The Nutmeg of Consolation (18 page)

'There she lies,' he said, turning to Stephen; and there indeed she lay under the blue sky, a trim and elegant ship with her red gunports open to air the deck. She was two thirds of the way down the bay the Nutmeg was now entering, framed by the shore with its white rim and by the rising forest-land behind, bright green in places. There was quite a surf running, and white water could be seen beyond the Corn�e's starboard bow and here and there in other parts of the bay.

'The tide is at the full,' said Jack. 'Slack water this last half hour. Have you been busy? There are sandwiches in the quarter-gallery, and a pot of coffee, if you feel so inclined. Dinner may be rather late: the galley fires have been out this age.'

'We have been as active as ants, carrying our sick to their bay and making all ready in the berth: lint galore, swabs, pledgets, chains, saws, gags. When do you suppose the action will begin?'

'Not for an hour or so, unless she smokes us first. As you see, there is no plain ring of coral enclosing a lagoon: it is more a question of independent reefs with a winding passage between them and a surprising great bar off the mouth of the stream. That is why she is lying so far out, no doubt. It is awkward for her boats, and when one of her cutters went in just now I think she touched on the tail of the bank. Do you see the watering-party?'

'I believe so.'

'At the foot of the black cliffs two points on the starboard bow: take my glass.'

The black cliff, the stream leaping down it, and the seamen gathered round their casks came startlingly close in the brilliant light. 'There may be some extremely interesting plants on that damp rock-face,' said Stephen. 'May I look at the Corn�e?'

'It might be indiscreet from the quarterdeck: the sash-light in the quarter-gallery would be better. Do you see Dick on the foretopsail yard? He is going to con the ship from there. It ought to be the master, but his bowels are upset. We have to head almost for the watering-place, then there are two dog-legs half a mile apart before we can luff up and run under her lee.'

'I shall go and peer at them from the lavatory, eating a sandwich as I do so.'

'Stephen,' said Jack in a low tone, 'look for Pierrot, Christy Palli�'s boy, will you? I hope you do not see him, because that would confirm my idea he is ashore. I fairly dread killing him.'

'You mean the young French officer you met in Pulo Prabang, our friend's nephew? But you forget I never saw him, either as a boy or as a man.'

'Very true,' said Jack. 'Forgive me.'

The Nutmeg stood on, with her captain alone on his quarterdeck, apart from a single man at the wheel and Hooper by the lee rail, looking like a ship's boy. Richardson stood high on the yard, looking down into the clear water ahead, dark blue for the deep water of the channel, light for the shoals on either side. A score of seamen stood about on the forecastle, their hands in their pockets, or lounged on the gangway, even leaning on the rail. All the rest of the ship's company were out of sight under the forecastle, under the gangways, on the half-deck and in the cabin. All the gun-crews were at their stations, and those who could make out anything through the cracks of their portlids or through holes in the canvas strips, told their friends what they saw in a low voice, with striking accuracy. The boarders had their weapons at hand, cutlasses, pistols, boarding-axes, pikes; slow-match smoked in tubs beside the carronades - Jack would never trust to the flint-lock alone; and now the atmosphere was grave.

Behind its sliding door the quarter-gallery was quite cut off from the close-packed attentive crowd and its rumble of voices: it was the Captain's washing, shaving and powdering closet, and together with its companion on the other side (his privy) it was one of the few upper parts of the ship left undisturbed when she was cleared for action. With its wash-basin removed it made a pleasant little place from which to view proceedings; and Stephen was luckier with his sash-light than any of the hundred-odd below decks, except for those who could command a scuttle.

Like them he saw the Corn�e come closer as the Nutmeg glided diagonally across the bay, disappear from his field of vision as she took the first dog-leg in the channel and reappear ten minutes later on the second, remarkably closer, still firmly moored; and as the Nutmeg continued her turn the motionless Corn�e and the sea around her moved steadily forward almost as far as his eyes could follow. It was now that he saw a signal break out at her masthead, just two imperative flags reinforced by a quarterdeck gun: the jet of smoke and then the crack, loud in this waiting silence. A strong voice from the deck above him: 'Stand by. Stand by, there. Man the lee-braces,' and the ship vanished beyond the edge of the sash light.

For Jack she was still very dearly in sight, and he did not need his glass to see her open ports fill with eighteen-pounders run out.

