There was, between them and the quarterdeck, a group of men who had left the fighting. They were standing about as if in a daze, gazing about at the littered corpses and wounded. Some held bloody cutlasses drooping in their hands. One or two were weeping. As the Welfare lurched, and another thunderous beating of canvas came from aloft, Mr Allgood emerged from the group. His face was covered in blood, and one arm hung limp beside him. He stared aloft, then shook his head. Matthews hailed him.
‘Ahoy! Mr Allgood! Here by the cutter! Quick man!’
The boatswain shook his bull head again, and began to walk towards them. He seemed drawn by the note of authority in Matthews’ voice. Broad himself was startled by it.
‘Here, man,’ said Matthews, when Allgood arrived. ‘We have got to get this ship under control. She will beat herself to pieces else.’
The huge warrant officer stared unseeingly. He blinked red-rimmed eyes. His face was livid and bloody. He looked beaten, hurt.
‘Oh God,’ he said at last. ‘Oh God, what have I done? Oh God, the shame of it.’
There was a rending explosion from aloft as a topsail split.
‘For God’s sake, man!’ snapped Matthews. ‘Pull yourself together!’
But Allgood mumbled on.
‘I started it,’ he said. ‘The boatswain, me, Jack Allgood. To raise a hand against an officer. To start a mutiny in His Majesty’s Navy. Oh God.’
Broad felt a flash of anger.
‘You started nothing, Mister,’ he said. ‘Have you forgot the boy so quick? Have you forgot what Swift did to that boy? You are dazed, you have been hit. Remember Thomas, that is all!’
The eyes cleared a little.
‘Ah, true,’ he said. ‘Most true. The man is a villain, double-dyed. But to mutiny, Jesse Broad, to raise a hand against an officer of the King…’
Matthews spoke now much like an officer. His lean face had hardened. His great jaw jutted with determination.
‘Your feelings do you credit, Allgood. But consider this: although the deed is done now, we can yet save something from it. We can save the Welfare for a start. And next we can stop the bloodbath. But Christ, we must be quick!’
As if to prove him right, the ship staggered to a big grey sea. She was falling off fast, lying almost in the troughs, and the wave broke right over her side and rushed across the waist. The broken bodies of men and boys were lifted and moved along like sodden logs. At the same time, there was a splintering crash from aloft as a spar carried away.
Allgood stared at Matthews.
‘We will be hanged,’ he said. ‘It is too late to change sides now, my friend. We will be hanged.’
‘For God’s sake!’ shouted Matthews. ‘Just get to work, damn you, get to work. You will not be hanged, depend on me. Nor will you change sides. But get to work, before you drown yourself and all the lot of us.’
The boatswain made his decision. He turned about, strode to the men in the waist, and began yelling orders at them. At first they seemed disinclined to move, but he laid about him with the flat of a cutlass, and they began to jump. Matthews looked at Broad with half a smile.
‘He’ll save the ship, all right,’ he said. ‘Now let us go and save the owner.’ He paused, and the smile deepened. ‘The ex-owner,’ he added, simply.
On their way aft they found muskets that had not been fired in the chaos. Broad went up the lee shrouds of the mizzen a few yards, and Matthews up the weather. They positioned themselves firmly in the rigging, and trained their weapons on the struggling men below.
Jesse was sickened by the carnage he saw. The captain, startlingly visible in his fine and gaudy clothes, was fighting like a demon, the centre of energy of a fair-sized group of men. All around the edges of this group there was a low wall of dead and wounded. Around that wall again, on the outside, was a ring of mutineers. The centre of their energy was the monstrous figure of Henry Joyce. He still held the marine officer’s light sword in his left hand, broken off six inches from the point. But in his right was the weapon most suited to him; a great curved cutlass that he wielded like a toy.
They were not making much noise any more; the fight had been a long, exhausting one. Matthews’ voice, a voice of brass, caused a dozen heads to lift.
‘Ahoy!’ he roared. ‘Ahoy below! You will put up your weapons this instant. The mutiny is over. We have won!’
The fighting faltered. But Captain Swift was not impressed, nor was Henry Joyce.
The captain shouted: ‘To hell with you! Come, my brave lads, fight on!’
And Joyce, like a refrain, roared: ‘Kill the bastards, kill the bastards, kill!’
Some of the impetus was gone, however. Men on the fringes backed off. Matthews shouted, ‘We have a musket trained upon you, Captain Swift. Surrender with your men or you must surely die. Surrender.’
More and more men drew back. The clash of blades grew less.
‘And you, Henry Joyce!’ said Matthews. ‘We have you covered. Call off your party or we will shoot.’
Joyce turned up his weird bald head in fury.
‘Are you traitors, you bastards? For I’ll die fighting till I’ve spilled his murderous blood!’
The sounds of steel had almost died. The panting circles looked at each other, and the men aloft.
‘Not traitors, Henry, but not butchers neither. And are you? And are all your men? We have won, we have brought the villain low. Shall we now behave like him? Shall we now be as black as that black devil?’
The argument won through to many of the men. Joyce’s heavy-bearded face looked aloft, then round the outer ring of tired mutineers. Blood from his upraised cutlass coursed backwards, dripping from the guard. He grunted.
Captain Swift, his pale eyes gleaming, seized the chance.
