The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  “Roughly, you say. Buried roughly, and without compunction. He was abused, then? Abused like Warren? Worse? Tell me, Samuel, I have to know. Poor Charles is dead. You must tell me the circumstances, however unbearable. I shall bear them.”

  When Sam had finished, the old man had shed a tear or two, but he did not avert his eyes or lower them at all. He was in his wig, despite the hour of the morning, and was fully dressed, despite he’d been in bed, so they assumed. For his own part, Will had a headache across the temples, the ache of lack of sleep, although he was anything but sleepy. For his life, he could not see how this would end. Now there was another silence, longer than the first, and not embarrassing in any way. Sir Arthur Fisher thought, and Will and Sam sat with him, waiting. Will sat, and waited, and his head hurt. That was all.

  “I do not believe it,” said Sir Arthur, in the end. “I do not believe your simple tale at all. You must go back for me. Will you?”

  As a bombshell going off, it had a strange, delayed effect. They heard the words, but did not seem to understand. They had told a simple tale, and he did not believe it. They were dislocated. For moments more they did not speak. Sam broke the silence.

  “Do not believe what aspect of it, sir? But surely…?”

  “It is too pat, too simple. Outsiders, young and drunk? So why were Yorke and Warren mistreated so abominably, why were their bodies hidden and abused? Most Customs men die in the heat of confrontation, you must know that, they meet a band who are too well armed and desperate and they lose the sudden battle. Most of all, their bodies are not hid. They are abandoned where they fall, they are casualties in a war that is as open as it is long-standing. This is not the normal run, it is of a different quality. Our two men disappeared, entirely. With not a word of anything going on at all, least of all a sudden bloody skirmish. Do drunk hotheads go to such strange lengths? I do not believe it.”

  “But,” Samuel began. He faltered. “Perhaps it is not the whole tale, but…”

  “There is a reason,” said Sir A. His voice, despite it all, was strong and clear, his presence suddenly commanding. “My nephew and Warren were put to death and hidden for some reason, and not by drunken layabouts. Nay, drunk they may have been, I hope for reasons of humanity that they were, as drunk as fiddlers’ bitches. But the thing was planned, and executed, for a reason. Either something had been discovered, or… or I do not know. But I will, I must. You both must go back for me, I… require it. Request it. Humbly.”

  “But the Biter, sir,” said Will. “Our release from duty was for five days only. Lord Wodderley — ”

  “Aye,” cut in Sir A, as if distracted. “Aye, Kaye will expect you, certainly. Well, you must go and fight it out with him, and I will make more representation to Bobby Beaumont, by express. Now you have found my nephew so cruelly murdered more time will be allowed, no question of it. Can you go today? Oh no, you are exhausted, what am I saying, you must have sleep.”

  The authority was gone again, and he looked old and tired, an old, saddened man. But both of them knew, horribly, that he was right about the nature of the deaths, and they had been somehow duped. Both said they would go immediately to London, but Sir Arthur would have none of it, and called his man. The details they must leave, he said, the way to find Charles Yorke. Then a meal, a wash, sleep, they could even have a coach if they preferred it, which enabled them to do some young man’s bantering on the theme of luxury, to ease the mood. With this in mind, also, Sam dropped in Deb. A shock for Sir A, he realised, but “Will here’s took a shine to her. Perhaps a small hallo before we go away?”

  Sir Arthur, drawn and grey, turned eyes from one to other of them as if they themselves were ghosts, or spoke a foreign language. Will blushed at his friend’s crassness, and moved his hands dismissively.

  “Sir,” he said. “A jest. The maid is nothing to me, naturally.”

  “Aye,” muttered Sir A. “The maid is nothing, that’s a fact.” His voice got stronger. “The slut has gone,” he said. “And this time, good riddance. It is a little whore.”

  “Gone!” said Sam, although William was struck speechless by the shock. “What? Run away, sir, like the last time? Well, glory be!”

