Kilsyth and I were in the shot locker. It took us time to find that out because it was black in there. Not dark, black. No light from under the door, no filtering of daylight – it was night when we were thrown in, anyway, but dawn made no difference. There was sound; creaking timbers, the slap of water against wood by the side and below us, pattering feet and thumping above us, all coming from a distance as if we were suspended in a cocoon in the middle.
And there was smell. All ships stink below deck; in fact, the shot locker is cleaner than most, but fresh air doesn’t reach it; what does is a mixture of bilge, sewage and sour wood.
When my head recovered a bit I groped about and found Kilsyth’s legs and knew they were his because they were bare. Since he’d put up the better fight, they’d treated him harder. My hands were bound but I managed to untie his feet and then tried to crawl up beside him to where his head was but his body filled the available space and I had to lie on top of him to feel where he was hurt. I loosened his jabot and patted his cheeks. He whispered something. I put my ear to his mouth. ‘Get off,’ he repeated.
I slid back and heard him groan as he sat up. We sat back to back and untied each other’s wrists. ‘What happened?’
I said, ‘It looks as if your Captain Porritt wanted a couple of extra hands and didn’t like to ask.’
‘We’ve been pressed?’
‘I think so.’
‘And the lassie?’
I’d led her to the shambles, carefully, taking trouble over it. ‘My fault,’ I said, ‘my grievous fault. The burden of it is intolerable. Have mercy on her, have mercy on her, most merciful Father, for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake.’
In the extreme moments you go back.
‘Lift up your hearts,’ said Kilsyth from the darkness.
‘We lift them up unto the Lord.’
‘Let us give thanks unto our Lord God.’
I couldn’t say it but he went on with the litany, ‘It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto Thee, O Lord…’
Either I passed out or slept, I can’t remember which. When I woke up the boat was under way and the Scotsman’s great feet were stepping on my hair as he explored our prison.
‘It’s a cupboard of sorts,’ he said, ‘a great cupboard. There’s shelving here to my right With… balls in it. Balls?’
‘Are they iron?’
‘Oh aye, cannon balls. Behind netting. The shelves are maybe ten foot wide. How deep I canna say.’
I could feel for myself that the space we were in, the gap between the shelves and the door, was about eighteen inches across. I joined his exploration, me taking the shelf side and him the other, so as not to get in each other’s way.
I found four shelves. Stretching the length and depth between each of them them was strong, tarred rope netting, like a vertical hammock, to stop the shot from dislodging in the ship’s movement and falling out. From what I could judge through the netting, the shots were smallish, sixteen- or seventeen-pounders, though crashing about loose in a storm they could have holed a ship as well as if they’d been fired at it.
There must have been a hundred or more on each shelf. The thought that such a mass was poised on one side of us added to the suffocation that tormented us both.
Kilsyth was excited about the door. ‘It slides. Aye, they’d need wide access. Well, a sliding door’s easier dealt with than a hinged. We could maybe crack it open with one of they balls, they’re heavy enough.’
We were in open sea by now and the boat acted like a bucking horse, trying to throw us out of its stomach. The noise was almost as wicked as the motion. I felt for the floor and hung on to it.
Kilsyth stepped on me again. He was still exploring. ‘There’s something here. Glass. What for would they put a panel of glass in a wall with no aspect?’
I’d lost interest.
Kilsyth shouted, ‘At least we are suffering as Bonny Anne was made to suffer, laddie. Do you not sense a holiness in that?’
I didn’t. I wanted death. In an hour I was really, really, wanting it. And kept on wanting for the best part of a week. They must have brought us water because Kilsyth kept giving me sips, and a bucket because I remember being sick in one. Then I heard Kilsyth calling me. ‘Will ye haste, laddie?’
The ship was still tossing and when I got up it pitched me over. I had to claw myself upright by the shelves and hang on while I felt about for him. He was standing with his front pressed against the shelves with, as far as I could tell, his arms spread out in a crucifix position.
‘I’ve no been very clever,’ he said.
While I’d been comatose he’d been spending hours gnawing away at a section of rope in the netting of the middle shelf. To do it at all he must have had teeth like scissors. Now he’d managed to fray the piece until there were only strands left. Then one of the shot had rolled against his cheek as the ship pitched and he’d heard the rest shift. At that point he’d realized he’d made a hole in a dam. ‘I’d an idea to use a shot against the door, do ye see, laddie. Hammer it open.’
He was holding to the netting, using his body as a brace to stop the whole bloody lot come bouncing out to crush us against the door. I hammered on the door, shouting for help.
Somebody outside hammered back and shouted something in a foreign language. I tried to tell him he was in as much danger as we were; the iron avalanche behind us would throw down the door like a wattle hurdle and flatten anything beyond it. I kept hammering and shouting but either the sod had gone away or wasn’t bothering.
We tried to mend the hole, Kilsyth braced against it while I worked round him in an attempt to splice the frayed rope together. I couldn’t do it. Even if we could have seen what we were about, I don’t think it could have been done. The pressure on the hole took the two gnawed ends of rope too far apart from each other.
In the end we had to take it in turns to hold on to the netting. When it was time to change places we had to wait until the ship tipped forward and sent the shifting iron away from the netting. The rumble as it turned and came back and pressed against our chests, threatening to break our ribs, is a sound that lives with me yet.
Kilsyth took longer shifts than me. He said it was because when I vomited from that position I missed the bucket. But even his strength would give out after a couple of hours and then he’d say, ‘If ye don’t mind, laddie…’ and I’d take his place until my arms began to shake and the bucketing of the ship bringing iron against the same area of bruised flesh became unbearable.
Food and water came when the oaf outside the door decided to deliver it, which he did about every two days through the nine-inch square glass window in the bulkhead on our right facing the shelves. He paid no attention to our shouts and, as he brought no light with him, didn’t see the predicament. He was a careless bugger who managed to slop most of the stew as he passed it through and only half-filled the leather flask of water so that thirst and hunger were added to our problems.
When we talked, which wasn’t much – the one resting was usually so tired from his turn at the netting that he slept – we planned what we’d do to the oaf when we got out. It was always ‘when’ with Kilsyth, never ‘if’. And we tried to work out what the window was for. Tapping it told us the glass was extremely thick and fastened on the other side. The second time Oaf came, a whiff wound its way from the other side of it through the stink and reminded me of battle.
‘Gunpowder,’ I told Kilsyth. It was his turn at the netting and I was feeding him with what stew I’d scraped up off the floor where Oaf had tipped it again. ‘I think next door’s the ammunition room. The magazine.’ It didn’t make either of us feel any better, but it helped us understand why Oaf hadn’t been trusted with a lighted candle.
We lost track of time but we must have been in that hold nearly a week when a glimmer came through the glass. I was on netting duty and it was Kilsyth who hammered and shouted.
I turned my neck to the right, sweating with fear. I’d prayed for light. Now I prayed that whoever was taking a flame into the ammunition room knew what he was doing. One spark would send him, us, the entire ship, into the air in pieces.
The glass opened and somebody’s hand held a thick, eight-hour candle through it. Our window, we saw, was one side of a hatch. There was a corresponding glass door on the other side and between them was a shelf. ‘Here,’ said somebody, ‘why’s that bugger kissing my cannon balls?’
‘There’s a hole in the damned net,’ Kilsyth told him, wearily.
‘Ster-rewth.’ The glass on our side was closed, the candle was stuck carefully on to a spike on the shelf and the window on the other side closed on it. There were shouts and then, for the first time since it had shut on us, the sliding door opened. Kilsyth was hustled outside and men came in. I was eased back, carefully, while a giant took my place and work began fixing up new netting. I was allowed to stagger out into the passage. I don’t suppose it smelled of pot-pourri but it was a paradise garden compared to the hold. A stolid-looking bastard in uniform kept his musket trained on Kilsyth and me.
Our deliverer came out of the hold while the work inside it went on and looked at us, picking his teeth. ‘How long’s that fucker of a hole been there?’
‘Days,’ I told him.
‘Should’ve said, shouldn’t you?’
‘The guard wouldn’t listen.’
Our deliverer surveyed the stolid-looking bastard. ‘He’s a marine,’ he said as if that explained it. ‘Got no milk in his coconut. Comes from Freezy-somewhere. Talk in grunts, they do.’
‘Can you get us some water?’
He turned on the marine and pointed to the musket. ‘What you going to do? Shoot ’em? In this section? Captain’ll have your bollocks for breakfast. Get ’em some water.’ As the marine hesitated, he added, ‘Do the poor sods look like they can scamper? Water. Get.’
The man went off and Deliverer studied us. ‘You both English?’
‘Scottish,’ said Kilsyth, sullenly.
‘Should have known from the frilly skirt. What about him?’
‘London,’ I told him.
‘Never. Whereabouts?’
‘Cornhill.’
‘Never. Cheapside, me. Nobby Clarke.’
