In Distant Waters nd-8

by Richard Woodman

  Drinkwater lay soaked in sweat, aware that it was neither the jerking of his cot, nor the violent motion of Patrician that had woken him, but something fading beyond his recall, the substance of his nightmare. Wiping his forehead and at the same time shivering in the pre-dawn chill, he lay back and tugged the shed blankets back over his aching body. The quinsy that had presaged his fever was worse this morning, but the terrors of the nightmare far exceeded the disturbances of illness. He stared into the darkness, trying to remember what had so upset him, driven by some instinct to revive the images of the nightmare.

  And then with the unpredictability of imagination, they flooded back. It was an old dream, a haunting from bad times when, as a frightened midshipman, he had learned the real meaning of fear and loneliness. The figure of the white lady had loomed over him as he sunk helplessly beneath her, her power to overwhelm him sharpened by the crescendo of clanking chains that always accompanied her manifestation. As he recollected the dream he strove to hear the reassuring grind of Patrician's own pumps; but he could hear nothing beyond the thrum of wind in the rigging transmitted down to the timbers of her labouring hull. The big frigate creaked and groaned in response to the mighty forces acting upon her as she fought her way to windward of Cape Horn.

  Then Drinkwater recognised the face. The white lady had had many forms in her various visitations. Though he thought of her as female, she possessed the trans-sexual ability of phantoms to appear in any guise. This morning she had worn a most horrible mask: that of the hanged man, Stanham. Drinkwater recognised it at once, for after the dead man had been cut down he and Lallo, the surgeon, had inspected the cadaver. It had been no mere idly morbid curiosity that had spurred him to do so, that day at the Nore ten weeks earlier. He had felt himself driven to see what he had done, as if to do so might avert some haunting of the ship by the man's spirit.

  Drinkwater had seen again in his nightmare the savage furrow the noose had cut in Stanham's neck. The face above was darkly cyanotic with wild, protuberant eyes. In the flesh Stanham's body had been pale below the furrowed neck, gradually darkening with blotchy suggillations where the blood had settled into its dependent parts. This morning, beneath the horrors of the face, Stanham's ghost had worn the white veils which marked his apparition as a disguise of the white lady.

  Full recollection brought Drinkwater out of himself. Unpleasant though the memory was, he was no stranger to death, or the 'blue-devils', that misanthropic preoccupation of naval officers forced to the lonely exile of distant commands. With an oath he swung his legs over the edge of the swaying cot and deftly hoisted himself to his feet as Patrician hesitated on a wave crest, before driving down into a huge trough. He half ran, half skidded across the cabin, fetching up against the forward bulkhead as the ship smashed her bluffbows into the advancing wall of the next sea and reared her bowsprit skywards. Drinkwater swore again, barking his shins on the leg of an overturned chair, and bellowed through the thin bulkhead at the marine sentry.

  'Pass word for my coxswain!'

  As he rubbed his bruised knee and swallowed with difficulty he finally remembered the true disturbance of the nightmare. It was not its recurrence, nor the ghastly transmogrification of poor Stanham, but the fact that the dream was always presentient.

  He fought his way aft, across the dark cabin, and slumped in a chair until Tregembo arrived with a light and hot water and he could shave, passing the moments in reaction to the knowledge that came with this realisation. God knew that a great deal could go wrong in this forsaken corner of the world where there seemed no possible justification for sending him, even given the anxieties of the most pusillanimous jack-in-office. In the extremity of his sickness and depression he felt acutely the apparent abandonment of the only man in power with whom he felt he had both earned and enjoyed an intimacy. Lord Dungarth, once first lieutenant of Midshipman Drinkwater's original ship, had treated him with uncharacteristic coolness since he had brought the momentous news of the secret accord between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon out of Russia. It was not the only service Drinkwater had rendered his Lordship's Secret Department and Dungarth's inexplicable change of attitude had greatly pained him, combined as it was with the proscription against shore-leave and the enforced estrangement from his wife and family.

  But these were self-pitying considerations. As the Patrician fought her way from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, he had gloomier thoughts pressing him. Presentiments of disaster were to be expected and, as he shuddered from his ague, he felt inadequate to the task the Admiralty had set him, not for its complexity, but for its apparent simplicity. It seemed, in essence, to be a mere exercise upon which almost any interpretation might be put by persons anxious to discredit him. So hazy were his orders, so vague in their intent, that he was at a loss as to how to pursue them.

