The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  “There is scurvy,” Gunning said. “I’m surprised, Mr Grundy, that you have not noticed it.”

  Grundy, who was drinking water and was as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, gave a startled jump and blinked, his eyes trying to focus in Gunning’s general direction.

  “Beg pardon, sir?” he said. “Scurvy, did you say? Nonsense, sir. Are you a medico?”

  Christ, thought Will, he don’t recognise Gunning, after all these weeks and months.

  Slack Dickie’s face went taut.

  “Scurvy, Mr Grundy? Could this be possible? They’ve had good meat enough, and bread and beer.”

  Grundy turned his face to Kaye, eyes swimming. He dabbed his lips, trying to collect himself.

  “Scurvy?” he repeated. “Not a bit of it. What… what symptoms, do you claim, sir?”

  He thought this was a test of expertise, extremely shrewd. But Gunning roared delightedly.

  “Just the usual ones! Just sitting down and falling down and lying down, and bleeding gums and ulcer-mouth and teeth you can pull out between your thumb and finger! They’ve got scurvy, man! Have you ever been to sea? Come and smell some of my sailors’ breath! That will flare your nostrils back, I tell you! They need some fruit and cabbage, and damn quick!”

  Captain Kaye put on a stern expression.

  “Mr Gunning, sir,” he said. “This is offensive. You may be master here, but you do not have jurisdiction across another’s field. I take it, Mr Grundy, scurvy is not a problem on my ship?”

  “Perhaps no men have come to see the surgeon, sir?” suggested Holt, diplomatically. “For surely, if scurvy had been seen, he would have recognised…?”

  Grundy was nodding.

  “The main symptom is a tendency to shirk,” he snapped. “It is the shirker’s joy and vade mecum. Tell them to come to me if they’ve disorders or complaints, sir. I will fetch them to their toes. Short shrift, sir. That is the cure. Short shrift and ha’pence.”

  It looked as if Gunning might argue, but in a half a moment he moved his shoulder in a shrug.

  “There’s one can hardly walk,” he said, laconically. “I’ll shoo him down to you, shall I? I’ll send him in the morning, so expect him in a week. Better, I’ll tell Jem Taylor and his lads to start him down with rope and rattan, shall I? That’s a lesson would be worth the watching!”

  Will did not understand this remark, but Sam, once the meal was over, explained. Men with scurvy, he said, got very weak and lost their grip on life: his father, mother, and his little brothers had died of it in sailing to Virginia. In the early light next morning, he took a careful look among the people and confirmed Jack Gunning’s diagnosis. There were several men with several signs, he said. The cure? (In reply to Will’s inquiry.) Fresh provender, and land. All Grundy could achieve, should he lay hands on them, would be to hasten their release — to the grim reaper!

  But luckily for all of them, especially the sick, Grundy’s ministrations would soon be redundant. According to Gunning’s calculations, they were on a latitude just south of a Jamaica landfall, and their longitude (a far less certain figuring) looked fair to being well within the Caribbean Sea, despite they had not seen any of the outer islands, the weather having been murky for the last few days. They had seen piles of clouds towering into the milky firmament, however, which probably denoted land beneath them, and they had caught whiffs of vegetation, sweet and musky, fresh and warm. Throughout the Biter there was certitude: their Atlantic crossing was almost at an end.

  Bentley and his friend, keeping watch one night — together for pleasure, though one of them should have been asleep — discussed the coming landfall and what they were like to find there. The warmth and blackness of the sky, few stars through the heavy muzz, was overawing in its way, and both of them were philosophical. Will in particular felt dwarfed and vaguely saddened, despite the balmy pleasantness. He felt that he had left his land for good, and all his people.

  “Christ, Sam,” he said. “It’s all so bloody vast it is a giant, giant world. We’ve been at sea for weeks and weeks; we’re doing about eight knots or so. It feels as though we’re running on forever.”

  Holt yawned. He filled his lungs, then let it out luxuriantly.

  “But there’ll be women there,” he said. “And good dry land, fresh fruit and meat and coffee, they pluck it off the bushes, did you know? There’ll be fresh water, Will. That’s what I miss most. I’m going to have a good, long, lovely soak. And then I’m going to find a woman. Oh God, yes!”

