In Distant Waters (8 page)

As he saw the cave opening up he realised access was obtainable only from his side. Mount could do nothing beyond cover Drinkwater as long as the captain remained outside the fall. But
it was too late for such considerations. The deserters knew of their presence; Drinkwater hoped they also thought the area was surrounded by Mount's marines, but, if that were the case, Drinkwater himself was unlikely to be the person sent in to winkle them out.

His eyes were accustoming themselves to the shifting light. The westering sun helped; the rapid tropic sunset was upon them.

Deep within the cave he saw a movement. Instinctively he brought the pistol up and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked in his hand and he saw a scuffle of reaction deep within. Quickly he moved forward, drawing the second pistol from his waistband and finding firmer footing within the cave.

Suddenly he was confronted by Hogan; the man held a levelled musket, its bayonet glittering wickedly in the strange, unreal light.

Drinkwater fired the second gun, but despite having its frizzen on, moisture had seeped from his shirt and been drawn into the powder by its hygroscopic qualities. The hammer clicked impotently and Hogan lunged.

His own gun-lock must have been rendered equally useless for he was relying on cold steel. Drinkwater stepped backwards and reached for his sword. The footing was slippery with slime; both men recovered. Hogan was an immensely strong and powerful man and he had Witherspoon somewhere in the darkness to aid him. Outside Mount was shouting something but Drinkwater paid him no attention, his eyes were fixed on the Irish giant. Somewhere behind Hogan, Witherspoon was suspiciously silent. Drinkwater flicked his eyes into the darkness but could see nothing. Hogan shifted his feet and Drinkwater's attention returned to the Irishman.

‘Don't be a fool, Hogan . . . you can't get away with this . . .'

‘You're alone Cap'n . . . that's enough for me. Sure, Oi'll fix me own way to die.'

‘What about Witherspoon?' Hogan grinned. It was clear he knew of Drinkwater's fear of the other man.

‘Or Oi'll fix yours for you, Cap'n!' Hogan lunged again. His reach was long and Drinkwater fell back, slipped and swiped
wildly with his sword. He felt the blade crash against the bayonet and the strength of his opponent as Hogan met the pressure. Drinkwater's mangled right arm was unequal to the contest. He saw victory light Hogan's eyes and felt the resistance of rock against his back.

‘Now, you English bastard!'

Hogan drew back the bayonet to lunge, his teeth bared in a snarl that bore all the hatred inherent in his heart. Desperately Drinkwater flung himself sideways, falling at his adversary's feet, the wet slime of the rocky ledge fouling him. He rolled madly, aware that he was somehow in contact with Hogan's feet. He kicked, and suddenly found the edge of the cave. A second later he felt the icy cold of water close over his head. The sudden shock electrified him. An instant later a great, irresistible pressure bore down upon him, punching and bruising him so that, for a moment he thought he was being beaten by Hogan until the roaring in his ears proclaimed the source of the pain was the waterfall itself. Then he was subject to an immense rolling motion and vast pressure. Darkness engulfed him as the force of the water thrust him down, rolling him over yet again, but this time in an involuntary way, shoving his aching body so that his lungs began to scream at his brain to let them have air.

He was drowning!

Such were the powerful reflexes tearing at the muscles of his chest that opposition to them was impossible. Blinding lights filled his head, the roaring of the water became intolerable. He could resist no longer. He opened his mouth and dragged water into his lungs.

Mount saw a figure suddenly rise, bursting from the surface of the dark pool some five yards below the fall itself. He levelled his gun, but his finger froze. So far out of the water was the man flung, welled up as strongly as he had just been thrust down, that Mount saw instantly that it was the captain.

A few minutes later Mount had dragged his gasping commander to the side of the pool. Drinkwater lay over a rock, his body wracked by helpless eructations as he spewed the water from himself. After a few minutes, as Mount alternately stared
from Drinkwater to the ledge beside the waterfall on the far side of the pool, Drinkwater's body ceased its painful heaving. He looked up, pale and shivering, a mucous trickle running down his chin. His shirt was torn and Mount saw the scars and twisted muscles that knotted his wounded shoulder. Instinctively he saw the captain incline his head to the right, indicating the shock of the chill in those mangled muscles.

‘Hogan's got your musket . . . his powder's spoiled . . .'

‘What about Witherspoon?'

‘Didn't see him . . . think I may have winged him with my first shot . . .

‘I'll get support, it's getting dark . . .'

‘No! We must . . .'

But he got no further. A loud bellow, a bull-roar of defiance, it seemed, came from the waterfall. Both men looked round and Mount scrambled to his feet.

From behind the silver cascade, glowing now with a luminosity that it seemed to carry down from higher up the mountain where the last of the setting sunlight still caught the stream, Hogan emerged. He bore the musket in one hand and in the other the limp figure of Witherspoon.

It seemed to the still gasping Drinkwater, that the darkest of his suspicions had been correct. The bull-roar had not been of defiance, but something infinitely more elemental. It had been a howl of grief, animal in its intensity. The drooping body of Witherspoon was undoubtedly that of a dead lover.

Such was instantly obvious to Mount too. Without hesitation the marine officer raised his big pistol.

‘Sodomite!' he snarled, and took aim.

In the almost complete gloom the two officers were quite hidden from Hogan. The Irish giant had no thoughts now, beyond the overwhelming sense of loss. The desperate venture on which he and his lover had set out that morning had seemed worth the hazard.
Patrician
would not stay. Hogan read his commander for a man of resolution, and nothing waited for Hogan over the Pacific horizon beyond the chance of death by wounding, death by disease or death from one or another of the multiple foulnesses that haunted His Britannic Majesty's fleet. The
island, though, offered a bold man everything. He could have outwitted fate and lived, like Crusoe, upon such a spot until he met death in God's time, not King George's. It would have worked but for Lieutenant Mylchrist.

