Fletcher's Glorious 1st of June

by John Drake

  Sarah Coignwood fought a mighty battle to deny a temper that was used to being nourished and indulged. Slym was a contradiction. He’d kill a man and never worry. He’d knock the teeth out of a suspect to get information. He’d sent hundreds to dance the Tyburn jig — women among them — and watched their judicial strangling as a matter of principle. But Miss Booth’s pretty little face had managed to stir his moribund conscience. And Lady Sarah knew why. It was Kate Booth’s amazing air of upright dignity, somehow preserved through her service as a common whore. As she recalled that even she, Sarah Coignwood, had consciously imitated Kate Booth during her trial, a shade of something perilous close to envy slid through Lady Sarah’s mind for the faery-princess bearing that the girl displayed.

  Envy of another woman was an unknown experience for Sarah Coignwood and her inward struggle reached its climax. She ground her teeth, drove her nails into the cushions of the vast sofa she was seated on, and smothered the eruption of fury that she was longing to unleash. She had to, for giving in to it would see Sam Slym out of her house and gone from her control for ever.

  “Sam,” she said, laying a soft hand on his, “I’m afraid. And if you won’t stand by me, I’m lost. Who will defend me if I lose you?”

  Slym saw the change come over the lovely face. He saw the anger quenched and the forced, conscious representation of tenderness begin. He knew her far too well by now not to recognise it. And he was far too acute an observer of mankind.

  He knew all about the other lovers. There were detailed entries for each of them on his record cards in the office off Aldgate High Street. He knew precisely when each had been sneaked into the house and he knew who was current favourite. He knew Sarah would turn him out whenever she was done with him and he’d spotted enough sneers from her elegant friends to know that he could never enter into their world except as a curiosity, led in on a golden chain for their amusement.

  He also knew what she and her perverted, maniac sons had done to that poor bastard Jacob Fletcher. The man was clean as a whistle. The Coignwood money was legally his and if he’d pitched Bosun Dixon into the sea, then it was self-defence ‘cos of what Lieutenant Seymour and Bosun Dixon were doing to him.

  He knew — for he’d seen it — what she’d done to her own son when it suited her and he knew what she’d do to Kate Booth given the chance. It was only his objections to some of her more creative ideas that had kept the girl in one piece. And it wasn’t that Slym was finicky. He’d have clipped Miss Booth’s dainty ear himself if that’s what it took to help her memory along. That’s why he’d brought her away from Mrs Simpson’s in the first place. But the things Sarah wanted to do to the girl were different. And at bottom of it, and worst of all, he knew that it was only the fear of Fletcher that kept him, Sam Slym, in Dulwich Square.

  But he listened while she lied that she’d never intended Kate Booth to be used for anything other than bait. And he listened while she explained what must be done to make sure that Fletcher would find the house in Maze Hill, and how he must arrange to receive Fletcher such that he got in, but never got out again.

  Sam Slym listened and nodded, and added a few points of his own, and a plan of action was agreed even though he saw all her lies and could list her faults like the expert that he was. He knew she’d betray him the moment it suited her. But he would stand by her and fight for her, and die in her service if need be. In short he would deny himself and elevate her interests above his own, because he loved her.

  32

  I escaped from the Admiralty’s officers on 16th June. From then until the 24th I hid with Sammy in the lodgings he’d found for us in Fighting Cock Lane. With the money he’d got from Black Dick he could take his pick more or less, and so had been careful to find us somewhere in a quiet street, with its own front door, so I could be smuggled in when nobody was looking.

  Sammy being ashore first, before my escape, was a vital part of our plan. For otherwise how would I have kept out of sight? I’m too big to hide and folk notice me, so once the hue and cry went up, then I’d have been taken or betrayed in no time. But as it was, we had a nice cosy hole to hide in, and Sammy could go out and bring in our food and drink while things got quiet enough for us to leave Portsmouth. And remember, that getting out of Portsmouth was no easy matter, for “Pompey” was the strongest place in the kingdom. A regular walled city with fortifications, earthworks, and guns bristling at the landward approaches to the eastward, and the sea to every other direction.

