"Beneath the aurora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Вудмен Ричард)

CHAPTER 5 A Most Prejudicial Circumstance

'Pray sit down, Mr Huke.'

Huke threw out his coat-tails and sat on the edge of the chair bolt upright with his hands upon his knees and his elbows inclined slighdy outwards. It was not a posture to put either of the two men at ease.

'I was much taken up with the urgency of departure and communicating the purpose of this voyage to Lieutenant Quilhampton of the Kestrel' If Drinkwater had expected Huke to look from his captain to the cutter, which could be glimpsed through the stern windows when both vessels rode the crest of the wave simultaneously, he was mistaken. Mr Huke's eyes remained disconcertingly upon Drinkwater who wondered, in parentheses, if the man ever blinked.

'Sir,' said Huke in monosyllabic acknowledgement.

'It is proper that I explain something of the matter to you.' Huke merely nodded, which irritated Drinkwater. He felt like the interloper he was, in a borrowed ship and a borrowed cabin, and that this was the light in which this strange man regarded him. He considered offering Huke a glass, but the fellow was so damnably unbending that he would seem to be currying favour if he did. 'Before I do confide in you,' Drinkwater went on pointedly, regretting the necessity of revealing anything to Huke, 'perhaps you will be kind enough to answer a few questions about the ship.'

'Sir.'

'You are up to complement?'

'Within a score of hands, aye.'

'Is that not unusual?'

'We took aboard near twenty men during the last week off Leith. All seaman. Took most of 'em out of a merchantman.'

'Very well. Now the Master reports the stores will hold for three months more…'

'And our magazines are full; we have scarce fired a shot.'

'Did Captain Pardoe not exercise the guns?'

'Oh, aye, sir.'

'I don't follow...'

'Captain Pardoe was not often aboard, sir.'

'Not often aboard?' Drinkwater frowned; he was genuinely puzzled and Huke's evasive answers, though understandable, were confoundedly irritating.

He rose with a sudden impatience, just as the ship lurched and heaved. A huge sea ran up under her quarter, then on beneath her. As he staggered to maintain his equilibrium, Drinkwater's chair crashed backwards and he scrabbled at the beam above his head. From the adjacent pantry came a crash of crockery and a cry of anger. So violent was the movement of the frigate that the perching Huke tumbled from his seat. For a moment the first lieutenant's arms flailed, then his chair upset and he fell awkwardly, his skinny shanks kicking out incongruously. Hanging over the table, Drinkwater noticed the hole worn in the sole of his first lieutenant's right shoe.

He was round the far side of the table and offering the other his hand the moment the ship steadied. 'Here, let me help ... there ... I think a glass to settle us both, eh?'

He was gratified to see a spark of appreciation in Huke's eyes.

'Frampton!'

Pardoe's harrassed servant appeared and Drinkwater ordered a bottle and two glasses.

'We'll have a blow by nightfall,' Drinkwater remarked, as they wedged themselves as best they could; and while they waited for Frampton, Drinkwater filled the silence with a reminiscence.

'This is not the first ship I have joined in a hurry, Mr Huke. I took command of the sloop Melusine in circumstances not dissimilar to this. The captain had become embroiled in a ridiculous affair of honour and left me to make a voyage to the Greenland Sea in a ship I knew nothing of, with officers I did not know. You can doubtless imagine my sentiments then.' [See The Corvette.]

'When was that?' Huke asked, curiosity about his new commander emerging for the first time.

'At the termination of the last peace, the spring of the year three.'

'I was promoted lieutenant that year.'

'Mr Huke,' Drinkwater began, then Frampton appeared and they concentrated on the wine and glasses. 'Did you lose much just now, in the pantry?'

'Aye, sir, two cups and a glass.'

'Oh, a pity.'

'Aye, sir.'

'You were saying, sir?' Huke prompted expectandy.

Drinkwater felt suddenly meanly disobliging. 'I forget,' he said, ' 'twas no matter.'

