Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House Read online

  “That is very singular,” I admitted.

  “Chessyre had several days’ sailing time to consider of his story, before appearing off Spithead in the captured prize. He might have walked the Manon’s deck with any number of devils, Jane; he might have been tortured in his mind up to the very moment of going over the side with Seagrave’s letters, and only cast his lot for murder as he gained the Admiral’s ship to convey his intelligence.”

  “He took a formidable risk. What if the British seamen under his command denied the charge against their captain?”

  “They probably knew nothing of Chessyre’s intent while yet in Portsmouth; they should have been sent out to regain the Stella once the prize was secured. Chessyre seized his moment, convinced that he should be safe.”

  “—Acting solely from revenge?”

  “And from interest, Jane. A healthy and hopeful self-interest. Eustace Chessyre thought to be made master on the strength of this action—and if Seagrave were removed from the Stella, why should not Chessyre command her? A temporary appointment, perhaps, but one that might satisfy so embittered a man. Never mind that masters and commanders are never posted into anything higher than a sloop: Chessyre was in the grip of delusion.”

  “He should better have thrust the dirk into Seagrave’s heart,” I observed, “and assumed command of the Stella while yet on the high seas.”

  Frank was silent an instant in consideration. Then, with his eyes fixed upon the rain-splashed paving-stones at our feet, he said, “It is one thing to strike down an enemy in the heat of battle; it is quite another to kill a man in cold blood with whom one has sailed year after year. If pressed, I should say that Eustace Chessyre is not above plotting what is devious; he may calculate, and lie, and attempt to turn misfortune to every advantage—but I do not think he would do murder outright.”

  “How kind you are!” I cried. “How judicious! The court-martial had better employ your powers of pleading on behalf of your fellow man, Fly. To say that the Lieutenant preferred Seagrave to die at the hangman’s hands, rather than his own, is so much flummery. I wonder your man can live with himself!”

  “He certainly does not live in comfort,” my brother said. “I have been long enough at war to recognise the stench of fear; it dogs the gundeck before every engagement, it sleeps in the hammocks of unsound men. Chessyre’s room was rank with it, Jane. The man is awash in terror, and sinking fast.”

  I halted on the street and stared at Frank. “And what do you believe him to fear? Discovery in deceit?”

  “I cannot say. Something more powerful than myself, or all the threats I might bring to bear. But in parting with the fellow, I urged him to consider his course—to judge if it were sound—and pressed my direction into his hand. We might yet hope for a visit from the Lieutenant, and a reversion of events, before Thursday morning.”

  We walked on, each of us silent, until achieving the turning for Queen Anne Street. There my footsteps slowed, and I gazed down the broad sweep of the High to the huddle of buildings that fronted the Quay. One of these—a squat, square stone structure of ancient date, with a peaked brick roof and windows barred with iron—was Wool House.

  “What we require,” I told my brother, “is an impartial witness to the French captain’s death.”

  “That is exactly what we shall never have,” Fly retorted.

  “Do not be so certain, my dear,” I replied. “Never is an unconscionable period.”

  1Present day visitors to the probable site of Austen’s house in Castle Square may still walk the wall that bordered what was once her garden but will notice that the sea has long since receded. A public-works land-reclamation project filled in the estuary that once divided this part of Southampton from the New Forest —Editor’s note.

  Chapter 6

  Wood House

  24 February 1807,

  cont.

  ~

  WOOL HOUSE DATES, I AM TOLD, FROM THE FOURTEENTH century, when Southampton was a far smaller port than it now appears, and the town’s habitation was contained entirely between the Water Gate and the Bar. It was built during a period of warfare and constant strife; a period, too, of thriving commerce, when the wool from England’s great herds travelled across the sea to weavers in Flanders, and thence to the princes of Florence. Wool House once formed the hub of this trade—a meeting place for the Wool Merchants Guild. They were warm men, quite plump in the pocket, and if indeed it was they who soldered bars to the building’s window frames, we may comprehend the value of their fears.

