The Shadow of the Eagle (33 page)

‘Which is not as you see it, eh?’

‘I did not say so, sir.’

‘No. Thank you, Mr Marlowe.’ Then a thought occurred to Drinkwater. ‘By the bye, Mr Marlowe, pipe up spirits.’

The helmsmen heard the order and Drinkwater was aware of a shuffling anticipation of pleasure among them. It would do no harm. ‘Sauce for the goose’, he muttered to himself, ‘is sauce for the gander.’

The respite thus gained lasted for only some twenty minutes. The forenoon was almost over, but the day was unchanged, the sea sparkled in the sunshine and the steady breeze came out of the northwest quarter. The four ships were spread out over a large right-angled triangle upon the ocean. At the northern end of the hypotenuse lay the
Gremyashchi,
now hove-to; at the point of the right-angle, the battered
Arbeille
continued to lick her wounds and drift slowly down to leeward. Both vessels were awaiting the outcome of events at the far end of the hypotenuse, where
Andromeda
lay, and astern of her, swiftly catching her up,
L’Aigle
followed.

Despite the scepticism of his sailing master, Drinkwater was confident of having almost achieved his objective. If the
Arbeille
was commanded by an officer of similar resolution to that of
L’Aigle,
and it seemed impossible that he should not be, the fact the corvette had dropped out of the action suggested she had sustained a disabling proportion of damage. He clung on to these thoughts, arguing them slowly, interspersed with waves of pain from his arm which gradually became more assertive as the effect of the laudanum wore off.

Under her topsails,
Andromeda
stood on and her crew awaited the enemy. As
L’Aigle
approached, Drinkwater skilfully maintained the weather gauge by edging
Andromeda
to starboard every time he observed Lejeune attempt the same manoeuvre with
L’Aigle.
On the upper-deck the marines and the gunners relaxed in the sunshine, going off a pair at a time to receive their rum ration on the gun-deck. This hiatus was soon over.

His head throbbing with the beat of his pulse, Drinkwater strode forward and bellowed down into the waist, ‘Stand-to, my lads. The Frenchman is closing us fast; there’s hot work yet to do.’

Lieutenant Ashton had not given a second thought to Sergeant McCann after the marine had departed from the gun-deck. His baiting was the vice of a man who habitually used a horse roughly, sawed at the reins and galled his mount with a crop, a man who was given to mindless and petty acts of cruelty simply because fate had placed him in a station which nurtured such weaknesses. Since his schooldays, Ashton had learned that small facts gleaned about others could be put to entertaining use, and McCann had been a trivial source of such amusement. Yet he was not a truly vicious man, merely a thoughtless and unimaginative one. His solicitude for Marlowe, expressed in his question to young Paine, had been out of concern more for his sister and her unborn child than for the actual well-being of the man responsible for impregnating her. Blood-ties, if they were inevitable, should not be reprehensible, and it mattered much to Josiah Ashton that Marlowe acquitted himself well, perhaps more than to Frederic Marlowe himself. It would not have mattered much to Ashton had Marlowe been killed, provided only that his death was honourable, or appeared so, even if some stain upon his sister’s good character was then unavoidable.

As he waited in the gun-deck for the action to resume, Ashton, having dispensed with Marlowe, was calculating his chances of advancement if matters fell out to his advantage. Down below he was relatively safe, unless they were boarded, and even then he was confident that his own skill with a small sword and a pistol would keep him out of real trouble. Marlowe, he judged, might attempt some quixotic act and was as likely to get his come-uppance in a fight, assuming he survived the next hour. Word had already come down to the gun-deck that Captain Drinkwater had a shattered arm. If he did not fall it was quite likely that gangrene would carry him off later. On the other hand, perhaps some opportunity for Ashton to distinguish himself would emerge during the forthcoming hours.

Ashton looked across the deck to where Frey, ever diligent, peered out of a gun-port, striving to see the enemy frigate coming up from astern. Frey was senior to him, but who knew? Perhaps he too would stop a ball before the day was over.

‘I can’t see a damned thing,’ Frey complained, crossing the deck and passing close to Ashton as he bent to stare out of one of his own larboard battery gun-ports. Ah, here she comes. Looks as though it’s your turn for it first.’ Frey smiled and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good luck.’

‘Good luck,’ Ashton replied with more duty than true sincerity.

A moment later one of the gun-captains called out, ‘Here she comes, me lads!’ and a ripple of expectation ran through the waiting men, like a breeze through dry grass.

‘Lay your guns,’ Ashton commanded. He waited until, like statues, the crews stood back from their loaded and primed pieces, their captains behind the breeches, lanyards in hand. Eventually, all along the deck the bare arms were raised in readiness.

‘Fire!’ Ashton yelled, and the gun captains jerked the lanyards and jumped aside as the still-warm guns leaped inboard with their recoil, and their crews fussed round them again.

On the deck above, Sergeant McCann had ensured each marine checked his flint and filled his cartouche box. Worn flints would cause misfires, and most of his men had fired profligately.

‘Make every shot count,’ McCann warned them, ‘and every bullet find its mark.’

His men muttered about grandmamas and the sucking of eggs, but they tolerated Meticulous McCann. He was a thoughtfully provident man and though few knew him enough to like him, for he had too many of the ways of an officer to enjoy popular appeal, they all respected him.

When the captain’s warning to stand-to and prepare to receive fire came, Hyde merely nodded to McCann, who repeated the order. It was then, in the idle, fearful moment before action, McCann thought of Ashton, and as he lowered his weapon and lined foresight and backsight on a small cluster of gilt just forward of
L’Aigle’s
mizen mast, it was Josiah Ashton’s image that his imagination conjured up beyond the muzzle of his Tower musket.

