Perilous Shore

by Chris Durbin

  ‘Avast,’ he shouted, ‘hold her there, Bosun.’

  Now it was the yawl’s turn. Turner had to hold the sloop’s stern against the wind and the tide until the aft warp could be passed.

  Kestrel’s bows were now only two boat’s-lengths off the dock wall. Jackson took up the heaving line and stood at the starboard cathead. He flung the coil and the longboat’s coxswain caught it and handed it forward. The bow oar scrambled up the dockside again and hauled the line in hand-over-hand. The second warp was attached to its end and when that came snaking over the masonry, he slipped the eye onto the outer bollard.

  From there it was easy. Very slowly, Kestrel was drawn into the basin entrance by a steady pull on the two warps. Her bows passed through the gap and now the last of the flood tide pushed them gently inwards.

  The rattan fenders compressed with that gentle creaking sound – so known and loved by sailors as marking the end of a spell at sea – as Kestrel was hauled firmly alongside.

  ‘Fore and aft springs if you please, Mister Jackson,’ said Fairview as the sloop came to rest starboard side to with her bows just thrusting through the cut and into the wet basin.

  ◆◆◆

  ‘It’ll be six weeks I don’t doubt, Captain Holbrooke,’ said the master attendant, ‘maybe two months if we can’t get her into the dry dock this time next month. I expect you’ll be looking forward to a little shore-leave.’

  The master attendant was inclined to be talkative. He was evidently well-pleased that Kestrel was being turned over to him so quickly. He had a constant multi-dimensional battle with the Admiralty, the navy board and the sea officers in which the sustained employment of his teams of shipwrights, caulkers, riggers and all the other trades tended to be forgotten. There was plenty of work in the commercial yards that lined the Solent and its tributaries, and his waking nightmare was to lose his best men during a quiet spell when he couldn’t employ them.

  ‘Yes, I must pay my calls in London, but otherwise I won’t be going far. My home’s in Wickham and I plan to visit the yard every other day. Mister Lynton will be on hand too.’

  The master attendant looked doubtful at this news; he didn’t relish the thought of a ship’s captain looking over his shoulder. But Holbrooke was determined that Kestrel should be ready for sea by the end of May, and if he had to ruffle a few feathers to ensure that the work continued apace, then so be it. The master attendant shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of resignation.

  ‘We’ll warp her into the basin now and close the gate while the water’s good and high. I can see the ordnance yard’s wagons ready to take away your guns and powder. We’ll put the victuals and stores into the number two shed,’ he said. ‘They’ll be safe there, under lock and key.’

  ‘What will you do first?’ asked Holbrooke, intensely interested in this hitherto neglected part of his profession. He hadn’t stood by a ship undergoing this kind of work before.

  ‘It’s all about the wait for the dry dock, sir. Your sloop needs to be scraped and re-caulked and given a couple of coats of the good white stuff. But as you can see,’ he waved his arm towards the already occupied dry docks, ‘we’ll have to wait our turn. I can be sure of a dock in four weeks’– barring accidents – whereas if I try for one in the next few days, we could be disappointed at the last moment and lose all those days of waiting. Their lordships are demanding ships be made ready for the summer and that creates a very high take-up for docks. As for the work, I’ll start on shifting the magazine and fitting your port-lids tomorrow, but the wheel can wait. We can even fit that while she’s docked down, being as it’s all inboard work.’

  Holbrooke and the master attendant watched a cheerful procession of sailors making their way ashore. Each man carried his entire belongings in his sea-chest and a canvas bag, and they were lugging two of each between every pair of men. The chests were bound for the store while the bags would accompany them on leave. There was much to be cheerful about because all but two of the ship’s company had been given a pass for four weeks’ leave. Most would disappear into the boarding houses and sailors’ lodgings of Portsmouth Point. Some had family close by and a small group was heading for the carrier’s cart to take them to London. The two who had ties in Plymouth had left the day before. The purser had begged a working passage for them on a chartered coasting hoy and with this wind they could hope to be there in two days.

