Larcum Mudge (Alexander Clay Series Book 8)

by Philip K Allan

  The fire was no more than a few glowing embers, but there was enough light from the room’s two little windows for him to see Molly, her loose hair a river of copper, as she bent over the crib beside her, gently singing in Cornish. Her eyes lit up at the sight of him, and she rushed across, her excitement tempered with her desire not to wake the baby again.

  For a long moment he just held her close, the scent of her hair filling his nose, her warm body pressed close against him.

  ‘You be home, my lover,’ she murmured, into his ear. ‘I’ve been awaiting this last month or more, ever since some of the lads from the Channel Fleet started returning.’

  ‘Aye, that I be, Mols,’ he replied. ‘An’ proper home this time, what with the peace an’ all.’ He felt her grip tighten, and then become loose as she stepped away from his embrace to draw him towards the crib, and the sleeping baby.

  ‘She be as lovely as a spring morn, Molls,’ he enthused, ‘taking after you, for the most part, of course.’

  ‘She’ll be nothing of the sort if you wake her up again,’ she scolded. ‘Speak soft, lover! You ain’t hailing one of them mastheads in a gale, no more!’ They both spluttered at this, the need to be quiet making them laugh all the more. Molly led her husband out of the back of the cottage, into the garden, where they could collapse on a bench against the back wall, and let their joy flow.

  ‘Oh, my Adam,’ gasped Molly. ‘Be you truly back for good this time?’

  He drew her close with an arm around her waist. ‘I reckon so,’ said her husband. ‘I come back with Able, that shipmate I told you about. He be as good a man as they come. Proper deep an’ all. He ain’t got no place to go, being a run slave, so I asked him to come back with me.’

  ‘Be a bit tight in the cottage, lover, what with the babe an’ all, but I daresay we’ll manage.’

  ‘Don’t you go fretting about Able, Mols,’ explained Trevan. ‘He’s got a nice bit of chink laid aside, on account of this book he wrote about being a slave, an’ all. Once he finds his feet, he’ll get a place of his own. Him an’ me, we’re going to be partners, an’ buy ourselves a Falmouth Lugger. Ain’t nothing we don’t know about sailing, an’ Able, he were a fisher back in Africa, afore he was took.’

  ‘So, where have you left this business partner of yours?’ asked Molly.

  ‘He’s gone for a walk about the place,’ explained Trevan.

  ‘You sent him away for a stroll!’ exclaimed Molly. ‘What kind of a welcome be that? Half the folk in the village think them from Devon be foreign! What they’re going to make of a blooming African, don’t bear thinking on! Just you go an’ fetch him back, Adam Trevan, while I gets some food prepared.’

  *****

  Rain again, thought Clay, staring through the small window set in the upholstered door. The shower quickened to a deluge, thundering on the coach’s roof, and he felt the horses slow as they shied away from its sudden onslaught. The passing fields and hedgerows blurred into swirling green as water lashed against the glass. The coachman barked angrily, and after a few cracks of his whip the horses sped up once more.

  It seemed to have been raining ever since the Griffin had rounded the Lizard and come up to Plymouth. It had trickled down from the mass of rigging onto the heads of the crew, as they prepared their ship to be passed across to the dockyard. It had dripped onto his oilskins as he stood by the entry port, shaking the hand of each of his men, as they were paid off to return to their lives ashore. It had thundered down on the deck of the empty frigate, as he had held a last dinner on board with his officers.

  That had been a strange meal, he reflected. Had it not been for the absence of the usual pair of eighteen-pounders, he could have imagined that nothing had changed. That beyond his cabin door was the packed, noisy decks of a fully manned warship, instead of the empty, echoing shell that the Griffin had become, full of dark shadows and old memories.

