Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 24, No. 3, March 1979

Cork Against the Hulks by S. S. Rafferty

Of all the ridiculous escapades in which Cork has involved us over the years, not one could surpass our present predicament. Bad enough all those wasted years we spent gadding about these colonies in the clutch of his depraved desire to solve crimes. Bad enough that he let hang slack the accumulation of a vast mercantile fortune ready at hand for the taking. Bad enough that I, Wellman Oaks, a conscientious yeoman, have had to suffer his dalliances — balls in Charles Town, Boston Town, Philadelphia, and New York; ladies of frippance hither and yon; coursing events; pok-ar; duels (husbands); endless buckets of oysters and tankards of Apple Knock. Now he has a new fascination. Cork has a war.

It is our financial ruin, this Revolution. Gone The Hawkers, a fine trading vessel now prowling about as an American capital ship. Gone the talc works and the choklit factory. By Jehovah, even the worthless copper mine up on the Hudson is in the hands of the British troops. Probably using it as a necessary, and rightly so.

It’s all John Jay’s fault, damn his eyes. When the separation hostilities started, he dangled a carrot before Captain Jeremy Cork’s nose which he couldn’t resist.

“Certainly you could raise a regiment of your own,” he cajoled Cork that night back in ’76. We were in Philadelphia and had just settled the Declaration Plot affair, probably the most important case in Cork’s career as a detector. Oh, Cork was high in the stirrups, I can tell you. As full of himself as a six-foot-six man can get. “But you have demonstrated an uncanny sense of spione,” Jay the Tempter went on. “Field intelligence will be the crux of this war, and you’re the man for it, sir. You’re a woodsman, a mariner, a shrewd logician and student of the human condition.”

Cork’s chest was poutering like a pigeon in love. Damn fool. In love with himself. Spying, indeed!

I think it was Jay’s use of the title “spymaster” that lured the lamb into the chute.

“Full control?” Cork asked.

Jay blanched. “Well, within reason. You report directly to me, not Washington.”

There you have it. These rebels would well fit into the obscene subtleties of a French court on any given day. That was months ago, maybe a hundred years ago, or seemingly so. In that time, Washington has managed to lose every military encounter, despite Cork’s ardent supply of information from his network of informants. In fact, Cork seems better organized for war than most of the senior Continental officers.

Everything we do is secret. Half the time I don’t know where we are — or I’m told to forget it if I do. So my vagaries should be excused. I can tell you that, as of this writing, we were exactly thirty-five miles from New York by cade mecum calculation. It was summer, as unbearably hot a summer as Long Island has ever had. The safe house where Cork had set up his clandestine headquarters was fronted by a forgotten trail and backed by salt-sanded beach.

I aroused on an August morning which was already proving to be a hotted blister on this earth’s skin to find him huddled like a cold man at the rude table which served as our eating board, work table, and, twice, as a surgery slab for wounded agents.

He was looking at maps. Number 7, a redheaded Irishman in his thirties, sat across from him. All of them have numbers rather than names, don’t ask me why — but Jay is impressed. (The workie’s name is Reilly, and a bit of a lout.) Each agent, in addition to a number, has an identifying password in Injun jabber.

“Good morning,” I said convivially. Cork grunted something and Number 7 sat suspiciously mute.

“You’re sure?” Cork demanded of him.

“As sure as I am of me own mother, Captain. They brought The Angel’s crew in last Tuesday.”

“The full crew? No casualties?”

“Far as I can gather. The Angel’s officers have been paroled, of course, but you said you was only interested in the crew.”

“Correct.”

I poured a cup of small beer and sauntered over to the table. The maps were crude, but the details were not beyond me, mostly because Number 7 had bothered, spy that he was, to mark it “Wallabout Bay.”

I know the area well. Wallabout Bay is a belly of water that hangs off the East River in the upper reaches of Brooklyn. The old-time Dutchmen called it Wale Bogt, with good reason. At low tide, it is nothing more than a large expanse of mud flats, stench, and skeeters.

In ’76, the area was an American stronghold; then, on an August morn such as this one of which I write, Howe’s army poured ashore and devoured Long Island like carpenter ants spelling doom to all New York. The Wallabout was now a graveyard for British prison hulks.

Number 7 was tracing a line with a grimy finger. “ ’Ere’s the channel at low tide, Captain.”

“Yes, I know. The British call it The Wintering now.”

“There are nine of ’em moored along the channel.”

Cork squinted his eyes in thought as if to squeeze facts from his prodigious memory. “Nine? Then one is new.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Whitly, Scorpion, Prince of Wales, John, Stromboli, Good Hope, Falmouth, and Hunter.”

“And now the Jersey, Cap. She be the outermost ship in the southern curve of the channel.”

“Aha, that’s good news.”

I was appalled. “Good news? Another hellhold is good news?”

“No, Oaks, my joy is that a sixty-four-gun ship of the line no longer has fangs.”

“The problem, Cap, is which hulk Vs in.”

“It s the Jersey, you can be sure of it. The other ships in the south channel — Good Hope and Falmouth — are hospital ships. ‘Hospital ships,’ ” he scoffed, “a typical English euphemism. He’s in the Jersey, all right.”

