Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Peter Smalley
Title Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Spring 1792
Copyright
About the Book
Spring 1792.
Captain James Rennie is anxious to be active again after a year on the beach. And this time he longs for regular service with the Fleet as opposed to the extraordinarily dangerous detached missions he has been assigned by Britain’s shadowy spy masters in the last few years. His friend, Lieutenant James Hayter, is haunted by his past and he too longs for the sea.
Both will find their escape, but not in the circumstances they would have wished. Once more the summons comes for a secret voyage, in pursuit of a heavily armed neutral vessel. Aboard the ship lies a secret that could change the course of the coming war for Britain, and the loss of which could tip the balance irrevocably in favour of Revolutionary France. Rennie and Hayter must play a deadly game involving sea battles, mutiny and breathtaking deception. And, of course, the only stakes in the game are victory or death.
About the Author
Peter Smalley was born in Melbourne, Australia, and hails from a seafaring family. After an early career in advertising he became a screenwriter, broadcaster, and novelist. He lives in London with his wife, Clytie.
Also by Peter Smalley
HMS Expedient
Port Royal
Barbary Coast
The Hawk
The Gathering Storm
The Pursuit
Peter Smalley
What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
(Edmund Burke, 1780)
For Clytie, with whom I cross the sea
SPRING 1792
LIEUTENANT JAMES HAYTER, RN, and his wife Catherine were in the blue drawing room at Melton House, his father’s seat near Shaftesbury in Dorset, and they were discussing, with increasing hot vigour, Catherine’s late social activity.
‘Why must you harry and press me so, again and again, when—’
‘You say that you have never seen this man?’ Over her. ‘Never at any time?’
‘As I have said – not as I collect.’
‘I am obliged to say, painful though it may be to both of us, that I do not believe you.’
‘You dare to say that? You dare to accuse me of lying to you!’
‘I should not wish to, were I able to call it by another name, but I cannot. I am a plain-spoke man, and I must speak plainly now. I think that y’did see this man, at the Bell at Warminster, by arrangement.’
‘I have not been near to Warminster the entire spring!’
‘Not in April? Not then, with your friend Mrs Swanton?’
‘I have met Fanny Swanton on many occasions. She is my dearest friend. Why should not I meet her? Do you forbid even that?’
‘In course I have never forbidden any of your pleasures, when they have been above reproach, but in this instance—’
‘Above reproach! Fanny and I have been friends since we were children together. How could you begin to suggest that she—’
‘Mrs Swanton has wrote to you from Warminster, has not she?’
Catherine shot him a dark glance, then her gaze faltered and she looked away from him, disconcerted.
‘Yes, I have found it.’ James nodded, his eyes still hard on her, and he took from the pocket of his coat a folded letter, and held it up. ‘I have found the letter.’
‘You have searched through my private things?’ Again staring at him, anger and confidence returning.
‘I am your husband.’ Holding up a hand before she could continue, shaking open the letter in his other hand and glancing at it. ‘Mrs Swanton writes very favourable about him, don’t she? Mr Bradley Dight? “My dear, what a handsome fellow he is.” And then . . . yes, here it is: “I will see to it that you are introduced to him, when you come to me next. I know that you will like him, and he you.”’ James looked up from the page, and tilted his head a little. ‘Do you still say that you never met the fellow?’
‘When? Where? These insistent questions are very vexing. I have already told you, I do not recall—’
‘I warn you, Catherine, do not play childish games! If you did not meet him at Warminster, then you met him at Bath!’
Shaking her head, and feigning exasperation: ‘Often, when I was with Fanny at Bath – at home, or at the play, or the Assembly Rooms – we did meet a great many people, yes, both ladies and gentlemen. What could be more usual? I cannot absolutely swear that I did not meet him, nor absolutely that I did, even if Fanny wished it. And when—’
Over her, holding up a small pasteboard card: ‘Is this not Mr Bradley Dight’s calling card, left at Mrs Swanton’s house at Bath? A card you have kept hidden?’
