'Le trident de Neptune est le sceptre du monde.'
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.
They had escaped from the action unobserved, rowed the cutter deep into the re-entrant lagoon behind the bay and bivouacked after a fashion in the lee of the boat. Blixoe had shot two ducks and they had roasted the carcasses over a miserable fire hidden from observers in a small valley between the dunes. After that they had slept, Blixoe and his marines on their guns. When Quilhampton awoke to the yelp of the dog the first thing he noticed was that the man approaching them did not seem alarmed at their presence. This realisation put him on his guard and he called the others awake.
The newcomer sat astride a plodding donkey, his large, horny feet hanging almost to the ground. He wore a dirty cotton suit, his face grimy and unshaven beneath a battered, wide-brimmed hat. He had a long knife at his belt, carried a gun and, Quilhampton noticed, across his curious wooden saddle-bow a wineskin was slung.
Trying to look casual Quilhampton stood and wished the newcomer good morning.
The man reined in his burro and grinned, letting fly a torrent of incomprehensible words and jerking his jutting chin from time to time in the direction of the open sea. He appeared to end his address on an interrogative note. Quilhampton shrugged.
The stranger made the universal gesture of eating and then pointed in the direction of the village they had seen from the summit of the dunes the previous afternoon.
'He's tellin' us we can get food at the village, sir,' muttered Blixoe.
'Yes.' Quilhampton nodded vigorously. The stranger grinned and rubbed his right forefinger tip against the ball of his thumb.
Quilhampton shook his head. 'No…' He tried to remember scraps of Spanish he had learned as a prisoner at Cadiz, three years earlier, but his memory failed him as the stranger's eyes became less friendly. The man jerked the head of the burro round, suddenly suspicious.
Quilhampton had a sudden inspiration. 'Hey… amigo… agua ...' He pointed at his mouth. The mongrel was crouched, as though guarding his master's retreat from these ragamuffin strangers, growling defiance.
But the newcomer was not in a charitable mood. He hefted his gun and kicked the donkey forward. Giving a short bark, the dog turned and followed.
'He had a wine-skin,' said Blixoe, raising his musket.
'No…' The powder in the pan flashed and the shot knocked the hat from the mestizo's head. His long legs kicked the donkey wildly and the over-burdened beast broke into an awkward gallop.
'Hold your fire!' Two more of the marines followed their sergeant's lead. The wine-skin, jolted or flung sacrificially from its perch, plummeted to the ground while man, donkey and dog disappeared whence they had come.
A howl of triumph went up and the seamen and marines began running forward. Realising what was happening Quilhampton began to run too. He reached the wine-skin just as a seaman picked it up.
'Give it to me, Lacey.' He held out his hands. The seaman looked around, seeking support among his mates.
'Bollocks,' said someone behind Quilhampton and Lacey tore the plug from the neck of the leather bag and squirted the dark fluid expertly into his open mouth. The act was a signal, the men clustered forward and grabbed at the thing, wine spilled about them and some reached eager mouths, though none were satisfied. Quilhampton, Blixoe and Marsden stood back from this unruly melee. Then something inside Quilhampton snapped. He strode forward, swung his wooden arm and scattered the drinkers, catching the wine-skin as someone dropped it.
'Sern't Blixoe, get some order into these men… you too, Mr Marsden… pull yourselves together and remember you're man-o'-war men, not scum!'
He raged at them and they shamefacedly responded, though one or two remained truculent. Blixoe got his men to shepherd them into a rough line.
'Now then… that's better. Let me remind you I'm in command and I shall decide what's to be done…'
'Well, what is to be done… sir?' sneered a man named Hughes.
'That's for me to decide.' Quilhampton faltered. What was to be done? There would be food in the village and the inhabitants were, nominally at least, enemies. The marines had their muskets and bayonets, the seamen their knives. Marsden also had his tools, only he himself was unarmed.
'Well… I think the first thing to do is to secure some victuals in the village. I'm sure we can persuade our friend to give a quantity of bread as well as the wine.' It was a feeble joke but it brought a laugh to unite them. They turned and began to follow the tracks of the burro through the sand.
The Royal Navy had invaded California.
Drinkwater stood as the bolts of his cell were withdrawn. Bread, wine and fruit were brought in and he was reminded of imprisonment in Cadiz in the days before the great battle off Cape Trafalgar. He recognised his guard too, for while the tray bearing his breakfast was carried by a half-breed, de Soto stood in the doorway. His face was expressionless and Drinkwater met his gaze, suddenly feeling his spirit must not submit.
'You are dishonoured, sir,' he snapped suddenly. 'Captain Rubalcava has broke his parole!'
A flicker of anger kindled in the officer's eye as the last word suggested the gist of Drinkwater's outburst. He uttered a word to the mestizo who swung a bucket into the cell and retreated, pulling the door behind himself with a crash of bolts.
But Drinkwater felt a renewal of hope. Beyond the confines of the stone corridor he had heard a laugh, a loud, happy laugh and he knew instantly the very curve of the throat from which it had come. He was in a cell below the commandant's residence, a bridewell for special 'guests' of His Excellency, too precious to be mewed up in the common calabozo of San Francisco.
'Well, Captain, please sit down.' Captain Jackson Grant, speaking fluent and colloquial Spanish, motioned Rubalcava to a seat. He grinned at the dark and vicious face of the Spaniard. 'You have come to pay me, eh?' Grant laughed.
Rubalcava nodded. 'Yes, I have come to pay you. You are short of men, I have come to pay you in men…'
'The devil no! I gave you intelligence of the British…' 'You said you were short of men, Capitán Grant!' 'Sure, I said I was short of men. I am short of men, but I'm damned if I want men for what I told you. I can get my own men in the first cat-house ashore…' Grant shouted angrily.
'You will take men, Capitán Grant, because that is what you are being paid…'
'Damn you, Rubalcava, I don't need men. I can sail this hooker from here to Baltimore with a mate and a cook!'
Rubalcava's mouth curved in a sneer. 'You have a great reputation for bragging, Capitán. You will take men… as I give them…'
'The hell I will…' Grant was on his feet. Rubalcava merely lifted his elegantly booted feet and put the red heels on Grant's table. 'I want gold, Rubalcava, gold…'
'We have not yet found El Dorado, Capitán, in the meantime, you will settle for men, otherwise…'
'Shit, man, there is gold in California… what the devil do you mean otherwise?'
'Otherwise, Capitán Grant, we shall have to inform the authorities that you have been selling aguardiente to the natives.'
'The hell you will… I bought the fucking stuff from the authorities!'
'I think you are mistaken, Capitán. At least, the authorities know nothing about the matter.'
Grant expelled a long, frustrated breath. 'You will regret getting the better of me, Rubalcava, damn your insolence…'
Rubalcava smiled again. 'Perhaps, Capitán… anyway I have six men for you. All prime seamen, just as you require.'
'Six. Good God, man, you have a whole frigate's crew imprisoned. You could have let me have more than six!'
'For you to sell to the Russians? No, no, Capitdn, these are honourable prisoners-of-war. Besides, we need them to work cargo in the merchant ships.' Rubalcava paused, catching the American's eye. 'Or to dig for gold in the hills, Capitán, eh?'
Grant laughed, good-naturedly. 'Oh, sure, Captain Rubalcava, sure.'
'It is thirsty work, discussing business, Capitán Grant.'
Grant blew out a breath and reached for two glasses and a bottle of aguardiente. He slopped a finger of the brandy into each glass and handed one to the Spaniard. 'To what do we drink then? Eh?'
'To the late Nicolai Rezanov, eh, Capitdn Grant?' And with his free hand Rubalcava piously crossed himself. 'Requiescat in pace.'
Lieutenant Quilhampton waved Blixoe's flanking party forward, waiting with the main body in a slight hollow in the sand. He watched Blixoe and two of his marines edge forward, approaching the strangely silent village. The smoke of cooking fires rose into the air and the clucking of hens could be heard, but the bark of a dog or the squeal of a child was suspiciously absent.
There was a sudden shout and sand spurted up around Blixoe's party. A haze of smoke hung over the wall of a ramshackle hut and Quilhampton could see the rough timber had been loopholed for small arms. Blixoe began to wriggle back in retreat. There was a second volley and then a whoop. Ragged Indians and half-castes, the tiny population of fishermen, ran out of the hut and launched an impetuous charge across the beaten sand towards them. They waved a few muskets and staves and pikes, and they outnumbered the cutter's crew. Quilhampton turned to his men, but they were already in full flight. He made a violent movement of his good hand to Blixoe, who needed no second bidding, and twenty minutes later they had tumbled into the cutter and were pulling as hard as they could from the desultory shots and the shouted insults of the natives.
When they had opened the range they hung over their oarlooms and, those of them that could, laughed at the comic humiliation of their predicament. Others sat and pondered what was to be done.
'It is God's will, friends, we shall have to make the best of it. It is not the first time we have been torn from our places by the rough circumstances of existence.'
'For Chrissakes, you witless fool, do you not know that a Yankee packet is hell compared to old Drinkwater's barky.'
'Old Drinkwater don't have a fucking barky, Sam, so let's take Derrick's advice and make the best of it. They say these Yankees pay well and sail like witches.'
'And their women is handsome, their land rich and we shall find the streets of Baltimore paved with gold… yes, I heard the same kind of crap from a recruiting lieutenant somewheres…'
'Well, my lads… so you've volunteered for service under the old stars and stripes, the flag of liberty, free trade and sailor's rights and glad we are to welcome you all aboard the old Abigail Starbuck.'
Captain Grant came on deck to review his new recruits.
Clucking his tongue and pronouncing himself satisfied, he delivered them to his chief mate.
It was towards evening when the bolts of Drinkwater's cell were drawn back again. Don Alejo Arguello entered the tiny room and swept a bow at his prisoner.
'Capitán … I am so sorry that you have been the misfortunate victim of the bad luck of war.'
'The misfortunes of war have little to do with it, Don Alejo. I had your words that Captain Rubalcava would not serve again…'
'Capitán,' Don Alejo protested, his tone exaggeratedly reasonable, 'Don Jorge, he is an officer of, of energy, of spirit… he was on board with me, one of the four fregatas that your navy attacked without declaration of war four years ago… Do not talk of civilisation, Capitán Drinkwater…'
Drinkwater remembered the incident. Their Lordships had despatched a force of four frigates to intercept a squadron of Spanish cruisers homeward from Montevideo with specie worth over a million pounds sterling. Their force had been so equal that the Spanish commander, Rear-Admiral Don Joseph Bustamente, had been compelled to fight to defend the honour of his flag. A superior force would have achieved the same result (which was to provoke Madrid to declare war) and have avoided the loss of many lives and the explosion of the Spanish frigate Mercedes. Governments could forget such things easier than the men whose lives they marked.
'You understand, Capitán… Doña Ana Maria said you were simpatico…'
'Where are my men, Don Alejo, and my officers? Is the surgeon allowed to attend the wounded… ?'
'Capitán, I forgot, you are wounded. I will have to send for…'
'I am all right, Don Alejo,' snapped Drinkwater, 'it is my men I ask after.'
'My dear Capitán,' Don Alejo shed some of his easy humour and his tone hardened, 'we are civilised people. They are being looked after and your officers, they are in the charge of military officers… come, I will bring you ink and a pen and send you some meat; we shall look after you. Good night…'
And he was gone, leaving Drinkwater alone with his thoughts.
'Belay that sheet and settle down… now pay attention. We have only about ten leagues to sail to San Francisco. When we get there we can find out what has become of the ship and our shipmates. Then I will decide what to do. Whatever happens we will have to slip into the harbour unobserved, either at night, or in a fog. I am relying on your loyalty. That's all.'
I'm hungry…'
'Aye and thirsty…'
'You can belay that lubberly talk. We're all hungry and thirsty, but tomorrow we will find water at least…'
'I bloody hope so… for your sake… lieutenant…'
Quilhampton ignored the sneer. The boat rose and fell on the long Pacific swells that were the aftermath of the recent gale and other, more distant, disturbances. Under its single lugsail the cutter made a good speed and the tiller kicked under his arm. The day was leaching a golden glow across the western horizon behind them as they steered south-east and the first stars were visible against a clear, rain-washed sky.
It was curious, he mused, how the merest chance could comfort a man and how insubstantial a foundation was required for hope. But the disastrous loss of the ship seemed to satisfy some arcane and superstitious foreboding that had haunted him for so long that its fulfilment had come as something of a relief. And so retrospectively ridiculous had the day's events seemed, that their escape was like an entr'acte. This instant was reality; this kick of the tiller, this dying of the day and the chuckle of water along the boat's strakes. He sensed a curious and inappropriate contentment, as of one having turned a momentous corner. The episode on the beach had been one of desperation. He was now engaged on something of purpose. The boat's course was his best chance of seeing Catriona MacEwan once again. And as his men dozed James Quilhampton hummed gently to himself, and beat time with his wooden hand upon the gunwhale of the cutter.
Time hangs heavily upon a lonely man who has suffered a great misfortune. His troubles dominate his thoughts and disturb his attempts at sleep. He relives the hours of his disaster in a knowingly fruitless attempt to reverse time; he attempts to shift blame and then to acknowledge his own responsibility. His mind deploys logic and then rejects it in favour of vague, superstitious emotions which play on the very vulnerability of his isolation. Culpability seems his alone; he has dared too much and providence has cut him down to size. Such solitary pits for the soul are dug by circumstance for every commander of ships. In this, Drinkwater was no exception.
Although logic told him the chain of bad luck began when the leak forced him to seek the shelter of a careenage, superstition sought an earlier explanation: the hanging at the Nore, the loss of the Danish privateer, the sighting of the strange ship off the Horn, the incident at Mas-a-Fuera. Even the worthless capture of the Santa Monica seemed but another malevolent step in a fantastic conspiracy by fate. Such fears, dominant in the small hours, could have been dispelled by a turn on the quarterdeck at dawn while the watch swabbed down and the smell of coffee blew about the ship. The 'blue-devils' was a misanthropy endemic among sea-officers but against which there were known specifics.
Some men played instruments, some invited company, some diverted their minds by reading, writing, sketching. Some drank. All relied upon the routines of the naval day to ameliorate their obsessive preoccupations. Some carried the dissolution of their lives within their characters, some gave way to jealous fits, some to violent abuses of their powers. Some bickered with their officers, some immersed themselves in trivial matters and disturbed the tranquillity of their ships. Most ultimately coped, because demands were put upon them that compelled them to submit to influences beyond their own passions.
Cooped day after day in solitary confinement, allowed no exercise beyond the tiny cell, Drinkwater went unrescued by routine or any demand upon his expertise with which to patch his spirit. He was left alone with the wild fears of his imagination. Logic told him that he was guilty of misjudgement and incompetence, and every view from his tiny window reinforced this opinion as he looked down upon his captured ship. Superstition told him he had been abandoned to his fate, that dark, unworldly spirits had been released by his actions. From beyond the grave Edouard Santhonax laughed; a great hollow laugh that brought him bolt upright from sleep, and his old enemy melted into the gentle, uncomprehending pity of his own wife's face.
How would Elizabeth feel when she heard? What would Lord Dungarth conclude? What would John Barrow think of him?
'What will they say in England?' he whispered to himself. They had become too used to victory…
But that was no good. That was merely another excuse. Discontent had caused the leak and for that he alone was responsible. For several days his mind revolved along this morbid orbit. He sought consolation in the writing of his journal, but after the harrowing experience of recording the events in the log, he could put nothing in his private papers that did not reek of self-pity. He began to dismiss in his mind all mitigating factors. His own culpability began to assume its own stature and grow in his thoughts so that it threatened to unhinge him. But in the end long experience of a solitary existence saved him. The learnt disciplines of combating the blue-devils came to his rescue. At first he stood upon the table and scanned the anchorage, avoiding the sad sight of Patrician. He watched the merchant ships, half a dozen of which he could just see. The comings and goings of their boats, the laboriously swept lighters that crabbed out to them like giant water-beetles with the hides and tallow and assorted exports of the colony. He could see among them the Abigail Starbuck, a tall-sparred, handsome vessel, as were all the latest American ships. Once he thought he saw Jackson Grant, and once, quite ridiculously, the figure of the Quaker Derrick upon her deck.
It was that sighting that brought him to the recognition of his self-deception. It was clearly a ridiculous fancy! He would have to take hold of himself. Although he had not mitigated his self-blame, from that moment it ceased to be a passive response to his predicament and began to spur his resolution to transcend his plight. He began to write in his journal and in doing so called up incidents of the previous days that were not directly connected with the loss of the Patrician.
… I realised the place of my imprisonment when I heard the laugh of Doña Ana Maria…
He stopped writing as a thought struck him. If Grant had betrayed him to the Spanish, why had not Grant told Don José of the death of Rezanov? And if he had, why had the news not been communicated to the Russian's betrothed?
That laughter had been full of unalloyed joy, the expectant, irrepressible joy of someone expecting the arrival of a lover. Drinkwater recalled how her eyes had glowed as she had spoken of the Russian. He shook his head. The time for such abstruse preoccupations was over. He wrote on, dismissing the matter, for it made no sense to him and had no bearing on his fate.
He was woken next morning by the concussion of guns. For an instant hope leapt into his heart but the noise, answered somewhere to seaward, resolved itself into an exchange of salutes. He clambered up onto his table. For a long time he could see nothing and then, into his field of view and bringing up to an anchor slightly to seaward of the Patrician, was the heavy black hull of a Russian line-of-battle-ship.