‘Martin Millet.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mart. What you doing in the service of King Louis?’
‘Wishing I wasn’t.’
He grinned. ‘Yeah, well. Pressed men’s kept in the capperdochy for a bit. Teaches ’em to appreciate the comforts of service when they come out.’
He was a typical product of Cheapside, undersized and quick as a ferret without a ferret’s good teeth. He was no advertisement for the comforts of service under Louis XIV; he wore an English sailor’s jacket over galligaskins, both of them filthy. In my eyes, though, he was beautiful.
‘There was a woman with us,’ I said.
‘Little Miss Modicum? Sorry, cocky, she’s in the quarterdeck cot now. Captain’s perks.’ He patted my head. ‘Now don’t take on. At least he ain’t sharing her round, mingy bastard. And she’s better off up there than down here.’ He peered into the shot hold and held his nose. ‘Gawd save us. And I ain’t usually partickler.’
‘The guard won’t change our bucket,’ I explained, ‘and he’s starving us.’
‘See about that,’ said Nobby, ‘Only thing to be said about this floating fortune, the grub’s good.’ He shouted into the locker, ‘You buggers finished yet?’
‘When do we get to Scotland?’ asked Kilsyth, who’d been having trouble with Nobby’s accent.
‘Scotland?’ Nobby asked me, ‘Does he think he’s going home to his haggis?’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Windies.’ He shook his head at Kilsyth. ‘Bloody sight better’n Scotland. Warmer.’
We were put back when the netting was mended and a change of bucket and some water came in with us, which, with the relief of not having to hold back a hundred rounds of shot, would have made it first-class accommodation in our eyes if the thought of Bratchet and our destination had been more bearable.
It took even Kilsyth half an hour to find a ridiculous shred of hope. ‘Maybe the West Indies is where they took Bonny Anne,’ he said, ‘Maybe we’re the second arrows shot to find the missing first. Maybe we’ll land where she did.’
I couldn’t answer him. I could hear him beginning to pound on the door, a steady, slow knocking.
‘I’ll not be able to stand it, Martin,’ he said quietly, ‘If we’re pressed men, why not let us out and work us? If I’m to be kept in this stank all the way, I’ll lose my reason.’
‘He’s keeping us to sell when we get there,’ I said, ‘Some rich colonial widow’ll buy you as a body slave and make unreasonable demands on your person.’
But he kept on hit-hitting the door until I shouted at him to stop it.
Physically, things improved. The safety lamp, which, basically, was what our glass hatch was, was kept burning now so that we had light. We were in calmer seas and the captain ordered gunnery practice and the shot-locker and magazine were in use. The shot was found to be rusty and Kilsyth and I were set to cleaning it, which required space, so the door was left open with Oaf the marine standing guard outside.
He had the brain of an ox. He’d been told to stand guard and that’s what he did. Luckily, Nobby was overseeing the ammunition, coming down to the hold frequently, and he would tell him to fetch us water, so he did that too.
Cleaning the shot was a labour Hercules would have blanched at. Rust can damage a gun barrel and affect the accuracy of the round and meeting Nobby’s specification that he should be able to see his face in each one when it was finished wore our pewterwort cloths to rags and our fingers to the bone.
But Nobby was our lifeline, bringing us food and news. He was pleased to find a fellow-Cockney among the rag-tag of deserters and pressed men of all nations which formed a large proportion of the Holy Innocent’s crew. Her officers were French or Scottish and Irish Jacobites and Nobby didn’t think highly of them. ‘Load of dolly-worshipping, land-swabbing maltoots as couldn’t sail Woolwich ferry.’ As for Captain Porritt, ‘A cold, meat-mongering bastard.’
Nobby’s own career had been eventful, a condemned young pickpocket to whom the judge had offered alternatives of hanging, transportation or the navy. He’d chosen the navy which had suited him until he’d acquired a captain who didn’t and had then jumped ship, ironically enough, in Barbados where he’d joined a pirate vessel.
When the pirate came off worse in an encounter with a French warship, he’d been captured, sailed to Le Havre and transferred with the other pirates to the Jacobite Holy Innocent. He was indignant about this. He didn’t mind Frogs, he said, but ‘Jacks’ gave him the fucking pip. ‘Betraying your own country, I arst you.’
He denied that his own record of loyalty was somewhat blemished: ‘Couldn’t help it, could I? I’d a done different given the choice. If my aunt’d been my uncle she’d have had balls under her arse but she didn’t. Queen Anne ought to know that.’
His claim that in the Royal Navy, then His Majesty’s, he’d been a master-gunner was unlikely, but there was no doubt he was a respected member of the Innocent’s gun deck and it was his orders and Cheapside oaths we heard when the cannon were run out and began firing practice.
Sensitivity wasn’t his strong suit, though, and he couldn’t keep his tongue away from the subject of Bratchet. Being the only woman on board she was the talk of the ship. Many of the crew, like Nobby, had been transferred after a voyage in one ship directly on to another without being allowed to set foot on land, and sexual starvation had stimulated their imagination.
The first time he began musing in our company on what Bratchet and the captain were getting up to in the quarterdeck cabin, Kilsyth went for him. He was only stopped from wringing Nobby’s neck by the Oaf’s musket butt landing on his own. After that ‘baiting the sporran-splitter’ became Nobby’s pastime and I had to hold on to Kilsyth’s belt to stop him leaping at the little sod again.
‘Will ye take this?’ he shouted at me when Nobby went, ‘Will ye hear the poor lassie’s name soiled by that nose-dropping?’
‘You’re only making him worse,’ I said.
‘The dirty-tongued callant, does he think women begin and end at their crotch?’
‘It’s probably as far as he can reach.’
Kilsyth had made Bratchet into one of his storybook females, as he had Anne Bonny, an innocent virgin in the bestial grip of a villain. How he thought anyone could stay innocent in Puddle Court I can’t say. I knew that what she’d been through there probably made it worse for her now, but she was alive, she was surviving.
I began to suspect that Kilsyth would respect her more if she didn’t; he liked his dreams unsullied. He was getting on my nerves. For that matter, I was getting on his; a result of being cooped up together too long with not enough food and air.
Eventually, when he said, ‘Better for her if she threw herself in the sea,’ I hit him and we fell to brawling.
Gradually, however, Nobby’s references to Bratchet changed. Her nights were still being passed in the captain’s cabin, but she’d been taken under the wing of the ship’s cook, he said, and spent her days in the galley where he met her from time to time. ‘You never said she was Puddle Court. Knew it well. Feisty little masterpiece, ain’t she? Cusses like a Christian.’ He began to bring messages from her and tidbits the cook had given her. ‘Wants to come and see you, cheeky mare, but Porritt’s orders is he’ll flay anyone as takes her below. Means it and all, the bastard.’
Neither the captain nor Nobby had reckoned on Bratchet’s powers of persuasion. Two nights later the glass on our side was opened. I heard Nobby’s voice, ‘An’ be fucking quick about it,’ and I saw Bratchet’s face framed in the hatch.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes. Are you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Her face withdrew as her hand came carefully round the candle and passed over a greasy parcel. ‘Sausages.’
‘Wonderful.’
Her face reappeared. ‘How is he?’
‘Asleep.’ I stepped aside so that she could see Kilsyth where he lay, his cheek cradled on his bonnet. I gave him a nudge with my boot but he only stirred and she said, ‘No, let him rest. He’s terrible thin.’
So was she, though it was difficult to see her properly, the glare of the candle kept us both blinking. She said: ‘I asked him to let you out but he won’t.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, stupidly.
‘He’s not a nice man, Mart.’
‘Isn’t he?’
‘He was going to give me the cat. And he said he’d throw you overboard if I didn’t… you know.’
‘I know.’
‘What does he think of me?’ And this time she wasn’t referring to the captain.
‘He thinks you’re a lion.’
She nearly smiled. ‘Does he?’
‘So do I,’ I told her.
Her hands came through the hatch and I held them until she jerked as if she was being pushed. ‘Hang on, Nobby,’ she said irritably.
Nobby’s voice hissed, ‘I’ll be hanging from the yardarm if you lovebirds don’t give over. And you with me.’
She leaned as close as she could, nearly singeing her hair on the candle. ‘Work at the crossroads,’ she said, ‘We’re not done yet.’ She disappeared. The glass closed.
When Kilsyth woke up I told him, ‘There’s something up. Bratchet’s got a gleam in her eye.’
He was miffed at missing her. ‘But maybe she’ll no want to be seen, poor soul. How did she look?’ He was almost disappointed when I said she was fine; he thought that a fate worse than death should carry some mark.
‘There ain’t no fate worse than death,’ I said, ‘and she’s saving you and me from the fishes.’
He shook his head: ‘Better for her…’ he began and stopped at the look in my eye.
She’d considered it.
