“Sir?”
“Pardon me, Wickham,” Hayden said quietly. “I don’t know what will happen. I am not Captain Hart’s protégé, that is certain. Prize money might not counterbalance disobeying orders and getting three of his crew killed.”
“Oh, he shall not be troubled about the deaths, sir. I can assure you that. Disobeying his orders, though … The captain does not like to be defied in the least thing. Mr Arnold, our old first, used to say that if the captain ordered you to steer south and you deviated to avoid wrecking the ship he would have you court-martialled for insubordination.”
Hayden wished the men would not speak to him so—as though they all conspired against the captain and so could say whatever they liked. Yet what was he to do? Defend Hart? He had just disobeyed the man’s orders and conspired with the doctor to take command of the ship, however briefly.
Lurking beneath the surface was an awareness that he had done more than disobey Hart—he had proven to the crew that he was not in the least shy. Let Hart abuse him in public all he liked, the timid captain would now never be shut of the knowledge that Hayden could do what he could not—and that the crew were, to a man, sensible of it. All Hart’s bullying would now be seen for what it was—malice inspired by envy.
“Divide the crew into two watches, Mr Wickham … I will stand the first watch and you the second. The off-watch may sleep on the deck. It will be a quiet night, I expect.”
“Aye, sir.” Wickham went off about his business, without question.
He posted lookouts, for there were frigates about and maybe gunboats, too. His disposition of the crew showed an admirable balance between the needs of the ship and the requirements of discipline, while still rewarding the men for their part in the action by easing the regulations a little.
Some spirits were found and the off-watch—and some of the men on watch, he feared—sat on the deck in the moonlight and got quietly drunk. Hayden cautioned them to make no noise as there might be enemy ships in the dark. He purposely carried no lanterns and trusted to sharp eyes and starlight to keep them safe. If his prize were run down by a British frigate he would look the fool, but they were no match for a French frigate and had to trust to darkness to keep them safe.
The shore breeze carried them a few miles out to sea, where Hayden hove-to for the night. Two hours after midnight the wind died away altogether, and the ship lay on a glassy sea. The waning moon rose at midnight, forming an almost unbroken silver path to the shore.
Hayden could not sleep. It was not worry about the morrow, though his mind did stray there, now and again. More he thought of his childhood visits to Brittany and his mother’s people dwelling there. How different they had seemed to his parents’ friends in England. The smells of the houses came back to him on the land breeze. The scent of gardens or baking bread, hay new-mown. He felt what he could only describe as a deep longing for his mother’s homeland—a place where he had known great happiness as a child. How he regretted those few weeks in Paris now, for they had tainted his perception of his mother’s people, and made him question his own understanding. If only he’d been at sea for that time, far from the mobs and inflammatory speeches, the calls to the barricades.
Until he had taken this commission, Hayden had always found matters clearer at sea. The enemy sailed under a known flag and one was never puzzled about their culpability—it was a simple matter of sinking or taking them before they did the same to you. The sea he had known since childhood, and he had managed a ship in almost every imaginable condition. He trusted himself at sea far more than upon the land. But clarity aboard ship had been surrendered the day he set foot on the Themis, where nothing was as it seemed. To find himself, now, but a few miles from his uncle’s home, aboard a French prize, waiting to be castigated for doing his duty—it was a strange pass.
Hayden had been on voyages where the wind and the sea would not allow you to go where you wished. The forces of weather were too great to contend with, leaving the captain either to wait until the weather favoured him, or to adjourn to some place the weather would allow. He wondered why he persisted in His Majesty’s Navy when the Navy itself was like a force of nature trying to turn him back. There was no indication that this weather would ever change.
But he had sided with the English in this improbable war, and there was a part of him that believed success in his career would mean acceptance among his father’s people.
Hayden’s self-awareness was certainly enough that he knew his father could not be forgotten in this matter. He had been a promising officer whose career had been cut short. There was a trust there. A task to be completed. A standard to be taken up. Foolish, perhaps. Sentimental, certainly. But he wished to finish what his father could not.
