The War Chest

by Porter Hill

  As they approached the intersection of two streets, Horne raised his hand and edged to the corner of a clay building. Removing his cocked hat, he peered down the adjoining street.

  He was looking into a cul-de-sac. A cart had been overturned three-quarters of the way down, to act as a barricade, and six men knelt behind it: two Royal Marines, a Royal Navy Lieutenant, two men whom Horne guessed to be British seamen, and a slim Asian wearing a turban and long robe. The Marines and the Lieutenant were peering round the cart, their muskets pointing down the street, while the two seamen were behind the barricade, reloading their flintlocks with ball and powder. Beyond them, Horne saw a small house at the end of the street; it had no windows, only a squat door and reed walls which immediately impressed him as being highly inflammable.

  Surveying the rest of the street, he pulled back his head and levelled the hat over his forehead. ‘There are six of them’, he reported. ‘They’ve barricaded the house with a cart. But they aren’t too concerned about covering themselves from the rear.’

  Anxiously, Bapu asked, ‘Any sign of activity in the house, sir?’

  ‘None I can see.’

  Jingee whispered, ‘Can we sneak up on the Navy men, Captain sahib, and—’ he mimed slitting his throat.

  Horne shook his head. ‘Not with their firearms, Jingee. It’d be too risky.’ Turning to Bapu, he asked, ‘Is there a back entrance to small houses like that?’

  Bapu knew the house and replied without hesitation. ‘No, sir. It’s called a howdah, like a howdah on the back of an elephant. But instead of four curtains, its walls are grass and wood.’

  ‘Which burn.’

  Bapu looked at the others. ‘I’m afraid so, sir. The heat of one musket ball could set it ablaze.’

  The men exchanged glances.

  By now Kiro, shirtless and wearing only his white Japanese trousers, had joined the group. ‘There are five of us, sir,’ he said. ‘We can cross by the roof tops and drop down on the wagon from both sides.’

  Horne had taken that and other facts into consideration. But apart from being worried about fire, he was also concerned that his men might become too enthusiastic in a rescue attempt. Their loathing of press gangs—coupled with the anticipation of a long-awaited reunion—could easily intoxicate them and turn what should be a minor venture into a wild, excessive blood bath.

  ‘We must remember that if we kill one of them, we’ve got a price on our heads,’ he cautioned. ‘They’re the King’s men, for better or worse.’ Turning to Bapu, he asked, ‘Can you get horses where you work?’

  ‘Four, sir.’

  ‘Fetch them.’

  Before Bapu could move, there was a sudden lull in the shooting. Horne removed his cocked hat and leaned round the corner again. He quickly withdrew his head.

  Keeping his back to the wall, he whispered, ‘Two men are coming this way. One’s a Marine. The other’s Indian. Bapu, look and tell me if you recognise him.’

  Bapu dropped to the ground and peered round the base of the wall. Rising to his feet, he stood beside Horne, saying, ‘Aye, I know him, sir. The dirty Sudra’s name is Rangi. He hangs around wharfside taverns. There’s no doubt about it, sir. He’s probably the one who betrayed their hideout.’

  ‘Get the horses, Bapu. Bring them back here.’

  When Bapu had departed, Horne began explaining the first steps of his hurriedly improvised plan to the other three men.

  ‘Kiro, you come with me.’

  The Japanese moved to Horne’s side.

  Looking from Jud to Jingee, Horne continued, ‘There’s an alleyway halfway down the street. You two wait here. Don’t move until you see Kiro and me go into the alleyway. Understand?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ nodded Jud.

  ‘Aye, aye, Captain sahib,’ whispered Jingee.

  Horne beckoned to Kiro. ‘Let’s go.’

  Resettling the cocked hat on his head, he rounded the corner and walked authoritatively toward the two approaching men. Kiro followed a few steps behind him.

  The Royal Marine halted when he saw Horne’s gold-faced uniform. Touching the base of his tall shako hat, he reported, ‘Men resisting the King’s forces here, Captain.’

  Pleased for once that his frock-coat so closely resembled the Royal Navy’s uniform, Horne continued walking towards the Royal Marine, speaking in a firm but low voice so as not to alert the men kneeling behind the cart.

  He demanded, ‘Who’s in charge, Sergeant?’

