by Peter Rimmer
In those early young days they called her Tilda and many said she was the prettiest girl in Chester, some even went as far as the whole of the Wirral of Cheshire but all of them said she could have done ten times better than the roving seaman who told strange tales and talked of great wealth that had no reflection in his seaman's clothes. They called him a big mouth but within three voyages he came back to Liverpool as coxswain of the ship, appointed halfway through the voyage when the original coxswain died of yellow fever. It was at the end of that voyage they were married. She had been dominated by her father and was now dominated by her husband. She was to have his children, look after his small house and behave herself while he took the steps to move them out of poverty. Never once had she looked at another man during the long months alone for fear of reprisal. He had learned the word 'gainsay' at an early age. As the years went by she forgot who she was and did as he told her and the big mouth proved his worth and the small house grew to a mansion. The one thing she had never understood was the loyalty of his crews but then she had never been to sea and seen the bond of man in danger and need for leadership to survive.
She had tried to help Emily when they came to Hastings Court after the wedding but had failed. The young extrovert who had cantered over the county with Sebastian had withdrawn into her shell and even when the boy was born Emily had left most of the bringing up to the nurse, brooding alone in her room or walking for hours in the woods. The light had gone out of her eyes. Mathilda never once heard her laugh and Harry had reached for affection to Alison Ford. Emily's father had left for Italy the day after the wedding in the old church. Some letters came for Emily but after the first they were left on the silver tray in the hall unopened. First she put it down to Arthur spending his weeks and more often his weekends in London but even before Harry was born she recognised a cold indifference. They were pawns in two other people’s game of chess, strangers in a marriage of their fathers' convenience. The only person Mathilda could see who was happy with the arrangement was her husband. He was the squire, the real master of Hastings Court and his heir, young Harry, was the apple of his eye because young Harry was going to be recognised by the county as a gentleman.
"Five hundred pounds," he was raging again. "I'll offer anyone five hundred pounds who finds that boy and brings him back to his ancestral home. Good God woman, there have been Mandervilles on this estate since the time of the Conqueror. That brat can't take that away."
"If they find Harry they will find Sebastian," she said miserably.
"And bring him to justice."
"Hang him, Captain; you're talking about our youngest son."
"He kidnapped my grandson, for God's sake. And his mother."
"I rather think she went willingly. They were inseparable since childhood."
"She consented to marry Arthur."
"Maybe. She loved her father. Did what he said. Have you ever looked at the calendar?"
"What do you mean?" snapped The Captain as he stopped pacing the front terrace. The sun was throwing the shadows of the old trees from far away. "What do you mean by that?"
"I think our grandson was born a little too early to have anything to do with Arthur. Anyway, she's not his type. He likes sluts."
"What do you mean, sluts?"
"Whores. The woman he keeps in that house in London. I think that Sebastian kidnapped his own son and that will make a difference in a court of law. Leave well alone."
"What about my grandson?"
"He'll be living his life without your help and maybe his mother is smiling again."
"Five hundred pounds 'ill bring 'em back. Brass that's what people understand. Someone must know where they are and this time I have the law on my side. Five hundred pounds is a lot of money. Five hundred pounds will find them."
"Don't you see what you're doing?"
"Of course I do. I want my grandson back in Hastings Court."
The Reverend Nathanial Brigandshaw saw the reward posted on a billboard in the docks, the youthful face of Sebastian grinning at his fate.
"It is the enemy within us that destroys. A family, a nation are the same, Bess," he told his wife. "We Brigandshaws are destroying ourselves as we are trying to be what we are not. Mother was a scullery maid and father a common seaman, for God's sake. Now look at what we are trying to be. Why did I go to Arthur that morning?"
"Because you thought it was right."
