Droits of the Crown by David Donachie

Author:David Donachie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

On a day of warm winter sunlight, as John Pearce oversaw the re-victualling of the ship, the hired transport vessel William of Eastry, sailing at a snail’s pace through wind-driven sleet, finally drew alongside the jetty set aside for Haslar Naval Hospital. The substantial building lay in Gosport, across water from Portsmouth, the ship here to drop off the sick and wounded sailors she’d brought back from the Mediterranean.

As a sight, it did nothing to inspire the vessel’s purser, Cornelius Gherson, well wrapped against the elements, who had come on deck early to get away from quarters far from immune to the all-pervading sounds and smells of bilge. Even worse were the long-occupied bunk beds and hammocks full of the sick and suffering. It was a noise and atmosphere he’d had to endure for weeks as his ship ploughed its way back home, through seas which seemed almost designed to see off many of the casualties on its lower deck.

Right now, he was impatient to get off the ship, even prepared to accept the discomfort of a boat. This would take him across the choppy waters to the defensive walls of Portsmouth and the Sally Port, to then taste the delights of a town he knew well. This accepted, it was impossible on a daily basis to avoid comparing what he called his ‘present desperate plight’ with the freedoms, comfort, and profits he’d enjoyed here when serving as clerk to Captain Ralph Barclay.

His late employer was a naval officer who typified the truth that, though competent in all matters to do with the sea, they could be absolute dunces when it came to prospering ashore. Because of this, he had originally given Gherson the task of seeing to his shipboard accounts. This included illegally disposing, on his captain’s behalf and with a small amount deducted for himself, of a quantity of stores without the fact showing up in the log of Barclay’s frigate, HMS Brilliant.

These logs would later be examined by the ‘eager-to-find-a-discrepancy’ functionaries at the Navy Board, so it took unusual skill to hide the frauds, this being one Gherson possessed. Having been on half pay for five years prior to the outbreak of war, Barclay had good cause to consider himself hard done by, so he saw such depredations as recompense for the failure of the Admiralty to give him a ship and the full pay which went with it. He had also recently acquired a young and beautiful wife, she such an added potential expense, he’d take her to sea aboard his frigate rather than face the added outlay of maintaining a household ashore.

To say his marriage had caused him no end of trouble was to understate the case: it had been an error of biblical proportions for a man like Barclay, humourless and an onboard martinet, to take a wife twenty years younger than he, a woman who turned out to be the very opposite of submissive. The endless ramifications of his marital troubles had

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