Whoever this mysterious person was, my heart went out to him. A British prison ship is a foul purgatory. Living on two-thirds rations of weevilly biscuits, putrefied salt pork, and suet creates horrors in the body. Locked below decks in leaking vessels breathing dank air makes death attractive. Many an American sailor or soldier has so died a slow death in the bowels of these ships which, ironically, are dead themselves.

Cork concluded his business with Number 7 with blunt dispatch, ordered me to give him five pounds, dismissed the man, and returned to brooding over the map. Back in the old days, when he took on the solution of “social puzzles” for the sport of it, I used to rankle him with chidement. But now I hold my tongue, for he is fiercely committed to the damnable war. And besides, there is nothing left to prod him about, since we have lost every pound and half joe he ever had. Oh, to be sure Washington begs the Congress for salary advances for officers, the privateers take a healthy cut of their prize money, and the field troops simply go home if they are not paid. But Cork insists on serving sans d’argent. That’s not patriotism, it’s peacockery. At least Washington gets expenses!

I was marking Reilly’s — Number 7’s — payment in my ledger book with disgust. He had drawn over sixty-five pounds in the past seven months, which is an indication of the lavish lives these field agents lead.

“He doesn’t spend it on himself, Oaks,” the Captain said, reading the thoughts behind my facial expression. “He buys information, he snoops, he lives at the edge of his life.”

“For five pounds, he well should! Do you know what five pounds would buy in New York City right now?”

He sighed impatiently — nay, in sufferance. “Oaks, you have an irritating love of coin but a lack of true enterprise. Here sits before you a man whose head is worth twenty thousand pounds. Why not slip out of here some night and collect the bounty from the Tories?”

He wasn’t being cruel or challenging my loyalty. He just revels in the fact that the enemy would pay more to see him dead than Washington himself, and he loves to proclaim it.

I stuck to the issue. “Five pounds must have bought you a veritable trove of information.”

His face softened to that grin that always perplexes me. It is the face of a wise child bearing some family secret best left untold.

“Or a pack of lies, my old son.” He gave forth a huge sigh. “That’s the problem with this spione business.”

“You think Reilly is a turncoat?”

“No.” He chuckled. “He hasn’t the guile. It is the information that bothers me.”

“All I know is that some Americans are prisoners aboard a prison hulk, which hardly seems like information.”

“Let me complete the tapestry for you. Come, sit, for God’s sake. Dump that beer and pour yourself some Knock. You’re going to need it, lad.”

And so Cork began that meticulous step-by-step assemblage of facts that ends in a pyramid of deductions coming to a concise top point. By Jupiter, that fine head is worth much more than twenty thousand pounds. It’s priceless when put to a problem.

“You will recall Dispatch Number Four-oh-three?”

“Of course. It’s in Volume Six of the Black Books. I’ll get it.”

“No need. I retain its substance. All right, then you know that our people in France have been urging support for our cause in a more open manner. Now, new facts in which you had no purview — don’t look offended, Oaks, it was a verbal message from Jay.”

I was. offended, by God! Jay has a code number, Cork has a code number, a lout like Reilly has a code number, but I don’t. Heaven forbid Wellman Oaks should know what’s going on. All I seem to do is hand out five pounds here and six pounds there and file dispatches. There isn’t even a price on my head. What’s the sense of living in danger when no one knows about it except yourself?

By “our people in France,” he meant, of course, Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee, the American commissioners who were desperately trying to convince Louis XVI to come openly into the war as our ally. Old Louis had balked at an open confrontation with England, but I wasn’t taken in by all the gibberish in previous dispatches about the commissioners “buying supplies” from the Hotalés Company of Paris, which just happened to be run by Beaumarchais, the playwright. I didn’t have to be an expert in spione to deduce that the money came from Louis’s coffers, but Whitehall seemed too stupid to figure it out.

Cork went on. “Some weeks ago a clandestine plan was proffered by us to the French, and an agent was dispatched to present their response to the Congress. He was put aboard the cutter Angel off the Azores, and that was the last heard of both The Angel and the agent until Number 7 showed up here today. The ship was taken, so he tells me, by the royal frigate Downs, its crew transferred to a capital ship bound for the American patrol, and then sent aboard the Wallabout hulks.”

“Won’t our people in France dispatch another courier once they learn of The Angel’s capture?”

“There isn’t time, damn it. For the loss of two words, a campaign is in jeopardy.”

“Two words? Oh, forgive me—” I feigned humility “—that would be a breach of security.”

“Stop cavilling. It’s a code system I worked out for Franklin’s use in sending messages to Congress. Four proposals were presented at the Quai d’Orsay, but only Franklin and the courier know which one was accepted. Two damned words!”

“Perhaps he will effect an escape.”

“Very few have been successful. The inner Wallabout shoreline is heavily patrolled, and it’s a long exhausting swim to the other side of the river for a man weakened by starvation rations.”

Cork got to his feet, crossed the room to the window, and stared out at the water without seeing it. He was living in his head.

“What do you plan to do, Captain?”

He snapped back to the present, turned to me, and said casually, “I’ll just have to go and fetch him.”

