Web of Discord

Captain Edgar Adams RN closed his brass telescope with a
decisive
snap, and thrust it into one of the capacious pockets of his regulation greatcoat. His two companions, well wrapped up against the rigours of the Cornish winter, made as if to retrace their steps up the steep path from the sheltered sandy beach, but Adams remained impassive, staring out thoughtfully across the choppy, sullen waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Well, Mr Pascoe,’ he said at length, ‘your surmise was correct. It’s a Russian vessel right enough, an ocean-going steamer of 1870s vintage, low at the stern, suggesting cable drums in the aft holds. It’s a cable layer, or cable repair vessel. And it’s got no business to be lurking here, off Porthcurno.’

Captain Edgar Adams was a lithe, energetic man in his early forties, with a firm mouth and bright grey eyes. His black hair was beginning to show a hint of grey at the temples, and his clean-shaven face was bronzed from long exposure to sun and wind. He had addressed his words to a young man whom he judged to be no more than twenty-five. Pascoe was wearing a light-brown tweed overcoat with matching cap, and looked alertly at the world through gold-rimmed pince-nez, secured by a black ribbon.

‘No business whatever,’ observed the third man, an elderly, bearded gentleman enveloped in a long astrakhan coat. He wore a tall silk hat, and had encased his hands in rather
incongruous
black woollen gloves. ‘It was very enterprising of Pascoe here to telegraph direct to me at Winchester House. Pascoe, as I think you know, is the chief cipher clerk at Porthcurno. Well done, young man! Now, can we please get back to the cable station before we all perish from the cold?’

‘By all means, Mr Dangerfield,’ said Captain Adams. ‘There’s nothing more to be learned here.’

It had been snowing for most of the previous week, and the dismal landscape was pocked with unsightly scabs of half-frozen snow. Mr Dangerfield, one of the directors of the Eastern Telegraph Company, hated snow, and had no great love for Cornwall. It was far too remote from his comfortable panelled office in Old Broad Street. People like Adams were used to all kinds of weather, and young fellows like Pascoe could endure anything within reason.

Still, it had been worth the long drag down from London. It had been prudent of him to alert the Foreign Office to the possibility of skulduggery. It was almost inevitable that some mystery-man like this Captain Adams should have turned up from Whitehall to accompany him down to Porthcurno. It would all make an interesting tale to tell old Sir John Pender, the chairman, when he returned to London.

The three men began the upward climb through the stunted vegetation and masses of storm-weathered rock flanking the winding path from the beach. After a while they reached the Eastern Telegraph Company’s settlement and cable station at Porthcurno, an impressive pile of buildings rising in what was virtually a wilderness. The company’s house flag flew proudly from a pole near a snow-spattered tennis court. Young Mr Pascoe, the chief cipher clerk, unconsciously assumed command, leading the other two men through the high-ceilinged instrument room, where various machines, gleaming in brass and mahogany, clicked and clattered under the charge of a team of other earnest young men. He opened
the door of a little inner sanctum, and Captain Adams prepared to hear the so far hidden details of the incident at Porthcurno.

‘I suppose “incident” is too strong a word to use,’ said Mr Dangerfield. He had retained his heavy greatcoat, and stood near the blazing fire, holding his silk hat by its brim. ‘But that Russian ship has been lurking four miles off the Cornish coast for three days, and as you observed earlier, it has no business to be near a sensitive area such as this.’

William Pascoe had sat down on an upright Windsor chair, and proceeded to drape himself in long ribbons of paper
telegraph
tape. He glanced at the director over his gold pince-nez.

‘With respect, Mr Dangerfield,’ he said, ‘it’s not the presence of that ship that constitutes the incident; it’s what happened to these transmissions that came through from the Scilly Islands cable after that ship had appeared. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, to be exact.’

‘Quite so. Well, I’ll leave the two of you alone to talk about it. I shall go along to the mess. I fancy a bite to eat after that cold traipse down to the cove. And perhaps a glass of
something
, if they’ve got it. Tell Captain Adams all about those transmissions. I’ll see you both later.’

Mr Dangerfield dragged himself away from the blazing fire in the little office, and went out into the instrument room, closing the door behind him. Young Pascoe smiled. Dangerfield wasn’t such a bad old stick, all things considered.

