‘Eet is not my fault, Captain . . . the wind . . . eet go,’ he said.
‘That’s a damned fine excuse.’ Drinkwater expelled his breath in a long sigh of resignation. Any form of resistance was clearly too late.
‘Wh . . . what is the matter?’ Little Gillespy’s voice piped as he came on deck behind Frey, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The Spanish officer pointed at him, looked at Drinkwater and burst out laughing, exchanging a remark with his men that was obviously obscene.
‘We are prisoners, Mr Gillespy,’ said Drinkwater bitterly. ‘That is what is the matter.’
‘Preesoners,’ said the Coast Guard officer, testing the word for its aptness, ‘si, capitán, preesoners,’ and he burst out laughing again.
Had he not had Quilhampton and Tregembo with him and felt the necessity of bearing their ill-luck with some degree of fortitude in front of the two midshipmen, Drinkwater afterwards thought he might have gone mad that day. As it was he scarcely recollected anything about the ignominious march through the town beyond a memory of curious dark eyes and high walls with overhanging foliage. Even the strange smells were forgotten in the stench of the prison in which the five men were unceremoniously thrown. It was a large stone-flagged room, lined with decomposed straw. A bucket stood, half-full, in a corner and the straw moved from the progress through it of numerous rats. Drinkwater assumed it must be the Bridewell of the local Alcaid, emptied for its new inmates.
Conversation between the men was constrained by their respective ranks as much as their circumstances. Tregembo, with customary resource, commenced the murder of the rats while James Quilhampton, knowing the agony through which Drinkwater was going, proved his worth by reassuring the two midshipmen, especially Gillespy, that things would undoubtedly turn out all right.
‘There will be a battle soon and Nelson will have hundreds of Spaniards to exchange us for,’ he kept saying. ‘Now, Mr Gillespy, do you know how many Spanish seamen you are worth, eh? At the present exchange rate you are worth three. What d’you think of that, eh? Three seamen for each of you reefers, four for me as a junior lieutenant, one for Tregembo and fifteen for the captain. So all Nelson has to do is take twenty-six Dagoes and we’re free men!’
It went on all day, utterly exhausting Quilhampton, while Drinkwater paced up and down, for they drew back for him, clearing a space as though the cell was a quarterdeck and the free winds of the Atlantic blew over its stinking flagstones. Once or twice he stopped, abstracted, his fists clenched behind his back, his head cocked like one listening, though in reality from his mangled shoulder. They would fall silent then, until he cursed under his breath and went on pacing furiously up and down.
Towards evening, as darkness closed in, the heavy bolts of the door were drawn back and a skin of bitter wine and a few hunks of dark bread were passed in on a wooden platter. But that was all. Darkness fell and the place seemed to stink more than ever. Drinkwater remained standing, wedged into a corner, unable to compose his mind in sleep. But he must have slept, for he woke cramped, as another platter of bread and more raw wine appeared. They broke their fast in silence and an hour later the bolts were drawn back again. The Coast Guard officer beckoned Drinkwater to follow and led him along a passage, up a flight of stone steps and through a heavy wooden door. A strip of carpet along another passage suggested they had left the prison. The officer threw open a further door and Drinkwater entered a large, white-walled room. A window opened onto a courtyard in which he could hear a fountain playing. Leaves of some shrub lifted in the wind. On the opposite wall, over a fireplace, a fan of arms spread out. A table occupied the centre of the room, round which were set several chairs. Two were occupied. In one sat a tall dragoon officer, his dark face slashed by drooping moustaches, his legs encased in high boots. His heavy blue coat was faced with sky-blue and he wore yellow leather gloves. A heavy, curved sabre hung on its long slings beside his chair. He watched Drinkwater through a blue haze of tobacco smoke from the cigar he was smoking.
The other man was older, about sixty, Drinkwater judged, and presumably the Alcaid or the Alcalde. The Coast Guard officer made some form of introduction and the older man rose, his brown eyes not unkind. He spoke crude English with a heavy accent.
‘Good day, Capitán. I am Don Joaquín Alejo Méliton Pérez, Alcade of Tarifa. Here’, he indicated the still-seated cavalry officer, ‘is Don Juan Gonzalez De Urias of His Most Catholic Majesty’s Almansa Dragoons. Please to take a seat.’
