The King's Bounty

by Sara Fraser

  ‘I will, Hebrew. You may count on it,’ she told him, and left the shop.

  He knew with a powerful certainty that he would indeed meet her again. His father, who had been sitting on a tiny stool in the darkest corner of the shop, clucked his tongue scornfully.

  ‘The boy is a fool!’ he stated firmly to an invisible audience. ‘It’s no wonder I haff vhite hairs, and a head mad vith worry. He’ll be the ruin of the bissniss, he vill.’

  His son ignored him and dwelt upon his memory of the young woman, who in spite of her shabby travel-stained dress had carried herself like a queen. ‘Ve’ll meet again, my pretty. I know it,’ he thought, and went back to his ledgers.

  Sarah paused beneath the overhanging three gold balls of the pawnshop and drank in the scene that curved away from each side of her. On both sides of the street, the crooked, ramshackle ancient buildings were crammed one against the other as if they battled for the very ground they stood upon. Liquor shops, contract taverns, tailors, chandlers, grocers, watch-jobbers, eating houses, ordinaries, drapers, pawnbrokers, cook-shops, beer- and gin-kens, all clamoured with garishly painted signs and strident-voiced shopmen to be allowed to serve and entertain the passers-by. At one end of the street she could see the arch and drawbridge of King James Gate, that cut off the Island from Portsmouth proper, with the vivid scarlet, white and gold of its military sentinels standing watch upon it. At the other end was the open sky, where the buildings ended and the road ran into the shingle of the beach. The masts and rigging of anchored merchant ships and men o’ war lying at their moorings of the Portsea dockyard presented a brave show of flags and buntings fluttering in the wind.

  In the street itself civilians were in the minority. They were mostly ticket-porters with the fantail hats and leather shoulder cushions attached by straps to their foreheads, waiting to carry the chests of travellers and Royal Navy men coming ashore at the Spice Island Point, where the lighter men ran their boats up on the shingle beach to unload. Dozens of bell-bottomed, loose-jacketed sailors, their round flat-crowned hats perched jauntily on their tarred pigtailed heads, swaggered by arm-in-arm with women of every conceivable shape and colour. Ragged, gin-sodden hags who for a penny or two would allow any perversion to be practised upon their raddled flesh. Young fresh-faced girls newly come to their age-old profession, who gloried in their tawdry finery of feathered turbans and bonnets and breast-revealing gowns; and who for a few brief months would command high fees and gentle treatment. Older women, still retaining some attractions of face and body, but thin-lipped and hard-eyed, knowing too much of the cutting knives of abortionists, the blows and kicks of drunken clients and vicious ponces, and the slow insidious rot of syphilis and gonorrhoea.

  From the ground floors of the taverns sounded the stamp of feet and the wailing of fiddles as the matelots gaily danced, drank and sang their precious hours of freedom away. In the upstairs rooms, blue- and white-uniformed naval officers also entertained their women; and though the food and wines were finer the songs, dances and the urgency of hands seeking warm, soft flesh were the same.

  In the gutters outside the foodshops and inns, beggars plied their pitiful trade. Some armless, some legless, some blind, and some all three. Their hoarse pleas for help mingled with the shouts of the street urchins that swarmed shoeless, half-naked, ragged, hungry and neglected, few knowing a mother, even fewer a father.

  Periodically a file of soldiers shouldering muskets with fixed bayonets and led by halberd-carrying sergeants patrolled the area, sharing that task with mixed parties of armed marines and cudgel-swinging, hard-hatted ships’ petty officers. Whenever men’s voices bellowed oaths and curses, and women screamed as glass shattered and furniture crashed over in the taverns and beer-kens, the patrols suddenly appeared and battered down the doors. Minutes later, bloody broken-headed men and women would be hauled out bodily from the rooms and flung into the stinking, refuse-thick gutters, to await the rough justice and draconian punishments of the town’s military Provost Marshal.

  The very vitality and bustle of the street acted as a magnet, and as Sarah Jenkins stood absorbing this new world, her heart thudded within her breast. ‘This is the place . . . This is where I’ll make my fortune and become a fine lady,’ she promised herself exultantly.

  ‘Spare a copper, spare a penny piece for a bold tar, ’oo lorst ’is eyes and legs at Trafalgar Cape wi’ immortal Nelson.’ The whining voice came from ground level and Sarah started in shock as a grasping hand tugged her skirt.

