“Patrick Hare. Papist blasphemy and expressing opinions sympathetic to the Irish rebellion.”
Patrick Hare was gagged with a metal spike that split his lips open on both sides and made him drool blood. His back was already raw—scabbed and half-healed from a previous punishment.
“Spreading sedition is a crime against the whole ship’s company,” said Walker, stirring out of a kind of trance of glory—his face shining. “And treason is a capital offense…”
“Sir.” As first lieutenant, Peter was standing at Walker’s elbow. “I was present when this incident occurred,” he said. “Hare expressed a sympathy with the Catholic suffragist movement—which is not an illegal nor a treasonous organization.”
“He added a great deal more in Irish, sir,” said Lieutenant Sanderson.
“And the speaking of Irish is an offense in itself,” Walker finished with a smile. “Let him have twenty.”
“Twenty lashes, sir?” asked the boatswain with a tinge of disappointment.
“Twenty dozen.”
Tears leaked from Patrick Hare’s tightly closed eyes and ran into his torn mouth as he was tied to the grating.
“Sir,” said Kenyon again. “Might I remind you that, only last week, Doctor O’Connor said he was not to be punished again for a month, to let his heart recover from the strain.”
“O’Connor? Yes, well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? These people are as thick as thieves.” Walker frowned at the boatswain. “Well? Lay on, man.”
“Sir…” There was an unmistakable urgency in Kenyon’s tone now. Too much, for at the sound of it the captain’s face suffused with red. His lips drew away from his teeth; his eyes disappeared into fleshy slits.
“Do you want to join him, Mr. Kenyon? Well? Do you? The next time you question me, I will have you under the lash, sir, admiral’s favorite or not. Do you understand me?”
“I do.” Peter bowed his head, and a muscle worked in the angle of his jaw. “I understand you very well,” he said in a meek, polite voice that made Walker turn back to his business with a smile. But Summersgill had seen the young man’s eyes, alive with fury and a kind of sympathetic fear, and he heard the criticism at the heart of this surrender.
They threw Hare’s body over the side along with a boy of thirteen called Joseph Zacharias, guilty of falling asleep on watch, who had been given the choice of starving to death or being thrown out to swim home. He was alive when the sharks got him, but the prevailing opinion was that it was still the better choice.
In the afternoon, when every spot had been scoured from the decks and a chill rain had set in above, Summersgill found Peter in the wardroom. His young friend’s head was bent over a glass of port, as though to veil his betraying eyes from the world.
“I have never seen such a travesty of justice,” said Summersgill. “Little surprise the admiralty has such a difficulty in recruiting enough men. Is it the same throughout the navy?”
“I wonder you ask me, sir.” The young man looked up with a glitter of green fury and shame like the sudden sparking of an emerald.
“I ask you because it’s clear to me that a bruised face is a small price to pay to be spared the lash. Because I have never for one moment believed that this is the career you love so well and write so eloquently about to your poor mother that she simply has to read the letters to all her neighbors.”
Kenyon gave a snort that might have been laughter and passed the decanter. “You know, sir,” he said quietly, “that I am as recently come to this ship as you are yourself. But that time has been long enough for me to learn that Bates is an awkward, unhandy, ill-tempered rogue.” He looked down, drawing a little noose on the table in the ever-present damp. “And that Hare was a good man. Well liked. Ready with a kindness. You understand? I spared the wrong one. I should have found a way to…”
Silence for a moment, and Summersgill wondered how many of the other blank-faced officers suffered so, how many of the boys wept into their pillows every night, mute and hopeless. “Is this how the whole navy works? Is this how you would run a ship?”
Kenyon looked at him sideways, with a wary look such as Summersgill had never seen on his open face before, then drained his glass and stood. “Would you like to climb to the fighting top, sir? There is a fine view. I can recommend it.”
There was not, in fact, a view worthy of the name—gray waves and gray drizzle slanting sideways across the surface of the sea. Water ran down the masts and the rigging about them with a faint, musical trickle, and Summersgill huddled in his borrowed oilskins and felt impressed with himself for climbing to this eminence without a second’s fear.
