The commodore thrust his hands behind him.
“Make a signal as soon as she is anchored. Captain repair on board.”
The captain hid a smile. The mood was good. He had known times when he had made a dozen signals right in the middle of another ship’s last-minute manoeuvring. As if he had enjoyed the apparent confusion caused. There must be something special about this one, he thought.
With her topsails shivering to the regular crash of her eleven-gun salute to the commodore, His Britannic Majesty’s frigate Tempest continued slowly across the harbour. The glare on the surface was so fierce that it was painful to look much beyond the rigging or gangways.
Richard Bolitho stood aft at the quarterdeck rail, his hands locked loosely behind his back, trying to appear relaxed despite all the usual tensions of entering an unfamiliar anchorage.
How still it was. He glanced along his ship, wondering how she would appear to the commodore. He had taken command of Tempest in Bombay when she had been commissioned for the Navy, just two years ago.
The thought of the actual date made him smile, changing his grave expression to one of youthfulness. For it had been his birthday, as it was today. On this, the 7th of October, 1789, after making one more in a countless line of forgotten landfalls, Richard Bolitho of Falmouth in the County of Cornwall was thirty-three years old.
He glanced quickly to the other side of the deck where Thomas Herrick, the first lieutenant, and his best friend, was peering beneath the shade of one hand while he studied the set of the braced yards and the shortened shapes of the bare-backed topmen. He wondered if Herrick had remembered. Bolitho hoped not. In these waters, with week following week of disagreeable climate and persistent calms, you were all too conscious of the passing of time.
“ ’Bout five minutes now, sir.”
“Very well, Mr Lakey.”
Bolitho did not have to look round. In the two years of his command in Tempest he knew the voice and temperament of all those who had served with him for most of the period. Tobias Lakey was the lean, taciturn sailing master. Born and raised in the spartan reality of the Scilly Isles off the tip of Bolitho’s own Cornwall, he had gone to sea at the age of eight. He was about forty now. In all those years, in every sort of vessel from fishing boat to a ship of the line, there was little of the sea’s ways he had still to learn.
Bolitho glanced slowly along the deck, trying to recall all the other faces which had vanished in the two years. Death and injury, disease and desertion, the faces had come and gone like the tides.
Now Tempest’s company was much like any other in a vessel which had never touched a British port, and as mixed as the waterfronts she had seen in her voyages. Some were men who really wished to make the Navy their career. Usually they had signed on other ships in England and had transferred to any available when their own had paid off. They better than most would know that conditions in England, six years after the war, were in many circumstances far worse than life aboard a man-of-war. Here at least they had security of sorts. With a fair commander and a large portion of luck they could make their way. In their own country, for which many of them had fought long and hard, there was little work, and the seaports were too often full of the war’s cripples and those rejected by the sea.
But the remainder of Tempest’s people were a real meltingpot. French and Danes, several Negroes, an American, and many more besides.
As he looked at the men at the braces and halliards, the boat handlers waiting to lower his gig outboard, the swaying line of sweating marines on the poop, he tried to tell himself he should be content. He knew that if he were in England he would be fretting and worrying about getting back to sea. Trying to obtain a new ship, any ship. That was how it had been after the war. Then he had already held two commands, a sloop and his beloved frigate Phalarope.
When he had been given the Undine, another fifth-rate, and despatched to Madras on the other side of the world, he had felt only gratitude that he had been spared the fate of the many who daily thronged the Admiralty corridors or waited in the coffee houses, hoping and praying for just such a chance as his.
That had been five years in the past. And apart from a short visit to England he had been away from home waters ever since. When he had taken command of Tempest he had expected to be recalled to England for new orders. To be sent to the West Indies perhaps, to the Channel Fleet, or to the territory which was in dispute with Spain.
He looked at Herrick again and wondered. Herrick said nothing of his own views now, although he had once made them plain enough. Apart from his coxswain, John Allday, Bolitho knew of no other who risked his anger by such plain speaking.
It had all come back to him when Tempest had anchored at Madras two months ago. Even as his boat’s crew had made their desperate efforts to pull him through the angry surf without getting their captain soaked to the skin he had remembered his first visit. When he had carried Viola Raymond, wife of the British Government’s adviser to the East India Company, as passenger. Herrick had spoken out then to warn him of the real dangers, of the risk to his name and advancement in the one life he loved.
Automatically he touched the shape of the watch in his breeches pocket. The watch she had given him to replace one broken in battle.
Where was she now?
During his brief return to England he had gone to London. He had told himself he would not really try to see her again. That he would just pass her house. See where she lived. At the same time he had known it was a lie. But he could as easily have stayed content with her memory. The house, apart from the servants, was empty. James Raymond and his wife were away on the government’s business. Raymond’s steward had been offhand to a point of rudeness. Aboard a King’s ship a captain was second only to God, and many said that was merely due to seniority. In the streets and terraces of St James’s he ranked not at all.
He heard Herrick call, “Stand by to let go, Mr Jury!”
Jury, the barrel-chested boatswain, needed no advice about watching the anchor party, so Herrick must have sensed Bolitho’s mood and was trying to jerk him from it.
Bolitho smiled wearily. He had known Herrick since taking command of Phalarope, and they had rarely been apart since. He had not changed much. Stockier perhaps, but the same round, open face with those bright blue eyes which had shared so much with him. If, as Bolitho now suspected, his brief affair with Viola Raymond had made its mark in high places, then Herrick was being punished too, and without cause. The thought angered and saddened him. Maybe the commodore would shed some light on things. But this time he would not hope. He did not dare.
He thought of his despatches, of the extra news he would give Commodore James Sayer. He remembered Sayer quite well, and had met him in Cornwall once or twice. They had served in the same squadron on the American station before that. Both lieutenants.
With the echoes of the final shot hanging in the air Tempest glided the last half cable to her prescribed anchorage.
Bolitho said curtly, “When you are prepared, Mr Herrick.”
Herrick raised his speaking trumpet, his reply equally formal.
“Aye, aye, sir.” Then he shouted, “Man the lee braces there! Hands wear ship!”
The motionless seamen sprang into life.
“Tops’l sheets!”
Bolitho saw Thomas Gwyther, the surgeon, hovering by the larboard gangway, trying to avoid the hurrying seamen. How unlike the last surgeon Bolitho had had. He had been a violent, towering drunkard of a man. One who had let his passion for drink and the memories he had tried to contain with it destroy him entirely. Gwyther was a stooped, dried-up little man with wispy grey hair, whose frail looks were at odds with his apparent toughness and durability. He attended to his duties readily enough, but showed far more interest in plants and vegetation in whatever place the ship touched land than he ever did in humanity.
“Tops’l clew lines!”
The master said in his flat, unemotional voice, “Put the helm a’lee.”
Tempest, obedient to rudder and to the dying breeze, turned slowly above her own image, losing way, her decks even hotter as the last canvas was manhandled and fisted to the yards.
“Let go!”
Bolitho heard the familiar splash beneath the bows, and pictured the massive anchor shattering the stillness of