  Will’s mind turned to Deb Tomelty then, and a painful emptiness spread out, as if inside his chest. He felt a vast, dark longing in him, but felt that he was stupid, weak. How could he love her still, who had had no idea what love might really be; how could sensation remain so sharp? Months, many months, since last he’d seen her, he had thought she’d died. And if he loved her, would she still cleave to him? Ridiculous.

  “I think of Deborah,” he said to Sam. “I wish I did not, but I do.” To make it sound less hopeless, less a question of such crushing loss, he added: “I suppose you think of Thin Annette, as well?”

  “Felicity,” said Sam. It slipped out unbidden, and he found it quite astonishing himself. “How strange, Will, that I should think of Dickie’s skinny sister! Felicity’s the Latin word for happiness, an’ all, unless I’ve got it wrong. How very strange!”

  They stood in silence for a while. The dawn was breaking astern of them. The pink flush threw lustre on the seas ahead, tingeing the black with blue. The world was very large, and they were quite alone.

  In fact, they weren’t alone, while at that moment the world, in terms of metaphor, was small indeed. Some miles ahead of them, on a crossing course, was a Spaniard, freighted with plate silver from the isthmus and boxes of gold coin, escorted by two Guarda-Costa ships, severely armed, that had latched onto her when she had been separated by the wicked weather, out of season, from the force assigned to sail with her to Spain. She was badly damaged, her escorts less so, and they were looking to reach southern Cuba and regroup with a Navy force, or put in, if need be, for repairs.

  And not much further, in this small world, Deb lay in her meagre bed and thought — among, however, many other things — of Will.

  TWENTY

  The sun, sending its feelers to the west, revealed to Bentley and his friend a black mountain stark ahead of them, with flickering veins of white-hot fire inside it. As the sun rose, the mountain range changed shape and constitution to become a bank of cloud, made jet and silver by the play of violent lightning. It spread to north and south across their whole horizon, and climbed to heights they scarce believed. Their wind was blowing towards it, warm and almost gentle, and the sea they rode on was still smooth and undulating. Neither had seen its like before.

  Gunning had, though, and he approached them silent from behind to startle them. He had a spyglass in his hand, and he was thoughtful.

  “I thought the seas were lumpish in the night,” he said. “It’s our sea meeting his and tumbling, dost understand? Give him an hour, and ours will be running back again, towards the east. We’ll maybe see some vomiting again.”

  The two stared for a while.

  “Is it a hurricane?” asked Will. Gunning hissed breath through nostrils.

  “Should not be, although it’s possible. Your Carib is a weirdly place for weather, sweet and lovely except for hurricanes in season, but often with a cracker up its sleeve. It’s the volcanoes, maybe. When they blow, they blow everything to buggery. Weather changes, it goes all to cock and sideways.” He gave another snort. “Port Royal disappeared one fine day, you know. Not so many bloody years ago. Fell into the sea, under a wave, half the population gone, white, black, and redman. all the ships and all the brothels, all the churches, too. You’d think God might mind his own a little, wouldn’t you, but he don’t. When all is said and paid for, he doesn’t give a shining shit.”

  Will, despite himself a little shocked by such unbridled blasphemy, said quickly: “
I didn’t know that. About volcanoes, I mean. I knew Port Royal went, though. Two thousand killed, or more.”

  Gunning was contemptuous.

  ‘‘What caused the fun, then, if it weren’t volcanoes? Don’t you think you ought to know these things? You’re officers, ain’t you, with little bits of paper?”

  Sam studied Gunning’s face with interest. It seemed to him there might be something going on behind it, and wondered if it could be drink. How long since Jack had last broke out? Some weeks, some weeks…

  “I always heard it was a judgment on such a wicked place,” he said. “It was bursting at the seams with whores and pirates, so the good God put his thumb down on the lot. Maybe the priests and vicars that got hammered in their churches had their fingers in the penny pile? Or in the nuns and choirboys, even.”

  Gunning was no longer listening. He had his spyglass to his eye and he was studying. Sam’s eyes followed, as did Bentley’s.

  “What is it, Jack?” said Will. “I thought I saw a dash of white. Is it a sail?”

  The sun was blazing ever further westward, accelerating. As the sea turned from black to royal to a greenish azure, white flashes appeared above the rolling waves, rhythmic, tantalising.

