The Devil's Luck (A Charlie Raven Adventure) Read online

  ‘On deck! Land, ho! On deck there! Land!’

  Men, as they do, ran forward to the bow. Others jumped into the rigging, swarming off the deck, straining forward with their eyes.

  ‘Where away?’ roared Mr Collins. He was forward of the quarter deck, but moving to the captain. ‘Give me a bearing, damn you!’

  ‘Fine on the bow, sir! Nearly dead ahead!’

  Another cry came, from the foremast head.

  ‘A point to starboard! Half a point!’

  ‘Any sail? See you any vessels?’

  There were not. And the wind was dying. Puffs came and went, canvas crashed and slatted, yards began to grind and swing in their chains and jeers. Small bursts of Channel water threw themselves upwards, slopped through the drain ports on to the deck.

  ‘God damn it all to hell!’ screamed Captain Maxwell. ‘Break out those sweeps! Lift out some lighter canvas! Set stunsails! I will make land! I will!’

  Up ahead, behind the distant islands, the sun was dropping down the blue, blue sky. And down to the south of them, and more and more inaccessible, lay two French men of war, unsuspecting, sitting targets.

  Getting ready to set sail again. Overhauling rigging, bending canvas on, no doubt checking armaments, perhaps not too far away from manning capstans for the anchor lift.

  Mr Collins was at the captain’s elbow.

  ‘We’re losing steerage way,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost it now completely, sir.’

  ‘Then we pull,’ Maxwell replied. He raised a hand to the first lieutenant, by the wheel.

  ‘Mr Stewart! Set it on!’

  Chapter Three

  It was halfway through the preparation that Charlie Raven reappeared, driven whether by a sense of duty or the prompting of some other boy or man it was not known. Certain it was that the quarters down below were hardly tenable once the sweeps were being readied to run out.

  Each oar was some twenty feet in minimum, of sturdy ash, mainly square in section except for the tapered loom, which had room on it for several men, side by side. The oars were shipped in rope slings, a sort of makeshift rowlock that sat in or on the edge of cut-outs on the lower edge of gunports. In the lowest tier, nearest the surface of the water, the men could sit on trestle benches to do their work, while the upper oarsmen stood and pushed in Maltese style.

  Some of the sweeps had blades to scoop and cut a substantial body of water, but the longer ones were merely squared, in the fashion of propellants on an Irish curragh. They were easier to abstract from seas that caught at them, making it less likely for men to be thrown backwards and badly hurt or crippled.

  In truth, the manpower that could be deployed through this means was almost laughable in contrast to the size of the vessel, but at sea – or more likely when too close to land – they were considered a necessity, or at least a last resort. Sometimes the Pointer could be towed by her own boats, which was not feasible in today’s circumstance, and sometimes there were navy or commercial boats to do the job. It was a measure of the captain’s determination – desperation – that it was even spared one thought today.

  The sweeps themselves were stored in any place a space was found. They were, in the nature of things, overlaid with gear and clutter, some useful, some kept merely in the hope that one day it would ‘come in.’ The men were used as ferrets and as beasts of burden digging them out, and much sweat and a little blood was spilled. The more cruel of the boatswain’s mates had a field day of harassing, their canes and rope’s ends doing sterling work.

  And always, Captain Hector Maxwell ranged like an avenger in the background. He was a man who shouted as naturally as he breathed. He was a man who spat, and swore, and screamed. From time to time he was a man who used his fists, the largest and most muscular of the seamen forced to submit to blows and spittle.

  ‘This ship will make landfall!’ he roared. ‘We will lurk behind the islands for this night, and at dawn, God willing, we will have a breeze again. We will dash across the Channel like a bat from bastard hell, and we will cut and drown and burn those filthy Frenchmen! Work, you bastards! Work!’

  It was a half an hour, more, before the sweeps were ready to be dipped, and in the first ten minutes disasters came thick and fast. The wind had died but the sea had not, and what flatness the breeze might have wrought in it was gone for good. The waves rolled from every quarter, and those that hit the ship rolled back again to plough into their followers. The tide was on the turn as well, and a cross-lop building up, which had the Pointer rolling, pitching, lurching. She had little steerage way, and much time was consumed with quieting the spars and sails. The first blades that were dipped went either too far in, or did not reach the sea at all. Those that went in were seized by the waters, and wrenched violently at the men on the looms. Men who could not reach the surface with their blades stood up, and slipped, and poked, and pulled. For fifteen minutes, she made no way at all.

