by Seth Hunter
On the morning of the fifth day, she and Louisa were taking the air on deck when a sail was sighted some little distance to the south-west. This appeared to cause some agitation among the officers and crew, and the Captain’s steward shortly came over and advised them to return to their cabin. The approaching vessel was thought to be an Algerine, he confided, and ‘purely as a precaution’, the Captain had determined to run for the port of Masala, some several leagues to the north-west. As the women were ushered below, they saw the guns run out.
They remained in the gloom and stench of the lower deck throughout the ensuing encounter, news of which was conveyed to them by the dull report of cannon fire, initially at some distance but growing increasingly closer. Louisa was now quite fearful, Caterina only slightly less so, though her annoyance far outweighed her apprehension.
‘Idiot,’ she berated the Captain. ‘I’ll give him an Ave Maria. I hope they bend him over one of his precious guns and take turns.’
Certainly the guns did not seem much use for any other purpose. Possibly the ship was heeling too far over for them to bear – a mishap of which her Admiral had warned her during one of his weighty expositions – but for whatever reason they remained silent. The only sounds that carried to the two women were the wails of their fellow passengers, the occasional drumming of feet upon the upper deck, and, of course, the distant guns of the enemy. They became less distant as time went by and finally there was another, sharper report, and the crash of something large and solid hitting the hull. Shortly after, the vessel made a violent lurch and appeared to stop dead in the water.
Caterina climbed irritably to her feet. ‘Be damned to this,’ she said.
Among her possessions that were not stowed out of reach in the hold of the ship was a travelling bag containing a pair of pistols which had been given her by the English Ambassador shortly before his own flight from Venice. Caterina began to load them, ramming home the wadding, powder and shot with the tool provided for this purpose and distributing the required measure of powder into the firing pan.
Louisa observed these preparations with some astonishment.
‘What are you doing?’ she enquired at length.
‘I am doing whatever may be necessary to defend our honour,’ Caterina replied, more to shut her up than anything, for the loading of a pair of pistols required considerable attention.
‘You do not consider that a prayer would help?’ Caterina detected the irony in this remark and was impressed.
‘It would do no harm,’ she conceded, in a similar spirit, ‘if you feel the inclination.’
She cocked each of the pistols in turn and sighted along the barrels. Then she took one in each hand and led the way to the upper deck with Louisa following close behind.
She had reached the top steps when the hatch cover was thrown back and she saw a man staring down at her. His face was bearded and swarthy and he wore a turban. She raised one of the pistols and had the satisfaction of seeing the face withdraw.
Her satisfaction did not last long. There were shouted commands in a foreign tongue and the barrels of several guns appeared over the edge of the hatch. Then she heard a voice she recognised.
‘Whoever you are, you must come on deck – and without your weapons.’ It was the voice of the Captain, though somewhat more subdued than usual. ‘I regret to have to inform you that the ship has been taken.’
Caterina swore an oath.
‘What are we to do?’ Louisa hissed in her ear.
‘There is not much we can do,’ Caterina admitted. ‘Save to make the best bargain that we can.’
She mounted the last few steps of the ladder. In spite of Captain Fry’s instructions, she kept the pistols with her.
To her considerable annoyance, she discovered the deck to be filled with men in beards and turbans, all staring at her and waving an assortment of weaponry. Their vessel was drawn up alongside. It was smaller than the Saratoga but more men lined the rails and clung to the rigging, all similarly attired and armed to the teeth.
Caterina caught the eye of the Saratoga’s Captain. He looked suitably contrite. ‘I am truly sorry,’ he informed her, ‘but to avoid bloodshed I have surrendered the ship. Do please give up your pistols.’
There was another man at his side. Though he wore a turban, his face was fair-skinned and his beard was reddish-blond. Caterina kept her pistols levelled.
‘Kindly inform him, in whatever language he speaks, that I am a nun,’ she told the Captain. ‘A woman of God,’ she added, in case it lost something in the translation. ‘And that I will be treated with respect – or I will blow his brains out.’
