Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House (32 page)

“You said, I think, that you are a little acquainted with Captain Smallwood—the officer in command of the prison hulk?” I enquired as we hurried down the High towards Southampton Water. I spoke in part to defray anxiety; I could not help but feel we should have been hours beforehand in our apprehension of danger.

“An excellent fellow! Though quite enslaved to cards,” Frank returned distractedly. “There is no one like Smallwood for playing at faro. I met with him some once or twice in Malta, and later in the West Indies; I have seen
Hamlet
in his company, too, while ashore in Gibraltar. He once put me in the way of a bang-up prize-agent.”
¹

“But is Smallwood likely to oblige you in so serious a matter, without the requirement of greater authority— or at the very least, a full explanation?”

“I cannot say,” Frank admitted. “The Navy is rather ticklish about—”

“—
niceties
and
farms,”
I supplied. “Not to mention the conduct of prisoners of war. Smallwood should not like to risk the disapprobation of the Admiralty, in the person of Sir Francis Farnham.”

“Nor should anyone, I expect—but Farnham need not come into it. We shall have Hill at our side, and a man of science may convince a fellow of anything. We must try Smallwood's character, and hope for the best. Mind the loose cobble, Jane!”

What my brother intended was fairly simple: he thought to secure Mr. Hill's support in urging the release of Etienne LaForge into Frank's care, so that the Frenchman might be removed from the hulk and placed in a room at Mrs. Davies's lodging house. The fact that LaForge was a surgeon—rather higher in his berth than a common seaman—should be strenuously represented, as well as the gravity of the man's condition. Nothing of our murderous suspicions need be disclosed to Captain Smallwood; nothing but charity and goodwill on the part of ourselves should be displayed; and with a minimum of fuss or anxiety, we might all sleep soundly in our beds this evening.

Such was the plan, and it might have gone off to perfection—but for the small difficulty of our discovering, at the moment of arriving at Wool House, that the place was locked and deserted. Even the Marines who usually stood guard before the great oak doors were fled.

“I suppose Mr. Hill can have no reason for remaining in attendance,” said Frank thoughtfully, “the prisoners being taken off to the hulk. I shall have to seek him at his lodgings. He resides in St. Michael's Square, I believe—no very great distance. You might remain on the Quay, Jane, and await our return.”

“I shall stare at the hulk until my eyes fail me,” I promised him.

• • •

I
MADE MY WAY TO THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE PAVING
and hastened past the wharves towards Water Gate Quay. The heavy stone expanse thrust out into the sea had no power to cheer me, this darkening day; the distance between Quay's end and anchored prison hulk was too great to admit of comfort. I stood near a piling and felt the wind tug at my pelisse; sea birds wheeled and cried overhead like unquiet souls. As always, the activity on Southampton Water was very great, despite the late hour and lengthening shadows. Boats of every description plied their oars between mainland and moorings.

The hulk was easy to discern, dismasted and stripped of its sails, against the backdrop of the New Forest. Only this ship, out of all the others at anchor, must exhibit no purposeful movement on its upper deck; here the activity was entirely below, behind the closed portals that had once housed guns, and now sheltered the abandoned wretches tethered in chains. What sin had Etienne LaForge committed, that he must suffer so fearful a purgatory?

The Water was all chop and white-curling wave, the stiffening breeze driving the current hard against the shore. I could feel its shuddering force slap at the stones of the Quay on which I stood. The hulk would be heaving in its depths, the misery heightened for those in delirium. I narrowed my eyes, attempting to pick out even one figure against the dusk—and saw a rocket soar up near the prison ship's hull. It exploded overhead in a red arc of light.

“Young fools,” muttered a voice at my feet.

I glanced around, but could discover no one.

The harsh clearing of an old man's throat assailed my ears; I peered down die steps that led from quay to water, and eventually discerned a figure familiar in its outline—a seafaring man, with a neat white queue hanging down his back and a silver whistle around his neck. He was crouched in the stern of a small skiff, smoking his pipe. A quantity of fish was neatly stowed in a basket at his feet, and his line and tackle laid by.

“Mr. Hawkins,” I said.

The Bosun's Mate pulled his pipe from his lips and nodded. “Miss Austen, ma'am. Nell said as you were very kind to her. I thank you, I do, for your attention to my poor girl.”

