A King's Cutter (18 page)

I cannot escape
, Nathaniel wrote in his journal,
a growing sense of apprehension which is both irrational and defies the precepts of reason, but it is in accord with some basic instincts that are, I suppose, primaeval
. He laid his goosequill down. No one but himself had realised his assailant was not Bolton for they had found the wretch in the inn yard, cramped in the stable straw and he had been taken defending himself with a knife. The sergeant had drawn his own conclusions. Lugged unconscious aboard
Kestrel
, Drinkwater had been powerless to prevent the foot-patrol from beating up Bolton before throwing him into a cell. In the confusion Santhonax had vanished.

Drinkwater sighed. Poor Bolton had been found hanged in his cell the next morning and Drinkwater regretted he had never cleared the man of his own wounding. But
Kestrel
was at sea when he recovered his senses and even then it was some time before the dreams of his delirium separated from the recollection of events.

Drinkwater kept the news of the presence of Santhonax to himself with the growing conviction that they would meet again. Santhonax's presence at Sheerness seemed part of some diabolical design made more sinister by the occurrence of an old dream which had confused the restless sleep of his recovery. The clanking nightmare of drowning beneath a white clad lady had been leant especial terror
by the medusa head that stared down at his supine body. Her face had the malevolent joy of a jubilant Hortense Montholon, the auburn hair writhed to entangle him and his ears were assailed by the cursing voice of Edouard Santhonax. But now, when he awoke from the dream, there was no comforting clanking from
Cyclops
's pumps to chide him for foolish imaginings. Instead he was left with the sense of foreboding.

His wound healed well, though the need to keep active caused many a spasm of pain as the weather continued bad. In a perverse way the prevailing gales were good for
Kestrel
, preventing any grievances becoming too great, submerging individual hatreds in the common misery of unremitting labour. The cold, wet and exhaustion that became part of their lives seemed to blur the edges of perception so that the common experience drove men together and all struggled for the survival of the ship.
Kestrel
was now on blockade duty, that stern and rigorous test of men and ships. Duncan's cutters were his eyes, stationed as close to the Texel as they dared, watching the Dutch naval arsenal of Den Helder just beyond the gap between Noord Holland to the south and the island of Texel to the north.

The channel that lay between the two land masses split into three as it opened into the North Sea, like a trident pointing west. To the north, exit from the haven was by the Molen Gat, due west by the West Gat and southwards, hugging the Holland shore past the fishing village, signal station and battery of Kijkduin, lay the Schulpen Gat.

These three channels pierced the immense danger of the Haak Sand, the Haakagronden that surfaced at low water and upon whose windward edges a terrible surf beat in bad weather. Fierce tides surged through the gattways and, when wind opposed tide, a steep, vicious breaking sea ran in them.

Duncan's cutters lay off the Haakagronden in bad weather, working up the channels when it eased and occasionally entering the shaft of the trident, the Zeegat van Texel, to reconnoitre the enemy. Drinkwater's eyebrows were rimed with salt as he took cross bearings of the mills and church towers that lined the low, grass-fringed dunes of Noord Holland and Texel, a coastline that sometimes seemed to smoke as it seethed behind the spume of the breakers beating upon the pale yellow beach. It was a dreary, dismal coast, possessed of shallows and sandbanks, channels and false leads. The charts were useless and they came to rely on their own experience. Once again Drinkwater became immersed in his profession and, as a
result of their situation, the old intimacy with Griffiths revived. Even the ship's company, still restless over their lack of pay, seemed more settled and Griffiths justified in his suggestion that Bolton might have been a corrupting influence.

Even Appleby had ceased to be so abrasive and was more the jolly, easily pricked surgeon of former times. He and Nathaniel resumed their former relationship and if Griffiths still occasionally appeared remote in the worries of his command and harassed by senior officers safe at anchor in their line-of-battleships, the surgeon was more able to make allowances.

Drinkwater was surprised that in the foul weather and the staleness of the accommodation Griffiths did not succumb to his fever but the continuous demands made upon him did not affect his health.

