Storm Tide Read online

  The struggle ended suddenly as Rob put the blade to Lendal’s throat.

  ‘Who are you?’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing?’

  Lendal tried to shake the knife off.

  ‘I was looking for the head,’ he said, sounding aggrieved. ‘Can’t a man go for a piss in peace?’

  ‘You tried to kill me.’

  ‘I tripped.’

  ‘Why? Who sent you?’

  Lendal spat in his face. Rob pushed the knife against his throat. Lendal’s eyes widened, white in the gloom, as he saw he could not lie his way out.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘No one.’

  Silence. Rob pushed the knife so hard against the skin that blood beaded on the blade. It was as close as he had ever come to killing a man, and he wondered if he would have the courage to push the knife the last fraction of an inch if he had to.

  There was a sharp movement behind him, a thump and a squeal. Angus leaned in close, dangling something over Lendal’s head. It seemed to be alive, wriggling and squirming as it hung from his hand.

  ‘I caught a rat,’ he said casually. ‘You know what it’ll do to that pretty face of yours if I let it? It’ll eat you up, one nibble at a time. Little teeth, take a while to gnaw through into your brain. But it’ll get there, I promise you.’

  Lendal started to shake. Angus lowered the rat, so that its scrabbling paws scratched Lendal’s cheek below the eye.

  ‘Take him off me!’ screamed Lendal.

  The noise had woken the other men in the room, but Rob ignored them.

  ‘Who sent you?’ he asked again.

  With the rat squealing and writhing over Lendal’s face, Rob had drawn back. Only a little – but it took the knife away from Lendal’s throat. Lendal saw his opportunity. He lunged for Rob.

  In the dark, Rob scarcely knew what happened. As Lendal grabbed for the knife, the rat fell and scurried off. Angus was knocked aside. Lendal’s hand closed on Rob’s, trying to pry the knife from his fingers.

  Rob tightened his grip, wrestling Lendal for the weapon. It jerked back and forth between them. Rob was the bigger man, but Lendal had a desperate strength. What fear or hate must drive him, to still think of attacking Rob in front of so many witnesses?

  Afterwards, when Rob remembered the fight, he realised it must have taken mere seconds. At the time, it seemed like an eternity of struggle, darkness, and the sharp tang of iron as he and Lendal wrestled the weapon between them. Rob felt the hilt begin to slip in his sweaty palms. Lendal was pulling it away from him, and Rob did not have a good enough grip to resist.

  He did not fight it. Instead, he put all his weight behind it, driving the blade back towards Lendal much faster than his enemy expected. At the same time, he twisted the handle, so that the blade was angled straight at Lendal’s neck.

  The blade was so sharp he felt only the slightest resistance as it sliced open Lendal’s throat. Hot blood spilled over his hands. Lendal went limp. There was a loud thump as his skull hit the deck. Then he lay still.

  Rob dropped the knife. It was the first time he had killed a man, and his mind was in turmoil, but even as the blood dripped from his hands his mind repeated one question.

  Why? Why did he try to kill me? Why, even after I caught him, did he still try to attack me? He must have known he could not escape.

  Rob could ponder that later. He was locked in a stinking hold, with thirty other men and a corpse he was responsible for.

  ‘How do we get rid of him?’ Rob asked, breathing hard.

  ‘Out the head,’ said Angus.

  He tore aside the curtain that screened the privy. Standing on one leg, he stamped his foot through the wooden boxing that surrounded the hole, pounding again and again against the iron grating beneath.

  With a splintering of wood and a splash, the grating came free and dropped into the river. Rob and Angus lifted Lendal’s body between them and jammed him through the gap. They wiped the blood off their hands onto his shirt.

  Rob twisted Lendal to squeeze him through, ignoring the men behind him who had woken up to this extraordinary scene. For a thin man, Lendal was surprisingly heavy.

  ‘It’s lucky he’s a wee thing,’ grunted Angus. ‘He fits through a space made for a little shit.’

  The corpse’s shoulders popped through the hole. The rest of him fell rapidly and splashed into the river below. Angus peered after it.

