The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

It was an old ship’s cutter, paddled out from the dockyard by an unruly gaggle, not one shipped oar between them. To nose it round the stern, one man held a broken bottomboard, another used a bailing tin. From the middle somewhere, a young carpenter with a bag of saws in hand hurled up a rope without a warning, which Jem Taylor, coming up behind his officers, caught in the air and bent on round a stanchion.

  “There lies a bumboat near the other side,” he said, in a gentle burr. “Shall I get un for thee, Mr Holt?”

  “Better not,” said Sam. “We need someone to oversee this — Oh, to hell in clogs! Jem, keep’em at it for me, won’t you? We shall not be long, just coffee and a shave. Will — down the other side, man. Let us escape this cesspit. Come.”

  They did. As the dockyard men swarmed over the larboard bulwark, Sam and Will ran for the starboard, hailed the bumboatman, and dropped lightly down the steep side into his craft. Within minutes they had been dropped on some hard-standing, picked their way up through the labouring men, and were seated in a small and smoky shop eating hot bread rolls and blowing aromatic steam from off their coffee. William had even managed a quick visit to the privy, hard beside the kitchen wall — reserved for customers, not dockyard toilers, and hence not unrespectable.

  “This is the life eh, Will?” asked Samuel, through bread roll. “You’d never know there was a war on, would you?!”

  Will was happy, and he could not understand it. His service in the Navy had shown him many sights and many situations, but nothing, none, like this. In twenty-four hours, give or take, his notions all had been turned topsy-turvy. Across the table top, the young man he had scorned smiled at him like his one true friend, and spoke of war as of another jest. There was a war on, and they had left their posts, and it did not matter, because their King’s ship was not ready, and she had no commander, no proper company, and only half her rigging. She was not even the King’s — and the man who owned her had gone ashore after a night of whoring in the captain’s cabin.

  “Sam,” he said. “I think that wine I had last night was drugged. Is Gunning a drunkard, by the way?”

  “Of course he is,” said Sam. “Did he not look wonderful just now? We will not see him more today, I doubt, depending on which day of his debauchery is reached. Normally it is three days and then, you’ll see, he is drier than a prioress’s privates till the next time. Do you suppose such parts are dry? I have seen some very pretty nuns myself. Oh! You have your prudey look on, Will!”

  William felt a blush arising, but he raised a laugh. In truth, he did find Samuel a little raw on the subject of the sex, although he no longer considered him in all things low and of a vulgar quality; indeed, he was ashamed to remember his earlier opinion.

  “No, but — you said he is a good man, too, a useful master. Is that true? I can hardly credit it. He is so… so very lax.”

  Sam was supping coffee, and snorted into it.

  “Oh, lax! Will, the Biter’s lax, Lieutenant Kaye is lax, the men are lax. There are hard jobs in the Navy, there are hard men doing them. There are easy jobs to which soft men come flocking, moths to the candle flame. Some men have talent, some men have guts, some men are mad, some men are parasites. In six months before this latest refit, I am informed, the Biter saw action of a sort just thrice. Two boardings and one short chase. Nobody killed, nobody hurt, a very minimal number of good seamen taken. Shore parties since I joined her not much better, although Jem Taylor is a useful man and some of the people can crack heads together when all’s said. Good God, Will, our men have liberty near every week — shore liberty, it is unheard of! Why don’t they run? Because there is no call to! Their life on board is like a paradise. They would sell their grandmas to be in the Navy! Their sisters’ honour! The ship is lax, Will, not just sottish Gunning. The Biter’s lax, and all who sail on her.”

  A woman came out of the kitchen, fat and indifferent. She took their coffee pot away, leaving another, hot one. Sam poured and drank.

  “Go on, ask it then. Am I lax, too? No, Will, I’m not. I’m not and never will be. I hate the ship, I hate that master Gunning, I hate most of the men, and most of all I hate Slack Dickie Bloody Idle Kaye. Why do I tell you this? Because I think I like you, Will, and I think that you will see the merit of my views in double quick time. And you, like me, will wish, and want, and hope, and strive to find some mettle and to grasp it. I want to fight the enemy, that’s what I want and wanted from my service here. And the Biter is a shitty ship, a filthy and corrupt ship, that needs some iron in her soul, and I would like to be it.” He stopped. “I speak too much, and far too openly. One word from you to Kaye on this and I am finished.” He was not one whit abashed. “You have not met him yet. He too is rich. Perhaps you’ll find a kindred soul, and then I’m finished ditto. Ah well, a short life and a merry one. I can always sell my arse.”

