Kite considered the matter further. In recent weeks, it was true, Makepeace had been bound up with the purchase of a new vessel, the Pride of Galway, but his preoccupation did not necessarily conceal ulterior motives. Or did it? And had Katherine got wind of something when she had asked what would happen to her and her brothers when her father died, as die he surely must? He would follow his dead godson William Kite into eternity, for once the dreaded cholera had induced its filthy rice-water flux, there was no hope of recovery.
‘Christ!’ Kite flung aside his blanket and rose to his feet. He felt like death himself as he drew back the curtains. He wondered if he had dozed, for it was light and the rain had stopped, but he could see by the rigid winged flight of the gulls above the chimneys, that the gale blew with unabated fury. The wind had shifted though, scouring the sky clear of clouds.
‘A north-wester,’ he muttered.
‘Kite.’ He spun round, startled. Puella stood in the doorway.
‘Puella! You startled me…’
‘I have seen into the future tonight.’
‘Yes,’ he said dryly, ‘I thought you had.’
‘You will not be happy, Kite.’
‘That is scarcely surprising.’
‘Listen, Kite. Do not mock me.’
‘I do not mock you, Puella…’
‘You brought me to this terrible place, Kite…’
He sighed, closing his eyes. He was too tired to remonstrate; besides, it did no good. Puella was fixed in her views. As his old father had observed long since, ‘she ploughs her own dark and incomprehensible furrow.’
He bowed his head and when he looked up, she had gone. He followed her through into the bedroom. She lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
‘Puella,’ he began, sitting on the edge on the mattress.
Puella closed her eyes in dismissal and all he could do was touch her hand.
Puella refused to break her fast the following morning, or to leave her bed. She did not accompany him to the church for William’s funeral, and the congregation was pitifully small. Katherine was there, as was his chief clerk, Jasper Watkinson, with Mrs Watkinson, and the assistant clerk Nathan Johnstone, whose wife had died in child-bed only two weeks earlier. Helen was in London with her husband, so poor little William had few to see him lowered into the cold earth while the gale only added a haste to the proceedings which Kite found deeply troubling as he fought to keep his balance in the buffeting wind.
Kite stood beside the priest as he intoned the committal. The man’s surplice flapped with a furious distraction, like a flag, and his words were torn away in a mumbled incoherence. Kite’s own coat remained sodden from the previous night and he felt the weight of it irksome. He was ashamed of this, guilt-ridden that it dulled the keen edge of grief, but the feeling of detachment was as much a consequence of his lack of sleep as was the gritty sensation in his eyes. Patches of sunlight streamed up the hill, over the distant masts and yards of the moored ships and the smoking chimneys, rising, it seemed from the grey expanse of the Mersey, rather than emanating from the cloudy sky. The brilliant sunny patches were followed by deep, chill shadows, so that the change of temperature was as palpable as the unpredictable visitations of death itself.
Afterwards he stood and mumbled his thanks as Watkinson and his spouse awkwardly expressed their condolences. Johnstone followed, uncontrollably lachrymose, for the funeral too closely followed the burial of his own young wife.
‘I’m so sorry, sir, so very, very sorry…’
‘Thank you Nathan,’ Kite said solemnly, wretched at the compounding of the man’s grief.
Then Katherine was beside him, her plain face damp with tears. ‘I’m so sorry, Uncle William…’
The paucity of words struck him: everyone was so sorry, as though they were apologising for their part in the sad little affair. ‘Thank you, m’dear,’ he said, touching her hand. ‘How is your father today?’
She shook her head. ‘My mother asked for you, but I did not like to distract you.’
‘I shall wait upon her later, Kate. It was good of you to come. Are you alone, if so I shall walk you…’
‘No, no, that will not be necessary.’ She gestured unhappily to a figure whom Kite had not noticed before. Frith bowed.
‘My condolences, Captain Kite, upon your grievous loss.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Kite returned the bow. Frith had managed a different formula. It was more appropriate, but its disinterest was manifest.
‘Your wife – is much afflicted, I don’t doubt, Captain Kite.’
‘She is distraught, sir, as you may well imagine.’
‘Of course.’ Frith bowed again then, straightening up, put on his hat and offered his arm to Katherine. Kite caught the glance that she threw at her honorary uncle and put his own hat upon his head. The priest was hovering for his fee. But as Kite walked towards that worthy he could not escape the slight hint of insolence in that small hesitation Frith had interjected to his reference to Puella. It was done by a man who knew of a secret power he had over his ignorant interlocutor.
