It was true this lady had wearied me somewhat with her changeableness, being first hoity-toity and then friendly: yet I had hunted for an excuse, on the night of my departure from Arundel, to bid her farewell. More than once after I had left, I had regretted my failure to have a final word with her; and now this miniature called her to my mind once more and left me puzzled as to how it had come in my coat. I thought of asking Jeddy whether he knew how it got there, since he had brought the coat from Arundel. I was reluctant to speak of the matter to him, but I was even more eager; so in the end I sent Tommy Bickford to bring Jeddy to my cabin.
When he came in, his knee-long pea-jacket unbuttoned, I unlocked the small oak chest my father bought in Ireland, the one with the large eight-sided bottle and the two six-sided bottles and the four four-sided bottles, and we hooked our feet around the table leg and had a thimbleful of red rum to a quick trip.
At length I asked Jeddy whether he had seen Lady Ransome before he left Arundel. He said he had. She had come down to breakfast with her husband, he said, seeming to be in a fret, most likely over the embargo, and in a twitter to be gone from the house. For a time I held the picture of her in my hand under the table, and finally brought it up and showed it to him. He whistled when he saw it, and I could tell he had never seen it before.
“There’s a tidy craft!” he said, taking it gingerly between his salt-hardened fingers. “Fine sweeping sheer to her and no foolish top-hamper. Sweet bows, and as nice a tumble home to her dead-works as you’ll find anywhere!”
There were times when Jeddy became so nautical in his talk that a porpoise might have sickened to hear him run on, though he had often enough heard my mother declare that no man with a thought for the comfort of others would speak constantly in terms of his calling. “Just because you set out to be a mariner,” she said, “don’t forget the manner of speech of those who can’t understand sea terms.” But it may be that Jeddy, having been a school teacher for so many years, was impelled by the very dullness of his former occupation to express himself in the terms of his new one.
“You talk like a ship chandler,” I said, taking the picture from him. “I’m not blind! What I want to know is what to do with it. I don’t know how it got in my dunnage nor anything about it.”
Jeddy squinted at me knowingly. “I’ll tell you this much! That picture’s worth something! It’s not one of those things done by a swab-artist out of a bumboat for eight dollars. You’d pay fifty pounds for a picture like this in London, even without any copper bottom or binnacle fights around it! Stow it away, Richard! Findings keepings! If ever you’re without money in a foreign port, a little bauble like that would keep you for a month.”
This was good advice, so I put the picture on top of the striped silk shirts in my chest, and Jeddy and I played piquet and had another thimbleful of red rum to fair winds and a smooth passage before turning in. But after he left me I took the miniature from the chest and dropped it in a pocket of my shirt, determined always to have it near in case there was need, as Jeddy had said, to sell it.
I was happy to be back on the old Neutrality once more, for she was a good brig and comfortable, having been planned by my mother. I have heard it said in Arundel that many masters plan their own vessels, but they are built the way the shipbuilders think they ought to be built—except in my mother’s case. Where my mother was concerned it was not so; and either the vessel was built the way she drew it, or the shipbuilder was tongue-lashed into going away and living in another town. The bulkheads creaked, in a heavy sea, like a whole flock of crow-blackbirds walking in an oatfield; but the chairs and the bunks were big and comfortable, and a man could move around without having his head caved in by the bottom of a whale-oil lamp, they being out of the way and so fixed that they reeked less than most; though to my mind there is a homey scent to burning whale oil, perhaps because I was born aboard the Orestes in Copenhagen harbor and so learned to know the smell before I had formed other tastes.
* * *
It was a little before sunrise the next morning when Cephas Cluff, the first mate, banged on the door to say there was a sail to leeward, maybe two miles away, and that she had just hauled her wind to cross our course. A ship, Cephas said she was, probably homeward bound and wishful of speaking us to get news or bearings.
The wind had dropped, and the water was tolerably smooth; so, mindful of the embargo, I told Cephas we must warn her. With that I hustled into my clothes and pea-jacket and went on deck.
