The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  Mather was present, and civilised as usual, but there were other planters whose vileness could be graded by degrees. They were all stout and florid men, wrong side of fifty, whose sole topic was the scandal of living in such a filthy island, in such a filthy sea, and abandoned, unappreciated, by the filthy government “back home” who starved them of money and protection while the French islands wallowed in the lap of luxury. Will could see that Holt was on the verge of hysteria at some of these excesses, and even Dickie’s eyes grew sometimes round.

  “We are martyrs, sir!” gruffed Dodds at one point. “We are beset by French, by savages, by Spanish pirates of the Guarda-Costa, and we are all alone! We have no proper army here, we must raise our own militia and must pay for it ourselves, and our only Navy ship is yours, that is not even properly in the water! We pay our taxes, sir – by God we do, and through the nose! – and where is the Squadron? Swanning, is where! Swanning offshore so we are told, in case the French fleet ever comes, when they will run off to save their precious ships, no doubt! Fleets are meant to fight, sir, not to skulk! And while they skulk, we are murdered in our beds by savages. It is our tragedy! Our time of martyrdom!”

  No point in arguing, so they sank into embarrassed silence. Mather, to his credit, did try to demur, but Dodds, his companion Peter Hodge, and a third reactionary called Martin Newman, were quite prepared to shout him down, or anyone. It was Sweetface Savary who called a halt at last, and it was a great surprise. The mild lieutenant had been pale and peaky for a day or two, but it seemed that he had reached a certain point. He put down his napkin, dabbed his lips, and said with cutting dryness: “I do not have you down as martyrs, gentlemen. It seems to me, in fact, that you are in clover here. The slaves outweigh you by God knows what to one, and yet they do not rise and slaughter you. They give their lives and labour free, they coddle you, feed you, make you rich – and then they die exhausted. If anyone should bear the name of martyr, it is them, surely? The Africans, not you.”

  It was as if a mortar had gone off. The planters damn near bayed, and Dodds clenched his fists as if to rise and strike. The noise became cacophony and the young Englishmen could only sit and wait. Savary weathered it with pale fortitude, inside a dew of sweat.

  When the worst was passed, however, came the shrewdest jibe. Martin Newman stared at Savary with eyes that shone with venom, and said carefully, “How dare you say that, sir, and poor Sir Nat a living rebuttal of your vile opinions? Have you no shame, sir? Have you none at all?”

  Savary had no idea what he might mean, and said so. Dodds and Newman jumped on his ignorance without mercy.

  “So!” cried Dodds. “Know nothing but accuse at will! That is vile, sir! That is metropolitan!”

  Newman added: “Sir Nathaniel is our neighbour! A good fine Englishman on the verge of death! Crippled, destroyed, brought down to ruination! He is a martyr, sir! He is a martyr to betrayal. By black savages and an English whore!”

  “Fie sir!” said Holt; but Will asked quietly: “I beg you, sir, what can you mean by that? Sir Nathaniel, surely… well, did he not fall off his horse?”

  “He did!” Hodge shouted. “And this doxy had the chance to save his life and spurned it! He appealed to her from off the ground, white man to white woman, and she ignored him! When he told us, he broke down in tears! White woman? She is a bloody black man’s whore!”

  Sam Holt said shakily: “Let us have this clear. Sir Nathaniel do live, don’t he? You say she spurned the chance to save him. But he is saved.”

  “He lay there and she spurned him,” said Ephraim Dodds. “She ran off with her lover to the hills and left him dying. If the Navy has any use at all, the faintest shred of any honour, you would bring her back in chains, Captain, so we can hang her. We demand it of you in the name of the Assembly. Go out and track her down. She is a murderess.”

  Savary’s voice was firm and clear.

  “It was the slaves who died,” he said, “not Sir Nathaniel. You burned them, sir, you tortured them to death, we heard the screams. The maiden has killed nobody. If murderers there be, she is not one of them.”

