An Ill Wind (13 page)

‘There are seven cabins,’ Barclay had informed him. ‘You can avoid the accommodation of the premier, his second lieutenant and the master, which are on the
larboard side. There are four smaller cabins to starboard and Pearce will not be gifted anything approaching the best. The one you want will likely be that nearest to the quarter gallery that serves as the wardroom privy. I made sure Daws was aware of the poison he was carrying and I know that was a message he passed on to his officers. Pearce is lucky not to be bedded in the privy itself, but he will be close to the stink of the place, which serves him well.’

The space was tiny, painted white and barely big enough to sling the cot that filled it. The lantern, unshaded, revealed Pearce’s sea chest, with his initials upon it, parked beneath. Lifting the lid, the first thing Gherson saw was the oilskin pouch and that went straight into his coat pocket. Rummaging around, all he could discover were spare shirts and stockings, plus an old battered tin which, when he prised it open, revealed compacted, dry earth, a bit of which fell to the floor and had to be hurriedly brushed into the planking.

Satisfied he might have what he was looking for, Gherson shaded the lantern again and made his way back out on to the main deck, nodding to Devenow to tell him that he could go and indulge himself with the rest of the crew. Then it was back to Ralph Barclay to open the pouch and see what it contained. The folded but unsealed order releasing the Pelicans, signed by Parker, was of interest, causing Barclay to curse both the captain of the fleet and the man he served.

It was also a strong indication that, despite Hood
confirming the verdict of his court martial, he harboured doubts about it, which made Barclay wonder what that might portend, though he was quick to dismiss any worry. The trio named were lowly seamen so any threat they might present would be minimal. The response was different when he examined the letter.

‘The Right Honourable William Pitt MP,’ Barclay said, in a hushed tone, when he examined the superscription. Then he turned it over to look at the seal, catching his breath as he examined it. ‘Damn me, that’s Hood’s seal.’

‘May I?’ Gherson asked, holding out a hand, taking the letter and examining it when Barclay did as he was bid. ‘I take it you would wish to know the contents, sir?’

That got Gherson a hard look. ‘Am I right in thinking you can open this?’

‘Not only open it, but reseal it so no one would know it has been tampered with.’

‘I am forced to ask what it was you did to earn a crust prior to joining the navy, Gherson?’

That got a terse response. ‘I think you of all people, sir, know I did not join, I was pressed.’

‘That is all water under the bridge,’ Barclay spat, before laughing as he saw the horrified look on Gherson’s face. ‘An inadvertent pun but, by the devil, a good one.’

‘Let me take this to my berth.’

‘No. Whatever you do must be done in my presence.’

‘You do not trust me, sir?’

‘Nonsense,’ Barclay lied, ‘of course I do, but I want to see how it is done.’

Unconvinced, Gherson gave him back the letter and exited, to return in a few minutes carrying a knife so thin the blade appeared too flexible to wound. He also had a shaker of wig powder and a square of cloth.

‘Where did you get those?’

‘In Toulon, sir, where else? Please be so good as to fetch over that lantern and open the door.’

That done, Gherson lifted a cushion off the stern locker and smoothed the cloth over the bare wood, then he laid the letter on that and very carefully sprinkled a little powder around the seal. He indicated to Barclay to put the lantern down, heating his thin knife blade over the tallow flame, turning it this way and that until it glowed, then took it off the flame and allowed it to cool.

‘It must be hot, but not so that it will burn the paper on which the letter is written, which is fortunately of a very high quality.’

‘That makes a difference?’

‘Very much so, sir, given this would be much more difficult with paper of poor quality. That marks more readily.’

Kneeling down, Gherson spread his index finger and thumb and pressed down on the paper, peering close to slip the hot blade under the very edge of the seal, flattening it, then making a gentle sawing motion as he worked the wax loose.

‘The powder takes the heat not the paper, so there is no burn mark.’

Barclay reached for the now open letter, only to have Gherson knock his hand away. ‘You must wait till the wax has completely cooled.’

