but oddly colorless features and fairish brown hair as straight as rain.
The second U-boat attack came not long after midnight, about two hours into the middle watch. Again Matthew was woken by the alarm. He could roll out of bed and into his jacket and boots almost automatically now. Knowing what was coming did not make it better. In an instant he thought of going to where the prototype was stored rather than up to the bridge, but then Archie’s warning brought back some sense. To do that would give him away immediately. And it would then be only a matter of time, perhaps minutes, before Harper or Robertson, whichever it was, would kill him and put him over the side. During the battle with the U-boat would be the ideal time.
Instead he went with the other men, hurriedly. Feet were pounding along the narrow, corticine-floored, metal-walled passages and up the steps, boot soles clanging and scraping, all the way up to the bridge.
He got there before Ragland. The duty officer looked tense in the yellow glare of the lights, his eyes searching the rain-swept night, and the endless black waves around them.
“Bastards are bloody invisible in this,” he said bitterly. “The sooner we try this damn invention we’re supposed to have, the sooner we’ll have a chance! What the hell are we waiting for—Jerry to sit there in the middle of a calm sea so we can take a shot at him and see if we strike? Damn it, we can do that already.”
“Wish I knew,” Matthew said sympathetically. “Maybe it needs daylight to see the results? I’ve no idea.” That was an approximation of the truth. He did not know how they would have tested it to be certain of its abilities.
Further conversation was lost in the noise of gunfire, and it was several minutes before he realized it was not depth charges going off, nor torpedoes fired at them. It was a surface vessel opening up with its four-inch guns and the shells were landing only just short, the water shooting up in columns and falling back again. They were being attacked from both sides, surface and beneath.
They changed course and returned fire, orange flame blossoming from their guns. The noise ripped through the night, bruising the senses.
The next hours passed in a haze of chaos with smoke and flame so thick it choked, then ice-cold air hurting the lungs, then more guns again. Every now and then Matthew saw through the clearing smoke the silver trail of a torpedo or the pale gout of water leaping two hundred feet high as a depth charge exploded in the sea, or a shell fell wide and burst.
Then the shooting got more accurate. Shells tore into the decking, sending splinters of hot metal flying. One gun turret erupted in fire and there was a desperate scramble to get the injured men out. Matthew was sent with a message, stumbling down the gangways, choked with the acrid fumes of cordite and the smell of burning rubber from the corticine.
He saw smoke-grimed faces bent to guns, stokers heaving coal into the boilers, bodies gleaming in the red light of flames, skins almost black, other men injured, blood on their uniforms, eyes hollow with shock.
This time there was no conclusion, no strike of depth charges and wreckage spewed up and floating on the sea, no wait for bodies, just a long, slow winding down of tension and release of fear as time stretched out after the last burst of gunfire.
They had lost two men dead and thirteen wounded, most of them flesh injuries or burns. Three were serious; one would be fortunate if he survived. He had been in the gun turret that was hit.
Matthew was coming up from carrying a message to the ship’s surgeon, and on the way back up to the bridge, when he passed Robertson in the passage. For a few moments they were alone, the thrum of the engines loud, like a mechanical heartbeat, the air close, suffocating with the smell of oil and smoke and rubber, the swing and surge of the sea now so familiar they both adjusted to it without thinking.
Matthew was the senior. Robertson stood aside for him. He was broad-chested and heavy shouldered. His face was expressionless except for the illusion of lopsidedness created by streaks of oil on his nose and left cheek.
It was a chance that Matthew could not afford to pass by, little as he wanted to take it. He was exhausted as well, and he realized how physically afraid he was. He had just survived a battle and he wanted to escape and be safe, even if only for a few hours. He stopped. He needed to say something, provoke an answer. With every hour there was less time ahead.
“Are you all right, Robertson?” he asked. “Is that blood on your face?”
Robertson looked alarmed. He brushed off the smear then put his hand to his nose. His relief was palpable. “No, it’s oil, sir.”
“Good. Makes one wonder why I chose the navy and not the army,” Matthew said with a slight smile.
Robertson met his eyes squarely. “Why did you, sir?” In the narrowness of the corridor he was about two feet away from Matthew.
Matthew drew in his breath to answer just as the ship juddered and pitched, and Robertson lunged forward, throwing his arms out to save himself, and catching Matthew, pinning him to the wall.
Matthew lifted his knee to jab Robertson in the groin just as Harper came around the corner. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted at Robertson. He charged forward ready to attack him.
Matthew felt a wave of relief so intense he almost burst out laughing, he could feel it well up inside him, hysterical and absurd.
Robertson looked stunned. “Sorry, sir,” he said with alarm. “Suppose I haven’t got my sea legs as well as I thought.” He turned to Matthew. “Didn’t mean to hurt you, sir. Meant to go against the wall.”
Matthew did not believe him, but there was no point in saying so now.
“No harm done,” he replied, straightening up. “Thank you,” he said to Harper. There was no need to let him know what he had interrupted. “All a bit tired, I expect. It must be dawn soon.”
Harper stretched his hand out to look at the watch on his wrist.
“Yes sir, in about half an hour.”
Matthew stared at it. It was beautiful, wrought of mixed silver and gold, with a green line around the face. He had seen it before, when Detta had showed it to him as the gift she had selected for her father.
Matthew was standing in the bowels of the
He must get out of here, quickly, before he betrayed himself even if only by his shaking body or the sweat on his skin and his ashen cheeks.
“Thank you,” he gasped, his voice hoarse. “We must be well into the North Sea by now.” He nodded briefly and walked away, his legs like jelly, forcing himself not to run.
He went straight to the bridge and asked for permission to see the captain. It was refused.
“The captain gave me a particular duty to perform,” he said urgently, hearing the panic inside himself. “I have to report a conclusion. Tell him so, and do it now.”
Something in his manner must have caught the man’s belief. He returned and conducted Matthew up to where Archie stood alone, staring across the gray water, Cape Wrath to the south, the open North Sea ahead.
“Yes?” he asked.
“It’s Harper. I have no doubt at all.”
Archie smiled, his eyes brighter, something inside him easing. “Good. I’ll have him put in the brig. Well done. Now you can go and get some sleep.”
Matthew knew that it would be a long time before Archie himself could sleep. There was no one else to carry any of his burden. He was alone.
Matthew stood to attention. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Matthew slept easily that night.
He woke in the morning to the news that the Grand Fleet had been ordered to sea and the German High Seas Fleet had left harbor. For one idiotic moment, feeling the steel steps under his feet and the rail in his hands, he wondered if this was what it had been like on the morning of Trafalgar a hundred and nine years ago. There would have been the silence of wind and sail then, but the same tingle in the air, the unbearable sweetness of life bound
