Adam watched him. “I’m listening.”
Richie looked at Martin as if to gain his support. “She was already run ashore, sir, in the Gulf of Guinea it was. There was a terrible blow o’ wind and we lost some of our canvas before we could claw clear!”
“Why did you call your captain a coward? Was it because he did not stand up for you when we boarded Eaglet? ”
Richie looked at his leg-irons as if shocked at what he saw.
“He wouldn’t go to the schooner’s rescue. Some of ’er people had managed to get ashore—not many, I think. We didn’t know she were a man-o’-war at that time. The men who managed to reach the beach were set upon by natives. Hacked ’em to pieces. Even above the wind we could hear ’em screamin’!” He gave a great shudder. “Probably thought she was a bloody blackbirder!”
Adam reached down and gripped the cutlass, the new short-bladed one which Dunwoody had helped load into the ill-fated schooner. Richie stared at it dully. “We picked up just the one man, sir. He’d gone outboard when the vessel struck. I went over the side after him even though the Cap’n was shoutin’ for me to stop! He was afraid he’d follow the schooner on to the beach!”
Adam found time to wonder how many of Anemone ’s company could swim. Very few probably.
He looked at the cutlass. The man could be lying. Some of the others from Eaglet might confirm or refute his story. But that would take too long. They might never know now.
Richie said thickly, “The man lived for an hour or so. It was then that we knew she was a King’s ship. He was a seaman, like I was once.” He sounded beaten, as if he had already seen the sentence of death.
“Where you got those scars on your back? A striped shirt at the gangway?”
“Yessir.”
Adam stood up and crossed to the cabinet again. He could feel the man’s eyes following every move, as if he expected to be taunted, despised.
He said slowly, “You know this island of Lorraine, Richie.” He saw him watching the cognac as it mounted the side of the glass while the deck went down again. “You’ve visited it many times?”
“Once, sir. Just the once.”
Adam glanced at Martin’s anxious face. “Once.” He held out the glass. “Get this into you, man.”
Richie almost choked on it and did not stop until it was empty.
Adam said, “This is not a game of cards, Richie. My ship and your life are too high for mere stakes. You deserted from the navy?” He saw him give a despairing nod. “Helping the enemy, being in possession of a cutlass which may or may not have come your way by accident.” He poured some more cognac. “Not just a hanging, is it?” He forced himself to add, “Have you ever seen a flogging through the fleet? The rope is a relief after that!” He said sharply so that even Martin jumped, “What ship were you in? And I want the truth.”
Richie’s red-rimmed eyes looked down. “Last one was the Linnet, sloop-of-war. I was a maintopman, sir. I ran from her, I couldn’t take no more of it.”
Adam watched him. The man’s scars spoke for themselves. Perhaps he deserved them. He held his breath as the man lifted his chin and looked him straight in the eyes. It was like seeing somebody else.
He said quietly, “Afore that I was in the old Superb, sir. Cap’n Keats. Now there was a man.”
Adam glanced at Martin. “Yes, I know.”
Feet moved overhead and somebody laughed. Adam looked around the cabin, soon to be stripped and laid bare like the rest of the ship. Ready for battle, and battle there was going to be. He knew it: could feel it like a sickness. And yet someone had laughed. It was Christmas.
He said, “Will you trust me, Richie, as you once did Captain Keats? I promise I will do my best for you afterwards.” The word seemed to hang in the air.
The man looked at him gravely. He seemed stronger because of it, and not merely because of a promise that might not be honoured.
“Yes, sir.” He nodded slowly, then asked, “The irons, sir?”
Adam looked at Martin. He probably thinks me insane. “Have them struck off.”
The escort re-entered and Richie was led away.
Did I do right to trust him? But all he said was, “Leave me, Aubrey.” As Martin turned to go he added, “I shall see you at dawn.”
As the door was closed he sat and looked at the empty chair. It was strange to accept that he knew more about the man called Richie than he did about most of his ship’s company.
