by Sara Fraser
His flow of words delivered in a respectful tone left the slow-witted militiaman gaping. Those prisoners who understood English began to laugh jeeringly, and explain to their friends what had been said.
Jethro felt angry at the guard for allowing himself to be drawn into such a position, but was careful to keep all expression from his voice.
‘Private Butler, go and fill this for me.’ He handed his round wooden water-canteen to the man. Nathan Caldicott bowed to Jethro, realizing why the corporal had intervened.
‘Why good morning, Corporal. What a lovely day it is. It makes a man’s heart just fill to the brim with joy and contentment, does it not?’
Jethro was conscious of the interested stares of the other convicts and realized that this was to be something of a test of him in their eyes. He grinned back at the New Englander.
‘It is indeed a pleasant morning, Yankee Doodle,’ he said lightly. ‘And I’m most happy to see how much you appreciate our fine English weather. Now in return for our favouring you with such a pleasant day, I want you to favour me.’
Caldicott bared his toothless gums in a smile. ‘But how can I do that, Corporal? Let me hasten to assure you that if I could favour you then I would . . . But I’m hardly in a position to do so.’
‘On the contrary, my friend,’ Jethro told him solemnly. ‘You’re in the ideal position to favour me. All you have to do is to keep on using that pick. Your comrades will follow your example and within a very short space of time the ditch will be completed and England will be made safe from invasion.’
The American chuckled and asked. ‘Why should I wish to make England safe from invasion, Corporal Limey?’
Before replying, Jethro let his eyes roam over the men standing around the New Englander. One in particular held his gaze. A tall, blond-haired Frenchman with flamboyant mustachios and dark brown eyes suddenly struck a chord in his memory . . . ‘I wonder if that is the one Sarah told me of,’ Jethro thought, then said aloud,
‘Because, Yankee Doodle, if England were invaded then the war would stretch on for many years and you would remain a prisoner, perhaps for the rest of your life. So it is to your advantage to keep this country inviolate. Then we English will win the war sooner and you will all be set free to return home.’
‘Well, that’s a mighty convincing argument, Corporal,’ Caldicott grinned, and lifted his pick in readiness to strike. ‘I only wish that someone had explained the situation so concisely to me before . . . Then I would never have ceased from labour.’
The steel pick spike bit deep into the hard ground and the men recommenced their work.
Henri had caught the speculation in the corporal’s eyes when he had stared at him, and he felt a sudden rush of hope. Perhaps the man had been approached by Sarah. The Frenchman’s thoughts were bitter as they ranged back over the preceding weeks. The parcel had reached him safely and he had split the contents between his group of would-be escapers. Gaston de Chambray, as the elected leader of the party, had taken the charts and compass. The pistols, balls, and powder had been secreted in a hollow beam. The gold, all in half-sovereigns, had been divided equally and hidden in the securest place the men could find, their own bodies. The coins were put in slender hollow tubes fashioned from bone or wood and smoothed and polished. Each man then inserted his tube into his rectal passage. The discomfort of such a hiding place was considered a small price to pay in return for the absolute security of the money.
It had seemed to Henri that nothing could now prevent their escape. The gallery sentries had been delicately approached and had proved amenable when given gold, with the promise of more to come. All that the plotters had wanted was a stormy moonless night to shield the noise and movement of the breakout. Then, without any prior warning, an extra muster of the upper battery had been called two days before and from the ranks of les officiers and messieurs ou bourgeois men had been indiscriminately picked out, bundled immediately into lighters and taken ashore. Henri and Nathan had been the only members of the escape group chosen, and had not been able to exchange even a word with the others. Under the watchful eyes of militiamen, prisoners from every one of the hulks had been formed up into a long column and marched to Fort Cumberland. Henri’s one hope now was that his comrades still on the Crown could get word to Sarah as to what had happened, so that she could re-establish the chain of communications between them and he. But up to this time no message had reached Sarah telling of Henri’s transfer.
