A King's Cutter

by Richard Woodman

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Harry, come to the point.’

  ‘Do you know what passed between Bolton and Short the afternoon they had their altercation?’

  Drinkwater hesistated. He had not mentioned Bolton’s crime aboard Kestrel. The relish with which the twisted clerk had mentioned it had sickened Nathaniel. He had had no desire to promulgate such gossip. He shook his head. ‘No. Do you?’

  Appleby’s chins quivered in negation. ‘I gather it was some sort of an unpleasant accusation. The point is Nat, and recollect that I spend a great deal of time between decks and am party to much of the rumour that runs about any vessel, the point is that I’d say he was eating himself up.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘His mind is close to the precipice of insanity. I’ve seen it before. He lives in his skull, Nat, a man with a bad conscience.’

  Drinkwater considered what Appleby had said. A ship was no place for a man with something on his mind. ‘You reckon he’s winding himself up, eh?’

  Appleby nodded. ‘Like a clock spring, Nat . . .’

  Drinkwater stood on the Gun Wharf at Sheerness and shivered, watching the boats coming and going, searching for Kestrel’s gig among them. Beside him James Thompson, the purser, stood with the last of his stores. Merrick and Bolton were with him. Drinkwater was anxious to get back on board. The winter afternoon was well advanced and the westerly wind showed every sign of reaching gale force before too long.

  Their refit was completed and they were under orders to join Vice-Admiral Duncan at Yarmouth.

  ‘Here’s the gig now,’ said Thompson and turned to the two mess-men, ‘get that lot into the boat smartly now, you two.’ Drinkwater watched the boat pull in, Mr Hill at the tiller. As soon as it was secure he passed a bundle of charts, the letters and newspapers to the master’s mate. Then he stood back while a brace of partridges, some cheeses, cabbages, an exchanged cask of pork and some other odds and ends were lowered into the boat.

  ‘Bulman completed watering this afternoon, Mr Drinkwater,’ volunteered Hill.

  Drinkwater nodded. Thompson looked at Drinkwater. ‘That’s it, then.’

  ‘Very well, James, let’s get on board before this lot breaks,’ he nodded to the chaos of cloud speedily eclipsing the pale daylight to the west, behind the broken outlines of the old three-deckers that formed the dockyard workers’ tenements.

  ‘Come on you two, into the boat . . .’ Merrick descended the steps. ‘Come on Bolton!’ The man hesitated at the top, then turned on his heel.

  ‘Hey!’

  Drinkwater looked at Thompson. ‘He’s running, James!’

  ‘The devil he is!’

  ‘Mr Hill, take charge! Come on James!’

  At the top of the steps Drinkwater saw Bolton running towards the old battleships.

  ‘Hey!’

  The wind was sweeping the wharf clear and Bolton pushed between two lieutenants who spun, a swirl of boat cloaks and displaced tricornes. Drinkwater began to run, passing the astonished officers. Already Bolton had reached the shadows in the lane leading to what was called the Old Ships, traversing the dockyard wall and away from the fort at Garrison Point. He knew that Bolton could not pass the sentries at the gates or cross the ditches that surrounded the place. He was making for the Old Ships and a possible way to Blue Town, the growing collection of inns, tradesmen’s dwellings and brick built houses that was accumulating outside the limits of the dockyard.

  Abruptly he reached a ditch, James Thompson puffing up beside him. At the top of the low rampart a short glacis sloped down to the water. It was slightly overgrown now, elderberry bushes darker patches against the grey-green grass. The pale sky in the west silhouetted a movement: Bolton. Drinkwater began running again. Thompson came after him then tripped and fell, yelling obscenities as he discovered a patch of nettles.

  Drinkwater ran on, disturbing a rabbit which bobbed, grey-tailed, ahead of him before turning aside into a burrow. Then he approached the first of the hulks, vaguely aware that behind him shouts indicated where someone had turned out a foot patrol.

  The old battleship rose huge above him, its lines made jagged with additions: chimneys, privvies and steps. The rusting chains from her hawse pipes disappeared into the mud and men were trudging aboard, looking at him curiously as he panted past them. The smell of smoke and cooking assailed his dilating nostrils and he drew breath.

  A shadow moved out from the far hulk, a running man stooped along the tideline and Drinkwater wished he had a pistol. Bolton was making for a ramshackle wooden bridge that lay over the fosse, an unofficial short cut from the Old Ships to Blue Town. It was getting quite dark now. He clattered across the black planking over mud and a silver thread of water. The violent tug of the rising wind at his cloak slowed him and the breath was rasping in his throat at the unaccustomed exercise. To his right the flat expanse of salt marsh gave way to the Medway, palely bending away to Blackstakes and Chatham. To the left the huddle that was Blue Town.

  It was almost dark when he entered the first narrow street. He passed an inn and halted. Bolton had evaded him. He must draw breath and wait for that foot patrol to come up, then they must conduct a house-to-house search.

  ‘Shit!’ Exasperation exploded within him. They had been at Sheerness for weeks. Why had Bolton chosen now to desert? He turned to the inn to make a start in the search. In the violence of his temper he flung open the door and was utterly unprepared for the disturbingly familiar face that confronted him.

  The two men gaped in mutual astonishment, each trying to identify the other. For Edouard Santhonax recognition and capture were instinctively things to avoid. His reaction was swift the instant he saw doubt cloud Drinkwater’s eyes. For Nathaniel, breathless in pursuit of Bolton, the appearance of Santhonax was perplexing and unreal. As his brain reacted to the change of quarry Santhonax turned to escape through a rear exit.

