The War Chest (8 page)

Babcock whistled.

‘Apart from the gold‚’ elaborated Horne, ‘the
Royaume
is supposedly carrying heavy cargo. Disguising her true mission, I suppose. Whatever the reason, the cargo’s in our favour as it slows down her progress.’

Groot, sitting cross-legged to Horne’s right, raised his hand.

Horne nodded permission to speak.

‘
Schipper
‚’
he began, using the Dutch word for captain. ‘How is the French ship armed?’

‘We don’t know, Groot. Incidentally, how do our guns stand?’ He looked at Kiro.

Kiro had been a gunner aboard a Japanese pirate boat out of Nagasaki, learning English from a Lascar sailor before being captured in an attack on an East India Company merchantman and jailed in Bombay Castle. Because of his experience Horne had appointed him gunner aboard the
Huma.

Sitting on deck in front of Horne’s berth, Kiro answered, ‘Larboard guns are stronger than starboard, sir.’

Horne said, ‘We must try for perfect balance, Kiro. Also, I want swivel guns ready on the forecastle.’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’

Horne’s hazel eyes moved from Kiro to Jud squatting next to him, and then to Jingee, the only Marine able to stand up straight without brushing his head on the cabin’s low beams.

‘If any of you men have questions, ask them. We can always work out some kind of plan. The orders are difficult but not impossible. We’ve had a tougher command.’

Babcock laughed. ‘That’s the trouble. We shouldn’t have done so well.’

‘Are you afraid, Babcock?’

Babcock answered honestly, one hand stroking the monkey cradled on his arm. ‘Not of having to find a needle in a haystack. But set against a treasure ship better armed than us, hell, yes, I’m … afraid!’

‘We know nothing of its munitions,’ Horne reminded Babcock.

Jud asked, ‘What about her escort, sir?’

‘My information, Jud, is that the
Royaume
left Le Havre unescorted.’

Horne resettled himself on the edge of the desk. ‘But I’ll say this. If there
is
an escort, if the
Royaume
is
sailing in convoy, we shall abandon the mission. Immediately. No permission asked.’

Jud smiled. ‘Sir, you of all men would find a way to sneak us into a convoy and make away with a gold chest.’

Horne glowed, not above enjoying idle flattery.

Groot called, ‘What we are doing now,
schipper,
is patrolling all southern waters for a French ship.’

‘Yes, Groot. In effect. The winds fortunately narrow down the work for us. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Agulhas, the Roaring Forties should bring the
Royaume
directly into our path.’

Jingee asked, ‘Is it possible, Captain sahib, that the French ship has already passed?’

‘Or pirates got to the gold before us?’ put in Jud.

‘Those are both possibilities,’ said Horne. ‘We merely have to continue our search, looking, waiting, hoping.’

He glanced around the cabin. ‘Any more questions?’

There was a silence broken only by the sound of the
Huma
sailing under full canvas, the creak of timbers, the prow cutting through lapping waves.

Horne looked at Mustafa, realising that the Turk had been silent throughout the entire morning’s meeting.

‘Mustafa, do you have any questions?’

The beefy Turk began to speak but stopped, shaking his head, his thick black moustache turning down at both bushy ends.

‘What is it, Mustafa? Something’s troubling you?’

Glancing around the cabin with quick, darting eyes, Mustafa looked back at Horne and asked, ‘What do we do with the gold, sir, when we get it?’

Laughter filled the cabin.

Horne raised both hands for silence. ‘Return it to Bombay—’

Mustafa’s face fell.

Horne’s answer had only been a quick response, and he added, ‘You didn’t think we were going to be able to keep it, did you, Mustafa?’

‘Sir, if there’s a lot of it and we’re the only ones who know where it is—’

The men laughed louder.

Horne smiled, realising, however, that Mustafa had raised a legitimate point. Governor Spencer had not told Horne what to do with the valuable cargo if and when the Marines did seize it. Was that not strange?

Jud left the meeting early to return to the forenoon watch. Horne had divided duty into six watches, joining the first and second dog watches into one stand.

Long hours of raw, fresh sea air invigorated Jud. He was pleased to be free again of land. Shipboard life was the only true happiness he knew—at least, these days.

Life had changed after Jud’s wife, Maringa, had died. Tall, sweet-faced, with eyes like a doe, Maringa had been a house slave in the castle of the Omani Sheik All Hadd. Jud had been saving to buy her freedom for the time when she gave birth to their child.

Maringa had brought a son in the world. A Nubian midwife had given Jud an exact description of the child she had delivered, stillborn—Maringa had also died the same night.

