The blazing Indiaman was broad on their larboard beam and dropping astern. The French frigate was making off to the north, leaving the remaining Indiaman and the schooner to their fate. Sprite had worn round under Icarus's stern and was engaging the jury-rigged schooner.
'Good man, Sundercombe,' Drinkwater muttered, seizing the speaking trumpet as they bore down on the Icarus. Men were swarming on her forecastle and he could see the glimmer of lanterns as they sought to clear away the tangle of fallen gear. Drinkwater leapt up on the rail, clasping the mizen rigging with one hand and the speaking trumpet with the other.
'Icarus ahoy Captain Ashby…'
'Sir?'
'Secure what you can here. Those are two captured Indiamen, by the way, with prize-crews aboard. Then rejoin the convoy. Keep Sprite under your orders. I'm going in pursuit of that frigate.'
'He's a Frenchman, Captain Drinkwater, did you know?'
'Yes. Are you manageable?'
'Aye, I've a forecourse, I think ...'
'Good luck.'
'And you.'
They waved, their ships rolling in the swell, and Wyatt brought Patrician on to a course parallel with the retiring French frigate. She was ahead and to starboard of the British ship and both had the fresh trade wind blowing on their starboard quarters.
'It's going to be a long night, James,' Drinkwater remarked.
'It's already nearly ten,' Quilhampton said after consulting his watch.
'Moonrise in three hours.'
They set every stitch of canvas the spars could stand, started the mast wedges and ran preventer stays up to the topmast caps, setting them up with luff tackles. Never had the Patrician's crew been so hard driven since, those who remembered it afterwards claimed, they had been in the Pacific. There was, Drinkwater knew, little doubt of the outcome if the masts and spars and canvas and cordage stood the strain. The French frigate was a fast ship, but slightly smaller than the British, of a lighter build and, though well handled, unable to match the hardiness of her pursuer. Patrician was a razee, a cut-down sixty-four gun line-of-battle ship, heavy, but able to stand punishment and, in a strengthening wind, in her element with a quartering sea. Moonrise found the distance between the two ships significantly lessened. Patches of cloud came and went across the face of the full moon, adding to the drama and excitement of the night, and periodically Lieutenant Gordon, pointing the guns himself, tried a shot at the enemy's top-hamper, seeking to cripple him as he fled.
And periodically too, the enemy fired back, though both commanders knew the issue would not be so easily settled, that their scudding ships, heeling and scending under their press of sail, were uncertain gun-platforms, that the angle between them was too fine for more than a lucky shot to tell, and that either luck on the part of one, or disaster for the other, would bring the matter to a conclusion before daylight.
Luck, it seemed, first favoured the French. A shot from a quarter gun struck Patrician's waist, felling an entire gun's crew with a burst of lacerating splinters, sending men screaming like lunatics in antic dances of pain and killing three men outright. A second shot struck Patrician just below the starboard fore chains, carrying away a stay-rod. But for the preventer rigged an hour earlier, the shroud above might have parted and the entire foremast gone by the board. As it was the carpenter was able to effect repairs of a kind. Half an hour later a third shot hulled the pursuing British frigate and she began taking water. Once again the carpenter and his mates were summoned. They plugged the shot hole and the pumps were manned, but it shook the Patricians' confidence and the men murmured at their inability to hit back.
'I wonder if Metcalfe would have managed anything?' Moncrieff superciliously asked no one in particular. 'He was a damned good shot...'
The remark provoked in Drinkwater's mind's eye an image of Thurston falling from the rigging, which was so vivid he started and became aware he had been half-asleep on his feet. 'Metcalfe...?' he said, stupidly and shaken, 'Oh, yes, he was, wasn't he ...'
'He's done it!' Quilhampton's cry was echoed round the ship. Gordon had fired his foremost gun, loaded with bar shot, as the Patricians stern had fallen into a trough. The rising bow had thrown the shot high, almost too high. But the crazy, eccentric hemispheres had, with the aid of centrifugal force, extended the sliding bars and the spinning projectile had struck the enemy's fore topgallant mast. For a moment the pallid oblongs of its two sails leaned, suspended in a web of rigging, flogging as the wind caught their underbellies, and then they sagged slowly downwards.
Patrician closed on her quarry; after hours of seeming inactivity her quarterdeck was again seething with officers bawling orders.
'Lay her alongside, Mr Wyatt, and shorten sail. Don't overshoot.'
They were too late for such precise niceties of manoeuvring, the night had grown too wild and they were too tired for fine judgement. Patrician overran the French ship, loosing off a rolling broadside and receiving fire in return. The British gunners, so long inactive, with news of the fallen topgallant to cheer them, poured more fire into the enemy. On board the Frenchman, the gunners served their cannon gallantly, but the chaos of fallen spars which just then broke free of the restraints of the upper rigging and crashed down through the boat booms, caused their rate of response to slacken as they confronted blazing gun-muzzles forty yards from their ports.
'Let fly sheets! Let her head fall to starboard! Stand by, boarders!'
The two ships closed, the Patrician slightly ahead. Between them the water ran black and silver where the moonlight caught it. The slop and hiss as the outward curling bow waves met and intermingled threw spray upwards to reflect the stabbing glare of the gunfire. The night was full of noise, of wind in rigging, of rushing water, of the cheers and shrieks and shouts of four hundred men, the concussions of their brutal cannon and the stutter of Moncrieff's marines as their muskets cleared the way for the mustering boarders.
'He shows no inclination to edge away,' Quilhampton called, drawing his sword, and then the night was split by a man's voice, a bull-roar of defiance:
'What ship is that?'
'That's no frog...' Quilhampton began.
'No, I know,' Drinkwater moved to the rail and leaned over the hammock netting.
'His Britannic Majesty's frigate Patrician, Nathaniel Drinkwater commanding. Is that you, Captain Stewart?'
'Aye ... how in hell's name ... ?'
Stewart's voice was drowned in the discharge of Gordon's starboard battery. 'Fate,' Drinkwater muttered as he turned. 'Pass word to Frey to have his larbowlines ready to board. Now, Mr Wyatt, lay us alongside.'
'Aye, aye, sir!'
'Come, James, death or glory, eh?' Drinkwater said, sensing the puzzlement in Quilhampton by the odd stance of the one-armed officer. He drew his sword. The gap between the two ships closed and then they collided. Drinkwater clambered up on the rail, fighting to get his legs over the hammock nettings and gauge when to leap. He dropped into the mizen chains. Below him the bulging topsides of the ships ground together, their rails separated only by the extent of the rounded tumblehome. A quarterdeck 18-pounder went off beside him. He was deafened and the heat seared his stockings. He remembered he had forgotten to change his clothes before going into action, as was customary. If he was wounded, his dirty linen might infect him.