A Brig of War (20 page)

Bruilhac nodded. Drinkwater went on, ‘
Bon. Mon Capitaine
 . . .' he struggled, failing to find the words for what he wished to convey. He picked up the pistol he had removed earlier from his belt and pulled back the hammer. Taking Bruilhac's hand he placed it palm down on the table and spread the fingers. ‘Bang!' he said suddenly, pointing the weapon at the index finger. He repeated the melodrama for the other three. The colour drained from Bruilhac's face and Drinkwater refilled his grog. ‘Courage, mon brave,' he said, then, as the boy stared wide eyed over the shaking rim of the beaker, ‘
Ecoutez-moi, Gaston: vous parlez, eh? Vous parlez beaucoup
.'

As if on cue Griffiths entered with Rogers behind him, bearing the muster book. Drinkwater stood up and snapped ‘Attention!' Bruilhac sprang to his feet, rigidly obedient. ‘I think he'll talk, sir,' said Drinkwater, quietly handing the pistol to Griffiths. ‘Rum will loosen his tongue and I said you'd shoot each of his fingers off in turn if he did not speak.'

Griffiths's white eyebrows shot upwards and a wicked twinkle appeared in his eyes as he turned to the cadet, and the swinging lantern light caught his seamed face. To Bruilhac he seemed the very personification of Drinkwater's imminent threats.

Drinkwater motioned the boy to follow Griffiths into the after cabin. As he closed the door he heard Griffiths begin the interrogation. Words began to pour from the hapless boy. Drinkwater smiled; sometimes it was necessary to be cruel to be kind. He turned to Rogers.

‘Well Rogers, what kind of a butcher's bill do we have?'

‘Oh, not too bad, bloody shame we blew the prize up. I'd have made a comfortable purse from her.'

Drinkwater withheld a lecture on the impracticability of such a
task as getting
La Torride
in order, and contented himself with saying, ‘She was a wreck. Now, how many did we lose?'

‘Only eleven dead.'

Drinkwater whistled. ‘Only? For the love of God . . . what about the wounded?'

‘Eighteen slight: flesh wounds, splinters, the usual. I caught a splinter in the cheek.' He turned so that the light caught the ugly jagged line, half bruise, half laceration, that was scabbing in a thick crust. ‘You escaped unscathed, I see.'

Drinkwater looked Rogers full in the face, feeling again a strong dislike for the man. He found himself rubbing at a rough congealed mess in his right ear. ‘Almost,' he said quietly, ‘I was lucky. What about the serious cases?'

Rogers looked down at the muster book. ‘Seven, six seamen and Quilhampton.'

‘Quilhampton?' asked Drinkwater, a vision of the boy's pretty mother swimming accusingly into his mind's eye. ‘What's the matter with him?'

‘Oh, a ball took off his hand . . . hey, what's the matter?'

Drinkwater scrambled below to where Appleby had his cockpit at the after end of the hold. Already the stench was noisome. To the creak of the hull and the turbid swirl of bilgewater were added the groans of the wounded and the ramblings of delirium. But it was not only this that made Drinkwater wish to void his stomach. There seemed some sickness in his fate that Providence could pull such an appalling jest upon him.

He paused to allow his eyes to become adjusted to the gloom. He could see the pale figure of Catherine Best straighten up, a beaker in her hand. She came aft, catching sight of the first lieutenant. ‘Mr Drinkwater?' she said softly, and in the guttering lamplight her face was once again transfigured. But it was not a beauty that stirred him. He saw for the first time that whatever life had done to this woman, her eyes showed a quality of compassion caused by her suffering.

‘Where is Mr Q?' he asked hoarsely. Catherine led him past Tyson who was bent over a man Drinkwater recognised as Gregory, the helmsman who had held the brig before the wind the night they struggled with the broken foreyard. Tyson was easing a tourniquet with a regretful shake of his head. The woman
stepped delicately over the bodies that lay grotesquely about the small, low space.

