A private revenge

The Typhoon

Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater gave up trying to sleep. His cot rocked and jerked so violently on its lanyards that his body was never still. He kicked the twisted blankets aside with a sudden spurt of furious annoyance.

His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician pitched violently, her bow flung into the air as if her twelve hundred tons were of no consequence, for all her massive timbers. Drinkwater was driven to consider her fabric as a sum of many small and separate parts which, God alone knew, were now subjected to stresses and strains beyond the computation of his tired brain. All that he could consider at that moment was a vivid image of his ship flying to pieces from the pounding she was now under­going. There was something alarmingly new about this present motion, and the thought led him to conclude that he must have been dozing. Anger had been born out of this interruption of his rest. The knock at the cabin door only increased his resentment.

'Yes?' His voice was sharp and strained.

'Captain, sir, if you please, Mr Fraser's compliments and would you step on deck, sir?'

Midshipman Belchambers's face was grey with fatigue and fright, reminding Drinkwater that he was not alone in his exhaustion.

'What is it?' He raised himself on a precarious elbow and quizzed the midshipman as the cot lanyards alternately slackened and snapped taut so that his awkwardly prone body was feather-light one second and leaden the next. The ship's stern was lifted rapidly as a sea slammed viciously under her transom and against her stern windows over which the dead-lights had been dropped. Water drove in round the sashes, squirting over the settee before running to join the mess slopping back and forth across the chequer-painted canvas on the deck.

Midshipman Belchambers grabbed a corner of the sideboard, his Adam's apple bobbing uncertainly above his grubby stock.

'I can't say, sir,' he gabbled and, clapping a hand over his mouth, fled from the captain's presence.

Drinkwater stared after the boy. The grey gleam of water, mixed with fragments of biscuit from the shattered china barrel, flowed in miniature torrents round the legs of the lashed table, and overturned chairs slid back and forth, back and forth ...

'God's bones!' Drinkwater blasphemed through clenched teeth, hoisting himself carefully out of his cot and seeking a footing in his stockinged feet amid the cold swirl of the water. The shards of porcelain grated across the deck like shingle on a beach as he felt his stockings take up the water. Drinkwater's shins were already criss-crossed with bruises, his old shoulder wound ached abominably, his mouth was foul with the taste of bile and his eyes ground grittily in their sockets, sure evidence of lack of sleep.

He clung upright with difficulty, drawing on coat and cloak, despite the stuffiness of the air. Outside his cabin the marine sentry slithered towards him and they collided amid a confused and embarrassed explosion of apology and profanity. Patrician's motion was unpredictably irregular, a bucking, scending, rolling caused by the seas which slammed her sides and ran below by a hundred leaky routes. A rancid stench rose from the crowded berth-deck below and was given seeming embodiment by the creaks and groans of the labouring ship. Grasping the companionway man-ropes, Drinkwater climbed carefully on deck.

He reached the quarterdeck surprised that it was full daylight. Fraser stood clinging to the starboard hammock cranes.

'What is it, Mr Fraser?'

The first lieutenant shook his head, concern etched in his drawn expression.

'I cannot tell precisely, sir ... the confusion of the sea ... 'tis the worst thing I've seen.'

Drinkwater was suddenly attentive and looked about him, the stupor of exhaustion flung away. Was it a matter of Scots caution, or did a shoal lurk beneath this monstrous confusion of water? He could not tell; his charts were totally inadequate and he had no precise knowledge of their whereabouts. For four days they had run before the storm without a stitch of canvas set and their topgallant masts struck. Two men had been killed getting the heavy lower yards lashed a-portlast so that Patrician offered as little top-hamper as possible to the fury of the wind. The decks were cluttered with lowered spars, yet the big frigate still steered downwind with the speed of a cantering horse.

On the second night of the storm the lower masts had glowed with St Elmo's fire, the corposant running hither and thither in the rigging until their baffled compass had, in the hours that followed, circled gently in a kind of bewilderment that confused Drinkwater. He had lost his old sailing master, killed in the action with the Russian line-of-battle ship Suvorov, and had no one to turn to for advice, as Fraser had now turned to him.

For those four days they had run square to leeward with great seas heaping up astern, their foaming crests breaking and running after the fleeing ship. They had been pooped twice, sluiced from taffrail to knightheads by an avalanche of green water that tore coils of rope from the fife-rails, swept men off their feet and dashed them into the guns. In this deluge arms had been broken, an elbow shattered and a leg snapped so cleanly that it lay like a carpenter's angle. Worst of all two men had been washed overboard. One, Midshipman Wickham, they had not seen again, the other, the marine quarter-guard, had been found clinging to the heads, his feet dragging in the water in the last extremity of distress. The experience made the ship's company more cautious and the second pooping caused less damage.

But this morning the sea no longer drove from astern and the wind no longer roared through the standing rigging to tear the slack stays of the upper masts in great bights to leeward. Nor was the air filled with salt and spray driving downwind like buckshot. Instead, the surface of the ocean rose up in heaps; waves slopped with malignant power against each other, flinging dark columns of water high into the air, from which they fell back in a vast welter of confusion.

In this lashing of the sea Patrician was caught helplessly, the violence of her motion whipping her truncated masts so that blocks flew about aloft with sufficient energy to brain a man sent to secure them. Abrupt enough to throw an incautious man from his feet as she lay down to a roll, Patrician's hull would be thrust back by a wave running in opposition to the first. This conflict of forces assailed her simultaneously, sending wracking stresses through her straining hull while the tortured bodies of her company met the onslaught with instinctive and tiring muscular exertions.

If the air no longer boomed with the sound of the great wind, it was now filled with the huge slop and hiss of the aimless sea, and the desperate cries of exhausted birds. The deck was covered with their pathetic, flapping forms, a variety of species including brilliantly coloured land-birds.

Looking upwards Drinkwater saw the explanation for his surprise at the daylight. For the duration of the storm they had run under a low and oppressive overcast of thick scud. Now the sky was inexplicably clear and the last stars were fading against the blue of the morning, though the horizon that ringed them was still dull under a rim of encircling fractus.

'I tried a cast o' the lead, sir, but nae bottom ...' said Fraser, suddenly thrusting out an arm. Drinkwater grasped it, and clawed his way uphill towards the starboard rail, then immediately found himself cannoned into Fraser by the frigate's lurch.

'Devil take it! Obliged, Mr Fraser ...'

Drinkwater caught his breath and looked about him again.

He had, he realised now, known instinctively that this terrible motion was not due to shoal water; the extraordinary funnel of clear and windless sky stirred something else in his tired brain. He fought to clear it, buying time with a pathetic joke.

'Belchambers bid me "step" on deck, Mr Fraser. If it was your choice of phrase you could have bettered it.'

A thin, respectful grin spread briefly across the Scotsman's worried face.

'Aye, sir, 'twas ill-chosen.'

'No matter.' Drinkwater jerked his head at the sky. 'This present lull will not last. I mind some instruction on the matter, 'tis the same as a West India hurricane, though known differently in these seas. Do you look again to the breeching of the guns. I wish we had struck some of them down into the hold, but it is too late now. I'll take the deck.'

Aye, aye, sir. We've beckets on the wheel and clapped lashings on the tiller. All she'll do is lie a-hull.'

'That's well done.'

Fraser skidded off, shouting names at the duty bosun's mate, and Drinkwater jammed his body against the starboard mizen pin-rail, feeling the sore places on his back where the ropes had abraded him earlier. He looked after his first lieutenant: poor Fraser, as first luff he should have enjoyed the privilege of being exempt from watch-keeping. But with Lieutenant Mylchrist and Mr Hill dead, only he and Quilhampton remained of the lieutenants and senior officers, though Drinkwater had written out an acting commission for Mr Midshipman Frey.

Fraser's predicament led Drinkwater's thoughts to a review of his hard-pressed command. In addition to her present plight there were other concerns that drove his mind into a remorseless circle of worry. The presence of over a hundred Russian prisoners placed strains upon the domestic arrangements of a ship and company already stretched by a long and dangerous voyage. Patrician's own people were worn out with the war, transferred from one ship to another at the whim of the almighty Admiralty and now fighting for their very existence in this dismal corner of the north-west Pacific.

Captain Drinkwater stared bleakly ahead, noting the relative shift in the shrinking patch of blue sky and weighing up the chances of a glimpse of the sun before the cloud lowered over them again.

The squawks of the birds drew his thoughts inboard once more as a handful of seamen, clinging on to any handhold, strove to clear the decks of some of the hundreds of dying creatures. He watched them, trying to judge their temper for though they had fought well against a Russian battle-ship in the Pacific, their mood had been uncertain off the Horn and they had been near-mutinous off California, several of them deserting at San Francisco.

In his heart, Drinkwater knew he could expect no less. Some of them had been at sea since the turn of the century, had served as volunteers in the Peace of Amiens and had then been swept up in the turbulence of the renewed war with France.

Drinkwater cursed the chain of events that had led them to this day, for he too suffered, suffered as personally as his men, for the secret he and they had brought back from the Baltic in the late summer of 1807. That overwhelming need for secrecy had led Their Lordships to despatch him to the Pacific to head off Britain's quondam ally Russia, whose Tsar had abandoned his alliance with the Court of St James in favour of a shoddy opportunist accommodation with Napoleon Bonaparte. This allowed Tsar Alexander to meddle with Sweden and Turkey and lend his British-trained fleet to the Emperor of the French. Had Drinkwater, despite the odds, succeeded in crushing the Russian presence in the Pacific? He had fought the Suvorov to a standstill, as the state of his frigate testified, but his cruise to locate the Juno had failed. She had slipped from him, and his nature would not allow him the reasonable excuse of having the whole Pacific to search to comfort him in his failure.

Perhaps she was at Canton, perhaps not ...

A watery gleam caught his attention to larboard. He turned and lifted his eyes. As the circle of clear sky moved over them a shredding of the cloud on its eastern rim exposed for a second a pale yellow disc. The sun!

'Mr Belchambers! My sextant and the chronometer! Upon the instant, sir!'

Transfixed, Drinkwater watched the face of the sun darken as, like dense smoke, cloud trailed across it, then lighten again. Impatiently he waited for the boy's return. The sun swam clear of cloud, hurting his eyes, and he thought its warmth struck him, though afterwards it seemed a mere illusion. Suddenly the confusion of the sea held less terrors and flashed friendly fire back at them in reflections. Amidships a man smiled and raised a low cheer. All about him there was a spontaneous outburst of relief. The watch, huddling in the lee of the boats on the booms, struggled to their feet, other seamen stopped throwing the birds overboard and even, it seemed, the birds themselves ceased their death struggles to bask in the sunlight.

Drinkwater's patience snapped. 'Where the devil's that boy?'

'Beg pardon, sir ...'

His sentry's head was poked up the companionway level with the deck.

'Eh? What is it?' Drinkwater asked the marine.

'Begging your pardon, sir, but Mr Belchambers 'as 'ad a fall, sir.'

'What? God-damn! What about my sextant?' Drinkwater was already crossing the deck and exchanging the ineffable sweetness of sunshine for the stygian gloom of the gun-deck. Shoving aside the sentry, he entered his cabin. By the grace of God Belchambers had not reached the Hadley sextant, nestling in its baize-lined box and lashed atop his locker. Instead the boy lay amid the swirl of biscuit and china with a sprained ankle. His small, frightened face was twisted with agony.

'I ... I'm sorry, sir ... I acted with haste ... festina lente, sir,' the boy added gamely.

'No matter, Mr Belchambers, are you all right?' Drinkwater bent over the midshipman.

'Apart from my ankle, sir ...'

Drinkwater turned to the marine. 'Get a couple of hands to carry Mr Belchambers to his berth.'

Drinkwater reached across the midshipman who was drawing himself up against the locker. 'You must excuse me, I have urgent matters to attend to.'

Lifting the sextant from its box he caught the strap of the chronometer case with his left hand. Sticking his elbows out for balance he gingerly made for the bottom of the companionway and shouted up for assistance.

'Here, zur, let me ...'

Old Tregembo his coxswain shouldered past him and took the chronometer box.

'Mind how you go, damn it,' snapped Drinkwater as both men grabbed the man-rope at the same instant.

'Up you goes, zur, an' I'll follow ...'

But it was too late. Already the sun had been swallowed by cloud and the eye of the storm was passing over them. Fractus again curtained the sky and the confusion of the sea was abating. Streaks of spume were appearing upon its surface which was heaping once more in regular ridges. The calm of the dawn had vanished. Patrician, with her lashed tiller and locked rudder, was paying off to lie beam on to the rising wind that came at them now from the contrary direction. Drinkwater bit off his disappointment at failing to get a sight. As the deck steadied to a roll, he crossed it swiftly and peered into the binnacle. He had at least a notion of their heading and now, as it blew with swiftly increasing strength, the direction of the gale. That brief glimpse of the sun had fed his starved seaman's instinct with a morsel of information.

The compass had steadied and the wind blew now from the west-nor'-west.

But it was precious little comfort. An hour later Patrician was assailed again by the violence of the storm. It no longer screamed with the malevolent harpy-shriek of a strong gale, but had risen to the mind-numbing boom of a mighty wind, and the spray tore at the very eyes in their sockets, forcing their heads away.

'It's blowing great guns, sir,' shouted Fraser as he clawed his way towards Drinkwater on completion of his rounds.

'A great wind, Mr Fraser. I mind now the captain of an Indiaman once telling me it was called tai-fun by the Chinese.'

CHAPTER 1 The Brig

Drinkwater closed the log-book. Knowledge of his position at last gave him a measure of contentment. The inadequacy of his chart sent a flutter of apprehension through his belly, to conflict with the realisation that he had been extraordinarily lucky. He recalled memories of talks with Captain Calvert nearly thirty years earlier, dredging up facts imparted to the impressionable young Midshipman Drinkwater by the old East India commander. Calvert had told him of the curious revolving storms of the China Seas which were comparable with the hurricanes of the West Indies or the feared cyclones of the Bay of Bengal.

From what his sextant and chronometer had revealed he was now able to make an informed guess at Patrician's track in a long curve that had brought her from the Pacific Ocean into the eastern margins of the South China Sea. The typhoon's eye, or centre, that funnel of clear sky in which they had experienced the severest thrashing of the sea, had passed over them, subjecting them to the violent winds beyond. They had been fortunate that their ordeal had lasted only another two days, for though the wind remained fresh and a heavy residual swell still lifted and rolled the frigate, the sea was no longer vicious. A measure of its moderation could be gauged by the smell of smoke and salt pork that was percolating through the ship. The thought of hot food, however rudimentary, brought a glow of satisfaction to Drinkwater's spirits as surely as the knowledge of his ship's position.

In this mood Drinkwater, tired though he was, finished his self-imposed task of writing up his private journal. As he did so his cabin was suddenly filled with the delicious bitter smell of what passed for coffee aboard His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician. Drinkwater looked up.

'Coffee, sir?'

Mullender poured from the pot he had brought from the pantry and Drinkwater sipped the scalding liquid gratefully. Mullender stood, balancing himself against the heave of the ship which was pronounced here, at the stern.

'Hot food today, sir,' Mullender remarked. Such things assumed a rare importance on board a storm-damaged ship and Drinkwater looked keenly at his steward. How long had Mullender attended him? To his shame he had forgotten; and he had forgotten whether Mullender was married or had children. The man stood patiently, holding the coffee-pot, waiting for Drinkwater to ask for more, a grubby rag of a towel over his bare arm with its sparse flesh and pallid skin. Drinkwater caught the steward's eye and smiled.

'That's good news, Mullender, good news . . .'

'Aye, sir.'

Mullender's impassivity, the expressionless look to his eyes and face struck Drinkwater, and it occurred to him that he had taken Mullender so for granted that he was guilty in some way he could not quite comprehend. He held out his cup and watched the brown liquid gurgle into it.

'We have all been sorely tried, Mullender,' he said as he swallowed the second cupful.

'Aye, sir.'

Drinkwater handed the emptied cup back to the steward. 'That was most welcome, thank you.'

He watched Mullender retreat to the pantry. Was there something odd about the man's demeanour, or was he himself mildly hallucinating from the effects of exhaustion? He did not know. What was important was to secure for them all a period of rest. Wearily he rose from the table and left the cabin.

There was more to hearten him on deck, for it was one of the minor miracles of the sea-service that the sum of a ship's company's efforts could produce spectacular results from meagre resources. And Patrician and her people had indeed been sorely tried in the preceding months.

She had taken a buffeting entering the Pacific by way of Cape Horn the previous year; she had been deliberately sabotaged by someone in her own company and refitted on the coast of California; and she had fought two actions, the second against heavy odds. The brutal combat with the Russian line-of-battle ship Suvorov had left her a battered victor with the added responsibility of prisoners amongst her own disaffected crew. Now, bruised by the long passage across the North Pacific and the terrible onslaught of a typhoon, it was still possible to set her to rights, to turn out of her hold sufficient material to make good the worst ravages of the elements, to rouse out of her sail-room enough spare sails to replace her rent canvas, or hoist from her booms a permutation of spars which allowed her to carry topgallants on all three masts. It was true she was no longer the lofty sail-carrier that had left the Nore amid the equinoctial gales of the autumn of 1807, but despite shortages of powder and shot, despite a desperate depletion of her stores and victuals, she remained a King's ship, an arm of British policy in these distant waters.

'Good morning, sir.'

Lieutenant James Quilhampton touched the forecock of his battered hat, his tall, gangling frame familiarly out-at-elbows, his wooden fist by his side and a wide grin upon his face.

'Good to see a little sunshine, Mr Q,' remarked Drinkwater.

'Indeed it is, sir. Frey told me you were active with sextant and chronometer an hour since, sir. Dare I presume a longitude?'

'You may. And it crossed tolerably with yesterday's meridian altitude. If it remains clear, I shall get another at noon and be happy as a prentice-boy on pay-day.'

It was another minor miracle, Drinkwater thought, that neither of his instruments had suffered damage in the typhoon. It was true there were two other quadrants on the ship, but the loss of the chronometer would have been catastrophic.

'We shall have to maintain a masthead look-out, Mr Q, day and night, for we have passed the outer islands and are presently amid the reefs of the China Sea.'

The two men exchanged glances. Both were thinking of the brig Hellebore and her wrecking on a reef in the Red Sea.

'God forbid that we should be caught twice like that,' Quilhampton said fervently, expelling his breath with a shake of his head.

Drinkwater caught the faint whiff of the lieutenant's breath and was reminded of another problem, for the unfortunate taint, increasingly common to them all, was an early sign of scurvy.

'We must wood and water, and seek fresh fruit and vegetables, Mr Q. I've a mind to beat up for the China coast. There's the Portuguese colony of Macao, or the East India Company's establishment at Canton where we may also find word of the Juno. It is still possible that she has escorted Russian ships there from Alaska with the season's furs.'

'Will you exchange our prisoners there, sir?' Quilhampton nodded forward to where, under a marine guard, a group of bearded Russians exercised round and round the fo'c's'le.

'If I can. They are a damned liability on board.'

'And their officers, sir?'

It was Drinkwater's turn to expel breath, a signal of exasperation borne with difficulty. 'I doubt they'll go, God damn 'em. My only consolation is that I do not have to suffer them day and night.'

The deaths of Lieutenant Mylchrist and the Master, Mr Hill, had left empty cabins aboard. Acting Lieutenant Frey had been ordered to stay in the gunroom while the cabins of the dead officers were turned over to the most senior of the Russians. At least Captain Prince Vladimir Rakitin did not have to share Drinkwater's own cabin, though he ate at his table. On such a long commission Drinkwater prized his privacy above all else.

'Talk of the devil,' muttered Quilhampton, drawing himself up as officer-of-the-watch to give the paroled prisoners formal permission to exercise on the quarterdeck.

'Good morning, Captain.'

The tall, heavily built figure of the Russian nobleman crossed the deck towards Drinkwater, staring about curiously. Rakitin was pale from his enforced confinement below decks for the duration of the typhoon.

'Good-day.'

Drinkwater was icily polite to his prisoner.

'You have refitted your ship in good time.'

Rakitin's excellent English was unnerving. The Russian had served with the Royal Navy before the Tsar had turned his coat and succumbed to Napoleon's blandishments at Tilsit. Drinkwater found this familiarity as repulsive as the man himself.

'My men know their duty, Captain,' he replied softly.

The two commanders stood side by side, united in rank, divided by hostility and yet compelled by convention to maintain a degree of amity. Considering them from the other side of the quarterdeck, Quilhampton thought them an odd pair. Tall and powerful, Rakitin's broad shoulders stretched the cloth of his high-collared uniform, an a la mode outfit that stank of Parisian fashion. Beside him, half a head shorter, his soft undress uniform coat lapels fluttering in the breeze, Captain Drinkwater balanced himself against the Patrician's motion.

Quilhampton could see the inequality of Drinkwater's shoulders, the result of two wounds that even padding and the heavy bullion epaulettes could not disguise. The hair, receding slightly from the high forehead, still hung in a thick, ribboned queue down Drinkwater's back, an old-fashioned affectation that conveyed an impression of agelessness to the loyal and devoted Quilhampton. As if sensing this scrutiny Drinkwater turned, catching Quilhampton's eye. The thin scar on the left cheek showed livid after the weathering of recent weeks, and the powder burns about Drinkwater's eye puckered the soft skin to give him a curious, quizzing appearance.

'Mr Q!' Drinkwater called. 'Have the kindness to arrange for

Captain Rakitin's officers to attend the purser and supervise an issue of grog to their men in compliment to their labours at the pumps.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Rakitin turned, an expression of surprise on his face. 'My men have been pumping?' he asked.

'Yes,' replied Drinkwater smoothly, 'in order that mine might repair the ship.'

Drinkwater felt a contempt for Rakitin's ignorance of what his men had been doing. It seemed for a moment that Rakitin might protest, but he held his tongue. The Russian seamen had proved tireless and dogged workers, as conscientious at pumping as they had been serving the Suvorov's, guns. But indomitable as they had been in action, they had been ravaged by scurvy, reduced in numbers by sickness, and the high sea running during the battle had made it difficult for Rakitin to use his lower-deck guns. In the end Suvorov had been at the mercy of Patrician's 24- and 18-pounder cannon which had cut up her rigging and masts, hulled her repeatedly, and swept her decks with a hail of canister and langridge. By the time Rakitin struck his colours, Suvorov's powers of resistance were as shattered as her hull and when, in the moderating sea of the following day, they had taken off all those that they could, she had settled so low in the water that the fire they had started aboard her had barely caught. As for Drinkwater, he had lost more men in the rescue than in the action.

Rakitin, left to a sullen contemplation of his fate, had persuaded himself that his ship had been wantonly sacrificed by the British acting under Drinkwater's orders. The fact that Drinkwater possessed neither the resources nor the men to take the Suvorov as a prize did not enter into the Russian commander's bitter reflections. Aware that he had failed in his mission, Rakitin sought among his officers men of like opinion, cultivating them assiduously in this assumption, until they had convinced themselves of its accuracy. It was an understandable enough attitude, Drinkwater reflected, aware of the under­current of hostility. Rakitin would have to account for the loss of his ship to the Admiralty at St Petersburg, and the difference in force between a seventy-four and a frigate, albeit a heavy one, was going to be difficult to explain.

Rakitin had seized eagerly on the intelligence that the British ship had been built twenty-four years earlier as a 64-gun line-of-battle ship, insinuating this into his persuasive argument and glossing over the fact that she had been cut down to her present establishment in 1795. Somehow Rakitin had mitigated his defeat, at least in his own mind.

Despite this, Drinkwater could not deny an underlying sympathy with Rakitin's plight. He knew what it was to lose a ship. The loss of self-confidence alone could sink a man's spirits beyond revival. Nor did Drinkwater forget other matters concerning Russia; his brother Edward was serving with the Russian army, an agent of Great Britain now, nominally at least, an enemy. So Drinkwater cultivated Rakitin with an icy reserve, not knowing, in this long and bitter war, when Tsar Alexander might turn his coat again, or when some obligation towards himself might not prove of advantage.

'Our men work well together, Captain. We should not be enemies. I believe Admiral Seniavin feels this.'

'Seniavin?' Rakitin looked at Drinkwater in astonishment, his mind plucked from the narrow contemplation of his misery to the speculative castle-building that officers called 'strategy'.

'Yes,' went on Drinkwater, 'I am advised that he is opposed to the Tsar's alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte.'

'I have my orders, Captain. It is my duty to obey them,' Rakitin growled.

'But,' said Drinkwater, suddenly brightening at the prospect of a little innocent bear-baiting, 'you also have your opinion, n'est-ce que pas?'

Rakitin turned and drew himself up. 'The alliance with the Emperor Napoleon is one offering great advantages to Russia. It is impossible that the French should rule Europe from Paris, but Europe ruled from Paris and St Petersburg must be, he shrugged, très formidable ...'

'Until the Emperor Napoleon wishes otherwise, eh?'

'Captain Drinkwater, you cannot hold out the hand of friendship to Russia. Your army abandoned ours in the Netherlands, your Nelson threatened our ships in our own Baltic Sea. You still have a fleet there blockading our coasts, you tell us we can only trade with you ...'

You sailed in our ships, Prince Vladimir, you learned much from us and supported us in the North Sea. We pressed gold and arms on you, even refitted your ships; was not this proof of our friendship?'

Rakitin flushed with anger and was about to launch into a tirade on Britain's perfidy when there came a cry from the masthead.

'Deck there! Sail to leeward!'

Quilhampton reacted instantaneously, leaping into the lee mizen shrouds and yelling back: 'Where away?'

'Three points on the lee bow, sir ... looks like a vessel under jury-rig!'

Quilhampton scanned the horizon and could see nothing. He jumped to the deck and held his glass out to Midshipman Dutfield.

'Up you go, cully, and see what you make of her.'

