The Privateersman

by The Privateersman (retail) (epub)

  ‘I did not think that, Nathan. But why confess the matter? many men would have thought nothing of it.’

  ‘Because I am ashamed…’

  ‘Did you not enjoy her? Did you fail to satisfy her?’

  ‘That is the point, Captain Kite,’ Johnstone replied, his voice still low. ‘Of course it was pleasurable and she was hot for me. Or perhaps any man,’ he added revealingly.

  ‘That we cannot tell, but why should you feel shame? Because your wife is not long dead?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was too dark to see the expression upon Johnstone’s face, but the enunciation of the word sounded as if he was being strangled.

  ‘And you feel you have besmirched or betrayed her memory?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Johnstone.

  Kite stepped close to Johnstone and put his hand on the younger man’s arm. ‘My dear fellow, you are no worse than the rest of us. I should be obliged if you would act discreetly while you are here, for if you have truly satisfied Mistress Wentworth she will most assuredly pursue you. Do not cause her to be bitter by taking another woman while we are here, simply do the gallant thing, we shall be here no more than a month.’

  ‘A month! I shall contrive to avoid the woman…’

  ‘That would be ill-mannered of you…’

  ‘But I have no desire to repeat my folly!’

  ‘Call it an indiscretion, Nathan. Consider it a privilege to have all your appetites satisfied in one evening, and a mark of good manners to have satisfied your hostess’s wants too. Between us we have done well, for I have presented our host with something to divert his mind.’

  ‘That is most kind of you sir,’ Johnstone said with a venomous sarcasm.

  Kite laughed. ‘Oh come, Nathan, you should not have confided in me. I am not a priest.’

  ‘That you are not…’

  ‘But I will not make these facts public.’

  ‘I pray you will not, sir!’

  ‘Come Nathan, laugh at yourself. It will do you good, sir.’

  Chapter Five

  The Wentworth

  ‘Well, what did you think of her?’

  ‘She will not be fast, but she’ll be weatherly enough and would stand more and heavier guns than the six miserable four-pounders that she bears now.’ Kite said, sitting opposite Wentworth in the cool of the waterfront office into which he had once stumbled what seemed a lifetime ago.

  ‘And she is well-built?’

  Kite nodded, ‘no question of it. Truth to tell, I prefer mahogany to oak as I think it less susceptible to rot and, in these latitudes, the damned ship-worm.’

  Wentworth nodded. ‘Very well, I shall make Diego Galvez an offer…’

  Kite looked out of the window. The Santa Margarita de los Angeles lay off in the bay. He would change her name, though to what he had not yet decided. He would have wider yards fitted in due course, for her rig was too narrow for his taste and he thought she would profit from wider courses and topsails.

  ‘We could send Spitfire down to Maiquetia…’ Wentworth was saying and Kite came to himself.

  ‘There is no need. Galvez is on board, on his way to Havana with his wife and daughter. Ask him to dinner. He is, as you know, eager to sell and would release the ship once he has reached Cuba. I think he intends to settle there, for he is past his middle years.’

  ‘What is the daughter like?’

  ‘Pleasant enough in her manner. She speaks excellent English, but she is not handsome. Why, do you indulge in indiscretions these days, Wentworth?’

  Wentworth winked and touched the side of his nose with his right index finger.

  ‘It is the heat, no doubt,’ Kite remarked drily.

  Wentworth chuckled and Kite thought that he had never seen anything less like a libertine than the rotund figure before him but then, he reflected, Mrs Wentworth seemed the very epitome of matronly virtue and he knew that poor Johnstone had enjoyed her embraces on several occasions now.

  ‘By the way, Kite,’ Wentworth said, breaking into Kite’s reflections and tossing a newspaper across his desk. ‘I received this from Holmes of the Morning Star which arrived after you had gone aboard the Santa Margarita… By the way, you are not intending to trade under that name are you?’

  Kite picked up the paper. ‘No, but what do you think? You own half of her.’

  ‘Which of the two of us owns the angels?’ Wentworth quipped. ‘Not I, I think.’

  ‘Then call her Santa Margarita.’

