Blown Off Course (10 page)

The village he entered was small, self-contained, with a jetty and a muddy main street that included some shops, a covered market and, at either end, that ubiquitous feature of the English town, the tavern. He
made for the first of those, given he was sharp-set and his stomach was rumbling for a hunk of cheese, some bread and perhaps an apple. The interior was, as ever, smoke-filled and warm, with each of the small rooms having a healthy fire in the grate. Being a stranger, he was examined; being in a naval boat cloak over his uniform, such examination was not excessive, that is until, in one snug arbour, he espied a group of
pipe-smoking
men, a half-dozen in number, one in the same garb as he, albeit the coat was very well worn indeed, the remainder in short blue jackets, far-from-white ducks and wearing striped stockings.

‘Good day, gentlemen,’ he said, taking a chair not too far away. ‘I trust I find you in good cheer.’

The looks he got were not actually unfriendly, they were just emanating from faces of overall ugliness that would find amiability impossible and he knew, without having to be told, that he was in the presence of a press gang, which, if it was fortuitous given his purpose, produced in his belly a slight tinge of utterly unnecessary apprehension: he was a naval officer and in no danger at all.

‘An’ good day to you, sir,’ came back a gruff reply from the lieutenant, a man with black eyes and several scars on a heavily pock-marked face. ‘Are you from these parts?’

‘Passing through,’ Pearce replied, ‘but it is good to see a blue coat.’

‘Not many pleased to see these coats,’ said another of the group, a remark that produced amused and general agreement.

‘Gentlemen, I suspect I know your purpose.’

‘Ain’t hard to guess,’ came the reply from the very furthest away; they seemed to be talking to him by turns. ‘Seeing there ain’t no ship o’ the line in the offing.’

‘I am told it a good station for the task you perform,’ Pearce advanced, adding, ‘the very
necessary
task.’

‘We takes up more’n a few,’ the lieutenant agreed.

The fellow had a voice no more refined than his inferiors, not that Pearce was surprised: the Impress Service was no place for gentility and that extended to those who officered the bands. It also seemed to be something of a republic, the whole party drinking together and no sign of any deference to hierarchy in their manner or response, and they spoke as they chose. Momentarily distracted by a serving girl and his order for food and a tankard of ale, he resumed his conversation when she left.

‘Had much recent success?’

It was as if he had thrown a bucket of cold water on what had been an already low level of bonhomie, for to a man their faces closed up. ‘Forgive me if I seem overly curious, but I have not met many men who undertake your kind of work.’

‘Never pressed?’ demanded one of the group, clearly incredulous.

Pearce never had, yet he knew it would be foolish to say so, given every naval lieutenant would have, at some time in his service, even as a midshipman, been sent out with a party from whichever ship he was serving on to find men, willing or not, to man her in time of war,
an almost common state of the nation for these last hundred years. Even those who thoroughly disagreed with the practice were obliged to undertake it.

‘I meant a real professional. It seems to me that I might learn something from your experiences, given we all know how hard it is to find volunteers.’

‘That’s not a breed we come across often,’ their officer responded. ‘Our task in these parts is to take up the boobies that think a boat to yonder bay will put them beyond our reach.’

‘Ah yes,’ Pearce acceded, ‘we sit in a favoured spot for deserters from Spithead.’

That got sage nods, and since silence followed as the men drank from their tankards, Pearce was left at a stand, one easily solved by offering them all a refill.

‘You taken a prize ship, then, has you, sir?’ asked one, the first to acknowledge his rank, so great was the power of liberality.

‘I confess to having the good fortune to have done so.’

If Pearce had expected congratulations he was sadly disappointed: these fellows looked very put out and one actually said, ‘All right for some.’ But he was grateful really, for they showed a singular lack of the common curiosity when given such a statement: in any other gathering of naval folk he would have been immediately pressed for details. Silence ensued until the drinks arrived, then Pearce raised his own tankard to toast them.

‘To you, gentlemen, enjoying the same measure of success as I have, albeit your aims are different.’

The toast was acknowledged and reciprocated, with the lieutenant, at least, showing a glint of good humour. ‘Happen most folk don’t know how dangerous our task be. I daresay, in your success, you faced a degree of shot?’

‘I did,’ Pearce replied, thinking immediately of the number of occasions when he had done just that.

‘Well, we ain’t safe just ’cause we’re on dry land, my friend. The men we seek to take up are prone to deep violence to avoid being collared.’

‘Armed an’ all, now,’ said one of his men, his pipe stem aimed at John Pearce’s face. ‘You would not guess on that, now would you?’

