The Admirals' Game (11 page)

His second attribute was his ability with writing and figures, plus the information from the premier of that ship that Gherson was a man more inclined to side with authority than his shipmates. Ralph Barclay had set off from Sheerness without a clerk, doing the work himself while naming a relative for the remuneration, a cousin so strapped he was happy to take a small percentage of the actual pay.

Having taken some prizes, and with the anticipation of being able to afford it, he had been glad to see the way Gherson, clearly more experienced in the area of bookkeeping than he, had so quickly sorted out his books and logs, always a worry given they were examined first by one of Parker's secretaries, before being passed on every quarter to the Admiralty. But could he trust the fellow?

It was as if Gherson read his mind. ‘I know there are risks, sir, there always are in such activities, but I believe that I have minimised them, and should we be sent away I cannot see how we can be exposed by those who supply us while, on board, we both have a shared risk, only fitting for a shared reward. There is not a merchant captain coming in from Italy who will not bite our hand off for what we have in our possession.'

‘No, Gherson. We cannot sell from this port, that is too dangerous. The cables we are supplied with have a red thread running through them for identification, the French rope makers do something similar, the same with canvas. Also, every powder barrel and box must be branded. We must keep these stores until we are well away from here, then sell them, and I suspect we will get a higher price for them in a neutral port than we would from any Italian master trading with Lord Hood.'

‘Then I cannot see, sir, how such a thing can be kept from Mr Glaister.'

‘True,' Barclay nodded; his premier was responsible for checking the level of stores and preparing a log which corresponded to his own.

‘The purser?'

‘Will welcome an increase in his stipend, and no doubt demand a portion to cover the losses he claims.'

‘Has he any losses?'

‘No, but there is not a purser in creation who is not one to scream he is on the brink of penury.'

‘Members of the crew?'

‘Will do as they are bid,' Ralph Barclay snapped, ‘or feel the consequences on their ribcage.'

‘We will need some of them.'

Thinking on that he came up with two names, one the ship's bully, but devoted to him, the other a rat-faced bosun's mate who was as slippery as an eel. They too had given positive evidence at his court martial.

‘Devenow and Kemp. Seek them out.'

‘Trustworthy?'

Ralph Barclay positively crooned at Gherson then, for he was really talking about him.

‘Of course they are not trustworthy, Gherson, which is why they will be so valuable to our enterprise.'

‘Sir,' said the marine sentry to the captain now back in his cabin. ‘Midshipman Burns is waiting to take his leave of you.'

Ralph Barclay did not respond at once, looking instead at the still-closed door of his wife's quarter gallery. She too should bid the little bugger farewell; he was her relative in truth, not his, and it was an excuse to demand she show herself, a chance to see how much he had further fractured their relationship. Part of him wondered if a bit of a beating and forced compliance might make her careful of his moods, frightened in other words. If that was what it took, he would be happy; he was not a man to hanker after anything but an obedient and dutiful wife.

‘Ask him to wait. I will call when I am ready.'

He went to the door, which did not have a lock, and
tried to open it, only to find that Emily had wedged something heavy against it.

‘Madam, your nephew is about to depart the ship. I believe it would be fitting that you should wish him farewell.' Getting no response, his voice went to a growl. ‘I insist that you do this, and I will take an axe to this door if you do not come out of your own volition.'

It took a few moments for her to respond, but eventually she dragged her chest away from the door and emerged. Ralph Barclay examined her for signs of his own aggression, for if she was bruised he intended to send her straight back behind that door. A man might be entitled in law to beat his wife, but it would never do to display to the world the fact he had exercised it.

There were signs that she had been weeping, but they were faint, and thankfully there was no evidence of any discoloration on her forehead, nor even a red mark. Satisfied, Ralph Barclay called to his marine sentry to admit Toby Burns, who came edging round the door in a way that made his superior think of a garden slug.

‘I came to take my leave, sir, with your permission.'

‘Granted, boy,' Ralph Barclay boomed. ‘And be conscious of the honour being bestowed on you. If there's a plum going in the fleet it goes to those serving close to the flag, so you may look to advancement.' The voice dropped then to a seemingly regretful and avuncular tone. ‘You know I would not let you go, Mr Burns, if I did not think it to your advantage, and neither, I know, would your aunt.'

‘Aunt Emily,' Toby Burns said, meekly. ‘I hope I have your blessing.'

