The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  “Say, Tobias, there you are,” Bolingbroke’s voice came from somewhere forward. “I’ve a thought to take a run ashore if the old man gives us leave, but I’ll need my shoes shined up and I would be eternally grateful was you to do that.”

  Jack looked in the direction of the voice. His eyes were adjusting to the half-light and he could see Bolingbroke sitting at the forward end of the table, leaning with elbows back and grinning that grin of his, and Jack realized then he was more sick of this torment than he was afraid of being put on shore. Let the old man set him on the beach, he and Noddle would make their way home together.

  “Very well,” Jack said. “I’ll clean them up. Give them here.”

  Bolingbroke snatched the shoes from the bench beside him and tossed them to Jack. “Shine ’em up good, boy, the way the ladies like ’em.”

  “Special shine for you, Bolingbroke,” he said. He put the shoes on the deck. Bolingbroke was looking away, confident that Jack would do his bidding. Jack unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers. His eyes were now adjusted enough that he could direct a steady stream of urine into Bolingbroke’s shoes.

  Even as Jack felt relief come over him, relief on many levels, he sensed a tension ripple through the forecastle, like the cold downdraft that presages a squall. He looked up just as Bolingbroke sensed it as well. Bolingbroke jerked his head in Jack’s direction, and Jack had the great satisfaction of seeing Bolingbroke’s shocked expression, his horrified expression at Jack’s defiance. But the look was gone as quickly as it had come, and Bolingbroke was the picture of composure as he slowly rose from the bench and stepped aft. Jack quickly rebuttoned and rebuckled.

  Jonah Bolingbroke was a big son of a bitch, with four inches and fifty pounds on Jack, but Jack no longer cared about that any more than he cared about being set ashore, or much of anything at that point.

  What’s more, it had been two years since they last met, two years during which Jack had been hauling lines, sweating lines, fisting canvas, wrestling with recalcitrant ships’ wheels, coiling cables, leaning into capstan bars, or heaving at the handspikes of windlasses, two years of shoreside brawls, many a jolly good rough-and-tumble’o. He was not the boy he had been and he was not intimidated and he did not hesitate at all to step forward, cock his arm, and drive his fist into Bolingbroke’s jaw so fast that Bolingbroke did not even have time to replace his cocksure look with one of surprise.

  Jonah stumbled back, his hands to his face, and Jack tried to ignore the pain that exploded in his knuckles. A knot of their shipmates caught Bolingbroke before he hit the deck and set him on his feet. His hands came down and balled into fists. There was blood in the wake of Jack’s punch, a split lip it looked like. “You son of a whore, Biddlecomb, I’ll do you for that!” Bolingbroke said, more of a growl than an articulate sentence, and with that he bounded across the deck, straight at Jack.

  His right hand swung around in an arc, making for the side of Jack’s head. Jack lifted his arm to block the punch and realized his mistake even as he saw Jonah’s powerful left come up from below and connect with his stomach, blowing the wind out of him and doubling him up. But Jack knew by instinct that the knee was coming next, so he twisted to the side and when Bolingbroke made his move, his knee found only air. That threw his balance off and Jack straightened enough that he could give Bolingbroke a left to the stomach and a right to the side of the head that sent him sprawling back but did no worse, since Jack, understanding that his fist would explode in pain with the blow, had pulled the punch.

  Bolingbroke was more mad than hurt, and he was very, very mad. His hand went around behind him and when it returned it was clutching his sheath knife, the blade glowing dull and menacing in the gloom. Jack reached around and pulled his knife as well, and then strong arms grabbed him and held him immobile and he saw others grab Bolingbroke. “None of that, none of that,” Ferguson said, and the knives were wrenched from the combatants’ hands and they were shoved toward one another again, encouraged by their mates to beat each other half to death, but not to finish the job with blades.

  Jonah swung, an ugly roundhouse, and Jack leaned back, felt the air of the blow on his face like the concussion of a cannon blast. He stepped in and landed a quick jab with the right, another with the left. Bolingbroke stumbled back again and then there was a loud knock on the hatch combing overhead and the voice of the first mate called down, “Holloa, the fo’c’sle!”