  “Nay,” said Sir Arthur, “not run away. Wimbarton came for her, oh, yesterday. She’s gone back with him to be his concubine, for all I know or care. As far as I can see he’s saved her from the gallows, for the time at least. Mistress Wimbarton is dead, killed by the accomplice, that mountebank, and he’s the one that’s run this time. William, I can’t believe you’ve took a shine to her, your friend here has a senseless sense of fun. But if you have done, rid yourself, I beg of you. The woman is, to all intents and purposes, a murderess.”

  Will, head splitting with exhaustion, tried hard to catch his thoughts and ask a question. But the door opened then, and Tony came in. Before Sir A had finished his instructions Mistress Houghton had arrived, guessed it all from the expressions, and took control. She bustled round Sir A like Mother Hen, and drove them out — after hurried greetings, and thank-yous, and condolences — to the tender care of Tony and the women of the kitchen. In the passage just outside the door though, Sam turned to Tony fiercely.

  “What?” he demanded. “About the maid? You heard him call her murderess. This Deborah, this little pretty thing. ’Fore God, Tony, spit it out! And sense!”

  There was little sense to be had so easily. All Tony knew was that last morning, Chester Wimbarton had turned up with an entourage led by such types of danger as Fiske and Jeremiah, and they had all come armed. Deb, known to be slippery, had been guarded instantly, while the magistrate and Sir A had been closeted some time. No shouts, no arguments, until they had emerged in twenty minutes and Deborah had been brought and told to go with them. Then there had been screaming, Tony allowed, for she had been hysterical as any wildcat, and screeched that Wimbarton was a liar and Sir A a fool or worse. In the end, with Sir A unmoved, she had been bundled up on to a horse — no carriage had been bothered with — tied across it like a bale of wool, and carried off. This last, he added, seeing Will’s white face, had been considered pretty vile by all of them, and shaming that Sir A had allowed it. Although, by then, he’d gone inside and closed the door.

  “But what is thought?” asked Samuel. “Tony, your opinion. You run the house. You must have an opinion.”

  “I do not run the house, sir. Mistress Houghton does, I would ask her. But the story as we have gleaned it, right or wrong, is that Mistress Wimbarton was struck at by the mountebank with some kind of club, from which she later died. Both the man and Deborah then ran away, she here and he to God knows anywhere, and the magistrate has raised a hue and cry and offered a reward for him. His servants later picked up on the grapevine — probably from within this house, I’d guess — that she at least was here.” He looked at William, expression neutral, and added drily: “Wimbarton wanted her for her teeth, but when his wife’s face rotted would have taken her for other purposes, I’m told. Maybe his wife died from her vile reaction to her tattered mouth, that is another story we are told, aided by the beating from the stick. Whichever way, the magistrate had paid for her, so she was his. If she refuses to be his concubine, he can always have her hanged. As an argument in favour of a little whoring, it is not unpowerful.”

  “But it is the mountebank that’s dead,” said William, at last. “The woman killed him, not he her. It is the mountebank that’s dead.”

  The steward, large, implacable and calm, eyed him thoughtfully.

  “That’s what Deborah kept screaming,” he said. “The master shouted once, just once in all the time he kept the yard. She screamed that, not for the first time or the tenth, and Sir Arthur shouted that she was a liar, else why not mention it before? She screamed the mountebank was dead, and the servants must have buried him, she’d seen Milady shoot him in the head. She screamed Wimbarton must have murdered her. That’s when Sir Arthur went inside and Jeremiah dragged her across his pommel. In truth, sir, it sounded — ”


  Mistress Houghton came along the passageway, and Tony stopped. At a sign, the steward left them, and she took them into a room they had not seen before, a sitting room with a small bright fire and a sewing box and contents scattered casually on the rug. She bade them sit, and told them Sir Arthur was in a tired state, but grateful for the things they’d found out for him, however horrible. She had heard the tail-end of the former conversation, she added, and had heard Will’s name — “young Mr Bentley’s” — from the maid herself, while the magistrate and master had held their confabs. She looked at Will not unkindly, but in a manner of reserve.

  “She said that she had told you that the mountebank was killed,” she said. “She insisted on it. But earlier she had told a different tale, so as not to… ah, upset the master. I’m afraid I… well, I did not believe a word of it, her latest version, I thought she would say anything to avoid Wimbarton having her. Sir, forgive me if I insult her as a friend of yours, but… Do you believe her story could be true?” There was only one time and circumstance in which Will and Deborah could have spoken in this intimacy, and all three of them now knew it. Impossible, of course, that it should be acknowledged. Will nodded.

