The Shadow of the Eagle (28 page)

The cumulo-nimbus cloud moved towards them like a mythological creature; potent and awe-inspiring. Drinkwater had no idea of its altitude, indeed he was unable to see the distant anvil-shaped thunder head which was torn from its summit by the strong winds of the upper-atmosphere; nor did he know of the movement of air and moisture within it that made of it a cauldron seething at the temperature ice formed. What concerned him was the wind he knew it would generate at sea level, and the hail that might, in the next quarter of an hour, hit them with the force of buckshot.

Then, as if to signal an intelligence of its own, the thundercloud gave notice of its presence to the less observant men on
Andromeda’s
deck. It was riven from top to bottom by a great flash as the differences in electrical charge within the cloud sought resolution. The sudden, instantaneous illumination galvanized the men into sudden, furious action and within minutes
Andromeda’s
topgallants were off her before the first erratic gusts of the squall arrived; then it was upon them in unremitting fury, producing a high-pitched whine in the rigging as the full force of the wind struck them.

‘Steady there,’ Drinkwater said, striding across the deck to brace himself alongside the helmsmen, ‘ease her if you have to, Quartermaster.’

The frigate heeled to the onslaught and began to accelerate rapidly through the water which foamed along her lee rail. The sea was almost flat; the earlier rain had done its work and now hailstones beat its surface with a roar.
Andromeda
raced through the water so that even Ashton was moved to comment.

‘My God, sir,’ he said, coming up to Drinkwater, ‘she’s reeling off the knots as if pursued by all the devils in hell!’ He laughed wildly, caught up in the excitement of the moment as, with a tremendous thunderclap, lightning darted all about them and the retina was left with a stark impression of wet and drawn faces about the wheel, sodden ropes and the lines of caulking in the blanched planking. Even the streaks of a million hailstones as they drummed a furious tattoo on the deck remained, it seemed, indelibly impressed upon the brain. So vivid was this brief vision that the quarterdeck seemed inhabited by more ghosts, and Drinkwater shivered as much from the supernatural moment as the cold drenching he was undergoing.

Circumstances remained thus for some twenty minutes, with the ship driving to the north-east, her helm having been eased up to let her run off before the wind a little and ease the strain on the gear aloft, for she still carried her full topsails, fore topmast staysail and spanker. Periodically illuminated by lightning and assaulted by thunder,
Andromeda
ran headlong. After the first moments of apprehension, the glee infecting Ashton had spread to the men at the helm and a quiet chuckling madness gripped them all. The excitement of their speed was undeniable and their spirits rose as the hail eased and then stopped.

As the huge cloud passed over them, it took the wind with it. The first sign of this moderation was a slow righting of the ship, so that while she still heeled over, the angle at which the deck canted eased imperceptibly back towards the horizontal. And it was at this moment that the frigate was visited by the corposant.

It began imperceptibly, so that the watchers thought they were imagining it and made no comment lest their mates thought they had taken leave of their senses; then, as it grew brighter they looked at each other, and saw their faces lit by the strange glow. Out along the yards and up the topgallant masts the greenish luminescence grew, stretching down towards the deck along the stays and lying along the iron cranes of the hammock nettings so that
Andromeda
assumed, in the wastes of the North Atlantic Ocean, the appearance of some faery ship.

The weird glow had about it an unearthly quality which was almost numinous in its effect upon those who observed it, silencing the brief outburst of loquacious wonder which it had initially prompted. Here was something no man could explain, though some had seen it before and knew it for St Elmo’s fire. Some it touched personally, sending crackling sensations up the napes of their necks, making their hair stand on end and in a few cases glow with the pale fire of embryonic haloes. All smelt the dry, sharp stink of electrical charge, and as the display slowly faded, a babble of comment broke from the watching men, officers and ratings alike, an indiscriminate wonder at what they had all seen.

Ashton seemed to throw off his peevishness and was unable to resist the temptation to discuss the phenomenon with Midshipman Dunn, while the men at the wheel, kept usually silent by the quartermaster in charge of them, chattered like monkeys. The remainder of the watch, settling down again after their exertions, speculated and marvelled amongst themselves in a ground-swell of conversation.

