Beneath the Aurora (15 page)

This news raised a cheer which, half-hearted at first, soon grew in modulation, a madcap disorganized noise accompanied by grins and laughter and multiple shiverings.

‘Very well, then,' Drinkwater continued after the noise had died away, ‘the watches below have twenty minutes to get into fresh clothes. Then they are to relieve the watch on deck. If I see a naked man half an hour from now, he'll be in the bilboes. Pipe down the watch below!'

Drinkwater jumped down from the rail. He was shuddering from the chill and covered with goose-pimples. ‘Come, gentlemen, what do you want to make of yourselves, a spectacle?'

The ship had not quite been abandoned to these cavortings, but the calm had made easier this odd business of sanitation. As the officers tumbled below to the partial privacy of the wardroom and shut the door on the berth deck beyond, they reacted according to age and temperament. The paunchy Walsh was outraged, amusingly speechless and spluttering with florid indignation. The others, even the sober Huke, were
constrained to laugh, Jameson continuing to leap about, flicking a towel with aggravating accuracy at Walsh's wobbling buttocks.

‘Damn you, Jameson! Don't do that, you confounded fool!'

‘Come, come, Walsh, don't be an old prude, you enjoyed the bathe, don't deny it!'

The elegant Mosse had been resolutely opposed to undressing, until he realized his pride would take a bigger dent if he refused. The second lieutenant was as elegant without his uniform as when fully attired. It was, he later claimed, untrue to say clothes made the man, but that beauty only needed to be skin deep to make an impression.

In this he was disturbingly right for one member of the officers' mess. A man-of-war lodged many types but all, whether extrovert or introvert, were eventually compelled to surrender in large measure any sense of individual privilege; a mess – whether forward or aft – rubbed along together on consensus, and disagreements were usually things of small moment.

But
Andromeda
's wardroom sheltered a misfit in Mr Templeton. As long as Templeton could haunt the captain's cabin, nursing his own secrets, he was content. But when he was compelled to associate with these bears, he felt awkward, conspicuous and a figure of ridicule. While being with them, he was not of them.

Much of this self-perception was in his own imagination, but the events of the early morning had shocked him deeply, not just as a matter of spectacle, but as a powerful and unlooked for spur to a hidden, barely acknowledged lust, which distracted him from all his other preoccupations.

Templeton had never acknowledged the proclivity that now overwhelmed him. He had spent his drab, pretentious life of genteel servitude largely occupying his mind. His social life, such as it was, had revolved around that of his ageing mother and her coterie of friends. He had vaguely supposed he would at an appropriate time and when one or other of the matrons had decided the matter for him, take one or other of their plain daughters to wife. To this end, and to satisfy his ambitions, he had sought to improve his place at the Admiralty. Meddling in its intrigues and hoping to advance from
lowly copying clerk, he had aspired to and achieved the post of a cipher clerk, a confidential servant of the state, whose opinion was sought first by Lord Dungarth and now by Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater.

In some ways this filled him with a heavy conceit, partially satisfying inner hungers, but from time to time he was moved to acknowledge another stirring, aware that there was about this an air of disgrace. This in turn was sublimated by classical considerations and not held to resemble, in even a distant way, the disgusting soliciting, importuning, love-struck moonings and filthy couplings of his fellow clerks with the doxies who inhabited the purlieus of Whitehall.

The morning's events had, however, brought him perilously close to a terrible exposure, for he had been physically moved by the experience, almost conspicuously aroused. He had consequently suffered the acute fear of discovery together with the agony of frustrated desire caused by the mass propinquity. Nor had it helped to see the odd individual, from an indisputably lower order of society, in a state of abandoned tumescence. That their fellows dismissed them laughingly made his own situation all the more shameful, for where this condition had occurred to him naturally, he had always banished it by occupying his mind with the diversion of a book, or some other study.

Now he hid in his flimsy cabin and wept, for it only added to his burden of fear.

The score or so of men whom Drinkwater had so disreputably sniffed out received Kennedy's especial attention. A perceptive observer would have noticed these unfortunates had in common the most wretched and ragged appearance. The surgeon took their names and ensured their washing was more than a cursory drenching, subjecting them to a thorough examination, then flinging their clothes overboard. Afterwards he sent them to the purser for new slops, brushing aside their protests that they could not afford such luxuries with the assurance that they ‘would soon be able to pay out of their prize-money'.

