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Marlowe was nowhere to be seen in the confusion as Drinkwater summoned a hatless and dishevelled Birkbeck who seemed otherwise unscathed. 'She'll get alongside us now, by God!' the sailing master bellowed above the din.

'We must have given as good as we've got!' Drinkwater roared back.

For a few moments there was utter confusion, then L'Aigle loomed close alongside and through the clearing smoke they could hear cries of 'Vive L'Empereur!' and 'Mort a l'Anglais!' as the French soldiers whipped themselves into a frenzy.

'Prepare to repel boarders!' Drinkwater shouted, his voice cracking with the effort as his head reeled, and then the two ships came together with a sudden lurching thud and a long, tortured grinding. Above their heads on the quarterdeck, L'Aigle's mainyard thrust itself like a fencer's extended and questing epee, wavering as the two ships moved in the seaway. Shapes like ghosts appeared over the rail as veterans of Austerlitz and Borodino, of Eylau, Friedland, Jena and Wagram prepared to launch themselves across the gap between the two frigates, on to Andromeda's deck.

Lower down, beneath the pall of smoke that lay in the gulf between the two ships, Frey had seen the approach of L'Aigle and heard the excited shouting of the battle-mad troops. The cry to repel boarders came down through the thick air in the gun-deck and passed along the lines of cannon in shouted warnings.

Frey withdrew from his observation post and hurried aft to where Ashton was scurrying up and down his guns, half bent as he squinted along first one and then another as they jumped inboard for reloading. Steam sizzled as the wet sponges went in, adding a warm stickiness to the choking atmosphere. Frey tapped him on the shoulder.

'Josh!' Frey bellowed until he had attracted his colleague's attention. 'Josh! I'm taking my fellows to reinforce the upper-deck.'

'What?' Ashton was almost deaf from the concussion of the cannon and Frey had to shout in his filthy ear before Ashton understood.

'No, let me. You fight the guns.' The words were uttered before Ashton realized the implications: he had given voice to his thoughts and wavered briefly, half-hoping Frey would contradict the suggestion.

'If you want to go fire-eating good luck to you.' Frey nodded assent, straightened up and hastened back up the deck, half bent to avoid collisions with the beams. 'Starbowlines!' he bellowed, 'Small arms from the racks and follow Mr Ashton on deck! D'ye hear there? Starbowlines with Mr Ashton to the upper-deck! We're about to be boarded!' Men came away from the guns and helped themselves to cutlasses, withdrawing across the deck to where Ashton hurriedly mustered them while Frey turned back to invigorate the now flagging port gun-crews.

'Bear up, my boys, we can still blow their bloody ship to Old Harry!'

As Ashton led his men off, Frey's guns continued to engage L'Aigle's cannon muzzle to muzzle.

On the quarterdeck Hyde came into his own. In a few seconds, he had concentrated his lobsters into a double line of men behind which Drinkwater and Birkbeck could gather their wits and attempt to avert disaster. By passing messages to the steering flat, Andromeda might yet break free of L'Aigle's deadly embrace, but they had first to clear away the wreckage of fallen masts and throw back the wave of invaders.

Birkbeck's gaze ran aft and he clutched with thoughtless violence at Drinkwater's wounded arm. 'By God, sir! Look! There's the Russian!'

He pointed and Drinkwater, shaking from the pain of Birkbeck's unconscious gesture, turned to see above their stern the taut canvas of the Gremyashchi as she bore down into the action.

CHAPTER 18

The Last Candle

May 1814

Drinkwater felt the chill of foreboding seize him. The game was up.

He was conscious of having fought with all the skill he could muster, of having done his duty, but the end was not now far off. He saw little point in delaying matters further, for it would only result in a further effusion of blood, and he had done everything the honour of his country's flag demanded. Besides, he was wounded and the effect of the laudanum was working off; spent ball or not, it had done for his left arm and he could no longer concentrate on the business in hand. He was overwhelmed with pain and a weariness that went far beyond the urgent promptings of his agonizing wound. He was tired of this eternal business of murder, exhausted by the effort to outmanoeuvre other equally intelligent men in this grim game of action and counter-action. The effort to do more was too much for him and he felt the deck sway beneath his unsteady feet.

'Here the bastards come!'

It was Marlowe waving his sword and roaring a warning beside him. The first lieutenant had lost his hat like Birkbeck, and his sudden appearance seemed magical, like a djinn in a story, but it was a Marlowe afire with a fighting madness. Both his amazing presence and his words brought about a transformation in Drinkwater.

To strike at that moment would have resulted in utter confusion: Napoleon's veterans were after a revenge greater than the mere capture of a British frigate and the thought, flashing through Drinkwater's brain in an instant, compelled him to a final effort.

'God's bones! The game is worth a last candle ...'

But his words were lost as, with a roar, the boarders poured in a flood over the hammock nettings and aboard Andromeda. They were answered by a volley from Hyde's rear rank of marines who promptly reloaded their muskets in accordance with their drill. Beside Drinkwater, Birkbeck drew his sword in the brief quiet. The rasp of the blade made Drinkwater turn as the front rank of marines discharged their pieces from their kneeling position.

'Stand fast, Birkbeck! I promised you a dockyard post. Hyde, forward with your bayonets!'

Drinkwater had his own hanger drawn now and advanced through the marines with Marlowe at his side. He distinctly heard Marlowe say 'Excuse me,' as he shouldered his way through the rigid ranks, and then they were shuffling forward over the resultant shambles of the marines' volleys.

Only the officers had been protected by Hyde's men; as the Frenchmen scrambled over the hammock nettings and down upon Andromeda, they had encountered the upper-deck gunners, topmen and waisters, the afterguard and those men whose duties required them to be abroad on the quarterdeck, forecastle and the port gangway. At Drinkwater's cry to repel boarders, most of these had seized boarding pikes, or drawn their cutlasses if they bore them.

L'Aigle's party had not been unopposed, but they outnumbered the defenders and while some were killed or remained detained in the hand-to-hand fighting, more swept past and were darting like ferrets in their quest for an enemy to overcome, in order to seize the frigate in the name of their accursed Emperor. Hyde's marines had fired indiscriminately into the mass of men coming aboard, hitting friend and foe alike, aided by discharges of langridge from the swivel guns in the tops that now swept L'Aigle's rail and inhibited further reinforcement of the first wave of boarders.

All this had taken less than a minute, and then, after their third volley, Hyde's men were stamping their way across the deck, their bright, gleaming steel bayonets soon bloodied and their ranks wavering as they stabbed, twisted and withdrew, butted and broke the men of the Grand Army who had the audacity to challenge them at sea, on their own deck. They were all slithering in blood and the slime that once constituted the bodies of men; the stink of it was in their nostrils, rousing them to a primitive madness which fed upon itself and was compounded into a frenzied outpouring of violent energy.