'Could you not ...' Fraser looked conspiratorially about the deck, to make sure that no one was within earshot of the pair of them, '... ask Tregembo to ...?'
'Spy, you mean? Carry lower-deck tittle-tattle?'
'Aye, sir.' Fraser seemed rather relieved that Drinkwater grasped his meaning.
'If it was known, I'm damned certain Tregembo would have told me. The trouble is Tregembo don't know.'
Fraser subsided into unhappy silence. Drinkwater was aware that Midshipman Dutfield was trying to catch his eye.
'Beg pardon, sir, but Mr Ballantyne's compliments and the entrance to the strait is in sight.'
'Very well, Mr Dutfield, thank you.'
They had, for the past two days, been aware of the presence of land. At first they had seen the electric storms above the distant, jungle-covered mountains, then the clusters of islands forming the Anambas archipelago lifted over the horizon. Odd tangles of floating vegetation, bound by the roots and stumpy remnants of mangroves, drifted past. 'Floating islands' Ballantyne called them, recounting how sometimes they reached astonishing size and had once concealed a host of Dyak canoes from which he and his father had only escaped with difficulty and the prompt arrival of a breeze.
Of Dyaks they had seen nothing, gliding over a smooth, empty sea, and now picking up their landfall with gratifying precision. Rank upon rank of hills were emerging blue and low from the clouds hovering over them, a seemingly impenetrable barrier whose nearer bastions were turning slowly green as they approached. Stretching away into the northern distance the long finger of the Malay peninsula crept round almost a third of the horizon, its distal point Pulo Tumasek. To larboard rose a wild jumble of islands, the Rhio archipelago, which, from this distance, retained the impression of a continuous, if indented coastline. Beyond, indicated as yet by clouds, lay the vast island of Sumatra, parallel to the Malay coast and containing, between the two, the Malacca Strait, highway to Prince of Wales Island, as Penang was then more familiarly known. Beyond all lay the Indian Seas.
Drinkwater strained his glass further to larboard. Somewhere to the southwards, beyond the Rhio islands, lay the Gaspar and Sunda Straits, shortest route to the Cape of Good Hope, and barred to the China fleet by Dutch and French cruisers. But today he could see nothing, nothing but an empty blue sea, glittering beneath a brazen sky. And, curiously, it brought him no pleasure. Somehow he would rather have seen an enemy, been faced with a task; somehow the very emptiness of the ocean seemed ominous.
'Beg pardon, sir.'
Belchambers's face, poked round the door of the tiny cabin, was more readily seen in his shaving mirror, thought Drinkwater, as he rasped the razor upwards over the stretched skin of his throat.
'What is it?'
He forced the query through the clenched teeth of a jutting jaw.
'This, sir.'
Drinkwater swivelled his eyes a little. The image of Belchambers's hand could be seen in the cracked mirror. The fingers unfolded to reveal a crushed scrap of paper.
Drinkwater had seen one before and the shock made him nick himself. It was a round robin, a message from the ship's company, and it cast his mind uneasily back to the days of ninety-seven, the year of the great mutinies. They had been a common thing then, demands, protests, both reasonable and unreasonable, sent aft to the officers in this anonymous, yet neatly demotic way.
'What does it say?'
Affecting a sang-froid he did not feel, Drinkwater dabbed at his bleeding throat and completed his shave. 'Read it,' he commanded, a little more forcefully.
Belchambers cleared his throat. The self-conscious gesture relaxed Drinkwater. 'Are they going to cut my throat, or should I complete the matter myself, Mr Belchambers? Eh? Give the thing here, thank you.'
He took the crumpled and grubby paper and the boy fled gratefully. Captain Drinkwater's mood had been dangerously unpredictable of late.
Drinkwater smoothed the sheet and stared at it. In all justice to the midshipman, it was not easy to read, almost obscured by the creases into which it had been balled, the easier to be thrown on to the quarterdeck. It would have been tossed at Quilhampton's feet, no doubt, with not a man on deck anywhere near it as the lieutenant bent to pick it up. Or, of course, it would have been dropped during the night. No matter now; here it was, in the hands for which it was intended, and the writing was well formed, legalistic and educated — a bad sign. Drinkwater frowned; he was seeing ominous signs in everything these days. He read:
To Captain Drinkwater, Esquire
Y'r Honour,
We, the Ship's Company, with our Humble Duty beg to Acquaint Your Honour of our Reprobation of the Events of this Day. Knowing Your Honour's Mind to be of Lofty Principles, we, the Ship's Company, Entreat you not to be Misled by former Occurrences. We Solemnly Swear that no Malice Aforethought attaches to the Heinous and Hideous Interference with the Binnacle Lantern that Must be Contemptible to the Minds of British Seamen.
We, the Ship's Company, Desire to Inform Your Honour of our Loyalty to Our Duty and Our Country.
Signed,
By Us All,
One and Indivisible.
It was a concoction worthy of the most appalling Patriotic Club, but its outrage rang with sincerity. Its very vehemence suggested a wiping out of the shameful acts off California. These were men, quite capable of outrageously mutinous behaviour, angrily repudiating any suggestion of its initiation in this case.
'They want to go home,' muttered Drinkwater, smiling at himself in the battered glass, and crushing the round robin in his hand.
But it offered little peace of mind, merely diverting his suspicion elsewhere. Morris he knew to be too motivated by self-interest to have attempted such a stupid thing. Morris had nothing to gain by diverting Patrician and could not possibly have known of the Dyak presence. Drinkwater was tempted to seek its motivation in mischief rather than malice. He recalled Midshipman Chirkov's sudden interest in navigational matters, and the suspicion, once it crossed his mind, seemed a reasonable one, redolent of idle folly and petulant resentment over earlier humiliation.
Dangerously stupid and consequentially disastrous as the matter had been, he realised his suspicions were circumstantial and unprovable. He knew only that his own vigilance must increase, and that the burden of his responsibilities weighed even heavier upon him. When later that day, as the sun dipped crimson towards the thunderheads above the blue mountains of Sumatra, the masthead reported two sails, Captain Drinkwater could not have cared whether or not they were enemies.
They made contact with the two ships just before daylight finally vanished from the tropic sky, two sloops from Penang sent questing down the Malacca Strait after reports of enemy cruisers off the Rhio archipelago. They were not naval ships, but belonged to the East India Company's Bombay Marine, the Arrow and the Dart, nattily smart twenty-two-gun ship-rigged sloops aswarm with lascars and a commander not much older, or so it seemed to Drinkwater's jaundiced eye, than Fleetwood Pellew.
Convoy, escort and new arrivals lay to in a calm through the night. The continuing windlessness of the following morning, with the sea like blue steel, pricked here and there by the lifting spearheads of flying fish, allowed much boat-trafficking between the ships. Drinkwater, watching the masters rowed about the wallowing fleet, knew that tittle-tattle was being plied about, mostly pejorative to his reputation, a fact confirmed by the boats' avoidance of the Patrician.