The King's Bounty

by Sara Fraser

  ‘So?’ The major glared at the beefy-faced sergeant. The man plodded on doggedly. ‘I rackon they’se got the gaol-fever on ’um, sir. And that being the case, then a surgeon’s needed badly, or we’em all likely to catch it.’

  ‘Jail-fever! God rot me, Sergeant! You sound like an old woman, frightened of shadows. It’s probably something they ate that’s upset them. Where are they?’

  ‘I’se had ’um carried down to the upper battery, sir.’

  Major King drew himself uncertainly erect. ‘I’ll come myself and look at them.’

  In the fetid stench-filled gloom of the upper battery, the four sick men were lying side by side on the bare boards. King went to stand over them, swaying and hicupping.

  The orange-yellow rags, the shaven heads and the filth-grimed skins gave the men a remarkable similarity of appearance so that they could have been facsimiles of each other.

  King pointed at the nearest. ‘What ails you, man?’ he growled.

  The skull-like head shifted on the greasy planking and the deep-sunk eyes were badly bloodshot, while his body heat was a tangible aura. ‘If it please, yer honour . . . I feel as if me ’ead’s breaking and I’m burnin’ up, and me guts is tearing at me summat chronic,’ he croaked through cracked dry lips.

  The man next to him groaned loudly and his legs jerked. He broke wind audibly and a stain of dark liquid oozed from under his hips. The vileness of the released smell overlaid even the thick foulness of the odours already present.

  ‘God rot me! The dirty bugger’s mucked himself!’ the major cursed. ‘It’s the flux, these buggers ha’ got, Sar’nt. Nothing more and nothing less. Give them a purge, man. That’ll clear the badness from their systems. They’ve been eating rats again without a doubt, and naturally they’ve got a dose o’ the flux . . . Serve ’um right!’

  He used his toe to prod the nearest man’s verminous body.

  ‘You’ll be given a purge, my man . . . And tomorrow you’ll go to your work, or I’ll know the reason why.’ He bent to the convict and tore the rags from his bony chest. ‘D’you hear me, man . . . I’ll know the reason why.’ Then, swaying wildly, he left the battery.

  The militia sergeant also bent over the sick man, to look carefully at the flesh of stomach and chest. There was a rash of small red pustules covering both. He straightened and hurried after King.

  ‘Please, sir.’

  King swung to face him, a dull flush darkening neck and face and demanded angrily, ‘What is it now, man?’

  The sergeant hesitated, fearful of the major’s choleric temper, then swallowed hard and said,

  ‘The flux you say these men ha’ got, sir . . . Only one on ’um has it . . . The others ha’ got the gaol fever. I’se sin it afore, sir. Back home in Worcester . . . I’se sin it at the lock-up there.’

  The major’s mouth gaped wide as he roared at the man. ‘I’ve told you what the trouble is with those men . . . Now if you pester me any further I’ll ha’ you triced up and flogged . . . Understand?’

  The sergeant blenched and saluted.

  Harry King stared hard at the N.C.O., then waved him away. The stump of his arm still throbbed dreadfully and he returned to his cabin to drink more rum. It was an hour or two later when, lying fully clothed in his box hammock, he felt the first itch of insects on his groin.

  He grumbled and scratched the spot through the thick white kersey of his breeches. ‘Goddam these bloody convicts,’ he muttered aloud. ‘I’ve picked up a damn flea from one of the filthy buggers.’

  He drifted into a drunken doze and some hours later woke to the sounds of the sentries clumping round and round the gallery catwalk, and the echoing shouts of ‘All’s well . . . All’s well . . . All’s well . . .’

  His groin itched intolerably in half a score of places.

  ‘Goddammit, I’ve picked up an army of fleas,’ he groaned miserably, fumbling with the laced codpiece of his breeches. Opening it he slipped his hand inside and rucked at his hairy groin with blunt, thick fingers. One stained fingernail trapped and crushed one of the tiny pale lice that had itched him. It was one of several that had found their way on to his uniform while he had been examining the sick men in the upper battery. The louse died instantly but the Rickettsia germs of typhus that it and its companions carried had already passed through the scratched skin and were beginning to multiply in Harry King’s blood . . .

