Honour This Day

by Alexander Kent

  Keen’s eyes settled on Parris by the rail. “Stay here. Hold the quarterdeck.” Just the flicker of a glance towards Bolitho. It was as if they had clasped hands.

  Then he too was up and running along the starboard gang-way, as the enemy clambered aboard, or fired down from their own ship. Lieutenant Lovering pointed with his hanger and yelled, “To the fo’c’s’le, lads!” Then he fell, the hanger dangling from his wrist as an unseen marksman found his victim.

  Dacie the one-eyed boatswain’s mate was already there on the beakhead, swinging a boarding axe with terrible effect, cutting down three of the enemy before some of Adams’s marines jumped down to join him, their bayonets licking through the nets, hurling aside the men caught there like flies in a web.

  The swivels in the maintop banged out again, and some of the Spanish sailors about to join the first boarders were scattered in a deadly hail of canister. Those already aboard Hyperion fell back, one throwing away his cutlass as the marines cornered him on the forecastle, but it was already too late for quarter. Gunsmoke drifted over the deck and when it cleared, there were only corpses as the jubilant marines fought their way across to the other ship’s deck.

  Jenour stood close beside Bolitho, his sword drawn, his face like one already dead. He shouted, “Two of the Dons have struck, Sir Richard!”

  Despite the clash of steel and the sporadic bang of muskets, there were faint cheers from another ship, and Bolitho imagined he could hear drums and fifes.

  He climbed up the poop ladder and rubbed his eyes before peering through the enveloping smoke. He could just make out Obdurate, now completely dismasted and lashed alongside the Spanish two-decker she had collided with. A British ensign flew above the other vessel’s deck, and Bolitho guessed it was Captain Thynne’s men who were cheering.

  Then he saw Benbow, pushing past another crippled Spaniard, pouring a slow broadside into her as she moved by. Masts toppled like felled trees, and Bolitho saw Herrick’s flag curling above the smoke, so bright in the mocking sunlight.

  He thought wildly, Hyperion had cleared the way, just as Naylor had promised she would.

  Allday shouted, “Here, watch out!”

  Bolitho turned and saw a group of Spanish seamen clamber up over the starboard gangway, slashing aside the nets before anyone had noticed them. They must have climbed from the main-chains; they could have been creatures from the sea itself.

  Bolitho drew his sword, and saw some of Adams’s red-coated marines already hacking their way aft on the other ship. These boarders had no chance at all. Their own vessel would have to strike unless the other two-decker could come to her aid. But another broadside hurled smoke and debris high in the air and even on to Hyperion’s maindeck, as one of Bolitho’s squadron, probably Crusader, raked her from stern to bow.

  There was a lieutenant leading the small group, and as he saw Bolitho he brandished his sword and charged to the attack.

  Jenour stood his ground, but the Spaniard was a fine swords-man. He parried the blue blade aside as if it was a reed, twisted it with his hilt and sent it flying. He drew back to balance himself for a last thrust, then stared with horror at the boarding pike which lunged up through the quarterdeck ladder. The seaman gave an insane yell, tugged the pike free and drove it into the lieutenant’s stomach.

  Bolitho faced another Spaniard who was armed only with a heavy cutlass.

  Bolitho yelled, “Surrender, damn you!”

  But whether he understood or not the seaman showed no sign of giving in. The wide blade swung in a bright arc and Bolitho stepped aside easily, then almost fell as a shaft of sunlight probed through the smoke haze and touched his injured eye. It was like that other time. Like being struck blind.

  He felt himself swaying, the old sword held straight out, pointing uselessly at nothing.

  Parris yelled, “Stop that man!” Bolitho could only guess what was happening, and waited for the searing agony of the cutlass he could not see. Someone was screaming, and occasional yells told Bolitho that more of Keen’s men were running to vanquish the last of the attackers.

  Allday sliced his blade at an angle, his mind numb as he saw the other man lunging towards Bolitho, who was apparently unable to move. The blade took the man on one side of his head, a glancing blow, but it had Allday’s strength and memory behind it. As he pivoted round, squinting into the sudden glare, he saw Allday looming towards him.