James Quilhampton had seen her the previous day from the rocks of a small and insignificant headland a few miles north of the entrance to San Francisco. In the little cove behind him the cutter lay drawn up on the beach, while from the wooded slope that rose behind the strip of sand came the dull sound of an axe. Occasionally the snap of a musket betrayed Blixoe's hunting party. They had crept into the cove to hide and recruit their strength while Quilhampton decided what to do. Sweet water streamed out of the dense woods and they slaked their thirst and rinsed the salt from their clothes and bodies. That night they bivouacked in the fragrant undergrowth and loafed the following morning away, waiting for the night. In the late afternoon they had sighted the big ship coming down from the northward. From the little promontory, Quilhampton saw she was a two-decked man-of-war, black-hulled and flying the dark, diagonal ensign of Russia.
It seemed the final bar on the stronghold of the enemy, setting awry his carefully made plan. Ordering the men to spend another day in idleness he languished in indecision. But game and water were plentiful, and the fresh meat emboldened him. When the next evening Blixoe came to him for orders, he had decided to throw everything to hazard.
'Very well,' he said as they lay back round the fire, licking their fingers clean of the juice of venison, 'this is what I intend that we do, and if any man will not gamble on the outcome he is free to take his chance…'
Quilhampton wanted none but willing spirits with him.
His fears were vindicated; he had no doubt this was the ship they had seen off Cape Horn and now she arrived like Nemesis. Through his glass he saw the twinkle of gold braid upon her quarterdeck, saw her entry manned and the Spanish officer board her. He could hear the faint piping shriek of the calls, given in the British style by officers who had trained with the Royal Navy. Drinkwater remembered Admiral Hanikov's fleet in the North Sea in the summer of 1797 and wondered whether this ship had come direct from Kronstadt or had been detached from Seniavin's Adriatic squadron.
He saw, too, the procession of boats leave the side of the Russian ship and, half an hour later, heard the sound of voices speaking French pass below his window, Russian officers ascending the path that wound upwards to the Residence from the boat jetty and the battery below. Surely now the news of the death of Rezanov would be made known to Doña Ana Maria? To his recovering mind the preoccupation offered a point of focus beyond his own unhappiness.
'Capitán, I have the honour to present Prince Vladimir Rakitin, of His Imperial Majesty's ship Suvorov.'
Drinkwater gave a short and deliberately frigid bow. Although he was curious about the Russian his incarceration had made him angry and he fixed his eyes on Don José.
'Don José, I protest at the dishonour you have done to me. Where are my officers? Why have you not permitted a surgeon to visit me, or allowed me to exercise? What have you done with my people? I had always thought the Spanish a civilised nation. I am mortified to find myself, so recently a guest at your table, treated with every courtesy due an honourable enemy employed on a mission of humanity, suddenly deprived of the courteous formalities of war. You are, sir, guilty of having condoned the breaking of the terms of exchange by Captain Rubalcava and his men.'
Drinkwater felt invigorated by the cathartic effects of this outburst. He felt washed clean of the self-pity that had nearly drowned him in his confinement. Now there were other causes to fight, exposures to make before this newly arrived ally of the Spanish authorities. He turned towards the Russian officer: 'I am sure that His Imperial Majesty's Navy would not have treated the courtesies of war with such disdain…'
He bowed with an exaggerated politeness to the Russian officer. Both Don José and his brother were angry. They understood the gist of his wordy accusation although they wore smiles and made gestures of incomprehension. For a moment Drinkwater expected to be conducted peremptorily back to his cell, but it seemed that he had been brought here for other reasons.
'Capitán,' said Don Alejo, 'Don Jorge Rubalcava is a zealous officer… you see, I know the word from reading your newspapers… it is perhaps that he has been,' again the ritual of shrugging, 'much revenge to you… but, well, you are our enemy. England is…' Don Alejo waved towards the doorway and across the terrace upon which Drinkwater had waited the summons to meet the Commandante all those days ago. The gesture was redolent of vast, insurpassable distances.
'And you tell us you come to make war for Russia…' Don Alejo smiled and looked in the direction of Rakitin.
'Yes, Captain, you are come to make war on our posts in North America, eh?'
Drinkwater turned. The Russian was a man of middle height, with a powerful physique, deep-set eyes overhung by shaggy brows and a coarse sabre-wound upon his chin. His tight-buttoned blue tunic with its double row of gilt buttons was closed to his chin and heavy bullion epaulettes fringed his shoulders. He wore white breeches and heavy top-boots. His plumed hat was tucked beneath his arm and he was attended by a tall lieutenant and a pair of midshipmen who lounged languidly with the air of bored courtiers, their eyes only casually registering Drinkwater's presence, as though at some minor entertainment offered by a country cousin to visiting townsfolk.
'I have my orders, Captain…'
'Yes.' Rakitin turned and with a formally white-gloved hand, patted a small pile of documents on the table beside him. Drinkwater flushed scarlet. He had failed to secure his secret instructions, now they had fallen into the enemy's hands. Suddenly it did not seem relevant that they were imprecise and vague. He had let his orders and instructions, his code and signal books fall into the hands of the enemy! A void opened in his stomach and he made an effort to control himself. Don Alejo was smiling at him; Drinkwater drew himself up and affected to ignore the supercilious Spaniard.
'You speak excellent English, Captain Rakitin. Perhaps I can say that I have found no defence on earth effective against dishonourable men…'
The barb went home; Don Alejo's smile vanished, but Drinkwater found little comfort in Rakitin's reply.
I learnt to speak English in your navy, Captain Drinkwater,' the Russian answered in a chilling bass, 'where I also learned that British officers do not do these things.' Rakitin paused to let the meaning of his words sink in, watching with satisfaction the colour drain from the Englishman's face. 'But you have no further use for them now you are a prisoner. You have failed…' Rakitin turned away dismissively. Drinkwater felt as though he had been struck. Shaking violently from a hopeless anger, he was led out of the room. He scarcely saw his surroundings as he stumbled beside his escort across a courtyard to the steps which led to his cell below the stables. A dark shape swam mistily into his vision and then the virago-face of Doña Helena was thrust into his. She wore an expression of triumph, her tiny eyes blue chips of vindictiveness. 'So God has delivered his enemies into our hands…' Her vulturine swoop had halted Drinkwater. He pulled himself upright, suddenly recovering himself before this haggard crone. He mustered all the dignity of which he was capable and, remembering the old woman's office, said, 'Please convey to Doña Ana Maria my sincere condolences upon her tragic loss.'
And as he swept her aside he felt a small satisfaction that the words had come as a surprise and caught her at a disadvantage.
Drinkwater had been imprisoned before. In the hectic days before the great battle off Cape Trafalgar, on his way in a small coasting vessel to command one of Nelson's battle-ships, he had been captured and thrown into a filthy gaol in the Spanish town of Tarifa. From there he had been taken to Cadiz, transferred to the custody of the French and interrogated by Admiral Villeneuve, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleets of France and Spain.* (*See 1805) During this period there had been a suffocating sense of frustration at the ill-luck of falling captive, and angry railing against fate in which self-recrimination was absent. But he had been within the orbit of great events, events which were gathering a momentum in which his circumstances might be rapidly altered. Now, however, the hopelessness of his situation was absolute. There was no likelihood of sudden advantage, he could expect no support, no intervention, no miraculous rescue. His ship was taken, his mission exposed, his people scattered beyond recall. He was utterly ruined, having so conspicuously failed in his duty. In his heart he knew that providence had deserted him and that there was only one course of action open to an honourable man. For hours after his humiliating interview with the Commandante, Don Alejo and Prince Rakitin, he paced his cell; from time to time his fingers sought the pocketed shape of his pen-knife.
Resolved at last, he tore a page from his journal and began to write. His report to the Admiralty was a model of brevity, recording the essential facts without mentioning the disloyalty of his men, the cause of the leak or the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. Neither did he mention the breaking of their parole by Rubalcava and his men, nor the inhuman treatment he had been subjected to, for fear of Don José's destroying the despatch when it was discovered afterwards. As he wrote the superscription he knew it only necessary to record the end of Patrician and his own career. He sealed the folded paper with a blob of candle-wax, tore out another sheet and, dipping his pen, wrote My Dearest Elizabeth…
Then his nerve failed him and he sat staring into the empty air, fighting back the waves of sick despair that threatened to engulf him. He found he could not conjure the image of his wife's face in his imagination; it seemed their enforced estrangement lay like a great barrier between them. Perhaps, he thought, his death would be the easier to bear. As for his children… he threw aside the thought and drew the pen-knife from his pocket, opening the blade and staring at the dull shine of it. He had no idea how long he sat in this cataleptic state. Daylight faded and the cell was in darkness when he heard the lock grind in a cautious tripping of its levers. He was instantly alert to the possibility of treachery. To take his own life as the only recourse open to him was one thing, to be foully murdered by his captors was another, not to be submitted to without a struggle. He gripped the tiny knife and rose to his feet. Beyond the door he heard a whisper. To his astonishment it was a woman's voice.
'Capitán… please you give your word of honour you will not make to run away… I must speak with you.'
He knew the voice instantly, recalled her spectacular beauty and felt his heart hammer painfully in his breast. Her tone was insistent, foolhardy.
'Si, Señorita. I understand… you have my word.'
How had she obtained the keys? Was she being used and was he about to die in circumstances that had been contrived to compromise not only his professional, but his personal honour? His fist crumpled the unwritten letter to his wife, then the bolts drew and the door swung suddenly inwards. She came inside, a wild perfumed swirl of dark brocade, to lean on the door, swiftly closed behind her.
'Capitán… ?' Her voice was uncertain in the darkness of the cell. He could see the paleness of her skin and the heaving of her breast as he crossed to the table to strike a flint and steel, slipping the pen-knife into his pocket.
'Pardon, Señorita, I was not expecting a guest.'
The sarcasm did him good, driving the gloom from his mind. The tinder caught and he lit the candle stump. The flame rose brilliant and he turned towards her holding it in front of him. She drew in her breath sharply and he realised his appearance was unprepossessing. He rubbed his bearded cheek.
'A razor is not permitted…' The incongruity of the remark almost made him laugh, considering what he was about to attempt with his pen-knife blade, and then he saw the state she was in. The candlelight danced in eyes that were full of tears and the heaving of her breast was not due to the excitement of her strange tryst with an enemy officer or the animal stench of his quarters.
'Señorita, what is it? What is the matter?'
'Capitán ... what is it that you mean by your words to Doña Helena? It is not true… tell me it is not true.'
He frowned, then drew out the chair for her. She shook her head. The candle caught the tears flung from her eyes, the dark shadow of a wave of hair fell across her forehead, too hurriedly put up.
'Señorita…'
'Prince Vladimir arrived today, but Nicolai is not with him. I ask where is Nicolai and Rakitin says nothing.' She spat the Russian's name as though flinging it from her with contempt. 'But I know his ship has come from the north, he must know about Nicolai.'
She was weeping now. He wanted to comfort her but dare not move. He knew now that he had seen Rakitin's ship off the Horn and that in the interval the Russian had been north to the Tsar's settlements on the coast of Alaska.
'What does your father tell you?' he asked gently. She shook her head, trying to speak through her grief.
'Nothing. Don Alejo promises Nicolai will come on the Juno as before,' she threw up her head, but I do not believe Don Alejo,' she said in a voice which conveyed the impression that she did not trust her uncle. 'And then you say that thing to Doña Helena,' there was a pause and then she added in a lower voice, a voice that spoke of confidentiality and trust, 'she would not believe you.'
Drinkwater sighed. The honour was one he could have done without at such a moment. 'Señorita, I do not know that I can tell you the truth, I can only tell you what I have myself been told.' He paused and motioned her again to the chair. This time she moved slowly from the door and sank onto it. There was the faintest breath of air through the cell, reminding Drinkwater that the door was open. For a moment he was a prey to emotions as savage as those which tore at the young woman.
'I was told that Nicolai Rezanov was dead,' he said flatly.
The finality of the word seemed to staunch the flow of tears. Truth was, Drinkwater thought as he held her gaze, always easier to face than uncertainty. 'I may have been misinformed… told wrong. I hope, Señorita, that I have been…'
A ghost of a smile crossed her face and her fingers rested lightly upon his hand. 'Who told you, Capitán?'
'An American. Captain Jackson Grant.'
He saw her pupils contract and her nostrils flare with anger and he sensed her resolution. A sudden hope sprang into his mind. 'I know he is not to be trusted. Did he not come here to see your father and betray me?'
'Perhaps,' she frowned, 'yes… yes, he was here. I heard he knew where your ship was.'
'Then he is not to be trusted,' Drinkwater said hopefully. 'He is a man who seeks for himself… one perhaps who would be in Nicolai Rezanov's place,' he added in a lower voice.
She flashed him a look of imperious suspicion, then her expression softened. 'And you, Capitán?' she asked raising her fingers from his hand, 'where do you wish to be? Are you to be trusted?'
'I can only tell you what I have been told, Señorita. I would not cause you distress. I have nothing. All I know is that you expected Rezanov and he has not come. Rakitin is silent, but Jackson told me he died in Krasnoiarsk… yes, that was the place.'
'He was a good man, Capitán… can you comprehend that?'
'Yes. Grant said that.'
But she seemed not to hear him. '… A good man, perhaps a saint… not like Rakitin.' Again the utterance of the Russian's name disgusted her. It appeared that Rakitin had joined the list of Doña Ana Maria's would-be and unwanted suitors. She let out a long, shuddering sigh. 'And in my heart I know he is dead.'
She crossed herself and Drinkwater put his hand gently upon her shoulder. The warmth of her flesh seemed to sear him. She looked up at him for a long moment so that the temptation to bend and kiss her flared across his brain and then she rose and the moment was gone.
'Gracias, Capitán, you have been… you have your own misfortune. I shall pray for you.'
Drinkwater recalled the papal attitudes to suicide. 'You do me too much honour, Señorita… pray for my wife and children.'
She paused in the act of turning for the door. In the gloom of the cell her dark dress and the black pile of her hair merged into the shadows, so that the single light of the candle threw her face into a spectral detachment which seemed to diminish from his vision as in a dream and he stood, long after her departure, with its lovely image imprinted on his retina, unaware of the grind of the bolts or the tumbling of the lock.
' "Whom the gods wish to destroy",' he quoted softly to himself,'"they first make mad." '
He did not go mad. The appearance, or perhaps the disappearance, of Doña Ana Maria saved him from himself. He no longer paced like a lion confined in the Tower menagerie but stood stock-still, held in that cataleptic state familiar to commanders of ships whose duty requires their presence on deck long after the exhausted body is capable of sustaining it. They stand, as Drinkwater stood now, immobilised, faculties reduced to the barely necessary, like a submerged whale, eyes open yet in a strange detachment, all but lost to exterior circumstances so that they endure cold and sleeplessness unaware of cramps or the passage of time, though instantly ready to respond to sudden emergency.
In this condition the mind behaves oddly, ranging over vast plains of consideration, soaring above mountains of fantasy and pausing beside dark lakes of doubt, dispensing with the formality of language and encompassing thoughts and images beyond the powers of expression. Drinkwater's thoughts came and went, slipped in and out of rationality, leapt deep chasms of pure reason and became part of an infinite consciousness beyond himself. In this enchantment Drinkwater slipped the bonds of honour and reaffirmed his faith in providence. All thoughts of suicide left him and it seemed he felt, as he had once before felt when lost in a small boat in the fog of the Greenland Sea, a haunting intimacy with Elizabeth and his family.
He remained in this state for many hours. Even when the candle stump expired with an upward and pungent twist of smoke, he did no more than acknowledge the onset of total blackness without it moving him. In this trance the night passed and grey dawn filtered in through the barred window of his cell before he came to himself, shuddering with the cold and the pain of movement as he returned to full consciousness. But it was more than dawn that had woken him; his seaman's instincts had been stirred by distant noises in the fading night: the splash of an anchor, a few shouts and later the noise of impatient boots upon the steps that ran up from the boat landing somewhere below his cell-window. They echoed in the corridor beyond his barred door and he heard the guard accosted, and then the sounds faded. He dragged the chair to the window and strained to peer below. The harbour was still, the gentle ruffling of the slight breeze had kept the usual morning fog away, enabling the newcomer to work into the anchorage, close under the Residence. She was a schooner, an aviso, a Spanish despatch-vessel with tall, raked masts and the look of speed about her. From where had she come? Monterey? San Diego? Panama? And what news did she bring that was so urgent that her commander must bring her in so early and wake the Commandante's household? Did it concern him? Was he perhaps to be taken south, or disposed of in some Spanish oubliette? Inexplicably he felt his long-stilled pulse begin to race.
The noises died away and there followed a silence so full of suspense that it set him to a frustrated and angry pacing in which his mind now boiled with possibilities. For an hour he was a prey to such mental toil that the soothing effects of his catalepsy had evaporated by the time the sun had risen and the blood noise rushed through his ears so that he almost missed the sounds of departure, feet running hastily upon the path below. He reoccupied his spy-post and saw the aviso's boat pull out from the jetty and watched it go, not to the schooner but to the Suvorov. Later it returned and he heard the low sinister bass of Rakitin, grumbling at the Commandante's summons and the ungodly hour. Then, a little later still, the hasty retreat of the Russian's boots… and silence.
The turning of the lock and shooting of bolts startled him when it came. He half-expected release, so strung were his nerves, but it was only the grimy, sleep-sodden orderly who brought him bread, thin wine and an empty slop pail as he had done on so many, many previous mornings. The familiarity of the ritual, backed by the drawn sword of an officer outside cast Drinkwater's spirit into depression. But he could not eat and jumped upon the chair yet again when the thin, reedy piping of the bosun's calls preceded the stamp-and-go of a hundred feet in the heart-wrenching procedure of departure. Rakitin had learned much from the Royal Navy. Watching from a distance, Drinkwater might have been looking at a British man-of-war getting under weigh and in his mind he could hear the orders passed as the topmen went aloft and the topsails were cast loose in the buntlines, their clews hauled out. On the high steeved bowsprit of the Suvorov men scrambled, casting loose the robands that secured the jibs. On the fo'c's'le men leaned outboard, fishing with the cat-tackle for the anchor ring as it broke surface under the round, black bow of the Russian seventy-four. And then he suddenly realised with a pang that sent an actual stab of pain through his guts, his own Patrician was also getting under weigh. There were fewer men and it was clumsily done, but within the hour she was slipping out of his view, following in the wake of the Suvorov. The last he saw of her as she swung to round Point Lobos was her white St George's ensign: only it was no longer subordinate to the red and gold of Spain. Now above it flaunted the diagonal cross of Russia.
