The two sat in silence until Bennett broke it with a gentle but persistent snoring. Katherine looked up again at her husband; he had been called out at five o’clock that morning and had a right to doze in the warm room, she concluded charitably. He was a good man as well as a good physician, attentive without being demanding, and she had long since despaired of having children. It was a shame, though no child of hers would carry on the Makepeace name and, with Harry dead, all hinged now on Charlie. Nevertheless, she would have liked children and flattered herself that she would have made a competent mother. Her train of thought strayed now to Harry, her poor wastrel brother, who had thrown up his chances of a political career, annoyed his step-father, upset his mother and bought himself a commission.
‘I shall make a name for myself in North America,’ he had declared with a laugh to his sister on the even of his departure when he had appeared resplendent in his scarlet coat and his powdered wig. His battalion had been embarked in one of Makepeace and Frith’s vessels, for war-transportation was proving lucrative to the ship-owners of Liverpool, despite the down-turn in general trade with America. Poor Harry had made no impression upon America; on the contrary, the continent had made a fatal impact upon him. Bunker Hill! How could so beautiful a creature as Harry Makepeace die on the slopes of so prosaic a place? His mother had wept for a week, inconsolable over the loss of her favourite child. They had had a letter of condolence from Captain Kite, one of several he had written since he had left England, saying that he had met Harry in Boston before the battle and had learned afterwards that Harry had been ‘among the fallen’.
Here her reverie was abruptly ended as her husband jerked awake with a start. ‘Here they are!’ he exclaimed.
‘My dear,’ she said gently, ‘you are confused by a dream. There is no-one.’
‘I heard the bell!’
‘No, Bennett, you heard nothing…’
‘There it is,’ the doctor said his face beaming as, from the hall, the sound of the front door bell jangled.
‘Good Lord,’ exclaimed his wife, growing pale.
‘Well, well,’ muttered her husband, getting to his feet and walking to the door. ‘I shall have to see who it is at this hour.’
As Bennett left the room, Katherine laid aside her work and rose to her feet. From the hallway she heard her husband’s voice raised in surprised welcome.
‘Good God, William, is that you? Well, well, and you have a lady with you… Ah, there you are Siobhan, look who the gale had blown to our door…’
‘Why,’ Katherine heard Mrs O’Riordan say as she primped her own hair, her heart beating. ‘Captain Kite, sir, what a pleasure!’
‘Kate!’ Bennett called and she joined the merry confusion in the hall. ‘Lo, Odysseus has returned,’ Bennett said with a delighted laugh, ‘and brought Penelope with him!’
Katherine looked at the strange woman who was slipping off her cloak, catching a glimpse of dark hair and a face of astonishing beauty which smiled magnetically as it caught her eye. Kite bowed over her hand as Bennett ushered them into the drawing room where Kite introduced his companion.
‘My wife, Sarah…’
Doctor Bennett bowed and Katherine nodded, welcoming her new guest while Bennett drew up chairs and invited Kite’s wife to seat herself. Katherine studied her with interest, noting enviously that though her own senior by several years, the new Mistress Kite was indeed a woman of outstanding beauty, with fine dark hair, a fair unblemished complexion, clear eyes, even teeth and a sensuous mouth. Her riding habit, though worn and stained, seemed a little small and though graceful in her movements, Katherine formed the suspicion that she was pregnant.
‘Well, well,’ Bennett said from a side-table where he poured oporto into glasses, ‘a warm welcome to you both. When did you berth?’
‘We arrived this morning, before the wind got up,’ Kite said, ‘and were fortunate to berth directly on the tide.’ Kite took the offered glass and expressed his thanks. ‘There were the customary delays, but I was determined that Sarah should not spend another night on board.’ Kite reached out and took his wife’s hand. ‘She is expecting…’
‘I knew it,’ Katherine said, smiling and clapping her hands with pleasure.
‘You see, my dear,’ Bennett said, ‘I told you I had one of my apprehensions.’
They explained the uncanny presentiment of arrival that Bennett had experienced and Sarah said, ‘you are very kind. I hope we shall not put you to too much trouble.’
‘Who else should you go to, my dear lady,’ Bennett replied enthusiastically, ‘the house is yours and I am entirely at your service professionally and as a private person.’
‘Thank you Doctor Bennett.’
‘Dear lady, please call me Joshua,’ he leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘It would give me exquisite pleasure, for my wife denies me the intimacy and insists on calling me “Bennett”.’ He pulled a face and sipped his wine, ‘’tis such a damnably dull name, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I have heard it used as a Christian name in America…’
‘Ah, but not by Christians, surely. By red indians, I suppose?’ Bennett’s eyebrows rose quizzically over the rim of his nearly empty glass.
Sarah laughed. ‘Of course by Christians.’ She turned towards Kite. ‘Shall we call our son Bennett, William?’
‘If it please you, my dear Sarah, though I fear William Bennett Kite is something of a mouthful.’