  “It is a ship,” John Gunning said. “Spanish by her cut, but something strange. She only has one… she’s a clumsy galleon, but she’s only got one mast. I think — ”

  “Another one!” said Will, whose eyes were very keen. “There is another sail, Jack! To north of her! It’s… no, I’ve lost her. I — No! There she is!”

  Sam, frustrated, tried to get a borrow of the telescope, but Gunning would not give. Their faces close, Holt got a whiff of liquor from the master’s breath. Oy oy, he thought. Oy oy…

  In a minute more, Gunning picked up another vessel, somewhat astern of the other two, and decided that the biggest one had lost a mast, or perhaps some upper yards. Biter was flying down the wind towards them, though, and he observed, with quiet amusement, that perhaps it was past time they told their lord and master.

  “If she is a Spaniard,” he said, “those others must be escorts, must they not? Which argues she is a merchantman, worth guarding. There will be treasure to be took, maybe.”

  “Spanish?” said Sam. “We are not at war with Spain, Jack, are we?”

  “You never know,” said Gunning. “Nor don’t you never know with Dickie, do you? He owes money left and right, ain’t no one told you that yet? Remember my friend Campbell, young Ellen’s beau? Who do you think greased the selling of the Biter with the Office? Do you think it cost Slack Dickie nothing? He owes Eddie about — ”

  He was cut off by a bellow from aloft. It was the lookout, up on the main royal yard. A sail, he roared, then another, then the third. As Kaye clambered onto deck, Will shouted, “On the bow? We have them! Peel your eyes for any more!”

  Kaye, whose face was flushed from sleep, was pointed in the right direction, then clapped Gunning’s spyglass to his eye. Will went to weather, to the shrouds, and scuttled up two dozen feet or so. As the light strengthened he could see the ships quite clearly. A crippled merchantman and two smaller fighters, not lofty, but distinctive, in the Spanish manner. It was an amazing picture, for beyond them, a massive backdrop, the sky was black as pitch, with lightning flickering like blazing silver threads. They were close-hauled though, and Biter was running easy, so all shared a wind of one direction. Impossible to say at this stage which way the storm was making, though, or how fast.

  “That’s weather damage,” said Gunning, who had retrieved his glass. “She’s not been attacked. The pinks are battered, ditto. One’s got a main sail split, the other’s got a jury yard. Easy pickings, Capting, easy pickings! She’ll be loaded up with jewels and silver for the King, depend upon it. We’ve got the wind gage, our gunnery’s the very acme, and we need a fight to blow the farts away!”

  Then, all pretence forgotten, he hauled a small flask from out an inner pocket, and sucked liquor from it. Smiling, he offered it to Kaye, then Sam, who refused it, too. ’Fore God, thought Sam, this could shape up a good one. They had not had breakfast yet…

  “Mr Gunning,” said the captain, stiffly. “Those ships are Spanish, as I think. We have no quarrel with them that I know. And I would thank you not to drink upon my quarterdeck.”

  The closing speed between the vessels was swift, and it seemed most of the people were of Gunning’s mind about the protocol. The rumour spread like lightning that the big one was a treasure ship, and also that she was sinking so it would be an act of mercy to save her men and loot. The gunner presented himself, as if awaiting orders, and Sweetface’s soldiers turned out unbidden in sweat and scarlet, standing stiff and formal and expectant in the waist. But orders came there none, save directions to the helm to ease her up to pass the trio safe to leeward, offering no hint of pugnacity at all. Knots of crewmen stood round in disaffection, glaring at the poop and muttering.

  A voice from high above boomed down, “She’s running guns out, sir! The frigate to our larboard, if that’s what the Dons do call ’em. I can see men on the quarterdeck, and at the prow. She’s got bow chasers, sir. They’re loading them.”

  It was the boatswain, Taylor, leading instinctively as usual. He was high up by the main truck, clinging like a monkey. Gunning, also, was in the ratlines. It was hard to tell if he had his spyglass or his bottle in his hand.

  “Coastguard,” he shouted. “Guarda-Costa. They think all English ships are smugglers, and he’ll try and board. Luff up, on the wheel there! Luff up and let him see we’ll rake him if he dares.”