“On the Northumberland we used to dance.” Kenyon stood with one hand on the shrouds, leaning out into unsupported air. “All the long weeks of sailing with the trade winds—the mids would skylark and the men dance and sing. The officers…we put on a play, with a musical review and poetry readings.”
“Not like this.”
“No.” He turned with a flash of sudden intensity. “I’m not saying that we didn’t flog. We have the combings of the jails thrust on us to turn into sailors. Dumb, illiterate, violent brutes who don’t understand anything but force. I am no opponent of flogging at need, God knows. But…”
He fell silent again, and Summersgill could see the keen gaze automatically sweep the rigging and deck, whether looking for nautical perfection or for the captain’s spies, Summersgill didn’t know.
“Do you remember my tutor, Mr. Allenby?” said Kenyon, seemingly at random. “He was a great judge of horses. He used to say that the last thing you want is a hunter so broken that it will only obey. You should hope for loyalty and a spirit to match your own, and to establish a rapport with it, such that—if you fell—it would return for you out of affection. There is no comparison, he said, between the lengths that a friend will go for you and the grudging obedience of a slave.” Kenyon looked down from the dizzying height into the waves. “I have often thought the world would do well to heed his wisdom.”
“Is a ship much like a horse?” Summersgill asked, amused by the realization that this was the answer to his question. He had not yet caught the young man openly saying anything seditious. Not even critical. But such innocent lying, such half-hearted concealment of the truth beneath so obvious a metaphor? Poor Peter. He would never make much of a conspirator.
“It is like a horse, sir, in the sense that a horse is faster and stronger than a man. Only man’s authority over the beast prevents him from being trampled into the dirt every time he applies the whip. In the same way, the Nimrod has seven hundred and ninety-three men, and forty-five officers, including the boys. Only our authority and the affection—or terror—in which we are held prevents the men from realizing their own strength. When they trust us and believe in us, all is well. When they don’t…”
Summersgill felt for a moment as though the frail platform on which he sat had lurched towards the sea. He had been thinking of Peter’s dilemma as a personal one, much like his own—the distress of a reasonable and fastidious gentleman at having to participate in a distasteful system. But there was more than disgust at play here—there was a mortal, abject dread.
The bestial faces of the sailors flashed into his mind, gazing up in silent, powerless hatred at the gold-braided figures on the quarterdeck. Suppose their hatred did at last boil over? What example of restraint and kindness had they been set? It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Mutiny?”
Kenyon gave him a smile as thin as a garrote. “Indeed. I must therefore do everything in my power to support the present regime. And you had best pray, sir, that the men continue terrified of their captain and in awe of their officers. Because if it ever crossed their minds that he—and we—are only human, I should not give you a farthing for our lives.”
Chapter Five
The noise pummeled her, picked her up, swept her away, tossed in the din like a doll in a millrace. Astounding, unbearable, exhilarating. The air stank of
fireworks and, mysteriously, Emily wanted to laugh and laugh for the sheer glee of it. Stuffing her hands into her ears, she did so and could not hear her own voice over the thunder.
Above, a ferocious sun was beating down on deck, tar was falling from the yards in sticky rain, and it was tacky underfoot as the caulking between the deck planks softened. Down here on the gun deck, that sweltering heat was added to by the bursts of fire, the tons of red-hot brass, and the bodies of three hundred men, their skins shining, sweat falling onto the guns to go up in steam as soon as it touched.
Emily stood beside and a little behind Captain Walker, watching. Now that she had been put in her place and made no attempt to leave it by speaking to him, they had reached this amicable state in which both pretended the other did not exist. The pretense did not allow any familiarities to be taken, however. Just as Walker had made no concession to the weather, Emily had not permitted herself to do so either, and at times she thought she should fall down simply from the heat. Sweat ran down her back, down her legs, making her petticoats cling suffocatingly beneath the stiffly hooped weight of her gown. Her torso itched, the creases in her shift pressed into her skin by the tight boned stays, and the sack dress she wore on top felt heavy as armor. She could hardly walk or lift her arms. How the gun crews could stand it, she couldn’t imagine. At the thought, in sympathy, her joy began to wear off.
