Skull and Bones (51 page)

    "Go-on!" cried the driver.

    "Huzzah!" cried the street.

    "Pity a poor soldier!" cried the beggar.

    "An' his fambly!" cried the urchins.

    "Ruined at Fontenoy in King-George-Gawblessim's-service!"

    But all were ignored as the coach ground to a halt, its multi-layer paintwork half-covered in mud, the horses snorting and steaming in the cold air, the driver throwing off the blanket that covered his knees, shifting his feet in the box of straw that kept some warmth in, and turning back to the guard who sat behind him.

    "Heave the mail, Jimmy, boy!"

    "Right y'are, Davey!"

    And the guard threw down the sealed canvas bag of letters, into the arms of Mr Kemp, proprietor of the Royal George, who'd stepped out the instant the coach arrived, backed by maids and ostlers of his staff. There was no official mail service, but the Polmouth and Western Staging Company, who owned the Lightning, carried letters to make an extra profit.

    Then all parties set to. The ostlers took off the horses and put on a fresh team. The maids opened the coach doors, threw down the step, and bobbed and curtsied as five passengers got out, stumbling on cramped limbs. Most were desperate for the privy and ran straight into the house, to make haste before the coach was on the road again.

    But one had arrived at his destination. He had no further to go. He stood waiting while his box was handed down. It was heavy, and he gave a hand so it didn't get dropped. It was a seaman's chest, much like any other, except that the initial "B" had been burned on the top of it with a hot iron, and the corners were somewhat smashed and broken as by long, rough usage.

    "Handsomely, there!" he cried, in a voice accustomed to command. "Hand her down gentle!"

    He was a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man with a tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat. His hands were ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the scar of an old sword-cut gleamed livid white on his cheek. He was a formidable man, but was melancholy and silent. He'd not spoken a word to anyone in all the ten, long hours from Bristol. He'd just dozed, and dreamed and muttered to himself, occasionally disturbing his fellow passengers by the foul oaths and dreadful things he said in his sleep. But none dared wake him or complain.

    He was still standing outside the inn when the passengers scrambled aboard and the coach pulled out again. He ignored every one and every thing, except that, in an odd moment - perhaps thinking of better days - he astonished all the world as he turned to the beggar who clutched at his sleeve, whining and pleading… and gave him a silver dollar.

    "Gedoutovit!" said the landlord of the Royal George, putting a swift boot up the beggar's breech. "You didn't oughter mind him, sir," he said. "Nearest
he
got to the Battle o' Fontenoy was a gin-shop of that name, down the road there!"

    "What?" said the big man, whose mind was far away.

    "Would you be lookin' for a room, sir? Clean sheets, good fire, good food?"

    "D'you get much company?"

    "God save you, sir,
yes!"
the landlord smiled. "Never been busier, sir!"

    "Then it'll not do for me!"

    "Oh."

    "I wants somewhere quiet. Nearby and clean, but quiet.

    Here -"

    "Oh!" said the landlord, and gazed at the incredible sight of a golden guinea.

    Some hours later, the big man got down from the two- wheeled cart behind a miserable old horse that had brought him from Polmouth on the wind-blown cliff road that looked down over red, sandy beaches. Together, he and the carter heaved the chest into a handbarrow brought on purpose, since the final hundred yards wouldn't take wheeled traffic of any size.

    And so, Billy Bones came plodding up to the door of the Admiral Benbow Inn, with his sea-chest following behind, and the inn's sign creaking over his head. It was so peaceful that his sombre mood lifted, and he gazed down at Black Hill Cove, which the inn overlooked, and he whistled and sang to himself…

    Fifteen men on the dead man's chest,

    Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

    He rapped at the worn old door, with a bit of stick like a handspike, that he was carrying. He rapped to announce himself, since it was already open, and inside he could see the public room, and a bit of company: harmless local folk, and a sickly, white-haired man in a long apron, serving them, with a lad beside him holding a jug. The kinship was plain in their faces.

    "Good day to you, sir," said the white-haired man, touching his brow. "May I be of assistance? I'm Hawkins, proprietor of this establishment, and this here be my boy Jim."

Afterword

    LONG JOHN SILVER: THE NEED FOR CHANGE

    Readers of the two previous books in this series,
Flint and Silver
and
Pieces of Eight,
will have noticed the progressive change in Long John Silver's character in these books, and especially in this one.

    This is because, as I wrote the books, I increasingly felt an obligation to deliver up Long John Silver, in the end, as the character that Stevenson created - which was not my original intention.

    When first I set out to write this series, I was fed up with characters in popular culture who were anti-heroes, half- heroes, and non-heroes: Batman, for instance, depicted as more sinister than the villains he conquers.

    So, I decided to present John Silver as a cross between Dan Dare and Douglas Bader - and if you've never heard of them, please look them up (try Google), because they shaped my values as a child and still exemplify the virtues that I admire today.

    Fair enough, then: Silver could start out like that. But I realised that he couldn't be the same truthful, decent, gentleman o' fortune by the end of Book Three. And so I contrived that he was forced into lies, betrayal and murder.

    Not that there's no good left inside him! Not at all. But - to the best of my ability - as my trilogy ends, he is now the equivocal, crafty bugger that Stevenson made him. And dangerous besides.