Satisfied that the prisoners were now working well, Jethro went a little distance along the ditch, then turned to study the blond Frenchman. He had spent long hours of quiet talk with Sarah and during those hours she had told him all that had befallen her, and why she had come to Portsmouth. It was her description of Henri Chapteur that had struck the chord in Jethro’s memory; that and the fleeting glimpse he had had of the man in Bishops Castle. Now unable to cast it from his mind he went back and beckoned the man.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
Henri was shovelling dirt into a wheelbarrow, one of a long line of barrows that formed a continuous procession along the floor of the ditch. The Frenchman gazed steadily at Jethro and saluted smartly.
‘It is Chanteur, Corporal. Lieutenant Henri Chanteur of His Imperial Majesty’s Third Chasseurs à Cheval.’
Jethro kept his face impassive, showing no reaction to the knowledge that this was Sarah’s one-time lover before him. Instead, he turned and asked the American the same question.
‘It’s Captain Nathan Caldicott, of the brig Susanna.’
The skeletal body stiffened as he executed a grotesque parody of a military salute. ‘That’s a merchant mariner’s salute, Corporal,’ he grinned. ‘Not so Goddam precise as you soldiers do it maybe, but adequate none the less.’
Jethro smiled at the man, feeling a liking for him. ‘You’ll not get me to rise to your baiting, Captain Caldicott,’ he replied and moved on past them.
‘I’ll have to get word to Sarah,’ he told himself. ‘She has a right to know that her French friend is here, and not on the hulks . . . Goddam me, if I don’t feel jealous,’ he suddenly thought. ‘Like a bloody silly schoolboy.’
At noon a bugle was blown from the parapet of the fort and all the prisoners downed tools. They were formed into a column, three abreast, then after being counted, were marched back into the fort and halted on the parade ground. Orders were shouted and the front and rear ranks shuffled until a gap of a full five yards or more separated the lines of men.
The senior sergeant of the guards shouted, ‘Parade SIT!’ and the prisoners squatted or sat where they had stood.
A party of convicts came hurrying from the kitchens, some carrying between them great steaming iron cauldrons, and some with sacks of bread over their shoulders. All the prisoners produced battered metal pannikins from their waist-bags, and each man held his pannikin high above his head. The cauldron parties passed along the ranks of seated and squatting men, and as they passed, two convicts using long-handled ladles splashed a portion of the watery gruel into every pannikin. The sack carriers tossed cobs of bread on to the gravel before each prisoner. The men stayed as they were with the pannikins held high until the entire parade had been served. Only then, and not before, the senior sergeant bellowed,
‘Parade EAT!’
Under the muzzles of aimed muskets and cannons turned from the embrasures to cover them, the prisoners took their dinner. Jethro and his squad of guards patrolled up and down the centre rank. He watched with pity the stinking, emaciated, stubble-jawed prisoners wolfing the foul-smelling grey gruel and sour bread, and he knew that he could no longer continue in this type of duty. He walked side by side with his friend Turpin Wright.
‘It’s no good Turpin,’ Jethro told him. ‘I can no longer remain here . . . I intend to volunteer to the next Quotal.’
The one-time convict regarded the corporal with shrewd eyes. ‘That doon’t surprise me, cully,’ he answered. ‘I bin wondering how long you’d be
able to stick this bloody work.’
‘And you?’ Jethro asked. ‘Will you remain here?’
Turpin had his arms crossed over each other at his waist to carry his musket in the support position. Now he moved the gun smartly to the shoulder as an elegantly-uniformed officer came strolling along the ranks towards them. They both halted and turned to face the officer. Jethro saluted and turned his head as the man languidly passed so that his eyes were always fixed on him. It was Lieutenant the Hon. John Coventry. He ignored the corporal and Chosen Man, not bothering to return their salute, and kept his gaze fixed on some distant point as if the sight and smell of prisoners and soldiers alike, offended his sensibilities. Once the adjutant had passed the two friends walked on.
‘Which regiment will you volunteer to?’ Turpin wanted to know.
‘Any . . . So long as it’s in the Peninsula,’ Jethro told him. ‘For I’ve a strong wish to see some real fighting men. I’m sick and tired of fireside heroes and blusterers like that fop who’s just passed us.’