‘I hope, Toby,' she replied after a significant pause, in a voice that was short on affection, ‘that you enjoy the same relationship with your superiors and shipmates as you have had on this vessel. I also hope that you continue to serve those in command in a similar fashion to the loyalty you have demonstrated to Captain Barclay. Should you do that, Toby, I am sure you will go far in the service.'

Toby Burns looked as though she had slapped his face which, of course, metaphorically she had.

‘I should be on your way, lad,' Ralph Barclay said. He was addressing the boy, but looking daggers at his wife. ‘It does not do to keep admirals and flag captains waiting.'

As a crestfallen Toby Burns went through one door, a defiant Emily Barclay went through another.

John Pearce had brought himself to Heinrich Lutyens's hospital, rowed over in the jolly boat from the anchored HMS
Faron
by his Pelicans, aided by his other old shipmates, Latimer and Blubber Booth. The doctor being an ecumenical sort in areas of class, they were all sat at the same board eating supper, the main course of which was roasted fowl, heaven sent to men bored by pork and beef kept months in the cask. John Pearce was listening to the weather, and a wind that had obliged his host, given the draughty nature of the building, to set a large fire going in the grate, for before climbing down into the boat, the master had alluded to a sky full of high racing clouds, which he maintained presaged a change.

‘Overdue rains, Mr Pearce, and I know from my experience that, for all the Mediterranean is an inland sea, it can be as harsh to a seaman as any ocean.' The
wind was strengthening as they spoke, that evidenced by the way the sloop was straining on her anchors, and it had whipped up the Grande Rade into a state that guaranteed a choppy crossing. ‘I reckon if you're comin' back aboard this night, it will be a rough old return.'

‘Boat cloaks? asked Pearce.

Neame grinned, his round, ruddy face alight with the notion he propounded. ‘A pail for bailing, most like, and a prayer to Neptune.'

Sitting now in Lutyens's quarters, which were on the outer shore of the St Mandrier Peninsula, Pearce could hear the windows rattling ever louder as the wind strength increased, and it was not long before the sound of heavy rain began to batter against the glass in a relentless tattoo.

‘I fear we may be your guests for the night, Heinrich, the weather is worsening by the minute.'

‘In that case, my friends,' he replied in a weary voice that matched his strained countenance, ‘you must keep me entertained, for I am spent from treating my patients.'

‘What would do that, your honour?' demanded Charlie Taverner, his face cheerful, a combination of wine and relaxation. ‘If you has a nut and three decent shells I can lighten your purse no end.'

Michael O'Hagan threw up his hands. ‘In the name of Jesus, hide your coin, Mr Lutyens, otherwise he will have it all. I've seen Charlie work the thimblerig afore.'

‘All in my purse does not amount to a great deal, since I have not been paid a penny these last months.'

‘No one has, sir,' moaned Latimer from behind a long clay pipe. ‘And neither will they be. It's credit wi' the purser that keeps body and soul, and a warrant when we land home again, 'less'n the capt'n gets a payment for prize money, and decides to lay out a bit.'

Blubber Booth continued where Latimer had left off. ‘Fat chance of that, they look to their own comfort afore ours. No, it'll be wait for a warrant, an' a crimp standing by to trade it at half face value.'

‘Scandalous!' Lutyens exclaimed, when the practice of paying seamen in paper warrants instead of hard money was more fully explained.

Latimer fixed Lutyens with questioning eyes when that subject was exhausted. ‘The lads told me, your honour, that you was one to keep a weather eye on your shipmates.'

That had everyone except Blubber and Latimer looking at the table, it being something those who had served under Ralph Barclay knew but never mentioned, though something must have been said to those two; not surprising, given the time they had served alongside the Pelicans. From the very first day aboard HMS
Brilliant
, Lutyens had sent shivers up the backs of the men for the way he crept around the ship, forever scribbling in a little notebook. Initially, it was suspected he was passing on what he observed to the captain, but that faded as no response came as chastisement for whatever indiscretions he managed to observe.

His note-taking became so continuous that it ceased to
be remarked upon – unlike his treatments, which tended to be rendered cack-handed by his indifference to his patient's pain, and were a constant source of comment – yet no one on board the frigate had ever charged him to explain what he was about. It became known that he had left behind a well-paid position in London to come to sea, and also that he was well connected; his father was pastor of the Lutheran Church, much patronised by the German-born Queen Charlotte, which gave him access to the court.