Now there you have Cork in all his simple directness. Waste not one iota of logic on the proposition that, if escape was nigh impossible, so was entry. Mere details have no residence in Cork’s neighborhood.

He sat down at the table again and sipped Apple Knock most of the morning. I kept my silence and waited for that sign I know so well. It came around noon. His blue eyes began to twinkle and he stopped stroking his chin, then his long fingers snapped like a flintlock. He had it! Or thought he had.

He started out of the house and headed toward the small dock that ran out into the water. At its far end was a dilapidated storage shed once used by fishermen for nets and tackle and such. God knows what Cork uses it for — it’s his private preserve and he is strict about its sole use. I threw caution to the winds and followed in his wake.

He seemed not to notice me until he reached the shed door and then, to my surprise, he said over his shoulder, “Well, man, don’t dawdle. Time is our enemy.”

I was so shocked by his allowing me into his inner sanctum that its interior was momentarily lost on me. Not for long, however, and when my senses were to rights, they were immediately numbed again.

“Wonder of wonders!” I exclaimed. “What devil’s doing is this?”

There before me was what appeared to be the upright product of some fabulous bird. This fantastic wooden egg, about eight feet high and easily as much around, was banded by iron straps in the barrel-stave manner. From one side projected a rudder-like apparatus; on the other was a corkscrew propeller with another projecting from the top. It looked much the same as Bushnell’s concoction except for a strange paddlewheel affair affixed above the rudder.

“The Turtle!” I cried. “It’s a large version of Bushnell’s submersible.”

“Vastly improved. It’s called The Tortoise.”

So the sly dog was off on his own again, despite Washington’s orders. The original Turtle was the creation of a Connecticut gadgeteer named David Bushnell, who had the ingenious idea of affixing mines to the bottom of enemy ships with a detachable auger device. On September sixth back in ’76, Washington approved its use in a daring underwater attack on HMS Eagle. This 64-gunner was singled out because it was the flagship of Admiral Lord Howe. It was hoped that both the Eagle and old Black Dick himself would go to the bottom. It failed for a number of reasons — mostly because of an inexperienced diver and an auger that couldn’t penetrate the Eagle’s hull. After two more failures, Washington abandoned the idea.

Oh, how Cork had ranted and raved when he heard of Washington’s loss of interest! “What would a tobacco farmer know of seamanship?” he had bellowed. “Here he has a formidable weapon to put fear into the hearts of every British seaman afloat, and he brushes it aside!” (He truly respects Washington’s field ability, but finds him weak in naval acumen.)

“Well, it did fail on three occasions,” I reminded him. “No sense throwing good money after bad.”

“You’re as big an ass as he is, Oaks. The Turtle would have worked if only that diver had moved a few inches to the left or right under the Eagle. That auger struck the iron bar connecting the rudder fitting to the sternpost. They don’t have rudders or sternposts on tobacco plantations, so they’re a mystery to Washington.”

As I stood there looking at this gigantic reproduction of Bushnell’s idea, a new sense of poverty came over me. If Congress wouldn’t provide funds for submersibles, I could guess who did.

He walked over to it and rapped on its oak hull. “Sound as a dollar,” he said, knowing the full worth of the American shinbuck. “And ready just in time.”

Suddenly I saw his plan, and I felt a goose walk over my grave. War does strange things to men’s minds. It turns some into jellied cowards and inflates others to heroic proportions. Then there are those souls who lose all perspective in their blood lust and turn fiendish. I feared Cork had now joined that depraved regiment.

“You can’t!” I shrieked. “I’ll axe that hull myself before I’ll let you commit this atrocity.”

“What the devil are you babbling about?”

“Captain—” I pleaded with him “—you will be blowing up hundreds of innocent prisoners — our own men! You would do this to silence a spy?”

That smirk-a-mouth of his is the most annoying habit he has. It says multitudes, and this time it told me that I should be dragged off and locked in an attic like a looney relative.

“Oaks, my friend,” he said in mock patience, “you have the singular ability always to miss the point. In the bawdy house of life, you waste your precious time listening to the piano player. I want that agent alive and talking, you twit. I need two words.”

With this, he took a ladder from the corner and propped it against the submersible. Bawdy house, indeed! He is our resident authority on such places. And I am not partial to piano music at all. Fiddles are my meat.

At the top of the ladder, Cork opened the hatch of his contraption and I ventured to open the one on my face.

“So you’re going to sail up to the hulk and have our man jump aboard, are you? I assume they have guards posted.”

He was climbing down inside the egg and his voice echoed out to me. It was like talking to the Oracle at Delphi, which I believe Cork thinks he is at times.

“There are guards.” His voice reverberated from the hatch. “Probably a Lieutenant, two mates, and a dozen seamen.”

“Well, that’s not too many!” I shouted up to him.

“And thirty soldiers, probably Hessians, since the Jersey is new to the Wallabout.”

“Well, when do we leave?”

Now the Oracle was erupting. “We? What in hell do you mean, we?” His words flowed like molten lava, but I was undaunted. We argued most of the afternoon and into the evening, and finally I hit upon a subtle but effective premise.

