The Weeping Ash

by Joan Aiken

  Captain Capel of the sloop Mutine was a friendly little man, round and brown as a nut; he readily agreed to carry a letter from the Paget twins to England, and also the parcel of Cal’s poems addressed to John Murray’s, the publishers in Albemarle Street, London.

  “Bless you, that will not be the least trouble in the world,” he said.

  Cal asked, with diffident politeness, glancing over the busy decks of the Mutine, which was within an hour of putting to sea, whether Captain Capel could suggest any ship in the port of Alexandria on which the brother and sister might take passage to England.

  “That I can, my boy! I know for a fact that Captain Phillimore, of the Tintagel, is desperate for hands; she was a French ship of the line, the Timoléon, you know, captured two weeks ago at Aboukir; ran aground on a sandbank, ha-ha! and her cowardly rogues of Frogs all jumped overboard and left her, now she is being patched up to return and form one of the Channel fleet off the Downs. But Phillimore is sadly short of men, he has only a prize crew added to what he can scrape together of riffraff from the port of Alexandria; I am sure he will be happy to give your sister a berth if you, sir, would be prepared to enlist as one of his junior officers for the voyage and work your passage.”

  Cal was rather startled. “I know nothing of seamanship, sir! I fear Captain Phillimore would find me more of an encumbrance than a help.”

  “Oh, psha, my boy! Anybody can see that you are a fine, well-set-up young fellow, accustomed to a life in the open air, used to encountering difficulties and perils—as indeed my friend Cameron says in this letter; he gives an excellent account of you. You will soon learn to distinguish the bow from the stern, ha-ha! Ability to handle men is the important thing—if you have that, you will be welcome, even if you have no more notion of navigation in you than this sea chest. Wait but two minutes—I’ll scribble a note to Phillimore.”

  “This is very good in you, sir.”

  Scylla glanced at her brother in slight surprise as Captain Capel, without more ado, sat down on the sea chest and dashed off a note on a tablet. It was true, she thought wonderingly, that Cal, whom she had been used to regard as a dreamy, rather inactive creature, fonder of playing pachisi with Prince Mihal than engaging in any outdoor pursuit, now presented a very different impression to the casual eye. Sun-browned, wiry, and self-possessed, he stood coolly on the deck, looking about him; his quick, dark glance, under the soft, winged brows, took in all the movements of the men who were busily engaged in making the sloop ready for sail. His brows were drawn together in a frown of concentration as he watched the sailors; he was evidently doing his best, already, to make some sense of their activities.

  “There!” said Captain Capel, handing Cal the folded paper. “And I wish you godspeed! Now I must bid you farewell—your servant; ma’am! You will excuse me, but I have a hundred and one things to attend to before we set sail.”

  And he bustled away over his cluttered deck but turned to call a warning:

  “Mind now! Captain Phillimore is a queer, cross-grained fellow—disappointed many times over promotion, you know! It soured him a trifle—soured him; ay, he’s something of a tartar. But now that he has the promotion—he was first lieutenant of the Leander, you know, before the battle at Aboukir—now he has his captaincy, perhaps he will be in better skin. For your sakes, I hope so. Mr. Smiley! Handsomely with those tubs, if you please.”

  * * *

  The Tintagel was a very different ship from the trim little Mutine, as they discovered when they had succeeded in locating it amid the tangle of shipping in the port of Alexandria. And Captain Phillimore was a very different person from the smiling, round-faced little Captain Capel. Indeed, at first sight of Captain Phillimore, Scylla’s heart sank; she had half a mind to urge Cal not to approach him; surely in all this huge port, crammed with craft, there must be some other vessel proposing to set sail for England in the near future? But then, she thought, we might have to wait here for a week, ten days, two weeks, kicking our heels; in her present miserable state of mind, the prospect of such inaction was not to be borne; so she stood quietly by the rail while Cal, having presented his note to the midshipman of the watch, was conducted to the captain on the quarterdeck.

  Captain Phillimore was much older than Scylla had expected after learning that he had only just received his promotion from first lieutenant. No wonder he had been soured and disappointed! He must be in his midfifties at least. He was a large, stout man with a face that was red, weather-beaten, pockmarked, and almost perfectly spherical; a fringe of reddish beard adorned it, like the tuft of a coconut, a bulbous, somewhat flattened nose occupied a great deal of the center, to make up, it seemed, for the fact that his eyes, set remarkably far apart, were unusually small and slitted. The general effect of this countenance was far from prepossessing.