  Poor Charlie Raven chose this time to come on deck, and stood there in the Pointer’s waist forlorn. He was in his uniform blue coat, his white breeches stained in filth and vomit, and Lieutenant Bullen, the first to notice him, moved swiftly to push him back below.

  ‘Sir,’ he whispered urgently, ‘get you to your quarters instantly. Do not come on deck the way you are. Captain Maxwell—’

  Too late. Maxwell had seen. In the chaos of the deck he lighted on them like a homing hawk. Bullen had pushed, but now he pulled, on Raven’s shoulder. It would be too bad if he was thought to be escaping.

  ‘You,’ squawked the captain. ‘What - on my quarterdeck? Good God, sir, you are like a gutter rat! You skulk below, and now you bring your stench into the open air. God damn you, sir, you are a piece of scum!’

  The seamen who were near enough to hear this – not many, for the bulk were at the sweeps below – assiduously ignored it. The other midshipman on board, a fat and stupid booby with more wealth than ability, they would have mocked for this treatment, behind the hand or not. But Raven was a well set up young gentleman, ready with politeness and a smile. He neither despised them, and for that, nor did they him. And they felt sorry, too, because he was the captain’s target for this trip, which they neither understood nor liked.

  ‘Sir,’ said Raven. ‘I beg your pardon, I was taken ill. I shall endeavour that it will not occur again. I am prepared to do my duty now, whatever it shall be.’

  ‘Easily said,’ sneered the captain. ‘Cannot you see we are too pressed to pamper you? Get on to something useful instantly. Mister Swift! Give the poltroon some maidly task to get him from my gait!’

  ‘Perhaps a lookout, sir?’ said Swift. ‘His eyes are good I guess, and the wind will blow the stink away.’

  Raven’s face was no longer green, but its pallor somehow intensified before their sight. The captain seemed fascinated.

  ‘Good God, a ghost,’ he said. ‘What ails you, man? Are you afraid to do your proper work?’

  Indeed it seemed he was. Raven stood shaking, his eyes ranging from man to man, then gazing upwards to the flogging sails. The yards were dark with men, beating and handing at the canvas, taming it to lie along the spars.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I beg to tell… Sir, I have no head for—’

  Lieutenant Swift, as if he had not heard this hinted at before, let out a snort.

  ‘No head for heights, is it? Before God, sir, whoever heard of such thing?’

  And Maxwell roared:

  ‘You there! Bosun’s mate! Start that midshipman with your cane! Yes, sir, that midshipman, that damned disgrace to name of officer! Start him, I tell you! Beat him up the shrouds!’

  It was unprecedented, not to be heard of, and all around the grouping silence fell. That the captain should command a man to beat an officer, however junior…was the world capsized and floating upside down?

  Both Swift and Bullen moved rapidly. Swift grabbed Raven’s arm to urge him to the weather shrouds, while Bullen moved in front of them to block the way.

  ‘Sir!’ he said. �
��Captain, this young man is not fit! He is sick and he has shoes on and they are slick with filth. If he goes above the deck, sir, he will likely fall. It will…it will cause a dreadful stir. Their lordships, sir…they…’

  Charlie Raven, however, had decided, it would seem. With a wild movement he broke free from Daniel Swift, and sidestepped Lieutenant Bullen. As the ship rolled to starboard he ran updeck to the larboard shrouds, his fingers stretched to grab whatever cordage fell to hand. He was clumsy, and before he’d climbed three feet off deck, Pointer was rolling back the other way, the sea was rising up to meet him.

  At the same moment there was a rending crack from the ’tween decks, and a cacophony of yells and screams. As Raven clung on sickly and the rolling frigate rose him up again, a stream of men issued onto the waist, some of them bloody. They were carrying, half pulling, a man who gushed crimson on the planking. A broken stump of oar loom had pierced his stomach cavity.

