Forced to go back aboard ship, as much by his own superiors as any threat of weaponry, Pearce had set out to mount a rescue, thwarted by the man who commanded the ship on which he was serving. The fact that such an intervention was fitting did not make the memory of having to leave Ben to his fate any more palatable. Looking over the taffrail at Tunis sinking into the horizon had been hard, reckoning, as he did, that he was leaving a friend to die.
‘Can’t understand why he didn’t want to come with us,’ Charlie said, shaking his head. ‘You had words with him, John – do you know?’
‘I think he’d found a place, Charlie, and maybe some peace. He never told you why he was in the Liberties, did he, what he was running from? The rest of you were open, he was not.’
It was Rufus who articulated the agreement. ‘No, he kept that to hisself: close was Ben.’
‘Then I reckon it was something he could not happily live with,’ Pearce responded. ‘Somehow he saw the navy as a break with whatever it was.’
‘Bad, then?’ Rufus asked.
‘We’ll never know, will we?’
At that moment, hundreds of miles to the east, Ben Walker, well fed and healthy, was continuing in his efforts to learn Arabic, without which he could not go on to be instructed in the Mussulman’s holy book, the Koran. His teacher, appointed by the Bey of Tunis in an act of caprice that hinted at salvation, was a grey beard with soft brown eyes that mirrored a gentle manner. To Ben it was barely believable: by reputation the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and the Bey was certainly that, were the stuff of nightmares, inclined to sell into concubinage any women they captured; men were either killed or made slaves.
Ben had enjoyed a brief moment of hope when he espied John Pearce, only to see that disappear as the local power forced him to retreat, the whole played out on his defenceless back by the man who whipped him doubly hard for his disobedience. He had then been dragged off by force, this pointing to only one fate, and Ben had no idea what had saved him from summary execution. He only knew that, being interrogated by one of the Bey’s courtiers, for the first time since he killed the girl he deeply loved and the man who had seduced her, he had told another human the story and allowed the tears he should have shed years ago to flow.
Instead of the beheading he anticipated – no doubt after a decent bout of cruel torture for both his crime and his Christianity – he had been treated with gentility: first bathed and allowed new clothes, then taken to the comfortable cell he still occupied, fed so that from being a near skeleton he had been brought back to full, rude health. The price of his deliverance was this instruction; he had no idea of the why and wherefores, he only knew that life was better than death and that he had gratitude for whatever God of whatever religion had intervened to let him live.
Alone at night he often wondered about the men with whom he had been pressed from the Pelican Tavern – given his solitary life, more than they thought about him – men he had come to know through shared misfortune, and even more closely through shared adventure. When they had left to go back to England he had declined to join them, knowing he would be returning to a life he had not enjoyed one bit, a life where his past deeds weighed heavily on his conscience.
Often he envisaged that separation, those last farewell gestures from the deck of the merchantman they were taking home, a quartet of figures in their ducks and short jackets. Given that image he had struggled with another. What in the name of eternity had John Pearce been doing in an officer’s blue coat and behaving as though he was entitled to the wearing of it? Had the others been with him, Charlie, Rufus and that giant O’Hagan? The thing he thought about most, though, was obvious: his own eventual fate.
For what had he been spared, perhaps so he would make a more convincing victim? Those were the thoughts of the dark nights: during the day, as he was allowed to wander, with an escort, the courtyards and hallways of the Bey’s palace, allowed to dip his finger in the many cool fountains, and even occasionally be taken outside the palace walls and into the bazaar, Ben Walker wondered if he had been blessed in some way. But more than that he wondered if he had been forgiven.
‘To Ben and Abel, may God bless and keep them,’ said Michael, lifting his tankard and, as the others joined with him, emptying it in honour of their dead comrades.
That made John Pearce more reflective than the others: Abel Scrivens, crushed between barrels in the deep hold of HMS Brilliant, had died in place of him, the real target of the malice of Martin Dent. Odd that he thought of the boy in a kindly way now; how strange life was. So many things had been resolved when they had all been stranded on the Breton shore, not least that Martin had behaved with enough bravery and application to impress him, even more so when the boy asked him for forgiveness. He knew, for a fact, that he had come into his own then, had shown that he could think clearly in a crisis, lead and, more importantly, command both loyalty and obedience; that was until he thought of Toby Burns, who had not only proved to be lily-livered, but deeply treacherous to boot. The mention of his name darkened Michael’s demeanour.
‘Sure,’ he growled, ‘I am not a man to wish ill on anybody, but if the good Lord could see fit to take off that boy’s head with a cannonball I would be content.’
‘A lying little shite that Toby Burns, Michael,’ added Charlie.
‘Now don’t you go givin’ shite a bad name.’
‘Refills,’ said Pearce.
Toby Burns was on deck, sharing the watch with Mr Beddows, trying to look as martial as possible, with HMS Britannia ploughing her way towards Corsica and more battle. The bandage he had been required to abandon, but he had taken to combing his hair forward over his brow when not wearing his hat, and if those he messed with wondered if there was a scar to show, they were too polite to ask: after all, their fellow midshipman was much cosseted by Admiral Hotham and no one wanted to offend him.
