by M. C. Muir
‘Belay your hurry, boy’ Oliver called.
‘Captain,’ Tommy cried, ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t see you coming out.’
Oliver looked at the lad and immediately glanced down to his hand. The linen bandages had gone and the hand was completely healed – minus a little finger.
‘I see you sport a hand almost like mine,’ the captain said, holding out his clawed finger and thumb. ‘Be careful. You now have the mark of a sailor who has seen action, and the colour of skin to boot. Beware if the Press is about.’
‘I will, and thank you, sir. I’d never have sailed if it weren’t for you.’
Oliver smiled. ‘Have you signed again?’
‘No, Captain. No disrespect, but I promised me ma that I’d find me a ship and I’d make me some money before I returned.’
‘And is that where you are heading now? Home?’
‘Aye, Capt’n. I’m not sure how I’ll get there, but even if I have to walk, I’ll manage it.’
‘Did you know the mail coach leaves daily from this very spot? But I think you have not been allocated all your prize money yet.’
‘Not yet, but I collected my wages from Perpetual, and I got fifteen shillings prize money from the ship Mr Hazzlewood delivered to Kingston. I reckon the navy will hold anything else that’s due to me till later.’
‘Indeed they will.’
‘But I’ll be back. I promise, and I’ll bring my brother with me.’
‘Then I wish you good luck, young man.’
‘Thank you, Capt’n,’ Tommy said. ‘And the same to you.’
* * *
ADMIRALTY ORDERS
by M. C. Muir
The Oliver Quintrell Trilogy
Book 3
PROLOGUE
1804
In the palpable dankness of the graveyard, the gentleman’s features were hidden beneath the broad rim of a felt hat. Only the satin ribbon on his powdered queue was visible. From his shoulders, a dark velvet cloak fell to his knees but when the moon emerged from between the clouds, the white silk stockings accentuating his shapely calves glowed as did the silver buckles on his shoes.
Standing next to him was a much younger man - bareheaded, with an anxious expression on his face. His fingers were locked tightly together preventing his hands from shaking. Two shabbily dressed men, armed with the tools of their trade, padded along the path ahead of them.
‘Which one is it?’ the taller fellow asked.
His accomplice, skinny as a barge-pole, stinking of ale and stale tobacco smoke, walked on slowly peering into the shadows before kicking the toe of his boot into a mound of newly dug earth.
‘This one ’ere,’ he said.
Dropping to his knees, he removed the stones that decorated the grave and placed them aside, carefully replicating their positions.
‘Don’t dilly-dally,’ the gentleman in the cloak advised, his cultured voice low but demanding.
There was no response, save for the crack of a twig snapped underfoot and the breeze whistling the Lord’s vengeance through the treetops.
Digging with wooden spades and heaping the soil neatly into a small pile, the men ignored the rustling in the bushes. A fox or badger making its nocturnal rounds. Having repeated the ritual many times, the sack-’em-up men were not distracted. They knew exactly where to dig and how much dirt to remove before they would strike the head of the coffin.
After scraping the loose earth from it, one of the resurrectionists cracked the lid open with a single blow. Then, with an iron bar, he prised up the splintered timbers ignoring the smell of death released into the night air.
Standing with his legs apart over the hole, the taller of the pair reached under the cadaver’s torso whilst his assistant took a firm grip around the head. With a single fluid movement, they slid the body upwards and out of the casket and deposited it onto the grass. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, the shroud, which had cocooned it, was stripped away. This was returned to the coffin and the body rolled up in a length of canvas.
During the theft, which took but a few minutes, not a word was exchanged between the two exhumators. As soon as the job was finished, the grave was quickly returned to its previous appearance. The remnants of the coffin lid were replaced. The soil shovelled back. The stones, which had decorated the mound returned to their original positions. Finally, a handful of leaves, pulled from the nearest bush, were sprinkled over the gravesite leaving no obvious trace a robbery had taken place.
