In Distant Waters (16 page)

Hortense Santhonax stared back at him from cool grey eyes. Beneath the studied negligence of her pearl-wound and piled auburn hair, her lovely face held a hint of a smile. He remembered her, years ago, almost as long ago as the Spanish outrage at Nootka Sound, before she married Edouard Santhonax and espoused the Bonapartist cause. She had been a frightened
emigrée
then, Hortense de Montholon, running from the vengeful howl of the pursuing mob, to be rescued by an impoverished master's mate named Nathaniel Drinkwater.
*

He had been half in love with her then, before she turned her coat and married his enemy.

He had killed Edouard Santhonax less than a year previously, killed him to preserve the secret he had brought out of Russia. He had widowed her in the line of duty. Or had he and why did he stare at her portrait now? The bare shoulders and the soft breasts were barely concealed by the wisp of gauze artfully placed by the skilled hand of a seductress. She was already rumoured to be the mistress of Talleyrand, a fading beauty he supposed. It made no
sense to be subject to so compelling an urge as had driven him to remove her portrait from the obscurity of his sea-chest.

Except that she was providence, an ikon, presentient as his dream and an impulse to be obeyed in those rare moments of hiatus when his tired mind was in revolt. An ikon: an apt simile. He was unable to shake off that old superstition of his destiny. She had become the embodiment of the spirit of France, inhabiting the subconscious recesses of his imagination and marrying the man whose fate had become inextricably bound up with his own. The dice had fallen his way last, it had not always been thus as his wrecked shoulder testified; but he was not yet free of Santhonax's ghost. The secret from Russia still haunted him, even here in the Pacific.

‘Witchcraft,' he muttered and let the margin of the canvas go. It coiled itself like a spring and he looked up to see the faithful, pale oval of Elizabeth's portrait staring at him from its frame. ‘Witchcraft,' he repeated and, hiding the canvas again, he drew on his cloak and went on deck.

In some strange way he felt relieved by the power the portrait of Hortense possessed. There was a reassuring quality of normality about it: a familiar neurosis. He had not been too much overcome by the beauty of Ana Maria.

*
See
A King's Cutter

‘If you wish to say something Tregembo, for God's sake say it and stop fiddling with those damned pistols!' Drinkwater snapped irritably. Mullender's duster and Tregembo's fidgeting had driven him on deck where a sleeting rain had turned him below again.
Patrician
bucked to the onset of the rain-bearing squall and gusts of cold, damp air rattled in through the sashes of the stern windows.

‘You'll be needing 'em 'fore long zur, if I ain't mistaken,' Tregembo growled.

‘The pistols? Would to God I needed 'em instanter! That damned convoy should have appeared by now . . .'

‘I didn't mean for that, zur . . .'

‘Eh?' Drinkwater frowned, looking at his coxswain with sudden attention. ‘What the devil
did
you mean then?'

Tregembo laid the pistol down in its box and waited until Mullender had gone into the pantry. His old face, lined and scarred as it was, bore every indication of concern. ‘Zur . . .' The door to the tiny pantry stood open behind him. Drinkwater crossed the cabin and closed it. ‘Well?'

‘The people, zur . . . you know they're disaffected . . . 'tis common enough upon a long commission an' they mean no harm to you, zur . . . but . . .'

‘Spit it out Tregembo, I'm in no mood for puzzlements.'

‘ 'Tis the men you left behind, zur . . . 'tis scuttlebutt they're to hang, an' such rumouring is having a bad effect, zur . . .'

‘For God's sake Tregembo, those men
deserted
 . . .' Drinkwater sat and stared gloomily at the old Cornishman.

‘There are stories of women, zur . . . the boat's crews saw
women ashore, an' there are grog shops a-plenty . . . those merchant-seamen were three sheets to the wind, they'm saying . . . they be powerful reasons for making a man run, zur.'

Drinkwater nodded. ‘I know all this, Tregembo . . . why tell me now?'

‘Because it won't be single men, zur. Next time it'll be a boat's crew, zur, an' the word, as I hear it, is to hell with the officers . . .'

There was a peremptory knock at the cabin door. Instantly Tregembo turned away, picked up the pistol case, shut it and slid it into its stowage in the locker.

‘Come!'

It was Fraser. He was followed by the elderly Mr Marsden, a wizened and wrinkled man skirted with a leather apron which hid bandy legs but revealed a powerful torso, muscular arms and hands of immense size. The sudden irruption of the first lieutenant and the carpenter into Drinkwater's cabin indicated something serious had happened.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, but Mr Marsden has just made an urgent report to me concerning water in the wells.'

Drinkwater looked sharply at the carpenter. ‘Well, Mr Marsden?'

‘Three feet, sir, in two hours, and making fast.'

‘When were the wells last pumped? At the change of the watch?'

‘Yes, sir, an' nothink much in 'em bar what you'd expect.'

‘Something adrift below, then?'

Marsden nodded. ‘Seems likely, sir.'

‘Any idea what?'

‘No sir . . .'

‘No shot holes . . .'

‘Not that I can see, sir . . . 'sides we engaged that Spaniard wi' the larboard broadside . . .'

‘Aye, and now we're on the larboard tack! Mr Fraser, put the ship about on the instant! Mr Marsden pump the wells dry, let's see if the other tack makes any difference.' He rose, perversely relieved in the need for action, potentially disastrous though the news was. For the ship suddenly to make so much water could be due to any one of a hundred reasons, none of them easy to
determine, let alone overcome. ‘Come gentlemen, let us be about our business!'

Grabbing hat and cloak Drinkwater hustled Fraser and the carpenter out of his cabin and followed them on deck. Alone in the cabin Tregembo watched the surge of the smooth wake as it rose, bubbling green from
Patrician
's transom. A long-tailed Bosun-bird slid across his field of view, quartering the wake for prey. ‘Don't you forget what I told 'ee,' he muttered after Drinkwater.