  With that hail Biddlecomb and Bolingbroke dropped their fists and melted back among the men milling about, and the rest took on attitudes of nonchalance that were ludicrously insincere. The mate’s shoes, stockings, breeches, and then the rest appeared as he came down the ladder. He stopped when his head was below the level of the deck, turned and looked around. He was no fool, and he had been to sea long enough to know that something was acting here, but in accordance with the hierarchy of the merchant trade he would let the forecastle sort out the forecastle’s problems, as long as it did not interfere with the efficient and, more to the point, profitable running of the ship.

  “Harwood, where the devil are you?” the mate snapped.

  “Here, sir,” Jack said, trying not to sound like a man in the middle of a fistfight.

  “Get your dunnage and get aft. We have to leave Noddle ashore, so the old man’s moved Dailey into his berth and he wants you to ship as third.” He took one last glaring look around, and having said what he had to say, he was up the ladder and gone.

  And that was an end to it. Because as pathetic a creature as a third mate might be, he was a mate nonetheless, and no one in the forecastle, particularly not as ill-considered a whore’s whelp as Jonah Bolingbroke, would voluntarily get athwart his hawse. He would not cross him even after Jack, his sea bag over his shoulder, heading up the ladder on his way aft, pointed to the half-filled shoes on deck and said, “Bolingbroke, that’s disgusting. Get that cleaned up and be quick about it.”

  So their enmity, by no means ended, was tabled until they reached Boston, their next port of call, and Bolingbroke was paid off and disappeared in the mysterious and debauched way of sailors ashore. And Jack went on hating him, despite the fact that everything that Jack Biddlecomb was, everything he had thus far accomplished, he owed to Jonah Bolingbroke.

  * * *

  With his move aft, Jack was no longer Harwood but rather Mr. Harwood, and once he had left the Hancock in Philadelphia and shipped aboard another as second he became Mr. Biddlecomb, which he remained until the blessed moment when he became Captain Biddlecomb. And, as Captain Biddlecomb, Jack spent much of his time below, laboring over bills of lading, and bills of health and general clearances and clearing manifests and invoices, lists of passengers, lists of crew, lists of sea stores. He discovered that the life of ease he had always imagined his former captain Mr. Asquith enjoyed was not so easy at all, that it was, in fact, more drudgery and paper than he had quite realized. That, despite the fact that Jack had always had a hand in keeping the ship’s books and accounts in order.

  His days were spent pen in hand, or arguing with chandlers and sailmakers and riggers and ship’s carpenters and, more obsequiously, with Robert Oxnard, as well as Oxnard’s agent, William Dailey. Dailey, in particular, seemed to have an endless assortment of papers for him to consider, and on the worst of their meetings Jack found himself signing forms for this or that without even understanding in any meaningful way what it was he was signing.

  In the evening, when the ship’s carpenters and the riggers and the longshoremen were done with their labors, and there was no one left aboard in need of supervision, Jack and Stiles and a gaggle of sundry young gentlemen took their pleasure in Philadelphia, the greatest city in the burgeoning United States of America. Like a pack of feral dogs they roamed the taverns, pursuing women and the endless amusements that only a thriving port city could offer.

  Philadelphia, capital of the United States, was no creaky, arthritic, staid farm community with its entrenched and homogeneous population, a churc
hgoing, disapproving community always keeping a weather eye out for impropriety, and quashing the first hint of it. This was a seaport, its lifeblood flowed from the Atlantic, up the Delaware Bay to the wharves and anchorages on the Delaware River, and when it was spent it flowed out again. And carried on that stream the goods and the people of the Atlantic world, sailors with no communal ties who sated long-pent desires, always with the knowledge that, no matter how debauched they became, no matter how quickly they ran through three, four, or six months’ wages, their hard-won abilities to hand, reef, and steer would provide for them both their passport and their breakfast.

