The Blighted Cliffs (25 page)

It
was desperate work, though with so many men in so small a space, and
no room to swing or cut, it was hard to land decisive blows; instead,
our two sides heaved against each other as if in some vast wrestling
bout, while sword-blades stabbed blindly between the gaps. Looking
behind I saw that another group of Frenchmen were coming down the
forward ladder to try to break us from the rear, but Crawley was now
aboard and mustering a second file of our men to resist them. They
protected us, but became increasingly outnumbered as French
reinforcements flooded down; we were squeezed closer and closer until
at last we fought almost back to back. A blade hissed past my face;
soon they would have us pinioned so close together they could hack us
apart at will. Had there not been such a press of bodies about me, I
might have collapsed.

Somewhere
in all that shouting and clamour, I thought I heard a distant
banging; then the deck seemed to shudder, and a succession of
powerful thuds pounded the deck over our heads. The crowd around me
began to lessen. We were moving again, driving forward with lunging
blades, while our enemies were in an unmistakable retreat. I pressed
home the advantage, letting a week's accumulated frustration batter
down my safer instincts so that I cut and slashed with a fury I had
never known. Too much fury, I saw too late, for although the enemy
were retreating before me - before us, to be accurate - my excitement
had taken me beyond the safety of our ranks and I stood exposed in
the space between the two sides.

'Watch
yer 'ead, Lieutenant!' called someone from behind.

I
swung about, and saw a snarling French officer coming at me across
the deck. I lifted my sword to check him and he stopped, but the
strength I gained from seeing him falter melted away as he pulled a
pistol from his coat. I froze, petrified between the twin impulses of
either charging him before he could fire or hurling myself down out
of his way. The gun came up. I saw him closing an eye and squinting
down the barrel, a look of intense concentration fixed on his face.

There
was an explosion, a burst of smoke, and a crack. Then nothing.

I
remember little enough of that fight, and nothing at all after that
moment, but I do recall the strange sensation when I regained my
senses. I was lying propped against the bulwark next to a cannon, my
head resting on a bundled hammock, and for several minutes the images
I saw mingled freely with half-recollected scenes from my awakening
after Trafalgar. There was little to choose between the two: the
stink of blood and powder was everywhere, and shirtless men ambled
back and forth across my field of view, shapeless bundles dragging
behind them. A sheep was bleating somewhere in the distance, and I
could hear sharp orders being rattled off from on high. Was this the
afterlife - sitting in a bloody coffin while the sounds of the Lord
almighty drifted in through the skylight? But that did not seem
right. I had never heard the Almighty myself, but I doubted he spoke
with the voice of Captain Davenant.

I
chuckled at that, wondering whether the comparison would please him,
but the shaking of my head induced a terrible ache in my temples. Had
I been shot? With a start I remembered seeing the ball - or at any
rate, the pistol - coming for me. But when I raised a hand to my
forehead it came away clean, and definitely touching skin, not
bandage.

Gingerly,
I got to my feet. It set my head pounding again, but I steadied
myself with a hand against the beams and managed to shuffle across to
the ladder. A stiff man in a red coat - a demon, I thought vaguely,
or maybe a marine - bustled past me, paying me no notice. There were
fewer bodies than I remembered. And there was light coming through
the hatch above, as well as cool, pleasant air. Screwing up my eyes -
they were tender - I gripped the rungs of the ladder and carefully
lifted myself up.

'Alive,
Lieutenant?' Crawley's voice. Perhaps I had not ascended to heaven.

'Don't
know, sir,' I replied honestly. 'Was I shot?'

He
snorted. 'I shouldn't think so, Lieutenant. Apparently you dived out
of the way just as your opponent fired. I fear your instincts may
need a little adjustment, though: you jumped headlong into the edge
of the companionway and knocked yourself cold. Ducker had
to
run the villain through for you. Ah, here comes Boyes.'

I
turned, and began to notice the activity about me on deck. A squad of
marines -
Lancelot
's,
maybe? - were herding prisoners below, pricking none too tenderly
with their bayonets if any faltered, while those sailors who could
still stand were trying to drag the wreckage off the main deck. Smoke
and fog still filled the air, but I saw an officer - also from the
Lancelot
,
I guessed - making his way towards us. Another man, not in uniform
but surprisingly well kempt, followed.

'
Lancelot
arrived?' I asked Crawley.

'None
too soon.'
Lancelot
's
newly arrived officer answered for Crawley, speaking brusquely over
him. He was tall and thin, with an arrogant face that made no secret
of his own self-regard. 'A few more minutes and you'd have been
ground down to nothing.
Lancelot
put a broadside through her rigging and a company of boarders on her
deck and swept them up nicely.'

'I
could hardly forget, Lieutenant Boyes.' Even among the ruins of
battle, neither officer affected any warmth. 'Has the prize yielded
anything to your search?'

'Sadly,
we failed to find anything of value.' I suspected the frigate would
have been looted quite thoroughly before any official inspection was
made. 'But we did turn up this little curio.' He pulled the second
man forward. 'This is Mr Nevell, an Englishman discovered without
explanation in the hold of a French man-of-war.'