On the night she’d been taken, she was dragged shouting and struggling to the captain’s cabin, pushed inside and the door closed on her. The quarters were beautifully proportioned if she’d been in a state to appreciate them. There was a wall of leaded panes opposite her through which came the smell of sea. Behind a huge table with an ornate flange running round its top, a man was studying a chart. He raised his head and she stopped shouting instantly.
‘You call yourself Mlle La Fée?’ When she nodded, he said in English, ‘You and your friends are enemies of King James.’ He reminded her of the Pretender. Very neat, very cold. And of somebody else, she couldn’t think who.
‘We ain’t,’ she said, ‘We been serving his very own mother, Queen Mary Beatrice. What you up to?’
He’d got up from the desk then, walked round it and hit her across the face. ‘I’ll not have that name uttered from a mouth like yours,’ he said. ‘You’ve been spying on her. You and your paramours.’
She didn’t try to deny or protest, there would be no point. She could see he didn’t want to believe her anything other than an enemy. Anyway, she was too afraid. She’d remembered who he reminded her of. The man who’d raped her at Effie Sly’s had eyes like this one.
‘You’re a whore.’ He was very close to her and she felt the huff of his breath on her cheek as he said, ‘A harlot. I shall have your men put in a sack and thrown overboard. I shall have you stripped and lashed until the blood runs.’
The ferocious prayer that Bratchet sent up in that moment was answered by the unlikeliest guardian angel of any, but a guardian angel nevertheless. Clear as a voice from heaven, she heard the words of Floss, the Puddle Court prostitute, talking about her most dangerous clients. ‘You don’t want to show ’em you’re frightened,’ Floss had said, and now said again into Bratchet’s mind. ‘Show ’em you’re scared and they’ll do you where Maggie wore her beads.’
‘A waste,’ she whispered. She took a deep breath to control her breathing, and tried again. ‘Waste that is. Able-bodied fellows like them. Always useful. And me. Able-bodied too.’ She had trouble getting out the last word. ‘Useful.’
What appalled her then and after was that they understood each other as if he’d been buying and she’d been selling at the same stall for all their lives. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, ‘Later.’
During the laborious business of getting under way, she tried to find some corner where she wouldn’t be stepped on and watched him as he strode the quarterdeck, rapping out orders to his officers. The ship dwarfed her; it seemed to have been designed for giants. Hawsers were thick as sewer pipes, cables the width of barrels, blocks as big as footstools. The anchor stock came up like a whale flipper rising from the sea, sails that rose and shook out were frightening in their immensity.
She was sick twice, though not from the motion of the sea. She kept trying to tell herself, ‘He’ll be too tired,’ or, ‘He’ll forget,’ or, ‘I’m not here at all. This ain’t happening.’ Only at one point did it occur to her to question why it was happening, though she did think the wind of fate was blowing her back and forth across ‘this sodding Channel a bit too often for my liking’. She supposed it was politics; Martin Millet had displeased the Jacobites.
It didn’t occur to her at all to become angry. She was a straw caught up in a whirlwind. Her self-regard had been left behind at St-Germain-en-Laye.
She was woken up by an officer with a cane and a sneer, to find that she’d fallen asleep on a coil of rope. ‘On your feet, my little lap-clap. Captain wants you.’
She went to the quarterdeck cabin.
She never told anybody what went on in there. It was perfectly understood between her and Porritt that after each encounter she must bargain again for the two men he kept down in the ship’s hold. She once said she reminded herself of the sultan’s slave from the Arabian Nights that Mary Read had read to her. Except, where Scheherezade told her master tales every night in order to save her life, Bratchet used her body and saved three lives.
But after the first week she waited until evening and then went for’ard where she couldn’t be seen and climbed up on the ship’s rail, clinging to the shrouds.
From up here the grey sea curling past below looked very wet. And strong. It would turn her over and over like a performing seal until the ship had gone and then fill her mouth.
She held her breath to experience what those last few minutes of suffocation would be like and ended up gasping. She wouldn’t be able to gasp. No wind down there to take into her lungs.
Would that final inability be worse than living? It would be shorter, there was that for it. No more spiralling down to greater and greater degradation. The trouble was that Martin and Kilsyth would follow her not long afterwards.
But she couldn’t go on. ‘I got my troubles, they got theirs,’ she thought. Perhaps, with her dead, Porritt would let them off. Anyway, what did she owe them that she must go on living through hell for their sake? She was less than nothing to them; they’d shown that clearly enough on the winter journey from St-Germain to Le Havre. Only a means to find Anne Bonny, that’s all she was to them.
She knew gossip about her filtered down to where Martin and Kilsyth had been locked in the hold. If she lived and they lived there would come the moment when she would have to meet Kilsyth’s eyes and the disgust in them. She couldn’t.
There wasn’t a single soul to offer her comfort. The crew called her ‘the captain’s warming pan’. Every morning in the early hours, Porritt pushed her out of the cabin to wander the deck, occupying space but no position among the hurrying, pattering seamen, sleeping in the longboat where they kept the hens, or crouching under the shelter of the quarterdeck’s overhang.
She was in no danger of attack – she was the captain’s property and no more to be touched than his silver snuff box – but she wasn’t allowed to go below and was therefore prey to hostility and insults. Thinking she didn’t understand – word had gone out that she had been at St-Germain and was therefore ‘a high-nosed French bitch’ – the terms ‘cunnyborough’, ‘Hairyfordshire’, ‘fly-cage’, ‘salt-cellar’, ‘scut’, etc., all slang for the female pudenda, were bandied about, with ornamentation, by the grinning mouths of the English among them.
There was no comfort. Oh, God help me.
‘You don’ wan’ do that,’ said a voice.
Bratchet looked down to where the ship’s cook, an enormous black man, rested a bucket of peelings on the gunwale and watched the sea, as she did. Somebody had been putting plates of food in the longboat for her; she supposed he had. It didn’t interest her.
‘Wednesday,’ he said, ‘One bad day for jumping. I jumped Wednesday once.’ He waited for her to say something. She didn’t. ‘Davy Jones, he threw me right back. That bad luck, sure ’nough.’
‘I’m tired,’ she said, looking down at him. He looked back. He had the most intelligent set to his face she’d ever seen; no, not so much intelligent – knowing. They shared, and had shared, something, a condition, a history. It was strange, she thought, that two such different men, Porritt and a ship’s cook, should see into her bones. But whereas Porritt was pitiless, this man understood.
‘What yo’ name?’ he asked.
‘Bratchet.’ The days of Mlle La Fée were over.
He knew she wasn’t going to jump now. So did she or she wouldn’t have spoken to him. ‘You hungry,’ he said, ‘you come to my galley. I got coucou make you feel like spirit boiling over.’
He threw the peelings overboard then swung her down, enveloping her in a strong smell of sweat, cooking and an alien skin that was vaguely comforting after the unscented, chill wind. ‘De longer you live, de more you hear,’ he said.
He made up a bed for her in a corner of the galley with some sheepskins and she slept for twelve hours through the hubbub of clashing skillets, oven lids, shouting, and chopping.
When she woke up he cleared the galley so that she could take a bath in a salting pan, found a shirt and a small pair of calico trousers which he turned up for her and a jelly-bag cap which he stuffed her hair in. ‘Captain, he playing cards tonight. Won’t want company.’ He stood back to look at her. ‘Sweetest-lookin’ galley mate I ever see.’ She washed her dress and he hung it to dry in a gun port and then set her to work peeling turnips.
With the acquisition of trousers and a friend, she felt a bit better. The attitude of the crew towards her ameliorated slightly; they noticed her less and treated her with more of the raillery they used on one of their own. A hard core still regarded her with enmity – she couldn’t decide whether it was because they suspected her of being the captain’s spy, or because she was a whore or just because she was a woman – but the cook stopped their mouths. ‘Dis galley ent no swear country,’ he’d tell them, and threaten them with, ‘You know why Jack didn’ eat he dinner? He din’ get any.’
He carried weight in more ways than one. Generally, he was known as Licky – all sea-cooks were called Lick-fingers but with no more sting than the Lincolnshire gunner was called ‘Yellow-belly’, or the undersized topman ‘Jack Sprat’, or the rating in charge of the poultry ‘the Duck-fucker’, and with the respect due a man who not only provided sustenance and sewed up wounds, but could, and would, if offended, throw you into the scuppers as effortlessly as breaking an egg.
To Bratchet his protection and the unspoken understanding between them hauled her above despair and kept her afloat. He rarely talked about his past, ‘Don’ ask me where I been, ask me where I’m gwine,’ but he made her ashamed of despairing at all since she gathered he’d survived slavery. There were scars on his wrists and ankles, and once, when he spilled hot soup on his jacket and he tore it off, she saw a back which a whip had bitten into so many times and so deeply that it looked corrugated. But he could still say, ‘Even if de Devil bring it, God sen’ it,’ though which god he referred to she wasn’t sure.