Drinkwater and Rakitin, their interest aroused, dropped their conversation instantly and stood watching the nimble boy ascend the rigging of the main mast. Dutfield reached the topgallant yard and threw a leg over it, hooking himself steady and releasing his two hands to raise the glass. His body arced against the sky for what seemed an eternity as everybody on deck waited for his opinion of the stranger.

They saw him lower the glass and look down, expecting any moment to hear news, but, apparently unsure, the midshipman raised the telescope again. The waist was filled with a murmur at the delay.

'Bosun's mate! Keep the men busy there!' Quilhampton ordered, adding, 'Watch your helm there, quartermaster,' as the petty officer at the con inattentively let the ship's head pay off.

At last Dutfield's voice hailed them from aloft.

'Brig, sir, and seen us by the colours reversed in her rigging!' 'What colours?' bellowed Drinkwater through cupped hands. 'British, sir ...'

'Up helm a trifle Mr Q, let's bear down on this fellow. Call all hands to stand by to reduce sail ...'

Patrician lay hove-to, her main-topsail billowed back against the mast and her fore and main courses flogging sullenly in the buntlines as they brought the brig under their lee and prepared to hoist out a boat. Drinkwater studied the craft through his Dollond glass. She was a brig all right, and lying low in the water with both masts gone by the board. Her crew had managed to fish a yard to the stump of her foremast and had a leg-of-mutton sail hoisted, just, Drinkwater judged, giving her master command of his vessel.

'Ah, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater turned to the young man at his elbow, 'do you be kind enough to go over and offer what assistance is in our power. Find out her port of destination and her master's name. If she requires it, we can get a line aboard.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

And Mr Frey . . .'

'Sir?'

'Ask if she has any charts of the China coast.'

Drinkwater watched the boat bob over the swell, the oar-blades catching the brilliant sunshine, then disappearing in the deep troughs. As the boat rose again he recalled himself and turned suddenly, casting an incautious eye skywards and receiving the solar glare in his face.

'How bears the sun, Mr Q?' he asked urgently.

Quilhampton grasped Drinkwater's meaning and covered the three yards' distance to the binnacle. 'Close to the meridian, sir.'

'Damn!' With the agility of a younger man, Drinkwater made for the companionway and dropped below, startling Mullender as he fussed about the cabin. Grabbing the sextant from its lashed box and crooking it in his arm, he hastened back on deck. He flicked down the shades and clapped it to his right eye. To his relief he saw the sun was still increasing its altitude, climbing slowly to the meridian, and he waited for the ascent to slow.

'Watch the glass, there!' he called.

The quartermaster of the watch moved aft to heave the log as Quilhampton stood ready to turn the sand-glass. Forward the lookout on the knightheads walked aft and stood beside the belfry. Drinkwater caught the culmination of the sun on the meridian. He could compute their latitude exactly now and by a piece of legerdemain determine, to a reasonable accuracy, their longitude as well. Knowledge of their position would be invaluable both to himself and, he suspected, the beleaguered master of the wallowing brig.

'Eight bells!' he called, lowering the sextant. The log was streamed, the glass turned and eight bells struck. The watch was called and yet another day officially began on board the Patrician.

An hour later he was bent over the cabin table, comparing his calculations with the reckoning of Captain Ballantyne, Master of the Country brig Musquito of Calcutta. Ballantyne was a short, red-faced man in a plain blue coat and tall boots, a tired man who had wrestled gamely with the typhoon for ten days and been forced to sacrifice his masts in order to preserve his ship.

Sunlight reflected off the swell beyond the windows and danced upon the white paintwork of the cabin, filling it with flickering lights as the frigate rolled easily.

'Well, sir,' said Drinkwater straightening up, 'will you serve us as pilot? If we are to bring both our ships safely to an anchor our need of each other is mutual.'

He was aware of continuing suspicion in Ballantyne's face. The merchant shipmaster remained obviously circumspect. To Ballantyne, Drinkwater was something of an enigma, for he was no youthful popinjay like so many of the young sprigs that came out in sloops and frigates to press men like carcasses from Country ships. In fact his appearance in these eastern seas was something of a mystery to a man like Ballantyne who, in common with all the trading fraternity, liked to keep his fingers on the pulse of Government business. Drinkwater's request for a pilot and charts confirmed him in one suspicion.

'I am indeed under an obligation to you, Captain Drinkwater, and one that I would not willingly shirk, but I am surprised to find you here. Are you not part of Drury's squadron?'

It was Drinkwater's turn to show surprise. 'Drury's squadron ... ? No sir, I am not. I am from the coast of Spanish America. Furthermore I understood Admiral Pellew to be commanding the East India station ...'

'Pellew still commands, but Drury has a squadron at Macao ...'

The welcome news that British men-of-war were at hand, that he might speedily obtain spare spars and canvas, perhaps fresh victuals too, besides making good other deficiencies in his own stores from Drury's ships, seemed to lift a massive burden from Drinkwater's weary shoulders.

'Then let us make for Macao, Captain Ballantyne ...'

'No, sir! That I must urge you not to ...'

Drinkwater was surprised and said so.

'Captain Drinkwater,' Ballantyne said as patiently as he could, 'you are clearly unacquainted with the situation in these seas. Drury has been empowered by the Governor-General of India to offer what Lord Minto is pleased to call "protection" to the Portuguese Governor at Macao. This is nothing more nor less than coercion, for the Portuguese colonists there are friendly to us, the more so since the damned French have designs on both Portugal herself and her overseas settlements. There are already stories of a French army coming overland through Persia and of an enemy squadron bound for these waters. If they take Macao then our China trade would be ended at a stroke ...'

Ballantyne stopped, his serious expression adding emphasis (o his speech. 'It would mean ruin for many of us in Country ships and the end of the East India Company.'

Drinkwater regarded this information with some cynicism. He held no brief for the India monopoly, but he acknowledged the influence of those who did. Ballantyne seemed to sense some of this indifference.

'Consider, sir,' he said, 'what the alliance between the Dutch and French has already achieved: the Sunda Strait is closed to our ships and it has been necessary to convoy the trade through the Strait of Malacca. I do not think you can be aware of the numbers of French cruisers, both privateers and men-o'-war frigates, that the French have operating out of the Mauritius. One, the Piemontaise, a National ship, was taken by the San Fiorenzo off Cape Comorin, but at appalling cost, and that is our only success! That damned rogue Surcouf plundered our shipping right off the Sand Heads with complete impunity ...'

'The Sand Heads ... ?' queried Drinkwater, aware of his ignorance and the apparent hornet's nest that he was blundering into.

'Aye, off the entrance to the Calcutta river, Captain, plumb under the noses of the Hooghly merchants and Admiral Pellew himself!' Ballantyne's tone was incredulous.

'Pellew cannot have liked that,' observed Drinkwater drily, 'he used to enjoy the boot being on the other foot.'

'You know him then?' asked Ballantyne.

'A long time ago, when he commanded the Indefatigable. But this does not explain your reluctance to allow me to take you to Macao. You must understand that now I have learned of a British flag-officer in the area it is my plain duty to report to him.'

'By all means do so, sir, but after you have towed me into the Pearl River. It will delay you perhaps a day, two at the most.'

You have a reluctance to go to Macao, Captain Ballantyne? A commercial one, perhaps?'

Ballantyne nodded. Yes. I have a cargo, sir, a valuable cargo and a mortgage on the ship. Opium for the mandarins makes me damned anxious to take your offer of assistance. Mind you,' Ballantyne added forcefully, 'no salvage claim, by God, or I'll counter-claim on the basis of these charts and my services to bring you into the Pearl River ...'

'Or Macao ...'

Ballantyne's eyes suddenly narrowed. 'No, not Macao, Captain. My services are not available for Macao.'

'Very well, sir,' said Drinkwater coldly, 'then I shall order the preparations for passing the tow discontinued and make up the numbers of my complement from your ship. While being indebted to you for your elucidation of the mysteries of Oriental politics, I believe that I may find my own way to Macao ...'

'Hold fast, sir,' Ballantyne snapped back, 'if I lose Musquito I am a ruined man. If I go direct to Macao with my ship in her present condition I shall not get her up to Whampoa, nor will I avoid incurring crippling tariffs payable to the Portuguese.' Ballantyne paused. 'I am willing to compensate you for your trouble; an ex gratia payment, perhaps ...'

Drinkwater was indignant. 'I am not to be bribed, damn you!' he said sharply, and Ballantyne met his outrage, raising his own voice.

'An ex gratia payment is not a bribe, damn it, it is a legitimate payment for actual services! God damn it, Captain Drinkwater, you have my fate in your hands, sir; it is not easy for me to beg ...'

Drinkwater considered the man before him. Exhaustion was perhaps making them both over-hasty. Above their heads and floating down through the open skylight came the noise of men heaving a hawser aft, ready to pass across to the stricken brig. Drinkwater needed a few minutes to reflect. He was desperate for those stores, yet there might be problems over having them allocated to Patrician, since she was not under Drury's orders. On the other hand the Honourable East India Company's ships at Canton would almost certainly hold stocks of spars and canvas which he could requisition. Judging from Ballantyne's jittery anxiety the spectre of his pressing men would be lever enough for him to have his own way.

'Has Admiral Drury power to take over the dockyard at Macao?' he asked in a more conciliatory tone.

'I think not. The last I heard was that the matter was at an impasse. Drury commands the ships, but his troops are mainly sepoys in the Company's service. They are under the direction of a Select Committee acting in the Company's interest. If you ask me there will be trouble with the Portuguese and, after that, trouble with the Chinese.'

'Which is why you are anxious to get your cargo to Canton?'

'Aye. I want to break bulk before the trade is stopped. There are already rumours that the Emperor at Peking wants it permanently terminated. That would not be in the interest of the Viceroy at Canton, it's his principal source of income, both by way of customs duties and chop ...'

'Chop?' queried Drinkwater.

'Cumshaw, baksheesh, bribes ...'

Abruptly Drinkwater made up his mind. He and his ship needed a brief respite. If he proceeded to Macao doubtless Drury, a man whose reputation he did not know and who in turn owed Drinkwater nothing, might press further duties upon him. He wanted to work his ship homewards and had no wish to have her detained in eastern waters on arduous service that would end up with half his crew dead of scurvy or malaria. He could tow the Musquito towards Canton as Ballantyne desired, pretending ignorance of Drury's presence and arguing his urgent need of fresh victuals. He would be certain of finding stores at the Company's depot and might recruit his ship before finding Drury. In addition he might persuade Drury to send another vessel after the Juno. He felt desperately tired, over­whelmed by lassitude and, in reality, only too happy to accommodate Ballantyne's entreaty. He felt that sometimes a post-captain might play for advantage like a politician.

'Very well, Captain Ballantyne, the matter is agreed. You will pilot us into the Pearl River and provide me with charts necessary to take me to Penang. I shall take your brig under tow and endeavour to take off as much of your cargo as possible if she shows signs of foundering.'

'Damn it, thank you, sir!' Ballantyne held out his hand, his sudden smile evidence of his relief and the stress under which he had been labouring. Drinkwater wondered how much money rode upon the successful discharge of Musquitd's cargo. 'I will put my second officer aboard you, sir,' Ballantyne went on, 'to act as your pilot. He is as familiar as myself with the navigation of the Pearl River.'

'You have perfect confidence in him?'

'Absolute, Captain Drinkwater, and he may stand surety for my good conduct — he is my son.'

'I had not exactly wanted a hostage,' Drinkwater said wryly. 'Come,' he added, 'let us drink to our resolve.'

He summoned Mullender from the pantry and the two men sipped their wine while the companies of their ships passed a towline.

Drinkwater could only guess at what Ballantyne's son's mother had been. A Begum, perhaps, or a Rani? Or did such noble ladies refuse to cohabit with the likes of Ballantyne? With the low passed, he stood now with the younger man as he had his lather, consulting the charts. Possibly he was merely the bastard offspring of a nautch-girl, for he was clearly a man of colour. Drinkwater had yet to test his abilities, though he hoped he had inherited some of his father's skill, for Ballantyne had saved Musquito after a fight of ten days against the worst weather a mariner could encounter in these seas. Yet was it possible that so prosaic-looking a man could have sired so exotic a son?

Jahleel Ballantyne was taller than his father, his skin a light coffee colour, his hair jet-black and loosely flowing to his shoulders. He wore a blue broadcloth coat like his father, but his trousers were thin cotton pyjamas, baggy in the leg and caught at the waist by a wide, scarlet cummerbund from which a pair of pistol-butts protruded. His low-crowned hat sported an elaborate aigrette and the man smoked long, thin cheroots. He spoke perfect English with a clipped, slightly nasal accent, emphasising his words with eloquent movements of his hands. Patrician already had a crop of exotics among the inhabitants of her lower deck. Only time would tell what the wardroom would make of such an addition to its number.

'It is perhaps unnecessary to warn you, sir, of the dangers ahead, because you have many guns and are a ship of force. But we will be proceeding slowly, and we might be mistaken by the Ladrones for an India ship ...'

'Pardon my interrupting, Mr Ballantyne, but who, or what, are the Ladrones?'

'Chinese pirates, sir. They usually take ships off the Ladrones Islands here.' Ballantyne laid the point of the dividers upon a small archipelago, one of several which lay scattered about the huge estuary of the Pearl River. 'They have numerous junks armed with cannon.'

'Don't the Chinese authorities take a dim view of these people?'

Ballantyne smiled, a peculiarly engaging smile, accompanied by a gentle rocking of his head. 'To the mandarins these people are poor fishermen ...' he paused, seeing Drinkwater's expression of mystification. 'There is much to understand about these parts, sir.' Jahleel Ballantyne smiled again.

'Indeed, so it would seem, Mr Ballantyne.'

They were interrupted by Mullender.

'Beg pardon, sir, Mr Fraser's compliments and he says he'll have to turn Mr Chirkov out of Mr Mylchrist's cabin, sir, to accommodate ...'

Mullender nodded in Ballantyne's direction and Drinkwater sensed an amusing antipathy to the presence of the half-caste officer.

'That will be very satisfactory.'

'Mr Chirkov won't like it, sir, he's a very particular young gentleman.'

Drinkwater turned. 'He's a prisoner-of-war, damn it, Mullender, not a maid to be cossetted over her mooning ... my apologies, Mr Ballantyne, come, let us go on deck ...'

Tregembo, Drinkwater's coxswain, emerged from the pantry grinning at the discomfited steward who stood in the centre of the suddenly empty cabin.

'What did you stand up for that Russian booby for?' he growled at Mullender. 'Particular gennelmen aren't exactly the Cap'n's cup o' tea.'

Mullender shrugged, a man of proprieties more than words, and deeds.

'Ain't proper ... Count Chirkov's a gentleman ...'

'Count Chirkov's a damned bugger, you old toss-pot,' said Tregembo dismissively.

'But he's a gentleman,' persisted Mullender doggedly.

CHAPTER 2 New Orders

Midshipman Count Anatole Vasili Chirkov of the Imperial Russian Navy found captivity amusing rather than irksome. A proclivity for indolence helped, together with a rather fetchingly cultivated languor. Chirkov had discovered that a certain type of lady in the salons of St Petersburg found the affectation attractive, combined as it was with a biting sarcasm about the endeavours of others. It was a pretension peculiarly adapted to a rich adolescent. The conceit had also proved surprisingly useful aboard ship where, he had realised, a dearth of variety gave him a natural advantage over the dullards on board and provided him with innumerable targets. In fact, captive or not, Midshipman Count Chirkov found himself rather more popular than otherwise.

An exception to this general rule was Captain Drinkwater who proved impervious to Chirkov's charm. The Russian regretted he had not killed the British captain when he had had the chance in Lituya Bay. The momentary advantage he had enjoyed over Captain Drinkwater had enlarged itself in Chirkov's fertile imagination and he would have boasted about it, but for the fact that losing it so swiftly argued against himself. Drinkwater, Chirkov reluctantly had to admit, was no fool. But then neither was he a gentleman, for Chirkov had felt Drinkwater's contempt as long ago as their first encounter in San Francisco and was happy to shrug him off as a curiosity of the British navy. His own captain, Prince Vladimir, had more or less confirmed this, calling Drinkwater 'a tarpaulin', to be tolerated, when he could not be avoided, whilst Chirkov's present inconvenient circumstances persisted.

Chirkov, fluent in the French of his class, had had only a rudimentary knowledge of English when he had been taken prisoner. Recent association with Patrician's 'young gentlemen', particularly since his transfer from a cabin to the gunroom, had brought them into a greater intimacy. Chirkov had assumed a casual ascendancy over the youthful Belchambers, and formed a loose friendship with Frey who, although rated acting lieutenant, remained accommodated in his former quarters due to the overcrowding of the ship.

Although Chirkov had some duties, they were nominal. He was supposed to supervise a division of the Russian sailors who had their hammocks slung in the cable tiers, but this irksome responsibility was easily delegated to a petty officer. This allowed him to indulge his apparently limitless capacity for doing nothing. At the present moment he was leaning on Patrician's fo'c's'le rail, half-propped on the breech of the foremost larboard chase gun while Mr Comley, Patrician's bosun and another amusing tarpaulin, hove a cable up outside the ship from the hawse pipe and bent it on to one of the sheet anchors.

Astern of them and, remarkably, still afloat, the brig Musquito stretched her towline. It had taken almost a fortnight to beat up into the mouth of the Pearl River among the blue hills and myriad islands of the Kwangtung coast. The bat-winged sails of the big fishing junks that had loomed out of the dawn mist two days earlier were here replaced by hundreds of small sampans. Under sail, fishing or being patiently sculled by short Chinese who tirelessly manipulated their long stern scull, or yuloh, they dotted the waters of the estuary. Ahead Chirkov could see that the banks of the river came together and pale marks against the grey-green of the distant hills betrayed the embrasures of forts.

Far above Chirkov's indolent head the lookout reported the presence of 'sails', by which all on the quarterdeck assumed he meant he had sighted the heavy crossed yards of European vessels.

'They will be the Indiamen loading, I suppose,' remarked Drinkwater to Mr Ballantyne who stood next to him on the quarterdeck. A warm afternoon was producing a sea breeze, giving them their first favourable slant since they had picked up the tow, and under all the sail she could set, the British frigate was working slowly inshore.

This fair breeze had produced a mood of contentment in Captain Drinkwater. Ballantyne's fears of pirates had proved groundless. Though two big junks had closed with them in the morning's mist, they had sheered off when they ranged up close, and there was no evidence to suspect their motives had been sinister.

'No, sir ... they cannot be Indiamen or Country ships,' replied Ballantyne. He raised his glass and studied the masts and spars of the distant ships at anchor. Then he lowered it and pointed ahead of them. 'See, there are the forts at the Bogue, sir, what is sometimes called the Bocca Tigris. Those are the Vice­roy's war-junks, three of them anchored under the cannon of the forts. The Indiamen are inside the Narrows, beyond the Bogue at Whampoa. They should already be discharging. Some of those ships may be Indiamen but ...' Again he raised his glass and stared at the anchored vessels, some two points to larboard.

'They're men-o'-war, sir,' shouted Quilhampton suddenly. He had hoisted himself into the mizen rigging and had been looking at the ships himself. 'And flying British colours ...'

'They must be Admiral Drury's ships, sir,' said Ballantyne.

Drinkwater sensed a rivalry existing between the two young men. He turned to Fraser, standing beside the binnacle and watching anxiously as they crept into Chinese waters.

'What's your opinion, Mr Fraser?'

Fraser borrowed Quilhampton's proffered glass and clambered on to the larboard rail. At last he jumped down.

'No doubt, sir. A British seventy-four, two frigates and two sloops ...'

'A seventy-four!' exclaimed Drinkwater, unable to contain his surprise. The presence of a powerful third-rate argued it was, at the very least, a force under a senior captain flying a commodore's broad pendant. And that meant an officer senior to Drinkwater. Now his plan to recruit his ship before reporting his presence to his seniors was impossible. He fished irritably in his tail-pocket for his Dollond glass and, stepping up on a carronade slide, half-hoped to confound the experts beside him. To his intense annoyance he found they were correct.

There was something familiar about the seventy-four. She lay with her head to the eastward, riding to a weather tide, and he had a good view of her. He was certain he had seen her before. Then he recognised her. He shut his glass with a snap and jumped down to the deck.

'She's the Russell, gentlemen, unless I am greatly mistaken.' But he was confident of her identity. She had been part of Onslow's division at Camperdown and had stood in the line at Copenhagen where, punished for her mistake in following the Bellona, she had taken the ground under the Danish guns. 'And she flies a flag at her mizen ...'

There was no doubt in Drinkwater's mind that he had discovered the squadron under Rear-Admiral Drury.

He had his barge called away as soon as he had saluted Drury's flag, leaving Fraser to anchor Patrician and Musquito. He could only clearly identify one of the two frigates, the Dedaigneuse, for a fine rain had begun to fall and a damp chill filled the air so that the oarsmen bent to their task over a smooth sea, blowing the trickling rain from their mouths. Drinkwater sat wrapped in his thoughts. He watched the big two-decker loom over them as they approached, remembering her on a grey, gun-concussed October afternoon off Camperdown eleven years earlier. Eleven years! Where had the time gone? He wondered if Tregembo, sitting beside him at the tiller, entertained himself with such gloomy thoughts. Eleven years! They were both worn out in the King's Service, grown grey in the harness of duty like their ships.

'Boat ahoy!'

'Patrician !' Tregembo's quick response gave no indication of such day-dreaming. On board Russell they were already aware of Patrician's identity, for they had exchanged the private signal as they approached, but Tregembo's short reply to the challenge indicated that Patrician's captain sat in the boat. A few minutes later Drinkwater stood on the deck of the line-of-battle ship listening to the apologies of Russell's first lieutenant who was excusing the absence of her captain.

'He is in conference with the Admiral and the other captains of the squadron, sir,' the lieutenant explained, 'and they have been joined by the Select Committee.'

'And what precisely is that, sir?' asked Drinkwater, feigning a deliberate obtuseness.

'The Select Committee?'

'Yes.'

'A body appointed by Lord Minto, the Governor-General, sir ...'

'The Governor-General of India?' interrupted Drinkwater.

'Why, yes, of course, sir.' A faint note of exasperation was creeping into the lieutenant's voice. 'We have occupied Macao and are now making demands of the Chinese.'

'What the devil for? I had some notion that Macao was Portuguese territory.'

'Why, sir, we have to protect our trade.'

'To protect our interest, more like it.'

'If you say so, sir,' said the lieutenant with ill-concealed disdain. The arrival of His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician may have taken the flagship by surprise, but it was easy to see that this Captain Drinkwater was a curmudgeon of the old school. The first lieutenant did not think that such an officer would pose much of a threat to the promotion stakes on the East Indies station. Drinkwater appeared to possess the intelligence of an ape! Captain Drinkwater's next remark plucked him out of his smug reverie.

'Be so kind as to tell me the names of the squadron, if you please. I remarked the Dedaigneuse; who commands her?'

'Captain Dawson, sir ...'

'Never heard of him,' snapped Drinkwater.

'A promising young officer,' replied the first lieutenant, laying too facetious an emphasis on the word 'young' and attracting a hard stare from Captain Drinkwater. The lieutenant blushed and hurried on. 'The other is the Phaeton, Captain Pellew

'Sir Edward's son?' asked Drinkwater.

'Yes, sir, Captain Fleetwood Pellew. She's just in from Nangasakie, been trying to discover what the Dutch send two ships to Japan for every year.'

'Is this part of protecting our trade too?' asked Drinkwater drily. 'And the sloop?'

'The Diana. The Jaseur, sloop, is cruising in the offing. The Indiamen', he went on, gesturing to two Company ships anchored inshore, 'are the David Scott and the Alnwick Castle, they were taken up to transport five hundred sepoys and some European artillery ...'

'To occupy Macao.'

'Exactly, sir.'

Are we at war with Portugal? Or merely doing in the East Indies what we are fighting the French for doing in Europe?'

It amused Drinkwater that such heresy silenced the lieutenant. The uneasy conversation was brought to an abrupt conclusion by a group of men spilling out on to the quarterdeck from the admiral's cabin. Three were obviously the civilians of the Select Committee, the others were the captains of the squadron. Drinkwater wondered what contribution Fleetwood Pellew could make to Admiral Drury's deliberations. He seemed little more than a boy, scarcely older than his own midshipmen.

'Captain Drinkwater?' The admiral's secretary was at his elbow. Admiral Drury will see you now, sir.'

'I don't like it, sir, damned if I do. Don't know why Pellew's got us into this damned scrape, running round at the behest of the Governor-General when his lordship represents the Company's

fiscal interest with no thought of policy. God damn it, Drinkwater, all I've heard since I came out is "the Company this", and "the Company that". Begin to think the sun rises and sets out of the Company's arse, God damn me if I don't!'

Drury paused, venting his spleen and clearly glad to be rid of the role of courtier.

'Help yourself to a glass.' He indicated a decanter and the sparkle of lead crystal glasses on a tray.

'Thank you, sir.'

'Well, Captain Drinkwater, where the deuce have you sprung from? When this business is over I'm to relieve Pellew, but I'm damned if my briefing mentioned you or your frigate.'

'I'm under Admiralty orders, sir, discretionary instructions concerning the deployment of a Russian line-of-battle ship ...'

'A Russian battle-ship! Good God, this matter has more complications than a witch's brew!'

'She is destroyed, sir. I have her commander and her survivors aboard Patrician.'

"You took a line-of-battle ship with your forty?'

'Her people were much debilitated by scurvy, sir.'

'By heaven, sir, your report will make more interesting reading than most of the paper on my desk!' Drury waved his hand over the litter of correspondence before him. 'I see you brought in a brig.'

'Yes, sir. The Musquito; Captain Ballantyne master. She's a Country ship, damaged in the recent typhoon.'

'It missed us here. You'd better get her up the Bocca Tigris and into shelter ...'

'Very well, sir.'

'Send your written report as soon as possible.'

Aye, aye, sir. My ship is in want of repairs ...'