  She saw the little slit eyes slew around in her direction and felt an unaccountable surge of self-consciousness. Hitherto it had not troubled her that she had been unable, partly through lassitude and weakness, partly from the shortness of the time available, to purchase European garments suitable for a young lady about to set sail for England. She still wore a pleated dress and tunic procured in Afghanistan, over embroidered perjamas and curly-toed leather slippers. She noticed Captain Phillimore’s eye resting disapprovingly on her sunburned skin and the hair which, during her sickness, Miss Musson had been obliged to cut close to her scalp; now, starting to grow again, it covered her head in short silvery curls like the fleece of a lamb; she had done her best to conceal its immodest shortness by draping a Kashmir shawl over her head, but she was carrying little Chet, who, in his eagerness to see everything around him, was wriggling from side to side, and the shawl had become dislodged and slipped to her shoulders.

  Little Chet himself came in for an equally condemning glance; indeed Captain Phillimore seemed to regard him with a kind of incredulous loathing. Since Cal had nodded to Scylla to approach, she moved across the deck and did her best to curtsy politely without loosening her grip of the baby.

  Phillimore was saying, “Damned if I ever thought I’d be reduced to carrying a half-caste blackamoor brat between my decks—however, what can’t be cured must be endured!”

  “That baby is no half-caste, sir,” Cal said politely. “He is the son of the Maharajah Bhupindra Mansur-i-Zaman Amirul-Umra Mohinder Singh, of Ziatur, and we are taking him to the Maharajah’s cousin Prince Gobind Tegh Bahadur, in London, so that when the little prince is old enough he may be sent to Eton.”

  “Hm; I see,” remarked Captain Phillimore, his tone conveying that he did not believe a word of it. “Eton! Ha! Lucky if they take him in there! And you two are brother and sister,” he went on, in a tone of equal disbelief, glancing from the black-headed Cal to his sister’s silvery nimbus.

  “Twins, sir,” said Cal rather stiffly. “We have our papers of identification—”

  “Oh, papers, papers,” exclaimed Phillimore harshly—he had an extraordinary voice, both fruity and croaking, as if it had acquired a crust on it through countless years of brandy-bibbing. “Such papers may be purchased in any bazaar, I daresay. Still, Capel was right—I’m damnably shorthanded. If you travel on my ship, sir, you must be prepared to work for your passage.”

  “I shall be glad to do anything that is required of me, sir—”

  “Very well! Very well! It will be work, mind you, not just standing about with your hands in your pockets giving orders. I’ll ship you as junior lieutenant, fifth, under Gough, there—he’ll take you to your quarters and show you how to go on, and I’ll have your papers drawn up by and by.”

  “And my sister, sir?”

  “Your sister.” Again Phillimore gave the word that disbelieving emphasis. “Understand me now, young man, this is a decent ship! The hands may keep their sluts below decks; such animals must have their doxies on board (besides, women are needed for passing up powder from the magazine) but I require my of
ficers to conduct their amours ashore, there is to be no indulging your lusts while shipping under my command, is that quite clear?”

  “Sir,” began Cal, stiff with outrage, but Scylla hastily interrupted him.

  “Since Captain Phillimore evidently finds it difficult to believe that we are brother and sister,” she said, trying to make her voice as tart and cold as iced lime juice, “it will be best, and will also further the interests of propriety, if I and my charge travel on some other vessel—which I myself would greatly prefer! I do not choose to have my credentials in doubt.”

  Captain Phillimore’s rusty gray brows shot up at the sound of Scylla’s voice; and he became a trifle more conciliating.