The times when Porritt sent for her after she’d taken up residence in the galley, Licky made her feel like a soldier going into battle. ‘You ain’ short on spirit, just height,’ he said, and gave her his own form of absolution: ‘Remember, “can’ help’’ don’ mean”do for purpose”.’
Gradually, the greyness with which she’d surrounded herself dissolved and the ship gained focus. She began to respect the skill of men, reduced to dwarves by the enormous ship, which kept the huge, complex structure ploughing onwards by invisible propulsion. The first time the wind dropped, it gave her a moment of surprise that manpower itself wasn’t enough to drive the ship forward.
The Holy Innocent was Dutch-built, a frigate carrying a complement of over a hundred men and eighteen guns. She’d been captured by the French who’d handed her over to the Jacobites. Thanks to Marlborough, the English fleet was making life too difficult for illegal runs across the Channel and now Porritt, with a Letter of Marque from King Louis, was taking the ship to be a thorn in the flesh of the Royal Navy in the West Indies and pick up what booty he could.
The senior officers were nearly all English or Irish Jacobites, the crew a more uneasy mixture of nationalities and creeds. Only a few of them were on board from conviction, the rest mainly criminals and deserters who’d signed on because privateering promised an easier discipline than that of the prison or navy they left behind.
In that they were mistaken. Porritt had sailed under James II when he was Duke of York and Admiral of the English Royal Navy and had absorbed not only an admiration for, but also many of the qualities of his late king. ‘He fierce and he stupid,’ Licky told Bratchet, ‘an when the head bad the whole body bad. Look like me and some fellas miss de pier head and jump in the wharf.’
Essentially, the ship was a wooden feudal castle. The entry port through which Bratchet had been ushered on the night she boarded had a curving roof held up by cherubic caryatids as did the oak-panelled door to the quarterdeck cabin, the figurehead was a gloriously sculpted lion, the ship’s lantern – in which a man could stand up – a thing of brass and glass that could have graced a mansion.
Although she was not allowed to go below, Bratchet gathered that the crews’ quarters were less congenial. Above decks it was noisy; sheets could flap like pistol-shots, the wind wailed a permanent dirge through the rigging, somebody was always shouting orders or swearing at the goats which, once they’d found their sea-legs, nibbled free of their ropes and got in everybody’s way, eating everything in their path from wood shavings to the log book.
On the whole, the stink of rotting water from the bilges below and the pungency of goat urine and the hog and cattle pens on deck were overwhelmed by the smell of wood and salt, although once, when she was standing in the bows near the bowsprit, admiring the knights’ heads carved like crusaders’ helms on the principal bow timbers, Bratchet’s nostrils alerted her that she’d solved the mystery of why men disappeared from sight when they clambered forward towards the bowsprit, as if intent on an uninterrupted sea view. The cross-trees supporting the projecting timbers just below her were covered with salt-encrusted excreta, suggesting that while the crew’s balance in using this form of water closet was excellent, their aim was not.
Her own needs were attended to in a brine pot with a lid and used in a cupboard near the galley Licky had given her to live in; possibly less hygienic than the heads, but safer and more private.
The galley was the ship’s heart, its kindness, literally the one fire in its belly – and that only permitted in calm weather. Discounting the magazine, it was the most dangerous place on board, home to the medicine chest and surgeon’s needles. An unexpected wave or trough causing the ship to lurch could misdirect a chopper and cut off a cook’s fingers or spit him on one of his own gutting-knives, or pour scalding water over him, or throw open a carelessly closed fire door in the huge and hideous cast-iron stove bolted to the middle of the floor, tipping live coals on to his feet and either procuring a conflagration that could consume the ship or gaining him a flogging.
In fact, a ship’s cook had to be a brave man, if only to withstand the unremitting complaints against a diet which necessarily deteriorated as the voyage went on, breeding sufficient weevils in the cheese to allow it to stagger off.
For the Bratchet the galley was sanctuary and Licky the sanctuary-keeper and she left them as little as possible. Being free of officers – stewards collected and took the cooked food to the various messes – it was also a gathering ground for the discontented.
All was not well on the Holy Innocent. Discipline was harsher than many of its crew had expected aboard a privateer, and getting harsher. Also, the non-Jacobite Englishmen were becoming aware that the voyage’s purpose was to harry the Royal Navy and were showing a surprising distaste for the enterprise, considering that most of them had deserted from the navy in the first place.
‘I got mates on HMS Vengeful an’ the Dreadnought,’ Nobby Clarke complained, ‘Firin’ on ’em if they fire on you’s one thing, but I ain’t blowin’ ’em out the water deliberate. I got feelings.’
‘You ain’t got feelings and you ain’t got mates,’ the carpenter, Chadwell, told him, ‘’Less it’s the goats.’
‘An I ain’t no fucking Papist, neither,’ continued Nobby. ‘’F I’d a knowed that fucking Porritt was a dolly-worshipper, I never would’ve signed.’ The high Roman Catholicism of morning prayers and the mass the ship’s complement was made to attend every Sunday was causing offence to those among the crew who had suddenly remembered they were Protestant. Two topmen, a German and a Dutch Lutheran, had been particularly affronted, refused to join in and had been flogged as heretics – an unheard-of thing on a privateer where belief was usually in booty and little else.
‘You cuss one more time an’ this soap gwen fit in yo’ mouth,’ said Licky, who was scouring his chopping board. The reproof reminded the off-watch group in the galley of Bratchet’s presence and four heads turned distrustfully in her direction; Sam Rogers, the ship’s chief helmsman, Chadwell, like Nobby a Londoner, and Pickel, one of those flogged, a Dutchman, who’d been aboard the Holy Innocent when she was captured by the French and had turned his coat rather than become a prisoner of war. The first three and Licky had sailed together before in circumstances they preferred to keep vague and all of them hated the ship’s master, O’Rourke, an Irishman belonging to the brutality school of seamanship.
Sam Rogers, the big, quiet helmsman, was particularly singled out for humiliation; known for being a first-class navigator, he had accordingly attracted the jealousy of O’Rourke who was in charge of navigation and who was pursuing a vendetta against Sam and a young topman, Johnson, on the grounds that they were homosexuals.
Nobby bobbed a mock curtsey towards the Bratchet. ‘Sorry, miss. Forgot as the cap’n’s f-f-f-fancy piece was present.’
Licky intervened. ‘She all right.’
‘’F you say so.’ Nobby shrugged.
‘An’ I say so.’ Bratchet found her tongue. The injustice of the crew’s attitude, which refused to see she was as much a victim of the regime as they were, was now exasperating rather than depressing her; donning trousers had given her confidence to fight it.
She shouted, ‘I’m fucking the bastard for if I don’t my friends in the hold get chucked over the side, and me with ’em. I ain’t his warming pan or his fancy-piece or any other bloody thing and if you knew anything, you monkey-headed little piece of shit, you’d see I don’t like it.’
Licky was appalled; Nobby delighted. ‘Monkey-headed piece of shit, she called me. Good Lunnon cussing, that is. Cheapside?’
‘Puddle Court,’ sulked the Bratchet.
‘Knew it well, knew it well. Give us yer famble.’
They shook hands. Nobby was horrible; from his scabby head, his broken, Roquefort cheese teeth, his agile, stunted body and his spread bare feet there issued an indescribable aroma that was unsweetened by his affection for goats, the rumour being that he was on intimate terms with Brilliana, the prettiest of the nannies. Crew members not renowned for hygiene had been known to refuse food when Nobby was in the galley and Licky, who loved him, insisted he come no nearer than the doorway: ‘Whut you smell of, I ain’t cookin’.’
Like so many seamen, he was tragic; he pined for the voice of his mother and Bow bells, knowing that his desertion from the navy meant he would never be allowed to hear them again. Yet what endeared him to his friends was a humour that had survived flogging at the cart-tail when a boy, impressment, flogging on most of the ships he’d served on, shipwreck, smallpox, homesickness and toothache. Against the odds, against experience and certainly against all appearances, a divine spark flickered in Nobby. And it was through Nobby that Bratchet picked up the trail of Mary Read and Anne Bonny.
She’d begun to try and relieve the lot of the two prisoners in the shot-locker. Nobby, as a senior gunner, was one of the few men allowed down there and he brought up reports that they were short of food. ‘Can’t you take them some?’ she begged him.
‘Thank you,’ Nobby said, ‘An’ spend the next week huggin’ the capstan? Good night, Mary-Ellen.’
Bratchet appealed to Licky and Licky overrode Nobby’s objections. ‘You take ’em or you get empty belly yo’self.’
‘They got enough fucking troubles without your maw-wallop,’ Nobby grumbled. But he did it.
Bratchet waited for him, sitting with her legs over the companionway. ‘Are they all right?’ she asked when he came back.