  *

  Jethro had decided not to burden Sarah with the knowledge that the man she had wished to help was still a prisoner. His present unease, as he now walked up and down the top of the ditch where the prisoners were labouring, was caused by his sense of being obligated to Henri Chanteur. The Frenchman had not himself referred to his saving of Jethro from the rock fall, and paradoxically it was this very failure to remind Jethro of it that heightened the young corporal’s consciousness of the debt he owed Chanteur. But how to repay that debt was the problem.

  ‘Corporal Stanton! Corporal Stanton!’ one of the sentries farther along the ditch shouted and beckoned.

  When Jethro reached him, the man pointed. ‘Look there, corporal. There’s another on ’um just fell down.’

  A convict was lying on the ground, jerking spasmodically and groaning.

  ‘Goddam it!’ Jethro cursed softly and slid down the banked sandy incline to cross to the man. Nathan Caldicott was there before him and he looked up at Jethro.

  ‘It’s another o’ them from the Fortune hulk, Corporal,’ he said solemnly. ‘I reckon that it’s the fever they got . . . Why there’s been near a score o’ the poor critters just up and fell down real sick in the last day or so.’

  The young corporal knelt by the fallen convict, whose frightened eyes gazed beseechingly at him.

  ‘Try and tell me where the pain is?’ Jethro ordered gently. The man’s body abruptly stiffened and the cords of tendons stood out from his thin unshaven throat. The spasm passed as abruptly as it had begun and the man gasped . . .

  ‘I’m boilin’ hot, bleedin’ boilin’ and me head’s burstin’, Corporal . . . It warn’t too bad when I was roused this mornin’, but now it’s like some bleeder is astickin’ knives all over me . . . Aggghhh, God save me, it’s bleedin’ killin’ me!’ He clenched his fists, driving his long gnarled black fingernails deep into his leathery palms. Blood spurted from his lips where his teeth had bitten, as he writhed in agony once more.

  Nathan Caldicott went on to his knees facing Jethro across the stricken man. He used both hands to lift the jacket away from the twisting body. ‘Lookee here, Corporal.’

  Jethro looked and saw under the grey mat of chest hair a rash of angry crimson points.

  ‘Goddam you, you little bastard!’ the American swore and brushed away a minute pale speck from the back of one hand. ‘Goddam lice!’ he spat out. ‘These men from the Fortune and Ceres both, are eaten alive with the blamed pests.’

  Shaking his head, Jethro rose to his feet. ‘It’s the gaol fever right enough,’ he murmured, and prayed silently . . . ‘God above, help us all.’

  *

  Major Harry King tossed and turned in his high-sided box hammock, the sweat of his body glimmering in the light of the oil lamp slung above him, and raved deliriously.

  ‘Stand ready, blast you! Sergeant Ryder, cover that gunport the Frogs will be jumpin’ through the damned thing in a minute! Avast there, you lubberly swabs . . . Hold hard, I say! Hold hard! Curse your thick wooden heads . . . Uggghhhh? Uggghhhh! Aggghhh!’

  His bare feet beat a bruising furious tattoo on the wooden hammock panels and his body arched upwards, as if to throw off the pain that was assaulting him so mercilessly, devouring even the hallucinated images of his mindless delirium.

  Matthew Purpost, surgeon of the Third Worcestershire Militia, rested his hand on the burning skin of the sick man’s forehead and pulled a long face.

  ‘There’s nothing to be done, I’m afraid.’ He indicated the fiery rash on abdomen and chest. ‘It’s the gaol fever.’

  �
�I feared as much when Blenkinsop reported to me,’ Captain Joseph Ward murmured. He was standing by the surgeon’s side, his head bent under the low deckhead.

  ‘God blast the man!’ the surgeon suddenly exploded. ‘Why was I not informed of this before? Why did Blenkinsop only come to you today, Joseph?’

  The captain placed his hand on his companion’s shoulder.

  ‘Because Major King, here, considered the sickness afflicting some of the prisoners to be a mild dose of the flux, or just self-induced illness to avoid working on the fort. Why, he threatened to have Blenkinsop flogged if he persisted in saying that it was not the flux, but the fever.’

  The surgeon tossed his head in anger. ‘Then dying though he may be, I can feel no pity for this block-headed fool,’ he said grimly. ‘For the fever will by now have been spread to God knows how many others, and all this incense,’ he pointed to a small portable brazier whose burning coals had been smothered in herbs to give off pungent-smelling fumes, ‘all that damned stinking smoke that we shall be producing on these hulks and in the casemate cells will not save a single one of the poor devils who have been infected.’ His eyes were tragic as he stared at Joseph Ward. ‘There are times, Joseph, when I could curse myself and my entire profession for our helplessness, and sheer bloody ignorance when we face this type of fever.’

