By the Mast Divided (7 page)

He had seen faces like that before, and much worse in the Bridewell. Recollection of that stinking pit of a prison sent a deep shudder though his already chilled frame. There was little room in this boat but that could not compare with the need to share a barred basement cell, thirty feet square, with over a hundred souls, and the stink of human effluvia that created. Old men and women, some of quality, others the dross of the streets, lay cheek by jowl with bow-legged, ragged and skeletal young boys and girls whose only crime had been to steal food in an attempt to ward off starvation. Some were those close to death when they arrived, and others he had watched as they struggled to survive in the cold, damp and disease ridden, rat infested hell-hole.

Worse were those wedded to crime, the dregs of humanity who made it necessary for he and his father to take turns in sleeping, if a
half-comatose
state on a filthy stone-flagged floor, with only a minimum of straw – home to a whole race of biting insects – could be called that. Of both sexes, they would rob whoever they could of whatever little they had, even down to the clothes on their back if they could be removed with enough guile. Set up supposedly to meet the needs of justice, the Bridewell was a true den of iniquity with the venal warders the top of the pile of human ordure, men who made sure that anything of value – a watch, a ring, a good shirt or handkerchief – went first to them as payment for some small act of partiality. He recalled how hard he had run that day, how his mind had worked to provide the right answers, ones that would keep him free from a return to that purgatory, only to
find that fate in the end had played a cruel trick by delivering him into another.

Adverse luck had caused him to choose the Pelican, there was no point in looking for a deeper meaning, and there was some comfort in the fact that the men who had chased him all of the previous day would be hard put now to find him. But would anyone else in a world that seemed to have turned against him? As he ran through again and again the events of the last four years, of the highs and lows he had enjoyed, he had to ask himself again if anything his father had done in the time had been worthwhile.

‘What does it matter now?’ Pearce said out loud, in a voice so rasping that it told him he was in need of a drink of water.

‘I would be after saying, friend, that talking to yourself would be the first sign of madness, if what we were about was not mad enough itself. What in Christ’s name am I doing in a boat?’

The voice from the comatose body close to his, unmistakably Irish, was that of O’Hagan. And so was the face now that Pearce could look at it properly; big, round, coarse-skinned, with narrow eyes that could seem to be merry even in this dire situation, the whole topped with the black, tight and thick curly hair that had saved him from concussion. Gone was the belligerent drunk of the night before; this incarnation could even manage a smile in a situation that did not in the least deserve one.

‘Where in the name of Holy Mary are we?’

Pearce managed a grim smile. ‘In a boat, friend, as you say. We had the misfortune to run into a press-gang last night.’

It was clear by the confusion on O’Hagan’s face that he could not remember. He pulled himself up with some difficulty as his hands, like Pearce’s own, were tied, groaning as he did so, those bright eyes closing to pressed slits as he slowly shook his head. ‘Jesus, Joseph and Mary, the drink has done for me again. Not that I had enough to fell me, they must have put gin in my yard of ale, the bastards.’

Pearce looked down the boat to see if Charlie Taverner had heard the statement, one with which he would certainly not agree, but he looked to be either sleeping or still out from the effect of the blow he had received. Out of the corner of his eye, Pearce also saw Coyle, the little marine asleep across his lap, looking at them. He was seeing him for the first time in daylight, and he observed that their chief captor had a face so red and fiery, and so round, that except for the lack of a smile it would not have disgraced a Toby Jug. He was glaring at them now, as if by merely communicating they were fomenting rebellion. Pearce jerked his
head slightly in warning as the Irishman reopened his eyes, but it was ignored.

‘O’Hagan, Michael, Patrick, Paul.’ The bound hands came up as if to propose a shake, and Pearce was treated to another bit of evidence, in a pair of huge, heavy-knuckled fists, that he was with a man who would have been hard to take up sober. But with his own hands tied behind his back he was in no position to take up the invitation of contact.

‘That’s a lot of names.’

‘It is in the Papist tradition, I suppose for fear that God or the saints might lose us.’

‘Which one do you go by?’

‘Michael.’ He grinned. ‘Or O’Hagan. Or “you damned bog trotter” if you prefer.’

‘We met last night, Michael, and I recall that you tried to knock my head off my shoulders.’

Those merry eyes showed disbelief at first, then, with the addition of a slight headshake, acknowledgement. ‘The drink, it is, for I am a lamb when not full of it. Your name?’

