In Distant Waters

by Richard Woodman

  ‘Señorita, what is it? What is the matter?’

  ‘Capitán . . . what is it that you mean by your words to Doña Helena? It is not true . . . tell me it is not true.’

  He frowned, then drew out the chair for her. She shook her head. The candle caught the tears flung from her eyes, the dark shadow of a wave of hair fell across her forehead, too hurriedly put up.

  ‘Señorita . . .’

  ‘Prince Vladimir arrived today, but Nicolai is not with him. I ask where is Nicolai and Rakitin says nothing.’ She spat the Russian’s name as though flinging it from her with contempt. ‘But I know his ship has come from the north, he must know about Nicolai.’

  She was weeping now. He wanted to comfort her but dare not move. He knew now that he had seen Rakitin’s ship off the Horn and that in the interval the Russian had been north to the Tsar’s settlements on the coast of Alaska.

  ‘What does your father tell you?’ he asked gently. She shook her head, trying to speak through her grief.

  ‘Nothing. Don Alejo promises Nicolai will come on the Juno as before,’ she threw up her head, ‘but I do not believe Don Alejo,’ she said in a voice which conveyed the impression that she did not trust her uncle. ‘And then you say that thing to Doña Helena,’ there was a pause and then she added in a lower voice, a voice that spoke of confidentiality and trust, ‘she would not believe you.’

  Drinkwater sighed. The honour was one he could have done without at such a moment. ‘Señorita, I do not know that I can tell you the truth, I can only tell you what I have myself been told.’ He paused and motioned her again to the chair. This time she moved slowly from the door and sank onto it. There was the faintest breath of air through the cell, reminding Drinkwater that the door was open. For a moment he was a prey to emotions as savage as those which tore at the young woman.

  ‘I was told that Nicolai Rezanov was dead,’ he said flatly.

  The finality of the word seemed to staunch the flow of tears. Truth was, Drinkwater thought as he held her gaze, always easier to face than uncertainty. ‘I may have been misinformed . . . told wrong. I hope, Señorita, that I have been . . .’

  A ghost of a smile crossed her face and her fingers rested lightly upon his hand. ‘Who told you, Capitán?’

  ‘An American. Captain Jackson Grant.’

  He saw her pupils contract and her nostrils flare with anger and he sensed her resolution. A sudden hope sprang into his mind. ‘I know he is not to be trusted. Did he not come here to see your father and betray me?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she frowned, ‘yes . . . yes he was here. I heard he knew where your ship was.’

  ‘Then he is not to be trusted,’ Drinkwater said hopefully. ‘He is a man who seeks for himself . . . one perhaps who would be in Nicolai Rezanov’s place,’ he added in a lower voice.

  She flashed him a look of imperious suspicion, then her expression softened. ‘And you, Capitán?’ she asked raising her fingers from his hand, ‘where do you wish to be? Are you to be trusted?’

  ‘I can only tell you what I have been told, Señorita. I would not cause you distress. I have nothing. All I know is that you expected Rezanov and he has not come. Rakitin is silent, but Jackson told me he died in Krasnoiarsk . . . yes, that was the place.’

  ‘He was a good man, Capitán . . . can you comprehend that?’

  ‘Yes. Grant said that.’

  But she seemed not to hear him. ‘. . . A good man, perhaps a saint . . . not like Rakitin.’ Again the utterance of the Russian’s name disgusted her. It appeared that Rakitin had joined the list of Doña Ana Maria’s would-be and unwanted suitors. She let out a long, shuddering sigh. ‘And in my heart I know he is dead.’

  She crossed herself and Drinkwater put his hand gently upon her shoulder. The warmth of her flesh seemed to sear him. She looked up at him for a long moment so that the temptation to bend and kiss her flared across his brain and then she rose and the moment was gone.

  ‘Gracias, Capitán, you have been . . . you have your own misfortune. I shall pray for you.’

  Drinkwater recalled the papal attitudes to suicide. ‘You do me too much honour, Señorita . . . pray for my wife and children.’

  She paused in the act of turning for the door. In the gloom of the cell her dark dress and the black pile of her hair merged into the shadows, so that the single light of the candle threw her face into a spectral detachment which seemed to diminish from his vision as in a dream and he stood, long after her departure, with its lovely image imprinted on his retina, unaware of the grind of the bolts or the tumbling of the lock.

