William Bentley knew that one day he would be a great sea officer. He knew, sitting hunched in the sternsheets of the cutter, cold and stiff, that if anything was spotted tonight, he would be the one to spot it. He did not know why, because Higgins, although loathsome, was wide awake and watching, and at least half the boat’s crew were good steady men with eyes like hawks. But know it he did.
He sat tensely, as he had sat for hours now, watching the rolling waves and the sparkling sky. Save for the occasional creaking of the stern oars, silence. Outside the boat, the splashing of the creaming seas, the low drone of the wind. Far away astern and to larboard a few small lights of Portsmouth. To starboard, on the island, nothing. Then Higgins, beside him, said quietly, ‘Well gone two bells. I doubt we’ll not see anything tonight.’
William ground his teeth in fury. What could one do with a man like that? My God, why did he not light a lantern and have done with it! The muscles of his cheeks ached with hatred. Hatred and the effort to reconcentrate his hearing.
But it was no good. He kept on hearing the voice, echoing and echoing. ‘Well gone two bells, mutter mutter; doubt anything tonight, mutter mutter.’ The night seemed full of muttering.
‘Pity we could not have invited Joel as well, for that matter,’ said Hardman. ‘He’s a hell of a fellow to have at a shindy.’
‘Hell of a drinker,’ grunted Broad, as his weather blade bit deeper into a sea than he expected. ‘Joel, my friend, is a demon when he has the brandy in him.’
‘Well gone two. Doubt anything tonight...’
William Bentley cursed the muttering, cursed Higgins, cursed everything. Then the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise.
‘Higgins!’ he hissed. ‘Give orders, sir! There’s a boat out there!’
‘His sister too,’ said Hardman. ‘A fine woman that. Damn the war, I say.’
‘The war may save your life then,’ Broad replied. ‘For Louise would eat you, friend Hardman. Bones and everything.’ Their laughter drifting over the water convinced Higgins, and probably saved William Bentley an unpleasant reward for his incautious mode of addressing the lieutenant. The seamen whirled on their thwarts, braced their feet, and carefully shipped their oars, already muffled in canvas at the rowlocks. Higgins withdrew his pistols from their oilskin covers and cocked them. William Bentley cleared a heavy cudgel. The boat needed to be rowed silently less than two hundred yards to be directly in the path of the wherry. He marvelled once more at his uncle’s brilliance. He had predicted the smugglers’ course past the island to exactitude.
What was more, the scoundrels were still too far out to even bother to look for trouble.
‘A fine French wife like Louise would be the making of me,’ Hardman was saying. ‘The English maids strike so dull when viewed—’
Apart from a few curses, these were the last words he ever uttered. A bullet pierced his throat when one of Higgins’ pistols went off in the heat of the struggle. Jesse Broad was knocked unconscious with the loom of an oar. Until the second the wherry struck it, they had no inkling that the cutter was there. It was neatly done.
As they pulled back to the Welfare, Bentley fumed. He was almost exploding with suppressed rage. A fine strong smuggling man lost. The primest of prime seamen, and fighters too. All thanks to that fool, that dolt, of a third lieutenant and his stupid pistols. He was enraged.
They cast the wherry adrift as being too light for naval use. In it they left the body of Hardman, tossing gently in his own thick blood. But the barrels of brandy went with them.
Four
Jesse Broad was put in irons when he was brought on board the Welfare. The boatswain, a bull of a man called Allgood, had noted Captain Swift’s observations on the state of the crew, and he knew a good addition to it when he saw one. Jesse Broad was powerful, impressive – and a seaman. He could also almost smell his own fireside from where they lay at anchor, and would run if given half a chance. Jack Allgood put him in irons.
Four hours later, two of the boatswain’s crew – he dubbed them mates, although only one was rated so – unshackled Jesse and led him to a large wooden washtub set up near the foremast. The day was cold and bright, much colder than the day before, the wind having backed to the east of south. It was blowing quite hard, and the Welfare snubbed uncomfortably at her great cable in the short lop. Broad looked towards Langstone, where he was shortly due to see his only son christened. The muscles in his neck worked. The home shore was as clear as a bright model, scoured by the clean wind. It seemed near enough to reach out and touch.
When the boatswain’s mates ordered him to strip he did not argue. For several years Broad had avoided the Navy, despite being as prime a target of the press as any man ashore, but he was not ignorant of the service. These boatswain’s mates were tough and brutal men. One carried a rope’s end of careful fancy-work, ending in a knuckly Turk’s-head the size of a chestnut. The other had a rattan cane that would lift the skin like wet paper. Behind them stood a gang of villainous sailors – landmen, rather; waisters and other scum. The washing party.
Jesse Broad was a little surprised by this. He was clearly to get the full treatment, as laid down on His Majesty’s receiving ships for pressed men. But as he was not on board a receiving ship, and as they knew he would make a fine seaman, he could only think they meant to humiliate him, to break his spirit. He knew the ship by reputation; what seafarer in these parts had not heard of savage Daniel Swift?
Still, it seemed an odd sort of way to win the obedience of a good hand.
Standing naked in the biting wind, staring levelly at the dribbling ‘barber’ who hacked at his hair with a pair of blunt shears, Broad heard a commotion, and saw a sight that explained the situation in part. He was not the only new arrival. There was to be a receiving party.
Thomas Fox, still ill, his head splitting from gin and misery, was pushed along the deck at arm’s length by a laughing bully with a handspike. If he faltered or stumbled, the long wooden bar was jabbed viciously into his smock where his kidneys would be. He yelped like a dog and sobbed like a child. Thomas did not see the coast of Hampshire or the Isle of Wight. He saw nothing. Just a spinning kaleidoscope of bright sky, green sea, strange sea things of deck, mast and cordage, flashes of laughing faces, brown and leering, cruel and taunting. He reached the foremast
in a rush, propelled by a sharp thrust from the handspike which brought him bang up against something soft and frightening. He opened his eyes, and looked at the strong pulsing throat of a naked man.
All sorts of strange notions flashed then through his brain. He was not in heaven, surely? This could not be an angel? In hell, perhaps? A naked man standing by a steaming tub, surrounded by wild-eyed devils in aprons.
The nearest devil, a gibbering thing with a crooked eye and a grin of unmitigated evil, was making passes over the head of the naked sinner with a pair of wicked-looking scissors.
He stared into the strong brown face of the naked sinner. It was kindly, and did not flinch from his hot gaze or panting breath.
‘Are we in hell?’ he whispered.
The eyes regarded him for some short time. The eyes crinkled, the lips moved in half a smile.