As week succeeded week Drinkwater’s frustration mounted. He was tormented by worry over Elizabeth, worry that could not easily be set aside in favour of more pressing duties because there were none to demand his attention beyond the routine of daily life at anchor. The myriads of flies that visited them drove them to distraction and the lack of shore leave for the hands exacerbated their own cramped lives.
Strangford Wrinch passed them alarming intelligence, gathered from a certain Hadji Yusuf ben Ibrahim, commander of a sambuk. In December of the old year a French division under General Bon had occupied Suez. Bonaparte himself had accepted tribute from the Arabs of Tor in Sinai and reached an accommodation with the monks of the mysterious monastery of St Catherine at the southern extremity of that peninsula. General Desaix was scattering the mamelukes to the four winds in an energetic sweep up the Nile Valley. Egypt had become a province of France and it was clear that, despite Nelson’s victory at Aboukir and the subsequent blockade of the Mediterranean coast under Sir Samuel Hood, the French were far from beaten. They might yet move further east and in the absence of Blankett Hellebore would be no more than a straw under the hooves of the conqueror.
At the end of January Griffiths ordered them to sea. For a fortnight they cruised between Perim and Jabal Zuqar, exercising the guns and sails. Then they returned to Mocha Road and the shallow bight of its bay, to the heat and flies and the deceptive, fairy-tale wonder of its minaret. Again Griffiths departed daily, smilingly ordering them to submit to the will of Allah, to learn to keyf, to sit in suspended animation after the manner of the Arabs.
‘Holy Jesus Christ,’ blasphemed the intemperate Rogers in sweating exasperation, ‘the stupid old bastard has gone senile.’ ‘Mr Drinkwater!’ The knocking at the door was violently urgent. The face of Quilhampton peered round it, white with worry. ‘Mr Drinkwater!’
Drinkwater swam stickily into consciousness. ‘Eh? What is it?’
‘Two ships standing in from the south, sir!’
Drinkwater was instantly awake. ‘Inform the captain! General Quarters and clear for action!’
The midshipman fled and Drinkwater heard the brig come alive, heard the boy’s treble taken up by the duty bosun’s mate piping at the hatchways. He reached for his breeches, buckled on his sword and snatched up the loaded pistol he habitually kept ready. He rushed on deck.
It was just light and the waist was all confusion with the slap of two hundred bare feet and the whispered exertions of five score of sleep-befuddled seamen driven by training and fear to their stations.
Drinkwater picked up the night glass from its box and did the required mental gymnastics with its inverted image. He swept the horizon and steadied it on the two shapes standing into the road. The larger vessel might be a frigate. Some of the new French frigates were big vessels, yet she seemed too high and not long enough to be a French thoroughbred. The smaller ship was clearly a brig of their own size.
Griffiths appeared. ‘Hoist the private signal, Mr Drinkwater!’
Rogers reported the batteries cleared for action. ‘Very well, Mr Rogers. Man the starboard. Mr Drinkwater, set tight the spring. Traverse three points to larboard!’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Drinkwater cast a final glance at Quilhampton’s party hoisting the private signal to the lee foretopsail yardarm where the wind spread it for the approaching ships to see. ‘Mr Grey, waisters to the capstan!’
Hellebore trembled slightly as the spring came tight and she turned off the wind, bringing her starboard broadside to bear upon the strangers. Drinkwater watched apprehensively. There was no reply to the private signal.
‘Starboard battery made ready, sir,’ Rogers reported. All activity had ceased now, the gun crews squatting expectantly around their pieces, the captains kneeling off to one side of the recoil tracks, the lanyards tight in their hands.
Hellebore was a sitting duck, silhouetted against the sunrise while the newcomers approached out of the night shadows.
‘Mr Rogers! Fire Number One gun astern of her if you please.’
Drinkwater raised his glass and watched the bigger of the two ships. Forward the gun barked. Daylight grew rapidly, distinct rays from the rising sun fanned out from behind the crags of the Yemeni mountains. As the muezzin called the faithful to prayer from the distant minaret of Mocha, Drinkwater saw the British ensign hoisted to the peak of the approaching ships and an answering puff of smoke from the off-bow of the bigger one.