With one man carrying the tools and the other with the corpse balanced over his shoulder, the pair headed for their cart hidden in the bushes beyond the cemetery wall. By the time they reached it, foul fluid was oozing from the fetid body saturating the grave robber’s hands and clothes. But with no knowledge of the spectre of death carried in such matter, the man was unconcerned.
The pair might have been half-drunk, half-stupid or half-mad, but they were savvy enough to know there was a ready market for the product of their labours. Although fresh cadavers were preferred, corpses in any state of decomposition were always needed and no questions were ever asked. Payment was made on delivery and prices were guaranteed. Ten pounds for full-grown adults. A lesser amount for children. Babies and still-borns paid by the inch with a handsome bonus for a woman carrying a dead infant inside her. All-in-all, the resurrectionists made a tidy living. Their latest stiff was the result of another successful night’s work.
As for the two observers, their experiences of the event were quite different. For the well-spoken gentleman cloaked in velvet, the retrieval had been performed cleanly. The cadaver appeared fresh and he was well satisfied with the outcome. Apart from that, watching a theft taking place always provided a frisson of morbid excitement even though he had witnessed it several times before.
For the younger man, however, the desecration of the grave, the disturbance of the dead and the stripping of the body were abhorrent acts. He dared not allow himself to dwell on the dire consequences should he be discovered there. With his conscience tearing at his throat, heart and stomach, his only concern was to get out of the graveyard as quickly as possible.
CHAPTER 1
Portsmouth Harbour
4 August 1804
‘Captain coming aboard. Side boys! Bosun’s mates, look lively now.’
The call brought an instant flurry of activity on deck. Topmen slid down the shrouds, idlers hurried up from the waist, whilst those already on deck shuffled into the semblance of lines amidships. The two dozen marines who appeared from different parts of the ship made a better presentation, though their stature was less uniform than the dress they were wearing.
‘Hats off! Silence!’ The voice of the youngest midshipman quivered both through lack of confidence and the fact his voice had only recently broken. As if in response to the dull thuds when the bow of the captain’s boat bumped against the frigate’s hull, a cacophony of drumming sounds commenced in the hold. In contrast to his usual placid expression, a frown of frustration creased the face of the first lieutenant who headed the line of officers waiting to greet the captain on his return.
The high-pitched peep of the pipes carried across the waters of Portsmouth Harbour and, when the unmelodious tune penetrated the bowels of the ship, the banging rose as if in accompaniment.
Stepping onto the deck, Oliver Quintrell stopped momentarily and raised his hat respectfully to His Majesty’s frigate, Perpetual, the vessel he had commanded for over a year. After casting a glance forward, aft and aloft, he inclined his head and listened.
‘Welcome aboard, Captain,’ Simon Parry said.
‘Has the ship suffered a mischief during my absence? Is the carpenter working below?’
‘No, sir. I have a group of pressed men confined in the hold. I can only assume they got wind of your arrival.’
‘I trust you will attend to it, Mr Parry.’
‘Yes, sir, immediately.’
‘I will speak with you in my cabin fifteen minutes from now. In t
he meantime, I do not wish to be disturbed.’
‘Aye aye, Captain.’
With the hammering noises reverberating along the ship’s timbers, Oliver Quintrell headed below.
Mr Parry thought nothing the brevity of the conversation. He had expected nothing less. However, the senseless banging from the hold was something he had not anticipated. He glanced at the level of sand in the half-hour glass. It had only recently been turned.
‘Mr Tully, go below and put an end to that din. And tell whoever is responsible that if the noise does not cease, every man jack of them will be flogged.’
The second lieutenant knuckled his forehead in the style of a common sailor. Although he wore an officer’s uniform, many years before the mast had left Ben Tully with old habits.
‘Mr Gibb, deliver the captain’s dunnage to Casson, his steward. Mr Nightingale, attend to the boat. I think it will not be needed again.’
With the larboard watch on duty, the sailors of the starboard watch, the waisters and idlers returned below. Climbing the ratlines, the bosun and his mate returned to the pots hanging in the rigging and continued working aloft. On the weather deck, after cursing the men for walking on the sail he was working on, the sailmaker resumed his job with palm and needle, inserting a patch of canvas into an already heavily patched topmast staysail.