Catherine now rushed toward him, and tried to snatch the card from his hand. He jerked his hand away.
‘Ahah! No, you don’t, madam!’
‘Well – what if I did meet him!’ Her dark eyes openly defiant now. ‘In least he is amusing, and gentlemanly!’
‘Ahh.’ Quietly, fiercely, holding the card. ‘And I am not?’
‘Not at present.’ Defiantly. ‘Not for some little time since, neither.’
‘Ahh.’ Again, with a little nod. ‘I see. I am not amusing, nor gentlemanly, nor witty, nor urbane, nor have I the easy charm of a damned foppish wastrel – not at present. But I am still your husband, and I command—’
‘You may command nothing, sir.’ Sharply. ‘You are not at sea now, snarling orders upon your quarterdeck.’ She turned her head away, her slender neck rigid with anger.
James saw the curl of soft dark hair at the nape of her neck, and was at the same moment furiously angry with her – and filled with sudden long-absent desire. A sharp breath to steel himself, and:
‘You had better tell me the truth, Catherine. Is he your lover?’
‘My lover?’ Turning on him in furious astonishment. ‘You believe that of me?’
‘What else am I to believe? Letters, and cards, and secret assignations! Am I to be made a cuckold, without a murmur of complaint!’
‘Ohh!’ Again turning away.
‘Answer me! Deny that he is your lover! Deny it to my face!’
‘I will do nothing of the kind, sir.’ Bitterly. ‘You may think what you like, now.’
‘You do not deny it! Goddamn your faithless impudence, madam!’
Without another word Catherine snatched up her bonnet from the arm of the sofa where she had laid it with her basket of fresh-cut flowers, and swept from the room. The basket slipped and tumbled to the floor, spilling blooms wide across the palmetto-patterned rug.
‘Hell and fire!’
James kicked savagely at scattered stems of flowers. He turned this way and that, took a great breath, and slowly let it out. His anger had vanished like mist on the wind, and he was left with a sour taste on his tongue, mingled with the fragrance of his wife’s cologne in his nostrils, and the heavy sweet scent of the flowers at his feet. He felt exhausted, and low in spirit. The flash of her dark eyes as she had left him, a flash of scorn and contempt, had wounded him, even as he had wounded her by his accusations. In truth he had very little against Mr Bradley Dight, beyond a single letter from a mischievous woman, a calling card hidden among gloves in a drawer, and the fact that he had indeed met Catherine – by her own admission. He had very little against him, except a poisoning suspicion. Bradley Dight was a prosperous young man who had that season taken a house at Bath; his name had been widely mentioned as one of a group of fashionable and amusing people whom society wished to acknowledge; he was much admired, it was said, by young ladies, including – presumably – Mrs Swanton. “My dear, what a ha
ndsome fellow he is.” And Catherine? He could not be certain they were lovers. Not absolutely. In fact – he could prove nothing.
James slumped down in the wide-shouldered chair by the fireplace and stared into the empty grate. It was mid-spring, and his father Sir Charles Hayter – ever acute in economy – had ordered that no fires were to be laid in any of the downstair rooms save his library, and Lady Hayter’s private parlour. The Dorset air was not chill today, yet neither was it warm. The quiet ticking of the long-case clock. The still, enclosed air of the room. James lifted his head. The tall window at the end, new green leaves pressed close, framing the panes. A coaltit fluttered briefly at the unyielding glass, and fled. Broad lawns beyond, and away in the west white clouds slowly piling, against looming blackness.
‘It will rain.’
James and Catherine had come to Melton for a fortnight, at Lady Hayter’s invitation, while minor refurbishments were carried out at Birch Cottage, their home at Winterborne Keep, south of Blandford. In truth they could have remained at Birch Cottage without inconvenience, but Catherine had wished for a change. Things had not been right between them for many months.
