by Carla Kelly
His eyes on the much sharper-looking marine guard that accompanied Captain Ogilvie, the Captivity’s corporal took the chits, saluted and scurried below deck.
“Seven minutes,” Able said under his breath. “Let us hope Captain Faulke isn’t constipated and sitting in the head. Ah, no, here he is,” he finished in French.
Captain Faulke probably had too much power in his little kingdom of misery and suffering, Able decided, especially when he started to argue with Captain Ogilvie about being disturbed at his dinner.
He was starting to wave his arms about, and order Captain Ogilvie to just leave the damned escapees when Building Eleven blew. The night sky lit up with one bright orange ball of fire, and another. The sound hurt Able’s ears.
There you are, Monsieur Spymaster, whoever you are, he thought, with a combination of relief and satisfaction. Orange flowers to blossom on the wharf, even if it is the wrong building.
Since everyone’s attention on deck was riveted to the shore, Able and Jean both slipped out of their rope ties. Captain Ogilvie nodded to his sergeant, who smoothly stuffed a gag in Captain Faulke’s mouth while his corporal roped him tight.
The Captivity’s guards had rushed to the railing, gesturing and jabbering. They didn’t even notice when two more of Ogilvie’s Marines looped another rope around Faulke’s pudgy legs and neatly lowered him over the side to the remaining Marines in the cutter bobbing below.
Not losing a moment, Jean ran to the companionway that led to the hold. Able followed, alert, wondering when the hulk’s guards would notice their pathetic captain was gone. Maybe they wouldn’t notice at all, and assume he had gone back to his quarters, protesting done and his dinner waiting.
At the companionway, Jean turned suddenly and shoved Able back. “I’m doing this alone,” he said. “You don’t know what Claude Pascal looks like and I do.”
“You need help,” Able replied, and pushed against the Frenchman. “We’re wasting time.”
“Trust me,” Jean said.
Do I? Able asked himself in instant alarm. His doubt must have registered on his face. Without a word, Jean Hubert, lieutenant and man who had given his parole as a gentleman, smashed his cudgel against Able’s temple. Even the voices in his brain stopped, stunned, as he dropped to the deck.
— Chapter Forty-four —
He will never forgive me, Jean thought, as he ran down the too-familiar steps into the hold, where his former friends and shipmates had all crammed close to the portholes on the side closest to the still-distant docks. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to be part of a sober-looking delegation who had to tell Meridee Six that her man was dead and their son fatherless.
Bien sûr, I will probably be dead, too, Jean reminded himself. If he couldn’t extricate Claude Pascal, protected by his collection of thugs who bullied the weaker prisoners, he could at least get close enough to stab the man before they murdered him in turn. Able didn’t need a fate like that.
He had forgotten the dim fug of the hold, the air murky and barely breathable. The stench made his eyes water. How did I live here for nearly two years, he asked himself in dismay. And how are my countrymen managing?
“Don’t think these things,” he muttered under his breath. He lowered his cudgel and edged closer to the crowd of prisoners, grateful now for the vile fog, because he stood out from them, well-fed and healthy, his hair thick again and nicely trimmed, because Mrs. Perry was a surprising barber.
The way the deck slanted, he knew all eight hundred prisoners on all three levels were watching the spectacular blaze from their tiny portholes with the iron bars.
“Jean? Lieutenant Hubert? Est-ce vous?”
He turned around slowly, fearing that his enterprise was about to end before it began. Maybe he shouldn’t have clubbed Able Six. His sigh of relief was heartfelt and unheard, thanks to the chatter of voices by the portholes. Jacques Rien crouched close to him, Jacques, his signalman.
“Oui, c’est moi.”
Jacques looked worse than before, his hair nearly all fallen out from malnutrition except for a few straggly clumps, his arms skeletal. He had the same grin, though, if minus a few more teeth. The fire still burned within.
“Claude said you were dead, but I thought you must have escaped.”
“And you need to come with me,” Jean whispered. “I have an idea you would prove yourself useful.”
“To the English? Sorry, Jean, but no.”