Lutyens had gone from seeming to be a nosy pest, moved on to the position of ship's curiosity – a good portion of the crew thinking he might be mad – to finally to end up being accepted as something of an eccentric. Now, those who had served with Lutyens were embarrassed that Latimer, a stranger to the doctor till this very night, had brought up the subject, clearly letting him know his habits had been discussed.

‘I have my own reasons for that,' Lutyens replied, in quite a guarded way.

‘Be interesting to hear 'em, your honour.'

Innocently said, it looked as if Lutyens was about to respond with a sharp denial. The long nose that dominated his face was twitching, and his fish-like eyes had actually begun to narrow, when Pearce, seeing his discomfort, quite deliberately changed the subject.

‘Thimblerig, Charlie, is that how you made your way?'

Natural caution, bred by years of living in fear of the
law, made Charlie's face close up; that was a question his friends would not ask, as well as one to which no stranger would be granted an answer.

‘He did better than that,' cried Rufus, who being light in the head had been most affected by Lutyens's wine. ‘Tell 'em about the watch raffle, Charlie.'

‘I dunno what you're talking about.'

‘Holy Mary, you'll be tellin' us you was in the Liberties for partiality,' cried Michael.

‘You're among friends here, Charlie,' Pearce insisted, ‘and there is not a tipstaff within a thousand miles who knows your name.'

‘Friends?'

Charlie rolled the word around his mouth, as if tasting it to see if it was true, for he had had his differences at some time with most at this board: Michael over the favours of a tavern serving wench called Rosie, Pearce for the way he had, thanks to the attention paid to a woman, let them down while they were lying off Portsmouth awaiting release; Lutyens himself had interrogated him on first acquaintance in a manner more like a magistrate than a doctor, raising his hackles.

Of the original half-dozen press gang victims who had come together under the moniker of Pelicans, Charlie had taken the experience most badly. Yet he could not be said to have enjoyed much in the way of prosperity as a free man, if anyone could be said to be such in the Liberties of the Savoy, hiding from tipstaffs on the boundary line who knew his name and description; hot-bedding in a
rookery hutch, working odd jobs on the Thames shore for a pittance wage, or lounging around unemployed, often without the means to eat or enjoy a wet. Charlie was in the Liberties for one very good reason: to step outside was to have his collar felt for any number of crimes, many of which carried the threat of the Tyburn Necklace, though none of them were bloody in nature.

Suddenly he smiled, and it was something to see, the way it lit up a good-looking face. He tipped his hat back slightly to gift himself a more raffish appearance, and began to talk.

‘It was a good 'un, the watch raffle, an' no error, for there is not a poor man walking that don't hanker after a timepiece of his own.'

‘And not a dip born,' cried Blubber, ‘who would not filch you for one.'

‘I was that as a nipper,' Charlie responded, seeming a bit wistful for that lost youth.

‘That was one of the things my father taught me early,' interjected Pearce. ‘How to spot the local dips, who would tag on to him knowing he was going to attract a crowd to hear him speak.'

‘Do you miss that existence, John?' asked Lutyens.

‘Never in life! How could I miss not knowing where I was going to lay my head?'

‘We're none of us strangers to that,' Blubber responded.

‘Also, I never knew whether my passing round of the hat would provide enough to pay for a meal, and all the
while I was collecting the local lads were working up to pinch the takings. It wasn't only dips I had to worry about.'

‘Sure,' Michael insisted, ‘now we know why you're always up for a fight.'

‘Sometimes my whole life felt like a fight.'

‘It could not have been all bad.'

‘No, Heinrich, it wasn't, but it was not always good, and even if my father was preaching a message aimed at improving the lot of the deprived, they did not always appreciate the sentiment. We were chased out of more than one town.'

‘Tell me about your father.'

‘So you were a child pickpocket, Charlie?'

Pearce had abruptly changed the subject again, back to Charlie, because he did not want to talk about Adam Pearce, dragging his motherless son around the country, end to end, across and back, or his ideas. Worse, it might lead to Paris, and how old Adam had died and that was memory he never wanted to recount. He had in his sea chest a box of the Parisian earth in which his father was buried, which one day he might throw on the graves of those who had murdered him.

‘I was a prize 'un,' Charlie responded, ‘afore my fingers got too heavy for the lift. It's a game for a nimble youngster.'

‘Shifty eyes is the best way to spot 'em, the little bastards,' cawed Latimer. ‘They gather like crows when a ship comes in. I can see your like, easy, Charlie.'

