‘Oh, Lydia!’ he gasped, returning to the painting. ‘The child! It will arrive any day now.’ Images flooded his mind of all the dangers she would be facing back in England. He had lost John, surely he could not loose Lydia too? He thought of the many women he had heard of who had died bringing new life into the world. He got up from his chair and began to pace the deck, an anxious father-to-be, as if Lydia were giving birth in his sleeping cabin beyond the bulkhead rather than in a different hemisphere altogether. So real was the illusion that he jumped when there was another knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ he called. The distinctly un-midwifely form of Midshipman Russell marched into the cabin.
‘Mr Armstrong’s respects, and he believes the smoke may be coming from some manner of little islet, sir. Masthead reports a great mass of what look to be birds.’ Clay pushed aside thoughts of his wife and hurried to pull on his coat.
‘First smoke and now birds? Very well, tell Mr Armstrong that I truly am coming this time, Mr Russell.’
On deck, the cloud of terns was visible as a coiling swirl of white specks, while behind them was a thin feather of brown. The bow of the Titan pointed directly towards it, and with a keen wind on her quarter the gap was closing quickly. Clay went across to join the sailing master by the rail.
‘You suspect there may be an atoll of some description ahead, I collect, Mr Armstrong,’ he said.
‘I do, sir,’ replied the American. ‘It is the only possible explanation for all those birds. Clearly something has vexed them, to have taken flight in such numbers. I assume that will be the fire.’
‘And nothing is marked on the chart?’ he asked.
‘No, sir, but that is not unusual. These waters are dotted with little unmarked islands. Most ships are obliged to keep to the main shipping routes in consequence. You would not wish to discover one at night, under full sail.’
‘No, I should think not,’ said the captain.
‘Deck there!’ bellowed the lookout. ‘Land ho! Land on the bow!’ Armstrong turned to his captain and raised his hat in mock salute. His periwig lifted from his bald pate at the same time.
‘Congratulations, Mr Armstrong. Kindly have this atoll of yours noted on the chart. You may name it Armstrong Island, if you wish.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ beamed the American. ‘I believe that I shall.’
The sighting of land sent a buzz of anticipation through the crew. Taylor and Macpherson hurried up from the wardroom, where they had been playing backgammon together, to find out what was afoot. On the forecastle, all discussion about the mutinous crew of the Echo had stopped, and they were clustered along the rail or had climbed part-way into the fore shrouds in the hope of seeing more.
‘Mr Russell, take a glass aloft and tell me what you can see,’ ordered Clay. The midshipman rushed to the main shrouds and thundered up them at the speed of a moderate sized ape. When he reached the main royal yard he hooked one arm around the thin upper mast and focused the telescope with the other.
‘I think I can see the island now, sir,’ said Armstrong from beside him. ‘See, a low area of surf and pale blue water dead ahead.’
‘Yes, I have it now,’ said Clay. He looked up towards the midshipman. ‘Mr Russell, can you see what has caused all this smoke?’
‘I cannot make out much, in truth, sir,’ he replied. ‘I thought I could see a small blaze, but all these damned birds are in the way.’
‘Can you see anyone who may have set the fire?’
‘Maybe a figure? No, he is obscured again, sir. Ah, there he is! No, two of them! One is waving a shirt on a stick of some sort.’
‘Castaways!’ exclaimed Taylor. ‘I wonder how they come to be so far out at sea, sir.’
‘We are several hundred miles from land, and even farther from where our shipping might be found, sir,’ said the master. ‘There are Arab slavers who ply these waters. Perhaps that is who they are.’
‘We shall soon find out, Mr Armstrong,’ said Clay. ‘Kindly summon the launch crew, and pass the word for the surgeon. Tell Mr Corbett to expect some patients to attend to.’
‘Three, sir!’ yelled Russell from the masthead. ‘I can see three of them. One is collapsed at the other two’s feet.’
