The Privateersman

by The Privateersman (retail) (epub)

  Chapter Ten

  A Ship For Rhode Island

  They stumbled through the thick snow almost blind, glad of its concealment, yet uncertain of their way until Harper called for them to halt and they heard some drunken shouting which, in ten minutes, led them to the waterfront. Earlier, among the score or so of craft moored along the wharf, Harper had spotted a small rowing boat, too small for the gangs of Patriots that, if the noise was anything to judge by, were already pulling through the soft snowflakes towards the anchored ships.

  ‘At least there will be no lack of warning,’ Kite said anxiously, as the other two scrambled down into the little boat.

  ‘Aye, but John Corrie might think they’re only revellers, sir,’ said Harper as he sorted the oars. ‘Christmas is not far off.’

  ‘Christmas?’ queried Kite, pausing turned to step from the ladder into the wildly rocking boat. ‘I had forgotten about Christmas.’

  ‘We’re ready, sir,’ Harper said. The Second Mate and Jacob had settled themselves on the two thwarts and each pulled a pair of oars.

  ‘Very well, then let’s cast off.’ Kite turned to get his bearings. The boat had no rudder and he would have to set their course from memory. ‘Give way together… Pull starboard… Now… pull evenly.’

  A moment later it was as if the world had disappeared. The boat surged along, floating on jet black water in a tiny circumscribed area which was limited by the cold, pale and falling snow. As each white flake touched the surface of the sea, it vanished, but Kite took no interest in this. he was looking over his shoulder, trying to keep track of the wake and correct its deviation from what he tried to judge was a straight line in the direction to the ship. Somewhere ahead of him he could hear the noise of the Patriots and after a few moments he commanded: ‘Oars!’

  Harper and Jacob raised the oar-blades from the water and held them horizontally as the boat carried her way through the water. Kite listened intently, trying to divine the direction of the Wentworth from any commotion, but the Patriots had fallen silent themselves.

  ‘They’ll have strung themselves out in a line abreast,’ Harper offered.

  Kite nodded, ‘just what I was thinking,’ he agreed. They glided on in silence for a moment, Kite’s anxiety increasing with every passing second. Then, quite distinctly they heard a shout which confirmed their supposition.

  ‘Here she is!’ the voice called and then there were several shouts as each boat identified its relationship with the locator of the Wentworth and Kite was galvanised.

  ‘Give way! Pull starboard hard!’

  Harper and Jacob laid back on their oars and the boat leapt through the water, the bow rising under the power of their strokes, with Kite in the stern sheets leaning forward as if he could impart initial impetus to their advance. Then Kite suddenly sensed something was wrong. A second later there seemed to be a huge black hole in the white curtain of snow as the hull of a vessel loomed out of the night. An instant later they struck her bow-on, the violence of the collision tumbling Jacob and Harper off their thwarts onto their backs. Kite was catapulted onto his knees in the stern sheets, striking his head on Harpers’s vacated thwart. The Second Mate lost his oars, and the boat’s stem was sprung, so that as they ceased swearing and settled themselves again, Jacob exclaimed, ‘boat’s leaking, Cap’n!’

  ‘God damn!’ Kite said, but a voice above their heads interrupted.

  ‘And what in tarnation may all you noisy buggers be up to running into this ship when any self-respecting Yankee would be tucked up in the lee of bum island?’

  Kite settled his hat and looked up. A man’s face stared down at them out of the darkness and a moment later another next to him held a light over the side. The assumption that they were part of the general uproar aboard on the waters of the harbour that night, caused Kite to recollect himself. ‘We’re looking for the English ship, the Wentworth.’

  ‘And what have the poor buggers over there done to upset your precious susceptibilities then?’

  ‘They’re defying the Patriot Committee’s regulations on the imports of tea.’

  ‘Are they indeed,’ the man drawled. ‘Well, well, and is that lynching offence in Rhode Island? Well,’ he went on, not waiting for a reply, ‘she’s not half a cable away on my larboard beam… I should hurry if I were you.’ The seaman nodded and they looked down to where a dark swirl of water, lit by the glimmer of the lantern, was just beginning to cover the bottom boards.