‘British ensign, sir.’
‘Then answer at the dip.’
An hour later he was anxiously waiting for Griffiths to return from the fifty gun Centurion, commanded by Captain Rainier.
Drinkwater ran a surreptitious finger round the inside of his stock. He could not understand why, in the heat of the Red Sea, the Royal Navy could not relax its formality sufficiently to allow officers to remove their broadcloth coats when dining with their seniors. After all, this moment, when the humidor of cheroots followed the decanter of port round the table, was tacitly licensed for informality.
They were listening to an anecdote concerning the social life of Bombay told by Centurion’s first lieutenant. It was an irreverent story and concerned a general officer in the East India Company’s service whose appetite for women was preserved within strictly formal bounds: ‘. . . and then, sir, when the nautch-girl threw her legs round him and displayed a certain amount of enthusiasm for the old boy, d’you see, he ceased his exertions and glared down at her; “any more of this familiarity,” the old bastard said, “and this coupling’s off’!’
The easy laughter of Centurion’s officers was joined by that of the young commander of the eighteen-gun brig Albatross, a man more than ten years Drinkwater’s junior. It seemed that all these officers from the India station led a life of voluptuous ease and licence. It suddenly rankled Nathaniel that their partners with Duncan in the grey North Sea, with St Vincent off Cadiz and with Nelson in the Mediterranean led a different life. He thought of the rock off Ushant and of the storm-lashed squadron that kept a ceaseless watch on Brest and, in the smoky heat of Captain Rainier’s cabin, had a sudden poignant urge to be part of that windy scene, where the rain squalls swept like curtains across the sky, obscuring the reefs that waited impassively to leeward of the lumbering divisions of British watchdogs. This effete bunch of well-laundered, red-faced hedonists made Drinkwater feel uncomfortable, offended his puritan sensibilities. It was as if overlong exposure to the heady tropical beauty of Indian nights had affected them with moon-madness.
Neither had Griffiths forgotten his duty, as the slight edge of sarcasm in his voice implied.
‘Du, sir, ’tis a wonder you sallied so far from home with such delights to keep you at Bombay. May one enquire of your intentions?’
‘Of course, Captain,’ said Rainier, a large fleshy man with an expansive manner who appeared like an Indian Buddha surrounded by blue cheroot smoke. ‘The news we had from Nelson, both from Duval and yourself, is what brings me to carry out the present reconnaissance of the Red Sea.’
‘And effecting a junction with Admiral Blankett, sir?’
The captain shrugged. He did not seem eager to combine his force with Blankett’s. Yet if he did the Red Sea squadron would almost certainly be sufficient to bottle up the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, locate and destroy whatever ship Santhonax had at his command.
‘Blankett’s whereabouts are somewhat unknown. My own instructions are clear. I am to determine the extent of French military action in Egypt relative to a descent upon India. That is all.’ It was clear to Drinkwater that the nautch-girls of Bombay sang a sweeter song than the sirens lurking on the imperfectly known reefs of the Red Sea.
Rainier exhaled elaborately, indolently watching the three concentric smoke rings waft slowly towards the deckhead with obvious satisfaction.
‘Oh bravo, sir,’ breathed Adams sycophantically, giving Drinkwater a clue to his early promotion. Rainier raised his fingers in a gesture of unconcern that seemed not to warrant a s
hrug of the shoulders. ‘I think the matter of little moment, ’tis but in the nature of an excursion.’ He caught sight of Griffiths’s frown. ‘Oh, I know, Captain Griffiths, you come panting from the battlefields of Europe, lathered with the sweat of your own efforts, your energy is not the plague, you know. It is not contagious. We have our own way of attending to the King’s business out here. We are not unaware that Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore,’ he added for the benefit of the new arrivals from England, ‘is raising rebellion against us. We even have information that Bonaparte himself has been in contact with him. But I am not of the opinion any great risk attends the matter.’
Rainier drew heavily upon the cheroot and a comfortable little ripple of self-satisfaction went round the table amongst the officers of the two ships.