  ‘Don’t you fear that they’ll run, sir?’ asked the master attendant, looking doubtful as each man knuckled his forehead to the first lieutenant. ‘I saw the clerk of the cheque going out to you yesterday, so I suppose they’ve been paid.’

  ‘Yes, they’ve been paid, but we’ve been lucky with prizes and I doubt whether any of them will forego their share for a life on the run. In any case, they’re good men, and I don’t have any real fears. No doubt there’ll be a few stragglers, and we’ll have a week or two to round them up before we sail. But desertion? I think not,’ replied Holbrooke as he acknowledged the more exuberant seamen who waved in his direction.

  No, he wasn’t worried about losing his crew; in fact, a few of them had asked whether they could bring friends or relatives back with them, landsmen hoping to try their luck at sea. Amazingly, they seemed to like service in Kestrel. It was undeniably more comfortable work than signing on to a short-handed merchantman and the food was generally better. And even though it was more dangerous, they had a better chance of staying out of a French prisoner-of-war camp than they would in a merchantman, with the enemy privateers being so active. Certainly, in a merchantman the pay was better with the inflated wartime rates, but the past few months had shown the potential for taking valuable prizes in a small, fast cruiser. Only two men had been denied leave, incorrigibles whom the master-at-arms had identified as likely to abscond. They’d already been sent to the receiving ship and with any luck they’d be snapped up by the port admiral and drafted to a ship-of-the-line before the sloop was ready to be handed back. Lynton had made it quite clear to the second-in-command of the old Minotaur hulk that Kestrel would make no fuss if they were never seen again.

  The master attendant gave Holbrooke an old-fashioned look and shrugged again. He’d seen ships come and go and he’d seen young commanders with these egalitarian ideas before. Privately, he expected there to be a significant delay when Kestrel was ready to be handed back, while Holbrooke frantically tried to gather his crew together. The captain was probably right that there would be few genuine deserters, a term that they both understood to mean those men who had no intention of returning and relied on losing themselves among the shifting community of itinerate seamen. But he’d seen ships held up for weeks while three-quarters of their people took their leisure ashore, judging to a nicety the point where straggling, which was rarely punished at all, became desertion with the threat of serious reprisal.

  ‘Do you have a few moments to see the drawings, Captain? I think you’ll like the way we’re going to lead the wheel tackles and you’ll see that we’ll be encasing the tiller on the upper deck, so it won’t disturb your cabin at all.’

  That avoided the usual disadvantage of fitting a wheel in a flush-decked sloop. It still required a long tiller attached to the head of the rudder to provide the leverage to move it, and usually the tiller would be moved from the upper deck to the deck-head immediately below, and that was the captain’s cabin. The master attendant’s proposal kept the deck-head of the cabin clear.

  ‘You’ll have your very own two-foot-high poop-deck, sir, just like a flagship, and a stylish taffrail to match. You won’t be flush-decked any longer,’ and he smiled happily at his own joke.

  ‘Well, the men already talk of the fo’c’sle, the waist and the quarterdeck, just like a frigate, even though we have a clean sweep from forward to aft. I expect they’ll have no trouble in adapting to a poop-deck.’

  ‘Just so long as they don’t give themselves airs and graces, sir, that never leads to any good.’

  ◆◆◆

  Holbro
oke went below to see to his own things. His servant had already packed up his personal belongings and was busy transferring them to a cart that would take them to the Dolphin on the High Street. His servant was a freed slave from a French plantation on San Domingue; the only surname he’d ever known was Serviteur, a working name if ever there was one. He’d been the major-domo in the great house and his knowledge of looking after a gentleman far exceeded the needs of most sea officers. Serviteur would accompany Holbrooke and the chaplain to the Dolphin.

  ‘Your furniture will be going to number two store, sir, but everything else will be going with you.’

  ‘Thank you, Serviteur. I hope we won’t be gone too long,’ he said as he looked wistfully around the cabin.

  He’d grown fond of the sloop, having taken it from Dutch pirates in the Caribbean. He felt more ownership than if it had been an anonymous ship allocated to him by a soulless Admiralty.

  ‘Do you wish to have any leave, Serviteur? The first lieutenant tells me that you didn’t request any.’

