Chapter 5
The noise pummeled her, picked her up, swept her away, tossed in the din like a doll in a mill race. Astounding, unbearable, exhilarating. The air stank of fireworks and, mysteriously, Emily wanted to laugh and laugh for the sheer glee of it. Stuffing her hands into her ears, she did so and could not hear her own voice over the thunder.
Above, a ferocious sun was beating down on deck, tar was falling from the yards in sticky rain, and it was tacky underfoot as the caulking between the deck-planks softened. Down here on the gun-deck, that sweltering heat was added to by the bursts of fire, the tons of red-hot brass, and the bodies of three hundred men, their skins shining, sweat falling onto the guns to go up in steam as soon as it touched.
Emily stood beside and a little behind Captain Walker, watching. Now that she had been put in her place and made no attempt to leave it by speaking to him, they had reached this amicable state in which both pretended the other did not exist. The pretense did not allow any familiarities to be taken, however, so just as Walker had made no concession to the weather, so Emily had not permitted herself to do so either, and at times she thought she should fall down simply from the heat. Sweat ran down her back, down her legs, making her petticoats cling suffocatingly beneath the stiffly hooped weight of her gown. Her torso itched, the creases in her shift pressed into her skin by the tight, boned stays, and the sack dress she wore on top felt heavy as armor, so that she could hardly walk or lift her arms. How the gun crews could stand it, she couldn't imagine. At the thought, in sympathy, her joy began to wear off.
These men had been awake half of the night as they trimmed and re-trimmed the sails to squeeze an extra knot of speed out of the ship, trying to make up for the time lost to the storm. They had been on their knees before dawn, scrubbing the decks, pumping up the salt water, scouring the planks with holystones and flogging them dry with bundles of rags. Now they worked like Trojans in an inferno that would undo any man's strength, and faces that had been alight with the glory of the great guns were beginning to look numb and closed with exhaustion.
Outside, boat crews labored to pull rafts of barrels far forward into position to float past as targets, and in the brief break while Walker was scowling at his watch, Emily noticed two of the gun captains surreptitiously debating. Mr. Anderson, tears in his eyes, his pasty white face whiter still with fear, was whispering urgently to Mr. Andrews. As soon as Walker looked up, the child flinched away, shaking his head emphatically.
Finally, Andrews patted Anderson on the shoulder and strode down the awfully bare corridor of planks between the gasping gun crews, Walker's disapproving eye resting on him the whole way.
"You have something to say, mister?"
"Aye, sir. Mr. Anderson feels that number six is dangerously overheated, sir. I've looked at the piece and I concur. The touch-hole is almost white hot."
"And Mr. Anderson did not have the guts to report this himself?"
"Sir, he..."
"Don't think I haven't noticed how you mollycoddle these boys, Andrews." Walker narrowed his eyes and thrust his face forward. In response, Mr. Andrews drew himself up with an unconscious, pugnacious quirk to his mouth. More like one of the wild Irishmen who roamed the streets of St. Giles half-cut and looking for a fight, Emily thought, than like a sober officer of His Majesty's Navy.
Seeing the physical threat failing, Walker changed tactics. "Or is it something else, eh," he asked, raising his eyebrows, "that makes you so tender of the little lads? Well, Mr. Andrews, I hanged a man just the other week for that." Emily watched with interest as the young man's face paled with shock at this, and she wondered what the captain was suggesting. Not ... Oh, no, surely not. Oh, that was beyond the pale! What a vile thing to be accused of, no wonder he looked so appalled.
From her own experience with the boys, there wasn't a jot of truth in it, but someone was bound to believe it. Someone was bound to "explain" the offense to the children, and thus pollute their life with one more nightmare. Someone was bound to bump into Mr. Andrews in the dark between decks and give him a beating, just in case. What a vicious man Walker was, and how inventive with his methods of control. Lord, how she did despise him!
"No, until Mr. Anderson grows the balls to make his own decisions, he cannot expect me to listen. Dismissed."
The targets were let loose. The note of the cannon was different as they bellowed—they leaped as they recoiled, the chains that held them to the hull twanging taut, the impact of their weight making the whole frame of the ship shudder. There were worried faces as the crews jumped out of their way, yelling and cursing as men began to burn themselves on the hot metal. In snatched intervals of silence, there was a delicate, metallic pinging noise.
She was just beginning to wonder whether it would be a good time to leave when number six exploded.
The din was staggering. The flame even more so. A wave of incandescent heat washed over her, and a thrumming sound passed her left ear. Her world paused strangely, so that between the explosion and the first scream there seemed a slow, infinite time in which to think but where movement was suspended.
Then someone shoved past her, bucket in hand, and everything resumed its usual pace. She turned to find the deck aflame—a seething chaos of men pouring water, stamping on fire with their bare feet. The crew of number six lay scattered around it, broken and as red as the cannon itself.
