A Brig of War

'So we continue to wait, sir?'

Griffiths nodded. 'I know, bach, idleness is bad for the people for-rard but, duw, we have no choice. Wrinch is right,'

Griffiths soothed, brushing the flies away from his face. 'Damned flies have the impertinence of Arabs… No, Mocha Road is the rendezvous.' His white-haired head sank in thought. 'Hmmm, Yr Aifft…'

'Sir?'

'Egypt, Nathaniel, Egypt. There is great activity in Egypt. Bonaparte has made himself master of Cairo. A general named Desaix is blazing a trail through Upper Egypt with the assistance of a Copt called Moallem Jacob.' He paused. 'I think Nelson may be right and with that devil Santhonax to reckon with…' He raised his white eyebrows and clamped his mouth tight shut. Then he blew out his cheeks. 'I wish to God you'd shot him.'

Inaction, like the heat, seemed to have settled permanently upon the brig. The pitch bubbled in the seams and Drinkwater had the duty watch keep the decks wet during daylight. They listed the ship with the guns and scrubbed the waterline, they overhauled the rigging and painted ship. Griffiths forbade exercising the guns with powder and a silent ritual was meaningless to the men. To divert them Drinkwater sent Lestock, his mates and the midshipman off in the boats to survey the road. Although this stimulated a competitiveness among the junior officers and promoted a certain amount of professional interest, once again high-lighting Mr Quilhampton's potential talents, it was limited in its appeal to the hands and soon became unpopular as the boats roamed further afield. Lethargy began to spread its tentacles through the brig, bearing out Appleby's maxim that war was mostly a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of energy.

As week succeeded week Drinkwater's frustration mounted. He was tormented by worry over Elizabeth, worry that could not easily be set aside in favour of more pressing duties because there were none to demand his attention beyond the routine of daily life at anchor. The myriad flies that visited them drove them to distraction and the lack of shore leave for the hands exacerbated their own cramped lives.

Strangford Wrinch passed them alarming intelligence, gathered from a certain Hadji Yusuf ben Ibrahim, commander of a sambuk. In December of the old year a French division under General Bon had occupied Suez. Bonaparte himself had accepted tribute from the Arabs of Tor in Sinai and reached an accommodation with the monks of the mysterious monastery of St Catherine at the southern extremity of that peninsula. General Desaix was scattering the mamelukes to the four winds in an energetic sweep up the Nile Valley. Egypt had become a province of France and it was clear that, despite Nelson's victory at Aboukir and the subsequent blockade of the Mediterranean coast under Sir Samuel Hood, the French were far from beaten. They might yet move further east and in the absence of Blankett Hellebore would be no more than a straw under the hooves of the conqueror.

At the end of January Griffiths ordered them to sea. For a fortnight they cruised between Perim and Jabal Zugar, exercising the guns and sails. Then they returned to Mocha Road and the shallow bight of its bay, to the heat and flies and the deceptive, fairy-tale wonder of its minaret. Again Griffiths departed daily, smilingly ordering them to submit to the will of Allah, to learn to keyf, to sit in suspended animation after the manner of the Arabs.

'Holy Jesus Christ,' blasphemed the intemperate Rogers in sweating exasperation, 'the stupid old bastard has gone senile.'

'Mr Drinkwater!' The knocking at the door was violently urgent. The face of Quilhampton peered round it, white with worry. 'Mr Drinkwater!'

Drinkwater swam stickily into consciousness. 'Eh? What is it?'

'Two ships standing in from the south, sir!'

Drinkwater was instantly awake. 'Inform the captain! General Quarters and clear for action!'

The midshipman fled and Drinkwater heard the brig come alive, heard the boy's treble taken up by the duty bosun's mate piping at the hatchways. He reached for his breeches, buckled on his sword and snatched up the loaded pistol he habitually kept ready. He rushed on deck.

It was just light and the waist was all confusion with the slap of two hundred bare feet and the whispered exertions of five score of sleep-befuddled seamen driven by training and fear to their stations.

Drinkwater picked up the night glass from its box and did the required mental gymnastics with its inverted image. He swept the horizon and steadied it on the two shapes standing into the road. The larger vessel might be a frigate. Some of the new French frigates were big vessels, yet she seemed too high and not long enough to be a French thoroughbred. The smaller ship was clearly a brig of their own size.

Griffiths appeared. 'Hoist the private signal, Mr Drinkwater!'

Rogers reported the batteries cleared for action. 'Very well, Mr Rogers. Man the starboard. Mr Drinkwater, set tight the spring. Traverse three points to larboard!'

'Aye, aye, sir.' Drinkwater cast a final glance at Quilhampton's party hoisting the private signal to the lee foretopsail yardarm where the wind spread it for the approaching ships to see. 'Mr Grey, waisters to the capstan!'

Hellebore trembled slightly as the spring came tight and she turned off the wind, bringing her starboard broadside to bear upon the strangers. Drinkwater watched apprehensively. There was no reply to the private signal.

'Starboard battery made ready, sir,' Rogers reported. All activity had ceased now, the gun crews squatting expectantly around their pieces, the captains kneeling off to one side of the recoil tracks, the lanyards tight in their hands.

Hellebore was a sitting duck, silhouetted against the sunrise while the newcomers approached out of the night shadows.

'Mr Rogers! Fire Number One gun astern of her if you please.'

Drinkwater raised his glass and watched the bigger of the two ships. Forward the gun barked. Daylight grew rapidly, distinct rays from the rising sun fanned out from behind the crags of the Yemeni mountains. As the Muezzin called the faithful to prayer from the distant minaret of Mocha, Drinkwater saw the British ensign hoisted to the peak of the approaching ships and an answering puff of smoke from the off-bow of the bigger one.

'British ensign, sir.'

'Then answer at the dip.'

An hour later he was anxiously waiting for Griffiths to return from the fifty-gun Centurion, commanded by Captain Rainier.

Drinkwater ran a surreptitious finger round the inside of his stock. He could not understand why, in the heat of the Red Sea, the Royal Navy could not relax its formality sufficiently to allow officers to remove their broadcloth coats when dining with their seniors. After all, this moment, when the humidor of cheroots followed the decanter of port round the table, was tacitly licensed for informality. They were listening to an anecdote concerning the social life of Bombay told by Centurion's first lieutenant. It was an irreverent story and concerned a general officer in the East India Company's service whose appetite for women was preserved within strictly formal bounds: '…and then, sir, when the nautch-girl threw her legs round him and displayed a certain amount of enthusiasm for the old boy, d'you see, he ceased his exertions and glared down at her; "any more of this familiarity," the old bastard said, "and this coupling's off"!'

The easy laughter of Centurion's officers was joined by that of the young commander of the eighteen-gun brig Albatross, a man more than ten years Drinkwater's junior. It seemed that all these officers from the India station led a life of voluptuous ease and licence. It suddenly rankled Nathaniel that their partners with Duncan in the grey North Sea, with St Vincent off Cadiz and with Nelson in the Mediterranean led a different life. He thought of the rock off Ushant and of the storm-lashed squadron that kept a ceaseless watch on Brest and, in the smoky heat of Captain Rainier's cabin, had a sudden poignant urge to be part of that windy scene, where the rain squalls swept like curtains across the sky, obscuring the reefs that waited impassively to leeward of the lumbering divisions of British watchdogs. This effete bunch of well-laundered, red-faced hedonists made Drinkwater feel uncomfortable, offended his puritan sensibilities. It was as if over-long exposure to the heady tropical beauty of Indian nights had affected them with moon-madness.