In Northern Seas

by Philip K Allan

  ‘Only just,’ replied Preston. ‘I was woken by this peculiar banging against the hull.’

  ‘Aye, it started a while back,’ said the Scot. ‘At first I thought it was in my head, occasioned by sharing a dram too many of Danish aquavit with Faulkner and Corbett last night. Surely the carpenter will not be working on the hull at this ungodly hour?’

  ‘It is no shipboard sound that I am acquainted with,’ said Preston, struggling with his clothes. ‘I shall come as soon as I am able to dress, although it might be quicker if I had my servant to assist me.’

  ‘Och, let the wee laddie sleep,’ said Macpherson. ‘Would you find it insupportable for me to assist you?’ Preston was silent for a moment, weighing the humiliation of being dressed by a brother officer against a lengthy bout of one-handed fumbling with his clothes. Another bang, sharper this time, sounded behind him.

  ‘Much obliged to you, Tom,’ he said, pulling open the door. The marine was fully dressed, and stepped into the cabin. He took the britches from Preston’s unresisting hands and dropped to his knees to hold them out.

  ‘Tis no matter, Edward,’ he said. ‘I have served my father in the office of a servant enough times, when the whiskey has unmanned him. Now let’s get that nightshirt off you.’

  The young lieutenant turned his slim torso away from his friend, unwilling for him to see the hump of flesh lined with puckered scars that covered where his arm had once been. Only when his shirt was being buttoned up for him did he relax.

  ‘I believe we might dispense with a weskit and neck cloth at this hour,’ said the marine, ‘but you’ll be wanting your warmest coat and gloves.’

  Once the lieutenant was dressed, the two men hurried through the sleeping ship and up onto the quarterdeck. Outside it was bitterly cold but calm with a gentle breeze pushing the frigate forwards. Overhead the night sky was a dark bowl, studded with an unimaginable number of stars. Blake, who was the officer of the watch, looked around from his place by the wheel.

  ‘My, but my watch is getting popular,’ he exclaimed, indicating all the shadowy figures that were lining the rails. ‘And all come to admire a fine night, with a little ice in the water.’ Preston and Macpherson found an unoccupied stretch of rail and looked out over the calm sea. For the most part it was a mirror for the heavens, a dark, endless carpet studded with reflected points of light. But dotted over the surface were numberless grey lumps that barely showed above the water. Most were small, but one piece of ice the size of a large barrel drifted close to the hull just beneath them. As the frigate hissed onwards it struck with a thump that sent ripples across the water, and set the stars to dancing. The ice slowly turned through the water, grating and knocking against the hull until it was lost behind them.

  ‘Ice!’ exclaimed Macpherson. ‘Is that all that has occasioned such a disturbance?’

  ‘I will have you know it can be very hazardous, Mr Macpherson,’ said Taylor, one of the figures standing near them. ‘A floating ice mountain can easily sink a ship, although I will own that this broken stuff should present little difficulty to a vessel built to resist cannon balls.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said the marine. ‘I had not meant to make light of them, but down below the sound was distinctly menacing. I had envisaged Krakens rising from the deep to assault us, at the very least.’

  ‘I am sorry to see you disappointed, Tom,’ said Clay, who stood next to Taylor. ‘For my part I shall leave you seeking your sea monsters and turn in. Keep our speed under two knots, if you please, Mr Blake. They will do little harm struck at that speed. I am to be called if the floes become any larger or more numerous.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Blake, touching his hat to his captain. Others began to drift away, leaving Preston and Macpherson alone under the stars. After a while the older man began to speak.

  ‘I hope you will not think me presumptuous, but I could not but note the reluctance you had to let your wound be viewed,’ he said.

  ‘It is a particularly ugly wound,’ explained Preston, after a while.

  ‘Aye, as are they all,’ said the marine. ‘But a wound suffered for your king is not without honour.’

  ‘As everyone seems anxious to tell me,’ said the Yorkshireman. ‘But in my heart I sometimes wish that I had either been spared altogether or been slain outright. Life might be simpler now.’

  Macpherson looked at his young companion with concern. ‘Edward, laddie, you cannot truly mean that?’