‘Well, I suppose I might as well come wi’ you.’ Wright showed his brown stubs of teeth in a cheeky grin. ‘These poxy barrack-women are not for a lover o’ my tender years. I’ve a fancy for an armful o’ black-eyed señoritas.’
Jethro chuckled at his friend’s words.
‘Caporal Stanton.’ The voice sounded from the centre rank. ‘Caporal Stanton . . . May I request something?’
Jethro saw that it was Henri Chanteur. ‘Yes, Lieutenant Chanteur,’ he replied. ‘You may certainly make your request . . . Whether I can grant it remains to be seen.’
‘It is a small thing, Caporal. I merely wish permission to go up on to the walls and pick a few sprigs of garlic in order to flavour this bread, so that I cannot taste how bad it is.’
Jethro smiled at the man. It was a common enough request he had made, for on the earth-topped fillings of the bastions and walls of the fort, the wild garlic planted by previous French prisoners flourished thickly.
‘Come, Chanteur, I will go with you myself,’ he told the Frenchman.
Together they mounted the inclined gunwalk and on to the bastion platform. Then, while Jethro leant against one of the long-snouted thirty-two-pounder guns, the Frenchman scrambled up on to the broad parapet itself and foraged about for the young tender shoots of garlic. Jethro watched the man for a little time, then impelled by. an overpowering curiosity, he asked,
‘Have you been a prisoner long, Lieutenant Chanteur?’
The Frenchman’s white even teeth glistened. ‘Over three years now, Caporal. I was wounded and taken at Talavera.’
‘I expect you have come to hate England during those years,’ Jethro stated.
Chanteur shook his handsome head vigorously. ‘Pas du tout! . . . Not at all. On the contrary, England holds for me some of my happiest and most pleasing memories. You see, I was a parolee in the county of Shropshire until only a few weeks since. It was a very happy time for me . . .’ he smiled reminiscently and touched his fingers to his lips. ‘Yes, very happy,’ he breathed.
Jethro felt jealousy again twist his innards. Unable to stop himself, he was driven to go on, ‘They say that the girls of Shropshire are very accommodating to the French . . . Did you find them so?’
He waited the Frenchman’s answer, tense and keyed up, not knowing how he would react if the man spoke boastingly of his love affair with Sarah. To his surprise the Frenchman’s eyes were sad, as he shrugged silently and expressively. Jealousy was now a hot torment in Jethro’s brain and he could not bear to leave the subject, but must prod and poke at it, as a child worries an open sore.
‘Did you find the Shropshire women to be easy to conquer?’ he persisted.
Henri Chanteur, when he finally answered, appeared to be talking to himself, as he toyed with the sprigs of wild garlic.
‘Easy to conquer? Of that I can say nothing . . . Perhaps there are some parolees who would regard an Englishwoman as an object to be conquered. I cannot feel this way. I know only that for me there is one Englishwoman for whom I have a deep and abiding love. If there can be a conqueror in the emotion of love, then it was she who conquered me . . . My only regret is that she would not take me for husband.’ He shrugged again and looked directly at Jethro. ‘I wonder if you know what it is, Caporal Stanton, to be in love with a woman who wants you only for a friend.’ He uttered the last words in tones of such sadness that Jethro’s jealousy died within him.
‘Goddam me! But the Frenchie really loved Sarah,’ he thought, with something akin to pity in his heart. ‘And he still feels her loss badly, by the look of him.’
Jethro experienced a sudden liking for the other man, and admiration for his gentlemanly honesty, knowing how many men would have hit back at a woman who had rejected them by telling lies to blacken her character.
‘Come,’ he said aloud. ‘We must return or the dinner period will be gone and you’ll not have time to eat your bread and garlic.’
‘Bon!’ Chanteur pushed the plants into his waist-bag and the pair returned to the parade ground.
The guards went a few at a time to their barrackrooms to eat their beef and bread and before Jethro had finished his, the prisoners had gone back to work. While he made his way along the ditch to rejoin his section, Jethro turned over in his mind what Sarah had told him of her attempts to ensure Henri’s escape.
