The shadow of the eagle

boarded!' Men came away from the guns and helped themselves to cutlasses, withdrawing across the deck to where Ashton hurriedly mustered them while Frey turned back to invigorate the now flagging port gun-crews.

'Bear up, my boys, we can still blow their bloody ship to Old Harry!'

As Ashton led his men off, Frey's guns continued to engage L'Aigle's cannon muzzle to muzzle.

On the quarterdeck Hyde came into his own. In a few seconds, he had concentrated his lobsters into a double line of men behind which Drinkwater and Birkbeck could gather their wits and attempt to avert disaster. By passing messages to the steering flat, Andromeda might yet break free of L'Aigle's deadly embrace, but they had first to clear away the wreckage of fallen masts and throw back the wave of invaders.

Birkbeck's gaze ran aft and he clutched with thoughtless violence at Drinkwater's wounded arm. 'By God, sir! Look! There's the Russian!'

He pointed and Drinkwater, shaking from the pain of Birkbeck's unconscious gesture, turned to see above their stern the taut canvas of the Gremyashchi as she bore down into the action.

CHAPTER 18 The Last Candle

May 1814

Drinkwater felt the chill of foreboding seize him. The game was up.

He was conscious of having fought with all the skill he could muster, of having done his duty, but the end was not now far off. He saw little point in delaying matters further, for it would only result in a further effusion of blood, and he had done everything the honour of his country's flag demanded. Besides, he was wounded and the effect of the laudanum was working off; spent ball or not, it had done for his left arm and he could no longer concentrate on the business in hand. He was overwhelmed with pain and a weariness that went far beyond the urgent promptings of his agonizing wound. He was tired of this eternal business of murder, exhausted by the effort to outmanoeuvre other equally intelligent men in this grim game of action and counter-action. The effort to do more was too much for him and he felt the deck sway beneath his unsteady feet.

'Here the bastards come!'

It was Marlowe waving his sword and roaring a warning beside him. The first lieutenant had lost his hat like Birkbeck, and his sudden appearance seemed magical, like a djinn in a story, but it was a Marlowe afire with a fighting madness. Both his amazing presence and his words brought about a transformation in Drinkwater.

To strike at that moment would have resulted in utter confusion: Napoleon's veterans were after a revenge greater than the mere capture of a British frigate and the thought, flashing through Drinkwater's brain in an instant, compelled him to a final effort.

'God's bones! The game is worth a last candle ...'

But his words were lost as, with a roar, the boarders poured in a flood over the hammock nettings and aboard Andromeda. They were answered by a volley from Hyde's rear rank of marines who promptly reloaded their muskets in accordance with their drill. Beside Drinkwater, Birkbeck drew his sword in the brief quiet. The rasp of the blade made Drinkwater turn as the front rank of marines discharged their pieces from their kneeling position.

'Stand fast, Birkbeck! I promised you a dockyard post. Hyde, forward with your bayonets!'

Drinkwater had his own hanger drawn now and advanced through the marines with Marlowe at his side. He distinctly heard Marlowe say 'Excuse me,' as he shouldered his way through the rigid ranks, and then they were shuffling forward over the resultant shambles of the marines' volleys.

Only the officers had been protected by Hyde's men; as the Frenchmen scrambled over the hammock nettings and down upon Andromeda, they had encountered the upper-deck gunners, topmen and waisters, the afterguard and those men whose duties required them to be abroad on the quarterdeck, forecastle and the port gangway. At Drinkwater's cry to repel boarders, most of these had seized boarding pikes, or drawn their cutlasses if they bore them.

L'Aigle's party had not been unopposed, but they outnumbered the defenders and while some were killed or remained detained in the hand-to-hand fighting, more swept past and were darting like ferrets in their quest for an enemy to overcome, in order to seize the frigate in the name of their accursed Emperor. Hyde's marines had fired indiscriminately into the mass of men coming aboard, hitting friend and foe alike, aided by discharges of langridge from the swivel guns in the tops that now swept L'Aigle's rail and inhibited further reinforcement of the first wave of boarders.

All this had taken less than a minute, and then, after their third volley, Hyde's men were stamping their way across the deck, their bright, gleaming steel bayonets soon bloodied and their ranks wavering as they stabbed, twisted and withdrew, butted and broke the men of the Grand Army who had the audacity to challenge them at sea, on their own deck. They were all slithering in blood and the slime that once constituted the bodies of men; the stink of it was in their nostrils, rousing them to a primitive madness which fed upon itself and was compounded into a frenzied outpouring of violent energy.

White-faced, Drinkwater advanced with them, his left shoulder withdrawn, his right thrown forward. With shortened sword arm, he stabbed and hacked at anything in his way. He was vaguely conscious of the jar of his blade on bone, then the point of a curved and bloody sabre flashed into his field of view and he had parried it and cut savagely at the brown dolman which bore it. A man's face, a thin, lined and handsome face, as weather-beaten as that of any seaman, a face disfigured with a scar and sporting moustachios of opulent proportions and framed by tails of plaited hair, grimaced and opened a red mouth with teeth like a horse. Drinkwater could hear nothing from the hussar whose snarl was lost in the foul cacophony to which, hurt and hurting, they all contributed in their contrived and vicious hate.

The hussar fell and was shoved aside as he slumped across the breech of a carronade. The enemy were checked and thrust back. Men were pinioned to the bulwarks, crucified by bayonets, their guts shot out point-blank by pistol shot, or clubbed with butts or pike-staves, and then with a reinforcing roar Ashton's gun crews came up from the waist, eager to get to closer grips with an enemy they had shortly before been blowing to Kingdom Come with their brutal artillery.

Drinkwater sensed rather than saw them. It was all that was needed to sweep the remaining able-bodied French, soldiers and seamen alike, back over the side of Andromeda and across the grinding gap between the two heaving ships. Drinkwater was up on the carronade slide himself, trying to get over the rail one-handed. Frustrated, he put the forte of his hanger in his mouth, afterwards recalling a brief glimpse of dark water swirling between the tumble-home of L'Aigle and Andromeda. He leaned outwards and seized an iron crane of L'Aigle's hammock nettings as Ashton's men joined Hyde's marines and their combined momentum bore the counterattack onward.

Sergeant McCann had been the right-hand marker as Lieutenant Hyde ordered the marines to advance. They had only to move a matter of feet; less than half the frigate's beam, but every foot-shuffling step had been fiercely contested, and McCann felt his boots crunch unmercifully down upon the writhings of the wounded and dying. The pistols in his belt felt uncomfortable as he twisted and thrust, edging forward all the time, but they reminded him of his resolve.

Suddenly he was aware of movement on his extreme right. As the flanker, he turned instinctively and saw Lieutenant Ashton lead the gunners up out of the gun-deck. He grinned as his heart-beat quickened and Ashton, casting about him to establish his bearings and the tactical situation, caught sight of Sergeant McCann appearing in the smoke to his left.

'Forward Sergeant!' he cried exuberantly, engaging the first Frenchman he came across, a dragoon officer