‘Let’s hope so, sir.’
‘Yes.’ Drinkwater turned away and made for the cabin of the brig where, rolling himself in his cloak and laying his cocked pistols beside him, he lay down to rest.
He was woken from an uneasy sleep by Mr Frey and rose, stiff and uncertain of the time.
‘Eight bells in the first watch, sir,’ said Frey.
Drinkwater emerged on deck to find the brig racing along, leaning to a steady breeze from the north, the sky clear and the stars glinting like crystals. Quilhampton loomed out of the darkness.
‘I believe we have ’em, sir,’ he pointed ahead, ‘there, two points to starboard.’
At first Drinkwater could see nothing; then he made out a cluster of darker rectangles, rectangles with high peaks: lugsails.
‘Straight in amongst ’em, Mr Q. Get the men to their quarters in silence. Orders to each gun-captain to choose a target carefully and, once the order is given, fire at will.’ Fatigue, worry and the fuzziness of unquiet sleep left him in an instant.
‘ ’Ere’s some coffee, sir.’
‘Thank you, Franklin.’ He took the pot gratefully. Night vision showed him the dark shadow of Franklin’s naevus, visible even in the dark.
‘ ’S all right, sir.’
Drinkwater swallowed the coffee as the men went silently to their places. The brig’s armament was of French 8-pounders; light guns but heavy enough to sink the chaloupes and péniches.
‘Haul up the fore-course, Mr Q. T’gallants to the caps, if you please.’
‘Rise fore-tacks and sheets there! Clew-garnets haul!’ The orders passed quietly and the fore-course rose in festoons below its yard.
‘T’gallants halliards . . .’
The topgallant sails fluttered, flogged and kicked impotently as their yards were lowered. The brig’s speed eased so as to avoid over-running the enemy.
Drinkwater hauled himself up on the rail and held onto the forward main shroud on the starboard side. Bonaparte had eased her heel and he could clearly see the enemy under her lee bow.
‘Make ready there! Mr Frey, stand by to haul the fore-yards aback.’
The sudden flash of a musket ahead was followed by a crackle of fire from small arms. The enemy had seen them but were unable to fire cannon astern.
‘Steady as you go . . .’
‘Steady as she goes, sir.’
He saw the dark blob of a chaloupe lengthen as it swung round to fire a broadside, saw its lugsails enlarge with the changing aspect, saw them flutter as she luffed.
‘Starboard two points! Gun-captains, fire when you bear.’
There was a long silence, broken only by shouts and the popping of musketry. A dull thud near Drinkwater’s feet indicated where at least one musket ball struck the Bonaparte. The chaloupe fired its broadside, the row of muzzles spitting orange, and a series of thuds, cracks and splintering sounded from forward. Then they were running the chaloupe down. He could see men diving overboard to avoid the looming stem of the brig as it rode over the heavy boat, split her asunder and sank her in passing over the broken hull. Along the deck the brig’s guns fired, short barking coughs accompanied by the tremble of recoil and the reek of powder. Another boat passed close alongside and Drinkwater felt the hat torn from his head as musket balls buzzed round him.
‘Mind zur.’ Like some dark Greek Olympic hero Tregembo hefted a shot through the air and it dropped vertically into the boat. Next to him Quilhampton’s face was lit by the flash of the priming in a scatter gun and the bell-muzzle delivered its deadly charge amongst the boat’s crew as they drew astern, screaming in the brig’s wake.
‘Down helm!’
‘Fore-yards, Mr Frey!’
The Bonaparte came up into the wind and then began to make a stern board as Drinkwater had the helm put smartly over the other way. Amidships the men were frantically spiking their guns round to find new targets. Individual guns fired, reloaded and fired again with hardly a shot coming in return from the invasion craft that lay in a shattered circle around them. Mount’s marines were up on the rails and leaning against the stays, levelling their muskets on any dark spot that moved above the rails of the low hulls, so that only the cry of the wounded and dying answered the British attack.
‘Cease fire! Cease fire!’
The reports of muskets and cannon died away. Drinkwater counted the remains of the now silent boats around them. He could see nine, with one, possibly two, sunk.