"We are too quick to impose our judgement. Why should I be right? The judge. The arbitrator of good. Now mother tells me the boy's more likely Seb’s. Why couldn't I mind my own business? If he hangs I will have helped to cast the rope. If I had not told Arthur Seb was here it could have been any maniac running off with Emily and the child. Good God, Bess, no one knew Seb was in the country until I told them. And I do it every day. Every day I am telling people what to do because I think, me, Nat Brigandshaw, the holy Reverend, what is good for them. What do I really know about their lives except I would not like to live the same way? I tell all those poor souls what I want. What would be good for me? Why do we interfere, Bess?"
"Because we want to help," answered his wife.
"But do we help?"
"I don't know."
Arthur Brigandshaw saw the reward in The Times which ruined a generous day. The last thing Arthur wanted was Emily back in Hastings Court. Paying for another man's bastard was not on Arthur's itinerary and the status quo was much to his satisfaction. When the latest of his live-in housekeepers demanded he made her an honest woman he could honestly say he would be delighted but the law would have something else to say. He told himself he would happily have his cake and eat it too. It was the kind of situation that appealed to Arthur.
The day before news of the Jack being raised in Central Africa, had sent the shares in the British South Africa Company up twenty-two shillings more than Arthur's purchase price but he was not going to sell. Soon the thousands of prospectors who were combing the countryside would strike it rich and the flow of royalties to the BSAC would send the price of their shares to the sky. Why, Arthur told himself, letting greed get the better of him, last week's newspaper had said there was more gold in the country than in the whole of the Transvaal. Everyone knew the gold on the Witwatersrand was more than anything they found in California. If he sold his shares and paid off his debts he would have twenty thousand and some pounds in his pocket he calculated. But if he waited for the gold to flow out of the earth he would become a millionaire, a man richer than his father and without the impediments of his father's birth. Rich, free of his wife and father, unable to marry, the combination for Arthur was idyllic. He could have as many mistresses as he wanted without the slightest chance of a problem.
Ignoring his father's request to return to Hastings Court, Arthur took the train to Dover. Paris in the autumn was as perfect as Paris in the spring. Even with a house and twenty thousand pounds he was a rich man. The banks would not worry him. Their loans were now covered well above the hilt. Mentally he wished his young brother well. The man and small boy were out of the country. It was obvious. If only his father would let the matter rest. He was master of Hastings Court, wasn't that enough? How much did one's vanity require to quench its thirst?
Alison Ford was the first to discard her corset, the stay that strapped in her stomach. The temperature in the valley had risen to a hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the rains refused to break. Each afternoon the clouds built up ominously and twice there were streaks of lightning but not one drop of rain. Four rondavels, pole and mud huts, had been built under a spreading acacia tree that rose a hundred feet above the roughly thatched roofs, the roots of the great thorn tree tapping the living waters of the Zambezi River. Across from their camp, a long island stood out in mid-stream, rich in tangled green undergrowth with ilala palms stretching out of the thickets to reach for the sky. On the near shore of the island, crocodiles sunned themselves and when their blood temperature rose too high they slid into the water and floated with the str
eam, nose and eyes bulging from the water.
By the time the first big drops of rain splashed the dark surface of the flowing river, Alison had discarded the top stay, made from strips of whalebone and elastic a quarter inch thick and Emily had followed suit. The temperature had risen another five degrees Fahrenheit and convention had been sacrificed to the heat. The men still wore breeches and shirts with long sleeves, the breeches held up with thick braces that Tinus used to hook his thumbs when he was standing looking out at the great river and the herds of animals forced near the river by the six-month drought: all the waterholes away from the big river had dried up along with the rivers. Everything, man and beast, was waiting for the rain; tempers flared as the heat pressed down. Even the girls in print frocks that came to the ground and showed the shape of their bodies underneath in the bright sunlight were too hot to worry about the breach of decorum: English ladies of good breeding had never before lived in the valley of heat. During the day, it had become too hot to talk or complain and even Harry sat quietly in the shade of the big acacia tree and envied the crocodiles' cool water. Finally, Tinus had given up his search for the spoor of the great elephant and only shot the meat they cooked over the evening fire to the rumbling sounds of distant thunder.
