Ebb Tide (17 page)

Such arrangements took time to effect, but within fifteen minutes Poulter had brought his ship's head round and had closed the estimated location of the disaster. Calling down for dead slow speed, he scanned the sea ahead of the ship. Up at the base of the bowsprit and aloft in the rigging, his men were doing likewise. One of the men at the knightheads called out and pointed at the very instant he saw something himself. He was joined by the seaman in the foretop. Poulter focused on the object as
Vestal
neared it.

It was a dark, hard-edged shape, like a porpoise's fin, which he recognized instantly as a section of the boat, the bow he thought, where the gunwales and the stem were joined with a knee. Then he saw a head bobbing near it, and another... Poulter's spirits rose in proportion. It was always damnably difficult to see men in the water and, he thought, the men in the boat could not have been dispersed very much. If only Captain Drinkwater had not been so old and the boat had not run under the ship. Perhaps they would be lucky ...

Drinkwater was reduced to a terrified primal being, intent only on staying afloat and aware of the feebleness of his body. He was wounded and hurt, wracked with agonies whose location and origins were confused but which seemed in their combined burden to be preventing him from swimming. The realization overwhelmed him with anxiety. He had a strong desire to live, to see his wife and children again. He was shivering with cold, weighed down by his waterlogged clothes but, energized by the air he now drew raspingly into his lungs, he renewed his fight to live.

In terror he found he could no longer swim. His body seemed leaden, unable to obey the urgent impulses of his brain. He went under again, swallowing mouthfuls of water as he floundered, before panic brought him thrashing back to the surface, his arms flailing in a sudden reflexive flurry of energy. Then, quite suddenly, both ending the panic and bringing to his conscious mind a simultaneous sensation of sharp pain and a glorious relief, his right arm struck an oar. A second later he had the thing under his armpits and was hanging over it, gasping for breath and vomiting sea water and bile from a burning throat.

The sensation of relief was all too brief, swept aside by a more sobering, conscious and logical thought. They would never recover him. He was going to die and he recalled the presentient feeling of doom he had experienced when lost once before in a boat in an Arctic fog. It had been cold, bone-numbingly cold so that he had shivered uncontrollably then as he shivered now. He had no right to live, not any more. He was an old and wicked man. He had killed his friends and betrayed Elizabeth. He had lain with Arabella Stuart in that brief liaison that had drawn from him an intense but guilty passion. Why had Arabella so affected him and turned his head? Was it because it had always been turned since he had set eyes on Hortense, whose haunting beauty had plagued him throughout his life, an exciting alternative to Elizabeth's loyal constancy? And what was love? And why was it that what he had was not enough? Was it ever enough, or were men just wicked, inevitably, innately evil? But he had not loved Arabella, not as he loved Elizabeth. Their parting had not affected him beyond causing him a brief, if poignant regret. Yet his hunger for her at the time had been irresistible. Was that all? Was the sole purpose of their encounter nothing more than that? The waywardness of it struck at the certainties he had clung to all his life. Surely, surely...

And as he sucked the air into his aching lungs he recalled Elizabeth and tried to seize her image, as if holding it in his mind's eye would revive hope and lead him to understand what was happening to him. Were all men left to die and obliged to relinquish life in this terrible desolation? Was it not therefore better to be cut in two by an iron shot and to be snuffed out like a candle? And then he knew, and felt the conviction with the absolute certainty of profound insight. He had been tempted, and had succumbed to the flirtatious loveliness of the American beauty, because the remorse he had afterwards suffered had saved him from the greater, irreversible sin of insensate entanglement with Hortense.

It made sense with a simplicity directly attributable to providential intervention, and in the moment that he realized it, he felt a great burden lifting from him. This relief came with an easing of his breathing and the final eructation of his cramped and aching stomach. He raised his head as he lay wallowing over the oar, and looked up. He could see the ship again! She had turned round and grew larger as she came towards him. As she drew near, he could see a man up in the knightheads pointing ahead of the ship.

Drinkwater raised an arm and waved. He tried to shout, but nothing came from his mouth except a feeble croak. It would be all right! They could see him. He was not going to drown. He was redeemed, forgiven. He began to laugh with a feeble, manic sound through chattering teeth.