'Is she fit for service, sir? If not you may have a week. No more.'

A week will be ample, sir.'

'Very well. Thank you, Captain.'

It was rather an inconclusive dismissal, thought Drinkwater as he regained Russell's quarterdeck. Despite his assurance to

Drury, a week seemed quite inadequate for what needed to be done. The continuing rain only added to his depression. Later he was to regard the interview as fateful. For the time being he wanted only to sleep.

Rear-Admiral Drury regarded the arrival of an additional frigate as providential. The fact was that the East Indies command was like no other in the long list of the Royal Navy's responsibilities. It had already been the victim of intrigue, formerly being divided between two officers who, admirable individually, reacted like poison when requested to cooperate. Pellew had won the contest and Troubridge had been recalled, to die when the Blenheim foundered through old age, rot and the use of 'devil-bolts' in her hull. Now Drury was to inherit the edifice that Pellew had erected, and Drury did not like it. Pellew was universally acknowledged as a fine seaman. As a frigate captain he had been without equal, receiving the reward of a knighthood for the destruction of a French frigate early in the war. But honours had dried up after a decade of conflict, and Pellew had ruined his reputation by shameless nepotism. His boys Fleetwood and Pownall were barely old or fitted enough to be lieutenants in charge of the deck, never mind post-captains!

Drury cursed as he bent over the papers on his desk. As for grand strategy, all that mattered to Lord Minto and the damned Selectmen was the China trade, the India trade, and the self-interest of the merchants of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The scum had already written to London with their opinion of no confidence in Pellew and his measures to protect their confounded commerce! Drury wished the Honourable East India Company to the devil.

It was a damned irony, Drury mused. How could anything associated with mercantile transactions be honourable? The very notion was preposterous! He snorted indignantly and while his secretary waited with the patience of a tried and beaten man, the admiral scribbled his signature on a dozen letters and notes.

But William O'Brien Drury was a pragmatist brought up in a hard school. He had not yet inherited Pellew's command and he acknowledged the influence of India House and its Court of Directors. The Select Committeemen hung on his coat tails, eternally muttering about loss and demurrage and half a hundred other insignificant notions that were bound up with their infernal and corrupt business. It was bad enough having to coerce the Portuguese, for it was just conceivable that a French squadron from the Mauritius, or a Dutch squadron from Batavia might occupy Macao and strangle the Canton approaches with a blockade, but the idea of bullying the hapless Chinese was quite contrary to Admiral Drury's idea of duty!

At last he sighed, and put down his pen. He rubbed his hand wearily across his face.

'Bring me Captain Drinkwater's report when it is delivered,' he remarked to his secretary, reaching out for the neck of the decanter.

'Do you have any orders for him, sir, that I may be drafting in the interim?'

Drury thought for a moment. 'Yes, I'm going to send him to Penang with those few ships that are completing their lading. They will need an escort and I cannot spare young Pellew or Dawson. Besides,' the admiral added, 'with French cruisers about I'd rather have an experienced officer in command of a convoy than one of those young popinjays.'

'Not to mention the pirates,' muttered the secretary as he scooped up the signed letters for which he had been waiting.

CHAPTER 3 Whampoa

'Steady as you go, sir.'

Drinkwater lowered his glass and nodded at Lieutenant Fraser. 'Mr Ballantyne has the con ... sheets and braces to the Master's helm, if you please.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Drinkwater held Fraser's eyes, searching for a flicker of resentment. Had Fraser hesitated out of deference to Drinkwater's presence? Or was there a taint of bad blood in the air? Surely not, though God alone knew the undercurrents of discontent that ran beneath the decks of his precious command. Ballantyne was a newcomer, a cuckoo in the uncomfortable nest of Patrician's wardroom.

Drinkwater dismissed the morbid train of thought. The Narrows known as the Bogue were closing in, the embrasured forts clearly visible as the breeze blew the ship steadily inshore, with the Chinese Viceroy's war-junks closing in on either quarter like huge, primordial birds of prey. The little Musquito, tugging and dragging at the dripping towline, rolled in their wake.

'Very well, Mr Fraser, you may send the men to quarters. In silence, if you will.'

Ballantyne turned and, to avoid his eyes, Drinkwater raised his glass again, studying the curious rig of the closing junk to larboard. He did not want the rat-a-tat-tat of the marine drummer's snare alarming the unpredictable Chinese, despite

Admiral Drury's assurances that a bold front would secure him a safe anchorage with the Indiamen above the Second Bar.

'Sir,' implored Ballantyne, 'I most earnestly entreat you not to compromise my father.'

Hissed at by Comley's mates who were deprived of their pipes at the hatchways, the watch below were pouring up from the berth-deck to take their stations at the quarterdeck guns with the low slap-slap of their bare feet.

'And I entreat you, Mr Ballantyne, to attend to your duty. You are a King's officer now.' Drinkwater looked quickly at Fraser, but the first lieutenant appeared to derive no satisfaction from his rebuke to the newcomer. Chastened, Ballantyne turned away. There were always problems arriving off a foreign coast, Drinkwater reflected, matters of propriety, of the correct number of guns to fire in a salute; of the number to expect in return and of the action to be taken if one did not receive them. He had gathered enough from Drury and Ballantyne himself to realise the delicacy of the balance maintained by the Honourable East India Company and the satellite shipping houses of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in their relationship with the Celestial Empire of the Son of Heaven.

'The Emperor in Peking, sir, regards King George as a vassal chieftain,' Ballantyne had explained, highly amused, 'such is his ignorance ...'

Drinkwater raised his telescope and studied the junk to the west of them. There would be no exchange of gun-salutes, Drury had said, not until he had concluded his negotiations with the Viceroy.

'Mr Ballantyne,' said Drinkwater, without lowering the glass, 'there is a gentleman aboard that junk who appears to be a man of some importance.'

'He's the hoppo, sir, the mandarin charged with the duty of collecting the customs revenue, the chop. I imagine he will board Musquito when we bring her to anchor. We should take in the fore-course now, sir ...'

'Very well.'

'Fore clew-garnets! Rise fore-tacks and sheets!'

Drinkwater turned his attention to the forts. Brilliant-hued banners fluttered over ramparts of pale stone and he could see the muzzles of heavy cannon.

'Antique guns, sir,' reassured Ballantyne.

'What are those things beside the banners?' Drinkwater pointed to coloured shapes bobbing up and down behind the parapet.

'Tiger masks, sir, intended to intimidate us.'

'I see ...' replied Drinkwater uncertainly.

But the Chinese cannon did not dispute their passage, though the war-junks hung on their flanks until they had passed beyond the Bogue and the First Bar. Under topsails, Patrician forced her ponderous way upstream against the yellow ebb of the Pearl River. To starboard the hills rolled away to the east, echoing the jagged peaks of Lin Tin Island offshore, but to larboard a flat alluvial plain stretched westwards, intersected by convoluted channels and formed from marshy and insubstantial islands that altered as the river altered. The hills to the east were bare of trees, stripped by the hand of man, terraced here and there to form fields which fell away from the walled villages on their summits.

With sharply braced yards and the jibs and spanker to assist, Patrician rounded a long bend, finding the main stream divided by low islands. Although the layered spire of a pagoda broke the skyline, it was the tall masts and yards of the East Indiamen that dominated the anchorage.

'Whampoa, sir, and that is Danes Island, and that is ...' Ballantyne aired the knowledge of a dragoman while Drinkwater studied the shipping through his Dollond glass. Most of the Indiamen seemed to be discharging, though there were smaller 'Country' ships, Indian owned, loading from the mass of junks, sampans and lorchas that crowded round them. One or two of these seemed ready for sea.

An hour later Patrician had cast off Musquito and anchored beside her. From her quarterdeck Ballantyne senior waved his gratitude. Drinkwater turned to the son. The man was well pleased with himself, puffing contentedly on a cheroot.

'Well, sir, you acquitted yourself with credit. If you still wish it I shall request Admiral Drury confirm your acting warrant as master. In the meantime we shall further test your abilities in a refit.'

'I am honoured, sir, to accept.'

'In that case, Mr Ballantyne, be so good as to obtain the services of a tailor and extinguish that confounded cheroot!'

Drinkwater gestured at Ballantyne's exotic figure, and this time Fraser could not repress a smile.

'Sentry!'

Drinkwater's exasperated voice rose to a querulous pitch and he dragged himself to his weary feet. He half opened the cabin door to bawl again at the sentry.

'For God's sake, man, do your duty and keep these hawkers quiet!'

His attempt to close the door failed. Instead the mortified marine, his shako missing and his ported musket pressed impotently across his own chest, fell backwards into the captain's arms.

'Beg pardon, sir . . .'

The sight of Patrician's, commander, his blue, white and gold uniform marking him as a personage of supreme importance to the people of the Pearl River, only fuelled their desire to secure some patronage from him, the reason for their besieging his quarters. If Drinkwater had entertained any reservations about Ballantyne's ability to find a tailor, they were now swiftly dispelled. Ballantyne could obtain the services of a tailor, a washerwoman, a boot-maker, an ice-seller, a vendor of chickens, eggs or cabbages, a barber, a fortune-teller, a servant or a whore, though, at that moment, they all seemed to be attempting to claim the attention of Captain Drinkwater.

Tregembo! Mullender!' Drinkwater bellowed, putting his weight behind the broad shoulders of the marine; but no reinforcements came from the pantry and Drinkwater's tired brain realised that similar scenes were being enacted throughout the ship.

'I'm sorry, sir,' mumbled the compressed bootneck.

Drinkwater grunted acceptance of the unfortunate marine's apology. Doubtless the poor fellow expected a dozen at the gratings tomorrow and would likely get them if nothing mollified Drinkwater's rising temper.

'Fire your damned musket, man!' he bellowed in the marine's grubby ear. The sudden report gained them the necessary second's initiative and the throng of supplicating Chinese was pushed beyond the doorway.

'Pass word for Mr Mount!' Drinkwater called through the closed door, leaning his back upon it and wiping his forehead. Catching his breath after the unaccustomed exertion he stared through the stern windows. It was a grey, drizzly late November day, yet the broad waters of the river swarmed with sampans and junks. Somewhere just out of sight on their larboard quarter, Musquito lay aground on the fringes of Danes Island. Here, where the Europeans were allowed by the Chinese authorities the concession of a place to repair and refit their ships, Captain Ballantyne was discharging his cargo of opium in order to survey his ship. Low sheds had been erected on the island, under the roofs of which the crews of the Indiamen repaired masts and spars, reminding Drinkwater of the pressing needs of his own ship.

'Sir? Sir? Are you all right?'

Drinkwater recovered himself and opened the door a trifle. The crowd outside had subsided, clearly concluding that admittance to the great man's cabin was impossible. Most had gone in search of more accessible prey.

'Mount, come in, come in. Of course I am all right, but what of the rest of the ship?'

Mount grinned. 'Taken lock, stock and barrel by boarders, sir.'

'Get your men aft, then, and clear 'em. We've got work to do!' Drinkwater noticed the crestfallen look in Mount's eyes. 'Damn it, Mount, you know as well as I do what will happen if liquor vendors get among the people. We will have a species of anarchy aboard.'

'Aye, sir, but the men know there are women available and even I have need of a new shirt ...'

Drinkwater eyed the marine officer; Mount had served with him for five years and Drinkwater knew him for a steady, reliable man. The plea was eloquent, Drinkwater's testiness a reaction after the long weeks of lonely strain. They had a day or two ...

'Very well, Mr Mount, clear the ship, then have the goodness to request Mr Ballantyne to arrange for two tradesmen of each kind to come aboard. He and the Purser are to issue passes, you are to put Sergeant Blixoe on the entry and double the sentinels.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

'And send Fraser aft, I want a guard rowed round the ship. And your men are to fix bayonets and load powder only. I want no unnecessary blood shed on our account.'

'What about women, sir?'

Drinkwater stared at the marine, hesitating. He could allow women on board in accordance with the usage of the Service. It was common in Spithead where men-of-war at anchor frequently assumed a frantic and degenerate appearance, aswarm with whores who were fought over and coupled with by men denied outlet for their natural urges for months at a time. It dispensed with the awkward business of shore-leave and reduced the risk of desertion. One thing could be relied upon if women were allowed on board, and that was the exhaustion of the seamen in a violent excess of promiscuity. It had its merits, if strictly controlled.

Against it was the threat of further rumblings among the men. They were not a happy crew, compounded of volunteers, pressed men, Quota men and the sweepings of British gaols. Many of them had been at sea now for years, hardly stepping ashore except on remote beaches to wood and water the ship. The sight of women would inflame the men, denial of access to them might precipitate serious disaffection and even desertion.

Hovering over this delicate equation was the ever-present spectre of disease. Release of libidinous pressure now might result in an epidemic of clap or worse, the lues. The venereal list already bore eighteen cases of the former acquired in California in addition to the decrepit and decomposing luetic whose appearance served as a ghastly warning to them all and whose shambling figure kept Patrician's heads clean. Surgeon Lallo had reported two more cases of the disease already in the second stage. How many more would be acquired here at Whampoa? He felt irresolute, exhausted.

"You may allow the tradesmen, Mount.' He hesitated, his eyes meeting those of the marine officer who remained expectantly in the cabin.

'Very well ... women as well, but not until this evening ...' Mount departed and soon the frigate was filled with the shouts and squeals of disruption as his mustered marines forced the Chinese back into their boats at the point of the bayonet. If the unfortunate vendors had earlier mistaken Patrician for a run-of-the-mill East Indiaman, they were now learning their mistake.

For the next two days Drinkwater kept himself to himself, taking a turn on deck shortly after dawn and again in the evening. The chance to sleep undisturbed while his charge swung to her cable in a safe anchorage was too luxurious an opportunity to forego after the relentless months of service he had endured. He was overwhelmed with a soporific lethargy, dozing off over his charts like an old man, even after sleeping the clock round, eating erratically, to the despair of Mullender who had purchased fresh vegetables, and drinking little. On the first evening at anchor he had barely been able to keep awake as Captain Ballantyne eloquently expressed his gratitude and sought to introduce Drinkwater to the commanders of the East India Company's ships at Whampoa. Drinkwater excused himself, pleading the disorder of his ship, but in fact the plain truth was that he was utterly exhausted and had no stomach for socialising.

Mullender and Tregembo, his coxswain, crept in and out of the cabin while Derrick, the pressed Quaker who did duty as the captain's clerk, silently maintained the ship's books without the dozing Drinkwater ever being aware of his presence.

'Don't you wake him,' the solicitous Tregembo had said as Derrick passed through the pantry to collect the muster books.

'I am sufficiently acquainted with the virtues of silence, Friend,' replied the Quaker drily.

But their protection was broken by the still-limping Belchambers who nervously, but over-loud, tapped upon the cabin door.

'Sir ... sir ... Sir! If you please, sir ... there's a boat that's brought orders from the flagship, sir.'

'Specie, Captain, my clerk will give you the details. At one per cent its carriage should compensate you a little for the inconveniences attendant upon my diverting you ...'

It had been a long pull in the barge, though they had sailed much of it, and Drinkwater still felt a mild irritation that Drury had summoned him in person to acquaint him of something as easily conveyed in a letter.

'And the Juno, sir? I had hopes of finding her here.' 'Damn the Juno, Captain. These matters that I have in hand supersede that preoccupation. I have read your report, read it with interest, Captain Drinkwater, and not a little admiration. I think I may relieve you of the discretionary part of your orders ...'

Drinkwater looked at the admiral; this was a different Drury. It was obvious to Drinkwater why he had been chosen to relieve Pellew: there was a clear-thinking and obviously principled mind concealed behind the ram-damn seaman's exterior. He warmed to the man, forgiving the admiral the tedium and risk of the long boat journey. He was suddenly pricked with conscience, aware that Admiral Drury might be able to answer a question that had been bothering him for months now. 'Please, do be seated, Captain, and take a glass ...' The admiral's servant proffered the tray and then Drury waved him out, seating himself. 'Y'r health, Captain Drinkwater.'

'Your servant, sir.' The fine bual reminded Drinkwater of a long dead Welsh commander, and also of the question that begged resolution.

'Sir, forgive the presumption, but I am anxious to know the fate of Lord Dungarth. You will be aware from my orders that I have some knowledge of his Lordship's office ...'

Dungarth was the obscure head of the British Admiralty's Secret Department, the very centre of its intelligence network and a man who, along with the formidable figure of John Barrow, the Second Secretary, was instrumental in forming Admiralty policy. Drinkwater had known him since he had been a midshipman, even held him as his patron and friend. The last news he had had of the earl was that he had been blown up by an explosive device which had destroyed his carriage somewhere near Blackheath.

You heard ...'

'By the hand of Rear-Admiral White, sir ... an old messmate.'

'Dicky White, eh?' smiled Drury. 'Had the sense to hang up his sword and take his seat in Parliament for a Pocket Borough ...' Drury sipped his madeira. 'As for Dungarth, he still breathed when last I heard ... what, eight months ago.'

'But the prognosis ... ?'

'Was not good.'

Drinkwater nodded and they sat in silence for a moment. 'You had some expectation of preferment by his hand, did you?' asked Drury.

Drinkwater smiled ruefully. 'I fear I am a little long in the tooth to entertain such thoughts, sir.'

'We are of one mind, Captain.'

'I beg your pardon, sir ... ? Drinkwater looked up in surprise. Drury was mocking him!

'I am aware that you are an officer of experience, Captain. I have here', Drury patted a folded bundle of papers, 'your written orders which, loosely summarised, instruct you to take under convoy those ships ready to proceed. Our presence here in force has disrupted the trade and most of the India ships will not be ready. The Viceroy in Canton has been ordered by his Emperor to evict us from Macao and halt all intercourse with us. This interdict is contrary to the private ambitions of the Viceroy and will inconvenience him in the collection of his revenues. The Son of Heaven at Peking will expect the same tribute from his proconsul in Canton irrespective of its origin. I have come here to stop the French or Dutch from seizing Macao and ruining our trade, but I am also hounded by a mercenary pack of Selectmen to compel the Viceroy to continue trade through Canton and Whampoa and disobey the Emperor. The Indiamen have only just begun to break their outward bulk. There are fourteen large Indiamen, fifteen large Bombay vessels, six from Bengal, five from Penang and a brace from Negapatam and Madras. They have all yet to load. A boom and a fleet of war-junks could seal them above the Bogue and they could be forcibly discharged without any payment for their lading.

'Such a threat has the Selectmen quivering in their boots! That's why I want you to get out whatever specie the Chinese merchants have already collected, and, together with the two Indiamen and eight or nine Country ships that have managed to load, see them safe to Penang. If you ain't doing a service to the merchants, you'll be doing one for old Sir Edward.'

'I see, sir. And you think my grey hairs will help me ...'

'Damn it, Drinkwater, you've seen these boy captains! What the hell use d'you think Fleetwood Pellew is without I have a steady first luff to stay his impetuous helm. Such arrant nepotism will ruin the Service, to say nothing of prohibiting the promotion of worthy men who must be shackled in subordinate stations. Between us, magnificent seaman though he be, Pellew's made a ninny of himself on behalf of those two bucks of his.' Drury paused to drain his glass. All these young blades think about is prize money; prize money before duty ...

'Have you heard about young Rainier? No? Last year he was a snot-nosed midshipman; pulled the strings of influence and got himself command of a sloop; begged a cruise off the Commander-in-Chief and went a-skulking in the San Bernardino Strait. Took the Spanish Register ship San Raphael, pocketed fifty thousand sterling and sent Sir Edward his share of twenty-six. Yes, that stings, don't it, eh?

'And Fleetwood; sent up to Nangasakie to reconnoitre? Reconnoitre, my arse! Old Daddy Pellew wanted another slice of eighth-pie. Young Fleetwood, the valiant captor of Batavia, was to take one of the two Dutch ships that visit those parts every year and relieve them of the silk or spices, or whatever they go up there for and buy off the Mikado.

'That's why I want you to see these ships safe to Penang, Captain. There are several powerful French frigates working out of the Ile de France. Surcouf has raided the doorstep of Calcutta with impunity in a letter-of-marque called the Revenant that sails like a witch; word has it that he's at the Mauritius now, but he's quite likely to take another look into the Hooghly or the Malacca Strait.'

'I see, sir ...'

'Apart from the French National frigates, their privateers and the Dutch ships of war, you've pirates ... oh yes, sir, pirates. The Ladrones are infested with 'em and they'll take Country ships, knowing them lighter armed than the Company's regular vessels. Get south of the Paracels reefs and you can forget the Ladrones. What you'll have to worry about then are the Sea-Dyaks from Borneo. Fall into a calm and they'll paddle their praus up under your transom and cut out whatever they fancy ... that's why I want a man who knows his duty, Captain Drinkwater, so your one percent will be well earned if you get a chest or two of silver dollars to India safely.'

Drinkwater put out his hand for the packet of orders. Already his head was formulating the likely signals for his convoy. How the devil could he extend comprehensive protection with a single ship?

'Will you send a sloop with me in support, sir?'

'I doubt I can spare one,' Drury said bluntly. 'When will you be ready for sea?'

'You promised me a week, sir, of which five days yet remain.'

'Very well. And now to a more immediate business ...'

'Sir?' Drinkwater frowned, puzzled.

'I want to hoist my flag in Patrician, Captain Drinkwater, just for a day or two.'

CHAPTER 4 The Dragon's Roar

Captain Drinkwater looked across the strip of grey water between his barge and that of the Dedaigneuse, and met Dawson's eye. He smiled encouragingly at the young post-captain. Dawson smiled back, a trifle apprehensively.

The two captains' barges were leading a flotilla of the squadron's boats, their crews bending to their oars and leaving millions of concentric circles expanding in their wakes to mark the dip, dip, dip of the blades. In each boat sat a small detachment of marines, muskets gleaming between their knees.

Dawson was in command, for Drury had ordered him to proceed the twelve miles upstream from Whampoa to obtain stores (in particular liquor) from the European factories at Canton and to determine the whereabouts of the specie. Drinkwater, out of a sense of curiosity and the realisation that his presence aboard Patrician was frustrating Fraser in his attempts to refit the ship, had volunteered his own services and those of a midshipman and his barge. The whiff of action had persuaded Mount to come with a file of his marines and Drury himself had, at the last minute, hailed Dawson's passing boat and climbed aboard. Perhaps it was the admiral's presence that rattled Dawson.

Or perhaps it was the situation that was rapidly deteriorating and that promised trouble ahead of them, that caused the young captain's anxiety. Drinkwater did not know.

To be truthful, he did not much care. The whole sorry business seemed utterly incomprehensible and as distant from his pursuit of Russian warships and defeating the French as if he were engaged at single-stick practice on Hadley Common.

The fact was that he was a mended man; his physical collapse had given him time to recover his faculties and his vigour. He wanted to be off with the convoy, to get out of the Pearl River and headed, if not for home, then for the staging post of Penang. He had vague thoughts of persuading Pellew to take ship in Patrician when he handed over the chief command to Drury, as a guarantee of their destination. That, he thought, would make a fine Christmas gift to his ship's company. But the silver specie had yet to come down from Canton and Patrician was not ready to proceed; so when Drury announced his intention of sending Dawson upstream with the squadron's boats, Drinkwater had found the suggestion of adventure irresistible.

And so, judging by their efforts, had his men. They were all volunteers, all save Tregembo, who followed his captain out of affection, though he would never admit it was more than duty. Drinkwater looked at the men closely as they plied their oars. They looked well enough on their diet of, what had they christened it? Ah yes, he recalled the crude jest, the coarse synonymous phrase for coition, bird's nest pie.

'River's more or less deserted, sir,' remarked Acting Lieutenant Frey beside him.

It was true. Though sampans and a few small junks moved up and down the river, the normal volume of traffic with which they had become familiar was no longer visible.

'I suppose they know what we're up to, Mr Frey.'

'I suppose so, sir.'

It was all an appalling tangle, Drinkwater mused. At Macao an affronted Portuguese population were suffering the occupation of the Company's sepoys, anxious to see the British gone. In the European 'factories' at Canton an increasingly beleaguered group of merchant agents were anxious to get out of China at least some of the huge deficit owed by the native merchants. The mandarins and Viceroy, organs of the Imperial civil

service, had to maintain their own 'face' and power, while at the same time obeying the orders of the Emperor in Peking who, celestially indifferent to the fate of Canton, wanted all contact with the fan kwei, the barbarian 'red-devils', broken off. Meanwhile at Whampoa the ship-masters and the Select Committee wanted to use Drury's armament to force the Chinese to pay up and the Viceroy to permit trading to continue. Drury, declaring the whole thing a 'complex, crooked, left-handed, winding mode of proceeding', had himself joined the boat operation to stop the matter getting entirely out of hand.

Beside Drinkwater, Frey suddenly craned his neck and stared ahead. Drinkwater followed his gaze. The roofs of Canton were coming into view. The tall, narrow-fronted buildings of the factories, marked by the flag-poles and the flaunting foreign colours, lay downstream from the more distant pagodas and the yellow walls of the city which rose from a higgledy-piggledy mass of scratch-built housing clustered about its buttresses.

'Canton ...', muttered Frey, speaking without knowing it. Drinkwater smiled inwardly. He must remember to call in the midshipmen's journals in a week or two, and see what Mr Frey's skill with brush and water-colour made of the scene.

'Boats ahead, sir!' The call came from the barge's bow. Drinkwater stood up, steadying his knee against a thwart. In the next boat Dawson did the same.

They were strung across the river, lying to a boom of ropes, eight or nine heavy junks, and just below them, sampans which appeared to be full of armed men, men with what looked like medieval hauberks of heavy cloth or leather over their, robes, and small metal caps with horsehair plumes.

'They've got bows and arrows, sir!' reported the bowman, and the sailors and marines burst out laughing with good-natured contempt.