Lieutenant James Quilhampton had intended making the entrance to San Francisco Bay in the last hours of the night. The appearance of a light northerly breeze augured well and they had begun from their refuge in good time to be within the harbour by dawn, intending to hole-up on one of the islands and reconnoitre the shipping during the coming day. But they were turned back by the arrival of a fast schooner, whose commander beat up under the headland of Bonita Point before wearing for the anchorage below the battery near Point Lobos. This obstacle had cost them time, but caution dictated a retreat, and the Patrician's boat was put reluctantly about for the sanctuary of the hidden bay.
Quilhampton fumed at the delay. He had made his preparations with great care. Although his resources were limited he knew that much depended on success. Everything, in fact, not least his very life and his future. He wished he had not sent that final letter to Catriona. To have someone, however distant, to whose image a man might cling in such desperate moments in his life, seemed to him a most desirable thing. But it would not have been fair to Catriona and, God alone knew, she had been ill-treated by neglect for too long already.
'I am stripped to the most indigent circumstances,' he muttered to himself as he cooled his heels on the little curve of sand within the cove, 'stripped to the very last resort of the naked…'
The phrase pleased him; oddly it comforted him to come face-to-face with absolute desperation. He held his life cheap now, and that meant he could undertake any enterprise. Smiling grimly to himself he looked up, swinging his eyes to rake the small arc of the horizon visible between the two rocky headlands that concealed their hideaway. What he saw destroyed his resolution. Two ships stood out to sea, heading north, their crews making sail as they lay over on the starboard tack. The leading vessel was the big, black Russian two-decker. The other, he was certain, was the Patrician.
Quilhampton frowned. What the devil did it mean? Should he go on into San Francisco or follow the two ships? He swore venomously. If Drinkwater and his people were aboard the Patrician, it was out of the question for Quilhampton with a handful of men in an open boat to give chase. He was utterly without resources, the mood of his men was not encouraging, in short the mere consideration of such an enterprise was as foolhardy as it was impractical. But was the alternative any better? The plentiful game and easy living of the last few days had prompted muttering from the men. If they had the opportunity of spirits and access to women his control over them would be broken utterly, and any approach to San Francisco, however made, risked that.
And what could he do if he got there? With Captain Drinkwater and some of Patrician's men they might have attempted something, but with the ship and, presumably, Drinkwater himself, carried off under Russian escort, what was the point of running his head into a noose? Sighing, he looked up. Beyond the headlands of the cove the sea-horizon was empty. A sudden, panicky fluttering formed in the pit of his gut and he felt a desperate surge of self-pity. For a moment the horizon misted and then he forced a wave of anger to over-lay the hideous sensation. Reluctantly he turned away from the sea and made his way up the tiny valley behind the cove. There really was no alternative open to him. He would have to give himself up to the Spanish authorities; that way he might survive the mutinous knives of his men.
Some time after the departure of Patrician Drinkwater fell into a profound sleep, his exhausted body seeking its revenge upon his shattered spirit. He woke ten hours later, cramped and racked with pain in the mangled muscles of his mauled shoulder, but oddly alert and with his mind calmer than it had been for many days. There was no reason for this feeling beyond a half-remembered fragment of chill philosophy. He could not recall its source; Epictetus, perhaps, or Marcus Aurelius, the only classical reading he had ever found aboard a man-of-war, but the text soothed him. Nothing, the ancient averred, happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear.
The pegs upon which men hang their reason are oddly illogical, but Drinkwater put behind him all thoughts of suicide from that moment and sat quietly in the gathering darkness of the approaching night. In such a mood a man might escape, or be shot.
He heard the footfalls on the stone flags of the corridor. There were several of them and they approached purposefully. There was nothing furtive about the way the lock was sprung or the bolts withdrawn. By the time the door was flung open and de Soto entered the cell with a lantern, Drinkwater's heart was pounding. De Soto jerked his head imperiously and Drinkwater rose.
'Adelante!' De Soto stood aside and indicated Drinkwater should step outside. Apprehensively he did as he was bidden, the cool, night-fresh air wafting along the corridor sweet in his nostrils. The officer was accompanied by two soldiers bearing muskets with bayonets fixed. They began to walk, Drinkwater with them, to where the corridor turned and joined the entrance gate through which the men from the boats had passed.
But he was not taken to be shot. They crossed the courtyard and entered the Commandante's quarters where once (it seemed so long ago) he had dined in honour and now was brought in ignominy.
He had hoped for an interview with Don José, but it was before Don Alejo that he found himself. From various shreds of evidence, from their first encounter on the Santa Monica, to the innuendoes of Don Alejo's niece, Drinkwater had conceived a dislike of the Spaniard. He was as slippery as an eel, interested solely in his own intrigues, whatever they were. If Drinkwater had been hoping for some relaxation in his regimen he was to be disappointed. Don Alejo's remarks were obscure and not reassuring.
'Ah, Capitán Drinkwater, I see you are in good health, buenas…' Don Alejo smiled like a cat, ignoring the stink of his prisoner, the unshaven face, the filthy neck linen. 'We have been waiting for instructions from Panama…'
'What the hell have you done with my ship?'
'Capitán, please. She is not your ship. She fell a prize to the valour of Spain.'
'Where the hell has she gone?'
'Under escort… to a place of safety,' Don Alejo's eyes narrowed. 'How do you know about your ship?'
Drinkwater evaded the question. He did not want his tiny window stopped up. 'I am not a fool. You have also received news, Don Alejo, this I know, that an aviso arrived this morning…'
'Ah, but no news about you, Capitán. I regret…'
'Don Alejo, I demand that, at the very least, you accommodate me in quarters befitting my rank, that you oblige me by placing me under parole, that you allow me to shave, to see my officers and men…'
'Capitán, you are not in your quarterdeck, please.' The Spaniard's voice was harsh, cruel. 'It is not possible…'
'If I ever have the opportunity to lay even with you, Don Alejo…'
The Spaniard had been sitting on the corner of a heavy oak table, one booted leg swinging, his manner disinterested. Now he came to his feet, face to face with his prisoner.
'Do not threaten me, Capitán. You have nothing to make me fear. You have no men, no guns, nothing.' He jerked his head at the guards and snarled something incomprehensible. Drinkwater was marched out, still wondering why he had been summoned.
They were crossing the courtyard when they met Doña Ana Maria and her duenna. Seeing him, she smiled sadly. 'A happy day, Capitán, for you…'
He frowned. Was she mocking him? 'For me, Señorita? How so?'
De Soto's forbearance snapped and he disregarded the speaker's rank and connections, shouting the girl to silence and propelling Drinkwater suddenly forward with a blow on his shoulder that sent a wave of agony through him. He stumbled and all but fell, the pain blotting out all sensibility until he found himself once more in his cell and heard the heavy, final thud of bolts driving home. It was only then that he tried to make some sense out of the interview and its inexplicable sequel.
'Easy, lads, easy…'
The boat ghosted along, only a whisper of water under her bow accompanied by the drip of water from the motionless oar-blades. The dark hull of an anchored ship loomed over them; it was one of the anchored merchantmen and the noise of a squeeze-box and some languidly drunken singing came to them. Lights shone from her stern cabin and a gale of laughter told where her master entertained. The germ of an idea formed in Lieutenant Quilhampton's brain, but this vessel was too big by far, perhaps they would find something smaller, more suitable further into the anchorage. He did not have to surrender; at least not yet.
The need for caution receded now they were in the anchorage. There were other boats about, ferrying liberty-men to and from their ships. It was a contrast to the naval anchorages he was familiar with, where the fear of desertion made every ship row a guard and the passage of boats at night was strictly controlled. He began to relax, to cast about for a likely target, a small ship, like a schooner, easily manageable by a handful of desperate men. If he could strike quickly, divert his men's minds away from the thought of stews and whores he might, he just might…
'Sir…' the man at bow oar hissed in the darkness.
'What?'
'Listen, sir…'
He heard the voice immediately. 'Hold water!' he commanded, and when the boat lay stopped he cocked his ear again, getting his bearings.
The querulous voice was indisputably Yankee.
'Well, Friend, he was here but a minute ago… perhaps he pisseth against a wall…'
'Jesus, I thought you mother-fuckers were supposed to be seamen! I ain't a whit surprised the British are losing ships if they're driven to manning 'em with canting Quakers… you tell him to lay aft when he's finished for Chrissakes…'
'Thou takest too much in vain the Lord's name, Friend…'
A snigger of recognition came from the oarsmen, half amused, half admired at the Quaker's undaunted attitude. If Derrick was aboard the ship under whose stern they had stopped, who else might there be? Or had Derrick deserted alone, prompted by those ridiculous pacifistic views of his? The questions tumbled through Quilhampton's mind and he leaned forward.
'Give way, easy, lads, and keep deathly quiet,' he whispered, and the oars dipped into the water again. In the stern, Quilhampton pulled the tiller hard against his chest and swung the boat's bow towards the Abigail Starbuck.
'Oars…'
The men ceased rowing and the boat glided on. A tinkling sound could be heard and, peering ahead, Quilhampton caught the faint silver arc of urine falling from the height of a ship's forechains. As the boat slid under the bulk of the ship's hull he saw, against the slightly lighter darkness of the sky, the shape of a man buttoning the flap of his trousers. As the boat got closer and the man turned inboard his face was suddenly illuminated. Caught with one foot on the rail as he swung round he paused.
'I heard him,' said a deep-burred and familiar voice, 'a right bloody bucko bastard of a Yankee Dandy…'
Quilhampton drew a breath. If the man holding the lantern was not Derrick, or there were others within earshot they might be ruined, but the moment was not to be lost and the occupants of the boat were all registering recognition and surprise so that their own silence could not be relied upon.
'Tregembo!' Quilhampton hissed.
Looking up, Quilhampton saw the man turn and peer down, saw a second head and a lantern.
'Put the fucking light out!' said one of the oarsmen.
'Tregembo, it's me, Mr Quilhampton…'
'By Gar… quick, Derrick, ower we go, afore that Yankee sees us…'
'Wait! Are there more of you?'
'Aye, but don't wait, zur…'
Tregembo was already clambering over the side, though Derrick appeared to hesitate. The Cornishman, his legs dangling from the chains, seeking a foot-hold in the boat, looked up.
'Come on, damn 'ee, you can pull an oar if you can't fight!'
Someone stood and reached up. Tregembo fell heavily among grunts from his shipmates and the boat rocked dangerously and then Derrick was following and, a minute later, the long-boat was pulling cautiously off into the darkness.
When sufficient distance had been put between them and the Abigail Starbuck Quilhampton ordered them to cease rowing.
'Lay aft, Tregembo, and report.'
'Willingly, zur.' Tregembo struggled down the boat as the men pulled aside for him until his scarred, grizzled and dependable features peered into Quilhampton's face.
'Thank God you came, zur… I'd been meditating on swimming ashore once I knowed where they'd got the Cap'n…'
'Where is he, Tregembo, d' you know?'
'Aye, zur, Mister Derrick, 'e found out. That was the Yankee hell-ship Abigail Sommat-or-other and if her mate hadn't had a whore in his bunk we'd not have had the liberty for a piss to remind us we were free men…'
'The captain, Tregembo…'
'He's a prisoner in the Governor's Residence,' put in Derrick. 'I overheard the mate and Captain Grant discussing the matter when the Patrician left harbour this morning.'
'I saw that,' Quilhampton cut the Quaker short. 'Do you know the way to this Residence?'
'It's above the boat jetty, zur, where we was anchored before.'
'Very well… stand-by… give way together…'
As the boat once more gathered way, James Quilhampton turned her in for the shore, conjuring up from his memory the lie of the land above the landing-jetty.
Drinkwater shut the log and doused the candle as he heard the key turn cautiously in the lock. It seemed an age before the bolts were drawn back, by which time her appearance did not surprise him.
'Capitán … ?'
'Here, Señorita…'
'You do not know the news? They did not tell you? Not even my father?'
'I have not seen your father, Señorita…'
'Ahhh…' she seemed relieved.
'But what news is this… ?'
'Ana Maria?' The voice of Doña Helena rasped anxiously through the night and the hurried tap of her questing feet approached.
'Please, Capitdn, you go now… for our honour, you must go, it is not right…'
'But I do not understand… you will be in trouble… there is no need…'
'Please, Capitán,' she beseeched him and he heard the prattle of the duenna's voice suddenly louder, rattling something to someone else in quick, urgent Spanish. He heard the lugubrious tone of the Franciscan father and then their shadows leapt large along the wall of the corridor.
'Vamos!… go quick…' She stood aside and the priest loomed in the doorway as Doña Helena screeched something. For the briefest fraction of a second indecision held the four of them in a trance and then Drinkwater acted. The priest held up an imperious hand, but Drinkwater brushed him aside and made for the end of the corridor. The guard was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps too long acquaintance with the English captain had made them careless, perhaps Doña Ana Maria had bribed them, he neither knew nor troubled to think of it, only an iron gate separated him from the terraced garden of oleanders and orange trees through which the path to the boat-jetty led downwards.
It was unlocked. Flinging it open he began to run, his muscles cracking under the unaccustomed strain of rapid descent.
Quilhampton remembered the battery that lay between the boat-jetty and the Residence above. It was not on the direct path, but lay off to the right, occupying a natural bastion, an outcrop of rock behind which earth-falls had filled in a roughly level area which the hand of man had improved with stone flags so that it supported heavy cannon mounted behind embrasures of stone.
He knew it would be guarded and his approach to the jetty was conducted with caution. He was astonished, therefore, when the noises of pursuit, of shouting and brief glimpses of lights came from above and, as the bowman jumped ashore with the boat-painter, he considered immediate withdrawal. But the knowledge that Drinkwater himself was up there somewhere made him stay his hand. He had quizzed both Derrick and Tregembo concerning the disappearance of the ship. They both agreed she had been carried off under Russian colours in full view of all the merchantmen anchored in the harbour; but he was unable to shake them from their conviction that Drinkwater had remained in San Francisco, a prisoner of the Spanish authorities. It occurred to Quilhampton that both men had a personal interest in the fate of the captain, and both were comparatively indifferent to that of the ship herself. If their information was correct and he had judged their motives correctly, then perhaps fortune might be persuaded to turn in their favour.
The noises coming from above certainly indicated that she was not running in the favour of their enemies. A shot rang out, perhaps from the battery, and the string of lights and the noise of pursuit came lower down the hillside. Whoever was running was important enough to warrant a full-scale attempt at recapture.
'Sergeant Blixoe, your best shot to try and hit the leading lantern as soon as he can.'
'Very good, sir.'
There was a stir of excitement in the boat and Quilhampton said, 'Sing, lads, sing loud and clear… sing Spanish Ladies… sing, damn you!'
It was a faltering start and they had no clue as to Quilhampton's crazy idea but something infectiously insane about his own cracked and tuneless voice made them join him.
'Farewell and adieu to you Spanish ladies,
Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain…'
They could afford to sing in English and indicate their presence to whoever was crashing through the bushes above them with musket balls singing into the night after him. There were enough Americans in port to justify a drunken outburst and no one on a clandestine mission would betray their presence with such impunity. What would happen if they had to suddenly conceal themselves again did not occur to Quilhampton. He had staked all on a single throw, arguing that only one man could be important enough to chase with such energy. It simply never occurred to him otherwise.
Beside him the kneeling marine fired. The snap and flash of the musket punctuated the old sea-song causing a missed beat, but they picked it up again.
'… orders to sail for Old England
and we hope in a short-time to see you again.'
Drinkwater heard the singing, taking comfort from the sound of drunken seamen that indicated the probable presence of a boat below. If there had been no boat he would have made for the town where the merchantmen's boats lay, but the sound of so ancient a sea-song beckoned him, and he tripped and stumbled as the first bullet whined past him. It is difficult to hit a target downhill, easier to fire upwards, but the shot that he saw from below made him check his flight. For a moment he was confused, then he heard an anguished roar from above and his heart leapt with hope. It was impossible, but surely whoever fired that lone shot had been aiming at his pursuers. He did not consider the matter an instant longer, but plunged headlong downwards.
Quilhampton saw the figure the second it broke cover from the undergrowth and challenged them.
'Who the hell are you?'
The voice was recognisable, the raw rasp of it familiar to men whom it had commanded for five years and more.
'Friends, Captain, hurry…!'
'Mr Q?'
'The same, sir.'
'Well met, by heaven, into the boat, quick… why this is Patrician's cutter!'
They tumbled into the boat, Blixoe firing another shot at the Spaniards who were but a few yards behind Drinkwater. The oarsmen needed no special bidding to effort. They had swung the boat round and bent to their task with back-breaking energy that made the oar-looms bend and crack under the strain.
'There's a long-waisted Spanish aviso-schooner hard-by, Mr Q,' Drinkwater pointed into the night where two raked masts were just perceptible against the sky, 'and I judge most of her people to be ashore.'
'Aye, aye, sir… knives and foot-stretchers, lads, we're almost up to her… are you reloaded, Mr Blixoe?'
