Tide of War (8 page)

T
HE LOG SHIP SPLASHED
over the leeward quarter and shot swiftly astern in a millrace of white water, watched with eager eyes by as many of the company as had secured a place along the rail.

“Turn!” yelled Francis Coyle as the ribbon crossed the rail, his voice, which had recently broken, pitched a little higher than he might have wished in the presence of so wide and critical an audience.

His young associate, Mr. Place, dutifully turned the twenty-eight-second timer and held it level with his eye. An expectant hush from the audience. The wind played its endless music in the taut rigging. The last grain of sand …

“Stop!”

Coyle nipped the line between finger and thumb, measured the distance from the last knot with a practised eye and ran back to the little group of figures at the stern with a look of barely suppressed excitement upon his freckled features.

“Twelve knots and three fathoms, sir. If you please.” Remembering to snatch off his cap only at the conclusion of this astonishing revelation.

“Thank you, Mr. Coyle,” replied Nathan coolly, keeping his own face straight with an effort. He turned away with his arms clasped
behind his back but not before he had seen the grins on the faces of the nearest hands and heard the gleeful repetition along the rail.

Twelve knots and a half, near as damn it, the best yet by almost two knots. Nathan caught the eye of the mate—and his particular friend—Martin Tully, and permitted his face to relax a little. He would have laughed aloud had he not feared the wind might take it amiss. For the past three days the
Speedwell
had been running before a brisk northeasterly that had taken them far out into the Atlantic to some hundred leagues north of the Azores, rarely dropping below seven to eight knots and often exceeding that. In the past few hours it had shifted somewhat to the east without diminishing in intensity. Nathan restrained himself from a reckless remark but he could not help thinking that at this rate they would make the Havana in little more than a month from now. But of course that could never be—his innate pessimism reasserted itself—and even then it would be nearer three since Captain Kerr first “went missing” with his cutter. Three months for the
Unicorn
and the
Virginie
to conclude their dalliance in the waters of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico or wherever they chanced to meet.

The
Virginie
had been Nathan's particular study since he first heard of her from the First Lord of the Admiralty. She was a new ship, almost as new as the
Unicorn
but armed as Chatham had said with forty-four guns—forty 18-pounders and four 36-pounder
obusiers:
a short-barrelled weapon not unlike a carronade but with a higher elevation more in line with a mortar. If it had indeed been a humourous conceit of Admiral Ford to send a unicorn in pursuit of a virgin, it could be the French who had the laugh on him. Nathan could not help but recall that in the myth it was the beast that came off worse from the encounter. Yet here he was exulting in the headlong rush to battle, curbing his impatience lest it should not be fast enough to find the
Unicorn
before she found her
Virginie.
As if his presence alone would make the difference between victory and defeat.

He was not normally so sanguine. His recent promotion had done little to address a somewhat negative assessment of his abilities
as an officer, a doubt that had persisted since first obtaining his commission. He had some ability as a commander, if only in the command of detail, but he privately considered he was more suited to the role of purser. He constantly failed to measure up to his own standards of what he considered to be outstanding leadership and his skills as a navigator were far eclipsed by Tully who could take in a chart at a glance as if the rocks and shoals came leaping out at him and was possessed of an almost mystical sense of direction and their position upon the map as if sextants and quadrants were mere playthings for the less gifted. A natural born sailor he had an instinctive feel for the sea and the wind and their effect upon hull and sail which Nathan could only labour dully to emulate, struggling with the mathematics, his brain relentlessly obsessed with calculation.

He was good with men, too. Nathan watched him covertly as he leant against the rail, conversing easily with the second mate, Jonathan Keeble. He appeared to be at ease with most of his acquaintance, whether they were old salts like Keeble, born and bred on the waterfront at Marblehead, or the Honourable Philip Whiteley, the lieutenant of marines who had joined them at Portsmouth and was the second son of a viscount.

But perhaps this was not surprising given Tully's own background.

