Rapscallion (8 page)

"We usually
sell them back to the contractor." The speaker was seated next to Millet
at the end of the table. He was a cadaverous individual with deep-set brown
eyes, a hooked nose, and a lot of pale flesh showing through the holes in his
prison clothes. "He gives us two sous. The following week, he returns the herring
to us so that we can sell them back to him again. Most of us use the money to
buy extra rations like cheese or butter. It helps take the taste of the bread
away."

Lasseur picked
up a piece of dry crust. "Call this bread?

This stuff would
make good round shot. If we'd had this at Trafalgar, things would have been
different."

"What do
you think the British were using?" Fouchet said. He lifted his piece of
bread and rapped it on the table top. It sounded like someone striking a block
of wood with a hammer. He winked at the boy, who up to that moment had been
trying, without success, to carve a potato with the edge of his spoon.
"Give it here," Fouchet said, and solved the problem by mashing the
offending vegetable under his own utensil. He handed the bowl back and the boy
smiled nervously and resumed eating. He was the only one at the table not to
have passed comment on the food.

"Do they
ever
give us meat?" Hawkwood asked.

"Every day
except Wednesdays and Fridays," Millet said, with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
"Don't ask what sort of meat it is, though. The contractors keep telling
us
it's
beef, but who knows?
Could
be anything from pork to porcupine."

Fouchet shook
his head. "It's not porcupine. Had that once; it was quite tasty."

Lasseur
chuckled. "How long have you been here, my friend?"

Fouchet wrinkled
his brow. "What year is it?"

Lasseur's jaw
fell open.

"I'm
joking," Fouchet said. He stroked his beard and added, "Three years
here. Before this I was on the
Suffolk
off Portsmouth." He
jabbed a finger at the tall, hook-nosed prisoner. "Charbonneau's been
held the longest. How long has it been, Philippe?"

Charbonneau
pursed his lips. "Seven years come September."

Seven years
, Hawkwood thought. The table fell quiet as the men
considered the length of Charbonneau's internment and all that it implied.

"Anyone
ever get away?" Hawkwood asked nonchalantly. He exchanged a glance with
Lasseur as he said it.

"Escape?"
Fouchet
appeared to ponder the question, as if no one had asked it before. Finally, he
shrugged.
"A few.
Most don't get very far.
They're brought back and punished."

"Punished
how?" Hawkwood pressed.

"They get
put in the hole," Millet said, removing a fish bone from between his teeth
and flicking it over his shoulder.

Hawkwood scraped
his lump of cod to the side of his mess tin.
"Hole?"

"The
black
hole."
Millet's tone implied that he could only have meant the one
hole and Hawkwood should have known that.

Fouchet laid
down his spoon. "It's a special punishment cell; makes the gun deck look
like the gardens at Versailles."

Across the
table, Lasseur considered the description. He stared hard at Fouchet and said,
"What about the ones who got away, how did they do it?"

Fouchet
shrugged. "You'd have to find them and ask them."

"You don't
know?" Lasseur said.

"Sometimes
it pays not to ask too many questions."

"You've
never considered it?"

The teacher
shook his head. "It's a young man's game. I don't have the energy.
Besides, the war won't last for ever."

"The Lord
loves an optimist," Charbonneau muttered, scratching the inside of his
groin energetically.

Lasseur pushed
his tin to one side. "I have to ask, Sebastien: how, in the name of the
blessed Virgin, did someone like
you
end up in a
place like
this?"

Fouchet smiled,
almost sadly. "Ah, if you only knew how many times I've asked myself that
very same question."

"
You going
to eat that?" Millet sniffed, indicating the
remains of Lasseur's fish.

Lasseur gave him
a look as if to say,
What
do
you
think?
He then watched,
fascinated, as the seaman reached over and, with grubby fingers, helped himself
from the tin.

"I
committed an indiscretion," Fouchet said. "I was a professor of
mathematics at the university in Toulouse and I had a liaison with the wife of
one of my colleagues. He did not take kindly to the title of cuckold and
insisted on calling me out. Unfortunately for him, I proved the better shot.
His friends took it rather personally. They had influence, I did not. I lost my
position, along with what little that remained of my
reputation. When
I applied for alternative teaching posts, I found doors were shut in my face. I
sought solace in the grape; a panacea not exactly conducive to the furtherance
of one's career. That would have been the end of it, had it not been for a
miracle."

"What
happened?"

A rueful smile
split Fouchet's creased face. "I was conscripted."

The grins began
to circulate around the table until Millet, who started to laugh, forgot he was
still trying to digest Lasseur's discarded cod. He was turning red when
Charbonneau slapped a palm between his shoulder blades, bringing him back to
the vertical and the rest of the table to their senses and reality.

Hawkwood guessed
Fouchet's situation wasn't unique. The latter's reference to the hulk's self-founded
academy and the standard of workmanship he'd observed looking over prisoners'
shoulders as he'd traversed the gun deck was proof of that. It was one of the
notable differences between the British and French forces. Whereas Britain
swelled the ranks with volunteers - which in many cases meant felons and
homeless men looking for a roof and a meal - Bonaparte's troops contained a
large portion of conscripted men from all walks of life. In all likelihood,
there were probably as many skilled
craftsmen
and
teachers among the mass of prisoners on board
Rapacious
as there
were in any of the small towns lining the shores of the surrounding estuary.

"I see you
favour your right leg," Lasseur said. "You were wounded?"

Fouchet smiled.
"Musket ball; just below my knee." He tapped the joint. "It's
the devil in cold weather; doesn't work too well in the damp either."

The teacher
turned to Hawkwood. "So, Captain Hooper; what's your story? How did you
come to be captured?"