In despair, Jud had refused to eat for a week, wanting to die himself, to join his wife and son in a faraway world. But the gods would not have Jud. So he had turned to crime, becoming reckless as he burgled the homes of rich merchants, shops and warehouses, behaving as if he was determined to be caught. He
was
caught, stealing from a warehouse of the Honourable East India Company, and was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in Bombay Castle. He would not have cared if it had been a hundred, or a thousand years.

The
Huma
—like the cells honeycombed beneath Bombay Castle—was a world without women. Jud was happy in such a world, at least for the present. At sea, alone on the quarterdeck, or high on the yardarm where he liked to crawl and sit by himself, he talked to his son, speaking to his dead child in the ancient African practice of ancestor worship. But instead of talking to ancestors, Jud talked to his progeny.

‘How are you, boy?’ he called to the wind.

‘Boy, you have a bigger eye than me. Show us how to find that French ship, boy. Help your old man.’

Standing on the quarterdeck on the forenoon watch, Jud looked at the southern sky as he talked to his son and, spotting a trace of a storm cloud, he asked, ‘Boy, what you blowing my way? Is your Ma angry today, boy? Is that your Ma’s temper I see rising like brimstone and smoke?’

The
Huma
grew restless as morning passed, rising, dipping, lifting on swells, crashing down into the troughs.
Overhead
, the sky remained cloudless, the sun a yellow blot high on a blue bowl, but all around the frigate the sea churned and thrashed, becoming a greenish-grey murk.

Looking southeast across the bows from the quarterdeck, Horne watched a bank of dark clouds rising on the horizon, forming like a dust storm on a plain. Looking towards the wheel, he saw Groot—a blue peaked cap set back on his tow-blond hair—keeping a wary eye on the clouds.

Jud moved towards Horne. ‘The storm might move to the east of us, sir.’

Horne felt the wind behind him. ‘Or we’re going to blow straight into it.’

‘Sir, shall we close-roll the topsails?’

Horne remained silent, concentrating on more than wind stretching the canvas; he was listening to the sounds of the ship, her cries, her groans, how supple she was under the growing storm waves. Like people, each ship weathered differently and, as this was Horne’s first storm watch for the
Huma,
he was anxious to learn the frigate’s each and every eccentricity.

Jud offered, ‘Sir, why don’t I go aloft and send down the pirate?’ He and the other Marines referred to the men from the
Huma
’s
former crew as ‘the pirates’, calling hands recruited from Company ships ‘Company jacks’ or ‘jacks’, and the new sailors from Madagascar coastal villages, ‘the lubbers’.

The wind pitched the
Huma
more violently, driving her
prow into the rollers, intensifying the roll and pitch pattern.

Horne raised his eyes. ‘It’ll be a wild ride up there, Jud.’

‘Sir, we need a lookout. There’s a pirate up now and this weather could toss him over.’

Horne agreed. A lookout was necessary, especially so close to the Agulhas current. He knew, too, that Jud enjoyed riding a storm, and would think of any excuse to scale the ratlines.

Lowering his closely shaved head, Jud confessed, ‘It’s this push under my feet, too, sir. A storm troubles me, sir. I’d rather be—’ he raised his eyes, ‘—up top.’

Sea turbulence made the deck rise against a man’s feet, creating an uneasy feeling. Smiling, Horne waved Jud fore, ordering, ‘Change course and gallants!’

‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Jud was gone, half-running along the gangway to the foremast, shouting to the pirates, jacks and lubbers.

Horne gripped the quarterdeck rail, noticing men moving from the ship’s waist, drawn by the sudden shift in weather, curious to see the change in the sky, the way clouds rose and sped with the wind, their shapes altering quickly as the wind accelerated.

A boiling sea, too, aggravated sea-sickness, and Horne looked to see if any men moved towards the scuppers, doubled over to lose their breakfast.

But the Marines, as well as the new crew, seemed readily reconditioned to sea travel, including the men whom Governor Spencer had gleaned from the Malagasy fishing villages. Horne was less concerned about the ship’s provisional crew, however, than he was about the welfare of his Marines.

Neither Groot nor Babcock showed any recurrence of their sickness, nor had it spread to any of the other Marines. Perhaps Babcock had been right. Perhaps Groot’s cooking had poisoned them.

The one thing which Horne was most grateful for was that his men were not quarrelsome.

Dissension amongst crew was dangerous. Arguments and fights had been known to sink ships, sow mutinies. Horne had insisted that none of his recruits be pugilistic. He wanted fighters, but not men who fought and squabbled and argued amongst themselves.

