'Shall we run then?' Derrick suggested querulously.
'Is that a Russkie?' asked one of the seamen, coming up to the two men while behind him the remainder stood and stared despairingly to leeward. Marsden looked at first Blixoe and then Derrick. He was not given to quick thinking.
'Run? Where to?'
'Anywhere… we're faster than a brig, can sail closer to the wind…'
Marsden looked at the Quaker with something akin to respect. 'I suppose running ain't fighting,' he said, rubbing his chin and considering the matter.
'Of course we'll run' snapped the seaman, shouting for them to start the headsail sheets and cast loose the lashings on the helm.
'Wait!' Derrick was staring through the telescope. 'I'd swear that was Mr Quilhampton on the knightheads…'
'Seems a shame, zur, to burn a prize like that,' Tregembo muttered, watching Quilhampton's firing party at work and the flames take hold of the brig.
'She stank near as bad as you when you emerged out of that swine-midden,' remarked Drinkwater. 'I have never seen so slovenly maintained a ship.'
'You damned near had me finished with all that shouting,' said Tregembo.
'That's as maybe, Tregembo. Would you have had me abandon you? By God, Susan would never have let me forget it…'
They smiled at each other relieved, both aware that they had enjoyed a lucky escape. They withdrew from the stern window of the schooner, Drinkwater to pour himself a glass of the Spanish commander's excellent oloroso, Tregembo to fuss the elegant little cabin into something more befitting a British naval captain. The stink of smoke came in and Drinkwater waited for Quilhampton's party to get aboard. A moment or two later Quilhampton knocked on the door. He entered, grimy but smiling. He held out a rolled chart.
'A glass, James, you've earned it… what d' you have there?'
'The answer to the riddle, sir… yes, thank you.' Quilhampton took the glass from Tregembo, who gave him an old-fashioned, sideways look.
'How did they behave?' asked Drinkwater, unrolling the chart and staring at it.
'The men, sir?'
'Yes.'
'Like lambs, all eagerness to please. Never seen a firing party so eager to destroy a prize, couldn't do enough for me… would have burnt the damn thing twice over if it'd been a fit plea for mitigation…'
Drinkwater looked up from the chart and eyed the lieutenant speculatively. 'You think it should be, James?'
'We've little choice, sir. In any case, they outnumber us and I'm not sure about the men that were with me. It was only circumstances and self-preservation that kept us together… Marsden's all right, Derrick's a canting neutral and I suppose we can rely on old Tregembo…'
'Less of the "old", Mr Quilhampton, zur, if you please,' growled the Cornishman.
Quilhampton grinned and downed his glass, winking at Drinkwater.
'Let's hope they all appreciate which side their bread's buttered on now,' said Drinkwater, finishing his own glass, 'even so, I'll have to read 'em the riot act.'
'I'll muster them, then, sir.'
'Yes, if you please, and try not to look so damned pleased with yourself.'
'I think you'll find something to smile about, sir, if you study that chart.'
'Why?'
'I think it shows us where we may find Patrician.'
Drinkwater looked down at the chart with its unfamiliar script and mixture of incomprehensible Russian characters and French names favoured by more aristocratic hydrographers. 'Anyway,' went on Quilhampton, pausing by the cabin door, 'I'm uncommon pleased to be given a fighting chance again.'
'Yes,' agreed Drinkwater, 'it was quite a turn up for the books, eh?'
'Well, "fortune favours the brave", sir,' Quilhampton remarked sententiously.
'I think,' replied Drinkwater drily, 'that last night, fortune was merely inclined to favour the least incompetent.'
Quilhampton left with a chuckle, but Drinkwater exchanged a glance with Tregembo.
'I'll let 'ee know if I hear anything, zur, have no fear o' that.'
'Very well, Tregembo,' Drinkwater nodded, 'only I've a notion to set eyes on my family again.'
'You ain't the only one, zur.'
