A matter of honor, p.15
A Matter of Honor, page 15
The prospect of imminent battle weighed heavily on Richard’s mind, as he knew it did on the mind of every man aboard Ranger. It was a subject that lingered just below the surface of shipboard conversations like raw meat set in a trap, yet it remained one unspoken, taboo, the trap mechanism rarely engaged. Richard fought hard to keep such thoughts at bay by focusing on the tasks at hand and by reminding himself whence he had come and why He refused to broach the forbidden subject, though he knew his messmates wished that he, as senior midshipman, would. He did not know, could not yet know, why he refused so adamantly—his messmates were, after all, his closest friends aboard ship, and Agreen one of his closest friends ever—but he sensed his reticence was bom not so much from a fear of dying as a fear of something he believed was worse than dying: becoming maimed, crippled for life, a deformed creature cast out, no longer of use to anyone. As he walked the deck and inspected the guns, he saw in the eyes of those who greeted him that they too had crossed mental swords in the timeless self-examination of men about to engage in battle.
“Mistah Cutlah. Mistah Cutlah, suh!”
Richard was on one knee beside a gun when Scipio Africanus came bounding up to him. His teeth and the whites of his eyes shone brilliantly in the glow of a three-quarter moon.
Richard stood up. He put his hands on his hips and looked squarely down at the young boy. “What are you doing on deck, Scipio? You should be below, asleep.”
“It’s my watch, suh,” Scipio replied, grinning.
“Your watch? What are you talking about? Powder monkeys are exempt from night duty. You know that.”
“I do, suh. I knows it well. But I got t’ thinkin’ my place be here on deck with you, suh. I been ’signed to number-three bat’rey,” he said, his skinny chest puffing out with pride when he added, “That’s your battery, Mistah Cutlah.”
“I’m aware of that,” Richard said with mock resignation. During the previous day he had been informed by Joshua Loring who had been informed by Captain Jones that Scipio Africanus was to be transferred to number-three battery It was not an official transfer, since powder monkeys served all guns. But it was the battery that the boy had requested. “You, Scipio, are the only person aboard this ship who can get whatever he wants from the captain, whenever he wants it.”
“Thankee, suh. I knows that too!” The grin on Scipio’s face expanded if such a thing were possible. “Think well see action tomorree, suh? I do.”
“I doubt tomorrow,” Richard said, “but soon enough.” He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Get below and get some sleep, Scipio. I need you rested in case we do see action tomorrow. Can’t have you nodding off on duty, now can we? Not with a job as important as yours.”
“No suh. I mean, yessuh. I mean, aye, aye, suh.” Scipio giggled at his confusion. “But Mistah Cutlah, it smells somethin’ awful down there.”
Scipio was right. It did smell something awful down there. The bracing scents of freshly hewn oak and cedar had long since yielded to the rancid odors of one hundred forty men sleeping, smoking, eating, and, when rain thrummed on the crew’s latrines outside on the beakhead, urinating in a confined space shared with rats and other denizens thriving in an environment of filth and stench. Such rank odors resisted the efforts of sailors’ scrubbing the decks with a mixture of sulfur and vinegar, as they had done since the days of Magellan, and burning stale tobacco in metal pots. Where Scipio and the other ship’s boys were berthed, in the forwardmost part of the forecastle by the manger, lurked the most fetid odors of all. It was here that the pigs, ducks, sheep, and chickens herded aboard at Nantes were tethered in pens seldom cleaned out. “A fish stinks from the head,” was an expression Richard had once heard in Boston. To his mind, it was an expression equally applicable to a ship long at sea.
“Below with you, lad,” he commanded.
“Aye, aye, suh.” Scipio saluted and raced off to the fore hatchway leading below. “Good night, Mistah Cutlah,” he called out, his grin as infectious as ever.
Good night? Six bells had struck at the forecastle and at the small bell mounted at the break of the quarterdeck railing. In less than one hour, at four o’clock in the morning, bosun’s mates would be weaving among the hammocks, rousting out the starboard watch. This morning, Richard reminded himself, the crew must take extra care in cramming their hammocks tightly within the bulwark nettings. In the event of battle, they would provide much needed cover to those on the weather decks.
