Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

Chapter 19 The Greased Monkey

1 November 1808, cont.

“Whatever are we to tell Mamma, Jane?” my brother exclaimed as Mr. Hawkins and I settled ourselves amidships, snug in a pair of blankets afforded us by the hoy’s captain. Frank’s wife, Mary, was divided between wringing my gown of seawater, and murmuring vague phrases of sympathy. “She shall be forced to lock you in your bedchamber, if you do not display more sense.”

“What has sense to do with it, Fly? We did not in- tend to be marooned!”

“Nor did you intend to fall off your horse — but the injury was as severe.”

“I cannot think your decision to land in so lonely a place was wise,” Mary ventured doubtfully. “What possessed you to choose that isolated stretch of shingle?”

A glance at Mr. Hawkins confirmed that he had no intention of rescuing me from my predicament; the old seaman was sunk in black anger at the loss of his skiff.

“I have lately acquired a taste for sketching,” I told them lamely. “I thought to capture the prospect of. . of Hythe, just opposite, by setting up my easel in that exact spot.”

As there was nothing very extraordinary in the stretch of shore across the Water, my brother should well look perplexed.

“Mr. Hawkins was so kind as to oblige me, by putting me off at the desired point; but once we had landed, and walked a little way to determine the most advantageous position — we returned to find that the boat, along with my nuncheon, paintbox, and sketching things, had been seized by an unknown!”

“That is worrisome in the extreme,” Frank said heavily.

I stared at him. “What can you mean? It is decidedly vexing — and I regret the loss of Mr. Hawkins’s boat, not to mention Cassandra’s paintbox—”

“Jane, have you heard nothing of the news out of Portsmouth?”

“I have not.”

He glanced at his wife, whose eyes filled with tears.

“We suffered an extraordinary attack in the early hours of morning. All of Portsmouth is in disarray.”

“The naval yard?” I demanded. “Was another ship fired?”

“Much worse, I fear,” he said glumly. “The prison hulks, moored off Spithead, were liberated by a means no one may comprehend. With my own eyes, Jane, I saw the riot of French ranks — hundreds of the inmates, swarming over the decks. The crews of two hulks at least were murdered as they stood. Captain Blackstone is believed dead, though his body has not yet been recovered — it is thought that it was heaved overboard when the hulks were fired—”

“Good God! To consider such a scene!”

“It was dreadful,” Mary muttered in a choked voice. “Beyond the power of words to describe. We saw the flames throughout the night, and Frank would not stay, but must hurry to the aid of those who fought the fires. He was gone well past dawn, Jane, and I could not sleep for fearing—”

He laid his hand over hers, and she bowed her head to his shoulder. “I determined to carry Mary and the child to Southampton this morning, to remain in Mamma’s care until Portsmouth is deemed safe.”

“Are the prospects so very bad, Frank?”

“Do not ask me to describe what I saw last night,” my brother said harshly. “It defied even my worst experience of battle. In war, one expects devastation — one meets it with a certain fortitude — but to affix the horrors of engagement upon a well-loved scene, familiar through years of association—”

Years, indeed. It was at the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth that Frank had learned his love of the sea, at the tender age of twelve. He had been hauling or dropping anchor in those waters all his life.

“But did no one witness the fiend who sparked so grave a crime?” I enquired.

“That is the question that must consume us all! I should have said an army was required to liberate those hulks—”

“Not a bit of it,” spat Jeb Hawkins. “At dead o’night, when the crews are settin’ skeleton watch? All that’s needful is one greased monkey lithe enough to climb up through the chains — slit a throat or two on the quiet, like — and pilfer the guard’s keys. Then you’ve an entire hulk what’s crying for blood and freedom, and the monkey’s off about his business on the next scow down the line.”

My brother frowned, and might have hurled a biting retort — for in his eyes, the pride and vigilance of the Royal Navy required an enemy legion, to suffer such an ignominious action. I grasped his wrist, however, to forestall dispute.

“What of the prisoners now?” I enquired. “Have any been recovered?”

He shook his head. “Too many slipped unnoticed into the darkness, Jane. We feared for the fate of several ships of the line, moored likewise in Spithead, and subject to the ravages of fire, to spare much effort in pursuing the French. It is a heavy business, to protect a fighting vessel from its own stores of gunpowder. We are lucky that none of them exploded last night, and in an instant set off all the others!”

If you commanded the direction of Enemy forces... where next should you aim your imps of Hell?

