Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments Read online

  SERGEANT VERITY PRESENTS HIS COMPLIMENTS

  Also by Francis Selwyn

  CRACKSMAN ON VELVET

  SERGEANT VERITY AND THE IMPERIAL DIAMOND

  FRANCIS SELWYN

  STEIN AND DAY/Publishers/New York

  For Gordon Grimley, who named Verity

  First published in the United States of America, 1977 Copyright © 1977 by Francis Selwyn All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Selwyn, Francis. Sergeant Verity presents his compliments.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.S4693Sg3 [PR6069.E382] 823'.9'14 76-41724 ISBN 0-8128-2148-5

  Contents

  BIRKENHEAD DRILL 1852 page 9

  THE HIRING-ROOM 1860 41

  SATAN'S MISTRESSES 141

  THE TEETH OF THE WOLF 207

  1

  BIRKENHEAD DRILL 1852

  Joseph Morant-Barham, heir to the heir of Earl Barham, honourable only in title, laid two cards on the smooth green nap of the miniature gaming-table. At nineteen years old, his flushed face showed a smooth and almost dimpled petulance to match his pigeon chest and shock of dark, perfumed hair. Cornet of Horse in the 12th Lancers, young Morant-Barham's reputation at faro, baccarat or loo had driven such games from the mess-room to more private apartments where his brother officers were not obliged to invite him. It was not said that Cornet the Hon. Morant-Barham cheated at cards. He might do, but such things were not said in the mess of the Lancers.

  It was common knowledge that before the regiment embarked for the Cape there had been a row of some sort at the Beargarden Club in St James's. Complaints were said to have been laid before the club committee over Morant-Barham's conduct at cards. It was even suggested that the committee had drafted a request for his withdrawal from membership. But a future Earl Barham was a considerable adornment to the club and its Finances. Joey Morant-Barham might be 'an uncommon bad fellow for a hand at loo', but he seemed to care little how much he spent on the club otherwise. Being only a year out of Harrow, and a likeable young man into the bargain, he was merely informed that his fellow members had decided not to 'recognize' him in the card-room for the next twelve months. In every other room of the club, he would be their friend and crony. In the card-room, the older men would ignore his very presence. However, it was not supposed that a future Earl Barham would show such deplorable form as to go where he knew that he must be unwelcome.

  For the moment, the Beargarden Club was ten thousand miles away. Not one of the other subalterns at the table was from the 12th Lancers. In their own dull and lacklustre mess-rooms they were whispered of as 'fast' young men, but once the story of their evening with Earl Barham's grandson was out, they would shine with the glory of undisputed rake-hells.

  When Morant-Barham laid down his cards, a hundred sovereigns were at stake. His hand of a five and a three was closer to beating the bank than any player had come in the past half hour. The cards lay on the antique baize, its walnut surround polished to the gloss of liquid honey. The young man looked up, moistening his lips and glancing at the other four men. Opposite him sat the banker, Lieutenant John Ransome of the 73rd Foot, brushing his silky black moustaches against the brick-red of his face, a complexion acquired by several years of Indian service. Like the others, Ransome was bare-headed, his scarlet tunic with its gold braiding open and crumpled. With a deep, enigmatic smile, he laid his two cards on the baize. The seven and two of diamonds, a natural and unbeatable nine.

  There was a general intake of breath at the narrowness of Morant-Barham's defeat, as well as at the size of the stake he had lost. The young man's mouth twisted nervously. His companions sat in silence and heard far below them the deep reassuring double beat of HMS Birkenhead's powerful engines, the three steel fists of the pistons sparring forward and down in succession. The fins of the ship's paddle-wheels beat the surface of the South Atlantic in a light, rapid putter, just below the level of the cabin-ports, where the hissing paddle-wake bubbled and broke. Beyond this luminous froth, the surrounding ocean swell had long since grown black in the late twilight. Four or five miles astern, the coast of southern Africa was now indistinguishable from the dark water, except where the fire of an isolated kraal flamed briefly and then vanished. Morant-Barham's boyish face dimpled in a grimace of self-disparagement.