Richard resumed his methodical walk, touching his hat to David Wendell, the junior watch officer, walking slowly toward him.
“All is well, David?”
“Aye, Richard. You?”
“Yes.”
Richard moved on but something made him stop and turn around. David Wendell was standing a few feet away from him, watching him, his features faint in the glow of moon and lanterns.
“What is it, David?”
Wendell stepped closer and spoke softly lest anyone overhear them. “Nothing, really… It’s… eerie, that’s all… I mean, here we are, one small ship. And there’s England out there, our enemy, with the most powerful navy in the world. And we’re about to attack it.” He held his hands out with palms up, as a priest would during communion. “Lieutenant Simpson’s not right, is he, Richard? This cruise isn’t just lunacy, is it? We will survive, won’t we?”
“That’s certainly the captain’s intent,” Richard assured him, his measured tone meant to convince himself as much as the younger midshipman. They were edging toward that forbidden zone of conversation; Richard proceeded carefully. “This is no suicide mission, David. Remember that. We have surprise on our side. The British don’t know we’re here. The last thing they would expect is what we’re about to do.”
Wendell laughed nervously. “For what our enemy is about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful,” he said, with impressive bravado.
At eight bells the watch changed. Richard and David Wendell met Agreen Crabtree and Charles Charrier on the quarterdeck. They returned their salutes and handed over the reins of responsibility to them. Joshua Loring emerged from a hatchway amidships, followed by Elijah Hall as the commands and shouts of bosun’s mates bellowed up from below amid groans and curses of men roused from dreams into drudgery. Dull shards of daybreak were brightening the eastern sky as lookouts scampered aloft to scan 360 degrees around the ship for any nick of sail or, worse, the hull of an enemy ship.
“All clear!” the lookouts shouted down from all three masts, and the morning routine began anew.
Despite a serious lack of sleep in recent days, Richard was not tired. He was off duty and could have opted to go below to coax what rest he could. Instead he remained on the weather deck amidships, out of the way of sailors going about their predawn duty of scrubbing, polishing, and coiling. Pulling the warmth of his woolen boat cloak tightly around him, he gazed out upon a scene changing color like a slow-moving chameleon from black to dark gray, from slate to white gray, ultimately to a startling deep blue in the frost of an April dawn. Everywhere the morning sun danced serenely off the waves, casting a panorama of glittering jewels before him. Ranger had held true to her northwesterly course, and Richard felt her bow lift as sailors aloft lowered the fore course from its fixed yards and hauled up the flying jib. Topgallants and royals remained furled, however, to make Ranger less visible to a passing ship.
“Blessin’s of the morning to ye, sir,” a gunner’s mate greeted Richard. A veteran of the Royal Navy in the late 1760s, he was wearing the short blue jacket and round woolen cap of a petty officer, and he had his hair tied back in a queue with a piece of codline. He knuckled his forehead in salute and gave Richard a smile that verified which front teeth had been punched out in Nantes during a drunken tavern brawl Only the quick and hard-lined intervention of Lieutenant Simpson with the local magistrates had kept much of Ranger’s complement of petty officers out of a French prison.
“And to you, Covey,” Richard replied. “It’s a fine morning we’re blessed with.” As he spoke, he couldn’t avoid noticing the right side of Covey’s face, swollen as it was with an ugly discoloration from the lower jaw up to where a silver ring hung from the man’s ear lobe. “Have you seen the surgeon recently?” he asked.
“Have not, sir,” Covey confessed, instinctively massaging the area with his fingertips. “I did see ’im after it ’appened though. The fight, I mean. Broken, ’e told me, and it’ll take weeks, mebbe months to ’eal proper, ’ssumin’ it ever does. Which it won’t. But no matter. ’Taint nuthin’ anyone can do.”
“I’m sorry It looks mighty painful.”
“’Tis, sir, ’tis. But it’s me own bloody fault. I ’predate yer concern, though, sir, sincerely I do.” Covey knuckled his forehead a second time and ambled aft.