  Propped against the wall of the pawnshop was a grotesque figure, dressed in rags so filthy that no trace of original colour could be discerned. The stumps of thighs jutted out from the base of the torso and the ends had been left uncovered to show the hideous lumps of putrid-hued flesh, created by the surgeons’ knives and saws, and the cauterizing boiling tar. The beggar’s head was wrapped in greasy swathes of cloth which hid all but the gap-toothed mouth and pimpled, bristled chin. Sarah shuddered as the blackened hands, taloned like claws, tugged insistently again and again on her skirt.

  ‘Spare a copper! Spare a penny piece, for a bold tar as lorst ’is eyes and legs wi’ immortal Nelson at Trafalgar Cape.’

  She fumbled in the pocket of her skirt and, finding a coin, pressed it into one of the groping hands.

  ‘Bless yer kindness, lady. Bless yer a ’undred times!’ The gap-toothed mouth grinned and spittle dribbled down the bristled chin. ‘Bless ye good ’eart!’

  Sarah pulled free and walked on slowly towards the seaward end of the street. Behind her the beggar stealthily lifted a fold of the cloth covering his face so that his bleary yellowed eyes could examine her clearly. He vented a low whistle of appreciation and beckoned one of the street urchins playing in the foul-smelling gutter before him. The child came and the beggar whispered urgently.

  ‘Run and tell Moonlight Annie, that theer’s a fresh partridge afluttering up to’ards the Point.’

  The child disappeared into an adjoining beer-ken, and the beggar grinned and let the fold of cloth drop over his eyes once more. Then resumed his plaintive whine. ‘Spare a penny! Spare a copper for a bold tar ’oo . . .’

  Sarah dawdled along the road, absorbed in the sights, scents, and sounds that surrounded her. Brilliantly-feathered parrots hung in tiny cages before a small shop, and they preened and groomed their plumage, spreading their wings, cawing and screeching in constant cacophony, while one cackled almost humanly. ‘Rot my bollocks! Pretty! Pretty! Rot my bollocks! Pretty! Pretty!’ Sarah laughed at the gorgeous white-and gold-feathered bird, and a passing sailor, struck by her beauty, stopped to speak.

  ‘Wheer bist wandering, my lovely?’

  Sarah smiled at him. ‘I’m walking for my health,’ she replied.

  He grinned, showing strong teeth stained brown from the cud of tobacco he had tucked in his cheek. The skin of his pleasant face was deeply suntanned, and his long tarred pigtail snaked over one broad shoulder and down the front of his short open blue jacket.

  ‘You don’t want to walk alone in this street, gal,’ he told her. ‘Some o’ these drunks ’ull be athinkin’ you’m not the good, nice wench I can see you am . . . If you gets my meanin’.’

  Sarah side-stepped him and went on, saying in passing, ‘My thanks for the warning, but I’m well able to steer a safe course.’

  ‘Come inside for chops and rumpsteaks, lady,’ a short, fat white-aproned man invited from the doorway of a cook-shop. ‘Just smell that loverley pie I’m acookin’ in the oven this very minute, will you.’

  The savoury scent of roasting meat and baking pastry and thick rich hot-spiced gravies billowed out in almost tangible clouds from the shadowed interior.

  ‘Only the finest, tenderest and freshest meats here, lady,’ the shopman continued to cajole her. ‘Ate enough on it and it’ll keep that fine body o’ yourn as firm and juicy as a capon.’

  She fended him off with a shake of her head, then stepped close to the wall to give way to a pair of half-drunk marin
es who had their scarlet-sleeved arms wrapped around the waist and shoulders of the young, fresh-faced girl between them. She wore the plumed-turbaned finery and deep-slashed colourful gown of a successful whore and was laughing shrilly, responding to the rough banter of her companions. But Sarah saw that above the laughing mouth the thickly kohled blue eyes were bleak and hopeless.

  Sarah pursed her lips. ‘That’s one trade I’ll not be following,’ she told herself silently. ‘No matter how empty my belly might become.’

  Another shop window caught her attention. Behind its bow-fronted diamond panes, a jumbled profusion of ornaments and jewellery glittered and sparkled. She pressed her nose to the distorting glass and gazed at the strange barbaric trinkets garnered from the four corners of the earth.

