by Jan Needle
“Well, Lieutenant,” he said, easily. “She is good and peaceful and a proper ship now, ain’t she? What news of anything? Where is your friend? Sam Holt was not so hard to find, and I expected he’d have joined us ’ere now. Down below, you’ll tell me, sleeping like a baby?”
“Below, sir? Why, no he’s not,” said Will, astonished. He’d had no further news of Holt since meeting Kaye in his prison cell, and had tended not to hope too hard. This was a pleasant shock.
“Nay, I’ll warrant not!” crowed Kaye, delighted at his subterfuge. “I’ll warrant he’ll be with his whores in Blackfriars! When he learned he wan’t to hang, he sprang to life, to horse, and to attention! Now that, Lieutenant, is what I meant by it — a man piratical!”
Bentley, beneath his belt, was hollowed out. Sam was found, and that was wonderful; found out and signed up for the brig. But had he chose to go to Dr Marigold’s e’er making way to find and talk to Will? Was friendship then so cheap? And with that thought came thoughts of Deborah, raw and horrible. It was in the courtyard at Marigold’s gay house that he’d abandoned her, crying out and fighting for her life. Since then he’d feared her dead, in truth, and borne a weight of sadness and of guilt, a pit of loss and ignorance he skirted round but could not penetrate. For all enquiries, by word of mouth and letter, had yielded him no information at all. Nothing, indeed, had had to be enough.
Sam Holt, at that same moment, was indeed at Marigold’s, in the arms of Thin Annette, his favourite harlot. Pale and gaunt, he had hurried there after Kaye had tracked him down and filled his heart with hope and expectation that he might find his friend. He had been treated like some welcome ghost by the ostlers, who had seen him always as a lucky common man who’d rose, and not a normal Navy officer, high and mighty.
“Shit and muffins!” Rich had exclaimed, when Sam had got down from his hack and stretched his bones. “You look like walking dead, sir! I heard they’d stretched you! Are you still alive?”
He reached across and pinched an arm with vigour, then kept his hand there, clasped around the bone.
“Christ,” he added, less jovially. “You’re bloody scrawny, though. Feel that, Tim.”
“Shot through the neck and through the back, and God knows what else,” Sam told them, laughing. “It was Frenchies on a Shoreham beach, and a Frenchie girl that saved my worthless skin, her and an English one or two. Richard, shut your gab. You know who I’m looking for.”
Rich thought he did, as did Mrs Putnam also, the fat and comfy keeper of the corridor of whores, but they were wrong. Within five minutes he was face to face with their guess, Thin Annette, then in her arms. He drank her presence through her lips, and in another minute she was naked and undressing him, and tutting and cooing and emitting little frightened cries.
“Oh, Sam, oh, Sam, what have they done to you? Oh, Sam, you’re thin. Those scars! Your neck! Your chest! Your — ” Brief pause. “Oh, Sam, there’s nothing wrong with that! Oh, Sam.”
When they had done, they lay there like two lovers, not a sailor and a whore, and talked about the weary months since they had done this thing before. Sam made light of his travails and travels, and said that he did not believe his neck was ever due for stretching because he, luckily, had friends. Annette said her life, sadly, had been wearyingly the same since she had kissed him last, but she had heard he’d been a traitor and been hanged and swung on Tyburn tree.
“I went and looked one day,” she said. “A day-time jolly down to Execution Dock. Some one of the company pointed out the longest black thing dangling on a gibbet and swore it was you, but I knew it wa’ not. Not tall enough.” She ran a finger down his white, protruding ribs. “You look more like him now though, although not encased in pitch,” she said. “I’m glad you ain’t, Sam. I’ve missed your face. And prick.”
It responded to this on the instant, and they made love again. And it was love, too, a sort of love, thought Sam, for his soul had ached with loneliness and want of her. There was danger, true, in being there because he owed the painted whoremaster guineas by the score, but Kaye had given him the chance, now, to pay off his debts sometime. Will’s part in this — his insistence that Sam must be found — the captain had, however, not revealed.