  “Madam,” he said, “I believe it to be true. I believe, as Tony said, the magistrate’s men have buried Dennett and the hue and cry is but a blind, to obviate a risk that Wimbarton be suspected for his disappearance. As to the wife, I do not know. Deb said she was in a dreadful way of health, quite putrefying; she might just have died. It is a way to frighten Deb to silence, saying the mountebank killed her, also. Deb was, in general eyes, the mountebank’s accomplice.”

  “A way to get her as a useful pretty whore into the bargain,” Sam added coarsely. “Beg pardon, Mrs Houghton, that was not nice.” He did not apologise to Will, despite his jealous sensitivity.

  “Aye,” said Mistress Houghton. “There was the money, too. Wimbarton said the mountebank stole money, and Deborah as well, he guessed. Another piece of stuff to shut her mouth.”

  “Hell, hell!” said Will, passionately. “When was the time for all this to be done!? There was a shooting, a bursting in of servants, and Deb’s escape! How was she accomplice? How steal? If they escaped both, why is she now with the magistrate, and Marcus Dennett clean away!? It is blackmail, plain and simple! Play ball with him or she may hang, it is her choice. It’s horrible! She saw Dennett fall, she saw him bleed and die! Is there no way that we can get her off from this? You do believe me, Mistress Houghton? You do believe her now?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m inclined to say I do, young man, I do. But sadly my belief is an irrelevance. The magistrate has witnesses who will swear to every detail of his case, and in any way he is a magistrate. Who would believe her story contra his? Or ours, or yours? So Deborah must be…” She sighed. “Perhaps he’ll be a kindly master to her,” she added. “Stranger things have happened, when all’s said.”

  “And Sir A?” asked Sam. “If you told him this? Or Will did? If he believed it?”

  Mistress Houghton shook her head.

  “I cannot tell him at the present moment. He could not stand it, I promise you. But when I do, when the opportunity is right… then, what? The fact remains, sirs. She is the magistrate’s, he probably owns her even if she would deny it. And how could she deny it? She would hang, you know that’s true. Mr Bentley. Sir. There is nothing to be done.”

  “But you will tell him?” Sam said. What else was there to say?

  “I will tell him,” she responded. “When the time is right. But sirs, you know the news that he has suffered, because you brought it. Have pity on his age, have pity.” She stood, and came to touch Will on the arm.

  “We all need pity, sir,” she said.

  *

  Although they ate, and slept for some few hours, William and Samuel left Langham Lodge both miserable and exhausted. The thought of detouring to pass by Wimbarton’s estate occurred to them, but neither expressed it. They set out at an almost gentle pace, to conserve their dwindled energy and because the prospect of arrival was not a happy one. William in particular felt lost and powerless, not only for himself. Deborah, not far from where he rode, was a prisoner, facing legal rape and worse. Short of storming Wimbarton’s house and dying, probably, in the attempt, there was nothing he could do. His death, in such a case, would be legal, equally. They had not any rights.

  “You are right,” he said to Samuel later, as they moved through heavy rain. “They send us here, they send us there, we are not free in any sense at all. The world rules us and tosses us about, there is nothing but constraints for us. And here we go again to face that fat hog Kaye and battle with his whim, to try and persuade him to let us go and do something with honour in it. Sam, I must aid Deb! And cannot. Oh, it is intolerable.”

  Sam could not reply to that, for he feared a difference of opinion inherent in the thought of honour might put a wedge between them. Sir Arthur’s reading of the thing had shaken him, but he could not get it from his mind. Most men in Customs battles died in the heat, most Customs men did not work in deepest secrecy, but Yorke and Warren had disappeared without a trace, with not a word of any kind of something going on. There was something up, Sir A thought, something afoot, and Sam feared Céline or Sally was the key, and Jesse Broad’s widow and her crew were not the bystanders — almost innocent — that his friend took them to be. Sam saw Will’s pain because of Deborah as doubly unfortunate in this — because it made his thinking cloudy on the other issue. Sam thought that Kaye would let them go — he thought he’d have to, if Lord Wodderley would act on the express — but he feared what they might uncover on a return to Hampshire would make things for William seem ten times worse.