Little Anderson was taking the pulse of a man, apparently unaware of the shard, thick as an ax blade, embedded in his own thigh. "Mundy and China George are alive," he cried in a watery voice, struggling to lift the closest man to him—he hadn't the strength to lift the seaman's head and shoulders. "Someone help me! Oh!"
Noticing his own wound, he gazed at it, swaying, before his eyes rolled back and he fell. Andrews made an instinctive movement towards him and stopped, his face grim, before deliberately turning away to lift Mundy onto a hastily improvised stretcher. It was Chips, the ship's carpenter, who knelt by the wounded boy's side, trying to find a place to press on the wound without driving the jagged brass further in. There was a smell of charring flesh. All of the shrapnel was still red hot.
Emily tried to move forward, and only then realized she was shaking so hard she could hardly stand upright. A rage that felt almost like a religious experience overwhelmed her, sweeping her along before it. "He
said,
" she hissed between her teeth, clamping them together between words to still their chattering, "he said it wasn't safe! He said it! Why didn't you listen?"
"Too bloody right, missy!" Suleiman "Sully" Chips looked up with cannon fire in his eyes. He was a slender man with the build of a jockey, whose deep, almost blue-black skin had fascinated Emily on sight. He had been so amused by her regard that he expanded on it at every meeting with a yet more implausible story of his native land.
In this place of oppression and silence, he had been—like Hawkes—one of the few comfortable acquaintances Emily had made, and she thought him too gentle, too good-humored for the life. Now, however, there was nothing gentle about him; the veins stood out in his neck as he hurled himself forward at the captain. He never got close; recognizing the signs of a man pushed too far, he was suddenly surrounded by fellow sailors, trying to calm him down or, failing that, to drown out his accusing voice.
"Chips, leave him be."
"Come back here to the boy; we've to move him."
"Let it go! Sully, let it go!"
But Suleiman would not let it go. He drew himself up to his full height of five-foot-one and in a loud voice demanded, "Aren't none of you
angry
? Han't any of you got the guts the young missy's got? We all fucking know who killed these men. We all know it! Han't any of you the stones to stand up and make it stop?"
"Leave. Now." The second lieutenant came up beside Emily, his hand on his sword, loosening it in its scabbard. At the sight she realized the peril—imagined the gun deck erupting into violence. The officers were armed with swords, and marines were even now filing in behind them with rifles and bayonets in their hands, but the men had cannonballs and cartridges of gunpowder. If it came to a fight, she could vividly imagine the carnage. So close they lived to this avalanche of barbarism. Her glorious anger faded at the thought, and fear replaced it. She shook out her skirts, squeezed between the line of rifles and ran away, feeling cowardly and humiliated and desperately afraid.
Chapter 6
"Are..." After the rigors of punishment day, Walker had retired to his cabin to rest, and Summersgill found Peter Kenyon standing very stiffly on the quarterdeck in the isolation of profound shame. "Are you well?"
He couldn't tell whether the rigid posture was due to pain or to the unbearable affront to his dignity, but he suspected the latter. It was a matter of embarrassment even to himself to acknowledge the atrocity.
Kenyon had observed that some leniency might be possible in the sentencing of Suleiman Chips, "a good man, overcome by a temporary fit of grief", and on hearing Walker sentence him to keelhauling, had objected that keelhauling had been banned by act of parliament some years ago as too barbaric a punishment for naval use.
One could argue that he had known the risk he was taking, speaking up—the captain's warning was unequivocal—but nevertheless not a single man on board had imagined Walker would really go through with his threat. It tore a hole in the laws of nature to suppose an officer and a gentleman could be treated like a common man. The sense of disorientation, of the world gone mad, was more frightening than the punishment itself.
Summersgill himself, not bound by naval tradition, had left the quarterdeck so that he might not see his young friend being flogged like a common tar, and now Kenyon acknowledged that kindness by a slight lift of the lips. "I'm prime, thank you, sir. Yourself?"
"I admit to feeling somewhat oppressed." Summersgill looked down to where the body of Chips lay sewn into a hammock. "Something has to be done," he said. "Must you bear this? Can you not call him out? I swear to God if he had done the same to me, I would!"
Kenyon smiled, as though charmed by the thought of Summersgill dueling. True, he was not the most likely combatant, but there were some insults even the most peaceable of men could not endure. Honor would demand action, even from him.
"The captain would be quite within his rights to refuse a challenge," Kenyon said softly, his voice rough. Frowning at the sound of it, he turned away to watch the sea. His hands were white on the rail, and there was a persistent tremor in the muscles of his arms. "It isn't possible to maintain discipline in a ship where the officers are fighting duels over every trifling slight. We must learn to accept a certain amount of humiliation in the exercise of our duty, so the admiralty says. And if I were to fight him despite a refusal, not only would it be murder, but it could well precipitate the mutiny we fear."
"Would that be such a bad thing?"
Kenyon laughed, ducking his head. The movement concealed his eyes but bared the spreading bloodstain on his collar. Summersgill looked away quickly, as he would from any obscenity.