'Mr
Nevell?' Crawley's eyes swivelled on to him. 'What have you to say?'

The
man gave a shrug, and a surprisingly careless smile for a man in his
predicament. 'I was trying to find a passage home, after being
wrecked in the
Ariadne
.'

'And
did you misplace your uniform then, Mr Nevell?' Boyes showed no
sympathy.

Nevell
smiled again. 'I see your confusion, Lieutenant,' he said. 'But no,
I'm not with the navy.' He paused. 'I work for the Post Office.'

10

BOYES
WAS THE FIRST TO REACT TO NEVELL'S UNEXPECTED WORDS, and did nothing
to mask his incredulity.

'Queer
place to be delivering a letter. Would a packet ship not have served
you as well, without the added hazards of being mistaken for a
Frenchman or hanged as a traitor?'

'Sadly,
I had no choice in the matter.' Nevell remained studiously polite.
'After the
Ariadne
was wrecked I managed to swim ashore and evade the gens d'armes for a
week, but they grabbed me while I was trying to haggle a journey home
aboard an English free-trader in Calais. They too wanted to shoot me
for not being in uniform.' He smiled at Lieutenant Boyes.
'Fortunately I convinced them I was a civilian, and they decided to
imprison me instead. I never had much ambition to spend the war in a
French gaol - too many nasty stories surround them - so I slipped out
when they weren't looking and stowed away on the first ship I could
find, thinking to get some distance away from the inevitable search
parties. I was hardly in a position to negotiate my passage.'

It
was quite a tale
,
rendered even more incongruous by his well- tended attire and the
calmly bemused set of his youthful face. His brown hair was neatly
tied back with a length of French ribbon, and only a tar stain on his
thigh suggested he had not stepped straight from a fashionable
assembly. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps simply out of spite,
Boyes stared at him with outright disbelief, as if he had just
announced that he had flown down from the moon. Crawley, however, was
giving him an appraising look.

'Tell
me, Mr Nevell,' said Crawley. 'What became of Captain Smith and his
crew after the
Ariadne
foundered?'

Nevell
frowned. 'Captain Stowecroft, was it not?' he asked earnestly. Then,
catching Crawley's eye, he began to smile.

'Was
that your gambit, Captain? Did you expect to catch me as a spy?'

Crawley
shrugged.

'Captain
Stowecroft and his crew and I became separated in the surf, and I
could not wait for them on the beach as I feared we had been seen by
a shore patrol. Sadly, when I was caught, my interrogators made no
mention of any other survivors, although that may be because they
evaded detection better than I.'

'The
only man left from the crew - how marvellously convenient,' Boyes
remarked with a sneer.

Nevell
looked pained. 'Please, Lieutenant. After my extraordinary good
fortune in finding a rescue from my predicament, do not tell me that
I have merely swapped the captivity of my enemies for that of my own
countrymen.'

'That
depends on who your true countrymen are.' The arrogance in Boyes'
thin face was unyielding. 'Perhaps we could ask the Frenchy captain
what he knows.'

'I'm
sure a meeting with him could be arranged,' said Nevell.

There
was an awkward silence.

'Of
course,' said Crawley, choosing his words carefully, 'the frigate's
captain is dead.'

As
Boyes grasped Nevell's insult, his face began to flush; it seemed
momentarily he would be moved to an act of some violence. Much as I
appreciated Nevell's wit, and much as I would have enjoyed seeing him
lay into that prig - for despite Nevell's slight build and unassuming
manner, there was definitely a hint of steel within him - I felt that
an officers' brawl on the quarterdeck of a French prize would not be
looked upon kindly by their lordships at the Admiralty. Particularly
if I became involved.

'On
the topic of the dead,' I broke in, 'I fear I have lost my sense of
the action since I, ah, lost my senses.' It was a pathetic joke, the
sort that might have caused endless mirth at one of my parents'
dinners, but it served well enough to break the mood. I pressed on.
'For all the valiant fighting I saw, and of course partook in, it
seems incredible that some fifty of us, in our scrap of a cutter,
could overwhelm and capture so large a prize.'

This
last comment did little to placate Boyes, and he turned his are on
me. 'You did not. For all your valiant fighting' - from his tone, we
might have been playing in the bath rather than battling for our
lives -'you were within scant inches of becoming Buonaparte's
prisoners yourselves, and giving him your little dinghy as a prize.
Fortunately for you, having first successfully engaged and defeated
her companion brig, we of the
Lancelot
were then able to come up on them and force their surrender.'

'Indeed
we did.' A new voice joined our conversation: Davenant, springing
from the hatchway and advancing upon us with a great, cocksure smile
lighting up his face. 'Of course, it was good of you to bring them to
bay, Crawley, and I shall record your presence at the action in my
report.' He slapped him jovially on the back. 'You'll get your prize
money, never fear. But we've more important matters than dividing the
laurels to see to.' He gestured behind him, where a pair of marines
were escorting forward a French officer. 'This is Monsieur Giscard,
the
Thermidor
's
first lieutenant. Until this morning.'