'We've two cartridges that ain't spoiled, sir…'
'Cold steel then…' Quilhampton turned to Drinkwater. 'I've no sword, sir…'
'Nor me, James…'
And then they bumped alongside the low hull of the schooner and were scrambling up her side, finding toe-holds on her gunsills and swinging their legs over the rail.
The anchor watch had been alerted by the shots ashore, no more than two hundred yards away. But they had made the error of going and reporting the matter. The aviso had been left in the hands of a young midshipman, newly out from Spain, and her crew were largely mestizos, unused to real action on a great ocean that their employers were apt to consider their own exclusive preserve. Only the midshipman put up a fight, to be skewered by Blixoe's bayonet for his gallantry. Within minutes the schooner had changed hands.
There were no boats at the jetty beyond a small dinghy with insufficient capacity for immediate pursuit. But the precise circumstances of Captain Drinkwater's disappearance were somewhat confusing to the pursuers, mixed as they were with treachery within the Residence. Neither did the Spanish immediately appreciate the danger their aviso lay in, so that Drinkwater and his companions were able to slip the cable of the schooner and make sail unmolested.
They felt the bow rise to the onshore swell from the mighty Pacific as soon as they rounded Point Lobos. The aviso heeled over as they belayed the halliards and Drinkwater came aft to Quilhampton at the helm.
'How does she steer, James?'
'Like a witch!' answered Quilhampton, his eyes dancing in the light from the binnacle.
'Like a witch, eh?' repeated Drinkwater in a lower voice, recalling another face lit from below by a poor glim. How would she fare now, he wondered? And what was the fateful news that had caused her to liberate him?
It was then that it occurred to him that had they not killed the midshipman they might have discovered it. 'Too late now,' he muttered sadly.
'Yes,' Quilhampton's voice agreed enthusiastically, 'they're much too late now to catch us.'
Drinkwater opened his mouth to explain, thought better of it and grunted agreement. 'D'you think we can find anything to eat aboard this hooker, Mr Q?'
If the vicissitudes of the sea-service had thrown Nathaniel Drinkwater ignominiously out of one of the most powerful frigates in the Royal Navy, then the inexplicable actions of a beautiful woman had restored him to a position of some influence. He had hardly dared hope for such a sudden and apparently fortuitous reversal in his situation as had been precipitated by Doña Ana Maria's actions and consolidated by the appearance of James Quilhampton and his forlorn hope.
The sudden, easy taking of the schooner still struck him as an equally lucky link in the chain of events which had led him to liberty; he had yet to learn that there was more of cause and effect, and less of coincidence in these events than he then supposed. But, for the moment, little could dull the relief and joy that filled him as he watched the dawn over the distant coast and shivered in the fresh westerly breeze that blew onshore and under the influence of which the narrow gutted schooner laid her seething course northwards.
Drinkwater had to acknowledge that she was a smart, fast and rakish craft. Her long, low hull mounted twelve 6-pounder carriage guns, mere pop-guns that could serve to over-awe native craft or a merchantman, but amidships, where traditionally she might have carried her boats, she mounted a heavy carronade, the Spanish equivalent of a 32-pounder, he judged, curiously rigged on a rotating slide somewhat in the manner of the mortars in the old bomb-vessel Virago, so that the gun might be brought to bear on a target on either side if due care were taken of the intervening rigging. This powerful weapon gave Drinkwater fresh cause for hope, for with it he might yet achieve something worthwhile and there was only one task that demanded his relentless attention until it was accomplished, the recapture of the Patrician.
He looked aloft. The two raked masts carried huge gaff-rigged sails, the after one was capable of bearing a maintopsail which he could set at full daylight when the watch changed. For the time being he was content to act as officer of the watch as well as commander of his pathetically small crew. Still, they seemed happy enough, basking in their change of fortune and making free with the personal effects they had discovered on board. Properly, Drinkwater should have secured these, but he was not kindly disposed towards the Spanish of San Francisco after the breaking of their parole, the shameful way he had been held captive and the mature suspicion that Don Alejo and Rubalcava, at least, were involved in some action which, to them, justified their dishonourable treatment of their prisoners. Besides, the poor devils who had arrived with Quilhampton had only the rags they stood up in, and Drinkwater was far too considerate of his men's welfare to let the conventions of protecting private property stand in the way of their well-being.
'Forward there!'
A man named Lacey stood up from where he had been huddling under the weather rail dodging spray. 'Sir?'
'Ease the foresheets a little…'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
Drinkwater eased the helm and the schooner's head fell off the wind a point or two, her long bowsprit pointing at a shallower angle to the line of the coast.
'Ease the mainsheet,' he said to the seaman who stood at the helm beside him.
He felt the pressure on the rudder ease as the sheaves squealed slightly with the strain on the heavy mainsheet.
'She'm a flyer, sir,' said the man conversationally, resuming his post at Drinkwater's side and Drinkwater agreed, reflecting upon the alteration in their circumstances. Aboard the Patrician the man would not have dared address his commander in such familiar tones; here, doing duty beside him, it was the most natural thing in the world.
'She certainly is, Potter, and off the wind, on a reach, she'll fly faster than the wind.'
Potter digested this intelligence with a frown, but Drinkwater did not expand upon this curiosity of natural law. Instead he sowed the seeds of his intentions.
'Now we're well out of sight of the Dons, we'll close the coast again. That'll be Point Reyes, where we were cruising when we discovered that leak,' he pointed at the blue line of the Californian shore.
'Ahhh…' Potter nodded, pleased to be taken into the captain's confidence.
'Now what I think we should do, Potter, is chase north and find out what those damned Russians have done with our ship and shipmates.' Drinkwater paused and looked sideways at the man, an able-seaman and once rated captain of the foretop. 'What d'you think of that, eh?'
'Few more men'd be handy, sir, begging your pardon for saying so.'
'Yes, they would, but we've got a fair wind, a fast ship and at least one heavy cannon to play with… and we've got something else, Potter… surprise!'
They fell silent again and then Potter said, 'Sir… that leak, sir… it were done a'purpose.'
Drinkwater did not take his eyes off the horizon, though he knew Potter was eyeing him sidelong. 'I know,' he said shortly, then turned and smiled disarmingly at the seaman, 'and I'd hang the scum that did it if I had proof, Potter; but that's of no avail now. Do you cut along and call out the watch below. It's time you and I got some rest.' He took the helm and watched Potter scuttle forward.
James Quilhampton came on deck a few minutes later. He was smiling broadly, for it was a beautiful morning with clear visibility and a fresh breeze that made the blue seas turn white as they broke and from which a school of dolphins leapt and gambolled and ran in and out under the cutwater of the racing schooner.
'Morning, sir.'
'Morning, James. We'll set proper watches now. You and Tregembo, Marsden, Blixoe and one marine, together with the four seamen I've just called to form the larboard watch. I'll head the starboard with the rest… seventeen of us in all. I'm going to locate the Patrician if I can, James, and retake her…'
'We could do with a few more men for that, sir,' remarked Quilhampton.
Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes, Potter's just told me that, but what we lack in men we might make up for with stealth and surprise.'
'Not to mention that confounded great "smasher" amidships…'
Drinkwater grinned. 'We are of one mind, James… here you are, head in for the coast. Keep a sharp lookout for sails or masts. I've no idea what those damned Russians intend to do with the ship, but I don't want to miss her for want of a pair of eyes.'
'Very well, sir.'
'I'm going below to get some sleep.'
They coasted northwards for over a week without the sight of a single sail. The year was well advanced and Drinkwater supposed that merchant ships were either finishing their lading in Alaskan waters and not yet ready to sail southwards, or that Russian ships loading provisions for the hardships of the northern winter had not yet departed from the Spanish settlements of California. Then, as they stood out to sea to round what the English navigators called Cape Disappointment but which on Drinkwater's Spanish chart bore no name at all, they saw the masts of some ships hidden behind a low spit of land to the southward of the Cape.
'The mouth of the Columbia River, James… hoist Spanish colours and stand inshore. We'll take a closer look.'
It took them four hours to work their way up into the estuary of the river against a considerable current which, fuelled by the melting snows of distant mountains to the eastward, streamed out into the ocean with an impressive velocity. But the schooner stood inshore and the low point to the southward opened slowly to starboard, to reveal a shallow lagoon and a secondary headland from which the first grew in a long sandy spit. This headland was covered with woods in which a clearing had been made and the stockade of a primitive fort erected. Above the fort flew the colours of Tsar Alexander I, though neither of the two vessels at anchor were larger than brigs.
'A Russian settlement, by Heaven,' muttered Drinkwater, staring through his looted glass at the group of curious men drawn up by a pair of boats on the beach.
'Fetch us an anchor, James, close alongside the outer of those two brigs.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
Drinkwater watched Quilhampton go forward, his wooden arm hanging incongruously below the Spanish uniform coat that was far too short for his long, lean frame. He grinned at the young man, and caught the mood of high excitement that infected his men. There were only a handful of them, but they had had time to settle well and, with the single exception of Derrick, were spoiling for a fight.
'Brail all ...'
Quilhampton passed the agreed order quietly. The jibs fell, fluttering along the bowsprit with a rasp of their hanks on the stays, and a man clambered leisurely out along the spar to restrain them with a roband or two, while the main and foresails were brailed to the masts, their gaffs, standing spars. Against the current the schooner lost way and was brought to an anchor and a short scope of cable. Then they hauled the cutter alongside from its position towing astern. With some show it was manned and a Spanish boat ensign found and its staff stuck in the verdigrised brass ferrule in the cutter's rudder-stock. Wearing an oddly cockaded Spanish bicorne Drinkwater took his place in the stern, a large light-cavalry sabre, that he had found hanging on the schooner's cabin bulk-head, held between his knees. A brace of primed, cocked and loaded pistols lay on the stern sheets beside him, while the oarsmen each had a cutlass from the schooner's capacious arms-chest concealed beneath their thwarts.
They cleared the stern of the schooner and Drinkwater looked up. 'God bless my soul!'
In a beautifully carved scroll worked beneath the cabin windows he read her name for the first time: Virgen de la Bonanza. Several men caught the direction of his eye, grinning at the first word which was comprehensible to them. What the rest meant none of them knew. Drinkwater's face stiffened. They were supposed to be masquerading as Spaniards!
The group on the beach had grown by the time they reached it.
About a score of villainously bearded and greasily apparelled men stood idly watching them. He took them all to be Russians, except perhaps one, a late arrival wearing the buckskins and moccasins of a mountain-man, the likes of which he had once seen, long ago in the Loyalist militia in New York. He was clearly something of a wonder to the others, for they looked at him curiously, drawing aside for him as he joined them. Drinkwater was close enough to observe these details, for the next instant the boat grazed the sand and he rose to his feet.
Drinkwater never had any Thespian pretensions, but his lack of familiarity with the Spanish tongue had driven him to an almost risible extreme in an attempt to head off the slightest suspicion that he was anything other than Spanish. 'Needs must when the devil drives,' he said to Quilhampton when explaining his intentions and the men's laughter had been muted by the order that one of them was going to have to carry him, piggyback, ashore. But it was at Derrick's suggestion that he bore the handkerchief, a large, ostentatious square of flowered silk that they guessed was a gift for the Virgen's captain's paramour in Panama. The prominent manipulation of the kerchief alone ensured his disembarkation appeared alien enough and, ironically, he was glad of it himself, when he caught the stench of the Russians.
Potter put him down with a relieved grunt and Drinkwater, the heavy sabre knocking his hip, strode amongst the group of grim watchers and swept his hat from his head.
'Buenos días, Señors.' He bowed, placed his hand on his breast and plunged on. 'El Capitán Rubalcava, del barco La Virgen de la Bonanza.' The name of his assumed identity and that of his ship sounded marvellously authentic and the latter allowed a spate of eloquence that, he guessed, disarmed any suspicions amid the dull-eyed Russians. Of the effect upon the frontiersman he was less sure. He tried to recall the first-person singular and managed only a squeal. 'Eee, er, dos San Francisco…' He allowed himself to peter-out and stare round at the men. Their eyes were blank with incomprehension.
'No comprendez?' They stared back. He turned to the mountain-man. He had blue eyes like the others, but there was a narrowing of them, a shred of suspicion in their cold appraisal. Drinkwater leaned forward with exaggerated Latin effusiveness.
'Senor?' he asked, directly.
'No comprendez…' the man said slowly. A spark of understanding formed in Drinkwater's mind and he said quickly before the other revealed a perfect knowledge of Spanish, 'Ahh, Señor, muy amigo, you spik English, sí?'
The man nodded.
Drinkwater straightened, took a step towards him and waved his handkerchief airily, approaching the mountain-man, appearing to dismiss the assembled Russians whose dull, peasant wits watched this show as though it was a visitation by a dancing bear and they would presently be requested to reach for kopecks, at which point they would scatter.
'Eet is good, hey?' Drinkwater plunged on, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward again in a mannerism he had copied subconsciously from Don Alejo. 'I come to find Eenglish ship… Eenglishmen… comprendez?' He bastardised the English words by elongation, relapsing into the odd Spanish word for punctuation with a speed he hoped continued to deceive.
The mountain-man regarded him for some time, a ruminative air about him, as though he spoke little, and when he did the words had to be dragged from him.
'Yeah. Comprendez. I ain't see'd no ship, but…'
Drinkwater drew back in disappointment. With no news of Patrician there was little point in risking his neck further; but something about the mountain-man held his attention. He played the charade a step further, aware that beyond the group and walking down from the direction of the stockade a uniformed officer and an escort of armed men were approaching.
'Eenglishmen, Señor… you see, que?'
'Yeah… I see…'
'Twenty-two…' The man became aware of the approach of the officer and he jerked his head. 'Ask him.'
The Russians were falling back; some of them removed their fur hats in the presence of the officer. Drinkwater turned to the newcomer. He wore a uniform of brown cloth with red facings, dark breeches tucked into high boots. His tie-wig was ill-kempt and old-fashioned and the hat he bore in his hands had seen better days.
Drinkwater drew himself up and essayed a low bow, flourishing his handkerchief and never taking his eyes off the face of the Russian officer. It was a cruel face, pock-marked and thin with long deprivation, yet with an imperious pair of eyes deep set on either side of a beak of a nose. The voice, when he spoke, was thin and reedy. The officer was clearly at the opposite end of the social class at whose other extremity Captain Prince Vladimir Rakitin occupied a place.
Taking a deep breath and noticing that his boat's crew had turned the boat round and were standing knee-deep in the water holding it ready for escape, Drinkwater began again.
'Buenas días, Señor, Ee, er La Capitán…'
A look of understanding passed between the two of them and the unpleasant Russian officer fixed his eyes upon Drinkwater. His glance was truly intimidating and, masquerading as he was, Drinkwater felt unequal to the task of staring him down. Instead he bowed again.
'Niet! No English. Here, Russia. You go!'
The officer turned on his heel, leaving Drinkwater half-recovered from his bow.
'Now you go, amigo,' said the mountain-man, his drawl lingering mockingly upon the Spanish word so that a worm of alarm writhed in Drinkwater's gut. 'Vamosl'
Drinkwater turned and walked towards the boat. Potter bent his back and Drinkwater waved him aside, splashing through the shallows.
'Vaya con Dios, Capitdn Rubalcava,' called the mountain-man and then added something which made the Russians around him laugh.
'They were lying, of that I'm certain,' Drinkwater said, accepting the glass of wine that Derrick handed him.
'About the ship, sir?' asked Quilhampton.
'No, about men, Englishmen,'
'Our men, sir?' Quilhampton frowned. I don't quite follow…'
'There's the rub, James, neither do I.' He felt the wine uncoil its warmth in his belly, relaxing him. 'But I mean to find out. That Yankee knew something, for he mentioned twenty-odd men and I've already been played false by one American. We'll reconnoitre that fort tonight. Any movement from it?'
'Nothing new. That cove is still spying on us from the platform over the gate.'
'And the brigs?'
'Nothing. They don't appear to be working cargo, though they've tackles rigged.'
'Perhaps we interrupted them.'
'It's possible. What would they be loading?'
'Furs perhaps, jerked meat, other staples, Indian corn, say purchased with iron trinkets. It's a safe enough haven for refitting ships too. They need labour for that, skilled labour…'
Comprehension kindled in Quilhampton's eyes. 'You mean English seamen, sir?'
'Yes.'
'You mean men from the Patrician, sir?'
'Yes.'
'But we're miles away from Drake's Bay, sir…'
'We got here, James, and those brigs looked handy enough craft.'
'Good God!' Quilhampton paused.
'It looks as though the Russians not only took our ship but might be holding our men. Let's get under weigh now and beat a retreat with our tails between our legs. We can return in the cutter after dark.'
It began to rain as they left the schooner. Their last glimpse of her pitching in the swell, hove-to in the darkness, was swiftly eclipsed by a hissing curtain of drizzle which seemed to seal them in a hermetic world of sodden misery. It was not cold until those sitting still felt the rain penetrate to their skin and envied the steady labours of the oarsmen. The interminable night passage was accompanied by the steady splash of oars and the occasional staccato chatter of teeth.
But the rain killed the wind and flattened the sea to a greasy swell that, at last, thundered on the low sand-spit ahead of them and signalled their proximity to the estuary. Drinkwater swung the tiller and skirted the breakers, edging round the northern extremity of the spit until they knew by the feel of the boat that they were in the mouth of the river and could feel the bite of the seaward current.
'Oars.'
The men ceased rowing and bent over their looms. Drinkwater ordered a tot passed to each man. It was aguardiente, Spanish firewater, but none the worse for that. They would need all the courage it put into their bellies, for their powder was soaked and whatever they might achieve would be by cold steel.