Drinkwater poured himself a second glass of the oloroso and, while he waited for the men to be mustered on deck, he studied the chart. The brig's Russian master was an untidy navigator; the erasure of her track was imperfectly carried out. It was quite obvious that Captain Rakitin had a nearer rendezvous than Sitka and, studying the features of the inlet, it was the very place he himself would have chosen to hide a prize. Delighted, he tossed off the glass and composed his features. He was going to have to scold the men, but by all accounts they had quite a tale to tell.
Quilhampton gathered the details, noting them down on a page torn from the schooner's log-book. The men who had absconded from Drake's Bay had found the same village that Quilhampton had been driven from and met the same reception from its inhabitants. Although a body of opinion sought revenge on the local peons, wiser councils prevailed and the deserters moved further inland, reducing the chances of being retaken by any parties sent out by Drinkwater. For a day or two they remained together until they reached the great sequoia woods where game, water and freedom had split them into groups and they had lost their discipline. For a few days they wandered happily about and then one party found an Indian village. Their attempt to establish friendly relations with the native women met a hostile rebuttal. Another party roamed into a Franciscan mission and were driven off by angry mestizos who had been told they were devils. Within a week the country was raised against them and several were killed or left to the mercies of the natives as the manhunt spread. Eventually twenty-two of them found themselves rounded up and turned over to a strange, English-speaking man in fringed buckskins whom the local people held in some awe.
To the British deserters he promised, with complicit winks and other indications of racial superiority, that if they played along, he would accomplish their rescue. There were prolonged parleys, exchanges of some form of gifts or money and then they were led off on the promise of good behaviour, by the mountain-man whom they knew by the obvious alias of 'Captain Mack'. Since the alternative was inevitable death at the hands of either Indians, half-caste Spanish or the tender ministrations of what they thought was the Inquisition, they shambled off in the wake of their rescuer.
After a march of three days, Captain Mack led them down to the sea, on the shores of Bodega Bay where, to their astonishment, they found soldiers who spoke a language they could not understand, but was clearly not Spanish. It did not take them long to find out that they had unwittingly become the serfs of the Russian-American Company, and that they were to be shipped in one of the filthy brigs that lay in the bay to the Company's more secure post on the Columbia River. Captain Mack had gone with them to strike his bargain with the commandant there, and had been waiting to return to the mountain forests of California when Drinkwater had arrived in the schooner. As for the men, they were to be employed refitting or serving in Russian ships in the Pacific.
'The hands are mustered, Captain.'
Drinkwater came out of his reverie to find Derrick confronting him. 'Eh? Oh, thank you, Derrick. I shall be up directly.'
There was something piratical about the assembly amidships. Whether it was the lean, dishevelled and indisciplined appearance of the men, or whether the character of the schooner under its false colours, or simply the crawling uncertainty that nagged at Drinkwater that contributed to this impression, he was not sure as they stared back at him. Despite his titular right to lead them, his tenure of command had never rested on such insubstantial foundations. Among the men confronting him were almost certainly those who had attempted to sabotage the Patrician.
'Very well,' he began, silencing them and studying their faces for traces of guilt, defiance, insolence or contrition. 'Fate has literally cast us in the same boat…' he slapped the rail beside him, 'and I intend to discover the wherea
bouts of the Patrician and free our shipmates from the kind of bestial treatment some of you have just subjected yourselves to. Make no mistake about it, there are worse forms of existence than service in the King's Navy.' He paused, to let the point sink in.
'I can offer you little beyond hardship and the possibility of retaking our ship from the Russians, clearing our name as a company and destroying our enemies.'
He paused again, clambering up on the carriage of a 6-pounder. 'Well, what d'you say? Are you for or against? Do we keep that rag aloft,' he pointed up at the red and gold ensign of Spain still at the main peak, 'or are we going to take this little hooker into Plymouth to be condemned as a prize to Patrician?'
There was a second's hesitation and then they were yelling stupidly and throwing their arms in the air in acclamation. Drinkwater got down from the gun carriage.
'Very well, Mr Q. Lay me a course of nor'-nor'-west. Happily their experiences as subjects of the Tsar have taught them that there are degrees even of injustice.'
Chapter Nineteen
The Trojan Horse
July-August 1808
Drinkwater tapped the dividers on the chart and looked up, gauging his prisoner.
