The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  The men were friends, despite the social gap and protocols of service and command. For two months or more, on this occasion, they had quartered this stretch of coast not as riding officers but in the utmost secrecy, from east of Selsey to beyond Keyhaven in the west. Before that they had wormed deep into the eastern mysteries, from whence the threat was being made. Warren, too, had felt excitement mounting in the past few days. His circumspection, though, was stronger than Charles Yorke’s.

  “Aye, aye,” he said. “At the very least I think we’re closing in. This inn is good and secret, Mrs Cullen’s lack of curiosity is capital indeed. However — ” he cleared his throat, as if to give a shout — “However, she could be a little prompter with her suppers!”

  Outside the low, dark room there were noises. Horses stamping in the yard, and voices. There was a sudden spattering at the thick window glass. Rain had been in the air all day, despite the warmth. It had arrived.

  “They’ve timed it well for shelter,” Warren said. “In Hampshire, tell me, does it always rain?”

  “I am a Surrey man,” Yorke chuckled. “Let it come down!”

  Then the door crashed open, and four men burst in, preceded by a wave of brandy, a veritable sea of stench. Outside there were more voices, male and loud, and a brief woman’s scream as Mrs Cullen rushed from her kitchen to see what might be going on. Yorke caught a glimpse of her, white kerchief at her ample bosom, white features flushed and anxious, as she was pushed behind a door unceremoniously. A large and ruddy man had pushed her, a man with whiskers and a pigtail like a seaman, although his coat was tailed and upon his head a shallow, curl-brim hat. He held a pistol in his hand, a long and wicked thing, with a semi-bell.

  “My God,” said Warren. “We are discovered, Mr Yorke. We are betrayed.” His voice was low, filled with anxiety. But then he rapped out, in a hard and fearless tone: “Quit off from here instanter, you drunken sots! We are armed!”

  The men were also armed. More pistols had appeared. A knife. Two more pushed in, one with a cutlass. Warren and Yorke — who had not produced their weapons — stood watchfully, and waited. The smell of brandy was underlaid by damp clothing, sweat, of man and horse. No fear, though. The ruffians did not smell of fear.

  “You are Customs men,” said one. He was small and bright-eyed. “You have come to spy on us. We have found you out.”

  From outside, strangely, there came a high-pitched, shaking scream. Then muffled shouting, and the screaming stopped. One of the interlopers lifted his arm, and in his hand a bottle. He raised it to his mouth and drank.

  Yorke spoke. His voice was brazen. It rang in the low room like a bell.

  “We have come to meet your masters, fool,” he said. “We are the reverse of Customs, we are venturers from London, come to help your trade.”

  Desperate times need desperate remedies, thought Warren, at his side. Saying the unsayable to unknown men with guns.

  They were not impressed, apparently. The body of them surged forward, and their looks were bestial. It was clear that they had been drinking for a good time, and with purpose. Now there were seven in the room, and the door was bursting with the weight outside. Yorke reached for the inner pocket of his coat, wherein he kept a pistol, always primed. It was a Cyrus Rollins, made for him especially, bespoken by his uncle and protector, with a special cover on the priming pan, a neat device that made — said Cyrus Rollins — misfires history.

  But Warren saw the movement, and spoke so only Yorke would hear, with calm authority.

  “No. They will kill you if you touch it, they are beyond control. Leave it, Mr Yorke.”

  Into Yorke’s head came the thought that, drunk, mad or sober, the open barrel with its promise of a monstrous ball of lead might act as a bucket of cold water in their faces. If it came to shooting matches they would win, that was not in dispute. But one of them would die first. Who would be the one to risk it?

  “Charles,” he said, but hesitated, and they were lost. There was a surge, apparently involuntary, a group movement that occurred without an order being given. Two tables squawked as their legs scraped across the flags behind the weight of men, and a heavy settle went over backwards with a bang.