"It has the potential to be very bad indeed. Yesterday I would have said I could hold the crew together through my own authority." The half hidden smile shaded into bitterness. "But you've seen what has become of that. And the authority of the other officers, with me. If we may be punished like ordinary men, why should we be obeyed like gods?"
"You're saying it wouldn't stop with the captain?"
"Exactly so." Kenyon raised his head. With the sea shining behind him only the small lines of endurance around his mouth distinguished him from the figure of a martial saint painted on a church wall. "I don't think they would kill me at first—the stripes might save me for a few days, until they realized I wasn't going to join them. I don't think they would kill you or your wife..." he sighed, "but it would not surprise me either. They would certainly kill—possibly torment—young Hawkes and his messmates. Anderson, too, if he survives the surgery. And I hope I do not need to mention the fate that would be suffered by your ward and her maid. You have no conception, sir, of what these men are capable of when their blood is up."
Peter shuddered. It was only a small, involuntary flinch, but from a man who faced Walker every day, it spoke volumes. Summersgill thought about Emily and the twelveyear-old "young gentlemen" and felt his throat close with dread. He drew out his handkerchief and pressed it to his lips, forcing himself to breathe in the calming smell of lavender.
"Sir?" said Kenyon, watching as Chips' tie-mate, Boyd, made to shake his fist at the quarterdeck. The coxswain caught the arm, pulled it down, and hurried him away, pressing a packet of tobacco into his hands. "If I can keep the crew together until we strike soundings in St. George, can you get the captain removed once we arrive?"
"I think I can!" Summersgill had not been thinking so far ahead, but now he thought about Admirals Sullivan and DeBourne who both had sons involved in minor smuggling activities. They would undoubtedly prefer the young men to be gently warned rather than prosecuted. "Yes, yes, almost certainly. If I write the letters today I can have him diverted into a career in the dockyards within a quarter ... or perhaps better say a half year."
Kenyon laughed again—a bark of appalled dismay. "Half a year! We will be lucky if there's a week's tolerance left in the men"
He made an abortive movement as if to reach out and take Summersgill's arm, and though his face was as composed as always, Summersgill had known him from childhood and discerned both an apology and a request for reassurance. The second touched him deeply. Such a splendid young man to be looking to him for help, and yet so young. So young to be bearing this burden.
"I hope you will forgive me, sir, if I say that my greatest concern is not our lives at all. We were sent to Bermuda to combat privateers, and the
Nimrod
is a floating fortress. There isn't a settlement on the islands or another ship in these waters could stand against her."
"That is a pleasing thought, surely?"
"It is. As long as she remains in the navy. But once the men are branded mutineers, then what? They'll have this ship and nothing to lose. I dread to think of the damage they could wreak with it."
Summersgill pictured it. Bad enough the fleets of cutters, sloops, and brigs that flitted from isle to isle making it impossible for decent folk to live without fear of robbery or violence, but add the
Nimrod
and you would add terror. "Oh, I agree!" he said, appalled, "I agree. But what can we do?"
Kenyon gave him a smile of exceptional sweetness. "If the men do mutiny, and I can get down there myself, I intend to blow the powder magazine."
Summersgill wondered suddenly why he had taken this position. He was a landed gentleman and a mathematician, not an adventurer. The realm of sudden death and glory had never appealed, not even when he was young.
"However," Kenyon continued, "it's more likely that the men will get the officers out of the way first, and if I can't..."
Heroism at his age? His skin shrinking away from the vision of himself setting a candle flame to hundreds of tons of gunpowder, Summersgill swallowed. Would there be time for it to hurt? Time to feel the scalding flame, as though he swam in molten lead? Did his oath of allegiance absolutely require that? And if it did, would he really have the courage to go through with it?
Yet could he continue to live, knowing himself a coward? Hadn't he said himself that sometimes honor demanded action? Well. Well, why not?
"My family?" he said, fighting a need to weep at the thought of them, alone in this harsh world, alone on the treacherous sea. "Promise me you will put them into a boat. Promise me my wife and daughter will live."
Glancing aft, Kenyon's eyes lit on the group of midshipmen who were heaving the log to determine the ship's speed, unnaturally studious and quiet for such young boys, their faces pinched with fear. "I mean to take Andrews into my confidence and give him the job of making sure all the youngsters get aboard the longboat. Bess should go, too, this will be no place for her."
He looked back with a rueful smile. "I would certainly have asked you to go and him to stay," he explained, "if it weren't—you understand I mean no disrespect—for the fact that he is a better navigator and a better sailor than you, and so stands a better chance of bringing them safe to shore."
Unexpectedly, Summersgill found himself laughing. "Had I had known the advantage of having such a trade I might not have taken so great a care to remain entirely ignorant all my life." He took Kenyon's hand and shook it, resigned. "Very well, Peter, should it become necessary to blow us all to kingdom come, you may count on me."