Richard Woodman - In Distant Waters

In a fury he had ordered the ship under weigh, only to recall that he had given Lieutenant Quilhampton shore-leave, and been compelled to fetch a second anchor. Poor Quilhampton. Drinkwater looked up at him in the maintop dictating some memorandum to Frey. They were as close to friendship as a commander and his second lieutenant could be, for Drinkwater's wife and Quilhampton's mother enjoyed an intimacy and Quilhampton had been Drinkwater's earliest protege. He felt a surge of anger against the Admiralty, the war and the whole bloody predicament of his ship at the thought of poor Quilhampton. The young man was wasting the best years of his life, crossed in love by the implacable exigencies of the naval service. Drinkwater wished it was he, and not Fraser, who was first lieutenant.

'Your steward enquires if you wish for some coffee, Captain?'

'Eh? Oh, thank you, Derrick…'

Drinkwater roused himself from his reverie and nodded to his clerk. Derrick's face had lost neither its sadness nor its pallor in the months since his impressment by Mr Mylchrist and the cutter's crew. Taken from the banks of the River Colne as he walked from Colchester to Wivenhoe, Derrick had protested his refusal to take part in belligerent operations with such force and eloquence that the matter had eventually been brought to Drinkwater's attention. So too had the strange offender. Drinkwater remembered the man's first appearance in his cabin on that last forenoon at anchor at the Nore, some five days after they had hanged Stanham.

'Take off your hat!' an outraged Lieutenant Mylchrist had ordered, but the man had merely shaken his head and addressed Drinkwater in a manner that brought further fury to the third lieutenant's suffused face.

'Friend, I cannot serve on thy ship, for I abhor all war…'

'Be silent, damn you! And call the captain "sir" when you address him…'

'Thank you, Mr Mylchrist, that will do… I think I know the temper of this man.' Drinkwater turned to the solemn yet somehow dignified figure. 'You are of the Quaker persuasion, are you not?'

'I am…'

'Very well… I cannot return you to the shore, you are part of the ship's company…'

'But I…'

'But I shall respect your convictions. Can you read and write? Good, then you may be entered as my clerk… attend to the matter, Mr Mylchrist…'

And so Drinkwater had increased his personal staff by a clerk, adding Derrick to Mullender, his steward, and Tregembo, his coxswain, and finding the quiet, resigned Quaker an asset to the day-to-day running of the ship. If he had entertained any doubts as to the man infecting the ship's company with his peculiar brand of dissenting cant, he need not have worried. The hands regarded Derrick with a good-natured contempt, the kind of attitude they reserved for the moon-struck and the shambling, half-idiotic luetic that kept the heads clean.

'Thank you, Derrick. Tell Mullender I shall come below…'

'Very well, Captain, and I have the purser's accounts fair-copied and ready for your signature.'

Drinkwater took another look round the deck and, as Derrick stood aside, he went below for a warming mug of coffee.

'Deuced if I understand the man.' Lieutenant Mylchrist tossed off the pot of shrub and stared with distaste at the suet pudding the wardroom steward laid before him. His eyes met those of his messmates, staring from faces that were tired from unaccustomed exertion. 'He's a damned slave-driver, though why he had to drive us . . .'

'Stuff your gape with that pudding, Johnnie, there's a good fellow,' said Mount, with a note of asperity in his voice. 'Ah, Fraser, here, sit down… Steward! Bring the first lieutenant a bottle!'

'Thank you, Mount.'

'Well, there's one consolation…'

'And what might that be?' enquired the chastened Mylchrist.

'We'll all sleep like logs tonight.'

'Except those of us with a watch to keep,' muttered Mylchrist.

'You make sure you keep it, cully, not like that episode in Leith Road where you neglected the basic…'

'All right, all right, there's no need to go over that again…'

'Maybe not, you see yourself as a victim today, but the plain facts are that you'll be a worse victim if you don't take the captain's point.'

Mount stared round the table. He was, with the exception of Hill, the oldest officer in Patrician's wardroom, something of a Dutch-uncle to the lieutenants.

'Well, what exactly is the captain's point?' asked Mylchrist sourly.

'That this ship is a bloody shambles and has no right to be.'

'She's no different from the other ships I've served aboard…'

'Bloody Channel Fleet two days from home and a couple of cruises in the Med. For God's sake, Johnnie, don't show how wet you are. Goddamn it, man, Midshipman Wickham was in the Arctic freezing his balls off before you'd heard a shot in anger…'

'Now look here, Mount, don't you dare patronise me…'

'Gentlemen, gentlemen, be silent!' Fraser snapped, and an uneasy truce settled on the table. 'Mount's right… so is the captain… it's no your place to strut so branky, Johnnie… the men say she's a donsie ship…'

'Poppycock, Fraser… the ship's not unlucky, for that I take to be your meaning. The trouble is we're out of sorts, frayed like worn ropes…' Mount smiled reassuringly at Fraser, 'and that business off the Orkney upset us all.'

'Captain Drinkwater most of all,' said Quilhampton, speaking for the first time. 'I think he feels the shame of that more keenly than the rest of us.'

Quilhampton rose and reached for his hat and greygoe. 'I must relieve Hill…' He left the wardroom and a contemplative silence in which they each relived the shame of the action with the Danish privateer. They had chased her for four hours, sighting her at dawn, hull down to leeward ten miles to the east of the Pentland Skerries. The Dane had run, but once it was clear the heavy frigate could outsail her in the strong westerly wind, she had tacked and stood boldly towards the Patrician . Unbeknown to the captain on the quarterdeck above, the two lieutenants on the gun-deck had relaxed, assuming the capture to be a mere formality once the intelligence of the privateer's turn had been passed to them. Despite the shot from a bow-chaser the Dane had not slackened her pace, but run to leeward of the Patrician , and the sudden broadside that Lieutenant Mylchrist's battery had been ordered to fire had been ragged and ineffectual, only succeeding in puncturing the privateer's sails.

Once to windward the Danish commander sailed his nimble vessel like a wizard. Though Drinkwater turned in his wake, the Dane beat upwind with an impressive agility. Whenever the Patrician closed the range to cannon shot, the Dane tacked, keeping a press of canvas aloft so that the momentary disadvantage he suffered while he gathered way on the new tack was compensated for by the attention the Patrician had to pay to going about.

With two hours to sunset the privateer had slipped into Sanday Sound, taking advantage of the weather tide that sluiced through the rocks, islets and Orcadian islands with which her commander was more familiar than either Drinkwater or Hill. In the end, as darkness closed over the Patrician and caution forced her to haul off the land, the Danish privateer had escaped.

It was not Hill, but Drinkwater himself who turned the deck over to Quilhampton.

'Well, James, you have the ship.' Isolated by the howl of the wind, Drinkwater unwound with uncharacteristic informality. He fixed the younger man with a perceptive stare.

'Sir?' said Quilhampton, puzzled.

'You have not spoken of it, James… the matter upon which you solicited my advice in Leith Road…' Drinkwater prompted, 'the matter of matrimony, damn it.'