Quilhampton lay on his cloak, his head pillowed on his broadcloth coat. His breeches stained dark with blood and urine. His left arm extended nine inches below his elbow and terminated in a clumsy swathe of bloodstained bandages. His eyelids fluttered and he moved his head distressingly in a shallow delirium. Catherine Best bent to feel the pale sweating forehead. Drinkwater knelt beside the boy and put his hand on the maimed stump. It was very hot. He looked across the twitching body. Catherine's eyes were large with accusation.

Drinkwater rose and stumbled aft, suddenly desperate for the fresh air of the deck. At the ladder he ran into Appleby. The surgeon's apron was stiff with congealed blood. He was wiping his hands on a rag and he reeked of rum. He was quite sober.

‘Another glorious victory for His Majesty's arms . . . you will have been to see Quilhampton?' Drinkwater nodded dumbly. ‘I think he will live, if it does not rot.' Appleby spat the last word out, as if the words ‘putrefy' or ‘mortify' were too sophisticated to waste on a butcher like Drinkwater.

Nathaniel made to push past but Appleby stood his ground. ‘Send two men to remove that . . . sir,' he said, pointing. Drinkwater turned. A large wooden tub lay in the shadows at the bottom of the ladder. Within it Drinkwater could see the mangled stumps and limbs amputated from Appleby's patients.

‘Very well, Mr Appleby, I will attend to the matter.'

Appleby expelled his breath slowly. ‘There's a bottle in the gunroom, I'll join you in a moment.' Drinkwater nodded and ascended the ladder.

Griffiths sat in the gunroom, while Rogers poured for both of them. ‘The teat of consolation,
annwyl
,' said Griffiths gently, seeing the look in Drinkwater's eyes. ‘Santhonax is at Kosseir.'

‘Ah,' Drinkwater replied listlessly. The rum reached his belly, uncoiling the tension in him. He stretched his legs and felt them encounter something soft. Looking under the table he saw Bruilhac curled like a puppy and fast asleep.

‘He still has all his fingers.'

Drinkwater looked at Griffiths and wondered if the commander knew in what appalling taste his jest was. Griffiths could not yet have seen the casualty list.

‘He's lucky,' was all he said in reply.

On the afternoon of 10th August it seemed that Santhonax had surprised them. Anxious glasses trained astern at the two ships foaming up from the southward while
Hellebore
staggered under a press of canvas in a desperate claw to windward and safety. The leading pursuer was indisputably a frigate. Optimists claimed it was
Fox
, the more cautious Griffiths assumed the worst. Bruilhac had told them of a third ship in Santhonax's squadron, for whom
Hellebore
had been taken by the officers of
La Torride
. He was not to be caught by the same ruse. ‘Let the wrecks of others be your seamarks, Mr Drinkwater,' he said without removing his eye from the long glass.

‘She's tacking.' They watched the leading ship come up into the wind, saw her foresails flatten and the swing of the mainyards. As she paid off, the foreyards followed suit and the bright spots of bunting showed from her mastheads.

‘British colours and Admiral Blankett's private signal, sir,' reported Rogers. Her exposed side revealed her as
Fox
.

‘It seems you were right, Mr Drinkwater,' said Griffiths drily. Keeping his men at quarters the commander put
Hellebore
before the wind and ran down towards his pursuers. They proved to be
Fox
and
Daedalus
, sent north by Rear-Admiral Blankett who had taken sufficient alarm from Strangford Wrinch to despatch Captains Stuart and Ball without seeing the necessity to come himself and thus forgo the carnal delights of Mr Wrinch's hospitality.

Griffiths was summoned on board for a council of war, the outcome of which was to attack Kosseir, destroy Santhonax and open the port to traffic from the Hejaz. French defeat would not only result in an improvement to the Meccans able to join Murad Bey, but would enable the British to pre-empt any French attempt upon India the following year. Returning from the meeting Griffiths also brought back personal news.