  ‘But what can anyone expect you to do, either to prevent these outbreaks or to cure them?’ the captain said sympathetically. ‘Men can do nothing against the invisible humours and miasmas in the atmosphere.’

  Purpost clucked his tongue against his teeth. ‘Tst! Tst! Humours? Miasmas? . . . Cannot you see that these are only the excuses we medical men use to cover up our lack of knowledge,’ he said forcefully. ‘And because of that lack of knowledge, thousands die miserably, as this one here will die . . .’ Muttering to himself in disgust, Purpost took a scalpel from his box of instruments and lifted King’s arm from the hammock. ‘Sentry?’ he bellowed.

  ‘Sir.’ A grizzled old militiaman stamped into the cabin.

  ‘Come here and hold this bowl close up under the Major’s arm for me, will you.’ The surgeon touched with his toe a crock bowl on the floor beside his instrument box. Then he spoke to Joseph Ward. ‘Here I go once more, Captain, undoubtedly doing the wrong thing by bleeding the poor devil.’ He paused and pulled a wry grimace. ‘But then, that’s the only sovereign remedy I was ever taught, and all the most learned doctors swear to its efficacy, do they not?’

  Without listening for any reply, he took a firm grip of the major’s twitching forearm and cut a neat incision in one of the ropy veins. The black blood ran over the white skin and fell splashing into the shiny bowl beneath . . .

  *

  Through the days and nights that followed, Matthew Purpost and his mates bled and purged, and blistered and cupped. They dosed with laudanum and mercury and syrup of angelica. Applied plasters of mustard, linseed meal and dried violets. Pungent fumes poured from a score of braziers on the ’tween decks of the Fortune and Ceres and such quantities of smoke billowed from the gunports that at times the hulks appeared to be ablaze from stem to stern. But still the epidemic took its toll. Convicts and their guards alike fell ill with headaches and high fevers. Their chests and stomachs developed the fiery red rashes and their bodies were racked with agonies. Delirium set in and they raved and cursed imagined foes, cowered from nightmarish hallucinations, and spoke tenderly to non-existent lovers. The delirium was superseded by a mental and physical torpor and then the tormented flesh chilled, and kindly death released them from their purgatories. Purpost worked as if he had the strength of ten men. Driving himself relentlessly on until his exhausted body failed him, he would slump down in a corner and sleep for brief hours, which on awaking he sorely grudged.

  Major Caldwell and Captain Ward did everything they could to aid Purpost in his fight against the disease. They turned the Fortune and the Ceres into isolation hospitals and forbade any direct contact between them and the fort. Supplies would be placed on the spit of land that curled out into Langstone Harbour and left there for the boats to fetch. If any man, woman or child in the fort showed symptoms of illness, then they were immediately carried out on to the spit to await the hulks’ boats. Armed sentries patrolled the beaches constantly by day and ensured that this cordon sanitaire was not breached. By night all traffic from hulks to shore was stopped. The only action left now was for men to pray.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It wanted an hour to tattoo on a bleak day at the end of March when the small son of one of the veterans came to the casemate barrackroom to tell Jethro that he was wanted at the Land Gate guardroom. The day’s duties had only finished a few minutes previously and he had just changed into his white canvas fatigue rig to begin the interminable pipe-claying and black-balling of his accoutrements. The casemate was full of men busily engaged on the same task, some sitting on their beds, others at the tables that ran down the centre of the room. The low hum of conversation and laughter, the cheerful crackling of the driftwood fire in the grate, the profligate glow of many candles, for today had been the weekly ration issue, gave to the white-washed casemate a cosily domestic air.

  Jethro rose from his corner bed which, now he was a corporal was his alone, and, putting on his forage cap, followed the boy. Turpin Wright looked up at him as he passed. He nudged his bedmate, a lanky lugubrious-faced Scotsman, and started to sing softly.

  ‘On the banks o’ the roses me love and I sat down . . .

  And I pulled out me German flute to play me love a tune . . .’

  He paused and grinned. ‘I could guess what sort o’ tune you’ll be playing on your flute in a few minutes, Corporal Stanton.’ And smacked his lips salaciously.

