Bolitho 01 - Richard Bolitho Midshipman by Alexander Kent

Author:Alexander Kent
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-05-26T17:34:53+00:00

6

Face to Face

`Easy there! Watch your stroke!' Hope, the Gorgon's fifth lieutenant, hissed in the darkness, craning forward from the sternsheets as if to seek out the noise.

Bolitho crouched beside him and turned to peer astern. Only an occasional feather of white spray or a trailing glow of phosphorescence around the oars betrayed the position of the other cutter. It was very dark, and after the cloudless day, surprisingly cold. Which was just as well, he thought, for they had come a long way. The boats had been lowered and manned before dusk, and while Gorgon made more sail and went about to leave them to their own resources they had settled down to a long, steady pull towards the slab of headland.

When darkness had arrived it had been sudden, like the fall of a curtain, and Bolitho found himself wondering what was going on in the lieutenant's mind. It was a far cry indeed from the time when he had thrown open the door of the Blue Posts at Portsmouth and bellowed at the midshipmen. He remembered what Grenfell had said then about Hope's worries of promotion. The memory saddened him. Grenfell was dead, and Hope would indeed be moving up a place when the captain chose to accept that the lieutenant who had been in charge of the City of Athens was also killed.

Eden was leaning against him, his head lowered almost to the gunwale.

Bolitho said quietly, `Still a way to go yet, Tom.'

It was an eerie sensation. The cutter thrusting jerkily across the inshore currents, the oars rising and falling on either beam like pale bones, their usual noise muffled by rags and thick layers of grease.

Ahead of the boat there was a darker wedge to show the division between sea and sky, and Bolitho thought he could smell the earth, sense its nearness.

In the bows, bent over the stem and a viciouslooking swivel gun, was a leadsman, his boat's lead and line sounding the way above sandbars and hidden rocks.

Turnbull, the master, had explained to the two lieutenants that it was best to creep right inshore, so that once around the headland they would lie somewhere between the beach and the anchored ships.

It had all sounded so easy. Not now, as a man caught his foot in a cutlass and set it clattering across the bottom-boards, and Hope snarled, `God, Rogers, I'll have you beaten senseless if you make another sound!'

Bolitho looked at his profile, a shadow against the oars' spray alongside. A lieutenant. A man who knew that Tregorren was following close astern, depending

on his ability to lead the way. Thirty men. For a press-gang, or for manning a couple of heavy guns, it was ample. For taking a ship against odds, and without surprise, it was disaster.

A strong eddy pushed the hull aside, so that the coxswain had to use his strength at the tiller to bring it back on course. The air felt different again and the sea across the larboard beam looked livelier.

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