Kydd (12 page)

“How long have you been quarter gunner, Donnelly?” Tyrell began mildly.

Unsure how to play it, Donnelly muttered something.

“Speak up, man!” Tyrell snapped.

“Two year, near enough,” Donnelly repeated. He had the unfortunate quirk of appearing surly when being questioned in public.

“Two years — a petty officer for two years, so you know well enough that a petty officer does not engage in brawling. Disrated. You’re turned before the mast and will shift your hammock tonight.”

Donnelly’s dogged look created a wave of barely concealed muttering. This was hard. The reason for the aimless flaring and fisticuffs was well known: Donnelly had a sweetheart in Portsmouth.

Tyrell watched the men. His hard face gave no quarter. “Collaby!”

His clerk hurried over with a thin black leatherbound book. Tyrell took it.

“Articles of War!” he thundered.

“Off hats!” the Master-at-Arms bellowed. In a flurry of movement the entire assembly removed their headgear — the officers’ cocked hats, the round hats of the petty officers and the amazing variety of the seamen’s head coverings, ranging from shapeless raw woolen articles to the stout traditional tarpaulin hats.

In grim stillness all stood to hear the strict law of the Service. The sea breeze plucked the hair on hundreds of bare heads.

The words were flung out savagely. “‘Article twenty-three. If any person in the Fleet shall quarrel or fight with any other person in the Fleet, or use reproachful or provoking speech or gestures’ and so on and so forth, as well you know, ‘shall suffer such punishment as the offense shall deserve, and a court-martial shall impose.’
 
”

He slammed the book shut.

“On hats!”

“You shall have a court-martial, should you wish it. Have you anything to say?”

Donnelly looked stupefied. This was no choice at all — a court-martial could lead anywhere, from admonishment to a noose at the yardarm.

“No? Then it’s half a dozen for fighting.”

A fleeting smile appeared on the boatswain’s mate’s face, and he lifted his bag.

A wave of unrest went through the mass of men like wind through a cornfield. This was ferocious justice.

Tyrell waited, with a terrible patience. “And another dozen for the utter disgrace you have brought on your position, you damned rogue!”

Donnelly’s head whipped round — apart from the fact that eighteen lashes was far above the usual, his “offense” had no standing in law, however useless it would be to argue.

“Strip!” There was a chilling finality in the order.

Donnelly stared at Tyrell, his eyes wild. He stripped to the waist in deliberate, fierce movements, throwing the garments to the deck, stalked over to the gratings and spreadeagled himself against the upright one, his face pressed to the wooden checkerboard.

“Seize him up!”

The quartermasters tied his hands to the grating with lengths of spun yarn and retired. The boatswain’s mate advanced, taking the cat-o’-nine-tails from the bag. He took position a full eight feet away to one side and drew the long deadly lashes through his fingers, experimentally sweeping it back to ensure that there was enough clear space to swing it.

Kydd stared across the few yards of empty deck to the man’s pale, helpless body. His eyes strayed over to Renzi, who still stood impassive and with his arms folded. His anger rose at the man’s lack of simple compassion and when he looked back at Donnelly he tried despairingly to communicate the sympathy he felt.

“Do your duty!”

Kydd was startled by the sudden furious beating of a marine drum on the poop. It volleyed and rattled frantically as the boatswain’s mate drew back the cat in a full arm sweep. At the instant it flew downward the drum beat stopped, so the sickening smack of the blow came loud and clear.

Donnelly did not cry out, but his gasp was high and choked. The nine tails had not only left long bruised weals where they landed, but at every point where the tail ended, blood began to seep.

“One!” called the Master-at-Arms.

The drum began its fierce noise again; Donnelly turned his head to the side and fixed Tyrell with a look of such hatred that several of the officers started.

Again the whipping blow swept down. It brought a grunt that seemed to Kydd to have been dragged from the very depths of the man’s being.

“Two!”

Even two blows was sufficient to make the man’s back a raw striping of bloody welts, the animal force of the blows visibly as violent as a kick from a horse, slamming the body against the grating.

“Three!”

Donnelly did not shift his gaze or his expression from Tyrell’s face. Blood appeared at his mouth where he had bitten his lip in agony, trickling slowly down in two thin streams.

“Four!”