‘Thank you, señor.’
‘I too have been prisoner. Of you English. When you are defending Gibraltar under General Elliott.’
‘Don Pérez, I protest, my effects . . . my clothes . . .’ he grasped his soiled shirt for emphasis, but the old man raised his hand.
‘All your clothes and equipments are safe. I ask you here this morning to tell me your name. Don Juan is here coming from Cadiz. He is to take back your name and the ship that you are capitán from . . . This you must tell me, please.’
The Alcalde picked up a quill and dipped it expectantly in an ink-pot.
‘I am Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater, Don Pérez, of His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Antigone . . .’
At this the hitherto silent De Urias leaned forward. Drinkwater heard the name Antigone several times. The two men looked at him with apparently renewed interest.
‘Please, you say your name, one time more.’
‘Drink-water . . .’
‘Eh?’ The Alcalde looked up, frowned and mimed the act of lifting a glass and sipping from it, ‘Agua?’
Drinkwater nodded. ‘Drink-water.’
‘Absurdo!’ laughed the cavalry officer, pulling the piece of paper from the Alcalde, then taking his quill and offering them to Drinkwater who wrote the information in capital letters and passed it back.
Don Juan De Urias stared at the letters and pronounced them, looked up at Drinkwater, then thrust himself to his feet. The two men exchanged a few words and the officer turned to go. As he left the room the Coast Guard officer returned and motioned Drinkwater to follow him once again.
He was returned to the cell and it was clear that much speculation had been in progress during his absence.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Quilhampton, ‘but could you tell us if . . .’
‘Nothing has happened, gentlemen, beyond an assurance that our clothes are safe and that Cadiz is being informed of our presence here.’
Drinkwater saw Quilhampton’s eyes light up. ‘Perhaps, sir, that means our release is the nearer . . .’
It was an artifically induced hope that Quilhampton himself knew to be foolish, but the morale of the others should not be allowed to drop.
‘Perhaps, Mr Q, perhaps . . .’
They languished in the cell for a further two days and then they were suddenly taken out into a stable yard and offered water and the contents of their chests with which to prepare themselves for a journey, the Alcade explained. When they had finished they were more presentable. Drinkwater felt much better and had retrieved his journal from the chest. The Alcalde returned, accompanied by Don Juan De Urias.
‘Don Juan has come’, the Alcalde explained, ‘to take you to Cadiz. You are known to our ally, Capitán.
Drinkwater frowned. Had the French summoned him to Cadiz?
‘Who knows me, señor?’
Perez addressed a question to De Urias who pulled from the breast of his coat a paper. He unfolded it and held it out to Drinkwater. It was in Spanish but at the bottom the signature was in a different hand.
‘Santhonax!’
PART THREE
Battle
‘Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.’
VICE-ADMIRAL COLLINGWOOD TO HIS OFFICERS,
HMS Royal Sovereign, forenoon, 21st October 1805
‘The enemy . . . will endeavour to envelop our rear, to break through our line and to direct his ships in groups upon such of ours as he shall have cut off, so as to surround them
and defeat them.’
VICE-ADMIRAL VILLENEUVE TO HIS CAPTAINS
Standing Orders given on board the Bucentaure,
Toulon Road, 21st December 1804
Chapter 17
14 October 1805
Santhonax
Lieutenant Don Juan Gonzalez de Urias of His Most Catholic Majesty’s Dragoons of Almansa flicked the stub of a cigar elegantly away with his yellow kid gloves and beckoned two of his troopers. Without a word he indicated the sea-chests of the British and the men lifted them and took them under an archway. Motioning his prisoners to follow, he led them through the arch to the street where a large black carriage awaited them. Dragoons with cocked carbines flanked the door of the carriage and behind them Drinkwater caught sight of the curious faces of children and a wildly barking dog. The five British clambered into the coach, Drinkwater last, in conformance with traditional naval etiquette. Tregembo was muttering continual apologies, feeling awkward and out of place at being in such intimate contact with ‘gentlemen’. Drinkwater was compelled to tell him to hold his tongue. Behind them the door slammed shut and the carriage jerked forward. On either side, their gleaming sabres drawn, a score of De Urias’s dragoons formed their escort.
