Drinkwater paced the quarterdeck. With his officers decimated and his ship requiring a thorough overhaul and reorganization, he had enough on his mind without grief and the presence of an enemy immeasurably stronger than himself not four miles away.
After he had sailed clear of the bay, he had brought Andromeda back across the fiord and found the shallows upon which Malaburn had so treacherously anchored the frigate only a day before. Here the ship and her company drew breath beneath the northern stars. A rudimentary anchor watch kept the deck, and most men slept, exhausted by the day's exertions.
Drinkwater walked up and down, up and down. The extreme lethargy that had seized him earlier, that had driven all thought of Kestrel and James Quilhampton from his brain, had left him. He felt almost weightless, as though he derived energy from the workings of his mind. He did not question or marvel at this manic activity; it did not occur to him that the news of Quilhampton's death compounded the weight of accuracy of Surgeon Kennedy's insubordinate accusation. This fateful personalization of so terrible a truth drove like a blade into his soul, and his unquiet spirit teetered on the brink of reason.
Up and down, up and down he paced, so that the men on duty, huddled in the warmest corners they could find beneath the wrecked masts, formed their own opinions as they watched the figure of their strange captain. His body was dark against the sky, the relentless scissoring of his white-breeched legs pale against the bulwarks.
'You know he pinched the fuse out of a shell,' a seaman whose battle station had been at a forecasde carronade whispered to a shivering watchmate. 'Bill Whitman told me he was as cool as a cucumber. Just looked at it for a bit, then bent over and squeezed the fuse. Then he dug the bloody thing up with his sword and dropped it over the side.'
'Christ, he's a hard bastard!'
'Makes old Pardoe look like a fart in a colander.'
'Anyway, bugger Drinkwater. I could do with a drink.'
'Couldn't we all...'
'He'll have had one.'
'Or two.'
They dozed into envious silence as Drinkwater's restless pacing soothed the fury of his thoughts, ordered their priority and saved him from the descent into insanity.
'Two watches,' he muttered to himself, 'Jameson and Birkbeck. First to clear the rest of the wreckage, then rig topmasts. Birkbeck will accomplish that, if we are left alone. If...'
He turned his mind to the problem of the enemy. He was compelled to accept the fact that yesterday's action had been a defeat. He drew no morsel of comfort from anything which Frey had reported. It was perhaps a cold consolation that the Odin's fire had been furious, but Dahlgaard's countrymen had twice before impressed British seamen with their valour and this was mere corroboration. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, to have come so close, to the point of actually observing the very muskets and sabres which would be used to ravage the peaceful settlements of Canada being lifted from the Odin, and to be powerless to stop their transhipment.
Had he been able to fire at the American ships, he might at the very least have reduced them to a state which no prudent commander would take across the Atlantic in winter. But the presence of the Odin had transformed the situation, and cost Drinkwater any tactical advantage he might otherwise have possessed.
The irony of it burned into his self-esteem. He shuddered, as much with self-loathing as with cold.
Faced with such reproach how could there be any satisfaction in knowing he had done his duty? He had spent a lifetime doing his duty and what had it availed? The war ground interminably on, the men he had befriended and then led had died beside him. His friendship seemed accursed, a poisoned chalice. He wished he had been wounded himself, killed even ...
He drew back from the thought. What would Birkbeck do now if he was dead? The thought struck him like a pistol ball, stopping him in his mad pacing. What was he to do? He felt bankrupt of ideas, beyond the obvious one of slipping unobtrusively out of the Vikkenfiord. Instinctively he sniffed the air. There was something odd ...
He had not noticed the creeping chill of dampening air. Now sodden ropes dripped on a deck perceptibly dark with moisture. The fog had come down with a startling suddenness, though its symptoms had encroached gradually.
Fog!
Even in the darkness he could see the pallid wraiths steal in over the bulwarks, wafted by the light breeze that blew the cold air from the distant peaks down over the warmer waters of the fiord.
Fog!
Hated though it was as a restriction on safe navigation, the enfolding vapour was a shroud, hiding them from the enemy. Could he spirit his ship to sea, clear of the gorge? He thought not; the fear of losing her filled his heart with dread.
Fog!
Then, as the fog enveloped them completely, the idea struck Drinkwater. Fate tugged at the cord of his despair and wakened hope.
Templeton had never before experienced so terrible an event as the action in the bay. When he learned that they had anchored to engage the Odin he could not understand so deliberate and foolhardy a decision, until Kennedy, up to his elbows in reeking blood, explained that it was expected of a man-of-war that she be carried into battle against all odds and that to shirk such a duty laid her commander open to charges of dereliction of duty and cowardice.
'And they wouldn't scruple to charge him either,' Kennedy said, as he completed the last suture and motioned his patient aside and the table swabbed for the next.
Templeton knew of such things in the abstract, had read a thousand reports in the copy room, but the reality had never struck him with all its terrible implications as the torn and mangled wrecks of what had, shortly before, been men were dragged on to the surgeon's extempore operating table. Convention demanded that a captain's secretary share the risks of the quarterdeck with his commander, but Drinkwater, unused to such an encumbrance, had made it known to his clerk that he expected no such quixotism.
'Besides,' Drinkwater had said, 'only you and I are privy to the exact details of this matter and, if anything happens to me, you will be best able to advise my successor. Stay below, you may be able to assist Mr Kennedy in his duties.'
Thus it was that Templeton found himself in the cockpit, among the gleaming scalpels, saws, clamps, catlings and curettes of Surgeon Kennedy's trade when the wounded began to pour below in ever-increasing numbers.
Tempelton's experience of the previous day's action had, if not inured, at least accustomed him to expect the conventional brutalities of naval war. And the unaccustomed harshness of his existence since joining the frigate, the miseries of sea-sickness and the violence of the ocean had begun the ineluctable process of eroding his sensibilities. But the action in the bay produced so severe a drain upon Kennedy's resources that Templeton found himself inexorably drawn into the actual business of assisting.
Whereas on the previous day he had merely tied bandages, passed words of consolation along with a bottle among the men, and taken and recorded their names and their divisions, today he had actively helped Kennedy and his tiring loblolly 'boys' in the gruesome business of amputation, excision and debriding. He found, after a while, assisted by rum, a savagery that matched the speed of Kennedy's actions.
But nothing had prepared him for the horror of discovering Greer's white and mutilated body stretched upon the sheet spread on the midshipmen's chests, of seeing the mangled stump of Greer's right arm whose hand had so lately transported him; or the shock of the apparent callousness of Kennedy's cursory examination.