, heavily built figure of the Russian nobleman crossed the deck towards Drinkwater, staring about curiously. Rakitin was pale from his enforced confinement below decks for the duration of the typhoon.

  'Good-day.'

  Drinkwater was icily polite to his prisoner.

  'You have refitted your ship in good time.'

  Rakitin's excellent English was unnerving. The Russian had served with the Royal Navy before the Tsar had turned his coat and succumbed to Napoleon's blandishments at Tilsit. Drinkwater found this familiarity as repulsive as the man himself.

  'My men know their duty, Captain,' he replied softly.

  The two commanders stood side by side, united in rank, divided by hostility and yet compelled by convention to maintain a degree of amity. Considering them from the other side of the quarterdeck, Quilhampton thought them an odd pair. Tall and powerful, Rakitin's broad shoulders stretched the cloth of his high-collared uniform, an a la mode outfit that stank of Parisian fashion. Beside him, half a head shorter, his soft undress uniform coat lapels fluttering in the breeze, Captain Drinkwater balanced himself against the Patrician's motion.

  Quilhampton could see the inequality of Drinkwater's shoulders, the result of two wounds that even padding and the heavy bullion epaulettes could not disguise. The hair, receding slightly from the high forehead, still hung in a thick, ribboned queue down Drinkwater's back, an old-fashioned affectation that conveyed an impression of agelessness to the loyal and devoted Quilhampton. As if sensing this scrutiny Drinkwater turned, catching Quilhampton's eye. The thin scar on the left cheek showed livid after the weathering of recent weeks, and the powder burns about Drinkwater's eye puckered the soft skin to give him a curious, quizzing appearance.

  'Mr Q!' Drinkwater called. 'Have the kindness to arrange for

  Captain Rakitin's officers to attend the purser and supervise an issue of grog to their men in compliment to their labours at the pumps.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  Rakitin turned, an expression of surprise on his face. 'My men have been pumping
?' he asked.

  'Yes,' replied Drinkwater smoothly, 'in order that mine might repair the ship.'

  Drinkwater felt a contempt for Rakitin's ignorance of what his men had been doing. It seemed for a moment that Rakitin might protest, but he held his tongue. The Russian seamen had proved tireless and dogged workers, as conscientious at pumping as they had been serving the Suvorov's, guns. But indomitable as they had been in action, they had been ravaged by scurvy, reduced in numbers by sickness, and the high sea running during the battle had made it difficult for Rakitin to use his lower-deck guns. In the end Suvorov had been at the mercy of Patrician's 24- and 18-pounder cannon which had cut up her rigging and masts, hulled her repeatedly, and swept her decks with a hail of canister and langridge. By the time Rakitin struck his colours, Suvorov's powers of resistance were as shattered as her hull and when, in the moderating sea of the following day, they had taken off all those that they could, she had settled so low in the water that the fire they had started aboard her had barely caught. As for Drinkwater, he had lost more men in the rescue than in the action.

  Rakitin, left to a sullen contemplation of his fate, had persuaded himself that his ship had been wantonly sacrificed by the British acting under Drinkwater's orders. The fact that Drinkwater possessed neither the resources nor the men to take the Suvorov as a prize did not enter into the Russian commander's bitter reflections. Aware that he had failed in his mission, Rakitin sought among his officers men of like opinion, cultivating them assiduously in this assumption, until they had convinced themselves of its accuracy. It was an understandable enough attitude, Drinkwater reflected, aware of the under­current of hostility. Rakitin would have to account for the loss of his ship to the Admiralty at St Petersburg, and the difference in force between a seventy-four and a frigate, albeit a heavy one, was going to be difficult to explain.

  Rakitin had seized eagerly on the intelligence that the British ship had been built twenty-four years earlier as a 64-gun line-of-battle ship, insinuating this into his persuasive argument and glossing over the fact that she had been cut down to her present establishment in 1795. Somehow Rakitin had mitigated his defeat, at least in his own mind.

  Despite this, Drinkwater could not deny an underlying sympathy with Rakitin's plight. He knew what it was to lose a ship. The loss of self-confidence alone could sink a man's spirits beyond revival. Nor did Drinkwater forget other matters concerning Russia; his brother Edward was serving with the Russian army, an agent of Great Britain now, nominally at least, an enemy. So Drinkwater cultivated Rakitin with an icy reserve, not knowing, in this long and bitter war, when Tsar Alexander might turn his coat again, or when some obligation towards himself might not prove of advantage.

  'Our men work well together, Captain. We should not be enemies. I believe Admiral Seniavin feels this.'

  'Seniavin?' Rakitin looked at Drinkwater in astonishment, his mind plucked from the narrow contemplation of his misery to the speculative castle-building that officers called 'strategy'.

  'Yes,' went on Drinkwater, 'I am advised that he is opposed to the Tsar's alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte.'

  'I have my orders, Captain. It is my duty to obey them,' Rakitin growled.

  'But,' said Drinkwater, suddenly brightening at the prospect of a little innocent bear-baiting, 'you also have your opinion, n'est-ce que pas?'

  Rakitin turned and drew himself up. 'The alliance with the Emperor Napoleon is one offering great advantages to Russia. It is impossible that the French should rule Europe from Paris, but Europe ruled from Paris and St Petersburg must be, he shrugged, très formidable ...'

  'Until the Emperor Napoleon wishes otherwise, eh?'

  'Captain Drinkwater, you cannot hold out the hand of friendship to Russia. Your army abandoned ours in the Netherlands, your Nelson threatened our ships in our own Baltic Sea. You still have a fleet there blockading our coasts, you tell us we can only trade with you ...'