“It’s in your best interest to take me, and, by the way, that submersible will carry three men. I checked.” We were at a late supper of cold potatoes and cod. “Captain, if you leave me here in enemy territory I am bound to be captured sooner or later — if something happens to you, all the sooner, I fear. A fellow of my constitution would not stand up long to the brutalities of interrogation. Heaven forbid I would be tortured beyond endurance. They would extract my finger- and toe-nails one by one, then hot oil would be applied in insidious places, drop by drop. Failing that — and I shudder to think of it — the Squaw’s Revenge. No, Captain, I would break, and I’m the only person outside of yourself who knows the full fabric of your spy network — names, locations, plans, everything — hide, hair, and tallow.”

The mention of the Hairbuyer was my master stroke. He is Cork’s British counterpart, his nemesis. Cork has laid a personal £10,000 bounty on his head. Even if we do win the war, it will be cold potatoes and cod forevermore. The point that rasps Cork’s soul is that he doesn’t know this cruel butcher’s identity, while the British are fully aware of Cork’s — at least his name, if not his location.

The Hairbuyer got his name from the savage Indians who serve the British. I commented earlier on what evil things war can do to men, and he is its most fiendish example. He buys the scalps of the wives of American officers and manages to have them delivered to their unfortunate husbands in the field. Cork calls it warfare of the soul. I call it gruesome.

“We leave tomorrow night,” Cork said, to my astonishment. I had expected at least six hours more haranguing.

“We do?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said in triumph, “I am most happy to learn that I am of some importance to this organization.”

“Oh, you are. You’re pedalling the paddlewheel. Now shut up and bring me the East River charts.”

Two days later, I lay exhausted in a dank salt marsh in the center of Wallabout Bay. My legs ached with pain from treadling The Tortoise up the river all the way from Governor’s Island to the Bay. After much preparation, we had left the safe-house dock after sunset the previous night in a “Tory” fishing smack, slipped across Great South Bay and into the open Atlantic with the submerged Tortoise in tow.

When the tide turned, we tacked landward again, entered the Narrows, and crossed over Upper New York Bay past the unsuspecting British patrol barges. Off Governor’s Island, Cork and I cast off in The Tortoise, he at the glowing foxfire-coated instruments, I at the treadle.

Although my legs were soon numb as we made our way upriver, I actually had the easier task. Cork had plenty to do keeping us on course. When I felt I could not move a leg one more time he said, “All stop, Oaks,” and The Tortoise started to rotate.

“Now pedal like hell,” he commanded, “we are going into Wallabout.”

We sat in the submersible until the tide drained the water-covered mud flats and then we emerged into the sunlight to find ourselves safely hidden amid the tall reeds.

The skeeters were infernally happy to have us among them, while overhead the scavenger gulls squeaked like unoiled hinges. In the oppressive heat of the noonday sun, the whole place reeked of fish. Across the tidal pond lay the hulks, grim and foreboding. Through blurry eyes, I watched these once-proud mistresses of war barely moving in the low tide of their degradation. I could not help but think they were like some once gay king’s courtesans, now toothless and haggard, sent to the putrid castle dungeons belowstairs.

Cork lay against a small hummock, studying his prey through a long glass.

“Well, that’s a bit of luck,” he whispered to himself.

“Luck?”

He handed me the glass and I trained it at the Jersey on the outside anchorage. The magnification, to my eyes, made her all the more gruesome. Her rotting hull had been stripped of her proud fittings — the useless whore’s jewels returned to the sovereign’s treasury — leaving only the flagstaff and bowsprit. Even the rudder was gone, rendering her an aimless cripple to be abused by jailers. A spar amidships supported a derrick which probably hauled aboard the awful swill the prisoners ate and, I suppose, the poor devils relished. There were rude cabins, more like shacks, fore and aft and, for a touch of homeyness, a clothesline was strung with washing. About the decks milled ragged men under the wary eyes and ready muskets of soldiers.

I took the long glass from my eye and wiped away the sweat it had created. “If it’s luck, I don’t see it. That thing is impregnable.”

“Look astern,” Cork softly commanded.

Again the magnification. There were two British naval officers apparently talking to a Hessian officer of Grenadiers. The sun glittered off the brass plate of the Dutchman’s turnback cap.

“You conjectured Hessian guards back on Long Island. But the guards on duty are British!”

“A mixed complement, and that’s good luck. Obviously the Hessians have the night watch, and they probably resent it. Moody sentries are rarely alert, and they avoid the diseased corpses stored on deck for the next day’s burial ashore. Don’t look aghast, Oaks. Number Seven has observed the hulk’s routine. The prisoners are shut below at dusk and allowed on deck at dawn. We will swim over tonight and slip aboard on the aft mooring chains.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll know when we get there. Better start rending our clothes so we can mingle with the prisoners unnoticed.”

The last was not difficult to accomplish, since our ordinary seaman’s slops were as ragged and filthy as if they had originally been issued aboard Noah’s ark. But the first part — “We’ll know when we get there” — filled my belly with dread.

“Do you know whom we are looking for once we get aboard, Captain?”

“One of two agents. One named Willis Aymes is the primary, or Edward Thatch, his backup.”

“Each carries one of the two words, no doubt.”