Drinkwater, appraising the cordon of junks, judged the passage of the river effectively barred, unless they were going to break Drury's injunction not to open fire. He cast a quick look at either bank. There were cavalry drawn up and though they

would be seriously hampered by the multitude of people that stood curiously along the margin of the river, the entire mass was a formidable barrier to their progress.

'Easy there, Mr Frey, easy ...'

'Pull easy, lads ...'

The oarsmen slackened their efforts and Drinkwater heard Drury hailing him.

'Cap'n Drinkwater! I'm pushing on ahead ... do you hang back in my support. My interpreter tells me one of the junks bears an admiral.'

'Very well, sir. And good luck.'

Drury waved his hand and sat down again. Drinkwater saw him lean forward and exchange remarks with the interpreter. Dawson's face was set grimly.

'Oars, Mr Frey.' He turned and waved to the boats astern. As Dawson's barge pulled forward, the flotilla followed Drinkwater's example, their oars lifting horizontally, silver drops of water running along the looms, while the boats slowed, gliding in the admiral's wake.

Drinkwater watched as a perceptible ripple of excitement seemed to transmit itself from one bank to the other via the armed junks, at the sight of the single boat detaching itself from the others.

'What the devil's the admiral trying to do?' muttered Mount.

'Negotiate, Mr Mount,' said Drinkwater, 'and I'll trouble you not to open fire without my express authority.' Drinkwater repeated the order to the lieutenant in the adjacent boat, with instructions to pass it along the line. Drury had been explicit upon the point.

'Why the devil did he bring us then?'

'Something the celestials call "face" I believe, Mr Mount,' said Drinkwater, still watching Dawson's barge as he closed the hostile junks. 'A kind of ritual posturing to decide who shall have the upper hand in a matter. Ask Ballantyne to enlarge on the point ...'

Admiral's standing up, sir,' reported the bowman.

'Eyes in the boat,' snapped Frey as the idle and curious

oarsmen turned their heads to see what was happening.

'Bloody hell!'

A ground swell of voices like the stridulation of cicadas had accompanied their approach to the cordon. Against it they quite clearly heard Drury's voice and the shrill interpretation. The remarks had been cut short by a dense volley of stones that sent up tiny plumes of water all round Drury's boat.

'Advance!' signalled Drinkwater, and the assorted gigs and cutters, spreading out in a long line, pulled forward once more, closing the admiral whose oarsmen held water not twenty yards from a large, three-masted junk upon whose deck a knot of richly robed mandarins could be clearly seen.

Drury continued expostulating, moving his hands, though they could hear no more than the drone of his voice above the rising chatter of the vast crowd.

More stones plopped about him, some skimming across the placid river or falling alongside the supporting boats. Then suddenly it was not a volley. A sharp cry from the commanding junk and the jerk of a baton launched a hail of well-aimed missiles against the British. Ten yards away Drinkwater saw a marine drop his musket and clap his hands to his nose as blood gushed brightly through his fingers. Men moved dangerously in the boats as knocks and shouts told where others took blows and the boats received damage.

'Up marines, and present!'

Mount's order rang across the water and the marines in all the boats stood up and levelled their muskets. The sudden elevation of the soldiers further rocked the boats and Drinkwater realised they were blocking his view and that he had himself been standing for some moments.

'Hold your fire, damn you!' Drinkwater bellowed, suddenly seeing Dawson's face turn and blench at the proximity of the other boats. Drury turned too, took in the situation at a glance and bent to consult his interpreter.

He straightened up again and looked round. Astern of the admiral's barge the boats had drawn up in line abreast, their oarsmen dabbing at the river to maintain station against the

current. Stones continued to fall about them. One concerted volley seemed flung with concentrated viciousness, hitting several men in Russell's longboat. Stung by this furious assault her men suddenly dug in their oar-blades and, with a bending of looms, the marines in her were standing up again, cocking their muskets. Other men in other boats were being hit and cries followed one another with mounting rapidity. Men were shouting now; another boat moved forward and more marines, no longer hesitating like their officers, were flicking off their frizzens and snapping back the hammers of their flintlocks.

'Hold your fire!' roared Drinkwater. Drury had been adamant upon the point, this was to be a show of force only. To defy this mob with lead would call down a vengeful horde and the only result would be death for all of them, and a particularly senseless death at that.

'Hold your fire!' Drinkwater shouted again.

'Back-water and hold your fire, damn your eyes!' Drury, frustrated in his attempt to communicate with the Chinese admiral, was himself bull-roaring at his men. His pugnacious spirit was held in admirable check amid a crescendo of noise as cymbals and gongs now enhanced the cries of the Chinese and the curses and mutterings of the British. The marines lowered their muskets irresolutely, and sat down to lessen the target area they presented to the hundreds of Chinese who, leaning from the junks and sampans, seemed provided with an endless supply of pebbles and stones.

'They are driving us out as devils, sir,' volunteered Frey, 'that is why they are beating the gongs ...'

'Your intelligence is ill-timed, sir,' snapped Drinkwater. 'Sit down, damn you!' he shouted at a midshipman who, in the Dedaigneuse's cutter was standing in her stern sheets, waving his dirk and uttering a stream of obscene invective at the obdurate Chinese.

'Sit down at once and hold your tongue, sir!'

Even in such extreme circumstances the incongruity of the boy's torrent of filth annoyed Drinkwater. They were all

over-wrought and he was aware that his silencing of the midshipman was a vent for his own pent-up feelings.

Then suddenly it seemed as if a dark cloud had passed over them and their eyes were assailed by a sibilant vibration that rent the air above them. The volley of arrows splashed into the river astern of them, clearly aimed over their heads in intimidation. And then came a mighty roar, so sudden after the unnerving noise of the arrows that men's faces paled in fear, and so close that the wave of concussion and heat that seared them sizzled hair and added the sharp stink of its frizzing to the blast of powder. Their boats rocked dangerously. The huge bell-mouthed cannon, concealed until that moment by rush matting draping the sides of a war-junk, vomited a red and yellow tongue of fire.

No shot or langridge came from the dragon's mouth, but the message from its black muzzle was potent enough: the Chinese were not open to negotiations. Admiral Drury was waving the boats back. Dawson's barge was crabbing round, swinging her bow downstream. Willingly now the others followed suit and, helped by the current, dropped swiftly down towards the refuge of their ships.

Astern of them the clamour of the Chinese and their gongs rose to a victorious crescendo to which was now added the snap of fire-crackers. Banners waved and the huge dragon gun spat tongues of fire at their retreat. Aboard the greatest of the junks, the Viceroy of Canton received the congratulations of his court.

On either bank cavalry kept pace with them for a mile or so, then fell back, and their last sight of the citizens of the great city was a single draped palanquin that watched them from a low rise on the levee.

The red curtains fluttered a little as the brass ferrule of a telescope was withdrawn, and a few minutes later the bearers, obeying some command from within, swung it round and headed back towards Canton. Alongside it trotted a little Indian boy with an impish face and almost pointedly prominent ears.

CHAPTER 5 The Matter of Morale

'... A red flag from the foremasthead of the escort shall signify the convoy to form line ahead, to clear such armament as shall be borne by each ship and to maintain station until such time as the said red flag shall be struck.'

Drinkwater ceased dictating and stared over Derrick's shoulder as the Quaker clerk finished writing.

'I think that is all, Derrick. Now we must have fourteen copies, one each for our charges and two for ourselves, one of which is to be kept in the binnacle. You have my authority to impress the midshipmen on the duty of copy-clerks.'

Aye, Captain.'

And Derrick ...'

The Quaker, gathering pens and ink-pot, looked up at Drinkwater.

'Ensure they make no mistakes ...'

'Very well, Captain Drinkwater.'

A knock came at the door and Midshipman Belchambers's face peered round it. 'Beg pardon, sir, but Mr Quilhampton's compliments and there's a boy asking to see you.'

A boy?' Drinkwater frowned.

A native boy, sir . . .'

A Chinese boy?'

'Looks more like an Indian boy to me, sir.'

Something about his assumption of mature judgement on the part of the youthful Belchambers brought a smile to Drinkwater's face. There had been an atmosphere of something like farce attendant upon the affairs of the British ships at Whampoa following Admiral Drury's 'humane retreat' from Canton.

Drinkwater, in receipt of his orders, wanted only to be out of the river and on his way to Penang. Fortunately Drury had hauled down his flag from Patrician's main-masthead and had returned to Russell, pondering his next move and reading the riot act to the dithering Selectmen.

'If neither peace nor commerce is to be had by an act of war, I never will sanction the slaughter of those defenceless multitudes,' Drury had said to them in Drinkwater's cabin before his departure. 'We have trampled under foot every moral law of man and nations, and the poor defenceless Chinese have been infuriated to a frenzy ...'

Something of the fighting-cock had had to explode from this exemplary lecture and poor Drury, having been humiliated personally in his attempt to act to the satisfaction of all parties, suddenly reacted angrily, perhaps contemplating how fortunate the boat expedition had been in avoiding real casualties.

'However, gentlemen, if one of my seamen had been, or is killed, I will destroy Canton. Therefore recollect what you will have to answer for. I gave you quiet possession of Macao, but I tell you no hostile act shall be committed against the Chinese, unless a man is killed, which nothing but the most singular accident has prevented. The seamen under my control have borne to be fired at, but once let loose,' the admiral finished dramatically, 'no power on earth can stop 'em!' Out of tact or embarrassment no one mentioned Drury's failure to bring off a single piece of silver specie.

The Select Committee had been packed off to finish negotiations with the mandarins from the luxurious quarters of the Stirling Castle, East Indiaman, while Drinkwater gathered the few ships that were ready to proceed and prepared to depart with this small convoy.

And now a boy was asking for him.

'What does he want, Mr Belchambers, have you ascertained that?'

'Well, sir, beg pardon, sir, to see you.'

"You had better bring him down then.'

Belchambers seemed to hesitate.

'What is the matter now?'

'Well, sir, Mr Quilhampton voiced an opinion that the boy might be an, er, assassin, sir ...'

Drinkwater laughed. 'That's most solicitous of Mr Q, Mr Belchambers. It does not occur to you that the lad is doubtless a servant from one of the Indiamen.'

'That's unlikely, sir ...'

'Oh?' Drinkwater's temper was shortening. He had other matters to consider and a final letter of instruction to draft for the masters and commanders of the convoy.

'Yes, sir, he came down river in a sampan.'

'Bring him below,' Drinkwater snapped, meeting Derrick's eye as the clerk, penned in the cabin by this odd exchange, now slipped out to co-opt the midshipmen as copy-clerks.

Drinkwater bent over the chart that lay on his table. It was a survey by Huddart, and Ballantyne had laid off the best course for them to follow, south and then south-westward towards the tip of the long Malay peninsula. Such was his preoccupation that he had almost forgotten the announced visitor when the hobbling Belchambers showed the boy in.

He was shorter than the midshipman, and possibly two or three years younger. His features were neat and small, almost feminine, with huge brown eyes outlined with a hint of kohl. He bowed, displaying a jewelled turban, and drew from his loose sleeve a letter.

Drinkwater took the letter, an amused smile playing about his mouth, for in the shadows beyond the diminutive exotic, Mr Midshipman Belchambers stood anxiously, his hand on a half-drawn dirk.

Drinkwater slit the wafer, half turning to the window to read the message.

Canton

20th November 1808

To the Officer Commanding the Convoy Bound for India

Honoured Sir,

Knowing your Imminent Preparations for Departure and the Frustrations your Party has Suffered in its Attempt to recover the Silver owed the British Merchants by the Rascally Hong, I have it in my Power to carry off most of the Specie at the time of your sailing if, in the First Part you Signify at what time this will occur and, in the Second Part you allow Myself and a Servant to Embark in your Frigate. The Matter to be Secret between ourselves.

Please convey your Answer to the Bearer. He is dumb but understands English. I am, Honoured Sir,

Your most humble and obedient Servant,

A Friend.

Drinkwater read the letter through twice. It could be a ruse, of course. Information as to the convoy's sailing could be passed to the forts at the Bogue, or to the pirates of the Ladrones. But that information could as easily be signalled, for it would take several hours for the convoy to drop down river and they could scarcely do so unnoticed. In any case Drury had promised them the escort of the Phaeton until they were clear of land.

On the face of it this unknown 'friend' was obviously anxious to buy his way out of what might prove a dangerous place for a European, and had the decency to attempt to recover what the British merchants most desired. Yet why should the man insist on secrecy when he was proposing to achieve what the British merchants wanted?

To cheat them? Perhaps, and that was why he wanted passage in a frigate rather than a merchant ship. Drinkwater looked at the boy. He was dumb, yet the face was intelligent, and it watched Drinkwater with the passive observance of something feral. He thought for a moment of calling away his barge and consulting Drury, but he knew this boy would take news of his indecision back to his unknown master.

Besides, Drury had employed Drinkwater on the task for his experience, and he had a mind to get to the bottom of what would doubtless turn out to be no mystery at all.

'Tell your master ...no, wait, I'll write.'

He turned to his desk and picked up his steel pen, searching for the ink-pot that Derrick had moved.

The boy was suddenly beside him, the smell of scent wafting from his small body. Drinkwater felt a small brown hand on his arm and the dark, liquid eyes were staring up at his face. Behind them there was a shuffling movement, and the evening light glancing off the river gleamed on the naked blade of Belchambers's dirk.

But these were details on the periphery of Drinkwater's perception. Afterwards he considered the value of the stones in the boy's turban and the oddity of his prominent and pixie ears. In the moment of arrest, as the boy strove to prevent Drinkwater committing anything to paper, he was aware principally of the hollow of the boy's mouth, and the insistent grunts that filled its tongueless monstrosity.

He dreamed that night; a restless half-sleep full of terrors. He was flung down and drowning, drowning in waves of Elizabeth's hair that caught and clung to his struggling body, drowning in the laughter and shouts and smiles of thousands upon thousands of Chinese whose narrow eyes and loose, gaudy clothing seemed to have displaced his wife's tresses and moved with the overwhelming restlessness of the sea. Then he was fighting for air, surfacing in this very cabin, dark, lonely and cold. But there was a sweet and seductive laughter beyond the door and he struggled towards it in anticipation of all the delights of the flesh that he had for so long lived without.

But the woman beyond the door was ghastly; a horror of all the nameless, haunting horrors that mocked a man out of the darkness of his own desire. He drew back, pursued. The hag metamorphosed into the little Indian messenger who, mouth open, came to engulf him with his tongueless hole from which, Drinkwater fancied, the very sulphureous stink of hell itself seemed to emanate. And all about him laughter rang in his ears, laughter from Chinese and Indian and European faces ...

He jerked awake, the sweat pouring from him, the thin laughter coming from beyond the cabin door. It was high-pitched and piping, and combined with the dream to bring him leaping from his cot, his heart thundering in his chest, his night-shirt sticking to his body and the lank locks of his loosely bound hair plastered to his scalp.

Pulling on breeches and tucking the tails of his night-shirt into them, he yanked his cloak from the hook by the door and stepped precipitately out on to the gun-deck. The dozing marine sentry sprang upright with a click of musket against buckles.

The giggling laughter came again, resolving itself into the now familiar sounds of pre-dawn coition from the berth-deck. His confusion clearing from his fogged mind, Drinkwater ran up the quarterdeck ladder, announcing his presence by a discreet cough.

Mr Meggs, the gunner, appeared from beyond the mizen mast. 'Sir?'

'What day is it?'

'Why, er, Sunday, sir.'

'And the time?'

'A little before three bells, sir,' and then added, as if sensing the captain's distraction, 'in the morning watch, sir.'

'Pipe all hands.'

All hands, sir?'

'You heard me, damn it, and clear the ship. No showing of legs, Spithead style, I want the lower deck cleared fore and aft and the people mustered.'

'Ship's company to muster, sir, aye, aye.'

Somewhat bemused at this extraordinary behaviour, the elderly Meggs shuffled forward, hesitated, looked back at the captain, then called for the bosun's mate of the watch.

'Mr Meggs!'

The gunner turned at the captain's shout. He began to shuffle aft again.

'Mr Meggs,' said Drinkwater quietly, 'I am aware that only the recent casualties force you to keep watch on deck, but be so kind as not to appear on the quarterdeck in your slippers.'

Meggs looked down at his erring feet. Habitual use of felt slippers in Patrician's magazine, where the wearing of leather soles might rasp and ignite the coarse grains of spilt gunpowder, probably rendered it instinctive that the poor fellow put them on at the call of the watch. Perhaps, thought Drinkwater, catching a smell of the man, he slept in the festering things!

'I beg your pardon, sir.' Meggs looked crestfallen.

'Be a good fellow and have something more suitable on when you muster.'

'Very well, sir ...' Meggs looked hard at his captain and Drinkwater suddenly looked down at his own appearance.

'Perhaps,' he said, recovering himself at last, 'that had better stand for both of us, eh? You may wait until four bells before turning up the ship.'

Fully awake and aware of the ludicrous appearance he would cut even in the predawn gloom, Drinkwater hurried below. As he turned for his cabin above the companionway, he was aware of a face staring up at him. For a second he stopped, his heart beating as though this was some impish visitation from his dream, and then it was gone, the young Chinese girl vanishing into the stygian darkness.

'Pass word for my steward,' he growled at the marine, and the whisper went around the ship that Captain Drinkwater was awake and something was afoot.

Sluicing his face after the harsh ministrations of the razor Drinkwater called for a clean shirt. It occurred to him that the few days of relatively relaxed routine might prove fatal to the delicate matter of morale. He was aware that he had left the refitting of the ship to Fraser and though he could find little to fault with the first lieutenant's arrangements, only time would prove their thoroughness.

Drinkwater was unhappily conscious that any loosening of the bonds of discipline was a risky matter, and that mumblings of discontent had accompanied Patrician from the moment the crew of Antigone had been turned wholesale into her, topped up with the scum of a hot press and sent round Cape Horn to absent them all from European waters.

The long-service volunteers had had their willingness to serve eroded by lack of shore leave and the association of landsmen, lubbers, thieves and petty felons; men whose proper habitat was a gaol, but whom the Admiralty saw fit to pour into men-of-war to fill their impossible complements. It was for prime seamen to tolerate them, but to be reduced to their level was something that proud men, jealous of their expertise, could not submit to.

Drinkwater's greatest enemy was desertion. Jack had a simple understanding of the world and to him the foreign shore of China offered escape from the endless round of grinding labour expected of him aboard a King's ship. Drinkwater knew and understood all this, and before Patrician had sailed for the Pacific he had had to hang a man at the fore-yardarm for desertion, pour encourager les autres.

He shook the awful image from his mind's eye and summoned more cogent reasons for his attitude. He could not afford to lose a single man. Ballantyne had told him the Indiamen were often short of hands on a China voyage, of how they embarked Chinese to make up their complements, and how their commanders would be keen to secure the services of a dozen active topmen, even to the extent of hiding them until they were out of sight of land. To this must be added the potent inducement of the high and guaranteed wages paid on Company ships.

In short, Drinkwater mused as he tied his stock and reached behind him for the coat that Mullender held out, he would not be at all surprised if he was short of men. The question was, how many?

Beyond the cabin door the pipes squealed as four bells struck. Drinkwater stood before his mirror, head a-cock, listening to the sounds of reaction, judging by the inevitable sluggishness, the little shrieks of the whores and the suppressed oaths, the temper of his men.

Midshipman Count Vasili Chirkov felt his hammock shake. 'Come on, Vasili, get out ... uniform ... muster ...'

Midshipman Dutfield was climbing into his breeches, rousing the indolent Russian between grunts of effort as he and his colleagues sought the neglected items of their uniform in the gloomy chaos of the gunroom.

'Non ... no ...'

The girl stirred in the crook of his arm and nestled comfortably up to him.

Dutfield shook the hammock violently and then Frey was standing close, holding up a glim so that it shone unequivocally over the exposed bodies.

'Come on, you lubber!' the acting lieutenant urged, 'Or the Captain will marry you to the gunner's daughter.'

'No ...' Chirkov peered over the edge of the hammock. 'I have girl first ...'

Dutfield and Frey exchanged glances. Frey winked and shrugged. He felt his new-found authority inadequate to the task. The midshipmen left the gunroom and joined the rush to the upper deck.

The ship was a babel of confusion. Everywhere along the berth-deck men were hurriedly drawing on clothes and unlashing and rolling hammocks. Small brown Tanka women, their usefulness now past and to whom the sudden shrill of the pipes and flurry of activity must have been beyond all comprehension, were being roughly shoved aside. In one place two men were busy thrusting their paramours through an open gun-port into a waiting sampan, in another one of these unfortunate creatures was crying like a child, her ankle badly sprained from too sudden a descent from a hammock.

'Clear lower deck! Out! Out! Out!' Bosun Comley was bawling, urging his mates to use their starters, and lashing about him with his cane.

'Get these whores over the side! This is a King's ship, not a kennel!'

'Bloody hypocrite!' remarked a Quotaman who had once entertained social expectations but had been found guilty of embezzlement.

'Clear lower deck!'

Lieutenant Mount appeared, buttoning his tunic and shouting.

'Ser'nt Blixoe! Pass word for Ser'nt Blixoe ...'

'Here, sir!'

'Give the Bosun a hand to get these trollops into their boats ... not too roughly, Ser'nt.'

Meanwhile, in the gunroom, Midshipman Count Vasili Ghirkov was reaching the climax of his urgent love-making.

His sword hitched and his hat ready in his hand, Drinkwater half sat on the edge of his table, one leg swinging, awaiting the summons to the deck. When it came at last he affected not to notice the inordinate delay, not to enquire from Mr Belchambers, who had been sent limping down to inform him the muster was complete, why he had heard noises below decks that indicated a party of marines sent twice through the ship. He knew already what that signified.

It was growing light as he climbed to the quarterdeck. The men were massed amidships, over the booms and along the gangways, in the lower rigging and, still distracted by the departing women, craning over the rails. Beyond the hammock nettings he could see the trucks of masts as three or four score sampans rocked away from their sides.

'Eyes in the ship there!' Fraser touched his hat. 'Ship's company mustered, sir.'

'Very well, Mr Fraser.'

There was something wrong. He could see instantly the lack of symmetry in the ranks of marines who rigidly lined the sides of the quarterdeck. He caught Fraser's eye and raised an eyebrow.

'Four men missing, sir,' hissed the first lieutenant in a low, tense voice.

'How many marines?'

'None, sir. Corporal Grice is still searching the ship.'

'Any boats missing?'

'No, sir. Too many sampans ...'

Drinkwater nodded a curt acceptance of what he had already guessed. Affecting to ignore the report he stepped forward.

'Well, my lads,' he began, staring at the bleary faces that were taking shape in the growing light, 'the Chinese consider us barbarians, I'm told, and looking at the present state of the ship's company, I'm not entirely surprised ...'

A collectively sheepish grin seemed to spread across the more tractable members of the crew.

'You have all enjoyed a little relaxation and the ship is almost ready to proceed ...'

'Where are we bound, Cap'n?'

The voice was unidentifiable, but it might have asked for all except the Russian prisoners, for the light of interest kindled in their washed-out faces.

'We are escorting a convoy to Prince of Wales Island and then ... then I think it time that we took ourselves home ...'

He was aware that few of them knew where Prince of Wales Island was, and fewer cared, but they all wanted to hear their final destination. He was cut short by a spontaneous burst of cheering, cheering that only died away when Corporal Grice and his detail emerged from the after companionway half dragging, half shoving an able seaman named Ward, and escorting the protesting Chirkov and his half-naked flower-girl in to the ampitheatre of unoccupied deck before the captain.

Chirkov shrugged off the rough hands of the marines and turned as though to join his fellow prisoners, gathered about Prince Vladimir.

'Stand still, sir!' rapped Mount, pleased with his men.

'Make your report, Grice,' said Drinkwater quietly, nodding first at Ward.

'Caught him going out through a gun-port, sir. Into a sampan under number three gun, sir.'

Drinkwater nodded. 'Anything to say, Ward?'

The unhappy man shook his head. 'Put him in the bilboes, Corporal.' Drinkwater had no intention of marring the present moment with a flogging. On the other hand ...

He turned to the sulking Russian. Not taking his eyes off the young nobleman, Drinkwater said, 'Captain Rakitin, this officer is under duty to you. He is responsible for a division of your men and has been publicly taken with this woman. Have you anything to say on his behalf?'

It gave Drinkwater a grim satisfaction to see the big Russian nonplussed, even if only for a moment.

'If it was one of my midshipmen he would be made to kiss the gunner's daughter!'

'No ... no, that would be most irregular ...'

'I shall punish him tomorrow, Captain,' Drinkwater said, 'when I deal with my own defaulters. Kindly be answerable for his behaviour until then.' He turned to Fraser. 'Pipe the men down, Mr Fraser, I want to be ready to weigh at first light tomorrow.'

'What about the deserters, sir? asked Fraser as the muster dispersed.

'No more sampans alongside, Mr Fraser, and a better guard boat tonight. Forget the deserters and let the men enjoy the anticipation of seeing Midshipman Chirkov's matrimony.'

Touching his hat, Drinkwater left the deck. Behind him Fraser and Mount exchanged glances.

'Forget the deserters,' muttered Fraser, 'that's no' wise ...'

'I think,' mused Mount quietly to the worried first lieutenant, 'that we are more concerned with morale at the moment.'

CHAPTER 6 The Concerns of a Convoy

'Well, gentlemen, that concludes matters ...'

Drinkwater looked round at the faces of the dozen men gathered in his cabin. Most wore plain cloth coats, some sported brass buttons or a strip of gold leaf about their cuffs, but two wore the brass-bound uniform of the East India Company's livery.

'If there are no more questions I wish you all good-night and would be obliged if you would heave a-peak the instant you see my signal at daylight. We will make the best of our way beyond the Bogue and I will signal a boat from each of you before forming the order of sailing.' In this way Drinkwater could allow for any idiosyncrasies he noticed in the passage downstream.

