By the Mast Divided

by David Donachie

  ‘No blood?’ asked Pearce, gingerly moving his shoulders, not far, for to do so brought a stinging sensation.

  ‘None, though your back be as red as a monkey’s arse.’

  ‘We laid into you hard, mind,’ said Costello. ‘Had to put up a show.’

  Pearce eased himself on to a chest, and he sat there hunched over. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, you being such a damned lubber,’ sneered Ridley, ‘and, I will add, as useless aboard ship as a whore without a hole.’

  ‘If you’d been caught off Deal,’ Costello added, ‘I doubt you’d be talking now, nor for a good week after.’

  Pearce looked at the pair, both smiling, the quizzical expression on his face plain evidence that he was still confused. Ridley sat opposite him, and hunched forward, his voice quiet. ‘Not all cat o’ nine tails come the same, and, since it be a new one for each man to punish, it depends on who’s making ’em as to how much damage they do.’

  ‘Have you got it now?’ asked Costello.

  ‘I think so,’ Pearce replied, in a far from convincing tone.

  ‘Ain’t got a clue, Ridley,’ Costello responded. ‘Not a bloody inkling has he.’

  ‘We, or the Bosun hisself, makes up the cat,’ said Ridley, earnestly, ‘a new one for each flogging. And if’n we want to we can choose fresh hemp to make it, or go for a harder rope.’

  ‘And we can soak it an’ dry it,’ added Costello, ‘till it gets real nippy, and even treat it with a touch of pitch if we like. The one that does the damage is the thieves’ cat, ’cause that has knots in the tails, and is made for any grass-combing bugger who steals from his mates and is caught.’

  ‘What you just had,’ Ridley added, ‘was made special from hemp, and soft. Mind we blacked it up a bit to make it look like the proper article.’

  ‘It still hurt,’ Pearce protested. He nearly added something about the blow to his pride, but held back – these fellows would not care a hoot about that.

  ‘That ain’t pain, mate,’ Ridley scoffed. ‘Even a common cat would have had you hanging by the thumbs. But the feeling aboard was that old Barclay was coming it a bit high, that he can’t have his missus parading around the deck, her bein’ as pretty as she be, without she catches the odd eye, and bein’ she’s sociable, will be on the receiving end of the odd comment. That if he is goin’ to flog for that, then there is not a man aboard who won’t feel the gratin’ on his cheek at some time this commission.’

  Costello’s voice had a lot of satisfaction in it. ‘That was our way of telling him, carry on, mate, but it won’t strike no fear.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Lutyens, appearing in the doorway.

  Ridley was on his feet in a flash. ‘Now don’t you go spreading that round the wardroom, Mr Lutyens.’

  The surgeon put his head to one side, not responding to Ridley’s worried expression. ‘You did not say so, Ridley, but you implied that the captain would have seen through your ruse?’

  ‘He would have, your honour, lest he be blind.’

  ‘Then I imagine that everyone in the wardroom will have observed the same.’

  ‘Some will, some are too callow,’ said Costello. ‘But if you say ’owt it will become a topic. If that happens it will get to Barclay’s ears at some point and he will have to come out and do something.’

  ‘At a cost to all and sundry,’ added Ridley.

  Lutyens produced a quite singular smile. ‘You can scarce comprehend how much pleasure silence will give me, as I try to discern who has made the link and who has not. Nothing affords as much gratification as watching grown men sniff round a commonality that no one may voice. Now, if you will be so good as to leave me with my patient.’

  Ridley asked his questions in a fading voice as they made their way out. ‘Is that bugger odd, Costello, or is it just me?’

  ‘No, mate, he’s as daft as a brush, and as creepy as a spider.’

  Lutyens smiled at Pearce. ‘I see the men lack certain comprehensions.’

  ‘I hazard,’ Pearce replied, ‘that you might find them wiser than you think.’

  ‘I do hope so. Now please lie down so that I can examine your back. Ah! Very red indeed, and,’ as Pearce winced, ‘sore to the touch. I fear we have just observed a barbaric ritual, though there was an early Greek philosopher who held that humans had to be driven to goodness like a donkey to the plough.’

  ‘Heraclitus,’ Pearce replied, without thinking.