“No,” Cork said, training the long glass back on the Jersey, “both-carry the message. One is for safety, lest something happen to the other.”

I now knew my real purpose for being there and I nearly cried with pride. I was Cork’s backup on this mission of missions!

“Are they known to you by sight, Captain?”

“No, but either one should not be hard to find. Number Seven knows for sure that Willis Aymes is aboard; he couldn’t verify Thatch on the Provost’s list, but the records the British keep can’t match yours, old son.”

Now how Number 7 ever got to look at the Provost’s list is a mystery to me, but I could see where some of that five pounds had gone. We slept.

It was six bells in the mid-watch and, from our eerie hiding place among the unshrouded corpses on the Jersey’s middecks, I could hear the hulk fleet sound the hour up and down the channel in a ghostly echo. Three o’clock, I thought, and only an hour or so before dawn, thank Jehovah! Cork had been correct about the Hessian’s laxity, and we came up the after chains easily and found, indeed, that death was a daily occurrence on this hulk. There were at least ten bodies laid in a clump, and we lay among them and waited.

Somewhere forward, the young guards were fruitlessly trying to teach a parrot what were obviously German obscenities and, after an hour of failure, they fell back on guttural English swear words for their amusement — to no avail, because I could hardly understand them, never mind the parrot. Nevertheless, when they gave up in disgust, saying, “Das Schwartzbart ist ein dummkopf,” I wished they had stayed with it; it distracted me from my horrible surroundings.

I felt a nudge in my side and Cork’s huge hand literally dragged me to the starboard side of the ship. In the dark I heard him rustle a tarpaulin, and then I was rolled under it with him behind me. It was stifling and I started to whisper my discomfort, but stopped. Of course! He had surveyed this hiding place during the day through the long glass, but to have used it for several hours on coming aboard would have suffocated us in the oppressive heat. But now the dawn was almost upon us and we had to take cover.

From the swelter of our lair, my ears greeted a multitude of sounds — the sounds of a war-day. First, the slap-slap of oar looms of the burial boat and the muffled voices of the graves detail taking off the dead. Eight bells chimed through my brain and then, from the shore, the heroic drum ruffle of reveille with sentries relieved of challenge and boyish fright. Our canvas covering was now hot as a stovelid. New sounds — the drums ashore beating troop assembly with its quarter-time tempo which the soldiers call the Ladies’ Parade. The Jersey was abustle with movement as if this old whore was about to tremble herself into some futile modicum of respectability. The Hessian guards’ guttural was replaced by Kentish English and at last the rattle of the lug chains over the prisoner hatches running free.

“Now,” Cork whispered, and we rolled out into the glare of sunshine. I’m not a Papist, but if there is such a thing as purgatory it was there before my eyes. Like ravenous, red-eyed dogs, the wretched, ragged men burst upon feed pots of oatmeal thick as paste and devoid of human acceptance. Yet they shoved and fought to dip their bowls into it.

“Look alive now,” Cork said, nudging me into reality. “My name is Connor. You’re Treford, taken off the prize Gloria. Follow my trail.”

What else have I been doing these many years? I did again, to the larboard rail where the men were feeding.

“ ’Morn to ya,” Cork said to a man standing alone, finger-scooping porridge into a mouth lacking front teeth. He was possibly the ugliest creature I have ever seen — shortish, with cruel grey eyes set into a completely bald head, with deep scars embedded in his cheeks and massive forearms. He looked like an abused tavern fireplace — solid, sooty, and scarred by over-use.

“Who the hell’s you?” he asked between fingerfuls.

“Connor, off’n the Gloria, taken two months back. Came over from Falmouth yonder after the belly gripes like my mate ere, Treford.” Cork forgets nothing. The Gloria privateer was taken off the Carolinas. I kneaded my brain. There were men named Connor and Treford on its manifest.

“Must be mighty hearty to survive hospital,” the fireplace said warily. “Mine’s Bunch Booth, Master at Arms in Angel until two weeks aback.”

He did not extend a hand, and thank God, for I would have had to accept that filthy, porridge-dripping paw, which looked more like a vise than a hand. He was well suited to a Master-at-Arms berth. How well the abused know how to abuse.

“Angel, eh?” Cork said in slovenly dialect. “Say, I had a few mates in ’er. Name o’ Aymes and Thatch. Sure like see ’em oncet more on earth.”

“Well, if it’s Aymes y’ seek, best take a spade,” said the brute, pointing to shore. “Died two nights ago. Now, Thatch—” he cocked his cloudy eye “—there’s no Thatch in Angel and that’s a certainty. Say, you fellows look mighty too healthy fer comin’ off a hospital hulk.”

“You don’t look too peaky yourself.”

A toothless grin came forward. “Twenty-five year afloat. Hell, I lived on maggot pork and biscuits that’d crack a rat’s teeth since I could walk. Aymes was a good hand in Angel, good foretopman.”

“Too bad he didn’t get shipped over to Falmouth,” Cork said.

“Would have been a waste — ’e was stabbed — run through like a sand shark in the night.”

Only someone who has known Cork as long as I have could sense the jolt this news sent through him. With Aymes dead and Thatch not even aboard, all our efforts were for naught.