The horror of Donnelly’s torment tore at Kydd. It went on and on in endless sequence; the lower grating was now spattered with blood, and when the boatswain’s mate drew back the cat for the next stroke, combing his fingers through the tails, bloody gobbets dropped from them.

Donnelly’s eyes flickered now at each blow and started rolling upward, his grunts turning to smothered animal cries. His back was in places a roiling mess like a butcher’s cut of raw liver.

“Twelve!” The Master-at-Arms looked questioningly over to Tyrell.

“Quentin!” Tyrell snapped, utterly unmoved.

The tall boatswain’s mate surrendered his position and cat to Quentin, who was left-handed — this would enable the stripes to be crossed.

Before he could begin his grisly work, Donnelly’s eyes rolled entirely out of sight with a soft despairing groan, and he hung down.

The surgeon thrust over and examined him. Donnelly was semiconscious, occasionally rolling his head about and issuing tiny childlike whimpers.

“Sir, this man’s —”

“Souse him!”

“Sir, I must insist! There is —”

“Then get below if you must. I will not have my discipline questioned. Carry on, Quentin.”

A fire bucket of seawater bearing the cipher of King George was produced. Measuring his distance, Quentin dashed the full contents against the man’s back.

Donnelly shrieked just once and hung senseless.

A midshipman crumpled to the deck.

Tyrell scowled. “Cut him down,” he grunted.

A
t a somber dinner Kydd pushed away his wooden platter. It was not possible to eat after the scenes he had witnessed.

“Some says as how you’re not a real sailorman till you’ve got your red-checked shirt at the gangway,” said Bowyer.

Nobody laughed.

“Pat should never’ve got more’n half a dozen,” Doud said, playing with his hard tack. Various growled comments supported him, although Renzi sat in his usual, watchful silence.

“How the bloody hell can y’ take it like this?” Kydd flared. “Are we animals t’ be whipped? Even a pig farmer takes better care o’ his stock. What lunatic way is this?”

“Yer right enough, lad,” Claggett replied. “But yer have ter understand our sea ways too. See, we’re different to youse ashore where you hang a man for stealin’ a handkerchief or clap him in a bridewell fer bein’ half slewed in the street.”

“Me brother was transported ter Botany Bay fer twitchin’ just two squiddy cock pheasants,” Whaley agreed.

Claggett nodded. “Well, what I means to say is that if we chokes off everyone on board what does somethin’ wrong, why, soon we’d have no one left to man the barky. Besides which, makes no sense to bang anyone up in irons doing nothin’ fer too long, or we’d soon be gettin’ shorthanded. An’ that makes no sense if we meets a blow, or comes up with an enemy.” He finished his grog. “So everythin’ we does is short and sharp, and back on course again, yardarms square, ’n’ all a-taunto!”

In a low voice Bowyer added, “But there was no call for Tyrell to
come the hard horse like that. Pat’s a right good hand. Has a short fuse only.”

Kydd brought up the subject again when the two returned to the maintop. Bowyer was working on one of the many blocks. His keen-edged knife split the frayed strapping, which pulled away from the deep score around the wooden shell of the block. He began a short splice on a new length of rope to create a circular shape.

“Joe, you
really
think floggin’ a man is right?”

“It’s one way o’ discipline, we do hold with that, but there’s them what makes too free with it, and that’s demeanin’ to our honor,” Bowyer said seriously, twisting the splice to make it lie more easily. His marline spike had an eye, a length of twine secured it to his belt and Kydd guessed that this was to prevent it from falling on the heads of those below.

“Here, clap on to this,” Bowyer said.

Kydd did as he was told, extending the circle so Bowyer could ply his wooden serving mallet to apply a tight spun yarn covering continuously around.

“It’s important to us — that is to say, we.” Bowyer smiled at Kydd. “A sailor has pride, ’n’ so he should. There’s none can hold a candle to us in the article o’ skill. I’d like to see one of them there circus akrybats step out on a topsail yard, take in a stuns’l when it comes on to blow. Or one of yer book-learned lawyers know the half of how to cat and fish a bower anchor.”

