The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers
Page 17
Everyone laughed at this. Hagan licked his lips, pleased with his witticism.
Plumduff added: ‘If he recovers. Mr Adamson says…’ His voice trailed off. At the mention of the surgeon, Swift’s face had darkened. The fat second lieutenant gulped. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said miserably.
‘That damned surgeon has overstepped his duty, in my opinion,’ the third lieutenant said ingratiatingly. William sneered inwardly. Trust Higgins to try the smarmy line. His uncle would soon see through that!
But Swift turned to the man with a faint smile. ‘Aye, Mr Higgins,’ he said. ‘You are damned right.’
Over the mutton, well-seasoned as it was the last edible meat of a sheep killed days before, the conversation dwelt on the way Joyce had withstood the lash. It was generously allowed that villain or not, drunk or not, he had shown almost incredible fortitude.
‘Like a great beast of burden,’ young Jack Evans squeaked.
‘Why, on my father’s farmlands we have bulls that are smaller than Henry Joyce. Aye, and weaker.’
‘I would rather speak of him as a wild beast,’ put in William. ‘A beast of burden may be strong, but it is also tractable. I consider Joyce to be more a…lion. Or…a wolf?’ He brightened. ‘No, a bear, a great wild bear. For did you not remark his eyes as he was being flogged? They glowed, yes glowed. They were small and red.’ He looked at the attentive faces around him. ‘Yes indeed,’ he finished. ‘He is a wild animal, no beast of burden.’
Later on, over good Cheshire cheese and a dark powerful wine that made William’s head sing, the captain dropped a bombshell.
The conversation had drifted from Joyce, and others of the people who reminded the assembled company more of animals than men, skated over the conduct of the warrant officers and the peculiar obscenity of the purser’s revolting form, and returned by a roundabout route to the surgeon and the dead marine. Swift, more genial now, was prepared to joke about him.
‘Darting here and there with his little black brandy bottle,’ he said. ‘I should not be surprised if he had not poisoned that malingerer just to score a point.’
‘Like we poisoned poor old Mr Marner,’ said James Finch breathlessly. It was the first time he had dared open his mouth in such great company, and he was flushed and excited, as drunk as fun. He was ignored.
‘It was an unfortunate episode, however,’ put in Captain Craig, the marine officer. ‘My men were deeply disturbed by it. It is not a good thing, to have a comrade drop before your eyes like that.’
‘Indeed,’ replied Swift. ‘The lengths to which some people will go are amazing.’
This remark caused an uncomfortable pause. William, whose mind had admittedly grown fuzzy, could not quite make out what it meant. Apparently he was not the only one.
‘Well,’ continued Craig, clearing his throat. ‘Perhaps the funeral will improve their morale. A little drum-beating and the popping of their muskets into the air. That should perk them up.’
‘No,’ said Captain Swift. His voice was quiet, but it cut like a knife. Everyone was stilled.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ Craig asked at last.
‘I said “no”, Captain Craig. No, sir. No drums. No muskets. No damned funeral at all if I have my way.’
The air in the cabin had become tense. Hagan licked his lips with a small wet sound.
Captain Swift went on: ‘That man was a shirker. He had lain in that sick-bay since we left England and refused to move a muscle.’ He jerked his head up, the big nose suddenly reminding William of a shark’s fin. ‘And God knows, Captain Craig, there is little enough for a marine to do in any case.’
The tone was deliberate, the insult unequivocal. William flicked his eyes about, intensely embarrassed. Everyone’s hands were resting on the table, unmoving. Jimmy Finch had turned a delicate pale shade of green.
‘May one ask, sir,’ said Craig levelly, ‘what are your intentions?’
Swift blew air noisily through his nostrils.
‘You may, sir. I cannot, of course, forbid a funeral. Even scum like that cannot be hurled overboard like carrion. But it will be plain and simple. The plainest and the simplest. He will be slipped over the side with a prayer and a promise. I will make the promise: that every damned malingering dog I catch in future will not even get so Christian a burial.’
Every man and boy at the table was looking downwards. They raised their eyes, reluctantly, when Swift gave a short laugh. On his face was one of his strange, dazzling, smiles. It seemed to William most inappropriate.