‘It is often the way,' pronounced Appleby when Drinkwater mentioned it. ‘While the body is under stress it seems able to stand innumerable shocks, as witness men's behaviour in action. But when that stimulus is withdrawn, perhaps I should say eased, the tension in the system, being elastic and at its greatest extension, retracts, drawing in its wake the noxious humours and germs of disease.'

‘You may be right, Harry,' said Drinkwater, amused at the pompous expression on the surgeon's face.

‘May, sirrah? Of course I am right! I was right about Bolton, was I not? I questioned his mental stability and, poof! Suddenly he's off and then, when he's taken he becomes a suicide.' Appleby flicked his fingers.

Drinkwater nodded. ‘Aye Harry, but even you doubted your own prognosis when he did not run earlier. He did leave it to the last minute, even you must admit that.'

‘Nat, my boy,' gloated Appleby the gleam of intellectual triumph in his eyes, ‘one always has to leave suicide until the last minute!'

‘You're just good at guess-work, you damned rogue,' he said, wondering what Appleby would make of his own suspicions and convictions.

‘Oh ho! Is that so?' said Appleby rolling his eyes in mock outrage, his chins quivering. ‘Well my strutting bantam cock listen to old Harry, there's more that I can tell you . . .' He was suddenly serious, with that comic pedagoguish expression that betokened, in Appleby, complete sincerity.

‘I'll back my instinct over trouble in the fleet . . .' Drinkwater looked up sharply.

‘Go on,' he said, content to let Appleby have his head for once.

‘Look, Nat, this cutter's an exception, small ships usually are, but you are well aware to what I refer, the denial of liberty, the shameful arrears of pay, the refusal of many captains to sanction the purchase of fresh food even in port and the general abuses of a significant proportion of our brother officers, these can only have a most undesirable effect.

‘Take the current rate of pay for an able seaman, Nathaniel. It is twenty-four shillings, twelve florins for risking scurvy, pox, typhus, gangrene, not to mention death itself at the hands of the enemy . . . d'you realise that sum was fixed in the days of the Commonwealth . . .' Appleby's indignation was justly righteous. To be truthful Drinkwater did not know that, but he had no time to acknowledge his ignorance before Appleby continued his grim catalogue of grievances.

‘To this you must add the vast disparity of prize money, the short measure given by so many pursers that has added the purser's pound of fourteen ounces to the avoirdupois scale; you must add the abatement of pay when a man is sick or unfit for duty, even if the injury was sustained in the line of that duty; you must add deductions to pay for a chaplain when one is borne on the books, the deductions for Greenwich Hospital and the Chatham Chest . . .' Appleby was becoming more and more strident, counting the items off on his fingers, his chins quivering with passion.

‘And if that were not enough when a man is gricomed by the whores that are the only women he is permitted to lie with, according to usage and custom, he must
pay me
to cure him whilst losing his pay through being unfit!

‘The families of seamen starve in the gutters while their menfolk are incarcerated on board ship, frequently unpaid for years and when they do return home they are as like to be turned over to a ship newly commissioning as occasion demands.

‘I tell you, Nathaniel, these are
not
facts that lie comfortably with the usual canting notions of English liberty and, mark me well, if this war is protracted there will be trouble in the fleet. You cannot fight a spirited enemy who is proclaiming Liberty, Equality and Fraternity with a navy manned by slaves.'

Drinkwater sighed. Appleby was right. There was worse too. As the prime seamen were pressed out of homeward merchant ships the Lord Mayor's men and the quota men filled the Press Tenders, bringing into the fleet not hardened seamen, but the misfits of
society, men without luck but not without intelligence; demagogues, lower deck lawyers; men who saw in the example of France a way to power, to overturn vested interest in the stirring name of the people. With a pot so near the boil, was the purpose and presence of Capitaine Santhonax at Sheerness to stir it a little? The proximity of Sheerness to Tunbridge occurred to him. A feeling of alarm, of duty imperfectly performed, swept over him.

‘Aye, Harry. Happen you are right, though I hope not. It might be a bloody business . . .'

‘Of course, Nat!
When
it comes, not “if”!
When
it comes it could be most bloody, and the authorities behave with crass stupidity. See how they handled that
Culloden
business,' Drinkwater nodded at the recollection but Appleby was still in full flood.