In a ship of few secrets – there was no ship in the fleet adept at keeping those – the proposed destination towards which they were heading was common knowledge. The town at the base of the Bay of San Fiorenzo was to be the first place on the island that Lord Hood intended to subdue. It was even known how many arguments he had undertaken with his army generals, who were adverse to any kind of action until they had more troops to command, acquiescing in the attack only when not to do so would smack of being shy.
Naturally, being bullocks, they had to be got ashore before they could fight anyone. Toby Burns had learned that he, under the command of Beddows, had been given a place on the first draft of boats that would land them on the hostile shore. At dinner, after orders had been issued, those others who would have the same sort of duty had been eager to talk of how quickly they, too, could get ashore and take part in the action. They at least were honest if foolish, in contrast to the hypocritical senior of the mids’ berth, who would be remaining aboard: he had somehow escaped the proposed landing.
‘Burns, you of all people must be afire to add more lustre to your reputation. I am envious in the extreme.’
Looking at a man near thirty years of age, a shallow thinker whom he knew would never make lieutenant, the fellow having already failed the examination twice, he wondered on how unfair life was, while at the same time enthusiastically acceding to the expressed sentiment. The older fellow only kept his place as a mid so he could be fed and watered at the king’s expense: with no pay and no private means he would have been reduced to beggary ashore. His seniority in the berth came from his years not his ability. Why was it that such a useless creature was spared risk when he was so regularly exposed?
Toasting the coming attack with wine that was almost undrinkable, he thought back to the last time he had taken a boat into a proposed attack. God, he hoped the man who would command him off that round tower was cleverer than the old bugger who had run them aground in Brittany: he had nearly drowned in a maelstrom of rocks and spume-filled water for want of the man’s ability to steer the right course, and then he had been stranded with that swin
e Pearce and the others, who had acted as if he should solve their problem. He would have done if left to his own devices, surrender being better than stupid sacrifice, but no, clever clogs Pearce had had them all risking their necks in the most stupid fashion and for, to his mind, a dubious purpose.
‘By God, Burns,’ the senior cried from the top of the table, his face flushed from over-consumption, his voice laced with drunken hyperbole. ‘You have about you the face of wrath itself. God help Johnny Crapaud when he feels your steel.’
‘Hear him, hear him,’ called the rest of the berth, all red-faced, all taken with drink, as they slammed their pewter mugs on the table in support of the senior.
‘The question still stands, friends. What are you going to do?’
Greeted with shrugs, Pearce carried on, enumerating the thoughts on which he had already ruminated, Michael, surprisingly, looking less than pleased at the prospect of going back to his shovel.
‘You don’t get it, John-boy, it’s a short life, and as sure as there is a God in heaven, it is a hard one. The men who employ we Irish don’t care much if we live or die, and enough do when a trench falls in or a shored-up wall of earth gives way.’
‘The pay is good,’ Rufus said, with a melancholy air: as an indentured apprentice he had not seen much in the way of that commodity.
‘It needs to be, Rufus,’ Michael replied, ‘for the work is endless. You would not know near despair till you have dug out a lake for some great lord, with teeming rain on your back, or sunk a shaft for a new mine, up to your knees in water.’
‘You drank every penny you earned,’ chuckled Charlie.
‘With what I was doing by day, drink by night was what kept me going. I won’t say sailing a ship is easy, nor will I say it is not without risk, but by Jesus it has the legs on ditch digging.’
‘Do you want to go back to the Liberties, Charlie?’
‘You know I don’t, John, just as you know I might not have a choice.’
‘You could go back to Lichfield, Rufus, you would surely be safe there.’
Looking at Pearce, Rufus shook his head. ‘What do you think my master would have done when I ran? He will have demanded back from my pa what he paid to indenture me. The only thing I would get back in Lichfield is the back of his hand, and more’n once before bein’ tied once more to a bench.’
‘Warrants might have expired,’ Charlie said, but not with a look of any hope.
‘And you, John-boy, what are you going to do?’
‘You mean after I see Barclay locked up in the Fleet, Michael?’ He looked at them all in turn. ‘Put your hands on the table, palms up.’
Slowly they obliged, showing skin near black, so ingrained was it with the tar from rope work. There was no need to say what he was implying but he did so anyway.
‘Even if you can dodge the tipstaffs, you’ll be had up by every crimp in creation and the first thing they will do is ask to see those same hands.’ Then he looked at their heads. ‘Pigtails don’t help much either. You’ll be tagged as sailors right off, and unless I can get you protections, you’ll be back aboard a king’s ship in days, and it’s not unknown for them to be ripped up in your face.’
‘There will be broken bones and blood spilt, John-boy, if a body tries that.’
‘Yours, Michael. The crimps will take one look at the size of you and resort to clubs; Charlie and Rufus they will just nab by force of numbers.’
That induced another bout of silence: what John Pearce was saying was true. To press them would be as illegal as the first and second times it had happened, but once you were on board a ship and out of sight of land that counted for little.
‘There are ways to avoid the press, John,’ said Rufus, ‘as every man aboard will tell you.’
