Rapscallion (5 page)

The lieutenant
peered over the clerk's shoulder.

The clerk
sneered.
"Our first American.
Not so independent
now, are you?" He sniggered at his own wit.

The lieutenant
viewed Hawkwood with undisguised hostility as the clerk began to transfer the
details into the ledger, repeating the information under his breath as he did
so. "Rank: captain; date of capture: 20th January; action in which taken:
Ciudad Rodrigo; date of arrival: 27th May; application for parole under
consideration; physical description . . ." The clerk raised his eyes again
and murmured, "Height: approximately six feet; scarring on left side of
face . . . surly-looking brute.
Assigned to the gun deck.
Next!"

After listening
silently to the description and the comment, the lieutenant favoured Hawkwood
with a final grimace of distaste before he turned away.

"Damned renegade,"
Hawkwood heard
him mutter under his breath.

The interpreter
jerked his head for Hawkwood to move along. Behind him, he heard Lasseur give
his name and the clerk's litany began again.

At the next
table the prisoners were presented with a rolled hammock, a threadbare blanket
and a thin, wool-stuffed mattress.

Hawkwood studied
the armed guards ringing the deck. Their escort had been composed of marines,
seconded to the shore establishment, but neither the army nor the navy liked to
assign regulars to the prison ships. True fighting men were needed abroad. This
lot would be members of a local militia, specially recruited, Ludd had told
him. He'd seen two of the guards exchange knowing grins as they stared at the
boy's milk-white buttocks during the enforced bathing. One of them had nudged
the other and sniggered. "Wait till His Majesty gets a look at that!"

Hawkwood
wondered what that meant.

The processing
stretched over two hours. There were not that many new arrivals - three
boatloads in all, perhaps forty men in total - but the ill-tempered admissions
clerk seemed intent on proving how pedantic he could be. Slowly, however, the
line of men began to shorten. Hawkwood was intrigued as to why they'd been
herded into one half of the quarterdeck rather than escorted below. His
question was answered as the last prisoner was handed his bedding.

A figure
appeared at the rail of the deck above them. He was tall and raw-boned. His
face was gaunt and pale. The white piping on his lapels proclaimed him to be
another lieutenant, though he looked old to be holding the rank. Hands clasped
behind his back, he gazed dispassionately at the crowd of men gathered beneath
him. His eyes were very dark. Gradually, as the prisoners became aware that
they were being observed, an uneasy silence descended upon the deck. Beneath
his hat, the lieutenant's eyes moved unblinkingly over the upturned faces. The
clerk and the lieutenant at the table rose to their feet.

The gaunt
lieutenant remained by the rail, his body incredibly still, as he continued to
stare down. Not a word was uttered. Only the sound of the gulls wheeling high
above the ship broke the stillness. Then, abruptly, after what seemed like
minutes but could only have been twenty or thirty seconds, the lieutenant
stepped back from the rail, turned abruptly, and, still not having spoken,
returned from whence he came.

"Our brave
commander," Lasseur whispered. "Rumour has it he once captained a
frigate, had a run-in with one of our eighties off Finisterre, and surrendered
his ship. After they exchanged him, he was court-martialled." Lasseur
sucked in his cheeks. "Took to drink, I'm told."

Hawkwood
wondered where Lasseur had got his information. Some people had an uncanny
knack of picking up all kinds of rumours. Though, in fact, Lasseur was only
half right. The commander of the hulk, if that's who the lieutenant had been,
was named Hellard and he had indeed been demoted from captain. But it had been
Funchal not Finisterre where the lieutenant's fate had been sealed, and he had
taken refuge in the bottle before the engagement, not following it. Hawkwood
had been told the correct version by Ludd during his briefing; though it didn't
alter the fact that Hellard had been assigned to
Rapacious
as
punishment. Furthermore Ludd had told Hawkwood that Hellard's background was
modest, which meant he'd been unable to call on a patron to rescue him from
exile and set him back on the promotion ladder. Commanding this floating tomb
was as high as Lieutenant Mortimer Hellard was ever going to get. And he knew
it. It accounted for the stony countenance, Hawkwood thought. This was a man
resigned to his fate, resenting it, and suffering because of it.

"Take them
below, Sergeant Hook." The order came from the lieutenant with the bitten
fingernails. "And do something about those. They're making the place look
untidy."

The lieutenant
scowled at a pair of prisoners whose legs had given way. Hawkwood assumed they
were the two who had been helped up the stairs by their fellow detainees. He
wondered what had become of the men who'd been left in the longboat, and
whether anyone had bothered to retrieve them. No one in authority on
Rapacious
seemed interested in taking a look. It was more than
likely the boat was still drifting at the end of the line.

"Aye,
sir."
The sergeant of the guard saluted lazily and turned to the
prisoners. He nodded towards the stairway. "Right, you buggers, let's be
having you. Simmons, use your bayonet! Give that one at the back there a poke.
Get the bastards moving! We ain't got all bleedin' day!
Allez!"

Lasseur caught
Hawkwood's eye. The Frenchman's smile had slipped from his face. It was as if the
reality of the situation had finally sunk in. Hawkwood shouldered his bedding,
remembering Lasseur's earlier whispered comment. As he descended the stairs to
the well deck it didn't take him long to see that Lasseur had been mistaken.
Hell would have been an improvement.

Hawkwood was no
stranger to deprivation. It was all around him on London's cramped and filthy
streets. In the rookeries, like those of St Giles and Field Lane, poverty was a
way of life. It could be seen in the way people dressed, in the looks on their
faces and by the way they carried themselves. Hawkwood had also seen it in the
eyes of soldiers, most notably in the aftermath of a defeat, and he was seeing
the same despair and desperation now, carved into the faces of the men
gathered on the deck of the prison hulk. It was the grey, lifeless expression
of men who had lost all hope.