She had come up fast, a sturdy black ship with a white streak; too sturdy, it seemed to me—and in a breath it dawned on me that here was no merchantman at all, but a sloop-of-war. In that very moment she triced up a port, fired a gun, hoisted the British flag, hauled up her courses, hauled down her jib, took in her topgallant sails, and backed her maintopsail, all with a speed impossible for a merchantman.
Here was a fine mess, I thought to myself, feeling as though someone had stuffed my mouth with cotton—a fine mess, and never so much as a rat hole through which we could dodge.
The men stood looking from me to the sloop and back again, knowing well that one or more of them, before nightfall, would be wearing a British seaman’s uniform; and I could hear Jeddy cursing a set of curses he never learned out of the Fifth Reader or Bowditch’s Navigator.
She was pierced for eight carronades to a side and had long guns forward and amidships, so I knew we would be torn to shreds with grape if we tried to run for it, or overhauled in this breeze, even though we got through the grape unscathed. There was nothing to do but come into the wind, and bring-to under the lee of this damned sloop.
The captain, a portly man, stood on one of the carronades, looking at us. “This is His Britannic Majesty’s sloop Gorgon!” he bawled through a trumpet, “I’m sending a boat!” and send it he did, with twelve men besides the oarsmen, and a thin, red-faced lieutenant important in the stern sheets.
There was no formality about this officer when he came aboard, except for his uniform, which was a natty blue affair with tight net breeches, and with a gold swab as big as my mother’s mop on one of his shoulders. It made me uncomfortable to look at him, what with my pea-jacket and my red-flannel shirt and the high leather boots I found most comfortable at sea. Ten men came over the side behind him, hard-looking broad-shouldered men, blue jackets to their knees and cutlasses and pistols at their waists.
“Who’s master here?” he snapped, looking at Cephas Cluff, who was as tall as I, but broader in the beam, and important looking.
“I am,” I said. “Step in the cabin and look at my papers.”
He whirled and stood staring at me for a moment, his head lowered a little. Then he flashed a quick glance at Cephas and Jeddy and turned his attention to me again.
“Call all hands on deck!” he ordered, without so much as a “sir” or “if you please.” I think if I had met this lieutenant under other circumstances I might have felt a liking for him; but there was something about the hard roundness of the blue eyes in his thin red face, and the fixed, contented smile on his down-curved mouth, that soured everything in me.
Every last one of our crew was in the waist, watching us. “The men are on deck,” I said, “and you’ll find no Britisher among ’em. They’re all from the same town: the town of Arundel. There isn’t one of ’em you can touch.”
“Call ’em aft!” he said. “I’ve heard that story before! I know more than to let any Yankee skipper pick men for me.”
The men came aft silently. The lieutenant turned to me with more politeness than he had yet shown. “Was there any talk of an embargo when you cleared?” he asked.
I pretended ignorance. “What embargo is that?”
His smile hardened on his face, and his eyes, fixed on mine, were cold as those of a halibut. “You say you’re master of this brig, and you ask what embargo! You Yankees think you’re pretty smart, but we know a thing or two ourselves! We know you’re a lot of tricky rascals, quick as snakes to turn against your own c
ountry or against the country that provided spawning grounds for your people!”
I had heard all I could stand. “Do what you’ve come to do and get off this quarter-deck,” I said, keeping as quiet as I could, because of the long guns slewed around on the sloop to bear on us.
He turned and looked at the men. They were staring at the mastheads, or at the deck seams, mild and harmless appearing as though no word of what had been said had penetrated their skulls.
