The Horizon (1993) (2 page)

David had been away with the Home Fleet. It had all been over and done with when he had reached here.

He had always been a grave, self-controlled man in
the face of tragedy, but this final time he could not contain his anguish. He had gripped his younger brother’s hand and had spoken one word. ‘
Why?
’ It still seemed to hang in the air over this place.

He climbed down and said to the groom, ‘I’ll need you tomorrow. Bright and early.’

The man nodded. ‘Mr Swan has got everything done, sir.’ When the captain did not reply he flicked the reins and the pony turned automatically towards the stable yard.

Jonathan thought of Swan, who had been David’s Marine Officer’s Attendant, and a whole lot more. Batman, servant, bodyguard, friend. He was now in his forties, still a Royal Marine, but only in his heart. Curiously enough, he had been the first to learn of David’s death when the postman had brought the news from the village.

But perhaps it was only right that he had been the first, a man who had been closer than anyone to David in Africa and then in China during the savage Boxer Rebellion. Then back to the fleet again, until that last link in the chain of tragedy which had left its mark on this house and estate had recalled him. After Sarah’s death David had been given extended leave to help his father, who had suffered a stroke which had left him as helpless as a child. He had died soon afterwards, and the doctor had confided that the General’s heavy drinking had not helped.

Jonathan walked into the familiar hallway with its fine, curving staircase. He heard Swan’s hurrying footsteps and braced himself for the meeting.

Swan had been left in charge of the house after David had fired the steward. Like the empty gatehouse, carelessness and neglect were a sign of the times.

‘I’m sorry, but this house is not open to visitors yet!’

Jonathan started. He had been so immersed in his thoughts that he had failed to see the man in a neat suit who was sitting at a small dark desk onto which, in other days, the General had thrown the visiting cards of callers.

Swan came out and Jonathan was shocked by his appearance. He may only have been in his early forties, but he looked ten years older.

There was nothing feeble in his tone however. ‘You calls the captain
sir
in this house!’ He shot Jonathan a worried smile. ‘He owns it.’

The official stammered, ‘I – I’m
very
sorry.’ He glared at Swan. ‘Er – sir.’ He tried again. ‘I thought you would have known about the proposed conversion of the house and buildings into a convalescent home for officers.’

‘I did know.’ Jonathan glanced around. The paler patches where paintings and portraits had once hung. Proud faces, the smoking walls of gunfire in battles from Trafalgar to the Crimea. Each panorama had been careful not to show the true horror of war as he had seen it in France.

Swan said, ‘We’ve prepared the other wing, sir. Just like Major David wanted it.’ He waited for the government official to go and said doggedly, ‘I should have been with him. How could it have happened?’

Jonathan walked into the other room and tossed a dust sheet away from his father’s favourite chair. It was
already getting dark and it was not even four o’clock, and the rain was falling again, tapping on the tall windows; the sound which had frightened him as a small child. Was that why he still hated a thunderstorm, he wondered. Once he had been here alone, and when the lightning had filled the place with livid flashes and the thunder rolled against the hillside like an artillery bombardment, it had been as if those very pictures had come to life, men fighting their battles in miniature. He forced it from his mind and concentrated on Swan’s despairing question. How could it have happened? From the first day, upon his entering the Corps, the invincibility of the Royal Navy had been drummed into him as it was into every schoolboy in the country. The Royal Navy was the mightiest fleet in the world: it did indeed rule the waves, the sure shield every Briton accepted as his right. A source of pride, unchallenged since Nelson had fallen at Trafalgar.

But in times of peace when almost daily troopships had left Southampton and Liverpool unmolested to deal with trouble in obscure parts of the Empire, for ‘a skirmish’ as the General had often scornfully described such campaigns, the dangers of all-out war seemed unreal. The minds of planners and peacetime senior officers ashore and afloat refused to change, so that when war with Germany broke out they found they had been outstripped. Jonathan had been on a short staff course, and had been astounded by the complacency still rife in those first months. Throughout the fleet, gunnery officers were still chosen for flag rank; others were largely ignored. As for tactics, the torpedo and the
possible use of aircraft as weapons were discounted and thought vaguely ridiculous.