  ‘ “Whom the gods wish to destroy”,’ he quoted softly to himself, ‘ “they first make mad.” ’

  * See 1805

  CHAPTER 16

  June–July 1808

  The Despatch Vessel

  He did not go mad. The appearance, or perhaps the disappearance, of Doña Ana Maria saved him from himself. He no longer paced like a lion confined in the Tower menagerie but stood stock-still, held in that cataleptic state familiar to commanders of ships whose duty requires their presence on deck long after the exhausted body is capable of sustaining it. They stand, as Drinkwater stood now, immobilised, faculties reduced to the barely necessary, like a submerged whale, eyes open yet in a strange detachment, all but lost to exterior circumstances so that they endure cold and sleeplessness unaware of cramps or the passage of time, though instantly ready to respond to sudden emergency.

  In this condition the mind behaves oddly, ranging over vast plains of consideration, soaring above mountains of fantasy and pausing beside dark lakes of doubt, dispensing with the formality of language and encompassing thoughts and images beyond the powers of expression. Drinkwater’s thoughts came and went, slipped in and out of rationality, leapt deep chasms of pure reason and became part of an infinite consciousness beyond himself. In this enchantment Drinkwater slipped the bonds of honour and reaffirmed his faith in providence. All thoughts of suicide left him and it seemed he felt, as he had once before felt when lost in a small boat in the fog of the Greenland Sea, a haunting intimacy with Elizabeth and his family.

  He remained in this state for many hours. Even when the candle stump expired with an upward and pungent twist of smoke, he did no more than acknowledge the onset of total blackness without it moving him. In this trance the night passed and grey dawn filtered in through the barred window of his cell before he came to himself, shuddering with the cold and the pain of movement as he returned to full consciousness. But it was more than dawn that had woken him; his seaman’s instincts had been stirred by distant noises in the fading night: the splash of an anchor, a few shouts and later the noise of impatient boots upon the steps that ran up from the boat landing somewhere below his cell-window. They echoed in the corridor beyond his barred door and he heard the guard accosted, and then the sounds faded. He dragged the chair to the window and strained to peer below. The harbour was still, the gentle ruffling of the slight breeze had kept the usual morning fog away, enabling the newcomer to work into the anchorage, close under the Residence. She was a schooner, an aviso, a Spanish despatch-vessel with tall, raked masts and the look of speed about her. From where had she come? Monterey? San Diego? Panama? And what news did she bring that was so urgent that her commander must bring her in so early and wake the Commandante’s household? Did it concern him? Was he perhaps to be taken south, or disposed of in some Spanish oubliette? Inexplicably he felt his long-stilled pulse begin to race.

  The noises died away and there followed a silence so full of suspense that it set him to a frustrated and angry pacing in which his mind now boiled with possibilities. For an hour he was a prey to such mental toil that the soothing effects of his catalepsy had evaporated by the time the sun had risen and the blood noise rushed through his ears so that he almost missed the sounds of departure, feet running hastily upon the path below. He reoccupied his spy-post and saw the aviso’s boat pull out from the jetty and watched it go, not to the schooner but to the Suvor
ov. Later it returned and he heard the low sinister bass of Rakitin, grumbling at the Commandante’s summons and the ungodly hour. Then, a little later still, the hasty retreat of the Russian’s boots . . . and silence.

  The turning of the lock and shooting of bolts startled him when it came. He half-expected release, so strung were his nerves, but it was only the grimy, sleep-sodden orderly who brought him bread, thin wine and an empty slop pail as he had done on so many, many previous mornings. The familiarity of the ritual, backed by the drawn sword of an officer outside cast Drinkwater’s spirit into depression. But he could not eat and jumped upon the chair yet again when the thin, reedy piping of the bosun’s calls preceded the stamp-and-go of a hundred feet in the heart-wrenching procedure of departure. Rakitin had learned much from the Royal Navy. Watching from a distance, Drinkwater might have been looking at a British man-of-war getting under weigh and in his mind he could hear the orders passed as the topmen went aloft and the topsails were cast loose in the buntlines, their clews hauled out. On the high steeved bowsprit of the Suvorov men scrambled, casting loose the robands that secured the jibs. On the fo’c’s’le men leaned outboard, fishing with the cat-tackle for the anchor ring as it broke surface under the round, black bow of the Russian seventy-four. And then he suddenly realised with a pang that sent an actual stab of pain through his guts, his own Patrician was also getting under weigh. There were fewer men and it was clumsily done, but within the hour she was slipping out of his view, following in the wake of the Suvorov. The last he saw of her as she swung to round Point Lobos was her white St George’s ensign: only it was no longer subordinate to the red and gold of Spain. Now above it flaunted the diagonal cross of Russia.

