The evening seemed destined for success: all invitations were taken up and Kydd was kept busy greeting the steady stream of guests who showed every inclination to linger.
Cecilia sparkled as hostess; her orange-flower and brandy rout cakes were universally applauded. Becky, under Tysoe’s discreet tutelage, mingled with a tray of cordials and wines and it was not long before number eighteen resounded to scenes of gaiety and warmth.
“Ah, Mrs Mullins!” Kydd said warmly. “Y’r help in acquiring m’ residence is much appreciated. Can ye not feel how it likes t’ see a party?”
“I do that, Mr Kydd,” she replied, hiding a smile.
“Sir, a Miss Robbins.” It was the hired footman at the door.
“Why, Mr Kydd! So good of you to remember us.” There was movement behind her as she went on, “Ah, the invitation did mention ‘a friend,’ did it not?” she cooed.
“O’ course it did, Miss . . .” Her friend emerged from behind her, stopping Kydd mid-sentence. “Oh! Er, th-thank you f’r coming, Miss Lockwood,” he managed, then remembered a polite bow, took the proffered hand and escorted her in.
She was in a cream dress of the latest fashion and had taken some considerable pains with her Grecian hairstyle. “I noticed your ship arrive, Mr Kydd,” she said warmly. “Such a pretty creature. A brig-sloop, I’d hazard?”
“Aye—that is t’ say, yes, she is. Teazer is her name.”
“How curious,” she said. Her hazel eyes held his for a long moment. “Does she suit you?”
Kydd returned the look coolly but inwardly he exulted. How had she known it was his ship unless it had been pointed out to her—or she had been looking out for it? Either way it proved her interest in him. “Why, Miss Lockwood, there’s been three Teazers in our sea service this age but none s’ sweet a sailer on a bowline as—as my Teazer. ”
“How agreeable for you.” She paused and continued softly, “Tell me this, would you trust your very life to her in a great storm?”
“I would,” Kydd answered immediately. He wondered what lay behind her words, realising that she was using the seafarer’s “she” for a ship instead of the landlubber’s soulless “it.” “I have afore now, an’ conceive I will again, all th’ time I’m in English seas.”
“Just so,” she said politely, her eyes still on him. Kydd felt a blush rising. “Well, Mr Kydd, if I don’t see you again tonight let me tell you how much I have enjoyed meeting you once more.”
Kydd bowed wordlessly and, claimed by Miss Robbins, Persephone Lockwood entered the throng. Kydd gazed after her, seeing people fall back in deference to her quality and respectful glances flashed his way.
He resumed his duties, conscious of rising elation. Time passed, and the first guests made ready to depart, among them Miss Lockwood. Should he strike up a conversation before she left? But before he could act she had caught his eye and moved over to him. “Mr Kydd, thank you for a lovely evening.”
“M-my pleasure, Miss L-Lockwood,” he stuttered.
“I wonder—no, I have no right to ask it of you,” she said, with a frown, a gloved hand going to her mouth.
“Do, please,” Kydd said gallantly.
“Well, since you are so obliging, it does occur to me that you could be of some service to me in a small matter that would really mean a lot.”
“Miss Lockwood, if I c’n do anything . . .”
“It’s for my father,” she said apologetically. “I have it in mind to present him with a painting for his birthday, a marine painting. You see, I’m concerned that it be completely authentic in its sea detail—you’ve no idea how testy Papa gets when he espies errors in the rigging and so forth. If you could assist me to choose wisely I would be most grateful.”
“Er, yes! I mean t’ say, o’ course I will.”
“You’re most kind. Then shall we meet at the print publisher in Old Plymouth? I’ve been told he also has some fine sea paintings. Would Wednesday, at eleven, suit?”
“Wednesday, yes,” Kydd blurted. Two days.
“Oh—and this had better be our little secret,” she concluded, with an impish smile.
“Come.” Kydd looked up from his pile of official letters.
“I’ll be off ashore, then, sir,” his first lieutenant said boyishly. He looked dashing in his cutaway coat and gush of lace cravat, and held a rakish silk hat as though he was trying to hide it.
