With All Despatch

by Alexander Kent

  There was a wild cheer and Bolitho swung round to see the schooner’s foresail tearing itself apart, the wind bringing her down as she fought against the confusion of sea and helm.

  Bolitho bit his lip as another ball screamed overhead and a length of halliard whirled across the deck like a wounded snake. It could not last. One ball into Telemachus’s only mast would finish it.

  Paice said wildly, “He can’t depress his nine-pounders, sir!”

  Bolitho stared. Paice was more used to this kind of vessel and would know the difficulty of mounting a long nine-pounder on the deck of a merchantman.

  “He’s trying to put about!” Triscott waved at his gun crews. “Into him, lads!” He watched as their grimy hands shot up. “Fire!”

  Paice whispered, “Holy Jesus!”

  Luck, the skill of an older gun-captain, who could say? Bolitho saw the schooner’s bowsprit shiver to fragments, the forecastle suddenly enveloped in torn shrouds and writhing canvas.

  Paice searched through the drifting smoke for his boatswain.

  “Mr Hawkins! Stand by the arms chest!” He tugged out his own hanger, his eyes back on the schooner. “By God, they’ll pay for this!”

  Bolitho saw the distance dropping away as the crippled schooner continued to pay off downwind. His eyes narrowed and he heard the vague bang of muskets, the balls slamming against the cutter’s hull. How long? He gestured urgently. “Can you man-handle the other carronade to the starboard side?”

  Paice nodded, his eyes blazing. “Clear the larboard battery, Mr Triscott! Lay the smasher to starboard and prepare to fire!” He glanced at Bolitho and added, “They may outnumber us, but not for long!”

  Bolitho watched the punctured sails rising above the cutter as if to swoop down and enfold her, smother her into the sea. Fifty yards. Twenty yards. Here a man fell coughing blood, there another clapped one hand to his chest and dropped to his knees as if in prayer.

  Bolitho pushed the boy down beside the companionway.

  “Stay there!” He drew the old sword and pictured Allday right here beside him, his cutlass always ready.

  “Stand by to board!” He saw their faces, some eager, others fearful now that the enemy was alongside. They could hear them yelling and firing, cursing while they waited for the impact.

  Bolitho walked behind the crouching seamen, his sword hanging loosely from his hand.

  Some glanced at him as his shadow fell over them, stunned, wild, filled with disbelief as he showed himself to the schooner’s marksmen.

  “Ready!” Bolitho winced as a ball cut through the tail of his coat. Like a gentle hand plucking at it. “Now!”

  The two carronades exploded in adjoining ports with a combined roar which shook the cutter from truck to keel. As the smoke fanned inboard and men fell about coughing and retching in the stench, Bolitho saw that most of the schooner’s forecastle had been ripped aside, and the mass of men who had been waiting to attack or repel boarders were entwined in a bloody tangle, which turned and moved as if one hideous giant had been cut down. The weight of grape with canister from the poop swivel had turned the deck into a slaughterhouse.

  Bolitho gripped the shrouds and shouted, “To me, lads! Grapnels there!” He heard them thudding on the schooner’s bulwark, saw a crouching figure beside an upended gun, as if watching the attack. But it was headless.

  The two hulls ground into each other, lurched apart, and then responding to the hands at the grapnels came together in a deadly embrace. “Boarders away!” Bolitho found himself carried across to the other vessel’s deck, men thrusting past and around him in their need to get at their adversary.

  Figures fell screaming and dying, and Bolitho saw Telemachus’s anger and jubilation change yet again to an insane sickness. With cutlass and pike, bayonets, even their bare hands they fell on the schooner’s crew with a ferocity which none of them would have believed just an hour earlier.

  Bolitho shouted, “That’s enough!” He struck down a man’s cutlass with his own blade as he was about to impale a wounded youth on the reddened planks.

  Paice too was yelling at his men to desist, while Hawkins the boatswain and a picked party of seamen were already taking charge of halliards and braces, to prevent the two hulls from destroying each other in the swell.

  Cutlasses were being collected by the victors, and the schooner’s company herded together, their wounded left to fend for themselves.

