A Brig of War (13 page)

The men emerged sleepily. Lestock came up, followed by Rogers. ‘Ah, Mr Lestock, I do not require your presence, thank you.' The elderly man turned away muttering. ‘Mr Rogers I desire that you take command of the hands and unrig the broken yard, clear all that raffle away and then get one of those Corsican pines inboard and rig it as a jury yard to reset the spare topsail without delay. Wind's easing all the time. When you have completed that bring in a second tree and get a party of men under the direction of Mr Johnson to start work with draw knives in shaping up a new yard, better let Johnson choose the spars. We'll transfer the iron work after that and paint the whole thing before swaying it aloft. Your experience on
Hecuba
should stand you in good stead.'

Still fuddled with sleep Rogers could not at first understand what was happening. It dawned on him that it was not much past five a.m. and that he had had hardly any sleep. It was doubtful if he yet knew of Drinkwater's discovery of Mistress Best or of
his part in the conspiracy. ‘Look, damn you Drinkwater, if you think . . .'

Drinkwater took a step quickly and thrust his face close to Rogers's. ‘It used to be said that every debt was paid when the main topsail halliards were belayed, Rogers, but it ain't so. Newton's third law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Now you are about to have that demonstrated to you. You have had your pleasure, you poisonous blackguard, and by God, sir, now you are going to pay for it! Carry on!' Drinkwater turned contemptuously away and called Mr Quilhampton to his side.

‘Fetch my quadrant and the time-keeper from my cabin, take your time, Mr Q. Make two trips. If you drop that chronometer it will be the worse for you.'

The boy hurried off. Drinkwater was beginning, just beginning, to feel better. He would take a series of sun altitudes in a while and calculate their longitude by chronometer. He was very proud of the chronometer. The convalescing Captain Torrington had been landed with his men at the Cape. The army officer had been most grateful to the commander and gunroom officers of the
Hellebore
and asked if there was any service he could perform for them. By chance his brother, a civil officer in the service of the East India Company was taking passage home in one of the Indiamen in Table Bay and Torrington intended to return with him to England. His brother had advanced the Captain a considerable sum of money to defray his expenses whilst the Indiamen were at the Cape and he was willing to do his best to purchase some comforts for his benefactors.

Drinkwater, having missed his opportunity to obtain a timekeeper at Syracuse, knew that John Company's ships carried them. ‘Sir, if I could prevail upon you to beg a chronometer from the commander of one of the Indiamen we should be eternally obliged to you. You are aware of the nature of our mission and that we were sent on it somewhat precipitately; a chronometer would be of great use.'

‘I should regard myself an ingrate if I were not to purchase you one my dear Drinkwater, a few wounds and a clock are a small price to pay to avoid Botany Bay.' They had laughed heartily at the noble captain as they lowered him into the boat.

‘You know I used to deplore the sale of army commissions but when you have a generous and wealthy fellow like that to deal
with it don't seem so bad a system,' Griffiths had said ironically.

The following morning the instrument arrived in an exotically smelling teak case. Drinkwater had taken it in charge, not trusting Lestock to wind it daily at the appointed hour. He had confirmed the longitude of Table Bay to within seven minutes of arc and this morning would be the first time they had seen the sun since leaving to run their easting down in the Roaring Forties. The result would make a nice matter for debate when Lestock came below for dinner.

After Lestock relieved him at eight bells and Drinkwater permitted the hands to cease their labour for half an hour to break their fasts, the first lieutenant sent for the woman. He sat himself down at the gunroom table and made her sit opposite while Appleby passed through into Griffiths's cabin to tend the commander.

The door had hardly closed on the surgeon when Drinkwater felt his calf receive a gentle and seductive caress from her leg. Last night, tired and a little drunk he had been in danger of succumbing. The lure of even Catherine's used body had sent a yearning through him. But this morning was different. His position would not tolerate such licence as the men toiled in expiation above his head. Besides, despite his fatigue, his spirit was repaired and his body no longer craved the solace of poor, plain and desperate Catherine. Daylight did not help her case.