‘They ain’t crowin’,’ admitted Nobby, ‘but they’re livin’. And grateful for the junk an’ dumplings. More feared for you, they was, but I told ’em me and Licky had you in charge. Poor bastards, I’ll give ’em this much, the shot’s never gleamed like it. Nearly finished.’
‘What’ll he do to them then?’
‘Put ’em to work. No point throwin’ good men to the sharks; we’re short-handed as is.’ It was another cause of complaint; the Holy Innocent’s complement was barely enough to man a ship of her size and the crew were being badly overworked. ‘Shift your arse away from the fuckin’ ladder. I got to get on watch.’
He patted her bottom appreciatively as he climbed out. ‘I like women’s bums in trousis, I do.’
‘You keep your dirty little paw off mine.’
‘Here,’ he said, pausing, ‘you want to get Licky t’show you how to use a cutlass. Mustard with a cutlass, our Licky. Used to chop up other sambos in the jungle, shouldn’t wonder.’ He persisted fondly with the tradition that the cook had been a cannibal in his youth.
‘What do I want with a cutlass?’
‘You could trim our cap’n’s yardarm for ’im, for a start. Best famble I ever knew with a cutlass was a bloss. Mary Read, that was. Sailed with Calico Jack.’
Slowly, the Brachet turned on him. She grabbed his jacket. ‘Who?’
‘Lay off. Wassa matter with yer? Me body’s Brilliana’s.’
‘Who did you say?’
‘Mary Read.’ He was backing off. ‘Course, I din’t know her well, not to talk to like.’
‘Where was this? When?’
The ship’s bell was clanging for the second watch, a tocsin nobody dared disobey.
Nobby slapped her hands away from his jacket and ran off. As she watched his dirty heels disappear his voice came back to her. ‘There was two on ’em. Mary Read an’ Anne Bonny.’
Bratchet sat at the companionway until shouldered away from it by others of the watch following Nobby. Slowly, she made her way to the galley.
They found each other. Somehow, somewhere – where? – Mary had caught up with Anne. Both of them had been alive – when? – and together. Both of them alive then. Both.
The thought swung her into the galley which was full of stewards demanding instant food for the men just off watch. Licky was grumbling at the invariable insults to his cooking as he and his assistant, Slushy, slopped stew and beans into the waiting buckets. ‘Please and thankee don’ break no bones. Get back there. Some people like horse dung, they always in de road.’
‘Where you been?’ he demanded of Bratchet – she had become an integral part of the short-handed galley crew. ‘Han’ out that cheese.’
‘Hand it out, girl,’ somebody shouted, ‘we’m goin’ to carve ninepins out ’f it.’
‘Ain’t as hard as yo’ head. Now git.’
‘Looks like somebody eaten this stew already.’
‘You watch yo’ mouth. You kin take the man out de pig pen, but you can’ take the pig pen out de man.’
At last the galley was emptied and they could begin clearing the debris. Bratchet washed down the mammoth sideboard. ‘You ever heard of a Calico Jack, Licky?’
‘You ever heard’ve elbow grease? Calico Jack? He pirate.’
‘Pirate?’ They sailed with a pirate? She scrubbed on. ‘Well, d’you ever hear of two women, Anne Bonny and Mary Read?’
‘I heard’ve ’em.’
The way he said it made her turn round. He wasn’t looking at her. ‘What? What about them? When did you hear about them?’
He said, automatically, ‘Ask no questions, yuh hear no lies; put down molasses, cetch no flies.’ Then he said, ‘They dead, girl. Years back. Spanish Town.’
‘They ain’t dead. They’re not.’
He went back to his stove. ‘So I heard.’
‘They were friends of mine.’
He shook his head. ‘Dead. An’ can’ run from they coffin.’
She got tired of questioning; he merely trotted out more of his infuriating proverbs. ‘Don’ put yuh head where your body can’ go.’
Nobby was more helpful, though equally depressing, when he stood at the galley door that night. ‘Yeah, dead, poor bitches. Pleaded their bellies at their trial.’
‘What trial? What do you mean “pleaded their bellies”?’
‘Bunged, Bratchie. Sprouted. Pregnant. Sailed with Calico Jack, din’t they? Gawd, even a cockrel got in the family way sailin’ with randy Jack. Licky, didn’t you once say you had a brother…?’ He stopped suddenly.
Bratchet looked round, but Licky was innocently stirring the next stew. Nobby became vaguer after that. Calico Jack’s crew, he said, including Anne and Mary, had been overpowered in a fight with the Royal Navy, taken to St Jago in Jamaica to face a Vice-Admiralty Court where all of them had been condemned to death. The sentence had been carried out in the case of the men but suspended for the two women until they had given birth. Both had died in childbirth. When? Nobby couldn’t say. ‘Three, four years back.’
‘What happened to the babies?’
Nobby shrugged.
Unanswered questions. Oh, Anne. Oh, Mary. All that confidence dissipated in a prison cell. She went into her cupboard and shut the door. Oh, for the babies. She ached with pity for them, for the mothers; birth took the adventure out of what they’d done and made it tragedy.
There was a knock on the door and Licky’s voice: ‘Skirt time, Bratchie girl.’ Porritt had sent for her. She dressed in her female clothes and went to the quarterdeck. The horn lantern hanging from its roof showed the plump cheeks of the cherubs at his door and the curve of their necks. Babies. Mary and Anne had given birth to the children she’d never have.
The next day she went on asking questions about Anne Bonny and Mary Read. She discovered whom to ask; men who evaded questions about their past, mainly English, a few of the other nationals, hardly any of the French, none of the officers. The ones who’d been pirates.
There was a surprising number of them, she suspected at least seventeen, perhaps more; men who’d tumbled into what they called the Brotherhood like pebbles washed on to a beach and now, with equal helplessness, had landed on a Jacobite privateer.
And they all met in the galley.
‘You were a pirate, weren’t you,’ she said to Licky when they were alone, ‘You and your brother.’
‘You wash your mout’ out,’ he said, ‘I was ree-spec’able. Din’ I ever tell you how I was de Earl of Portland’s favourite slave?’
‘No.’
‘Bought me special from Jamaica. Give me eddification. Went with he to France on he’s embassy to King Louis. I was a fine man, plumed hat, lace cuffs. “You one fine dam’ Negro,” say Louis. “You one fine dam’ king,” I tell him, “if a mite hasty.” Din’ I ever tell you that?’
She believed him; he had amazing areas of knowledge. The use of the word ‘pooped’ as a synonym for exhaustion, he’d once explained to her, came from captains and masters who’d had to stay too long on the poop deck of a ship during a battle or storm.
But she still knew that either before or after the embassy to France, he had been a pirate. It was slavery which had given him the empathy which he extended to her situation, but his refusal to think that a woman on board a ship spelled bad luck came from his pirate days. It was the same with Nobby. Piracy was like the army, she thought, women with love of adventure had found a niche in the freebooting life which suited them. From what little she could gather from former members of the Brotherhood, Mary and Anne had become part of its folklore just as Kit Ross had in the army.
She could find out very little more. Ex-pirates were guarded about their past for one thing and on the Holy Innocent they had other things to talk about. They came to the galley to grumble about the increasing severity of life above. More and more often she could hear for herself the thwack of the bo’sun’s ‘starter’ as it hit the seamen’s posteriors and the yells of encouragement from O’Rourke. Floggings, which generally occurred at the beginning of a voyage to attract the men’s attention to the penalty for indiscipline, were becoming more frequent rather than less, and for slighter reasons.
One of the sailmaker’s assistants had been given six of the best for the crime of feeding the ship’s cat.
Sam Rogers complained little, though his face showed the strain of O’Rourke’s persecution of his friend, Johnson, which was becoming savage. A lurch of the ship during a calm morning had sent a cauldron of near-boiling water over Bratchet’s toes, causing her to hop with pain and Licky to go storming up on deck to complain. He came back tight-lipped. ‘Dat man wuss than obeah,’ referring to O’Rourke.
O’Rourke, it appeared, had sent Johnson to the tops for no reason, waited until the man was negotiating the cross-trees some sixty feet above the deck, then grabbed the helm from Sam Rogers and sent the ship veering, nearly tipping the youngster into the sea.
‘Near broached we,’ said Licky, ‘That man.’
Porritt had come storming out of his cabin to find out what had happened. O’Rourke had blamed Sam. ‘Ogling his beloved too hard to watch the way,’ he’d said, and such was the fear in which he was held that nobody, except Sam, had refuted the statement. Sam had been docked pay and privileges – as the best helmsman on board he was too valuable to flog.
Bratchet asked, ‘Are he and Johnson…’ she didn’t know a polite word for it in English so she used French, with which Licky had become acquainted during his time with the Earl of Portland ‘…n’aiment-les que les hommes dovés?’
‘What ain’t met you don’ pass you,’ said Licky, from which she gathered he regarded it as none of his business. Time and again she was struck by the crew’s casual attitude to what, on shore, ranked high in the list of carnal sins; the result, she supposed, of enclosing men within wooden walls for months, sometimes years, at a time.
