The East Indiaman Read online

  Hooker moved his vast body uneasily so that the chair upon which he sat creaked in protest. ‘Well William, I suppose I know you well enough and our fates are so inter-twined that little harm can come of my telling you. I suppose you have a right to know that you are not aiding and abetting a criminal, for you must have thought my hiding in the stews of Gravitt’s Yard a strange matter. ’Tis a private affair, of course, and goes back a long time.’ Hooker paused, as if wondering whether to confide In Kite. ‘To be truthful,’ he resumed, having apparently resolved this dilemma, ‘it was a foolish thing to return at all. I am a not inconspicuous figure…’ Hooker rumbled a self-deprecating laugh, drained his glass and refilled it. ‘Many years ago, as a young man of modest means I courted a young woman of great beauty. She rejected me and sent another suitor to tell me to keep my distance. The bugger was offensive in what he declared to me were the feelings of the person in question and I threw him down the stairs from my rooms. He limps to this day, but he afterwards married the lady upon whom I had set my deepest aspirations.’ Hooker sighed. ‘I was sorely affronted by the manner in which I had been treated, but the blade took it into his head that he was the wronged party. A week later he turned up at my rooms a second time. His leg was all splinted and he had half-a-dozen cronies with him, all half-drunk and all eager to revenge themselves. Naturally I defended myself and, it only being possible to ascend the staircase one at a time, I had no trouble in rendering them all down to an impotent heap at its foot in a matter of moments.

  ‘That should have been the end of the affair, but two years later, as I prospered in business under-taking insurance risks, my offices were burned down. I later learned that this man’s wife had had a still-born child and that he attributed this to me; a preposterous notion. I had not seen the young woman since she had rejected me, but I entertained no illusions about the malice her husband bore me for the disfigurement of his own beauty.’ Hooker scoffed. ‘So I betook myself and my money to India where, within ten years, I had acquired a fortune and a wife of my own. I began to consider what I should do and determined to return to the place of my birth and buy an estate in the locality which was, I knew from correspondence with my former partner in risk, just then offered up for sale.

  ‘Upon my arrival in the town our presence was made known and that very evening I received a call from my old enemy. He was by then a widower and informed me that I had blighted his life and the life of his wife, an odd reversal of perception, you’ll allow, but this consumed him and he threatened me and told me to leave. I remained a few days but then one of my dacoits was found dead in a ditch. There was not a mark upon him and night had been cold, so the coroner decided the fellow had been drunk – for an empty bottle was found near him. Two days after the inquest my enemy woke to find all his horses dead. Their stalls were soaked in their blood but no-one had heard or seen anything. I knew my men had taken their revenge and, my wife now fearing the worst, I decided that I had little option but to return to India. Thus, my dear fellow, I went to ground in Gravitt’s Yard where you found me.’

  ‘I see,’ Kite replied. ‘Thank you for your confidence.’

  Later, as they went to bed, he told Sarah of Hooker’s account and she said, ‘Do you suppose the young lady rejected his suit on account of his smelling so? I should have done so, even had he come to me with all the fabled wealth of the Indies in his pocket! How do you suppose his poor wife copes?’

  ‘She does not seem to notice,’ Kite replied.

  ‘Or it is the reason for her apparently permanent inertia?’ Sarah added waspishly.

  ‘Josiah tells me she is cold,’ he said.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Sarah, snuggling under the bedding, ‘let us hope this odd partnership pays some dividend. I worry about little Emma; do you think that she will suffer in India?’

  ‘I think we shall be at sea much of the time. I had thought to recommend that you take as many books as we can manage, even if we encase some of them for the outward voyage…’ And so their discussion turned to the uncertain future that now opened before them, and the day of their departure approached.