  ‘Shove off Jacob. Give way!’

  They worked their way clumsily off the strange vessel’s side. Jacob stowed one oar and he and Harper carried on with one oar each. Kite looked back and called out his thanks, recognising the schooner next to which he had anchored the Wentworth hours ago. As they rounded the bow with Harper holding water, they heard the noise of the attack. There were shouts and a pistol cracked in the darkness. Someone aboard the Wentworth was ringing the ship’s bell rapidly as an alarm while above the uproar Kite clearly heard Corrie’s voice calling all hands.

  ‘Pull, damn you!’ he shouted, but their progress was hampered by the rapid increase in the boat’s weight as it filled and steadily lost buoyancy. Kite stared ahead, but could still see nothing beyond the white curtain and then, away to the left, he caught sight of a flash and a second gunshot sounded above the hubbub.

  ‘She’s filling fast, sir,’ Harper grunted between tugs at his oar.

  ‘I know,’ Kite snapped and then he sensed the loom of the ship and hissed, ‘hold water!’ Over their heads raked the Wentworth’s bobstay and as Harper and Jacob dug their oars into the sea, Kite reached up and tried to arrest their forward motion. The decelerating efforts caused the water in the boat to rush forward and Jacob groaned as it rose round his legs.

  ‘Up you go, Zachariah!’ Kite commanded as he clung to the chain bob-stay. Harper dropped his oar and Kite turned away as the Second Mate’s feet momentarily kicked in his face and then disappeared into the darkness. ‘Now you, Jacob!’

  Kite followed the quartermaster as the three men scrambled aboard over the bow and they paused for a moment by the bitts to gather their wits. They could see the fight in the waist was already over. The Patriots had easily over-whelmed the Wentworth’s anchor watch. They, and the rest of the crew coming sleepily on deck at the summons for all hands, had been shepherded into a confused and disconsolate huddle by the main-mast. The Patriots not guarding the Wentworth’s crew were busy assembling lanterns and Kite could see Rathburne’s face lit by one of these as he confronted John Corrie, his drawn sword scarcely an inch from the unfortunate Mate’s breast.

  ‘Pipe down the lot of you and no harm will come to you,’ Rathburne was saying as Kite, drawing his own hanger, stormed aft and shoved his way through his cowed crew.

  ‘Put up that weapon, Rathburne!’ Kite brought his own sword-blade up and his men surged forward. But the sudden emergence of Kite made no impression upon the imperturbable Rathburne who merely held up his hand to stop any precipitate action by his own men. Calmly he turned his head to Kite and smiled. The next moment Kite felt the jar of sudden impact and the sword was struck from his hand and he, and not Corrie was menaced by Rathburne’s sword-tip.

  Kite flushed with mortification as Rathburne rapped out his orders. ‘Get this mob into two boats and take them ashore. You may go with them, Captain Kite, and count yourself lucky that I am only seizing your ship…’

  ‘You have no right, damn you!’ Kite expostulated.

  ‘I have every right, Kite!’ The rhyming remark produced a laugh from the Patriots, who immediately began to herd the Wentworth’s people over the side. The lantern light jumped erratically from one face to another as Kite felt a rising tide of furious impotence.

  ‘You cannot treat these men with such inhumanity, Rathburne,’ he expostulated. ‘Let them at least take their personal effects!’

  ‘We will send what we do not require ashore in the morning,’ Rathburne said dismissively, sheathing his sword. Then he bent and quick
ly picked up Kite’s sword, grasped the blade in both hands and snapped it smartly across his knee. Holding the two parts out to Kite he said, ‘You should not carry one of these unless you can use it, Captain Kite. It is a gentleman’s weapon.’

  Kite kept a level head. ‘I shall ask you formally, Rathburne, by what right and for what purpose you have boarded my ship?’

  ‘I am not answerable to you, Kite. I am requisitioning this ship for Rhode Island…’

  ‘What? Does Rhode Island have a navy?’ Kite scoffed.

  ‘It does now, Kite. Now get over the side while I still have my temper and thank God that you are a man of small significance.’

  Stung to the quick by Rathburne’s cool arrogance, Kite said, ‘you are a murderer and a pirate…’ But Kite bit his tongue as the tip of Rathburne’s sword raked his cheek.

