Victory Page 5

  Inside the roughly made envelope is a small piece of coarse, frayed cloth. It is a dirty cream color, a lighter brown than the paper around it: a ragged little piece of material about three inches square. Molly takes it out between her finger and thumb and puts it on the palm of her left hand.

  And in that instant, the presence of power floods all around and through her like a great noise, so that she feels suddenly giddy. She puts her other hand flat on the bed beside her, to prop herself up. She is not frightened, not at all; it is more like an excitement, like the feeling of having been given some wonderful piece of news.

  Then it is gone, as if a huge chord of music had suddenly boomed out, and then just as suddenly stopped.

  Russell is gazing nervously at her face. “Moll? You look like . . . are you going to have one of your sideways times?”

  “No!” Molly says. “I’m fine.” She holds her palm out to him. “Look—it’s a piece of cloth. It’s really old.”

  “Yeah,” Russell says, glancing at it. He is still keeping a cautious eye on her face.

  Molly moves her hand to slide the little square of cloth back into its folded paper covering, but as she does so, she notices some words written on the paper itself. She pauses and instead opens out the fold.

  This writing is very faint, and in a different hand: a beautiful slanting copperplate handwriting, from another age. Molly knows at once that it is much older than the inscription by Mr. Edward Austen. She has seen writing like this before, on a school visit to the British Museum in London. That day, most of the kids had obsessed over a prehistoric mummified little man, but her favorite thing had been the old handwritten letters and manuscripts, in glass-topped cases covered with velvet curtains to keep the light from fading the ink.

  She starts to read aloud again. “Thif the moft—” then she smiles, remembering the way the old manuscripts had every S written like an F.

  She reads: “This the most precious possession of my father Samuel Robbins, his piece of the flag of HMS Victory on which he served as a boy at Trafalgar. Given into my safekeeping as a girl, before his last voyage from which he did not return. May God bless my dear father and his Admiral.”

  Molly finds her voice shaking, and she stops. “Oh my goodness,” she says. She stares at the piece of darkened cloth in her hand.

  Russell picks up the wounded book and studies the handwriting. “There’s a signature here too,” he says. “Emma . . . Tenney. See?” He hands it to Molly. She looks, and nods.

  “Cool,” Russell says. “You got a piece of history, Moll.” And Molly realizes that he has no idea of the nature of this amazing thing that has come into her life. For Russell, this is just an old book with some writing and a dubious relic in it. Though he lived for two years in England, he has come home and changed back into an American boy, and the name Nelson is no more than a memory of that dude on the pole in Trafalgar Square. If the piece of flag had something to do with George Washington, it might have kept his attention. But it is as English as Molly and her book, and besides, Russell has far more interest in sailing, girls and his impending driving test than in history.

  Molly slips the square of cloth back into its brown paper covering, and closes the book.

  Russell gets up, puts out a hand and ruffles her hair briefly. “You going to bed? Sleep well.”

  As he goes out, Molly says, “Russ—don’t tell anyone. About the book.”

  He pauses, looking back at her with his quirky eyebrows raised. “Okay. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’d just like it to be my private thing.”

  “You’re a funny kid,” Russell says indulgently. “Sure—I’m as silent as the grave.” And she knows, as he leaves, that his mind has already run on to other far more immediate concerns than her broken book and its long-dead owner.

  But for her, something magical has happened, something that links her back to her lost land, something that feels like the opening of a strange perilous door.

  Sam

  1803

  All that first night and half the next day they kept us penned down there in the depths of the ship, with no more food but some more water, and two other buckets in which to piss. I was sick as a dog still, from the stench and from the swaying of the ship, and the men who had been drunk when they were caught were groaning and even howling with pain and fury. It was a miserable, reeking bunch of men who were herded up on deck by two marines sometime in the next afternoon.

