The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (7 page)

Tom glanced about him, immensely weary, the fight
had used up a day’s energy.

“Joseph, get them below! Quickly, push them into
their wardroom, cram them together so they can’t move.”

He turned, picked out sailors from the Star, sent
them in pairs to take the huddled merchant hulls who had stayed to watch the
fun, had been promised a grandstand view of the hangings and now were too frightened
to run.

Ten minutes of frantic action, pushing and shouting
and chasing their captives into safe custody.

The Star had torn loose from the Frenchman, was
threatening the merchantmen, John Murray stood by the wheel and apparently in
command; as he watched there were a dozen of splashes at her side – it seemed
that some of the French had managed to board her and had been killed there.

They took half of the crew from each of the
merchants and set them under guard on the Star’s deck; the island boats were
almost always crewed by a family together, fathers and sons and brothers and
cousins side-by-side and now hostage for each other’s good behaviour. They left
one man from the Star aboard each as a prize-master, having too few uninjured
bodies to do more, and turned their heads northwards. Tom found he was in
command, for Blaine and Smith and the two prize-masters had died at the front
of the fight, leading their men, as was only right. John Murray told the tale
of what had happened behind him on the Star’s deck.

“Me and they Coleses was towards the stern when you
went over the bows, Tom, and before we could get up to join you there was a
couple of dozen Frogs on board. They killed the captain straight off, because
‘e didn’t know ‘is arse from ‘is elbow, ‘e was that pissed. Smithy got one in
the guts at the same time. They Coleses went in with cutlass in one ‘and, those
bloody knives of theirs in t’other and one of the Frogs shoots George down in
the first rush; Joby went bloody mad then. Just run in to ‘em, ‘e did, swinging
knife and blade and going straight through ‘em; they stuck ‘im with a cutlass
before ‘e’d made a yard and ‘e didn’t take no bloody notice, just kept goin’. I
reckon ‘e killed a dozen before ‘e dropped with no blood left in ‘im. Dick and
Luke was with me, and we all three got our pistols and a blade and we went in
behind ‘im and finished off the job. Come the end of it there ain’t no more
than the three of us left on Star, and it don’t look like you lot came out a
lot lighter, do it?”

“Not as bad as it looks, John. Three of my boys are
dead and five more are chopped up a bit, but the buggers knew how to fight,
mate – they’ve earned their money.”

They made Antigua in convoy, six merchant hulls and
two national vessels making an impressive display and bringing any number of
sour comments from the navy, all of whom were stretched to the full on convoy
duty and had not had the chance to go cruising for a year and more. The admiral
bought in the two national ships and crewed them with promoted young men from
his favourites’ ships and sent them off to work the small islands and cays,
theoretically to suppress the pirates who hung about the shallow waters, but he
too was missing his prize money. The cargos of sugar and molasses sold, as
ever; the foodstuffs went to the plantations and the hulls themselves were
bought up by local merchants, they having lost too many of their own boats to
the French in past months.

It took only three weeks to condemn and dispose of
the prizes, it being one of the rare occasions in which celerity was to the
advantage of the lawyers. None of the few attorneys-at-law on the island
specialised exclusively in the Admiralty Court, there was not enough business
for them to make a living thus, so they all had clients wanting to purchase the
cargo or prizes and whose interests would be best served by speed and who might
not continue to patronise a lawyer who caused delay. They were close to the
hurricane season and the West Indies convoy to England was due to sail very
soon; the merchants wanted their sugars to sell in London this year and the
Law, servant always to the rich and powerful, obliged.

Tom, as senior survivor, was forced to deal with the
prize agent, an experience which stretched his literacy to its utmost limit and
introduced him to the practices of trade, something which he found to be
fascinating. He had to give the final approval to every sale of prize goods and
accept the price negotiated; it was not easy to calculate what discount should
be given for rapid payment or what was the correct valuation to be given to
foreign weights and qualities of molasses and rum. He had to learn quickly, and
to take advice from the agent, accepting the responsibility for decisions that
he did not fully understand. He enjoyed himself.