‘Well,’ said Swift. ‘Have you anything to say, Captain? You may be frank with me.’
‘Well sir,’ Craig replied. ‘Then I will be frank. I do not like it. I do not like it at all.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Hmm… Because, I think, because—’
‘Because your men will not like it,’ Swift interrupted icily. ‘That is why. Because you fear you may have trouble with your men.’
Craig bowed his head as if in deference to the captain’s opinion.
‘Well, sir,’ continued Swift. ‘I say this. Damn your men’s opinions, and damn their feelings.’ His voice rose.
‘This, gentlemen, is what is wrong on board my ship, and this is what I shall stamp out. There is a laxity; there is a softness. These people are scum, and they are getting away with what they will. All of you, all you officers, all you silly drunken boys, are playing their game. And you will cease! I want this damned ship tightened up, do you hear? And I want to see you do it. Now.’
There was a long silence, broken only by the whistle of air in Swift’s thin nose. He had ended his speech loud, very loud. But when he spoke again, his voice was quiet.
‘Now gentlemen, will you be so good as to take a little port with me? And let us converse of happier matters.’
They did, and soon he had them all laughing, at stories of his boyhood in a ship of the line commanded by a real old character. William’s confusion gradually faded away as the port mellowed him, and smoothed the rough edges of his drunkenness. Of course Uncle Daniel was right. There was only one way to deal with scum, and they had been lax.
The fine weather, perhaps, lulling them into a false sense of comfort. He determined, fuzzily, that he would mend his ways. And the people’s.
*
In the part of the Welfare where Fulman’s mess were taking their dinner, wine was also being drunk. By now the small quantity of beer remaining in the casks had been declared unfit even for seamen to drink. This unprecedented decision had been forced on the reluctant Butterbum by Mr Allgood; probably, it was generally felt, more out of a desire to thwart that character than for the benefit of Jolly Jack. The wine was a thin and highly acid white, but to the people it was paradisial after the vile dregs of ale, which by this time were graced with tiny wiggling creatures that made one cough.
The men’s food was also beginning to show signs of life, which most of them bore in good part. But to some, who were laughed at as being too lordly for their own good, eating was becoming a trial. Thomas Fox was one of them. The ‘bread’, which was as hard as rock and crawling with weevils and maggots, he found particularly repulsive. Peter watched him banging it and picking at it in a vain attempt to separate the livestock from the substance.
‘You’m a funny one, Tommy Fox,’ he· said. ‘Why you trying to get rid of them harmless creatures? They gives that bread its taste.’ Thomas did not reply. At home, in those far-off days that were like a dream, bread had been a joy to him.
‘Anyone’d think as how you was a proper gent,’ continued Peter. ‘Them fat white maggots is good to the tongue. They cools you down on days like this.’
Old Fulman butted in.
‘Give it a little rest, eh Peter boy? I expect young Tommy do recall a little better grub than you do.’
Peter smiled, chewing heartily at a mouthful of rancid beef, bone-hard biscuit, bitter weevils and slimy, cooling maggots. He swallowed, washing down the rough bits with a long draught of wine.
Thomas, toying with the vile food, flicked his eyes up at the bright, jolly face. It was true, he had not. Oh God, mother, mother! Fresh bread and eggs and cheese and all. Oh God, oh God!
‘No, I’ll wager. Why some days, Tommy, I fought the very dogs in the street for bones that fell from the slaughterer’s cart!’ He looked round, as if expecting to be contradicted. ‘It is true,’ he said.
No one contradicted him. Most were too busy eating.
Jesse Broad, who like Thomas found the food almost unbearable, did not bother to say so. He ate doggedly, rather than starve. We all get there in the final reckoning, he thought. Poor little Peter started life eating such filth, I come to it now and must school myself until I stomach it. The maggots did cool the mouth and throat in fact, and the weevils did impart a certain bitterness to the hard, tasteless biscuit. He almost gagged at the thought. The fatness of those maggots!
‘I saw yon poor marine sewn in for burial not two hours since,’ Peter said brightly, after a pause.
