‘I’ll have you know, sir, that I mislike topping it the plunderer. This is nothing but bare-faced thievery.’
Popham’s smile slipped. ‘Call it what you will but you’ll do it. They turned down a perfectly good arrangement when we first arrived and put us to much bother and expense, not to say blood, to come to the same end. All their fault, therefore.’
Chapter 104
Nyholm
Kydd sat in his office, depressed and moody. As well as the cloying fetor of smouldering debris desolation and bleakness lay over the city, impossible to ignore. The sooner they were quit of the place the better.
He turned to his lists. There was no option but to fall in with Popham’s demands. He was the designated naval representative under the Articles.
Was the man still a friend? He rather doubted it.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ he called heavily.
Dillon entered with a lopsided grin. ‘Um, I’ve two persons desiring passage to England, should you be kind enough.’
‘No, by God!’ Kydd blazed. ‘Not even if they’re the King and Queen of Lilliput! Tell ’em to go to the army transports or other – Tyger’s not a convenience for fallen travellers.’
‘Sir, if you’d be good enough to tell them yourself.’ He stood aside.
‘What – who the devil …?’ Kydd spluttered, as two apparitions came in, stopping before his desk. Ragged, caked in pale dust and with eyes bright but red-rimmed, they waited respectfully.
‘Nicholas? Cecilia?’ Kydd gasped, unable to believe what he was seeing.
‘The same,’ croaked Renzi. ‘Lately delivered from durance vile.’
‘And … and Cecilia?’
‘Your sister, Thomas,’ she managed quietly.
It was too much and she threw herself on him, sobbing with a deep, wrenching relief.
It took some time for order and naval discipline to be restored before Kydd could indicate that, as of that moment, HMS Tyger should be entirely at their service, the great cabin of her captain their especial residence.
‘You’re too kind, dear fellow, but we do not wish to inconvenience. For now we’d be satisfied with our present quarters until you’re ready to sail and-’
‘Nonsense! I won’t have it – Cecilia might feel need to make use of my copper hip-bath and you could-’
‘Thank you, brother, your kindness is much appreciated. I believe, however, that we must be content with our present situation while you’re engaged with your current duties. Please don’t concern yourself on our account – the Amalienborg Palace is renowned for its civilities.’
‘But perhaps dinner tonight? At which all shall be revealed, I promise.’
He grinned. ‘Of course, Nicholas, you may count upon it.’
They left and Kydd sat down, bemused and curious by turns as to why his closest friend and his sister should be in the very place in the world he wouldn’t wish any to be.
‘Sir?’
He looked up. The duty master’s mate had poked his head around the door. ‘I’ve a kindness to ask of you, sir.’
‘What is it?’
‘Sir, I’ve a care for my younger brother, who went ashore with the 52nd and … and I’d be beholden to you should you allow me to step ashore and see if he … is in health, as it were.’
‘Mr Maynard, go as of this minute!’
Chapter 105
The day was grey, in keeping with what was about to take place; the only points of bright colour the ensigns and pennants of the great fleet that Britain had sent to exact its will.
It was so vast that it stretched in an unbroken forest of spars well up the Sound. In the van was the majestic Prince of Wales, flagship of Admiral Sir James Gambier, at the head of a concourse of ships-of-the-line such as had not been seen since Trafalgar.
In the centre were even more – eighty ships, the transports for the army divisions that had compelled the Danes to bow to their fate, and the dread weapons they had employed to such effect.
And in the rear, Superb and other sail-of-the-line of Commodore Keats, with his three frigates lying off the Trekroner Fortress.
‘Preparative,’ Tyger’s signals midshipman reported importantly, his telescope on the flagship.
The English were about to leave Copenhagen to its inhabitants and sail away for ever.
Standing on the quarterdeck, Renzi murmured to Cecilia, ‘A memory that will never leave us.’ She squeezed his arm tightly, gazing back at the stricken city.
‘Execute!’ came the next signal.
From the yards of the van and centre, sail appeared and slowly, ponderously, the grand fleet got under way for the open sea.
The rear remained where it was, theirs a solemn duty.
‘Give me that glass, younker,’ Kydd rapped, taking the telescope and training it on the shore. He’d spotted unusual movement along the waterfront, like the stealthy advance of an army. He held his breath and stared – was this going to be a last frenzied falling upon the forces that had so grievously hurt their city?
Yet there were no trumpets or drums, wild shouts or gunfire. In an unearthly hush, a ghost-like mass of people flooded forward until the foreshore was black with silent figures, standing, watching. From Swan Mill to far along into the harbour, hundreds, thousands of Danes had come to witness the last act.
The first of the Danish fleet emerged from its refuge.
Christian VII, flagship, powerful enough on her own to take on any one of the British 74s that waited for her outside. No white ensign was flaunted aloft, for this was not a mano’-war taken in battle.
She was closely followed by Waldemaar, Prindsesse Sophia Friderica, more. One after another, the proudest vessels of the Royal Danish Navy passed through the harbour entrance by the Citadel seeming, to the still figures along the water-front, almost close enough to touch.
In an endless stream, battleships, frigates, others emerged to join the British fleet. Still more – even the gallant Nakskov kanonchalup going now to serve a different master.
And in all the time it took to assemble there was not a murmur from the crowded foreshore.
‘Hands to the braces,’ Kydd ordered quietly.
Superb’s signal to get under way soared up.
Tyger’s post was in the rear, the last ship to quit the scene and therefore granted the final view of Copenhagen harbour.
Where a first-rank navy had rested in the bosom of its nation’s capital, now there was nothing but bare wharves, deserted storehouses and an expanse of empty harbour. A bleak and unforgettable sight.
As the last ship took up on its northward course, Tyger braced about and followed.
Guessing Renzi’s thoughts, Kydd went over to him. He gave a twisted smile. ‘Nicholas, m’ friend. Do know we’ve scuppered Boney, that’s true enough …’
Without taking his eyes from Copenhagen and its army of silent watchers slipping astern, Renzi whispered, ‘Yes, dear fellow, but how will history judge us?’
Author’s Note
John Lethbridge of Newton Abbot is an almost unknown figure – and a surprising hero. ‘Wrackman’, as he was known locally, was a modest wool merchant who in mature years, and with a large family to support, took it upon himself in that inland Devonshire town to think about wreck-diving in a special contrivance of his own devising, after he had spent half an hour in a barrel at the bottom of his pond. At a time when Blackbeard and Teach were ravaging the Spanish Main, he was quietly at work in places like Cape Town and Madeira, where he brought up three tons of silver in his ‘diving engine’, retiring years later a wealthy man.
When I came across an item in a local paper, reporting that in the 1840s a full working set of his gear had been found on a Dorset farm, my creative juices began to flow. Readers interested in the device can today view a faithful replica in Cherbourg’s Cite de la Mer. Incidentally, the legendary Tobermory Galleon has not yet been found – the latest attempt, by Sir Torquhil Ian Campbell, 13th Duke of Argyll, was begun in 2014.