Richard Woodman - In Distant Waters

There was a second's hesitation and then they were yelling stupidly and throwing their arms in the air in acclamation. Drinkwater got down from the gun carriage.

'Very well, Mr Q. Lay me a course of nor'-nor'-west. Happily their experiences as subjects of the Tsar have taught them that there are degrees even of injustice.'

Drinkwater tapped the dividers on the chart and looked up, gauging his prisoner.

Vasili Zhdanov, one of the three men captured with the Russian brig, spoke English of a kind, having been in attendance upon his one-time master when that worthy had served as an officer with the Anglophile Seniavin. However, Zhdanov had been caught stealing and after a sound whipping had been sold to the Russian-American Company, so that he had found a kind of life as seaman in one of the company's trading brigs. Now the reek of him, and particularly of his Makhorka tobacco, filled the cabin.

'How do you know that the British ship Patrician is here?' Drinkwater pointed to the bay which lay far to the northward, on the south coast of distant Alaska. There were a thousand anchorages amid the archipelagos of islands that extended northwards from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, not least that of Nootka Sound, but this remote spot…

'I see… she come… Suvorov come…' replied Zhdanov, haltingly.

'Who is captain of Suvorov ?'

' Barin Vladimir Rakitin…'

'How many guns?'

Zhdanov shrugged; he was clearly not numerate. 'Do you wish to serve King George of Great Britain?'

'I fight with Royal Navy,' Zhdanov said with some dignity, but whether he referred to Drinkwater's proposed change of allegiance or to his own past history he was unable to make clear. Drinkwater looked up at Quilhampton.

'Split the three of them up, try and make them understand they can join us and swear 'em in. If they protest, you'll have to put 'em back in the bilboes…'

'Aye, aye, sir.' Quilhampton led the Russian out. Drinkwater opened a stern window to clear the air. The man reminded him of a strange cross between a feral animal like a bear, and a child. Yet there was something impressive about him, reminding Drinkwater of those vast numbers of such men he had seen encamped about the Lithuanian town of Tilsit a year earlier. Like patient beasts they had awaited their fates with an equanimity that struck him as stoic. Zhdanov had responded to his own autocratic proposal with the simple obedience that made the Tsar's armies almost invincible.

He looked again at the chart. There was logic in secreting a ship in such a place. It was well-surveyed, compared with the adjacent coast, a strange opening into the surrounding mountains, like a fiord except that its entrance, instead of being open, was almost closed off by rocky promontories. Between them, Drinkwater guessed, the tide would rip with considerable ferocity.

Inside, the fiord was deep, a single steep islet rising in its middle, beyond which there was a sudden, abrupt bifurcation, the bay's arms swinging north and south and terminating in glaciers. If Vasili Zhdanov was right, somewhere within those enclosing pincers of promontories lay Patrician .

Drinkwater opened the dividers and stepped off the distance, laying the steel points of the instrument against the latitude scale; more than a thousand miles lay between their present position and the lone bay which nestled under the massive shoulder of Mount Elias and the great Alaskan Range. He stared unseeing from the stern windows. So much depended upon their success. Where were Fraser, and Frey, the punctilious Mount or Midshipman Wickham? Were they prisoners aboard their own ship, or had they been held at San Francisco?

If providence granted success to this venture, he would return thither and force those corrupt time-servers, the Arguello brothers, to release his men. And force some measure of expiation out of that dishonourable dog, Rubalcava!

He felt his pulse beat with the mere thought of revenge and a wave of anger swept over him as he recalled the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Prince Vladimir Rakitin.

If, if only providence had turned her face upon him again, he might yet do something to retrieve the ragged flag of honour.

No matter how assiduously one studied a chart, the reality never quite conformed to the imagination. Assessment of the present landscape had not been helped by the unfamiliar topographical terms Zaliu, Mys or Bukhta rendered incomprehensible by the Cyrillic script. Neither was Drinkwater's familiarity with French sufficiently proficient to determine whether it was La Perouse or the Russian Kruzenstern who had named the places on the chart. What impressed him was the quality of the thing, manufactured as it had been half a world away in the Russian hydrographic office in St Petersburg.

He raised the glass again and raked the shore, seeking the narrow, half-hidden entrance and avoiding the scenic seductions of the mountain range that seemed to beetle down upon the littoral. It was stunningly magnificent, this chain of mighty peaks, shining with the sunlit glitter of permanent ice, like the nunataks of Greenland. And then he saw her, the black tracery sharp in the crisp, cool air which sharpened every image with more intensity than the most cunningly wrought lens. He knew instantly that the ship anchored beyond the low headland was indeed Patrician .

He shut his glass with a snap. 'Hoist Spanish colours, if you please, and call all hands to their stations.'

He had assumed the worst and formed his ruse accordingly. Patrician , he theorised, would be well manned by the enemy, despite his inclination to believe the contrary due to her remote location. Her own people would have been removed in San Francisco, so there would be no spontaneous rising to assist; art and cunning must, therefore, be his chief weapons. He sent below for the Spanish uniforms and saw to his side-arms long before the approach to the entrance. When he was ready he turned the Virgen de la Bonanza to the north-east and, ascending to the foretop, spied out the narrow strait between the guardian headlands. From that elevation he saw at once why the entrance was so difficult to locate from the deck. The island, which he knew lay within the bay, lay directly upon the line of sight when peering through the gap, so appearing to form one continuous coastline. Turning, he called down to Quilhampton by the helm, the course was altered and the bowsprit below him swung towards the narrows.

The schooner heeled, turning to larboard and bringing the wind fine on that bow and Drinkwater, surveying the entrance from his perch, felt the fine thrum of wind through the stays and the halliards that ran past him. The water ran suspiciously smooth in the gut, with darker corrugations rippling out from either side, corrugations which tore off into whorls and rips of gyrating turbulence, where unseen rocks or sudden treacherous shifts of current manipulated the violent motion of an ebbing tide.

'Deck there!'

'Sir?' Quilhampton looked aloft.

'I want a steady hand on the helm… there's a deal of broken water ahead…'

'Aye, aye, zur.'

Drinkwater smiled as Tregembo took the helm and then turned his attention to the narrows again. Their progress was becoming slower, as they felt the increasing opposition of the tide. The schooner crabbed sideways under its influence, unable to point closer to the wind. Drinkwater bestowed a quick glance at the anchored ship.

She was alone, alone beneath those great slabs of mountains which lifted into the heavens behind her, their snow caps sliding into scree and talus, tussocked grass and low, stunted trees which, on the lower ground that fringed the fiord, changed to a dark, impenetrable mantle of firs. And she was most certainly the Patrician .