Kydd(2)

The young man tried to ease his position, but it was hopeless: confined as he was by other wet bodies, seasickness and the continual violent motion of the hoy, he lacked strength to move. Nearby, a pale flaccid face lifted. The empty eyes looked into his and as he watched, a weak spasm produced from slack lips a green ooze that tracked across the sunken cheeks. The sight brought on the inevitable, but there was no more of his meager breakfast to bring up. Subsiding weakly after a series of dry heaves, Thomas Paine Kydd laid his head once more on the wet, hard boards.

Only a few nights earlier, he had been enjoying warmth and companionship in the Horse and Groom in Merrow village, a public house that dated back to the first King Charles; its age and solidity spoke of the bucolic calm of that part of England. Three miles up the road was Guildford, a popular staging halt on the way from London to the trading ports of the south and west. There, in the last days of the peace, he had seen from his wig shop in High Street grim faces of naval officers staring from coach windows as they clattered over the cobblestones on their way to the Angel posting house.

He had heard in the shop that this war was going to be quite different from the stately clashes of empires earlier in the century. It was not going to be a traditional war against France. Instead, it would be a fight to the death against the howling mob that had overwhelmed all the forces of the state and had now put to death their own king. In the Horse and Groom there had been bold talk that night, and this time not only from Stallard and his crew, as usual ensconced in secret conclave in the snug. It was widely held that the midnight rides of “Captain Swing” and a rash of rick-burnings were the work of Stallard and his men, and Kydd tried to avoid their company.

The loss of the American colonies and the fall of Lord North, spectacular victories in India and the rise of the younger Pitt had not disturbed this quiet corner of England, so it had been all the more shocking when a wider world had come smashing in on the night the press-gang had made its move. Tipped off by a sheriff’s man who wanted to rid himself of undesirables, they had sprung their trap with practiced ease.

One minute it was noise and laughter, the next an appalled silence in the smoke-filled taproom at the sight of sailors appearing at every exit. They were in a costume like those to be seen in the theater, complete with pigtails, black tarred hat and short blue jacket. And each had a cudgel in one hand, which he tapped slowly in the opposite palm.

Patrons were allowed to leave, but at each door they were separated into those who would go home to relate their escape to wide-eyed loved ones, and those who would begin a long journey to their fate on the high seas. Kydd had struggled but, under the weight of superior numbers, was soon overpowered.

The trip east to the Isle of Sheppey had taken two days. They had avoided towns, and the men had been handcuffed to a tarpaulin-covered wagon like common criminals. Kydd had felt bitter and hopeless by turns, not able to find comfort in cursing as Stallard seemed to do, or in the fatalism of the two merchant seamen also caught up in the press.

They were kept for two more days in the dank holding cells in Sheerness’s Blue Town, a bleak garrison town, at the tip of the desolate island at the mouth of the Thames. It seemed to Kydd that he had arrived at the end of the earth. He was almost relieved when it was time to board the hoy. Then he saw, for the first time, the forest of masts set in an iron-gray winter sea, and knew he would need all the courage and strength he could muster for whatever lay ahead.

Now he tried to ignore the steady trickle of icy rainwater, on its way to the bilge, that coursed down his neck and back.

Suddenly the tarpaulin was flung aside, and Kydd took in the brightness of the pearly winter sky above, the reluctant stirring of damp men and, dominating all, the colossal form of a great ship. It seemed all gunports and lines of yellow and black timber, unknown fitments and black ropes. It towered up to the deck-line, and then above to an impossibly complex structure of masts and yards, black and ominous against the sky.

His eyes sought meaning in the rush of detail. The massive sides of the ship were near enough to touch. At such proximity the pockmarks of age and battle were all too clear, and at the point where the fat side of the ship met the muddy gray waves of the Thames estuary, dark-green weed betrayed the urgency with which the ship had been summoned from her foreign station. In the dark beyond the open gunports Kydd could discern unknown movement. From a small opening near the waterline discolored water dribbled on and on into the sea.

“Let’s be havin’ yer, then, me lads!” the petty officer said, and released them with a brisk clinking of metal. Kydd rubbed his wrists.