The Black Hand (8 page)

C
YRUS BARKER HAD RETURNED FROM HIS MEETING
and was waiting in the hall, a trifle impatiently.

“How was your tea?” he asked.

I searched for an appropriate adjective. “Informative.”

The Guv gave me an appraising look, then led me out the door with a wave of his cane. Outside, a man was waiting for us. He had an air of authority about him, in an easygoing, bluff sort of way. He was about forty, tall and thin but muscular, with hair blown by the wind and bleached by the sun. His skin was deeply tanned like leather, and he was without a jacket in the heat, making me itch to remove my own. He wore braces over a white shirt with no collar, and a handkerchief was tied loosely about his neck. By now, I knew the sort of fellow Cyrus Barker would trust and favor, and this was one of them.

“Lad, this is Peter Beauchamp, a former shipmate of mine. Peter, Thomas Llewelyn, my assistant.” The man didn’t speak, but nodded and turned, heading off toward the Channel. We followed him. Every bird in Sussex was in
full throat, and rabbits nibbled on the beds of thyme. The sky overhead was nearly cloudless and so deeply blue that a painting of it might have looked unnatural. The only way I’d find out where we were going, I reasoned, was to get there.

The three of us walked into the town of Seaford and through it. Beauchamp was greeted by some of the villagers and murmured a response. When we reached the water’s edge we had a perfect view of the Seven Sisters rising from the town clear up to Beachy Head, the highest point along the entire south coast. The white cliffs were so dazzling they hurt the eyes.

Beauchamp led us to a multicolored group of small dwellings by the Channel’s edge. They were coast guard cottages, or at least they once were. Someone must have purchased them all and knocked out walls higgledy-piggledy, turning the entire place into a single dwelling. I almost wanted to call it a warren, for the yard and beach were full of children running and playing and none of them looked over five years of age.

We were met at the door by a cheery, sturdy girl with loose brown hair and a face full of freckles. This, it turned out, was Mrs. Beauchamp, and the brood disporting on the pebble beach was theirs, all seven of them.

“Brought company,” Beauchamp said offhandedly. His wife, far from seeming offended, welcomed us warmly.

“Are you gents hungry? I could do a good fry up in a few minutes.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Barker said, removing his hat. “We’ve eaten.”

“Ah, yes,” came the reply. “Up at the big house. Quite a to-do up there, Peter tells me.”

“I’m checking on the fleet,” Beauchamp murmured and passed out the back door. He was a man of few words, most of them cryptic. Of what fleet was he speaking, precisely?

The answer was out on the shore. Twenty boats with numbers painted on their sides were drawn up on the shingle with the children running about them. They were sturdy fishing vessels. A larger boat lay out in the water, moored at the end of a long dock. Her deck was of stained teak with whitewashed quarters, and she had both masts and a smokestack. She must have been over a hundred feet in length and all the brass fittings gleamed in the sunshine, but what I noticed first and foremost was the name across the stern.

“The
Osprey,”
I murmured with a thrill.

I won’t say Cyrus Barker ran—he’s not really the running sort—but he easily outstripped me across the beach and dock and was soon climbing the ladder on the side and going aboard. Beauchamp went second; and when I was halfway up the ladder, he laid a hand on me and deposited me on the deck. While my employer plunged below, I looked about the vessel.

Properly, I learned later, it was a lorcha, a Manila-built ship constructed from European plans. It was designed to run with Chinese junk sails as well as European ones, and, of course, had been altered to run on steam as well. No amount of white paint and brass could disguise its piratical appearance, caused by the way the front and back ends were so much higher than the center. I’m no mariner, but it was an odd craft, principally due to a large winch at the stern that must have been used for hauling in nets. It seemed to have gone through so many permutations it could have been turned into anything at a moment’s notice.

The captain came on deck. Barker had discarded his jacket and stood in his waistcoat and shirt, the sleeves of which he was already rolling up. In place of his customary bowler he now wore a black cloth cap, already streaked with brine.

“Get up steam. Let’s take her out.”

“Aye, Cap’n,” Beauchamp said, dashing below.

“What should I do, sir?” I asked.

“Sit there and try to stay out of trouble,” he said, pointing to the deck.

“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I said, and he frowned.

“Don’t worry,” he growled. “You’ll have plenty to do soon enough.”

Getting up steam is a long process. It was nearly an hour before the
Osprey
got under way. During that time, for the most part, we baked in the sun. The Guv tested every knot, caressed every surface, fussed over the mildest rust or warping, and stalked the decks like the captain he was.

“Mr. Llewelyn,” Barker called from the helm, once we’d gotten under way. “Go belowdecks and relieve Mr. Beau-champ. Tell him I need him.”

“Yes, sir,” I told him. I’d worked out by then that Barker couldn’t run the entire ship by himself and that his sole crewman could not keep the fire stoked and do his other duties. Boilers run on coal; Welshmen pull coal from the earth; and who better to stoke a fire, any fire, than a Welshman? I was wearing a good suit, but at least I’d decided against my white flannels that day. I’d have been a sight after an hour in the engine room.

“Captain’s sent me down to relieve you,” I told Beauchamp, who had stripped to boots, trousers, and the kerchief
knotted about his neck. His chest was slick with sweat and black with soot. In the red light of the firebox he looked hellish enough.

“Very well,” he cried over the roar as he opened the hot doors of the boiler. “Keep the firebox full and the coals evenly distributed. Don’t let the fire go out, or you’ll regret it.”

He went above while I took off my shirt, seized the shovel, and thrust it into the bunker of coal. “Come to sunny Seaford,” I growled aloud as I shoveled. “Try the bracing life of a stoker.”

