The War Chest (7 page)

Adam Horne strolled down the hill from Company House wishing there was some way to be a Bombay Marine without being connected to the East India Company. Involvement with them made him feel dishonest. He too often suspected them of dishonourable activities, sensing that his work helped unlikeable men to achieve ignoble ends.

Horne held no illwill against commerce. His father was a banker, and the profits from business had fed and clothed him since childhood. But the size of the East India Company was now giving businessmen the power of kings, allowing them control over life and death. To Horne’s mind, this privilege was exceedingly dangerous.

In 1600 Queen Elizabeth had granted a royal charter to a collection of English merchants who wanted to participate in the wealth being brought back to Europe from the Orient by Dutch and Portuguese trading companies. Quickly surpassing Holland and Portugal, England had also overtaken France’s East India Company, the
Compagnie
des
Indes
Orientales,
turning a war with France from a struggle for trade into a battle for territory.

One hundred and sixty-one years after its conception, England’s East India Company possessed more wealth, more power than most nations. In recent years Horne had seen how the Governors were beginning to increase the Company’s profits with the help of the sword, deposing Indian rulers who refused to grant them trading rights, planting company puppets on native thrones. Robert Clive,
the former Governor of Bengal, had been the first man to hold a Company post as well as a commission in the Army. Retiring to London on his vast wealth from India, Clive was considered to be the richest man in the world.

Suspicious of Governor Spencer’s real reasons—together with those of his two colleagues, Pigot of Madras and Vansittart of Bengal—for sending the Company’s Marines to seize the French war chest, Horne reached the bottom of the hill, wondering if the Governors were trying to fuel a mutiny within the French forces. A mutiny could rid the East Indies of the French once and for all.

Or did the British Navy Board truly want the French war chest for their own coffers, needing the gold to finance other colonial campaigns in, say, Canada? Despite his pleasure at being given the
Huma,
Horne suspected that there was some sinister motive behind this sea venture.

The sounds of a bare-knuckle fight made him pause at an opening between the sun-bleached houses and, looking through the gap, he saw a group of men shouting and laughing.

More than thirty men had formed a tight circle around the combatants and were calling out encouragement:

‘Give him a taste of your knuckles, Dave!’

‘Smash that monkey-face!’

‘Show the Bombay buccaneer who’s a man!’

The mention of ‘Bombay buccaneer’ alerted Horne. Pushing his way through the circle, he saw the heads of two men, recognising one of them as Babcock, the other as Dave Linderman, the boatswain’s mate from the
Unity,
a bear of a man with a pug-nose and bushy side-whiskers.

‘Hit him harder, Dave!’

‘Bloody that American blow-hard!’

‘Black and blue the big lubber!’

Babcock was fast on his feet for a man of his size; he was dancing around Linderman, throwing alternating blows of his fists in quick, hard-hitting succession—the left, the left, the right—knuckles cracking against Linderman’s face, breaking his skin, smashing his nose, pummelling his ears.

Bobbing to the left and right, Linderman had failed to avoid most of Babcock’s punches; blood was streaming from his nose, and his lower lip was cut and swollen. The crew, however, continued to cheer Linderman and jeer at Babcock.

Linderman struck a blow to Babcock’s ribs and repeated the strike, concentrating on this target with a burst of new energy. Doubling over, Babcock brought his elbows to his side as the cheers rose for Linderman.

Bursting from the crouch, Babcock wrapped his left arm around Linderman’s neck, locking the seaman’s head under his upper arm like a wrestler, and began driving his fist against Linderman’s face.

Horne saw that Babcock might seriously injure his opponent if he continued. Bolting forward, he grabbed Babcock by the shoulder, separating the two men.

Babcock spun, ready to attack his new opponent, but seeing it was Horne, he hesitated, gasping, ‘What the hell—?’

Horne moved between him and Linderman. ‘Get out of here, Babcock.’

‘Hell I will! They started it!’

Horne wanted to collect his Marines and tell them the news about the
Huma,
perhaps help join the work being done on the frigate.

As the seamen backed away, subdued by the sight of the gold-trimmed uniform, Horne repeated, ‘Babcock, get out of here.’

A man called from the circle, ‘Go on, you big monkey! Go with him!’

Babcock pointed at the man. ‘Hear that? Hear what they called me? Monkey!’

‘Monkey!’ shouted another seaman. ‘You look just like your kid!’

Babcock lunged for the man.

