South of Aden

Chapter One: Sealed Orders

The heat in Suez that autumn had a weight to it, like a hand pressed flat against the back of the neck, and Captain John Moresby had learned in twenty-two years of service that a man could not argue with weather any more than he could argue with a commodore.

He stood in the outer office of the naval agent's house on the harbour front with his hat under his arm and his shirt sticking to his spine, watching a fly walk across a map of the Red Sea that had been pinned to the wall so long the paper had gone the colour of weak tea. The southern portion of the map was almost blank. There were the Dahlak islands, sketched with the confidence of a man guessing, and there was the Hanish group, drawn smaller than they were, and between them a great deal of white space in which some earlier hand had written, in ink now faded to brown, *reefs reported*.

Reported. Not charted. Not sounded. Reported, the way a rumour is reported, by men who had seen something in the dark and lived long enough to mention it in a tavern.

"He'll see you now," said the clerk.

Commodore Lucius Markham sat behind a desk of Indian teak with a punkah cloth swinging overhead, pulled by a boy in the corridor who could not be seen but whose bare heel occasionally squeaked on the tiles. Markham was sixty, dry as a biscuit, and had the particular pallor of a man who had spent thirty years in hot climates and resented every hour of it.

"Moresby." He did not stand. "Sit down. You know why you're here."

"I believe so, sir."

"I doubt it, but sit anyway." Markham slid a canvas packet across the desk. It was sealed with three blobs of red wax and tied with tape. "The Admiralty wants a cable to India. Not next year — they want it yesterday, and they've discovered, as governments do, that they have no idea what lies on the bottom of the sea between Suez and Aden. There is a chain of volcanic islets in the southern part of the strait. Nobody has charted them properly. Nobody has sounded the channels. If the cable is to be laid, the Board must know where the bottom is firm and where it is coral and where it drops away into nothing. That is your task. Precise soundings, triangulated positions, a fair chart in duplicate."

"Yes, sir."

"Ninety days."

Moresby let a beat pass. "Ninety days from Suez, sir, or from Aden?"

"From the day you clear the Suez roads. Ninety days, and I want the brig back in Aden with her work done and no nonsense." Markham's eyes came up, and there was something almost kindly in them, which was worse than anger. "You understand this is not a generous allocation."

"It is not, sir."

"It is not, and I did not choose it. I chose you, however, and I want you to understand exactly what that cost me." The commodore laced his fingers. "Your name came up at the Board and a man laughed. Not maliciously. He simply laughed and said, *Moresby? The unlucky one?* Scurvy in the *Wren* in 'fifty-eight. Fire in the *Tamar* in 'sixty. Two survey cruises begun and neither finished."

"The scurvy was bad lime juice, sir. Contract stores. I reported it."

"You did. Nobody read it. And the fire?"

Moresby's jaw moved. "A lamp in the sail room. My negligence, in the sense that everything aboard is my negligence."

Markham nodded slowly. "That is the correct answer, and it is why I put your name forward. But hear me. There will not be a third chance. If you come back to me with a half-finished chart and a good excuse, you will finish your service in a victualling yard counting barrels of salt pork, and you will be forty-four years old and that will be your life." He pushed the packet an inch further. "Do you want it?"

"I want it, sir."

"Then take it, and take my advice with it, free of charge. Survey the islets. Sound the channels. Do not be interesting. The Admiralty does not reward interesting. It rewards accurate."

Moresby took the packet. Its weight surprised him — there were enclosures, sailing instructions, a bundle of blank survey forms. "May I ask about the cartographer, sir?"

"Mr Clive Stainton. Twenty-six, best hand on paper the Hydrographic Office has produced in five years, and nephew to Sir Edward Stainton who sits on the Board." Markham's mouth thinned. "You will find him able. You may find him ambitious. That is not a fault in a young man. It is only a fault in a young man on a small ship."

"And the surgeon?"

Markham sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Ah. Yes. Mrs Caroline Halkett."

"A woman, sir."

"A widow. Her husband held the post in the *Dovetail* until a fever took him at Massawa eighteen months ago. She had been assisting him for four years, and when he died she simply — continued. Dressed wounds, set bones, took off a stoker's foot in the *Cormorant* and the man walked on a peg within the month." He shrugged. "I had two candidates for the berth. One was a drunk. The other had never seen the tropics and had opinions about bleeding. She is better than both and I have not the time to be squeamish. But John —" it was the first time he had used the name — "she is on that ship as a surgeon and nothing else. No passengers. No private undertakings. If I hear she is collecting butterflies for some society in Kensington on Her Majesty's time, the berth ends and so does your goodwill with me. Is that plain?"

"Perfectly, sir."

"Good." Markham stood at last, and offered his hand, and his grip was dry and hard. "Ninety days, Moresby. Do the dull thing brilliantly."

*

The brig *Dovetail* lay at the outer mole with her yards squared and her paint blistering, two hundred and ten tons of Admiralty survey vessel with a bluff bow and a hull that had been doubled at Portsmouth against coral. She was not a beautiful ship. She was, Moresby thought, coming down the mole steps with the packet under his arm, exactly the sort of ship they gave a man they were not quite finished with.

Forty-two souls, all told, including himself.

At the head of the gangway stood the first mate, and he did not smile, because in three years Moresby had never seen Rufus Pallant smile with anything but the lower half of his face.

"Sir."

"Mr Pallant." Moresby handed him the packet to carry, an old courtesy between them. "We're for the south. Islets between the Dahlak and the Hanish. Soundings and triangulation, ninety days."