Isolated by rank and precedent, Drinkwater found himself refreshed as though by a long sleep. Afterwards, he attributed this invigoration to the electrical charge in the air which had been palpable. More significant, however, was the effect it had upon his mental processes. Hardly had the wonder passed and the quiet nocturnal routine settled itself again upon the ship, than his racing mind had latched on to something new.

Gone were the morbid preoccupations of earlier; gone were the complex doubts about the propriety of his course of action, of his conniving to get Prince William Henry to sanction it. Gone, too, was the gloomy, fateful conviction of his own impending doom. He shook off the weight of the dead ghosts he had borne with him for so long. James Quilhampton’s was not a vengeful spirit, and the earlier manifestations of Elizabeth and Hortense were exhortations to greater endeavours, not the harbingers of doom!

This train of thought passed through his mind in a second. Having settled in his mind the eventual, anticipated arrival of
Gremyashchi
and the Antwerp squadron, he was now stimulated by a strange optimism.

He found himself already considering how, when he met Count Rakov and his unholy allies, he might handle
Andromeda
to the best advantage and perhaps inflict sufficient damage before surrendering, to prevent them accomplishing their fell intent.

He was still on deck at dawn, though he had been fast asleep for three hours, caught by a turn of the mizen topgallant clewline around his waist, a dark, bedraggled figure whose hat was tip-tilted down over one shut eye, who yet commanded in this dishevelled state the distant respect of those who came and went upon the quarterdeck of His Britannic Majesty’s frigate
Andromeda
as she cruised to the north of the islands of Flores and Corvo.

Nor did he wake when the daylight lit the eastern horizon and the cry went through the ship that three sails were in sight to leeward.

CHAPTER 15 
First Blood

May 1814

Sergeant McCann was woken as
Andromeda
heeled violently under the onslaught of the squall. He had turned in early, eschewing the company of the corporals, increasingly isolated by his obsessions. His messmates and privates, gaming or yarning about him, reacted to the sudden list of the ship by putting up an outcry, taken up by the adjacent midshipmen so that the orlop bore a brief resemblance to a bear-pit until word came down from the upper-deck that the ship had been struck by a heavy gust of wind and the noise gradually subsided. It had, however, been sufficient to wake McCann from the deep sleep into which he had fallen shortly before.

Now he lay wide awake, the edge taken off his tiredness, his heart beating, staring into the Stygian gloom. Like Captain Drinkwater’s cabin two decks above him, Sergeant McCann’s accommodation was inhabited by ghosts, but unlike his commander’s visitation, which had been on the edge of consciousness, McCann could summon his mother and sister almost at will; and unlike Captain Drinkwater he could not pace the quarterdeck to escape his delusions. Instead he embraced himself in his hammock and once again let the sensation of waste and failure flood his entire being.

In the days they had lain off the Azores, Sergeant McCann’s self-loathing had eclipsed the affront he had felt at Ashton’s double insult. Instead he had convinced himself that if he were neither a Yankee nor a bugger, he was something worse: he was a coward. Looking back upon his worthless life, he saw that he had always taken the path of least resistance, a path the politics of his parents had set him on. He realized his loyalism had not been based on any personal conviction but was an inherited condition, and while he had given his oath to the king as a provincial officer, it had been as much to revenge himself upon those who had despoiled him of his natural inheritance, rather than out of any principle towards the crown and parliament on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. Recalling the homespun battalions confronting the British regular and provincial troops across the Brandywine, he realized he had always had more in common with them than the rough infantrymen and their haughty officers, or the poor benighted Hessian peasants and their red-faced and drunken
junkers.

In contrast, on the exposed deck above the unhappy McCann, his tormentor, Lieutenant Ashton, was undergoing a transformation. The wild schemes born out of his anger were washed out of him by the squall and the visitation of St Elmo’s fire. But Sergeant McCann enjoyed no such liberation. His preoccupations were deeper rooted and the springs of his being were wound tighter and tighter by his misery. Having set it aside for so long he found he was no longer able to forsake his past, unable to detach it from the present, and subconsciously ensured it was to influence the future.

