by Sara Fraser
Later that morning, when the dinner drum sounded in the fort, the rations of both guards and prisoners were brought out to them at the grave. Turpin Wright was one of the escort to the ration party. He came to talk to Jethro, who was standing at the edge of the digging, his tough leathery face eager with his news.
‘They’se come, matey. The first recruiters for the Quota.’
Jethro’s heart leapt at the news. ‘From where, and what regiment?’ he asked.
‘From the Twenty-Fourth Foot in Portugal,’ his friend told him. ‘There’s bin a bit o’ fun down in Colewort this morning as well, from all accounts.’
‘Oh yes . . . What about?’ Jethro was only mildly curious. His main interest was the arrival of the recruiting party. Turpin laughed in high glee. ‘It’s Rourke, he’s agooin, to meet the Drummer’s Daughter by the sound on it.’
Jethro’s interest quickened. ‘Why? What’s the Irish bastard done?’
‘He was one o’ the guard on the Crown hulk larst night,’ Turpin told him, nudging and winking. ‘And a bunch o’ bleeding Froggies got clean away from it . . . the hulk’s captin is ablaming Rourke, because he was corporal o’ the gallery sentries and the Frogs broke out of a gunport on the gallery. The officers rackon that the Frogs give Rourke a pile o’ gold to close his eyes while they scarpered.’
Jethro nodded slowly. ‘Ah well, it’s hard luck for Rourke, but I don’t doubt but that he and the rest knew something of it . . . Did they find gold on him?’
‘Nooo!’ Turpin spat on the ground to emphasize his next words. ‘That Paddy is too bleedin’ fly for that. He’d split the rhino wi’ the other coves, but he stowed his own somewhere safe. The orfficers found the other coves’ gold, but they never found Rourke’s . . . ’E’s a bugger, arn’t he!’ he finished, shaking his head in admiration.
In the trench beneath them, Henri Chanteur’s heart raced.
‘De Chambray has escaped,’ he thought, and hope flooded through him. ‘If Gaston got away, then he must now be at the hideout, and he must already have arranged for a boat . . . Mon Dieu! I have a chance, if I can get to him. I have a chance of going home . . .’
Barely able to conceal his rush of emotion, he worked on silently, his mind desperately formulating plans. Finally he was decided.
‘I’ll have to take the risk,’ he told himself. ‘If I don’t do it before evening, then it will be too late for Nathan.’
The Frenchman nerved himself and began to stare at Jethro, willing the corporal to look at him. When their eyes eventually met, Henri winked and nodded slightly towards the barrel of drinking water that was set on a heap of shingle some yards away.
Jethro realized that the man wished to speak privately with him. He returned an almost imperceptible nod of affirmation and Henri raised his arm.
‘Can I get some water, caporal?’ he asked loudly.
‘Carry on,’ Jethro told him, and walked casually to stand by the barrel.
Henri lifted the rusty drinking can that was chained to the wooden strakes and under cover of sipping from it whispered urgently,
‘Will you help me, Caporal?’
Jethro kept his gaze fixed on the trench and spoke from the corner of his mouth. ‘Is it to escape?’
The Frenchman did not attempt to prevaricate. ‘Yes . . . I want to get myself and Nathan Caldicott back to France . . .’ He paused and fought successfully against the urge to remind the other man of his debt of life.
Jethro stared at the solitary hunched figure of the American in the distance, and thought of how the Frenchman had risked the anger of his fellow prisoners to warn one of the hated English of danger. All his instincts pushed him inexorably in the same direction.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
Henri could have sagged to the ground, so intense was his relief. ‘I shall pretend to be ill,’ he whispered rapidly. ‘Send me to the spit, then make sure that it is you who stays to guard Nathan and myself until the hulks’ boat comes. Then Nathan and I will feign death and you will see to it that we are both thrown into the grave with the bodies that will come from the hulks. Then just leave us there . . . I will do the rest.’
‘Very well, I’ll help you,’ Jethro whispered, then shouted aloud, ‘Come on you lazy French hound, get back to your work. You’ve spent too much time already sipping water like a fancy doxy.’
