The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  Sometimes the guilt for this, Deb found almost overwhelming. She stood upright in the violent sunshine, unconsciously holding a rough pineapple with great tenderness, as if it were her mother’s face, and felt the sweat run down her cheeks like tears. Missy was near her, and Goanitta, and she saw they were neither sweating nor suffering her mental agonies. Not for the first time she felt envious of the fact that they were slaves. They had been torn from their homes and families, and it had not been their fault. As she had got to know these women, and she had clicked into their language and their way of thought, they had talked to her of home, of their lands across the sea, and she had tried to understand their pain. She wished that somehow she could say sorry for the death of Cecily.

  They were not slaves now though, Missy and Goanitta; that was their touchstone. If they had a name it was “runaways,” and if they had a future it was precarious. They grew plantains, cocoa, avocados, corn, and their menfolk cleared ground for them, protected them, looked out for them, and largely stayed invisible. They protected, then they hid. They were not free either. No one was free.

  Mildred was Deb’s most incisive informant, although she appeared to like the white girl least. She came and went from their secret area deep in the woodland more like a man than other women, and according to Kinji and Rebekah, she was a “sort of” man, she was a warrior. Getting explanations of this from the girls was difficult, because laughter was their self-defence, and Mrs M, when Deb appealed to her, sucked her teeth and spat into the fire. But Mabel, when she was around, would sometimes be forthcoming, and Deb learned much from her.

  “No one on this island free,” she said one night, her boy-child sleeping in her arms. “We come from Africa in chain and slavery, and most we dies like that. Us woman in this town we left alone by white man, we left alone by black man, but only ’cause we got some use, see gal? White man grow sugar cane, sometime him little coffee, indigo. We grow him food he eat, and feed his niggers. Sell it, keep all happy. If him got sense, he grow him own food. Him got no sense.”

  “But you are free then, in some wise or other?” Deb asked, uncertainly. “If they know you’re here and let you sell your products? And if they let you be?”

  Mabel laughed.

  “Until it suit him other way,” she said. “Until his own niggers tell him we take their trade away, so we got to stop. Anyway, who say he know we here? He know we somewhere, white man, but he never find us, can he? If you go walkin’ gal, you ever find your way back here? No think so.”

  Mrs M, who had been listening across the fire, spoke low in a language Deb could not follow, and the conversation, apparently, was at an end. Mildred, however, at other times, sketched in more details. The mass of blacks were held as slaves, she said, but some were allowed some freedom, and some had taken it by running to the mountains to become Maroons. Over the years the Maroons had become a terror and a danger to the white man, there had been wars and massacres, there had been triumphs and disasters. The greatest of the leaders was a witch called Nanny, who lived in Nanny Town, except she was a spirit, maybe. She was the obeah woman, said Mildred, a lady of the science. With her great guidance, the white man could not win.

  It seemed to Deb that the white man had won already, hands down. So she made a non-committal noise, and was rewarded, to her surprise, with a smile.

  “White man cannot win, I say, but I not say black man win though, do I?” Mildred said. “Black Maroon win treaties with the white, and black man live in peace now, of some sort. Maroon have own towns, have own fields and cattle, have Captain this and Colonel that, and get to see the gubnor once a year to get some presents and touch hat to him. But white man not free neither, eh? Maroon force treaties, white man pay him money. And in this town, in other little town like this, we also free. We not Maroons, we not free, we just invisible.”

  “But what are you? A Maroon? A warrior? Rebekah said –”

  Mildred clicked her teeth.

  “Tssst! Rebekah said! You go sleep now Debbeerah.” She laughed. “You free go to sleep, you not free talk all night. You understand me now?”

  Deb listened to her chuckles in the hot and noisy darkness.

  *

  It was the return of Captain Jacob Tsingi that brought the major complication. Whatever Mildred had said to him and his companions on their first visit to assess the new white runaway, he’d made it clear he would not keep away. His reappearance came within five days.

