“She should be with the Leeward escort, sir.” His confidence wilted under their combined attention. He added, almost humbly, “It was in orders, sir.”
Tyacke said, “So it was, Mr Daubeny. Now tell Mr Carleton to make the signal.”
Ozzard closed the door. “Concerning supper, Sir Richard-”
“It might be delayed.” He looked at Tyacke. “But we will take a glass now, I think.”
Tyacke sat again, his head still cocked to catch the muffled sounds from the world outside. The squeak of halliards, the voice of the signals midshipman penetratingly clear as he spelled out the signal to his men.
He said, “You think it’s bad, sir.” It was not a question.
Bolitho watched Ozzard approaching with his tray, his small figure angled against the movement of the deck without effort. The man without a past, or one so terrible that it clung to him like a graveyard spirit. So much a part of the little crew.
“I believe it may be our next move, James, albeit a foul one.”
They drank in silence.
Jacob Borradaile, the Alfriston’s commander, was not in the least what Bolitho had been expecting. He had been on deck to observe the brig’s smart performance as she had tacked this way and that, her bulging sails salmon-pink in the failing light as she had wasted no time in taking position under Indomitable ’s lee and sending a boat over the heavy swell.
Tyacke had remarked of Borradaile, a good hand. Came up the hard way. From him, there could be no higher praise.
As Tyacke escorted him aft into the cabin, Bolitho thought he had never seen such an untidy, awkward-looking figure. Although he must have been about the same age as Avery or Tyacke, he was like some gaunt caricature, with sprouting, badly cut hair and deep, hollow eyes; only the ill-fitting uniform revealed him to be a King’s officer. However, Bolitho, who had met every imaginable kind of man both junior and senior, was immediately impressed. He entered the cabin and took his outstretched hand without hesitation or any trace of awe. A firm grip, hard, like a true sailor’s.
Bolitho said, “You have urgent news.” He saw the man’s quick assessment of him, as he might examine a new recruit. “But first, will you take a glass with me?”
Borradaile sat in the chair Ozzard had carefully prepared in advance. “Thank ’ee, Sir Richard. Whatever you’re taking yourself will suit famously.”
Bolitho nodded to Ozzard. Borradaile had a faint Kentish accent, like his old friend Thomas Herrick.
He sat on the stern bench and studied his visitor. In his fist, the fine goblet looked like a thimble.
He said, “In your own words. I will see that you are returned to your ship before too long.”
Borradaile stared at a sealed gunport as if he expected to see the brig across the uneasy strip of water. Alfriston had been handled well, as if one man and not an entire trained company had been in charge. Tyacke would be thinking much the same, remembering his previous command.
Borradaile said, “It was Reaper, Sir Richard. A day out from Bermuda and she broke away to chase a stranger, a small vessel- brigantine, most likely. Alfriston was becalmed, sea like a mill pond, an’ our one remaining charge, a company ship called Killarney, was no better than we. But Reaper had the wind under her skirts and gave chase.”
Bolitho asked quietly, “Did that surprise you, so close to your destination?”
“I don’t think so.”
Bolitho said, “Man to man. This is important. To me, maybe to all of us.”
The hollow eyes settled on him. Bolitho could almost hear his mind working, weighing the rights and wrongs of something that might end in a court martial. Then he seemed almost visibly to make a decision.
“Reaper’s captain was new to the ship, his first proper patrol away from the squadron.”
“Did you know him?” Unfair maybe, but also perhaps vital.
“Of him, sir.” He paused. “Reaper had a reputation. Maybe he was eager to give her back something he thought she’d lost.”
The shipboard noises seemed to fade away as Borradaile related the hours that had decided Reaper’s fate.
“There were two frigates, sir. French-built, if I’m any judge, but wearing Yankee colours. They must have sent the brigantine as bait, an’ once Reaper changed tack to go after it, they showed themselves.” He ticked off the points on his bony fingers. “Reaper had run too far down to lee’ard to be able to claw back to her station. They must have been laughin’, it was so damned easy for them.”
Bolitho glanced at Tyacke; he was resting his chin on his hand, and his face was like stone.
Borradaile added, “I could do nothin’, sir. We’d barely picked up the wind again. All I could do was watch.”
Bolitho waited, afraid of breaking the picture in the man’s thoughts. It was not uncommon. A young captain eager for a prize, no matter how small, and eager too to prove something to his ship’s company. He knew of Reaper’s bitterness after the battle, when her brave captain, James Hamilton, had been killed in the first broadside. It was so easy to be distracted for the few seconds needed by a skilful and dangerous enemy. It nearly happened to me when I was so young…
Borradaile gave a great sigh. “Reaper came about as soon as her captain knew what had happened. I watched it all with a big signals glass-I felt I had to. It was madness, I thought. Reaper stood no chance, a little sixth-rate against two big ’uns, forty guns apiece was my guess. But what could he do? What would any of us do, I asked myself.”
“Did they engage immediately?”
Borradaile shook his head, his gaunt features suddenly saddened. “There were no shots fired. Not one. Reaper had run out some of her guns by then, but not all of ’em. It was then that the leading Yankee hoisted a white flag for parley and dropped a boat to go across to Reaper.”
Bolitho saw it all. Three ships, the others merely spectators.
“An hour, maybe more, maybe less, an’ the Reaper lowered her flag.” He spat it out angrily. “Without so much as a whimper!”
“Surrendered?” Tyacke leaned forward into the light. “Not even a fight?”
Alfriston ’s commander seemed to truly see him for the first time, and there was compassion in the hollow eyes as they noted the full extent of his injury. “It was mutiny,” he said.
The word hung in the damp air like something obscene, devastating.
“The next thing I knew was, a boat was sent from Reaper with some of the ‘loyal men.’” He turned to Bolitho again. “And her captain.”
Bolitho waited. It was bad, worse than he had believed possible.
Borradaile spoke very slowly. “Just before Reaper left her station to give chase there were men being flogged at the gangway. I could hardly believe it.” There was disgust and revulsion in his voice, from this, a man who had come up the hardest way of all, through the ranks, to achieve his own command. A man who must have seen every kind of suffering at sea, and brutality, too, in that demanding life below decks.
“Was he dead?”
“Not then, he weren’t, sir. The Yankee officers who had gone over to parley had invited Reaper’s people to join them. I heard from some of the men who were allowed away in the boat that it was the old cry of ‘dollars for shillings’-the chance of a new life, better paid and well treated under the Stars and Stripes.”
Bolitho thought of Adam’s Anemone. Some of her people had changed sides when the flag had come down. But this was different. It was not desertion, which was bad enough: it was mutiny.
“When they agreed, the Yankee told them they could punish their captain in the way they had suffered under his command. That’s what they were doing all that time. First a few of the hard men, an’ then it was like a madness. They seized him up and flogged him until he was in ribbons. Two hundred, three, who could say? Alfriston don’t rate a surgeon, but we did what we could for him, an’ his senior lieutenant who was stabbed when he tried to defend him. He’ll probably live, the poor devil. I’d not be in his shoes for a sack of gold!”
“And then?”
“They boarded the Killarney an’ stood away. I waited a while and then relaid my course for the Bermudas. I landed the survivors at Hamilton and made my report to the guard-ship. I was ordered to find an’ report to you, sir.” He glanced around the spacious cabin as if he had not noticed it before. “They could have taken Alfriston, too, if they’d a mind.”