Alexander Kent - The Only Victor

Jenour could barely keep up with him. Bolitho seemed tireless, as if his mind were breaking out of a self-made prison.

Bolitho added, "The enemy know we are about-they have all day to watch us. I intend to discover what is happening around the Cape where the other anchorage lies. I feel the remedy may be there, rather than a hundred-mile struggle from SaldanhaBay I do not know these captains here, and there is little time to do so. As you. are aware, Stephen, in my despatch to the army I requested that the attack be delayed."

Jenour watched the eyes, lighter grey now as he turned towards the open sea. Like the ocean itself, he thought.

He said, "But you do not believe that the general will agree?"

Bolitho clapped him on the arm like a boyish conspirator. "We will act independently." His face was suddenly introspective. "As this is a day for remembering Nelson, let us use his own words. The boldest measures are usually the safest! "

That night Bolitho sat by the stern windows of the cabin-which had once been used by no less than a governor-general, who had fled on board to escape the plague which had broken out amongst the islands he controlled-and watched the ships' riding lights with no inclination to sleep.

The air was heavy and humid, and as a guardboat pulled slowly amongst the anchored squadron, he thought instead of Cornwall, of the bitter wind on the night when she had come to him. Just over a month ago, no more; and now he was here in the shadow of Africa, and they were separated again at the whim of others.

Did they need his skills so much that they could overlook his contempt for them? Or, like Nelson, would they prefer a dead hero to a living reminder of their own failings?

The deck quivered as the anchor cable took the sudden strain of a faster current. Allday had not been very optimistic about shifting to the old sixty-four. The company had been aboard too long, pressed from passing merchantmen in the Caribbean, survivors from other vessels, even pardoned prisoners from the courts of Jamaica.

Like Warren, the ship was worn out, and suddenly thrust into a role she no longer recognised. Bolitho had seen the old swivel-gun mountings on either gangway. Not facing a possible enemy but pointing inboard, from the time when she had carried convicts and prisoners-of-war from a campaign already forgotten.

He thought he heard Ozzard pattering about in his newly-occupied pantry. So he could not sleep either. Still remembering Hyperion's last moments-or was he nursing his secret, which Bolitho had sensed before that final battle?

Bolitho yawned and gently massaged his eye. It was strange, but he could not clearly remember why Ozzard had not been on deck when they had been forced to clear the ship of the survivors and the wounded.

He thought too of his flag captain and firm friend, Valentine Keen, his face full of pain, not at his own injury but for his viceadmiral's despair.

If only you were here now, Val.

But his words went unspoken, for he had fallen asleep at last.

AN ONLOOKER, had there been one, might have compared the little topsail schooner Miranda with a giant moth. But apart from a few screaming and wheeling gulls, there was none to see her as she came about in a great welter of bursting spray, her twin booms swinging over to refill the sails on the opposite tack.

She leaned so far to leeward that the sea was spurting through her washports, rising even above her bulwark to surge along the streaming planking, or breaking over the four-pounder guns like waves on rocks.

It was wild and exhilarating, the air filled with the din of sea and banging canvas, with only the occasional shouted command, for nothing superfluous was needed here. Each man knew his work, aware of the ever-present dangers: he could be flung senseless against some immovable object to suffer a cracked skull or broken

limbs, or be pitched overboard by a treacherous wave as it burst over the bows and swept along like a mill-race. Miranda was small and very lively, and certainly no place for the unwary or the inexperienced.

Aft by the compass box her commander, Lieutenant James Tyacke, swayed and leaned with his ship, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping a slippery backstay Like his men he was soaked to the skin, his eyes raw from spray and spindrift as he watched the tilting compass card, the flapping mainsail and pendant while his command plunged again, her bowsprit pointing due south.

They had taken all night and part of the day to claw out of SaldanhaBay away from the impressive formations of anchored men-of-war, supply ships, bombs, army transports and all the rest. Lieutenant Tyacke had used the time to beat as far out as possible to gain the sea-room he needed before heading back to Commodore Warren 's small squadron. There was another reason, which probably only his second-in-command had guessed. He wanted to put as much ocean as possible between Miranda and the squadron before someone signalled him to repair aboard the flagship yet again.

He had done what he had been ordered, delivered the despatches to the army and the commodore. He had been glad to leave.

Tyacke was thirty years old and had commanded the speedy Miranda for the last three of them. After her grace and intimacy, the flagship had seemed like a city, with the navy seemingly outnumbered by the red and scarlet of the military and the marines.

It was not that he did not know what a big ship was like. He tightened his jaw, determined to hold the memory and the bitterness at bay Eight years ago he had been serving as a lieutenant aboard the Majestic, a two-decker with Nelson's fleet in the Mediterranean. He had been on the lower gundeck when Nelson had finally run the French to earth at Aboukir Bay, the Battle of the Nile as it was now called.

It was too terrible to remember clearly, or to arrange the events in their proper order. With the passing of time they eluded him, or overlapped like insane acts in a nightmare.

At the height of it his ship, Majestic, had come up against the French Tonnant of eighty guns, which had seemed to tower over them like a flaming cliff.

The noise was still there to remember, if he let himself, the awful sights of men, and pieces of men, being flung about the bloody litter and gruel of the gundeck, a place which had become a hell all of its own. The wild eyes of the gun crews, white through their filthy skins, the cannon firing and recoiling, no longer as a controlled broadside but in divisions, then in ones and twos, while the ship shook and quaked around and above them. Unbeknown to the demented souls who sponged out, loaded and fired because it was all that they knew, their captain, Westcott, had already fallen dead, along with so many of his men. Their world was the lower gundeck. Nothing else mattered, could matter. Guns were upended and smashed by the enemy's fire; men ran screaming to be driven back by equally terrified lieutenants and warrant officers.

Run out! Point! Fire!

He heard it still. It would never leave him. Others had told him he was lucky Not because of the victory-only ignorant landsmen spoke of such things. But because he had survived when so many had fallen, the lucky to die, the others to cry out their lives under the surgeon's saw, or to be pathetic cripples whom nobody wanted to see or remember.

He watched the compass card steady and felt the keel slicing through the steep rollers as if they were nothing.

He touched his face with his hand, feeling its roughness, seeing it in his mind as he was forced to do each day when he shaved himself.

Again he could remember nothing. A gun had exploded, or a flaming wad had come inboard from one of Tonnant's lower battery and sparked off a full charge nearby. It could have been either. Nobody had been left to tell him.