‘Mr Corbett!’ called Clay down to the surgeon, as he appeared on the main deck. ‘You had best accompany the launch crew, and take some water with you.’
Closer and closer the Titan came, shouldering her way through the long rollers. The island grew from a little swirl of white in the vastness of the ocean to a stretch of scrubby vegetation with patches of bare rock. It seemed to be surrounded with coral reefs and warm lagoons. Much of the vegetation was now charred and some of it still smouldered close to the feet of the men. Their fire was almost out now, and the birds were beginning to alight again amidst the ruins of their breeding colony. The ship was close enough for everyone to be able to see the little figures, even without telescopes. The two men had now stopped their waving and were helping their colleague towards the beach nearest to the approaching frigate.
‘That doesn’t look like Arab dress those men are wearing,’ remarked Armstrong. ‘I could swear that the one on the right is in britches.’
Up at the masthead Midshipman Russell had the best view of all. He focused his telescope on the castaways. There was something familiar in the way one of them moved and stood. The man’s face turned towards him and he gasped. Behind the hollow eyes, thick stubble of beard and smears of filth was a face he knew.
‘Captain, sir!’ he bellowed. ‘I think one of the castaways may be from the Rush!’
*****
Later that day, when he came off watch, Jacob Armstrong made his way down to the wardroom of the Titan and disappeared into his little cabin. He hung his coat up on the hook behind the door, loosened his neck cloth, and unbuttoned the front of his waistcoat with a sigh of relief. Once he was in his shirtsleeves, he sat down at his tiny desk and went over the observations he had made earlier. After a few moments of patient work, he lay them aside with a grunt of satisfaction and pulled the chart towards him. Then he transferred his conclusion onto the middle of a blank area of ocean as a tiny pencil cross. He checked his calculation once more, and when he was certain that all was as it should be, he cut a new nib for his pen, dipped it into the ink well and made the mark permanent. He added the name Armstrong Island in tiny little letters next to it, with a smile of pleasure. Then he paused, his blotter hovering in his hand, and thought about the three men that had been saved earlier. He rapped his fingers on the side of the desk as he pondered what to do. A few moments later he leant forward once more, put a neat line through the word Armstrong and replaced it with Hope.
Chapter 13 Return
‘All three of them have slept for over a day and a night in a most satisfactory fashion, sir,’ announced Richard Corbett, as he polished his little steel-framed spectacles on a corner of his waistcoat. ‘They have taken on board prodigious quantities of fluid, and are even starting to void some urine as their functions recommence. But even so, they are still very weak. I am most concerned for Mr Croft, who was quite spent when he came on board yesterday morning. If we had not picked him up when we did, I doubt if he could have survived a further day of such deprivation.’
‘Do you hold that they shall make a full recovery, doctor?’ asked Clay.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the surgeon, reaching forwards to touch the top of his captain’s walnut desk. ‘With a deal of water to revitalise them, they are already much improved, but it will be some time before they can take on sufficient nourishment. These cases of enforced fasting cannot be rushed. Portable soup and a little sweetened burgoo, together with watered wine, is all that I will permit them to have today.’
‘Do they have any other injuries, apart from thirst and hunger?’
‘Only those you would expect from a lengthy time in a small boat, sir. The sun has quite scorched their skin in places, especially Mr Croft. Then they all have some unpleasant s
ores and a degree of wastage of the tissues. I have greased and dressed their various wounds. What they chiefly need is rest, and in time, adequate sustenance.’
‘I understand,’ said Clay. ‘Yesterday they were in a truly shocking state. Even my particular friend, Captain Sutton, barely seemed to recognise me.’
‘He will know you today, sir,’ replied the surgeon. ‘In fact he was asking for you when he awoke, just before I came up from his cabin.’ Clay rose from behind his desk and started to pull on his coat.
‘Then I must go to him,’ he said. ‘At once!’
‘I had planned to administer some further drops of laudanum, but I could delay his dose for a little while, sir,’ said Corbett, getting up as well. ‘But I can only sanction a brief visit, and that only after I have first examined him. He is still in need of much rest.’