  “Aye,” he said, after some contemplation. “It is intolerable. The wicked crew of smugglers and what they’ve done to Yorke and Warren, the thought that Sally might be springing our enemies back to France, Wimbarton and that pretty little girl he has no right to, Slack Dickie and his power over us, poor Charlie in the Devil’s Punchbowl. Lord, friend, how lovely it would be to be just rich!”

  They were not rich, they were as poor as dirt, though not without their horses and their privilege. When they arrived, Slack Dickie exercised his power ruthlessly, and overrode all arguments and claims. At dawn next morning the Biter slipped downriver, with Gunning — drunk and hardly capable — at the con. Kaye’s agents had reported juicy pickings in the offing, the remnants of a storm-tossed convoy from the East, crammed with fine sailors for the taking. Kershaw implied some pressure had been on from their lordships, for this lieutenant of the Press to do some pressing; there was a war on, after all. Slack Dickie, on the quarterdeck in the fine bright morning, his fat face and plumpudding eyes a picture of unwonted keenness and efficiency, was off to make a killing.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When Deborah awoke, that same bright shining morn, she knew her time had come, with no escape. She was in a high room, more like an attic in the house than her prison of earlier, and from the open window she could hear only country silence — birdsong, breeze, some cattle lowing. It made her think of her home, on the Cheshire edge of Stockport near the River Goyt of a summer Sunday, and she had a strong wrench of dread and misery that she would never see it, or any of her people, ever again. Well, she told herself, you left them without farewell or by-your-leave, so home-sickness is no one’s fault but yours. Then she wept at her own hard-heartedness; for she missed her mother, terribly.

  Two days before, after she had sprung at him, the master, her new lord and master Wimbarton, had withdrawn from her presence apparently unaffected by her attempt to rip his face. This was in the coachhouse, a large, bare, bottom chamber, which Jeremiah had pushed her into after she’d been dropped down from the horse. Deb had been almost broken by the journey, bent across the backbone belly-downward, and when she’d hit the ground she’d had spots before her eyes and could not stand unaided. Fiske had cleared the others off with brisk brutality, slamming a door on her an
d Jeremiah and the master, then she’d been left swaying like a baited bull. Her stomach pained her, she had an urgent need to piss, but her heart was filled with only hatred and mistrust. She had a feeling this would be a little sport, to show her in what respect he held her, what she might expect if she did not co-operate. Wimbarton and Jeremiah watched, like farmers at a market, as she stood her ground. By Mary and the saints, she thought, I’d rather die than let him play with me.

  Wimbarton, perhaps, had more shame than Dennett had done, God rot his soul. He did not pull his club out, but moved in on her like a thin and feeble wrestler, in anticipatory crouch. Jeremiah, far better able to give a maid this sort of paying out by the look of him, merely leaned back against the wall with a half-smile on his lips as Wimbarton approached. Deb, from her aching bladder to her aching limbs, was the breathing antithesis of submission, crouched also, but hers a feral crouch, a pre-explosive bunching led by glaring eyes. She had all her clothes on also, her skirts were long and full, winter ones borrowed from one of Mrs Houghton’s maids. If he should try for me, she thought, I’ll make it half an hour till he finds the spot, by which time I’ll have blinded him.

  Wimbarton could read minds, perhaps. Anyway, he straightened up, and turned away from her, and said to Jeremiah, “Take that gown from off her, will you? I am too old for all this teasing, strip her to the buff.” At which moment Deb sprang at him, claws out, and Jeremiah moved like lightning to smack her a heavy blow between the eyes, placed nicely so as not to crush her nose, and Deb sprawled out in the coachhouse dust and lay and pissed herself. Her skirts had risen up as she had skidded, so they knew what was happening, there was a puddle and the hot wet smell. Jeremiah had looked angry, but Wimbarton had laughed, which Deb found much more frightening. But it ended the attempt. Before he left her, he told his man to lay off her or else, and get the women to look after her.