The Irishman rolled his shoulders. ‘Two more dead in the night. But at least the last five have had their crisis and survived it. So we’re not doing too badly. Unlike them.’ He nodded back to the Sweet Eliza.
‘What do you mean? How can you know?’ Jack feared the Irishman was going to start talking about the senses he’d acquired as the seventh son of a seventh son or some such bollocks but the answer was more prosaic.
‘Why do you think Engledue keeps holding us back?’
‘The Eliza’s a slower ship.’
‘Aye. But the crew are telling me she’s sailing even slower because she’s being sailed poorly. Now, Link is every kind of poltroon but he’s canny of sea, wind and sail. Something’s up. Engledue’s slowing us so we can find out what.’ He nodded to starboard. ‘See that cloud? That’s the coast of France, at the tip of Normandy. Pass that, and it’s a clear run to Bristol. A few days, I’m told, if this wind keeps up.’
‘England. Home,’ said Jack, feeling his chest flutter as he said the words.
‘England, anyway.’ That darkness that could sometimes eclipse the light even in Red Hugh’s eyes came.
‘Do you go on to Ireland straightaway?’
‘Ireland?’ The darkness faded. ‘Sure, did I not leave my poor country twenty years ago to make my fortune and vow not to go back until it was made?’
‘But the prize money. You said—’
‘Unhappily, the Robuste has not proved a treasure ship, though I’ve no doubt she’ll pay handsomely enough. Still and all, it’ll be a teardrop in yon ocean. McClune Hall is mortgaged nine times over. And I’ve other owings.’ He slapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘What do you say, lad? Shall we post an advertisement in the Bristol Record, gather a crew of cut-throats and turn privateer? Three more voyages like this one might make a dint in the auld debt.’ He laughed. ‘Once this story gets turned to a song, won’t they flock to the brave Grenadiers of the Sweet Eliza?’ He began to whistle.
‘I’m sorry, but if I ever set foot on a deck again it will be too soon. And as for elephants …’ Jack shuddered.
‘Now, lad, and after all the fun we’ve had?’ Red Hugh smiled.
Jack looked past his friend’s shoulder. The slowing of the Robuste had brought the Sweet Eliza and Link a little closer. ‘Fun that will be leading us to the yardarm perhaps. Isn’t that the punishment for mutiny?’
Red Hugh looked where Jack did. ‘Now now. The good Captain will listen to reason. I have no doubt upon it.’
Captain Link would not listen to reason. For the very good reason that he was dead.
‘Three days,’ said the Scot, McRae, when he arrived in the Eliza’s jolly boat. He had taken on the running of the ship. ‘The grippe got him and didnae let him go. Despite his caring.’ He nodded down to the boat, where Barabbas, the Negro, rested on an oar.
Jack tipped his head. ‘Link’s slave had the tending of him?’
‘Aye. Never left his side. Despite the screams and curses and the last two days of whimpering. I took the Cap’n for a man of stronger will. He made more noise than any of the other sick.’
They all looked at each other, then looked away. Jack glanced down, into the boat. Barabbas held his gaze. Jack shivered, took a breath. ‘What will happen to him? Will he still be a slave to the Links?’
‘Now there’s a strange thing,’ replied McRae, ‘for didn’t the Cap’n give the Darkie his manumission before he died? We thought he was too delirious to write but there was his signature, clear as day. And witnessed by the surgeon.’ He paused, sucked at his teeth. ‘Which was a wee bit strange, ken. Seeing as he’d been dead himself near a week.’ He shook his head. ‘So, like the Bible story, our Lord dies and Barabbas goes free – and immediately expressed a desire to serve with this crew.’
Each was still finding something else to study. Finally, Red Hugh spoke. ‘So, does Link feed the fishes now?’
‘He doesnae. He was a shareholder in the company and an alderman of the city.’ McRae smiled. ‘So we’ve given him one last taste of the grog he so loved. He’s pickled and waits in a barrel below.’
Jack tried to find anything sad in the situation. He failed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least with his last act Link has made some reparation for his evil trade.’
‘What, man? Freeing Barabbas?’
Jack smiled. ‘Spoiling the liquor. No man will be turned into a slave for that cask of Guinea rum.’
