Peto came upon him just as he turned his head from landwards. ‘I’m pleased to say, Hervey, that I shall have no further call on your admirable travelling library, for I have now completed my manuscript.’
Hervey expressed himself pleased, not that Peto should have no further need of his books, but that he had evidently reached a conclusion in his strategical conception.
‘Yes, and I am quite certain that it is a true model for the future,’ he said emphatically. ‘I have called it The Action off Lissa, A Latter-day Punic Victory. Note, mind, that I choose the word “action” rather than “battle”, for it was the manoeuvre before the engagement that was the really significant.’
Joseph Edmonds would have approved. That much Hervey was sure of, for Hannibal’s outwitting of the consuls at Cannae was his constant inspiration. Indeed, Edmonds had a notion that all military truth was extant in the three centuries before Christ, and that gunpowder merely hastened things rather than changed any fundamental principle. ‘Acceleration’ was what he called it.
‘I should have liked to meet your Major Edmonds,’ said Peto. ‘Indeed I believe I half-know him, for scarcely a week has passed that you have not spoken of him. Well, Hervey,’ he smiled, ‘you may now read my monograph at your leisure since I have had my clerk make a fair copy. He finishes it even as we speak.’
‘Captain Peto, I am very grateful—’
‘And you will mind, mark you, the inscription I have placed in it.’
Hervey inclined his head and raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
‘De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!’
‘Danton?’ Hervey smiled by return. ‘Pour les vaincre, pour les atterrer! Goodness, how it must give you satisfaction to turn the words of the enemy so!’
‘The enemy? Hervey, let me remind you: there is now peace on earth!’
It amused them each as much.
Flowerdew came up, knuckled his forehead and went to the hen coop. A few moments’ searching through the bedding produced two good-size eggs, and a little smile of satisfaction. ‘There, Captain, I said as they’d start layin’ again. It was that foul weather off Madagascar that stopped them up!’
‘Yes,’ shrugged Peto, ‘and I was the one who wanted to put them all in the pot! An egg for breakfast: oh what a prospect again! Captain Hervey shall have the other.’
‘Oh no, Flowerdew should have it by rights.’
‘As you please, Hervey, but Flowerdew will sell it to the highest bidder in the wardroom — isn’t that so?’
His steward merely grinned.
‘In that case,’ grinned Hervey back, ‘I shall claim the right to be the highest bidder. You will let me know the final price?’
‘Ay, sir, that I will! Right generous of you, sir.’
‘That egg may cost you more than a whole breakfast in St James’s, Hervey. A nice gesture, though. You’re a good sort. Men will always follow you, even though they’ll curse your ardour at times.’
Hervey was rather flattered.
‘How is your horse? Still out of sorts?’ Peto seemed done with fighting for the time being, theoretical or otherwise.
‘Out by the merest degree,’ he replied, ‘but it’s nothing more than a chill — nothing like as bad as that she came aboard with. It was that same foul weather near Madagascar, I think. The worst is over.’
‘She looked rather sorry for herself this morning, I thought.’
‘Well, she would wish for a good gallop, but her stall allows her plenty of movement. She’s borne it handsomely. Neither heavy seas nor heat appears to trouble her. I’m intensely obliged for your allowing her so much of your gundeck.’
‘And you yourself have not found things too… confining?’
Hervey smiled broadly. His ordeal was all but over, and he had much to thank Peto for. ‘My dear sir, for me it has been pleasure without alloy. I have read much, I have learned a language in no little measure, for your clerk has been a most excellent schoolmaster, and I have greatly enjoyed — and profited from — our colloquies.’
‘I am glad to hear it,’ replied Peto, with genuine satisfaction; ‘and you have maintained a most vigorous regimen: I see you racing to the tops from time to time with the alacrity of a seasoned hand.’
‘And I believe that I am stronger than before through the exercises that Mr Locke puts upon his marines.’
‘Very probably,’ smiled Peto. ‘Locke is a diligent officer, though life has dealt him ill indeed.’
The stern lights were being lit, and Hervey lowered his voice lest the mates heard. ‘You know, when we were at Shrewsbury he was… well, an Olympian to us younger boys. He seems now… altogether cut down, diminished.’
