A King's Cutter Read online

  Drinkwater nodded, aware of the intended irony and continuing to warm to his new commander.

  ‘Very well,’ Griffiths continued. The second reason is less easy to confess and I tell you this, Mr Drinkwater, because there is a possibility of command devolving upon you, perhaps in adverse circumstances or at an inconvenient time . . .’ Drinkwater frowned. This was more alarming than the previous half-expected revelations. ‘Many years ago on the Gambier coast I contracted a fever. From time to time I am afflicted by seizures.’

  ‘But if you are unwell, sir, a, er . . .’

  ‘A replacement?’ Griffiths raised an indignant eyebrow then waved aside Drinkwater’s apology. ‘Look you, I have lived ashore for less than two years in half a century. I am not likely to take root there now.’ Drinkwater absorbed the fact as Griffiths’s face became suddenly wistful, an old man lost in reminiscence. He finished his glass and stood up, leaving the commander sitting alone with his wine, and quietly left the cabin.

  Overhead the white ensign cracked in the strong breeze as the big cutter drove to windward under a hard reefed mainsail. Her topsail yard was lowered to the cap and the lower yard cockbilled clear of the straining staysail. Halfway along her heavy bowsprit the spitfire jib was like a board, wet with spray and still gleaming faintly from the daylight fading behind inky rolls of cumulus to the westward. The wind drove against the ebb tide to whip up a short steep sea, grey-white in the dusk as it seethed alongside and tugged at the boat towing close astern. The cutter bucked her round bow and sent streaks of spray driving over the weather rail.

  Acting Lieutenant Nathaniel Drinkwater huddled in his tarpaulin as the spume whipped aft, catching his face and agonising his cheek muscles in the wind-ache that followed.

  He ran over the projected passage in his mind yet again, vaguely aware that an error now would blight any chances of his hoped-for promotion. Then he dismissed the thought to concentrate on the matter in hand. From Dover to their destination was sixty-five miles, parallel with the French coast, a coast made terrible by tales of bloody revolution. In the present conditions they would make their landfall at low water. That, Drinkwater had been impressed, was of the utmost importance. He was mystified by the insistence laid upon the point by Lieutenant Griffiths. Although the south-westerly wind allowed them to make good a direct course Griffiths had put her on the larboard tack an hour earlier to deceive any observers on Gris Nez. The cape was now disappearing astern into the murk of a wintry night.

  Drinkwater shivered again, as much with apprehension as with cold; he walked over to the binnacle. In the yellow lamplight the gently oscillating card showed a mean heading of north-west by west. Allowing for the variation of the magnetic and true meridians that was a course of west by north. He nodded with satisfaction, ignoring the subdued sound of conversation and the chink of glasses coming up the companionway. The behaviour of his enigmatic commander and their equally mysterious ‘passenger’ failed to shake his self-confidence.

  He walked back to the binnacle and called forward, summoning the hands to tack ship. A faint sound of laughter came up from below. After his interview, Griffiths had withdrawn, giving the minimum of orders, apparently watching his new subordinate. At first Drinkwater thought he was being snubbed, but swiftly realised it was simply characteristic of the lieutenant. And the man who had boarded at Deal had not looked like a spy. Round, red faced and jolly he was clearly well-known to Griffiths and released from the Welshman an unexpected jocularity. Drinkwater could not imagine what they had to laugh about.

  ‘Ready sir!’

  From forward Jessup’s cry was faintly condescending and Drinkwater smiled into the darkness.

  ‘Down helm!’ he called.

  Kestrel came up into the wind, her mainsail thundering. Drinkwater felt her tremble when the jib flogged, vibrating the bowsprit. Then she spun as the wind filled the backed headsails, thrusting her round.

  ‘Heads’l sheets!’

  The jib and staysail cracked until tamed by the seamen sweating tight the lee sheets.

  ‘Steadeeee . . . steer full and bye.’

  ‘Full an’ bye, sir.’ The two helmsmen leaned on the big tiller as Kestrel drove on, the luff of her mainsail just trembling.

  ‘How’s her head?’

  ‘Sou’ by west, sir.’

  That was south by east true, allowing two points for westerly variation. ‘Very well, make it so.’

  ‘Sou’ by west it is, sir.’