The reply ‘John Pearce’ came without thought, the next being that such openness was incautious. There had been a time, before he and his father fled to France, when the name of Adam Pearce had been on everyone’s lips. Having been absent two years he had no idea if that notoriety had faded. Charlie Taverner had certainly stirred at the mention, or was that just apprehension?

‘Ah! The simplicity of the English,’ O’Hagan exclaimed. ‘You never fear the deities will lose you.’

‘My father is Scottish.’

‘Of what faith?’

‘None that I, or he, would admit to.’

‘It is not possible to live without faith in Christ.’

Pearce smiled. ‘It is. Michael, believe me it is.’

‘Shut them up, Kemp,’ growled Coyle.

Kemp made his way unsteadily up the boat, timing his move to miss the rower’s actions, his decorated pigtail swinging behind him, causing groans and cries of muted anger as he stepped across the bodies that lay between him, Pearce and O’Hagan. When he reached them he leant over, his pointed rodent face as ugly as the whiff of his breath. As he leant forward the dewdrop of mucus, which seemed a permanent feature of what was a red-tipped and pinched nose, threatened to detach itself; but it did not – by some miracle it stayed affixed.

‘You two ain’t got the message, ’ave you?’ Kemp said, raising a cosh and giving them each in turn a none too gentle tap on the crown of their heads. ‘Coylie don’t want you a’talking, so that means, my hearty lads, that you will shut your gobs.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to be asking of a son of Erin.’

‘Don’t get bold, mate.’

‘Can I sing then?’

Pearce winced in sympathy as Kemp caught O’Hagan a heavier blow, one that caused an audible crack and made the Irishman duck away with his whole face screwed up. ‘You’ll sing enough when we get you aboard, Paddy, and to any tune we care to whistle. Now shut up, or else I’ll be forced to stuff your mouth with this here cosh.’

O’Hagan looked up, his eyes full of defiance. But he met those of Pearce, and acknowledged the shake of the head.

‘Sit down, Kemp,’ said Coyle, who had been given clear orders from his captain not to allow the pressed men to be seen by anyone, with the added warning that should that happen he would not be alone in facing the law. ‘We’s passing Gravesend. There’s Men o’ War set there. Anyone on a ship about here sees you and that pigtail swinging a cosh they won’t need much thinkin’ to get what we’s about. Remember this lot ain’t rightly ours till they is sworn in. Be just the thing for some other crew of bilge-water buggers to get a boat in the water an’ try and snaffle our goods.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Kemp, with a loud sniff and a deft use of the sleeve to clean the end of his nose, but the words were so soft only those next to him could hear it.

Pearce was one, and, looking up he could see the higher masts of half a dozen ships poking up into the morning sky. Gulls flew overhead, swooping down or swinging out of sight on the breeze, in a free manner that seemed to mock those confined in the boat.

‘How long till we raise the barky?’ asked Kemp.

‘Few hours yet, mate. Tide’s turned agin us,’ said Coyle, ‘an’ this sodding wind don’t aid us nowt.’

‘Captn’ll be well aboard before we, I reckon,’ Kemp opined, ‘which will not make him happy. Hope to Christ he didn’t get back to a charge to weigh, for there was a rumour flyin’ that the order was set to come from the Commodore to up anchor and make for Deal.’

‘There’s always a rumour on the wing, as you well know, mate, just as there’s bugger all or little that’ll make Ralph Barclay happy, ’cepting, happen, that pretty wife of his.’

‘Now there,’ said Kemp, with real feeling, ‘is a flower it would be nice to pluck. I saw her in the Sheerness yard when she came down first to look out to the ship, pretty as a picture.’

‘Happen you’ll get the chance, mate. Old Barclay ’tends to take her to sea with him. He’s even had a double cot shipped aboard for their comfort.’

‘Not too sure I like that idea,’ Kemp replied. ‘Women aboard a barky brings bad luck.’

‘It don’t matter a dollop of shit what you like, nor any soul else for that matter.’ The voice got harsh then as he growled at the crew of the boat, who were rowing but without much effort. ‘Get your soddin’ backs into them sticks.’