He was surging forward through the darkness on the word of a deserter, reliant upon the skills of seamen many of whom had never set foot aboard ship until the press-gangs had dragged them from their streets and farms. It was little enough.
He was surprised that he could feel no misgivings or doubts. They were committed. I have committed them.
He dragged some paper on to his table and after a moment began to write.
My dear Zenoria. On this Christmas day 1809 we are sailing into a battle. I know not what outcome we may expect, but my heart is brave because of you . . .
He stood up and crushed the paper into a ball before pushing it out of the quarter window.
An hour later he climbed to the quarterdeck and saw them watching him. His shirt was clean, and in the gloom his breeches and stockings were like snow.
To the deck at large he said, “May Christmas be good to us all!” He turned to the first lieutenant, “Send the hands to breakfast early and tell the purser I am expecting some generosity from his stores!”
A few of them laughed. Adam peered at the horizon, or where it should be.
“I shall go around the ship, Aubrey.” He snapped his mind shut to the letter that she would never see. “Then you may beat to quarters and clear for action!”
The cards were down.
“Ship cleared for action, sir.” Martin watched his captain standing by the tightly packed hammock nettings.
“Very well.” Adam stared up at the sky. It was paler now, and the sea’s face was showing itself beyond the bows, with the occasional hump of an unending roller lifting the deck very slightly before passing away into the remaining shadows.
Faces took on shapes and identities: the men at the nearest eighteen-pounders already stripped to the waist, the gun captains and older hands quietly explaining the workings of their particular division, as if all the others were unimportant.
Lieutenant Baldwin’s marines were settling into place at the nettings, while others were already aloft in the fighting-tops, ready to shoot down on an enemy with their muskets or the deadly swivel-guns mounted on each barricade. Almost everybody would soon be visible except for two men in the sickbay who were too ill even to work the pumps if required.
The marines’ coats looked very dark in the poor light. It seemed quiet, unusual not to hear Sergeant Deacon’s rasping voice chasing them, making certain that nothing was amiss.
Old Partridge glanced suspiciously at the released prisoner, Richie, who was standing beside the captain’s coxswain.
Adam knew the sailing-master did not approve but had decided to ignore him. It was little enough, perhaps all they had. Jorston, a master’s mate due for promotion, was up in the crosstrees with a telescope, although his instinct, his sailor’s cunning, was far more valuable.
It was getting brighter much faster now, and Adam saw several seamen at their guns peeking out to see what was happening.
He searched his mind for last-minute faults, or obstacles he had overlooked. But his thoughts were empty now; his limbs felt loose and relaxed. It had often been like that for him before a sea-fight.
He almost smiled. How they would all laugh if there was no enemy ship here, or they found only some innocent trader who had put in for repairs. Unlikely, he told himself. Mauritius was only a day’s sailing away for an average vessel. He thought of the powerful Unity. Beer would be very wary of risking her in such a dangerous place.
He saw Partridge murmuring with his other master’s mate, Bond. They looked like a pair of conspirators.
“Rowlatt, sir.”
A face came into Adam’s mind. Another one who had been aboard since the beginning.
“Good man.”
He crossed to the chart-table, which Partridge had brought up from below, and beckoned to Richie. “Show me again.”
The tall bosun leaned over the chart and touched it gingerly with his finger.
“It looks about right, sir. The lagoon is on the sou’-eastern corner, an’ the reef runs out for about two miles. The other side of the entrance has more rocks.” Surprisingly, he looked up at the great red ensign streaming from the gaff.
A true seaman, Adam thought. To sail clear of the long reef would mean that he would have to tack repeatedly to enter the lagoon, which appeared to be shaped like a great flask. Richie had not been studying the flag itself but was gauging the wind that was lifting it towards the mizzen-mast. It would be easier for any ship to quit the lagoon with the south-westerly wind holding so steady. To tack back and forth to get inside would be a lengthy, not to say hazardous, business.
He looked at Richie’s strong profile. A man with a history, but there was no time to think about that.