  The ebb ran fair down the coast here and the westing they had made beating offshore ought to put them up-tide and to windward of the landing place by the time they reached it, leaving them room to make the location even if the wind backed. Or so Drinkwater hoped, otherwise his commission would be as remote as ever.

  Towards midnight the wind did back and eased a little. The reefs were shaken out and Kestrel drove southwards, her larboard rail awash. Drinkwater was tired now. He had been on deck for nine hours and Griffiths did not seem anxious to relieve him.

  Kestrel was thrashing in for the shore. Drinkwater could sense rather than see the land somewhere in the darkness ahead. It must be very near low water now. Drinkwater bit his lip with mounting concern. With a backing wind they would get some lee from the cliffs that rose sheer between Le Tréport and Dieppe and it would be this that gave them the first inkling of their proximity. That and the smell perhaps.

  In the darkness and at this speed Kestrel could be in among the breakers before there was time to go about. Anxiously he strode forward to hail the lookout at the crosstrees. ‘Who’s aloft?’

  ‘Tregembo, zur.’ The Cornishman’s burr was reassuring. Tregembo had turned up like a bad penny, one of the draft of six men from the Nore guardship that had completed Kestrel’s complement. Drinkwater had known Tregembo on the frigate Cyclops where the man had been committed for smuggling. He was still serving out the sentence of a court that had hanged his father for offering revenue officers armed resistance. To mitigate the widow’s grief her son was drafted into the navy. That he had appeared on the deck of Kestrel was another link in the chain of coincidences that Drinkwater found difficult to dismiss as merely random.

  ‘Keep a damned good lookout, Tregembo!’

  ‘Aye, aye, zur.’

  Drinkwater went aft and luffed the cutter while a cast of the lead was taken. ‘By the mark, five.’ Kestrel filled and drove on. There was a tension on deck now and Drinkwater felt himself the centre of it. Jessup hovered solicitously close. Why the devil did Griffiths not come on deck? Five fathoms was shoal water, but it was shoal water hereabouts for miles. They might be anywhere off the Somme estuary. He suppressed a surge of panic and made up his mind. He would let her run for a mile or two and sound again.

  ‘Breakers, zur! Fine on the lee bow!’

  Drinkwater rushed forward and leapt into the sagging larboard shrouds. He stared ahead and could see nothing. Then he saw them, a patch of greyness, lighter than the surrounding sea. His heart beat violently as he cudgelled his memory. Then he had it, Les Ridins du Tréport, an isolated patch with little water over it at this state of the tide. He was beginning to see the logic of a landfall at low water. He made a minor adjustment to the course, judging the east-going stream already away close in with the coast. They had about three miles to go.

  ‘Pass word for the captain.’ He kept the relief from his voice.

  The seas diminished a mile and a half offshore and almost immediately they could see the dark line of the land. Going forward again and peering through the Dollond glass he saw what he hardly dared hope. The cliffs on the left fell away to a narrow river valley, then rose steeply to the west to a height named Mont Jolibois. The faint scent of woodsmoke came to him from the village of Criel that sheltered behind the hill, astride the river crossing of the road from Tréport and Eu to Dieppe.

  ‘Da iawn, Mr Drinkwater, well done.’ Griffiths’s voice was warm and congratulatory. Drinkwater relaxed with relief: it seemed he had passed a test. Griffiths quie
tly gave orders. The mainsail was scandalised and the staysail backed. The boat towing astern was hauled alongside and two men tumbled in to bale it out. Beside Drinkwater the cloaked figure of the British agent stood staring ashore.

  ‘Your glass, sir, lend me your glass.’ The tone was peremptory, commanding, all trace of jollity absent.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, sir.’ He fished it out of his coat pocket and handed it to the man. After scrutinising the beach it was silently returned. Griffiths came up.

  ‘Take the boat in, Mr Drinkwater, and land our guest.’

  It took a second to realise his labours were not yet over. Men were piling into the gig alongside. There was the dull gleam of metal where Jessup issued sidearms. ‘Pistol and cutlass, sir.’ There was an encouraging warmth in Jessup’s voice now. Drinkwater took the pistol and stuck it into his waistband. He refused the cutlass. Slipping below, screwing his eyes up against the lamplight from the cabin, he pushed into his own hutch. Behind the door he felt for the French épée. Buckling it on he hurried back on deck.

