Rapscallion

Next, canvas slippers were distributed. Neither Hawkwood nor Lasseur were deemed impoverished enough to warrant the gift of the shoes. Hawkwood noticed that both his and Lasseur’s footwear were attracting surreptitious attention from some of the less fortunate prisoners and he made a silent vow not to let his boots out of his sight.

A look of irritation moved across the registration clerk’s pinched face at Hawkwood’s lack of response. The lieutenant maintained his impression of boredom. The clerk flicked his finger imperiously and the man standing at his shoulder in the yellow uniform repeated the question in French.

“Hooper,” Hawkwood said. “Matthew.”

As Hawkwood gave his name, the clerk stiffened and frowned, while next to him the lieutenant’s head snapped round. His eyes darkened.

The clerk recovered his composure and turned his eyes to the grainy sheet of paper at his elbow. He ran the nib of his pen down the page and gave a small click of his tongue as he found the entry he was looking for. Hawkwood assumed it was the list of prisoners transferred from Maidstone and that the clerk was confirming his name.

The lieutenant peered over the clerk’s shoulder.

The clerk sneered. “Our first American. Not so independent now, are you?” He sniggered at his own wit.

The lieutenant viewed Hawkwood with undisguised hostility as the clerk began to transfer the details into the ledger, repeating the information under his breath as he did so. “Rank: captain; date of capture: 20th January; action in which taken: Ciudad Rodrigo; date of arrival: 27th May; application for parole under consideration; physical description …” The clerk raised his eyes again and murmured, “Height: approximately six feet; scarring on left side of face … surly-looking brute. Assigned to the gun deck. Next!”

After listening silently to the description and the comment, the lieutenant favoured Hawkwood with a final grimace of distaste before he turned away.

“Damned renegade,” Hawkwood heard him mutter under his breath.

The interpreter jerked his head for Hawkwood to move along. Behind him, he heard Lasseur give his name and the clerk’s litany began again.

At the next table the prisoners were presented with a rolled hammock, a threadbare blanket and a thin, wool-stuffed mattress.

Hawkwood studied the armed guards ringing the deck. Their escort had been composed of marines, seconded to the shore establishment, but neither the army nor the navy liked to assign regulars to the prison ships. True fighting men were needed abroad. This lot would be members of a local militia, specially recruited, Ludd had told him. He’d seen two of the guards exchange knowing grins as they stared at the boy’s milk-white buttocks during the enforced bathing. One of them had nudged the other and sniggered. “Wait till His Majesty gets a look at that!”

Hawkwood wondered what that meant.

The processing stretched over two hours. There were not that many new arrivals – three boatloads in all, perhaps forty men in total – but the ill-tempered admissions clerk seemed intent on proving how pedantic he could be. Slowly, however, the line of men began to shorten. Hawkwood was intrigued as to why they’d been herded into one half of the quarterdeck rather than escorted below. His question was answered as the last prisoner was handed his bedding.

A figure appeared at the rail of the deck above them. He was tall and raw-boned. His face was gaunt and pale. The white piping on his lapels proclaimed him to be another lieutenant, though he looked old to be holding the rank. Hands clasped behind his back, he gazed dispassionately at the crowd of men gathered beneath him. His eyes were very dark. Gradually, as the prisoners became aware that they were being observed, an uneasy silence descended upon the deck. Beneath his hat, the lieutenant’s eyes moved unblinkingly over the upturned faces. The clerk and the lieutenant at the table rose to their feet.

The gaunt lieutenant remained by the rail, his body incredibly still, as he continued to stare down. Not a word was uttered. Only the sound of the gulls wheeling high above the ship broke the stillness. Then, abruptly, after what seemed like minutes but could only have been twenty or thirty seconds, the lieutenant stepped back from the rail, turned abruptly, and, still not having spoken, returned from whence he came.

“Our brave commander,” Lasseur whispered. “Rumour has it he once captained a frigate, had a run-in with one of our eighties off Finisterre, and surrendered his ship. After they exchanged him, he was court-martialled.” Lasseur sucked in his cheeks. “Took to drink, I’m told.”