  Chapter Five

  Captain ‘Topsy-Turvy’

  Kite’s optimistic hopes of an early departure were destined to be dashed. The sailing of the Spitfire was to be delayed for months. First Rose Hooker fell ill. Kite called in his old friend Joshua Bennett, a doctor whose skill Kite had long admired and who attended his exotic patient with a mixture of consolation, sympathy, patience and anodyne placebos. He sent his wife, the plain but capable Katherine whose rogue of a father Kite had sailed with when he had first shipped outward aboard a Liverpool slaver, to visit daily and Mrs Bennett thereby eased a burden from Sarah’s shoulders. After Captain Makepeace’s death, his widow and Katherine’s mother, had remarried. Her new husband, the wealthy Frith, had long been an enemy of Kite’s, though Katherine remained a firm friend of the Kite household, for Kite had saved he from a marriage with Frith, arranged by her devious mother who was already the man’s mistress. Frith himself remained unforgiving, for Kite had once bested him and he now took delight in Kite’s commercial ruin. Frith was instrumental in changing Kite’s status to that of a pariah, of one no longer welcome on the floor of the Liverpool Exchange. Kite’s only consolation as his creditors closed in upon him was that he could meet his debts, but this wore thin as time passed and he had to raise credit with Hooker.

  Next Hooker persistently postponed the date of sailing, uncertain as to whether his wife was sufficiently recovered to undertake the hazards of a voyage. To exacerbate this valetudinarian attitude, the weather now conspired with a series of hard westerly gales that mewed outward-bound shipping in the Mersey.

  With Christmas hard upon the heels of an improvement in the weather, came the unwelcome intelligence of further activity of American privateers in the Irish Sea and a further fit of nerves by Hooker and his wife so that, as the year turned, Kite became savage in his private opinion of his dubious partner.

  ‘One would think,’ he snarled vehemently at Sarah when undressing one night in mid-January 1781, ‘that the damned lubber did not want to leave at all!’

  Sarah, seeking to pacify her angry and frustrated husband whom, she well knew, had perforce to maintain an air of equanimity in his daily intercourse with Hooker, replied that the delay was perhaps providential, and that a spring departure was preferable, allowing them to double the Cape of Good Hope and pick up the favourable monsoon in the Indian Ocean.

  Kite reluctantly admitted the sense of this and Sarah, capitalising upon her moral advantage, added that it was no concern of theirs, for such was their penury that Hooker was bearing the costs of the delay.

  This was some consolation, but Kite was no less irked. He maintained a chilly formality with Hooker, bound by these humiliating ties, but this was not the end of the strain under which the delay compelled them all to exist. Kite’s house was over-crowded; the dacoits were troublesome, feeding the more restive of their neighbours in the locality with rumoured causes for unwanted pregnancies, burglaries and other ills. Kite’s reputation once more sank, his eccentric reputation earned by formerly having a blackamoor wife was now resurrected. He again became known as Captain ‘Topsy-Turvy’, a nick-name attached to him as a flouter of convention. Moreover, his association with a vast and stinking partner whose wife was also a curious native from some foreign shore only added to the public hostility.

  Kite was not the only man touched by the war. Losses and restrictions on Liverpool shipping had brought real hardship and privation to many in the port. Civil disorder and occasional full-blown riots were not uncommon. Once roused, the mob had to find its scapegoats. Again, as when he had first brought his beautiful black bride among them, the populace demonstrated their hatred of the eccentric by breaking Kite’s windows.

  Neither Kite nor Sarah viewed this indignity as the end of the world, but for Rose Hooker the ugly horror compelled her to retreat to her bed while her husband, now caught on the sh
arpening horns of a dilemma, suddenly considered their departure urgent. Tension between the tainted Hooker and his wife only added to the strain under which the household laboured. The daily change of the dacoit guard upon Hooker’s treasure had long been a source of irritation to Mrs O’Riordan and it was only with difficulty that Kite persuaded her not to leave his service. But she was plagued too by an unexpected liaison between Maggie and Jack Bow who, having at first been a meek and grateful addition to Kite’s ménage, had long since given in to his impudent nature. For three weeks Mrs O’Riordan had been consumed by anxiety that Maggie would fall pregnant, having discovered the maid and Jack in thoughtless intimacy. The beating which she gave the girl she afterwards claimed a specific against such an eventuality, having first convinced herself that the circumstances would most likely produce a conception. Accordingly she was mortified when, upon informing Dr Bennett for whom she had the most profound respect, the doctor dismissed the claim as ‘a ridiculous conceit with no foundation in scientific fact and too much reliance upon the voiding effects of unwarranted violence’.