The few animals that had so far escaped slaughtering being reserved for the officers, the rest of the crew was now on a monotonous and scanty diet of salted beef. It had to be soaked for days before it could be cooked and then kept at simmering point in its compartment in the stove for hours before it was edible.
Coinciding with the approach into warmer weather, the galley, which had been comfortable while they were in the Bay of Biscay, was now hardly endurable. How Licky kept his temper with the complaints that were becoming increasingly nasty, though justified, Bratchet didn’t know.
‘Ain’t the vittles,’ he told her, ‘it’s sippers runnin’ out’s the trouble. Cheapsgate cap’n, he din’ buy enough.’ Sippers was rum; according to Licky a crew could be kept on starvation food rations and still remain content as long as they got their daily ration of rum. On the Holy Innocent, they weren’t. The ship had been badly provisioned.
There was still ale, though that was becoming musty-tasting. Water in the barrels was turning green and acquiring the richness of pond life. Bread, known as ‘biscuit’, crumbled to dust in the mouth and smelled of the fish that Licky had placed on top to attract the weevils from it. So far he had averted scurvy but the herbs and salads he had grown in the jolly boat for this purpose had yesterday been tipped overboard when the boat had to be launched so that Chadwell could caulk a suspected leak near the waterline.
‘What are we going to do?’ Bratchet asked him. She was becoming frightened; the ship was in mid-ocean, beyond the point of no return but still with over 2,000 nautical miles to go. Some of the men were beginning to show signs of sickness, mainly from exhaustion. Nobby reported that Martin and Kilsyth were suffering from heat and foul air.
‘Yuh never know de luck of a lousy cat,’ Licky said, which was no help.
Nobby’s opinion of his captain – ‘If he’s a fucking fulker we’re in low tide. If he’s a fucking landlubber we’re on the rocks’ – was general. Miserliness was one thing, but the growing suspicion that Porritt didn’t know what he was about was creating fear. An incompetent captain presaged disaster.
He’s frightened. It was occurring to her that Porritt had bitten off more than he could chew, and knew it. His experience of seamanship, she was beginning to suspect, was limited to small ships in the Channel. In handing him the Innocent, Louis had promoted him beyond his capabilities. It accounted for the harshness; terror that any relaxation in discipline would lead to behaviour he couldn’t control.
A wiser captain would have provided more rum, the occasional dancing on deck to Dai Griffith’s hornpipe, competitions, anything to keep the men interested and keen. The only way Porritt knew was to work them till they dropped and flog them when they did. Worse still, he allowed O’Rourke’s sadism free rein and then was forced to support him, leading to injustices.
The worst case was Johnson’s. It had only been a matter of time before O’Rourke found an informer – Licky called such men ‘Jacks o’ both sides’; Nobby had other names for them – willing to testify that he had been the subject of unwanted sexual advances by Johnson. The information was enough for O’Rourke to haul him before the captain; it was also unlikely enough to have been dismissed by a man of sense – Johnson was good-looking while the informant, Thody, had an appearance that compared unfavourably to Nobby’s, without the saving grace of that gentleman’s humour.
But Thody was a Roman Catholic, like Porritt, like O’Rourke. Johnson was not. The bo’sun was told to pipe all hands and Porritt announced the sentence to the assembled ship’s company: ‘For attempted buggery which is an abomination in the sight of God, Seaman Johnson will be seized to the shrouds this night and on the morrow will receive thirty lashes.’ There was a murmur from the men which died away as O’Rourke signalled to the bo’sun to be ready with his starter.
In the galley later, as all over the ship, it was the irregularity of the sentence rather than the sentence itself on which discussion centred. A man could be seized to the shrouds or he could be flogged but rarely both; with this double sentence Johnson’s night exposed to spray and wind would be given additional torment by the thought of the flogging to come, a punishment more usually carried out immediately it was pronounced.
‘Ain’t fuckin’ seamanlike,’ Nobby complained from his doorway, ‘Not shroudin’ an’ a red-laced jacket. You never got ‘em both in the navy. I sailed under captings’d make old Porritt look like the Archangel Gabriel, but they was always seamanlike. He’s green is Porritt, green as a fucking fig. Thass what worries me.’
It seemed to worry everybody except the Bratchet, who was more concerned for Johnson. ‘Can he survive thirty lashes?’ What little she had seen of the boy suggested he was frail.
‘Thirty? Thirty’s nothing,’ Nobby assured her, ‘Easy as piss the bed, thirty. I’ve had forty an’ walked away whistlin’.’
‘An’ deserved ‘em,’ said Chadwell.
‘Not for buggery, I din’t. I ain’t no boretto man.’
‘Goats bein’ your fancy,’ said Chadwell, who adored egging on Nobby’s conversation, ‘Capricornico man, you are.’
‘I don’ like to go into battle wit’ zis captain,’ said Pickel, ‘I end up fucking dead, I think. He no seaman.’
It seemed to Bratchet that as they complained of their captain’s mishandling of Johnson’s punishment, his inept provisioning, his apparent inability to keep O’Rourke in check, they were actually talking about something else, a faraway option that they could take or reject but which, even from here, was too horrific to name.
Licky, she noticed, kept them simmering, shrugging a ‘You dancin’ to the music he playing,’ when they looked like letting the matter drop, ‘You jus’ a walkin’ ground for monkey parade ’pon.’
‘You don’t want them to mutiny, do you?’ she asked when they were alone.
He turned on her. ‘That one heavy word, girl. You watch your triside.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He’d never been angry with her before.
‘Yeah, well, you keep a still tongue an’ a fuzzy eyebrow.’
It was a night when Porritt sent for her. As she passed the mainmast shrouds, she saw Johnson, a black cruciform, spread-eagled against criss-crossed moonlight, his face to the sea. To one side of him stood a marine with musket at the slope.
Crouched against the gunwale in the shadows at Johnson’s hanging feet, utterly still, was Sam Rogers. The scene reminded her of a painting that hung in Mary of Modena’s salon of the soldier and the mother at the foot of the Cross.
That night she begged Porritt not to have Johnson flogged, knowing it was useless but feeling that if she didn’t she would bear some of the responsibility for what happened to the boy. Then and the next morning she paid for it. When the all hands was piped, the bo’sun put his head round the galley door: ‘That’s you an’ all, girl. On deck. Cap’n’s orders.’
She trailed on deck behind him and took up a place beside Licky. The sea-cook put out his hand and she held on to it. Porritt read out offence and sentence again. Two seamen assisted Johnson to the capstan where he was shackled to one of the spars. The cat’s nine knotted strings hung ready over another spar. The master-at-arms stepped forward, took hold of Johnson’s collar and ripped the shirt out and down, exposing his young, very white back to the waist. Inconsequentially she thought, Why do they tear a good shirt?
The master-at-arms stepped back, took up the knotted strings by their handle and swished them through the air, getting his range. There was a name for the sound it made. Seamen had a name for everything. She couldn’t remember what it was, but she remembered Nobby’s phrase from last night. Red-laced jacket. They’re going to give him a red-laced jacket.
She’d seen floggings before, in the Puddle Court days. They’d tied Harry the Sorner to a cart-tail for begging and whipped him from Charing Cross to Temple Bar and she and Effie had followed the nasty old bastard, jeering.
What’s different? She was. It wasn’t just that Johnson was young and she liked him, or that the ceremonial, the silent, ordered ranks of men, were sickening; she had changed. Somewhere along the line of the past years she had joined a higher humanity.
As the master-at-arms stepped forward again and raised the whip she closed her eyes and kept them closed, trying not to listen to the sounds at the capstan, trying to blank out her imagination. It’s a seagull screaming. It’s not Johnson.
‘All over,’ said Licky. But she opened her eyes too soon, while they were still unshackling. It was a red-laced jacket. The phrase was hideously apt. Later on in the galley she held the salve while Licky’s white-fronted fingers applied it to the cuts and Sam Rogers held his friend’s hand and crooned to him and then hoisted him by his armpits over his shoulder and carried him to his quarters.
Johnson’s eyes had become vague. For the rest of the time she knew him, they never regained the look they’d had before. Neither did Sam Rogers’s.
Two days later there was the Brilliana business.
Nobby’s supposed relationship with the animal had provided her with a personality, making her the ship’s pet, allowed to wander at will, given slops of ale and scrapings off the men’s platters, an object of amusement, affection and the butt of their most obscene jokes. They should have seen the danger. O’Rourke ordered her to be slaughtered for the officers’ table.
Licky went up to argue with him knowing that, if he didn’t, Nobby’s outrage would get the little gunner a flogging. Bratchet poked her head above deck and watched the cook explaining that there were still three other goats that could be killed for the officers before they need sacrifice Brilliana.
O’Rourke smiled at him, showing strong, wide-spaced teeth. ‘But I want that one.’ His th’s, like Licky’s, came out as d’s.
