On a Making Tide

by David Donachie

  The pale damp head, hair plastered to the scalp, shook slowly, the eyes flickering as Mallory told him about the card game and his winnings, as well as the place where he had spent the night. That started a babble of remorse, with more pleas for forgiveness to his Maker and his parents, and an insistence that his condition resulted directly from his sin.

  ‘Hell’s teeth,’ Mallory said, easing him back and bathing his head again. ‘Don’t you go fretting o’er that. What you did were nowt but natural. God wouldn’t have much to concern hisself with if men and women didn’t get together, now, would he? And it strikes me, the way one man dies and another lives, with no rhyme or reason to it, he might be a dab hand with the old dice in that lair of his.’

  The response was a stream of mingled prayers and psalms, snatches of one well-known verse mixed with another, none making any sense. Mallory shouted till one of his shipmates arrived and pulled back the cloth.

  ‘Double up to tell the Captain Mr Nelson’s a-showing signs of coming round.’

  ‘Double up? Who the fuck do you think you are, Mallory? Double up, you order me, and you not even warranted let alone commissioned.’

  Mallory raised his knobbled fist. ‘This be better than either, if you don’t shift your arse.’

  ‘It has been represented to me by the surgeons that for you to remain on this station carries a grave risk.’

  Seated in his dining cabin, Captain Farmer appeared a lot less imposing than he did on the quarterdeck, both in voice and manner more like a slightly forgetful uncle than a Tartar of a commander. He would have described the youngster before him as wasted, with his skin so pallid and his bones so prominent. Only the eyes still had power, which could be laid at the door of his recurring fever.

  ‘Nevertheless, sir I would wish it so.’

  ‘You have been under the burden of this for near a month, Mr Nelson. Every slight improvement brings a fresh bout of debilitation in its wake.’

  ‘With God’s help, I will fully recover.’

  ‘I cannot indulge you, Mr Nelson. Your pleas have swayed me once already, and I feel I have been foolish to comply. It is my natural instinct to support a brave face but in this I have been mistaken.’

  Hardened as he was by his years of command, even George Farmer was touched by the look of loss that swept across the young man’s face. But he knew he must hold firm. He had relented to that look once already, and that in the face of Surgeon Underwood’s contrary advice, only to regret it.

  ‘You must not see it as a stain, young fellow. The log of the ship will show that you made every effort to remain at your duties. No want of character can be attached to your name.’

  Nelson heard the words, but not the sentiments. He was being discharged as unfit for duty, and that before he had even acquired a lieutenant’s commission. Tears pricked his eyes as his thoughts turned to the sins he had committed, and the punishment and retribution that seemed so harsh. Had his transgressions really deserved this?

  ‘HMS Dolphin has orders to sail for England,’ Farmer continued. ‘Captain Pigot has agreed to take you aboard and give you passage home. It is my earnest wish that you are fully recovered when you make that happy return. The service needs men of your stamp, Mr Nelson. God knows they are few enough in number.’

  As Farmer spoke, the young man before him seemed to shrink into a uniform coat that was already too big. It was as though the glue that had held him upright was melting. His look of despair was obvious and Farmer had to look away.

  Horatio Nelson was thinking of death, which at this moment he would have preferred to discharge. Somehow the small panes of the cabin’s casement windows dissolved into the faces of his family, his sisters Susanna, Anne and Catherine smiling sweetly, as they would over a childish misdeed. His brothers’ faces held a look of triumph, as if happy to see their bumptious brother brought low. He shut his eyes rather than gaze on the images of his parents.

  ‘Mallory!’ Farmer called. The able seaman stepped through the door, touching his forehead. ‘Help Mr Nelson back to his sick bed. You will then undertake the packing of his sea chest, Mr Troubridge to assist. Take care that his books and journals are secure in there. He will need them to pass for lieutenant.’

  That one word returned enough strength to Nelson for him to sit upright. He had held out for a month when even the most confident of his shipmates had despaired. He would hold out longer, and show them all that he was the better man, including all those upstarts who would condescend to his parentage and upbringing, wherever they might be. With a peremptory gesture he waved Mallory back, which caused him immediate regret.