  ‘Perhaps not when I am sharing a fine night like this with you, Tom,’ said Preston, ‘but in darker times I come to think on it.’ The ship sailed on, and another floe drifted close beneath them, but failed to make contact with the side.

  ‘Do you remember when I was shot, back in ninety-six?’ said Macpherson. ‘Attacking that damned fort in St Lucia?’

  ‘The bullet stopped by Miss Clay’s book,’ said Preston. ‘How could I forget? It was the talk of the fleet.’

  ‘Aye, it was much discussed, but that miraculous escape masked the truth,’ said Macpherson. ‘All my peers thought it a splendid matter, and everyone seemed much more concerned to view the wee book with the ball lodged within its pages, than to consider how I might be. For I was shot that day! I saw that damned French soldier aim his piece and pull the trigger. I was struck the hardest blow I have ever endured, and fell to the ground insensible.’

  ‘You had a brace of bust ribs and a bruise the size of a dinner plate, as I recall.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Macpherson. ‘And night terrors that came to haunt me long after that had faded away. When I next had to face the French, I found myself shamefully un-manned by what had passed. For a while, I, too, thought that it might have been simpler if I had not had the damned book upon me that day.’

  ‘I recall that tremble in your hand, back aboard the old Titan, when we fought that Frenchman off the coast of Ireland,’ said Preston. ‘But you faced down your fears, as I recall.’

  ‘I did, and I would council you to confront your own, Edward,’ said the marine. ‘You can be their master or their slave. I would recommend the former.’

  Preston stared out over the dark sea in the starlight for a moment.

  ‘So what should I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Be proud of your wound, knock down any fellow who speaks ill of it, and tell Miss Hockley how you feel towards her, before the poor lassie gives up on you entirely,’ said the Scot. ‘That should answer.’

  ‘Are you now taking the office of my confidant, Tom?’

  ‘Sooner that then your valet,’ said Macpherson, turning his friend towards him. ‘I fear I have buttoned your coat up very ill.’ He corrected the misaligned buttons, his fingers quick and nimble.

  ‘Much better,’ laughed Preston, ‘although being a valet doesn’t seem a position requiring much in the way of deference or domestic skill, to judge from Mr Vansittart’s man.’

  ‘Aye, you have the truth of it there,’ said Macpherson. ‘I believe friend Rankin’s abilities lie in a quite different direction, if you follow me.’

  ‘That foray of his into Danish territory?’

  ‘That, and these rumours of strangling a man with a silk cord,’ said the marine. ‘It put me in mind of a story told by a cousin who served in a John Company regiment out in Madras. They have some manner of Indian highwaymen in those parts, named Thugs, who murder their victim in just such a fashion.’

  ‘Why do you suppose that a diplomat of the crown should travel accompanied by such a fellow?’ asked Preston.

  ‘Curious, is it not?’ mused Macpherson, stroking at one of his sideburns.

  ******

  The Scotsman had returned to the warmth of below decks, along with most of those who had come to investigate the strange knocking. The frigate had shouldered her way past the last of the ice, and was now sailing through the night across an endless expanse of dark water. Preston listened to the gentle creak of the rigging as the frigate’s masts swayed across the vault of stars, and felt the whisper of th
e breeze against his face. Both seemed to urge him to sleep, but the young officer knew that he had too many thoughts whirling through his head for that.

  He turned from the rail, and looked across the deck of the frigate. There was no moon yet, but the stars were clear above and the ship generated her own light. Grids of squares were projected onto the sails from the lamps hung beneath the gratings on the main deck. The faces of Blake, the midshipman of the watch, and the quartermaster at the wheel were lit by the oil lamps in the compass binnacle. The afterguard sat in shadowy groups around the quarterdeck, marked by their quiet talk, and shifting of position. The lights that hung beneath the quarterdeck and forecastle showed the rest of the watch at their posts. Only one figure seemed out of place — a slender looking seaman hunched in a coat several sizes too large, who was barely visible in the shadows behind the last carronade on the starboard side. He felt drawn towards the sailor, hoping it might be the person he had been thinking of.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Preston,’ said the figure, the warm voice accompanied by a cloud of breath. ‘I had hoped to pass unnoticed here, and so enjoy a little more of this beautiful night.’

