Captain's Surrender (3 page)

Which had been when Mr. Andrews—after a week of stuttering and running away—had suddenly begun to speak to him. "You do know, sir," he had said quietly, "that the captain has his informers in every level of the ship, and no one's sure who they are? He hears everything, and he pays back what he doesn't like threefold. There isn't one of us on board who isn't afraid."

"If a man does his job to the best of his ability, he should have no cause to be afraid!" Peter had replied indignantly, and Andrews laughed, a cynical little smirk replacing the blush and look of panic that had heretofore been his permanent expression.

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Not on the
Nimrod
though, sir. We eat our own."
This dark and rather Celtic observation—hovering ominously on the edge of meaning—came back to him now, less for its warning than for the surge of relief and delight he had felt at having finally discovered an ally on this unhappy ship. It was the first gesture of friendship that he had received on board, and he treasured it. He treasured it, indeed, so much that when Andrews had followed it up by offering to remove himself from the cabin, he had not had to think twice about saying no.
Resting the feather of his quill against his cheek, he looked up meditatively at the sleeping man, just as the rain eased and a slice of sunshine lanced unexpectedly through the porthole, making Andrews' hair blaze like copper and fire. Idly, Peter wondered why it was thought to be such an unattractive color, for he found it very pleasing. There was an unearthliness about it, perhaps, which made him feel as though Andrews existed partly in a different world from himself. A feeling that only increased when he discovered the midshipman had a large repertoire of Irish folk tales and could be persuaded to share them, late at night, when he was halfway through his second bottle of wine and thoroughly hidden in the darkness.
Peter dipped his quill and brought it to hover over the page, meaning to write;
nevertheless, I have been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a valuable young man, whom I hope soon to count as a friend. He is already an ally.
But something persuaded him to hold off—a wish not to tempt fate, perhaps, or the conviction that his mother would not be interested in such small details.
Instead he laid the pen down in its place in his writing box, took out the silver and glass shaker, and shook sand over his letter, drying the ink. Folding it rather than putting it in the box where it belonged, he set it inside a book and tucked the book into the center of a pile of neatly folded stockings in his sea chest, feeling ridiculously cloak and dagger but unwilling to take the risk that anyone could find it. A man like Walker, who could flog a seaman for being diligent enough to repair damaged rope before coiling it, would not hesitate to use even the mild dissatisfaction of his letter as evidence of mutinous thoughts.
He closed the sea chest softly, as if that too might be a crime.
Mutinous thoughts?
As he set his wig carefully on top of his own black hair and his hat upon that, he almost felt he was drawing a cover over revolution, holding it down. For God's sake! He had been aboard less than three weeks—he could not judge in that time. Nor was it his business to criticize how a captain ran his own ship. A man's ship was his kingdom, and if Walker's was an unhappy one, what of it? It was no excuse for rebellion. How would the service operate without order, without obedience, without ...
tyranny
?
Carefully, so as not to disturb Andrews' well earned rest a second time, he padded out into the wardroom, leaning back for a moment on the closed door as if he could trap the treasonous thoughts inside. Clearly he had been reading too much in the papers about the war in the Americas, and the colonists' notions of self rule and justice for all. He had been infected by revolutionary fervor, but it would not do. It would not do. Not in the Navy. So he preferred a happy ship? What of it? If an unhappy ship worked as well, it was no business of his to contemplate overturning the established order. He was appalled at himself for even thinking it.
Truly appalled—for when he straightened up he found that his hands were trembling and his heart racing within him. His conscience felt tender and swollen, as though his guilt was obvious to all. Fortunately, however, those who were not needed on deck were asleep, recovering from the storm, and he had time to breathe deeply, smooth the creases of his cravat, and gather himself, unobserved.
But, as first lieutenant, it
was
his business, he decided, to do what he could to minimize that unhappiness. He could set the ship in such good order that Walker would have no reason to tyrannize. He could protect the ship's people by making them as perfect as it was humanly possible to be, and that he would do with all the strength in him.
