The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  “What are these?” Duncan asked.

  Ishmael made a rumbling noise as if he needed to clear his throat. “Coffee houses and other establishments.”

  “Establishments?” Duncan read the names. “Mrs. Wagner’s Lodge of Relaxation, the Sauce and Tail, the Garden of Escape.” He paused, digesting the names. “These would be landmarks for visiting sailors. Bawdy houses.”

  “Not at all. Only the low, unhealthy places are called bawdy houses. These are places for making easy friendships, that’s how the bosun put it,” the young Nipmuc said with an awkward expression. “And he says such places always overflow with secrets of the city.” He pulled the paper from Duncan and folded it into his pocket.

  Several hours later a rap on Duncan’s makeshift door announced the unexpected arrival of the captain, who presented a basket with a jar of ale, several hard-boiled eggs, and a sausage with fresh bread. Duncan nodded his gratitude. “A feast,” he observed.

  “We are rich in provisions since we took on stores against a much longer voyage,” the Welshman explained. As Duncan sat on his cot shelling one of the eggs, the captain lowered himself onto the stool and extracted a sheaf of papers and a writing lead from his waistcoat. “There will be inquiries by the insurance association,” he announced.

  Duncan took a bite out of the egg. “Inquiries?”

  “About your cargo. The ship is responsible. I will acknowledge that mischief on board resulted in the loss of your cargo.”

  “That would reflect badly on you,” Duncan observed.

  The captain gave a heavy sigh. “I am well-seasoned in arguing with owners. If I had exercised more authority over the blaggards, your troubles might have been averted.”

  “I doubt it. More likely you too would have been lost over the side.”

  “If the army has sunk so low, then it’s a wonder the colonies haven’t cast off the yoke long ago.”

  “There are honorable men who wear the king’s uniform,” Duncan offered half-heartedly.

  “Too few, I wager.” The captain extended one of the papers to Duncan. “The purser copied a list of your cargo off the manifest. If you sign it, I can begin the process with the association when we drop anchor.”

  Duncan did not take the paper. “Tell me, Captain,” he asked after another bite of egg. “Are you well acquainted with London?”

  “Aye, lived there ten years before the flux took my wife. That still sits hard with me, for I fear it may have been the city’s foul miasmas that did her in.”

  Duncan opened the jar to fill the horn cup the captain had provided, then handed it to the Welshman. “Spend an hour with me and do me a small favor or two in London, and I will forgo my insurance claim.”

  The captain was indeed savvy about the old city, taking in the first map Ishmael had provided and recording a dozen more landmarks on it, even sketching in several streets and the outline of the parks around Whitehall and the site of Buckingham House, which was being converted into the king’s new residence. He expressed surprise at Duncan’s interest in Bedlam Hospital but readily drew a long narrow building to the northeast of the city’s center. “Outside the old Moorgate,” he explained, “excepting the gate itself was torn down eight years ago.” He added lines around the hospital building. “The grounds are surprisingly spacious inside the great walls, with the southern perimeter covered by a long section of the ancient Roman wall. They built it after the great fire in the last century, and some say it was an effort to match the grand buildings of Paris.” He added two short perpendicular lines in the center of the front wall. “There be some right hideous statues over the main entrance.

  “And the Moorgate,” he sighed, adding another short pair of lines intersecting the city wall. “I was that sorry to see the old gates demolished. Most had been there a thousand years and more. Seemed right arrogant for a gang of quill pushers to decide they must come down to serve their notion of a modern city. Progress comes too fast. Why, I hear there are great ugly steam machines doing work out in the mines. What of the poor men who are put out of work? There’s even talk of putting such machines on ships. Who would ever take to the sea if their vessel was banging and coughing up smoke all day?” He shook his head. “There’s big changes coming, whether we want or not. You can smell it in the London air, when it ain’t choking ye.”

  Duncan filled his cup again. “And the Horse Guards?” he asked with a nod to the map.

  Captain Rhys grimaced. “Ye mean the Horse Guards who tried to kill ye, who think they did kill ye and have been laughing about it ever since? If you love life, McCallum, stay away from them. If ye were smart ye would remain with the Galileo until I take her on the Boston run next month.”