The lieutenant went down among them. When he came to Tommy Bickford, he stopped. Now, Tommy was like his father, who carried my father to shore when he was hurt aboard the Congress galley, on the day General Arnold outthought and outfought the British at the Battle of Valcour Island, though outnumbered ten times over. He was flat backed and handsome, with wavy light hair and cheeks like a girl, and so soft-spoken and pleasant and willing that he was no more like the ordinary run of boy than a tapering spar is like an alder fish pole. There was no man on our brig or in all Arundel for that matter who wasn’t perpetually pleased with Tommy and forever going out of the way to coddle him; and it was my guess he would be master of his own ship at eighteen.
The lieutenant laughed. “You can’t breed ’em like this in your filthy country!” He motioned to his line of waiting seamen. “Take this one!”
“Hold on,” I told him. “That’s Tommy Bickford from Arundel. His father was a soldier in the Revolution!”
“Gammon!” the lieutenant said, watching me closely, so it came to me he had a reason for speaking roughly. “There never was an American that told the truth about that tuppenny ha’penny business you call a war!” He motioned to his seamen again. “Take him!”
The slatting of the running rigging, the yawping of the chickens in the coops that filled our boats, and the creaking of the rudder sounded as loud in my ears as though I had never heard them before. There was an aching in the muscles of my upper arms. The corvette, no doubt impatient at the lieutenant’s slowness, fired another gun. We stood like figureheads.
Two of the Britishers closed in on Tommy, taking him by the shoulders and wrists. At that my little white dog Pinky whipped out from behind me like the end of a parted tow rope; and with his whiskers bristling so they hid his furious little black eyes he went to haggling at the ankle of the nearest sailor, all the time making a hellish sucking noise in his throat.
The man kicked at him, shouting, and strove to draw his cutlass without loosing Tommy’s wrist. At that the lieutenant shouted as well, and stooped to slap Pinky with his open hand. Somehow the little dog released himself like a chronometer spring, whipping up and turning in mid-air; and in a second he had slashed the soft, muscular edge of the lieutenant’s hand, cutting it to the bone. The lieutenant yelled and kicked at him, and all our Arundel men shouted together. Pinky, whirling, ran between them and stood partly behind the mainmast, peering out at the lieutenant with his stump of a tail bent up over his back as though on the verge of breaking, his whiskers bristling fiercely, and his legs planted as stubby and straight as a brace of whitened hitching posts.
The lieutenant stared at his hand, flipping it in the air so that drops of blood fell on the scoured deck; then in a flash he reached in the bosom of his coat and drew a pistol, which he leveled at Pinky.
Now, I well knew my business, which was to take our brig and its cargo safe to Cadiz, regardless of the acts of British lieutenants who exceeded their authority, or of the misfortunes of our crew, or even of my dog, who was a better friend to me than most of the humans I had met. Yet it is impossible, as I must often say, to lay out a course in this life and stick to it. Much as I hated the British lieutenant for his treatment of us, I would have laid no hand on him or any of his men, but would have steered clear of his determined spite. Our undoing came because I couldn’t see my little Pinky shot down without protest. Neither, as luck would have it, could Jeddy Tucker. I have no doubt, in view of what I later learned, that if our downfall had not come through this, it would certainly have come somehow; for the officers of the war sloop knew what they were about.
However that may be, I struck at the leveled pistol with a belaying pin that had got into my hands God knows how; and a fraction of a second later Jeddy Tucker, on the lieutenant’s other side, undertook to do the same. The force of my blow must have been greater than I thought, for when I hit the pistol the lieutenant pitched forward as though he had stumbled, and the pistol exploded. It was then that Jeddy’s belaying pin came down. He was able to soften the blow, he told me, but he couldn’t stop it, and so the pin rapped the lieutenant lightly on the back of the head. He dropped to one knee and was up again immediately.
“All right! Keep back there!” he shouted to his men, who had their cutlasses out and were spreading toward us. He felt the overhang of his head with his good hand and looked from Jeddy to me. “Whose dog is that?” he asked.
Half inarticulate from apprehension, I said it was mine, whereupon the down-curving smile deepened on his lips, as if there were something about the fact that gave him malicious pleasure.