Grabbing Babcock by the shoulder, Horne raised a fist to his face. At the same moment, a small, nut-brown monkey wrapped its small furry arms around Horne’s leg and leaped, chattering, to swing from Horne’s bicep to Babcock’s shoulder, hugging Babcock’s neck and licking his
blood-streaked
face with a wide, wet tongue.

Horne demanded, ‘Whose is that?’

Babcock wiped perspiration mixed with blood from his brow. ‘Mine.’

Horne awoke to the absence of gulls mewing, the first time in five days that the scavenger birds had not awakened him with their tormenting chorus. Having cleared Madagascar, the
Huma
had emerged from the southern waters of the Strait of Mozambique and had passed far enough east from Africa to be rid of the foul, harping land birds.

Leaping from his berth, he grabbed the twill trousers he had substituted for the breeches of his uniform. Three sharp knocks sounded on the cabin door as he stood looking to see where he had tossed the
dungri
shirt he had sleepily pulled off last night after studying charts, examining current flows, estimating where—and when—the
Huma
might spot the French treasure ship.

Calling for the early morning visitor to enter the cabin, Horne was not surprised to see Jingee carrying in a breakfast tray. He never ceased to be amazed by the way the young Tamil found time to perform watch duties as well as act as his valet, personal cook and
dubash.
Horne had eaten better since leaving Port Diego-Suarez six days ago than he had in six months in Bombay.

The distribution of duty aboard the
Huma
was prejudiced, Horne knew. He had appointed his Marines to positions of officer rank aboard the frigate. Whilst he was familiar with the abilities of his men, he knew nothing about the recruits whom the East India Company had gathered on Madagascar. Governor Spencer had culled a skeleton crew from three Company ships in harbour and from the sailors who had previously served aboard the
Huma.
He had also found a
handful of young islanders anxious to escape the tedium of their villages. The result was a shipful of lascars, pirates, fishermen—a motley crew over whom Horne’s six Marines had command.

Jingee, proud to be one of the
Huma’
s
new ‘officers’, still wore his turban,
dhoti
and loose cotton shirt. Transferring a plate and bowl from the bamboo tray to Horne’s desk, he announced, ‘The wind’s strong from the west this morning, Captain sahib.’

‘Hmmm.’ Horne stood on one foot, pulling on a tall leather boot, the footgear being the only part of his uniform he chose to wear aboard the frigate.

Jingee continued arranging Horne’s breakfast on the desk rather than setting a proper table. The bowl of fruit he placed on the neatly pressed cloth was more for
ornamentation
than consumption. Horne suspected that if he asked for a vaseful of flowers to decorate his table, Jingee would somehow produce roses or lilies or field flowers in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Ramming his foot into the second boot, Horne inhaled the tempting aroma wafting from the steaming dishes. He normally did not enjoy eating in the morning, but Jingee inevitably prepared some tempting fare—hot bread laced with cinnamon, porridge dotted with succulent raisins, fruit-flavoured teas.

Curious about the activity on the quarterdeck, Horne reconfirmed as he moved to the desk, ‘Jud’s morning watch?’

‘Yes, Captain sahib. And Groot’s sailing master at the wheel.’ Jingee turned to a locker, took out a freshly laundered shirt and passed it to Horne, holding out his hand for the wrinkled garment that Horne had picked up from the arm of the chair.

Surrendering the soiled shirt, Horne asked, ‘What about the new men?’

Jingee tossed the shirt towards the door where he would
not miss it on the way out of the cabin. Crossing to the berth to straighten Horne’s bed linen, he answered, ‘The new men ask questions all the time about Marines, Captain sahib. They don’t understand the ways of Bombay Marines.’

Who did understand the Bombay Marines? Particularly those in Horne’s squadron? Manning a pirate frigate and searching for a French treasure ship—Horne’s Bombay Marines must seem normal to very few outsiders.

‘The new hands‚’ continued Jingee, ‘think that a Marine should be—’ he nodded at the door, ‘—a guard. A sentinel. A man who stands in the companionway with a musket on his shoulder.’ Jingee stood rigidly, chest thrown out, both arms at his sides to illustrate his point.

‘That’s how a Marine should be, Jingee. Aboard other ships. Navy ships.’

Jingee bent over the wrinkled bed linen. ‘But not the
Huma.’

‘Nor the
Eclipse.
Nor any ship over which I have had command, and probably will ever have command.’

Horne preferred a crew to be versatile, capable of as many feats as possible; he also believed that the men themselves preferred their duty to be that way.

