Fletcher's Fortune

by John Drake

  Unfortunately, today, he was not at all pleased with the person that his eyes beheld. The fellow was a Sea Officer, a Lieutenant by the name of Salisbury, who’d come knocking at the door, claiming to be a friend of the Admiral’s nephew. That, and his uniform, had persuaded the servants to let him in, and had obtained him this interview. But one look at the man persuaded the Admiral that he’d not get in a second time.

  For although Lieutenant Salisbury’s uniform was smart as paint, and although there wasn’t a single grain of dirt anywhere upon him, there was a lank and greasy look about the man himself, that turned the Admiral’s stomach.

  And neither did the Admiral like what the fellow was saying.

  “So, my Lord,” said Salisbury, stooping forward with an oily seriousness, “I had hoped that my close connection with your nephew might lead you to do something to get me employed.”

  “Employed?” snapped the Admiral. “What d’you mean ‘Employed’?”

  “I had hoped that you might influence the Admiralty to give me command of a ship.”

  “But you’ve got a ship, haven’t you? What about this Bullfrog you told me about?”

  Salisbury smiled patiently and tried to explain an affair that caused him no little pain.

  “I’m afraid, my Lord, that there was some trouble in the ship. The unexplained loss at sea of my Bosun, together with certain legal actions on behalf of an apprentice who had been illegally pressed, caused their Lordships of the Admiralty to take away my command.”

  “What?” said the Admiral. “Don’t see why that should be! Men are lost at sea. That’s the way of things. And men get pressed in time of war. Are you telling me that’s the only reason they took your ship from you?” Salisbury looked shiftily round the room and confided in the Admiral.

  “I am afraid, my Lord,” he said, “that there are those at the Admiralty who dislike me personally, and seek only the chance to blight my career.”

  “Huh!” said the Admiral. “Now fancy that! But come to the point, man. What d’you expect from me? I’m damned if I see any reason to help you.”

  “Oh?” said Salisbury. “Are you entirely sure, my Lord? Have I not explained that I am a close friend of your nephew Alexander? Does that mean nothing to you?”

  There was a brief silence. The Admiral frowned and certain thoughts, kept many years at the back of his mind, stirred like the awakening of a nest of spiders.

  Suddenly the Admiral was afraid. He wanted no more of this conversation.

  “I bid you good day, Mr Salisbury!” he said.

  “No, my Lord,” said the other, “that won’t do!”

  “Damn you, sir!” said the Admiral, and reached for the bell to summon the servants.

  “My Lord,” said Salisbury quickly, “your nephew is engaged in a plot to kidnap a man and, I think, to murder him. He forced me into this plot and I, too, am his victim. If I were to make public all that I know of your nephew, I could ruin him. And if you refuse to help me, I will do it.” He paused for breath and looked at the Admiral, frozen with the bell in his hand. Salisbury knew that he had won a point. “So, my Lord,” he sneered, “will you do nothing to help him? Do you care nothing for your family?”

  With those words, Salisbury over-played his hand. The Admiral cared for his family more than Salisbury dreamed. He cared for Sarah, his adored younger sister and he cared for her son Alexander. From her earliest childhood she had captivated the Admiral and she could do no wrong in his eyes. For her, he’d advanced the boy’s career to the limit of his power. Even now, Alexander was at sea only because Harry Bollington owed the Admiral a favour and so had ignored the evil whispers that followed Alexander wherever he went.

  But now, the Admiral’s nose was being rubbed deep into things that he’d striven to keep it out of. He was a rough man who’d lived in a rough world, and this sort of plotting sickened him. But far more was he sickened by finally having to accept that Alexander, for all his courage and skill and seamanship, was rotten to the core. He knew that he must grasp the nettle and cast him off.

  First, however, there was Mr Salisbury’s threat. Admiral Williams rang the bell loudly. Heavy footsteps sounded and his butler entered the room. Now it was Salisbury’s turn to be frozen in anticipation.