‘I'll beg you not to be so offensive, mate,' Charlie responded in a hard voice, but he was only joshing.

‘The watch raffle, Charlie,' demanded Rufus.

Charlie patted him on the top of his ginger hair. ‘Think he's never heard the tale afore, poor lad. We would get a good watch, never bought, filched, with a long chain was best, and set up outside a tavern.'

‘You was the caller, Charlie.'

‘I was, Rufus, stood on a chair, hauling in the fish wi' sweet talk and a'swinging the timepiece and an invite to listen. Once they got to hear it tick I knew I had 'em and at half a crown a go, a numbered ticket for the coin. Then, on the reason that the tickets had to be folded and drawn by someone even-handed, we would go into the tavern and scarper out the back door, leaving the idiots a'waiting till doomsday for us to come back out.'

‘How much went to the tavern keeper?' asked Pearce, a question that got him an intense look from Charlie. ‘I've seen on my travels every trick in the book, Charlie, and I know the type of man who keeps a tavern looks to earn where he can.'

‘We slipped him enough to make sure that where folk got angered, which they surely did when they found they'd been dunned, he dealt wi' it, if necessary by a use of his club.'

‘You don't feel guilty?' asked Lutyens. ‘You were taking money off those who could ill afford it.'

Charlie looked thoughtful for a moment, as though wondering whether to answer, and when he did his tone
implied it was a daft question. ‘Guilt, your honour, is for those who can eat regular without worry. I never had that from the day I was born to—'

‘The day you was pressed,' Latimer snapped. ‘Say that for the Navy, Charlie, leastways you get regular fed.'

Charlie did not want to dwell on any notion that praised the Navy, so he went on to talk about vending fake lottery tickets, milling coins for the gold off the edge, setting up a board for three-card monte and thimblerig, which were hard because you needed a couple of bruisers standing hard by to take in hand anyone who complained about being cheated.

‘Trouble wi' bruisers is, it's hard to get them to admit their share is a fair split.'

Best of all for Charlie was the finding of a human mark with a full purse, usually some bumpkin from the country, who was eager for a taste of London life; he would get that all right, and wake to find himself in bed with a pretty half-guinea whore demanding payment, and a tavern keeper below with a hefty bill for good food and drink, this while his good new friend, his purse, and the promised chance to make his fortune in a cunning,
fail-safe
scheme, were nowhere to be seen.

‘What was the fail-safe scheme, Charlie?' asked Blubber.

‘First you found out where they hailed from, then it was hands in the air, a cry of sweet chance, and then you shut up. Curious they'd get, and you let the sods drag out of you that you is privy to a scheme to extract gold
from the very part of the country in which they live. How come no one local knows of this, they say? What, you cry, let the locals in and it will be a mad dash wi' little for everyone, but kept secret a few can make a mint.'

‘An' they fall for it?'

‘It should be hard,' Charlie said, ‘but it ain't. The oddity is how quick they want a share.'

John Pearce was less surprised than the others; he and his Pa had come across any number of dubious projectors on their travels. ‘The twin engines of greed and fear, Adam Smith called it.'

‘And who,' demanded Michael O'Hagan, ‘is Adam Smith when he is out and scaring folk?'

‘A Scotsman like me.'

‘Of which,' Blubber insisted, ‘saving your own presence, Mr Pearce, there be a mite too many.'

‘Christ, they get everywhere.'

Pearce smiled. ‘Like the Irish, Michael.'

‘We dig dirt, while Sawney Jock mines gold.'

‘If only that were true, Michael, all my father mined was trouble.'

The conversation went round the table with the wine bottle, to establish that Blubber and Latimer had been ship's boys grown to seamen aboard merchant ships as well as men o' war, both from a coastal birthplace where fishing was the main occupation, though work on the smacks, owned by men with tight fists, was hard to come by. Rufus, originally from Litchfield, had been a bonded apprentice to a London tanner, before running away
from a man he saw as a tyrant out to bleed him dry.

Only Michael O'Hagan had what seemed an ordinary life, if being raised in Irish poverty could be called that. Being his size, and a bit of a mouth to feed in a large and still-growing family, he had left home because he had to, although he had used his strength to make his way, digging canals and sinking new shafts for mines. The rate of house-building, and the high wages paid for foundation-digging, had brought him to London; the love of drink and his attraction to Rosie had brought him to the Pelican Tavern. Like his mates, Ralph Barclay's criminality had brought him to this board.