Ebb Tide (28 page)

'Where the hell did you get to?' Drinkwater asked.

'The devil...' Edward retorted, but his explanation was cut short. Drinkwater felt the ball strike the boat through the body of his brother. Over Edward's shoulder, he saw a hussar lower his carbine and reload.

Now that the boat was clear of their field of fire, the swivels aboard
Kestrel
opened up again behind them, the shot buzzing past overhead as Drinkwater lunged aft to grab Edward.

'Hold on, Ned! Hold on!' A thick red stream ran astern of the boat.

'Too late, Nat. My back's shot through.' He looked up and Drinkwater saw the last flicker of the departing soul. 'No trouble ... to you now ...' he gasped as he relinquished his grasp upon the boat and upon life itself. Drinkwater tenaciously clung on to his brother as he was once more pulled alongside
Kestrel.
Ned was dead before they reached the cutter's side, but they dragged his body aboard and laid him in the scuppers.

'Are you all right, sir?' Frey asked as Drinkwater almost fell over
Kestrel's 
low gunwale on to the deck, while a last carbine ball whined overhead.

'Yes, yes.' He looked down at Edward. The eyes were already glazed, opaque. 'Poor fellow', he sighed, as he bent down and closed the lids. Then he stood and looked at Frey. 'Do you get under weigh now, Mr Frey.'

'Those devils have given up now,' Frey said matter-of-factly, jerking his head at the shore. Drinkwater turned to see the hussars tugging their mounts' heads round and turning away. Several of the horses had bodies slung over their saddles. One, that of the Cossack nicknamed Khudoznik, lay exposed by the retreating tide.

'You need to dry yourself, sir,' Frey advised, 'you look blue with cold.'

'What's that? Oh... oh, yes, I suppose I am a trifle...' Drinkwater realized he was chilled to the marrow and quite done in. He stared again at Edward's body, reluctant to leave it. 'We'll take him home and bury him,' he said to Frey, as he moved on shaky legs towards the companionway.

'It's a long way from Russia,' Frey remarked. 'Yes. But perhaps that does not matter too much.'

CHAPTER 13
The Chase

April 1815

'Out of the frying pan, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater said, lowering the glass. Astern of them, the sharply angled sail of a lugger broke the line of the horizon with a jagged irregularity as the French
chasse marée
came up, carrying the wind with her. Seven miles further north
Kestrel
experienced nothing more than a light breeze. 'Almost the only circumstances', Drinkwater muttered angrily, 'which could place us at a real disadvantage.'

Frey turned from his place by the tiller as Drinkwater looked aloft, but they had every stitch of canvas set and no amount of tweaking at the sheets would improve their speed. Drinkwater cast about him. 'They must have slipped past
Adder.
At any other time we might have expected a British cruiser in the offing but all we have in sight at the moment are a couple of fishermen...'

He raised his glass again. It was damnably uncanny. The lugger was carrying the wind with her, sweeping up from the south, and would be quite close before they felt the benefit of it themselves. He looked at Frey. A brief glance was enough to tell him that he was seething at their ill-fortune. He would be dog-tired now after a sleepless night, as were the rest of them, Drinkwater himself included. Poor Frey,
Kestrel
was a pathetic enough command; to lose her to the enemy like this would be a worse blow to his pride than the loss of the yacht to Drinkwater!

Perhaps there was something they might do, though. 'I'm going below for a few moments, Mr Frey.' 'Aye, aye, sir.'

In the cabin the Baroness and her daughter were fast asleep, wrapped in blankets while their outer garments dried in the rigging above. The boy Charles lay on the settee awake, his face pale with seasickness, his eyes huge and tired. Drinkwater smiled, trying to convey reassurance to the young lad. He smiled wanly back at him. 'That's the spirit,' Drinkwater said, helping himself to some cheese, biscuits and wine as he drew out a chart and studied it. 'Help yourself,' he offered, indicating the wine and biscuits and hoping the lad would remain below and not get wind of their pursuer.

After about ten minutes of plying dividers and rules, Drinkwater stuffed the chart away, pulled his hat down over his head and went up on deck. Striding aft he relieved Frey.

'Go and try to get some sleep, there's a good fellow. You need it and we may have work to do in an hour or two.'

