It was a dark, hard-edged shape, like a porpoise's fin, which he recognized instantly as a section of the boat, the bow he thought, where the gunwales and the stem were joined with a knee. Then he saw a head bobbing near it, and another... Poulter's spirits rose in proportion. It was always damnably difficult to see men in the water and, he thought, the men in the boat could not have been dispersed very much. If only Captain Drinkwater had not been so old and the boat had not run under the ship. Perhaps they would be lucky ...
Drinkwater was reduced to a terrified primal being, intent only on staying afloat and aware of the feebleness of his body. He was wounded and hurt, wracked with agonies whose location and origins were confused but which seemed in their combined burden to be preventing him from swimming. The realization overwhelmed him with anxiety. He had a strong desire to live, to see his wife and children again. He was shivering with cold, weighed down by his waterlogged clothes but, energized by the air he now drew raspingly into his lungs, he renewed his fight to live.
In terror he found he could no longer swim. His body seemed leaden, unable to obey the urgent impulses of his brain. He went under again, swallowing mouthfuls of water as he floundered, before panic brought him thrashing back to the surface, his arms flailing in a sudden reflexive flurry of energy. Then, quite suddenly, both ending the panic and bringing to his conscious mind a simultaneous sensation of sharp pain and a glorious relief, his right arm struck an oar. A second later he had the thing under his armpits and was hanging over it, gasping for breath and vomiting sea water and bile from a burning throat.
The sensation of relief was all too brief, swept aside by a more sobering, conscious and logical thought. They would never recover him. He was going to die and he recalled the presentient feeling of doom he had experienced when lost once before in a boat in an Arctic fog. It had been cold, bone-numbingly cold so that he had shivered uncontrollably then as he shivered now. He had no right to live, not any more. He was an old and wicked man. He had killed his friends and betrayed Elizabeth. He had lain with Arabella Stuart in that brief liaison that had drawn from him an intense but guilty passion. Why had Arabella so affected him and turned his head? Was it because it had always been turned since he had set eyes on Hortense, whose haunting beauty had plagued him throughout his life, an exciting alternative to Elizabeth's loyal constancy? And what was love? And why was it that what he had was not enough? Was it ever enough, or were men just wicked, inevitably, innately evil? But he had not loved Arabella, not as he loved Elizabeth. Their parting had not affected him beyond causing him a brief, if poignant regret. Yet his hunger for her at the time had been irresistible. Was that all? Was the sole purpose of their encounter nothing more than that? The waywardness of it struck at the certainties he had clung to all his life. Surely, surely...
And as he sucked the air into his aching lungs he recalled Elizabeth and tried to seize her image, as if holding it in his mind's eye would revive hope and lead him to understand what was happening to him. Were all men left to die and obliged to relinquish life in this terrible desolation? Was it not therefore better to be cut in two by an iron shot and to be snuffed out like a candle? And then he knew, and felt the conviction with the absolute certainty of profound insight. He had been tempted, and had succumbed to the flirtatious loveliness of the American beauty, because the remorse he had afterwards suffered had saved him from the greater, irreversible sin of insensate entanglement with Hortense.
It made sense with a simplicity directly attributable to providential intervention, and in the moment that he realized it, he felt a great burden lifting from him. This relief came with an easing of his breathing and the final eructation of his cramped and aching stomach. He raised his head as he lay wallowing over the oar, and looked up. He could see the ship again! She had turned round and grew larger as she came towards him. As she drew near, he could see a man up in the knightheads pointing ahead of the ship.
Drinkwater raised an arm and waved. He tried to shout, but nothing came from his mouth except a feeble croak. It would be all right! They could see him. He was not going to drown. He was redeemed, forgiven. He began to laugh with a feeble, manic sound through chattering teeth.
The forward lookouts aboard Vestal had not seen Captain Drinkwater. They had caught sight of two of the oarsmen and Captain Drew, who clung to the bow section of the port cutter in which was lashed an empty barricoe for added buoyancy. They lay some two hundred yards beyond Captain Drinkwater, who again passed unseen beneath the plunging bow of the Vestal.
Drinkwater looked up again. Vestal's bowsprit rose over him like a great lance. He saw the rigging supporting it, the twin shrouds, the white painted chain bobstay which angled down to the iron spike of the dolphin-striker that passed half a fathom above his head. Then came the white lady who, following the iron spike as the ship drove her bow into a wave, seemed to sweep down towards him with malevolent intent. A cold terror seized his heart as the ship breasted the wave and rose, lifting the figurehead so that the white lady seemed suddenly to fly above him higher and higher, retreating as she did in the dream.
Then the forefoot of the Vestal's bow thrust itself at him, striking the oar and wrenching it from his grasp. The foaming bow wave separated him from it and swept him down the ship's port side. He tried to shout again but suddenly the sponson threw its shadow and the paddle-wheel drove him down and he was fighting for his life with Edouard Santhonax in an alley in Sheerness, breathless after his run, and aware that he had allowed himself to be caught at a disadvantage, the consequences of which were as inevitable as they were dreadful. As the Frenchman's sword blade struck down in the molinello, he felt the thing bite into his shoulder with the same awful finality as he had experienced all those years ago.
Two paddle floats hit him in succession in passing and sent him deeper into the swirling depths of the turbulent sea. The roaring in his ears was the thunder of a great battle, the endless, ear-splitting concussion of hundreds of guns. It was inconceivable, terrible, awful. He glimpsed Camperdown and Copenhagen and Trafalgar. He glimpsed the darkness of a night action and saw, as he came near the surface in the swirling water of the paddle race, the pallid faces of the dead.
There were so many of them! Faces he had forgotten, faces of men he had never known though he had had a hand in their killing — of a French privateer officer, of a Danish captain called Dahlgaard, of an American named Tucker, of an anonymous officer of the French hussars, of Edouard Santhonax, of old Tregembo whom he had dispatched with a pistol shot, of James Quilhampton whose death he had mourned more than all the others. They seemed to mock him as he felt his body spin over and over, and the constriction in his breast seemed now to be worse than ever and somehow attached to the laughter of these fiends who trailed behind the white lady and struck with the cold, deep into his soul.
CHAPTER 6
Tales of the Dead
'Nathaniel, what is it?'
Elizabeth looked up from her needlework as she sat by the fire. Her husband was staring through the half-opened shutter, out across the lawn in front of Gantley Hall where, judging by the draught that whirled about her feet and the noise in the chimney, a biting easterly wind was blowing. The rising moon cast a pale glow on his face, a chilling contrast to the warm candle-light and the glow of the fire. She watched his abstracted profile over her spectacles for a moment, then bent to her work with a sigh. He was not with her in the warm security of their home; his restless spirit was still at sea and his poor, divided heart revealed itself in these long intervals of abstraction. Then she heard the chink of decanter on glass and the low gurgle of poured wine.