There were a number of problems to face, not least
being that Blaine had left no instructions to apply in case of his death. The
prize agent believed Mr Blaine to have been the sole owner of the Star, but he
did not know this certainly to be the case and, as well, had no directions for
his heirs and assigns.

“It is unusual, Mr Andrews, for the master of a
privateer to be sole owner, indeed, it is unique in my experience – normally
they have no more than eight of the sixty-fourths - and it will take years to
have enquiries made in England. Do you know if Blaine had family?”

Tom was certain Blaine had been alone in the world,
such kin as he might have had having dropped off when he was discovered to be
an embarrassment rather than a dashing young frigate captain. He knew that
Blaine had never married, said as much and added some interesting extra
information.

Tom had been thinking hard over the few days since
their lucky encounter with the French navy and had decided, amongst other
things, that he was too young to die. He had a scar across his ribs now, as
well as that on his face, and wondered just how lucky he might be next time –
he had got away with it twice now, he told himself and that meant either that
he was fireproof or that he was bloody fortunate. He would be eighteen later in
the year and wanted to celebrate his birthday, not be the centrepiece at a
wake; it was time to say farewell to privateering, which left the question of
what to do next. He had a solution, wondered if he could get away with it.

“I believe, Mr Johnson,” he tentatively offered the
prize agent, “that is, I am pretty much certain from what the captain told me
when he was talking, which he did a lot.” The prize agent knew that Blaine had
been a drunk and that bottle-hounds could never keep their mouths shut, nodded
understandingly; he liked young Andrews, a brave and open-faced lad and very
bright, too young yet to have learned habits of roguery.

“Go on, Mr Andrews.”

“Well, sir, from what he said, the captain wasn’t
the owner as such, he was the front man, you might say, on a big share, maybe,
for three gentlemen who didn’t want to be known to be in the business of
letters of marque. The Earl, an admiral and a right reverend gentleman, I was
told. The Earl thought he should not be getting his hands dirty with our trade,
and the admiral and the bishop aren’t allowed to, not in public.”

Johnson leant back in his chair, thinking quickly in
his turn; Tom’s suggestion was very believable, made much more sense than to
accept Blaine as sole proprietor in his own right, but it created an even
bigger problem. He was Antiguan born, second son of an established merchant and
set up as an attorney and small businessman on the side; he had no contacts in
London who could guide him through the jungles of society and could do himself
great harm if he unwittingly offended a figure as powerful as an earl – there
were two in Dorset, he believed, one of them, Shaftesbury, politically
prominent. Small colonial merchants had no business thrusting themselves to the
attention of such people – a word to the Governor and he could be swatted like
a fly.

“Do you know just who the three proprietors are, Mr
Andrews?”

“Captain Blaine gave me their names, sir, and told
me that they knew me to be one of his junior officers, having approved my name
when he gave it to them.”

The second big lie, the first having been accepted.

“Good! They do not know me, and have no reason to
place any trust in me, but you can, as it were, vouch for my probity, Mr
Andrews. What I would wish to do, Mr Andrews, would be to beg you to act as my
messenger and courier. I would wish to transmit the ship’s share, less my
commission, to these gentlemen, would normally place the transfer in the hands
of my bankers – but that is a very public process, involving much naming of
names! Was I to convert the sums involved into gold and trade bills drawn on
London, then it would be possible for my messenger, well feed, to carry them to
the gentlemen, all anonymously, assuring them that I do not even know their names.”

Over the period of an hour Johnson explained the
nature of trade bills, drawn and discounted, often third or fourth hand and
effectively untraceable without great effort, and set about persuading Tom to
carry such a vast sum for him. They agreed in the end that Joseph should be
asked to travel as well, as paid escort, and that Tom should receive the sum of
two hundred pounds in addition to, of course, all the costs of a passage to
Poole. The sum involved was about twenty thousands of pounds, fifty per centum
of the total value of their prizes, the ship’s share.

