Beneath the Aurora (19 page)

So small a space of time had been occupied by this event that he arrived on the forecastle hard on the heels of the rebels, quite unaware that he was lucky to have escaped with his own life. He saw, looming above him and, it seemed, just beyond
the stuffed hammock nettings, the rushing bowsprit, jibs, figurehead and forefoot of the passing Danish frigate.

Andromeda
's starboard bow-chaser fired, the gun carriage rolled inboard and her crew leapt round it with sponge and worm, cartridge, ball and rammer. The next gun fired, and the next. Concussion was answered by concussion. The air seemed thick with great gusts of roaring wind and heated blasts that made him gasp. He was spun round, confused; he breathed with difficulty, his quarry had vanished, seemingly swallowed up in this smoky and explosive hell.

Then he saw them, clustered above the port sheet anchor lashed in the larboard forechains. A second later he also saw the fluke and stock disappear overboard. To the buzzings and roars, cries and thumps was added an undertone he was unfamiliar with.

Unbeknown to Mr Templeton, just beneath his feet and in preparation for anchoring in the fiord if it had been necessary, the sheet anchor drew its heavy hemp cable rumbling after it to the sea-bed. In the stunning confusion of the noise and smoke, it suddenly struck him what was happening and he hesitated.

Drinkwater knew what had happened the moment he realized that the sudden acceleration of the enemy was apparent, not real, motion.

As he looked round he saw that it was the sudden swing of
Andromeda
's bow to port, manifested by the rake of the bowsprit across the distant hills, that had caused this disorientation. In the instant of comprehension, cause was of less moment than effect. From having a sporting chance at inflicting damage upon her enemy,
Andromeda
was suddenly laid helplessly supine under the enemy guns, her vulnerable stern exposed as she swung.

The Danes were not slow to exploit this chance, for the British frigate continued to turn slowly, obligingly, caught by her treacherously released larboard sheet anchor. The rebels had put wracking stoppers on the cable so that, when some fifty fathoms had run out, it jerked at the anchor, and the flukes far below bit at the deposits of moraine on the sea-bed.

Circumstances had conspired in their favour, for it so
happened that, having worked across to the opposite shore,
Andromeda
was, as her captain had supposed she would be, in far shallower water than prevailed in the main body of the fiord. Her anchor, after plucking at the bottom, bit effectively. But such was her speed that, although the swinging moment was applied at her bow and she turned to expose her narrow stern to the surprised Danes, she swung through more than a neat right angle. In fact she continued to swing, turning almost back the way she had come and exposing her whole port side. Moreover, this wild turn had flung her sails aback and this caused her to slow, almost to follow her enemy as she floundered and bucked in response to the powerful tug of her hemp cable.

‘Bloody anchor's shot away!' Drinkwater roared. ‘We've club-hauled! Let go t'gallant halliards! Clew up tops'ls! Main and fore clew garnets!'

They scarcely felt the crash and thump of the Danish shot as it flew about. The air was full of the wind of its passing and men who had been standing one moment had vanished the next, to become a bloody pulp and then a slime as others, their eyes and attention aloft, slithered and stumbled through their remains.

Drinkwater felt a smart blow on the shoulder and the sting of something sharp across his face. His hat was torn from his head and he was vaguely aware, though he remembered this only afterwards, of something gold spinning away from him.

Walsh ran towards Drinkwater as he was consumed with anxiety for the main topgallant mast. It swayed gracefully out of the vertical, halted and swung in a web of rigging, then its broken foot pulled away from the upper hounds and it began to fall, bringing the topgallant yard and sail down with it. About twenty feet above the boats on the booms, its descent was arrested by more rigging and wreckage and it hung, suspended, like the sword of Damocles above their heads, gently swaying.

Huke was already rallying men to get it lowered down on deck to salvage what they could. Drinkwater turned his attention to the departing enemy. He could not suppose the Danes would not come back and finish what they had already begun. He felt someone tugging at his clothing. It was Walsh.