  To carry His Majesty's flag upon the Pacific coast of North America on a Particular Service, was all very high faluting; to make war upon Spanish Trade upon the said coast, was all very encouraging if one took as one's example the exploits of Anson fifty years earlier. But this was the modern world, and he was not allowed a free hand, being ordered to concentrate his efforts upon the North American coast, far from the rich Spanish trade routed to the Vice-royalties of Peru and the entrepot of Panama. Besides, to any British commander, the Pacific was haunted by the ghosts of a murdered Cook and the piratically seized Bounty.

  As for what he took to be the core of his orders, the instruction to discourage Russian incursions into that sea and upon the coasts of New Albion, they seemed to Drinkwater to be the most nonsensical of them all, harking back to the dubious claims of Francis Drake and serving to remind him that his Russian connections had landed him in this desperate plight, thousands of miles from home or support. Mulling such thoughts as he fought his quinsy and waited for Tregembo, shaking with the mild fever of an infection, he was in a foul and savage mood. His coxwain's unannounced appearance stung him to an uncharacteristic rebuke. 'Knock before you enter, damn you!'

  Sourly he watched Tregembo fuss over the hot water and the glim, whose light was transferred to a lantern and the lashed candelabra, illuminating the cabin with a cheerlessness that revealed the tumbled state of its contents.

  'You'll catch your death, zur, sitting like that…' 'Don't fuss, Tregembo,' replied Drinkwater, mellowing and seeing in the seams and scars of the old man's highlit face the harrowing of age and service. He opened his mouth to apologise but Tregembo forestalled him.

  'The fever's no better, zur, if I'm a judge o' temper.' Drinkwater stood with the sweat dry on him and drew his nightshirt over his head. He grunted and took the soap from Tregembo's outstretched hand.

  'I'll get Mr Lallo to make up some James's Powders, zur…' 'You'll do no such damned thing, Tregembo…' 'Dover's Powders then, zur, they be a powerful sudorific…' 'Damn James and Dover… fresh air will cure me, fresh air and hot coffee, be off and find me some hot coffee instead of standing over me like a poxed nursemaid…'

  'There be fresh air a-plenty this morning, zur,' muttered Tregembo as he left the cabin and the remark brought the ghost of a smile to Drinkwater's haggard face, even as it reminded him of his greatest problem, his crew.

  Over four years earlier, in the spring of 1803 and the brief period of peace, he had taken command of the sloop Melusine. She had been manned by picked volunteers, men who chose to stay at sea in the Royal Navy, rather than chance their luck in the uncertain world ashore. Many of them had been aboard ship for long before that. The resumption of war had carried them to the Arctic aboard Melusine, and to the Atlantic and Baltic in the frigate Antigone, into which ship they had been turned over when Drinkwater reached post-rank. Now the process of transfer had been repeated and that core of volunteers still lingered at the heart of Patrician's company. But men volunteer for perceived goals and these resented being taken advantage of even more than the pressed men. The latter were made up of the victims of the Impress Service, the Quota-men and the Lord Mayor's men, the dr
egs of debtors' prisons and the hedge-sleeping vagrants that armed parties of officers and seamen had discovered in sweeps made along the ague-plagued coast of Essex, whence Drinkwater had sent his boats. In successive waves these men had made up the deficiencies in number that death and an increase in tonnage had made necessary to man the enlarged complements of Drinkwater's successive ships. What to those eager volunteers had been thought of as a single commission, an Arctic voyage with a bounty at its conclusion, had not yet ended.

  The people were divided, the one-time volunteers forming a slowly contracting minority, apt to regard itself as an elite, and suffering from the poor conditions of a Royal Navy on a wartime footing. Earlier that year in the Baltic their mood had become ugly. Lieutenant Quilhampton had suppressed an incipient mutiny by the force of his personality alone, but the news of it had made all the officers wary, heightening the tensions in the ship and drawing again those sharp social distinctions that blurred easily in a happy ship. Inconsequential things assumed new importance. The rivalry between seamen and marines coalesced into something less friendly, more suspicious; and the twinkle of the marines' bayonets lost its ceremonial glitter, fencing the vulnerable minority of the officers from the murmurs of the berth-deck.