  In the interval of five hundred years that stretches between those times and ours, the incidence of warfare borne in ships across the Channel has hardly diminished; but the wool trade has found other weavers to surfeit, other backs to clothe, and fewer pockets to line with guineas. Wool House itself has served many uses: as a customs house, as the offices of the local constabulary, and most recently, as a gaol for prisoners of war. The bars once intended to keep miscreants out, now serve to hold them within.

  I turned into French Street, as though merely another lady intent upon securing seats in a box at the pretty little theatre that stood some distance beyond; and lingered before the double black doors that fronted the Water Gate Quay. Two Marines in scarlet dress stood to either side of the arched portal; one was rigid with his sense of duty, but the other allowed his gaze to stray insolently over my form. Without even a second perusal, he dismissed me as unworthy of his attention.

  “Pray tell me, sir,” I said in an accent sharpened by suppressed indignation, “whether Mr. Hill, the surgeon, is within Wool House? I have undertaken to assist him in his ministrations to the French.”

  The Marine’s gaze returned to my countenance with an expression of slow amusement, but his companion— somewhat senior in rank, from his appearance—relaxed his stance and bowed.

  “You will find the surgeon within, ma’am—but allow me to urge you to reconsider. Wool House is not a suitable place for a lady.”

  He possessed a kindly visage, and his glance was direct; it held neither presumption nor arrogance, but merely the most active concern. I managed a smile.

  “May I enquire as to your name?”

  “Major Morrissey, ma’am.”

  “I am Miss Austen, Major,” I told him, “the sister of Captain Austen of the Royal Navy—and I fully under stand the dangers to which I expose myself. But were my brother laid low on enemy shores, I should wish him to be equally served by the hand of some French lady.”

  “Step lively, Stubbs,” the Major urged his subordinate, “and shift the door for the Captain’s sister!”

  A heavy block was moved—an iron ring turned—a bolt thrown back—and the massive oak doors suffered to swing slowly inwards, while my two protectors lowered the muzzles of their guns to prevent the sudden escape of anyone within. I hesitated an instant on the threshold, my eyes overcome by the blackness of the interior, then took a few steps forward.

  “Knock three times on the oak when you wish to be let out,” Major Morrissey urged, “and mind you don’t exhaust yourself, ma’am. Recollect that in their right senses, these fellows would as soon blow your good brother to pieces as take a cup of gruel from yourself.”

  With a screech of protest as painful as a sinner’s wail, the heavy doors swung closed.

  I was conscious of an awkward silence, as of conversation abruptly cut off, and then a resurgent murmur of male conversation, and a guttural bark of laughter. The dimness within was not so heavy as I had at first supposed; there were, after all, several barred windows punctuating the massive stone walls, and through the bleary panes of glass a little light must penetrate. Two or three candles burned in niches high above the prisoners. But the room was darkest at my feet, where so many men lay side by side. It was as though the shadows emanated from the sick themselves, to hover like a gathering of souls in the rafters above.

  It was as well that I had stopped short just beyond the room’s threshold—for there was barely space to wal
k among the pallets. I stifled a gasp of disbelief as I gazed about me—how many men had Mrs. Braggen described? Forty, in a room better suited for half that number? At least ten were arranged around two tables at the rear of the room, playing at cards; but they alone were upright of the entire assembly. The rest lay in suffering at my feet, some as still as death, some moaning piteously for water. Others thrashed about as though pitching with the roll of the waves; and I saw, with failing looks, that these men’s legs were bound with hemp to prevent them kicking at those who would aid them.

  The atmosphere, though cold and damp, was sharp with the smells of blood and human waste, and putrefying wounds; with the heavy must of unwashed men. The animal odour of tallow mixed chokingly with the charcoal smoke from a single fire at one side of the chamber. There had recently been meat roasting somewhere on a spit.

  I felt my gorge rise, and fumbled in my reticule for a handkerchief. Cecilia Braggen was right to fear the spread of contagion, when it found its source in such a room.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez, madame? cried the voice of one grizzled old card player

  “Le medecin,” I returned, after an instant’s panicked retrieval of my schoolgirl French. “M’sieur Hill. Estil ici?”

