Drinkwater had a sight of the deck of the Étoile du Diable as she heeled over to larboard, exposing the view. Even with all the quoins out they were having trouble pointing their guns while the Kestrels had all theirs rammed in to level their own cannon and the labour of hauling their carriages uphill against the list. Three men had gone below to Appleby nursing splinter wounds when a shot from the Étoile du Diable, fired below the horizontal, ricochetted off the face of a wave and hit Kestrel’s starboard chain-whale from below. The lignum vitae deadeye of the after mainmast stay was shattered and the lanyard parted. A second ball carried away the topmast stay and a sudden crack from aloft showed the topmast tottering slowly to larboard.
‘Goddamn . . . cut that away!’ But Drinkwater was already rushing forward, leaping into the weather rigging with an axe. The passage of a final ball winded him and left him clinging trembling to the lower shrouds, gasping for breath like a fly in a web. He felt the shrouds shudder as the topmast tore down the lee side, shaking the mast and carrying the yards with it. A stunsail boom end caught the mainsail and opened a small split which slowly enlarged itself. The wreckage fell half in the water, half on the larboard waist. Kestrel lost way.
She was beaten.
On the starboard bow Étoile du Diable drew ahead. Upon her quarter stood Santhonax with his plumed hat in his hand.
He waved it over his head. Then he jumped down amongst the gunners who had served the still smoking stern chaser.
‘Cythral,’ muttered Griffiths, his eyes glittering after the enemy. ‘Let fly the sheets!’ he shouted.
Drinkwater climbed down to the deck.
‘Mr Drinkwater!’
‘Sir?’
‘Secure what you can of that gear overside.’ Their eyes met in disappointment.
‘ “Pride cometh before a fall”, Mr Drinkwater. See what you can do.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Drinkwater went forward again. Leaning over the side he surveyed the raffle of spars, canvas and cordage, of blocks and ironwork. And something else.
At the trailing masthead, one end of its halliard broken and dragging along the cutter’s side, was the black swallowtail pendant, mocking them.
PART TWO
The North Sea
Chapter Ten
December 1795–November 1796
The Apothecary
Short drew back his well-muscled arm then brought the cat down on the man’s back. ‘Seven!’ called Jessup dispassionately.
The red weals that lay like angry cross hatching over the flesh were suppurating and blood began to ooze from the broken skin.
‘Eight!’
Drinkwater could see the man’s face in profile from where he stood by the starboard runner. Although he bit hard on the leather pad the victim’s eyes glared forward, along the length of the gig across the transom of which he was spreadeagled.
‘Nine!’
The inevitable had happened. The offender was the apothecary embarked from the Royal William and named Bolton. Bolton seemed unwilling or unable to make the best of his circumstances. He appeared to be a man penned up within a private hell that left him no rest. Appleby called him ‘an human pustule, full of corrupt fluid and ripe for lancing’. He went about heedless of his surroundings to the point of apathy, tough enough to endure Short’s abuse and starting without a word or apparent effect. What seemed to Short to be intransigence attracted all the bosun’s mate’s bullying fury. Short was unused to such stolid indifference and when violence failed he had recourse to crude innuendo. He found his barbs reached their mark. Ransacking every corner of his mind for human failings, he scoured the depths of every depravity, insensitive to the changing look of increasing desperation in Bolton’s eyes. Pursued, Bolton ran until at last, flushed from cover, he turned at bay. Short had got there in the end over some clumsiness at gun drill, some trivial thing for which he had been waiting.
‘Bolton! You crap-brained child-fucker . . .’ And the rammer had swung round, driven into Short’s guts with a screech of mortification from Bolton.
‘Twelve!’ Short was panting now, the bruise in his midriff paining him. Harris, the second bosun’s mate, relieved him, taking the cat and running the tails through his left hand, squeezing out the blood and plasma. Harris spread his legs and drew back his arm.
‘Thirteen!’
They were all on deck. Griffiths, Drinkwater and Traveller with their swords, the hands ranged in the waist, their faces dull, expressionless.
‘Fourteen!’
