The deck beneath him began to vibrate. It pushed upwards urgently. The Welfare began to rise, to fight back. Before he fully knew it, the water around his head had become less solid. His lungs sucked in a vast gout of air and spray combined. He coughed and spluttered. Then his shoulders were clear, and rapidly the water rushed past him, across the planking and over the sides. The weed-draped forefoot appeared, as the Welfare lifted herself high before beginning the next plunge.
Mr Allgood, streaming like a fountain, smiled at him. ‘That was a bitch of a sea, eh my buck!’ he said gaily.
‘The seventh son of the seventh son!’ He laughed at Thomas’s blank look, then said to himself, in a lower tone: ‘And where’s our fine young gent, I wonder?’
William Bentley emerged just then from the lee scuppers. He was white about the face, except for his mouth, where bright blood streamed from a torn lip.
‘Ah,’ breathed Allgood. There was a strange note in his voice. But the hairy face was as bland as ever.
As Bentley limped up to them, the boatswain said stiffly: ‘Sorry about your accident, Mr Bentley, sir. I should have sung out earlier.’
The midshipman was shaking; not much, but visibly. ‘You are wasting time, boatswain,’ he said. Despite himself his voice was gaspy. Thomas looked at the deck, at the storm headsails, anywhere except at his face. He was beginning to work things out.
‘Get that dog to his task immediately. I shall have an eye upon you.’
He turned on his heel and walked to the weather rail.
Then he began to work his way aft.
It did not occur to Thomas immediately, exactly what Bentley’s last remark had meant. He took in the scene on the deck, where several knots of men were trying to secure everything that had broken free before another big sea swept her. On the quarterdeck stood a few officers, in streaming tarpaulin. Behind them, the wastes of the Channel, bleak and lonely.
He was shivering with cold. He could not be wetter.
He had been covered way over his head in water. The keen wind pressed the wet cloth to his thin body. His teeth began to chatter. He turned his eyes to Mr Allgood, fear growing in his stomach. The midshipman had spoken of his task. There was a cold light in Allgood’s eyes.
‘No,’ muttered Thomas. ‘Oh no. Sir, I could not.’ Allgood let go of his shoulder.
‘You heard the young gentleman,’ he said. ‘Get about your business before you regret it sorely.’
The heads could not need cleaning in this weather, he thought. They were being constantly washed by these waves. And no one could use them.
‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘Please sir. I cannot.’
A new, hard note came into the boatswain’s voice. ‘Get down there, boy, before I take a cane to you. God damn it, do you dare to defy orders!’
Thomas Fox could not raise his eyes from the deck, although he saw nothing.
‘Oh please sir,’ he said.
At last, with lifeline and a stiff broom, he found himself in the beakhead gallery. He was not sure how he came to be there. He knew the boatswain had lifted him, had knotted a rope about his waist. His fingers were almost too nerveless to hold the rail, let alone the broom. His head swam. Each time the gallery dipped and the sea rushed up towards him he went rigid with shock. The memory of that monstrous wave that had engulfed him was unbearable.
His bewilderment over Mr Allgood was complete. He was a mighty man, in physique and in power on the ship. He had saved Thomas, and yet he put him to this agony. Even now he stood above him, roaring occasionally when Thomas went numb, and striking out with the free end of the lifeline which he held. Thomas felt nothing except the crashing rise and fall of the bow, saw nothing except the green seas that turned to raging foam as the ship ploughed into them. He moved the broom this way and that as if he was in a dream. The agony was never-ending.
When the boatswain at last told him to come back inboard, Thomas was not able to. His legs were too weak for climbing, and his fingers could not grip. He looked at the grating beneath his feet, watched the foaming stempost, his head hanging.
‘Look at me, boy!’ roared Allgood. But he could not raise his head. In the end the boatswain hauled him onto the foredeck as if he had been a parcel. Thomas half walked, half crawled to a hatchway, blindly. If another big sea had raked the deck he would surely have been washed away.
He fell through the hatch and lay on the deck below. Peter found him, and got him to their mess.
Fourteen
The reason no more big seas came a board, although Thomas did not know it, was because the weather was moderating. It was also hauling back to the east. When dawn had broken, Broad was way aloft, sent there with other keen-eyed men to search for the Frenchman. The seas were empty. In every direction there was nothing but rolling water, white-capped and angry, and torn, lowering cloud. They had given her the slip.
Jesse Broad did not have long enough to decide if he regretted it or not. For by the time of full daylight, another hazard was seen by the highest man on the mainmast. After he had sung out, the other men in the rigging strained their eyes for signs of land. A few minutes later Jesse could see the faint line of breakers.
A great pain seized him. All chances of being weather-bound had gone. The French frigate that he had hoped might force them to make port for repairs had vanished in the night. He stared until his eyes ached. The coastline of England. And now the Welfare would claw off of it. He wondered if he would ever see that shore again.
Shortly after the sighting, all the lookouts were called down to normal duties, save the highest. Given the small number of skilful men he had, Swift’s way was to make them work on sundry tasks, not necessarily in their normal parts of ship. So Broad, nominally a mainmast topman, was not spared other work as well, even on other masts. It was a killing system. The duty now was to put the ship about, to turn her away from those hungry breakers and steer her out into the Channel. Jesse and the other men raced each other to the deck, where the boatswain’s mates waited with their rope’s ends and rattans, the officers hunched like vultures on the quarterdeck, and the midshipmen strutted like vicious guinea-fowl, ready to pounce and tyrannise for any reason or none.
The Welfare was still carrying the close-reefed topsails and storm headsails she had worn throughout the night. But handling them was even harder if anything, now that another day had broken. More men were down sick, no one had eaten a hot meal since God knew when, and very few had slept. The exhausted sailors stumbled to sheets and braces like donkeys; hands were clumsy, and easily torn through long immersion in sea-water. Broad’s head was splitting as he did his share of the work. His brain was numb and his limbs seemed all to hurt.
As he crossed from one set of running rigging to another, he staggered against Matthews, head bent into his weather-proofed coat, his face almost hidden in an oiled hat. Matthews gave him a sort of smile.
‘Glad you signed to serve the King, Mr Smuggler?’ he said sardonically.
Broad smiled back.
‘As glad as I guess you are to be handling hemp instead of giving orders,’ he replied. They passed on to their respective positions.
Huddled under the shelter of the weather bulwarks later, Broad remembered storms at sea when he’d been running cargoes with Joel Gauthier of the Beauregard, a great man for dirty weather. But this was different. He could not remember ever being so weary, so hungry, so cold. As for the end of it – well, in his old trade, the end was always just over the horizon. As an able seaman in His Majesty’s Navy, what end could he ever hope for?