The French Prize (22 page)

They worked in silence. Then Bolingbroke said, “Your father paying Waverly for you to be here?”

“No,” Jack said, alert now to danger of some kind. In truth he did not know what arrangement his father had made.

“But you ain't a sailor,” Bolingbroke continued, “with your books and your white stockings and all.”

“I'm a sailor,” Jack said. “I'm just not a dog, to be kicked and boxed around the deck.”

Now it was Bolingbroke who flushed red. He turned from his work and looked Jack in the eyes. “Are you saying I am?”

Jack shrugged. He turned and worked the new ratline into a clove hitch around the shroud. He heard Bolingbroke turn back to his own work. They were silent for some time, knotting, splicing, seizing, as the foretop moved through its easy sway and roll and the
City of Newport
made easting under all plain sail. Jack pulled a length of spun yarn from a ball he had carried aloft, ran his eyes over Bolingbroke's work. “Where that clove hitch crosses, it wants to be outboard and slant up, aft to forward,” he said helpfully. But Bolingbroke was not looking for help, apparently.

“Shut your mouth,” he said. That minor conflict, unpleasant as it was, might have been no worse if Henry Hacking had not chosen that moment to appear over the rim of the foretop, take one quick look around, then cuff Bolingbroke on the side of the head and explain to him, in a voice loud and studded with profanity, that the clove hitches had to slant up from aft forward. “Like Biddlecomb there done it.”

Jack made no comment. He did not have to. And it would be some time before he understood how completely Bolingbroke's enmity had been cemented at that moment.

As Jack continued to subtly liberate himself from Waverly and the great cabin, so he came increasingly into contact with Bolingbroke. In the merchant service as well as the navy there were certain jobs that were designated as boys' work. Those jobs—sweeping fore and aft, coiling down the lines, slushing the masts, loosening or furling the light sails, and a dozen other tasks—were too trivial or mean for the able-bodied men, or even the ordinary seamen, to bother with, at least if a boy was available when the work needed doing.

More often than not Jack was not available, being in the care of Captain Waverly and set to more erudite tasks. But when he was about ship's work, he and Bolingbroke might find themselves side-by-side in the slings of the yard while reefing topsails, or high aloft, laid out on the topgallant yards, loosening off those sails or wrestling the canvas back onto the yard, a job that called for a degree of cooperation that increasingly neither felt like giving.

They worked high above the deck or deep in the hold, places where conversations could not be overheard, and Bolingbroke probed and pulled and worked his way into Jack's spirit like a gale of wind tugging at a furled sail, looking for that flaw in the stow that would allow it, with relentless malice, to pull the canvas from its gaskets and shred it to ribbons. He needled Jack about his family's wealth, about his father's fame, about his education, about how easy Jack had it as a child. They cut Jack, each of these thrusts, but Jack turned them aside with his own verbal parries before the wound was deep.

But when Jonah suggested that Jack was little more than a passenger aboard the
City of Newport
, that his place had been secured by privilege and not merit, that he was only playing at sailors, his blade found its mark. Bolingbroke, sensing as much, continued in that vein, waxing on about how he himself had been hired on with no assistance from anyone, having no one in the world interested in helping him, whereas Biddlecomb was aboard through the influence of his father and would never be able to shift for himself, were the apron strings cut free.

Jack had little to say in response because secretly he worried that it was true. Certainly his father had secured his position aboard the ship, and he was not treated like a foremast hand or a typical ship's boy. No one in the forecastle, or indeed any of the mates, would dare to cuff him as they cuffed Bolingbroke. Na
ï
ve and generally unaware as he was, this came as a startling revelation to Jack.

Worse was when Bolingbroke assured Jack that he was despised by the foremast hands for the privileged place he held aboard the ship. And with that came Jack's sudden appreciation for the subtle, muted disrespect, bordering on loathing, with which he was indeed held. Jonah had pulled a curtain back. Jack did not like to look at what was behind it.