‘You surprise me in that, I must say,’ Pearce replied.

‘Right now we is on the trail of a fellow that near killed two men.’ Pearce could not breathe and it did not get easier. ‘Part of a trio that arrived on the beach not two mornin’s past. We lost them ourselves but they were threatened by a pair of crimps seeking to steal our bounty.’

‘They bastards got what they deserved, I say,’ came another voice, soon matched by a third.

‘One of the parties out hunting heard the pistol shots and went to see what was what.’ A coarse rumble of a laugh, which spread to the others, followed those words. ‘Found a right to-do, with blood everywhere.’

‘That’s right,’ the lieutenant said. ‘It be a grievous assault.’

‘Should have heard them bleat when they could talk.’

It was hard for Pearce to make out who was speaking, not that it much mattered.

‘Had their guns pinched and their grub and beer, so there is stealing from a person to face up to and housebreaking.’

‘The place was falling apart, didn’t take much breaking.’

The lieutenant finished the litany. ‘All they now need is to employ those pistols in highway robbery.’

‘Serious crimes,’ Pearce was obliged to respond.

‘Never fear, it will not be brought to civil justice,’ the lieutenant maintained. ‘The culprits were run sailors and we will have them back, though we might be obliged to hand over the one who did the damage. A Paddy, we were told, a giant of a sod by all accounts, so right now we are waiting for a list from Portsmouth of sailors run recent. Soon we’ll have his name, and the others. With names and a right good description we will have them by the heels in no time.’

One of his companions had an opinion. ‘Might be best to hand ’em in for a better bounty from the magistrates, and who knows, the whole three of them might be strung up, which will be a fine sight to see.’

Slowly Pearce lifted his tankard to cover his face, mouthing into it, in words that sounded as hollow as he felt in the pit of his stomach, ‘Then I wish you joy of it.’ He could not, of course leave it there, and once he had composed his face he put forward the obvious question.

‘You are sure you will catch them, Lieutenant?’

‘Once we has the names. They’re in a boat, but I
have been told it is a leaky bugger, so they won’t outrun us in our eight-oared cutter.’

‘They might take to the land.’

‘They might at that, but with their names and descriptions put out, I don’t give much for their chances. Better we catch them than the law!’

Forced to eat his food, even though his appetite had gone, and also keep up a genial conversation with men he considered beneath contempt, it was near to half an hour before he felt he could decently get up to leave. Once out of the tavern he made his way to look out at the flat, muddy tideway and stood in contemplation: what to do? Should he go in pursuit of his friends, or head back to Portsmouth? For the former, he would need a boat and several oars willing to row for however long it took, days perhaps, and he had no guarantee of catching up with them, just as he had no idea if they were still afloat. If he went back to Portsmouth and HMS
Fury
, that at least promised the possibility of an effective outcome.

He made for a knot of what he assumed to be local fishermen to bespeak a boat for Portsmouth, only to find, despite their garb, their physical build and the smoking pipes, they were women, leaving Pearce to surmise their
menfolk had either made themselves scarce because of the presence of those he had just been drinking with, or had been taken up by the navy already, leaving their spouses to keep fishing to feed their families.

Even the women seemed unwilling to chance what they saw as dangerous waters; the best they would agree to was to drop him on the Southsea shingle and at no small cost, so he found himself in the thwarts facing two creatures who, despite his high regard for the opposite sex, he could not in any way regard as attractive. Short on teeth, square-faced and ruddy, they swore, spat and pipe-smoked in such a way that no man need fear comparison for his manners, just as in the article of cleanliness the odour of fish they gave off was quite offensive. He was heartily glad to hear the keel grind onto the beach, even if they had been informative on the dangers of the part of the world in which they lived.

That left a long walk into the city, along a barren foreshore above a strand of exposed and blustery shingle, so it was very late in the day when he got into the dockyard, which meant he was heading for the mast house at a time when the lamps were being lit. The frigate was where he had left her, with just enough westerly light left to show that, if her decks were free of labour, her lower masts were in and seated. He ran aboard, making his way straight for the wardroom, where a light showed through the casements.

As luck would have it the master was there as well as the other warrants, cook included, but not the purser, all sitting round a bottle and the remains of their dinner,
the smell of which hit a man made hungry again by that walk along the strand. Time had allowed Pearce to rehearse what he was about to say and to discard any other avenue than anger: persuasion, an appeal to better nature, was unlikely to produce the result he sought and his voice was already loud as soon as he had cleared the doorway. He was received in shocked silence when he began to berate them for sending his friends into an area where they were almost certain to be caught.