  “Boston?”

  “Aye, taking over dry goods from Yorkshire after a stay in the shipyard. The old girl needs her hull scraped and new copper plate installed. And I mean to strengthen some of her knees.”

  “The Horse Guards?” Duncan asked again.

  The captain frowned. “They have a building in Whitehall, more like a small castle.” He studied Duncan’s map, still laid out before them, and placed a small X beside St. James’s Park. “The Angels of Westminster, some in London call them. Not because they are saints but because as far as the king’s business goes, they are incapable of committing a sin. That is to say they can commit it but they will nae be punished for it. They just march down the hall and ask forgiveness.”

  “Down the hall?”

  “The Secretary at War and his Council keep their offices there. Some call the Guards their fancy serving boys.”

  In the middle of the night, seeing light filter through the hole in the wall, Duncan ventured back into the sick bay. Ishmael was carefully sharpening a scalpel, studying Hastings with a hungry eye. “I could fall,” Ishmael suggested, “and accidentally cut his throat.”

  “Then stop carrying a scalpel,” Duncan warned, then saw a half-filled vial of laudanum on the apothecary table. “Did you miss a dose? That should have all been used at his last dosing. We can’t afford to have him wake.”

  “I lightened the dose,” Ishmael confessed. “Just before the next dose he will become semiconscious. I told him I was Lieutenant Nettles and he responded to my questions.”

  “Ishmael! It is too risky!”

  His Nipmuc friend ignored him. “His club is Boodles on a place called Pall Mall, his games are whist and piquet, and his favorite house of pleasure is Madame Roland’s Finishing Academy, where he intends to go directly after we drop anchor.”

  “You heard all that?”

  “In two sessions, with some cajoling. Even in his current state he is most perverse. I had to ask things indirectly, so I dropped the names of bawdy houses from the bosun’s map and he cursed and said I should know he was faithful to Madame Roland.”

  As Duncan studied the prostrate major, Hastings stirred. Ishmael put some of the honey and water mixture to his lips and he drank.

  “Christ, that ale is weak, Nettles,” Hastings muttered, his eyes still closed.

  Duncan jerked back into the shadows but saw Hastings’s head loll sideways. Ishmael turned with a grin. This was the semiconscious state he had described. It was a great temptation to use it to their advantage, but also a great danger. The lieutenant might arrive, trapping Duncan in the sick bay. The level of Hastings’s consciousness was impossible to gauge.

  Ishmael made the decision for him. “What will we tell the colonel?” he asked Hastings.

  Hastings turned up in a clownish grin, his eyes still closed. When he spoke his words were slurred. “You know the colonel is useless. It’s the secretary and the earl who matter.”

  “But what shall we report to them?” Ishmael asked.

  “Mission on course. So far so good, we tell them, but the campaign is far from over. The fat fool has spun a complex web. He must be stopped at all costs, Nettles. There is clearly more afoot than we estimated. The incognitum, the Covenant, the transit. The Council must understand! He uses them lik
e weapons!” Hastings spoke in short, slurred sentences, his eyes still closed. “He is the hub, the rot that must be scoured clean. Too big a risk to ignore.” He repeated faintly, “Too big a risk.” Hastings’s head rolled again and he seemed to have lost all consciousness.

  Ishmael and Duncan exchanged a confused glance. “Stopped?” Ishmael ventured.

  Hastings did not seem to hear. Duncan took a step toward the door. Suddenly the major’s hand flailed the air and he grabbed Ishmael’s arm, pulling him close. “If all else fails, Lieutenant, we must kill him! We must kill Benjamin Franklin!”

  Chapter 10

  BEST TO SPEND A COUPLE hours down in the bilges afore we drop anchor in the pool of the Thames,” Darby explained as he guided Duncan and Ishmael toward Fleet Street. The bosun had been loaned by the captain as an escort for their first few hours in London. He gestured at Ishmael, who had been holding his hand over his nose and mouth. “Sort of seasons the nostrils, ye might say.”

  “If I had known, I would have begged Duncan to sew my nose closed,” Ishmael growled. His excitement about arriving in the city had been overwhelmed by its stench. Except along the widest, most heavily used thoroughfares, piles of rotten refuse appeared at regular intervals. The gutters along both sides of the streets held sluggish streams of the excretions of London’s residents, both two-legged and four.

