Billy Bacon and the Soldier Slaves
BOOK ONE
Andrew Wareham
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Billy Bacon and the Soldier Slaves
Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Wareham
All Rights Reserved
Contents:
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Historical Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
By the Same Author
Introduction
Billy Bacon and the Soldier Slaves: Billy Bacon the butcher’s apprentice, faces the choice of being abused or of killing his abuser. Charged with murder, he flees and joins the Army. In 1786, he finds safety in a battalion bound for India where he survives disease and conflict and learns to be a good soldier. However, he doesn’t feel safe once back in England. With the chance of another foreign posting, Billy rises through the ranks and joins a previously unknown regiment of slave soldiers in the Sugar Islands.
Best read in series order
Historical Note
An estimated ten thousand slaves were bought and became soldiers in the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the survivors became free men. It was always difficult to find officers and very few commissions were sold. A number - how many is unknown for lack of records - of regular sergeants were given regimental commissions and rose to senior rank.
Author’s Note: I have written and punctuated ‘Billy Bacon’ in a style reflecting English usage in novels of the period, when typically, sentences were much longer than they are in modern English. Editor’s Note: Andrew’s book was written, produced and edited in the UK where some of the spellings, punctuation and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
Billy Bacon and the Soldier Slaves
Chapter One
Billy ran the grindstone down the edge of the boning knife, one of his own tools as apprentice to a butcher. The blade was almost as long as his forearm, narrow, slightly curved and with a heavy spine; it would suit many purposes besides filleting joints of beef.
He glanced across at the other apprentice, twenty years old and only a year short of serving his time and inured to the lesser irritations of the occupation. Samuel could not understand why Billy was so upset with the master’s brother.
“It ain’t like it does you no ‘arm, is it, Billy? The old sod only wants you to do ‘im sometimes, and ‘e always gives a pound of sausages or a lump of beefsteak after, don’t ‘e? And a silver shilling as well, if you’re good to 'im!”
Billy thought Samuel was simple.
“I told ‘im no, and I ain’t ‘aving it, not no way! My bum’s me own, thank’ee kindly! There’s guttersnipes enough in town willing to do it for tuppence, if that’s what ‘e needs, but if ‘e comes after me again, ‘e’s in trouble!”
He changed to the fine oilstone, bringing the edge up to the last degree of sharpness, as he had been taught from his first days in the trade.
“There! I could bloody shave with that!”
Samuel agreed, it had a finer edge than he could manage; he had never quite mastered the art of sharpening a blade and Billy looked after his knives and cleavers every week, free of charge, as a kindness to his workmate. Samuel was thankful and really did not want to see Billy dangling from the town gallows.
“Maybe you could talk to the master, Billy – ‘e might not know what Mister Arthur’s doing in ‘is spare time, like.”
“Balls! The Old Man knows alright – and ‘e don’t care while Mister Arthur keeps ‘is money in the shop. If Mister Arthur walks out in a huff, like, then ‘e’s going to ‘ave to sell up to pay ‘im off. Their old dad left the business to ‘em ‘alf and ‘alf when ‘e died. Mister Arthur goes out buying beeves and sheep and hogs, the Old Man does the slaughterhouse and butchering side, and they makes their money – but they needs to stick together, so ‘e ain’t going to do nothing, except maybe put me before the Bench as an ‘unruly ‘prentice’. You knows what would ‘appen then!”
Samuel did. An apprentice who broke his indentures was subject to criminal law – and the magistrates listened to master rather than man. If Billy was lucky, he would be birched – which was painful and humiliating, a beating on the bare butt administered with a bundle of twigs. If the Bench decided he was too old for the birch, then he would receive a public whipping, as many as fifty lashes on the back and administered by the cat – and that would lay him in bed for a week and would be followed by discharge by his master, and then the constable marching him to the town boundary and ordering him down the road and out of their sight, penniless and unemployable, his scars stigmatising him.
Wise apprentices did not provoke their masters to any extreme, except perhaps in the biggest towns where they were sufficient in number to be frightening. The London apprentices were wisely feared by the government, being the most volatile of mobs, willing to stone the constables and overset the coaches of the rich, but outside of the capital, things were very different and the apprentice walked very small.
“But if you takes to ‘im with a knife, you is going to get you neck stretched, Billy!”
“No I ain’t! You knows ‘e only tries it on a Sunday when the shop’s shut and the Old Man’s off with ‘is missus and the kids to ‘er dad’s place. Going to be bloody hours before the Old Man comes back. Time ‘e’s back, I’m long off on the road, and with a quid or two out of Mister Arthur’s pocket to keep going with.”
Samuel was permitted, as a senior apprentice, to visit his own parents of a Sunday, would know and see nothing.