Coyle was not thinking about women at sea and bad luck. He was thinking that Kemp was right; that Barclay had missed his chance to weigh till at least tomorrow. And that was no way to be carrying on when your ship was berthed right under the Commodore’s window if the order came to get cracking. There would be hell to pay and no pitch hot from that quarter, which would see Barclay properly hauled over. The captain was known to be a hard-horse commander – the type prepared to win the respect of his crew through fear if he had to – who cared little if he was loved or loathed, a man to pass that kind of raking on to another.

Someone would get it in the neck, for certain, and Coyle had no desire to be the one to bear the brunt of Ralph Barclay’s anger.

The captain of HMS
Brilliant
made Sheerness well ahead of his longboat and cutter, landing just as the guns boomed out to announce dawn, and being sensible of the fact that he had been off the station without permission, he went to the Commodore’s office to cover his absence, only to find out from a clerk, and with a sinking heart, that an order had been posted the previous evening commanding him to weigh at first light, an instruction with which he was already too late to comply. His desire to depart immediately was quashed by the next comment that his superior, in need of some explanation as to why his orders had been ignored, wanted very much to see him. Gnawing on the forthcoming interview, he crossed a waiting room full of officers, here to demand stores, cordage and spars, or a plea to light a fire under the low thieving scullies that worked in the dockyard, taking station by the window that looked out over the anchorage, sparkling in the early morning light.

‘Captain Barclay.’ The high voice, with the burr of a Norfolk accent, made Ralph Barclay spin slowly round, and being sure he knew the speaker he dropped his head to return the greeting, looking into a pair of startlingly blue eyes and a youthful face, this under a hat worn athwart the head instead of fore and aft, a method of dress Barclay had always found affected.

‘Captain Nelson.’

‘Should I be surprised to see you here?’ Nelson asked.

‘I cannot think why.’

‘I was talking to Davidge Gould,’ Nelson responded, ‘we met at the Assembly Rooms last night. He told me you and he were set to weigh this very morning.’

‘That is so,’ Barclay replied, nodding in the directions of the Commodore’s office, ‘but as you well know, sir, it is often easier to issue orders than to obey them.’

Nelson smiled, a natural reaction given his own reputation, which was one that could be said to hold a cavalier attitude to authority. ‘Only too well, Captain Barclay, only too well.’

‘But I shall weigh soon, never fear.’ Barclay said that more in hope than anticipation, for at this moment he had no idea of the condition
of his ship. He had departed yesterday from a vessel yet to complete her stores.

‘Waste not a moment, eh?’ said Nelson cheerfully.

‘An admirable sentiment, sir,’ Barclay replied, thinking that only someone like the man before him would employ such a worn and trite cliché.

‘You chose not to attend the ball last night.’

Ralph Barclay wondered if Nelson knew he was in hot water, and was guying him. ‘I was, Captain Nelson, otherwise engaged.’

‘You missed an entertaining evening,’ Nelson replied.

‘Really?’

Nelson very obviously failed to pick up Ralph Barclay’s mordant tone, for the flat and featureless Isle of Sheppey, on which Sheerness stood, was a place reckoned by most naval officers to be damned dull. The inhabitants were a singular bunch, their view of the world formed by a flat, windswept, marshy landscape; fishermen, subsistence farmers who scratched at poor soil, prone to smuggling to make up for what they lacked in legal income. Excepting those that toiled in the dockyard, most were wary of a Navy that could press men and make sail in a wink, and damned reluctant to bow the knee to naval pretensions. They kept themselves aloof, obliging the Navy to make its own entertainment with regular gatherings at the Assembly Rooms and the occasional private house, all populated by the same familiar faces.

‘But I daresay your wife will inform you of that,’ Nelson added, ‘for there can be no doubt that she enjoyed the occasion.’ Ralph Barclay stiffened while Nelson burbled on in happy reminisce. ‘I doubt there was one blank space on her dance card, sir, and pretty and vivacious as she is, Mrs Barclay lit up the whole affair. Davidge Gould was particularly attentive.’ Nelson shook his head slowly, as if in wonderment. ‘He certainly knows how to make the ladies laugh.’

‘Since he is to be my junior on my allotted convoy duty, I have more interest in his ability to sail his ship.’

The tone of that response, and the far from pleasant look that accompanied it, penetrated both Nelson’s naiveté as well as his good humour and he mumbled, in a slightly embarrassed fashion, ‘You are bound for the Mediterranean, I believe?’

‘We are.’