  ‘Would my presence be unwelcome then?’ said the young lieutenant, hesitating to come closer. A trace of white glimmered in the night.

  ‘By no means,’ she said, making space for him at the rail.

  ‘You need not fear my intervention, Miss Hockley’ said Preston, taking a place beside her.

  ‘True, but then you are not my father, come to fuss over my getting a chill.’

  ‘That is so,’ he said. ‘Do you find his consideration for your welfare trying?’

  Sarah Hockley let out a long sigh. ‘He means well, and could not be more attentive, but sometimes I do find it confining,’ she said. ‘Take our voyage now, into the unknown. To my way of thinking it is an exhilarating adventure, but father only frets about how we shall get home, and how I might be ravaged by one of the young men aboard.’ Preston laughed at this, a little abruptly. As it happened, ravishing Miss Hockley had featured in several of his more lurid dreams.

  ‘Perhaps if I had been raised at home, in a more conventional manner, I could have been content with such attention,’ she continued. ‘But my mother passed away when I was but a child, and my father took me to sea with him to supervise my education. I fear he was not aware what an exhilarating schooling it would prove. Climbing the rigging; yarning with the hands; learning to hand, reef and steer; visiting all manner of foreign ports. I am quite the Amazon, you know, Mr Preston. Do take care!’

  ‘It may be too late for that, Miss Hockley,’ he said quietly.

  She looked at him quizzically. ‘And yet I feel that you have been avoiding me of late, Mr Preston,’ she said.

  ‘In truth, I probably have,’ he said. ‘Your father made his disapproval of me very plain.’

  ‘He disapproves of most of the men who wish to befriend me.’

  ‘Yet he also told me that I might be mistaking a women’s sympathy at my condition for something more than it was,’ he said. ‘That you might, in reality, be repelled by my injury.’

  She turned to look into his sad, dark eyes, and saw the longing in them. Then she leant towards him and touched his left shoulder, her hand gentle at first as it felt through the heavy broadcloth of his coat. He felt tears start in his eyes as she cupped her hand around the stump.

  ‘Miss Hockley...’ he began.

  ‘Shhh...’ she urged, ‘call me Sarah, please.’ He found that he had slipped his good arm around her waist and she drew close to him. Her face was just beneath his now, the eyes smiling, her lips slightly parted. He bent forward and gently kissed her.

  ******

  The lovers were so wrapped in each other that the first flicker of green in the sky passed unnoticed by them. Together they had unbuttoned the front of Preston’s coat, and she had pulled it around her to make a tent of shared warmth in the chill night. It was only the exclamations of surprise from those around them on the quarterdeck that alerted them to what was happening. Preston noticed with a smile that the afterguard had all moved themselves to the opposite side of the deck from him and Sarah, and that Lieutenant Blake stood with his back solidly positioned towards the couple. Then he gasped aloud too.

  In utter silence a curtain of green had dropped across the sky, bathing the ship in a venomous light. The lower edge was sharp, coiling over and over like tumbling silk, while the highest part faded into crimson before vanishing altogether. It hung like a translucent sheet, gossamer thin so that the stars behind it were still visible.

  ‘What in the name of all creation...’ breathed Sarah Hockley, standing close within the arc of his arm.

  ‘Aurora,’ he whispered by her ear. ‘T’is the fabled Northern Lights come to bless our understanding.’ She squeezed his arm, and then settled back against his chest. He drew the flap of his coat across her, and with the perfume of her filling his nostrils he watched as the first wash of light began to fade. Almost immediately a fresh swath of bright green appeared, stretched across a new part of the sky, to be greeted by murmurs of appreciation from the watching sailors. Now the light seemed shaped into a distant land of hills and vales, green and sunlit, glimpsed through a crack in the heavens.