  Both Will and Sam felt general excitement, and both understood the captain’s reticence full well. Foreign ships; but not the enemy. To attack would be an act of piracy, which could cause a war. They felt for him, and felt the grinding pressure from the people.

  “We are a Navy ship,” snapped Captain Kaye. “He will not try to board us! Hold your course!”

  It was Big Angus, of the Scots, who had the helm at present, and his face and stance reflected a rare affinity with the feelings of the crew; of anger and accusation at Kaye’s peaceable intentions. If up to them, they would have steered across the Spanish squadron’s hawse, but Dickie would prevent it, the poltroon.

  But Kaye, for once, was not for turning. He indicated to Lamont to ease the spokes, as per his earlier instruction, and raised a spyglass to his eye, a glass he’d shouted for from Black Bob. The small, sad boy stared at the ships as if excited for a moment, then, shoulders slumping to their normal stance, turned and slunk below.

  “She’s flying signals,” Taylor shouted. And then: “A squall, a squall! It’s going to get us with its tail! Up helm and let fly all!”

  As the Spanish ship broke out its signal flags, it was overtaken, then enveloped, in a murky, ragged, cloud. The black mass ahead had spread a wide, deep tentacle in an instant, surrounded still by blue sky and hot sunshine. The merchantman, if such she was, and her two snapping escorts, were swallowed completely as in a rolling plume of smoke, with grey spume and vapour flying from its edges. In the instant she became invisible, the leading gunship fired a shot, and then the Biter was buried in a steaming, stinging rain that was as hot as coffee from a stove. There was a thunderclap of gear, a roaring and a hurrying of men, and Slack Dickie’s smartest neckcloth was plucked from off his throat and lost. Within half a minute the Biter was pressed down almost on her beam ends with her people, newly smart and seamanlike, swarming everywhere to most excellent purpose. The racketing of cord and canvas was like a firecracker show, but she lost no major sail and no spar of any kind. Big Angus, with the help of Ayling and Tom Tilley, wrestled with the wheel, and kept the Biter under command, shooting forward ever faster athwart the fetch. Gunning and Will, at a weather shroud together, watched the display with satisfaction. Gunning, indeed, raised his bottle in salute, before he emptied it and tossed it overside.

  The squall was clear of them in twenty minutes, leaving the Biter with her decks awash in a roll
ing, angry cross-swell. The sun burst out, the dirty clouds shot off downwind, and within the shortest time the drying deck was lost in mist, with rainbows. Gunning bellowed to loose the brailed and clewed-up sails, tend sheets and braces, and sweat up on slackened halyards. They had a good breeze now, warm and kindly, despite it was ahead of them for fetching the Jamaica coast, and to Will the storm looked blown-out, finished. The Spaniards, moreover, seemed quite lost.

  Gunning, apparently, did not agree on either count.

  “Mr Kaye, sir,” he shouted, exuberantly. “They fired on us, sir. I told you so! The cripple’s on her own out there! I say we board her while we’ve got the chance!”

  This caused a flurry, as neither Kaye nor any others had spotted the galleon, but Gunning, on seamanship, was rarely wrong. He climbed on to the rail, pointing ahead and half a point to leeward, and the captain lumbered after him. The sea was darker than before the squall, a writhing mass of foam-streaked rollers. Almost out of sight, on the horizon and dipping, was the single mast, with rags flying from her topmost yard.

  “Higgins!” Gunning shouted to one of his former seamen from Press tender days. “You’ve got the peepers, man. Get up aloft and see if you can spot the others! Mr Taylor, did the stunsails all survive? Get ’em stretched again and lively, we’ll run the bastard down before the storm comes up our arseholes like ten ton of bricks! Mr Black, you fat disgrace! Get me a bottle of your finest, and put it on my slate! And if the seal is broken this time, I’ll tear your bollocks off!”

  Black, the pasty purser, who had been fighting with Geoff Raper about a sack of flour spoiled in the squall, smiled sickly, as if he found Gunning amusing, but dared not answer back. He disappeared, and came back seconds later with the goods. Gunning broke the wax off, plucked the cork out with his teeth, and spat it overside. No need for corks when Gunning was a-drinking, said his smile. No need for corks at all.