1805 (12 page)

‘I think there's the reason for the activity, sir,' said Fraser pointing above the town. ‘I'll wager that's the Emperor himself.'

Drinkwater swung his glass and levelled it where Fraser pointed. Into the circle of the lens came an unforgettable image of a man in a grey coat, sitting on a white horse and wearing a large black tricorne hat. The man had a glass to his eye and was staring directly at the British frigate as it swept past him. As he lowered his own glass, Drinkwater could just make out the blur of Napoleon's face turning to one of his suite behind him.

‘Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor o' the French,' muttered Fraser beside him. ‘He looks a wee bit like Don Quixote . . . Don Quixote
de la Manche
 . . .'

Fraser's pun was lost in the roar of the batteries of Boulogne as they reopened their fire upon the insolent British frigate. Shot screamed all round them. Hill was demanding they haul further offshore and Rogers was asking for permission to re-engage. He nodded at both officers.

‘Very well, gentlemen, if you would be so kind.' He turned for a final look at the man on the white horse, but he had vanished,
obscured by the glittering train of his staff as they galloped away. ‘The gale has done our work for us,' he muttered to himself, ‘for the time being.'

‘Will you damned lubbers put your backs into it and
pull
!'

Midshipman Lord Walmsley surveyed the launch's crew with amiable contempt and waved a scented handkerchief under his nose. He stood in the stern sheets of the big boat in breeches and shirt, trying to combat the airless heat of the day and urge his oarsmen to more strenuous efforts. Out on either beam Midshipmen Dutfield and Wickham each had one of the quarter-boats and all three were tethered to the
Antigone
. At the ends of their towropes the boats slewed and splashed, each oarsman dipping his oar into the ripples of his last stroke, so that their efforts seemed utterly pointless. The enemy lugger after which they were struggling lay on the distant horizon.

Walmsley regarded his companion with a superior amusement. Sitting with his little hand on the big tiller was Gillespy, supposedly under Walmsley's tutoring and utterly unable to exhort the men.

‘It is essential, Gillespy, to encourage greater effort from these fellows,' his lordship lectured, indicating the sun-burnt faces that puffed and grunted, two to a thwart along the length of the launch. ‘You can't do it by squeaking at 'em and you can't do it by asking them. You have to bellow at the damned knaves. Call 'em poxy laggards, lazy land-lubbing scum; then they get so God-damned angry that they pull those bloody oar looms harder. Don't you see? Eh?'

‘Yes . . . my Lord,' replied the unfortunate Gillespy who was quite under Walmsley's thumb, isolated as he was in the launch.

The lesson in leadership was greeted with a few weary grins from the men at the oars, but few liked Mr Walmsley and those that were not utterly uncaring from the monotony of their task and being constantly abused by the senior midshipman of their division, resented his arrogance. Of all the men in the boat there was one upon whom Walmsley's arrogant sarcasm acted like a spark upon powder.

At stroke oar William Waller laboured as an able seaman. A year earlier he had been master of the Greenland whale-ship
Conqueror
, a member of the Trinity House of Kingston-upon-Hull and engaged in a profitable trade in whale-oil, whale-bone and the smuggling of furs from Greenland to France where they were used to embellish the
gaudy uniforms of the soldiers they had so recently been cannonading upon the cliffs of Boulogne. It had been this illicit trade that had reduced him to his present circumstances. He had been caught red-handed engaged in a treasonable trade with a French outpost on the coast of Greenland by Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater.

Although well aware that he could have been hanged for what he had done, Waller was a weak and cunning character. That he had escaped with his life due to Drinkwater's clemency had at first seemed fortunate, but as time passed his present humiliations contrasted unfavourably with his former status. His guilt began to diminish in his own eyes as he transferred responsibility for it to his partner who had been architect of the scheme and had died for it. The greater blame lay with the dead man and Waller was, in his own mind, increasingly a victim of regrettable circumstances. When he had been turned among them, many of
Melusine
's hands had been aware of his activities. They had shunned him and despised him, but Waller had held his peace and survived, being a first-rate seaman. But he had kept his own counsel, a loner among the gregarious seamen of his mess, and long silences had made him morose, driven him to despair at times. He had been saved by the transfer to the
Antigone
and a bigger ship's company. Among the pressed and drafted men who had increased the size of the ship's company to form the complement of a frigate, there had been those who knew nothing of his past. He had taught a few ignorant landsmen the rudiments of seamanship and there were those among the frigate's company that called him friend. He had drawn renewed confidence from this change in his circumstances. He let it be known among his new companions that he was well-acquainted with the business of navigation and that many of
Antigone
's junior officers were wholly without knowledge of their trade. In particular Lord Wamlsley's studied contempt for the men combined with his rank and ignorance to make him an object of the most acute detestation to Waller.

On this particular morning, as Waller hauled wearily at the heavy loom of the stroke oar, his hatred of Walmsley reached its crisis. He muttered under his breath loudly enough for Walmsley and Gillespy to hear.

‘Did you say something, Waller?'

Waller watched the blade of his oar swing forward, ignoring his lordship's question.

‘I asked you what you said, Waller, damn you!'

Waller continued to pull steadily, gazing vaguely at the horizon.

‘He didn't say nothing, sir,' the man occupying the same thwart said.

‘I didn't ask you,' snapped Walmsley, fixing his eyes on Waller. ‘This lubber, Mr Gillespy, needs watching. He was formerly the
skipper
of a damned whale-
boat
 . . .' Walmsley laid a disparaging emphasis on the two words, ‘a bloody merchant master who thought he could defy the King. And now God damn him he thinks he can defy you and I . . .'

Waller stopped rowing. The man behind him bumped into his stationary back and there was confusion in the boat.