'Stand-by… give way together…'
They pressed on until they could see the dull leap of orange flames from behind the Russian stockade. They paused again and Drinkwater gave his final instructions. A few moments later the cutter's stem grounded on the shore of the Columbia River for the second time, only on this occasion there was to be no masquerading. Leaving the boat keepers, Drinkwater led Quilhampton and Blixoe, Tregembo and a handful of seamen inland. The rain still fell and they felt their feet sticking in the ooze which sucked tenaciously on the well-trodden path up from the landing place. After a few yards they reached the tideline where low scrub, grass and trees began.
Drinkwater led them off to the left, keeping between the river and the fort, but working round behind it, guided by the red glow of the fire within the stockade. The seething hiss of the rain on the sea and mud became a low roar as they moved beneath the trees, dripping in huge droplets upon them. Despite the discomfort it covered their approach and they were close enough to make out the dancing of flames through the interstices of the pine-log rampart. Motioning them to stop, Drinkwater edged forward alone to peer through one of these slender gaps.
By now his night-vision was acute. He could see the upper outline of the stockade against the sky and, except by the gate, it appeared to be unpierced by guns, although there was doubtless a walk-way behind it to allow defenders to fire over the top. For some yards clear of the fort, the trees and brushwood had been cleared, but the nature of the night allowed him to slip across this glacis undetected. Pressed against the resinous pine trunks he peered into the fort.
The interior of the post was roughly circular, a number of buildings within it provided quarters and stores. Outside what he supposed to be the main barrack block a large fire was crackling, the flames and sparks leaping skywards despite the efforts of the heavens to extinguish them. He could see a few men lounging under the overhanging roof of this block, and the blackening carcass of a deer being roasted on spits, but from his vantage point he could see little else. The garrison, however, seemed a small one and the governor doubtless lived in one of the log cabins, for Drinkwater could just make out a square of yellow light close to the gate, as though a lamp burned behind a crude window. Cautiously he returned to the others, whispering to Quilhampton: 'Damned if I can see what we're looking for.'
'Oh. What now, sir?'
'We'll edge round the place.'
They began to move forward again, a pall of dejection falling on the miserable little column. They became careless, snapping twigs and letting branches fly back into the faces of the men behind them. They lost touch with the stockade on their right, moving into dense brushwood that tore at them, aggravating their tempers and unsettling them. Drinkwater began to question the wisdom of proceeding further. Then he stopped, so abruptly that Quilhampton bumped into him. Not five yards ahead of them a tall figure had risen from the bracken, hurriedly knotting the cords of his breeches. Drinkwater knew instantly it was the mountain-man.
To what degree the man's preoccupation had prevented his hearing the approach of the party, Drinkwater could only guess. Such a voyageur, at once a hunter, tracker, trapper and forest dweller, must have possessed instincts keen as any stag, but at that moment they had been somnolent, intent on more fundamental physical needs. Their surprise was mutual and as they stared at each other in silence, Drinkwater could just see the gleam of the foreshortened rifle barrel.
'Another step and you're dead, Mister. I thought you bastards might be back…'
So, the mountain-man had not been taken in by the disguise of the morning, and with that realisation Drinkwater sought to temporise, capitalising on that brief confidence of the forenoon.
'I've come for those Englishmen you spoke of.'
The mountain-man gave a short, dry laugh. 'You won't find 'em here.'
'Where then?'
'Why the hell should I tell you?'
'You told the Russians… said they knew about the matter.' The mountain-man seemed to hesitate and Drinkwater added, 'I'm surprised you want the Russians on your doorstep.'
'I sure as hell don't want you British. We got rid of you back a while and I aim to keep it that way…'
'And the Russians?' Drinkwater persisted.
'Ain't no trouble at all…'
'Bring you vodka for furs and whatever Indian women you can sell 'em I daresay,' said Drinkwater.
'What's that to you, Mister? I've been expecting you ever since I found your damned men wanderin' about the back-country behind Bodega Bay.'
'So you knew we weren't Spanish?'
'I've been expecting the British a-lookin' for their deserters, Mister. You didn't even come close to convincin' me. You see I know Rubalcava, Mister.'
'And you're on friendly terms with the Russians too, eh? Do I take it you've sold my deserters to that cold-eyed bastard that commands here?'
'What makes you think I'm hugger-mugger with the damned Russkie, eh? I ain't particularly friendly with anybody, especially the bloody British.'
'But…'
'But… I can't shoot the lot of you so just turn about and walk back to your boat…'
'I doubt you can shoot anyone in this damned rain…'
'You ain't heard of a Chaumette breech, Mister, or a Goddamned Ferguson rifle? I could blow the shit out of you right now and pick off another of you before you got into those trees…'
The click of the gun-lock sounded ominously above the drip and patter of the rain.
'If you don't want the British here, why don't you tell me where those men are?'
'Ain't answering any more questions. You get goin'. Vamos, Capitán…'
Drinkwater turned and the men parted for him. He looked back once. The rain had eased a little and the cloud thinned. The mountain-man stood watching their retreat, his long gun slung across his arm, the noise of laughter muffled by his huge beard. At the same instant the man threw back his head and loosed an Iroquois war-whoop into the night. The alarm stirred noises from the direction of the stockade and the crack of the man's rifle was swiftly followed by a cry and the crash of a man falling behind him, sprawling full length.
'Back to the boat!' Drinkwater hissed, waving them all past him and stopping only Mr Quilhampton as the two of them bent over the felled seaman. It was Lacey and he was past help; the mountain-man had been as good as his word. The ball had made a gaping hole in Lacey's neck, missing the larynx, but severing the carotid artery. The wound was mortal and Lacey was close to death, his blood streaming over Drinkwater's probing hands.
'Come, James, there's nothing to be done…'
There was no sign of the mountain-man but from the fort came the shouts of men answering an alarm. Somewhere to their right they could hear their own party crashing through the undergrowth accompanied by a stream of oaths and curses.
'Go on, James!'
'Not without you, sir.'
'Don't be a bloody fool…'
Between them Lacey rattled out his life and fell limp. Drinkwater wiped his hands on Lacey's gory jacket.
'Poor devil,' he said, wondering if the ball had been intended for himself.
'Come on then.'
They both began to run.
In the rain and confusion they reached the boat unmolested, but the Russians were already pouring out of the fort towards the landing place. By the time Drinkwater reached the cutter with Quilhampton most of his party had mustered, but two were missing, stumbling about near the fort.
'Where's Hughes?' called Quilhampton.
'Fuck knows, he was behind Tregembo…'
'Tregembo?' Drinkwater spun round. 'Is he missing?'
'Seems so, sir…'
'God's bones!' Drinkwater swore. 'Get that boat off into the water, hold off the beach. You take command, James.' He raised his voice, 'Tregembo!' He roared, 'Tregembo!'
He began to run back the way he had come. Somewhere to the right he could see the shapes of men running and then the flash and crack of a musket, soon followed by a fusillade of shot as the approaching Russians fired wildly into the night. There was a harsh order screeched out and it stopped. Drinkwater recognised the voice of the governor and then, clearly above the hiss of the rain, he could hear the awful slither and snick of bayonets being fixed. He caught up the sabre he had looted from the schooner and hefted it for balance.
'Tregembo!'
He spat the rain from his mouth and almost retched on the sudden, overpowering stench of pigs. Somewhere close by was a sty and he heard the ruminant grunts of its occupants change to a squealing. Two men and the dull gleam of steel were approaching and must have disturbed the swine.
'Tregembo!'
How many shots had the mountain-man fired? Was Tregembo lying out there dying like Lacey, while he had run for his life?
The two men were nearer and he swung round to defend himself.
'Tregembo!' he roared in one last desperate attempt to locate his servant. Suddenly a third man was upon him, risen, it appeared, from the very ground itself.
'Clap a stopper on the noise, zur…'
'God damn you, Tregembo…'
Drinkwater slashed wildly at the first assailant and felt his sabre knock aside the bayonet thrust. Whirling the blade he caught the second man as he tried to work round Drinkwater's rear, driving both off for a second. He began to fall back, waving Tregembo behind him,'… Why the devil didn't you answer me?'
'I fell among swine,' Tregembo called as he moved towards the boat behind his commander.
'Then run, man, ran!'
Drinkwater saw an opportunity and slashed again, slicing in above the thrusting bayonet as the Russian infantryman lunged forward. The man's face was a pale blur and Drinkwater saw the dark splotch of blood against his cheek as the point of the sabre caught it, and then he turned and began to run, leaping the tussocks of grass and then slithering through soft sand and mud. He tripped and fell full length in the shallows, hard on Tregembo's heels. The Cornishman turned and helped him to his feet.
'God! What a damned farce!'
They scrambled into the boat amid a confusion of limbs and bodies, dominated by Quilhampton's voice calling above the rain and the tumult, 'Where's the captain? Has anyone seen Captain Drinkwater?'
'Here… I'm here, Mr Q… now get this festerin' boat under way!'
'Thank God! Aye, aye, sir… out oars! Come on there… for Christ's sake! Give way!'
As the boat pulled out into the estuary, a storm of small shot whined over their heads and all they could see were a few shapes splashing about in the shallow water in almost as much confusion as themselves.
'Let's sort this boat out.' Drinkwater's own sense of dignity and his innate hatred of disorder surfaced in the rout. 'Be silent there,' lie ordered for the noise of swearing continued unabated and it suddenly dawned on him that it was no longer his own men who were responsible.
'What the deuce?'
Drinkwater looked round, thinking for an instant he was going out of his mind for the noise came out of the night ahead of them and the oaths were unmistakably English. Then he saw the looming bulk of one of the anchored brigs athwart whose hawse the current was sweeping them.
'It's the English prisoners, sir,' shouted Quilhampton in a moment of comprehension, 'they must have heard us…'
Drinkwater considered the odds. How many Russians were aboard the brig? But the current had committed him.
'Catch a-hold then… come, lads, quickly… up and board her! Come on there, lads, those are your festerin' shipmates aboard there, prisoners of the Russians…'
A groundswell of anger stirred the occupants of the boat and she rocked dangerously as men reached out at the passing hull. Then the cutter jarred against the brig with a crash and they found themselves jammed under her forechains and were swarming up over her ample tumblehome. Driven by their recent defeat and now finding themselves among the familiar surroundings of a ship, they swept the length of her deck within a minute. At her stern, the watch of a dozen men, confused by the noises ashore, suddenly attacked by desperate assailants and mindful that below decks a score of rebellious prisoners only awaited liberty before cutting their gaolers to pieces, soon capitulated. Most jumped over the taffrail to save their lives by swimming ashore, though three were taken prisoner. Drinkwater realised he was in possession of a Russian brig at the same moment that he caught a glimpse of the unsecured cutter drifting away downstream.
'What is it, Mr Derrick?'
There was an odd formality about those left aboard the Virgen de la Bonanza. Mr Marsden, the Patrician's carpenter but the most experienced seaman on board, hurried to answer Derrick's summons. The Quaker's innate dignity, his literacy and his position as the captain's secretary almost gave him the status of a gentleman, while his tenacious hold on his faith had elevated him from a mere curiosity to something of a sage among the hands.
'I believe it to be the cutter, Friend Marsden, and it appears to be empty.'
Marsden took up the offered glass and levelled it. The dawn was heavy with the night's rain, the sea a sluggish undulating plain of uniform grey. No wind above the whisper of a breeze ruffled its surface, as though the sea was suppressed beneath the sheer weight of the sky's bequest. Every rope and spar, every sail and block was sodden with water. Rain had run below through cracks and companion-ways, scuttles and ports and, though it was not actually falling at that moment, more was threatened and the coming of day was only a lightening of the tone of the gloom. Their visible horizon was bounded by mist, a murky perimeter into which the grey, unoccupied shell of the cutter rocked, not above six cables away, borne seawards by the inexorable current of the Columbia River.
Fifteen minutes later the thing lay not thirty yards off and they could clearly see it was empty. There were disorderly signs of hurried evacuation. Several of the oars were missing, one stuck up, its blade jammed in the thole pins. Another was broken, the jagged loom indicating it had struck hard against something.
The remnants of rags hung down from the rowlocks, where, the night before, they had muffled them. Oddly the painter lay neatly coiled in the bow.
'Damned if I understand the meaning o' this,' muttered Marsden.
'I think we are alone, Friend, left to our own resources,' said Derrick, his sonorous tone carrying the dreadful implication to Marsden.
'Streuth! What's to be done? And the cap'n gone, an' all…'
'Could we fetch San Francisco?'
Marsden shrugged. 'God knows… I suppose we could… ain't my trade, nor yours neither… hell and damnation take it!'
'Come, Friend, such language availeth nothing.' Derrick turned away from the rail and looked along the schooner's deck. Their handful of a crew would be hard-pressed to bring the schooner back to San Francisco.
'Oh, my fuckin' oath,' moaned Marsden and Derrick turned. The carpenter was staring to starboard where, out of the mist, the grey shape of a ship was emerging. 'We be sunk good an' proper now, Mister Derrick, that's one o' them Russian brigs we saw yesterday. Reckon they know all about us an' what's happened to the Cap'n.'
'Shall we run then?' Derrick suggested querulously.
'Is that a Russkie?' asked one of the seamen, coming up to the two men while behind him the remainder stood and stared despairingly to leeward. Marsden looked at first Blixoe and then Derrick. He was not given to quick thinking.
'Run? Where to?'
'Anywhere… we're faster than a brig, can sail closer to the wind…'
Marsden looked at the Quaker with something akin to respect. 'I suppose running ain't fighting,' he said, rubbing his chin and considering the matter.
'Of course we'll run' snapped the seaman, shouting for them to start the headsail sheets and cast loose the lashings on the helm.
'Wait!' Derrick was staring through the telescope. 'I'd swear that was Mr Quilhampton on the knightheads…'
'Seems a shame, zur, to burn a prize like that,' Tregembo muttered, watching Quilhampton's firing party at work and the flames take hold of the brig.
'She stank near as bad as you when you emerged out of that swine-midden,' remarked Drinkwater. 'I have never seen so slovenly maintained a ship.'
'You damned near had me finished with all that shouting,' said Tregembo.
'That's as maybe, Tregembo. Would you have had me abandon you? By God, Susan would never have let me forget it…'
They smiled at each other relieved, both aware that they had enjoyed a lucky escape. They withdrew from the stern window of the schooner, Drinkwater to pour himself a glass of the Spanish commander's excellent oloroso, Tregembo to fuss the elegant little cabin into something more befitting a British naval captain. The stink of smoke came in and Drinkwater waited for Quilhampton's party to get aboard. A moment or two later Quilhampton knocked on the door. He entered, grimy but smiling. He held out a rolled chart.
'A glass, James, you've earned it… what d' you have there?'
'The answer to the riddle, sir… yes, thank you.' Quilhampton took the glass from Tregembo, who gave him an old-fashioned, sideways look.
'How did they behave?' asked Drinkwater, unrolling the chart and staring at it.
'The men, sir?'
'Yes.'
'Like lambs, all eagerness to please. Never seen a firing party so eager to destroy a prize, couldn't do enough for me… would have burnt the damn thing twice over if it'd been a fit plea for mitigation…'
Drinkwater looked up from the chart and eyed the lieutenant speculatively. 'You think it should be, James?'
'We've little choice, sir. In any case, they outnumber us and I'm not sure about the men that were with me. It was only circumstances and self-preservation that kept us together… Marsden's all right, Derrick's a canting neutral and I suppose we can rely on old Tregembo…'
'Less of the "old", Mr Quilhampton, zur, if you please,' growled the Cornishman.
Quilhampton grinned and downed his glass, winking at Drinkwater.
'Let's hope they all appreciate which side their bread's buttered on now,' said Drinkwater, finishing his own glass, 'even so, I'll have to read 'em the riot act.'
'I'll muster them, then, sir.'
'Yes, if you please, and try not to look so damned pleased with yourself.'
'I think you'll find something to smile about, sir, if you study that chart.'
'Why?'
'I think it shows us where we may find Patrician.'
Drinkwater looked down at the chart with its unfamiliar script and mixture of incomprehensible Russian characters and French names favoured by more aristocratic hydrographers. 'Anyway,' went on Quilhampton, pausing by the cabin door, 'I'm uncommon pleased to be given a fighting chance again.'
'Yes,' agreed Drinkwater, 'it was quite a turn up for the books, eh?'
'Well, "fortune favours the brave", sir,' Quilhampton remarked sententiously.
'I think,' replied Drinkwater drily, 'that last night, fortune was merely inclined to favour the least incompetent.'
Quilhampton left with a chuckle, but Drinkwater exchanged a glance with Tregembo.
'I'll let 'ee know if I hear anything, zur, have no fear o' that.'
'Very well, Tregembo,' Drinkwater nodded, 'only I've a notion to set eyes on my family again.'
'You ain't the only one, zur.'
Drinkwater poured himself a second glass of the oloroso and, while he waited for the men to be mustered on deck, he studied the chart. The brig's Russian master was an untidy navigator; the erasure of her track was imperfectly carried out. It was quite obvious that Captain Rakitin had a nearer rendezvous than Sitka and, studying the features of the inlet, it was the very place he himself would have chosen to hide a prize. Delighted, he tossed off the glass and composed his features. He was going to have to scold the men, but by all accounts they had quite a tale to tell.
Quilhampton gathered the details, noting them down on a page torn from the schooner's log-book. The men who had absconded from Drake's Bay had found the same village that Quilhampton had been driven from and met the same reception from its inhabitants. Although a body of opinion sought revenge on the local peons, wiser councils prevailed and the deserters moved further inland, reducing the chances of being retaken by any parties sent out by Drinkwater. For a day or two they remained together until they reached the great sequoia woods where game, water and freedom had split them into groups and they had lost their discipline. For a few days they wandered happily about and then one party found an Indian village. Their attempt to establish friendly relations with the native women met a hostile rebuttal. Another party roamed into a Franciscan mission and were driven off by angry mestizos who had been told they were devils. Within a week the country was raised against them and several were killed or left to the mercies of the natives as the manhunt spread. Eventually twenty-two of them found themselves rounded up and turned over to a strange, English-speaking man in fringed buckskins whom the local people held in some awe.
