By the Mast Divided (34 page)

Pearce, standing by the companionway, was aware that the trembling he always experienced before a fight was wholly absent. And yet he was very afraid – afraid of the pain that was coming, as well as the mutilation to his skin. But the greater fear was of personal disgrace; that he might not bear himself as he thought he should – take the punishment, make not a sound, make no gift to Barclay of a pleading or supplicant look. He might break down and scream for mercy and that image, as Coyle edged him up the companionway steps, induced the greatest degree of dread.

The whispered words as he passed from a crew that was, in the main, 
still strange, had a profound effect. ‘Head up, mate’ hissed one, that amongst many a ‘Good luck’ and ‘It ain’t right.’ Even Devenow, as he passed him, gave him a slow nod, an unsmiling one for sure given his jaw was yet to heal, but nevertheless an acknowledgement that he did not approve of what Barclay was doing. His fellow Pelicans, when he saw them standing in their ranks, all had an attitude, which ranged from Michael O’Hagan’s barely suppressed fury, to Rufus’s inability to look at what he knew was going to be gory.

Then he was in an open space, a square formed by the rise of the poop and the assembled men, able to see clearly the grating to which he would be lashed, to see little Martin Dent in his red coat and hat, trying not to grin, ready with his black-covered side drum and sticks to provide the muffled rat-a-tat-tat that would cover the flogging of the man who had broken his still swollen nose. He was every bit as gleeful, Pearce reckoned, as those brute women, like Madame Defarge, who sat knitting at the bottom of the guillotine steps.

How different to Paris and the scene around that instrument. This was ordered and silent; a revolutionary beheading was strident and smelly, a dense crowd packed tight in a cobbled square eager to ensure that each prisoner brought to the block knew that they thought him a traitor. The stink of packed, unwashed humanity mingled with the very relevant smell of voided bowels as those about to die first clapped eyes on the instrument by which they would be dispatched. On this deck the air was clean, there was a breeze that would carry away any smell should he fail to control his own muscles. And he was not about to die – instead of a guillotine he was threatened by the contents of a red baize bag held by Sykes, the Bosun. He would be humiliated, he would be bloodied, but he would live.

Emily Barclay came on deck, which set up a murmur that rippled through the entire assembly, quickly suppressed by the divisional officers. Her husband’s body actually quivered with the effort not to show his shock at her presence: there was no sham indifference now – the desire to tell her to get back to his cabin was very evident in his contorted features. Pearce, too, was surprised. He jerked his head to curtail the natural desire to look at her again. Overborne by cries of ‘Silence there’, Emily Barclay merely nodded to her husband and, wordlessly, ascended the steps to a point on the poop from which she could observe proceedings.

‘Mr Digby,’ croaked Barclay, ‘this man is in your division, and has been arraigned here on the charge of disobedience to a direct order.’ There was a pause, the point at which Barclay should have read out the 
specific charge, but it passed in silence from a captain who exercised his right to disoblige. ‘Do you wish to plead for him?’

Digby stepped forward smartly and raised his hat. ‘He has expressly requested that I do not, sir.’

That set up a soft murmur all along the deck that had every voice of authority calling for silence.

‘Has he by damn!’ Barclay’s eyes were wide open with surprise, Pearce’s closed as if he was again wondering at his own folly. ‘I have scarce heard of such arrogance.’

‘It is not, sir,’ Digby added, in a measured tone, ‘a sentiment that I am familiar with. But I am bound to respect, perhaps even admire, any man who espouses such a plea.’

Digby might as well have slapped his captain with those words. Did Barclay see the nods, slight but visible, from the crew, the eyes of his officers raised a fraction higher to denote dissension, the look of unhappiness on Roscoe’s face and the drooping shoulders of Sykes? Emily Barclay’s head dropped in a gesture of sadness, as though she was seeing a champion humiliated.

Barclay snarled his response. ‘You may respect such a person Mr Digby, you may even extend to admiration, I do not! To my mind it comes under the heading of the same degree of arrogance that sees him here in the first place. But I am man enough to respect the request. We will see if he is so haughty after two dozen of the cat. Bosun, seize him up.’