  The mood around the table had been mixed too. There had been laughter, of course, and the warm companionship that flows from shared battles fought and storms endured. The wine had flowed too, and the conversation with it, but beneath the surface Clay had detected stronger currents running. For some, the peace came with the hope of new opportunities. Like Edward Preston, his face flushed with joy at the prospect of returning to Yorkshire to marry his fiancée. For others peace came with the uncertainty of a life ahead on half pay, stretching away into the future. Most of the younger officers had been little more than children when the war had started. The navy had provided almost all the structure in their lives, from the food on their plates to the clothes they should wear and the duties they must perform. As he had shaken their hands and wished each of them good fortune, he had seen the anxiety in their eyes.

  The coach lurched over a rut in the road, throwing him briefly against the padded side, and then steadied once more. The light outside was fading quickly as evening approached, along with the end of his journey. They rattled through a little hamlet of stone cottages. A dog ran alongside for a stretch, barking furiously at the whirling spokes. Two men in smocks and leggings, hooded against the rain, leant on their spades while they watched him pass. Clay stared at both with unseeing eyes, lost in his own thoughts.

  As a senior post captain, with a generous amount of prize money to his name, half pay should hold no terror for him, even if he had not married well. Yet here he was, with anxiety knotting in the pit of his stomach with each mile he came closer to home. Every moment of my time at sea was full to bursting with the affairs of my ship, he thought. What will I do tomorrow, let alone all the days that follow that? Of course, there were the children. Francis would be over three now, yet he was almost a stranger to his son and his new-born daughter, Elizabeth. And then there was Lydia, beautiful Lydia. He had loved her for years, and yet, thanks to the war, how much time had they actually spent together? He knew the portrait of her from his cabin wall far better than the original.

  Then the journey was over. The coach swept up to the front of Rosehill Cottage, and with a final cry from the driver, came to a halt. Clay stepped down from the musty warmth of the interior into the cool dusk. Sometime ago the sun had set, unseen behind the thick cloud, and all around him shadows were lengthening into night. The coach’s guard was busy unstrapping his bags and sea chests as he walked towards the house. Rain continued to beat down, splashing up from the flagstones of the path and soaking his shoes and stockings. The door opened as he reached it, and he stepped into the familiar, brightly lit hall.

  ‘Welcome home, sir,’ said the maid, dropping a curtesy and taking his hat from him.

  ‘Thank you, Nancy,’ he heard himself say. ‘Is your mistress home?’

  Before she could answer, the drawing-room door was flung open, and there was Lydia. Her hair was a river of glossy night and her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. She ran across the hall and flung herself into his arms, and he wrapped her in folds of wet cloak and warm kisses. With a deep sigh, he felt all the ridiculous doubts that had plagued his journey fade away. Behind his back Nancy was closing the door. Shutting out the rain and, far away beyond a distant shore, the darkening sea.

  Epilogue

  Jack Broadbent could not quite believe his luck. The trial of the two dozen mutineers who had been apprehended so far had been a brisk, efficient affair. Each man had been brought into a stark room with whitewashed walls and bare floorboards, shuffling in irons between a pair of marines. They had faced a line of stone-faced officers behind a cloth-covered table, as the ghastly details of what had happened aboard the Peregrine were read out by the prosecuting officer. After a perfunctory examination of the evidence, each one of them had been questioned and then sentenced to death. Each one, that was, except for him.

  Some had taken it badly, weeping and pleading as they were dragged away. Others, like the hulking John Graves, had been defiant, shouting out the justice of what he had done over the drone of the clerk reading out the verdict. Most had accepted their fate calmly, their faces blank,
their eyes already far away. But his trial had been different. There had been Clay’s testimony, read out by the defending officer. It was a carefully crafted statement, pulling all the best from his time on board the Griffin. How he had volunteered to serve, been promoted, settled in well and helped a junior officer in the capture of the Margaret Harmony. Then it highlighted his role in the attack on the Peregrine, righting the wrong he had helped to do. How he had saved his shipmates from the burning sloop. Finally, it told of how he had been one of the first to board the mighty Centaure, and that when he had been accused of the mutiny, he had readily confessed.