“Stabbed?” Cork’s tone was suspicious. “The British are usually very thorough in a prisoner shake-out. Was it a fight over food?”

Bunch Booth shrugged his massive shoulders, a movement that seemed unnatural, almost coquettish, for his rough and ready demeanor. “Who knows in the night what goes on, matey, who knows?”

He moved away on the crowded deck.

“That’s a curious customer,” I said above the babbling din.

“More curious than you know, Oaks.”

“We’d best make plans to get out of here since we came on a goose chase.”

“No, we’ll tarry a bit,” Cork murmured solemnly.

“Tarry! Captain, this is insanity! Aymes is dead, and Thatch doesn’t seem to exist. What could we possibly gain by staying in this awful place?”

“Several things. First, is Aymes truly dead? Second, is Thatch here under another name? Third, we have there a ‘curious customer,’ as you call him.” He nodded at a knot of men yarning with Bunch Booth at the middeck. “Most convivial for a former Master at Arms. They’re usually the most hated men aboard any ship.”

“Well, incarceration tends to boil away old bitterness.”

“He’s a liar or something else, you can mark it.”

“A liar? About Aymes’s death? You have no proof.”

“About Aymes being a fine foretopman. Think, lad. The Angel was a cutter, single-mainmasted, built for speed with a great press of canvas, but no foremast in the mariner’s sense. A veteran sailor such as Booth is supposed to be wouldn’t make such a mistake, if he is what he claims. We’ll save time if we split up and talk with as many men as we can. Don’t waste time with anyone who was not in The Angel. I’ll take the forward deck section, and you go aft.”

I started to move, but Cork’s hand stayed me for a second. “Be careful, Oaks. And stay clear of Bunch Booth.”

I began my trek through the mass of ragged men, some sitting mumbling in groups of twos and threes, some standing alone, staring vacantly. Through their grim tatters, I could make out that the majority were soldiers, the length of their beards and the degree of their emaciation grimly indicating the length of their imprisonment.

As I neared the riser of the quarterdeck, I looked up at a strange and pathetic sight. A child, a boy no more than eight or nine, was leaning against the fife rail, feeding bits of bread to a parrot. It was strange that a child should be in this place; pathetic because a few of the morsels fell to the lower deck where a prisoner greedily retrieved the crumbs like a barnyard hen. As I neared the prisoner, he eyed me warily, as if to defend his feeding ground. On my approach, the boy quickly disappeared.

“Yer too late fer breakfast, mate,” the man taunted me. In good health, he was probably thin by nature, but now he looked like a railbird — the appearance heightened all the more by his small stature and beak-like nose.

“Pretty damn cruel, if you ask me,” I said, “letting that child tantalize you with crumbs from a parrot’s mouth.”

The little man cackled. “He’s not tantalizin’, he’s helping his shipmate. You must be new aboard.”

I told him the hospital-ship story. “That little tyke was a crewman?”

“Well, you might say he was. I was the cook aboard Angel, and little Jibs was my galley boy.”

My ears pricked up at the mention of Angel and I let him go on.

“The boy was living with his American grandma in France and the old lady died. He has kin in Massachusetts, so the Frenchies was sendin’ him home. We got jumped and he got took like the rest of us. The lobsterbacks are arrangin’ to send him home, but it’ll take a month, the way they work. Well, at least two from The Angel is gettin’ decent food.”

“I wouldn’t call the crumbs he dropped decent food.”

“Not me. Him and Blackbeard. The parrot. The Lieutenant let him keep the bird for amusement. I guess the British navy ain’t all rotten. I can’t say the same for the Kraut-eaters though. It makes ’em madder than hell because they can’t teach him cuss words. That parrot’s dumb as Job’s turkey.”

I asked after my “old friends,” Aymes and Thatch, and got the same answer we had gotten from Bunch Booth. Aymes was dead and there never was a man named Thatch aboard The Angel.

“Say, if you was a friend of Aymes,” the seacook, who gave his name as Potts, suggested, “you probably got a right to what little gear he had. It ain’t much, but if we ever get off this hellhold you could turn it over to his folks.”

My heart started to beat faster, calling my brain to quarters. If Aymes had left some belongings behind, he might have left the message among them. I looked about in vain for Cork and then, not wishing to lose the opportunity, took action.

“Can I see them?”

“Sure, mate, come on belowdecks.”

I think it was the Italian fellow whom Cork occasionally reads — Diego or Dante something — who described a descent into hell, and now I was living it. The heat mixed with the dampness of rotting timbers created a steamy vapor in the air that carried the awful stench deeper into my lungs.

“Over this way, mate.” Potts guided me in the half light that filtered in from the old gun ports, now latticed with iron bars.

Suddenly, I felt a jolting pain in my throat. My locomotion stopped and, for a moment, so too my awareness, except that I was choking. Somehow my brain cleared enough to ken that a massive arm had encircled my neck and held me in an excruciating death-lock.

“Squirms like an eel, don’t ’e, Bunch?” I heard Potts cackling.

“More like a snake. Hold still, you murderous, spying scum.” The grip grew tighter and I was about to pass out.