The Nutmeg was tracing the long curve that was to carry her alongside the frigate, now almost right ahead and broadside on. The French colours ran up to the Corn�e's mizen-peak: Jack waited for the warning shot.

There was no warning shot. Instead the three aftermost eighteen-pounders fired to kill almost simultaneously.

'All hands,' called Jack as the balls raced overhead at topsail height a few yards to starboard. It was clear that his disguise had been pierced, but although he might be raked fore and aft he still hoped to sail the Nutmeg close enough to engage with real effect. Below him in the waist the bosun sprung his call: the officers came running up to the quarterdeck. 'Courses and staysails,' said Jack. 'Bear a hand, bear a hand, bear a hand, there. Mr Crown, cast off the painted strips. Mr Fielding, ensign and pennant.'

Stephen heard the crash of a ball somewhere forward, and then in a turmoil more apparent than real his door slid open and Seymour called in his ear 'They have smoked us, sir. Captain desires you will go below.'

The Corn�e's remaining eighteen-pounders fired in a long rippling sequence, her side vanishing behind the smoke. Holes appeared in the topsails and courses; the tack of the mainsail, just belayed, sprang free; the balls sent water splashing from the forecastle aft; several shot up white fountains close at hand; the last shattered the larboard cathead.

'Good practice for such a distance,' observed Jack.

'Very creditable, sir,' said Fielding. 'I wish it may not improve, however.'

A pause during which the Nutmeg, in spite of her wild maincourse, advanced two hundred yards, and then in a deliberate fashion all the Corn�e's larboard guns fired, one after another. Six balls hit the hull, masts or yards; one carried away half the larboard quarter-gallery; and the sixteenth came the length of the ship at chest height, killing two men on the forecastle and three on the quarterdeck: Miller, just next to Jack Aubrey, a hand at the wheel, and the master.

'Man the lee braces,' called Jack, wiping Miller's blood from his face: and to the men who had instantly taken over the wheel, 'Port your helm.'

The Nutmeg turned fast to starboard, and in a voice that reached the orlop he gave the infinitely welcome order 'Fire as they bear.'

Now the sick-berth echoed not only with the sledge-hammer blows of the enemy's shot but the much louder cracking roar of the Nutmeg's thirty-two-pounder carronades and the shriek of their slides as they recoiled. Stephen, Macmillan and Suleiman the loblolly-boy were already busy - splinter-wounds, contusions, a forearm broken by a falling block - but as they stitched and bandaged and splinted they nodded to one another with satisfaction. Bonden, carrying young Harper down in his arms, said 'We are slogging it out, sir; a pleasure to see.'

So they were, and the sky echoed and re-echoed with their thunder, a continuous roar beneath the separate explosions.

The Nutmeg, like most Dutch twenty-gun ships, carried all her armament on a single deck: she was firing into the wind, so that her smoke was instantly swept away: it was therefore easy for the quarterdeck to see the pitch of her thirty-two-pound balls. She was firing remarkably fast, at least twice the speed of the Corn�e, and her teams were working perfectly together, ammunition coming up from the magazines with clockwork regularity: but at high elevation their shot was wild, and at low, though their line was true, the balls fell short. The Corn�e was slow by any standard, partly because she was firing to leeward and the eddying smoke obscured her view; but even at three quarters of a mile she was shockingly accurate. Furthermore, although she was clearly husbanding her powder, never wasting a shot, she quite certainly was not limited to four barrels nor anything like it.

'Stand by the chasers,' called Jack. 'Mr Fielding, we will wear ship.'

The Nutmeg turned, bringing the wind right aft, came up again on the starboard tack and sailed off as she had come. As she turned the stern-chasers managed to get in three shots each, two of which certainly went home; but the Corn�e fired two broadsides, the first of which might have dismasted the Nutmeg if she had not put her helm hard over at the right moment. The second fell short.

'If they had fired as quick as they fired straight,' reflected Jack, 'we should have been hard up in a clinch, and no knife to cut the seizing.' He did not confide this thought to his first lieutenant however but said 'She is finding it hard to win her anchor.' Even without his telescope he could make out that the shorthanded Corn�e was having a wretched time at the capstan; and with it he could see the straining red-faced men, sometimes only three to a bar, trying to force the drum to turn: then shifting over to the other cable, heaving on that, veering the first and so trying again, rather than leave anchor and cables so many thousand miles from any replacement.