– SEVEN –
Ghosts
He lay there, back pressed into wood, bayonet already in his hand. He didn’t remember drawing it nor descending the path to reach this log barrier. Night and mist obscured his sight and his fingers were numb with cold. All that was clear was the sound that must have halted him there – footsteps on shale, coming ever closer, up from the beach below. Instinct had prompted him to unsheathe his weapon. Instinct would tell him what to do next.
And yet, when he heard the voices, recognized the enemy tongues – French, Abenaki – instinct failed. He could not move. Even when a leg came over the log, when both his duty and his need urged him to the attack, he couldn’t. All he could do was drop the bayonet, press himself back into the rough wood. Perhaps they might not notice him if he made himself very small.
Another leg followed, a body, a face. And though he’d only seen this face so briefly on this same path up the cliffs of Quebec, on another night long ago, he recognized it. He’d never forget the face of the young Frenchman he’d killed. The first man he’d ever killed.
And yet here he was, walking past, without a glance down.
Other men came over, other victims. He’d killed them all, these shadows flowing over the log. Here were the two cavalrymen he’d stabbed on the Plains of Abraham. Three Abenaki followed, slain on the same field, then and later. Then three more came, French again but not regular soldiers, coureurs de bois, in their furs and tasselled caps, the last one still clutching the arrow in his chest that Jack had shot into him. Yet he was laughing with his companions, following them up the slope. Finally, men he could not recognize but wearing the varied garb of privateers came, marching on into the dark.
Jack breathed, a long exhalation of relief. Though they each bore terrible wounds, which he had inflicted, it didn’t seem to inconvenience any of them. They were alive, all these men he thought he’d killed. And even though their deaths had been necessary, in battle and fair fight and for survival – his own, and that of his comrades – he thought it was better that they were still alive. And so, presumably, did they.
The idea made him chuckle. He had better be moving on, away from his dead. He was just beginning to rise when he heard another slip of shale from below him. He sank back just as a body swathed in red serge straddled the log, dropped his side of it.
This was wrong. This man wore the King’s uniform. Jack hadn’t killed anyone on his own side. And then he remembered and, just as he did, the man turned and looked at him.
‘How do, Jack?’
‘Craster.’
The sight of him brought all kinds of memories. Cousins, both Absolutes, Jack and Craster had grown up together and loathed each other from the very beginning. Yet loathing had turned to something far worse; for when this brute ravished the girl Jack had adored, Jack had tried to kill Craster at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in revenge. They had even fought a duel, of sorts, their schoolboy efforts dwarfed by the larger event, when Jack’s father had killed His Majesty’s Minister, Lord Melbury. What the actions of that night had set in motion! At the least, all the men who had preceded his cousin up the slope would still be alive – if only Craster Absolute had not raped Clothilde Guen.
He studied his cousin now. Thinner than he remembered him. Haggard. A winter in a cave will do that, Jack knew by experience. Then he remembered what he had done to this man. He had not killed him, merely marooned him in the middle of the Canadian wilderness with his wits, a knife, enough food to last only a week, and something else. He’d left him there with some … one else.
/> ‘Fancy some breakfast, Jack?’ His cousin spoke in the accent they’d both largely shed, that of their shared Cornish boyhood. And he had something in his hand, hidden behind his body. A pasty?
‘That’d be proper,’ Jack said, and watched as the hand began to emerge from behind his cousin’s back. It came slowly, as did Jack’s scream, when he saw that what Craster Absolute was offering him was a human head; an Abenaki head, grasped by the warrior’s top-knot above another face Jack recognized …
He thought it was his scream that woke him, no longer bounded by his dream. Or perhaps it was the hardness of wood, because he’d forced the thin mattress off the frame and splintering slats dug into him. Or it may have been the cold, the blankets were all thrown about. Whatever it was, it took a while to halt the scream, until the thin window coverings could be ripped aside and dawn’s wretched light reveal to him a room cleared of ghosts.
Footsteps came – up stairs, not shale. He crossed to the bed, managed to get the mattress centred on the frame and a blanket half across him before the door opened.
