Mr Corbett's Ghost (8 page)

Then we came to the
Little Willelm
and he at once began to complain that it was insufficiently armed and pointed out the maze of stitching on the fore-topsail where English musket-fire had peppered it to a sieve. Together with all his other qualities, he is a great coward and I felt myself blush as he ranted on in the hearing of one of the ship's officers. Then, with my hand to his elbow, he went aboard, stepping down on the deck as if it were a single floating plank and not secure.

The
Little Willelm
, being but a smallish barquentine, could offer only a tiny cabin next to the surgeon's; but at least it was clean which flattered Mynheer Tripp unwarrantably.

‘Go away, Vaarlem!' he mumbled, and crawled on to the bunk—for the motion of the ship at its moorings was already unsettling his stomach. So I left him and went out on to the maindeck in the sunny air and watched the crew go about their business in the rigging and on the yards.

‘How come a fine-looking lad like you goes about with an old rag-bag like him?'

Mynheer Leyden—an officer of good family—was standing by me.

I answered: ‘Sir—he's a great man, whatever you may think, and will be remembered long after you and me are forgot.'

After all, one has one's pride!

Mynheer Leyden would have answered, but Captain Kuyper began shouting from the quarter-deck to cast off and Mynheer Leyden shrugged his smooth shoulders and went about his duties. These seemed to consist in putting his hands behind his back and pacing the larboard rail, nodding to the crowd of fishwives and early clerks who always throng the harbour in the mornings to watch the glorious ships heave and puff out their sails like proud white chests and lean their way into the dangerous sea.

Once out of the harbour, the foresail was set and I went below to inform Mynheer Tripp he was missing a very wonderful sight, for there was not much wind and the great spread of canvas seemed to be but breathing against invisible, creaking stays. But he was already up and about—and in a more cheerful mood. He'd had intelligence that the
Little Willelm
was to sail west by south-west to lure enemy vessels into pursuit, when they'd be blown out of the water by our own great ships which would be following on the next tide. His cheerfulness arose from the discovery that the
Little Willelm
was the swiftest vessel in the Channel and was not intended to fight.

‘A clean pair of heels, eh? Ha-ha!' he kept saying . . . and grinning in a very unwholesome manner. It was the only time I'd ever known him take a real pleasure in cleanliness. Later on, his spirits rose high enough for him to behave in his usual way. He began soliciting guilders from the officers to portray them prominently in the battle-piece. Full of shame—for he was earning a good deal of contempt—I warned him he'd be prosecuted for false pretences.

‘Why?' he muttered angrily—the wind catching the soft brim of his black hat and smacking his face with it.

‘Because they won't be larger than thumb-nails, sir!'

‘You mind your own business, Vaarlem!' he snarled, quite beside himself where guilders were concerned. ‘If
those little tinsel nobodies tell their dough-faced relatives that such and such blob of paint is their darling—well? Why not? What's wrong with a little family pride? Immortal, that's what they'll be! So keep your middle-class nose out of my affairs, Master Vaarlem . . . or I'll paint you as an Englishman!'

He stalked away, holding his hat with one hand and his filthy shawls and oil-stained coat with the other. But soon after, he sidled back again and remarked ingratiatingly, ‘No need to tell your papa everything I say, Roger, dear lad . . . words spoke in haste . . . no need for misunderstandings; eh? Dear boy . . .'

He was so mean, he was frightened my father would withdraw me as his pupil—and with me would go guilders. I looked at him coldly, while he bit his lip and brooded uneasily on whether he'd cut off his nose to spite his face; not that either would have been the loser.

I was more offended than I cared to let him know, so I obliged by keeping my nose out of his affairs for the remainder of the day. Which wasn't difficult, as he kept to the great cabin with the surgeon. Not that he was really ill—God forbid!—but he was cunningly picking the surgeon's wits relative to every ache and pain that plagued him. While all the while, the simple surgeon was happily imagining himself in the forefront of the Town Hall's battle-piece, a hero for ever. (Mynheer Tripp did indeed make a small sketch of him: a very wonderful piece of work—for somehow he caught a look of bewilderment and embarrassment in the surgeon's eyes as if God had too often stared them out.)