To the British deserters he promised, with complicit winks and other indications of racial superiority, that if they played along, he would accomplish their rescue. There were prolonged parleys, exchanges of some form of gifts or money and then they were led off on the promise of good behaviour, by the mountain-man whom they knew by the obvious alias of 'Captain Mack'. Since the alternative was inevitable death at the hands of either Indians, half-caste Spanish or the tender ministrations of what they thought was the Inquisition, they shambled off in the wake of their rescuer.
After a march of three days, Captain Mack led them down to the sea, on the shores of Bodega Bay where, to their astonishment, they found soldiers who spoke a language they could not understand, but was clearly not Spanish. It did not take them long to find out that they had unwittingly become the serfs of the Russian-American Company, and that they were to be shipped in one of the filthy brigs that lay in the bay to the Company's more secure post on the Columbia River. Captain Mack had gone with them to strike his bargain with the commandant there, and had been waiting to return to the mountain forests of California when Drinkwater had arrived in the schooner. As for the men, they were to be employed refitting or serving in Russian ships in the Pacific.
'The hands are mustered, Captain.'
Drinkwater came out of his reverie to find Derrick confronting him. 'Eh? Oh, thank you, Derrick. I shall be up directly.'
There was something piratical about the assembly amidships. Whether it was the lean, dishevelled and indisciplined appearance of the men, or whether the character of the schooner under its false colours, or simply the crawling uncertainty that nagged at Drinkwater that contributed to this impression, he was not sure as they stared back at him. Despite his titular right to lead them, his tenure of command had never rested on such insubstantial foundations. Among the men confronting him were almost certainly those who had attempted to sabotage the Patrician.
'Very well,' he began, silencing them and studying their faces for traces of guilt, defiance, insolence or contrition. 'Fate has literally cast us in the same boat…' he slapped the rail beside him, 'and I intend to discover the whereabouts of the Patrician and free our shipmates from the kind of bestial treatment some of you have just subjected yourselves to. Make no mistake about it, there are worse forms of existence than service in the King's Navy.' He paused, to let the point sink in.
'I can offer you little beyond hardship and the possibility of retaking our ship from the Russians, clearing our name as a company and destroying our enemies.'
He paused again, clambering up on the carriage of a 6-pounder. 'Well, what d'you say? Are you for or against? Do we keep that rag aloft,' he pointed up at the red and gold ensign of Spain still at the main peak, 'or are we going to take this little hooker into Plymouth to be condemned as a prize to Patrician?'
There was a second's hesitation and then they were yelling stupidly and throwing their arms in the air in acclamation. Drinkwater got down from the gun carriage.
'Very well, Mr Q. Lay me a course of nor'-nor'-west. Happily their experiences as subjects of the Tsar have taught them that there are degrees even of injustice.'
Drinkwater tapped the dividers on the chart and looked up, gauging his prisoner.
Vasili Zhdanov, one of the three men captured with the Russian brig, spoke English of a kind, having been in attendance upon his one-time master when that worthy had served as an officer with the Anglophile Seniavin. However, Zhdanov had been caught stealing and after a sound whipping had been sold to the Russian-American Company, so that he had found a kind of life as seaman in one of the company's trading brigs. Now the reek of him, and particularly of his Makhorka tobacco, filled the cabin.
'How do you know that the British ship Patrician is here?' Drinkwater pointed to the bay which lay far to the northward, on the south coast of distant Alaska. There were a thousand anchorages amid the archipelagos of islands that extended northwards from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, not least that of Nootka Sound, but this remote spot…
'I see… she come… Suvorov come…' replied Zhdanov, haltingly.
'Who is captain of Suvorov?'
'Barin Vladimir Rakitin…'
'How many guns?'
Zhdanov shrugged; he was clearly not numerate. 'Do you wish to serve King George of Great Britain?'
'I fight with Royal Navy,' Zhdanov said with some dignity, but whether he referred to Drinkwater's proposed change of allegiance or to his own past history he was unable to make clear. Drinkwater looked up at Quilhampton.
'Split the three of them up, try and make them understand they can join us and swear 'em in. If they protest, you'll have to put 'em back in the bilboes…'
'Aye, aye, sir.' Quilhampton led the Russian out. Drinkwater opened a stern window to clear the air. The man reminded him of a strange cross between a feral animal like a bear, and a child. Yet there was something impressive about him, reminding Drinkwater of those vast numbers of such men he had seen encamped about the Lithuanian town of Tilsit a year earlier. Like patient beasts they had awaited their fates with an equanimity that struck him as stoic. Zhdanov had responded to his own autocratic proposal with the simple obedience that made the Tsar's armies almost invincible.
He looked again at the chart. There was logic in secreting a ship in such a place. It was well-surveyed, compared with the adjacent coast, a strange opening into the surrounding mountains, like a fiord except that its entrance, instead of being open, was almost closed off by rocky promontories. Between them, Drinkwater guessed, the tide would rip with considerable ferocity.
Inside, the fiord was deep, a single steep islet rising in its middle, beyond which there was a sudden, abrupt bifurcation, the bay's arms swinging north and south and terminating in glaciers. If Vasili Zhdanov was right, somewhere within those enclosing pincers of promontories lay Patrician.
Drinkwater opened the dividers and stepped off the distance, laying the steel points of the instrument against the latitude scale; more than a thousand miles lay between their present position and the lone bay which nestled under the massive shoulder of Mount Elias and the great Alaskan Range. He stared unseeing from the stern windows. So much depended upon their success. Where were Fraser, and Frey, the punctilious Mount or Midshipman Wickham? Were they prisoners aboard their own ship, or had they been held at San Francisco?
If providence granted success to this venture, he would return thither and force those corrupt time-servers, the Arguello brothers, to release his men. And force some measure of expiation out of that dishonourable dog, Rubalcava!
He felt his pulse beat with the mere thought of revenge and a wave of anger swept over him as he recalled the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Prince Vladimir Rakitin.
If, if only providence had turned her face upon him again, he might yet do something to retrieve the ragged flag of honour.
No matter how assiduously one studied a chart, the reality never quite conformed to the imagination. Assessment of the present landscape had not been helped by the unfamiliar topographical terms Zaliu, Mys or Bukhta rendered incomprehensible by the Cyrillic script. Neither was Drinkwater's familiarity with French sufficiently proficient to determine whether it was La Perouse or the Russian Kruzenstern who had named the places on the chart. What impressed him was the quality of the thing, manufactured as it had been half a world away in the Russian hydrographic office in St Petersburg.
He raised the glass again and raked the shore, seeking the narrow, half-hidden entrance and avoiding the scenic seductions of the mountain range that seemed to beetle down upon the littoral. It was stunningly magnificent, this chain of mighty peaks, shining with the sunlit glitter of permanent ice, like the nunataks of Greenland. And then he saw her, the black tracery sharp in the crisp, cool air which sharpened every image with more intensity than the most cunningly wrought lens. He knew instantly that the ship anchored beyond the low headland was indeed Patrician.
He shut his glass with a snap. 'Hoist Spanish colours, if you please, and call all hands to their stations.'
He had assumed the worst and formed his ruse accordingly. Patrician, he theorised, would be well manned by the enemy, despite his inclination to believe the contrary due to her remote location. Her own people would have been removed in San Francisco, so there would be no spontaneous rising to assist; art and cunning must, therefore, be his chief weapons. He sent below for the Spanish uniforms and saw to his side-arms long before the approach to the entrance. When he was ready he turned the Virgen de la Bonanza to the north-east and, ascending to the foretop, spied out the narrow strait between the guardian headlands. From that elevation he saw at once why the entrance was so difficult to locate from the deck. The island, which he knew lay within the bay, lay directly upon the line of sight when peering through the gap, so appearing to form one continuous coastline. Turning, he called down to Quilhampton by the helm, the course was altered and the bowsprit below him swung towards the narrows.
The schooner heeled, turning to larboard and bringing the wind fine on that bow and Drinkwater, surveying the entrance from his perch, felt the fine thrum of wind through the stays and the halliards that ran past him. The water ran suspiciously smooth in the gut, with darker corrugations rippling out from either side, corrugations which tore off into whorls and rips of gyrating turbulence, where unseen rocks or sudden treacherous shifts of current manipulated the violent motion of an ebbing tide.
'Deck there!'
'Sir?' Quilhampton looked aloft.
'I want a steady hand on the helm… there's a deal of broken water ahead…'
'Aye, aye, zur.'
Drinkwater smiled as Tregembo took the helm and then turned his attention to the narrows again. Their progress was becoming slower, as they felt the increasing opposition of the tide. The schooner crabbed sideways under its influence, unable to point closer to the wind. Drinkwater bestowed a quick glance at the anchored ship.
She was alone, alone beneath those great slabs of mountains which lifted into the heavens behind her, their snow caps sliding into scree and talus, tussocked grass and low, stunted trees which, on the lower ground that fringed the fiord, changed to a dark, impenetrable mantle of firs. And she was most certainly the Patrician.
'Steady there…'
He felt the schooner lurch and looked below to see Tregembo anticipate the tide-rip's attempt to throw the vessel's head into the wind. The sea was slick with the speed of the tide, almost uninfluenced by the effect of the breeze as it rushed out into the ocean beyond the confines of the bay. Those dark corrugations resolved themselves into standing waves, foaming with energy as the mass of water forced itself out of the bay so that the schooner slowed, stood still and began to slip astern.
The heads of curious seals, impervious to the viciously running ebb, popped out of the grey water to stare like curious, ear-less dogs, their pinched nostrils flaring and closing in exaggerated expressions of outrage at the intrusion.
For an hour they hung, suspended in this fashion until, almost suddenly, the tide slacked, relented and the power of the wind in their sails drove them forwards again. The low roar of the rush of water eased, the corrugations, the rips and eddies diminished and slowly disappeared. For a while the strait was one continuous glossy surface of still water, and then they were through, brought by this curious diminishing climax into sudden proximity with their quarry.
'And now,' said Drinkwater regaining the deck, 'we must play at a Trojan Horse.'
'After Scylla and Charybdis 'twill be little enough, sir,' remarked Quilhampton with unbecoming cheerfulness.
'Belay the classical allusions, Mr Q,' snapped Drinkwater, suddenly irritated, 'belay the loud-mouthed English and lower the boat, then you may carry out your instructions and fire that salute…'
The bunting of the Spanish ensign tickled Drinkwater's ear as he was rowed across the dark waters of the inlet towards the Patrician. The schooner's boat, hoisted normally under her stern, was smaller than the cutter they had lost in the Columbia River. But he hoped his approach was impressive enough and he was aware, from a flash of reflected light, that he was being scrutinised through a glass by one of the half-dozen men he could see on his own quarterdeck.
Behind him came the dull thud of the 6-pounder, echoing back after a delay to mix its repetition with the sound of the next signal-gun so that the air seemed to reverberate with the concussion of hundreds of guns as the echoes chased one another into the distance in prolonged diminuendo.
No answering salute came from the fo'c's'le of the Patrician, no answering dip of her diagonally crossed ensign. He stood up, showing off the Spanish uniform with its plethora of lace, and holding out the bundle of papers that purported to be despatches.
He noted a flurry of activity at the entry with a sigh of mixed relief and satisfaction.
'How far is the schooner, Potter?' he asked the man pulling stroke-oar.
'She's just tacked, sir,' replied Potter, staring astern past Drinkwater, 'an' coming up nicely… they're tricing up the foot of the fores'l now, sir and the outer jib's just a-shivering… 'bout long pistol shot an' closing, sir.'
'Very well.' Drinkwater could smell the rum on the man's breath as he made his oar bite the water. Off to starboard an unconcerned tern hovered briefly, then plunged into the water and emerged a second later with a glistening fish in its dagger-like beak.
'We're closing fast, lads, be ready…' He paused, judged his moment and, in a low voice, ordered the oars tossed and stowed. Beside him Tregembo put the tiller over. Amid a clatter of oars coming inboard the bowman stood up and hooked onto Patrician's chains.
Drinkwater looked up. A face stared down at him and then he began to climb, not daring to look around and ascertain the whereabouts of Quilhampton and the schooner. At the last moment he remembered to speak bastard-French, considering that it was not unreasonable for a Spanish officer to use that language when addressing a French-speaking ally. The fact that he spoke it barbarously was some comfort.
Stepping onto the deck he swept off his hat and bowed.
'Bonjour, Senores,' he managed, looking up with relief into the face of an officer he had never seen before, 'ou est votre capitaine, 's'il vous plait?'
'Tiens! C'est le capitaine anglais!'
Drinkwater jerked round. To his left stood one of the midshipmen he had last seen in Don José's Residence at San Francisco. Hands flew to swords and he knew that his ruse had failed utterly. He flung the paper bundle at the young man's face and drew the cavalry sabre before either of the Russian officers had reacted fully. Letting out a bull-roar of alarm he swiped the heavy, curved blade upwards in a vicious cut that sent the senior officer, a lieutenant by his epaulettes, reeling backwards, his hands to his face, his dropped sword clattering on the deck.
'Come on, you bastards!' Drinkwater bellowed into the split second's hiatus his quick reaction had brought him. 'Board!'
Would they come, those disloyal quondam deserters, or would they leave him to die like a dog, hacked down by the ring of steel that was forming about him? What would Quilhampton do? Carry out the plan of getting foul of the Patrician's stern in a histrionic display of incompetence which was to have cut Drinkwater's inept French explanation and turned it into a farce of invective levelled by him at Quilhampton, under whose cover the Virgen de la Bonanza was to have been run alongside the frigate. During this ludicrous performance his men were supposed to have come aboard…
Armed seamen with pikes from the arms' racks around the masts and marines with bayonets, men with spikes and rammers and gun-worms were closing, keeping their distance until they might all rush in and kill him.
'Board, you bastards!' he shouted again, his voice cracking with tension, his eyes moving from one to another of his enemies, seeking which was the natural leader, whose muscles would first tense for the kill and bring down Nemesis upon his reckless head…
It seemed he waited an age and then a shuffling of the midshipman's feet told him what he wanted to know. He thrust left, pronating his wrist and driving his arm forward so that the mangled muscles cracked with the speed of his lunge. The pointe of his sabre struck the young man on the breast-bone, cracked it and sent him backwards, gasping for breath in an agony of surprise. As he half-turned he sensed reaction to his right, a movement forward to threaten his unprotected back. He cut savagely, reversing the swing of his body, the heavy weapon singing through the air and cutting with a sickening crunch into the upper arm of a bold seaman whose cannon-worm dropped from nerveless hands and who let out a howl of pain and surprise. And then he lost the initiative and was fighting a dozen assailants for his very life.
'Frey, I think you are an infatuated fool. That must be the twentieth portrait of La Belladonna you have done,' quipped Wickham, looking down at the watercolour, 'and they do not improve. Besides they are a waste of the dip…' He reached out with dampened fingers to pinch out the miserable flame that lit the thick air of the cold gunroom and received a sharp tap on the knuckles from Frey's brush.
'Go to the devil, Wickham! I purchased that dip out of my own funds…'
Wickham sat and put his head in his hands, staring across the grubby table at Frey. 'What d'you suppose they intend to do with us?'
'I don't know,' replied Frey without looking up, 'that's why I paint, so that I do not have to think about such things…' He put the brush in the pot of water and stared down at the face of Doña Ana Maria. Then, in a sudden savage movement, his hand screwed up the piece of paper and crumpled it up.
Wickham sat back with a start. 'Shame! It wasn't that bad!'
'No, perhaps not, but…'
'Was she really handsome?'
'Quite the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,' Frey waxed suddenly lyrical.
'How many women have you seen, Frey? You've been aboard here since…'
'What was that?' asked Frey sharply, sitting upright.
'One of the men cursing those bastard Russians for being too free with their knouts, I expect,' said Wickham in a bored tone.
'No! Listen!'
It came again, an agonised bellow of command and there was something vaguely familiar about the voice. Frey's eyes opened wide.
'It can't be…'
'Can't be what… ?'
The shout came again and then there were the screams and bellows of a fight somewhere above them. Both midshipmen stood. Their sentry, a slovenly Russian marine, stirred uneasily, hefting his neglected musket, his thumb poised on its hammer.
There was a sudden buzz throughout the ship as other men, confined in irons or about their imposed duties realised something momentous was happening on deck. For too many days now they had rotted in a regime of inactivity, required only occasionally to turn out and pump the bilges, or tend the cable. For the most part they had languished in almost total darkness, separated from their officers, uncertain of their future, toying with rumours that, when the Suvorov returned, many of them would be drafted into her, or into other Russian ships or settlements. For Prince Rakitin such a draft of healthy labour seemed like a blessing from heaven, sufficient to restore the fortunes of the Russian-American Company after the loss of Rezanov.
Frey stood cautiously, not wishing to alarm the sentry. He had learned enough about their gaolers to realise that the man would display no initiative, did not dare to, and would remain at his post until someone came down and relieved or shot him.
'What the devil is going on?' Frey asked in an agony of uncertainty.
'Damned if I know…'
Then there was an outburst of the most horrible noise, a howling ululation that reminded the two youths of stories of Iroquois massacres they had heard old men tell from the Seven Years War. It was much closer than the upper deck, and provoking responses even nearer as the captive British seamen joined in with whoops and shouts of their own. The two midshipmen could hear shouts of joyful recognition, the clank of chains and the thud-thud of axes, the sharp clink as they struck iron links, more shouts and then, to compound the confusion, Patrician lurched as something large and heavy struck her.
