'Aye, Sandwich — she's th' receiving ship only,' Kydd answered. Too old for any other work, she acted as a floating prison for pressed men and others.
'Do you know then who's the captain of the sixty-four over there?' Cockburn asked.
'Director} No, Tarn, you tell me!'
'None else than your Cap'n "Breadfruit" Bligh, these five years avenged of his mutiny.' He paused impressively.
Kydd did not reply: in his eyes Bligh should have been better known for his great feat of seamanship in bringing his men through a heroic open-boat voyage without the loss of a single one. He turned abruptly and clattered down the ladder to the open boat-space on the upper-deck.
Sitting cross-legged on the fore-hatch gratings, a fiddler sawed away, his time being gaily marked by a capering ship's boy with a tambourine weaving in and out of the whirling pairs of sailors and their lasses. Some of the women wore ribbons, which the men took and threaded into their own jackets and hats.
Groups gathered near the fore-mast playing dice, perched on mess-tubs; others tried to read or write letters. The whole was a babble of conviviality and careless gaiety.
Kydd looked about: there was drink, mainly dark Kent beer but not hard spirits. So far there was no sign of real drunkenness - that would come later, no doubt. Groups of men, probably from other ships, were in snug conversation at mess tables further aft. Ship-visiting was a humane custom of the service and even if liberty ashore was stopped acquaintances with former shipmates could be pleasantly renewed.
But as he moved towards them, the talk stopped and the men turned towards him warily. 'Lofty.' He nodded to Webb, a carpenter's mate.
The man looked at him, then the others. 'Tom,' he said carefully.
'Nunky,' Kydd greeted an older able seaman.
There was the same caginess. 'Yes, mate?'
The seamen looked at him steadily. The visitors were clearly long-service and showed no emotion. Kydd shrugged and moved down the fore-hatchway to the gundeck, the lower of the two lines of guns, and to the screened-off areas for the married men along the sides of the deck between each pair of cannon. There was an air of an unexpected domesticity, ladies gossiping together on benches along the midline of the deck, brats scampering about. A dash of colour of a bunch of flowers and the swirl of dresses added an unreality to the familiar warlike nearness of the gundeck. Kydd answered the cheery hails of some with a wave, a doff of his hat to others, and passed aft, happy there would be no trouble there.
A final canvas screen stretched the whole width of the deck. Kydd lifted it and ducked beneath. In the way of sailors, girls they had taken up with in this port before became 'wives' again for their stay. But in deference to real wives they were not accorded the same status or privacies. In hammocks, under hastily borrowed sailcloth between the guns, the men consorted with their women, rough humour easing embarrassment
Kydd moved on, eyes steadily amidships, alert for the trouble that could easily flare in these circumstances. Then down the hatchway to the orlop — the lowest deck of all. In its secretive darkness anything might happen. He kept to the wings, a walkway round the periphery, hearing the grunts and cries from within the cable tiers. It was a harsh situation, but Kydd could see no alternative; he would not be one to judge.
On deck again he was passed a note by a signal messenger. 'Fr'm offa bumboat, Mr Kydd.'
It was addressed to the officer-of-the-watch. Kydd opened it. It was in an unpractised but firm round hand:
Dere Sir,
I humblie pray thet yuo will bee so kind as too allow my dere bruther, Edward Malkin, be set ashor on libbertie. Whyle he was at see, his muther dyed an I must aqaynt him of itt. Iff yuo find it in jor harte to lett him on shoar to the atached adress he will sware to repare back on bord tomorow afor cok-crow.
Yor servent, sir
Kitty Malkin Queen Street Sheerness
Kydd's heart sank. There had not been so many deaths on Achilles's commission, but Ned Malkin's had been one, a lonely end somewhere in the night after a fall from a yardarm into an uncaring sea. His pay had stopped from that hour; Kydd hoped that the family were not dependent on it.
The captain had not yet returned with the admiral's sanction to shore-leave, and no one could go ashore, except on ship's business.
He stared across the grey sea to the ugly sprawl of Sheerness at the tip of the island. The least he could do while he was delivering the dockyard demand was call and gently extinguish false hopes. As he gazed at the land he imagined a forlorn soul looking out across the stretch of water, silendy rehearsing the words of grief she would have to impart.
Folding the paper and sliding it into his coat, he said, 'Tarn, you have th' ship. L'tenant Binney is in the wardroom. I'm takin' a boat to the dockyard.'
As he watched the modest ramparts of the garrison fort rise above grey mud-flats, the low marshy land stretching away on Sheppey island as well as across the other side of the Medway, the isolation of the place settled about Kydd. Even when they rounded the point and opened up a view into the dockyard, the bleakness of Sheerness affected his spirits.
The dockyard itself was concentrated at the Thames-ward tip of Sheppey, the usual features easily apparent — a ship under construction on the stocks, a cluster of hulks further along and countless smoky buildings of all sizes and shapes. An indistinct clamour of activity drifted across the water as the cutter went about and headed in to a mud-dock.
The last of the tide had left the stone steps slippery with weed, and Kydd stepped carefully ashore, finding himself to one side of a building slip. His experience in a Caribbean dockyard did not include new ships and he looked up at the towering ribbed skeleton with interest.
Direcdy ahead, across the dusty road, were the dockyard offices. These had seen many a naval demand and Kydd was dealt with quickly. He was soon out again in the scent of fresh-planed timber and smithy fumes.
He gathered his thoughts. The dockyard was not big: he would find where the Malkin family lived fairly quickly, then get it over with. While still in the boat he had seen a sizeable huddle of houses just outside the gates, and guessed that this would be where most lived.
It was not far — between the saw-pits and clangour of the smith's workshop, past more graving docks, one holding a small frigate with cruel wounds of war, and then to the ordnance building with its gun-wharf adjacent. Finally there was the extensive mast pond and, out from it, half a dozen sizeable hulks close to each other.
The gates of the dockyard were manned by sentries, but they merely looked at him with a bored expression. A master's mate would never be asked for a liberty ticket. 'D' ye know where I c'n find Queen Street?' he asked.
One man scratched his jaw. 'Doan think I know that 'un,' he said, after a pause. 'This 'ere is Blue Town, yer knows,' he said, gesturing to the mean streets and ramshackle dwellings that crowded close after the drab burial ground. 'Ye c'n get anythin' yer wants there,' he said, eyeing Kydd curiously.
Kydd started off down the rutted street, which passed along the boundary of the garrison. A crazy web of litde alleys intersected it and a stench of sewerage and decay was on the air. Blue Town was not the kind of area to be graced with street signs. The barefooted urchins were no help, and his shoes spattered mud over his coat. As the settlement thinned into marshland Kydd saw the road wind away across the marshes into a scatter of far-off buildings he assumed was Sheerness town.