Pirate Boy of Sydney Town Read online

  ‘So now the Dutch are our enemies too?’

  ‘Exactly. Napoleon would take England too if he could, just like he’s invaded half of Europe. But we will beat him — and as we do, men like me will make our fortunes. And you will be at my side.’

  ‘I don’t understand, sir.’ Ben’s lips felt numb, his mind as thick as treacle.

  His father lowered his voice even further. ‘No more plodding among the country clods for my son. We’re going to capture a Dutch ship, lad. Not a warship like the Navy fights, but an enemy’s trading ship. Ships laden with gold that sail far south to catch the world’s fastest winds, then up the west coast of New Holland to Batavia to buy their pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon. Not one of them will suspect they might be attacked so far south.’ Mr Huntsmore’s face had fallen into what Ben suspected was his true expression: the bright face of a gambler dreaming of gold. ‘Capturing just one of those ships will pay my debts a hundred times over, make us rich as nabobs. And these . . .’ He lifted the letters and kissed them. ‘These give me, Branwell Huntsmore, the right to take any enemy ship, lock, stock, gold and spices.’

  The clock seemed to stop ticking. Time stretched, so it felt like minutes before Ben managed to whisper, ‘We’ll be pirates?’

  Pirates were thieves. Murderers.

  His father grinned. ‘Privateers, because we have the blessing of the Prince of Wales. We’ll take a load of convicts out there and cargo too, to get some ready cash and so nobody suspects what we plan to do. We don’t want others joining in our game. Once two or three Dutch ships have been taken, other captains will get wary and arm their ships. We want them just sitting there, ripe for the plucking. The Golden Girl’s decks are being reinforced even as we speak, and Captain Danvers has set about hiring the right crew. There’ll be cast-iron cannons and muskets down in the hold and barrels of gunpowder. Just one ship, son, to turn our fortunes right!’

  Ben couldn’t seem to move or speak. It was too much to take in. He had lost his home, his life. And this was what his father was offering to replace it.

  ‘Well, son? Are you with me? Or have you been turned into a mouse by too much petticoat rule?’

  Ben met his father’s eyes. ‘What if I say no, sir?’

  Mr Huntsmore gazed at him. ‘Lily-livered, eh?’

  ‘I am not lily-livered!’

  ‘This is for your sake too,’ his father said. ‘I’m offering you adventure! But if you are afraid to join me, you can stay with your mother in Sydney Town. I’ll rent a house there.’

  ‘Mama is coming too? But . . . but it’s a dangerous voyage to Port Jackson, sir!’

  Ben knew enough about shipping to understand that one in four ships sank — wrecked on rocks or icebergs, or lashed with giant waves in storms; or were blown off course, or lost in the doldrums when no wind blew to fill their sails so all on board starved or died of thirst.

  ‘Anything I leave here with your mother could be confiscated to pay my debts,’ Mr Huntsmore said. ‘She has to come. Well? Are you scared to leave your little badger’s burrow? Frightened to face the world?’

  Ben met his father’s eyes again. ‘I’m not scared, sir.’ Mama’s words came back to him: We have no choice. And this at least was a way he might be able to buy back their home. ‘I’ll fight with you,’ he added quietly. ‘If that will get our fortune back.’

  His father laughed and clapped Ben on the back. He stank of rum toddy, Ben realised. Even his skin smelled of it.

  ‘Losing this place may be the best thing that ever happened to you!’ he said. ‘Should have been sent to school long ago. But you mustn’t breathe a word, eh?’ Mr Huntsmore tapped his nose. ‘Not even to your mother. Especially not to her. Women don’t understand business. Or the difference between being a privateer and a pirate.’

  Yes, my father is a pirate, Ben thought. He is looting his wife’s life and his son’s.

  He lifted his chin. ‘When we have made our fortune, I will buy Badger’s Hill back.’

  His father shrugged. ‘I doubt you’ll still want this old place when you’ve seen more of the world. No, we’ll have something much grander, boy. A castle maybe. And a proper heiress for you to marry, not a Friday face from a backwater where there are scarce three families fit to dine with.’

