The Corvette (35 page)

Melusine
clawed back to windward while her two enemies came round in pursuit again. Already they were a mile away to the north-west and Drinkwater thought he could keep them tacking in his wake
for an hour or two yet while he sought a new opening.

‘That lugger's out of the running, sir,' offered Hill, pointing to the
chassé marée
half a mile away. Her crew had sweeps out and were pulling her desperately out of the path of the approaching British sloop which seemed to be bearing down upon them with the intention of administering the
coup de grace
. In fact Drinkwater had long since forgotten about the lugger, although it had been no more than forty or fifty minutes since they had fired into her.

He nodded at Gorton with the good-natured condescension of a school-master allowing his pupils an indulgent catapult shot at sparrows. The larboard guns fired as they passed and several balls struck home, causing evident panic among the lugger's crew.

Drinkwater was seized by a sudden feeling that things had been too easy and recalled the dead and wounded. He turned and called sharply to the midshipman who was in attendance to the quarterdeck and whose obvious pleasure at still being alive had induced a certain foolish garrulousness with the adjacent gun crews.

‘Mr Frey!'

‘S . . . Sir?'

‘Pray direct your attention to the surgeon, present him with my compliments and ascertain the extent of our losses. I am particularly concerned about Mr Bourne.'

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

After Frey had departed Drinkwater called for reports of damage and the carpenter informed him that they had a shot between wind and water, but that otherwise most of the enemy's fire had been levelled at personnel on the upper deck.

Pacing up and down Drinkwater tried to assess the state of his enemies. He had not succeeded in forcing
Nimrod
to surrender and his chances of annihilating the
Requin
were slight. But the whaler had failed to take advantage of a clear shot at
Melusine
's stern. Did that argue her untrained crew had simply missed an opportunity or that, having fired into a King's ship they might have taken heed of Drinkwater's earlier hail?

Discipline was not so tight on a merchantman and a crew might be seduced from its nominal allegiance to their master by the threat of the gallows. Drinkwater considered the point. Did it also signify that
Requin
's fire had been at
Melusine
's deck, not at her rigging? In the place of the privateer Captain Drinkwater thought he might have wanted the naval vessel disabled from a distance, without material damage to the
Requin
herself.

Unless, argued Drinkwater,
Requin
's superiority was overestimated. Perhaps her crew were less numerous than he supposed and therefore to decimate the British had become a priority with
Requin
's commander.

‘Wind's veering, sir.' Hill interrupted his train of thought.

‘Eh?'

‘Hauling southerly, sir.'

It was true. The wind had dropped abruptly and was chopping three, no, four points and freshening from the south-east. Drinkwater stared to the south, there was a further shift coming. In ten minutes or so the wind would be blowing directly off the mountain peaks to the southward. All the ships in the fiord would be able to reach with equal facility. It altered everything.

‘That puts a different complexion on things, Mr Hill.'

Hill turned from directing a trimming of the yards and nodded his agreement. For a few moments Drinkwater continued pacing up and down. Then he came to a decision.

‘Put the ship on an easterly course, Mr Hill. I want her laid alongside the
Nimrod
without further delay.'

It was a decision that spoke more of honour than commonsense, yet Drinkwater was put in an invidious position by his orders. It was doubtful if St Vincent could have foreseen the extent of the French presence in the Arctic, or of the treachery of Ellerby and, presumably, Waller. Yet Drinkwater's orders were explicit in terms of preventing any French ascendancy in the area. The red rag of honour was raised in encouragement; not to use his utmost endeavour was to court a firing squad as Byng had done fifty years before.

Requin
's shot stove in the gunwhale amidships, dismounted a gun and wiped out two gun crews. The maintopmast was shot through and went by the board and the big privateer bore up under
Melusine
's stern. The single report of a specially laid gun appeared to annihilate the four men steering by the clumsy tiller.

Then Drinkwater realised that the rudder stock had been shot to pieces and the tiller merely fallen to the deck, taking the men with it. They picked themselves up unhurt, but Drinkwater's eyes met those of Hill and both men knew
Melusine
was immobilised. Two minutes later she bore off before the wind and with a jarring crash that made her entire fabric judder she struck
Nimrod
amidships.

‘Boarders awa-a-ay!' Mad with frustration and anger Drinkwater lugged out his borrowed sword and grabbed a pistol from his waistband and ran forward. Men left the guns and grabbed pikes from the
racks by the masts and cutlasses gleamed in the sunshine that beat hot upon their backs as they crowded over the fo'c's'le and scrambled down onto the whaler's deck.

Quilhampton was ahead of Drinkwater and had reached the
Nimrod
's poop where Ellerby stood aiming his great brass harpoon gun into the
Nimrod
's waist as Drinkwater led his boarders aft. A cluster of men had gathered round him but the majority of his crew, over twenty men, were dodging backwards into whatever shelter the deck of the whaler offered, making gestures of surrender and calling for quarter.

‘Mr Q! Stand aside, damn it!' Drinkwater called, his voice icy with suppressed fury. He saw Ellerby raise the huge gun, saw its barrel foreshorten as the piece was aimed at his own breast and heard the big Yorkshireman yell:

‘Stand fast, Cap'n Drinkwater! D'you hear me! Stand fast!'

But Drinkwater was moving aft and saw the smoke from the gun. He felt the rush of air past his cheek as the harpoon narrowly missed him and a second later he was shoving Quilhampton aside.

Somebody had passed Ellerby a whale-lance and its long shaft kept Drinkwater at a distance. ‘You traitorous bastard, Ellerby. Put that thing down, or by God, I'll see you swing . . .'

