The Mountain of Gold (24 page)

Ah, them.' O'Dwyer remained obstinately cheery. 'You know, I had almost forgot about them?'

The innate courtesy of my kind won a close-run battle, and I said, 'You will take some refreshment, Colonel?'

I led him below to my cabin, where a glowering Musk stood over some mead and cake. The Irishman ate and drank greedily, all the while making inconsequential conversation about the weather, the
Prospect's
passage down from the Tower, and His Majesty's countenance (inscrutable, as ever) at their last interview. At length, though, the moment I had been dreading could be delayed no longer.

'Now, Colonel,' I said, in as matter-of-fact a way as I could manage, 'I have given much thought to the matter of our messing arrangements—'

O'Dwyer waved his hand airily. 'Oh, no matter, my dear captain! I am perfectly content with my humble berth aboard the
Prospect.
I know full well that honour demands you should surrender your cabin to me, as the senior personage embarked, and content yourself with one of your lesser officer's pestilential hutches. But there is no need, I assure you.'

Behind him, Musk shook his head vigorously, thereby underlining my own reaction. 'No, sir,' I replied, 'my honour would simply not hear of it.' It was not a manner of the relative status of a military colonel and a naval captain: aboard
Prospect,
among a body of soldiers who would be overawed by his rank and a crew free of the constraints of naval discipline, O'Dwyer would undoubtedly be better placed to essay the flight back to his corsair friends that we all expected him to attempt at the first opportunity. Holmes and I had discussed the matter at some length, and I concurred reluctantly with his assessment: to wit, it is an eternal truth that for all the temporary inconvenience, it is preferable to keep a mad dog in one's view and under one's control than to unleash it. 'Thus I have a compromise to propose,' I said gritting my teeth. 'A captain's cabin, even on a Fifth Rate, has ample space for two. Yet we both deserve the privacy due to our rank. Consequently I shall arrange for a partition to be erected, and a new door cut in the bulkhead yonder. You, Colonel—' I was very nearly sick as I spoke the words—'may even have the starboard, and the captain's quarter gallery'.

A captain and a gentleman can make no greater sacrifice than to surrender his personal place of easement, especially when it is being surrendered to a traitor of the foulest sort.

O'Dwyer seemed genuinely perplexed by the seeming generosity of my offer, but only for a moment. Then he nodded, ran his hand through his ochre hair, and spoke slowly and coldly. 'Of course, Captain Quinton. As you say. Aboard his own ship, a captain's word is as statute law.' Those cold green eyes narrowed. After all, who am I, a mere renegade, to dispute it, even if clad in the fine rags of a superior officer?'

The Irishman's acquiescence surprised me: both Holmes and I had expected roaring, or at least a venomous snarling, in opposition to my suggestion. On reflection, that acquiescence should have troubled me far more than it did. As it was, I summoned Carpenter Shish and his crew, and O'Dwyer resumed his assault upon the cake. The impressively efficient Shish and his men arrived within minutes, replete with deals, saws and hammers, and set to with the urgency that can only be witnessed in sailors endeavouring to impress soldiers. The din of their partition-building made impossible even the strained conversation between O'Dwyer and myself; at length, the renegade excused himself and indicated that he would return to
Prospect
to attend to the loading of his belongings and to issue orders to his second-in-command, a Captain Facey.

As we watched the longboat pull away and disappear once more into the fog that enveloped the Downs, Musk turned to me and remarked, gruffly, 'Wooden walls do not a prison make, or whatever your father's old friend Lovelace said. He'll need watching, that one.' He nodded toward the receding shape of O'Dwyer, ensconced in the stern of
Prospect's
longboat. 'Or, better still, filleting.'