  ‘No… I do not like…’

  ‘Call her Wentworth and be damned to it,’ said Kite scanning the paper to see what it was he was supposed to be digesting. Then he saw the item and, as Wentworth smiled his approval at Kite’s suggestion of the new name, he read the account of the burning of the Gaspée. Off the coast of Rhode Island, the British revenue schooner had been in chase of a local packet whose master was a suspected smuggler and, in chasing her into Providence she had run aground. That night boats from the sea-port had approached the Gaspée and her commander, a Lieutenant Duddingston, had challenged them and forbidden them to come aboard. He was shot in the groin for his pains, whereupon over sixty masked men had boarded the vessel and she had been set on fire. A subsequent reward by the Colonial authorities of £500 had failed to tempt a single witness into giving information that would convict anyone involved in the deliberate act of piracy.

  ‘If that is not an act of open rebellion, Kite, I don’t known what is,’ Wentworth said.

  Kite nodded his head. ‘Yes, I confess that shocks me. You are right and the fact that no-one will take the reward argues that it is men of influence who are behind all this trouble.’

  ‘Yes, they are indeed pirates; they should be hanged, all sixty of them. But in Rhode Island they are probably saying it indicates the unanimity of dissent, a general disaffection with the Government and an indication of the loyalty of the populace to the ideals of liberty.’

  ‘And to hell with poor Duddingston.’

  ‘And to hell with poor Duddingston indeed, Kite. You will note that, unlike the so-called massacre at Boston, there is no mention of victims. Duddingston suffers as a proxy for the King and his Ministers; not, of course, that they will care very much.’

  ‘No. But Lord Rockingham’s government went a long way to redress the grievances of the colonists. If only he and not North were still in power.’

  ‘The impression here,’ Wentworth said, ‘is that North is the King’s toady.’

  Kite smiled. ‘I think King’s Friend is the correct designation of North’s politics.’ He tossed aside the paper, a gesture eloquent with the dismissal of politicians in general and British ministers in particular. He stared once more at the ship beyond the window. ‘So, what do you say to Wentworth?’

  ‘I think it makes her sound like an Indiaman and has an aristocratic ring to it, certainly. If you are to trade upon the Yankee coast it is as well that the King’s late and conciliating Minister should be so commemorated.’

  Kite frowned. ‘I don’t follow…’

  ‘The Marquess of Rocking’m,’ Wentworth drawled the name as it was pronounced in London, ‘is Charles Watson-Wentworth…’

  ‘Ahh. I had forgot. Then that is what she shall be,’ Kite said standing, ‘and since I am intending to modify her sail plan I shall be satisfied with you having your name carved across her stern.’

  ‘Ah, you will trim her kites then,’ Wentworth said with a chuckle.

  ‘Very droll, Wentworth, very droll.’

  Captain Kite sailed from Antigua as soon as the sale had been completed and a cargo of sugar and rum had been loaded. He wished to be clear of the islands before the onset of the hurricane season and made first for Savannah with the last of Spitfire’s transhipped cargo of crockery. He had left Jones in command of the schooner and Wentworth had found employment for her trading between the islands. He had left Johnstone in Wentworth’s counting house and Kitty Wentworth’s bed. Johnstone was showing signs of tiring of his seemingly insatiable mi
stress, but he had not mentioned his liaison after that first, impetuous confession, nor had Kite raised the subject, for it was none of his business.

  Kite was pleased to have established both Johnstone and Jones in posts from which they could profit. It had been essential to have them to help him refit Spitfire and leave Liverpool, but his desire for solitary independence had grown, prompted perhaps by the narrow society of St John’s and the fact that much of the town was haunted by the ghost of Puella. He had never allowed himself to meander about the place; there had been no nostalgic wanderings off the track he had beaten for himself between the harbour, with its waterfront warehouses and counting-houses, its sail-maker’s loft and its chandlers’ premises, the steps where the ships’ boats picked up their officers, and Wentworth’s villa. He went nowhere near the house which he and Puella had once rented and where their first son Charles had died, and he made a point of sleeping aboard either Spitfire or Wentworth, as the Santa Margarita was renamed with due ceremony.

  It was never difficult to find a crew among the waterfront loiterers and several of the ship’s former seamen remained on her books. The matter of officers was more difficult, but Wentworth found a satisfactory first and second mate willing to serve and so Kite was able to sail in her as he had planned.