He looked at Swan and replied, ‘It was stupidity. There’s no other answer.’

He could see it as if he had been there. Three of the navy’s big twelve-thousand-ton cruisers,
Aboukir
,
Cressey
and
Hogue
, had been sailing near – too near – the Dutch coast without an escort. Only a month had passed since the declaration of war. On that calm September morning between seven and eight o’clock a German submarine had closed with the cruisers and had sunk all three, with a terrible loss of life. David had been in one of them.

Swan watched him, unwilling to break the stillness. He had never known this Blackwood very well. There was much of Major David about him although he was taller, slim and straight-backed, with unruly brown hair and level blue eyes which were now deeply troubled.

His features were tanned and somehow boyish, although Swan knew he must be at least thirty; still only a captain but promotion was slow in the Corps. Maybe he only looked young because he hadn’t grown a moustache like so many Royal Marine officers. But there was fire too; Swan had been close to officers long enough to recognise it when that stupid official had challenged him.

‘I’d like a drink, Swan.’

Swan grinned, his apple-red face lighting up for the first time. ‘Course, sir. Got some good Scotch . . .’

‘Then bring it, and I want you to join me.’

Swan frowned. ‘Wouldn’t be proper, sir. I knows me place.’

Jonathan leaned back in the chair and watched the light dying outside.

‘But this is your place, Swan. And I want you to be here when I come back . . .’

The picture refused to form.
Suppose I don’t come back?
The Royal Marines would soon be in the thick of it. He pressed his eyes tightly shut. The place in France where he had been completing his course with a Home Counties regiment had almost been overrun. They had counter-attacked, and he had seen them die, not in dozens as their colonel had predicted, but in hundreds. In the twinkling of an eye: men falling, being blown to pieces, blinded in the ruthless exchange of fire and bayonet. They gained a few yards but lost it when the Germans had thrown in another assault.

When he opened his eyes again he saw Swan with the decanter and two glasses. He smiled, and the shadows fell away. ‘Good.’

Swan said, ‘Cook’s got something nice for your supper, sir.’

Jonathan reached for one of the old General’s finely-cut goblets and saw that his hand was shaking. But the Scotch was superb, one of the General’s prize malts.

He said, ‘Here’s to the Royals, eh?’

Swan watched him warily. ‘
Is
it going badly over there, sir?’

Jonathan held out his goblet again and stared at it. Was it empty already? Then he looked at the wall where one of the great pictures had been and said softly, ‘It’s not a war, Swan.’ He held the refilled glass very tightly, and saw that his hand was steady. ‘It’s sheer bloody murder.’

Some time later, Swan picked up his own glass and tiptoed away as Jonathan’s head fell against the chair.

He paused and looked back. With his face relaxed in sleep he was very like his brother, he decided.

Albeit for one night only, a Blackwood had come home.

Twenty miles south of Hawks Hill and the surrounding Hampshire countryside, the bustling naval port of Portsmouth seemed to cringe under a blustery wind. The broad harbour, usually so sheltered from all but the fiercest gales, was alive with cruising wavelets that broke into cat’s paws against the sides of anchored and moored warships, while smaller craft were tossed about in clouds of spray. Every kind of ship was in evidence. Light cruisers, two elderly pre-Dreadnought battleships, and low-lying torpedo-boat destroyers, somehow sinister with their raked black hulls, seemed to fill every buoy and berth. Beyond them, poking above the dockyard jetties and walls, were the upper-works and fighting-tops of many more, being repaired, refitted, or constructed to prepare for rising losses at sea.

At the top of the harbour and shining in spray like the symbol she was, Nelson’s old flagship
Victory
, painted now in Victorian black and white, was a reminder, if one was ever needed, that this was the home of the world’s greatest navy.

But on this particular January morning the eyes of almost everyone from sodden boats’ crews to idlers on the walls of Portsmouth Point or across the tossing water on the Gosport side, were turned to the largest ship ever
to appear. H.M.S.
Reliant
, one of a new class of super battle-cruisers, seemed to rise contemptuously above them all. There were other battle-cruisers in the fleet; in fact they had been the only major warships to have been committed to action with the Germans off Heligoland Bight, when, in support of vessels of the Harwich Force, they had sunk three enemy cruisers in the first weeks of the war.