His frame was wracked by monstrous sobs as he dragged the dead body of his lover out of the cave. It only seemed another paroxysm of grief when Mount's ball shattered his skull, and smashed his brains against the cliff behind him.

Shaking from cold and shock Drinkwater followed Mount gingerly back across the stream. Once again he approached the entrance to the cave. In the last of the daylight the two officers stood staring down at their victims.

‘God's bones,' muttered Drinkwater crouching down before his legs gave under him. His first shot had indeed hit Witherspoon, hit the breast and heart. Witherspoon must have died instantly, so silently that even Hogan himself had not realised until after Drinkwater's escape, the damage that single shot had done. For Witherspoon's breast was exposed as Hogan had desperately sought to stem the bleeding wound. The shirt was torn back and the two officers stared down at the shapely breasts of a young woman.

‘I'm damned if I understand why we're not cruising off the Isthmus,' complained Mount as he lounged back in his chair and awaited the roast pig whose tantalising aroma had been permeating the ship for much of the forenoon. ‘It is common knowledge, even to Their Lordships, that Panama is the focus of Spanish power.'

‘I think you jump to conclusions, Mount,' replied Fraser, cooling himself with an improvised fan fashioned from a sheet of discarded cartridge paper. The wardroom was insufferably hot, even with a windsail ducting air from the deck, and its occupants were as frayed as the end of the canvas pipe itself. ‘Besides, preoccupations with opportunities for prize-money are an obstruction to duty.'

‘Don't preach to me, Fraser . . .'

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen . . . such querulous behaviour . . . it's too exhausting by far . . . be so kind as to leave the preaching to me.'

‘God save us from that fate,' said Mount accepting the glass from King, the negro messman, and rolling his eyes in a deprecating fashion at Fraser. Both officers looked at the temporiser in their midst.

The Reverend Jonathan Henderson, chaplain to His Britannic Majesty's frigate
Patrician
, laid a thin, knotted finger alongside his nose in a characteristic gesture much loved by the midshipmen for its imitable property. It invariably presaged an aphorism which its originator considered of importance in his ministry. ‘I am sure they know what they are about and it will avail us nothing if we quarrel.'

‘What else are we to do, God damn it?' said Mount sharply.

‘Come, Mr Mount, no blasphemy if you please.'

‘I'm a military man, Mr Henderson, and accustomed to speak my mind within the mess, and I've been too long at sea to have much faith in the wisdom of Their Lordships.'

‘If you're referring to my relatively short career . . .'

‘
Short?
Good God man, you've not been at sea for a dog's watch! What the devil d'you know about it.'

‘Come sir, I was chaplain to the late Admiral Roddam . . .'

‘Admiral Roddam? He spent the American War swinging round his own bloody chicken bones and port bottles until they had to move the Nore light to mark the shoal . . . Admiral Roddam . . . hey King, refill my glass and deafen my ears to sacerdotal nonsense.'

Henderson looked furiously at the grinning negro and rounded on Mount.

‘Mr Mount, I'm a man of God, but I'll not . . .'

‘Gentlemen, pray silence . . . you raise your voices too loudly.' Fraser straightened up from the rudder stock cover from which vantage point he had been trying to ignore the petty squabble.

‘There has been a deal too much argument since that business at Juan Fernandez . . .'

‘There is usually a deal too much argument when empty vessels are banging about.'

‘Very well, Mr Lallo,' snapped Fraser at the surgeon who, until that moment, had occupied a corner of the table with his sick-book, ‘belay that.' Lallo shrugged and pocketed his pencil. ‘Tell us how Mylchrist is.'

‘He'll live, but his shoulder'll be damned stiff for a good while.'

‘Like the captain's.'

‘Aye, like the captain's.'

‘But he's over the worst of the fever?'

Lallo nodded and a silence fell as they considered the events on the island. In the days that had followed their departure from Juan Fernandez the echoes of the affair had petered out except when conversation aimlessly disturbed it. Among the people it had lit another portfire of discontent, for two-thirds of the ship's
company had not enjoyed the liberty of that first watch-ashore. Nevertheless, the nature of the incident had had less lasting impact on the men than upon the officers. The hands had preoccupations other than sentimental considerations over a pair of love-lorn deserters. In the collective wisdom of the crew there was an easier acceptance of the vagaries of human nature. Their lives were publicly lived, crude in their exposure and therefore the revelation of Witherspoon's sex came as less of a shock than the vague realisation that they had, perhaps, been made fools of.

Among the officers the reaction had been different. It was to them truly shocking that a woman, even a woman of the lowest social order which it was manifestly obvious that Witherspoon was not, should be driven to the extremity of resorting to concealment on a man-o'-war. Many and various were the theories advanced to explain her action. None was provable and therefore none was satisfactory. To some extent it was this inexplicable nature of the affair that made it most irritating. Unlike the people, the living conditions of the officers were such that they could function as individuals. The solitude of their tiny cabins enabled them to think in privacy and in privacy thoughts invaded unbidden. Of them all James Quilhampton had been most deeply stirred.

It had been Quilhampton who had climbed back up the dark valley and found Mount and Drinkwater, and the dead bodies. It had been Quilhampton who had organised the burial party and stood beside the chaplain as he performed his first real duty since recovering from the sea-sickness induced by the doubling of Cape Horn. The two lovers had been buried that night and the sky above the lantern-lit burial-party had been studded by stars. This involvement had revived thoughts of his own hopeless love affair, left far behind on the shores of the Firth of Forth and long-since repudiated when the news that
Patrician
was bound for the distant Pacific had plunged him into extreme and private depression.