I'd intended to leave him for much longer than I did; at one time in the day I'd very serious thoughts indeed of leaving him altogether and fighting for Holland. This was when we saw our first English sail and there was great activity on the lower gun-deck against the chance of an encounter. She was a handsome, warlike vessel, bosoming
strongly along. ‘A seventy-four,' remarked Mynheer Leyden briskly. ‘By tomorrow she'll be driftwood!' Then we outpaced her and the sea was as clean as a German silver tray.

It was a few minutes before half past eight o'clock in the evening. I'd been on deck together with several officers. The wind was gone. The air was still. A sharp-edged quarter moon seemed to have sliced the clouds into strips, so that they fell away slowly, leaving dark threads behind. Earlier, Mynheer Leyden had been urging me to speak with the captain relative to my becoming a midshipman, for I was of good family and too good for Mynheer Tripp. To be a painter was a lower-class ambition. (‘All right! He has his gift! But what's that to you and me? God gave him sharp eyes—but He gave us good families! Vaarlem, my boy—I can't make you out!') Then, a few minutes before half past eight, he said quietly, ‘Vaarlem: you'd best go down and fetch him.' Which I did.

‘Sir: you must come up on deck at once.'

Mynheer Tripp glanced at me irritably, began to mumble something, then thought better of it. He stood up and wrapped himself in the filthy shawls and coat he'd strewn about the cabin.

‘Hurry, sir!'

‘Why? The sea won't run away . . . and if it does, I shan't be sorry!' He followed me on to the deck.

‘Look, Mynheer Tripp! The Englishman!'

For a proud moment, I thought he'd had enough brandy to make him behave like a Dutchman, for he stood quite still and silent. Then the brandy's effect wore off and his own miserable spirit shone through. Every scrap of colour went from his face and he began to tremble with terror and rage!

‘Madmen!' he shrieked—and I wished myself at the
bottom of the sea and Mynheer Tripp with me. The Englishman was within half a kilometre, and still moving softly towards us, pulled by two longboats whose oars pricked little silver buds in the moonswept sea. She was as silent as the grave, and any moment now would turn, broadside on, and greet us with the roar of thirty-seven iron mouths. For she was the seventy-four.

Mynheer Tripp seized my arm and began dragging me towards the quarter-deck, shouting outrageously: ‘Move off! For God's sake move off! We'll all be killed! How dare you do such a thing! Look! Look! This boy . . . of a good family . . . very important! If he's harmed I'll be prosecuted by his father. And so will you! I demand to go back! For Vaarlem's sake! Oh, my God! A battle!'

They must have heard him aboard the Englishman. I could only pray that no one aboard it knew Dutch! I felt myself go as red as a poppy. To be used by this villainous coward as a mean excuse—I all but fought with him!

‘You pig, Mynheer Tripp!' I panted. ‘This time you've gone too far!'

‘Pig?' he hissed, between roarings at the captain. ‘You shut your middle-class mouth, Master Vaarlem! These noodles have no right to expose me . . . us to such danger! I'll sue—that's what I'll do! In the courts!'

Captain Kuyper—a man who'd faced death a hundred times and now faced it for maybe the last—stared at Mynheer Tripp as if from a great distance.

‘You are perfectly right, sir. This ship is no place for you. You will be put off in the boat and rowed to where you may observe the engagement in safety. Or go to Holland. Or go to Hell, sir! As for the boy—he may stay if he chooses. I would not be ashamed to die in
his
company.'

To my astonishment, before I could answer—and God knows what I'd have said—Mynheer Tripp burst out with: ‘How dare you, sir, put such ideas into a boy's head!
What d'you expect him to say? A boy of good family like him! Unfair, sir! Cruel! Dishonest! What can he know? I warn you, if you don't put him off, I'll not stir from your miserable ship! Both of us—or none! Oh, there'll be trouble! In the courts!'

