The Hunger (12 page)

There wasn’t.

Seven

A wave washed over the side and drenched John’s breeches and boots with the smell of the sea. The
Vengeance
loomed ahead against a sunset sky filled with the heaped clouds that threatened rain. Spray lashed his face. He shifted with the swell to keep his balance. His hands were shackled behind him with heavy iron. He was bound for purgatory in the form of a ship, stripped of masts and sails, lurching in the harbor and crammed with three times the human cargo the designers had intended.

When a frigate was no longer seaworthy the navy either broke her up for scrap or dismasted her and made her into a prison ship, commonly called a hulk. The
Vengeance
heaved sullenly on the swells of the coming storm. The English did not like to think they needed permanent prisons. Most English prisoners were only waiting transport to Botany Bay and the French would be paroled to France as soon as the war was won. Why should England pay to construct prisons just to get them through the present crisis? Crisis followed crisis and the war with France dragged on. So they filled the gap with ships. What better place to stow prisoners than in the
middle of freezing water, in a confined area that was easy to guard?

The four guards in the skiff heaved at the oars, drawing the skiff up beside the frigate. All was quiet late at night. The gun ports were locked shut. The decks were empty, except for sentries striding fore to aft. No light shone save under the quarterdeck where the captain of this abomination and the guards would be barricaded behind heavy oak overlaid with beaten iron to protect them from their charges. Below, five hundred prisoners were left to their own devices, living in squalor. The skiff kissed the side of the hulk covered with seaweed and barnacles.

His commitment took on frightening proportions. Thank god Barlow had provided one guard aboard who could vouch for his true identity and watch his back. Prisoners on the hulks died from starvation, disease, or violence by both prisoners and guards. John had begun to think of this faceless Faraday as a lifeline already.

The guards did not unshackle him so he could crawl up the stairs poking from the side of the hulk. One called out sharply to unseen men above. A hook was lowered from a boom. They slipped it under one of his arms at the shoulder and signaled. The rope jerked upward and he was hauled bodily aboard, wrenching his shoulder with the weight of his own body.

Collapsing on his knees upon the deck, he heard a rough voice say, “Well, what ’ave we ’ere? The latest Frenchie, lookin’ for a lesson?” He raised his head and looked into a heavy English face that spoke of coarse beginnings. Thick lips, thick brows, dull eyes, and largish ears, all stuffed inside an English naval uniform that looked two sizes too small. The ruffian jerked his knee up and caught John’s chin. John went reeling to the deck. Dimly he heard the wastrel say, “Strip off them fine clothes and take ’is boots. They’ll bring some shillings in town.”

Panicking, John thought of the sticking plaster that held the oil-cloth pouch flat to his chest. Two shapes descended on him. One pulled at his boots, the other unlocked his manacles. When his hands were free, the guard rose and kicked him over his loins. “Get that there coat off, French dog.” He squirmed out of his coat and unbuttoned his breeches. The guard crowed at finding the three louis he had left in the pockets. When all that remained was his shirt, he rolled onto his belly on the deck. They pulled it off him, but they couldn’t see his oilskin packet pressed against the boards. They tossed him some roughly made togs of yellow canvas as he lay naked and shivering on the deck.

“ ’Eave him below wif ’is fellows,” one of them cried.

He scrambled to his hands and knees, his back toward the ruffians, clutching the canvas uniform to his chest to cover the packet. They shoved him through a hatch. He tumbled down a ladder to the deck below. Lying in a heap, he tried to breathe. The air down here was close and fetid with the odor of bodies and tobacco, tar and that fecund smell of wet wood at sea.

John rolled his bruised body onto his back hoping he hadn’t broken anything and saw the square of lighter black disappear. When the echo of the wooden hammer battening the hatch had died, John heard breathing and movement around him. Coughs, soft oaths in French and English and something he thought was Dutch swelled over his returning senses just as rough hands dragged him up. As his eyes adjusted to the greater darkness he could make out dim forms of crouched men and swinging hammocks.

“Ye cain’t stay ’ere. Deck is full.”

