In Distant Waters nd-8

by Richard Woodman

  'I counted seven Russian vessels in the anchorage, sir, a schooner, three brigs, a barque and a ship, sir.'

  'Yes. I saw them last night. They will be expected on the Alaskan coast soon, and now we have arrived, just at the wrong moment for them. Not only have we advertised our presence, but we have destroyed one unit of the Spanish squadron that might have protected their trade.'

  'But it's Russian trade, sir. I mean, are the Dons that interested in protecting it?' asked Fraser, to whom the matter was still confused.

  'I presume they would not want it destroyed,' Drinkwater replied.

  'But the Russians, sir, if they are seeking territory, will become a direct threat to the Spaniards, competing for the same length of coast.' Fraser frowned.

  'Yes. Eventually they might, once our claims of land and our failure to maintain them are dealt with. But, for the meantime, they are allies of expedience. Besides, this could become a matter of national prestige. I imagine the Dons would like their revenge for the loss of Nootka Sound. They only capitulated before because they lost the French monarchy as a support. Now they have Tsar Alexander. I believe they are about to settle the coast between them.'

  'With what force?'

  'The destruction of the Santa Monica does not draw all their teeth, Mr Fraser. Their main Pacific base is at Acapulco, they will have ships at Panama and, from what I heard tonight, there is a garrison at Monterey. I learnt something else tonight, gentlemen, and this is the reason why we have been compromised. The murder, if indeed there has been a murder, is a prevarication, a means to delay us. The Commandatore has agreed to meet me to discuss the return of our men after the murderer has been tried. He has made protestations of not wishing to impugn the honour of our flag after our courtesy to our prisoners. In the same breath he is talking of our breaking the terms of the truce, of referring to Monterey for instructions… in short, any damned obstruction that will delay us while we are enmeshed in some specious diplomatic tangle.'

  'But sir, they have no force to keep us here!' expostulated Fraser. 'We can tow out from their guns in a couple of hours and those toy brigs wouldn't knock the marines' shakoes off.'

  'You are correct in your specific, but not your diagnosis. We can tow out, Mr Fraser, but we may well meet a line-of-battle-ship coming in.'

  'We can outmanoeuvre a Spanish battle-ship, sir,' said Fraser almost flippantly.

  'She will be Russian, Mr Fraser, we saw her off Cape Horn and by the certainty with which our friends ashore are behaving, I believe her arrival imminent.'

  'Do we tow out, sir?' Quilhampton asked, that inchoate sense of foreboding closing round him again. He had found its first physical manifestation at Mas-a-Fuera and the second had dotted him with the spittle of hostile Spaniards, half-castes and Indians. Now every moment of delay increased its intensity.

  'Yes, make your preparations. Let us slip our cable and use the fog to make a virtue of necessity. In an hour then…'

  They left him, scuttling out to pass word to the watch and turn out those sleeping below and at the guns. They would all be ragged-nerved and foul-tempered by the time they had laboured at the oars of the boats and dragged Patrician's inert mass clear of the bay. He would have to be patient with them and watch for outbursts of disaffection. In the meantime he would have to wait. He could not sleep, although he was haggard with exhaustion. An hour's sleep would make him feel worse than none at all. He poured the last of the bual into his glass and went on an impulse to his sea-chest. Rummaging in the bottom he drew out a frayed roll of canvas. Spreading it on the table he looked down at it. It was the portrait of a woman painted long ago by the French Republican artist Jacques Louis David. In addition to the frayed edges and cracked paintwork, little circles of mould were forming on the canvas, perverting the purity of the colours, and there were three holes, where the tines of a fork had once pierced it.

  Hortense Santhonax stared back at him from cool grey eyes. Beneath the studied negligence of her pearl-wound and piled auburn hair, her lovely face held a hint of a smile. He remembered her, years ago, almost as long ago as the Spanish outrage at Nootka Sound, before she married Edouard Santhonax and espoused the Bonapartist cause. She had been a frightened emigree then, Hortense de Montholon, running from the vengeful howl of the pursuing mob, to be rescued by an impoverished master's mate named Nathaniel Drinkwater.* (* See A King's Cutter.)

