The Death Card (A Charlie Raven Adventure)

by Jan Needle

  Down in the cabin there was no one but a servant, of thirteen years and no great awareness. Hastie shooed him out before sitting Nelson on a settle, and in one movement laying him back and taking the yellowed horsehair off his head.

  ‘This wig is a disgrace, sir. I wonder that the men can hide their amusement at it, slipping and slopping on your head. You’d be better off…’

  ‘Without it?’ said Nelson. He tried to laugh, but managed just a smile. ‘You need to see an eye-physician, Timothy. And it was you who shaved me was it not? You promised me it would grow back thicker.’

  Hastie removed the captain’s coat, then loosed the silk scarf at his neck and mopped his face. It was bristling with sweat and bites and pustulations. The crown of his head was scarred with scratches. However hard he told him to stop attacking it, the daily ploughing with his nails went on.

  ‘Your poor head, sir,’ he said. ‘I have made another ointment. I suggest a long night in a proper bed, in a proper house, and a cooling draught of lime and sugar. Then a sleep till long gone sunrise.’

  Nelson, eyes closed, merely harrumphed. The governor of Jamaica, General Dalling, was not the sort to let the grasses grow. He had his squadron, his military and every other man upon the island jumping about like spiders on a griddle. Before Hinchinbrook’s warps were all secured, word had been brought that he required her captain at King’s House.

  ‘But is the Badger here already?’ Nelson asked. ‘If Collingwood’s arrived mayhap there is a plan to use us both for Dalling’s venture. Cuthbert will be hungry for action also. God damn that bloody Lowestoffe! My own command, and I lose her when there’s treasure to be won!’

  Hastie was mixing up a potion, but he reflected that the man was right. Nelson had acceded command of the Lowestoffe to John Luttrell of the Leeward Islands squadron before a raid on St George’s Key, to try and wrest it back after a sudden Spanish sortie. But Luttrell had changed his plan and sailed instead for Omoa, where some millions of gold – heavily guarded – were awaiting shipment to Spain.

  It had been an assault of brilliance against a well-defended fort, with the loss of only four sailors and a soldier despite odds of two to one, and Luttrell had carried off three million pounds in bullion, it was said. Nelson, to his fury, had been forced to continue chasing and stopping lone ships, and taking cargo and specie only if he could prove that it was contraband. Most craft, sadly, had been legitimate, and Hinchinbrook had taken goods which would yield less than eight hundred pound when processed through prize courts.

  The surgeon’s mate, who had become Nelson’s favoured medico more by accident than design – he had signed on as a soldier – knew his man well enough to realise how bitterly this rankled. Although small and lately rather sickly, the captain had a huge ambition, for cash as well as honour. Tim Hastie had walked to Liverpool from the north of Wales to become an apothecary’s apprentice, but his accent was not so marked as Nelson’s Norfolk. Nor did his desire to rise in wealth and station burn with anything like Nelson’s flame.

  At this moment, though, it seemed as if he might sink into sleep. His eyes were fluttering, and his breathing was light. Tim reached across the narrow chest to move a blanket over him when there came a knocking at the door, and a loud halloo.

  ‘Nelson, you devil! Friend Horatio! The Governor’s men have sent an urgent word. Where are we? Why are we keeping him? Are we not aware there is a bloody war on!?’

  The figure in the doorway was tall and stooping, with no wig on, and a head of dark-brown hair. Although ten years older than Horatio, he was of lesser rank. He was Lieutenant Collingwood, the captain of the Badger.

  ‘Ah,’ said Nelson. ‘I was dreaming of the devil, Cuthbert. And here you are. Timothy, I will need my coat again. There is a bloody war, indeed.’

  Two

  It was still a great surprise to Hastie, not born a sailor, how quickly these great and complex ships were knocked from one world to another. When he had gone below the deck had been alive with seamen, the soldiers had been pushed back and sidewards like so many sheep, and the masts and rigging had been swarming with a rioting of monkeys, as far as he could tell.

  Now the deck was almost quiet, and the soldiers had apparently gone ashore. The hatchways were open, and derricks and sweating men were beginning to haul stuff out of her bowels, prior to pushing more stuff back again. The noise and chaos had transferred as if by magic from deck to cobblestones, over which carts were clattering in every direction.

  ‘How far is it?’ asked Hastie (who, like a soldier, really did not know). ‘Where we’re going to? Did you say the King’s House, sir? The one in Spanish Town? Must we have a horse, or carriage? My captain is not fit for any violence.’

  Collingwood, although lugubrious by Nelson’s standards, was a most efficient man. Within two minutes he had conjured up a trap, controlled by a free black man almost as large as the vehicle. The passengers squeezed in – small, medium and gangly – and the mule trotted off.

  ‘King’s House, sir? Gu’nor Dalling place? Very good, sir. Please.’

  The growth in population, since the Hinchinbrook set sail six weeks before, was little short of miraculous. Across the Grand Parade, the trap made pretty much a walking pace, with whips and foul oaths bandying around it in great abundance. There were no slave ships in, and the pens and posts were empty, the platforms for the auctioneers mere refuges for sleeping drunks and vagrants. But the crowds were pervasive, as were their bellows and their smells. Only women were in short supply, except for prostitutes. They taunted the parading soldiers, and the soldiers threatened them with joyful lust.

  ‘Christ,’ said Lieutenant Collingwood. ‘This place is like Newcastle when the pits are lowse. I wonder why we fight the Spaniards for it. What use is it to man or beast?’

  Tim Hastie laughed. He gestured at the slave pens, the huge open market, the ships moored all along the quays.