‘Half the admirals are blind. Look how they ridiculed John Clerk of Eldin because he was able to point out how to win battles. Now they all scrabble to fight on his principles. Look how the powdered physicians of the fleet ignored Lind's anti-scorbutic theories, how difficult it was for Douglas to get his cartridges taken seriously. Remember Patrick Ferguson's rifle? Oh, the list of thinking men pointing out the obvious to the establishment is endless . . . what the deuce are you laughing at?'

‘Your inconsistent consistency,' grinned Nathaniel.

‘What the devil d'you mean?'

‘Well you are right, Harry, of course, these things are always the same, the prophet unrecognised in his own land.'

‘So, I'm correct.
I
know that. What's so damned amusing?'

‘But you yourself objected to Sir Sydney Smith meddling in your sick bay, and Sir Sydney has a reputation for an original mind. You are therefore inconsistent with your principles in your own behaviour, whilst being comfortingly consistent with the rest of us mortal men.'

‘Why you damned impertinent puppy!'

Drinkwater dodged the empty tankard that sailed towards his head.

Thus it was that they rubbed along together while things went from bad to worse for British arms. Sir John Jervis evacuated the Mediterranean while Admiral Morard de Galles sailed from Brest with an army embarked for Ireland. That he was frustrated in landing General Hoche and his seasoned troops was a piece of luck undeserved by the British. The south-westerly gale that ruined the enterprise
over Christmas 1796 seemed to the Irish patriot, Wolfe Tone, to deny the existence of a just God, while in the British fleet the gross mismanagement of Lord Bridport and Sir John Colpoys only reduced the morale of the officers and increased the disaffection of the men.

Again only the frigates had restored a little glitter to tarnished British laurels. And that at a heavy price. Pellew, now in the
razée Indefatigable
, in company with
Amazon
off Brest, sighted and chased the
Droits de l'Homme
returning from Ireland. In a gale on a lee shore Pellew forced the French battleship ashore where she was wrecked.
Indefatigable
only escaped by superlative seamanship while
Amazon
failed to claw off and was also wrecked.

In the North Sea, action of even this Pyrrhic kind was denied Admiral Duncan's squadron. Maintaining his headquarters in Yarmouth Roads, where he was in telegraphic communication with London, Duncan kept his inshore frigates off the Texel and his cutters in the gattways through the Haakagronden, as close as his lieutenant-commanders dared be. Duncan's fleet was an exiguous collection of old ships, many of sixty-four guns and none larger than a third rate. The admiral flew his flag in the aptly named
Venerable
.

The Dutch, under Vice-Admiral de Winter, were an unknown force. Memories of Dutch ferocity from King Charles's day lingered still, forgotten the humiliation of losing their fleet to a brigade of French cavalry galloping over the ice in which they were frozen. For like the Spanish they were now the allies of France, but unlike them their country was a proclaimed republic. Republicanism had crossed the Rhine, as Drinkwater had predicted, and the combination of a Franco-Dutch fleet to make another attempt on Ireland was a frightening prospect, given the uneasy state of that unhappy country.

Then, as the wintry weather gave way to milder, springlike days, news of a new kind came. The victory of St Valentine's Day it was called at first, then later the Battle of Cape St Vincent. Jervis had been made an earl and the remarkable, erratic Captain Nelson, having left the line of battle to cut off the Spanish van from escape, had received a knighthood.

The air of triumph even permeated
Kestrel
's crowded little cabin as Griffiths read aloud the creased copy of the Gazette that eventually reached the cutter on her station in the Schulpen Gat. Drinkwater received an unexpected letter.

My Dear Nathaniel
, he read,

I expect you will have heard the news of Old Oak's action of St Valentine's Day but you will be surprised to hear your old friend was involved. We beat up the Dons thoroughly, though I saw very little, commanding a battery of 32's on Victory, into which ship I exchanged last November. You should have been here, Nat. Lord, but what a glorious thing is a fleet action. How I envied you Rodney's action here in '80 and how you must envy us ours! Our fellows were so cool and we raked Salvador del Mundo wickedly. The Dons fought better than I thought them capable of and it was tolerably warm work
 . . .