“I still reckons you’s daft, Billy.”
“So I may be, Samuel. But I ain’t bloody stupid, and I ain’t putting up with it!”
Sunday came and the Master took his family and both apprentices to Morning Service at the parish church, as was proper, and then led them back to the premises in the centre of the small market town of Bishop’s Waltham, on the edge of the chalk in the south of Hampshire. He gave the boys their weekly pocket money of sixpence each, an act of generosity on his part, for it was not provided in the indentures, was made from the goodness of his heart. He then put his family up in the pony and trap that made deliveries during the week and set off down the Wickham road to the farm where his wife’s people had lived for generations. Samuel walked off to greet his own parents, a mile or so in the opposite direction towards the village of Upham. Bill
y remained to mind the premises until they returned.
Ten minutes later Mister Arthur appeared from his small cottage, a hundred yards distant, where he lived on his own. He let himself through the back door, locking it behind him.
“Good morning, Billy-me-boy! All on your own and lonely-like?”
“On me own, and ‘appy to stay that way!”
Mister Arthur produced a shilling and laid it down on the table in the back room, out of sight of the shop windows.
“Come on now, Billy. You’re a big boy now!”
“No.”
“Well, if you don’t want a shilling, you can do it for free! Come ‘ere!”
Mister Arthur – big and powerfully built – grabbed at the young apprentice, laughed as he ducked away.
“Playing chase, Billy? It ain’t going to do you no good.”
“I got me knife!”
“Ooh! What a fierce little boy! Come ‘ere!”
Mister Arthur dived forward, impaled himself on the boning knife, the razor edge slipping between his ribs and showing out of his back. He crumpled onto the floor, dead instantly.
Billy stood silently for a few seconds, close to vomiting. He shuddered and turned away – he spent his days handling dead meat. This was just another pig, he told himself.
He slipped his hand into the inside waistcoat pocket where Mister Arthur kept his drawstring purse, opened it to see silver coins and a single golden guinea. He picked up the shilling as well, then ran up to the attic he shared with Samuel. He had a heavy leather coat, given by the master to wear when making deliveries on rainy days, and a pair of outdoor shoes. He changed his footwear, put on the coat and picked up the ready-packed small bag that contained all the rest of his possessions – a second shirt and two pairs of stockings and his better pair of breeches. He was downstairs in two minutes and out of the back door and trotting down the road. It was the best time of day to run, he thought, most of the well-off in town sitting down after church or chapel, the lesser mortals standing in the several pubs of the town centre.
He walked all afternoon, keeping to the lanes rather than the high roads, and making his way north and east, hoping eventually to get to London. What he would do there, he had no idea, but it was a big place, he had heard, and he could get lost there. He knew the countryside for five miles or so, and had some idea of where the nearer towns were and intended to lay up in woodland overnight and then make for Petersfield where there would be a bakery. A loaf of bread, and a slab of cheese if he could buy it, and then out of the small town and on the road to Guildford, which they said was on the way to London. He had seen the stagecoach twice weekly, ‘The Flyer’, with the names of its towns painted on the sides, so he knew the route to follow.
The night was warm and dry and he slept curled up under bushes in a coppice just outside Petersfield, his feet sore from unaccustomed long walking; he was hungry as well. He found a stream, fast-flowing and clean, to drink from and waited in the early summer sunshine until he saw activity in the fields nearby and knew that the working day had started. He walked briskly into the little town, not much larger than Bishop’s Waltham but busier for being on the road from Portsmouth north to London. There was a baker’s shop, open for custom and with a few loaves in the window. He bought a small loaf and spotted hot meat pies next door and laid out another tuppence. He found the little square where a dozen stalls were set out on market day, empty now, but with a single bench, and sat down to eat, close to the coaching inn and its board with the fares set out for passengers to inspect. He saw that fourpence would take him as far as Guildford as an outside passenger, a slow three hours ride, but quicker and easier than his feet.
He thought about the coach and decided that it made sense. Once he reached Guildford he might be able to find a carrier’s cart going to London, and that would be cheaper still, but would be a bit of a risk because he would have to ask about among the locals to discover a man who would take him. Carriers did not set off from the inns, did not have regular picking-up points like the coaches. He finished his pie and ate a chunk of fresh bread and decided that he would not have breakfasted any better in the shop – there was good meat there, but not for the bellies of apprentices.