Richard leaned against the bulwark and folded his arms in front of him above the hammock nettings, at chin level. The wind had freshened a knot or two and felt inviting against his face, the chill it carried more soothing than anything else. Amid the beauty and serenity of an open sea at dawn, always his favorite time of day, it did not seem possible that Ranger was sailing on an irrevocable course of death and destruction. Feeling instead a sense of contentment rare for him these days, he stared out at the white-tipped waves and summoned to mind images of life, not death, and what life signified to him while in the arms of Anne-Marie Helvétian.
☆ ☆ ☆
THEY HAD made it through the first act of The Barber of Seville. Earlier that afternoon, during un déjeuner très agreeable at Passy, Richard had listened with amusement as Anne-Marie described with girlish enthusiasm the play they were to see that evening at the Tuileries. Richard found himself caring little about Don Bartolo and Count Almaviva and their love triangle with Rosina, but Anne-Marie would see nothing suggesting disinterest on his face as she rambled on excitedly. After they arrived at the palace and were seated in the sky blue theater within a private alcove reserved for them by Anne-Marie, her manner bore no resemblance to what he had witnessed earlier in Passy. Well into the act, during a scene in which Figaro was plotting with the disguised count on how to win the heart of the popular Rosina, she rested her head on Richard’s shoulder and began rubbing her hand up and down the upper arm of his blue midshipman’s coat, her thoughts seemingly far removed from the farcical doings on stage. When Richard, questioning, gently lifted her chin, in the same motion she brought her lips to his, her left arm curling around his neck, her lips parting, her tongue an indicator of her fierce desire. When the act was over and the audience preoccupied with applause and shouts of appreciation, they arose together, drawn up by the same conclusion, and walked from the alcove to the grand hallway, with its massive Doric columns and magnificent stairway, and out the front doors of the palace to where their carriage waited at curbside.
“Please, hear me out, Anne-Marie,” Richard had managed as their carriage approached her residence in Passy, her mother away for the evening, never one to interfere with her daughter’s affaire de coeur. The world was swirling around him: he had no foothold, no anchor, nothing to stem the heady tide of passion save for fleeting vestiges of his rigid Puritan upbringing and fast-evaporating, misguided notions of female sexuality drummed into him by overzealous, Bible-thumping preachers of God. “Is this really what you want? I’m leaving soon for my ship. I may never come back here. I may never see you again.”
She nuzzled into the hollow of his neck, kissing him there. “Je sais bien,” she whispered, her breath sensually warm on his ear, her husky voice reinforcing his own arousal. “Our days may be numbered, mon chéri, but even so, I shall always have the memory of you.”
Always have the memory of you. Richard had savored those words then as he savored them now, their mere recollection stirring his loins. Only one other person had ever said anything like that to him, and that had been years ago, in another, more innocent age when he was young and free and uninitiated and her country was not at war with his. He was older now, a young man who had been swept deeply and willingly into the blissful abyss of physical rapture with a young woman of beauty and substance and sexual appetite who could have had any man she desired—and she had chosen him. He cared for her deeply, and he knew she cared for him that way. But was there more he could feel? Should feel? He may have been young in those days of innocence, but what he had felt then, and what he had held close to his heart ever since, was something quite unlike what he now felt for Anne-Marie.
On the morning of his departure from Passy she had smiled brightly at him and had chatted in casual tones as he and Captain Jones and Lieutenant Wallingford said their goodbyes to the assembled hosts. It was as though he was embarking on a routine call to duty and would be returning to her before the week was out. Only her brief, hard cling at their last embrace confirmed what feelings were being restrained. His last view from the carriage was of Anne-Marie standing before the magnificence of the chateau de Chaumont beside Dr. Franklin, the old man’s arm draped consolingly around her shoulders as she raised her hand in final farewell.
☆ ☆ ☆
THE SOUND of seamen piped to breakfast brought him back with a start. A quick glance of the sun off the horizon confirmed how long he had been daydreaming. He looked to his right. Agreen was leaning against the bulwarks exactly as he was, with his hands folded before him.
“How long have you been there?” Richard asked him.
“A spell. Figured you might want t’ talk. If I figured wrong, just tell me t’ shove off.”