Sutton had been installed in the spare cabin off the wardroom. It was a dim little space, with a single horn lantern that swung from a hook in the beam above his head. He had been washed and shaved, but this only served to emphasize how gaunt his face looked. He was sitting up in his cot when the surgeon entered, and drinking from a marine’s water canteen that hung from the bulkhead beside the bed.
‘My apologies, Mr Corbett,’ he said. ‘I know you urged me not to take excessive fluid, but I do not seem to be able to stop. It is so wonderful to be able to drink water! I made a promise, when we were adrift, that if I survived, I would never allow myself to be thirsty again.’
‘I am sure it will do you little harm, sir, but please be moderate, I pray,’ the doctor said. He felt for his patient’s pulse with one hand, while he pulled out his pocket watch with the other. ‘Still a little elevated, I find,’ he muttered to himself. He slid his hand onto Sutton’s forehead. ‘Do you feel able to accommodate a visit from the captain?’
‘I would want that above all things,’ exclaimed Sutton, pulling himself upright in bed.
‘Control yourself, please. You must not become over-excited.’ He turned towards the open cabin door. ‘No more than ten minutes then, sir.’ He made his way out, and the tall figure of Clay stooped in through the low door, seeming to fill the whole of the tiny space.
‘Good heavens, I had forgotten how cramped a lieutenant’s cabin is,’ he exclaimed. ‘Did we truly pass all those years in a dark cave as tiny as this?’
‘Alex!’ said his friend, holding out his arms. ‘Oh my, but it is good to see your face! There were times when I thought that I might never look upon you again.’
‘And for my part, I thought you dead, brother,’ said Clay into Sutton’s shoulder, his eyes welling up as he held his friend close, partly through sheer joy and partly because of the painful feel of his friend’s ribs under his nightshirt. ‘I experienced the greatest astonishment when Mr Russell said he recognised you from the masthead.’ After a while he let him go and sat down in the chair next to the cot. ‘My, but it is good to see you again!’
‘What have you there, Alex?’ asked Sutton, indicating the pile of slim leather volumes Clay held on his lap.
‘I thought that while you are confined down here, you might like something to read. These are my sister’s first two novels. I make no doubt that you will have read them already, but they may prove more diverting than looking at the underside of the main deck.’
‘They will be most welcome, once I can persuade your surgeon not to render me insensible with milk of the poppy every five minutes.’
‘So, Lazarus, while you are still lucid, tell me how it was that you came to be on that godforsaken little rock, instead of cold in your grave as I supposed?’ asked Clay.
While his friend listened to his tale, Sutton talked and talked. He started with the battle with the Prudence, and how Windham had betrayed him.
‘So you had ordered him to closely engage the enemy?’ said Clay, his face white with rage. ‘I knew that damned bastard was lying! You know that in his version of events your plan was to stand off and cripple the Frenchman from range. He shall pay for his deceit in full measure, I swear it.’
Sutton went on to touch on the misery he had felt as he surrendered the splintered remains of his precious Rush to the enemy. He spoke of the piles of dead and wounded men that had littered the deck, and how the ship itself had been sinking beneath his feet. Then had come the final ordeal, after the French had dragged the hull of the sloop up onto the beach: watching from the quarterdeck of the departing Prudence as flames consumed the Rush. Clay patted his arm in sympathy.
‘She was a fine little ship,’ he said. ‘My first command, too. Remember how she was when we first went aboard her, back in Bridgetown? Her hull was so foul with weed she could barely muster five knots!’
Sutton moved on to his time as a captive on Reunion. The weeks of boredom, his daily walk along the shore mulling over his various problems, and then the day the squadron arrived. He explained how the signal was sent, with flags made from clothes. Then how they had been spotted and forced to flee, chased through the groves and cane fields by patrols of soldiers.
