On a Making Tide (6 page)

Foley, sharp nose set dead ahead, went walking by, for all the world as though he hadn’t a care. Not much bigger than the boy to whom he had spoken, he’d been one of those in the mid’s berth who had not seen the need to take this new arrival down a peg or two: the escapade with the pissing competition had been prompted by humour rather than dislike. This had caused Nelson to wonder if he, too, had been an unwilling victim of Rivers’s attentions. Laughter – young and high-pitched mixed with the gruff older sounds – floated from the quarterdeck to his ears as Foley joined his peers, leaving Nelson to wonder what he’d said to them to make them laugh.

Tentatively, Nelson put his foot on the first rung, feeling it dip beneath his weight as he looked up at the long, rising stretch of square knotted ropes; the shrouds, which ran like a hempen ladder from the ship’s side, all the way up to the wide platform he thought was named the foremast top.

‘Clap on with one hand,’ he repeated to himself, as, taking a deep breath, he began to ascend.

Though the ropes moved, seeming to have a life of their own, he was pleasantly surprised at the ease of ascent, the strands of hemp being easy to grip. On a relatively windless day, they sloped in at an angle, so when he paused gravity laid him safely on the rope surface. The admonishment not to look down was one he knew from climbing trees, so he kept his eyes fixed upwards on his destination. This was the point at which the narrowing ropes passed the mainforemast yard, and touched the wood of the top, right by the lubber’s hole that would take him on to the wide fighting platform.

He was followed by hoots of derision that were quickly silenced by whatever authority was on deck. The top, over fifteen feet across, felt secure in these inland waters, where the roll of the ship was slight, and that was made even easier as
Raisonable
snubbed gently at her cables. The edge had no barrier except the next set of shrouds. Stepping out on to the exterior of those reprised all his fears and imaginings. This was a much narrower avenue, the roll more exaggerated as the height increased. The smaller upper foremast cap felt less secure, three connecting beams barely big enough for two men to stand on together. But he reached it, hooked his arm through a taut, convenient stay, then looked down gratefully and began to consider his position.

The way down was simple, the requirement being that he tell his uncle the truth. This was something he could not do, regardless of the consequences. After only two full days in the berth, he had formed an opinion about all his fellows; socially, morally and sexually. But what he had learnt was as secret as the fumblings in the holds. Recalling that, and
the smell of rot that pervaded the bottom of the hull, bilge water that no amount of vinegar and burning sulphur could make sweet, nearly made him gag.

To distract himself he spent the rest of the morning looking at the flat marshes that surrounded the anchorage, at the warships still anchored, with fishing smacks, bum boats and yachts either still in the water or racing for some unspecified destination. From this height he could see over the low marshes and the Kentish coast to the great watercourse of the river Thames. Upriver he imagined he saw the haze that covered London, smoke from a hundred thousand fires that filled the atmosphere of that great city, a noxious brew that had amazed a country boy from deepest Norfolk.

‘Mr Nelson.’ He looked down, to see the premier standing on forepeak. ‘You may return to the deck.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he replied, putting a foot over the edge to search for the first ratline rung of the shrouds.

‘What kind of lubber are you, sir?’ Fonthill yelled, in a voice that the boy imagined could be heard on land. ‘Do you not know to use the windward side?’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Nelson yelled back.

He crossed the platform to come down on to the weather side wondering as he descended whom he could ask to explain to him the reason for what he had just been told. But the slight wind on his back, pressing him in, provided its own explanation. He felt the ropes moving long before Rivers came into view. His tormentor shot past him before he could respond to the delivered insult. Arms moving like a monkey, Rivers swung out on to the upper cap, then grabbed hold of a backstay that ran from above his head to the deck, threw himself into seeming thin air, and shot down towards the deck, feet round the rope, hand over hand, whooping to demonstrate his superiority to the dumbstruck newcomer.

Nelson knew he had just been challenged, and wearily restarted his climb. He hauled himself without enthusiasm, back on to the narrow platform. The rope that Rivers had used to descend could not be reached by merely holding out a hand – he would have to jump for it. Looking down to the deck, a hundred feet below, he felt sick, as much by the faint straight lines of the caulking as by the sea of faces looking up and watching him. The dare was too stupid to accept, too blatant to be refused, and no order came from a superior to desist.

In those fleeting seconds he thought about his father and his family, all the pets lodged at Parsonage Farm and the friends he had had at school. But when he jumped, the image in his mind was of his mother, smiling benignly as he arced through thin air to catch the thick, rough stay with one hand. The leg that he got round it didn’t support him, and he dropped sickeningly, forced to use his other hand to prevent his arm being wrenched from its socket.