  “Lieutenant Salisbury,” said the Admiral, “I’ve heard what you say, and here is my reply. Should you breathe one word of your wicked lies around the town, then I shall use my uttermost influence and spend my last penny piece to see you ruined! I’ll not rest till you starve naked in the gutter.” That said, the Admiral turned to his butler. “Chapman! This gentleman is never to be admitted again to my house. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  “And now, you will apply your boot to his backside as many times as are necessary to see him on his way.”

  “Yes, my Lord,” said the butler, and reached for Lieutenant Salisbury’s collar.

  23

  I suppose I could still have got free of the Navy even then. But I was too curious. I didn’t know what I really was, you see, and here was the possibility that somebody else did! At bottom I was ashamed of what I was. But a conspiracy of Sea Officers was trying to kill me, so I must be something more important than a whore’s bastard, mustn’t I? And there was the little matter of Sammy and Norris saving my life. After that, and in the teeth of my better judgement, I couldn’t look Sammy in the eye and say I was going to run.

  Anyway, I went back to Phiandra, and all the way out to the ship we talked about what was to be done. Sammy said that they should have to take turns guarding my back, and we made a thousand guesses as to who my secret enemy might be.

  But it was all wasted effort for we could none of us imagine who it might be: the Captain? Mr Williams? Mr Seymour? Sammy said they were the finest officers he’d sailed under in thirty years. Or what about Mr Webb, the Master’s mate? He was a Lieutenant in all but name and respected by everyone for his skill as a navigator. And in any case he was a small chap and couldn’t have put up the fight that my attacker had. Similar considerations applied to Mr Haslam and Mr Golding, the Master. They were both of them too old and slow. And even if we did work it out, what could we do? Go to the Captain (assuming he wasn’t the one) with our unproven suspicions? We’d be hanged for mutiny most like. In fact, there were so many ways for an officer to ruin a lower-deck hand that it could be dangerous even to let my enemy know I suspected him. So we went back to our duties quiet as mice and kept the thing to ourselves.

  Everyone was pleased to see us, the other messes duly got their shore leave and Lieutenant Williams drove us and the dockyard people half mad with his eagerness to be at sea again. Fortunately, life on a King’s ship doesn’t encourage pondering and speculation, and I had plenty to keep me busy. For a start, I had to tell the Bosun why we were not, after all, about to sell a cable. But that was no problem. I’ve forgotten what tale I told him, but he swallowed it whole. He was so much under my spell by then that I swear he’d have believed me if I’d said all the dockyard tradesmen had suddenly grown honest and were refusing to buy the King’s property.

  Then, towards the end of June, a much-awaited letter from their Lordships of the Admiralty told Captain Bollington that all his mighty string-pulling had borne fruit. His piratical orders to raid the French coast were reaffirmed. And not only that, but he’d managed to increase the size of his expedition. We were to be accompanied by his nephew, Andrew Bollington, Lieutenant and Commander of the cutter Ladybird, which was ready for sea at Portsmouth.

  Ladybird had the reputation of being an uncommonly fine little ship: a man o’ war in miniature, with eight four-pounder swivels and a pair of carronade twelve-pounders. She was no more than sixty feet long and her crew was thirty men. But she was built for speed with a huge spread of fore-and-aft sail; one of the fastest ships in the Navy. The addition of this nimble vessel would be invaluable for scouting and for catching anything too fast for Phiandra to come up with.

  With his belove
d orders in his hand, Captain Bollington threw all his energies into getting the ship ready for sea. Within a week the work was complete and Phiandra set sail on 5th July with Ladybird following astern. After their fun with the “wives” and their shore leave, Phiandra’s crew were as happy a band of brothers as ever put to sea. That is, of course, with the exception of one unknown maniac pursuing a secret blood-feud, and me, the object of it.

  Given fair winds we should reach the mouth of the river Aron in a week at most and then Captain Bollington’s game would begin in earnest. In the meanwhile, the ship’s eternal cycle of drills went on with even more energy than before. Lieutenant Seymour had us at the great guns even as we were clearing Portsmouth harbour. And there I saw something that set me off on a game of my own and one infinitely more agreeable than the blood and carnage that was awaiting us on the French coast.

