Absolute Honour (4 page)

Jack saw the sailor’s cheery face cloud, knew what that was. McRae, indeed all of the ship’s company, had seen the Dragoon
uniform he first wore aboard, knew him for an officer and a guest at the Captain’s table. They could not see beyond the scarlet
and braid, which Jack had only worn for less than two years, to the young man who’d drunk and sung in half the low taverns
of London. They saw a baronet’s son and a lieutenant. Aboard even a merchant ship that rank divided.

‘It is fine, Hugh. I’ll to my hammock.’

‘Nonsense. The night is just beginning and you must hear Murphy play while he’s still sober.’ He took Jack’s arm, led him
to the waiting McRae. ‘I’ll vouch for him.’

The frown did not leave the face. ‘Aye, sir.’

The whole larboard watch – Larbollians, as they were
known – were crammed into the hold and all cheered when Red Hugh stooped through the low doorway. The cheer faded when Jack
followed. Most men looked down, some stared challengingly.

His guide did not hesitate. Seizing Jack’s arm, he thrust the younger man forward. ‘Now, lads. I know what you think you see
here. An officer in King George’s Army, a gentleman. And maybe he is, maybe he is. But I tell you, mere appearances can deceive.’
He stooped and grabbed a bulky seaman from his squat, yanking him up as if he were gossamer. Each of his knuckles bore a letter,
the left hand spelling ‘Hold’ the right ‘Fast’, a reminder when high up in the rigging. As Red Hugh rolled back the man’s
shirt sleeve, he revealed more black stains – a ship, a swallow, an anchor. They were all, Jack noticed, rather well done.
‘You, Williams. You think you’ve a fine collection there, do you not?’

‘I ’ave.’ The Welshman thrust his chin out. ‘Best on the ship.’

‘Better than these?’ Before he could stop him, Red Hugh had leaned forward and wrenched Jack’s shirt open. Any protest he
might have made was cut off by the approving gasp of the sailors as they saw the wolf’s jaws on his chest, the wreath of oak
leaves around his shoulder that Ate had rendered so beautifully – and painfully! – in their cave the winter before.

‘Executed by a painted savage, no less!’ the Irishman declared. ‘And without the benefit of your fine needles.’

Williams peered close. ‘Not bad,’ he grunted. ‘Seen better.’

Red Hugh was not the only one who jeered. Pushing him back down, the Irishman pointed to another sailor. ‘Ingvarsson, you
lump of fjord filth. How many men is it you claim to have killed?’

The man had no eyebrows on a forehead that sloped into his eyes, and a scar that split his nose and ran to each ear.
‘Claim? It is five, by God. Five! And I could do six with pleasure,’ he growled.

The others hooted. Then Red Hugh spoke, quietly now. ‘Well, ’tis obvious none of you have heard the tale – nay, the legend
– of Black Jack, saviour of Canada.’

Jack looked about him, wondering of whom these words were spoken. When he realized, he flushed pink, but no one noticed for
all eyes were on Red Hugh. It was obvious that here, as at the Captain’s table, the Irishman could hold an audience.

‘Yer man, the Viking here, claims five souls despatched, one for each decade of his life. But I have to tell you that Black
Jack …’ he paused and they waited, eager, ‘has four more scalps to his name, so he has. That’s nine for those who can’t count
– and him scarce eighteen years of age. Nine! Dead at his hand, and not stabbed with a shive down a back alley nor shot genteelly
and safely with a pistol firing over the red ranks. Killed face to face, man to man, with tomahawk and sword and his own strong
hands. Frenchies and wild savages in equal numbers.’

Jack was not sure whether to look modest or appalled at the revelation of what he’d told Red Hugh in private. He was not proud
of the tally. In each case, they’d been necessary, that was all. And they were just the ones he could remember.

The men had no such doubts. A cheer came which Red Hugh rode, calling out over it, ‘And to top it all, his mother was Jane
Fitzsimmons, the nightingale of the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin. By Christ, lads, he’s halfway to being an Irishman!’

The cheering by now had become almost universal. Stooping again, Red Hugh grabbed the mug offered, Guinea rum spilling over
its lip, then cried, ‘I give you that scourge of French manhood, that bed-warmer for their ladies, the newest member of the
Fo’castle Club of the
Sweet Eliza
– Black Jack Absolute!’

