Killigrew and the Incorrigibles Read online

  About six feet tall, bull-necked and bow-legged, his face burned brick red by the sub-tropical sun, he wore tight pantaloons and an old-fashioned bobtail coat, with a neckerchief of black silk tied sailor-style across his broad shoulders. Two six-barrelled revolving ‘pepperbox’ pistols were tucked in a broad-buckled leather belt six inches across. A small straw hat with a blue ribbon was balanced on top of his oiled, sandy hair, looking ludicrous above his large bullet-head.

  Dressed in this eccentric manner, John Giles Price was a familiar figure to all the convicts on Norfolk Island. He jumped down from the saddle and faced both convicts and guards challengingly.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Bob had an accident,’ offered Vickers.

  ‘I wasn’t asking you,’ snapped Price. ‘Take that man’s name, Mr Lang. Thirty-six lashes. Now tell me what happened.’

  ‘It’s like he said, Mr Price,’ said Lang. ‘Murdoch had an accident.’

  ‘We saw the whole thing,’ added the other guard, and Lang nodded.

  Price shook his head in disgust. ‘I’ll see you two later.’ He crouched over Murdoch, holding him still. ‘Who did this to you, lad?’

  ‘Me eyes!’ sobbed Murdoch. ‘I’m blinded! Oh God, me eyes!’

  Price slapped him, then grabbed him by the front of his jacket and shook him vigorously. ‘Blow on who faked this, Bob.’ Despite his aristocratic birth, Price was fluent in thieves’ cant. Where he had learned it was anyone’s guess, but it added to the impression that it was impossible to keep anything from him.

  ‘It was Wyatt, wasn’t it?’ Price persisted as two more guards came running up to investigate the commotion. ‘You don’t have to voker anything: just nod. Tell me it was Wyatt, and I’ll put him on the triangles and bung him such a scroby no one will ever need fear him again, granny me?’

  ‘Accident,’ Murdoch sobbed in a weak voice. ‘It were an accident, I swear it!’

  Price threw him down with an expression of disgust. ‘Take him to the hospital lock-up,’ he ordered two of the guards. Then he rounded on Wyatt. ‘You don’t waste time, I’ll say that much for you.’

  The convict regarded Price with contempt, but said nothing.

  ‘You needn’t smile, Wyatt. You might frighten your fellow inmates – you may even scare some of my men – but you don’t frighten me. You think you’re a regular pebble, eh? Well, I’ve broken iron men before now. Don’t think you’re any different. I’ll break you, Wyatt. I’ll break you like you were made of china. By the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll lick my arse and like it. You’ll beg me to kill you. But I’m not going to let you off as easily as that.’ He turned to the guards. ‘Put him back in the water pit. A few hours in there should soften his skin up nicely for his next flogging. Three hundred lashes.’

  ‘Three hundred!’ sneered Wyatt. ‘Not worth taking my coat off for.’

  ‘Five hundred, then. I’ll take the flashness out of you, my joker! Take him away.’

  As the guards led Wyatt away, Lissak shook his head. Three hundred lashes would have killed any normal man. Five hundred should have taken care of most of the toughest ‘pebbles’ amongst the inmates. But if Price thought it would break Ned Wyatt, he had another think coming.

  Chapter 1

  The Good Samaritan

  Lieutenant Kit Killigrew was awoken by someone knocking on the door to his cabin. He was sprawled on the bunk, his shirt drenched with sweat. It was evening: no light came through the tiny porthole.

  Still half asleep, wakened from a nightmare, Killigrew slithered over the board at the side of the bunk, opened the locker below and took one of a brace of six-barrelled ‘pepperbox’ revolving pistols from its mahogany case. Crouching on the floor, he levelled the pistol at the door with a trembling hand.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Strachan,’ returned the sloop’s assistant surgeon. ‘May I come in?’

  ‘One moment!’ Awake now, realising that he had been dreaming of events that had happened over a year ago, Killigrew returned the pepperbox to its case, closed the locker, and stood up. He struck a match, applied the flame to the stub of a candle, and glanced around the cabin. A bottle of Irish whiskey, three-quarters empty, stood on the fold-down desk. He corked it and thrust it down the side of the mattress on the bunk, then checked his appearance in the mirror. He brushed his tousled black hair as best he could, but there was nothing he could do about the bags beneath his bloodshot brown eyes, and as for his unshaven jaw, well… that was one of the perils of having a swarthy complexion.