  On she went, half drunk with the salt tang of sea, wet sand and stone, fresh-cut timbers, tarred ropes and cables, spiced with the scents of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, peppers, coffee, rum, brandy, tobacco, snuff, and a myriad other smells of a great maritime port. Her pleasure was suddenly marred by a sense of loneliness. A longing for someone dear to her to share all this with.

  ‘I wish that Jethro were with me,’ she thought, and her whole being pulsed with a hungry yearning for him to be there. Walking by her side, smiling with her and sharing her delight in this treasure-house of new experience. Half-angrily she thrust the thoughts from her mind. ‘It’s no use my wishing for what cannot be,’ she told herself, and tried to ignore the tiny voice in her mind, which would not be silenced but kept on repeating, ‘Yes, but how wonderful if it could be so.’

  She had reached the shingled Point, and was standing looking at the rows of boats drawn up on the pebbles when the Negress came from behind her and said, ‘God save me, my honey, but you were hard to find.’

  Sarah swung in a surprise which deepened when she saw the magnificent figure now standing at her side. The Negress was a glossy plum-black in colour and stood a full six feet in height. The curves of her body, accentuated by her flowing green robe shot with shimmers of gold, were huge at breasts, hips and shoulders, and yet so perfectly proportioned that they were beautiful. She wore no hat and her thick woolly curls were tight to her well-shaped head. Apart from one thick silver bangle on her plump wrist, her only jewels were the great gold chains which dangled from her ears and which glinted as she moved.

  ‘Moonlight Annie bids you welcome to Spice Island, my honey.’ The voice was deep and musical and the splendid white teeth flashed in the purple-painted thickness of curved lips as she smiled at Sarah. ‘Don’t you take fright, my honey, I know you’re new come here. It’s Moonlight Annie’s business to know these things.’

  Sarah had recovered from her surprise, but not entirely from a faint sense of awe at being confronted by such an overwhelmingly outlandish creature.

  ‘What do you want with me?’ she asked, a trifle nervously. The Negress chuckled and rolled her long-lashed eyes so that the whites seemed to rotate around the axis of the jet black centres.

  ‘Only to talk, my honey. Only to talk.’ Her deep voice was warm and friendly. ‘Come in here with me and take a glass of wine.’

  Impelled by loneliness and curiosity, Sarah allowed herself to be gently ushered into a small tavern that fronted the shingle, and within moments found herself sitting in a tiny room sipping sweet heady wine with her new acquaintance.

  Shimson Levi had watched Sarah’s departure through the grilled windows of his shop. He saw the beggar accost her and then the small boy being sent on his errand. When the big Negress came out of the beer-ken and spoke to the beggar before hurrying away up the street, Shimson scowled to himself. ‘Oh no, Moonlight,’ he muttered. ‘This vench isn’t for you.’

  From a hidden drawer under the counter he pulled a small silver-mounted pistol and slipped it into the waistband of his breeches.

  ‘Vatch the shop, old ’un,’ he told his father, and went into the street.

  The Negress was far ahead of him, but her height and exotic colouring made her an easy mark to follow. By the time he reached the shingle, however, the two women had already disappeared. He looked about him at the huddled row of ramshackle taverns and houses and, beginning with the nearest, began to prowl through them.

  The warmth of the room and the strength of the wine, coupled with the effects of her hard travelling, combined to relax Sarah and make her drowsily careless. Although expecting that the giant Negress would eventually make her some sort of proposal, for the time being Sarah was content to sit and rest in the Negress’s congenial company. Moonlight Annie’s high spirits and friendly manner were a welcome change from the loneliness of the past weeks. But Sarah retained enough awareness to say after a time,

  ‘Listen, Mistress, I’ll pay the score here. For I’ve heard that sometimes, penniless girls are recruited into bawdy houses and with all respect, I have no wish to be.’

  The Negress threw back her head and laughed uproariously, her massive breasts and shoulders heaving with her enjoyment. When her mirth had subsided she wiped the laughter tears from her plum-black cheeks and answered, ‘Oh my honey, don’t you know? You’ve already bin recruited.’

  Sarah’s head rang with alarm. She made to rise but the vast black hands clamped on her two wrists and pinned them to the table-top.

  Sarah’s wits raced. ‘If you do not release me this instant, then I’ll scream for help,’ she threatened.

  Moonlight Annie’s golden earchains swung and clinked as she slowly shook her head. The smile on her thick purple lips momentarily lost its warmth and became vulpine.