  A small figure rose up from the floor like Beelzebub, and saluted me with a bow: Mr. Hill, I did not doubt. He was spare of form, with a periwig affixed rather carelessly on a bony head; shirtsleeves turned back, forearms bare, and a heavy black apron over his shirtfront and trousers. I should have known him for a naval surgeon in a moment; his very air suggested shipboard economy.

  “You one of the naval ladies, I trust?” he enquired without preamble.

  “My name is … Miss Austen,” I stammered. “And you are … Mr. Hill?”

  His eyes surveyed me shrewdly; it was a measuring glance, as my brother Edward might assess the points of a prospective hunter, and I quailed at the surgeon’s calculation of my fitness or courage. The awful truth of my careless undertaking had fallen full upon me. When Mrs. Braggen proposed the duty this morning, I accepted with the view to a litde French conversation. I thought to soothe a fevered brow, and discover, in the process, whether any of the Manon’s crew was held at Wool House. But I found myself in the midst almost of batde. There was nothing of frivolity here; no easy passage for deception. These men represented the harsh spoils of war, in all their misery and deprivation; and however soon they might be exchanged, I should not lightly forget them. I fought the impulse to turn and pound heartily upon the door in expectation of die Marines.

  “You are some relation to Captain Frank Austen?” Mr. Hill enquired.

  “His sister, sir.”

  The surgeon wiped an instrument absently on his canvas apron, and nodded. “I met with the Captain some once or twice, while serving in the Indies. You’ll do. Pray follow me.”

  I took up the basin he thrust into my hands, and commenced to spoon weak gruel between the cracked lips of one unshaven face after another. And presently— as though I had been no more than an insect that came to light upon a table—I was dismissed from the interest of the French, as care for their own consuming anxieties superseded the novelty of my presence. The card players returned to their gambling, and the sick to their pitiful moaning. I followed Mr. Hill in a sort of macabre dance, stooping and rising, from one sad pallet to the next, and felt that the line of suffering should never come to an end.

  The contagion was of a peculiar kind: some of my patients were o’erspread with red spots; others suffered trembling so acute, they could neither stand nor hold a spoon; all were racked with fever. But I detected no inflammation of the lungs—no catarrh, that might be manifest in coughing; whatever the ill, it could not be laid to the account of Southampton’s raw weather.

  “What ails these men?” I whispered once.

  “Gaol-fever,” replied Mr. Hill grimly. “A common enough complaint, when so many are forced to shift together like beasts in a barn. But there is litde a surgeon may do for such a malady. I have bled them; I have given water; and for the rest—God shall provide.”1

  From the look of the poor wretches lying about the floor, all that God was likely to provide, I knew, was a foreign grave.

  WE WORKED IN SILENCE, BUT FOR THE FEW WORDS OF direction Mr. Hill deemed necessary. I emptied cham

  ber pots through the barred windows into the Southampton gutters; I cleaned wounds with rags dipped in hot water; I pressed cold compresses against fevered brows; and once, to my horror, I was required to hold steady the shoulders of a man while Mr. Hill probed his angry flesh for the bullet buried there. Far from interrogating the assembled enemy, I was tongue-tied with pity and horror. At this rate, I thought despondently, I should learn nothing that might support Captain Seagrave’s claims of innocence.

  My passage among the pallets had revealed one item of intelligence, however. Members of the Manon’s crew were certainly among the inmates of Wool House. I learned this not from any words of French that were spoken, but from a lady’s skill at observing the fine points of dress. It is a seaman’s habit to embroider ribbons upon his shiny tarpaulin hat; the ribbons invariably bear the name, in bright letters, of the ship that he serves. Four at least proclaimed the Manon. Three lay by the sides of men tossing upon the floor; but the last still rested upon the head of a fellow who seemed in better health than his brothers.