  ‘You can do it Mr Nelson, I know you can,’ the sailor said.

  The smile they exchanged heartened him more than any words or terrors he could conjure up. ‘You never gave up on me, did you, Mallory?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be right, your honour, seeing as how you never did for me.’

  Farmer coughed then, since the exchange of affection between the two men threatened to get out of hand. Nelson got to his feet and grasped Mallory’s hand and gave it a vigorous shake. ‘I would take it as an honour, Mallory, if you would count me as your friend, and that you would call upon me when you are next in England.’

  He bowed to a shocked Captain Farmer, and walked stiff-legged out of the cabin. Mallory sniffed loudly, then followed him.

  ‘Not that you’ll get as far as England,’ Farmer said softly, to himself. ‘I wager you won’t even raise the Cape.’

  James Pigot was a fine sailor, as well as a deeply religious man respected by his crew, a group honed over years of service and careful transfers to reflect their captain’s piety. Men addicted to gambling, drinking and pursuits of the flesh had been sent into less scrupulous vessels. Not all those who remained, after three years in the East, had white skin, but the men who replaced those who had died on the commission had their own binding faiths, which Pigot was careful to honour. Thus the Dolphin carried everything from Catholics, through high and low church Anglicans, to freethinking Anabaptists and Hindus.

  Having served with and been a friend to Maurice Suckling as a youngster, he would not suffer to see the nephew confined to a sick bed below decks. Nelson was accommodated in his own coach, off to the side of his great cabin, the care for his health physical and spiritual the personal responsibility of the Captain. Natural daylight came through the casements as well as fresh air. Though his steward administered food for the body, the care of the young man’s spirit was a duty that fell to Pigot. Given the wavering nature of the boy’s illness, in and out of deep fevers that continued to waste an already skeletal body, he veered between sermons on hope and tracts to prepare a troubled soul for the rigours of eternity.

  In lucid moments Pigot and Nelson read psalms together. If he was well enough he was taken out on deck to attend the Sunday service. That was an obligatory gathering for the whole ship’s company, a requirement that could not be laid aside for anything other than danger from battle or the elements. An inspection of the ship, by the Captain, followed before the various elements of the crew were permitted to worship in their own manner. When sick, in a half-comatose state, smitten by another bout of fever, Nelson would lie in his cabin listening to Pigot read his service, his grip on reality often tenuous.

  ‘He has a faith that I fear shames mine.’

  A voice close by was inclined to bring Nelson out of his troubled sleep, and Pigot’s voice was the cause of that now. He knew, even with his eyes closed, that he had again been very ill, so much so that he had lost all track of time. He was too exhausted even to open his eyes, as he heard the purser of HMS Dolphin reply. ‘Either that or a will that bespeaks pride.’

  ‘Never. Remember, I have sat with him. I know he loves his God as much as we do ourselves. Odd that though I never clapped eyes on the boy till he came aboard sick, I have come to esteem him almost as much as if he were my own son.’

  ‘That is a dangerous fancy, Captain Pigot. And if it is true that you feel
so you must steel yourself to the prospect of loss.’

  ‘That I have done already, though I have prayed for a better conclusion.’

  ‘In truth, he should have expired already. The final spasms cannot be long in coming.’

  So I am going to die!

  That notion was not new to Nelson, nor was it wholly unwelcome. Death was a constant, as his father was fond of saying, quoting from Corinthians, ‘As in Adam, all die’, though he would never fail to follow with a message of uplift, like, ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

  Nelson was subject to the contradictions of the very sick; death, and the release from pain, suffering and shame, held a deep attraction; against that, life held out a vision of fame and fortune, of a lieutenant’s commission, of being gazetted as a post captain, then an admiral’s command, manoeuvring great fleets and confounding England’s enemies. There was a beautiful wife, too, and a hoard of smiling children, broad acres to shame his Orford cousins and a great palace, a gift from a grateful nation to rival the Marlborough edifice at Blenheim.

