The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  “You are right indeed, my friend,” he said, “you have the whole thing at your fingertips, to sell up now would be a strange idea, quite foolish, because the price would not reflect the value. But the trouble is, you see, we are so very… well, disheartened, me and Jonathan. Joe don’t give a fig either way, at his age, he is just heartbroken that his Pa and Ma are gone, but me and Jonathan – well, to tell the truth of it, our hearts are broken, too. Between us two, and this must go no further, mind, well, if the right man came along, with the right money, well, we’d sell up like a shot. Sell? Nay – we’d damn near give it away.”

  Swift – timing again – ended this line of conversation here abruptly, declaring it too depressive to be borne. But he gave Jeremy a warning to be careful how he spoke, in case some man of little conscience might perceive the time as ripe to make a bid, and be persuasive only because the family felt so low. Jeremy seized his hand and wrung it.

  “Good advice, sir, good advice,” he cried. “Pray God that we can take it, brother Jonathan and me. But the temptation to just sell and go, to throw the lot away, the years of grief and work and hardship – oh, I cannot tell you, friend. We are low at present, but the future is exceeding bright, our fortune must increase beyond belief, given a little time and energy put in. But where to get that from, how to drag it from our hearts, that’s the problem, is it not? We are downhearted, sir, and there’s an end to it. I am not very confident we can go on.”

  To get them from this painful subject (before he went a step too far) Swift turned to matters military, to tactics, distances, and possibilities for the best achievement of reprisal. He had picked every brain among the island men about the strength and capability of Marlowe and his band, and he had gone to Captain Shearing and his grim lieutenant to double check. The islanders, he felt certain, were overconfident. They were champing at the bit for Kaye to return so that the thing could be set in motion and the victory won. Indeed, over the next few minutes, he felt once more that Jeremy Siddleham thought the thing would be as easy as a mouse-hunt. He could not wait, it seemed, to march out in pomp, find Marlowe, and behead him on the spot. For Swift, that begged many questions.

  “The trouble as I see it, sir,” he said, “is that we lack knowledge of their whereabouts, these renegades. All very well to push out westward with ‘musket, fife and drum’ as the song has it, but how do we locate them? Marlowe ain’t going to sit and wait for us, is he? He ain’t going to come out of the woodland and form up in battle lines for us to run at and destroy? I mean, for God’s sake, sir – how do we come down on him?”

  Siddleham made light of it.

  “There are ways,” he said. “These niggers are not subtle men, sir, are they? We will go in pomp and panoply, with uniforms and drums, and like children they will come out of the bushes to see the passing show. We can push them, if we need to, right to the far shore. We can push them off the cliffs into the sea.”

  “Do we have no spies, though?” asked Swift. He did not wish to denigrate, so he kept his feelings tightly penned. “I am sure you have it right, sir, but we do not have much time at our command. At the very least, remember, the French fleet might appear on the horizon, it is always possible. As a commander, I would be happier to set off in certain knowledge that the quarry won’t elude me.”

  This time his eyes betrayed a certain bleakness, which Siddleham took care to read. He sighed.

  “Aye, Captain Swift,” he said. “’Tis pity that we lack an island network. Our bloodhounds are efficient, and we have white rogues from time to time, turncoats, lovers of the pirate life, but most of them we hang, and some send back to England. There are rumours that the Lamont men are back again, but I cannot think it true. They were Scotch, the filthy scum of Aberdeen, who escaped the gallows by the merest thread and would never dare to sneak back here again. Fine spies, though. As well as being rapists, thieves and murderers.”

  “Ah, Caledonia,” said Swift, in genuine disgust. “’Fore God, Siddleham, we are beset by races much inferior, ’tis not the blacks alone that bear the mark of Cain.”

  He sighed.

  “Nonetheless, if we have no proper spies, we must make best use of the men we have, I cannot impress too much our need for solid information. We are not hunting mice, sir, we are hunting a deep dyed villain who is reputed as a warrior. You spoke of bribes, so can I take the liberty to exhort you? Speak to your fellow gentlemen, speak with a purpose. The expenditure of some few guineas, I believe, would pay back its weight in something worth more than just mere gold. I must leave it up to you.”

