Stand Into Danger (20 page)

“Oh, God!”
Bolitho shaded his eyes against the bars of sunlight. Their attackers had it behind them and were closing in on the stampeding seamen, that terrible din of screaming voices making it impossible to think or act.

Bolitho realized they were black men, their eyes and mouths wide with triumph as they hacked down another sailor and pounded his face to a bloody pulp with a piece of coral.

Bolitho ran to meet the attack, dimly aware that more figures were rushing past him as if to separate him from his remaining seamen. He heard someone shrieking and pleading, the sickening sound of a skull splintered open like a coconut.

He found he had his back to a tree and was striking out wildly, wasting his strength, leaving himself open for one of those fire-hardened spears.

Bolitho saw three of his men, one of whom had been wounded in the leg, standing together, hemmed in by screaming, slashing figures.

He pushed himself away from the tree, hacked open a black shoulder with his hanger and bounded across the trampled sand to join the embattled seamen.

One cried, “'S'no use! Can't 'old th' buggers!”

Bolitho felt the hanger knocked from his hand and realized he had not fastened the lanyard around his wrist.

He searched desperately for another weapon, seeing that his men were breaking and running towards the beach, the injured one hopping only a few paces before he too was cut down.

Bolitho got a terrifying impression of two staring eyes and bared white teeth, and saw the savage charging towards him, scooping up a discarded cutlass as he came.

Bolitho ducked and tried to leap to one side. Then came the impact, too great for pain, too powerful to measure.

He knew he was falling, his forehead on fire, while in another world he could hear his own voice calling out, brittle with agony.

And then, mercifully, there was nothing.

When consciousness finally returned, the agony which accompanied it was almost unendurable.

Bolitho tried to force open his eyes, as if by doing so he could drive away the torment, but it was so great he could feel his whole body contracting to withstand it.

Voices murmured above his head, but through his partially closed eyes he could see very little. A few hazy shapes, the darker shadows of beams directly overhead.

It was as if his head was being crushed slowly and deliberately between two heated irons, torturing his cringing mind with probing pains and brilliant flashes like lightning.

Cool cloths were being dabbed over his face and neck and then across his body. He was naked, not pinioned by force but with hands touching his wrists and ankles in case he struggled.

Another thought made him cry out with terror. He was badly injured elsewhere than in his head and they were getting ready for him. He had seen it done. The knife glittering in the feeble lanterns, the quick cut and turn of the blade, and then the saw.

“
Easy,
son.”

That was Bulkley, and the fact he was here helped to steady him in some way. Bolitho imagined he could smell the surgeon, brandy and tobacco.

He tried to speak but his voice was a hoarse whisper. “What happened?”

Bulkley peered over his shoulder, his owl-like face with the little spectacles poised in the air like a comic bladder.

“Save your breath. Breathe slowly.” Bulkley nodded. “That's it.”

Bolitho gritted his teeth as the pain tightened its hold. It was worst above his right eye where there was a bandage. His hair felt tight, matted with blood. Vaguely the picture re-formed, the bulging eyes, the cutlass swinging towards him. Oblivion.

He asked, “My men, are they safe?”

Bolitho felt a coat sleeve brush against his bare arm and saw Dumaresq looking down at him, his shape made more grotesque by the angle. The eyes were no longer compelling, but grave.

“The boat's crew are safe. Two of your original party reached it in time.”

Bolitho tried to move his head, but someone held it firmly.

“Stockdale? Is he? . . .”

Dumaresq smiled. “He carried you to the beach. But for him all of the people would have been lost. I shall tell you later. Now you must endeavour to rest. You have lost a lot of blood.”

Bolitho could feel the darkness closing over him again. He had seen the quick exchange of glances between Dumaresq and the surgeon. It was not over. He might die. The realization was almost too much and he felt the tears smarting in his eyes as he gasped, “Don't . . . want . . . to . . . leave . . .
Destiny.
Mustn't . . . go . . . like . . . this.”

Dumaresq said, “You will recover.”

He rested his hand on Bolitho's shoulder so that he could feel the strength of the man, as if he were transferring some of his power into him.

Then he moved away, and Bolitho realized for the first time that he was in the stern cabin and that beyond the tall windows it was pitch-dark.

Bulkley watched him and said, “You have been unconscious all day, Richard.” He wagged his finger at him. “You had me somewhat troubled, I can tell you.”

“Then you are not worried for me now?” Again he tried to move, but the hands gripped him firmly like watchful animals.

Bulkley made a few adjustments to the bandages. “A severe blow to the head with a heavy blade is never a thing to be scoffed at. I have done some work on you, the rest will depend on time and care. It was a close-run fight. But for Stockdale's courage, and his determination to rescue you, you would be dead.” He glanced round as if to ensure that the captain had gone. “He rallied the remaining seamen when they were about to flee from the beach. He was like a wild bull, yet when he carried you aboard he did it with the gentleness of a woman.” He sighed. “It must be the costliest cargo of fresh water in naval history!”

