'Swine,' muttered the fellow next to Matt, a plantation overseer from St. Kitts. 'By Christ, I'd like to meet him one dark night outside Basseterre.'
'There's a dream,' Matt agreed. 'But only a dream, Davis. If the froggies don't get us be sure we'll die of exhaustion.'
'Avast there,' bellowed Arbuckle. 'Cease talking. Fall out that man.'
They waited at the head of the companionway, staring stonily in front of themselves. This much they had learned, even in the few days they had been on board. But whether on instructions from aft, or whether it was merely because he carried himself differently to the other pressed men, Matt was marked.
'You there, Hilton,' Arbuckle snapped. 'You spoke. Don't lie to me, man. What did you say?'
Matt gazed at him. By heaven, he thought, but Davis is right; if I happen to survive this miserable adventure, I'll go looking for you.
'Speak up,' roared Arbuckle, his rope flailing the air, the knotted end catching Matt on the shoulder. Instinctively his fists came up, but Davis held his arm.
'You'd be mad, Mr. Hilton.'
'Mutiny,' Arbuckle shouted. 'To me, the watch.'
Matt allowed his arms to drop, and stood still, panting for breath, feeling the breeze playing around his head, feeling curiously weak in the belly.
'What is the trouble, Mr. Arbuckle?' asked Mr. Hill, returning from aft.
'This fellow, sir,' Arbuckle panted. 'Talking he was, sir, and when I took him to task, making ready to strike me.'
'Yet he had more sense, I observe,' the lieutenant remarked.
'Aye, for the time,' Arbuckle grumbled. 'Tis the man Hilton, Mr. Hill. A trouble-maker from the beginning.'
'Ah,' Hill agreed. 'With ideas above his station. Come man, what did you have to say?'
Matt sighed. ‘I remarked that if the French did not kill us, his lordship certainly would, sir.1
'Gad, sir,' Hill said. 'You'd criticize your betters?'
'I doubt there is such an animal on board this vessel, Mr. Hill,' Matt declared, his anger finally breaking through his fear.
'Gad, sir,' Hill said. 'Gad.' His face turned purple and he seemed almost to lose the power of speech.
'What is that man complaining about, Mr. Hill?' Captain Symonds had descended from the poop, unnoticed in the altercation.
'Gad, sir,' Hill said again. 'He is a regular sea lawyer, sir. A born trouble-maker.'
'As I observed even while he was on the beach at Orange Town,' Symonds agreed.' 'Tis clear to me he needs a dose of naval discipline. Twelve lashes, Mr. Arbuckle, and have it done immediately.'
Matt stared at him in utter horror, mingled with total consternation. 'You ... you cannot flog me,' he protested. 'My name is Matthew Hilton.'
Symonds gazed at him in turn, brows drawn together over icy eyes. 'Make that fifteen lashes, Mr. Arbuckle,' he said. 'For addressing me uninvited.'
He turned on his heel and went for the ladder to the poop. Where Rodney waited. Rodney. Matt stared at the admiral, willing him to take notice, and indeed he was watching the proceedings on the deck. Then willing him to interfere. Sufficient to take a planter away to fight, and perhaps to be killed. To flog him like a common seaman, or a slave ...
But Rodney was not going to interfere, he realized, and the empty feeling was back in his belly as fingers gripped his arms and marched him to the side of the vessel, while behind him the marine drum rippled across the morning to summon the ship's crew to watch punishment, to inform the rest of the fleet of what was taking place.
His shirt was pulled from his back, and the breeze tickled his nipples even as the sun scorched his shoulders. He could hear movement now, the shuffling of feet behind him. Many would be grinning and winking; the seamen had little time for the impressed planters and overseers in any event, and for Matt Hilton least time of all. He resisted the temptation to turn his head, just as he resisted the temptation to shout out that this could not be happening, that one could not flog a Hilton, that with a wave of his hand he could buy this entire crew as indentured labour, that he could, within a few years, personally impeach George Rodney before the House of Commons. That would all be futile now, and make him a more contemptible figure than ever.