Peto understood. ‘He would take no leave when last we were in Portsmouth. He broods too much. Sea air seems to revive him, though. I warrant he could swing one of those cutlasses clean through the best Baltic fir sometimes.’
It was curious how little they had spoken up to now of Nisus’s officers. In the Sixth they would have talked freely about those who shared the regiment’s badge, for the officers and men were the regiment. Unlike His Majesty’s Ship Nisus, the 6th Light Dragoons had no other corporeal form. But Hervey and Peto could only agree: Locke needed a more clement diversion than a cloister with wooden walls.
When Peto broke to speak with the officer of the watch, Hervey went to the main deck, to Jessye’s tranquil stall. There she stood four-square, a little back from the door, grinding hay in her mouth in a slow, rhythmical motion, as content as he had ever seen her. She had lost the roundedness whence came so much of her supple agility, but not as much as he had feared, and he prayed again that soon they would be ashore to begin restoring that muscle. He pulled her forelock gently, and rubbed her muzzle. She whickered. Just loud enough for him to hear — no-one else. So many thoughts crowded in upon him — the years they had spent together, the shot and the shell, and the terrible sights and the terrible sounds. Could there be any secret closer, or safer, than that between a man and his horse? Thank heavens, then — for her sake at least — that there was peace on earth. She had seen and heard and done enough. India would be kinder to her, and he left for his cabin with a smile of satisfaction at the thought.
In his cot he turned to the psalms appointed for the evening — for the sixth time of reading during the passage. He smiled again when he saw them. ‘Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding,’ said Thirty-two. He frowned in dissent, for Jessye gave the lie to any literal rendering. ‘A horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man: neither shall he deliver any man by his great strength.’ Again, he dissented at Thirty-three. But in Thirty-four he could at least acknowledge a lament for Henry Locke’s condition: ‘Great are the troubles of the righteous.’ ‘Righteous’ was perhaps too preachy a word, but that admirable officer of Marines deserved something of equal worth. Without doubt, though, he brooded too much. Perhaps Locke would see his fortune restored in some future action, but with peace on earth it seemed unlikely. Jessye’s deliverance — and Hervey’s too, if he were to own to it, for only peace was likely to see Henrietta restored to him — would therefore be Locke’s damnation. It was, he pondered, a rather wretched sort of corollary to the adage of the ill wind.
Next morning
Captain Peto was standing with his clerk on the quarterdeck, dictating letters of presentation to the authorities in Calcutta. He had been minded to address this courtesy for some days now, seeing Nisus’s progress, by the chart, northwards along the coast of Coromandel towards the Bay of Bengal. And yesterday he had known it to be pressing when the crew had seen sea snakes swimming alongside — a sure sign of being in those waters, said his trusty almanack. They were vivid serpents, their sinewy lengths — dark blue with yellow bands — gliding effortlessly at the ship’s side alternately on and just below the surface. Peto had not cared for the sight, and even less when one was netted, and displayed later in a bottle of pickling fluid by an old hand wh
o delighted in collecting such curios. This morning there were no serpents, but they were joined by a pair of squawking parakeets, as appealing to Peto as the snakes had been repulsive, their greens and reds all the more brilliant for the drab contrast of the quarterdeck in whose rigging they now sat whistling and calling. ‘Shall I try an’ catch one, sir?’ asked one of the mates at the wheel, in gentle Devon: ‘’E’d be a ’andsome thing in yome cabin.’
‘No,’ replied Peto, shaking his head; ‘we should only get the one, and then the other would fret. Leave them be.’ And in truth he had no special regard for the thought of the bird’s squawking the while in his quarters. He turned back to his clerk: ‘I shall take it as a propitious omen for our run into Bengal — like Noah’s dove!’
Peto was, indeed, well pleased with the fair winds of late. At the outset of the voyage, as they crossed an uncommonly tranquil Biscay, Nisus had all sail set and, though Peto had chafed at the need (for they could make no more than five knots), Hervey had been pleased at the opportunity it gave for him to learn the sail plan — and he had gained some approval from the crew by his eagerness to visit the tops. By the time they had reached the Cape Verdes the wind had freshened and they had cruised then on, for the most part, without jibs and staysails. On the run southeast to the Cape they had topsails only, and occasionally the foresail, and she had come up past Mauritius and the Maldives on the south-westerlies of the dying monsoon without Peto once needing to set the topgallants.
