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Authors: C.C. Humphreys

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‘Perhaps, sir,’ he said, ‘if you had experienced the helplessness of a slave you would be less prepared to exploit it.’

Link leaned his jowly, purple-bruised face across at Jack. The man was scorbutic, his foul breath and decaying teeth additional
indicators of the scurvy that had taken half the crew. ‘Do you speak again of your
weeks
spent with the Abenaki savages?’

Jack nodded. He had told the story of his capture and escape after the Battle of Quebec in the early nights of the voyage
when they had all still been polite strangers. Now, two months into the crossing, it was another source of mockery for Link.
‘I do. And may I say—’

‘May I say,’
interrupted the Captain, his Bristol accent fashioning a mockery of Jack’s Westminster School-ed one, ‘that you were
never
a slave.’

‘Are you calling a me a liar, sir?’

Jack’s voice, instead of rising, had dropped to a whisper. Link recognized the danger. The challenge went, if the mockery
did not. ‘Not at all. But I do say you mistook your state. For you are both white, Christian and, above all, a Briton. And
as you well know,’ he opened his half-toothed jaw and sang, ‘ “Britons never never never will be slaves.” ’

The purser and the surgeon, when they recognized the tune, joined in, thumping their approval with pewter mugs.

The verse done, the Captain continued. ‘Now, shall I tell you my favourites from among the tribes?’ He licked his lips. ‘The
Yaruba, see, are tall and strong but have narry enough flesh on ’em, to my taste. The Mina are squat and too plump. No, sirs,
for breasts and thighs, there’s none that can compare with your Ibo.’

When Link’s cronies had finished with their huzzahs, when silence was brought by the necessity of more guzzling, a quiet voice
intruded. ‘Now, Captain, I was wondering, so I was, about a little point you might clarify for me?’

Link wiped his mouth. Since the Irishman rarely spoke at his table the Captain had few weapons against him, apart from the
more obvious jibes at his country. ‘Well, sir?’

‘I was wondering,’ Red Hugh continued, ‘how Mrs Link and all the little Links of Bristol – six of the small blessings, I believe
you said – how they received the joyous news of so many African siblings?’

Jack only saw it because he happened to glance at Barabbas who was carrying the rum jug away. But that broken hand was raised,
just failing to conceal the briefest of smiles.

The slave was swifter than the master. ‘Mrs Link …’ he gaped.

‘And all the little Links,’ Red Hugh repeated.

Comprehension came. ‘You dare – dare! – to place my wife in the same breath as … as …’

‘But, to be sure, as you were mentioning your progeny so fondly yourself, I thought your help-meet must share in your joy.
Not to mention all the little Links.’

Something about the repetition seemed to cause a dangerous mottling and puffing of the already purple jowls, and almost made
Jack laugh, for as the Captain began to push himself up from the table he looked like nothing so much as a deranged and dangerous
turkey.

‘Do … you know, sir, who you insult? I am God aboard my own ship. I could have you … make you … you would be stripped … whipped
…’

Link had taken three steps forward, bringing his head level to the taller man’s chest, for Red Hugh had also risen. They could
not have been more opposite in shape – a bull terrier pressing into a heron. The Captain’s hand was shoved into the Irishman’s
immaculate waistcoat – how the man remained so clean when the rest of them were so grubby mystified Jack – and he appeared
to be engaged in wrenching off a pearl button. But as Jack watched, he saw the Irishman’s hand – its knuckles as covered in
red hair as the rest of him – drop onto the Captain’s wrist.

‘What do you—’ Link began, then stopped, his eyes suddenly quizzical, the purple of his face whitening.

‘Now, now,’ said Red Hugh softly. ‘Now, now.’

There was no sudden movement, nothing seemed to happen. But the Captain suddenly pulled away, backwards, sitting down hard
into his chair. And as soon as he did, he vomited, spraying rum and salt cod across the table.

It was Red Hugh who reached him first, an arm around his back. ‘Dear Captain, dear soul. Some water there, heh?’

Water was brought, drunk, spewed up. The surgeon came and felt the Captain’s head. Link himself, gagging still, sat with filmy
eyes.

‘I think, my dears, that our leader requires his bed. A good signal to retire to ours, eh, young Jack?’

