By the Mast Divided (4 page)

His head numb, it was with some difficulty, and in a thick voice that Pearce replied. ‘The law says you can only press those bred to the sea.’

The rope caught him again, and as his knees began to buckle the officer’s face came right up to him to growl, ‘From now on, for you, I am the law.’

Pearce was hurt, but he was still trying to think what to say. It was illegal to press in the Navy any man who was not a sailor by trade, but it was, notoriously, a law frequently ignored. Press-gangs would take up anyone they could lay their hands on and hope that once confined to a ship the victim would be in no position to do anything about it. Any person who missed the sufferer was unlikely to have enough influence either to find the poor soul or to get him free. Even then, a justice of the
peace would have to be involved and, in Pearce’s case, that was not the sort of official he could give his name to.

Those holding him spun him round and he could see, down the alley in the light of several lanterns, that the group with whom he had been drinking was reunited. They were trussed as he was, as were at least a dozen other souls, like chickens ready for the pot. All except Charlie Taverner, who, hatless now and bleeding from a head-wound, was bent over and clearly in no condition to run anywhere. O’Hagan, still shuffling and groggy, was dragged out through the door to join them, the man that Pearce had clobbered, hatless, staggering at the rear.

‘Tavern’s clear, sir,’ said a light, youthful voice at Pearce’s rear. ‘Except for women and the useless.’

‘Thank you, Mr Farmiloe, get these men into the boats and away from here.’

Flickering torches lit the way to the boats, three of which, sitting offshore, were hailed to come and collect their cargo. The officer and the youngster called Farmiloe got into the smallest and were immediately rowed away. One by one each of the trussed men was dragged through a few feet of Thames mud, to be thrown bodily over the side of the bigger boats, cuffed hard if they showed the slightest reluctance, before being told to lie down. The smell of stale seawater rose to greet Pearce as he was forced to his knees, then on to his side, where he and the others were bound by another rope, his lashing him to O’Hagan, who was mumbling incoherently. Pearce’s head was still buzzing from the blows he had received, but he was, nevertheless, listening as hard as he could to the jocose talk of his captors, hoping, as they shipped oars noisily into the rowlocks, to glean from that some clue as to where he was being taken.

‘Be a mite parky this night what with this ’er wind, Kemp, an’ we’ve a fair way to go to the Nore.’

The Nore – the anchorage at the mouth of the Medway – Rochester, Chatham, Sheerness, naval and military towns that had never been sympathetic to any radical ideas. He tried hard to recall if his father had any friends there, which produced a blank even before he considered the impossibility of any form of communication with them.

‘Tarpaulin capes, Molly, if Barclay gives us forty winks, other ways it will freeze your balls off.’

‘I’ve got a big one if you wants to share it. Keep you right warm it will.’

The reply was tired, as if responding to an old joke. ‘Sod off, mate.’

‘You’ll be rowing too hard, mate,’ added a third voice, ‘to ever feel cold, ’cause Barclay, I can tell you, is in a hellfire hurry.’

‘He allas is, Coyle.’

Different accents, one sounding of the Midlands, the other, called Molly, of Norfolk, the last, the man named Coyle, unknown. But the name Barclay – which must be that of the officer – had been said loud and clear. How many different shades of English had Pearce heard in his travelling years, how many miles had he and his father coached, ridden or walked? How much stupidity had they seen in the glaucous looks of slack-jawed peasants, or in the ale-red faces of so-called squires? Were this lot dim enough to present him with a chance of escape?

The one called Coyle, clearly in charge, spoke again, loudly, to address those captured, standing to be visible to all. ‘We will have silence now, d’ye hear. Not a word spoken, and especially not any cry for succour as we pass by the ships downstream, with their captains and crews sound abed.’ A knotted rope was raised to swing shoulder high. ‘This be the least you’ll get if you break that commandment, and my mates, who will row this boat, can employ their oars, if need be, to ensure silence. It would be an error to think they might hold back for fear of knocking you to perdition.’

