by John Drake
I broke off reading to glance up at Cooper. I wondered if he was the source of this rubbish. Perhaps he’d even written it himself? It turned my stomach, quite frankly. It’s bad enough when a man robs you. But when he wants to pretend he’s a hero into the bargain, that’s too much. The seeds of my great disliking for Daniel Cooper were sewn that day, though if I hadn’t been feeling so low, I should probably have felt sorry for him, to see a man revel like that in false flattery. And there was more to come yet.
“There, sir!” says he. “See how my exploits are reported for all Washington to see.” I looked again at the cutting. It was from The Globe, a Washington paper. I’d missed that. “Every member of the Congress will have seen it,” says Cooper, turning to Colonel Derby, the Commandant, and a couple of civilians who’d come in with them. They were brothers, by the name of Hart. “Only think what this will mean for the Navy and Boston!” says Cooper and they all three smiled so merrily that first I thought they were a set of toad-eaters crawling for his favour. But they weren’t.
“Now we shall get our frigate!” says one of the Harts.
“And our Navy Dockyard!” says the other.
Something was going on, and I couldn’t guess what, but I could see this was not the moment to pitch into Cooper for the damned lies in that damned newspaper. So I held my peace and waited for Cooper to get round to me. There had to be more reason for his coming here than to show off his press cuttings.
“But, Lieutenant Fletcher,” says he, “you must wonder what purpose brings me here?”
“It had crossed my mind,” said I, and everyone laughed like drains and slapped me on the back. This looked good. I’d been right to keep quiet.
“Sir,” says Colonel Derby, a red-faced old buffer in a powdered wig and service coat, “Commander Cooper has spoken for you. He insists that the word of a British Naval Officer may be relied upon and he is come to bear you off to more comfortable quarters.”
And so he had, by George! Derby took charge and made me raise my right hand and swear by the Almighty not to attempt escape. And since he was a professional soldier, and a veteran of the Revolution, we had all the trimmings too. I had to swear “… not to offer harm to the Peoples nor Properties of these United States, nor essay whatsoever act that might undermine its constitution … etc., etc.”. Which was all harmless fun as far as I was concerned and wouldn’t hold me back five seconds if I saw a good chance to run. The only trouble was, where to? I wasn’t going into the vast American interior with its murdering, scalping savages, and I couldn’t get home to England without a ship and a crew.
But that could wait upon opportunity. The first thing was to get out from behind iron bars. Once we’d completed Colonel Derby’s formalities we went out into Queen Street, where Cooper had a carriage waiting, and I began to realise that he was something more than an unemployed sea officer. The carriage was a spanking new landau, German-built and harnessed to a fine team of matched greys. And he had smart liveried servants on the box, both black as my boot. In short, I sniffed the authentic reek of money.
Cooper waved me in with a bow, and he and the Hart brothers got in after me. Colonel Derby raised his hat, the two sentries on the door presented arms, and the carriage moved off.
During the short ride to Cooper’s house, the bold Commander chattered nonstop to the Harts, and I looked about me pretending to take a view of Boston while paying careful attention to what was said. In fact it was all of a piece. It was all a matter of Boston and its politics.
To begin with, this was no frontier town with clapboard shacks and hairy-arsed wild men pistolling one another on the street. Boston in 1794 was a real, bustling city of nearly 20,000 people. As you approached from the sea, the skyline was a packed mass of roofs, bristling with church spires and public buildings. There were libraries, bath-houses, coffee-shops, insurance offices, theatres, warehouses, clock towers, ironmongers and fashionable ladies taking tea in their salons.
The city was two miles long by a mile and a quarter wide, and was built on a squat peninsula shaped not unlike a miniature of the North American continent itself, and connected to the Massachusetts mainland by a narrow isthmus at the southern end. At the top end, Boston looked a quarter of a mile across the Charles River estuary, to the Charlestown peninsula and Bunker Hill. So Boston was encircled by water, and the eastward (seaward) side was a mass of wharves and dockyards.