Coyle struck off the chains that bound Pearce’s hands, as Ridley and Costello, the two bosun’s mates who had acted as his tutors, approached. At least, thought Pearce, sensing no malice in them, it was not that
rat-faced
bastard Kemp who so relished the thought of inflicting pain.

‘Your shirt, mate,’ said Ridley, in a kindly voice, while Costello added, white teeth flashing, ‘No good gifting the purser extra profit.’

Pearce was confused. The image he had of a flogging, the common tale recounted by everyone he had met who had witnessed such a thing, was of a calculated brutality designed to humiliate the offender and discourage others from transgression. These men were supposed to handle him in a rough manner, bind him tight to that grating then rip his shirt off his back, not help him pull it over his head, roll it up and hand it to Charlie Taverner for safekeeping. They led him without compulsion to the grating and tied him in such a manner that he was secure enough not to fall, yet not so tightly bound as to deny blood to his outstretched hands. A strip of hard leather was produced, well chewed by the look of 
it, and a gentle hand was placed on Pearce’s shoulder, as Ridley said, ‘Bite hard on this, mate.’

Beyond Ridley, Pearce could see Sykes. Standing next to Barclay, he opened the red baize bag, reached into it and pulled out a cat o’ nine tails, that black, menacing and iniquitous whip. He shook it so that each of the nine lines hung loose, then swung it quickly to create a swish that promised much pain, which brought from his commanding officer a nod of approval. Costello came back into view, to take off the bosun the instrument of punishment, likewise swinging it in test, as he moved to stand behind his victim. Finally Barclay spoke, loud and clear, so that he could be heard in the forepeak.

‘Bosun, carry out the punishment.’

As he tensed himself, Pearce had a sudden thought that this was inevitable; the sure knowledge that he could never have so knuckled down to the nature of naval discipline to avoid a flogging. Not that he could accept the right of anyone to inflict it on him – that flew in the face of everything he believed. And what was it about the men witnessing this that they could watch in silence and not act to prevent it? What was it that made such people accept the disciplinary right of a man to beat them to a pulp merely because he wore a blue coat and couple of epaulettes, and carried in his pocket a piece of paper from an even bigger set of rogues allocating to him a wholly specious authority?

Why were there so few men like his father who were prepared not only to speak out against injustice, but to do so despite personal risk – to say to those who wished to protect their wealth and property that any fight they created was not one in which those who were dispossessed wished to be part, for it was they who were maimed or killed. But they did. Pearce had seen the eager faces, heard the excited talk, when they had first chased that privateer – men like Dysart, Ridley and Costello would happily slaughter any Frenchman that Barclay told them to, quite unable to grasp that the same trick was being played by some foreign authority on their opponents. If they were not prepared to alleviate their own lot, to raise themselves from the dearth that such a life imposed, was it worth one drop of breath to persuade them to try? That had been an ever-growing doubt in the last few years, from the point where he had stopped believing everything his father said, and began to have the doubts natural to a growing intelligence.

He could imagine the scene at his back, Costello setting himself for the blow, legs spread for purchase, arm well back to maximise the strength of the cut. And he heard it before it struck, the sound reminiscent of a 
venomous snake he had once seen in a Parisian fanum of natural wonders, and to him just as deadly. The sting, as the nine tails struck home made him shudder and bite hard on the leather. Yet Pearce knew himself to be shocked more than pained, for the feeling across his back was one of a spreading numbness, not the agony he had anticipated. The next blow came while that thought was still in his mind.

Pearce had been beaten in every one of the many schools he had attended, for fighting, for impudence, or some other misdemeanour, with varying degrees of hurt dependent on the cruelty of the pedagogue determined to quell his rebellious nature. Such whippings had been administered to his bared posterior not his back, but he could recall right now, as more blows landed on him, that, while he was smarting, he had experienced worse pain than this. The sound of heavy breathing behind him testified to the amount of effort being expended by Costello, but that was not being replicated on his own flesh. Had all those tales he had heard about naval punishment been so much stuff – or might he find that the pain would come later, that his skin was not as whole as he supposed, but a mass of bleeding lacerations that would suppurate for weeks before healing.