“Get down to the orlop. That’s where the new ones goes.”

He stumbled and was pushed toward another hatch. He half slid to the deck below, landing on a body crouched at the bottom of the ladder. He fell to his knees.

“A new one, eh? Down! Down below.”

“I’ll take them clothes.” Someone made to snatch the canvas he clutched to his chest. John tore himself away and made for the next hatch. Throwing himself feet first into the blackness, he slid down, breaking the hold of the hands that snatched at his arms and ankles.

The orlop deck was pitch-black and, if possible, the atmosphere was even closer than on the decks above. It was a wonder men didn’t faint or even die down here.

“Français?”
a voice whispered.

“According to my parents.” His flawless French had saved his life many times.

“There is room in the corner.”

John looked around. It was so black he could not see at all. But hands came out and guided him, more gently than on the decks above. “Did they give you a blanket?”

“They gave me these rags and a kick down the hatch.” He stumbled over bodies.

“François—get Linnet’s blanket. He can’t feel the cold now.”

A thin blanket was pressed into his hand he was pushed down into a narrow space under the hammocks. “Merci,” he whispered to his benefactor. “Your name?”

“Reynard,” came the fading reply.

John settled himself as best he could, feeling his sore ribs and back for damage. He shrugged his wrenched shoulder and decided it was not dislocated. Then he donned the canvas suit and pulled the thin blanket around him, shivering.

“If you live long enough, you may inherit a hammock,” the denizen above him said.

“I’ll live,” John vowed under his breath.
“Pardonnezmoi.”
He apologized to his neighbor.

“No apologies needed. He’s dead. You have his blanket. At least you’ll have more room when they haul him out.”

John pushed himself against the tarred bulkhead, away
from his neighbor corpse. His stomach protested against the rise and fall of the ship with the swell of the growing storm. He fouled his sleeping place with vomit. No one seemed to notice except the man above him, who let out a guffaw. “You’d best get used to being belowdecks in a heavy sea,” he cackled. “Or you’ll end like Linnet there.”

For the first time, a thread of doubt wound through John’s heart. His plan to find Dupré. convince him to reveal the name of the central figure behind the French intelligence, and then escape seemed a little naïve. And Lord knows naïveté had been his undoing in the past. Well, if he failed, he would just go to Faraday . . .

He wouldn’t fail. He wouldn’t ask to be taken off the hulks, no matter how bad it got. He couldn’t fail Barlow, and he couldn’t fail England. If French spies had free rein, how far was it from invasion and defeat? England was the only thing between Bonaparte and all of Europe.

He clutched the blanket round his shoulders and tried to think of anything besides the heaving of his stomach. An image came to him of Beatrix Lisse; her hair like coals glowing faintly red, and her eyes, normally so languid and bored, snapping when provoked . . . He smiled. Oh, she would be angry with him about now. Would she hear that he had missed their engagement for a mill? He did not doubt it. And he could never tell her otherwise. But it would not matter. A woman like that would accept no reason why he should not have kept his engagement. By the time he returned, her obviously capricious interest would have moved on.

It was for the best. A man like him had no business with any but the denizens of Covent Garden. Beatrix Lisse was just the same, of course, a courtesan. She made no attempt to hide it. But she had more intellect, more mystery, more emotional intensity somewhere below her cavalier attitude than any woman he had ever met. Was she a spy? Useless to speculate. She would never let him
get close enough to find out, now. He would have to leave that to Barlow. The thought that she would never receive him was depressing, though.

His stomach got the better of him once again. He was in for a long night.

The only way he knew it was day was that the prisoners were rousted to the waist of the ship for counting, deck by deck. He had shivered all night in the dark stench of the orlop deck. By morning there was hardly air to breathe. So the brisk wind blowing across the waist of the
Vengeance
felt like heaven, in spite of the cold that struck to his bones. His fellow prisoners were a ragged bunch. Some yellow canvas suits were so weather-beaten they were almost white. Each bore the initials T.O. for Transport Office. Some prisoners were naked or nearly. These might be taken for madmen with beards and hair in disarray. Whether they had traded their clothes for food or had had them stolen, it was impossible to tell. The prisoners were thin, some spectrally so. He glanced around the deck, packed with silent men. The guards were a sullen lot, sailors judged unfit to go to sea. They were the dregs of the navy. Which one was Faraday?

