A King's Cutter

Chapter Eleven A Time of Trial

 December 1796-April 1797

'Hold still!'

'Damn it Harry…' Drinkwater bit his lip as Kestrel slammed into a wave that sent a shudder through her fabric.

'There!' Appleby completed the dressing.

'Well?'

'Well what?'

'What effect is it going to have? My arm's damned stiff. Will I fence again?'

Appleby shrugged. 'The bicep was severely lacerated and will be stiff for some time, only constant exercise will prevent the fibres from knotting. The wound is healing well, though you will have a scar to add to your collection.' He indicated the thin line of pale tissue that ran down Nathaniel's cheek.

'And?'

'Oh, mayhap an ache or two from time to time,' he paused, 'but I'd say you will be butchering again soon.'

Drinkwater's relief turned to invective as Kestrel butted into another sea and sent him sprawling across Appleby's tiny cabin, one arm in and one arm out of his coat. In the lobby he struggled into his tarpaulin while Appleby heaved himself on to his cot, extended one leg to brace himself against the door jamb, and reached for his book. Drinkwater went on deck.

Eight bells struck as he cleared the companionway. The wind howled a high-pitched whine in the rigging, a cold, hard northerly wind that kicked up huge seas, grey monsters with curling crests which broke in rolling avalanches of white water that thundered down their advancing breasts with a noise like murder, flattening and dissipating in streaks of spindrift.

Spume filled the air and it was necessary to turn away from the wind to speak. As he relieved Jessup a monstrous wave towered over the cutter, its crest roaring over, marbled green and white, rolling down on them as Kestrel mounted the advancing sea.

'Hold hard there! Meet her!' Men grabbed hold-fasts and the relieving tackles on the tiller were bar taut. Drinkwater tugged the companionway cover over as the roar of water displaced the howl of wind and he winced with the pain of his arm as he clung on.

Kestrel staggered under the tremendous blow and then the sea was all about them, tearing at them, sucking at their legs and waists, driving in through wrist bands, down necks and up legs, striving to pluck them like autumn leaves from their stations. A man went past Drinkwater on his back, fetching up against number 10 gun with a crunch of ribs. Water poured off the cutter as she rode sluggishly over the next wave, her stout, buoyant hull straining at every strap and scarph. Men were securing coils of rope torn from belaying pins and relashing the gigs amidships. Shaking the water from his hair Drinkwater realised, with a pang of anger that fed on the ache in his bicep, that he would be cold and wet for the next four hours. And the pain in his arm was abominable.

The winter weather seemed to match some savage feeling in Drinkwater's guts. The encounter with Capitaine Santhonax had left a conviction that their fates were inextricably entwined. The ache of this wound added a personal motive to this feeling that lodged like an oyster's irritant somewhere in his soul. What had been a vague product of imagination following the affair off Beaubigny had coalesced into certainty after the encounter at Sheerness.

I cannot escape, Nathaniel wrote in his journal, a growing sense of apprehension which is both irrational and defies the precepts of reason, but it is in accord with some basic instincts that are, I suppose, primaeval. He laid his goosequill down. No one but himself had realised his assailant was not Bolton for they had found the wretch in the inn yard, cramped in the stable straw and he had been taken defending himself with a knife. The sergeant had drawn his own conclusions. Lugged unconscious aboard Kestrel, Drinkwater had been powerless to prevent the foot patrol from beating up Bolton before throwing him into a cell. In the confusion Santhonax had vanished.

Drinkwater sighed. Poor Bolton had been found hanged in his cell the next morning and Drinkwater regretted he had never cleared the man of his own wounding. But Kestrel was at sea when he recovered his senses and even then it was some time before the dreams of his delirium separated from the recollection of events.

Drinkwater kept the news of the presence of Santhonax to himself with the growing conviction that they would meet again. Santhonax's presence at Sheerness seemed part of some diabolical design made more sinister by the occurrence of an old dream which had confused the restless sleep of his recovery. The clanking nightmare of drowning beneath a white clad lady had been lent especial terror by the medusa head that stared down at his supine body. Her face had the malevolent joy of a jubilant Hortense Montholon, the auburn hair writhed to entangle him and his ears were assailed by the cursing voice of Edouard Santhonax. But now, when he awoke from the dream, there was no comforting clanking from Cyclops's pumps to chide him for foolish imaginings. Instead he was left with the sense of foreboding.

His wound healed well, though the need to keep active caused many a spasm of pain as the weather continued bad. In a perverse way the prevailing gales were good for Kestrel, preventing any grievances becoming too great, submerging individual hatreds in the common misery of unremitting labour. The cold, wet and exhaustion that became part of their lives seemed to blur the edges of perception so that the common experience drove men together and all struggled for the survival of the ship. Kestrel was now on blockade duty, that stern and rigorous test of men and ships. Duncan's cutters were his eyes, stationed as close to the Texel as they dared, watching the Dutch naval arsenal of Den Helder just beyond the gap between Noord Holland to the south and the island of Texel to the north.

The channel that lay between the two land masses split into three as it opened into the North Sea, like a trident pointing west. To the north, exit from the haven was by the Molen Gat, due west by the West Gat and southwards, hugging the Holland shore past the fishing village, signal station and battery of Kijkduin, lay the Schulpen Gat.

These three channels pierced the immense danger of the Haak Sand, the Haakagronden that surfaced at low water and upon whose windward edges a terrible surf beat in bad weather. Fierce tides surged through the gattways and, when wind opposed tide, a steep, vicious breaking sea ran in them.

Duncan's cutters lay off the Haakagronden in bad weather, working up the channels when it eased and occasionally entering the shaft of the trident, the Zeegat van Texel, to reconnoitre the enemy. Drinkwater's eyebrows were rimed with salt as he took cross bearings of the mills and church towers that lined the low, grass- fringed dunes of Noord Holland and Texel, a coastline that sometimes seemed to smoke as it seethed behind the spume of the breakers beating upon the pale yellow beach. It was a dreary, dismal coast, possessed of shallows and sandbanks, channels and false leads. The charts were useless and they came to rely on their own experience. Once again Drinkwater became immersed in his profession and, as a result of their situation, the old intimacy with Griffiths revived. Even the ship's company, still restless over their lack of pay, seemed more settled and Griffiths seemed justified in his suggestion that Bolton might have been a corrupting influence.

Even Appleby had ceased to be so abrasive and was more the jolly, easily pricked surgeon of former times. He and Nathaniel resumed their former relationship and if Griffiths still occasionally appeared remote in the worries of his command and harassed by senior officers safe at anchor in their line-of-battleships, the surgeon was more able to make allowances.

Drinkwater was surprised that in the foul weather and the stale-ness of the accommodation Griffiths did not succumb to his fever but the continuous demands made upon him did not affect his health.

'It is often the way,' pronounced Appleby when Drinkwater mentioned it. 'While the body is under stress it seems able to stand innumerable shocks, as witness men's behaviour in action. But when that stimulus is withdrawn, perhaps I should say eased, the tension in the system, being elastic and at its greatest extension, retracts, drawing in its wake the noxious humours and germs of disease.'