The French Prize (9 page)

Like Rumstick, the chair was well made and not about to come apart. It was the work of John Townsend of Newport, one of a set of chairs and matching table that Rumstick had ordered in the years following the War for Independency, after his long association with his particular friend Isaac Biddlecomb had left him wealthy enough to afford such things. Both the chair and his friendship with Isaac had stood many a test and both were found to be durable, able to stand the strains, the bumping and scraping and occasional abuse that went with simple existence.

The chair, and Rumstick, were turned away from the desk. Across the room, sitting more erect than Rumstick in a chair that was sister to Ezra's, was Jeremiah Tillinghast, still wearing the reddish-brown homespun stockings that had greeted Jack on his first full day in command of the
Abigail
. Tillinghast was talking, Rumstick was listening.

“I could never discover the place they agreed to meet, you see, so I hove to by Oxnard's wharf and kept a weather eye on
Abigail.
I'll warrant I was coming to think Jack would take a pass on the whole affair, but at length his friend Stiles comes along, and off they go.”

“To meet Bolingbroke?” Rumstick asked.

“To have their breakfast, if you can credit it.”

Rumstick shook his head. “These young men today,” he said. “Even an affair of honor won't get them out of bed before the sun.”

“They're the future of our country, Captain,” Tillinghast said.

“You put me in the dumps when you remind me of that. But pray, go on.”

“Once they've had done with their breakfast they're off to the Southwark, and I'm in their wake, but well astern, so they never see me. They meet Bolingbroke at that empty lot on Second, you know the one?”

“I do.”

“There's some business about weapons, I think. I was in an alley where I could see, but too far away to hear. In any event, they was talking about something, talking being what these young fellows do best. I was watching them all the while, and had they chosen pistols I was ready to step forward. Swords, I would have let Jack have a few passes, let him run free, as it were, unless he looked to be standing into danger. But before they even settled on weapons, up pulls Oxnard in that new coach-and-four of his, steps right up and orders everyone gone, like they was foremast hands and he the admiral. He takes Jack off in his coach, and that's an end to it.”

Ezra frowned and stared at the pattern in the carpet. “It's passing strange,” he said at last. “Jack and Bolingbroke have mixed it up over and again through the years, but I would not have credited Bolingbroke with being the kind would look for an affair of honor. A cove like that has damned little honor to defend.”

At that, Tillinghast just shrugged.

“So now that you know what Bolingbroke looks like, tell me, was he at the tavern you dragged Jack out of?”

Tillinghast shook his head. “I was too far to get a good look this morning, and things was a bit confused the other night, so I can't say for certain.”

Rumstick nodded. He could just picture Tillinghast and a few of his mates tearing up the Blue Goose and dragging Jack and Stiles and the rest of those young bucks out of there. Tillinghast exuded power, in the way he sat, in the way the cloth of his coat was stretched tight over the muscles in his arms. He was a tough son of a bitch, and Rumstick was one to know, because he had known plenty of tough sons of bitches in his near forty years at sea. He had seen men sit silent and unmoving as ship's carpenters used pliers to pull rotten teeth from their mouths. He had seen men spend hours aloft, bare-handed, pounding the ice out of the double-aught canvas of frozen topsails just to make the cloth pliable enough to reef. He had seen men with dreadful wounds keep on fighting as they slipped in their own blood. He had seen men with mortal wounds refuse to leave their stations, unwilling even in the face of death to abandon their shipmates.

Ezra had sailed with Tillinghast and he knew he was that kind of tough. His age was harder to figure. Rumstick guessed it was a little less than his own, late forties, perhaps, but with these seamen, with their lean, hard bodies and weathered faces, it was a tricky thing to gauge.

Rumstick continued to ponder the mystery of it all. With everything that had passed between Bolingbroke and Jack Biddlecomb, why would Bolingbroke call him out now, of all times? And for so minor an affront as a tavern brawl? “It don't answer,” he said at length. “Bolingbroke just ain't a dueling sort of cove.”