  Jenour heard the next blow even as he scrabbled in the bloodstained scuppers to retrieve his sword. Parris, who was sobbing with pain from a slash across his wounded shoulder, saw the cutlass hit the Spaniard on the forearm; could only stare as the arm, complete with cutlass, clattered across the deck.

  Allday spat, “An’ this is for me, matey!” He silenced the man’s scream with one final blow across the neck.

  He grasped Bolitho’s arm. “You all right, Sir Richard?”

  Bolitho took several deep breaths. His lungs felt as if they were filled with fire; he could barely breathe.

  “Yes. Yes, old friend. The sun . . .”

  He looked for Jenour. “You have true courage, Stephen!”

  Then he saw Jenour’s features change yet again and thought for an instant he had already been wounded. There were wild cheers from the ship snared alongside by a tangle of fallen rigging, but as a freak gust of wind drove the smoke away Bolitho knew the reason for Jenour’s stunned look of dismay.

  He turned, covering his left eye with his hand, and felt his body cringe.

  The Spanish admiral’s flagship San Mateo had stayed clear of the close-action, or maybe it had taken her this long to put about. She seemed to shine above her own tall reflection; there was not a scar or a stain on her hull or a shot hole in her elegant sails. She was moving very slowly, and Bolitho’s mind recorded that there were many men aloft on her yards. She was preparing to change tack again. Away from the battle.

  Bolitho could feel his limbs quivering, as if they would never stop. He heard Parris shout, “In Christ’s name! She’s going to fire!”

  San Mateo had run out every gun, and at the range of some fifty yards could not miss with any of them, even though two of her own consorts lay directly in the path of her broadside.

  Bolitho’s mind refused to clear. It was Hyperion they wanted. The defiant ship with his flag still at the fore which had somehow broken their line, and inspired the others to follow. He looked at Allday but he was staring at the enemy flagship, his cutlass hanging loosely from his fist.

  Together. Even now.

  Then the flagship fired. The sound was deafening, and as the weight of the broadside smashed into the drifting Hyperion, Bolitho felt the deck rear up as if the ship was sharing their agony.

  He was thrown to the side of the quarterdeck, his ears deaf to the thundering roar of falling spars, of men crying and screaming before the torn rigging dragged them over the side like corpses in a huge net.

  Bolitho crawled to Midshipman Mirrielees and dragged at his shoulder to turn him on to his back. His eyes were shut tight, and there was moisture like tears beneath the lids. He was dead. He saw Allday crouching on his knees, his mouth wide as he sucked in the air. Their eyes met and Allday tried to grin.

  Bolitho felt someone pulling him to his feet, his eyes blinded again by the sunlight as it laid bare the destruction.

  Then the smoke drifted lower and hid San Mateo from view.

  19 THE LAST FAREWELL

  SIR PIERS Blachford steadied himself against the makeshift table while the guns thundered out yet again and shook the whole ship. He wiped his streaming face and said, “Take this man away. He’s dead.”

  The surgeon’s assistants seized the naked corpse and dragged it away into the shadows of the orlop deck.

  Blachford reached up and felt the massive beam by his head. If there was really a hell, he thought, it must surely look like this.

  The swinging lanterns which dangled above the table made it worse, if that were possible, casting shadows up the curved sides of the
hull one moment, and laying bare the huddled or inert shapes of the wounded who were being brought down to the orlop with hardly a let-up.

  He looked at his companion, George Minchin, Hyperion’s own surgeon, a coarse-faced man with sprouting grey hair. His eyes were red-rimmed, and not only from fatigue. There was a huge jug of rum beside the table, to help ease the agony or the passing moments of the pitiful wounded who were brought to the table, stripped, then held like victims under torture until the work was done. Minchin seemed to drink more than his share.

  Blachford had seen the most terrible wounds. Men without limbs, with their faces and bodies burned, or clawed by flaying splinters. The whole place, which was normally the midshipmen’s berth, where they slept, ate and studied their manuals by the dim light of their glims, was filled with suffering. It stank of blood, vomit and pain. Each thundering roar of a broadside, or the sickening crash of enemy balls hitting the ship around them, brought cries and groans from the figures who waited to be attended.

