Baltic Mission (21 page)

Mackenzie laughed. ‘He does not strike me as a man who might be afraid of the dark, Captain.'

Drinkwater grinned back. ‘Perhaps not; but he was once. Good luck, Mackenzie.'

‘A bientôt
, Captain . . .'

For two days Drinkwater kept
Antigone
under weigh. He was merciless to the entire crew, officers and men alike. The British frigate stood on and off the land, first under easy sail and then setting every stitch of canvas she possessed. When ropes parted or jammed, he chastised the petty officers and midshipmen responsible with verbal lashings from the windward hance. It brought him a deep inner satisfaction, for junior officers were rarely blamed for the many small things that went wrong on board. They buried such failings more often than not by starting the unfortunate hands, a practice that usually assuaged the quarterdeck officers. Midshipmen had the worst name for these minor malpractices which caused such resentment among the men, and it did them good to be chased hither and thither and called to account for their failures in full view of the ship's company.

As the studdingsails rose and set for the eighth or ninth time, as the topgallant masts were struck and the yards sent down, the men worked with a will, seeing how at every misfortune it was a midshipman, a master's mate or a petty officer that was identified as being the culprit. The hands were in high glee for, with the captain on deck throughout the manoeuvres, there was little revengeful starting carried out by the bosun's mates who well knew Drinkwater's aversion to the practice. It was one thing to start men aloft in an emergency or when faced with the enemy, when the need to manoeuvre was paramount; but quite another to do it when the ship was being put through her paces.

Even the officers bore their share of Drinkwater's strange behaviour, Rogers, as first lieutenant, in particular. But he bore it well, submitting to it as though to a test of his recovery. At the end of the second day, as the men secured the guns from a final practice drill, Drinkwater pronounced himself satisfied, ordered a double ration of three-water grog served out to all hands and brought the ship to
anchor a league from Memel light.

‘Well, Mr Rogers, I think the ship will make a fast passage when she is called upon to do so, don't you?'

‘Yes, sir. But a passage where, sir?' asked Rogers, puzzled.

‘Well, if we get the right slant of wind, we shall make for London River!'

Rogers's smile was unalloyed. ‘Hell's teeth, that's good news. May I ask when that might be?'

‘When Mr Mackenzie returns, Sam, when Mr Mackenzie returns.'

Mr Mackenzie returned shortly before noon three days later, hailing them from the deck of a fishing boat and obviously in a state of high excitement. Drinkwater was on deck to meet him and found Mackenzie had lost his air of cool self-possession. His dust-stained clothes flapping about him, he strode across the deck, his face lined with dirt which gave its expression a compulsive ferocity.

‘Captain, your cabin at once,' he seemed breathless, for all that he must have been inactive during the boat's passage.

‘Prepare to get under weigh, Mr Rogers,' Drinkwater ordered, turning towards Mackenzie, but the agent shook his head.

‘No . . . not yet. There is something we must attend to first. Come, Captain, every second counts!'

Drinkwater shrugged at the first lieutenant. ‘Belay that, Mr Rogers. Come then, Mr Mackenzie.' He led the way below and Mackenzie collapsed into a chair. Pouring two glasses of blackstrap Drinkwater handed one to the exhausted agent. ‘Here, drink this and then tell me what has happened.'

Mackenzie tossed off the glass, wiped a hand across his mouth and stared at Drinkwater with eyes that glittered from red-rimmed sockets.

‘Captain,' began Mackenzie, ‘I need you to come with me. I have returned to persuade you. It is imperative. It is a mad enterprise, but one on which everything hangs.'

‘Everything?' Drinkwater frowned uncertainly.

‘Yes, everything,' Mackenzie insisted, ‘perhaps the history of Europe. You are the one man who can help!'

‘But I am a sea-officer, not a spy!'

Drinkwater's protest roused Mackenzie. ‘It is precisely because you are a sea-officer that we need you . . . Ostroff and I. You see, Captain Drinkwater, my hypothesis has proved correct. Napoleon and Alexander are to meet in conditions of the greatest secrecy, and to gain access we need a seaman's skills.'

The British spy made out a desperate case for Drinkwater's help and he had to concede the justice of the argument. What Mackenzie demanded was incontrovertibly within the latitude of Dungarth's special instructions. Whatever the bureaucrats at the Admiralty might think of him leaving his ship, he felt he was covered by Lord Dungarth's cryptic order:
You should afford any assistance required by persons operating on the instructions of this Department
. Now he knew why the old, recurring dream had woken him a few mornings before; he had felt a presentiment and he knew the moment for full atonement had come.

‘Damn these metaphysics,' he growled, and turned his mind to more practical matters.

Mackenzie had suggested they took a third person, someone with a competent knowledge of horses, for they had far to travel, yet one who would play up to the fiction of Mackenzie masquerading as a merchant and Drinkwater as the master of an English trading vessel lying in Memel. For this there was only one candidate, Midshipman Lord Walmsley, the only one of
Antigone
's people who was familiar with horses, and who spoke French into the bargain. His lordship showed a gratifying willingness to volunteer for a ‘secret mission' and was ordered to remove the white patches from his coat collar and to dress plainly. His preparations in the cockpit spread a sensational rumour throughout the ship.

For himself Drinkwater begged a plain blue coat from Hill, leaving behind his sword with the lion-headed pommel that betrayed his commissioned status. Instead he packed pistols, powder and ball in a valise together with his shaving tackle and a change of small clothes.

‘You will not need to worry about being conspicuous,' Mackenzie had yawned, ‘the countryside is alive with travellers all going wide-eyed to see their little father the Tsar meet the hideous monster Napoleon.'