“I’d prefer you stay,” Richard said a little sheepishly He knew Agreen would not open the subject of Anne-Marie. Upon Richard’s return from Paris, Agreen had sensed that something profoundly personal had happened to his friend there. Whoever she was, Richard made it clear more from what he didn’t say that she would not be subjected to typical shipboard swagger and crude jokes. “Any change in our course or speed?”
“No change. Callum claims we’ll be sightin’ Ireland anytime now We’re makin’ near ten knots last time I checked.”
Richard glanced aloft at the yards braced half-over and the snowy white courses and topsails bellying out taut from them. “Those French shipwrights sure know their trade, don’t they, Agee? Have you noticed how much better Ranger sails now? Whatever the cost, it was worth it.”
Crabtree chuckled. “I agree. But you should have been there when those shipwrights started cuttin’ down her masts an’ yards. Hall was fit t’ be tied, a mad cock peckin’ on frickin’ hens in the coop, with them Frenchmen cursin’ and hollerin’ Lord only knows what. If the Frogs had said the hell with it, an’ the captain had come back with Ranger not ready for sea, I’d’ve jumped ship.”
“Why was Hall so mad?”
“Waste of time ’n money, he kept sayin.’ If Ranger had been out takin’ prizes, he claimed, we’d all be gettin’ rich ’stead of doin’ all this work ashore an’ the captain dallyin’ about fancylike in Paris. A lot of men agreed with him, I’m sorry t’ say Hall met with the crew an’ reads out the pamphlet he and Simpson drew up. Asks for a show of hands like we’re in some sort o’ frickin’ Congress. Some sailors took his side. No marines did, though. Probably figured if they had, Wallingford would see ’em choked with their own neck-stocks when he returned.”
Richard whistled softly “So that’s what was behind the petition.”
He was referring to a formal petition presented to the captain by Lt. Elijah Hall after Jones’s return to Nantes. It had been signed by certain members of the ship’s crew, and it sought approval on a policy for taking prizes as Ranger’s primary objective in European waters. The petition went on to request that representatives of the crew be informed of the captain’s intentions, with power to override his orders if they were deemed contrary to the agreement. Jones had calmly read the petition out loud at the quarterdeck railing, with his officers beside him and the entire ship’s complement assembled below on the weather deck. He had then taken his time tearing the document into tiny shreds, letting the pieces fall as litter onto the deck below. Further discussion of this petition was forbidden, he informed the crew Henceforth, any man heard so much as whispering this sort of mutiny would receive two dozen lashes at the grate. Any man openly espousing it would be hanged on the spot. Was he understood?
He was. The matter was dropped—but forgotten?
“Haven’t had much time t’ talk with you, Richard, since Simpson put us on different watches.”
“I understand, Agee. But tell me, Where was Simpson in all this?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask that, Mr. Çutler.”
They turned, startled, to face the gangly first officer, the curl of his lip conveying his opinion of them both. They had not heard him approaching, nor were they aware that their voices had risen in volume to tones of normal conversation.
“Who’s on duty here?” Simpson demanded, his narrowed eyes flickering from one to the other. Seamen on that section of the weather deck promptly found chores to do elsewhere.
“I am, sir,” said Agreen, at attention.
“So it’s my other nemesis, Mr. Crabtree,” Simpson said, with a tinge of disappointment. “If you are on duty, what are you doing, here lollygagging with Mr. Cutler?
“Answer me, Mr. Crabtree!” he barked when Agreen did not respond.
“Mr. Crabtree and I were not lollygagging, sir,” Richard said tightly. “He was asking my opinion about—”
“Shut your gob, Cutler,” Simpson sneered, his face darkening. “I wasn’t addressing you. When I want your opinion about something, I’ll ask for it, though I’d advise you not to hold your breath waiting.” His eyes swung back to Agreen. When he spoke, it was in an odd, sing-song kind of voice. “Well, Mr. Crabtree, here you are, my duty officer, clearly acting as though you’re off duty. That alone is cause for punishment, wouldn’t you say? What’s more, I have caught you leaning against a bulwark while on duty. You do realize that is forbidden a midshipman?” It was a rhetorical question and technically he was correct, but it was a Royal Navy regulation that Jones had never enforced.
