Under false colours

'Herr Thiebault is a very clever man, Herr Liepmann,' Drinkwater said slowly. 'I understand he must hold us hostage against your good behaviour.' Drinkwater accompanied this speech with a deal of gesturing and was rewarded by more nodding from Liepmann.

'Ja, ja.'

'Why does he want to bring in more English ships, the ships now at Helgoland? We know he is frightened of Marshal Davout ...'

Liepmann looked from one to the other. His tongue flickered over his lips and a faint smile followed.

'Ze scheeps at Helgoland have guns, no?'

Drinkwater nodded.

'Marshal Davout he like guns. Herr Thiebault vill get guns. Make money and pleez Marshal Davout. You understand?'

Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes.'

'Damned if I do.'

'It is ver' dangerous for you here. You must not stay ...'

Liepmann had his own game to play, Drinkwater thought, but it was essential that Galliwasp and Ocean escaped from the river before Drinkwater or Gilham made an attempt at getting out of Hamburg.

'We must wait, Herr Liepmann, until we hear from Helgoland that our ships are safe.'

'Ja, ja,' the Jew nodded. 'It will be ver' dangerous for you stay here. Zis is best place. When time come we take you out of Hamburg mit ze sugar.'

'Can you send a message to Helgoland,' Drinkwater asked, 'if I write it?' Liepmann nodded. 'Herr Nicholas has told me ...'

'Ja,' Herr Nicholas tells me also.' Liepmann threw a glance in Gilham's direction and pointed at a ledger lying on a shelf. Inkpot and pen stood close by.

'In English, Kapitan ...'

Drinkwater exchanged glances with Liepmann.

'It is safe?'

Drinkwater took up the pen and wrote carefully in capitals:

G AND W TAKEN OUT OF THEIR SHIPS BY FORCE BUT PRESENTLY SAFE ENJOYING HOSPITALITY OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. ARRANGEMENTS SET AWRY BY ARRIVAL OF MARSHAL DAVOUT. SHIPS DISCHARGED OUTWARD BOUND.

He paused a moment, wondering how to sign himself, and then added: Baltic.

Straightening up he handed the torn-out page to Liepmann. The Jew took the pen, dipped it in the inkpot and on another piece of paper began to write a jumble of letters, having memorized the crazy alphabet from Canto II of Dante. When he had finished the transliteration he opened the lantern and held Drinkwater's draft in the candle fiame. The incinerated ash floated lazily about the table.

'There is one more thing, Herr Liepmann. You should understand that it was never intended that more ships would come, only that they would pretend to come. Do you understand?'

'They not come?' Liepmann regarded Drinkwater with surprise.

'No. They were to have gone only to Neuwerk ... to look as if they were coming into the Elbe.'

'You do not wish to sell ze guns, nein?'

'No, only the greatcoats and boots.'

'Ach ... and ze sugar, ja?'

'Yes,' Drinkwater said, matching the Jew's smile, 'and the sugar.'

Liepmann had turned to go when Gilham, his mouth full of the food which he had been busy eating during this exchange, asked, 'Herr Liepmann, did you pay Littlewood?'

Liepmann turned to Gilham, a look of mild surprise on his face. 'Ja. I pay him goot ... also for your scheep, ze Ocean, two thousand thalers ...'

In the wake of Liepmann's departure Gilham grunted his satisfaction. With a wry look at his compatriot, Drinkwater helped himself to what was left of the sausages and bread.

He felt better with food inside him, aware that the winter's day, short though it had been, had passed slowly and been full of the uncertainties that kept a man from feeling hungry until actually confronted with food.

With a little luck they would be all right. A day or two lying low and then, when Galliwasp and Ocean were clear, Liepmann would smuggle them out of the city. Drinkwater was content to leave the details to the Jewish merchant. Davout would be settling in, receiving reports from the French officials and administrators, all of whom would be wary, and it would take even so dynamic a soldier as the marshal was reputed to be, a few days to decide upon what course of action to settle. There was no doubt that he had been sent to shut the gaping door that Hamburg had become in his master's Continental System.

'You seem to know a deal of what's going on,' Gilham said, suddenly jerking Drinkwater from his complacency and reminding him that if his real identity or position were known, then capture meant certain death.

He shrugged. 'It is not so very difficult to deduce,' he said with affected nonchalance, undecided as to whether to take Gilham into his confidence. 'D'you trust Littlewood?' he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

'I don't have much choice, do I?'

It was bitterly cold in the watchman's room and Drinkwater slept fitfully, waking frequently, the knotted muscles of his wounded shoulder aching painfully. Beside him Gilham snored under a blanket with a full belly and the sailor's facility for sleeping anywhere.

Drinkwater envied Gilham. He himself was desperately tired, tired of the burden Dungarth had laid upon him and tired of the interminable war. He had done his best and was no longer a young man. Now his shoulder pained him abominably.

He thought of his wife, Elizabeth, and their children, Charlotte Amelia and Richard. He had not seen them for so very long that they seemed to inhabit another age when he was another person. He found it difficult to remember exactly what they looked like, and found all he could call to mind were the immobile images of the little portraits that used to hang in his cabin when he was in command of a frigate and not cowering under borrowed blankets in a Hamburg garret.

Where were those imperfect portraits now? Lost with his other personal effects when the Tracker foundered and poor Quilhampton died, together with Frey and Derrick.

He tore his exhausted mind from horrible visions of his friends drowning, deliberately trying to recall the items of clothing, the books, charts and equipment he must have lost along with his sea-chest and the pictures of his family.

There was his sword and sextant, his journals and the little drawing case Elizabeth had given him, pretending it came from the children ...

Mentally he rummaged down through the layers of clothing in the chest. The polar bear skin, presented by the officers of His Britannic Majesty's sloop-of-war Melusine and there, at the very bottom, cut from its wooden stretcher, the paint cracked and flaking, another portrait, found when he captured the Antigone in the Red Sea, ten, eleven years earlier.

Odd how he could recall that portrait in all its detail: the beautiful French woman, her shoulders bare, her breasts suggestively rendered beneath a filmy wrap of gauze, her hair a la mode, piled up on her head and entwined with a string of pearls. Hortense Santhonax, now widowed, though an unmarried woman when he had first seen her ...

He closed his aching eyes against the moonlight that flooded in through the lozenge shaped window set high in the apex of the gable-end. It was all so long ago, part of another life ...