  For his own part Drinkwater had, that summer, been driven to supplementing the men's pay by a bounty of his own, a circumstance which had imperilled his domestic finances, leaving his wife and dependants at a disadvantage and a prey to the fiscal inroads of inflation and income tax.

  Drinkwater scraped his face, nicking his cheek as Patrician staggered into another heavy sea. He swore, rinsed his razor and bent unsteadily to his task. The face that stared back at him was drawn with anxiety. The receding hair exposed his high forehead and the streaks of grey at his temples were prominent, even in the half-light of the candle-lit cabin. He still wore a queue, an unfashionable defiance behind, for what nature deprived him of in front. But though his eyes were tired and their lids dotted with powder burns like random ink-spots, though the scar that puckered down one side of his face joined the distortion of his features necessary to the task of shaving, and though he was gaunt from the effects of ague and quinsy, there was about the line of the mouth a determination that marked him for one of the most experienced frigate commanders in the Royal Navy.

  Ungraced by much political interest, only his long-standing friendship with Lord Dungarth could be said to have aided his career; but even that had not been without effort on his own part. Dungarth had ensured that all Drinkwater's skills had been fully exploited by his Secret Department, that great coup from beneath the raft at Tilsit, when the two Emperors' conversation had been overheard verbatim, had repaid any debt of advancement his lordship might conceive to be owing.

  Drinkwater wiped his chin and called for Tregembo, indicating he had finished with bowl and razor. He tied his stock and drew on soft leather hessian boots. Winding a muffler around his neck he put on his undress uniform coat and a heavy boat-cloak. Tregembo fussed about the cabin, moving quietly in respect of the captain's ominous silence. Picking up his hat Drinkwater jammed it on his head and went on deck.

  In the high southern latitude dawn was early. The eastern horizon was suffused with a light still too weak to penetrate the cloud rolling to leeward from the west. On the starboard bow an inky darkness blurred the meeting of sea and sky, and the perceptible horizon was reduced to the crest of the great waves that loomed out of the gloom and roared down upon them, driven by the interminable winds of the Southern Ocean.

  As Patrician dipped her reefed jib-boom, one such wall of water rose on her bow, its vast face gaining in brightness as it approached the vertical and reflected the growing light from the east. Patrician rolled away from it, her topsails, hard reefed though they were, suddenly flapping from want of wind and a hush falling eerily upon her decks. Her hull seemed suddenly inert as the advancing sea sped towards them, its slope streaked with spindrift, debris of a million million successive disintegrations of its toppling crest.

  'Hold on there!'

  Drinkwater grabbed the nearest hammock stanchion and braced himself as Lieutenant Quilhampton called the warning to his watch. It seemed as if they all held their breath.

  And then the frigate began to lift her bow as the trough that preceded the wave passed beneath her and she felt the breasting rise of that mountainous wave. From a sluggish tremor the angle rapidly increased and then she canted and the bow reared skywards. Aft, the waterlevel rose almost to the rail, so that the sea squirted in round the gun-ports and from below came the crash and curse of men and loose gear tumbling about. Drinkwater prayed that the double-lashed breechings of the guns had not worked slack during the night and the dual crash that ended this strange hiatus momentarily persuaded him that he was mistaken. But instinct made him look upwards to where the wind had reached the topsails. The maintopsail was already in shreds, pulling at its bolt ropes like wool caught on a fence, and the foretopsail was bending its yard like a bow. An explosion of white reared up all along the starboard rail as they reached the breaking crest and it flung all its fury at the ship. She rolled to leeward and lay down under the violent onslaught of the wind. The air, a moment earlier almost motionless before the advancing mass of water, was now suddenly filled with the terrible noise of the gale, solid with the particles of water it had ripped from the surface of the ocean and drove downwind with the velocity of buckshot.

  But the leeward roll saved Patrician's deck from the worst of the breaking sea, though there was not a man upon it who was not instantly soaked to the skin. The ship toppled as the wave passed beyond her tipping-centre and she plunged downwards, into the welter of lesser waves that scarred the back of the great sea.