The attempt to clamp his free foot round the line was only partially
successful, as the pace of his descent increased alarmingly. Only his burning palms stood between him and disaster. At last he got some purchase with his legs, was able to slow down a fraction, in which moment he saw his proximity to the bulwark and the deck. It gave him the chance to judge the right moment to let go and he landed in an untidy heap, rolling over several times until he found himself close to stockinged legs, looking up into the frowning face of Lieutenant Fonthill.

‘Creditably done, Mr Nelson, for a first effort. But I will point out to you that what is necessary in an emergency will not answer at anchor. Skylarking in the rigging while berthed is forbidden. Since you are new you would not have been aware of that. Should you transgress again, however, I’ll stretch you across a gun, with your breeches down, and give you two dozen of my very best.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ the boy replied, struggling to his feet, to stand trembling before the premier. A cough behind him made him turn round, to find a pigtailed seaman holding out his hat.

‘Your coat is a disgrace,’ Fonthill continued. ‘Go and change it at once, then report back to the Captain.’

Rivers stood to the rear of Fonthill, surrounded, barring Dobree, by the rest of the mids. Keenly, Nelson examined their faces, gratified to see that if he excluded his tormentor and Makepeace, there was something close to respect in their stares. He clapped on his hat, raised it in salute, then headed for the companionway, the rest trailing in his wake.

‘Mr Rivers, you will report to me just after defaulters in the morning.’

The older midshipman raised his own hat to acknowledge the order. As a result he didn’t see Nelson lift a belaying pin from the rack. Nor, as he came down the companionway, out of strong light from the deck, were his eyes adjusted enough to pick out his adversary. So when Nelson clipped him round the ear with the long, round piece of wood, using enough force to stun him through his hat without breaking the skin, it came as a complete surprise.

Emma was right about Lady Glynne being ill. She died in high summer, and within a month the funds for Emma’s education had dried up. Sir John had not returned to Hawarden to see his wife buried, and the curate’s pleas that outstanding fees be remitted had been ignored. Word eventually came through Emma’s mother, and though carefully couched it was clear that the connection with Sir John, who was now free to pursue a second wife, had been broken.

Money did come, enough to pay for Emma’s keep, but not her schooling and no information either as to how Mary Lyon had earned it. Grandma Kidd was quick to kill off any speculation, as though Emma couldn’t help but notice how the whole family, who had boasted often of her mother’s good fortune, fell silent now, given to mumbling responses rather than clear answers when their neighbours made enquiries.

The news that her mother was coming home ‘to sort matters out for Emma’s future’ induced mixed feelings. Emma’s sense of attachment to both Hawarden and her nan, the pleasure she took in the tasks she now performed, made her unsure if she wanted anything to be different. Yet the other half of her reasoning engaged with her innate sense of adventure: the little voice that insisted that change was best. What worried her was the kind of transformation her mother had in mind.

‘If she’s not to be put to learnin’,’ insisted Mary Lyon, ‘then she’ll have to be put to something other.’

‘Leave the child be,’ hissed Grandma Kidd. ‘She ain’t of an age for toil.’

‘I don’t recall you saying that when I was just gone nine.’

‘Times alter,’ the old lady barked.

Anything but school, was Emma’s single thought. Her ear was pressed to the door, not that it needed to be. Like everything in the Steps, windows and roof included, it was a poor fit, a source of fierce draughts in winter. It was no aid to slumber when the men of the house, her father and uncle Willy, decided to stay up late over a jug of grain spirit, waste a candle and their breath, noisily putting to rights the county of Cheshire, as well as King George’s domains. Nor did the door disguise the grunts of copulation
between her grandparents, a rare occurrence but never a silent one, which taxed her powers of belief. Now, neither woman was making any effort to keep quiet and Emma’s mother continued in the same hard tone in which she’d made her opening remark.

‘It’s a burden to me that is hard to bear, Ma, though I’ll stand it to see her lettered and able to count. But I can’t be paying out good coin just so she can loaf around here.’

‘She don’t loaf around. She helps.’

‘Do what? Ply coal by the road for a few pennies a day so folk can cook their vittles? Is that to be the lot of my girl, a-squatting there waiting for some bright jay with half torn breeches to come along and catch her fancy?’

‘She’s too sharp for that.’

‘How come you’re so damn sure, Ma? You fell for my pa in like manner.’

‘Am I to be recalled for every sin in my life? That was in times past, an’ we ain’t done so bad neither. The Kidd house owes nowt to nobody.’

