The Old Vengeful

by Anthony Price

  It was no wonder they’d run, decided Elizabeth. Life ashore if you were poor could have been no picnic anywhere in those days. But life afloat in the twentieth year of the war with France would have been a worse bargain. And if any men had done their bit, Tom Chard and Abraham Timms had done theirs.

  “And yet that isn’t the whole truth, I suspect,” said Wilder gently. “I think … from what Tom Chard said between Parson Ward’s lines … I think they still reckoned they were under their officer’s orders.” He paused. “I think that they were simple men—Timms less simple than Chard, but both essentially simple men.” His eyes fell to the Vengeful box. “It is possible that I am imagining too far now … but they had their orders … and they had that… and simple men tend to approach life’s problems literally.”

  “And what was their problem?” Aske sniffed. “Other than keeping out of the press-gang’s clutches?”

  “It was very simple—and very complicated. They had the surgeon’s case, by which the Lieutenant had set such store … but they didn’t know what to do with it, Mr Aske.”

  The box was beginning to hypnotise Elizabeth: it had come ashore from the Vengeful, against the odds of shipwreck; and it had travelled to Lautenbourg—and out of Lautenbourg, down an unclimbable cliff; and it had travelled across France in the midst of a twenty-year war, and had come through the waves from the dying midshipman into a stolen boat—and then into a Ramsgate boat, good luck cancelling bad—and finally ashore … the odds building up and multiplying all the way … and somehow, in the end, to Father, and to her … and now it was here, in a strange house, hypnotising her.

  “They’d have done best to chuck it overboard,” said Aske. “If it was empty—“

  “But they didn’t.” Wilder sounded almost triumphant in his statement of the obvious. “It is here. So that was what they didn’t do—that, at least, is certain!”

  “So what did they do with it?” Aske swivelled towards Elizabeth. “How did your father get it, Miss Loftus?”

  Elizabeth looked at Professor Wilder helplessly. “His crew gave it to him—the survivors—?”

  “They bought it from White and Cooper, Antiques, of Southsea, Miss Loftus.” Wilder nodded. “Binnacles and barnacles, and a wealth of maritime knick-knackery, much of it spurious and all of it over-priced, according to David Audley’s young man. But old Mr Cooper—who was young Mr Cooper then—remembers buying it, and selling it … And he bought it from the intestate estate of Mrs Agnes Childe, of Cosham, with a job lot of junk, because he wanted some choice items which had been included in the lot, which he had spotted … And, fortunately for us, old Mr Cooper is old enough— and rich enough—not only to remember his sharp practice, but to exult in it … And to remember that Mrs Agnes Childe was née O’Byrne, of Ratsey and O’Byrne, ship’s chandlers and merchants of Portsmouth—two very old-established families of Hampshire, in business and commerce … and in Parliament too, after the Reform Bill of 1832, in the Whig interest.” He was looking at Elizabeth now. “Agnes married the Honourable Algernon Childe, who got himself killed in 1915, at Ypres, with the Grenadiers. Which left only the old lady, with all her family debris—the Honourable Algernon being a younger son, with nothing to his name except his name … But it’s the other names that ring the bell—eh, Miss Loftus?”

  She knew then. Even before he reached down and opened the box-lid, she knew, because she had polished those names dozens of times.

  “Amos Ratsey, Jas. O’Byrne, Octavius Phelan …” he read from the plate inside the lid. “All the names of Dr William Willard Pike’s grateful patients—‘With the Respectful Compliments of Amos Ratsey, Jas. O’Byrne, Octavius Phelan, Edward MacBaren, Chas. Lepine, Michael Haggerty, Jas. Fitzgerald, Edmund Hoagland, Thomas Flower, Patrick Moonan of Portsmouth, Southsea and Cosham’—grateful patients all … Or maybe not, perhaps?”

  “Why not, Professor?” asked Aske.

  “Who were they, Mr Aske? Men of some substance, undoubtedly— Ratsey and O’Byrne were, certainly!” He nodded. “They did not combine their enterprises until 1815, but in 1812 they both held valuable contracts for supplying naval stores, and did business in the dockyards. And after the war they branched out into war surplus in the South American trade—guns and uniforms as well as stores and provisions … for the freedom fighters of those times—all quite respectable, as well as being profitable.” He smiled. “Men of substance—such men as might well respectfully compliment their physician on his patriotism, and could afford to buy him a new set of the tools of his trade.”

