The Stuart Sapphire (2 page)

‘I think it is time to make a move. Ready?’ And so saying, Tam, after a cautious look at the still empty ship’s rail, inched forward and, after some anxious moments, managed to undo the heavy rope linking boat to ship.

Pushing aside the tarpaulin he nodded towards one of the oars. ‘Take it.’

‘I’ll try,’ was the uncertain reply. ‘It’s very heavy.’

‘That will be all right once we are moving, the sea will keep it afloat,’ said Tam with a confidence he was far from feeling.

The departing storm had left not the inky darkness but the steely twilight of a long summer evening in which they would be clearly visible, an added danger to their escape, thought Tam, should any decide to stroll on the deck.

However, a glimpse of candlelight from an upper-deck cabin window brought faint sounds of drunken laughter, indicating that the jailers were off duty and too busy with their noisy leisure to notice any sounds from beyond the ship.

Tam looked at the boy struggling with the oar. ‘Steer away. We’ll be safe soon. What’s your name, lad?’

‘Jem, sir. Is it far?’

Tam thought it would be easy, rowing steadily towards the shore. But distance was deceptive, those white cliffs further away than he had imagined.

‘Is it far?’ the boy shouted again.

A difficult question to answer. Even as he thought of a plausible statement that would not reduce his companion’s spirits – or his somewhat ineffectual rowing, the boy screamed and dropped the oar.

Tam saw it floating away and cursed him steadily.

‘Why did you let it go? What did you do that for?’

‘My hands – they’re sore. Look at my blisters.’

Tam had no desire to see his wounds; he could have cheerfully added to them by strangling him, but instead he was considering a more urgent problem: how the prevailing offshore wind might help them reach land with only one oar.

Suddenly, like some miracle of prayers answered, the horizon was no longer deserted as the dark shape of an approaching ship loomed into view.

A three-masted frigate was heading rapidly in their direction.

The boy stood up, regardless of the effect on the balance of the boat, and yelled:

‘Help! Help!’

‘Sit down, you idiot. They can’t hear you. And you’ll have us in the sea. Do as I say.’

The boy sat down wearily, nursing his hands and sobbing quietly.

‘Stop that – when they get nearer, then you can start shouting and they’ll see us and hear us.’

Tam was not, however, totally confident about that either and wished he had something, a lantern, any kind of light to show the ship bearing down on them where they were.

It was certainly gaining on them, moving very rapidly, and a feeling of horror added to their danger. This was no
longer a frigate homeward bound but a crippled and dying vessel, masts dangling, sails ripped. What concerned him most was that although the tide and the prevailing wind were driving it towards the shore – and them – the crash of breaking timbers indicated that it was also sinking rapidly.

Thanks to the deft use of his telescope by the captain of a small merchant vessel on its way along the Channel, the fishermen of Brighton had been alerted to the plight of a Scottish frigate, the
Royal Stuart
, adrift and heading landwards.

This promising drama had succeeded in summoning George, Prince of Wales, newly created Prince Regent in his mad father George III’s sad decline, from the arms of his latest conquest, Sarah, Marchioness of Creeve, presently sated and asleep in his bed.

Attired in one of his more spectacular naval uniforms, chosen at random, he had joined other spectators in the fading light of a summer evening where a canopy had been hastily erected on the promenade to protect the royal viewers from the townsfolk’s vulgar gaze.

This measure also offered protection from the thieves who inhabited Brighton’s ever-growing underworld which, like fleas on a dog, had now settled happily in the area surrounding the Marine Pavilion.

A royal court meant royal pickings and twilight was
their friend, with enough illumination to assist cutpurses in such an audience of eager spectators, yet enough dusk to make sure they slipped away unobserved. For all knew the price of capture, the gibbets chain-rattling their burdens on high ground above the town, a grisly testament to the cost of failure.

As for the royal courtiers, the solemn sight of a sinking ship had already ensured a brisk trade of their own. Bets on how long it would take the ship to sink beneath the waves, and whether there would be any survivors and most of all how many might be expected to reach the shore alive. An entertainment that was considerably more exciting than watching fowls or animals tearing each other to pieces, or even the bloodier, brutal human boxing matches. True, the latter had a certain secret appeal to many of the court ladies as a more stimulating experience than the daily boredom of gown-fittings and Court gossip.