There was a chorus of 'good-nights' and mutual exchanges between these masters of the convoy who all knew each other. An undercurrent of relief had permeated their gathering for Drinkwater's briefing: he knew that indecision had sent the Select Committee into a catalepsy and that these men, at least, were fortunate to have completed their cargoes and be homeward bound.

Drinkwater nodded dismissal to Ballantyne who, attired in the more-or-less regulation dress of a warrant officer, had cleared away the copies of Huddart's charts that had been his passport to Patrician’s wardroom. Fraser, too, was about to leave the cabin, but Drinkwater stepped forward and restrained him with his hand.

'Captain Callan,' Drinkwater called, and one of the East India commanders turned in the doorway. 'Might I have a word, sir?'

'Of course, Captain ...' Callan, a tall, slightly red-faced man with bushy eyebrows above deep-set eyes, was commander of the Indiaman Guilford, and senior of the two John Company men.

'I will be blunt with you, sir,' began Drinkwater, 'I am short of men.'

Callan nodded. 'I wondered when you would turn poacher.' He nodded at Fraser. 'We acceded to your first lieutenant's requests for spars from our stores in the bankshalls on Danes Island in the pious hope that we might assuage the Navy's rapacious appetite. It seems that, having plundered our stores, you now want our men.'

'It seems that you do not quite understand ...' replied Drinkwater coolly.

'Oh, I quite understand, Captain Drinkwater. In fact I understand very well and that is why we, the masters in the convoy, have agreed a confederation united to oppose you if you send any men on board our ships with the intention of removing our people. Just attempt it, sir, just attempt it, by God!'

Drinkwater raised an eyebrow. 'You know my rights in the matter, Captain Callan ...'

'Aye,' Callan retorted swiftly, 'such as they are this far from home and with the sworn affidavits of my colleagues to counter you. Besides, many of my men hold exemptions and it is a matter of record that we too are under-manned.'

'Captain, I do not submit to intimidation. Perhaps you need not threaten me if I assure you that I have no intention of pressing your men. I will give you my word of honour upon the point, if it pleases you.'

'Then, why ... ?'

'But', Drinkwater pressed on, 'might I ask you how you feel about the boot being on the other foot?'

Callan's mouth was still open and it was clear that Drinkwater's remark had caught him at a disadvantage.

'If I am not to poach from you, sir, you should not poach from me.'

'You heard?' frowned Callan.

'Three prime topmen. I guessed.'

A reluctantly appreciative smile hovered about the corners of Callan's mouth. Drinkwater wondered if Callan knew to what degree he had been bluffing. The commanders of Indiamen were no fools. A fortune of £20,000 was nothing to them, trading as they did on their own account. They were often part-owners of their ships, for the Honourable Company chartered rather than owned the great argosies, expecting them to make four or five voyages before they were worn out. The thought amused Drinkwater, making him smile in return. By Company standards Patrician was a hulk!

'I will return them in the morning, Captain Drinkwater.'

'No. Oblige me by holding them until I send for them. I do not want my own people disturbed by a flogging until we are out of soundings.'

'Very well.'

'A glass to warm the temperature of our meeting?'

'Obliged.'

'Pray sit down ... Fraser, will you join us?'

'Thank you, sir.'

'My first lieutenant has done wonders to repair the damage wrought by the typhoon, Captain Callan, the least we can offer him is a drink ...'

Fraser blushed and mumbled something as Drinkwater served from the decanter.

'I see you have taken on the younger Ballantyne, Captain Drinkwater,' remarked Callan conversationally.

'Yes. I lost my own master in action. You know him?'

Callan nodded. 'He's illegitimate, of course, Ballantyne has a wife in Lambeth. Rather a colourful fellow, the son ...'

'He seems competent enough. I do not know that a little colour hurt a man of its own accord.'

'I meant in terms of manner, rather than blood, Captain, though there are those who would dispute the matter.'

'Well, I am not versed in these contentions. Let him serve until he proves himself one way or another.'

'Or a ball carries off his head.'

'You think that likely?'

Callan shrugged. 'You heard the opinion aired here tonight that the protection of the trade is inadequate. Pellew has a few frigates on station, but these are too well-known now and the Dutch and French have both got formidable ships in these seas.'

'You havena mentioned pirates, sir,' prompted Fraser, relaxing with his glass.

'Don't be a doubting Thomas, Lieutenant. The Ladrones will not touch us, but the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo are a different matter. They have taken four Country ships this last quarter, and all were richly laden, almost as if they knew ... I tell you it's been a damned bad year for our trade, without this farce between the Selectmen, the Viceroy and our dear friend Admiral Drury.'

You refer to the failure to extract the specie?' asked Drinkwater, refilling the glasses.

'Aye. The Chinese merchants of the Hong are a damnable tricky lot. The Viceroy wants the trade, the Hoppo of the Imperial Customs wants the trade and the European merchants want the trade, but if they can get it for nothing by hiding behind the Emperor's proscription they will, that's why we're so damned anxious to get our ships out of the river.'

'Captain Callan,' said Drinkwater, rising and walking round behind his writing-table to produce the mysterious letter he had received from Canton, 'what d'you make of this?'

He watched Callan frown over the thing, holding it to the candelabra to read it. He shook his head and looked up.

'I don't recognise the hand. Have you heard further from this Friend?'

'No ... I made it clear that we would sail at dawn on the second, but we have heard nothing since his messenger departed.'

Drinkwater thought briefly of the boy and the dream, but dismissed the silly obsession.

'Did you mention it to your admiral?'

Drinkwater shook his head. 'No, he had already rejoined the Russell beyond the outer bar. Besides, if the thing had happened I could have sent word that we had got the specie via the Phaeton; she is due to drop down river with us tomorrow.'

Callan shrugged and appeared to dismiss the matter. 'I heard you took a Russian seventy-four, Captain,' he said, rising and holding out his hand.

Drinkwater nodded. 'We've a few of her people to prove it.'

'Here's my hand, Captain. I confess your escort is providential. Before your arrival the best we could hope for was Pellew's whipper-snapper Fleetwood. Perhaps we can dine during the passage, Captain, and with you, Lieutenant ...'

Fraser saw Callan over the side and into his waiting boat. It was quite dark and Drinkwater stared out over the leaden surface of the great river. The mysterious letter seemed to signify nothing beyond some poor European thwarted in his efforts to get out of the beleaguered factories. Whatever its source it was beyond his power to do anything about it.

But thought of the letter worried Drinkwater now that he sat alone in his cabin. It resurrected the image of the tongueless child and the hideous dream. He knew the dream of old. With infinite variations the spectre and the sensation of drowning had accompanied him since the days when he had endured the tyranny of the sodomite bully of the frigate Cyclops. He had been an impressionable midshipman then, thirty years earlier, but the dream had come to mean more than the random nocturnal insecurities of his psyche; it had become an agent of premonition.

The thought stirred his imagination. He stopped staring out of the window, turned and picked up the candelabra. The halo of its light fell on the portrait of Elizabeth. Almost unconsciously his hand touched the carmine paint that formed the curve of her lips.

Had the premonition served warning of the deserters? Or potential trouble with the Russian prisoners? Somehow neither seemed important enough to warrant the appearance of the spectre. Was the nightmare significant of anything corporeal?

He stood for several minutes willing his head to clear of these foolish megrims, cursing his loneliness and isolation, aware of the half-empty bottle on the table behind him.

That was too easy. He placed the candelabra beside it, paused, then resolutely took his cloak from its peg by the door and made for the blessed sweetness of fresh air.

Pacing up and down the deck he lost track of the time, though the watch, conscious of his presence among them, struck the half-hours punctiliously on the bell, while the sentries' assiduous calls were echoed by the guard boat rowing round the ship. It was not long before his mind was diverted, preoccupied by anxieties about the forthcoming convoy duty.

Below him the ship stirred slowly into life, prompted in part by the rhythms of her routine, in part by his own orders in preparation for departure. The first symptom of the coming day was the rousing of the 'idlers', those men whose duties lay outside the watch-bill. They included Drinkwater's personal staff, his steward, clerk and coxswain. This trio enjoyed the privilege of brewing what passed for coffee in the sanctum of the captain's pantry, a ritual that reduced itself to a formality of grunts and mutual acceptance as they went on to perform the tasks that bound them not to the ship, but to the person of Captain Drinkwater.

The Quaker Derrick had the lightest duties, clearing the captain's desk and ruling the ledgers and log-book. Tregembo, the old Cornish coxswain who had been with Drinkwater since the captain had been a midshipman aboard Cyclops, attended to Drinkwater's personal kit, to his razor, sword and pistols. It was to Mullender that fell the lot of the menial. The captain's steward was a self-effacing man who possessed no private life of his own, nor any personality to awaken him to the deprivation. He had been born to servitude and never questioned his lot, content with the tiny privileges that accrued to his rating.

The trio was dominated by Tregembo, for Tregembo was a man of forthright stamp, whose wife Susan was cook to the Drinkwater menage in distant Hampshire. Long service and Cornish cunning had ensured Tregembo exercised influence, even in the wardroom, and his protection of his master was legendary throughout the ship. It was Tregembo who first sensed danger.

'What means this 'ere?' he asked Derrick, holding out the letter from Canton that Drinkwater had left upon his desk.

'Thou should'st not read the captain's correspondence ...'

'Thou knows I can't read, that's why I'm asking thee!' snapped Tregembo at the Quaker, 'tis what that boy brought ...'

'Yes ... 'tis only a request for a passage,' said Derrick dismissively, taking the sheet of paper and slipping it into the ship's letter book.

'I didn't like the cut o' that boy ...' ruminated Tregembo, 'he put me in mind o' something ...'

'Thou seest knots in a bullrush, Friend,' muttered Derrick, and Tregembo, staring through the stern windows at the emerging grey of the Pearl River, growled uncharitably.

'He put me in mind of a boy who used to be a whatsit to Captain Allen o' the Rattler.'

'And what does that signify?' asked Derrick.

'Nothing,' said Tregembo, 'but that Captain Allen was hanged for buggery.'

Lieutenant Quilhampton was called with the news that the captain was already on deck. James Quilhampton had suffered the agonies of sexual temptation while Patrician had swung to her anchor. He was near despair, for it was months earlier that he had received a letter already half a year old, that Catriona MacEwan would not repulse his advances if he pressed his suit. To the thin, one-handed young man, such a prospect offered a happiness that he had once despaired of, and the Captain's announcement that they were homeward bound only made their present tardiness the more reprehensible. He was suddenly, expectantly awake on this dawn of departure, eager to get the anchor atrip and loose off the gun that, with a shaking topsail, would signal the convoy to weigh. Waving aside the offered coffee he pulled on shirt and breeches, rasped his cheeks and wound a none-too-clean stock about his neck. Kicking his feet into pinchbeck-buckled shoes he strapped his wooden forearm in place, pulled on coat and hat, and hurried on deck.

His arrival coincided with the midships sentry's challenge.

'Boat 'hoy!'

In a frenzy of efficiency he hurried to the entry and peered over the side. 'It's only a junk, man,' he snapped at the marine, waving at the score or so of batwinged sails that moved slowly over the almost windless river.

'Aye, sir, but she's been standing towards us since she came through the Indymen ...'

'She does appear to be approaching us, Mr Q,' remarked Drinkwater, coming up.

'Morning, sir.'

'Mornin', replied Drinkwater, turning to the marine. 'Give her another hail.' Drinkwater raised his glass and levelled it at the junk. Quilhampton spotted activity about the mast, one of the three sails beginning to collapse, flattening the row of battens one on top of the other as the halliard was let go.

'Boat, 'hoy!' bellowed the marine.

'Ah, I thought so ...' Drinkwater lowered his glass and Quilhampton could himself see the flash of colour in the grey dawn, like the blue of a jay's wing, where the gaily coloured figure of the little Indian boy stood at the junk's ungainly bow.

'I think we have a passenger or two, Mr Q, and a whip at the main yardarm might prove useful.'

Aye, aye, sir.' Quilhampton turned away just as the bosun's pipes began squealing at the hatchways to turn up Patrician's company. It did not seem to matter that they had thirteen or fourteen thousand miles of ocean to cross before a sight of the English coast would greet them: there was nothing so exciting as the final moment of homeward departure!

Behind him, watched by the marine and Captain Drinkwater, the junk rounded to under the Patrician's quarter and dropped alongside.

Tregembo watched the junk from the starboard quarter-gallery. Something in the appearance of that boy and the mention of sodomy had brought back unpleasant memories of the berth-deck of His Britannic Majesty's frigate Cyclops and the unpleasant coterie that had held sway under the leadership of a certain Midshipman Morris. Morris had been the evil genius who had presided over the cockpit and whose authority the young Drinkwater had challenged. Tregembo too had been mixed up in the dark and unacknowledged doings of the lower deck that had ended the tyranny by the quiet murder of one of Morris's confederates. Not that Tregembo possessed a conscience over the matter, rather that the disturbing influence had dominated an unhappy period of his hard life and the unbidden memory had made him introspective, in the manner of all elderly men. That is why for several moments he could not believe his eyes and thought himself victim of a trick of the light.

'It be impossible,' he muttered, for the figure was too gross, too robed in fantastical costume and too given to fat to be anything other than someone else. But just for a moment, as the mandarin hoisted himself up Patrician's tumblehome by way of the man-ropes, Tregembo fell victim to the fanciful notion that he was the man Morris.

It was Quilhampton who first recognised the stranger stepping down on to Patrician's deck. Quilhampton had known Morris when that officer had briefly commanded the brig Hellebore and Drinkwater had served as his first lieutenant. Unlike Tregembo he knew little of the man's history or his appearance as a younger man. Quilhampton recalled him already running to seed, though not as gross or disguised as he now appeared. Quilhampton had half forgotten the sick commander they had left in hospital at the Cape of Good Hope, forgotten the rumours that the ship's surgeon had been poisoning him, forgotten even the few facts from his own past that Captain Drinkwater had let slip. To Quilhampton recognition came most easily, though he too was surprised at the extravagant appearance of this quondam naval officer.

Drinkwater, his mind ranging from the forthcoming details of ordering his charges under weigh to the potential securing of the specie he anticipated off the junk's deck, saw only a large, obese man in the yellow silk robe of a mandarin. Recognition of the man as a European was incidental to the sudden flurry of activity about the deck. Fraser was alongside him, as was Ballantyne, and Acting Lieutenant Frey had his yeoman of signals bending flags on to halliards.

Reports flooded aft: the capstans were manned and the nippers in place, below in the cable tiers the Russians prepared to coil the huge, wet and heavy cable. Mr Comley had his fo'c's'le men at their stations and the topsail sheets and halliards were manned. On the quarterdeck a party of marines were tailing on to the main topsail halliards and a quarter-gunner, lanyard in hand, had a carronade charged and ready to fire as the signal for the convoy to weigh.

Gradually a calm settled over Patrician. Men stood expectantly at their stations; Fraser told off the acknowledged reports as they came in; Ballantyne stood by the wheel. Only Quilhampton seemed party to the drama at the embarkation point.

'Are you the gentleman from Canton?' asked Drinkwater, giving the newcomer his full attention now. 'D'you have that specie ready to heave aboard?'

The Indian boy stood beside his master, contrasting his bulk.

'I am he, Captain Drinkwater, and the specie wants only a tackle to secure it.'

It was the voice, the voice and the malignant and venomous inflection of hatred laid upon his own name that awoke Drinkwater to the stranger's identity. Suddenly the nightmare's premonition came to him.

And recognition slid beneath Drinkwater's rib-cage with the white-hot agony of a sword-thrust.

CHAPTER 7 Morris

It was clear from the self-possession of Morris's smile that he was not surprised at the presence of Nathaniel Drinkwater in the Pearl River. The solicitations of the unknown 'friend' suddenly assumed a sinister aspect and the infallibility of the nightmare was proved once again, for here, at last, Drinkwater knew, was the cacodemon presaged by his dream. This realisation steadied him and he met again the eyes of his enemy.

Morris's gross figure was largely hidden under the yellow silk robe but his hooded eyes seemed to complete his strange oriental transformation.

'Captain Drinkwater, what a pleasure!' Morris bowed, the smile wider as he sensed Drinkwater's uncertainty. 'Please be so kind as to have my traps, and in particular the two bronze-bound chests, hoisted aboard.'

'Mr Q!' Quilhampton, casting a suspicious eye in Morris's direction, crossed the deck. 'Have the goodness to escort this gentleman and his ... his servant to my cabin.' Drinkwater paused, then added, 'and look lively with those chests.'

'Mr Quilhampton, I do recall you too ... still with Captain Drinkwater, eh?' Something offensive in Morris's tone lingered after he had left the deck and the boom of the signal gun made Drinkwater start, even though he had absently nodded his permission for its discharge, for he had been watching the heavy chests swing aboard. He disguised his exposure with a barked order: 'Lively with those halliards now!'

The topsail yards rose on freshly slushed masts. The braces were manned and trimmed so that, as the anchor tripped from the mud of the river-bed, Patrician's head fell off downstream in a languid turn that carried her perilously close to the Guilford, before her long raking jib-boom pointed at the forts of the Bogue and the open sea beyond.

Drinkwater left the management of his ship to his officers and levelled his glass at the big Indiaman's quarterdeck. He could see Callan, arm outstretched as he got his own ship under weigh. A junk still lay alongside her and was being cast off as Patrician drew clear of Guilford's quarter.

'Leggo and haul!'

The foretopsail swung on its parrel, flogged, then bellied out to the favourable air that, with the current, swept them southwards. Astern other ships were blossoming canvas, including Fleetwood Pellew's Phaeton, and beyond the convoy the remaining ships lay idle, awaiting the outcome of the negotiations with the Chinese. Among them Drinkwater could just make out the half-repaired masts of Musquito.

Beside the binnacle, his dark face working with anxiety, the younger Ballantyne ordered the helm eased a spoke or two, while Fraser, speaking-trumpet in hand, supervised the setting of more sail.

As Guilford fell astern, Callan raised his hat and bellowed something across the widening gap of water. Drinkwater was not sure of what he said, though his gesture indicated something of success.

'Pleased to be going, sir,' remarked Quilhampton, who had returned to the deck, nodding at the Guilford.

'So it would seem,' acknowledged Drinkwater, fixing Quilhampton with a stare. 'You have secured our guest, have you?'

'Aye, sir ... he is Commander Morris, isn't he? I mean I didn't expect to see him here ...'

'Neither did I, Mr Q, believe me, neither did I, and I doubt he still holds naval rank.' And then another thought struck him. 'Is Tregembo aware of his identity?'

'Yes, sir ... leastways I think so, for he looked shocked when I entered the cabin ...'

"Tregembo was in my cabin?'

'Aye, sir; with Derrick and your steward ...'

'God's bones!'

Tregembo was a factor in the complex train of thought that assailed him with renewed force. It was clear that he could no longer avoid giving the matter of Morris his full attention. He looked about him. The convoy stretched astern of Patrician, each ship setting more canvas and with a red ensign at the peak, for Drinkwater had insisted they show a unity of national colours and that the East Indiamen forsake the gridiron ensign the Company flew east of St Helena.

It seemed his orders were being followed to the letter and he grunted his satisfaction. Ballantyne and Fraser had the conduct of the ship well in hand and he anticipated no trouble when they passed the Bogue; he could absent himself from the quarterdeck for a while.

'Mr Fraser! Do you call me if you need me.'

Drinkwater went below. Enveloped by the gloom of the gun-deck he paused, rubbing his eyes as a worm of apprehension writhed in his gut. Should he send for Quilhampton as a witness, or keep this stinking matter to himself?

The rousing click of the marine sentry's musket against his webbing buckles stirred him. He must show none of the weakness he felt. Morris was the lowest kind of creature that crawled upon the face of the earth. God rot him.

Drinkwater nodded perfunctorily at the marine and passed into his cabin.

Morris was sitting at the table. The boy knelt beside him bare-headed and the pair were almost in silhouette, backed by the expanse of the stern windows. The bright picture of the following convoy, the teeming river and the green hills of China lent a mesmeric effect to the confrontation. There was no sign of Drinkwater's staff and the door to the pantry was closed. Morris's hand stroked the boy's head, his fingers playing with a pixie ear as though it belonged to a spaniel. The concupiscent gesture uninterrupted by Drinkwater's arrival appalled him. It was Morris, in perfect possession of his wits, who broke the silence.

'Necessity makes strange bedfellows, Nathaniel.'

The double entendre, the use of his Christian name, even the sound of Morris's voice seemed to strangle any reply from Drinkwater and, for a gasping moment, he felt the sensation of drowning revive from the memory of his dream.

'So ... they gave you a frigate, eh? I always marked you for a coming man, did I not? In New York, I recall ... and later ... oh, I remember everything Nathaniel, everything ... the humiliations I suffered at your hands, the termination of my career, my illness and abandonment at the Cape ...'

There was no whining in this catalogue of grievance, but the sincere belief in a corrupt truth. Morris's tone brought Drinkwater to himself and swept aside the spectral remnants of his own fears.

'Hold your tongue, damn you! You cut no ice here, sir! I shall have you put aboard an Indiaman directly we ...'

'No! No, you will not do that, Nathaniel, consider the matter of the specie ...'

'D'you think I care a fiddler's damn for one per cent of anything that you've had a hand in?'

'Tch, tch, Nathaniel...'

'God damn you, sir, but desist from using my name!'

'We are excessively prejudiced, I fear, eh?' Morris was almost purring, his bloated face expanded laterally by a smile, his hand ever fondling the head and ears and nape of the boy. 'Come, come, then Captain, shed your tired old hypocrisy; make known what arrangements you have provided for my accommodation. You will not transfer me to an Indiaman, no, nor to one of those pestilential Country ships. For a start they will likely refuse me, for a second reason, if you need further persuasion, the specie, whether you wish to claim your percentage or not, will be at greater risk aboard another ship ... the pirates are dangerously active in these seas, my dear fellow ... Come, reconsider and do not be intemperate, you always were the very devil for duty, even as a tight-arsed little midshipman.'

'Morris, as God is my witness ...'

'Oh, silence! And stop that prating cant before you start! What use would I have for you now, eh?' The sly, archly languid tone was shed in an instant. It had come upon Morris lately, like his fat. Remembered was the sharp trading of insult for insult, of venom flecking the very spittle round his mouth in the malignant outbursts that had first alerted Midshipman Drinkwater to the presence of an envious and inept rival. Later, the horrified young Drinkwater discovered the bully was a sodomite who dominated a faction among the weaker members of the lower deck of the frigate Cyclops. *(* See An Eye of the Fleet.)

Morris's forbidden passion had awakened sympathetic lusts elsewhere on board, to become not a secret cabal which might have existed undetected by authority, but a hell's kitchen that dealt in intimidation and murder. It was whispered that sodomy was as old as the Bible; that some men deprived of any outlet for physical passion would inevitably be seduced by its specious attractions to relieve the misery of their lives aboard a man-of-war. Some such men might be forgiven the aberration if it impinged on no one unwillingly, whatever the raillings of the Articles of War. But Morris had made of his vice a weapon with which to terrorise, a means by which to indulge and fulfil a cruel megalomania. At the end of the affair, when he had been tactfully dismissed from the ship to avoid scandal, Morris had laid the blame on unrequited love. The thought still appalled Drinkwater.

'You sired siblings on your Elizabeth then.' Morris nodded at the portraits on the forward bulkhead. The indelicate remark presumed the familiarity of old friendship.

'You presume too much. Hold your tongue here!'

'Ah, I forgot. Captain Drinkwater commands here.' The sarcasm was as smooth as the yellow silk robe Morris wore. 'But I am beyond your orders, muy Capitán. I am no longer in your navy. I resigned my commission from His Britannic Majesty's illustrious service. I am passed far beyond you and your lash.'

'Two boxes of specie do not purchase you immunity from authority,' Drinkwater cautioned, a horrible thought occurring to him of Morris and Rakitin in some unholy confederacy, combining with the disaffected elements of his tired and impatient crew. Morris smiled, unconcerned at Drinkwater's attitude.

'I have taken some insurance. More specie went aboard Guilford. Odious though it may seem to you, my arrival at Calcutta will be expected. You will have to attend to your duty most assiduously in respect of the Guilford, my dear fellow. As for me, I will not insist that you pander to my every whim; I doubt, candidly, that you would be able to ...'

Drinkwater stood stock-still, half listening to Morris's baiting sarcasm. He could see, beyond the rim of the table, the lip of the half-opened drawer where, prior to his arrival, it was clear Morris had been inspecting the contents of his journal. He opened his mouth to inveigh further, but thought better of it. A knock sounded on the cabin door. Midshipman Dutfield announced Lieutenant Fraser's compliments and the intelligence that they were approaching the Bogue.

'Very well, Mr Dutfield, I will be up directly.'

'A handsome young man, Captain.' Morris's laughter followed Drinkwater in his retreat to the quarterdeck.

Lieutenant Quilhampton flung his hat on his cot and wrenched at the stock about his thin neck. He turned to find Tregembo at the door of his tiny cabin. 'May I speak with 'ee, zur?'

'What the devil is it, Tregembo?'

'Do 'ee know who's come aboard, zur?'

'You mean that fat mandarin is, or was, Commander Morris? Aye, I know, and I doubt the captain is much pleased about the matter ... why?'

Quilhampton stared at the old Cornishman. He had never seen the weather-beaten face seamed with so much anxiety.

'Zur, forgive me for saying so, 'tis more than a fancy, but you only remember that bugger from the Hellebore ...'

'I mind enough that he was an evil sod with one of the midshipmen there ...'

'No,' interrupted Tregembo urgently and lowering his voice, 'I mean more'n that, zur; I mind him from way back on the old Cyclops, zur. 'E swore then as how he'd spavin the Cap'n, zur, and I know, zur, I feels it now as he's come to do just that.'

Quilhampton frowned. 'Spavin? You mean ruin Captain Drinkwater? How can he do that? You ain't suggesting this counterfeit mandarin fellow knew who commanded this ship? Come, come, Tregembo, I understand your dislike of matters as they stand, but he's clearly been engaged in trade and wants to leave Canton ... anything else is sheer foolish conjecture.'

