On a Making Tide

by David Donachie

  Money did come, enough to pay for Emma’s keep, but not her schooling and no information either as to how Mary Lyon had earned it. Grandma Kidd was quick to kill off any speculation, as though Emma couldn’t help but notice how the whole family, who had boasted often of her mother’s good fortune, fell silent now, given to mumbling responses rather than clear answers when their neighbours made enquiries.

  The news that her mother was coming home ‘to sort matters out for Emma’s future’ induced mixed feelings. Emma’s sense of attachment to both Hawarden and her nan, the pleasure she took in the tasks she now performed, made her unsure if she wanted anything to be different. Yet the other half of her reasoning engaged with her innate sense of adventure: the little voice that insisted that change was best. What worried her was the kind of transformation her mother had in mind.

  ‘If she’s not to be put to learnin’,’ insisted Mary Lyon, ‘then she’ll have to be put to something other.’

  ‘Leave the child be,’ hissed Grandma Kidd. ‘She ain’t of an age for toil.’

  ‘I don’t recall you saying that when I was just gone nine.’

  ‘Times alter,’ the old lady barked.

  Anything but school, was Emma’s single thought. Her ear was pressed to the door, not that it needed to be. Like everything in the Steps, windows and roof included, it was a poor fit, a source of fierce draughts in winter. It was no aid to slumber when the men of the house, her father and uncle Willy, decided to stay up late over a jug of grain spirit, waste a candle and their breath, noisily putting to rights the county of Cheshire, as well as King George’s domains. Nor did the door disguise the grunts of copulation between her grandparents, a rare occurrence but never a silent one, which taxed her powers of belief. Now, neither woman was making any effort to keep quiet and Emma’s mother continued in the same hard tone in which she’d made her opening remark.

  ‘It’s a burden to me that is hard to bear, Ma, though I’ll stand it to see her lettered and able to count. But I can’t be paying out good coin just so she can loaf around here.’

  ‘She don’t loaf around. She helps.’

  ‘Do what? Ply coal by the road for a few pennies a day so folk can cook their vittles? Is that to be the lot of my girl, a-squatting there waiting for some bright jay with half torn breeches to come along and catch her fancy?’

  ‘She’s too sharp for that.’

  ‘How come you’re so damn sure, Ma? You fell for my pa in like manner.’

  ‘Am I to be recalled for every sin in my life? That was in times past, an’ we ain’t done so bad neither. The Kidd house owes nowt to nobody.’

  ‘Then how come I’m required to send so much?’

  ‘It be ’cause I’m raising your bairn.’

  ‘All the more reason why it’s got to stop. I saw her when she came in, filthy she were, her hair all matted with the black dust. I could scarce bear to kiss her cheek.’

  ‘If she be that covered in filth,’ Grandma Kidd growled, ‘you’ve no fear for her being taken up by any passing fancy man.’

  ‘Ain’t I? Well, let me tell you I knows more about that than you. As for times, they don’t change when it comes to falling for the wrong blade, and I stand as testimony to that.’

  Ordered to wash and brush her hair, Emma left the door and went to the rickety washstand, the voices fainter but still audible as they continued the argument. It was odd to the girl, who recalled that her mother and her gran had been right friendly at the time she had gone off with Sir John. But there had been more coin around then, enough for ribbons and a new dress. She decided, as she watched the water in the basin turn from clear to dark grey, that she would wear that same dress now, even if it was a mite small for her. The sight of it might cheer her ma, who looked very fine and fancy in what she was wearing, even to the quality of the buckles on her shoes.

  The water was near black by the time she finished, so dirty that she chucked the contents out into the lane at the back of the house and refilled the bowl with what was left. Even that was discoloured when she had finished, testimony to how much of the coal stuck to her on a windy, August day. Yet for all the filth it was a job she enjoyed. There were her regular customers, who used the purchase as much to pass the time of day as to buy fuel for their fire. Naturally, given her age and the way she was growing there were boys around, gawky, spotty fellows in the main, who would guy her as a group and blush to the roots if faced with her on their own.