Then he turned his mean, inflamed face towards me and muttered urgently: ‘Keep quiet, Vaarlem! None of your business! Don't you dare say a word! I forbid it!'

Captain Kuyper shrugged his shoulders and turned away. ‘Put them both in the boat, and let one man go with them to take the oars. Immediately! I want Mynheer Tripp off this ship at once. Or by God, I'll throw him off!'

Quite sick with shame, I followed Mynheer Tripp, who'd scuttled to the boat and hopped into it, clutching his sketchbooks and horrible clothes about him—in a panic that the captain would do him a mischief.

The sailor who rowed us was a tall, silent fellow by the name of Krebs. For about twenty minutes he said nothing but rowed with a seemingly slow, but steady stroke. Mynheer Tripp, his head hunched into his shoulders, grasped my wrist and stared at the diminishing bulk of the
Little Willelm
which lay between us and the huge Englishman. Implacably, the Englishman came nearer and nearer and still did not turn. We could no more see the longboats . . . but the men in them must have had nerves of iron, for they were within musket range of the
Little Willelm
and could have been shot to pieces.

‘Faster! Faster!' urged my master, as the bowsprit of the Englishman appeared to nod above the
Willelm
's deck. There looked to be no more than fifty metres between them. Then she began to slew round . . . ponderously . . . malignantly . . .

‘Will you watch from here, sirs?' Krebs had stopped rowing. There was nothing contemptuous in the way he spoke. He simply wanted to know.

‘Is it . . . is it safe?'

Krebs eyed the distance. ‘Most likely . . . yes, sir.'

The two ships now lay side by side—the Englishman's aft projecting beyond the
Willelm
. Her after-castle, much gilded and gleaming under three lanterns, rose nearly as high as the
Willelm
's mizzen yard. A very unequal encounter. Perhaps she thought so? And was waiting for a surrender?

Krebs shipped his oars and stuck his chin in his great hands. Calmly he stared at the dark shape of his own ship, outlined against the sombre, spiky brown of her enemy. Though the shrouds and yards must have been alive with marksmen, nothing stirred to betray them.

‘Thank God we ain't aboard!' he remarked at length. Mynheer Tripp nodded vigorously. He'd begun to make sketches by the light of a small lantern. Approvingly, Krebs glanced at them. Very workmanlike. I began to feel cold and lonely. Was I the only one who wished himself back aboard the
Little Willelm
?

The beginnings of a breeze. The great ghostly sails of the Englishman began to shift, but not quite to fill. The
Willelm
's sails being smaller, bellied out more fatly. The bold little Dutchman and the skinny Englishman began to move. Masts, which had seemed all of one ship, began to divide—to part asunder . . .

There seemed to be a moment of extraordinary stillness—even breathlessness—when suddenly a huge yellow flower of fire grew out of the side of the Englishman. (Beautiful Dutch lady—take my murdering bouquet!)

And then enormous billows of reddish smoke roared and blossomed up, blundering through the rigging and fouling the sails and sky. The engagement was begun.

A faint sound of screaming and shouting reached us, but was instantly drowned in the roar of the
Willelm
's broadside. Then the Englishman fired again—this time with grapeshot, which makes an amazing, shrieking sound as it flies.

‘The mainmast! D'you see? They've got the mainmast!' muttered Krebs, his face white even in the reddish glare of the encounter. ‘Shrouds and halyards cut through—murder, for them on deck! Slices them in two and three parts! Murder, it is!'

The
Willelm
was still firing—but not full broadsides. Half her ports must have been shattered.

‘They've got to heave the dead out of the way!' Krebs said very urgently—as if it was his immediate task. ‘Can't get to the powder quick enough with all them dead tangling up the trunnions . . . got to heave 'em out . . . Cap'n'll be down there now—he'll be doing the right thing—'