As for the poor fellow who had caused all this to-do, he was brought on deck in a hammock and set in the pale sunshine that finally triumphed over the cloud. By mid-morning a light
breeze had sprung up from the west and above the already stuffed hammock nettings, spread in the ratlines and along light lines rigged for the purpose, breeches and trousers, shirts and vests and pantaloons, cravats and neckties, scarves and bandanas, socks and stockings, aprons and breeches fluttered in the breeze.

Amid this gay and unwarlike decoration, Drinkwater paced the deck in deep confabulation with Kennedy.

‘Well, sir, we have done what we can . . .'

‘I'm told it is very efficacious, that the contagion is spread by the flea and that only extreme cleanliness will extirpate it.'

Kennedy frowned. ‘ 'Tis true, sir, that the putrid fever is common to poor conditions, but to attribute it to the flea is somewhat far-fetched.' Kennedy had wanted to say ‘preposterous', but in view of the captain's age and rank he forbore. Nevertheless he pressed his argument.

‘If your hypothesis was right, sir, then the disease would be as prevalent among people of the better classes as among the poor; but it is the poor who are most afflicted. The flea is common to both, but dirt and misery are not.'

‘
Quod erat demonstrandum
, eh, Mr Kennedy?' asked Drinkwater wryly. He was in better humour, glad that matters had passed off as well as they had and that, apart from the surplus bunting, order was now restored to the ship.

‘Exactly so, sir.'

‘I shall not argue the point with you. I only know what I have observed, or heard others speak of. Not all were ancient tarry-breeks.' Drinkwater smiled at his young colleague. ‘Keep that fellow in a fever out of the berth deck and we may yet save others. Ah, Tom, are you better for your bath?'

‘I have to say, sir, that for a moment or two, I seriously doubted the wisdom of what you were doing, but', he shrugged and looked about him, ‘there seems little sign of ill-effect, beyond the adornments aloft, that is.'

They all laughed at the first lieutenant's allusion to the fluttering disorder about them.

‘There'll be none, Tom,' Drinkwater said reassuringly. ‘It was all taken humorously and most of 'em will know by now that it was for their own good. As for the officers, it was for their benefit too; besides, 'twas a case of
noblesse oblige
.'

‘Perhaps you are right. I certainly feel better now the gunpowder is all doused. Seems a damned dangerous thing to do, to stum the ship like that.'

‘But you have to dry her through, Tom; you know how oak sweats and she'd been closed down during the storm. After we've exercised the guns I want the bilges pumped dry and then have salt sprinkled into the wells . . .'

‘Aye, aye, sir,' said Huke, with just a faint trace of resignation in his tone to amuse Drinkwater.

More officers joined them, and it occurred to Drinkwater that each felt a compulsion to reappear upon the quarterdeck fully accoutred, to reassert their individual status. Whatever the darker motives, they laughed and smiled, exchanging grins with the men at the wheel.

‘Have you heard Jameson's joke, sir?' drawled Mosse.

‘No, pray share it, Mr Jameson.'

The third lieutenant blushed, made a face at Mosse and shook his head.

‘Come, Roger, or I shall steal it . . .'

‘Do as you please, damn you, Stephen.'

Mosse turned insouciantly to Drinkwater and Huke. ‘Jameson has some crack-pot notion that we were ridding ourselves of fleas, sir, and, having due regard to the naked disorder so recently upon our decks, likened it to an event of history, sir.'

‘And what was that, Mr Mosse? As I am sure you about to tell us.'

‘Why, the Boston flea party, sir!'

Despite the misgivings of his officers, Drinkwater had known very well what he was doing. By following the mass drenching with a gunnery exercise he achieved that unity in a crew which, with a less active commander, might otherwise have taken months. He had been lucky in Huke, capitalizing on that diligent officer's hard work, but he was pleased that after noon, notwithstanding the ridiculous washing that still blew about above their heads, they had loosed three broadsides from each battery, and shot at a dahn-buoy until their ears rang with the concussions of the guns.

To crown the events of the day Drinkwater cleared the lower deck and summoned the ship's company aft.