  The only ways in and out were by sea or through gates which in wartime were guarded by armed Redcoats. So once the news of my escape was out, the soldiers were looking for me at the gates and the Navy was guarding every boat.

  On the other hand, this was wartime, and the Army and Navy had too many things to do to give much attention to one absconded man. That’s what we’d hoped and so it proved to be. Sammy kept a watch on the gates and we found that after a few days the guards grew slack and eventually they stopped turning over the contents of carts and waggons to see who was hiding inside, and the mails and coaches went through without even a check. But to be safe, we left it for eight days in all, and Sammy drove in and out of the town a few times in the cart he’d bought just to see if he’d be stopped.

  The cart was another idea we’d had aboard Queen Charlotte. I could not possibly expect to walk out of Portsmouth. Even at night I’m just too big and too easy to spot. Even the dullest soldier would have challenged me. So that meant the cover of a vehicle. But any public conveyance would have risked the chance of my being discovered, so we had to have something of our own. In that way, I could hide while Sammy drove and we wouldn’t have to walk all the way to London once we were beyond the city walls.

  The fact that Sammy knew nothing about horses or carts didn’t bother him in the least.

  “Can you drive, Sammy?” I’d asked.

  “Aye!” says he, without hesitation.

  “Have you ever driven?” says I, suspiciously.

  “No!” says he.

  “But how can you … ?”

  “Jacob, lad,” says he, “if I can strike a main t’ pliant stuns’l in a gale of wind, I don’t see as how I can’t steer an ‘osses arse!”

  That was typical of bloody seamen. They were so pig-headed proud of what they could do, and so contemptuous of landsmen, that they thought they could do anything. And in fact one of the sights of any naval seaport was a party of seamen on shore-leave, with a commandeered public coach laden with tarts and grog, thundering up the turnpike at full gallop with a cheerful tar at the reins and the white-faced driver cowering beside him.

  So Sammy bought a large dog-cart, with seating for two and a big box behind with slits for ventilation, for taking gun-dogs on a shooting expedition. He paid far too much to the villain that sold it him and he spent a day blundering round the town learning to say “Whoa!” instead of “Avast!” and “Walk on” instead of “Give way”. But he got the hang of it soon enough, and by the time I came ashore he was driving like a man of twenty years’ experience. Which I suppose proves his point.

  He’d hung about Portsmouth Point with the cart on the day I was due ashore, and followed the coach with me and my captors inside. When I jumped out, he left the cart in charge of a crossing-sweeper and chased after me. He’d come prepared and the unfortunate Lieutenant Lloyd was not expecting an attack from behind.

  The sand-bag was a careful thought too.

  “It’s heavy, you see?” says he. “But it’s limp so it don’t break bones. No point killing the sod, was there?”

  So, on 24th June Sammy drove us out through the old St Thomas’s Gate in the Landport Ravelin, picking a time when the traffic was busiest, and got through with nobody paying us the least attention. He was driving and I was crammed into the dog-box with my knees under my chin and feeling sorry for myself. For one thing it was deuced uncomfortable for a man of my size but worse than that I was worrying. I was worrying about what Sarah Coignwood might do to Kate Boot
h. Later on, when we got on to the open road and there were less people about, I got out of the box and talked it over with Sammy — for probably the hundredth time.

  “D’you think she’ll do what she said, Sammy?” says I.

  “No, you daft bleeder!” says he. “I told you: she only said it ‘cos she’s a mad bitch.”

  “Yes, but if she is mad she might do it anyway.”

  “She ain’t that mad. She come after you with the Law at her back, didn’t she? That was clever work that was. A mad woman couldn’t have done that.”

  “But she might do it for spite. She might …”

  “Bugger me, Jacob,” says Sammy, exasperated with my persistence, “clap a hitch on your jawing tackle, will you? Listen! If she was to ...” Sammy paused, searching for words to say an unspeakable thing, “if she was to do … them things … what she said … then she’d do it for you to see, wouldn’t she? It’d be done to get at you. And with you out of sight, there ain’t no point in it, is there?”