  ‘There sir, is a mark for you, where once Mistress Tyrell struck you to the amusement of the townsfolk. You may tup her, Captain Kite, as the pleasure takes you, for she is as mad a bitch as ever came on heat. But every time you shave, sir, you will recall how John Peck Rathburne fucked you! Now get over the side!’

  It had stopped snowing when Kite woke and the humiliations of the night crowded into his recollection. A brilliant sunshine shone through the imperfectly pulled curtains and he sat up, his cheek drawn and scabbed from Rathburne’s sword-cut. Touching it he groaned with discomfort that was more moral than physical.

  ‘You are awake.’ Sarah turned from the dressing table where she sat before the mirror in her satin robe, brushing her luxuriant dark hair.

  ‘I am ruined,’ he said shortly, trying to recall the extent of their intimacy the previous night and then, seeing the blood-soaked shirt and neck linen thrown over the back of a chair, remembering his abject homecoming. He had been exhausted and, having had his wound cleaned up, for the intense cold had stopped the bleeding, he had been helped to bed and recalled only falling into the softness of Sarah’s bed before oblivion claimed him.

  ‘Oh, God… They have the upper hand so completely… They have taken the ship, Sarah.’ He ran his fingers threw his tangled hair. ‘What the devil are we to do? We are besieged here, damn them.’

  ‘John Rathburne sent three men here this morning about an hour ago. They have brought a portmanteau full of your effects. Your fellow Ben is below in the kitchen with that ugly fellow Zachariah, the negro and another man named John…’

  ‘Corrie?’

  ‘Yes.’ She skilfully wound her hair into a tight knot and, lancing it to the top of her head, began to assume the cool and elegant poise that he so admired. ‘The rest of your men were put into a barn for the night.’

  ‘That is most kind of the Patriots,’ Kite said with a vicious and hopeless sarcasm. He threw off the bed sheets and rose, fumbling behind the side-screen as he urinated into the chamber-pot concealed behind it.

  ‘I will send for hot water,’ Sarah said.

  ‘We must go to Antigua,’ he said, emerging from the screen, ‘but first I would lodge a formal complaint with the Governor.’

  ‘That will do little good,’ Sarah replied. ‘Listen to me. I have been up most of the night and have considered our situation in the wake of what has happened and what I know of matters hereabouts. We have no place here, the Patriots will see to that. it would not matter that we declared ourselves the most ardent admirers of Sam Adams and John Hancock, that we hated King George and drank daily to his damnation, they would never believe us. What titles we have in law will be over-turned the instant they begin the rebellion…’

  ‘They are intending to rebel?’ Kite paused as he tucked his shirt-tails into his breeches. It was as though the actual import of what he had been involved in had only just fully occurred to him in the aftermath of the taking of the Wentworth.

  ‘You think all this is some kind of childish prank?’ Sarah asked in astonishment. ‘For years these people have committed acts of provocation to one purpose, to goad the authority of the Crown. Today, tomorrow, who knows when? Oh, William, you know perfectly well what this is.’

  He nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes. Yes, I do now. In the abstract, as touching the lives of others it was of no great personal moment but now… now it is very different.’

  ‘And do you wish the seizure of the Wentworth to be a casus belli? I do not want the murder of my husband to tear this otherwise pleasant place apart!’

  ‘Have you no thoughts of vengeance?’

  ‘On the few, yes. But not on the many. For those who like sheep ba-aed at Arthur’s terrible end I have only contempt, William.’ Her eyes blazed as she regarded him, half turning on the stool before the dressing table. He was almost choked by the intensity of her passion and her beauty. Moved, he held out his hands.

  She rose and came towards him. ‘We will take our revenge in due course, in time of our own choosing, William.’

  He nodded and looked down at her. ‘I have not been very gallant, have I?’

  She shook her head and took his hands. ‘No sir, you have not,’ she said, her mood suddenly lighter. ‘You wallowed in my bed and then this morning, you rose and took a piss in my jordan as though you had every right to be in my bed-chamber.’ She was smiling. ‘In fact, Captain Kite, your behaviour has been monstrous and you should hang your head in shame.’