“Belay that, Bunch,” I heard the salvation of Cork s voice. “You’re covered.”

Sweet relief of release brought air — still foul, but welcome — back into me. As I rubbed my neck, I could see the Captain standing like a specter in the shadow of a stanchion, a boarding pistol in his hand. He must have secreted it on himself before we left the safe house. Ever practical, I wondered if the flintlock was still damp from our swim, and obviously so did Cork, for he pressed the forward trigger and the spring bayonet flicked into place. Perhaps he did it for effect; he loves drama.

“So it’s the other one,” Bunch growled, “and right as a true bearing I was about you two. Spies sent among us like bilge rats at the grain sacks. That damned idiot Cunningham didn’t even have enough sense to send a spy who knew somethin’ about sailin’ a ship. Foretopman, hah! He was no sailor a’tall, poor lad. But I ran up yer true pennant when you swallowed that one.”

The Cunningham of whom he spoke was Captain William Cunningham, Provost Marshal of New York. Our dossiers on this black-Irish criminal-turned-soldier bulged with his cruelties.

Cork, still training the boarding pistol on them, asked the Master at Arms, “Why didn’t you accept parole along with the other officers and senior mates?”

Bunch Booth scoffed defiantly. “Same as I told yer butcherin’ Provost, ya lickspittle, parole is to give yer word, and I can’t.” He turned his massive bull head with its scarred face to the quivering Potts. “Sorry, Cookie, we couldn’t have strangled the skinny one for Lady Liberty.” He turned back to Cork. “Well, have at it and make it clean.” He laughed again at an afterthought. “At least you’ll get no scalp from me.”

A strange expression came into Cork’s face, one I’d never seen before. He looked like a stunned schoolboy who had been told that all his sums were wrong. The pistol came down to his side, the bayonet re-sprung and secured in his belt. He came forward to a surprised but still wary Bunch Booth. “You’re a true son of liberty, sir, and I give you my hand on it.”

That handclasp was like two gigantic palmetto leaves entwined, and one of the most manly expressions of mutual respect I have ever experienced. I didn’t have to be told, nor did Cork, why Bunch had refused parole. It went beyond loyalty to his crew and scaled the heights of sacrifice. This rough-and-tumble seaman would, by sheer determination, keep his men’s spirits alive, if not their bodies. He was a walking symbol of diffident fortitude — what the Americans call guts.

As we later learned, he had been pressed into the Royal Navy at twelve, never to see Spithead again until he was eighteen, only to ship out again until he jumped ship in the Indies and plied his trade in various American bottoms. If the brutalities of navy life — the floggings, the weary watches before the mast, the harsh discipline of “gentlemen” officers, and the months of tainted food — couldn’t break him, how could this hulk? Perhaps there is some Divine scheme that prepares us for one brilliant hour.

Cork huddled us into the darker shadows and spoke rapidly and incisively. “Our business here is of vital importance to the cause, Booth. Is Aymes really dead? Where is Thatch and what’s this about scalping?”

“Aymes is dead and he was stabbed and scalped, although the other lads don’t know about that part. No sense puttin’ more fear in ’em. Me and Potts wrapped him in a shroud and put him out with the dead like he passed normal-like. I told you he was stabbed because I wanted to see how you took the wind of it. And you didn’t show a ripple. That’s why I saw you as a spy. There’s no Thatch here and that’s on the book, brother.”

“Whom do you suspect of Aymes’s murder?”

“None of my crew, but we got a lot of other crews and soldiers aboard.”

“Who else died the same night as Aymes? Think carefully, Booth.”

“ ’Tain’t hard,” Potts piped. “I was on burial detail, both Mr. Booth and me. There was a young soldier name of Coombs and that slant-eyed duck — what’s ’is name?” He looked at Booth.

“Never knew it to tell. Looked like a half-breed harpooner I once met.”

Cork shook his head in disgust. “A Micmac Abenaki.”

“A what?”

“A Nova Scotia member of the Abenaki nation, Oaks. They resemble Orientals in feature because they have mixed blood with the snow tribes of the Arctic regions.”

“But he was deader’n a mackerel,” Potts exclaimed, “and he didn’t kill himself neither.”

“An Indian can play possum for hours, and with the help of an herbal concoction he can truly appear dead, even to a gravesman.”

“You mean Cunningham sent a murderin’ savage in here?”

“No, Booth. Cunningham is a blackguard, but he knows nothing of Indians and how to control them.” Cork stopped for a moment and a sly smile gave way to his muttering. “So at last he’s tipped his hand!”

“What say?”

“Never mind. It’s another matter, Booth. It seems our trip has been foiled, Oaks, and now we must plan an escape.”

“I’m still tryin’ to figger out how you got aboard.” Bunch Booth scratched his head and gave us a toothless smile.

“That, too, will have to wait. First, are there any weakened bars on the gunports?”

Another smile from Booth, this time like that of a fox. “Aye, but these lads are too weak to swim for it.”

“I’ll try to have supplies smuggled to you. And believe me, Congress will hear of these conditions. Now, tonight, we are going to have a bit of an insurrection of our own.”