It was almost three bells when Ashton’s guns barked again, beating the enemy by a few seconds. Although the range was short, Drinkwater had Birkbeck edge
Andromeda
away from
L’Aigle,
to prevent Lejeune running up too close and attempting to board and exploit his greater numbers. Even so, the storm of enemy musketry was prodigious, and the rows of hammocks were destroyed by lead shot ripping into them, fraying the barricade they made, so that the shredded canvas fluttered in the breeze. Those balls which passed over the hammocks in their nettings, either buzzed harmlessly overhead, or found a target. Most passed by, but a few struck the masts, or the boats, and a few knocked men down.

As for the enemy’s round shot, they thudded into the hull or struck the lighter bulwarks, sending up an explosion of splinters. Occasionally a ball came in through a port, struck a carronade and ricocheted away with a strident whine. Others flew higher, aimed to bring down
Andromeda’s
upper spars, discommode those on the upper deck and rob the British frigate of the ability to manoeuvre which she had thus far so brilliantly exploited to avoid such a fate. The cries of the dying and the wounded filled the air again, and a large pool of blood formed at the base of the mizen mast, pouring in a brief torrent from the shattered body of a topman lying across the trestle-tree boards of the mizen top high above.

The action had reached its crisis, and Drinkwater, increasingly assailed by the agony of his wounded arm, knew it. He fought the excruciating ache and the desire to capitulate to its demand to lie down and rest; his mouth was dry as dust and his voice was growing hoarse from shouting, though he could not recall much of what he had said in exhorting his men.

He knew too, that whatever the shortcomings of his ship and her company, they could not have fought her with more skill and vigour. From Birkbeck masterfully conning her, to the men who put the master’s orders into practice; from the solicitous and grateful

Marlowe running about the upper-deck directing the carronades, to the lieutenants and gunners below, he could not have asked for more. Nor should he forget Kennedy and his mates, labouring in the festering stink of the orlop, plying scalpel and saw, curette and pledget to save what was left of the brutalized bodies of the wounded. His own mortality irked him: he would have to submit to the surgeon’s ministrations if he survived the next hour, for his bandaged arm oozed blood.

The thunder of their own guns bespoke a furious cannonade; the decks trembled with the almost constant rumblings of recoil and running out of the 12-pounders of the main armament, and it was clear to Drinkwater’s experienced ear that Frey’s unengaged gunners had crossed the deck to help fight the larboard battery. In fact Frey had assumed command of the forward division, an order Ashton had not liked receiving, though he could not avoid obeying it, for to do so would have been to have transgressed the Articles of War in refusing to do his utmost in battle.

But Ashton could not deny the effectiveness of the reinforcement, and so furious did the gunfire become that not even the brisk breeze could now clear the smoke and the gap between the two ships became obscure. Neither the officers in the gun-deck nor those upon the quarterdeck could now see very much.
L’Aigle
was marked by her lines of flashing muzzles and the tops of her masts above the cloud of powder-smoke. Then they heard a cheer ripple along the upper-deck and watched as, in an almost elegant collapse,
L’Aigle’s
main topmast went by the board. Within a quarter of an hour, however,
Andromeda
had lost her own mizen mast and the wreckage brought down her main topgallant. Two carronades on the quarterdeck were also dismounted in the general destruction of her bulwarks adjacent to the mizen channels. A moment later she had lost her wheel and all those who manned it as her upper-deck was swept by a hail of grape-shot.

Marlowe was nowhere to be seen in the confusion as Drinkwater summoned a hatless and dishevelled Birkbeck who seemed otherwise unscathed. ‘She’ll get alongside us now, by God!’ the sailing master bellowed above the din.

‘We must have given as good as we’ve got!’ Drinkwater roared back.

For a few moments there was utter confusion, then
L’Aigle
loomed close alongside and through the clearing smoke they could hear cries of
‘Vive L’Empereur!’
and
‘Mort a l’Anglais!’
as the French soldiers whipped themselves into a frenzy.

‘Prepare to repel boarders!’ Drinkwater shouted, his voice cracking with the effort as his head reeled, and then the two ships came together with a sudden lurching thud and a long, tortured grinding. Above their heads on the quarterdeck,
L’Aigle’
s mainyard thrust itself like a fencer’s extended and questing
epee,
wavering as the two ships moved in the seaway. Shapes like ghosts appeared over the rail as veterans of Austerlitz and Borodino, of Eylau, Friedland, Jena and Wagram prepared to launch themselves across the gap between the two frigates, on to
Andromeda’s
deck.

Lower down, beneath the pall of smoke that lay in the gulf between the two ships, Frey had seen the approach of
L’Aigle
and heard the excited shouting of the battle-mad troops. The cry to repel boarders came down through the thick air in the gun-deck and passed along the lines of cannon in shouted warnings.

Frey withdrew from his observation post and hurried aft to where Ashton was scurrying up and down his guns, half bent as he squinted along first one and then another as they jumped inboard for reloading. Steam sizzled as the wet sponges went in, adding a warm stickiness to the choking atmosphere. Frey tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Josh!’ Frey bellowed until he had attracted his colleague’s attention. ‘Josh! I’m taking my fellows to reinforce the upper-deck.’

‘What?’ Ashton was almost deaf from the concussion of the cannon and Frey had to shout in his filthy ear before Ashton understood.

‘No, let me. You fight the guns.’ The words were uttered before Ashton realized the implications: he had given voice to his thoughts and wavered briefly, half-hoping Frey would contradict the suggestion.

‘If you want to go fire-eating good luck to you.’ Frey nodded assent, straightened up and hastened back up the deck, half bent to avoid collisions with the beams. ‘Starbowlines!’ he bellowed, ‘Small arms from the racks and follow Mr Ashton on deck! D’ye hear there? Starbowlines with Mr Ashton to the upper-deck! We’re about to be 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.