The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  He remembered the awful voyage from Sallyport, across Spithead, to the ship anchored off the tail of the Isle of Wight. He remembered a desperate fight for freedom, heavy repeated blows, a bone-shattering descent from the pier to the jetty to the cutter, a long heaving voyage of spray, tears and sickness.

  By the time he had been hauled roughly up the steep side of the frigate he was practically insensible. Exhaustion, misery, rage, drunkenness. They had all taken their toll. And he felt the hopelessness well up once more. The hopelessness of trying to get a response from the stony-blank face of the fair-haired young midshipman who had cheated him.

  Thomas lay in a heap, sprawled in the noisome liquid mixture of beasts’ manure and his own vomit, crying weakly into the crook of his elbow. Exactly why it had happened he could not fathom still. But what had happened he knew too well. He had been pressed – or tricked, or kidnapped, the words did not matter – into His Majesty’s Navy. He was on board a ship and he would never see his home or family again.

  Before his tortured brain lapsed into stupor, Thomas remembered something else. As he had stumbled across the deck, he had seen a vision in scarlet. A small company of marines had stood by one of the masts, with long muskets and cocked hats. They had swayed and swum in his sight, until one round, fair-skinned head had stood out from the rest.

  Thomas had stopped, reached out, groaned. ‘Silas!’ he had shouted.

  But the shout had come out as a drunken grunt. And the fair-skinned head had not flinched, had not displayed a flicker of emotion or recognition.

  Thomas had been hustled and pushed into the bowels of the ship, into the hot stinking darkness, and into a pen with the sheep. And oh, they had been sick, both beasts and boy.

  *

  In the same afternoon another man from this neck of Hampshire, a man named Jesse Broad, had enjoyed the same soldier’s wind that had blown William Bentley’s cutter to Portsmouth and back without a tack. It blew a big lugger called Beauregard straight as an arrow from the coast of France to the eastern Wight. Out in mid-Channel the stiff westerly produced a good-sized lop, but the two lugsails were reefed not because of any enmity in the weather.

  Broad and his friend Hardman had consulted several times with Joel Gauthier, the French skipper of the lugger, and all had agreed they must slow down or reach the English coast too early.

  Hardman had ragged Jesse Broad, in any case, about the earliness of the trip. Normally the whole affair would take place under cover of darkness. But this time it was different. This time they were not running a real cargo – just a couple of small barrels for ‘personal consumption’ – and Broad was determined to be home before dawn, in safety and comfort. Hardman too, really. They were bound not to be late for the christening of young Jem, Broad’s first son, and Gauthier had been more than ready to risk the channel in daylight, infested as it was with British men-of-war, for the sake of his friends and partners.

  About four miles off the island, in the pitch blackness of the autumn night, Gauthier hauled his wind while his crew helped Broad and Hardman launch their wherry. She was a light boat, fast and quiet, built to a drawing of Jesse’s own. They made her bow fast to a stay with a painter, picked her up bodily, six of them, spun her in the air like a top, and heaved. There was a splash, and the wherry was bobbing alongside.

  Two small barrels went on board, then four oars. Jesse Broad and Hardman shook hands with Gauthier warmly. They reminded each other of their next rendezvous, exchanged greetings to families and friends, shook hands again. A few seconds later the Frenchman put up his helm to get some way on, then went about smartly and took the other leg of his soldier’s breeze back to France. Broad and Hardman, guided by the wind on their sides, the set of the waves, the glittering stars, headed for the tail of the island.

  *

  William Bentley knew that one day he would be a great sea officer. He knew, sitting hunched in the sternsheets of the cutter, cold and stiff, that if anything was spotted tonight, he would be the one to spot it. He did not know why, because Higgins, although loathsome, was wide awake and watching, and at least half the boat’s crew were good steady men with eyes like hawks. But know it he did.

  He sat tensely, as he had sat for hours now, watching the rolling waves and the sparkling sky. Save for the occasional creaking of the stern oars, silence. Outside the boat, the splashing of the creaming seas, the low drone of the wind. Far away astern and to larboard a few small lights of Portsmouth. To starboard, on the island, nothing. Then Higgins, beside him, said quietly, ‘Well gone two bells. I doubt we’ll not see anything tonight.’