Kite was seized with the conviction that Katherine, poor unhappy Katherine, had indeed got wind of something sinister. Returning home only to confirm what, in his heart he already knew, that Puella had refused any food, he replaced his hat and made again for his door. He should, he knew, have invited the small funerary party back to some sustenance, but with the shadow of Puella’s grief adding to the lugubrious morning, he could not do it. Instead, he walked again to the Makepeace’s house where Bridget bobbed him her deferential curtsy and asked him to wait.
Mrs Makepeace came to him, red eyed from weeping and watching at her husband’s bedside.
‘Oh, William, I am so glad to see you. He has not long now…’
‘Has the doctor…’
Martha Makepeace shook her head. ‘He has gone.’ She paused, then added, ‘and he will not see a priest.’ The news did not surprise Kite, but he lowered his head in sympathy. He felt for Martha and her family, but his own situation continually overlaid theirs.
‘I understand he was asking to see me, Martha,’ he said gently, and she nodded, recovering some of her old, familiar, brisk efficiency.
‘Yes. Please forgive me. Come.’
Kite followed her upstairs and into their bedroom. The curtains were drawn but Makepeace’s pallid features were illuminated by a candle. His face was already cadaverous and immobile, the skin like wax, the lips all but gone and his mouth a dark hole through which he drew breath. His eyes seemed large, like a new born child’s except that their rims were red and watery, and they fastened on Kite’s figure as he loomed into the candlelight.
Makepeace lifted a hand and with a tiny gesture beckoned Kite, so that Kite bent to him.
‘Makepeace, old friend…’ Kite said, ‘it is Will Kite come to see you.’
The dying man’s lips moved and Kite bent to hear what he was trying to say, taking Makepeace’s hand and squeezing it gently. It felt like a scrap of discarded paper.
The words came out clearly, wheezed with long gaps between them, evidence of the effort that went into their enunciation. ‘You…. must…. forgive…. me…’
Kite frowned and raised his head, to look Makepeace in the face. ‘There is nothing to forgive, old fellow….’
But there was a blazing in Makepeace’s eyes, a final desperate attempt to communicate and then, quite loudly, just as Katherine came into the room, Makepeace said, ‘Forgive…’
‘Oh, God…’ Martha was at the bedside on her knees as Kite straightened up and stepped back into the shadows. He caught Katherine’s eyes and shook his head. She turned to the curtains, pulled them back and threw open the window. Then she went to the bedside and knelt beside her mother. Kite withdrew.
At the foot of the stairs Makepeace’s man-servant was waiting with Bridget.
‘Your master is dead. You may send for me if there is anything Mistress Makepeace wishes me to attend to…’
/> ‘There is no need to concern yourself, Captain,’ Frith’s figure emerged from the side parlour. ‘You have troubles enough of your own, I imagine.’
There was something unpleasantly insinuating about Frith’s presence, Kite thought, but he merely bowed and took his hat and cane from Bridget.
‘Thank you, Bridget,’ he said, noting the tears in her eyes.
Kite could not stay in his own house with Puella refusing to see him and although he remained there for the rest of that day, and that night slept again in his study, he made for his company’s chambers off Water Street early the following morning, calling for bread and coffee to be brought to him. A few moments later Watkinson entered the office.
‘Captain Jones is here sir, and asking to see you.’
‘Jones? Good God, how did he get here in this weather?’
‘I have not asked him, Captain Kite, but he is clearly travel-stained.’
‘Ask him to come in.’
A moment later Jones stood before him. He rocked a little, like a drunken man, but Kite could see the mulatto ship-master was exhausted. His blue coat was salt-stained and muddied, his breeches filthy and his shoes caked in mud. The stock about his neck was grubby and the deep rings beneath his eyes were purple on his honey coloured skin.
‘Sit down, sit down, Jones.’ Kite rose and motioned to Jones to pull up a chair into which the mulatto collapsed with a terrible sigh.
‘A glass, Watkinson and hasten that bread, damn it. Captain Watkinson is in extremis…’
Jones tossed off the glass of Jerez and rubbed a dirty fist across his eyes. He tried to say something, but only a croak came from his mouth.