Kestrel lay hove-to, her staysail aback. There had been no waiting for the punishment. They had only just secured the guns at which they had been exercising. In a cutter there were no bilboes and Griffiths ordered the flogging immediately.
‘Fifteen!’
The sentence had been three dozen lashes. Already the man’s back was a red and bloody mess. He was whimpering now. Broken. Drinkwater felt sickened. Although Griffiths was no tyrant and Nathaniel recognised the need to keep order, no amount of flogging would make a seaman out of Bolton. God alone knew what ailed the man, though Drinkwater had heard from the misshapen clerk on the receiving ship he had been sentenced for incest. But whatever madness or torment hounded him he had taken enough now. The punishment should be suspended and Drinkwater found himself staring at Griffiths, willing him to stop it.
‘Sixteen!’ A low, animal howl came from Bolton which Drinkwater knew would rise to a scream before the man lost consciousness. Whatever guilt lay on the man’s soul he expiated it now, slowly succumbing to the rising pain of his opened back.
‘Seventeen!’
‘Belay there!’ Griffiths’s voice whipped out. A ripple of relief ran through the assembled people. ‘That’ll do, cut him down, pipe the watch below, Mr Jessup!’
Drinkwater saw Bolton stiffen as a bucket of sea water was thrown over his back. Then he fainted. Appleby came forward to attend him. Drinkwater turned away.
‘Leggo weather staysail sheet, haul taut the lee!’
Was there a perceptible resentment in the way the order was obeyed? ‘Lively now! ’Vast and belay!’ He walked aft. Or was he too damned sensitive?
‘Steer north by east.’
‘Nor’ by east it is, sir.’
Kestrel steadied on her course and made after the convoy.
She had not been a happy ship since she had left Portsmouth. Her officers were a discordant mixture of abrasive characters. Appleby’s pompous superiority which suited the bantering atmosphere of a crack frigate’s gunroom was out of place here. Even Drinkwater found him difficult at times, for age and bachelorhood had not moderated his tendency to moralise. Griffiths had withdrawn as Drinkwater had known he would and their former intimacy was in abeyance. Jessup and Traveller, old acquaintances of long standing and great experience, employed their combined talents to prick Appleby’s self-esteem, while the two master’s mates, Hill and Bulman, both promoted quartermasters, survived by laughing or scowling as occasion seemed to demand.
Drinkwater felt a sense of personal isolation and took refuge in his books and journal, maintaining a friendship with Appleby when the latter was amenable but quietly relieved that his tiny cabin allowed him an oasis of privacy. This disunity of the officers spilled forward to combine with a growing resentment among the men over lack of pay and for whom the small, wet cutter was a form of purgatory.
They had weathered the great gale of mid-November shortly after their arrival in the Downs and barely a fortnight later learned of the mutiny on the Culloden. There had been an exchange of knowing looks round Kestrel’s cabin when Appleby had read the newspaper report, but the unreported facts sent a shiver of resentment through the crew.
The news that the authorities had agreed to favour the mutineers’ petition without punishment had been followed by information that the law had exacted its terrible penalty. Imagination conjured a picture of the jerking bodies, run aloft by their own shipmates in all the awful guilt-sharing ceremonial of a naval execution
while the marine drummers played the rafale and the picket trained their levelled muskets on the seaman. In the atmosphere prevalent aboard the cutter it was an image that lingered unbidden.
Griffiths looked aft over the transom and jolly boat in its stern davits. Above his head the ensign drooped like a rag but the morning, though chill, was fresh. A mood of mild enthusiasm infused Madoc Griffiths and he wondered if it was the effect of the man beside him. Drinkwater spoke with an old lilt in his voice, a tone that had been absent for some time now.
‘I’ve given the matter a deal of thought, sir, and I reckon that it ain’t unreasonable to bring Bolton aft as an additional messman. The mess is damned crowded, Merrick could do with some assistance and Short is still plotting against Bolton . . . pending your approval, of course, sir . . .’
Griffiths nodded. ‘Very well, Mr Drinkwater, see to it. Glad I am that you are mindful of the hands. It is not always possible for a commander since he has other things to concern him, but it should be the prime consideration of his second. ‘Tis a pity more do not follow your example.’