  As a Bosun’s mate, my station at general quarters was on the fo’c’sle where four carronade twenty-four-pounders and a file of marines came under the command of the Bosun. Mr Shaw was impressed with my time under Sammy Bone and rated me Captain of number one carronade. Number two crew was entirely made up of Irishmen, led by a merry, handsome fellow by the name of Matthew O’Flaherty. And O’Flaherty had a girl running cartridges for his gun. [Modern readers will be shocked at the suggestion of a woman’s presence aboard a warship on active service, especially since Admiralty regulations specifically forbad this. But there is much evidence of their presence. The memoirs of Mr John Nicol, who served deep in the magazines of Goliath at the battle of the Nile, and thus could see none of the action, state “any information that we got was from the boys and women who carried the powder”, and further “I was much indebted to the gunner’s wife who gave me and her husband a drink of wine now and then”. S.P.] She was small and pale, with jet-black hair and a serious, unsmiling face. For gun-drill she was dressed in seaman’s rig, which suited her very well. In fact she washed all remaining thoughts of Polly Grimshaw clean out of my head. I mentioned this to Sammy later and he warned me off.

  “Very well,” says he. “You can look, but don’t you touch! Her name’s Kate Booth and she’s O’Flaherty’s girl. She took a fancy to him and stayed when all the other girls was turned off.”

  “Well,” says I, with a hungry look in my eyes, “we shall have to see about that!”

  “No!” says Sammy firmly. “Men fight over drink and they fight over money, but that’s nothing to how they fight over women!” He saw the confident grin on my face and shook his head. “Now listen to what I’m telling you, Jacob,” and he spelt it out to me, jabbing his forefinger into me for emphasis. “If it’s over women it don’t matter how big you are. You’d get it in the back one dark night and that’d be that! You’ve already got one mad bugger trying to knife you; d’you want two?”

  “Oh,” said I.

  “Yes!” said Sammy. And there I would have left the matter, but it wouldn’t leave me alone.

  The next day we were at gun-drill again when one of our carronades displayed a particular trick of its species that made gunners like Sammy Bone so wary of them. It was a hot, airless day, with barely enough wind for steerage way and Lieutenant Seymour took advantage of this to practise shooting at a mark: a tub with a spar and a scrap of canvas lashed to it for a flag. This time he picked on the carronade crews, and with the long guns silent and their crews greeting our efforts with derisive cheers, each carronade fired in turn with the ship fifty yards from the target. This was hard, and not what carronades were good at. They were intended for rapid fire, blasting the enemy at a range too close to miss.

  So we sweated and ached and missed and tried again. And the jeering from the gundeck grew louder and the carronades got hotter. Hot guns shoot harder than cold guns, and they recoil harder. Especially carronades do and they don’t recoil like normal guns, which roll back on their trucks. Instead there’s an upper carriage to which the barrel is fixed, and this runs back along an oak slide that’s fastened to the deck by a pivot so the whole thing can be trained from side to side. As with long guns, the recoil is checked by heavy ropes, the breeching tackles.

  On that day, thanks to Mr Seymour’s constant firing, the carronades were now far too hot to touch, and the recoil was frighteningly violent. Perhaps he should have stopped the drill, I don’t know. I’m not the expert that he was. But what happened was sudden and shocking.

  “BOOM!” Number two fired and jerked viciously backwards. The tackles parted like cotton and 1500 pounds of smouldering iron smashed free of the slide and slammed monstrously down on the deck. Matthew O’Flaherty, with the trigger-line still in his fist, was right in the way. When a gardener kills a slug, he puts it on a big stone and smacks another stone down on top. O’Flaherty’s arms and legs were still there, but the rest of him looked like what’s left between the stones, except there was more of it. The slimy innards of his body sizzled and fried under the hot gun.

