The East Indiaman Read online

  ‘Never!’ he bellowed as he slumped to the deck.

  ‘Then take the consequences!’ the American commander shouted back.

  A moment later the schooner ran alongside and grappling irons snaked across to bind the two vessels together. Then a swarm of Yankee privateersmen swarmed over the rails of the two ships.

  Gilbert drew his hanger and stood, a tatterdemalion sentinel over the fallen British commander; Allison drew his own sword and handed Molly a pistol while Wise grabbed the grieving Manton and hauled him to his feet. Amidships Jeffries, Grove and the seamen were fighting for their lives, but for all their courage, the British were outnumbered and out-classed. Gilbert proved an able swordsman, but he was too tall and, denied the space of a piste, was quickly pressed and disarmed. Allison was shot through the thigh and only Molly saved him from being given the coup de grâce. An American officer fought his way aft and hacked through the ensign halliards so that the red bunting, with its stripes of blue and white, fell into the sea and, dragging astern in the Sea Lyon’s wake, was reduced to a mere rag.

  When it was all over, Wentworth appeared on deck. He confronted the American lieutenant who was just then securing the prisoners and sending a man to take the Sea Lyon’s helm. He bore two loaded pistols which he held in front of him and, as someone called the Yankee officer’s attention to the nervously approaching figure, he pulled both triggers. Flint snapped on steel and with a flash and puff of smoke the two firearms barked, but Wentworth’s shaking fists sent the shots wide. A moment later the merchant fell dead from a dozen balls that the angry privateersmen discharged into his fat body.

  Down below, Wentworth’s unfaithful wife was already sprawled in ungainly death.

  Before the two vessels separated, the Sea Lyon with her prize crew aboard and already clearing away the wreckage of the action, Captain Clarkson and his surviving passengers were taken aboard the schooner. Here they were met by another American officer who, removing his hat, bowed and addressed them.

  ‘Josiah King, commander of the schooner Algonquin of Newport, Rhode Island,’ he said introducing himself. ‘I am truly sorry to see you reduced to this extremity,’ he continued, ‘and must compliment you on your courage but, had you submitted to force majeur, you would have saved much unnecessary effusion of blood.’

  Clarkson, held upright between Gilbert and Jeffries, a blood-sodden pledget bound to his shoulder, nodded as the major offered up Clarkson’s sword.

  ‘Well now,’ said King with a smile, ‘is that the gallant captain’s sword, or your own, Major?’

  ‘I was disarmed aboard the Sea Lyon by one of your licensed pirates, Captain,’ Jeffries coolly replied. ‘This is Captain Clarkson’s sword.’

  ‘Thank you, but you may return it to him. I have all the prize I wish from Captain Clarkson.’ King turned to Clarkson who was pallid from loss of blood. ‘I shall have my surgeon attend you, Captain, but tell me sir, I see you are from Liverpool, but who owns your vessel?’

  ‘Captain William Kite, sir,’ Clarkson replied through his teeth.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said King with a wide grin.

  Chapter Two

  The Honourable Company

  Mr Quentin Cunningham, Third Clerk to the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company bit his lip with vexation. A man of less refinement than Cunningham would have sworn, but the Second Clerk believed firmly in personal inhibition as a mark of gentility; indeed he attributed his position to this quality as much as to the fine hand he wrote. Just at the moment, however, he was finding it extremely difficult to concentrate on the practice of handwriting and had not executed his last line of prose with his customary ease. He looked across the copying room to where his colleague, Anthony Burridge, the senior copy-clerk sat idle, his head raised, similarly arrested in his task by the persistent interruption to their joint diligence.

  Burridge, a man eleven years Cunningham’s senior, felt the Third Clerk’s gaze upon him and, with a nervous twitch that rippled across his shoulders and caused the older man to wink one eye as his head jerked, bent again to his task with a scratch of quill nib on paper. But Cunningham derived no satisfaction from this manifestation of his power and remained himself in suspended animation. The noise had an odd quality of demanding attention; like the ticking of a clock its measured regularity had become as much part of the neighbouring room as the slightly creaking boards from which it was generated, but, unlike a clock, it refused to fade from the consciousness of the two clerks. It was strangely insidious, perhaps because it was caused not by a mechanical device, but by a man of such patience that its very regularity was its most alarming feature.