  Lutyens’ voice rose in surprise. ‘You know the philosophers?’

  ‘No.’

  Pearce was cursing himself for his lapse, especially with one as watchful as this surgeon. If he had had a fractured education, with little formal schooling, he had learnt much from a father who, having educated himself, took endless pains to teach his only son. John Pearce might know little formal Greek or Latin, but he had discussed a great deal of philosophy as Adam Pearce searched endlessly for the key to unlock the means to improve the lot of his fellow humans. Heraclitus was one of the villains of philosophical history, a misanthrope who had shown scant regard for his fellow man, cruel even by the standards of Ancient Greece. But whatever he knew and didn’t know was not something to share with this man, who was closer to authority than he was to those before the mast.

  Lutyens’ voice bore within it a deep degree of irony. ‘You know nothing of philosophy yet name one of the more obscure in the pantheon. If you know of Heraclitus, you must also know of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato. I fancy I am not being told the truth, John Pearce.’

  His patient shot him a look, and the surgeon responded by saying. ‘Your true name is no mystery on any part of the ship now.’ He followed that with a shout for some fresh water. ‘For I need,’ as he said to his patient, ‘to soak some dried comfrey that I will apply to your back. Do you know anything of medicinal herbs, Pearce?’ That was followed by a grunt, as he turned to open another chest, his voice going hollow as he knelt down to search through it. ‘And would you tell me if you did? You would probably gabble the Latin tag for Poison Ivy then deny you had any knowledge of what you just said.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ Pearce insisted.

  Lutyens’ voice took on an injured tone. ‘It annoys me that you should take such an attitude.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘It may surprise you to know that I have an abiding interest in my fellow-man.’

  Pearce wanted to say that there was little shock in that statement; the way he crept about the ship, popping up in all sorts of odd places, was unnerving, only marginally less so than the cold way he seemed to examine anyone who caught his eye. Suddenly Lutyens’ fish-like face was right in front of Pearce’s, the surgeon squatting to speak to him.

  ‘And I have watched you more than most, as being part of a section of the crew in which I have an especially deep curiosity. You are a pressed man, taken against your will, and you are no sailor.’

  ‘I think I know that.’

  ‘Shall I tell you what I have observed, Pearce?’

  It was painful to shrug, better to stay still, so Pearce’s pretence at an indifferent response had to be made with his eyebrows.

  ‘Water, your honour,’ said a voice.

  ‘Put it down and ask the sail maker if either he or one of his mates will attend upon me.’ The wooden bucket was right before Pearce’s eyes as Lutyens stood up, and he watched the surgeon dunk into it a large handful of dry, dark green leaves, pressing them down until they were submerged, his voice carrying on in that hurt tone.

  ‘What I have observed?’ Lutyens asked himself. ‘I will tell you, shall I, about your mess table. O’Hagan, the Irishman, I like, for he is a genial soul when not being practised upon and the fact that he has beaten the resident bully is to be applauded. The Taverner fellow I would be careful to trust, unlike Gherson who I would not trust at all. That name inclines me to believe he is of Huguenot stock, you know, and slimy in the extreme.’

  The n
eed to defend him as a messmate was automatic, and given what he truly thought of the man, quite convincing. ‘You damn him for his antecedents? Does merely being a descendant of a French Protestant who fled a Catholic massacre make him slimy? You might as well accuse King Louis and say he deserved to lose his head for it.’

  Lutyens positively purred, like a man who had sprung a trap. ‘I wonder how many common seamen could conjure up a memory of St Bartholomew’s Night?’

  Pearce had exposed himself again and he knew it. ‘Anyone who has knowledge of their religion.’

  ‘No, John Pearce, it is too long past. That massacre took place two hundred and fifty years ago, and even a pious religious memory would scarce include a knowledge of the Bourbon bloodline.’

  ‘Simpson, sailmaker’s mate, your honour. I was sent for.’

  Pearce turned his head, even though to do so stretched the skin on his back. Simpson looked down at him and winked, another man who would have ignored him before the flogging.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Lutyens cried. ‘I require you to make me up a sort of apron, from very light canvas, one that fits on the back not the front of the person wearing it.’

