A King's Cutter

Chapter Ten The Apothecary

 December 1795-November 1796

Short drew back his well-muscled arm then brought the cat down on the man's back. 'Seven!' called Jessup dispassionately.

The red weals that lay like angry cross hatching over the flesh were suppurating and blood began to ooze from the broken skin.

'Eight!'

Drinkwater could see the man's face in profile from where he stood by the starboard runner. Although he bit hard on the leather pad the victim's eyes glared forward, along the length of the gig across the transom of which he was spreadeagled.

'Nine!'

The inevitable had happened. The offender was the apothecary embarked from the Royal William and named Bolton. Bolton seemed unwilling or unable to make the best of his circumstances. He appeared to be a man penned up within a private hell that left him no rest. Appleby called him 'an human pustule, full of corrupt fluid and ripe for lancing'. He went about heedless of his surroundings to the point of apathy, tough enough to endure Short's abuse and starting without a word or apparent effect. What seemed to Short to be intransigence attracted all the bosun's mate's bullying fury. Short was unused to such stolid indifference and when violence failed he had recourse to crude innuendo. He found his barbs reached their mark. Ransacking every corner of his mind for human failings, he scoured the depths of every depravity, insensitive to the changing look of increasing desperation in Bolton's eyes. Pursued, Bolton ran until at last, flushed from cover, he turned at bay. Short had got there in the end over some clumsiness at gun drill, some trivial thing for which he had been waiting.

'Bolton! You crap-brained child-fucker…' And the rammer had swung round, driven into Short's guts with a screech of mortification from Bolton.

'Twelve!' Short was panting now, the bruise in his midriff paining him. Harris, the second bosun's mate, relieved him, taking the cat and running the tails through his left hand, squeezing out the blood and plasma. Harris spread his legs and drew back his arm.

'Thirteen!'

They were all on deck. Griffiths, Drinkwater and Traveller with their swords, the hands ranged in the waist, their faces dull, expressionless.

'Fourteen!'

Kestrel lay hove-to, her staysail aback. There had been no waiting for the punishment. They had only just secured the guns at which they had been exercising. In a cutter there were no bilboes and Griffiths ordered the flogging immediately.

'Fifteen!'

The sentence had been three dozen lashes. Already the man's back was a red and bloody mess. He was whimpering now. Broken. Drinkwater felt sickened. Although Griffiths was no tyrant and Nathaniel recognised the need to keep order, no amount of flogging would make a seaman out of Bolton. God alone knew what ailed the man, though Drinkwater had heard from the misshapen clerk on the receiving ship he had been sentenced for incest. But whatever madness or torment hounded him he had taken enough now. The punishment should be suspended and Drinkwater found himself staring at Griffiths, willing him to stop it.

'Sixteen!' A low, animal howl came from Bolton which Drinkwater knew would rise to a scream before the man lost consciousness. Whatever guilt lay on the man's soul he expiated it now, slowly succumbing to the rising pain of his opened back.

'Seventeen!'

'Belay there!' Griffiths's voice whipped out. A ripple of relief ran through the assembled people. 'That'll do, cut him down, pipe the watch below, Mr Jessup!'

Drinkwater saw Bolton stiffen as a bucket of sea water was thrown over his back. Then he fainted. Appleby came forward to attend him. Drinkwater turned away.

'Leggo weather staysail sheet, haul taut the lee!'

Was there a perceptible resentment in the way the order was obeyed? 'Lively now! 'Vast and belay!' He walked aft. Or was he too damned sensitive?

'Steer north by east.'

'Nor' by east it is, sir.'

Kestrel steadied on her course and made after the convoy.

She had not been a happy ship since she had left Portsmouth. Her officers were a discordant mixture of abrasive characters. Appleby's pompous superiority which suited the bantering atmosphere of a crack frigate's gunroom was out of place here. Even Drinkwater found him difficult at times, for age and bachelorhood had not moderated his tendency to moralise. Griffiths had withdrawn as Drinkwater had known he would and their former intimacy was in abeyance. Jessup and Traveller, old acquaintances of long standing and great experience, employed their combined talents to prick Appleby's self-esteem, while the two master's mates, Hill and Bulman, both promoted quartermasters, survived by laughing or scowling as occasion seemed to demand.

Drinkwater felt a sense of personal isolation and took refuge in his books and journal, maintaining a friendship with Appleby when the latter was amenable but quietly relieved that his tiny cabin allowed him an oasis of privacy. This disunity of the officers spilled forward to combine with a growing resentment among the men over lack of pay and for whom the small, wet cutter was a form of purgatory.

They had weathered the great gale of mid-November shortly after their arrival in the Downs and barely a fortnight later learned of the mutiny on the Culloden. There had been an exchange of knowing looks round Kestrel's cabin when Appleby had read the newspaper report, but the unreported facts sent a shiver of resentment through the crew.

The news that the authorities had agreed to favour the mutineers' petition without punishment had been followed by information that the law had exacted its terrible penalty. Imagination conjured a picture of the jerking bodies, run aloft by their own shipmates in all the awful guilt-sharing ceremonial of a naval execution while the marine drummers played the rafale and the picket trained their levelled muskets on the seaman. In the atmosphere prevalent aboard the cutter it was an image that lingered unbidden.

Griffiths looked aft over the transom and jolly boat in its stern davits. Above his head the ensign drooped like a rag but the morning, though chill, was fresh. A mood of mild enthusiasm infused Madoc Griffiths and he wondered if it was the effect of the man beside him. Drinkwater spoke with an old lilt in his voice, a tone that had been absent for some time now.

'I've given the matter a deal of thought, sir, and I reckon that it ain't unreasonable to bring Bolton aft as an additional messman. The mess is damned crowded, Merrick could do with some assistance and Short is still plotting against Bolton… pending your approval, of course, sir…'

Griffiths nodded. 'Very well, Mr Drinkwater, see to it. Glad I am that you are mindful of the hands. It is not always possible for a commander since he has other things to concern him, but it should be the prime consideration of his second. Tis a pity more do not follow your example.'

Drinkwater coughed with embarrassment. He was simply determined to do whatever lay in his power to ameliorate the condition of Bolton, the most abused and useless of Kestrel's company. Here the man might be induced to assist Appleby medicinally and give his mind something to work on beyond its own self-consuming preoccupation. And perhaps thereby Drinkwater might stem the rot that he instinctively felt was destroying the cohesion of them all.

'See to that at once, Mr Drinkwater, and when you have done so sway out both gigs, run the larboard broadside out and the starboard in as far as the breechings will permit. It's a grand day for scraping the weed from the waterline and there'll be no wind before nightfall.'

If the mood of his sailing master had lightened his heart Lieutenant Griffiths did not find that of his surgeon so enjoyable. He looked up at Appleby an hour later from a table split by sunny squares let in through the skylight