On a Making Tide

by David Donachie

  It took the senior midshipman a good minute to begin a vain attempt to stop the fight. Given the ballyhoo, this allowed time for Mrs Killannan to arrive, her shout bringing immediate relief to Nelson. Nearest the door, and between the gunner’s wife and the fray, Dobree took a thudding clout, which threw him out of the way. Her hands and forearms were not all fat and she had little difficulty in dragging or punching everyone back from the boy still huddled on the floor. ‘You miserable swabs,’ she cursed, dragging Nelson upright and hauling his face into the apron that covered her ample bosom. ‘Don’t you surmise no better’n to batter the Captain’s nephew?’

  The bloodied face was pushed back for examination, the note in Mrs Killannan’s voice carrying more than a trace of desperation. ‘And who’s to excuse this away when the Pig comes aboard?’

  She caught her breath, as if to try to cover her inadvertent use of the Captain’s nickname. But the boy wasn’t listening. He was wriggling to get free. Nelson knew he was hurt, but could still feel no pain. The salty taste of blood in his mouth seemed quite pleasant. That didn’t last the distance between the mid’s berth and the gunner’s quarters. Agony came as the force that had animated him subsided and his hurts were not aided by the less than gentle ministrations of Mrs Killannan and her neat rum.

  Her husband sat through this, chewing on his tobacco, a glint in his eyes, which twinkled every time he moved the quid to one side so that he could repeat, ‘You’re fer the ’igh jump now, me girl. It’ll be roast Sow, stuffed and trussed, when the Pig comes up that there gangway.’

  Which he did the following morning, the ceremony of piping the captain aboard attended by everyone. To avoid any further trouble his battered nephew had spent the night in the gunner’s quarters. Captain Suckling spotted him right away and his all too obvious wounds. But the needs of his office took precedence and the formalities were punctiliously observed. Only when they were complete was his nephew summoned, first to account for his presence but much more for his condition.

  Stepping into the great cabin of HMS Raisonable for the first time terrified him, almost as much as the stern look in his uncle’s eye. Pacing back and forth, Captain Maurice Suckling was silhouetted against the casement windows that ran across the rear of the ship. Thus, the angry look he wore was apparent each time he turned to retrace his steps. Yet there was something else, a similarity to the memory of Nelson’s mother. This meant that the boy’s eyes, which would have been better cast down in shame, were occupied in close scrutiny of his relative’s features. That made his uncle stop and growl. As Nelson didn’t know him well, it was impossible for him to deduce if the wrath was genuine or contrived, but the voice was certainly peppery when he spoke.

  ‘I come aboard only to find you already here when you’re not supposed to be.’

  ‘My father was eager to return to take the waters at Bath, sir.’

  ‘You mustn’t interrupt me,’ his uncle insisted, though in a tone less abrupt. He was slim, like his nephew, and shared in some measure the Suckling gentleness of feature, which made it hard for him to sustain outrage. ‘Being blood makes no odds.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘And try to remember the correct form of response to a superior. You’re supposed to say, “Aye, aye, sir.”’ Nelson complied immediately, just as his uncle was about to continue, which earned him a searching stare. The older man was clearly wondering if the boy was baiting him. ‘How am I going to explain to your father the condition I find you in?’

  It was lucky that his uncle Maurice couldn’t see the bruises that covered his body and legs. They were well hidden by his breeches and blue uniform jacket. But the marks on his face bore ample testimony to the beating he had taken. Every time the youngster moved his tongue he could feel the extra thickness of his lips and rock the tooth that had come loose on one side. He had a black eye that was turning yellow at the fringe, plus a prominent lump on his forehead, the result of Rivers’s most telling punch.

  Captain Suckling was no fool. He had been a midshipman himself once, so knew what a bear pit the berth could be, even if he was careful of the quality of the youngsters who occupied his. He wondered if that word ‘youngsters’ was accurate. Those aboard Raisonable ranged from a pair of children of even more tender years than his nephew, to Dobree and Rivers who were so long serving that they had grown to be men of eighteen.

