Hanging Matter

by David Donachie

  For all the pain under his hat, Harry was laughing inwardly. James, who’d aimed to miss, was alive. So was Farrar, if he could bear the state of his head for the rest of the day. All the debts were settled and clear, with honour satisfied, even if purses and hearts were empty. But the unexpected bonus was not something even he could have foreseen. Lord Farrar would now, and for the rest of his life, be a laughing-stock. He would always be the man who, on Hampstead Heath, on a winter morning, took careful aim and shot his opponent’s second. He could challenge all he liked in future. Anyone, with even the dullest wit, had good reason to turn him down. After all, what gentleman, happy to risk his own life, would readily imperil the life of his second?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  IT WAS curious to watch, the way the new men refused to mingle with the old. Even in a landlocked barn the conventions of shipboard life were observed, with those who considered themselves old Medusas, and thus a cut above the others, shying away from contact with the men Pender had brought in. He had hoped that the older hands would inform the newcomers of their profits, to persuade them that sailing under Harry Ludlow was worth a good deal more than a mere merchant wage. But contact was kept to a minimum, with growls exchanged instead of words. Another factor which militated against an easy transition was his own lack of authority, for Harry had not formally given him any office. And Tite, who seemed to have nothing better to do, was always there to undermine him.

  Pender would fight as readily as the next man, but he hated to do it without purpose. He could not easily convince himself that it was necessary now. But his main worry was simple. If his captain’s information was correct, they would be going into action against Trench and his men in a matter of days, with only this scratch crew to back them. Right now, with their petty disputes about hierarchy grumbling below the surface, they were as likely to assault each other as attack anyone else.

  The old Medusas were less of a worry. They knew Harry, and once he was here to command them would follow wherever he led. Perhaps the same could be said of the others, for the captain had the rare gift of attaching men to his cause. Only someone like Pender, close enough to see him without his public mask, knew how much concentration went into that seemingly effortless air of confident leadership.

  Flowers was the obvious candidate amongst the new men. He was a big, swarthy fellow, scarred from many encounters. Both his nose and his jaw seemed slightly out of turn, and his habit of talking out of the corner of his mouth gave his whole head a slight crescent shape. He was vocal about the small slights Harry’s old crew delivered, and moaned incessantly about being berthed too far away from the stove. And his effect on the Deal men was clear. He was turning them into a fractious mob, biting at each other with as much venom as they displayed for the older hands.

  Flowers had, as might have been expected, hogged a place by the stove, turfing out one of the other sailors. That hadn’t satisfied him though and he launched into a barely disguised attack on the Medusas, who were ranged around the other side. Pender only heard the exchange by accident, having come in to organise some small-arms practice. A quick word would have silenced both men. But it would also leave them disgruntled, with their quarrel still simmering, plus the added resentment from being checked by him. So, aware that they hadn’t spotted him, he held his tongue.

  “Will you leave off with your gab,” said Peacham, one of Harry’s topmen. “You don’t need a fucking stove, mate. You’ve got enough hot air coming out of your gob to melt Polar ice.”

  The other man spat into the open stove, producing a loud hiss. “I don’t recall askin’ for your opinion, mate.”

  “It’s easy to avoid my opinion. Just stay quiet, an’ at your end of the barn.”

  Flowers pushed his head back, sniffing the air loudly, vaguely waving his arm towards the Medusas’s hammocks. “There’s a rank smell here, an’ no error. Now it ain’t straw, ’less it’s been pissed on, but it’s plain enough where it’s coming from.”

  “Your nose is too close to your arse, old son,” said Peacham, a remark which was greeted by laughter from his mates.

  “No, it’s not that. Smells like someone has fouled their nest to me. Can’t say I fancy sharing a lower deck with someone that can’t hold their water.”

  “Then you knows what to do, mate. The road back to Deal starts right outside the barn.”

  As the other man stood up from his seat, Pender said, “Shut up, Flowers.”

  He spun round to face the voice, determined to deliver the reply he’d already worked out. “Happen I will take that road. An’ if I do, I dare say most of the lads will go back with me.”

  The Deal men growled and nudged each other. But Pender’s next words soon put an end to that. He was as aware as anyone that this was the moment of truth. “You’ve failed to spot that I’m astride the road, Flowers.”

  “If I want to go, Pender, you won’t stop me.”

  Pender stepped forward and slowly took off his outdoor coat, then his pea jacket. The murmuring had stopped and the eyes of all the men flicked between the opponents in this new dispute. Flowers didn’t need telling what was up. A man didn’t take off his coat in that manner unless he had a fight in mind.

  “Is it just you and me?” he asked, glancing at the Medusas.

  “Square goes, Flowers,” said Pender, looking in the same direction. “You got naught to fear from them, they don’t rate me any higher than you do.”

  The man spat on his hands before raising them in front of him. He also crouched slightly, with the eyes narrowing in his scarred crescent face. “Then let’s be having you, mate.”

  “Not in front of the stove. If we knock that over the whole barn will go up.” Pender indicated the empty space at the far end. “You come over here, Flowers. And never fear, for I intend to keep you warm.”