‘Give way, damn you!' Walmsley ordered, his voice low. Beside him little Gillespy was trembling. The oarsmen stopped rowing and the launch lost way.

‘Go to the devil, you poxed young whoreson!' Waller snarled through clenched teeth. A murmur of approval at Waller's defiance ran through the boat's crew.

‘Why you God-damn bastard!' Walmsley shoved Gillespy aside and pulled the heavy tiller from the rudder stock. In a single swipe he brought the piece of ash crashing into the side of Waller's skull, knocking him senseless, his grip on the oar-loom weakened and it swept up and struck him under the chin as he slumped into the bottom of the boat.

The expression on the faces of the launch's crew were of disbelief. Astern of them the towline drooped slackly in the water.

Drinkwater sat in the cool of his cabin re-reading a letter he had recently received from his wife Elizabeth, to see if he had covered all the points raised in it in his reply. The isolation of command had made the writing of his private journal and the committing of his thoughts to his letters an important and pleasurable part of his daily routine. Cruising so close to the English coast meant that Keith's ships were in regular contact with home via the admiral's dispatch-vessels. In addition to fresh vegetables and mail, these fast craft kept the frigates well supplied with newspapers and gossip. The hired cutter
Admiral Mitchell
had made such a delivery the day before.

He laid the letter down and picked up the new steel pen Elizabeth had sent him, dipping it experimentally in the ink-pot and regarding its rigid nib with suspicion. He pulled the half-filled sheet of paper towards him and resumed writing, not liking the awkward scratch and splatter of the nib compared with his goosequill, but aware that he would be expected to reply using the new-fangled gift.

Our presence in the Channel keeps Boney and his troops in their camps. Last week he held a review, lining his men up so that they presented an appearance several miles long
 . . .

He paused, not wishing to alarm Elizabeth, though from her letters he knew of the arrangements each parish was making to raise an invasion alarm and call out the militia and yeomanry.

It is said that Boney himself went afloat in a gilded barge and that he dismissed Admiral Bruix for attempting to draw a sword on him when he protested the folly of trying an embarkation in the teeth of a gale. What the truth of these rumours is I do not know, but it is certain that many men were drowned and some score or so of barges wrecked
.

He picked up his pen and finished the letter, then he sanded, folded and sealed it. Mullender came into the cabin and, at a nod from Drinkwater, poured him a glass of wine. He leaned back contented. Beyond the cabin windows the Channel stretched blue, calm and glorious under sunshine. Through the stern windows the reflected light poured, dancing off the deckhead and bulkheads of the cabin and falling on the portraits of his family that hung opposite. He became utterly lost in the contemplation of his family.

His reverie was interrupted by a shouting on deck and a hammering at his cabin door.

Drinkwater sat in his best uniform, flanked by Lieutenant Rogers and Lieutenant Fraser. The black shapes of their three hats sat on the baize tablecloth, inanimate indications of formality. Before them, uncovered, stood Midshipman Lord Walmsley. Drinkwater looked at the notes he had written after examining Midshipman Gillespy. The boy had been terrified but Drinkwater and his two lieutenants had obtained the truth out of him, unwilling to make matters worse by having to consult individual members of the boat's crew. Gillespy had withdrawn now, let out before Walmsley was summoned to hear the surgeon's report.

Drinkwater had once entertained some hopes of the midshipman but this episode disgusted him. He himself had no personal feelings towards Waller beyond a desire to see him behave as any other pressed seaman on board and to see him treated as such. Walmsley knew of Waller's previous circumstances and Drinkwater assumed that this had led to his contemptuous behaviour.

He looked up at the young man. Walmsley did not appear unduly concerned about the formality of the present proceedings. Drinkwater recollected his acquaintance with Camelford and wondered if
Camelford's presence had set a portfire to this latent insolence and arrogance of Walmsley.

The silence of waiting hung heavily in the cabin. Following the incident in the launch, Drinkwater had had the boats hoisted inboard. Their progress to the west was no longer necessary since their chase, a lugger holding a breeze inshore, had long ago disappeared to the south-west. There was a knock at the door.

‘Enter!'

‘Come in, Mr Lallo. Pray take a seat and tell us what is the condition of Waller.'

The surgeon, a quiet, middle-aged man whose only vice seemed to be a messy reliance upon Sharrow's snuff, seated himself, sniffed and looked at Drinkwater. His didactic manner prompted Drinkwater to add: ‘In words we all comprehend, if you please, Mr Lallo.'

Mr Lallo sniffed again. ‘Well, sir,' he began, casting a meaningful look at the back of Lord Walmsley, ‘the man Waller has taken a severe and violent blow with a heavy object . . .'

‘A tiller,' put in Rogers impatiently.

‘Just so, Mr Rogers. With a tiller, which has caused an aneurism . . . a distortion of the arteries and interrupted the flow of blood to the cere . . . to the brain . . .'

‘You mean Waller's had a stroke?'

Lallo looked resentfully at Rogers and nodded. ‘In effect, yes. He is reduced to the condition of an idiot.'

Drinkwater felt the particular meaning of the word in its real form. That Waller and his treason were no longer of any consequence struck him as an irony, but that a midshipman should have reduced him to that state by an over-indulgence of his authority was a reflection of his own powers of command. Drinkwater did not share Earl St Vincent's conviction that the men should respect a midshipman's coat if the object within was not worthy of their duty. He had always considered the training of his midshipmen a prime responsibility. With Walmsley he had failed. It did not matter that he had inherited his lordship from another captain. Nor, he reflected, could he hope that the processes of naval justice might redress something of the balance. The arrogance of well-connected midshipmen was nothing new in the navy, nor was the whitewashing of their guilt by courts-martial.