Back on safe ground, Nelson’s bright blue eyes lit up again. ‘Then we will serve together once more, as we did in the West Indies in ‘82, for I believe I am to be ordered to the Med also.’ Nelson dropped his voice, as
though what he had to impart was confidential. ‘We may even, I am told, be under the same Commanding Officer.’

‘Nothing is certain. I saw Lord Hood yesterday and he has not made up his mind.’

‘If only it was his mind to make up, Captain Barclay. He aches for the Channel, but I for one hope that he is given the Mediterranean, because I know, and I am sure you agree with me, that he will be an active commander.’

Ralph Barclay looked at Nelson hard then, trying to discern once more if he was being practised upon. Hood had been the last Commander in Chief they had served under together, and it could hardly have been a secret that the relationship between the admiral and Ralph Barclay had not been warm. And Nelson, despite having a more friendly rapport with the man had, like him, spent the last five years on the beach, his pleas for employment made to that self-same Lord Hood ignored – good grounds for dislike, if not downright detestation.

But looking into the infernally trusting face of this short-arse before him, he had to conclude, on the experience of past acquaintance, that there was no nuance in the words, because it was something Horatio Nelson was incapable of. The man was an innocent, who had no idea how he was practised upon by those with more guile than he – which, on mulling it over, included just about everybody, not least a crew Ralph Barclay had seen talking to their captain on his quarterdeck as though he was a common seaman. The man had no notion of the difference in service before and abaft the mast, claiming to treat all, officers and hands, with equality. Of course, Nelson craved popularity, which was always a mistake. Come a desperate battle, men over-indulged would not fight as well as those who had been exposed to proper discipline.

‘That service is not a time I recall with much pleasure, Captain Nelson.’

‘Really?’

Left with Hood after Rodney had gone home, Ralph Barclay had not enjoyed anything in the way of a cruise that might bring in some money, and that in a sea teeming with privateers and American trading vessels trying to run the island blockade; that had gone to Hood’s favourites, and was just another lump of grit in the relationship he had with the man who controlled the Navy. Mind, neither had Nelson been allowed to cruise, but that was because of the tub he commanded.

‘It would surprise me if you did, given the vessel which you had under your hand.’

‘Ah,’ Nelson sighed, ‘old
Albemarle
.’

‘From what I recall, Captain Nelson,’ Barclay replied, with deep irony, ‘she was never new.’

Nelson looked pained. Barclay knew him to be one of those coves who hated to say a bad word about any ship he had captained. A lot of commanders were like that, superstitious that condemnation of a vessel’s very obvious faults would bring ill fortune. Ralph Barclay was a man who could damn the planking beneath his feet in a hurricanno. Seeing the sudden sadness of Nelson’s eyes, he had to look away in embarrassment, though he did not have to wonder what had brought that on, Nelson being notorious as a sentimental creature.

‘I do not say she was perfect,
Albemarle
, but I cannot bring myself to condemn her.’

‘Oh come, Captain Nelson, she was a complete dog.’

And she had been, a wallowing tub of a converted merchantman, rated as a frigate, that missed stays with depressing regularity and was forever struggling to keep station on Hood’s flagship, canvas of every description being employed in a bewildering set of changes to the sail plan that had provided a deep vein of amusement on what was otherwise the dull service of cruising in the hope of the arrival of another French fleet.

‘Though I must add,’ Barclay said hastily, as he saw that he had deeply wounded Nelson, ‘that the crew must have been the best men aloft in the Caribbean.’

Nelson brightened at that; Barclay knew from their previous acquaintance that he was in the presence of a man who wore his heart on his sleeve. You could always get a smile from Horatio Nelson if you praised his crew. Personally, he would have flogged half of them for the liberties they took, and the state of a Nelson deck was not something to recall with fond memory. He wondered what it was about this man, whom he really didn’t think he liked, that he bothered to care if he was happy or not?

‘You would be amazed. Captain Barclay, how many of them have joined me aboard
Agamemnon
.’

So, Nelson, not far above him on the captain’s list, had got HMS
Agamemnon
, a ship-of-the-line, albeit a small one of sixty-four guns, while he had been given one of the lesser frigates. There, in stark relief, was the way both men stood in the eyes of the man with the power to dispense commands. Perhaps Nelson was right to esteem Hood after all.