A second rocket fired out of the Water and exploded with a great report over our heads: Despite myself, I started.

Jeb Hawkins pointed toward the prison hulk with his pipe stem. “That's a sorry sight, if 1 may be so bold. It burns my heart to see the
Marguerite
in such a state -cut down to a stump and disgraced. The times we had in her—aye, and the battles, too!”

“You were posted once in that ship?” I enquired curiously.

“That I were, ma'am—four year and more, ?? d many a sharp brush the
Marguerite
saw. She took fifteen French prizes in her day, and seven Spanish, make no mistake. She were a barky ship, the
Marguerite;
but it's donkey's years since she were fit for sailing.”

“What cause could the crew, find for signal rockets?” I asked him.

“Why, that's never the crew, ma'am! That's a few of Southampton's best, in Martin Whitsun's cockle of a boat, chivvying the Frenchies with the sound of the guns! The young lads're forever plaguing the prisoners with a fight; they think it drives the French half-mad, to have the sound of shells whizzing overhead and be prevented from offering a reply.”

I strained my gaze towards the hulk's waterline, and discerned the very small craft Hawkins had described, hard in the lee of the ship and almost indistinguishable in the darkness. A sudden misapprehension seized me. What if the rockets were a diversion—a cover for greater malice about to operate on board?

I turned to stare at the Quay's end, and Winkle Lane; no sign of Frank or Mr. Hill. And at every moment the dusk grew heavier! Surely if murder were done, it would strike under cover of night! I rounded on Mr. Hawkins in his skiff.

“You say that you are familiar with the
Marguerite.
Would you be so kind as to convey me to her?”

Hawkins eyed me dubiously; between drabs and prison hulks, he no doubt thought, I possessed curious tastes for a lady.

I opened my reticule and retrieved my purse: four shillings, five pence. The sum would have to do. I held out the coins.

“You're never thinking of clambering aboard yourself,” he protested. “It's right difficult for a lady, without a chair; but happen the Captain could find one—”
²

“We shall deal with that difficulty when we come to it.” I clinked the money enticingly.

He shrugged, rose into a half-crouch, and extended-his palm. I dropped the shilling pieces into it.

“Have a care, ma'am, to step into the middle of the boat I'm not so young as I was, but strong enough for all that to make the
Marguerite
in under ten minutes.”

Ten minutes! It seemed ten hours, rather, as the Bosun's Mate heaved and grunted at his oars. I sat in the bow, facing the hulk, and he amidships, with his back turned to his object; I was privileged, therefore, to experience every agony of apprehension while the distant outline of the
Marguerite
loomed and grew no nearer. Eventually, however, as the darkness of late winter descended and the shouts of men flew across the Water, the hulk ceased to recede” I thought it came a litde nearer—a litde nearer—and a litde nearer; the Bosun's Mate showed sweat on his brow, and at last we approached so swiftly that the dark and glistening hull of the ship filled all our sight, a mountainous wall, with the waves slapping against its anchor-chains in petulant bursts of foam. A few lanterns had been lit against the turning of the day; their warm yellow light pooled in places on the upper deck, but shed no glow in the dark under-regions, the successive rings of hell, that comprised the lower decks. From die closed gun ports came the piteous sounds of suffering men—groans, cries of delirium, the harsh cut of laughter.

Another skiff, larger than the Mate's and filled with at least eight young bucks of seafaring aspect, rowed around the
Marguerite's
bow and roared with delight at die sight of us. One—who must be their leader—held aloft a bottle in salute.

“Old Hawkins, ahoy there! Have you come to join the merriment? And brought a fishwife, too! Are you after selling your girl, Mate?”

“She's too dear for your purse, Martin Whitsun,” Hawkins retorted, “and well you know it”

“Aye, none but a fool would pay more than tuppence.” Whitsun busied himself with a bulky object clutched against his chest; another rocket, perhaps. He must have a store of them at his feet The two skiffs were drifting closer together; in a minute I should be discovered as anyone but Nell Rivers. I shrank behind the Mate's sturdy back.

“Oi, Nell,” shouted a buck through the gloom, “have ye tired of good English cock, then? Do you think to dance a jig for the Frenchies' pleasure? There's many a lad would die for the sight of your arse, love!” He grasped his trousers in a lewd gesture and commenced to lurch drunkenly in the skiff, so that it rocked and bobbled perilously in the waves.

