by Alan Evans
He was thinking ahead now, staring not at his hands, but unseeingly at the grey-painted, sweating steel side of his cabin, unaware that his fingers had ceased trembling and lay still.
Tomorrow?
He pushed up from the desk and began pacing his cabin, the eight or nine feet from the door to the rear and back again, brushing between the round table and the leather couch.
McLeod had the watch and was on the bridge. Elizabeth Ramsay was in her cabin, the door firmly shut behind her. But below, in the wardroom, they heard Smith’s pacing, faintly. Gallagher, Danby and Ross sat at the table, washed now and free of the smoke-grime and sweat-streaks of action. Wilberforce, the steward, had produced sandwiches and whisky. Gallagher’s gaze lifted up to the deckhead and the sound of that pacing. He raised his glass and said, ‘You’re a mad, hard-nosed bastard. But here’s to you.’
Ross echoed deeply, ‘Aye!’
Up on the bridge Wilberforce entered the wheelhouse bearing a tray and spoke to McLeod, ‘Brought you some sandwiches and a little something, sir. And for the captain.’
Buckley, his back against Smith’s door, said, ‘Leave his.’
Wilberforce objected. ‘He’ll be expectin’ something and I’ll be in the rattle if I don’t—’
‘He won’t be and you won’t be,’ Buckley told him flatly and not moving from the door, ‘but you will if you barge in there now. Leave it, I’ll take it in later.’
Wilberforce gave him the tray and went off, muttering, ‘Bloody officers!’
Buckley thought, ‘I’ll give the captain ten minutes to work the worst of the mood off him. Then he can swear at me as much as he likes. He’s done enough.’
The pacing went on.
11—The Trap
In the last of the night they encountered fog again, but Smith did not order a reduction in speed and Audacity tore through the grey veils at a pounding fifteen knots. Only on changing course to round the north-west tip of Gotland did he slow the ship to an easier ten. Audacity was safely across the shipping lane that ran east to west the length of the Baltic and now headed for the neutral coast of Sweden, on her way, ultimately, to the Sound. And he had always to keep in mind the consumption of coal. Audacity started this voyage with enough for ten days’ steaming but that was at an economical speed of eight or ten knots. At fifteen she ate coal and he would get none in the Baltic.
That morning off Gotland he stopped Audacity and they buried the dead seaman off the tug and the man taken from the lifeboat the previous day. He had died in the night of shock, exposure and pneumonia. Smith had the two German officers brought up for the ceremony, the oberleutnant of the guard-boat and the tug’s master. It was bitterly cold as Audacity rolled slowly in the dank mist that glistened on the canvas shrouds wrapped tight by Fenwick’s neat-stitched twine. Afterwards the sun sucked up the mist and it was a fine day.
He paced the flying bridge in the late forenoon, eight strides forward, eight strides aft. He was alone but for the two lookouts, one on either wing of the bridge. They kept out of his way but eyed him covertly now and again as he strode restlessly, scowling. He glanced at them, gauging their mood. He always tried to gauge the mood of every man aboard as he saw them going about their duties and today was satisfied that his crew was cheerful. This was a sparkling, bright morning: they had smashed a German convoy, and then got away without a scratch. Well, not entirely: there were the usual bruises and scrapes inevitable when hands and arms and shoulders work with the hard, moving steel of a gun.
Audacity herself had been equally lucky. The single shell that hit her had missed the wireless room with Sparks at his post inside and burst in the empty mess of the four-inch gun’s crew. Bennett fixed a patch on the hole and now a man was daubing on paint. Every time Smith turned at the port side he saw him, brush in hand. He sang softly and out of tune but in time to the wheezing of Wilberforce’s concertina that the steward was playing in his pantry.