Two more weeks, Tom on tenterhooks, and the cash and
bills was all to hand, in two heavy leather valises, and Tom and Joseph took
passage north, to Savannah in the first instance, the convoy having sailed. The
survivors of the Star were paid their full shares, the mothers of the dead
freemen receiving theirs, much to their surprise – they did not expect honest
treatment from white merchants. John, Dick and Luke stayed with the Star, for
lack of anything better to do, and Johnson announced that he would find a
master and officers and a full crew for her, pro tem, until instructions
arrived from England, and send her out again; there were naval officers on
shore and seeking employment, beached or wrecked and superfluous to the
establishment and he was sure that he could man her.

The made their farewells, reached Savannah and found
that they had been directed wrongly, they should have gone to Charleston. In
Charleston a few days afterwards they found two convoys about to sail, the
larger to London, a much smaller group to New York; to Joseph’s surprise he
found himself in a cabin on the largest of the New York bound merchants, Tom
having bought space on a London ship, very publicly, but sailed on another as
the two convoys left harbour together. They reached New York ten days later,
unannounced, unknown and rich.

Chapter Four

New York was vile, rotten, corrupt, a town under sentence
of death, the seat of government for the losing side in a war that still had a
year or two to run but whose eventual end was clear; it had no future as far as
building a business was concerned, but it provided every opportunity for
short-term enrichment. The soldiers could talk of their expectations of winning
next season’s battles, and the navy was slowly regaining control of the seas,
but the reality in civilian eyes was that the Americans and French would win
the war, and have no interest in the frauds and corruption of the previous
regime, being too busy establishing their own, possibly using the same people
at all except the very topmost level.

Profits were to be made from treachery and spying,
looting, smuggling, theft and fraud; government funds were open to every peculator;
licences to trade could be bought from the most junior of clerks; blind eyes
were more expensive, but every general, customs officer and excise man sold them.
For those who already had money, the grease to smooth their way through the
maze of officialdom, New York was an
Eldorado
, a
Golconda
, the
source of unlimited wealth. There was no police force, and the military
provosts were few and untrained in the role, their rank and file sometimes
honest, their officers – careers finished and seconded to the duty because they
were inefficient or cowardly or simply disliked in their regiment - invariably
hungry; the sole limitation on the criminal endeavours of the ordinary man was
the existence of other criminals with their snouts in the trough and no great
desire to share, and opportunities were so great that it was not too difficult
to find one’s own, exclusive swindle. For a young man with money, no scruples
and fewer morals, New York was a paradise on Earth; the hooked grin on Tom’s
face turned into a smile of pure delight. Joseph, ever at Tom’s shoulder, had
been brought up to Bible and Hellfire and disapproved, sometimes loudly, but he
found himself able to accept a share in the profits, though sometimes wrestling
with his conscience as he closed the drawstrings of his purse.

They landed on an autumn morning, looked about at
the expanse of crowded, bustling wharves, a hundred times greater than English
Harbour or Poole, men and horses, wagons and handcarts intermixed, crates and sacks
and packing cases in heaps on the waterfront, moving into and out of warehouses
and ships’ holds, a shouting cacophony, an apparent chaos. First impression
said it was wide-open, an uncontrolled shambles; more careful observation
disclosed two pickets of soldiers, acting as provosts, and dozens of armed men
stood watching over individual warehouses and gangplanks, private guards
hefting clubs and pistols and cutlasses in casually professional fashion, as
ready to kill as to say ‘good-morning’ and as little moved by the one as the
other. The presence of so many on police duty meant there was no law and order
– as young as he was, Tom knew that the dragoons and excise men were only to be
seen when smuggling was rife, when control had been lost – a peaceful
countryside needed no armed men to keep it down, an orderly dockside required
few visible policemen. The Second Mate from their ship passed by as they stood
watching, exchanged a casual nod, and Tom asked him what he should do for
accommodation, could he give a recommendation.

“You’ll have to take a hotel room for the while, sir
– and very expensive that will be, too, because it will have to be one of the
big places, the ones that will have quarters for your boy.”

Joseph scowled and shuffled a pace backwards to a
place of subservience.

“Down at the Battery, sir, Robertson’s has a cook
who can do more than burn a steak, but ‘tis a guinea a night, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr Jones. It will do for the while, till
I can find a place of my own.”

