I took the long glass from my eye and wiped away the sweat it had created. “If it’s luck, I don’t see it. That thing is impregnable.”
“Look astern,” Cork softly commanded.
Again the magnification. There were two British naval officers apparently talking to a Hessian officer of Grenadiers. The sun glittered off the brass plate of the Dutchman’s turnback cap.
“You conjectured Hessian guards back on Long Island. But the guards on duty are British!”
“A mixed complement, and that’s good luck. Obviously the Hessians have the night watch, and they probably resent it. Moody sentries are rarely alert, and they avoid the diseased corpses stored on deck for the next day’s burial ashore. Don’t look aghast, Oaks. Number Seven has observed the hulk’s routine. The prisoners are shut below at dusk and allowed on deck at dawn. We will swim over tonight and slip aboard on the aft mooring chains.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll know when we get there. Better start rending our clothes so we can mingle with the prisoners unnoticed.”
The last was not difficult to accomplish, since our ordinary seaman’s slops were as ragged and filthy as if they had originally been issued aboard Noah’s ark. But the first part — “We’ll know when we get there” — filled my belly with dread.
“Do you know whom we are looking for once we get aboard, Captain?”
“One of two agents. One named Willis Aymes is the primary, or Edward Thatch, his backup.”
“Each carries one of the two words, no doubt.”
“No,” Cork said, training the long glass back on the Jersey, “both-carry the message. One is for safety, lest something happen to the other.”
I now knew my real purpose for being there and I nearly cried with pride. I was Cork’s backup on this mission of missions!
“Are they known to you by sight, Captain?”
“No, but either one should not be hard to find. Number Seven knows for sure that Willis Aymes is aboard; he couldn’t verify Thatch on the Provost’s list, but the records the British keep can’t match yours, old son.”
Now how Number 7 ever got to look at the Provost’s list is a mystery to me, but I could see where some of that five pounds had gone. We slept.
It was six bells in the mid-watch and, from our eerie hiding place among the unshrouded corpses on the Jersey’s middecks, I could hear the hulk fleet sound the hour up and down the channel in a ghostly echo. Three o’clock, I thought, and only an hour or so before dawn, thank Jehovah! Cork had been correct about the Hessian’s laxity, and we came up the after chains easily and found, indeed, that death was a daily occurrence on this hulk. There were at least ten bodies laid in a clump, and we lay among them and waited.
Somewhere forward, the young guards were fruitlessly trying to teach a parrot what were obviously German obscenities and, after an hour of failure, they fell back on guttural English swear words for their amusement — to no avail, because I could hardly understand them, never mind the parrot. Nevertheless, when they gave up in disgust, saying, “Das Schwartzbart ist ein dummkopf,” I wished they had stayed with it; it distracted me from my horrible surroundings.
I felt a nudge in my side and Cork’s huge hand literally dragged me to the starboard side of the ship. In the dark I heard him rustle a tarpaulin, and then I was rolled under it with him behind me. It was stifling and I started to whisper my discomfort, but stopped. Of course! He had surveyed this hiding place during the day through the long glass, but to have used it for several hours on coming aboard would have suffocated us in the oppressive heat. But now the dawn was almost upon us and we had to take cover.
From the swelter of our lair, my ears greeted a multitude of sounds — the sounds of a war-day. First, the slap-slap of oar looms of the burial boat and the muffled voices of the graves detail taking off the dead. Eight bells chimed through my brain and then, from the shore, the heroic drum ruffle of reveille with sentries relieved of challenge and boyish fright. Our canvas covering was now hot as a stovelid. New sounds — the drums ashore beating troop assembly with its quarter-time tempo which the soldiers call the Ladies’ Parade. The Jersey was abustle with movement as if this old whore was about to tremble herself into some futile modicum of respectability. The Hessian guards’ guttural was replaced by Kentish English and at last the rattle of the lug chains over the prisoner hatches running free.
“Now,” Cork whispered, and we rolled out into the glare of sunshine. I’m not a Papist, but if there is such a thing as purgatory it was there before my eyes. Like ravenous, red-eyed dogs, the wretched, ragged men burst upon feed pots of oatmeal thick as paste and devoid of human acceptance. Yet they shoved and fought to dip their bowls into it.
“Look alive now,” Cork said, nudging me into reality. “My name is Connor. You’re Treford, taken off the prize Gloria. Follow my trail.”
What else have I been doing these many years? I did again, to the larboard rail where the men were feeding.
“ ’Morn to ya,” Cork said to a man standing alone, finger-scooping porridge into a mouth lacking front teeth. He was possibly the ugliest creature I have ever seen — shortish, with cruel grey eyes set into a completely bald head, with deep scars embedded in his cheeks and massive forearms. He looked like an abused tavern fireplace — solid, sooty, and scarred by over-use.
“Who the hell’s you?” he asked between fingerfuls.
“Connor, off’n the Gloria, taken two months back. Came over from Falmouth yonder after the belly gripes like my mate ere, Treford.” Cork forgets nothing. The Gloria privateer was taken off the Carolinas. I kneaded my brain. There were men named Connor and Treford on its manifest.
“Must be mighty hearty to survive hospital,” the fireplace said warily. “Mine’s Bunch Booth, Master at Arms in Angel until two weeks aback.”
He did not extend a hand, and thank God, for I would have had to accept that filthy, porridge-dripping paw, which looked more like a vise than a hand. He was well suited to a Master-at-Arms berth. How well the abused know how to abuse.
“Angel, eh?” Cork said in slovenly dialect. “Say, I had a few mates in ’er. Name o’ Aymes and Thatch. Sure like see ’em oncet more on earth.”
“Well, if it’s Aymes y’ seek, best take a spade,” said the brute, pointing to shore. “Died two nights ago. Now, Thatch—” he cocked his cloudy eye “—there’s no Thatch in Angel and that’s a certainty. Say, you fellows look mighty too healthy fer comin’ off a hospital hulk.”
“You don’t look too peaky yourself.”
A toothless grin came forward. “Twenty-five year afloat. Hell, I lived on maggot pork and biscuits that’d crack a rat’s teeth since I could walk. Aymes was a good hand in Angel, good foretopman.”
“Too bad he didn’t get shipped over to Falmouth,” Cork said.
“Would have been a waste — ’e was stabbed — run through like a sand shark in the night.”