A man was sent up to take Pearce’s uniform coat; that to be sponged and pressed, his stock washed and ironed dry, while, razor in hand over a bowl of steaming water, looking into a less than clear mirror, he rehearsed again and again the lines he had worked to death on the way to Winchester, continually aiming to hit the right tone. It had to be firm but apologetic that no warning of what had occurred could be made. Breakfast came as well – he was assured that the other guests had yet to appear or request refreshments – added to the information that there were no places on the London Flyer until the next day; whatever was about to happen would take place here in the Wykham Arms.
After a knock, the door opened and the serving man returned with his clothing, which he handed over with a look at O’Hagan, awake but still recumbent, that promised hellfire for his being fully clothed while laying on the establishments linen. All he got in response was an exaggerated wink and the remark that, sure, soft bedding beats a hammock any day and if he had a wench handy his pleasure would be complete.
‘Saving your presence, but you asked to be informed if the other guests were up and about. I am to say the ladies have called for hot water.’
‘There’s no justice in the world, John-boy, here’s you with two paramours hard by and me bereft.’
If they, as a pair, did not already stand very high in the regard of the staff of the Wykham – no doubt the night man had described their arrival – that remark and its implications, judging by the expression on the servitor’s face, took it to a new low. He exited murmuring about the world going to the dogs, with Pearce calling after him to fetch two hearty breakfasts and quickly, as well as an inkwell and paper, the latter immediately.
‘I have no mind to face anyone on an empty stomach.’
‘Am I allowed to be an observer, John-boy?’
‘No you are not. This is serious, Michael, and the last thing I need in the background is you grinning and leering at me.’
That was what Pearce got now. ‘Then you will give Mrs Barclay my compliments.’
‘Would you not be better seeing if the horses are being well looked after?’
‘Why, brother, are we planning a quick getaway?’ O’Hagan started to laugh, his body heaving. ‘Sure that would be a sight, the hero John Pearce in flight from a couple of women.’
Another knock, another glare at the bed, but the means to communicate was handed over, with Pearce carrying it to the dresser and immediately sitting down to write.
‘Instead of vexing me, Michael, you would do me a service if you were to ask for a private room in which I can speak to Emily. There will be one on the ground floor, I’m sure.’
Michael dragged himself up, pulled on his boots and headed for the door. ‘And here was me thinking my days of being a servant were at an end.’
The note Pearce wrote was short, simply saying that he was staying in the same inn and that he desired a word in private. The temptation to add ‘to avoid a scene’ he considered but put aside; Emily, if she knew the connection to Amélie Labordière, would smoke his reasons without them being spelt out. Michael returned to say the room had been reserved and where it was, just off the hallway, and that Pearce appended, as well as a time he hoped she would accept. Breakfast arrived next and the pair sat down to a couple of beefsteaks washed down with strong local cider. The plates were clean and the cider jug empty when Emily’s reply came that she was at his convenience.
‘At my convenience,’ Pearce moaned, for it was so very formal. ‘This is going to be worse than even I imagined.’
‘Hell hath no fury, I am told, like a woman scorned,’ Michael said, getting to his feet. ‘And now, if you will forgive, I must go about my occasions, as polite folk say.’
‘I have another letter to write, to Dundas, telling him I am returned and who with.’
Michael’s eyes were twinkling. ‘Your one-time mistress, John-boy?’
‘Damn you, no, the Count de Puisaye.’
‘Sure, I cannot help but think your man would prefer the former.’
Aboard HMS York Lieutenant Moyle was likewise examining his empty breakfast plate, washed down in his case by a bottle of claret, and ruminating on the state of his existence, which seemed as messy as the remains of the fowl he had just consumed. Like all young men he had entered the navy full of ambition and had, in his first midshipman’s berth, dreamt of the glory of command in battle, of a great victory that would set him up with his richly deserved estate and carriage and four with which to go about and impress. How different it had been in reality! A struggle to maintain even employment as a midshipman, then once that had been achieved a scraped pass in the lieutenant’s examination followed by years of pleading for a place afloat and, on landing one, being shown to be barely competent in the necessities of his profession.
He still occasionally shuddered to recall the very obvious mistakes he had made, added to the realisation that he was not cut out to be a seaman. It was a distant relative and MP, much badgered and eventually worn down, who had secured for him this posting, which if it was a lowly one was at least secure as long as he did not foul his own anchor. But it was also, most assuredly, not a platform to better things; to be promoted to captain, to be made post from his present position was too fanciful for words, so it was incumbent upon him to make the best he could out of what was a dead-end position.
‘Tolland, sir,’ said the guard, a different fellow from the previous night, through the open door.
‘Let him enter and close the door behind him.’ The guard obliged and Jahleel Tolland clanked forward as he had before, to stand just inside the closed door, his eyes on the breakfast remains with Moyle jesting as he observed the direction of the look. ‘I daresay you did not eat as well as I.’
‘You knows I did not,’ Tolland growled. ‘I had gruel not fit for pigswill.’