  ‘Come in.’

  The door opened and Strachan entered. He tried to peer over Killigrew’s shoulder as if looking for evidence of the lieutenant’s drinking – since the lieutenant was an inch shy of six feet in height, almost a head taller than the assistant surgeon, he was on a hiding to nothing – before he met Killigrew’s gaze with the china-blue eyes that blinked owlishly behind his wire-framed spectacles.

  ‘Is everything all right, Killigrew?’

  ‘Of course. Why shouldn’t it be?’

  Strachan shrugged. ‘I was just asking.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m just going ashore, to go to the theatre. I wondered if you wanted to come.’

  Killigrew shook his head. ‘No, thank you. I thought I’d get an early night.’

  ‘It’ll do you some good to go out for an evening. You spend far too many of your off-duty hours cooped up in this cabin. It’s no’ healthy.’

  The lieutenant smiled wanly. ‘Is that your medical opinion, Mr Strachan?’

  ‘It’s a piece of advice from a friend. Damn it, Killigrew. You’ve got to snap out of this… this lethargy. Come on. There’s a production of The Merchant of Venice on at the Theatre Royal. You like Shakespeare, don’t you?’

  Killigrew sighed. ‘I’ll need to get permission from the Old Man.’

  ‘He’s already given—’ began Strachan. He broke off and bit his lip.

  The lieutenant nodded slowly as realisation dawned. ‘Was it his suggestion you drag me out of my cabin?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I was going to ask you anyhow,’ Strachan replied defensively. ‘It’s not as if we’ve never gone to the theatre before. I seem to recall we used to go all the time, before…’

  ‘Before Hong Kong, you mean?’

  Strachan nodded. ‘Look, if the Old Man told me to drag you along, I’m sure he did it with the best intentions. He’s worried about you, Killigrew. We all are. These past few months… ye canna deny you’ve been off the fang.’

  ‘Off the what?’

  Strachan blushed. Usually there was little trace of his native Perthshire in his accent, but occasionally he would betray his origins with a Scottish turn of phrase. ‘Out of sorts.’

  Killigrew picked up the fob-watch that lay on his desk and glanced at the face. ‘I haven’t eaten yet.’ Now he was just making excuses.

  ‘The curtain doesn’t go up until eight. We can dine at a chop-house ashore. Westlake tells me there’s a place on Campbell Street where they do a first-rate toad-in-the-hole.’

  ‘Very well,’ Killigrew said wearily. It was all one to him if he could forget for a couple of hours by losing himself in a Shakespearean drama or by drinking himself into oblivion. ‘Give me a quarter of an hour to get changed and I’ll meet you up on deck.’ Strachan withdrew. Killigrew stripped off his sweat-soaked shirt, shaved, and scrubbed his face and hands at the washstand. He put on a clean shirt, waistcoat and his undress navy-blue frock coat.

  Admiralty regulations demanded that any naval officer going ashore should wear his cocked hat, but the Admiralty was on the other side of the world, and Killigrew would feel self-conscious wearing a cocked hat in a chop-house, so he put on his peaked cap instead. He made his way up on deck.

  It was eighteen months since the Tisiphone had set out from Portsmouth, stopping off at the ports and colonies of the British Empire to ‘show the flag’. Eight score feet from stem to stern and thirty-two
feet in the beam, the brig-rigged paddle-sloop was a relatively small ship, intended for inshore work rather than fleet actions. A single black funnel rose between her two masts, and her armament consisted of two thirty-two-pounders abaft the paddle-boxes and a sixty-eight-pounder pivot gun on the forecastle. Beneath her prow the figurehead – a representation of the snake-haired scourge of the damned after which she had been named – glowered over the dark waters where the lights from Hobart Town glittered in the night.

  Only the men of the anchor watch were on deck; most of the starboard watch had been given permission for a run ashore, and were presumably engaged in their own pursuit of debauchery. Strachan was waiting, and the boatswain had ordered the ship’s dinghy to be lowered to take the two officers ashore.