Huke's face fell, relapsing into its disinterested expression. There was a predictability about the man, Drinkwater thought, to say nothing of a dullness.

'Anyway, your health.' Huke mumbled a reply before his beak of a nose dipped into the glass.

'Ah, I recall, I was asking about Captain Pardoe, his exercising of the crew. They seem reasonably proficient.'

'Aye, they are.'

'Thanks to you?'

'Yes, in part.'

'Well come, Mr Huke,' said Drinkwater, a note of asperity creeping into his voice. 'Do I attribute your lack of respect to your not being unduly used to having an officer superior to yourself on board?'

Drinkwater caught the swift appraising glance of Huke's eyes and knew he had struck home. It had not entirely been guesswork, for in addition to Huke's hints had come a somewhat belated realization that it was odd that Pardoe had turned up on his London doorstep so promptly after Barrow had indicated that the Andromeda could be made available.

'I thought the regulations were quite specific upon the point, expressly forbidding captains to sleep out of their ships ...'

Huke gave a great sigh. 'Very well, since you'll not be content, sir, until you have dredged the bottom of the matter, Pardoe has no interest in the ship and we are cousins. I made up the ship's books and the rest of the officers and crew thought he was detained on parliamentary business. He is the Member for Eyesham ...'

'So you maintained the fiction?'

'That is right,' Huke said wearily. 'And in return I was allowed an emolument…'

'An emolument?'

'A portion of Captain Pardoe's pay went to my sister who lives with my widowed mother and has no other means of subsistence.'

'And will Captain Pardoe continue with this arrangement?'

Huke gave a thin and chilly smile. 'Would you, Captain Drinkwater, if there was no reason to?'

No wonder, thought Drinkwater, Pardoe had been so keen to relinquish his ship once it was clear that the interests of party had been served by his obliging the ministry. The captain's protests had been all sham. He would make an excellent politician, Drinkwater privately concluded.

'If he told you he regretted handing over command, sir, it was a lie. He is a man who seeks ease at all times, and even when aboard never took the conn or put himself to the least trouble. He is a great dissembler; any man would be fooled by him as would be any woman.'

Huke broke off. He did not reveal that his sister had been dishonoured by Pardoe, and had borne him a bastard, acknowledged only because of the ties of blood. The child had died of smallpox eighteen months earlier, so Pardoe could cynically drop the old commitment.

'I'm sorry, Mr Huke. I had no wish to pry. Pray, help yourself.'

'It's been difficult, sir,' Huke said, the wine loosening his tongue. 'It was not in Captain Pardoe's interest to see me advanced ...'

'No, I can see that,' Drinkwater frowned. 'My presence here is hardly welcome then?'

'I could not expect promotion because of Captain Pardoe's removal, sir, but, yes, at least under the previous arrangements I had a free hand on board and my dependants cared for.'

'Damn it, Huke, 'tis outrageous! We must do something about it!'

Huke looked up sharply. 'No, sir! Thank you, but you would oblige me if you would leave the matter alone. It was inevitable that it would end one day…'

'Well, what did Pardoe think would happen when I joined?'

'That I would simply carry on as any first lieutenant.'

'I don't want a resentful first lieutenant, Mr Huke, damn me, I don't, but I'm confounded glad you have told me your circumstances. What's your Christian name?'

'Thomas, sir.'

'D'you answer to Tom?'

Something of a smile appeared on Huke's weatherbeaten face. 'I haven't for some time, sir.'

Drinkwater smiled. This was better; he felt they were making progress. 'Very well, then let us to business.' Drinkwater pulled a rolled chart from a brass tube lashed to the table leg and was gratified that Huke helped spread it and quickly located the lead weights to hold it down upon the table. He indicated its salient points:

'To the west Orkney and Shetland, to the east the Skaw of Denmark, the Naze of Norway and here,' his finger traced the Norwegian coast due east of Orkney, 'Utsira.' Beside the offshore island of Utsira the ragged outline of the coast became more deeply indented, fissured with re-entrant inlets, long tapering fiords that bit far into the mountainous terrain, separating ridge from ridge where the sea exploited every glacial valley to thrust into the interior. Each fiord was guarded by rocks, islets and islands of every conceivable shape and size, their number, like the leaves upon a tree, inconceivable.

