The Flag Captain

by Alexander Kent

  Giffard seemed to have been reading his thoughts. And that was strange too, for Bolitho had never given him credit for having any imagination. He asked, ‘Would you like me to send some of my men to search for the flag-lieutenant, sir?’ He waited, squeaking back on his heels. ‘I can spare a platoon long enough for that.’

  Bolitho imagined Calvert and his four companions out there somewhere in the darkness, terrified and helpless. Better they were dead than to fall into the hands of some of the marauding tribesmen described by Draffen.

  He replied, ‘I would be grateful.’ He made himself add, ‘But do not risk their lives to no purpose, Captain Giffard.’

  The marine said, ‘They will obey orders, sir.’ Then he grinned, as if more at ease with his usual pomposity. ‘But I will pass your order to them immediately.’

  The central tower was divided up mainly into living quarters for the garrison officers, three of whom were accompanied by their wives. As Bolitho trod carefully over scattered stone chippings and various items of personal clothing and equipment he wondered briefly what sort of a life a woman could expect in a furnace like Djafou.

  The commandant’s quarters were at the top of the tower and looked out across the bay towards the beaked headland.

  He was sitting in a huge, high-backed chair, and made to rise as Bolitho, followed by Bickford and Allday, entered the room. He had a neat grey beard, but his face was the colour of faded parchment, and Bolitho guessed he had been the victim of a severe fever on more than one occasion. He was an old man, with wrinkled hands which hung as if lifeless on the arms of the big chair, and had probably been given the post of commandant because nobody else wanted it, or him.

  Fortunately, he spoke good English, and had a gentle, courteous voice which seemed so out of place in the fortress’s grim and uncompromising surroundings.

  Bolitho had already been told by Bickford that his name was Francisco Alava, once a colonel in the dragoons of His Most Catholic Majesty’s household. Now, and until the day he died, he was designated commandant of the most dismal place in the Spanish chain of possessions in the Mediterranean. He had probably committed some petty breach of etiquette or misdemeanour to receive such a post, Bolitho thought.

  He said, ‘I would be pleased if you would make your quarters available to me for the present, Colonel Alava.’

  The two hands lifted shakily and then fell back on the chair again. Sickness, old age and the awful explosions of Inch’s mortars had taken a hard cost of his frail resources.

  Alava said, ‘Thank you for your humanity, Captain. When your soldiers arrived I feared they would slaughter all of my people here.’

  Bolitho smiled grimly. Giffard would certainly take exception to hearing his marines called soldiers.

  He said, ‘At daylight we will see what can be done to restore the defences here.’ He walked to an open window and looked across the dark, swirling currents below the fortress. ‘I will be expecting other ships soon. Also a vessel which will need to be beached so that repairs can be made to her hull.’ He paused and then swung round from the window so that even Allday started. ‘You may know her, Colonel. The Navarra?’

  Just for a fraction of a moment he saw a spark of alarm in the old man’s eyes. Then the hands twitched again, dismissing it.

  ‘No, Captain.’

  Bolitho turned back to the window. He was lying, and that was as good as proof Witrand had indeed been intended for this desolate place. Probably the brig was the vessel which had been waiting to make the transfer at sea.

  But there would be time for that later. Time to allow the commandant to reconsider, to decide where his own safety lay now his defences had fallen.

  He nodded to Bickford. ‘Escort him to the other room and have the officers kept apart.’

  As the commandant hobbled through a door, Sawle entered on the opposite side, his shirt sodden and torn, and carrying his coat casually over one arm.

  ‘You did the task very well.’ Bolitho watched the new light in the lieutenant’s eyes. A kind of contained wildness, a confidence born of a single dangerous act. He had been more afraid of showing fear than of fear itself, and now that he had survived he would expect his reward and more.

  Sawle said, ‘Thank you, sir.’ He did not attempt to hide the new arrogance which his triumph had roused in him. ‘It was easy.’

  You only think it was easy, my friend, now the danger is past. Aloud Bolitho said, ‘Report to Mr. Bickford and he will give you your orders.’

