For King or Commonwealth (28 page)

Here he found Clarkson had been wounded in his right hand and was sitting at the base of the mizen mast, his face the colour of cartridge linen, contemplating the bloody wreckage of three fingers.

Faulkner relieved the indomitable and doughty Whadcoat of his temporary command, sending his lieutenant back to exhort those serving the guns to exert themselves to their utmost. Faulkner was dizzy with the fury of the battle, only vaguely aware of what he did, of ordering the helm put over and the ragged sails re-trimmed as they hauled round and avoided close contact with their enemy. They had a Dutchman on both sides at one time, the
Union
belching fire and iron in a relentless thunder that seemed to Faulkner to have been going on for such an immensity of time that there was neither past nor future, only this dreadful, cacophonous present, this roaring in his ears, this thumping, throbbing heartbeat that seemed to have migrated up into his shoulder.

It ended at last, though Faulkner had no clear notion of when exactly that was. The sun seemed still high in the heavens, but Whadcoat afterwards told him that it was six hours past noon that the Dutch stood off towards their home coast under a freshening wind. This, held Whadcoat, was the clear and unequivocal judgement of God, for normally in such circumstances, the concussion of the guns killed a light wind and generated a calm. Instead, the Lord God of Hosts had sent a wind which had by this time veered into the north-east quarter, enabling the Dutch to make sail.

The English fleet followed and that evening, as the sun set and the men were busy cutting away the damaged fore topmast and main topgallant, knotting and splicing the damaged rigging, sending down the ragged fore topsails and making some fist of a jury rig, Whitaker dressed Faulkner's wound, inserting the bristle to allow the pus to drain from it. When at last Faulkner and Whadcoat expressed themselves satisfied with the running repairs, the watches were set, station was taken up on the lanterns hoisted in the rigging of the
Resolution
, the
James
and the
George
and the fleet settled down for the night as it shadowed the Dutch down the coast of Holland. The
Union
's men were exhausted but Faulkner saw that they were fed and issued with beer. To a groaning acceptance of the inevitable, he passed word that they should rest from their labours which, he felt certain, would not be over for some hours yet.

By dawn the tide and wind had carried both fleets south until they lay not far from Dunkirk. Just as Faulkner had thought, Tromp renewed the action the following morning, turning on his pursuers for a few more hours of fighting but the Dutch had lost the taste for English iron, their shallower-draughted ships outgunned by their heavier opponents as they retreated into the estuary of the Schelde. Making the best of his way into the heart of the action, Faulkner took the
Union
inshore, engaging two Dutch men-of-war. His gunners warmed to their work and had compelled both of the enemy's ships to strike their ensigns to the hoarse cheers of the
Union
's people.

It was now that the Dutch suffered their heaviest losses, some twenty ships, eleven captured, six sunk and three destroyed by exploding magazines. With Blake arriving on the scene, Tromp's fleet was blockaded between Flushing and Breskens, the action ending in a decisive victory for the English.

By the evening of the 3rd June, Monck had ordered the worst-damaged ships back into home waters. Among them lumbered the crippled
Union
, under what sail that could be set upon her shattered masts, her captain retreating to his cabin with a note from Monck ordering him home, but bearing the compliment that ‘no captain has done more this day than you'.

Faulkner stiffly rose from his contemplation of the sea astern. Somewhere over the horizon, Monck and Blake were anchored, bottling up the flower of the Dutch fleet. A pale square caught his eye, lying upon the dark planking. He picked it up and, in the faint light, recognized it as the order to withdraw.

Weak and feverish, Faulkner submitted to further ministrations from Whitaker once they had anchored in the Medway, off Blackstakes. The surgeon shook his head over the wound, drew out the bristle and sniffed at it with a grunt.

‘Lie down, sir, this will not take a moment. Have you some fortified wine?' The servant Jackson brought a bottle and Whitaker decanted half a pint into a dish, dipped his scalpel in the wine then began his excoriating curetting of the wound. Faulkner writhed with the painful intrusion, unable to stifle the cry of agony it produced, but Whitaker was skilled in his butchery, quick and sure. Having withdrawn the knife, he poured the remainder of the wine into the wound and drew the flesh together with adeptly made sutures.

‘Consider yourself fortunate, Captain Faulkner, to have wine to hand. I believe it maketh all the difference.'

‘Why so?' asked Faulkner through gritted teeth as Whitaker applied a pledget and bound up his shoulder.

