A private revenge

The Natunas were astern; suppose they had concealed a Dutch cruiser, or even a French one? He rubbed his chin, feeling the scrubby bristles rough against the palm of his hand.

Canvas flogged above him and the cries of 'Let fall! Clew down!' and 'Sheet home!' accompanied the sudden bellying of the fore and main courses. Above the topsails the topgallants and royals were spreading Patrician's pale wings in the morning sunlight. His eye was caught by a sudden movement lower down. Midshipman Chirkov was on deck. Drinkwater recollected the presence of the young Russian the night before. He suddenly vented all his bile on the good-for-nothing young man.

'Mr Chirkov! Damn you, sir, but my orders are explicit! You are forbidden to be on deck at this hour!'

There seemed something vaguely dreamy about the young man, something weird that Drinkwater had neither the time nor the patience to investigate. Doubtless the young devil had got his hands on liquor, probably Rakitin gave him access to it ...

'Go below, sir, at once!'

'All plain sail, sir,' reported Ballantyne, recalling Drinkwater to normality.

'Very well, Mr Ballantyne, thank you.'

'Sir?'

'Well, what is it? Hurry man, for I want to set the stuns'ls.'

'Would not the lightning have affected other ships? We were, by all accounts, no distance from the convoy.'

'What?' Drinkwater looked sharply at the master. Did Ballantyne have a valid point, or did that single, fateful glimpse of the convoy argue that it had been immune from the lightning? He recalled the bolt hitting the sea quite close. Surely that was what had disturbed the magnetism in the needles suspended on their silken threads below the compass card. It had all been something of a nightmare, Drinkwater thought, recalling vignettes of evidence, lit by flashes of lightning or the unholy gathering of men round the binnacle light on the gun-deck.

'No. I think not,' he said with assumed certainty. 'There was a thunderbolt struck the sea quite close to us, Mr Ballantyne, I think it was that that mazed our compass ...'

And so he came to believe for the time being.

'Trouble never comes in small bottles, does it, Mr Lallo?'

'No, sir.'

'What should we do? Quarantine 'em?'

'We may be too late for that, sir,' Lallo cautioned.

'Is it as contagious as the Gaol Fever?' Gaol fever they called it aboard ship, and ship fever they called it ashore, ascribing its spread to the least desirable elements of each of the societies in which, amid the endemic squalor, it spread like wildfire.

'It's hard to say, sir. I'm not over-familiar with the yaws, but typhus ...'

'We've contained outbreaks of that before ...' Drinkwater said hopefully. It was true. Clean clothes and salt-water douches seemed, if not to cure typhus, at least to inhibit its spread. Perhaps the same treatment might stay this present unpleasant disease. He suggested it. Lallo nodded gloomily.

'We must try,' said Drinkwater encouragingly, bracing himself as Patrician leaned to a stronger gust under the press of canvas she was now carrying. Suddenly Drinkwater longed for the luxury of his own cabin; to be watching the white-green wake streaming astern from below the open sashes of the wide stern window, and the sea-birds dipping in it.

Lallo coughed, aware of Drinkwater's sudden abstraction. He stared at the surgeon's lined face. Was he going out of his mind to be thinking such inane thoughts? How could he stare, delighting in the swirling wake, when Lallo was here, bent under the weight of his message of death?

'Quarantine 'em,' he said, suddenly resolute, 'station 'em at the after guns; to be issued with new slops at the ship's expense (we've widows' men to cover the matter), ditch their clothing. They're to be hosed down twice daily and dance until they're dry. Keep their bodies from touching anything ...'

Lallo nodded and rose. 'I'll tell Fraser to re-quarter them. You said after guns, sir?'

Drinkwater nodded. Yes, he thought, after guns, close to Morris ...

'Sail ho!'

Drinkwater stirred from his doze, fighting off the fog of an afternoon sleep.

'Two sails! No three-ee! Point to starboard! 'Tis the convoy!'

He was on deck before the hail was finished, up on the rail and motioning for the deck glass. Someone put it into his hand and he watched the sails of a brig climb up over the rim of the world, saw them foreshorten as she altered course towards them and then he jumped down on deck and felt like grabbing both Fraser's hands and dancing ring-a-roses with him for the sheer joy of finding the lost ships. Instead he said:

'Put your helm down a touch, Mr Fraser, let's close with 'em as fast as possible and offer our apologies ...'

The two vessels came up hand over fist. On the horizon to the south-west they could see the rest of the convoy close together.

'Odd, sir, they seem to be hove-to.'

'Shows they've been waiting for us. They've been buzznacking.'

Drinkwater's cheerful tone was redolent of the relief he was feeling at overtaking the convoy before dark. It was Hormuzeer that approached them, a trim little brig that had once been a privateer and now ran opium to China under the command of an elderly but energetic Scotsman named Macgillivray. Through their glasses they could see her come into the wind with a large red flag flying at her foremasthead.

'That's a damned odd signal for her to be flying,' someone said among the curious little knot of officers who had gathered on deck.

'Into action?'

'They're hoisting out a boat ...'

'Get the stuns'ls off her, Mr Fraser, if you please,' snapped Drinkwater, his face suddenly grim. 'If that's the convoy over there, we've two ships missing.'

'Aye, sir, we sorely missed you. Your absence, sir, was ill-timed. Dolorous, sir damned dolorous.' Macgillivray's face was thin, hollow-cheeked and pitted by smallpox. A hooked nose that belonged to a larger man jutted from between two deep-set and rheumy eyes that fixed Drinkwater with a piercing glitter. Across the nose and cheeks, red and broken veins spread like the tributaries of a mapped river, contrasting with dead-white skin that seemed to have been permanently shaded by a broad-brimmed hat. As if to augment the ferocity of his expression, grey whiskers, sharply shaved below the cheekbone, grew upon his face below his eyes.

'I have explained, Captain Macgillivray, why I failed to keep station last night. The matter is done, sir, and the time for recriminations is past ...'

'No, sir! Damn no, sir! We shall have time for recriminations at Penang, you mark my words. We demand the navy protects us, sir, and you are missing. We lost two ships, sir ...'

'Captain Macgillivray, you have told me three times that two ships are missing and I have told you twice why we lost contact with you.' Drinkwater was almost shouting down the furious Scotsman, bludgeoning him into silence with his own anger. 'Now, sir, will you do me the courtesy of telling me which two ships and how they were lost?'

Macgillivray subsided, then he opened his thin mouth as though diving for more air. 'Pirates, sir, pirates. Sea-Dyaks from Borneo forty praus strong, sir, forty! Pirates with gongs and shrieks and stink-pots and blow-pipes in red jackets. Straight for the Guilford they came, took Hindoostan as well, swarmed aboard and carried her off before you knew it.'

'When?'

'At dawn.'

'Did you attempt to drive them off?

'Aye, we opened fire, but the wind was light ...'

And you were spread out?'