  Lieutenant James Quilhampton had intended making the entrance to San Francisco Bay in the last hours of the night. The appearance of a light northerly breeze augured well and they had begun from their refuge in good time to be within the harbour by dawn, intending to hole-up on one of the islands and reconnoitre the shipping during the coming day. But they were turned back by the arrival of a fast schooner, whose commander beat up under the headland of Bonita Point before wearing for the anchorage below the battery near Point Lobos. This obstacle had cost them time, but caution dictated a retreat, and the Patrician’s boat was put reluctantly about for the sanctuary of the hidden bay.

  Quilhampton fumed at the delay. He had made his preparations with great care. Although his resources were limited he knew that much depended on success. Everything, in fact, not least his very life and his future. He wished he had not sent that final letter to Catriona. To have someone, however distant, to whose image a man might cling in such desperate moments in his life, seemed to him a most desirable thing. But it would not have been fair to Catriona and, God alone knew, she had been ill-treated by neglect for too long already.

  ‘I am stripped to the most indigent circumstances,’ he muttered to himself as he cooled his heels on the little curve of sand withing the cove, ‘stripped to the very last resort of the naked . . .’

  The phrase pleased him; oddly it comforted him to come face-to-face with absolute desperation. He held his life cheap now, and that meant he could undertake any enterprise. Smiling grimly to himself he looked up, swinging his eyes to rake the small arc of the horizon visible between the two rocky headlands that concealed their hideaway. What he saw destroyed his resolution. Two ships stood out to sea, heading north, their crews making sail as they lay over on the starboard tack. The leading vessel was the big, black Russian two-decker. The other, he was certain, was the Patrician.

  Quilhampton frowned. What the devil did it mean? Should he go on into San Francisco or follow the two ships? He swore venomously. If Drinkwater and his people were aboard the Patrician, it was out of the question for Quilhampton with a handful of men in an open boat to give chase. He was utterly without resources, the mood of his men was not encouraging, in short the mere consideration of such an enterprise was as foolhardy as it was impractical. But was the alternative any better? The plentiful game and easy living of the last few days had prompted muttering from the men. If they had the opportunity of spirits and access to women his control over them would be broken utterly, and any approach to San Francisco, however made, risked that.

  And what could he do if he got there? With Captain Drinkwater and some of Patrician’s men they might have attempted something, but with the ship and, presumably, Drinkwater himself, carried off under Russian escort, what was the point of running his head into a noose? Sighing, he looked up. Beyond the headlands of the cove the sea-horizon was empty. A sudden, panicky fluttering formed in the pit of his gut and he felt a desperate surge of self-pity. For a moment the horizon misted and then he forced a wave of anger to over-lay the hideous sensation. Reluctantly he turned away from the sea and made his way up the tiny valley behind the cove. There really was no alternative open to him. He would have to give himself up to the Spanish authorities; that way he might survive the mutinous knives of his men.

  Some time after the departure of Patrician Drinkwater fell into a profound sleep, his exhausted body seeking its revenge upon his shattered spirit. He woke ten hours later, cramped and wracked with pain in the mangled muscles of his mauled shoulder, but oddly alert and with his mind calmer than it had been for many days. There was no reason for this feeling beyond a half-remembered fragment of chill philosophy. He could not recall its source; Epictetus, perhaps, or Marcus Aurelius, the only classical reading he had ever found aboard a man-of-war, but the text soothed him. Nothing, the ancient averred, happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear.