‘I wish I shared your confidence, sir,’ Griffiths said.
‘Oh, come, sir,’ put in Adams, ‘the French are not here in force. Why, how many ships does Blankett have, eh?’ Adams turned to the only non-uniformed figure at the table, strange in civilian clothing a decade out of fashion.
‘He has three sixty-fours,’ said Wrinch, ‘America, Stately and Ruby. The two first named were due home, the third on a cruise. He has two frigates, Daedalus and Fox with the sloop Echo. She too is due home.’
‘You see, Griffiths,’ said Adams, ‘that is a sizeable squadron.’
‘If it is all together,’ growled Griffiths unconvinced.
Rainier seemed to want to terminate the argument.
‘Come Griffiths, it is not as though we are up against Suffren, is it?’ The captain muttered through his fist as he picked at a sliver of mutton lodged irritatingly in his molars. ‘Eh?’
‘The French commander is a pupil of Suffren, sir. He is well-known to my first lieutenant and myself, sir. A true corsair, cunning as a fox, dangerous and resourceful. Not a man to underestimate.’ Griffiths’s voice was low and penetrating.
‘How come that you know him, sir?’ enquired Centurion’s captain of marines.
Griffiths outlined the tasks assigned to the twelve-gun cutter Kestrel during her special service on the coasts of France and Holland. He spoke of how they had come into conflict with the machinations of Capitaine Edouard Santhonax, how they had tracked him from the coves of France to the sandy beaches of Noord Holland and how Drinkwater had finally captured him during the bloody afternoon of Camperdown. He told them of the brutal murder of the British agent, Major Brown, taken in civilian clothing and strung up on a gibbet above the battery at Kijkduin in full view of the blockading squadron. As his voice rose and fell, assembling the sentences of his account he compelled them all to listen, straightening the supercilious mouth of Commander Charles Adams. ‘. . . And so gentlemen, Santhonax contrived to escape, devil take him, by what means I do not know, and if this French army in Egypt is as powerful and as dangerous as Admiral Nelson seemed to think, then, myndiawl, you should be cautioned against this man.’ A silence followed, broken at last by Rainier.
‘That was bardic, captain, truly bardic,’ said Rainier dismissively, taking snuff.
‘Captain Griffiths is right, sir,’ put in Wrinch at a moment when Drinkwater sensed Rainier wished to conclude matters. ‘Santhonax is taking native craft, perhaps to use as transports to India, perhaps to prevent the transfer of the faithful from the Hejaz across the Red Sea to Kosseir. These ‘Meccan’ reinforcements have been told they have but to shake a Frenchman to dislodge the gold dust from his clothes. They are flocking to join Murad Bey by way of the caravan route to Qena. Murad,’ he added with the same condescension as had been used to explain Tippoo Sahib to the uninitiated, ‘is a Circassian who commands the Mameluke forces in Upper Egypt. Now, although Desaix has beaten him and scattered his forces, Murad is, in reality, undefeated. To bring him to his knees Desaix must strangle his reinforcements from Arabia either by taking the dhows at sea, or by taking Kosseir. If this is done then additional tarrifs will be levied on trade from Arabia, as Bon is already doing at Suez on the trade from Yambo and Jeddah. Bonaparte’s government in Cairo is already said to be much pressed for cash and driven to all manner of expedients to raise it.’
‘And do you think Santhonax and Desaix could concert their actions to the necessary degree?’ asked Rainier at last, disquieted despite himself by the turn the conversation had taken.
‘Indeed, sir. Men have done such things. Egypt is ungovernable, of course. It may well be that the French will push on to India. That would be more prestigious for them than ultimate retreat.’
‘Do you think prestige would outweigh military sense?’ sneered Adams.
‘In France,’ retorted Wrinch coolly, ‘they have just undergone a revolution caused by inferiors revolting that they may be equal. Equals, like Bonaparte and Desaix, Captain Adams, revolt in order that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind that creates, and is created by, revolutions.’
‘That is sophistry, sir,’ bridled the commander flushing.
‘That is Aristotle, sir,’ replied Wrinch icily.
An uncomfortable silence fell on the table. Then Wrinch went on.