  ‘Oh no, my honey. You won’t scream, because there’s no one to hear you.’

  ‘The landlord will,’ Sarah retorted defiantly.

  The Negress laughed amusedly. ‘The landlord is an old friend, my honey. So stay still, and let’s talk some more.’

  ‘I’m no sixpenny whore!’ Sarah’s temper had risen and it overlaid her fear of the other’s great size.

  The big eyes facing her widened in mockery. ‘I know you’re not, my honey. I wouldn’t be interested in you if you was . . . No, I like you because you looks like one of the gentry, a real lady. My gentlemen friends will pay a high price, and gladly, for a fine-mannered piece like you.’ Her voice softened. ‘And you’ll do well out of it, my honey . . . Moonlight Annie knows how to treat her girls proper. You’ll earn more money than you’ve ever dreamed on. Why, in a few months you’ll be riding in your own carriage, with servants to wait on you hand and foot, and that’s the truth, I swear it on my soul!’

  The Negress grimaced. ‘Listen, my honey. One shout from me and there’ll be two of my bully-boys here in a second. They’ll not be gentle with you, I’ll tell you that. They likes to give the girls a rough handling, them two does.’

  Sarah screamed, and tried to jerk free. Her body was strong and agile and the Negress, for all her bulk, was forced to close with the smaller woman to stop her escaping. She shouted aloud, ‘Morry! Beddo! Get in here!’

  Two burly, rough-looking men burst into the tiny room and in seconds their brutal hands had smothered Sarah’s cries and pinioned her struggling body across the table. The Negress put both hands on her big hips and stared at the girl’s full heaving breasts.

  ‘You’re a rare sweet prize, my honey, no doubt on it.’

  ‘And so are you, Moonlight!’ Before anyone could react to his shouted words, Shimson Levi hurtled through the door to clutch the Negress’s throat with one hand, and with the other ram the barrel of his pistol between the thick lips.

  ‘Let the girl loose, or I’ll blow this nigger sow’s head off,’ he hissed at the men holding Sarah.

  The bully-boys gaped open-mouthed at Moonlight Annie, who nodded as best she could.

  Levi swung the Negress so that her body was half between him and the men, then said urgently to Sarah, ‘Take your bag, girl, and get along to my shop. I’ll be there straight behind you.’

  Sarah, trembling and flushed, her mind reeling from the impact of so many violen
t events, did as she was bid. Shimson Levi wrenched the pistol barrel from Moonlight Annie’s mouth and thrust it brutally under her chin, gouging the soft folds of flesh so that she winced in pain.

  ‘That vos my vench you’d got there, Moonlight, you black sow,’ he told her menacingly. ‘I’ve a mind to blow your brains out.’

  The Negress was badly shaken. ‘I didn’t know that, Shim. I swear on my soul, I didn’t know!’

  ‘Veil, now you do,’ Levi growled. ‘And don’t try any more o’ your tricks vith her, Annie, or I’ll see that you svings for it.’ He glanced at the two bully-boys. ‘That means you two as vell . . . Don’t any of you forget that Shimson Levi knows enough about you lot to get all of you hung from Vapping Valls . . . And if anything should happen to me, then my family up in London vill lay the info in front o’ the beaks . . . Remember it vell.’

  Once satisfied that he had cowed them, Levi released the Negress’s throat and slipped the pistol back into his waistband. ‘And now I’ll bid you good day,’ he told them, and walked casually out from the tavern.

  Back at the pawnshop, Sarah was standing waiting. Already her resilient spirit had thrown off the effects of her unpleasant experience. When Shimson Levi returned she started to thank him, but he silenced her.

  ‘No, my vench, don’t thank me,’ he grinned. ‘It’s only that I’m not a man to let a bunch o’ vharf rats like them come between me and a bit o’ good business. Let’s see the rest o’ that stuff you’re acarrying now, shall ve?’

  Sarah’s face hardened. ‘So that’s your game, is it, Hebrew? I’m to give you the stuff for helping me, am I?’

  He shook his macassared curls and said gently, ‘No, my pretty. You’ve not understood me right. I intend to give you a fair price for it.’ His moist, protruding eyes were kindly and his sincerity so patent that she softened immediately.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, and poured out the silver from the sack.

  Levi whistled softly as he calculated a rough total of its value. ‘That’s a handsome sight, my pretty, and truth to tell I’ve not sufficient here in the shop at present to cover it.’