Born To Privilege (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 3)

by Andrew Wareham

  Quarrington drained his glass, face reddening in indignation.

  “Six weeks ago one of my traders came in, from the Cape – one or two a year go down to fetch ostrich plumes for me – good money in them! She carried a pair of nabob India merchants as passengers, coming home to retire, and they told the tale of how there was a pirate playing merry hell with trade round the waters of the Spice Islands. Said he had taken over one of the Malay sultanates and armed the folk there with rifled muskets better than John Company possessed. Rajah Star, they called him, with a fleet of a European ship and twenty big proas. He has not taken an Indiaman yet, but they say it’s only a matter of time.”

  “So, young John pirated your ship and took her to the East Indies. Using his own name so he must have little intention of ever returning to England, must intend to stay in the East. I suppose I must tell his father… but I am not at all sure what I should say… did he cost you much, all told?”

  Quarrington shook his head, confessed to having his hull insured with Lloyds of London and also in New York. He had, in fact, in purely financial terms, come out of it quite well.

  “But, Thomas, that ain’t the point! Leaving aside my captain, who must have had his neck wrung, he took my ship and left me looking foolish, and it is becoming known! Not so important now that I have left the trade, but a man has his pride, you know! Add to that, the owner of the carbines is dunning me for his money – that young sod pocketed the bloody lot!”

  The indignation on Quarrington’s face was too much for Tom – he burst out laughing.

  “One must admire the young fellow, Jonathan – as thieves go he is fairly thorough! On a serious note, I do not see what is to be done from here. We could hire a privateer, one of the big vessels laid up since the wars ended, too large for the smuggling lay, and send her out, but ten-to-one she would turn pirate herself once she was past Java Head – it would be throwing good money after bad. Leave the boy alone, I would say – he will get too big for his boots sooner or later and then the Bombay Marine and the Navy will bestir themselves. A pair of frigates for his fleet, a thousand marines for his land base, and farewell Rajah Star! The Admiral on the China Station will deal with that problem when the need arises.”

  Alec Fraser was the renegade of his family, a pale, bloodless, albino sort of black sheep but nonetheless, ‘not quite the thing’. His father was a minister and he had produced six sons and three daughters – not that the girls counted for much in a low church family – Alec the fifth of the boys. Three of his brothers had become ministers, each ensconced in a respectable agricultural community, living in comfortable frugality in a neat, tidy manse with a very large vegetable garden in perfect order, a few obedient flowers to the side, setting the example of Protestant thrift. The fourth had chosen the Law, was a Writer to the Signet and well-placed to become rich. All were married to properly dowdy wives. The youngest of the family was still at school but was rarely seen without his Bible, would be a shining addition to the family ranks. Alec, however, had turned his back on the path of soap and virtue, had chosen to dabble in coal and steam, despite it being frequently asked of him just where engines were to be found in the Good Book. His decline into poverty and degradation had been freely prophesied and his father had prayed long despairing hours over him, but he had persisted in his descent into the ranks of the unwashed and ungodly.

  He had derived great pleasure from penning his first letter home, informing his parents that he had taken up residence in England, in the manor-house of Lord Andrews where he was now tutor to his youngest son. He wrote that he was salaried at one hundred pounds, English, and was in addition to be clothed and fed by the estate, to be given access to a horse of his own and, furthermore, had already been entrusted with the care of one of their rare great dogs, a successor to his old Bouncer. Three months later he had had even greater pleasure in telling them of his first bonus – the sum of two hundred and thirty pounds, sat in his bank account and earning its two per centum, compounding, already. He had fitted a new condenser to the steam engine at the works on the estate and it had been so efficient that my lord had had drawings sent to his enterprises in Lancashire and Wales – they said that they were saving a good three pounds a week in coals on each of their engines, a not insignificant sum, as his parents would appreciate.

  He did not, however, make much mention of my lord’s family, other than to laud the intelligence and application of young Mr Joseph.

  “A youth of Shining Parts, one destined to play a Leading Role in the New Land being created by Steam and Coal.”