  The dinner party ended very quickly after this. Had Mather not been present it could have turned into a rout, but he, although the youngest of the island men, was powerful in personality. He engineered it that their mules were quickly brought to door, and the Jacquelines found themselves in the balmy and odiferous night making their farewells with absurd politeness, and wishing ahead for further pleasant evenings, God forbid.

  The mule trip back down into Kingston, and then a boat ride to Port Royal and their berth, were pleasant in fact, and for Sam and Will informative. Savary, who had been quartered up in town, elected to go with them to the Jacqueline, as their conversation had put all three of them on a firmer footing than before. As an Army man he had been at some distance from them since the first, and disinclined to try and bridge the gap. At dinners in the Biter’s cabin he had had the air of sharing few beliefs or pleasures with them, more especially those of the coarser types (as they guessed he saw it), like big Jack Gunning and Sam Holt. But it was Sam’s robust congratulations for his treatment of the planting men that seemed to make the difference.

  “Good God, man,” Sam had said, as they left Kaye and Mather at the plantation gates to go their separate ways, “I must say admiration for the way you dealt with them. What antiques, eh? What gargoyles! I thought that bent and gnarled old bastard was going to burst of anger, or have your bloody head off with an axe!”

  Savary, tiny and peculiar on his gigantic mount, smiled wanly. Although the moon was low as yet, it was not precisely dark, with stars blanketing the skies. The mule was dark brown, with great shining eyes, and exuding health and life. Lieutenant Savary, by contrast, was somehow sickly.

  Will said quietly: “I thank you for your defence of Deb. You do not know her, I believe, but you know our story. I met her once, we loved, and I believe I love her still. Now she is hurt, and hated, and she has run away. I must find her and protect her, and I do not know how. There, that is the truth of it, Lieutenant. I am sorry that we have not spoke before.”

  Sam, if tempted to make comment on the words “protect her,” kept silent for once, and Savary made no reply. At last he said: “I have noticed, sir, that you and your friend here use first names for each other. I would take it as an honour if you would call me Arthur. Although Sweetface, I suppose, will do!”

  It was agreed – Arthur, not the nickname – with pleasure, and they chatted for some minutes about family things, and backgrounds and so on. Savary was not a rich man and his father was a reverend, which meant, he said, that he was actually a pauper. It was normal, they agreed, for the non-inheritors of well-off families to go into the Church, the Army, or the Navy, but poor Arthur was thus second-generation indigent, a very heavy load. To finance him, his mama had had to sell her meagre heirlooms.

  Sam, shrewdly, wondered if the Church connection was the source or reason for his “unusual views,” and Arthur flushed and then, more oddly, gave a shudder. He stopped his mule, and gripped the saddle hard. His upper lip was beaded.

  “Are you unwell?” asked Will, reining in beside him. “I thought that earlier you…”

  Savary took a deep breath. After a moment he flicked his rein and the mule sauntered on.

  “Not quite well, I think,” he said. “Mosquitoes on that damned beach I guess. They never ceased attacking me.” He almost laughed. “My soft and lady skin again. For a man who wants to be a general, it is a curse! Or is that another of Sam’s ‘unusual views’?”

  There was no side to him, and now they all shared laughter easily. But Sam was not to be sidetracked.

  “No, but Arthur. For a man whose job is keeping Frenchmen from the planters’ shore and negers from their throats so they can make their fortunes unmolested, you say some funny things. I haven’t heard you praising Crapaud yet, but you gave Dodds short shrift on martyrdom. You said he was in clover, did you not? And worked the slaves to
death for profit.”

  “It is the truth,” said Savary. “Slavery’s a man-killing exercise, a machine. That is abomination, surely? In this day and age.”

  There was a hint of the holy in this which made both Will and Sam uncomfortable. They were believers in the normal way, they supposed, but the Biter, an unholy ship, suited them both admirably.

  Savary went on: “My father is a man of God, and in some ways I am not. He agrees with Bishop Berkeley that beggars should be put to slavery to bring them to their senses, and that slavery fits in with Holy Writ. Black men’s colour is the mark of Cain, so they don’t suffer in the way that white men do. Abominable? I find it so.”