  Blachford could only guess what was happening up there, where it was broad daylight. Here on the orlop, no outside light ever penetrated. Below the waterline it was the safest place for this grisly work, but it revolted him none the less.

  He gestured to the obscene tubs below the table, partly filled with amputated limbs, a stark warning to those who would be the next to be carried to endure what must be an extension of their agony. Only death seemed like a blessed relief here. “Take them out!”

  He listened to the beat of hammers in the narrow carpenter’s walks, which ran around the ship below the waterline. Like tiny corridors between the inner compartments and the outer hull, where the carpenter and his mates repaired shot holes or leaks as the iron smashed again and again into the side.

  There was a long drawn out rumbling directly overhead, and Blachford stared at the red-painted timbers as if he expected them to cave in.

  A frightened voice called from the shadows. “What’s that, Toby?”

  Someone replied, “They’re runnin’ in the lower battery, that’s what!”

  Blachford asked quickly, “Why would they do that?”

  Minchin took a cupful of rum and wiped his mouth with a blood-stained fist.

  “Clearing it. We’re alongside one o’ the buggers. They’ll need every spare Jack to fight ’em off!”

  He shouted hoarsely, “Next one, Donovan!”

  Then he eyed Blachford with something like contempt. “Not quite what you’re used to, I expect? No fancy operating rooms, with lines of ignorant students hanging on your every word.” He blinked his red-rimmed eyes as smoke eddied through the deck. “I hope you learn something useful today, Sir Piers. Now you know what we have to suffer in the name of medicine.”

  A loblolly boy said, “This one’s an officer, sir.”

  Blachford leaned over the table as the lieutenant was stripped of his torn shirt and pressed flat on the table.

  It was the second lieutenant, Lovering, who had been shot down by a Spanish marksman.

  Blachford studied the terrible wound in his arm. The blood looked black in the swinging lanterns, the skin ragged where the ball had split apart upon hitting the bone.

  Lovering stared at him, his eyes glazed with pain. “Oh God, is it bad?”

  Minchin touched his bare shoulder. It felt cold and clammy. “Sorry, Ralph.” He glanced at Blachford. “It’s got to come off.”

  Lovering closed his eyes. “Please God, not my arm!”

  Blachford waited for an assistant to bring his instruments. He had had to order them to be cleaned again and again. No wonder men died of gangrene. He said gently, “He’s right. For your own sake.”

  The lieutenant rolled his head away from the nearest lantern. He was about twenty-two, Blachford thought.

  Lovering said in a whisper, “Why not kill me? I’m done for.”

  More crashes shook the hull and several instruments fell to the deck. Blachford stooped to retrieve one of them and stared, sickened, as a rat scurried away into the shadows.

  Minchin saw his disgust and set his teeth. Coming here with all his high-and-mighty talk. What did he know about war?

  From one corner of his eye he saw the lamplight glint on Blachford’s knife.

  “Here, Ralph.” He placed a wedge of leather between his jaws before he could protest. “I’ll give you some proper brandy after this.”

  A voice yelled through the misty smoke. “Another officer, sir!”

  An assistant held up his lantern and Blachford saw Lieutenant Quayle slipping down against one of the massive timbers, trying to cover his face with his coat.

  A seaman protested angrily, “’E’s not even marked!”

  Lieutenant Lovering struggled on the table, and but for the assistant holding his uninjured arm, and Minchin’s hands on his shoulders, would have fought his way to his feet.

  “You bloody bastard! You cowardly—” His voice trailed away as he fell back in a faint on the table.

  Blachford glanced again at Quayle; he was gripping his fingers and whimpering like a child.

  “Call him what you will, but he’s as much a casualty as any of them!”

  Minchin replaced the leather wedge between Lovering’s jaws. Brutal, callous; they were the marks of his trade. He held Lovering’s shoulders and waited for him to feel the first incision of the knife. With luck he might lose consciousness completely before the saw made its first stroke.

  Minchin could dismiss what Blachford and others like him thought about the navy’s surgeons. He could even ignore Lovering’s agony, although he had always liked the young lieutenant.