  The Marine began to reply but Horne’s left arm flew at him, striking his chin. Using the ancient Greek method of open-hand fighting, he cut his other hand into the man’s chest and neck. Kiro used Karate to attack the Indian spy, knocking him unconscious with three deft chops.

  Seeing Horne and Kiro pull the two men into the alleyway, Jingee and Jud raced towards them, pulling off belts and turbans to gag and bind the two victims.

  The four friends quickly tied the men’s hands and feet, then Horne whispered, ‘Jud, you come with Kiro and me. Jingee, you wait here until you see it’s clear to make a dash for the house.’ Readjusting his hat, smoothing his shirt and frock-coat he stepped from the alley, followed by Kiro and Jud.

  As they approached the wagon, he was amused to see that the attack had not attracted the attention of the other men. Moving closer, he demanded in a loud voice, ‘Who’s in charge here?’

  The Naval officer jumped at the sound of Horne’s voice. Seeing the gold-braided uniform, he sprang to his feet and saluted. ‘Lieutenant Fanshaw, sir!’

  Horne’s hand caught Fanshaw’s chin as he kicked a flintlock from the next man’s grip. Kiro tackled a seaman loading a musket as Jud charged the fourth man.

  Behind them, Jingee dashed from the alley, raced round the overturned wagon and ran for the grass house, shouting, ‘Babcock! Groot! Mustafa! Open the door!’

  The small door flew open; three men bolted stoop-shouldered from the hut: Groot wearing a blue cap pushed back on his blond head; Mustafa, his hirsute chest bare and his thick, black, Turkish moustache lifted in a rare grin; Babcock with his sandy hair tousled and his ears large and red.

  As Horne helped Kiro and Jud to drag the four remaining men of the press gang from the wagon to the hut, Babcock ran to Horne shouting, ‘Holy hell! It’s about time you got here, Horne! These two were driving me crazy! Groot talks too much and Mustafa doesn’t talk enough!’

  Horne tossed the Lieutenant’s unconscious body into the hut and called to the big American colonial, ‘Babcock, you still haven’t learned how to address an officer properly, have you?’

  ‘Yes … suh!’ mocked Babcock, throwing out his chest.

  A rumble sounded in the distance. Turning, the men saw Bapu rounding the corner on a black stallion, leading three other horses by their reins.

  Chapter Three

  THE UNITY

  The Arabian Sea sprayed Adam Horne with fine pinpoints of mist as he stood at the larboard rail of the Honourable East India Company’s Indiaman, the Unity, five hundred ton burden, on its southwest course.

  Booted feet wide apart, chest bared for work, he bellowed to the five men climbing three ropes he had ordered to be hung from the main topgallant yardarm. The second day since weighing anchor, it was the first occasion for Horne to test his Marines’ stamina.

  Hands cupped to his mouth, he trumpeted, ‘Mustafa, too slow! Bapu, you move like one of your elephants! Climb like a monkey, man! Climb like a monkey! Keep your legs wrapped around that rope, Jingee! If you fall, you’ll burn your hands!’

  Horne was not surprised that Jud led the rope climb. No wall had been too high for the African to scale before he had been captured and imprisoned for thievery. Horne remembered how Jud’s criminal background had helped him become a good topman aboard the Eclipse.

  Bapu and Kiro moved up the two ropes flanking Jud, the roll of the ship causing them to swing back-and-forth from the fore to the mizzen mast. Both men wore white dhotis; both had knotted rags around their foreheads, the sinewy
Japanese looking as dark as the brawny Indian.

  Behind them moved Jingee and Mustafa. Horne watched Jingee struggling to climb hand-over-hand as the ship’s movement swung him like a pendulum against the billowing topgallant sail. He noticed, too, that Mustafa—heavily muscled, a true personification of the legendary barrel-chested Turk—seemed to be slowed by his bulk.

  Groot and Babcock were not taking part in the morning drill. When the Unity had got under way the day before, the ocean’s dips and swells had sent them vomiting to the scuppers and had incapacitated them again today in their berths. Horne knew it was not unusual for a man to lose his sea legs after spending a considerable length of time ashore, but he was surprised it had happened to men as seasoned as Babcock and Groot. Hoping that they were not suffering from a more serious complaint, he consoled himself that they were merely passengers on this section of the voyage.