‘Easy to enter a dead soul as a volunteer,’ wheezed a pinched-faced sailor who stood beside Coyle. Pearce recognised his voice as the Midland one. ‘Save the King a bounty, that would.’

‘Belay that,’ said Coyle, without much force, his eyes now fixed on Pearce, who was staring at him hard. ‘But it would reward you to listen to Kemp there, given that him being a bosun’s mate, and a real terror with the cat o’ nine tails, he has maimed many a soul before.’

Pearce thought to make another protest, but decided it would be useless. If he could not persuade the officer called Barclay, then he had no chance with his inferiors, and the result would probably only be another blow to his already aching head. No protest came from the shore – there was no sign of any watchman or a rescue posse, those who had fled must have looked to their own skin and safety rather than showing any concern for the ones who had been caught. He could not see much from his prone position, but he could guess at the attitude of those with whom he shared this boat and his bonds – resigned at best, despairing at worst, frightened when they contemplated what might be about to befall them – for there were no end of tales to recall, stories of the harshness of life at sea. All the torches had been extinguished, leaving a single lantern hanging on a pole above the stern of the boat, to which Coyle moved,
sitting down, hand on the tiller, next to the little marine.

He spun the boy’s head to look at his swollen face. ‘Well, young Martin, Dent by name and well dented by nature. You’ll be even prettier when that nose is healed.’

Then, with a soft command to dip, the oars hit the water, the sailors either side leant forward, took the strain, and the boat began to move.

Rocking back and forth, aware that his backside now ached as much as his head, Pearce tried to sort out in his mind the consequences of what had happened and how he would get out of this. That was an absolute necessity, since so much depended on it. He had been sent back from Paris with the express task of facilitating his father’s return – friends had to be mobilised, petitions had to be made to those in power to allow a sick man, now no more loved in Paris than he was in London, to come home to live out his remaining time in peace. A twinge of that guilt he had felt since leaving France surfaced then, the feeling that in acceding to his father’s request to undertake this task his real concern had been to secure his own safety.

In a less than ordinary life, travelling from place to place with Adam Pearce, son John had experienced much upheaval – the early death of his mother, endless strange towns and cities, the smiles and kindness of those who shared his father’s vision, the visceral hatred of those who did not, and finally the hell of prison life made worse by the calculated indifference of the warders in the Bridewell Gaol, who would do nothing; provide a decent cell, food and drink, or carry letters to those outside, friends who would help to alleviate their suffering without a bribe.

Eventually, after many months of effort, those same friends had secured them first a degree of comfort, then freedom. What followed was so very different from what had preceded their incarceration; the thrill of being close to a father whose time had come, for the French Revolution had rocked the established order. Now he walked alongside a man who gathered crowds by the thousand instead of the hundred, who was plagued by profit-seeking printers demanding pamphlets. For a whole year and more, life was exhilarating, but that euphoria faded, to be followed by confusion, as that seemingly massive support, frightened by events across the Channel, began to atrophy.

His writings had, by that time, made Adam Pearce a national figure – polemics railing against the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many, of exploitation and endemic corruption, views that had made him anathema to those who governed the land. Then finally, one radical pamphlet too many – too abusive to let pass, in which he had called for
King George to be tried for treason – had given them the excuse to throw both him and the son who aided him back in gaol, this time with little prospect of quick release. Avoidance of that – and the men who would arrest them for a government bounty – entailed a hurried flight abroad.

Paris had made Adam Pearce welcome in the winter of 1790, for his fame and his ideas had crossed the Channel to a society dedicated to making them real. He was lauded as an honorary Frenchman, invited to address the National Assembly and granted a pension; great thinkers had sought his views, radical newspapers had published his writings and the salons of the Revolutionary greats hung on his words. Not any more; that too had turned sour. His star had waned as French politics steadily became more deadly: men who had risen on the fury of the Paris mob to become the rulers of France could not tolerate dissent any more than the rulers of Great Britain.

