Richard Woodman: In Distant Waters

Drinkwater found himself willing the man to stop, to submit to the Admiralty's omnipotent will and die quietly as an example to others, but Stanham was not going to oblige. The dark tangle of his blood-choked brain was roaring with the anger of betrayal, of treachery and injustice. The dark shape of his body set against the rolling scud seemed possessed of a protest from beyond the grave. Drinkwater cursed the Norwich informer, cursed John Barrow and his lack of compassion and cursed himself for bringing back such a secret from Russia that men still died for it.

Gradually asphyxia subdued the spasms. Stanham had given up the ghost. It seemed that a collective sigh, audible above the wind and the responding hiss of the sea, came from the Patrician's assembled company.

'Eight bells, sir.'

'Make it so and pipe the hands to dinner.'

The yellow flag fluttered down from the masthead as the four double rings of the bell tolled the hour of noon. Pipes twittered amidships and the men began to move below. Faintly similar noises could be heard from other ships. The rumble of voices grew as the men glanced upwards in passing forward.

'Another good man bin stabbed by the Bridport dagger, 'en…'

'No good'll come of it… 'tis bad luck…'

The mutter was drowned by the crash of the marines' boots as Mount dismissed his guard and reposted his sentries. Frey was bending over the swooning midshipman. Mr Belchambers was not yet thirteen years of age and his name was sonorously inappropriate for so small and insubstantial a figure. It was odd, Drinkwater thought, that men like Stanham had to be hanged while there seemed no lack of foolish boys to come and play at being men.

'We shall get under weigh the instant the wind eases, Mr Fraser,' Drinkwater growled as he turned below. 'I received my orders by the same despatch-boat as brought this…'

He held up the crumpled piece of paper.

'Very well, sir… and him, sir?' Fraser's eyes jerked aloft.

'Leave him for an hour… but no more, Mr Fraser, no more, I pray you.'

Above their heads Stanham's body turned slowly in the wind. Dark stains spread across his clothing and it was subject to the most humiliating ignominy of all; his cuckolded member was engorged with his stilled blood.

Drinkwater lay soaked in sweat, aware that it was neither the jerking of his cot, nor the violent motion of Patrician that had woken him, but something fading beyond his recall, the substance of his nightmare. Wiping his forehead and at the same time shivering in the pre-dawn chill, he lay back and tugged the shed blankets back over his aching body. The quinsy that had presaged his fever was worse this morning, but the terrors of the nightmare far exceeded the disturbances of illness. He stared into the darkness, trying to remember what had so upset him, driven by some instinct to revive the images of the nightmare.

And then with the unpredictability of imagination, they flooded back. It was an old dream, a haunting from bad times when, as a frightened midshipman, he had learned the real meaning of fear and loneliness. The figure of the white lady had loomed over him as he sunk helplessly beneath her, her power to overwhelm him sharpened by the crescendo of clanking chains that always accompanied her manifestation. As he recollected the dream he strove to hear the reassuring grind of Patrician's own pumps; but he could hear nothing beyond the thrum of wind in the rigging transmitted down to the timbers of her labouring hull. The big frigate creaked and groaned in response to the mighty forces acting upon her as she fought her way to windward of Cape Horn.

Then Drinkwater recognised the face. The white lady had had many forms in her various visitations. Though he thought of her as female, she possessed the trans-sexual ability of phantoms to appear in any guise. This morning she had worn a most horrible mask: that of the hanged man, Stanham. Drinkwater recognised it at once, for after the dead man had been cut down he and Lallo, the surgeon, had inspected the cadaver. It had been no mere idly morbid curiosity that had spurred him to do so, that day at the Nore ten weeks earlier. He had felt himself driven to see what he had done, as if to do so might avert some haunting of the ship by the man's spirit.

Drinkwater had seen again in his nightmare the savage furrow the noose had cut in Stanham's neck. The face above was darkly cyanotic with wild, protuberant eyes. In the flesh Stanham's body had been pale below the furrowed neck, gradually darkening with blotchy suggillations where the blood had settled into its dependent parts. This morning, beneath the horrors of the face, Stanham's ghost had worn the white veils which marked his apparition as a disguise of the white lady.

Full recollection brought Drinkwater out of himself. Unpleasant though the memory was, he was no stranger to death, or the 'blue-devils', that misanthropic preoccupation of naval officers forced to the lonely exile of distant commands. With an oath he swung his legs over the edge of the swaying cot and deftly hoisted himself to his feet as Patrician hesitated on a wave crest, before driving down into a huge trough. He half ran, half skidded across the cabin, fetching up against the forward bulkhead as the ship smashed her bluffbows into the advancing wall of the next sea and reared her bowsprit skywards. Drinkwater swore again, barking his shins on the leg of an overturned chair, and bellowed through the thin bulkhead at the marine sentry.

'Pass word for my coxswain!'

As he rubbed his bruised knee and swallowed with difficulty he finally remembered the true disturbance of the nightmare. It was not its recurrence, nor the ghastly transmogrification of poor Stanham, but the fact that the dream was always presentient.

He fought his way aft, across the dark cabin, and slumped in a chair until Tregembo arrived with a light and hot water and he could shave, passing the moments in reaction to the knowledge that came with this realisation. God knew that a great deal could go wrong in this forsaken corner of the world where there seemed no possible justification for sending him, even given the anxieties of the most pusillanimous jack-in-office. In the extremity of his sickness and depression he felt acutely the apparent abandonment of the only man in power with whom he felt he had both earned and enjoyed an intimacy. Lord Dungarth, once first lieutenant of Midshipman Drinkwater's original ship, had treated him with uncharacteristic coolness since he had brought the momentous news of the secret accord between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon out of Russia. It was not the only service Drinkwater had rendered his Lordship's Secret Department and Dungarth's inexplicable change of attitude had greatly pained him, combined as it was with the proscription against shore-leave and the enforced estrangement from his wife and family.

But these were self-pitying considerations. As the Patrician fought her way from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, he had gloomier thoughts pressing him. Presentiments of disaster were to be expected and, as he shuddered from his ague, he felt inadequate to the task the Admiralty had set him, not for its complexity, but for its apparent simplicity. It seemed, in essence, to be a mere exercise upon which almost any interpretation might be put by persons anxious to discredit him. So hazy were his orders, so vague in their intent, that he was at a loss as to how to pursue them.

To carry His Majesty's flag upon the Pacific coast of North America on a Particular Service , was all very high faluting; to make war upon Spanish Trade upon the said coast , was all very encouraging if one took as one's example the exploits of Anson fifty years earlier. But this was the modern world, and he was not allowed a free hand, being ordered to concentrate his efforts upon the North American coast, far from the rich Spanish trade routed to the Vice-royalties of Peru and the entrepot of Panama. Besides, to any British commander, the Pacific was haunted by the ghosts of a murdered Cook and the piratically seized Bounty .