While Barker and his old shipmate played pirates above and steamed along on my sweat, I filled that insatiable maw with shovelfuls of coal. No doubt the Guv was congratulating himself on building my character. Now that I knew the
Osprey
had been docked here all along, I was surprised the Guv hadn’t brought me down here earlier for a thorough cramming course in nautical training, including deck swabbing, barnacle scraping, and hatch battening, whatever that was.

Doing mindless labor always makes me think, and this was mindless enough. Why had Barker, a man of so many secrets, really brought me down here? Was it to meet Mrs. Ashleigh, the keeper of so many of them? Or should I accept that he was here to protect his interests? Each question was accompanied by a shovelful into the firebox of the steam engine.

“You can stop!” a voice called in my ear.

“What?”

“I said,” Peter Beauchamp repeated, “you can stop. No sense killin’ yourself down here. You’ve been at it for half an hour. Go topside and leave this to me.”

“Thanks.”

“Reckon the
Osprey
has a new stoker.”

I had no response to that. I seized my clothes and staggered up the steps to the deck. There was a marvelous breeze coming over it just then, and I stood with a shirt in one hand and a jacket in the other flapping in the breeze like flags as the wind caressed my chest with its wonderful cool fingers. I closed my eyes and threw back my head.

“Are you going to stand there all day, Mr. Llewelyn?” my employer asked. “There’s work to be done.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, struggling into my shirt, which is not easy to do in a stiff breeze.

“Stow your gear below,” he ordered. “You’ll not be needing it here.”

Cyrus Barker now stood with his feet planted widely on the poop deck, the wheel in his hand, steering. His manner had changed subtly since I’d come aboard. There was no more “lad” or “Thomas,” but the more formal “Mr. Llewelyn,” as if there were a hundred of us at his command instead of two, and he would not play favorites. There was a look of contentment on his face. God was in his heaven; all was right with the world.

“So, where are we?” I asked, after having struggled into my shirt and stowed my gear. One side of the ship faced land a half mile off, but I could not see a coastline on the other.

“Near Newhaven. We took her out as far as Hove and are returning. How’s your stomach? Are you seasick?”

“I didn’t have time to be, I guess.”

“Would you like a treat?” Barker asked.

I hesitated. The Guv’s idea of a treat would always differ from mine; perhaps a tot of rum or grog. One could never tell with him, but it would be churlish to refuse.

“Certainly,” I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice.

“Climb the mainmast there. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.”

It will be
, I told myself,
if I happen to fall to the deck from that far up
. The belief that I had any choice in the matter was an illusion, of course. I walked to the mast, seized the first rung, and began to climb. There was no crow’s nest at the top of the mast, but presumably, one could stand on the top spar and hold the mast for dear life. I didn’t dare look down until I had struggled to the very top.

I could picture it all in my mind—the sudden slip caused by inattention or a bit of grease on the spar; the sudden futile scramble for a finger’s purchase on anything; the sudden plunge, knowing that I would probably not survive; and the final, shattering crash upon the hard wood of the deck below.

It was quiet up here, once I’d reached the top spar; I didn’t hear the constant complaint of wood creaking against wood. The wind whistled slightly as it broke over the outstretched spars. It was an alien world so far up. I could see the broken line of chalk cliffs and the toylike lighthouse of Belle Tout. On the other side, France had come into view.

Barker changed course; and the mast I stood on dipped from the perpendicular, leaving me scrambling to hold on. I had no wish to be tossed into the sea. When we were upright again, I made my descent to the deck in a sedate manner far better than the way I’d first imagined. The Guv had been right. I would never forget my first time atop a mast.

“That’s fantastic,” I told him, as soon as my feet landed
on the firm deck. “You can see all the way to France up there.”

“I hope you are sufficiently cooled off from your exertions. Now go down and tell Mr. Beauchamp to stop engines. No, wait! I’ll tell him. You take the wheel.”

“Me, sir?”

“Aye. Try not to crash on any rocks. Captain Beauchamp would not like his ship reduced to kindling.”

“I thought it was your ship, sir,” I said, tentatively taking the wheel.

“I’m still owner, and may do as I like when I’m here, but he’s captain the rest of the time. He runs the fishing fleet here, you see. I can’t allow the
Osprey
to lie idle. It has to be worked.”

“So he’s the fellow you send checks to every month.”

“Aye. There’s a lot of upkeep on a ship like this. It has to be laid up for the winter, and have the barnacles scraped off the hull. It has to be repainted and polished. Oh, there’s a thousand things done to keep a ship afloat year after year.”

“It must have taken you years of hard work to buy such a unique vessel, sir.”

“Oh, no, lad,” he said. “Won her in a game of chance in Manila one evening. Fan-tan, I believe it was. Extraordinary bit of luck.”

“I thought you hated gambling and all games of chance.”

“Oh, I do. Some people will bet on anything and ruin their families over it. But you know, I haven’t always felt that way. Look, there’s Seaford ahead. Steady as she goes. I’d better go warn Beauchamp.”

Barker called out to Beauchamp, and the ship slowly
came to a standstill, rocking as the waves rolled under it. The Guv moved to the bow and released the anchor with a splash, while Beauchamp came up the stairs again and leaned against a railing, whittling a piece of wood with his jackknife. Barker put his foot up the starboard side of the boat and looked out across the water of the Channel.

“Storm’s coming in,” he remarked. “The sky was red this morning before we left London.”

Beauchamp nodded. I could picture the four of them—Barker, Ho, Dummolard, and Beauchamp—in this boat, not saying much for hours at a time, answering any question put to them with grunts. As much as I was enjoying the trip, if they expected me to endure such conditions for long, they would require a press-gang.

A heavy metal object was suddenly dropped into my lap. It was shaped like a truncheon.

“That, Mr. Llewelyn, is a belaying pin. They go in the holes along the side here, and the lines are tied to them.”