Drinkwater coughed with embarrassment. He was simply determined to do whatever lay in his power to ameliorate the condition of Bolton, the most abused and useless of Kestrel’s company. Here the man might be induced to assist Appleby medicinally and give his mind something to work on beyond its own self-consuming preoccupation. And perhaps thereby Drinkwater might stem the rot that he instinctively felt was destroying the cohesion of them all.
‘See to that at once, Mr Drinkwater, and when you have done so sway out both gigs, run the larboard broadside out and the starboard in as far as the breechings will permit. It’s a grand day for scraping the weed from the waterline and there’ll be no wind before nightfall.’
If the mood of his sailing master had lightened his heart Lieutenant Griffiths did not find that of his surgeon so enjoyable. He looked up at Appleby an hour later from a table split by sunny squares let in through the skylight while from overside the rasp of bass brushes attacked the weed.
‘He’s not yet fit to return to duty,’ said Appleby cautiously.
‘Who is not fit, Mr Appleby? Bolton is it?’
‘Yes sir,’ said Appleby, aware that Griffiths was being deliberately obtuse.
‘The man I had flogged?’
‘Yes sir. He took it badly. At least three of Short’s stripes were low, one seems to have damaged the left kidney.’ Griffiths’s face was expressionless. ‘There has been some internal haemorrhaging, passing out with the man’s urine, he’s weak and the fever persists.’
‘So cosset him, doctor, until he’s fit again.’
‘Yes sir.’ Appleby stood his ground.
‘Is there something else?’
‘Sir, I . . .’ Perspiration stood like pearls on Appleby’s forehead as he balanced himself against the increasing list induced by the gun trucks squealing overhead as they prepared to scrape the other side. ‘I was sorry that you found it necessary to flog Bolton, sir, his state of mind concerns me. I had thought you a most humane officer . . .’
‘Until now?’ asked Griffiths sharply, his eyebrows knitting together in a ferocious expression made more terrifying by the colour mounting to his cheeks. Appleby’s courage was tested and, though his chins quivered gently, he lowered his head in silent assent.
With an effort Griffiths mastered himself and rose slowly to his feet, expelling breath in a long, low whistle. He leaned forward resting himself on his hands.
‘Mr Appleby, indiscipline is a most serious crime in a man of war, especially when striking a superior is concerned . . .’ He held up a hand to stop Appleby’s protest. ‘Provocation is no mitigation. That too is in the nature of things. We live in a far from perfect world, Mr Appleby, a fact that you should by now have come to terms with. As commander I am not permitted the luxury of sympathising with the individual.’ Griffiths looked significantly at Appleby. ‘Even the well-intentioned may sometimes be misguided, Mr Appleby.’ He paused, allowing the implication to sink in. The surgeon’s mouth opened and then closed again, Griffiths went on.
‘There is some deep unhappiness in Bolton. Ah, you are surprised I noticed, eh? Nevertheless I did,’ Griffiths smiled wryly. ‘And Short tripped the spring of some rare device in his brain. Well Short has a sore belly as a consequence, see, so some justice had been done. I appreciate your concern but, if Bolton is a rotten apple you must see Kestrel as little more than a barrel full of ripe ones.’ Griffiths paused and, just as Appleby opened his mouth to speak, added ‘I offer this explanation not to justify myself but out of respect for your intelligence.’
Appleby grunted. He knew Bolton’s insubordination could not go unpunished but he felt the case justified a court-martial at a later date. Griffiths’s summary justice had clashed with his professional opinion. By way of rebuke Griffiths added ‘Mr Drinkwater has suggested that Bolton comes aft as an additional messman. I am sorry that the suggestion did not come from you.’
Griffiths watched Appleby leave the cabin. It was strange how two men could take alarm from the same cause and react so differently as a result. Or was it his own reactions that were so disparate? Prejudice and partiality played such a large part in the affairs of men it was impossible to say.