  “So what, then?”

  “So who were the rest of them? Amongst my friends and contacts locally, and among the excellent employees of the Central Library and Museums staffs, not one of those names rings any bell as a local gentleman in the Portsmouth district of that time.” Wilder shook his head. “There was a Tom Flower who plied his trade ferrying officers to their ships—a one-eyed fellow with an exemption certificate in his pocket, to keep the press-gang off his back … And a ‘Jim Fitzgerald’ jailed for sedition in 1814, for damning the King’s eyes and wishing Parliament hanged, among other things … But neither of them sound like Dr Pike’s grateful patients.”

  “Well, you’d hardly expect to trace everyone from those days, surely?”

  “You’d be surprised, dear boy. It was a much smaller world then. I would have expected more than two at the first trawl.” He looked at Aske shrewdly. “And I would certainly have expected Dr Pike himself.”

  “Dr Pike … himself?”

  “There was no physician of that name practising in the Portsmouth region in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. And neither is there a Pike in any naval list my friends in Greenwich can turn up.” The shrewd look came to Elizabeth. “Pandora’s box, you have here, my dear: we open it, and whatever there may once have been in it, only mysteries pop out of it now.”

  Aske shook his head. “He needn’t have been a Portsmouth man— but that won’t do, will it! Not if Ratsey and O’Byrne were local …”

  “No. But he could have been signed on by the captain of the Vengeful in a foreign port on a temporary basis—ship’s surgeons came in all shapes and sizes in those days. Only the same objection still holds good—the inconvenient Messrs Ratsey and O’Byrne—how did he know them, then?” Wilder shook his head back at Aske.

  Aske made a face. “But even if we can trace them all somehow, in the end … that still won’t tell us what was in the box.” He looked sidelong at Elizabeth. “Even if we were in a position to guess, we can never know, not now.”

  “No, Mr Aske,” said Wilder. “But we could try another guess … which would make the contents of the box, if any, altogether unimportant.”

  “What?” Momentarily Aske had been wrapped up in his own imaginings; which, Elizabeth supposed, were of Colonel Suchet’s ultimate Portsmouth Plan. “If any?”

  Wilder spread his hands. “We are assuming, quite reasonably, that the box contained something of value. But suppose, Mr Aske, that it was the box itself which was the thing of value? What do we have then?”

  Elizabeth stared at the box. “A list of names—“

  “A list of names! Precisely, Miss Loftus. Amos Ratsey, Jas. O’Byrne, Octavius Phelan—a list of names where no one would look twice at them, even if that was what he was looking for.”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Aske. “Not ‘Jas.’ for ‘Jasper’—‘Jas.’ stands for James—James O’Byrne—James Burns!”

  “Ah…” Wilder picked up Aske’s excitement. “That small adjustment means something to you, does it?”

  “James Burns does, by God!” Aske stepped round to get a better view of the inside of the lid. “And half those other names are Irish—that fits too.”

  “More than half, dear boy,” amended Wilder mildly. “Am I to assume from this that James O’Byrne, alias Burns, was a French agent? And the others were his friends? His spy-ring, or whatever the term they favoured then? A Franco-Hibernian group, anyway—wild g
eese come home to roost, eh?”

  Had that been his guess all along, wondered Elizabeth; but because he hadn’t lost his good teacher’s preference for drawing out his pupils he’d let them come to it in their own way?

  “Franco-Irish-American, perhaps.” Aske’s second thoughts were more cautious. “We’ve still got a lot of checking ahead of us … but it does fit some of our facts quite well—don’t you agree, Miss Loftus?”

  Elizabeth nodded, yet found herself drawn to the expression on the old man’s face: it was as though he was willing her to go on, to build more elaborately on their card-house of guesses.

  A tragedy, he had said. And there was a hint of sadness in that look of his, which reminded her of that.

  “Amos Ratsey and James … Burns,” she began tentatively. “If they were spies, they were never caught, were they?”

  Wilder shook his head. “No. They both flourished like the proverbial green bay-tree after the war. That is a fact—a historical fact.”