  The Unity’s Captain, Thomas Goodair, had cordially welcomed Horne aboard the Indiaman two days ago. He had not asked why Bombay Marines should be sailing as passengers aboard a merchant ship instead of patrolling coastlines and compiling charts, performing their customary duties.

  Nothing about this mission was going to be ordinary, Horne had decided. He had the inexplicable feeling that events would continue as unconventionally as they had begun.

  Having galloped from the district beyond the Spice Market where they had left the press gang bound and gagged, Horne had ordered his men to abandon their horses near South Wharf. Seizing a fisherman’s dongi, they had rowed across the harbour to the Unity, announcing themselves with a loud shout before climbing a rope ladder to the port entry.

  Fortunately, Captain Goodair had been aboard, reading Commodore Watson’s letter informing him of Horne’s imminent arrival with seven Marines. An Englishman with a kind face weathered by thirty-seven years in Indian Service, he had assigned the Great Cabin to Horne and had invited him to dine with him in his cabin. The other men were assigned to sleep with the crew below the forecastle, and to eat with them between the guns fore of the main deck. Goodair, as anxious as Horne to escape the press gang, had weighed anchor at first light of the new day.

  His eyes raised aloft, Horne backed towards the forecastle as he saw Jud—followed by Kiro—swing from the yardarm, snatch for the ratlines, and begin scrambling down, down, down past the shrouds.

  Watching Kiro gaining on Jud, he pulled off his boots to participate in the next drill, and as the two men—Kiro now in the lead—cleared the futtock shrouds, he bellowed, ‘Jump!’

  Kiro hit deck a few seconds before Jud.

  ‘Take … cover!’

  Horne dived as he shouted the command, leading Kiro and Jud to the narrow space he had created by weaving the ship’s lifelines with auxiliary ropes and stretching them starboard to larboard.

  Cheek pressed to the deck, he propelled himself by his elbows, scrambling towards the capstan. The smell of tar—mixed with the holystone’s pungency—filled his nostrils. Conserving his breath as he crawled, Horne was glad he had followed a daily regimen of exercise and food over the past six months, performing the circuit of routines he had learned long ago from an old British soldier, Elihu Cornhill, at a tumbledown estate in Wiltshire. Many military critics denigrated Cornhill’s survival techniques as eccentric, even dangerous. Horne had learned that they saved men’s lives.

  * * *

  Bapu, a hefty man with skin the colour of rich earth and eyes placed closely together like a snake, knew he was no sailor. He was a soldier. A warrior. A bandit. So why did he feel so satisfied to be back at sea, sweating out his guts in the midday sun?

  Neither was Bapu a follower, an acolyte, someone to be part of another man’s pack. Born a Kshatriya leader, he had been a renegade chieftain to a band of cut-throats in the Rajasthan hills before being apprehended and imprisoned at Bombay Castle. With that history, why was he so damnably content at being reunited with Captain Horne? Why had he spent the past six months in a Bombay elephant house, living no better than some lowly mahoot, waiting for Horne to snap his fingers for him to come running?

  These questions occurred to Bapu in fragments as he bellied across deck, climbed ratlines, charged a musket’s bayonet towards the straw-filled dummy fixed to the forecastle, Horne shouting orders like a master.

  Having been plucked by Horne from a subterranean prison, Bapu was grateful for being saved from a life of incarceration, but his gratitude to Horne did not include devotion. He did not worship Horne; he had seen enough of the Englishman to know that the topiwallah was no god.

  Meeting at beer shops. Swimming to Elephant Rock. Gathering for suppers. Bapu had seen Horne, alone and with the other six Marines, during the past land-locked months in Bombay. During that time, he had observed how uneasy Horne was on land, restless, a man with nowhere to go, a man with little to talk about—or, at least, a man not willing to share private thoughts.

  Horne was a strong man. Bapu had also seen that when Horne became angry, his face looked like the head of a hound ready to attack. Instead of depending on strong jaws and teeth to tear into his victim, Horne threw his whole body—including his mind—towards attack. Horne’s ambition seemed to be to teach other men to fight in a similar way.

  Perhaps that’s why Bapu admired Horne. Horne shared; he was one of the most generous men Bapu had ever met, not only with objects, but with time, ideas, accomplishments. Was that not the true test of generosity in a man?