A little officer, almost as round as he was tall, made his way to the edge of the quarterdeck. His uniform was tricked out with gold braid at every turn, and he wore a huge rosette of gold upon his hat. The effect only served to make his person seem less elegant, not more. He did not wear the epaulettes of a captain, however. A lieutenant his age who hadn’t made captain never would. That could turn an ambitious man mean.

“Is this our jailer?” John whispered to the man pressed against him to his right.

“Lieutenant Rose,” the Frenchman spat.

John glanced around, recognizing the voice. “Reynard?”

The man nodded, his eyes crinkled. He was a large
man with a nose that was much too large and a generous mouth that gave his face an open expression.

“Thank you for the blanket. I might have frozen to death.”

“Shush,” another man hissed. “Do you want punishment?”

A guard jerked his head around. “You there!” He pointed to John. “Step forward.”

Now John knew why the deck was silent. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd. A guard approached and ordered him to lace his fingers behind his neck. Then the brute gave him a back-handed blow to the head with his truncheon. John staggered, but he got his feet under himself and stood. This adversary was the one who had hit him the night before.

“Ohh, Lieutenant, we got a live one here,” the brute chortled, and raised his truncheon again. John braced himself, but someone behind the guard called out in a reedy voice.

“I was warned about that one. He’ll be punished, never fear. But we’ve more important game afoot just now, Mr. Walden.”

“Back to your place,” Walden growled, disappointed of his game.

John stood where he was, fingering the blood at his temple, before hands pulled him back into the crowd. He tore his gaze from the guard, who seemed excited by his insolence. What did Rose mean, he had been warned? There was an air of expectancy among the prisoners.

The lieutenant cleared his throat loudly at the edge of the quarterdeck. “I know how you murderous lot fuddled the count yesterday to give your extremely stupid compatriots time to make good their escape.” His voice held a natural whine.

John could feel the prisoners hold their collective breath.

“Carpenters are even now sealing the holes you cut between the decks.”

Clever, John thought, to send men slipping between decks so that the escapees would not be missed. Still the prisoners held their breath. They cared not if their ruse was found out if it had served its purpose. John did not like the smug smile on the lieutenant’s pudgy face.

“Gentlemen.” The lieutenant nodded to four guards who pulled on ropes hanging from a boom on the forecastle. The rasp of rope against wood was nearly drowned by a murmur of dread that went through the packed bodies as they began to understand what might be coming.

The bodies that flopped over the rail of the forecastle were naked and gray-white, having been submerged in the nearly freezing water for some time. They were pierced by the same kind of hooks that had raised John last night, but these went through their backs and protruded through their sternums rather than being hooked under their arms. Any blood had washed away. That left them looking more like carcasses than human bodies. A horrified gasp went up around the deck. John went still. Escape was looking more difficult by the moment. He hoped Faraday would have some ideas. He searched among the guards for a face that might be friendlier, but he could see only hardened scowls and self-satisfied grins.

“So you see,” the lieutenant continued, “as usual, escape failed. Why do you do it?” he mused. “Sure, it lends interest to my job, but to you? Disappointment and death.” He rubbed his hands. “Now to the punishment. Rations to be cut in half for three days.”

A groan went up from the prisoners.

“And . . .” The lieutenant’s voice rose over the din. “All trade is suspended with the shore. You’ll make do with prisoners’ rations from now on.”

At this the groan turned to an angry growl.

“And all your possessions forfeit.”

The prisoners looked around in panic. There was some brouhaha belowdecks. A crane pulled up a net from below filled with bedding, clothing, and a mishmash of what might, in some other world, be trash. The net was swung out over the side and into the bay.

Moans of despair shot through the crowd.

“Get them below. No exercise today.” The lieutenant turned on his heel and retreated to the rear of the quarterdeck to confer with his officers. Guards began to herd the men below.