‘Good man!’ he cried. ‘Good man! By God, whatever your name is, and you too, Broad, you’ll not regret this work! I’ll shower guineas on you till your pockets groan. When these scum swing, you’ll stand beside me in full honour. Your fortunes are made, lads, depend on it. I will see you rich as Croesus!’
Broad’s eyes, sighting down the barrel of his musket at the captain’s handsome head, raised themselves in horror to the figure of his companion in the weather shrouds. He was deeply disturbed by the captain’s words. Henry Joyce gave an animal roar of anger. Spittle sprayed from his lips as he barked his hatred.
‘So, you filthy bastard, Matthews! You’d be bribed, would you? You’d sell your shipmates to this demon, would you? Well damn you then, but I’ll die fighting, anyway!’
‘Do not heed him, Matthews!’ cried Swift. ‘He is a mutineer and murderer. All will swing, all! But you will be a rich man, that I promise you!’
The two camps squared up once more, and Broad still stared at Matthews. Before the factions could come to blows, however, the brazen voice of his companion stilled their arms.
‘I do not want your riches, Captain Swift, nor yet your filthy blood. You may offer me all the world, but I will see you in hell before I take it. Likewise you, Joyce. You will die by my hand, I promise you, if you scratch but one more fellow’s skin. This filthy bloodshed’s over. It is over! Now put up, put up! Another word, Swift, and you die!’
For some minutes, below decks in his alcove, William Bentley had known that it was time to move. The uncontrolled, dangerous motion of the Welfare had been arrested. She had fought and lunged and shivered for a great age, her timbers shrieking with the unaccustomed strains. Now she had settled down. She rolled and swooped, but in a normal, patterned way, under command and sailing. The noises, too, had died. No more men had plundered and shouted in the captain’s cabin or the officers’. Below decks she was bereft of voices, strangely empty of her teeming men.
He did not know what to do, but he knew he must do something. It appeared to him most unlikely that the mutineers had failed, most unlikely that he would find his uncle living, or indeed any of the officers. He had a damned fair idea of Plumduff’s fate, and of his own if he appeared among the glorying crew and was taken. But he knew he had to act.
In the long time of silence behind the heavy curtain, in the long minutes after all frantic noise had ceased, he had tried hard to make a decision about right and wrong. He had a vision of monstrosity concerning Thomas Fox that almost choked him; he had a distaste for his uncle’s excesses of conduct that amounted to physical horror, that made his muscles crack with tension and his flesh crawl. And yet – and yet… Mutiny. Ah Christ, no, it was impossible. And gunfire, and Plumduff, and such filthy mindless beasts as Henry Joyce.
He made the climax of revulsion and confusion project him from the alcove. The pistols were ready, heavy and reassuring in his hands. He moved swiftly and quietly to the door of the cabin, which was swinging open, and looked forward along the dark and silent deck. He took a step, then stopped. If he went forward, if he reached the upper deck from that direction, he could only be taken, it was inevitable. He must try for surprise.
As William turned to go back into the captain’s cabin, there was a movement in the dimness before him. He froze, his eyes glaring at the dark shadows around the hatchway to the deck below. He pressed himself behind the door, one long pistol hanging ready by his side to be jerked up and fired. He waited.
There was an odd sighing noise as the shadow moved again. A sighing and a shuffling. It was a man, climbing from the lower deck. He was breathing noisily, almost panting, with the queer sighs intermixed. If no one challenges this noisy item, thought William, at least it will prove the place is empty. He waited, impatient and afraid.
As the figure crawled into a lighter patch, he came near to gasping. The object had on a wig, and a pair of bent-wire spectacles, and was drunk, dead drunk. On an impulse, he went up to the crouching figure and spoke; it was worth a try.
‘Mr Marner,’ he hissed. ‘Mr Marner it is I, Will Bentley. Pull yourself together man, and quickly. I need your help.’
He supposed that Marner had been skulking below all the time, had missed it all, rolled in his blankets, and had been missed in his turn by the wandering mutineers. He jerked at the old schoolmaster’s shoulder none too gently.
‘Get up, damn you, and listen. We will find you an arm. This ship has fallen to a mutiny, Mr Marner, and we are the only men left free. Do you hear me, sir, do you hear me? You are a gentleman, God help us, and you will aid me in this. Do you understand?’
The filthy, drunk old man was on his hands and knees.
Very slowly, he pushed his trunk upwards until only his knuckles were on the deck. His face was pale beneath its sheen of dirt. He was dribbling a little, trying to form a smile.
‘Mr Bentley,’ he mumbled, and his voice was slurred. ‘If you care to go below, sir, to our quarters, you will find your little friend. Little Jimmy Finch, sir, little Jimmy Finch, God rest his soul. They stuck him, sir, like a little squealing pig, from the arsehole to the crown. He is dead. Oh very, very dead.’
Mr Marner dropped forward on his hands again, and let out a drunken cackle.
‘And I hope,’ he said, when he had got his breath, ‘I hope, oh how I hope, that when they catch you, sir, they’ll do the same to you.’
He slowly sank, as his elbow strength gave way. He was old, and stinking, and unsavoury. William Bentley regarded him through tears. He pulled a sleeve roughly across his blinded eyes, and dashed aft through the captain’s cabin.