  “Now, now, my dear—there’s no occasion to fly up into the boughs! In point of fact I am already carrying a lady back to England—Mrs. Whiteforest, widow of Captain Whiteforest, who was killed on the Majestic; Mrs. Whiteforest has no maid, the black hussy ran off with an Egyptian; so if you, miss, ain’t averse to sharing a cabin with the lady and performing a few services for her—she’s somewhat down-pin at present, you see, having just lost her husband—”

  “Certainly, I shall be very glad to take care of Mrs. Whiteforest,” Scylla said calmly, having intercepted Cal’s anxious look; she smiled at him, gave a cool, dismissing glance at Captain Phillimore, and added, “Perhaps, sir, you would be good enough to allow Lieutenant Gough to direct me to this lady’s cabin so that I may introduce myself to her? And I daresay you will permit my brother to have our baggage brought on board by and by?”

  * * *

  From the start, it was plain to Scylla that their passage on the Tintagel could offer no pleasure; the disposition of Captain Phillimore was a guarantee of that. And there was no friendship or distraction to be found, either, in Mrs. Whiteforest; the poor lady, already thin, pale, and weak with grief, was also a martyr to seasickness and during the seven-week passage hardly ventured on deck more than twice. She kept her bunk, and Scylla must look after her hand and foot. Wryly, Scylla consoled herself with the thought that at least she was too much occupied to have time for bewailing her own misfortunes.

  She was, however, exceedingly unhappy.

  Cal’s grief, when he learned that Cameron had gone off without bidding him good-bye, had been intense but short-lived. He had questioned Scylla about the final interchange.

  “You say he offered marriage to you? And you refused him? Well, that was levelheaded enough, you could hardly be expected to share his kind of a roving existence, and he must have had the sense to see that; I daresay he only offered because he felt responsible for you; he must have been greatly relieved when you said no. But what I fail to understand is why he felt it needful to sheer off so fast. There need have been no awkwardness; we have all been cheek by jowl forever, after all! It is too bad! I had a hundred things to say to him before he left. And it’s odds but we’ll never see him again.” To this Scylla had dismally agreed.

  “I daresay you would not have suited,” Cal went on, pondering. (This had been aboard the coastal schooner sailing to Alexandria.) “You never seemed to have much to say to one another. But still, I am half sorry you did not accept him! There would have been something to be said for having Cameron as a brother-in-law. He is a capital kind of fellow—a rare hand in a tight place. You will be lucky if you find anyone like him in London.” Scylla said nothing to this. “However I daresay it is all for the best,” Cal decided in the end.

  Once aboard the Tintagel, there was no time for such conversations. Cal, instructed in his duties by Gough and Howard, the two lieutenants immediately senior to him, seemed to be kept busy every minute. The Tintagel, a full ship of war, was still severely undermanned.

  Moreover she was, apparently, in very bad condition. So Scylla learned from Mr. Fishbourne, the purser, a small friendly man who came to Mrs. Whiteforest’s cabin to inquire if the ladies had all they needed. Mr. Fishbourne had been a barber in civil life, before being impressed into the navy, and he still kept all the garrulity of his former trade.

  “Oh, a shocking state the ship was in!” he said earnestly to Scylla. “And still is, ma’am, if you’ll believe me. Those bloodthirsty rebels of Frenchies may be all very fine when it comes to chopping of people’s heads with their guillotine, miss, but keeping a ship in decent trim, that’s quite another matter. Her bottom boards was all rotted, miss, no one had so much as scraped off a barnacle in years, and as for stores! There wasn’t enough to keep a crew of mice in cheese crumbs. The only thing in plentiful supply was grog, for the Frogs won’t so much as pull a sheet without they have their oh-de-vee, as they call it; that’s the only thing Captain Phillimore found to approve, he being quite a one for the grog himself. But he’s changing all the rest, toot sweet, as the Frenchies say.”

  Scylla could see that Phillimore was a fierce disciplinarian; men in his crew were frequently flogged; they were ducked from the yardarm, half a dozen times over, until they were gasping and half drowned; hung up by their wrists in the shrouds with weights attached to their feet; obliged, for slowness in obeying an order, to drink gallons of salt water, for other faults, deprived of food, drink, or tobacco; and their tongues were scraped with hoop-iron if he overheard them swearing, though he could be foul-mouthed enough himself on occasion.

  Sometimes Scylla wondered if Phillimore’s addiction to punishment was due to the fact that he himself for so many years must have felt unreasonably deprived of the power to mete it out; now he was making up for lost time.