Drinkwater was forced backwards, stumbled and fell over as Ellerby, his face a mask of hatred, stabbed forward with the razor-sharp lance. Suddenly Ellerby had descended the short ladder from
Nimrod
's poop and stood over Drinkwater.

Aware of the quivering lance and the fanatical light in Ellerby's pale blue eyes Drinkwater could think only of the pistol he had half fallen on. Even as Ellerby stabbed downwards Drinkwater rolled over, his thumb pulling the hammer back to full cock and his finger squeezing the trigger.

He felt the lance head cut him, felt the cleanness of the keen edge with a kind of detachment that told him that it was not fatal, that the lance had merely skidded round his abdomen, through the thin layer of muscles over his right ribs. He stood up, bleeding through the rent in his coat.

Ellerby was leaning drunkenly on the lance that, having wounded Drinkwater, had stuck in the deck. The beginnings of a roar of pain were welling up from him and streaming through his beard in a shower of spittle. Drinkwater could not see where the ball had entered Ellerby's body, but as he crashed forward onto the deck its point of egress was bloodily conspicuous. His spine was shattered in the small
of his back and the roar of impotence and pain faded to a wheezing respiration.

Drinkwater pressed his hand to his own flank and looked down into his fallen foe. Ellerby's wound was mortal and, as the realisation spread men began to move again. The whale-ship crew threw down their weapons and James Quilhampton, casting a single look at Drinkwater, gave orders to take possession of the
Nimrod
.

Drinkwater turned, aware of blood warm on his hand. Before him little Mr Frey was trying to attract attention.

‘Yes, Mr Frey? What is it?'

Frey pointed back across
Melusine
's deck to where the
Requin
could be seen looming out of the smoke.

‘B . . . beg pardon, sir, but Mr Hill's compliments and the
Requin
is bearing up to windward.'

As if to lend emphasis to the urgency of Frey's message the multiple concussion of
Requin
's broadside filled the air, while at Drinkwater's feet Ellerby gave up the ghost.

Drinkwater felt the relief of the broad bandage securing the thick pledget to his side. He stared through the smoke trying to ignore Skeete who was tugging his shirt down after completing the dressing.

‘That'll do, damn it!' he shouted above the noise of the guns.

‘Aye, aye, sir.' Skeete grinned maliciously through his rotten teeth and Drinkwater tucked his shirt tails impatiently into his waistband still trying to divine the intentions of
Requin
's commander.

Leaving Lord Walmsley in command of
Nimrod
Drinkwater and the boarding party had returned to
Melusine
although the whaler and sloop still lay locked together.
Requin
lay just to windward, firing into the British ship with her heavier guns. At every discharge of her cannon they were swept by an iron storm. There were dead and dying men lying on the gratings where their mates had dragged them to be clear of the guns and from where the surgeon's party selected those worthy to be carried below to undergo the horrors of amputation, curettage or probing. The superficially wounded dressed themselves from the bandage boxes slotted into the bar-holes in the ship's capstans, and held against such an eventuality. Drinkwater saw that stained bandages had sprouted everywhere, that the larboard six-pounders were being served by men from both batteries and that Gorton was wounded.

The noise was deafening as the Melusines fired their cannon as fast as each gun could be sponged, charged and laid. Ropes and splinters rained down from aloft and below the mainmast three bodies lay where they had fallen from the top. Only the foremast stood intact, the foretopsail still filled with wind.

The stink of powder smoke, the noise and the confusion and above all the unbelievably hot sun combined with the sharp pain in his flank to exhaust Drinkwater. It crossed his mind to strike, if only to end the killing of his men and the intolerable noise.

Something of this must have been evident in his face, for Hill was looking at him.

‘Are you all right, sir?' Hill shouted.

Drinkwater nodded grimly.

‘Here sir . . .' Hill held out a flask and Drinkwater lifted it to his lips. The fiery rum stirred him as it hit the pit of his stomach.

‘Obliged to you, Mr Hill . . .' He looked up at the spanker. It was too full of holes to be very effective, but an idea occurred to him.

‘Chapel that spanker, Mr Hill, haul it up against the wind. Let us swing the stern round and try and put
Nimrod
between us and that bloody bastard to windward!'

A shower of splinters were struck from the adjacent rail and Drinkwater and Hill staggered from the wind of the passing ball, gasping for breath. But Hill recovered and bawled at the afterguard. Drinkwater turned. He must buy time to think. He saw Mount's scarlet coat approaching after posting his sentries over the prisoners aboard
Nimrod
.

‘Mr Mount!'

‘Sir?'

‘Mr Mount, muster your men aft here . . .'

The katabatic squall hit them with sudden violence, screaming down from the heights to the south of them, streaking the water with spray and curling the seas into sharp, vicious waves in the time it takes to draw breath. The air at sea level in the fiord had been warmed for hours by the unclouded sun. Rising in an increasing mass, this air was replaced by cold air sliding down from its contact with the ice and snow of the mountain tops to spread out over the water as a squall, catching the ships unprepared.

Melusine
's fore topgallant mast, already weighed down by the wreckage of the main topmast and its spars, carried away and crashed to leeward. But the chapelled spanker, hauled to windward by Hill's men, spun the sloop and her prize, while
Nimrod
's sails filled and tended to drive both ships forward so that their range increased from their tormentor.

But it was a momentary advantage for, hove to, the
Requin
increased her leeway until the strain on her own tophamper proved too much. Already damaged by
Melusine
's gunfire, her wounded foremast went by the board. Dragged head to wind and with her backed main yards now assisting her leeward drift,
Requin
presented her stern to Drinkwater and he was not slow to appreciate his change of fortune. A
quick glance at
Nimrod
's sails and he saw immediately that he might swiftly reverse their turning moment and bring
Melusine
's battered larboard broadside to bear on that exposed stern.