  ‘The question was rhetorical,’ said Collingwood. ‘But is this a fit way for a nation to gain wealth?’

  Cuthbert Collingwood, thought Hastie, was not like so many of his class. He lacked a sense of humour, true, but his concern for men of lesser wealth and station seemed genuine, possibly because his own lack of such advantages had cost him dear. Had it not been for an act of bravery and intelligence in supplying ammunition to hard-pressed troops fighting American rebels at Bunker Hill he would be a midshipman still. Destined, as ever, to creep in Nelson’s wake.

  What’s more, it did not seem a burden to him. Indeed, Tim knew, the men were true friends in spite of everything, they sailed together in convoy when they could, and shared lodgings in Kingston when ‘at home.’ Nelson, although from an unexalted family of itself, had an uncle who had become Comptroller of the Navy. The nephew had passed for a lieutenant before his age allowed him to, and had risen – through merit only, it was said! – fast through the ranks. Cuthbert Collingwood, lieutenant, twenty five; Horatio Nelson, twenty, a full post captain. And neither of them had a quarrel with the other over it.

  Today, though, it was not the nation’s wealth, or slavery, that filled their thoughts. Their cruising for smugglers and pirates had brought them little joy or specie, and the Lowestoffe’s huge bonanza rankled deep. Both men had served on her, with Cuthbert replacing Nelson as lieutenant, then as commander of the Badger when he had joined the Hinchinbrook. They had been cheated, and they wondered if the governor had plans to lift them out of it. Nelson was down for eight hundred pounds of prize awards to Cuthbert’s feeble three. Money, to men of their position, meant everything. To rise they had to have it.

  ‘You seem to like this General Dalling well enough, Horatio,’ said Collingwood, as they rattled through the crowds and jumble. ‘I always found him a pretty vulgar sort to be a governor. All mouth and bluster. What will he offer us, think you?’

  ‘Your trouble, Cuthbert, is you have no sense of fun. Dalling is a fine man, if a type of clown. My God, he even walks like a gimpy dog, and jokes of nothing but his
gout, and agony.’

  ‘And blames it on anything but its cause,’ Hastie put in. ‘I swear he lives on port wine, sir, he takes it in the morning instead of coffee. Then wonders why he can hardly walk.’

  ‘Come come,’ said Nelson, in reproof. ‘He damn near lost a foot at Quebec, fighting ’gainst the French. He was with General Wolfe, and that should be good enough for any man. His bluster is not piss and wind, nor is his limp indulgence. He is nearly fifty, into the bargain, and I hope that I shall be as spry at that age.’

  As the King’s House hove into sight, Collingwood was laughing.

  ‘Not much chance of that, you shrimp,’ he said. ‘You’re too damned ambitious to avoid a blade or bullet long. You won’t make old bones, my friend, I’ll wager on it. Look at you now; a few weeks of bracing air at sea, and you’re still wheezing like a grampus!’

  Tim Hastie was defensive, but could only agree with the main proposition. He was solicitous.

  ‘Lieutenant Collingwood speaks true,’ he said. ‘Whatever madcap scheme the governor’s dreamed up this time, I hope you will be cautious of your health, sir. You must have rest. You must get Cook to feed you wholesome foods. One hears Dalling has got an expedition planned, and one receives it with a certain trepidation. You need rest, captain.’

  The rumour was that the governor, relieved by the fact of Comte d’Estaing’s French fleet abandoning their supposed attack on Jamaica, had decided to mount a full-scale surprise invasion on the Mosquito Shore himself. England already had a presence in this territory, and Dalling was certain that he could drive a wedge into the heart of Spain’s America.

  ‘He sees it as an English triumph,’ said Collingwood. He laughed. ‘The triumph residing in the bottom or a bottle, most like.’

  But Nelson was prepared to mock his two companions.

  ‘Your failing is, the both of you, that you suck too many limes and lemons. Rest be damned. And if Dalling is for it, it is not a madcap scheme. He is a brave and sober man.’

  But as the trap pulled up at the steps leading to the massive oaken doors of the King’s House, the wicket flew outwards with a mighty bang; so mighty indeed that their mule nearly bolted. Nelson’s mouth hung open for a moment as a gentleman burst forth into the sunshine. An important man, robed and suited and in a full half-wig. Behind him came the Governor, purple with rage, his two fists clenched and shaking.

  ‘Drunkard!’ he roared. ‘Poltroon! Liar! How dare you disobey me?’

  ‘Sir,’ the other man entreated. ‘Sir, believe me. You do not have the right. The law states clearly—’

  ‘Clearly be damned! The law be damned! I want him prosecuted, Mr Harrison, and I don’t care who he is! Those prizes do not sail for England until the prize money is paid! And damn your lawyer’s heart!’

  As Harrison – Attorney General and Advocate General to the island of Jamaica – backed down the steps in disarray and Dalling blundered after him, Captain Nelson, determined as a first rate man-of-war, skipped from the trap to put himself between them with a smile.

  ‘Ah Colonel Dalling. I hope my timing is not inconvenient? You asked to see me. I hope it is not impertinent that I brought my friends?’

  The governor, for a long moment, looked as if he might explode. He glowered over Nelson, and his eyes flashed in his congested visage. Then Collingwood climbed down from the trap to back his smaller friend, and it was over.

  Mr Harrison was gone. Swallowed by the crowd, whose faces ranged from shock to some delight.

  ‘Drunkard!’ somebody shouted after him. Then, slyly: ‘Aye, well one can name another, can’t he, Governor!’ And slipped away as Dalling lunged for him.

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