  I shall never forget that day. The sky was grey, but dazzling after the darkness below. Blinking, we came staggering out into the world of the Royal Navy: a line of marines drawn up, all red and gleaming white; the mocking, watching faces of many seamen, and a table, an ordinary table, looking very strange there on the deck of a ship, with three officers sitting at it. The one in the middle looked so grand that I thought he must be the captain of HMS Victory. He had a straight nose and a strong mouth, long brown hair tied with a black ribbon, and a cockade in his hat, and his coat was blue with white lapels and gold anchor buttons. He was the finest man I had ever seen.

  The seaman in charge of us pulled off his hat. “Twenty-seven pressed men, Your Honor,” he said.

  The officer looked at us, turning his head slowly to survey the whole group. “Gentlemen,” he said clearly, “you are aboard His Majesty’s Ship Victory, under the command of Captain Samuel Sutton, and I am First Lieutenant Quilliam.” He paused, glancing at the officer beside him, and his voice changed. “Dear God, what a sorry bunch,” he said. “Sort them, if you please, Mr. Smith.”

  Mr. Smith was a thin-faced man in a plain dark coat; later I found out that he was one of the ship’s surgeons. He came round to the front of the table and began pointing at us.

  “You, and you—step forward—and you—” He picked out seven of us, including my uncle and me, and the marines pushed us to stand in front of the others.

  Mr. Smith said curtly, “Take the rest—strip and wash.” And I saw now that farther along the deck, grinning sailors waited with buckets and brushes. A hubbub of orders and protest and laughter began, and without ceremony all the other captives were seized and stripped of their clothes, and scrubbed clean. They hopped around, naked, shivering. But certainly they had been a filthy lot, with dirt-encrusted clothes and greasy hair. I realized that those of us separated out by Mr. Smith the surgeon were the only decent-looking human beings in the group—and I felt an extra wave of gratitude toward my uncle, whose first act on taking me into his home had been to set me naked in a bath and have me wash my body and my hair clean with soap, in water that to my astonishment was warm. After that, he and my aunt had given me clean clothes, and thrown my old ones away.

  My uncle was standing now in front of the first lieutenant, who was checking his name on a list.

  “Well, Charles Davis,” he said, “are you prepared to take the bounty and serve your country in His Majesty’s Navy?”

  My uncle took a deep breath, and touched his fingers to his forehead in a sort of salute. “Begging your pardon, sir, I have been serving my country making rope in His Majesty’s Dockyard these past fifteen years—rope for this great ship you command, too.”

  The sailor in charge of us made a growling noise at his having the audacity to speak so, but Lieutenant Quilliam looked at my uncle with interest.

  “Have you indeed,” he said. “Well, now you may follow that useful trade here, Charles. We can well use another roper.”

  My uncle said desperately, “I know nothing of the sea, sir.”

  Lieutenant Quilliam said, “I do not choose to waste a skilled rope-maker as a pressed land man. For a start, I shall write you down Ordinary Seaman, with five pounds bounty and a fair wage and chance of promotion, and you will follow your calling. But you must enter the Service.”

  His eyes held my uncle’s for a long moment, and as I looked at my uncle’s face I saw him lose all hope of his secure ropewalk life and his wife and home, all in that instant. He even answered like a sailor. “Aye ay
e, sir,” he said.

  “Sign your name here.”

  So my uncle Charlie signed.

  “Good man,” said the first lieutenant, and motioned him farther down the table, to the men who would measure his height and chest and write down the color of his eyes and hair, all so that he could be listed and captured as a deserter if he ran away.

  And there was I, standing in turn in front of the great man.

  He looked at my name on his list. “Samuel Robbins,” he said. “Are you for a life of adventure, boy? Will you take the King’s shilling?”

  “The other officer told me seven pounds a year, Your Honor,” I said without thinking, and the sailor in charge instantly cuffed me round the head. But the lieutenant held up his hand to stop him, and looked me in the eye. I think he was trying not to smile.

  “He was right,” he said. “The shilling is a token. Seven pounds a year for a boy, if you join the Service.”

  I looked for my uncle, but I couldn’t see him in the crowd of men. “I will do the same as my uncle, sir, if you please.”