In the middle of November the rains broke and they laughed with joy and for the first time amid the clashes of monstrous thunder, using the excuse of her fear, Alison and Tinus became lovers, each returning to their huts before morning. Not one of them thought of the past or the future. Even Tatenda smiled at the white man's happiness.
Early in the morning, at the time Emily was conceiving her second child out of wedlock, the Pool of London was gripped by a black frost. Jeremiah Shank sitting half frozen on a discarded wooden railway sleeper was out of money, out of a job, and out of the smallest prospect of finding one. The Certificate of Character given to him by Captain Doyle after his discharge from the Indian Queen was tantamount to a blacklisting from any British boat or any boat calling at a British port. The Merchant Navy had ostracised him. Jeremiah Shank was a man of small stature and sharp features, the nose slightly twisted to the left from birth. Unfortunately he also had one eyelid that permanently drooped but these were not the features that got him into trouble. Unbeknownst to him and quite outside his control the combination of the bent, twisted nose and one drooping eyelid gave him the cocky look of the man sneering at the world and particularly his fellow man. Even perfect strangers found their fists in voluntary clenching when they perceived him in the line of sight. When men grew to know the man they not only clenched their fists but punched him on the crooked nose. Over the years of punishment the constantly broken nose had tilted more and more to the left. Even dogs ran away from him.
The east wind was cutting through his short seaman’s jacket and the scarf that wrapped around his face. Beneath this paltry protection against winter weather there was nothing left in his stomach to make a noise. At one point during the night he had thought he was going to die. The Mission to Seamen had told him to go away as they were tired of his fights. Before the dawn and as the temperature continued to fall he began to pray and when the dawn showed him where he was sitting in the lee of Colonial Shipping's Pool of London warehouse, where he had staggered, cold and hungry in the early part of the night, he looked up at the post on the wall and the grinning youthful face of Sebastian Brigandshaw.
"There is a God," he croaked to himself and got up to stamp the circulation back into his feet. With the first glimmer of hope, he began to work his way round to the front of the building. Clutched in his right hand was the poster.
Five men in winged collars sat at high lecterns in the counting room. The youngest of them was forty-years-old. None of them looked up. Leading off from the counting room were private offices and behind these the warehouses stuffed full of the proceeds of Empire: chests of tea from India and Ceylon, Demerara sugar from British Guiana, cloves from Zanzibar, raw wool in great bales from Australia, hogsheads of tobacco from America, the first Empire; and waiting to go out, cloth from the Lancashire cotton mills, steel from Sheffield and every kind of new-fangled machine known to man. Even in the counting house Jeremiah Shank could smell the cloves. He waited in the warmth, the coal fire acting like a blood transfusion. For more than an hour no one took the slightest notice of him sitting on the wooden bench next to the roaring fire. Even the tearing east wind failed to penetrate the building. On the bench sat the notice, Sebastian looking at the ceiling. When he was quite warm and sure he could stand properly he stood up, lifting his head above the sanctuary of the shipping counter, catching the eye of one of the scribes.
"You!" shouted the man. "What are you doing there? Out! Out! No seamen. Dear oh dear. Get out, I say. The Captain is almost due. Get out, you hear me?"
"I want to see The Captain."
"Don't they all. Now out. What's wrong with your face?"
"I'll wait for The Captain."
"You'll do nothing of the sort. You know who I am! Chief clerk! Chief clerk!"
At the moment the chief clerk, puny as he was, clutched his right hand into a fist, the owner of Colonial Shipping, still in town to pursue his younger son, opened the second door from the outside, the first already shut behind him against the winter wind, and took in Jeremiah and the poster all in one.
"Good morning Captain Sir," five men said in unison standing to attention.
"I know this man," said Jeremiah, the Lord was still on his side. He was pointing down at the poster still lying face up on the bench.
