Desolation Island (30 page)

'Surely, sir...' began the older man - he looked much older now but went no further.

With the thrust lower, the Leopard fairly wallowed in the deeper troughs; yet her speed was still so great that she could certainly avoid the following seas with skilful handling: Jack named a team of men to take the wheel, prime seamen, four at a time, two glasses to a trick. The danger was more the shock when the wind took her full on the crests, and ordinarily Jack would have had her under a close-reefed foretopsail alone or even less - just enough to keep her ahead. But with the Waakzaamheid creeping up he dared not take more in; nor could he haul up the jib again. If this went on he would have to compensate the lack of thrust by lightening the toad: he would have to pump out the tons and tons of fresh water down there in the hold. The Waakzaamheid was half a mile away. He saw two flashes, but never the pitch of the shot, quite lost in this white turmoil.

He made a tour of the ship - long, wind-hurried strides forward, a battle against it aft - which showed him that all was as snug as it could be in such a case, and that there was no likelihood of any change of sail for some while - no voluntary change - and he called for Moore, Burton and the best gun captains in the ship.

'Sir,' said Grant, as he was leaving the quarterdeck, 'the Waakzaamheid has opened fire.'

'So I gather, Mr Grant,' said Jack, laughing. 'But two can play at that game, you know.'

He was surprised to see no answering smile at all, but this was not the moment for brooding over his lieutenant's moods, and he led his party into the cabin.

They cast loose the guns, removed the wing deadlights, and looked out on to a soaring green cliff of water fifty yards away with the Leopard's wake trace down its side. It shut out the sky, and it was racing towards them. The Leopard's stern rose, rose: the enormous wave passed smoothly under her counter, and there through the flying spume lay the Waakzaamheid below, running down the far slope. 'When you please, Mr Burton,' said Jack to the gunner. 'A hole in her foretopsail might make it split.' The larboard gun roared out and instantly the cabin was filled with smoke. No hole: no fall of shot either. Jack, to starboard, had the Dutchman in his dispart sight. A trifle of elevation and he pulled the lanyard. Nothing happened:

flying spray had soaked the lock. 'Match,' he cried, but by the time he had the glowing end in his hand the Waakzaamheid was below his line of sight, below the depression of his gun. From down there in the trough she fired up, a distant wink of flame, and she got in another couple of shots before the grey-green hill of water parted them again.

'May I suggest a cigar, sir?' said Moore. 'One can hold it in one's mouth.' He was acting as sponger and second captain, and his face was six inches from Jack's: he was encased in oilskins and there was nothing of the Marine about him but his fine red face and the neat stock showing under his chin.

'A capital idea,' said Jack, and in the calm of the trough, before the Waakzaamheid appeared again, Moore lit him a cigar from the glowing match in its tub.

The Leopard began to rise, the Dutchman appeared, black in the white water of the breaking crests high up there, and both nine-pounders went off together. The guns leapt back, the crews worked furiously, grunting, no words, sponged, loaded, and ran them out again. Another shot, and this time Jack saw his ball, dark in the haze of lit water, flying at its mark: he could not follow it home, but the line was true, a little low. Now they were on the crest, and the cabin was filled with wind and water mingled, unbreathable: the gun-crews worked without the slightest pause, soaked through and through.

Down, down the slope amidst the white wreckage of the wave, the guns run out and waiting. Across the hollow and up the other side. 'I believe I caught his splash,' said Moore. 'Twenty yards short of our starboard quarter.'

'So did I,' said Burton. 'He wants to knock our rudder, range along, and give us a broadside, the bloody-minded dog.'

The Waakzaamheid over the crest again: Jack poured the priming into the touch-hole with his horn, guarding it with the flat of his hand, the cigar clenched between his teeth and the glow kept bright; and this bout each gun fired three times before the Leopard mounted too high, racing up and up, pursued by the Dutchman's shot. On and on: an enormous switchback, itself in slow, majestic motion, but traversed at a racing speed in which the least stumble meant a fall. Alternate bursts of fire, aimed and discharged with such an intensity of purpose that the men did not even see the storm of flying water that burst in upon them at each crest. On and on, the Waakzaamheid gaining visibly.

Here was Babbington at his side, waiting for a pause. 'Take over, Moore,' said Jack, as the gun ran in. He stepped over the train-tackle, and Babbington said, 'She's hit our mizen-top, sir, fair and square.'