  Mr James he had seen only for a few days before he had departed to join his regiment, supremely confident, outwardly, in his ability to succeed as a light infantryman – ‘first into the field, last out’. Alec did not really approve of soldiers, but he supposed they were necessary, like tom-turd-men, essential to the health of society.

  He had not met Mr Robert – the Heir – yet, but expected to make his bow to him within a few days.

  Miss Charlotte he had met, and had been given her hand to shake! He had fallen instantly in love – respectfully, silent and red-faced at a distance, where he knew he would stay. She could not be for the likes of him, he knew that… but he could dream. He had never actually spoken to a young girl before, of course – his school life had been monastic and at university his spare funds had amounted to sixpence a week, not quite sufficient to roister on. He hardly regretted not knowing what to say as he would have no occasion ever to converse with her, but he saw her almost every day, riding or walking the dogs or accompanying her ladyship in the carriage. He strongly, and rightly, suspected that she had never noticed him, but no matter! She would still be his lady, even though she did not know it, and it would not, of course, affect his work at all.

  “Locomotive steam engines, Joseph – they have one overwhelming advantage over stationary engines. What is it?”

  Joseph was used now to Mr Fraser’s methods of teaching – asking, questioning, arguing, rarely didactically stating fact – was ready with an answer.

  “Ropes, sir. A stationary engine must wind a long cable – four hundred yards at Roberts and, I am told, longer elsewhere, though I have not seen that for myself. They snap, sir, if they are used for too long, and the whiplash kills. I would imagine as well that they are wasteful of coals, sir, because the engine must pull the weight of the rope as well as its load of trucks.”

  “Correct! Both points are well-taken. A strong rope is a heavy, thick rope, so the need arises to compromise – to make the rope as light as possible and as strong as necessary. Inevitably, when coals are expensive and workers are not…”

  “Then men die, sir. Hence the need for reliable locomotive engines to pull loads in and around the works as well as cross-country. So, sir, there is a need for two different sorts of locomotive engines, one fast for great distances, the other simply powerful for heavy loads…”

  Joseph’s voice tailed off and he sat blank-faced for a couple of minutes, Fraser waiting patiently, knowing that his mind was active and elsewhere.

  “Rack-and-pinion for the works engines, sir? Steam cranes as well… Would a fixed cable be possible, sir, the engines to pull themselves along by winding the cable in? No, not a good idea, sir, it would gain very little as a strong rope would still be necessary, even more so, perhaps. I would like to look at rack-and-pinion, sir, especially around mines as they are often located on hillsides.”

  Fraser made a note in his diary, a brief instruction to himself to check his texts. He had a memory of a diagram of a rack and pinion system used in the north of England, unpowered and no more than a braking system, in effect, for tubs on a steep trackway. It would make a starting point for the lad to work from.

  Henry Star whistled a little tune as he sat on the seat of his closed wagon, next to his driver, behind a team of six mules. It was hot, must be sweltering inside, but that was no concern of his – the blacks were used to heat. He took a pull at the jug of whisky and water
, well diluted, the spirits doing little more than sterilise the water, it was never wise to trust back-country springs. Four more hours would see him back in New Orleans with twelve pieces of goods to sell on – girls between the age of ten and fifteen, or thereabouts, and all of them light-skinned, no more than quarter-caste, sure to fetch a high price from the more exclusive cat-houses and give him and his partner a very good profit. The plantations were generally willing to sell their whiter slaves – ‘high-yellows’, they called them – at a very low price, not wanting to keep the evidence in sight of their families in most cases as almost all of them were the result of the owners straying with their house servants. In the nature of things their mothers tended to have been handsome women, giving them a higher value still.

  Slave trading was generally seen as a low sort of occupation, but Henry was banking up to five hundred dollars a month from his specialisation. A couple of years and he would be able to branch out, to use his capital in some more respectable lines of business. It was a stroke of luck, he reflected, that had forced him to desert from the English forces in the north and make his way to New Orleans in time to join the militia and fight in the battle there, on the winning side and making a name for himself as a hero. He laughed as he thought back – he had held his post on the wall, three wounded men loading for him as he kept up a sufficiently accurate fire to drive a bold storming party off because he had not dared be defeated and taken prisoner to be recognised as a deserter fighting for the enemy and shot for sure.