The man grinned widely. ‘A nun, is it? Then I am Sinbad the Sailor.’ He turned and said something in a foreign tongue which caused some amusement among his fellows. Then, turning back to Caterina, he told her: ‘I’d be the more inclined to believe ye, lass, if you was to put those irons down and conduct yourself as befits a woman of God.’
Caterina frowned with displeasure, for she was not used to being laughed at.
‘I take it you are English,’ she addressed him sternly. ‘And a renegade.’
‘English be damned,’ said he, ‘and as to t’other, ye may take me for what ye like. Now put them down like a good lass, afore ye do yourself some harm.’
‘Only when I have your assurance,’ she insisted, ‘that we will be treated with respect.’
Ignoring this request but giving a wide berth to her pistols, he peered past her into the shadows below the hatch and reacted with exaggerated astonishment when he saw Louisa peer ing back up at him. ‘Well, damn me for a bampot,’ he declared obscurely, ‘there is another of them.’ And then, stepping back a pace and bowing low to Caterina, ‘Ye have my word on it, lass. If the word of a renegade has any value to ye.’
Caterina considered for a moment, but in truth she had little choice in the matter. She raised her right hand high into the air and pulled the trigger. The subsequent explosion rather surprised her. She had not been at all sure that she had loaded them properly. She did the same with the other. A little theatrical, admittedly, but then she was still, in her heart, an actress – and besides, she had not been too confident about handing them over fully loaded in case they went off by accident.
When the smoke cleared she saw that the renegade was grinning at her, but now in something more like admiration than mockery. She tossed the empty pistols on the deck. She had made as much of a point as was available to her and was under no illusions that it would make a great deal of difference.
She was in the hands of the Devil – again – and the future would require some very hard bargaining indeed.
Part One
The Prisoner of The Rock
Chapter One
The Black Sheep
The British Mediterranean fleet off Cadiz, 7 July 1797. A Sunday, and the ships were rigged for church, though it was not the chaplains who read the lesson, nor was it from The Book of Common Prayer:
If any person in or belonging to the fleet shall make, or endeavour to make, any mutinous assembly upon any pretence whatsoever, every person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the sentence of the court martial, shall suffer death.
The solemn voice of the Flag Captain rang out across the sluggish waters, and in the silence that followed, other, more distant voices could be heard, as if echoing down the long line of fighting ships.
… shall suffer death … death … death … death.
The Articles of War, as devised by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, left little room for compromise, and as if to emphasise the point, the four corpses hanging from the yardarms of the flagship twisted a little on their ropes to provide a creaking chorus to the sombre lesson from the book of King’s Regulations; the ships gently rising and falling on the slight swell like bobbing gulls, and the men standing grim and silent at their divisions.
The main deck of the flagship was unusually crowded, for the Admiral had ordered that every ship
in the fleet should send two boatloads of seamen to witness the punishment meted out to their former comrades. And so they had. But no one looked at the bodies swinging from the yardarm. As if by common consent, every eye was averted from the bloated and discoloured faces. Instead, the gaze of a thousand men was fixed upon the quarterdeck where the Admiral stood at the side of his Flag Captain with the rest of the ship’s officers in support – and four ranks of red-coated Marines providing a solid wedge of bayonet and muscle between rulers and ruled.
Among the officers stood a man wearing the uniform of a Post-Captain. It was an ill-fitting uniform, for it had been borrowed for the occasion from one of slighter build, and this, together with certain other of his features, gave him an air of slightly awkward individuality. He was a month short of his twenty-ninth birthday but looked younger – younger than many of the lieutenants and even some of the midshipmen aboard the flagship. His hair was dark and his countenance more swarthy than was the norm among those honest, red, perspiring English faces: he might have been a Spaniard or, worse, a Frenchman – a misfortune of which he was more than usually aware at this critical moment in his career.