On deck the watch were running to their stations to tack ship. Drinkwater took no part in the manoeuvre, instead he fished in the tail-pocket of his coat for his glass then levelled it to the eastward.

Banks of slate-coloured clouds rolled to leeward dragging dull curtains of rain behind them, blotting out sections of the faint blue line of the coastal mountains of California. From one such shroud the low line of Punta de los Reyes was emerging.
Patrician
had spent nine days keeping station off the point round which any convoy from San Francisco must pass on its way to the Alaskan settlements of the Tsar. They had kept well to seaward of the long, low arm of sand-dunes and marram grass, lurking out of sight to avoid either of those two man-of-war brigs that might be sent to see if the coast was clear. Even allowing a week for the tardiest merchant ship to complete her lading, it would be reasonable, Drinkwater argued to himself, for them to have intercepted some trading vessels moving north by now.

Patrician
jibbed up into the wind and the foreyards were swung on the word of command.

Unless, Drinkwater mused, those merchantmen were waiting for something more puissant than a pair of brigs; something like a Russian line-of-battle-ship! Not for the first time Drinkwater cursed the brevity of his aptly-styled briefing from the Admiralty. Again he felt that sense of abandonment by Lord Dungarth, the very man from whom he would have expected the most comprehensive elucidation of the state of affairs in the Pacific. He knew his orders originated from British spies in the Russian service, agents whose access to the
most secret intentions of the Tsar had been preserved at a prodigious cost, as Drinkwater had good reason to know.

Supposing, he reasoned, he had been utterly mistaken in that glimpse of another man-of-war off Cape Horn. Suppose that brief spectral image had magnified itself in his imagination and the vessel had been, at worst, a Spaniard. He knew that the Russian-American Company, under whose auspices Russian ships traded down the coast from Alaska, had armed vessels at their disposal. He knew, too, that at least one frigate had been built on the Pacific coast of North America for the purpose of reinforcing Russian claims upon the shores of what Drake, Cook, and now the Admiralty, were pleased to call ‘New Albion'.

Patrician
forged ahead, gathering increasing way on the new tack. The hands were busy coiling the braces on the pins and on the fo'c's'le the weather fore-tack was hauled down to the bowing bumpkin. Shafts of sunlight fanned down through the clouds, dappling the surface of the sea with brilliant patches of dancing water. Off on the quarter a school of dolphins abandoned the chase of a shoal of bonito and gambolled in their tumbling wake. Neither the brightening weather nor the appearance of the cetaceans lightened Drinkwater's gloom. All his ponderous considerations were of little consequence now. Marsden's report postponed them indefinitely. The leak and its cause superseded all other matters and it did not help his temper to realise that the trap he had baited by towing out of San Francisco Bay would now be useless. His nearest dockyard was in the West Indies, with the Horn to double to get there. He had only one course of action open to him: Hobson's choice of a careenage.

‘Well?'

As Marsden came aft Drinkwater stopped at the after end of the starboard gangway, his cloak flapping round him in the wind, his hands clasped behind his back. The carpenter's face was still clouded by concern.

‘She's still makin' water, sir . . . perhaps a little less, but 'tis bad enough, sir.'

‘Damn! Very well, Mr Marsden, very well. I'll be below myself shortly. Mr Fraser!'

‘Aye, sir?'

‘Steer east-nor'-east and fetch me the coast directly.'

Below the waterline the hull was a vast stygian cavern of noise. He followed Marsden and his two mates with their lanterns guttering in the stale, mephitic air, trying to shut out the natural noises of the creaking and groaning space to hear those unnatural sounds the better. It was a hopeless task, one that he was less qualified than Marsden to execute, yet one which demanded his attention. How far below the waterline was this leak? Any remedial action he took depended upon some rough location. To careen
Patrician
properly would render her utterly defenceless should she be taken by surprise, for all her guns and stores would have to come out of her and be safely landed. Drinkwater had himself led an attack on a French frigate in such a supine state, and carried her safely out to sea from her bolt-hole on the Red Sea coast of Arabia. To be served himself in similar fashion, dished-up to an enemy without the chance of defending himself sent worms of apprehension crawling about his belly. But he had to know the worst and he stumbled along the carpenter's walk, a narrow space maintained free of stores just inside the ship's skin, by which access was provided to plug shot-holes and maintain the water-tight integrity of the ship.

‘Mind, sir, this grating be a bit loose . . .'

‘Yes, thank you . . .'

In the yellow pools of lamp-light he could see the ship's inner skin, discoloured with the traces of mould. The thick air was heavy with the multiple smells of this great warehouse of the cruiser's wants. Here powder and shot were stored in magazines and lockers; locked store-rooms housed spirits and flour, fish and dried peas. Tier upon tier of barrels stowed bung up and bilge-free, held the potable sweet-water; casks of dubious age contained the salt-pork and cheese provided by a munificent Victualling Board; the oats and dried fruit, the wood-store and oil-room, all fitted below the waterline, above, abaft or forward of the hold proper. The platformed section of the orlop along which they worked their way showed no ingress of water. Amid the creaks and groans of the ship's timbers, the slosh of
bilge-water and the hiss of the sea beyond the inner and outer wales and the massive futtocks, they strained their ears for sound of a roar, a spurt, even a trickle of incoming water. But all they could make out above the working of the ship, was the squeal of disturbed rats.

Drinkwater escaped to the upper deck, scanning the horizon and again finding the sea bereft of any sign of a ship. A mile to leeward a whale fluked, slapping the water with its gigantic tail before sliding into the depths of the ocean. Somehow that brief appearance of leviathan only served to emphasise the emptiness of the scene.