  Bolitho said breathlessly, “Send men below, Mr Paice—some brave fool might try to fire the magazine.” More orders and some cracked cheers rose around him, and he saw Triscott waving his hat from Telemachus’s poop. The boy was standing near him, trying to cheer but almost choked by tears as he saw the devastation and the hideous remains left by the carronades.

  Hawkins squeaked through blood and pieces of flesh, his boots like a butcher’s as he reported to his commander.

  “All secured, sir.” He turned to Bolitho and added awkwardly, “Some of us was no ’elp to you, sir.” He gestured with a tarred thumb. “But you was right. The ’olds is full to the deckbeams with contraband. Tea, spices, silk, Dutch by the looks o’ it.” He lowered his voice and watched without curiosity as a badly wounded smuggler crawled past his boots. “I’ve set some armed hands on the after ’old, sir. Spirits by the cask, Hollands Geneva I’ll wager, and there may be more.”

  Paice wiped his face with his sleeve. “Then she is a Dutchie.”

  Hawkins shook his head. “Only the cargo, sir. The master is, or was, from Norfolk. Most of the others is English.” His lip curled. “I’d swing the lot of ’em!”

  Bolitho sheathed his old sword. Hoblyn had been right about that too. The cargo intended for Whitstable had probably begun its journey in the holds of some Dutch East Indiaman. A quick profit.

  He looked at the dead and dying, then across at Telemachus, her own pain marked in blood. There had been little profit this time.

  Paice asked anxiously, “Are you well, sir?” He was peering at him. “You’re not hurt?”

  Bolitho shook his head. He had been thinking of Allday, always close at times like these, and they had seen more than enough between them.

  “I feel as if I have lost my right arm.” He shook himself. “Have the vessel searched before nightfall. Then we shall anchor until we can attend to our repairs.” He watched as one of the smugglers, obviously someone of authority, was marched past by two seamen. “That is good. Hold them apart. There is much we don’t yet know.”

  Paice said simply, “My bosun spoke for us all, sir. We fought badly because we had no heart for it. But you are a man of war. We shall know better in future.”

  Bolitho walked to the side, his whole being revolted against the sights and stench of death.

  Hoblyn should be pleased; Their Lordships of Admiralty also. A fine schooner which after repair could either go to the prize court or more likely be taken into the navy. An illegal cargo, and desperate men who would soon hang in chains as a warning to others.

  His glance moved over some of the huddled prisoners. A few of them might be pressed into service like their ship, provided they were found guiltless of murder.

  It should have been enough. He felt a seaman offer his hard hand to assist him over the bulwark to Telemachus’s deck.

  But if victory there was, it seemed an empty one.

  6. THE BROTHERHOOD

  JOHN ALLDAY sat on a stone bench with his back resting against the wall. There was only one window, small, and too high to see out of this damp, cell-like room, but he had kept his eyes open since he had surrendered to the press gang and knew that the lockup house was somewhere on the road to Sheerness. They had passed a small cavalry barracks, no more than an outpost for a handful of dragoons, but enough, it seemed, to allow the press gangs to come and go without fear of being attacked by those who might try to release their captives.

  Allday guessed it was about noon and tried to disperse his own sense of uneasiness, the conviction that he had acted rashly and
might find himself in worse trouble.

  His companions, just five of them, were a poor collection, he thought. Deserters probably, but no loss to any ship of war.

  Feet clattered on cobbles and somewhere a man laughed. There was an inn just a few yards from the lockup house, and he had seen two fine-looking girls watching from its porch as they had hurried past. He had thought of the inn he visited in Falmouth. He felt suddenly alone, and lonely.

  He recalled too the time he had been taken by Bolitho’s press gang in Cornwall. He had tried to lie his way out of it, but a gunner had seen the tattoo on his arm, the crossed cannon and flags which he had gathered along the way when he had served in the old seventy-four, Resolution. If what he had suspected was a fact, this same tattoo would help rather than hinder his hazy plan. If not, he might find himself aboard a seagoing ship, outward bound to some hell on the other side of the world before he could make himself believed. Even then, a captain short of trained men would scarcely be willing to listen.