And there you have factors one and two in Boston politics. Number one: Boston depended on seafaring. Number two: Boston had no love for the British, as you may have deduced from the name “Bunker Hill”.
For a jolly little battle was fought on Bunker Hill, nineteen years earlier, in 1775, during the Revolutionary War. 2,600 Redcoats marched up the slope in perfect formation, to the sound of fife and drum, and steadily on into the massed fire of American infantry dug in behind fortifications. Our side was heavily mauled, but after two or three dreadful repulses, they broke through and treated the Yankees to the bayonet. It was the bloodiest single engagement of the entire Revolution and neither side ever forgot it. That was the sort of tale that a young Bostonian like Cooper learned at his mother’s knee.
Perhaps as a consequence of this, Cooper and his friends, who were of the Republican faction, supported the French and opposed the British in our present war. They also supported the rebuilding of the United States Navy which Congress had sanctioned in March, a fine thing for Cooper and the Hart family, for they had the U.S. Navy’s one and only ship fitting out in the Hart yard, and Cooper was pulling every string in sight to get command of it. What’s more, President Washington had approved a series of big over-blown frigates to be new built, and the Harts had high hopes of getting the contract for one of them, a forty-gunner to be called Constitution. It was my introduction into Boston politics — Yankee politics really — a dish I hadn’t the least taste for, but got stuffed with till it made me sick.
Cooper was up to his neck in it, thanks to his father who’d made his pile in shipping, got himself elected to Congress, and gone south to Washington where the power was. Cooper managed the Boston business, played at being an officer, and lived in the family’s elegant house in the Tontine Crescent, on the south side of Franklin Street. It was outside this house that the landau stopped on 18th March. One look at it confirmed that the Coopers had money. It was in a graceful white-stuccoed, curving terrace, like the best of Bath or London. Mind you, the north side of the street was a mire, half-drained, with haphazard works under way.
We clambered out, servants grovelled on all sides, all of ‘em black. Doors opened and in we went, Cooper and the Harts yammering nineteen to the dozen. But I hardly got time to notice the elegance of everything in the hall before my feet gave signs of going from under me.
I was over the worst of my wound and getting better, but after three days mainly in bed, I’d used up my strength. The ceiling swung around my head and all the voices got faint. But I didn’t quite go over, and Cooper and his chums clapped a hold on me. Then there was someone else there, taking charge and giving orders in the accent of the deep south. Cooper fell back, the servants took over, and I was bustled off to a delightful little room that had been prepared for me in the back of the house so that they didn’t have to haul my deadweight upstairs. Someone had used some brain.
It was all warm and snug in that room, with a fire blazing and a big bed made up and aired. They got me inside, extracted me out of my clothes (which hadn’t been changed for weeks and were none too sweet), sat me in a chair stark naked, to sponge the dirt off me, and towelled me down, then they put me to bed in a fresh nightshirt smelling of lavender. I was too weak to do much for myself and the whole process was dreamy and pleasant. For one thing they were a damned smart set of servants who went about their business like experts, and for another the one in charge, who did most of the work, was the most extraordinarily fine woman.
She was black as midnight, with a figure like a sandglass, tall and splendid with brilliant eyes and fla
shing white teeth. Her name was Lucinda, and she was Cooper’s housekeeper. He had a butler too, but Lucinda gave the orders and kept the purse. She was a remarkable creature in many ways. I’d had some experience of women by then, and black girls, too, thanks to the hospitality of Pareira Gomez’s African king, but not girls like her. She looked you straight in the eye and was dressed like a lady of quality. What’s more, she had the height to stand eye to eye with me.
Once she’d got me tucked up in bed, she sent the others away and did her final bits of fussing about. Tired though I was, I realised that I was very anxious that she should stay a little longer. Just looking at her was working wonders for me, though she had her nose in the air and was acting the perfect grande dame. I was searching my muddled brain for something to say, when she got in first with her lilting southern voice, “Is they anythin’ ay-ulse yoo wan, Loo-tenan’ Fletcher?” says she, looking down at me. As she said this, she arched her eyebrows and pouted her lips, ever so slightly. Such tiny movements that I wasn’t really sure I’d even seen them. None the less, I got the distinct impression that a signal had just been run up to the masthead.