He asked sharply, “On this course you say we could pass through the reef with barely a change of tack?” He could feel Martin and Dunwoody watching him and knew that Partridge was frowning with doubt.
“That’s what we done when we came afore, sir. There’s a gap in the reef, and a cluster of rocks on the far side.” He shrugged. It was all he knew. “The cap’n used to keep them in line, on the same bearing he called it.”
It was not the kind of thing he could invent, Adam thought. But everything he had learned since he had first joined his uncle’s ship as a midshipman had given him this inner wariness. As a watchkeeping officer and now as a post-captain he had always mistrusted a reef, especially with the wind astern and fewer chances by the minute to avoid running aground.
Richie was staring at him, anxiety, hope, even fear returning to his eyes.
It would be useless to threaten him. Dangerous even.
He thought of the Eaglet ’s master down below under guard. He had made this same approach, probably more times than Richie knew. He would be listening, wondering, perhaps even hoping that Adam would see his beautiful Anemone transformed into a wreck, mastless, with her keel broken on a reef.
He said, “Begin sounding, if you please!”
He watched the leadsman in the forechains begin to heave on the heavy lead and line, until it lifted high above the creaming bow-wave and began to swing over and down again in one great circle. The seaman was a good leadsman and looked unconcerned as the apron took the whole weight of his body.
It was still too poor a light to see the lead leave his control and fly away ahead of the beak-head and the raked hull below.
“No bottom, sir!”
Partridge said gloomily, “It’ll soon shelve, sir!” To his mate he whispered, “I’ll gut that bastard if he’s leadin’ us on to the reef!”
Adam walked away from the others and recalled his tour around the messdecks before the hands had been called to quarters. There had been several familiar faces, but most of them were strangers still. Perhaps he should have tried harder to bridge the gap instead of making them perfect their sail and gun drill? He had dismissed the idea. His uncle had always said that teamwork alone could bring the respect of one man for another. But loyalty had to be earned.
He saw the youngest midshipman, Frazer, who had joined the ship at Portsmouth, full of eagerness and excitement. Now he was thirteen, but looked younger than ever. He was staring at the sea, his hands opening and closing around his puny dirk, lost in thought.
“Here comes the sun!” But nobody answered.
Adam saw it pushing the last shadows from the deeper troughs, making them shimmer like molten glass. Hereabouts the ocean had undergone a sea-change, the surface pale green, with a mist lingering above it, moving with the wind so that the ship seemed to be stationary.
The first sunlight laid bare the deck, the gun crews with their rammers and sponges, and the tubs of sand that contained slow-matches in case the flintlocks failed. There was more sand on the deck below the gangways, so that men should not slip if water came inboard. Adam tightened his jaw. Or blood. It seemed bare overhead with the big courses brailed up to give a clearer vision and to reduce the risk of fire. In a ship like this, with tar and tinder-dry planking, even a burning wad from one of the guns could be dangerous.
Colour came seeping through the rigging: the marines’ coats were scarlet again, their fixed bayonets glinting like ice.
He looked narrowly along his waiting gun crews, and at the others who would trim the yards, men and boys of all ages and from every background. He had asked some of them about themselves when he had done his rounds before dawn. Some had been shy, then eager to talk; others had crowded closer to listen. Many had just watched him: their captain, the symbol of their hardship, their captivity as they might see it. Men mostly from the south and western counties of England, from farms and villages, and a few who had been unlucky enough to be caught by the press-gangs in a sea-port.
The cry from the master’s mate from the crosstrees was loud and clear.
“Breakers ahead!”
From the chains the leadsman cried, “No bottom, sir!”
Adam said, “Keep your eyes open, lads.” He saw Martin looking at him. “Put a good bosun’s mate at each cathead, Mr Martin. If we have to anchor we will have to shift ourselves!”
“By the mark ten!”
Adam kept his face composed. Partridge was right; it had begun to shelve. From no bottom, where the lead would not even reach, to sixty feet.
