A Flag of Truce (16 page)

‘Mr Farmiloe,’ he said pointing due west. ‘I am terribly tempted to give that ship opening the bay a gun.’

The youngster was slow to respond, as he always was with Pearce, but finally curiosity got the better of him and he looked at it through a glass. ‘Why, sir, it is naught but a Postal Packet by its ensign.’

‘I know the captain and the crew, and they will be ashore at the same time as you and I, so I can look forward to making an introduction.’ He looked over his shoulder, to see the cutter closing, and gave orders for the gangway to be opened, and everyone to be ready to receive, with due ceremony, the captain aboard.

‘How went it, sir?’ he asked of Digby, once their salutes were complete.

‘Well, Pearce, very well.’

‘The admiral said yes?’

‘With qualifications. The French must be escorted at all times, and I have said it will be officers and a party of hands, but best of all Pearce, he has granted me permission to sleep out of the ship. It is a dangerous thing for a sailor to say, but I long for a night in a motionless cot.’

McGann was not hard to find. The run of taverns that made up the Gut were crowded with sailors from all the ships stuck for a westerly passage, plus the army, though the officers and ranks of the garrison tended to favour different venues, and the odd local, who were Spanish in the main, but prepared to deny that for profit. The captain of the
Lorne
was well on his way to being drunk, with that glassy-eyed look and hint of a sway that Pearce recognised. Yet the smile was the same drunk or sober, and when he saw Pearce his arms went out, thumping inadvertently another customer round the ear, and in a trice he had his much taller friend in a crushing embrace.

‘Mr Pearce, sir, can I tell you how happy I am to see you, sir. What good fortune attends.’

Pearce looked over McGann’s shoulder and greeted the members of his crew, all of whom had been kind to him, as McGann shouted for more drink, this while one of his men sought to pacify the man who had been clouted.

Having, with some effort, detached himself,
Pearce introduced his companions. ‘May I name to you first,
Lieutenant de Vaisseau,
Gerard Moreau, who I regret to say, speaks no English.’

‘
Pas de problem, mon ami,
’ exclaimed McGann, taking and pumping Moreau’s hand. ‘
Voulez-vous prendre un boire avec moi
?’

‘Mon plaisir, monsieur.’

‘This,’ Pearce interrupted, albeit he was amused by McGann’s less than perfect French, ‘is Midshipman Farmiloe, like me of HMS
Faron
.’

‘Young man!’ exclaimed McGann, in a voice that carried and bounced off the smoke-blackened walls. ‘You too will drink with me.’

‘And…’

‘Say no more, Mr Pearce, until you have a tankard in your hand.’

That did not take long, McGann being a
well-known
customer;
Lorne
ran the mails and official despatches between England and Gibraltar on a regular basis. The people who owned this tavern knew his shout and knew how to serve him. Everyone within close proximity was handed a drink, including the total stranger he had accidentally buffeted, which mollified the man more than the apologies of McGann’s crew.

‘You will recall me telling you about the men I was pressed with,’ Pearce said, his voice raised to cover the din of drinking salutation. ‘I am happy to say I have them here with me.’

‘John Pearce, you have achieved your object.’

‘Not quite, but I want you to meet my Pelicans.’

Each got a hearty shake. McGann, who was a short fellow, looked like a dwarf beside Michael, and though Pearce sought to explain what had actually happened as opposed to that which McGann supposed, he had a strong feeling not a word penetrated. He looked at Moreau, who was laughing, not at the little Ulsterman, but because of him.

‘
Un homme très amusant, Monsieur Pearce, je pense.
’

Funny yes, thought Pearce, but he could be trouble also, having a fatal flaw when in drink of assuming that every woman he met was madly in love with him, a fact he would act upon even if their escort, or the husband, was standing right next to them. He was a gifted fellow at sea, and an absolute menace ashore, something Pearce had had occasion to witness and confirm, which had him wondering what the combination would be of that man drunk, as well as Michael O’Hagan. It did not bear thinking about.