  It was midmorning, a week and a half after his aborted duel with Bolingbroke, Jack having given up waiting for an invitation to continue the affair, that he returned after a particularly grueling and vexing time at Oxnard’s to the wharf where Abigail remained tied, fore and aft. Jack had managed to infuriate Oxnard by returning to the chandler an entire delivery of salt pork, ten barrels of it, meant to feed the Abigail’s men. His reason for returning it, a reason by Oxnard’s lights entirely inadequate, had to do with its being rancid beyond what even a foremast hand could be expected to eat. Jack suspected that some teamster along the way had emptied out most of the brine to lighten the barrels and make them easier to transport.

  “Now see here, Jack, your foremast hand don’t need fancy cooking, none of your French cuisine with sauces and such. Just give them their salt pork and dried peas and a run ashore and they’re merry as grigs,” Oxnard had explained. But Jack had served his time in the forecastle, had eaten his share of rancid beef purchased, as this no doubt had been, at a greatly reduced price, or taken off the chandler’s hands in exchange for some other consideration. For his men, Jack would have none of it.

  In the end he won that fight, but it meant Oxnard had little appetite for the next request. “And, pray, sir, don’t forget that I will need that rôle d’équipage,” Jack reminded him.

  The rôle d’équipage. It was an innocuous document by any standard—a list of the ship’s crew—but thanks to a decree by the Directoire it had become very crucial indeed. Since 1778, when France had first joined the Americans in their fight against the British, the French had required American ships to show a passport, no more, to prove their nationality. But now the Directoire, furious at the new American treaty with England, was requiring a rôle d’équipage as well. Any ship boarded by a French privateer that could not produce one was considered a fair prize. It was retaliation and a chance for plunder, no more, but when one ship was armed with heavy cannon and the other was not, all the treaties in the world counted for little.

  This was not a situation in which Jack wished to find himself, his own newly installed great guns notwithstanding. But for all the importance that the rôle d’équipage carried, Oxnard gave Jack’s request a wave of the hand and a “Yes, yes, of course,” by way of dismissal.

  And that in turn put Jack in a foul mood, which he nursed and stoked on the way back to the Abigail’s berth. He paused on the wharf and ran his eyes over the ship tied there. The bulwarks were done now, the paint fresh; black from the rail down to the gunnel, which was a brilliant red, then the chief of the hull oiled down to the lower wale, which was black like the bulwarks. The gunports were neatly cut, three per side, and the great guns came poking out like some hibernating beasts testing the air for spring.

  It was all excellently well done, shipshape and Bristol fashion, and normally Jack would have looked on it with the same appreciation with which he might run his eye over the fine lines of a young woman in a silk dress. But the presence of the guns, thrust upon him, still grated and made his mood fouler still.

  With those irritants already gnawing at him, Jack Biddlecomb was not in an ideal temper for the surprise of finding, on entering his cabin, a young gentleman sitting at his table, scratching away with a pen at some correspondence, a small stack of papers to one side, a glass of wine at hand, a cigar smoldering in a saucer that belonged to a tea set his mother had sent aboard.

  “What, ho?” Jack asked, too surprised to come up with more.

  The young man looked up. A smooth, close-shaven face, good skin, very pale. Hair the color of wet sand. He looked to be about Jack’s age, perhaps a year or two older. The shirt and stock visible around the periphery of his silk jacket were white beyond anything Jack could hope to achieve with his own shirts. Indeed, they made the fresh paint of the great cabin seem yellowed in contrast.

  “Oh, yes,” the young man said, showing none of the surprise that Jack was exhibiting. “My chest and bags are on the deck above. Pray, fetch them down here directly.” He lifted the cigar, put it between his lips, and readdressed himself to his writing.

  “And you would be…?” Jack queried.

  The young man looked up again, and now there was the slightest crease of irritation on his brow. “William Wentworth, Esquire. Of the Boston Wentworths.”

  “The Boston Wentworths? Indeed?” Jack had no notion of who the Boston Wentworths were.

  “Indeed, yes. You’ll find the name on my chest. Which, you may recall, I requested that you bring down directly.”

