In Distant Waters (22 page)

‘I'll lay a guinea you've a theory of your own, though.'

Blixoe pulled the corners of his mouth down. ‘I reckon we've all got theories, sir. Trouble is, the truth ain't much to do with theories, is it?' Blixoe turned and faced Quilhampton. ‘Truth is, sir, that the men are at the end of their tethers. We lost a good prize and we know there's rich pickin's off the bloody Dagoes; there's men as knows the papist's ways, stuffin' their churches with gold and word has it that there is a church somewhere about
this coast where they've the bones of some saint all laid out in a casket of jewelled gold . . . and what they're wondering is why, begging your pardon, sir, the Captain ain't batterin' down these bloody Spanish churches, sir . . . by way of an act of war, like? That's the truth of it, sir.' Blixoe paused, then added, ‘If you'll pardon me for speaking freely . . .'

‘Yes, of course, come, they seem to have finished down there . . .'

They could see the barge being dragged into the water. Men were scrambling into her, ready to pass her painter to the cutter. Quilhampton looked again at the ship. The foretopgallant yard was across.

And then he froze. The heat went out of the sun and his heart suddenly thudded in his chest. ‘Look!'

Pointing with one hand he restrained Blixoe with the other. The marine paused and shaded his eyes against the glare. They were insubstantial at first, mere phantoms in the haze, but then their outlines hardened, the sharp, squared edges of topsails, the low hulls of men-of-war standing into the bay. There could be no doubt as to the purpose of their approach.

‘Come on!' Slithering in the sand, Quilhampton began an awkward descent.

‘Fire those bloody muskets, lads,' Blixoe called to his platoon and a ragged volley of alarm sounded flatly across Drake's Bay.

‘God's bones!'

Drinkwater swung round and stared at the beach as the sound of the volley echoed across the bay. He expected to see men running but on the contrary, they stood stock-still around the boats, every attitude suggesting they were as surprised as himself at the shots. Then he saw the tiny white figure of Quilhampton in his shirt-sleeves, running ungainly through the soft sand, his arms waving wildly and with the four marines stumbling after him.

‘What the devil . . . ?'

‘Deck there!'

They swung to the hail from the foremast where topmen sat astride the newly sent up top-gallant yard.

‘To seaward, sir!'

Drinkwater and the officers idle on the quarterdeck spun round, following the man's urgently outstretched arm.

‘Bloody hell!'

‘It's those Spanish brigs!'

‘Jesus!'

The two brigs had broken through the vaporous tendrils of the mist and were suddenly recognised as the vessels they had seen last anchored under the shadow of Point Lobos, beneath the
Commandante
's Residence. They were standing into Drake's Bay, their yards braced and on slightly diverging courses. End-on, Drinkwater did not need glasses to see the bristling lines of cannon piercing their sides.

‘Beat to quarters! Man the capstan!'

They had a spring upon their anchor cable; it lay slack in the
water and, if they were quick, might give them a moment's advantage.

‘Where's my coxswain?'

‘Here, zur . . .'

‘Sword and pistols, upon the instant! Gentlemen, arm yourselves . . . they will rush us!'

The deck of the
Patrician
presented a spectacle of disorder. Topmen descended from the foremast by the backstays, sliding down hand-over-hand. Officers and men ran, bumping into one another, as they scurried to their posts.

‘Man the larboard broadside!'

Drinkwater saw Fraser, his sword drawn, his shirt-tail un-tucked from some strenuous endeavour at the base of the foremast, run below to command the battery in Quilhampton's absence. Amidships, Hill stood ready by the capstan, pushing spare waisters into place about the splayed bars and then Tregembo was awkwardly hitching his sword-belt about his waist and Derrick was silently offering him his pistols.

He stuck one in his waistband and fisted the other. A thought struck him and he held it out to the solemn Quaker. ‘Here, defend thyself, if no one else . . .'

Derrick shook his head and Drinkwater, his mind pressed, dismissed the man for a high-minded fool.

‘Guns are bearing, sir,' squeaked Belchambers alongside him, sent by Fraser.

‘Are they loaded, damn it?'

‘Mr Fraser says to tell you they're loaded, sir as best they can be . . . mixed shot and langridge . . .'

‘Then run 'em out!'

The boy skittered off and Drinkwater took one last look about the deck. It was a chaos of flung-down hand-spikes, of uncoiled ropes and stoppered sails rolled in grey sausages of resistant canvas. Spars, half-secured and almost ready for hoisting, lay at drunken angles, like pitch-forks left against a hay-cart. But the men at the quarterdeck guns were kneeling ready, though their breasts heaved from their late exertions, and the dishevelled marines, in unprofessional oddities of dress, leaned upon the hammock nettings, their bayonets gleaming and their muskets
levelled. They had not been utterly surprised and, as yet, the Spanish had not a single gun that could bear. Below his feet he felt the 24-pounders rumble out through their ports.

The brigs were close now, perhaps two cables away and he could hear an angry buzz that came from a dense cluster of men about their twin fo'c's'les. They were dark with boarders, heaped like swarming bees.

‘You lads there,' Drinkwater called to the quarterdeck gun-captains, ‘mark their boarders,' he raised his voice, ‘mark their boarders, fo'c's'le!' a wave of comprehension came from Midshipman Wickham forward. If those three carronades did their business, their spreading langridge would tear a bloody and ragged hole through that cluster of men.