‘Last night I threatened to have you flogged. I have decided against that, but if you attempt the seduction of me or a single one of the men I will visit the cat upon your back.' He saw the initiative fade from her eyes. ‘Have you ever seen a flogging, Catherine?' he asked coldly.

She nodded. Drinkwater opened the ship's muster book, snapped open the inkwell and took up his pen. ‘I am entering you on the ship's books as a surgeon's assistant. You will be fed and clothed. If you prove by adhering to the regulations of the ship, that you can carry out your duties I will use my best endeavours to have your sentence remitted by whatever time you serve aboard this ship. I have a little influence through a peer of the realm and it may prove possible, if your services are of a sufficiently meritorous nature, that the remission of the whole of your sentence is not beyond the bounds of possibility.'

He did not know if such a course was remotely possible but it
kindled hope in Catherine's eyes. She was a creature of the jungle, an opportunist, amoral rather than immoral and yet possessed of sufficient character to have hazed a whole ship's company. That showed a certain laudable determination, Drinkwater thought. His plan might just work. ‘Will you agree to my conditions? The alternative is to be put in irons indefinitely.'

‘Yes, yer honour.' She lowered her face.

‘Look at me Catherine. You must understand that any infringement of the ship's rules will destroy our agreement.' She looked up at him then at Appleby who had come from Griffiths's cabin shaking his head over the captain's condition. ‘Mr Appleby here will witness your undertaking.'

‘I understand yer honour, but . . .'

‘But what?'

‘Well sir,' she said ingenuously, ‘it's Mr Jeavons and Mr Davey, sir.'

‘The surgeon's mates?' She nodded.

‘They're my regulars, like, sir, they've come to expect . . . you know . . .' She looked down again while Drinkwater looked at an Appleby empurpling with rage. ‘Why the damned, festering . . .' Drinkwater held his hand up.

‘I will deal with them Catherine. They will not trouble you again.' He turned the book round and held the pen out. ‘Make your mark there,' he pointed to the place but she said indignantly ‘I know, sir, I can read and write.'

She signed her name with some confidence. ‘Very well, Catherine, now while I read out the men's names do you tell me with whom you have slept.' He began to read. She did not know all their names but the percentage of the crew who had visited her was large. But neither was it surprising. It was even possible that this bedraggled creature possessed a gentleness absent from the lives of the seamen and that it was for more than lust that they came to her.

‘It must stop now, Catherine.' She nodded, while Appleby, with a hideous implication said, ‘I will look into this matter.'

Drinkwater dismissed Catherine and sent for Appleby's mates. It was certain that they had been instrumental in suggesting Catherine dupe the brig's officers to their own advantage. Their plan had misfired when they discovered that many more of the hands would have to be a party to it and that those men would soon come calling for their share of the trophy. Besides, Catherine
had to be found employment under supervision. Appleby was the only trustworthy person who did not have to keep a watch, and as the woman showed an aptitude for medical work she would be best employed with him.

It was the work of a moment to disrate the surgeon's mates. They protested they held their warrants from the College of Surgeons, that they were gentlemen unused to the labour of seamen. But being alone in the Southern Ocean had its advantages. There was neither court of appeal nor College of Surgeons south of the equator and they were soon turned to on deck where the starters of the bosun's mates were stinging their backsides with a venom spurred by a gradual realisation that the hands were being worked like dogs because of a certain lady of easy morals between decks. That her two pimps had been turned among them was a matter for some satisfaction.

Drinkwater concluded his morning's work by also appointing Tyson surgeon's assistant. He too could write, they had discovered, and Drinkwater was amused to find Appleby growling over the radical alterations to his department. ‘My dear fellow,' said Drinkwater summoning Meyrick from the pantry with some blackstrap, ‘you have always fancied your chances as a philosopher, now you have the most literate department in the ship. You will be able to plead the benefit of clergy for all of 'em. Now do be a good fellow and allow me to compute this longitude before Lestock comes below.'