His name was Peake. Nathaniel Peake. But his friends called him Nathan, and despite his appearance he was an Englishman – or at least half of one on his father’s side – and as loyal a subject of King George, at least in his own estimation, as any man afloat. (He could not speak of those ashore, being but little acquainted with the breed.) Despite the uniform, he was at present without a command: his ship, the Unicorn, having run upon the Rock of Montecristo and foundered with all hands while he was on business ashore – a circumstance which could also be construed as an offence under the Articles of War.
He had been summoned to the flagship for an interview with the Admiral, and while it was unlikely to turn out as badly as it had for the four men swinging at the yardarm, he could not help but consider that the present occasion was not auspicious. Being ashore upon the King’s business should not, in all fairness, be regarded as either wilful or negligent, but there were certain ambiguities, certain subtleties, in the nature of that business which gave the Captain especial cause for con cern. Besides which, he was not overwhelmed by the capacity of a naval court to dispense fairness, or even justice – the recent trial being, in his view, a case in point – and while he had every confidence in the judgement of his fellows when it came to seafaring, he was less sure of their reasoning in the finer points of the law.
As the lesson drew to a close, it was an earlier article that occupied his private thoughts:
If any officer, mariner, soldier, or other person of the fleet, shall give, hold or entertain intelligence to or with any enemy or rebel without leave from the King’s Majesty or his command ing officer, every such person so offending, and being convicted by the sentence of a court martial, shall be punished with death.
The Captain had, during his short career, entertained a great deal of intelligence with the King’s enemies, and though in his opinion he had always had the King’s leave to do so – or at least that of his commanding officers – he was not entirely sure that the present company would see it in quite the same light. Particularly not his present commanding officer, Admiral Sir John Jervis.
Nathan glanced towards this godlike figure as he gazed down upon the ship’s company – as God Himself might gaze down upon His ungrateful Creation, Nathan considered, in the days and centuries following the Fall.
Fanciful though this notion was, it could not be denied that the Admiral was in a most ungenerous mood.
A few months previously, he had presided over the defeat of the Spanish fleet – the fleet presently locked up in Cadiz by the British blockade. Nathan had played his part in this, albeit as a passenger, and was proud to have done so. He was not convinced that it was as great a victory as the British government had subsequently proclaimed – only four Spanish ships in total having struck their colours – but it was an opinion he wisely kept to himself in the present company. Back home, he had been assured, the church bells had been rung from one end of the country to the other in honour of the brave boys in blue, and there had been a mood of popular rejoicing. For a time the Admiral and his men had basked in the approval of Parliament, press and public – a rare concordance. But then Parliament, press and public were united in their hunger for victory, no matter how insubstantial.
There had been precious little to celebrate since the start of the war, back in 1793, when the great powers of Europe had also achieved a rare unity in their bid to crush the forces unleashed by the French Revolution. But Paris had stood; the Revolution had endured. And as the years went by, the tide of war had swung against the monarchists. New French armies – raised by a levée en masse – had stormed across Germany and Northern Italy. The Pope had been forced to pay tribute to keep them out of Rome. The ancient Republic of Venice, mistress of the seas, had been torn apart, the British fleet driven from the Mediterranean. Holland and Spain had even gone so far as to change sides, if only in the hope of claiming a share of the spoils, and even the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna, brother of the murdered Queen Marie Antoinette, was now thought to be seeking a humiliating compromise with the regicides in Paris.
Little wonder that the news of a single naval victory off Cape St Vincent had caused such rejoicing back in England.
But it had not lasted long.
Early that month, news had arrived of a mutiny at Spithead, the home base of the Channel fleet. The brave boys in blue had apparently refused to sail until the Admiralty agreed an improvement in their pay and conditions. The contagion had spread to the North Sea fleet at the Nore, where by all accounts the hands had turned out their officers and refused to join the blockade of the Dutch fleet. Instead they had elected a com mittee of representatives on the French model, imposed their own blockade of London and threatened to sail up the Thames and lay siege to Parliament.
