Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  “No, sir. I mean we didn’t deprive him of his command—”

  “D’ye mean he wasn’t locked in his cabin for most of the fight with the picaroons?”

  “No, sir, he was, but it weren’t Peter Wickett that locked him in.” That was shoal water for me, as I’d been the one who’d locked Cousin Billy’s door. I’d done it because he was sloppy drunk and I didn’t want him found in a puddle of his own piss, but I didn’t guess Tingey needed to hear it. His clerk would just write it down. “Captain Trimble—he left the deck by his own choice, sir. He put it to a vote whether we should surrender. And we all demanded the right to defend ourselves. It was our right and duty, sir.”

  Whitlow scratched with pen on paper.

  “You have the right and duty,” said Tingey, “to obey the lawful orders of your superiors.”

  “That we do, sir,” said Dick. “Lawful orders.”

  “Are you a lawyer, that you know what is lawful and what is not?”

  “It’s our right as free men to defend our flag against dishonor, sir, and our duty as officers not to cry for quarters.”

  “I see. What about the report by Mr. P. Hoyden Blair, the assistant U.S. consul to San Domingo? He was aboard, and he has not a good thing to say about any of you.”

  Dick’s face twisted in a sneer. “Maybe that’s because he was hiding below decks during the fight, too, sir.”

  Crawley jerked his head back. “Do you mean to disparage Mr. Blair?”

  “I do,” said Dick. “He even took a shot at Mr. Graves here when he went to check on the captain.”

  “Twice,” says I. “With the very same pistols—”

  Tingey held up a hand. “Continue, Whitlow.”

  “Aye aye, sir. ‘Death was by a single gunshot wound to the right breast. It was attended by the Rattle-Snake’s surgeon, Humbert Quilty, and witnessed by the principals’ seconds, Mr. Graves and Mr. Towson.’”

  A fug crept into the closed room as Whitlow read. When the clerk paused for breath, Crawley said something about someone having had a bad oyster for dinner, which I guessed he was joking because it was getting on spawning season for oysters and no time to be eating them, but he clammed up when Tingey turned his eye on him.

  Tingey and Crawley leafed through the logs that Dick and I had kept at sea, commenting to each other on the contents while Whitlow scratched notes. Every time they asked one of us a question, the clerk set down what we said, and it soon got to the point that we couldn’t so much as twitch without sending his pen whispering across the page.

  Crawley read excerpts from Billy’s log as well. It was inaccurate when it wasn’t incoherent, and dwelt on his attempts to stay in the good graces of the crew.

  “That last,” said Tingey. “How did he go about it?”

  “Extra grog, sir,” I said.

  Tingey looked puzzled. “What about disciplinary measures? Any floggings?”

  “One, sir. It made him sick.”

  “Strike that, Whitlow, and continue with the recitation.”

  There was a lot about how Peter had questioned everything Billy did, from when to get the topmasts in during a blow to whether it was permissible to allow one of His Majesty’s frigates to send British marines aboard to search for deserters—which it wasn’t, and which hadn’t stopped Billy from allowing it anyway.

  “You were boarded,” said Tingey. “Does he give any particulars, Whitlow?”

  “Says here, ‘H.M.’s frigate Clytemnestra, Captain Sir Horace Tinsdale,’ sir.”

  “Yes, but how many men did they press?”

  Whitlow looked at it near and far, and up and down and sidewise. “Doesn’t say, sir.”

  “They pressed no one, sir,” said Dick.

  Tingey turned a frown on him. “And how was that?”

  Whitlow spoke without looking up. “A Frenchman hove into view and the Clytemnestra crowded on sail in chase of her, says here.”

  “Yes,” said Dick, “but before that, Mr. Wickett hauled down our colors.”

  Tingey raised an eyebrow. “Did he, then? Why so?”

  “So Tinsdale would have to accept our surrender.”

  Tingey almost smiled. “And force him to commit an overt act of war in the doing of it,” he said. “A clever fellow is your Mr. Wickett, and I dare say Mr. Trimble resented it. But let us dispense with that. The unfortunate Mr. Trimble’s squabbles with his lieutenant are not germane to these proceedings.”