Here was novelty indeed, a new kind of entertainment with many human lives in hazard, and an air of excitement prevailed as, for those addicts to gambling on anything and everything, there was already a clerk seated in his carriage busily taking promissory notes.

Amongst the more fervent, the prince had challenged George ‘Beau’ Brummell: ‘100 guineas against the ship sinking within the next half hour.’

The response: ‘Give you 200 guineas against any survivors.’

His Royal Highness’s sporting tastes were not shared by his fifteen-year-old daughter Princess Charlotte, stammering protests at his side.

‘I – I – Do you think Papa, co – consider – such – m – m – matters?’

Prince George regarded his only legitimate offspring,
heiress to the throne of England, with distaste. Aware that he had never liked her from the very day she was born, repulsed by the sight of ‘an immense girl’ and remarking before witnesses who had long memories: ‘We would have hoped for a son.’

And that was it, the fact that gnawed at his guts through the passing years, the gross unfairness that even the power of Divine Right of kings did not extend to producing a son – and securing the future dynasty of England.

Wearily he turned his back on Charlotte, seeing a parade of all the women he had slept with since he was a lad of sixteen. The latest and very voluptuous Sarah Creeve was also mistress of his younger brother Frederick, Duke of York, which gave the affair a certain extra titillation. Last seen and heard snoring as he crept out and looking less like the ‘Kitten’ (so-called for her slanting green eyes) than a fat tabby cat, with a passion for jewels to enhance her nakedness.

He sighed. Even the poorest peasant was welcome to his favours, his proud boast that satisfaction of his lust merely required a tolerably pretty woman with full breasts: ‘a bright wench and clean straw.’

It was unfair that Fate had been so grossly unkind. Considering that his scattered seed could have populated a small town with a multitude of largely unacknowledged (but still eternally clamouring) fine, healthy sons, on more than one occasion he regarded Charlotte closely.

He would have liked to prove that she had not sprung from his loins. God only knew how many lovers his wretched Princess Caroline of Wales had taken to her bed in the sixteen years since their marriage. But seeing the girl’s face reflected beside his own in the mirror left him in no doubt over her legitimacy. She was unmistakably his daughter.

The miraculous product of an arranged marriage, hideous to him, and from only two copulations with his unsanitary foul-smelling bride. The first on their wedding night heavily reinforced with wine. Rising from the floor where he had slept as dawn crept through the window of their bridal chamber, he had slipped between the sheets and performed his dynastic duty. And again with equal reluctance some days later when this most unlikely princess had been spawned.

After her birth he could have, should have, tried again, fought back his nausea for his bride’s unwashed body: ‘fore and hind parts indescribably filthy,’ he whispered to his intimates. And although his manhood could normally be guaranteed to rise to the occasion, ready and eager when required, even fortified by large quantities of stimulants, it remained limp and flaccid in his lawful marriage bed with his lawful or, as he most frequently referred to her, his ‘awful’ wife.

Charlotte was clutching his arm, stammering her protests, whining that she was cold, she wished to go indoors. He signalled to her governess whose curtsey did not quite conceal a look of disapproval.

He watched them head back towards the Pavilion and sighed deeply. He must marry the girl off without delay. There were plenty of royal families in Europe hovering in the wings anxious and eager to negotiate an alliance with the future Queen of England.

An arranged marriage to a royal prince, such as William of Orange, had a certain appeal to the Prince Regent. Candidly he cared not to whom, and refused to listen to Charlotte’s protests that she did not want to marry for years and years and, when the time came, that she would choose her own husband. Her future, such a small matter
of whether she would be happy or not, did not concern him, his only reason for the hustle was the hope of male issue. The nearest he would ever get to securing the throne for a grandson of his own dynasty.

‘It’s sinking, Sire. Only minutes now…’

‘It’s going down…’

A panic-stricken rush to the clerk’s carriage with hands eagerly waving promissory notes ensued. The prince rewarded, to his gleeful satisfaction, with a baleful glance from Brummell who had just lost 100 guineas, gave permission for a return to the Pavilion.

Back to bed? His thoughts returned with little enthusiasm as he remembered how early morning light could render exceeding tawdry the naked, bejewelled body of Sarah Creeve eagerly awaiting his return.