  There were dozens of ships crammed in the harbour that evening: whaling ships for the most part, but there was a convict brig recently arrived from England in company with a couple of shiploads of free emigrants, a sandalwood trader returned from a successful voyage to Shanghai via the New Hebrides, and a rakish, flush-decked topsail schooner of about a hundred and fifty tons. The last of these, the Wanderer, was said to belong to a millionaire who owned half of New South Wales; the fact that his yacht flew the white ensign – a privilege reserved amongst civilian vessels for members of the Royal Yacht Squadron – indicated that he was certainly a man of some influence, whoever he might be.

  The dinghy’s crew rowed the officers across to the quayside and left them there. Killigrew looked at the buildings on the waterfront. Some fine Georgian brownstone warehouses lined Salamanca Place off to their left, while Murray Street ahead of them was flanked by the customhouse and a large hotel. The streets were bustling, even at that time of night: shabby-genteel sheep farmers celebrating successful sales and purchases at the stockyard, whalers in oilskins making the most of a run ashore by staggering from tavern to whorehouse and back again, and prostitutes of every class, in last year’s fashions from Paris, cruising for trade.

  ‘Which way is Campbell Street?’ asked Strachan.

  ‘I’ve no idea. Let’s ask.’

  Killigrew was looking for someone who might be a native of the town – and it seemed to be a toss-up between a prostitute cruising for trade and a chain-gang of convicts in yellow fatigues decorated with broadcloth arrows, being escorted back to their barracks for the night – when a black lurched out of the crowd towards them, clutching his right arm in his left hand. Killigrew stepped aside to let the weaving black pass, but the man collapsed on the boardwalk outside the customhouse.

  The other passers-by gave him a wide berth: just another Aborigine drunk on the streets of Hobart Town. It was fifteen years since the British had – with the kind of good intentions that paved the road to Hell for others – shipped the last of the Van Diemen’s Land Aborigines to die on Flinders Island. But there were still one or two Aborigines on the streets of Hobart Town, and it was nothing unusual to see one fall down drunk in the gutter.

  Killigrew was worldly-wise enough to know that when a man collapsed on the street right in front of him, it might very well be a diversion for an attempt to rob him. He glanced about them to make sure there were no unsavoury characters – something of which there was no shortage in Van Diemen’s Land – loitering with intent in his immediate vicinity.

  ‘We’d better see if we can help him,’ he told Strachan. A man of radical political notions, Killigrew was keenly aware that as an officer of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, he was one of the bulwarks of the Empire that had allowed the Aborigines to die out. So it was a vague, liberal sense of guilt which motivated him; that and a healthy dose of good old-fashioned Christian charity – the kind that did good works for their own sake rather than to trump the neighbours in a holier-than-thou spirit. If he was a cynic, it was only because he had seen too many of the romantic ideals he cherished crushed underfoot by a cruel world.

  A fellow humanitarian, Strachan did not need Killigrew’s prompting to go to the black’s aid, and he crouched to examine him. The unconscious black wore bell-bottomed trousers and a striped guernsey under a monkey jacket. Like most sailors he was bare-footed. But the quality of his clothes, while not exactly top-drawer, was certainly good enough to suggest he was not one of those impoverished Aboriginals one usually saw falling down drunk in the streets of Hobart Town and Sydney.

  Strachan indicated the blood that soaked the black sailor’s sleeve. ‘Have you got a knife I can borrow?’

  Killigrew handed Strachan his clasp knife and the assistant surgeon cut away the cloth. The lieutenant drew his breath in sharply when he saw a splinter of bone protruding from the sailor’s forearm.

  ‘A compound fracture,’ Strachan said matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t think he did this falling down.’

  ‘Can you do anything for him?’

  ‘Aye. But first we have to get him off the street.’

  ‘All right.’ Killigrew glanced about and saw the Harbour View Hotel on the other side of the street. ‘In there. You take his feet.’

  ‘Mind his arm.’

  As the two of them lifted the unconscious man between them, Killigrew saw another sailor hurry round the corner of the custom house. An American Indian, to judge from his copper-toned skin, aquiline nose and long, raven-black hair – probably from one of the Yankee whaling ships anchored in Sullivan’s Cove. The sailor came to an abrupt halt when he saw the two naval officers carrying the unconscious man. Their eyes locked – Killigrew wondered if this was the man who had broken his burden’s arm – and then the Indian turned and hurried back the way he had come.

