The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  “No, sir!” It came out half explosion, much too high. But Will was scandalised, amazed. “No, sir,” he said, more levelly. “Mr Holt is experienced above his years, is honest, and he’s full of pluck. I shall learn from him, and take it as a privilege.” He almost laughed, surprised by the jollity of the thought. “With me as second under him, Lieutenant Kaye would never make a captain, I declare. Sam Holt can even navigate, and should be lieutenant, save he has no cash or interest. I will learn from him, uncle.”

  Swift humphed, and set off for some buildings up the slip.

  “Aye,” he said. “And navigation, that’s another thing. Kaye cannot navigate to save his life or yours, he takes it as a joke, the great poltroon. He has a sailing master, who also owns the ship, who also drinks his life away. Where was he yesterday? Where today? Why cannot you navigate, sir? Why?”

  “Because,” said William, but an answer was not needed.

  “Because you’ve wasted time! Because you’ve dozed around on shore like a crying baby or a maid! You will learn navigation, Mr Bentley, and Kaye will have a navigator! There, sir! There!”

  Luckily, it seemed to William, they had reached the shed that Swift was making for. They entered, and a man in leather apron bustled down to them from the far end. Taking his cue from Swift, this man, the master-shipwright it would appear, ignored William and entered into animated conversation about timber, dates, supplies. After half an hour he was desultorily introduced, then had to say a quick goodbye before they hustled out again. Swift gathered up the boat’s crew with a shout, and five minutes later they were shooting upriver on a rising tide. There were questions William would have liked to ask, but the stroke oar still had ears, and his Uncle Daniel was preoccupied. Why should he not be? thought William. He is a Navy captain, yet a ship is being built for him. A fast ship and a handy. And Swift was off to join a squadron in the Straits…

  *

  Daniel Swift had one more surprise in store for him that day, and it was the stiffest of them all. When they reached the Biter’s deck, he barked an order before William had time even to open his mouth, and a seaman scuttled aft as if it was his own commanding officer who had spoken. In truth, Swift’s name and fame were known to all on board, and sailors take no chances with such people. Within seconds Samuel Holt appeared, then behind him the small black boy, whom Swift glanced at with disdain.

  “Bloody pantomime,” he muttered. “Will, my boy, that’s why you’re here, d’you see? Now” — to Samuel — “is Lieutenant Kaye on board? And my man Kershaw? My apologies to Mr Kaye, but I am short of time.”

  Samuel made the slightest bow.

  “You are expected, sir. Bob! Bring hot water from the galley. Hot water! Tea!”

  “No time for tea, no time for nonsense,” snapped Swift. “Mr Bentley, follow here. This is for you.”

  He almost leapt aft, pushing Black Bob roughly to one side. Will and Sam exchanged a look, but had no time for conversation. William got in the cabin behind Swift, and Samuel after him. Kaye, a trifle strained about the lips, was already on his feet.

  “Ah, Captain Swift. Capital to see you. How did you with the business at the yard?”

  “No matter of that, excellent, right well,” he said. “Kaye, we’ll talk tonight, sir, I must fly. Now, Kershaw. Have you explained yourself?”

  In the cabin dimness, William had not seen the man. He came forward hesitantly, not a little odd. He was not old — forty maybe, maybe less — but he had the air of someone for whom age was an irrelevance. He had suffered something, something devastating. He had one hand only, and a blinded eye, but the damage was not physical, thought Will. He was strung up like a racehorse, overbred. Captain Swift touched him gently on the arm, and he somehow flinched.

  “Explained himself? Not much he has! You are too shy, sir,” said Swift. “Mr Bentley, by the kind permission of Lieutenant Kaye here, Mr Kershaw is the man I told you of. He is a good man — indeed with stars and sights and compasses and quadrants he is a genius — and he has sailed with me before. He is to be your tutor, to mug you through your exam to be lieutenant. You are getting old, sir, and you bid fair to disgracing us! Mr Kershaw will whisk you up to scratch in no time.”