He sighed deeply, in sore need of a devotion less demanding as from the direction of Steine House, home of Mrs Fitzherbert, candles gleamed in the upstairs window. Maria Fitzherbert, commoner and Roman Catholic, twice widowed, whom he had married secretly in 1785 and whom he still regarded as his legal wife with undying affection, although not with undying
faithfulness
. Maria had never reproached him, always aware that a dynastic royal marriage was inevitable, and she pretended, at least, to understand that gratification of lust had little to do with impeding the course of his true love.

Another glance towards that inviting candlelit window and with a whisper to his equerry, a cloak thrown over his uniform, he could still hear the cheers for the lost ship echoing as his carriage headed across the Steine.

‘It’s going down,’ shrieked the boy.

It was indeed. Tam shouted: ‘Hang on, whatever you do.’

A mile offshore and Tam, aware of the deadly danger, was using the one remaining oar to steer their tiny boat out of the path of the sinking ship.

They were too close. If it hit them they were doomed. They would go under with it. And avoiding that, as it sank the swell in its wake would break their frail craft like matchwood and carry them to the bottom of the sea.

Where was its crew? Dead or drowned, for its deck seemed deserted of all life. Then with an almighty tearing sound, the groan of a dying giant, sails ripping, a shriek of timbers, the masts were ripped from their moorings.

Tam and the boy hung on grimly as the wreck vanished beneath the waves. Seized as if in some sea-monster’s relentless fist, helpless, they watched as an enormous wave sped towards them, lifting the boat, heaving them up into the air, holding them on its crest before hurling them back down again into the sea.

Gasping for breath, Tam surfaced first, looked for the boy. Saw a white face, a thin arm and grabbed it.

‘Hold on!’

A piece of mast, strong and sturdy, surfaced and drifted by.

‘Seize it!’

As the boy did so, Tam’s worst fears were realised.

That boiling frothy sea in the momentum of the ship’s last moments had carried them further away from the distant shore, where pinpoints of light were now barely visible.

There was only one solution. He pointed. ‘Swim for it! You can swim, I take it.’

He wasn’t sure whether the answer was yes or no, so he shouted: ‘Hang on to the spar, it’ll carry you in. It’s not far off.’

‘Look! There’s another ship!’ shouted the boy.

Turning his face from the shore, Tam saw a small cutter rocking across the waves towards the spot where the ship had gone down.

‘We’re saved!’ And the boy so saying began to wave and shout for help.

Tam could see figures on board, leaning over, watching. They certainly seemed to be looking in their direction.

A fishing boat – what a piece of luck, he decided as it turned towards them.

‘We’re saved,’ the boy sobbed. As the cutter loomed above him, Tam realised that while he would be glad to have seen the lad to safety, the more dominant part of his mind demanded, what next?

After having helped him escape from the dreaded hulk and transportation, and the worse fate of near drowning, once they were set ashore on dry land together, would conscience allow him to abandon this youngster without a qualm to take his own chances of survival? Ruefully, Tam decided that Jem had already displayed all the symptoms of being totally unable to survive an uncertain future.

At the same time, the very last thing he wanted or needed on his time-quest was having a scared young lad hanging on to him. Such were his thoughts as the men, huddled in cloaks, leaned over and held out an oar for the boy to seize.

As they pulled him aboard he laughed. ‘Thank you, sirs, thank you. You saved our lives.’ Dripping wet, the boy did not forget his manners. Turning, he looked down anxiously at Tam, who, pushing aside the spar, seized upon the oar
and waiting to be heaved aboard, held out his hand.

His hand was ignored.

‘Only the boy. Not him – he’s a law officer. See the uniform.’

‘Push him back into the sea.’

‘We’ll do more than that.’

A coarse laugh. ‘Aye, make a good job of it – one less to cope with.’

And the oar that was to be his lifeline, now struck out at him. Instinctively he ducked as violent contact was made with the side of his head. His sudden agony darkened the sky and a deadly flash of insight brought too late the realisation that their rescuers were not fishermen.

They were smugglers, carrion searching the seas for anything of value drifting from the wreckage.

His last thought as he sank beneath the waves, eager to swallow him once again, was that the uniform jacket labelling him as an excise officer was to be his shroud.