  Work wasn’t all plain sailing, of course. Some of the women were shrews, and it wasn’t confined to the old crones either. And there were the goats: men who couldn’t look at young girls without thinking themselves beauty enough to be considered swains. Age was little barrier to their fooling themselves. There were those who were old, at least thirty years, all the way up to men who could give years to her grandpa. What they had in common was a sweet tongue and a look in the eye that she now knew too well.

  At first, Emma had taken as friendship their dallying by her handcart. The first untoward hand on her backside had soon disabused her of that notion, and she had to thank her stars for her grandma’s pitch being on such a busy spot, so that even a muted squeal was usually enough to deter the lecher. Failing that a cry of ‘There’s my grandma’ drove them far enough away to restore her safety.

  Sometimes it was true. Grandma Kidd, on the box of her cart with the old nag puffing along, would come in from the coastal marshes with a fresh supply of sea coal heaped in the back. Beach scouring always produced something, and when the wind was right, strong and north-westerly, an abundance of washed up coal.

  By the time she got to brushing her hair, a dampened cloth placed around her shoulders so that the dust dislodged didn’t spread, the heat had gone out of her elder’s argument. She counted the strokes in her head and fell into daydreams of herself on the arm of a handsome fellow, well dressed and about to enter his carriage and four. By a hundred strokes she was in a grand house, with a dark panelled entrance and a stairwell lit by a huge window. And there was always a bed at the end of a long corridor, soft, full of feathers, and because she was so young, it was a bed she occupied alone.

  ‘Two hundred,’ she said aloud, and stood to slip off the dirty dress she was still wearing. Even filthy it was neatly folded, as it was required for the morrow. No point in wearing something clean that would get just as dirty. With no smalls or petticoats on underneath, she stood naked for a second, looking down at the spreading nipples and hint of breasts she had sprouted these last weeks, and below them the first signs of silky hair between her legs. None of the other girls her age were, as yet, anything more than children, still squealing like infants when they played. Emma knew she had left them behind, and the thought was pleasing.

  The scraping noise alerted her to two things: that she should have pulled the shutters before disrobing and that she wasn’t the only one looking at her body. Fighting back the temptation to glance round at the window, she went to the chest by the far wall that contained her dress and bent to open it. Part of her mind told her she should be outraged, that she should scream blue murder and have these peepers taken up. Yet another part of her took a delicious thrill in being watched.

  Emma reckoned she knew who it was. Tom Meehan and Bart Higgins: two of the most tenacious of her workplace admirers, neither much more than two years older than herself. They thought she had no idea they followed her home, but Emma knew all right, and that gave her pleasure too.

  The smell of mothballs filled her nostrils as she shook out the blue dress and slipped it carefully over her head. Only then did she spin round sharply, quick enough to catch a glimpse of a pair of disappearing, becapped heads. Then, in a loud voice, as she tied her ribbons and finished her hair, she sang a song she had heard in the market, standing outside the Red Bull Inn, that she knew would increase the discomfort of her peeping Toms.

  They took old Cain to ’Merica, cause his crimes were manifest,

  There weren’t not one of his neighbours, wh
o’d swear he weren’t a pest,

  Some were wont to hang him, and from a gibbet swing,

  Yet others swore a gibbet’s too fine, a sill is just the thing,

  For Cain he was peeper, who spied on spouse and maid

  So they packed him off to foreign parts, a trussed and bonded slave …

  There were several more verses, which saw the peeper tarred and feathered, whipped, pilloried and finally blinded, but the scrabbling sound that came through the ill-fitting window made the continuation of the ditty unnecessary. That made Emma glow even more and, with a final look in her little glass, she went through to the parlour to greet her mother properly.