Hawkwood wondered where Lasseur had got his information. Some people had an uncanny knack of picking up all kinds of rumours. Though, in fact, Lasseur was only half right. The commander of the hulk, if that’s who the lieutenant had been, was named Hellard and he had indeed been demoted from captain. But it had been Funchal not Finisterre where the lieutenant’s fate had been sealed, and he had taken refuge in the bottle before the engagement, not following it. Hawkwood had been told the correct version by Ludd during his briefing; though it didn’t alter the fact that Hellard had been assigned to Rapacious as punishment. Furthermore Ludd had told Hawkwood that Hellard’s background was modest, which meant he’d been unable to call on a patron to rescue him from exile and set him back on the promotion ladder. Commanding this floating tomb was as high as Lieutenant Mortimer Hellard was ever going to get. And he knew it. It accounted for the stony countenance, Hawkwood thought. This was a man resigned to his fate, resenting it, and suffering because of it.

“Take them below, Sergeant Hook.” The order came from the lieutenant with the bitten fingernails. “And do something about those. They’re making the place look untidy.”

The lieutenant scowled at a pair of prisoners whose legs had given way. Hawkwood assumed they were the two who had been helped up the stairs by their fellow detainees. He wondered what had become of the men who’d been left in the longboat, and whether anyone had bothered to retrieve them. No one in authority on Rapacious seemed interested in taking a look. It was more than likely the boat was still drifting at the end of the line.

“Aye, sir.” The sergeant of the guard saluted lazily and turned to the prisoners. He nodded towards the stairway. “Right, you buggers, let’s be having you. Simmons, use your bayonet! Give that one at the back there a poke. Get the bastards moving! We ain’t got all bleedin’ day! Allez!”

Lasseur caught Hawkwood’s eye. The Frenchman’s smile had slipped from his face. It was as if the reality of the situation had finally sunk in. Hawkwood shouldered his bedding, remembering Lasseur’s earlier whispered comment. As he descended the stairs to the well deck it didn’t take him long to see that Lasseur had been mistaken. Hell would have been an improvement.

Hawkwood was no stranger to deprivation. It was all around him on London’s cramped and filthy streets. In the rookeries, like those of St Giles and Field Lane, poverty was a way of life. It could be seen in the way people dressed, in the looks on their faces and by the way they carried themselves. Hawkwood had also seen it in the eyes of soldiers, most notably in the aftermath of a defeat, and he was seeing the same despair and desperation now, carved into the faces of the men gathered on the deck of the prison hulk. It was the grey, lifeless expression of men who had lost all hope.

They ranged in age from calloused veterans to callow-eyed adolescents and they looked, with few exceptions Hawkwood thought, like the ranks of the walking dead. Most wore the yellow uniform, or what was left of it, for in many cases the prison garb looked to be as ragged as the clothing that had been stripped from the backs of the new arrivals. Many of the older men had the weathered look of seamen, though without the ruddy complexion. Instead, their faces were pallid, almost drained of colour.

Some prisoners huddled in small groups, others stood alone, if such a feat was possible given the number of wasted bodies that seemed to cover every available inch of space. Some of the men were stretched out on the deck, but whether they were sleeping or suffering from some malady, it was impossible to tell. The ones that remained upright gazed dully at the new arrivals being directed towards the hatch and the stairs leading into the bowels of the ship. Some of the men looked as though they hadn’t eaten for days.

“My God,” Lasseur gagged. “The smell.”

“Wait till you get below.”

The voice came from behind them. Hawkwood looked back over his shoulder and found himself eye to eye with the dark-haired interpreter from the weather-deck.

“Don’t worry; in a couple of days, you won’t notice. In a week, you’ll start to smell the same. The name’s Murat, by the way. And we call this area the Park. It’s our little joke.” The interpreter nodded towards the open hatch and the top of the ladder leading down. “You’d best get a move on. Squeeze through, find yourselves a space.”

“Murat?” Lasseur looked intrigued. “Any relation?”

The interpreter shrugged and gave a self-deprecatory grin. “A distant cousin on my mother’s side. I regret our closest association is in having once enjoyed the services of the same tailor. I –”

“How much do you want for your boots?”

Hawkwood felt a tug at his sleeve. One of the yellow-uniformed prisoners had taken hold of his arm. Hawkwood recoiled from the man’s rancid odour. “They’re not for sale.”