It was as Lord Harold had predicted. So much of chaos, and of death, in the wee hours; a strike unlooked-for, despite the Navy’s vigilance. The liberation of the hulks should bring in its train a creeping fear, that not even His Majesty’s strongest ports could be defended against an enemy as clever as it was insidious.

Did his lordship know already what had occurred? Word should have been sent along the Navy signal lines, from Portsmouth to the Admiralty, as soon as the dawn had broken. That the evil had occurred in Lord Harold’s absence — when Orlando should unaccountably be silenced — when Mrs. Challoner entertained a party of friends in seeming innocence, and balls of light flared at midnight from the Abbey walls—

Had Sophia or her gallant Mr. Ord signalled the attack from the ruined heights?

“Hundreds of the French, still at large,” I murmured, and thought of the black-cloaked figure who had fled the Abbey passage not an hour ago.

“That is what Frank meant,” Mary added, “when he declared the theft of Mr. Hawkins’s boat to be worrisome in the extreme.”

“The skiff was stolen, no doubt, by a freed prisoner, who lurked along the shingle, and observed all that you did,” my brother declared. “He thanked God and the Emperor when you appeared in his view, Jane, complete with vessel and nuncheon!”

“—Which is halfway across the Channel now, and may he drown before he ever sees Calais!” Hawkins spat once more into the bilge, drew his pipe from his nankeen pocket — and saw that the tobacco was wet with seawater. He subsided into morose silence. I endured my mother’s strictures regarding

the idiotishness of girls left too long upon the shelf; promised her I should never again quit the house of an early morning without informing her of my direction; and refused to pen a note to Mrs. Challoner denying myself the honour of attending her evening party.

“What can it be to you, Jane, to give up this small pleasure?” my mother demanded in exasperation. “It is not as though you bear the woman any great affection; and now your brother is come, you might plead the necessity of a family engagement. Frank thinks of taking Mary to the theatre in French Street while he is ashore — for, you know, his time is not his own, and he may be ordered back to sea at any moment. Cannot you remain quietly at home with the baby and Martha Lloyd tomorrow, and allow your brother to enjoy an evening with his wife?”

It was a simple enough request. I apprehended how selfish I must seem — how lost to everything but my own petty concerns. Being prevented from sharing so much as a word of the truth — that the attack on Portsmouth required me to exert vigilance in the only quarter I might suspect — I was left with but the appearance of disappointed hopes, and a mulish insistence that I could not fail Mrs. Challoner.

“Cannot Frank and Mary be persuaded to the theatre this evening instead? For I should gladly look after little Mary Jane tonight. But tomorrow, Mamma, is quite out of the question—”

“Mary is resting at present, and cannot say whether she shall summon even enough strength to descend for dinner. You know that she is a very poor sailor, particularly in so small a vessel as the hoy. And with Martha not yet able to set her foot to the floor—”

“Frank,” I called to my brother as he appeared at the foot of the stairs, “would you care to take a turn along the Water Gate Quay? We might learn what news there is of Portsmouth on the wharves, and stop at the butcher’s in our way, for the procuring of Cook’s joint.”

“That is a capital idea!” my brother cried. “Do not trouble yourself, Mamma, with fetching your purse — for I shall supply the joint this evening, in gratitude for all your kindness to my poor Mary.”

• • •

I formed a desperate resolution as we walked through Butcher’s Row, and came out along the High, and turned our faces towards the sea. My brother is a fellow of considerable understanding, when dealing with matters nautical; but his notions of chivalry and the proper station of women are charmingly Gothick. He might ignore the vital nature of what I should tell him, and fix instead upon the impropriety of Lord Harold’s every action.

“Should you not like to see the theatre this evening, Fly? For who knows when you shall be called back to the St. Alban’s. Never put off until tomorrow the chance that might be seized today.”

“Very true,” he said with a look of humour in his eye; “and you might serve me admirably this evening, without the slightest disarrangement of your plans for tomorrow. What is this Mrs. Challoner, Jane, that she commands such attention? I will allow her to be a very dashing young woman — but I should not have thought her quite in your style.”

“Frank,” I said abruptly, “I must take you into my confidence on a matter of gravest import — but first, you must assure me that no word of what I tell you will pass to Mary, or, God forbid — to Mamma.”

His sandy brows came down at this. “I know that you should never fall into error, Jane, by your own inclination — and so must assume that no wrongdoing is involved in your tale.”

“None on my part. You are aware of my acquaintance with a gentleman by the name of Lord Harold Trowbridge?”

“Cass mentioned something of him, once,” he said in an altered tone. “The fellow is a blackguard, I collect, who treated you most shabbily. Has he descended upon Southampton?”