‘William Arthur Bennett Kite,’ Sarah corrected, adding wistfully, ‘I should like Arthur to be thus memorialised…’
‘As you wish,’ Kite said, smiling indulgently, so that Katherine asked:
‘Who is Arthur?’
‘My first husband. He was killed by the rebels.’
‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ said Katherine awkwardly, quickly adding, ‘so was my brother Harry…’
‘Lord, Katherine, I had forgot,’ began Kite as Katherine shook her head.
‘Do not worry William, the time for grief is past and you were kind enough to write at the time. Besides, this is a cheerful occasion and not one on which we should dwell on death. Pray tell me what you would like to eat.’ Katherine turned to Sarah. ‘I know little of ship’s fare beyond the fact that it is distasteful. What would you like?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘You are very kind, Katherine, but I am not hungry. We had a fresh pie brought aboard from the shore and did not intend to put you to any trouble.’
‘It would prove no trouble at all…’
‘Well I shall have another drink,’ put in Bennett, ‘and I doubt not that you will join me Kite, eh?’
‘Obliged, Bennett.’
‘You’ll be glad to be home then, William?’ Katherine said, adding pointedly, ‘and we must find alternative lodgings, Bennett.’
‘Eh, what’s that?’ Bennett said, looking round from the side-table. ‘Oh, yes, my goodness me, we must, we must.’
Kite held up his hand and shook his head. ‘No, no, it is not our purpose to evict you, though I should like us to remain here until after Sarah’s confinement.’
‘As I said, dear lady, this is the very place for you in your condition.’ Bennett handed Kite his refilled glass. ‘There is ample room for us all and we had anticipated your arrival, for the bed is airing as we speak.’
‘Your forethought does you credit, Bennett,’ Kite said. ‘But in all seriousness, we shall need some time, for I have my fortune to repair and I do not think this war will benefit us here, in Liverpool.’
‘War? What war?’ Bennett looked up, halted in the very act of resuming the comfort of his chair, his face transformed by incredulity.
‘Why, this war in America… The war in which Harry was killed…’ Kite said with an air of bafflement.
‘But, though Harry was killed, Bunker Hill was a victory for the King’s arms and surely it has put paid to all notions of outright rebellion.’ Bennett was frowning.
Kite and Sarah exchanged glances and Kite shook
his head. ‘My dear Bennett, Bunker Hill was only the beginning and Harry lost his life not as some unfortunate but necessary consequence of the military art. There was little artful in the attack on Bunker Hill and Harry, in common with some ninety-six other infantry officers, lost his life largely through incompetence.’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Katherine, her hands to her mouth, ‘that is too cruel!’
‘Not necessarily his own, Katherine,’ Kite temporised, ‘but that of General Gage and General Howe.’
‘But how d’you know all this?’ Bennett asked, unconscious of the pun and throwing an anxious look at his wife.
‘We were there, Bennett, among the wounded when the first two attacks failed. It was no brilliant military exploit but a hard fought battle in which the rebel yokels stood their ground and repulsed our infantry like heroes…’
‘Damn it, Kite, that is treasonable…’
‘Oh, Bennett, pray do not take up that stupid opinion that likens admiration for an enemy to some form of treachery. It was widespread among the officers in Boston before the battle and they thought if they took brooms to the summit of Bunker Hill they could seep the farm-boys out of their entrenchments. Now I understand that the defeated hay-seeds have fortified Dorchester Heights and the talk is increasingly of evacuating Boston.’
‘Evacuating Boston? Good God, is this true?’
‘It is all too true, Joshua,’ said Sarah, ‘and on another occasion, I shall tell you how my first husband lost his life and how my present husband fought the rebels at sea.’
‘Good God, Kite, you have resumed privateering, have you? I had not heard that letters of marque and reprisal had been issued.
‘Nor had I,’ remarked Kite drolly, ‘but the whole matter has gone beyond such touching niceties, Bennett. Believe me, we are at war and will have a hard time of it before it is over.’
Bennett blew out his cheeks and nodded. ‘Aye, I can see that, and if we become preoccupied with our misguided trans-Atlantic cousins, I would lay money on the French trying their luck against us.’
‘I should not wonder if the Americans will not seek an alliance with them,’ Sarah said, ‘though it may make strange bed-fellows, to be sure.’ Katherine looked at her sharply, astonished at her presumption.
‘No, nor I,’ agreed Kite, seemingly unruffled at his wife expressing her political opinion so frankly. ‘And is so, we shall have to consider our personal position most carefully, though we have left Nathan Johnstone, you will remember him as my clerk…’
‘Oh yes,’ said Bennett, ‘I recall him; a widower…’
‘Now remarried, I shouldn’t wonder, to a rebel lass and intending to settle in Massachusetts.’
‘Good Lord, what will become of him after the rebellion?’ Katherine asked, enmboldened by Sarah’s candour. ‘Will he not hang for a traitor?’
‘If we win,’ said Kite, ‘do you suppose the King’s Ministers will order every rebel hanged? There are thousands of them. Besides, it presupposes our troops will prove victorious.’