  Allday watched him leave and murmured, ‘Weasel!’

  Bolitho looked past him. ‘Go and take care of Mr. Lucey.’ He sat down suddenly in the commandant’s great chair. It was just as if his legs had given way under him. He added, ‘See if you can find something to drink. I am like a kiln.’

  Alone, he stared round the gloomy, barren room. Perhaps one day, because of a bad wound or disability, he would be given a task like Alava’s. An outpost with the grand name of governorship where he would spend the days trying to hide his bitterness, and the ache for a ship from home, from his subordinates.

  He realised his eyelids had started to droop and that Giffard had entered the room without his hearing.

  Giffard said, ‘My men found Mr. Calvert, sir.’ He looked uneasy. ‘He was wandering around lost, and near out of his mind to all accounts.

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘No sign of the three seamen, but he was carrying the midshipman on his back.’ He shrugged wearily. ‘But he was already dead.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Mr. Lelean, sir.’

  Bolitho rubbed his eyes to hold the dragging tiredness and strain away. Lelean? Lelean? Which one was he?

  Then he remembered. Keverne leaning over the quarterdeck rail to relay his instructions to the gundecks. Three apprehensive midshipmen. One upturned face had been covered with pimples. Lelean. He had been fifteen years old.

  ‘Ask Mr. Calvert to report to me.’ He looked at Giffard’s red face. ‘I will see him alone.’

  Allday arrived with a large glass jug filled to the brim with dark red wine. It was very bitter, but at that moment tasted better than any admiral’s claret.

  Allday said, ‘Mr. Calvert’s here, Captain.’

  ‘Show him in, and then wait outside.’ He watched Allday leave, his shoulders set in stiff disapproval.

  Calvert was swaying from exhaustion, and as he stood staring listlessly at Bolitho he looked almost ready to fall.

  ‘Easy, Mr. Calvert. Take some of this wine. It will refresh you.’

  Calvert shook his head. ‘I would rather speak, sir.’ He shuddered. ‘I cannot think of anything else.’

  In a strange flat voice, broken only occasionally by deep shudders, he told his story.

  From the moment he had been landed from a boat things had started to go wrong. The three seamen had deliberately misunderstood his every order, probably testing for themselves the lieutenant’s incompetence which was common gossip throughout the ship.

  Lelean, the midshipman, had attempted to restore discipline, but had been unnerved by Calvert’s inability to take charge of three ordinary seamen.

  They had made their way inland, pausing frequently while one seaman or the other complained of sore feet, exhaustion and other trivial excuses to rest. Calvert had grappled with the vague map and had tried to gauge their distance from Giffard’s pickets.

  He said brokenly, ‘I got lost. Lelean was trying to help me, but he was just a boy. When I told him I did not know where we were he stood up to me and said that I ought to know.’ He moved his hands vaguely. ‘Then there was the attack. Lelean was hit by a musket ball and two of the seamen killed outright. The third ran off and I never saw him again.’

  Bolitho watched his agonised face, seeing the sudden terror in the darkness, the swiftness of death. Probably tribesmen, lurking like jackals for pickings after the fight between Spaniard and Englishman.

  Calvert was saying, ‘I carried Lelean for miles. Sometimes w
e hid in the scrub, listening to the others talking. Laughing.’ His voice broke in a sob. ‘And all the time Lelean kept repeating how he trusted me to get him to safety.’ He looked at Bolitho, his eyes blurred and unseeing. ‘He actually relied on me!’

  Bolitho stood up and poured a goblet of wine. As he thrust it into Calvert’s hand he asked quietly, ‘Where were you when the marines found you?’

  ‘In a gully.’ Some of the wine ran down his chin and across his soiled shirt. Like blood. ‘Lelean was dead. The wound must have been worse than I realised. I didn’t want to leave him there like that. He was the first one who ever trusted me to do anything. I knew…’ He faltered. ‘I thought no one would come to search. There was the attack. All this.’