  Cunningham found himself trying to work out at what point the man causing the intrusive footsteps turned about in his pacing and found that he could not do so. There seemed no hesitation in the regularity of each footfall after its predecessor and the Third Clerk found his mind’s eye conjuring up the image of a man who walked endlessly forwards, yet remained in the same spot while the floor upon which he strode with slow precision moved under him. Cunningham also caught himself thinking that this was no military man, but a sea-captain. Instead of the parade ground for which it seemed most suited, each step was measured in a slow-time capable of absorbing the roll or pitch of a ship.

  Cunningham drew out his half-hunter and consulted it. The man had been striding up-and-down, or on-and-on Cunningham thought with a prickle of extreme irritation, for upwards of five and thirty minutes. Why on earth he had been left to vegetate for so long Cunningham could only guess. The Directors, upon whom the petitioner from Liverpool had come to wait, had their own reasons for most things and it was not Cunningham’s prerogative to question such matters, but if the Third Clerk was annoyed, surely the petitioner would be irate: yet there was no hint of impatience in that measured tread. The worthy sea-captain had requested the Court of the Honourable East India Company for a meeting months earlier, and Cunningham himself had signed the letter arranging this appointment. At eleven of the clock, he recalled, and the captain had arrived on the first stroke of the hour. Moreover Cunningham knew that the morning’s conference of the Honourable Company’s ships’ husbands had broken up some quarter of an hour earlier. The superintending officers, who had been conferring upon the readiness of their respective ships to depart from the Thames outward bound for India and China, had handed him their conclusions as they had trooped out into Leadenhall Street. Even at that moment Cunningham was writing, or trying to write, to the Admiralty to finalise the allocation of four frigates to convoy the East India fleet. The two senior ships’ husbands, who remained in the elegant court-room with its horse-shoe shaped table, would be enjoying a glass, no doubt, but, Cunningham assumed, their desire to allow the Liverpudlian mariner to cool his heels was having the very opposite effect upon the clerk’s office beyond the waiting room!

  It was no good, an exasperated Cunningham concluded: he would have to intervene! Laying his quill down he rose and, opening the doors between the clerk’s office and the ante-chamber, he went through. Having committed himself to this act, Cunningham realised he had acted on a foolish impulse, had forsaken his customary personal inhibition and had not the faintest idea what he should do next. Instead he was simultaneously aware of three things: that he had committed an impropriety; that Burridge, disturbed by the uncharacteristically precipitate movement of his superior, had ceased writing and was awaiting the outcome; and that he himself had in fact invaded the ante-chamber in order to find out how the captain reversed his direction of travel without the slightest faltering in his pace. In this at least fate granted the Third Clerk gratification, for the captain had his back to Cunningham as he closed the doors behind him, nor did he make any effort to turn prematurely. Perhaps he had not heard the doors open, but if not he evinced no surprise when, in a smooth swing of his body during which his pace altered not a whit, he confronted Cunningham. Cunningham realised in a flash of intuition that the captain was probably, no certainly, a
n accomplished swordsman. Despite his middle years, he walked with a supple grace and a perfect balance so that, as he began a remorseless advance upon the Third Clerk, Cunningham, used to regarding any inhabitant who hailed from the north-country as inferior, conceived a sudden wary respect for the petitioner. Cunningham recalled the man’s name as giving no hint to any gentility. Captain Kite had seemed, at least by his letters, to be little more than a sea-officer who came to his point without equivocation. It was true that upon his arrival, Cunningham had noted his dress was untypically sober. The effect this had upon Cunningham as Captain Kite now bore down upon him, fixing him with a stare above which one eyebrow lifted interrogatively, had the Third Clerk swallowing awkwardly.

  Captain Kite was dressed entirely in black, more like a priest than a sea-officer and, for an unnerving moment, Cunningham entertained the fantasy that the captain from Liverpool had mysteriously transmogrified into Beelzebub. Even more unsettling was the inexorable pace of advance with which the man now approached Cunningham. The Third Clerk was on the very edge of precipitate retreat when he recalled the principle of personal inhibition and caught himself aghast. Suddenly the Liverpudlian stopped in front of him and Cunningham could almost hear the sigh of satisfaction from Burridge behind him as the damnable pacing finally stopped.