  ‘Am I to be granted an explanation, sir?’ Suckling demanded.

  Nelson hesitated, partly because he had no idea of what to say but more because he was so struck by his uncle’s looks. Take away the wig and replace it with a cap, add a touch more flesh, though less colour, to the cheeks, and he might have been facing the wrath of his late mother.

  ‘Well, boy?’

  ‘I f-fell down a companionway, sir. It was an accident.’

  There was no doubting the nature of the family likeness as Suckling digested that, and Nelson saw the rage coming long before his uncle delivered his response. ‘Fell? Do you take me for an idiot, nephew?’

  ‘No, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Then you will explain to me who is responsible for this. And I will point out to you that I command here and that every member of the berth you occupy is here because I have taken them on.’ His fingers clicked loudly. ‘I can have any one of you off this ship in an instant.’

  Horatio Nelson didn’t know much about the Navy as yet, but he knew that that was stretching the truth. Maurice Suckling had filled his mid’s berth with the relatives of people to whom he either owed a favour or from whom he sought one. Even if one or two were no-hopers, who might sit the lieutenant’s examination till Doomsday without passing, he was obliged to keep them on his books, so that their relatives or patrons would look favourably on any request the captain of Raisonable put forward. In his own case, he prayed that the family connection would exert too much pressure on his uncle for him to take any precipitate action.

  ‘It is, sir, the truth.’

  Suckling responded slowly, his voice a good octave deeper than it had been previously. ‘How long have you been aboard my ship, nephew?’

  ‘This is my third day, sir.’

  ‘And has anyone had the presence of mind to point out to you the masthead?

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then you will oblige me, Mr Nelson, by making your way to that station, and you will stay there until I call you down. I would advise you to contemplate the folly of your response, and reflect that with a father who is a clergyman, and myself as your relative, I have the right to expect from you the complete truth.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  Suckling observed the stiff way his nephew turned and left the cabin. He knew little of the boy. Given the size of the Rector’s brood occasional visits to Burnham Thorpe had tended to cause all the nephews and nieces to take on a single personality. According to his father, Horatio was the terrier of the bunch, as well as the runt, never content to let an older sibling hold sway. He had questioned in his letters the Rector’s notion of sending him to sea, which by its very nature was a hard, dangerous life. His brother-in-law had informed him that if anyone was inured to a world of rough and tumble, it was his third boy. The long-suffering cleric had tried and failed to calm the beast of transgression that lay within the child’s breast.

  The Captain smiled as he recalled the last lines of his final letter. It had been a warning, in some sense, to the Rector of the worst he might expect: ‘Let him come, and the first time we go into action, a cannonball may knock off his head and do for him at once.’ The smile evaporated as the recent memory of his nephew’s swollen face swam back into his mind. Given the state of him, it looked as though he might not survive long enough to face a day’s sailing, never mind a proper sea fight.

  ‘Mr Fonthill!’ he yelled. ‘If you please.’

  The first lieutenant, seated in the wardroom below the captain’s feet, heard the faint sound of his name through the deck beams. But he was the senior officer on the ship – ba
rring the Captain – and with a proper sense of his place in the scale of things, he didn’t move until the officer of the watch sent a messenger to fetch him. He entered Captain Suckling’s day cabin with a degree of confidence, since the man behind the desk was not only his own patron but had a deep appreciation of his subordinate’s efficiency in running the ship. ‘Sir,’ he said, removing his hat in the required fashion.

  Fonthill was not received with the civility he had come to expect. He was subjected to a baleful look, and there was a rasping note in his superior’s voice. ‘What in the name of God has been going on in the mid’s berth, Fonthill? My nephew looks like he’s come off second best in a cockfight.’

  The Captain’s nephew looked aloft to the tiny platform called the top foremast cap, over a hundred feet in the air. The drawings he had studied had done nothing to show the dimensions of these great lengths of fir. Had Raisonable been at sea, he would have seen, several times a day, men make their way up to that place with an ease born of long habit. No sail could be set without it. So it was effortless, in a rational way, to look at the task as one that presaged no danger, a mode of thought an idle mind might contemplate when not required to do likewise. But rationality be damned: he was scared stiff.