  Anger seethed, but Ben kept his voice calm, as Mama had done. ‘I want Badger’s Hill, sir.’

  ‘Well, I expect Nattisville will be willing enough to sell to you when the time comes. There’s no decent hunting here, and tuppence in the bank at the end of the year.’ He rang the bell. ‘Another rum toddy,’ he ordered Filkinghorn when the butler opened the library door.

  Mr Huntsmore waited till the old man had left, then smiled at Ben, his eyes gleaming. ‘They think Branwell Huntsmore is finished in the city, but we’ll show them, won’t we, son? We’ll come sailing back with a fortune.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Ben, but inside he was thinking that he no longer had a home. He must leave his friends as well as all the people he held dear. All he had now was a ship, a distant colony, and his father’s dreams of riches and adventure — all dependent on the words he must not say.

  Privateer. Pirate.

  CHAPTER 2

  1810

  The Golden Girl sat off the heads of Sydney Harbour. The cold wind from the freezing Southern Ocean they had just left spat and buffeted them, and waves slapped at her sides. No man on board knew how to navigate the narrow passage between the headlands, or what treachery the harbour rocks might bring. Captain Danvers had sent two men in the ship’s pinnace to fetch the pilot to bring the Golden Girl safely into port.

  Ben sat numbly on a coil of rope on deck. He knew he should be excited, so near a strange new land and the enterprise that would make them rich. But he just felt numb, as if every bone had been leached of strength and his mind too.

  The ship stank of death. Typhoid had come on board with the casks of water at Rio de Janeiro, and Ben had been one of the first to come down with it. Days and nights had merged as he lay there sweating, delirious, seeing Mama’s face swimming in the dimness of the cabin as she bathed his skin to try to lower his fever. Then Mama had vanished, and the Scottish steward, McStewart, had tended him instead. Then he, too, disappeared.

  Ben had been delirious for two weeks, and too weak for three weeks after that even to sit up. By the time he could eat the broth one of the sailors brought him, made from the jellied portable soup Mama had prepared so many months before at Badger’s Hill, they had already sailed into the freezing gales of the Southern Ocean. And that was when he learned that Mama, and McStewart too, had died of the fever.

  Mama’s body had long since been wrapped in canvas and slipped overboard. His father told him there had been prayers.

  Ben felt like yelling at the wind, ‘It isn’t fair!’

  It wasn’t fair that Mama should die, or that she should do so far from the soil and people that she loved. It wasn’t fair that Ben hadn’t been there to hold her hand, to whisper that he loved her, that one day he’d get back Badger’s Hill. And it wasn’t fair that now he was alone with the man he must call Father.

  Life isn’t fair, whispered the wind. Only the scraps that we make fair.

  Mr Huntsmore and Captain Danvers were among the few who had escaped illness. Over half the ship’s crew were dead, their corpses left, like Mama’s, among the green water and the icebergs. But the fever had finally burned itself out. The ship no longer flew the yellow flag that warned other ships to keep clear in case the sickness was passed to them.

  Up on the foredeck, Ben’s father paced with Captain Danvers, watching for the pilot. A few sailors trimmed the sails just enough to keep the ship steady. The rest of the crew were below, weakened by fever and by scurvy. The waves sloshed against the hull, the seagulls screamed, the timbers creaked, and the sails slapped. But the ship was strangely quiet. Even the yells and curses from the convicts down below in the hold had ceased.

  How many of them had died? Ben wondered. No one kn
ew. It seemed that no one cared. Some must still be alive, because the buckets of food and water that were lowered twice a day into the hold returned empty. Other than that, no one opened the hatch except on the captain’s orders.

  When they had first sailed, the hundred and twenty men down there had seemed like a vast beehive below the decks. Ben had heard moans and sometimes screams; and laughter that was even worse, on and on until it became a shriek.

  Mama had cried for the convicts in those first weeks at sea. Late at night, when his parents had thought him sleeping, Ben had heard her plead, ‘For God’s sake, Branwell! They are people, not just cargo.’

  His father had just laughed. ‘Of course they are cargo, Margaret. The best kind. I get paid for each man I take from Plymouth, not each one I deliver to Port Jackson. The fewer who survive the better. What they don’t eat on the voyage, I can sell when we arrive.’