‘Oh, my!' the marine officer gasped, ‘oh, my!' He knelt at Drinkwater's feet in a ridiculous posture, and Drinkwater looked down at him. The florid face was suffused with hurt and pain and anger, the eyes ablaze, and then the light went out of it, the shadow of death moved swiftly across it and Walsh fell full length at Drinkwater's feet. Afterwards, Drinkwater could not understand how the ball had hit the marine officer, or where it had gone, for its imprint was clear in Walsh's wrecked back.

Drinkwater stared at the mangled man for a moment, felt his gorge rise and turned away, fishing frantically in his tail pocket for the Dollond glass so that he could shut out this madness and concentrate on the neat, ordered image of the enemy frigate again.

‘She's the
Odin
, sir, must be new tonnage, we burnt everything on the stocks, but I do recall timbers on the ways being marked
Odin
.' The voice of Birkbeck, calmly professional, steadied him, corroborating his earlier asides to Huke and referring to the great act of licensed arson which had followed Admiral Lord Gambier's action and the military operations of General Lord Cathcart which had culminated in the occupation of Copenhagen six years earlier.

‘Thank you, Mr Birkbeck,' Drinkwater said, and the master turned to an elderly master's mate named Beavis and remarked on the captain's coolness. ‘Look at him; one epaulette shot away and taken half his cheek with it, no hat and not a word of alarm.' Birkbeck shook his head. ‘I thought him half-mad t'other day when he had us all bollock-naked under the pumps, now I know he is.'

‘He'll need to be,' replied Beavis, ‘if we're to get out of this festering mess.'

The Danish frigate had swept past them and she too was now taking in sail. Already her topgallant yards were down and the men were aloft laying out along them to furl the sails, and her main course and forecourse were swagged up in their buntlines and clew garnets. As Drinkwater watched, he saw her turn slowly into the wind, tack neatly under topsails, spanker and jibs, and head back towards them.

On
Andromeda
's deck order was reasserting itself. Despite
being badly cut up both by the fort and the
Odin, Andromeda
was capable of resistance. Huke appeared at his elbow.

‘Are you all right, sir?' the first lieutenant asked solicitously, seeing the blood on Drinkwater's cheek.

‘Not a good moment for you to step into my shoes, Tom,' Drinkwater joked grimly.

‘I meant your face.'

Drinkwater put up his hand and brought it away sticky with blood. ‘Well, I'm damned; I had no idea – it's no more than a scratch.'

‘You've lost your swab.'

‘Ah,' Drinkwater put up his hand, ‘confounded thing must have carried away. It's happened before.'

‘Aye, and lacerated your cheek. Anyway, I've been forward. I found Templeton up there, he saw what happened.'

‘What, with the anchor?'

‘Aye, it was cut away – deliberately,' Huke added, aware that Drinkwater was only half-listening, that he was concerned about the Danish frigate a mile away. He beckoned Templeton. ‘Tell the Captain, Templeton.'

Templeton's face was uncertain, struggling to comprehend what had transpired.

‘Go on, man! Get on with it . . . Oh, for God's sake!' Huke fumed impatiently. ‘The shank painter was sliced through like that damned gun-breeching. This,' Huke gestured wildly round, ‘this is no accident!'

‘The devil it ain't!' Drinkwater experienced a constriction about his throat. He felt a clear sensation of being strangled and as he fought off this weakness, Templeton's expression looked oddly equivocal.

‘Would you know the men who did this?' Drinkwater asked desperately.

‘I don't know,' Templeton answered evasively, avoiding Drinkwater's scrutiny, ‘it was all rather confusing. I could try.'

‘Yes, you could,' Drinkwater snapped, his eyes cold. ‘Take Walsh and a file of his men . . .' Drinkwater remembered. ‘Oh, Walsh is dead.' He looked down at the red corpse. Templeton's eyes followed and saw the horror at his feet for the first time. ‘Damnation!' The clerk's eyes glazed over and
he crumpled in a swoon at Drinkwater's feet. ‘Damnation!' Drinkwater swore again.