  Jack took a step into the cabin. Wentworth leaned back in his chair, regarding him with curiosity and vague amusement. “And why,” Jack asked, “would you expect me to fetch your dunnage?”

  Wentworth took a pull on his cigar and exhaled a column of smoke like a blast from a cannon’s muzzle. His amusement at Jack’s effrontery made his lips twist up at the corners. “Well, that is what you hardy tarpaulins do, is it not? Fetch one’s ‘dunnage’?”

  Jack took another step and sat on the edge of his berth. Wentworth’s eyes followed him, though his body moved hardly at all. “Fetching dunnage is indeed what we hardy tarpaulins do,” Jack agreed. “Doling out sound thrashings to those who annoy us is another, so one must take care in our company.”

  Wentworth laughed out loud. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and tapped the ash into the tea saucer. “Oh, my dear man, I suggest you not try that, out of consideration for your own health. Now, Ned Buntline or whatever your name might be, off with you and fetch my dunnage, as I asked.” Once again he turned to his writing. He managed to scratch out a few more words in what Jack saw was an astoundingly neat copperplate before looking up again, the amusement quite gone from his face.

  “I say, are you still here, Ned?”

  “That’s Captain Ned. Captain Jack, actually.”

  Wentworth leaned back again, but his look of mild irritation did not alter. “Captain Jack. Captain of…?”

  Jack held up his hands to indicate their surroundings. “All that you behold before you,” he said.

  “Really?” Wentworth said. “Captain of this ship? You are not the gnarled old sea dog I had envisioned. Forgive me. I am terribly disappointed.”

  “I quite understand,” said Jack, who was also disappointed, having hoped to give greater discomfort to this loathsome intruder. “I fear you will be more disappointed still, Master Wentworth, when I tell you that you are in my cabin and I must ask you to leave it at once.”

  At that Wentworth smiled again and looked around with an expression approaching surprise. “This? The master’s cabin? Surely not.”

  “Indeed it is. The cabins for passengers, if such you are, and I dare say it is looking less and less likely, but if such you are, those cabins open onto the alleyway outside my door.”

  “You know,” Wentworth said, tapping more ash into the saucer, “I did look into those rooms, but I took them to be pantries or closets or such. Though now that you mention it, each did seem to sport a singular manner of shelving which might be construed as a sort of bed.”

  “We hardy tarpaulins call them ‘berths’ but yes, that is the very thing.”

  Wentworth shook his head at the wonder of it. “And here I had been congratulating myself on doing the decent thing and taking the most unaccommodating space for myself, thinking sure there must be finer cabins elsewhere aboard for the master�
�yourself, apparently—and Mr. Frost.”

  Jack had heard the name Frost recently but he could not recall where, and at the moment he did not care. His patience with this banter was at an end, so he said, “And why, pray, might you be looking for a cabin aboard my ship at all?”

  By way of answer, Wentworth dug through the small pile of papers on Jack’s table, extracted one, and handed it to him. Jack recognized immediately the flowing hand and ostentatious signature of Robert Oxnard, Esquire, and he read:

  Dear Captain Biddlecomb,

  This note shall be presented to you by Mr. William Wentworth, Esquire, of Boston, whom you will kindly provide passage to Barbados on your upcoming passage thence, and in addition …

  The note went on to address such issues as cabin stores (Wentworth would provide his own), manner in which Wentworth was to be treated (decently), and sundry other concerns. By the end of the first paragraph Jack had read enough to know he was stuck with Wentworth, and between the great guns and this young scion of the Boston Wentworths he wondered what Oxnard might foist on him next. He handed the note back to Wentworth and shouted up through the skylight, “Maguire! What, ho, there, Maguire!”

  A moment later the big seaman stood crowding the great cabin door. “Maguire, pray fetch down Mr. Wentworth’s dunnage. Let him take out what he’ll need for the voyage, then see the rest stowed down in the orlop. Mr. Wentworth may have his choice of any of the cabins forward.”

  “Cabins, sir?” Maguire asked.

  “Yes. In the alleyway outside there. You know, the ones designed for the convenience of the gentry.”