He had expected nothing. Pallant was a man built out of silences; forty-eight years old, grey at the temples, hands like knotted rope, a face that gave away no more than a shut door. He had been at sea since he was eleven and had the whole Red Sea in his head, every current and every rotten anchorage, and he never explained how.

But this time something happened in Pallant's face. It was not much. It was a stillness that went one degree too deep, a fractional pause with the packet half-taken, as though a hand had closed on the back of his collar.

"Between the Dahlak and the Hanish," he repeated.

"You know the water."

"I know it, sir." He took the packet. "Bad water."

"Bad how?"

"Shoal. Foul bottom. And it dies on you." Pallant looked out past the mole at the flat sheet of the Gulf. "Wind dies. Sea goes like glass. A ship can sit in that for a fortnight and never move a cable's length."

"Then we'll be glad we've a boat's crew and long oars," said Moresby, more cheerfully than he felt. "Get the water casks topped to the last inch, Mr Pallant. Every cask, and two spare. If we're becalmed I'd sooner be bored than thirsty."

"Aye, sir." Pallant went, and Moresby watched him go and thought: *there is something there.* But there was always something there with Pallant, and a captain who went digging in his mate's past on the first day of a commission was a fool.

He went below.

The great cabin of the *Dovetail* was nine feet by twelve, and two-thirds of it had already been taken over by paper. Sheets of it, pinned to a drawing board, weighted with lead sinkers, and behind the board a young man in shirtsleeves with a pencil behind each ear.

"Captain Moresby." Clive Stainton put down his dividers and stood. He was tall, fair, well made, with the sort of open handsome face that photographs well and gives nothing away. "Forgive the invasion. I've been laying off the traverse from the Dahlak."

"Before we have any observations to lay off?"

"Before, so that when the observations come I need only put them in." Stainton smiled. "Ninety days, sir. I mean to spend all ninety of them working and none of them ruling lines."

It was, Moresby had to admit, the right answer. "Show me."

The boy — twenty-six was a boy to him — turned the board, and Moresby's irritation dissolved into something like awe. He had seen a great deal of naval draughtsmanship in his life, most of it competent and some of it good. This was neither. This was beautiful. The coastline of the Dahlak group ran across the sheet in a line so clean and so alive that you could feel the water on the other side of it, and the soundings were lettered in a hand as fine as engraving.

"That's very good work, Mr Stainton."

"Thank you, sir."

"How much of it is invention?"

A flicker. Then, easily: "About a third. It will be corrected or scraped out, whichever the sextant says." Stainton took a pencil from behind his ear and turned it over in his fingers. "May I speak candidly, sir?"

"I'd prefer it."

"This chart is going to be the standard reference for the southern Red Sea for the next fifty years. Whoever's name is on it will be — remembered. Not celebrated. Remembered. There's a difference and I'd rather have the second." He met Moresby's eye. "I intend to work myself half to death for you. I only ask that the work be allowed to be excellent, even when excellent is slower."

"Ninety days, Mr Stainton."

"Ninety days is the Commodore's number, sir. It isn't the sea's."

And there it was, Moresby thought — perfectly reasonable, perfectly said, and containing somewhere inside it the seed of every disagreement they would have.

"We'll manage both," he said. "Where's my aide?"

"On deck being shouted at by the boatswain, I believe."

Midshipman Arthur Pawley was nineteen, narrow as a marlinspike, with ink on his fingers and a cowlick that no amount of water would defeat. He had come out of the *Britannia* eighteen months ago with high marks in mathematics and no idea at all how to speak to a seaman, and he was learning that second thing painfully, in public, every day.

At this moment he was learning it from Solomon Chalk.

The boatswain was fifty, thick through the chest, with a face burnt to the colour of a saddle and an eye that had gone milky on the left from a burst block twelve years before. He was the best seaman in the ship and knew it, and he had the deep religious streak that some sailors get, the kind that reads signs in weather.

"— and when I says *belay*, Mr Pawley, sir, I don't mean take a turn and think about it. Beg pardon, sir." This last to Moresby, with a knuckle to the forehead and no discernible loss of dignity.

"Carry on, Chalk." Moresby paused. "Are the boats sound?"

"Both cutters sound, sir. Jolly boat wants a plank amidships and Mr Penny's about it now."

Arthur Penny, the carpenter, was on his knees in the waist with a spokeshave and a mouth full of copper tacks, and he took the tacks out to say, "Two days, sir, and she'll be better than she was." He was thirty-five, bald early, and had the particular calm of men whose work is either right or wrong with nothing in between. In two previous commissions Moresby had never heard him raise his voice.

He stood at the rail a while and watched the water casks come aboard, and the pigs of ballast, and the crates of instruments packed in straw, and last of all a great many small wooden boxes with brass hinges, which the surgeon received herself at the head of the gangway and had carried below with her own hands.

Moresby counted them without meaning to. Eleven.

A surgeon's chest is one chest. Bandage rolls are another. Splints and a bone saw and a case of instruments and a spirit lamp and a scale — call it four, generously five.

Eleven.

He said nothing. That, he would think about later, in the middle of a black night on a beach of volcanic sand, was the first decision of the voyage: to see a thing and let it pass, because it was easier, because he liked the woman's brisk competence, because Markham's warning had been the warning of a man in a cool office and Moresby was already sweating and already sailing.

They warped out of Suez on the fourth of October, 1862, with a following wind and the sun going down red as a furnace door behind the Egyptian hills.

In his journal that night, Midshipman Pawley wrote:

*Sailed at 6. Wind N by W, fresh. Captain in good spirits. Mr Pallant is not, but I have never seen him otherwise, and Chalk says he was born in a fog off the Nore and has been looking for the way out ever since. Ninety days. It seems a great deal of time.*