H. M. S. Cockerel, page 6
“Finest in Europe,” opined several together.
“ . . . sitting on their hands nigh on a whole year,” continued the speaker, “feared of a tagrag-and-bobtail horde o’ Frog peasants—led by former corporals, so pray you—’stead o’ kickin’ their arses out o’ their territories a week after the invasion.”
“We should have declared when France took Antwerp,” another anonymous strategist declared strongly. “Why, we might as well give up the Continental, and the Baltic trade, else. What’s next on the Frogs’ menu? Amsterdam . . . Copenhaven . . . Hamburg?”
Finally a commodore, fresh from the seat of power in the Board Room, came down the stairs, and was almost mobbed for information. He held up a hand to silence their fervent queries.
“The true facts which obtain, sirs . . .” he announced solemnly. “Very early this morning, His Majesty’s Brig o’ War Childers, standing off-and-on without the harbour of Brest, was fired upon by French batteries. Word has reached us by the semaphore towers that she was struck several times by heavy round-shot. Childers will come in, to display her damage, and the French round-shot . . . in her timbers, and upon her decks.”
“But, are we at war, sir?” several officers demanded.
“Better you should ask of Lord Dundas, or Lord Grenville, for that, sirs,” the commodore rejoined, snippish at their lack of deference to a senior officer, and their lack of decorum. “The Secretaries of State, and the Foreign Office . . . our Sovereign and Parliament, will best answer.” The commodore glared them to silence, harrumphed a last broadside of displeasure, settled his waistcoat, and stalked away to gather his things.
“It’s come!” Alan Lewrie muttered to himself, feeling a thrill run up his spine to be there, on such a momentous occasion. Secretly pleased, though, to know there would be no more indecision, no more delays. Soon he would be aboard a ship again. The time for half-measures and tentative mobilisation was ended. “By God, it’s come!”
“It’s war!” a lieutenant nearby cried exultantly, lifting his arms in glee. “Glorious war, at last!”
Lewrie cocked his head to peer at him searchingly, as he and his compatriots pummeled each other on the back and chortled happily. Of course, he was very young, the lieutenant, he and all his fellows in badly tailored, ill-fitting “pinchbeck” uniforms. His sword was a cheap Hamburg, not even ivoried or gilded, with a brass grip sure to betray him and turn in his grasp were his palms ever damp.
Second or third sons, the honourably penniless, with no means of livelihood but the sea, and warfare. For these desperately eager young men, peace had been a death sentence, stranding them miserly and sour on half-pay and annual remittance, perhaps, of less than fifty pounds altogether. But war, now . . . !
Prize money, full pay, loot from captured ships, and a chance to practice their sea-craft, to gain advancement . . . to be noticed at last. Weaned as they were, as Lewrie had been, on personal honour, on “bottom” so bold they’d dare Death itself to display gay courage, risk life and limb for undying fame and glory . . . or fall gloriously at the very moment of a famous victory . . . well, now!
Surely, Lewrie thought; the fools must recall the dangers, the fevers . . . the rancid food, foul living conditions . . . storms and peril! They weren’t ignorant midshipmen, starry-eyed and joining their first ship! They’d gone months without a letter, years of separation, seen shipmates slaughtered, scattered in pieces like an anatomy lesson at a teaching hospital, hopelessly wounded men passed out the gun ports alive to clear the fighting decks, dead sewn up in shrouds . . . or the permanently crippled amputees, the blind, the . . . !
’Course, there’s more’n a few thought me perverse, for sneerin’ at death-or-glory. No one, in his right mind, goes out of his way to die a hero, does he? Leastways, I didn’t. Not to say that Fortune didn’t have her way with me, whether I wished or no. I mean, dead is dead, for God’s sake, and what’s the bloody point of . . .
“Lewrie?” A voice interrupted his fell musings. “Would Lieutenant Lewrie be present? Alan Lewrie, Anglesgreen, Surrey . . . ?”
“Here!” Lewrie shouted in a loud quarterdeck voice, putting aside all his foul, ungentlemanly, un-English sarcasms and forebodings at once. “Tomorrow” was here!
“The Deputy Secretary, Mister Jackson, will see you upstairs, Lieutenant Lewrie,” an old and ink-stained senior writer informed him. “Would you kindly step this way, sir?”
George Jackson, Esquire’s offices were a smaller adjunct to the First Secretary’s, on the same floor as the Board Room. Lewrie presented himself, fingers twitching to seize the packet of orders which would be his passport. His Fortune.
