Under false colours

Drinkwater swore with frustration, turning from the flogging canvas to stare again into the darkness on the starboard quarter, praying that on the beleaguered deck of the Tracker they would light another Bengal fire. But there was no sign of the flare of red orpiment and Drinkwater succumbed to a sensation of blazing anger as another stinging deluge swept the Galliwasp's deck.

'By your leave, sir,' he shouted at Littlewood, shoving past the captain and climbing into the main shrouds, suddenly glad to do something, even if the work in hand was not what was expected of a post-captain in His Majesty's Navy.

He reached the futtock shrouds before he felt the folly of his action come with a shortness of breath and a weakness in the knotted muscles of his mangled shoulder. The power of the wind aloft was frightening. Gritting his teeth, the tail of his tarpaulin blowing halfway up his back, he struggled into the top. Here, he found himself face to face with one of the Galliwasp's men who recognized him and made no secret of his astonishment.

'Jesus, what the bloody hell ...?'

'Up ... you ... go ... man,' Drinkwater gasped, 'there's work to be done.'

The mast trembled and the flailing of the torn canvas lashed about them. The air was filled with the taste of salt spray and the noise of the wind was deafening, a terrifying howl that was compounded of shrieks and roars as the gale played on the differing thickness of standing and running rigging, plucking from them notes that varied according to their tension. Each responded with its own beat, whipping and thrumming, tattooing the mast timbers and their ironwork in sympathy, while the indisciplined, random thunder of the rent canvas beat about them.

The men of Galliwasp's duty watch scrambled up beside Drinkwater, huddling in the top until they saw their moment to lay out on the trembling yard. Drinkwater found himself shuddering shamefully, regretting the foolhardy impulse that had driven him aloft. It had been a complex nervous reaction prompted initially by the need to do something for Quilhampton and his brig. Denied of the familiar catharsis of bawling orders to achieve results, he had sought to influence the Galliwasp's small civilian crew by this foolhardy gesture. There had also been the realization that from aloft he might obtain a better view, might indeed be able to see the Tracker and direct some means of alleviating his friend's plight from such a vantage point. But neither of these rational if extreme reasons were what truly motivated him: what he sought in the wildness of that night was the oblivion of action, the overwhelming desire to court death or to cheat it, to invite fate to deal with him as it saw fit, to submit himself to the jurisprudence of providence, for the truth of the matter was that he could no longer bear the burden of his guilt for the death of old Tregembo.

The folly of his ill-considered action came to him now as he panted in the gyrating top, clinging with difficulty to the mast as his body was flung backwards and forwards and the thudding of his heart failed to arrest the pitiful weakness that made jelly of his leg muscles, so that he quivered from within as he was buffeted from without.

Littlewood was shouting from below, 'Lay out, lay out!' and Drinkwater realized the master had ordered the barque's helm put up so that she eased off the wind and ran before it, taking the flogging remnants of the topsail clear of the yard. The men around him were suddenly gone, their feet scrabbling for the footrope, one hand clinging to the robands, the other reaching for the stinging lashes of the wild strips of canvas. Now they were mere ghosts, grey and insubstantial shapes in the gloom, laying out along the yard that seemed to lead into the very heart of the gale.

Drinkwater stood immobilized, unaware that he was the victim of mental and physical exhaustion. Not since the day more than two years earlier, when he had hidden in an attic in Tilsit observing the meeting of Tsar Alexander and the Emperor of the French, had he known a moment to call his own. The strain of bringing home the secret intelligence; the fight with the Zaandam; the killing of Santhonax, and the damage to Antigone; the row with Barrow at the Admiralty; the hanging of a seaman and the blight it had thrown on the outward voyage of His Majesty's frigate Patrician; the killing of the deserters beneath the waterfall on the island of Mas-a-Fuera; the loss and recovery of his ship and the consequences of their finally reaching Canton to make the fateful rendezvous with Morris — all seemed to have led inexorably to the terrifying necessity of murdering his oldest and most loyal friend. And to add to his guilt was the knowledge that Tregembo had sacrificed everything out of a sense of obligation to himself, Nathaniel Drinkwater.

