Rapscallion. James McGee
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were more of them than there was of me,” Hawkwood said.
Fouchet smiled. “I believe I overheard Murat say it was at Ciudad Rodrigo?”
Hawkwood nodded.
“That’s a long way from home. What was an American doing there?”
The question Hawkwood had been expecting and of which he was most wary.
“Shooting British soldiers; officers mostly.”
“Why?”
“Your Emperor was paying me.”
Fouchet smiled. “I meant why you?”
“I’m a sharpshooter: First Regiment of United States Riflemen. I thought you might need my help.”
“Cheeky bastard,” Charbonneau said. “What makes you think France needs your help?”
Millet rolled his eyes. “Look around, idiot.”
Construct a biography based on your own expertise, James Read had told him. An officer from the Regiment of Riflemen had been the obvious choice. The American equivalent of Hawkwood’s former regiment, the Rifle Corps, used the same methods as its British counterpart, combining the tactics of the Light Infantry and, in the case of the Americans, native Indians, to harass and disrupt enemy movements. The first into the field and the last to leave.
“Heard that was a fearsome fight,” Millet said.
Fouchet frowned. “The siege took two weeks, I think I read.”
“Twelve days,” Hawkwood said. “Might as well have tried to stop the tide. How do you mean, read?”
“It was in the newspapers. They’re forbidden, but we manage to smuggle them in. Costs us a fortune. A few of us understand some English, but it’s usually Murat who translates. Not that we believe everything that’s in them, of course. You were wounded?” The teacher indicated Hawkwood’s facial scars.
“One of their riflemen took a stab at me with his bayonet.”
“You were lucky. You could have lost the eye.”
“He was upset.” Hawkwood shrugged. “We’d killed a lot of his comrades. Our cannon blew them to pieces. It didn’t stop them coming at us, though.”
“What happened to the rifleman?” Charbonneau asked.
“I killed him,” Hawkwood said. “He died, I lived. We surrendered. The British won.”
Hawkwood’s manufactured account wasn’t too far from truth. He’d read the dispatches. The Rifles had been in the thick of the action, providing covering fire for the Forlorn Hope, the forward troops leading the assault on the walls. The breach had been nearly a hundred feet wide, a huge target for the French gunners who’d launched a hail of grapeshot on to the attackers. It was only after the cannons had been destroyed and a French magazine had blown up that the British had managed to finally take the town. That much had been covered in the newspapers, but only the dispatches covered the aftermath, with accounts of how British soldiers, incensed by the slaughter of so many of their comrades, had gone on a drunken rampage. To prevent a massacre, officers had been forced to draw their swords on their own men. To add to his woes, Wellington had lost two of his best generals: Mackinnon of the 3rd Division and the Light Brigade’s Black Bob Crauford, under whom Hawkwood had served on a number of engagements.
“Bastards,” Millet muttered. “Goddamned bastards!”
The occupants of the table fell into a sombre silence.
Charbonneau broke the spell. “What about you?” he asked Lasseur.
Lasseur launched into a humorous account of his capture and imprisonment. It wasn’t long before his audience was smiling again, by which time supper was almost over. The messes began to break apart as the prisoners retrieved their hammocks from the foredeck and took them down to their allotted spaces below.
The boy had fallen asleep at the table, head across his folded arms.
“What’s his story?” Fouchet asked, as Millet and Charbonneau left to reclaim their aired bedding.
Lasseur shook his head. “He hasn’t said much. My guess is he got separated from the rest of his crew. So far, all he’s given me is his name.”
Fouchet nodded his understanding. “I suspect he’ll be all right once he’s with someone his own age. I’ll have a word with the other boys. Perhaps he’ll talk to them. In the meantime, it would be in his best interest if you kept a watch on him.”
The quiet note of warning in the teacher’s voice caused Lasseur to pause as he got up from the table. “That sounds ominous. Something you’re not telling us?”
“The boy’s young, small for his age, an innocent from what you’ve told me and from what I’ve observed. He’s also far from home and therefore doubly vulnerable. It should come as no surprise to you that there are those on board who would be likely to take advantage of his situation.”
Lasseur sat back down. “How likely?”
Fouchet smiled sadly. “My friend, there are over nine hundred men on this ship. More than eight hundred of them are imprisoned as much by inactivity as they are by these wooden walls. I suspect you already know the answer to your question.” The teacher picked up his tin and utensils and rose stiffly from his seat.
From the look on Lasseur’s face Hawkwood knew the privateer captain was remembering his exchange with the balding man on the gun deck. Lasseur stared down at the sleeping boy. His face was as hard as stone. “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time Hawkwood had experienced the restraints of a hammock. There was a definite art to clambering into the sling, but it was a case of once mastered, never forgotten. As a soldier, he’d grown used to bivouacking in uncomfortable surroundings, be it barn, bush or battlefield. On the march, you took advantage of sleep and sustenance when and where you could, because you never knew when the opportunity would arise again. A hammock was the epitome of comfort compared to some of the places he’d had to rest his weary head.
He lay back and listened to the emanations of the four hundred souls hemmed in around him. The sounds varied widely in content and tone, from the drawn-out cries of the distressed and the wheezing of the consumptives to the groans of the dysentery sufferers and the weeping of the lonely and dispossessed. When added to the chorus of swearing, hawking, spitting, farting, coughing and general expectorations common to the male species, they formed a discordant backdrop to the physical deprivations endured by men held in mass confinement and against their will.
The human sounds began to fade as the hulk’s inhabitants fell under the spell of night. In the darkness, however, the ship continued to express her own displeasure. A continuous cacophony of groans and creaks from the vessel’s ancient timbers filled the inside of the hull. It was as if Rapacious was venting her irritation at the presence of those trapped aboard her. The pull of the tide and the sound of the wash against her sides seemed magnified a thousand-fold, as did the hypnotic slap of rope and line against her cut-down masts and yards.
Mercifully, her gun ports remained propped open, for these were the only means of ventilation. Even so, it was unbearably warm. The squeak of hammock ring against hook and cleat was a grating accompaniment to the noisy tossing and turning of the gun deck’s restless residents as they sought relief from their sweltering discomfort.
Even if there had been silence within the hull, the rhythmic step of the sentries along the metal gantry outside and their monotonous half-hourly announcements that all was well was a salutary reminder that the will of every man on board, be he prisoner or guard, was no longer his own to command.
A sniffle sounded close by. It was the boy. He was lying on his back, blanket pushed down over his lower legs. His right arm rested across his face as if to ward off a blow. As Hawkwood watched, the boy turned his head, the