Beneath the Aurora (27 page)

Drinkwater could imagine the confusion. With no hand on the tiller,
Kestrel
's rudder would have swung amidships and the turning moment applied to the cutter would have ceased. She
would have sat, a perfect target, at something less than pistol shot, off the
Odin
's starboard quarter.

‘I went aft and put the helm over to make a stern board and we backed the jib, but we were too close under the land to get a true wind and she blew towards the
Odin
and paid off to starboard again, back on our former tack. We took another storm of raking fire . . .'

It was a marvel that Frey had not been hit, Drinkwater thought, watching him take a fourth swig from the nearly emptied bottle.

‘Then your shot from
Andromeda
brought down the
Odin
's fore and main topmasts and her fire slackened perceptibly. Anyway,
Kestrel
paid off fast to starboard and we cleared the
Odin
's stern, thank God! My next problem was the Americans. The Yankees were doing their best, though their fire was nothing compared to the
Odin
's. They soon saw us though, coming out of the smoke on the
Odin
's starboard quarter, and quickly laid their guns upon us. I couldn't risk running under their lee, so I gybed and got her on to a broad, starboard reach . . .'

‘You sailed across the bows of the Americans and across their field of fire?'

Frey tensed, nodding unhappily. ‘I wanted only to get out of that accursed bay, damn it!'

‘I am not judging you, my dear fellow,' Drinkwater said with a gentle resignation.

Frey relaxed visibly. ‘We returned fire,' he said with a shred of pride, ‘but lost our topmast and were badly hulled . . .'

‘And the butcher's bill?'

‘Almost half the ship's company killed or wounded, sir.'

‘God's bones,' Drinkwater whispered, rubbing his hand across his face. He looked at Frey. ‘And what of James?'

‘It must have been instant, sir. He was quite shot to pieces . . .'

A heavy silence lay between the two men as they mourned their mutual friend. The bottle dropped from Frey's hand with a thud, recalling Drinkwater to the present. Frey drooped sideways, fast asleep. Drinkwater rose and lifted his legs out along the settee, settling him down. Then he took his cloak and laid it over Frey, tucking it in to prevent him from rolling
off the narrow settee. As he took his hands away they were sticky with blood.

Drinkwater paced the quarterdeck. With his officers decimated and his ship requiring a thorough overhaul and reorganization, he had enough on his mind without grief and the presence of an enemy immeasurably stronger than himself not four miles away.

After he had sailed clear of the bay, he had brought
Andromeda
back across the fiord and found the shallows upon which Malaburn had so treacherously anchored the frigate only a day before. Here the ship and her company drew breath beneath the northern stars. A rudimentary anchor watch kept the deck, and most men slept, exhausted by the day's exertions.

Drinkwater walked up and down, up and down. The extreme lethargy that had seized him earlier, that had driven all thought of
Kestrel
and James Quilhampton from his brain, had left him. He felt almost weightless, as though he derived energy from the workings of his mind. He did not question or marvel at this manic activity; it did not occur to him that the news of Quilhampton's death compounded the weight of accuracy of Surgeon Kennedy's insubordinate accusation. This fateful personalization of so terrible a truth drove like a blade into his soul, and his unquiet spirit teetered on the brink of reason.

Up and down, up and down he paced, so that the men on duty, huddled in the warmest corners they could find beneath the wrecked masts, formed their own opinions as they watched the figure of their strange captain. His body was dark against the sky, the relentless scissoring of his white-breeched legs pale against the bulwarks.

‘You know he pinched the fuse out of a shell,' a seaman whose battle station had been at a forecastle carronade whispered to a shivering watchmate. ‘Bill Whitman told me he was as cool as a cucumber. Just looked at it for a bit, then bent over and squeezed the fuse. Then he dug the bloody thing up with his sword and dropped it over the side.'

‘Christ, he's a hard bastard!'

‘Makes old Pardoe look like a fart in a colander.'

‘Anyway, bugger Drinkwater. I could do with a drink.'

‘Couldn't we all . . .'

‘He'll have had one.'

‘Or two.'