He was a Channel Islander: the son of a Guernsey fisherman who had married the daughter of a local
seigneur
and though the young woman had been disowned by her family for the offence and died soon after, Tully had been taken into his grandfather's house to receive the education and upbringing of a gentleman.

But some recalcitrant strain had inclined the boy to take his father's part and at the age of sixteen he had quit the seigneurial home to become first a fisherman and then a smuggler, in which latter occupation he had been surprised by a British sloop and given the choice of serving in the Navy or assisting in the colonisation of Botany Bay. He had been master's mate on the
Nereus
and Nathan had formed a sufficient respect for his skills to retain his services on the
Speedwell
during her covert missions to Le Havre.

If and when he assumed command of the
Unicorn
he had resolved to make Tully up to acting lieutenant.

“Mr. Place, there!” Tully broke off his conversation with Keeble to fling out a rebuke to the senior of the two boys who were clowning about some fifty feet above his head in the futtock shrouds. Place had just snatched at Coyle's cap and almost missed his footing on the ropes. “If you must contrive to kill yourself, sir, pray indulge me by doing so over the sea so we will not be obliged to scrub you off the deck.”

The two boys grinned but climbed into the maintop where they were safer and less noticeable.

Coyle and Place. An unlikely alliance. Nathan wondered if it would endure until they reached the Havana where, inevitably, they must part for Coyle belonged to the
Speedwell
and Place … Place belonged to King George.

Place's mother had by some divine process learned of Nathan's appointment to post captain and surprised him at Shoreham with young William in tow. She was the widow of one of his father's old shipmates who had been killed at the Battle of the Saints when his son was barely a year old and she had often been a guest at Windover. She had begged him to take her son into the service as a volunteer—for he had his heart set on it, she said—and after some feeble protests Nathan had agreed. He had been much the same age when he himself had joined the Navy, taken on by another of his father's old shipmates: it was the way the system worked. And if Nathan did not entirely approve of it he had not declined to take advantage of it for most of his life.

And so young William Place would join Nathan on the
Unicorn
as a captain's servant, volunteer first class: the first step on a ladder that could make him an admiral, if he did not fall off it and break his neck—and his mother's heart.

But Coyle was a different case. He had been cabin boy on the
Speedwell
when Nathan first took command of her. Just turned twelve. A by-blow of the mate, it was said, who had jumped ship—or
been taken by the press, it was not entirely clear. Either way he had left young Frankie to fend for himself, though he was in the way of becoming a ship's mascot even then. An engaging lad. They both were: he and his new friend. Willing and able. But Nathan could not look at them without thinking of Alex—and remembering the look on his face when Nathan told him he was going back to sea and leaving him at Windover.

“Take me with you,” he had begged, fighting back the tears. “Please,
monsieur,
I will try not to trouble you.”

But Nathan could not take a seven-year-old into the Navy.

“I will be back soon,” he said, with no means of knowing if it would be this year or next, or ever. “And you will be a good boy while I am away and apply yourself to your studies so that your mother would be proud of you.”

Feeling that he had deserted him. And betrayed Sara.

He had left early the next morning, before Alex was up, and he did not dare look back for fearing of seeing his desolate face in the window.

Three bells into the afternoon watch. Nathan turned at the stern rail, braced against the sharp cant of the deck as the barque leaned into the long Atlantic swell. And the unknown figure at her bow—Diane the huntress or some lesser deity?—hurling the spray from her flowing locks as she hurried back to her home waters.

Nathan would be sorry to see her go. She and all her dissolute crew. He watched them now as they lounged about the deck. He knew them all by name and character, though he might flatter himself as to the latter for they were born smugglers and dissemblers: blockade runners who had almost certainly been running contraband into France when they were taken by a British cruiser off La Rochelle. Most were from Salem or Marblehead, a few from Boston, all Massachusetts men and some old enough to have fought against the Crown during the Independence War—yet they had been willing enough to serve King George, if only for the bounty it paid them. And they appeared well-enough disposed to the thirty
marines the
Speedwell
had taken aboard at Portsmouth, in as much as any seaman could tolerate so alien a species.