  “I am not rich, Sam. I — ”

  “No matter if you are. I’m not. I’m damn near destitute. I mentioned parasites just now, did you notice that? I can be bitter, I have prejudice, please guard against me on that score. Richard Kaye is not a parasite deliberately I do not think, but he is very, very rich. I do not know why he needs the Biter; he uses her somehow like old King Charlie used his yachts, in golden days. I do not trust him, and I hate the way he uses her. Now I grow confused, ignore me. I need the privy, then a shave. Do you bother?”

  William, for reasons he could not have quite explained, made a joke.

  “Indeed I do, Sam. Indeed, I went just now!”

  Perhaps it was a kind of indicator, to tell Samuel that he, himself, was not so very grand, that they should be open friends. Samuel, calmly, held his eyes.

  “I am very blunt, like a poor sailor,” he said. “Do not feel you have to emulate. I don’t think badly of you, that you are well bred. Think well of me despite that I am not. Pay the reckoning, although you are not rich. The barber is a furlong down the way. But first the jakes.”

  Will Bentley finished his coffee slowly. And while he drank, he thought.

  *

  In the breakfast room at Langham Lodge, Sir Arthur Fisher took tea with Mrs Houghton, and pondered gloomily over the fate of Cecily and Deb. He had known for two hours that the maids had gone, but had not known what definite action, if any, he could take. Mrs Houghton had been set on to sound the household girls and women, while Tony and his cohorts had searched the park and grounds, then asked out on the roads if anything was seen or heard at night.

  “The general feeling,” said Mrs Houghton, “is that they deserved their fate. Our girls, as usual, sir, are hardly charitable.”

  Both Sir Arthur and his housekeeper smiled ruefully. They knew, indeed, the girls would have raised their eyebrows even at this sight. It took some of the country people time to adjust to the baronet’s modern notions. A woman who, at bottom, was just a servant taking tea with the master led sometimes to jealousy or disapproval, and endlessly to speculation. Sir Arthur was a wisp, the woman like a hard, fit pudding, who had never shown a moment’s interest in a man. Never mind: folk speculated happily.

  “Maidens are such peaky things,” said Sir Arthur. “But do they know what that fate might have been, deserved or not? Did any of them hear anything, or see movement at all? Maybe some of them talked the night before. Were there no hints?”

  “Liza said they were spirited,” replied the housekeeper. “They were all much taken by the figure of the mountebank, who it is assumed was using the maids’ bodies throughout the journey south, and Liza says the hurt one told her he would come for them whatever, that he could glide through walls.”

  “Which of them is Liza? Am I wrong? I thought Liza was the sensible one?”

  Mrs Houghton nodded.

  “She is, sir, you’re not wrong. The others were twice as daft. In short, they all know nothing, so fantastical are rife. Both maids are pregnant, says Harriet, and the man had to have them so to sell the babies for a devil-worship celebration due at Kingston on Black Sunday. I boxed her ears most soun
dly.”

  “Are they, though? With child?”

  “Lord, how should I know, sir? Deb in her shift was well formed for her age — I take her for sixteen or so — she is even luscious. Her nipples were quite pale though, if I may be so frank, and her belly only rounded as you’d expect from such a shape of maiden. Cecily I bathed, and she was but a little slip, although well-breasted. Nipples also very pink and flat. Unlikely, sir, unlikely.”

  Sir Arthur sighed.

  “I never had a daughter,” he said.

  No, you had three sons, thought Mrs Houghton, and her heart was filled. Sir Arthur shook his head, as if to clear it.

  “Most like they ran,” he said. “I feel keenly I have done them ill, you know. They expressed a worry, I dismissed it. That was bad in me.”

  “No, sir.” She moved her head from side to side, slow and emphatically. “Their worry was absurd. An unknown magistrate, they claimed, who did not know where they were taken by Mr Samuel and his friend, but who was going to track them here to Langham. Absurd on every count, sir, even the first. Surely you do not believe the story of the teeth?”