‘I fear one has escaped us,’ he said to no one is particular.
‘There she is, sir!’ Frey was pointing to the southwards where the dark shape of a sail was just visible.
‘Haul the fore-yards there, put the ship before the wind, Mr Q.’
Bonaparte came round slowly, then gathered speed as they laid a course to catch the departing bateau. From her size Drinkwater judged her to be one of the larger chaloupes canonnières, rigged as a three-masted lugger. For a little while she stood south and Drinkwater ordered the fore-course reset in order to overhaul her. But it was soon obvious that the French would not run, and a shot was put across her bow. She came into the wind at once and the Bonaparte was hove to again, a short distance to windward.
‘What the devil is French for “alongside”?’ snapped Drinkwater.
‘Try accoster, sir.’
‘Hey, accoster, m’sieur, accoster!’ They saw oar blades appear and slowly the two vessels crabbed together. ‘Mr Mount, your men to cover them.’
‘Very well, sir . . .’ The marines presented their muskets, starlight glinting dully off the fixed bayonets. There was a grinding bump as the chaloupe came alongside. The curious, Drinkwater among them, stared down and instantly regretted it. Drinkwater felt a stinging blow to his head and jerked backwards as it seemed the deck of the vessel erupted in points of fire.
He staggered, his head spinning, suddenly aware of forty or fifty Frenchmen clambering over the rail from which the complacent defenders had fallen back in their surprise.
‘God’s bones!’ roared Drinkwater suddenly uncontrollably angry. He lugged out his new hanger and charged forward. ‘Follow me who can!’ He slashed right and left as fast as his arm would react, his head still dizzy from the glancing ball that had scored his forehead. Blood ran thickly down into one eye but his anger kept him hacking madly. With his left hand he wiped his eye and saw two marines lunging forward with their bayonets. He felt a sudden anxiety for Frey and saw the boy dart beneath a boarding pike and drive his dirk into a man already parrying the thrust of a bayonet.
‘ ’Old on, sir, we’re coming!’ That was Franklin’s voice and there was Tregembo’s bellow and then he was slithering in what remained of someone, though he did not know whether it was friend or foe. His sword bit deep into something and he found he had struck the rail. He felt a violent blow in his left side and he gasped with the pain and swung round. A man’s face, centred on a dark void of an open mouth, appeared before him and he smashed his fist forward, dashing the pommel of his hanger into the teeth of the lower jaw. The discharge of his enemy’s pistol burnt his leg, but did no further damage and Drinkwater again wiped blood from his eyes. He caught his breath and looked round. Something seemed to have stopped his hearing and the strange absence of noise baffled him. Around him amid the dark shapes of dead or dying men, the fighting was furious. Quilhampton felled a man with his iron hook. Two marines, their scarlet tunics a dull brown in the gloom, their white cross-belts and breeches grey, were bayonetting a French officer who stood like some blasphemous crucifix, a broken sword dangling from his wrist by its martingale. A seaman was wrestling for his life under a huge brute of a Frenchman with a great black beard while all along the deck similar struggles were in progress. Drinkwater recognised the struggling seaman as Franklin from the dark, distinctive strawberry birthmark. Catching up his sword he took three paces across the deck and drove the point into the flank of the giant.
The man turned in surprise and rose slowly. Drinkwater recovered his blade as the
giant staggered towards him, ignoring Franklin who lay gasping on the deck. The giant was unarmed and grappled forward, a forbidding and terrifying sight. There was something so utterly overpowering about the appearance of the man that Drinkwater felt fear for the first time since they had gone into action. It was the same fear a small boy feels when menaced by a physical superior. Drinkwater’s sword seemed inadequate to the task and he had no pistols. He felt ignominious defeat and death were inevitable. His legs were sagging under him and then his hearing came back to him. The man’s mouth was open but it was himself that was shouting, a loud, courage-provoking bellow that stiffened his own resolve and sent him lunging forward, slashing at the man’s face with his sword blade. The giant fell on his knees and Drinkwater hacked again, unaware that the man was bleeding to death through the first wound he had inflicted. The giant crashed forward and Drinkwater heard a cheer. What was left of his crew of volunteers encircled the fallen man, like the Israelites round Goliath.