“You cannot make a dead man proud,” he muttered to himself.
A throat quietly cleared not a yard away, making him spin around.
“I think it is my watch, sir,” Wickham said. The moonlight threw a shadow net of rigging over the boy.
“Is it?”
The midshipman nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Then the deck is yours. You won’t object if I sit here on the rail? The moonlight is very fair.”
“So it is, sir.” Wickham came and stood by the rail, looking out to sea. “It is a strange night, sir. Reflective, I suppose.”
“Why is that?”
The boy shrugged. “Even a small action, like the one we fought today, makes a body philosophical. It is hard to grasp that a man can be alive one instant and dead the next. Like a candle being snuffed. I ran my cutlass through a Frenchman’s breast—right through the heart, I’m sure. He fell, and I could see his face as I withdrew my blade. He knew in that instant that I had killed him. I shall never forget his expression, sir. What an appalling thing to have done—stolen away a man’s life …” The boy fell silent.
“Yes, it is. There is nothing worse. Was that the man who tried to bayonet me?”
“Aye, sir.”
“You killed him, but you saved my life, for which I have not thanked you.”
“No need, sir. You might save my life someday. Shipmates,” he said, as though it were all the explanation necessary.
“The Frenchmen we killed today,” Hayden said suddenly. “I felt I knew them. The harbour at Brest was well known to me when I lived here, and the docks were thick with such men, all in their Breton sailors’ caps, shirt-sleeves rolled.” Hayden glanced at Wickham in the moonlight, only to find a look of desperate distress on the boy’s face. “I wish I had some sage advice for you, Mr Wickham, but I think the best a man can say is: it is a war. Those men would have killed you without a moment’s hesitation. It is a terrible thing, but the radicals must be stopped. Best we keep the guillotine on their side of the Channel.” Hayden wondered if his own misgivings made his words sound as false as they felt.
The boy nodded, trying valiantly to regain his composure. “Yes, sir. It was just the first time … I’m sure I’ll make my peace with it.”
“I’m sure you will.”
One of the crew walked by, keeping himself awake on watch by staying on his feet.
“It is rather like a holiday, isn’t it, sir?” Wickham said, making Hayden laugh. “I mean, the men all sleeping about the deck, and no one turning the glass or striking the bell.”
“Yes, exceedingly like a holiday,” Hayden agreed.
“The men are all very pleased about the prize money, Mr Hayden.”
“Tell them not to spend it before our claim has gone through the Prize Court.”
“Is it true that the men aboard the other frigate will share in our prize?”
“It is, yes.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“Well, a prize might not strike so quickly if there were not another ship nearby. So even if she does not fire a shot, a second ship can influence the action.”
“But the other frigate could never have reached the transport on that wind, and we were forced to fight, despite her presence
.”
“All that is true, but one day it will be your ship in the offing and you receiving a share of the prize money for doing little or nothing, and then you’ll see the justness of it, I’ll wager.”
Wickham laughed gently. “Perhaps you are right, Mr Hayden. I will leave you to your thoughts, sir.”
Hayden was not sure that he wanted to be left to his thoughts. The many notions that found him in the dark of night—anxieties and doubts—come morning, often seemed not worth all the anguish. But these ideas visited him by night whether he made them welcome or not.
Fourteen
Hayden woke at first light, groggy and out of sorts. His sleep had been full of dreams, some dark, violent, and cruel—reliving the brief skirmish he’d just survived—but others had been so sweet they had made his heart ache. Dreams of a girl he’d adored as a boy spending the summer of his tenth year in France. In his dream she had told him his blue eye was “for the sea” and his green “for the earth,” though in real life she had been much given to laughter and not to sounding like some gypsy fortune-teller.
“Good morning, sir.” Midshipman Lord Arthur Wickham was standing at the taffrail, perusing the sea with a French glass. “I can see the Themis, sir. And the French coast is just visible to the east.”