There were ragged holes in the elbows of the prisoner’s jacket and the knees of his trousers shone as if they had been newly waxed. His feet were stuffed into a pair of canvas slippers, though they were obviously too small for him as his heels overlapped the soles by at least an inch. Several boils had erupted across the back of his neck. His shirt collar was the colour of dried mud.

“Ten francs.” The grip on Hawkwood’s arm tightened.

Hawkwood looked down at the man’s fingers. “Let go or you’ll lose the arm.”

“Twenty.”

“Leave him be, Chavasse! He told you they’re not for sale.” Murat raised his hand. “In any case, they’re worth ten times that. Go and pester someone else.”

Hawkwood pulled his arm free. The prisoner backed away.

The interpreter turned to Hawkwood. “Keep hold of your belongings until you know your way around, otherwise you might not see them again. Come on, I’ll show you where to go.”

Murat pushed his way ahead of them and started down the almost vertical stairway. Hawkwood and Lasseur followed him. It was like descending into a poorly lit mineshaft. Three-quarters of the way down Hawkwood found he had to lean backwards to avoid cracking his skull on the overhead beam. He felt his spine groan as he did so. He heard Lasseur chuckle. The sound seemed ludicrously out of place.

“You’ll get used to that, too,” Murat said drily.

Hawkwood couldn’t see a thing. The sudden shift from daylight to near Stygian darkness was abrupt and alarming. If Murat hadn’t been wearing his yellow jacket, it would have been almost impossible to follow him in the dark. It was as if the sun had been snuffed out. Hawkwood paused and waited for his eyes to adjust.

“Keep moving!” The order came from behind.

“That way,” Murat said, and pointed. “And watch your head.”

The warning was unnecessary. Hawkwood’s neck was already cricked. The height from the deck to the underside of the main beams couldn’t have been much more than five and a half feet.

Murat said, “It’s easy to tell you’re a soldier not a seaman, Captain. You don’t have the gait, but, like I said, you’ll get used to it.”

Ahead of him, Hawkwood could see vague, hump-backed shapes moving. They looked more troglodyte than human. And the smell was far worse down below; a mixture of sweat and piss. Hawkwood tried breathing through his mouth but discovered it didn’t make a great deal of difference. He moved forward cautiously. Gradually, the ill-defined creatures began to take on form. He could pick out squares of light on either side, too, and recognized it as daylight filtering in through the grilles in the open ports.

“This is it,” Murat said. “The gun deck.”

God in heaven, Hawkwood thought.

He could tell by the grey, watery light the deck was about forty feet in width. As to the length, he could only hazard a guess, for he could barely make out the ends. Both fore and aft, they simply disappeared into the blackness. It was more like being in a cellar than a ship’s hull. The area in which they were standing was too far from the grilles for the sunlight to penetrate fully but he could just see that benches ran down the middle as well as along the sides. All of them looked to be occupied. Most of the floor was taken up by bodies as well. Despite the lack of illumination, several of the men were engaged in labour. Some were knitting, others were fashioning hats out of what looked like lengths of straw. A number were carving shanks of bone into small figurines that Hawkwood guessed were probably chess pieces. He wondered how anyone could see what they were doing. The sense of claustrophobia was almost overpowering.

He saw there were lanterns strung on hooks along the bulkhead, but they were unlit.

“We try and conserve the candles,” Murat explained. “Besides, they don’t burn too well down here; too many bodies, not enough air.”

For a moment, Hawkwood thought the interpreter was joking, but then he saw that Murat was serious.

There was just sufficient light for Hawkwood to locate the hooks and cleats in the beams from which to hang the hammocks. Many of the hooks had objects suspended from them; not hammocks but sacks, and items of clothing. They looked like huge seedpods hanging down.

Murat followed his gaze. “The long-termers get used to a particular spot. They mark their territory. You can take any hook that’s free. Hammocks are slung above and below, so there’ll be room for both of you. Best thing is for you to put yours up now. The rest are on the foredeck; they’re taken up there every morning and stowed. When they’re brought back down you won’t be able to move. You’ve got about six feet each. Come night time there are more than four hundred of us crammed in here. You’re new so you don’t get to pick. When you’ve been here a while you might get a permanent place by the grilles.”

“How long have you been here?” Hawkwood asked.

“Two years.”

“And how close are you to the grilles?”