It was a fine day with a breeze keeping the Innocent on a beam reach and nothing but sea as far as the horizon. Swabbers were holystoning the planks, the sailmaker, Partridge, was splicing rope, Porritt was pacing the quarterdeck and two men were working the chain pump, discharging the bilge into the wake in regular, monotonous swishes – all seemingly intent on their work. The only pair of ears that weren’t straining to catch the argument taking place in the waist of the ship were Brilliana’s; with a fetching little bonnet that Nobby had woven for her tied on top of her head, she was eating strands of rope discarded by the splicing party.
It was a pleasant, orderly, even cheerful scene and Bratchet had hopes of it. Having kept out of O’Rourke’s way, all she knew of his character was by report. In appearance he was handsome, tall and strong, with very black hair, running somewhat to fat; his musical Irish tenor made a descant to Licky’s bass West Indian rumble. The crew’s assertion that he was a heavy drinker was borne out by his high colour, but he seemed in jolly mood. It was too nice a day to be anything else.
His voice rang out reasonably, ‘But d’you see, cook, I want that one.’ He went to the gunwale and picked out a belaying pin; twirling it, he walked over to the goat, swung it high and smashed it on to her head. Brilliana went down. Her legs kicked and then stilled. O’Rourke nudged the body with his foot. ‘With turnips, if you please, cook.’
For a moment everybody’s head turned towards the quarterdeck. Porritt was looking into the distance, his hands behind his back. Helped by one of the holystoners, Licky carried the body down the galley hatch. As he passed the sailing master, he said warningly, ‘Your head ain’t made only for yo’ hat.’ Ignoring him, O’Rourke ordered sawdust. There had been an issue of blood from the goat’s ears.
It was an incident that, looking back on it, Bratchet thought precipitated what happened later more than any other thing – except, possibly, the paucity of rum. It had been unnecessary. Among hardship and cruelty inherent in shipboard life, the gratuitous killing of a pet goat had introduced the unprofessional element of personal hatred for an object of affection. O’Rourke’s hounding of Johnson, she realized, had been from the same cause. A wiser captain would not have allowed either. They were acts of brutish ill-will spawning discontent.
Watching it grow into mutiny was like seeing birds gathering to migrate; not so much a clear decision as a gradual, corporate, fluttering unease that could not be acted upon until enough of them felt the call.
Like migration, it was brought about by weather-change. It was becoming hot. Working on deck exposed men to a thirst which couldn’t be satisfied by the one scoop of green water which was their ration. Three Frenchmen who rushed a barrel received six lashes apiece on skin already blistered by sunburn.
On the gun deck the ports were opened to allow a breeze from the ship’s way to waft through the officers’ quarters. Elsewhere the stink wasn’t helped by the early symptoms of scurvy which turned men’s breath fetid. Seamen who’d once climbed the rigging like monkeys began to suffer breathlessness halfway up and clung on to recover, earning themselves a lashing at O’Rourke’s orders when they came down. What little coolness there was on crew deck was in the carpenter’s walk, a low, narrow passageway running round the ship’s inner skin to allow repairs below the waterline; ideal for conspiracy.
The ship began to whisper. Men stopped talking if an officer passed by, swabbers muttered out of the side of their mouths to each other over their mops, topmen could be seen nodding at lookout, passwords were exchanged. The whispering spread, until it seemed to Bratchet that the whole ship was connected by a cobweb of hissing that had its centre in the galley where Licky was.
Nobby and Sam Rogers, with Pickel and Chadwell as their assistants, were the mutiny’s recruiting officers and its organizers; it was they who held meetings in the carpenter’s walk, probed and took soundings and came back to say: ‘If’ – it was always ‘if’ in the early stages – ‘If we do it, the topmen are with us.’ Or the portside gunners were with them. Or the sailmakers.
But the instigator was Licky. Bratchet wondered if the others knew how much he influenced them; she thought they didn’t. A proverb here, a reminder of what this or that pirate had achieved, a display of his knowledge of the Caribbean and what they could do when they got there, memories of Port Royal in Jamaica, the freebooters’ heaven, built up their confidence.
‘You planned to take the ship all along, didn’t you?’ she said to him after they’d gone.
This time he wasn’t angry. He opened his eyes wide to show white all around them and let his mouth gape. ‘You t’ink a stupid ol’ sea-cook like me plan sometin’?’
‘Stop it,’ she said, ‘You know I’m with you. I hate him.’
‘You ain’t wid anybody.’ He was suddenly very serious. ‘You ain’t going piratin’. Very dangerous business, piratin’. Hostis humani generis. You better’ve jumped. You think I doin’ this to go piratin’?’
‘What for then?’
‘Ol’ Porritt, he weren’t goin’ where I want t’go. Now, put them beans in soak. You can’ stop yo’ ears from hearin’ but you kin stop yo’ mouth from talkin’. Won’t be long now.’
‘It had better be soon.’ She was beginning to despair of her two men’s survival. She made Nobby take them her water ration. She begged him to smuggle her down to see them. It was partly her fault that they were still confined. Early on she had made the mistake of pleading with Porritt to let them out and realized that, despite his need of extra hands, he was keeping them there to spite her.
He had a crucifix over his bed; his steward, Hopkirk, told her the captain spent half an hour on his knees before it every day. She couldn’t think what he had to say to it, or how he dared listen to its reply. He was a man in a dimension all his own, wandering deeper and deeper into greyness where nobody could find or touch him.
His anger if she spoke in his presence was prompted by fear of finding her an individual instead of an object. He permitted O’Rourke’s cruelty because he had no standard of decency to judge him by.
There were times when she wondered what had happened to him to make him like he was, what twisted God he worshipped to permit himself to remain so. Mostly she didn’t bother. He was a lost soul and he could stay lost. The revulsion and fear she’d felt for him were being replaced by contempt; prostitutes, she imagined, survived on the same basis. But I’m no prostitute. ‘Can’t help ain’t do for purpose.’ Thanks to Licky, she was a mutineer. Hostis humani generis, Licky had called pirates, using the Latin of old statutes, the enemy of all humanity. But she knew a greater enemy of humanity than they were.
On Porritt’s card-playing nights, she went on at Nobby to take her down to the hold. Licky got tireder even than Nobby of hearing her. ‘Oh, take the woman, she wuss nagger than my first wife.’ He promised Nobby an extra ration of coucou and that he would deflect Porritt’s manservant if he came to take her to the quarterdeck.
She followed a nervous and irritable Nobby, holding on to his shirt as he took her along the carpenter’s walk in darkness. There was an eeriness to sound down here; men’s echoing voices and, always, the reminder of the sea, the castle’s besieger, only inches away, threatening to break in. An occasional chink in the inner bulkhead gave her, for the first time since coming aboard, glimpses of the part of the deck which housed commissioned officers and the guns.
She saw carved bosses and cornices as if the boat-builders had taken pride and time in creating a thing of beauty. But they’d run out of both when they got to the ordinary seamen’s quarters, though even here beams and planking had the dignity belonging to plain oak and elm. It was the only dignity. These were airless burrows – if air could penetrate the ship’s bulkheads so could the sea – where men scurried about their business bent double or slept in tiers, outnumbered by the rats.
She gasped in air that hadn’t circulated since the voyage began, but had become more and more warm. It was like being buried and she had to stop herself telling Nobby she wanted to go back. She only knew they’d arrived when he put his hand over her mouth then swaggered up to a figure that had a lantern by its feet, a musket in its hands and appeared to be studying a blank wall with every appearance of interest. ‘Me and the boy just got to count the grape boxes, Hans me old square-head. All right?’
He unlocked a door and she slipped through while Hans was still nodding. Inside there was light from a candle set in the wall behind thick, barred glass, and a stack of barrels and boxes lashed to iron rings by rope – and nothing else.
Nobby opened the glass panel and said: ‘In there. Keep your voice down an’ be fucking quick about it.’
We stared at each other through the hatch. She was appalled by what she saw: two dirty, bearded, slowly dying skeletons. By becoming Porritt’s warming pan, she might have saved Kilsyth and me from being thrown overboard, but she could see that in the conditions we were kept in, we wouldn’t last much longer.
For that matter, she wouldn’t either. Porritt was becoming increasingly violent, his climaxes dependent on whipping himself into a rage. At that moment, she was grateful that the bruises and bites were on her body, not her face; she wanted us to know that she was submitting to Porritt unwillingly, but saw no need to add to our misery by letting us see she was being tortured.
She passed over the sausages Licky had given her, desperate to give us something better, some hope, a reason to hang on. She leaned as near to me as she could: ‘Work at the crossroads,’ she said, willing me to understand, ‘We’re not done yet.’