Years later, thinking back on that time, after the memory of his apprenticeship aboard the
City of Newport
had dulled enough that he no longer tried actively to forget it, Jack understood that it was Waverly the men hated, not him. It was Waverly, with discipline so taut it approached maniacal, and a mate who delighted in enforcing it. Waverly, who rarely gave a Sunday off at sea or a run ashore in port, who laid in food that was remarkable in its badness and paucity, who was never satisfied and not shy about saying so.

Jack's only experience with shipmasters up until that voyage had been with his father and Rumstick. Watching Waverly in command, thinking Waverly the very model of the ideal master, he had concluded that his father and Rumstick had been too easy on their men. It would take some years at sea, and the experience of serving many sorts of captains, before he understood that the opposite was true.

But more than his hard driving, it was Waverly's attitude that set the men off. Seamen could stand a driver, they could stand a screamer and a mean son of a bitch. Any man who had gone to sea for any length of time had seen all those and more. But Waverly's imperious quality, his utter disdain for the forecastle, worked on them. No sailor expected to be treated as an equal, but neither would he tolerate being regarded as a slave. Aboard the
City of Newport
, however, the great cabin was very much the big house, Waverly was the master, the mate the overseer, and those forward little more than field hands.

The same attitude that made Waverly seem the gentleman mariner ashore made him the insufferable tyrant afloat. And Jack Biddlecomb, in the eyes of the foremast hands, was Waverly's boy, a young gentleman there to be molded in the image and likeness of the master.

All this Jack would come to understand years later, but at the time it was a mystery to him, bewildering and heartbreaking that he was so shunned by the men he longed to join. And when his verbal sparring with Bolingbroke finally and inevitably turned to violence, there was no one there to stand with him.

They were in the cable tier, sweeping. It was hot, the work was dusty, the dust clinging to the sweat on their faces, getting under their shirts. Bolingbroke was going on about the rotten food forward and asking Jack about the dinner he had enjoyed aft in the great cabin. Jack, done with the nasty insinuations, turned and hurled his broom at Bolingbroke, and had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch in the dim light, seeing the handle of the broom glance off his head.

“You little shit!” Bolingbroke hissed. “You wait until we get a run ashore, I'll do you for this!”

“Why wait?” Jack asked. “You want satisfaction, well, come along and I'll give you satisfaction!”

“Sure, and one scream from you and here comes the mate to box me good, and carry you back to the great cabin!”

“All right, then, you tell me where.”

There was only one place aboard that small merchantman that might be reasonably secure from Waverly and the mates, where two men might beat each other senseless with no interference. That was the forecastle, the forbidden place, forbidden to Jack. But he was in the grip of anger and despair now, and the boundaries set by Waverly were the last of his concerns. And so, just minutes after eight bells had rung out in the night watch, after the larboard watch, Bolingbroke's watch, was relieved, Biddlecomb made his silent way out of the cabin he enjoyed aft, crossed the dark and rolling deck, and climbed below to the forecastle, his first visit to that wicked den.

There were half a dozen men there, just the off watch, and the steward and cook who had heard about the fun and turned out to watch. Biddlecomb clenched his fists so that no one would see his hands shake. He hoped he would not puke. He had never been more frightened in his life. Climbing aloft at sea for the first time was nothing to this.

Jack's feet hit the deck and he turned and looked around the fetid space. There was one lantern hanging from the overhead, spilling a feeble pool of light on the planks underfoot and leaving most of those quarters, the berths and the sea chests and the gear hanging from hooks, in deep shadow.

Bolingbroke stood on the other side of the patch of light. He looked bigger than Jack remembered. But Jack noted with some satisfaction that he stood alone, that the rest of the crew seemed not much interested in his success or failure. If he, Jack, was an outcast here, if the men were indifferent to his fate, then the same apparently was true for Bolingbroke.

Jonah took a step toward him. “I'll give you a chance to apologize to me, here, in front of the others,” he said.

“Sod off,” Jack said, the most foul invective he could make himself say, though by then there were few profane words he had not heard.