‘And you do not think they will be, do you Kite?’ Bennet asked, his voice sober with concern.
Kite shook his head. ‘No, not in the end. They will have their Bunker Hills and declare them victories, but in the end I think the task too vast. The country is enormous.’
‘Well what do these rebels want?’
‘Independence… a new, trans-Atlantic country…’
‘A new England? I thought they had that.’
‘No, something entirely different,’ put in Sarah, ‘a country where any man may rise and not concern himself as to how he does it…’
‘A republic then?’
‘Yes…’
‘And a man like Nathan Johnstone can change his nationality in this rebellion, and emerge as an…’
‘American,’ offered Sarah coldly.
‘Well, well,’ said Bennett, digesting the news. ‘Well, well.’
They sat in silence for a moment, the gulf of different experiences lying between them, then Kite recalled something.
‘Kate, my dear, it is remiss of me,’ he said, reaching into an inner pocket of his coat. ‘I seem to be forgetting everything important this night.’ He held out a small paper package sealed with wax. ‘It is Harry’s ring. I think Charles is to have it, but I do not intend to wait upon Frith, so perhaps you would deal with it.’
Her hand shook as she took the little packet and broke the seal. ‘How did you come by it?’ she asked.
‘I was with him when he died. It was quite circumstantial.’
Kate looked up from the ring which lay in its crumpled square of paper. ‘You never said so in your letter.’
‘No. There is always much one does not say in such letters.’
After they had retired for the night, Kite was unable to sleep. Beside him Sarah’s even breathing told where she had sunk into the unbelievable luxury of a feather mattress. Kite recalled another homecoming, when he had taken the expectant Puella north to the Lakes and how he had come down the following morning and been filled with such optimism that it seemed the whole world must be imbued with the same sensation of hope. But so much had happened since that bright moment of expectation. Puella and her son were dead, killed by the cholera for which this place was notorious, he had all but abandoned Liverpool and as the world moved on the fortunes of men rose and fell. He thought of Johnstone in Boston hitching his fate to the apparently rising star of Yankee republicanism, of Wentworth and his unfaithful wife in St John’s and of the late Captain Makepeace’s widow now in her marriage bed with Frith, her former lover. He thought too of John Peck Rathburne in Newport, and the Rhode Islander’s defiant declarations; would they ever meet again? He sought an answer in the darkness, but there was no sense of Puella’s presence. Perhaps she slept at last, and then he recalled the odd little yarn of Bennett’s ‘apprehension’ of their arrival tonight.
Well, well, how strange. Puella had killed herself in this very room and yet Kite felt no terror at the thought, only a profound sadness for her unhappiness and a vast gratitude at her act of manumission to himself. That her obi approved of his new wife he was in no doubt, but Kite was not a man of such self-conceit that he could content himself with such a thought, even as Sarah lay breathing evenly beside him. No, William Kite the self-declared privateersman, had murdered a hundred men on the deck of a ship he conceived to be his own property and wrongfully taken from him. What had happened to the apothecary’s son who had once splinted the wings of birds and bound up the wounds of pet dogs?
The terrible image of the carnage upon Rattlesnake’s deck filled his mind’s eye; the writhing bodies, torn to pieces by the ragged, homespun and extemporised weapons of death, the stink of blood and shit, mixed with the smoke coiling out of the ship’s hold. He shook off the haunting thought and Rathburne returned unbidden in its place, Rathburne defiant even in his pain, telling him his wife was mad.
No, Sarah was not mad; they were all mad! Poxed with insanity in all their vain endeavours! And he, William Kite, was adding to the world’s over-flowing portion of folly, for he had fathered another human life even now quickening in his wife’s belly.
What would become of his third child? Would he or she survive? Would cholera revisit his family and take the infant? Was that how nature revenged itself upon the ludicrous creatures that called themselves humans? The sensation of panic rose in him and he was aware that Puella’s spirit had gone now, leaving him alone and frightened in the lonely darkness. How quickly a man’s mood swung!
He eased himself from the bed and went to the window. Peering through the curtains he watched the grey daylight grow over the roof-tops of Liverpool and felt his own apprehensions recede. He must not linger here in Liverpool to expose either Sarah or her child to the dread rice-water disease, despite Bennett’s offer of himself as man-midwife. He must take all possible care of them both, for fate had given him a new lease on a life he had once thought finished and such opportunities came to few souls.
Having resolved the matter, he returned to the bed, careful not to disturb the sleeping Sarah. He lay quietly for a while and then, as the sun rose, he slipped into a dreamless sleep.
Will Kite emerge a hero or will fate deal him one last decisive blow?
Fear and fighting with sea-faring William Kite. On the High Seas from 18th century Liverpool to the Gold Coast and the American War of Independence, this thrilling historical series is breathlessly action-packed.
The epic William Kite Naval Adventures are perfect for fans of Hornblower and Sharpe!
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Severn House Publishers
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Richard Woodman, 2000
The moral right of Richard Woodman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788632188
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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