A faint angry bellow came down wind to us. I could see the captain of the corvette standing on a carronade, clutching a shroud, and I knew he was bawling to his lieutenant to come back.
“Under the circumstances,” the lieutenant said, “I shall have to ask you to return with me and explain to the captain about this boy.”
“My God, man!” I said, “this is an American vessel! You can’t do a thing like that!”
The lieutenant indicated Jeddy. ‘This man one of your mates?” he asked.
“Second mate.”
“Bring him, too. You’ll want someone to corroborate your statements.” He motioned to his men. They signaled their boat, and two of them went over the side with Tommy Bickford.
The lieutenant laughed at my irresolution. “Hurry along, Captain,” he said, his voice seeming to mock me, “or I’ll bring over the gig and press your whole crew. God knows we need ’em, and anybody with half an eye can see they’re all Englishmen!”
He had us, and there was no way out. “We’ll come in our own boat,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” he replied, grinning sardonically.
“Lower away a boat!” I shouted, thinking to have a moment to say a word to Jeddy and Cephas.
“I’ll send two men with you,” the lieutenant added, “to guard against Yankee tricks.”
I could feel my muscles move under my pea-jacket. For the first time in my life I felt an ugly, coppery hatred, a great powerful bitterness surging through me, from head to foot, like the wave of heat from a tumbler of bad brandy, against men who would use their strength to change the lives of defenseless people. I hated this sneering lieutenant; I hated his ship; above all I hated the country that had sent him out to rob us of our rights and our freedom.
We went into our boat, Jeddy and I, followed by two English sailors; and Gideon Lassel and Seth Tarbox pulled us over to the sloop. The lieutenant, waiting for us when we came over the side, led us aft at once.
The captain, a walrus-like man, leaned against the weather rail and looked at us from under heavy eyebrows, each as big as a field mouse.
“Sir,” the lieutenant told him, “this man claimed to be the master, but the whole thing was too fishy. No master would have assaulted a king’s officer, as this man did. There’s no doubt the affair was hocuspocused to screen the real captain, who must have been English. This man admitted ownership of a terrier that bit me, sir, and the dog’s an English dog, no fear of that!”
He had hardly finished before the captain snapped at him, “Pass the word to get under way, and turn these men over to the bos’n.”
“My God, sir!” I exclaimed, “you can’t press the officers of a merchant vessel!” The captain looked up to see the fore-topsail braced aback. I could hear the orders being given in the waist of the ship and see the men, swarms of them compared with our little crew, hoisting and sheeting home the sails. I thought for a moment of going overboard and swimming fo
r it, but two red-coated marines stood near at hand, their muskets slanted toward us. As the sloop fell off, Gideon and Seth set up a shouting from our boat below; but before I could answer them the captain turned sharply on us.
“Oh, indeed!” He clasped his hands behind his back and teetered on his toes. “I can’t, eh? And what’s to stop me, if I may ask?”
“The customs of civilized nations,” I said.
“Tchah!” The captain worked his bushy eyebrows up and down. “Tchah! Save your exalted sentiment for the marines!” He brandished his finger in my face. “We spoke the ship Clio out of New York yesterday. She told us every port on the Atlantic coast had been warned of to-day’s embargo against England. Yes, by God, and here you are dodging out with a full cargo! Customs of civilized nations, indeed! You say you’re an American, and yet you’re doing your best to embarrass your own country!”
He bellowed with laughter. “Doesn’t that seem a bit contradictory, Mr. Doyle?”
“It puzzles me completely, sir,” the lieutenant answered.
“There you are!” bawled this red-faced walrus. “You cant be Americans if you’re turning against your country! All Americans are noble heroes, willing to die for their glorious nation—eh, Mr. Doyle?”
“Yes, sir: so we’ve always heard.”
The captain turned to look back at the Neutrality. A stretch of tumbling blue water lay between us. She had gone off on her course, flirting her taffrail in the air as if glad to be rid of us.
The Lively Lady Page 6