  She was stacking yams in a shady corner with Marge and Kinji, and it was the Africans who saw him first. They were chattering in Kreyole, all three, and as usual Deb was sweating, they were not. She waved both arms above her head to move the air around her, and pulled out the bosom of her cotton gown to cool her breasts and stomach. As she did so, Kinji squeaked and grabbed at the cloth to cover her again, pointing with her eyes. Captain Jacob stood silent in the shadows with his bodyguards, and when he saw that she was looking, his face broke into a sunny smile. He was like a schoolboy.

  “Miss Debbeerah!” he said. “I give you greeting! I come to see this man of you. I come to make him offer.”

  Although she wondered how he had learned her name, Deb found herself responding to his open smile, and his absurdity. His acolytes were looking glum, as usual, and the contrast was endearing. His energy was astonishing, his features shining like a sunbeam, his tight-curled hair as springy as fresh mountain fern. Beside her, she felt Kinji and Marge responding also. Kinji, indeed, was opening like a flower.

  “Sir,” Deb said. “I thank you, but still I am betrothed. And my man would not take any money for me. I am not for sale.”

  “Where is he, then?” asked Captain Jacob. “What sort of man should leave him woman in the woods? Come live with me, Miss Debbeerah. I got house in town. I got no more wife than you.”

  Her mind came back to earth. This boy was sweet and silly, some sort of prince maybe, with a gun and bodyguards, but she was just a runaway, who would end up not as his wife but as a whore again, this time a black man’s whore. Involuntarily she was flushing, with a kind of shame.

  “My man is a sailor.” Her voice was low, and wobbled. “He is a navy man. He has had to go to sea. He will soon be back. I am spoken for.”

  Oddly, the situation changed, although the black men in the shadows did not move. Jacob had lost his smile, and the atmosphere, in an instant, was oppressive. Deb was compelled to say some more.

  “I am sorry for it, sir,” she said, “but these things are…”

  Two of the stonefaced men stepped forward. They were in ragged trousers only, but wore cutlasses at side. One’s hair was grizzled, brindle-grey. The other man was bald, and only had one ear.

  “Captain say come. You come.”

  “No!” said Deb. It was an exclamation. She was shocked and fearful. The baldhead man took another pace, aggressively.

  Beside her, Marge give a little groan. The grey-haired man pulled out his cutlass from his belt.

  “No!” said Deb again, this time a note of rising panic. And Captain Jacob shouted something at the men, and struck one of them open-handed on the shoulder, with a shocking crack. The forward movement ceased. New silence fell. Jacob was in the shadow still, but Deborah saw him smile.

  “I go now,” he said. “I come back again, when you think about all thing. You tell your man I buy you off him. Maybe I kill him.”

  He laughed suddenly, as if that were a joke. Deb’s mouth was dry, her stomach trembling, as he faded into the woodland with his acolytes.

  Chapter Twelve

  Post Captain Daniel Swift had almost reached the southern Caribbean when he saw the vessel, and for the first time in weeks his heart quickened with the whiff of opportunity. His own ship was a slow and ugly tub, and the irony of her name – the Beauty – was doubled by the actual beauty of the craft brought into focus through his lens. She was a slaver from her aspect, as dirty as a whaling ship, but of lovely lines. He snapped his spyglass closed, and spoke to his chief lieutenant.r />
  “By George, Anderson,” he said. “We could have her if we wanted. Could we not?”

  Anderson was a man he liked to twit, because Anderson was stupid and a brute, beholden to him as few men were. Swift had seen him killing on the most slender provocation, but made it clear he’d keep the secret to the grave – unless.

  “Well?” he said. “Will you vouchsafe an answer, sir, shall we run her down? It is a veritable shit-basket, but surely she’s an enemy?”

  The ship to leeward probably was French – her lines and rig suggested it – but she was not flying any colours, and scarcely any useful sail. Anderson clapped his telescope to his eye, and he stared and pondered.

  “Aye, sir,” he said at last. “Crapaud slaver for a sovereign, and she’ll stink worse than a charnel house. I count nine guns.”

  Swift laughed.