‘Captain Adams,’ said Pascoe, ‘the messages relayed through the submarine cable from Scilly are received in cable Morse, which is printed out on these long strips of paper. This
particular
batch of signals was sent from the cable station on the isle of St Mary’s. They’re business communications from Abraham & Company, the marine victuallers on Tresco.’

Pascoe picked up the long paper streamer, and passed it slowly through his fingers. Adams noted the printed Morse characters, signs that needed a skilled reader to interpret. He watched as Pascoe paused at a stage where half the long
streamer was lying in a rough curl at the side of his chair. This young fellow evidently excelled at his work, which accounted for his senior position at Porthcurno.

‘It was at this point, Captain Adams,’ Pascoe was saying, ‘that the business messages suddenly stopped. Eleven forty-seven on the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of January – just a week ago. For nearly half an hour the engines disgorged gibberish. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the gibberish ended, and the business messages resumed.’

Pascoe reached across to the table behind his chair, and picked up a cloth-bound notebook, which he handed to Adams.

‘I translated all the messages for that morning into straight English, and wrote them down in this book. I’ve also
transliterated
the gibberish. I call it that because I don’t understand it. Wiser heads may be more successful.’

Captain Adams looked at the eager young employee of the Eastern Telegraph Company. We could do with a fellow like him on the edges of our concern, he thought. He evidently thinks the way we think. But would he have the skills to survive at the age of twenty-five? Ability needed to be matched by
experience
.

He said aloud, ‘What happens to these messages after you’ve received them here?’

‘They’re taken up to Penzance, and relayed by telegraph to London. We have a special arrangement with the Post Office to use their London wire.’

Adams opened the notebook, and began to read. The first part of Pascoe’s transcription recorded detailed requests for information from various London ships’ chandlers and
mercantile
grocers. These ended after nine pages, and Pascoe had written in bold handwriting, ‘The gibberish starts here.’

Adams started to read silently, and then aloud, his voice becoming more confident as he progressed.

‘You’ve transliterated the Morse very cleverly, Mr Pascoe,’ he said, ‘so cleverly, in fact, that I can recognize the words as Russian. So from – what time did you say? – eleven forty-seven, on the twenty-fifth last, someone managed to stop the signals
from St Mary’s, and replace them with this outpouring of Russian—’

‘Splicing!’ cried Pascoe excitedly. ‘That Russian ship out there will have the necessary gear to lift the cable, and make a splice to a transmitting apparatus of their own! It must have been a kind of test, because after a while the business messages resumed.’

Captain Adams had flicked through the remaining pages of the notebook, and saw where Pascoe had written, ‘12.12 p.m. St Mary’s station signals resumed.’ There followed a faithful rendering of Messrs Abraham & Company’s requests for ship’s provisions.

‘A test? You may well be right, Mr Pascoe. But a test of what? That is the question.’

‘What did the Russian message say?’ asked Pascoe
impatiently
. ‘Is there any clue there?’

Captain Adams smiled, and shook his head.

‘Not at the moment, Mr Pascoe. This screed of Russian is nothing more or less than a long quotation from a novel by Nikolai Gogol. It’s called
Dead
Souls
.’

‘There you are, then, sir! It was a test – a test to see if their illicit splice had worked.
Dead
Souls
?
That sounds very sinister. Is it a gloomy sort of book?’

‘As a matter of fact, Mr Pascoe, it’s a very funny book, if you understand the Russian sense of humour.’

That statement, he thought, was true enough, and it was a fair answer to the excellent young man’s question. But it was only true on the surface. He had seen things on this visit that it would not have been prudent to mention to these good folk at Porthcurno. That ship…. It would not stay long, now, of that he was sure. They would have learnt very quickly that he was down there in Cornwall. But if ever he saw it again, he’d know it well enough, and not just as a sinister shape anchored near the horizon. For he had often pored over the shipbuilder’s
original
plans of the
Lermontov
,
so that he could now picture it as a familiar berth, where he could walk sure-footed on the mess deck, in the cabins, in the hot, thudding engine room, and in
the great cold spaces of the cable tanks in the hold. It was part of his vocation to know such things.