Not that any of this was any of Rumstick's affair. He had no official business in Philadelphia, or anywhere, for that matter. At the end of the war he had continued on with Stanton and Biddlecomb, Merchants, taking command of a series of ships on a series of voyages to the West Indies and beyond. But for Ezra, who had been part of that group of upstart Rhode Islanders who had begun fighting the Revolution before most others even knew there was a war, the merchant service was pretty small beer. After ten years of near constant armed conflict he found he could not muster much enthusiasm for haggling with merchants over bills of lading.

The monotony of the carrying trade pushed him from the sea, and the fact that a new nation was being built on the foundation he had fought so hard to lay kept him ashore. The War for Independency had left the former colonies a smoldering ruin, and now architects of every stripe were struggling to design what new edifice would be built in its place. After all the suffering that he had endured, witnessed, and doled out over the years of fighting, he could not spend his days worrying about the price of molasses in Barbados and take no part in this creation.

Lofty debate over the philosophy of governance was not for Ezra Rumstick and his ilk, and he knew it. The clever coves, the Adamses and the Madisons and the Jeffersons and Hamiltons, and, on another level, the Biddlecombs and the Stantons, were the ones who would build it up, who would make their long-winded arguments based on Cicero or whatever ancient worthy they were citing that week. They were the ones who would shape the United States to be the very thing for which so many had shed so much blood.

Creating a government was a messy thing, that was one of those truths Rumstick had discovered, to his surprise. Questions of how much power a federal government would wield in relation to the states, whether the Federalists wished for an American monarchy or the Democratic-Republicans following in Jefferson's wake would bring the nation down in chaos were not topics for effeminate debate in some salon, but issues that would genuinely determine what sort of a nation rose from the ashes.

There was a place for Ezra Rumstick, and it was not arguing in the fancy halls where the tables were covered in green baize and laid with silver writing sets. And just as he was coming to understand that, the French burst into a revolution of their own, to the near universal delight of all Americans, their former
compagnon d'armes
. Rumstick, like most
citoyens
of the United States, had cheered them on at first, seeing, correctly, that the French Revolution was a continuation of the spirit born in America.

But soon the glorious revolution in France devolved into a bloody, chaotic affair, and Rumstick, like many of his countrymen, felt his enthusiasm turn to wariness and disgust. His support for the revolutionaries of France fell by degrees with each head that dropped into a wicker basket.

Could the heads start rolling down Market Street in Philadelphia? To most it seemed impossible, but Ezra Rumstick had seen quite a bit of the true nature of men, even Americans, and he was not so sure. There had already been rioting a'plenty in America, with Jefferson and his followers standing in unwavering support of the Frenchies no matter how deplorable and bloody their behavior. So when his particular friend Isaac Biddlecomb was elected to the House of Representatives as a delegate from Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Ezra understood where his place would be. On the streets. In the alleys. In the shadows. Making certain that the heads did not roll.

Keeping young Jack Biddlecomb alive and out of prison had become something of a sideline to his main concern.

“I don't care for this, Tillinghast, I tell you, I don't,” Ezra said at last. “This business with Oxnard's promoting Jack never did smell right. And now you throw Bolingbroke into the pot.”

“Jack's a damnably fine seaman,” Tillinghast said. “Oxnard promotes him, he gets a good shipmaster, and gets to stick Isaac Biddlecomb's nose in it. And some of that will splash onto Adams as well.”

“I know,” Ezra said. “But it still don't smell right. I think we better have a word with Master Bolingbroke.”

Tillinghast smiled and stood. “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, then turned and was gone. Bolingbroke, of course, would not come willingly. That was what accounted for Tillinghast's smile, and his genuine enthusiasm for the task.

 

7

It had, in fact, been two years since Jack Biddlecomb and Jonah Bolingbroke trod the same deck, and bunked in the same forecastle, and gone at one another with fists and knives. Jack had not been a mate then. He had not even been Jack Biddlecomb then, and that was where the trouble had started, that time, at least.