Ralph Barclay had to stop himself from swiping him with his one good hand: no one treated him with such contempt, but he was too curious about the contents of the letter to do so. Gherson closed the lantern door and, once he had unfolded the letter, he held it over the writing so that both Barclay and he could easily read it.

‘By damn, he’s trying to ditch Hotham, the old fraud.’

‘I see no mention of you, sir, and that I think is more important.’

‘Are you sure this was all you could find?’

‘Yes,’ Gherson snapped.

‘Do not get above yourself, Gherson, I won’t stand for it.’

‘What do you want to do with this?’

‘Can you reseal it?’

‘Of course.’

Ralph Barclay had to restrain himself again: no one talked to him in such a manner, damn near to sneering, regardless of their nefarious skills.

‘Then it needs to be copied, resealed and returned to Pearce’s sea chest.’

‘What?’

‘Which, Gherson, means you best get about it.’

He had to take it back to his berth, carefully refolded and hidden inside his coat. There he quickly copied what Hood had written and took it back to Barclay’s cabin, where, blowing off what powder remained, he reheated his knife and ran it over the exposed back of the seal, taking care to keep his other hand underneath the wax to ensure it did not drip. The act of resealing was carried out quickly, pressure applied to allow the melted wax to congeal. Having waited to make sure it was solid, Gherson slipped it back into the oilskin pouch.

‘You will have to aid me, sir.’

‘What!’ Barclay exclaimed, lifting his head from Gherson’s fair copy.

‘Devenow went to join his kind. If he is not astride some whore he will be in drink and I would not trust him in that state to keep watch for me.’

‘No, Gherson, I cannot be seen to be complicit. This is a task you must carry out alone.’

‘What if I were to suggest, sir, that it need not be returned?’

‘You’re not shy are you, man?’

‘No, sir, I am at risk, while you are not.’

‘In a good cause, Gherson,’ Barclay replied, trying and failing to suppress a yawn. ‘Best, I think, you do what must be done quickly.’

The mutual eye contact was far from friendly, but both men knew that there was little choice in the matter.

‘After all,’ Barclay added, ‘we would not want you caught in the wardroom once our stalwarts come back from their revels. It is not unknown for officers in drink to be free with their fists.’

Sat anxiously, with the book she had been trying to read in her lap, Emily Barclay prayed that Lutyens would leave his part of their shared berth, while also alternating between determination and apprehension. There was also the problem of justifying her intention, rationalised on the grounds that, with difficult decisions to make regarding her own future, she needed to know what Pearce’s words portended for the man to whom she was married. Every time she tried to read, the words ‘perjury’ and ‘court martial’ played on her mind and it was with a panicked reaction she got the book up to her nose as the screen twitched before being hauled back.

‘I must walk the deck and see what is going on,’ Lutyens said.

‘Hardly necessary, Heinrich,’ Emily replied automatically, before cursing herself. ‘You can hear enough to guess.’

‘A picture paints a thousand words.’

‘The picture of which you speak requires only one – disgraceful.’

That got her a wan smile. ‘We must not be too quick to judge.’

Then he was gone and she strained to hear his receding footsteps before pulling back the curtain once
more to ensure he had truly departed. Seeing no one, she slipped quickly into the other berth, kneeling before the chest in which he kept his instruments, many secured to the lid of his chest. The case with the bone saws she recognised immediately, having seen it too many times since her first experience of helping him treat the wounded.

The papers were not hidden, they lay instead on top, and a quick perusal of the first sheets told her precisely what they contained, though her heart skipped a beat to read the words, written in a fine sloping hand, which opened her husband’s trial. Leafing through she came to the parts at which she had been present, the words, or to be more accurate the lies, familiar from memory. There was no time to read them all and no need: she knew what they were and that sufficed.

When Lutyens returned, looking in to say he had done so, she was still holding the book, but reading it, difficult before, had become impossible now.

