The Judith and Mary of Bristol was on charter to the Navy, a small, rotund but seaworthy vessel that had done the trip several times before. The crew quarters right in the eyes of the ship were tiny, but the men on each side of the table tucked into their meal with gusto. There was small beer to follow and Kydd drank it thirstily — it was no more than a few days old and was fresh and soft. He listened to the talk that followed. The Judith had reached her rendezvous late because she had sailed well out into the Atlantic to avoid any privateers at the entrance to the Channel. She was to supply Duke William and return to Devonport to de-store before going to Bristol for refit.
Kydd tried to hide his excitement — Bristol had no significant naval presence that he knew of. He took a deep breath. “Thanks for the scran. Might be I can return the favor.”
The nuggety seaman opposite grinned. “No need fer that at all, boyo!” he said, in a pleasant Welsh borders lilt.
“No — what I mean is, there’s maybe a bit o’ gold in it f’r you.”
The seamen looked at each other.
“How so, lad?”
For answer, Kydd stood up and, fixing them with blazing eyes, tore off his shirt to reveal the half-healed wounds, livid purple weals, some still weeping in places. “There’s ten guineas in it for you if I’m aboard when you sail,” he growled.
“An’ a berth in a King’s ship for us all if yer found,” another seaman muttered.
“What do y’ say?”
At first there was no response, and Kydd feared the worst.
Then the dark nuggety seaman stood up. “Name’s Finchett — Billy to you. Welcome aboard the Judith!”
Giddy with relief, Kydd sat down.
“We has a little, who shall say, accommodation in the hold we useta make our own before, when the press-gang’s out abroad. Ye’ll be safe enough there, boyo.” His palm came out, apologetically. “We needs to make other arrangements, you’ll unnerstand.”
The guineas chinked solemnly into the silence.
After the break, Kydd returned to the hold for work. Duke William required only half of Judith’s cargo of powder and soon they would cease their labor and return aboard.
Finchett clambered about over the top of the cargo as though checking their stowage.
There was much more light in the hold than there was on the old Duke William, but even so, there were dark recesses in the corners.
“Here you are, Tom,” Renzi whispered. He had noiselessly appeared at Kydd’s elbow with a shapeless piece of jute sacking. “Your gear — take it.”
Kydd grasped it, touched by his friend’s thoughtfulness.
“Last barrel, you men!” called down the boatswain.
Finchett gave Kydd a significant look and sauntered over to the after corner. Kydd followed, looking up through the hatch as though waiting for the can-hook to come plunging down again. His heart hammered. It was not too late to abandon the unknown, return to the warmth and safety of his mess — and his friends.
A bulky water barrel rested in the dark outer end of the lower hold. It had an old strop and toggle lying around it, and it looked just like the other sea stores. Finchett slipped the toggle and took the after chine in his fingers.
Checking around carefully, he lifted — the barrel split in two length-ways, hinging at the forward end. He let it fall again. “Get in when yer hears me shout ’n’ don’t come out till you hears a knock, two times two.”
Kydd wiped his clammy hands on his trousers and looked back. Renzi had come over to see the arrangement and now stood quietly.
“It seems that this is goodbye, my good friend,” Kydd whispered.
There was no answer. Renzi’s face was away from the dull light and it was difficult to read his expression.
From the opposite corner of the hold came the loud splintering of wood. “What the hell are youse doing, yer useless lubbers?” came Finchett’s shout. “Call yerselves seamen? I’ve seen better sailors in Mother Jones’s barnyard!”
Kydd gulped. A quick glance back at Renzi and he had the barrel top lifting. There was no time to lose. His heart thudding, he climbed in and began lowering the top half over him.
“Tom — ” Renzi’s voice was hoarse, unnatural.
Kydd hesitated.
“I — I’m coming with you!”
Mind racing, Kydd crouched down — and immediately felt an opening in the end of the barrel. In the dimness he made out that the opening communicated with the rest of the ship aft in some way. On hands and knees he crawled through.
He looked back to see the figure of Renzi dropping in, and the barrel lid closing. It was now totally black.
Almost immediately there was a scrabble of sound outside as someone secured the strop, and then quiet. Whatever else, the minimum they could expect was a flogging for attempting to desert — Renzi was now as guilty as he.
Renzi must have found the opening too, for his elbows caught Kydd in the side.
“I really do beg your pardon,” he murmured, and wriggled aside.
Kydd felt a rise of panic as claustrophobia threatened. He could feel deep frames as they crossed and curved away upward, a flat decking pressed down close above. They must be at the very lowest point of the vessel, where the rise of the keel led to the transom and rudder pintle. There would be rats and cockroaches crawling unseen among them in the dark.
The smell was bad, but less so than Duke William’s nauseous depths. It was very close and stuffy and Kydd panted in anticipation of the air expiring.
“I must be demented! Utterly bereft of my senses!” came Renzi’s voice.
The motion was not helpful — the swash and hiss of waves above them was quite audible, and the little brig’s liveliness was unsettling after the battleship’s grand movements. Kydd lay full length, trying to relax. The jerk and wallow of the vessel was trying and he needed to brace himself against the hard beams. Time passed. He knew that they were still alongside from the irregular thumps as they bumped the bulbous sides of Duke William.