The forward lookouts aboard
Vestal
had not seen Captain Drinkwater. They had caught sight of two of the oarsmen and Captain Drew, who clung to the bow section of the port cutter in which was lashed an empty barricoe for added buoyancy. They lay some two hundred yards beyond Captain Drinkwater, who again passed unseen beneath the plunging bow of the
Vestal.

Drinkwater looked up again.
Vestal's
bowsprit rose over him like a great lance. He saw the rigging supporting it, the twin shrouds, the white painted chain bobstay which angled down to the iron spike of the dolphin-striker that passed half a fathom above his head. Then came the white lady who, following the iron spike as the ship drove her bow into a wave, seemed to sweep down towards him with malevolent intent. A cold terror seized his heart as the ship breasted the wave and rose, lifting the figurehead so that the white lady seemed suddenly to fly above him higher and higher, retreating as she did in the dream.

Then the forefoot of the
Vestal's
bow thrust itself at him, striking the oar and wrenching it from his grasp. The foaming bow wave separated him from it and swept him down the ship's port side. He tried to shout again but suddenly the sponson threw its shadow and the paddle-wheel drove him down and he was fighting for his life with Edouard Santhonax in an alley in Sheerness, breathless after his run, and aware that he had allowed himself to be caught at a disadvantage, the consequences of which were as inevitable as they were dreadful. As the Frenchman's sword blade struck down in the
molinello,
he felt the thing bite into his shoulder with the same awful finality as he had experienced all those years ago.

Two paddle floats hit him in succession in passing and sent him deeper into the swirling depths of the turbulent sea. The roaring in his ears was the thunder of a great battle, the endless, ear-splitting concussion of hundreds of guns. It was inconceivable, terrible, awful. He glimpsed Camperdown and Copenhagen and Trafalgar. He glimpsed the darkness of a night action and saw, as he came near the surface in the swirling water of the paddle race, the pallid faces of the dead.

There were so many of them! Faces he had forgotten, faces of men he had never known though he had had a hand in their killing — of a French privateer officer, of a Danish captain called Dahlgaard, of an American named Tucker, of an anonymous officer of the French hussars, of Edouard Santhonax, of old Tregembo whom he had dispatched with a pistol shot, of James Quilhampton whose death he had mourned more than all the others. They seemed to mock him as he felt his body spin over and over, and the constriction in his breast seemed now to be worse than ever and somehow attached to the laughter of these fiends who trailed behind the white lady and struck with the cold, deep into his soul.

CHAPTER 6
Tales of the Dead

February-March 1815

'Nathaniel, what is it?'

Elizabeth looked up from her needlework as she sat by the fire. Her husband was staring through the half-opened shutter, out across the lawn in front of Gantley Hall where, judging by the draught that whirled about her feet and the noise in the chimney, a biting easterly wind was blowing. The rising moon cast a pale glow on his face, a chilling contrast to the warm candle-light and the glow of the fire. She watched his abstracted profile over her spectacles for a moment, then bent to her work with a sigh. He was not with her in the warm security of their home; his restless spirit was still at sea and his poor, divided heart revealed itself in these long intervals of abstraction. Then she heard the chink of decanter on glass and the low gurgle of poured wine.

'You drink too much,' she said without looking up.

'Eh? What's that?'

'I said, you drink too much. That is the fourth glass you have had since dinner. It does not improve your conversation,' she added drily.

'You are becoming a scold,' he retorted.

She ignored the provocation and looked up at him. 'What is troubling you?'

'Troubling me? Why nothing, of course.'

'Why then are you looking out of that window as though expecting to see something? Is the garden full of ghosts?'

'How did you know?' he asked, and their eyes met.

'There is something troubling you, isn't there?'

He shook his head. 'Only the weather, my dear,' he said dismissively, closing the shutter and crossing the room to sit opposite her. He stretched his legs out towards the fire.

'And the ghosts?'

He sighed. 'Oh, at moments like this I recall Quilhampton ... And one or two others...'

'Why at moments like this?' she asked, lowering her needlepoint and looking at him directly over her spectacles. She saw him shrug.

'I don't know. They say old men forget, and 'tis largely true to be sure, but there are some memories one cannot erase. Nor perhaps should you when you have borne responsibility.'