‘Not in a port, Rufus, you would need to go inland to be really safe and I don’t need to say what risks you run then, even the Liberties have already proved not to be that – safe, I mean.’
‘But you can get us protections?’ asked Charlie.
John Pearce knew what he was driving at. The men who wanted to execute the warrant on Charlie Taverner, who stood on the exits to the Liberties of the Savoy looking for anyone foolish enough to step outside the safe boundary, would have eyes for a fellow quite different to the man sitting opposite Pearce now. Charlie had kept his hair short before, now he had a pigtail; he had walked like any other soul, now he could not help but sway like a sailor; and his tarred hands might be a shield against arrest: the warrant was issued for a landsman.
‘I think I can, but I would say to you stay aboard Grampus until I put them in your hand. But let’s go back to the question Michael first posed. The truth is I have no occupation and little in the way of coin, so I have to find some way of living while the case goes through the lawyers, and I think that will take time, a lot of time if the Admiralty defends Barclay.’
‘So?’ asked Michael.
‘My first job on going ashore is to take a private letter from Lord Hood to the king’s first minister. It was he who got me out to the Mediterranean to rescue you in the first place, and I have good grounds to believe if I ask him for a favour he might grant it.’
‘That favour bein’ what?’
‘Maybe I can get the warrants on Charlie and Rufus lifted or, failing that, find us a berth that will keep us in body and soul and keep us together.’
‘A naval one?’ asked Rufus.
‘Probably.’
‘With pay?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re forgetting, John,’ said Charlie, grinning, ‘that the first thing we want is to see your back.’
‘The only time you want to see my back, Charlie, is when I am ordering more ale.’
‘For which,’ Charlie replied, waving his tankard, ‘you seem a bit slow to get a’movin’ on, which I seem to recall is your way. You needed a nudge the night we met.’
Emily Barclay had given up trying to read: those papers she had found under Lutyens’ bone saws impinged too much on her thinking and the ramifications of what they would mean were endless. For her husband they would possibly mean a life in hard labour or transportation and, much as she had come to see him in an unflattering way – even if she knew the case to be correct – she yet did not want to see that wished upon him. If he was incarcerated what would become of her? Was it a selfish thought to imagine a life in the shadow of that disgrace, certainly one in which she would have no income, for his pay would cease with conviction, but also one in which she would be left in the limbo of a grass widowhood?
How would she live? No one would take her in as a governess, the only occupation for which she could lay any claim to be qualified, with that stain of association to her name, leaving her with a vision of a life spent in penury, perhaps as a washerwoman or a seamstress. Then there was her family, what would become of them? The house they occupied, indeed the reason they had been so keen on her marriage, was entailed to Ralph Barclay through a line of obscure cousinage to her mother’s family: had she refused his offer he might have turfed them out. What would happen to his property if he was a convicted felon? Would it be forfeit, would they be rendered homeless?
Raised to be respectable, to never do anything to bring the family name in disrepute, how could her family walk the streets of Frome with this hanging about their heads? If she knew it to be a bit of a backwater, Emily also knew that it encompassed their whole life, and had hers until she came to sea. Many times it had been a duty to visit and give succour to those unfortunates forced into the workhouse. It was all too easy to imagine that was where her parents would be forced to reside, given they had between them only the most meagre of stipends upon which to support themselves, certainly too constrained to allow for the cost of renting a decent house.
The noise of merriment had abated somewhat, what with both coin and bodies exhausted, even those on the fiddle and the flutes sending out weary sounds. The greater noise was of those coming back on board from their exertions in Gibraltar
, with much shouting of a drunken nature, fortunately too indistinct to tell her, as they were telling their shipmates, what they had been about. No one would be allowed to sleep ashore, for if Captain Daws was lax in the article of what happened in his absence, he was not about to allow others a privilege denied to him: no captain could spend their night outside their ship without express permission and he had made that a condition of anyone going ashore this night.
The Pelicans came back aboard as merry as anyone, for their quiet conversation had given away to a move to noisier and more entertaining places. Rufus was grinning from ear to ear, content to be ribbed by Michael and Charlie. John Pearce was inebriated, but still, in his mind, he knew that nothing had truly been resolved. Matters would have to wait until they dropped anchor in whatever harbour for which HMS Grampus was headed.
He had no inkling that anyone had been in his cabin until the next morning, when, with a clearer eye and seeking a clean shirt, he saw traces of dirt in the gaps between the planking and places where the caulking had, like almost all of it aboard this ship, moved. Touching, it, smelling it, he then reached into his chest and brought out the tin of earth. Taken from a Parisian graveyard in which he had buried his father, it was to him a talisman, for he had sworn that one day he would return to that spot, exhume the remains of Adam Pearce, and take him home to Edinburgh for burial.
It only took a pinch of that, matched to what he had observed on the floor, to tell him his sea chest had been searched, it also took no imagination whatsoever to guess who might have been the culprit. An examination of Hood’s letter, taken into the cabin and to the stern casements for better light, showed it to be intact, that at least had not been interfered with. But he had to thank his luck that he had left the really important papers with Lutyens…unless?
An Ill Wind Page 15