  ‘Tide’s on the ebb,’ he declared. ‘He’ll be halfway to Sheerness before anyone finds him.’

  Rob leaned over the toilet and vomited into the river. When he turned around, he saw two dozen pairs of eyes watching him. The men were awake and had seen what he had done. If Rob had anything left in his stomach, he would have voided his guts again.

  ‘I think we’re all agreed what happened,’ said Angus calmly. ‘Mr Lendal decided he didn’t fancy the sailor’s life after all and broke through the head before we could stop him. Ain’t that right?’

  No one answered. One of the seamen – an old collier from Newcastle – spat out a wad of tobacco.

  ‘Didn’t like the bugger nohow.’

  Light flooded the room as the hatch was thrown open. Lieutenant Coyningham’s petulant face peered through the opening.

  ‘Enough loitering. You are to come with me aboard HMS Perseus.’

  He squinted into the darkness, seeing the broken wood around the toilet. It was lucky in the dark he could not see the blood on the floor.

  ‘What happened here?’

  ‘It was Mr Lendal, sir, the new volunteer,’ said Angus. ‘He escaped through the shi—’

  ‘I can see where he went,’ said Coyningham. ‘How long ago?’

  There was a general shrugging of shoulders.

  ‘He went in the night,’ said Angus.

  ‘I will alert the shore parties. He will be lucky to survive the currents.’

  The collier shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afeard he weren’t a strong swimmer.’

  ‘Then the Devil take him.’ Coyningham beckoned them up. ‘Now on deck with you. The last man up will feel the taste of the lash.’

  As they climbed the ladder, one of the younger recruits asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  Coyningham looked as if he might strike the youth for speaking out of turn. Then he relented. He bared his teeth in an ugly grin.

  ‘You are going to teach those damn Yankee colonists a lesson in obedience to the King.’

  I

  t was difficult wearing a ship on your head. But that was the latest fashion, and the Comtesse de Bercheny was never less than fashionable. Her hairdressers had been working since dawn, piling her long golden hair into a great pouf. They had stretched it over wire frames, tortured it with hot irons and pins, and hardened it in position with so much paste you could crack an egg on it. Atop that, they set a papier mâché model of a ship in full sail, with the white fleur-de-lis banner of King Louis XVI streaming from its masthead.

  The comtesse waved to the gathered crowds as she descended from her gilded carriage. She had been born Constance Courtney, but she had left that name behind so long ago she hardly remembered it. She had married a French captain, whose wedding gift to her had been an early death. Barely pausing to mourn, she had worked her way up the ranks of the French aristocracy with ruthless ambition: from the captain to a colonel, from the colonel to a general, and finally to her present husband, the Comte de Bercheny. It had not always been smooth – she had faced death more than once. But she was a resourceful woman, and somehow she had survived while her former lovers were all discarded or deceased. She sat at the height of French society – an intimate friend of the new queen Marie Antoinette, the first name on the guest list for every ball – and stood at the centre of attention now, as she stepped onto the quay at the harbour of Brest.

  A young man in a commander’s uniform saluted her. His uniform shone bright and new, from the gleaming buckles on his shoes to the glittering gold lace that trimmed his hat. He had fine fair hair, and a haughty face which had been educated to expunge every emotion. Yet even he could not hide his excitement.

  ‘Étienne.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You look very handsome.’

  He took Constance’s arm and steered her towards a row of officers lined up to receive her.

  ‘I am glad you are here, Maman,’ he murmured in her ear. ‘I know how you have worked for this moment.’

  She handed him a sealed packet from her bag.

  ‘The King himself signed your commission two days ago.’

  She nodded graciously to the first lieutenant as he bowed to her, noting how his eyes lingered on the swell of her breasts where they squeezed out of her bodice. She favoured him with a smile. She knew the effect she had on men. She enjoyed toying with them, though it was a long time since she would have bothered with a mere lieutenant.

  ‘And which is your ship?’ she asked her son, looking at the crowded fleet in the harbour.

