Leaving the rescued man gasping, Hayden swam out again as he could hear men crying out. A sea lifted him as he reached a man. The sailor grasped for Hayden, pushing him under, but Hayden surfaced behind the man, took a hold of him strongly, and on his back dragged him to the yard. After that he was spent utterly, barely able to hold the yard as the sea lifted them.
‘Call out,’ Hayden shouted. ‘All at once or we shall never be heard. ‘Here!’ he called. ‘Here!’
Men joined him. ‘Here!’ they called from lips so cold they could barely form words. ‘HERE!’
A sea broke over them, battering Hayden down into the frigid waters, though he somehow kept his grip on the spar. When he surfaced again, the man to either side of him was gone, as was the boy holding the lantern.
‘Call out or we’re lost,’ Hayden cried. ‘Here!’
Fewer men took up the cry this time, and with less energy.
By luck Hayden found the foot rope, which had remained with the yard, and this allowed him to bear himself up a little more easily, though his leg soon trembled with the effort of supporting his weight even in the sea.
Men began to fall away, as though blown by the wind or some current in the sea. The man nearest Hayden slipped under, gasping. Reaching out, Hayden found the man’s coat sleeve but his fingers could not close on it. The last he felt was the man’s stone-coarse hand scrape by his own, neither able to take hold.
It became increasingly difficult for Hayden to keep his head from sagging into the water, the muscles of his neck no longer obeying his commands. He leaned his temple against the arm thrown over the spar. An urge to retch washed through him, the cold penetrating deep into his bowels. No one called out. The moon broke free of the clouds and cast its chill glow upon a glassy ocean of irregular seas crested in moonlight. A few stars, scattered among the clouds, shimmered in the heavens. Hayden knew that he would not endure ten minutes more and thought of his father upon a ship, so many years ago, foundering in the winter Atlantic. Often, he dreamt of his father drifting in the depths, asleep until the sea gave up her dead. Hayden would soon begin his own slow descent, leaf-like, to join the elder Hayden.
‘Sir?’
Hayden’s eyes had closed and he opened them with effort. A small boy, lips bruised and eyes sunken, pushed at the shoulder of his jacket.
‘Sir.’
‘Yes?’
‘I thought I ’eard s-someone cry out.’
‘Where away?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
Hayden tried to make his addled brain work. ‘Let us get you up on the yard. Can you manage?’
‘I don’t think so, sir.’
‘I will help. Crook up your leg and let me get a hand under your knee.’
The boy did so, but when he put weight on Hayden’s bent wrist, Hayden nearly went under, his arm giving way. The ocean had sapped all his strength.
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘You are not to blame. Listen carefully. I’m standing on the foot-rope. I will duck under the water and you will step on my back, climb up and straddle the yard. Do you understand?’
‘Are you sure, sir?’ the boy asked.
‘It is the only way. Ready?’
The boy nodded and Hayden let the water close over his head, holding the yard with his wrists, fingers fused and useless. A knee thumped into his temple, passed by, and a small foot pressed down on his shoulder, almost sending Hayden into the depths. A long moment he bore the weight and just as he was about to give way, there was a sudden push and the foot was gone. Floating to the surface Hayden might have drifted off, but the boy took Hayden’s arm between two wrists and helped pull it over the spar.
‘Cry out,’ Hayden gasped.
‘Here,’ the boy squeaked. ‘Themis!’
Over the roar of the gale no one would hear him, Hayden despaired.
‘Here!’ the boy managed, a little louder – a little more desperate. ‘Thee-mis!’
The wind answered with a gust, spume flung upon them from the streaked surface.
‘Did you hear, sir? S-sir?’
‘No,’ Hayden thought he answered but was not certain. He felt as though he were slipping into a dream.
‘Hold tight, sir. H-here!’