The deck of the Bonaparte remained in British hands.
Antigone leaned over to the wind and creaked as her lee scuppers drove under water. Along her gun-deck tiny squirts of water found their way inboard through the cracks round the gun-ports. In his cabin Drinkwater swallowed his third glass of wine and finally addressed himself to his journal.
It is not, he wrote at last, the business of a sea-officer to enjoy his duty, but I have often derived a satisfaction from achievement, quite lacking in the events of today. We have this day taken a French National brig-corvette of sixteen 8-pounder long guns named the Bonaparte. We have also destroyed twelve invasion bateaux, two of the large class mounting a broadside of light guns, taken upwards of sixty prisoners and thereby satisfied those objectives set in launching the attack at dawn. Yet the cost has been fearful. Lieutenant Gorton’s wound is mortal and nineteen other men have died, or are likely to die, as a result of the various actions that are, in the eyes of the public, virtually un-noteworthy. Had we let the enemy slip away, the newspapers would not have understood why a frigate of Antigone’s force could not have destroyed a handful of boats and a little brig. It was clear the enemy had prepared for the possibility of attack, that the brig was to bear its brunt while the bateaux escaped, and, that, at the end, we were nearly overwhelmed by a ruse de guerre that might have made prisoners of the best elements aboard this ship, to say nothing of extinguishing forever the career of myself. Even now I shudder at the possible consequences of their counter-attack succeeding.
He laid his pen down and stared at the page where the wet gleam of the ink slowly faded. But all he could see was the apparition of the French giant and remember again how hollow his legs had felt.
Chapter 6
April–May 1804
The Secret Agent
As April turned into a glorious May, Lieutenant Rogers continued to smart from Drinkwater’s rebuke. It galled him that even the news that the Bonaparte had been condemned as a prize and purchased into the Royal Navy – thus making him several hundred pounds richer – failed to raise his spirits. There were few areas in which Rogers evinced any sensitivity, but one was in his good opinion of himself, and it struck him that he had come to rely upon his commander’s reinforcement of this. Such hitherto uncharacteristic reliance upon another further annoyed him, and to it he began to add other causes for grievance. Drinkwater’s report had said little, certainly nothing that would elevate his first lieutenant and place him on the quarterdeck of the prize as a commander. In fact Drinkwater had sent the prize into Portsmouth with the wounded under the master’s mate Tyrrell, so, apart from his prize money, Rogers had dismissed the notion that he could expect anything further from the capture. In addition to this it seemed that the impetus to Antigone’s cruise had gone, that no further chance of glory, advancement, or simply resuming his normal relationship with Drinkwater would offer itself to him. He took refuge in the only action left to him as first lieutenant; he harried the crew. Antigone’s people were employed constantly in a relentless series of drills. They shifted sails, exercised at small-arms and cutlasses, and sent down the topgallant and topmasts. To kill any residual boredom they even got the heavy lower yards across the rails a-portlast. When Drinkwater drily expressed satisfaction, Rogers demurred respectfully and repeated the evolution until it was accomplished to his own satisfaction.
For his part, Drinkwater accepted this propitiation as evidence of Rogers’s contrition, and his own better nature responded so that the difference between them gradually diminished. Besides, news of Gorton’s slow death at Haslar Hospital seemed to conclude the incident.
Towards the end of April they had spoken to the 18-gun brig-sloop Vincejo on her way to the westward, with orders to destroy the coastal trade off south Brittany. Her commander had come aboard and closeted himself with Drinkwater for half an hour. Their discussion was routine and friendly. After Wright’s departure Drinkwater was able to confirm the speculations of the officers and explain that their late visitor was indeed the John Wesley Wright who, as a lieutenant, had escaped from French custody in Paris with Captain Sir Sydney Smith. He also mentioned that Wright was far from pleased with the condition of his ship, its armament, or its manning, and this seemed to divert the officers into a discussion about the ‘Vincey Joe’, an old Spanish prize, held to be cranky and highly unsuitable for its present task.