The names upon the chart were long and unpronounceable, the headwaters of the inlets faded into dotted conjecture, the hachured mountains rose ever vaguer into the wild hinterland.

'It is a Danish chart, Tom, incomplete and probably poorly surveyed. It is the best the British Admiralty could come up with. The Hydrographer himself, Captain Hurd, sent it...'

Huke straightened up and looked Drinkwater squarely in the eye. 'There is something out of the ordinary in this business, then,' he said quietly.

Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes, very. Is it only the chart that has made you think this?'

'And the manner of your arrival, sir.'

'Ah. In what way?'

'I had heard of you, sir. Your name is not unfamiliar.'

'I had no idea,' Drinkwater said, genuinely surprised.

'You mentioned the Melusine and a Greenland voyage. And did you not take a Russian seventy-four in the Pacific?' There was a strained tone of bitterness in Huke's words.

'Luck has a great deal to do with success, Tom…'

'As does a lack of it with what others are pleased to call failure.'

'Indeed, but look, see that little fellow doing a dido on the quarter?' They stared across the mile of grey, windswept wilderness that separated the diminutive cutter Kestrel from her larger consort. 'Her commander is a mere lieutenant, like yourself, an #233;l#232;ve of mine, God help him, a bold and brave fellow who lost a hand when a mere midshipman before the fortress of Kosseir on the Red Sea. [See A Brig of War.] I have been striving to get a swab for him for years, so do not conceive great expectations; by which I do not mean I will not strive to advance any officer worth his salt.'

'I shall concede him the precedence,' Huke said, adding, 'he has independent command in any case.'

'I shall do my best for both of you, but James Quilhampton is a good fellow.'

'I have not yet met him…'

'No, had we had more time, I should have dined all of you. I hope that we shall yet have that pleasure, but for now rest assured that if we are successful in our enterprise, then I will move heaven and earth to have those officers who distinguish themselves given a step in rank.' 'And what is this enterprise?'

'Blowin' great guns, sir!'

Lieutenant Mosse was a dark blur in the blackness.

'Indeed it is.' Drinkwater put a hand to his hat and felt the wind tear at his cloak as he leaned into it, seeking the vertical on the wildly gyrating deck. Above his head the wind shrieked in the rigging, its note subtly changing to a booming roar in the gusts which had the almost painful though short-lived effect of applying pressure on the ears. The ship seemed to stagger under these periodic onslaughts, and around them the hiss and thunder of tumbling seas broke in looming chaos beyond the safety of the wooden bulwarks.

As he struggled past the wheel and peeped momentarily into the dimly lit binnacle, the quartermaster shouted, 'Course dead nor' east, sir.'

He tried looking upwards at the tell-tales in the thrumming shrouds but he could see nothing but the pale blur of a scrap of canvas somewhere forward.

'Wind's sou' by east, sir, more or less, been backing an' filling a bit, but tending to veer all the time.'

'Thank you. What's your name?'

'Collier, sir.'

'Very well, Collier, and thank you.'

He passed from the feeble light of the binnacle into the manic darkness. The moving deck beneath his feet dropped, leaving him weightless. He felt the wild thrust of the storm as Andromeda dipped her stern and a sea ran beneath her. Then the next wave was upon them, hissing and roaring at them, its crest tumbling in a pale, sub-luminous glow that lay above the line of the taffrail. The frigate felt the uplifting buoyancy of its front, she pressed her decks insistently against the soles of Drinkwater's shoes and he was saved from blowing overboard. He reached for and grasped the lanyard of an after mizen backstay, pulling himself into the security of the pinrail where he looped a bight of downhaul round his waist and settled his cloak in a warm cocoon, feeling still the forces of nature through the vibrating rigging.