That night, we could hear the din raised by the prisoners as we quietly swam across the flooding Tidal Pond. After some difficulty, we found the flotation markers Cork had left and made our way to the half-submerged Tortoise.

Once aboard, Cork located the sulphur stick-box and lit a candle to check the instruments.

“Don’t look so woebegone, Oaks. At least we know The Hairbuyer’s operating in Canada at the moment.”

“I was thinking of the little boy. I trust he is sent home safely.”

“What little boy?”

“The little blond fellow on the quarterdeck. Didn’t you see him this morning? He was feeding his parrot, Blackbeard, and Potts at the same time.”

“Confound and goddamn you, man,” he fumed, “when will you learn to report every detail?” He started to scamper out of the submersible.

“The tide will be turning in an hour,” he said sternly. “If I haven’t returned by then, you are to drift out with it as best you can. If you get back, send this message to Congress: They are not to be hoodwinked into thinking the message from Paris has been intercepted when they receive Aymes’s scalp. Even if his wife or kin identifies it, they are to pay it no mind.”

“But, Captain,” I pleaded, “the child will certainly be transferred home. Why risk it?”

He reached down before he went out the hatch and touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry I abused you, old son. Have a care now.”

I waited in the dreadful darkness, praying for his safety. How like him to go back for Jibs or any child. Oh, I know over the years people have laughed behind my back over my steadfast loyalty to Cork. But they will never know how it feels to be sold into bondage, to come to a strange land and then, at a Philadelphia dockside, to be bought like a sack of apples by a tall sunburned American in buckskins and then have that man turn to you and say, “Well, man, what are you waiting about for? Go now, lad, you’re free.” And when I asked why, to be told, “Because I can’t buy them all, and you looked the most in need of freedom.”

Over the years, I have harangued about his extravagances, his excesses; and yet his first extravagance was me.

The depth bubble was rising all too fast for my liking when I heard the thud and clatter at the hatch. I thanked God and opened it. His wet body dropped down. He secured the hatch tightly and said breathlessly, “Strike the candle, Oaks.”

I did, and saw him standing shirtless and exhausted.

“You couldn’t get the child, then. Too bad.”

“Don’t worry. The child will get home. I got what I wanted.”

From behind him, he had his shirt tied like a sack, and from it he took the damned parrot. “Meet our agent, Mr. Thatch,” he said triumphantly.

“Oh, Captain,” I said with true pity, “you’re mistaken. Potts told me, he’s as dumb as Job’s turkey. Even the Hessian guards gave up in disgust last night.”

“Then there were a flock of Job’s turkeys aboard that ship, and I among them until you told me his name was Blackbeard. Don’t you see? Franklin’s a clever old coot. What was Blackbeard the pirate’s real name?”

“Tench, I believe.”

“Or Thatch. No one was ever quite sure. Leave it to an old printer like Franklin to remember that oddity, but then he was a printer’s apprentice when Blackbeard was holding sway, and facts like that stick in a boy’s mind.”

“But the bird can’t talk — or imitate, to be more correct.”

“Parrots are stupid, Oaks, but that’s because people don’t know how to get their attention. Down in Spanish America, they have a trick of teaching them most anything — but you have to do it in the dark, so they can concentrate on the lesson.”

“Well,” I said, trying not to sound ignorant, “did you have a nice conversation on the way back? It’s certainly dark enough in the water.”

“A very nice conversation, to be sure — eh, Polly? Listen.”

All I heard were cackles and squawks, and I told Cork so.

“You don’t hear it because you don’t know what you’re supposed to hear.”

The bird rattled on, over and over, with the same gibberish.

“Am I supposed to hear ‘cawkee-gee, cawkee-gee’?”

“Close enough.”

“Those are the two words? Cawkee-gee? Wait, is this Injun jabber?” Cork grinned.

“And that bird has been saying the secret code words all over the ship, with no one the wiser?”

“I would have been if I had gone aft and you forward.”

“But you didn’t know Franklin was going to use a parrot.”

“No, but I would have gotten the Blackbeard-Thatch connection, and I did once I was properly informed. The use of Quinnipiac dialect words was prearranged before Franklin left for France. The spione situation must be quite fierce there, and Franklin suspected that Aymes might be intercepted. And he was right, since The Angel was jumped and Cunningham himself interrogated the crew.”

“But how did Aymes get singled out for death and scalping?”

“We did not see his remains, but I suspect Franklin might have erred in choosing him as a courier. Bunch said he was no sailor. The Provost saw through his role and, knowing he could not extract information by torture, passed his finding to The Hairbuyer.”

“But how could Franklin be sure you’d get the parrot?”

“If Aymes fell, then Jibs was to get the bird into safe hands, the lad tells me, and, considering his age, his release was assured. The boy only knew he had a stupid bird. Now, let’s to work. I have what I came for.”

The tide was at the turning, which made the treadle work easier.

“I suppose we’ll have to give the parrot a number, since he’s a top spy,” I chided.

He ignored me with silence, but I could tell he was chuckling. Damn him.

“And put him on the pay books,” I said airily.

More silence.

“And give him an Injun jabber password.”

The bird cawed. “Cawkee-gee.”

Cork navigated in silence.

And I, as usual, persist.