  It was Kite’s intention trade on the American coast and to pick up a cargo of cotton from Savannah for Philadelphia or New York. However, he loaded a full cargo with an option to carry it to Liverpool and before August was out, had discharged his entire lading of cotton bales at the Quaker city and then New York, somewhat relieved that he was not compelled to return to Liverpool so soon. In fact he picked up a part cargo of trans-shipped British and European manufactures, goods which ranged from fashionable gowns, millinery and a quantity of haberdashery, books, fine porcelain and glassware, cotton piece goods, silks and worsteds, to some fine guns and gentlemen’s small swords. Although far from fully loaded, Wentworth’s part cargo when sold in Boston, yeilded the New York merchants a fine haul and Kite the high freight rate that Wentworth’s agent had arranged.

  ‘You see Captain,’ this worthy had explained, ‘for some time now the Bostonians do not consider it fashionable to be seen purchasing goods from Britain. There is in fact what amounts to an embargo in that port. But of course, whether you are an ardent Whig or a loyal Tory, you want the goods, so you quietly order them from New York and we ship them from here as though they are New York products.’

  ‘But that is ludicrous…’

  ‘It is also profitable, Captain, which as you know, over-rides every other consideration in this life.’

  ‘But the Wentworth is a British ship, will that not raise a degree of this illogical prejudice?’

  ‘No. The majority of the gentry purchasing your lading from the emporia of Boston will be Tory and therefore only careful not to excite attention in Boston itself. Most of the mob who are putty in the hands of the radical orators of New England will not know that the à la mode notions were carried in your vessel.’

  ‘But some of the mob will have discharged the cargo and will therefore know the origins of the cargo…’

  ‘Yes,’ said the agent with a trace of exasperation in his tone, ‘you are an Antiguan vessel and clearly have not come from England for most of your crew are negroes, mulattos or quadroons, with scarce a white face among them. As for yourself and your ensign, many British masters trade on this coast alongside their native Yankee cousins…’

  And so for several months Captain Kite and the Wentworth were employed, mainly on the coast north of Cape Hatteras until, with the onset of the worst of winter weather Kite considered his plan of extending the Wentworth’s spars and sails. His experience of the ship convinced him that this was a proper course of action and he consulted his two mates, John Corrie and the forbiddingly named Zachariah Harper, a native-born Yankee.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, what d’you think of my idea?’ He looked first at Corrie, the senior of the two. He was a handsome man in his early thirties, but had lost most of his front teeth in a brawl and this detracted from his looks. He was married to a mulatto woman in St John’s by whom he had had eight children and had proved himself a competent and steady man who knew his business both in working the ship and in the handling of her cargo. Corrie nodded his approval, his voice whistling through his broken teeth as he said. ‘It’ll do no harm, Cap’n, none at all.’

  ‘Mr Harper?’

  The Second Mate was a man with no claim to looks whatsoever. Indeed he was of such extraordinary ugliness that his face seemed to have no cohesion, being put together, as it were, from odds and ends of features. Neither eye matched its fellow, his nose was huge, his lips non-existent while his chin jutted forward to a point upon which he grew a beard without a complementary moustache upon the upper lip. He had the large and pendulous ears of an old man and wore his hair excessively long. But he was powerfully built and Kite had more than once been glad to see him leading the hands aloft to tame a sail hurriedly clewed up in a squall. In short he was one of the finest practical seamen Kite had ever encountered and he waited to see what Harper would say.

  ‘It is a good idea, sir,’ he said, ‘but we shall have to move the chess-tree further forward and fit longer bumpkins over either bow to haul the tacks down, and that will necessarily govern the extent to which you can extend the yards…’

  ‘And the brace-leads will have to come aft,’ Corrie put in.

  ‘That’s less of a problem…’

  Kite nodded and then Harper asked, ‘where will you have this work done, sir?’

  ‘The only yard I have had personal experience of was at Newport, Rhode Island…’

  ‘Roberts’s yard?’ Harper asked. ‘I know it as a good place. I would not recommend New York, sir. There the prices are too high, they are so used to Government contracts.’

  ‘D’you have any objection to Roberts’s yard, Mr Corrie?’ Kite asked the mate.

  ‘I have no opinion on the matter, Cap’n.’

  ‘Very well, Newport, Rhode Island it is. I shall write directly and see what we are able to arrange.’