But to resist those temptations he must refuse to acknowledge that he was here at all. He discovered his eyes open, and staring at the sea, and then the cloud capped peak of Mount Pelee, dominating the skyline. The fleet was past Dominica, and abeam of Martinique. Martinique, they had been told, was the West Indian home of the French fleet. The harbour of Fort Royal was too strongly defended to be assaulted by sea, but surely the French, having shared the honours With Hood and Graves off the Chesapeake, would be willing to take on Rodney? Surely, as they reached to the south, they would see the topmasts and then the filling sails as the French came out to do battle, and his punishment would be forgotten in the general beat to quarters.
But it would not happen soon enough. He was suddenly aware of having had all the breath torn from his lungs; the pain did not penetrate for nearly a second afterwards, then, as his mouth sagged open in shocked horror, the second blow-fell, and this he heard, and felt, at the moment of impact. His body stiffened, and his thighs and belly slapped against the gunwale, while again he was afflicted by a paralysing shortage of breath.
Martinique had disappeared in a mist of tears. But so had the sea and even the sun, and the gentle thrumming of the wind and the sloughing of the waves past the hull. The morning was dominated by the drum roll, which was back in his ears. Think, he screamed at himself. Think, or scream aloud. He thought of Sue, shapelessly and formlessly. A white body dangled in front of him, purest, finest damask, throbbing at tumescent breast and passion-wet at beckoning groin; and there were eyes, a cool, steady blue, staring into his with all the intensity she could summon, willing him to stay firm, to stay sane, to survive until they could meet again, and a mouth, slightly parted, as she would when passion began to creep up her body, revealing a trace of white teeth, a whisper of pink tongue. Oh, Sue, Sue. No doubt she was lost now. For even if he survived this misery and agony, she would have had time to think, to understand the enormity of what they had done.
Besides, had she not said, that when he left her, it would be forever?
Oh, Sue, Sue. But the body was gone, whisked away by the spreading pain, by the filthy dampness of his breeches, for he had no more control of his muscles than of his mind, and hung by his wrists, banging the gunwale with every roll of the ship. He was being flogged like a slave, until he would be unable to think, unable to do more than feel, blindly to obey any command for fear of another session with the lash.
Like a slave. So then, should he not be thinking of another body, another face, another smile? Oh, Christ in heaven. He had scarce thought of Gislane for months. Robert had accomplished all he had set out to do, even if in a manner he could not have forseen. But Gislane. Gislane. How often had she been suspended like this, to have the flesh torn from her back. Had she screamed, as he so wanted to scream? Had she hated those who stood around her, as he hated Rodney and all his scum? But Gislane's hatred would have extended onwards and outwards. For she would have waited, with slowly gathering despair, for the coming of the man who had sworn to love her, and would therefore rescue her from her tormentors. And as the days had become weeks, and the weeks had become months, then would her hope have turned to hate.
And she had been no more than twenty miles away, all of that time, a constant lurking despair in the recesses of his own mind which had driven him the more urgendy to the arms of Suzanne.
He was conscious of his body slowly slipping down the gunwale, until he knelt on the deck. They had released his wrists. He crouched, head resting against the wood, and sobbed. And was aware of people standing around him.
'Up lad,' said Mr. Arbuckle, the harshness gone from his voice. 'You'll walk away from fifteen lashes, lad. You must.'
Matt breathed, slowly and carefully, aware of a growing sensation of the purest agony, which was somehow
dissociated from his mind, and yet dominated it, and his every movement.
'Up lad,' Arbuckle said again.
Wearily he gripped the rail and pulled himself to his feet, and Arbuckle nodded, and pointed with his chin. 'You'll salute the poop.'
Matt turned, and faced the quarterdeck, and raised his right hand. Christ that I held a pistol, he thought. An endlessly loaded pistol with which I could fire again and again and again at their laughing faces. Except that none of the faces were laughing, or even smiling. Punishment was a serious business, at sea. The salute was returned, and Arbucklc was taking his arm, to face him forward. He moved over the deck, trying not to stumble, no longer aware of the tears which still streamed down his face. Men parted before him, and there were hands to assist him down the ladder.