  The hard eyes bored into those of Siddleham, who did not quail. Which heartened Swift most mightily. This man, he felt, was one that he could trust.

  *

  The Lamonts, at the abandoned stockade, did not waste time luxuriating in their new-found estate. Almost before the Jacqueline was finally disappeared they had satisfied themselves there was no trace of treasure left behind, then began to organise the men, both black and white, into those who knew about deep diving and those who did not. Thompson and Mick Carver retained their positions as masters, with Timba as their jewel, and Chattel was given the task by his “mannie,” Dod, of selecting and testing out the new young men they’d persuaded to join them from the hinterland on their journey to the Biter bay. He also knew the location of the hidden canoe, and the best water-springs, and he played his cards with notable success. Wee Dod still treated him with brute disdain, but made it clear Chattel was a cut above the others and must be seen as such. This meant a cut above some of the white men also; and when Seth Pond objected, Dod beat him insensible with his pistol-butt. Chattel became part of the inner circle in some small respects. He was a good man for their purposes, the Scots believed. That was enough.

  Chattel, the canoe recovered, selected men to build a raft like the one they’d used before (which the Jacquelines had destroyed), and others to trap animals, gather fruit and plants, and set up cooking places. While this went on he took men out two-by-two with Timba to get a diving crew. Among the lumber left by the English in the stockade was rope, pig iron and some spikes. A salvage captain could have scarcely asked for more.

  Five men were chosen to be the divers, all young, all small, all black. Two had English names, two West Coast African, and one – Scrap – that may have been a dog’s or a description. Before nightfall they had reached the sunken deck, and by an hour after dawn next day had brought some silver up. The Scots took the plunder into the inner fortress, and when, some hours later round the night-time fire Chris Thompson asked them where the Santa treasure was, the stuff they’d sailed away with when the Spanish ship was scuttled, they laughed. It was spirited away.

  Another thing that convinced them of Chattel’s worth was his continued lack of interest in the value of the stuff brought to the surface.

  “We stay out in the woods, see?” he said. “No sugar fields is paradise for us. We hunt, sell flesh to white man, we visit womans in the woman towns, they fuck and feed us, raise up all our kid. All you white man got is hunger for him gold. All you fun is kill him nigger man. We don’t want you kill us, so we be you friend. We dive for you. We bring him treasure up. If Navy come we go fight them ’long o’ you – or run, depend on if them winning.”

  Three bearded faces stared at him. Chattel looked calmly back.

  “It good to be part of you strong force,” he said. “It fun to rob and steal and kill him planter man and rape him wife and bakra-missy. And when you win all treasure and go move along, we fellow stay in woods. Why you think we want move?”

  Wee Dod got off his log and walked up close to Chattel, and Chattel did not flinch or shift his gaze. He was unafraid.

  “Ye’ll dae fer me,” said Dod. “I’m yer mannie, ken? An’ ye’re ma loon.”

  They smiled. They understood.

  *

  The Worm was at the tiller as they sailed across the Biter bay heading for Port Royal. Lieutenants Holt and Bentley were asleep, peaceful on the bottombo
ards, and the old black man was dozing, but keeping course as ancient sailors will. The breeze was on his larboard cheek, and if it moved across his neck as the gig slid off her heading, his inexorable hand brought her gently back. The night was black, the air was sweet as milk, the world was all serene.

  In any way, there was nothing to be seen that would have drawn the Worm’s attention. The fires on shore were down, the men were all asleep, even the lookouts. The gig, what’s more, was a long way out, because there were headlands to avoid. The bay, to all intents, was empty. The gig, and three-man crew, sailed gently on.

  Chapter Thirty

  Slack Dickie, when the Jacqueline dropped hook in Kingston harbour, was still as drunk as he had been on leaving Biter Bay, and John Gunning was as sober as a judge. At first the people had found it amusing and endearing to see their slack-mouthed skipper slouching round the quarterdeck, but it had palled. One drunk in high position was enough, and his inebriation was of a different order from London Jack’s wild bouts – he was damned miserable. Far from feeling pity, the people felt embarrassment and shame when Kaye, as Gunning told it to Ashdown and Bosun Taylor later, “took to mewling like some sort of lovesick maid or shepherd swain.” The strangest thing, and most deeply scandalous, was that the loss of Marianne Siddleham was no more the major focus of his misery.