  If they weren’t germane to the proceedings then I didn’t know what was; but if he wanted to let them dogs lie, I wasn’t about to rouse them up again. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, leaning over on one ham with a preoccupied air for so long that I wondered if it was he that had consumed Crawley’s bad oyster.

  “Very well, gentlemen,” said Tingey at last. “Synopsize for me the more salient points of your late cruise, after which you may go as far as George Town, but leave word where you may be reached. Today is . . .”

  “Friday, sir,” said Crawley.

  “Today is Friday. We have too much work for us to resume this tomorrow. Return here at noon on the Monday, unless you hear otherwise from me. But before you go, gentlemen,” he said, holding out a hand as we made ready to haul our wind, “Whitlow will supply you with pen and paper. I require a full report, as best you are able to remember, of the events that led up to the unfortunate death of your late commander.”

  Whitlow put us each into a separate room. I sat at the desk I was shown to, ignoring the civilian clerks shuffling their papers to let me know I didn’t belong there, and cut a new quill with my clasp knife while putting my thoughts in order. I had no idea where to start. So I started at the beginning, continued till I’d finished, and then stopped. I spared Billy, Wickett, and myself nothing. I didn’t condemn or hedge or embellish. I merely put down what had happened and when: Billy’s drunkenness at all hours, his attempting to surrender when the picaroons attacked us and then hiding below with a bottle, his publicly accusing Peter of lying about the fight and then refusing to explain or apologize, his refusing to let me be his second—and, God help me, my siding with Peter. Dick had stood up for Billy—long enough to see him shot, anyway.

  I sat looking out the window. The whiteness of the clouds was so pure that I could’ve wept. The room was dark when I returned my eyes to my paper.

  I dipped my pen again and wrote: Believing it necessary for his protection, I locked Capt. Trimble in his cabin during the fight with the picaroons.

  The room Dick had gotten for us was in an old stone house, hard by the waterfront on Bridge Street in George Town. It had an iron bed in it with a cob-filled mattress for me and Dick and a pallet on the floor for Jubal.

  “I’m cutting out,” I said. “You hear me, Dick Towson. I’m through with the sea.”

  It was a black night, no moon. It was warm, too, the first evening of summer, and the air hung damp and heavy over the Potomac. If quiet was a prime need for speechifying, George Town had it in spades. Besides my own steps, all I could hear was the water swirling around the granite boulders upstream at the falls of the Potomac, and every fifteen minutes the chimes of the town clock a few blocks east over by the market. My pacing was more careful than I would’ve liked, what with Greybar trying to rub his head on my ankles. Cats make terrible noises when you step on them.

  “There’s a reason Tingey’s still a captain,” I said. “He got spine.”

  I’d been thinking about it all evening, kind of pulling at it, the way you do a rotten tooth. February before last, back when he was in the Ganges and still commodore of the Santo Domingo squadron, Tingey got boarded off Cap Saint-Nicólas by His Majesty’s frigate Surprise, Captain Edward Hamilton commanding. “I say,” says Hamilton, “do you hand over any Englishmen you happen to have lying about.” I’m only guessing about the exact words, mind, but you bet he mustered the crew and started picking out the likeliest-looking topmast Jacks. So Tingey gets his back up and says, “A public ship carries no protection but her fl
ag”—which was pretty good stuff, considering he shouldn’t have let them aboard in the first place—and tells Hamilton to vacate the premises forthwith.

  The clock down the street jangled out another quarter hour, then bonged twice, out of tune and dismal.

  “Dick.”

  “Mmph.”

  The ships were a fair match on paper—Surprise was rated as a 28 and Ganges as a 26—but Ganges carried long nine-pounders while Surprise carried thirty-two-pounder carronades. That gave Hamilton a considerable advantage at close range—which is exactly where Tingey had let him get. I had to hand it to Tingey, though, he brassed it out pretty good once he seen what a bind he’d gotten himself into. He said he didn’t guess he’d prevail in a fight, but he’d die before he let the British take off any of his crew.

  “Dick, wake up.”

  “No.” The husks rustled in the mattress as he rolled over.