  He studied her round, taut face for seconds. Mrs Houghton did not get flustered but her eyes dropped, and, imperceptibly, her shoulders.

  “Poor Cecily’s teeth were taken,” he said simply. “Someone paid the quack to rip them out. Such a business does cost money, I would guess, and not a pauper’s portion. It might be absurd to think the perpetrator or his quack would find out they were here and come for them, but they would see it differently, perhaps. All they know is that some rich man — living hereabouts — would want them back, or Deb at least, because he had been cheated.”

  Mrs Houghton said, with passion, “But you would have stopped them, master! You have not done them ill, you took them in, protected them! To even think that is to do you ill! Ingratitude!”

  Sir A did not respond. She stopped, then quickly coloured.

  “I beg your pardon, sir. I should leave such nonsense to Liza and to Harriet, perhaps. They were not ungrateful, but — ”

  “But afraid. Indeed.” He sighed again. “Call Tony for me, Mrs Houghton, please. I will send him out again to look around and ask more questions. I have some idea as to who might have done this gross transaction, as do you. But we must not leap in the dark. It is a very bitter thing to think of someone, very bitter.”

  When she had gone to fetch him Tony, Sir Arthur thought about the girls, and the wide and wooded country locally, and hoped the ass they had “borrowed” would help them gain their objective, which he guessed would be London, not many miles north from where he sat, and where the streets — to girls like Deb and Cecily — were paved with gold, a tradition set in stone. He doubted, sadly, that he would ever see them more, but hoped they might survive to tell a tale to ones who loved them. Which thought led him to his nephew, and another worry. He was south, down Portsmouth way with good Charles Warren, and Sir Arthur had expected to have heard from him before this. Truly, dark times, he thought; foul times.

  *

  At about this time — broad day, warm sunlight getting warmer by the minute — they buried Warren in a field. Not in a grave, a hole in the ground however shallow, but in a haystack, that was hard and wet. Charles Yorke, from fifteen yards away, watched without discernible emotion, indeed hardly capable of structured thought. He lay along the horse’s back, head resting sideways on its neck, too dulled by ill-treatment and exhaustion to do more than gaze. He found the antics of the murderers more interesting than the fact of Warren’s death; they were like dervishes and ghouls, but slowed down by exhaustion in their turn. Three or four just sat apart, lost in the thick steam arising from the soaking grass, immobile in the aftermath of drunkenness.

  They had no tools except their swords, and the ground and sodden grasses had resisted their attempts to grub out a shallow hole. They had turned to the rick in expectation, and been maddened by its own resistance. The hay was old, hard-packed and blackened, with the air of being derelict. Warren also, abandoned like a broken doll in front of it, his head at an angle, his behind grotesquely in the air, one arm snapped askew.

  It was the big man, Peter, of whom Yorke had been conscious on occasions during the long hours of their drab ordeal, who broke through the hard black outer layer of the rick and gave a cry. Others thrust in arms next to his, tearing out lumps of sodden hay they then cast to the ground before plunging in for more. Their renewed whoops, although triumphant, tended towards the hollow in Yorke’s ears, as if something was coming to an end. Indeed, the rampage had been on for untold hours; if Warren were to be stuffed out of sight at last, it

  must be huge relief to them. One man gone — mocked, outraged, abused, despatched. Which left just him. Charles Yorke watched them pick up Warren’s body, still without emotions. The gentlemen had said that he might live, if he would throw his lot in with them, become a secret agent for the wild men of the east, a cancer in the heart of Customs House. What was he meant to do? Ask these half-drunken savages? Indicate that he had come to a decision? Or merely wait, until they spoke again of it, more clearly? He did not know, but thought more likely they would kill him, in the end. It was not, somehow, a quite unwelcome prospect.

  Warren’s corpse disappeared fast and suddenly. Seven or eight men surrounded it, lifted it, and thrust it home into the rick headfirst, like a ramrod. The feet, in their black muddy boots, stuck out, then were seized and pushed by several hands, with added shoulder thrusts, then covered with wet hay. Now me, thought Yorke, but could not move, despite he wanted to sit up to face his nemesis.