Ross and McLeod were happier men, relieved that last night’s wild escapade had not ended in disaster, and that Audacity was now on a course that might take them to safety. Some of Ross’s charges, the prisoners, were on deck now in the well between superstructure and poop: the oberleutnant and crew of the guard-boat. The master and the crew of the tug had been up for exercise earlier. While their officer tramped the deck to starboard the guard-boat’s crew strolled or lounged along the port side. They already appeared reconciled to being prisoners of war; an armed sentry watched them from the poop. The oberleutnant was a man in middle-age, obviously long since passed over for promotion and Smith’s capture of his ship had ended his career. His crew had simply changed from one form of captivity, weeks spent swinging around their anchor, to another.
The prisoners were still an infernal nuisance, however, and Smith wished there was some way he could be rid of them. But if he put them ashore in a neutral country to be interned they would tell their tale to a German consul and they knew about Audacity’s disguise—the four boxes of timber ‘deck cargo’ now erected again by Bennett—and the Camel.
He glanced forward and saw the carpenter and his mates now at work in the opened box below the fo’c’sle, measuring, sawing, hammering. Bennett knew what he had to do; Gallagher had sketched a plan for him, of a platform sixty feet long, and there was plenty of timber for the job.
Gallagher was also forward of the bridge. The lid of the ‘box’ that held the Camel was also slid back so the fitters and riggers could get in and work on the aircraft. Gallagher was with them. He had told Smith happily: ‘Her tyres were soft but they just needed pumping up and we’ve done that. Jerry had packed up all the spares and stores he found with her, and the petrol; there’s all we’ll need. We’re stripping and overhauling the engine but we know already there’s not a damn thing wrong with it. The wings were stowed on their leading-edges all the time so they’re all right. There are holes all over the fuselage, one or two broken spars and snapped wires, but nothing we can’t repair as good as new.’
Danby was not with Gallagher. Of course. That was still the only jarring note. The armourers had the Camel’s twin Vickers machine-guns out on the deck, stripped down for cleaning and overhaul. A half-hour ago Gallagher had fired practice bursts at a barrel towed astern. Now Danby stood by the men, hands in the pockets of his oversize jacket, smiling. He got on all right with them, anyway. He might not be a pilot, let alone an ace, but he had got them safely to Petrograd.
Even Elizabeth Ramsay was quiet. Wilberforce, the steward, had earlier brought up a chair for her and set it on the deck in the lee of the forward ‘box’. She sat there in the sun, sheltered from the wind and with a blanket wrapped around her, reading a book, presumably from the dog-eared collection in the wardroom. Smith occasionally saw her turn a page but he never saw her look up at him, though she did and more than once.
He thought that there was only one discontented man aboard, himself, and that because of the girl’s reaction. Why had she been so bitter on learning she was not to risk her life in Russia? Relief would have been a normal reaction, possibly tinged with the disappointment of anti-climax, but not that emotional outburst wrung from her: ‘Damn you all to hell!’
He tried to put the girl from his mind, continued pacing. He should count his blessings: Audacity had not been captured nor sunk and he had not lost a man. So far as the enemy knew, after capturing Königsberg, Audacity had headed for the waters off Helsinki. She was not seen there but nor was she sighted anywhere else so they might reasonably conclude she found no pickings off Helsinki but evaded capture, then crossed to attack in the Gulf of Riga, and would now be running for her Russian base. So the search would be concentrated eastward but there would still be patrols at this western end of the Baltic.
*
Gallagher, standing with one of the fitters on a makeshift staging by the Camel’s engine, could see over the side of the ‘box’ to the girl sitting only a few yards away. He watched as she rose and walked aft towards the bridge, thought she was
well worth looking at.
She reminded him of the girl in London. Well, there were really two girls, one dark, one fair. They rented a flat and Johnny Vincent and he had shared it with them during the week before they sailed for Murmansk with the Flight. They had a fine time. Lying in late in the morning, having a few drinks before lunch—and a few after. Playing billiards, golf; talking, arguing, laughing. A show every evening, and the girls…Johnny said he wanted to ask the fair one to marry him but Gallagher laughed him out of it: ‘Get married? When we’re going to Russia? Come off it, Johnny!’