  William’s face was blazing, and he blessed the lack of light. But he would not drop his eyes from Kershaw’s face, and all he saw there he distrusted. The eyes were slant, and slippery, the expression cant. The mouth was wet and nervous, the tongue unstill behind the lips. Christ, you bastard man, thought William of his uncle: you have got me on this mad ship for some reason, and this is your spy. You bastard, bastard man.

  ELEVEN

  The hole they made for Charles Yorke was not a grave, nor yet an oubliettey in theory. There were men among his captors who wanted him to die, but there were others, by now, who could not bear the thought. Yorke lay in the weakening autumn sunshine, beside a rocky bank, and heard them arguing. He wondered, off and on, which faction would win the day, but there was part of him that almost did not care. Charles Yorke was weary, almost unto death.

  The sequence of events he’d been a part of was very hazy as he lay there. He remembered leaving London, he remembered stopping with his uncle at the Lodge, and talking through the plan. He remembered that he and Warren — dear, dead Warren — had talked to people Charles had known before, who were worried over something. He remembered meetings with some leaders, and promises of more. He remembered that they’d said that he could live.

  When was it, though? Two nights? Three? A week ago? The men who’d held them, the drunken band, had changed, had grown and dwindled, ever on the move. The only constant thing had been the drinking, and the blows. In barns and inns and scattered villages words had been said, spirits taken, and cruel, savage punishment meted out upon their bleeding forms: see these men, these spies. They are the enemy, they oppose. Learn what we do to those who will defy us.

  There was a big man, a fat, strong, tall man who had been there many times, if not all. At first he had seemed a terror, a man without compassion in his soul. Since Warren’s burning, Yorke thought, he had changed. Twice or three times he had mopped Yorke’s face, dipped bread in gravy and helped him take it down, tried to express something perhaps, then given up on it. Yorke could hear his voice as he lay in the sunshine, deep and hollow, somehow hopeless. We have gone too far in this, he heard him saying. We must not kill this man, it is not possible. It is inhuman, it is cold blood, impossible.

  They were in a clearing, in a scrubby wood. Yorke lay on a stony rise, beside a rocky outcrop, full of caves and fissures. The sun shone through branches, dappling the grass. If he moved his head he could see some of the fellows, although not the big one. Another one he recognised, a ginger man, was staring at the ground between his feet, face grey with days of alcohol and fatigue. A third man was weeping, face clutched in his hands. Weeping for me, thought Yorke, peculiarly. For my fate, or his own dilemma. How extraordinarily strange.

  Then voices rose, and men began to shout. Yorke closed his eyes, afraid of what he might see if anger turned into more blows and kicks for him. He had a longing, enormous and unfathomable, not to be hurt afresh. His body shrank upon itself, he prayed, he prayed they would not set on him.

  “He will find us out!” roared someone. “If we don’t kill him, they will track us down and hang us!”

  “They will track us down and hang us anyway!” yelled another voice. “God’s blood, do you think they will applaud!”

  “Oh God, oh God!” a young man cried; almost a boy in fact. “They said that we must save him, didn’t they? Oh God, why have we done this dreadful thing!”

  “Oh shut your din, you coward, and let us kill him now! At least with only corpses to accuse us we have a better chance.”

  And the big man’s voice chimed in, an ending knell.

  “So will you do it then, Tom Littleton? Will you cut his throat, or what? For if it’s killing for the sake of argument, count me out. It is too late, too late.”

  Wron
g, though, to say Yorke felt hope renewed. He felt nothing substantial, his mind was all aswirl, thoughts came and went, hope, fear, indifference, non-understanding. He could see a bird perched on a branch, but could not make out its colours or its kind, which disappointed him. Shouts came with murmurs, tears with shouts, then slowly they were mixed with movement, and the clunk of rocks. Men were moving, men were shifting stones, the argument had died away.

  This went on, he imagined (or imagined he imagined; he was in a dream) for a time interminable. Sometimes men came to him, their faces swam before his eyes, sometimes he was left. By the time they came to move him the sun was high, judging by the heat. But their numbers had diminished. He saw the big man, Peter, and he tried to speak. But no sound came, no words, and the face was closed and shuttered anyway.