These men had been awake half of the night as they trimmed and retrimmed the sails to squeeze an extra knot of speed out of the ship, trying to make up for the time lost to the storm. They had been on their knees before dawn, scrubbing the decks, pumping up the salt water, scouring the planks with holystones and flogging them dry with bundles of rags. Now they worked like Trojans in an inferno that would undo any man’s strength, and faces that had been alight with the glory of the great guns were beginning to look numb and closed with exhaustion.
Outside, boat crews labored to pull rafts of barrels far forward into position to float past as targets, and in the brief break while Walker was scowling at his watch, Emily noticed two of the gun captains surreptitiously debating. Mr. Anderson, tears in his eyes, his pasty white face whiter still with fear, was whispering urgently to Mr. Andrews. As soon as Walker looked up, the child flinched away, shaking his head emphatically.
Finally, Andrews patted Anderson on the shoulder and strode down the awfully bare corridor of planks between the gasping gun crews, Walker’s disapproving eye resting on him the whole way.
“You have something to say, mister?”
“Aye, sir. Mr. Anderson feels that number six is dangerously overheated, sir. I’ve looked at the piece and I concur. The touch-hole is almost white hot.”
“And Mr. Anderson did not have the guts to report this himself?”
“Sir, he…”
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you mollycoddle these boys, Andrews.” Walker narrowed his eyes and thrust his face forward. In response, Mr. Andrews drew himself up with an unconscious, pugnacious quirk to his mouth. More like one of the wild Irishmen who roamed the streets of St. Giles half-cut and looking for a fight, Emily thought, than like a sober officer of His Majesty’s Navy.
Seeing the physical threat failing, Walker changed tactics. “Or is it something else, eh,” he asked, raising his eyebrows, “that makes you so tender of the little lads? Well, Mr. Andrews, I hanged a man just the other week for that.”
Emily watched with interest as the young man’s face paled with shock at this, and she wondered what the captain was suggesting. Not… No, surely not. That was beyond the pale! What a vile thing to be accused of, no wonder Mr. Andrews looked so appalled.
From her own experience with the boys, there wasn’t a jot of truth in it, but someone was bound to believe it. Someone was bound to “explain” the offense to the children, and thus pollute their life with one more nightmare. Someone was bound to bump into Mr. Andrews in the dark between decks and give him a beating, just in case. What a vicious man Walker was, and how inventive with his methods of control. Lord, how she did despise him.
“No, until Mr. Anderson grows the balls to make his own decisions, he cannot expect me to listen. Dismissed.”
The targets were let loose. The note of the cannon was different as they bellowed—they leaped as they recoiled, the chains that held them to the hull twanging taut, the impact of their weight making the whole frame of the ship shudder. There were worried faces as the crews jumped out of their way, yelling and cursing as men began to burn themselves on the hot metal. In snatched intervals of silence, there was a delicate, metallic pinging noise.
She was just beginning to wonder whether it would be a good time to leave when number six exploded.
The din was staggering. The flame even more so. A wave of incandescent heat washed over her, and a thrumming sound passed her left ear. Her world paused strangely, so that between the explosion and the first scream there seemed a slow, infinite time in which to think but where movement was suspended.
Then someone shoved past her, bucket in hand, and everything resumed its usual pace. She turned to find the deck aflame—a seething chaos of men pouring water, stamping on fire with their bare feet. The crew of number six lay scattered around it, broken and as red as the cannon itself.
Little Anderson was taking the pulse of a man, apparently unaware of the shard, thick as an ax blade, embedded in his own thigh. “Mundy and China George are alive,” he cried in a watery voice, struggling to lift the closest man to him—he hadn’t the strength to lift the seaman’s head and shoulders. “Someone help me. Oh!”
