Under False Colours (19 page)

'
Ja
,
ja
.'

'Why does he want to bring in more English ships, the ships now at Helgoland? We know he is frightened of Marshal Davout ...'

Liepmann looked from one to the other. His tongue flickered over his lips and a faint smile followed.

'Ze scheeps at Helgoland have guns, no?'

Drinkwater nodded.

'Marshal Davout he like guns. Herr Thiebault vill get guns. Make money and pleez Marshal Davout. You understand?'

Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes.'

'Damned if
I
do.'

'It is ver' dangerous for you here. You must not stay ...'

Liepmann had his own game to play, Drinkwater thought, but it was essential that
Galliwasp
and
Ocean
escaped from the river before Drinkwater or Gilham made an attempt at getting out of Hamburg.

'We must wait, Herr Liepmann, until we hear from Helgoland that our ships are safe.'

'
Ja
,
ja
,' the Jew nodded. 'It will be ver' dangerous for you stay here. Zis is best place. When time come we take you out of Hamburg
mit
ze sugar.'

'Can you send a message to Helgoland,' Drinkwater asked, 'if I write it?' Liepmann nodded. 'Herr Nicholas has told me ...'

'
Ja
,' Herr Nicholas tells me also.' Liepmann threw a glance in Gilham's direction and pointed at a ledger lying on a shelf. Inkpot and pen stood close by.

'In English, Kapitan ...'

Drinkwater exchanged glances with Liepmann.

'It is safe?'

Drinkwater took up the pen and wrote carefully in capitals:

G AND W TAKEN OUT OF THEIR SHIPS BY FORCE BUT PRESENTLY SAFE ENJOYING HOSPITALITY OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. ARRANGEMENTS SET AWRY BY ARRIVAL OF MARSHAL DAVOUT. SHIPS DISCHARGED OUTWARD BOUND.

He paused a moment, wondering how to sign himself, and then added: Baltic.

Straightening up he handed the torn-out page to Liepmann. The Jew took the pen, dipped it in the inkpot and on another piece of paper began to write a jumble of letters, having memorized the crazy alphabet from Canto II of Dante. When he had finished the transliteration he opened the lantern and held Drinkwater's draft in the candle fiame. The incinerated ash floated lazily about the table.

'There is one more thing, Herr Liepmann. You should understand that it was never intended that more ships would come, only that they would pretend to come. Do you understand?'

'They not come?' Liepmann regarded Drinkwater with surprise.

'No. They were to have gone only to Neuwerk ... to look as if they were coming into the Elbe.'

'You do not wish to sell ze guns,
nein
?'

'No, only the greatcoats and boots.'

'Ach ... and ze sugar,
ja
?'

'Yes,' Drinkwater said, matching the Jew's smile, 'and the sugar.'

Liepmann had turned to go when Gilham, his mouth full of the food which he had been busy eating during this exchange, asked, 'Herr Liepmann, did you pay Littlewood?'

Liepmann turned to Gilham, a look of mild surprise on his face. '
Ja
. I pay him goot ... also for your scheep, ze
Ocean
, two thousand thalers ...'

In the wake of Liepmann's departure Gilham grunted his satisfaction. With a wry look at his compatriot, Drinkwater helped himself to what was left of the sausages and bread.

He felt better with food inside him, aware that the winter's day, short though it had been, had passed slowly and been full of the uncertainties that kept a man from feeling hungry until actually confronted with food.

With a little luck they would be all right. A day or two lying low and then, when
Galliwasp
and
Ocean
were clear, Liepmann would smuggle them out of the city. Drinkwater was content to leave the details to the Jewish merchant. Davout would be settling in, receiving reports from the French officials and administrators, all of whom would be wary, and it would take even so dynamic a soldier as the marshal was reputed to be, a few days to decide upon what course of action to settle. There was no doubt that he had been sent to shut the gaping door that Hamburg had become in his master's Continental System.

'You seem to know a deal of what's going on,' Gilham said, suddenly jerking Drinkwater from his complacency and reminding him that if his real identity or position were known, then capture meant certain death.

He shrugged. 'It is not so very difficult to deduce,' he said with affected nonchalance, undecided as to whether to take Gilham into his confidence. 'D'you trust Littlewood?' he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

'I don't have much choice, do I?'