  “Do you want to set some rules?” said Pender.

  “I don’t.”

  Pender shrugged. It would be a dirty bout anyway, if it went any time, with scratching, biting, kicking, and gouging. He had survived more than one of those in his time, and all because of his own speed. Besides, he didn’t know any other way to fight. The streets in which he’d been raised allowed for only one aim. Win, whatever it takes, for there’s no nobility in losing. Flowers might be twice his size, but the man moved slowly. And given their relative weights, the bigger man would expect Pender to stay away from him. He was wrong.

  There is a coldness that comes over a good fighter. He can see clearly, hit hard, and in the right place, all the time keeping a dispassionate watch on his opponent. There is also that ability to bury any feeling of pain, so that he ignores whatever his enemy is doing to him, until he achieves his own aims. Pender was like that. Flowers caught him twice before he was inside the bigger man’s guard, but his determination carried him onwards. Flowers tried to bear-hug him then, to squeeze the air out of his lungs, but Pender head-butted the man’s already bent nose. Within the space of a few seconds he kneed him in the groin, punched him in the guts, pushed both his thumbs hard into his eyes, then sank his teeth into the man’s ear.

  Flowers had already started to retreat under this assault. Pender, letting go of his bleeding ear, allowed enough daylight to come between them to swing both hands and feet, something he did relentlessly, landing blows that had little actual weight, but a profound effect. Once you are going backwards, it is hard to reverse it. And a man intent on protecting himself is not retaliating. Pender increased the gap and his heavily booted foot took Flowers under his knee. The man dropped slightly, enough to equalise their differing heights, and then Pender caught him. The fist, right at the point of the chin, jerked Flowers’s head back. Already off balance, he fell. Pender’s swinging boot took his head just before it hit the floor.

  “I smoked you right off, sir,” said the doctor, an elderly gentleman by the name of Milliard. Harry winced as the physician dabbed at his head with the raw spirit, wondering if he was ever, in his life, to be away from brandy used
in one form or another. But the doctor had pronounced it efficacious and there was no gainsaying medical opinion.

  “Your brother has that portrait of you in his drawing-room, has he not?”

  Harry couldn’t nod, so he grunted, hoping by doing so to state his displeasure at the mention of the piece, but the doctor had turned his attention to James, clearly intimate enough with the younger Ludlow brother to feel confident in giving him a wigging.

  “Duelling, sir. I thought at least you had more sense.”

  “So did I, Dr Milliard.”

  The old man pushed hard at the long raw wound on Harry’s head, which may well have served to show his displeasure, but his victim felt aggrieved. James, not at all put out at the tone of the doctor’s strictures, continued smoothly, with a sense of detachment quite alien to the subject. “I cannot say how I would act in other circumstances. There is an element of the romantic in all this. My soul was engaged. So perhaps I required myself to seem heroic.”

  Harry, still being stung by regular daubings of spirit, cursed James under his breath.

  “Soul, forsooth,” spat Milliard. “The only emotion attached to duelling is stupidity.”

  “Then we are a tribe of fools, for Harry has been out too.”

  The doctor sniffed loudly, and his ministrations immediately became more intense. His next words were preceded by a very painful jab at the very seat of his patient’s discomfort. “That does not shock me. I have looked on your brother’s face often. You caught him well, for he would not hesitate to kill.”

  “Damn it, sir,” snapped Harry, throwing back his head to get away, “if you’re not more gentle with your daubing I’ll be tempted to prove you right.”

  The raised voice, the glare, and the threatening manner didn’t affect Milliard at all. He looked at Harry, his head cocked slightly to one side. “Oh, yes, James Ludlow, you caught him well.”

  “You must come with me, James. How can you miss being there when we catch up with Obidiah Trench?”

  James waved his hand languidly, for he was truly stuck with a good reason to deny Harry’s wish. The primary cause of his early return to London was now a painful memory. He had commissions that had already waited eighteen months. They would not suffer for another week. And, in truth, he wasn’t sure, in his present frame of mind, if he could face being confined in the studio with a subject.

  “It will mean staying at Cheyne Court,” he said finally.

  “For one or two nights,” replied Harry. Then his face took on that devious look that James had caught in the portrait. “What if I could get Arthur away from the house?”

  The thought of Arthur brought colour back to James’s cheeks.

  “He won’t go when I’m there. He’d be too afraid that I’ll undo all his meddling.”

  “Meddling,” said Harry, “what meddling?”

  He was still getting the reply to that question, and a lot more besides, in the coach that took them down to Deptford, with James displaying a rare passion in the process.

  “It amazes me that you cannot see these things, Harry. If you had talked to Tite, he would certainly tell you. He has made that poor old man’s life a misery.”

  The “poor old man” tag jarred with Harry, who knew Tite better than James supposed, but he let it pass.

  “The man even scolded you the night we got back. Scolded you for being late for dinner in your own house.”

  “He has acquired the habit over the years of considering it his own.”

  “It is not acquired, brother. It is a national trait. From Bute downwards, every Scotchman who’s held high office has behaved as if he owned England. Dundas is the same, wrapping Billy Pitt round his little finger.”