A terrible fear had spread through the commanders at sea. Sir John Jervis had resolved to stamp out the first signs of mutiny as soon as they appeared. And a complaint against excessive punishment had provided him with what he would doubtless consider to be just cause.
Which was why four dead bodies were now swinging from the yardarm of the flagship and the word ‘Death’ echoed down the long line of warships off Cadiz.
The shrill wailing of the boatswain’s pipes signified that proceedings had come to an end. The off-duty watch was dismissed for dinner. The visiting seamen returned to their own ships. The Admiral and his entourage disappeared below.
Having nothing else to do, Nathan tarried on the quarter deck. No one spoke to him. He had begun to suspect he was regarded as something of a pariah, a black sheep. His fellow officers had sympathised with him over the loss of his ship, but being as superstitious as any of the foremast jacks, they no doubt thought that misfortune was catching and wished to avoid too close a contact with a source of infection.
He did not have long to wait. A lieutenant presented the usual respects and begged to inform him that the Admiral would be happy to see him as soon as his duties permitted. The words were a mere courtesy. Bracing himself for the worst, Nathan followed the officer below.
Admiral Jervis was at his desk, its surface entirely covered in papers. He was not alone. His secretary, Benjamin Tucker, was in attendance, and there was another man in civilian dress, unknown to Nathan, who looked upon him keenly as he entered the cabin.
The stern windows were open to the sea but the air was humid and the Admiral’s ruddy countenance was slick with sweat. He had taken off his wig, and what little hair he had was plastered thinly across his scalp. He looked older than he had on the quarterdeck and less imposing, but no more amiable. Nathan had seen a portrait of him in his youth when he had appeared every inch the dashing young officer, but there was little of that dash now. His eyes had shrunken in his skull and grown hooded, and his nose, which had always been large, now appeared more like to a beak than ever, so that Nathan, who may well have bee
n biased, had the impression of a malevolent old buzzard glowering over the corpse of his prey.
When Nathan entered, the Admiral was dictating a note to his secretary. The part that Nathan overheard was in Jervis’s usual forthright style:
‘Furthermore, I am pained to note that all the lieutenants are running to belly. They have been too long at anchor. I have therefore issued a general order to block up the entering ports that they may be obliged to come and go by climbing over the hammocks. I have the honour to be, sir, your most obedient et cetera, et cetera … Ah, Peake, so there you are.’
It was the first time Nathan had engaged with the Admiral at close quarters and he had good reason to feel apprehensive. Jervis was a fierce disciplinarian, famous for treating officers and men with the same harsh severity. Hangings might be uncom mon, but lesser punishments were meted out with a frequency – and a disregard for human dignity – that disturbed not a few of his officers. Just a few days since, he had ordered a young midshipman to be courtmartialled for allowing his boat’s crew to plunder a Spanish fishing vessel. Nathan had no objection to that – the midshipman was entirely out of order – but it was not enough for Jervis that the court had ordered the officer to be deprived of his rank and stripped of his uniform before the whole ship’s company. He had personally intervened to order the man’s head shaved and a notice hung around his neck describing the crime – and then, as a further humiliation, made him solely responsible for cleaning the ship’s privies until further notice.
But he could be extremely generous at times, and was said to be entirely unmoved by rank and privilege. You were as like to suffer a withering rebuke if you were the son of a cowherd or a peer of the realm.
‘Well, sir,’ he growled when Nathan had made his bow, ‘I hope you are not another of these fools who think a rogue should not be hanged upon a Sunday.’
Nathan was well aware that the timing of the execution had aroused further disquiet among the officers. The men had been condemned late on Saturday night and it had been widely anticipated, even by the President of the Court, that their sentence would be deferred until the Monday, out of respect for the Sabbath. The Admiral, however, had begged to differ.