With a great deal of shipping in Gibraltar, finding a quiet corner to talk was not easy, that made doubly difficult by the obvious desire of his trio of friends to visit the more interesting fleshpots. Rufus in particular, having dipped his wick in Leghorn, was afire to compare where they were now with what he had experienced there, and it took damn near an order from John Pearce to get them to allow him the time he thought he needed.

‘Sure,’ Michael O’Hagan said, ‘the navy all comes down to where you are serving and who you are under, John-boy.’ Then he grinned. ‘And I’d add to that the number of heathens you have to mess with.’

‘Dogs lead a better life,’ said Charlie, leaving Rufus, who had been nodding at Michael’s opinion, half shaking his head at the same time.

‘Like the one you led when we met?’ asked Pearce.

‘I was my own master, John,’ Charlie insisted, before looking around, he being sat on the very edge of the booth they were occupying, to ensure he had not been overheard.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ Michael swore, crossing himself out of habit. ‘You as a master of anything makes a soul shudder.’

Pearce looked at him hard. ‘You were damn near starving, Charlie, and I recall your tankard was empty and I had to fill it.’

‘I had my mates,’ he replied, suddenly looking wistful. ‘Old Abel, God rest his soul, was a good friend, and Ben.’

‘I wonder whether he is still in the land of the living,’ said Rufus, his gaze on John Pearce.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Rufus. There was nothing I could do that would not get us all killed.’

That had them drinking silently and thinking about Ben Walker, who, for reasons of his own, had declined to leave HMS
Brilliant
and the command of Ralph Barclay, off the coast of Brittany, when given the chance. Pearce knew that to be a better vision of him than the last time he had clapped eyes on him, toiling as an emaciated slave, burdened by grain sacks and being whipped to move faster by a pitiless overseer on the Barbary shore. Ben had recognised John Pearce, blue coat and all, which had led to a confrontation with the whip-bearing overseer, and a noisy one at that, only to find himself surrounded by the quick arrival of armed men.

Forced to go back aboard ship, as much by his own superiors as any threat of weaponry, Pearce had set out to mount a rescue, thwarted by the man who commanded the ship on which he was serving. The fact that such an intervention was fitting did not make the memory of having to leave Ben to his fate any more palatable. Looking over the taffrail at Tunis sinking into the horizon had been hard, reckoning, as he did, that he was leaving a friend to die.

‘Can’t understand why he didn’t want to come with us,’ Charlie said, shaking his head. ‘You had words with him, John – do you know?’

‘I think he’d found a place, Charlie, and maybe some peace. He never told you why he was in the Liberties, did he, what he was running from? The rest of you were open, he was not.’

It was Rufus who articulated the agreement. ‘No, he kept that to hisself: close was Ben.’

‘Then I reckon it was something he could not happily live with,’ Pearce responded. ‘Somehow he saw the navy as a break with whatever it was.’

‘Bad, then?’ Rufus asked.

‘We’ll never know, will we?’

At that moment, hundreds of miles to the east, Ben Walker, well fed and healthy, was continuing in his efforts to learn Arabic, without which he could not go on to be instructed in the Mussulman’s holy book, the Koran. His teacher, appointed by the Bey of Tunis in an
act of caprice that hinted at salvation, was a grey beard with soft brown eyes that mirrored a gentle manner. To Ben it was barely believable: by reputation the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and the Bey was certainly that, were the stuff of nightmares, inclined to sell into concubinage any women they captured; men were either killed or made slaves.

Ben had enjoyed a brief moment of hope when he espied John Pearce, only to see that disappear as the local power forced him to retreat, the whole played out on his defenceless back by the man who whipped him doubly hard for his disobedience. He had then been dragged off by force, this pointing to only one fate, and Ben had no idea what had saved him from summary execution. He only knew that, being interrogated by one of the Bey’s courtiers, for the first time since he killed the girl he deeply loved and the man who had seduced her, he had told another human the story and allowed the tears he should have shed years ago to flow.