  “Huh! They cut their losses, and joined the winning side,” said Aske. “But after the retreat from Moscow they didn’t have much choice—Moscow, and then the failure of the American invasion of Canada … and then Napoleon was beaten at Leipzig, and Wellington crossed the Pyrenees from Spain—what else could they do but keep their heads down and hope no one rumbled them?”

  Amos Ratsey and James Burns had lived to keep their secret—a secret which Tom Chard hadn’t known when he told his part of the tale, years afterwards, to Parson Ward. But that wasn’t a tragedy—it was more like the luck of the Irish. So what—

  “What I’d like to know is how the devil Agnes—what was her name? Agnes née O’Byrne, anyway—how she got hold of that?” Aske pointed at the Vengeful box. “Chard and Timms must have brought it ashore. But what did they do with it then, I wonder?”

  That was it: Humphrey Aske had been tracking her own thoughts, but somehow he’d overtaken her on the home straight.

  She stared at Wilder. “They gave it to James Burns, of course. Is that what they did, Professor?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Loftus.” He stared back at her. “Yet that would seem like another very fair guess … Or, let’s say, I can think of no other way it could have become an O’Byrne family heirloom.”

  Aske frowned. “Why on earth did they give it to him?” He shook his head. “Timms and Chard weren’t spies, for God’s sake, were they?”

  “That they were not, Mr Aske. I think they were good men and true—true to their salt, even the American. I believe that they must have come ashore with it, but they didn’t know what to do with it. So they read the names on the lid—or Abraham Timms did—the names and the places … and they decided to deliver the box to one of those names. They may have looked for Ratsey first—or maybe O’Byrne was the first name they traced.” He shrugged. “It’s even possible they were aware they ought to give it to someone in authority, but they couldn’t do that, could they?”

  “You’re darn right! Not if they were also busy deserting! Even going back to Portsmouth would have been like putting their heads in the lion’s mouth—that would be one hell of a risk for them. But why should they want to do that?”

  “Why indeed?” Wilder’s voice was gentle. “Why do men do brave deeds—if I knew that I would be wiser than I am! How did the O’Byrne family get the box? We don’t know—but they did get it … And why did O’Byrne keep the box?” He smiled. “But he did keep it, for here it is—and that was an irrational act. And that is what men do, Mr Aske: they act irrationally, as their instincts prompt them to do.” He stopped smiling. “Or it could be that Chard and Timms were simply keeping faith with men they admired—‘a noble-hearted and humane officer’ was how Tom Chard described his lieutenant—and little Paget was a ‘high-spirited young gentleman’ … Keeping faith is another irrational act, more often than not. But men will persist in doing it.”

  Elizabeth shivered. “How awful!”

  “Awful?” Aske snuffled as though amused. “If it’s true, I’d like to have seen Burns’s face when they turned up with it—it must have put the fear of God up him!” He chuckled. “And then the relief when he twigged they were deserters! I’ll bet he filled their pockets with guineas to enable them to make themselves scarce, too … If it’s true it’s a damn good story, I’ll say that for it!”

  Elizabeth was scandalised. “But it’s an awful story, Mr Aske! The lieutenant and the midshipman—they went through all that, and then they died for nothing—absolutely nothing!” The enormity of the Vengeful tragedy suddenly enveloped her. “They all died for nothing, really—“

  “Chard and Timms got away, remember!” Aske moved to make amends.

  “But they gave the box to Burns—of all men—“

  Aske seemed to be trying not to smile. “But it didn’t matter either way by then, Miss Loftus. There wasn’t going to be an invasion by then, anyway. It was all for nothing from the start—that’s what I mean. Don’t you see the irony of it?”

  Irony? thought Elizabeth. It was the uselessness of all that courage and endurance and ingenuity which cut so deep. The irony was merely an insult added to that injury.

  “But cheer up, Miss Loftus.” Aske managed to make the smile almost kindly. “Professor Wilder may still be quite wrong, you know. There could be other explanations—dozens of them … We don’t know who Dr Pike was yet, for a start—or how he and his amazing box got aboard the Vengeful… And Timms could have been an American agent—a sort of prototype CIA man—and we don’t know how he joined the Vengeful either… All we know is that we’ve a lot more work to do. But now at least we know where to start looking.”

