‘As to that, sir…’ ‘Well?’
William put the tips of his forefingers into his mouth and bit them gently.
‘Well, sir. Let us say that Thomas Fox might claim he did not volunteer.’
Swift looked at him under his fierce strong brows. ‘But he accepted the bounty?’
‘He accepted thirty shillings.’
‘And?’
‘He might claim it was not so much the King’s bounty as… Well, sir, he was on his way to market.’
Swift smiled bleakly.
‘Surely he would not be so foolish as to have parted with his flock for thirty shillings?’
‘He seemed satisfied at the time, sir.’ A short laugh.
‘No no, Mr Bentley, I’ll not believe it. Thirty shillings is thirty shillings. Whatever the value of a dozen sheep, and I confess I have not an inkling, the sum is too pat; too appropriate. Five pounds for an able seaman, two pounds ten shillings for an ordinary, thirty shillings for a landman.’
‘As I told him, sir.’
The man looked into the eyes of the boy. ‘As you told him?’
‘Yes sir. Evans heard me, if it were ever to be in dispute.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Captain Swift after a moment’s silence, ‘perhaps I might see my way to offering him some more money, however. For his beasts. Sheerly out of generosity, as there can be no doubt that he took the bounty with his eyes open. Another thirty shillings, perhaps.’
He motioned with his hand and their glasses were refilled.
‘Most appropriate, sir,’ William said gaily. ‘But I am sorry indeed to have provided only sheep and a landman. Perhaps you will allow me to try again? To go ashore and forage one more time?’
That was not to be, however. Daniel Swift dismissed his servant, then dropped his nephew a hint. It was very apparent, without one word breaking such secret matters, that the frigate Welfare would soon be putting to sea. William felt a surge of excitement. By God, he thought, a little action would be a very fine thing.
‘As to the paucity of hands,’ said Uncle Daniel, ‘I have another string to my bow. It is a gamble, but one worth taking. Higgins will be out tonight with a strong crew, and I hope to catch a prize.’
He watched William’s eyes. William asked the question without a word being spoken.
‘Smugglers,’ the captain continued. ‘I have been watching ever since we anchored in the Roads. And I have spoken to several experienced shore officers in the city. The trade’s a flourishing one in these parts. They use the beaches at Southsea and Eastney, the bay here, the creek at Bembridge. Tonight I have high hopes.’
It was too much for William. ‘Higgins!’ he blurted out.
Captain Swift’s pale eyes became cold. He stared at his nephew.
‘An officer with great potential,’ he said. His voice was smooth and hard. William swallowed. He thought Higgins a toady, and dangerously weak. But it was not his place to breathe a word of that.
‘I beg pardon, sir,’ he said dearly. ‘My excitement ran away with me. I merely expressed disappointment at not being named. My natural conceit, sir. Forgive me.’
A smile creased the thin face. William felt another rush of excitement, and warmth. Captain Swift was a hard man, and he wondered sometimes at his choice of officers. But of his affection for William there was no doubt. He knew he was forgiven, and went on.
‘Please, Uncle Daniel,’ he said impulsively. ‘Let me go too. Will there be many of them? Will there be a fight? My God, sir! I’d love a fight!’
It didn’t take much persuading. He left the cabin a few minutes later as happy as a lark, and clattered down to the midshipmen’s berth, deep in the ship, aft. His friends greeted him with good-natured envy. His fame in recruiting twelve sheep and a ‘half-wit boy’ had gone before him. He revelled in their admiration, freely given, but refrained from telling them of the hot work to come. That would feed the fires of adulation for the next day, perhaps.
At about the same time, right at the farther end of the ship, Thomas Fox came slowly out of his drunkenness with a mounting panic that approached terror. All around him there was darkness, and heat, and the smell of vomit and animals. He lashed out wildly with his arms and legs, and awakened a chorus of bellowings and bleatings. He felt hot fur, saw the outlines of beasts – and slowly remembered.
He remembered the awful voyage from Sallyport, across Spithead, to the ship anchored off the tail of the Isle of Wight. He remembered a desperate fight for freedom, heavy repeated blows, a bone-shattering descent from the pier to the jetty to the cutter, a long heaving voyage of spray, tears and sickness.
By the time he had been hauled roughly up the steep side of the frigate he was practically insensible. Exhaustion, misery, rage, drunkenness. They had all taken their toll. And he felt the hopelessness well up once more. The hopelessness of trying to get a response from the stony-blank face of the fair-haired young midshipman who had cheated him.
Thomas lay in a heap, sprawled in the noisome liquid mixture of beasts’ manure and his own vomit, crying weakly into the crook of his elbow. Exactly why it had happened he could not fathom still. But what had happened he knew too well. He had been pressed – or tricked, or kidnapped, the words did not matter – into His Majesty’s Navy. He was on board a ship and he would never see his home or family again.
Before his tortured brain lapsed into stupor, Thomas remembered something else. As he had stumbled across the deck, he had seen a vision in scarlet. A small company of marines had stood by one of the masts, with long muskets and cocked hats. They had swayed and swum in his sight, until one round, fair-skinned head had stood out from the rest.
Thomas had stopped, reached out, groaned. ‘Silas!’ he had shouted.
But the shout had come out as a drunken grunt. And the fair-skinned head had not flinched, had not displayed a flicker of emotion or recognition.
Thomas had been hustled and pushed into the bowels of the ship, into the hot stinking darkness, and into a pen with the sheep. And oh, they had been sick, both beasts and boy.
In the same afternoon another man from this neck of Hampshire, a man named Jesse Broad, had enjoyed the same soldier’s wind that had blown William Bentley’s cutter to Portsmouth and back without a tack. It blew a big lugger called Beauregard straight as an arrow from the coast of France to the eastern Wight. Out in mid-Channel the stiff westerly produced a good-sized lop, but the two lugsails were reefed not because of any enmity in the weather.
Broad and his friend Hardman had consulted several times with Joel Gauthier, the French skipper of the lugger, and all had agreed they must slow down or reach the English coast too early.
Hardman had ragged Jesse Broad, in any case, about the earliness of the trip. Normally the whole affair would take place under cover of darkness. But this time it was different. This time they were not running a real cargo – just a couple of small barrels for ‘personal consumption’ – and Broad was determined to be home before dawn, in safety and comfort. Hardman too, really. They were bound not to be late for the christening of young Jem, Broad’s first son, and Gauthier had been more than ready to risk the channel in daylight, infested as it was with British men-of-war, for the sake of his friends and partners.
About four miles off the island, in the pitch blackness of the autumn night, Gauthier hauled his wind while his crew helped Broad and Hardman launch their wherry. She was a light boat, fast and quiet, built to a drawing of Jesse’s own. They made her bow fast to a stay with a painter, picked her up bodily, six of them, spun her in the air like a top, and heaved. There was a splash, and the wherry was bobbing alongside.
Two small barrels went on board, then four oars. Jesse Broad and Hardman shook hands with Gauthier warmly. They reminded each other of their next rendezvous, exchanged greetings to families and friends, shook hands again. A few seconds later the Frenchman put up his helm to get some way on, then went about smartly and took the other leg of his soldier’s breeze back to France. Broad and Hardman, guided by the wind on their sides, the set of the waves, the glittering stars, headed for the tail of the island.