Was his father still at liberty or had the Parisian tyrants carried out their threat to imprison him? How desperate was the situation here at home? He had been on his way, this very morning, to find out from an old family friend, one of those who had helped secure their release from the Bridewell. Only lucky chance had allowed him to see the men watching the house, and avoid the hand that had been within an inch of grabbing that prominent collar. How had they known he was back in England, for he had only landed on the Kent coast three days previously? Or were those men bounty-seekers, freelance narks just watching the house of a well-known radical politician in hope rather than anticipation?

Why did he have to run anyway? His sole crime was that he shared the blood of Adam Pearce, a man Billy Pitt and his minions saw as dangerous, a freethinker who expounded and wrote a message so perilous that his progeny must be likewise tainted. Such an accusation might not hold up in a court of fair judgement: but what court now, aware and in fear of the fervour across the Channel, and with war just declared, would acquit even the innocent?

There was a faint chance that some authority might intervene in the present situation, but as a hope it didn’t rate very high; if the common gossip he had heard about press-gangs was true, and that had to be dredged from distant memory, this Barclay would take them straight aboard ship, well out of the reach of any law that could constrain him. He could swim but escape was very likely impossible, and almost certainly dangerous. Even assuming he could get free from the ropes that bound him, he was not sure they would not actually kill him rather than let him
go. An oar on his head would mean he might drown, to become just one of the dozen dead bodies fished out of a river like the Thames every day.

It was not worth the chance. Best to get aboard ship, get free from his bonds, see the lie of things, and find some way of escaping or communicating with the shore. Could the latter be the most promising option? Adam Pearce had made some powerful friends, who if they did not share his father’s views nevertheless did not agree that a man should be condemned and incarcerated for freely expressing them. These were people who had the power to get the proscription on both Pearces annulled – if they could work to get the King’s Bench warrant lifted, they could likewise work to get him free from the Navy.

And perhaps, all that achieved, they could also help Pearce bring to bear on the offending officer, a man who had pressed illegally, the full majesty of the very same law that now threatened him. There was no doubt at all that Barclay had broken every statute in creation, so Pearce, in a pleasantly vindictive train of thought, and the all too painful memory of the blows he been forced to endure, comforted himself with the vision of that bastard, not him, in the dock of a court, as a red-cloaked judge passed sentence.

Cornelius Gherson stood with his back to the parapet of London Bridge, in the gloomy recess between two covered stalls, searching for the words that would get him out of the beating that was about to be administered. The man who would oversee it, though take no part, Alderman Denby Carruthers, stood well back behind the four bruisers he had hired to teach the young swine who had cuckolded him a lesson. The noise of the great artery that was London Bridge, of carriages, hawkers, and sedan chair lead-men yelling to clear a passage, was a low hum in the background. And in the spilt light that allowed Gherson to examine the faces before him, it was a world away.

It would do no good for him to plead an accident; that Denby’s wife, Catherine and he had found themselves alone and overcome by passion. She was, after all, at thirty-three, a good fifteen years older than her lover. To say that, full of food and wine, nature had taken its course sounded very lame. Even worse would be to allude to love, first because it was untrue – if there was any devotion on Gherson’s part it was to the love of conquest and access to her purse, and, secondly, it would not serve to calm the man whom he had offended. It was too late for promises of better behaviour and the look in the alderman’s eyes did not encourage the idea that an apology would settle the matter. But given that it was the
only thing Gherson could think of, he said, ‘I am truly sorry, Alderman Carruthers.’

The four scarred faces between him and Denby Carruthers, the men who had trapped him in here, didn’t move a muscle. But Gherson did note that there was no ill will in them, just indifference.

‘I am here to ensure that you are sorry, Gherson,’ said Carruthers, in a voice that betrayed a great deal of suppressed emotion. ‘Firstly, you will oblige me by handing over that fine topcoat you are wearing, and the silk one underneath. Also those fine silver-buckled shoes which, I think I am right in saying, my household monies paid for.’