Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [16]
The two who held her by the arms now were typical of their breed, with their ugly, foxy faces and broken teeth. There was no light in their eyes.
‘Why me?’ she asked them when she’d caught her breath. ‘It wasn’t me who hit anyone.’
‘You were inciting riot,’ one said. ‘Bloody troublemaker.’
‘Take me to Lieutenant Captain Tench,’ she said boldly. ‘I’ll explain it to him.’
They didn’t reply, just dragged her on along the passage and up the companionway, out on to the deck. Mary was sure she was going to be tied up somewhere for a flogging but at that moment, as her lungs filled with the sweet, fresh air after breathing effluent for so long, she didn’t care.
She saw the night sky, sprinkled with a million stars, and the moon cutting a silver path across the dark waters of the river to the shore, and it seemed to be a sign that this was her moment, the opportunity she’d hoped for.
‘I want to see Tench,’ she screamed out at the top of her lungs. ‘Get him now.’
One of the guards struck her, knocking her down on to the deck. ‘Shut up,’ he hissed at her, and added a stream of profanities.
All at once Mary saw what they were about. They hadn’t dragged her out of the cell for formal punishment. They were intending to have their way with her, then shove her back later, with no one the wiser.
Determination was one of Mary’s strongest attributes. While she might be prepared to be bedded by someone who would feed her, allow her to wash and perhaps show her some affection, she wasn’t going to let herself be taken by a couple of rutting animals. She guessed too by the way they’d tried to silence her that there were men on the Dunkirk who didn’t approve of prisoners being raped. So she yelled again and again, and when one of them tried to cover her mouth, she bit his hand and punched him, screaming still louder for Tench.
‘What’s going on?’ a voice boomed out, and as the two men let go of her, she saw a slim male figure silhouetted in an open doorway to one of the many sheds that were built on the deck.
‘Mr Tench?’ Mary yelled out. ‘They dragged me out, I’ve done nothing wrong. Help me, please.’
‘Stop that yelling and come in here,’ he said. ‘And you too,’ he added to the men.
The shed was part ward room, part office. At the centre of it was a table littered with papers and lit by a couple of candles. It looked to Mary as though this man had been writing, for there was an open notebook and an inkwell in front of the stool he’d obviously just vacated.
Mary had no way of knowing if this was Watkin Tench. But the gold braid on his well-fitting red jacket and his spotless white breeches proved he was an officer, and he spoke like a gentleman. He was of slender build, with dark crinkly hair and brown eyes, and she thought he was around twenty-four or -five. His face was unremarkable, with small, neat features and clear and glowing skin. While he looked irritated at being disturbed, he certainly didn’t give the impression of being bad-tempered by nature.
‘Your name?’ he asked curtly.
‘Mary Broad, sir,’ she said. ‘I was trying to make the women let the sick ones have some soup,’ she added quickly. ‘Some of them didn’t like it, and one hit me, then these two dragged me out.’
‘She was trying to start a fight,’ one of the guards claimed. ‘We had to separate her.’
‘Wait outside, you two,’ the young officer said.
They left, one muttering something under his breath. Once the door was closed, the officer perched on his stool and looked hard at Mary.
‘Why were you calling out my name?’ he asked.
Mary felt a sense of relief that she had found the right man. ‘I’d been told you were fair,’ she said.
Tench nodded noncommittally, and asked Mary to explain what had happened.
Now that she had a platform to air her complaints, she spared him nothing. She said how the strongest women got the food while the weakest were starving, and that in her opinion there wasn