“Ah, yes!” says I. “Something to drink … some soup, perhaps?”
“Yezzah,” says she, and glided off as graceful as a panther.
She was back ten minutes later with a bowl of broth and a napkin so I could be fed without splashing the bed. She secured the cloth neatly under my chin, which meant her leaning across me with her breasts bouncing an inch from my nose, and the scent of her went to my head like a jug of rum. We’d just settled down nicely, with her alongside, one hand behind my head and the other shovelling soup with a spoon, when Cooper and the Harts came in to see their tame Limey. They stayed too, damn ‘em, ‘cos I was almost sure Miss Lucinda had looked me over and liked what she’d seen (she’d had a damn good look, after all) but as long as Cooper and Co. were there, they were queering my pitch and there was nothing I could do to try out what seemed the best piece of luck that I’d had since I’d set eyes on John Stark.
But the wretches stayed and talked politics over me till I dropped off to sleep, so there was no fun and games that night. Nor was there for some days thereafter, which was probably just as well since it took me that long to get back my full strength. And in that time I was extended every hospitality by Cooper, including as soon as I was up to it, a tour round the Hart shipyard to view the man-o’-war they were fitting out for the infant United States Navy.
This was Declaration of Independence, a gift from the Frog Navy, that had started life as the two-decker Euphonie, 64. But the Yankees had no use for one lonely ship of the line, so the Harts had chopped away her poop, quarterdeck and fo’c’sle to form a sort of ponderous frigate, known as a “Ralizay”.** The word is “Rase”. Fletcher would accept no criticism of his phonetic spelling and simply became abusive of the French language and of myself. S.P.
Declaration was rated for thirty-eight 24-pounders on the gun-deck (ex lower gun-deck), and twenty 32-pounder carronades, on her flush-decked quarterdeck/fo’c’sle (ex upper gun-deck). A massive armament for a frigate.
Cooper was a familiar figure in the shipyard and you could see the power his family wielded from the way everyone treated him. Americans like it to be thought that they don’t have noblemen and so every man may look any other man in the eye and think himself his equal. Well, from what I saw in Boston in ‘94, that was almost true but not quite. Cooper didn’t call himself a lord, but he damn-well acted like one: At least he did where the common herd was concerned. The only real difference from an English lord was the way he kept company with the Hart brothers, who were tradesmen. Of course, this is hardly surprising, since his own father had been in trade, and rich business folk like these were the power in the land. And a damn fine thing too, if you ask me.
So Cooper would link arms with the Harts and go striding round the yard, in the midst of the thumping and sawing, and the tar and tackles, happy as a child, arguing and pointing and always asking questions. One way or another, Cooper’s powerful connections were going to get him a ship, it was obvious. As for me, I was led like a bear, half on parade as a trophy and half there to have my brains picked. As I’ve said, they had a mighty respect for the Royal Navy in technical matters. But it was a hell of a bore. I’ve never had any real interest in ships. They’re a means to an end for me.
But later that day, when Cooper had had his fill of shipyards, we were whisked back to his house in the carriage, and then he excused himself and said he had to go to a meeting of some Navy Society or other. No doubt more politicking to get the command he wanted. So off he went, leaving me alone in the house with the servants. If I’d wanted to, this would have been the ideal opportunity to run. But there was nowhere to run to, and anyway, I had reason to stay.
Over the past few days, I’d grown more and more convinced that Lucinda had her eye on me. A flick of an eyelash here, a backward glance there, nothing obvious, but I was sure she was beckoning me on. Either that or she was the kind that enjoyed tantalising men. In other words, I wasn’t sure at all, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself with my host’s trusted housekeeper.