A replacement for
Echo
had joined the squadron. The ship-sloop
Hotspur
had brought out mail, news and orders. The latter included a tersely worded instruction that
Hellebore
was to be
returned at once to England. Nelson, the author of her present predicament was, it seemed, in disgrace. His euphoric languishing at Naples after Aboukir had been tarnished by the Caraccioli affair and followed by a leisurely return home by way of a circuitous route through Europe during which his conduct with the wife of the British Ambassador to the court of the Two Sicilies was scandalous.

Drinkwater paid scant attention to this gossip, depressed by the realisation that
Hotspur
had brought no letters from Elizabeth. Then Griffiths swiftly recalled him to the present.

‘Oh, by the way, Nathaniel,
Hotspur
brought two lieutenants to the station. One is appointed to
Daedalus
and he wished to be remembered to you. He was insistent I convey his felicitations to you.'

An image of the ruddy and diminutive White formed in his mind. Perhaps White had news of Elizabeth! But he checked this sudden hope on the recollection that White would not exchange the quarterdeck of
Victory
for an obscure frigate in an even more obscure corner of the world without an epaulette on his shoulder.

‘The gentleman's name sir?'

‘A Welsh one,
bach
. Morris if I recollect right.'

A strong presentiment swept over Drinkwater. From the moment he had jestingly suggested shooting off Bruilhac's fingers and found Quilhampton handless, Providence seemed to have deserted him. The strain of weary months of service manifested itself in this feeling. His worries for Elizabeth stirred his own loneliness. It was a disease endemic among seamen and fate lent it a further twist when he recalled the words Morris had uttered to him years earlier.

Drinkwater had been instrumental in having Mr Midshipman Morris turned out of the frigate
Cyclops
where he had dominated a coterie of bullying sodomites. Morris had threatened revenge even at the earth's extremities. Suddenly Drinkwater seemed engulfed in a web from which he could not escape. The revelation that Dalziell was related to Morris made months earlier seemed now to preface his present apprehension.

On the morning of 14th August 1799 in light airs the brig of war
Hellebore
led Captain Henry Lidgbird Ball's squadron slowly into Kosseir Bay. The indentation of the coast was formed by a headland,
a small fort and a mole which protected a large number of native craft gathered inside. More dhows lay anchored in the inner roadstead. Above the fort the tricolour floated listlessly. Of the frigate of Edouard Santhonax there was no sign.

Griffiths swore as he paced up and down the quarterdeck, one ear cocked to hear the leadsman's chant from the chains. Whilst the taking of the dhows and fort were of importance to Ball, only the destruction of Santhonax would satisfy Griffiths.

The men waited round the guns, the sail-trimmers at their stations. Lestock fussed over a rudimentary chart he had copied from
Fox
's as
Hellebore
picked her way slowly inshore. Drinkwater stared at the town through his glass. It was past noon with the sun burning down on them from almost overhead. Drinkwater indicated the dhows.

‘Santhonax's fleet of transports, I believe sir.' He handed the glass to Griffiths. The commander swept the yellow shoreline shimmering under the glare. He nodded. ‘But that
cythral
Santhonax is nowhere to be seen.' Griffiths cast a glance about him. ‘Strike number five the instant the leadsman finds six fathoms, the closer in we get the greater the risk of coral outcrops.'

As if to justify Griffiths's concern
Hellebore
trembled slightly. Griffiths and Drinkwater exchanged glances but even the jittery Lestock seemed not to have noticed the tremor. The leadsman allayed their fears: ‘By the mark seven . . . by the deep eight . . . a quarter less eight!'

Hellebore
crept onward. ‘By the deep six!'

‘Strike number five! Braces there! Main topsail to the mast!' The red and white chequered numeral flag fluttered to the deck and the brig lost way as the main yards braced round to back their sails. She ceased her forward motion.

‘Let go!' The anchor dropped with a splash as the first gun boomed out from the fort. Unhurriedly the three British ships clapped springs on their cables and traversed to bring their full broadsides on the wretched town. The fire from the fort ceased, as though the gunners, having tried the range, paused to see what the British would do.