Jack, who had hardly left off staring at Link, enjoying what he was seeing, nodded. While Barabbas, the purser and the surgeon
half-dragged Link across the room to his bunk, Jack and Red Hugh went to the cabin door accompanied by Lieutenant Engledue,
who was awake at last. He yawned. ‘I think I will seize the moment, too,’ he murmured, holding the door open for them. ‘Pity
about our noble leader. This Guinea rum, eh? It’s meant for the black traders, of course, who sell their kin to us. White
folk can hardly handle it. Give me a smooth Madeira any day.’

With a knowing smile to Red Hugh and a bow to Jack, he headed to his own bunk.

The Irishman pulled Jack the other way, towards the quarterdeck. ‘A breath, do you not think, lad?’

The air, as it had been for several days now, was heavy and hot. The south-westerlies that had at first driven them fast across
the Atlantic, trailing a memory of icy New Found Land, had died on them two weeks before. Since then progress had been slow,
every sail hoisted to catch what little breeze there was. Moreover, it was clear that no one was quite sure exactly where
they were. Though he knew little of navigation, Jack was aware a midday sighting of the
sun was required to gauge latitude. And the clouds that held the muggy heat upon them had prevented a view for several days
now.

Still, after the stench of Link’s cabin, even this air was an elixir. Down below, while the winds had driven them and it was
too cold to stay on deck, they’d lived in a fug compounded of bodies that were never washed, of men succumbing to scurvy as
their teeth rotted, of damp wool and canvas washed in urine and never given a chance to dry. They’d eaten weevil-filled biscuits
and green meat, and belched out too much rum by the light and reek of whale-sperm candles. And beneath all this, the base
note of all scents still survived, no matter how often vinegar was scrubbed across the decks and gunpowder flashed in the
holds: the stink of a slave ship where Negroes had been chained together in their own shit and vomit and ceaseless terror.
As soon as the weather improved a jot, both Red Hugh and Jack had slung their hammocks on the quarterdeck. Even if he’d shivered
the first few nights, at least Jack still had his bearskin – and never did he think he’d say that its lingering smell was
close to sweet. Yet, after eight weeks of imprisonment by the wind, it almost was.

‘Onion?’

Jack shuddered. ‘Must I?’

‘You know you must. Unless you care for a touch of what’s making our noble Captain’s breath fouler than nature already did?’

‘And why are you certain this has any effect on the condition?’ grumbled Jack, taking the yellowing bulb and reaching for
his paring knife.

‘Sure, and did I not read James Lind’s great treatise on the subject? Did not my company of Grenadiers survive the six-month
siege of Kiskunhalas by eating almost nothing else?’ Red Hugh had expertly peeled the skin in one piece and now dropped it
onto the deck. ‘We had the complexion of
choirboys at the end of it,’ he said, munching happily, ‘and farts that could have floated a coach and four.’

Jack laughed and began peeling his onion, as the tinkle of a bell told him that a friend drew near. Jeremiah, sole survivor
of the five goats taken on board at Newport, nipped at his trouser leg. The goat had already snaffled the Irishman’s dropped
onion skin, so, to a disapproving grunt from his companion – Jack was ever an easy mark for the goat – he sliced off a quarter
of his onion and let it fall. The three chewed for a while in silence until Jeremiah, seeing that nothing else was forthcoming,
went off to scrounge elsewhere.

Suddenly Jack remembered what had allowed them this escape to the deck. ‘The Captain. What did you do to him?’

‘Poor auld fella was taken ill suddenly, is all.’

‘Tell me.’

Red Hugh considered, then swallowed the last of his onion. ‘Finish that and give me your hand.’ With a grimace, Jack duly
did. The Irishman held him almost in a handshake but slightly higher, on the wrist, the grip light. ‘Now now,’ he said, as
he had to the Captain, ‘now, now.’ Then he squeezed hard, the pad beneath his forefinger boring in under Jack’s thumb.

The pain was sudden, intense and made Jack’s knees give. Red Hugh prevented his fall. Taking his hand back, Jack rubbed it,
inhaling deeply to clear the nausea. ‘How … ?’ he said after several moments.

Red Hugh shrugged. ‘I had it from a man who had it from a man who had it from a man … from Transylvania.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s up on the border with the Turks. Some of our lads fought there.’ He smiled. ‘And now you have it.’

Jack pushed himself off the rail, eager. ‘You’ll have to show me again.’

‘I will. But later. You can only learn it by the receiving of
the thing. And you’ll be needing a little time to gather yesself.’