Eventually, in common with all those in the gloomy orlop, Sergeant McCann fell asleep, awaiting the events of the dawn.

Lieutenant Frey woke Drinkwater who was stiff and uncomprehending for a moment or two, until the import of Frey’s news struck him.

‘Do you lend me your glass,’ Drinkwater urged, holding out his hand. Grasping the telescope Drinkwater hauled himself up into the mizen rigging, the mauled muscles of his shoulder aching rheumatically after the exposure of the night. Drinkwater’s hands were shaking as he focused the glass, as much from apprehension as from cold and cramp, but there was no denying the three sails that were, as yet, hull-down to the eastward. And while it was too early to distinguish one of them as the
Gremyashchi,
he already knew in his chilled bones that among them was the Russian frigate.

For a long moment Drinkwater hung in the rigging studying the three ships, estimating their course and guessing their speed. He was computing a course for
Andromeda,
by which he might intercept the ‘enemy’ in conformity with the idea he had hatched during the night. He could not call it a plan, for to lay a plan depended upon some certainties, and there were no certainties in his present situation. He doubted if
Andromeda,
against the darker western sky, had yet been seen by the strangers, but it would not be long before she was, for Rakov would have warned
Contre-Amiral
Lejeune of the presence of the British ship. Drinkwater turned, Frey’s face was uplifted in anticipation.

‘Wear ship, Mr Frey, and lay her on a course of south-east; set all plain sail and the weather stun’s’ls. Be so kind as to turn up all hands and have them sent to break their fasts. We will clear for action at eight bells, after the ship’s company have been fed.’

‘Aye, aye, sir!’

Drinkwater was almost ashamed of the gleam his words kindled in Frey’s eyes. He jumped down on to the deck and, leaving Frey to handle
Andromeda,
went in search of Frampton, some hot water and his razor. Meanwhile the word of impending action passed rapidly through the ship. Between decks she sizzled with a sudden stirring as the watches below were turned out, to dress, bundle up their hammocks and stow them in the nettings on the upper deck while the complaining cook flashed up the galley range and cauldrons of water went on for burgoo. In the wardroom the officers rummaged in their chests for clean linen, the better to ward off infection if they were wounded; in the cockpit the midshipmen unhooked their toy dirks from the hooks on the deck-beams above their heads, and chattered excitedly. Even Mr Paine, for whom the last few days had been a humiliating ordeal, livened at the prospect of being able to prove himself a man in the changed circumstances of an action. In the marine’s mess, the private soldiers quietly donned cross-belts and gaiters, while a corporal checked the musket flints in the arms racks; Sergeant McCann dressed with particular care, and sent the messman forward to the carpenter with his sword and the instruction to hone it to a fine edge. He also carefully checked the pair of pistols which were his private property and the last vestige of his former employment as a provincial officer.

As the watches below assembled at the tables on the gun-deck to receive their hot burgoo, a black, gallows humour was evident, containing less wit than obscenity, more readily endured by those at whom it was aimed than would normally have been the case under ordinary circumstances, for by such means was courage invoked.

‘Jemmy,’ one wag shouted across the deck, ‘you’ll get your pox cured today, if you’re lucky!’

To which the rotting Jemmy swiftly replied, ‘Aye, you cherry, an’ you may never get the chance to catch it!’ This grim exchange provoked a general mirth, broken only by the order to relieve the watch on deck and the subsequent pipe of ‘Up spirits!’

After this necessary ritual, the marine drummer ruffled his snare and beat them all to quarters, at which the bulkheads came down aft, and Drinkwater’s insubstantial private quarters metamorphosed into an extension of the gun-deck. All along the deck, the tables had vanished, whisked away like a conjuring trick, giving a prominence to the bulky black guns. The breechings were cast off and the cannon moved inboard from their secure, stowed positions with their muzzles lashed hard up against the lintels of the gun-ports. Their crews ministered to them, clearing the train-tackles, worming the barrels and checking the firing-lanyards and flints of the gun-locks. On the upper deck the carronades and chase guns were cleared away; Hyde held a swift parade of his marines and sent them to their posts. Then Drinkwater called all the officers to the port hance from where he was watching the three strange sails.