  Bolitho took the empty glass from his nerveless fingers. ‘Go and rest, Mr. Calvert. Tomorrow things may seem different.’ He watched the other man’s eyes. Tomorrow? It was already here.

  Calvert stared at him with sudden determination. ‘I will never forget that you sent men to look for me.’ The determination faded. ‘But I couldn’t leave him there like that. He was just a boy.’

  Bolitho recalled Broughton’s scathing comment, as if it had been spoken aloud in the room. Do him good! Well, perhaps after all he had been right.

  He said gravely, ‘Many good men have died today, Mr. Calvert. It is up to us to see their efforts are not wasted.’ He paused before adding, ‘And to ensure that young Lelean’s trust is not betrayed.’

  Long after Calvert had gone Bolitho sat slumped in the chair. What was the matter with him to offer Calvert such comfort?

  Calvert was useless, and probably always would be. He came of a background and social climate which Bolitho had always mistrusted and often despised.

  Was it because of that one spark which had been given him by the dead midshipman? Could he really hold on to such ideas in a war which had passed all reason and outwitted traditional sentiment?

  Or was it that he had replaced Lelean with his own nephew? Would it have been fair to add to Calvert’s misery when inwardly he knew he would have acted the same had it been Adam out there in an unknown gully?

  When the first grey fingers of dawn explored the wall of the commandant’s room Bolitho was still in the chair, dozing in exhausted sleep, and awakening at intervals to new doubts and problems.

  On the top of the central tower Bickford was already awake and watching the probing light. After a while he could wait no longer and beckoned to a seaman who was standing nearby.

  ‘Good enough, eh?’ He could not stop grinning. His part of the action was done, and he was alive. ‘Run up the colours! That’ll make Coquette sit up and beg!’

  * * * * *

  At noon Bolitho climbed to the top of the central tower and leaned over the battlements to study the activity in the bay. Just after dawn the frigate Coquette, followed by Inch’s Hekla, had passed through the narrow channel below the fortress, and within an hour had been joined by the battered and listing Navarra. Now, as he watched the boats pulling busily back and forth from the shore to the ships, from the marine outpost on the beaked headland to the pickets on the causeway, it was hard to remember it as the empty place it had once been.

  He raised a telescope and trained it across the anchored bomb vessel until he had discovered Lieutenant Bickford and his landing party searching amongst the low-roofed buildings at the top of the bay. Giffard had already reported the village—for it was little more than that—to be quite deserted. The fishing boats which they had sighted before the first attack proved to be derelict and had not been used for many months. Like the village, they were part of some ghost habitation from the past.

  The one good capture had been the little brig, named Turquoise. She was a merchant vessel, armed only with a few outdated four-pounders and some swivels, but refitted and properly equipped would make a very useful addition to the Navy List. She also represented a command for a junior officer. Bolitho had promised himself that Keverne should get her as his just reward.

  He moved the glass slightly to watch the Navarra being warped closer and closer to the beach. The master’s mate sent to command her had made sail as fast as he had been able, just as soon as he had sighted the British ensign flying over the fortress. The makeshift repairs had begun to give way, and it had been all he could do to reach Djafou before the sea overtook the pumps for the final plunge.

  Bolitho was glad Keverne had selected the master’s mate in question. A less intelligent seaman might have obeyed his last order to stand clear of the land until the squadron’s entrance, for fear of incurring the displeasure of his superiors. Had he done so, the prize ship would indeed have been lost, for within thirty minutes of her arrival the wind had died completely, and the sea, from the headlands to the burnished horizon, was like a sheet of dark blue glass.

  Boats were all around the listing vessel, and he could see parties of men from the other ships busily unloading stores and heavy spars, swaying out guns and anchors to lighten the hull as much as possible in readiness for beaching.

  Like the crew of the little brig, who had surrendered without a murmur of protest, the arrival of the Navarra’s company and passengers posed another real problem. He saw many of them being gathered in lines on the beach, the women’s clothing contrasting vividly with the silver-coloured sand and the hazy hills beyond the village. They had to be fed and quartered, as well as protected from any marauding tribesmen who might still be nearby. It was not going to be easy, and he doubted if Broughton would view their presence as anything but an unwanted nuisance.