  Instead he concentrated on his daughter in Dover, whom he had not seen for two years.

  “Next.” Lovering was carried away; the amputated limb fell into the tub. The wings and limbs tub as most of them called it. Until it was their turn.

  Blachford waited for a seaman whose foot had been crushed beneath a careering gun-truck to be laid before him. Around him the loblolly boys and their helpers held the flickering lanterns closer. Blachford looked at his own arms, red to the elbows, like Minchin’s and the rest. No wonder they call us butchers.

  The man began to scream and plead but sucked greedily on a mug of rum which Minchin finished before laying bare the shattered foot. The hull quivered again, but it felt as if the battle had drawn away. There seemed to be cannon fire from all directions, occasional yells which were like lost spirits as they filtered through the other decks.

  Hyperion might have been boarded, Blachford thought, or the enemy could have drawn away to re-form. He knew little about sea-warfare other than what he had been told or had read about in the Gazette. Only since his travels around the fleet had he thought about the men who made victories and defeats real, into flesh and blood like his own.

  “Next!” It never stopped.

  This time a marine ran down a ladder and called, “We’ve taken the Don alongside, lads!” He vanished again, and Blachford was amazed that some of the wounded could actually raise a weak cheer. No wonder Bolitho loved these sailors.

  He looked down at the young midshipman. A child.

  Minchin probed open part of his side where the ribs showed white through the blood.

  Blachford said quietly, “God, he looks so young.”

  Minchin stared at him, wanting to hurt him, to make him suffer.

  “Well, Mr Springett won’t be getting any older, Sir Piers. He’s got a fistful of Spanish iron inside him!” He gestured angrily. “Take him away.”

  “How old was he?”

  Minchin knew the boy was thirteen, but something else caught his attention. It was the sudden stillness, which even the far-off gunfire could not break. The deck was swaying more slowly, as if the ship was heavier in the water. But the pumps were still going. God, he thought, in this old ship they never seemed to stop.

  Blachford saw his intent expression. “What is it?”

  Minchin shook his head. “Don’t know.” He glanced at the dark shapes
of the wounded along the side of the orlop. Some already dead, with no one to notice or care. Others waiting, still waiting. But this time . . . He said harshly, “They’re all sailors. They know something is wrong.”

  Blachford stared at the smoke-filled ladder which mounted to the lower gun deck. It was as if they were the only ones left aboard. He took out his watch and peered at it. Minchin reached down and refilled his cup with rum, right to the brim.

  He had seen the fine gold timepiece with the crest engraved on its guard. God rot him!

  The roar of the broadside when it came was like nothing Minchin had ever experienced. There must have been many guns, and yet they were linked into one gigantic clap of thunder which exploded against the ship as if the sound, and not the massive weight of metal, was striking into the timbers.

  The deck canted right over, shivered violently as it reared against the ship alongside, but the din did not stop. There was an outstanding, splitting crack which seemed to come right through the deck; it was followed immediately by a roar of crashing spars and rigging, and heavy thuds which he guessed were guns being hurled back from their ports.

  The wounded were shouting and pleading, some dragging themselves to the ladder, their blood marking the futility of their efforts. Blachford heard the broken spars thudding against the hull, then sudden screams from the carpenter’s walk, men clawing their way in darkness as the lanterns were blown apart.

  Minchin picked himself up from the deck, his ears still ringing from the explosion. He saw some rats scurrying past the bodies of those who were beyond pain, and shook his head to clear it.

  As he brushed past, Blachford called, “Where are you going?”

  “My sickbay. All I own in this bloody world is in there.”

  “In Heaven’s name, tell me, man!”

  Minchin steadied himself as the deck gave another great shudder. The pumps had finally stopped. He said savagely, “We’re going down. But I’m not staying to watch it!”

  Blachford stared round. If I survive this . . . Then he took a grip on his racing thoughts.

  “Get these men ready to move on deck.” The assistants nodded, but their eyes were on the ladder. Going down. Their life. Their home, whether from choice or impressment; it could not happen. Shoes clattered on the ladder, and Dacie, the one-eyed boatswain’s mate, peered down at them.