The covering finished, Bowyer put the serving mallet aside and flexed the stiff circle. He settled it over the scored part and offered the block to Kydd. “Hold it in place here, mate,” he said, and prepared to apply a stout round seizing at the base of the block to bowse the strap close in. “You see, Tom, when we gets a thunderin’ squall comes up and we has to get aloft and get in sail, we don’t want no misgivin’s about the jack next to yer on the yardarm. In the short of it, I’m saying we has our loyalty, and it’s to our mates, our ship and the Navy.” He seemed uncomfortable with expressing sentiment, but finished firmly, “But we expects it back, shipmate.” The seizing was finished with riding turns and crossed. “There you are, Tom — take pride in yer work ’n’ you can be sure it’ll return the compliment ’n’ look after you, just when yer come t’ need it.”
Bowyer carefully gathered up the odd bits of twine and stranded rope, and put them in his leather belt pouch. “Ned, keep a weather eye for that toggled lift coming up, mate,” he told Doud. “Kydd is goin’ to be a-learnin’ some bends ’n’ hitches.”

He reached for a light jigger tackle belayed to a cleat and helped himself to its end. “Now, Tom, this could save yer life one day. It’s called the bowline, an’ it’s the only one you c’n tie one-handed.”

Bowyer was a good teacher, patient and with a vast fund of salty asides to give meaning to what was being done. He made Kydd practice each action until it was instinctive. “Middle of a gale o’ wind ain’t no time to be puzzlin’ over which way to bend on a line — your mates relying on yer an’ all.”

Kydd descended from the tops to the lower world with a twinge of regret. Something of Bowyer’s simple contentment at the exercise of his sea skills was attractive to him, especially when contrasted with the harsh imperatives of life on the lower deck. He imagined wistfully what it would be like to be a true son of the sea.

Toward evening one or two boats were still circling the ship, forlornly hoping for a change of heart, but whenever they closed on the
Duke William
they were menaced with the threat of a cold shot hove through their bottom. Eyes aboard the old ship watched hungrily, but it was common knowledge that Tyrell had told the Master-at-Arms that if any came aboard, then he himself would be turned before the mast as a common seaman. Even so, shoreside grog somehow found its way on board and before the end of the dog-watches there were eight men in irons — long bars along which iron shackles slid, seizing them by their legs as securely as the stocks ashore.

At supper there was little avoiding the topic.

“It’s fair burstin’ me balls just watching them trugs in the boats!” Whaley tried to laugh, but a cloud of depression hung about him.

Howell leered at him. “Like as not, boy, we’re goin’ to ground on our own beef bones waiting for somethin’ to happen, and no steppin’ ashore in the meantime, not with our hellfire jack of a first luff! So best you get used to the idea, cully!”

Kydd tried not to notice Bowyer’s downcast silence. He looked over at Wong. The man’s forehead glistened, but otherwise his bearing gave
nothing away, and therefore Kydd almost missed the slight movement of his hands. His pale stubby fingers held a tankard, and as if of its own tiredness, the pewter slowly crumpled into a shapeless ball, the rest of Wong’s body remaining quite motionless.

“And so say us all, that so, mate?” Doud’s attempt to draw in Buddles failed, the man’s misery was so deep.

Doud got to his feet. “Gotta see a man about a dog,” he said, and hurried off, but not before receiving an approving wink from Claggett.

“Hear tell as how you’re skylarkin’ in the tops now, Tom.” Whaley looked at Kydd with interest: for a landman only days aboard to have made it aloft so soon must indicate something of his mettle.

Kydd flushed with pleasure. He was being included in the general conversation for the first time in this mess, and felt pleased that it was Whaley, the born seaman, who had done so. “Couldn’t help it — Joe would’ve given me a quiltin’ with a rope’s end, else,” he said, a wide smile firmly in place.

Howell stirred with irritation. “Said before, younker, you’re a land-man ’n’ not bred to the sea. Ye’ll take a tumble off a yard first blow we gets and —”

“Clap a stopper on it, Jonas. Man wants t’ be a sailor, is all.”

Doud arrived back, and Kydd recognized what was going on in the play with the jacket and Buddles’s pot.

Doud pushed across the pot with its dark mahogany contents. “Get this in yer, cuffin,” he said quietly. “Things’ll look different after, you’ll see.”

Buddles stared at him, then took a good swallow, sputtering his thanks. No one seemed to know quite what to say to him, and stared at the table or looked pensively at each other.

The conversation turned to other subjects over the greasy boiled salt pork, which followed.

When all was eaten, Bowyer spoke. “Tip us your ‘Dick Lovelace,’ Ned, I have a hankerin’ after somethin’ sad, mate.”