  ‘Now what the hell!’ the captain shouted. ‘What tricks are these? Mr Stewart! Get these bastards back to work!’

  The injured man was screaming and the surgeon, Mr Adler, seemed up to his wrists in blood and organs. From below there was more shouting, and when the first lieutenant went below the noise of whipping with stick and rope’s end soon brought it to an end.

  Lieutenant Swift, looking overside by the larboard shrouds, observed the wild thrashing of the sweeps. Above his head, rigid as a graven statue, Charlie Raven was wrapped around the stays, his eyes hard closed.

  ‘Men below!’ yelled Swift. ‘Sir, the larboard sweeps are all a’tangle. Mr Collins, get more men to the oars, more men below! Look lively there, we need more oarsmen!’

  At which point, oddly, Midshipman Raven appeared to drop out of the sky. Not far, indeed, only six feet or so, and he landed on all fours like an ape, then shot across the deck towards the open hatch and disappeared.

  ‘What?’ they heard Mr Collins cry. ‘You here? Ah yes, then, take that bow oar, it is the lightest. And get it biting instantly.’

  Ten minutes later, everything was changed. The sailor who had been speared on the broken sweep was dead, the blood was cleared away. The yards were free of topmen, the sails rough-clewed awaiting proper stow. And the sweeps were pulling steadily. Through the ever-calming water, Pointer was making headway. The lookouts at the trucks sang out from time to time, sometimes singly, sometimes in chorus.

  The Isles of Scilly were heaving into view.

  Chapter Four

  By the time they dropped their anchor on an eastern bay carved from one of the smaller islands, the Pointer was in the flattest of flat calms. The captain’s mood was not improved much, and the enjoyment all men took from the calming beauty of their surroundings and the velvet-black warm air worked not on him at all. Far from rigging an anchor light in the forward rigging, Maxwell insisted on no glims of any sort. When Mr Collins suggested mildly they could be run down upon, he called him a mere fool.

  ‘This is the arse end of the English Channel, Mr Master,’ he said, ‘and our look-outs will be doubled up and trebled any way. All hands are placed on full alert the whole night through. If the merest zephyr stirs, I will be informed of it, and I want all canvas re-stowed loose upon the spars now to be dropped on any instant. Do I make my meaning clear?’

  Clear enough, to all who heard him. Most of the seamen were in a state of great exhaustion, many with bloodied hands from hours at the sweeps, and Lieutenant Swift had insisted as they came to anchor that the rough and ready furling of the sails be tackled anew to make the vessel harbour shipshape. Now it was all hands aloft once more, on the captain’s latest whim, and the canvas was blotched anew with blood.

  There was no noise, however; another order made on pain of death. When all was re-stowed and snug, and the people fed, it was represented by the boatswain that they might benefit from some relaxation. By which he meant a go of wine or beer – unstated – and then maybe a dancing and a sing around the forebitts. All were rejected, in a display of peevishness that Lieutenant Bullen clearly disapproved of. That, too, remained unstated, though.

  By the time the officers retired to the great cabin to share a late dinner with their captain, they were very hungry, and a little on their edge. Before they were poured even a glass of wine, he had one more shot in his locker. It came hard, and fast, and most upsetting.

  The men were all at table when Midshipman Raven sheepishly came in. It had been noted, and agreed, that he had acquitted himself exceeding well after his sickness and odd behaviour on deck and in the lower shrouds. Mr Collins had reported – and been backed by the dour Lieutenant Stewart – that he had shot below ‘like a terrier after rats’ and seized hold of an abandoned sweep when most of the men were still at sixes and sevens. The broken sweep, apart from killing an able seaman, had put the larboard crew into a dreadful ruck, from which only Stewart’s beating and the master’s expertise seemed able to extract them.

  But Charlie Raven, transformed, had seemed to know precisely what to do. He had made a beeline for one abandoned oar, been directed to a lighter one by Mr Collins, and shipped it in its rowlock in an instant. Then he had swung his back into the job, found a rhythm, and chanted it infectiously to all the other sailors. He had transformed a rabble into a real boat’s crew.