“Your servant, sir,” Lewrie coaxed, to gain the man’s notice.
“Ah? Lewrie, well,” Jackson said, barely looking up from the burgeoning mounds of documents on either side of his tall clerking-desk, behind which he slaved standing up. He looked down immediately, though, to cluck his lips over an ineptly turned phrase, perhaps some ink smudge, or a clumsy or illegible example of penmanship. “I have your orders, sir. Hmm . . . these, aye.”
“Thank you, sir.” Lewrie beamed, accepting the folded sheaf of vellum which one busy hand extended to him. He opened them eagerly, to see to which ship, what sort of ship, he would be assigned.
“Bloody hell?” escaped his lips as he beheld the concise words. “Excuse me, Mister Jackson, sir. There must be some mistake. I’m for the Impress Service? Me, sir? ’Mean t’say—!”
“You wish to question the wisdom of our Lords Commissioners, do you, Lewrie?” Jackson countered quickly, rewarding him with a tiny moue of disgust.
“Sir, I’m not so old I dodder! ” Lewrie rejoined with some heat. “My sight is excellent, I’ve all my limbs . . . I’m sound, in wind and limb! Hale as a dray horse, sir. With all my teeth, which is more’n some may boast! Sir, the Impress Service is for those who—”
“If we’re not at war with France this very instant, young sir, we shall be by nightfall,” Jackson fussed, giving Lewrie only half of his distracted attention. “No, no. Redo this section before . . . this whole page, in point of fact, before it goes to Mr. Stephens. Now, Lewrie . . . should there have been an error, which I most surely doubt, you may correspond with us from your new posting to amend it. Prevail ’pon your patrons to write us . . . but at this instant, we need to man the Fleet. The bulk still lies in-ordinary, and must be got to sea! Orders have come down for a hot ’press,’ Admiralty Protections to be waived, and that requires the most immediate reinforcement for the Impress Service. Else merchant seaman will escape our grasp, and England’s ‘Wooden Walls’ will continue to languish for want of hands! I do not originate orders, Lewrie, I only inscribe them and pass them on. Bloom where you’re planted, for the nonce, hey?”
“Sir . . . Mister Jackson, I implore you,” Lewrie continued, in a softer, more wheedling tone of voice, striving to sound reasonable . . . though what he wanted most at that moment was to leap across the desk and strangle the frazzled old fart. “There was a term of service, in the Far East, a covert expedition . . . ’84 through ’86. Notice was put in my packet to the effect that I was unemployable. To disguise my absence, so I could pose as a half-pay officer with no prospects who took merchant service. Were you to but look, sir . . . perhaps that is still in there, and influenced my assignment . . .”
“I am aware of that service, sir, and I was most scrupulous, at the First Secretary’s behest, to expunge your file of any false information, and to include a true accounting of your deeds, as soon as you paid off. Telesto, 3rd Rate eighty-gunner . . . Captain Ayscough. And, I also vividly recall your most gracious reception in the Board Room by Admirals Lord Hood and Howe, and Sir Philip Sydney. February of ’86, was it not, sir?” The Deputy Secretary fussed, proud of a memory as finely honed as his master, Philip Stephens. “I recall, too, that you received an immediate further active commission to the Bahamas, your first true command, did you not, sir? Hardly a sign of official disapproval, surely. There, d’ye see?”
“Good God, though, sir . . .” Lewrie shivered.
“Do you object strenuously enough to refuse an active commission, Lewrie,” Jackson cautioned with a grim, reassessing stare, “we shall needs select another officer. I might imagine an hundred men would leap at the chance. And you may continue to wait belowstairs. You are not so senior, or renowned, I must advise you, that a refusal now might ever lead to an active commission dearer to your heart. It is customary to demote truculent officers to the bottom of the List. Or strike them off altogether. It is your decision. Well, sir?”
“No, sir,” Lewrie all but yelped quickly. “I shall not refuse! It’s just . . . it’s just . . .”
“Needs of the Sea Service, sir,” Jackson concluded with a prim smugness. “Which do not, of necessity, happen to coincide with yours. And, we note that you are a married officer, sir. Surely your wife . . . and children, I note as well . . .”
“That’s not a handicap like being lamed, or . . . surely!”