  What would Bolitho do without him? He screwed up his brows in a deep frown. He had watched Bolitho’s despair as he had met one barrier after another, and then the affair with the Loyal Chieftain had been more than enough.

  He glanced at the door as a key grated in it and the same gunner’s mate with the foul breath peered in at them.

  He gestured with his key. “Outside and get cleaned up. Then there’s some bread and cheese, ale too if you behaves yerselves!” He looked directly at Allday. “You stay ’ere. We need some more words about you.”

  Allday said nothing as the others hurried away, already lost. Was the gunner’s mate merely dragging it out for no purpose, or was there something behind his remarks?

  But it was another who finally entered the dank room. Allday recognised him as a member of the press gang, the one who had spoken to him on the way here.

  “Well, Spencer?” The man leaned against the wall and regarded him bleakly. “Got yerself in a right pot o’ stew, eh?”

  Allday shrugged. “I ran once. I’ll do it again.”

  “Mebbe, mebbe.” He cocked his head to listen to some horses cantering along the roadway.

  “With them bloody dragoons on yer tail you’d not get far, matey.

  “Then there’s no way.” Allday lowered his head, to think, to hide his eyes. It was something like a wild animal’s sixth sense, an instinct which he had always possessed, and which had saved his skin too many times to remember. Something Bolitho admired and respected, and had told him as much.

  The man said, “Sailmaker, y’say?”

  Allday nodded. He had no fears there. He had learned to stitch and use a sailmaker’s palm before he was eighteen. There were not many tasks aboard ship he could not manage.

  “Does it matter now?”

  “Look, matey, don’t take that tone with me—”

  Allday sighed. “You know how it is.”

  The other hid his relief. For a moment he had felt something akin to fear when the big man had stirred from smouldering anger.

  “Right then. There are ways. An’ there’s those who needs the likes o’ you.” He gestured contemptuously at the closed door. “Not like them bilge rats. They’d rob an’ cheat anyone, gallows meat th’ lot of ’em!”

  He moved closer to Allday and added quietly, “We’re movin’ tonight. So wot’s it to be? Another poxy ship o’ th’ line, or a berth in somethin’ a bit more—” he rubbed a finger and thumb together “— rewardin’, like?”

  Allday felt cold sweat on his chest. “Can it be done?”

  “No questions. But yes, it can, an’ it is!” He grinned. “You be ready, see?”

  Allday leaned over to pick up his old jacket and was careful that the other man saw his tattoo. “I can’t stomach being locked up.”

  “Right you are. But make no mistake. If you betray those who might be willin’ to ’elp you, you’ll pray for death on a halter. I’ve seen things—” He straightened up. “Just believe me, see?”

  Allday thought of the corpse on the Loyal Chieftain’s deck, the rumours he had heard from some of the Telemachus’s hands that the murdered man’s family had vanished too. It did not need a magician to discover why.

  The door opened and the gunner’s mate came in. “You can get yer grub now, er—Spencer.”

  Allday watched for a hint of understanding between them, but there was none. In this game nobody trusted anyone. Perhaps the gunner’s mate was controlling this strange business?

  Any deserter would probably take an offer of help, even if it landed him in the midst of a gang of smugglers. Being retaken by a press gang at best meant the same life from which he had tried to escape. At worst it could mean real hardship, plus a savage flogging as a warning to others.

  The gunner’s mate walked beside him to a long, scrubbed table where the others were already eating bread and cheese as if it was their last meal on earth.

  He said, “Stick to the sea, Spencer. Don’t get like them scum.”

  Allday asked casually, “What did you want to talk about?”

  The gunner’s mate picked up a tankard and waited for a seaman to fill it with ale for him.

  “Don’t matter now. Your ship, the London, ’as sailed for the Caribbean. You’ll just ’ave to take what you’re given.”

  When Allday had been pressed and taken to Bolitho’s frigate Phalarope he had seen nothing like this. From a quiet Cornish road to the messdeck of a man-of-war. He smiled grimly. Him and Ferguson who had later lost an arm at the Saintes. Now they would serve no other. It was more like love than duty.