These were unknown waters for him, however. He had seen the River Plate a year or so after Trafalgar, he had crossed the North Atlantic half a dozen times, and he had regularly patrolled the Azores. But his fighting had been in the Mediterranean. The sultry breezes of the Indian Ocean were as new a pleasure as they were for Hervey. He was mindful, though, of the greater need for caution in the tropics, for the heat of the sun played tricks on sea currents and wind alike. But these breezes held a sensuous promise too, the breath of the Spice Islands — the ‘Islands of Spicerie’, an earlier locution that had fascinated him since first he had seen it, as a captain’s servant more than a decade before, on an old chart. He stood by the rail now, luxuriating in the warmth and the recollection.
‘Do you wish you might be with the East India Squadron for some more definite period?’ asked Hervey, having joined him from a full half-hour’s strapping.
Peto nodded thoughtfully. ‘I should wish to see the great anchorage at Trincomalee: it has no equal, I have heard. And yes, I should welcome a cruise in warm waters. Any seaman would. I should wish to weather a typhoon once in my service. The China Sea’s reckoned the most dangerous in all the oceans — shoals and reefs so steep-to that the sounding line can give no warning of their proximity.’
‘But…?’
Peto sighed. ‘I have no appetite for squadron work, unless I should be commodore. Now that peace is come, advancement will be slow. I shall not see a seventy-four, likely as not. I should as soon take my pleasure under Admiralty letter in a frigate, therefore.’
Hervey would have imagined it thus. Peto, he now knew, was his own man.
* * *
Within the hour the wind was falling unaccountably, and by late morning Nisus had every yard of sail set but could make little steerage way. In the afternoon Peto conceded that they were becalmed and was contemplating the unwelcome prospect of dropping anchor for the night: being in unfamiliar waters, he was doubly wary of drifting closer to the shore than he would wish. And, thus becalmed, her crew were put to making and mending, and a boat was lowered so that Peto might take a closer look at the bottom, for he very much feared that weed was growing, she being overdue for recoppering. By the chart they were but a few miles south of the old French settlement of Pondicherry — Hervey climbed the mainmast for a glimpse of the place whose name had possessed almost magical qualities since his first schoolroom meeting with Robert Clive. But the great fort there remained just a little too distant for his telescope, and so he had to content himself with listening to one of the mates recounting how he had weathered a typhoon in an East Indiaman before the turn of the century.
The long warm hours were a great pleasure for the crew, now able to aerate their hammocks and wash and hang to dry all manner of things without the usual risk of salt spray spoiling their hussifry. Peto was pleased with this contentment, for there were few favours remaining in the purser’s store with which he might reward them, and he had of late been increasingly exercised by the leak below the waterline, as well as, now, by the accumulation of weed. The leak was too near the keel for the carpenters to make good, and several times a day hands were sent below to the pumps. This back-breaking work, in the hot and stuffy conditions below deck, had not made for the happiest of crews before this day’s respite and, with weed as well as a leak, Peto resolved to put his ship into dry dock as soon as they reached Calcutta.
For the rest of the day Nisus lay motionless in the water — at least as far as forward progress was concerned, for by late afternoon it was evident that she had drifted west towards the coast, with now not twenty fathoms beneath her. And so Peto, for the first time since they had left France, ordered that her anchor be dropped for the night. He did so reluctantly, but he had no wish to find himself on a lee shore when dawn came. At about eight-thirty, however, a southeasterly blew up, as if from nowhere, and at once Nisus was a bustle of activity again, hands piped to their stations with an alacrity which would have done them credit had they been beating to quarters. And much to Peto’s satisfaction it was too, for at that time of an evening it was a very fair test of a crew’s handiness to have the best part of half of them turned out from their hammocks or recreation so fast. Hervey had been sponging Jessye down when he felt the first breath of wind, and he began drying her off as the mates’ pipes began shrilling. Yet even in the short time it took him to rub her down the capstan was turning, the muscles of three-score marines and seamen straining at the bars, and the topmen were making ready to loose sail. Nisus was under way in less than a quarter of an hour from Peto’s first order, the breeze freshening throughout that time, so that by nine-fifteen, when at last the captain went to his quarters for some supper, she was making six knots with unreefed topsails and her foresail set. Now very much gratified by the address which all had shown, he lit a cigar, resolved to open his last bottle of malmsey and sent Flowerdew with an invitation for Hervey to join him.