“To a boys’ school. Follow me if you want, but don’t hinder me now. We have to relieve the world of Claude Pascal,” Jean said.
Two pats on his back and a little push forward told him that Jacques was no enemy, no matter what he decided to do about Jean’s impulsive offer. And if Able ever forgives me for what I just did to him, he thought.
It wasn’t hard to move closer and closer. Jean had more strength than most of the unfortunate wraiths chattering excitedly and he shouldered them aside easily. He heard snatches of conversation, as the prisoners wondered what this might mean for them. Had Napoleon landed French troops on England’s shores? Was the end of their endless captivity near?
With Jacques Rien behind him, Jean finally stood next to Claude Pascal, traitor to his own and in league with the captain now trussed neatly and waiting in a Royal Navy cutter on the hulk’s starboard side. And was he more? Had his deeper game included terrorism in English seaports? If that was so, should he, Jean Hubert, Frenchman, stop Pascal?
Suddenly undecided, he watched the shore, squinting to see the house two doors down from St. Brendan’s. Hopeful and fearful, too, he wondered if Walter Cornwall and the Marines had followed through and cleaned out the nest of conspirators so Nick Bonfort, small Gunwharf Rat with a mighty heart, could send his message.
And there it was: “Mission accomplished. What now?” Jean held his breath. A godless man, he prayed to the Omnipotent Almighty that there was no code and Pascal would not be suspicious.
“Ah bien,” Pascal said. He laughed, and flashed his own returning signal as Jean tightened his grip on his cudgel.
But wait. Look. Could it be? From another house two or three doors from the conspirators’ den came another signal. Shocked, Jean watched, then leaned back to inquire of his own signalman, the faithful Jacques Rien. “What do you read?” he asked.
“Drydock Two on what day?” Jacques whispered.
Claude Pascal flashed an answering signal as Jean the atheist prayed again that Nick and the other boys were alert enough to write down these flashes, too. Good God, how many plants were there along the shore? With or without Claude Pascal in tow, he had to get out of the hold alive to alert Able. Jean scanned the shoreline and to his relief saw no more pinpoints of answering light from land-based signals.
He had to act. If he survived, there would be time later to ask himself when he had turned from his own revolutionary cause to the British, and their response to Napoleon’s determination to rule the world for France. He knew there was no woman involved, and no guarantees for himself. As he wavered, Jean Hubert remembered the kindness of his rescue. He remembered his friends and little students, who had already labored their young lives under more handicaps than ever burdened him. He was a man of the world. When the war finally exhausted itself, he would get on. Maybe someday he could return to France. If not, he would manage.
“Jacques, I am going to club Pascal and grab him. Do or do not help me, but do not hinder me,” he whispered. “I am still your commander and that is an order.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The fire in Building Eleven had died down and the men cramming the few portholes were starting to drift back to their hammocks. So much enthusiasm had exhausted them.
In silence, he slammed the cudgel against that demon Pascal’s head and grabbed him around the neck when he screamed and struggled.
Oh hurry, hurry, he told hims
elf as he started dragging Pascal toward the companionway. His bare feet slipped on the deck, slimy with human waste from prisoners with not enough strength to get to the foul buckets, but he stood up and forged ahead in the semi darkness.
The man was no lightweight. Jean knew Pascal had been eating better, if not at Captain Faulk’s table, then someplace where starving prisoners couldn’t see him. Pascal clawed at Jean’s arm, and tried to regain his footing.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Jacques Rien exclaimed. The signalman snatched the cudgel from Jean’s hand and slammed it down on Pascal’s knee, with a satisfying crunch. “You have troubled us enough.”
As the two of them dragged the screaming Claude Pascal to the companionway, Pascal’s thugs and toadies muscled their way through the crowd of prisoners staring as if mesmerized by the odd scene before them. Starvation had rendered them slow of thought and they milled helplessly.
Jean’s head jerked back as fingers in his hair yanked hard and threw him sideways. He clung to Pascal, trying to turn him to use him as a shield against the kicks and blows that rained down on him now. With a moan, he heard the faithful Jacques Rien give way.