Elizabeth smiled. 'It is the burden of that responsibility that prevents you from accepting things as they are, my dear,' she said gently. 'If, as you say you believe, Providence guides us in our lives, then Providence must bear the burden of what it creates. After all, you yourself are what you are only partly by your own making.'

Drinkwater smiled over his glass. 'Yes, you are right.' He leaned forward and patted her knee. 'You are always a fount of good sense, Elizabeth.'

'And you drink too much.'

'Do I?' Drinkwater looked at his empty glass. He placed it on an adjacent table. 'Perhaps I do. A little.'

'What o'clock is it?' Elizabeth asked.

Drinkwater lugged out his watch and consulted it. Almost ten,' he said, looking up at her. 'What is it?'

'Oh nothing. I was just thinking you have had that watch a long time.'

He gave a short laugh. 'Yes, so long that I forget it was your father's.'

'It was, I think, the only thing of any real value he had.'

'Except yourself,' he said.

'Thank you, kind sir.' Elizabeth stifled a yawn. 'I shall not linger tonight,' she said, laying down her work. 'Susan will have put the bedpan in an hour since.'

'Then I shall not make up the fire ...'

Drinkwater was interrupted by a loud and urgent knocking at the door. 'What the devil...?' Their eyes met.

'Were you expecting someone?' Elizabeth asked, a sudden suspicion kindled in her.

'No, not at all,' Drinkwater answered, shaking his head and rising stiffly. He hobbled awkwardly towards the hall door muttering about his 'damned rheumaticks'.

Elizabeth sat and listened. She heard the front door open and felt the sudden in-draught of cold air that sent the dying fire leaping into a brief, flaring activity. She heard, too, a man's insistent voice and her husband's lower response. Cold air ceased to run into the room and she heard the door close. The exchange of voices continued and then her husband came back into the room.

'What is it, Nathaniel?'

'There's a vessel in trouble in the bay. I have Mr Vane in the hall. He has his trap outside. I shall have to go and see what can be done.'

Elizabeth sighed. 'Very well. But please ask poor Mr Vane in for a glass while you put on something suitable for such a night.'

Drinkwater turned back to open the door and waved for the visitor to enter. 'Remiss of me, Vane, come in. My wife will look after you while I fetch a coat.'

'My boots, Captain ...'

'Oh, damn your boots, man. Come you in.'

'Thank you, sir.' Vane was a large man who always looked uncomfortable indoors, despite the quality of his coat and cravat. He entered the drawing-room with his customary awkwardness. 'Mistress Drinkwater.' He bowed his head, turning his low beaver in his hands.

'I should like to say it was pleasant to see you, Mr Vane, and in a sense it is,' Elizabeth said, as she rose smiling, 'but at this hour and in such circumstances ...'

'Aye, ma'am. There's a ship in trouble. I saw the rockets go off just as I was going up with Ruth and, as you know, the Captain likes to know...'

'Oh, yes,' Elizabeth said, handing a glass to her unexpected visitor, 'the Captain likes to know. Here, take this for your trouble.'

'I didn't ought to...'

'You may need it before the night's out.'

Vane's huge fist closed round the glass and he smiled shyly at his benefactress, for Elizabeth had established him as the tenant in Gantley Hall's only farm. Vane had been driven off land that his family had worked for years by an extension of the Enclosures Act. He had come to Elizabeth's notice while eking out a living as a groom in Woodbridge where, for a while, she and Louise Quilhampton, the dead James's mother, had run a small school. Louise had heard of his plight and the incumbent of Lower Ufford had stood as guarantor of his character when Elizabeth, in the absence of her husband at sea, had come to grips with the management of the small farm they had bought with the estate. She had liked his slow patience and the ability the man possessed to accomplish an enormous amount without apparent effort. It was in such stark contrast to her own erratic attempts to accomplish matters that she had regarded the arrival of Mr and Mrs Vane as providential, an opinion shared by her fatalistic husband. Vane was supported by his energetic wife. Ruth Vane was a plain woman of sound good sense who managed a brood of children with the same efficiency as her geese and hens. On his rare visits to Home Farm, 'The Captain' as Drinkwater was always referred to between them, voiced his approval. 'Mistress Vane runs as tight an establishment as the boatswain of a flag-ship, and that bear of a husband of hers puts me in mind of a lieutenant I once knew ...' Elizabeth smiled at him now.