‘Hold thy tongue awhile, Peter,’ repeated Grandfather Fulman irritably. ‘We are at supper. We do not want to hear of dead men.’
‘Aye,’ said Peter, ‘but it was wonderful interesting when all’s said. Did you know he did stitch his nose in with him? The sailmaker? He run that great curved needle straight through the poor dead fellow’s beak.’
Broad looked at Fulman enquiringly. He could half believe any barbarity on board a Navy ship. Fulman tutted gently.
‘My, Peter, how you do chatter on,’ he said comfortably.
He belched.
‘Is it true?’ asked Broad. ‘About the fellow’s nose? I’ll skin you, Peter,’ he added, mock threateningly.
Grandfather Fulman belched again.
‘Oh aye, true enough, friend Jesse.’ He indicated a mess of gristly beef on Broad’s platter that looked abandoned. ‘Ah, by the way…if I ain’t being forward…’
Broad pushed it across with a faint shiver. The old man filled his mouth and chewed solidly. When he had swallowed, he went on.
‘Ah, well they say it is this way. When a fellow dies on board of a ship and the sailmaker sews him into his last overcoat, as it were, there’s always one more chance. Which is, of course, that he’s not so much dead as dead drunk.’
Peter squeaked with laughter.
‘Nay Peter, you may laugh, but I have seen it more than once. A fellow can go that rigid in rum you’d not credit there could be breath left in him. Gospel. Any road, friend Jesse, that’s the tale. With the last stitch, the sailmaker drives that great needle through the corpse’s – right through the horny part, there, where it do hurt the worst. And many’s the corpse, I suppose, that must have sat right up at that, a-howling blue bloody murder and calling for another dram!’
Peter nodded vigorously.
‘I seen it, Jesse,’ he said earnestly. Then added with a giggle: ‘Tell you what, though! That bugger didn’t jump! Him’s as dead as this beef!’
‘Aye,’ put in the taciturn Samuel. ‘And a lot deader than the biscuit.’
There was another silence, a shipboard silence. The noise of the sea, the noise of the rigging, slatting from time to time as the wind fluked. And the louder noise, the strange noise, of Padraig Doyle eating. Broad watched the blind man’s mouth as he tried to masticate like other men, wondering dully whatever could have happened to have brought him to such a state. Without a tongue he could hardly eat the hard, stringy naval fare. Awful, dreadful things had happened and were happening in rebel Ireland, Jesse knew. What tales of torture would poor Doyle tell if someone had not ripped his tongue out? Or had he lost it, and his eyes, in an accident? It was not likely, he decided. And decided, also, that his own sufferings since the night of his capture were a minor thing compared with the worlds of misery that were a commonplace on this awful ship.
‘They do say, Tommy,’ piped up Peter gaily, ‘as how you’ll be made to run the gantlope for the affair of them four chickens.’
‘Hush hush,’ said Grandfather Fulman. ‘Leave it be, Peter.’
‘Well, ’tis only a rumour I dare say,’ Peter added, a little chastened. But after a short while he chattered on.
‘Old Butterbum will put it to the gentlemen, you see, that by stealing them, you was robbing your shipmates and so must run it. Well that’s a fine joke, for when did we taste chicken last?’
‘Now shut your silly mouth,’ said Fulman harshly.
Surprisingly, Thomas spoke. It was the first time he had uttered a word to his messmates for days. He did not look up, however, and his voice was thin with misery.
‘What is a gantlope, Peter?’ he said. ‘And why must I run it?’
Everyone stared at him. Except for Peter, who rattled on in delight.
‘Oh it is terrible, a terrible thing,’ he said, the words tumbling over each other in his excitement. ‘You will be carried in a barrel like a king, and all your shipmates will line the decks, all the people in two great rows. Each man shall have a rope’s end, including me an’all I do suppose, and we must give you great blows on the head as you go along – carried, you will be, in a barrel.’
He paused for breath. No one tried to stop him. No one tried to speak or move.
‘We must all beat you hard, see, Tom, or else we shall get beat in turn. And the master-at-arms shall walk ahead of you backwards, with his sword at your throat, to make sure you are not drawn through the lines too fast. Oh aye, I forgot – and you shall receive a half-dozen with the cat before you get in your barrel.