They ranged in
age from calloused veterans to callow-eyed adolescents and they looked, with
few exceptions Hawkwood thought, like the ranks of the walking dead. Most wore
the yellow uniform, or what was left of it, for in many cases the prison garb
looked to be as ragged as the clothing that had been stripped from the backs of
the new arrivals. Many of the older men had the weathered look of seamen,
though without the ruddy complexion. Instead, their faces were pallid, almost
drained of colour.

Some prisoners
huddled in small groups, others stood alone, if such a feat was possible given
the number of wasted bodies that seemed to cover every available inch of space.
Some of the men were stretched out on the deck, but whether they were sleeping
or suffering from some malady, it was impossible to tell. The ones that
remained upright gazed dully at the new arrivals being directed towards the
hatch and the stairs leading into the bowels of the ship. Some of the men
looked as though they hadn't eaten for days.

"My
God," Lasseur gagged.
"The smell."

"Wait till
you get below."

The voice came from
behind them. Hawkwood looked back over his shoulder and found himself eye to
eye with the dark- haired interpreter from the weather-deck.

"Don't
worry; in a couple of days, you won't notice. In a week, you'll start to smell
the same. The name's Murat, by the way. And we call this area the Park. It's
our little joke." The interpreter nodded towards the open hatch and the
top of the ladder leading down. "You'd best get a move on. Squeeze
through, find yourselves a space."

"Murat?"
Lasseur looked intrigued.
"Any relation?"

The interpreter
shrugged and gave a self-deprecatory grin.

"A distant
cousin on my mother's side.
I regret our closest association is in having once enjoyed
the services of the same tailor. I -"

"How much
do you want for your boots?"

Hawkwood felt a
tug at his sleeve. One of the yellow- uniformed prisoners had taken hold of his
arm. Hawkwood recoiled from the man's rancid odour. "They're not for
sale."

There were
ragged holes in the elbows of the prisoner's jacket and the knees of his trousers
shone as if they had been newly waxed. His feet were stuffed into a pair of
canvas slippers, though they were obviously too small for him as his heels overlapped
the soles by at least an inch. Several boils had erupted across the back of his
neck. His shirt collar was the colour of dried mud.

"Ten
francs."
The grip on Hawkwood's arm tightened.

Hawkwood looked
down at the man's fingers. "Let go or you'll lose the arm."

"Twenty."

"Leave him
be, Chavasse! He told you they're not for sale." Murat raised his hand.
"In any case, they're worth ten times that. Go and pester someone
else."

Hawkwood pulled
his arm free. The prisoner backed away.

The interpreter
turned to Hawkwood. "Keep hold of your belongings until you know your way
around, otherwise you might not see them again. Come on, I'll show you where to
go."

Murat pushed his
way ahead of them and started down the almost vertical stairway. Hawkwood and
Lasseur followed him. It was like descending into a poorly lit mineshaft.
Three-quarters of the way down Hawkwood found he had to lean backwards to avoid
cracking his skull on the overhead beam. He felt his spine groan as he did so.
He heard Lasseur chuckle. The sound seemed ludicrously out of place.

"You'll get
used to that, too," Murat said drily.

Hawkwood
couldn't see a thing. The sudden shift from daylight to near Stygian darkness
was abrupt and alarming. If Murat hadn't been wearing his yellow jacket, it
would have been almost impossible to follow him in the dark. It was as if the
sun had been snuffed out. Hawkwood paused and waited for his eyes to adjust.

"Keep
moving!" The order came from behind.

"That
way," Murat said, and pointed. "And watch your head."

The warning was
unnecessary. Hawkwood's neck was already cricked. The height from the deck to
the underside of the main beams couldn't have been much more than five and a
half feet.

Murat said,
"It's easy to tell you're a soldier not a seaman, Captain. You don't have
the gait, but, like I said, you'll get used to it."

Ahead of him,
Hawkwood could see vague, hump-backed shapes moving. They looked more
troglodyte than human. And the smell was far worse down below; a mixture of
sweat and piss. Hawkwood tried breathing through his mouth but discovered it
didn't make a great deal of difference. He moved forward cautiously. Gradually,
the ill-defined creatures began to take on form. He could pick out squares of
light on either side, too, and recognized it as daylight filtering in through
the grilles in the open ports.

"This is
it," Murat said.
"The gun deck."

God in heaven
, Hawkwood thought.

He could tell by
the grey, watery light the deck was about forty feet in width. As to the
length, he could only hazard a guess, for he could barely make out the ends.
Both fore and aft, they simply disappeared into the blackness. It was more like
being in a cellar than a ship's hull. The area in which they were standing was
too far from the grilles for the sunlight to penetrate fully but he could just
see that benches ran down the middle as well as along the sides. All of them
looked to be occupied. Most of the floor was taken up by bodies as well.
Despite the lack of illumination, several of the men were engaged in labour.
Some were
knitting,
others were fashioning hats out of
what looked like lengths of straw. A number were carving shanks of bone into
small figurines that Hawkwood guessed were probably chess pieces. He wondered
how anyone could see what
they were doing. The sense of claustrophobia was almost overpowering.

He saw there
were lanterns strung on hooks along the bulkhead, but they were unlit.

"We try and
conserve the candles," Murat explained. "Besides, they don't burn too
well down here; too many bodies, not enough air."

For a moment,
Hawkwood thought the interpreter was joking, but then he saw that Murat was
serious.

There was just
sufficient light for Hawkwood to locate the hooks and cleats in the beams from
which to hang the hammocks. Many of the hooks had objects suspended from them;
not hammocks but sacks, and items of clothing. They looked like huge seedpods
hanging down.