It did not take long for me to regret my honourable gesture. I was in my truncated half-cabin, attempting to rearrange my possessions around the demi-culverin that now cribbed and confined me even more than it had done before. I contemplated the chamber pot acquired for me by Musk in Dover, and shuddered. Beyond the partition, I could hear every tiny sound as O'Dwyer arranged his own possessions, which seemed to include an unsettling number of knives, swords and other blades of indeterminate size, whistling and singing all the while. To this day, I do not know whether he did so unconsciously or as a deliberate taunt to the Captain of the
Seraph;
but his musical range seemed as catholic as it was tuneless, embracing a clutch of French airs, some songs of his Irish childhood and a succession of strangely pitched Arab chants. I looked about in horror, seeking some escape from my cell. Beyond the stern window and through the fog lay Holmes'
Jersey,
but Holmes was ashore, apparently carousing with the Governor of Dover. Jordan, Captain of the
Mary,
was old, godly, and insufferably dull. I could go ashore, but Deal, that very Gomorrah of Kent, would contain an entire army of mariners, most of them whoring, drinking and brawling from dawn 'til dusk and thus on 'til dawn once more. Cornelia and my friends might as well have been an eternity away. That left only my ship, a Fifth Rate frigate of but three hundred and fifty tons burthen and ninety feet in length, and where aboard her would be free of the foul presence of O'Dwyer? Francis Gale was ashore, visiting an old friend who had a parish a little way beyond Richborough...

At last, I threw open the door newly cut in the bulkhead and made my way to the quarterdeck, thence to the poop. But here, too, no saving peace was to be found. O'Dwyer was still beneath my feet, his singing clearly audible. There were a few men on the upper deck and on the forecastle, but by chance, almost none of them were familiar faces from my old Cornish coterie. I craved solitude. I craved clear air, not the fetid fogs that still swirled around the ship, albeit now rather less densely than they had. The one reassuring sight was the stocky bulk of Kit Farrell, stepping out from the forecastle .

On impulse, I strode across the upper deck to meet him. 'Boatswain Farrell,' I said formally, 'you recall the time when you told me of the noblest experience to be found on a ship? And the best way for a captain to survey the true dimensions of his command?'

Kit looked at me quizzically. 'Indeed, sir. But—'

'I have a mind to be about it.'

'Now,
Captain? But it's hardly—'

'Now, Boatswain.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Kit's expression was curious, but he was too good an officer to argue the case. It was fortunate (or, as it transpired, unfortunate) that Musk was nowhere to be seen, for he would have had no such qualms.

We went to the starboard rail, and without a second thought I took hold of a lanyard, lifted myself onto that thin palisade, and swung myself out, over the side of the ship, to obtain a footing on the lower shrouds.

Kit said, 'Gently, sir. Make sure of your grip and your footing. It's dank weather, the shrouds are sodden—'

But I took no heed. I had observed enough of veteran topmen going aloft to know the manner of it. Hand over hand, as sure of their footing as spiders...

I climbed with the blind determination of a man fleeing a pursuing demon. At one step, the demon seemed to take the form of an Irish renegade in a red uniform; at another, a plausible, cunning bride; at another, a smiling, duplicitous monarch. Up, to the foot of the futtock shrouds that stretched out to the edge of the maintop. The true seamen went that way, scorning the lubber's hole through the top itself. Matthew Quinton, true seaman, would go that way, then.

I pulled myself outward, then up, then over, fearing nothing, and at last stood on the top, clinging with one hand to the maintopmast. I looked about me, and was amazed by the glories of what I beheld. At that height, the fog was all but gone, consigned to the parts beneath. I could see the lookout on
Mary,
staring quizzically across at me, and the masts of the myriad of ships that lay within the Downs. I could see the square mass of Dover's great keep, standing sentinel above its cliff to the south. And there, in the far distance, the matching white cliffs of France, my grandmother's homeland .

Kit Farrell pulled himself up behind me, having maintained a respectful distance (although in truth, if he had been so minded he could have reached the top in a fraction of my time).

'Well done, Captain!' he cried. 'To be fit for the yards and tops—the mark of a true seaman, by God!'

But in that moment the breeze freshened a little, and the ship lurched. I felt the momentary terror of losing my grip on the maintop as my body followed the pitch. I clutched desperately for the maintop. As I regained my grip, I could see the fog roll away from the deck beneath, like the parting of a curtain.

The deck so very far beneath.

There were our great guns; not great now, but very small indeed, no more than little tubes. And there, some of my men. Why, even Musk, now staring aloft in some apparent dismay, was no larger than a mouse upon the floor...

A strange picture flashed across my mind; a scene unrecalled for almost twenty years. A small excited child taken by its father to the pinnacle of a church tower, there to be shown his ancestral lands stretching all around—only to dissolve in screaming terror at the thought of such a great height, and the child's unshakeable conviction that he would inevitably throw himself from it.