‘I have just come from that very place, which is cursed with a press gang that damn near resides there. I have a good mind to turn you in.’

‘The purser were in on it an’ all,’ the carpenter protested, an exclamation that got him a glare from the master, who was, by his high expression, not a man to be easily browbeaten, while the gunner would not catch his eye. The bosun, master at arms and the one-legged cook, who had had nothing to do with the whole affair, just looked affronted.

‘I cannot see, sir, what it is you can turn us in for.’ the master protested.

‘Is it not an offence to aid and abet a man wishing to desert from the navy?’

‘Which I did not do,’ the bosun insisted, to nods from his two drinking companions.

‘We acted for all,’ was the response from the senior warrant, seeking to make them equally responsible. ‘It may be that such an act is an offence, yet you have no proof unless your men have been caught, which I take leave to doubt, for you would have told us so if they had.’

‘Are you saying you will deny granting them that aid?’

The master held up a hand to shut up those complaining who, unbeknown to Pearce, had been no part of the arrangements. ‘We most certainly will, sir, though I fail to see how we could be posed with the question, given your trio had no business to be on this ship anyway. We looked at the problem with care and did the best we could for them, even to the article of my drawing for them a map and allowing the use of our jolly boat, so that’s an end to it.’

‘Not supposed to be on the ship?’ Pearce asked, trying not to look confused.

‘Not mustered, was they?’ the gunner said, finally emboldened enough to speak. ‘They ain’t on the ship’s books, so how can they run from a barky in which they had no business bein’ aboard in the first place?’

Pearce had come here to threaten them with exposure, on the very good grounds that to do so was to ensure their silence as to the identity of his friends and it was only on hearing what had just been said he realised that the tactic was not necessary. That press gang lieutenant could ask till he was blue for the names of recent deserters, but the Pelicans would not come up. That did not get them off the hook, there was still a description out for Michael, but without a name to put to it, half its use would be lost. You could not apprehend a man merely for his size and birthplace.

‘What do you mean you did your best for them?’ he asked, really to gain a little time to think.

The response was gabbled as they tried to get their part of the story in, with three particularly claiming
ownership of the notion of the boat, which sent the carpenter puce with rage and turned the whole thing into an argument, but out of their disputes came the alternatives to what they had done and they were all worse. Well aware of what an admission of error by him would achieve, Pearce adopted a humble tone.

‘Gentlemen, I owe you an apology.’

‘You have the right of that, sir,’ the master insisted, only partly mollified and still glaring at his companions for their temerity and failure to see how his superior intelligence had so readily found the solution to an intractable problem.

‘Yet I am bound to seek to find out what will you say if you are asked about my men?’

‘Sir, we will deny any knowledge of your friends, even if, in order to lessen their own punishments, they say we helped them. Why, I would not even admit they were aboard the ship and neither, sir, would any one of us. As far as HMS
Fury
is concerned they do not exist.’

‘The purser would say the same?’

‘He might be a robbin’ little bastard, sir, but he is no fool, and by the bye, he is looking out for you.’

That got a shrug: the man could wait. These fellows had given Pearce what he had hoped for, even if it had come about in a different manner. His threat to turn them in had been posed to gain their silence; they would cling to that anyway. A warrant and description might come as far as Portsmouth, and if it did would any of these men see it and make the connection? If they did, would they tell the authorities or keep their mouths
shut for fear of involvement? If the answer could not be definite, the conclusion was likely to be that, given human nature, for not to do so was to risk punishment themselves of an unspecified nature.

‘Any road,’ the gunner, said, ‘you was gettin’ them protections.’

‘Which I have in my pocket.’

‘Then,’ the master spoke again, obviously confused, ‘where is the difficulty?’

‘The difficulty, sir, is this. I now have no idea where they are, so I would be obliged if you would draw for me the same map you penned for them.’

Not, Pearce thought, that such a thing would be of the slightest use!

Over his own dinner and a bottle of wine it soon became obvious he only had a single course of action and that was to keep an eye out at the one place he could be sure they would seek to get to, the Pelican Tavern. To go charging about the country asking for them would be to put them in jeopardy, not rescue them from arrest. He just had to trust to them to find their own way to London and into the Liberties, while he kept an eye on the sources of news in case they were apprehended. With that in mind he would return to Nerot’s Hotel and wait, making daily visits to the Pelican to see if they turned up. Then he recalled his letter to Pitt and there was some pleasure in thinking if the sod had replied and wanted his services, Pearce would have the pleasure of telling him he would damned well have to wait.