Among Moyle’s less attractive traits, and he would have been pushed to admit it as true, he seeing himself as an upright soul, was his tendency to bully and the tone of the prisoner’s voice irritated him enough to bring what was never far from the surface to the fore. When the nature of his task and his lack of prospects took him into a depression, which it did on many occasions, there was the saving grace of always having other people to physically take it out on.
‘I could have you flogged at a whim, cur, and be assured it is not a task I delegate to others. It is my own arm I employ and my own retribution I satisfy.’
‘I daresay you provide what you can,’ Tolland replied, working hard to look contrite, for there was a game to be played and an angry hulk commander was not helpful.
‘I do,’ Moyle purred, ‘and I am seen as generous.’
Outside the door, the guard who had fetched Tolland from below raised his eyes to the deck beams above his head in disbelief; with the exchange loud enough, he could hear clearly what was being said and his reaction would have been greeted by his fellow guards as correct. Moyle was a lying, thieving bastard who stole what rations he could, a tyrant and an oppressor of those beneath him, as well as an arse-licker to anyone who had the means to allow him to further line his pockets. The last thing the guard heard was that Tolland should sit down; with the two now close the talk was too indistinct to make sense.
‘I sense you have come to a proper appreciation of your situation?’
‘Hard not to,’ Tolland responded, holding up manacled hands that showed evidence of being bitten more than once.
‘Ah yes. The ship’s cats do their best, but with rodents so numerous it would take a blaze to shift them.’
‘Moving up a deck would suffice some.’
‘So it would, Tolland, but I am sure you have not come to see me seeking only a bit of deck elevation.’
‘I want to know what would it take to get my brother and I free?’
‘Not a great deal – someone to attest in writing, of course, and it would need to be a person very respectable, that you are not seamen and are, in fact, gentlemen.’
‘
And how would this person of standing be made aware of where we are?’
‘You would have to communicate with them by letter. I take it you can write?’
‘My brother has a fair hand, yet he lacks the means to do what you say, for he too had his purse swiped by your men.’
‘True,’ Moyle replied, with a grim smile, ‘but I do not lack the means.’
Dealing with a plague of rats did not preclude thinking and Jahleel Tolland had been gifted many waking hours to do that. He had guessed that this Lieutenant Moyle had in mind to set them free and for a price, only neither of them knew what that should be. Moyle was keen to extract the maximum he could, without any knowledge of what kind of funds the Tollands had access to; Jahleel had the opposite aim, to get off this ship for as little disbursement as he could.
He had hidden the money he carried in his saddlebags in a pocket on the inside of his riding boots, unobserved by Pearce and his sailors who were not, in any case, looking to steal. That was now hidden in the filthy straw on which he and his gang had been obliged to sleep; even if rats might leave the odd mark of their teeth they could not eat gold. Having palmed a couple of guineas on being called to come to the great cabin, he moved his hand across the tabletop and left them in plain view. Eyes drawn to them, Moyle moved slowly to pick them up.
‘There has to be more than this?’
‘For paper and an inkwell?’
‘For the right to walk free.’
‘All eight?’
‘Two, no more.’
If Jahleel Tolland thought about that at all, it was not for long; his other men would just have to take their chances. ‘Happen the man I write to could satisfy your needs and mine but I would need to know how much that would be. I can scarce ask if I do not know.’
Moyle sat back, still playing with the coins. ‘I would need ten times this and more. Judas priced Jesus at thirty pieces of silver. I am sure you value your head higher than that.’
If Jahleel Tolland was thinking, I’ve got you cheap you grasping sod, there was no sign of it on his face. If anything he looked worried, as if what was being requested was too steep. He had that sum hidden in the straw, but he knew this Lieutenant John Moyle was not a man to trust. He could just take what Jahleel had, then laugh in his face; better a couple of night’s fighting off rats than that.
‘I’d say he might go to that, but there’s only one way to be certain.’
‘A letter?’ Tolland nodded as Moyle flipped the coins. ‘Let us say this pair of beauties will cover pen and ink, shall we?’
‘Does it cover a higher deck too?’
‘Perhaps when your letter is written and I have seen what it says and to whom it is addressed. After all, I must make sure you do not try to dish me by some code I cannot comprehend.’
‘My brother will write in front of you.’
‘He will have to,’ Moyle laughed.
‘When?’
‘The guard that takes you down can bring him up.’
‘After we’s had a word, so he knows what needs sayin’.’
Moyle nodded, loudly ordered Tolland taken down, then went to admire his image in one of the many mirrors that dotted the bulkheads of his cabin, thinking that if he was not as much a sailor as many of his contemporaries, he was very much their match in the means to extract profit from a situation.
Pearce was standing by an unlit fireplace when Emily entered the private room, his elbow on the mantle. He had been staring at a very poor reproduction of the kind of painting done by the leading London artists – in this case no doubt executed by a travelling limner and copyist – of men mounted on horses, their pack of hounds chasing a fox across, he assumed, the Hampshire landscape, and thinking how often in his life he had been the prey and not the hunter. Turning as the door opened, what he observed, a tight-lipped Emily Barclay, did nothing to make him feel less so and that was compounded when he walked towards her, holding out hands she declined to take, with a sharp shake of the head.