They dozed into envious silence as Drinkwater's restless pacing soothed the fury of his thoughts, ordered their priority and saved him from the descent into insanity.

‘Two watches,' he muttered to himself, ‘Jameson and Birkbeck. First to clear the rest of the wreckage, then rig topmasts. Birkbeck will accomplish that, if we are left alone. If . . .'

He turned his mind to the problem of the enemy. He was compelled to accept the fact that yesterday's action had been a defeat. He drew no morsel of comfort from anything which Frey had reported. It was perhaps a cold consolation that the
Odin
's fire had been furious, but Dahlgaard's countrymen had twice before impressed British seamen with their valour and this was mere corroboration. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, to have come so close, to the point of actually observing the very muskets and sabres which would be used to ravage the peaceful settlements of Canada being lifted from the
Odin
, and to be powerless to stop their transhipment.

Had he been able to fire at the American ships, he might at the very least have reduced them to a state which no prudent commander would take across the Atlantic in winter. But the presence of the
Odin
had transformed the situation, and cost Drinkwater any tactical advantage he might otherwise have possessed.

The irony of it burned into his self-esteem. He shuddered, as much with self-loathing as with cold.

Faced with such reproach how could there be any satisfaction in knowing he had done his duty? He had spent a lifetime doing his duty and what had it availed? The war ground interminably on, the men he had befriended and then led had died beside him. His friendship seemed accursed, a poisoned chalice. He wished he had been wounded himself, killed even . . .

He drew back from the thought. What would Birkbeck do now if he was dead? The thought struck him like a pistol ball, stopping him in his mad pacing. What was
he
to do? He felt bankrupt of ideas, beyond the obvious one of slipping unobtrusively
out of the Vikkenfiord. Instinctively he sniffed the air. There was something odd . . .

He had not noticed the creeping chill of dampening air. Now sodden ropes dripped on a deck perceptibly dark with moisture. The fog had come down with a startling suddenness, though its symptoms had encroached gradually.

Fog!

Even in the darkness he could see the pallid wraiths steal in over the bulwarks, wafted by the light breeze that blew the cold air from the distant peaks down over the warmer waters of the fiord.

Fog!

Hated though it was as a restriction on safe navigation, the enfolding vapour was a shroud, hiding them from the enemy. Could he spirit his ship to sea, clear of the gorge? He thought not; the fear of losing her filled his heart with dread.

Fog!

Then, as the fog enveloped them completely, the idea struck Drinkwater. Fate tugged at the cord of his despair and wakened hope.

Templeton had never before experienced so terrible an event as the action in the bay. When he learned that they had anchored to engage the
Odin
he could not understand so deliberate and foolhardy a decision, until Kennedy, up to his elbows in reeking blood, explained that it was expected of a man-of-war that she be carried into battle against all odds and that to shirk such a duty laid her commander open to charges of dereliction of duty and cowardice.

‘And they wouldn't scruple to charge him either,' Kennedy said, as he completed the last suture and motioned his patient aside and the table swabbed for the next.

Templeton knew of such things in the abstract, had read a thousand reports in the copy room, but the reality had never struck him with all its terrible implications as the torn and mangled wrecks of what had, shortly before, been men were dragged on to the surgeon's extempore operating table. Convention demanded that a captain's secretary share the risks of the quarterdeck with his commander, but Drinkwater,
unused to such an encumbrance, had made it known to his clerk that he expected no such quixotism.

‘Besides,' Drinkwater had said, ‘only you and I are privy to the exact details of this matter and, if anything happens to me, you will be best able to advise my successor. Stay below, you may be able to assist Mr Kennedy in his duties.'

Thus it was that Templeton found himself in the cockpit, among the gleaming scalpels, saws, clamps, catlings and curettes of Surgeon Kennedy's trade when the wounded began to pour below in ever-increasing numbers.

Tempelton's experience of the previous day's action had, if not inured, at least accustomed him to expect the conventional brutalities of naval war. And the unaccustomed harshness of his existence since joining the frigate, the miseries of sea-sickness and the violence of the ocean had begun the ineluctable process of eroding his sensibilities. But the action in the bay produced so severe a drain upon Kennedy's resources that Templeton found himself inexorably drawn into the actual business of assisting.