Jones smiled politely, waved and whistled to a
four-wheeled carriage drawn by a pair – suitable to the dignity of a man who
could afford a guinea a night - and gave the driver directions. Joseph picked
up the bags and heaved them aboard before climbing up onto the roof, hissing at
Tom when he made to protest that they had to fit in, to do it properly. Joseph,
coming from Antigua, knew that he was free, but had no illusions that that
meant equal, readied himself to bow and scrape in proper humility, consoling
himself that he was going to be richer than most of the whites surrounding him
and sneering; one day he would take his money and buy some land and be
truly
free, somewhere, in some country where a black man could dare to be rich.

Robertson’s was perfect for Tom’s needs – Mr Jones
had judged him well, it seemed - it was expensive but not genteel, no sprigs of
the English aristocracy, actual or would-be, were to be found inside its doors,
it catered exclusively for merchants and polite criminals, those who wore
collars and washed their shirts quite often. He laid down fourteen guineas in
advance, ringing each coin on the mahogany counter, and took a bedroom and
sitting room for himself and a separate cubicle in the quarters for Joseph, not
a bunk in the common servants room, meals included. The bags were sealed with
quantities of wax and placed in the strongroom, itself under permanent armed
guard and generally reckoned to be secure.

On the first evening he came to an amicable
arrangement with one of the several unattached young ladies to be found in the
public rooms of the hotel, a pretty blonde-haired girl about two years his
senior in age, a lifetime in experience; apart from the obvious reason, he had
noticed that none of the men were unaccompanied – a complaisant young miss was
a necessary accessory - a statement of success. Jenny knew everybody as well,
was able to steer him towards a number of useful contacts, found him an
attorney who knew of a warehouse with its own living quarters on the docks and
was able to arrange its rental at very reasonable terms, for coin in advance –
gold was in short supply, most transactions being made in various forms of
paper. Tom presumed that she took a cut on each deal, but
nothing
came
for free in this town and she had a living to make, a future to secure in a
very uncertain world.

It took a week to close the lease and furnish the
living quarters, Joseph doing the actual work of purchasing and moving
furniture and equipping the kitchen, again a statement of wealth and position –
young Mr Andrews kept his own black, did not get his own hands dirty. Joseph
carefully referred to himself as ‘the Andrews’ servant’, implying that he had
been a house slave and was still in servitude – freemen were distrusted but
slaves were assumed to be stupid and docile – he overheard to their profit many
a conversation for being treated as a dumb animal.

Jenny also was able to introduce Tom to Mr Robert
Chawleigh – ‘call me Bob’ – an ‘agent’ and ‘trader in bits and bobs, ho-ho’ -
who, she said, knew everybody and could be relied upon to point his clients in
the right direction and, most importantly, stayed bought, never a whisper of a
double-cross from Bob, everybody knew he was straight. Bob was looking for a
man with a warehouse, a discreet gentleman who could buy and store a few tons
of tobacco and then arrange to ship it out without any fuss. There was a
planter ‘down the coast’ who had a consignment he wanted to move urgently – he
needed the money, could not wait the months involved in shipping his crop to London
and selling it.

Tom showed very interested, wanted to know more,
arranged to meet a representative of the gentleman in question, the meanwhile
discovering all he could about tobacco growing; it was soon clear that the
nearest tobacco plantations were all well south, firmly in rebel-held lands,
deep in the colonies, their ports blockaded. The English newssheets were
available, with prices of goods at auction – Virginia tobacco was in
increasingly short supply, its price rising every month in London; there was
scope for profit. Customs could be squared, trading licences procured at little
cost, but it might be wiser to attempt to conceal the tobacco in another cargo,
give an appearance of legitimacy; rather than buy hold space it would be better
to charter his own vessel.

Joseph set to work to discover a legitimate cargo,
bought in best-quality seasoned timber for furniture making – oak and maple and
walnut – and beaver skins for the hatters, commodities always in demand in
London. Tom demanded two hundred tons of tobacco of Bob, disconcerting him, for
he had been trying to move a river-boat load of fifteen tons.

“Can’t slip that much through the patrols, Tom, it
ain’t possible.”

“Can’t be done then, Bob?”

They were sat to dinner in Robertson’s, both enjoying
the change from the well-done beef that was all that was normally available
elsewhere, as well as taking advantage of the unusually widely spaced tables
that ensured privacy.