A year ago they had lost their only son to an outbreak of typhus, and Catherine herself had been gravely ill. Subsequent to that calamity, James was embroiled in a hazardous clandestine mission in revolutionary France, during which he had become romantically entangled with a Frenchwoman, who had later been killed, and the mission had failed. Downcast and bereft, James had returned to his ailing wife in England, and tried to find harmony and hope anew. Alas, far from achieving a renewed bond of tenderness and affection, they had drifted apart. When she had recovered her health, Catherine determined on a life of gaiety and distraction to counter the grievous loss of her son, and James – unable to match her mood, which he found frivolous and self-indulging – turned in on himself and grew increasingly morose. He became suspicious of his wife’s frequent absences at Wells, and Bath, and Lyme, and fell to questioning her at length upon her return from these excursions, and for her own part Catherine grew increasingly resentful and reluctant to answer him, and relations between them were first strained, then fractious, and at last hostile. For months now, they had slept in separate bedchambers. Both of them felt that the fortnight at Melton was their last real chance of reconciliation, yet neither was prepared to concede anything to the other, so bitter had the differences between them become. And then he had found the letter, and the card.
Now as he sat low in his chair James reflected on the overwhelming love and desire they had felt for each other in the first years of their life together, the warmth of their affection and the passion of their embraces. He thought of how they had rejoiced in the birth of their son. Of how, each time he came home from foreign service, they had rekindled the fire of their early attraction, and made it blaze again.
‘God’s love, how could we have come to this . . . ?’ Murmured on the quiet air.
Presently he got up on his legs, went outside and sniffed the approaching storm. A breath of cold wind cleared his head, and he became resolute.
*
‘Bring her a point closer, if y’please, Mr Loftus. If we are to board short we must make headway, you know.’ Captain William Rennie, RN, came aft to the wheel. He braced himself on the tilting quarterdeck, hands clasped behind his back.
‘Ay, sir.’ Bernard Loftus, his sailing master, turned and gave the instruction to the helmsman. HM frigate Expedient, thirty-six guns, heeled into the stiff westerly and beat close-hauled six points off the eye of the wind on the starboard tack, sails quivering taut on bowlines, and seamen of the afterguard hanging their weight on the falls to trim her to an exactitude.
‘Hold her so, just so.’ Rennie sniffed the wind, smelled rain, and: ‘The glass has not lied to us, Mr Loftus. There will be a storm of rain.’ Nodding westward, where cumulo-nimbus stood broad and tall and threatening on the sky.
‘Ay, sir. That will likely become a storm of wind.’
‘Indeed. I was of a mind to exercise the great guns today, but now I do not think so.’
‘Had you meant to fire the guns, sir?’ Bernard Loftus turned his face to leeward as a glittering smash of spray flung aft from the dipping bow and swept across the quarterdeck.
‘Did y’say fire our guns?’ Rennie ducked his own head, then lifted it, his thwartwise cockaded hat dripping. ‘Nay, Bernard, I meant merely a running-out exercise, quoins pushed. We must not waste powder in home waters, hey?’
‘No, sir, in course not.’
‘The Ordnance don’t like it, and neither do Their Lordships.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Hm. I expect you will say that I have ignored such strictures often, in the past.’
‘I have no observation to make, sir. My business is navigation, not gunnery.’
‘Hm. Hm.’ Rennie glanced at him and smiled. ‘Very wise in you, Bernard.’ Now he looked round, and frowned. ‘You said Mr Leigh had gone below very brief. Where is he?’ He meant the ship’s first lieutenant, who had the deck.
‘In truth Mr Adgett had wished me to go below, sir, but Lieutenant Leigh said that he—’
‘Adgett? What is the trouble?’
Mr Adgett was Expedient’s carpenter, and had been with Rennie since the ship’s first commission in ’86.
‘I do not know that there is any trouble, sir. I think he wished merely to show me something in the water tier. When Mr Leigh said that he—’
‘Water tier?’ Rennie’s affable demeanour had disappeared. ‘If I know anything about Mr Adgett, that is his way of saying there is a leak. Christ in tears, did not the damned dockyard men tell her off to us as sound? What was they about all these last weeks, when they had her shored up in the bloody dry dock?’