Bolingbroke took a step forward and swung and Jack stepped back and made a feeble swipe in return. Bolingbroke dodged it with ease, stepped in again. He made a jab with his left, which Jack deflected. Then Jack felt Bolingbroke's right fist connect with his stomach, connect with enough force to lift him from his feet, and he knew he was in trouble.

He landed, doubled over, and staggered back until he hit the bulkhead, which helped hold him upright. He knew he had to stand, to get his arms up to ward off the next blow, but he could not make his body do that, and so Bolingbroke's fist was unimpeded as it struck him right across the face, twisted him around, and deposited him on the deck.

The pain was radiating out from two points now, and Jack had the idea that he might lie there on the deck a bit, but Bolingbroke's shoe connected with his stomach and blew the wind out of him, so that now along with the agony of the blows he was gasping for breath, flailing to draw air into his lungs. Another kick, this time to the chest, and Jack was curled up in a ball.

He opened his eyes and from that odd angle saw Bolingbroke coming at him again, but before his cocked leg could deliver another blow he was grabbed by a few of the others and dragged back. Jack heard someone say, “That's enough, you beat him too bloody, that son of a bitch Waverly will have us all for it.”

There it was. The foremast jacks would see him spared because he was Waverly's boy, under Waverly's protection. Jack felt a rage run through him that drove him to sit up, drove him to gain his feet and, with blood spewing from his mouth, still half hunched over, fling himself at Bolingbroke once again.

He did not get far in that, maybe two steps before he was grabbed by the watching men as they had grabbed Bolingbroke. “Well,” someone said, “ain't he the little hero, just like old daddy!” They shoved him up the ladder and they were laughing as they did. The fight had earned him no respect in the forecastle, and when Waverly asked him about the bruises, and he swore to all that was holy he had fallen down a hatch, that bought him no respect, either.

He earned only one thing from that fight and that was a nickname, Little Hero. From that night on, whenever he was out of the earshot of Waverly or the mate, he was Little Hero, a mocking, hateful sobriquet. Little Hero. Isaac Biddlecomb's son, Amos Waverly's boy.

It was humiliating and intolerable and there was only one way out, one way that would relieve him of that awful name and the self-doubt Bolingbroke had so skillfully and viciously planted. He could think of only one course by which he might discover if he really was no more than the son of Isaac Biddlecomb, child of privilege, unable to navigate the wicked world as Bolingbroke did, or whether he could make his way on his terms alone.

The passage had not been unfruitful. Jack now had knowledge enough to ship as an ordinary seaman, and he would do so once he had the years and the size. Until then, boys who knew the head from the halyard were always wanting aboard. He was encouraged, as they stood into the harbor in Lisbon, to see the vast array of shipping at anchor there, and the number of vessels of all size that flew the Stars and Stripes at the mizzen gaff.

In casual conversation with Waverly he discovered that they would not be lightering the cargo off but rather warping alongside a dock, when the space was ready to receive them. When they did, and when Waverly had gone ashore for business or drinking or whoring, Jack did not know which, Jack packed up one suit of decent clothing, his ditty bag, his blue jacket and his tarpaulin hat, a blanket, and eating utensils, wrapped them all in his oilskins and bound them well.

Knowing where Waverly kept the specie he carried for business purposes Jack paid himself what he reckoned were fair wages for the work he had done. Once it was well dark and he was sure the steward would not surprise him, he climbed out the stern window, and from there it was easy enough to reach the after dock fast and climb, monkeylike, to shore.

In canvas trousers and a checked shirt, a tarpaulin hat on his head, Jack was all but indistinguishable from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other sailors who roamed that port city, who moved with ease from ship to ship, forecastle to forecastle, with nothing but their labor and knowledge to sell, no community to which they must answer, save for the free-flowing community of mariners who washed up in every place that bordered salt water. The seamen's cocky swagger, the way they wore their clothes, cocked their hats, the way the half-fathom of ribbon on the hat's crown hung over their left eye, these were not things that could be faked, but Jack was a full-fledged member of that tribe now, and there was nothing false in his carriage.

He headed off down the quay, determined to remake himself, authentically, in the image he had embraced.