An Ill Wind (5 page)

If their soldiers had been less than wholly supportive, the senior Spanish naval officer had backed whatever plans Hood mooted to the hilt, deferring to him as the commander of the allied force because the British had the most powerful fleet. Yet a man would have had
to be blind not to see such a policy did not always sit well with the more junior officers: they still saw Albion as the traditional enemy, smarted daily about the occupation of Gibraltar, now ninety years a British thorn in the pride of Spain.

‘I suspect they blew the two powder ships, milord,’ said Smith. ‘They did not want us to have them any more than the French.’

‘A couple of powder-filled frigates are neither here nor there, Sir Sidney,’ Parker responded, ‘but those ships of the line they failed to burn will come back to haunt us.’

‘They feared to make us too powerful,’ Hood snapped, causing both of his other officers to look at him. ‘We are strange bedfellows, you know that and so do they. The last thing they want is a British fleet in the Mediterranean so powerful that it would be unassailable by Spain alone.’

‘Are you saying they will desert the alliance, milord?’

‘I am saying they have taken precautions to ensure they are not at a disadvantage if they do. Sir Sidney, I require from you a despatch regarding your exploits of last night, to go with mine in due course back to London, where I daresay another nail will be manufactured from my words to seal my coffin.’

Sam Hood had never looked young, he was after all in his seventies, but he had, up till now, looked sprightly. He did not appear to be that now: he looked
worn down with the cares of his command.

‘We must find another anchorage, Parker, and since we still have French capital ships to contend with it will have to be one close enough to cover Toulon. Let’s send out some more sloops and frigates to see what they can find.’

‘Corsica, sir?’

‘Yes, Sardinia at a push.’

‘If you recall the despatch Lieutenant Pearce brought in during the summer, milord, he has noted the main ports, such as Calvi and Bastia, are held by strong garrisons.’

‘Then we might have to boot them out, Parker,’ Hood retorted, with some of his old fire. ‘You would do service in that, Sir Sidney, would you not?’

‘Happily, sir, as would every officer in your fleet.’

‘Right, Parker,’ Hood commanded. ‘Once all is settled signal the combined fleets to weigh for Leghorn.’

The hospital was empty now, and Heinrich Lutyens walked the rooms to ensure that nothing had been left behind, at the same time wondering what a fate had ensured he ended up here, doing that which he had sought to get away from in London, the exclusive practice of his profession. His sea chest was already aboard, but over his shoulder he had a satchel containing his notebooks and the ledger into which the hurried scribblings he had made these past nine months had been copied. Were they complete? Could he, from what
he had already, compile that treatise he had set out to compose, an academic study of the stresses and strains of naval life on the human mind?

Idly he wondered if he would decline to serve on, and go back to what he had left behind, a highly successful and lucrative practice based on the twin facts that, not only was he highly thought of by his peers, but he was socially well connected, through his father, to the court of King George. Serving as a ship’s surgeon was beneath his standing, a post normally occupied by men little above the old station of barbers, but it had not been without pleasures.

The men he had studied on HMS
Brilliant
, including those pressed by Ralph Barclay, had provided him with much material – not least, because he was educated, John Pearce. And Lutyens had been in a proper battle, albeit below decks in the cockpit and out of sight of the action, had been taken prisoner when Ralph Barclay was forced to strike his colours, so he had that experience, though it had been a benign confinement, given he had taken on the task of looking after the wounded from that sea fight.

Wherever they were bound for now he still had charges who required treatment and he might be afforded further opportunities for study. After all, HMS
Hinslip
was a ship, another floating and confined world, where all the things that interested him would once more be on display: the interaction of humans with each other in a constrained wooden hull; fears, bravery perhaps, the
disputes that happened with men living cheek by jowl in damp conditions and eating a diet so boring that their most common complaint was a compacted bowel. On top of that there was the relationship between Emily Barclay and her husband; how would that work out? Plus he still had close and observable John Pearce and his Pelicans. Yes, there was still much of interest.

‘Do you so enjoy being a prisoner that you fear to leave that estate?’

Heinrich Lutyens turned to face John Pearce, a haughty look on what had been described as a fish-like face, his fine nose in the air. ‘Given the lack of culture of the alternative, John, it has its attractions.’

‘Come,’ Pearce said, ‘the last boat is ready to cast off.’