“I suppose,” Sam asked her wistfully, “I suppose none of my friends do come here now? I mean one in particular, I suppose…”
She laughed at him, with frank amusement at his reticence.
“You mean Deb’s beau!” she said. “Flax-haired William! No, Sam, I ain’t seen him at all, but Deb I have, a lot, or rather — ”
“Deb?” he interrupted. “What, she’s alive still? Good God, Annette, Will was certain she was dead! When he last saw her… well, he told me, in the jail… Well…”
“Aye, well indeed. She was stripped naked like a strumpet and was like to have been shagged to death or torn in pieces, except that Marigold saved her and Marge washed the blood off and set her on her way, with kisses and a little bit of money. They killed a man, you know. I bet sweet Willie did not tell you that, did he? He could not have come back here, and that’s the reason; they would have tore him off for hanging. ’Fore God, Deb only dared to come herself when she was in a state of terminals. It was the only place she knew.”
“And is she here now then?” he said, eagerly. “Christ, Will was mad in love with her, and knowing Will he loves her still! If I could find her, and then find him…well, oh fine indeed!”
Annette, lean and hungry as a hunting dog, entwined her limbs with his to get the warmth, and broke the next news gently.
“No, she’s not here no longer, not at all. Indeed, if she was anywhere, I’d have thought ’twas with that man you called your uncle to me once, the rich old man in Surrey that looked after her one time. She tried to get there I know, but had to come back here again, and I guess she might have tried another sortie. But if she had got there, would not you have seen her, though? You ha’ been living there, I guess?”
Sam demurred, but clearly had no plan to tell her why. Indeed, Sir Arthur had saved him from detention, possibly the gallows even, and Mrs Houghton and her maidens had nursed him back with great solicitude to something like good health. As so many times before, he had returned the kindnesses by leaving Langham Lodge, and that abruptly. As before, he had not been certain what had spurred him; except for money owed, for obligations, for the fact he felt an ever-growing burden to the poor old man, a burden he could not hope to pay for or unload.
“I quit my uncle’s some good time ago,” he said. “Even if she had got there, I must by then have left. Ah, poor Deborah. Poor Will.”
She touched his arm.
“Don’t say die, though. If she ain’t here she may be there then, mayn’t she? She was a bold survivor, Deb. After Marge Putnam put her out, she got down to Shoreham, so she said, in seeking you and William. Then she got across to Portsmouth.”
“We were in Shoreham, briefly… Well, on that beach, but… but Portsmouth? Why? And how, for that matter?”
Annette laughed.
“The how is easy, for she walked and borrowed lifts on drays and carts to save her pence. The why was to do with smugglers, and Customs men; I don’t rightly remember, for she told it kind of bent. But a fat man tried to buy her for a harlot, although he called it by a different name, that Deb found vile. It made it sound like poetry, she said, a nymph of some sort, a — ”
“Spithead Nymph,” said Sam. “Aye, that’s what they call the Navy whores down thereabouts. And she took umbrage, did she? Good for her.”
She got up on one elbow, her thin, sharp face severe.
“Ho, Mister Gentleman,” she said, pointedly. “Spit and Head don’t sound to me like poetry, but what’s so terrible to be a whore? I serve you well enough, don’t I? I took you for my friend.”
“You’re not a whore,” smiled Sam, and shook her gently by her straight black hair. “You are Annette.”
“Ho ain’t I, then! What am I? Is whoring a game beneath your dignity
so suddenly? Like Deb?”
Sam hunched up quickly to her level and planted a firm kiss on her lips. He wrapped his arms round her and pressed her to his chest. And he was laughing — his saving grace.
“All right, then you’re a whore,” he said, through lips and teeth entangled. “You are a harlot, and I’m lucky in your arms. I forgot, Annette, you have to earn your board and keep; no one gives you a private yacht to swan it in, like me and all the other Navy officers. But to me you ain’t a harlot in the old disgraceful way, and I guess that must be what Deborah meant. What, some fat old lecher tried to gi’ her tuppence for a fuck, and she got on her high horse? Well good for her, I say again — and wouldn’t you do just the same? You would!”
Annette was mollified. She had to smile, but ruefully.