  He knew he was being watched by the very people he had failed to name in the great cabin. Not all of them were ill disposed. But even those who sympathised with his plight would do nothing to aid him, fearing, as much as he did himself, the ridicule that must ensue from being thought soft. He was on his own, faced with a direct order he dare not disobey, required to go aloft by a route that was something of a mystery to him.

  Grabbing one of the taut lanyard ropes that held the shrouds, he jumped up on to the bulwark, his first thought to look down at the grey tidal waters of the Medway estuary. It was an unpleasant sight. Flotsam, the filth of the thousands of ships that used the Thames, had been brought up by the tide, and was drifting beside the warship. In a flash he saw his body floating among that nautical debris, a corpse that would, for years to come, be washed in and out by the continuous ebb and flow.

  ‘Take your time, Nelson. Never look down. Don’t try going up by the futtock shrouds, use the lubber’s hole. And always keep one hand clapped on.’ He turned at the soft voice, partly in response but more in mystification, only to elicit, for his pains, a harsh whisper: ‘Don’t look at me, in the name of Holy Christ.’

  Foley, sharp nose set dead ahead, went walking by, for all the world as though he hadn’t a care. Not much bigger than the boy to whom he had spoken, he’d been one of those in the mid’s berth who had not seen the need to take this new arrival down a peg or two: the escapade with the pissing competition had been prompted by humour rather than dislike. This had caused Nelson to wonder if he, too, had been an unwilling victim of Rivers’s attentions. Laughter – young and high-pitched mixed with the gruff older sounds – floated from the quarterdeck to his ears as Foley joined his peers, leaving Nelson to wonder what he’d said to them to make them laugh.

  Tentatively, Nelson put his foot on the first rung, feeling it dip beneath his weight as he looked up at the long, rising stretch of square knotted ropes; the shrouds, which ran like a hempen ladder from the ship’s side, all the way up to the wide platform he thought was named the foremast top.

  ‘Clap on with one hand,’ he repeated to himself, as, taking a deep breath, he began to ascend.

  Though the ropes moved, seeming to have a life of their own, he was pleasantly surprised at the ease of ascent, the strands of hemp being easy to grip. On a relatively windless day, they sloped in at an angle, so when he paused gravity laid him safely on the rope surface. The admonishment not to look down was one he knew from climbing trees, so he kept his eyes fixed upwards on his destination. This was the point at which the narrowing ropes passed the mainforemast yard, and touched the wood of the top, right by the lubber’s hole that would take him on to the wide fighting platform.

  He was followed by hoots of derision that were quickly silenced by whatever authority was on deck. The top, over fifteen feet across, felt secure in these inland waters, where the roll of the ship was slight, and that was made even easier as Raisonable snubbed gently at her cables. The edge had no barrier except the next set of shrouds. Stepping out on to the exterior of those reprised all his fears and imaginings. This was a much narrower avenue, the roll more exaggerated as the height increased. The smaller upper foremast cap felt less secure, three connecting beams barely big enough for two men to stand on together. But he reached it, hooked his arm through a taut, convenient stay, then looked down gratefully and began to consider his position.

  The way down was simple, the requirement being that he tell his uncle the truth. This was something he could not do, regardless of the consequences. After only two full days in the berth, he had formed an opinion about all his fellows; socially, morally and sexually. But what he had learnt was as secret as the fumblings in the holds. Recalling that, and the smell of rot that pervaded the bottom of the hull, bilge water that no amount of vinegar and burning sulphur could make sweet, nearly made him gag.

  To distract himself he spent the rest of the morning looking at the flat marshes that surrounded the anchorage, at the warships still anchored, with fishing smacks, bum boats and yachts either still in the water or racing for some unspecified destination. From this height he could see over the low marshes and the Kentish coast to the great watercourse of the river Thames. Upriver he imagined he saw the haze that covered London, smoke from a hundred thousand fires that filled the atmosphere of that great city, a noxious brew that had amazed a country boy from deepest Norfolk.