‘I have observed it deters putrefaction, sir. One cannot guarantee it, of course, but the advantage lies with you for submitting to it.'

‘I think,' Faulkner gasped as he recovered himself, ‘I should rather drink the stuff . . . Steward, two glasses, if you please.'

One was passed to Whitaker who acknowledged his commander's generosity with an appreciative nod. ‘One glass will do you no harm, sir, but more will, I have observed, stimulate bleeding.'

‘I shall heed your advice, Mr Whitaker.'

The following morning Faulkner felt much better but the ascent of his spirits was short-lived. At noon he received some papers from the dockyard, brought downstream from the Commissioner at Chatham. As the dockyard officer accepted the list of requirements to put the
Union
back into fighting order, Faulkner noticed a personal letter to himself among those dropped on his desk. He did not at first recognize the hand, though he afterwards found out it was from his son, Henry, but the news, already some weeks old, was all too clear: in May Sir Henry Mainwaring had died.

For a moment Faulkner felt nothing. It took him time to realize what this meant: that Sir Henry, who had, as it were, brought him forth into the world in which he now functioned with such confidence, no longer existed. Death was commonplace, but specific deaths such as so closely touched his very being, emptied him of life. He sat, carefully, lowering himself like a man prematurely aged as the import of this news sank in and it struck him that, for all the swaggering self-conceit, for all the ready wit and the smooth phrase, the grasp of his profession and his ability to handle a ship and command the respect of his fellow men, his future was somehow imperilled by the lack of Sir Henry. Sir Henry had been more than a father to him, for fathers have a habit of casting out their young to fend for themselves, if they do not bind them in to some family enterprise. He himself had done it rather differently by abandoning his sons, but the result had been the same, as young Nathaniel had demonstrated. But Sir Henry had been so much more, so very much more than a mere paternal figure, more than a mentor. He had been an intellectual companion, a sounding board, a man against whom Faulkner could measure himself. He had once heard Brenton describe the man who taught him sword play: ‘He made me fight as if I, too, was as brilliant at the feint, the deception, the lunge and parry as was he.' And he remembered thinking, in one of those quick, intuitive flashes of knowledge that fix in the brain as certainties, that that was exactly what Sir Henry was then to him. And now he was no more, already laid to rest alongside the body of his short-lived wife whom Faulkner had seen but twice before she died.

He sighed deeply, re-read the letter and then put it away. It had been good of Henry, who had himself been named after his father's patron, to let him know. Faulkner rose. Sir Henry would have not approved of moping when there was work to do and a ship to refit.

It was only as he passed out on deck that Faulkner had the odd fancy that, in that recollection, Sir Henry still walked with him. It also occurred to him that his wound ached much less this morning.

As a man may do in the privacy of his own thoughts, Faulkner conceived a curious notion that the rapid healing of his wound owed more to the intercession of the dead Mainwaring than the skill of his surgeon. He chid himself for so Popish a notion, but nevertheless the conviction grew so that he always thereafter held it to be Mainwaring's last beneficent act towards the wretched, starveling boy he had lifted from the gutter.

Some weeks later, as Faulkner readied the
Union
for sea, he received an order by fly-boat from General Monck. ‘My dear Captain,' he read, flattered by the cordiality of the mode of address,

I intend to withdraw the main part of the fleet shortly and am earnest that you should as soon as may be convenient, but at all costs before the end of the present week, station yourself off the Texel whither De With withdrew after the late action. I understand from intelligencers at Den Helder that the Dutch squadron under him is ready for sea and anxious to rejoin Tromp here off Flushing. Pray, therefore, bring me notice of any such move that De With might make. This is properly work for a frigate, but I would have a ship of force there, for fear of a lesser vessel being overwhelmed.

It was a concise brief in which Faulkner knew likely as much as his commander-in-chief and this sense of personal inclusion seemed to be embodied in the simple signature: ‘Monck'. Faulkner was gratified by the confidence the General clearly felt in him, for the task was a post of honour, and particularly so, given Faulkner's past. He passed word for Clarkson and his charts.

Two weeks later, in mid-July, having been on station off Den Helder with the Haak Sand under his lee and a few nights of anxiety under his belt, Faulkner received a second note from Monck which simply informed him that he was back on his station in the mouth of the Schelde but would come north and show himself off the Texel. ‘The enemy having made no move, this is the period of greatest danger,' Monck had concluded.