  “It is Black Bob he seems to mourn,” said Jack, as the three of them shared coffee in the silent, scented darkness on the night that they had slipped their mooring. “I helped him to his berth to save him rotting on the deck like some longshore loafer, and he damn near told me so. You’d have thought the Scotch had ate the little neger the way Slack Dick went on. He was babbling that we should have never let him go, that Sam Holt was some sort of heartless bastard who deserved a wicked fate.”

  “Christ,” said Bosun Taylor. “Did I come into it? It was me and Mr Holt that done the deed, in fact!”

  Gunning laughed.

  “I told you he was arseholes-under. You never got a mention, Jem. You ain’t an officer, you see? You don’t impinge upon a gentleman like Dick!”

  “Did he not mention Mistress Siddleham, though?” put in Ashdown, in his soft Irish voice. “By gob, I was in the stockade when he got the news of her that day, and you’d have thought he might be going to die there on the spot to join her. I saw him push a bottle down his neck and suck it nearly dry.”

  “He did,” said Gunning. “Mr Black’s very best, it was – or put another way, Pure Pusser’s Piss. But he seemed to love the woman right enough back then. Though I must report Lieutenant Bentley damn nearly blubbed as well, and he’s hot for the Spithead lass. Christ, men are foolish, so we are.”

  “I can’t see Bentley blubbering,” Ashdown said. “He’s not a soft-one, is he?”

  Jem Taylor grunted.

  “Like blazing buggery he is,” he said. “I’ve seen him slap down Toms Hugg and Tilley side-by-side together in the times gone by. Now they was lovebirds in their own sweet way, till Tommy Tee swapped spit with a mosquito, but no one said they wasn’t men, did they? Not if they wanted to keep on breathing God’s fresh air.”

  “Aye,” mused Gunning. “And Tom Aitch is wed now, ain’t he? To Black Nell, and she’s a woman, far as you can tell. Well I know she is, for I’ve rolled with her meself, although you needn’t tell him that, if you please! The point is, friends, Captain Dickie Kaye is maybe lost. And any port’s the watchword ain’t it, in a storm?”

  They watched Kaye keenly in the ensuing days, and Ashdown and Taylor grew increasingly disturbed. Slack Dickie was a man of very many faults, who could not be trusted as far as one could sneeze, and for an officer drink was a great disaster. For his people, too, if he should mistake a lee shore for a sheltered refuge in a hurricane. Dickie, in the normal run, was Dickie: to be tolerated, amused by, or in worst-case cursed and moaned about. But this new Dickie was some sort of stranger; a stranger they would give nothing to, and sympathy least of all.

  One thing they would give though – they had to, it was in the nature of their trade – was loyalty. When Swift’s gig ranged up alongside back in Kingston harbour, with Dickie white and unsteady despite hot coffee by the gallon, you’d have thought he was the Pope for pomp and dignity. Swift clambered up, was piped by men so clean and neat it hurt them, and greeted first by London Jack, in white shirt and dark blue coat as smart as if he’d taken King’s commission. He begged Swift’s pardon for the captain in advance because, he said, he had become the victim of some tropical distemper, and Swift, a brave man but not incautious, thus stayed far enough off Kaye to avoid the fumes of wine and brandy exhaling from his pores and pallid lips. He passed on greetings from his noble father, and hinted broadly that their private business on the island had been set in train already; they must talk. As the main stow started, Swift was rowed ashore, and Slack Dickie went to bed; without a bottle. Gunning was his guard.

  Kaye was struggling, there was no doubt of that, and a lesser man than London Jack – now sworn once more to never touch a drop – would not have kept him off the liquor. But when Bentley and Holt came alongside the sleeping Jacqueline in their gig one early dawn, he was awake and sober, and staring at the deckhead. They offered a report, and he listened listlessly. It boiled down to this: they had found the maid, they had talked to the renegade, and they believed that all of them were innocent of the recent massacre. They wished to know if he accepted their assessment, but Captain Kaye did not care to reach any conclusion. Miss Siddleham was dead, that much he did know. And little Bob was lost to him, as well.

  One thing, however, did flicker in his interest.

