“Then how might I be of service, Sir Thomas?” Ball opened, clearly interested in what brought a dashing frigate to the more remote eastern Mediterranean.
“I’ve urgent instructions for Admiral Louis, sir,” Kydd said. “Do you have knowledge of his movements at all?”
“Pray do not alarm yourself, Captain. In this part of the world things seldom happen with any degree of rapidity. Have you any notion of what those instructions might contain?”
This was a senior naval officer and a civil governor who had every right to know what was happening. Kydd clutched to himself the gratifying knowledge that he was no longer a dutiful messenger carrying sealed dispatches. He was at a rank and respected enough to be a player in the wider drama, trusted with inside knowledge.
“Lord Collingwood was good enough to inform me, yes, sir. And they are …”
He briefly told of the worsening situation in the Turkish capital and the desperate plea of the ambassador to be taken off.
“I had no idea it had got to such a pass-but I can’t help you much to find Admiral Louis’s squadron. Let’s get out the charts and take a look at the rendezvous positions he’s used in the last few months.”
It was an impossibly large area to cover: from Egypt in the south to the Aegean in the north, the ancient sea held so much of significance and threat that no single place thrust itself out over the others.
“If he’s got wind of how things are deteriorating, he may wish to place himself athwart the only seaway to Constantinople. This is the strait of the Dardanelles and is damned narrow and chancy navigating. The rendezvous for that is here, at the island of Tenedos, just south of the entrance. I’d start there, if I were you.”
Standing south to avoid a blustering gregale, L’Aurore rounded Greece and headed for the northern Aegean.
It was sailing of the kind that Kydd disliked most: uncertainty, aimless searching, yet all to be done at breakneck speed with no promise of a happy ending. From daybreak to darkness, doubled lookouts, relieved every half-hour, and the same intensely fatiguing duty at night, straining for lights in the blackness.
They reached the Dardanelles and the island of Tenedos. Bare, straggling and all of five miles across, it lay just off the coast of Anatolia, providing a useful haven.
But it was empty of anything that flew a British flag.
Kydd brought his ship to anchor and retired to his cabin, tired and dismayed. A crisis was brewing and the ambassador thought it so bad he was apparently abandoning his post. The longer the delay, the worse things would get, and only L’Aurore’s precious instructions would start in train a powerful squadron to the rescue.
He had to find Louis! L’Aurore was in the far north of the Aegean. If they were not here, by definition the squadron was in the south. Or in the west off the Morea, Greece. Or even, damn it all, southwest off north Africa. He could go mad just thinking of the alternatives.
One of which was-do nothing. Stay at anchor until the squadron came upon them on its constant ranging around the eastern regions.
His nature shied from inactivity as a course of action, but what else could he do?
He threw down his pencilled notes in frustration and went on deck.
He gazed on Turkish Anatolia opposite-a dry, scrubby and nondescript coastline, looking as old as time. A light breeze blew from the land, darkling the sea in delicate feather-like fans.
He was not the only one staring at the shore: Dillon stood over the two new midshipmen, one of whom had a small telescope up.
Oh, to be as carefree as those two! Presumably this would not be their view …
On impulse he drew nearer.
Dillon was treating his duties as schoolmaster seriously. He had taken to carrying a rattan cane borrowed from the boatswain’s mate and frowning at his charges on all possible occasions, which had raised a smile from more than one onlooker.
Kydd had let him loose on harmless paperwork after a week’s apprenticeship under the ship’s clerk, Goffin, and he had proved effortlessly able, even suggesting a novel system of filing. But it would inevitably be some time before he could be trusted with confidences.
For all that, the young man was keen and hadn’t been dismayed by his small taste of action. Was he seeing the far parts of the world that he’d yearned for?
“Now mark this, Mr Willock,” Dillon said, in gruff tones. “If I inform you that the river you see to the left is the Scamander, what does this tell you?”
Kydd gave a small smile: Dillon must have sighted the ship’s charts to know that.
“Oh, it’s a long one?” one boy hazarded.
Even in the small weeks they had been at sea, the pair had bloomed, due in most part to his inspired idea to have that hardened old reprobate but first-class seaman Doud on hand as their “sea-daddy” just as, so long ago, the seamed old Bowyer had taken him under his wing.
Doud had found them both in his watch and was at first disdainful and short, but their childish desire to deserve well of L’Aurore had melted him, and now there was none on the gun-deck who would dare make sport of his lads.
To watch him teach the youngsters fine sennit or an intricately worked west-country whipping would have softened the hardest heart. His big, blunt seaman’s fingers would carefully tease the twine and rope, and the result would always be a perfection of neatness that challenged their little fingers. He would softly encourage, allow them to make their mistakes and never let impatience show.
The result had been a rising confidence, a willingness to try more and a disarming glee at what they had accomplished, which was on occasion brought before their captain for grave praise.
Before long he would allow Doud to get them aloft.
“No, no, Mr Willock,” the schoolmaster said reprovingly. He pointed the cane sternly at the bare hillocks. “Regard! That … is the Troy of Helen and Paris, Achilles and Hector, is it not?”
“It is?”
Curzon turning to listen, raised his eyebrows in surprise.
Ignoring him, Dillon glared at the hapless boy. “Scoundrel! You have not attended to your histories. In the dog-watch you’ll write out for me two hundred times:
“Oh, sir! Do I have to?”
“Which being meanly translated from the Homer is, ‘I carry two sorts of destiny towards the day of my death.’ You may choose which tongue it is you inscribe.”
With new-found respect Curzon came over, too.
“And now, Mr Clinch. You have the advantage, you know where we are. Pray tell us, then, what of this island, that we anchor in its shelter?”
“Oh, well, it has a temple of sacrifices and similar?” the lad said hopefully.
“For not knowing that this is the very island behind which the Greeks hid their ships while the Trojans hauled their wooden horse inside the city, you are under the same penalty, sir.”
Kydd grinned. “I do believe we’re not to be spared an education even as Mr Renzi has left us, Mr Curzon.”
In much improved humour he returned to his dilemma-and quite suddenly had the answer. Just as the Greeks had cut through an insoluble stalemate at Troy with a bold stroke, so would he.
“Ask Mr Kendall to step down,” he said, and put his thoughts in order.
“Sir?”
“We’ve an urgent situation as won’t allow us to wait in idleness for Admiral Louis to join us. I’ve a mind to do something about it.”
“Send out boats, sir?”
“Not at all. I intend that L’Aurore shall pierce the Dardanelles and go to the rescue of the ambassador directly on our own.”