Cross of Fire (10 page)

He gave a brief study of the wine cradled in the rope beckets just inside the door and a twelve-pounder at his left knee and another just past his cot. A breath of his cot: clean, no trace of powder, an emery starchiness to the sheets, a compass set into the wood above for him to read on his back. He slung his sack and entered the cabin. Dry, beeswax-scented air was just overpowered by the coffee pot sitting in its gimbal on the table and squeaking to and fro with the tide.

He tossed his hat beside it and stared out the slanted windows to the grey horizon and a picture of the crosstrees and furled sails of a dozen ships in the pool as if painted on the walls of a child’s bedroom.

He was home.

Even the sound of feet overhead and the hammering from the fore was comforting. The crash of the man stumbling through the coach shattered Coxon’s reverie, the reparation coming before Coxon could scowl.

‘My apologies, Captain,’ the young man made to salute, instinct over sense, forgetting that his hands were full.

His hat was under his arm amongst a large parallel rule and rolled-up charts sticking out from every angle like spines on a porcupine. The salute precipitated the clanging fall of brass instruments and notebooks and another profuse apology as the man bent to gather his detritus.

‘Most sorry, sir!’ More metallic pieces of him seemed to fall off like a clock flying open as it tumbled down a staircase.

‘I am most dreadfully sorry, sir.’

He bundled some of the tools and charts to the table with his hat which collided with Coxon’s and the coffee pot, agitating it across the table. He slapped his hand on it just in time for the save and just in time to scald his palm, which he now blew on and shook before handing it out to his captain.

‘Lieutenant Christopher Manvell, Captain! At your service, sir!’

Coxon looked down at the hand and watched it slowly withdraw as he left it hanging.

‘
You
are my appointed First?’ Coxon’s eyes dragged up the slender body of the man. A handsome if somewhat chalky face under queued auburn hair the shine and thinness of which gave the man a feminine appearance to Coxon’s mind, although it probably merely contrasted with his own coarse grey. The thick long eyebrows were dark and raised giving a permanently astonished look to the man’s face.

‘I am,’ Manvell said seriously. ‘Please forgive my brusque entrance, Captain.’

‘You did not knock, Lieutenant.’

‘No. Unquestionably I did not. For my innocence I did not expect you to be here, Captain, so soon. I had hoped to set up my charts in anticipation of your arrival.’

‘You are clumsy, sir!’

‘Indeed. But I am blessedly thin which has limited my propensity to disturb I find.’ He smiled and then pulled it back behind his lips as Coxon glared.

Coxon moved away to the window lockers, turned his back. ‘Take up your hat, Mister Manvell. Leave and enter again. Correctly if you please.’

Manvell backed from the room, sliding his hat from the table along with a divider which clanged like a dropped anvil behind Coxon’s back.

Moments later Coxon heard the faint rap and bid enter. Manvell slunk into the room; Coxon watched his first lieutenant’s dejected reflection in the diamond shaped panes.

‘Come in, man.’

Manvell stepped forward. ‘Lieutenant Christopher Manvell, Captain. Reporting for duty.’

Another rap from the other outer coach door, the official entrance for visitors where a cot lay for gentlemen not of the crew, botanists or political advisers and such, and where a stool and marine and a hanging lighted lantern indicated that the captain was within.

Coxon held up a hand for Manvell to be silent and called the party in. Thomas Howard swept through the door, his hat already neatly under his arm. His voice stalled as he saw Manvell.

‘What is it, Mister Howard?’ Coxon asked.

Howard looked between them both.

‘I . . . I merely wished to inform the
Standard
that I could not find Lieutenant Manvell, sir.’

Coxon introduced the lieutenant with an open palm.

‘It seems I have found him myself, Mister Howard. That will be all.’

‘Very good, sir.’ Howard clicked his heels and spun around out of the room, glad at that moment that he was not the First after the sight of Manvell’s flushed face and the mess of instruments and papers on the floor.

Coxon scratched his hair, smoothing it forward as he spoke, his concentration on the polish of his floor.

‘Now, Mister Manvell,’ his eyes flashed upwards again and Manvell jerked as if shot. ‘You wished to set up your charts for some account? Explain, if you please.’

Manvell gingerly bent to the remainder of the papers and brass and began to gather them up.

‘Yes, sir. I had hoped—’ he stopped as Coxon came down to help. ‘I had hoped that I might demonstrate my diligence to my duties to the
Standard
by comparison of notes of her previous endeavours and—’ He rose with Coxon, who passed back pencils, rules and an ivory compass card with a kindly look as if handing a dropped handkerchief to a blushing housemaid in the street.

‘You know, you may find that if you took the purchase of a barber-surgeon’s etui, such for the storing of probes, you might find your tools less liable to jump from your arms, Mister Manvell.’

‘Of course, sir. Very good, sir.’ Manvell carefully set the instruments down. ‘I believe I did have such an item but . . . made loss of it and since—’

‘Made a good splash did it?’

‘Quite, sir . . . and since such event I have found it generously sensible to lose only one card at a time rather than the whole suit, as it were.’

Coxon went for the coffee.

‘Sound reasoning. But perhaps you can explain to me why you need such a compendium?’

Coxon poured then held out the pot for Manvell, waiting for him to notice that there was only the captain’s cup at the captain’s table.

‘Well, man? Do you expect me to pour it over your hands! Fetch a
cup
!’

‘Of course, sir. Very good, sir.’