‘Emily, I …’
The head dropped so he could not see her eyes. ‘Do you not think, John, that explanations are superfluous? I assume that you have arranged the meeting for that purpose?’
‘It is all coincidence, happenstance. I found Amélie to be in distressed circumstances and felt obliged to help her.’
‘While providing for yourself an outlet for …’ That obviously conjured up a word for Emily she could not use. ‘How very convenient that must have seemed.’
‘It was not convenient, in fact it was damned …’ Pearce threw up his hands, for to use such language with Emily was to destroy his case on its own. ‘Forgive my blaspheming but can you not see that I am being judged in a light that is unfair?’
‘It is not a pleasure,’ Emily whispered, ‘when you think you have secured someone’s heart, to find you are required to share it.’
‘You cannot think I would do that. Is your opinion of me so low that you can even consider such a thing?’
‘You have needs, have you not?’
‘I am a man, I grant you.’
‘Which I seem to recall you expressed in embarrassing circumstances in Leghorn. It did not seem to affect you at all that you were the butt of the laughter of the fleet, running through the streets, pursued by an irate husband, in nothing but your smalls.’
‘That was before you and I discovered our mutual regard. I cannot be blamed for red-blood prior to—’
‘To what, John, my disgrace first and humiliation second?’
Her shoulders started to heave, not much but it was easy to discern her distress. Slowly, and with no pressure, he put his hands on them. ‘I pledged myself to you and I do so again now.’
‘So Madame Labordière means nothing to you?’
‘I cannot say nothing,’ he replied moving one hand to lift her chin, ‘but in comparison to my feelings for you …’ Emily allowed her head to be lifted, and as it was, the shaking of her shoulder turned from suppressed to violent and as soon as he could clearly see her face, John Pearce exclaimed, and not with joy, ‘Emily, are you laughing?’
Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Forgive me, I cannot help it, and only the Good Lord knows how I kept it hidden for this length of time. You looked like a lost child when I came through that door.’
John Pearce swept past her and flung open the very same door. Michael O’Hagan was standing in plain view, as so were the Count de Puisaye and Amélie, they looking at him with some curiosity.
‘Michael,’ Pearce barked. ‘Is your hand in this?’
‘Mother of God, I did you a favour, for I could not imagine the poor fist you would have made of matters had I not explained them first. Now gather yourself, for Mrs Barclay has arranged to take these poor travellers on a tour of the city and they are anxious to be on their way.’
John Pearce felt his arm taken by Emily Barclay, his mood unsure. Was he angry or glad? – it was hard to tell.
‘I’m told the cathedral is especially fine, John, and as we walk we must indeed talk, for while you have been away, I cannot say that I have been comfortable regarding our future.’
‘You and Amélie?’
‘Have become, on a very short acquaintance, very firm friends. After all, what a boon it is to be able to talk with someone who knows all your faults and is prepared to list them, albeit I sometimes struggle with the French.’
‘What faults?’
Emily smiled sweetly, then sighed. ‘It is a blessing we have the whole day to discuss them.’
‘I suppose you have taken the count to your bosom as well.’
The reply was an emphatic ‘No’.
That was a condition the fellow in question did nothing to alleviate as he disparaged that which he was shown: Winchester Cathedral was fine, if cramped compared to Notre Dame, Chartres, Reims or the great double basilica of Bourges, proper edifices built to the glory of God, of which he was sure this English church was just a pale copy erected by poorly trained masons. Not a religious man a
t all and certainly disinclined to defend the unnecessary property of what he knew to be a bloated established church, John Pearce was thinking that the guillotine was too good for the old fool.
Franklin Tolland wrote his letter still chained, which did nothing to aid the fluency of the quill; indeed he could bareley recognise his own hand, a point Moyle dismissed as he picked up the sanded page and read it, nodding as he saw that the sum of forty guineas was required for release, close to a year’s income for a gentleman. Added to that which he had been gifted by Pearce that would add up to a tidy sum that he could invest in government Consols, as he did with anything he could get from his benighted office.
One day he would have enough to relinquish HMS York, enough to add to his half pay as an unemployed lieutenant, the means to purchase a cottage and a bit of land that he would see worked to his advantage, and then there was also the possibility of a woman with whom to share it. The name of the addressee he noted, to be written down later. This Denby Carruthers fellow was surely well heeled and might, at some future date, be a source of more funds.
‘I will have you and your brother moved up a deck, away from the most pernicious rodents.’
‘No,’ Franklin barked, ‘you must move us all or the others will become suspicious that we mean to ditch them.’
Moyle was halfway across his deck before Franklin finished. ‘Do not use that tone of voice with me, lest you want a scar on your other cheek to balance up your looks. And for your tone you can stay where you are!’
‘The letter?’
‘Will be sent, never fear, but I wonder if your friend will want you and the vermin you will fetch along?’ The look that crossed Franklin Tolland’s face then gave Moyle the impression that this Carruthers fellow might not – that indeed he might not get what he now considered his due. ‘Pray he does, cur, for I have it in me to make what you have now seem like paradise.’
A Sea of Troubles Page 15