It was bitterly cold in the watchman's room and Drinkwater slept fitfully, waking frequently, the knotted muscles of his wounded shoulder aching painfully. Beside him Gilham snored under a blanket with a full belly and the sailor's facility for sleeping anywhere.

Drinkwater envied Gilham. He himself was desperately tired, tired of the burden Dungarth had laid upon him and tired of the interminable war. He had done his best and was no longer a young man. Now his shoulder pained him abominably.

He thought of his wife, Elizabeth, and their children, Charlotte Amelia and Richard. He had not seen them for so very long that they seemed to inhabit another age when he was another person. He found it difficult to remember exactly what they looked like, and found all he could call to mind were the immobile images of the little portraits that used to hang in his cabin when he was in command of a frigate and not cowering under borrowed blankets in a Hamburg garret.

Where were those imperfect portraits now? Lost with his other personal effects when the
Tracker
foundered and poor Quilhampton died, together with Frey and Derrick.

He tore his exhausted mind from horrible visions of his friends drowning, deliberately trying to recall the items of clothing, the books, charts and equipment he must have lost along with his sea-chest and the pictures of his family.

There was his sword and sextant, his journals and the little drawing case Elizabeth had given him, pretending it came from the children ...

Mentally he rummaged down through the layers of clothing in the chest. The polar bear skin, presented by the officers of His Britannic Majesty's sloop-of-war
Melusine
and there, at the very bottom, cut from its wooden stretcher, the paint cracked and flaking, another portrait, found when he captured the
Antigone
in the Red Sea, ten, eleven years earlier.

Odd how he could recall
that
portrait in all its detail: the beautiful French woman, her shoulders bare, her breasts suggestively rendered beneath a filmy wrap of gauze, her hair
a la mode
, piled up on her head and entwined with a string of pearls. Hortense Santhonax, now widowed, though an unmarried woman when he had first seen her ...

He closed his aching eyes against the moonlight that flooded in through the lozenge shaped window set high in the apex of the gable-end. It was all so long ago, part of another life ...

Somewhere below him Liepmann's dogs stirred. Johannes, the young man who brought them their food and served as the Jew's watchman, was probably doing his rounds.

The whining suddenly rose to a bark of alarm. Once, twice, the hounds yapped before shots rang out. The barking ended in a mewling whine.

For a moment Drinkwater lay still, unable or unwilling to comprehend what was happening, then a muffled shout was followed by a curt, monosyllabic command.

Drinkwater threw off his blankets and reached for his boots.

'Gilham! Wake up!'

He kicked the recumbent figure into consciousness.

'What's the matter?' Gilham asked sleepily.

'The bloody French are here!'

Drinkwater pulled on his coat and kicked his blankets into the shadows. Feet pounded on the wooden ladders, the floor of their hideout shook. Gilham was on his feet, picking up the empty wine bottle from the table.

'Get in the shadows, man, and keep quiet!' Drinkwater hissed, though his own heart was pounding loud enough to be heard.

The door to the watchman's room was flung open. Three dragoons, clumsy in their high jackboots, burst into the room. For a moment they froze, staring about them, the moonlight gleaming on the bronze of their high, crested helmets and the steel of their bayonetted carbines. Then a fourth, a sergeant holding up a lantern, shoved past them. Drinkwater was aware of more men on the landing outside and the terrified whimper of a young prisoner. They had already seized Johannes.

The sergeant's lantern light swept the room, falling on the absurd gilt tassels on Drinkwater's hessian boots. A second later it played full in his face.

'Qu'est ce que vous foutez là
?'

The lantern's light found Gilham, then the basket and utensils used to bring their supper, the pen and ink, the extinguished lamp and the torn pages of the ledger. A few black wisps of ash stirred in the air.

The dragoons stepped forward and Gilham shattered the wine bottle and raised its broken neck with a defiant cry. The noise terminated in a grunt as he doubled up in pain. The nearest dragoon's toecap struck him in the groin and vomit splashed on to the floor.

The dragoons secured their prisoners in a silence broken only by the rasp of Gilham's tortured breath. The sharp reek of spew filled the stuffy air. With cords about their wrists both Drinkwater and Gilham were pushed forward to join Johannes on the wooden catwalk that served as a landing from the topmost ladder.

