The Mountain of Gold (36 page)

Worst of all, sickness was increasing, an ominous sign indeed so many weeks before the beginning of the wet season, when the fevers would be at their height. Since losing Castle, we had committed to the river one of the better Bristol men and one of Facey's soldiers. Humphrey, the surgeon, had four more under treatment, two of whom had come to him in the last day alone. He suspected the marsh ague, malaria, in three of the cases, though the fourth, young Penhallow, my companion in severing the cable during the fire at Deptford, had a fearful case of the bloody flux. There was little point in prescribing the eternal surgeon's remedy of bleeding to him; a pity, for Lanherne reckoned he had the makings of a good seaman. I sorrowed as I agreed that Penhallow should be given up for dead and laid upon a platform in the hold to await his end.

Early one morning, with the dawn just breaking, we were nearing the landmark shown on Belem's charts as Elephant Island. The river flowed around it in two remarkably deep channels, with twenty fathoms' water or more. Rupert and Holmes had reconnoitred this as a possible site for a fort, it seemed, but were soon dissuaded; and in truth, I have never seen a less military isle. It was nothing more than a tangle of high mangroves, some three leagues in circuit. I sent a boat's party to examine it, but they reported that the ground consisted of a clay-like slime, and that the high tides lapped over it to a depth of a foot or more.

With my curiosity about the island satisfied, I went below to visit the dying Penhallow. To this day, I do not know quite why I did so. I think I felt guilt that this good and honest fellow, one who had followed me so loyally and assisted me so notably at Deptford, would die on my account on such a desperate fool's errand, and I was mindful of the dire impact his death would have on his ancient widowed mother. Both Kit Farrell and Musk chided me for this womanish concern for just one rude tarpaulin's death, but somehow I felt that young Penhallow deserved his captain's company as he took his final journey. Thus I went down into the very bowels of the ship, to the hold itself. That dark space was blessedly cool, although the climate made the bilges stink even more prodigiously than usual. The platform on which Penhallow had been placed was concealed behind a pile of victuallers' barrels. The young man, his flesh grey and damp, was wholly unaware of my presence. I sat and prayed silently as his breaths got shallower and further apart.

I do not know how long I sat there—perhaps one turn of the glass, maybe two. My thoughts soon wandered from prayer, and meandered through my own dark concerns: O'Dwyer, Montnoir, the Lady Louise. I was not even aware that Penhallow had stopped breathing; I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I did not notice the moment of his death.

I prepared to rise, but then stayed, and held my breath. Another was in the hold with me. Beyond the barrels, I could hear what sounded like a timber being levered from the deck. I stood and stepped out from behind the barrels.

In the dim light of that low place, illuminated by just one lantern, I must have presented a spectral sight to the man. He was standing, a crowbar in his hand, above a hole in the deck. He had evidently pulled away the board that had covered it, which now lay to one side.

He stared at me in blind incomprehension, and then a moment later in utter terror.

'Captain—'

'Mister Shish?'

The carpenter of the
Seraph
still stood there, staring at me. My first thought upon seeing him had been that he must have been about some business naturally connected with his office; the removal of a timber board from the deck fell naturally within the carpenter's remit. But his horrified reaction at the sight of me and the way in which he kept the crowbar raised told a very different story. And why would the carpenter concern himself with the removal of one board in the hold? Surely he would have despatched one of his crew to attend to such a trivial matter?

What matter, though? I had no idea. I also had no weapon, and Shish still brandished the crowbar like a cutlass.

'What are you about, Mister Shish?' I asked.

'Captain—Captain, oh Jesus—it must be God's judgment upon me—' With that, the young man dropped the crowbar onto the deck and began to sob uncontrollably.

I needed assistance, and above all, I needed expert advice. 'Ho, there! Ho, anyone!' I cried. But there was surely nobody within earshot...

Phineas Musk stepped into the light. Likely he had come below to see where the foolish young heir to Ravensden had got to. 'Aye, Captain?' he said.

'Musk, fetch me Mister Negus and Mister Farrell. Discreetly. Do not mention why I wish to see them, and do not mention this to any other.'

'Aye, sir.'

Musk went, leaving me alone once again with the carpenter, who seemed to have lost all control of himself: he merely stood there, shaking and sobbing, reciting psalms and Puritanical prayers to himself.