McGann was in deep conversation with Moreau now, while Michael, Charlie and Rufus had been taken up by the crew of the
Lorne
, which left Pearce with a rather stiff Farmiloe.

‘I wish I could persuade you to relax, young man. I have already told you I bear you no malice,
yet I fear you do not quite believe me.’

‘I do, sir.’

Right then, Pearce resolved to get the boy drunk; perhaps then, whatever fears he was harbouring would emerge. He had just put his tankard to his lips, after signalling to the innkeeper for a round of refills, when a loud and peremptory voice interrupted him.

‘There, sir, you sir!’

Pearce turned slowly to look into the red and furious face of an army officer, using his elbows to make his way through the crowd. There was something about him that was familiar, but Pearce could not place why it should be so.

‘I see by your countenance, sir, that you do not recall me?’

‘I do not.’ Pearce looked at the insignia, unsure of the rank.

The man’s hand swung, and though Pearce ducked away it still caught him a glancing blow on the cheek and all he could hear was the voice shouting. ‘Perhaps, sir, that will refresh your memory, you damned coward.’

Pearce moved fast, just ahead of Michael O’Hagan who looked set to flatten the soldier. For him to strike an officer would be tantamount to a capital crime, not that Michael would hesitate because of such reasoning. Instead Pearce’s hand shot out, open-palmed, and caught
the redcoat under the chin, sending him reeling back into the arms of a group of fellow soldiers who had obviously followed him across the room. Suddenly there were two groups, those not party to what was obviously going to be a brawl, moving away.

‘You do not run this time, sir,’ shouted his assailant. ‘Perhaps you have learnt not to be shy since we last met.’

Pearce recognised him now. On his last visit to Gibraltar, in the company of Captain McGann, he had been obliged to strike this fellow. Not that the redcoat was entirely at fault: McGann had been making advances to his wife, a
voluptuous-looking
creature with an ample bosom, who really should not have been in a place of such low repute. In seeking to apologise on McGann’s behalf he had been, himself, insulted, and the major’s continued refusal to accept it as an error had sparked Pearce into an action he had later regretted; he had punched the sod. A general mêlée followed, involving the officers of the ship that was to take him to meet Lord Hood, but he had been hustled away. With orders to weigh, there was no time for the duel which was bound to follow.

‘Well, sir, what do you say. I have administered a blow. Are you going to run again, or is your plan this time to set a bunch of ruffians on me? Do so if
you dare, I have my friends to aid me, and when all is ended I will still demand satisfaction.’

Pearce was still restraining Michael, who, looking at the line of redcoat officers, hissed. ‘Let me be, John-boy, I’ll crease the lot of them.’

That was when McGann stepped in front of both Michael and Pearce. ‘You, sir, I demand your name.’

‘And who, sir, are you?’

‘I am the author of this sorry affair, the man who, I am told, insulted your wife. It was to defend me that this fellow struck you a blow.’

His crew must have told him; inebriated as he had been there was no way McGann could have remembered. ‘It matters not, the blow was struck. Satisfaction is required.’

‘Several blows have been struck, sir,’ McGann slurred, ‘but I am responsible. If you wish for satisfaction you must take it from me.’

‘Wait your turn, dwarf.’

McGann, more steady than Pearce thought him capable of, walked straight up to the major and slapped his cheek.

‘I will not wait, sir, I will be first, and I ask you to name your weapon.’

‘Pistols!’ the major barked, then turned to another officer and named him as his second. Pearce saw, out of the corner of his eye, the crew of the
Lorne
nodding; was it relief?

‘Mr Pearce will be mine.’

‘Good. When I have seen to you he can be next. Until dawn tomorrow.’

‘Fernando,’ McGann shouted, as the major stomped away. ‘Our tankards are empty.’

They had to be up before dawn and with Digby sleeping ashore Pearce could leave the ship without having to explain his destination. He had with him the surgeon Lutyens, to see to the wounded, and a sword he fully intended to use – as the man struck he had the choice – because despite McGann’s protestations of the previous night, which he repeated ad nauseam, that he had no worries about this coming event, there was no way a man as drunk as he had been could face up, at the crack of dawn, to an opponent versed in the use of arms. Pearce intended to force him to step aside and it was therefore something of a shock to observe, when they met on the dockside, that the captain of the
Lorne
seemed to be in fine fettle.

