Beneath the aurora nd-12 Page 20

  'Well done, Mr Birkbeck, I had the same thing in mind. Now, give me your arm ...' Birkbeck assisted him to his feet.

  'Galley range is alight and burgoo, molasses and cheese are to be issued. Mess-cooks have just been piped. Purser kicked up a fuss about the cheese, but I told him to go to the devil.'

  Drinkwater nodded his agreement while the blood trickled painfully back into his legs. He sought to invigorate himself by rubbing his face, but his palms rasped at the encrusted scab, which he had momentarily forgotten, and he swiftly desisted.

  'You can issue spirits before you turn all hands to, and what about the officers' livestock?' he added as the idea struck him. 'With so few of them left, can I not purchase what remains so that we can get a decent meal into the men at midday? I'll add my own pullets and capons.'

  'That'll put heart into the men, sir, and God knows they need it. The wardroom bullock took a cannon-shot, but he's edible. Beef and chicken stew sounds like the elixir of life.'

  'Yes, it does. As for the ship herself...'

  'We can begin to clear this lot, and the carpenter and I reckon we can step topmasts again.'

  'By tonight?'

  'By tonight.'

  'Excellent!'

  'And we've a spare tops'l just finished at Leith. Oh, I reckon she'll show enough canvas to handle.'

  'Mr Birkbeck, if you achieve that I don't know what I can do for you.'

  'Get me home in one piece, sir, and I'll not complain.' The master paused and looked at Drinkwater. He was unshaven and still besmirched with powder grime, the abraded scab bleeding again from one disturbed corner, the undress coat with its missing epaulette emphasizing the cock-eyed set of the captain's shoulders. With his loose hair, strands of which had escaped from the queue, Drinkwater looked like some raffish and outcast beggar.

  You'd feel better after a wash, sir,' Birkbeck offered.

  Yes, yes, I would,' Drinkwater replied, finally stirring.

  'I'll pass word to Frampton.'

  'I thought I might have lost him too,' Drinkwater said in a low voice, and Birkbeck, taking advantage of this moment of confidentiality, asked:

  'What d'you intend to do, sir, when this fog clears?'

  'How long d'you think it will hang about? There's no sign of the sou' westerly ...'

  'Glass is rising. I reckon we can guarantee today, that's why I want to crack on with the masts. Can I use Kestrel's men? I've been aboard her this morning and she's very badly hulled. I doubt she can make a passage and we could use her lieutenant...'

  Drinkwater walked awkwardly to the frigate's side above which he could just discern the cutter's truncated mast, and peered over the rail. Birkbeck drew alongside him.

  They could just make out the shattered and splintered state of Kestrel's upperworks.

  'I don't think she's fit for much. We could burn her,' Birkbeck suggested.

  Yes, perhaps,' Drinkwater agreed thoughtfully. 'Anyway, you may have as many men as you like after I have two dozen volunteers. Call for them after they have broken their fast and do you see that you feed Kestrel's crew along with our own.'

  Birkbeck looked mystified at first and then horror struck. 'You don't mean to attempt something against the enemy, sir?'

  'Yes, I do, and if I have not returned by tomorrow morning, Lieutenant Jameson will be in command.'

  'But with respect, sir, I think we have done as much...'

  'Give me half an hour to wash and shave, Mr Birkbeck, then ask Jameson to wait on me. Muster my volunteers at two bells. Come now, there ain't much time.'

  Drinkwater left Birkbeck staring after him open-mouthed.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Measure of Success

  November 1813

  In the event, Drinkwater found his plan to use Kestrel quite impracticable. She had been badly hulled and even the plugs put in by her carpenter failed to stem the leaks which proved too copious for the pumps to handle without almost continual manning.

  'We can't risk being betrayed by their noise,' Drinkwater remarked to Frey, who had had his wound dressed and insisted he was fit for duty.

  'We could fother a sail, sir,' suggested the cutter's boatswain.

  T'would take too long, and there is much else to be done,' replied Drinkwater.

  Instead they put the volunteers to emptying the cutter of her powder, and her gunner to preparing some mines, small barricoes filled with tamped powder and fitted with fuses made from slow-match.