Babcock was undisciplined, sometimes bordering on insubordinate and, frequently, downright sloppy. But he had excellent intuition, a keen nose for sniffing out trouble. Fred Babcock was a born survivor and Horne regarded him as one of his best men.

Efficient, fastidious Jingee often irritated the other Marines—Horne had had to face that fact. But Jingee possessed the priceless knack of knowing when to give men elbow room, when to stop nagging his colleagues, how to turn criticism into flattery. Of all Horne’s men, Jingee was the only courtier.

Mustafa was probably the most surly-tempered of the Marine unit, the least amicable of Horne’s men. Aggressively strong men were often tightly strung, their sensibilities pulled taut like the strings on a musical instrument, ready to snap at the slightest provocation; when played correctly, they produced beautiful music and rendered remarkable results.

Kiro, like Mustafa, was also tightly strung. But, unlike Mustafa, Kiro knew how to keep himself busy. In this respect, Horne identified with him and his constant need to keep his physical drives flowing; always teaching, improving, honing, seeing room to improve oneself, pressing towards an unattainable excellence.

The least difficult man to live and work with was, of course, the African giant, Jud. Kind, generous, quiet, obedient and fearless, Jud had formerly been matched in those qualities by that other affable Marine, Bapu. Ferocious but even-tempered; strong but gentle as a child; vengeful
but as sentimental as a new bridegroom—yes, Bapu had been an ideal colleague and companion.

Horne had decided not to try to replace Bapu. He had never set out to assemble any set number of Marines, and had originally chosen sixteen prisoners from Bombay Castle. That number had been pared down to seven. Now there were six.

But should he think about a permanent team, a squadron of a fixed number? Was there a need for a band of saboteurs in warfare? There were Navies. There were Armies. There were Merchant fleets. There were privately conscripted forces which bore arms. But would anyone—any crowned head, democracy or company—require a band of men trained in specialised feats of combat?

Hmmm. It was an interesting idea: men especially prepared for the hit-and-run attacks, a unit never to be disbanded. Or was that why Commodore Watson was maintaining an interest in Horne’s motley group of men? Did he have more noble ambitions for the small corps of Marines than Horne even suspected?

His daydreams were interrupted by Jud’s cry from the rigging.

Moving fore, Horne saw Jud against the sky, beckoning to him with one hand, pointing southwards, hailing, ‘Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!’

What did he see? The
Royaume
?

Forgetting about his idle daydreams of a hit-and-run squadron of troubleshooters, forgetting about the winds tilting the masts and yards, Horne hurried down the gangway and, pulling off his boots, leapt barefooted for the shrouds. The soles of his feet were hardened from walking across rock and sand, and he easily climbed the hemp ratlines toward the forestay, keeping his eyes aloft; he
wondered if he had had the good luck to find the French treasure ship so soon.

Clearing the futtock shrouds, he enjoyed the moment of hanging backwards, a spine-tingling suspension in space before resuming his crawl towards the foretopgallant shrouds.

Jud, both mahogany-brown legs locked around the crosstree, raised his right hand, pointing south as Horne approached the yardarm.

Settling against the mast, Horne pulled the spyglass from his waistband, but first accustomed himself to the roll of the ship—a dizzying circle moving left, right, fore, aft—before raising the glass to his eye.

Finding the blur among the distant clouds, he studied the triangle before passing the spyglass to Jud.

Jud held the glass with both hands. ‘A brig, sir.’

Now Horne could see the ship with his naked eye. ‘That’s what I make out, Jud. And a strong gale chasing her.’

‘With us right behind her.’

‘Can you catch her colours?’

‘I see red, sir, and—’ lowering the spyglass, he handed it to Horne. ‘I can’t say for certain, sir.’

Horne tucked the spyglass into his waistband and surveyed the horizon. The view was magnificent from aloft, but he would have enjoyed it more without the yardarm circling in mid-air, one moment tipping him to the west, one moment tipping him facedown to the sea, the deck disappearing behind him, and the next moment dashing him backwards to face the sky. The wind was rising, too, and he shouted, ‘Let’s go below.’

‘If you leave your glass with me, sir, I could stay and try to catch a glimpse of her colours. The wind might help us gain on her.’

It was a sensible idea. Brave, too.

Trusting Jud not to put himself—or any of the hands—in danger, Horne passed back the spyglass and swung his leg
over the yard, preparing to descend. He was not halfway down the shrouds when he heard Jud beginning to sing, raising his deep, rich voice in a song to the wind. Or, at least, Horne
thought
Jud’s words were addressed to the wind, some mysterious African chant carried to the storm clouds gathering on the southern horizon.

His thoughts went back to the ship, and her proximity in the brewing storm.

