Scarborough Fair - Chris Scott Wilson [15]
Paul Jones had traveled the same road earlier during his stay in France when visiting Brest at Brittany’s tip where the French fleet lay at anchor. Now, his hand was always near the hilt of his sword. Any stranger to peer suddenly in the coach window was likely to be greeted by the wide muzzles of the two pistols he wore pushed into his belt. Even when he slept, a loaded pistol was always tucked under his pillow.
He was weary. The enthusiasm incited by Franklin at the Hotel Valentinois had seeped away with each jarring rattle of the coach as the driver bullied the horses with his whip. Listening to the crack of the lash and the jingling of the harness rekindled memories he would rather forget. Aged sixteen at the close of war in 1764, he had been released from his article of apprenticeship after serving only three years on Friendship, a brig trading out of Whitehaven to Barbados and Virginia. He had secured himself a position as third mate on King George, also sailing out of Whitehaven. What Congress’s record of his service did not show was that King George had been a “blackbirder,” a slaver carrying negroes on the middle passage from Africa to wherever there was a market. Her live cargo had been sold to the highest bidder at the auction block.
It was no trade for the squeamish and the stench of a slaver could be detected ten miles downwind, but a young man with little or no hope of a regular berth had to take whatever he could secure. Like it or not, his four years in the blackbird trade had taught him much. The two years on King George and another two on Two Friends, sailing out of Kingston, Jamaica as chief mate.
Paul Jones wrinkled his nose in distaste. Strange how a few whip cracks and the rattle of harness could induce perfect recall of the slaves’ jangling neck and ankle irons and the damnable stench of an abominable trade where human beings were treated with less care than animals. It was certainly a smell he would never forget. He shrugged away the memory as the coach slowed, the driver screaming curses. Thrown from side to side as the narrow iron wheel rims skidded on cobbles, Paul Jones threw up the blind. Holding on to his hat he leaned out into a bitter sea fret that drove into his cheeks.
“Where are we, coachman?” he yelled.
On the box, the driver wrestled with the traces, guiding the two wheel horses. “Lorient!” he called into the fading day.
“Thank God,” the American muttered, ducking back inside from the blinding rain. His journey was over. But then he wondered if his journey would ever be over, and if his feet would ever pace the hollow planking of a quarterdeck. If at times he hated the sea with its feminine temperament, and saw his voyaging as purely the means to gain enough wealth to buy the plantations he hoped to eventually own, then the last few months had proved how much he hated the land. At least on the open sea under a wide spread of canvas he was the temporary master of his own destiny. Ashore, his motivation seemed to leak away as he shunted between diminishing hopes of escaping the land’s miserly clutches.
The coach slowed and he could hear the driver calling to somebody in the street. A voice answered and the horses’ hooves picked up tempo again, but after several corners they mercifully came to a standstill.
“Voila M’sieur, there you are, sir. We are here.”
Paul Jones fastened the buttons of his coat and curled his cloak about his shoulders before opening the door. The mist’s clammy fingers gripped