  Duncan, anticipating the reek, had taken a dozen cloves from the galley and kept one clenched in his front teeth as he studied the crowded streets. Several passing women pressed small bunches of flowers to their noses, sold on the cobbled streets to the hawkers’ cry of “nosegay” and “posies.” Ishmael, for the third time that hour, declined Duncan’s offer of a clove, apparently thinking it less than warrior-like.

  “Lobsterbacks,” Darby muttered in warning as a squad of soldiers marched around the corner they were approaching. Duncan pulled his tricorn hat low but kept his eyes on the redcoats. He had not expected army patrols in London, but then he understood as an ornate coach-and-four came into view behind them. They were escorting a dignitary through the crowded streets.

  “Don’t gawk, boy,” Darby warned. Duncan turned to see Ishmael staring at the extravagant vehicle, with a liveried driver on the front bench and a matching footman standing on a rear platform. Gilt-edged windows contrasted elegantly with the black enamel of the coach. The gleaming brasses on the harness all depicted the head of a lion.

  Ishmael could not resist gazing at the coach, which was no doubt conveying a minor royal, and Duncan pulled him away just as some hard-looking men with quarterstaves began knocking heads to push back the crowd. Darby led them down another fetid alley and they emerged into a small but pleasant square that was the terminus of a paved street with several well-appointed brick and clapboard buildings of three and four stories. They followed Darby up the steps of the large one at the base of the square, scattering a group of youths gathered there with a good-natured cry of “Make way, ye sorry lubbers!” Several of them, clearly recognizing Darby, raised knuckles to their foreheads with suppressed laughs. He tussled the unkempt hair of the nearest. “Why, ye’ve grown half a foot since I saw ye, Robbie boy.” The boy’s face broke into a wide grin, and the taller boy beside him swelled up with pride as Darby patted his shoulder on the back and declared, “All shipshape, Captain Xander?”

  “Loaded and ready for action, sir!” came the boy’s ebullient reply.

  “Good lads,” he explained to Duncan after tapping a brass knocker in the shape of an anchor. “Link boys and runners,” he added, then greeted the maid who opened the door with an exaggerated bow and stepped inside. “Welcome to Neptune’s Crown,” he announced, then aimed a nautical whistle down the hall that led to the rear of the building. “Most just call it the Neptune.”

  Duncan and Ishmael shared an amused glance over finding an inn by such a name in the heart of the city, but their expressions changed to wonder as they reached the common sitting room. The walls of the spacious, tidy chamber were lined with nautical charts and shelves that overflowed with books and models of ships. Some of the renderings were skillfully shaped cutaways of hulls, but most were intricate full-rigged miniatures of barks, brigs, frigates, schooners, and even a fat Dutch galliot.

  Duncan laid his bag by the door and stepped closer to admire the closest model, that of a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, the main fighting machine of the British Navy, complete down to its tiny anchor chains.

  “They call her a Third Rate,” came a soft voice over his shoulder, “but that seems such a meager title for such a mighty ship.” Duncan turned with surprise to see that the speaker was a big-boned woman in late middle age, whose left leg extending below her skirt was an ornate piece of wood carved with anchors and mermaids, adorned with a pewter cap. “This one’s the Bellona,” she explained with obvious pride, “the prototype, the first of our seventy-fours. Back in sixty-one she captured a French ship of the line. What a glorious fight that was! My Jasper was there, on a frigate off Cape Finisterre, God rest his soul.”

  Duncan nodded awkwardly. “A magnificent rendering,” he offered, casting a questioning glance at Darby.

  “Yer landlady,” Darby explained. “Mrs. Clementine Laws. She is as seasoned a battle veteran as ye’ll find anywhere in the Royal Navy.”

  Duncan made a respectful bow. “Duncan McCallum. Your servant, ma’am.”

  Ishmael, however, could not take his eyes off the woman’s peg leg until she lifted it and tapped the pewter knob against his shin. “Not polite to gape at a lady’s bare legs, son,” she chided with a good-natured smile.

  Ishmael seemed not to hear her. “Where?” he asked in confused wonder.