  I took a couple-three more turns up and down the room in the dark. There was a clear space between the door and the window along the wall, except for Greybar trying to attack my feet. He wrapped his paws around my ankle, and I stopped to look out into the blackness. The breeze shifting the curtains around smelled of river mud and the outwash from the paper factory.

  Edward Hamilton was no lace hanky. He was the same Hamilton that cut out the mutinied Hermione right from under the Dons’ noses at Puerto Cabello in New Granada last October, killing over a hundred of her crew, but that day in the Ganges he’d discovered he had somewhere else to be and buggered off empty-handed. I’d thought it was fine stuff when I read it in the papers, for a man to be willing to take such a decision as Tingey did against such odds.

  But now something wasn’t sitting right. If you’d asked me yesterday did I think Tingey would like how Peter had forced Sir Horace Tinsdale’s hand under similar circumstances, I would’ve said yes. The parallels were obvious: Tingey had forced Hamilton to decide whether pressing a few men was worth committing an act of war, and Peter had done the same when he hauled down our colors and dared Sir Horace to accept our surrender. When I first seen Tingey earlier that day I thought some of the benefit might could rub off on me, but he had shied from the similarity like it was corn liquor at a camp meeting. I kicked the bed.

  “Dick—wake up, dern ya.”

  “Please shut up.”

  I grabbed his foot and walked away with it.

  “Hi!” he said, and added some interesting embellishments when he hit the floor.

  Jubal sprang up in the dark. “Is you well, Mars Dickie?”

  “Yes, Jubal. Go to sleep now.” Dick said it like shushing a child.

  When Jubal had stopped thrashing around on his pallet and fussing with his blanket, I said, “Dick, listen, I’m going to cut and run.”

  I couldn’t see him at all in the dark, but there was a sort of billowing sound like he was tucking his shirttails under himself where he sat on the floor.

  “Well,” he said, “of all the darn fool—”

  “Shhh! Hear that?”

  “I expect to hear myself snoring in about a minute. I’d get back in bed but I can’t—”

  “Listen. Hear that?” I held still, and the distant sound of the falls at once became clear. “General Washington was building him a series of locks up there before he died, and Lighthorse Harry Lee is keeping on with digging the canal. I guess if I wait long enough I could float all the way to the Ohio, never once set foot on solid ground if I didn’t have a mind to. Or I could just walk up to Hagerstown and catch the stage. Inside a couple weeks I could be rolling into McKeesport. See my old man. I’m going to make whiskey. It won’t be so bad.”

  “Walk, it’ll be faster.” He yawned. “What are you on about, anyway? It must be four bells in the middle watch.” He yawned again.

  “Two a.m.,” I said.

  “Oh, good guess,” said he. “Huzzah for me.” Greybar purred in the blackness, and I guessed that Dick had picked him up and put him in his lap. “Besides, I thought you hated him.”

  “My pap? I never said I hated him.”

  “That’s right.” The mattress rattled as he climbed back into bed. “He hates you. You really ought to make that up with him, if you don’t mind my thrusting in my oar. Fathers with money come in handy, especially when you’re supposed to be courting a rich man’s daughter. Like my sister, f’rinstance.” He yawned hugely.

  I touched the front of my shirt, feeling for the pewter locket with its miniature portrait of my dead mother. She was white, and my father was white, but somehow, somewhere, I had gotten amalgamated, a mix of the white race with another, the exact identity of which had been denied me. I was light enough that I hadn’t even knowed until Commodore Gaswell told me, and dark enough that I believed it the moment he said it. I still wasn’t sure as sure of it. I had some questions that needed answering. But no, I didn’t guess the old man would be any too happy to see me.

  “There’s money to be made out west,” I said. “With a raft of whiskey and a Spanish trading license, I’d have to be dumber as a rock not to turn a profit.”

  “Well, I guess you are that, then,” said Dick. “Where do you figure on getting a Spanish trading license?”

  “In Saint-Louis on the Mississippi. My mother was born there. Maybe someone remembers her.”

  “Stay out of Louisiana. The Spaniards are crazy.”

  “Hang the Spaniards and New Orleans too.” I could walk all the way to New Albion on the far side of the continent. All I would need was a bag of corn and a shotgun. “Why don’t you come with me? We could be the first white men to set eyes on the Lost Tribe of Israel.”

