China Flyer (2 page)

Adam Horne passed the row of East India Company warehouses lining the Bombay waterfront and hurried across a rope and wood footbridge connecting the dockyards to the native bazaar built on the marshlands. The sun was blazing high in the sky and Horne felt the heat prickle through his woollen uniform. As he stepped from the footbridge onto the embankment, he longed to rip open the gold buttons and free himself from the high-collared jacket, the stifling shirt and restricting waistband. A meeting with Commodore Watson was one of the rare times in Marine service when he donned the heavy
frock-coat
and breeches copied from the officer’s dress of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Still, he would not have to endure the discomfort for much longer. Soon he would be shirtless, wearing
dungri
breeches, standing barefoot on the
quarterdeck
of the
Huma
and inhaling raw salty air, and meanwhile he was in a hurry.

Despite his disapproval of today’s fight between his Marine, Fred Babcock, and an Asian seaman, Horne did not want to miss the match. He frowned inwardly as he remembered how Babcock had become involved in the challenge at a waterfront beer shop. He had been arguing about bareknuckle fighting, boasting that the English were champions of all pugilists. The other men in the beer shop had been seamen off a Malagasy raiding boat. One of the raiders had challenged the loud-mouthed Babcock to a fight, and Horne had no power on shore to prevent the fight from taking place.

The harbour marketplace was crowded with hawking pedlars, herdsmen in brightly coloured headdresses, dhoolie bearers carrying veiled women peering through curtains. Horne moved through the din of shrill voices and jangling bells, momentarily forgetting about Fred Babcock’s fight as he mulled over the meeting he had left a few minutes ago at Rose Cottage.

Elated at being granted the
Huma,
Horne wondered if he would have command of the frigate merely to sail to Madras. Would it now be his official command?

And what about the mission? Would there be sealed orders aboard ship disclosing more details, or would he have to wait until Madras to hear where the Governors suspected their missing employee might have fled? The man must have disappeared with a great deal of money for the Governors to be sending the Bombay Marine after him.

First, though, there was work to accomplish here in port. The
Huma
was being provisioned at this very moment, Watson had explained. It was therefore vital to ensure that there was no cheating. A baker’s dozen might be thirteen, but a naval storeman’s dozen too often counted eleven, ten, nine …

The sound of wailing recalled Horne to his surroundings.

To his left, he saw a field stretching between the tented bazaar stalls and a clay hovel. In the centre, a circle of people sat cross-legged around a cluster of flopping vultures. Looking more closely and seeing that the vultures were fighting over—pulling apart—a human corpse, Horne realised he was witnessing a Parsi funeral.

Parsis were Indians who believed that to bury their dead in the earth—or to cremate a body by fire or inter it in the sea—was to defile those earthly elements with carrion. The Parsi mourners held one another’s hands as they sat around the funeral altar, chanting prayers as the vultures voraciously tore apart the decayed flesh, the birds gorging
themselves on the human feast, flopping away when they were glutted.

Horne quickened his pace, checking his disapproval of the Indian tradition as he remembered how the Parsis criticised Europeans for burying their dead in the earth. Did it really matter whether a body was eaten by vultures or by worms?

By association, his thoughts returned to Commodore Watson’s remarks about being dead and buried when Horne returned from Madras.

Was Watson really so ill? If so, what was the cause? He had not seemed feverish, or no more than Horne himself in this stifling weather. In this woollen frock-coat.

Horne thought of the English world which the Watsons had recreated in India, the cozy nest they had built in the Old Church quarters, with its rural British atmosphere and homely smells. Horne himself had been in India for how long? Eight years. How European had he remained? Had he become easternised without noticing the changes in himself? His rooms near Bombay Castle were as simple as the cell of a hermit priest; no more than a place to sleep, a station to await the next command.

His commands had been few: first aboard the
Eclipse
which had been destroyed in a storm off the Coromandel Coast; latterly on the
Huma,
the frigate he had captured from pirates in the past year. Neither ship had afforded him the luxuries enjoyed by the officers of His Majesty’s Navy. But, then, he was not desirous of luxury; he had abandoned households of servants back home in England. He had not tried to replace them in India, and certainly never at sea.