  ‘Well, sir? How long am I to be kept here?’ Captain Kite asked.

  ‘Er, not long, Captain Kite, not long. I do apprehend, sir, that it will not be more than a moment. I feel certain, Captain Kite…’

  Then, as though the spell was now broken, a second door at the far end of the ante-chamber was opened. Looking beyond his interlocutor, Cunningham saw the portly figure of Captain Woolnough and behind him the lesser bulk of Captain Drysdale, the two ships’ husbands who had remained to draft a minute to the Court of Directors over a congenial glass of wine. The drafted minute would in due process arrive on Cunningham’s desk for formalisation by himself.

  Aware of the movement behind him the black-clad Liverpudlian turned slowly and Cunningham watched in a motionless fascination as Captain Kite’s back receded, crossing the wooden floor with exactly the same dreadful pace that had so disturbed the industry of the clerk’s office.

  ‘Captain Kite?’

  ‘The same, gentlemen.’ Kite stopped, bowed, and then held out his hand.

  ‘I am Thomas Woolnough, Senior Ship’s Husband and a Director of the East India Company, Captain Kite,’ the larger of the two men declared shaking Kite’s hand, ‘and this is Jeffrey Drysdale, who occupies a similar position in our Court. Please do you come in…’

  And then the three men passed from Cunningham’s sight as the far doors closed. He sighed, as though relieved of an intolerable burden, and returned to the clerk’s office where Burridge looked up briefly.

  ‘Thank heaven’s they’ve admitted him at last,’ he breathed as he resumed his seat.

  ‘I thought they never would,’ added Burridge, bent over his desk again.

  ‘Odd cove, I thought. Dressed more like a damned papist than a sea-captain.’

  ‘He has an idiosyncratic reputation, I gather,’ remarked Burridge didactically.

  ‘Oh?’ responded Cunningham. Part of his self-denial rested on his refusal to listen to gossip, but the curious disturbance of his normally placid routine exposed him to a moment of weakness.

  Burridge, who did not eschew any form of intelligence and derived a degree of satisfaction from possessing facts unknown to his superior, explained. ‘He was in a slaver and became infatuated with one of the blackamoors to the extent of setting her free in order to marry her.’

  But Burridge’s loquacity was a presumption, Cunningham would not tolerate it and recalled the Third Clerk to his sense of propriety. ‘It is of no consequence to me that this Captain Kite favours women of colour,’ he responded primly. ‘Indeed, if the half of what I hear is true, so do most of the Company’s servants in India…’

  ‘I’m talking of a black-slave from the Gambia…’ Burridge persisted, but Cunningham would have none of it.

  ‘The devil you are, Burridge, and a deal to much of it, to be sure. Kindly attend to your task.’

  And with that Burridge twitched again, and a silence fell once more upon the labours of the two men. It did not last, however, for instead of the intrusive noise of pacing, a faint, slightly sickly odour now began to permeate the clerk’s office and, like puppets manipulated by springs, the two men slowly looked round as they became simultaneously aware of this new intrusion.

  An exceptionally large man stood panting and perspiring in the outer doorway. He held under one elbow a small seemingly odoriferous spaniel while his other hand rested upon a silver-headed cane.

  Cunningham rose, unable to disguise the expression of real exasperation on his face at this further disturbance. ‘Mr Hooker,’ he began, ‘I told you yesterday, your petition has been rejected. The Directors will not entertain your project. Do please accept this ruling as final and absolute…’

  ‘Hold your tongue!’ The large man lumbered forward and such was the stink he brought with him that Cunningham was compelled to retreat a step before recovering himself.

  ‘Mr Hooker,’ Cunningham protested with a deep breath, placing himself in front of the large man who seemed intent on invading the ante-chamber,’ I really must insist upon your leaving…’

  ‘Damn your impudence, sir! Stand aside!’

  The intimidating bulk rose above the slim figure of the Third Clerk who seemed like a small sea-bird in danger of being swept aside by the bow of a great ship until Burridge suddenly rose from his desk and, with a surprising agility, threw himself in front of the intruder.