The wardroom presented a post-storm squalor of half eaten cold dishes of food, abandoned oilcloths, drowsing servants, and drying pools of water. Lt. Harcourt was there, asleep in a chair with his head pillowed on his folded arms and a self-satisfied rat gnawing on a chicken bone by his hand. This, for a start, needed to be rectified. Peter woke the servants and set them to clean, woke Harcourt and sent him off to his cabin to sleep in private, and then went on deck to supervise the coiling of ropes and satisfy himself that no rational mind would see fit to order those extra forty strokes.
Peter Kenyon was not an inconsiderable officer, indeed he believed himself to be extremely capable. He had a series of successes behind him of which he was justly proud, and he would do what he could. He only hoped it would be enough.

Chapter 3
Sunlight fell on the pages of Emily Jones' book, surprising her. Putting it down on the side of her cot, she looked up. For the first time in days, the arch of the stern windows showed clear rain-washed skies, purple and charcoal storm-clouds retreating towards a now almost mythical England, so far away.
Flinging her feet out of bed, the oilcloth covered floor springy and warm beneath her bare feet, she caught sight of her father's wife, buried under shaking blankets, and the feeble movements in the hammock where her father lay suffering, and—for their sake—refrained from dancing at the excitement of it all.
The wooden world in which they were all confined rose and fell with each wave, which she had expected. What she had not expected was the side to side roll and the irregular speeding and slowing depending on the wind. These three oscillations combined to result in the ship proceeding with a motion like a hesitant corkscrew—up, down, left, right, and forward, all at the same time. Emily found this thrilling, like the motions of a country dance, but she could plainly see it was not so pleasant for everyone.
There was no sign of her maid, Bess, but after the girl's heroic service, mopping, running about with malodorous buckets, administering wine and water, laudanum, and cool cloths, Emily did not grudge her a morning off. It was easy enough to dress in an old gown and twist her hair into a plain bun beneath a firmly pinned hat.
With a glance of sympathy for the sufferers, she let herself out of the cabin and onto the quarterdeck. There the breeze attempted to fling her bonnet over the rail. She clutched it and looked up to where sunlight burst brilliantly on the concavities of white sail. The air smelled fresh after the cabin's reek of sickness, and the deck beneath her feet was clean enough for a ballroom—lines of dazzling white wood and gleaming black pitch.
On either side of the great wheel, two men with checked shirts and long, swinging pigtails stood, gentling the huge ship on her course. Neither so much as glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the cabin door closing. But several officers turned to look at her forbiddingly. There was no echo to her hopeful smile in a single face, and despite the calm immensity of light she felt an oppression such as she had experienced all too often among those who blamed her for her father's immorality. The vinegar faces told her the captain was on deck, for they were none of them so unfriendly when he was below.
Turning, she saw him at the far side of the quarterdeck, standing in splendid isolation, glaring up at something about the sails which affronted him. A heavy man, with a ruddy face deeply grooved with disapproval, he was the epitome of cleanliness from his snowy wig to his highly polished shoes.
Though there were above fifty men visible, scrubbing, polishing, coiling rope, there was no sound of voices. The great ship forged her way onwards in silence through the bright day as though there were no live thing on board.
Emily supposed that she should greet the captain, make the effort to thank him for getting them through the terrifying weather. Just because he was an ass didn't mean that she should be, after all. So she braced herself and walked forward, prepared to be amiable. But as she passed the wheel, Walker turned and gave her a vicious glare—as nakedly aggressive and as shocking as a slap in the face.
Reeling away, exactly as though she had been slapped, she collided with her father, who had emerged from the cabin just in time to see the exchange. His face was white with fury and then green. Turning, he ran for the rail but could not quite make the distance before being comprehensively sick over the gleaming, proudly scrubbed decks.
She rushed to his side, hearing an oath behind her and the sound of hurrying feet. By the time he had taken her proffered handkerchief and could look up, holding it to his mouth, a noseless, toothless tar—one of the common sailors—had come running, a large bucket of seawater carried effortlessly in his sinewy hands. As she helped her father to scramble back to his feet, the sailor gave them both his own scouring look of utter contempt.