A few days later Monck's fleet, or the greater part of it, some eighty sail of men-of-war, came up from the south and, for a week, cruised off the Texel. Then, suspecting his absence from the Schelde would have tempted Van Tromp to move, he brought the
Resolution
close up under the
Union
's stern and hailed her.

‘I shall be gone from here after nightfall, Captain Faulkner,' he shouted in his harsh voice. ‘Maintain your station and keep me informed. Do you hoist an admiral's lanterns tonight.'

Jumping up on the carriage of a gun, Faulkner waved his acknowledgement of the instruction. The
Union
bearing Monck's lanterns would maintain the pretence at least until tomorrow's dawn, beyond which it would be impossible to conceal the truth from any watcher on the dunes at Kirkduin, but it might prove sufficient. Thus, shortly after nightfall, he was aware of Monck's ships slipping away like predatory owls, dark and sinister shapes, half seen, yet pregnant with menace.

The deception failed, however. The following forenoon a sail was seen heading towards them from the south, beating up against the wind. As she got closer she fired a gun to leeward and hoisted a signal that, owing to her aspect, no one aboard
Union
could make out until one of the junior officers with better sight than his seniors expressed the opinion that it signified an urgent despatch. Although none of his seniors could agree, the outcome proved him right. Heaving to under the
Union
's lee and hoisting out a boat, her commander had himself pulled across to the larger vessel, and almost ran up the
Union
's side.

Faulkner had hardly read the note, seen the captain of the fly-boat over the side of the
Union
with a glass of wine inside him and returned to his cabin to consult his charts in the light that Van Tromp was at sea, than Whadcoat sent down for him.

‘They're coming out,' he said shortly, by way of explanation, when Faulkner reached the deck and took the proffered telescope. It was a bright summer day with masses of white, fleecy cloud building over the land as Whadcoat pointed to the low line of sandy coast which gleamed yellow in the sunlight. Where the yellow line broke, indicating the gap between the mainland of Holland and the island of Texel, he could clearly see the mass of shipping, the dark, beetle-like hulls each with its heap of white sails as the squadron of De With emerged for battle.

Faulkner looked aloft. The
Union
was hove to under easy canvas on the starboard tack, dipping to the low swell and leaning slightly to the wind from the west-north-west. The enemy would be hard on the wind coming out, but the moment they were clear and could head south, the wind would be fair.

‘Very well, let us fill the main tops'l and make for the General.'

‘Head south. Aye, aye, sir.'

Whadcoat turned away to bellow orders and a moment later the pipes twittered, the main braces made the block-sheaves rattle and the main yards came round. Suddenly the
Union
was under way, finished with dipping and curtseying to the enemy's shoreline, filled with a sense of urgent purpose that no amount of assurance that lying off an enemy's coast keeping watch could match. Faulkner could almost feel the mood of the men lift. He summoned all his officers to his cabin, and told them what he knew.

‘Van Tromp is at sea, gentlemen,' he said, looking round at their faces. He picked up a pair of dividers and referred to the chart that showed the gentle curve of the coast of the province of Holland, with the Frisian island of Texel to the north and the archipelago of large islands in the estuary of the Schelde that formed the province of Zealand in the south. As for their own cruising ground, it occupied that swathe of the sea known as the Broad Fourteens, owing to the uniformity of its fourteen-fathom depth. ‘There has been an inconclusive engagement off Katwijk.' He indicated the little town to the south with his dividers. ‘De With is clearly seeking a junction with Tromp. The General is pursuing Tromp and we lie betwixt the two fleets.' He paused to let the gravity of their situation sink in. ‘We must, of course, maintain contact with De With, but keep out of trouble ourselves.' A murmur of assent ran through the assembled officers. ‘My guess is that the two fleets will engage here. He laid the points of the dividers on a coastal town. They leaned forward, several trying to pronounce it with its harsh guttural sound. ‘I think I have the advantage of you,' Faulkner said with a hint of irony, referring to his period of exile among the Dutch. ‘Schveningen,' he articulated, scraping the name, so odd to English ears, from the back of his throat. Some of them sniggered like schoolboys; there was no explaining the strange ways of foreigners, no wonder they had to be fought. Conscious of their thoughts, Faulkner smiled to himself. If it helped them risk their lives in battle, he would not deny them their xenophobia. ‘That is all for now,' he said. ‘When the time comes I have no doubt but that I may rely upon you all.'