“Very well. Call her merely a handmaiden—too stupid to know her purpose—and she will thank you for it from the bottom of her heart.”
“She don’t even like that fellow Farnham!”
“Perhaps not,” I agreed, “but she may feel herself in some wise bound to his purpose. How did she phrase things just now? ‘Not all our obligations are matters of choice.’ How soon after her marriage to her cousin was Simon Carruthers born?”
Frank stared. “I have not the slightest notion!”
“You should do well to enquire. Phoebe Carruthers might do much for the father of her dead child, however little she has cause to love him—particularly when Sir Francis’s quarrel is with the man she blames for her son’s death.”
Chapter 20
An Episode with Rockets
28 February 1807,
cont.
~
“GOOD LORD, JANE—IF YOU WOULD HAVE SEAGRAVE the victim of a plot constructed well before the Stella sailed, then you must admit Mrs. Carruthers is out of it!” Frank cried. “Her boy was yet alive when Seagrave left the Channel. She could have no cause to hate poor Tom. Indeed, she vows she loved him as a brother.”
“But after she received the intelligence of young Simon’s death, and learned that Seagrave was accused, moreover, of murder, her sentiments may have undergone a change. Sir Francis had only to appeal to Mrs. Carruthers’s grief and sense of outrage, to secure her as accomplice.”
My brother pursed his lips. “We cannot prove that either of them had anything to do with Seagrave’s debacle, you know. I should look an absolute fool, did I suggest to the Admiralty that Sir Francis Farnham was Chessyre’s murderer.”
“We cannot risk an injury to your career, Frank— even in such a cause,” I said with decision. “The Admiralty shall be left in ignorance until such time as guilt is irrefutable. We must provide our friend Mr. Pethering with evidence of so compelling a nature, that he cannot do otherwise than arrest Sir Francis and Mrs. Carruthers both.”
“But how?”
“By catching them in their last desperate act.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed. “Have not they done enough?”
“Etienne LaForge,” I said urgently to my brother. “He is in the gravest danger. Mrs. Carruthers meant to learn from us what the French canvassed, in their talk at Wool House. The appeal to her son’s death was but a subterfuge: she was sent to test what we know. Sir Francis fears and suspects every sort of betrayal—this is why LaForge was poisoned after giving evidence in Seagrave’s trial. And that is why the sick men have been removed to the prison hulk.”
“Farnham need only exchange the French to France to be secure in their silence,” Frank objected.
“But LaForge requested the right to remain in England as payment for his honesty. Does Farnham know as much?”
Frank looked all his discomfort. “The subject was generally discussed. Mr. Hill certainly knew of LaForge’s plea, and I conveyed it myself to Admiral Bertie, who assured me he would try his influence at the Admiralty. As a prisoner, LaForge and his situation must fall under the authority of the Transport Board….”
“Which is governed by Sir Francis Farnham. Good God, we have contrived between us to deliver the man to the very Devil!”
Frank ran his hand through his hair. “Then we must endeavour to save him, Jane. I believe I know a way.”
WE FOUND THAT IT WAS NEARLY FOUR O’CLOCK, AND ordered dinner to be sent to my mother’s room—left a note of apology and very little of explanation for Mary and Martha—and set out for Wool House thereafter.
“You said, I think, that you are a little acquainted with Captain Smallwood—the officer in command of the prison hulk?” I enquired as we hurried down the High towards Southampton Water. I spoke in part to defray anxiety; I could not help but feel we should have been hours beforehand in our apprehension of danger.
“An excellent fellow! Though quite enslaved to cards,” Frank returned distractedly. “There is no one like Smallwood for playing at faro. I met with him some once or twice in Malta, and later in the West Indies; I have seen Hamlet in his company, too, while ashore in Gibraltar. He once put me in the way of a bang-up prize-agent.”1
“But is Smallwood likely to oblige you in so serious a matter, without the requirement of greater authority— or at the very least, a full explanation?”
“I cannot say,” Frank admitted. “The Navy is rather ticklish about—”
“—niceties and farms,” I supplied. “Not to mention the conduct of prisoners of war. Smallwood should not like to risk the disapprobation of the Admiralty, in the person of Sir Francis Farnham.”