As she followed Nobby back through the ship, she discovered that she was relieved Kilsyth had been asleep for her visit. He might have absolved her for becoming Porritt’s sexual companion, but she didn’t want absolution; she didn’t deserve it. She was as much the captain’s victim as the two of us in the shot locker. What she wanted was understanding, the sort Licky had given her. Kilsyth wasn’t the man to give it, he was too pure, his chivalry was too unbesmirched by life’s mud. For the first time, and reluctantly, Bratchet felt resentment. He wouldn’t understand. Then she softened. Why should he? But she came away reassured that at least Martin Millet not only understood but admired her. And God knows I did.
It was the start of her reassessment of our relationship. She told me later that until then she had been confused; the blame she had laid on me for not taking her away from Puddle Court had been a sort of luxury, a way of focusing all its awfulness on a scapegoat. I wasn’t her scapegoat any longer. She didn’t know what I was; she was just glad it had been me who faced her through the hatch.
But they’re dying, both of them.
If there was to be a mutiny it had to be soon. For her to encourage it was useless; the little caucus that gathered in the galley would resent a chit urging them on to risk the terrible punishment that awaited mutineers. With desperate urgency, she watched as Licky encouraged it instead.
One day it was still ‘if’, the next it was ‘when’. The collective mind had consolidated.
‘Be you with us or against us, Miss Bratchet?’ asked Sam Rogers, formally.
She was surprised she was being consulted. ‘With you.’
‘Because,’ he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘we do need your aid with the captain. We don’t want no upset, it’s to go off quiet like if so be it accords with our plan.’ He was a deliberate man, every sentence was plodded through to its end.
She became frightened then. They want me to murder him in his bed. I can’t.
‘He keeps two pistols in his cabin, so we’m told.’
She nodded and swallowed. ‘One in his table drawer near the bed. The other’s in a sort of rack behind the door.’ She’d seriously thought of using one of them – either on him, or herself.
‘Primed?’
‘I think so.’
‘An’ do he always lock the door when you’m… in there with un?’
‘Yes.’ Even though there was always a marine posted outside it. And he takes the crucifix down from its place over the bed.
‘Then we want you to take one of they pistols and hold him at bay, like, unlock the door and let us in. We’ll tackle the marine, but if so be as we have to break the door down ’twill give un time to get a pistol and us’ll have to shoot un.’
They were all looking at her, Nobby, Pickel, Chadwell, Sam and one of the Frenchmen who’d joined the group, a sardonic middle-aged man, Rosier, known as ‘Rosy’ and reputed to be a great gambler.
They think I’m betraying Porritt. Anger overtook her. Never mind that she was being violated by a madman; in their book the sex act conferred a duty on the woman, however unwilling. You’re men. You’re my friends, but you’re men.
‘Will ee do it?’
A minute before she might have agreed unconditionally and been swept along, perhaps to be in no better case than she had before, a woman of no substance. Now she paused. How had Anne Bonny and Mary Read earned themselves a respected place among such men? True, she wasn’t the stuff of either Anne or Mary, but this was her chance to try to be.
‘I’d like to know your plans,’ she said.
She got angrier as they looked at Licky to see if they should tell her. Rosy muttered something about ‘les poules’ and she made him jump by turning on him and telling him in French to be quiet.
Licky shrugged at them. ‘De same dog that bring a bone can carry one,’ he said.
So they told her. It was to be the next night. Nobby, followed by Pickel, would take food down to the prisoners in the shot hold as he often did and, while he engaged the guard in conversation, Pickel would knock the man on the head. Nobby was then to unlock the small arms room and hand them out to men waiting in the carpenter’s walk.
She interrupted. ‘My friends must be let out first.’
Sam nodded.
A third of the officers would be on deck and were to be individually overpowered, the rest would be below in their usual condition, either drunk or asleep. They were to be presented with their captain, a pistol to his head, and given a choice: surrender or be shot.
With a new respect they watched her consider the plan. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing would be. Part of her was so frightened she wanted to scream, to let everything stay as it was, but part of her knew it couldn’t stay as it was if she and her men were to survive.
In any case, the putative mutineers had seen a vision of the future which destroyed their patience with the present. If they knew, and they did, as she did, that failure meant an appalling death, they could none of them go back now.
She wasn’t going to go back either; if this thing succeeded she wasn’t going to be returned to the passed-over, directionless and inferior being men had made her before.
‘I want two things,’ she said, ‘I want to keep one of Porritt’s pistols.’ Guns were like penises, they gave you power. Since she lacked a penis, she was bloody well going to have a gun. ‘And once we’re in charge, I want to be ship’s purser.’ She had to have a role. Purser Phillips had died of an apoplexy two days out, since when the job had been carried on by everyone and no one, rendering the stores into a mess that had been the despair of Licky.
‘Pusser?’ squeaked Nobby, ‘You want to be a fucking pusser?’
She winked at Licky who winked back. ‘Take it or leave it.’ Let’s sweep the horizon while we have one, my God.
Sam Rogers extended his large hand. ‘Done.’
She shook it.
It was too much to hope that Porritt would send for her the next night, and he didn’t. She wanted to flounder and ask her fellow-mutineers what she should do but that would have put her back into subservience. The mutiny had to go ahead that night; the danger of an informer alerting the officers was too great to wait. In any case, her courage wouldn’t last another day. It was up to her to initiate the action. ‘I’ll get in to him somehow,’ she said.
The chief conspirators in the galley, Nobby, the Frenchman Rosy, Sam and Pickel, were radiating a terrible energy. Chadwell muttered prayers to himself. Only Licky looked much as usual. They helped her to the companionway as if she were an invalid, patting her, and followed her up until their heads were through the hatch and they could watch her progress by peering under the stretch of canvas that deflected the galley’s smoke from the quarterdeck.
On the weather side of the quarterdeck, where the officers always stood, she could see outlines against a sky still not quite black. She heard Nobby counting their hats – in this light the feature that distinguished them from the ordinary seamen. ‘Lawrence, Fortescue, Forbes. That’s right. Porritt ain’t there. The fucker’s in his cabin, sure enough.’
Her legs waded across the deck rather than walked, dragging against unreality. This isn’t me. I’m not here. I’m somewhere else. Then she thought with relief, He won’t let me in. He’ll be playing cards with O’Rourke. There was a silver path on the sea to starboard where the moon was coming up. The ship was going fast and smoothly, the sails’ canvas creaking.
As she passed the hatch to the gun deck she heard O’Rourke’s voice issuing up from below in an Irish ditty about a maiden. Hopkirk would be in there giving him his supper. She slowed, panicking, unable to remember if Hopkirk was in the conspiracy or not.
The chandler, Sweetman, was in it. He’d chosen this moment to trim the ship’s lantern and was getting sworn at for his pains by First Mate Fortescue, especially as he’d brought along an unusual number of his men to help him – and all of them watching her. Look natural, you bloody idiots.
From behind a coil of rope she heard a whisper: ‘Go it, girl.’ How many were there hidden on deck? Sam had told them to stay below until he gave the signal. Hopeless.
The marine outside the captain’s door was Beckerman. Definitely not in it. None of the marines were. Hadn’t been given the chance; to all right-minded seamen marines were neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring. He gave her his usual leer and moved aside to let her knock on the door. The cherubs were leering as well.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me,’ she said tonelessly. Tell me to go away. I’ll go.
After a long pause, he opened the door and let her in, frowning. ‘I didn’t send for you.’
‘No.’ But he was locking the door behind her, as he always did. The sight of the punch-bag had activated the usual need to use it. He shrugged and went and sat in his chair, flexing his hands, working up hatred, waiting for her to undress.
The walk across the deck had cost too much, made her too tired. She could barely move. This won’t work. Languidly, she turned to the door, took the pistol out of the rack, nearly dropped it because it was so heavy and aimed it at him. She had no idea how it worked. ‘There’s a little safety catch here, look,’ Chadwell had said, drawing the outline of a flintlock. ‘Pull it back. See…’ dotting a line backwards, ‘…like this.’
‘An’ if that don’t work, chuck it at the bugger,’ Nobby had said.
Porritt was staring at her. ‘It’s not primed. What are you at?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She transferred it to her left hand, and brought up her knee to rest it on while she unlocked the door with her right. There was the sound of scuffling outside.
Porritt still stared at her. ‘What are you at? Put it down.’ The strange thing was that his tone was as lacklustre as hers, as if they were rehearsing something that was not yet to come about.
I should say something. Tell him what he is. She was too tired. The pistol, which she still pointed at him, told it all, unprimed or not. Anyway, there wasn’t time. Sam Rogers rushed in, holding the marine’s carbine, with some of the others behind him.
Then it became real. Porritt shouted ‘Mutiny,’ and ‘This is mutiny,’ before they fell on him. Out on deck, running towards the after hatch to go and find the shot locker, she could still hear him shouting ‘This is mutiny,’ over and over, as the English king he’d once served had kept shouting ‘This is the standard of rebellion,’ again and again, equally unable to believe his reign was ending.