'Easy, lad,' they said. No contempt now. He had taken his punishment without a word, and he was one of them. A tired member of the lower deck. He was in the lantern-lit gloom of the gun deck, and there were other hands eager to stretch him on his face, and smooth hair from his face, wash the blood from his cuts, hold him down as they tenderly applied salt to burn away any infection. His head was pillowed on a woman's lap, and another wiped his brow. None of the women had paid him the least attention when first he had come aboard. They belonged to the tars, to the men who had proved their manhood and their ability time and again, not to a boy who could do no more than protest. But now he belonged. Now he was one of the slaves.
'Three minutes,' Mr. Arbuckle said, closing his watch with a snap. 'Now there is a very good time. And all a waste of time, indeed. Fall out, lads, and take a breather.'
He was almost a friend, now, and like them, he doubted the reason for their existence. The fleet lay at anchor in Gros Islets Bay, at the north end of St. Lucia, sheltering behind the bulk of Pigeon Island, an accumulation of brilliant floating fortresses, their yellow-hulls punctuated by the rows of red gunports, come to rest in a tropical paradise, surrounded by mountains to the south and east, gazing at the empty sea to the west and north, scorched by the sun all day, cooled by the breeze in the evening, while the varnish peeled from the topsides and the tar bubbled in the seams, and the guns had to be cooled with gallons of water less they become too hot to touch.
Here they were, and here they stayed, in apparently timeless patience, waiting. Yet the ocean was not entirely empty. There were frigates out there, ceaselessly patrolling, ceaselessly watching de Grasse. For he was out there too, not twenty miles away, securely tucked away in Fort Royal. He had come, behind them, and stolen to safety while they had searched for him south of St. Vincent, ranging past the Grenadines in angry impotence. Nor had he come empty-handed, for on the way he had seized St. Kitts and placed a French garrison on the grim ramparts of Brimstone Hill which had first been fortified by old Tom Warner. What had Dirk and Suzanne thought of that, as they had watched it happen from Statia; or Gislane, from the mountain peak of Nevis? Matt could think these things now. He had lost the capacity for tears, lost the capacity for feeling. He worked, and he drank his ration of Tenerife wine, and he chewed his salted pork and his tooth cracking biscuit, with their complements of molasses and pickled cabbage, an innovation, like the wine instead of watered rum, of Dr. Blane, the fleet surgeon, which, however grumbled at by the old tarpaulins, had kept the crews wondrously free of sickness. He rolled dice and listened to the reminiscences of the jack tars, and he polished his cannon and trained his leather-hard feet to carry powder up and down, up and down, until he thought he could do it in his sleep. And he waited. Like everyone else on board this fleet. Like them, he presumed himself in purgatory, which would end, no one knew when. De Grasse had accomplished enough for glory this year, and was safely to port. He could afford to laugh, and enjoy himself; sometimes, when the wind shifted northerly, they almost thought they could hear the sound of music and laughter drifting towards them across the channel. Then they played their own fiddles and endeavoured to strike up a dance, but there was little enough laughter.
Even the common seamen were aware of the dismal times on which their country, and their navy, had fallen. Hood and Graves between them had not been able to save the army from the disgrace of Yorktown; some said the two admirals had quarrelled, others that it was simply because the British navy was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Hood on his own had outmanoeuvred de Grasse off Basseterre, brilliantly excluding the French from the roadstead while occupying it himself. The English could still work their vessels better than the frogs. But having proved his seamanship, he had been unable to do more than sail away. The French were masters of Brimstone Hill, and that one fortress, the Gibraltar of the West Indies, they call it, could defy an entire line of battleships. Hood's squadron of the red lay closest to the sea, now, and licked their wounds in angry disappointment. Often enough, when the boats' crews went ashore for water and fresh vegetables, the men from the main fleet and the men from the van encountered each other, and jeering became open hostility, which ended in fisticuffs and some unfortunates being triced up in the rigging to have their backs sliced to shreds.