  “The king is content to term himself a Briton.”

  “I have nothing against the Union, brother. Indeed some of the Irish are amusing. I don’t know that we’ve gained much from the Welsh connection, except a lot of lawyers and doctors who poach English clients.”

  “Well, I thank God for it,” snorted Harry, finally stung into a derisive response. “We are in the midst of a war with the French, and the Union will survive because we have a few amusing Irishmen, some very rapacious Scotchmen, and a lot of Welshmen of the middling sort.”

  “Now if we’d united with the French, Harry,” said James, with a twinkle in his eye, “that would have been just the thing, for it would have been the blending of two cultured nations, both raised by Rome. We have flown in the face of our classical heritage and not only taken down the walls, but we have permitted the barbarians to enter.”

  “Am I being practised upon, brother?” asked Harry.

  James laughed and nodded. “We are approaching the dockyard, Harry. It would never do to have you in that benign frame of mind when you look over the ship. If I cannot rouse you to parsimony with tales of Arthur, then I must stoop to other means.”

  Harry looked out as the coach swung through the narrow dockyard gate. The shed itself was already occupied with the frame of another vessel, but through the skeletal timbers Harry could see the ship he was after, riding on the oily waters. He nudged James and pointed.

  “That’s the one.”

  “You forget that I’ve already been here, brother. I know that is the one.”

  “She has a neat trim about her, don’t you think?”

  “I fear I’ve failed to put you in the mood to haggle,” said James, doubtfully, for if Harry had looked at a woman with the naked affection he was demonstrating for this hulk he’d be confined by a magistrate.

  But haggle he did, for over an hour, and that after an inspection which had taken even longer. The Blackwall shipbuilder, Grisham, had as many dodges as Harry had answers. First was the price, then there was the small matter of what that included. Each dockyard luxury was Harry’s absolute necessity … The discussion was too technical for James so he turned away. The winter sun started to set over the river, full of every kind of sailing craft. The sunset colours, shot through with the smoke from countless chimneys, formed the most extraordinary background.

  The chill air kept the warm smoke from settling, and it lay like a strand of diaphanous grey in a wide stripe about five feet above the water. The sky was tinged azure blue, silhouetting the ships’ masts, stark and black. The moon was well up, a narrow crescent of white. In the foreground the filthy water rippled, picking up the dying rays of the sun. The horizon was indigo here and orange there, with the wispy clouds hanging like black veils.

  It had been a bad day for James Ludlow, indeed a bad week, ever since his return to London. But looking at that setting, which made him itch to have his paints, did more to restore him to peace than anything Harry could say. He knew that he was bored with portraits. He would not promise never to do another, but he was determined that his next foray would be by personal choice. But this, with the ships and the light; surely his heart would lift to paint scenes like this.

  “I shall inspect the copper bolts at random, at least one in ten, on the day of purchase,” said Harry, emerging from the shipbuilder’s tiny office.

  “Then you must pay to have them replaced, sir, as well as removed, for they have been set in tight. So tight I doubt you’ll shift them. We do not furnish gimcrack work in this yard.”

  “You will pay, Mr Grisham, not I,” replied Harry, without the slightest hint of rancour. “And you will not lose by it, if you exclude time, for I have no desire to change the bolts, merely to inspect them.”

  “Only time, sir,” cried Grisham theatrically. “Have you been asleep these last five years? Has no one told you how the price of labour has risen? Why, the men who work here rob me blind.”

  “It is your blindness that worries me, sir, for if they are robbing you, they may well be robbing the ship.”

  Even James knew that dockyard trick. The scullies who worked there would cut both ends off the bolts, some as long as four feet, and hammer them home on either side of the join, leaving nothing in the middle. The copper purloined was sold
as scrap. Since these same bolts were the very thing that held the main ship’s timbers together, it did not need Providence to endanger the crew. A hefty blow and the ship would just disintegrate.

  Harry had all the cards and he knew it. The original buyer for this novel design had failed to complete the transaction. Grisham would be well aware, by now, that the navy was unlikely to take her. What he couldn’t guess was that Harry had that information too. In the shipbuilder’s mind, as he looked at this potential purchaser, he rated him a difficult customer. This was hard bargaining, and for all that he was conceding points, he was enjoying the game. There was a final loud shake of the hand, and the business was complete.

  “Four months, Mr Ludlow, an’ there’s my hand on it,” said Grisham.

  “Fourteen weeks,” replied Harry, opening up an earlier dispute.

  “We’ve been through that, sir,” said Grisham with a sigh. He was a man who’d not shake hands lightly.

  “So we have, Mr Grisham, so we have. I shall instruct my attorneys to draw up a contract.”

  The light was fading as they left, with the moon more powerful than the sun. Harry lay back on the padded seats of the coach. “Why, I am quite done up, James.”

  “But happy?”

  Harry jerked upright. “I know she looks a mess to a landsman’s eye. But she’s a beauty, James, and no mistake.”

  “Then I wish you joy of her.”

  Harry looked James right in the eye, gripping his arm with one hand. “And you, brother, how are you?”

  James laughed, which was answer enough.