Bolitho looked at him. Allday was quite right. Before, they had been kept too busy after a sea fight to brood or to find pain in misgivings. He saw Herrick. The captain. The man who really counted just now.
Allday sighed. 'They did proudly, all the same. There's a different air in the ship.'
Bolitho walked slowly aft to the taffrail, letting the wind explore his stained clothes and aching limbs like a tonic.
Harebell was tacking across the. larboard quarter, very clean and bright in the glare.
He pulled out his watch. The whole battle had taken less than two hours. Some corpses drifted astern, pale- faced in the clear water, and he guessed they were some of the French boarders who had fallen in the attack. And what of their own bill? How many lay dying or awaiting burial?
Two seamen ran along the poop, marlin spikes in their hands as they peered round for ropes which needed repair. For them it was over. For now. They chatted to each other, thankful to be whole, grateful to be alive.
Bolitho watched them in silence. Perhaps Herrick was right. About people in England who did not spare a thought for men like this.
He nodded to the two seamen as he strode to the ladder. If it were the case, he decided, then it was their loss. For men such as these were worth a thought, and much more beside.
8. Aftermath
JOSHUA MOFFITT, the commodore's personal clerk, tapped his teeth with a pen and waited as Bolitho leaned back at his desk and took another swallow of coffee.
Bolitho let the strong black coffee explore his stomach, and tried to concentrate his mind on the report he was dictating for the admiral. If it would ever be sent. If it would ever be read.
He knew Moffitt was watching him but was almost used to his strange opaque stare by now. In the sleeping cabin he could hear Ozzard, his servant, making up the cot, his feet barely audible on the deck, and wondered at the fates which had made these two men fill their present roles. It would be better for them both if they were reversed, he thought. Ozzard, who attended his daily wants, from shaving water to a clean shirt. had been, it was said, a lawyer's clerk. He certainly had education, more than some of the officers. Moffitt, on the other hand, whose duties involved the careful writing of every order and despatch, of noting down each of Bolitho's personal signals and instructions for the other captains in the squadron, was a product of the slums. He had wispy grey hair and glazed staring eyes which peered out from his parchment face like those of a man near to death. Or, as Allday had remarked unsympathetically, 'I’ve seen better looking rogues dangling on a gallows!'
From the little he had been able to discover, Bolitho had learned that Moffitt had been in a debtors' jail, awaiting transportation to the new penal colony at Botany Bay. A hopeful lieutenant with a court's warrant for encouraging recruitment to His Majesty's Navy as a direct substitute for transportation to the other side of the world, had arrived at the jail, and with several others Moffitt had begun a new life. His first ship had been an eighty-gun two-decker, and in a brief skirmish off Ushant her captain's clerk had been killed by a stray musket ball. Moffitt had used the opportunity well, and had made yet one more change in his affairs by assuming the dead man's duties. Transferred to Lysander at Spithead, he had been ready and willing to offer himself as a commodore's clerk, unless or until a better fitted person could be found. The rush to get the ship ready for sea and complete all repairs in time to receive Bolitho's broad pendant had allowed Moffitt to slip into his new role with barely a ripple.
Bolitho looked into his cup. It was only too easy to send Ozzard to make fresh coffee. It was one of his weaknesses. But he would stick to his rule and try to eke out his supply as long as possible.
He heard the insistent thud of hammers and the rasp of saws. The work of repairing the damage was still going on without a break. This was the morning of the fourth day after the battle. Lysander, with the sloop and the prize in company, had continued in a slow north-easterly crawl, the hands turned-to until there was no proper light in which to work, to get her ready to fight again when required.
In his mind's eye he could see the chart when he had examined it before his meagre breakfast. They had been forced to maintain a very slow progress. Tattered sails had had to be sent down from aloft for repair or replacement from their stocks. The jib boom had been almost entirely refashioned after its thrusting collision with the French seventy-four, and he could join with Herrick's report in complimenting Tuke, the carpenter, for his energies and devotion to perfection.
Herrick quite rightly had written well of Lieutenant Veitch. The third lieutenant had controlled the gunnery throughout the battle, but more than that, he had decided, without calling for permission or advice, to double-shot some of his guns to help the carronade' s attack on one of the enemy ships. Doubleshotting was a risky thing under perfect conditions and with experienced seamen. Yet Veitch had man-aged to keep his head enough to select such men from disengaged guns and use the bombardment to maximum effect. Midshipman Luce, Yeo, the boatswain, and Major Leroux, all had been placed on the captain's record for Bolitho's approval.
On the other side of the coin, Lysander had lost thirteen dead, either in the battle or later of their wounds. The surgeon had reported another five who might die at any moment, and ten who would almost certainly be fit for duty with any kind of luck.
The enemy had probably lost far more, as well as the hurt of being driven off by a single ship. But where men were concerned it was of little comfort. They had weeks, perhaps months yet to endure without additional support. Muscle and bone were more important than hemp and oak frames, and men themselves more vital than all besides. He tried not to think of his own report, as yet unfinished at Moffitt's bony elbow.
The clerk asked, 'Will we continue, sir?' His voice, like the man, was thin and scratchy. His entry in the muster book described him as being aged thirty-eight. He looked nearer sixty.
Bolitho eyed him gravely. 'Where did we get to?'
The pen moved across the papers. 'During the action the ship was under control the whole time, and only when entangled with the second French vessel's rigging was she forced to lose way. 'The opaque eyes were level again. 'sir?'
Bolitho stood up and walked to the quarter gallery, his hands behind his back. He could not keep Herrick's face out of his thoughts. In the battle, at the moment when a collision had shown itself unavoidable. That was the moment. It stood out even above the thunder of gunfire, the awful cries, the twisting scarlet patterns around the wheel. In those vital minutes Herrick had hesitated. Worse than that, at a time when the French had taken the initiative, and might have used it to attack the ship from either side, he had made a wrong decision. It was like hearing his voice, here in the cabin. The anguish as he had ordered Gilchrist to repel boarders. And it had been the wrong order. Defensive action at that stage could have broken Lysander's morale, quenched her peo- pie's