“By all means, Mr Standish.” The unwritten custom was that the two officers would take turn and turn about to be out of the ship while at short stay in port. “An’ good fortune with the . . . the entertainments.”
The other flashed a broad smile and was gone.
Kydd bent once more to his task. The constant stream of invoices, dockets, reports and correspondence requiring his sole attention never ceased to amaze him, but any matter skimped or overlooked might rebound at a later time.
“Enter!” he called at a timid knock.
“From ashore, sir,” squeaked Andrews.
It was a simple folded letter from Cecilia.
Dear Thomas,
Jane has been lately telling me of your dockyard, and how it is the very wonder of the age. She says that if you are known to a person of consequence it is quite the thing to visit at length under escort. You would oblige me extremely if you will indulge my curiosity when convenient.
His dockyard? Kydd smiled. Plymouth, big as it now was, was near dwarfed by the naval dockyard and the vast population of workers that had grown up around it, but he was feeling restless and an excuse to get away and promenade in the sunshine was welcome. “At ten, the North Stairs,” he scribbled on the back of the note. She would know where the officers stepped ashore.
She was waiting for him, twirling a parasol and in infectious good spirits. “Such a handsome escort for a lady,” she exclaimed, taking his arm. Since the return of Kydd and Renzi from Terra Australis Cecilia had made a remarkable recovery and was now undeniably in looks, her strong dark features catching eyes on all sides.
“Then shall we spread sail an’ get under way, Cec?”
Seamen touched their hats with a grin and a grave ensign of Foot saluted Kydd’s gold and blue smartly as they moved off round the wall to the Fore Street entrance. The master porter emerged from his little house and recognised Kydd with a wave, the two sentinels coming to a crashing “present.”
“This is y’r royal dockyard, then, sis. Seventy-one acres an’ three thousand artificers, not t’ mention th’ labouring men. I dare t’ say there are more’n half ten thousand men at work before ye now.”
It gave pause, for the largest industrial endeavour in his home town, the Guildford iron foundry, could boast of no more than a few score and none other in Kydd’s acquaintance had more than some small hundreds.
“What a charming chapel,” Cecilia murmured, looking at a trim little edifice just inside the gates.
“Seventeen hundred, sis, William the third.” An avenue of well-tended lime trees stretched away to a lengthy terrace of fine houses that might well have graced Bath or London. “An’ those are the quarters of the officers o’ the dockyard—there ye’ll find the commissioner, master shipwright, clerk o’ the cheque, all your swell coves. Gardens at th’ back an’ offices in the front.”
But her eyes were down the slight hill to the main dock area and the towering complexity of a ship-of-the-line in dry-dock. As they approached, the scale of the sight became more apparent: soaring to the skies, her masts and yards higher by far than the tallest building anywhere, it seemed incredible that this great structure was actually designed to move.
Clutching Kydd’s arm Cecilia peered over the edge of the graving dock, unprepared for the sheer grandeur of the dimensions of what she saw: the huge bulk of the vessel, the muddy floor of the dock so far below and the tiny figures moving about from under.
“I’ll show ye a sight as you’ll never forget,” Kydd said. “Mind y’r dress.” He found a small flight of stone steps with an iron hand-chain that led
down into the abyss. “Come on, Cec.”
Frightened, but trusting, she clung to the chain and they descended, down and down. The sunlight faded and a miasma of mud and seaweed wafted up, thick and pungent. On the last step Kydd called a halt. “Look now, sis.”
She turned—and caught her breath. In a giddying domination, the colossal green-streaked bulk of the battleship reared above them blotting out everything. As well, it stretched away down the dock on and on, longer than a town street, and the impression of a monstrous bulking poised only on the central keel-blocks and kept from toppling by spindly-looking shores caused a strange feeling of upside-down vertigo.
Kydd pointed past the fat swell of the hull to the further end. “Those are our dock gates, Cec. I have t’ tell ye that the other side o’ that is the sea, and where we’re stood is usually thirty feet under th’ waves.”
“They w-won’t open them while we’re still here, will they?” she added, in a small voice.
“Not till I give ’em the order.” Kydd chuckled, but Cecilia mounted the steps back to the sunshine with almost indecent haste.
