Rebellion

He was about to get up when he saw the remains of the boat. A stempost and four feet of splintered bow lay several feet away, wedged among the seaweed-encrusted rocks like shattered pieces of discarded bone. There were no markings to suggest what ship they might have come from. He looked around for more wreckage but couldn’t see anything and he knew it was probably pointless to continue the search. In any case, it was time to move on. Still finding his feet, he made his way back to the beach.

He looked up at the cliff face. The worn parts of it looked soft and crumbly. There had been recent slippage, he saw, which suggested that a good many of the boulders he was skirting were the results of landslides. Emerging from the debris, he placed that thought firmly at the back of his mind and headed for the dunes.

A distant, low-hanging smudge drew his gaze. Drifting wood smoke; which meant a dwelling of some sort, but the contours obscured his view so whether it was evidence of a village or town or a single isolated abode, it was too far away to tell. By-passing the place and proceeding on his way was one of the options open to him, but when he thought about it, that idea didn’t make much sense. Where was he proceeding to? Far better to find out where he was and then determine his next move. And the only way to accomplish that was either look for a convenient signpost, or ask somebody.

That was when he heard the groan.

He stopped dead and listened, his skin prickling. The noise came again, from close by; a low exhalation, as if someone was in pain. He turned towards the source and saw movement; a dark shape slinking behind a bank of grass close to the entrance of what looked to be a narrow gulley running between two dunes. There was something else, too, leading away from the gulley back towards the sea; shallow and uneven depressions in the sand; scuff marks, as if an animal had dragged its way ashore.

God’s blood! Hawkwood thought.

He moved swiftly and silently, keeping low, knowing it was still a risk, but driven by a feeling of expectation that was impossible to ignore. The hairs rose along the back of his neck when he saw the black jacket and the hunched shoulders of the figure that was trying desperately to burrow itself into concealment.

Sensing imminent discovery the figure stopped moving, but only for a second and not before Hawkwood had seen that it was favouring its left arm. As fear overcame caution, the prone man suddenly tried to rise and run, but the effort proved too much and he stumbled and fell to his knees, chest heaving. Hawkwood stepped forward. The man turned and looked up over his shoulder, resignation on his pale, pain-streaked face, which expanded into shock when Hawkwood said evenly, “Going somewhere, Lieutenant?”

He knelt quickly, just in time to allow Griffin’s commander to collapse into his arms.

There were livid bruises and abrasions on Stuart’s cheeks and forehead. His clothes were damp and encrusted with sand. He stared up at Hawkwood as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Good God, you’re alive!” he breathed hoarsely.

“I could say the same to you,” Hawkwood said, cradling the lieutenant’s shoulders. “Can you sit up?”

Stuart nodded. With his back propped against a stout tuft of grass, he swallowed and coughed. When he’d recovered, he stared at Hawkwood. “I still don’t believe it! We launched the boat but when we couldn’t find you, we thought you’d perished.” He cleared his throat again and with an expression of distaste wiped a loop of spittle from his chin.

Hawkwood looked at the lieutenant in amazement. “The bloody ship was turning turtle! How in God’s name were you able to launch the boat?”

To Hawkwood’s further astonishment, Stuart shook his head, wincing as he did so. “She didn’t sink.” And from somewhere, a wry smile appeared. “I told you she was a sound ship. It’d take more than last night’s blow to break her. Griffin lives to fight again.” Suddenly, the smile fell away, replaced by an expression of acute sorrow. “Though the cost was far greater than I would have imagined.”

“How many did you lose?” Hawkwood asked, thinking about the difficulties the crew must have endured just trying to get the boat into the water, let alone conducting a search in waves as high as a three-storeyed house.

The lieutenant hesitated and then said with despair in his voice, “Fifteen, including Marlow and Sheldrake.”

“The men in the jolly boat?”

Stuart looked at him, his brow furrowing. “How . . .?”

“I found their bodies,” Hawkwood explained.

The sadness remained etched on Stuart’s bruised face. His jaw tightened. “They were good men. When I asked for volunteers they were the first to step forward. But the waves proved too much for us. They carried us ashore but the boat foundered on the rocks. We were cast into the water and separated.”

Another of the Almighty’s cruel japes, Hawkwood thought bitterly. It had been the jolly boat, built for purpose, that had fallen victim to the fierce and unforgiving sea while he’d been transported to safety on what had amounted to little more than a piece of driftwood. He recalled Fitch and the wrath in the helmsman’s face when he’d voided his anger in the midst of the storm. Hawkwood hadn’t even reached his destination and already the mission had cost the lives of fifteen men.

Stuart emitted a grunt of discomfort as he shifted position. He continued holding his left arm close to his chest.

“Let me take a look at that,” Hawkwood offered.

