In Distant Waters (23 page)

His hanger flickering desperately, Lieutenant Fraser was fighting for his very life.

Mr Lallo motioned to Skeete and the loblolly boy dragged the twitching body of Lieutenant Mylchrist to one side. Already the pledget they had just secured was darkening with blood.

‘Next!' Lallo wiped a reeking hand across his brow and took a pull at the rum bottle he kept propped against a futtock.

Derrick, the captain's Quaker clerk, heaved the next victim onto the canvas spread on the sea-chests. It was one of the topmen, a big, burly man whose legs were curiously drawn up in the foetal position. His eyes were staring wildly and his lips were rimed with dried spittle. The swaying lantern hooked above the operating ‘table' threw dreadful shadows across his features, so that his face seemed to be working in convulsive spasms.

Skeete forced fingers into the man's mouth, prised open his jaw and, with the vicious ease of practice, thrust a damp pad of leather into the topman's gape. The jaws snapped like those of a predator.

‘Legs down!' Lallo ordered and Skeete jerked his head at Derrick. The Quaker swallowed hard and took the leg opposite to Skeete, while Lallo forced down the man's shoulders.

‘Ahhhh . . .'

Lallo slopped rum into the open mouth and deftly replaced the leather pad as the man went slack.

‘Not on the wound, for Christ's sake!' Lallo shouted as Derrick, beholding the complete horror of the injury, gagged uncontrollably.

Lallo slopped rum on his hands, wiped them on his apron,
and bent over the ghastly ruin of the man's abdomen. The fetid air of the orlop was filled with the stench of blood, urine, rum and vomit and resonated with the groans and whimpers of the wounded.

‘He's lucky,' remarked Lallo to the professionally interested Skeete, ‘no rupture of the guts . . .' His finger traced the blue outline of a section of intestine, almost caressed the crinkled mass of a protruding curve of bowel and pointed to the smooth darkness of an excrescent organ.

‘Aye.' Skeete agreed with his superior.

‘Needle and sutures, Skeete . . .' Lallo began tucking the misplaced viscera back into the hollow of the body. He might have been stuffing a cushion. ‘You'll have to help,' he remarked, looking up at Derrick, who had come forward again, his forehead pale as wax in the yellow guttering of the lamp-light. ‘You should be used to quaking,' he jested, provoking a snigger from Skeete as he produced the prepared needle.

They drew the two sides of the topman's belly together and, with a swift and deft precision, the surgeon looped a line of sutures down the white flesh.

‘Missed his wedding-tackle eh, Skeete?' he remarked, finishing the stitches with a flourish.

‘By a mile, sir,' grinned Skeete.

‘Next,' said Lallo . . .

Midshipman Frey was on the quarterdeck. He was already wounded in the shoulder and feeling light-headed. He felt a terrible blow in his guts, a blow that drove the wind from his body and he felt himself flung back, crashing against a gun carriage and slumping down, hitting his head on the bulwark. For a long time he lay inert, the noise of battle seemingly miles above him while he fought for his breath in an interminable indrawn gasp that seemed like an enormous and unsuccessful paroxysm that would go on until he lost consciousness.

But he did not lose consciousness entirely. He seemed dimly aware of many things; if he did not succeed in inflating his lungs he would die, but the light was bright in his eyes and he remembered the sunshine, diffused by the golden mist. The upper spars
that he had been engaged in hoisting, seemed drawn with a perfect precision against the sky. He had thought of attempting to paint that effect of the light later, and he thought of the resolution again now, only filled with a sadness that he might never be able to try it. If he did not draw his breath soon, his hand would have lost its cunning for ever.

And then the reflex triumphed and air was drawn painfully into his lungs. Agony radiated outwards like a bomb-burst from his chest, stabbing him with fires of red-hot iron and it seemed easier to die than to endure.