  “I suppose so,” says I glumly.

  “Any road,” says he, “why’ve we got to go to London at all? We could get a ship in Bristol as easy as London, and then the wide world’s ours!” He turned to look at me. “You got along without Miss Katy all these months, so why’re you moping over her now?”

  “No,” says I, “I’m responsible. I wouldn’t leave a dog in that creature’s hands.”

  “Hmm,” says Sammy and sighed deeply. “Suppose not,” says he, “but Lady bleedin’ Sarah ain’t just going to give her up, you know.”

  “I know,” says I. “D’you think your brother can help us?”

  “Maybe,” says he, and sighed heavily.

  “Tell me about him again, Sammy,” says I, partly because I wanted to know, but mainly because my worrying was getting Sammy more and more depressed — a state I’d never ever seen him in before.

  Sanuny liked to talk about his brother, and I thought that might cheer him up.

  “Well,” says he, “our Toby’s a few years younger’n me and he went to London as a lad. He married Pen years ago and they got six or seven kids. I see him every few years when I get to London. He’s got a boatyard down Wapping way, and he’s a fly cove.” Sammy grinned. “He’s a sort of rescuer. That’s what he is. Him and his mates they rescue all sorts o’ tackle and gear out o’ the ships in the London Docks.”

  I grinned too. This was a favourite subject of Sammy’s. He was tremendously proud of his brother, whom he took to have really made something of himself.

  “What sort of gear does he rescue?” says I.

  “All sorts,” says Sammy. “Bit o’ rum and sugar out o’ the West India Docks. Then there’s spices, silk and the like out o’ East Indiamen. Things that ain’t too bulky.”

  “He rescues them, does he?” says I.

  “Aye, lad!” says he.

  “And he’ll take us in, will he?” says I.

  “That he will, lad!” says Sammy.

  *

  We were ten days on the road because we found it better to keep off main roads, which were too busy. That way I didn’t have to scramble into the box to hide myself every time a coach went rattling past in a cloud of dust and the outside passengers gazing curiously down upon us. But side roads meant a circuitous route and getting lost frequently. We didn’t dare try to change the horse, for that would have drawn attention. So we had to keep resting our one nag, and that slowed us down too. We camped at night in a little canvas tent and cooked our food over an open fire.

  Sammy dealt with the practicalities with consummate ease. It really was true that seamen could master any craft. He was as good at making camp as an American frontiersman.

  Finally we came into London, which you could smell before you saw it, just as you can today: coal fires and horses. Countless thousands of both. Once we were well into the throng of traffic I came out of the box and sat out boldly beside Sammy. There’s no better place to hide in all the world than London. What’s one man among those hordes?

  And it didn’t matter if I was a big ‘un, neither. What might have stood out even in a town the size of Portsmouth was lost in London. I dare say even a man with two heads would find a dozen others like himself, and certainly once you got along Cheapside and Cornhill where trade was celebrated in its glory, then all the faces of mankind were on display: Turks, Chinese and woolly-headed negroes, let alone simple Englishmen who happened to be well grown.

  You have to remember that in those days London was bigger than any other city in England (or in the world for that matter) to a degree that folk don’t appreciate today. To strangers in 1794, London was simply dazzling. Boston was a fair city, as I’ve said in these pages, and Portsmouth was no mere village, but either of them would have been swallowed up in London and hardly noticed. In London, there were so very many people, there was so much unending noise, the crowds were so unimaginably large, and the streets so winding, and the whole place so precious complicated that Sammy and I, who neither of us really knew it, got lost far worse than ever we did on the road.

  As anyone does in these circumstances, we fell out repeatedly and blamed one another for taking the wrong way. We got hot and bothered and even Sammy lost his temper. And when we asked directions, I had to hold him back from using his sand-bag on some of the bright Cockney wits with their pitying scorn for clod-hopping rustics who didn’t know which way led to Wapping.