  Professor Wilder reached down to close the lid of the box, replacing the Guardian on it as though to cover up the dark tale he had conjured from it. “And I can probably help you there. I have contacts on both sides of the Atlantic.”

  They were both trying to jolly her out of her depression, but she couldn’t be lifted so easily. There was something malevolent about that box—and about the long-lost Vengeful herself, too. The Vengeful was to blame for everything, it seemed to her suddenly.

  “She was an unlucky ship.” The words discharged her feelings. “She killed them all—all but two.”

  “My dear … they were all unlucky ships, the Vengefuls,” said Wilder softly.

  “What?” She looked at him in surprise.

  “Didn’t your father ever tell you? They had the reputation for being killers. Great fighters too, to be fair—‘Storm and tempest/fear and foes/ They’ll be with her where/ the Vengeful goes’—that’s what they used to say about her. Didn’t he tell you?”

  She shook her head.

  “That was one reason why they re-named the thirteenth Vengeful, my dear. Add unlucky thirteen to a bad-luck name, and that’s a sure recipe for disaster.” He pointed to the box. “And the navy’s got too much riding on her for anything to be allowed to go wrong this time.”

  “What d’you mean—this time?” She didn’t understand.

  “It’s in the paper today.” He stooped and picked up the Guardian— it had been the newspaper, not the box, at which he had pointed. “’ Wonder ship on missile tests’—“ he passed the paper to her “—you can read it for yourself.”

  Elizabeth took the paper automatically. There was a large, slightly blurred picture of one of those ugly modern warships, all top-heavy with modern gadgetry, which were so different from the greyhounds of Father’s time.

  She read the caption: “HMS Shannon, the Navy’s new anti-submarine command vessel, leaving the pier at the Kyle of Lochalsh base for trials with the air-dropped Stingray anti-submarine missile and the new generation heavyweight torpedo”.

  And the story was in bold type below the Wondership heading: “High ranking American and NATO naval officers shipped aboard the latest addition to the Royal Navy’s anti-submarine capability, the command vessel HMS Shannon, yesterday.

  “They left the new pier at the Kyle of Lochalsh for a de
monstration of anti-submarine warfare in Europe’s only offshore range, the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre, in 10 square miles of the inner Sound of Raasay, off the west Ross-shire coast of Scotland.

  “The ‘Shannon’ will show off weapons systems which the Government hopes to sell to NATO on the top-secret range, which boasts a multi-million pound installation of sea-bed hydrophones and cable links to a mainland computer …”

  “What wonder ship?” asked Aske.

  “The Shannon,” said Elizabeth.

  “In attendance will be a small fleet of auxiliary ships and one of the navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarines, HMS ‘Swiftsure’, which it is thought will be playing the part of a Soviet intruder …”

  “What’s that got to do with us, for heaven’s sake?” said Aske a little tetchily.

  “See for yourself.” Elizabeth handed him the Guardian.

  “Wonder ship on missile tests?” Aske wrinkled his nose at the headline, and then studied the text briefly. “Very interesting, I’m sure … But, more to the point, Professor—can you give us the names of those contacts of yours? I think we’ll be needing them.”

  Wilder inclined his head. “In anticipation of just that request, Mr Aske, I have prepared a little list for you.” He produced a long white envelope from his breast pocket. “For the Americans I have also written brief letters of introduction. For the English, it will be sufficient to mention my name … And now I must be away, regretfully.” He bowed to Elizabeth.

  Aske looked at Elizabeth quickly. “But won’t you stay, Professor? I’m sure Mrs Audley will expect us to ask you to … and we do still need your brains, sir.”

  “No. I think you’ll do very well without me.” Wilder spoke with the resolution of a grandee. “Besides which, at my age one becomes a creature of habit, and my housekeeper has a steak-and-kidney pie and a bottle of Beaune waiting for me … And these August evenings are closing in, and it will be dark soon, and the forecast is for rain … and I have an hour’s drive ahead of me. So thank you—but no.” He turned for a last time to Elizabeth. “Miss Loftus … it has been a pleasure. And I hope you will regard me as a friend now, and will call on me. I see far too few young women these days.”