It didn’t take a moment to confirm the arm wasn’t broken but the lieutenant’s wrist was badly sprained.

“We should get off the beach and find shelter,” Hawkwood said.

Stuart nodded and Hawkwood helped him to his feet. When they were both standing, he found that Stuart was gazing at him. Sorrow had been replaced by a kind of weary amusement.

“What is it?”

“I was thinking it’s true: the Lord does work in mysterious ways.”

“How so?”

“We’re alive when we’ve no right to be.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“On the contrary, I’m exceedingly grateful. I’ll make a point of telling Him so when we do finally meet.”

Hawkwood smiled. “Paradise over purgatory? You’re that certain you’ll be going up, not down?”

Stuart returned the smile with a tentative one of his own. “Well, if I wasn’t sure of it before, I am now. Why else would He have chosen to save a poor sinner?”

“You’ve a theory, I take it?” Hawkwood said drily.

The lieutenant tilted his head and threw Hawkwood a specul ative look. “Perhaps we’ve been delivered for a reason. Did it ever occur to you that you may have been put on this earth to serve a higher purpose?”

“Every God-damned day,” Hawkwood said, wondering if Stuart had expected him to give the enquiry serious consideration. “But I’ve learned to live with it. Now let’s get off this bloody beach, shall we?”

The lieutenant nodded firmly. “An excellent suggestion.”

“By the way,” Hawkwood said, tugging on the coat he’d taken from the dead seaman. “Where’s the ship? You never said.”

“I instructed Lieutenant Weekes to ride out the storm as best he could and if possible lay three miles off the point, out of sight and range of the shore battery.”

“Shore battery?” Hawkwood paused, the coat half-on and half-off his shoulder.

“Fort Mahon.” Stuart nodded towards the northern end of the line of cliffs. “At Ambleteuse, the next town up the coast. The fort guards the town and the mouth of the Selaque River. It was due to be one of Boney’s embarkation depots when he was planning his invasion back in ’05. Turned out that wasn’t such a good idea. There’s too much silt. It makes navigation a bugger. The winds along this coast don’t help either, as we found out. The garrison’s been reduced since then; reassigned to other districts. Now it’s us who’re doing the invading. There’s a kind of justice there, don’t you think?”

Hawkwood didn’t respond to that. The history of the place didn’t interest him. It wasn’t as if he was taking the Grand Tour. However, the proximity of a fort and a shore battery, irrespective of troop numbers, was relevant only in as much as it called for one thing: a rapid departure. He pulled the rest of the coat on and secured it. It was heavy and damp and a dry coat would have been far preferable, but the tarpaulin was still a welcome protection against the snappy sea breeze.

“Griffin will rendezvous later this evening and pick me up,” Stuart added.

Hawkwood gave him a sceptical look. “Your jolly boat’s wrecked. How do you propose to get out to her? Swim? I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Stuart shook his head. “Our agents will provide the necessary assistance. As fortune would have it, we’ve landed remarkably close to our intended destination. Wimereux’s not much more than a mile or so yonder.” Stuart indicated in the direction of the smoke, still visible beneath the overcast sky. “We should make our way there with all dispatch. The Frogs might not be too conscientious when it comes to maintaining seaborne surveil-lance of their coastline but they’ve an annoying tendency to send out shore patrols, so it doesn’t pay to be too conspicuous.” The lieutenant slid the wrist of his injured arm between two of the fastened buttons on his coat to form an improvised sling.

Amen to that, Hawkwood thought, though he wondered if the French would seriously expect anyone to have come ashore during the furore of the previous night’s storm and then felt infinitely foolish when it struck him that’s exactly what had happened, albeit at nature’s behest.

As if reading his mind, Stuart added, “The sooner we make contact with our friends, the better. There’s likely to be concern for our safety. They’ll be expecting word and in any case we need to send you on your way.”

The colour was gradually returning to the lieutenant’s face and there was a renewed confidence in his tone. Ten minutes ago, he’d been a shipwrecked mariner, alone and injured on a hostile coast with a third of his crew missing, presumed drowned. Now, his spirits lifted by the unexpected arrival of an ally, he appeared anxious to get back into the fray.

They left the beach behind. The dunes began to give way to an area of grassy hummocks freckled with clumps of wind-blown gorse. Further inland, the gorse merged into thickets of prickly, waist-high scrub. Beyond the scrub, Hawkwood could see pine trees. The smell of resin hung heavy in the damp morning air. Sandy, needle-strewn pathways weaved through the gaps between the thickets. They were criss-crossed with enough tracks to suggest it was an area well visited by humans and animals – mostly of a domestic kind, to judge by the amount of sheep and goat droppings that lay scattered about like fallen berries – which explained the shorn state of the turf, Hawkwood reasoned.