Henri waited until the grave was finished and the prisoners were starting to form up for the return to the fort before he made his move. He staggered suddenly and dropped to his face on the shingle. The hard pebbles dug painfully into his flesh and aided him to groan realistically. It was Jethro who came to look at him. The corporal turned him flat on his back and lifted his jacket to examine beneath.
‘Goddam it!’ Jethro cursed aloud and shouted over his shoulder to the sergeant. ‘This bugger’s got the fever by the look of it.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ his superior answered. ‘He was next to the baldy one all morning. Will you stay here and hand them. both over to the Fortune’s boat, Corporal Stanton.’
Jethro feigned annoyance. ‘Why me? I want to go back to my quarters as much as the rest of you.’
The sergeant tried to mollify him. ‘There’s only these three privates here apart from me and you, Corporal Stanton; and it must be a man that can be trusted that I leave here. A private man won’t do, will he?’
‘Arrggh!’ Jethro made a gesture of dismissal with his hand. ‘All right, I’ll stay . . . But I’ll want this extra duty made up to me,’ he demanded.
The sergeant, anxious to leave this cold bleak beach, nodded. ‘You shall, I promise you.’
The working party, tools over their shoulders, shambled off into the murk, the white crossbelts of the escorts forming a shifting pattern on the fringes of the amorphous orange-yellow oblong of the prisoners. The darkness deepened and once Jethro knew that he could not be observed except with great difficulty from either the fort or hulks, he slapped Henri’s chest.
‘Go and get your friend,’ he ordered. ‘Then both of you come back here and lie face down behind that water barrel. I’ll have to make certain that you’ll be the last two put into the trench, or you’ll drown in it.’
Henri wasted no words, but did as he was instructed. Nathan was shivering uncontrollably and constant spasms of coughs shook his meagre frame. Jethro regarded him doubtfully.
‘You’ll not be able to sham dead very successfully, Yankee Doodle.’
Caldicott bared his toothless gums with a trace of his old drollness.
‘Never fear about a New Englander bein’ able to sham dead, Corporal,’ he gasped. ‘That’s the reason so few of us died on Bunker Hill. We just played possum and let the Limeys run straight over us and keep on chasing shadows.’
Jethro grinned, admiring the dauntless spirit of the man. The pair lay down behind the water barrel and the three waited for the hulks’ boats to appear. Periodically the muffled, choking coughs of Nathan Caldicott sounded, but as time wore on the attacks became wider spaced and of shorter duration and eventually ceased.
It was fully dark when lights could be seen moving on the water and two heavily laden longboats, their oars splashing and rowlocks squealing, came slowly towards the shore and beached, crunching on the shingle. Jethro went to them. The oarsmen were all civilian convicts, who stayed on the hulks to help Matthew Purpost and his mates, on the promise of a pardon of their sentences if they should survive. Every man of them was drunk for it was only by swilling down enough rum that they could blot out the horror of the charnel-like decks of the hulks and the constant fear of death.
A surgeon’s mate was in charge of the party and he too was drunk. Jethro shouldered his musket and saluted.
‘The grave is prepared, sir.’
The surgeon’s mate, a tiny wisp of a man wearing a soiled, red coat and blue pantaloons, with his black-feathered cocked hat crazily askew on his narrow head, returned the salute. Then he held his lantern high above his head to cast it
s beams into the boat behind him, and hiccupped, slurring the words,
‘It don’t matter a damn whether the grave’s prepared or not, Corporal. These buggers ain’t particular as to where they lie this night.’
The light shone on a tangle of heads, arms, sightless staring eyes, legs, feet, and slack gaping jaws. The corpses were still dressed in the orange-yellow rags they had lived in and now wore for shrouds.
The dead men were dragged across the shingle by staggering, swearing convicts and let drop into the trench. Jethro, watching from the side, now fully understood why this burial was being carried out by night under the fitful light of dull lanterns. The corpses were an obscene parody of human beings, and the singing, cursing, stumbling men who toppled the poor dead flesh so callously into the splashing surging water were also obscene parodies of humankind.