He shifted on the staging and saw Danby with the armourers, smiling. What did he have to grin about? What was the little bastard thinking?
Danby was happy for a little while. The armourers were joking as they worked on the guns and he was one of them. They’d gone through some hard and dangerous times on their way out of Russia and there was mutual respect. On their part not the hero-worship they had for Gallagher, but respect nevertheless. He could do their job as well as they. He sniffed at the faint aroma of gun oil and the penetrating reek of the dope the riggers were painting on the repairs made to the fuselage. When the dope dried it would tighten the fabric, but now it only made the stuff hang damply loose over the ribs like an old man’s skin.
This was the life he wanted. It was a far cry from the dusty office in Eastcheap and he could smile at that now. Junior clerk, the junior clerk of a dozen. The senior clerk was old Jameson, sixty-five and looking more like ninety-five after a half-century in that cramped, dark, little hole. That had been Danby’s destiny, to fill old Jameson’s chair after a lifetime of working for the firm. A family firm in which the family took the top jobs, while the Danbys waited for the Jamesons to die.
The war had been his chance to break out. He’d volunteered as soon as he was old enough, though well aware that three of the clerks older than himself had regretted their eagerness and been buried in Flanders. That was a risk he was ready to accept in order to get away, to become somebody; an officer in the Royal Naval Air Service.
He looked up and met Gallagher’s bitter stare, knelt quickly and said to one of the armourers, ‘Here, let me give a hand with that.’ He kept the smile fixed in place.
He had thought he’d escaped from the office, that instead he would serve in a profession even after the war, live with a little dignity and a deal of pride. But Gallagher had destroyed that hope. With Gallagher’s report on his record there would be no question of him staying in the R.N.A.S., or the R.A.F. as it was now. And there was nothing he could—or, rather, would—do about it.
Smith’s thoughts were interrupted: ‘Begging your pardon, sir.’ A man stood at the head of the ladder.
Smith halted. Why couldn’t they leave him in peace? He rasped, ‘Yes?’
‘The lady would like a word with you, sir. Mr. Ross told her you were busy and not to be disturbed, but…’ His voice trailed away before Smith’s glare.
But Elizabeth Ramsay was a law unto herself. Should he send her away, to rub in that he was captain of this ship and she only a passenger? But was she not more than that? Last night she had cursed him—out of disappointment and anger? She had blamed him once before, equally unfairly. So…‘Ask her to come up.’ Was it possible that she wanted to apologise? Or rather, not wanted, but thought that she should?
He met her at the head of the ladder, handed her up to the flying bridge and said, ‘We can talk here. It’s private.’
She looked forward, then aft, the length of the ship. ‘Is it? Everyone can see us.’
Exactly. For safety’s sake. His safety. But the lookouts were yards away, on the wings and out of earshot. ‘They can’t hear us.’
Their glances met, slid off. That tension was between them, as always. Smith suggested, ‘Shall we walk?’ Talking might be easier then.
‘Yes.’ She kept pace at his shoulder and did not hesitate now. ‘I want to—explain, about last night.’ Smith waited in silence, glanced at her as they turned at the rail. She had changed her clothes, wore a fresh dress that showed when her cloak flapped open on the wind. He remembered her carpetbag had come aboard with her last night. Her lips were painted again but she still looked young.
Elizabeth Ramsay wrapped the cloak around her and said, ‘You might understand if I begin at the beginning. My father was English but my mother was French. He was a restaurateur and my mother was a cook. He would buy a run-down place cheaply, work it up for two or three years then sell it at a profit and move on. We travelled all round the Baltic. A funny, gipsy sort of life, I suppose, but they liked it.’ She smiled faintly, remembering. ‘That’s how I learned the languages, though I’ve been told I have a natural gift in that way—mimicry, maybe.