He had not forgotten the knack, though he had certainly lost his sea-legs in his months ashore. It was preferable to be up here than cooped in his cabin, for he could not sleep. He was loo restless, his mind too active to compose himself, and even lying in the cot had failed to lull him. The ship was noisy as she strained under the onslaught of the sea. Her complex fabric groaned whilst she alternately hogged and sagged as the following waves lifted her and thrust her forward, then passed under her and she fell back off each crest, into the succeeding trough.

Added to this ceaseless cycle of stresses was the resonance produced in the hull by the deep boom of the storm in the spars and rigging, that terrible noise that lay above the adolescent howl of a mere gale and sounded like nothing so much as the great guns of Mosse's phrase. And for Drinkwater and the officers quartered in the stern of the ship, there was the grind of the rudder stock, the clink of chains, and the curious noise made by the stretching of white hemp under extreme tension as the tiller ropes flexed from the heavy tiller through their sheaves to the wheel above, where Collier and his four helmsmen struggled to keep Andromeda on her course.

Secure and familiar now with the pattern of the ship's motion, Drinkwater took stock. They had struck the topgallant masts before sunset, and sent the upper yards down. Only the small triangle of the fore topmast staysail and the clews of the heavy forecourse remained set above the forecastle, yet even this small area of sail, combined as it was with the mighty thrust of the wind in the standing masts, spars and rigging, sent Andromeda down wind at a spanking six or seven knots.

This, Drinkwater consoled himself, was what frigates of her class were renowned for, this seaworthiness which, provided everything was done in due and proper form, engendered a sense of security. Then a thought struck him with as much violence as the storm.

'Mr Mosse!' he bellowed, 'Mr Mosse!' He began to unravel himself, but then the lieutenant appeared at his elbow.

'Sir?'

'The lantern! Did I not leave orders for the lantern to be left burning for Kestrel to keep station by?'

'Aye, sir. But it has proved impossible to keep it alight. I sent young Pearce below to set a new wick in it. He should be back soon.'

'When did you last see the cutter?'

'I haven't seen her at all, sir, not this watch.' Mosse continued to stand expectantly, waiting for Drinkwater to speak, but there was nothing he could say.

'Very well, Mr Mosse, chase the midshipman up.'

A few minutes later Drinkwater was aware of figures going aft with a gunner's lantern to transfer the light. They knelt in the lee of the taffrail and struggled for a quarter of an hour before, with a muffled cheer, Pearce succeeded in coaxing the flame to burn from the new wick and the stern lantern was shut with a triumphant snap.

Its dim glow, masked forward, threw just enough light for Drinkwater to see the muffled figure of the marine sentry posted by the lifebuoy at the starboard quarter. Neither vigilant sentry nor lifebuoy would do any poor devil the least good if he fell overboard tonight, Drinkwater thought, feeling for poor Quilhampton in his unfamiliar and tiny little ship.

No, that was ridiculous, James was as pleased as punch with his toy command and had made a brilliant passage from the Chapman light to Leith Road in four days, comparable to the best of the Leith packets and certainly faster then the passage Drinkwater had himself made with Captain McCrindle.

'She's a damned sight handier than the old Tracker,' Quilhampton had crowed, as he entertained Drinkwater to dinner in the cabin of the cutter aboard which Drinkwater himself had once served. He had proudly related how he had over­hauled one of the packets off the Dudgeon light vessel. [See A King's Cutter.]

The recollection alarmed Drinkwater. He had so often witnessed pride coming before a fall, and, moreover, he was acutely aware that history had a humiliating habit of repeating itself. He recalled a storm off Helgoland when he had lost contact with his friend aboard the gun-brig Tracker. He had later been overwhelmed by Danish gun-boats, wounded and compelled to surrender, and the ship in which Drinkwater sailed had been wrecked upon the reefs off Helgoland itself. [See Under False Colours.]