  ‘No sir. I know nobody in this country except the Kestrels. I’d like to see London one day, but otherwise I’m content.’

  ‘Then when I visit the Admiralty, you’ll come with me.’

  Holbrooke still found it a novelty to have a servant. He’d grown up in a cottage on the outskirts of a small Hampshire market town. On washing days his mother had been helped by a local girl, but she could hardly be called a servant. Serviteur could have taken advantage of him, he knew, but so far there had been no sign of that kind of behaviour.

  ‘If that’s all done, then I think we’ll get underway,’ he said. A servant might have been a novelty to Holbrooke, but since taking command of Kestrel he’d never once set foot off the sloop without the ritual of pipes, doffed hats and attendant sideboys. Now, with the ship in dockyard hands, there was nobody to see him over the side. He walked over the gangway as if he was walking off a Gosport wherry.

  ◆◆◆

  2: Blessings of the Land

  Thursday, Thirtieth of March 1758.

  The Dolphin, Portsmouth High Street.

  Holbrooke’s face was studiously expressionless. ‘I wonder – just hypothetically – what would be a suitable time of day to call upon a young lady?’ he asked, ‘at her family home,’ he added, for context.

  Chalmers paused, fighting hard to keep the smile from his face and searching back through his memory to a time when he too had paid calls on young ladies.

  ‘Well, it depends on the circumstances of the hypothetical case,’ he replied with unnatural solemnity. ‘If the caller hasn’t chosen to obtain permission from the young lady’s father, then I would say any time in the middle watch would be appropriate, and a ladder of an appropriate length may come in handy. At what height is this hypothetical lady’s chamber?’

  Holbrooke looked at him sharply, then his face creased into a grin.

  ‘I’d never associated you with facetiousness, David,’ he replied. ‘The location of the lady’s chamber is not an important factor in this question. You may assume that the hypothetical father’s permission has been sought and obtained.’

  Chalmers gazed discreetly out of the window; Holbrooke was blushing, the bright crimson colour creeping up from his stock to his cheeks. It was hard to imagine a person less suited for deception than George Holbrooke. Not only had he ordered breakfast at a distressingly early time, but here he was in his best frock coat and he’d shaved so close that the rush of blood to his face threatened to break through what was left of his epidermis.

  They’d taken a pair of rooms at the Dolphin, a newly established inn on the busy main street of Portsmouth. It sat opposite the church of Saint Thomas whose gilded weathercock in the form of a ship under sail watched over the proceedings of the great port city. The Dolphin was a convenient distance from the dockyard gate, close enough to walk to the wet basin in about thirty minutes and ideally suited to accommodate a sea officer and a chaplain whose mark was accepted everywhere, in consequence of Kestrel’s known accomplishment in taking prizes. They were sitting now in Chalmers’ room which had half of a shallow bay window that looked left towards the Square Tower and the Sally Port, and beyond to the Solent. Portsmouth Point was – thankfully – out of sight to the right of the tower.

  ‘In that case, eleven o’clock – six bells in the forenoon watch if you prefer – is generally considered a suitable time in London town, but anywhere between ten and twelve. If you call before ten you risk embarrassing the family before they’ve composed themselves. After twelve gives the impression that you expect to be invited for dinner. Elsewhere, outside London, I can’t say, but I imagine that it won’t be so different.’

  Chalmers looked at his pocket watch.

  ‘If you ask the landlord to hail a carriage now your timing will be about right.’

  ‘You make some unwarranted assumptions about my destination, David,’ Holbrooke retorted.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he replied, ‘and yet only yesterday I distinctly heard your clerk announcing a letter from a Mister Featherstone in Wickham which you hastily forbade him to open. After your visit to your father in December you mentioned, in passing and yet not without a certain je ne sais quoi in your tone, a young lady named Miss Featherstone. And of course, you sent a letter to a gentleman of the same name on Tuesday morning. There are few secrets in a sixteen-gun sloop George, and it doesn’t take the intellect of an archbishop to make the connection.’

  Holbrooke laughed out loud.

  ‘Few secrets indeed,’ he said, privately pleased that there was no more need for subterfuge. ‘Would you care to join me? To visit Wickham, I mean, not to call on the Featherstone family.’