  It was a sort of cavern they had made for him. He was lifted, for he could no longer walk, and transported not ungently across a rocky patch, then down into a cleft. Three men lowered him, and underneath him more took his weight, then eased him through split walls of stone that glittered with some kind of mica. As his new world darkened, Yorke came to some sort of senses, and dark foreboding rose in him. He would have screamed, but he saw a face close by his own, and something in it kept his mouth shut. It was a face that could turn to anger and to evil if he made a yell, and they would have killed him, he thought, upon the spot. Sometime, not long afterwards, he wished they had.

  They put him in a fissure, with horse blankets under him. Without a word, they indicated a small trickle of a spring that wet the rock, beside a stone water jug they’d brought, and a flaxen saddle-bag, full of bread. Two of them, one ginger, the other very young, crouched above him as he lay, as if they might speak or say farewell and have some friendly conversation. But in the end they turned away, and clambered up the narrow rocky chimney he’d been brought down, their boots sending dust and stones cascading. When they were gone, enough light still spilled in for him to see the food and water, and the walls, and for a time he could hear feet and voices. He also heard rocks being manhandled, rocks clonking down, to block the passage was his only guess. The light did dwindle, in fits and starts, but when they stopped he still had enough to see by. Not that there was much to see.

  Charles Yorke, lucid for a while, tried to think what it all meant, and whether this cleft was intended for his tomb. But he thought of Big Peter, and the red-haired man, and the crying youngster, and it gave him hope. He had water and food, and with water by itself one could survive for many days. Then there were the leaders, who had offered him a trade for information. Someone would return when he was softened up enough. If they did not, even, somebody else must surely chance along.

  Men are not animals, he told himself, men are not beasts. They would not leave me here to starve to death, they could not. In any way, that was not their plan.

  *

  That night, after Swift had been rowed upriver and William had tried to “settle Kershaw in,” it looked to him and Samuel as if they might find liberty. Word seemed to be, among the dockyarders and the people, that the work was almost finished, and it would be “out on service” soon, or at least a trip to victualling wharf and then powder and supplies. Indeed, before he’d left, and in despite his hurry, Captain Swift had had some private words with Kaye, that had been apparently galvanic. The man had strode about the quarterdeck, and issued orders, and even done some shouting, in the great tradition. Some men had even jumped, Sam pointed out, laconically.

  “It cannot last, though,” he said. “God knows what your uncle said to him, but Kaye will relapse by nightfall, he must. The fellows too, I haven’t seen them move like this for aeons. They will need a night in bed.”

  Kaye did relapse. After disappearing to his cabin in late afternoon, and sending Black Bob to the cook to get him ham and muffins, he sent word for them to attend on him for a little wine. They found him lounging across a settle, in silk shirt and linen drawers, with a mild sweat on. Languid was the word, but a fresh clothes suit was laid out, and Black Bob was labouring with a silken cravat and a pleating iron.

  “This is beastly, men,” he told them, when they had seats and glasses. “We have worked ourselves like slaves, the men have been like Trojans, and now there’s nothing for it but to wait.”

  Sam Holt and Bentley did not demur. The wine was good, the view across the river soothing. Most likely, they had the feeling, they would be sent ashore.

  “So where is Gunning?” asked Lieutenant Kaye, rhetorically. “Where is the master and his men? He had word yesterday to be here today, he knows the work is almost done. It is too bad, too bad. Your uncle” — was this slyness, gleaming in the blandness of the eye? — “your uncle, Mr Bentley, would be in fits.”

  William, although he had not had chance to tell it to Samuel, had a fair idea of the stimulus for the lieutenant’s keenness. Before he had left, Swift had called him peremptorily to one side, to give him “final information” on the way ahead. He was to dine with Kaye on shore that night, then in the morning would take coach to Plymouth and his ship. He would be away a year or two, and in that time Will Bentley had this task to do: serve Kaye, but serve him to the purpose, as explained. He was a good, rich man who would one day be a lord and have great power — but he was lacking.