  He glanced around the yard. Small groups of men were being mustered and checked by the lieutenant and some other members of a press gang.

  His heart sank. Not a good seaman amongst them . . . he almost laughed. How could he care about the needs of the fleet when at any moment his own life might be in danger?

  But there had to be a way of doing it. If not the gunner’s mate, then who? No ordinary seaman, press gang or not, could manage it alone. It would be more than his life was worth. A brief court martial, a few prayers, and then run aloft to some big ship’s main-yard to kick your breath to the wind. No, there had to be more involved than that.

  He watched the lieutenant, the same one who had called on him to stand and be examined. Allday knew ships, and he knew officers. This lieutenant had not the brains even to be dishonest.

  The lieutenant shouted, “Pay attention. I’ll not say it twice!”

  Silence settled over the uneasy gathering.

  He continued, “In view of the situation here you must move at dusk to Sheerness. You will go in separate parties, and obey all orders without hesitation. I shall personally see that any disorder is treated as mutiny.” He glared around. “I need not say more, I think?”

  Allday heard someone whisper, “Sheerness, up the road! Christ, Tom, we’ll be signed into some ship afore the week’s out!”

  A tall figure with white patches on his collar moved from one of the outhouses.

  Allday watched, his heart suddenly beating hard. The midshipman looked old for his lowly rank, about the same age as Telemachus’s Lieutenant Triscott. A pale, embittered face, the mouth turned down like someone permanently out of humour. Passed-over for lieutenant, or held back because of a senior officer’s disfavour? There could be a dozen reasons.

  Allday reached out to pick up some cheese and saw the midshipman give him a quick glance, then another at the seaman who had made him the offer.

  So this was it. Allday tried to think clearly and calmly so that the chunk of dry cheese almost choked him.

  There had to be an officer mixed up in it, even if it was an unimportant, passed-over midshipman.

  The gunner’s mate said, “That’s Mr Midshipman Fenwick. ’E’ll be with your lot.” He glanced at him curiously. “Between us, ’e’s a pig, so watch yer step!”

  Allday faced him. “I’ll remember.”

  He returned to the cell-like room, his mind already busy
on the next tack. If Bolitho discovered what was happening, it would be Mr bloody Fenwick who would need to watch his step.

  Allday grinned. And that’s no error.

  Commodore Ralph Hoblyn climbed up from the schooner’s cabin and leaned heavily on an ebony stick while he looked along the upper deck.

  Bolitho watched him and tried to read his thoughts. The schooner, originally Dutch, had been renamed the Four Brothers, and, according to her papers, was used for general trading from the port of Newcastle. Her owner and master were one and the same, a man named Darley who had died in the brief but savage fight with Telemachus.

  Now she lay at anchor off Sheerness, with the scarlet coats of a full marine guard at bow and stern in case anyone inside or outside the dockyard might be tempted to pilfer her cargo.

  Hoblyn regarded the great bloodstain which had defied all attempts of the captured smugglers to remove it. The remains of those cut down by the carronades’ devastating bombardment had been thrown unceremoniously overboard, but the stain, and the shattered timbers and planking were evidence enough of the battle.

  Hoblyn wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. Bolitho had noticed that he seemed to tire very easily. Was it just that he had become unused to the sea, or did this schooner’s deck act as a cruel reminder of his last command?

  He said, “I am extremely gratified, Bolitho. A full cargo, and a well-found vessel to boot.” He glanced up at the rigging, some of which had been spliced by Paice’s hands for the passage to Sheerness. “She’ll fetch a good bounty at the next prize court, I shouldn’t wonder. The dockyard can patch and paint her beforehand, of course.”

  Bolitho asked, “You’ll not take her into the service, sir?”

  Hoblyn shrugged and winced. “I should be delighted to act on Their Lordships’ behalf, naturally, Bolitho, but money first—theirs or someone else’s.” He turned towards him. “No favours.”

  Hoblyn walked to the vessel’s wheel and touched it thoughtfully. “I shall send word immediately. To the Customs Board too.”