Before the task was finished, the wind gusted ever stronger, and showers of rain spattered on the shingle.
‘Goddam and blast this bloody inclement weather,’ the surgeon’s mate slurred.
‘When you have finished the unloading, sir, there are two men who died today in the fort to add to the list,’ Jethro said politely.
‘Where are they?’ the surgeon’s mate peered owlishly about him.
‘Over there, lying by the waterbutt, just beyond the trench.’ Jethro pointed into the darkness. ‘Their names are . . .’
‘Don’t bother to tell me, Corporal.’ The tiny man shook his head hard, causing his hat to tip even more crazily and the long feathers to brush across Jethro’s face. ‘It don’t matter a cuss to me, what names they bore . . . we only record the numbers who die. I’ll add a two to the total and that will be sufficient.’
The rain came heavier, spitting on the hot opaque horn sides of the lanterns. The large drops multiplied and hammered in a hissing roar across the beach. The last bodies from the hulks had been tossed into the grave by now, and the surgeon’s mate shouted in a reedy voice,
‘Man your oars, we’ll go back to the Fortune until this storm blows over, then return and cover these buggers up.’ He blinked several times in rapid succession at the tall militiaman in front of him, trying to focus his wavering sight.
‘Be a good fellow, Corporal and drop them two o’ yours into the hole, will you?’
Jethro saluted. ‘Very good, sir.’
‘You are a good man, by God!’ The tiny man spaced every word very precisely, then staggered to the waiting boats. The oars splashed and the boats pulled away into the blackness of the night.
Jethro ran to the water barrel. ‘Lieutenant Chanteur! Captain Caldicott!’ He shook them both by the shoulders. ‘Quick, now’s your chance.’
Henri was on his feet instantly.
‘Nathan, come on!’ He bent to urge his friend. The American lay motionless. The young Frenchman felt a clutch of dread, and gently turned his friend’s limp figure. Nathan could have been asleep, so peaceful was his face in death.
‘Don’t stop to grieve, Chanteur,’ Jethro told him gently. ‘Do your weeping for your friend when you arrive safely back in your homeland.’
Henri swallowed hard and replied quietly, ‘My thanks to you, Caporal Stanton, for your help.’
Jethro shook his head. ‘Don’t thank me, Frenchman. Our nations are still at war and we must remain enemies who will try and kill each other if we meet in battle. If we should meet again when peace comes, then give me your thanks, and I will give you mine for saving my life as you did . . . Go quickly now. I will attend to Caldicott.’
Henri took a final look at the peaceful face of Nathan Caldicott and bent to touch the cold lips with his fingers.
‘God be with you, Nathan, wherever your soul has gone to,’ he murmured.
Jethro watched the young Frenchman disappear into the dark veils of rain, then gently lifted the American’s body to the edge of the grave. He let it slip down to join the others that awaited and muttered, ‘May the place you have gone to show you more mercy than you found here on earth, Yankee Doodle.’
Jethro turned and squelched his sodden way back to the fort and to Sarah, and as his boots crunched over the shingle his spirits began to lighten.
‘Tomorrow I’ll volunteer to the Twenty-Fourth,’ he thought happily. ‘And then Turpin and I will be off to the Peninsula, and the sun there will make Sarah’s cheeks bloom like young roses.’
The veteran sentry at the Land Gate stepped from his sentry box and came to the charge, his bayoneted musket glinting wetly in the lamplight from the archway.
‘Who comes there?’ his old voice quavered fiercely, and the pouring rain ran in streams from his oilskin-covered shako and caped watchcoat.
‘Corporal Jethro Stanton, of the Grenadier Company.’ Jethro answered, and then laughed aloud in sudden exultant joy at simply being alive. ‘A man who’s going to help chase the Frogs clean across the Pyrénées to Paris . . . That’s who comes here, my old bucko,’ he joked and entered under the great stone arch, whistling the Rogues’ March.
the end
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