"Bastards," Millet muttered. "Goddamned bastards!"
The occupants of the table fell into a sombre silence.
Charbonneau broke the spell. "What about you?" he asked Lasseur.
Lasseur launched into a humorous account of his capture and imprisonment. It wasn't long before his audience was smiling again, by which time supper was almost over. The messes began to break apart as the prisoners retrieved their hammocks from the foredeck and took them down to their allotted spaces below.
The boy had fallen asleep at the table, head across his folded arms.
"What's his story?" Fouchet asked, as Millet and Charbonneau left to reclaim their aired bedding.
Lasseur shook his head. "He hasn't said much. My guess is he got separated from the rest of his crew. So far, all he's given me is his name."
Fouchet nodded his understanding. "I suspect he'll be all right once he's with someone his own age. I'll have a word with the other boys. Perhaps he'll talk to them. In the meantime, it would be in his best interest if you kept a watch on him."
The quiet note of warning in the teacher's voice caused Lasseur to pause as he got up from the table. "That sounds ominous. Something you're not telling us?"
"The boy's young, small for his age, an innocent from what you've told me and from what I've observed. He's also far from home and therefore doubly vulnerable. It should come as no surprise to you that there are those on board who would be likely to take advantage of his situation."
Lasseur sat back down. "How likely?"
Fouchet smiled sadly. "My friend, there are over nine hundred men on this ship. More than eight hundred of them are imprisoned as much by inactivity as they are by these wooden walls. I suspect you already know the answer to your question." The teacher picked up his tin and utensils and rose stiffly from his seat.
From the look on Lasseur's face Hawkwood knew the privateer captain was remembering his exchange with the balding man on the gun deck. Lasseur stared down at the sleeping boy. His face was as hard as stone. "I'll bear that in mind," he said.
It wasn't the first time Hawkwood had experienced the restraints of a hammock. There was a definite art to clambering into the sling, but it was a case of once mastered, never forgotten. As a soldier, he'd grown used to bivouacking in uncomfortable surroundings, be it barn, bush or battlefield. On the march, you took advantage of sleep and sustenance when and where you could, because you never knew when the opportunity would arise again. A hammock was the epitome of comfort compared to some of the places he'd had to rest his weary head.
He lay back and listened to the emanations of the four hundred souls hemmed in around him. The sounds varied widely in content and tone, from the drawn-out cries of the distressed and the wheezing of the consumptives to the groans of the dysentery sufferers and the weeping of the lonely and dispossessed. When added to the chorus of swearing, hawking, spitting, farting, coughing and general expectorations common to the male species, they formed a discordant backdrop to the physical deprivations endured by men held in mass confinement and against their will.
The human sounds began to fade as the hulk's inhabitants fell under the spell of night. In the darkness, however, the ship continued to express her own displeasure. A continuous cacophony of groans and creaks from the vessel's ancient timbers filled the inside of the hull. It was as if Rapacious was venting her irritation at the presence of those trapped aboard her. The pull of the tide and the sound of the wash against her sides seemed magnified a thousand-fold, as did the hypnotic slap of rope and line against her cut-down masts and yards.
Mercifully, her gun ports remained propped open, for these were the only means of ventilation. Even so, it was unbearably warm. The squeak of hammock ring against hook and cleat was a grating accompaniment to the noisy tossing and turning of the gun deck's restless residents as they sought relief from their sweltering discomfort.
Even if there had been silence within the hull, the rhythmic step of the sentries along the metal gantry outside and their monotonous half-hourly announcements that all was well was a salutary reminder that the will of every man on board, be he prisoner or guard, was no longer his own to command.
A sniffle sounded close by. It was the boy. He was lying on his back, blanket pushed down over his lower legs. His right arm rested across his face as if to ward off a blow. As Hawkwood watched, the boy turned his head, the movement revealing his right eye and lower jaw.
At that moment, a scream rose out of the darkness. It seemed to hang in the air for two or three seconds before ceasing abruptly. Hawkwood knew it had originated not on the gun deck but somewhere below, deep within the bowels of the ship. There was little or no reaction from either the sentries outside or the occupants of the surrounding hammocks, save for one: the boy. Moonlight from the open gun port highlighted a pale segment of cheek, skin tight over the bone. The boy's eye was a white orb in the darkness. He stared wildly at Hawkwood for several seconds, terror written on his face, then his throat convulsed and he turned away, pulled the blanket over himself, and the contact was lost.
The scream was not repeated. A small, rounded shadow appeared at the grille. A rat was squatting on the sill, preening. As if suddenly aware that it was being observed, it paused in its ablutions and lifted its head. Then, with a flash of pelt and a flick of tail, it was gone.
Hawkwood closed his eyes. It was interesting, he thought, that the rat, when startled, had chosen to exit the hull rather than seek sanctuary within it.
Perhaps it was another omen.
CHAPTER 5
Hawkwood stood at the rail of the forecastle and gazed down at his new world. The view was less than impressive.
Aside from the two accommodation decks, the only other areas on the ship where prisoners were permitted to gather were the forecastle and the well deck, the space referred to euphemistically by the interpreter Murat as "the Park". Lasseur had taken it upon himself to pace out the Park's circumference. The survey did not take long. It was a little over fifty feet long by forty feet in width. It didn't need many prisoners to be taking the air to make the deck seem overcrowded. It explained why so many men chose to remain below decks. With space at a premium, they didn't have much choice.
Bulkheads at the forward and aft ends of the ship separated the prisoners' quarters from those of the ship's personnel. The militia guards occupied the bow. The hulk's commander and the rest of the crew were accommodated in the stern. At first sight, the bulkheads appeared to be made of solid iron. On closer inspection, Hawkwood discovered they were constructed from thick planking studded with thousands of large-headed nails. Loopholes had been cut into the metal-shod walls at regular intervals to allow the guards on the other side of the partition to fire into the enclosed deck in the event of misbehaviour or riot. They resembled the arrow-slitted walls of a medieval keep. With the gun deck reminiscent of a long dungeon, it wasn't hard to imagine the hulk as some kind of bleak, impregnable fortress.
At six o'clock the guards had removed the hatch covers, allowing the prisoners to carry their bedding topside to be aired. Hawkwood had welcomed the first light of dawn, still conscious of the collective reek coming off his fellow inmates. Lieutenant Murat had given his assurance that it would take only a few days to become acclimatized. As far as Hawkwood was concerned, the moment couldn't come soon enough. The gun- port location may have provided access to the elements and a sea view, but it didn't mean the smell was in any way reduced. The foul odours within the hulk had built up over so many years that they'd become engrained in the ship's structure, like a host of maggots in a rotting corpse.