  “The roper is your uncle? Are you apprenticed?”

  “No, sir. I was just starting. He brought me from the country a week ago.”

  “I was a country boy myself once,” Lieutenant Quilliam said. He handed me a pen. “Make your mark here.”

  “I can write, sir,” I said, proud of myself that I could say so, and I wrote my name. The lieutenant gave me another close look and nodded me down the line.

  And so I became a sailor.

  HMS Victory was so huge, I felt like a lost ant in a giant ant-hill. On deck, all I could see or think about was the great singing mass of ropes and canvas overhead, the three towering, swaying masts, and the hundreds of men shinning up and down the rigging to release the sails or furl them. Below, the ship was a dark complicated world, down and down, one deck after another, all lined with black iron cannons and intent men bustling along on mysterious errands. It was three days before I saw my uncle again.

  The first day was a blur of shouted orders and muddle, as two other new boys and I were sent from one place to another to be issued hammocks, shown how and where to stow them, taught the way to the part of the upper gundeck where we would sleep and eat. And because HMS Victory had sailed out of the Medway estuary now, all the time the floors were slanting and tossing, and I was trying not to slide or crash into a stairway, or be sick.

  And very soon, work began. Because I was a country boy and ignorant of the sea, they gave me to the ship’s cook, to help look after the chickens and do anything else he wanted. There was not only live poultry aboard the ship, but animals too, so that there would be eggs and fresh meat for the officers. (Fresh meat for the men too, when a voyage began, but soon they had only tough salt beef and pork that had been stored in casks, sometimes for years.) Somewhere on board there were ducks and geese, sheep and pigs, but Charles Carroll, the ship’s cook, kept the best of the chickens two decks down to be handy to his galley, a stuffy little world framed by an enormous iron stove set on a tiled floor.

  So there I was sent, with another boy called Stephen, a small, weaselly little fellow with darting black eyes that never looked at you straight on. Carroll the cook was an oldish man, completely bald, with a wooden leg and a rasping voice; he looked as though he would lay you flat with one of his broad hands if you so much as sneezed at the wrong moment. When we were delivered to him as helpers, he looked at us without enthusiasm, spat into the fire his assistant was lighting in the stove, and said curtly, “Can you kill and pluck a fowl?”

  “Oh yes, sir!” piped Stephen, so quickly that I doubted this was true.

  “Get on, then. Two of the hens, and look sharp about it. They’re up the stairs there. And I want the feathers saved.”

  Stephen scuttled off. I paused. “Sir—we’ll need knives, and a bucket—and hot water—”

  Carroll reached out to an array of kitchen tools hanging on a rack, dropped a small axe and a knife into a wooden bucket, and thrust it at me. “Everything out of this galley comes straight back, or you get a thrashing,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Draw them hot water, Tommy,” he said to his assistant, and I looked at the man properly and could hardly move for surprise. All his skin was shiny black—his face, his neck, his hands, everything—and I had never seen such a thing before. Tommy saw my ignorance at once, I think, and grinned at me: a broad white grin full of gleaming teeth. It made me grin back, before I ran up the stairs.

  It was easy to find the chickens; they were cackling wildly in a row of wooden cages, as Stephen groped inside one of their doors. I could see he had the wrong cage; the hens were white, and all cozied up with straw to protect their eggs.

  “Not those, they’re the layers. Here—” I opened a cage with black and whites like those we used to kill on the farm for dinners at the great house. I grabbed one of the hens and brought it out, kicking; then I held it across to Stephen. “You want to wring its neck?”

  He shook his head, staring. He was a real city boy, you could tell. He’d probably never even seen a live chicken before. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to kill it; that was the one job on the farm that I had really hated. But I’d had to do it then, and I had to do it now.