At noon Drinkwater called the hands aft. His announcement to them was brief and to the point. The woman, Catherine Best, he told them, had been apprehended. The deception against the Regulations for the Good Order of His Majesty's Navy on board His Britannic Majesty's Brig of War
Hellebore
was at an end. Although it verged upon the mutinous by virtue of its very nature as ‘a combination', in the effective absence of the captain, he had decided that he could not flog the woman without inflicting the penalty upon them all. He held them all culpable, however, and would punish all of them by a stoppage of grog, to be indefinite against their good behaviour. The groan that met this announcement convinced Drinkwater that it was the correct measure. The deprivation of jack's grog was a punishment incomprehensible to landsmen. As for the woman, he continued, she was now part of the ship's company. Any man found lying with her would receive
the same punishment as that prescribed by the Articles of War for that unnatural act whereby one man had knowledge of another. He did not need to remind them that the punishment for sodomy was death.

When he had finished he sent them to their dinner. ‘By heaven, Nathaniel, that was a rare device,' muttered Appleby admiringly, ‘what a splendid pettifogging notion. Worthy of Lincoln's Inn.'

Drinkwater smiled thinly. He was thinking how far they had yet to travel and how little of their task they had yet accomplished.

‘What d'you intend to do about Dalziell and Rogers?'

‘Let them stew a little, Harry, let them stew.'

In longitude forty-five east they hauled to the northward, the wind quartering them until it gradually eased and died away from the west. They entered the great belt of variables south of Madagascar and worked north by frequent yard trimming. Twice they sighted sails but on both occasions they did not seek to close the other. The men began to mutter. The deprivation of their grog continued days after they had toiled to get first the jury foreyard up, then its permanent replacement. The lack of it was beginning to rankle. As the weather continued to improve Drinkwater had sent up the topgallant masts. On their first day of light winds they had hoisted the boats out and hauled them up to the davit heads on either quarter. Griffiths had recovered sufficiently to be told of the events of the last fortnight. He had been so choleric that Appleby feared for a recurrence of his fever, but the old man had subsided to order that Drinkwater continue the ban on grog just at the point when Drinkwater was considering reinstating it.

‘No indeed! The weather is improving, the men do not need it to drive them aloft, see; let them feel the want of it a little longer.'

Catherine Best appeared a reformed character and Appleby was the butt of jokes about the reclamation of fallen women. Although he resisted at first, Griffiths had finally allowed her to attend him. Reporting to the commander one morning Drinkwater had commented on her as she left the cabin. ‘There is a little good in the worst of us,' Griffiths quoted with more than a trace of Welsh piety, Drinkwater thought wryly. ‘
Du
, but she's a sight better than those gin-soaked mountains of lard at Haslar . . . or for that matter the herring gutters they had in the hospital at Yarmouth . . .' Griffiths was beginning to enjoy his convalescence
and if the men thought their commander had adopted their bawd then let them, he thought. They would be of that opinion anyway and Drinkwater was at last able to wring the issue of grog from Griffiths.

It was whilst observing Venus after sunset that he first heard the rumour. Beneath the poop two men sat in the gloom of dusk while
Hellebore
ran north north east under easy sail.

‘We be a cursed ship with a woman on board,' he heard one voice.

‘Ah, bull's piss. They Indiamen carry women
and
chaplains, they seem to manage. Anyway you tried hard enough to have her.'

‘No I didn't.'

‘You bloody well did, you said yerself that if you'd been below before that slimy rat Jenkins you'd'ave slipped her what she had coming to her. I heard you.'

‘We still be accursed. You heard o'the Flying Dutchman? Him what inhabits these waters? You heard of him then?'

Drinkwater brought the planet down to the fast fading horizon, twisting the quadrant gently and smoothly. Satisfied he rocked it slightly from side to side so that the gleaming disc just cut the horizon, all the time adjusting the index to follow the planet's setting. ‘Now!' he called to Quilhampton who was taking the time on the chronometer. He paid no more attention to the rubbish he had overheard. Lestock came up shortly afterwards to relieve him and looked suspiciously at the longitude Quilhampton had chalked on the slate.