‘Black Jack!’ came the cry, followed immediately by shouts of, ‘Pledge, pledge, pledge!’ A mug was thrust at Jack, and he
seized it, slopping some of its contents down his shirt, raising it before him. He was still feeling a little nauseous from
Red Hugh’s grip on deck but hesitation here would spell an end to a society he desperately wanted to enter. He knew what to
do. ‘My lords,’ he cried, ‘a pox on all Puritans and a rope for all politicians.’

‘Huzzah!’ was the response.

It seemed to take an inordinately long time to reach the bottom of the pewter but when he did he felt instantly better. Even
more so when he’d sat rather suddenly down and Murphy began to play.

McRae had been right about the fiddler. There’d been a glorious hour when the balance between rum swallowed and fine notes
produced had been just right; a further half-hour when voices drowned out the faulty notes. Then he’d attempted some sad lament
that only he seemed to know. On one especially long and tortured note, with the man’s nose almost touching his knee, another
sailor stepped forward and grabbed bow and fiddle just before Murphy sank soundless to the deck.

The silence only lasted a moment. There were boys as well as men in the room and one of these youths now stood up. With hands
behind his back, and in a sweet voice not yet broken, he began to sing, ‘Lochaber, No More’.

Of those still awake, more than half joined in the chorus of the old Jacobite song and Jack, with his eyes tight closed, was
one of them. For the time of the singing he was no longer aboard the
Sweet Eliza
but back with his friends at Westminster, in a private room at the Five Chimneys on Tothill Fields where, three June 10ths
in a row, each scholar sported a white rose to show their allegiance on the Old Pretender’s birthday:

I gae then, my lass, to win honour and fame

And if I should chance to come gloriously home

I’ll bring a heart to thee with love running o’er

And then I’ll leave thee and Lochaber no more.

The chorus ended and Jack opened his eyes to find Red Hugh staring at him. The Irishman’s voice was soft, audible only to
Jack, the song continuing beyond it.

‘Are those tears, lad?’

Jack rubbed, laughed. ‘Possibly. It’s smoky down here, is it not?’

Red Hugh regarded him for a moment. ‘Are you not, then, a follower of the Lost King?’

Jack thought for a moment then shook his head. Any following he’d done had been merely a schoolboy attraction to the romance
of a doomed cause. ‘In truth, I am not. Though I grew up in a house where my father is a Tory of the old school who damned
the Hanoverians even while he fought for them in all their wars.’

‘And your mother?’

‘I think my mother saw Ireland’s liberty in the Old King’s cause, at least for a while. But her beliefs have become more …
extreme of late.’ He chuckled. ‘Indeed, I think she has moved beyond all kings.’

The man before him nodded and gazed away to the singer, but not before Jack noticed something dark come into his regard.

‘And you?’ Jack asked. ‘Have you worn the oak leaf of the Stuarts yourself?’

Red Hugh looked back. Whatever had fleeted in his eyes was gone. He smiled. ‘Aye, lad. I was out in the forty-five.’

‘You fought—’

‘I did. Stood under English grapeshot on that damn moor. Shed my own blood and the blood of others. Many others, may God have
mercy upon me.’

Jack thought back to the two battles he’d fought the previous year, both before the walls of Quebec. ‘I knew a Scotsman who
was also at Culloden. A fine man. Donald Macdonald of—’

‘Of the Royal Ecossais! I know him well, heard he’d taken the Hanoverian shilling as I had taken the Austrian.’ He paused.
‘Knew, you said?’

Jack nodded. ‘He died at the second battle of Quebec.’

The Irishman sighed. ‘Another who’ll come no more. Like the Bonnie Prince.’

‘His cause is finished, then?’

‘With Charles Stuart a drunk in Germany, a wife-beater, a madman taken to the Anglican communion to gain support?’ He snorted
his disgust. ‘Aye, most think that cause is through, to be sure.’

‘Do you?’

Red Hugh shook his head. ‘I used to be a Jacobite, lad. Used to be. No more. And, sure, am I not about only me own business
now?’ He turned to the boy who had just finished his performance. ‘But I do love the songs still. So sing, young Conor, sing
us that one again.’

The boy, delighted to have an audience still awake, did as he was bid. Red Hugh reached for two rum mugs, handed one to Jack,
then raised him up and led him by the arm across to a butt that held rainwater. ‘The songs and the toasts. Shall we have an
old one?’ He turned back, kicked out at some dozers at his feet who grumbled awake. ‘Here’s one, lads: to the King across
the water!’