  ‘You are a monster!’

  ‘Then you are a monster’s wife. Get used to it. Perhaps it’s best things turned out the way they have before you make my son a lily-hearted weakling like yourself.’

  His mother didn’t answer. Later, he heard her sobs. Ben wished that he had risen from his trundle bed to comfort her and tell her that he loved her, and that his father was going to make their fortune once again and they would return to Badger’s Hill, and be happy. But he had not. And now Mama was gone.

  Something thudded against the deck below his feet. It sounded like a broom handle. A hoarse voice called, ‘Anyone alive up there? For pity’s sake, help us! We’re half-dead down here, those of us who ain’t corpses already. If there’s anyone alive up there, help us!’

  The surviving convicts must have realised the ship had stopped but was still at sea, buffeted by ocean waves and wind, not bobbing gently in the harbour. They must also have guessed that typhoid had thinned the crew, and perhaps wondered if enough remained to sail the ship to safety. How long would the convicts have to wait down there? And what if there was no spare pilot at the tiny port to sail the Golden Girl into safe harbour? How many more would die? And Ben could do nothing to help.

  Or could he? He looked at the rope that let down the food and water buckets, the wheel that rolled the rope out and back. It took only one man to turn it. Ben was only a boy, still weak from the fever, but he could try.

  He looked around. No one paid him any notice. He stepped over to the hatch and lifted. Nothing happened. He was too weak. Lily-hearted . . . He was not!

  He pulled again, and the hatch shifted. A stench wafted up, thick as toast. It knocked him backwards, almost blinded as the filthy air stung his eyes, and crawled down his nose, his throat.

  A scurvy-weakened sailor, his bare feet swollen, stumbled towards him. ‘What you doin’? You can’t do that!’

  ‘I’m the owner’s son,’ said Ben. ‘I can do whatever I like.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ The sailor limped away towards the foredeck.

  Screams and mutters rose from below as the piercing ocean light blinded those who had lived for five months in darkness. If they could survive down there, then Ben could bear the stench. He lifted the bucket on its rope and swung it down into the filth and darkness of the hold.

  ‘What’s goin’ on? The cursed bucket’s empty!’ It was the same voice as before, hoarse and angry.

  Ben forced himself to peer through the hatch. Darkness moved within darkness. ‘Can you cling onto the bucket?’ he called. ‘I’ll haul you up.’

  Silence. Was it hope or calculation?

  ‘Let down the ladder, boy.’ The tone was wheedling now.

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  Wouldn’t do that. Could a band of convicts take over the ship? Surely not, weak and starved as they must be. But Ben couldn’t risk it. He might save just one or two though — bring them up into the light, feed them plum cake and portable soup.

  The rope rocked. Someone screamed below. He heard a snarl, a gust of foul language, then the order: ‘Heave away!’

  Ben anchored himself against the rail and pulled at the rope, sweating, his arms trembling. Suddenly the rope moved easily and he heard a scrambling sound. Two claws grabbed the edge of the hatch and hauled up a heap of bones and rags and filth. It collapsed on the deck, hiding its face from the light.

  It wasn’t human. It couldn’t be human.

  ‘Water!’ the creature muttered, still face down on the deck.

  Ben grabbed the mug tied to one of the water barrels, filled it, unfastened it, then slid it towards the figure on the deck. A claw scrabbled blindly, found the mug, drank.

  ‘More,’ it muttered.

  Ben ventured closer. He grabbed the mug before the claws could reach for him and filled it again. Again the figure drained it. The stench was unbelievable. Were those maggots in its hair? But the creature was human, and a human Ben had saved. Out of all the misery of the past year, he had done this at least — brought a suffering person up into the sunlight.

  Ben waited for the convict to say, ‘Bless you, young master.’ Instead he muttered a string of words, so hoarsely that Ben had to struggle to make them out. They were filthy words, angry words, some of which he didn’t know.

  ‘Murtherin’ buzzards . . . Heartless fevermongers . . . Puffguts stuffin’ ’emselves while poor folk die . . .’