At the top Kydd could not resist stepping over to the adjacent dock—even bigger, the seventy-four within seeming quite diminished. “Now this one. It’s the biggest in th’ world, an’ the dockyard has a story about it.
“Y’ see when it was built, it was designed f’r our largest ship, the Queen Charlotte of a hundred guns. But then the Frenchies built one much bigger, th’ Commerce de Marseille of a hundred and twenty guns—nearly three thousan’ tons. So just in time, they enlarged it an’ finished it f’r the war in ’ninety-three.”
He paused for effect. “Now, ye’ll recall in that year that Vice-Adm’ral Lord Hood took Toulon an’ much o’ the French fleet. So this is sayin’ that it’s just as well they made their changes when they did, for the first ship t’ use the dock was the Commerce de Marseille herself!”
Arm in arm they passed the clatter of the joinery workshops, the rich stink of the pitch house, then dock after dock, each with a man-o’-war in various stages of repair and alive with shipwrightery and riggers.
At a substantial kiln a procession of men were withdrawing steaming planks wrapped in cloths. “The chippies use th’ steam chest t’ bend their strakes round th’ frames an’ fit ’em by eye— that’s three curves in one, I’ll have ye know,” Kydd said admiringly, remembering Antigua dockyard in the Caribbean.
“Oh—the poor man!” Cecilia gasped. Peering into a sawpit she had glimpsed the lower individual of a pair who were plying a mighty whip-saw to slice a bole of oak to planks. The one above the trestle bent to saw and direct the cut while his partner, showered with chips and dust as he worked, took the other end in a dank pit the size of a grave.
“All day, an’ a shillin’ only,” Kydd said, then pointed out the rigging house. “You’d not credit it, but old Tenacious has near twenty miles o’ rope aboard. Goes fr’m your light tricin’ line all the way t’ the anchor cable, which is two feet round, if ye can believe it.”
Cecilia nodded doubtfully, so Kydd went on, “Which is sayin’ that the crew on the capstan are heavin’ in seven tons weight o’ cable alone, straight up an’ down and stand fast the weight of the anchor.”
Seeing her suitably impressed, he changed tack. “An’ above the riggin’ house we have the sail loft. Ye’ll know how important this is when I say that we carried more’n four acres o’ sail, and if y’ stop t’ think that we needs so much spare canvas, an’ ropes wear s’ fast, and multiply this by the hundreds o’ ships we keep at sea . . .”
A broad canal crossed their path, running a quarter of a mile straight into the interior of the dockyard. Fortunately it was spanned by a swivelling footbridge. “This is th’ Camber. Right up there we have th’ boat pond an’ it’s also where Teazer hoisted aboard her fit of anchors. An’ I think I c’n find ye somethin’ there tolerably divertin’.”
They turned left towards a stone building a good hundred yards square, bristling like a porcupine with multitudes of tall chimneys. A muffled cacophony of clanking, screeches and deep thumping strengthened as they neared the fitful yellow glare at the glassless windows.
“The smithy,” Cecilia pronounced, seeing an expanse of adjacent open ground covered with hundreds of finished anchors, each set upright and painted black against rust.
“Aye, the blacksmith’s shop. But let’s take a peek inside.” It was a scene from the Inferno: hundreds of men at work on fifty huge forges in an atrocious clamour, white-hot metal showering sparks into the smoky gloom, the dismal clanking of the bellows chains and pale faces darting about with red-hot objects.
“Shall we see th’ hammer forge, Cec?” Kydd shouted in her ear. “Hercules, they call it, an’ it takes thirty men to—”
It seemed that his sister would be happy to defer this pleasure to another time, and instead was content to hear that the shop contributed an amazing number of metal objects to be found about a ship-of-war, and that when it was time for anchor-forging the men demanded large quantities of strong ale in place of their usual gallon of small beer, such were the hideous conditions.
The wonders of the dockyard seemed endless. At the mast house Cecilia admired a 120-foot mainmast for a first-rate man-o’-war being shaped from a number of separate pieces to form a single spar ten feet round before it was rolled into the mast pond with a thunderous splash.