They walked out and made for the jetty, past some very forlorn-looking locals, the fishermen, their wives and children who eked out a living in this tiny bay. They would fear what was coming, even if they had, being poor and ignorant folk, done nothing to deserve to suffer from revolutionary retribution.

‘Can we not, John—?’

‘No,’ John Pearce said, cutting right across Lutyens, his face clouding into anger. ‘I tried to persuade the captain to take them off with us, but he has strict orders from Hood. No civilians.’

‘Then may God bless them.’

‘As long as Doctor Guillotine does not.’

The sight of smoking Toulon had long disappeared over the stern as HMS Hinslip cleaved her way through a heavy swell, under lowering clouds that threatened worse weather to come, surrounded by the overladen ships of the combined fleets, somehow the attitude of gloom making itself felt over the intervening sea. On the quarterdeck stood Captain Sidey, in his foul-weather gear, oilskin coat and hat, legs spread to cope with the motion of the ship, his square, weather-beaten face set and determined, eyes narrowed to keep out the flying spume.

John Pearce stood on the leeward side, his arm hooked round a stay, well away from the water shipping in over the weather beam. Here the heavily canted deck took the bulwarks close to the grey, foam-flecked waters of the angry Mediterranean. He was wondering what the
future held, there being something about staring at the shifting seawater to invite introspection, for once they had landed at Leghorn he would be looking for the first vessel home.

He had, quite naturally, looked for HMS
Brilliant
, likely to be somewhere out there on the vast expanse of sea, but had gained no sight of the ship into which he had been originally pressed. It had been a long journey from Sheerness, full of incident: of initially seeking to avoid those with whom he had been taken up, only to become close to many of them; of being pressed not once but twice; of surviving being wrecked on a Breton shore; being raised more by malice than favour to the rank of midshipman, then, due to good fortune and the advice of better men, to success in battle and his present rank, that a gift from King George himself that ignored the requirement that a naval lieutenant must not only have six years sea time, but should face an examination by a panel of senior captains.

None of it would have come about if he had not ducked into the Pelican to avoid a pursuit determined to put him in prison: one sojourn in the Fleet as a youth, sent there with his father by a vengeful government seeking to shut up a radical voice, was enough to make anyone desperate to avoid repetition. Of course, not even that inadvertent slipping into the Thameside tavern would have occurred if he had not come back from Paris in the hope of getting lifted the warrant for sedition, outstanding against both him and his father,
far from well and still in the French capital.

‘A penny for your thoughts.’

Pearce turned just in time to see Emily Barclay, in her hooded cloak, stagger, taken off guard by a suddenly much sharper tilt of the deck. Instinctively he held out a hand to stop her falling over, catching her wrist and pulling her towards him, only to find that she put out an equally determined hand, firm on his chest, to stop that resulting in more bodily contact.

‘Always give one hand for the boat, Mrs Barclay, I thought you would know that by now.’

It took no effort to get her wrist out of his hand, Pearce was not seeking to keep hold of it, and she did that which she should have done before, stretched out to secure herself with a grip on the hammock netting.

‘Thank you, Lieutenant Pearce, I fear I spent enough time ashore to forget.’ Aware that he was staring at her she looked quickly over the side. ‘It is all so grey, not what they tell us about the wine-dark sea.’

‘There are spots of brightness even in such a dull aspect as this.’

‘Do you know Homer?’ she asked, avoiding what was clearly a compliment.

‘I do, both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
and I have struggled to think what kind of wine the ancients drank that turned it the colour of seawater, whatever the state of the sunlight. I cannot countenance blue wine any more than grey.’

‘I think, sir, it was a poetic allusion.’

‘There are moments when poetry cannot do other than come to mind, for instance the presence of a beautiful woman must have inspired Homer to write of Helen.’

Her voice took on a sharper note and she looked into his smiling face. ‘Please, Lieutenant, can we put aside this gallantry?’

‘I shall if you will stop calling me Lieutenant.’

‘You are not, I hope, suggesting I use your given name?’

‘You do for Heinrich Lutyens.’

‘With whom I have shared experiences that…’ Emily Barclay stopped then, the words she was about to say too close to those she had used with her husband.

‘Perhaps, given that I have no duties and yours will ease as the wounded recover, we might get to know each other better. I have an impression that such a thing would not displease you.’