  They had stopped their mules on a bluff, overlooking Kingston harbour. The moon was higher, and the vision beautiful and calm. Borne on the gentle breeze from the interior, they heard a distant screaming. Which could have been, indeed – anything at all. Sweetface began to shake again. For a moment he was panting.

  “And you believe religion do you, Will?” he asked. “Ashdown was born a Catholic but he says it is insanity, balderdash, plain lies. He quotes John Cary, the Bristol merchant. ‘Every person lives by every other. The liberty of the subject is vital to the nation’s wealth.’ Something on those lines, in any way. Ashdown has the quotes, not me.”

  “Ashdown?” said Sam. “What, Jack Ashdown, our man on board? What does he know of slavery?”

  “He knows much of many things, you should talk to him sometime. He’s long-headed and by no means rough. He was deported as an abolitionist. Did you know black people cannot be held true Christians, whatever their beliefs? Did you know that up and down the colonies of America only true Christians can keep slaves? Not Jews, not Mahometans, and certainly not blacks. Ashdown found that ironical – good Christians alone can keep men in servile barbarism. Perhaps he assumed that you, like any Navy officer might be supposed to do, took a similar position. It is in some ways your duty, after all.”

  When they got back to the Jacqueline they lit up lamps, and sat in the cluttered cabin and drank and talked some more. Ashdown, said Savary, knew he was still in some danger back on the island, but Jamaica was a land of fragments now that absent landlordism was rife, so he had hopes to be unrecognised. As long as “those Scotch devils” kept their distance.

  “They dealt in slaves, and theft, and crime of every dye,” he said, “and won’t forgive him for informations laid against them. He paints them as the very worst of men.”

  By this time, in the early hours, Savary had to go to bed. For a long time he had been wilting, and although Sam twitted him, it quite obviously was not to do with drink. He was growing paler in the pale candlelight, and fits of shivering and sweat were coming on him. There was no surgeon on the ship – Grundy had gone off days ago, and God alone knew where – but there was the French captain’s bed, which was good enough for anyone save Slack Dickie Kaye. They had to help him in it in the end, with buckets and some towels near to hand. He went straight off to sleep, which reassured them, and they sat and talked some more about what a pleasant man he’d turned out to be.

  It was a pity they had not got to know him earlier, they agreed, for a good companion on a vessel was a precious thing. He had seemed so frail, so womanish, so unlikely on a fighting ship or in a uniform. But not far below the softness, it seemed, there was sterling steel. They promised themselves that they would catch up on their losses, and get enjoyment to the full.

  In the morning, though, Lieutenant Savary was very sick indeed, and the boat’s crew made off like a duck in flight to get across the harbour to the Kingston medicos. It was too late. At twelve o’clock the nurses stripped him, and at quarter past they took his blood. By night time he was delirious, but next morning he was raving, and when he calmed down they took more blood, dosed him with alcohol and mercury, wrapped him in hot towels, then in cold. For another day he swooped up and down, in and out of delirium, and by alternatives screamed and shivered, burning hot or freezing. On the morning of the third day they applied more leeches, and he died.

  It was the beginning of a minor epidemic.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In Deborah’s camp, her life became progressively more difficult. She had quickly patched up her row with Kinji, and her willingness to work brought the hard-eyed Mildred slowly round. She proved herself particularly effective with the bees, which surprised her as mightily as it surprised the Africans. She would open nests quite fearlessly, and something in her movements – or perhaps her body smell, as Mrs M insisted – appeared to settle them. They let her rob them of their honey as if she were a benefactor, and somehow that is what she came to feel. Sometimes she could prod and poke around for half an hour without a single sting, and she could extract bees from her hair and clothes as happily as a monkey picking fleas.

  She could not go to the markets, however, or even leave the camp for any distance with the other women, for fear she might be seen and reported to the whites. Deb found this irksome, and her frustration grew. Their camp was small, their tilled fields just a tiny patch in a fecund wilderness, and what is more, there were no white people at all for miles around. Why should she be betrayed to them by other Africans? She was one of them, surely? She had thrown her lot in with the runaways.