As the noise from the brigs grew louder it seemed a grimmer silence settled upon the
Patrician
. Drinkwater pierced it. He would have to loose his cannon soon, or risk his enemies stretching ahead and astern of him, out of the lines of bearing of his guns.

‘Stand by for boarders! Fire!'

The thunder of the cannon erupted in orange flames and the white obscurity of reeking powder smoke. The deck vibrated with the recoil of the heavy trucks and, as the smoke cleared, he could see the gun-crews leaping about their pieces as they reloaded. But, it was already too late. So close were the brigs that the most elevated gun had sent its shot no higher than man-height above their rails. Their masts and topsails, shivering now as they checked way to drive alongside, loomed above the shredding smoke and Drinkwater could see the white circles and interlacing and expanding ripples that showed more than half his shot had plunged harmlessly between, and far beyond, the Spaniards.

But there were bloody gaps in the clusters of men about the beakheads of the enemy, and there were dots in the water, some inert and some waving, where men died and shrove their souls in agony. He could hear the screams and a weird ululating cry as some unfortunate man spewed shock and horror and the dreadful pain of a mortal wound into the air.

It was a moment of the briefest pause. Below a fast-reloaded
gun roared again, followed by another and another and then Drinkwater turned. The first brig crashed into the bowsprit, locking her own in a tangle of splitting wood and torn wreckage. He could see the smoke and stab of small arms and a few bold men beginning to scramble across the interlocked spars as the enemy brig, thus entangled, fell slowly off the wind and alongside the British frigate.

Aft, the second brig loomed close alongside. There was a sickening crash as her cathead struck the
Patrician
's quarter and the impact of the collision sent a second mighty tremble through the ship. A grappling iron struck the rail and its line was belayed, to be cut through by a marine; but another followed, and another, and the marine fell back, clutching his throat, shot through at close range by a pistol ball.

‘Get your men on deck, Fraser!' Drinkwater roared below and swung round, his sword drawn, joining the hedge of bayonets and boarding pikes and cutlasses as the gunners abandoned their now useless pieces and fought to defend themselves.

The Spaniards poured over the rails, jumping like reckless monkeys from one ship to another, and Drinkwater knew that the Dons had emptied every stew and calaboose, every tavern and every vessel with men who had a mind to cut the bloody British intruders down to size. And, God, there were enough of them. If every waterfront idler, and every drunken
mestizo
in San Francisco had come, it did not explain the torrent of men that poured, cutting, slashing and stabbing their way across his quarterdeck.

He recognised the uniform of a provincial Spanish regiment, an officer leading a party of the brig's seamen, together with a ragged rabble of ‘volunteers', a mixed rag-bag of races, half-drunk and verminous from the desperate look of them.

But as he fought for his life, he recognised something else, something that his heightened consciousness had half-expected. There were men from the
Santa Monica
, men in clear breach of their parole, and at their head, howling with the triumphant bellow of a
conquistadore
, was Don Jorge Méliton Rubalcava.

By the time Quilhampton reached the boats, the brigs were alongside
Patrician
. He splashed through the shallows and fell into the stern of the cutter.

‘Leave the barge!' He ordered, panting with exertion, ‘Oars! Come on, come on,' he chivvied, ‘give way together!'

Shoving the tiller across the boat, he swung the cutter's bow round towards the noise and smoke of desperate battle.

Drinkwater was slithering in gore. His right forearm was cut and blood trickled from the graze of a pistol ball across his skull. He hacked and stabbed with his sword and the clubbed pistol in his left hand was sticky with gore. He was aware of beating off a savage attack, of flinging back the first impetuous rush of the Spaniards. He was aware too that Midshipman Wickham had reported from the fo'c's'le that they had succeeded in staving off the inrush of boarders forward. Slewed on their slides the heavy carronades had cut swathes of death through the enemy and dampened the ardour of their attack.

But Lieutenant Mylchrist had been carried below dangerously wounded, and Wickham feared another rush from the regrouping Spaniards. Drinkwater asked where the first lieutenant was, but lost Wickham's reply as he parried a pike thrust and cut savagely at a swarthy cheek, seeing the bright start of blood and the pain in the glaring eyes of a man.

‘Mount, bayonets here!' he bawled and threw himself back into the fight as the Spaniards renewed their attack upon the heavily outnumbered British.

Fraser never got out of the gun-deck. From a boat towing alongside, or by sliding down the bumpkins of the after brig, men squeezed through a loose gunport as Fraser obeyed Drinkwater's order to reinforce the upper deck with his gun-crews. This small intrusion quickly became a torrent as two, then three ports were opened. Dark, lithe men with short stabbing knives clenched in their teeth and wet from a partial ducking alongside, hauled themselves inboard to confront the gunners. The gun-crews were tired after days of exertion and the recent labour of hauling out their weapons and it seemed this influx of men was endless, a
wildly diabolical manifestation rising from hell itself. They were small wiry, half-caste fellows, who wriggled between the guns and seemed utterly at home in the shadows of the gun-deck, as happy as the nocturnal pick-pockets, scavengers, footpads, pimps and thieves they were. They slipped easily inside the long guards of defenders with rammers and pikes, hamstringing and hobbling men who fell howling, only to be disembowelled and eviscerated by the gleaming knives that flashed dully in the semi-darkness.