'Begging your pardon, gentlemen, but there's a message come for Captain McCullough. Your tender's just arrived, sir, with word of a movement along the coast, and they're awaiting orders.'
McCullough rose, a somewhat relieved expression crossing his face. 'I'll be up directly,' he said to the second mate and, turning to the others, apologized. 'Gentlemen, forgive me. It has been a most stimulating evening, but I must leave at once. My tender, the Flying Fish, was not expected to return until tomorrow, so this news means something considerable is under weigh ...'
Robinson waved aside McCullough's explanation. 'Now, Drinkwater, here's an opportunity for us all to do our duty! Will you accept our services as volunteers, McCullough? You will? Good man! Gentlemen, to our duty...'
And with that Robinson rose and went to his small cabin, muttering about priming pistols. 'Will you have us, sir?' Drinkwater asked, rising slowly to his feet. Antique and libertarian as we may seem, we are not wholly without experience in these matters.'
McCullough shrugged. 'Your reputation is solid, sir, but I am not so certain how strong a trade-wind blows ...'
'Come, sir,' Moring snapped as he leapt to his feet, 'that remark is of dubious propriety. Let us show you how strong a trade-wind may blow, damn it!'
And so the uncongenial occasion broke up in petty rivalry, and Drinkwater went reluctantly to shift his coat and shoes, and buckle on his hanger.
It was a moonless night of pitchy darkness and a light but steady southerly wind, a night made for the running of tubs on to the beaches of Dungeness, and the Flying Fish slipped south-westwards under a press of canvas. The comparison with Kestrel, thought Drinkwater, as he squatted on one of the tender's six carronade slides, ended with the similarity of the tender's rig. Thereafter all was different, for Flying Fish was stuffed with men, and the dull and sinister gleam of cutlasses being made ready was accompanied by the snick of pistol frizzens as the men prepared for action. What precise intelligence initiated this purposeful response, Drinkwater had only the haziest notion. Treachery and envy loosened tongues the world over, and word of mouth was a deadly weapon when employed deliberately. But patient observation, infiltration and careful analysis of facts could, as Drinkwater well knew from his brief tenure of command of the Admiralty's Secret Department, yield strong inferences of intended doings.
In truth his curiosity was little aroused by the matter; he felt he had exhausted his own interest in such affairs years ago. It was, like the command of Kestrel, something he was quite content to give up to a younger and more eager man. Every dog had his day, ran the old saw, and he had had his. If the evening's evidence was anything to go by, he was out of step with the temper of the times. Younger men, men like Moring, Robinson and McCullough, had made their own world and he was too rooted in the past to do more than offer his unwanted comments upon it. Nevertheless, it seemed that with the past something good had been lost. He supposed his perception was inevitable and that the hard-won experience and wisdom of existence was perpetually squandered as part of the excessive bounty of nature. These men would learn in their turn, but it seemed an odd way for providence to proceed.
Such considerations were terminated by McCullough summoning them all aft. Stiffly Drinkwater rose and joined the others about the tiller. A master's mate had gone forward to brief the hands, and Drinkwater stood listening to McCullough while watching the pale, bubbling line of the wake draw out from under the Flying Fish's low counter, creating a dull gleam of phosphorescence at the cutwater of the boat towing astern.
'Two of our pulling galleys reported a long-boat from Rye run across to France a couple of nights ago,' McCullough was saying. 'Information has reached us that the contraband cargo will be transferred to three fishing-boats which will return independently to their home ports. The long-boat will come in empty; apart, I expect, from a few fish.
'The rendezvous is to be made on the Varne Bank, near the buoy of the Varne. It is my intention that we shall interrupt this. I want prisoners and I want evidence. From you, gentlemen,' McCullough said, turning to his three volunteers, 'I want witnesses, not heroics.'
As Moring spluttered his protest, Drinkwater smiled in the darkness. At least Elizabeth would approve of him being a witness; he was otherwise less certain of her enthusiasm for his joining this mad jape.
'And now, gentlemen,' McCullough concluded, 'I must insist upon the most perfect silence.'
For another hour they squatted about the deck, wrapped in their cloaks against the night's damp. The low cloud was breaking a little, but a veil persisted over the upper atmosphere, blurring the few stars visible and preserving the darkness.
But it was never entirely dark at sea; the eyes could always discern something, and intelligence filled in details, so that it was possible, while one remained awake, to half-see, half-sense what was going on. The quiet shuffling between bow and helm, accompanied as it was by whispers, told of the transmission of information from the lookouts, and in due course McCullough himself, discernible from the shape of his cocked hat and a tiny gleam on the brass of his night glass, went forward himself and remained there for some time. Drinkwater had, in fact, almost dozed off when something like a voltaic shock ran along the deck as men touched their neighbours' shoulders and the company rose to its feet.
After the long wait, the speed with which events now accelerated was astonishing. The preservation of surprise had compelled McCullough to keep his hand hidden until the last moment and now he demonstrated the skill of both his interception and his seamanship, for though their course had been altered several times in the final moments, it seemed that Flying Fish suddenly ran in among several craft to the accompaniment of shouts of alarm and bumps of her intruding hull.
The drilling of her company was impeccable. On a single order, her mainsail was scandalized and the gaff dropped, the staysail fluttered to the deck with the thrum of hanks on the stay, and men seemed to drop over the side as they invaded the rafted boats which, until that moment, had been busy with the transfer of casks and bundles of contraband.
For a brief moment, it seemed to the observing Drinkwater that the deterrent waving of dimly perceived cutlass blades would subdue the smugglers, but suddenly riot broke out. Cries of surprise rose in reactive alarm, the clash of blade meeting blade filled the night, and the grunt of effort and the flash and report of the first pistol opened an action of primitive ferocity. Beside Drinkwater, Moring was jumping about the deck with the undignified and frustrated enthusiasm of a schoolboy witnessing his first prize-fight, while all about them the scene of struggle had a contrived, almost theatrical appearance, for the pistol flashes threw up sharp images in the darkness and these stayed on the retina, accompanied by a more general perception of men stumbling about in the surrounding boats, grappling and hacking at each other in a grim and terrible struggle for mastery.
This state of affairs had been going on for no more than two or three minutes with neither side apparently prevailing, though shouts of execration filled the air along with the cries of the hurt and the occasional bellowed order or demand for surrender. Suddenly matters took a turn for the worse.
The ship-keeper, left at the helm of the Flying Fish, added his own voice to the general uproar. 'To me! Help! Astern here!'
Drinkwater turned to see the flash of a pistol and the ship-keeper fall dead. A moment later a group of smugglers came over the Flying Fish's stern and rushed the deck. He lugged out his hanger just in time, shouting the alarm to Moring and Robinson, and struck with a swift cut at the nearest attacker.