‘Take your time, Jones, take your time.’
‘I am sorry to hear of your loss, Captain Kite.’
Kite nodded. ‘It is good of you to put the matter before your own tribulations, Captain Jones.’
‘I am sorry for those too, sir. I had not meant… I mean I know the ship to have been of especial…’
‘All our ships are special to us, Captain Jones. The loss of one is of no more significance than the loss of another…’ Even as he said the words, he knew them to be untruthful. The loss of a ship with a valuable West India cargo was infinitely worse than one with two hundred tons of coal in her holds, but Kite could not add to Jones’s obvious distress. He had been in command of the African Princess, the ship named after Puella, and Kite knew well that the wrecking of her had some mystical link in Jones’s mind with the death of his own son and the deliberate decline of Puella. Jones’s mixed blood placed him in part under the influence of such damning superstitions.
‘How did it happen?’
‘Bad weather, sir. Days of it. No glimpse of the sun, no sign of land till we struck. We were out in our reckoning, sir, way out, but if daylight… Well, sir, it wanted but two hours before dawn when… Had we had just a little luck, a moon, or bright starlight…’
Kite waited. To relive that terrible moment when normality turns in an instant to chaos was clearly an ordeal for Jones. Kite could imagine it well enough: an hour or so before the first flush of daylight in the east; the ship running fast before the wind; an overcast sky and the night black as the devil’s riding boots; then the sudden shuddering lurch, the parting of stays, the crash of topmasts, yards, sails, all going by the board and the splitting of the hull on the unyielding rocks. Perhaps too, the sudden high loom of a cliff and then the struggle to contain disaster as panic stricken men come up from below, screaming about water pouring into the ship, only to find the ordered deck a ruination of broken spars and a web-like trap of rope and canvas. Within moments the sea would be breaking over the wreck and the first men would be swept to their deaths; then the impossibility of getting out a boat and the quick descent from discipline and order to the anarchy of every man clinging on for dear life. Even in a moderate breeze, the scene would have been hellish enough.
Jones finally finished his account. They had struck on Cape Clear Island and the ship had gone all to pieces before the next morning. He and eight men had survived. He had the ship’s papers and her log, and had saved a quantity of gold bullion from her, but that was all. Her muscovado had washed like honey out of her split hull, the rum had run out of its stove casks with a stink that had brought a score of indigent Irish onto the scene, and while these hardy men had risked their limbs and even their lives to save some of the cane spirit for their own enjoyment, Jones and his men had clambered ashore by way of the fallen mainmast.
Jones stood and fished in his coat tails, his fists dredging up the bright glint of gold coin. ‘I could not sleep well while I carried this, no, nor tarry on my passage. We were a week on the island before the weather allowed us to get to Baltimore and then it was a long march to Cork where we took ship. It was two days before we left…’
‘We heard that the wreck had been reported by a military officer conducting a survey on the coast, Captain,’ Kite said. He found the name board and her port of registry washed ashore near Schull and had thought the crew all lost. We received an advice from Dublin to that effect.’ Kite frowned, ‘but surely, no ship came in last night…’
Jones shook his head. ‘No, I have come directly from Tenby…’
‘That is the devil of a journey…’
‘Aye, sir, it is, but I did not feel that I could anywhere rest easy until I have got rid of…’ Jones gestured at the pile of coin glinting on the desk-top.
‘And the log and papers?’ Kite prompted.
‘I have them outside, sir,’ Watkinson said, indicating the door to the counting house, ‘and there is bread and coffee arriving.’
After he had eaten, Jones left for his home. He had arrived in Liverpool in 1760 as mate of the Spitfire, which vessel Kite himself had commanded. They had brought in with them their prize, the French privateer La Malouine, later renamed African Princess, and in due course Jones had been promoted into her as master. He had married and in the intervening eleven years had bred a family of four boys and a single girl between his voyages to the West Indies.
For some of that time Kite to had continued voyaging, taking command of a succession of the ships owned jointly by Makepeace and Kite: the Salamander, the Firefly and the Samphire. Puella had, from the first, steadfastly refused to accompany him, preferring to stay ashore and bring up their child. But in due time the strain of living alone, a black mistress in a household of white servants, began to unnerve her. She had trouble with a man-servant and threatened to beat him; he raised a mob who stoned the house and broke all the windows so that Kite had to abandon his sea-going and take up a desk alongside Makepeace in the company chambers.