Tregembo opened his mouth, shut it and stared at the lieutenant.

'Beg pardon for troubling you, zur.' And he left Quilhampton staring at the closed door.

Morris had been put in command of the brig Hellebore at Mocha, at the end of 1799, or beginning of 1800, he could not quite recall. He had superseded Commander Griffiths, killed in action, and had relieved Lieutenant Drinkwater of his temporary command. Quilhampton remembered Morris getting the step in rank that properly belonged to Drinkwater. Surely that fact would atone for any earlier disagreement between the two men? Doubtless so partisan a champion of Drinkwater as Tregembo would see such a miscarriage of justice in an unfavourable light as far as Morris was concerned. But he remembered other things too; those rumours about Morris that concerned allusions of sodomy with one of the midshipmen, and the scuttlebutt that the surgeon and his woman, a convict they had rescued from an open boat, had been poisoning Morris.*(See A Brig of War.) He had dismissed it at the time; young Midshipman Quilhampton had not then learnt the extent of the perfidy of ordinary mortals.

Was there something in Tregembo's alarum? Or was the old man a victim of senility, of over-anxiety on behalf of his master?

Of course, that was it! He was known to be jealous of his assumed influence over the captain. So what if he remembered the petty squabbles between a pair of midshipmen in an ancient and long-rotten frigate? Lieutenant Quilhampton shrugged off the matter and bellowed at the wardroom messman to fetch him a basin of warm water from the galley. While he waited he fell to calculating how long it would be before he might present himself in the Edinburgh drawing-room of Mistress Catriona MacEwan and whether, after so long a commission, he had accrued sufficient funds to take a wife.

Drinkwater's thoughts were hardly on the convoy he was marshalling off the Bogue. Patrician lay with her sails clewed up, only her mizen topsail still sheeted home and backed against its mast. Above his head a flutter of bunting tested his signalling system and already, in conformity with his orders, boats from the various ships were converging on the frigate. First to arrive was Phaeton's, to collect his final despatch to Admiral Drury. Her midshipman was of the same age as her commanding officer.

'Tell Captain Pellew that I'd be obliged if he would stand to the southward in company until sunset tomorrow.'

'Very well, sir.'

'And that I shall discharge him from his obligation at that lime by a gun and the union at the foremasthead.'

'Union at the foremasthead ... aye, aye, sir.'

Drinkwater turned to greet Callan. 'I did not expect you would come in person, Captain Callan,' he remarked, surprised.

'I do not think you understood my hail in the river, Captain Drinkwater, but I loaded several chests of specie from a junk, sent by order of the Hong without guard to avoid rousing the suspicions of the Imperial Customs. I counted the amount, ten thousand taels less a few score, some three and a half thousand sterling at seven shillings the liang. I think Drury and the Selectmen should be informed.'

'I agree. I have sent the substance of your news by Phaeton's boat.'

'You have?'

Drinkwater nodded. 'I also shipped specie, though I have not counted it, two chests.'

Callan's eyes lit up. 'By God, Captain, we've done it! The Hong must be under diabolical pressure ...'

'Captain Callan,' Drinkwater broke in, 'I'm not certain you are correct. It is my understanding that the removal of the specie may not necessarily have been with the full approbation of the Hong. It was brought off by a European, a man in mandarin costume named, I believe, Mister Morris ...'

Callan's expression darkened and his forehead furrowed. 'Morris? You say "brought off", is he here, on board?'

'In my cabin,' Drinkwater nodded.

'I must speak with him ...'

'One moment,' Drinkwater restrained Callan. 'What d' you know of him?'

Callan reflected a moment. 'He is a man of irregular habits, Captain, not approved of by society in Calcutta, but not unknown in these parts. He was ostracised to Canton but was undeniably successful as a man of business, holding high influence over certain of the native houses in Calcutta, Rangoon and now, here, in China.'

'If by "irregular habits" you refer to the sin of Sodom, I take it you forgive him on the grounds that you and your colleagues find his acumen of use to you.'

The veiled sarcasm in Drinkwater's voice stung Callan, who flushed. 'This is the east, Captain, things are not ordered here the way they are in England.'

'Come, come, sir,' said Drinkwater acidly, relieving himself of some of the bile formed by the encounter with Morris, 'it is unfair to suggest that Mr Morris's pederasty is unique to the orient. You find him useful, that I understand ...'

'Captain, you are under a misapprehension if you consider men of trade to be inferior to men of your warlike stamp ...'

'I infer no such imputation, Captain Callan. I simply remark upon your tolerance. Mr Morris does not strike me as a man upon whom, sodomite or not, I would put the least reliance.'

Drinkwater paused, he did not want to give Callan the information that he and Morris were old acquaintances. 'Well, perhaps I am wrong. He brought off the silver and has redeemed the trade for this year, at least. Tell me, whence did he come? Is he Country born?'

'No ... he came out in an Indiaman from the Cape, found employment in the Marine at Bombay, but shortly afterwards resigned. There was a whiff of scandal, I believe. I first knew him some six years ago when he arrived at Calcutta. He caused a flutter then for appearing in native costume. Shortly afterwards he moved to Rangoon on behalf of some Parsee interests, and then here, to Canton. But I must see him ...'

Callan went below, escorted by Belchambers to admit him past the marine sentry. Drinkwater was fully occupied himself as officers, mates and a master or two came aboard from the merchant ships. Patiently he answered their questions and issued his last-minute orders. Chiefly he impressed upon them the necessity of keeping in company and of not passing the Rhio archipelago without escort, for which purpose he named Pulo Tioman the rendezvous. Few demurred, only an officer off the Ligonier, with Guilford the only other Indiaman, objecting on the grounds of delay, while the second mate of a Country brig, the Hormuzeer, claimed his ship was swift enough to outrun even the fastest cruiser the French could send against them.

'Well, sir,' Drinkwater replied testily, 'the responsibility for his vessel lies undisputedly with your master, but if I were he I would prefer the company of others to the risk of isolation.'

The man went off grumbling and Drinkwater turned away, only to be confronted with Callan. 'Have you answered the purpose of your visit?' he asked the India officer.

'Yes, thank you. I am not certain I trust him, Captain Drinkwater, but he has shown me accounts which indicate the money is indeed from the Hong in just and equitable payment of debts. I would like to believe him ...'

'What possible advantage could he derive from the matter, his having admitted the sums to you?'

Callan shrugged. 'That is what makes me uneasy; on the face of it I cannot see any.'

'Then perhaps he will be content with a commission. Did you ask him from what he was running?'

'Why he abandoned his post at Canton?'

'Yes.'

'He volunteered that he was in danger of his life after the repulse of Admiral Drury and on account of the disfavour in which the native Chinese presently hold Europeans ... but that will pass', Callan added, 'the minute their supply of opium is throttled.'

'Nevertheless, he himself may well be in fear of some retribution.' Drinkwater did not know why he sprung thus to Morris's defence. Perhaps, he thought, as Callan summoned his boat, because at the back of his mind was a suspicion forming that was too dark, too terrible and too preposterous to be anything other than the invented phobia of a disturbed mind.

CHAPTER 8 Fair Winds and Foul Tempers

It was symptomatic of the confusion in Drinkwater's mind caused by the presence of Morris that he forgot the matter of the deserters during Callan's visit. Fraser reminded him later that day, asking also if he felt well.

'Quite well, thank you,' Drinkwater replied tartly, 'do I give you the impression otherwise?'

Fraser almost visibly quailed: 'I had it in mind that you were not yourself, sir ...'

'Then who the devil should I be, eh?'

'I beg your pardon, sir ...'

'Damn it, Fraser, I beg yours. Yes, I'm deuced distempered and out at all elbows with a festering passenger occupying my cabin. Needs must when the devil drives and the ship is so overcrowded, but tell Marsden I want the place screened ... decently too, no parish-rigging, but a decent slat-and-canvas job.' Drinkwater paused, judging how far he could take Fraser into his confidence. 'That man is to be allowed as little liberty as possible. His boy-servant will attend his needs and he will be permitted the freedom of the quarterdeck only when I give my permission and at no time in the hours of darkness. He will dine at my table, damn it, and I shall be consulted in all matters concerning him. Mount is to advise his sentries of this. The invitation of the wardroom is not to be extended to him.'

'Aye, aye, sir ... er, may I ask why you ... ?'

'No, sir, you may not. You have your orders, now attend to them.'

'Very well, sir ... and what about Chirkov?'

Drinkwater swore. 'We are down by the head with idlers, damn it! Send Mr Comley to the gunroom, Fraser, and in the presence of all its inhabitants have him administer a dozen stripes of his cane. Let's have done with that young gentleman once and for all!'

'And the deserters, sir? Word has it that the people know their whereabouts and ...'

'And ... ?'

'Begging your pardon, sir, but that you do too.'

Drinkwater stared at his first lieutenant. Fraser was a good, competent officer. Drinkwater had taken him as a favour to Lord Keith and though there was not the intimacy that existed between the captain and Quilhampton, there was a strong sense of mutual regard between them. He had never known Fraser attempt to meddle with his own method of command before, yet here was a direct, if obscure, inference.

'Go on, Mr Fraser, and do stop begging my pardon; you are, after all, the first lieutenant.'

Fraser's diffidence seemed to slip from him, and Drinkwater mentally reprobated himself for his cross-grainedness. He sometimes forgot the age difference between himself and his officers and the intimidating effect it could have on their confidences.

'Well, sir, I got wind o' scuttlebutt that the people had heard you knew the whereabouts o' the deserters ...' (How? Drinkwater asked himself. Not Tregembo, certainly; perhaps Mullender or the Quaker Derrick, whose loyalty lay closer to his moral creed than any imposed regulations of the Admiralty.) '... and that you wouldn't reclaim them on account o' the fact that you didna' want trouble.'

'I see. But such an assumption of weakness might provoke trouble nevertheless.'

'Aye, sir, that's true,' said Fraser, relieved that the captain took his point.

Drinkwater recalled his remark to Callan about not wanting to disaffect the men when the ship was idle. Misinterpretation of such a speech was not surprising. He still had Phaeton in company, he could alter course for Macao and arraign the recaptured deserters before a court martial which would assuredly hang them. Or he could affect to ignore the matter a while longer, and deal with it when he judged proper.

'I shall recover the deserters tomorrow, Mr Fraser, if the sea permits it. In the meantime deal with Midshipman Chirkov and get Marsden to rig up those screens.'

In the gloom of the gunroom, lit by the grease-dips' guttering flames, the Patrician's midshipmen stood alongside their Russian counterparts. In the main they had got on well together. Frey, partly by virtue of his personality, partly by his acting rank, was the acknowledged senior, and there was some evidence that Chirkov was not liked by the other Russians on account of his overwhelming idleness. There was, therefore, no particular objection to the first lieutenant's announcement of the punishment, nor any move to release Chirkov when he struggled, protesting the indignity of being held by two of Comley's mates. It was no fault of the other midshipmen, British or Russian, if Chirkov failed to understand that he was being let off lightly, given what amounted to a private punishment on a crowded man-of-war, rather than the spectacular public humbling of being beaten over the breech of a quarterdeck carronade.

Comley laid on over Chirkov's breeched backside to the count of twelve, and when he marched his mates out of the cockpit he respectfully touched his hat to them all. 'Gentlemen ...' he said.

'There, sir,' Frey remarked reasonably to the straightening Chirkov who was choking back tears of rage, pain and humiliation, 'you have had the honour of a thrashing from one of His Britannic Majesty's bosuns, he is senior to you and therefore your submission is without prejudice to your character as an officer.'

Grins greeted this droll speech, but its humour was lost on Chirkov.

'A Mister Bosun is not superior to a Russian Count,' he hissed.

'Perhaps not, sir,' replied Frey quickly, 'but he is most assuredly superior to a midshipman.'

'Particularly a Russian midshipman,' added Belchambers boldly.

Enraged, Chirkov turned on the diminutive Belchambers, but the boy adroitly dodged him and the sudden movement sent agonies of pain through Chirkov's buttocks. As Belchambers slipped past his would-be assailant and made for the companionway to the deck, Frey, Dutfield and the rest barred his retreat. Chirkov was faced with an unsmiling wall of bodies.

'You deserved it, Count Chirkov,' said Frey, 'recall you are a prisoner of war. You would do best to forget the matter. I can assure you that Captain Drinkwater has dismissed it from his mind.'

'What do I worry about your Captain Drinkwater's mind? Captain Drinkwater can go to the devil! I am insulted. I cannot call for satisfactions from Mister Bosun but I can from you!' Chirkov rammed a finger into Frey's face. 'You are only acting lieutenant, you are challenged!'

A stillness fell on the gunroom. The midshipmen swayed amid the creaks and groans of the ship's fabric as it worked easily in the quartering sea. They watched Frey's reaction.

'Duelling is forbidden on board ship, sir, but I shall be pleased to meet you ashore upon our arrival at Prince of Wales Island.'

'Pistols,' snarled Chirkov, and stumbled unhappily from the circle of onlookers.

Captain Drinkwater looked about him. He knew he ought to be contented. The convoy was closed up in good order, spread over some five square miles of the China Sea, not in columns, but a loose formation centred on Guilford and Ligonier, the big

Indiamen, both of which had lanterns in their mizen tops that glowed weakly in the failing daylight. Clouds covered the sky, outriders of the northerly monsoon that drove them southwards with a fair wind for the Malacca Strait. In accordance with his Standing Orders the ships were taking in their topgallants for the night, snugging down to avoid the separation that might make one of them a vulnerable hen for any marauding French reynard cruising on the horizon. Drinkwater looked at the main crosstrees from which Midshipman Dutfield was just then descending. When the midshipman reached the deck he made his report.

'Two junks in the north-east quarter, sir, otherwise nothing in sight beyond the convoy.'

Acknowledging the intelligence, Drinkwater was peeved that the news brought him no satisfaction. He nodded and turned to Frey.

'You may fire the chaser, Mr Frey, and make Phaeton's number ...'

Drinkwater looked astern. Fleetwood Pellew's crack frigate dipped her ensign in farewell, hauled her yards and, on a taut bowline, stood to windward, returning to the coast of China. Patrician was in sole charge now and Drinkwater could go below.

But he lingered. There was no solace in the cabin, divided as it was and with Morris inert and inscrutable behind the canvas screen. So far Drinkwater had avoided all contact with his enemy, unwilling to stir any memory or allow Morris the slightest grounds for reawakening old enmities. Drinkwater did not know how Morris had got word of his presence in the Pearl River, though it was not hard to imagine in the circumscribed circle of gossip attached to the trading fraternity at Canton, but he was convinced Morris had some ulterior motive for selecting Patrician as his means of reaching India. And it went beyond the customary carriage of specie in His Majesty's ships, as witness the chests put aboard Guilford.

No, Morris had personal reasons for seeking passage with Nathaniel Drinkwater, and the quondam naval officer had once sworn he would professionally ruin the man who had displaced him on a quarterdeck.

Coxswain Tregembo lay in his hammock and stared at the dimly visible deck beam a few inches above his nose. During the night the sea had risen and Patrician was scending before the quartering waves. On either side of him the hammocks of other men pressed against his own in the fourteen inches allowed each man. Tregembo was part of a suspended island of humanity that moved almost independently of the ship, adding its own creaks and rasps and rub of rope and ring and canvas to the aching groans of the working timbers of the frigate.

To a less inured nose than Tregembo's, the stench would have been overpowering, for all Lieutenant Fraser's sedulous swabbing with vinegar, airing and burning of loose powder. Ineffectually washed bodies, the exhalations of men on an indifferent diet that whistled through badly maintained teeth and the night-loosening of wind combined with the effluvia of the bilge that rose from below. Rat droppings and the residual essences of the myriad stores concealed in the storerooms and hold added to the decomposing mud and weed drawn inboard on the cables so lately laid on the bed of the Pearl River. Flakes of green and noxious matter gave off gases as they broke down into dust, to be carried into the limbers of the ship by the trickling rivulets of leaks that found their inexorable way below.

Scarcely noticing this mephitic miasma that cast yellow haloes round the guarded lanterns by the companionways and dully illuminated the dozing sentries, Tregembo lay unsleeping. He too considered the presence of Morris in their midst.

Unlike his captain, Tregembo's intellect did not flirt with notions of providence or fate. Considerations of coincidence in Morris's resurrection aboard Patrician were quite absent from his thoughts. To Tregembo the world was not a vast, wondrous mystery in which his life held some fraction of universal implication; but a confined, tangible microcosm of discomfort, tolerable if one occupied the office of captain's coxswain under a man of Drinkwater's stamp. It was not that Tregembo lacked the intelligence to cast his mind beyond the compressing tumblehome of Patrician's planking, nor that he was incapable of regarding the star-strewn sky with awe. It was just that his firmament was limited by the deck beam above him and that such considerations as Drinkwater could indulge in, for Tregembo bordered on the effete and were beyond the sensible limits of practical men. That Morris had turned up in China was, to Tregembo, not to be wondered at. He had been left half-way there, at the Cape of Good Hope some years ago, and it did not surprise the old Cornishman that he had made a new life for himself beyond the Indian Seas.

Listening to the noises of the night around him, to the soft, abrasive whisper of a hundred swinging hammocks and the labouring of the ship, the audible hiss of the sea beyond the double planking of the hull, the thrum of wind in the rigging far above him and the mumbles and grunts of dreaming men, Tregembo thought back to a gale-lashed night nearly thirty years earlier when he and another had sprung a man from a foot-rope when reefing a sail, flinging him into the sea, to disappear into the blackness astern of the hard-pressed frigate Cyclops.

It had been a judicial murder, secretly sanctioned by the tacit approval of most of the members of the lower deck, and it had put an end to the bullying and the tyranny of a certain Midshipman Morris and his sodomitically inclined cronies. Tregembo smiled to himself. He recalled the young Drinkwater seeking guidance when the same Morris turned upon his messmates for amusement. The eventual confrontation had matured the promising young midshipman, and had been the beginning of Tregembo's service to Drinkwater.

What worried Tregembo now, and kept him from sleeping, was the certainty that Morris would seek in some way to discredit the captain. When the young Drinkwater had sought out Tregembo for a confidant, the Cornishman had advised him that he had nothing to lose by opposing the cockpit bully.

Now things were different; Captain Drinkwater had everything to lose, and the thought made Tregembo uneasy.

Morris too was awake, listening to the breathing of Drinkwater beyond the canvas screen. The captain was asleep now, Morris knew, though it had been a long time before he had dropped off. Morris had heard also the revealing tinkle of glass and bottle after Drinkwater had come below.

Never, in his most extreme fantasies, had Morris imagined that Drinkwater would ever be delivered up to him so perfectly. In the days when, after his ousting from the Cyclops, he had smarted over his rival's luck, he had continued his pursuit of a naval career. He had been helped by petticoat influence, of course, but there was nothing unusual in that. Then had come the time when he had been appointed to the brig Hellebore and, delectably, had Drinkwater as his first lieutenant.

Only the onset of chronic illness had prevented him from fully exploiting that opportunity, and in his long convalescence at the Cape Drinkwater had slipped from his grasp. News had come to Morris there of the death of his sister by whose influence he had formerly gained employment, and a letter refusing to ratify his promotion to Master and Commander had left him high and dry at the tip of Africa. He could have gone home, but a welter of debts and creditors decided him against it. Besides, the frequent passage of Indiamen and the consequent society of one or two men of oriental taste induced him to try his luck in India.

Morris smiled to himself. He felt immensely benign, as good and calm as when the opium fumes took his soul and wafted it through paradise. Even in the gloom he could see the pale face of the sleeping boy. He had not paid much for the tongue-tied child, more for the services of the surgeon of the European infantry battalion in Madras whose fourchette had not simply sliced the frenum, but had excavated the child's mouth to make an apolaustic orifice for his master.

There was no abatement of the wind at dawn. Cloud obscured the sky and a touch of mist hazed the horizon. The convoy remained in tolerably good order but Drinkwater, early on deck from an unsatisfactory night's rest, was frustrated in his plans to lower a boat and recover his deserters.

Tregembo had more success, entering the captain's cabin soon after Drinkwater had gone on deck and before either Mullender or Derrick was about. Slipping round the canvas screen he woke the corpulent mass of Morris by hauling his catamite off him. It was the first time Morris had knowingly laid eyes on the old Cornishman for ten years.

'What the ... ?'

'Remember me, do ye?'

'You ...' Morris's face creased with fear and the struggle to recall a name. The old man had been in Drinkwater's cabin when he had first entered it. Now he shook Morris with a horrid violence.

'Tregembo, Cap'n's cox'n. I remember you, an' I want words to tell 'ee that I'll see 'ee in hell before ye'll touch the Cap'n!'

Morris, still supine in the tossing cot, quailed under the venom of Tregembo's words. The boy had shrunk into a crouch, whimpering against the carriage of a gun.

'Tregembo ...' muttered Morris, his eyes fixed on the glowering, over-zealous old man, recalling memories of Tregembo's past and how, like Drinkwater's, they lay like the strands of a rope, woven with his own. It was clear that Tregembo had come to threaten, not to murder. This realisation emboldened Morris. He eased his bulk on to an elbow.

'Ah, yes, Tregembo ... yes, I recall you now. You are Captain Drinkwater's lickspittle, his tale-bearer. Yes, I recall you well, and your part in certain doings aboard Cyclops ...'

'Aye. And you'd do well to keep your memories in your mind Mister Morris, for I'm not afeared of you and know what you'd do if ye had the chance. Just you recollect that old Tregembo will be watching you, and your dandy-prat there.' Tregembo gestured at the boy.

'Is that a threat, Tregembo?'

But the Cornishman had said his piece and retired beyond the canvas screen. The boy whimpered fearfully and, as Patrician dipped suddenly into the trough of a wave, vomited over the deck. The sharp stink assailed Morris's nostrils and from pique he clouted the frightened and abject creature.

Tregembo felt satisfied with his mission of intimidation. He had hoped for an ally in Mr Quilhampton and had been disappointed. There was, however, one further thing to be done to complete the execution of the plan he had made during the night.

He found Drinkwater at the weather hance, wrapped in his boat-cloak.

'Beg pardon, zur ...'

'What is it, Tregembo? ...'

'That Morris, zur.' Tregembo's eyes met the Captain's.

'Well?'

"E knows me, zur ... I spoke to him this morning.'

'You announced your presence, you mean ... advised him to mind his manners, is that it?'

'Something o' the sort, zur.'

Drinkwater smiled. 'Be careful of him, Tregembo. Unfortunately we must bear with him ...'

'You be careful o' him, zur,' Tregembo broke in, 'he's not forgotten nothing, zur ... be assured o' that.'

'Thank you for your advice.'

Tregembo bridled at the faintly patronising air of Drinkwater's reply. 'He weren't never a gennelman, zur; he'm no longer quality.'

'No, you're right ...'

'You shouldn't leave your pistols in your cabin, zur, I don't know that he's got any himself, but ...'

'I've been thinking about that. I've decided to take over poor Hill's cabin and put Prince Vladimir in to share with Morris.'

Tregembo considered the proposition and a twinkle in his eyes caught an answering glimmer in Drinkwater's.

'I'll see to it, zur.'

'If you please.'

'Beg pardon, sir.' Lieutenant Quilhampton touched the fore-cock of his hat.

'Yes? What is it?'

'Weather's tending to thicken, sir.'

Drinkwater cast a look about the frigate, quickly counting his scattered charges. Two of the Country ships, small, round bilged brigs, were wallowing, dropping astern and fading into the encroaching mist that had dissolved the horizon, reducing the visible circle of sea on which the ships of the convoy drove southwards.

'Very well. Make the signal to shorten sail.'

Quilhampton acknowledged the order and the hitched bundles of coloured bunting soared aloft to break out at the main masthead. From forward an unshotted gun boomed to leeward, drawing attention to the signal. While the Patrician's men leapt into the shrouds and lay aloft, Drinkwater watched the evolutions of the merchant ships. He knew the Indiamen were reluctant to crack on apace, believing in a leisurely progress as least wearing on cargo, company and passengers. If the convoy were being shadowed, now would prove an opportune occasion for an attack. But the convoy behaved itself. The Indiamen shortened down and the cluster of Country ships followed suit, the rearward sluggards sensibly holding on until they had come up with the majority.

'Bring the ship close to the starboard quarter of the rearmost brig, Mr Q.'

'On the wind'd quarter of the Courier, aye, aye, sir.'

If they were to be attacked, Drinkwater wanted Patrician to windward and able to crack on sail to support any part of his little fleet. He watched as the helm was put down and the men manned the braces, swinging the yards a point or two, easing the sheets and leading the weather tacks forward. The convoy drew out on Patrician's larboard bow and then, yards swung again, she came back before the wind, reined in upon the quarter of the inappropriately named brig Courier, slowest vessel in the convoy.

Aware of someone beside him, Drinkwater turned, expecting

Quilhampton to report the adjustment to the frigate's station, but it was Rakitin.

'I have had a report, Captain Drinkwater, from one of my officers, that you have ordered him to be beaten. Count Chirkov is most ...' Rakitin sought the right word for the humiliation of his subordinate with no success. 'Count Chirkov has ... I protest most strongly.'

Drinkwater fixed the Russian with a glare and tried with difficulty to keep his temper. Morris, the Russians, such petty matters; relatively trivial when compared to the importance of the convoy and the dangers inherent in the latent disaffection of his crew. He knew that in the circumscribed limits of a ship such trifling irritations assumed an importance scarcely to be conceived by those on land, an importance that the rigid enforcement of naval discipline defused, but which grew and festered among those not held in such thrall with, moreover, the time and opportunity to dwell upon them. He rounded on the Russian.