The sea no longer felt cold, but warm, inviting. How easily he could depart this life for the sweet dream that beckoned – Henrietta drawing him into her arms, his father whispering his name in joyful awakening. A jumble of memories and emotions. Then voices. What were they saying?
He was hauled bodily over a hard edge and tossed down on some unyielding surface. The voices kept yammering, words unfathomable, and then someone said, ‘Is he alive? Mr Wickham! Is he alive?’
He surfaced into warmth, a soft weight pressing him down – like a covering of warm snow. For a moment Hayden lay still, uncertain, afraid to open his eyes. And then he did. A reddish glow illuminated a small circle, and within it, distant but a yard, crouched a figure on a stool.
‘Wickham?’ His voice came out parched and harsh.
The figure stirred. ‘Captain Hayden!’ Of an instant, the boy was on his feet. ‘We thought, when you stopped shivering that meant either you recovered or…’ He chose not to complete this sentence.
‘What in the world is in my cot?’ Hayden asked, hardly able to move under the weight. ‘And what has me bound to my mattress?’
‘We have every blanket the officers possessed, or nearly so, to cover you. And Jefferies heated nine-pound balls in the stove and we placed them all around you – it was Mr Gould’s idea. Mr Barthe and Mr Franks ran several ropes up to the deck-head to bear all the weight. We have been exchanging the balls for newly heated ones as they’ve cooled. But here you are, sir! Alive!’
Hayden thought the boy would weep.
Hayden found his mind was a jumble of half-remembered images. ‘There were others…’
‘From the Syren, sir? We preserved the lives of all who made it into the boats but for two who were found floating near to you, Captain. All the men who first came away in the boats we kept separate from our crew, so they should not be exposed to the influenza, and have placed them on other ships in the convoy.’
‘Cole?’
Wickham lowered his voice. ‘Never found, sir.’
‘The French?’
‘We have not caught sight of them since their seventy-four went down.’
‘How long have I been… asleep?’
‘I do not know if you have been properly asleep, Captain. There has been a great deal of muttering and incoherent speech, and opening your eyes. You were in a delirium, like, but lacking the fever. The opposite, in truth, for you had the life nearly drawn out of you.’
‘How long?’
‘Most of a day, Captain.’ Wickham brightened. ‘I shall inform Mr Hawthorne and Mr Barthe that you are awake, sir. They have been terribly concerned, and in and out of your cabin every bell.’
‘What of the sick? Griffiths?’
Wickham took his gaze from Hayden’s face, and shook his head just perceptibly. ‘We’ve lost more men, sir. The doctor is with us, yet… but is most grievously ill.’
There was a moment of silence between them.
‘I shall tell Mr Hawthorne that you have survived, Captain, if you will excuse me.’
Before Wickham reached the door, Hayden had slipped into a dream – the warmth of a female embrace.
Fatigue hovered ever near. Hayden found he could not stay upon his feet long and required sleep after even a brief period out of his cot. He continued to eat the diet Ariss had prescribed – even so, his strength was returning but slowly.
Archer and Barthe were more than able to command the Themis, but there was an entire convoy that required the direction only a single, decisive commander could provide, and Hayden could not slack for a moment if he hoped to bring his charges safely to anchor in Gibraltar.
For this reason he was on deck as often as he felt able, and when abroad, found himself regularly passing by the quara
ntine-berth. As much as the place unsettled him, he could not stay away. Enquiries about the doctor’s condition were met with hopeful words but disheartened looks.
Upon one of his rounds, Hayden happened upon Mr Gould sitting at the aft mess table. Realizing that Ariss, Gould and Smosh must periodically have fresh air and a few moments’ respite from their labours, the starboard aft mess had been designated for their use alone – not that the crew needed to be encouraged to keep their distance.
Here he found Gould seated at the table – ‘slumped’ would be a more accurate description – and before him, a dozen paces distant, stood a small gathering of hands.
‘Will you have more, Mr Gould?’ one of the men asked.