  Étienne handed her a brass telescope, a delicate instrument that had been a gift from his father in Paris. Holding her bare shoulders, he steered her until she was pointing in the right direction. Among the scarred old two- and three-decker ships of the line at anchor, one ship almost gleamed on the water. The red paint on her gunports was still wet, the tar shiny on her rigging. The sails brailed on her yards were virgin white, not yet stretched by storms and rain. At the front, the figurehead of a gold-beaked hawk leaned ravenously over the water, its wings streaming back around the bow as if she were dropping on her prey.

  ‘The ship seems so small,’ said Constance. ‘Will she really carry you all the way across the ocean?’

  ‘The Rapace is the finest ship afloat,’ boasted Étienne, with the fervour of a child with a new toy. ‘Forty guns, and with the wind off her quarte
r she will veritably fly. She can outrun anything larger and destroy anything smaller.’

  Constance embraced him. Étienne was her first son and her favourite: strong, handsome and fierce. He was almost as ruthless as she was. She did not spoil him – she needed him to be hard, and he was too proud to accept charity in any case – but she worked tirelessly at court to promote his interests. More than one admiral had received a private audience in her boudoir. How else would a young cadet, barely twenty, be given command of the newest ship in the navy?

  ‘I hope you burn the English navy to ashes,’ she said, with sudden vehemence.

  Étienne gave her a warning look. ‘You forget, we are not at war with England,’ he reminded her loudly, for the benefit of the assembled crowd.

  ‘Of course,’ said Constance. ‘How silly of me. Old instincts die hard.’

  The crowd laughed appreciatively. They understood that peace between England and France was a diplomatic fiction. It was nothing but a breathing space between wars. The last time France and England fought, France had lost an empire in North America. France was ready for revenge, and the only question was when the government would feel bold enough to take it. War was fermenting between Britain and the American colonies. King Louis would wait for the colonists to weaken their masters – and then he would strike.

  What no one on the quay knew, except Constance and Étienne, was that the first manoeuvres of the war were already in motion. The document Constance had brought from Versailles was not a regular commission. It authorised Étienne to act as a privateer in the rebel navy of the American colonies. The ship was French, and the crew were French, but they would fight under an American flag in the name of the new American republic. Another fiction, another lie.

  But Constance knew, better than most, that lies and fictions could kill far more suddenly than the truth.

  ‘Come back in glory,’ she murmured in Étienne’s ear.

  A few successful battles, bloodying British noses and capturing their ships, would make him a sensation in Paris. Her sycophants in the press would write him up as a hero, while her allies would ensure that his name was spoken at every salon and soirée in the city. Then an advantageous marriage into the topmost echelons of aristocracy, and her ascendancy would be complete.

  But there was more to it than ambition. Twenty years earlier, a British army had left Constance to die in an Indian dungeon. It had been the worst ordeal of her life; she had crawled out of it barely alive. She would have ended her life in an Indian brothel if a French officer had not rescued her. She never forgot a debt. Every shot her son fired against British ships would strike another blow for her revenge.

  Étienne stiffened and saluted. Out on the Rapace, a gust of wind snapped the white flag from the masthead.

  ‘I will make you proud, Maman. The British ships will be easy prey. I will send you the head of the first captain I capture, wrapped in his own flag.’

  Constance moistened her lips with her tongue. ‘My dutiful son.’

  R

  ob had thought shipping on the Perseus would be much like the merchantman he had sailed on with Cornish. In some ways, indeed, it was. The sails, the lines and the rigging were the same. The layout of the decks, the structure of the hull were similar enough. The wind, the waves, the points of the compass were familiar.

  Everything else was different.

  The Dunstanburgh Castle had worked her way from India to London with a crew of fifty. The Perseus was little larger but carried over two hundred. The difference was the guns. Captain Cornish had carried a few to scare off pirates, but each one took up tonnage that could more profitably be used for cargo. On the Perseus, the guns were her reason for existence. They sat like crouched beasts along her main deck, long twelve-pounders that could throw a ball over a mile. In battle, it needed six men to service each gun, and more to keep handling the ship.