‘I never suffer from the effect of drink of a mornin’, John, which I put down to a fine Irish constitution.’

Introduced to Lutyens, they fell to discussing the seat of the heavy drinker’s problem, which was held to be the liver and gout afflicting the big toe, with the surgeon talking of the dissections he had performed on victims of everything from an excess of gin to the occasional cadaver fallen to the perils of over-indulgence in claret, his opinion that the former was ten times more insidious than the latter, owing to the low quality of the brew.

‘Though I have to say, Captain, that the gin drinker is the article more often to be found on the cutting table for another reason, they being more likely to suffer a pauper’s death than a man addicted to wine.’

‘The heart, sir, you must have seen the heart?’ demanded McGann, in an exercise in morbidity that Pearce found strange given where they were heading. ‘In that I do very much envy you.’

‘Sir, I have seen it in its working mode on more than one occasion, and it is, the first time you set eyes on it, the most amazing sight.’

‘Tell me more.’

Given an audience Lutyens responded, and was soon explaining what he had seen of kidneys, muscles, genitals of both sexes, the route of bodily waste through the gut to the fundament, in such detail that Pearce dropped back to be out of earshot. He had not thought himself squeamish, but such a precise description of the human innards was
not to be borne before a man had consumed a hearty breakfast. One cup of coffee was insufficient; it had left his stomach to rumble, a necessary condition, it being held inadvisable for a participator to eat before a duel.

‘Mr McGann seems in a jolly mood.’

‘Same as ever, our capt’n,’ replied the crewman McGann had fetched along. ‘He don’t change much, as you will have noted.’

‘Indeed I have,’ Pearce replied. McGann drank little or nothing at sea, saving his immoderation for the shore. He too had a happy ship, and like Henry Digby he was the cause, with a care for his crew that bordered on the fatherly; ever smiling, his orders always soft and supplicant, not harsh. ‘Yet I fear for him this day.’

The man slapped his hand on the polished box he carried, which had to contain a pair of pistols. ‘I should fear for the man he slapped.’

‘That was surely unusual behaviour for the captain. I observed him drunk on our last meeting, but he showed no hint of a violent temperament.’

The sailor just smiled, and there was no time to elicit any more information as, puffing from the steep climb, they reached an open space near the top of the Rock, chasing away the apes that occupied the heights. Looking east they saw that the sky was tinged with grey, and their ears told them the military party was approaching on
horseback. Lutyens and McGann were still deep in conversation, and the sailor was rubbing one shoulder as though it was causing him some pain.

Courtesy is the absolute requirement of duelling; whatever the offence waiting to be settled, everyone has to behave like a gentleman. Thus, polite greetings were exchanged by those not the principles, and introductions carried out, and Pearce received with grace the invitation from Major Lipton’s second that an apology be offered. This, despite Pearce’s pleading, McGann flatly refused to accept.

‘Then let me fight him first, with swords. I have trained with some of the finest fencing masters in Paris and if it smacks of showing away, I am good with a blade. I fancy that, soldier or no, I can best him in that department and if I can you will not have to contest your dispute with him at all.’

McGann looked up at him with a belligerent expression. ‘If you are the John Pearce with whom I sailed not two months past, you would not be seeking to kill the fellow, regardless of his bellicosity.’

‘Of course not. I would seek a satisfactory wound. One that satisfied his honour and my own.’

‘And then what happens? This Lipton is stationed here, and I am a regular caller at the Rock, as my duty demands. I daresay he would wait till your wound healed and still demand that I meet
him. Best then to get it over with now.’

‘You are determined then?’

‘I am.’

‘Then I hope your opponent has the same attitude you ascribe to me.’