  Mont Jolibois rose above them as the boat approached the shore. To the left Drinkwater could see a fringe of white water that surged around the hummocks of the Roches des Muron. He realised fully why Griffiths insisted they land at low water. As many dangers as possible were uncovered, providing some shelter and a margin of safety if they grounded. Forward the bowman was prodding overside with his boathook.

  ‘Bottom, sir!’ he hissed, and a moment later the boat ran aground, lifted and grounded again. Without orders the oars came inboard with low thuds and, to Drinkwater’s astonishment, his entire crew leapt overboard, holding the boat steady. Then, straining in a concerted effort that owed its perfection to long practice, they hove her off the sand and hauled her round head to sea. Drinkwater felt foolishly superfluous, sitting staring back the way they had come.

  ‘Ready sir.’ A voice behind him made him turn as his passenger rose and scrambled onto the seaman’s back. The boat lifted to a small breaker and thumped back onto the bottom. The seaman waded ashore and Drinkwater, not to be outdone, kicked off his shoes and splashed after them with the agent’s bag. Well up the beach the sailor lowered his burden and the agent settled his cloak.

  ‘Standard procedure,’ he said with just a trace of that humour he had earlier displayed. He held out his hand for the bag. ‘Men with dried salt on their boots have a rather obvious origin.’ He took the bag. ‘Thank you; bonsoir mon ami.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Drinkwater to the figure retreating into the threatening darkness that was Revolutionary France. For a second Drinkwater stood staring after the man, and then trudged back to the boat.

  There was a perceptible easing of tension as the men pulled back to the waiting cutter. As though the shadow of the guillotine and the horrors of the Terror that lay over the darkened land had touched them all. Wearily Drinkwater clambered on board and saluted Griffiths.

  The lieutenant nodded. ‘You had better get some sleep now,’ he said. ‘And Mr Drinkwater . . .’

  ‘Sir?’ said Drinkwater from the companionway.

  ‘Da iawn, Mr Drinkwater, da iawn.’

  ‘I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand.’ He wrestled with fatigue.

  ‘Well done, Mr Drinkwater, well done. I am pleased to say I do not find my confidence misplaced.’

  Chapter Two

  December 1792

  First Blood

  Not all their operations went as smoothly. There were nights that seemed endless when a rendezvous was missed, when the guttering blue lights shown at the waterline spat and sizzled interminably achieving nothing. There were hours of eye strain and physical weariness as the cutter was laboriously kept on a station to no purpose, hours of barely hidden bad temper, hunger and cold. Occasionally there was brief and unexpected excitement as when, in thick weather, Kestrel disturbed a mid-Channel rendezvous of another kind. The two boats that parted in confusion did so amid shouts in French and English; slatting lugsails jerked hurriedly into the wet air and the splash of what might have been kegs was visible in the widening gap between the two vessels. Kestrel had fired her bow chasers at the retreating smugglers to maintain the illusion of being the revenue cruiser she had been taken for.

  Then there had been an occasion of dubious propriety on their own part. Griffiths sent two boats to creep for barricoes off St Valery while Kestrel luffed and filled in the offing, Griffiths handling her with patient dexterity. Sitting in one of the boats Drinkwater continually verified their position, his quadrant horizontal, the images of two spires and a windmill in alternating sequence as he made minute adjustments to the index. His voice cracked with shouting instructions to the other boat, his eyes streamed at the effort of adjusting to look for Jessup’s wave before refocusing on the reflected images of his marks. The two boats trailed their grapnels up and down the sea bed for hours before they were successful. What was in the little barrels Drinkwater never discovered for certain. Griffiths merely smiled when he eventually reported their success. It crossed his mind it might, quite simply, be cognac; that Griffiths as a man entrusted with many secrets might have capitalised on the advantages his position offered. After all, thought Drinkwater, it was in the best traditions of naval peculation and there was the matter of a few loose gold coins he had himself acquired when he retook the Algonquin in the last war. Somehow it was reassuring to find Griffiths had some human failings beyond the obvious one of enjoying his liquor. Certainly Kestrel never lacked strong drink and Griffiths never stinted it, claiming with a mordant gleam in his eye, that a good bottle had more to offer a man than a good woman.