'Kit,' I said, 'I fear I have been proud. Impulsive. A fool.' I swallowed very hard. 'Kit. Can't move. Can't breathe.'

The young man must have grasped my meaning at once. My face must have told its own story, for it felt strangely cold of that sudden; as cold and clammy as it feels now, here in my dotage, as I step ever nearer the graveside. My friend took hold of my free arm and forced me both to grip the maintop with both hands and to look upwards, away from that fascinating, horrifying sight beneath. With all my heart, I cursed my precipitate flight from the merely unpleasant company of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer to this far more terrible predicament.

The swell caught the hull again, and the mast lurched once more. My head throbbed, my eyes clouded and darkened. I tried to swallow, but could not, for my throat felt dry and hard. I clung ever more tightly to the maintopmast and prayed, silently but with a sudden and rare zeal, to the Anglican God of my fathers and, for good measure, to the papist God of my French grandmother.

Kit blew a short, shrill pipe on his whistle, to what end I knew not. Then he turned to me in a matter of fact way and said, 'Not proud at all, sir. The opposite, I reckon. Not many captains are willing to risk all on an ascent. And none I know who possesses a dread of heights. The men will respect you the more for it, Captain Quinton, that they will.' At that moment I cared not a jot for the respect of the men, but I was too consumed by terrors to tell Kit that. As it was, my boatswain continued his discourse as though we were whiling away a pleasant evening in an alehouse. 'Why, the first year or more that I was at sea, I feared the masthead more than Old Nick. Even fell off it once, straight into the sea. Fortunate for me, sir, it was only my uncle's ketch, so the mast was far less than half the height of this—and we were in shoal water, close off the Orford Ness, so there was but little difficulty in fishing me out. But it was a mighty fright, all the same.'

I was still very young, but Kit, of my own age, had evidently already learned a lesson that it took me many more years to master: that soothing, distracting words can diminish even the darkest of horrors. I envied him then, and not for the first time. My own age, but master of the situation. Master of the right words. Master of his captain.

A shuffling and a familiar grunt heralded the arrival of a second man on the maintop—John Treninnick, the stunted monoglot Cornishman whose dexterity upon the yards was the stuff of legend upon our lower deck. Thus the purpose of Kit Farrell's whistle revealed itself.

'Now, Captain,' said Kit, 'I'll go down beneath you, and Treninnick at your side. Through the lubber's hole this time, I think, sir.'

Reluctantly, I glanced downward, and located the edge of the lubber's hole with my foot. Kit dropped lightly through it and gripped the shrouds beneath. One force, and one force alone, impelled me to loosen my grip on the maintopmast and haul myself through the hole: my ferocious determination not to be carried down to the deck in Treninnick's arms, like some swaddling babe, thereby dishonouring at a stroke the many illustrious generations of the House of Quinton. Once I had begun the descent, a rather more practical consideration revealed itself. Treninnick, who could have been up and down the mast thrice in the time it took me to get down, was not a patient man, and clearly had to restrain himself from overtaking me. Despite his remarkable agility, he was not a markedly light man either. Thus the prospect of my fingers being crushed beneath Treninnick's calloused and pungent bare feet drove me ever downward. And all the while, as I continued to look straight ahead at the mainmast (a sight far preferable to the upward spectacle of Treninnick's feet and arse), Kit Farrell kept up his ceaseless, calming banter: 'Of course, you'll find Myngs at his masthead at the slightest excuse, but that's affectation—a proud Norfolk tarpaulin, Myngs is, and he'll ever chance to prove himself better than any man of his company. Now Lawson, well, he started on the colliers, so he's not a man to climb the shrouds—'

With that, my foot struck the starboard rail, and I swung on the shroud to deposit myself upon the
Seraph's
deck once again.

Quite a crowd of the curious had gathered upon the upper deck by now, a plainly disapproving Phineas Musk at the head of them. I controlled myself with some difficulty, looked about me, and said casually, 'As you say, Boatswain, the
Mary
seems to be in some danger of fouling her bower. But our deck appears in order apart from that small matter of the poor stowing of the sheet shot. Order a party to see to it, if you please.'