That would be the best and quickest way to get myself out of this cosy berth and back into prison. So I was careful to behave myself and resisted the temptation to grab some of the more delectable parts of Lucinda as she swayed past me in the corridors of Cooper’s house. Even when she swept past close enough to brush against me when I was damn sure she didn’t have to. The trouble was, the woman was so damn self-possessed. Many tall girls will stoop to try to disguise their height, but not Lucinda. She stretched up to the limit of her inches, held her head high and looked down her nose at the world. And that’s just dandy as far as I’m concerned. I don’t mind a bit if a woman’s as tall as me, or taller, if it comes to that — not if she’s as slender as Lucinda, and not if she’s got her figure.
So that afternoon I strolled into Cooper’s day room as the front door banged after him, on his way off to his meeting. He wouldn’t be back for hours. I watched him through the window as he got up into the carriage and the coachman drove him away. Then I took a book out of a book case and settled down in a chair by the fire.
By chance I picked a rattling fine book. It was a book of bound pamphlets all about how the Yankee Congress was trying to set up a proper coinage for the country. Gold always was my favourite subject and I was fascinated to learn that the Yankees hadn’t near enough coin of their own, and half the world’s gold and silver coinage was passing as legal tender. It nearly put other thoughts out of my mind. But not quite.
Where I was sitting, I was close to the bell-pull that summoned the servants. Now a tug on that cord was supposed to bring the butler, but Lucinda was too sharp-eyed not to notice I was alone, so I wondered who might answer if I were to ring.
I tugged the cord, and seconds later was most disappointed to hear the heavy steps of the butler, Joseph, coming to the door.
“Sah?” says he. “How may I serve you?”
“Oh, fetch me a brandy,” says I irritably. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed I was alone. Perhaps I’d been mistaken after all and she wasn’t running the rule over me. It’s too damned easy for a man to believe a thing when he wants to believe it.
I was busy feeling sorry for myself when the door opened again, and Lucinda entered with a decanter and glass on a silver tray. She had the same, God-damn-you look in her eye as she put the tray on a little table and moved the table close to my hand.
“Yo’ brandy, sah,” says she and straightened up to her full height, looking down on me where I sat in my chair. “Ah have to send Joseph into the town, sah, on business. Is they anythin’ you might want, sah … ?” the eyebrows lifted just a fraction, “from the town, that is?” she completed.
Damn the woman! She had me on a knife-edge. I still didn’t know where I stood. Was that an invitation or not? I couldn’t tell, and I still had to be careful of offending Cooper’s damned puritan sensibili
ties. He wasn’t one for the ladies, that’s for sure. He’d not passed a remark about women in all the hours I’d suffered his monologues of conversation. Boston politics and the United States’ Navy was his world. And he was a strict churchgoer too. One false step and I’d be out on my ear.
“Nothin’, sah?” says she, straight-faced. ‘‘You cain’t think o’ nothin’ you want?”
“Er ...” says I, growing hot under the coins, and looking at the curves under her grey gown, but I funked it. “No,” says I, “nothing.”
Damn it! thinks I. How could this be the “come on”? From the look on her face she could have been a governess scolding her pupils.
“As you wish, sah,” says she, and waltzed to the door. Just as she went out, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “I hope you won’t be afraid in this big house all alone with me, sah. I had to send the maids out too, sah. They’s just you and me here, sah. Nobody else …”
That was too much. I was out of the chair and across the room in three steps. I seized her by the waist and whisked her off her feet, straight up into the air at the full length of my arms, just to show her what was what. I doubt many men had served her like that before. Tall and splendid she might be, but I was six feet high and turned the scales at sixteen stone, of which not one ounce was fat.
“Now then, ma’am!” says I, “just what game are we playing?” She laughed most beautifully, a musical sound that made my spine tingle.
“My,” says she, “what a big, fine boy you turned out to be. And just when I was giving you up!” Well, that was plain enough. We were done with codes and ciphers at last. I grinned happily and lowered her until her toes were just clear of the ground, and held her there while I kissed her. Or to be more precise, while she kissed me, for she slid her hands around the back of my neck and dug her fingertips into me, urging me to it like a groom with a horse. And she slid her tongue around and inside my mouth like a hungry animal. By George but that woman knew what she wanted.