"Then you'd better follow me into my office," said The Captain by which time the five men were diligently back to their tasks.
"Close the door," said The Captain. "Now, who is he?"
"Sebastian Brigandshaw, your youngest son."
"Where is he?"
"First the reward, Captain Sir, then I'll tell. I ain't ate nothin' for four days so I want my money first."
"Don't be stupid. You're probably lying."
"How I know his face? One more night like last night and I'll be dead, then you'll never know Captain Sir...All right. Give me fifty quid and I'll tell you all about the Indian Queen."
"You sailed out with my boy?"
"And back again. Now, can I 'ave my fifty quid?"
The Captain thought for a moment and smiled, "I rather think you can."
Outside, with his back to the warehouse buildings, Captain Doyle contemplated the bleakness of the London docks. Ships with furled sails were like trees without leaves, struck equally by the bitter cold. One two master was tacking with the east wind into port and a steamship threw sooty clouds of black and white smoke that smelt of sulphur into the morning air: she would sail on the tide that pulled back and forth from the Thames estuary and the Royal Navy port of Chatham. In his pocket was his letter of resignation and a list of his officers and men, with their signatures, who wished to leave Colonial Shipping and follow their captain: only seven members of the crew had not been asked to sign. All those asked were listed on his sheet of paper.
From the corner where he had stood waiting, Doyle had seen The Captain go through the outside door into the building but still his conscience pricked, the loyalty given over so many years he now found difficult to throw away. Before The Captain had strode across the dockyard, Doyle had seen Shank and known his purpose. The man was a misfit in a world that hated difference. There was no compassion for a misfit out at sea. Friends turned on friends after weeks of close quarters and a Shank was a catalyst for disaster. The first time he had sent him away with a good Certificate of Character, taken him back for pity and finally thrown him off the ship at Cape Town, thinking any white man could make some kind of life for himself in the colony.
The door banged in the wind behind him and Doyle turned to watch a rejuvenated Shank stride away from the building. In a way Doyle was glad and hoped the man would put the reward to good use.
The Indian Queen had sailed home three weeks earlier and every member of the crew knew a
bout the reward and was ashamed of a man pursuing his own son through the law. The deputation had been led by the coxswain and the first officer and the pre-emptive plan had been set. They all knew it was only a matter of time before someone told The Captain but with the days in port the mood of his crew had changed. The contingency plan they had made called for the purchase of a new ship driven by steam with the crew and officers owning half the shares according to their rank. Not only would they own half the profits but half the ship when the bank was repaid its loan. The other half would be owned by their backers, Sebastian Brigandshaw and Tinus Oosthuizen, from the proceeds of the last ivory hunt; Tinus's last hunt for the Great Elephant.
Being a man who had always faced his dangers, Captain Doyle turned away from the tall masts and black funnels and walked towards the front door of Colonial Shipping.
As Doyle expected, the last person The Captain expected to see in his office that morning was the master of the Indian Queen.
They were both the same size and build; stocky men who had weathered all the oceans of the world. The Captain was fifty-four-years old and Doyle, five years younger. They had first sailed together when Doyle was nineteen and the wind and sun had not turned his face into hard leather run through with rivers and ravines. A piece of Doyle's right ear was missing, lost to frostbite on a deadly voyage round the Horn into the waters of the Arctic. The Captain had a small finger, the pinkie, missing from his left hand, a reminder of the same deadly voyage. Nine Englishmen had died on that voyage round the Horn of South America fighting the Cape Horn current and the west wind drift, taking English machinery on the short route to Chile in a ship of three hundred and four tons. Doyle had been The Captain's coxswain. Doyle remembered in those days, before his obsession with gentry, The Captain had a heart: all the profit from the owner's and Captain's portion of the profit had been given to the families of the nine dead men, according to their rank: even in death there had been an order of seniority. For a moment Doyle thought of letting The Captain verbally vent his feelings and for him to keep the papers closed in his pocket.