  ‘Jings!’ gasped Strachan. He had his back to the custom house and had not seen the American Indian sailor. Killigrew did not want to worry him by mentioning it. ‘He weighs a ton!’

  They carried the unconscious man across to the hotel where the arrival of two naval officers carrying an unconscious black man caused something of a furore in the entrance hall. Killigrew forestalled any objections by using the crisp tones of command he usually reserved for the deck of the Tisiphone. He snapped his fingers – no easy feat in kid gloves – at a couple of flunkeys.

  ‘You and you – carry this fellow up to a bedroom.’ Although Killigrew belonged to the Upper Ten Thousand of Society, he probably ranked about nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-ninth, and could hardly afford a room at the Harbour View Hotel on a naval lieutenant’s income; but he would worry about that later.

  The flunkeys gawped at him. One of them crossed to the open door behind the reception desk and called through it, ‘Mr Palgrave?’

  An officious-looking fellow with slickly oiled hair stepped into the doorway, and regarded the flunkey who had summoned him disdainfully before turning his attention to the unconscious man at Killigrew’s feet. ‘What on earth is going on here? This is a respectable hotel! Get that deuced jacky out of here at once!’

  ‘This man is in urgent need of medical attention,’ snapped Strachan.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ demanded a new voice.

  Everyone turned as a prosperous-looking gentleman descended the grandiose staircase. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, a splendid set of snow-white whiskers linking his sideburns via his upper lip as if to make amends for the shiny dome of his balding head. His girth was equally opulent, with a large gold watch chain stretched across the front of the white satin waistcoat beneath an exquisitely tailored brown kerseymere tailcoat. He held a fat cigar in one kid-gloved hand, and Killigrew was enough of a connoisseur of fine tobacco to know a Havana when he smelled it.

  The oily hotelier converted from a disdainful snob into a fawning, obsequious minion at once. ‘I do apologise for this, Mr Thorpe. I’ll have these fellows removed from here at once.’ He did not specify whether he was talking about the unconscious black or the two upstart naval officers.

  ‘Indeed you shall. You’ll have him removed to one of your finest rooms; and see to it that he gets the best medical attention Hobart Town has to offer. I’m sure I don’t
need to tell you that money is no object.’

  The hotelier’s jaw started to drop, but he recovered himself before it reached its fullest extent. ‘Of course, Mr Thorpe. Right away.’ He turned to the two flunkeys. ‘You heard Mr Thorpe. See to it at once!’

  ‘Handle him like china.’ As the flunkeys lifted the injured man between them, Thorpe dropped a shiny crown piece into the pocket of one of them.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Ministering angels of mercy could not have borne the injured man up the stairs more tenderly. Strachan went up after them, and Killigrew was about to follow, but the mysterious philanthropist laid an ebony cane across his chest to stop him.

  ‘Wait one moment, sir. I crave your indulgence. That was a deuced Christian thing you and your companion did, bringing that poor fellow in here. I should like to shake you by the hand, sir.’

  Killigrew had no objections. Beneath the kid gloves, Mr Thorpe’s grip was firm and confident; a little too firm for Killigrew’s liking, but it would have been churlish to massage his fingers afterwards, except by clasping his hands behind his back and doing so discreetly.

  ‘We only did what any charitable Christian soul would have done, sir,’ he replied, embarrassed by the praise.

  ‘I wish I could agree with you, sir. But sadly, Christian charity is clearly in short supply in Hobart Town these days. I wonder if it would have occurred to me to stop and help that poor fellow had I come across him in the street? Had the Good Lord presented me with such a test, I fear I should have been found sadly wanting, without your shining example to show me the way. You shame us all, sir, you shame us all. I should be honoured to be acquainted with your name, young man.’

  ‘Killigrew, sir. Lieutenant Christopher Killigrew, HMS Tisiphone. And my friend is Mr Strachan, our assistant surgeon.’

  ‘Thorpe’s the name, sir. Thaddeus Thorpe. Tell me, Mr Killigrew, have you and your friend dined yet this evening?’

  ‘No, sir. As it happens, we were just about to stop at a chop-house on our way to the theatre when we encountered that poor fellow and—’