  “You met offshore, you say? But could you find this man again, this Marlowe man? Your Uncle Swift is –”

  “No sir,” said Holt, “I doubt we could. That is why they rowed out from the shore to us, I guess. The Worm – our black sailor, sir, remember? – our Worm took us to an area he thought the rogues would be keeping overlooked, and so it proved. We saw no beach or landing there at all, but Marlowe sailed off from somewhere; a hidden cove maybe. Maybe even a cave – the rocks are a honeycomb, it’s true. Sadly, if we want to speak to Mr Marlowe in the future, he will have to find us out, not vice versa. It is a hider’s paradise.”

  *

  Next time Kaye met Captain Swift he was stone sober, but his mood was still weak and yonderly. He had gone ashore escorted, discreetly, by London Jack, with the purpose of meeting the Siddlehams. They had had more time to achieve composure now, they had had the funeral, the support of all their friends and fellows through the worst of times, but they all still put on a show of manly grief, even Joseph, despite his careless age. Kaye cried frankly, and Jeremy and Jonathan dabbed their eyes with lawn. But his shuddering was soon embarrassing, and Kaye became aware of it. He wondered if his grief were natural, in fact, and became almost lost in his confusion. Marianne’s austere and haughty face – beloved, truly – kept merging with Black Bob’s. As touched with misery, indeed, but far more…beautiful. Suddenly, Dick Kaye was dying for a drink.

  Gunning took him off from the Siddlehams’, on their hired mules, before the decanters did the rounds, on “press of urgent business.” It was by pre-arrangement, and the business was to be with Swift, in a quiet corner of the Navy Offices. Swift had been picking Shearing’s brains, and let him know a portion of the concern he felt about striking off into the interior without a guarantee that they would come up with the “enemy.” Shearing, naturally, had agreed with Swift that it was difficult – as he had earlier agreed with the planters that it was…well, not too difficult. When Swift had challenged him on this, Shearing had smiled his easy, easy smile.

  “I have to live here, Captain,” he said. “If I do not back them in their expeditions, my position is untenable. And I expect that you, and they, will find some ‘Afric hordes’ to fall upon, even if not this Marlowe man himself, if he does indeed exist. You’ve heard of ‘Nanny’? A mythic creature, said to be a woman, revered and loved by all the foolish island s
avages despite the fact that no one’s ever seen her. And thus as real as you or I. Or, indeed, as Mr Marlowe. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  Swift thought such sophistry unbecoming in a Navy man.

  “Word games are one thing, sir,” he said, “but I must do the fighting. For you, and them, and His Majesty the King. I take it hard indeed I have no intelligence, as I will be deploying several hundred men. If they do not fall through force of rebel arms they’ll die of the vile diseases on this filthy island, in some probability. I take it hard that I must strike out blind.”

  Shearing removed all traces of his smile.

  “Aye indeed,” he said. “It is unfortunate. But people have died, sir. Important people. Rich young ladies. The world is full of savages, and it is our duty to destroy and cleanse them. In Jamaica young men come back with black men’s heads strung from their saddles, and claim a bounty. It is paid to make the world a better place. It is paid to spread morality, and the Word of God. We are Christians, sir. We behave as such.”

  It was at this point that Richard Kaye stepped into the office, and shortly, with the room cleared and fresh drinks ordered, Swift checked his pallor for signs of infectivity, clasped his hand, and gave him warmest greetings from his father. He asked after his current health (better, much better Kaye replied, remembering what London Jack had bid him say), and how he had been “succeeding in his quest.”

  This threw Kaye considerably, because for the life of him he could not imagine what the quest might be. The secret treasure that Swift should not even know about? The march into the west? The hunting of the English whore? The recovery from his loss of Marianne? He was saved by a quiet tapping on the door and the entry of a tall black man in servants’ livery. He had brandy and wine, and a jug of lime and other juices, mixed up with soft brown sugar. Gunning had said quite brutally that he must avoid strong drink at any cost, and Slack Dickie wavered for all of half a moment. He saw Marianne gazing at him, and Black Bob’s face melding into hers. He accepted brandy and conveyed it to his trembling lips. Swift, not noticing, not interested, took a glass of wine, and did not touch it.