Free In Distant Waters by Richard Woodman Page B

we’re doing so far north . . .’
    â€˜If I remember correctly, Mr Q,’ broke in Lallo, ‘the captain was about to confide in us when the recall guns were fired on the desertion of those two . . .’ Lallo hesitated.
    â€˜Persons, Mr Lallo?’ offered Henderson.
    â€˜Exactly, Mr Henderson . . . now tell us . . . that confidence was interrupted, but you are in the captain’s pocket enough to get furlough in Edinburgh town . . . What’s this about Russians?’
    â€˜I’ve no more influence over the captain than you, Mr Lallo; indeed I’ve a good deal less, I dare say . . .’
    But their deliberations were cut short, for faintly down the cotton shaft of the windsail came a cry: ‘Sail . . . sail ho! Two points on the larboard bow!’
    They forgot the roast pork and the glasses of shrub and sherry. Even the Reverend Mr Henderson joined the rush for the quarterdeck ladder adding to the clatter of over-turned chairs and the noise of cutlery as the dragged table-cloth sent it to the deck. King stood shaking his head and rolling his eyes in a melancholy affectation. Only Quilhampton remained impervious to the hail of the masthead lookout.
    His only reaction was to bring his wooden hand down on the table in a savage blow, bruising the pine board and giving vent to the intensity of his feelings. For underneath his personal misery, below the strange disturbance caused by the desertion on Juan Fernandez, lay the knowledge that most oppressed him and of which he had been dreaming fitfully as he had dozed on his cot. More than any other officer, it was James Quilhampton who best understood the smouldering mood of the men. It had been Quilhampton alone who had defused the incipient mutiny aboard the
Antigone
the previous summer. Very little had happened to placate the men since Drinkwater’s bounty, paid out of the captain’s own pocket, had eased tension for a while. But the money had been paid to the whores of Sheerness and any good that Drinkwater’s largesse had achieved had long since evaporated. Somehow the affair at Juan Fernandez had crystallised a conviction that had come to him as he had held the tawny-haired Catriona in his arms on his departure from Edinburgh, the conviction that
Patrician
was unlucky and that she would never return home.
    Captain Drinkwater had been more relieved than otherwise at the discovery of Witherspoon’s sex. No captain, particularly one engaged on a distant cruise in the Pacific, relished the discovery of sodomitical relationships within his crew any more than he relished the problem of desertion. The fact that Witherspoon was a woman made Hogan’s action understandable and lent a measure of reason to the twin absenteeism that stemmed from passion, not mutiny. What Drinkwater had dreaded when he learned of the failure of two hands to muster, was a sudden, unpredictable revolt among the men. His orders were difficult enough to execute without the ferment that such a disorderwould cause, a disorder which might threaten not merely his command, but his very life. He was not untouched by the tragedy that had happened beneath the waterfall, but he perceived again the workings of providence and when he had entered the initials
D.D
. against the two names in the ship’s muster book, his sense of relief had been very real. In the margin provided for remarks, he had added:
Killed while resisting arrest, having first Run
.
    It was a poor epitaph. A poetaster might have conjured up a romantic verse at the tragedy; a venal commander might have kept the two names on the ship’s books and drawn the pay himself, or at least until he had repaid himself the cost of the sword he had lost in the pool beneath the waterfall. But Drinkwater felt only a further sadness that Hogan and Witherspoon had gone to join those damned souls who awaited judgement in some private