Michael O’Hagan was seething, on the balls of his feet, glaring at the captain, his heart pounding as he fought his own demons. He wanted to rush across the deck and lift Barclay up by the neck, which he would then break before slinging him overboard to drown in green water. Yet mad as Michael was, the line of marines acted as a check on his desires – he would only get a musket ball for his pains, long before he could kill Ralph Barclay, and what good would that do? He took comfort in conjuring up the ways he would employ to dispose of the bastard should a future chance occur.

Charlie Taverner wasn’t interested in the captain – he was more concerned with the punishment. So far the victim had not cried out, an achievement Taverner thought he would be unable to replicate. He was jerking as much as Pearce, especially when the fourth blow brought real pain, a cry stifled by that leather strap, striking as it did in a place already assailed, and as the number rose so did the hurt. Each time Taverner heard the numeral and observed John Pearce’s body coil up in anticipation, he winced himself at the spasm which followed the thwack of contact.

Rufus still had his eyes closed, and what he saw behind those lids was much worse than the reality. He too had heard of the horrors of a naval flogging, of the cuts inflicted by the cat that, once a blow had landed 
repeatedly on the same spot, opened the skin to expose the white bones of the victim’s ribs. The John Pearce in his imagination was no longer standing, but was slumped, hanging on the lashings that tied him to the grating, while his own blood formed a pool around his bare feet, and bits of his flesh flew in all directions as the cat o’ nine tails slashed back and forth.

Cornelius Gherson was fascinated by the spectacle, not at all squeamish about the pain being visited on his messmate, even a little disappointed that there was not more in the way of gore. The humbling of Pearce he could easily endure, for before him was a fellow too full of himself, by far, prone to giving out orders as if he had some kind of authority and probing into matters which were none of his concern. The disbelief that had greeted his attempt to explain the events of the previous night – that mere curiosity had got him into trouble – had been particularly galling. Doubly galling was the way the others had responded when they tired of his grunts, Taverner almost calling him a liar to his face and that stripling Dommet making a snide reference to cats and nine lives.

He was not about to tell any of them what he had overheard, the sound of a group of sailors talking treason, that gambling was just a cover for an activity that would see them damned by a man like Barclay or any other captain for that matter. They would have accepted his explanation for his presence, that he had been attracted by the sound of dice, if the boy Dent had not observed the length of time he had eavesdropped on the quiet conversation taking place in the cutter. That was another gripe to lay against Pearce. It was his feud with the boy that had endangered the whole mess and nearly got him killed.

And what drivel he had overheard, from men whose ignorance was staggering; talk of rights and abuses, and ways to make life in general, and particularly that aboard ship, better for the common sailor, of pay not raised for a hundred years or more, captains too fond of the lash and pursers who cheated on their accounts. Half-baked notions he had thought as he listened; useful information though in the strange world in which he now found himself, particularly the obvious fact that while such forbidden talk might be kept from those in authority, it must be known and tolerated amongst the experienced members of the crew. His friend Molly had evinced no surprise when Gherson asked him to convey to the men who had nearly dumped him into the sea that their secret was safe, even from those with whom he shared a mess table.

Another thwack brought him back to the present, and to the notion 
that what was happening on this deck barely rated against the pleasure he had derived from a bloody cockfight or a decent bear baiting in which dogs had torn at the fur and flesh of the bear. It could not hold a candle to a pair of Bull Mastiffs at each other’s throats. There was a moment in which, seeing the bosun’s mate prepare another swing, he had to restrain himself from crying out encouragement, as he would have done at any one of those spectacles.

Emily Barclay looked at the line of indifferent marines, men who had the air of having witnessed much of this before, since she did not want to look at the punishment being inflicted because of her. Each administered blow was like a lash on her conscience. She knew each time the cat landed her husband’s eyes flicked in her direction, so she set her face not to react in any way. But inside it seemed the rhythm of the blows matched that of her heart, the thudding of which felt just as heavy.