Horne was nearing the lubber’s hole when he heard a shout. Certain it was not part of Jud’s song, he tightened his grip on the ratline and looked aloft, to see Jud pointing south, calling, ‘Another ship, sir! A second ship!’

Scurrying up the ratline, Horne swung onto the
crosstree
and grabbed the spyglass from Jud’s extended hand. Both legs locked tightly around the yard, he steadied himself with one hand as he raised the glass to his eye.

Yes, there was a second sail on the horizon, a ship which had obviously come from the south towards the first vessel.

Jud shouted over the wind. ‘She looks like another brig, sir.’

Horne was thinking less about the ship’s size than about the direction from which she had come. Mauritius lay to the east; the Agulhas current would come from the southwest. Was one ship an escort of the other? Was one the
Royaume
carrying the war chest from Le Havre?

As Horne handed the spyglass back to Jud, a crack of lightning lit the ship.

Ignoring the jagged streak, Jud studied the two vessels. ‘I see another blur of red, sir,’ he said. ‘The second ship’s colours look—’

Lightning again streaked the quickly darkening sky.

Horne held out his hand for the glass. ‘Enough, Jud.
We’re going down. Everybody. I’m not losing a man to a storm.’

‘Sir, one question.’

‘Be quick about it.’

‘If we see them, sir, they see us.’

‘I’d think so.’

‘But the first ship does not appear to be in flight, sir. Not fleeing and not chasing.’

‘There could be two or three possibilities for that, Jud.’ Raising his voice above the strengthening gale, he went on, ‘One, they could be heavily armed. Not frightened of us. Or else they could be heading for an important rendezvous, willing to chance our presence for exchange of information.’

‘The treasure ship, sir?’

Horne remained silent, not wanting to raise his hopes.

‘What are we going to do, sir.’

‘Go below‚’ Horne ordered.

‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Jud grinned, grabbing for the shrouds, eyes sharpening for any sign of pirates, jacks, or lubbers in the wildly tilting network of masts, spars, and rigging.

The Indian Ocean bubbled in the worsening storm, water churning around the
Huma
as she laboured under storm sail. The growing wind whipped the waves into sharp, jagged whitecaps, tossing them into rollers against the frigate’s hull as clouds coloured the sky like night, a heavy darkness lit by the occasional crack of lightning.

Horne ignored the rain beginning to pelt the quarterdeck as he puzzled over the meaning of two mysterious ships, of not one but two brigs visible to naked eyesight.

If their meeting was a rendezvous, what was its purpose? Why in the middle of the Indian Ocean? Was it accidental or planned? He knew the two vessels were more than merchant ships—he knew it. He trusted his intuition
on that matter. They were not British ships, either, because Company or Navy vessels would raise a flag signal—even to an unmarked ship like the
Huma.

So who were they? More pirates? Privateers? If so, why hadn’t they given chase? Did the
Royaume
have an escort? Or was it in convoy? Would other ships soon be visible? Were they grouping for the storm?

Horne’s only consolation was that the two ships—French, Dutch, Spanish, whoever they were—could go nowhere in these foul conditions. The storm came from their direction. The possibility was, though, that they could pass through a lifting storm more quickly than the
Huma.
So Horne had to remain alert, be ready to pounce at the first break in the storm, not losing track of them. If it weren’t the French treasure ship, whoever it was might have news of the
Royaume
and be able to give Horne some valuable information.

Pacing the quarterdeck, holding the
Huma
to storm sail, Horne wondered if he was driving the ship too heavily through the gale. He remembered a stormy journey from his boyhood, riding in a coach with his father from Bath to London. His father had told the driver to tie burlap bags over the horses’ heads to prevent them being panic-stricken by the lightning. Horne Senior had urged the driver to use the whip on the frightened animals, to force them on in the storm. Young Horne had begged his father to spare the animals, to let them rest, but the elder man had insisted that his appointment in London was more important than any team of coach horses.

Was he himself now doing the same thing? The
Huma
was no animal, of course, but a ship did have a life of its own, it was more than timber and canvas and rigging.

Why, then, was he driving her so ruthlessly into the wind? The main masts had been destroyed recently by gunfire and the replacement and repairs could well have been slipshod. A strong gale would reveal faults, cracks, patchy repairs.

He was troubled by less practical questions, too. He knew that he was uneasy about Governor Spencer’s orders, so why was he driving the
Huma
—and himself—like this to obey them? Why was he obsessed with the urge to achieve what might well be impossible? Why did he feel the need to excel, especially in an undertaking which he found suspicious and of which he did not wholeheartedly approve? Was this one of those occasions when obedience might be wrong?