The hours of the afternoon rushed by. He had left instructions with Quilhampton to execute his will should he fail to return, and had attempted to write to Elizabeth but gave the matter up, for his heart was too full to trust to paper. Instead he went to the orlop to see Tregembo who was recovering well, and passed on a brief message to be given in the event of his disappearance. It was inadequate and ambiguous, but it was all he could do.

‘I wish I could come with 'ee, zur,' the old man had said, half rising from the grubby palliasse upon which he lay. Drinkwater had patted his unhurt shoulder.

‘You be a good fellow and get better.'

‘And you look after yourself, boy,' Tregembo had said with a fierce and possessive familiarity that brought a sudden smile to Drinkwater's preoccupied face.

Finally, he had written his orders to Rogers, placing him in temporary command. Should he fail to return within ten days, Rogers was to open a second envelope which informed their Lordships of the state of affairs Mackenzie had so far discovered and his own reasons for leaving his ship. As the dog-watches changed, Mackenzie woke, and half an hour later they left the ship.

Lieutenant Quilhampton commanded the boat, making his second trip to Memel to land agents and scarcely imagining why the captain found it necessary to desert them like this. The mood in the boat was one of silent introspection as each man contemplated the future. Drinkwater and Mackenzie considered the problems ahead of them while James Quilhampton and the oarsmen gazed outboard and wondered what it would be like to be under the orders of Samuel Rogers. The only light heart among them was Lord Walmsley who had a thirst for an adventurous lark.

The long northern twilight offered them no concealment as they pulled into the river, past the lighthouse tower and its fire. The quays of Memel were still busy with fishing boats unloading their catches. Drinkwater tried to assume the character of Young, master of the
Jenny Marsden
, as typifying the kind of man he was trying to ape. He tried to recall the jargon of the merchant mariners, mentally repeating their strange terms in time with the oars as they knocked against the thole-pins: loss and demurrage; barratry and bottomry; pratique and protest; lagan and lien, jetsam and jerque notes, flotsam and indemnity. It was a bewildering vocabulary of which he had an imperfect knowledge, but in the event there were no Custom House officers to test him and with a feeling of anti-climax Drinkwater followed Mackenzie up a flight of slippery stone steps onto the quay, with Walmsley bringing up the rear.

There were no farewells. Quilhampton shoved the tiller over and the bowman bore off. Ten minutes after approaching the quay the barge was slipping seawards in the gathering darkness. Quilhampton did not look back. He felt an overwhelming sense of desolation: Drinkwater had deserted them and they were now to be subject to the arbitrary rule of Samuel Rogers.

Lieutenant Samuel Rogers sat alone at the captain's desk. His eyes
looked down at the table-top. It was clear of papers, clear of Mount's long-borrowed Military Atlas, clear of everything except a key. It was a large, steel key, such as operated a lock with four tumblers. A wooden tag was attached to it and bore the legend: SPIRIT ROOM.

Rogers stared at the key for a long time. He was filled with a sense of power quite unattached to the fact that he was now in effective command of the
Antigone
. This was something else, something strange stirring in a brain already damaged by alcohol and the horrible experience of being lashed in a strait-jacket. Rogers was quite unable to blame himself for his addiction. He blamed fate and bad luck and, in a way, that obligation to Drinkwater which had become a form of jealousy. And Lallo's justification for his treatment had rested on Drinkwater's own instructions. He had been ‘confined quietly' . . . the meaning was obvious. That it had been done for his own good, Rogers did not dispute. Disagreeable things were frequently done for one's own good and a streak of childishness surfaced in him. Perhaps it was a weakness of his character, perhaps a by-product of his recent chronic alcoholism, but it was to darken his mind in the following days, worsened by the isolation Drinkwater's absence had placed him in and the position of trust that he now occupied. That, too, was attributable to Drinkwater, and it was this sense of being in his place and having to act in his stead that suffused Rogers with an extraordinary sense of power. In this peculiar and unbalanced consummation of a long aggrieved and corrosive jealousy, Rogers found the will to reject his demon.

With a sweep of his hand he sent the spirit room key clattering into a dark corner of the cabin.

“I hate the English as much as you do!”

Alexander to Napoleon, 25 June 1807

General Edouard Santhonax, aide-de-camp to His Imperial Majesty Napoleon, Emperor of the French and Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army, completed his verbal report. He watched his master pace slowly up and down the beaten earth floor of the low wayside inn which was serving briefly as Imperial Headquarters. The Emperor's polished half-boots creaked slightly as he walked between the two crude tables and their attendant benches at which sat his secretaries and crop-headed Marshal Berthier, the Grand Army's Chief-of-Staff. Their heads were bent over piles of documents taken from dispatch boxes.

The Emperor was dressed in the dark green undress uniform coat of the Horse Chasseurs of the Guard and his plump hands were clasped in the small of his back. He spun round at the end of the tavern, his head bowed, the fine brown hair swept forward in a cow-lick over the broad forehead. He paced back, towards the waiting Santhonax.

Santhonax stood silently, his plumed hat beneath his arm, the gold lace on his blue coat a contrast to the Emperor's unostentatious uniform. Napoleon stopped his pacing a foot in front of the tall officer and looked up into Santhonax's eyes.

‘So, my General, we have an emissary from the Tsar, eh?'

‘That is so, Sire. He waits for your command outside.'

Napoleon's face suddenly relaxed into a charming smile. His right hand was raised from behind his back and pinched the left cheek of General Santhonax, where a livid scar ran upwards from the corner of his mouth.

‘You have done well,
mon brave
.'

‘Thank you, Sire.'

Napoleon turned aside to where a map lay spread on the rough grey wood of the table. He laid a plump finger on the map where a blue line wound across rolling country.

‘Tilsit.'

A shadow of hatching lay under the ball of the Emperor's finger, indicating the existence of a town that straddled the River Nieman.