'Come on, Wickham!' Frey's hand scooped the water-pot from the table and hurled it in the face of their sentry. Momentarily blind the man squeezed the trigger of his musket and the confined space reverberated with the crack of the shot. The ball buried itself in the deck-head and the Russian stabbed out with his bayonet but the thing was unwieldy in the small space, and the two midshipmen dodged nimbly past him.
Out on the gun-deck the scene was like a painting of the Last Judgement. Russians lay dead or writhing in agony, like the damned on their way to hell-fire. A handful of piratical British seamen led by Captain Drinkwater's coxswain Tregembo were turning up the hatchways like avenging angels and out of the hold poured a starveling rabble of pale and ragged bodies, corpses new-released from their tombs, some dragging irons, some half-free of them so that they held the loose links and went howling after their captors, swinging the deadly knuckle-dusters in a whirlwind of vengeful pursuit.
Tregembo, by all that's holy!' Frey stood for an instant, taking in the scene, then ran to a still-writhing Russian, tore the cutlass from his dying grasp and hurried on deck.
Lieutenant Quilhampton lost his cheerfulness the instant Captain Drinkwater left in the schooner's boat. All his attention had to be paid to split-second timing, to bring the Virgen de la Bonanza up under Patrician's stern, to fail in an attempt to tack and fall alongside the frigate in a display of Hispanic incompetence that, if he was a yard or two short, would condemn Captain Drinkwater to an untimely death.
His throat was dry and his heart thudded painfully as he sought to concentrate, gauging the relative angle of approach, his speed, and the set of a tide that was already flooding in through the narrows behind him.
'A point to larboard, if you please,' he forced himself to say, feigning complete mastery of himself and seeing Drinkwater ascend the Patrician's side by the man-ropes.
What would happen if Quilhampton failed and Drinkwater died? For himself he knew that he could never return and press his suit for the hand of Catriona MacEwan. Somehow such a course of action would be altogether dishonourable, knowing that he had failed the one man who had ever shown him kindness. And what of Drinkwater? Quilhampton knew of his distant devotion to his family, for all the estrangement imposed by the naval service, and this particular commission. Did Drinkwater expect him to fail? Would Drinkwater rather die in this remote and staggeringly beautiful corner of the world, attempting to recapture his own ship, rather than live with the knowledge of having lost her? If so the responsibility he bore was even heavier, the bonds of true friendship imposing a greater burden than he felt he had skill to meet.
And then he felt the tide, flooding in with increasing strength. Patrician was already lying head to it, his own course crabbed across; another point to larboard perhaps…
'Larboard a point.'
'Larboard a point more, sir.' There was warning in the helmsman's voice. Quilhampton looked up; the luff of the mainsail was just lifting.
'She's a-shiver, sir,' Marsden said from amidships.
Quilhampton did not answer, he was watching the schooner's bowsprit, watching it cross the empty sky until…
'Down helm!'
The Virgen de la Bonanza turned slowly into the wind.
'Midships!'
He stole a quick look along the deck. Apart from the half-a-dozen men at the sheets, the remainder, armed to the teeth, lay in the shadow of the starboard rail or crouched under the carelessly thrown down tarpaulin amidships.
The Virgen de la Bonanza lost way. The quarter of the Patrician loomed over them. They could see marks of neglect about the frigate, odds and ends of rope, scuffed paintwork…
A terrible bellow of range came from the deck above. With mounting anxiety Quilhampton suddenly knew he had now to concentrate more than ever before. Such a howl had not been planned, something was wrong, very wrong. He could abandon all pretence.
'Up helm! Shift the heads'l sheets!'
He checked the swing. 'Steady there, lads, not yet, not yet…'
The schooner began to swing backwards. He looked over the side. The boat, bobbing under the main chains of the Patrician, was already empty. He saw the last pair of heels disappear in through an open gun-port with relief. Drinkwater had at least the support of Tregembo and his boat's crew. A moment later the boat was crushed between the schooner and the frigate as the two hulls jarred together.
'Now!'
There was an ear-splitting roar from amidships. The big carronade, trained forward at maximum elevation and stuffed with langridge, ripped through the rigging of the forechains and, in the wake of that iron storm, Quilhampton loosed his boarders.
Drinkwater parried the first wave of the attack. There was a curious life in the cavalry sabre; centrifugal force kept it swinging in a wide and dangerous swathe though it tore mercilessly at the wrecked muscles of his wounded right shoulder. How long he could keep such a defence going he did not know, but he knew that he would have been a dead man already had he been armed only with his old hanger. He had fired two of the three pistols he had carried and foolishly thrown them down, intending to draw the third, but he could not free it from his belt, and it ground into his belly as he twisted and dodged his assailants.
He did not escape unscathed. He was cut twice about the face and received a deep wound upon his extended forearm. A ball galled his left shoulder and a pike thrust from the rear took him ignominiously in the fleshy part of the right buttock. He began to feel his strength ebb, aware that one last rally from his opponents would result in his death-wound, for he could fight no more.
His vision was blurring, though his mind retained that coolness that had saved him before and fought off the weakness of his reactions for as long as possible. A man loomed in front of him, he swung the sabre… and missed. Tensing his exposed stomach he waited for the searing pain of the pike thrust.
'Fuck me! It's the Cap'n!'
The pike-head whistled past his face as the wielder put it up. Suddenly all opposition melted away, there were friendly faces round him, men he had known once, long ago, long ago when he had commanded the Patrician…
But it was not Valhalla he woke to, nor had it been the faces of the dead he had seen. Some intelligence beyond mere consciousness had allowed him to faint at last, recognising his part in the fight need no longer be sustained. His men had followed him, wiping out the stain of their desertion.
Somewhere far above him voices were discussing him. Impertinent voices that spoke as though he was nothing more than a blood-horse whose health was uncertain.
'Will he pull through, Mr Lallo?'
'Of course, Mr Q, 'tis only a drop of blood he's lost. He'll save me the trouble of prescribing a remedy. There's nothing serious, though that cut in his glutens maximus will embarrass him…'
'His what?'
'Arse, Mr Q. He'll not sit for a week without it reminding him of its presence.'
Quilhampton laughed. 'I'll go and see about some food…'
'Go and find him a bottle of port. Nothing reconstitutes the blood better than a fortified wine.'
'There's some excellent oloroso aboard the Virgen…'
'What a damnably blasphemous name… go and get some then…'
'You're a pair of impertinent dogs,' Drinkwater muttered, fully conscious.
'There, Mr Q, I told you recovery would be complete… welcome aboard, sir.'
'Thank you, Mr Lallo, how many men do we muster?'
'I believe they call you "Captain Mack",' Drinkwater said. His wounded buttock still troubled him and he preferred to stand, his back to the stern-windows, a grim imperturbable silhouette regarding his prisoner. Mack's eyes were defiant, truculent. He nodded, but held his tongue.
'I understood you did your hunting further south, amid the barrens of California.'
'They ain't barrens,' said Mack shortly, with a half-smile that was at once menacing and secretive.
'Perhaps not,' replied Drinkwater dismissively; he had learned the term in the American War and its precise meaning was unimportant now.
'You are a citizen of the United States of America, are you not?'
'I suppose I am…'
'You suppose?'
'In so far as I'm under any man's jurisdiction. I reckon to be born free, Mister, I respect it in others, I expect it from them.'
'Meaning you could have shot to kill me when we disturbed you at your office?'
'Sure. I can hit a running moose…'
'You didn't respect the freedom of my men, you turned them over to the Russians.'
'Hell, Cap'n, that's bullshit. You didn't respect their freedom either, an' that's supposing they was free in the first place, instead of run from this here ship.'
Drinkwater smiled. 'But you didn't turn 'em over to the Russkies for love of Old England…'
'Sure as hell I didn't.'
Then why?'
'They was trespassin', Cap'n.'
'So were you, on Spanish territory. Did you sell 'em?'
'What the hell would I want with roubles, Cap'n?' the mountain-man answered contemptuously.
'I presume you require powder and shot,' Drinkwater replied coolly, 'and gold is always gold…'
A spark of something flared in the mountain-man's eyes, hostility, malice perhaps, Drinkwater could not be sure beyond knowing he had touched a nerve.
'You are a solitary, Captain Mack. A man apart. I do not pretend to understand your motives and my men would have you hang for your treachery.'
'I promised them nothing!'
'Maybe not. Would you have me hand you over to the Spanish authorities at San Francisco… ?'
Patrician lifted to the swell and leaned gently over to the increasing breeze as, on deck, Lieutenant Fraser crowded on sail. Drinkwater smiled with grim satisfaction, for a wave of nausea passed visibly over Mack's features.
'You will do as you please, I reckon,' he said with some difficulty. Drinkwater jerked his head at Sergeant Blixoe.
'Take him below, Sergeant.'
He could afford clemency. It was good to have them all back together. Fraser, Lallo, Mount, Quilhampton, even the lugubrious chaplain, Jonathan Henderson. He looked astern through the cabin windows where, under Hill and Frey, the Virgen de la Bonanza danced in their wake. Perhaps best of all was to see little Mr Belchambers's cheerful smile, for Drinkwater did not think he could have brought himself to have written to explain the boy's loss to his trusting parents. It was true that there were still men missing, men who had been pressed by the Spaniards to labour on the wharves of San Francisco, but for the great majority the raid on the outpost on the Columbia River had reunited them in spirit, wiping out memories of discontent, disloyalty and desertion. It was less easy for Drinkwater to forget the depths to which he had sunk, of how near he had been to suicide; less easy to forget the risks he had run in his desperation, but the raid had had its effect, paltry enough though it had been in terms of military glory. They had landed by boat in the mist of early morning in a brief and bloody affair in which all the advantage had been with the assailants. They had carried off all that they had not destroyed, even Tregembo's swine, setting fire to the fort with the same enthusiasm they had burnt the first brig.
Drinkwater turned from the stern windows and glanced down at the chart on his table. They would do the same to the Russian outpost at Bodega Bay, where the mysterious mountain-man had first enslaved his own deserters. His men would enjoy that and he could set free Captain Mack, leave him to his damnable wilderness. Then he would return to San Francisco. His heartbeat quickened at the thought of confronting the Arguello brothers. How unexpected were the twists of fortune and how close he had come to ending his own life in the cell below the Commandante's residence. If it had not been for Doña Ana Maria…
He forced his mind into safer channels. His first consideration was the destruction of the second Russian post at Bodega Bay.
Lieutenant Quilhampton jumped into the water of Bodega Bay and led the men ashore. They splashed behind him, Mount leading the marines, Frey with his incendiary party. They met only token resistance. A couple of shots were fired at them out of bravado, but the two grubby wretches immediately flung down their muskets and surrendered. Surprise had been total and the British party entered the now familiar stockade with its stink of urine, grease and unwashed humanity, to set about its destruction.
Only when he saw the flicker of flames did Drinkwater leave the ship in the boat. In the stern-sheets, escorted by two of Mount's marines, sat Captain Mack. Wading ashore with the mountain-man's long rifle, Drinkwater indicated that the marines were to follow him with their prisoner. As they walked towards the blazing pine logs that exploded and split in great upwellings of sparks as the resin within them expanded and took fire, they met Quilhampton's party escorting a pathetic collection of bearded moujiks back to the boats.
'Where's the commandant?'
'No one seems to be in command, sir, just this handful of peasants.'
'He's a-fucking Indian women, Cap'n, or lying dead-drunk under a redwood tree,' drawled Captain Mack.
'Very well. Let him go.' Drinkwater motioned to the marines and they stood back. He jerked his head at the mountain-man. 'Vamos!'
Mack half-smiled at the irony, but held out his hand. 'My gun, Cap'n.'
'You get out of my sight now. When my boat pulls off the beach I'll leave your rifle on that boulder. You can get it then.'
'You don't trust me?'
'Somebody once told me the Cherokees called you people Yankees because they didn't trust you.'
'Ah, but others called us English then…'
Mack grinned, reluctantly acknowledging an equal and stalked away. He did not look back and his buckskins were soon as one with the alternate light and shade that lay beneath the trees. Drinkwater turned back to the incendiary roar and crackle of the burning fort when there came a shout, the snap of branches and a roar of anger. Drinkwater spun round.
Mack was running back towards them, pursued by a dark figure in an odd, old-fashioned full-length waistcoat. The man had lost his wig and hat but he held out a pistol and, as he took in the sight of the burning fort, he fired it screaming some frightful accusation after Mack. The mountain-man fell full length, his spine broken by the ball, and Drinkwater ran up to him as he breathed his last. Behind Drinkwater the marines brought down the wigless Russian.
Drinkwater bent over the dying Mack. '… Thought… I'd betrayed…' he got out through clenched teeth, and Drinkwater looked at the Russian, rolling beneath the bayonets of the marines. It must have been the returning commandant, misinterpreting the mayhem before him as his post blazed and Mack walked insouciantly away from the scene.
Drinkwater watched as life ebbed from the tumbled goliath, shot so ignominiously by a debauched ne'er-do-well, and felt that sharp pang of regret, that sense of universal loss that accompanied certain of the deaths he had witnessed. He was about to stand when his eye fell upon something bright.
Half a dozen huge nuggets of the purest gold had rolled out of the mountain-man's leather pouch.
'Bury 'em both,' he called to the marines, and scooping up the treasure he swept them into his pocket.
Gold.
It threw off the reflections of the candle flames leaping and guttering as Patrician worked her way off shore in the first hours of the night. Tomorrow she would appear off Point Lobos, but tonight she would hide herself and her prize in the vastness of the Pacific.
Gold.
A king's ransom lay before him. No wonder Mack had scorned the idea of payment for passing Patrician's deserters to the Russians, and no wonder he had not wanted those same men wandering over wherever it was he found the stuff, for that was the only implication that fitted his deed and his character. He would not encourage the Spaniards, for their tentacles would spread inexorably northwards, while the Russians could supply him with those necessities he was compelled to get from civilisation. Powder, shot, steel needles, flints… Drinkwater had no idea how many natural resources the wilderness contained.
But it contained gold.
And what the devil would such an unworldly man as 'Captain Mack' do with such a treasure? That was a mystery past his divining.
'Cleared for action, sir!'
'Very well, Mr Fraser.'
Above their heads the white ensign snapped in the breeze from the north that had blown fresh throughout the night and was only now losing its strength as they came under the lee of the land. From his post on the gun-deck, Quilhampton tried to locate the little cove where he and the cutter's crew had holed up and from where he had seen the Patrician carried off into captivity. Suppose the Suvorov was waiting for them under the protection of the Spanish battery on Point Lobos? What would be the outcome of the action they were about to fight?
He found he dare not contemplate defeat, and felt the atmosphere aboard the ship imbued with such a feeling of renewal that defeat must be impossible, no matter what the odds. Those two raids, little enough in themselves, had patched up morale, made of them all a ship's company again, a ship's company that had endured much. There was talk of going home after the job was done, after the Spanish and the Russians had been made to eat their own shit, and the gun-captains kneeled with their lanyards taut in their fists in anticipation of this event.
'Thou art my battle-axe and weapons of war,' the Reverend Jonathan Henderson had declaimed at Divine Service that morning, 'for with Thee I will break in pieces the nations, and with Thee I will destroy kingdoms,' he had railed, and if no one understood the finer theological points of his subsequent deductions, all made the blasphemous connection between Jeremiah's imputed words and themselves.
'Stand ready, sir,' Mr Belchambers squeaked at the companion-way, 'maximum elevation,' he went on repeating Drinkwater's orders from the quarterdeck, 'no sign of the Russian ships. Target to be the battery, starboard broadside.'
Quilhampton grinned. The boy had the phrases arse-about-face, but he was cool enough. He stooped and peered through the adjacent gun-port. He saw the smoke suddenly mushroom from the end cannon, wafting outwards in a great smoke-ring, but no fall of shot followed.
'Make ready!' Belchambers's squeak came again.
'Make ready there, starbowlines!' Quilhampton roared with mounting excitement.
A second smoke-ring mushroomed from the embrasures of Point Lobos.
'They're bloody well saluting us,' muttered Quilhampton, frowning.
'Hold your fire, sir! There's a flag of truce putting off from the shore.'
A groan of disappointment ran along the gun-deck.
'Capitán, my brother, Don José Arguello de Salas, Commandante of His Most Catholic Majesty's city of San Francisco, extends his most profound apologies for this most unfortunate mistake.'
'Damn you, Don Alejo. Where is your brother? I demand to know more of this affair, this so-called mistake which I know to be nothing short of a towering fabrication, a… a…' words failed to express Drinkwater's angry sense of outrage.
So many half-guessed-at truths had found their answers in the hour since the flag-of-truce had first been seen. But Don Alejo was not a man to concede a thing. As Drinkwater faltered, the wily Spaniard rammed home his counter-stroke.
'We are both guilty, Capitán. You, please, you steal our schooner, La Virgen de la Bonanza.'
'That is an outrageous allegation…'
'Capitán, please, it is one of the confusions of this war.'
'If you had informed me, as you were duty bound to do, that she brought news of our new alliance, I should not have been forced to capture her. You, Don Alejo, acted outside all international law by selling, yes sir, selling His Britannic Majesty's ship Patrician to the Russian power in the person of Prince Rakitin after you had heard that your country was once again an ally of mine. Such an action is the basest and most dishonourable that I have ever heard of.'
'A little mistake, Capitán Drinkwater,' snapped Don Alejo, 'a little… what did your English papers say, eh? Ah, sí, a quibble, like when your ships come under your Admiralty orders and attack Bustamente's frigates and blow up the Mercedes and send women to God before you have a declaration of war! It is nothing! Nothing!' Don Alejo made a gesture of contemptuous dismissal.