Bolitho could feel a new drowsiness closing in to withstand the pounding anguish in his skull. Bulkley had given him something.

He whispered, “You would tell me if . . .”

Bulkley was wiping his fingers. “Probably.” He looked up and added, “You are being well cared for. We are about to weigh anchor, so endeavour to rest yourself.”

Bolitho tried to keep a grip on his senses. About to weigh anchor. Here all day. So the water must have been obtained. Men had died. Many more afterwards, he thought, when Colpoys' marines took their revenge.

He spoke very slowly, knowing his words were getting slurred, but knowing too that he must make himself understood.

“Tell Aur—tell Mrs Egmont that . . .”

Bulkley leaned over him and pulled at his eyelids. “Tell her yourself. She has been with you since you were brought aboard. I told you. You are well cared for.”

Then Bolitho saw her standing beside him, her black hair hanging down over either shoulder, glossy in the lantern light.

She touched his face, her fingers brushing his lips as she said softly, “You can sleep now, my lieutenant. I am here.”

Bolitho felt the hands relax their hold from his wrists and ankles, and sensed the surgeon's assistants withdrawing into the shadows.

He murmured faintly, “I—I did not want you to see me like this, Aurora.”

She smiled, but it made her look incredibly sad.

“You are beautiful,” she said.

Bolitho closed his eyes, the strength gone from him at last.

By the screen door Bulkley turned to look at them. He should be used to pain and the gratitude of recovery, but he was not, and he was moved by what he saw. It was more like a painting from mythology, he thought. The lovely woman weeping by the fallen body of her hero.

He had not lied to Bolitho. It had been very close, and the cutlass had not only made a deep scar above the eye and into the hairline but had scored the bone beneath. Had Bolitho been an older man, or the cutlass expertly used, it would have ended there.

She said, “He is asleep.” But she was not speaking to Bulkley. She removed her white shawl and very gently spread it across Bolitho's body, as if his nakedness, like her words, was something private.

In
Destiny
's other, ordered world a voice bellowed, “
Anchor's aweigh,
sir!”

Bulkley put out a hand to steady himself as the deck tilted to the sudden pressure of wind and rudder. He would go to his sick-bay and have several long drinks. He had no wish to see the island as it fell astern in the dusk. It had given them fresh water, but had taken lives in exchange. Bolitho's party at the pool had been massacred but for Stockdale and two others. Colpoys had reported that the savages who had attacked them were once slaves who had possibly escaped when on passage to an island plantation.

Seeing Bolitho and his men approaching, they had doubtless imagined they were there to hunt them down and award some brutal reprisal. When
Destiny
's boats, roused by the pistol-shot from the beach and the sudden panic amongst the cutter's crew, had reached the shore, those same slaves had run towards them. Nobody knew if they had realized
Destiny
was not a ‘blackbirder' after all and were trying to make recompense. Colpoys had directed the swivel guns and musketoons which were mounted in each boat to rake the beach. When the smoke had drifted away there had been nobody alive to explain.

Bulkley paused at the top of the ladder and heard the clatter of blocks, the pad of bare feet as the seamen hauled at halliards and braces to set their ship on her true course.

To a man-of-war it was only an interlude. Something to be written up in her log. Until the next challenge, the next fight. He glanced aft at the swaying deckhead lantern and the red-coated sentry beneath it.

And yet, he decided, there had been a lot of worthwhile things, too.

11
S
ECRETS

THE DAYS which immediately followed Bolitho's return to the living were like parts of a dream. From the age of twelve, since he had first gone to sea as a midshipman, he had been used to the constant demands of a ship. Night or day, at any hour and under all conditions he had been ready to run with the others to whatever duty was ordered, and had been under no illusions as to the consequences if he failed to obey.

But as
Destiny
sailed slowly northwards through the Caribbean he was forced to accept his inactivity, to remain still and listen to the familiar sounds beyond the cabin or above his head.

The dream was made more than bearable by the presence of Aurora. Even the terrible pain which struck suddenly and without mercy she somehow held at bay, just as she saw through his pitiful attempts to hide it from her.

She would hold his hand or wipe his brow with a damp cloth. Sometimes when the agony probed his skull like a branding iron she put her arm beneath his shoulders and pressed her face to his chest, murmuring secret words into his body as if to still the torment.

He watched her whenever she was in a position where he could see her. While his strength held he described the shipboard sounds, the names of the sailors he knew, and how they worked together to make the ship a living thing.

He told her of his home in Falmouth, of his brother and sisters and the long Bolitho ancestry which was part of the sea itself.

She was always careful not to excite him with questions, and allowed him to talk as long as he felt like it. She fed him, but in such a fashion that he did not feel humiliated or like a helpless child.