  There was a silence and everyone on the fo’c’sle gaped in disbelief. Then men were shouting and running along the gangways from the quarterdeck: the Captain, the Lieutenants, and others. For a minute all was confusion: a ship’s boy retched in horror, blood ran round the ruined gun and the colour drained from Lieutenant Seymour’s face. He stood stunned and gaping as the Captain shook him by the shoulders.

  “Fortunes of war!” says the Captain. “As much as if he were slain by the enemy. No blame attaches.” But they were hard men who’d grown up with the sudden disasters of seafaring, so they didn’t spend long in worrying. Soon they had one party hauling the gun clear by tackles rigged to the fore-stay, while another cleaned the deck with mops, water and sand, and the Surgeon’s mates came with buckets to collect something for the Chaplain to say a service over. Finally, Lieutenant Seymour checked the tackles of every gun in the ship and fired a round from each with his own hand.

  And that was the end of Matthew O’Flaherty. His goods were auctioned off by the first Lieutenant and his “body” went over the side with due ceremony. But one of his possessions came to me. At dinner time, as I was sitting with my mates, I felt a touch on my shoulder. I looked round and there was Kate Booth. She looked tiny and pale close to, and quite young. Younger than me, I’d have thought. But she stared me boldly in the eye.

  “Jacob Fletcher?” says she.

  “Yes,” says I.

  “I want to talk to you,” says she. “Come and find me in the hold tonight.” Then she walked off. Everyone followed her with their eyes and then turned to look at me, nudging each other and licking their lips.

  “Huh!” says Sammy, shovelling salt pork into his mouth with his knife. “You’re the one then. It had to be you or Mason, so I’m not surprised.”

  “What?” says I. Sammy chewed hard and swallowed.

  “One woman, 250 men ... she’ll need a protector with the Irishman gone, and she’s picked you. You’ll find she’s got a little nest in the hold, aft of the main magazine.” Briefly he stopped eating and stared at me wistfully. “Stripe me!” says he. “Wish I was you.”

  That night while my mates were in their hammocks I crept off and went on an expedition to the fore-hold.

  There was little light and the place was full of the noises of the ship’s timbers, groaning and wheezing as she rolled through the night towards France. Down here, below the water-line, was a dark, lumpy world of casks and barrels crammed in tight over the ballast, with the stink of the bilge and the squeaking rats for company. The ship’s boys slept down here as well, in such wretched corners as they could find. A few well-aimed kicks soon got rid of them and then I was alone in the dark in as private a place as there could be inside one of King George’s frigates.

  With an intense and growing excitement, I saw what I was after: an oblong shape that glowed in the dark. Against the hull, hidden among the bulk of the ship’s stores, was a little cabin made of canvas and scraps of timber. It was some eight feet long by five feet wide and the yellow light of a lantern dimly threw up the shadow of a f
igure within.

  The figure moved and an end of the canvas tent twitched open. Kate Booth was frowning at me in the gloom. A frosty welcome, but the sight of her sent a shock running through me like the electricity up a telegraph wire.

  “Hmm,” says she, “it’s you. Come in.” So in I scrambled and sat down. There was not much to see inside, only the bare canvas, an old lantern and a few bundles. A piece of an old sail was folded up to make a softer floor to the little space over the assorted objects beneath. “What’s that?” said she, pointing at a bundle I had brought with me. It was a bottle of grog and some food: biscuit, cheese and salt pork. Well, you have to make an occasion of these things, don’t you? And I’d not seen her sit down to eat at supper time, so I thought she might be hungry. I undid the bundle.

  I was right too. She was hungry. She took what I’d brought and set to without a word. But the strange thing was the way she ate: neat as could be, like a lady of quality, with back straight and knees folded beneath her. She even produced a little silver knife to cut the cheese with, and bit of cloth to wipe her mouth.

  I stared at her in wonderment, enjoying the thrill of being here with her, alone in this secret place. She was wearing a man’s shirt and breeches cut to her size and I was fascinated by her great dark eyes and short hair that left the nape of her neck all smooth and naked. Neither of us spoke until she had finished eating.