Halfhyde and the Chain Gangs by Philip McCutchan

Author:Philip McCutchan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

HALFHYDE CLIMBED to the poop to clear a buzzing head. The girl had had a point, it was true. He accepted that the crew of the steam yacht would be ready with threats when he refused his cooperation. He could take the sting out of any threat connected with the gold by having it dumped overboard, yet that might not be enough. It was inevitable that there would be talk after arrival in South Africa – talk from the convicts, who could scarcely be kept in ignorance of any dumping of cases of bullion brought up from right beneath them. That would make matters look worse. As he had said to Victoria, however, his report of the bribery to Colonel Bowler was on record, and that would clear him and his ship. Bloody likely, she’d said. How did he know that report was on record and not just held within Bowler’s head? Bowler was in fee to the Home Office – and he’d do well to remember, she said, that Archer-Caine had implicated the Secretary of State in a vendetta against him…

Did he trust Bowler?

Doubts, unworthy ones perhaps, came. The fact that it had been Bowler who had suggested the gold-convict link from the start was probably totally irrelevant, the kind of obvious suggestion that anyone would have been expected to make in the circumstances. Bowler could all along have been making use of a prepared position, exploiting the Queen’s own idea of a convict draft to a labour battalion, exploiting it in a diabolical act of chicanery on behalf of his chief the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. Wheels within wheels, pressures, hints from on high…no one except the monarch was above the law, but often in theory rather than in practice. Those who made the law were always uniquely placed, and power went hand-in-hand with privilege. Almost nothing was impossible to the privileged.

But Bowler came from a good regiment. Would he be able to connive at dirty dealing, at murder, run against the grain of a lifetime’s service to the Crown? Halfhyde smiled inwardly, a grim grimace with no humour in it; often enough throughout history men had gone against their own code.

And Archer-Caine?

Was a convict to be believed implicitly? His story could be considered a very tall one, and he was able to offer no proof whatsoever. But a kind of proof might come when the steam yacht closed the Glen Halladale again.

AT TWO BELLS in the middle watch, the midnight to 4 a.m., the wind shifted. Very unexpectedly, very suddenly, it backed to the east, another tearing squall coming off the distant, invisible land mass across the Bay of Biscay; already the Second Mate had noted the falling barometric pressure, a sharp fall, and had called the Master. Halfhyde had ordered the upper topsails to be reefed down hard, and he had reached the poop just as the hands were swarming up the shrouds to the upper yards – just as the squall hit.

It

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