If I cannot drag you, Pascal, I will kill you, Jean thought, even as he felt a rib crack and the knife drop from his hand.
Sudden sounds of many men in the companionway. Yells and good round English curses. Flashes of light and the smell of gunpowder. Thank merciful heaven that the fingers clawing at his hair let go. He slumped to the deck as others grabbed Pascal. He tried to reach for Jacques Rien, but someone stepped on his arm.
“Oh, beg pardon, you rascal.”
It was Able Six, cutlass in one hand and a bloody bandage around his head. The Marine guard had cleared a path in the hold, with Captain Ogilvie shouting in desperately bad French to the now-cowed prisoners, who scrambled to get far away from this unwanted interference, and qui sait? Maybe his dreadful French.
“Capitain Ogilvie needs my French class in the worst way,” Jean said in French to Able, who laughed and helped him up, putting his free arm around Jean’s waist.
Jean swayed but managed to stand by grabbing at the stair railing. They watched as two Marines trussed up Claude Pascal as handily as they had tied Captain Faulke, and rushed the cursing, spitting conspirator up the stairs.
“And what about this man?” Captain Ogilvie toed the silent and crumpled form of Jacques Rien. “Friend or foe of yours, Hubert?”
“Friend. Does he live?”
Ogilvie bent down and placed his hand on the signalman’s heart. “He lives and by God he stinks.”
“Then pick him up and bring him along, too, s’il vous plâit,” Jean said. “If he decides to cooperate, he may prove of more assistance to your cause than I ever could. He is a signalman.”
“And if he does not?” Ogilvie asked, obviously not a man with much of a heart.
“We will think of something else, sir,” Able said firmly.
And that was that. Jean took a last look around the hold, in tears to leave behind brothers in arms. He was still a man with no choice. To stay here would be to die at the hands of disgruntled prisoners, or to perish from starvation and evil treatment, not trusted by the French prisoners or their British captors.
And true to the heart of scavengers and desperate men, someone in the hold would find surely Pascal’s golden horde of English coins from Captain Faulke and figure it out. It was the best Jean could do because a man has to live, no matter how, during a long war.
He and Able helped each other up the companionway. The deck was cleared and tidy. The Captivity’s Marines were already under the firm hand of Ogilvie’s sergeant of Royal Marines. “There will be another captain on board tomorrow,” Ogilvie said as he put a steadying hand on Able. “Mrs. Faulke and her daughter have been informed and are packing.”
Jean remembered. “You need to know this right away. When Pascal was responding to what we know was Nick Bonfort’s signal, I saw other signals from another house two or three doors down from the conspirators’ den.”
“Merciful heaven!” Able exclaimed. “Captain Ogilvie, we need to head for shore handsomely now.”
Moments later they pulled away from the Captivity. Captain Faulke sobbed and gargled behind his gag, and from the smell, must have filled his trousers. Trussed and silenced as well, Claude Pascal glared at the men around him, looking longest at Jean Hubert, who glared back with peace in his heart that no more French prisoners would be sacrificed to further Faulke’s aim for a better berth for himself, and Pascal’s plans for money, land and a fat wife. In the scope of the conflict now playing out on a broad canvas, it wasn’t much, and would certainly never land in the history books. It was enough to know that justice of some sort had prevailed.
Captain Ogilvie’s hastily scribbled note, put in the hands of the fastest runner on the cutter once it docked, was quickly in the hands of the major of Marines. A few crisp orders, and twelve men set off at once to clear out the houses closest to the known conspirator house.
Jacques Rien regained consciousness soon enough to find himself in the capable hands of a Haslar surgeon and his aide, Davey Ten, who grinned at Able Six, then frowned to see the bandage.
“I’m fine, Davey,” Able assured him. “Nothing wrong with me that a good scolding from Mrs. Six won’t cure.”
“Mam does that, doesn’t she?” Davey asked.