  Mildred, co-confidante with Mabel as the days went by, was a clear-eyed mentor who found Deb’s position sentimental. There was no such thing as a general loyalty, she said, and why should Deb think there might be? The planter men had fought to keep them separate.

  “Some try make us into Christian,” she said, “because they think that make us feel the same. Then others say we must not speak to your God, because we learn to speak in English then, and with all same language go to plotting, rise against you. Then some other say we got speak English, all black from all part of the Africa, so we cannot plot because all white man understand us. Maroon chiefs make same order, all speak in English so no confusion, no knife in back in night. Best thing, dear Debbeerah, you trust no one, see?”

  She laughed, her cold eyes touched by light.

  “Not even me, gal, that way safe. You trust not even me.”

  But Deb did trust her, and she learned her lessons well. How the Maroons were hated by some other blacks, how Maroon towns made their living hunting down plantation runaways, how they received payment for each pair of ears or head as proof they’d kill one or (in some enlightened quarters) more money yet to bring one back alive. How, like the whites, they tolerated runaways who did not join their formal bands, because they were useful go-betweens for selling produce, and as providers of some food and vegetables the Maroon lands could not grow.

  “It very funny thing,” said Mildred, with not an ounce of humour in her voice, “the Maroons don’t trouble us if we are useful to them, and the plantation slaves are grateful for the food we sell them likewise. Likewise white men too, who pretend we are not runaways, and not exist even. And then some thing go wrong, and all come slaughter us. Them Maroon, them plantation bastard, them plantation slave. They send men, and dogs, and horses and they shoot and chop us up. We must not be betrayed, Debbeerah. That is why you not go out of here.”

  Deb was not stupid, and she knew there was something else Mildred was willing her to understand. She did not, however, and Mildred, with a noise between her teeth, finally began to spell it out.

  “Your wanbe ’usband,” she began. “Your lickle Jacob Tsingi. He is Maroon.”

  Deb waited. No further forward, but she could feel tension in the air. Mildred clicked her teeth once more.

  “He young, he is a captain,” she continued. “Wha’ you think of him? Him Daddy is a colonel. Colonel Treatyman.”

  Deb was uncomfortable. She knew all this already, but in truth she did not know how to answer any more. She loved Will Bentley, and knew she would not see his face again. She felt lost and lonely among her newfound friends, she felt as much a prisoner as she had felt with Sutton and his filthy sons. And Jacob, despite his arrogance, despite his mos
t unpleasant bodyguards, was young, and beautiful, and above all, free. If he was a captain of Maroons he would have a town somewhere up in the west, in the Blue Mountains, she believed.

  As a captain of Maroons he must have some agreement with the whites, be free in his associations, be free to come and go. Be free to marry her – or at least to make her concubine – a white maid and a runaway. Or not? She did not know, of course; she knew absolutely nothing. But Mildred was waiting to be asked.

  “Mildred,” said Deborah. “If I should go with him… Would I be all right? Will he… look after me?” She felt a pricking in her eyes, felt tears begin to well and flood. Mildred’s face was honest still, her dark eyes sombre. “I do not want to go,” said Deb. “I do not want to go, Mildred. I have a man, an English man. And I am white.”

  Mildred nodded, very slowly.

  “Yes, you white,” she said. “For us that no problem. If you was black and Jacob white, no problem neither, white man fuck black woman all the time. But black man not fuck white woman, see? Black man who fuck white woman, him is dead.”

  “Oh,” said Deb. “But… But I thought Jacob…”

  “Problem is,” said Mildred, “he done tell you now already. Whatever you say Jacob in the end, he got have you, gal. We have hear him, him men have hear him. He say you go be his woman, so you go. Unless you man can save you, Debbeerah? He be here tomorrow? Maybe tomorrow be too late, who know? Maybe tomorrow, maybe next day, but someday soon. If you not going with your man – you go with Captain Jacob. That the truth.”