  My father had been able to grab a chicken’s head in his big hand and swing its body round in a swift circle to break its neck in a flash, but my hands weren’t strong enough to do that. Next to the cages there was a block of wood, stained dark; I knew what that must be for. “Hold tight,” I said to Stephen, “very tight”—and I put the struggling hen into his hands, stretched its neck out over the block and brought down the axe as hard as I could, to kill it fast. To my relief the head fell away—and Stephen shrieked, for the headless bird in his hands was still kicking, with blood splashing out. They often do that, even after they’re dead. Just as Stephen dropped it I shoved the bucket underneath, and as it went on twitching in there he turned his head away and retched. But he didn’t throw up, though his face was pasty white.

  “Good,” I said, to encourage him. “Now one more.”

  And we did it again. As the second hen’s body was bouncing around on top of the first, Tommy came up the stairway with a bucket of hot water in one hand and a mop in the other. He looked at the birds, nodded, and took the axe out of my hand.

  “Clean up well when you done,” he said. He had a funny accent, like singing. “All this ship have to be clean as a whistle, all the time, or we get the cat.”

  “The cat?” I said.

  “Cat-o’-nine-tails,” Tommy said, and made a horrible face. “Flogging, by a whip wi’ nine lashes to it. Or for boys, a beating with cane.”

  He put the mop into Stephen’s hands, and we both knew without speaking that we would make sure to use it well.

  So then I got the birds into the bucket of water while it was still hot, and showed Stephen how to pluck the feathers. He was slow and clumsy but he tried hard, and I began to think he might be better than his sly looks. He was a city boy sure enough; he said he had been living on the streets for half a year after running away from home. He was thirteen years old but very small for his age. He had been caught stealing bread, and put into the Navy instead of prison or a poorhouse.

  But we were all in prison on this ship, really.

  When we delivered the two naked hens to the cook, with their giblets and feathers clean and separate, I suppose he thought we were worth having as help. He set me to feeding the chickens, cleaning out their cages and collecting the eggs—with promises of a beating if I ever broke or stole one—while Stephen scoured pots and scrubbed the tiled floor. Within a day we were mucking out the pigs and the sheep too, and we soon found we had one of the worst jobs on the ship.

  I had to be out of my hammock before sunrise and get to the galley by four in the morning. That was when Mr. Carroll and Tommy began to light the fire and heat water for the men’s breakfast. After that the whole day was full of messy, reeking work, throu
gh dinner at noon, supper at four o’clock and bedtime at eight. As boys we were classified as “idlers”—a poor joke, considering how hard we worked. Idlers are the lowest form of life in the Royal Navy: the people who do all the jobs that have nothing to do with sailing the ship. And as third-class boys—there were three classes—we were the lowest of the low.

  About thirty of us boys slept on the upper gundeck, right underneath the ship’s deck, in canvas hammocks slung above the shining black cannons that poked their muzzles out all along both sides of the ship. They were big guns, firing iron balls that weighed twelve pounds each—though the guns on the decks below were much bigger, twenty-four-pounders on the middle gundeck and huge thirty-two-pounders on the lower. When they had gunnery practice Stephen and I had to keep out of the way, but the noise was stupendous and I longed to watch those powerful cannons being fired. Nearly every other boy was attached to a gun crew as a “powder monkey,” to fetch gunpowder every time the gun was fired. I was very envious of them.

  The leader of the boys seemed to be a redhead called William Pope; he and a bunch of his friends bossed us all around. They stole anyone’s jacket or shirt if they fancied it, or any little keepsake a boy had from home, like a knife or a kerchief, making me almost glad I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in—and slept in too, most nights. We had to wash our clothes and ourselves once a week for inspection, but otherwise there wasn’t time. Stephen and I smelled bad as a result, so the bigger boys made life miserable for us. Even though some of them had disgusting jobs of their own, they would scream and honk and hold their noses when we came near.

  “Shite smells bad enough,” said William Pope, shoving me away from him as I passed, “but pig-shite is worse!”

  So we had to sling our hammocks in a tiny cramped space next to the far bulkhead, just the two of us. Though maybe that was better than hanging close-packed like the others, so tight together that if you so much as coughed you would set the whole line of hammocks swinging.