Gould managed a shake of the head. Hayden could see only his back, but clearly he was bent over, engaged in the act of eating.
‘Mr Jefferies has been saving some cheese…?’ another wondered. ‘Shall I fetch you a slice?’
To this a nod of the head.
The crewman went off at a trot.
Seeing the captain the men all made their knuckle.
‘How fare you, Mr Gould? No, do not rise. Eat while you may. Lord knows, you will be called away soon enough.’
‘I am well, sir,’ Gould responded, hurrying to chew and swallow that he might answer his captain.
The man returned at that moment with cheese on a wooden plate and reaching out to his furthest extreme set it upon the table and then scurried back to stand among the men attending the midshipman.
‘You are in good hands, I see,’ Hayden observed.
‘Yes, sir. The men have been most kind, Captain.’
‘I can see that, and well deserved. Carry on.’ And Hayden passed by, feeling the greatest sense of relief he had in many days. The hands would forgive a courageous officer many offences or shortcomings. He had seen it oftener than he could say. And there was nothing the men feared so much as a pestilence – with the possible exception of sepsis. Aiding Mr Ariss in the quarantine berth had won Gould the admiration and appreciation of the older hands, no doubt, and the rest would follow their example. Gould would have no troubles with the hands for a very long time, and Hayden was very pleased to see it. Very pleased indeed.
Eleven
They lowered the dead man, twisting slowly in a crude sling, the noose he had used to hang himself still tightly encircling his delicate neck. Two of his mess mates caught him as he neared the deck and guided the body, almost tenderly, to the hard planks. He laid there, unnaturally, limbs stiff, strands of fine, youthful hair drifting about a bloodless face.
Hardly more than a boy, Hayden thought.
The men, gathering silently, removed their hats, and stared as though they had never seen a corpse before. Hayden hardly remembered the boy alive, but thought, now, he would never forget the sight of him in death, his slack mouth, swollen, purple lips, traceries of crimson across his cheeks where blood vessels had ruptured.
Griffiths came forward, still so weak that he braced himself on a walking stick, and unable to sustain a crouch, thumped down awkwardly on his knees by the boy’s side. He loosened the noose, a badly made knot that had slipped tight and tighter, suffocating him finally. An abrupt examination of the boy’s hands, his neck, then the doctor nodded to the men who stood by with a cot.
‘Carry him down to the sick-berth,’ he said hoarsely. ‘God rest his soul.’
‘God rest his soul,’ echoed in ripples across the deck, repeated by each man in turn.
Setting his stick and placing two hands upon the knob, Griffiths hauled himself up with difficulty. A quick, direct look at Hayden and the acting captain fell in beside the surgeon, the two making their way to the taffrail.
‘Please, sit, Doctor,’ Hayden insisted and Griffiths, a little out of breath, did so gratefully, tumbling down onto the little bench. Hayden leaned back against the larboard rail and waited.
‘I will examine him more thoroughly,’ Griffiths said, a little out of breath from even these small exertions, ‘but almost certainly it was self-murder.’
Hayden shook his head – the second such death since he had come aboard the Themis. A memory of the haunted look of Giles Sanson as he cast himself into the sea came to him – another face never to be forgotten.
‘I… I hardly noticed him when he was alive. One of the impressed men, I believe… What could have led one so young to so rash an act, one must wonder?’
Griffiths took a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his face, still gaunt from recent illness. ‘I will attempt to determine if any… unnatural acts were forced upon him.’
A muttered curse escaped Hayden’s lips. ‘Perhaps the men who knew him can cast a little light on this matter.’
‘If anyone knew him. Even so, I doubt you will learn anything that causes the least surprise; a young man, quite likely of sensitive disposition, impressed against his will, thrust into a harsh world he neither knew nor understood, taken to sea by winter, threatened and unnerved by terrible winds and seas, an enemy he knew nothing of trying to kill him with savage guns, and even his own crew probably hostile or at least uncaring, mayhap even cruel. I have seen melancholia sink its claws into men subjected to less. ‘Self-murder’ you will write in the log, but the boy was murdered by the Royal Navy. That is the truth.’