  The mattress crackled as he sat up. “That’s an idea.”

  “Thomas Jefferson says—”

  “That’s a dang crazy idea,” he said. “I got a better one. You come with me to White Oak for the summer. Let’s think on it for a month or two. Tingey will give us permission to ship out as soon as we find a berth, you’ll see.”

  FOUR

  Dick and I hired a boat to take us across the upper Chesapeake to White Oak Plantation, the Towson family holdings on a spit of land between the bay and the Chester River. As we sailed north along the eastern shore of a large island dedicated to wheat and tobacco, with the red-winged blackbirds creaking like rusty hinges in the cattails along the shore, Dick pointed past the salt marsh to the fields blowing green and silver in the breeze off the river, and beyond them to the gables of a mansion on a hill amid a grove of sycamores.

  “That’s where Lambert Wickes and his family have lived for the last couple of centuries,” he said.

  “Why, how you talk. How could he live for a couple of centuries?”

  “He didn’t. His family has, you ignoramus. Besides which, he’s dead anyway. Foundered off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland back in ’seventy-seven on his way home from taking Benjamin Franklin to France.”

  “Then why’d you—”

  He laughed. “Did you know that the cook was the only survivor?”

  I thought of Doc and how he’d fought in the old Rattle-Snake. “That don’t surprise me. Cooks is tough.”

  “Say, look,” he said, taking in the dozens of small craft on the broad river with a wave of his hand. The men in them were bending and heaving over nets stretched across the shallows. “The shad must be running. Do you like shad?”

  “No idea—”

  “They take some getting used to. They’re awfully bony, but oh! So fat and delicate! And their roe is something.”

  “What’s roe?”

  He looked at me like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be astonished or amused.

  “Why, it’s fish eggs, of course. We’ll have some for breakfast. You just wait—they’re superb.”

  I guessed I could wait a while; a good long while would do. What was superb to me was the sight of Arabella Towson, blond and pink and dressed in white, waving from the dock as we pulled into the cove at White Oak.

  I noticed straight away that Dick’s sister had cha
nged considerable since I’d seen her last. For one thing, her bosom had growed, which she’d emphasized with a low neckline and then obscured with a kerchief. Her dress was of some white gauzy stuff, and the afternoon sun behind her skirts caused my glance to linger below her waist. I thought I was being clever, taking it all in as I bent to make my leg, but as I rose my eyes met her sky-blue ones and I knew she’d seen me looking.

  She threw a deep curtsy that had more sass than courtesy in it, cocked an eyebrow at me, and said, “What a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Graves.”

  I bowed again, annoyed at the confusion that roared in my head. I would’ve recovered from it with grace if she hadn’t throwed her arms around me and kissed me. Her dress was as soft as clouds and she smelled like an orange tree in bloom, and it got me all tongue-tied and gangly. And then, as if she’d just then realized that her brother and a boatman and two Negroes were watching—or most determinedly not watching—she straightened her kerchief and said, “Well! Come, Matty. Come, Dickie. Papa and his lady are waiting. We saw you rounding the point. There are cool drinks and petit-fours in the garden.”

  She led me by the hand up the oyster-shell path while Dick strolled along behind with his hands in his pockets, whistling. Behind us, Jubal hauled the bags and chests out of the boat and piled them on the dock. Ahead of us, the red bricks and white columns of the manor house rose above the white oaks that give the place its name.

  I give her hand a squeeze. “Missed you, Arie.”

  She dropped my hand. “I am glad to see you still have the use of all your limbs, Mr. Graves.” She pinched my arm hard.

  I resisted the impulse to rub it. “Well, why wouldn’t I?”

  “When a gentleman goes off to cruise against the enemy and doesn’t write his lady for a year, naturally she frets.”

  “It weren’t neither a year. It was six months.”

  “Six months!” She said it like she’d caught me in some monstrous deed. “Six months without word! A gentleman needs to be more considerate of his lady.”

  “That was wrong in me.” His lady. I was pretty sure I liked the sound of that. I looked over my shoulder at Dick. He pretended to see something interesting in a nearby gum tree.