‘Then how come I’m required to send so much?’

‘It be ’cause I’m raising your bairn.’

‘All the more reason why it’s got to stop. I saw her when she came in, filthy she were, her hair all matted with the black dust. I could scarce bear to kiss her cheek.’

‘If she be that covered in filth,’ Grandma Kidd growled, ‘you’ve no fear for her being taken up by any passing fancy man.’

‘Ain’t I? Well, let me tell you I knows more about that than you. As for times, they don’t change when it comes to falling for the wrong blade, and I stand as testimony to that.’

Ordered to wash and brush her hair, Emma left the door and went to the rickety washstand, the voices fainter but still audible as they continued the argument. It was odd to the girl, who recalled that her mother and her gran had been right friendly at the time she had gone off with Sir John. But there had been more coin around then, enough for ribbons and a new dress. She decided, as she watched the water in the basin turn from clear to dark grey, that she would wear that same dress now, even if it was a mite small for her. The sight of it might cheer her ma, who looked very fine and fancy in what she was wearing, even to the quality of the buckles on her shoes.

The water was near black by the time she finished, so dirty that she chucked the contents out into the lane at the back of the house and refilled the bowl with what was left. Even that was discoloured when she had finished, testimony to how much of the coal stuck to her on a windy, August day. Yet for all the filth it was a job she enjoyed. There were her regular customers, who used the purchase as much to pass the time of day as to buy fuel for their fire. Naturally, given her age and the way she was growing there were boys around, gawky, spotty fellows in the main, who would guy her as a group and blush to the roots if faced with her on their own.

Work wasn’t all plain sailing, of course. Some of the women were shrews,
and it wasn’t confined to the old crones either. And there were the goats: men who couldn’t look at young girls without thinking themselves beauty enough to be considered swains. Age was little barrier to their fooling themselves. There were those who were old, at least thirty years, all the way up to men who could give years to her grandpa. What they had in common was a sweet tongue and a look in the eye that she now knew too well.

At first, Emma had taken as friendship their dallying by her handcart. The first untoward hand on her backside had soon disabused her of that notion, and she had to thank her stars for her grandma’s pitch being on such a busy spot, so that even a muted squeal was usually enough to deter the lecher. Failing that a cry of ‘There’s my grandma’ drove them far enough away to restore her safety.

Sometimes it was true. Grandma Kidd, on the box of her cart with the old nag puffing along, would come in from the coastal marshes with a fresh supply of sea coal heaped in the back. Beach scouring always produced something, and when the wind was right, strong and north-westerly, an abundance of washed up coal.

By the time she got to brushing her hair, a dampened cloth placed around her shoulders so that the dust dislodged didn’t spread, the heat had gone out of her elder’s argument. She counted the strokes in her head and fell into daydreams of herself on the arm of a handsome fellow, well dressed and about to enter his carriage and four. By a hundred strokes she was in a grand house, with a dark panelled entrance and a stairwell lit by a huge window. And there was always a bed at the end of a long corridor, soft, full of feathers, and because she was so young, it was a bed she occupied alone.

‘Two hundred,’ she said aloud, and stood to slip off the dirty dress she was still wearing. Even filthy it was neatly folded, as it was required for the morrow. No point in wearing something clean that would get just as dirty. With no smalls or petticoats on underneath, she stood naked for a second, looking down at the spreading nipples and hint of breasts she had sprouted these last weeks, and below them the first signs of silky hair between her legs. None of the other girls her age were, as yet, anything more than children, still squealing like infants when they played. Emma knew she had left them behind, and the thought was pleasing.

The scraping noise alerted her to two things: that she should have pulled the shutters before disrobing and that she wasn’t the only one looking at her body. Fighting back the temptation to glance round at the window, she went to the chest by the far wall that contained her dress and bent to open it. Part of her mind told her she should be outraged, that she should scream blue murder and have these peepers taken up. Yet another part of her took a delicious thrill in being watched.

Emma reckoned she knew who it was. Tom Meehan and Bart Higgins: two of the most tenacious of her workplace admirers, neither much more than two years older than herself. They thought she had no idea they
followed her home, but Emma knew all right, and that gave her pleasure too.

The smell of mothballs filled her nostrils as she shook out the blue dress and slipped it carefully over her head. Only then did she spin round sharply, quick enough to catch a glimpse of a pair of disappearing, becapped heads. Then, in a loud voice, as she tied her ribbons and finished her hair, she sang a song she had heard in the market, standing outside the Red Bull Inn, that she knew would increase the discomfort of her peeping Toms.