  You sailed in our ships, Prince Vladimir, you learned much from us and supported us in the North Sea. We pressed gold and arms on you, even refitted your ships; was not this proof of our friendship?'

  Rakitin flushed with anger and was about to launch into a tirade on Britain's perfidy when there came a cry from the masthead.

  'Deck there! Sail to leeward!'

  Quilhampton reacted instantaneously, leaping into the lee mizen shrouds and yelling back: 'Where away?'

  'Three points on the lee bow, sir ... looks like a vessel under jury-rig!'

  Quilhampton scanned the horizon and could see nothing. He jumped to the deck and held his glass out to Midshipman Dutfield.

  'Up you go, cully, and see what you make of her.'

  Drinkwater and Rakitin, their interest aroused, dropped their conversation instantly and stood watching the nimble boy ascend the rigging of the main mast. Dutfield reached the topgallant yard and threw a leg over it, hooking himself steady and releasing his two hands to raise the glass. His body arced against the sky for what seemed an eternity as everybody on deck waited for his opinion of the stranger.

  They saw him lower the glass and look down, expecting any moment to hear news, but, apparently unsure, the midshipman raised the telescope again. The waist was filled with a murmur at the delay.

  'Bosun's mate! Keep the men busy there!' Quilhampton ordered, adding, 'Watch your helm there, quartermaster,' as the petty officer at the con inattentively let the ship's head pay off.

  At last Dutfield's voice hailed them from aloft.

  'Brig, sir, and seen us by the colours reversed in her rigging!' 'What colours?' bellowed Drinkwater through cupped hands. 'British, sir ...'

  'Up helm a trifle Mr Q, let's bear down on this fellow. Call all hands to stand by to reduce sail ...'

  Patrician lay hove-to, her main-topsail billowed back against the mast and her fore and main courses flogging sullenly in the buntlines as they brought the brig under their lee and prepared to hoist out a boat. Drinkwater studied the craft through his Dollond glass. She was a brig all right, and lying low in the water with both masts gone by the board. Her crew had managed to fish a yard to the stump of her foremast and had a leg-of-mutton sail hoisted, just, Drinkwater judged, giving her master command of his vessel.

  'Ah, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater turned to the young man at his elbow, 'do you be kind enough to go over and offer what assistance is in our power. Find out her port of destination and her master's name. If she requires it, we can get a line aboard.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  And Mr Frey . . .'

  'Sir?'

  'Ask if she has any charts of the China coast.'

  Drinkwater watched the boat bob over the swell, the oar-blades catching the brilliant sunshine, then disappearing in the deep troughs. As the boat rose again he recalled himself and turned suddenly, casting an incautious eye skywards and receiving the solar glare in his face.

  'How bears the sun, Mr Q?' he asked urgently.

  Quilhampton grasped Drinkwater's meaning and covered the three yards' distance to the binnacle. 'Close to the meridian, sir.'

  'Damn!' With the agility of a younger man, Drinkwater made for the companionway and dropped below, startling Mullender as he fussed about the cabin. Grabbing the sextant from its lashed box and crooking it in his arm, he hastened back on deck. He flicked down the shades and clapped it to his right eye. To his relief he saw the sun was still increasing its altitude, climbing slowly to the meridian, and he waited for the ascent to slow.

  'Watch the glass, there!' he called.

  The quartermaster of the watch moved aft to heave the log as Quilhampton stood ready to turn the sand-glass. Forward the lookout on the knightheads walked aft and stood beside the belfry. Drinkwater caught the culmination of the sun on the meridian. He could compute their latitude exactly now and by a piece of legerdemain determine, to a reasonable accuracy, their longitude as well. Knowledge of their position would be invaluable both to himself and, he suspected, the beleaguered master of the wallowing brig.

&
nbsp; 'Eight bells!' he called, lowering the sextant. The log was streamed, the glass turned and eight bells struck. The watch was called and yet another day officially began on board the Patrician.

  An hour later he was bent over the cabin table, comparing his calculations with the reckoning of Captain Ballantyne, Master of the Country brig Musquito of Calcutta. Ballantyne was a short, red-faced man in a plain blue coat and tall boots, a tired man who had wrestled gamely with the typhoon for ten days and been forced to sacrifice his masts in order to preserve his ship.

  Sunlight reflected off the swell beyond the windows and danced upon the white paintwork of the cabin, filling it with flickering lights as the frigate rolled easily.

  'Well, sir,' said Drinkwater straightening up, 'will you serve us as pilot? If we are to bring both our ships safely to an anchor our need of each other is mutual.'

  He was aware of continuing suspicion in Ballantyne's face. The merchant shipmaster remained obviously circumspect. To Ballantyne, Drinkwater was something of an enigma, for he was no youthful popinjay like so many of the young sprigs that came out in sloops and frigates to press men like carcasses from Country ships. In fact his appearance in these eastern seas was something of a mystery to a man like Ballantyne who, in common with all the trading fraternity, liked to keep his fingers on the pulse of Government business. Drinkwater's request for a pilot and charts confirmed him in one suspicion.

  'I am indeed under an obligation to you, Captain Drinkwater, and one that I would not willingly shirk, but I am surprised to find you here. Are you not part of Drury's squadron?'

  It was Drinkwater's turn to show surprise. 'Drury's squadron ... ? No sir, I am not. I am from the coast of Spanish America. Furthermore I understood Admiral Pellew to be commanding the East India station ...'