While he could drown in gin the memory of what had happened, and play the agent at Lord Dungarth's behest; while he could avoid confronting the truth by dicing fortunes with Fagan or veil his soul with the mercantile intrigues of Isaac Solomon, his self-esteem clung to this outward appearance from habit. But now the gale had laid his nerves bare and drawn him up into the top by playing upon his anxiety, pride and weakness. Now it held him fast, exhausted, robbed of the energy or courage to lay out upon the yard and serve as an exemplar to the merchant seamen even now pummelling the torn topsail into bundles and passing gaskets to secure it. He wondered if they could guess at his fearful inertia as he clung to the reeling mast for his very life.

Why had he not reached the yard before this torpor over­came him? Why had he not dropped into the sea and the death he longed for? Why did some instinct keep his hands clenched to the cold ironwork of the doubling?

Quilhampton ...

The thought came to him dully, so that afterwards he thought that he must have swooned and lost consciousness for a few seconds, saved only by the seaman's habit of holding fast in moments of overwhelming crisis. Quilhampton's plight and his own deeply engrained and ineluctable sense of duty brought him from the brink of what was both a physical and a spiritual nadir.

Reeling, Drinkwater stared out to starboard where he thought Tracker might be seen, and he was suddenly no longer the supine victim of his own fears. The wind that had desolated him now returned to him his vigour, for he was abruptly recalled to the present with the sinister change in the wind's note. As he sought some sign of the gun-brig he became aware of the changed condition of the sea. It was no longer a dark mass delineated by streaks of spume and the roar of breaking crests tumbling to leeward. No longer did the sea rise to the force of the gale. Now it was beaten; the white breakers were shorn as the sound of the wind grew from the scream of a gale to the booming of a storm.

Beside him the mast creaked and with a sound like a gunshot the foretopsail blew out and the flogging of canvas began again, transmitted to the mainmast via the stays, a shuddering that seemed fair to bring all three of the barque's masts down. Below him Littlewood was bawling more orders and his men were laying in from the main topsail yard. Their faces, what he could see of them, were wild, fierce with desperation, excoriated by anxiety and the onslaught of salt spray which scoured the flesh and made looking to windward impossible. For an indecisive moment Drinkwater cast about him, conscious only of the vast power of the storm and the strain on the Galliwasp, but as Littlewood's men struggled over the edge of the top to go forward and try and secure the foretopsail, he recalled Quilhampton and tried again to make out the gun-brig in the surrounding darkness.

Littlewood was keeping his ship's head before the wind but Drinkwater was unable to see anything more than a small circular welter of seething white water, a tiny circumscribed world in which only they existed. He was aware too, that he was having difficulty breathing, that he could no longer cling to his perilous perch and retain the strength to descend the mast. Fearful of his own weakness as much as the wind's violence, he fought his way over the edge of the top, pressed into the futtock shrouds and impeded by the updraught of the wind. Like a fly in a web he struggled until he regained the comparative safety of the deck.

Littlewood had all hands mustered now, transformed by the catalyst of crisis into an inferno of energy. Unlike the complex arrangements on a man-of-war, with its chains of command extending from the quarterdeck into the nethermost regions of the ship, a merchantman's master was at once in supreme command but on an occasion such as this, driven of necessity to perform many duties himself. His mates and petty officers were also strained in the extremity of their situation, tailing on to ropes, heaving and belaying as they fought to subdue the flogging foretopsail and to brace the yards. Littlewood himself was struggling at the helm and Drinkwater crossed the deck to grab the opposite spokes and help him.

'Obliged,' shouted Littlewood. 'We've three feet of water in the well ... Did you see ... ease her a point, Captain ... did you see anything of the brig?'

'Nothing.'