Instead of the beheading he anticipated – no doubt after a decent bout of cruel torture for both his crime and his Christianity – he had been treated with gentility: first bathed and allowed new clothes, then taken to the comfortable cell he still occupied, fed so that from being a near skeleton he had been brought back to full, rude health. The price of his deliverance was this instruction; he had no idea of the why and wherefores, he only knew that life was better than
death and that he had gratitude for whatever God of whatever religion had intervened to let him live.

Alone at night he often wondered about the men with whom he had been pressed from the Pelican Tavern – given his solitary life, more than they thought about him – men he had come to know through shared misfortune, and even more closely through shared adventure. When they had left to go back to England he had declined to join them, knowing he would be returning to a life he had not enjoyed one bit, a life where his past deeds weighed heavily on his conscience.

Often he envisaged that separation, those last farewell gestures from the deck of the merchantman they were taking home, a quartet of figures in their ducks and short jackets. Given that image he had struggled with another. What in the name of eternity had John Pearce been doing in an officer’s blue coat and behaving as though he was entitled to the wearing of it? Had the others been with him, Charlie, Rufus and that giant O’Hagan? The thing he thought about most, though, was obvious: his own eventual fate.

For what had he been spared, perhaps so he would make a more convincing victim? Those were the thoughts of the dark nights: during the day, as he was allowed to wander, with an escort, the courtyards and hallways of the Bey’s palace, allowed to dip his finger in the many cool fountains, and even occasionally be taken outside the palace walls and into the bazaar,
Ben Walker wondered if he had been blessed in some way. But more than that he wondered if he had been forgiven.

‘To Ben and Abel, may God bless and keep them,’ said Michael, lifting his tankard and, as the others joined with him, emptying it in honour of their dead comrades.

That made John Pearce more reflective than the others: Abel Scrivens, crushed between barrels in the deep hold of HMS
Brilliant
, had died in place of him, the real target of the malice of Martin Dent. Odd that he thought of the boy in a kindly way now; how strange life was. So many things had been resolved when they had all been stranded on the Breton shore, not least that Martin had behaved with enough bravery and application to impress him, even more so when the boy asked him for forgiveness. He knew, for a fact, that he had come into his own then, had shown that he could think clearly in a crisis, lead and, more importantly, command both loyalty and obedience; that was until he thought of Toby Burns, who had not only proved to be lily-livered, but deeply treacherous to boot. The mention of his name darkened Michael’s demeanour.

‘Sure,’ he growled, ‘I am not a man to wish ill on anybody, but if the good Lord could see fit to take off that boy’s head with a cannonball I would be content.’

‘A lying little shite that Toby Burns, Michael,’ added Charlie.

‘Now don’t you go givin’ shite a bad name.’

‘Refills,’ said Pearce.

Toby Burns was on deck, sharing the watch with Mr Beddows, trying to look as martial as possible, with HMS
Britannia
ploughing her way towards Corsica and more battle. The bandage he had been required to abandon, but he had taken to combing his hair forward over his brow when not wearing his hat, and if those he messed with wondered if there was a scar to show, they were too polite to ask: after all, their fellow midshipman was much cosseted by Admiral Hotham and no one wanted to offend him.

In a ship of few secrets – there was no ship in the fleet adept at keeping those – the proposed destination towards which they were heading was common knowledge. The town at the base of the Bay of San Fiorenzo was to be the first place on the island that Lord Hood intended to subdue. It was even known how many arguments he had undertaken with his army generals, who were adverse to any kind of action until they had more troops to command, acquiescing in the attack only when not to do so would smack of being shy.

Naturally, being bullocks, they had to be got ashore before they could fight anyone. Toby Burns had learned that he, under the command of Beddows,
had been given a place on the first draft of boats that would land them on the hostile shore. At dinner, after orders had been issued, those others who would have the same sort of duty had been eager to talk of how quickly they, too, could get ashore and take part in the action. They at least were honest if foolish, in contrast to the hypocritical senior of the mids’ berth, who would be remaining aboard: he had somehow escaped the proposed landing.

‘Burns, you of all people must be afire to add more lustre to your reputation. I am envious in the extreme.’