‘I was fifteen when my mother died and I took her place in helping him with his work, though he employed a chef because I’m strictly a plain cook. Father taught me the running of the business and we went on as before, except that he left more and more in my hands. Early in 1914 he bought a place in Petrograd, but then the war came. He’d not expected that. He was a good man in business but took no interest in politics. He needed money to build up the place in Petrograd but virtually all his capital was invested or banked in Germany: he had always had a lot of respect for them as businessmen. He couldn’t touch his money, he worried about the restaurant and me, then in that winter he caught pneumonia and died.’
She looked quickly at Smith, then away. ‘That was the start of the bad times. I was twenty-two, with a big Petrograd restaurant that was barely making a profit and no one to turn to. He had never gone back to England and rarely talked of his family. I think there’d been a row because he was very bitter. Anyway, I didn’t know any of them and they were a long way off so I had to make a go of the place on my own. I did. It wasn’t easy, and one of the methods I resorted to was letting private rooms for intimate dinners. People would have a good meal and what went on behind closed doors was none of my business. But it got me a certain reputation.’
Her mimicry showed now. She lifted her nose in the air and spoke in a refined British embassy accent: ‘That Mrs. Ramsay who runs a house of assignation!’ She laughed then, but there was no amusement in it. ‘It was one means to an end but the end didn’t come as I’d planned it. I took no more interest in Russian politics than my father had but I could see what was going on around me; strikes, unrest, talk of revolution. There was nothing I could do about it, nowhere I could run to. The revolution came and I lost the restaurant, everything I had.’
For a minute or more she walked in silence, not looking at Smith but keeping pace, turning with him at the rail but always staring out at the sea that glittered with cold brilliance under the sun. Then: ‘So I had to go to the embassy. I had no choice. They knew about me, of course, or thought they did: “That Mrs. Ramsay!” I suppose it was my own fault and I should have told them the whole story, but I didn’t want to explain myself.’
Smith said nothing.
She looked at him but he kept his eyes trained ahead, wary of meeting hers as she said, ‘You understand that?’ He nodded, was conscious of her watching, uncertain for a moment, but then she made up her mind about him. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not trying to make out I am as pure as the driven snow. There have been men in my life—as there have been women in yours. There are a lot of things I’m sorry about but not many I’m ashamed of.’ That was neither defence nor defiance but a flat statement of fact: take it or leave it. She saw Smith nod endorsement.
Now she looked away. ‘So they knew about me at the embassy and it wasn’t long before they asked me to contact a particular Russian officer, because he’d been a customer at my place, spent a lot. He was the leader of the plotters. You saw him at Kirkko; he was at the tiller of the Anna. He wasn’t so much a devoted royalist as a dedicated capitalist. Later I met the whole group and they told me their price. I told them mine. I wanted one per cent, three thousand pounds. They agreed and it was a condition that I would return with the first instalment
. That was my condition. I wanted to make sure I got that first thousand pounds, whatever else happened.’
Now he stared at her. A thousand! That was more than three years’ pay!
Elizabeth Ramsay saw that look though she did not meet it. ‘You think you understand now, why I was hell-bent on the scheme going through?’ She shook her head. ‘I told you I had nothing, nobody. Only that label: “the Russian Whore”. You’ve heard it and Ross knew of it. It showed in your eyes, all of you. It had started when I was visiting the Russian officers and I didn’t deny it because it was a good cover—better than the Bolsheviks suspecting what I was really doing. And now I can’t deny it because that plot is a state secret and will be when the war is over, and mud sticks. So now you know why the plot was important to me. It meant security: at least one thousand pounds, and three thousand if it succeeded. That would keep me for years, set me up in business again, maybe in America. It meant a new start.’
She paused then, waiting for his reaction. He thought that at least he had the answer to a question that had plagued him all along: why did she have to go to the Russians with the gold? Now he knew they demanded it at her insistence.