  He had been half in love with her then, before she turned her coat and married his enemy.

  He had killed Edouard Santhonax less than a year previously, killed him to preserve the secret he had brought out of Russia. He had widowed her in the line of duty. Or had he and why did he stare at her portrait now? The bare shoulders and the soft breasts were barely concealed by the wisp of gauze artfully placed by the skilled hand of a seductress. She was already rumoured to be the mistress of Talleyrand, a fading beauty he supposed. It made no sense to be subject to so compelling an urge as had driven him to remove her portrait from the obscurity of his sea-chest.

  Except that she was providence, an ikon, presentient as his dream and an impulse to be obeyed in those rare moments of hiatus when his tired mind was in revolt. An ikon: an apt simile. He was unable to shake off that old superstition of his destiny. She had become the embodiment of the spirit of France, inhabiting the subconscious recesses of his imagination and marrying the man whose fate had become inextricably bound up with his own. The dice had fallen his way last, it had not always been thus as his wrecked shoulder testified; but he was not yet free of Santhonax's ghost. The secret from Russia still haunted him, even here in the Pacific.

  'Witchcraft,' he muttered and let the margin of the canvas go. It coiled itself like a spring and he looked up to see the faithful, pale oval of Elizabeth's portrait staring at him from its frame. 'Witchcraft,' he repeated and, hiding the canvas again, he drew on his cloak and went on deck.

  In some strange way he felt relieved by the power the portrait of Hortense possessed. There was a reassuring quality of normality about it: a familiar neurosis. He had not been too much overcome by the beauty of Ana Maria.

  Chapter Nine

  The Leak

  April 1808

  'If you wish to say something, Tregembo, for God's sake say it and stop fiddling with those damned pistols!' Drinkwater snapped irritably. Mullender's duster and Tregembo's fidgeting had driven him on deck where a sleeting rain had turned him below again. Patrician bucked to the onset of the rain-bearing squall and gusts of cold, damp air rattled in through the sashes of the stern windows.

  'You'll be needing 'em 'fore long zur, if I ain't mistaken,' Tregembo growled.

  'The pistols? Would to God I needed 'em instanter! That damned convoy should have appeared by now…'

  'I didn't mean for that, zur…'

  'Eh?' Drinkwater frowned, looking at his coxswain with sudden attention. 'What the devil did you mean then?'

  Tregembo laid the pistol down in its box and waited until Mullender had gone into the pantry. His old face, lined and scarred as it was, bore every indication of concern. 'Zur…' The door to the tiny pantry stood open behind him. Drinkwater crossed the cabin and closed it. 'Well?'

  'The people, zur… you know they're disaffected… 'tis common enough upon a long commission an' they mean no harm to you, zur… but…'

  'Spit it out, Tregembo, I'm in no mood for puzzlements.'

  'For God's sake, Tregembo, those men deserted…' Drinkwater sat and stared gloomily at the old Cornishman.

  'There are stories of women, zur… the boats' crews saw women ashore, an' there are grog shops a-plenty… those merchant-seamen were three sheets to the wind, they'm saying… they be powerful reasons for making a man run, zur.'

  Drinkwater nodded. 'I know all this, Tregembo… why tell me now?'

  'Because it won't be single men, zur. Next time it'll be a boat's crew, zur, an' the word, as I hear it, is to hell with the officers…'

  There was a peremptory knock at the cabin door. Instantly Tregembo
turned away, picked up the pistol case, shut it and slid it into its stowage in the locker.

  'Come!'

  It was Fraser. He was followed by the elderly Mr Marsden, a wizened and wrinkled man skirted with a leather apron which hid bandy legs but revealed a powerful torso, muscular arms and hands of immense size. The sudden irruption of the first lieutenant and the carpenter into Drinkwater's cabin indicated something serious had happened.

  'Begging your pardon, sir, but Mr Marsden has just made an urgent report to me concerning water in the wells.'

  Drinkwater looked sharply at the carpenter. 'Well, Mr Marsden?'

  'Three feet, sir, in two hours, and making fast.'

  'When were the wells last pumped? At the change of the watch?'

  'Yes, sir, an' nothink much in 'em bar what you'd expect.'

  'Something adrift below, then?'