  “Where’s my original flipper? Fish bait long ago. A godforsaken French cannonball knocked it off.”

  “But the navy doesn’t have—”

  “Doesn’t have wenches manning her guns? I should say not, more’s the pity. After my darling Jasper retired out of the navy as a ship’s master, he bought hisself a merchantman with his accumulated prize money. He wanted me to accompany him but I said only if he would buy me my very own brass nine-pounder, as a gift of the heart. A small gun, ladylike, ye might say. We was off the coast of Hispaniola when a French privateer came out for us. It was touch and go, I must admit, but I had my brass nine in the cabin set as a stern chaser and I brought her foremast down. The damned frogs took one last shot, the best they got off that day. It took out half of our lovely leaded-glass windows and my leg below the knee. Lying stunned on the deck, I didn’t even know it until Jasper picks up my leg and waves it at me. ‘Clem,’ says he, ‘we’ve had our last waltz,’ and he tosses it to the fishes. Right cross I was too, ’cause I would’ve made a fine knife hilt out of the bone.” She shrugged, then called for a scullery girl to collect the spittoons and turned back to the still wide-eyed Ishmael. “After that we cashed out and bought this place. Mr. Laws spent his last years building them models.”

  “Extraordinary,” Duncan said, now admiring a well-polished ship’s bell mounted by the entrance to a simply furnished but commodious dining room.

  Mrs. Laws puffed with pride. “Sometimes the navy shipwrights from Portsmouth ask to borrow a model for a spell, to check their own designs.”

  “A room or two?” Duncan asked. He was anxious to get settled and make contact with Franklin.

  The innkeeper nodded. “And didn’t the good Captain Rhys send word this hour and more? My two best on the top floor, if ye don’t mind three flights of stairs. Quiet and a fine long view of Westminster,” she declared, her gaze settling over Ishmael, who had ventured to another model which sat in a pool of light by the front window. “An eighteen-gun corvette, sleek as a cat,” she explained as she approached him, then halted, studying the young Nipmuc in the brighter light. She tilted her head in surprise, then with two taps of her pewter knob was at his side, lifting a hand. He froze as she extended a finger toward his jaw.

  “Prithee, young sir,” she asked as she gently traced her fing
er along the row of small tattooed fish that ran parallel to his ear and down his neck. “Might ye be an aborigine?”

  Ishmael stepped back and bowed. “Of the Nipmuc tribe,” he intoned in a solemn voice, then said in his native tongue, “Health and harmony be on this lodge and all who dwell in it.”

  As Mrs. Laws began a curtsy, made awkward by her wooden leg, a squeal of delight interrupted them from the shadows by the stairway. The landlady rolled her eyes, then called over her shoulder, “Lizzie, come out of hiding and make yer greeting, girl.”

  A young woman wearing long blond braids, of no more than twenty years, appeared blushing with excitement. She made a quick curtsy to Duncan and a longer one to Ishmael. She seemed to struggle for words, finally murmured a hasty “your honor,” then straightened and declared, “I have the top floor.”

  Mrs. Laws gave the chambermaid a gentle push. “Be about yer chores, lass.” The blond maid scurried back into the shadows. “I shall do what I can to protect ye, sir,” she said to Ishmael with a businesslike air, then gestured Duncan toward the small desk in the corner where the guest register lay.

  “The captain said three weeks and perhaps more,” Mrs. Laws said as Duncan sat at the desk, “and he will take a berth here as well after the Galileo goes into the shipyard.” She glanced up at Ishmael. “No need for ye to wait,” she said to the young Nipmuc. “Now where’s our pious porter?” She craned her neck toward the kitchens. “Sinner John! Clap on! Action stations!”

  Ishmael followed the porter, a stern man with a scarred, lean face and close-cropped hair, up the stairs with the baggage. Minutes later when Duncan found their rooms, however, he was nowhere to be seen. The two small but comfortable rooms connected through a door in their common wall, and Duncan found Ishmael’s bags on the bed of the adjoining chamber. He was about to close the gaping door of a narrow closet when he discovered it was not a closet but a low, short passage that led to a smaller hatch-like door that was also ajar, spilling brilliant sunlight.