  It was Warren who got his weapon out the quickest, his sword was cleared before the deadly little Rollins was even firmly in Yorke’s grasp. Quickest, but too late. A fellow to the left of him made a movement, low and sweeping, with what Warren, before it hit him, thought was a flail. By luck or horrible facility it took the hanger blade almost at the guard and broke it neatly off. As Yorke’s blunt pistol emerged into the light his chest took the full weight of two men, both of whom attacked his head with clubs. Drunk or not, a third man caught the Cyrus Rollins as, knocked from its owner’s hand, it described a graceful arc over the melee. Its patent pan-guard had not been displaced.

  Overwhelmed and clearly helpless, both men avoided fighting back beyond saving their faces from too-deadly hits. They were to be taken, they assumed; this party was not likely to be the instigators, there must be men behind them, the men, maybe, they’d sought. Yorke’s eyes, one bruised and closing, found his older consort’s, frankly to be reassured. To kill them would be purposeless, surely?

  But the men were wild with rage and drink. They tore Charles Warren and Charles Yorke from out the snugroom with the utmost savagery, smacking, kicking, hitting them with knobby clubs. By the time they had them in the yard, both were bloodied, the younger dazed almost to the point of disability. Warren, still compos mentis, tried to get a fix on faces, for the future satisfaction that would come from hanging them, but they came and went, and thronged and throbbed, and hallooed deafeningly as they rained down blows. It was raining, too, black and steadily, hissing from the leaves all-round the yard in the windless silence of the summer night, gushing from the gutters, falling in a curtain from the thatch. He picked out the large, loud villain in the curly hat and pigtail, he noticed several times the small man with the shining, vicious eyes, he saw a ginger fellow, a country stumbler who stayed back a ways, face set and maybe showing fright. But mostly it was jumble, men in coats, some wigged, some in heavy cloaks, some in short seamen’s breeches, slops. All, or almost all, consumed by anger.

  There were lights still in the inn, dim through the country glass, but no further sounds, no screams from Mrs Cullen or the hare-lipped girl who helped her. There had been men around to drink the nights before and in the mornings, but Yorke and Warren had no hopes by this; they would either stay well clear if they heard or saw this mob or — more like — had set it on or were a part of it. No aid from travellers, either; the inn was on a road more fairly called a track, which led from nowhere great to somewhere less important, as Yorke had coined the jest some days before when they had chosen it as perfection for their purposes. Not so perfect for survival, though, as they stood and stumbled in the rain, their feet and wrists jerked free of clothing to receive their bonds. They were to have one horse between them, it would seem, a big horse, extremely strong, that Warren caught himself admiring, in spite of all, and drunk or not, the bumpkins did their knots like angels. Not angels, seamen. Not bumpkins, men of free trade. But men, it looked, of awful wickedness.

  Yorke, struck in the face by a flail armed certainly with lead and truly deadly, was unconscious when they put him up. His eyes were open, now and then, but they did not see, and one bone of his cheek appeared collapsed, to fill out slowly as a great black livid swelling bloomed and blossomed. The horse stood stolid in the rain while they jerked and slid him into place, snorting only gently as a rope was fastened underneath its belly and hauled taut, a rope that held Yorke’s ankles fast together. His chest, raked by spasmodic coughs, was laid along the horse’s neck, his joined wrists bent underneath his belly. Warren was allowed an upended cask to step up from, and swung his leg across with some sort of dignity. He sat motionless as his ankles were lashed underneath, and tried to pull Yorke’s torso upright to save him from falling sideways when they should set off.
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  As the assailants mounted, Warren did a head count, not complete. Ten at least, probably more, but as they bucked and wheeled around the blackness of the yard accuracy became guesswork, more or less. There seemed to be nobody in command, and no idea of any form of discipline, or sense. Warren assumed they were being taken off to talk to someone, otherwise why not just have killed them where they sat? But as they moved out from the inn, his confidence grew less. Some of the men had whips, one a flail, three had cudgels. Defenceless, gripping the fabric of Charles Yorke’s coat to try and steady him, Charles Warren played the stoic as the blows and cuts came on to him, and he wondered at their frenzy and their hate. A whiplash split his cheek, a rough stick grazed his temple, then dislodged his wig, then raised his scalp. The head in front of him, lying on the horse’s neck, received repeated blows, and one bold hero prodded at it with his sword-point until Yorke’s blood ran thickly on to the horse’s hair.