“No surer sign that all of us Gunwharf Rats are loved,” Able said. “Go tend with your surgeon now. We’ll talk soon enough.”
Captain Ogilvie promptly vetoed any suggestion that Jean and Able walk back to St. Brendan’s. Once arriving there, he also vetoed Able’s request to continue down the row to the fourth house, where Marines had lined up six more conspirators. “I’ll keep Lieutenant Hubert with me,” the enigmatic Trinity Man said. “We might be needing a translator, eh, Jean?”
“Certainmente, capitain,” Jean said. “All you Englishmen think you need to do for a Frenchman to understand English is to speak louder and slower. Zut alors, I hear them now!”
He craned his neck painfully to look back down the quiet street, where Gunwharf Rats poured from St. Brendan’s and the Six house across the street. Mrs. Perry and the Bartlebys stood close by, ever protective. Was that Walter Cornwall holding little Betsy MacGregor so tight? Meridee Six had already wrapped her arms around her husband, the most fortunate Able Six, even if he was a bastard and too smart for anyone’s own good.
Jean Hubert – artist, adventurer, prisoner, seaman, and now man without a country – smiled in the dark. He knew he would come about soon enough, whether the war lasted another ten months or ten years.
— Chapter Forty-five —
Classes were suspended at St. Brendan’s the next day because no one could think about scholarship, not after such a night. Just as well; Able’s head ached abominably where his friend Jean Hubert had clubbed him. The pain was rendered more bearable because Mrs. Six cuddled close to him, cried a bit, scolded, but cuddled more.
He felt well enough to at least sit up in bed – Jean’s wallop had necessitated a few stitches – but he had made no objection to wallowing about in the comfort of his bedroom, Meri close by with Ben, and various friends trouping through to fill him in on the continuing saga.
John Mark came bouncing in first, holding up his bandaged arm, nearly beside himself with excitement. “Master Six, imagine this! I thought we who were left by the sea wall were going to languish into oblivion…”
Able laughed out loud. “John, you could never languish into oblivion. Tell me, were you wounded in a fleet action? Is there going to be a respectable scar?”
“I hope so,” the little fellow declared, as Meri turned away to laugh. “Seriously, Mam, would you want to be stuck at the sea wall where nothing was happening?”
“I am certain I would not,” she said. “You found adventur
e?”
“Gor, did we ever! Captain Ogilvie directed us to help surround and take the other house two doors down from the first one. I was tripped on the stairs by a real scoundrel with a dagger! Whack, whack, five sutures. Isn’t that simply famous?”
Able held up a placating hand. “John, you need to learn something about the ladies.” He reconsidered quickly, because he dearly loved to tease Mrs. Six. “Well, perhaps not. They like to see those scars, too, but only after they have healed.” I will never tell anyone how much Mrs. Six likes that scar on my knee, he reminded himself. A wink in the general direction of his wife made her blush, because she knew him pretty well, scars and all.
Ahem, moving right along. “John Mark, you will be the envy of nations tomorrow when school resumes,” Able assured him. “Just don’t pick at your scar and infect it.”
“No, Master Six. Davey Ten already told me how to take care of it.” His eyes grew wide again. “Davey even stitched me!”
Later that afternoon, Ben was dozing between Able’s legs on his bed when Nick Bonfort came in, quieter and more serious, because that was Nick. Jean Hubert, sporting his own bandage, leaned against the doorframe, regarded Nick with some pride.
“Come closer, Nick,” Able said. “In fact, you can sit with me. Ben is gone to another world right now and you won’t wake him.”
“Is this one of those times when I can call you Da?” Nick asked.
“It is,” Able told him, and swallowed down the lump in his throat. “I hear from Smitty and all concerned that you were calm in the face of real danger in that house.”
“Da, I wish we could have saved Mrs. Grundy and her son,” he said, his face clouding over, because Nick was a tender child.
“That is war,” Able said. Smitty had stopped by earlier to tell him that the conspirators had killed the old woman and her feeble-minded son that morning, to prevent any interference, in preparation to leave the house and destroy Building Twelve at dusk.
