Kydd gulped. A quick glance back at Renzi and he had the barrel top lifting. There was no time to lose. His heart thudding, he climbed in and began lowering the top half over him.
“Tom – ” Renzi’s voice was hoarse, unnatural.
Kydd hesitated.
“I – I’m coming with you!”
Mind racing, Kydd crouched down – and immediately felt an opening in the end of the barrel. In the dimness he made out that the opening communicated with the rest of the ship aft in some way. On hands and knees he crawled through.
He looked back to see the figure of Renzi dropping in, and the barrel lid closing. It was now totally black.
Almost immediately there was a scrabble of sound outside as someone secured the strop, and then quiet. Whatever else, the minimum they could expect was a flogging for attempting to desert – Renzi was now as guilty as he.
Renzi must have found the opening too, for his elbows caught Kydd in the side.
“I really do beg your pardon,” he murmured, and wriggled aside.
Kydd felt a rise of panic as claustrophobia threatened. He could feel deep frames as they crossed and curved away upward, a flat decking pressed down close above. They must be at the very lowest point of the vessel, where the rise of the keel led to the transom and rudder pintle. There would be rats and cockroaches crawling unseen among them in the dark.
The smell was bad, but less so than Duke William’s nauseous depths. It was very close and stuffy and Kydd panted in anticipation of the air expiring.
“I must be demented! Utterly bereft of my senses!” came Renzi’s voice.
The motion was not helpful – the swash and hiss of waves above them was quite audible, and the little brig’s liveliness was unsettling after the battleship’s grand movements. Kydd lay full length, trying to relax. The jerk and wallow of the vessel was trying and he needed to brace himself against the hard beams. Time passed. He knew that they were still alongside from the irregular thumps as they bumped the bulbous sides of Duke William.
Muffled shouts penetrated. They were repeated, and knocks were heard, approaching from forward. Kydd guessed that a search was under way. The knocks came closer and he stopped breathing.
Kydd jumped at a vicious banging on their special cask. It stopped, but a shouted exchange then started. The words could not be made out but Kydd thought that he recognized Elkins’s voice. He cringed – there would be no mercy from Elkins.
More shouts, answered distantly. Elkins was not moving on – he was a valued member of the boarding party for pressing in merchant ships because he knew all the tricks. They were trapped. The shouts became impatient. The distant voice answered shortly – but with a final banging it was over. Not daring to move, Kydd lay waiting. There were more isolated shouts, but they were moving away. Soon they died away and the two of them were left alone. The impossible seemed to have happened – and when finally the unruly bumping settled into a steady surge his heart leaped. They were under way, bound for freedom, and his life as a seaman in a man-o’-war was over.
It was almost an anticlimax. Without a doubt, for the rest of his life he was a marked man. The desertion was now actual, and even though he had been in the Navy only a few months, his name would be in a book somewhere, and all the dire penalties would fall due if he was discovered. It was a miserable situation.
He had given no thought to what he would do now. He could not return home, which implied survival elsewhere, but where? In wartime there was little call for a wig-maker, and his newfound skills as a sailor could find employment now only in the merchant marine, and there he would be in constant fear of the press-gang and someone recognizing him.
He would have to go somewhere like the colonies. His loyal heart would not allow him to go to the infant United States and he had heard that the new settlements in Botany Bay were in grave difficulties – no place for a fugitive.
The enormity of what he had done pressed in. He remembered Bowyer’s face with its slow smile as he gently put Kydd right about some seafaring matter, and felt demeaned, dirty and criminal.
A double knock was followed by another, and the barrel top lifted. Thankfully they scrambled out. “Two of yez!” Finchett said, in mock astonishment. “Well, yer both come up on deck ’n’ take your last sightin’ o’ Duke William!”
Cautiously they looked out from the hatchway, Judith’s low bulwarks making it inadvisable to show themselves on deck.
A mile or so off, Duke William was heading away from them, leaning into the stiffening breeze. With her yards braced up sharp, the big threedecker looked a picture of careless strength. And with her she carried Kydd’s friends: Doggo, Dick Whaley – Ned Doud, of course, not forgetting Pinto and Wong. Kydd’s eyes pricked, and glistened. Renzi touched his arm, but he still stared over the sea to the old ship-of-the-line. He gazed after her until first her hull sank beneath the curve of the horizon, then her topsails, lit redly by the setting sun, and finally, almost too distant to see, her royals. Then the sea was empty.
They sat together on the foredeck of Judith – the skipper had insisted they work their passage, and in the morning sunshine they were set to work seaming a threadbare foresail.
The brig met the seas in exuberant fashion, for she sailed up the long blue swells and down the other side instead of arrogantly shouldering them aside. The occasional breakers served to discommode, bullying her off course unmercifully.
The lighter spars and rigging seemed toy-like after those of a man-o’war but the freeboard of only a few feet gave an exhilarating closeness to the rush and hiss of the sea.
“Tom, dear fellow,” said Renzi.
Kydd had been quiet and introspective since their desertion, but had been respectful and considerate in their exchanges.
“Tom, we must give thought to our future.” Renzi’s impulsive act had changed his own circumstances fatally. Now there was no question of seeing through the high-minded redemption he had undertaken: neither could he return to his family with his tail between his legs. In truth he had no idea what to do.
“Th’ colonies?” said Kydd, looking up with troubled eyes.
“A possibility.” Renzi’s half-brother was in Canada and after his infrequent return visits Renzi had no illusions about the raw, half-civilized frontier life of the new continent.
“A foreign land, then?”
Renzi hid a smile. He knew that Kydd, like others of his kind, had only the haziest notion of the outside world. “Again, a possibility,” he answered. “We must consider carefully, of course.” With half the world at war and revolutionary disaffection rampant in the other, it would be a deadly gamble to find which of them, old world or new, would prove a reliable hiding place.
He returned to his palm and needle. They had but a few more days to make a decision before landfall in England, and then it would have to be final. For the first time Renzi felt that events were slipping out of his control and his options were being extinguished, one by one.
CHAPTER 12
Well, me boyos, early tomorrer you sees old England agen – ain’t it prime?” Finchett’s announcement did not seem to cheer Kydd and Renzi and, perplexed, he left them to it. The pair moodily sat on the canvas-covered main hatch; there seemed no point in conversation.
Interrupting their introspection, from the masthead there was a sudden hail. “Sail hooo!”
A single vessel within hours of the English coast – there could be little doubt about its origins. The entire maritime trade of England passed up Channel this way, as did the ships of the Navy going about their business of war.
“Youse had better be ready to stow yerselves below agen.”