‘Well, my lads, it has been an eventful day,' he said, pausing long enough to hear a groundswell of good-natured agreement, ‘and it is likely to be succeeded by a number of such eventful days. We are not far from the coast of Norway, and we are here to flush out a few privateers who have been reported lurking hereabouts. In a moment or two I am ordering the hoisting of Danish colours and we shall enter Danish waters. Next time you hear the drum beat to quarters the only surprise will be the one we will give to the enemy! Now, Mr Huke, we have disrupted the ship's routine sufficiently for one day and delayed long enough. Be so kind as to pipe up spirits!'

Drinkwater went below to a cheer; if there was opportunism, even sycophancy in it, he was undeceived. He had other matters to concern him. Quilhampton was still missing, and the men who had half-severed the gun-breech were among the mob happily awaiting their daily ration of rum.

‘Sir!'

Drinkwater stirred and saw Midshipman Fisher's head peering round the door. ‘What is it?'

‘Mr Birkbeck's compliments, sir, and we've sighted Utsira.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Almost six bells, sir.'

‘Very well.' The boy vanished. Drinkwater roused himself, swivelled in his chair and stared through the stern windows. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and he must have dozed for over an hour.

‘I am growing old,' he muttered to himself. There were not many hours of daylight left and the horizon was depressingly empty. He remembered James Quilhampton's
Kestrel
with a pang of conscience. ‘Old and forgetful.' The thought, too, was depressing.

Rising stiffly, he went into his night-cabin, opened the top of his chest and poured some water into the bowl recessed there. He threw water into his face, ran the new-fangled toothbrush round his mouth and stared at himself in the mirror. He was sure there was more of his forehead visible than when he had last looked, then chid himself for a fool, for he had done his hair immediately after the morning's dousing.

On deck he became brisk and eager for a sight of the island. ‘Where away, Mr Birkbeck?'

Birkbeck was standing with one of his mates, a man named Ashley. Both men lowered their glasses. ‘Two points to starboard, sir.'

‘Here, sir.' Ashley offered his telescope.

‘Thank you, Mr Ashley.'

Drinkwater focused the lenses upon the low island that appeared blue and insubstantial, then swept the sea around it in the vain hope that the grey-white peak of
Kestrel
's mainsail would break the bleakness of the scene.

‘Not a landfall to stumble across in the dark, or the kind of weather we laboured in the other night,' remarked Birkbeck.

‘No, indeed . . .' Drinkwater lowered the telescope and handed it back to the master's mate. ‘Obliged, Mr Ashley.' He looked up at the spanker gaff, where the unfamiliar red swallowtail ensign with its white cross flapped bravely in the breeze.

‘Handsome flag, ain't it? Last time I saw it fly in anger was at Copenhagen,' Birkbeck said.

‘Which ship were you in?' Drinkwater asked attentively.

‘I was with Captain Puget in
Goliath
.'

‘I don't recall . . .'

‘In Gambier's attack, sir, not Nelson's.'

‘Ah, yes . . .'

‘You were in the earlier action then?'

‘Yes. I had the bomb
Virago
.'

They reminisced happily, staring at the distant island as, almost imperceptibly, it took form. Drinkwater forbore from telling Birkbeck the clandestine part he had himself played in the events that led up to the appearance of Dismal Jimmy Gambier's fleet before the spires of the Danish capital in 1807. Instead, Birkbeck wanted to know of his brief meetings with Lord Nelson, which led to the inevitable revelation that Captain Drinkwater had not only been a witness to the battle of Copenhagen in 1801, but had also, ‘somewhat ignominiously', been a prisoner aboard the enemy flagship
Bucentaure
at Trafalgar.
*

‘I had no idea, sir,' said Birkbeck admiringly.

‘It was not a post to which much glory accrued,' Drinkwater replied ruefully. ‘Fate plays some odd tricks . . . I cannot begin to describe the carnage . . .'

The blue smudge hardened, grew darker and sharper, its outline more defined. Presently Huke joined them as Utsira revealed itself as a rocky, steep-sided, low island, with the surge and suck of a heavy groundswell washing its grim shoreline. Then, as the sun westered, it threw the rough and weathered surface into hostile relief.