Oh, they were slaves all right, slaves to the Articles of War, and through them, to the will of the captain of each ship, and through them, ultimately to the will of George Bridges Rodney, that distant and aloof figure they only saw sitting in his wicker chair, his right leg propped on a stool to relieve the agonies of his gout. He was the planter, the captains and officers his overseers, and the seamen the nameless mass who lay beyond their commands and their decisions. So perhaps, Matt thought, remembering how Sue had said that a spell as a clerk would benefit every planter, a spell on the lower deck of a man-of-war would also benefit every planter. But to think about Sue would be to make purgatory unbearable.
So then, think about slavery. He polished the gun barrel and gazed beyond the port at the green-clad slopes of St. Lucia. God alone knew whether he would ever be able to order a flogging after this voyage. But then, God alone knew whether he would survive this voyage. God, and Rodney.
Always his thoughts and his surreptitious glance came back to the distant figure. The admiral sat there now, beneath a tarpaulin rigged up from the rail to the mizzenmast to shade him somewhat from the sun. And he read his correspondence. There had been a great deal of it since the fleet had anchored here, and none of it calculated to improve the great man's temper. No doubt he had critics enough, who wondered why he had not been in command at St. Kitts, and who wondered by what real authority he had confiscated all the vast wealth of St. Eustatius and indeed, what had happened to it, or, if they truly suspected that much lay in the holds of this very fleet, what would happen to it were the squadron to be defeated in battle or scattered by a hurricane. The month was April, in the year of our Lord 1782, and in June, only two months away, the first signs of bad weather would start to appear in the sky. Then, the word was on the lower deck, they would sail for home, as was Rodney's custom, to refit and replenish their stores, and avoid the tempests, returning to the West Indies in October.
And then, he had thought, and they had laughed, divining his very mind. 'You're dreaming, Matthew, lad,' they said. 'Do you think any of us are allowed ashore? The girls now, they go, and come back. And if we're lucky bring some fresh blood, eh lass?'
How much more of a slave could one be than that? And to be confined on board a warship when anchored just off the English shore, for four months ... but he was confined on board a warship when anchored off the shore of St. Lucia, where he would be sure to find friends who would help him. And he was neither going mad nor attempting to swim to safety. Because he was a coward? Or because he feared that Rodney would merely march a file of marines behind him and further reduce him in manhood and indeed humanity.
So then, what did Rodney think of his seamen? Or did he think of them at all? Matthew Hilton had never thought of his slaves at all, with rare exceptions of house servants like Maurice, Robert's butler, or Thomas Arthur, who had held a similar position at Green Grove. But the very names, Maurice and Thomas
Arthur, dictated by the mood of the Hilton of the moment, had been a contemptuous non-recognition of them as individuals. As for the rest, they were no more than a mass, on whose broad backs rested the prosperity of the plantations. Just as Rodney, if he thought of his seamen at all, must recognize that if he ever caught up with the French, on their speed and ability and training would rest his ultimate victory. His task was to maintain that speed and training and ability at its maximum efficiency, much, no doubt, as he sharpened his sword, and if some of the blade was worn away every time he applied it to the whetstone, well, perhaps this was all to the good, as the steel left behind would be the more pure.
But could it possibly be God's will that any human beings should be so used? And indeed, where in the immense vault of heaven was it decided who was going to be born a planter and who a common seaman?
Dangerous thoughts, for the heir to a planting empire. But even more dangerous thoughts for a common seaman. Should Arbuckle even suspect a tenth of what was roaming about his brain he would find himself once again at the end of a cat-o'-nine-tails. He raised his head, and watched the shore once again, and the boat which had just left it and was returning towards the flagship. The morning's mail, more letters to irritate the admiral. And a flutter of skirts sheltering beneath a broad-brimmed hat; this was common enough. The officers were often invited ashore by the planters of St. Lucia, to alleviate their boredom, and they were always happy to entertain the ladies in turn, to rum punch beneath the awning on the quarterdeck.
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