Free Mr Corbett's Ghost by Leon Garfield

time in the day I’d very serious thoughts indeed of leaving him altogether and fighting for Holland. This was when we saw our first English sail and there was great activity on the lower gun-deck against the chance of an encounter. She was a handsome, warlike vessel, bosomingstrongly along. ‘A seventy-four,’ remarked Mynheer Leyden briskly. ‘By tomorrow she’ll be driftwood!’ Then we outpaced her and the sea was as clean as a German silver tray.
    It was a few minutes before half past eight o’clock in the evening. I’d been on deck together with several officers. The wind was gone. The air was still. A sharp-edged quarter moon seemed to have sliced the clouds into strips, so that they fell away slowly, leaving dark threads behind. Earlier, Mynheer Leyden had been urging me to speak with the captain relative to my becoming a midshipman, for I was of good family and too good for Mynheer Tripp. To be a painter was a lower-class ambition. (‘All right! He has his gift! But what’s that to you and me? God gave him sharp eyes—but He gave us good families! Vaarlem, my boy—I can’t make you out!’) Then, a few minutes before half past eight, he said quietly, ‘Vaarlem: you’d best go down and fetch him.’ Which I did.
    â€˜Sir: you must come up on deck at once.’
    Mynheer Tripp glanced at me irritably, began to mumble something, then thought better of it. He stood up and wrapped himself in the filthy shawls and coat he’d strewn about the cabin.
    â€˜Hurry, sir!’
    â€˜Why? The sea won’t run away . . . and if it does, I shan’t be sorry!’ He followed me on to the deck.
    â€˜Look, Mynheer Tripp! The Englishman!’
    For a proud moment, I thought he’d had enough brandy to make him behave like a Dutchman, for he stood quite still and silent. Then the brandy’s effect wore off and his own miserable spirit shone through. Every scrap of colour went from his face and he began to tremble with terror and rage!
    â€˜Madmen!’ he shrieked—and I wished myself at thebottom of the sea and Mynheer Tripp with me. The Englishman was within half a kilometre, and still moving softly towards us, pulled by two longboats whose oars pricked little silver buds in the moonswept sea. She was as silent as the grave, and any moment now would turn, broadside on, and greet us with the roar of thirty-seven iron mouths. For she was the seventy-four.
    Mynheer Tripp seized my arm and began dragging me towards the quarter-deck, shouting outrageously: ‘Move off! For God’s sake move off! We’ll all be killed! How dare you do such a thing! Look! Look! This boy . . . of a good family . . . very important! If he’s harmed I’ll be prosecuted by his father. And so will you! I demand to go back! For Vaarlem’s sake! Oh, my God! A battle!’
    They must have heard him aboard the Englishman. I could only pray that no one aboard it knew Dutch! I felt myself go as red as a poppy. To be used by this villainous coward as a mean excuse—I all but fought with him!
    â€˜You pig, Mynheer Tripp!’ I panted. ‘This time you’ve gone too far!’
    â€˜Pig?’ he hissed, between roarings at the captain. ‘You shut your middle-class mouth, Master Vaarlem! These noodles have no right to expose me . . . us to such danger! I’ll sue—that’s what I’ll do! In the courts!’
    Captain Kuyper—a man who’d faced death a hundred times and now faced it for maybe the last—stared at Mynheer Tripp as if from a great distance.
    â€˜You are perfectly right, sir. This ship is no place for you. You will be put off in the boat and rowed to where you may observe the engagement in safety. Or go to Holland. Or go to Hell, sir! As for the boy—he may stay if he chooses. I would not be ashamed to die in
his
company.’
    To my astonishment, before I