  It was not so much her waterlogged state that made Drinkwater abandon using Kestrel as the difficulty of approaching the enemy anchorage undetected. Although fitted with sweeps, she would be awkward and sluggish to row and difficult to keep on a precise course. The ship's boats were a different matter, but they could not carry the quantities of inflammable material that Kestrel could, and Drinkwater had, therefore, to modify his intentions.

  When he had exchanged with Quilhampton the previous day, James had departed in Drinkwater's own gig, and had left it towing astern throughout the action. Though it had received damage in the way of splintered gunwhales and a few holes in the planking, these were soon repaired with tingles, lead rectangles lined with grease-soaked canvas patches that were nailed over holes or splits.

  Kestrel herself bore two boats, one slung in stern davits which had been rendered useless, but another on deck amidships which, though damaged about the transom, and with one large chunk out of her larboard gunwhale, remained seaworthy. These, with an additional serviceable pulling cutter from Andromeda, provided Drinkwater with what he needed.

  'We can't man an armada, Mr Frey,' he explained as he oudined his plan, 'but if we take advantage of this fog and do our work coolly, there is a chance, just a chance, that we may yet achieve a measure of success.'

  Frey had nodded.

  'Are you fit enough for this enterprise, Mr Frey? I would not have you risk your life unnecessarily ...' Drinkwater broke off, remembering the blood on his own hand and attributing the unnatural glitter in Frey's eyes to grief and pain. He was, after all, of a sensitive, artistic bent.

  Frey cleared his throat. 'I am quite all right, sir.'

  'Very well, then. Do you take Kestrets boat. We know the course and will compare our compasses when we have drawn clear of Andromeda. I will follow in Andromeda's cutter and tow the gig. The rest you already know.'

  'Aye, aye, sir.'

  The interview with Jameson had been more difficult. However sanguine Jameson's ambition, he had not dreamed of such rapid promotion. To find himself elevated to first and only lieutenant was bad enough, but to have command, however temporary, devolved upon him so suddenly was clearly beyond the computations of his ambition.

  'But, sir, if I went in the boats…'

  'If you went in the boats I would have no one to take Andromeda home, Mr Jameson. And if I am not back by midnight that is exactly what I wish you to do. Here is my written order.' He handed the reluctant Jameson a scribbled paper. 'Captain Pardoe would never forgive me for losing all his officers.' The bitter joke twitched a responsive smile out of the young officer. 'This is a desperate matter, Mr Jameson, one that I cannot, in all conscience, delegate to you. Should I not return on time, I wish you good luck.'

  Jameson accepted the inevitable with a nod. In reality Drinkwater had abandoned reasons of state in prosecuting this last attack personally. Rather, a desire for vengeance inspired him — that, or a wish to die himself.

  He had thought vaguely of Elizabeth and the children and the handful of Suffolk acres that gave him the status of a country gentleman, but they were so far away, existing in another world, that he doubted their reality at all. They were a sham, an illusion, a carrot to dangle before him. Besides, return meant also the assumption of responsibility for Huke's mother and sister, Catriona Quilhampton and her child ...

  He thrust such considerations aside. He had forfeited all claim upon the smiles of providence when, in a storm of passion, he had lain with the American widow. He had proved himself no better than
the next man and could claim no especial privilege. All he could do now was to stake his own life as a tribute to the dead. They left almost unnoticed, clambering down into the boats while Birkbeck supervised Andromeda's toiling company as they disentangled the shot-away spars, cleared away the raffle of fallen gear and salvaged what could be reused.

  The men who had volunteered for Drinkwater's forlorn hope took their places at the oars. The looms were wrapped in rags and slushed with tallow or grease where they passed the crutches and thole pins. In every spare space the small barricoes of powder, jars of oil and impregnated rags lay in baskets. In the stern sheets, alongside the boat compasses and in two tinplate boxes in which officers usually kept their best hats, slow matches glowed. The tin boxes bore the names Huke and Mosse.

  'Give way.'

  'Give way.'

  The boats drew away from the ship, paused while Drinkwater and Frey conferred over their respective compass headings, and then settled down to the rhythmic labours of the oarsmen.