“More like an excess of limbs than the lack, Mister Lewrie.” Jackson took time to form a labourious jape. “You know the Navy has a chary opinion of the zeal of a married officer. Now, we are quite busy, and you have taken more valuable time than I should have given you. Will there be anything more you wish of me, sir?”
“Uh, no, sir. I suppose not.” Lewrie sagged, completely defeated. And burning at the unfairness of it, the peremptory treatment . . . and the utter shame of it! “Good day to you, sir.”
He bowed himself out, staggered down the hall, down the stairs, to the Waiting Room to gather his boat cloak. And reread what seemed a cynical boot up the arse.
“Mine arse on a bandbox!” he muttered bitterly. He wasn’t even to go near a real naval port. He’d expected the Nore, downriver near the mouth of the Thames and the Medway; to Chatham, perhaps. Or south to Portsmouth and Spithead. Instead, he was to report to the Regulating Captain of the Deptford district, just below London Bridge and the Pool of London. Deptford, hard by Cheapside, Greenwich Hospital and infamous Wapping. He seriously doubted if a single whole seaman, with any wits about him, would be found there after the morrow. Not after word of a “hot ’press” made the rounds!
“I mean, if one’s going to pressgang, at least one could have a post worth the trouble!” he sighed. From what he knew of the nefarious ways of Deptford dockyard officials, there’d be five thousand men with Protections by sundown (with a pretty sum in those officials’ pockets, too) and the “Wapping landlords,” the crimps, would sell a corpse to a merchant master before they’d ever aid an Impress officer. Navy bribes could never rival civilian.
“Dear Lord . . . is it too late to catch up with Sir George and ‘Porker’ Forrester?” he wondered as he pocketed his hateful orders and went out into the inner courtyard. “They mightn’t be too bad.”
C H A P T E R 3
Mi’ng arf on a . . . !” Lewrie cursed as he struggled to rise, running a tongue over his teeth to see if they were still all there. He tasted hot blood, coppery-salty; could almost smell it, like the damp winds off the Thames. “Get th’ baftuds!” he roared to his “gang” as he got to his feet again, knocked down with a (fortunately) empty chamber pot swung at his head by a desperation-crazed sailor just off a West Indies trader.
It had sounded like a mischievous lark when they’d set out on their raid earlier in the evening. Surround a ramshackle old lodging house converted to a sailors’ brothel; confer on the sly with the old Mother Abbess who ran it, so she could sell half a dozen or so of her worst-paying customers, who had taken the place over as a refuge, into the hands of the ’Press; creep up on them as they were well-engaged with girls, passed out drunk or asleep, and take them in a well-timed rush.
“’Ere’s yer hat, sir,” Cony offered.
“Phankee, Cony,” Lewrie attempted to reply. “Bu’ where’f me head?” He was only half-jesting, as his vision swam.
“Split yer lip, sir . . . looks worse’n h’it ’tis.”
Whores were shrieking, furniture banging, the pairs-of-stairs thundered ominously, making the thin lath and plaster partitions judder like the old pile was about to come down about their ears. Harsh male voices roared defiance on either side, with the occasional cry of a man getting the worst of some encounter. Truncheons beat a meaty tattoo, punctuated by the sound of a door being smashed down.
A shadow flitted past Lewrie’s notice from one of the rooms, loomed up in front of him. It was a sailor, a teenaged topman by his build. He gave a great gasp as he realized he’d dashed the wrong way, skidding to a halt with his mouth open to cry out.
“In th’ Kinf’s name!” Lewrie shouted first, bringing his truncheon down to thud on the lad’s shoulder and neck. The fellow dropped like a meal sack.
Damme, but that felt good! Lewrie exulted to himself.
“Oy, min’ me furnishin’s, yew!” the Mother Abbess commanded as she lumbered her bulk up the stairs. “Gawd, one o’ me very baist fackin’ cheers smashed! Ahh, shut yir gob, Helena! Stewpid bitch!”
A spectacularly developed young whore, all poonts and angular curves, was wailing her head off, garbed only in a thin, open, man’s shirt. Lewrie stopped to judge her performance for a stunned moment.
“Clumsy bastits, take keer, will ’ee, now!” the barge-shaped Mother Abbess carped. “Nought woz said ’bout trashin’ me place, sir! Fiffy poun’ damages, ye done, if it’s a fackin’ farthm’!”
“You wished them out, ma’am,” Lewrie commented, spitting in a corner to clear his mouth. “You should have liquored ’em better, ’fore we came. They’d have gone easier.”