"Fuckin' jobbernowl lubber! Which it took me fuckin' hours this mornin' a-scrubbin 'til me fuckin' knees
bled
t' get this clean. Will 'e fuckin clean it up himself? No 'e will not. Fuckin' grass-combing arsy-versy silver-spoon-in-'is-mouth Molly Clap's beau."
The feeling of being attacked from all sides was too much. Emily found herself shaking with fury, tears welling and threatening to fall, outraged on her father's behalf, and powerless to do anything about it. Her father himself, unshaven and cadaverous from a fortnight without food and still an interesting shade of green, had opened his mouth to deliver a cutting retort, when one of the officers strode across the quarterdeck in three long paces and cracked the sailor such a blow across the back with a stout cane that it drove him to his knees. A second blow landed on the man's shoulder, and a third on his face, overbalancing him. Tumbling backwards over the pail, he went sprawling—his eye already swelling—into the vomit. Covering his head with his hands, he cringed and whined as the last whistling crack drove into his belly, smacking all the breath out of him.
Coughing and whooping for air, he curled up tightly, trying to make himself small, but the officer insinuated the end of his cane between shoulder and bruised cheek and pressed, turning the man's head, forcing him to look up.
"This is George Summersgill, His Majesty's Comptroller of Bermuda. Soldier, statesman, our guest, and a man old enough to be your father. On every single count deserving of respect. You will apologize. Then you will further apologize to this young lady, whose ears have been offended by your profanity."
Angry though she had been, such casual brutality shocked Emily. She looked at the man who had come to their rescue with a sort of horror, while her father straightened himself and closed his eyes briefly to hide the terrible nausea and his weakness.
"He
is
a..." the sailor muttered.
Throughout the beating there had been no glimmer of human feeling on the young officer's face. Now, for the first time, there was a touch of something more personal, guarded until it was almost indecipherable. Frustration, perhaps. "Bates, are you
asking
me to take your name?"
Whatever it was, the sailor appeared to understand it. He closed his mouth and dragged himself to his feet. Staggering a little, he knuckled the side of his forehead that was not purple with spreading bruises. "Sorry, squire. I'm a crossgrained bugger at times, don'tee pay no mind. Nor you, fine missy. You want a thing, just call for Bates an 'e'll 'op to it right smart, aye?"
"Are you satisfied, sir?"
Emily was about to say, "No, not at all!" when the most astonishing thing happened. Her father opened his eyes and smiled a weak but genuinely warm smile at the newcomer. "Thank you, Peter. You may dismiss the man, I accept his apology. The true injury was elsewhere."
The stick rested on the sailor's blackened cheek for a moment, while the young officer looked down like an owner at his slave. "Get this cleaned up then. And, Bates ... Don't trespass on my kindness again. I cannot always be so forgiving."
As Bates swabbed the foul mixture of sea-water and sick from the deck, leaping down to the waist of the ship to refill his bucket, the officer folded his hands behind his back and drew himself up. He was a young man who might have been handsome had there been any affability about his
countenance, his eyes brownish green and stony as chips of jade. They softened as he looked at Emily and, tucking the cane under his left arm, he held out an elegant hand and smiled. "But we haven't been introduced. First Lieutenant Peter Kenyon. My family's estate borders that of your guardian. I must apologize again on behalf of my ship. We have none of us slept for the past week—running before the storm. I know that's no excuse but..."
"Please." It was painful to Emily to receive this gallantry even while she could see the terrible marks of the man's violence blooming on Bates' face. She knew, of course, that men were violent, but the easy ferocity, coming on top of that dreadful, murderous glare, made her feel conscious of the scarcely leashed brutality on board. She was one of only three women among eight hundred men. Pleasantries that might have been flattering in an assembly room full of other girls became difficult to negotiate, almost threatening in this atmosphere. "Please, it's quite all right. I'm an ignorant traveler in your world—I must expect to offend at all turns. I dare say I shall learn better in time."
She took the offered hand, surprised to find it quite clean— not bloodstained at all. Surprised, too, that he did not presume to raise it to his lips but only bowed over it civilly.