  Then, tirelessly, he had led the stroke. Small, but exceeding muscled it appeared, with an easy balance and rock-steady beat, he had picked the vessel out of her doldrums and got her moving through the turbulent, unfriendly seas as if he were a regatta coxswain. Slowly, then more steadily, the other men had caught the rhythm. Slowly, but still steady with it, the Pointer had begun to move along. There were no more stumbles, no more blades caught in the heads of seas, no more injuries. He had taken one small break for twenty minutes, while other men had taken more. Then had taken up the stroke again, until the sea had flattened and grown calm to help them. The oarsmen were half bemused. He was an officer. He was a gentleman. They could not believe it.

  Had Swift not bellowed at them, finally, they would have cheered him. But that, indeed, was quite beyond the pale.

  When he came to dinner, then, he perhaps half hoped he’d been forgiven. He opened the door quietly, waited until the captain had finished a sentence, then coughed, then bowed. Winterson, the captain’s servant, half smiled at him, a napkinned bottle in his hand.

  ‘What call you this?’ said Captain Maxwell. ‘What think you this is, boy, some Portsmouth ale-house? How dare you come into my cabin dressed like that?’

  Indeed he was a mess, which not even Stewart, an ill-dressed man enough, would have disputed. His clothes had been changed for sure, but his blue breeches were not much better than the ones he’d worked in, while his linen was all stained and yellow. He had a wig on, as befitted the captain’s table, but even that was a sad affair, more horse than horse-hair as Ross, the other mid, had once remarked.

  He stood there disconcerted. The cabin was dark enough for him to have hoped to be unnoticed, possibly, at least until he walked into the table-light. He twisted his hands in front of him, becoming red.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir. My best clothes have been spoiled rather in the day. I’m sorry for it.’

  ‘Your best clothes, maybe. I will not say you have not done some labour. But what about your second best? You look like a farm-boy. Nay! A farm-boy’s scarecrow!’

  Stewart, the first lieutenant, tried a joke. It was not in his normal character, so clearly was meant to be a help.

  ‘Hell, boy, you are making me look dapper!’

  Bullen laughed, and no one else.

  ‘You are a blackguard, sir,’ said Maxwell, with no indication whom he meant. But Raven took a tentative step nearer the table.

  ‘Where go you?’ said the captain. Raven stopped.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You do not attend this table dressed like that. Go and find some better clouts. I have seen men dressed more seemly from the purser’s slop. Go now. And come back when you are not a clear disgr
ace.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,’ said Raven. He turned quickly and went on to the deck. They hardly heard the catching of the door.

  ‘He has no other clothes, sir,’ said Midshipman Ross, almost to himself. He caught Maxwell’s face and blushed bright scarlet. ‘Beg pardon, sir. But he is…he is too poor, sir. That is all he has. It is disgraceful.’

  Ross, apparently, was too stupid to realize the implications of his statement. It was known that Raven was dirt poor, as a would-be officer he was one of the unfortunates. It was also known that Captain Hector Maxwell was his sponsor. It was a family thing.

  But Captain Maxwell had a face of stone.

  ‘So-called poverty is no excuse,’ he said. ‘There are a hundred poorer men on board this ship, and you do not see them at table dressed like that. Good God, there are launderers, tailors even, who would make him presentable for a few cold pence. He could even wash his shirts himself, like I did when I was a starter-boy.’

  ‘But not tonight, sir,’ Bullen put in mildly, ‘Today he did good work, tonight he needs to eat. He deserves to.’

  The tension round the table rose.

  ‘He is a bloody coward,’ Maxwell snapped. ‘He emptied his guts upon the quarterdeck, then when told to climb the mast near shit himself. I know what’s in your mind, sir, and I find it most impertinent. Just because he is some sort of kin you think I have an obligation. I have not. I am stuck with him because his father was a feckless rogue and coward, and the son is a feckless coward too. Now, sir. An end of it.’

  ‘He was not a coward at the sweeps,’ said Mr Collins. His voice was not loud, but it was firm. ‘He found a rhythm and imparted it. He was, I might say, the best man there.’

  The sailing master, in the scheme of things, was in a strange position. Neither gentleman nor people, neither sea officer nor hand. And, for this vessel at sea, the most important single man she had. Maxwell looked at him with loathing.