They were under way in a faint north-west breeze, making perhaps two knots due south. Hayden rose stiffly and turned a slow circle, examining the sea. The sky was opalescent, splashed across the eastern horizon with volcanic orange and red. High, irregular clouds dappled the vault, the moon in its last quarter pale among them. It was shaping up to be a fair day.
“Good morning to you, Mr Wickham. And how fare our sick and wounded this morning?” Hayden asked.
The boy made a face. “We lost Smyth, sir, though he clung to his life for a beastly long time.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. May God rest his soul.”
“Aye, sir. So said we all.”
“If you please, Mr Hayden …”
Hayden turned to find the coxswain, Childers, bearing a tray.
“It’s just boiled porridge and apples, sir. But that’s the French master’s own coffee. Mr Wickham said you might not mind eating on deck, sir.”
“I would not. Thank you, Childers.”
The coxswain made a knuckle and retreated back to his duties as steward, apparently. Hayden sat himself down upon a little bench-seat built up against the taffrail, and placed the tray on his knee. He was, to his surprise, famished.
“What of the prisoners, Mr Wickham?”
“Mr Franks is seeing to their needs, sir. He rousted out their own cook and put him to work. He said French victuals would be good enough for the prisoners, but wouldn’t answer for Englishmen.”
Hayden, who had grown up on French fare, hid his smile. A few bites into his breakfast, and the lookout called: “On deck! Sail sou’ west by south.”
“Is it the second frigate, Mr Lawrence?” called Wickham, who seemed if not his usual self, at least not overly subdued, which Hayden was happy to note.
“I think it is, Mr Wickham. It’s making to intercept our course about where we’ll meet the Themis.”
“You can’t make out her colours?”
“Not yet, sir, but when the sun’s up …”
“Thank you, Lawrence.”
Hayden sipped his steaming coffee and almost sighed. He had been killed half a dozen times over during the night, and here he was the next morning, drinking his morning coffee aboard a prize.
It had become apparent, during the dark hours, that his side stung and his shirt clung to his skin where the bayonet had run through his jacket. Finishing up his meal, Hayden stood, coffee in hand, and regarded the distant frigates. One was undoubtedly the Themis, and the second was almost as certainly British. Hayden couldn’t imagine a French frigate sailing so boldly toward the Themis, knowing there was a second British ship in these waters.
The sun’s limb touched the horizon, lifting slowly through the thin band of cloud.
“On deck! British colours at the mizzen,” the lookout called down.
“Thank you, Mr Lawrence,” answered Wickham. Seeing the first lieutenant had finished breaking his fast, the midshipman tipped his hat. “Your orders, sir?”
“You seem to have everything in hand, Mr Wickham. You might want to place me in irons before you take me aboard the Themis, but otherwise, carry on.”
Hayden removed his jacket, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and found his shirt pasted to his side by a sticky mass of blood.
“Oh, sir, you’re wounded!” Wickham said.
“Not compared with many another. Childers?” Hayden called the coxswain. “Is there some water on the boil?”
“There is, sir.”
“May I have a bowl?”
“Aye, sir.”
Hayden used the hot water to wash his wound as best he could, and found, to his relief, that it was a comparatively minor gash about three inches long. Childers bound it up for him and one of the men washed most of the blood from his shirt and waistcoat and hung them up to dry. A shirt was found among the dead French master’s linen, and Hayden pulled it on, slipping a jacket over top, not unaware that his uniform now reflected his parentage—part English, part French.
The Themis scratched a small wake across the blue surface of the sea, barely rocking in the calm waters. She turned to starboard as the two ships closed, clewed up her main and fore-course, and backed her main topsail. It took Hayden some time to wear the transport, due to their small crew, but they were soon hove-to thirty yards from the frigate. One of their cutters was brought alongside, and leaving Franks in charge of the prize, Hayden and Wickham descended into the boat.
“Well, now I’m for it,” Hayden said, feeling his resentment kindle.