“Nor should anyone, I expect—but Farnham need not come into it. We shall have Hill at our side, and a man of science may convince a fellow of anything. We must try Smallwood’s character, and hope for the best. Mind the loose cobble, Jane!”
What my brother intended was fairly simple: he thought to secure Mr. Hill’s support in urging the release of Etienne LaForge into Frank’s care, so that the Frenchman might be removed from the hulk and placed in a room at Mrs. Davies’s lodging house. The fact that LaForge was a surgeon—rather higher in his berth than a common seaman—should be strenuously represented, as well as the gravity of the man’s condition. Nothing of our murderous suspicions need be disclosed to Captain Smallwood; nothing but charity and goodwill on the part of ourselves should be displayed; and with a minimum of fuss or anxiety, we might all sleep soundly in our beds this evening.
Such was the plan, and it might have gone off to perfection—but for the small difficulty of our discovering, at the moment of arriving at Wool House, that the place was locked and deserted. Even the Marines who usually stood guard before the great oak doors were fled.
“I suppose Mr. Hill can have no reason for remaining in attendance,” said Frank thoughtfully, “the prisoners being taken off to the hulk. I shall have to seek him at his lodgings. He resides in St. Michael’s Square, I believe—no very great distance. You might remain on the Quay, Jane, and await our return.”
“I shall stare at the hulk until my eyes fail me,” I promised him.
• • •
I MADE MY WAY TO THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE PAVING and hastened past the wharves towards Water Gate Quay. The heavy stone expanse thrust out into the sea had no power to cheer me, this darkening day; the distance between Quay’s end and anchored prison hulk was too great to admit of comfort. I stood near a piling and felt the wind tug at my pelisse; sea birds wheeled and cried overhead like unquiet souls. As always, the activity on Southampton Water was very great, despite the late hour and lengthening shadows. Boats of every description plied their oars between mainland and moorings.
The hulk was easy to discern, dismasted and stripped of its sails, against the backdrop of the New Forest. Only this ship, out of all the others at anchor, must exhibit no purposeful movement on its upper deck; here the activity was entirely below, behind the closed portals that had once housed guns, and now sheltered the abandoned wretches tethered in chains. What sin had Etienne LaForge committed, that he must suffer so fearful a purgatory?
The Water was all chop and white-curling wave, the stiffening breeze driving the current hard against the shore. I could feel its shuddering force slap at the stones of the Quay on which I stood. The hulk would be heaving in its depths, the misery heightened for those in delirium. I narrowed my eyes, attempting to pick out even one figure against the dusk—and saw a rocket soar up near the prison ship’s hull. It exploded overhead in a red arc of light.
“Young fools,” muttered a voice at my feet.
I glanced around, but could discover no one.
The harsh clearing of an old man’s throat assailed my ears; I peered down die steps that led from quay to water, and eventually discerned a figure familiar in its outline—a seafaring man, with a neat white queue hanging down his back and a silver whistle around his neck. He was crouched in the stern of a small skiff, smoking his pipe. A quanti
ty of fish was neatly stowed in a basket at his feet, and his line and tackle laid by.
“Mr. Hawkins,” I said.
The Bosun’s Mate pulled his pipe from his lips and nodded. “Miss Austen, ma’am. Nell said as you were very kind to her. I thank you, I do, for your attention to my poor girl.”
A second rocket fired out of the Water and exploded with a great report over our heads: Despite myself, I started.
Jeb Hawkins pointed toward the prison hulk with his pipe stem. “That’s a sorry sight, if 1 may be so bold. It burns my heart to see the Marguerite in such a state -cut down to a stump and disgraced. The times we had in her—aye, and the battles, too!”
“You were posted once in that ship?” I enquired curiously.
“That I were, ma’am—four year and more, ?? d many a sharp brush the Marguerite saw. She took fifteen French prizes in her day, and seven Spanish, make no mistake. She were a barky ship, the Marguerite; but it’s donkey’s years since she were fit for sailing.”
“What cause could the crew, find for signal rockets?” I asked him.