‘By June the wind in the Red Sea will be predominantly from the north. Often this northerly wind reaches as far south as Perim and lasts until August. A sambuk goes excellent well down wind, a baghala could carry a battery of horse artillery or three companies of infantry. In the Arabian Sea from May to September the monsoon is favourable for a fast passage, if an uncomfortable one.’
‘Ah,’ interjected Adams, at last able to put a technical obstacle in front of Wrinch, ‘but you cannot land at Bombay or on the Malabar coast during the south west monsoon.’
Wrinch raised an eyebrow. ‘Even a Frenchman may round Cape Comorin, Captain. They may still have friends in Pondicherry and it is not many miles from there to Mysore.’
Rainier had had enough. He rose. ‘We sail in two days, gentlemen.’
‘Am I to join you, sir?’ asked Griffiths.
‘No, Griffiths. Do you stay here and wait for Blankett. You are possessed of all the facts and can best acquaint the admiral of’em. Your orders from Nelson were explicit. You have managed to convince me that perhaps I must look a little further into the matter, damn you.’
So Hellebore continued to wait. Having, as Appleby put it, sped with the wings of Hermes half way round the world, they had now to acquire the patience of Job. Griffiths spent less time ashore, apparently happier now that Rainier had gone north. But it was not only this that had relaxed the man. The true reason was revealed one night over a more frugal and less formal meal than that enjoyed aboard Centurion. In the cabin of Hellebore the brig’s officers dined off mutton, of which there was a good supply in Mocha, and drank their madeira with dark coffee and sweet dates, listening to the reason for Griffiths’s change.
‘To be without pain, gentlemen, is like a rebirth. Mr Strangford Wrinch is a man of many parts. You have seen only one side of him; that of a gossiping coffee merchant who keeps a kind of court in Mocha. In fact he is much more than that. He has journeyed into the interior and tells of mysterious cities long deserted by their inhabitants. He is a hadji who has twice been where it is not permitted for an infidel to go. He has fought in three Arab wars, is an expert in mathematics, astronomy and Arab literature, writes verse in Arabic and keeps a flight of sakers worthy of a prince . . .’ He paused and Drinkwater heard Rogers mutter a reference to boys. If Griffiths heard it he ignored it, fixing Appleby with a stare. ‘And he has some medical knowledge.’
As if on cue Appleby snorted. ‘You are going to tell me he knows a few nostrums, sir,’ the surgeon said archly.
‘Indeed not. I am going to tell you he knows a great deal. That he can cauterize a wound with hot oil, or sear the back with hot irons to cure rheumatism. Furthermore for open wounds an application of rancid butter or cow dung . . .’
‘Cow dung?’ Appleby’s head shot up in disbelief, his chins quivering. Rogers was laughing silently as if this revelation proved his private theory tha
t Griffiths was mad. Griffiths ignored him, obviously enjoying Appleby’s scepticism.
‘Just so, Mr Appleby. An application of cow dung, see, possesses certain properties which enable a wound to heal cleanly.’
Behind his hand Rogers muttered, ‘No wonder there are so many flies . . god-damned cow shit, for Christ’s sake.’ Mr Dalziell began to giggle and even the loyal Quilhampton found it impossible to resist. The sniggers spread to uncontrollable open laughter to which Appleby succumbed.
Drinkwater coughed loudly, mindful of a first lieutenant’s duty. ‘And this cure for your pain, sir, was that one of these, h’hm extreme and, er . . . h’hm unusual remedies?’
Griffiths turned towards Drinkwater, a mildly benevolent smile on his face. He shook his head, his eyes twinkling beneath their bushy eyebrows. ‘For the gout, Mr Drinkwater, an affliction long considered by the best English brains as incurable, Mr Wrinch prescribed crocus bulbs and seeds . . .’
‘Crocus bulbs . . .!’ guffawed Rogers whose mirth was past rational control. The tears streamed down the faces of the midshipmen and even Appleby was too stunned to offer resistance to this challenge to English medicine.
‘And you are quite without pain?’ asked Drinkwater, controlling himself with difficulty.
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