'And they are having no better luck with their longboat,' said Fielding. Jack turned, and there on a small reef not a quarter of a mile from the shore, was the Corn�e's massive longboat, firmly wedged on a falling tide. From the white water on either side it was clear that in his haste to join the ship the coxswain had steered for a narrow passage through the coral, the nearest way, and had misjudged the breeze or his draught or the leeway, if not all three. With real pleasure Jack saw that the active officer in a skiff directing their urgent attempts at unloading the casks and refloating the boat was Pierrot Dumesnil, that amiable young man, now in a frenzy of exasperation.

'They have their work cut out for some little while. But not for too long, I hope,' said Jack, looking up at the sun. 'There is not a world of time to spare. Now, Mr Walker?'

'A foot in the well, if you please, sir,' said the carpenter, 'but me and my mates have three comfortable plugs in the holes -there was only three hit us near or under the waterline. But the launch and the spars either side have suffered something cruel, and your larboard stern-gallery is well-nigh wrecked.'

Jack also heard the bosun's report, which had few surprises - he could see cut rigging and damaged sails on every hand -and then he said to Fielding, 'Let us heave to in the fairway with a stage over the side, as though we were in danger of foundering. Half a dozen hands can make the proper show while the rest are knotting and splicing: and we should pump, but on the far side. Mr Conway, pray ask the Doctor whether it would be convenient for me to come below. Mr Adams,' he said to his clerk, 'did you take notes?'

'Well, sir,' said Adams, 'I hardly knew what to do. Seeing we had not beat to quarters, officially we were not in action; so I made what I may call unofficial remarks. And seeing our people were not killed in regular action, I told the sailmaker I thought they should be sewn up in their hammocks, not disposed of in the usual way. I hope I did right, sir.'

'Quite right, Mr Adams.'

Down to the orlop, and by the time he reached it his eyes were sufficiently used to the gloom between decks for them to see Stephen's hands bright red under the hanging lamp. 'How much have we suffered?' he asked.

'Three splinter wounds died of loss of blood as soon as they were brought down or before,' said Stephen. 'Apart from that I have six in a very good way, with the blessing; a broken arm and some contusions; no more. For the dead you know better than I.'

'The master, I grieve to say; young Miller; Gray, a good man, at the wheel; and two more on the forecastle - a single raking shot.'

He sat between Harper and Semple, one of his bargemen, both of them splinter wounds, and told them how the day was doing. 'She could hit us very hard and we could scarcely hit herat all...'

'Our Agog hulled her twice, just abaft the cutwater,' said Harper, light-headed with loss of blood. 'I saw them go home with my own eyes. How we cheered!'

'I am sure you did. But now we mean to lead her on, lie in wait at the end of the Passage, and engage her at close quarters. She has fouled her anchor and her longboat is aground at present; but I dare say everything will be in order within an hour, and we can wait an hour.'

Chapter Six

Captain Aubrey did not have to wait so long. In forty-seven minutes the Corn�e had plucked both herself and her long-boat free, had stowed it on the booms in a seamanlike manner and had begun her pursuit of the Nutmeg. By the time they had threaded the channel from Nil Desperandum to the open sea and had settled down to the long chase that would lead them to the Salibabu Passage it was clear that the Frenchman had no intention of catching his quarry, no intention of overtaking the Nutmeg and closing with her. He had seen some of her thirty-two pound balls come aboard and he had no desire to see any more; a distant action was his aim, and every time Jack offered him the chance of drawing closer he declined it. His plan was so to reduce her speed by damaging her sails and rigging that he could yaw and reduce her with raking broadsides from half a mile or more.

It was clear too that Jack had over-estimated the Corn�e's powers. He had not supposed that a clean-bottomed frigate in tolerable trim could make less than eight or nine knots with this steady south-west monsoon on her quarter, even though the breeze had diminished somewhat during the day; but he was mistaken; with her whole pitiful spread of thin, patched sailcloth abroad the Corn�e could do no better than seven and a half: and although the Nutmeg was towing a heavy unseen buoy it was difficult to keep up a convincing appearance of flying with all possible speed - of really trying to escape. However, with sheets a little less taut than they should have been, some rather rough steering (Bonden was a master at this and he had several tricks at the wheel) and a slightly defective bracing of the yards it could be done; and so they ran eastwards, firing with a steady deliberation at something near the extreme range of their chasers.