Muffled shouts penetrated. They were repeated, and knocks were heard, approaching from forward. Kydd guessed that a search was under way. The knocks came closer and he stopped breathing.
Kydd jumped at a vicious banging on their special cask. It stopped, but a shouted exchange then started. The words could not be made out but Kydd thought that he recognized Elkins’s voice. He cringed — there would be no mercy from Elkins.
More shouts, answered distantly. Elkins was not moving on — he was a valued member of the boarding party for pressing in merchant ships because he knew all the tricks. They were trapped. The shouts became impatient. The distant voice answered shortly — but with a final banging it was over. Not daring to move, Kydd lay waiting. There were more isolated shouts, but they were moving away. Soon they died away and the two of them were left alone. The impossible seemed to have happened — and when finally the unruly bumping settled into a steady surge his heart leaped. They were under way, bound for freedom, and his life as a seaman in a man-o’-war was over.
It was almost an anticlimax. Without a doubt, for the rest of his life he was a marked man. The desertion was now actual, and even though he had been in the Navy only a few months, his name would be in a book somewhere, and all the dire penalties would fall due if he was discovered. It was a miserable situation.
He had given no thought to what he would do now. He could not return home, which implied survival elsewhere, but where? In wartime there was little call for a wig-maker, and his newfound skills as a sailor could find employment now only in the merchant marine, and there he would be in constant fear of the press-gang and someone recognizing him.
He would have to go somewhere like the colonies. His loyal heart would not allow him to go to the infant United States and he had heard that the new settlements in Botany Bay were in grave difficulties — no place for a fugitive.
The enormity of what he had done pressed in. He remembered Bowyer’s face with its slow smile as he gently put K
ydd right about some seafaring matter, and felt demeaned, dirty and criminal.
A double knock was followed by another, and the barrel top lifted. Thankfully they scrambled out. “Two of yez!” Finchett said, in mock astonishment. “Well, yer both come up on deck ’n’ take your last sightin’ o’ Duke William!”
Cautiously they looked out from the hatchway, Judith’s low bulwarks making it inadvisable to show themselves on deck.
A mile or so off, Duke William was heading away from them, leaning into the stiffening breeze. With her yards braced up sharp, the big threedecker looked a picture of careless strength. And with her she carried Kydd’s friends: Doggo, Dick Whaley — Ned Doud, of course, not forgetting Pinto and Wong. Kydd’s eyes pricked, and glistened. Renzi touched his arm, but he still stared over the sea to the old ship-of-the-line. He gazed after her until first her hull sank beneath the curve of the horizon, then her topsails, lit redly by the setting sun, and finally, almost too distant to see, her royals. Then the sea was empty.
They sat together on the foredeck of Judith — the skipper had insisted they work their passage, and in the morning sunshine they were set to work seaming a threadbare foresail.
The brig met the seas in exuberant fashion, for she sailed up the long blue swells and down the other side instead of arrogantly shouldering them aside. The occasional breakers served to discommode, bullying her off course unmercifully.
The lighter spars and rigging seemed toy-like after those of a man-o’war but the freeboard of only a few feet gave an exhilarating closeness to the rush and hiss of the sea.
“Tom, dear fellow,” said Renzi.
Kydd had been quiet and introspective since their desertion, but had been respectful and considerate in their exchanges.
“Tom, we must give thought to our future.” Renzi’s impulsive act had changed his own circumstances fatally. Now there was no question of seeing through the high-minded redemption he had undertaken: neither could he return to his family with his tail between his legs. In truth he had no idea what to do.
“Th’ colonies?” said Kydd, looking up with troubled eyes.
“A possibility.” Renzi’s half-brother was in Canada and after his infrequent return visits Renzi had no illusions about the raw, half-civilized frontier life of the new continent.
“A foreign land, then?”
Renzi hid a smile. He knew that Kydd, like others of his kind, had only the haziest notion of the outside world. “Again, a possibility,” he answered. “We must consider carefully, of course.” With half the world at war and revolutionary disaffection rampant in the other, it would be a deadly gamble to find which of them, old world or new, would prove a reliable hiding place.
He returned to his palm and needle. They had but a few more days to make a decision before landfall in England, and then it would have to be final. For the first time Renzi felt that events were slipping out of his control and his options were being extinguished, one by one.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
Well, me boyos, early tomorrer you sees old England agen — ain’t it prime?” Finchett’s announcement did not seem to cheer Kydd and Renzi and, perplexed, he left them to it. The pair moodily sat on the canvas-covered main hatch; there seemed no point in conversation.
Interrupting their introspection, from the masthead there was a sudden hail. “Sail hooo!”
A single vessel within hours of the English coast — there could be little doubt about its origins. The entire maritime trade of England passed up Channel this way, as did the ships of the Navy going about their business of war.
“Youse had better be ready to stow yerselves below agen.”
This was eminent good sense. One of the darker acts of a King’s ship was the stripping of seamen from homeward-bound merchant packets, a hard thing after a voyage to the Indies of a year or more.
