Kydd (20 page)

Wong waited until he saw bubbles, then hoisted him back up. Yates panted and spluttered. Again Wong slowly let him descend. The struggles became frenzied. When the bubbles came again Wong set him roughly on deck and folded his arms.

It all spilled out: Scully had made an arrangement with the owners of the vessel unknown to the master whereby he and his four accomplices would sink the ship, then take to the only boat, ensuring there would be no witnesses. It was barratry, an insurance swindle, and would have succeeded but for the storm. The men lost no time in damning Scully as the man who had killed Warren, and also revealed that he had planned to complete the deed that night by eliminating those remaining.

The master breathed in deeply and took control. “I’ll fix our position and have you aboard your ship as soon as I can.”

T
hree days later, back aboard
Duke William,
Kydd and Bowyer were with the starboard watch up on the topsail yard, shaking out a reef. In the maintop sailors swore heartily when the inexperienced officer of the watch let the ship come into the wind. Ponderously, the seventy-five-foot yard swung as the wind caught the sail momentarily aback, then more sharply swayed it back — to bring up hard against the braces.

One moment Kydd was standing watching for orders, the next he heard a brief cry and turned to see a gap where Bowyer had been shortly before. He stared down and saw men hurrying over to a still form, face down and at a distorted angle. For a moment he was stunned. Then, in a rising storm of feelings he shouted, shrieked — and flew down the shrouds.

A small crowd had gathered around Bowyer. Kydd thrust past, distraught at the spreading dark wet stain beneath. Gently he pulled Bowyer around to face upward. His eyes were closed and he was very pale, blood issuing from his nose and ears. His breathing was unnatural; harsh and stertorous.

“Where’s the doctor?” Kydd’s hoarse cry rose above the hushed voices. He cradled the barely breathing Bowyer, feeling the warmth seeping from his body.

“Stand clear — what happened?” the surgeon asked breathlessly.

“Fall from the yard,” said an officer, arriving from the quarterdeck.

The surgeon dropped to his knees and felt for a pulse, his eyes passing briefly over the inert body. He rolled back an eyelid. Holding a small silver
mirror to Bowyer’s lips, he inspected the result. “He lives yet, but I’ll not be sanguine about the outcome.” He straightened and looked around.

In the shocked silence nobody moved.

“Broken bones bear on his brain — it must be relieved. Tie him to a grating and take him below to the cockpit.”

The main hatch grating, which had so often seen the blood of floggings, was now smeared with the bright red of Bowyer’s lifeblood. There was no lack of men to help Kydd carry it below.

In the center of the noisome gloom of the cockpit Bowyer was placed on a table. Lanthorns could only provide their usual dim light, leaving much of the scene in shadow. The loblolly boys, broken-down men who were fit for no other work, stretched out Bowyer’s limbs, tying them to stanchions. Then they stood back and waited for the surgeon to return with his chest.

Suddenly Bowyer’s back arched and with a loud, tearing groan his body strained in a terrible convulsion. Kydd threw himself at his friend and tried to force him down. “F’r God’s sake, help me!” he screamed at the loblollies, who were standing well back in the shadows.

They remained still, one rhythmically chewing tobacco.

“Help, for Chrissake!” Kydd sobbed. The body was rigid and contorted in a grotesque upward spasm. His efforts to press the spine down were hopelessly ineffective.

There was a movement in the lanthorn glow and the surgeon was at his side.

Kydd gasped with relief. “He — he’s —” he tried to say.

“Opisthotonos,” the man muttered.

Kydd stared at him.

“Not unusual in these cases — leave him, it’ll pass.” He casually upended a green bottle, wiped his mouth and replaced the bottle in the capacious side pocket of his black coat.

Kydd reluctantly let go of his friend and hovered next to the convulsed body, unsure and cold with horror.

The surgeon pulled at Kydd’s jacket and said testily, “Be so good as to let me get on with it, will you?”

Kydd stepped back and watched as the surgeon rummaged in his
chest, bringing out some steel instruments, which he laid on a small collapsible table next to Bowyer’s head. The convulsion passed and Bowyer sank down.

The surgeon went to Bowyer’s head and addressed himself to the task. A razor was flourished, and Bowyer’s head was shaved around the seeping blood, leaving a monk-like tonsure.

“More light, you oaf!” he growled at the taller loblolly, who obediently held two lanthorns each side of Bowyer’s head.

