Caging the Eagle
'Napoleon in the Isle of Elba has ... only to be patient, his enemies will be his best champions.'
General Sir Robert Wilson
CHAPTER 14
St Elmo's Fire
May 1814
Drinkwater had experienced no such premonition as Lieutenant Frey. The appearance of the Gremyashchi had finally laid to rest the vacillating anxieties and uncertainties of the preceding days, replacing them with a firm conviction that Hortense's report was about to be fulfilled. Nor did he consider Captain Count Rakov would divert the Antwerp ships from their purpose, as was the opinion of Lieutenant Hyde in the wardroom below. Drinkwater's assessment was quite otherwise: Rakov was on the scene to guarantee the matter. There would be no bloodshed, no international incident, Bonaparte would simply be removed from the Bourbon French ship bringing him to Flores, transferred to one of the Antwerp squadron and conducted to the United States.
It was quite clear that the only certain rendezvous where this could be accomplished without attracting undue attention was off the Azores, and the fact that no proper arrangements had been concluded with the Portuguese captain-general at Angra do Heroismo, was evidence none was necessary, for there had never been any real intention of landing Bonaparte in the first place. And to guarantee the Tsar's plan, revealing the sly hand of Talleyrand, the Bourbon commander of the French naval ship carrying the former Emperor into exile would not be accosted by a couple of Bonapartist pirates, but a squadron operating under the ensign of Imperial Russia.
It was a cleverly conceived plan, but, concluded Drinkwater, this embellishment made his own task acutely difficult. It was he alone who would have to assume responsibility for thwarting the Tsar's intention. Not that he entertained any personal doubts as to the rightness of this challenge. It was clearly not in British interests to have the foremost soldier in the world free to command troops in the United States. A successful invasion of Canada would be a disaster for Great Britain, and Drinkwater did not need the protection of Prince William Henry's orders to buttress his own moral doubts, only to afford protection from those in the establishment who might regard his action as intolerably high-handed.
What now nagged him was the impossibility of the task. At least two well-armed ships had sailed under the command of this Admiral Lejeune, and while Drinkwater might have had a chance to outmanoeuvre them, they were now reinforced by the Gremyashchi, a powerful frigate in her own right, which alone would be more than a match for Andromeda. He was conscious that the action his zeal had now made inevitable could end only in defeat. If any premonition disturbed the tranquillity of Nathaniel Drinkwater during those tedious days in late May, it was that death would take him at the moment of his country's hard-won victory.
In the circumstances such a death would not be without dishonour, but he doubted much credit would accrue to his actions to warm his widow's heart. Poor Elizabeth; she did not deserve such a fate. To be left alone to manage his small estate, not to mention the dependants he had foisted upon her, would be a terrible legacy. His death would, moreover, burden her with the promised annuity to Hortense!
The thought appalled him. In his headlong dash into the Atlantic, thoughts of an early death had not really occurred to him, for he had lived with risk for so long, and while he had intimated in the letter he had sent to his wife by the Trinity Yacht that complications had been introduced into their lives by recent events, meaning those at Calais, he had withheld details as being best dealt with face-to-face. Now he could not even leave her a second letter, for the chances of its being discovered after a bloody action were next to nothing.
He slumped at his desk as behind him a pale, watery sun set over a heaving grey sea. All about him Andromeda creaked mournfully, echoing his dismal thoughts and ushering in an attack of the blue-devils. As the daylight leached out of the sky and the twilight gloom increased, he fell into a doze. Hortense and Elizabeth were in the cabin with him, both were restored to the beauty they had possessed when he had first set eyes upon them and both improbably held hands like sisters, and smiled at him approvingly. He woke with a start, his heart beating furiously, possessed with a terrible fear of the unknown.
The cabin was completely dark. During his brief sleep and unknown to Drinkwater, Frampton had entered the cabin but seeing his commander asleep had beat a tactful retreat. Waking thus, Drinkwater was overcome with the feeling that the cabin was haunted by ghosts. In an instant, he had rammed his hat on his head and fled to the quarterdeck wrapped in his cloak.
He almost instantly regretted this precipitate action. The quarterdeck was scarcely less congenial than the cabin; in fact it was a good deal less so. Night had fallen under a curtain of rain which knocked the sea down, hissed alongside as it struck the surface of the water and sharply reduced the temperature of the air. Ashton had the watch, his extra duty relieving Birkbeck of the task, and so the emotional air was even chillier than the atmospheric, though Drinkwater himself took little notice of this and, in his own way, only added to it by his presence.
His cloak was soon sodden, but he paced the windward quarter, his stride and balance adjusting to the swoop and roll of the ship as, with her yards braced up sharply, she stood northwards under easy sail, steering full-and-bye with the wind in the west-north-west. It was a dying breeze and about four bells the rain stopped abruptly as the wind veered a point or two. Drinkwater was vaguely aware of Lieutenant Ashton adjusting the course to the north-eastwards, maintaining the trim of the yards in accordance with the provision of Drinkwater's night orders for cruising stations. Within fifteen minutes the sky was clearing rapidly as the overcast rolled away to leeward and the stars shone out in all their glory.
If the air had been chilly before, it was positively cold now, or so it seemed to Drinkwater as the dramatic change woke him from his reverie and he found himself shivering. He was about to go below and seek the warm comfort of his cot, when something stopped him. He stood like a pointing hound, tingling with instinctive premonition. He looked anxiously aloft. The pale parallelograms of the topsails and topgallants were pale against the sky; the main course was loose in its buntlines, but the fore course was braced sharp up, its tack hauled down to the port bumkin. Behind him the quadrilateral spanker curved gracefully under the pressure of the wind. As he watched, it flogged easily, the failing wind easing and then filling it again, causing a fitful ripple to pass across the sail, from throat to clew. The lines of reef points pitter-patted against the tough canvas. Despite this apparently peaceful scene, something struck him as wrong. Something in the air which made his scalp creep.
'Mr Ashton!'
'Sir?' Ashton stirred from the starboard mizen rigging.
'Get the t'gallants off her!'
'The t'gallants, sir?'
'The t'gallants sir! And at once, d'you hear me?'
Drinkwater could almost hear Ashton's brain turning over the captain's lunatic order, but then the word was passed and the watch stirred out of its hiding places, hunkered down about the decks, and the shapes of men moved about the pin rails and prepared to go aloft. There was little urgency in their demeanour, obvious to Drinkwater's acute and experienced eye, even in the dark.
'Look lively there!' he cried, injecting a sharp urgency into the night. Ashton began to cross the deck towards him and Drinkwater turned away in silent rebuff, staring to windward, watching to see what would happen. Then he saw the cloud as it loomed into the night sky, rapidly blotting out the stars to the north-westwards. He could feel its presence as the air suddenly crackled with the dull menace of the thing, revealing the source of his premonition. It was odd, he thought, as he watched the vast boiling mass of it rear up and up into the heavens, how such a gigantic manifestation of energy could almost creep up on one unawares.
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 wh
ich 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 na
tural 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.
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