  Ben recognised those words. And he deserved them, sailing in the comfort of the owner’s cabin, with barrels of plum puddings stored in bran, and hams and soup to eat on their journey. But I had no choice, he thought. Except, of course, he had. He could have argued with his father, fought to send more food down to the convicts. He had been swallowed up by his misery and loss even before the fever.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the creature huddled on the deck. It was not enough. But it was all he had.

  At last the muttering stopped and the thing began to sit up. Suddenly it became a man. A man in rags, dripping with filth, rusty shreds of what had once been hair now crawling with lice, face worm-white, red-rimmed eyes shut against the light.

  ‘Water,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’ll get you another drink,’ Ben said.

  ‘Water to wash, you widgeon.’

  Of course. A bucket of seawater. As he turned to get it, Ben became aware that the sailor who had shouted at him earlier was coming back, and Father with him.

  ‘What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing, boy?’ yelled Mr Huntsmore. Then to the sailor, ‘Throw that thing back below.’

  ‘No!’ Ben forced his body between the convict and the sailor. ‘You can’t send him back down there!’

  His father looked at the bundle of rags in disgust. ‘I can send him anywhere I wish. Do you realise that typhoid may still be raging down there? They won’t let us dock if they think we carry fever.’

  ‘Ain’t no fever,’ said the man, still sitting with his eyes closed. ‘There’s scurvy, and a few gone mad. But the fever’s gone.’

  ‘Good.’ Mr Huntsmore gestured to the sailor. ‘What are you waiting for, man?’

  ‘No!’ cried Ben. He tried to think of an argument that might sway his father. ‘We need a servant to replace Mr McStewart,’ he said quickly. ‘Have you ever been a servant?’ he asked the convict.

  Was that a smile? A crafty, smug smile that said, I’ve got you now.

  ‘Just so happens I have,’ the man said. And added, ‘Master.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Mr Huntsmore returned to the quarterdeck, leaving Ben, the convict and the sailor by the hatch, now closed again. The convict was too weak to wash himself, and Ben didn’t have enough strength to haul up the seawater required. But they managed it, with bucket after bucket of cold water grudgingly hauled up by the sailor.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Ben at last, when the bundle of skin and rags next to him was almost clean. The man’s body was emaciated, and his eyes watered, still growing accustomed to daylight after the months below.

  ‘’iggins,’ said the man, spitting out a tooth and then another, an
d wiping his bloody mouth on his sleeve.

  Ben looked in horror at the yellow objects lying on the deck. He had not known teeth could get as long as that.

  ‘Higgins?’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s what I said. What’s yours?’

  ‘My name is Ebenezer Huntsmore. Can you walk, Mr Higgins?’

  A shake of the head, more lice than straggly hair. ‘Better lend us yer shoulder, Sneezer.’

  ‘My name is Ebenezer.’

  Higgins smiled innocently. ‘Weren’t that what I said?’

  Was that another sly grin? Ben remembered how the convict had found the strength to haul himself up the rope to the deck. How many reaching arms had he pushed past to make his way up to the light? How many desperate hands had he pushed away to get what he needed from the water and food buckets? For the first time Ben realised that sending a rope down into a hold full of convicts was the way to bring up the most ruthless, not the most deserving.

  ‘What was your crime?’ he asked. Please, not murder. Don’t let Higgins stab us in our beds. But murderers were hanged, weren’t they, not sent to the colony?

  ‘Bein’ poor,’ said Higgins flatly.

  Ben felt a spurt of anger. He had saved this man. He should be given gratitude, respect.

  ‘Apart from that,’ he snapped.

  ‘I were a fence, weren’t I.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The look was unmistakeably one of contempt now. ‘I had a fencin’ ken. Coves brought me stuff they nicked and I sold it on. Had a cross crib too, and a tribe of kinchin coves I was trainin’ to be thimblers.’

  The words were meaningless, but Ben suspected they meant nothing good.

  ‘I’ll take you to the servant’s quarters,’ he said coldly. It was just a hammock next to the owner’s cabin, roughly partitioned off with a blanket. But it would be a palace compared to where Higgins had been.

  Higgins shaded his eyes with his skeletal hands and tried to peer around. ‘Where are we?’