  The tableau vivant of Wolfe, the hero of Québec, the nobility of his death, the fluttering of the flags recurred in his troubled dreams, a great many of which were attended by his mother, albeit a younger vision of her than the one he remembered. Her message varied little in substance, even if he conjured up new wordings. Duty and diligence were the foundations of her refrain.

  She came again now, as he slipped once more into semi-consciousness, wavering between benign concern for a sick child and a hard remonstrance to be about his duty. Anyone still watching him would have seen his lips move, though they would have struggled to hear the whispered words as the boy spoke what he was sure were his mother’s utterances.

  ‘Step back from the gates of the abyss,’ he hissed, unaware that the ship in which he lay turned on to another tack that brought sunlight streaming through the window above his head. He felt the heat on his face as the hand of benign Providence, and through thin eyelids the world was suddenly the colour of bright gold. ‘Let death be stayed so that you can commit yourself to your nation, free to sacrifice your life, if need be, to raise her standard high.’

  He ran the gamut of positive images again: lieutenant, captain, admiral, hero.

  Pigot was on deck now, supervising the weekly running in and out of the guns, which rumbled mightily through the deck timbers and carried the tremor of their passing into the fevered brain sweating in the swaying cot. Visions of a stately mansion dissolved into the flame of battle as, using a private supply of powder, James Pigot set one watch against the other in firing the Dolphin’s great guns.

  The intensity of the golden light increased behind the invalid’s eyelids, concentrating into an ever-narrowing beam, his mother’s face to one side and that of General James Wolfe to the other. His lips moved again in translation of her pleas, which followed immediately on the boom of the second cannon.

  ‘Death will spare you only to a purpose, Nelson.’

  ‘I must be a hero!’ he said out loud, in a cracked voice of enough power to alert Pigot’s steward, who had been preparing a light repast in the pantry and now rushed to the patient’s side.

  The whole ship shuddered at the third shot, which heralded an emphatic ‘Yes!’ from his mother, again evident only on her son’s lips, and not witnessed. But the words that followed were audible and, to a deeply religious man, which Pigot’s steward was, they sounded like portents.

  ‘I see before me a golden orb,’ Nelson said, ‘a light so strong as to burn the soul.’ The steward crossed himself, then leant forward to try to hear the whispered words that followed.

  ‘That is the light of the Lord’s grace, Nelson, which shines upon you calling you forth to greatness.’ The voice deepened. ‘That shall be my destiny.’

  Pigot’s steward didn’t know whether to run or stay, didn’t know if these utterances were the words of the devil or the incantations of angels.

  ‘You will be spared if you accept your fate.’

  The image melted as two of the great guns fired simultaneously. The worried steward placed a cooling cloth across the sweating brow. Beneath it the face carried a smile, beatific to the impressionable observer, the look of a man at peace with his Maker. Fearing he was about to pass over, the steward ran out towards the deck to alert the captain.

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER 16

  Emma Lyon, now resident in the attics at Arlington Street, learnt many things in a short time, mingled with much teasing from the other residents. Among those was the deep dislike Mrs Kelly had for the word ‘whore’. Any man loose tongued enough to use it faced immediate ejection from her establishment. All those employed at the house were ladies, even if the euphemism ‘nuns’ was quietly applied. There was no prudery, but discretion was everything.

  London enjoyed many layers of licentiousness, from street walking strumpets through rookery moll houses to the more salubrious bagnios of Covent Garden. Arlington Street in St James’s was in a different league, close to clubs like White’s and Brooks’s. It was a house that few men were ashamed to be seen entering or leaving, styling itself a place of entertainment. The nun’s morality was loose certainly, but the attachments formed were expected to last longer than the few minutes allotted to a heated lecherous coupling with a moll.