‘Though you’re still short on your complement I’ll wager,’ Barclay growled.

Nelson replied, with a cheerful grin. ‘Never in life, Captain Barclay! I am happy to say that my muster book is near full, and the number of capital seamen who have come aboard is astonishing. A very high proportion, naturally, are Norfolk men from my own home county.’

Barclay was sure Nelson was exaggerating, that or boasting – the common view was that swanking was a trait of his. A sixty-four gunner required a crew of over four hundred men. ‘You cannot have manned a ship the size of
Agamemnon
solely with personal volunteers?’

‘Oh no. A hundred hands, prime seamen all, came only yesterday, shipped down from the Tower, I’m told, following a very obliging order from the Admiralty itself – I suspect the hand of Lord Hood. I must say he has done me proud, but the Impress Service officer did say that my own efforts were the cause, that it was a pleasure to provide men for a captain who could garner three-quarters of his crew without recourse to them.’

Barclay spun away then to hide his anger, and to keep Nelson from seeing the look of deep malevolence that filled his face. But there was a feeling of hurt too – of injustice that this pipsqueak should get so easily what he himself had been so roundly denied. Why? It could not be competence; when it came to ship management Ralph Barclay bowed the knee to no man, and even though he had never fought an action against a well-armed enemy he had no doubt that when the time came he would perform well. Did Hood hate him, or was it the memory of Admiral Rodney that plagued him?

He began to move away, lest his emotions become obvious, that action followed by an invitation from Nelson to ‘join me for dinner at the Three Tuns in Sheerness, should the opportunity arise’.

It was fortuitous that the summons to see the Commodore followed right on that, because Ralph Barclay would not have been able to compose a polite reply.

The interview that followed was uncomfortable in the extreme; the kind of dressing down he had not had since he had ceased to be a lieutenant and achieved Post Rank. That he had succeeded in securing some hands, though he took care not to mention the source, counted for nothing in the face of what was seen as the gross insubordination of being not only out of his ship without permission, but actually off the station, and he was told that if he did not weigh with alacrity he might find himself once more on the beach.

If anything, his ‘interview’ with his wife could be rated as even
more unpleasant, made more so from the haste with which it had to be conducted, for even in a hurry to get aboard ship it had been necessary, on the way to the rooms they had rented, to pay a visit to the Sheerness pawnbroker to retrieve goods he had pledged to fund the recruitment of volunteers – the silver buckles from his best shoes and some of the presents so recently gifted to them at their wedding. Emily was awake but not dressed, so he found himself trying to censure someone whose natural look of innocence was compounded by an appearance – tousled hair, night cap and gown, plus a pout on her face – that was almost childlike.

‘You would surely not forbid me permission to go to a ball, Captain Barclay?’

‘I admit I would not, but I cannot comprehend that you not only did so, but made an exhibition of yourself with my inferior officer.’ The pout changed to a look of perplexity, as Ralph Barclay continued. ‘Lieutenant Gould…’

‘Is he not a captain?’ Emily asked.

‘He is a Master and Commander, the senior officer on his vessel, which gifts him the courtesy title of captain, but his substantive rank is lieutenant. Not that it matters. He is a bachelor who has a reputation with the ladies…’

Emily interrupted him a second time. ‘He is also exceedingly kind, husband. It was he who found me at the Dockyard Commissioner’s house yesterday afternoon – we were taking tea there – to tell me what orders had been posted for you, and to say that he had passed those on to your First Lieutenant, Mr Roscoe.’

‘In that he did no more than his duty demanded.’

‘I think he exceeded that, husband. For Lieutenant Roscoe informed him that your own personal stores were woefully inadequate. I spent most of the evening before attending the Assembly Rooms accompanied by Captain, I mean Lieutenant Gould, rectifying that.’

It was Ralph Barclay’s turn to look perplexed, an expression that had Emily opening a drawer to produce a sheaf of bills, which she handed to her husband. As he, with increasing disbelief, read the long list of items she had pledged him to pay for, she kept talking, her voice a mixture of pride and humility, the former to cover her actions, the latter to admit to her need for assistance.

‘Of course, I immediately admitted my ignorance to the ladies with whom I was taking tea, that included the Commodore’s wife, and they were most obliging in giving me advice, though I can say the only item
that all agreed on was the need for ample vinegar to maintain the
sweet-smelling
nature of your cabin.’