Ричард Вудмен - Beneath the aurora

Frey looked puzzled. 'I'm sorry, Frey,' Drinkwater added, 'you ain't party to all the ramifications of this business. I will tell you all about it when we anchor in British waters.' Drinkwater smiled wanly. 'You'll have to possess your soul in patience until then, but suffice it to say the Danes were only acting as carriers, which may explain their indifference to the gold's fate. It was destined for Paris, not Copenhagen.'

'Ah, I see. Payment from the Yankees to the French for the arms being shipped into the American privateers.'

'Exactly so.'

'And kept damn quiet by those Danish officers in the know.'

'Yes.'

'I imagine there can be few of them left,' Frey said, 'judging by the carnage on deck.'

'No.' Both men were briefly silent, than Drinkwater returned to the matter in hand. 'You had better take Danks and four marines with you as a special guard. Keep Fisher, take Ashley and pick your prize crew, sixty men. We will weigh as soon as possible. Rattray Head is to be the rendezvous.'

You don't wish to tranship the specie aboard here, sir?'

Drinkwater shook his head again. 'No. The fewer people who know about it the better. It is safe enough in your hands. Besides, I don't want to wait a moment longer.' His last sentence was an excuse. The truth was, there was something obscene about the thought of tucking the gold under his own wing.

'I rather think you have made your fortune, sir.' Drinkwater shook his head again. 'I doubt it. I'll lay a guinea on it becoming a droit of Admiralty, Mr Frey, but you may at least have the commission for carrying it.'

And a brief gleam of avarice came into Frey's eyes, the first manifestation of mundane emotion since he had announced the death of James Quilhampton.

Mr Templeton looked up at the figure silhouetted against the battered remains of the stern windows. The seated clerk was shivering with cold and persistently glanced at the blanket forming an inadequate barrier to the open air which whistled with a mournful moan through the shot-holes in Andromeda 's starboard quarter.

Captain Drinkwater's silence grew longer, past the point of mere reflection and into an admission of abstraction. Templeton coughed intrusively. Drinkwater started and looked round.

'Ah ... yes ... Read what you have written, Templeton,' Drinkwater commanded.

'To the Secretary, and so on and so forth,' Templeton began, then settled to read: 'Sir, I have the honour to report …'

Head bent and stoop-shouldered beneath the deckhead beams, his hands clasped behind his back, Drinkwater paced ruminatively up and down the shattered cabin as Templeton's voice droned on through the account of the past weeks. He was compelled to live through those last hours in Quilhampton's company and forced to recreate from the spare words of his report the frightful minutes crawling through the hold in search of Malaburn. Finally Templeton concluded the details of the final action which culminated in the capture of the Odin as a prize of war.

'... And having, subsequent to a survey by Mr Jonathan Birkbeck, Master, condemned the Kestrel , cutter, as unfit for further service, her stores and guns having been removed out of her, she was, by my order, turned over to the enemy as an act of humanity in order that communication might be opened with Bergen and the removal of the wounded to that place be effected.

'Having taken in my charge the former Danish frigate Odin and placed on board a prize-crew, Lieutenant Frey in command, the said Odin did weigh and proceed in company with HBM Frigate Andromeda , leaving the Vikkenfiord shordy before dark ...'

'Very well. Add the date.' Drinkwater paused while Templeton scratched. 'Is that all for the time being, sir?'

Drinkwater had yet to account for the dead, to write their collective and official epitaph.

'Yes, for the time being. It is getting dark.'

'The evenings draw in swiftly in these high latitudes, sir.'

'Yes,' Drinkwater replied abstractedly. 'It is time we were gone, while this favourable breeze holds.'

'Mr Birkbeck says the glass stands very high and the northerly wind will persist for many days.'

'Does he now?' Drinkwater looked at Templeton as if seeing him for the first time in weeks. Templeton was not usually prone to such abject ingratiation. You are taking an uncommon interest in nautical matters, Mr Templeton.'

'Sir?'

The sarcasm struck Templeton like a whip and he turned his face away, but not before Drinkwater had seen the unaccountable effect his words had had. Nor could Templeton disguise the withdrawing from his sleeve of a pocket handkerchief.

Drinkwater was about to speak, then held his peace. He had been too hard on a man not inured to the fatigue of battle. A man of Templeton's sensibilities might receive hidden wounds, wounds of the mind, from the events of the last few days. For a moment Drinkwater looked at his clerk, remembering the rather supercilious man who had brought the news of Bardolini's landing that night at the Admiralty. Drinkwater felt the stirrings of guilt for, had he not insisted that Templeton sail aboard Andromeda , the wretched fellow might never have been subjected to the rigours of active service.

They had gone through much since, much that should have brought them closer, but Drinkwater felt a constraint between them; they no longer enjoyed that intimacy of communication which had marked their relationship in London. Something between them had diminished and failed to withstand the manifold pressures of life at sea. Perhaps it was merely the distance imposed by the isolation of his rank, and yet Drinkwater felt it was something more subtle. And with the thought, Drinkwater realized he felt an intuitive dislike of Templeton.

The dull boom of a gun, followed by another, echoed across the water. It was the agreed signal that Frey was ready to weigh, though it made Templeton start with a jerk.

'That is all for now, Mr Templeton.' Drinkwater watched the clerk shuffle unhappily forward, blowing his nose, bearing his own weight of guilt and grief.

Drinkwater threw his cloak about his shoulders, clamped his damaged hat upon his head and went on deck. He could not dismiss the unease he felt about Templeton, aware of his own part in the clerk's transformation. Something had altered the man himself, and Drinkwater felt an instinctive wariness towards him. It was a conviction that was to grow stronger in the following days.

The two ships stood down the fiord in line ahead, the symmetry of their sail-plans wrecked by battle. Andromeda 's jib-boom was shortened from her impact with the Odin , and both frigates bore an odd assortment of topsails on a variegated jumble of jury-rigged spars.

Already the high bluff with its fort and the burnt-out wrecks of the two American privateers had faded in the distance. They seemed now to have no existence except in the memory, though Drinkwater wondered how the Danish garrison were coping with the influx of wounded and the encumbrance of numerous Yankee privateersmen. He wondered, too, whether Dahlgaard had survived his wounds, or whether death had claimed him as well as so many others.

On either hand the mountains and forests merged into a dusky monotone, and the waters of the fiord, though stirred by the breeze, were the colour of lead. Even the pale strakes of their gun decks, yellow on Andromeda and buff on Odin , were leached of any hue; nor were the white ensigns more than fluttering grey shapes at the peaks of the twin spankers, for Drinkwater had forbidden Odin to fly her colours superior to those of Denmark while they remained in Norwegian waters.

'I dislike gloating, Mr Frey. You may play that fanfare when in a British roadstead, but not before.'