'What the devil is French for "alongside"?' snapped Drinkwater.
'Try accoster, sir.'
'Hey, accoster, m'sieur, accoster!' They saw oar blades appear and slowly the two vessels crabbed together. 'Mr Mount, your men to cover them.'
'Very well, sir…' The marines presented their muskets, starlight glinting dully off the fixed bayonets. There was a grinding bump as the chaloupe came alongside. The curious, Drinkwater among them, stared down and instantly regretted it. Drinkwater felt a stinging blow to his head and jerked backwards as it seemed the deck of the vessel erupted in points of fire.
He staggered, his head spinning, suddenly aware of forty or fifty Frenchmen clambering over the rail from which the complacent defenders had fallen back in their surprise.
'God's bones!' roared Drinkwater suddenly uncontrollably angry. He lugged out his new hanger and charged forward. 'Follow me who can!' He slashed right and left as fast as his arm would react, his head still dizzy from the glancing ball that had scored his forehead. Blood ran thickly down into one eye but his anger kept him hacking madly. With his left hand he wiped his eye and saw two marines lunging forward with their bayonets. He felt a sudden anxiety for Frey and saw the boy dart beneath a boarding pike and drive his dirk into a man already parrying the thrust of a bayonet.
''Old on, sir, we're coming!' That was Franklin's voice and there was Tregembo's bellow and then he was slithering in what remained of someone, though he did not know whether it was friend or foe. His sword bit deep into something and he found he had struck the rail. He felt a violent blow in his left side and he gasped with the pain and swung round. A man's face, centred on a dark void of an open mouth, appeared before him and he smashed his fist forward, dashing the pommel of his hanger into the teeth of the lower jaw. The discharge of his enemy's pistol burnt his leg, but did no further damage and Drinkwater again wiped blood from his eyes. He caught his breath and looked round. Something seemed to have stopped his hearing and the strange absence of noise baffled him. Around him amid the dark shapes of dead or dying men, the fighting was furious. Quilhampton felled a man with his iron hook. Two marines, their scarlet tunics a dull brown in the gloom, their white cross-belts and breeches grey, were bayo-netting a French officer who stood like some blasphemous crucifix, a broken sword dangling from his wrist by its martingale. A seaman was wrestling for his life under a huge brute of a Frenchman with a great black beard while all along the deck similar struggles were in progress. Drinkwater recognised the struggling seaman as Franklin from the dark, distinctive strawberry birthmark. Catching up his sword he took three paces across the deck and drove the point into the flank of the giant.
The man turned in surprise and rose slowly. Drinkwater recovered his blade as the giant staggered towards him, ignoring Franklin who lay gasping on the deck. The giant was unarmed and grappled forward, a forbidding and terrifying sight. There was something so utterly overpowering about the appearance of the man that Drinkwater felt fear for the first time since they had gone into action. It was the same fear a small boy feels when menaced by a physical superior. Drinkwater's sword seemed inadequate to the task and he had no pistols. He felt ignominious defeat and death were inevitable. His legs were sagging under him and then his hearing came back to him. The man's mouth was open but it was himself that was shouting, a loud, courage-provoking bellow that stiffened his own resolve and sent him lunging forward, slashing at the man's face with his sword blade. The giant fell on his knees and Drinkwater hacked again, unaware that the man was bleeding to death through the first wound he had inflicted. The giant crashed forward and Drinkwater heard a cheer. What was left of his crew of volunteers encircled the fallen man, like the Israelites round Goliath.
The deck of the Bonaparte remained in British hands.
Antigone leaned over to the wind and creaked as her lee scuppers drove under water. Along her gun-deck tiny squirts of water found their way inboard through the cracks round the gun-ports. In his cabin Drinkwater swallowed his third glass of wine and finally addressed himself to his journal.
It is not, he wrote at last, the business of a sea-officer to enjoy his duty, but I have often derived a satisfaction from achievement, quite lacking in the events of today. We have this day taken a French National brig-corvette of sixteen 8-pounder long guns named the Bonaparte.We have also destroyed twelve invasion bateaux, two of the large class mounting a broadside of light guns, taken upwards of sixty prisoners and thereby satisfied those objectives set in launching the attack at dawn. Yet the cost has been fearful. Lieutenant Gorton's wound is mortal and nineteen other men have died, or are likely to die, as a result of the various actions that are, in the eyes of the public, virtually un-noteworthy. Had we let the enemy slip away, the newspapers would not have understood why a frigate of Antigone's force could not have destroyed a handful of boats and a little brig. It was clear the enemy had prepared for the possibility of attack, that the brig was to bear its brunt while the bateaux escaped, and, that, at the end, we were nearly overwhelmed by a ruse de guerre that might have made prisoners of the best elements aboard this ship, to say nothing of extinguishing forever the career of myself. Even now I shudder at the possible consequences of their counter-attack succeeding.
He laid his pen down and stared at the page where the wet gleam of the ink slowly faded. But all he could see was the apparition of the French giant and remember again how hollow his legs had felt.
Chapter Six
The Secret Agent
As April turned into a glorious May, Lieutenant Rogers continued to smart from Drinkwater's rebuke. It galled him that even the news that the Bonaparte had been condemned as a prize and purchased into the Royal Navy—thus making him several hundred pounds richer failed to raise his spirits. There were few areas in which Rogers evinced any sensitivity, but one was in his good opinion of himself, and it struck him that he had come to rely upon his commander's reinforcement of this. Such hitherto uncharacteristic reliance upon another further annoyed him, and to it he began to add other causes for grievance. Drinkwater's report had said little, certainly nothing that would elevate his first lieutenant and place him on the quarterdeck of the prize as a commander. In fact Drinkwater had sent the prize into Portsmouth with the wounded under the master's mate Tyrrell, so, apart from his prize money, Rogers had dismissed the notion that he could expect anything further from the capture. In addition to this it seemed that the impetus to Antigone's cruise had gone, that no further chance of glory, advancement, or simply resuming his normal relationship with Drinkwater would offer itself to him. He took refuge in the only action left to him as first lieutenant; he harried the crew. Antigone's people were employed constantly in a relentless series of drills. They shifted sails, exercised at small-arms and cutlasses, and sent down the topgallant and topmasts. To kill any residual boredom they even got the heavy lower yards across the rails aportlast. When Drinkwater drily expressed satisfaction, Rogers demurred respectfully and repeated the evolution until it was accomplished to his own satisfaction.