‘Awright, my lover?’ Clary stood there, a gated lantern in her hand. She was across to him swiftly, the lantern put down, her hand reaching to caress his forehead. ‘So hot, Master Jack,’ she said. ‘Shall I fetch ’ee some water?’
‘Ale,’ Jack replied. It was early but he only needed to quench his thirst. Small beer would do him no harm. And the water in this inn had a curious taint.
‘I’ll fetch it right away,’ Clary said, but did not move, her hand still to his head, the other moving to the opening of his shirt. ‘So hot,’ she said again, in a different way, as her hand slipped inside.
His own came up to meet and hold it. ‘Ale, Clary.’ He let go her hand and she withdrew it reluctantly.
‘Are ye sure, Master Jack?’ She was twisting a curl back under her Abigail’s bonnet. ‘S’ just everyone’s still abed, like, and …’
He had made a mistake the week before. A relapse in his fever had forced Red Hugh to leave him at the Llandoger Trow tavern on Bristol Docks and journey only he knew where, vowing to return soon. He’d taken a kiss and, this first course accepted, the main meal was immediately proposed. He blamed his weakness for the result, unable to resist or, indeed, to take much of an active part. He was determined not to fall even thus far again. It was not that Clary was unattractive. She was slim at hip, small but well formed at bosom, with lascivious lips and a low gurgle of a laugh that lured. If she was none too clean, well, neither was he. As his recovery progressed, he’d been ever more tempted … and then he’d hear that same low gurgle, counterpointed by many groans, somewhere in the attic rooms above him. And some mornings Clary would appear with a new bonnet or bracelet, a new tortoiseshell comb for her hair. He didn’t blame her at all, a maid’s wages would be poor. Yet to succumb again did not seem quite … honourable.
However, Clary took his musing silence as a signal. Her hand returned, lower, and he groaned. Thus encouraged, she lifted the blanket, her hand sliding down still further, ‘Course, if you are still feeling weak, sir, your Clary could be as … obliging as she was afore, if’n … oh, Master Jack!’ Her fingers had slipped all the way down and a big smile came, before head followed hand under the blanket.
‘Clary …’ he said, trying to sound firm. Then both reacted to the cry from the corridor, a heavier tread that made the floorboards creak. Clary emerged, but was still bent over the bed, when the door opened.
‘What are you about there, girl?’
Mrs Hardcastle, the tavern’s landlady, stood in the doorway, making it seem small. When Jack saw who it was, he sighed. Temptation came in various forms.
‘Lieutenant Absolute, dear sir! Say the fever has not returned.’ She marched in, elbowing Clary aside. ‘A jug of water, quick there!’
The maid hovered, reluctant to cede the ground. ‘The master’s asked for ale.’
‘Then why are you still here? Be fast about it, you lazy slut.’ She turned back, did not see the tongue stuck out at her before Clary left. ‘I heard your cry, dear man, and hastened even thus from my bed.’
Mrs Hardcastle gestured to the loose gown that just contained her. She was built along similar lines to the Widow Simkin, with a bosom Jack could have rested his pint pot upon. Perhaps it was the way this was so often thrust at him, or the resemblance to his recent Quaker lover, but Jack had, with more firmness, already declined what was only slightly more subtly on offer. To begin with, there was a Mr Hardcastle somewhere about, the innkeeper. Yet even if the husband was drunk and unconscious by supper, it was not that which finally deterred Jack.
With little to do but lie and think, he’d mused on his recent history of both death and love. In a little less than two years, he’d killed perhaps a dozen men and made love to just two women, a disparity in numbers he dreamed of correcting. And yet … Those two had both been older than him by many years. Their experience had taught him well and he had been a diligent, delighted student. But he had loved neither Fanny Harper nor the Widow Simkin. The only girl he had loved, and in anything like an honourable fashion, had been Clothilde Guen, the goldsmith’s daughter of Thrift Street, Soho. Her innocence and stirring sensuality were a vivid contrast to the voracious widow and the skilled courtesan. What was she doing now? he wondered with a sigh. Absolute gold had expiated Craster’s crime, enabled her to marry a man she did not love for the sake of respectability. She had probably borne him two children by now.