  'Foretopmast's sprung above the lower cap, Mr Q… up helm! Get the ship before the wind and we'll take that tops'l off her!'

  'Aye, aye, sir!' Quilhampton dashed the water from his face with his one good hand, and swung round, staggering as Patrician lurched; but the huge sea had been the culmination of many, an ocean-bred monster in whose trail, for a while at least, midgets would follow. 'Up helm, there!'

  The ship's bow paid off to the southward and then to the east of south. Drinkwater anxiously stared aloft, trying to gauge the extent of the damage in the growing daylight and irritated at losing distance to windward. He had brought the frigate well south of Cape Horn, in a great tack to the south and west in order to double the tip of America as speedily as possible in an area where days of low scud made obtaining meridian altitudes difficult and only a fool would feel confident of his latitude.

  'Stand by to take in the foretopsail!'

  Quilhampton was bawling at his watch. Their response was slow, they seemed dazed, as if the great wave had some strange effect on them. But that was impossible, a figment of Drinkwater's fevered imagination. He held his peace for a moment longer.

  'Man the clewlines and buntlines!'

  The men were mustered about the pinrails and Drinkwater was reminded of something he had tried hard to forget; the dilatory action they had fought with a Danish privateer, caught off Duncansby Head, and which had escaped by superior sailing through the rocks off the Orkneys. By superior sailing… how that phrase haunted him, that sudden failure in performance that had endangered the ship now as it had done before. His patience snapped.

  'Call all hands, damn it! All hands, d'you hear there!'

  The squealing pipes made little impact on the gale, but the thin noise roused the ship as Quilhampton continued to shout at his men.

  'Clewlines and buntlines! Haul taut!'

  Drinkwater caught sight of the rise and fall of starters, of a scuffle forward of the boats and a man thrust out of the huddle round the mast.

  'Leggo top bowline, there! Lively there! Leggo halliards! Clew down! Clew down, God damn you, clew down!'

  'I think we have trouble forrard, Mr Q…'

  'Aye, sir… no, there goes the yard… lay aloft and furl… aloft and furl!'

  Men from the w
atches below were coming on deck and filling the waist with a worse confusion as another crack from aloft met the violence of a heavy leeward roll. Above the shouting and the orders, the wind screamed with renewed venom and the heeling deck bucked and canted beneath their slithering feet. Green water poured aboard and sluiced aft, streaming over the men at the pin-rails and knocking several off their feet.

  'Aloft and furl! Mr Comley, damn you, forrard, sir, and hustle the men!'

  Perhaps it was the disgruntled look which the boatswain Comley threw at Quilhampton, perhaps the passing of an ague-fit which stimulated Drinkwater to intervene, but he could stand chaos no better than inefficiency and such chaos and inefficiency threatened them all in that wild sea. He began to move forward, along the starboard gangway towards the forechains.

  What he found forward of the boats appalled him. The sharp perceptions of a feverish brain, the madness of the morning and the lingering suspicions and doubts about his crew coalesced into an instant comprehension. The few men who had begun to climb into the weather shrouds were half-hearted in their efforts and though no one actively prevented them, there were shouted discouragements thick in the howling air.

  'Don't risk yer life for the bastards, Jimmy…'

  'Let the fucking mast go by the board… we'll be home the sooner…'

  'Oi'll fockin' kill you if you so much as lay that rope on me again, so I will…'

  A man rolled against Drinkwater, one of the boatswain's mates, his face pale in the cruel, horizontal light of dawn, his eye already dark with bruising.

  'Aloft and furl, damn you all!' Drinkwater roared and hoisted himself up into the starboard foremast shrouds. He caught sight of the small, white face of Midshipman Belchambers. 'Take my hat and cloak…' The wind tore the heavy cloak from his grasp and thrust it at the boy, who escaped thankfully aft.

  'God's bones, d'you want to rot in hell, you damned lubbers? Aloft and furl!' He was aware of sullen faces, the spray stinging them as they looked up at him. The wind tore at his own body and already the cold had found his hands. There was no time to delay. Above them the foretopsail flogged and the mast shook and groaned while something was working loose, its destructive oscillations increasing with every roll of the ship.