Jack nodded. She was coming far too close: point-blank range now, and the wind to help her balls. 'Start the water, all but a ton; and try the jib, one-third in.'

Back to the gun as it ran out. Now it was the Waakzaamheid's turn to fire, and fire she did, striking the Leopard's stern-post high up: a shrewd knock that jarred the ship as she was on the height of the wave, and a moment later a green sea swept through the deadlights.

'Good practice in this sea, Mr Burton,' said Jack.

The gunner turned his streaming face, and its fixed fierce glare broke into a smile. 'Pretty fair, sir, pretty fair. But if I did not get home two shots ago, my name is Zebedee.'

The flying Leopard drew a little way ahead with the thrust of her jib, a hundred yards or so; and the switch-back continued, the distances the same. It was the strangest gunnery, with its furious activity and then the pause, waiting to be fired at; the soaking at the crest, the deck awash; the intervening wall of water; the repetition of the whole sequence. No orders; none of the rigid fire-discipline of the gun-deck; loud, gun-deafened conversation between the bouts. The dread of being pooped by the great seas right there in front of their noses, rising to blot out the sun with unfailing regularity, and of broaching to, hardly affected the cabin.

A savage roar from Burton's crew. 'We hit her port-lid,' cried Bonden, the second captain. 'They can't get it closed.'

'Then we are all in the same boat,' said Moore. 'Now the Dutchmen will have a wet jacket every time she digs in her bows, and I wish they may like it, ha, ha!'

A short-lived triumph. A midshipman came to report the jib carried clean away - Babbington had all in hand -was trying to set a storm-staysail - half the water was pumped out.

But although the Leopard was lighter she felt the loss of the jib; the Waakzaamheid was coming up, and now the vast hill of sea separated them only for seconds. If the Leopard did not gain when all her water was gone, the upper-deck guns would have to follow it: anything to draw ahead and preserve the ship. The firing was more and more continuous; the guns grew hot, kicking clear on the recoil, and first Burton and then Jack reduced the charge.

Nearer and nearer, so that they were both on the same slope, no trough between them: a hole in the Dutchman's foretopsail, but it would not split, and three shots in quick succession struck the Leopard's hull, close to her rudder. Jack had smoked five cigars to the butt, and his mouth was scorched and dry. He was staring along the barrel of his gun, watching for the second when the Waakzaamheid's bowsprit should rise above his sight, when he saw her starboard chaser fire. A split second later he stabbed his cigar down on the priming and there was an enormous crash, far louder than the roar of the gun.

How much later he looked up he could not tell. Nor, when he did look up, could he quite tell what was afoot. He was lying by the cabin bulkhead with Killick holding his head and Stephen sewing busily; he could feel the passage of the needle and of the thread, but no pain. He stared right and left. 'Hold still,' said Stephen. He felt the red-hot stabbing now, and everything fell into place. The gun had not burst: there was Moore fighting it. He had been dragged clear - hit - a splinter, no doubt. Stephen and Killick crouched over him as a green sea gushed in:

then Stephen cut the thread, whipped a wet cloth round his ears, one eye and forehead, and said, 'Do you hear me, now?' He nodded; Stephen moved to another man

lying on the deck; Jack stood up, fell, and crawled over to the guns. Killick tried to hold him, but Jack thrust him back, clapped on to the tackle and helped run out the loaded starboard gun. Moore bent over it, cigar in hand, and from behind him Jack could see the Waakzaamheid twenty yards away, huge, black-hulled, throwing the water wide. As Moore's hand came down, Jack automatically stepped aside; but he was still stupid, he moved slow, and the recoiling gun flung him to the deck again. On hands and knees he felt for the train-tackle in the smoke, found it as the darkness cleared, and tallied on. But for a moment he could not understand the cheering that filled the cabin, deafening his ears: then through the shattered deadlights he saw the Dutchman's foremast lurch, lurch again, the stays part, the mast and sail carry away right over the bows.

The Leopard reached the crest. Green water blinded him. It cleared, and through the bloody haze running from his cloth he saw the vast breaking wave with the Waakzaamheid broadside on its curl, on her beam-ends, broached to. An enormous, momentary turmoil of black hull and white water, flying spars, rigging that streamed wild for a second, and then nothing at all but the great hill of green-grey with foam racing upon it.