'But you traded, Don Alejo, sold my ship. You have been trading with the Russians ever since Rezanov came, eh? Your Most Catholic Master does not approve of his servants trading in his monopolies.'
'It was for my country that I remove your ship. You too-much disturb trade. Now we are at peace and allies, you have your ship back.' Don Alejo spoke in a lower key. 'Perhaps, Capitán Drinkwater, you should be a little obliged to me…'
'Upon my soul, why?' asked Drinkwater aback.
'When you first take me prisoner, Capitán, Don Jorge Rubalcava, he want to tell you to go to Monterey. There you not escape. There you lose your ship. Here in San Francisco…' He shrugged, a gesture full of implications, and Drinkwater understood that Don Alejo was beyond his comprehension in cunning. Whatever the venal sins of his brother, Don Alejo would emerge on the winning side, if he knew of the presence of gold in California, as that shrewd observation of Quilhampton's suggested, Don Alejo was not the man to make the knowledge public. Had he in some subtle way suggested to Doña Ana Maria that honour was at stake and so ensured Drinkwater's escape through her action? Looking at him, Drinkwater thought the thing at least a possibility. And Don Alejo had nothing to lose by it, for Drinkwater might have failed, lost in some obscure and savage fracas on the coast. He shuddered at the mere recollection of the night raid on the Columbia River.
'Now, Capitán, as to the matter of your men…' said the Spaniard smoothly.
Drinkwater frowned. 'I shall expect them returned instantly.'
'As soon as Don Jorge takes possession of the aviso, Capitán.' Don Alejo smiled victoriously. Drinkwater opened his mouth to protest the injustice of losing their prize. Then he remembered the gold and felt the weight of those nuggets dragging down the tails of his full-dress coat. When the time came, he thought, he could purchase comforts enough to compensate his men for the loss of their paltry share in the schooner. Perhaps they were better off, for the matter might lie before a prize-court for years, and only the attorneys would benefit. Besides, he had other matters to attend to. There were despatches, brought weeks earlier, carried overland to Panama with the news of the rising against the French, then up the coast in La Virgen de la Bonanza. Don Alejo swore he had intended to pass them to Drinkwater on his release, the very day Drinkwater had succeeded in escaping. And there was still the Russian power to destroy.
Don Alejo was holding out a glass.
'A toast to our new alliance, Capitán … to Dos de Mayo… the second day of May, the day Madrid rose against the French. It is a pity good news travels so slow, eh?'
He knew he was not supposed to see her, that she broke some imposition of her father's or her uncle's to contrive this clumsy meeting on the path. She was as lovely as ever and yet there was something infinitely sad about the cast of her features, despite her smile. She held two books out to him. They were his log and journal and he took them, thanking her and tucking them under his arm with the bundle of despatches Don Alejo had at last given him. He smiled back at her.
'Señorita, I am indebted to you for ever for my freedom, even,' he added, the smile passing from his face, 'for my very life.' He paused, recalling how close he had come to the ultimate act of despair and her face reflected her own grief. Then he brightened. 'And thank you for your kindness in retrieving my books.'
'It was nothing…'
'You knew about the changes in your country's circumstances?'
She nodded. 'Sí.'
'And disobeyed your father?'
'My father is sometimes deceived by Don Alejo.' Drinkwater remembered her obvious dislike of Don Alejo.
'He was engaged in some illegal traffic with the Russians?'
She shrugged. 'All would have been well had Nicolai lived.'
'It was fated otherwise, Señorita.'
'Si. Que sera sera,' she murmured.
'Why did you release me?'
She looked him full in the face then. 'Because you told the truth about Nicolai.'
'It was a small thing.'
'For me it was not. It has changed my life. I am to go into a convent.'
He remembered the Franciscan. 'It is the world's loss, Señorita.'
'I prayed for your wife and family… Adios, Capitán.'
'Adios, Señorita.' He bowed as she turned away.
Drinkwater watched through his glass as Hill brought La Virgen de la Bonanza to her anchor under Point Lobos that evening. He watched Don Jorge Rubalcava board her and wished he could shoot the treacherous dog with Mack's long rifle that now lay below in his cabin. Then he swung his glass to see if the rest of the bargain was being kept. He watched the boat approach, returning the ragged remnants of his men from the chain gang of servitude. By the time Hill and Frey came back from the schooner, Patrician's anchor was a-trip.
'I would not stay in this pestilential spot another moment,' he remarked to Hill as the sailing master made his report. The knot of officers within hearing nodded in general agreement. Only Mr Frey stood pensively staring astern.
'She intends to become a nun, Mr Frey,' he snapped, an unwonted harshness in his voice.
Drinkwater stared at the empty bulkhead. The paint was faintly discoloured where the portraits of Elizabeth and the children used to hang. Before him, on the table, were scattered the contents of the despatch brought weeks ago by the aviso. It had been a day of explanations, not least that of the most perplexing of his worries, one that had concerned him months earlier at the time of their departure from the Nore.
Some departmental inefficiency had delayed it and now it had been sent out after him to the West Indies, overland to Panama by mule and shipped up the Isthmus, to be opened and scrutinised by Don Alejo Arguello, no doubt, before finding its way to him. It was months old, so old, in fact, that its contents were rendered meaningless by the train of events, except that they heartened him, gave him some insight into his apparent abandonment by the head of the Admiralty's Secret Department Lord Dungarth. He read the relevant passage through again.
I write these notes for your better guidance, my dear Drinkwater, for I find upon my return from Government business elsewhere, that Barrow has sent you out insufficiently prepared. Seniavin declined to serve against us after his Imperial master succumbed to the seductions of Bonaparte, having seen service with us at an earlier period in his career. Rakitin is a less honourable man, untroubled by such scruples and well-known to some of your fellow officers. I would have you know these things before you reach the Pacific, for it reaches me that he is to command a ship of some force, perhaps a seventy-four, and capitalise upon the work done by Rezanov…
Drinkwater folded the letter. So, Dungarth had been absent on Government business elsewhere. Drinkwater was intrigued as to where that business might have been. Had his Lordship been back to France? He had made some vague allusions to Hortense Santhonax having become the mistress of Talleyrand. She had turned her coat before, might she not do so again?
He thrust the ridiculous assumption aside. That was altogether too fanciful. What advantage could either Hortense Santhonax or the French Foreign Minister derive from betraying such an unassailably powerful man as the Emperor Napoleon? It was a preposterous daydream. He picked up another letter. The superscription was familiar, but he could not place it. Then he recollected the hand of his friend, Richard White. Drinkwater slit the seal, anticipating his old shipmate must be writing to inform him he had hoisted a rear-admiral's flag.
A deck below Captain Drinkwater, Lieutenant Quilhampton was also reading a letter.
I am sure you meant no unkindness, Catriona had written, but I assure you that if the necessity to which you were put was painful to you, it was doubly so to me. You had the benefit of long consideration, I had only the most profound of shocks. I have burned those letters you returned but, sir, circumstanced as I am, I must risk all reputation and request you repent yourself of so rash an act.
'God bless my soul,' he muttered, 'what a surprise! What a marvellous, bloody surprise!'
Drinkwater read White's letter with a profound sense of horror. Following so soon upon the last he could scarce believe its contents and compared the dates. But White's was written a full fortnight after Lord Dungarth's and he had no reason to doubt its accuracy.
My main purpose in writing, my dear Nathaniel, is to acquaint you of the event of Thursday last when, on a lonely stretch of the Canterbury road near Blackheath, an incendiary device exploded beneath the coach of Lord Dungarth and his lordship's life is feared for…
He ruffled through the remaining papers (some routine communications from the Navy Office and an enquiry from the Sick and Hurt Board) for a later letter informing him of Dungarth's death, but could find nothing. A feeling of guilt stole over him; he had condemned a friend without cause and now Dungarth might be dead. And there was not even a letter from Elizabeth to console him. He looked up at the bare patches on the forward bulkhead and shook off the omen.
'Is she gaining on us, Mr Hill?' Drinkwater looked astern at the big, dark hull with the bow wave foaming under her forefoot and her pale patches of sails braced sharp up in pursuit of them. There was no doubt of her identity, she was the Russian seventy-four Suvorov.
'Gaining steadily, sir,' reported the sailing master.
'Good,' said Drinkwater, expressing satisfaction. He swung to the west where the day was leaching out of the sky and banks of inkily wet cumulus rolled menacingly against the fading light. The pale green pallor of the unclouded portion of the sky promised a full gale by morning. For the time being the wind was fresh and steady from the north-west. 'It'll be dark in an hour, that'll be our time. So you ease that weather foretack, Mr Hill, slow her down a little, I don't want him to lose sight of us, keep him thinking he has all the advantages.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
'Mr Fraser!'
'Sir?'
'Have you inspected all the preparations?'
'Aye, sir, and your permission to pipe the men below for something to eat, if you please.'
'Most certainly; and a tot for 'em, I want devils tonight.'
'Aye, aye, sir.' Fraser touched the fore-cock of his hat and turned. Drinkwater went below himself, leaving the deck to Hill. In his cabin Mullender poured him a glass of rum and mixed it with water.
'There's some cold pork, sir, sour cabbage and some figgy duff. Tregembo's put a keen edge on your sabre, sir, and your pistols are in the case.'
Mullender indicated the plates and weapons laid in readiness along the sill of the stern windows where the settee cushions had been removed. Drinkwater had lost the privacy of his cabin bulkheads, since Patrician was cleared for action and only a curtain separated him from the gun-deck beyond.
'And I found the portraits, sir, they're all right.'
'Good. Where were they?'
'Tossed in the hold.'
Drinkwater nodded and stared through the windows astern. 'Put but the candles, Mullender, I'll eat in the dark.'
He did not want to lose his night vision and the extinguishing of even so feeble a light would indicate some form of preparation was being made aboard Patrician. Drinkwater fervently hoped that Prince Vladimir Rakitin's opinion of him remained low. It had wounded him at the time it had been expressed, but Drinkwater sought now to fling it in the Russian's face.
But he must not tempt providence. She was a fickle deity, much given to casting down men in the throes of over-weening pride.
On deck again it was completely dark. They were near the autumnal equinox and already an approaching winter was casting its cold shadow over the water of the North Pacific. They pitched easily over the great swells, thumping into the occasional waves so that the spray streamed aft after every pale explosion on the weather bow.
'Very well, Mr Hill, pass word for all hands to stand to. Divisional officers to report when ready.'
When he received word that the ship was ready for action and every man at his station he gave his next order.
'Shorten sail!'
They were prepared for it. The lieutenants, midshipmen and mates took up the word and Patrician lost the driving force of her main and foresails. Men ran aloft to secure the flogging canvas. Neither sail had been set to much advantage, but not to have carried them would have alerted Rakitin. Now, with the onset of night, Drinkwater doubted the Russian officers would be able to see the reduction in sail. From the Suvorov, Patrician would be a grey blur in the night, and spanker and topsails would convey that impression just as well.
'Tack ship, Mr Hill'
The master gave the routine orders with his usual quiet confidence. Patrician turned, passing her bow through the wind so that the wind and the spray came over the larboard bow and she stood back to the north-east, slightly across the Suvorov's track, but in an attempt to elude her heavy pursuer's chase. It was precisely, Drinkwater argued, what Rakitin would assume he would do in an attempt to escape. It crossed Drinkwater's mind to wonder what exactly had passed between Rakitin and the Arguellos by way of a purchase price for his ship. He chuckled to himself in the darkness. This time there would be no humiliation, no superior sailing with which to reproach himself. This time, he felt in his bones, his ship's company had come through too much to let it go to the devil for want of a purpose.
'Ahhh…'
He could just see the Suvorov, swinging to starboard having seen the Patrician tack. He raised his speaking trumpet. 'Let fall!'
With a thunderous shudder bunt and clew-garnets were let go. Ropes whistled through the blocks and the great sails dropped from the yards, their clews drawn up to chess-tree and bumpkin as they were hauled taut. Drinkwater could almost feel Patrician accelerate, an illusion that was confirmed by the sudden change in relative bearing as the two ships closed in the darkness, Patrician rushing across the bow of the swinging Russian as she jibbed in stays, taking her wind as she sought to outwit her quarry.
'Hoist your lantern, Mr Belchambers! Mr Q, starboard battery as they bear!'
The noise of the wind and the tamed thunder of the sails gave way to something more urgent. The rushing of the sea between the two hulls, shouts of alarms from the Russian and, beneath their feet, the sinister rumbling of the guns as they were run out through the ports.
They were on top of her now, the range was point-blank, and no sooner were they run out than the gun-captains jerked their lanyards. On the fo'c's'le the heavy calibre carronades fired first and the smoke and concussion rolled aft with an awful and impressive rolling broadside that lit the night with the flames of its lethal explosions, yellow tongues of fire that belched their iron vomit into the heart of the enemy.
Above and behind Drinkwater Mr Belchambers succeeded in hoisting the battle lantern that was to illuminate the ensign straining from the peak of the gaff. It reached its station just as Drinkwater looked up at the spanker.
'Brail up the spanker! Up helm! Shorten sail!'
Patrician turned again, cocking her stern up into the wind, shortening sail again to manoeuvre alongside her shattered victim. The Suvorov lay in irons, her head yards aback and gathering stern-way. Drinkwater had no time to assess the damage for they had yet to run the gauntlet of her starboard broadside where she mounted a greater weight of metal than her opponent.
'For what we are about to receive…' someone muttered the old blasphemy but Quilhampton's gunners were equal to the challenge. As a row of orange flashes lit the side of the Suvorov the bow guns of Patrician, reloaded and made swiftly ready by the furious exertions of their crews, returned fire. Patrician shook from the onslaught of shot. Beside him Hill reeled, spinning round and crashing into him with a violent shock, covering him with gore. Drinkwater grabbed him.
'My God, Hill!' he called, but the old man was already dead and Drinkwater laid him on the deck. Somewhere close by someone was shrieking in agony. It was a marine whose head had been pierced by langridge.
'Silence there!' roared Lieutenant Mount, but the man was beyond the reach of discipline and Blixoe discharged his musket into the man's back. He too fell to the deck. Drinkwater recovered himself, spun round and looked at his enemy.
The Suvorov had broached. He could see much of her foremast had gone, and her fo'c's'le was a mass of shattered spars and canvas.
'Down helm! Braces there… !'
He brought Patrician back towards his enemy and raked her stern from long pistol shot. She was almost helpless, firing hardly a gun in retaliation. Nothing but her stern-chasers would bear now and their ports were too low to open in such a rising sea.
For two hours Drinkwater worked his frigate back and forth, ranging up under the Suvorov's stern, hammering her great black hull with impunity from his position of undisputed advantage. A rising moon shone fitfully between curtains of scud and the vast ocean heaved beneath the two labouring ships. The Russians fought back with small arms and those quarter guns they could bring to bear, but it was only later that Drinkwater learned that their complement was much weakened by the length of their cruise and that Rakitin's eagerness to acquire pressed recruits from the British Navy was to make good these deficiencies. But Russian tenacity was to no avail, for Suvorov wallowed unmanageable, a supine victim of Patrician's hot guns whose captains had the range too well and whose 24-pound balls crashed into her fabric with destructive precision. For those two hours they played their fire into their quondam pursuer, rescuing their reputation and the honour of their commander.
Towards four bells in the first watch the pace of Patrician's fire slackened and Drinkwater drew off, heaving-to under easy sail until daylight. Men lay exhausted at their guns and Drinkwater dozed, jammed against the mizen rigging, wrapped in his cloak.
It was Belchambers's excited squeal that woke him. Dawn was upon them and the wallowing hull of the Russian lay less than a mile away. A shred of smoke was drifting away on the wind, for the predicted gale was upon them, the sea rolling down from the north-west, its surface streaked by spume and shredded to leeward in a mist of spray through which the dark shape of a frigate-bird slipped on swept-back wings. The Suvorov had rolled all her masts overboard, but a second defiant shot followed the first and the dark, diagonal cross of the Tsar still flew from the stump of her mainmast. In the rough sea she was incapable of further manoeuvre and awaited only the coup-de-grace.
Drinkwater roused his ship and the men stood to their guns again. There was a curiously intent look about them now as they stared over the heaving waste of the grey seas at the wallowing Russian.
'Larboard battery make ready!'
All along the deck the hands went up. 'Ready, sir!'
'Fire!'
Fully half their shot hit the sea, sending up plumes of white which were instantly dissipated by the gale, but clouds of splinters erupted in little explosions along the line of the Russian's hull.
'Ready, sir!'
'Fire!'
They timed it better that time. The concussion of the guns beat at Drinkwater's brain as his eyes registered the destruction their iron was causing to their enemy. He wondered if Rakitin was still alive and found he no longer cared.
'Ready, sir!'
'Fire!'
He raised his glass. They were reducing the Suvorov to a shambles; as she rolled helplessly towards them he could see the havoc about her decks. Under the fallen wreckage of her masts and spars a fire had started, a faint growing flicker that sent a rapidly thickening pall of smoke over the sea towards them.
'She's struck, sir!'
Belchambers pointed eagerly at the enemy ship. The boy was right. The Tsar's ensign was being hauled down. 'Cease fire, there! Cease fire!'
'Congratulations, sir,' said Fraser, coming aft.
Drinkwater shook his head. 'Pass my thanks to the ship's company,' he said tersely. Fraser drew back and left Drinkwater staring down at the body of Hill. He had executed the Admiralty's instructions, carried out his particular service to prevent a Russian incursion south of the coast of Alaska.
As he bent over the body of the old sailing master he felt the heavy nuggets in the tail pockets of his coat touch the deck. It came to him that he might be a wealthy man and he wondered if the presence of gold in California was known to anyone in London. He thought of Lord Dungarth and the infernal device. Reaching out his hand he touched Hill's face, then stood and stared to windward, mourning his friends.