“Liquor ’em, hah!” the old whoremongress cackled mirthlessly. “An’ thaim ’thout tuppence betwixt ’em? Free gin, it’d been, an’ ’ey’d a got suspaictin’. Helena, will ’ee stop ’at caterwaulin’? Ye ain’t hurted. Hesh, hesh’r ye will be!”
The dark-haired girl hiccupped to sudden silence and leaned on the broken jamb of the door to her grubby little cubicle. Perhaps because of her mistress’s harsh glower, and her pudgy shaken fist, sign of a sound thrashing later. Perhaps because the sounds of melee diminished at last, with only the odd thud now and again, or a heartbreaking groan or two of pain.
“Ah, there ye be, sir,” Lewrie’s burly bosun’s mate reported as he rumbled down the passageway, dragging a squirming sailor under his arm in a headlock. “Got ’em all, we did, sir. Eight hands, t’gither. All prime seamen. Oh, make ’at nine, sir. See ye got one, too!”
“Lemme go, ya bastard!” the “prime seaman” in the headlock hissed. “I gotta p’rtection! A ‘John Comp’ny’ p’rtection!”
“Now what’s a West Indian trader called the Five Sisters doing with an East India Company Protection, hmm?” Lewrie smirked. “And how recently did you buy it? Wasted your money on a forgery, if you did. There’s no protection covers you. Face it, man . . . you’re took fair.”
“Sir, f’r God’s sake!” The man wriggled to face him, looking much like a beheaded victim under the burly bosun’s Henry-the-Eighth-ish armpit. “Frigate stopped us down-Channel, soon’z we wuz in Soundin’s. Took twelve hands . . . put eight Navy aboard t’work her in. We anchor in the Downs, befogged, an’ a Nore tender takes ’nother eight! An’ only lef’ us four t’do their work!”
“An’ how many volunteered, hmm?” The bosun purred, lifting the man almost off his feet, forcing him to look up at him awkwardly.
“Well, half o’ ’em, th’ firs’ time, an’ . . . three th’ last,” the seaman confessed sheepishly, then found some courage. “But that’z coz they’d been took, no matter, an’ least if ya volunteers, ya gets the Joinin’ Bounty, an’ yer pay gets squared, on th’ spot, see—”
“Then why not emulate them, and volunteer yourself, not sneak about?” Lewrie asked him. “Don’t you wish to serve your king?”
“King George ain’ off’rin’ twenny-five guineas th’ man, f’r a roun’ voyage, sir. Hoy, yer right, sir! I’m a volunteer, sir!”
“Much too late f’r that,” the bosun chuckled, shaking his whole frame, and jiggling the reluctant sailor with him. “Matey,” he cooed.
“Bloody . . . !” Cony whispered under his breath. “Twenty-five guineas! ” Those were royal wages, and the war not even barely begun!
Of course, it was suspect whether those merchant masters and ships’ husbands who offered such royal wages would ever pay up, for many were happy to see the Navy press their hands before putting in and paying off. In some cases, they even connived at it with Impress officers who’d tip them the wink, for a bribe, and certify that all wages were accounted for, up to date of impressment. And Navy hands had to be put aboard to assure that a ship had enough hands to reach harbour; what amounted to free labour. It was a wonderful bargain.
Lewrie had a chary eye for the Mother Abbess of the brothel, too. Twenty-five guineas, these last fortunate sailors had pocketed, yet now they were so poor they “hadn’t tuppence betwixt ’em?” Quim and gin, room and board, with perhaps more, paid the woman to shelter them before Five Sisters was laden and ready to sail, with a midnight dash from whorehouse to the docks at the last minute . . . a fee paid too, perhaps, for “long clothing” so they could do their dash without being recognised as sailors. And the forged protections . . .
And, Lewrie realised, she’d just made an additional ninety shillings from his own pocket, as the bribe price for revealing them!
They must have been too noisy, demanding, or upsetting . . . or had spent too freely too quickly. Else, she’d have been glad to have merely stripped them of their last farthing before turning them out her door and waving her fond goodbyes. Else, she might have simply sold them to merchant-ship crimps for more money. There must be some small measure of revenge being exacted, if she’d stoop to a Navy pressgang in Wapping.
“Any commotion in the streets yet?” Lewrie asked, going to the door to Helena’s squalid little bedchamber, and reaching past her for a fairly clean towel with which to dab his damaged lip.