Jack looked at his companion, wondering yet again. What did he truly know of this Red Hugh McClune? The man had leaked out
some information about his past, on certain subjects – women often, some cases he’d taken as a lawyer in Dublin, for example.
Mostly, since his audience demanded it, he’d told of his time in the Austrian Army. He’d not been a mere soldier but a Grenze.
All had heard of them, the finest light infantry in Europe it was said, drawn largely from the Balkan provinces to serve the
Hapsburgs against the Turks. Why an Irishman had joined them was never explained, though apparently he was one of many. The
man was a born storyteller, could entrance an audience with his tales of breaches stormed, ambuscades laid, hideous tortures
undergone. Yet question him on his present, as Jack tried to do, and only vagueness came. A trader, he’d say, sometimes. An
engineer, at others.

Jack rubbed his wrist. ‘I think, sir, that you are a very dangerous man.’

His companion turned his face again to the sea. ‘Oh no, lad. I used to be a dangerous man, when I was younger. Not any more.’

He had never stated his age. Jack took him to be near forty, a little grey in the beard he’d started growing the day he came
aboard, which was full within a week – unlike Jack’s black one, only now coming into its prime. If they were nearly of a height,
the thick mat of curly hair – the colour nearly the scarlet of the Dragoon coat Jack had stowed below – made the Irishman
seem much taller. And if they matched each other in a slim physique, Red Hugh’s seemed to be constructed entirely from whipcord
and scar.

Jack laughed. ‘Not too old to be swimming in the Atlantic in April, though?’

‘Ah, well!’ Red Hugh laughed, too. ‘That’s different. If
danger goes, folly with the ladies is the one thing age does not seem to alter.’ He turned to Jack, his blue eyes sparkling.
‘As I am sure you will continue to discover.’

Jack, in an effort not to appear a completely dull dog, had told a few tales of his own; especially of Fanny Harper, the courtesan
who’d undertaken aspects of his ‘education’ not covered by the curriculum at Westminster School. The Irishman’s jest made
him think on her, wonder again what had become of her.

The last time he’d seen Fanny she’d been standing near naked and shamed in the Rotunda Pleasure Gardens, at Vauxhall, moments
before the man who’d kept her, Lord Melbury, was shot to death by Jack’s father in a duel. The consequences of that night
had led him … here, he supposed, to the deck of the
Sweet Eliza
by way of war, slavery and a Quaker widow’s flannel sheets. He hoped that Fanny had survived her disgrace, her charms leading
her to another rich man’s bed. It was how she lived, after all.

This sudden memory – both of her and the mayhem caused by the discovery of their affair – now made him sigh. ‘I regret to
say you may be in the right.’

Red Hugh dropped a hand onto Jack’s shoulder.
‘Nun-quam paenitet,
lad. Never regret. Isn’t it the motto of the family McClune?’ His fingers suddenly dug in. ‘You know, I seem to recall there’s
another point somewhere … in here.’

Jack shrugged from the grip, catching the Irishman’s hand, twisting it back. He knew a few tricks of his own from his upbringing
in Cornwall. They wrestled, hands slipping and gripping, seeking dominance, both laughing, until they heard a footfall and
pulled apart to see who came.

It was the boatswain, McRae. A Scot, Jack had parted with an outrageous two ermine skins to the fellow for a set of sailor’s
clothes when it became clear that the two changes he’d allowed for the voyage would be insufficient, especially in the storms
when nothing dried. So, like Jack, he was
dressed in canvas trowsers – infinitely preferable with their drawstring to wool breeches, especially in the Heads when the
ship was bucking and plunging and buttons annoyed – a bum-freezer jacket and check shirt. They were both London pigeons to
Red Hugh’s peacock. Somehow, the Irishman, even in the worst of the weather, always contrived to have dry, clean clothes which,
moreover, would not have been unfashionable at St James’s Palace. The dark-green waistcoat and burgundy coat he sported now
caused Jack especial envy.

McRae put knuckles to forehead, a sailor’s salute. ‘Mr McClune, we’ve pipes lit and a jug in the fo’castle, if you care to
join us.’

‘Does Murphy play? Or is he too drunk?’

The sailor nodded. ‘He’s had just enough to make his bow fly, and not enough to bring it crashing to the earth. Yet.’

‘Then I will join you with pleasure before it does. For he’s a demon with the fiddle.’ The sailor headed for’ard while Red
Hugh turned to Jack. ‘So, my lad, I’ll to my countryman and you to your rest. Unless …’ He called up the deck, ‘McRae, can
my young friend not join us this night?’

BOOK: Absolute Honour
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