  ‘Hold hard, Mr Hooker!’ Burridge said sharply, ‘the senior husbands are presently occupied with another petitioner.’

  ‘So I gathered from your conversation,’ Hooker said, revealing the fact that he had overheard the two clerks. ‘And doubtless they will prefer this other petitioner above myself, eh?’ Hooker frowned and looked at the two clerks.

  Cunningham nodded. ‘I have no idea, sir, exactly what conclusion the Directors will come to since I have only the faintest notion of Captain Kite’s business with the Honourable Company, but I do assure you they are as likely to reject him as you, Mr Hooker, for the matter of the fleet has gone too far forward to brook alterations in the financial arrangements…’

  ‘Financial arrangements, d’ye say, eh?’ Hooker’s watery blue eyes focused upon the Third Clerk and Cunningham was almost overwhelmed by the smell of the dog which also stared at him with a lachrymose and myopic glare. ‘And what d’ye say this fellow’s name is? Kite, was it?’

  ‘Captain William Kite, Mr Hooker, is from Liverpool.’

  ‘And my own case…’

  ‘Is irrevocably lost, I regret to say, sir,’ said Cunningham smoothly, scenting victory and, after the morning’s deep frustrations, glad of the triumph. He had the impression of a foot-bladder deflating. Hooker seemed suddenly impotent, the man’s bluster vanished and he seemed almost frightened. He turned aside apparently diminished in stature, and shuffled out as silently as he had arrived. Cunningham drew a perfumed handkerchief from his cuff and waved it under his nose.

  ‘Obliged to you Burridge,’ he said, acknowledging his assistant’s intervention and sufficiently relaxing after all the excitement to add, ‘I think a man who walks the floor like a funeral drum and tups black wenches is preferable to one who appears like a ghost and nurses a poodle that stinks like a corpse.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Burridge chuckled nervously at Cunningham’s sudden loose confidence. Then taking advantage of the Third Clerk’s mood he asked, ‘What does Captain Kite want with the senior husbands?’

  ‘Much the same as Mr Hooker, I imagine,’ Cunningham replied with a little technical evasion as evidence of his propriety. He seated himself again and picked up his quill, regarding the nibbed end with an expert eye: ‘Money was at the root of both their petitions.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ sighed Burridge
who had long ago relinquished any hope of acquiring much of the stuff. ‘Money. So Captain Kite’ll be no-more successful then than was Mr Hooker.’

  ‘I’ll eat that damned dog if he is,’ replied Cunningham with an uncharacteristic vulgarity than dismissed thoughts of missed fortunes from Burridge’s mind and replaced them with a faint amusement that Mr Cunningham was not quite as genteel as he would like others to think.

  ‘I hope you don’t have to stoop to that, Mr Cunningham,’ he added with a low irony.

  Cunningham looked up, but Burridge was bent over his task once more, his nib scratching upon the paper as he drew out the spidery lines of his script. With a hand like that, Cunningham thought smugly, Burridge would never make anything more than a copying clerk.

  The two men worked on for a few minutes and then the door to the ante-room opened and Drysdale showed Captain Kite out with a nod at Cunningham.

  ‘Be so kind as to see Captain Kite out, Mr Cunningham, if you please.’

  The Third Clerk stood and led the black-clad gentleman out into the entrance hall and watched as, without a word, Captain Kite was swallowed up in the noisy bustle of Leadenhall Street.

  The black-clad figure stood undecided for an instant, then, turning in the direction of the Strand he began to walk briskly, his face set, his gaze fierce. He had not advanced fifty yards before a young lad was plucking at his sleeve. Preoccupied, Captain Kite shook the youth off, but the boy was persistent.

  ‘Please sir, please…’

  Kite stopped and regarded the lad. He wore a grubby pot-boy’s apron and was clearly not a foot-pad.

  ‘What d’you want?’ he asked crossly.

  ‘There’s a gennelman in the Ship and Turtle as wants to see ‘ee, sir. say’s its a matter of the gravest importance sir, an’ if you come, sir. I’ll get thrupennce for my trouble, sir, so please sir…’ the youth pleaded.

  ‘Thruppence, eh? That’s a considerable sum for so negligible a task. But stay, what’s the gentleman’s name?’