  And as he sat at his desk after his mates had left the cabin, Kite felt a quickening of his pulse. Newport was the home of Sarah Tyrell.

  * * *

  Kite’s knowledge of Roberts’s yard in Newport, Rhode Island, had been a consequence of disaster. Several years earlier while on his way back to Britain with the expectant Puella, the Spitfire had been severely damaged in a hurricane and Kite had put in to Newport, aided by Christopher Jones’s local knowledge. Here the schooner had been repaired, her broken spars renewed and her hull thoroughly refitted. Here too he had bought Puella some warm furs for the trans-Atlantic passage to an England lying under the frosts of winter. In so doing he had encountered Sarah Tyrell, the young wife of an older husband, Arthur Tyrell, a merchant whose connections with Antigua were well established.

  Mistress Tyrell had thought Kite louche in his flaunting his black mistress, but had then made Puella’s acquaintance and befriended the couple beleaguered by circumstances in Newport. Since then the house of Tyrell had been profitably associated with that of Wentworth in Antigua and Makepeace and Kite in Liverpool, and Kite had himself kept up a desultory correspondence with Tyrell, always asking that he be remembered to Mistress Tyrell and occasionally receiving reciprocal greetings, always couched in terms of absolute propriety.

  There had been, however, an undercurrent to this exchange of pleasantries, for the physical attraction between Kite and Tyrell’s wife had been mutual. It had amounted to no more than a brief exchange of veiled desire, a mere muttering of conventional pleasantries which had been charged with suppressed passion. In the ensuing years the possibility of their ever meeting again had grown increasingly improbable. But ever since he had read the account of the scandalous destruction of the schooner Gaspée off the Rhode Island coast, the possibility of again meeting Sarah Tyrell had quickened his heartbeat. Moreover, when the Wentworth sailed no
rth from Antigua the thought of putting in to Newport had lain at the bottom of Kite’s consciousness. He had been half-hoping, half-fearing that, quite by chance, the ship would find herself loading a cargo for Rhode Island, but since this had not transpired Kite knew that fate was not going to oblige him. He could not wait to drift into what might add to his catalogue of great sins, for he knew he would not be surprised by the passion the sight of Sarah would arouse in him. He knew that he was being tempted, and that the notion of improving the Wentworth’s sailing qualities and the existence of Roberts’s yard were perhaps in themselves fateful.

  Well, it was no matter, he thought. He had no need to succumb to temptation like the unfortunate Johnstone. It would be pleasant to see both Sarah and her husband again, he told himself, and he ought as a matter of honour tell Tyrell of the changed circumstances of the Liverpool firm that now styled itself Makepeace and Watkinson.

  And so, after discharging his cargo in Baltimore, Kite succeeded in laying a few tiers of beer consigned to Rhode Island over shingle ballast and sailed for Newport.

  When Captain Makepeace, master and commander of the slaving brig Enterprize had thrust the nubile and beautiful young black slave at the canting young Kite, he had intended merely to draw the poison of virtuous complaint against the slave trade by the poultice of lust. He hoped thereby to drown Kite’s disapproval, to reduce him to the lowest common denominator of his kind, to take from him the awkward intrusions of decency, humanity and compassion. Makepeace was annoyed that Kite, whom he had picked up in the gutters of Liverpool, should turn out to be a dissident spirit. The Captain had no need of an abolitionist among his officers and so sought to encompass the youthful idealist’s fall from his self-appointed status of moralist. But Kite, and what Makepeace conceived to be his black whore, had fallen in love. At the voyage’s end Kite had purchased his ‘Puella’ and set up house first in St John’s and much later in Liverpool. In fact, though they had then been mutually hostile, Makepeace had by his fatuous act, touched off a train of events which in due course had led to reconciliation, friendship, the virtual abandonment of the slave-trade by the old Guineaman and the establishment of the prosperous Liverpool house of Makepeace and Kite. That single act of silliness on the part of Captain Makepeace had shaped Kite’s future, as well as that of his old commander, though he himself had been wholly passive at its inception. He had often thought of it as a turning point in his life and ever since he has seen such moments clearly. Whilst young William’s death from cholera was not such a pivotal moment, the sacrificial and accusatory suicide of Puella most certainly was, for it had persuaded Kite to return to sea and try his fortune elsewhere than in disease-ridden Liverpool.