  In the Hampshire rain, in the noisy, drunken silence of the peaceful, violent night, Charles Warren began to doubt that they would ever see the light of day again.

  TWO

  Miles to the north of them, not far south of London, the rain was soaking and insistent, though similarly soft and almost silent, undriven by the faintest wind. William Bentley, drenched through his cloak and coat right to the skin, was saddle-sore and weary, and sick at heart. He was on his way to join a ship in Deptford, and he had been riding there since morning. He was not alone, but almost wished he could have been.

  The man beside him, tall and ungainly on his hack, was something of a prattler. Preceded by an express the night before, he had turned up at the crack of dawn, and gone about the house as if he’d been at ease. He had taken breakfast like a long-lost cousin, chattering to William and his father before formal introductions had been completed, and bowing to his mother and his sisters in a rather ill-bred way, and smiling. William was going back to sea again, he did not want to, the girls were heartbroken, and his mother had to keep her own opinions to herself. Midshipman Samuel Holt, though surely much too old to have not yet made lieutenant, was like a careless youth. He even did not fade or merge, or drift into the scenery, when the last farewells were made, and William reached down to touch his sisters’ fingers one last time. Father, as a contrast, had gone about his business on the farm ten minutes previously.

  At first, the weather dry and decent, the two young men had travelled side by side. Sam Holt had brought up many gambits, little snippets of his life and times, many opportunities for Bentley to respond, but the conversation, in the main, had been one-sided. William, aware, had explained he was not a talking sort of fellow, who spent much time alone. But he was also aware, at times, that his demeanour and expression spoke something different, of disaffection and a mild distaste. Truth was — and this he could not tell a stranger, even hint at — the idea of resuming the naval life, which had been disrupted violently for him some years before, was a form of mental anguish. So Holt, out of politeness, perhaps a desperation of his own, had talked the miles away, and had not seemed to mind Will Bentley’s taciturnity. The rain, however, when it came, might have been a relief, who knew? As the road bogged and the horses tired, they could ride apart, in damp cocoons of silence, where Will, at least, could brood and ponder.

  It was cash, the oldest, sharpest goad, that had resealed his fate as Navy officer. He had wanted, and tried, to leave the service, had refused all blandishments, cajolings, threats for some long time. His relations with his father — never warm — had frosted, and a dip in Bentley fortunes — never explicated — had led him to a realisation that threats of excommunication from the family and the home were not idle ones. On paper his sea-time was good, to their lordships — who knew not the half of it — his experience was excellent. He had been ill, true, a good excuse for the hiatus, but now his bronchial problems were all cleared up. Uncle Daniel Swift, roped in to take a hand in it, insisted that if he worked hard at navigation and “got in the thick” again, there was no reason in the world he should not resume his rise. William, who refused point blank to contemplate his uncle’s aid, or get advancement on his back, or even consider any offer of a shipboard place with him, made his own approaches to the Office and the Admiralty, speaking in his letters more of desire to resume than bleak necessity. Truth was, he did not want to starve.

  There was a war on, nor had he come ashore through reasons of dishonour. But although the first responses had been prompt, it seemed to him a weary time before the process was got running. And then the job had come, the place, position, the assigning to a ship. It was a small ship, the sort of ship that no one, he could imagine, would join from choice, a tender based in London River, another weight upon his heart’s unease. Bad enough to have to serve, but that was that. But how much worse to join the Impress Service, so universally reviled. Then, last evening the express, and here he was on horseback, alongside this lanky, stupid man, this prattler.

  To be fair though, William argued with himself, Samuel Holt had maybe prattled for discomfort’s sake, and indeed had not spoken now for something like an hour. In fact, as they jogged along, he it was who felt some need for conversation. Normally, William was happy to be silent, and spent the main part of his hours in lanes and byways, on horse or foot, in peaceful solitude. He had a boat as well, an open yawl with leg o’ mutton rig, that he sailed endlessly in the soft wildernesses of Langstone and Chichester havens, or out into the Solent and beyond the Wight. He fished, as he had to have a reason to be out there, no one sailed for pleasure, naturally. Him neither, in the last analysis, perhaps: William sailed because he needed to. Now, he had a need to know.