  The sentences of the others had been agreed in moments by their judges, but his had provoked true debate. He had watched, with a little hope, as Sir George, the court’s president, argued forcibly with a red-faced post captain, their exchange one of hissing fury. When all was resolved, he alone had his death penalty commuted to a hundred lashes.

  Broadbent had been flogged before. He had witnessed it almost every day on the Peregrine, where any offence, imagined or otherwise, was liable to be punished, but he had never been sentenced to more than a dozen. The fiery pain and the dull ache that had spread deep within him was familiar. The seemingly endless nature of the punishment was quite new. After the fiftieth stroke, he had begun to wonder if being hanged might not have been easier. After the sixtieth he had lost count. Shortly after that, he had lost consciousness.

  For days afterwards he had lain on his belly in the dockyard hospital, surrounded by the wounded from the fight with the Centaure. He had burned with pain, as if gripped by some tropical fever, hovering between life and death. But he was a strong man, in the peak of health, and as the weeks went by, it was life that had won. The ugly, seeping wounds that furrowed his back had become rose-coloured scars, and the agony had lessened to a constant throb.

  He could feel it now, as he walked gingerly along a dusty road, keeping to the side shaded by a stand of banana plants. He had set off soon after dawn, shaking the hand of the young surgeon who had treated him and collecting his belongings from the prison guard. It was a scant nine miles across the island to his destination, but already he was regretting his decision to walk. He was surprised by how weak he still felt, and how heavy the bag on his shoulder seemed. The tropical sun beat down on him, making the road ahead shimmer and dance. He pulled his wide-brimmed hat low over his lean, hawk-nosed face, hauled his dunnage sack a little higher on his shoulder, and gritted his teeth against the pain.

  A cane field opened up beside him, the green spears of a new crop bursting up through the crumbling earth. A line of slaves, wearing only ragged britches, worked with hoes, scraping around each plant and pausing occasionally to bend down and pull up a weed. Off to one side, the overseer sat on his horse, in the shade of a sandbox tree, his long whip coiled over the pummel of the saddle. A few of the slaves glanced towards the sailor, and one watched his uneasy gait for a moment before nodding in sympathy. When he returned to his work, Broadbent noticed that he too bore the savage scars of a recent flogging, crisscrossing his back and shoulders.

  The clop of hooves and the jingle of harness warned him that a horse and trap was approaching from behind. He moved onto the verge to let it rattle past, but it pulled to a halt beside him. The driver was a pleasant-looking young man, in an open shirt and waistcoat.

  ‘You look weary, sailor,’ he said. ‘Where are you heading?’

  ‘St Johns, sir,’ said Broadbent. ‘I heard there be a few ships as may be after crews lying in the port.’

  ‘Aye, so there are,’ replied the man. ‘And I daresay there will be a few of you man-of-war’s men looking for an honest trade now. Throw your dunnage in the back, and climb up. I can take you as far as Potters Buff ’Tis just a short step beyond there.’

  Broadbent struggled a little reaching the bench behind the horse, and the driver leant across to pull him up. ‘You seem a little frail to be returning to the sea so soon,’ he commented, once the trap was moving again. ‘Were you wounded in the war?’

  ‘Aye, in a manner of speaking, sir,’ said Broadbent.

  ‘I don’t suppose you were involved in the capture of that huge French vessel?’

  ‘The Centaure? That I was, sir,’ said the sailor. ‘I boarded her from the Griffin.’

  ‘Did you, by Jove!’ exclaimed his companion. ‘And I daresay your wounds came from that handsome victory. Then I shall take you directly to the quayside in St Johns. My aunt can wait for me a little longer.’ He snapped the reins against his horse’s back, and the trap gathered speed.

  After a while the young man turned towards his passenger again. ‘Might I know your name?’ he asked.

  Broadbent considered for a moment before replying. ‘Mudge, sir,’ he said. ‘Larcum Mudge.’

  ‘Larcum Mudge?’ queried the driver. ‘What manner of name is that?’

  ‘A right good one, I think you’ll find, sir.’