Reaching the Buddhist shrine he had been told to look for as a landmark, Horne turned into a deserted alleyway. As he moved farther into the dark shadows, he rested one hand on the hilt of his sword. The golden buttons fronting his jacket would melt down very nicely for some young
Hindu bride’s dowry; the glittering epaulets on his shoulders would fetch many rupees in the Thieves’ Market.

Emerging at the alley’s far end, he spotted the large shed with the conical straw roof where the fight was supposedly being fought. The low plank door stood ajar and, as Horne approached, he heard whistles and the babble of excited voices.

Pausing to prime his flintlock, he tucked the pistol into his waistband, then removed his hat to stoop and pass through the low doorway.

Horne resumed his full height inside the large barn, smelling the redolence of sweet straw intermixed with the stench of rancid perspiration. As his eyes adjusted to the faint light filtering through a hole in the roof, he appraised the crowd gathered in the middle of the dirt floor, the majority of the men being half-naked Asians with dhotties twisted around their loins and turbans knotted on their heads. Jabbering like noisy birds in a cage, the
tawny-skinned
men craned their necks to see the activity in the centre of the shed.

Pushing through the crowd, Horne spotted brawny Fred Babcock and his swarthy opponent. The two men faced one another as they revolved in a circle, dipping and weaving, bodies smeared with dirt.

As Horne edged closer, he saw that the contest was not the usual bareknuckle fight he had expected. The Asian had obviously chosen a local form of combat.

Each man had his left hand tied behind his back and the right hand lashed to a cudgel, a thick piece of wood with a hollow base to accomodate the fist and carved to resemble clenched fingers. The combatants’ feet were bare except for a leather strap holding a blade to the right ankle.

Watching the fighters as they jabbed the air with their
fists and kicked their ankle blades at one another, Horne understood why many Indians believed that this sport was the forerunner of cockfighting. Afghani in origin, the
club-and
-blade contest had been brought to India by Moghul conquerers in the sixteenth century, when their
fourteen-year
-old ruler, Akbar, had ordered such matches to be held in Delhi between Hindu captives, to decide their fate.

Despite its historic origins, Horne’s first instinct was to stop the match. It was not sport. It was blood lust. The ankle blades were sharply honed, the hand cudgels lethal weapons. The men might maim or kill one another.

Circling Babcock, the pirate jabbed with the wooden fist, at the same time twisting the scythe-like blade jutting from his foot. Excited voices rose from the spectators, the majority of men cheering for the Malagasy, calling his name—Katu—and urging him to kill the
topiwallah,
a foreigner.

A few natives cheered for Babcock, but his loudest support came from the small clutch of Marines standing across on the opposite side of the circle from Horne. Jingee, the delicately-boned Tamil, excitedly wagged his
white-turbanned
head, shouting like a man twice his size. Kiro bellowed in his native Japanese, making cutting and chopping movements with his hands as if he himself were fighting the pirate. Dirk Groot jabbered excitedly in a mixture of Dutch and English, his brilliant blue eyes following the two men inside the circle of noisy
spectators
.

The only Marine who visibly disapproved of the match was the African, Jud, his black face scowling and wincing as the men pummelled each other.

Horne turned from his men back to the fight.

The pirate steadied himself from a blow in the stomach, quickly bringing his fist down sideways. The edge of the carved fingers drew a line of scarlet across Babcock’s bare shoulder.

Lowering his head, Babcock charged forward like a bull.

Katu stepped aside, twisting his right foot to raise the blade towards Babcock’s stomach.

Babcock dived sideways.

Continuing to circle, Katu punched the wooden fist to block Babcock’s path.

Horne saw the quick movement and knew that the oak fist could crack Babcock’s skull, but, spotting the obstacle himself, Babcock dodged again and drove his left knee into Katu’s groin. As the pirate doubled over in pain, Babcock grabbed him by his greasy shanks of hair, simultaneously raising his right ankle to drive his throat onto the blade.

At that moment a blast rent the air.

‘Enough!’ Horne boomed over the rabble’s cheers and catcalls.

Babcock paused in his attack, gaping at Horne who was holding a smoking flintlock in one hand.

The pirate saw Babcock hesitate and, falling back, raised his right foot to slice open his stomach.

Horne had anticipated the action. Flourishing his sword, he jabbed at the man’s throat, driving him to the ground and thundering, ‘I ordered
stop
!’