  Mrs O’Riordan scarcely understood the doctor’s dismissal, except that it was vitriolic in its contempt, but she afterwards greeted him with cold formality. As for the doctor’s wife, whose devotion to Kite was well known to Siobhan O’Riordan, she was received with unveiled hostility so that, in due course, poor Katherine ceased to call upon her friends.

  Thus did all the inter-relationships break slowly down; only that between Sarah and Kite withstood the strain. But even this was threatened when, early in the new year, little Emma fell sick. Bennett admitted he was ignorant of the cause and had never seen the symptoms before; having chid Mrs O’Riordan for lack of science, all he could tell the anxious parents was that their daughter was ‘consumed by a vapid-decline that was not a consumption.’

  Kite steeled his heart against the inevitable, but Sarah was inconsolable. Her conception had been late in her life and she knew that only Bennett’s skill had saved her from puerperal fever. She knew another pregnancy would be dangerous, if not impossible and she felt she had failed her husband who had already lost two sons.

  Kite, torn between the necessity of preparing the Spitfire for sea and supporting his wife, bore this final onslaught of misfortune with an inscrutable fortitude. The change in his friend was remarked by Bennett whose concern for the husband was as great as that for his wife.

  ‘He has become cold as ice,’ he told Katherine, shaking his head.

  ‘But not with poor Sarah, surely?’ Katherine asked. She had been half in love with Captain Kite when a girl, and had remained fond of him ever since.

  Bennett shook his head. ‘No, but it is the very solicitude with which he treats her that in a curious and contrary way proves to me, who have known him for so long as you have, m’dear, that the man has buried his emotions deep in his soul.’

  ‘But,’ his wife queried uncertainly, ‘why is that so bad? Surely if he wishes to hide his pain, for pain he must certainly feel if the child dies…’

  ‘Oh, the child will most assuredly die, Kate. ’Tis only a matter of time.’ Bennett shook his head and, removing his shoes, tossed them into a corner and sank back into his chair with an unhappy groan. ‘But to answer your question, I apprehend that a man of William’s humour will not contain his grief. ’Twill emerge most precipitately at some inauspicious moment. One can only hope that William is able to contain it.’

  Emma died within a month of falling sick. Sarah spent the night locked in the child’s room while Kite slept in a chair outside her door. When Sarah emerged and woke him in the dawn she said simply, ‘It is time to go. We have no attachments here any more.’

  Kite rose stiffly. Touching his wife gently on the cheek he nodded then passed into the room where he pressed his lips to the cold little forehead. Sarah retired to the bedroom to sleep until evening, and Kite went down stairs to arrange for the funeral. He then walked down to the river.

  In his final harrowing, William Kite’s only unconstrained association was been with the Spitfire’s mate, Zachariah Harper. As an American Loyalist, Harper had lost everything. Harper’s own descent into the abyss had profoundly affected his outlook on life and, in sympathy with his employer, he daily sought to raise Kite’s spirits as the two men attended to every detail of the schooner. Since, to avoid unnecessary expense, they had delayed taking on a full crew until certain of their departure, Harper and his handful of employed seamen were joined by Kite whenever possible in the physical labour of preparation. Thus Kite, late a ship-owner and man of quality and means, had lost himself in the overhauling of rigging as much as the preparation of charts, submerging himself in the practicalities that only added to his soubriquet of Captain ‘Topsy-Turvy’. In this manner Kite found the means to sublimate his grief.

  As for Sarah, after the interment and pretending a commission from her husband, she boldly travelled to London in the company of Bandy Ben and Maggie, taking up lodgings off the Strand found for her through an acquaintance. From here she laid out the almost the last of Kite’s disposable capital and a sum of her own, acquiring a quantity of haberdashery, fashionable nick-knacks, French pattern-books, cased pistols, two dozen hangers, a dozen fine-wrought fowling pieces and three sets of fine Spanish harness. While in town in a mood of brittle gaiety, she attended the theatre in the company of her sister-in-law Helen Hope, flirted harmlessly and broke several hearts. Having thus diverted herself and, like her husband, sublimated her unhappiness, she returned home with her booty and, she hoped, the means with which to start the revival of her husband’s fortunes.