“Why, that’s never the crew, ma’am! That’s a few of Southampton’s best, in Martin Whitsun’s cockle of a boat, chivvying the Frenchies with the sound of the guns! The young lads’re forever plaguing the prisoners with a fight; they think it drives the French half-mad, to have the sound of shells whizzing overhead and be prevented from offering a reply.”
I strained my gaze towards the hulk’s waterline, and discerned the very small craft Hawkins had described, hard in the lee of the ship and almost indistinguishable in the darkness. A sudden misapprehension seized me. What if the rockets were a diversion—a cover for greater malice about to operate on board?
I turned to stare at the Quay’s end, and Winkle Lane; no sign of Frank or Mr. Hill. And at every moment the dusk grew heavier! Surely if murder were done, it would strike under cover of night! I rounded on Mr. Hawkins in his skiff.
“You say that you are familiar with the Marguerite. Would you be so kind as to convey me to her?”
Hawkins eyed me dubiously; between drabs and prison hulks, he no doubt thought, I possessed curious tastes for a lady.
I opened my reticule and retrieved my purse: four shillings, five pence. The sum would have to do. I held out the coins.
“You’re never thinking of clambering aboard yourself,” he protested. “It’s right difficult for a lady, without a chair; but happen the Captain could find one—”2
“We shall deal with that difficulty when we come to it.” I clinked the money enticingly.
He shrugged, rose into a half-crouch, and extended-his palm. I dropped the shilling pieces into it.
“Have a care, ma’am, to step into the middle of the boat I’m not so young as I was, but strong enough for all that to make the Marguerite in under ten minutes.”
Ten minutes! It seemed ten hours, rather, as the Bosun’s Mate heaved and grunted at his oars. I sat in the bow, facing the hulk, and he amidships, with his back turned to his object; I was privileged, therefore, to experience every agony of apprehension while the distant outline of the Marguerite loomed and grew no nearer. Eventually, however, as the darkness of late winter descended and the shouts of men flew across the Water, the hulk ceased to recede” I thought it came a litde nearer—a litde nearer—and a litde nearer; the Bosun’s Mate showed sweat on his brow, and at last we approached so swiftly that the dark and glistening hull of the ship filled all our sight, a mountainous wall, with the waves slapping against its anchor-chains in petulant bursts of foam. A few lanterns had been lit against the turning of the day; their warm yellow light pooled in places on the upper deck, but shed no glow in the dark under-regions, the successive rings of hell, that comprised the lower decks. From die closed gun ports came the piteous sounds of suffering men—groans, cries of delirium, the harsh cut of laughter.
Another skiff, larger than the Mate’s and filled with at least eight young bucks of seafaring aspect, rowed around the Marguerite’s bow and roared with delight at die sight of us. One—who must be their leader—held aloft a bottle in salute.
“Old Hawkins, ahoy there! Have you come to join the merriment? And brought a fishwife, too! Are you after selling your girl, Mate?”
“She’s too dear for your purse, Martin Whitsun,” Hawkins retorted, “and well you know it”
“Aye, none but a fool would pay more than tuppence.” Whitsun busied himself with a bulky object clutched against his chest; another rocket, perhaps. He must have a store of them at his feet The two skiffs were drifting closer together; in a minute I should be discovered as anyone but Nell Rivers. I shrank behind the Mate’s sturdy back.
“Oi, Nell,” shouted a buck through the gloom, “have ye tired of good English cock, then? Do you think to dance a jig for the Frenchies’ pleasure? There’s many a lad would die for the sight of your arse, love!” He grasped his trousers in a lewd gesture and commenced to lurch drunkenly in the skiff, so that it rocked and bobbled perilously in the waves.
“Mangy curs!” Jeb Hawkins swung upwards so suddenly that the pranksters were taken off guard. “I’ll teach you to show respect to a lady!” The blade of his oar slapped hard against the drunken man’s chest, and sent him careening overboard with a terrible cry. In falling, the man clutched at one of his mates—and the scuffle and tumble that then ensued caused Martin Whitsun to drop his rocket.
It had just been lit.
There was a horrified cry, “a welter of splashes and dark shapes leaping over the skiffs side, and I felt myself propelled backwards in Jeb Hawkins’s boat by the violent pull of the man’s remaining oar. And then, with a roar as calamitous as Judgement Day, the entire complement of Whitsun’s rockets flared and shot skywards.
