a favour done yesterday. Finally, he remembered. 'Yus, well, I was really tellin' Gilbert that my friends were - well, young ladies who had to make their own living, if you get my meaning.'
'Whores?' Gilbert asked.
'Well, yes, but that's a strong word.'
'St George's Fields,' Rossi said relentlessly. 'Accidente, San Giorgio mi aiutaP'
'Wotchew rattling on abart, then?' Stafford demanded suspiciously. 'Speak English!'
'I was asking St George to help me,' Rossi said, 'but you need his help more. Now come on, start again. First, we have the chapel in St George's Fields.'
'Well, the chapel belongs to Magdalen Hospital,' Stafford said, as though that explained everything.
'And . . .' Jackson said encouragingly, 'what sort of hospital is it? Like Greenwich Hospital, for seamen?'
'Nah, nah, nan!' Stafford exclaimed. 'That's the whole joke - it's for 'The Reformation and Relief of Penitent Prostitutes'!'
'A sort of Stafford family home, like Mr Ramage has St Kew, eh?' Jackson asked drily.
'You don't believe me,' Stafford complained, 'but it's run by dukes and earls and rich merchants. Has a surgeon, several apotharies -'
'Apothecaries,' Jackson corrected out of habit.
'- yes, s'what I said, and parsons. One's the chaplain and two more take it in turns to preach each evenin'. And the matron - she's a hard old biddy, I can tell you.'
'How can you tell us?' Rossi inquired innocently. 'Surely you've never been 'penitent'?'
Stafford realized he had talked too much, but as Jackson and Rossi (and Mr Ramage) knew that his job before the war, after an apprenticeship to a locksmith, was hard to describe, there was no need for secrets.
'One of my sisters,' he said, offhandedly. 'She got mixed up with that bad lot around Blackfriars and before we knew what had happened this pimp was threatening to cut her wiv a knife.'
'Then what?' Jackson asked, realizing that there were still aspects of Stafford's past life he knew nothing about.
'Well, when Neilley (that's what we call her 'cos she don't like plain 'Nell') when Neilley got the word back to us, me and some mates went darn to Blackfriars and called on this pimp.'
'And murdered him?' Rossi asked. Having spent a childhood in the Genoa slums, he was genuinely interested how the day-to-day problems of life in London were solved.
'Nah, that's 'gainst the law,' Stafford said airily. 'We just took Neilley and left 'im for dead.'
'There is a difference?' Gilbert asked, who had been trying to translate for Louis, Auguste and Albert.
'Oh yus, indeed. Murder's a capital offence in England, you know that. Get topped if you're caught. You know,' he explained, seeing the blank look on Gilbert's face, ''topped' - hanged. So we just cut him up a bit, like he'd threatened to do Neilley, and if 'e died later 'cos he 'adn't the sense to stop bleedin', that's 'is affair.'
'What about Neilley?' Jackson asked, puzzled by the connection with Magdalen Hospital and the dukes, earls and parsons who ran it.
'Oh, at first she took on a bit. She'd got a bit o' a taste for the life, if you get my meaning, but I persuaded her a stay at the Magdalen would put her right. Prayers and poultices, that's what she needed for a few weeks. She didn't agree, but she went all the same, and I used to go darn there a couple of times a week, just to make sure Neilley was paying attention to what all those dukes and earls and parsons and apotherums were telling 'er.'
'Was she? Many peoples is talking,' Rossi observed.
'She was listening an' prayin' an' taking her medicine,' Stafford said. 'The matron was watching her, special.'
'What, you paid the matron for special attention?' Jackson asked doubtfully. It did not sound like Stafford who, he thought, had always taken what he wanted, providing the lock could be picked.
'Well, not exactly paid 'er,' Stafford admitted, for the first time looking uneasy. 'Just sort of 'inted to 'er that if Neilley wasn't right as rain by St Swithin's Day, an' penitent too, matron might find 'erself in need o' a lot of prayin' and medicalatin' too.'
'Medicating,' Jackson said. 'You're a rough lot. What happened to Neilley? Was she the 'penten' you were telling us about?'
'Yus. Well, all that was going on abart the time the press took me up. My fault, 'cos I knew the word was out for a hot press, but one night I was drinking heavy down Fetter Lane an' reckoned I knew me way back 'ome without any of the gangers spottin' me, even though I couldn't see straight.'
'And?'