‘Pearce, I bet you a breakfast that I will eat mine with my own hand, but yonder major will need to be spoon fed. Now please be so good as to ask if the fellow will examine my pistols, which if he has no objection, I would prefer to use.’

That had Pearce consulting with Lipton’s second again. He looked at the army pistols, a rather scarred pair of ordinary weapons in a well-travelled box. McGann’s were as different as chalk and cheese, a beautiful pair of Lobey’s, with the fine inlay and beautiful craftsmanship for which the Dublin gunmaker was famous.

‘If you wish for accuracy and balance, sir,’ Lipton’s second said, as he held one in his hand. ‘I doubt ours would match the captain’s.’

‘Very well,’ growled the major, removing his coat. ‘One ball does as much damage as another.’

‘Then Mr Pearce and I will load them.’

There was another officer along with the military party, in a heavy cloak which kept hidden his rank, and a low hat that did much to disguise his features, no name being given as he stepped forward and supervised the loading, this as a red sun hit the horizon.

‘We will wait till it is full up, gentlemen,’ he growled. ‘I would not have it implied that anyone lacked advantage from a want of light.’

It only took minutes till the sun was a rising red/gold ball. With neither man facing the light they stood back to back in shirts and breeches only, this while Lutyens squatted by his medical case, taking out various articles and laying them out ready for use and working on some bandages for the expected wound. From under his cloak, the unknown officer produced a pistol of his own, primed and loaded, the reason for his person remaining anonymous emphasised in his next words.

‘The rules you know, gentlemen. Ten paces then turn, as I count them out. Anyone seeking to best their opponent before that I will shoot. On ten you may turn and fire at your own convenience. Should no shot strike either party I will call upon you to agree a conclusion or invite you to load again.’

The fellow, who could be had up for murder if he carried out his threat to shoot, had the voice for the count, deep and sonorous, and being garbed like the Grim Reaper gave him authority. McGann and Lipton moved, pace by pace, away from each other in slow measured steps. On the count of ten Pearce wanted to close his eyes, and his hand was gripping the hilt of his sword so much it hurt. Both men spun, the major pushing one leg back to get proper
balance, so as to aim properly. McGann did not bother with such refinements; he fired as soon as he saw his target, and Lipton spun away, taken at the top of his shooting arm, which was sent sideways, his weapon discharged in the process, the ball fired harmlessly into the ground.

‘I think you will find, Pearce,’ McGann called, ‘the major will not be looking for satisfaction from you this day.’

Lutyens was already by the wounded soldier, easing him into a sitting position and tearing at his shirt to get at the wound, a probe already in his hand. Lipton’s second was dosing his pallid principle with brandy, this before he put the leather strap the surgeon had handed him between his teeth. The way the wounded officer took the treatment was admirable; the man was no screaming milksop. He sat, looking over Lutyens shoulder as the surgeon probed with the lack of finesse for which he was known and winced only when he found the musket ball, ignoring the copious blood that flowed from the wound. The cloaked adjudicator stood over the scene and enquired as to whether his companion would be in need of a hospital.

‘No,’ Lutyens replied, finally extracting the ball with a log set of tweezers. He then produced what he liked to call his magic formula, a German preparation called Mellisengeist, and pouring that
onto a linen pad, he set to staunching the flow of blood.

‘Pearce, fetch me that bandage I have laid out, and the other I have already fashioned into a sling.’ The sun was up, bright gold and high by the time he had bound the wound and got the major back onto his feet, the man unsteady but determined. ‘He will have to walk down, he cannot ride.’

‘That is our responsibility,’ said his second. He looked over to where McGann stood, well away from the ministrations, and added, ‘The matter is of course settled. Gentlemen, I thank you for your attendance, and you, Mr Lutyens, for the attention you have given to my superior.’

The fellow in the cloak and his second either side of him, they led Major Lipton from the field, he hunched over in pain, as Pearce said, ‘You were well prepared, Heinrich, were you not? A sling already fashioned?’