“Deck hooo! She’s a cutter under flyin’ jib — ’n’ English colors!” Now there was no doubt: one of the many small warships on patrol. And her deep, narrow hull and that huge bowsprit meant speed. There was no way they could think of outrunning her.
The crew of the Judith had a protection from the press as a Fleet auxiliary, but these were personal to the bearer. There was no help for it: they would have to return to their black hole.
A last reluctant glimpse of the balmy day, and the cutter smartly tacking toward, and they returned below. It was uncomfortable and boring in their close black lair, waiting for the boarding to be over with, but it was infinitely better than the alternative.
The steady swooping movement was replaced by an uneasy bobbing — they had heaved to; a discordant bumping told them that the cutter was alongside. They resigned themselves to it: this might be the first of many such.
Faint shouts — probably Finchett expressing his views on the propriety of the Royal Navy interfering with the merchant service, and after an interminable time they felt the lurch and smooth take-up of sail once more. They waited for the signal, and before long they heard scrabbling at the toggle and the strop falling away. But there was no signal. Perhaps naval seamen were still aboard.
“Wait!” Renzi whispered. “We must be sure.”
The air grew stale, then close. They started to pant and felt giddy.
“We have to get out,” Renzi said. He tried to lift the barrel lid. It didn’t budge. He heaved at it, with no result. Putting his back under the lid, he uncoiled his full weight against it. It gave a little, then slammed down again. “There’s something on it,” he whispered. “Give me a hand.”
He guided Kydd in the blackness to put his back next to his own in the cramped space, and together they thrust upward.
Suddenly it gave and flew open. The hold was in darkness, of course, but on the next barrel a lanthorn stood, casting a dim yellow light.
They climbed out cautiously, but Kydd tripped on a dark shape on the deck next to the barrel. He bent to see what it was — and jerked up in horror.
It was a body. He bent again to roll it over — and his hand came away wet and sticky. “It’s Finchett.”
Renzi knelt and examined the corpse. “There’s a wound in his back,” he said. It didn’t make any sense. Maybe Finchett had been wounded on deck and had tried to reach them, expiring after releasing the strop. Renzi realized their reconnaissance would have to be cautious-something was terribly awry.
Kydd remembered that there was a small hatch forward; it allowed entry into the hold without needing the big main hatch to be opened. They scrambled across the remaining powder barrels and reached the hatchway ladder at the fore part of the hold.
“Careful,” whispered Renzi.
Kydd eased back the sliding hatch an inch. Sunlight flooded in, as did familiar sea sounds. The clean salt air was invigorating.
Renzi put his ear to the opening.
“What is it?” whispered Kydd urgently. He was beginning to feel ghosts.
“Quiet!” snapped Renzi.
Faint voices could be heard. They grew louder, and Renzi eased the hatch shut again.
“What?” Kydd asked.
Renzi looked at him gravely. “They were speaking French, dear fellow.”
The cutter must have been a French corsair under false colors — a smart move, given the circumstances. They had boarded the unaccompanied powder brig, probably massacred the crew and even now would be carrying her into a French port.
They stared at each other. Their immediate future was now very much in question. If they surrendered they would probably be hove overboard; if they waited until they reached port and discharged cargo they would be discovered and would rot in a military prison; and if they hid in their hole they would die there.
Renzi struggled with alternatives, but logic led pitilessly to a series of dead ends. He climbed back down the ladder and put his head in his hands.
“Nicholas! Up here, man!” There was sharp authority in Kydd’s voice. “We need t’ know where we stand. Try to listen t’ what they’re saying.”
Renzi slid the hatch open a crack and put his ear to it. There were two distinct voices, both young and strong, and another distant one, more mature. Their northern French dialect was difficult to follow, but he understood. The distant voice was giving the other two orders — probably the watch on deck, or what passed for it.
The orders themselves gave clues. What was aller vent largue? To go with the wind largue? That would be “large,” of course — the opposite of close hauled. In that case they were going in the opposite direction to before. “We visit Madame Cécile’s establishment when we reach Goulven” — where was that? This heathen dialect! But that meant it was somewhere in Brittany, almost certainly the north coast — they would not risk the longer voyage to Brest or points southward.
Renzi strained to hear, but there was only a tedious description of what they would find in Madame Cécile’s brothel. “We’re on our way to Goulven, which I believe to be on the north coast,” he quietly reported. “We are running large to the south or sou’-west, and I suppose we will reach port tomorrow.
“I can hear two on deck and one aft. There may be more below.”
Unarmed, they wouldn’t have a hope, no matter how much surprise they commanded. He resumed listening. What he heard made him start, but the import was worse — it was desperate.
“They’re saying that they hope they won’t have their prize taken from them by the Navy bound for Brest,” he whispered urgently.
Apparently an unknown force was sailing to make rendezvous with those in Brest. Together they could overwhelm Duke William and the two others, then be free to descend on any valuable British overseas possessions they chose.
Kydd was utterly resolute. “Nicholas, get yourself here!”
Tumbling down the ladder, he swung down to the capacious water barrels along the centerline at the forward end of the hold. He tapped them until he found an empty one. Knocking out one end, he began the laborious task of manhandling it toward the ladder.
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