‘Do you know what the name means, Captain sahib?’

‘What name, Jingee?’

‘The
Huma
?’

Horne had never thought about it. ‘No. What?’

‘It’s a mythical bird. A bird in Indian folklore which never stops flying.’

‘A bird that’s always in flight?’ Horne thought of the noisy seagulls which had thankfully disappeared from the stern windows.

‘The
Huma
flies day and night, Captain sahib. Never alights on a tree or a rock or a fence. Always staying in air.’

Horne was intrigued. He remembered how he had first visualised the frigate when he had seen it from the
Indiaman, seeing it as a large, magnificent eagle, travelling with a smaller predator, a kingfisher.

Bending over the berth, Jingee smoothed the sheet, saying, ‘That’s a sad story, don’t you think, Captain sahib? A bird that can never stop flying?’

‘Perhaps for a nesting bird, yes. But not for a predator, a hunter, or for a messenger. The gift of staying in motion could be a great attribute, Jingee. A wonderful gift. A fine feat.’

Jingee stood upright, surprised by Horne’s opinion.

‘Imagine it,’ Horne went on. ‘Such a bird would not have to waste time resting, taking food, sleeping. It would always have the strength to keep on flying, discovering new things, travelling to new places, encountering new things.’

Jingee bent back over the berth, shaking his head; he decided that Horne, the Captain sahib, would probably be such a bird rather than a nice, cosy nesting bird, a partridge, or a dove.

Horne picked some raisins from the porridge, eating them like sweets. ‘Do you think the name’s an omen, Jingee?’ he asked.

‘Omen, Captain sahib?’

‘For us? That we’ll always be on the wing? Never remaining in one place?’

‘I shall ask the astrologer, Captain sahib, when we return to Bombay.’

‘And if we don’t drop anchor, you’ll have your answer.’

Jingee laughed at Horne’s flippant remark. Moving towards the door, he glanced at him with admiration, knowing why he respected him. A stern, dedicated man, Horne also had a whimsical side to him, an appreciation of the mysterious, the unknown, the sacred. Jingee truly believed that Horne possessed great
karma,
that intangible, indefinable essence of a man’s soul.

Seated behind his desk, Horne spooned his porridge as he
studied a chart for Cape Agulhas. ‘Jingee,’ he asked, ‘have there been complaints from the crew about their food?’

Jingee cooked for Horne and, occasionally, for the other Marines, but never for the crew. The ship’s galley had a Malagasy cook. But Jingee had seen their provisions and answered, ‘The food is bad, Captain sahib. There are weevils in the biscuits. The dried fish is too salty. The barrel meat is tough as leather.’

Horne had feared this. He had seen one cask of salt fish after weighing anchor and had turned up his nose at the stench. At Port Diego-Suarez, he had been too busy supervising the ship’s refitting to attend to its provisioning. His first instincts on discovering the inferior condition of the supplies at sea had been to share his own food with the crew, but Jingee had pointed out that there would not even be enough staples from Horne’s provisions for one complete galley meal.

Why had Governor Spencer done such a thing? Horne wondered. Or had some local merchant taken advantage of the Company’s situation and produced old rations, a sad but familiar trick?

Jingee frowned. ‘If anybody gets hungry, I know where they can get a fat monkey to cook.’

Horne raised his eyes. He knew what monkey Jingee meant.

Jingee gripped an imaginary knife, threatening, ‘I’m going to kill that monkey myself, Captain sahib.’

Fred Babcock had kept the nut-brown monkey from Madagascar and brought it aboard the
Huma,
arguing that Navy ships had dogs and cats, so why could not the Bombay Marine have a monkey?

Jingee shook his head, saying, ‘You’ll see, Captain sahib. You’ll see. Babcock will bring that monkey to this morning’s meeting. You’ll see how loudly it chatters and screams.’

A meeting had been slotted between the morning and the late morning watch. Horne hoped no altercation would
develop between his men because of a monkey; he had too many important details to discuss.

Babcock’s pet monkey added to Jingee’s disapproval of the towering American Marine. A man who did not properly address his superiors was not a man to be admired. Jingee had always secretly disapproved of Babcock’s disrespectful ways but, of course, had tried hard not to betray any of his feelings. He had noticed, however, that Babcock seldom saluted Horne, that he seldom addressed him as ‘sir’ or ‘sahib’ or ‘
schipper
’,
or however people addressed officers in that far-off land across the Pacific Ocean called the Americas.