‘I must go below,’ she insisted, beginning to turn away, an act stopped by Pearce taking hold of her wrist again.

‘No. I have spoken too openly and I promise I will not cause you any more embarrassment.’

‘Why Lieutenant,’ Emily lied, seeking to look innocent, ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

Pearce grinned: she looked prettier than ever when she was dissimulating. ‘You asked what I was thinking about?’

‘You were, you must admit, in a brown study.’

‘I was thinking of the first time I saw you and how I got to be there.’ Seeing he had upset her again, he spoke quickly. ‘And since you are wearing the same hooded cloak you were wearing that day, it had brought back to mind even more unpleasant memories.’

‘My cloak?’

‘No, not that, but the circumstances in which it was observed. If you recall, your husband struck me a blow with his fist.’

Emily could remember that blow just as easily as John Pearce and she could also recall that she was the cause of it, or rather the fact that he had stared at her as he was brought aboard the ship and she had matched the look. ‘I am sorry he did that.’

‘Do not apologise for him.’

‘I didn’t.’

Both had spoken too abruptly and it rendered them silent, yet both had in mind the same image, albeit from different perspectives: he, in seeing a strikingly beautiful woman where it was least expected, acting out of habit, not sense, to make sure he had marked her out; she, observing the line of bedraggled pressed men, poor of appearance in the main – then he appeared, so obviously different in look and bearing, albeit he was followed by a giant she now knew to be the Irishman O’Hagan.

‘In truth, you caught me when I was recalling what had brought me back from Paris.’

‘Which was?’ Emily asked, although she had a very good idea: her husband, in the first days of Pearce’s
enforced service aboard HMS
Brilliant
, had intercepted a letter which he had sought to send to a famous radical politician in an attempt to gain his freedom. That, even coded and in French, had mentioned Paris and a sick parent and she, better at the language than her husband, had been reluctantly persuaded to translate it.

‘My father’s illness.’

‘What were you doing in Paris?’

‘Avoiding prison.’ That brought her head round to look at him directly. ‘My father and I fled to Paris to avoid a writ for sedition issued in the name of King George, a King’s Bench Warrant against what he had written about the exploitation of the people by the monarchy and the government.’

‘Your father was a Leveller?’ she asked, staring out to sea again.

Pearce smiled, thinking that given her probable upbringing such a notion would be anathema. ‘He would have been proud to have been called that. Folk named him the Edinburgh Ranter and those who disliked his words and his works blackened him, but a kinder soul you have never met.’

Now she had to look once more at Pearce: the way his voice had softened with remembered affection made it inevitable.

‘And your mother?’

‘Died bearing me. I was brought up by my father, and in a way that has made me feel different to other men.’

‘Hardly surprising given what you say of his opinions.’

That being delivered with some pique, Pearce was tempted to rebuke her, to demand how she, no doubt the product of a comfortable upbringing, with food always on the table, could possibly comprehend what life was like for the majority of her fellow Britons; but that would be to drive her away, so he stuck to reminiscing.

‘I did not mean that. My father was a man who saw the whole of his country as his home and everyone in it as his brother. As soon as I was weaned he took me on his travels, the length and breadth of the whole nation. I saw more in a month than most of my fellow countrymen will see in their lifetime, and not just places, but people from the lowest to the highest.’

‘Highest? In the company of a radical?’

‘Not every wealthy man sees disputing with a radical thinker as a crime. I have had many a happy time in great houses, and if we were invited to stay for long enough, I even went to school, though that was generally less pleasant. But enough of me, tell me about you.’

‘There is nothing to tell that would match that which you seem to have enjoyed.’

‘Why did you marry your husband?’

He should not have said it and he knew that, but he could not help himself. From the first time he had realised that Ralph Barclay and she were wed he had wondered at such an unlikely connection, a curiosity
only reinforced as he had come to see his character and the way she opposed him: he was a callous man; she was a humane woman.

‘That, Lieutenant,’ she snapped as, one hand firmly on the netting, she turned to leave, a signal gun sounding as if to mark the movement, ‘is none of your business.’

‘All hands to wear ship.’

Pearce knew that where he was standing he would be in the way as the sails were loosed and reset, but rather than follow Emily Barclay towards the quarterdeck he made his way forward, cursing himself and ignoring the water that, blasting over the bowsprit, covered him and soaked his legs.