Lutyens looked at Pearce and smiled, his thin hair blowing in the increasing breeze, his face alight with humour. ‘Captain McGann told me to get it prepared. In fact he told me the exact spot in which he was going to wound the fellow, the arm he would need to wield his sword. He laughed when he told me how you underestimated him. It seems that the good captain is a marksman of some repute.’

It was a week before they got their wind, with nights spent ashore in the company of the French officers. The captains were four very different men. Garnier, of wiry build and pale complexion, was less given to good humour than Moreau, but he was a very pleasant fellow, a well-read man who could hold a decent conversation, who also confessed liking to paint a little when ashore. Jacquelin was taciturn and not happy to share wine and food with folk he still saw as the enemy, which made being in his company hard going. Forcet of the
Entreprenant
was a fool, and uncouth with it, a man who would never have achieved any commissioned rank in royal service, and he gave the impression, as he damned the Jacobins, that he was as like to damn what went before and still save some bile for what might follow. He ate as though tomorrow was bound for famine, drank like a fish and became both coarse and incomprehensible when drunk, singing raucous and filthy songs which denigrated British manhood, this as the crew from the
Faron
were obliged to row him back to his vessel.

‘A dinna ken whit he was warbling aboot, your honour,’ said Dysart, ‘But ah can tell by the looks it wasna sweet talk.’

‘I will not translate, Dysart,’ Pearce replied. ‘We may well have to transport the fellow again and I know you will look for an opportunity to drown him if you understand his sentiments.’

Coming alongside the ships, he was faced with the other, junior officers, none of whom had been allowed to go ashore on that night, but people with whom Pearce had shared bread and wine. Not that they had failed to enjoy some evening entertainment if they were stuck aboard; ever since they dropped anchor the four ships had been surrounded by boats, some from Gibraltar, others all the way from Algeciras, selling everything they could possibly want, including women. The guard boats provided by Admiral Hartley did nothing to interfere in this trade, but they did seek to count the numbers allowed close, so that no Frenchmen could run when the boats pulled for the shore.

Eventually the wind swung round, cannons were fired as signals and the shipping in the bay became a hive of activity as they prepared to get under way. Digby waited until a whole host of merchant vessels had cleared the anchorage before signalling himself, hauling HMS
Faron
over her anchor and leading the way out past the western arm of Algeciras Bay. It was necessary to hug the Spanish shore, the Atlantic current being strongest in mid-channel and weaker by the land, yet even with a wind they made slow progress, inching along. At one point the current won out marginally over the wind, which had the boats out hauling the ships along. It seemed a blessing that it sprung up again before they passed the clifftop town of Tarifa.

‘Look there, Pearce, at that damned fortress.’ It needed no real indication from Digby to see the stone towers, dominating as they did the inshore waters, the muzzles of cannon very obvious in the wall embrasures. ‘I would not risk being this close in if we were fighting the Dons, I can tell you.’

‘Means waiting for a good blow,’ added Neame. ‘This puff would never serve if we was at war.’

‘And it’s every man on deck,’ Digby said, ‘guns run out and nets rigged in case the Spaniards send out gunboats or a capital ship from the bay.’

‘What happens if the wind shifts again, Mr Neame?’

‘Then you put up your helm, Mr Pearce, and run back for the safety of the Rock, ’cause the next thing on your larboard beam is Cadiz, home port to half the Spanish fleet.’

Things improved as they weathered Cape Trafalgar, the current easing as it became less intense, and Neame was able to alter course to take the squadron out into the deep Atlantic. He wanted sea room, not a lee shore, in case the wind did shift again, and soon they were leaving land behind, rising and falling on the Atlantic rollers that beat upon the rocky shore over the stern.

‘You know the Bay of Biscay, sir?’ asked Neame over a dinner in Digby’s cabin. Lutyens was again present, but his face went blank at the mention of anything nautical. ‘A foul place in the main.’

‘I sailed though it on the
Lorne
and though Captain McGann told me of the reputation of the bay, it was a mill pond on that occasion.’

‘Pray for something similar, Pearce, for it is a bad time of year to be around this part of the ocean. The south-westerlies of the autumnal equinox can be vicious.’