  High above the deck sat Harry Perkins, perched on the delicate royal yard with one hand gripping the topgallant mast beside him, and his feet dangling over the dark void. Like most of the watch he had been watching Preston and the girl. The young lieutenant was a popular officer with the men, and his terrible injury had caused much distress to his shipmates. But now he was mesmerised by the aurora, which he had the best view of in the ship. At first the lookout had been terrified. Nothing in his early life as a house slave in Jamaica, nor his time in the navy after he had escaped, had prepared him for for what he was seeing. He had cowered down against the mast when the poisonous green light had first appeared. Dim memories filled his head of the tales his African grandmother had told him, of evil spirits and the underworld. But slowly he had relaxed, reassured by the obvious awe and pleasure in the voices that drifted up from the deck below. Then he had sat back and enjoyed the extraordinary display in the sky.

  Small wonder, then, that Perkin’s duty as lookout quite left him for a while, and he failed to see the tiny square of grey that stood just proud of the horizon for fully half an hour. Had he seen it, he might have puzzled over it, until he noticed how the light of the aurora played across the sails around him, illuminating them, for once, in the dark night. Then he would certainly have realised that he was seeing the fore royal sail of a ship that quietly followed in the wake of the Griffin across this northern sea.

  Chapter 9

  Ice

  As the Griffin entered the Gulf of Finland her pace slowed appreciably. The nights were still cold, and full of eerie spectral light, but the days were starting to grow at little warmer as the short northern spring developed. The green sea continued to be dotted with clumps of ice. Most were small enough to be pushed aside by the solid bow of the advancing ship, but others were bigger. The experienced whalers amongst the crew warned that when the part above the water was the size of the frigate’s longboat, they were best avoided, for the part beneath the sea was always very much larger. Extra lookouts fed a constant stream of warnings back to the harassed officer of the watch as the frigate picked her way eastward.

  ‘Deck ho!’ yelled the sailor at the masthead. ‘Fleet at anchor, two points off the starboard bow!’

  ‘That will be Reval, sir,’ said Armstrong. ‘The Russians always moor up for the winter there. They move back to Kronstadt when the ice permits.’

  Clay turned his telescope towards the south. A low island, heavily forested with dark firs and rimmed with ice, blocked his view at first, but as the frigate sailed on he could see into the heart of a bay still choked with ice. At the southern edge were the hulls and lower masts of warships, while a little farther along the ice-bound shore he could see trails of rising smoke to mark w
here the city lay.

  ‘Do the ships not suffer from the freezing of the sea about them?’ he asked.

  ‘I daresay they do in part,’ conceded Armstrong. ‘But when the frost becomes cruel they force no end of serfs out onto the ice to cut and clear it away.’

  Clay turned his attention to Reval next. The city was surrounded by a stone wall with plentiful round towers, each topped by a witches’ hat of red tiles. Behind the wall he could see lines of roofs, the grey bulk of a castle off to one side, and another group of smaller ships locked into the ice inside a breakwater. The sun glinted off something as he swept the port, and he retraced a little. A cluster of gilded domes, all shaped like onions topped the largest building. Clay smiled to himself at the exotic look of the cathedral. You’re a long way from home now, Alex, he thought to himself as he closed his telescope.

  ‘Mr Russell and Mr Todd, a moment, if you please,’ he said, calling over the two midshipmen of the watch. Although they were dressed in matching uniforms, any similarity between the officers ended there. Russell was almost a man now, and he towered over the slight figure of his fourteen-year-old colleague, whose voice had yet to break.

  ‘I have a task of high importance for you to perform,’ he said gravely. ‘We may presently be at war with Russia, and to that end I need to inform Admirals Parker and Nelson the exact force that may oppose them. Kindly take spy glasses and notebooks to the mastheads, and provide me with a detailed reconnaissance of the enemy fleet.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ came the midshipmen’s replies, a good octave apart, and they hurried away to perform their duty.

  ‘What is it we are meant to do exactly, Rusty?’ whispered Todd to his colleague.

  ‘Pipe wants us to count the warships,’ said Russell, as they reached the main mast shrouds.

  ‘So why couldn’t he just have said that, then?’ asked the youngster, as they started to climb, ‘Instead of all that guff about admirals and the like.’