The surgeon felt the skull all over, then picked up a scalpel and, stretching the scalp with one hand, drew the blade smartly across in a three-inch incision. He made a similar cut at right angles at one end of the first incision, then peeled the scalp away in a triangle.

The sickly white of living, gleaming bone was clear in the close lanthorn light. The surgeon bent nearer and traced the long depressed fracture to where it continued under the scalp. Another incision and the whole was exposed. “Mmm, we have a chance, possibly,” he muttered. He lifted a complex instrument. “Basson’s patent trephine,” he said, with pride. Carefully he felt around the floating skull plates until he found a sound area, then applied the instrument and set to work.

In the breathless silence the tiny bone-cutting sounds grated unbearably. Kydd looked away at the loblolly boys, who watched the operation stolidly. The men who had helped him carry Bowyer down retreated farther and Kydd caught the gleam of a tilted bottle. The lanthorns gave off a hot oily smell.

A young midshipman from their nearby berth lingered, fascinated, and glanced up at Kydd with a twisted grin.

The surgeon exchanged his trephine for another instrument and inserted it in the skull cavity. Kydd let his gaze drop to the wound and saw Bowyer’s brain tissue, blood dripping slowly in small threads down the side of his face and to the deck. He could not control the sudden heaves — he staggered and held desperately to a deck stanchion. The surgeon straightened and glared at Kydd. “If ye’re going to cast your accounts now, kindly do it somewhere else.”

Kydd stumbled blindly toward the other men.

“Well, I hold myself in some amazement; he still breathes,” the surgeon said later, waving away the lanthorns and stretching. He wiped his hands
on his bloody apron, which he tossed to the loblolly boy, and took a long pull at his bottle. “You may have him,” he said shortly. “The loblollies will attend in course.” He disappeared into his cabin.

Kydd let out his breath. It was a waking nightmare, the blood-bespattered head all bandaged, the eyes receding into dark sockets.

They took Bowyer to the bay, the extreme fore part of the middle gundeck where the bows came to a point, and laid him down in a swinging cot, next to where the root of the mighty bowsprit reared outward.

One of the loblollies stayed, his tobacco chewing never ceasing.

His eyes dull with grief, Kydd sat with his friend. The hours passed; he willed with all his heart for some indication that the world had been set to rights again — for the eyes to flicker open, that slow smile — but there was only stillness and the hypnotic cycle of the rise and fall of the chest, a long moment of waiting, then another.

Kydd got up and stretched. There was no change; he would take a short break.

He returned to see the loblolly boy bent over Bowyer, working feverishly at the body. Kydd ran forward, guilt-ridden at having been absent. He realized that the loblolly boy had been at work on Bowyer’s finger, trying to pull off the worn ring. Kydd wrenched him around and pinioned him against the fore bulkhead.

A crowd quickly gathered at the commotion.

The loblolly’s eyes shifted. “But ’e’ll not need that where ’e’s goin’!” he whined.

Kydd smashed his fist into the man’s face and drew back his arm for another blow, but felt his arms seized from behind. “Don’t do ’im, mate — ’e’s not worth a floggin’!” someone cried.

Kydd fell back and the loblolly fled.

At three bells Bowyer gave a muffled groan and writhed in a weak spasm. Kydd lurched to his feet and held him down until it passed.

The vigil continued and Kydd’s hold on reality drifted. Shadows appeared, offering him grog, food. His messmates came in ones and twos; an awkward word, a hand clapped on the shoulder, understanding. Bowyer’s breathing was now almost imperceptible.

Exhaustion made Kydd’s eyes heavy and his head jerked as he fought to keep awake. In this half-world of existence there was a merciful sense of detachment, a disconnection from events. Toward the end of the last
dog-watch his mind registered a change . . . that there was now no movement at all. Bowyer’s appearance was quite unaltered, except that he no longer breathed.

His best friend was dead.

“Rum do, Joe gettin’ ’is like that,” said Doud.

“Not ’s if he were a raw hand — never seen such a right old shellback as ’e,” Whaley mused.

Pinto leaned across the table, his liquid brown eyes serious. “You joke — but we say, when the Holy Mother want someone, she call, you come.”