‘Sir!' The first lieutenant's cry of warning recalled Drinkwater's attention to the
Odin
. He looked out to larboard. The Danish frigate was bearing down on them in a second attempt to rake
Andromeda
from astern. But in her approach, just for a few minutes of opportunity, she was head on to them.

‘Messenger!'

‘Sir?' Midshipman Fisher stood beside him. The boy was pale and fidgeted with his coat lapels.

‘Are you all right, son?'

‘Perfectly, sir.'

‘Good, go below to the gun deck and tell . . .'

But Huke had anticipated the order and was shouting to Mosse on the gun deck below. The roar of the larboard broadside bellowed defiance at the approaching
Odin. Andromeda
rocked with the recoil. The men sponged and loaded and rammed, and again, then again, flung bar-shot high at the enemy's foremast. This was what Huke had trained his crew for, and if Pardoe's absence had been reprehensible, Huke had taken full advantage of the breach of regulations. The bar-shot, each comprising two hemispheres of iron joined by a rod, were flung from the gun muzzles and flailed wildly during their inaccurate, short-ranged trajectory.

The noise brought Templeton to. Drinkwater bent and shook him roughly. ‘Get up!' he commanded. ‘Get up and pull yourself together. I want those men rounded up.' He turned and bellowed, ‘Sergeant Danks!'

‘Sir?'

‘A file of your men, we've work to do on board! Follow me! Quickly now!'

Drinkwater helped Templeton to his unsteady feet and thrust him forward.

‘Shall I come too, sir?' It was little Fisher, still waiting for orders. Another broadside interrupted them.

‘No. Do you stand by Mr Huke,' and turning to Huke, Drinkwater shouted, ‘Tom, take command on the quarterdeck, d'you hear?'

‘Aye, aye, sir!'

‘Come, Templeton, Sergeant Danks . . .'

As he led them along the starboard gangway, Drinkwater was aware that it was already dusk, that the shadows of the surrounding mountains threw most of the water into a mysterious darkness from which the first stars were reflected. Night was almost upon them. Damnably odd that he had hardly noticed.

Since their treachery, and in anticipation of
Andromeda
being raked, the rebels had gone over the bow and concealed themselves on the heads. There, beside the pink nakedness of the carved representation of Andromeda chained to her rock, half a dozen men awaited the outcome of the battle, furiously debating their course of action, secure only for the time being, they assumed, because of the demands of the fight with the Danish ship.

As Danks's marines prodded them on to the forecastle at the point of the bayonet, they were greeted by cheers. Drinkwater forgot the matter in hand; he looked round to see the
Odin
's foremast totter and then fall sideways.

‘Secure those men in irons, Sergeant,' shouted Drinkwater, ignoring Templeton and hurrying aft towards the first lieutenant, anxiously staring at the
Odin
.

‘I think we've scored a point!' Huke shouted, his words drowned in yet another discharge of Jameson's cannon.

‘Well done, Tom . . .'

Both officers looked at the Dane. The
Odin
had fallen off the wind and only her bow-chasers bore; after two shots, they too fell silent. As the two men watched, the main and mizen yards were braced round; gradually the
Odin
began to make a stern-board.

‘A tactical withdrawal for the night, I think,' offered Huke.

‘Yes. And we shall do the same.' Drinkwater looked about him. ‘God, what a shambles!' Even in the twilight,
Andromeda
's deck bore the appearance of a slaughter-house.

Another broadside thundered out, the gun-flashes bright in the gathering gloom. ‘You may cease fire now. Pipe up spirits and have the cooks get some burgoo into all hands. The men can mess at their guns, then we have work to do.' He turned to the sailing master. ‘What o'clock is moonrise, Mr Birkbeck?'

‘Not before three, sir.'

‘We shall be gone by then.'

No one paid any attention to Templeton as he hung back until Danks had had time to secure his prisoners in the bilboes. Then he made his way hurriedly below.