  But no. Not him. The men struck flame and tried to fire the rick, which at first would hardly smoulder. No breeze, many hours of a downpour, old, rotten hay. They conferred, he watched them at it, there was some argument. At last they brought some brandy from their saddlebags, poured it on liberally, bottle after bottle, which spoke not just of easy come but wretched surfeit, as if they’d drunk furlongs beyond their fill. This time the rick did take when fire was applied; at first slowly, then with appetite. In two or three minutes after ignition it was going from the heart, although the smoke was black and heavy, not blue and dancing like a normal summer rick set off by men in drunken rage against their betters.

  Rick-burners hanged, thought Yorke, but doubted in his heart that these men would. If they did, though, he would not be there to see it. Poor Charlie Warren. He could see his boot, twisting in the sun. And hear it crackling.

  EIGHT

  Life on the Biter was an easy life, Bentley could see that and he could comprehend it. He could not, however, quite believe it, and he passed the next few hours in expectation that the truth would be revealed. For William’s truth, from his experience, was that life was hard, especially Navy life. As the day wore on no hardness came, and the general tenor of the ship and crew, if anything, became more comfortable, not less. The missing last ingredient was Lieutenant Kaye, her commanding officer; so William built his fears on him. Lieutenant Kaye would provide the hardness, whatever Samuel said.

  Lieutenant Kaye turned up that evening, at after six o’clock, by which time the midshipmen, between them, had achieved a remarkable great deal. Sam Holt had mustered the men — “the walking wounded” — when he and Bentley had returned from their “coffee run” ashore, and introduced them to their new officer in a parody of the formality that William remembered from his days in Welfare. He had lined the people up beside the gangway, and told off their names without any prompting from Jem Taylor. Silas Ayling, Tom Hugg, Tom Tilley, Billy Mann, John Behar, Joshua Baines, Geoff Raper, cook. There was another in the scuppers still, Peter Tennison, and five more not on board, including the carpenter and the sailmaker, who was in love and probably in tears somewhere (which joke of Sam’s had the men in tucks). They were, Sam told him loudly, good men all, who took their orders, were keen and clean, and most of all were sober. Amid renewed merriment, he told Jem Taylor to set them to on the essential tasks, behind the dockyard men: al
l cordage checked and coiled, misplaced rigging overhauled, and filth and mess cleared up and overboard. Then, stripping to his shirt, he chose a crew of four and pointed to the mast.

  “Mr Taylor, I will take this task, you take the foredeck and the bowsprit. Mr Bentley, might I suggest you go alone and tour from top to keelson and get to know her lie? At dinner we will confer.”

  Throughout the day Will looked, and searched, and crawled, and wandered. In the large hold, with its ranks of chains and irons for the pressed men, in the bilges, where he noted several gushing springs among the seams — and a dockyard team with mallets and oakum tending them — in the steering flat, the lazaret, the powder room (unlocked and empty), the sailmaker’s store, the carpenter’s workshop, the galley. He came to this just before midday, and was spoken to by Geoff Raper, a thin, shaking man with only half a left leg — no peg — one eye, and a Scotch way of speaking he could make hardly head or tail of. The broth was good though, strong enough in smell to mask the spirit-stale that rose from Geoff and others of the people, and he had baked bread of sorts — flat but very tasty.

  At times he spoke with Samuel, now sweating like a common man himself. William also, when he’d finished his tour, had peeled off his outer garments of a gentleman and pitched in, which apparently had gone down well with most of the people. Dressed, he looked rather soft, his face unlined and only lightly whiskered, but in his shirtsleeves he was a different matter. William sailed alone and frequently, winter and summer, and often in the sun went lightly clad. His hands were rough from rope and rowing, his arms were brown and hard and muscular. But it was his facility with the common seamen’s tasks that most impressed them. He could splice and whip with the fastest and the neatest, and his eye for necessary tasks or small improvements was like lightning. It was a commonplace that young officers and gentlemen should learn sailors’ tasks by doing them, and even more a commonplace that they did them like ham-fisted dogs (whatever compliments were passed for form and safety’s sake). But William could do it all, and passing well. Most liked him for it; and in men’s way, some would loathe him, for obscure reasons. This afternoon he got the benefit of the doubt, he thought. The men worked well, and not unkeenly, and the tasks got done. As in the morning, he felt an unaccustomed pleasure on this grubby little vessel.