“You just took a French prize, Mr Hayden. You should be cheered as you come aboard.”
“I don’t imagine huzzas are what Captain Hart has in mind.”
They were soon alongside the frigate and Hayden clambered quickly up the side, feeling that no matter how much abuse was heaped upon him, he would, in some intangible way, have the upper hand in his struggle with Hart until the captain proved himself in battle. As he came over the rail he was met by silence from the crew, but Hawthorne gave him a hand, smiling broadly.
“Well done, Mr Hayden! Well done!”
“How went our mutiny?” Hayden asked quietly, glancing fore and aft. There were more marines than usual stationed about the deck, but otherwise all seemed quiet.
“There were some floggings, sir, but it amounted to very little,” Hawthorne said quietly, but looked worried all the same. “We shall speak of it later.”
Mr Barthe came smiling down the deck and shook his hand. “Our first prize of the war,” he said warmly, “and all on your account, Mr Hayden.” He shook Wickham’s hand as well. “What is aboard her?”
“Grain,” Wickham said.
Barthe’s smile broadened. “Let the sailors of Brest go without their mealy French bread,” he said. “Their misfortune is our fortune.”
Landry was standing nearby, hands clasped behind his back. “The captain would see you in his cabin, Mr Hayden.”
Hayden nodded, glanced at Hawthorne, who raised an eyebrow and shook his head. The first lieutenant walked toward the quarterdeck companionway, sure his court-martial would be announced momentarily. As he went below, he glimpsed the other frigate ranging up under a press of sail.
A marine at the captain’s door announced him and Hayden doffed his hat and stepped into the great cabin. Hart stood by the stern windows, hands behind his back, staring out at the sun-dappled sea. Hayden waited for some time before Hart finally turned toward him. Instead of the anger he expected, Hart’s features were composed, even aloof, as though he had been put upon by some other and had retreated into exaggerated dignity.
“Never in my years of service have I had an officer disregard my orders so thoroughly as did you last night. Nor have I had a lieutenant under my
command wilfully put my ship and her people into such peril.” The look of haughty disdain disappeared, and the hazy eyes narrowed. “The courts-martial shall put an end to your capers, sir. Try to make me look the fool! It is nothing but damned luck that you did not wreck the Themis and drown my crew.” He slammed his fist down on the paper-strewn table. “Damn your eyes, sir! You shall not serve aboard a ship in the King’s Navy again! I will see to it!”
Through the open window came a hail from another ship. The second frigate had ranged alongside.
Hart looked around as though confused, then gathered his wits. “You shall take the prize to Portsmouth and, upon my return, face a court-martial. Now remove yourself from my sight.”
Hayden made a small bow, and left the cabin. It was no worse than he had expected. Hart had much influence with the Admiralty, so his threat was not empty, prize or no prize.
Very little aboard a ship was secret, and Hart’s threat would have been heard. Within the hour every one would know. Well, at least he would be off the ship. He would return to Portsmouth and make his report to Philip Stephens. One could hardly say he had fulfilled his commission, and he didn’t believe the First Secretary would think so either.
Up in the sunlight, Hayden could see the men gathered along the rail, and the masts of the frigate beyond. Hart appeared on the deck almost immediately, and went to the rail, where the midshipmen and warrant officers parted before him, every one sensing his anger. Hayden pushed through the men and found himself looking at the Tenacious, her captain standing on the rail, holding on to the mizzen shrouds with one hand.
“Hart, you young fire-breather!” Henry Bourne called across the calm water. “That was as neat a piece of work as I have ever seen! It took some bottom to slip in there with gunboats and frigates threatening, wind dying away, darkness approaching—not to speak of Les Fillettes! I feel avaricious to claim my share … but my crew do not agree.” A charming grin spread over his face. “I could not see all that happened in the dark. We could just make out the Frenchman hauling down his colours and then we heard musket fire and some hot work, or so it seemed. What was it that transpired?”
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