There were other things troubling him now. The sunlight flickered before his eyes as the dark and sinister shadows of men interposed themselves. He found he resented this and began to try and call them, to tell them to stop standing in the light, that he wanted the warmth of the sun to die by. He could see clearly now, shoes, and bare feet, and a marine's boots, all dancing in a mad figure. He would have to shout louder to make them hear and then they would stop . . .

Drinkwater saw Frey fall and cut his way through between a Spanish officer and a marine, swinging the sword across the neck of the seaman whose pike butt had been driven into the midshipman's guts. The exposure of himself was foolish for, in his concern, he half-turned to see if the lad was alive and received another nick on the forearm for his trouble. But it was the merest pin-prick, the point of a weapon, a long lunge and he saw the triangular blade withdrawn, following it with his eyes until he found its owner, Rubalcava . . .

‘You treacherous bastard!' Drinkwater attempted to bind the grinning Spaniard's blade, but a man fell across in front of him stone dead, and he saw it was a marine, and suddenly he was ringed with steel, standing astride the howling, heaving body of Midshipman Frey with a dozen enemies surrounding him. He gasped for breath and read triumph in Rubalcava's eyes.

He saw the Spaniard lower his sword point and stride across the deck. He brandished the long blade in a single side-swipe, severing the halliards of the ensign.

The wind tugged the huge, St George's cross and the bright
Union in its upper canton. Slowly it fluttered downwards to lie across
Patrician
's shattered rail. The noise of fighting ebbed away, to be replaced by the silence of defeat.

Quilhampton, willing the oarsmen to reach the ship as soon as possible, was watching events ahead of him in a lather of impatience. He did not recall until they were half-way back to the
Patrician
, that he had come ashore unarmed, relying upon Sergeant Blixoe's party to maintain discipline. His chief concern had been to recover the damaged barge. Now he was running full-tilt into action with nothing more than a tiller in his hand.

It was at the moment that this dawned on him that he saw the ensign lowered to the rail in token of submission. Aghast he stood in the boat, staring dumbfoundedly ahead. Seeing him thus, the oarsmen faltered, trailing their oars and looking round.

They were in the shadow of the ship and everywhere swarmed the alien figures of the enemy.

‘Fuckin' 'ell, they've taken the fuckin' ship . . .'

‘Oh shit . . .'

‘Put the helm over, sir . . . let's get the 'ell out of 'ere, for Chrissakes, before those bastards see us . . . come on you lot, backwater starboard and pull like fuck on those larboard oars.'

Quilhampton came to his senses as the boat turned, the jerk of the fleeing oarsmen set him heavily in the stern sheets. He did not interfere with their retreat.

His premonition had been right. They had lost the ship to the enemy.

‘Le trident de Neptune est le sceptre du monde.'

Lemierre

Drinkwater woke in the dawn, disturbed by the throbbing of his wounds and the spiritual nadir of defeat. His cell was a bare room with a small, barred window, a crude table, chair and palliasse, the details of which were just visible in the gloom. The hopelessness that had dominated his thoughts in the night was displaced by the physical discomfort of his body, and this demanded his attention. He was still tired from lack of sleep, but the edge had gone from his exhaustion, and his brain began to seek priorities in the instinctive business of survival.

They had brought him stumbling up what had seemed like thousands of steps before throwing him into this small room. He had no inkling of where he was beyond a vague realisation that Rubalcava had brought his prize into San Francisco Bay. Fatigue, despair and loss of blood had deprived him of rational thought in the aftermath of surrender and it was only just returning to him in the chill of this desolate dawn.

Slowly he dragged himself to his feet and stumbled to the chair, peeling off his coat and laying bare the bloody mess of his forearm. His head ached and he had another wound on his thigh, as well as numerous bruises and a shivering reaction to his plight.

They had left him a plate of bread and a jug of wine. After a mouthful he began to feel a little better. On the table lay the ship's log-book and his journal. He remembered taking them from his rifled cabin. They had also left him tinder and a candle end. He fished in his pocket. His Dollond glass was still there together with a small pen-knife.