He tore his mind from the picture of Anemone ’s keel cruising relentlessly toward the shallows.
Richie suddenly broke away and ran to the mizzen shrouds before anyone could move, and for a moment longer Adam thought he was casting himself to his death without even waiting to see their destruction.
But he pointed wildly as he clung to the tarred ratlines with his other hand.
“Lee bow, sir!” He seemed all excitement. “There’s the place yonder!”
Adam snatched up a telescope and realised that his fingers were suddenly slippery with sweat.
He saw the gap in the reef immediately, spray bursting on either side and hanging in the air like a shimmering curtain. He felt his heart pounding. It looked about as wide as a farm gate.
The leadsman cried, “Deep eight!”
Adam looked at Richie. He wanted to ask him if he was certain but knew he could not. If his trust was proved false, it would have the same result as if Richie were mistaken.
The masthead called, “Let her fall off a point, sir!” He repeated it and Adam realised he had been unable to think or move.
He called, “Have the braces manned, Mr Martin. We will steer nor’-east by east!”
“By the mark seven!” As if he were unaware of or disinterested in the approaching shallows, the seaman sounded completely absorbed.
“Steady as she goes, sir! Nor’-east by east!”
Some men were staring at the island now, suddenly so near. Flat and undulating for the most part but with one hill clearly visible, leaning over like a broken cliff. A good place for a lookout.
Adam clenched his fists. What did it matter? They would never get through. Anemone was not like a brig: she drew nearly three fathoms.
As if to mock him the voice floated aft. “An’ deep six!”
Adam said sharply, “Take in the stays’ls, Mr Martin!”
Their eyes met across the bare-backed seamen. It was already too late. “By th’ mark ten!”
Adam stared at his first lieutenant, then shouted, “Belay that order!”
He raised his telescope again and saw the reef tumbling away on either bow. There was spray and spindrift everywhere so t
hat the sailors’ bodies, the guns and the sails shone as if in a tropical downpour.
For the first time Adam heard the reef, the roar and quivering thunder as each wave crashed across it.
He saw Richie clasping his hands together as if in prayer, the spray soaking his face and hair. But he seemed to need to watch, and when he saw Adam he called brokenly, “I was right, sir! Right! ”
Adam nodded, barely trusting himself. “Prepare to wear ship, Mr Martin!”
“Man the braces there, lively now!”
Men seemed to come out of their stricken postures and ran wildly to the dripping, salt-hardened cordage.
The hull pitched and buffeted, and a great backwash from the reef ’s undertow gripped the rudder like some underwater monster so that Partridge had to put three more men on the wheel.
The sun swept down on them, the sails releasing clouds of steam as the day’s warmth began.
“Stand by to come about! Steer nor’-west by north!” It was as close as they could come up into the wind. But it was enough.
Adam stared until his mind throbbed at the two vessels that lay quietly to their anchors in water so calm that it was hard to believe what they had just gone through. One was a brig. Adam felt his mouth tighten. The other was a brigantine, her decks already alive with men as the frigate thrust through the falling spray, her masts steeply angled on her new tack.
Even before the sharp-eyed master’s mate called down from his precarious perch, from which he had helplessly watched what he had thought was oncoming disaster, Adam knew it was the ship in his uncle’s letter, the privateer Tridente.
“We will engage on both sides at once, Mr Martin. There will be no time and little room for a second chance. Double-shotted, if you please, so load and run out!”
A moment longer and then he called out loudly, “A guinea to the first gun captain to bring down a spar!”
Martin lingered despite the bustle on every hand, the rammers tamping down the balls and the wads, racing one another as the captain had made them do.
“You never doubted it, did you, sir?”
Then he hurried away without hearing a reply, if there had been one. As the gun trucks squealed up to each open port Martin drew his hanger and glanced aft to the quarterdeck rail. He saw two things. He saw the captain fling the new cutlass over the side; and then he slapped the man Richie on the shoulder.
Darkening Sea Page 21