“It didn’t do her any good though, did it? The high horse didn’t get her to your uncle’s house, although she tried for it, I’m sure. And after that she had to come back here and hope she did not end up swinging from a rope for the murder of the man she did with William.” She sighed. “I don’t know exactly what scared her off his house, she didn’t say, but she was in a bad way when she got to here, though. She was near to bloody starving, and she was ashake with terror case someone give her up to justice. I told her she looked worse than any whore I’d ever seen north of the river, and a Spithead Nymph might be a stepping up.” The smile died. “She only cried though,” she said, soberly. “She was a poorly little thing that night.”
“I can’t see Deb crying,” Holt said. “She’d don’t seem that kind of maid at all.”
“She ain’t.”
There was a pause.
“She’d been a whore before,” Annette said. “Of sorts. Funny how it took her this time, but it did. Love, I suppose. A bastardly thing to happen to a maid.” She looked at Samuel, levelly. “Starving she may’ve been when she got back here, but apart from mud and hunger she was as pretty as a painted picture. Marigold would have put her on immediate, but she’d have none of it, she was bound for better things than whoring, Deborah said. I was nearly jealous for a while. Poor little bitch. I hope her body is not rotting in a gutter. Poor hopeful little bitch.”
Sam was thinking. He must find Will — he had guessed by now, from Slack Dickie’s archness, where he would be — and tell him. They would need to look. He would want to search for her. Good God, thought Sam, she might be at my Uncle A’s. Good God.
Her eyes were keen on him, enquiring. Sam noticed.
“I must away, Annette,” he said. He crushed her leanness to him, and he kissed her, hard. “But I must shag you first.”
“An’ you have the silver, master, shag and welcome,” she replied, with irony. “I am a whore.”
“Silver have I none, fair maid,” he quoted. “But I have a long slate still, poor Marigold will vouch for that! Old Marge don’t seem to care in any wise; she did not ask for money off a poor young sailor-man.”
“And nor will I,” Annette laughed. “Your prodder’s longer than your slate, and that is good enough for me. Lay on and welcome — for you, sir, it is free.”
“I love you for it, maid,” said Sam. “I love you.”
*
Sam did find Will, later that night, but it was breakfast time next morning before they could put their plan for seeking Deb to Captain Kaye, and neither had had much sleep to bolster them against a disappointment. Sam had come alongside the Biter in a public wherry after three, and had been astonished to find a watchman still awake. He had crept below to indicated quarters, and had woken Will. In some quiet way they had both been overjoyed to see the other, and were rendered emotional by the fact that they could serve together, and at a proper task.
Sam filled his friend in briefly on his past months in the wilderness, but did not mention his news of Miss Tomelty (as Annette had insisted was Deb’s proper name) as yet. Will told of his time in prison, of talking to his father about their family’s connections with the smuggling that had so nearly brought them to their deaths, and his decision to go along with Kaye when chance was offered.
“We think he is a murderer, a traitor, and a fool, Sam,” he said, in the fuggy silent ’tween decks. “But I cannot tell what’s right or wrong no more. I killed that mountebank damn nearly in cold blood at Marigold’s, as Annette has told it to you, and you and me were jailed for what they said was treachery. Add to that, my father convinced me I’m a fool because I could not understand the business of that wicked trade, which he says is free and necessary. So are we rogues or heroes, do you know? I’m on the rocks.”
In the smoky flare of the cheap-fat candle, Holt was nodding. He had had his own long struggle for understanding, and had drawn a line beneath it, or go mad. It was a line in sand, but the firmest he was like to get.
“Sir A,” he said. “My uncle whom I will admit to treating like a father now, and who lost Charles Yorke in that most vicious way — well, as I understand it, he has interests in the Orient which means he smuggles also, in some sort of way, but to his total satisfaction that everything he earns is for the country’s good. I asked what had happened to the smugglers who sheltered us, the smugglers who tried to kill us, the French maid who saved both our lives. He said the Kentish and East Sussex men had had two hanged, but only humble batmen, and the Hampshire team, Bartram and Mary, Kate, Bob, Joe and all the boys, were saved and are hard at it still. The tie-up with the eastern lot, the murderers and villains, did not happen, and all the money-men behind the Trade… they’re free and flourishing. You know one of them is your father don’t you, Will? But that you damn near got hanged yourself, despite it? It was as close as any toucher.”