There were several more verses, which saw the peeper tarred and feathered, whipped, pilloried and finally blinded, but the scrabbling sound that came through the ill-fitting window made the continuation of the ditty unnecessary. That made Emma glow even more and, with a final look in her little glass, she went through to the parlour to greet her mother properly.

The pair sat on either side of the fire, her mother smiling and
straight-backed
in a low cut dress of fine green silk, her brown eyes alight. Nan was frowning and shaking her head, muttering to herself in a way that alarmed Emma. It seemed that while she had been brushing her hair, decisions had been taken.

‘Well, Emma,’ Mary Lyon said, her voice confident. ‘What do you say to a chance to enter household service? We shall find you a good family and a nice establishment, and maybe you can get back to your books.’

Her mother carried on, talking about rising in the household or maybe becoming a governess, if she could apply herself to learning, none of which did anything to cheer her grandmother. Emma wasn’t sure if she should be pleased or upset, the only idea in her mind that wherever she ended up might be more comfortable than the Steps.

‘What kind of bed does a girl get in service?’ she asked, breaking into her mother’s flow of assurances.

Mary Lyon’s eyebrows, pencilled to twice their normal size, went up in surprise. ‘Whatever do you mean, girl?’

‘Might they be allowed a feather mattress?’

‘I’ve no desire to accord my nephew favours, Mr Fonthill. But neither do I wish to see him expire before he ever gets sight of salt water.’

‘I’ve done what I can, sir, short of undermining Dobree or Mrs Killannan.’

Maurice Suckling knew that there were things he wasn’t being told.
Fonthill couldn’t be in ignorance of the true nature of events, even if he chose not to intervene. His nephew was engaged in a feud, the root cause of which he refused to divulge. Childless himself, Suckling was unaware that he was facing a perfectly normal parental dilemma. While demanding honest answers, he had to admire the way these were refused. Whatever punishment Nelson was being subjected to had to be suffered without recourse to either outside authority or family connection.

‘Things can’t go on like this,’ said Suckling, with a hint of a groan. ‘My arm aches from wielding that damned birch sapling. I’ve belaboured more haunches this past week than I have in the whole of my last commission.’

Fonthill didn’t reply, there being little he could say. There was nothing wrong with the Captain fetching a relative aboard, plenty of officers favoured their own, and though those sons and nephews often faced a torrid time in the mid’s berth, it usually died down when they learnt their place. Certainly there was bullying, and quite probably thievery in the article of food. Drinking was commonplace, and after life in a conventional home the shock of joining such a place was terrifying. But service life was harsh, a lesson that a midshipman best grasp as soon as possible.

‘Will there be anything else, sir? asked Fonthill, after a short pause.

Suckling glared at him. ‘Send my nephew to me.’

Nelson wasn’t winning his private battle, but neither was he losing. His reasons for fighting were simple: to prove to a group that must already have guessed the background to the conflict that he was more of a man than any of them. The berth had been split asunder for weeks now. The pups, led by him, now openly challenged the oldsters, with Dobree and Mrs Killannan trying and failing to hold the ring. Nelson was proud of his party, each willing to take what retribution was meted out to them rather than succumb to what he termed ‘arbitrary power’. He was fond of reminding them that they were trueborn Englishmen, using words recalled from his mother’s litany to raise them when spirits flagged.

Most of the day was spent in the carpenter’s walk. In a vessel at anchor inspections of the hull were infrequent. This was the quietest part of the ship, with a number of entrances and exits should danger threaten. They would go nowhere alone, lest the older boys waylay them – but that applied equally to their tormentors. Makepeace had certainly received a drubbing for ignoring that constraint, his howls of pain deeply satisfying as the smallest mids belaboured him with ropes’ ends while the remainder held him down. But the chief target was Rivers, who now bore a bandage on his head so that he couldn’t wear a hat. A typical bully, he never went anywhere unattended.

Foley, the bravest of Nelson’s companions who had been left as lookout, popped his head through the narrow hatchway that led to the orlop deck, his eyes bright, his long thin nose twitching as if he smelt danger.

‘Premier’s looking for you, Nelson. He’s sent a marine.’

Nelson shot out of the hatch, looked left and right to make sure it was safe, and scooted for the companionway, yelling in response to the marine calling his name. Fonthill was on the quarterdeck, pacing back and forth with a black look, the full force of which was turned on the Captain’s nephew as he appeared. He hated the lack of discipline. With the crew it would have been easy – a few men fetched up at the grating was enough to quell whatever ardent spirits had got out of control.