Boom! Boom! The light was searing, unlike anything I had ever witnessed, so that I covered my eyes with my hands and cried aloud in terror. Sparks and flaming pieces of Whitsun’s ruined skiff rained down all about us. I was struck a glancing blow by one splinter, and crouched as low as possible in Hawkins’s bow. Everywhere were heard the cries of Fire! Fire!-—and when I considered with surprise how singular it should be for the drunken bucks struggling about us to sound so vigorous an alarm, I glanced up at the Marguerite.
A burning spark, or several perhaps, had landed on the hulk’s deck, where a coil of cable or a bundled hammock had caught ablaze. Perhaps one of the lanthorns had been knocked over by a flying splinter or struck by an errant rocket. Whatever the cause, flames were now licking merrily along the deck, lurid and frightening in the darkness. Where there had been no activity before, was suddenly a handful of flitting shapes—theMarguerite’s skeleton crew, desperately working with sand and sacking to douse the greedy fire.
“Mr. Hawkins!” I cried. “What have we done?”
“That’s not our doing, ma’am,” he shouted back. “That’s God’s judgement on the poor Marguerite!”
“But the prisoners—the men in chains below! What will become of them?”
The Bosun’s Mate ignored me. He was bent over the side of his small craft, fishing intently for a floating oar. Heads bobbed everywhere in the expanse of water between ourselves and the Marguerite; Martin Whitsun’s gang, I supposed, abruptly sobered by the shock of February water. One man appeared intent upon making for our boat. He thrust an arm awkwardly above the waves and cried out, then was submerged in swell. I hoped fervently that the rogues were more adept at the art of swimming than I should be myself, and clutched firmly at the gunwale of the skiff.
Hawkins rose up from the side with a triumphant cry, and stowed his prize in the oarlock.
“Mr. Hawkins!” I shouted fiercely as the man began to pull away from the burning prison ship, “you must go back!”
“I can do nothing from die water, ma’am. It’s for the crew to save her now. The fire’s not so great—I’ve seen worse in my time—but in the event they carry powder, we would not wish to be near. If the ship blows—”
I clutched at die stem of one oar a
nd pulled heavily against my determined saviour. “There is a man held in that hulk who must not be left to die! I beg of you, Mr. Hawkins—consider your daughter! This man might be the saving of her!
Hawkins shipped his oars and stared at me. In the light thrown by the burning ship, his aged features were grotesque, like a gargoyle carved in a cathedral wall. The cries from the hulk grew more strident; I heard the splash of a body as it plummeted into the sea.
“Is that why you had me row you out to the boat? To save a Frenchie?”
“Nell’s paramour, one Chessyre, was murdered a few days ago.”
“I know it”
“Chessyre’s murderer would exult in this Frenchman’s death. He would think himself secure. He might then consider the life of a poor woman like Nell, who had the misfortune to be in Chessyre’s confidence. But if the Frenchman lives—and may tell his tale …”
“Then Nell shall be free from fear?”
It was a gross exaggeration of the facts, but I was desperate. I nodded my head.
Jeb Hawkins turned the small craft with a few dips of the oars, and heaved his way back towards the burning ing ship. All around us were the remnants of Martin Whitsun’s skiff, blasted sky-high and floating now in the water; and to my horror, I glimpsed an oblong shape with streaming hair that rose and fell with every swell of the current: the corpse of a drowned man. Hawkins ignored it, dipping his oars with care and maneuvering amidst the flotsam, until he came hard by the Marguerite’s bow.
“They have left out the ladders,” he muttered. “That’s just as well; I’m not the sea rat I once was. I shall go up through the sally port, and work my way down.3
God knows how many men are held below. What is this Frenchie’s name?”
“LaForge,” I said tersely. “He looks the gentleman.”
Jeb Hawkins threw me a grimace. “Have you any notion of oars?”
“None.”
“And I have no painter—only an anchor line I’m loath to lose. I’ll find a cable yon and toss it down. You must secure the skiff to the ladder.”
Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House Page 23