'I don't give much for our chances, sir. At the very least he'll have twice our numbers, and we made enough of a display of ourselves outside Calais to call down the vengeance of heaven. I don't suppose the deaths of half a dozen cavalrymen endeared us to them either.'

'Very well put, Mr Frey. Now do as I ask while I try and devise a stratagem.'

'Do you think...?'

'Don't ask me.'

Reluctantly Frey handed over the tiller and the course. Drinkwater leaned his weight against the heavy wooden bar. 'I'm going to alter a little to the westwards. Now do you go below for an hour. I shall call you well before things get too lively. Stand half the men down too.'

Frey went forward and some of the men on deck drifted below.
Kestrel
was just feeling the wind picking up and began to slip through the water with increasing speed, as though she felt a tremor of fear at the approach of the large, three-masted lugger coming up astern.

Drinkwater steadied the cutter on her new course and settled himself to concentrate upon his task. The satisfactions in steering were profound. The sense of being in control of something almost living struck him and he recalled that he had forgotten so much of what had once been familiar as he had risen to the lonely peak of command. He made a resolution not to look astern for half an hour. It was difficult at first, but the glances of the others on deck, increasing in frequency and length, told him the lugger was gaining on them so that, when the thirty minutes had passed, he turned, expecting to see the lugger's bowsprit almost over their stern. Though she was still some way off, two miles distant perhaps, she was no longer alone.

Now he could see a second lugger behind her, five miles away or maybe more, but close enough to spell disaster if his half-germinated plan miscarried. He resolved to wait twenty minutes before he looked again and set himself to reworking the hurried and imperfect calculations he had made below.

He now discovered a greater anxiety, that of wishing to see the chart, to re-measure the distances and make the tidal estimates again. It was easy enough to make a silly error, to rely upon a misunderstanding only to find that the stratagem, which was shaky enough as it was, would misfire and carry them to disaster. And then, with a forceful irony, a thought struck him.
Kestrel
was his own property and he might do with her as he pleased. He would not have to answer at his peril and so was free of one constraint at least, thank heavens!

He began to stare ahead and study the surface of the sea, to try and discern the almost invisible signs of the shoals, where the tide ran in a different direction and at a slower speed. The mewing gulls had a good view of these natural seamarks and he looked up to see the herring gulls gliding alongside, their cruel yellow beaks and beady eyes evidence of their predatory instincts. But they were lazy hunters; he was looking for more active birds fishing on the edge of the bank ahead.

He saw the first tern almost immediately, flying along with a sprat or some small fry silver in its red beak, and then another diving to starboard of them, under the foot of the mainsail. He craned his neck and stared intently over the port bow. As he did so a man forward rose and peered ahead, aware of Drinkwater's concern. A moment later more terns could be seen and then his experienced eye made out the troubled water along the submarine ledge.

'Sommat ahead, sir, looks like a bank...'

'It's the Longsand! Take a cast of the lead.'

Alongside the rushing hull the sea ran dark and grey, dulled by the cloud sweeping up and over the blue of the sky. The sounding lead yielded seven fathoms and then suddenly it was only three and they passed through a strip of white foam, dead in the water like the cast from a mill race seen some few hundred yards downstream. As suddenly as it had appeared, the white filigree was gone and the water was brown and smooth, as though whale oil had been cast upon it. Drinkwater knew they were running over the Longsand Head. He counted the seconds as
Kestrel
raced on, her pace seemingly swifter through the dead water on top of the bank.

'By the mark, two!'

Drinkwater felt the keen thrill of exhilaration, his heart fluttering, the adrenalin pouring into his bloodstream. At any moment their keel might strike the sand, and at this speed the impact must toss the mast overboard, but he held on, pitching the risk against the result, until the man in the chains called out 'Three... By the deep four... By the mark five!' and they were over the bank and ahead of them they could just see the low stump of the brick tower daymark on the Naze of Essex. Drinkwater, his knees knocking uncomfortably, altered course a touch and looked astern. His plan had almost worked, but the big lugger had seen the trap just in time and bore away, to run north, round the extremity of the bank, losing ground to the escaping cutter. It was not so very remarkable, for the commander of so large a lugger would know these waters far better than Drinkwater, who was relying upon knowledge learned thirty years earlier in the buoy-yachts of the Trinity House. Nevertheless, they had increased their lead and every mile brought them nearer the English coast and the presence of a British man-o'-war out of Harwich to the north-west of them.