Murat smiled.

“What if we want a place by the grilles now?” Lasseur said. His meaning was clear.

Four hundred? Hawkwood thought.

“It’ll cost you,” Murat said, without a pause. He read Hawkwood’s mind. “Think yourself lucky. You could have been assigned the orlop. There are four hundred and fifty of them down there, and it isn’t half as roomy as this.”

“How much?” Lasseur asked.

“For two louis, I can get you space by the gun ports. For ten, I can get you a bunk in the commander’s cabin.”

“Just the gun port,” Lasseur said. “Maybe I’ll talk to the commander later.”

Murat squinted at Hawkwood. “What about you?”

“How much in English money?”

“Cost you two pounds.” The interpreter eyed them both. “Cash, not credit.”

Hawkwood nodded.

“Wait here,” Murat said, and he was gone.

Lasseur stared around him. “I boarded a slaver once, off Mauritius. It turned my stomach. This might be worse.”

Hawkwood was quite prepared to believe him.

Lasseur was the captain of a privateer. The French had used privateers for centuries. Financed by private enterprise, they’d been one of the few ways Bonaparte had been able to counteract the restrictions placed upon him by the British blockade. But their numbers had declined considerably over the past few years due to Britain’s increased dominance of the waves in the aftermath of Trafalgar.

Getting close to Lasseur had been Ludd’s idea, though the initial strategy had been Hawkwood’s.

“I need an edge,” he’d told James Read and Ludd. “I go in there asking awkward questions from the start and I’m going to end up like your man Masterson. The way to avoid that is to hide in someone else’s shadow. I need to make an alliance with a genuine prisoner, someone who’ll do the running for me so that I can slip in on his coat-tails. You said you’re sending me to Maidstone. Find me someone there I can use.”

Ludd had met with Hawkwood the day prior to his arrival at the gaol.

“I think I have your man,” Ludd told him. “Name of Lasseur. He was taken following a skirmish with a British patrol off the Cap Gris-Nez. The impudent bugger tried to jump ship twice following his capture; even had the temerity to make a dash for freedom during his transfer from Ramsgate. If anyone’s going to be looking for an escape route, it’ll be Lasseur; you can count on it. He’s made a boast that no English prison will be able to hold him. Get close to him and my guess is you’re halfway home already.”

The introduction had been manufactured in the prison yard.

Lasseur had been by himself, back against the wall, enjoying the morning sun, an unlit cheroot clamped between his teeth, when the two guards made their move. The plan would never have been awarded marks for subtlety. One guard snatched the cheroot from between Lasseur’s lips. When the Frenchman protested, the second guard slammed his baton into Lasseur’s belly and a knee into his groin. As Lasseur dropped to the ground, covering his head, the guards waded in with their boots.

A cry of anger went up from the other prisoners, but it was Hawkwood who got there first. He pulled the first guard off Lasseur by his belt and the scruff of his neck. As his companion was hauled back, the second guard turned, baton raised, and Hawkwood slammed the heel of his boot against the guard’s exposed knee. He pulled his kick at the moment of contact, but the strike was still hard enough to make the guard reel away with a howl of pain.

By this time, the first guard had recovered his balance. With a snarl, he swung his baton towards Hawkwood’s head. But the guard had forgotten Lasseur. The privateer was back on his feet. As the baton looped through the air, Lasseur caught the guard’s wrist, twisted the baton out of his grip, and slammed an elbow into the guard’s belly.

Shouts rang out as other guards, wrongfooted by the swiftness of Hawkwood’s intervention, came running. It had taken four of them to subdue Hawkwood and Lasseur and march them off into a cell.

The clang of the door and the rasp of the key turning in the lock had seemed as final as a coffin lid closing.

Lasseur’s first action as soon as the door shut was to take another cheroot from his jacket, put it between his lips and ask Hawkwood if he had a means by which to light it. Hawkwood had been unable to assist. Whereupon Lasseur had shrugged philosophically, placed the cheroot back in his jacket, extended his hand and said, “Captain Paul Lasseur, at your service.” Then he’d grinned and touched his ribs tentatively. “I suppose it was one way of getting a cell to ourselves.”

Hawkwood hadn’t thought it would be that easy.