  The ship was a hundred and twenty feet long. Yet for all the crew worked and slept at close quarters, there were invisible barriers that a man crossed at his peril. The officers were distant, the captain almost as remote as God. Unlike Cornish, who had roamed the deck chatting to the men, Captain Tew was a stiff figure on the quarterdeck.

  Another difference was the discipline. Rob learned about this on his first morning aboard, when the boatswain’s mates came down to the lower deck using their starter ropes liberally to get men out of their hammocks. Aboard a merchantman, the crew were freely employed and could leave a captain who mistreated them at the next port. In the Royal Navy, most of the men were there against their will. The officers and petty officers treated the sailors as somewhere between criminals and animals. Orders were shouted, mistakes punished, and at the least delay the rope ends came out again. Rob was astonished that the crew didn’t mutiny. Yet they seemed to accept the conditions without question.

  ‘Cap’n Tew’s a firm man, but he’s fair,’ said one of Rob’s messmates at dinner that evening, a grizzled old gun captain named Hargrave. ‘He knows in battle it’s discipline as keeps a crew alive.’

  ‘Not like the Bloodhound,’ chimed in another. The Bloodhound was their nickname for Coyningham, the first lieutenant. ‘He’s a bad ’un. If the cap’n didn’t keep ’im honest, he’d flog us until the scuppers choked with our blood.’

  ‘He saved me from prison,’ said Rob loyally.

  The gun captain stared at him, one eye closed. ‘He took you to make his quota. He didn’t give a piss if you was off to prison or the House of Lords.’

  Next morning, the new recruits assembled on deck to be assigned their new stations. Coyningham prowled the line, glaring at the men.

  ‘Where did you serve before?’ he asked Angus.

  ‘Gunner on the Repulse, sir,’ Angus answered. ‘Three years.’

  Coyningham nodded. Then, without warning, he stamped his boot down hard on Angus’s bare foot.

  Angus gasped with pain. His body went rigid. He gritted his teeth and balled his fists so tightly the knuckles went white. Coyningham laughed.

  ‘You will have to move a damn sight faster than that. If that had been the trucks of a gun carriage, you would have lost your foot.’

  Anger boiled in Angus’s face. For a moment, Rob feared his friend would strike the lieutenant. Coyningham almost seemed to be encouraging him. He wanted an excuse to punish Angus. Not to make an example of him, but to hurt him.

  ‘Angus’s feet are so big, he’d probably stop the cannon better than a chock of wood,’ said Rob.

  It broke the tension. The men around him laughed. Angus took a deep breath and collected himself. But Coyningham wheeled around to Rob.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Rob Courtney, sir.’

  Coyningham’s piercing blue eyes met Rob’s. The salt air seemed to irritate them, for the eye sockets around them were bloodshot and red. A tear brimmed on his eyelid. Yet you would not mistake it for softness.

  ‘Do you think discipline aboard this ship is a laughing matter?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Rob was not easily cowed, but it took all his strength to stand up against the hostile energy blazing off Coyningham. He looked ready to strike Rob.

  But he did not. Rob was tall and well built, but more than that, there was an inner strength inside him that any man could see. It had not flinched from Coyningham’s anger, and that unsettled the lieutenant. Like any bully, he did not like a man standing up to him.

  Instead, he looked for easier pickings.

  The next in line was a London boy named Thomas, little more than thirteen years old. Rob had heard him crying in his hammock in the night.

  ‘Have you been to sea before?’ Coyningham asked.

  The boy shook his head, but said nothing. His silence enraged the lieutenant.

  ‘Answer me when I ask you a question, God damn you.’

  ‘No,’ sniffed the boy.

  Coyningham gave him a slap across the cheek. ‘If you ever speak to me, you address me as “sir”. You understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘I mean . . . yes, sir.’

  Too late. Another slap caught his mouth and made his lip bleed. Coyningham stepped back, his face flushed.

  ‘Take off your trousers,’ he told the boy.