‘Come, gentlemen, come,’ cried the Commodore, running on deck. Closer, closer: they were well within range, all colours abroad; within musket-shot, the Spanish decks crowded with faces; within pistol-shot.
‘Hard over,’ said the Commodore. The wheel spun and the big frigate turned with a roar of orders to round to and lie on the admiral’s starboard beam, twenty yards to windward. The Commodore took his speaking-trumpet. ‘Shorten sail,’ he cried, aiming it at the Medea’s quarterdeck. The Spanish officers spoke slightly to one another; one of them shrugged his shoulders. There was dead silence all along the line: wind in the rigging, the lapping of the sea.
‘Shorten sail,’ he repeated, louder still. No reply: no sign. The Spaniard held his course for Cadiz, two hours away. The two squadrons ran in parallel lines, gliding silently along at five knots, so close that the low sun sent the shadow of the Spanish topgallantmasts across the English decks.
‘Fire across his bows,’ said the Commodore. The shot struck the water a yard before the Medea’s forefoot, the spray sweeping aft. And as though the crash had broken
the spell of silence and immobility there was a quick swirl of movement aboard the Medea, a shout of orders, and her topsails were dewed up.
‘Do your best, Mr Osborne,’ said the Commodore. ‘But by God he shall make up his mind in five minutes.’
‘Bring him if you possibly can,’ said Stephen. ‘And above all, remember Godoy has betrayed the kingdom to the French.’
The boat pulled across and hooked on. Osborne climbed aboard the Spanish frigate, took off his hat and bowed to the crucifix, the admiral and the captain, each in turn. They saw him go below with Bustamente.
And now the time dragged slow. Stephen stood by the mainmast, his hands tight clasped behind his back:
he hated Graham, the commodore: he hated what was going to happen. He tried with all his force to follow and to influence the argument that was carrying on half a pistol shot away. If only Osborne could bring Bustamente aboard there might be a fair chance of an arrangement.
Mechanically he glanced up and down the line. Ahead of the Indefatigable the Medusa lay rocking gently beside the Fama; astern of the Medea the Amphion had now slipped round under the Mercedes’s lee, and in the rear lay the Lively, close to windward of the Clara.
Even to Stephen’s unprofessional eye, the Spaniards were in a remarkable state of readiness; there was none of that hurried flight of barrels, coops, livestock, tossed into the sea to clear the decks, that he had seen often enough in the Mediterranean. At each gun, its waiting, motionless crew; and the smoke from the slow-match in every tub wafted in a thin blue haze along the long range of cannon.
Graham was pacing up and down with a quick uneven step. ‘Is he going to be all night?’
he said aloud, looking at the watch in his hand. ‘All night? All night?’
A quarter of an endless hour, and all the time the sharp smell of burning match in their nostrils. Another dozen turns and the Commodore could bear it no longer.
‘A gun for the boat,’ he cried, and again a shot whipped across the Medea’s bows.
Osborne appeared on the Spanish deck, clambered down into the boat, came aboard the Indefatigable, shaking his head. His face was pale and tense. ‘Admiral Bustamente’s compliments, sir,’ he said to the Commodore, ‘but he cannot entertain your proposals. He cannot consent to being detained. He nearly yielded when I spoke of Godoy,’ he said to Stephen, aside. ‘He hates him.’
‘Let me go across, sir,’ cried Stephen. ‘There is still time.’
‘No, sir,’ cried the Commodore, a wild, furious glare in his face. ‘He has had his time. Mr Carrol, lay me across her bows.’
‘Lee braces – ‘The cry was drowned by the Mercedes’s crashing broadside as she fired straight into the Amphion.
‘Signal close engagement,’ said the Commodore, and the vast bay roared and echoed with a hundred guns. A great pall of smoke formed at once, rising and drifting away southwest, and within the pall the flashes of the guns followed one another in a continuous blaze of lightning. An enormous din, trembling heart and spine:
Stephen stood there near the mainmast, with his hands behind his back, looking up and down; there was the cruel taste of powder in his mouth, and in his bosom he felt the rising fierce emotion of a bull-fight – the furious cheering of the gun-crews was invading him.