Manvell found a decanter and glasses behind a brass guard above the writing desk. Coxon grimaced as he measured a small shot of coffee into a port glass.

‘So what is all this?’ He waved over the sprawl of tools. ‘You are more mathematician than seaman, is that it?’

‘Oh no, sir, but accuracy in all things is the measure of how men’s lives are saved.’

Coxon bowed to that with his cup as it went to his lips.

‘But we are on an easy run to Cape Coast Castle, land in sight all the way. Are we not?’

The old instinct in Coxon scratched at his collar as he studied Manvell over the cup. It should be only Coxon’s knowledge of the pirate hunt; beyond the traversing to Cape Castle to resupply General Phipps with victuals and deliver post, all the crew should be ignorant. He trusted Howard; the boy had bled with him and that counted enough, but after feeling William Guinneys coil like a snake around him on The Island those years ago when Guinneys’ orders had differed, Coxon now preferred to sniff his food well before he ate. He had more officers to meet. He would test them one by one.

Manvell bowed. ‘Of course, sir. Perhaps I just wished to show off apace. I am aware that I appear unimpressive at first sight, Captain.’ Manvell gingerly passed the scalding glass of coffee from hand to hand and finally placed it down to cool.

‘Modesty and duty impresses me more, Mister Manvell. I am more taken by a horse of the field than one of the course.’ He passed his cup arm over the table. ‘You have two compasses here. Why?’ Coxon could indulge the young man a little.

Manvell picked up one wooden and brass box.

‘For variation of the compass, Captain. I mark one compass “A” the other “B”.’ He picked up the other compass and demonstrated the etched ‘B’ on its base to his captain, who had been at sea for over thirty years.

‘At the binnacle I compare the readings for all three and allow for the true north. I then take my reading of the vane outside on the chains – to allow for minimal disturbance from the movement of the ship and to be as low to the earth as possible – and take a reading for both sides of the vane so that there will be two observations for both compasses. After which I am able to ascertain that any fault that may be in the construction of the compasses can be eliminated and a true bearing calculated.’ He paused for some compliment from Coxon but he only refilled his cup with eyes more firmly on the pot than the instruction.

‘Very well,’ Coxon said. ‘But for Cape Castle we will use the rhumb lines of a Mercator projection. I have all the readings I need for such a course. Do you have Moll’s map of Africa?’

Herman Moll’s 1720 map was as yet the most detailed description of the continent. Gibraltar at its tip, part of Brazil at its left side and Madagascar and the Amirantes to its right. But it had no rhumb lines. The rhumb lines, the loxodrome spider-web patterns that criss-crossed mariners’ Mercator charts were paths for ships to tread. But the Moll map served more as a land map than nautical chart, its detail for the coast exceptional to this end. Manvell rustled through his papers until he found it.

‘Good,’ Coxon said. He put down his coffee and picked out of Manvell’s collection a parallel rule, the compass card, divider and pencil, then with a sweep of his sleeve like a broom sent the rest to the floor. Manvell jumped at the sudden crash.

‘Does that offend, Lieutenant? I was beginning to accept that such disturbance was common in my cabin.’

Manvell watched his compasses dance on the floor like dreidels. A thousand images of their new imperfections spinning through his brain. Earnestly his voice was shamed.

‘My apologies, sir.’

‘The map to the table.’ Coxon cleared his coffee to a safer surface as Manvell set the paper.

‘Now, with no rhumb lines, and just Moll’s single compass rose, I want you to chart me a course from Cape Vert point – an easy start for it sits on the fifteenth parallel, is easy to sight and with the Verdes to our starboard you’d be a fool to not know where you are in the world – all the way to Cape Coast Castle. If you please, Mister Manvell.’

Manvell began to sit.

‘How long do I have, if I may request, sir, to measure my aptitude?’

Coxon took up his coffee.

‘Until I finish
this
, Lieutenant.’ He took his first sip.

Manvell did not take a seat.

The dividers first. He took the nautical mile reading from the latitude scale down the side of the map and set the legs; three attempts, his fingers unable to steady and Coxon on his second taste.

Manvell marked Cape Vert, a nice neat hook like a parson’s nose hanging off the coast as if God had created it just so for mariners to mark.

Taking up the rule and pencil he drew, assured and swift, a line through the archipelagos and past the Grain Coast, his second mark. Next he walked the rule to the rose near the edge then replaced the rule with his compass card and penned the bearing in the map’s margin. Next, he swiftly brought back the rule and drew again, traversing into the Gold Coast and Cape Castle clearly marked amongst the other factories. His third mark.

He walked the rule back to the rose, its hinge treading the way like pigeon steps and again with the compass card took and wrote his second bearing as Coxon’s cup lifted higher.

Provident that he had set the divider first. He danced it along the lines with one hand and pencilled his calculations with the other, dropping the brass instrument the moment Coxon placed back his cup.

‘Well?’ Coxon wiped his top lip. Manvell resisted wiping the shine from his forehead.

‘I believe, Captain, that from Cape Vert, south-east by south at thirty-five degrees for ninety miles. Then east by north for seventy miles, eighty-one degrees into Cape Castle.’

‘And if we maintain four knots from Cape Vert? You have us at how many hours?’

‘Forty-eight hours at twenty-four hour sail . . . if we are in need of urgency with our post, that is.’

Coxon looked down at the pencil marks and scribble that scrawled in their anxiety to finish; the numbers and letters falling over each other.