"You should certainly have been told that the windward side of the quarterdeck is sacrosanct.
No one
treads there but the captain. It's a tradition so old we forget sometimes that not everyone is born knowing it."
"Have I offended terribly?"
"Not at all," Kenyon said with conviction. On closer examination, there seemed to be something about him in conflict with Emily's initial impression, and now his lean face broke into a small smile, self conscious, rather sweet. "You were ... prevented, after all."
"Prevented," her father broke in with a self-depreciating laugh, "well, yes, and I am to suppose that being in the fire is preferable to being in the frying pan?"
Kenyon's smile widened. "I could name you several admirals who suffer from the same affliction, sir. It's the neatness of the decks that occupies our minds. Next time, over the side or—in extremis—into your hat, and no one will think the worse of you."
This was a comfort, and receiving comfort at this young man's hands was something of a puzzle. It was hard for Emily to reconcile the Kenyon of the cane with the Kenyon of the smile. She had almost considered asking him how he himself held the two together just as Edwards' voice croaked out behind them like the boom of a bittern.
"Mr. Kenyon, when you are done toadying, might you spare a second's attention to your tasks?"
There had been a thawing, a change of those green eyes from ice to liquid, so slight that Emily noticed it now only when it was withdrawn, and Kenyon again became all edges— inhumanly cold. He bowed stiffly and withdrew, and she found herself relieved to have him gone.
"Emily," her father chided her gently, "Peter is a fine young gentleman, whatever you might think. Had he not intervened, I would have been forced to punish the man myself. Let these people show contempt to you once, and you will never regain their respect."
"I understand, sir," she said and curtsied, feeling grateful to him that he had at least
tried
to come to her defense against the captain and responsible that he had lost so much countenance in failing. But she wondered, nevertheless, quite where a bastard stood in the scheme of things. She was not wholly sure she was not one of "these people" herself.
Thoroughly unsettled, and in the absence of other women to whom she could honestly open her mind, she decided to visit the ship's boys where she would at least have the comfort of being an adult among children. "Father, I've been having lessons with the midshipmen. The science of navigation has become my fascination. Oh, and Hawkes wishes to show me his pet rat—he says it is the size of a kitten—may I go?"
Her father smiled one of his sly, statesmanlike smiles—the one that indicated he already knew all her thoughts and approved, but could not, for reasons of good government, possibly say so aloud. "You will do whatever you please, my dear. As you always do. And I ... I think I need breakfast, and after that the nearest thing to a bath that can be arranged."
He returned to the cabin, and Emily went down into the warm, dark fug in the belly of the ship, wondering about Kenyon.
"Toadying" Captain Walker had said, and though she had no great respect for his opinions, this one had some plausibility. There was good reason for a man of ambition to toady to her father. If that was so, he had certainly succeeded in taking her father in, but he would find her a harder nut to crack.
She had been Summersgill's "ward" now for all of three months, but that time had been long enough to introduce her to the novel idea that she had become highly desirable in the marriage market. Men who had not looked at her twice when she was plain "Miss Jones from the milliners" positively fawned on Miss Summersgill-Jones. It had been flattering, at first, but that had worn off sometime after the second ball, when she realized that none of them were seeing
her
at all.
It probably was ridiculous of her to want to marry for love, but it was not ridiculous to want to marry someone who would treat her well and make her happy. This man, with his easy brutality and cold, shuttered eyes would do neither, and with his plausible manners he would deny her even the sympathy of her friends. True, he had not importuned her yet, but there had been an anxiousness in his look, and she felt sure it was only a matter of time.
As she opened the flimsy partition door into the gunroom and made admiring noises over the rat, she touched the damp, working sides of the ship and thought that in this matter she, too, was a man-of-war, readying herself for the onslaught of the enemy.
Summersgill, a distant, but an affectionate and dutiful father, had evidently decided it was now time to make sure his daughter was settled with a man who would offer her the life to which Summersgill felt she was entitled. She was sensible enough to be grateful for that. But when the time came, she fully intended to give herself to the man of her choice, not to be taken as a prize, whatever her father and his neighbors' children might have to say about it.