  But eventually we made our way by Tower Wharf, past the ancient fortress, along Catherine Street by the Red Lion Brew-house and so to Wapping Street which ran on for miles, with the River Thames to our right. And always: people, people, people, all different. The endless succession of new faces — rich, poor and middling — that only London could present.

  But now we were on the right road, and at last, with me leading the horse, which was staggering and not fit for its work, and Sammy walking beside me, and both of us in so foul a mood that we were no longer talking to one another, Sammy recognised landmarks and said we were nearly there. At about ten o’clock in the evening, with the sky still light, we found Bone’s Wharf. It was on Wapping Street, facing the river, between King Edward Street and Warren Square, just down-river from New Wapping Stairs.

  Bone’s Wharf was set among a row of similar premises, each comprising a pair of heavy gates, barred against the street, and enclosing a yard to receive carts, a house, some sheds and a warehouse, a short pier running out into the river and a boathouse. Each pair of gates had its owner’s sign hung on it or raised above it in an arch. There were half a dozen of them: a tight little squadron of busy enterprises, and it cheered me up just to look at them.

  I led the horse across the road and got the cart out of the way of traffic, stopped before the gates of Bone’s Wharf and Sammy hammered away on the woodwork with the butt end of the whip. Eventually a little hatchway, set into the gates, swung open and there was Sammy’s brother, a little fellow just like Sammy himself, with the same sharp eyes and alert look about him, but a good deal younger than Sammy, with only a few streaks of grey in his hair. I’d say he was a man in his forties. And by Jove he was pleased to see Sammy!

  As soon as his little spy hole swung open and he saw who was outside, he grinned and yelled back across his shoulder.

  “Pen,” says he, “it’s our Sammy!” and he threw open the gates to let us in.

  Well, I can’t say there’s many places where I’ve been made quite so welcome as Bone’s Wharf. Toby Bone lived with his wife and two sons and three daughters. The lads were full grown, the eldest girls nearly so and the youngest a little ‘un of six years. The whole crew of ‘em came pouring out and brought us indoors as if we were royalty.

  They unharnessed our horse and rubbed him down and stabled him nice and cosy alongside Toby’s own horses and they parked our cart in the yard. Our bits and pieces of luggage were carried in, and Sammy and I were sat at the head of the table in the parlour and food and drink placed before us. Everyone talked at once and Sammy beamed with d
elight and kept looking at me and nodding. He was showing them off, you see, for he was proud of his family and proud of their generosity.

  As for me, it was the first time in my whole life I’d ever seen a family — that is to say a family under way and in action: “with steam up” as we say today. Sammy and his brother were so alike, and you could see the likeness in the faces of the others.

  Some looked like Toby, some looked like their Ma, and some were a mixture, which of course is the natural way of things, but I’d never seen it before. Not seated all round the same table and shouting and laughing and elbowing one another. I thought it was just like a mess table at dinner time. It was strange and familiar all at the same time, and it was probably the first time I realised how much I’d missed by being raised up as an orphan.

  The other odd thing was feeling such a giant. I’m big even among normal folk, but Toby was the same size as Sammy, and his wife, Pen, was even smaller, and all the children took after their parents. The result was that I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput, and when I stood up I was looking down on a room full of tiny people. I felt that I must keep my arms folded and move carefully for fear of knocking them over.

  The youngest daughter was like a pretty little doll with a bright china face and big blue eyes. To me she seemed unbelievably tiny and delicate. Being the youngest, she was the pet of the entire family and when they pushed her forward to my chair to be introduced she stood up straight with her hands behind her back, and turned her cheek towards me. I guessed that she was expecting a kiss but I was unsure how to behave. I didn’t know how to treat children. I’d never met any before, aside from ship’s boys, and my communication with them had usually been through the toe of my boot. So I looked quickly at Sammy and he nodded, and so I leaned forward and planted a kiss on her little face, hardly daring to touch her for fear of breaking something.