  ‘Mr Nelson.’ He looked down, to see the premier standing on forepeak. ‘You may return to the deck.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he replied, putting a foot over the edge to search for the first ratline rung of the shrouds.

  ‘What kind of lubber are you, sir?’ Fonthill yelled, in a voice that the boy imagined could be heard on land. ‘Do you not know to use the windward side?’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Nelson yelled back.

  He crossed the platform to come down on to the weather side wondering as he descended whom he could ask to explain to him the reason for what he had just been told. But the slight wind on his back, pressing him in, provided its own explanation. He felt the ropes moving long before Rivers came into view. His tormentor shot past him before he could respond to the delivered insult. Arms moving like a monkey, Rivers swung out on to the upper cap, then grabbed hold of a backstay that ran from above his head to the deck, threw himself into seeming thin air, and shot down towards the deck, feet round the rope, hand over hand, whooping to demonstrate his superiority to the dumbstruck newcomer.

  Nelson knew he had just been challenged, and wearily restarted his climb. He hauled himself without enthusiasm, back on to the narrow platform. The rope that Rivers had used to descend could not be reached by merely holding out a hand – he would have to jump for it. Looking down to the deck, a hundred feet below, he felt sick, as much by the faint straight lines of the caulking as by the sea of faces looking up and watching him. The dare was too stupid to accept, too blatant to be refused, and no order came from a superior to desist.

  In those fleeting seconds he thought about his father and his family, all the pets lodged at Parsonage Farm and the friends he had had at school. But when he jumped, the image in his mind was of his mother, smiling benignly as he arced through thin air to catch the thick, rough stay with one hand. The leg that he got round it didn’t support him, and he dropped sickeningly, forced to use his other hand to prevent his arm being wrenched from its socket.

  The attempt to clamp his free foot round the line was only partially successful, as the pace of his descent increased alarmingly. Only his burning palms stood between him and disaster. At last he got some purchase with his legs, was able to slow down a fraction, in which moment he saw his proximity to the bulwark and the deck. It gave him the chance to judge the right moment to let go
and he landed in an untidy heap, rolling over several times until he found himself close to stockinged legs, looking up into the frowning face of Lieutenant Fonthill.

  ‘Creditably done, Mr Nelson, for a first effort. But I will point out to you that what is necessary in an emergency will not answer at anchor. Skylarking in the rigging while berthed is forbidden. Since you are new you would not have been aware of that. Should you transgress again, however, I’ll stretch you across a gun, with your breeches down, and give you two dozen of my very best.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ the boy replied, struggling to his feet, to stand trembling before the premier. A cough behind him made him turn round, to find a pigtailed seaman holding out his hat.

  ‘Your coat is a disgrace,’ Fonthill continued. ‘Go and change it at once, then report back to the Captain.’

  Rivers stood to the rear of Fonthill, surrounded, barring Dobree, by the rest of the mids. Keenly, Nelson examined their faces, gratified to see that if he excluded his tormentor and Makepeace, there was something close to respect in their stares. He clapped on his hat, raised it in salute, then headed for the companionway, the rest trailing in his wake.

  ‘Mr Rivers, you will report to me just after defaulters in the morning.’

  The older midshipman raised his own hat to acknowledge the order. As a result he didn’t see Nelson lift a belaying pin from the rack. Nor, as he came down the companionway, out of strong light from the deck, were his eyes adjusted enough to pick out his adversary. So when Nelson clipped him round the ear with the long, round piece of wood, using enough force to stun him through his hat without breaking the skin, it came as a complete surprise.

  CHAPTER 5

  Emma was right about Lady Glynne being ill. She died in high summer, and within a month the funds for Emma’s education had dried up. Sir John had not returned to Hawarden to see his wife buried, and the curate’s pleas that outstanding fees be remitted had been ignored. Word eventually came through Emma’s mother, and though carefully couched it was clear that the connection with Sir John, who was now free to pursue a second wife, had been broken.