  Drinkwater had no intention of trying to run straight into the anchorage. The vagaries of the compasses, particularly in these high latitudes, and the risks of being detected dissuaded him. He knew this was a last chance, knew too that once Captain Dahlgaard had discharged the remainder of his cargo and the fog had cleared, Odin would set off in pursuit of the British frigate.

  Instead, he had laid off a course which would take them beyond the bay, striking the coast north of the anchorage. This would allow them to drop back along the shore towards the enemy, encountering the American ships first. Dahlgaard, he argued, would be as exhausted as he was himself and preoccupied by completing the transfer of the shipment of arms and equipment, refitting his ship and preparing for sea. At the very least, Drinkwater's attack of the previous afternoon must have incommoded this plan to a degree. Frey had mentioned the Odin's loss of her fore and mainmasts, and he himself thought the mizen had been shot away earlier.

  As the boats glided over the still waters of the fiord, these considerations obsessed Drinkwater. Beside him Wells sat attentively, watching the man in the bow who held the end of a length of spun yarn. The other end was held in the hand of a bowman in Frey's boat, so that, paying out and heaving in, as the boats made small variations from their rhumb-lines, they kept in contact. At first it proved awkward and cumbersome, but after ten minutes or so, the men settled to their strokes and, just in sight of each other most of the time, they pulled along in line abreast.

  Drinkwater had given orders for the strictest silence to be maintained in the boats and after an hour's hard work, in a brief clearing in the fog, he waved at Frey. Both boats ceased rowing and, with the oars drawn across the gunwhales, they ran alongside, willing hands preventing them from coming into contact. Astern of Drinkwater's boat the empty gig ran up under their transom and Wells put out a hand to prevent it colliding.

  'Rum, I think, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater murmured in a low voice, and was gratified to see the men grin. Volunteers they might be, but they brought with them no guarantee of success.

  'No more than another mile, by my reckoning.'

  Frey nodded, and Drinkwater noted the high colour of his cheeks. It was probably the effect of the damp chill, he concluded, munching on a biscuit and sipping at a small pewter beaker of rum.

  Resting in silence they all heard the noise, a regular knock-knock, as of oars.

  'Guard-boat,' whispered Drinkwater, hoping to Almighty God it was not an expedition bound on a reciprocal mission to their own ships. They listened a little longer. Drinkwater thought he heard background noises of men speaking, and of them labouring at some task, but dismissed them as wishful thinking. They sat still as the sound died away, the men shivering as the fog chilled their sweat-sodden bodies.

  'Let's be getting on, then,' he ordered quietly, and the boats were shoved apart, the oars pushed out and the first strokes taken. A few minutes later, with the spun-yarn umbilical between them, they had taken up their former stations. Only the chuckle of water under the bows of the three boats and the dip and gentle splash of the oars marked their progress.

  Their arrival was less well organized, for the loom of smooth boulders ahead of Frey's boat caused her coxswain to put his tiller over and she ran aboard her sister with a clatter and an outbreak of muffled invective. Then the towed cutter ran up astern and struck Drinkwater's boat with a second thud, so that the ensuing confusion took a moment or two to subside.

  Frey's boat edged ahead and found a second boulder and then a steep shingle beach which rose swiftly to a gloomy forest of pine and fir. They ran the boats aground and Drinkwater ordered them all ashore. While the men relieved themselves, Drinkwater checked the slow matches. The foggy damp and the need for silence had dissuaded him from any ideas of striking flint and steel. Happily, the matches still burned.

  Satisfied that he could do no more, Drinkwater strode off to ease himself. Above the smooth stones of the beach, the ground grew soft with fallen needles and the air smelt deliciously of resin. Outcrops of rock broke through here and there, and were fronded with ferns, but an awesome and sinister stillness pervaded the forest, and he was glad to retreat to the water's edge, where the men talked in low voices.

  'Silence now.' The babble died down and, when all were reassembled, Drinkwater asked quietly, 'Any questions?' There was a general shaking of heads.

  'Back into the boats. Line ahead, Mr Frey.'