Lasseur had managed to maintain the devil-may-care façade up to the moment he’d seen the men in the longboat being cast adrift from the hulk’s side.

Around them, the other fresh arrivals assigned to the gun deck were also looking for places to bed down. The invasion of their living quarters had caused most of the established prisoners to pause in their tasks to take stock of the new blood. The mood, however, seemed strangely subdued. Hawkwood wondered if the original prisoners resented this further reduction of what was already a barely adequate living space.

Among the new batch was the boy. He was standing alone, weighed down by his hammock, mattress and blanket, utterly bewildered by the activity going on around him; though he was one of the lucky ones in as much as he did not have to amend his posture in order to move about inside the hull. He looked like a small boat tossed by waves as he was turned this way and that by the men brushing past him, mindless of his size.

The boy turned. One of the other prisoners, a slight, weak-chinned, effete-looking man with a widow’s peak of thinning hair – a long-standing resident of the hulk if the decrepit state of his yellow uniform was any indication – was crouched down with his right hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Hawkwood watched as a look of doubt crept over the boy’s face. The boy shook his head. The man spoke again, his expression solicitous. The boy tried to squirm away from the man’s touch, but the latter took hold of his jacket sleeve. The hand on the boy’s shoulder slid down and began to make gentle circular movements in the small of the boy’s back. The boy looked petrified. Hawkwood took a step forward.

“No,” Lasseur said softly, “I’ll deal with it.”

Hawkwood watched as Lasseur ducked beneath the beams and the hanging sacks. He saw the privateer place his hand on the man’s shoulder, lean in close and speak softly into his ear. The man said something back. Lasseur spoke again and the man’s smile slipped. Then he was holding his hands up and backing away. Lasseur did not touch the boy but squatted down and spoke to him.

A voice in Hawkwood’s ear said, “Right, it’s all arranged; a room with a view for both of you.” Murat looked around. “Where’s your friend?”

“Here,” Lasseur said. He was standing behind them. The boy stood at his side, clutching his bedding. “This is Lucien. Lucien, say hello to Captain Hooper and our interpreter, Lieutenant … my apologies, I didn’t catch your given name.”

“Auguste,” Murat said.

“Lieutenant Auguste Murat,” Lasseur finished. He fixed Murat with an uncompromising eye. “I want space for the boy as well.”

Murat’s eyebrows rose. He shook his head. “I regret that’s not possible.”

“Make it possible,” Lasseur said.

“There’s no room, Captain,” Murat protested.

“There’s always room,” Lasseur said.

Murat looked momentarily taken aback by Lasseur’s abrasive tone. He stared down at the boy, took in the small, pale features and then threw Lasseur a calculating look. “It could be expensive.”

“You do surprise me,” Lasseur said.

Murat’s brow wrinkled, unsure how to respond to Lasseur’s barb, before it occurred to him it was probably best to tell them to wait once more and that he would return.

Hawkwood and Lasseur watched him go.

“I have a son,” Lasseur said. He did not elaborate but looked down. “How old are you, boy?”

The boy gripped his bedding. In a wavering voice, he said, “Ten, sir.”

“Are you now? Well, stick with us and you might just make it to eleven.”

Murat reappeared and, unsmiling, crooked a finger. “Come with me.”

Stepping around and over bodies, heads bent, the two men and the boy followed the interpreter towards the starboard side of the deck.

“You’re in luck –” Murat spoke over his shoulder “– another place has become vacant. The former owner doesn’t need it any more.”

“That’s fortunate,” Lasseur said. He caught Hawkwood’s eye and winked. “And why’s that?”

“He died.”

Lasseur halted in his tracks.

Murat held up his hands. “Natural causes, Captain, on my mother’s life.”

Lasseur looked sceptical.

“From the fever. They say it’s due to the air coming off the marshes.” Murat jabbed a thumb towards the open grilles. “It’s the same both sides of the river. It’s what most men die of, that and consumption. That’s the way it happens on the hulks. You rot from the inside out.”

Hawkwood noticed that the prisoners near the gun ports were making use of the light to read or write, using the bench along the side of the hull as a makeshift table. Some were conversing with their companions while they wrote. As he passed, Hawkwood realized they were conducting classes. He looked over a hunched shoulder and guessed by the illustrations and indecipherable script that the subject was probably mathematics.