He discarded the unpleasant memory, choking off the train of reminiscence as it threatened to overwhelm him. The past was past and could not, in truth, be reproduced or resurrected. He stared out into the hideously noisy darkness, aware that the motion of the ship had changed. The sea no longer roared up astern in precipitous and tumbling ridges from which Andromeda flew headlong. Now the crests had gone and, as he craned his head round, he felt the stinging impact of sodden air, the dissolution of those very wavetops into an aqueous vapour that filled the air they breathed.

Looking up he saw the night was not so dark: a pallid, spectral mist flew about them, streaming down wind with the velocity of a pistol shot, it seemed, so that the masts and rigging were discernibly black again, yet limned in with a faint and tenuous chiaroscuro. For a moment he thought it was St Elmo's fire, but there was no luminosity in it — it was merely the effect of salt water torn from the surface of the sea and carried along by the extreme violence of the wind.

A man could not face this onslaught, for it excoriated the skin and stung even squinting eyes. It not only made manifest the frigate's top-hamper, it also carried moisture into every corner. Running before even so severe a storm, Andromeda's decks had remained dry. Hardly a patter of spray had hissed over the rail, but now, in the back eddies and arabesque fantasies of air rushing over the irregularities of her upper-works and deck fittings, the sodden air flew everywhere. In minutes Drinkwater's cloak was soaked, as though he had been deluged with a green sea; and while hitherto the wind had not seemed excessively cold, there now struck a numbing chill.

He tried to imagine what it would be like for Quilhampton aboard Kestrel. The cutter's low freeboard and counter-stern would have made her prey to a pooping sea. If she still swam out there somewhere astern, Quilhampton would have hove her to, he was sure of that. She hove to fairly comfortably, Drinkwater remembered.

Somewhere, distant in the booming night, the ship's bell tolled the passing hours. The incongruity of the faultless practice of naval routine in such primeval conditions struck no one on the deck of the labouring British frigate. Such routine formed their lifeline to sanity, to the world of order and purpose, of politics and war, and so it went on in its own inexorable way as did the watch changes. The blear-eyed, shivering men emerged on to the wet deck to relieve their soaked and tired shipmates who slid below in the futile hope that some small comfort awaited them in their hammocks. Watch change followed watch change as the routine plodded through the appalling night and, in the end, triumphed.

For dawn brought respite, and a steady easing of the wind, and found Drinkwater asleep, unrested, half severed by the downhaul. He staggered and gasped as he woke and Huke gave him his hand.

'God's bones!' he groaned. The furrow caused by the lashing had bruised his ribs and he gasped as he drew breath.

'Are you able to stand, sir?' Huke's expression of concern was clear in the dawn's light. Even as returning circulation caused him a slow agony and brought tears to Drinkwater's eyes, he found some satisfaction in the knowledge. He had won Huke over.

'Damn stupid thing to do,' Drinkwater managed, gradually mastering himself as the pain eased. 'How's the ship?'

'When I heard you had been up all night I came to report. I've had a look round. She's tight enough, four feet of water in the well, but the watch are dealing with that now. One seaman sprained an ankle, but he'll mend.'

'Is the surgeon competent?' Drinkwater asked.

'It would appear so, by all accounts. He's a young fellow, by the name of Kennedy. Scutdebutt has it that he had to leave Bath in a hurry. Something about a jealous husband. He's full of fashionable cant and thinks himself the equal of a physician, but he does well enough. At least Bath taught him plenty about clap and the lues.' Huke dismissed the world of the ton with contempt. Drinkwater liked him the more. He began to pace the deck, Huke falling in alongside of him. Every moment the light grew stronger.

'Odd, ain't it, that hurricane last night knocked the sea down so fast, there'll be little swell today if the wind continues to drop.'

'Did you look at the glass this morning?' Drinkwater asked.

'Steadied up.'

'Good. I'm concerned about the Kestrel.'

'She'll fetch the rendezvous at Utsira. We're almost certainly bound to be there before her.'

