A King's Cutter Read Free Page A

helm!’ he called.
    Kestrel
came up into the wind, her mainsail thundering. Drinkwater felt her tremble when the jib flogged, vibrating the bowsprit. Then she spun as the wind filled the backed headsails,thrusting her round.
    â€˜Heads’l sheets!’
    The jib and staysail cracked until tamed by the seamen sweating tight the lee sheets.
    â€˜Steadeeee . . . steer full and bye.’
    â€˜Full an’ bye, sir.’ The two helmsmen leaned on the big tiller as
Kestrel
drove on, the luff of her mainsail just trembling.
    â€˜How’s her head?’
    â€˜Sou’ by west, sir.’
    That was south by east true, allowing two points for westerly variation. ‘Very well, make it so.’
    â€˜Sou’ by west it is, sir.’
    The ebb ran fair down the coast here and the westing they had made beating offshore ought to put them up-tide and to windward of the landing place by the time they reached it, leaving them room to make the location even if the wind backed. Or so Drinkwater hoped, otherwise his commission would be as remote as ever.
    Towards midnight the wind did back and eased a little. The reefs were shaken out and
Kestrel
drove southwards, her larboard rail awash. Drinkwater was tired now. He had been on deck for nine hours and Griffiths did not seem anxious to relieve him.
    Kestrel
was thrashing in for the shore. Drinkwater could sense rather than see the land somewhere in the darkness ahead. It must be very near low water now. Drinkwater bit his lip with mounting concern. With a backing wind they would get some lee from the cliffs that rose sheer between Le Tréport and Dieppe and it would be this that gave them the first inkling of their proximity. That and the smell perhaps.
    In the darkness and at this speed
Kestrel
could be in among the breakers before there was time to go about. Anxiously he strode forward to hail the lookout at the crosstrees. ‘Who’s aloft?’
    â€˜Tregembo, zur.’ The Cornishman’s burr was reassuring. Tregembo had turned up like a bad penny, one of the draft of six men from the Nore guardship that had completed
Kestrel
’s complement. Drinkwater had known Tregembo on the frigate
Cyclops
where the man had been committed for smuggling. He was still serving out the sentence of a court that had hanged his father for offering revenue officers armed resistance. To mitigate the widow’s grief her son was drafted into the navy. That he had appeared on the deck of
Kestrel
was another link in the chain of coincidences that Drinkwater found difficult to dismiss as merely random.
    â€˜Keep a damned good lookout, Tregembo!’
    â€˜Aye, aye, zur.’
    Drinkwater went aft and luffed the cutter while a cast of the lead was taken. ‘By the mark, five.’
Kestrel
filled and drove on. There was a tension on deck now and Drinkwater felt himself the centre of it. Jessup hovered solicitously close. Why the devil did Griffiths not come on deck? Five fathoms was shoal water, but it was shoal water hereabouts for miles. They might be anywhere off the Somme estuary. He suppressed a surge of panic and made up his mind. He would let her run for a mile or two and sound again.
    â€˜Breakers, zur! Fine on the lee bow!’
    Drinkwater rushed forward and leapt into the sagging larboard shrouds. He stared ahead and could see nothing. Then he saw them, a patch of greyness, lighter than the surrounding sea. His heart beat violently as he cudgelled his memory. Then he had it, Les Ridins du Tréport, an isolated patch with little water over it at this state of the tide. He was beginning to see the logic of a landfall at low water. He made a minor adjustment to the course, judging the east-going stream already away close in with the coast. They had about three miles to go.
    â€˜Pass word for the captain.’ He kept the relief from his voice.
    The seas diminished a mile and a half offshore and almost immediately they could see the