Captain Sidey had notified all who came aboard that his birthday was imminent and he clearly had a desire they should celebrate it. He had formed a choir aboard
Hinslip
, and given they were approaching the festive season, he was intent on their practising for the forthcoming Nativity as well as celebrating his name day; if he made an error it was inviting his passengers to join in, or at least one of them. The weather had moderated somewhat, the sky clearing as the wind swung away from the westerly towards the north, turning colder, so with the ship running steady, the seasonal songs were sung under what was slowly turning from bright blue into a starlit sky, loud enough to be heard by those ships sailing close enough in company. Sidey had a stentorian voice and was a hearty chorister, and it was
soon apparent, given the quality of the rendition, that he had schooled his men, for they sang without books, knowing the words.

‘Heathen songs to my ears, Charlie,’ Michael whispered, ‘but there’s no doubting the skill.’

Unlike Pearce, stood by the binnacle, book in hand, trying to sing along with the crew, the Pelicans had avoided the warbling, thankfully in the eyes of most of those they were messing with given they would have upset the harmony. Heinrich Lutyens was the problem: he seemed to be managing that without assistance, his high reedy voice was rarely in proper tune, leading Emily Barclay, standing by his side and singing sweetly, to occasionally and quite visibly wince.

‘I used to look forward to Yuletide,’ young Rufus said, in an equally soft tone. ‘There was always a fair in Litchfield and folk were generous to us youngsters.’ Then he shivered, it being far from warm. ‘Not sure I’m doin’ that now, sat here.’

‘It was a time for profit to me, lads, shamed as I am to admit it. This week in London it were full of visitors come for the season, easy marks most of ’em and with bulging purses to boot.’

That got Charlie Taverner a look from Michael. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, Charlie, do you know what shame is, to be robbing folk at a holy time?’

‘You shamed yourself enough,’ Charlie hissed back, ‘holy time or nay, but you were too drunk to ever recall it.’

‘You were, Michael,’ Rufus said, more in sorrow. ‘Blind drunk.’

‘Seems a long time since I was in that state.’

‘Always ended with your wanting to fight some poor soul,’ Charlie complained. ‘With those damn great fists of yours.’

‘Did I ever get round to you?’

‘Never, mate, I was too nippy on my pins and you was too drunk.’

‘So I tried.’

‘You did.’

‘Now, would that be over your touching up sweet Rosie?’

‘I never did.’

‘Yes you did, Charlie,’ Rufus insisted, which got him a hard look for his honesty.

‘Can’t say I miss the Pelican much,’ Michael said. ‘Her excepted.’

‘Belay that noise, you lot,’ one of the sailors muttered. ‘We’s trying to sing.’

It was Charlie who responded; he hated to be checked even if the fellow doing it was in the right. ‘You sound like a bunch of crows to me, mate.’

‘From what I hear of you, mate, rooks is more your style.’

Charlie made to move forward, an act arrested with ease by Michael O’Hagan.

‘Damn cheek.’

‘There ain’t none of us saints, Charlie,’ Michael said.

‘No, Michael, or we would not have been stuck in the Liberties, wondering where the next fill of ale was coming from.’

As the singing soared, the trio fell silent, each still thinking of that. The Pelican had not been a place of much joy to the likes of Charlie and Rufus or their mates, Abel Scrivens, now dead, and Ben Walker, captured by Barbary pirates and, as Pearce had discovered in Tunis, a slave of the Mussulmans. The quartet had eked out a precarious existence on the Thames riverbank, not too bad in summertime and damned near too deadly for the cold and starvation in winter, often reduced to hot bedding with others to just have a place to lay their head and never sure where the next meal was coming from.

They were bound to the place by their past, each one subject of some warrant for crimes committed, locked in the Liberties of the Savoy where the writ of the tipstaffs did not run, free to roam only on the Sabbath. London and the teeming Strand was yards away at times, but they dare not step into that great thoroughfare or beyond for fear of being collared by the law on a weekday, Charlie least of all, he being a sharp who had worked nearby Covent Garden.

Michael was one to come and go from the Pelican as he pleased – he was a free man – his reasons for being there more to do with the aforementioned Rosie than anything other. An apple-cheeked serving wench of ample proportions, she had been Michael’s squeeze, due
to his always having coin in his purse and a manner of emptying it often, given that, as a man who could seriously wield a shovel, there was always more to be earned in a city forever expanding.