  Apart from meeting Horne in the past months, Bapu and the other six Marines had grouped together for their own reunions. Groot, Mustafa and Babcock had even shared rooms. Bapu knew that some people believed he was probably a closer friend to Jingee than to the other Marines because they were both Indian. But Bapu considered Jingee to be like many men of the Vaisya caste—arrogant, demanding, overly ambitious.

  Belonging to the older, more superior Hindu caste of the Kshatriya, Bapu was supposedly superior to someone of the Vaisya caste—even Jingee admitted that. Bapu thought that perhaps that was the reason Jingee expected him to lead a superior life, aspire to the grandeur of elite forebears, not live in an elephant house like some Sudra mahoot, a man below the caste system.

  Bapu’s closest friend ashore had been Kiro. His background as a Japanese pirate had been close to Bapu’s own past as a bandit. They had swapped stories, laughingly entertained future plans. Bapu liked Kiro because he was never loud, never brash, always showing a serene face to the world, except when he became angry, and then, Kiro exploded with the wrath of the Samurai he was.

  Bapu guessed that he and Kiro were friends because they had both forsaken their illustrious birthrights as heirs to an ancient warrior tradition. Could they somehow placate their ancestors by excelling as Bombay Marines?

  What did the future hold as a Bombay Marine? Or would Bapu return to hill life in northern India? He believed that if he did revert to a bandit’s life, he would return a better man than when he had been taken away in chains. Horne had improved Bapu’s strength, sharpened his intelligence, made his eye keener.

  Since leaving Bombay aboard the Unity, Horne had said nothing about their new mission except that the Marines would receive their orders on arrival in Madagascar. Bapu lay awake at night wondering what the assignment would be? Would it prove to be worth the lowly life he had led during the past months, living, waiting, biding his time in an elephant’s shed?

  He suspected he would not be disappointed. Horne was a feringhi, a foreigner, but he also belonged to the warrior caste. By nature.

  * * *

  Fatigued by the sea air and the first day of rigorous drill circuits, Adam Horne looked forward to an evening alone in the Great Cabin. His hopes were destroyed, however, when Captain Goodair sent an invitation to join him for supper in the ship’s roundhouse. Horne knew he must not decline the offer.

  Roast fowl and potatoes cooked in the Indian oil called ghee, served with an assortment of hot and sweet relishes and pickles, composed the modest but pleasant supper. The table
servant produced bowls of fresh fruit and an assortment of sweet biscuits along with the port.

  The Unity crested on the ocean’s swells, creaking down into the next trough. Captain Goodair was talking about a merchant ship’s deceptive appearance. Generous with his wine, he refilled Horne’s bumper from the cut-glass decanter and said, ‘A new Indiaman isn’t as large as ships in the last century. When too many leviathans came home empty-bellied from the East, owners began trimming down their size.

  ‘Although they’re built like warships, these new ships are not as strong as they appear. The Unity looks like a ship of seventy-four guns when, in actual fact, she’s equipped with twenty-eight, and those are spread along the upper deck. You’ve probably noticed the lower ports are caulked shut with pitch and oakum.’

  Horne had indeed seen that the Indiaman’s lower gunports had been sealed shut. Wanting to confirm his suspicions as to the reason, he asked, ‘Sir, who ordered them shut?’

  ‘Percival Sidwell. The ship’s husband.’

  There were powerful businessmen called ‘husbands’ who managed all aspects of an Indiaman, including its ‘bottom’ privileges—the right to replace the ship with a new vessel in future years. Horne knew from past experience that a ship’s husband worried more about profits than a ship’s fighting power.

  As if reading Horne’s thoughts, Goodair said, ‘Military men disagree with the elimination of guns for cargo. But, then, you probably think we should boast our own Marine unit, too!’

  Indiamen carried no Marines like a Navy ship, leaving the ship’s defence to its crew, the incentive to fight being the Company’s rule: A crew loses all claim on wages if a ship is captured.

  Horne saw no reason to raise old arguments and spoil a relaxing evening. Instead, he voiced one of the East India Company’s main disputations against the need for heavy arms on a merchantman. ‘Soon you’ll be in convoy, sir, and have the safety of numbers.’