‘I am nearly certain Adgett would have told me if there was a leak, sir. With your permission I will jump below at once, and—’
‘No no, Mr Loftus, y’will remain on deck, if y’please, and con the ship. I will go into the hold myself.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Stiffly, gripping a backstay as the bow dipped deep in a sudden trough, and the sea thudded in heavy under the cutwater. An explosion of spray across the forecastle.
‘You there, Mr Foster!’ Rennie, to one of the duty midshipmen.
‘Yes, sir.’ The boy attended him, removing his hat.
‘Find my steward and tell him that I want a can of tea directly. Steaming hot, say to him, with a splash of rum in it. Jump now.’
‘Ay, sir.’ The boy departed at a run, dropped his hat, retrieved it, and fled down the ladder.
There was no leak. Mr Adgett had merely been overcautious in drawing their attention to a modicum of water in the well, which he believed might possibly have come from leaking water casks.
‘What made ye think the casks had been damaged, Mr Adgett, good God?’ Rennie asked him in the glow of lanterns. ‘There is no sign of any damage at all, man.’ Glancing at Lieutenant Leigh, who nodded in confirmation.
‘No, sir.’ Mr Adgett. ‘But as I say, there is always the possibility of it, when there is more in the well than we would like. Either that, as I say, or a leak forrard. Which we has had in the past, sir, as you will be aware.’
‘Yes yes – what is the depth of water in the well today, Mr Adgett?’
‘Well, sir, it ain’t above a foot, but that—’
‘A foot only?’ Another glance at Mr Leigh, who gave an apologetic shrug.
‘Yes, sir, yes.’ Mr Adgett gave a little exasperated sigh. ‘But we was near dry when we weighed at Spithead, and even if it is only a foot now, what will it become if we continue to beat west into the wind, with a storm approaching?’
‘Yes, yes, well well, very good, Mr Adgett.’ A sniff. ‘You did right to draw it to Mr Leigh’s attention. But we will not allow ourselves to grow timid our first day at sea, hey? We must find out how she handles after the large repair, and shake her down in all distinctions. Water will get into a ship, Mr Adgett, when she puts to sea
after a long absence, that is inevitable. That don’t mean she is suffering serious indisposition. It is entirely usual, and I am at my ease about twelve inches in the well, today.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’ Another sigh, scarcely audible.
‘We will go on deck, Mr Leigh, wear ship, and run before.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Following the captain to the orlop ladder.
As they ascended, Rennie: ‘Backstays, Mr Leigh. That is what concerns me.’ Over his shoulder. ‘I shall say a word to Tangible. Backstays, and vangs, and the driver boom sheets.’
‘You wished me to remind you about gunnery, sir.’ As they came on deck, into the bracing saline air.
‘Yes, Mr Leigh, so I did. I have changed my mind. We have enough to do today without we—’ A terrible frown. ‘That man, there! Make fast that loose swinging block, before it carries away someone’s head!’ Striding aft from the waist ladder. ‘Mr Tangible! Mr Tangible! – Where is my boatswain when I want him!’
‘Stand by to wear ship!’
Mr Leigh stood at the breast-rail and bawled a series of commands through his silver speaking trumpet, which caught and reflected a flash of sunlight through the towers of canvas as he turned forrard. Expedient lost way, pitching on the increased swell, swung wide by the stern to face east, the sea lacing and seething along her wales, and caught the following wind. Soon she was sailing away from the storm, flying fair and true across the broad-rolling, wind-beaten sea at better than eleven knots.
At seven bells of the afternoon watch, Expedient tacked north round the Foreland of the Isle of Wight, and beat nor’-nor’-west to her mooring number at Spithead, making her signals. The flagship HMS Vanquish, one hundred, acknowledged.
Heavy rain was falling as Captain Rennie went ashore in his launch, wrapped head to foot in his new boat cloak. He went alone, leaving Lieutenant Leigh in command of the ship. As Rennie had gone down the side ladder he had called up to Mr Leigh at the rail:
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