Scarborough Fair - Chris Scott Wilson [88]
“All right, rest. Change places. Come on, you lazy bastards,” the petty officer said wearily, walking away to kick awake the next shift to take their turn.
Gratefully, Jackie released the bar, arms dropping lead heavy to his sides as he trudged to a heap of cordage. When a man rose to take his turn at the pump, Jackie sank down in his place, the hemp at least dry. His eyelids slid out of control over his hazy vision. It seemed only moments before a hand was shaking his shoulder.
“Wake up, damn it.”
“Not already. Let me sleep…” He tried to curl away from the intruder.
“It’s me, Billy. Don’t you want to eat? I’ll have it then…”
Jackie pushed himself upright, heavy as a cannonball. “Eat? I’ll eat. Give it here.” Some hard ship’s biscuit was pushed into his hand. Eyelids gummed together, he shoved the food into his mouth. It tasted like sawdust on his swollen tongue. He gagged, spitting out crumbs, mumbling obscenities.
A voice he didn’t recognize spoke beside him. “What d’you expect, lad? Hot rabbit broth? Maybe a bit o’ prime bacon, eh?” Jackie wrestled his eyes into focus. The speaker was a sailor in a tattered striped jersey. A ragamuffin of a man, his head a shock of ginger curls. He threw a questioning glance at his cousin.
Billy caught it. “This here is Thomas Berry. He was on the English man-o’-war.”
“That I was,” the Englishman nodded before biting into his hardtack carefully, biscuit crunching between rotten teeth. “A sailor in the King’s Navy, that’s me. And press-ganged too. I was a fisherman like you and your oppo here. We heard ’em coming up the street one night so I dived out the cellar door of the alehouse and a brute of a tar laid me out cold with a belaying pin. I woke up in a cutter with ten other men, trussed up like a chicken on the way to market. And me with a fat-arsed wife waiting nice and warm in bed at home.”
“When was that?” Jackie asked, although he couldn’t have cared less.
“Nearly ten months since, and every sodding day a bastard. I’m from the west country, I am, or I’d steal a boat and row like hell for it.”
“So would I if I knew where we are,” Jackie added drowsily.
“That’s just it, lad,” Tom Berry said with a sly grin. “Your cousin here says you belong to Scarborough?”
“What of it?”
“Well, laddo, that’s where we are. Off Flamborough Head a few miles. We can’t have drifted far in the night. Nowhere at all if that anchor we dropped held ground.”
“You sure?”
Billy snorted. “Course he’s sure. He was on the deck of Serapis there, not chained up below like us.”
Jackie came awake. Flamborough. Then, they were really but few miles from Scarborough. Home. After the last endless hours, the news seemed impossible.
“So you know the waters around here?” Tom asked, leaning close. “The tides at the Head look fierce. A man who didn’t know the waters could get carried out to sea or smashed to pieces on the rocks…”
“I know them all,” Jackie interrupted with a sneer, pride ruffling his feathers. “I have my own boat at Scarborough. I’ve fished all the way down to Kingston-Upon-Hull, and up past Whitby with our Billy here.”
“Then you’re my man. You and Billy.”
“What are you going to do?”
Tom Berry winked. “You wait and see.”
***
Paul Jones swilled his face with the lukewarm water the steward had brought. He dabbed his cheeks with a towel, peering into the mirror to inspect the line of his jaw for any stray whiskers. There were none. He folded the razor back into its ebony handle