“Mangy curs!” Jeb Hawkins swung upwards so suddenly that the pranksters were taken off guard. “I'll teach you to show respect to a lady!” The blade of his oar slapped hard against the drunken man's chest, and sent him careening overboard with a terrible cry. In falling, the man clutched at one of his mates—and the scuffle and tumble that then ensued caused Martin Whitsun to drop his rocket.

It had just been lit.

There was a horrified cry, “a welter of splashes and dark shapes leaping over the skiffs side, and I felt myself propelled backwards in Jeb Hawkins's boat by the violent pull of the man's remaining oar. And then, with a roar as calamitous as Judgement Day, the entire complement of Whitsun's rockets flared and shot skywards.

Boom! Boom!
The light was searing, unlike anything I had ever witnessed, so that I covered my eyes with my hands and cried aloud in terror. Sparks and flaming pieces of Whitsun's ruined skiff rained down all about us. I was struck a glancing blow by one splinter, and crouched as low as possible in Hawkins's bow. Everywhere were heard the cries of
Fire! Fire!-
—and when I considered with surprise how singular it should be for the drunken bucks struggling about us to sound so vigorous an alarm, I glanced up at the
Marguerite.

A burning spark, or several perhaps, had landed on the hulk's deck, where a coil of cable or a bundled hammock had caught ablaze. Perhaps one of the lanthorns had been knocked over by a flying splinter or struck by an errant rocket. Whatever the cause, flames were now licking merrily along the deck, lurid and frightening in the darkness. Where there had been no activity before, was suddenly a handful of flitting shapes—the
Marguerite's
skeleton crew, desperately working with sand and sacking to douse the greedy fire.

“Mr. Hawkins!” I cried. “What have we done?”

“That's not our doing, ma'am,” he shouted back. “That's God's judgement on the poor
Marguerite
!”

“But the prisoners—the men in chains below! What will become of them?”

The Bosun's Mate ignored me. He was bent over the side of his small craft, fishing intently for a floating oar. Heads bobbed everywhere in the expanse of water between ourselves and the
Marguerite;
Martin Whitsun's gang, I supposed, abruptly sobered by the shock of February water. One man appeared intent upon making for our boat. He thrust an arm awkwardly above the waves and cried out, then was submerged in swell. I hoped fervently that the rogues were more adept at the art of swimming than I should be myself, and clutched firmly at the gunwale of the skiff.

Hawkins rose up from the side with a triumphant cry, and stowed his prize in the oarlock.

“Mr. Hawkins!” I shouted fiercely as the man began to pull away from the burning prison ship, “you must go back!”

“I can do nothing from die water, ma'am. It's for the crew to save her now. The fire's not so great—I've seen worse in my time—but in the event they carry powder, we would not wish to be near. If the ship blows—”

I clutched at die stem of one oar and pulled heavily against my determined saviour. “There is a man held in that hulk who must not be left to die! I beg of you, Mr. Hawkins—consider your daughter! This man might be the saving of
her!

Hawkins shipped his oars and stared at me. In the light thrown by the burning ship, his aged features were grotesque, like a gargoyle carved in a cathedral wall. The cries from the hulk grew more strident; I heard the splash of a body as it plummeted into the sea.

“Is that why you had me row you out to the boat? To save a Frenchie?”

“Nell's paramour, one Chessyre, was murdered a few days ago.”

“I know it”

“Chessyre's murderer would exult in this Frenchman's death. He would think himself secure. He might then consider the life of a poor woman like Nell, who had the misfortune to be in Chessyre's confidence. But if the Frenchman lives—and may tell his tale …”

“Then Nell shall be free from fear?”

It was a gross exaggeration of the facts, but I was desperate. I nodded my head.

Jeb Hawkins turned the small craft with a few dips of the oars, and heaved his way back towards the burning ing ship. All around us were the remnants of Martin Whitsun's skiff, blasted sky-high and floating now in the water; and to my horror, I glimpsed an oblong shape with streaming hair that rose and fell with every swell of the current: the corpse of a drowned man. Hawkins ignored it, dipping his oars with care and maneuvering amidst the flotsam, until he came hard by the
Marguerite's
bow.