Only when the matter of shaving arose was she unable to keep a straight face.

“But, dear Richard, you do not seem to
need
a shave!”

Bolitho flushed, knowing it was true, as he usually shaved but once a week.

She said, “I will do it for you.”

She used the razor with great care, watching each stroke, and occasionally glancing through the stern windows to see if the ship was on even keel.

Bolitho tried to relax, glad that she imagined his tenseness was out of fear of the razor. In fact, he was more than aware of her nearness, the pressure of her breast as she leaned over him, the exciting touch on his face and throat.

“There.” She stood back and studied him approvingly. “You look very . . .” she hunted through her vocabulary “. . . distinguished.”

Bolitho asked, “Could I see, please?” He saw the uncertainty.
“Please.”

She took a mirror from the cabin chest and said, “You are strong. You will get over it.”

Bolitho stared at the face in the mirror. It was that of a stranger. The surgeon had sheared away his hair from the right temple, and the whole of his forehead from eyebrow to where the hair remained was black and purple with savage bruising. Bulkley had appeared content when he had removed the dressing and bandages, but to Bolitho's eyes the length and depth of the scar, made more horrific by the black criss-cross of the surgeon's stitches, was repellent.

He said quietly, “It must sicken you.”

She removed the mirror and said, “I am proud of you. Nothing could spoil you in my heart. I have stayed with you from that first moment when you were carried here. Have watched over you, so that I know your body like my own.” She met his gaze proudly. “That scar will remain, but it is one of honour, not of shame!”

Later she left his side in answer to a summons from Dumaresq.

The cabin servant, Macmillan, told Bolitho that
Destiny
was due to sight St Christopher's on the following day, so it seemed likely that the captain was about to clarify Egmont's statement and make certain he would stand by it.

The hunt for the missing bullion, or whatever form it had taken since Garrick's seizure of it, seemed of no importance to Bolitho. He had had plenty of time to think about his future as he sweated in pain or had found recovery in her arms. Perhaps too much time.

The idea of her stepping ashore, to rejoin her husband in whatever new enterprise he dictated, and not to see her ever again, was unbearable.

To mark the progress of his recovery he had several visitors. Rhodes, beaming with pleasure to see him again, unabashed as ever as he said, “Makes you look like a real terror, Richard. That'll get the doxies jumping when we reach port!” He was careful not to mention Aurora.

Palliser came too and made as close as he knew how to an apology.

“If I had sent a marine picket as Colpoys suggested, none of it would have happened.” He shrugged and glanced round the cabin, at the female attire draped near the windows after being washed by the maid. “But it apparently has its brighter aspects.”

Bulkley and Dumaresq's clerk supervised the first walk away from the cabin. Bolitho felt the ship responding beneath his bare feet, but knew his weakness, the dizziness which never seemed far away, no matter how hard he tried to conceal it.

He cursed Spillane and his medical knowledge when he said, “Might be a severe fracture there, sir?”

Bulkley replied gruffly, “Nonsense. But still, it's early days.”

Bolitho had expected to die, but with recovery apparently within his grasp it seemed unthinkable there was yet another course he might have to take. To be sent home in the next available ship, to be removed from the Navy List and not even retained on half-pay to give some hope of re-employment.

He wished he could have thanked Stockdale, but even his influence had so far failed to get him past the sentry at the door.

All the midshipmen, with the noticeable exception of Cowdroy, had been to visit him, and had stared at his terrible scar with a mixture of awe and commiseration. Jury had been quite unable to hide his admiration and had exclaimed, “To think that I cried like a baby over my pin-prick!”

It was late evening before she returned to the cabin, and he sensed the change in her, the listless way she arranged his pillow and made certain his water-jug was filled.

She said quietly, “I shall leave tomorrow, Richard. My husband has signed his name to the documents. It is done. Your captain has sworn that he will leave us to go as we please once he has seen the governor of St Christopher's. After that, I do not know.”

Bolitho gripped her hand and tried not to think of Dumaresq's other promise to the
Heloise
's master before he had died. Had died from Bolitho's own blade.

He said, “I may have to leave the ship, too.”

She seemed to forget her own troubles and leaned over him anxiously.

“What is this? Who said you must go?”

He reached up carefully and touched her hair. Like silk. Warm, beautiful silk.

“It doesn't matter now, Aurora.”

She traced a pattern on his shoulder with her finger.

“How can you say that? Of course it
matters.
The sea is your world. You have seen and done much, but all your life still lies before you.”

Bolitho felt her hair touch his skin and shivered.

He said firmly, “I shall quit the Navy. I have made up my mind.”

“After all you have told me of your family tradition, you would throw it all away?”

“For you, yes, I will.”

She shook her head, the long black hair clinging to him as she protested, “You must not speak like this!”