  Chalmers paused a moment. He’d been planning to explore Saint Thomas’ church. Then, if there was time, to look into Domus Dei, the church at the seaward end of the high street where Charles II had married Catherine of Braganza. It had been used as the Portsmouth garrison church for several decades, but he hoped some trace of its glorious past may have survived. However, a trip to Wickham was attractive. He’d like to call on the senior Holbrooke whose cottage lay just to the north of the village. The trout on the river Meon were just starting to fatten up after the winter and the Holbrooke cottage had fishing rights on a stretch of the stream. After all, he had been invited…

  It had been many years since he’d cast a fly, but William Holbrooke had repeated the offer – quite insistently – in a letter earlier in the week, and the weather was fair with a light breeze from the west. The Meon trout never rose beneath an easterly wind, he’d been assured.

  ‘Delighted. I’ll be ready by the time the carriage arrives.

  ◆◆◆

  ‘Captain Holbrooke, sir,’ announced the flustered maidservant, making an inexpert curtsey and offering a calling card on a tray, a combination of movements that almost toppled her. ‘He’s calling on Miss Featherstone,’ she continued with an unconcealed look of wide-eyed wonderment. ‘I’ve offered him a seat in the lobby, sir,’ she added.

  Martin Featherstone was a big man, a substantial person in this small market town on the tail of the South Downs. He stood a similar height to Holbrooke, but where the younger man was slender, Featherstone had put on weight with age and good living. He had a large, angular face – considered handsome by many women – and powerful neck and shoulder muscles that gave him the poise of a prize bull.

  On Thursdays Mister Featherstone would usually have been about his business. He was a corn merchant and even at this season of the year he was busy cutting deals with farmers and mill-owners, engaging carters on forward contracts and selling his stocks of grain to traders from London and beyond. However, the family had been set into a spin when a letter arrived from the young sea officer whom the whole town was talking about. His breakfast had been unaccountably delayed, and no iron had yet been applied to his shirt, even though he’d been informed by his wife that he couldn’t possibly leave the house in an un-ironed shirt. All this inconvenience, as far
as he could tell, was so that his daughter’s wardrobe could be overhauled. Consequently, and most unusually, Martin Featherstone was at home on Thursday morning and not in the best of tempers.

  Naturally, Featherstone knew nothing of the letter that his daughter had sent to Holbrooke in January, that was a matter between his wife Sophie and her stepdaughter, his own daughter, Ann. He’d been surprised, therefore, to receive a letter from Holbrooke on the previous Tuesday asking his permission to call on Ann. Of course, he’d heard of Holbrooke’s latest exploits in his sloop Kestrel; it was the talk of the town. He’d been with Commodore Holmes at Emden, apparently, and had taken prizes! Featherstone was a commercial man; he knew all about the naval prize system, so he was aware that Holbrooke was unlikely to be penniless.

  Perhaps a little rashly, Featherstone had replied to Holbrooke giving his permission. Meanwhile, he’d determined that he should know more about the naval rank system. At Christmas, Holbrooke had been introduced as a captain, and yet in the letter he’d described himself as master and commander. The subtlety of the distinction eluded him, but he felt it might be important. He’d agreed to meet a retired sea officer in Soberton later that week, to gain a better understanding. After all, he had only one child and he was a man of means. Martin Featherstone had ambitions for his daughter, and she was not to be given away to the first adventurer that crossed the threshold.

  The pace of life of a provincial corn merchant hadn’t prepared Featherstone for the rapidity of action that characterised the sea service. He’d expected a week or two to fritter away before Holbrooke appeared. Yet here he was, only a day after the earliest that he could have received Featherston’s reply, seated in the very lobby of Bere Forest House in Wickham’s square

  Martin Featherstone stared hard at the maidservant. Sophie oversaw the domestic affairs of the household and on principle he didn’t interfere, but his forbearance had been sorely tested this morning and this very maidservant was at the centre of the affair. It was she who should have laid out his breakfast and she should have ironed his shirt. But oh, no! She was too busy fussing around his daughter in the expectation of this visit.