He stood and stretched and wandered casually across to the inn to see how long he would have to wait for a coach; he watched as a horseman stopped outside and ran in with a sheet of paper, came out again with a man from the inn and attached the paper to the notice board, next to the coach times. He had seen that horse before, he thought, in the yard behind the magistrates’ courthouse in Bishop’s Waltham; the man’s face was vaguely familiar too. Billy changed direction and made his way along to an ironmongers, peered in the window for a couple of minutes while the fellow mounted and trotted off. He had a nasty suspicion about that piece of paper, ambled very casually – or so he hoped – across to read it. An apprentice to a butcher needed his letters for the shop work and he read fairly easily.
‘Wanted for Murder’, in large black print, somewhat smudged, struck off the press and taken out still damp, but horribly legible.
‘A Foundling Apprentice Boy, Billy, sometimes named ‘Billy Bacon’, of BISHOP’S WALTHAM in the county of Southamptonshire and a notable rogue and villain of the town.’
Billy was indignant at that, he had never been in trouble. He had had so little free time that he had not had the opportunity to run with the boys in the town, had never made mischief. He supposed that if he was a murderer then he must be a villain, but it seemed unfair, nevertheless. He read some more.
‘A youth of about fifteen years and of a surly cast of face, about five feet and six inches tall and sturdily made. He has brown hair and eyes and swarthy skin.’
‘Surly’ – what did an apprentice have to laugh about? What did they expect? He must remember to smile at people when he spoke to them – that would fool them!
‘WANTED for the wanton MURDER BY STABBING of the brother of his master, who found him in villainy, and for the THEFT of five pounds in his purse.’
That was a lie; there had been fifty-five shillings in that purse, and a couple of pennies – less than three pounds, but one shilling was enough to hang a thief. Not that the theft mattered, of course – they could not hang a man, or boy, twice.
‘A REWARD of TEN POUNDS STERLING to that man who takes him up or brings information of his whereabouts to a constable.’
Ten pounds was a lot – too much for safety. Few wage-earners saw more than two pounds a month, and even to the well-off, ten pounds was not to be sniffed at. The coach was too great a risk. Billy walked out of the little town and turned due west, back to the morning sun. A straight line to London made no sense now and going west took him almost the way he had come, which he thought would make pursuit less likely, for not being an obviously sensible way to go. He had heard that there was a town called Bristol, a big place on the coast where ships went out to America and places like that; he might be able to get aboard, working with the cook perhaps, for knowing his way around the butchery side of things.
He had a stroke of luck inside his first hour, coming upon a carrier’s cart just outside of the town on the road that led to Alton. It was coming on to rain and the carrier saw the chance to make a shilling, rather than the sixpence he might have hoped for, and invited Billy to climb aboard, if he could pay.
Billy showed that he had silver in his purse as he pulled out the shilling and the wagoner passed him onto another in the trade who took him as far as the Great West Road and Hungerford in the space of two days and for another three shillings. At Hungerford he risked the Accommodation Coach when it left at six in the morning and reached Bristol late in the afternoon, and there slept in the stable of the coaching inn, for having chatted to the driver as he sat on the roof of the coach and shown himself friendly and willing to give a hand with the horses in the evening.
The morning saw him dockside in Bristol, and wondering just what to do next.
There were ships. A lot of
them. Big ones and small and in-between size as well. Some of them had three masts; others had two and the smallest had only one, he saw. He thought that maybe the ships with the most masts travelled the furthest.
Unfortunately, none of the ships, large or small, had use for another crewman, especially one who was too old to be a ship’s boy, but was not yet fully man size. Mostly he was simply told to go away when he enquired at the quayside, but a few took pity on him and explained the problem, one of them in some detail.
“It’s the peace that’s the trouble, me lad! The war is over and the Americans have made a new country and the navy don’t need so many ships no more. There’s seamen by the thousand set ashore and two or three of them – skilled, able-bodied hands – looking for every place there is at sea. If so be you ‘ad been asking this time last year, then you’d likely ‘ave found a place, no questions asked, even as a landsman. But now, you ain’t needed. Not much work of any sort in Bristol, not nowadays. I suppose you’re running, boy, and got to get gone from ‘ere, and quick like. None of my business, whatever, but you ain’t goin’ to run off to sea, boy!”
“That’s a bit of a bugger, mister! Don’t reckon I’m running very far with no more than a quid in me pocket!”
“The Army will take you, lad. Go on up to the barracks up on the top of ‘ill, Cliftonville way. Ask the bloke on the gate if they’s got a battalion goin’ foreign, what can’t get men. Home service will have all they needs, but a battalion off to the faraway places might well be short of bodies. Don’t see you got any choice besides.”
Billy had heard of the Army and knew it was a last resort for drunks and no-hopers, no place for a young man who had once hoped to become a respectable shopkeeper in a good trade. He would not take that advice.
Billy Bacon and the Soldier Slaves (Colonial Warrior Series, Book 1) Page 1