But
Reliant
was something quite new and entirely different from her predecessors, and mounted six fifteen-inch guns in three turrets, all of which could be trained on separate targets at the same time. She also carried a formidable armament of seventeen four-inch guns. But it was her size that awed the casual onlookers, while to those who served such ships her massive armament, thirty-two thousand tons and length of nearly eight hundred feet spoke of unprecedented strength. Big as she was, she retained the graceful lines of a light cruiser. She had two funnels, the forward one slightly taller than the other, so it seemed that this huge ship was leaning ahead, as if eager to go.

Her abbreviated trials had been completed just before Christmas, and now fully manned with a complement of twelve hundred and fifty officers and men, stored, ammunitioned, her bunkers topped up with oil, she was as ready as any untried ship could be.

Aft in his spacious day cabin the man who would control
Reliant
’s progress in a war which had already spread beyond anything any of them had envisaged, Captain Auriol George Soutter, stood by a polished scuttle and stared out at some passing picket boats. In a comfortable green leather armchair the captain of the
dockyard, with a coffee-cup at his elbow, regarded him curiously. They were friends of a sort. The Royal Navy was like a family and you usually ran into familiar faces along the way. He had been a cadet and then midshipman with
Reliant
’s captain, but there was little else in common. Whereas he was comfortably round, as the result of too good a mess life over the years, Soutter was lean and straight-backed, young for his rank, younger still for the command he had been given. But his face, now in profile, had an old-fashioned look, and would not have been out of place with Drake or at Trafalgar. Eyes grey-blue like the North Sea, a tightness around the jaw which had developed on the precarious climb up the ladder. From twelve years old, to this. The other captain said, ‘What d’you think, George? You’ve not had much time to get your people into shape. I know they’re all hand-picked apart from the last intake, but it’s a hell of a responsibility, especially . . .’

Soutter turned from the rain-dappled scuttle and smiled at him. ‘Especially as after today, we are no longer a private ship – is that what you were about to say?’ Like all those who knew him, his friend had used his middle name. He had always loathed being called Auriol, and had been made to suffer for it as a cadet.

The other shrugged his plump shoulders. ‘Well, you know what they say.’

‘No. Tell me.’ Even his words were sparing, as if everything unnecessary had been honed away.

‘He has just been appointed rear-admiral, and when he makes
Reliant
into his flagship, not too many hours from now . . .’

Soutter looked past him. ‘One hour, fifty minutes to be exact.’

The ship’s crest, hung between pictures of the King and Queen on the white bulkhead, was an upraised, double-edged sword surrounded by a victor’s laurel leaves.
Reliant
’s motto,
Gedemus nunquam
, stood out in bright gold below the naval crown despite the grey light.
We will never give in
. Rear-Admiral Theodore Keppel Purves would like that.

‘Of course, I forgot. You served with him . . .’

Soutter’s mouth relaxed slightly in a smile. Oh no.
You didn’t forget
. ‘Under him. I was his gunnery officer in the
Assurance
. I doubt that he’s changed much.’

The other captain waited, but that was all there was. Gossip had it that Soutter and Purves had never really got on, and there had been talk of a court-martial or something damned close. The lords of Admiralty obviously thought it did not count for anything now. Soutter had been given command of this, the largest man-of-war in the service, when many others had been praying for it. As for Purves, he was known to be ambitious – another Beatty, some said. If Beatty, who commanded the battle-cruiser squadron, got to hear about that, the tension would be between
them
.

A door opened and Drury, the chief steward, peered in at them. ‘Beg pardon, sir, the commander’s respects an’ the dockyard launch is ’ere.’ He vanished, his accent hanging in the air like a piece of London’s East End.

The visiting captain reached for his cap and glanced at the fine cabinet which he knew contained Soutter’s decanters. ‘Best be off then.’ He held out his hand. ‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’