  Marsden nodded. 'Seems likely, sir.'

  'Any idea what?'

  'No, sir…'.

  'No shot holes…'

  'Not that I can see, sir… 'sides we engaged that Spaniard wi' the larboard broadside…'

  'Aye, and now we're on the larboard tack! Mr Fraser, put the ship about on the instant! Mr Marsden, pump the wells dry, let's see if the other tack makes any difference.' He rose, perversely relieved in the need for action, potentially disastrous though the news was. For the ship suddenly to make so much water could be due to any one of a hundred reasons, none of them easy to determine, let alone overcome. 'Come, gentlemen, let us be about our business!'

  Grabbing hat and cloak Drinkwater hustled Fraser and the carpenter out of his cabin and followed them on deck. Alone in the cabin Tregembo watched the surge of the smooth wake as it rose, bubbling green from Patrician's transom. A long-tailed Bosun-bird slid across his field of view, quartering the wake for prey. 'Don't you forget what I told 'ee,' he muttered after Drinkwater.

  On deck the watch were running to their stations to tack ship. Drinkwater took no part in the manoeuvre, instead he fished in the tail-pocket of his coat for his glass then levelled it to the eastward.

  Banks of slate-coloured clouds rolled to leeward dragging dull curtains of rain behind them, blotting out sections of the faint blue line of the coastal mountains of California. From one such shroud the low line of Punta de los Reyes was emerging. Patrician had spent nine days keeping station off the point round which any convoy from San Francisco must pass on its way to the Alaskan settlements of the Tsar. They had kept well to seaward of the long, low arm of sand-dunes and marram grass, lurking out of sight to avoid either of those two man-of-war brigs that might be sent to see if the coast was clear. Even allowing a week for the tardiest merchant ship to complete her lading, it would be reasonable, Drinkwater argued to himself, for them to have intercepted some trading vessels moving north by now.

  Patrician jibbed up into the wind and the foreyards were swung on the word of command.

  Unless, Drinkwater mused, those merchantmen were waiting for something more puissant than a pair of brigs; something like a Russian line-of-battle-ship! Not for the first time Drinkwater cursed the brevity of his aptly-styled briefing from the Admiralty. Again he felt that sense of abandonment by Lord Dungarth, the very man from whom he would have expected the most comprehensive elucidation of the state of affairs in the Pacific. He knew his orders originated from British spies in the Russian service, agents whose access to the most secret intentions of the Tsar had been preserved at a prodigious cost, as Drinkwater had good reason to know.

  Supposing, he reasoned, he had been utterly mistaken in that glimpse of another man-of-war off Cape Horn. Suppose that brief spectral image had magnified itself in his imagination and the vessel had been, at worst, a Spaniard. He knew that the Russian-American Company, under whose auspices Russian ships traded down the coast from Alaska, had armed vessels at their disposal. He knew, too, that at least one frigate had been built on the Pacific coast of North America for the purpose of reinforcing Russian claims upon the shores of what Drake, Cook, and now the Admiralty, were pleased to call 'New Albion'.

  Patrician forged ahead, gathering increasing way on the new tack. The hands were busy coiling the braces on the pins and on the fo'c's'le the weather fore-tack was hauled down to the bowing bumpkin. Shafts of sunlight fanned down through the clouds, dappling the surface of the sea with brilliant patches of dancing water. Off on the quarter a school of dolphins abandoned the chase of a shoal of bonito and gambolled in their tumbling wake. Neither the brightening weather nor the appearance of the cetaceans lightened Drinkwater's gloom. All his ponderous considerations were of little consequence now. Marsden's report postponed them indefinitely. The leak and its cause superseded all other matters and it did not help his temper to realise that the trap he had baited by towing out of San Francisco Bay would now be useless. His nearest dockyard was in the West Indies with the Horn to double to get there. He had only one course of action open to him: Hobson's choice of a careenage.

  'Well?'

  As Marsden came aft Drinkwater stopped at the after end of the starboard gangway, his cloak flapping round him in the wind, his hands clasped behind his back. The carpenter's face was still clouded by concern.

  'She's still makin' water, sir… perhaps a little less, but 'tis bad enough, sir.'