  William ground his teeth in fury. What could one do with a man like that? My God, why did he not light a lantern and have done with it! The muscles of his cheeks ached with hatred. Hatred and the effort to reconcentrate his hearing.

  But it was no good. He kept on hearing the voice, echoing and echoing. ‘Well gone two bells, mutter mutter; doubt anything tonight, mutter mutter.’ The night seemed full of muttering.

  ‘Pity we could not have invited Joel as well, for that matter,’ said Hardman. ‘He’s a hell of a fellow to have at a shindy.’

  ‘Hell of a drinker,’ grunted Broad, as his weather blade bit deeper into a sea than he expected. ‘Joel, my friend, is a demon when he has the brandy in him.’

  ‘Well gone two. Doubt anything tonight...’

  William Bentley cursed the muttering, cursed Higgins, cursed everything. Then the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise.

  ‘Higgins!’ he hissed. ‘Give orders, sir! There’s a boat out there!’

  ‘His sister too,’ said Hardman. ‘A fine woman that. Damn the war, I say.’

  ‘The war may save your life then,’ Broad replied. ‘For Louise would eat you, friend Hardman. Bones and everything.’ Their laughter drifting over the water convinced Higgins, and probably saved William Bentley an unpleasant reward for his incautious mode of addressing the lieutenant. The seamen whirled on their thwarts, braced their feet, and carefully shipped their oars, already muffled in canvas at the rowlocks. Higgins withdrew his pistols from their oilskin covers and cocked them. William Bentley cleared a heavy cudgel. The boat needed to be rowed silently less than two hundred yards to be directly in the path of the wherry. He marvelled once more at his uncle’s brilliance. He had predicted the smugglers’ course past the island to exactitude.

  What was more, the scoundrels were still too far out to even bother to look for trouble.

  ‘A fine French wife like Louise would be the making of me,’ Hardman was saying. ‘The English maids strike so dull when viewed—’

  Apart from a few curses, these were the last words he ever uttered. A bullet pierced his throat when one of Higgins’ pistols went off in the heat of the struggle. Jesse Broad was knocked unconscious with the loom of an oar. Until the second the wherry struck it, they had no inkling that the cutter was there. It was neatly done.

  As they pulled back to the Welfare, Bentley fumed. He was almost exploding with suppressed rage. A fine strong smuggling man lost. The primest of prime seamen, and fighters too. All thanks to that fool, that dolt, of a third lieutenant and his stupid pistols. He was enraged.

  They cast the wherry adrift as being too light for naval use. In it they left the body of Hardman, tossing gently in his own thick blood. But the barrels of brandy went with them.

  Four

  Jesse Broad was put in irons when he was brought on board the Welfare. The boatswain, a bull of a man called Allgood, had noted Captain Swift’s observations on the state of the crew, and he knew a good addition to it when he saw one. Jesse Broad was powerful, impressive – and a seaman. He could also almost smell his own fireside from where they lay at anchor, and would run if given half a chance. Jack Allgood put him in irons.

  Four hours later, two of the boatswain’s crew – he dubbed them mates, although only one was rated so – unshackled Jesse and led him to a large wooden washtub set up near the foremast. The day was cold and bright, muc
h colder than the day before, the wind having backed to the east of south. It was blowing quite hard, and the Welfare snubbed uncomfortably at her great cable in the short lop. Broad looked towards Langstone, where he was shortly due to see his only son christened. The muscles in his neck worked. The home shore was as clear as a bright model, scoured by the clean wind. It seemed near enough to reach out and touch.

  When the boatswain’s mates ordered him to strip he did not argue. For several years Broad had avoided the Navy, despite being as prime a target of the press as any man ashore, but he was not ignorant of the service. These boatswain’s mates were tough and brutal men. One carried a rope’s end of careful fancy-work, ending in a knuckly Turk’s-head the size of a chestnut. The other had a rattan cane that would lift the skin like wet paper. Behind them stood a gang of villainous sailors – landmen, rather; waisters and other scum. The washing party.

  Jesse Broad was a little surprised by this. He was clearly to get the full treatment, as laid down on His Majesty’s receiving ships for pressed men. But as he was not on board a receiving ship, and as they knew he would make a fine seaman, he could only think they meant to humiliate him, to break his spirit. He knew the ship by reputation; what seafarer in these parts had not heard of savage Daniel Swift?