'Yes, you are very probably right.' There was a reassuring conviction in Huke's words. 'Yes, you're right. Nevertheless…’

'Don’t concern yourself, sir. I'll have the t'gallant masts sent up again after breakfast and a lookout posted aloft.'

Very well.' They walked on a little. Then Drinkwater remarked, 'She's a lot easier now.'

It was relative, of course. The ship still scended and the dying sea surged alongside her hurrying hull.

'Shall I let fall the forecourse and set the tops'ls?'

'No, let us wait for full daylight and assure ourselves that Kestrel ain't in sight before we crack on sail.'

Drinkwater felt much better with a bellyful of burgoo and a pot of hot coffee inside him. Huke, he had learned during their morning walk, prescribed hot chocolate for the wardroom, said it gave the young layabouts a 'fizzing start to the day'. Apparently the idea originated with Kennedy, but Huke had tried it and endorsed it, to the disgust of several of the younger officers. Drinkwater had promised he would try it himself, but not this morning. After so miserable and worrying a night, he wanted the comfort of the familiar and had, in any case, brought a quantity of good coffee aboard in his otherwise meagre and hastily purchased cabin stores.

Mr Templeton joined him for a cup as he finished breakfast. The poor man looked terrible and stared unhappily at the rapid rise and fall of the sea astern, visible now that Drinkwater had had the shutters lowered. Templeton had been prostrated by sea-sickness before they passed the Isle of May, and last night had reduced him to a shadow.

'If it is any consolation, Mr Templeton,' Drinkwater said, waving him to a chair, 'the storm last night was one of the most severe I have experienced, certainly for the violence of the wind.'

'I scarcely feel much better for the news, sir, but thank you for your encouragement.' And, seeing Drinkwater smile, he added, 'I never imagined ... never imagined…'

'Well, buck up,' Drinkwater said with a cheeriness he did not truly feel. 'We have lost contact with the Kestrel, but perhaps we shall have news of her before nightfall. Just thank your lucky stars that it was over so soon; I've known weather like that last for a week. Today promises to be different.' Drinkwater grabbed the table as Andromeda heeled to leeward and drove her bowsprit at the sea-bed.

'You mean this is a moderation?'

'Oh my goodness, yes! Why, you should have been in the old Patrician with me when we fell foul of a typhoon in the China Sea ...'

But Drinkwater's consoling reminiscence was cut short by a short, sharp rumble that was itself terminated by a shuddering crash.

Drinkwater knew instantly what the noise was, for it was followed by a further rumbling and crash as Andromeda rolled easily back to starboard. He was out of his chair and halfway to the door before Templeton had recovered from this further shock.

'Gun adrift!' snapped Drinkwater by way of explanation as he flung open the cabin door and the noise of turmoil flooded in further to assault the already affronted Templeton. Rising unsteadily, he followed the captain, but waited on the cabin threshold. Beside him the marine sentry fidgeted uncomfortably.

'Number seven gun,' he muttered confidentially to the captain's clerk. The significance of the remark, if it had any, was lost on Templeton. He did not know that the guns in the starboard battery were, by convention, numbered oddly. Moreover, the perspective of the gun deck allowed him to see little. The receding twin rows of bulky black cannon breeches, with their accompanying ropework, blocks, shot garlands and over­head rammers, worms and sponges, looked much as normal. It was always a crowded space, and if there were more men loitering about than usual, a cause was not obvious. His view, it was true, was obscured by the masts, the capstans, stanchions, and so forth, but the marine's confident assertion meant nothing to him and gave him no clue.

And then the tableau before him dissolved. The frigate's lazy counter-roll scattered the group of men. With shouts and cries they spread asunder, leaping clear of something which, Templeton could see now, was indeed a loose cannon. The lashings which normally held it tight, with its muzzle elevated and lodged against the lintel of its gun-port, seemed to have given way and parted.