  But he could not match her flippancy. ‘Oh, Sarah, I have far more than you know to hang my head in shame over. I was disarmed by that man Rathburne on the quarterdeck of my own ship in the most humiliating manner.’

  ‘So, sir, your own loss of honour is greater than mine, is it?’ she asked with mock severity.

  ‘That is not what I mean…’

  She put her finger on his lips. ‘I know, my dear, but please right one wrong before you seek a more conspicuous and public satisfaction. You have only to ask…’

  It took Kite a moment to comprehend her innuendo and then he threw off as much of his megrimmed mood as he could and dropped to his knees. He looked up at her. ‘It is too short a time for either prudence or convention, Mistress Tyrell, but what has convention to do with our present situation? You must therefore forgive me all my monstrous presumptions, I beg. Will you therefore consent to do me the honour of becoming my wife?’

  She drew him up and they kissed. Kite felt the urgent pleasure of his arousal and Kite pushed her backwards towards the invitingly rumpled bed, but she drew away smiling broadly, his blood smeared across her cheek. ‘Not now, William. You forget I have ordered you hot water.

  ‘I am sorry, I had indeed forgot.’

  And as if she had been waiting outside, and perhaps she had, thought Kite, Bessie Ramsden knocked and brought in a large ewer of piping hot water. After she had gone and Kite bent over the steaming bowl, stripped to his waist and luxuriating in the perfume of Sarah’s soap, he heard her say, ‘We may publish our banns in Boston, William, and marry there.’

  ‘After which we must go to Antigua.’ Kite said, picking up a razor laid out for him, a distant look in his eyes. ‘That is our only chance.’

  ‘And shall we live in Antigua? I am not certain that I want to live in the Antilles. What shall you do? Go to sea and leave me alone in a strange place?’

  He broke off shaving and looked at her, as though suddenly having to encompass her in his plans which were still full of revenge and the longing to obtain redress from Rathburne. ‘If you are right, my love, and rebellion breaks out in New England, much ill may befall us. You yourself said we have no place here and while we could return to Liverpool…’ He rinsed his razor and wiped his face, straightening up and turning towards her. ‘Sarah,’ he said. ‘it may be unwise to marry in Boston, or indeed anywhere…’

  ‘But why?’

  Kite reached for his shirt and wrinkled his nose at its soiled state. Sarah rose and, her face set, opened a drawer and drew out a shirt and clean neck-linen. ‘Please, use these. But why should we not marry? I have just accepted your proposal,’ she concluded flatly.

  ‘Because I would not make y
ou so soon a widow twice.’

  She picked up his dirty linen and rounded on him angrily. ‘For God’s sake do not play games with my heart! Why should that be so?’

  ‘Rathburne may kill me.’

  ‘Then he would have to kill both of us.’ Sarah said with finality.

  ‘Come Sarah, that is not logical…’

  ‘If I were to come to sea with you it would be perfectly logical.’

  ‘But you do not know what you ask.’

  ‘Puella accompanied you, did she not.’

  ‘Yes, at the beginning.’

  ‘Well, we are at the beginning and I cannot play the role of passive wife any longer in these turbulent times. Think what being Arthur’s spouse has meant to me, William, these last thirteen odd years. I am but four and thirty…’

  ‘Beg pardon, my love, but the sea life is nothing like anything you have experienced,’ Kite said, shaking his head incredulously, ‘besides, having you with me will deprive me of my spirit, for I will be constantly anxious about your safety.’

  ‘Are the anxieties of being master of such a dimension? Why I know of wives in Newport and Providence who accompany their husbands to sea. They are strong women, full of courage, but I do not think them my superiors in spirit.’

  ‘But you are a lady, Sarah, and besides…’ Kite tailed off, taking up the clean crisp neck-linen that had been Arthur Tyrell’s.

  ‘And besides,’ Sarah prompted, ‘come, you are concealing something from me.’

  ‘No, I have not yet revealed it to you.’

  ‘Then do not prevaricate. What is your purpose in returning to sea, if not to trade?’ And then the thought occurred to her and she asked frowning, ‘you cannot mean you intend to seek a commission in the King’s service?’