“He is one of the Government’s most trusted advisors, Frank, and privy to the councils of war. He has spent the better part of the past year on the Peninsula, communicating the movements of the French. Indeed, I believe your Admiralty consigns a principal part of its Secret Funds to Lord Harold.”

“What do you know of the Secret Funds?” he demanded testily. And so, as we strolled the length of the High with a leg of mutton tied up in waxed paper, I related the baffling particulars of the past week: the sudden meeting aboard the Windlass, Lord Harold’s suspicions of Sophia Challoner, the oddities of Mr. Ord, and the cloaked figure I had encountered this morning in the depths of the subterranean passage. When I had done, Frank gazed at me with no little awe.

“You are a dark horse, Jane! But if your Lord Harold has had the use of a naval vessel — and no less a brig than Windlass—then his currency is good as gold. I know Captain Strong, and though he is but a Master and Commander, and young at that, I am certain he should never engage in any havey-cavey business along the privateering line. I may add that no less a Tory than Castlereagh professes to hold his lordship in high regard — and Castlereagh, in my books, can never err.”[22]

I murmured assent to the wisdom of Tory ministers.

“But I should not have suspected you, Jane, of skullduggery by night or day — though I have always said that you possess the Devil’s own pluck! And the stories you have fobbed off on Mamma — all with a view to making her believe his lordship is smitten with you—!”

“I did not have to work very hard at that, ” I retorted, somewhat nettled. “Mamma is ready to find evidence of love in the slightest male attention.”

Frank disregarded this aside; his moment of levity had passed. “Lord Harold truly believes Mrs. Challoner to have ordered the murder of old Dixon — the firing of the seventy-four — and the liberation of the prison hulks? I should be terrified to enter her drawing-room tomorrow; and I wonder at his lordship securing the services of a gentlewoman in pursuit of his spy, when he might have had a brigade of marines secured around Netley Lodge, merely for the asking!”

We had come up with the Dolphin Inn as he spoke, and almost without thinking, my feet slowed. I gazed towards the bow-fronted windows of the Assembly Room, and wondered which of the many glinting panes above disguised Lord Harold’s bedchamber. Had he returned from London? “A brigade of marines should never serve, Frank. Mrs. Challoner demands subtlety and care.”

“I apprehend. No mere cutting-out expedition, no shot across the bows, what? Don’t wish the birds to fly before we’ve clipped their feathers?”

My gaze fell from the Dolphin’s front to its side yard, where a group of ostlers loitered. They were the usual Southampton sort: roughly-dressed and fractured in their speech; sailors, some of them, turned onto land by dint of wounds. One of them lacked an arm; another had lost his leg below the knee, and supplied the want of a limb with an elegantly-carved peg. My brother no longer noticed such injuries; he witnessed them too often, once his deck was cleared for battle. The men of a ship of the line were torn asunder with a careless rapidity that defied belief in any God.

An oddity among the familiar grouping claimed my attention: the figure of a girl in a Prussian-blue cloak, a simple poke bonnet tied beneath her chin. She stood as though in suspense, being unwilling to venture the roughness of the stable yard’s men, but determined to gain admittance. Her gaze was trained on the windows of the inn above, and it was clear at a glance that she sought someone within. The slightness of her frame suggested extreme youth; and when she darted a furtive look over her shoulder, as though fearful of being watched, I gasped aloud.

“Flora Bastable! The maid dismissed from Netley Lodge! I should know those eyes anywhere — the exact colour of gentians, Frank, on a summer morn. But what can have brought her a full three miles from her home in Hound?”

“What the Devil do you care for a maidservant’s business, Jane?” he demanded impatiently.

At that moment, a chaise turned into the yard, blocking the girl from my view. When the way had cleared, she had vanished. Was it I who had driven her to flight? Had she sped deeper into the yard — or beyond it, to the alleyways and passages that led to the town’s walls?

And whom had she sought within? Her late mistress’s enemy — Lord Harold ?

“She certainly did not come here idly,” I mused, “and I read fear in her looks. Frank — say that you will help me! If the theatre is your object, persuade Mary that she is well enough to sit in French Street tonight; and insist upon my going to Netley Lodge tomorrow evening, despite Mamma’s protestations.”

My brother placed his hands upon my shoulders.

“I dislike the notion of you walking into such a den of vipers, Jane.”

“I dislike it myself. But I dislike the murder of good men — and the burning of ships — even more.”

“When you put it thus, my dear — I have no choice.” He drew my arm through his, and led me towards the Water.