  In her first few months Emma wasn’t allowed a hint of that. Her employment was simple: to keep the house clean by day and stay out of the way after dark. Time and her own insistent desire changed that. Cleaning remained her true chore, but within six months she was permitted to attend tables and guests, chastely dressed in a maidenly costume, serving wines and sweetmeats, smiling prettily and ensuring that her flawless complexion and fetching green eyes were noticed.

  In this she was coached by her mother, who taught her to bob while placing a dish, to serve from the left, allowing the faintest brush of bare flesh to connect with the flapping male hands that came her way. Avoiding anything more telling came naturally to a girl who had been the object of male desire since her earliest years. She knew as she worked that she was under triple scrutiny, the first maternal, the second male and sensual, the third and most exacting, Mrs Kelly’s.

  The proprietor watched her whenever chance permitted, coolly appraising her ability to deal with men, and judging the worth that could be placed on the unsullied virtue of such a lively and beautiful young creature. If she made a mistake, it was to mention the subject in the presence of Emma’s mother.

  ‘Jesus,’ Mrs Kelly protested, when Emma’s mother had finished spitting blood, ‘you make it sound as if I have no notion of how to proceed in such matters.’

  ‘How can that be, when I’ve seen you carry it through a dozen times?’

  ‘With proper discretion, for sure. And I know how to take my time. Mother of God, the way you’re talking anyone would think I’d peddle her off to the first guinea laden rake with the wit to enquire.’

  That had the ring of truth: the Abbess knew her stuff, knew that virtue could be milked, but that once surrendered the loss was permanent. Conversing with her customers she would promise much and deliver little. But eventually she would surrender Emma, charging a price for the privilege. Emma’s mother was in a bind, and that had much to do with her own standing as well as the rating Kathleen Kelly put on Emma’s virginity. She could only watch as the Abbess prepared Emma for the inevitable, using kind words and flattery to persuade the girl that what must be surrendered one day was best done in comfort, an arranged affair in which the older woman’s experience could be employed on Emma’s behalf.

  ‘The right fellow can open the gate to a life of pleasure. I’m sure, young as you are, girl, I don’t have to tell you what the alternative is.’ Kathleen Kelly was enough of an actress to make her next word strike terror into an inexperienced mind. ‘Pain!’

  Virgins were highly prized, especially by the older men, and a clean, guaranteed one, as opposed to the numerous scruffy urchins on the streets, created
a demand that made temptation impossible to resist. Kathleen Kelly had her clients’ trust. They knew she would never sell them short, vend the same girl twice, or lie about the hymen, employing tricks like sheep blood sacks inserted to expend false virginal blood. And the deflowering would be a pleasant affair, with the girl well prepared, fed with good wine and advice, willing instead of tense and anxious. Hardly surprising that bids for Emma had already been placed.

  From her own experience, Emma’s mother knew where that would lead. And there was another consideration: the longer Emma spent in the comfort of Arlington Street, the harder it would be to persuade her to return to a less glamorous existence. She would not see that the prospect that faced her mother now would face her in fifteen years’ time. But to complain too emphatically might see them both on the street without a farthing to sustain them. Getting Emma out of this place was a project that needed time for both mother and daughter to garner a little money.

  Emma was no help, revelling in the freedom that came her way. As soon as Mrs Kelly saw that she had a way with her, the personality to make her customers laugh – which in turn encouraged them to spend money – her morning duties evaporated steadily. There was a wardrobe full of clothes to wear and, properly chaperoned, she was allowed to go out with the other nuns, to walk in Kensington Gardens, even on picnics at which some of Mrs Kelly’s clients were present to pick up the bills.

  It was an alluring life to a girl of Emma’s age: free from expense, full of laughter and the finer things in life, wine, sweetmeats and attentive companions willing to insist that she was the comeliest thing. Looking older than her years added to her allure and offers from men to attend to her well-being were frequent. Quite a few were genuine, in the sense that a man might take her for a mistress, provide her with rooms, food and comfort so that he could enjoy the exclusive right to her favours. She might have succumbed without competition, but her companions on every occasion were not about to allow this newcomer a clear run at advantage, and scotched any overture that was broached.