  “Maybe they’re dead,” he said. “Maybe she’s derelict. But it’s not black men’s ghosts we want, it’s a ship. She’s French so we must take her. It is our duty.”

  The Beauty, to tell the truth of it, was sinking. Not in any haste, despite the pumps were manned for hours every day, but slowly and inevitably. She’d had hard usage in the Straits, absorbed the shocks of many detonations, and she was old. Swift’s hope had been to take a prize and sell her privately, a vessel and her cargo too, at best. But there were certain legal factors, even in wartime. A slaver might be the answer to a prayer.

  “Call all hands an’t please you, Lieutenant Anderson, and prepare to beat to quarters,” he said. “She looks an easy touch, but that could be a counterfeit. I will address the officers in my cabin in fifteen minutes.”

  As a fighting unit, the Beauty was an efficient ship, whose men had grown used to the vagaries of Swift’s command by long, hard usage. Six years ago or more there had been a mutiny in his frigate Welfare, and Swift had not seen himself in any fault at all. He had been a happy man indeed to watch the chiefest of the mutineers writhe to their deaths on Admiralty hemp, and one day he would track the others down and kill them too.

  Even from the windward, when they ranged up to her at last, the slaver stank like hell on water. It was not just the usual smell of shit, but shot through and overlaid with worse. The sharp sweetness of corrupted flesh, the reek of death that caused the chest to clench. Swift’s sailing master, a youngish man called Dorrint, made a pass under full canvas but kept too far off. When Swift roared at him and raised a fist, he saw that Dorrint was white and gagging. Swift laughed instead.

  “You are too nice, sir, far too nice,” he said. “For God’s sake use your kerchief to block up your lady nose. Now heave her to, I beg you. Bosun! Three boat’s crews. Immediate. Mr Anderson, lie off a little way and bring her alongside if I require it. Bosun! Bestir yourself, you bastard!”

  Leading from the front was something Swift revelled in. Not just because his people adored him for it (so he felt) but because it fired him. As he climbed on board and balanced on the rail above their heads, though, he could not force himself to breathe. Four men were straightway sick over the side.

  On deck was devastation. There were bodies everywhere, some naked, some in rags, some in a state of suppurating rottenness. There were men, not so many women, few children. Around the steering wheel was a pile of bodies, and hanging from the spokes a man who might just possibly be alive. Aloft, the gear was clattering, the canvas loose and useless. For the first time, Swift noticed falls, dangling from the lower yards. The boats had gone. The ship had been abandoned.

  It was left to a seaman to voice the next discovery.

  “They’re all black, sir,” he said. “They’re negroes. The white men must’ve gone.”

  In the event, this turned out as untrue. The boats secured, all men were set to searching for some indication of what had led to the disaster, for some sign of life. Swift drew his cutlass at the first mutterings of disaffection, and swept it like a scythe around his shoulder. He would lead the search, he said, and any man who would not do his best might jump overboard, for all he cared, and swim back to the Beauty – the sharks were good and welcome. Moving aft, he did not even pick his way with care, but scuffed through blood and matter. However, he did have shoes on; which his men did not.

  They found some white men, only two, and clear signs that there had been an insurrection. One had been the captain, and his throat had been cloven quite in two. He lay beside his berth, in nightshirt, and beside him, hacked and cut to pieces, was another man, in half a formal outfit that argued he was an officer also. Around him lay a half a dozen black men, whom he had killed with pistolet and cutlass before he had gone down. As Swift nudged one corpse with his foot it wriggled, and a large ship’s rat came out from under, red in teeth and snout, and looked at him accusingly. It moved off sluggishly, as if to show that it was fully sated.

  The scene in the slaves’ “accommodation” was too vile to be believed. Dead men and women piled and twisted everywhere, in all manner of secretions. Swift brooked no niceness from his people now, but drove them like a man possessed. Hatches were flung open, the makeshift cages and creations on the upper deck were smashed, hundreds of Africans of different shapes and races were tossed overboard. Soon the game became more jolly, as the white men warmed to it. When the sharks arrived, it proved possible to make them jump for morsels – a little girl, say, or boy. As night fell so did the wind, and the temperature went up. The work went on.

