Frey cleared his throat. 'I am quite all right, sir.'
'Very well, then. Do you take Kestrets boat. We know the course and will compare our compasses when we have drawn clear of Andromeda. I will follow in Andromeda's cutter and tow the gig. The rest you already know.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
The interview with Jameson had been more difficult. However sanguine Jameson's ambition, he had not dreamed of such rapid promotion. To find himself elevated to first and only lieutenant was bad enough, but to have command, however temporary, devolved upon him so suddenly was clearly beyond the computations of his ambition.
'But, sir, if I went in the boats…'
'If you went in the boats I would have no one to take Andromeda home, Mr Jameson. And if I am not back by midnight that is exactly what I wish you to do. Here is my written order.' He handed the reluctant Jameson a scribbled paper. 'Captain Pardoe would never forgive me for losing all his officers.' The bitter joke twitched a responsive smile out of the young officer. 'This is a desperate matter, Mr Jameson, one that I cannot, in all conscience, delegate to you. Should I not return on time, I wish you good luck.'
Jameson accepted the inevitable with a nod. In reality Drinkwater had abandoned reasons of state in prosecuting this last attack personally. Rather, a desire for vengeance inspired him — that, or a wish to die himself.
He had thought vaguely of Elizabeth and the children and the handful of Suffolk acres that gave him the status of a country gentleman, but they were so far away, existing in another world, that he doubted their reality at all. They were a sham, an illusion, a carrot to dangle before him. Besides, return meant also the assumption of responsibility for Huke's mother and sister, Catriona Quilhampton and her child ...
He thrust such considerations aside. He had forfeited all claim upon the smiles of providence when, in a storm of passion, he had lain with the American widow. He had proved himself no better than the next man and could claim no especial privilege. All he could do now was to stake his own life as a tribute to the dead. They left almost unnoticed, clambering down into the boats while Birkbeck supervised Andromeda's toiling company as they disentangled the shot-away spars, cleared away the raffle of fallen gear and salvaged what could be reused.
The men who had volunteered for Drinkwater's forlorn hope took their places at the oars. The looms were wrapped in rags and slushed with tallow or grease where they passed the crutches and thole pins. In every spare space the small barricoes of powder, jars of oil and impregnated rags lay in baskets. In the stern sheets, alongside the boat compasses and in two tinplate boxes in which officers usually kept their best hats, slow matches glowed. The tin boxes bore the names Huke and Mosse.
'Give way.'
'Give way.'
The boats drew away from the ship, paused while Drinkwater and Frey conferred over their respective compass headings, and then settled down to the rhythmic labours of the oarsmen.
Drinkwater had no intention of trying to run straight into the anchorage. The vagaries of the compasses, particularly in these high latitudes, and the risks of being detected dissuaded him. He knew this was a last chance, knew too that once Captain Dahlgaard had discharged the remainder of his cargo and the fog had cleared, Odin would set off in pursuit of the British frigate.
Instead, he had laid off a course which would take them beyond the bay, striking the coast north of the anchorage. This would allow them to drop back along the shore towards the enemy, encountering the American ships first. Dahlgaard, he argued, would be as exhausted as he was himself and preoccupied by completing the transfer of the shipment of arms and equipment, refitting his ship and preparing for sea. At the very least, Drinkwater's attack of the previous afternoon must have incommoded this plan to a degree. Frey had mentioned the Odin's loss of her fore and mainmasts, and he himself thought the mizen had been shot away earlier.
As the boats glided over the still waters of the fiord, these considerations obsessed Drinkwater. Beside him Wells sat attentively, watching the man in the bow who held the end of a length of spun yarn. The other end was held in the hand of a bowman in Frey's boat, so that, paying out and heaving in, as the boats made small variations from their rhumb-lines, they kept in contact. At first it proved awkward and cumbersome, but after ten minutes or so, the men settled to their strokes and, just in sight of each other most of the time, they pulled along in line abreast.
Drinkwater had given orders for the strictest silence to be maintained in the boats and after an hour's hard work, in a brief clearing in the fog, he waved at Frey. Both boats ceased rowing and, with the oars drawn across the gunwhales, they ran alongside, willing hands preventing them from coming into contact. Astern of Drinkwater's boat the empty gig ran up under their transom and Wells put out a hand to prevent it colliding.
'Rum, I think, Mr Frey,' Drinkwater murmured in a low voice, and was gratified to see the men grin. Volunteers they might be, but they brought with them no guarantee of success.
'No more than another mile, by my reckoning.'
Frey nodded, and Drinkwater noted the high colour of his cheeks. It was probably the effect of the damp chill, he concluded, munching on a biscuit and sipping at a small pewter beaker of rum.
Resting in silence they all heard the noise, a regular knock-knock, as of oars.
'Guard-boat,' whispered Drinkwater, hoping to Almighty God it was not an expedition bound on a reciprocal mission to their own ships. They listened a little longer. Drinkwater thought he heard background noises of men speaking, and of them labouring at some task, but dismissed them as wishful thinking. They sat still as the sound died away, the men shivering as the fog chilled their sweat-sodden bodies.
'Let's be getting on, then,' he ordered quietly, and the boats were shoved apart, the oars pushed out and the first strokes taken. A few minutes later, with the spun-yarn umbilical between them, they had taken up their former stations. Only the chuckle of water under the bows of the three boats and the dip and gentle splash of the oars marked their progress.
Their arrival was less well organized, for the loom of smooth boulders ahead of Frey's boat caused her coxswain to put his tiller over and she ran aboard her sister with a clatter and an outbreak of muffled invective. Then the towed cutter ran up astern and struck Drinkwater's boat with a second thud, so that the ensuing confusion took a moment or two to subside.
Frey's boat edged ahead and found a second boulder and then a steep shingle beach which rose swiftly to a gloomy forest of pine and fir. They ran the boats aground and Drinkwater ordered them all ashore. While the men relieved themselves, Drinkwater checked the slow matches. The foggy damp and the need for silence had dissuaded him from any ideas of striking flint and steel. Happily, the matches still burned.
Satisfied that he could do no more, Drinkwater strode off to ease himself. Above the smooth stones of the beach, the ground grew soft with fallen needles and the air smelt deliciously of resin. Outcrops of rock broke through here and there, and were fronded with ferns, but an awesome and sinister stillness pervaded the forest, and he was glad to retreat to the water's edge, where the men talked in low voices.
'Silence now.' The babble died down and, when all were reassembled, Drinkwater asked quietly, 'Any questions?' There was a general shaking of heads.
'Back into the boats. Line ahead, Mr Frey.'
Frey's boat led, out beyond the rocks then turning to starboard, edging along the shoreline. From time to time they had to shorten oars, even trail them, as they glided between the massive boulders that, smoothed by ice and water, had been cast aside as glacial moraine thousands of years before.