Looking at a man near thirty years of age, a shallow thinker whom he knew would never make lieutenant, the fellow having already failed the examination twice, he wondered on how unfair life was, while at the same time enthusiastically acceding to the expressed sentiment. The older fellow only kept his place as a mid so he could be fed and watered at the king’s expense: with no pay and no private means he would have been reduced to beggary ashore. His seniority in the berth came from his years not his ability. Why was it that such a useless creature was spared risk when he was so regularly exposed?

Toasting the coming attack with wine that was almost undrinkable, he thought back to the last time he had taken a boat into a proposed attack. God, he hoped the man who would command him off that round tower was cleverer than the old bugger who had run them aground
in Brittany: he had nearly drowned in a maelstrom of rocks and spume-filled water for want of the man’s ability to steer the right course, and then he had been stranded with that swine Pearce and the others, who had acted as if he should solve their problem. He would have done if left to his own devices, surrender being better than stupid sacrifice, but no, clever clogs Pearce had had them all risking their necks in the most stupid fashion and for, to his mind, a dubious purpose.

‘By God, Burns,’ the senior cried from the top of the table, his face flushed from over-consumption, his voice laced with drunken hyperbole. ‘You have about you the face of wrath itself. God help Johnny Crapaud when he feels your steel.’

‘Hear him, hear him,’ called the rest of the berth, all red-faced, all taken with drink, as they slammed their pewter mugs on the table in support of the senior.

‘The question still stands, friends. What are you going to do?’

Greeted with shrugs, Pearce carried on, enumerating the thoughts on which he had already ruminated, Michael, surprisingly, looking less than pleased at the prospect of going back to his shovel.

‘You don’t get it, John-boy, it’s a short life, and as sure as there is a God in heaven, it is a hard one. The men who employ we Irish don’t care much if we live or die, and enough do when a trench falls in or a shored-up wall of earth gives way.’

‘The pay is good,’ Rufus said, with a melancholy air: as an indentured apprentice he had not seen much in the way of that commodity.

‘It needs to be, Rufus,’ Michael replied, ‘for the work is endless. You would not know near despair till you have dug out a lake for some great lord, with teeming rain on your back, or sunk a shaft for a new mine, up to your knees in water.’

‘You drank every penny you earned,’ chuckled Charlie.

‘With what I was doing by day, drink by night was what kept me going. I won’t say sailing a ship is easy, nor will I say it is not without risk, but by Jesus it has the legs on ditch digging.’

‘Do you want to go back to the Liberties, Charlie?’

‘You know I don’t, John, just as you know I might not have a choice.’

‘You could go back to Lichfield, Rufus, you would surely be safe there.’

Looking at Pearce, Rufus shook his head. ‘What do you think my master would have done when I ran? He will have demanded back from my pa what he paid to indenture me. The only thing I would get back in Lichfield is the back of his hand, and more’n once before bein’ tied once more to a bench.’

‘Warrants might have expired,’ Charlie said, but not with a look of any hope.

‘And you, John-boy, what are you going to do?’

‘You mean after I see Barclay locked up in the Fleet, Michael?’ He looked at them all in turn. ‘Put
your hands on the table, palms up.’

Slowly they obliged, showing skin near black, so ingrained was it with the tar from rope work. There was no need to say what he was implying but he did so anyway.

‘Even if you can dodge the tipstaffs, you’ll be had up by every crimp in creation and the first thing they will do is ask to see those same hands.’ Then he looked at their heads. ‘Pigtails don’t help much either. You’ll be tagged as sailors right off, and unless I can get you protections, you’ll be back aboard a king’s ship in days, and it’s not unknown for them to be ripped up in your face.’

‘There will be broken bones and blood spilt, John-boy, if a body tries that.’

‘Yours, Michael. The crimps will take one look at the size of you and resort to clubs; Charlie and Rufus they will just nab by force of numbers.’

That induced another bout of silence: what John Pearce was saying was true. To press them would be as illegal as the first and second times it had happened, but once you were on board a ship and out of sight of land that counted for little.