  He attempted to shout ‘Stop! In the King’s name’, but the ineffectual croak that he emitted was drowned in the buzz of conversation from the artisans and seamen in the taproom. He pushed past several men who seemed to want to delay him. Eventually he struggled outside where he ran into the foot patrol. A sergeant helped him up.

  ‘This way,’ wheezed Drinkwater, and they pounded down an alleyway, no one noticing Bolton crouched beneath a hand cart in the inn yard, his heart bursting with effort, the scarred and knotted muscles of his back paining him from the need to draw deep gulps of air into his heaving lungs.

  The sergeant spread his men out and they began to search the surrounding buildings. Drinkwater paused to collect his thoughts, realising they were now hunting two men, though the soldiers did not yet know it. He thought Santhonax might have doubled on him. It was quite dark and Drinkwater was alone. He could hear the sergeant and his men calling to each other further down the lane. Then the rasp of a sword being drawn sounded behind him.

  He spun round.

  Santhonax stood in the alleyway, a grey shadowy figure with a faint gleam of steel barring the passage. Drinkwater hauled out his hanger.

  They shuffled cautiously forward and Drinkwater felt the blades engage. He could hear a voice in his head urging him not to delay, to attack simply and immediately; that Santhonax was quite probably a most proficient swordsman. Now!

  Barely beating the blade and lunging low, Drinkwater extended. But Santhonax was too quick and leapt back, riposting swiftly though off balance. Drinkwater’s parry was clumsy but effective.

  They re-engaged. Drinkwater was blown after his run. Already his hanger felt heavy on his arm. He felt Santhonax seize the initiative as his blade was beaten, then, with an infinite slowness, the rasp of steel on steel, he quailed before the extension. He clumsily fell back, half turning and losing his balance and falling against the wall. He felt the sharp prick of the point in his shoulder but the turn had saved him, he was aware of Santhonax’s breath hot in his face, instictively knew the man’s belly was unguarded and turned his point.

&nbs
p; ‘Merde!’ spat the Frenchman leaping back and retracting his sword. Drinkwater’s feeble counter attack expended his remaining energy on thin air. Then he was aware of the swish of the molinello, the downward scything of the slashing blade, He felt the white fire in his right shoulder and arm and knew he was beaten.

  He had been precipitate. He had broken his promise of circumspection to Elizabeth. As he awkwardly sought to parry his death thrust, the hanger weighing a ton in his hand, he felt Santhonax hesitate; was aware of running feet pounding up the alleyway from his rear, of something warm and sticky trickling over his wrist. Then he was falling, falling while running, shouting men were passing over him and above them the wind howled in the alleyway and made a terrible rushing noise in his ears.

  He could run no more.

  Chapter Eleven

  December 1796–April 1797

  A Time of Trial

  ‘Hold still!’

  ‘Damn it Harry . . .’ Drinkwater bit his lip as Kestrel slammed into a wave that sent a shudder through her fabric.

  ‘There!’ Appleby completed the dressing.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What effect is it going to have? My arm’s damned stiff. Will I fence again?’

  Appleby shrugged. ‘The bicep was severely lacerated and will be stiff for some time, only constant exercise will prevent the fibres from knotting. The wound is healing well, though you will have a scar to add to your collection.’ He indicated the thin line of pale tissue that ran down Nathaniel’s cheek.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, mayhap an ache or two from time to time,’ he paused, ‘but I’d say you will be butchering again soon.’

  Drinkwater’s relief turned to invective as Kestrel butted into another sea and sent him sprawling across Appleby’s tiny cabin, one arm in and one arm out of his coat. In the lobby he struggled into his tarpaulin while Appleby heaved himself onto his cot, extended one leg to brace himself against the door jamb, and reached for his book. Drinkwater went on deck.

  Eight bells struck as he cleared the companionway. The wind howled a high-pitched whine in the rigging, a cold, hard northerly wind that kicked up huge seas, grey monsters with curling crests which broke in rolling avalanches of white water that thundered down their advancing breasts with a noise like murder, flattening and dissipating in streaks of spindrift.

  Spume filled the air and it was necessary to turn away from the wind to speak. As he relieved Jessup a monstrous wave towered over the cutter, its crest roaring over, marbled green and white, rolling down on them as Kestrel mounted the advancing sea.

  ‘Hold hard there! Meet her!’ Men grabbed hold-fasts and the relieving tackles on the tiller were bar taut. Drinkwater tugged the companionway cover over as the roar of water displaced the howl of wind and he winced with the pain of his arm as he clung on.

  Kestrel staggered under the tremendous blow and then the sea was all about them, tearing at them, sucking at their legs and waists, driving in through wrist bands, down necks and up legs, striving to pluck them like autumn leaves from their stations. A man went past Drinkwater on his back, fetching up against number ten gun with a crunch of ribs. Water poured off the cutter as she rode sluggishly over the next wave, her stout, buoyant hull straining at every strap and scarph. Men were securing coils of rope torn from belaying pins and relashing the gigs amidships. Shaking the water from his hair Drinkwater realised, with a pang of anger that fed on the ache in his bicep, that he would be cold and wet for the next four hours. And the pain in his arm was abominable.

  The winter weather seemed to match some savage feeling in Drinkwater’s guts. The encounter with Capitaine Santhonax had left a conviction that their fates were inextricably entwined. The ache of his wound added a personal motive to this feeling that lodged like an oyster’s irritant somewhere in his soul. What had been a vague product of imagination following the affair off Beaubigny had coalesced into certainty after the encounter at Sheerness.

  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 Griffith
s 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.