Christmas and the arrival of 1796 passed almost unnoticed by the crew of Kestrel. They had not been long left independent and a peremptory order to join Admiral MacBride in the Downs had put paid to their chasing in the Channel after the mauling they had received from the Étoile du Diable. Although they did not know it at the time the failure of Dungarth’s department to locate the mysterious Capitaine Santhonax had brought him into worse odour with their Lordships than his remonstrances over Howe’s failure to turn Brown’s intelligence reports to good account in 1794. As a consequence Kestrel found herself employed on pedestrian duties. In company with the ship-sloop Atropos the cutter was assigned to convoy work. From the Thames to the Tyne and back again with two score or so of colliers, brigs and barques, all commanded by hard case Geordie masters with independent views was, as Nathaniel had predicted, boring work. It could be humiliating too. When Kestrel was ordered up to Leith Road to escort the crack passenger and mail smack to London with a cargo of gold, the packet master treated the occasion as a race. With a prime crew protected by press exemption and a reputation for smart passages, the smack proved a formidable opponent. She had a fuller hull than her escort and properly should have been beaten by the man o’ war cutter. But Kestrel carried her mainsail away off Flamborough Head while the smack drove on and left her hull down astern of the packet. Had not the wind hauled to the south-east and Kestrel not been able to point harder by virtue of her new centre plates, they might never have seen their charge again. As it was they caught her by the Cockle Gatt and stormed through Yarmouth Roads neck and neck with the flood tide under them.
During the summer they had idled round the dispersed herring fleet in the North Sea on fishery protection. Sickened by a diet of herrings, all chance of action seemed to elude them. Only twice did they have to chase off marauders, both Dutch and neither very eager. The expected depredations of French corsairs never materialised and it was confidently asserted that a nation that subsisted on snails and frogs was unlikely to have the sense to favour herrings. In reality French privateers found richer pickings in the Channel.
The war was going badly for Britain. In January Admiral Christian’s West Indies expedition was severely mauled by bad weather and dispersed. In February a Dutch squadron got out of the Texel and then, in late summer Spain went over to the French camp in an uneasy alliance.
At the conclusion of the fishing season Kestrel was ordered to refit before the onset of winter, the weatherly cutters being better ships to keep the sea than larger, more vulnerable units of the fleet. Along with these orders came news that Sir Sydney Smith had been taken prisoner on a boat expedition.
It brought a measure of personal satisfaction to Harry Appleby.
Leaning on the rail
Drinkwater stared across the muddy waters of the Medway, over the flat extreme of the Isle of Grain to the Nore lightvessel, a half smile on his face.
‘What the deuce are you grinning at, Nat?’ Drinkwater’s reverie was abruptly shattered by the portly bulk of Appleby.
‘Nothing Harry, nothing.’ He crackled the letter in his pocket.
‘Thinking of Elizabeth no doubt.’ Appleby looked sideways. ‘Ah you are surprised our worthy commander is not the only person capable of divining others’ thoughts,’ he added with a trace of bitterness, ‘and the symptoms of love have long been known. Oh, I know you think I’m good only for sawing off limbs and setting broken bones, but there’s little enough of that to occupy me so that I am reduced to observing my fellows.’
‘And what have you observed of late then?’
‘Why that you have received a letter from Elizabeth and will be looking for some furlough before we sail.’
‘Is that all?’ replied Drinkwater with mock disappointment. ‘No my friend, I doubt there’ll be time for leave, Griffiths is eager to be gone. Ah, but it’s a beautiful morning ain’t it?’ he added, sniffing to windward.
‘Nat.’ Appleby was suddenly serious.
‘Uh?’ Drinkwater turned abstractedly, ‘what is it?’
‘I have also been observing Bolton. What d’ye make of him?’
‘Bolton?’ Drinkwater frowned. ‘He seems well enough content since we brought him aft. Surely you’re in a better position to answer your own question since he’s been pounding pestle and mortar in your service.’
Appleby shook his head. ‘No I mean the inner man. What d’ye make of the inner man?’
Drinkwater’s pleasant introspection following the arrival of Elizabeth’s letter was gone beyond recall. He sighed, slightly resentfully.
A King's Cutter Page 12