  'Damn! Very well, Mr Marsden, very well. I'll be below myself shortly. Mr Fraser!'

  'Aye, sir?'

  'Steer east-nor'-east and fetch me the coast directly.'

  Below the waterline the hull was a vast stygian cavern of noise. He followed Marsden and his two mates with their lanterns guttering in the stale, mephitic air, trying to shut out the natural noises of the creaking and groaning space to hear those unnatural sounds the better. It was a hopeless task, one that he was less qualified than Marsden to execute, yet one which demanded his attention. How far below the waterline was this leak? Any remedial action he took depended upon some rough location. To careen Patrician properly would render her utterly defenceless should she be taken by surprise, for all her guns and stores would have to come out of her and be safely landed. Drinkwater had himself led an attack on a French frigate in such a supine state, and carried her safely out to sea from her bolt-hole on the Red Sea coast of Arabia. To be served himself in similar fashion, dished-up to an enemy without the chance of defending himself sent worms of apprehension crawling about his belly. But he had to know the worst and he stumbled along the carpenter's walk, a narrow space maintained free of stores just inside the ship's skin, by which access was provided to plug shot-holes and maintain the water-tight integrity of the ship.

  'Mind, sir, this grating be a bit loose…'

  'Yes, thank you…'

  In the yellow pools of lamp-light he could see the ship's inner skin, discoloured with the traces of mould. The thick air was heavy with the multiple smells of this great warehouse of the cruiser's wants. Here powder and shot were stored in magazines and lockers; locked store-rooms housed spirits and flour, fish and dried peas. Tier upon tier of barrels, stowed bung up and bilge-free, held the potable sweet-water; casks of dubious age contained the salt-pork and cheese provided by a munificent Victualling Board; the oats and dried fruit, the wood-store and oil-room, all fitted below the waterline, above, abaft or forward of the hold proper. The platformed section of the orlop along which they worked their way showed no ingress of water. Amid the creaks and groans of the ship's timbers, the slosh of bilge-water and the hiss of the sea beyond the inner and outer wales and the massive futtocks, they strained their ears for sound of a roar, a spurt, even a trickle of incoming water. But all they could make out above the working of the ship was the squeal of disturbed rats.

  Drinkwater escaped to the upper deck, scanning the horizon and again finding the sea bereft of any sign of a ship. A mile to leeward a whale fluked, slapping the water with its gigantic tail before sliding into the depths of the ocean. Somehow that brief appearance of leviathan only served to emphasise the emptiness of the scene.

  Slowly P
atrician approached the coast; the yellow line of Punta de los Reyes spread across the horizon ahead, the clouds hanging over the coastal mountains fused into mist and falling rain. Drinkwater crossed the deck to where Fraser, his odd, sandy features wearing a comic expression that bespoke his anxiety, waited to hear what Drinkwater had to say with as much patience as he could muster.

  'Hae ye any luck, sir?'

  'Little enough, Mr Fraser.'

  'No, I couldna find anything either. I thought it might be the hood-ends…'

  Drinkwater considered the suggestion. The hood-ends were where the butt ends of the strakes, or planks, met the timbering of the stem. Here, the constant working of the sea round the bow could disturb the fastenings and loosen the planks. Leaking about the stem was very difficult to determine at sea and was increased by the ship continuing to make headway.

  'That's an informed guess, Mr Fraser. Whatever the cause we cannot ignore the matter. I intend to get the ship into sheltered water and lighten her. We may have to careen, which will mean the devil of a lot of labour. Whatever expedient we are driven to we'll require a boat guard. If there is a Russian battle-ship in the offing we had better lie low. God help us if we are caught.'

  'Amen to that, sir.'

  'For heaven's sake it'll be like being caught in a whore-house on Judgement Day… begging your pardon, Mr Henderson.'

  'I appreciate the strength of your metaphor, Mr Mylchrist, and deduce therefrom that we can expect an exceedingly great wrath to descend upon us should the event come to pass.'

  'Well, we can't ignore the matter. Three feet in the well ain't a lot, but it came in damned quick and I think something fell out, a trenail, perhaps,' said Quilhampton, leaning on the wardroom table, his head in his hands, 'that's the only logical explanation.'