'Captain Rakitin, if you did me the courtesy of maintaining order among your officers, a situation requiring punishment would not have arisen. As it was I ordered your officer punished according to the usage of the British service in which he is now a prisoner. He was not publicly humiliated in front of the ship's company and should not, therefore, complain. However,' Drinkwater continued, a mischievous idea occurring to him, 'I have made arrangements for you to transfer into my own cabin, vacating the one you presently occupy. I also deliver Midshipman Count Chirkov into your especial charge. He is to live and mess with you and not to contaminate my own young men any more. Good-day to you!'

Drinkwater strode purposefully across the deck, bent over the binnacle to check the course and took station with Lieutenant Quilhampton.

'For God's sake, James, talk some sense to me before I am constrained to do something I shall regret.'

Quilhampton turned, cast a glance beyond Drinkwater's shoulder and muttered, 'He's in pursuit, sir ...'

'God's bones,' said Drinkwater through clenched teeth.

'Captain Drinkwater,' began Rakitin who had taken a moment to digest the import of Drinkwater's remarks, 'Captain Drinkwater, it is not ...'

'Deck there!' came the lookout's shrill cry. 'Ship to loo'ard bearing up! Gunfire to the s'uth'ard!'

The dull boom of a gun rolled over the water and the sharp point of fire from a second discharge caught their eyes as the ships of the convoy began to swing to starboard across the bows of those behind them. Strict order seemed about to dissolve into chaos.

'Hands to the braces! Starboard your helm, Mister! Don't run aboard that damned brig! Call all hands!'

Drinkwater dodged Rakitin, hauled himself up into the mizen rigging and strove to make out what was happening ahead. He hesitated only a second as another stab of yellow gunfire flashed through the mist.

'Beat to quarters!'

CHAPTER 9 Infirmities of Character

'Hold your course!'

Drinkwater moved beside the binnacle, steadying the helmsmen and countering a sudden and distressing nervousness on the part of Ballantyne, the new sailing master. Guilford loomed past a pistol-shot distant, her yards triced hard-up to avoid plunging into Ligonier under her lee. The latter, foul of the Hormuzeer, had broached and a brief glance showed men running out along her jib-boom, hacking at the mess of broken spars, torn canvas and tangled ropes where it had jammed in the Country ship's main rigging.

As Patrician's stern lifted, Drinkwater could see ahead. Only two more ships lay to leeward, and both were clearing from larboard, their heads laid on the starboard tack. Raising his glass he swept it across the misty horizon expecting to see the pale squares of enemy topsails taking substance above the low hull of a French frigate.

'Ship cleared for action, sir,' Fraser reported, and Drinkwater nodded. He had been so occupied with conning Patrician through the convoy that he had scarcely noticed the rattle of the marine drummer's snare, or the rushing preparations round the deck. Mount's marines lined the hammock nettings and the quarterdeck and fo'c's'le gunners knelt expectantly by their pieces. Midshipmen stood at their stations, little Belchambers, his ankle near normal, in the main-top. Drinkwater thought of Morris, suddenly exposed to the vulgar gaze of the people as the cabin bulkheads were removed and the eighteen-pounder beneath his cot was manned by a dozen barefoot seamen. Drinkwater wondered if he was still fondling his pathic.

They were crossing the stern of the leeward-most ship now and Ballantyne was gesticulating.

'Please, sir! Something is not correct!'

'Eh? What's that?'

'They are waving, sir, on the ship to starboard ...'

Drinkwater strode to the rail and peered over the hammock nettings. The square stern of the heavily laden Carnatic presented itself to his gaze. Two men were waving frantically from her rail and then a belch of smoke rolled from her waist as she discharged another gun.

'By God, it's an alarm!'

Drinkwater spun round. He had already detected the danger ahead by the sudden increase in the pitch of the deck.

'Braces, there! Lively now! Start 'em for your lives! Down helm! Down helm!'

There was no enemy frigate waiting to leeward of the convoy ready to snap up a prize; only an uncharted reef upon which the sea broke in sudden, serried ranks of rollers which exploded upwards, filling the air with an intense mist.

Mount saved them, slashing through the standing part of the main brace with his hanger, then cutting back into the strands of the topsail brace. As the yards flew round Patrician lay over assisting the helmsmen as they palmed the wheel-spokes rapidly through their hands. A member of the after­guard was already at the mizen braces while others started the main sheet at the chess-tree. The heavy frigate lurched to leeward, running her larboard gunports under water and taking gouts of streaming sea-water below as Lieutenant Quilhampton, in charge of the main batteries and suddenly aware of something amiss, ordered the ports secured.

'Jesus Christ ...' someone blasphemed. The steady stern breeze seemed, now that they reached obliquely across it, to blow with the ferocity of a gale. The extra canvas, shaken out again as they had overtaken the convoy, now pressed them over. To windward the seas assumed a new and forbidding aspect, heaping sharply into breaking peaks as they felt the rising sea-bed beneath them.

Drinkwater turned to leeward. He was beyond the heart-thumping apprehension of anxiety, his mind perfectly cool with that detachment that feared the worst. At any moment, driven by his own impetuosity, he expected Patrician's keel to strike the reef in a sudden, overwhelming shock that would carry her masts and yards over the side.

Beyond the narrow beam of the frigate's hull the seas down­wind bore a different look. Their precipitate energy was spent, they crashed and foamed and flung themselves in a thundering welter of white and green water upon the invisible obstacle of the reef.

'Hold her steady!' he ordered, his voice level as every man upon the upper deck who was aware of their danger held his breath.

For a minute ... two ... Patrician skimmed, heeling along the very rim of the reef, held from dashing herself to pieces only by the unseen, submarine run-off where the broken waves, spending themselves above, poured back whence they had come.

Ten minutes later they were in clear water and the white surge of foaming breakers with its cap of wafting spume lay fine on the weather quarter.

'I'm obliged to you, Mr Mount.'

'Your servant, sir,' replied Mount, still amazed at his own prescience.

'A damned close thing ...' Drinkwater's heart was thumping vigorously now. Reaction had set in; he felt a wave of nausea and a weakling tremble in his leg muscles. 'Secure the guns and pipe the men down,' he said to Fraser between clenched teeth.

And then Morris was there, standing upon the quarterdeck watching Comley hustling a party along to reeve off a new main-brace, his loose, yellow silk robe flapping in the wind, the Indian, decorously turned out in coat, turban and aigrette, hanging by his side.

Men were nudging each other and staring at the bizarre sight. When Morris and Drinkwater confronted each other, the latter was still pale from his recent experience.

You alarmed us, Captain,' Morris said smoothly, 'we thought you were going into action, but I see that, like Caligula, you had declared war on the ocean.'

The smug, urbane transition of remark into insult struck Drinkwater. He was reminded of how dangerous a man Morris was, that he was not without education, and came from a class that accepted privilege as a birthright. It had formed part of Morris's original enmity that the youthful Drinkwater was an example of an upstart family.

But Drinkwater's nausea was swiftly overcome by a rising and revengeful anger. He recalled something of the detached coolness that sustained him in moments of extreme stress.

'The bulkheads will shortly be re-erected. You will be able to return to your quarters very soon.' The words were polite, the tone sharp.

'But it is remarkably refreshing here on deck, Captain. You have a fine set of men ... handsome fellows ...'

The remark was loud enough to be overheard, on the face of it harmless enough, but tinged with notice of intent, judging by the amusement in Morris's deep-set, hooded eyes.

'Go below, sir,' Drinkwater snapped, facing his old enemy, and between them crackled the brittle electricity of dislike. Morris smiled and then turned to go. Drinkwater found himself confronted by Ballantyne. The master stood open-mouthed and Drinkwater thought of his earlier nervousness. He appeared to have a coward upon his quarterdeck.

'What the devil is it, Mr Ballantyne? Come, pull yourself together, the danger's past. Be kind enough to work out an estimate of our position so that we can amend the charts ...'

'No, no, sir. It is that man.' Ballantyne's head shook from side to side. 'I know him ...'

It occurred to Drinkwater that Ballantyne had not previously seen their passenger. For all Drinkwater knew, Morris had traded under a pseudonym.

'I knew him in Rangoon, sir,' Ballantyne persisted, 'he was up to mischief. He made much money.'

Mischief seemed a very mild word for what Drinkwater knew Morris was capable of.

'I should not believe all you hear, Captain Drinkwater, especially from a man of mixed blood.'

Overheard, Ballantyne paled, while Morris's head disappeared for the second time below the lip of the companionway coaming.

For two days nothing of note occurred. The wind eased, clearing the air so that the horizon became again the clear rim of visibility beloved by seamen. The convoy remained in good order and Drinkwater, immeasurably relieved by his move into the master's cabin, felt his spirits lighten. He dismissed his earlier fears of interference from Morris as foolish imaginings, recollections of the past when he had been a circumstantial victim of Morris's vicious and capricious nature. Now he had the upper hand; Morris was held aft under guard yet in the comparative freedom of the great cabin. His officers were loyal. The morale of his men was much improved by the news that their return home was now only a matter of time, and the convoy was well disciplined.

Privately, too, the move was beneficial. He had had Mullender take down the portraits, his journal was secure and his personal effects were removed from the defiling presence of Morris. What Morris did behind the canvas screen was his own affair, so long as it did not impinge upon the life, public or private, of Captain Drinkwater and his ship.

As Drinkwater's mood lifted, James Quilhampton's was damped by growing apprehension. The first excitements of departure from Whampoa had worn off, and the drudgery of watch-keeping imposed its own monotonous routines which combined with the demands of the ship and convoy to rouse dormant worries. It was Quilhampton who had, months ago, suppressed an incipient mutiny before its eruption. These were the same men, he thought as he paced the quarterdeck daily, observing them about their duties, the same unpaid labourers who were sorely tried by the hard usage of the King's Service. To Quilhampton, the spectre of mutiny assumed a new danger now that they were homeward bound; the danger that it might destroy any possibility of him marrying Mistress MacEwan. Part of his cavalier reception of Tregembo's warning was not so much because he did not believe in it, but because he did not want to contemplate any additional factor that might threaten or destroy his expectations.

Beyond the screen bisecting the captain's cabin Morris heard Captain Rakitin leave his indolent young companion while he took his exercise on deck. Morris, wrapped in his silk robe, touched the shoulder of his Ganymede and pointed at the screen. Impassively the boy rose and slipped past the end of the partition where, at the stern windows, communication between the divided cabin was possible. Morris waited, composing his face to its most benign expression, smoking a long, thin Burmese cheroot.

'Good morning,' he said as Chirkov, summoned by curiosity, followed the turbaned pixie. 'Please sit down. I hear you speak excellent English. Would you care for a glass ...?'

The boy produced a porcelain bottle and poured samsu into one of Drinkwater's glasses. Standing, Chirkov tossed back the glass, the raw rice spirit rasping his throat with a fire reminiscent of vodka. The glass was refilled. The Russian seemed reluctant to sit.

'We are both prisoners of Captain Drinkwater ...' Morris began experimentally, pleased with the contemptuously dismissive gesture made by Chirkov.

'You do not like Captain Drinkwater?' Morris asked.

'No! He is doing me dishonour, great dishonour. I will fight and shoot one of his officers soon.'

'A duel, eh? Well, well.' Morris motioned the boy to produce more samsu. 'And what is this great dishonour the ignoble Captain has done you?' Morris's voice had a soothing, honeyed tone.

'He ordered me to be beaten!' Chirkov spluttered indignantly.

'Beaten?' Morris's tongue flickered pinkly over his lips in a quicksilver reaction of heightened interest. He flickered a commanding glance at the Indian boy and more samsu tinkled into Chirkov's glass to be tossed back by the impetuous Russian. 'How barbaric,' Morris muttered sympathetically. 'And it is still painful, eh?'

Chirkov nodded, watching the boy pour yet more samsu. 'Oui ... yes.'

'I have a salve ... a medicine, specific against such a wound. If it is not treated it may fester.' Morris smiled, reassuringly. 'You do not want gangrene, do you?' Abstractedly Morris touched the glowing end of his cheroot to a bundle of sticks by his elbow.

'Gangrene?' Chirkov frowned.

'Mortification ...'

Chirkov understood and the dull gleam of alarm deliberately kindled by Morris appeared in his fuddled eyes.

'Would you like me to ... ? Morris's hands made a gesturing of massage and he addressed a few words of Hindi to the Indian boy.

Samsu and sympathy and the strange scent that wafted now about the cabin from joss-sticks burning in a brass pot beside Morris dissolved the young man's suspicions. The turbanned boy returned to his master's side with a pot of unguent. Morris made a sign for Chirkov to expose himself. Morris smiled a complicit smile and Chirkov, drunk and of sensuous disposition, did as he was bid. Morris dipped his hands in the salve and began to apply it as Chirkov, holding on to the edge of the table, stood before him.

For a few seconds a heavy silence filled the cabin. Morris felt the fierce triumph of discovery as Chirkov's compliance revealed his own hedonistic nature and then the Russian too was aware of the most pleasurable and undreamed of sensations' flooding through him as the tongueless boy obeyed his master's instructions.

'A glass, Mr Ballantyne?'

'Er, thank you, Mr Quilhampton.' Ballantyne struggled with the awkward surname. In the post-daylight gloom of the wardroom Quilhampton pushed the glass across the table, taking two fingers off its base as Ballantyne seized it. Then, holding the neck of the decanter in one hand, his own glass in the other, he tipped his chair back against the heel of the ship and with the unthinking ease of long practice, threw both feet on to the edge of the table. Ballantyne watched with fascination, for the hand in which Quilhampton held his glass, his left, was of wood.

'A rum thing, ain't it?' remarked the unabashed lieutenant.

'I beg your pardon, Mr Q ...' Ballantyne's overwhelming predilection for formality was one of his characteristic features. 'You lost it in action, I believe?'

'Yes. Damned careless of me, wasn't it? Have a biscuit. No? Then pass the barrel, there's a good fellow.'

'Have you had much experience of action?' There was an eagerness in Ballantyne's question that, together with other remarks he had made, had provoked a character analysis from Mount that suggested the new sailing master nurtured a desire to distinguish himself. 'To prove himself,' Mount had explained, with a knowing look that attributed Ballantyne's desire for glory to his coloured skin.

'Action?' remarked Quilhampton. 'Yes, I've seen enough. And you, have you had much experience with women, Mr Ballantyne, for I'm woefully ignorant upon the subject.'

'Women?' A faint light of astonishment filled Ballantyne's eyes. 'But you talk often of your woman, Mr Q ...'

'Because I am a besotted fool,' Quilhampton said in an attempt at flippancy, 'but I want to know of women, of the gender as a whole, not one in particular.'

'What is it you want to know?'

'Have you known many women?'

'Of course. Many, many women.' Ballantyne rolled his head in his quaint, exotic manner.

'Can a woman love a man with a wooden hand?'

'Now you are asking about one woman, Mr Q, and I am not comprehending you.'

'But to answer honestly you need to have known many women,' Quilhampton replied, a faint edge of desperation entering his voice.

'That is true. But I cannot answer for the particular ...'

'No.' Quilhampton's face fell. In the silence the messman entered with a lantern.

'But ...' said Ballantyne as the man retired, 'but I think it would be easier for a woman to love a man with a wooden hand than for a man to love a woman with a wooden leg.'

Quilhampton paused in the act of refilling his glass and stared at Ballantyne. The master was deadly serious and suddenly Quilhampton burst into laughter, giggling uncontrollably so that he only got all four chair legs and both his feet back on the deck with difficulty.

'What the devil is this rumpus?' asked Mount, emerging from his cabin, unfamiliarly attired in shirt-sleeves.

'Ballantyne,' gasped Quilhampton, 'Ballantyne is making up riddles ...'

Mount leaned against the door frame of his cabin and looked upon the young lieutenant indulgently as Quilhampton recounted the conversation. Switching his glance to the master Mount was aware that Quilhampton's unbridled mirth had irritated Ballantyne. He was bristling with affront, unable to see anything beyond Quilhampton's ridicule of his remark. Mount was quick to retrieve the situation.

'Perhaps, Mr Ballantyne, you would favour me with an answer to a more serious question than a young jackanapes like James is capable of framing.'

'What is it, Mr Mount?' Ballantyne asked, suspicious now that the two Englishmen were going to bat him back and forth like a shuttlecock.

'I heard you remark to the Captain that you knew something of our somewhat unusual passenger. Who, or what exactly is he?'

Quilhampton was still giggling, but Mount's question almost silenced him for he could make his own contribution to its answer. Almost, for his amusement was sustained by the sudden overwhelmingly serious cast that Ballantyne's swarthy features assumed. It seemed to Quilhampton that this gravity of its own accord drew Mount to a vacant chair, and his amusement only subsided slowly, for his sensibilities still lingered on Catriona MacEwan, the point from which his question arose.

'He is a bad man, Mr Mount. It is said that he was formerly a naval officer, but he was in Calcutta for some years and then moved to Rangoon where he traded with a Parsee. My father had some business with their house and they cheated him. My father has never divulged the particulars of their transactions, for I believe the loss was too shameful for him. Some time after this the Parsee was found dead, and although nothing could be proved against this man he moved on to Canton where he had considerable influence with the Hong in the interest of the opium trade. It is said that he had connections with the Viceroy and these enabled him to travel outside the normal limits imposed by the authorities on the foreign devils ...'

'Foreign devils?' queried Mount, frowning.

'The Europeans in the factories ...'

'Ah ... please go on ...'

'I cannot tell you much more, except that I know of his dishonest connections with my father and that when, on one or two occasions I saw him in Canton, my father warned me against him.'

'But you are not going into trade, are you, Mr Ballantyne? You have volunteered for King George's service, at least for the time being.'

'I should like to serve His Majesty,' said Ballantyne. 'Is it true that by being master I cannot obtain a commission?'

'It is unusual, certainly, unless you distinguish yourself in action against the enemy. I suppose if you earned Captain

Drinkwater's approbation and were mentioned in the Gazette, a commission might be forthcoming.'

There was a dry edge to Mount's voice that only Quilhampton recognised as faintly mocking. Now all suspicion was gone from Ballantyne's mind.

'And do you think we shall see action on a convoy escort?' Ballantyne asked.

Mount shrugged. 'One can never tell ...'

The noise of the fo'c's'le bell rang through the ship and the frigate stirred to the call of the watch. 'On the other hand the call of duty is remorseless,' he added. 'Your watch, Mr Ballantyne ...'

'You should not bait him, James,' remarked Mount, stretching himself and yawning.

'I didn't'

'Then keep your love-sickness to yourself.'

'It ain't contagious.'

'No, but misery is and a long commission's fertile ground for that.' Mount rose. 'Good-night, James, and sweet dreams.'

Quilhampton sat alone for a few moments. Soon Fraser would come below demanding a glass and the remains of the biscuit barrel. Quilhampton threw off his thoughts of Catriona, for the image of Morris had intruded. He wondered why he had not added his own contribution to the pooling of knowledge about Morris. Was it because he could not admit that such a man had once held a commission as a naval officer?

He would confide in Mount. He would trust Mount with his life, but Ballantyne ...? Ballantyne was not quite one of them; a merchant officer, a man of colour, a man for whom the grey seas of Ushant and the Channel were a closed book. Was Drinkwater truly going to confirm his appointment as master?

Quilhampton shrugged, drained his glass and made for his cabin. He did not want to socialise with Fraser, only to thrust his mind back to the pleasurable agony of dreaming of Catriona MacEwan.

On deck Mr Ballantyne paced up and down and dreamed of glory. He had set down upon Captain Drinkwater's chart the estimated position of the reef upon which the Patrician and her convoy had so nearly met disaster and earned a word of approval. He had modestly demurred from appending his own name to the shoal and now he fantasised about earning a more durable reward from the taciturn Captain Drinkwater. A commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy could lead him to social heights denied him on the Indian coast, — for his mother had not been the Begum of Drinkwater's fancy, but a nautch-girl stolen from a temple by his lusty father, a beauty, true, but a woman of no consequence in Indian society. His father cared little for the conventions of the coast and had set his heart on an estate in the English shires if fortune smiled on him. But Ballantyne the son had a sharper perception of values, forced upon him by bastard birth, a tainted skin and opportunities that had raised him from the gutter in which an Indian Brahmin had once suggested he belonged. Something of a subconscious resentment of his father for the predicament in which he had been placed prevented him from accepting a life in merchant ships, and the turn of events which took him from the labouring hull of the dismasted Musquito and placed him aboard the puissant mass of Patrician had awakened a sentiment of predestination in him.

It was this happy mood, combined with a lack of appreciation of the exact status of Midshipman Chirkov that led him to indulge the Russian prisoner when he requested to take the air on deck.

Mr Ballantyne, Master of His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician, felt a certain lofty condescension to Count Anatole Vasili Chirkov, and indulged the young and apparently interested Russian officer in a dissertation on their navigational position in the South China Sea.

CHAPTER 10 A Small Victory

In the stuffy hutch that had formerly been inhabited by Patrician's sailing master Drinkwater sat writing his journal. For a few moments he reflected before dipping his pen. Then he carefully scribed the date, forming the numerals of the new year with care.

We are now south of the twelfth parallel in less misty weather and lighter winds. My apprehensions of attack by Spanish cruisers from the Philippines seem unfounded and I assume their recent loss added to the knowledge of Drury's squadron in the area has made them more concerned for their own register ships than the plunder of our India trade. The convoy continues to behave well. The discipline of the Indiamen is excellent and the Country ships seek to emulate them to the extent of making the throwing out of recriminatory signals unnecessary. This good behaviour is not consistent with the conduct of all convoys ...

Drinkwater paused. While he allowed himself a certain latitude in personal asides, he was conscious of a desire to scribble all his random thoughts on to paper. He knew it was a consequence of his loneliness and the thought usually stopped him short of such confessions. Besides, they were too revealing when read later. But the urge to place something on record about Morris was strong, though the nature of the words he would employ eluded him. All he had written to date was a brief entry that Morris, formerly Master and Commander in His Majesty's Service, now a merchant at Canton, has come aboard for the passage with a quantity of specie.

It was a masterpiece of understatement, making no allusion to their previous acquaintance. Drinkwater knew the omission begged the question of for whom he wrote his journals. He had been ordered to destroy them, but had refused, considering them personal and not public property. In accordance with John Barrow's instructions his ship's logs had been dumped, so that no record of her activities in the Baltic existed; but even a man in the public employ was not to be utterly divested of personal life at the whim of another so employed.

He knew that, in truth, he wrote his journals for himself, an indulgence taken like wine or tobacco. It was unnecessary for him to have written anything about Morris beyond the fact that, like a phoenix, the man had risen from the ashes of the past. Out of the uncertainties and passions of adolescence when their antipathy had first found form, to the hatred of maturity aboard the brig Hellebore where Morris had indeed been 'Master and Commander', they had come now to a snarling and wary truce.

'Like two senescent dogs,' Drinkwater muttered, half lifting his pen as if to write down the words. But he laid the pen aside and closed his journal.

'We are too old now, too interested in feathering nests for our old age to disturb our lives with the revival of former passions.'

He spoke the words to himself, a low mumble that at least satisfied him in their formation, even though they failed to find their way on to the written page.

The improvement in the weather, the convoy's discipline in maintaining station and the apparently resigned behaviour of Morris persuaded Drinkwater that, subject to a degree of vigilance, his bete noire might be permitted the occasional freedom of the quarterdeck. The incongruous sight of Morris, corpulent under the shimmering silk of his robe, pacing beside Rakitin, became familiar to the other occupants of the quarterdeck during the first dog watch. As the hour of tropical sunset approached, Drinkwater also kept the deck, maintaining his own watch upon the two men. Little appeared to pass between them beyond the odd word, and the Russian seemed to have shrunk beside the obscene bulk of Morris. No longer filling his elegant uniform, Rakitin paced with hunched shoulders next to his enforced companion. The relentless nature of the ship's routine soon removed the novelty of this odd, morose promenade.

Midshipman Chirkov was also more in evidence, showing active signs of growing interest in professional matters and receiving instruction from Mr Ballantyne in a most gratifying manner. Drinkwater hoped the young man was taking advantage of the opportunity to increase his knowledge and that, reconciled to his fate, circumstances had wrought a sea-change in him.

The lighter winds slowed their southward progress and allowed fraternising between the ships so that, late one afternoon, Drinkwater found himself aboard the Guilford, dining at Callan's ample table.

Throughout the meal Drinkwater felt a sense of detachment. It was partly due to the fact that he was an outsider and not one of the small band of intimates who had grown wealthy in the service of the Honourable East India Company. Among the diners, four of Callan's own officers and an equal number from the Ligonier, including her commander, had been joined by several of the masters of the Country ships, men who considered themselves, equal to, if after, the lordly Company captains. Drinkwater found the overt and artificial social posturing rather amusing, though their knowledge of the trade and navigation of the eastern seas, expressed in an argot with which he was unfamiliar, increased his sense of being an outsider.

The assumed superiority on the part of the East India commanders, whose wealth and power conferred on them a cachet that found its greatest expression in these remote oriental waters, seemed to Drinkwater a bubble ripe for pricking. He had accepted Callan's invitation, he privately admitted to himself, for motives other than the anticipation of a good meal. Looking down the table, however, he could see James Quilhampton entertained no such ulterior considerations for the meal was sumptuous, served on crisp, white linen, eaten off splendid porcelain with fine silver cutlery and accompanied by wines drunk from glittering crystal glasses.

Drinkwater enjoyed the luxury of the meal. He played up to Callan's efforts to engage him in conversation, but both men knew that unfinished business lay between them and only the convention of good manners prevented its open and indelicate discussion before the other guests. Quilhampton and a handful of his own subordinates were being entertained by the Indiamen's. Drinkwater's attention was engaged by the senior men about him, portly men, for the most part, fleshy and rubicund from the climate and its alcoholic antidotes. They were men of strong opinion, products of almost unbridled licence and power, and although this fell short of the life-and-death power of a post-captain in the Royal Navy, it was clear that the opportunities their commands gave them for making money had given them confidence of another kind.