  The squadron was probably just below the horizon, and he could picture the admiral fretting and fuming at being becalmed, and still in ignorance of the success or failure of the attack. But the lack of wind was an ally, too. For if Broughton could not reach Djafou, then neither could an attacker.

  Metal groaned and clattered on the lower rampart, and he saw Fittock, the gunner, supervising the removal of one of the iron-mounted cannon so that the damaged wall could be partially repaired. The guns had already shown they could hold the entrance against powerful ships of war. And with the innocent-looking Hekla anchored in the centre of the bay, even a heavy attack along the coast by troops was a bad risk.

  He lowered the glass and tugged at his shirt which was clinging to his skin like a hot towel. The more he mulled over what they had found at Djafou, the more convinced he became that it was useless as a base. Automatically he thrust his hands behind him and started to pace slowly back and forth on the heated flagstones, his feet measuring almost exactly the span of the Euryalus’s quarterdeck.

  If he had held the final responsibility, would he have acted differently from Broughton? Return to Gibraltar and admit failure, or go further east in the hope of discovering a suitable bay or inlet without informing the Commander-in-Chief?

  He felt his scabbard slapping against his thigh as he paced, and let his mind stray back to the grisly hand-to-hand fighting during the night. Every time he allowed himself to be drawn into these reckless raids he was narrowing his own chances of survival. He knew it, but could not help himself. He guessed that Furneaux and some of the others imagined it was conceit, a desperate yearning for glory which made him leave his proper role of flag captain to take part in such dangerous forays. How could be explain his true feelings when he did not understand them himself? But he knew he would never allow his men to risk their lives because of some hazy plan from his own mind without his being there with them to share its reward or failure.

  He smiled grimly to himself. Which was why he would never attain flag rank. He would go on facing battle after battle, passing experience to the barely trained officers who were being promoted to fill the growing gaps left by the war’s harvest. And then one day, in a place like this, or on the deck of some ship, he would pay the price. As always, he found himself praying fervently it would be instant, like the closing of a door. Yet at the same time he knew it was unlikely. He thought of Lucey, and those others who were down below
in the great cool storerooms which were being used as a hospital. Coquette’s surgeon would do his best, but many of them would die slowly, with no relief from pain but the fortress’s supply of wine, which was mercifully plentiful.

  Bolitho paused by the battlements and saw a boat shoving off from the Coquette and turning towards the fortress. Another was leaving the bomb vessel, and he realised he had been so busy with his thoughts he had almost forgotten he had invited Inch and Captain Gillmor to dine with him. One of them might think of some idea, no matter how vague, which would throw light on Djafou’s total lack of strategic value.

  Later as he stood in the commandant’s cool room sharing a jug of wine with the two captains, he marvelled at the way in which they could discuss and compare their experiences and viewpoints of the brief, fierce battle. It was hard to realise none of them had slept for more than an hour or so at a time, nor did there seem much likelihood of rest in the near future. The Navy was a good school for such stamina, he thought. Years of watchkeeping and snatching catnaps between all the endless necessities of making and shortening sail, going to quarters or having to repair storm damage under the most severe conditions hardened even the laziest man to going without proper rest almost indefinitely.

  Inch was describing the excitement aboard Hekla as the marine spotters had recorded his first fall of shot when Allday entered to announce that Lieutenant Bickford had returned from his expedition to the village.

  Bickford looked weary, his uniform covered with sand and dust, and he downed the wine with obvious relish before saying, ‘I am afraid it is a fearsome place, sir.’ He shook his head as he recalled his grim discovery. ‘It has not been lived in for years. Not by villagers, that is.’

  Gillmor said chidingly, ‘Come now, Mr. Bickford, surely it is not the home of goblins!’

  ‘No, sir.’ Bickford’s serious face was strained. ‘We found a great pit behind the dwellings. Full of human bones. Many hundreds must have been thrown there to be picked clean by all the vermin from the rocks.’