‘What would I do if she were to ask me to help the Frenchie get away?’ he asked himself. ‘I don’t really know,’ was the answer he arrived at. ‘After all the man, pleasant and likeable fellow though he may be, is still an enemy soldier. If he returned to France he would undoubtedly go back to the Eagles, and then might well end up in Spain, fighting against our troops there. If I helped him escape, it is not beyond the bounds of probability that he could even kill me in battle . . . And yet it grieves me to know that someone whom Sarah holds dear should be rotting alive here.’
Later that same afternoon something occurred that would help when the time came to resolve his quandary. Jethro was standing opposite a party of prisoners who were sweating and straining to manhandle slabs of roughly dressed rock into position as a lining for the inner face of the ditch. Henri Chanteur was one of the party. A cart piled high with stone slabs and dragged by a pair of lather-streaked oxen came lurching and creaking along the top of the ditch. Directly above the spot where Jethro stood talking to the sentinel, the cartwheels skidded perilously close to the edge. The driver cursed loudly and stabbed viciously into the beasts’ rumps with his goad. They jerked clumsily away from the edge and the cart yawed violently and swung. The sudden change in direction caused the pile of slabs to shift. Henri Chanteur glanced up and saw the danger that Jethro Stanton and the sentinel were in.
‘Jump, Stanton! Jump!’ the Frenchman shouted urgently, as the slabs on the cart above the corporal’s head started to slide. Jethro heard the shout and reacted instinctively, pulling the sentry with him as he moved.
There came a loud scraping of rough stone and the top of the load toppled down into the ditch, crashing on to the spot where Jethro had been standing only a split-second before. The dust and chips of the rocks flew like shards of shrapnel and a small jagged piece tore the flesh below Henri’s left eye causing blood to trickle.
Jethro went to the man. ‘Are you hurt, Lieutenant Chanteur?’
‘Non, merci,’ the Frenchman answered quietly, ‘C’ est rien . . . It’s nothing!’
Jethro looked into the brown eyes of the other for long moments, then said quietly, ‘That is a life I owe you. I hope that someday I will be able to repay that debt.’
Later, when they had finished work and were sitting on the floor of their casemate prison, searching for the lice that abounded on their bodies and in the rags that covered them, Nathan Caldicott asked Henri,
‘Tell me Henry, what in all the name of Heaven, made you warn them goddam Limeys?’
The Frenchman shrugged. ‘The corporal is a man, is he not? And a good one, I think.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
All that day the stump of Major Harry King’s missing arm had been tormenting him. The pain had started as a dull ache and steadily worsened as the hours passed until it became a constant pulsing throb of agony. To deaden that agony, the major had begun to drink neat rum early in the afternoon, and by the time the convicts of the Fortune and Ceres had completed their day’s labour at Fort Cumberland and were being ferried back to the hulks on the broad-beamed, flat-bottomed lighters, the major was well drunk. He staggered up the ladder and on to the quarter-deck when the noise and bustle of the ship’s garrison told him that the convicts were coming back aboard the Fortune. The major steadied himself by holding on to the taffrail with his single hand, and stared, bleary-eyed at the scene below him.
The hulk’s garrison were all militiamen now, except for half a dozen invalided sailors from the Channel Fleet. The marines had been drafted to the American war, and to Harry King’s bitter chagrin he had been left behind as hulk commander. The major did not have a very high regard for the militia, or any other type of soldier, come to that. The only men he considered to be worth their salt were his own beloved Corps of Royal Marines. Some sailors, he admitted, were brave enough dogs in battle. But in his opinion they lacked the loyalty and steadfast discipline of the marines. Therefore, when the militia sergeant came to report that there was some illness amongst the prisoners which the sergeant considered warranted the attentions of a surgeon, the major sneered at the man.
‘Is that what you think, sergeant?’ He belched loudly and swayed. ‘Then pray tell me how can a Johnny Raw from some militia regiment of clod-hopping yokels know when a surgeon is required?’
‘If you please, sir,’ Sergeant Blenkinsop was not the brightest of men, but he had a retentive memory, and as a parish constable some years before he had encountered this type of sickness. ‘If you please, sir. There be four men took badly from Winchester gaol larst Monday.’