  “That navigator,” Swift said. “That tutor whom you looked at all askance. He is for you, undoubtedly — I know your attitude to honest learning, and it does me pain — but he is for Kaye as well. You were a way to get him on this ship without an insult. Lieutenant Kaye will rise to post if only he can fail blotting his copybook, if you take my meaning. You must help him. That is your bounden task.”

  Swift beamed, although Will’s face could have hardly asked for it. “Ah, my boy,” he said, “how glad I am to see you on board a ship again, and grown so keen at last! Ready for service to your King and family after all the wasted years. Rise through your work and education, pass for lieutenant, pick Kershaw’s brain. He still has one, doubt that not, despite what he suffered as three years a Spanish prisoner; do not underestimate him. Rise, help Kaye to rise, and then we’ll talk again about that ship I’m building, and of dynasties, and wealth! Remember what I told you, my sister’s son: wars do not last for ever, and there are fortunes must be made.”

  He had wrung Will’s hand then, and — startlingly — embraced him with vigour. Before he dropped into the borrowed pinnace, he said lightly: “I have kicked Kaye’s arse this afternoon, between us, William. I told him what he has to do to please their lordships, and rule one is a hard and busy ship. You will see a change in him; to you I look to keep it up. Tonight at dinner I will go at him again.”

  It was the coming dinner, possibly, that made Kaye spoil their own plans. The blow fell as they sat and sipped his wine and watched the traffic on the river. His grumbles about Gunning and his “infernal slackness” finished, Kaye had wandered over victualling, the badness of the Deptford rigging crews, the quality of woodwork the yard had “botched up” in the cabin (at his own expense, which was the worst of it by far!) and the general inferiority of everyone and sundry.

  “Indeed,” he said, “while I’m on shore with Captain Swift tonight, there is much labour to be done, and not just on board the Biter here. Labour! What do I say, it’s ‘duty’ is the word! I fear, my friends, a certain slackness has crept into your souls while we’ve been at Deptford, perhaps that rogue Gunning has infected you. Last night you went out with a crew and picked up pensioners and cripples, as Coppiner has told it at the Lamb, and that the first time that you’d served him in a week! Mr Bentley, you are new, but that is no excuse where Coppiner’s concerned, he is an ever-open maw. Your uncle warned me — I have to say this, sir — that you can be too pure, pedantic, prudish with the common man, and said I should have no truck at all with it. There now, it’s out — and you must put yourself together, pull your weight.” The strangest thing about this ambush of his uncle’s was the way it was delivered. Kaye’s bulbous eyes, bright with somet
hing that was not brightness, avoided direct contact with William’s, as if what he said was not really meant for him, and in any case was not of great importance. It was as if he was recounting something he’d heard about another party, who was not there and did not matter anyway. The upshot, nevertheless, was clear. That night they were ashore once more, with an Impress crew, and they were expected to do better. Meanwhile, as a measure of his new-found love of duty, their captain would stuff his head on shore with Daniel Swift, and afterwards God knew what debauchery by way of pudding. This joke — the burden of Holt’s song as they trudged the muddy streets of Wapping in the rain — helped keep their spirits up, but it was a dispiriter from start to finish. They took no able-bodied men, three wrecks worse than the night before’s, and were all quite bruised, some cut about by stones, when they were ambushed in an alleyway.

  Next day the dockyardmen finished without benefit of Kaye’s presence at all, John Gunning returned on board at suppertime looking like a plague victim turned out of a charnel house, and the cutter’s crew, without a by-your-leave, all ran ashore to go upon the bever. Samuel and William, by nine o’clock that night, decided that the runners had the right of it — and hailed a waterman to row them up to London town.

  *

  “So have you ever done the deed?” asked Sam.

  They were at the foot of a long, low hill, by the bridge, and the night was turning chill. William thought of an inn, a glass of toddy, something hot. Sam, after thirty seconds, snorted.

  “So, not. Well, how old are you? Old enough to have men flogged, to die for dear old England? Of course. And a countryman, to boot. Hampshire must be a strange country, though. Where I come from, such matters seem to be in the blood. I was fourteen when I was first seduced. The maid who did the cows on Sweeting’s farm. Maid! She was eight and twenty if a day, and she did me for a wager.”