‘your good shirt and admiral’s uniform has been spread out this last half glass.
Which you ain’t forgot you are dining with the wardroom today? Even the Doctor remembered it, and changed voluntary.’
The excitement of the chase had done wonders for the wardroom cook: he had lashed in most of his rarest and most costly ingredients – sherry in the turtle soup, port in the suckingpig’s gravy, brandy in one of the Commodore’s favourite forecastle dishes, fu-fu, ordinarily made of barley and treacle, but now with honey and cognac.
Jack made an excellent dinner, the first for a great while; the chase, the audible speed of the ship, with water singing loud along her side, the sense of eagerly straining wood, removed much of the restraint imposed by an admiral’s uniform in the place of honour, and there was a general sound of cheerful and spontaneous conversation.
Several of the officers had seen or more often heard something of Hoche’s disastrous attempt on Bantry Bay with an enormous, unmanageable fleet in ’96, and while for the most part they avoided shop, they had interesting things to say about that iron-bound coast, with its frightful seas in a full south-west gale – the Fastnet rock – the tide-race off the Skelligs – remarks however that might have been better timed if just such a wind were not already blowing, and if a dropping glass did not suggest that it would soon blow harder still.
After coffee Jack suggested that Stephen should put on a tarpaulin jacket and sou’wester – how perfectly named – and come with him to view their quarry from the forecastle, taking his come-up glass with them. It was a wet forecastle, with the spray and even green water of the following seas sweeping right forward to mingle with that flung up by the Bellona’s bows as she pitched hawse-deep; but their view was so imperfect that Jack proposed the foretop and called for Bonden.
Stephen
protested
that
he was perfectly recovered, perfectly strong enough for this
simple, familiar ascent. Jack hailed somewhat louder, Bonden came at the double, and Stephen submitted, observing privately, ‘I thus have the comfort of being raised safely, easily, to this eminence, and at the same time that of retaining my self-respect.’
The eminence of some eighty feet did indeed give them a fine uninterrupted expanse of grey, white-dashed, wind whipped ocean; and there in the north-east were the long looked-for sails. Not topsails alone, but sometimes courses too, and on occasion a hull rose clear. The Bellona had not
quite fetched their wake, since the quickest way to do so was to converge upon it in as straight a line as possible rather than make a dog-leg: this meant that from the foretop they still had a slight sideways, glancing view of the French line. Jack passed the telescope. ‘Two two-deckers, and a little small thing far ahead,’ said Stephen. ‘Then four that I take to be troop.
ships. And two frigates.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘How well he handles those troop-ships: all neatly in their station.
Their Commodore must be a man ol parts. They are fast, even very fast for troop-ships, but I have little doubt we are overhauling them.’ He turned a screw on the telescope that separated the two halves of a divided lens and said ‘Now you see two images of the leading two-decket just touching: if they stay like that, we are going at the same speed: if they separate, the chase is going faster: if they over lap, we are gaining. One has to wait quite a while for the effeci to be visible.’
Stephen gazed and gazed: after a long pause in which he pointed out a stormy petrel pittering up the side of a foaming roller he looked again and cried ‘They have joined.
The3 overlap!’
‘We are certainly gaining quite fast, and I think that if we were to leave the Thames to make the best of her way we might be up with them by mid-morning, within sight of land. I think their Commodore will almost certainly heave to and fight there, rather than close among those wicked rocks and on an unknown coast: besides, it might allow him to put his troops ashore under one or both of his frigates.’
‘Would our frigates not destroy them?’
‘Perhaps. But they might be badly outgunned in weight of metal. One Frenchman is I think a thirty-six-gun ship, almost certainly carrying eighteen-pounders, and the other a thirtytwo, with the same. Poor old Thames only has twelves, and Aurora no more than nines…’
Stephen made some other observations, but clearly Jack, gazing at the enemy, was not attending.
‘As things stand at present,’ he said at last, ‘the sooner we engage the better,’ and as he turned he called down to Meares, busy just abaft the forecastle, ‘I beg you will make sure of those ring-bolts, Master Gunner. They may be sorely tried tomorrow.’