  Still, it seemed an odd sort of way to win the obedience of a good hand.

  Standing naked in the biting wind, staring levelly at the dribbling ‘barber’ who hacked at his hair with a pair of blunt shears, Broad heard a commotion, and saw a sight that explained the situation in part. He was not the only new arrival. There was to be a receiving party.

  Thomas Fox, still ill, his head splitting from gin and misery, was pushed along the deck at arm’s length by a laughing bully with a handspike. If he faltered or stumbled, the long wooden bar was jabbed viciously into his smock where his kidneys would be. He yelped like a dog and sobbed like a child. Thomas did not see the coast of Hampshire or the Isle of Wight. He saw nothing. Just a spinning kaleidoscope of bright sky, green sea, strange sea things of deck, mast and cordage, flashes of laughing faces, brown and leering, cruel and taunting. He reached the foremast

  in a rush, propelled by a sharp thrust from the handspike which brought him bang up against something soft and frightening. He opened his eyes, and looked at the strong pulsing throat of a naked man.

  All sorts of strange notions flashed then through his brain. He was not in heaven, surely? This could not be an angel? In hell, perhaps? A naked man standing by a steaming tub, surrounded by wild-eyed devils in aprons.

  The nearest devil, a gibbering thing with a crooked eye and a grin of unmitigated evil, was making passes over the head of the naked sinner with a pair of wicked-looking scissors.

  He stared into the strong brown face of the naked sinner. It was kindly, and did not flinch from his hot gaze or panting breath.

  ‘Are we in hell?’ he whispered.

  The eyes regarded him for some short time. The eyes crinkled, the lips moved in half a smile.

  ‘That we are, my friend,’ said the naked man.

  There was a whistle of rattan, and the teeth, lips and eyes snapped shut.

  ‘Silence!’ roared a boatswain’s mate.

  Thomas would not, could not, take his clothes off when ordered, but it availed him nothing. They were torn from him, and he was hurled naked into the tub. There he was held down while sailors with brooms scrubbed him till his skin bled. His hair was lopped off, his skull roughly shaved. An evil-smelling yellow powder was poured into the water and rubbed into his skin, ears, eyes, mouth.

  After the washing and delousing, Jesse Broad and Thomas Fox stood once more on deck, and watched their clothes flung overboard. The smuggler, silent as the grave, blue with cold, stared straight ahead. Thomas, bleeding from one ear and several scalp wounds, snuffled noisily. He still tried to cover his nakedness.

  ‘Now, my bright boys,’ said Mr Allgood, appearing before them with a bundle of clothes, ‘here we have clothes fitting for a prince or even a king. Slops we call ’em, on account they comes out of the slop room, and you receives ’em by courtesy and consent of His Gracious Majesty. Who will, I might remind you, require payment for ’em in full to be docked out of your pay, you lucky sailormen.’

  He sorted out a great grey flannel shirt, which he held up in front of Thomas like a London tailor.

  ‘’Ere, you scrawny, ill-favoured, half-starved lubber,’ he said.

  ‘This is the smallest article of garmentry on board of the Welfare, which is much too good for you an’all, having been took off the corpse of a Spanish nobleman no less. But put it on and shut your gob, before my mates shuts it for you.’

  Fox took the shirt gratefully, and struggled into it. The neck was so wide his shoulders almost came through as well as his head, and it reached below his knees. Next he was given wide-bottomed trousers, a short wool jacket, neckcloth, and a belt of rope. He felt better dressed, although the slops were old and worn and much too loose for comfort.

  ‘Now you, my bucko,’ cried the boatswain, chucking a striped shirt at Jesse Broad. ‘Dress up fine now, for you’re off to see the captain very soon, to share a drop of fine French brandy that was delivered last night by a friend! Silk, I should have brought for you, damn me, but we ain’t none. So good old English flannel must serve!’

  Broad did not break his silence as he dressed. The clothes would suit well enough, although he regretted the loss of his own better ones – in a storm at sea these would provide poor protection. But he did not intend to face a storm at sea in them, or the Welfare.