At length, the lieutenant and master of the
Seraph
came into the hold, accompanied by Musk. Negus stepped over to the space in the deck where the board had been levered off, looked down into the dark place beneath, and nodded grimly to Kit Farrell.

Negus looked directly at Shish and said abruptly, 'And what business did you have with the garboard strake, Mister Shish?'

The young man shuddered and shook his head. 'Narrow channel,' he sobbed. 'Easy to get men off, and to shore—'

'Aye, after you'd sunk the ship,' said Kit. 'The garboard strake, sir,' he said, turning to me. 'The only outside plank reachable from inside the hull. Lifting the limber board, here, would allow him to get at it. Then he could jam the crow against a floor timber, lever it up, and make a leak that we would not be able to stop in time before the ship sank.'

'Damnable,' said Negus. 'Mightily damnable. And the chain pumps—your doing as well, Shish?'

Still the carpenter said nothing.

'Sabotage, then,' said Musk. 'Sounds much like treason to me. And we know what's done to traitors ashore, that we do. Hang 'em until nearly dead, draw the steaming entrails while they still live, then chop the bastards into quarters. But I expect the navy does things differently.'

'Not so very differently, Mister Musk,' said Negus in his broad Yorkshire burr. 'The sixteenth Article of War is the pertinent one, I think. "All sea captains, officers and seamen that shall betray their trust. shall be punished with death." A court-martial offence—a capital offence, indeed. Mister Shish, sir—if God so wills it, then you will hang.'

The young man could hardly have looked more devastated if the Lord Chief Justice of England himself had pronounced sentence, the black cap atop his wig. Of course, the dour Negus was quite right. It was difficult to imagine a case that fell more exactly within the terms of the sixteenth Article of War, for which the sentence was rightly unambiguous. But Shish was not a natural traitor, that much was certain. He was certainly not an obvious agent of my adversary, the Knight of Malta. Which meant .

'What did he offer you, Tom?' I asked, as kindly as I could. 'What was the price?'

The young carpenter must have had few tears left to shed. 'I—I cannot say—'

'Your loyalty to my good-brother is commendable,' I said.

Kit and Valentine Negus both looked upon me in utter astonishment. Musk merely raised his eyes and nodded, for unlike the other two, he knew Venner Garvey.

Shish was taken aback by my insight. His reply, when it came, was hushed and halting. 'I was to find a way of stopping the ship, or else delaying it, without endangering the lives of the crew—your life above all, Captain—and if possible without betraying myself,' he said. 'Not easy to reconcile, those goals, that they're not.'

'Indeed not,' I said. 'Besides, I presume you were only to come into play if his other schemes against us failed—the fire at Deptford and the flyboat in Long Reach?'

Shish shook his head. 'Only the flyboat, Captain. She was intended to ram us in the bow. That would be unlikely to kill or maim many, or any, but it would create enough damage to force us into dock for repair. Perhaps many months of repair. And no ship could be fitted out to replace
Seraph
before the spring.' Aye, that had the hallmark of Venner: delay, play for time, wait for the king to change his mind or have it changed for him. 'The fire at Deptford—well, that truly was an accident. Fires in the dockyards happen all the time.'

Musk scoffed, but I sensed that the miserable Shish spoke true. Risking the destruction of Deptford dockyard, several king's ships and perhaps many lives too was not what Venner Garvey was about. I had lost count of the number of times I had heard my good-brother advocate a great expansion of the navy, but only if that navy was controlled by the great men of Parliament, to wit, himself, and not by those dangerous adherents to arbitrary government and popish sympathisers, Charles and James Stuart.

'Well, Shish,' I said, 'my good-brother's concern for the wellbeing of myself and every man on this ship is gratifying. But you have still to answer my question. Why, man?'

'He—he convinced me that it was for the cause of Parliament,' the carpenter said miserably. 'The cause for which my father fell at Edgehill, when I was but five.'

The same age I was when my own father fell at Naseby.

My answer was grim. 'Aye, no doubt. Sir Venner Garvey can be mightily plausible. But you're no fanatic, Shish. I can't see you risking your life just for the Good Old Cause. What did he offer you?'

The carpenter looked down to the deck and whispered, 'One hundred and fifty pounds. A third of it, I received before we sailed from Deptford. The remainder was to come to me upon my return to England.'