‘If they draw, sir,’ replied the gunner, looking up with a grin, ‘you may draw me, too; and quarter me into the bargain.’
Jack laughed; but on deck he said privately to Stephen, ‘As I remember, the Frenchman’s orders were for Bantry Bay or the Kenmare river. Do you know either, or the deep inlets all along?’
‘Hardly at all, and then only from a landlubber’s point of view. I scarcely know west Cork at all. I did stay with the Whites once: not the Whites of Bantry but cousins between Skibereen and Baltimore. And then there was an idle tale of a white-tailed-eagle meeting on Clear Island that took me there. But as a guide I am useless, let alone a pilot, for all love.’
‘If things stand as they are, my mind is tolerably clear,’ said Jack.
Things did not stand as they were: the wind strengthened, veering westerly, so that they could carry no more than closereefed topsails; and even those hurried them along at a breakneck pace. As thick a night as could well be imagined, the sky entirely covered by clouds that barely cleared the masthead, frequent rain, often in very heavy squalls. Not the least possibility of an observation, and little reliance could be placed on dead-reckoning.
The Bellona had her three great stern-lanterns all ablaze, and from time to time Jack Aubrey left either his fiddle or the game of cards he was playing with Stephen to stand by them on the poop, watching the rain sweep past in their rays or searching the darkness astern for his squadron: at eight bells a suffused glow as the watch changed aboard the Stately, and once or twice a small light in what he took to be the Ringle right abeam; but almost all the time it was a roaring darkness, another manner of being. After a little while of this the
binnacle lamps were so bright when he returned to the quarterdeck that in their mere reflection he recognized the
midshipman of the watch, almost extinguished by his waterproof clothes and hat. ‘A dirty night, Mr Wetherby,’ he said.
‘I trust it don’t damp your spirits?’
‘Oh no, sir,’ said the boy, laughing with excitement. ‘Ain’t it a lark?’
Every few bells he walked – or sometimes clawed his way
– on the poop, sensing the changing forces of the air and sea: a great spring tide would flow tomorrow, and already in the
countless pressures working on the hull he thought he could
discern its first stirring.
‘The wind is almost due west now,’ he told Stephen, returning from one of these tours, very near the night’s end:
but Stephen was asleep, bowed in an elbow-chair, his head moving with the roll and pitch of the ship, and she racing through the blackness with him.
For what seemed no more than a moment Jack did the same: but the cry of the lookout on the forecastle ‘Breakers on the starboard bow’ pierced through the rising doze, and he was on deck before the messenger could reach him. Miller, the officer of the watch, had already started sheets to reduce the ship’s pace, and he and Jack stood listening: through the general din of wind and the crash of tumbling seas there came the
grave, regular beat of surf breaking on the shore or on a reef. ‘Two blue flares,’ said Jack, the agreed signal; and for once, in spite of wind and the omnipresent spray that wetted everything, they soared away at once, their unearthly blue showing clear.
‘Indeed the sky is higher, almost clear,’ said the lieutenant. ‘It will be day in half a glass,’ said the master. ‘You can make out a glimmer in the east already.’
The glimmer spread: the west wind, though still very strong, bore less rain, more cloud, and presently their nightaccustomed eyes made out first a long cape to larboard, cloud still covering all its height above a hundred feet, with islands at the seaward end, and then to starboard the even longer, even more cloudy headland on whose western side the sea was beating with such tremendous, rhythmic solemnity: between them lay a narrow rocky-sided bay reaching away into the land, losing itself in the murk; and as the light increased and the water grew lees dark they saw another rounded island some way down, close in on the northern shore. On this side of the island lay two ships. Jack took Miller’s glass. They were the French seventy-fours, and as he fixed them, with the utmost intense concentration, he grew more and more convinced that they too were uncertain of their landfall. Indeed, with this visibility, it might have been any one of half a dozen. And that they were trying to make it out, hoping for pre-arranged signals, friendly pilots: they had a green flag flying.