  By dawn the ship was clean. “All bodies gone?” Swift queried – and Anderson gave him a quirky smile. “All dead ones, sir,” he answered – “but sixty seven still alive.” Next question – what do with them?

  Back on board the Beauty Swift thought it through at breakfast, listening to the clanking of the pumps. The slaver’s papers, found locked up in a box, meant that even if the men who had abandoned her were ever seen again, the ship need not exist. She was named Cybèle above her rudderpost, with a distinctive figurehead at prow – two problems that could be cured easily with a chisel, axe and adze.

  “Tell me again, Mr Dorrint,” Swift asked his sailing master. “Which is the nearest land, and who has hold of it?”

  Dorrint tapped the chart in front of him, of the West Atlantic with the curve of Carib islands bowed out towards them. He traced his pencil north and west, to where Jamaica nestled beneath the rump of Cuba.

  “Well, we know that this one’s ours, sir, but that one there is French, I think, and that and that. ’Tis said that some of them will trade with us, illicitly, and sometimes it’s very tempting, is it not, a bit of trading on the sly? Well – rather tempting.”

  A small smile crossed Swift’s face, and he winked at Anderson.

  “Mr Dorrint has the right of it, I think,” he said. “Sixty slaves still living did you say, sir? In good condition they could raise three hundred pound.”

  “There were sixty seven,” Anderson replied. “One more died at midnight though, which brings it down to sixty six. The surgeon says their hardihood’s astonishing. All should have died in normal way, he thinks.”

  Swift was musing.

  “Just listen to that infernal pumping, gentlemen. Their lordships wish me to get another one in Kingston, but this ship is finished, we couldn’t chase a duck across a lake. I say we sail both ships for Saint Eustatius, and sell the Beauty there. We’ll get cash to spend on doing up the prize, and have a ship that fights, not fills up like a sieve at every capful. What think you, sirs?”

  Swift’s nose was in its high position, his eyes glittering with self-satisfaction and belief. He had left these men no option but agree with him, and he’d wager that they did not know to what, precisely. Whatever else, she was not his to sell.

  “Why Saint Eustatius, sir?” asked Dorrint naively. “I do not know the island, except by name. Do they buy slaves from Englishmen?”

  Anderson laughed triumphantly.

  “They’re Dutch!” he said. “To a Dutchman, Mr Dorrint, there is nothing in the world but florins and guilders, and they live and di
e for commerce, no awkward questions posed. The Beauty is a wreck, the slaves could be embarrassing. This is a fitting way of saving their lordships trouble getting rid.”

  Most elegant, thought Captain Swift. Most elegantly put.

  “By George,” he said. “What excellent ideas you have, Mr Anderson. Mr Dorrint? Do you agree? Then set a course sir, if you please! Saint Eustatius! Yes, an excellent idea. I will commend you to their lordships, both of you.”

  I will have that ship, he told himself. The Cybèle shall be mine – pourquoi pas! Perhaps a little treasure, too.

  Oh, excellent…

  Chapter Thirteen

  London Jack was as sober as a judge the day he conned the Jacqueline past the Twelve Apostles into Port Royal. They had been flying signals carefully, plus a gigantic England ensign, so the batteries stayed silent. Inside the harbour they could see no sign of any navy ship, save an old cutter on the foreshore with her mast down, but a mooring master pulled out towards them with speed commendable, and Gunning began to round up to drop the bower where he indicated. At the splash, a swarm of bumboats burst out from the shore, causing such excitement among the people that Will and Sam were forced to organise Savary and his marines to keep good order.

  “Later!” roared the boatswain, Taylor. “You’ll get your rum and whores, my boys! There’s work to do, remember!”

  “Bunts, clews, tacks, sheets, halyards!” John Gunning shouted. “Come on, you bastards! Get your arses in the air! Hugg! Tilley! Tell me when it’s holding! Stand by to veer some cable when I gives the word!”