  The pegs upon which men hang their reason are oddly illogical, but Drinkwater put behind him all thoughts of suicide from that moment and sat quietly in the gathering darkness of the approaching night. In such a mood a man might escape, or be shot.

  He heard the footfalls on the stone flags of the corridor. There were several of them and they approached purposefully. There was nothing furtive about the way the lock was sprung or the bolts withdrawn. By the time the door was flung open and de Soto entered the cell with a lantern, Drinkwater’s heart was pounding. De Soto jerked his head imperiously and Drinkwater rose.

  ‘Adelante!’ De Soto stood aside and indicated Drinkwater should step outside. Apprehensively he did as he was bidden, the cool, night-fresh air wafting along the corridor sweet in his nostrils. The officer was accompanied by two soldiers bearing muskets with bayonets fixed. They began to walk, Drinkwater with them, to where the corridor turned and joined the entrance gate through which the men from the boats had passed.

  But he was not taken to be shot. They crossed the courtyard and entered the Commandante’s quarters where once (it seemed so long ago) he had dined in honour and now was brought in ignominy.

  He had hoped for an interview with Don José, but it was before Don Alejo that he found himself. From various shreds of evidence, from their first encounter on the Santa Monica, to the innuendoes of Don Alejo’s niece, Drinkwater had conceived a dislike of the Spaniard. He was as slippery as an eel, interested solely in his own intrigues, whatever they were. If Drinkwater had been hoping for some relaxation in his regimen he was to be disappointed. Don Alejo’s remarks were obscure and not reassuring.

  ‘Ah, Capitán Drinkwater, I see you are in good health, buenas . . .’ Don Alejo smiled like a cat, ignoring the stink of his prisoner, the unshaven face, the filthy neck linen. ‘We have been waiting for instructions from Panama . . .’

  ‘What the hell have you done with my ship?’

  ‘Capitán, please. She is not your ship. She fell a prize to the valour of Spain.’

  ‘Where the hell has she gone?’

  ‘Under escort . . . to a place of safety,’ Don Alejo’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know about your ship?’

  Drinkwater evaded the question. He did not want his tiny window stopped up. ‘I am not a fool. You have also received news, Don Alejo, this I know, that an aviso arrived this morning . . .’

&n
bsp; ‘Ah, but no news about you, Capitán. I regret . . .’

  ‘Don Alejo, I demand that, at the very least, you accommodate me in quarters befitting my rank, that you oblige me by placing me under parole, that you allow me to shave, to see my officers and men . . .’

  ‘Capitán, you are not in your quarterdeck, please.’ The Spaniard’s voice was harsh, cruel. ‘It is not possible . . .’

  ‘If I ever have the opportunity to lay even with you Don Alejo . . .’

  The Spaniard had been sitting on the corner of a heavy oak table, one booted leg swinging, his manner disinterested. Now he came to his feet, face to face with his prisoner.

  ‘Do not threaten me, Capitán. You have nothing to make me fear. You have no men, no guns, nothing.’ He jerked his head at the guards and snarled something incomprehensible. Drinkwater was marched out, still wondering why he had been summoned.

  They were crossing the courtyard when they met Doña Ana Maria and her duenna. Seeing him, she smiled sadly. ‘A happy day, Capitán, for you . . .’

  He frowned. Was she mocking him? ‘For me Señorita? How so?’

  De Soto’s forbearance snapped and he disregarded the speaker’s rank and connections, shouting the girl to silence and propelling Drinkwater suddenly forward with a blow on his shoulder that sent a wave of agony through him. He stumbled and all but fell, the pain blotting out all sensibility until he found himself once more in his cell and heard the heavy, final thud of bolts driving home. It was only then that he tried to make some sense out of the interview and its inexplicable sequel.

  ‘Easy, lads, easy . . .’

  The boat ghosted along, only a whisper of water under her bow accompanied by the drip of water from the motionless oar-blades. The dark hull of an anchored ship loomed over them; it was one of the anchored merchantmen and the noise of a squeeze-box and some languidly drunken singing came to them. Lights shone from her stern cabin and a gale of laughter told where her master entertained. The germ of an idea formed in Lieutenant Quilhampton’s brain, but this vessel was too big by far, perhaps they would find something smaller, more suitable further into the anchorage. He did not have to surrender; at least not yet.