'My God, oh my God,' he said. 'Six hundred men.'

Throughout the day the Leopard ran under her foretopsail alone, and throughout the day the barometer moved up. The slackening of the wind that Jack had noticed before the sinking of the Waakzaamheid continued, but the sea was still as high or even higher for a while, and there was no possibility of altering course more than a point, still less of heaving to.

Jack lay there in his cot in the strangest state of daze. He knew that the ship was steering well, and that she was in good hands; he knew that the pumps were gaining, and that the carpenter had dealt with the shattered deadlights, while Killick and his mates were now restoring the great cabin, where they had already set the stove to rights; and he knew there was a strong likelihood that the storm was blowing itself out - that the ship had come through, and with all her guns aboard. If the Dutchman had not foundered when he did, they must have followed her water over the side. Yet all these things were at a remove. He knew them, but they did not concern him much. The vision of the Waakzaamheid on her beam-ends, overwhelmed by that terrible sea, presented itself again and again to his inner eye. This was war; she had sought the battle; she had done her utmost to destroy the Leopard; it was the biter bit, and his ship had accomplished a feat of great value to the Royal Navy in the farther Indies. But it filled him with a kind of sorrow, a strange abiding grief.

A light appeared, and he closed his eyes. 'Well, my dear,' said Stephen, 'you do not like the light: just so.' He put it behind a book and they talked quietly for a while. It was, as Jack had supposed, a splinter that had wounded him, a two-foot piece of oak with a jagged cutting edge, sent flying by the Dutchman's shot. 'I dare say it will give you pain in your head for some days,' said Stephen. 'The wound itself is spectacular, and it will spoil your beauty; but you have had many worse. It was Lord Nelson's wound, you know - your forehead hanging over your eye.' Jack smiled, He would almost have done without an arm to follow Nelson. 'Yet I do not quite like the bang the flat side gave you; there is some degree of concussion. Still, that is nothing to what the recoiling gun might have done. But for the interposition of St John, you were mere pulp, of little interest even to anatomy. As it is, I have great hopes of your leg. Is there any feeling in it, now?'

'Leg? What leg? Why, it is numb! Upon my sacred honour, it is numb.'

'Never be perturbed, my dear; I have seen far uglier limbs preserved.'

After a silence in which Jack seemed to lose all interest in his leg, he said, 'Stephen, what is that round your neck? You was not hurt, I trust?'

'It is a woollen comforter against the cold, knitted by Mrs Wogan. The lively red is designed to increase the wearer's sense of warmth, by the association of ideas. I am much obliged to her.'

'Which Mr Grant asks can he report,' said Killick, thrusting his head through the door, and speaking in a hoarse whisper.

Stephen stepped out and told Grant that the patient must not be disturbed; disturbance might agitate his mind.

'Do you mean he is not right in the head?' cried Grant. 'I do not,' said Stephen. He disliked the man's eager tone extremely, his obvious willingness to believe the worst; in any case he was on edge from want of sleep, and when he returned to the sleeping-cabin his face had a wicked, reptilian look. In his remoteness Jack did not notice it, however: he said, 'After anything of any action, I always have the blue devils. This time it is much worse. I

see that ship broaching to, and all her people, five or six hundred men. I see her over and over again. Can you explain that, Stephen? Is it something in the physical line?'

'To some extent I think it is,' said Stephen. 'Five and twenty drops of this' - pouring carefully from a bottle by the shaded light - 'will rectify your humours, as far as physic can.'

'It is less disgusting than your usual dose,' said Jack. 'I forgot to ask you, how was your night? How does your Gipsy woman come along?'

I cannot answer for Mrs Boswell: the Caesarean section is no light undertaking, even without a hurricane. But if it can be fed, the child may live, the creature. It is, as you predicted, female; and therefore hardy. I was at a loss to know what to do with it at first.'

'There is the girl that waits on Mrs Wogan.'

'There is. But you will recall that she was transported for infanticide, repeated infanticide. She is a little eccentric where babies are concerned, and I could not think her quite a proper person. However, I opened my mind to Mrs Wogan, and she very handsomely offered her services. She tends it at present in a basket, lined with wool; and begs it may be indulged with a hanging stove.'