Beneath the aurora

'So you maintained the fiction?'

'That is right,' Huke said wearily. 'And in return I was allowed an emolument…'

'An emolument?'

'A portion of Captain Pardoe's pay went to my sister who lives with my widowed mother and has no other means of subsistence.'

'And will Captain Pardoe continue with this arrangement?'

Huke gave a thin and chilly smile. 'Would you, Captain Drinkwater, if there was no reason to?'

No wonder, thought Drinkwater, Pardoe had been so keen to relinquish his ship once it was clear that the interests of party had been served by his obliging the ministry. The captain's protests had been all sham. He would make an excellent politician, Drinkwater privately concluded.

'If he told you he regretted handing over command, sir, it was a lie. He is a man who seeks ease at all times, and even when aboard never took the conn or put himself to the least trouble. He is a great dissembler; any man would be fooled by him as would be any woman.'

Huke broke off. He did not reveal that his sister had been dishonoured by Pardoe, and had borne him a bastard, acknowledged only because of the ties of blood. The child had died of smallpox eighteen months earlier, so Pardoe could cynically drop the old commitment.

'I'm sorry, Mr Huke. I had no wish to pry. Pray, help yourself.'

'It's been difficult, sir,' Huke said, the wine loosening his tongue. 'It was not in Captain Pardoe's interest to see me advanced ...'

'No, I can see that,' Drinkwater frowned. 'My presence here is hardly welcome then?'

'I could not expect promotion because of Captain Pardoe's removal, sir, but, yes, at least under the previous arrangements I had a free hand on board and my dependants cared for.'

'Damn it, Huke, 'tis outrageous! We must do something about it!'

Huke looked up sharply. 'No, sir! Thank you, but you would oblige me if you would leave the matter alone. It was inevitable that it would end one day…'

'Well, what did Pardoe think would happen when I joined?'

'That I would simply carry on as any first lieutenant.'

'I don't want a resentful first lieutenant, Mr Huke, damn me, I don't, but I'm confounded glad you have told me your circumstances. What's your Christian name?'

'Thomas, sir.'

'D'you answer to Tom?'

Something of a smile appeared on Huke's weatherbeaten face. 'I haven't for some time, sir.'

Drinkwater smiled. This was better; he felt they were making progress. 'Very well, then let us to business.' Drinkwater pulled a rolled chart from a brass tube lashed to the table leg and was gratified that Huke helped spread it and quickly located the lead weights to hold it down upon the table. He indicated its salient points:

'To the west Orkney and Shetland, to the east the Skaw of Denmark, the Naze of Norway and here,' his finger traced the Norwegian coast due east of Orkney, 'Utsira.' Beside the offshore island of Utsira the ragged outline of the coast became more deeply indented, fissured with re-entrant inlets, long tapering fiords that bit far into the mountainous terrain, separating ridge from ridge where the sea exploited every glacial valley to thrust into the interior. Each fiord was guarded by rocks, islets and islands of every conceivable shape and size, their number, like the leaves upon a tree, inconceivable.

The names upon the chart were long and unpronounceable, the headwaters of the inlets faded into dotted conjecture, the hachured mountains rose ever vaguer into the wild hinterland.

'It is a Danish chart, Tom, incomplete and probably poorly surveyed. It is the best the British Admiralty could come up with. The Hydrographer himself, Captain Hurd, sent it...'

Huke straightened up and looked Drinkwater squarely in the eye. 'There is something out of the ordinary in this business, then,' he said quietly.

Drinkwater nodded. 'Yes, very. Is it only the chart that has made you think this?'

'And the manner of your arrival, sir.'

'Ah. In what way?'

'I had heard of you, sir. Your name is not unfamiliar.'

'I had no idea,' Drinkwater said, genuinely surprised.

'You mentioned the Melusine and a Greenland voyage. And did you not take a Russian seventy-four in the Pacific?' There was a strained tone of bitterness in Huke's words.

'Luck has a great deal to do with success, Tom…'

'As does a lack of it with what others are pleased to call failure.'

'Indeed, but look, see that little fellow doing a dido on the quarter?' They stared across the mile of grey, windswept wilderness that separated the diminutive cutter Kestrel from her larger consort. 'Her commander is a mere lieutenant, like yourself, an élève of mine, God help him, a bold and brave fellow who lost a hand when a mere midshipman before the fortress of Kosseir on the Red Sea. [See A Brig of War.] I have been striving to get a swab for him for years, so do not conceive great expectations; by which I do not mean I will not strive to advance any officer worth his salt.'

'I shall concede him the precedence,' Huke said, adding, 'he has independent command in any case.'

'I shall do my best for both of you, but James Quilhampton is a good fellow.'

'I have not yet met him…'

'No, had we had more time, I should have dined all of you. I hope that we shall yet have that pleasure, but for now rest assured that if we are successful in our enterprise, then I will move heaven and earth to have those officers who distinguish themselves given a step in rank.' 'And what is this enterprise?'

'Blowin' great guns, sir!'

Lieutenant Mosse was a dark blur in the blackness.

'Indeed it is.' Drinkwater put a hand to his hat and felt the wind tear at his cloak as he leaned into it, seeking the vertical on the wildly gyrating deck. Above his head the wind shrieked in the rigging, its note subtly changing to a booming roar in the gusts which had the almost painful though short-lived effect of applying pressure on the ears. The ship seemed to stagger under these periodic onslaughts, and around them the hiss and thunder of tumbling seas broke in looming chaos beyond the safety of the wooden bulwarks.

As he struggled past the wheel and peeped momentarily into the dimly lit binnacle, the quartermaster shouted, 'Course dead nor' east, sir.'

He tried looking upwards at the tell-tales in the thrumming shrouds but he could see nothing but the pale blur of a scrap of canvas somewhere forward.

'Wind's sou' by east, sir, more or less, been backing an' filling a bit, but tending to veer all the time.'

'Thank you. What's your name?'

'Collier, sir.'

'Very well, Collier, and thank you.'

He passed from the feeble light of the binnacle into the manic darkness. The moving deck beneath his feet dropped, leaving him weightless. He felt the wild thrust of the storm as Andromeda dipped her stern and a sea ran beneath her. Then the next wave was upon them, hissing and roaring at them, its crest tumbling in a pale, sub-luminous glow that lay above the line of the taffrail. The frigate felt the uplifting buoyancy of its front, she pressed her decks insistently against the soles of Drinkwater's shoes and he was saved from blowing overboard. He reached for and grasped the lanyard of an after mizen backstay, pulling himself into the security of the pinrail where he looped a bight of downhaul round his waist and settled his cloak in a warm cocoon, feeling still the forces of nature through the vibrating rigging.