As he spoke, he moved his mug over the bucket. Jack nearly did the same. In the shelter of certain Jacobite taverns in Whitechapel
and Shadwell, sought out with his friends for the illicit thrill of them, he often
had
done the same. Yet that was before he’d joined the Army, before he’d sworn an officer’s oath to King George, to England.
So he just raised his mug straight up and, when the Irishman turned back to
him, said, ‘I’ll drink to this, sir: to friendship and Red Hugh McClune.’

That something, that darkness was there again, there and gone. Light and good humour ruled his face once more. ‘And I’ll drink
to you, Jack Absolute. To you!’

He woke where he’d fallen asleep, alone in the forecastle hold, his arm around Jeremiah. The goat was chewing his shirt-tail.
Yet it was not that movement but the ship’s that caused him to jerk his head up. His yelp at the pain disturbed the ruminant,
who bleated and shambled off. No, he realized, not movement. A lack of it.

The
Sweet Eliza
appeared to have come to a dead stop.

He stood and swayed, not only from the effects of motion on his head. The cabin’s floor seemed to be angled more acutely than
ever. He knew, because the Captain swore about it continuously, that the ship was more prone to heel than most. It seemed
that the constant trimming required had been somewhat neglected. Unless …

Jack suddenly thought of the other reason they could have stopped. They’d made port. While he slept, the wind had freshened
and driven them into some haven.

Two grazed shins and a banged head later – the gun deck through which he tripped had no guns but was stuffed with goods in
barrels and bails – he climbed the steep stair eagerly toward the light. And such light! The sun sliced into him, heating
what was already hot. He closed his eyes, using his hands to feel the last few steps up. When he reached the
quarterdeck, the combined effects of motion, sudden light and vicious heat had their effect. He staggered right, even though
it seemed uphill, and vomited over the rail. Only then did he see that they had reached no port, that the sea still stretched
away to the horizon and that it was as flat as the duck ponds in Hyde Park. He looked up. Such sails as were on the yards
hung limp. Finally, he looked across to the larboard rail where, it appeared, the entire ship’s company stood, no doubt adding
to the degree of heel. All had their backs to him, their attention, fortunately, on something else. Hoping perhaps that land
lay thither, and recognizing the exquisite linen of one particular shirt, Jack made his way over.

‘What is it?’ he said, sliding between the Irishman and the purser. Both of them had telescopes raised, along with half a
dozen others. ‘What do you all—’

‘Hush!’ Red Hugh lifted a finger to his lips, then pointed.

At first Jack could see nothing, such was the glare of sun behind him on the water. Squinting, eventually he saw what everyone
was staring at.

It was another ship. Having no clue as to its size, he was uncertain how far away it was. Far enough so he could distinguish
no person upon its decks; not so far that he could not tell that its sails, like those above him, also hung slack on the yards.

Despite the heat, Jack suddenly flushed cool, the pain inside his head forgotten. ‘Which colours does she fly?’ he whispered.

‘It is the question we’d all like answered,’ came the soft reply.

Jack stared harder. There was a piece of cloth on the ship’s stern that may have been a flag, but without wind to unfurl it,
there was nothing to expel the sudden fear now knotting his stomach as the residue of rum had knotted it. All knew that French
privateers cruised the sea lanes awaiting such
lone vessels as the
Sweet Eliza.
There was a good chance, of course, that it was an English privateer or indeed a ship from a host of other neutral countries.
There was a smaller chance that it owed allegiance to no country at all and flew under whatever colour it chose. Black, often,
the universal sign of the pirate.

Jack swallowed, looked about him at the silent, staring men. ‘Why is no one doing anything?’

‘And what would you have them do?’ There was irritation in Red Hugh’s reply. ‘You may have noticed that there’s no wind.’

Jack looked again at the limp cloths above him. ‘What happened to it?’

‘It died, dear joy, it died.’

Jack rubbed his eyes, looked again. It had to be a trick of light on water. Or maybe his eyes were just getting more used
to the glare. But the other ship’s details appeared a touch clearer.

‘They’re not making way, are they?’

‘They are.’

That cold flush came again. ‘But how?’ he said, suddenly annoyed. ‘How can they be? If the wind’s dead for us, it must be
dead for them, too!’