‘We came and looked for you that night, you know,’ said Clay. ‘Edward Preston and Tom Macpherson landed with some of his marines, before we fought the Prudence. They saw your sea chest in that little house, which gave us all such hope that you had survived the battle. But then, when the list of prisoners came through from the Commandant of St Paul’s, your name was absent, so we feared the worst.’
‘Oh Alex,’ said his friend. ‘That is the sort of low trick I would expect of Morliere. He knew perfectly well that we had escaped, but must have been so vexed that we had done so that he took a little petty revenge on my friends.’
‘Well, he certainly succeeded on that score,’ said Clay. ‘By the way, that jaunt ashore had best be strictly between us. Montague gave me an order not to attempt your rescue, which I chose to interpret as directed to me personally, rather than my people. I should prefer it if he did not discover I went against his expressed wishes.’
‘Did he, now?’ said Sutton. ‘I wonder why he issued such an order?’
‘He said it was because he could not afford to have me captured, too,’ said Clay. ‘It is an explanation that I do not find wholly convincing. To my mind he is altogether too close to that creature Windham, although I sense his patience is running thin with regard to his protege. Now, tell me how it was that you travelled from a shack on Reunion to a rock in the middle of the Indian Ocean?’
The rest of the story came rapidly. Sutton delivered the bare facts with little emotion, anxious not to dwell on the horror of his experience. He could trust his friend to read between the lines of the simple story, to fill in the fear and despair that Sutton would have felt when he found himself adrift, far out at sea, with no food or water. Clay in turn gave what answers he could to fill the gaps in his friend’s comprehension, explaining why the Titan had vanished far out to sea on that the first night, and how they had seen the thread of smoke on the horizon, all those days later.
‘Goodness, what a saga,’ said Clay, running a hand through his hair. ‘It is a miracle that you survived for so long in such a tiny little boat. You must have had many empty hours to reflect on matters.’
‘Do you mean about what I will do with our friend Windham?’ said Sutton.
‘I can imagine that must have engaged you for much of the time. What course have you resolved on?’
‘My first thought had been to call him out the moment I saw the blackguard, and shoot him like the dog that he is.’
‘An understandable desire,’ said Clay. ‘But I note you say had. Have you now changed your mind?’
‘I have, Alex, and it was Chapman, of all people, my steward, who made me think differently. In such an extreme position as we were in, convinced that we were soon to perish, there is a frankness of discourse that cuts across the normal constraints of position and rank. During one such debate, he said that he held me in part responsible for this whole sorry mess, and in truth he is right.’
‘Be
cause you killed Windham’s uncle,’ whispered Clay. ‘Surely you did not share that with him?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Sutton. ‘But he is a shrewd man. I am sure he suspects that something more substantial lies behind the bare facts that I gave him. No, his principal accusation was that I did not seek to resolve matters privately with Windham, and it was this want of action that let matters fester to a point when others became dragged in. He sees the principal victims in this matter to be his shipmates on the Rush.’
‘There is a deal of wisdom in what he says, John,’ said Clay. ‘And I think you are right not to consider a duel with Windham, for it would provide you with scant justice. You well know the intolerance that the Admiralty has for such affairs of honour. If you should kill him, you will be dismissed the service and your career will be over. If he should kill you, which is frankly the more probable outcome in your current state, where will the justice you seek be for all those shipmates?’
‘So what should I do, then?’ asked the patient. ‘I never put my orders to Windham in writing, and the only other person present when I gave them to him was poor Mr Wise, my lieutenant, who perished onboard the Rush.’
‘Go before Sir George and demand justice,’ urged Clay. ‘Any investigation will reveal the truth of what happened. Not only is there your testimony and that of Mr Croft, but you can ask that the French officers we captured on the Prudence be interviewed, too. I also understand that the crew of the Echo are very discontent. Sailors will tolerate much in a captain, but they have nothing but contempt for one who shirks a fight. Doubtless many of them will be happy to denounce him.’
The Distant Ocean Page 22