  The pair sat on either side of the fire, her mother smiling and straight-backed in a low cut dress of fine green silk, her brown eyes alight. Nan was frowning and shaking her head, muttering to herself in a way that alarmed Emma. It seemed that while she had been brushing her hair, decisions had been taken.

  ‘Well, Emma,’ Mary Lyon said, her voice confident. ‘What do you say to a chance to enter household service? We shall find you a good family and a nice establishment, and maybe you can get back to your books.’

  Her mother carried on, talking about rising in the household or maybe becoming a governess, if she could apply herself to learning, none of which did anything to cheer her grandmother. Emma wasn’t sure if she should be pleased or upset, the only idea in her mind that wherever she ended up might be more comfortable than the Steps.

  ‘What kind of bed does a girl get in service?’ she asked, breaking into her mother’s flow of assurances.

  Mary Lyon’s eyebrows, pencilled to twice their normal size, went up in surprise. ‘Whatever do you mean, girl?’

  ‘Might they be allowed a feather mattress?’

  ‘I’ve no desire to accord my nephew favours, Mr Fonthill. But neither do I wish to see him expire before he ever gets sight of salt water.’

  ‘I’ve done what I can, sir, short of undermining Dobree or Mrs Killannan.’

  Maurice Suckling knew that there were things he wasn’t being told. Fonthill couldn’t be in ignorance of the true nature of events, even if he chose not to intervene. His nephew was engaged in a feud, the root cause of which he refused to divulge. Childless himself, Suckling was unaware that he was facing a perfectly normal parental dilemma. While demanding honest answers, he had to admire the way these were refused. Whatever punishment Nelson was being subjected to had to be suffered without recourse to either outside authority or family connection.

  ‘Things can’t go on like this,’ said Suckling, with a hint of a groan. ‘My arm aches from wielding that damned birch sapling. I’ve belaboured more haunches this past week than I have in the whole of my last commission.’

  Fonthill didn’t reply, there being little he could say. There was nothing wrong with the Captain fetching a relative aboard, plenty of officers favoured their own, and though those sons and nephews often faced a torrid time in the mid’s berth, it usually died down when they learnt their place. Certainly there was bullying, and quite probably thievery in the article of food. Drinking was commonplace, and after life in a conventional home the shock of joining such a place was terrifying. But service life was harsh, a lesson that a midshipman best grasp as soon as possible.

  ‘Will there be anything else, sir? asked Fonthill, after a short pause.

  Suckling glared at him. ‘Send my nephew to me.’

  Nelson wasn’t winning his private battle, but neither was he losing. His reasons for fighting were simple: to prove to a group that must already have guessed the background to the conflict that he was more of a man than any of them. The berth had been split asunder for weeks now. The pups, led by him, now openly challenged the oldsters, with Dobree and Mrs Killannan trying and failing to hold the ring. Nelson was proud of his party, each willing to take what retribution was meted out to them rather than succumb to what he termed ‘arbitrary power’. He was fond of reminding them that they were trueborn Englishmen, using words recalled from his mother’s litany to raise them when spirits flagged.

  Most of the day was spent in the carpenter’s walk. In a vessel at anchor inspections of the hull were infrequent. This was the quietest part of the ship, with a number of entrances and exits should danger threaten. They would go nowhere alone, lest the older boys waylay them – but that applied equally to their tormentors. Makepeace had certainly received a drubbing for ignoring that constraint, his howls of pain deeply satisfying as the smallest mids belaboured him with ropes’ ends while the remainder held him down. But the chief target was Rivers, who now bore a bandage on his head so that he couldn’t wear a hat. A typical bully, he never went anywhere unattended.

  Foley, the bravest of Nelson’s companions who had been left as lookout, popped his head through the narrow hatchway that led to the orlop deck, his eyes bright, his long thin nose twitching as if he smelt danger.

  ‘Premier’s looking for you, Nelson. He’s sent a marine.’