  He looked at the figure beside him. The poor boy was yellow-faced, weeping still. Tufts of black hair stuck from his head at angles. His mother, if he had one, would not have known him. A farmer’s boy no doubt. And no doubt illegally pressed.

  ‘Not in hell, boy,’ he said abruptly. ‘For there is always hope while there is life. Obey orders, and keep counsel. You will come through.’

  He said no more, for the rope’s end banged into his back and made him gasp. The farmer’s lad turned a pair of large, swimming eyes upon him, and stared. Deep inside them, something that looked like hope glimmered for an instant.

  Inside the captain’s cabin the two stood like cattle at a market. Broad noted the wide polished table, the rich hangings, the heavy darkwood furniture. Only a frigate, but decked out like a flagship. Swift was reputed to be a rich man.

  Obviously rumour was not dressed in her liar’s garb on this occasion.

  Nor had rumour lied about the appearance of the man.

  He was small, but bulky and well-made in his blue coat of the finest, and his many-ruffled silk shirt. An air of confidence, elegance, self-satisfaction sat on his shoulders, and he had an easy, arrogant smile on his handsome face.

  The biggest feature on it was a fine, hooked nose, a great sickle of bone that give him the look of an emperor. But the features that captured the gaze were Swift’s eyes. They were pale; of no colour that Broad could distinguish, but pale. Cold and watchful and pale. They watched him now, unblinking. Broad watched back, but he knew more than to stare into the captain’s eyes. He dropped his own as if in deference, while in fact taking in the rest of the man’s figure. A cold, dangerous, cruel sort of a fellow, he decided. Rumour had not lied.

  To Swift’s right sat his first lieutenant, a thin, Irish-looking man of Broad’s age – about thirty. He had flaming red hair and wet lips. To the captain’s left, the second. A butter-barrel of a fat man, with a face like a suet pudding. He was known to the people, it later turned out, as Plumduff. Eyes like a pig.

  Behind Swift, a corporal of marines, at attention easily on the uneasily pitching deck. At the end of the table, in powdered wig of all things, the captain’s clerk, at a ledger. He had a quill and horn of ink ready. Broad looked through the square stern windows. He could see Point Gilkicker, the green scrub stretching away behind it. He wondered at the grandeur of the reception he and the boy were getting, and decided the officers must ha
ve gathered for a more important purpose. For a moment there was silence. Except, of course, for the noises of the ship and the sea and the wind.

  ‘You, sir,’ said Swift, ‘I propose to rate as able. You are a smuggler, a rogue, a buggering villain. Doubtless the son of a whore, probably the husband of one. But that is my proposal nevertheless. Have you anything to say?’

  The first lieutenant, Hagan, licked his lips. Broad stared over the captain’s head, at Gilkicker. A coasting brig hove into view, scampering towards Portsmouth harbour. As she rounded the point, braces and tacks were tended. In less than an hour she would be alongside in Shitty Corner.

  ‘Your compatriot, your fellow villain, was killed. I might have wished such a fate to overtake you, but God was not kind. I must make room for you in my ship. I propose to rate you able. To hand, reef and steer. What do you say?’

  Broad stared. He sensed a movement behind him.

  Someone preparing to swing. Swift raised his hand in a small negative.

  ‘Answer me, able seaman.’

  ‘Aye aye sir,’ said Broad. Swift smiled a tiny smile. ‘Good,’ he said. Then: ‘You are not the ordinary run of fellow, a fool could see that. You probably know that the manner of your coming on board of my ship was a thought irregular. You probably know that I should, to be within the letter of the law, have you taken to Portsmouth to be tried and hanged. You possibly even know that I cannot, in theory, rate you as able from the start of things. Well?’

  ‘Aye aye sir.’

  ‘What else do you know, I wonder? That I found the brandy excellent? That I need good seamen? That you will run at the very first opportunity?’

  Broad pondered, but his mind felt stodgy, muddled.

  He watched the coasting brig, fast disappearing. He had protection, in theory, he and his fellows were immune. But here, now, such influence – always nebulous – counted for nothing. Swift was the law, and no protection on the earth need sway him from his purpose. Yes, thought Broad, I will run. But what does this blue-coated, fish-eyed man mean by saying it?