Vasili Zhdanov, one of the three men captured with the Russian brig, spoke English of a kind, having been in attendance upon his one-time master when that worthy had served as an officer with the Anglophile Seniavin. However, Zhdanov had been caught stealing and after a sound whipping had been sold to the Russian-American Company, so that he had found a kind of life as seaman in one of the company's trading brigs. Now the reek of him, and particularly of his Makhorka tobacco, filled the cabin.
'How do you know that the British ship Patrician is here?' Drinkwater pointed to the bay which lay far to the northward, on the south coast of distant Alaska. There were a thousand anchorages amid the archipelagos of islands that extended northwards from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, not least that of Nootka Sound, but this remote spot…
'I see… she come… Suvorov come…' replied Zhdanov, haltingly.
'Who is captain of Suvorov?'
'Barin Vladimir Rakitin…'
'How many guns?'
Zhdanov shrugged; he was clearly not numerate. 'Do you wish to serve King George of Great Britain?'
'I fight with Royal Navy,' Zhdanov said with some dignity, but whether he referred to Drinkwater's proposed change of allegiance or to his own past history he was unable to make clear. Drinkwater looked up at Quilhampton.
'Split the three of them up, try and make them understand they can join us and swear 'em in. If they protest, you'll have to put 'em back in the bilboes…'
'Aye, aye, sir.' Quilhampton led the Russian out. Drinkwater opened a stern window to clear the air. The man reminded him of a strange cross between a feral animal like a bear, and a child. Yet there was something impressive about him, reminding Drinkwater of those vast numbers of such men he had seen encamped about the Lithuanian town of Tilsit a year earlier. Like patient beasts they had awaited their fates with an equanimity that struck him as stoic. Zhdanov had responded to his own autocratic proposal with the simple obedience that made the Tsar's armies almost invincible.
He looked again at the chart. There was logic in secreting a ship in such a place. It was well-surveyed, compared with the adjacent coast, a strange opening into the surrounding mountains, like a fiord except that its entrance, instead of being open, was almost closed off by rocky promontories. Between them, Drinkwater guessed, the tide would rip with considerable ferocity.
Inside, the fiord was deep, a single steep islet rising in its middle, beyond which there was a sudden, abrupt bifurcation, the bay's arms swinging north and south and terminating in glaciers. If Vasili Zhdanov was right, somewhere within those enclosing pincers of promontories lay Patrician.
Drinkwater opened the dividers and stepped off the distance, laying the steel points of the instrument against the latitude scale; more than a thousand miles lay between their present position and the lone bay which nestled under the massive shoulder of Mount Elias and the great Alaskan Range. He stared unseeing from the stern windows. So much depended upon their success. Where were Fraser, and Frey, the punctilious Mount or Midshipman Wickham? Were they prisoners aboard their own ship, or had they been held at San Francisco?
If providence granted success to this venture, he would return thither and force those corrupt time-servers, the Arguello brothers, to release his men. And force some measure of expiation out of that dishonourable dog, Rubalcava!
He felt his pulse beat with the mere thought of revenge and a wave of anger swept over him as he recalled the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Prince Vladimir Rakitin.
If, if only providence had turned her face upon him again, he might yet do something to retrieve the ragged flag of honour.
No matter how assiduously one studied a chart, the reality never quite conformed to the imagination. Assessment of the present landscape had not been helped by the unfamiliar topographical terms Zaliu, Mys or Bukhta rendered incomprehensible by the Cyrillic script. Neither was Drinkwater's familiarity with French sufficiently proficient to determine whether it was La Perouse or the Russian Kruzenstern who had named the places on the chart. What impressed him was the quality of the thing, manufactured as it had been half a world away in the Russian hydrographic office in St Petersburg.
He raised the glass again and raked the shore, seeking the narrow, half-hidden entrance and avoiding the scenic seductions of the mountain range that seemed to beetle down upon the littoral. It was stunningly magnificent, this chain of mighty peaks, shining with the sunlit glitter of permanent ice, like the nunataks of Greenland. And then he saw her, the black tracery sharp in the crisp, cool air which sharpened every image with more intensity than the most cunningly wrought lens. He knew instantly that the ship anchored beyond the low headland was indeed Patrician.