‘Well, Captain Hervey,’ he began, as they each took a chair by the stern windows, Peto looking out at the wake for any sign of increase in their speed, for the evening was still light; ‘we should make Calcutta in ten days if we can count on this wind, and then, I think, our paths must diverge.’
Hervey sipped his malmsey and lit a cheroot. Though he looked forward keenly to release from his confinement, he would nevertheless miss these opportunities for intimacy. ‘Captain Peto, I cannot thank you enough for the kindness you have extended. As I was saying to you only yesterday, the passage has been all ease.’
Peto inclined his head slightly, a gesture of both acknowledgement and pride. But before he could make reply there was a sudden commotion outside, making him sit bolt upright with indignation. ‘What in heaven’s name—’
The door burst open. A midshipman stumbled in, and quite overcome by the surroundings seemed unable to say a word. ‘Fire, sir!’ he shouted suddenly.
Peto was on his feet at once, dousing his cigar in his glass. He raced from his cabin to see smoke billowing from the galley ventilators and long tongues of flame sending sparks into the foresail. He bounded up a companion-ladder to the quarterdeck, roughly pushing aside another midshipman: ‘Hard-a-lee!’ he bellowed.
The officer of the watch had already put the helm over and Nisus was answering to starboard.
‘Beat to quarters, Mr Belben,’ he barked. ‘Close starboard gunports!’
The Marines bugler sounded ‘Alarm’. Firemen, one from each gun, raced to their posts. Gun captains on the weather side slammed closed the gunports (even on an
open deck Peto was not about to risk additional vent). The carpenters were already connecting hoses to the suction pumps. There was — thank heavens, he sighed — enough water to be able to get up force at once rather than having to wait for the seacocks to be opened. The decks were all activity, but perfect order. Nisus had a well-drilled crew. Peto had heard too much as a young midshipman of the explosion aboard the Boyne, and the loss of the first Amphion, ever to take fire drill for granted. Men at their quarters, with the officers under whom they worked in action, were less susceptible to the blind panic which had overtaken the Boyne in its dying moments. He cast his eye about: no sign of panic here, thank God. But why was this fire so fierce? What was fuelling it?
At the alarm the surgeon and his mates took station on the quarterdeck rather than the orlop, and soon they were attending to burns, the Marines sentries at the companionway first satisfying themselves that the wounds were serious enough for prompt attention. The foresail was now well alight but the hoses were at least having some effect in keeping the flames from spreading, dousing as much canvas as the jets could reach, with one playing directly into the galley ventilator. Two lines, one of sailors, the other of marines, were passing buckets to and from the cisterns at the head of the chain pumps by the mainmast. Hervey had gone straight to Jessye’s stall, where Johnson was already trying to calm her, and he got the marines to throw water over the roof and onto the bed. He pulled one of her blankets from the tackling chest, plunged it in her water butt and threw it over her head and shoulders, then pulling out a second, dousing it and throwing that over her back. Even with her head covered, with Hervey and Johnson standing by, and her head collar on, she was almost frantic, for nothing could keep the smoke out of her nostrils, and it was smoke that tokened fire — as she had known more than once in stables in Spain. She reared and struck her head on the roof. She reared a second time and dislodged one of the timbers. Never had Hervey seen her so terrified. He called to the marines, who were reluctant at first to come into the stall until Johnson’s tongue left them no other honourable course. ‘We must get her on her side,’ called Hervey above the din. ‘Johnson, turn her head this way. You men get your shoulders to her flanks and be ready to push when I get her forelegs from under her.’
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