  ‘A woman, look you, never lets you speak like a bottle does, boy-o. She has the draining of you, not you her, but a bottle leaves your guts warm afterwards . . .’ He finished on a long sigh.

  Drinkwater smiled. In his half-century at sea poor Griffiths could only have experienced the fleeting affection of drabs. Hugging his own knowledge of Elizabeth to him Nathaniel had felt indulgent. But he had not refused the cognac that made its appearance after the day off St Valery.

  Certainly Griffiths was unmoved by the presence of women which always sent a wave of lust through the cutter when they transferred fugitives from French fishing boats. The awkward bundles of women and children, many in bedraggled finery, who clambered clumsily over the stinking bulwarks into the boats to the accompanying grins of the Frenchmen, never failed to unsettle the exemplary order of the cutter. Griffiths remained aloof, almost disdainful, and obviously pleased when they had discharged their passengers. While their duties became this desperate business of strange encounters and remote landings Drinkwater patiently worked at his details. The tides, distances and the probabilities of unpredictable weather occupied him fully. Yet his curiosity and imagination were fed by these glimpses of fear and the glint of hatred that mingled with that of avarice in the fishermen’s eyes as they handed over their live cargoes. ‘We may stink of fish,’ a giant Malouin had laughed as his lugger drew off, ‘but you stink of fear . . .’

  As time passed, by a gradual process of revelation, Drinkwater slowly acquired knowledge beyond the merely digital duty of his own part of the puppet’s hand. From an apparently mindless juggling with the moon’s phases and southing, with epacts and lunitidal intervals, a conspiratorially winking Jessup one day showed him a lobster pot containing pigeons. The bosun silently revealed the small brass cylinder strapped to a bird’s leg. ‘Ah, I see,’ said Drinkwater, as pleased with the knowledge as the demonstration of trust bestowed by Jessup. Another link in the mysterious chain was added when he saw the pot hidden in the fishwell of a boat from Dieppe.

  Greater confidence came from Griffiths on an afternoon of polar air and brilliant December sunshine when the gig landed them on the shingle strand below Walmer castle. Within its encircling trees the round brick bastions embraced the more domestic later additions. Lord Dungarth was waiting for them with two strangers who talked together in French. He led them inside. Drinkwater spread the ch
arts as he was bid and withdrew to a side table while Dungarth, Griffiths and the livelier of the two men bent over them.

  Drinkwater turned to the second Frenchman. He was sitting bolt upright, his eyes curiously blank yet intense, as though they saw with perfect clarity not Drinkwater before him, but a mirrored image of his own memories. The sight of the man sent a chill of apprehension through Drinkwater. He restrained an impulse to shiver and turned to the window by way of distraction.

  Outside the almost horizontal light of a winter afternoon threw the foreground into shadow; black cannon on the petal-shaped bastions below, the trees, the remains of the moat and the shingle. Out in the Downs sunlight danced in a million twinkling points off the sparkling sea, throwing into extraordinary clarity every detail of the shipping. Beyond the dull black hull and gleaming spars of Kestrel several Indiamen got under way, their topsails bellying, while a frigate and third-rate lay in Deal Road. A welter of small craft beat up against the northerly wind, carrying the flood into the Thames estuary. The sharp-peaked lugsails of the Deal punts and galleys showed where the local longshoremen plied their legal, daylight, trade. In the distance the cliffs of France were a white bar on the horizon.

  Raised voices abruptly recalled Drinkwater’s attention. The three men at the table had drawn upright. Griffiths was shaking his head, his eyes half closed. The stranger was eagerly imploring something. From the rear Drinkwater found the sudden froglike jerks of his arms amusing as the man burst into a torrent of French. But the atmosphere of the room extinguished this momentary lightening of his spirit. The silent man remained rigid.

  Dungarth placated the Frenchman in his own tongue, then turned to Griffiths. The lieutenant was still shaking his head but Dungarth’s look was sharply imperative. Drinkwater caught a glimpse of the old Devaux, not the ebullient first lieutenant, but a distillation of that old energy refined into urgent compulsion. Griffiths’s glance wavered.