Griffiths was so fragile and peevish since his illness that Hayden chose not to argue this particular point. He thought it more likely that the boy was being ballyragged or even buggered, and that was a fault to be laid at the feet of the officers, of whom there were too few and of those only a handful had enough sea miles to know their business. He himself felt shame that this had happened aboard his ship – that the boy, friendless and despairing, had been driven to take his own life. Hayden felt the failure was his and his alone.
‘The good news,’ the surgeon said, ‘if there can be good news on such a day, is that the port doctor has declared us free of influenza. We may lower that cursed yellow flag and even venture ashore.’ Griffiths turned his gaze upon Hayden, who felt that the doctor had slipped a little away from life after his illness, and when one looked into his eyes he seemed to be somehow deeper inside, as though the man’s essence was falling into a dark and narrow well.
‘Then let us have it down this instant.’ Hayden looked about for the officer of the watch. ‘Mr Archer? Haul down the quarantine flag, if you please.’
‘Aye, sir!’ Archer responded, as though he had never been given such a gratifying order in all of his life.
‘Do tell me if you find anything out of the ordinary regarding… the dead boy.’ Hayden had already forgotten his name, but then his poor brain had not been quite the same since the Atlantic had nearly drawn all the life out of him. ‘I am called away. To report to the admiral, don’t you know. I pray it will be more productive then my last such encounter.’
Hayden went quickly down to his cabin and gathered up the diverse papers he would need – a list of those who had died of influenza, and those who had been lost in the foundering of the Syren. Requests for stores and water would go to the commissioner.
In a moment he was in the stern-sheets of the ship’s barge, Childers at the helm, and set off across the harbour, the little town of Gibraltar bathed in sunlight some distance away.
Admiral Joseph Brown sat at a writing table. Across the stern gallery, curtains hung, precisely drawn, so that the Mediterranean sun slanted down upon his desk leaving all of his considerable bulk in shadow but for powdery white hands. Thick spectacles and a puzzled squint suggested to Hayden that the man’s sight was failing. Not looking up from the report Hayden had submitted, the admiral said quietly, ‘How many men were found with you after the Syren went down?’
‘Six, sir… though two of those passed on soon after.’ Hayden did not say that he had almost been among them, hanging between life and death for several hours, the furnace of his body having been quenched by the winter ocean.
For a moment Hayden waited for the admiral to say more, but
the man read on, as though he had not received the report some weeks previously, for the Themis had been lying a month in Gibraltar harbour, quarantined, land tantalizingly near. The influenza had burned through Hayden’s crew like a fire, spreading from man to man, felling one then another. Twenty men the disease had claimed – one in ten – unheard of for such a contagion. Those who had fallen ill recovered slowly, a lingering cough, shortness of breath and loss of vigour common. And now, in the aftermath, the crew seemed haunted, silent, wary, as though the angel of death had walked among them, invisible, unmerciful, touching this man upon the brow then that. Even those who had escaped illness altogether appeared, somehow, convalescent.
Brown laid the letter aside and turned in his chair, a shuffling of the feet, a brittle twist of the shoulders. He removed his spectacles and for a moment contemplated Hayden. ‘The Syren’s only surviving lieutenant informs me that you threatened to fire into his ship. Is this true?’
Hayden felt his mouth go dry and when he spoke his voice was thickened and harsh. ‘Captain Bradley seemed to have believed he possessed the authority to appoint one of his lieutenants to command of the convoy. Certainly he did not. As senior officer the responsibility fell to me – by all practices of the Navy. Cole must have known this, and his actions were insubordinate, verging upon mutinous. I acted as the situation dictated to establish the proper chain of command.’
A Battle Won Page 20