  Frey's boat led, out beyond the rocks then turning to starboard, edging along the shoreline. From time to time they had to shorten oars, even trail them, as they glided between the massive boulders that, smoothed by ice and water, had been cast aside as glacial moraine thousands of years before.

  As they worked their way south-west, Drinkwater gradually became aware that he could see the shore and the dark shapes of the trees more and more clearly. Their tops moved languidly in the beginnings of a breeze, no longer grey monotones, but assuming the dark and variegated greens of which he knew them to be composed. The fog was lifting.

  Then, almost it seemed in the sky itself, the topgallant yards of the first ship appeared above them. It was the American privateer anchored closest inshore.

  Ahead of them Frey, whose boat still ghosted through the clammy vapour, had seen this apparition and altered course towards it. With a surge of jubilation, Drinkwater realized that though the fog was dispersing, the shift of wind which caused it had merely altered the relative balance of nature. He had seen sea-smoke in the Arctic years before, and now his boat pulled happily through it as it clung to the surface, rising no more than ten or fifteen feet, exposing the top-hamper of the enemy while concealing their own approach.

  He made a gesture to Wells and the coxswain leaned on the tiller. Drinkwater's boat pulled out to pass Frey and edge round the enemy, clear of her and obscured by the low fog. They could see the grey loom of the American ship and then lost sight of Frey as his boat dropped alongside and merged with her.

  From on board he could distinctly hear a voice sing out, 'Lower all, handsomely! Avast! Come up!' The accent was unmistakably American and Drinkwater was immeasurably encouraged by this, for they were clearly still loading cargo.

  Drinkwater felt his own sleeve being plucked and swung round. Wells was pointing ahead, to where the next ship was looming. Her hull seemed more distinct, the sea-smoke less dense. An empty boat lay under her stern davits, and a rope ladder dangled invitingly down from an open stern window. As they closed it, they could see the boat was picked out in white and blue, with some fancy gold gingerbread work along her quarters. Beneath the windows the privateer's name was carved, gold letters on a blue background: General Wayne.

  Without a word, the coxswain ran alongside, the bowman caught the painter round a thwart on the enemy boat and several oarsmen manoeuvred the trailing cutter alongside their own unengaged side.

  A moment later two men were swarming up the ladder, the first signalled the cabin was empty and then there was a general scramble as men clambered aboar
d, helped to lower lines and hoisted the combustible stores they had brought with them. They lifted the inflammables in through the cabin windows. Drinkwater motioned for the barricoes of powder which would form the explosive mines to be rolled towards him and flung back the rich carpet that was spread across the deck of the cabin to reveal the hatchway to the lazarette below. He was crouched beside it when the cabin door suddenly opened. The American commander Drinkwater had last seen aboard the Odin stood transfixed in the doorway. The look of insolence he had shown on the former occasion was gone, and now he wore an expression of incomprehension which turned rapidly to alarm.

  Drinkwater had had his back to the door as he inspected the hatch. Fitted with a bar and hasp, this would have been padlocked under normal circumstances. But the ship had been in action and the padlock had not been replaced. The carpet, however, had been roughly pulled back over the hatchway with its loose bar and Drinkwater had been in the act of lifting the bar clear when the American had appeared.

  Even as the Yankee commander opened his mouth, Drinkwater struck. Twisting with all his strength he straightened his legs, swinging upwards from his crouching position, the bar in his hand. The blunt edge struck the American violently, winding him so that he buckled forward. One of the seamen grabbed him, drew him into the cabin and shut the door.

  For a moment not a man moved, but no alarm was raised outside and Drinkwater had his hanger at the man's throat as he gasped for breath.

  'Get on with it!' Drinkwater hissed, and the tableau dissolved, the men tearing off the lazarette hatchway and stuffing it and the cabin full with the mines, powder and oil-soaked rags.

  Drinkwater bent to the American. 'I'm going to save your life and I'm going to gag you, then you go down into my boat. One false move and you are dead. Do you understand?'

  The American commander was still gasping for his breath, but he nodded and Drinkwater grabbed a passing seaman. 'Give me your kerchief. Now, you are to take this man back to the boat…'