And the message, that block of Russian text from Gogol, what did that portend? Well, taken in conjunction with the splicing, and with several other things he’d noticed, it meant devilry. He would leave Porthcurno that very day. No time was to be lost.

An elderly porter clad in the livery of the Great Western Railway held open the door of a carriage, and Captain Adams climbed into the long train that would convey him the 300 miles and more from Penzance to London. The porter had led him to that particular carriage, so that Adams was not surprised to find that the compartment was already occupied. He knew the mild, sandy-haired man who sat there, a copy of
The
Times
spread out across his knees. The man smiled at him almost apologetically.

‘Well, Adams,’ he said, ‘what did you think of it all?’

‘I think there’s something very sinister afoot,’ said Adams. ‘Dangerfield and Pascoe took me down to the cove at Porthcurno, and I had a good look at the ship. It was the old screw steamer
Lermontov
,
which was fitted out as a cable-ship eight or more years ago. I know it well. It was used as an
interceptor
vessel by the Imperial Russian Marine. After that—’

‘Did you tell the Porthcurno people that it was the
Lermontov
?’

‘Well, no; but I was happy to confirm their guess that it was a Russian ship. Incidentally, Dangerfield is staying on at the cable station for a few days, which is why he’s not with me now. Just as well, I suppose. He’d have wanted to travel back to London with me.’

‘The
Lermontov
?
Well, well. He was a poet, you know.
Lermontov
,
I mean. It’s not a genuine Russian name. He was descended from a Scotsman called George Learmonth. Anything else?’

Captain Adams smiled. His companion had evidently been looking up various names in an encyclopaedia. That fact told
him that the sandy-haired man had already known the identity of the mysterious ship. That, of course, came as no surprise.

‘Anything else, you ask? Yes, there was. At such-and-such a time on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of this month, the people on the
Lermontov
lifted the Scilly Islands cable, spliced into it, and delivered a stream of Russian, which was read at the Porthcurno cable station as cable Morse. It consisted of a string of paragraphs from Gogol’s
Dead
Souls
.’

The sandy-haired man drew the skirts of his heavy serge cloak about his knees. He uttered a stifled sound, which might have been a sigh, or a sardonic laugh, cut off in mid-utterance.

‘Well, Adams,’ he said, ‘I agree with you that this may prove to be a very sinister business. There’s a richly Slavonic flavour about all this that I very much fear means mischief. That
business
of
Dead
Souls
…. Very suggestive, don’t you think?’

‘I do. Either the crew of the
Lermontov
are of a literary turn of mind, or – well, you can imagine the alternative. It was a rehearsal, but for what? It’s time for me to disappear from the quarter-deck, and take my luck in a hammock once again. It was a rehearsal – but it was more than that. The only way to find out what it means is for me to run with the pack.’

‘I assume you’ll let Admiral Holland know? As head of Naval Intelligence he’ll want to know where you’ve gone.’

‘Oh, yes, I’ll let him know. But for the near future, I’m entirely at your service.’

‘I wish you well,’ said his companion. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll keep my ears open for interesting rumours.’

‘You have many ears, haven’t you?’

‘I have. And many eyes, too. I wish you God speed, Captain Adams.’

A couple of minutes later the train glided out of Penzance Station.

Early the following morning, the Russian cable-ship upped anchor, and steamed rapidly away from the Cornish coast. Young William Pascoe stood on the headland, watching it as it sailed towards the horizon. He wondered what dangers it had
brought in its wake when it had first anchored offshore. To the outsider, the quiet sandy beach at Porthcurno would seem to be little more than a picturesque home for the mournfully crying sea-birds wheeling above the rocky headland. But beneath the sand of the shore lay buried the great network of cables that made Porthcurno the nerve centre of the Empire. Destroy them, and Britain would become suddenly blind and deaf to the doings of the great world beyond its shores. Captain Adams, no doubt, would set various chains of action into motion. But was there anything that he, William Pascoe, could do? Yes, but he would have to be careful and discreet. Russia, he thought ruefully, once roused to anger, would make a formidable
adversary
. Yes, it would be more prudent to watch and wait – but prudence was something for older men to exercise. A young man was entitled to take risks.