Keeping his eyes on the Malagasy seaman, he shouted, ‘Babcock, report to the
Huma
immediately!’

‘But, Horne—’

‘Do as I say, Babcock. Report to the
Huma.’

Raising his voice, Horne called to the surrounding group, ‘All of you. Out of here. Go.’

The uniform might be stifling, he thought, but seeing the crowd begin to disperse, he realised that the
frock-coat’s
blue-and-gold magnificence was recognised as a symbol of unquestionable authority.

He pointed at the four Marines, adding for good
measure, ‘What are you men gawking at? I’m talking to all of you. Out!’

Jingee the Tamil’s dark eyes were large and alert under his white turban. ‘Leave and go to the …
Huma,
Captain sahib? Our old ship?’

‘That’s what I said.’ Horne pointed at the doorway. ‘Now out of here, all of you, before some Company snoop comes along and we have to answer to Commodore Watson for this fight.’

Dirk Groot, the Dutchman, asked, ‘Do we have a new command,
schipper
?’

‘You won’t have anything if you’re all thrown back into Bombay prison for attending illegal assemblies.’

Horne noticed a group of Malagasy seamen loitering beyond the low doorway. Hand on the hilt of his sword, he moved outside to disperse them before his men emerged from the barn. The last thing he wanted was for the Malagasies to try and settle the score in a grudge fight arranged for a later hour, in another part of town.

A
strong wind off the Malabar Coast laid the
Huma
over as her trimmed sails caught the gust. From the quarter-deck Horne studied the distant mountains of the mainland and wondered if a morning mist was making the jagged range hazy. Or were his eyes tired after three sleepless days and nights preparing to leave Bombay? Having reasoned that he could sleep once the frigate was under way, he had pushed himself during the final provisioning.

He took one last look at the watch scrambling overhead through the jungle of rigging, spars, and sails before going below for the meeting he had called with his Marines. Although most of the crew were new to the
Huma,
they were a familiar mixture of Lascar sailors, island fishermen and nutbrown villagers terrified of the sea. Jud and Groot had drilled the new men arduously in harbour and Horne believed that, without a storm, they could survive the voyage around Ceylon and up the Coromandel Coast to Madras. The difficulty would be to stop them from scattering upon arrival at Fort St George. Desertion was a greater problem than recruitment, particularly in the larger Indian settlements where many of the crew had relatives or friends.

Horne’s cabin was spartan but adequate for his needs. A trestle table; two rough chairs; a canvas hammock; a
brass-bound
sea chest packed with clothes and his few other possessions, its flat top serving as a wash-stand. Cases dotted the cabin’s deck—provisions provided by the East India Company for a captain’s use on the voyage.

The trestle table doubled as Horne’s desk; he sat behind it, boots crossed in front of him, facing his five Marines as waves crashed against the pitching hull, the sound blending with the creaking of timbers and the harping of taut rigging.

On the desk before him lay a parchment sheet giving him his formal command of the
Huma
for the voyage to Madras. Beside it lay the canvas envelope in which the document had been enclosed, complete with official wax seals. Signed by Bombay’s Governor Spencer, the command threw no light on their destination, but Horne now explained as much as he knew to the men lined up in front of him.

‘We are to find a company agent who’s gone missing from Fort St George,’ he began.

The name ‘Madras’ alerted the men.

Fred Babcock spoke first. ‘The damned Company’s not trying to catch us in a trap, is it, Horne? Sending us back into Fort George?’

‘That was my first suspicion,’ admitted Horne. ‘Nobody but the Governors knows we were inside the fort last April, and why.’

Babcock shook his head. ‘Send us after one missing man? I don’t know, Horne. It smells like a trap.’

Horne hated to begin every reunion by barking at Babcock about lack of discipline. His demands on the squadron were few, and critics often accused him of lax control. One of the few things he insisted upon, however, was being addressed respectfully by his men, for disrespect led to insubordination; moreover, they were sailing with a new crew for whom an example must be set.

Appraising Babcock’s slouched stance, sloppy clothes, tousled hair and unshaven face, Horne asked, ‘How long have you been a Marine, Babcock?’