  In the privacy of his own home Dr Bennett shook his grey head over Sarah’s behaviour, expressing misgivings that little good could come of any of it. ‘Such a curious expenditure of energy at such a time runs contrary to human nature,’ he declared. For once his wife did not agree with him. Katherine understood exactly why Sarah had behaved in the way she had, and wished her free of her misery.

  At the beginning of March Kite and his company finally boarded the Spitfire as she lay in the dock, gleaming with new paint and slushed spars.

  The final departure of the schooner attracted a crowd which consisted of rather more than the casual dockside loafers who might otherwise have attended the departure of so small a vessel. The curious among Liverpool’s growing numbers of wealthy were alerted to the event. Even in mourning Mistress Kite was sufficiently striking to attract a crowd of admirers among the men, and detractors among the women, but when her beauty was accompanied by the massive and malodorous bulk of her husband’s strange new partner and the brilliant and swirlingly scarlet silk-clad figure of his voluptuously exotic wife, few could stay away.

  The embarkation began with a little procession of turbanned dacoits in their white curtals, each with a Moghul sword strapped to his waist. They accompanied several carts bringing the last of the personal effects of the adventurers, among which was concealed the heavy chest containing Hooker’s fortune. Then came those servants which Kite had decided to take with him Maggie and Hooker’s protégé Jack Bow. Kite had also persuaded one of his counting house clerks, a certain Michael McClusky to join the party, and he too clambered aboard. Last came Hooker and the two ladies, attended by a wildly barking mongrel whose unwanted attentions amused the crowd and induced a few youths to draw attention to Hooker’s unfortunate bodily dysfunction.

  Captain ‘Topsy-Turvy’ was already aboard. Dressed like his wife in formal black, Kite ordered the warps carried out and the hands to the capstan. Then, to the tune of a fiddle and the cries of Zachariah Harper, the Spitfire cast off from the quay wall and was hauled out of the dock.

  Closing the entrance, Kite braced the schooner’s yards sharp up and let the square topsails fall. It was the moment of slack water as the breeze filled these high sails and, letting all her ropes go, Spitfire stood out into the Mersey. Here, in mid-stream, the first of the ebb caught her and, gently at first but with increasing strength, swept her down the river.
The big quadrilateral main and foresails were hoisted and the red ensign was broken out at the main peak. The staysails and jibs were run up and the canvas filled, driving the schooner forward so that the curl of white water at her forefoot grew. At the truck of her mainmast a long blue pendant streamed out. Upon it in white letters was spelt the little vessel’s name.

  As she gathered way the crowd were already dispersing. Captain ‘Topsy-Turvy’ had gone, and with him his strange household and companions. Most wished him good-riddance. A few, like Katherine and Joshua Bennett, wished him a quiet farewell and shed a tear or two. Mrs O’Riordan stared about the empty house, wondered whether she had been sensible to agree to stay on and keep the place aired, and what she would do with bandy Ben. It was a place to live, of course, and Captain Kite had made arrangements with Dr Bennett to ensure she was provided for – quite how in his straitened circumstances Mrs O’Riordan could not understand. What Mrs O’Riordan knew for as near a certainty as she could determine, was that India was a long way away and there was precious little chance of her ever seeing her employer again.

  It was Kite’s intention to get clear of the Chops of the Channel as fast as possible. Not only did he fear interference from American privateers, to whom rumour if not fact had now added a number of disaffected rogue Irish corsairs, but also from cruising British frigates whose commanders, if short of prime seamen, would not scruple to press men from a private vessel like the Spitfire. Given his luck to date, Kite’s apprehension was unsurprising; in the event he was fortunate and reached the latitude of Cape Finisterre unmolested. Here, however, a strong south-westerly wind rapidly increased to gale force just as those of his passengers unaccustomed to the motion of the schooner had been on the verge of recovery from sea-sickness. Their relapse was spectacular; to queasiness, sweating and the urge to void one’s stomach, was now added a portion of terror. Rose Hooker shrieked while her husband groaned, poor little Maggie, now undoubtedly impregnated by the precocious Master Bow, suffered further indignity, while the dacoits succumbed to a man and lay like the dead in a heap between decks.