Negus whistled, and Kit said, 'Great God, sir, that's six year's wages for a ship-carpenter on a Fifth Rate!'

'Aye,' I said grimly, 'quite a mountain of gold.'

'And if I was found out,' Shish said, 'or died in the execution of my task, then my widow was to receive a pension of fifty pounds a year for life—ample to provide for our little Joseph—' At that, he broke down. 'Oh Susan—Susan, my love! How I have disgraced you—'

As Shish sobbed, I thought much upon the sixteenth Article of War. It gave a captain no discretion in such a case; why should it? What discretion was needed in a case of a man heinously encompassing the destruction of his own ship? What clearer betrayal of a sea-officer's trust could there be?

And yet.

I looked at Negus; I knew his opinion, right enough, although there was also something else in his eyes that I could not quite identify. I looked at Kit, and for all his sympathy with Shish's circumstances, he was too good an officer to question the Articles of War. I looked at Musk, and strangely, I knew exactly what he was thinking, too: it was along the lines of
Sweet mother of Christ, the young master is going to make an almighty fool of himself once again.

'Well, then,' I said, 'it seems that I must fly in the face of my officers and the law of the land.' Musk groaned, Negus frowned, Kit looked at me curiously, and Shish continued sobbing. 'By the terms of the sixteenth Article, the course of action is beyond doubt. However, the matter is complicated, of course, because a capital case such as this must be judged by a court-martial under the terms of the thirty-fourth Article, as I recall, and by that same article, we cannot convene a court-martial without a quorum of at least five captains. And, gentlemen, we stand no chance of assembling such a quorum until we meet again with Holmes or some other squadron of English ships.' Negus shrugged; this, at least, was an undeniable truth. The waters continued to lap around our hull, and in that dark and stinking place below the waterline, a court-martial seemed a very distant prospect indeed. 'Moreover,' I said, obfuscating and legalising after the fashion of my teacher in such affairs, Tristram Quinton, 'the matter is complicated further by my close relationship to the instigator of this entire business, Sir Venner Garvey. Therefore, I could not possibly sit on any such court due to conflict of interest—and by the same token, I cannot pass down even interim judgment upon Mister Shish in the meantime. By all the ancient laws and traditions of the sea, a captain cannot merely resign his powers temporarily to his lieutenant or any other officer in such a grave case—' Negus and Kit both looked perplexed, as well they might, for that particular 'ancient law and tradition of the sea' had been invented in that very moment by Captain Matthew Quinton—'and besides,' I said, 'we are several hundred miles up the Gambia river, gentlemen, and I certainly do not intend to proceed any further in such dangerous waters, nor to go back downstream again, without a competent carpenter aboard this ship.'

'Sir,' said Negus, gravely but urgently, 'surely you cannot intend to release this traitor—'

I knew I risked bringing down the wrath of a court-martial upon myself—perhaps even a capital sentence with it—but the more I thought upon it, the simple truth of my final pronouncement grew upon me. We needed a carpenter. We certainly needed a carpenter more urgently than we needed a point of law.
And what if—?

Oh, yes, I would not put that past him, by God! I recalled the way Venner Garvey played chess, and the most unlikely and ruthless sacrifices he was prepared to make to achieve his ends. Perhaps he had gambled all along that if his agent failed and was discovered, the captain and officers of the
Seraph
would abide exactly by the letter of the Articles of War that Venner himself had played a part in steering through Parliament—imprisoning or executing young Shish, thereby imperilling the mission through the absence of a capable carpenter.

This mission will not succeed.

Perhaps not, Venner; but if it does not, it will not be because of you.

'Mister Negus, Mister Farrell,' I said, 'I take full responsibility for this upon myself. I will at once write a letter to the King and the Lord Admiral, absolving all of you of blame in this matter, the letter to be sent to them if the need arises.' I had not ignored the possibility that my Lieutenant and Master would see this incident as proof of my incapacity, and relieve me of command under the terms of the self-same sixteenth Article of War, for betraying my trust; but I believed I knew them both better than that. 'Meanwhile,' I continued, 'I ask this of you. We five men, here in this place are the only ones who know what has happened in this case. All I ask is that none of you speaks a word of it to any other soul, at least until we are back at the river mouth. Mister Shish is a free man. He remains the carpenter of the
Seraph.
In public, we will treat him, and he will treat us, as if nothing has happened. Are we agreed?'