He drew out the latter and prised out its tiny blade. Elizabeth
had given it to him. For a moment he sat regarding it mistily, fighting off an impulse to weep. He had a second draught of the raw wine and, while the shaking of his hands subsided, he fought to strike flint on steel and catch a light to the candle. It took him several minutes, but he felt much better as he made himself work.

Pulling off his shirt, he removed the tails and tore them into squares, using the wine to clean the superficial head-wounds, scouring them each until some subtle change in their hurt told him no purulent matter adhered to the tissue. Feeling bolder he set to work on his thigh. Like those on his forearm the cut was raised, hot and inflamed. Gritting his teeth he pulled the wound open, releasing a glair flood of matter and shuddering with the pain of the thing. When he had mastered himself he heated the knife blade. He knew he should perform curettage, that much he had learned from M. Masson, the surgeon of Admiral Villeneuve's flagship, the
Bucentaure
. Only thus could all the morbid flesh killed by the weapon be removed. His own surgeon, Lallo, did not believe the theory, pooh-poohing it for Gallic nonsense and regarding, Drinkwater suspected, his own enthusiasm to be verging on the treasonable.

The knife sizzled on his flesh, sending up a disgusting stink as he watched his own body burn. Only when the pain became unbearable did he stop, sweat pouring off him as his muscles contracted into a rigor of agony. He poured wine across the gaping redness and bound his leg with a piece of shirt. Then he turned his attention to his arm.

When he had finished he felt a curious shift in the nature of his pain. The insistent throbbing had eased, replaced by the sharp, almost exhilarating tingling of butchered nerve-ends. The former had throbbed with the rigadoon of death, the latter the invigoration of life.

Daylight had come by the time he had finished. Carefully he edged the table nearer the tiny window and, gritting his teeth, he clambered up on it. He found he could see out quite easily. He knew instantly where he was and the half-acknowledged familiarity of the ascent of the previous evening came back to him.

Between his prison and the distant mountains to the east, the
bay of San Francisco harbour lay awash with mist. The summits of the trio of islands, Yerba Buena, Treasure Island and Alcatraz, the island of pelicans, rose like mountain tops above this low cloud. So too did the masts of ships, the half-rigged topgallants of
Patrician
and close on either side, the lower trucks of the Spanish brigs. It seemed to him extraordinary that he did not even know their names. But this realisation was submerged in a greater horror. From the jutting peak of
Patrician
's spanker gaff the damp folds of bunting lifted lazily in the beginnings of a breeze. There were two flags, the one flaunting above the other; the red and gold of Castile superior to the white ensign. Such a publicly visible token of his abject plight took his spirit to new depths. He could not bear to look, and in shifting his gaze saw other masts, those of the merchant ships anchored off the town, and wondered if the treacherous Grant's
Abigail Starbuck
lay amongst them.

But his eyes were drawn ineluctably back to his ship, emerging steadily from the evaporating mist. Raising the Dollond glass he focused it upon the battered rail and relived that terrible hour.

James Quilhampton woke to the barking of a dog and was instantly on his feet. Rigid with damp and cold he and his men had spent a miserable night beside the cutter. They had watched, in utter dismay, as the victorious Spaniards had carried
Patrician
out of the bay. The shame of the British defeat seemed emphasised by the superior size of the captured ship, but Quilhampton had been granted little time for such fancy philosophising. His party consisted of himself, Blixoe and his three privates, Marsden the carpenter and a boat's crew of eight seamen who had been sent to recover the barge. Their situation was desperate. They had no food or water and the mood of the men was by no means stable. It did not take Quilhampton long to realise that several of the cutter's men were ripe for desertion and that his hold on the leadership of the little band was tenuous. Without a sword he felt naked, and without his coat his wooden arm, its articulation and belting exposed to the gaze of the curious, made him feel doubly vulnerable.