There was one useful task to perform before looking
for HMS
Fury
’s purser and departure, one he undertook the following morning, which was to see how the prize he had taken was being valued. That took him to the offices of the port admiral, who acted as vice admiral of the coast for this district and oversaw the work of the Portsmouth Prize Court. There, on enquiring how things were proceeding in the matter of the merchant vessel
Guiscard
, he was asked if it was any of his concern.

‘I am the officer who took her as prize.’

The clerk before him opened and thumbed through a ledger, making a great play, once he had found the page he was seeking, of taking his time to read what it contained, though the entry was clearly so recent he must have known what it said.

‘Says here she is claimed as the property of a religious order, a French and papist one by the look of the name.’

‘What?’

That led to another slow perusal of what was written. ‘They claim to be émigrés run from the mayhem over yonder water and that they set sail in this boat you’re claiming as a prize. Can’t be that if they own it and have come to England to escape.’

‘They don’t own it. The man who owned it was killed trying to flee the mouth of the Loire. The priests and nuns we found aboard were his passengers.’

That got him a direct look from the clerk. ‘So they was, indeed, running from the Revolution, sir?’

‘Yes, but they would have been victims of the Jacobins if myself and the men I led had not got aboard.’

‘There is a comment to say they rescued some British sailors who were adrift and a request to be granted any reward for the service.’

‘You may find this hard to accept from religious folk, but that is a lie.’

‘I would not put it past a papist to produce an untruth,’ the clerk said, gravely, ‘Nor an Anglican divine for that matter.’

‘I was adrift with men from HMS
Grampus
, it is true, but it is we who rescued them, not the other way round.’

‘You will be Mr Pearce, then,’ the clerk said, his name information once more extracted from the ledger. ‘And your representative is a Mr Davidson, right?’

‘It is.’

‘Well, you best take it up with him, for word has been sent of the counterclaim by the Order of St Eufemia that the boat be their own and if it is to be sold then any monies raised should go to support them.’

‘How do I prove it’s a prize?’

‘The only way is to go to the prize court, sir, which is overseen by a judge and let him decide. Or you might come to an amicable settlement. Mr Davidson, your prize agent will advise on the route to follow. I take it you has witnesses to back up your claim?’

About to answer in the affirmative, Pearce realised that at least three of the witnesses could not be called and when it came to the others, members of the crew of HMS
Grampus
, they could, by now, be anywhere.

‘Tell me, is there such a thing as a prize taken which is not disputed?’

‘Rare, sir, very rare.’

Outside the port admiral’s office, Pearce made straight for the London coach, having decided that, given the state of his purse, and the news he had just received, the purser of HMS
Fury
would have to wait.

The look on Ralph Barclay’s face when Devenow told him of his wife meeting and talking to John Pearce had been a picture of pure spleen, which had him volubly cursing the fact that he had ever come across the man. He was not in the presence of people who were about to point out to him he was the author of his own misfortune and neither was Barclay the type to admit such a truth to himself. He glared at Devenow as though he were the cause, but the man was accustomed to that and took no notice – to him his captain could do no wrong and that included the number of times he had been fetched up at the grating for his endemic drunkenness and flogged. Ralph Barclay was, to Devenow, a hard man, but a fair one.

‘Unpleasant as it is to hear, sir,’ Gherson had said, ‘it does not alter the real purpose of Devenow’s task, in which, I have to say he has succeeded admirably.’

That compliment had got Gherson a sour look: Devenow had no time for him because he was a slippery cove, secondly because he was too close to the man he admired, and lastly because, when it came to serving Captain Ralph Barclay, he was fresh to the duty. Devenow had served in Ralph Barclay’s ships during his previous commissions and had missed the man when his captain had been beached before the present war, which he thought madness on the part of those who
ran the service. As soon as he heard on the grapevine that his old commanding officer had been given HMS
Brilliant
he had volunteered and got aboard her fast, unaware that, on seeing him, his hero was not entirely pleased.

The reason was straightforward enough: Devenow was a drunk and bully, inclined to browbeat those weaker than he into passing to him their ration of grog, an article he would hoard until he could drink himself near to insensible, at which point, whoever in authority was unfortunate enough to come across him, found they had a right handful to deal with, given Devenow was a real hard bargain and almost always the toughest member of the crew. For all his reservations, Ralph Barclay had found Devenow to be as useful as he was pestilential, and in action at Toulon the man could have been said to have come close to saving his life, an act for which he had been rated as a servant, though he was singularly ill-equipped for that role.

‘We have,’ Gherson had continued, ‘the name of the attorney to whom she went, and if that produces the evidence we asked for, then it indicates clearly she has lodged the original papers there.’