  It was a strange old world, he reflected, that had brought him here to fall on his feet after being bumped from pillar to post, pushed from one expedient to the next, concerned only to stay alive, one jump ahead of the hangman on occasion, and none of it his fault, not really. Here he was, on his way to making a fortune while his brothers, who had all given ‘poor old Henry’ a helping hand, a leg up, time after time, laughing kindly the while, were stuck in their English mud, barristers and ministers and the like!

  He wondered briefly how John was getting on. He had left England expecting to hear of him, somehow, when he reached Upper Canada where he had always talked of going, but his name had been completely unknown there and he had been left on his own, twenty guineas remaining in his pocket when he accepted that he would not find his brother and no idea of how to work for his living. The army was recruiting locally, paying a militia, Fencibles, they called them, for service for the duration of the war with America, with a hint of a land grant at the end of it all. A few hundred acres of farm land would have been handy – not that he wanted to be a farmer but it would have given him something to sell on or rent out. He could handle small arms, musket and rifle and pistol, was young and fit, had no problem being accepted as a foot soldier – cavalrymen had to supply their own horse - that was beyond his means.

  He had quite enjoyed the militia, for the first month or two – discipline was relaxed, the men having elected their own sergeants, and the professional officers, all from England, staying at a distance. They had not been expected to stand in line, were to be light troops, skirmishers, armed with rifles to match the Americans, and he had shown himself to be a fair shot and willing to take his share of the camp chores. The other men knew he was a gentleman born, had no idea of fending for himself, but so were a number of others who had come out across the Atlantic and they were willing to show them how to go on, if they were willing in turn to learn.

  Ten weeks in and the company boarded ship, without being told where they were going or what was happening, given only an hour’s notice. Word spread during the day as they waited to sail – army fashion, a massive hurry followed by dragging delay as the first panic was overcome and the higher command worked out what they intended to do – that the Americans had invaded Canada, somewhere up the St Lawrence, burning and destroying as they had come. Some of the Indian tribes were up, on the American side, others had joined the British against the Americans. The Iroquois Confederation was said to be actively weighing up the chances of using the war to destroy all of the white invaders, but it was generally agreed that they would wait until the situation was clearer, for fear that they might come under American rule if all went wrong – they had had experience of the American policy of betrayal and massacre, preferred the British as far the lesser evil.

  Eventually they sailed and after three days were put ashore, the militia on their own, at a small settlement of a dozen log cabins and a single wharf, dwarfed by virgin forest. The officers, a captain, two lieutenants and a new and very green ensign, son of a local big-wig and generally seen as quite useless, conferred together in the largest cabin while the two sergeants brought the sixty men together.

  “Americans are reckoned to be forty miles or so south and west of here – maybe! They’re comin’ overland, through the forest, perhaps, or so they been told. Supposed to ‘ave cannon with ‘em – bloody fools! Can’t get big guns through where there ain’t no tracks! We got to fort up ‘ere, so they can’t build a battery to close the river, and then patrol out to see if we can find ‘em. Lieutenant Watkiss goin’ to take first patrol out – MacDonald and Lovat, your sections with me to go with ‘im.”

  Henry was a member of Corporal Lovat’s section.

  They spent two days building an abattis, felling timber and using the foot thick trunks, piled up on each other, to form a couple of strongpoints and the crowns and branches pointing outwards to create obstacles sufficient to prevent a charge of horsemen and slow any foot assault. A dozen rounds of grape or canister from a field piece would carve a breach, but a force without cannon would be stalled for days, possibly permanently, by the obstacle.

  Henry did not enjoy patrolling in the thick forest – the trees were fairly wide spaced, twenty and thirty feet apart mostly, but they shut out the sun, left a permanent gloom, and the wind rustled sufficiently to mask any other sounds at a distance. Ambush was always possible – every fold in the ground – and there were many of these – could have concealed a dozen of riflemen, or more of savages with bows-and-arrows and tomahawks. The woodsmen told them to keep an eye out downwind, to sniff the air, to watch the flight of birds, to look out for wood smoke, to examine the ground for droppings – animal and human alike – to memorise the colours about them so that they would recognise any alien intrusion into the pattern. Given ten years of practice Henry was sure he could have mastered all of that. He twitched and stared about nervously, all unaware that the experienced men had seen it all before and had him marked down as ‘dodgy’ – come a fight, he might settle down and do the job, he might break and run, the one chance as likely as the other.