  The rain had broken through the last defences of the felted wool around his neck, and was moving in runnels down his chest and back. Below the dampness was a band of discomfort, almost pain, around his waist, and below that still a spreading, jolted ache and soreness. They had ridden solidly, changing their hacks some thirty miles back, and William assumed and hoped that they were near their destination. London was not unknown to him, and the Portsmouth road a good one in the summer months at least, but this night was darker than the Shades. He had no inkling where they precisely were, and he needed rest. It was a way to frame his question.

  “Mr Holt,” he said. “What is this ship like, when we get to her? We will have a place to lie and sleep, at least?”

  Holt, up ahead, had given him some details of the ship before, in the early stages. A brig, quite old, quite small, but not unhandy. He swivelled in his saddle, looking back.

  “Mr Bentley, yes! That is to say, the Biter has such things, cots for the officers, all comforts of the home. Yes, there will be beds for us; I hope.”

  “But what do you mean by ‘hope,’ sir? Pray tell me more, and sensibly. What sort of ship is she? How run? Is it a bad ship?”

  Through the rain there came a muffled laugh. Holt eased his pace, dropping back until they went side by side.

  “Hereabouts,” he said, “there lives a man I know. He is a rich man, a baronet, a trader in the East. His house is large, and ornate, very comfortable, the alpha and the omega. To be frank with you, the Biter; sir — is not!”

  He dug in his heels, and his horse moved back ahead. Before its rump, wet and rhythmic, could disappear Will Bentley clogged his horse also, to draw up alongside. As he did so, they emerged from out of a clump of roadside trees and saw a long vista of rolling grass and hedge as the moon gleamed through a thinner patch of cloud. No buildings, no outer village of the Great Wen, but just the road, more like a river in the misty light, and another copse ahead.

  “So,” he said, determinedly. “What is your meaning, or must I wring it from you? Should we stop again? Would this merchant welcome us, or is there an inn hereabouts for getting warm and dry? How long are we from London? How long from Deptford and the ship? You make her sound a fright. Is that true?”

  He was thoroughly annoyed with Holt by now, a vulgar, laughing thing that would not give him answers. Fo
r hours he had talked too much, now there was no sense from him, just evasions. If there were truly no good berths on board, William was determined he would sleep on shore, at least for one night more.

  “I’ve told you all I can,” said Samuel, suddenly and tersely. “Good God man, the Biter is my ship, Lieutenant Kaye is my commander, what should I say to you? If it were my choice, we would stop off at Dr Marigold’s and get some wenches, or feather beds if Hampshire men prefer them for lying on! It’s above an hour, maybe two, to London Bridge, then a wherry to the tiers at Deptford. Then you will see the Biter for yourself, for your approval or disdain!”

  In silence, Will Bentley held his station, but a little chastened. Holt was right in one thing, but it gave him little comfort. If he disliked the vessel never so much, he could hardly say so to his new and fellow midshipman. Will felt he ought to make amends.

  “There is necessity,” he mumbled, “and speed is of the essence is the theory. We are under orders, after all, to join the ship. This Dr Marigold — he is the merchant, I suppose?”

  Holt let out a hoot of joy, all animosity evaporated.

  “The merchant! Marigold!? Nay, Mr Bentley, that is capital! The merchant is my… well, a kind of benefactor, a gentleman who has done me aid and kindnesses. Dr Marigold has a gay house in the Blackfriars — you know, maids for hire, harlots. He is a whoremaster!”

  He was laughing, so William joined in, to hide confusion. The use of whores, although he’d seen it on his uncle’s ship when lying in St Helen’s Roads, was a thing beyond his own experience, or even comprehension of such harsh desires.

  “Lord,” he said. “When next you see him — the good man, not the bad — please you don’t tell him my mistake.”