Whereas on the previous day he had merely tied bandages, passed words of consolation along with a bottle among the men, and taken and recorded their names and their divisions, today he had actively helped Kennedy and his tiring loblolly ‘boys' in the gruesome business of amputation, excision and debriding. He found, after a while, assisted by rum, a savagery that matched the speed of Kennedy's actions.

But nothing had prepared him for the horror of discovering Greer's white and mutilated body stretched upon the sheet spread on the midshipmen's chests, of seeing the mangled stump of Greer's right arm whose hand had so lately transported him; or the shock of the apparent callousness of Kennedy's cursory examination.

‘Nothing to be done. Move him over.'

Templeton was incapable, in that awful moment, of understanding that Greer's multiple wounds were mortal, his loss of blood excessive, and that no skill on earth could staunch the haemorrhage or close those dreadful wounds.

‘But he's alive!' he protested, staring in outrage at the indifferent Kennedy.

‘His wound is mortal.' Kennedy's tone was brutally honest. ‘I don't possess the cunning to prevent death.'

And Templeton looked again and saw the blue tint to the lips and the pallor of the formerly weathered features.

‘Here.' Kennedy picked up a bottle he kept at his feet and held it out across the body. The loblolly boys dragged Greer from beneath Kennedy's outstretched arm. ‘Come, bear up,' Kennedy growled, ‘pull yourself together, or men will say you were fond of him!'

Templeton grabbed the bottle and averted his eyes from Kennedy. The accusation implicit in Kennedy's remark did not strike Templeton until later when, he realized, lying awake while the exhausted ship slept around him, none would make any distinction in the nature of his ‘crime' as proscribed by the Articles of War. The thought added immeasurably to his burden of guilt.

‘What is the time?'

Full daylight glowed through the nacreous fog as Drinkwater woke suddenly from a deep sleep. He was sat against a quarterdeck carronade, sodden from the fog, agonized by a spasm of cramp as he tried to move.

‘Eight bells, sir, morning watch just turning out, I took the liberty of mustering all hands and telling them off in two watches.'

‘Well done, Mr Birkbeck, I had the same thing in mind. Now, give me your arm . . .' Birkbeck assisted him to his feet.

‘Galley range is alight and burgoo, molasses and cheese are to be issued. Mess-cooks have just been piped. Purser kicked up a fuss about the cheese, but I told him to go to the devil.'

Drinkwater nodded his agreement while the blood trickled painfully back into his legs. He sought to invigorate himself by rubbing his face, but his palms rasped at the encrusted scab, which he had momentarily forgotten, and he swiftly desisted.

‘You can issue spirits before you turn all hands to, and what about the officers' livestock?' he added as the idea struck him. ‘With so few of them left, can I not purchase what remains so that we can get a decent meal into the men at midday? I'll add my own pullets and capons.'

‘That'll put heart into the men, sir, and God knows they
need it. The wardroom bullock took a cannon-shot, but he's edible. Beef and chicken stew sounds like the elixir of life.'

‘Yes, it does. As for the ship herself . . .'

‘We can begin to clear this lot, and the carpenter and I reckon we can step topmasts again.'

‘By tonight?'

‘By tonight.'

‘Excellent!'

‘And we've a spare tops'l just finished at Leith. Oh, I reckon she'll show enough canvas to handle.'

‘Mr Birkbeck, if you achieve that I don't know what I can do for you.'

‘Get me home in one piece, sir, and I'll not complain.' The master paused and looked at Drinkwater. He was unshaven and still besmirched with powder grime, the abraded scab bleeding again from one disturbed corner, the undress coat with its missing epaulette emphasizing the cock-eyed set of the captain's shoulders. With his loose hair, strands of which had escaped from the queue, Drinkwater looked like some raffish and outcast beggar.

‘You'd feel better after a wash, sir,' Birkbeck offered.

‘Yes, yes, I would,' Drinkwater replied, finally stirring.

‘I'll pass word to Frampton.'