  The End

  Note from the author

  Historical fiction blends the truth with the made-up, and Larcum Mudge is no exception. These notes are for the benefit of readers who would like to understand where the boundary lies between the two. The only historical character in this novel is Earl St Vincent, who was First Lord of the Admiralty between 1801 and 1804. He brought to the position a zeal for reform not unlike that displayed by Jesus on entering the Temple. All of the ships mentioned in Larcum Mudge are fictitious, as are the characters who crew them. As in my previous works, I have done my best to ensure that my descriptions of those ships and the lives of their crews are as accurate as I am able to make them. Any errors I have made are my own.

  The mutiny on board the Peregrine is fictitious, although students of naval history will notice parallels with the rising that took place on board the frigate Hermione against the brutal Captain Pigot in September 1797. That too occurred in the Caribbean, with the crew gathering on the forecastle at night and fortifying their courage with stolen rum. Captain Pigot was hacked down in his cabin, and then tossed over the side while still alive. The slaughter then continued long into that hot night. Just as in the Peregrine, it included almost all the officers, the teenage midshipmen, and even Lieutenant McIntosh of the marines, who was dragged from his sickbed despite being in the final stages of Yellow Fever.

  The Hermione mutineers sold their ship to the Spanish government, in return for twenty-five dollars per man. Once this was done, they swore to change their names, disperse to the four corners of the earth, and never speak of the mutiny again. They were no more successful at this than the crew of the Peregrine. Over the following years, one by one, they were brought to justice by the long arm of the Royal Navy. As for the Hermione, she was recaptured two years later in a daring attack made by the frigate Surprise. It was determined that her name was too stained to be reused. Fittingly, given the fate of the mutineers, she became the Retribution.

  One of the bolder Hermione mutineers, David Forrester, managed to evade capture for nearly five years by hiding in plain sight. He coolly volunteered for the Royal Navy again and served as a bargeman for the captain of the Bittern, and there he might have remained had he not been recognised while walking down a Portsmouth street. His story provided me with the kernel of an idea that became the inspiration behind this novel.

  The fight with the Centaure also has at its root in a historical incident - the defeat and capture of the French eighty-gun ship Guillaume Tell. One of the few survivors from the French Mediterranean fleet destroyed by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, she found herself in a very similar predicament to that in which I placed the Centaure. In 1800 the Guillaume Tell attempted to escape from the siege of Malta. She was spotted by the blockading British fleet and found herself being pursued by the Royal Navy frigate Penelope, backed by two ships of the line. She could outrun the bigger British ships, but not the frigate; and she could outfight the Penelope, but only at the cost of permitting the supporting ships to catch her. She chose flight, a strategy that might have
worked, since she was a swift ship. Her misfortune was that the Penelope was commanded by Henry Blackwood, a shrewd Ulsterman whom Nelson considered one of the ablest captains in the service. After hours of manoeuvre and raking fire, the Penelope succeeded in damaging the Guillaume Tell sufficiently aloft to slow her to a point that the other two ships could arrive. After long and heroic resistance, the French ship was finally captured.

  The Peace of Amiens was signed at the beginning of 1802, but in reality it was no more than a truce in the two decades of struggle between Britain and France. None of the substantive issues between the two powers were resolved, and the fourteen months of breathing space it supplied was probably of most benefit to Napoleon, who was able to fully consolidate himself in power. The two nations resumed hostilities in May 1803.

  Writing novels set in the eighteenth century, I am always on the lookout for a good, contemporary name. I found Larcum Mudge inscribed on the wall of the parish church in the delightful village of East Bergholt, Suffolk. The Reverend Mudge was vicar of that parish at the end of the eighteenth century. It appealed to me both in its own right, and because it reminded me of two pioneers of the early Marine Chronometer, Thomas Mudge and Larcum Kendall. I have no evidence of any association between these three upstanding gentlemen and any naval mutinies, brutal or otherwise.

  Other books in the Alexander Clay series

  The Captain’s Nephew

  A Sloop of War