  “Too much brain, not enough bottom”, Lovat summed him up and kept him under his eye, making sure that he never stood sentry-go on his own and was at point only towards the middle of the day, when sensible men were sleeping and ambush was very unlikely.

  They saw nothing and were pulled out after a month, taken up river to join the main force of a couple of thousand marines and regulars and mercenaries intermixed and readying themselves to march south on the heels of the defeated invaders, more to keep them moving than to attempt to bring them to battle. The mercenaries, three hundred or so strong, were all French prisoners-of-war, recruited from the camps in England and, more commonly, Spain. Few of them were Frenchmen as such, the bulk being Italians, Germans, Spaniards, Dutch, Poles and Turks, swept up by Napoleon’s army as conscripts and with no loyalty to their late masters. They had, of course, exactly the same loyalty to their new officers, and very little desire to die for their new flag, or, perhaps, any other flag at all.

  Henry had learned a few words of French from his tutors, discovered that he was reasonably fluent and began to make himself useful as a liaison, carrying and translating commands. There were a number of French Canadians in the Fencibles, but the powers-that-be had little trust in any Frenchmen, kept them separate where possible. The junior officers of the ‘Independent Companies of Foreigners’, as they were elegantly titled, were themselves fore
ign nationals but the two captains were both English and neither spoke any other language; contact with them over a couple of weeks led Henry to suppose that they had been carefully selected for their posts, their own regiments having recommended them very forcefully and filling their positions so that there was no vacancy for them ever to return to.

  Captain Hayes was a drunk, a hopeless bottle-hound, incapable of functioning at all when less than half-drunk, useless when three-quarters, or more, gone; he was able to perform his duty, after a fashion, for no more than two hours of the morning. Wiggins was a shifty-eyed gentleman, unable to look directly at anyone, addressing the floor or the ceiling or the air it seemed; he knew how to run a company of soldiers, was adequate on the parade ground, gave clear orders, so it was possible that the officers of his battalion had simply come to dislike him, the sort of irrationality that could happen in the hermetic world of the Mess. Henry made himself indispensable to both – it was not difficult for a reasonably intelligent man to do, running their errands, particularly those that involved the language gap. He was a little surprised that the Fencibles showed no objection at all when it was suggested that he be transferred across to the Independent Company, but concluded that they were pleased to see him prospering – he was given a sergeant’s stripe immediately.

  He wondered whether he might not write a letter home – to tell his parents that he was enjoying some success, standing on his own feet, something they had doubted he could ever do. He had always been the weakling of the boys – the one who was a little slower, physically, not able to keep up, forever calling out, ‘Wait for me!’ He had been quick at learning his lessons, but he had never had anything to offer in the way of argument or discussion, was content to accept other, better, men’s opinions. He had always been obedient as well, never openly naughty, transgressing only when he was certain he would not be caught, clever at passing the blame, at creating a fog of suspicion, the only certainty being that he had not done it, whatever it was. He had not been well-loved by his brothers. When he grew up he became equally disliked by the maids in the house, his hands forever straying, groping, stopping just short of rape, crafty enough to leave no evidence, no real grounds for complaint to his father. The old man had got wind of something wrong, however, had started to discuss his future with him, all of the alternatives offered involving him going away, preferably overseas. Apprentice writer to a merchant in the Sugar Islands or India was favoured – five years of low pay, slavery in an office, living-in, the prospect of eventually becoming a junior partner, ‘provided he behaved himself’. He had run in despair at the prospect, begging money off of brother Tom and not wondering at all why it was immediately provided – he had asked for fifty and been given a hundred and helped to find a cabin on a ship west. Only now, a year later, did it seem to him that he might have been pushed out, his father and Tom together conspiring to encourage him to run.