  ‘The back,’ the sailmaker enquired, in a voice that implied, ‘I have been asked for some daft things in my time, but…’

  ‘Yes,’ Lutyens insisted, ‘it will need ties down the side, shall we venture to be nautical and call them reefs, the whole to act as a compress to keep in place what I am going to apply to this fellow’s back.’

  ‘Like a poultice, you mean, your honour?’

  ‘The very word, my man! How astoundingly apt. It would aid the efficacy of the thing if it was impermeable.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ asked Simpson

  ‘Proof against water.’

  ‘I could lard it with some slush from the cook,’ the fellow replied. ‘Can I say you will pay the price?’

  ‘Make it so, Mr Simpson,’ said Lutyens in a happy tone. ‘A double-reefed affair, in the nautical vernacular, an invention which will no doubt be handed down to grateful posterity as a Lutyens.’

  The sailmaker responded in a jocose tone of voice. ‘Since I be cutting and sowing the bugger, your honour, should it not be termed a Simpson?’ Lutyens barked a laugh, and Simpson added, ‘Be with you in half a glass, your honour.’

  ‘I would not have had to explain impermeable to you, John Pearce, would I now? Again you are silent but you fail to realise that from the very first, to me, you were singular, made so by the look in your eye.’

  ‘That was hatred.’

  ‘Hardly misplaced,’ the surgeon replied in a softer, almost regretful tone. ‘And I daresay you see me as an integral part of the abusive system. You do not reply to that, I observe, so I can take that as a yes.’

  It wasn’t, but neither could Pearce honestly say no. To him all authority was suspect, even Lieutenant Digby, who had been as kindly as his fellow officers were harsh. Was he wrong about Lutyens? The exchange with Simpson had been as that between two shipmates who knew each other well. The sailmaker had evinced no fear of the surgeon as a superior being.

  ‘Perhaps I should not treat you,’ the surgeon sighed. ‘Perhaps in pain you would be a man less troublesome, for I mean to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Not much point, Mr Lutyens, in asking of a man who knows nothing.’

  Lutyens knelt down again to look him in the eye. ‘You know that Captain Barclay only has licence to press men bred to the sea.’

  Pearce wished he was upright, being tall enough to command the surgeon, perhaps to impose himself, for this talk was heading in an uncomfortable direction. ‘Knowing that made no odds.’

  ‘You know,’ Lutyens insisted, ‘that there are two ways to avoid even a press as illegal as the one that took you up. The first is an exemption from the Admiralty.’

  ‘Which I do not possess.’

  ‘Prevarication, sir,’ Lutyens spluttered, ‘and damned annoying for being so! The second reason, as you equally well know, is to claim that you are a gentleman and no seaman. How do you establish that you are such? Not by the contents of your purse but by the manner of your speech and the depth of your connections. No captain, even one as foolish as Barclay, would take up and hold an educated man, for to do so would see him in the dock himself as soon as a properly written letter arrived in the right quarter, one that would force the naval powers to act.’

  A slow blink had to do service for the absence of a shrug. Pearce was thinking of his letter, hopefully winging its way to old John Wilkes, to set off a bomb under Barclay and his arrogance.

  ‘You can write,’ Lutyens continued, ‘and before you deny it the purser told me that your first request to him once he had issued you with your slops was for a quill, wax, ink and paper. What for? Not to make lists, so I surmise you wrote a letter. The question is, did you manage to get such a letter off the ship?’

  Lutyens gave him a chance to respond, a chance that Pearce declined to take.

  ‘Had you made a protest to Barclay and established your status you would not be here now. But you did not – you refused even to give your proper name when you first came aboard and you would still be called John Truculence if one of your fellow pressed men had not let slip the name Pearce. You were singular from the very first; you show a defiance to the officers and the trained seamen that comes, to my mind, not from temper but from a feeling of superiority. You casually allude to Heraclitus and demonstrate that not only do you know that Henry of Navarre was Protestant but that he was the first Bourbon King of France and ancestor to the late King Louis. So I am wondering, John Pearce, why you do not wish to use that name, just as I am wondering what it is that prevents you from bearding Captain Barclay and establishing that for him to keep you aboard is to risk his whole career.’

  ‘Do you think that comfrey has soaked long enough?’