'An' I was wrong. I sobered up in the 'old of a receiving ship anchored off the Tower with 'alf an 'undred other rascals that the pressgang had just rounded up, an' there we all were, screamin' at the top of our lungs that we'd fight the French wivart swords or pay.'
Wide-eyed, Gilbert exclaimed: 'You were all shouting that?'
'Well, not 'xactly shouting if you get my meaning, but we thought it. We was all recovering from too much drink, an' if anyone 'ad actually shouted, the noise would've done us an injury.'
Jackson explained: 'Staff sometimes exaggerates a little.'
Gilbert nodded and turned to translate for the other Frenchmen, but if anything Stafford's story grew in the translation: like Stafford himself, Gilbert was not one to let facts spoil a good tale.
The Frenchmen listened wide-eyed, glancing at Stafford from time to time. Between them they had lived as fishermen or on the Count of Rennes' estate. Brest was small, built round its port, the river and the naval dockyard. A city like London, with its capacity for sin and which offered such scope for lively fellows like Stafford, was more than they could imagine.
Stafford, his ten minutes of glory at an end, leaned against the ship's side and went to sleep with the Atlantic swirling past his head, separated by only a few inches of oak.
'What a man,' Louis commented in French, but Auguste winked. 'What a woman, eh? Can you imagine life with the sister of a man like this?'
'I could, but I'm not going to: most of the time it would be like war! In England are all the women like that?'
'No, most certainly not,' Gilbert said, shaking his head with the air of a connoisseur. 'I met several I would like to have married.'
Jackson said: 'You are going about it backwards. I followed what you just said. Under English law if a foreigner marries an Englishwoman he can be pressed, because marrying makes him the same as an Englishman - leastways, as far as the pressgangs are concerned.'
'You mean that foreigners are not pressganged?'
'Well, they are sometimes, but they can apply to their consul and be freed.'
'So as Frenchmen ... ?'
Jackson frowned, suddenly realizing that of the seven men making up Mess Number Eight in His Majesty's frigate the Calypso, Stafford was the only Englishman.
'As Frenchmen, I suppose you rate as 'enemy' unless you're serving in one of the King's ships. Still, there's one thing about it, when we arrive in England you can marry an Englishwoman without fear of the press because you're already serving!'
'What about you? You're American, aren't you?'
'Yes, but our government gives us things called 'Protections'. These certify that we're American citizens, so we can't be pressed. But if we are, we apply to an American consul, and the Protection should get us freed.'
'Why don't you have a Protection, then?' Gilbert asked.
'I've had one for years,' Jackson said.
'Then why don't... ?'
Jackson shrugged his shoulders. 'I'm too old to change my habits and I like serving with Mr Ramage.'
'But supposing you were transferred to another ship, what then?'
'We'll see. Mr Ramage and I have managed to keep together - and Rossi and Staff too - for several years now. And Mr Southwick.'
'And Mr Orsini?' Gilbert asked.
'Yes, he's been with Mr Ramage for a couple of years or so. '
'So when we get to England we can all stay together in the Calypso?'
Jackson shrugged again. 'It'll depend how the Jason affair turns out. If this Captain Shirley has friends in high places, there's going to be trouble.'
'But hasn't Mr Ramage friends in high places too?'
'Yes, but years ago his father - an admiral - was made the scapegoat for some government mistake, and people might attack our Mr Ramage to get at the father.'
Gilbert sighed. 'Politicians. . . they should all be made to go to that hospital Stafford was talking about.'
'I've never heard of a penitent politician,' Jackson said. 'Anyway, I'll be damned glad when we get a sight of the Lizard and then anchor at Spithead, or Plymouth, or wherever we're sent, so we get the trial or inquiry over quick.'
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ramage wiped the tip of the quill with the cloth, put the cork back in the inkwell, and started to read through his letter to Their Lordships. The report that would accompany it, seven pages in draft form, waited in the drawer. He had spent a couple of weeks on it: not two weeks of solid writing, but every day he had taken it out and read it through, at first changing whole paragraphs and then towards the end just substituting sentences or changing individual words.
The final draft, which his clerk would write out in a fair hand, did not bear much relationship to the first, in which he had let his anger with Shirley distort the narrative (surprisingly, Alexis had been the first to draw his attention to it), so that it read as though Ramage had expected trouble from the moment he sighted theJason, whereas he had hauled his wind and gone up towards her expecting to find a friend and exchange news.