Captain Topsy-Turvy, as Kite was known in Liverpool for upsetting the conventions of the day, became a diligent ship-owner, well known and well-liked in commercial circles, but his wife became an unhappy and increasingly resentful recluse. Puella rarely rebuked Kite, devoting herself to her growing son, refusing to allow Kite to send him to school, but insisting upon the employment of a governess and then, a few months earlier, a tutor.
Kite had acquiesced to all her demands, content that with his presence quelling any popular reaction to Puella’s colour, she seemed to have made a satisfactory life for herself. Their own moments of intimacy had become few and far between, but even this Kite could bear if he occupied his mind with the business of ships and cargo. Of the two business-partners he, rather than Makepeace, was the more dynamic and had thrown himself into the work of acting as ships’ husband. In this role he left to Makepeace much of the arranging of outward cargoes. His own superior hand-writing and the contacts he had made whilst working for the Antiguan merchant Joseph Mulgrave occupied him with the business of concluding deals on the homeward cargoes. By this means he kept himself appraised of developments in the West Indies and in the American Colonies, writing to his erstwhile fellow-clerk Wentworth at St John’s in Antigua, and to Arthur Tyrell in Newport, Rhode Island.
Gradually, as fewer and fewer people saw Puella,
and Kite’s presence on the dockside became a matter of daily regularity, people ceased to concern themselves with the anomaly of a rich black women in their midst. Liverpool was already a cosmopolitan town and, now unseen, Puella began to slowly acquire a kind of mythical status. That Captain Topsy-Turvy married a black woman worth, it was said, five hundred pounds a year in her own right, was seen by many as a mark of his financial acuity. By others it seemed to bear out the notion that in trade lay a fortune for all manner of people; if a black slave could earn her manumission and gain such a fortune, what might not a decent white person achieve?
Kite was oblivious to this widespread gossip. Makepeace, on the other hand, had been largely responsible for fostering it. After Puella’s disastrous attempt to beat her man-servant he realised that not only was Kite’s presence at his wife’s side necessary, but something must be done to protect his own fortune from any tainting by oblique association with the black woman. He had initially hoped that Puella would sail with her husband but, that proving impossible, the only thing to do was to encourage a belief in the lady’s native grandeur. It was not difficult to put about Puella’s nobility. Strikingly beautiful in her tall, upright ebony way, she did not disdain to enter Liverpool’s social life in the early days of her marriage. This had coincided with a popular print showing a native king trading with ‘some Liverpool masters’. The print had shown a be-plumed black chieftain attired, enthroned and surrounded by an almost Gallic splendour, while some homespun captains stood respectfully at the foot of the monarch’s dais. To the right of the king’s pavilion, the masts and yards of the white men’s slaving ships lay at their anchors in the waters of a distant but unmistakably African river; to the king’s left, a landscape of wooden baracoons were depicted spilling thousands of black slaves across a plain, like a dark stream which flowed towards the waiting ships. In the foreground a spokesman for the Liverpool masters, his hat in his left hand, his right foot forward in a bow, offered his right hand in a gesture of amity to that of a half-naked but lovely young woman descending from the dais at her father’s bidding. To offset the Liverpool masters, a group of splendid negro spearsmen, courtiers and royal mistresses appeared to applaud what had every appearance of a secular marriage. The meaning was clear enough, spelling out the commercial benefits to both the merchants of Liverpool and the nobility of ‘Guinea’, while few remained insensible to the implication inherent in the imagery. The print, known popularly as The Cornucopia of Africa, seemed to find genuine proof in the union of Puella and Captain Topsy-Turvy for, although it had become known that Puella had been shipped as a slave aboard Captain Makepeace’s own slaver, the Enterprize, the story of her false imprisonment and sale by a tyrannical usurper was confirmed by the common knowledge of her independent wealth. Makepeace had added a couple of hundred per annum to the real sum, and entirely suppressed the fact that her annuity was the gift of a wealthy West Indian merchant named Mulgrave, now long since dead. People forgave her her beating of a worthless Catholic Irish man-servant, admired her elegance when she went abroard and, as time passed and she became increasingly reclusive, slowly allowed her to slip from the forefront of their minds.
The Privateersman Page 2