“My brother is my father's favourite, and always has been.” It was strange that in moment of crisis he could say it without bitterness or remorse, even knowing it was the truth. “He can uphold the tradition. It is you I want, you I love.”

He said it so fiercely that she was obviously moved.

Bolitho saw her hand rest on her breast, a pulse beating in her throat which made her outward composure a lie.

“It is madness! I know all about you, but of me you know nothing. What sort of life would you have, watching me grow older while you yearn for the ships, for the chances you threw away?” She placed her hand on his forehead. “It is like a fever, Richard. Fight it, or it will destroy both of us!”

Bolitho turned his face away, his eyes pricking as he said, “I could make you happy, Aurora!”

She stroked his arm, soothing his despair. “I never doubted it. But there is more to life than that, believe me.” She backed away, her body moving in time with the ship's gentle roll. “I told you earlier. I could love you. For the past days and nights I have watched you, touched you. My thoughts were wicked, my longing greater than I would dare admit.” She shook her head. “Please, do not look at me like that. Perhaps, after all, the voyage took too long, and tomorrow comes too late. I no longer know anything.”

She turned, her face in shadow as she was framed against the salt-stained windows.

“I shall never forget you, Richard, and I will probably damn myself for turning your offer aside. But I am asking for your help. I cannot do it alone.”

Macmillan brought the evening meal and said, “Beg pardon, ma'am, but the cap'n an' 'is officers send their respects, an' will you dine with them tonight? It bein' the last time, so to speak.”

Macmillan was really too old for his work, and served his captain in the same fashion as a respected family retainer. He was totally unaware of the tension, the huskiness in her voice as she replied, “I will be honoured.”

Nor did he see the despair on the lieutenant's face as he watched her walk into the screened-off part of the cabin where her maid spent most of the day.

She paused. “The lieutenant is stronger now. He will manage.” She turned away, her words muffled. “On his own.”

With Bulkley's supporting hand at his elbow, Bolitho ventured on to the quarterdeck and looked along the ship's length towards the land.

It was very hot, and the scorching noon sun made him realize just how weak he still was. Seeing the bare-backed seamen bustling about the upper deck, others straddled along the yards as they shortened sail for the final approach, he felt lost, out of things in a way he had not known before.

Bulkley said, “I have been to St Christopher's previously.” He pointed towards the nearest headland with its writhing line of white surf. “Bluff Point. Beyond it lies Basseterre and the main anchorage. There will be King's ships a'plenty, I've no doubt. Some forgotten flag-officer who'll be anxious to tell our captain what to do.”

Some marines marched past, panting loudly in the red coats and heavy equipment.

Bolitho gripped the nettings and watched the land. A small island, but an important link in Britain's chain of command. At another time he would have been excited at a first visit. But now as he stared at the nodding palms, the occasional glimpse of native boats, he could only see what it represented. Here they would part. Whatever his own fate might be, here it was ended between them. He knew from the way Rhodes and the others avoided the subject that they were probably thinking he should be thankful. To have lived through that murderous attack and then be nursed by so beautiful a woman should be enough for any man. But it was not.

Dumaresq came on deck and glanced briefly at the compass and at the set of the sails.

Gulliver touched his hat. “Nor'-nor'-east, sir. Steady as she goes.”

“Good. Prepare a salute, Mr Palliser. We shall be up to Fort Londonderry within the hour.”

He saw Bolitho and held up his hand. “Stay if you wish.” He crossed the deck to join him, his glance taking in Bolitho's eyes, dulled by pain, the horrible scar laid bare for all to see. He said, “You will live. Be thankful.”

He beckoned the midshipman of the watch. “Get aloft with you, Mr Lovelace, and spy out Fleet Anchorage. Count the ships, and report to me as soon as you are satisfied.” He watched the youth swarm up the ratlines and said, “Like the rest of our young gentlemen, he has grown up on this voyage.” He glanced at Bolitho. “That applies more to you than anyone.”

Bolitho said, “I
feel
a hundred, sir.”

“I expect so.” Dumaresq grinned. “When you get your own command you will remember the pitfalls, I
hope,
but I doubt if you will pity your young lieutenants any more than I do.”

The captain turned aft, and Bolitho saw his eyes light up with interest. Without looking he knew she had come on deck to see the island. How would she see it? As a temporary refuge or a prison?

Egmont seemed unchanged by his ordeal. He walked to the side and remarked, “This place has altered little.”

Dumaresq kept his voice matter of fact. “Garrick will be here, you are certain?”

“As sure as anyone can be.” He saw Bolitho and nodded curtly. “I see you are recovered, Lieutenant.”

Bolitho forced a smile. “Thank you, sir, yes. I ache, but I am in one piece.”

She joined her husband and said steadily, “We both thank you, Lieutenant. You saved our lives. We cannot repay that.”