They stumbled downwards, the sergeant and his lantern ahead of them, the shadows of themselves and their escort leaping fantastically on the stacks of baled and cased goods piled on all sides. At ground level the sergeant paused, ordering his patrol into rough formation. The circle of lamplight illuminated his boots and the long tails of his green coat with the brass eagles securing the yellow facing of the turn-backs. It fell also on the corpse of one of Liepmann's watchdogs, the pink tongue lolling from its gaping jaw. The sergeant kicked it aside.

'
Ouvrez
!' he ordered, and a blast of cold air struck them as the door was swung open. The sergeant lifted the lantern and walked down the line of his men, peering at the three prisoners pinioned between the double files. He said something in a low voice which made his men snigger, then he swung round and Drinkwater saw the sabre in his right hand. Holding up the lantern in his left, he let the beam play on the stack of bulging sacks beside them.

'Hippolyte,' he commanded,
'allez ... votre casque, mon ami
.'

The dragoon who had thrown open the warehouse door trotted obediently up and doffed his helmet. He held it upside down as the sergeant lifted his sword arm.

'Qu'est que ce
?' he asked mockingly, slashing at a sack. Sugar loaves tumbled into Hippolyte's helmet and the dragoons roared with laughter.

'
Voila
!' cried the sergeant with a flourish.
'Nom de Dieu! Sucre
!'

And the patrol lurched forward into the dark cobbled alleyway in high spirits, locking the warehouse door behind them.

January 1810

They were not long in the custody of the sergeant and his troopers. At the end of the alley they found a mounted officer whose helmet, scabbard and horse furniture gleamed in the flaring light of a torch held by an orderly on foot. The leaping flame, lighting his face from below, gave it a demonic cast as he stared down at the prisoners, listening to the sergeant's report. The officer's bay mount shifted uneasily beside the flickering brand, tossing its head and throwing off flecks of foam from curling lips. The officer soothed its arched neck with a gloved hand.

With the stately clip-clop of the charger bringing up the rear they marched off, crossing a moonlit, cobbled square, to halt in the high shadow of the Rathaus. Despite the midnight hour, messengers came and went, clattering up to the waiting orderlies who grabbed flung reins as the aides dashed into the lit archway, the flanking sentries snapping to attention and receiving the most perfunctory of salutes from the young officers.

Drinkwater, Gilham and Johannes were marched off to a side door, entering a stone flagged passage that opened out into an arched chamber guarded by two shakoed sentinels and containing a staff officer who sat writing at a desk. The escort of dragoons was dismissed, infantry took over and the dragoon officer made a
sotto voce
report to the staff captain. The latter barely looked up, though his pen scribbled busily across the uppermost of a small pile of papers. These formalities over, the three prisoners were taken through an iron-bound door and locked into a small chamber which had clearly been used as a storeroom.

Gilham and Drinkwater exchanged glances but their silence did nothing to reassure the young German. Johannes was agitated to the point of visible distress and would have broken down completely had not their incarceration ended suddenly. A tall corporal of fusiliers, his shako plume raking the lintel of the door as he ducked into the makeshift cell, called them out.

'
Allez
!'

They trooped out and followed the corporal; two soldiers with bayonets fixed to their muskets fell in behind them. At the staffofficer's desk they were motioned to pass, and climbed a flight of stone steps to halt outside impressive double doors guarded by two further sentries.

'The holy of holies,' muttered Gilham and in the silence that followed Drinkwater could hear the chatter of Johannes's teeth. When the doors opened it startled the three of them.

Monsieur Thiebault advanced towards them. His face was pale and he wrung his hands with a nervous compulsiveness.

'Gentlemen ...' he said, attempting a reassuring smile, stepping aside and ushering them forward, 'His Excellency will see you now ...' He nodded at the guards.

Drinkwater and Gilham started forward with Johannes in their wake, but Thiebault, Drinkwater noticed, made a sharp gesture with his hand and turning his head Drinkwater saw the boy's arm seized by one of the soldiers. He caught Thiebault's eye and the customs officer raised his shoulders with a fatalistic shrug.