'He is a bad man, Mr Mount. It is said that he was formerly a naval officer, but he was in Calcutta for some years and then moved to Rangoon where he traded with a Parsee. My father had some business with their house and they cheated him. My father has never divulged the particulars of their transactions, for I believe the loss was too shameful for him. Some time after this the Parsee was found dead, and although nothing could be proved against this man he moved on to Canton where he had considerable influence with the Hong in the interest of the opium trade. It is said that he had connections with the Viceroy and these enabled him to travel outside the normal limits imposed by the authorities on the foreign devils ...'
'Foreign devils?' queried Mount, frowning.
'The Europeans in the factories ...'
'Ah ... please go on ...'
'I cannot tell you much more, except that I know of his dishonest connections with my father and that when, on one or two occasions I saw him in Canton, my father warned me against him.'
'But you are not going into trade, are you, Mr Ballantyne? You have volunteered for King George's service, at least for the time being.'
'I should like to serve His Majesty,' said Ballantyne. 'Is it true that by being master I cannot obtain a commission?'
'It is unusual, certainly, unless you distinguish yourself in action against the enemy. I suppose if you earned Captain
Drinkwater's approbation and were mentioned in the Gazette, a commission might be forthcoming.'
There was a dry edge to Mount's voice that only Quilhampton recognised as faintly mocking. Now all suspicion was gone from Ballantyne's mind.
'And do you think we shall see action on a convoy escort?' Ballantyne asked.
Mount shrugged. 'One can never tell ...'
The noise of the fo'c's'le bell rang through the ship and the frigate stirred to the call of the watch. 'On the other hand the call of duty is remorseless,' he added. 'Your watch, Mr Ballantyne ...'
'You should not bait him, James,' remarked Mount, stretching himself and yawning.
'I didn't'
'Then keep your love-sickness to yourself.'
'It ain't contagious.'
'No, but misery is and a long commission's fertile ground for that.' Mount rose. 'Good-night, James, and sweet dreams.'
Quilhampton sat alone for a few moments. Soon Fraser would come below demanding a glass and the remains of the biscuit barrel. Quilhampton threw off his thoughts of Catriona, for the image of Morris had intruded. He wondered why he had not added his own contribution to the pooling of knowledge about Morris. Was it because he could not admit that such a man had once held a commission as a naval officer?
He would confide in Mount. He would trust Mount with his life, but Ballantyne ...? Ballantyne was not quite one of them; a merchant officer, a man of colour, a man for whom the grey seas of Ushant and the Channel were a closed book. Was Drinkwater truly going to confirm his appointment as master?
Quilhampton shrugged, drained his glass and made for his cabin. He did not want to socialise with Fraser, only to thrust his mind back to the pleasurable agony of dreaming of Catriona MacEwan.
On deck Mr Ballantyne paced up and down and dreamed of glory. He had set down upon Captain Drinkwater's chart the estimated position of the reef upon which the Patrician and her convoy had so nearly met disaster and earned a word of approval. He had modestly demurred from appending his own name to the shoal and now he fantasised about earning a more durable reward from the taciturn Captain Drinkwater. A commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy could lead him to social heights denied him on the Indian coast, — for his mother had not been the Begum of Drinkwater's fancy, but a nautch-girl stolen from a temple by his lusty father, a beauty, true, but a woman of no consequence in Indian society. His father cared little for the conventions of the coast and had set his heart on an estate in the English shires if fortune smiled on him. But Ballantyne the son had a sharper perception of values, forced upon him by bastard birth, a tainted skin and opportunities that had raised him from the gutter in which an Indian Brahmin had once suggested he belonged. Something of a subconscious resentment of his father for the predicament in which he had been placed prevented him from accepting a life in merchant ships, and the turn of events which took him from the labouring hull of the dismasted Musquito and placed him aboard the puissant mass of Patrician had awakened a sentiment of predestination in him.
It was this happy mood, combined with a lack of appreciation of the exact status of Midshipman Chirkov that led him to indulge the Russian prisoner when he requested to take the air on deck.
Mr Ballantyne, Master of His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician, felt a certain lofty condescension to Count Anatole Vasili Chirkov, and indulged the young and apparently interested Russian officer in a dissertation on their navigational position in the South China Sea.
CHAPTER 10
A Small Victory
In the stuffy hutch that had formerly been inhabited by Patrician's sailing master Drinkwater sat writing his journal. For a few moments he reflected before dipping his pen. Then he carefully scribed the date, forming the numerals of the new year with care.
We are now south of the twelfth parallel in less misty weather and lighter winds. My apprehensions of attack by Spanish cruisers from the Philippines seem unfounded and I assume their recent loss added to the knowledge of Drury's squadron in the area has made them more concerned for their own register ships than the plunder of our India trade. The convoy continues to behave well. The discipline of the Indiamen is excellent and the Country ships seek to emulate them to the extent of making the throwing out of recriminatory signals unnecessary. This good behaviour is not consistent with the conduct of all convoys ...
Drinkwater paused. While he allowed himself a certain latitude in personal asides, he was conscious of a desire to scribble all his random thoughts on to paper. He knew it was a consequence of his loneliness and the thought usually stopped him short of such confessions. Besides, they were too revealing when read later. But the urge to place something on record about Morris was strong, though the nature of the words he would employ eluded him. All he had written to date was a brief entry that Morris, formerly Master and Commander in His Majesty's Service, now a merchant at Canton, has come aboard for the passage with a quantity of specie.
It was a masterpiece of understatement, making no allusion to their previous acquaintance. Drinkwater knew the omission begged the question of for whom he wrote his journals. He had been ordered to destroy them, but had refused, considering them personal and not public property. In accordance with John Barrow's instructions his ship's logs had been dumped, so that no record of her activities in the Baltic existed; but even a man in the public employ was not to be utterly divested of personal life at the whim of another so employed.
He knew that, in truth, he wrote his journals for himself, an indulgence taken like wine or tobacco. It was unnecessary for him to have written anything about Morris beyond the fact that, like a phoenix, the man had risen from the ashes of the past. Out of the uncertainties and passions of adolescence when their antipathy had first found form, to the hatred of maturity aboard the brig Hellebore where Morris had indeed been 'Master and Commander', they had come now to a snarling and wary truce.