From the end of the table Claggett coughed in a noncommittal way and called them to attention. “Joe had no folks.” The statement was bald, but downcast looks showed that the implications were clear. “He was one o’ the Hanway boys, he were never one fer the ’longshore life.” He glanced around. The shoddy purser’s glim guttered. This time there were no sardonic words about the smell. “I’d say that Tom Kydd is as close as any to Joe,” Claggett said.

“Where’s he now, poor mucker?” someone asked.

“Saw him a whiles ago up forrard on the fo’c’sle,” said Howell. “At the weather cathead,” he added significantly.

“Doesn’t someone go ’n’ see if we can help?” said Doud.

Whaley hesitated. “Did go meself, Ned, but he wants to be on his own.”

“Best to leave him so, I guess,” said Claggett. “He’ll get over it betimes.”

Kydd was not alone, there on the fo’c’sle in the wind and thin rain. In his befuddled brain he felt a fierce and uncaring joy in the hard bulk of the bottle that lay hidden, nestling next to his heart. Phelps could always be relied on where rum was concerned.

In the gloom of the night the fore lookouts kept out of the way and no one else was foolish enough to wallow in the chill misery of wind and rain. Kydd took another drink from his secret store. It helped, but only if he didn’t think. The trouble was there was no answer. Only blind fate. He took another swig. It burned as it spread into his vitals.

For some reason he found himself sitting on deck with his back to the
carronade, looking up with owlish eyes at the huge pale span of the foresail. Strange that. There should only be one foreyard; another seemed to be floating nearby. He leaned back to get a better view and toppled over. He struggled to sit upright again and fixed his eyes on the rain-black bitts to steady himself.

“Poor sod!” the larboard fo’c’sle lookout muttered to the other, jerking his head at the sodden, lonely figure. Neither could desert their posts — and that meant the result was inevitable. In a short while the Master-at-Arms with his corporals would be doing his rounds and would discover the poor wight. Then it would be irons overnight and the cat in the morning — at sea they were merciless when it came to a member of the fighting crew becoming useless from drink when at any time the enemy could loom up out of the night with all guns blazing. He’d be lucky to get away with just a dozen.

The lookout turned back to resume his stare out into the night.

The bottle tilted again. Bowyer had no right to leave him like this — he’d taken his advice and was well on the way to becoming a sailor. And now he had to sort it out for himself. It wasn’t fair. Unlike many of the pressed men, Kydd had found a friend. In Bowyer, he’d had someone who could take this hellish world and make sense of it, put it in perspective for him. Give him purpose, a future, and be there when needed. Kydd’s face contorted.

A figure emerged from the fore hatch, indistinct in the gloom. It hesitated, then came across and stood over him. Renzi looked down, with pity and revulsion in his expression. Blind sentiment played no part in Renzi’s character — Kydd must take his chances along the road he himself had chosen. In his own past he had seen too many like him, worse in fact, for those with the wealth to do it could go to hell in their own way. Renzi moved away — but something made him return. He looked down again. Kydd returned the look with drunken resentment and Renzi swore harshly, for he knew he could not abandon him. Not when the man bore the uncanny resemblance that had haunted Renzi since Kydd first came aboard. He jerked Kydd to his feet, tore the bottle from his grasp and hurled it into the night.

“Wha — how dar’ you, s-sir!” Kydd spluttered, trying to dislodge the grip clamped on his collar. Somehow his feet found the deck and he wriggled free.

Renzi regarded him grimly.

Kydd bristled. “You never l-liked Joe,” he said. “You don’ like anybody, you slivey bast’d!”

Renzi had deep reasons for his detached position. But something had to be done: if he did nothing, disengaged himself — the result would be inevitable. A pang of memory stabbed at him.

“Wha’s matter? Can’t speak? Don’t wanna speak wi’ a common jack — you too high ’n’ mighty, then?”

Kydd had changed, Renzi acknowledged to himself. Far from being a naïve young man from a country town pressed into an uncaring, alien environment, he was gaining confidence in his considerable natural abilities and had a very real prospect of being a fine seaman — if he survived.

“Ah, yes!” He looked at Renzi sideways with a leer. “I know — I know why you’re at sea wi’ the rest of us!”

He made exaggerated glances around to check for listeners. “You’ve done something, haven’t you? Somethin’ bad, I’ll wager, ’n’ they’re after you. You go ashore, they’re gonna nobble you. You’re runnin’, Renzi, running from somethin’.”