The wind had steadied now, a topsail breeze which, in the lee of the Longsand, drove
Kestrel
homewards with inspiriting speed. Drinkwater forgot his exhaustion in the joy of handling the little cutter and for a few moments scarcely thought about her pursuers until the anxious looks of the men on deck again drew his attention to them. He turned and looked over his shoulder.

The two enemy luggers were closer together now and were setting more sail, clear evidence that they were determined to overhaul
Kestrel
before she made it into Harwich harbour.

'They must know of the quality of our passengers,' he muttered grimly, for this was surely no mere retribution for the death of a handful of hussars or British insolence in the entrance to Calais. And then he recalled the man who had watched them from the extremity of the Calais jetty, and wondered who or what he was and whether he had anything to do with this determined pursuit.

Drinkwater had hoped that he might lure the larger of the two luggers over the Longsand so that she ran aground, and in doing so he had let
Kestrel
sag off to the west a little. With the flood tide now running into the Thames estuary from the north, he had to regain that deliberately sacrificed northing, sailing across the tide while the French luggers already had that advantage from their forced diversion round the seawards extremity of the shoal. There was, however, a further obstacle behind which he would feel safe. If he could hire the luggers on to the Stone Banks, to the east of the Naze, he could shoot north into Harwich through the Medusa Channel.

The idea filled him with fresh hope and he laid a course for the Sunk alarm vessel, lying to her great chain mooring and flying the red ensign of the Trinity House. She lay ahead, with her bow canted slightly across the tide under the influence of the strong southerly breeze. She was a fortuitous seamark and one which the Frenchmen might even attack if they were frustrated in their pursuit of
Kestrel.

For another twenty minutes they ran on, the luggers still gaining slowly, though now heeled under a vast press of canvas. As the range closed, Drinkwater called the crew to their stations for action and Frey, blear-eyed and looking far worse than if he had never slept, staggered out on deck, followed by the boy Charles.

'Send the lad below,' Drinkwater began, but it was too late. The boy had seen the luggers and glimpsed the large tricolours, and his face betrayed his fear.

'It's to be a damned close-run thing, Frey. We might make it into the Medusa Channel, we might not, but I think you had better...'

'You keep the helm, sir, now you have it. I'll send two men aft to trim sheets, then I'll fight the ship,' and without another word Frey swung away to see to the loading of the swivels and the mustering of the men with their small arms.

Drinkwater leaned on the tiller and, as Jago and a man named Cornford came aft, he ordered a little weight taken in on the main-sheet.
Kestrel
dashed through the water and a gleam of sun came through the clouds to turn to silver the spray driving away from the lee bow, making a brief rainbow with its appearance. Looking astern, terns dipped unconcernedly in their wake, while a fulmar quartered the sea in a single swoop. The fulmar caught Drinkwater's eye, swept down and upwards, away across the dark, predatory shape of the luggers' sails, absorbed only in its ceaseless quest for food and quite unaware of the grim game of life and death being played by the men in the three vessels below.

The nearer and larger of the two luggers was driving a bow wave before her that rose almost under her gammon iron. Her sails were stiff as boards and, even at the distance of a mile, Drinkwater could see the three great yards which spread her sails bending under the strain. If only, he thought, if only one would carry away.

But they stood, as did the lighter topsail yards above them, and the Frenchman loomed ever larger as the distance between them shrank and their courses converged. Drinkwater stared forward again and saw the tall lantern mast of the Sunk alarm vessel also growing in size as they rapidly closed the distance. He was aiming
Kestrel's
bowsprit for the bow of the anchored vessel, hoping to draw his pursuer in close enough for him to lose his nerve and bear away again as the tide swept them down on to the alarm vessel. It was an old trick, learned, like so much else he had used recently, in the buoy-yachts a lifetime ago, to determine the position of the alarm vessel's anchor by sailing up-tide of her, when any prudent mariner would pass down-tide, under her stern.