Mrs Hardcastle, with a deep bend to gather the bed clothes, offered further glimpses of what could be his. The maid returned, set down the beer and began a tussle over a blanket. For a long moment they had it stretched out above him, obscuring his view of the door, but he had no need to see to recognize the speaker.
‘The divil! Sure and that’s not a shroud you’re laying over my poor friend?’
‘About bloody time,’ said Jack.
‘Am I in the nick, dear heart?’ Red Hugh strode into the room. ‘Shoo, you vultures, and leave my comrade to recover his strength.’
‘I can assure you, sir,’ Mrs Hardcastle had drawn herself up, more like an enraged goose than a vulture, ‘that we—’
‘Be calm, pray,’ interrupted the Irishman, ‘for if my friend has been too sick or too particular to take advantage of what you would tender him, I’d be delighted to hold up the honour of the Lords of McClune with each of you, one after the other, or both at once, as you may choose.’
‘You … you damn’d potato face!’ Mrs Hardcastle, firmly putting away what had been on offer, swept furiously from the room.
Clary, however, lingered. ‘Shall I prepare a room for your honour?’ she said, with the smallest of curtsys.
‘It would have to be a very large room, to be sure,’ he guffawed while Jack groaned. ‘But alas, my jewel, I am come to collect and not to stay. So if you’d just bring the twin to that,’ he pointed at the jug of beer, ‘– for what’s my poor comrade to drink? – then we’ll trouble you no more.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’d give me no trouble at all, sir.’ She stared quite brazenly at the Irishman’s groin, then swept out with that familiar gurgling laugh.
Red Hugh gazed after her. ‘The trollop! Sure, I’m tempted to take that room. I am certain they rent by the hour here.’ He turned to Jack. ‘As I am also certain, my lad, that you’ve been having a fine auld time.’
‘Actually, I have not.’
‘Too sick?’
‘No, I am quite recovered.’ Jack sighed. ‘Too …’ he waved a hand. ‘I have been musing on honour.’
‘Ah, honour!’ With a leap, Red Hugh was instantly lying beside Jack on the bed, snapping at least two struts in the process. With his hands behind his head he continued, ‘Did I never tell you my favourite poem?’ He coughed:
‘She offered her honour
He honoured her offer
And for the rest of the night
It was honour and offer.’
He roared and, after a moment, Jack laugh
ed too. ‘And is that how you honour all ladies?’
‘Indeed not. There was one …’ That darkness came into his eyes again. ‘But another hour for sorry tales, eh?’ He swung off the bed. ‘Where’s that damn’d beer? We must toast my endeavours. Ah, there you are, you minx.’
Clary returned, placing a jug beside the other on the small table. She looked as though she would speak but a shriek from Mrs Hardcastle summoned her. With a distinct sway of her hips, she left.
Red Hugh watched her go again. ‘I’m certain I would not have lasted a week of that temptation. Probably not much over the hour.’ He made for the jugs, handed one to Jack, the pewter pots disdained. ‘I never took you for a puritan, Jack. Your own tales of actresses and Quakers hardly indicated it.’
‘I am not one. But …’ He stopped. He had his own sorry tale. He had never mentioned Clothilde to his companion.
Red Hugh was studying him. ‘Well then,’ he said eventually, ‘your health! Now tell me, lad, before I give you all my news, what are your plans?’
Jack had thought of several. He had his duty to his King, even if the dispatches he bore were half a year beyond their expectation. His regiment? He had no thought as to where the 16th Light Dragoons and its commander, John Burgoyne, might be. He’d left them training in London in the summer of 1759 when he’d been sent as King’s Messenger to Wolfe at Quebec. That was over eighteen months before. His father? Well, Sir James would probably still be at war in Germany, waiting out the repercussions of his slaying of Lord Melbury in the duel at Vauxhall, the duel Jack had provoked by daring to woo Melbury’s mistress, Fanny Harper. While his mother …
The thought of her uplifted him. ‘I suppose I go to London.’
‘How?’
‘How?’ It was a strange question. ‘By horse, naturally. I am a cavalryman not a bloody Grenadier.’
‘Jack, you’re swaying on the edge of that bed. I think anything livelier is beyond you. And why do you go?’
Absolute Honour Page 8