At the rope-walk she saw yarns ravelled in the upper storey ready to be laid up together into strands below, and these then twisted mechanically against each other to form the rope. “A sizeable hundred-fathom cable takes three thousand yarns,” Kydd explained, as she watched.
After the acrid pungency of the pitch house, where she was told about the difference between the two tars to be found aboard ship—one was asphaltum from Trinidad used for caulking deck seams and the other, quite different, derived from fragrant pine-tree resin from the Baltic and was used for tarring rope—she confessed, “Dear Thomas, I’m faint with impressions. Do let us find somewhere to sit down and refresh.”
It was a little disappointing—there was the wonderful sea stench to be experienced only in the burning of old barnacled timbers to recover the copper and, of course, the whole south corner where so many noble ships lay building on the stocks. And the Bunker’s Hill battery, which had a most curious brass gun from Paris . . . But perhaps it would be better to leave some sights for another time.
They walked slowly back to the gate. Cecilia wore a dazed look, and Kydd asked, “Did you enjoy th’ party at all?”
“I did—very much, thank you, Thomas,” she roused herself to say.
“The guests seemed t’ have a good time,” Kydd said proudly. “Did ye notice the admiral’s daughter? Persephone’s her name,” he added casually. “So good in her t’ come.”
“Oh, yes. It was surprising, I suppose.”
“Well, she was invited b’ another lady but, Cec, I think she’s interested in me. She asked about Teazer an’ if she suited me . . . Well, anyway, I thought she was.”
“Dear brother! Hers is a notable family and she’s certain to have a whole train of admirers of quite another sort to ourselves.”
“But—”
“Thomas, she’s a very nice person, I can tell, but please don’t mistake her politeness for anything else, I beg.”
“Miss Lockwood?” Kydd advanced into the upper room of the premises where he had been told she was waiting.
“Why, Mr Kydd! You’re very prompt, you know—I’d only just arrived.” She wore flowers in her hair, which complemented her gay morning dress. The only other in the room was an unctuous proprietor, who hovered discreetly. “What do you think?”
Kydd advanced to inspect the oil. It was a robust piece, a first-rate vessel of another age with bellying sails and two sloops on an opposing course. The man scuttled up and said quickly, “Ah, Samuel Scott, A First Rate Shortening Sail— time of the second George.”
He was cast a withering look and retreat
ed.
“Mr Kydd?”
This was not a time for hasty opinions and Kydd took his time. “A fine painting,” he began, aware from the discreet price tag that the artist was no mere dauber. “It is th’ commander-in-chief, as we c’n see from the union at the main, an’ if I’m not mistaken there is the gentleman himself in the stern gallery with another.”
She peered closer, unavoidably bringing her face close enough to his that he could sense her warmth. “Ha—hm,” he continued, trying to marshal his thoughts. “However, here I find a puzzle. The name is Shortening Sail but I see th’ sheets are well in, an’ the buntlines o’ the main course are bein’ overhauled. If there are no men on th’ yard takin’ in sail it speaks t’ me more of loosin’ sail, setting ’em abroad.”
“Mr Scott was well known as a marine artist, a friend to Mr Hogarth. Could it be that he’s amiss in his nauticals, do you think?” Persephone asked.
Kydd swallowed. “Miss Lockwood, if ye’ll observe the sea—it has no form, all up an’ down as it were. Real sea t’ this height always has a wind across it an’ you can tell from th’ waves its direction, an’ this must be th’ same as the set o’ the sails.”
She waited for Kydd to continue. “We have here our boats a-swim, which is tellin’ us th’ seas are not s’ great. So why then do we not see t’gallants set in any o’ the ships? And y’r sloops—at sea we do not fly our union at the fore or th’ ensign at the staff. This is reserved f’r when we take up our moorin’s, and—”
“Bravo!” she applauded. “I was right to ask your assistance, Mr Kydd. We shall have no further dealings with this artist.”
She threw a look at the proprietor, who hurried back. “I can see we have a client of discrimination,” he said, avoiding Kydd’s eye. “Therefore I will allow you to inspect this Pocock,” he said importantly, unlacing a folio. “A watercolour. Le Juste and the Invincible. Should this be more to your taste, do you think?”
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