Then the cheering was cut off, drowned, annihilated by a blast so huge that it wiped out thought and almost consciousness:
the Mercedes blew up in a fountain of brilliant orange light that pierced the sky.
Spars, great shapeless timbers rained down out of the pillar of smoke, a severed head, and now through their fall there was the roar of guns again. The Amphion had moved up to the leeward side of the Medea, and the Spaniard was between two fires.
Cheer upon cheer, a rolling fire, and the powder-boys ran by in an unbroken stream.
Cheers, and then one greater than the rest, quite different, a great exultant cry ‘She’s struck! The admiral has struck!’
The fire was slackening all along the line. Only the Lively was still hammering the Clara, while the Medusa was sending a few shots after the distant Fama, who, having struck, had nevertheless borne up: she was flying, uninjured, under a press of sail to leeward.
A few minutes later the Clara’s colours came down. The Lively shot ahead alongside the Indefatigable and Jack hailed the Commodore. ‘Give you joy, sir. May I go in chase?’
‘Thankee, Aubrey,’ called the Commodore. ‘Chase for all you are worth – she has the treasure aboard. Crack on:
we are all chewed up.’
‘May I have Dr Maturin, sir? My surgeon is aboard the prize.’
‘Yes, yes. Bear a hand, there. Don’t let her get away, Aubrey, do you hear me?’
‘Aye aye, sir. Briskly the cutter, now.’
The Lively wore clear of the crippled Amphion, just shaving her bowsprit, sheeted home her topgallants and headed south-west. The Fama, untouched in her masts and rigging, was already three miles off, stretching away for a band of deeper blue, a stronger wind that might carry her to the Canaries, or allow her to double back by night for Algeciras.
‘Well, old Stephen,’ cried Jack, hauling him inboard by main force, ‘that was a hearty brush, eh? No bones broke, I trust? All sober and correct? Why, your face is black with powder-smoke. Go below – the gun-room will lend you a basin until the cabin is set to rights – wash, and we will go on with our breakfast as soon as the galley fire is lit again. I will be with you once we have knotted and spliced the worst of the danger.’
Stephen looked at him curiously. He was bolt upright,
larger than life, and he seemed fairly to glow with light. ‘It was a necessary stroke,’ said Stephen.
‘Indeed it was,’ said Jack. ‘I do not know much about politics, but it was a damned necessary stroke for me. No, I don’t mean that,’ he cried, seeing Stephen jut out his lower lip and look away. ‘I mean she let fly at us, and if we had not replied, why truly, we should
have been in a pretty mess. She dismounted two guns with her first broadside. Though to be sure,’ he added with a delighted chuckle, ‘it was necessary in the other meaning too.
Come, go below, and I will join you presently. We shall not be up with her -, nodding towards the distant Fama ‘- much before noon, if that.’
Stephen went down into the cockpit. He had been in several actions, but this was the first time he had ever heard laughter coming from the place where men paid for what went on on deck. Mr Floris’s two assistants and three patients were sitting on chests round the midshipmen’s table, where the fourth patient, a simple fracture of the femur, had just been splinted and bandaged: he was telling them how in his haste he had left the rammer in his gun; it had been fired straight into the Clara’s side, and Mr Dashwood, seeing it sticking there, had spoken quite sharp and sarcastic -‘It shall be stopped from your pay, Bolt,’ says he, ‘you wicked dog.’
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said Stephen. ‘Since Mr Floris is not aboard, I have come to see whether I may be of any assistance.’
The surgeon’s mates leapt up; they became extremely grave, endeavoured to hide their bottle, assured him of their great obligation, but these men represented the whole of the butcher’s bill – two splinter wounds, superficial, one musket-ball, and this femur.
‘Apart from John Andrews and Bill Owen, who lost the number of their mess, in consequence of the figurehead of that old Mercedes cutting ’em in two,’ observed the femur.