Jack had abandoned the name Jack Biddlecomb in Buenos Aires at the same time he had abandoned the leaking, half-rotten, hogging old bucket known as the
Queen of the Sea
, aboard which he had shipped in Charleston. He had not been overly optimistic about the
Queeny
, as she was known to those aboard her, based on the sight of her alone, the sagging and crooked ratlines, the white patches on her standing rigging where the cordage had been imperfectly tarred, like exposed bone on some sun-rotten corpse, the strands of oakum hanging like seaweed from her deck seams that all but assured a leaky, miserable time below.

He was less enthusiastic still after meeting the mate, an inarticulate brute with one good eye and one wandering eye, neither of which would meet Jack's when they spoke, so that Jack was not entirely certain which eye was which. The master was half drunk when they met and soon after achieved full drunkenness, and in their brief months together never seemed to be in any other state.

But Jack needed to get out of town quickly following an unfortunate misunderstanding at a local brothel, and since
Queeny
was hove short in the stream and ready to make sail, and for some reason in desperate need of hands, he signed aboard, able-bodied.

All of the shortcomings of the
Queen of the Sea
Jack might have overlooked, most of them being not particularly unusual for the carrying trade, including the near constant pumping he soon found was required to keep her afloat. And to be sure, she was blessedly free of rats, though that could have been construed as a bad sign. But two things pushed him beyond his endurance.

One was the captain's insistence, after they sailed, that he did not warrant the rating of able-bodied, or the concomitant pay, and so rerated him as ordinary. Such a thing was unusual to the point of being unheard of, and would have infuriated Jack in any case, he having by then sailed for more than a year with the rating of able-bodied. But when it became clear to him that he was by far the most active and skilled, if youngest, man in a forecastle full of broken drunks and skulkers and sea lawyers, it became more than he could tolerate.

And just as he was making his displeasure known to the master, the old man saw far enough through a rent in the fog of rum to say, “Biddlecomb, is it? Unusual name. You must be relative to Isaac Biddlecomb, what made such a name for himself in the war. So what in hell are you doing in the fo'c'sle, eh, boy?”

And that was that. From then on there was nothing that Jack could do that would not be referred back to his lineage. “Do you see how he spilled slush on the deck!” one might say, “the son of Isaac Biddlecomb!” (they having guessed at his relationship to the Great Man). “See what the son of Isaac Biddlecomb reckons passes for a proper long splice!” This, like the pumping and the water dripping from the deckhead, had long been one of the regular plagues of his seagoing career, but of all of them, this, he was finding, was the one he could not with equanimity endure.

So, once the
Queen of the Sea
dropped her best bower in the harbor at Buenos Aires, and all was snugged down and the sun set and the anchor watch passed out drunk in the longboat on the main hatch, Jack lowered his dunnage and then himself into the captain's gig floating alongside and pulled for shore. Abandoning the
Queeny
meant abandoning the meager pay that was due him, and since the misunderstanding in Charleston had left him without a sou, he knew he was in for a bit of a lean time until he could find another berth. But this was not the first time he had taken French leave of a ship he had signed aboard. Indeed his very first voyage had ended that way.

And lean it was, for the few days he spent haunting the waterfront of that South American town, looking out for the main chance and keeping a weather eye cocked for any from the
Queen of the Sea
who might be looking out for him.

He was in a tavern off an alley that shared a wall with a chandler, hoping that someone would abandon a meal with a tolerable amount of food still on the plate, when he fell in with two Yankee sailors off a Boston ship called the
Hancock
lying at anchor out in the roads.

“The old
Hardcock
's in want of hands,” one of the sailors said, sniggering at this, the apogee of the seaman's sly, droll humor, though Jack could not imagine that he had made that witticism up on the spot, or, indeed, at all.

“Is that true?” he asked. “Or do you practice on me?”

“No, it's God's truth,” the other said. “We had one hand in the larboard watch break his leg and another got athwart the mate's hawse and run once he got the chance. The old man hates your dagos and Frenchmen, and would soon shoot an Englishman as let him slush the t'gallant masts, so an American is always welcome, especially a fellow knows a head from a halyard, which you look to be. What's your name?”