For a while they sat in silence and then they were clear of the town, rolling along a coast-road from which the sea could be seen. None of them looked at the orange groves or the cork oaks that grew on the rising ground to the north; they all strove for a glimpse of the blue sea and the distant brown mountains of Africa. The sight of a sail made them miserable as they tried to make out whether it was one of the sloops Collingwood had directed to blockade coastal trade with Cadiz.
‘Sir,’ said Quilhampton suddenly, ‘if we leapt from the coach, we could signal that brig for a boat . . .’
‘And have your other hand cut off in the act of waving,’ said Drinkwater dismissively. ‘No, James. We are prisoners being escorted to Cadiz. For the time being we shall have to submit to our fate.’
This judgement having been pronounced by the captain produced a long and gloomy silence. Drinkwater, however, was pondering their chances. Freedom from the awful cell at Tarifa had revived his spirits. For whatever reason the French wanted them at Cadiz, it was nearer to the British battle-fleet than Tarifa and an opportunity might present itself for them to escape.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ put in Quilhampton.
‘Yes, James?’
‘Did you say “Santhonax”, sir, when were were in the stable yard? Is that the same cove that we took prisoner at Al Mukhra?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
‘I remember him. He escaped off the Cape . . . D’you remember him, Tregembo?’
‘Aye, zur, I do. The Cap’n and I know him from away back.’ Tregembo’s eyes met those of Drinkwater and the old Cornishman subsided into silence.
Piqued by this air of mystery, Frey asked, ‘Who is he sir?’
Drinkwater considered; it would do no harm to tell them. Besides, they had time to kill, the jolting of the coach was wearisome, and it is always the balm of slaves and prisoners to tell stories.
‘He is a French officer of considerable merit, Mr Frey. A man of the stamp of, say, Captain Blackwood. He was, a long time ago, a spy, sent into England to foment mutiny among the fleet at the Nore. He used a lugger to cross the Channel and we chased him, I recollect, Tregembo. He shot part of our mast down . . .’
‘That’s right, zur,’ added Tregembo turning on the junior officers, ‘but we was only in a little cutter, the Kestrel, twelve pop-guns. We had ’im in the end though, zur.’ Tregembo grinned.
‘Aye. At Camperdown,’ mused Drinkwater, calling into his mind’s eye that other bloody October day eight years earlier.
‘At Camperdown, sir? There were French ships at Camperdown?’ asked Frey puzzled.
‘No, Mr Frey. Santhonax was sent from Paris to stir the Dutch fleet to activity. I believe him to have been instrumental in forcing Admiral De Winter to sail from the Texel. Tregembo and I were still in the Kestrel, cruising off the place, one of Duncan’s look-outs. When the Dutch came out Santhonax had an armed yacht at his disposal. We fought and took her, and Santhonax was locked up in Maidstone Gaol.’ Drinkwater sighed. It all seemed so long ago and there was the disturbing image of the beautiful Hortense swimming into his mind. He recollected himself; that was no part of what he wanted to tell his juniors about Santhonax.
‘Unfortunately,’ he went on, ‘whilst transferring Santhonax to the hulks at Portsmouth, much as we are travelling now . . .’
‘He escaped,’ broke in Quilhampton, ‘just as we might . . .’
‘He spoke unaccented and near perfect English, James,’ countered Drinkwater tolerantly, ignoring Quilhampton’s exasperation. ‘How good is your Spanish, eh?’
‘I take your point, sir, and beg your pardon.’
Drinkwater smiled. ‘No matter. But that is not the end of the story, for Mr Quilhampton and I next encountered Edouard Santhonax when he commanded our own frigate Antigone in the Red Sea. He was in the act of re-storing her after careening and we took her one night, in a cutting-out expedition, and brought both him and his frigate out together from the Sharm Al Mukhra. Most of the guns were still ashore and we were caught in the Indian Ocean by a French cruiser from Mauritius. We managed to fight her off but in the engagement Santhonax contrived to escape by diving overboard and swimming to his fellow countryman’s ship. We were saved by the timely arrived of the Telemachus, twenty-eight, commanded by an old messmate of mine.’