It occurred to Drinkwater that Callan might have assembled these men as allies to shame him into passing over the matter of the deserters. He smiled inwardly. He was quite capable of enjoying the fruits of Callan's table with as much insouciance as was Callan in accepting the protection of his frigate's cannon.

"Twas a trifle of a near-run thing t'other day, Captain Drinkwater,' remarked one of the masters of a Country ship. 'We were firing alarm guns and you took 'em for shots at an enemy, eh?'

A silence had fallen and faces turned towards him. A conspiracy to embarrass him seemed in the air, or was it a remark provoked by over-much liquor? At the lower end of the table, too, there was a stir of interest and Drinkwater was gratified at the sudden irritation in Quilhampton's loyal eyes. Deliberately Drinkwater drained his glass.

'I took 'em, sir, for what you say they were, alarm guns. I would have been failing in my duty had I ignored them. Had you perused your instructions you would have observed a signal to indicate the convoy was standing into danger ...'

Drinkwater watched the face of his interlocutor flush. The company shifted awkwardly in its chairs and he was persuaded that there was at best some practical joke afoot to throw him in a foolish light, for another spoke as though trying to regain the initiative.

'I don't think there was time for the hoisting of flags, Captain Drinkwater ...'

The diners sniffed agreement, as though implying such niceties were all very well for a well-manned frigate, but a tightly run merchant ship could not afford the luxuries of signal staff.

'You were damned lucky to get away with it,' remarked the commander of the Ligonier.

'Now there I would agree with you, sir,' Drinkwater said smoothly, 'but a miss is as good as a mile, they say ...'

'And we were fortunate not to lose your services,' said Callan soothingly.

'Yes,' agreed Drinkwater drily. 'What bothers me, gentlemen, is how such experts in the navigation of these seas as yourselves came to be so misled in your navigation.' He paused, gratified by a suggestion of embarrassment among them.

'I take it,' he went on, 'that we nearly ran ashore upon a hitherto uncharted spur of the Paracels? I trust you have all amended your charts accordingly ...'

Drinkwater looked the length of the table. It had been a foolish attempt to mock him, of that he was now certain, and unwittingly they had given him a means to get his own back.

'A delightful meal, Captain Callan, and one in which the humour of the company induces me to ask you for the return of my men.'

There was only the briefest of pauses and then Callan urbanely agreed.

'Of course, Captain Drinkwater, of course ...'

Was there the merest twinkle in Callan's eye? Drinkwater could not be certain, but he hoped so, for they had measured blade for blade and Drinkwater was fencer enough to know he had the advantage.

Contrary to expectations aboard Patrician, Drinkwater did not punish the deserters immediately. He had, he admitted to himself as he sat, wooden-faced, in the stern of his barge, fully intended to, but the sullen faces of his barge crew as, eyes averted, they rocked back and forward, half-heartedly pulling at the knocking oar-looms, dissuaded him. Not that he was afraid of the consequences of the flogging as he had earlier been. Indeed his mood was almost one of light-heartedness, so clumsy had been the efforts of the merchant masters to disconcert him, but Drinkwater possessed a strong, almost puritanical sense of propriety born of long service, and he would have despised himself if, after a magnificent dinner, he had viciously flogged the deserters.

It was impossible that he could excuse or exculpate them, for he had hanged a man for the same crime before leaving for the Pacific and such unheard-of leniency would, by its inconsistency, lead others into the same path. But their downcast misery as they sat in the stern sheets of the barge, in such close proximity to their captain, filled Drinkwater with an odd, angering compassion that, by the time he reached the ship, had dispelled his good humour.

'Put those men in the bilboes,' he curtly ordered Fraser as the first lieutenant stood with the rigid side-party, 'and prevent anyone approaching them,' he said to Mount, before hurrying below, only just catching himself in time to turn aside for the master's cabin and not walk, seething, into the main cabin. Suddenly the confines of his self-imposed prison oppressed him, and he as quickly returned to the deck, to pace up and down, up and down along the line of quarterdeck guns until he had mastered himself.

'He doesn't want to hang 'em,' said Quilhampton to the lounging officers in the wardroom.

'He'll have to. A court martial at Prince of Wales Island will condemn them without a thought ...' remarked Fraser.

'Not if he punishes 'em now, quickly ...'

'You mean flogs them?' asked Fraser.

'Yes,' replied Quilhampton, "twill serve as an example to the rest.'

'Good God, man, we were hanging people before! D'you think their blessed Lordships 'd approve of a mere flogging? They want stiffs for desertion, not red meat. He'll no' flog them, but keep them in irons until he can have them court-martialled by a full board at Penang.'

'But he doesn't want to hang 'em,' persisted Quilhampton.

'Och, you presume on your knowledge o' the man, Jamie. I sympathise but not even Captain Drinkwater can get awa' from the fact that desertion's a hanging offence.'

'Tomorrow will tell who's right. If he hasn't flogged 'em by seven bells in the forenoon watch I'm not James Quilhampton.' Quilhampton rose, yawning. 'I've the middle tonight, and I'm weary ...'

'What do you think, Mister Lallo?' Fraser asked of the surgeon who had sat silently through this exchange.

Lallo shrugged. 'I've no idea. Mr Q's solution seems the most humane, yours the most in conformity with the regulations ...'

'And the easiest for you,' added Fraser drily.

Ah yes.' Lallo's tone was unenthusiastic. 'Mr Fraser,' he said, suddenly shifting in his chair and reaching for the decanter on the wardroom table, 'there are other problems that confront us, you know.'

'Oh ... ?' Something in Lallo's voice caught Fraser's attention. 'What?'

'I thought I had three cases of lues as a legacy of California, now I have five, maybe six.'

'And is that so unusual? I saw the venereal list myself only this morning.'

'Two of the cases I'm certain are syphilitic, but the others ...'

'You are not sure?'

'No, I mean, yes, I'm sure.' Lallo rubbed his hand across his forehead in a gesture of extreme exhaustion. 'But it isn't the pox.'

'Well what is it?' snapped Fraser, a sudden fearful cramp contracting the muscles of his belly.

'Button-scurvy ...'

'Scurvy?'

'No! Button-scurvy, Mr Fraser, framboesia, the yaws ...'

'The yaws!'

'Aye, and it's contagious.'

Midshipman Chirkov's quarterdeck appearances had begun to assume a semblance of normality, so much so that the flattered Ballantyne remarked upon his regular interest to Quilhampton when handing over the deck to him at midnight. Together with the details of the course steered and the bearings of the merchantmen, the information made no impression upon the still sleep-dulled Quilhampton until he had been on watch for some time and had dismissed the more immediate preoccupations of his duty. It occurred to him then that Midshipman Chirkov's sudden enthusiasm was singularly uncharacteristic and that, for reasons of his own, he was currying favour with the vulnerable and somewhat pathetic Ballantyne. Had Quilhampton also known the state of hostility that existed between Chirkov and Frey, he might have associated Chirkov's sudden interest in navigation with something more sinister. But that was a matter of honour, a matter of honour forbidden on board ship, and so a closely guarded secret of the gunroom. As it was, his conversation with Ballantyne led him to make other assumptions, blinding him to what was going on almost under his very nose.

Morris had made no attempt to convert the indolent and sensual Russian to his own particular vice. Indeed, age, jaded appetite and excessive corpulence had rendered him less active himself in its pursuit. Besides, his seduction of the Russian youth had aims other than the fulfilment of his own overt desires; what Morris meditated was something infinitely more pleasurable than the mere gratification of lust, something that still appealed to a man far gone in lechery, holding out the budding promise of the most exquisite pleasure.

The boy he had had fashioned for his unique and effortless delight could be employed with equal facility to enrapture the libidinous Chirkov without too much arousing the young man's disgust at himself. Morris was delighted for the gift of so compliant an accomplice as Chirkov.

Nor did the lounging Chirkov, half drunk, half drugged by samsu and Malwa opium during the nights in which Rakitin slept and he and Morris held their unholy court, realise the extent to which he was being used. Morris had explained the dislike Drinkwater felt for them both as an unmannerly prejudice, offering Chirkov a spiteful little revenge upon the British captain by finding out the location of the frigate from the log and traverse board so that he, Morris, might be kept abreast of events that Drinkwater, out of malice, denied him. In return, the extravagant pleasures of Morris's half of the cabin amused the young man as an acceptable alternative to the gypsies who had first introduced him to the gratification of the flesh.

And unbeknown to anyone, even his helpless catamite, Morris plotted the southward progress of the convoy on a chart of his own.

CHAPTER 11 Blood and Rain

'One!'

Spread-eagled against the triced-up grating the man's body jerked in reflexive response to the first stroke of the cat. The flesh of the back was surprisingly pale, turning bronze at the nape of the neck. As he watched, his face a grim mask, Drinkwater saw the red weals begin to streak the skin . . .

'Two!'

As the second weals emerged beneath the unruptured skin, the first were rising in sharp relief. Drinkwater watched the man's face, the mouth distorted by the leather pad upon which he bit. The deserter had his eyes screwed tight-shut and Drinkwater knew he was bracing himself for the dreadful assault upon his body ...

'Three!'

The stretched skin, pressed upwards from below by the bleeding tissues beneath, began to break. At first the stretched pores exuded suppurations of blood and plasma, giving the impression of a rosy sweat that spread in bands across the man's back ...

'Four!'

Was this better than hanging? Was this man's life confined in the wooden bulwarks of His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician, in which even the ship's very name emphasised the subordination of her company, better than a swift and final agony at the end of a yard-rope? Was there, Drinkwater wondered as the bosun's mate laid on the tailed whip again, not one sublime second of freedom before the awful darkness of oblivion? One infinitesimal fragment of time and space where the spirit was free of obligation, of duty, of subservience?

'Six!'

His own freedom to think such thoughts suddenly overcame him. He wanted to ask whether, in that conjectural moment, a man would be free too of the awful obligation to have another man whipped; as if, in some way, the recipient of those lacerations should feel grateful to him for the moderation of the punishment his crime had merited. Drinkwater's eyes flickered to the mass of the ship's company gathered in the waist. Were they, could they fail to be aware of the condign nature of this thrashing? Did they not see in it a spirit of leniency, of sympathy, almost? Or did they see in it a weakness in himself, a weakness, perhaps, to be exploited?

They watched without expression. They had watched such punishments before and those that were intelligent enough to realise knew he had been lenient. Three dozen lashes was more than he normally administered, but it was downright soft on four bloody fools who had run in a place like China and had then been discovered in the very convoy the bloody ship was escorting!

'Twelve!'

Mr Comley intoned the strokes like those of a bell. The bosun's mate stopped and handed over the cat to another that the thrasher might not ease the violence of his stripes through fatigue. Their Lordships thought of everything ...

'Thirteen!'

Old Tregembo watched, sensing the mood of his fellows as vaguely contemptuous of the four men for having been caught so easily. Quilhampton watched full of the knowledge that Drinkwater had agonised over the decision and confident that he had come to the right, the only decision open to a reasonable man. Fraser, the cares of first lieutenant weighing upon him, felt a stirring of disapproval. He would have preferred the matter handed over to the admiral at Madras, or Calcutta or wherever he was, removing the stigma of it from the ship. Sometimes he envied Drinkwater's impeccable, irreproachable acceptance of his responsibilities, sometimes he disapproved of it. Like every second-in-command in history, Fraser knew what he would have done in the circumstances, and that it would have been diametrically opposite to what was now happening ...

'Twenty!'

It never occurred to Fraser that he would have handed the matter over through weakness, for there were half a dozen good reasons why, in his heart, he felt his own decision would have been the right one. Nor did it occur to him that Drinkwater had given more than the most superficial consideration to the matter.

'Twenty-four!'

The bosun's mates changed again for the last dozen. The man's back was laid open now. The cat bit into one vast bruise that had burst into a flayed mass of dark, bloody flesh. Lallo, the surgeon, stared at it, only half seeing more toil for him and his mates, his eyes fixed with a greater calculation on the men amidships, computing, or attempting to compute, how many had already taken the infection of the yaws ...

'Thirty!'

He had heard someone mutter the words 'humane punishment' as they had assembled on the quarterdeck in response to the cry for all hands to muster. It seemed a sophisticated conceit to run words like that together in justification of so barbaric a ritual. Not that Lallo condemned the flogging from any lofty principle; he was too old to think the world would ever set itself to rights, but to talk of 'humane punishment' was almost as stupid a thing to do as to run away from a man-o'-war; almost deserving of the same treatment too, he thought morosely ...

'Thirty-one!'

Derrick made himself watch, though revulsion rose in his throat on hardly suppressed upwellings of bile. He had seen this evil so often now, perpetrated on the whim of a man he both liked and respected. Intellectually he understood all Drinkwater's motives, both official and unofficial. But the inherent brutalising of them all he condemned as utterly evil. It reaffirmed his pacifism, revived his faith, for without war there would not be this grim, so-called necessity ...

'Thirty-two!'

The deserter was hanging by his wrist lashings now, unconscious like some early martyr. Blood ran down to the deck and trickled from his mouth where the leather pad had become dislodged. Senseless he hung there in the sunshine upon the golden, scrubbed timber of the grating so that Midshipman Chirkov was reminded of an icon, the glittering uniforms of the marines an encrustation of rubies, the naval officers a semicircle of sapphires. Fumes of opium still whirled in his brain, enhancing his hearing so that he heard the involuntary exhalations of the man's lungs as the sodden cat thrashed its final strokes upon the rib-cage. Chirkov felt nothing for the victim. All sensations were inwards. The flogging did not even remind him of his own humiliation. He saw only the strange beauty of the agonised body.

'Thirty-five!'

Midshipman Belchambers waited to faint. To his eternal shame he had fainted several times when witnessing punishment and, although he had since that humiliating period seen action and distinguished himself, he still feared that irresistible loss of control ...

'Thirty-six! Water! Cut him down!'

The man's body twitched as the green-white water slopped not ungently over his bloodied back, but he was unconscious as the bosun's mates sliced the lashings at his wrists and dragged him to one side where his messmates took him. Midshipman Belchambers took a deep breath. He was rather pleased with himself ...

'Next!'

Like Chirkov, Morris's hearing was acute. A pipe of opium made it so and the sounds from the quarterdeck revived old, old memories in Morris's mind, memories that the drug uncoiled in lascivious scrolls drawn in graphically slow motion across the mind's eye.

He fondled the boy's ear, realising that these were days of sublime happiness. Not only was he basking in the anticipation of personal success, but that was heightened by the unexpected bonus of encompassing the ruin of a man he had once attempted to love. To the expectation of revenge he now found added the knowledge that that youthful paragon had been brought low in the world, low enough to have his delicate nature sullied by the grim necessity of ordering floggings.

'Ah, my fine friend, how has the bloom withered upon the stalk, eh?' He chuckled, pleased, seeing in his mind's eye that it was Drinkwater's back that received the thrashing of the cat.

His grip suddenly tightened on the boy's ear, turning the puckish face towards his own bloated and puffy flesh.

'Tonight! Tonight we will do it. It will have to be tonight. And then, my little imp, we shall see, oh, yes, we shall see ...'

The boy grunted, the spittle in his throat, his mouth opening.

But Morris had averted his own hooded eyes, for above his head he heard more noises of punishment ...

'One! Two!'

And he smiled.

Despite his conviction of the rightness of Drinkwater's decision to mete out swift and humane justice to the deserters, Lieutenant Quilhampton did not share the captain's analysis of the people's collective attitude. For one thing he was less accustomed than Drinkwater to thinking of the ship's company as one amorphous mass. Rather, to him they were a sum of many separate parts, some of whom, those who fulfilled their duties in his division, were well known to him. But part of this disagreement was attributable to his own involvement in the stilling of their mutinous spirit in the Baltic. He knew that for a while he had sat on a powder keg and alone had snuffed out an already sputtering fuse. He was, therefore, upon his guard in the hours following the floggings. Loyalty, this apprehension about the explosive mood of the hands and his eager longing to return home, stopped him from sleeping, and men nudged each other from mess-table to mess-table and hammock to hammock, as Quilhampton prowled about the ship on one pretext or another.

But the mood of the ship was not threatening, for with that swift change that occurs at sea like the lifting of cloud shadows or a shift in the wind, the reported sight of blue islands to the south of them set their minds on a new tack, dispelling the gloom of the morning and setting their imaginations on anticipation of arrival at Prince of Wales Island, Pulo Penang, first stage on their homeward track.

'Where away?' asked Drinkwater with boyish eagerness, glad of some image to feast on after the shambolic succession of raw backs that had imprinted itself on his consciousness.

'Three points to larboard, sir. The Natunas,' replied Ballantyne confidently. The Dutch name alerted Drinkwater to the possibility of the presence of Dutch cruisers. He swung round and examined the convoy: still in good order, only one ship a trifle too far to leeward.

'Make to Hindoostan, "Keep better station".'

'The Carnatic's run a little ahead of her station, sir,' offered Ballantyne helpfully.

'No matter. She's in the grain of the convoy and another pair of eyes up ahead saves us a little trouble.'

'We may encounter a Dutchman or two, sir.'

'Yes,' Drinkwater said shortly, still peering through his glass, once more levelled at the serried blue summits of the Natuna Islands. He would almost welcome an action with the enemy, welcome it as being his proper business, as purging to his blood and cathartic to his ship. And if he died during it he could hug the satisfaction of duty well done to his crushed bosom as he enjoyed that vital, sparking moment of ineffable knowledge of freedom ...

Bloody stupid thought!

He snapped the Dollond glass shut. 'Very well, Mr Ballantyne. Send the men to quarters, we'll exercise the great guns!'

Drinkwater stayed on deck long after they had resecured their brutish artillery and the men, delighted with their exertions and the pulverising they had given the three beflagged casks, raced aloft and made sail to catch up with the convoy from which they had become separated in their manoeuvring. They had resumed their station long before the red sun reached down and touched the green horizon on its strange, tropical setting. It seemed quenched by the lambent rim of the visible world, cutting the sun in two so that a lenticular fragment of it lingered, gradually changing from fire to ice and then facing and etiolating the sky in the suddenness of the tropic night.

There was a magic in the moment and Drinkwater lingered to savour it, so unlike the attenuated twilight of the grey northern seas with which he was more familiar. One by one the heavily brilliant stars began to appear, those near the horizon coruscating with sudden apparent changes of fiery colour so that he fell into the simple game of identification, cudgelling his wits to remember their names and sad that command removed him from the daily necessity of knowing what he had once been adept at.

Beside him Ballantyne performed the mysteries of navigation, grunting figures to Midshipman Dutfield who read the corresponding times on the chronometer and noted the altitudes on a tablet. Drinkwater indulged his game and noted the disappearance of Canopus, halfalarmed that a squall would reach treacherously down and strike them.

'Wind's falling away, sir,' Acting Lieutenant Frey remarked as he took over the deck for the first watch.

'Yes.'

Having regained their station they were snugged down under easy sail, watching over the convoy as they had since leaving the Pearl River. One was tempted to call it an uneventful passage, setting aside the intrusion of Morris; but even that seemed contained since his judicious move to the master's cabin.

'I shall be below if you require me, Mr Frey.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

He read for a little, but the cabin was stuffily hot despite the wind-sails rigged amidships. He turned to his journal but the threat of megrims brought on by over-long introspection on the morning's floggings led him to conclude the task in as concise a form as decency allowed. In the end he amused himself with a letter to Elizabeth. If they were not sent home from Prince of Wales Island then he could forward the letter and, in any case, it was better written now, while his mood was light, than when he learned, pledges to his men notwithstanding, that Patrician formed a welcome addition to the East Indies squadron.

He must have dozed, for he found himself shaken awake with no idea of the time and the candle burnt low. He blew it out and, in his shirt-sleeves, went on deck.

The watch were busy, attentive to the shouts of Frey and his subordinate petty officers as they braced round the slatting sails. It was not a strong squall, but it had struck them from out of nowhere and the topsails and their blocks were flogging wildly.

'Lively there, damn it!' Frey cannoned into him. 'Get out of my ... Oh! Beg pardon, sir!' Frey drew back, hand to hat barely perceptible in the sudden impenetrable blackness. 'Taken aback, sir, damned squall hit us without warning.'

'It's uncommon dark,' replied Drinkwater. 'Have a mind for the convoy, Mr Frey.'

'Aye, sir.'

Frey turned and bawled for Mr Belchambers, sending him forward with the night-glass to keep a sharp lookout.

Drinkwater scrambled up the heaving deck to the starboard hance, went to fish in his pocket for his glass and then realised he was coatless. Not only was the night dark, it was damnably warm too.

'Only to be expected in four degrees north, I suppose ...'

'Beg pardon, sir?' It was Frey again, looming up and staring forward at men working at the midships pinrail. Drinkwater was not conscious of having spoken and the revelation of talking to himself startled him.

'Black as the Earl of Hell's riding boots.'

'Yes, sir.' Drinkwater heard the grin in Frey's voice. 'There're the lights of the convoy, sir, fine to starboard ... see?'

Drinkwater stared. Yes, he could see the faint glimmer of stern lanterns to the southward. And Patrician was steadying on course now, her yards braced round as the wind picked up, suddenly cold. Seconds later they were leaning to the pressure of it and rushing through the water at a rate of knots. Then with an equally bewildering suddenness the night was riven by lightning, a flash of intense brilliance that showed the dark spots of the convoy ahead and to starboard of them, leaving an almost indelible image on the retina so that it seemed nature had obliged them with a brief spectral revelation to ease their anxieties.

The next minute they were soaking from the deluge of rain that poured upon them, blotting out all but a narrow silver-slashed circle of sea around them, their heads split with the thunderous assault of the exploding cloud above them.

In the confusion of steadying on their course Drinkwater bumped into another body. It recoiled, half apologetically, and in a further, less brilliant flash of lightning which seemed to strike the sea with a sizzling alongside them, he recognised the startled face of Midshipman Chirkov.

'What happens if lightning strikes the ship, sir?' asked Frey anxiously, the cocks of his hat spewing water like gutter-pipes, his face a pale gash in the darkness.

'I should think it'd consume our masts ... possibly set us on fire

Drinkwater tried to think. He had heard of such a thing, surely? But there was nothing they could do to avert it. 'Steady on south by west, Mr Frey,' he said coolly. It was the only thing to do in this shivering cold. The rain fell so heavily that he felt the weight of its volume upon his head and shoulders.

'Binnacle light's out, sir ...' he heard one of the helmsmen report.

'Well get below and fetch a light,' Frey snapped.

'Keep her full and bye, Mr Frey. Steer by the luff of the main tops'l.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

A note of weary tolerance had crept into Frey's voice. Drinkwater peered upwards, water pouring into his eyes. The main topsail was a pale, almost imperceptible ghost seen as through a rain-beaten window.

'Do your best, Mr Frey,' he said with asperity.

In the hiatus that followed, as they waited for the rekindled light for the binnacle that, to judge by the curses muttered from the companionway, was extinguished as soon as it reached the deck, Drinkwater remembered Chirkov.

'Was that Mr Chirkov on deck?' he asked Frey in a more intimate, conversational tone.

'Chirkov? Oh, yes, sir, I expect so. He's taken to coming on deck. Ballantyne says he's interested in the navigation of the ship.'

'Well keep the lubber below after dark. You know my orders.'

Aye, aye, sir,' replied Frey, thoroughly peeved, and ready to shoot Chirkov any moment the Russian gave him opportunity.

Going below, Drinkwater found the ship in a state of disruption. The two Chinese pigs kept in the manger forward of the breakwater were terrified by the over-charged atmosphere and had begun squealing. Men below in the berth-deck were grumbling and Corporal Grice had turned out some of his men, so that a foot patrol in cross-belts and drawers had emerged from the orlop deck and were just then going below again to the hoots and jeers of those able to see the fools they had made of themselves. There was something chaotic about the ridiculous scene as it met Drinkwater's eyes, reminding him of one of the seditious drawings he had seen by Mr Gillray. For, at the foot of the ladder, a little pool of light was formed by half a dozen purser's glims from which an obscenely swearing quartermaster was trying to relight the binnacle lamp. It was this bizarre source of illumination that drew attention to Corporal Grice's folly. Drinkwater stepped over the hunched and cursing backs, leaving them to their task without his presence being known. Rain was streaming over the coaming of the companionway and he was chilled to shuddering by it.

He found Tregembo waiting for him with a towel.

'Thank you, Tregembo'

'Zur ...'

The remains of the candle he had extinguished earlier guttered on its holder. As he dried himself he felt the heel of the deck ease and a few moments later little Belchambers came below to report normality established on deck.

'Is the convoy in sight?'

'No, sir, the rain is still obscuring it, though it's much lighter now than it was, but Mr Frey says he had a good look at the convoy's bearing in the lightning, sir, and he's quite happy.'

'Very well, Mr Belchambers. Thank you.'

'Good-night, sir.'

'Good-night.'

'Thank you, Tregembo. You may get your own head down now.'

'Aye, zur ... G'night, zur.'

Outside the cabin Tregembo bumped into the surgeon.

'Cap'n's just turning in,' he said defensively, standing in Lallo's way.

'Very well,' said Lallo. The surgeon had been meditating all day when to tell Drinkwater about the epidemic of yaws that he might anticipate and had turned in irresolute. Woken by the general agitation of the ship and the clap of thunder he had resolved to act immediately. Now he felt a little foolish, and not a little relieved. A night would make no difference.

'I'll see him first thing in the morning,' he said, turning away.

But Mr Lallo was not the first officer to report to Drinkwater next morning; he was beaten by Mr Ballantyne who, head shaking and excited, burst in to Drinkwater's cabin with such violence that he fetched up against the rim of the bunk. Drinkwater started from sleep as if murder was in the wind.

'Sir! Oh, sir, calamity, sir!'

'What the devil is it? Why have you left the deck, Mr Ballantyne?' Drinkwater spluttered.

'The convoy, sir, it is not in sight!'