'They're my regulars, like, sir, they've come to expect… you know…' She looked down again while Drinkwater looked at an Appleby empurpling with rage. 'Why the damned, festering…' Drinkwater held his hand up.
'I will deal with them Catherine. They will not trouble you again.' He turned the book round and held the pen out. 'Make your mark there,' he pointed to the place but she said indignantly 'I know, sir, I can read and write.'
She signed her name with some confidence. 'Very well, Catherine, now while I read out the men's names do you tell me with whom you have slept.' He began to read. She did not know all their names but the percentage of the crew who had visited her was large. But neither was it surprising. It was even possible that this bedraggled creature possessed a gentleness absent from the lives of the seamen and that it was for more than lust that they came to her.
'It must stop now, Catherine.' She nodded, while Appleby, with a hideous implication said, 'I will look into this matter.'
Drinkwater dismissed Catherine and sent for Appleby's mates. It was certain that they had been instrumental in suggesting Catherine dupe the brig's officers to their own advantage. Their plan had misfired when they discovered that many more of the hands would have to be a party to it and that those men would soon come calling for their share of the trophy. Besides, Catherine had to be found employment under supervision. Appleby was the only trustworthy person who did not have to keep a watch, and as the woman showed an aptitude for medical work she would be best employed with him.
It was the work of a moment to disrate the surgeon's mates. They protested they held their warrants from the College of Surgeons, that they were gentlemen unused to the labour of seamen. But being alone in the Southern Ocean had its advantages. There was neither court of appeal nor College of Surgeons south of the equator and they were soon turned to on deck where the starters of the bosun's mates were stinging their backsides with a venom spurred by a gradual realisation that the hands were being worked like dogs because of a certain lady of easy morals between decks. That her two pimps had been turned among them was a matter of some satisfaction.
Drinkwater concluded his morning's work by also appointing Tyson surgeon's assistant. He too could write, they had discovered, and Drinkwater was amused to find Appleby growling over the radical alterations to his department. 'My dear fellow,' said Drinkwater summoning Merrick from the pantry with some blackstrap, 'you have always fancied your chances as a philosopher, now you have the most literate department in the ship. You will be able to plead the benefit of clergy for all of 'em. Now do be a good fellow and allow me to compute this longitude before Lestock comes below.'
At noon Drinkwater called the hands aft. His announcement to them was brief and to the point. The woman, Catherine Best, he told them, had been apprehended. The deception against the Regulations for the Good Order of His Majesty's Navy on board His Britannic Majesty's Brig of War Hellebore was at an end. Although it verged upon the mutinous by virtue of its very nature as 'a combination', in the effective absence of the captain, he had decided that he could not flog the woman without inflicting the penalty upon them all. He held them all culpable, however, and would punish all of them by a stoppage of grog, to be indefinite against their good behaviour. The groan that met this announcement convinced Drinkwater that it was the correct measure. The deprivation of jack's grog was a punishment incomprehensible to landsmen. As for the woman, he continued, she was now part of the ship's company. Any man found lying with her would receive the same punishment as that prescribed by the Articles of War for that unnatural act whereby one man had knowledge of another. He did not need to remind them that the punishment for sodomy was death.
When he had finished he sent them to their dinner. 'By heaven, Nathaniel, that was a rare device,' muttered Appleby admiringly, 'what a splendid pettifogging notion. Worthy of Lincoln's Inn.'
Drinkwater smiled thinly. He was thinking how far they had yet to travel and how little of their task they had yet accomplished.
'What d'you intend to do about Dalziell and Rogers?'
'Let them stew a little, Harry, let them stew.'
In longitude forty-five east they hauled to the northward, the wind quartering them until it gradually eased and died away from the west. They entered the great belt of variables south of Madagascar and worked north by frequent yard trimming. Twice they sighted sails but on both occasions they did not seek to close the other. The men began to mutter. The deprivation of their grog continued days after they had toiled to get first the jury foreyard up, then its permanent replacement. The lack of it was beginning to rankle. As the weather continued to improve Drinkwater had sent up the topgallant masts. On their first day of light winds they had hoisted the boats out and hauled them up to the davit heads on either quarter. Griffiths had recovered sufficiently to be told of the events of the fortnight. He had been so choleric that Appleby feared for a recurrence of his fever, but the old man had subsided to order that Drinkwater continue the ban on grog just at the point when Drinkwater was considering reinstating it.
'No indeed! The weather is improving, the men do not need it to drive them aloft, see; let them feel the want of it a little longer.'
Catherine Best appeared a reformed character and Appleby was the butt of jokes about the reclamation of fallen women. Although he resisted at first, Griffiths had finally allowed her to attend him. Reporting to the commander one morning Drinkwater had commented on her as she left the cabin. 'There is a little good in the worst of us,' Griffiths quoted with more than a trace of Welsh piety, Drinkwater thought wryly. 'Duw, but she's a sight better than those gin-soaked mountains of lard at Haslar… or for that matter the herring gutters they had in the hospital at Yarmouth…' Griffiths was beginning to enjoy his convalescence and if the men thought their commander had adopted their bawd then let them, he thought. They would be of that opinion anyway and Drinkwater was at last able to wring the issue of grog from Griffiths.
It was whilst observing Venus after sunset that he first heard the rumour. Beneath the poop two men sat in the gloom of dusk while Hellebore ran north-east under easy sail.
'We be a cursed ship with a woman on board,' said one voice.
'Ah, bull's piss. They Indiamen carry women and chaplains, they seem to manage. Anyway you tried hard enough to have her.'
'No I didn't.'
'You bloody well did, you said yerself that if you'd been below before that slimy rat Jenkins you'd'ave slipped her what she had coming to her. I heard you.'
'We still be accursed. You heard o'the Flying Dutchman? Him what inhabits these waters? You heard of him then?'
Drinkwater brought the planet down to the fast fading horizon, twisting the quadrant gently and smoothly. Satisfied he rocked it slightly from side to side so that the gleaming disc just cut the horizon, all the time adjusting the index to follow the planet's setting. 'Now!' he called to Quilhampton who was taking the time on the chronometer. He paid no more attention to the rubbish he had overheard. Lestock came up shortly afterwards to relieve him and looked suspiciously at the longitude Quilhampton had chalked on the slate.
'Come, come, Mr Lestock, the Board of Longitude thought the problem worth twenty thousand sterling. All I ask is that you have a little faith in their investment.' But he did not wish to get involved in an argument and he went on, 'It's high time we had those guns out of the hold. We're coming up with Île de France, even you latitude sailors must know that, and it's time we mounted a full broadside before we meet a Frenchman. If it is calm tomorrow we'll hoist 'em out. In the meantime she's full and bye, nor'nor'east, all plain sail and nothing reported. Logged six knots five fathoms at one bell, wheel and lookouts relieved. Good night, Mr Lestock.'