This had caused the gun to roll inboard, as though recoiling beyond the constraints of its breechings. It had fetched up against one of the stanchions, a heavy vertical timber supporting the deck above. Here it had slewed, perhaps due to one of its training tackles fouling, but this had caused it to swing from right angles to the ship's fore and aft axis, thus giving it greater range to trundle threateningly up and down. Its two tons of avoirdupois had already destroyed a lifted grating, splintered half a dozen mess kids, buckets and benches, and split the heavy vertical timber of the after bitts.

As Andromeda heaved over a sea, the malevolent mass began to move aft, gaining a steady momentum that caused Templeton, well out of its line of advance, to flinch involuntarily. As the deck rocked, this slowed and then went into reverse, but by now the forces of order were mustered. Templeton could see Captain Drinkwater and Lieutenant Huke (a dour but competent soul, Templeton thought), the marine sergeant and Greer, an active boatswain's mate who had befriended Templeton in an odd kind of way and seemed willing to answer any of Templeton's technical questions. He had asked them at first of Mosse, but that dapper young officer did not conceive his duty to be the instructing of a mere clerk. Greer had overheard the exchange, made in Leith Road before the onset of sea-sickness, and volunteered himself as a 'sea-daddy.'

Templeton watched fascinated as ropes appeared, sinuous lines of seamen running to keep them clear of fouling as, in a moment of temporary equilibrium, someone shouted:

'Now!'

And the errant gun was miraculously and suddenly over­whelmed. A knot of officers remained round the gun, Drinkwater among them. Templeton was childishly gleeful. He felt less queasy, slightly happier with his lot. The swift, corporate response had impressed him. Men drew back grinning with satisfaction, and although the 12-pounder stared the length of the gun deck, it was held unmoving in a web of rope, even when Andromeda tested the skill of her company by kicking her stern in the air and then plunging it into the abyss.

'Like Gulliver upon the Lilliputian beach,' he muttered to himself.

'Like 'oo, sir?' the marine beside him asked.

'Like Gulliver ...' he repeated, before seeing the ludicrous waste of the remark.

From behind him came the crash of crockery. He turned and looked back into the cabin. Coffee pot, cups and saucers lay smashed on the chequer-painted canvas saveall.

'Cap'n's china, sir,' said the marine unnecessarily.

'Oh dear…'

Templeton retreated into the cabin and stood irresolute above the slopping mess, then Frampton, the captain's servant, with much clucking of his tongue, appeared with a cloth.

'I don't know what Cap'n Pardoe'll say. We've only the pewter pot left,' he grumbled.

'Get out!' Templeton swung round to find Drinkwater in the doorway. The captain's face was strangely set. He shut the door and strode aft, putting his right hand on the aftermost beam, resting his head on his arm and staring astern. The servant swiftly vanished and Templeton himself hesitated; but it was clear the captain did not mean him. Templeton averted his eyes from the heave and suck of the wake and turned his gaze inboard. He admired again the rather fine painting of Mrs Drinkwater which the captain had hung the previous afternoon. He felt a return of his nausea and fought to occupy his mind with something else.

'Is ... is something the matter, sir? I, um, thought the taming of the gun accomplished most expertly, sir.'

Drinkwater remained unmoving, braced against the ship's motion. 'Did you now; how very condescending of you.' Templeton considered the captain might have been speaking through clenched teeth. Was this another sea-mystery? Was the captain himself suffering from mal de mer?

Templeton had reached this fascinating conclusion when the door opened once more and Huke strode in. He was carrying a short length of thick brown rope.

'Well?' Drinkwater turned. 'What d'you think?'

Huke held the rope out. 'There's no doubt, sir. Cut two-thirds through and the rest left to nature. Thank God it didn't part six hours earlier.'

And it slowly dawned upon Mr Templeton that the breaking adrift of the cannon had been no accident, but a deliberate act of sabotage.

'That is', he said, intruding into the exchange of looks of his two superiors, 'a most prejudicial circumstance, is it not?'