As the noise from below suddenly stopped, the caulkers took up the beat, hammering teased oakum into the seams that had opened in the deck beams permitting water to leak through to the wardroom.
There was no wind. Not even a breath of breeze. Wood smoke from the fire hearth in the galley hovered above the chimney before floating slowly up to the yards and evaporating. The smell of beef and onions, boiling in iron pots, drifted from the forward companionway.
Satisfied his orders were being followed, the first lieutenant strode along the deck observing the scene that had met the captain’s return. Aloft, Perpetual’s square sails were neatly furled to the yards, the main and mizzen staysails secured like flaccid members alongside the masts, and the jibs were folded in concertina fashion and lashed to the bowsprit. Only the mizzen was set, but it showed no inclination to move. With the frigate hanging off its anchor on a tide that had lost its sense of direction, the vessel was as still as if the ship was sitting on the stocks in dry dock.
For the past few hours, the lieutenant had observed the Portsmouth pound fill slowly with the incoming tide. He had watched the flood from the Solent slip gradually across the banks of sand engulfing Portsmouth Harbour and refloating the boats and victuallers’ barges settled in the Gosport mud. For Simon Parry, the rising tide was as insidious here as it was off the Kent coast. Seawater slowly drowning the treacherous Goodwin Sands was a sight he could never forget.
Higher up the harbour, towards the mouth of the Porchester River, the great hulks of war-wearied fighting ships, stripped of their pride and raiments, stood in single file, their rotting keels gripped by the mud. It was a slowly increasing line of emasculated men-of-war, now inhabited by French prisoners whose numbers had been increasing every week since the resumption of war. Occasionally another hulk was towed in and added to the line – a damaged British second-rate that had seen one too many battles or a pulverised French prize deemed uneconomical for repair by the Navy Board and of no resale value by the prize agents.
Now some of those stinking hulks provided accommodation for a rapidly growing number of convicts sentenced by the Assizes around the country to transportation to the colonies. And, as America was no longer a viable dumping ground for Britain’s felons, Australia was the prisoners’ likely destination. While signal flags no longer flew from their salt-hardened halyards, the ships were regularly decorated with a mismatched assortment of bed-sheets and clothing. Apparently today was washday.
Closer at hand was the bustling wharf around the Camber – Portsmouth’s inner waterway where local boats docked – an area where taverns and alehouses, chandlers’ shops and stores outnumbered the houses in the surrounding streets inhabited by seamen, custom officers, fishermen and tradesmen. This area was always busy. It was here Jewish merchants wandered the docks, quick to tempt recently paid-off sailors with gold baubles that were not real gold or pocket-watches that stopped ticking soon after the ship left port, and other useless knick-knacks at exorbitant prices. Harbour doxies, whose painted faces were the same in any port, roamed the Camber hiking the price on their purses for hungry sailors home after months at sea. If they had coins in their pockets, the women weren’t choosy about their clients.
Carts rumbled back and forth on the dockside with the occasional post chaise or coach rolling to a halt, discharging a paying passenger or sea captain or a rich merchant heading to his ship. Toothless old tars, cudding on tasteless tobacco leaves, hobbling on wooden pegs, littered the dockside begging for the opportunity to return to sea. But even the press-gangs ignored them.
Simon Parry checked the sand in the glass. Half of it had slipped through.
‘Come.’ Oliver called, in response to the tap on the door.
‘Welcome aboard, Captain,’ the first officer wished politely, after removing his hat.
‘What was that confounded racket that greeted me?’
‘I apologise. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ Mr Parry said.
‘Tell me about the men you have below.’
‘There are twenty pressed men. All sailors - brought aboard in the early hours of this morning.’
Oliver leaned back in his chair. ‘Please sit, Simon.’