  She herself, mindful of Captain Capel’s advice, kept well out of Phillimore’s way. Although she disliked being confined to the cabin and longed to be up on deck, she curtailed the period she allowed herself in the fresh air with little Chet to an hour a day, taken at a time when the captain was at his dinner. This restriction she found easier to bear because, when she did go up on deck, there was such a likelihood of being obliged to witness some distressing punishment and hear the cries of the victims as they were beaten or ducked by the bosun’s men.

  “It’s a damnable shame,” Cal muttered, meeting her once by chance on the quarterdeck. “Half those poor fellows haven’t committed the faults they are accused of; but what can one do? If you take their part against the captain, it is mutiny and you can be hanged for it. The captain is like God aboard the ship.”

  “For heaven’s sake, then, do not do anything foolish, Cal,” his sister warned him urgently. “It is only for a short period, after all.”

  “Just the same, it makes one’s blood boil!”

  Setting aside his feelings about the captain, Cal seemed to have fallen into the ship’s routine easily enough and to be absorbing information about his duties with commendable speed; he was on friendly terms with the other lieutenants, Gough, Howard, MacBride, Forsyth, and Goodwillie; the sailors seemed to accept him, and the midshipmen, mostly boys between fourteen and eighteen, showed a tendency to hero-worship when it came out that Cal had traveled overland from India through Kafiristan, Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey, had climbed mountains, shot a leopard, and resided with foreign potentates. Scylla, too, came in for some admiring and friendly smiles from the younger officers, but, remembering Captain Phillimore’s admonitions and evident low opinion of her, she thought it best to be extremely circumspect in her dealings with them, going and coming to her cabin (which had been that of the first lieutenant, allocated to Mrs. Whiteforest) by the shortest possible route, and keeping strictly to the small patch of deck assigned to her use when taking the air. If Captain Phillimore chanced to come out, even though she had not taken her allotted hour, she went below immediately.

  As one week followed another, however, in spite of these evasive tactics, she began to be forced to the disagreeable conclusion that Captain Phillimore was taking an undue interest in her; a great deal too much for her peace of mind. She felt his eye on her frequently. From time to time he would intercept her, as she hurried for the companionwa
y, and ask some question, always in a loud hectoring voice, and with a tinge of malice in it.

  “Your brother—Miss Paget—alleges that you have traveled through the pass of Lowacal and down the valley of the Kunar River in Kafiristan. Eh? Is that true? How did you find the natives in those parts? Were they friendly?”

  The sarcasm and disbelief in his tone were patent, but Scylla did her best, always, to answer simply and naturally.

  “The natives differed from one region to another, sir, as might be expected. Some were hostile; but most of them we found friendly enough.”

  “Some of them perhaps a little too friendly and oncoming, hmm?” Phillimore suggested with a significant leer at little Chet. “One of them, perhaps, left you with that little token of his friendship?”

  “I haven’t the least idea what you mean, sir,” Scylla said coldly. “And now, if you please, I must go below; Mrs. Whiteforest will be needing me.”

  Slowly the captain stepped aside to let her pass; he had evidently curtailed his dinner hour in order to come up on deck while she was still there; his face was flushed and his breath redolent of brandy.

  As the voyage proceeded it seemed to Scylla that the captain’s potations became deeper; often, after his dinner, he clambered up the companion like some gross fly and walked with a lurching and unsteady step; his loud hiccups and belches could be heard all over the quarterdeck; yet he was never completely inebriated. He seemed to have a remarkably strong head, and however far gone in liquor he appeared, the smallest emergency found him at once perfectly clearheaded and capable of dealing with it.

  Off the coast of Spain the Tintagel encountered a French privateer.

  Scylla and the baby were instantly ordered below, not just to their cabin but down to the orlop deck. “Captain’s orders, I am afraid, ma’am,” said Howard, the first lieutenant, delivering them; “he says he cannot allow females to be anywhere near the operational decks while an engagement with the enemy is in progress.” Mrs. Whiteforest protested faintly; the orlop deck was a horrible place, below water level, pitch-dark and infested with rats. But protest was of no avail. Groping their way, the females went below and sat among casks and water barrels, hearing the water rush past terrifyingly close outside, and the thunder of guns overhead. Little Chet set up a frightened wail; Scylla tried to hush him by singing all the Pushtu songs she remembered.