Noticing his own wound, he gazed at it, swaying before his eyes rolled back and he fell. Andrews made an instinctive movement towards him and stopped, his face grim, before deliberately turning away to lift Mundy onto a hastily improvised stretcher. It was Chips, the ship’s carpenter, who knelt by the wounded boy’s side, trying to find a place to press on the wound without driving the jagged brass further in. There was a smell of charring flesh. All of the shrapnel was still red hot.
Emily tried to move forward, and only then realized she was shaking so hard she could hardly stand upright. A rage that felt almost like a religious experience overwhelmed her, sweeping her along before it. “He said,” she hissed between her teeth, clamping them together between words to still their chattering, “he said it wasn’t safe. He said it! Why didn’t you listen?”
“Too bloody right, missy.” Suleiman “Sully” Chips looked up with cannon fire in his eyes. He was a slender man with the build of a jockey, whose deep, almost blue-black skin had fascinated Emily on sight. He had been so amused by her regard that he expanded on it at every meeting with a yet more implausible story of his native land.
In this place of oppression and silence, he had been—like Hawkes—one of the few comfortable acquaintances Emily had made, and she thought him too gentle, too good-humored for the life. Now, however, there was nothing gentle about him. The veins stood out in his neck as he hurled himself forward at the captain. He never got close. His fellow sailors, recognizing the signs of a man pushed too far, crowded about him, trying to calm him down or, failing that, to drown out his accusing voice.
“Chips, leave him be.”
“Come back here to the boy. We’ve to move him.”
“Let it go. Sully, let it go!”
But Suleiman would not let it go. He drew himself up to his full height of five-foot-one and in a loud voice demanded, “Aren’t none of you angry? Han’t any of you got the guts the young missy’s got? We all fucking know who killed these men. We all know it. Han’t any of you the stones to stand up and make it stop?”
“Leave. Now.” The second lieutenant came up beside Emily, his hand on his sword, loosening it in its scabbard. At the sight she realized the peril—imagined the gun deck erupting into violence. The officers were armed with swords, and marines were even now filing in behind them with rifles and bayonets in their hands, but the men had cannonballs and cartridges of gunpowder. If it came to a f
ight, she could vividly imagine the carnage. So close they lived to this avalanche of barbarism. Her glorious anger faded at the thought, and fear replaced it. She shook out her skirts, squeezed between the line of rifles and ran away, feeling cowardly and humiliated and desperately afraid.
Chapter Six
“Are…” After the rigors of punishment day, Walker had retired to his cabin to rest, and Summersgill found Peter Kenyon standing very stiffly on the quarterdeck in the isolation of profound shame. “Are you well?”
He couldn’t tell whether the rigid posture was due to pain or to the unbearable affront to his dignity, but he suspected the latter. It was a matter of embarrassment even to himself to acknowledge the atrocity.
Kenyon had observed that some leniency might be possible in the sentencing of Suleiman Chips, “a good man, overcome by a temporary fit of grief”, and on hearing Walker sentence him to keelhauling, had objected that keelhauling had been banned by act of parliament some years ago as too barbaric a punishment for naval use.
One could argue that he had known the risk he was taking, speaking up—the captain’s warning was unequivocal—but nevertheless not a single man on board had imagined Walker would really go through with his threat. It tore a hole in the laws of nature to suppose an officer and a gentleman could be treated like a common man. The sense of disorientation, of the world gone mad, was more frightening than the punishment itself.
Summersgill himself, not bound by naval tradition, had left the quarterdeck so that he might not see his young friend being flogged like a common tar, and now Kenyon acknowledged that kindness by a slight lift of the lips. “I’m prime, thank you, sir. Yourself?”
“I admit to feeling somewhat oppressed.” Summersgill looked down to where the body of Chips lay sewn into a hammock. “Something has to be done. Must you bear this? Can you not call him out? I swear to God if he had done the same to me, I would.”
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