Simon Parry continued. ‘Mr Tully took the gang out last night. I had received news an Indiaman had arrived in Spithead the previous day and paid-off some of its crew, so the gang went to the Northport Gate after midnight and waited for those heading for the
London Road under the cover of darkness. It was not a difficult task. The sailors were easy to identify.’ He paused. ‘I will have them mustered on deck for your inspection, when you see fit.’ Oliver nodded. ‘Have they been fed?’
‘Yes, they have.’
‘And what caused the noise? I trust they are doing no damage.’
‘There appears to be two or three who are not happy with the accommodation and they are stirring up the others. Mr Tully tells me they are using their shoes as hammers.’
‘Then I suggest, if you haven’t done so already, you collect every man’s shoes and stockings and let him go barefoot. Let us see how long they persist with their merry games. Knocking on the hull with swollen toes and bleeding knuckles is unlikely to create too much of a disturbance.’
‘It will be done.’
‘Has the doctor examined them?’
‘The doctor has not yet come aboard.’
‘What! I was advised he would arrive two days ago, while I was in London. Any message from him to explain this tardiness?’
‘No word, sir.’
The captain shook his head. ‘I presume we still have the surgeon’s mate in the cockpit?’
Simon nodded. ‘Abel Longbottom.’
‘Never was a man more inaptly named,’ the captain mused cynically.
‘And I’m afraid the loblolly boy is missing. He appeared to be a reliable fellow, but he never returned from his shore visit so I have entered an ‘R’ against his name.’
Oliver sighed. ‘If Longbottom is all we have in the sick berth, then pray to God we meet no serious action on this coming cruise.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Apart from the cockpit, is everything else in order? I trust the rest of the hands are all come aboard and the women returned to the dock.’
The lieutenant acknowledged, ‘All is as it should be.’
‘Thank you, Simon.’
Without knocking, the steward poked his head around the cabin door. ‘Coffee now, Capt’n?’
‘Thank you, Casson. That will be most welcome,’ Oliver removed his coat and loosened the buttons on his waistcoat.
‘How was your journey to London?’ Simon asked.
‘As tedious as ever,�
�� Oliver replied. ‘I dislike it more intensely every time I make it. The coach was uncomfortable and overcrowded with four passengers perched on top with the luggage. The
London Road is either a quagmire or the wheel ruts are baked hard as navy tack, and it seems to make little difference what season of the year it is. The only noticeable changes are the colours of the crops in the fields that sail by – unfortunately, they do not sail by fast enough.’ He shook his head. ‘As such, I was not surprised when the coach cast a wheel. Fortunately, no one was injured, but the driver was unable to repair the damage and a replacement had to be found. Despite being less than a few miles from Guildford, the incident delayed us for over three hours and resulted in me reaching
Grosvenor Square well after my sister’s household had retired for the night. Apart from that, as if to break the monotony while we waited, the coach was set upon by an angry mob. Quite an eventful journey, to say the least.’ ‘Footpads? You were robbed or hurt?’
‘Thankfully, no. It was a group of angry villagers seeking the Church sexton who, I learned, had been in the habit of passing word to the London resurrectionists of recent deaths in his parish.’
‘Resurrectionists?’
‘Grave-robbers eager to lift the corpses from newly dug graves. It seems they make a tidy living from the practice. But it is a dangerous occupation. I would not envy the man his fate if the irate relatives of a recently deceased victim ever caught up with him. To be skinned alive would be the least of his worries.’
Oliver sniffed the air when the coffee arrived. ‘Excellent, Casson.’
‘You want something to eat, Capt’n?’
‘Thank you, no. You may leave us.’
Simon put the question tentatively. ‘Might I venture to enquire if your attendance at the Admiralty was fruitful?’
Oliver had been anticipating the question and, knowing his first lieutenant was eager to receive news, he was surprised he had taken so long to ask. He, too, was eager to divulge the information he was permitted to share. ‘Fruitful indeed,’ he said, running his hand across the chart smoothed out on the table in front of him. ‘If all is well and we have a full crew, we sail tomorrow for Gibraltar, with dispatches to deliver on the way.’