“Can’t be done the way I was first thinking, Tom.
The tobacco warehouses are jam-packed full though, so it is merely a question
of seeking another way, we could find a thousand tons if we wanted. If we
cannot sneak the goods through, then they must come openly, preferably in an
official convoy run by the military. We will need to buy papers and permits to
load our goods onto military wagons - Major Jackson of the Commissariat who has
an unfortunate taste for slow horses and fast women, could well be open to
persuasion; settling day comes in two weeks and his credit is at an end, I know.
Only yesterday an acquaintance begged me to pass him the hard word, in fact.”

The expression was new to Tom, he asked what he
meant.

“Pay up, on time, or go for a swim in the Hudson,
wearing lead boots.”

“Ah! That could be a very short dip – sounds like a
very fair alternative, though. How much is he in for?”

“Only two hundred, but it’s not the first time he
has had to beg for credit and he’s run out of friends – he could be topped with
very little fuss, as an example to others.”

“Two hundred is always available to a friend, Bob,
and more, perhaps. Could I meet the Major, or should everything be done at a
distance?”

“I shall arrange for you to meet him, Tom.”

Tom relaxed as he left the hotel – Jenny had
suggested, very strongly, that he should learn to talk like a gentleman, it
would enable him to meet them on equal terms, and she had been teaching him,
correcting his aitches and broadening his vocabulary – she said her father had
been a curate and had wanted her to become a governess, but she had found more
congenial ways of making a living, coming out to New York with an officer when
she was no more than sixteen. It was still hard work though, the Dorset burr
very hard to shift from the tongue – but, he accepted, he needed to talk ‘like
a gentleman’ if he was to fleece the gentry, and they had the most money.

Major Jackson was plump, self-indulgent and a fool –
not unintelligent, not unwise in the ways of the world, but convinced that life
should be easy, that he should not have to work for a living, that he had a
right to the comfort he had been born to. He was a second son, his late father
a baronet, his brother settled on the family estates in Huntingdonshire on five
thousand a year, and himself having inherited only a very few thousands from
his mother; he ignored the fact that his brother had bought his commissions for
him, for that had been no more than was right for the head of the family,
merely deplored that he should be expected to keep himself and his family on
his pay. His family was now no more than a daughter, his wife and son having
been taken by typhus a year before, and he regretted bitterly that he could not
send his girl back to England, to live with his brother, but he could not
afford the cost of a passage for her and a maid. His expenses were the least a
gentleman could consider, and his gambling losses just one of those unfortunate
burdens the well-born had to bear; nothing was his fault, nothing was in his
power to amend – he was sure Mr Andrews could appreciate his position.

Mr Andrews appreciated only too well, so much so
that he offered a ‘temporary’ loan to tide the major over his current
difficulties – a mere monkey, five hundred pounds. As for terms, unimportant,
it could be repaid as and when the major might find it convenient – the major
could discuss that with Bob, at his leisure. There was no mention of anything
so unsubtle as a bribe, not even a hint that the major might wish to offer a
favour in return – they were merely gentlemen together.

It took two months, but on a cold January afternoon
a military convoy pulled into the yard of Tom’s warehouse, fifty of the largest
artillery wagons discharging two tons each of wrapped bales of tobacco – the
wrapping to disguise the nature of the goods, although the smell was pungent
and unmistakable at fifty yards; the wagons returned a week later with the
second half of the consignment. Bob had arranged for the leaf to be brought by
small coastal boats - tiny yawls and cutters and ketches that normally carried
no more than market gardeners and their vegetables from village to local town -
in consignments of five or ten tons at a time to a jetty a few miles down
coast; the boats would have stood out in New York itself, obviously out of
place, so the last stage had been made overland.

Another five days and Tom’s chartered ship docked at
the wharf opposite to his doors and his cargo was loaded, clean and dry and
bilge-free. She sailed into the storms of winter, her master quite without
apprehension – she was a new ship and well-found, would stand up to anything
short of a hurricane, and there were fewer hazards in the cold months –
cruising men-of-war less often to be found and private ships of war, never.