He shut his glass with a snap. 'Hoist Spanish colours, if you please, and call all hands to their stations.'
He had assumed the worst and formed his ruse accordingly. Patrician, he theorised, would be well manned by the enemy, despite his inclination to believe the contrary due to her remote location. Her own people would have been removed in San Francisco, so there would be no spontaneous rising to assist; art and cunning must, therefore, be his chief weapons. He sent below for the Spanish uniforms and saw to his side-arms long before the approach to the entrance. When he was ready he turned the Virgen de la Bonanza to the north-east and, ascending to the foretop, spied out the narrow strait between the guardian headlands. From that elevation he saw at once why the entrance was so difficult to locate from the deck. The island, which he knew lay within the bay, lay directly upon the line of sight when peering through the gap, so appearing to form one continuous coastline. Turning, he called down to Quilhampton by the helm, the course was altered and the bowsprit below him swung towards the narrows.
The schooner heeled, turning to larboard and bringing the wind fine on that bow and Drinkwater, surveying the entrance from his perch, felt the fine thrum of wind through the stays and the halliards that ran past him. The water ran suspiciously smooth in the gut, with darker corrugations rippling out from either side, corrugations which tore off into whorls and rips of gyrating turbulence, where unseen rocks or sudden treacherous shifts of current manipulated the violent motion of an ebbing tide.
'Deck there!'
'Sir?' Quilhampton looked aloft.
'I want a steady hand on the helm… there's a deal of broken water ahead…'
'Aye, aye, zur.'
Drinkwater smiled as Tregembo took the helm and then turned his attention to the narrows again. Their progress was becoming slower, as they felt the increasing opposition of the tide. The schooner crabbed sideways under its influence, unable to point closer to the wind. Drinkwater bestowed a quick glance at the anchored ship.
She was alone, alone beneath those great slabs of mountains which lifted into the heavens behind her, their snow ca
ps sliding into scree and talus, tussocked grass and low, stunted trees which, on the lower ground that fringed the fiord, changed to a dark, impenetrable mantle of firs. And she was most certainly the Patrician.
'Steady there…'
He felt the schooner lurch and looked below to see Tregembo anticipate the tide-rip's attempt to throw the vessel's head into the wind. The sea was slick with the speed of the tide, almost uninfluenced by the effect of the breeze as it rushed out into the ocean beyond the confines of the bay. Those dark corrugations resolved themselves into standing waves, foaming with energy as the mass of water forced itself out of the bay so that the schooner slowed, stood still and began to slip astern.
The heads of curious seals, impervious to the viciously running ebb, popped out of the grey water to stare like curious, ear-less dogs, their pinched nostrils flaring and closing in exaggerated expressions of outrage at the intrusion.
For an hour they hung, suspended in this fashion until, almost suddenly, the tide slacked, relented and the power of the wind in their sails drove them forwards again. The low roar of the rush of water eased, the corrugations, the rips and eddies diminished and slowly disappeared. For a while the strait was one continuous glossy surface of still water, and then they were through, brought by this curious diminishing climax into sudden proximity with their quarry.
'And now,' said Drinkwater regaining the deck, 'we must play at a Trojan Horse.'
'After Scylla and Charybdis 'twill be little enough, sir,' remarked Quilhampton with unbecoming cheerfulness.
'Belay the classical allusions, Mr Q,' snapped Drinkwater, suddenly irritated, 'belay the loud-mouthed English and lower the boat, then you may carry out your instructions and fire that salute…'
The bunting of the Spanish ensign tickled Drinkwater's ear as he was rowed across the dark waters of the inlet towards the Patrician. The schooner's boat, hoisted normally under her stern, was smaller than the cutter they had lost in the Columbia River. But he hoped his approach was impressive enough and he was aware, from a flash of reflected light, that he was being scrutinised through a glass by one of the half-dozen men he could see on his own quarterdeck.
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