The marines had been accommodated in the hold—with hooks rigged for their hammocks and gratings to give them light—much to the amusement of the Americans who said they had never shipped redcoats before, though they did not call them guffies or jollies or Johnny-toe-the-liners as a British crew would. In fact, with Nathan's consent, the marines had shed their coats and wore their chequered shirts or seamen's slops, mixing freely with the hands on deck, far more freely than would have been tolerated on a British man of war where they might at any moment be called upon to assist the captain and officers against a mutinous or even mildly subordinate crew.

Nathan was perfectly aware that this service might be required of them if and when he assumed command of the
Unicorn,
for the death of her previous captain remained something a mystery, and if members of the crew had been involved, an extra contingent of marines would prove useful.

He wondered if Imlay knew more of the affair. But Imlay had remained below decks since shortly after leaving harbour, his presence announced by the sounds of one in the throes of violent sea sickness. For the last two days he had been quieter—sleeping, Gabriel had assured Nathan when sent to ensure he had not expired. But he had slept long enough. It was time he took some air.

“Mr. Place,” Nathan raised his voice so that it carried to the boy in the maintop. “When you have finished your business aloft I should be glad of your company upon the deck.”

A brief—a very brief—interlude and Place came sliding down the mainmast backstay as if it had been designed for the express purpose of delivering small boys from one sphere to another in the minimum possible time short of pitching headlong to their doom.

“My compliments to Mr. Imlay,” Nathan instructed him in quieter tones, “and if he is feeling a little better I would be glad to have a word with him, either in my cabin or upon the deck, whichever he prefers.”

“Sir.” Place turned smartly about but then checked and turned back,
a troubled frown contorting his youthful features. “Beg pardon, sir, but if he is not?” Nathan raised a brow. “Not feeling better, sir.”

It was in Nathan's mind to suggest that Mr. Place might then seek the assistance of two stout marines in dragging him up on deck by the scruff of his neck but of course he merely inclined his head and suggested that it might be appropriate to consider that problem if and when the need should arise.

Place was back within the space of a minute. Mr. Imlay returned the captain's compliments and was feeling somewhat recovered, thank you, if still not strong, and would contrive to attend upon the captain as soon as he had finished his dinner.

“His
dinner?”

“Yes, sir, Mrs. Small having prepared him a little dish of rice and coddled eggs which she is feeding him in his cabin, sir, owing to the delicacy of his stomach.”

Nathan caught Tully's eye and knew what he was thinking.

Mrs. Small was the cook's wife, a Frenchwoman that he had met and married in Le Havre—and a far better cook than he would ever be if he lived to be a thousand. But she was not handsome—in Nathan's view she rather resembled an amiable troll—and he was inclined to think she was safe from Imlay's attentions, especially in his weakened state.

“ I trust she has not coddled the eggs in too much butter,” Nathan remarked, “or we will not see him for the remainder of the voyage.”

But within a few minutes of this exchange the invalid appeared on deck looking appreciably paler and thinner than when he had come aboard and a little unsteady on his feet but sufficiently the master of his inner self as to contemplate the sea if not with equanimity then at least without bringing up his dinner.

Nathan had a chair lashed to the 6-pounder at the stern where Imlay might repose in a degree of comfort and where they might converse with as fair a chance of privacy as anywhere on the vessel. They were partly shaded by the sails at mainmast and mizzen but the sun found the gaps between canvas and yard and the play of
light and shadow made it particularly difficult to read an expression that was enigmatic at the best of times.

Nathan had known Imlay over a period of fifteen months in France without ever forming more than the haziest impression of his true character. He wondered sometimes if Imlay knew himself any better. He appeared to change his nature as others changed their coats to suit the current fashion, or the climate, or the company.