Drinkwater kept to himself the orders Wright had passed him and the knowledge that Wright, like himself twelve years earlier, had been employed by Lord Dungarth’s department in the landing and recovery of British agents on the coast of France. The orders Wright had brought emanated from Lord Dungarth via Admiral Keith, and prompted Drinkwater to increase his officers’ vigilance in the interception and seizure of French fishing boats. Hitherto fishermen had been largely left alone. They were, as D’Auvergne had pointed out, the chief source of claret and cognac in England, and were not averse to parting with information of interest to the captains of British cruisers. But their knowledge of the English coast and its more obscure landing places, the suitability of their boats to carry troops and their general usefulness in forwarding the grand design of invasion had prompted an Admiralty order to detain them and destroy their craft. In this way Antigone passed the first weeks of a beautiful summer.
It was from their captures, and from the dispatch luggers and cutters with which Lord Keith kept in touch with his scattered cruisers, that Drinkwater and his officers learned of the consequences of the attempt made by discontented elements in France to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte. The Pichegru-Cadoudal conspiracy had implicated both wings of French politics and been exposed in the closing weeks of the previous year. It had taken some time to round up the conspirators and had culminated in the astounding news that Bonaparte’s gendarmes had illegally entered the neighbouring state of Baden and abducted the young Duc D’Enghien. The duke had been given a drum-head court-martial which implicated the Bourbons in the plot against Bonaparte, and summarily shot in a ditch at Vincennes. Drinkwater’s reaction to the execution of D’Enghien combined with the orders he had received from Wright to extend Antigone’s cruising ground further east towards Pointe d’Ailly.
‘Standing close inshore like this,’ Drinkwater overheard Rogers grumbling to Hill as he sat reading with his skylight open, ‘we’re not going to capture a damn thing. We’re more like a bloody whore trailing her skirt up and down the street than a damned frigate. I wish we were in the West Indies. Even a fool of a Frenchman isn’t going to put to sea with us sitting here for all to see.’
‘No,’ said Hill reflectively, and Drinkwater put down his book to hear what he had to say in reply. ‘But it could be that that is just what the Old Man wants.’
‘What? To be seen?’
‘Yes. When I was in the Kestrel, cutter, back in ninety-two we used to do just this waiting to pick up a spy.’
‘Wasn’t our Nathaniel aboard Kestrel then?’
‘Yes,’ said Hill, ‘and that cove Wright has been doing something
similar more recently.’
‘Good God! Why didn’t you mention it before?’
Drinkwater heard Hill laugh. ‘I never thought of it.’
In the end it was the fishing boat that found them as Drinkwater intended. She came swooping over the waves, a brown lugsail reefed down and hauled taut against the fresh westerly that set white wave-caps sparkling in the low sunshine of early morning. Drinkwater answered the summons to the quarterdeck to find Quilhampton backing the main-topsail and heaving the ship to. He levelled his glass on the approaching boat but could make nothing of her beyond the curve of her dark sail, apart from an occasional face that peered ahead and shouted at the helmsman. A minute or two later the boat was alongside and a man in riding clothes was bawling in imperious English for a chair at a yardarm whip. The men at the rail looked aft at Drinkwater.
He nodded: ‘Do as he asks, Mr Q.’
As soon as the stranger’s feet touched the deck he dextrously extricated himself from the bosun’s chair, moved swiftly to the rail and whipped a pistol from his belt.
‘What the devil are you about, sir?’ shouted Drinkwater seeing the barrel levelled at the men in the boat.
‘Shootin’ the damned Frogs, Captain, and saving you your duty!’ The hammer clicked impotently on a misfire and the stranger turned angrily. ‘Has anyone a pistol handy?’
Drinkwater strode across the deck. ‘Put up that gun, sir, d’you hear me!’ He was outraged. That the stranger should escape from an enemy country and then shoot the men who had risked everything to bring him off to Antigone seemed a piece of quite unnecessary brutality.
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