Babcock pulled at a big red ear. ‘Hasn’t a year passed, Horne, since you took us out of prison and trained us on Bull Island?’

‘I obviously didn’t do my job.’

The lumbering American colonial grinned. ‘I’m alive, aren’t I?’

‘My efforts reflect poorly on me if you don’t even know how to
address an officer, Babcock.’

Babcock stuck out his bare chest, snapping a salute. ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

Horne sprang from his chair. ‘Damn it, Babcock. Nothing’s a joke except you.’

The American held the ramrod-stiff posture, mocking, ‘But, sir, I’m a Bombay … Buccan
eer
!’

The East India Company’s Bombay Marines had no more than six frigates and ten galliots patrolling the Company’s trading routes and drawing charts for their merchantmen. The Marines, often slipshod in dress, were looked down upon by the Company’s Maritime Service, the men who served aboard the merchantmen, and had been dubbed by them, and the men of the Royal Navy, the ‘Bombay Buccaneers’.

Groot interrupted, ‘Question, please,
schipper.’

Ignoring the Dutchman’s request to speak, Horne was still glaring at Babcock. Was there only one way to teach respect to this man? Had the time come to
break the rule about not using the lash?

Groot tried again from the other end of the line.
‘Schipper,
what job does the missing man do for the Company in Madras?’ As usual, Groot made an attempt at showing Horne respect, using the Dutch word for captain. It was Groot, too, who always tried to divert attention from Babcock’s mistakes or misdemeanours. On shore between missions, they shared rooms in Bombay.

‘A purchasing agent, Groot,’ answered Horne and turned back to Babcock. ‘The man’s name is Fanshaw. He buys goods for merchants back in England.’

Horne looked at the other three men, noticing the Tamil, Jingee, glancing around the cabin at the work to be done,
planning where to stow supplies, move bulkheads, serve meals when Horne was using his one table as a desk.

Groot asked,
‘Schipper,
do they have any suspicion where the man’s gone?’

Horne gestured at the letter. ‘If so, Governor Spencer doesn’t say.’

Kiro saluted, touching the red band knotted around his shiny black hair. ‘Captain Horne, sir, if the Company’s called the Marine for assistance, does that not mean they suspect the man’s escaped on a ship?’

Horne nodded his approval at the Japanese. ‘I agree, Kiro. If they believed Fanshaw had fled, say, across the Chingleputt Hills, Governor Pigot could have called on the troops garrisoned at Madras to pursue him. Not the Marine.’

He looked from Kiro to Jud, to Jingee, to Groot. ‘Although Governor Spencer doesn’t allude to the possibility in his letter, I believe we must also be prepared to deal with kidnappers.’

‘Kidnappers,
schipper
?’
Groot kneaded the blue cap he held in his hands. ‘Men demanding big rewards from the Company?’

‘Possibly.’ Horne liked firing the men’s imaginations but he hated suspicions running wild. ‘I mention the point merely for you to consider.’

Jingee stepped forward, touching his white turban. ‘Captain sahib, might not the man, Fanshaw, already be dead? Had his throat cut? His head sliced from his neck. His heart ripped out. His arms and legs hacked from his body. His …’

Horne repressed a grin. Wasn’t it like Jingee to suspect murder, and a brutal murder at that? Horne had found Jingee jailed for stabbing to death an English factor.

‘True, that’s another possibility to consider, Jingee,’ he agreed. ‘The man might already be dead.’

Rising from his chair, he said, ‘We’ll meet again tomorrow.
Between now and then there are other things to think about, such as our new men. Study them. See if there are possible recruits for the Marine.’

Stopping in front of Babcock, he said, ‘I expect better conduct from you on this voyage, Babcock.’

Babcock repeated his mock salute. ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

Damn it. Doesn’t the man ever stop playing the fool?

A hail cut through the sounds of water sluicing against the ship’s hull.

‘Ahoy
…
ship
…
ahoy
…
ship
…’

Horne looked to Jud. ‘Who’s up top?’

‘The Ceylonese, sir.’

‘Join him,’ ordered Horne. ‘Check what he sees.’

Grabbing his spyglass he dismissed all the men, calling after Babcock, ‘Don’t think I’m forgetting about you.’ He moved toward the door, ordering, ‘For the moment, get your arse up on the quarter-deck.’