  Lutyens smiled, seeming to imply that he now knew something that had hitherto been a mystery, then stood, moving towards another locked chest, opened by a large key, from which he extracted a brown stopped bottle. A small measure of the contents was poured into a glass etched with markings, the whole presented to Pearce to drink.

  ‘A combination of medicine ancient and modern, will set you up famously and, as the captain requested, in short order.’

  Pearce sniffed it. ‘Laudanum?’

  ‘You know the tincture?’

  Pearce had dosed his father with laudanum often, to ease the pain of an internal affliction that would respond to no other palliative, just as he knew of people who took it in daily doses. It would make him drowsy, perhaps even senseless, but he also reckoned that it would make him forget the stinging of his back, as well as his present situation. The thought of a degree of oblivion was a welcome one, a period when he would not recall that he was a pressed seaman, nor think of the way he had deserted his father in Paris, of an escape which was, for the present, impossible. Raising himself on one elbow, Pearce threw his head back and downed the contents.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Lutyens, almost purring with pleasure. ‘Once that has touched upon the vital spirit, for there is nothing like an opiate to bring such a thing to fruition, we can continue our conversation.’

  The feeling of relief was immediate, a sensation spreading through his limbs that seemed able to relax each muscle in turn. The cold of the damp comfrey leaves being spread on his bruised back was soothing in itself, but Pearce knew that was not the root cause of his increasing comfort. A delicious numbness worked its way up from his kidneys to his shoulders, through his neck and into his head so that even his jaw seemed altered, though he had not thought it clenched. He could hear Lutyens singing softly, too low for any words to be discernible, yet soothing in the sound. Sleep seemed possible and that happy thought as he closed his eyes, brought a smile to his face.

  ‘So, John Pearce,’ Lutyens whispered in his ear, pencil poised over his notebook, ‘what of Plato?’

  ‘A foolish man, or so my father thought. The Republic is no
thing less than a paean to the Spartans, who lived off the back of slavery…’

  Lutyens interrupted gently, ‘Your father?’

  That produced a frown, as though the question was difficult. After a lengthy pause the reply came. ‘Adam Pearce.’

  The surgeon had been holding his breath, fearing he had gone too far too soon. ‘How silly of me. Is he not a friend to Tom Paine the radical pamphleteer?’

  ‘Friend no, but they share many of the same notions.’

  ‘What would they be?’

  What followed was mumbled and far from coherent. Words were being dredged from Pearce’s mind that were not really his own, but those he had heard from his father’s lips; each person’s right to the fruits of his labours, an end to tithes both feudal and clerical, ramblings on the iniquities of Kings, courts, titles, prelates as well as the hereditary principle, and the manifest failure of those who removed monarchs to make any change to the lot of the common man. Lutyens only half listened, for he had heard it all before, had indeed debated such notions with his friends, as aware as any man that the world in which he existed was riddled with manifest imperfections. But that was not really what interested him, and he happily let his patient ramble only so that he would become comfortable in a confessional state.

  It was for moments like this that Charles Lutyens had chosen the Navy and this ship. He knew himself to be over-qualified for such a lowly post, but that mattered not for the position was a means to an end. A surgeon he might be, but his interest lay not in the corporeal human body, with its mess of blood, tendons, tissues and bone, but in the brain, the cerebral part that controlled all those moving parts. He was enough of a student of Voltaire to scoff at any notion that the heart had any dominion over a man’s actions, sure as a rationalist that the head was the seat of all emotion. But it was not a surgical interest – he had trepanned enough cadavers in his training to be bored with the soapy mass of tissue contained in the skull. His fascination went deeper than the knife!

  The Sick and Hurt Board of King George’s Navy had not enquired too deeply into his competence or his motives; there was a war on, fleets fitting out and no excess of qualified medical men queuing to serve in the King’s Navy, especially in the smaller vessels. Here was one not only willing but eager, a fellow who had powerful connections, which wended though his Lutheran pastor father all the way to a royal family who often worshipped at his church. Lutyens had asked for a frigate because big ships carried too many men for his purpose and were rarely in action. If they did not comprehend the reason for the request, the officials at the Sick and Hurt Board were too grateful for the offer of his services to refuse.