  ‘Just get on with your cleaning, Chosen Man Wright, or you’ll not have to guess what the inside of the Black Hole looks like,’ Jethro threatened jokingly. His heavy boots crunched the gravel outside the casemate and he paused momentarily to clear his head of the barrack fug. His heart was light when he thought that the message might be from Sarah.

  ‘Goddam me! I’ve not felt this way about a woman since Abi.’ His face clouded as the last name flashed through his mind. Lovely Abi . . . Abigail Bartleet . . . a woman of the gentry that he had loved and lost in Redditch town, it seemed centuries ago.

  Dismissing the painful memory, he went on to the Land Gate. The veterans were providing the guard and their sergeant, a young one-armed ex-hussar asked, ‘Be you Corporal Stanton?’

  Jethro nodded. ‘Yes Sar’nt.’

  ‘Theer’s a young ’ooman wants to see yer. Her’s over theer in that coach.’

  The coach was standing some twenty-five yards from the gate, a single-horsed, canvas-topped carriage, whose ancient driver was slumped dozing in his seat. Jethro thanked the veteran and ran across the intervening distance. Sarah was waiting for him inside its dark interior. They kissed long and hard. Then he gently held her away so that he might enjoy the sight of her glossy chestnut hair and green eyes set off to perfection by the white carriage costume and feathered poke bonnet she wore.

  Ever since the day they had met each other again, they had seen each other at every opportunity. At the week-ends when Jethro received a few precious hours of liberty they had spent those hours together in a quiet country inn near Hilsea, and when she could, Sarah had slipped away from The Golden Venture to come here to Fort Cumberland on the chance of snatching a few minutes with Jethro.

  ‘You should not come here at this time,’ he told her with concern. ‘There is fever on the hulks out there.’

  She smiled lovingly at him. ‘Is there fever in the fort?’ she asked.

  ‘No, but it’s still . . .’ He began to speak and she stopped his words with a kiss.

  ‘Then the risk is well worth the taking,’ she whispered, as the kiss ended.

  ‘Is there any news yet?’ he asked expectantly.

  Her face saddened. ‘It’s bad, Jethro. I’ve been to see your colonel. He listened most
sympathetically to what I had to say . . .’

  ‘He would,’ Jethro interjected forcefully. Lieutenant-Colonel the Viscount Deerhurst was always prepared to listen sympathetically to a beautiful woman.

  Sarah continued. ‘But he said there was nothing to be done, and your discharge could not be purchased. You are in the militia and must stay in it until the Army of the Reserve is no longer needed and can be disbanded.’

  His face was grim. He looked down at their clasped hands and went on, ‘It’s not the army I hate, Sarah. It’s this damn business of guarding convicts and prisoners-of-war. I’ve no wish to be a turnkey. I detest having to drive men to labour and to stand over them as if they were only dumb beasts. That is not my idea of soldiering. I have been thinking of transferring to the regulars.’

  ‘Can you do so?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, there is something called a Quota Act which requires the militia to furnish replacements for the regular battalions.’

  Sarah’s hands freed themselves and stroked his hair nervously. ‘Tell me truthfully, Jethro, do you intend to transfer?’

  ‘It is in my mind to do so,’ he told her seriously.

  ‘But why do you wish to go to the wars?’ she demanded uncomprehendingly. ‘You could be killed! Or maimed like one of those poor fellows there.’ She jerked her shapely chin in the direction of the veteran gate sentinels.

  He smiled at her and touched his lips briefly to hers before replying. ‘It’s difficult to explain, Sarah. I’m not a man who believes that the King and his Ministers should be fought for or defended. We live in a cruel and corrupt country, where justice is something that only the rich and powerful can buy. To be truthful, I could find more reasons to fight against the throne of England and its adherents, than to fight for it. But still, I am an Englishman born and this, with all its dreadful faults, is still my nation. I’ve no wish to see a foreign Emperor ruling over us. The foreign king we have is bad enough,’ he said vehemently. Then he drew a long breath and said reflectively, ‘I think though that my main reason is that here in the militia we are only pretending to be soldiers. The opinion I hold of most of the officers and men in this battalion is a low one. Yet in the ranks of those veterans, there are officers and men for whom I hold a sincere respect. They laugh at we fellows when we strut about rattling our muskets and sabres in sham battles on our field days; and I do not resent their mocking us. Because they know what real soldiering is. Battle, death and suffering have been intimate companions to them. They have experienced events that I feel I must experience also.’