    Also, there's plenty more of him still in my imagination… such as the tale of what
really
happened to Jim Hawkins's expedition to Treasure Island…

LONDON UN-POLICED: CATCHING CRIMINALS

    In
Skull and Bones,
much of the action in London depends on the fact that in the 1750s there was no police force in the modern sense, only a medieval mixture of constables, marshal's men, beadles and watchmen.

    In fact, there were quite a lot of them: about 3,000 for a city of 750,000 people, which compares surprisingly well with modern figures. For instance, in June 2009, London's Metropolitan Police had c. 35,000 officers for a city of 7.5 million people. Thus, both then and now, there were about four officers per thousand of the population.

But
modern officers are trained, and fit, and in constant communication by modern media, whereas the 1750s equivalents were commonly too old, too slow, and too corrupt to keep the king's peace - and each one was utterly on his own.

    The Bow Street Runners, founded in 1749, were a unique exception, being remarkably efficient and honest (by eighteenth-century standards). They worked both as detectives and servers of writs, going up and down the kingdom - and even overseas - on missions such as I describe for my fictional

    Philip Norton. They were the James Bonds of their time. But they were small in number (a few dozen officers), they had no uniform, and they did not patrol the streets to keep order: not them nor anybody else.

    Another formidable obstacle to the apprehension of criminals was the fact that there was no way of showing a person's face to the public, other than by getting a talented artist to draw a likeness which would then be copied on to a copper plate - slowly, painfully, carefully - by equally talented engravers. Then prints could be made for wide distribution. This was a labour-intensive process, dependent on rare skills, and totally impractical for routine use, even if anybody had thought of using it to detect criminals, which they didn't! Thus recognition of criminals was strictly by eye, by people who already knew them.

    Likewise there existed no means of mass communication, long-range communication, nor instant communication whereby the efforts of such officers as did exist could be united in the attempt to apprehend criminals.

    Consequently, detection and apprehension of crime relied on direct, personal action, such as a householder catching a burglar, an employer detecting theft by an employee, or a traveller fighting back against a highwayman.

    Thus, with Flint cut from the gallows, and the javelin-men beaten senseless, Silver and Flash Jack could spirit him away, because there was nobody whose duty it was to chase them. And once they were out of sight of those who could recognise them, then they were safe, because nobody knew who they were. Even Silver's crutch wouldn't necessarily give him away, for cripples were far more common then, than today.

LONDON UN-POLICED: THE MOB

    As with crime, so with the London mob: that primordial force, deriving its name (as Dr Cowdray would have explained) from the Latin
mobile vulgus
meaning the moveable, or
fickle,
crowd for its dangerously volatile moods.

    Once the mob was roused, there was nothing to stop it, as - famously - during the Gordon Riots of June 1780, when Lord George Gordon, a Protestant fanatic, roused the mob against the government's plan to liberalise the laws proscribing Catholics from public service or commissions in the armed forces. Anti-Catholic prejudice was deep-rooted in English society and the mob turned out in vast and unknown numbers, rioting for a whole week, and doing some £30,000 pounds worth of damage (£30,000,000 in today's money), burning churches, prisons and houses, savagely beating any Catholics it could find, and lighting bonfires throughout the city.

    My account of the Georgian mob at play, in Chapters 26 and 27, is an accurate and restrained - I stress,
restrained -
description of historic reality. Even if there had been a police force, the mob would have rolled over it, so vast and ferocious as it was. Then, as today, faced with civil disturbance on this scale, the only answer would be to call out the army. In 1780, it took a week to get the necessary numbers of troops together and order was only restored with volleys of musketry fired into the mob, leaving hundreds killed and many more wounded.

    Neither did I exaggerate in describing the use of paper-wrapped excrement as a missile, beloved of the mob. The eighteenth century even had a name for this little beauty:
a flying pasty.

THE MUDLARKS

    As a further example of the lawlessness of eighteenth-century London, I point out that almost everything I wrote about these river pirates is historically accurate: their strange name, their ferocious violence, their bribing the law to keep its nose out of their affairs, and their audacious thieving of anchor cables while a ship's crew slept. They were
diamond geezers
of eighteenth- century crime. I did, however, make up the title of 'King of the River' and there was no King Jimmy, as far as I know.

    THE LEAP INTO HYPERSPACE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STYLE

    A common event in science fiction is the escape - say of
Millennium Falcon -
by leaping into hyperspace: that trans- dimensional realm where space is folded, time suspended and detection impossible. Well, an eighteenth-century sailing ship couldn't do that, but it did something very similar every time it went to sea, because once it had gone over the horizon, it was totally undetectable and totally unable to communicate with any person, place or ship that it couldn't see.

    It is hard for us to appreciate the total isolation under which men sailed in those times, and their exclusive reliance on their own skills. For comparison, when Apollo 13 went wrong, the crew were the most isolated men-in-peril in all history. But they were in constant communication with base, where experts worked on a full-scale simulation of their vehicle to give advice.

    And you didn't get that in the age of sail! You fixed it yourself or you died. You navigated skilfully or you died. You weathered the storm or you died. The sea made men out of boys, and heroes out of men… those it didn't kill.

    There were a few and limited exceptions to the loneliness of sail. Warships routinely sailed in fleets, and in wartime merchantmen sailed in convoys. Also, ships - especially warships - could communicate by flag signals, but only when in sight of each other, only in daylight and only in good weather, and certainly
not
when you most needed it: when the fog closed in, off a lee shore, in foul weather, at night.