  Nelson shot out of the hatch, looked left and right to make sure it was safe, and scooted for the companionway, yelling in response to the marine calling his name. Fonthill was on the quarterdeck, pacing back and forth with a black look, the full force of which was turned on the Captain’s nephew as he appeared. He hated the lack of discipline. With the crew it would have been easy – a few men fetched up at the grating was enough to quell whatever ardent spirits had got out of control.

  But with the so-called ‘young gentlemen’ it was different: the traces of interest were deep, and Captain Maurice Suckling would not share them with him. That made the imposition of discipline more complex, since in chastising them, he had only a limited idea of how they stood in terms of his own commander’s career.

  ‘It is not my habit to be kept waiting, Mr Nelson,’ Fonthill snapped, ‘and I am sweetness and light compared with the Captain.’

  ‘Sir!’ Nelson replied, as he slipped past the premier, to his uncle’s cabin, trying to adjust his hat and coat to make himself look presentable. His attire was one thing, his face quite another.

  The original bruises had long since faded. As he stood before his uncle, the boy was unaware that there was a look in his eye that had been absent the first time they had met. It wasn’t defiance, though it had a trace of that, more an expression hinting at the kind of confidence that bordered on insolence. It was obvious enough to rile his uncle.

  ‘There is a smugness about you, young man, which is unbecoming,’ he snapped. ‘You seem to have some trouble understanding your station, and not just in my cabin.’

  The expression disappeared, to be replaced by one of concern, as the Captain continued. ‘I am going to breach the grounds of strict convention and speak to you as a father would. I have no idea what caused such mayhem below decks, all I know is that it is so. It also seems as though no amount of chastisement with a crop will clap a stopper on it. This I subscribe entirely to your presence and behaviour.’

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘Silence! I asked you the first day I came aboard to tell me why you were in such a bruised condition. You chose not to answer. I have an abiding hope that you feel your honour would be impugned if you did so, since it would grieve me even to suspect a hint of arrogance.’

  Suckling paused, and his nephew stiffened at the increased scrutiny. He knew his uncle was trying to discern, from his reaction, whether what he had just said was true. If he had found the answer he gave no indication of it. ‘On my last visit to Norfolk, your father informed me that the word honour means something to you. Yet I must warn you against too strict an affection for it. It leads to trouble and, what’s more, it makes the proper maintenance of discipline impossible. Half the courts martial in the service are caused by wounded pride.’ A sudden change of subject caught Nelson off guard. ‘What do you know of the laws of the Navy?’

  ‘Not as much as I should, sir.’

  That was the only reply to such a general question, though the thought of what it might presage was unmis
takable.

  ‘Quite. Do you, for instance, know that I am forbidden by statute to take you to sea before you have reached the age of fourteen?’ Nelson tried to keep his face a mask, but he knew he was failing, and could almost feel his shoulders drop in anticipation of what would come next. ‘There is also a general feeling that the armament that has led to my command of this vessel may come to nothing.’

  ‘The Spaniards have backed down?’ Nelson asked, his voice cracked.

  ‘They are inclining that way.’ Suckling picked up a piece of folded parchment. Even broken, the thick seal that had held it was imposing. ‘Raisonable is to be paid off and laid up in ordinary, and I have here an order transferring me to another ship, a seventy-four.’

  ‘Congratulations, Uncle,’ the boy responded, weakly.

  ‘I am to take over Triumph forthwith. Naturally I am allowed to take my own people with me, and that includes midshipmen and my servants.’

  The youngster’s eyes had locked on his uncle’s, and his mind was working furiously. What, if anything, was he being offered?

  ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that we are likely to remain at anchor. Triumph is a guardship. There will be no action, nor are you likely to enjoy any sea-going experience. And the plain fact is, young man, that such a situation will never do.’

  Suckling sat down abruptly, and signalled his nephew to do likewise. As he continued Nelson noticed that his tone was noticeably softer.

  ‘I took you aboard for several reasons. Certainly I wished to please your father, but there was the memory of my sister, your dear mother.’