‘And that was the last time you saw him, sir?’
‘Yes. But not the last time I heard of him. After Napoleon extricated himself from Egypt and returned from Paris a number of officers that had done him singular services were rewarded. Santhonax was one of them. He transferred, I believe, to the army, not unknown in the French and Spanish services,’ he said in a didactic aside for the information of the two young midshipmen who sat wide-eyed at the Captain’s tale, ‘who often refer to their fleets as “armies” and their admirals as “captains-general”. Now, I suppose, he has recognised my name and summoned me to Cadiz.’
‘I think he may want information from you, sir,’ said Quilhampton seriously.
‘Very probably, Mr Q. We shall have to decide what to tell him, eh?’
‘Sir,’ said Gillespy frowning.
‘Yes, Mr Gillespy?’
‘It is a very strange story, sir. I mean the coincidences . . . almost as if you are fated to meet . . . if you see what I mean, sir.’
Drinkwater smiled at the boy who had flushed scarlet at expressing this fantasy.
‘So I have often felt, Mr Gillespy; but in truth it is not so very remarkable. Consider, at the time Tregembo, Mr Q and I were fighting this fellow in the Red Sea, Sir Sydney Smith was stiffening the defences of Acre and thwarting Boney’s plans in the east. A little later Sir Sydney fell into Bonaparte’s hands during a boat operation off Havre, along with poor Captain Wright, and the pair of them spent two years in The Temple prison in Paris,’ he paused, remembering Camelford’s revelations about the connection of Santhonax with the supposed suicide. ‘The two of them escaped and Wright was put in command of the sloop-of-war Vinejo, only to be captured in a calm by gunboats in the Morbihan after a gallant defence. He was returned to the Temple . . .’
‘Where Bonaparte had him murdered,’ put in Quilhampton.
Drinkwater ignored the interruption. Poor Quilhampton was more edgy than he had been a few days earlier. Presumably the strain of playing Dutch uncle to this pair of boys had told on his nerves. ‘Very probably,’ he said, ‘but I think the events not dissimilar to my own encounters with Santhonax; a sort of personal antagonism within the war. It may be fate, or destiny, or simply coincidence.’ Or witchcraft, he wanted to add, remembering again the auburn hair of Hortense Santhonax.
Silence fell again as the coach rocked and swayed over the unmade road and the dragoons jingled alongside. From time to time De Urias would ride up abreast of th
e window and peer in. After several hours they stopped at a roadside taverna where a change of horses awaited them. The troopers had a meal from their saddlebags, watered their horses and remounted. For some English gold Drinkwater found in his breeches pocket he was able to buy some cold meat and a little rot-gut wine at an inflated price. The inn-keeper took the money, bit it and, having pocketed the coin, made an obscene gesture at the British.
‘We are not popular,’ observed Quilhampton drily, with a lordly indifference that persuaded Drinkwater he was recovering his spirits after the morning’s peevishness. They dozed intermittently, aware that as the coast-road swung north the distant sea had become wave-flecked under a fresh westerly breeze. Drinkwater was awakened by Quilhampton from one of these states of semiconsciousness that was neither sleep nor wakefulness but a kind of limbo into which his mind and spirit seemed to take refuge after the long, unremitting months of duty and the hopelessness of captivity.
‘Sir, wake up and look, sir.’
From the window he realised they were headed almost north, running across the mouth of a bay. To the west he could see distant grey squares, the topsails of Nelson’s look-out ships, keeping contact with the main fleet out of sight over the horizon to the westward. The thought made him turn to his companions.
‘Gentlemen, I must caution you against divulging any information to our enemy. They are likely to question us all, individually. You have nothing to fear,’ he said to young Gillespy. ‘You simply state that you were a midshipman on your first voyage and know nothing.’ He regretted the paternal impulse that had made the child his note-taker. ‘You may say I was an old curmudgeon, Mr Gillespy, and that I told you nothing. Midshipmen are apt to hold that opinion of their seniors.’ He smiled and the boy smiled uncertainly back. At least he could rely upon Frey and Quilhampton.
1805 Page 16
