There would be evil today right enough: it was not possible to inspect a King’s ship, no matter how diligent its lieutenant, without finding something amiss. All he could hope for when he made his first rounds was that the faults could be righted by sweat rather than blood, and from within the ship’s own resources. His old friend the commissioner at Gibraltar had told him he believed Rupert to be well found, but he would only know for certain when he had seen for himself.
At eight o’clock Peto came on to the quarterdeck. For three hours the idlers and larboard watch had been holystoning the decks and swilling the dirty sand into the waterways and scuppers. The swabbers had flogged the decks until they were dry, and the trusted hands had brightened the brasswork about the rails and bitts. And when the sanding, holystoning, swabbing and polishing was done, other hands had flemished down the ropes and stowed the washdeck gear, so that by seven o’clock the work had been practically finished. When Lieutenant Lambe came back on deck after his morning shave he had professed himself pleased with things – as well he might, for this was but the day’s routine (every day barring Sunday), although the boatswain’s mates had known full well that a keener eye would be cast on their charges on this morning. At half past he had sent the mates below to pipe ‘All hands. Up hammocks’, and the entire crew – sleepers as well as watch – had scurried with their lashed-up bedding to the upper-deck nettings, where the quartermasters and midshipmen supervised the stowing, after which Lambe had been able to dismiss them to breakfast.
‘Good morning, sir,’ he said brightly, touching his hat. ‘Seven knots at present, five in the night.’
Peto nodded. It was a morning exactly as the evening’s red light had promised – the shepherd’s delight, but the sailor’s even more so. He loved Norfolk as loyally as any man (his father, and his father before him, had been born next-the-sea) but the fairest day in Nelson’s county could not compare with such a morning at sea, the sun on his face, the wind filling the sail, and the air as pure as the water of the Arethusa spring. He glanced at the rate-of-sailing board: a following wind and twenty miles during the middle watch (the calculation was simple enough). ‘Thank you, Mr Lambe. Have the master set royals and t’gallants when I am finished my inspection, if the wind does not freshen by much. We ought to be making nine knots while the sea is favourable.’
‘Ay-ay, sir.’
‘Have you had your breakfast?’
‘I have, sir.’
‘Do you have any objection to a little more?’
Lambe looked faintly bemused. ‘By no means, sir.’
Peto turned to his steward, who had come on deck with a coffee pot and cups. ‘Would you bring us a plate apiece of the ship’s burgoo?’
Flowerdew poured them coffee and then shuffled off in the stooping gait he adopted when asked to do something he found contrary to his own ideas of what was proper (or expedient).
‘Is that Mr Pelham I observe on the poop?’
‘It is, sir. He stood the middle watch, and came back on deck as soon as it was light enough to signal to Archer.’
‘Call him, if you will.’
Lambe beckoned the midshipman, who sped down the companion ladder as if the drummer were beating to quarters.
‘Sir!’ he squeaked, a discernibly new telescope peeping from beneath his cloak.
Peto returned the salute. ‘Mr Lambe informs me that you sustained an injury yesterday. Have you yet reported to the surgeon?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘I did not consider it serious enough, sir.’
‘Indeed? Have you some medical qualification?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then kindly give yourself the benefit of the surgeon’s, else how am I to rely upon what you see through that telescope of yours . . . It is a new telescope, is it not?’
‘It is, sir. I bought it of Mr Adams.’
Peto wondered what Adams – whoever he was (another midshipman, he supposed) – would make do with instead, but that was not his direct concern; he could leave the discipline of the midshipmen to Lambe. ‘Very well. Help yourself to coffee, Mr Pelham,’ he said, and with a measure of warmth, indicating the tray which Flowerdew had placed on the gallery locker.
‘Thank you, sir,’ replied the midshipman, fairly taken aback.
Lambe smiled to himself. He had fair roasted Pelham after the business of the parallax, and was himself thinking of some magnanimous gesture. This more than saved him the effort.
‘How old are you, Mr Pelham?’
‘Seventeen come next month, sir.’
‘And where are you from; where do your people live?’
‘I was born in Plymouth, sir. My father was captain of Repulse. He is dead now, sir; my mother also.’
Peto rather wished he had not asked. He was sentimental enough to believe a man must have a home to return to. And even though his own parents were now gone, he had the prospect of a warm heart and hearth. A smile almost overcame him, indeed, at the thought of Miss Elizabeth Hervey – Lady Peto – in the hall of that handsome Norfolk manor, advancing smiling to greet him on his return from some commission or other . . . He cleared his throat. ‘I am sorry to hear it, Mr Pelham. I did not know your father, though I know Repulse to have had a fine reputation in her day.’
‘He was killed off New Orleans, sir.’
Peto now dimly recalled the loss of the ship in that wretched and unnecessary campaign: Mr Midshipman Pelham had been semi-orphaned a long time . . . ‘And your mother?’
‘She died as I was born, sir. I was brought up by an aunt until such time as I could go to sea.’
A full orphan – Peto almost groaned; he ought to have expected it.
‘Mr Pelham was a volunteer at twelve, sir, on my last ship,’ said Lambe.
It told Peto a good deal about them both. ‘Then I trust you shall pass for lieutenant quickly, Mr Pelham. There is no time to lose even in these days of peace.’
‘I intend doing so, sir.’
Peto nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good. Capital, capital . . . And I would that you dine with me and Mr Lambe this evening.’
Pelham’s boyish but handsome face lit up like a signal lamp. ‘Thank you kindly, sir.’
Flowerdew returned with two bowls of oat gruel. Peto took a spoonful, as gingerly as he felt he might in such company, and tasted the crew’s breakfast.
Perhaps his memory – or his palate – played tricks on him, for he found it not nearly as repulsive as usual. In the East Indies, his former station, they had had a very decent porridge of corn and cinnamon, but the oatmeal cakes which the Victualling Board supplied were rough rations indeed, and boiled up in the galley copper, with water a month or more in the hold, the gruel was better fit for the sty under the forecastle. The Board held it to be a necessary corrective to the otherwise constipating ship’s diet, but the majority of men, Peto recalled, thought it a far better emetic.
Lambe saw his surprise. ‘We have an active purser. He sent back a good deal of the provender first offered.’
Peto nodded appreciatively. Time was when a captain appointed his own man, or rather put forward his clerk’s name to the Admiralty, but of late there had been a fashion to place experience in the position, for too often the purser had been in truck with the merchants who supplied the ship (and, shame to relate, in truck with the captain as well). ‘And real coffee to be had, you say, Mr Lambe? Remarkable.’ The old ‘Scotch coffee’ of the mess decks had been a foul brew, burnt biscuit boiled up to a black paste in rank water, and sugared until it could hold no more. ‘I shall expect to see contented faces and good constitutions at my inspection.’