Free An Ill Wind by David Donachie

now dead, and Ben Walker, captured by Barbary pirates and, as Pearce had discovered in Tunis, a slave of the Mussulmans. The quartet had eked out a precarious existence on the Thames riverbank, not too bad in summertime and damned near too deadly for the cold and starvation in winter, often reduced to hot bedding with others to just have a place to lay their head and never sure where the next meal was coming from.
    They were bound to the place by their past, each one subject of some warrant for crimes committed, locked in the Liberties of the Savoy where the writ of the tipstaffs did not run, free to roam only on the Sabbath. London and the teeming Strand was yards away at times, but they dare not step into that great thoroughfare or beyond for fear of being collared by the law on a weekday, Charlie least of all, he being a sharp who had worked nearby Covent Garden.
    Michael was one to come and go from the Pelican as he pleased – he was a free man – his reasons for being there more to do with the aforementioned Rosie than anything other. An apple-cheeked serving wench of ample proportions, she had been Michael’s squeeze, dueto his always having coin in his purse and a manner of emptying it often, given that, as a man who could seriously wield a shovel, there was always more to be earned in a city forever expanding.
    Charlie had hated him for his easy spending, but more for Rosie, on whom he had designs, thinking that he being a handsome cove, and he was that, was more appealing than the Irishman’s copper and silver. Rosie would have none of it: Michael O’Hagan paid for her favours and if Charlie wanted to share them, to which she was not averse, then he must shell out for them likewise.
    ‘I dreamt about us being pressed again last night,’ said Rufus, whose only crime was to have run from a bonded apprenticeship in the leather trade. ‘Woke up a’trembling.’
    ‘It would be Irish snores that would wake you, Rufus,’ Charlie whispered, ‘and they are loud enough to shiver the timbers.’
    Michael grinned at that: he was proud of his snoring, which was loud enough to drown out all the others doing likewise, each, with one watch on deck, in their twenty-eight inches of hammock space.
    ‘I don’t recall that night, as you know,’ he said.
    ‘You were so drunk you tried to belt Pearce when he told you to run,’ Charlie cackled, but that did not last, given it was not an occasion to remember fondly. ‘We should have spotted them tars eyeing the place.’
    ‘And young Martin.’
    The boy they were speaking of, Martin Dent, a growing lad now and a skilful topman on HMS
Brilliant
, had been a drummer boy then, in a red coat that stood out a mile even in that smoky, crowded place.
    ‘We was too busy dunning Pearce for ale,’ said Rufus.
    ‘I don’t recall you getting him to shell out for drink,’ Charlie snapped, adding a finger gesture to one of the captain’s choir. ‘That were me, mate.’
    ‘You got a silver tongue, Charlie, an’ no error.’
    ‘But now’t but air in his breeches,’ Michael scoffed.
    ‘When I’m dreaming,’ Rufus insisted, ‘I sees them tars burstin’ in with clubs the size of spars, with us runnin’ all ways to no purpose.’
    Not only had Barclay’s men rushed the tavern, they were outside the doors front and back, waiting to catch hold of anyone trying to run. All three of them, Abel Scrivens and Ben Walker too, had, with John Pearce and more than a dozen others, found themselves bruised and battered, trussed like chickens before being thrown into the boats and carried down the Thames to Sheerness.
    The singing of a hymn had reached a crescendo, the voices rising to a swelling sound that filled the gathering gloom, then stopping abruptly, to leave Captain Sidey beaming with pleasure, that is until he looked sideways to the surgeon.
     
    In a cut-down part of Sidey’s cabin, Ralph Barclay swung in his cot, aware that he was well enough now to havejoined in the choral