  He was sitting up, shaky and weak, and though desperate to consume some hot broth, looked unable to hold the spoon that Mr. Hill had afforded him. I judged him to be a seaman, of perhaps fifty years or so; but whether he should be rated Ordinary or Able, I not entirely say.2 I inclined towards Able: from the

  length of his hair, which was knotted in a queue that reached to the middle of his back, I suspected him of naval pride; and, of course, there was the hat, with its handsome red ribbons embroidered in blue and white. Manon.

  I took bowl and spoon from the man’s shaking fingers and helped him gently to eat. His jaw trembled as the broth trickled into his mouth, and he closed his eyes. “Merti, madame.”

  “De rien, I replied

  His eyes flew open. “Vous parlezfrancais?”

  “Un pen, settlement. II y avait beaucoup de temps …”

  He fluttered a thin hand in dismissal of my excuses. His red-rimmed eyes were dangerously over-bright “Avez-vous du papier?”

  Did I have paper? I stared at him in consternation. I could not have understood the words correctly.

  “Pour les lettres,” he insisted. “Jevoudrais écrire à Provence…”

  Letters home. But of course. He was probably illiterate, and would depend upon the skill of others to despatch his intelligence to France. Somewhere in the south of that country, there might be a wife or a child—someone who could fear him dead, were it not for the arrival of a missive penned in a strange hand. A whisper of excitement rose up within me. For surely this fellow—so recently taken prisoner—must desire to relate every detail of the Manon’s engagement with the British? Should he not be likely to recount, in tedious detail, the moments that led to his ship’s capitulation?

  “I shall find you paper,” I said without regard for French or English, and set down the man’s bowl. His gaze followed me in hopeful confusion as I hurried towards Mr. Hill.

  After whispered consultation, the surgeon accepted the few coins I pressed into his palm and sent an urchin to a nearby tavern. The appearance of writing materials a quarter of an hour later occasioned a surge in health, an increase of life and energy among the ailing. A few moments bent over my pen, and I was surrounded by such men as could drag themselves near to watch my hand move across the cheap foolscap. Had the supply of paper not been swiftly exhausted, I might be writing to France still. A tedious job I should have found it, for the mind of your common sailor is in general unimaginative.

  The fellow whose duty I first undertook, was direct in his wording and naive in his aims. He wished only to inform a lady named Marguerite that he was alive— that he was confident he s
hould soon be returned to Boulogne—that he desired her to remain chaste—and that she must not, on any account, sacrifice the red-backed rooster to her mania for cassoulet. I managed to convey as much of these varying sentiments as my pitiful mastery of French would allow, and then enquired: “Do you not wish to tell her anything of the engagement in which you fell prisoner? It was with the Stella Moris, was it not?”

  My seaman pursed his lips and emitted a peculiarly French sound somewhere between an expectoration and a whistle, as if to say, “Tant pis. He had done with defeat; he was marshalling his strength for a return to battle; he could not reflect upon ships that were lost. Why discredit the Emperor’s glory, by sending news of so ignominious an engagement? All these sentiments and some I could not fathom were contained in that single syllable, that sputum of contempt. I folded the sheet of paper in disappointment

  But directly I had sealed the edges with tallow, my services were implored by others too ready to relate the particulars of the Manon’s loss. And here I discovered, to my chagrin, the limits of schoolgirl French.

  I had never been taught the sort of terms that might prove useful in such a pass—the French that should distinguish the differences among guns, or describe the varying weights of shot, or convey the particulars of sail and line. I struggled to decipher the full sense of vient sous le vent, which I took to mean “coming under the wind,” when (I later learned) it meant “coming into the lee.” I could not attempt to explain “seizing the weather gauge” in any language. And I knew nothing of the patois that reigned supreme among the denizens of the gundeck. I was on the verge of despair, when a quiet voice at my shoulder said in English—

  “I believe I might prove of some assistance, madame?

  My face flushed with effort, my ears ringing with a multitude of voices, I turned to glare at the man propped against the stone wall. And managed to utter not a word of acknowledgement or thanks, being overcome, of a sudden, with confusion and surprise.