‘And…’ His voice was tailing off. He seemed seized with sudden awareness of what the words all meant. ‘And afterwards too… Another half a dozen… Oh.’
His eyes were wide and horrified. His mouth hung open.
He was spilling his wine.
Thomas Fox was moaning quietly, the Irishman’s arm around his shoulder.
Nineteen
As the Welfare slowly approached the Line, as she lost all last vestiges of steady, useful wind and entered the band of hot, light, fluky airs known as the doldrums, Broad lost all traces of the strange contentment he had intermittently felt at the mere fact of being a seaman at sea.
Whereas before the ship had plunged and sung, filling him with wild joy despite himself by her living, vibrant beauty, she was now a floundering, sluggish thing. The fitful breezes left her alone for hours on end, then took her briefly and cruelly, often aback. The thrum of taut cordage and bellying sails had been replaced by the slap of idle ropes against swinging spars, the flapping of heavy, leaden canvas that hung like dense sheets from the creaking yards. She was becalmed, bewildered, the wild fronds of green weed floating out along her sides to prove how little headway she was making. Usually it was none. And these doldrums went on and on. She lopped interminably in the brazen sea, glowing with heat, the bright, harsh sun bubbling the pitch on her deck planks, bleaching even the tarred ropes that swung uneasily aloft.
Below decks it was bad enough. As they had driven down into warmer latitudes the heat in the men’s living quarters had risen day by day. At night, at first, it had grown cooler, with damp, salt air blowing softly through the open ports and hatches. But for days the night air had been as hot as that which stirred by day. On the upper deck it was stifling, almost unbreathable. But below it was far worse. Every man lived in a bath of sweat and grime, every article of clothing was stinking and stiff with salt. The drinking water was undrinkable, had been for ages; the beer was condemned; the wine and grog aggravated thirst, not assuaged it.
Then there were the bugs. The bugs, the lice, the cockroaches. The biting, stinging, stinking insects. Not a piece of bedding that did not have its full complement of ‘passengers’. Not a shirt or pair of trousers. The men spent hours every day searching seams, bursting blood-filled bodies, heaving useful i
tems over the side. But the invaders marched on, invincible. The stench of cockroaches, the buzz and tick as they flew about in the dark and bumped into things, was awful. Even on deck, where many men now slept, they nibbled at dirty ears and eyebrows, chewed at calloused skin.
From the bilges, the underlying smell of sewage that Broad had noticed right from the first, had taken on a new power. It overlay everything, and with a vengeance. The foetid shingle, mud and stones that kept the Welfare upright and made her sail so stiff, was warm and rotting. All the filth and slime washed from the decks above over the years was cooking gently, exhaling a charnel-house odour that could all but be felt. The biscuit, stored in porous bags in the bread-room deep in the hold, took on the smell. The weevils and maggots thrived on it; but the most hardened seaman found his staple revolting now it reeked so strong of excrement.
At the instigation of Mr Adamson, the captain allowed – or rather ordered – that the living areas should be scrubbed thoroughly every day with lashings of water, then sprinkled with vinegar. This had the effect of keeping the men busy all the time, so was allowed to be a good thing. It also, however, kept them below decks, kept the living spaces constantly damp and steamy, and kept the bilges in a never-ending turmoil as the pumps removed the cleansing-water that had flowed into them. Daily the smells were revolved, churned, renewed. As to the vinegar – well, maybe it fought the vapours that were said to spread diseases; but the ‘wildlife’, against all predictions, seemed to like it as well as the dirt it was meant to replace.
The rotting of the food, already well advanced, increased rapidly.
Cheese and butter there were in the stores, as well as opened casks of salted pork and beef. The former items went off very rapidly, with a smell so greasy and pervasive from the rancid butter that much of it went over the side, to the purser’s eternal misery. The cheese became uneatable unless soaked in wine for days. Broad had never believed the tales of seamen making buttons and model ships from lumps of cheese; but in the doldrums he found it true. As for the pork and beef – well, some of it had already achieved several years of age. But even so, one or two barrels went rotten. He marvelled at the power of a maggot’s jaws.