Jingee thought about Fred Babcock—and his annoying little brown pet monkey—as he washed Horne’s laundry. Using ash soap that he carried tied around his waist in a leather pouch, he crouched in the space which seamen used for their latrine, the enclosure at the fore part of the ship and named for its location—the ‘heads’.

Rubbing a shirt’s collar, his thoughts moved to another Marine, Bapu. What was happening to Bapu? How would he come back to earth in the divine cycle of existence? Would he return to relive his role as a warrior? Or would Bapu’s forebears consider that he had forsaken the
Kshatriya
caste? Being disowned, Bapu would be reborn outside the system of the four castes, coming back a
Panchama
—somebody so deplorable that people would not touch him. Perhaps he would even be reincarnated as someone who had to ring a bell to warn unsuspecting strangers that his polluting presence was approaching them.

Not wanting to wash Horne’s clothing in harsh, salty sea water, Jingee rinsed the shirt in a bucket of drinking water he had taken unnoticed from the casks. As he worked, he
thought about the rest of the Marines. He had definite opinions about each and every one of them.

Mustafa and Groot had been good friends of Babcock in Bombay; the three of them had lived together. But, then, they were
topiwallahs
—foreigners who wore hats, not turbans. In fact, Groot never took off that blue cap. Did he wear it for some religious reason? Was he some kind of northern Sikh?

Thinking of religion, Jingee reflected that Mustafa was a Muslim. Muslim invaders had come to India more than three hundred years ago and put their Grand Moghul on the throne. The Hindu Tamils in the south had never accepted the Moghul’s religion, but many northern Indians not only bowed to the mighty court of wealth and power but accepted the word of Allah.

Jud—also a Muslim—mystified Jingee more than Mustafa. To Jingee, Mustafa was little better than a thug. A tough. But, Jud, ah, he was different. He was special.

Jingee considered that Jud must be an exceptional man for the priests of the Red Temple to allow him to guard their fabulous treasures. Hindu priests were
Brahmins,
the highest caste in all creation, and if
Brahmins
recognised something unique in Jud, then he must be no common thief. He must have great
Karma.
Jingee often heard Jud singing to the wind and suspected it was some kind of religious chant, some conversation with spirits.

The Japanese Marine, Kiro, frightened more than baffled Jingee. Japanese Orientals and Asian Orientals were similar, yet so different. All Bombay Marines were supposed to be accomplished assassins. Jingee had killed his previous employer—an English district officer—who had defied Hindu law by yoking a Brahmin to an Untouchable to till his kitchen garden. Jingee had warned the foreigner that he was violating sacred laws. But the foreigner had continued to ignore Jingee’s warning and Jingee had driven a dagger through the man’s sacrilegious heart. For that
crime Jingee had been condemned to Bombay Castle.

Kiro, however, was a different kind of murderer. He was stealthy, quiet, his eyes like water at night. Seldom talking, never divulging secrets. Yes, Jingee had to admit to himself that if he were to fear any of the Bombay Marines, it would be Kiro.

He stood wringing water from Horne’s laundry over the blue-grey waves lapping below, thinking of the way the Captain sahib held together this unusual assortment of men. Without Horne, the Marines would not talk to each other, not see each other, not even know each other. They were united by Horne and, of course, by their criminal backgrounds. But the important link was the Captain sahib.

Pulling out a length of string from the side of his
dhoti,
Jingee knotted it across the heads, letting the wind off the sea begin drying the wet laundry. The morning was hot. The clothes would dry quickly. Jingee was not on watch duty, so he could stand here waiting until it was time for the morning meeting. If somebody wanted to use the heads, Jingee did not care. They could go somewhere else. His work came first. The Captain sahib reigned supreme.

The six Marines came to Horne’s cabin for the meeting. Seeing them gathered so casually inside the small space reminded Horne of the old days aboard the
Eclipse.

Pressing on with business at hand, he addressed them standing at his desk. ‘I haven’t informed you about the purpose of our new assignment for the simple reason that we’ve had more important things to occupy our minds. But now that the
Huma’
s
at sea, I can tell you the bad news—we’ve been deputed to find a needle in a haystack.’

Glancing from Babcock with his monkey by the door, to
Mustafa cross-legged on the deck, to the other four men lounging or squatting around the cabin, he continued, ‘We’re here to find a French ship, the
Royaume.
She sailed from Le Havre six months ago carrying a shipment of gold. She’s bound for Mauritius. Our orders are to commandeer her.’