"There were
more of them than there was of me," Hawkwood said.

Fouchet smiled.
"I believe I overheard Murat say it was at Ciudad Rodrigo?"

Hawkwood nodded.

"That's a
long way from home. What was an American doing there?"

The question
Hawkwood had been expecting and of which he was most wary.

"Shooting
British soldiers; officers mostly."

"Why?"

"Your
Emperor was paying me."

Fouchet smiled.
"I meant why
you}'"

"I'm a
sharpshooter: First Regiment of United States Riflemen. I thought you might
need my help."

"Cheeky
bastard," Charbonneau said. "What makes you think France needs your
help?"

Millet rolled
his eyes. "Look around, idiot."

Construct a
biography based on your own expertise, James Read had told him. An officer from
the Regiment of Riflemen had been the obvious choice. The American equivalent
of Hawkwood's former regiment, the Rifle Corps, used the same methods as its
British counterpart, combining the tactics of the Light Infantry and, in the
case of the Americans, native Indians, to harass and disrupt enemy movements.
The first into the field and the last to leave.

"Heard that
was a fearsome fight," Millet said.

Fouchet frowned.
"The siege took two weeks, I think I read."

"Twelve
days," Hawkwood said.
"Might as well have tried to
stop the tide.
How do you mean,
read?"

"It was in
the newspapers. They're forbidden, but we manage to smuggle them in.
Costs us a fortune.
A few of us understand some English, but
it's usually Murat who translates. Not that we believe
everything
that's in them, of course. You were wounded?" The
teacher indicated Hawkwood's facial scars.

"One of
their riflemen took a stab at me with his bayonet."

"You were
lucky. You could have lost the eye."

"He was
upset." Hawkwood shrugged. "We'd killed a lot of his comrades. Our
cannon blew them to pieces. It didn't stop them coming at us, though."

"What
happened to the rifleman?" Charbonneau asked.

"I killed
him," Hawkwood said. "He died, I lived. We surrendered. The British
won."

Hawkwood's
manufactured account wasn't too far from truth. He'd read the dispatches. The
Rifles had been in the thick of the action, providing covering fire for the
Forlorn Hope, the forward troops leading the assault on the walls. The breach
had been nearly a hundred feet wide, a huge target for the French gunners who'd
launched a hail of grapeshot on to the attackers. It was only after the cannons
had been destroyed and a French magazine had blown up that the British had
managed to finally take the town. That much had been covered in the newspapers,
but only the dispatches covered the aftermath, with accounts of how British
soldiers, incensed by the slaughter of so many of their comrades, had gone on a
drunken rampage. To prevent a massacre, officers had been forced to draw their
swords on their own men. To add to his woes, Wellington had lost two of his
best generals: Mackinnon of the 3rd Division and the Light Brigade's Black Bob
Crauford, under whom Hawkwood had served on a number of engagements.

"Bastards,"
Millet muttered.
"Goddamned bastards!"

The occupants of
the table fell into a sombre silence.

Charbonneau
broke the spell. "What about you?" he asked Lasseur.

Lasseur launched
into a humorous account of his capture and imprisonment. It wasn't long before
his audience was smiling again, by which time supper was almost over. The
messes began to break apart as the prisoners retrieved their hammocks from the
foredeck and took them down to their allotted spaces below.

The boy had
fallen asleep at the table, head across his folded arms.

"What's his
story?" Fouchet asked, as Millet and Charbonneau left to reclaim their
aired bedding.

Lasseur shook
his head. "He hasn't said much. My guess is he got separated from the rest
of his crew. So far, all he's given me is his name."

Fouchet nodded
his understanding. "I suspect he'll be all right once he's with someone
his own age. I'll have a word with the other boys. Perhaps he'll talk to them.
In the meantime, it would be in his best interest if you kept a watch on
him."

The quiet note
of warning in the teacher's voice caused Lasseur to pause as he got up from the
table. "That sounds ominous. Something you're not telling us?"

"The boy's
young, small for his age, an innocent from what you've told me and from what
I've observed. He's also far from home and therefore doubly vulnerable. It should
come as no surprise to you that there are those on board who would be likely to
take advantage of his situation."

Lasseur sat back
down.
"How likely?"

Fouchet smiled
sadly. "My friend, there are over nine hundred men on this ship. More than
eight hundred of them are imprisoned as much by inactivity as they are by
these wooden walls. I suspect you already know the answer to your
question." The teacher picked up his tin and utensils and rose stiffly
from his seat.

From the look on
Lasseur's face Hawkwood knew the privateer captain was remembering his
exchange with the balding man on the gun deck. Lasseur stared down at the
sleeping boy. His face was as hard as stone. "I'll bear that in
mind," he said.

It wasn't the
first time Hawkwood had experienced the restraints of a hammock. There was a
definite art to clambering into the sling, but it was a case of once mastered,
never forgotten. As a soldier, he'd grown used to bivouacking in uncomfortable
surroundings, be it barn, bush or battlefield. On the march, you took advantage
of sleep and sustenance when and where you could, because you never knew when
the opportunity would arise again. A hammock was the epitome of comfort
compared to some of the places he'd had to rest his weary head.

He lay back and
listened to the emanations of the four hundred souls hemmed in around him. The
sounds varied widely in content and tone, from the drawn-out cries of the
distressed and the wheezing of the consumptives to the groans of the dysentery
sufferers and the weeping of the lonely and dispossessed. When added to the
chorus of swearing, hawking, spitting, farting, coughing and general
expectorations common to the male species, they formed a discordant backdrop to
the physical deprivations endured by men held in mass confinement and against
their will.