Will nodded. His father’s explanations, face-to-face in dismal prison rooms, and in letters later glossed passionately by his older sister Lal on her visits, had led him to an understanding that black and white were not shades he could rely on in questions of family and love. Lal had told him that poverty and ruin were skulking in the background always, and their father fought both tooth and claw to keep them at bay. And then she’d laughed, sunny and self-mocking, in a sprig-muslin dress that made him long for home and carefree times.
“We seek gentility,” she’d said. “The new world is on the up and up, Will, and we must rise above the ruck or slide into the mire; it is the coming way. Father might have to take a crooked path, but he’s respectable. Next year, perhaps, he’ll stand for Parliament, except he has a son in jail, and Mama has had to sell the family silver to pay the lawyer men! La, sir, that’s a jest!” Her face stilled, serious. “La, sir, it is not,” she added, “not entirely. But never mind, Will, never mind. We shall be strong and strengthen still.”
To Sam he replied: “I do know that. I heard that you had got an easy ride by the same token, because Sir A had ears in government. And also, like me no doubt, through expenditure of some poor someone’s cash. But you have not made mention of the French maid, Céline. Sally, as you know her. You thought she was a spy behind it all and had betrayed us. She was not, and did not. So did she hang?”
“Know not,” said Sam. “I honestly know not. Sir A still wants vengeance for his protégé, for Charles Yorke and his friend Warren, done to death by most dishonest men. If French Sally is dead, I should feel like him, is all. I, too, should want revenge, but on so-called honest ones.” He paused. “I am sorry for my doubting, Will,” he said. “I am sorry for it.”
He told Will then of Thin Annette at Dr Marigold’s, and what she’d said of “Deb Tomelty.” He hoped that it would lighten things, and it did. Will, in actual fact, almost exploded with excitement and with joy, and any hope he’d had of convincing himself she was a mere sad memory melted instantly. Hope burst out, and it would not be suppressed.
“We must go,” he said, and said it over, every two minutes, until Sam could douse him down. “We must talk to Kaye and tell him we must go. Sam. Instanter. Now. What o’clock is it? It must be getting on for dawn. She might be at your uncle’s still! Oh heavens, Sam, oh heavens! W
e must go this moment, instanter!”
“We wake him, do we?” Sam said, ironically. “We barge into his cabin and pluck Black Bob out of his tender arms? Well met, we cry! Your new ship’s officers, ready for duty! Except we’re going on a jaunt, to hunt some quim! Well, Will… shut up, shut eye, and wait till morning. Good God, he has had no sight of me on board yet, and him the captain! Also, he saved our lives!”
They did shut eye and both — as seamen can — seized the chance of sleep, however minimal, though Bentley almost had to drag it down upon himself. But they were up before the lark, got coffee out of one-leg Geoff, washed, dressed, and chafed impatiently in the early warming sun, and watched the Biter come to life. They watched men they knew, and some whom Sam did not, tumble from the forward hatchway. They watched three soldiers, scrawn and scruff and misery, chivvied from below by an officer who, when fully viewed, struck Sam with frank astonishment.
“Who’s that?” he said. “He is a child! Is that our officer of marines?”
“His name’s Lieutenant Savary,” Will muttered sideways from his mouth. Then shouting started: military orders, morning drill, which filled the sailors with a smug delight. Josh Baines, lurking near the shoreside bulwark, moved his mouth as if to spit into the water, then caught Will’s eye, remembering the new regime. He smirked instead, ingratiatingly. Will, his comments masked by the soldiers’ racket, added: “He is twenty, I believe. He has four musket men in all, but one of them got stabbed in Deptford. God knows if he’ll be ready when we sail.”
“Twenty! He looks twelve. Cheeks like a pair of apricots, that curly hair. Christ, Will, Black Bob had need of looking to his laurels. Has not Slack Dickie got the drools for him?”