  'Gilt, I think,' said Ransome smoothly, 'tick being no go. When a fellow may be fighting the Kaffirs tomorrow, he oughtn't to start issuing paper for what he owes tonight.'

  Morant-Barham drew five little pillars of gold coin towards him, checked their number and slid them hard across the table.

  'Curse it!' he said, mocking his own misfortune again and slewing the coins with vindictive force. The gold columns slithered and fell. Bright, tiny sovereigns spun and rang in the rich oil-light, bouncing and rolling in every direction, over the gilded wooden chairs, under the small ornamental tables with their alabaster lamps and silk-tasselled shades in rose pink, into the recesses of the fine Regency sofa with its cerise velvet, all of which accompanied Cornet the Hon. Morant-Barham, even on a troopship.

  'Come now, Joey!' said Frank Chamberlain on his right. 'What's the good of being beastly ill-natured? A man must learn to take his licking and not squeal. You ain't down to your shirt-tail yet by a long chalk. And your old governor don't keep you short. By George, he don't!' Chamberlain indicated the comforts of the cabin with a general wave of his hand. Morant-Barham said nothing. For the chance to call him Joey, to chaff him about his people, and then to boast of the familiarity in their own mess-rooms, men like Chamberlain were prepared to lose unquestioningly at baccarat. Morant-Barham saw no cause for complaint, especially since his guests were now about to part with their money more freely and more willingly than they themselves had ever imagined.

  'Ain't it time to be getting down to the pasties on the old green baize again?' said Charley Keston of the 84th Foot. 'Cut and shuffle, Jack Ransome!'

  'Have the goodness to wait,' said Morant-Barham coldly, 'while the servant is called to fetch the yellow-boys off the floor.'

  'Hold hard, Joey,' said Chamberlain good-humouredly. 'A fellow don't play in front of his batman. Colonel Seton won't have faro or baccy on shipboard, and the servant isn't born that wouldn't peach on his master if it paid him.'

  'My servant don't peach, Frank,' said Morant-Barham. 'And I've a mouth that's dry as a whore's bush for a hock and seltzer water.'

  He clapped his hands over his head with the impatience of a schoolboy summoning one of his minions. His four guests sat in their unbuttoned tunics, the smoke from their Flor Rothschild cheroots drifting, greenish-grey, into the rich tawny oil-light overhead. The door opened.

  'Fetch in some seltzer water and German wine,' said Morant-Barham languidly.

  'Very good, sir.' The voice was a soft but pert cockney treble. Chamberlain looked at John Ransome.

  'By thunder!' he said. 'Joey's got a bum-boy!'

  'No I ain't,' said Morant-Barham smoothly. 'It's a doxy. She won't pass for a Grosvenor Square lady but she's a sight better than having one of the soldiers' or sailors' women. She only dresses like a valet so she shan't be spotted easy. And if Colonel Seton should come on me for it now, I shan't have to look far to know who peached.'

  The others exchanged glances, marvelling and congratulating themselves at the same time on the richness of the story they would have to tell, how they had gamed for a hundred sovereigns a hand with young Lord Barham and his woman in a sumptuously furnished cabin on the Birkenhead, outward bound from Simon's Bay. When the girl returned with the hock and seltzer water, each of them turned in his chair to admire her.

  'Over here
, Miss Janet, if you please,' said her young master gently.

  Her dark hair was shaped close to her head, its length pushed up into a pretty top-knot with the aid of a tortoiseshell comb. Soft features and a faint freckling were illuminated by the apparent timidity of her brown eyes. Morant-Barham's guests moistened their lips thoughtfully at the shapes revealed by the white cotton shirt and dark brown tights, which resembled the costume of a footman. The girl was a little stocky, but the slight heaviness of her thighs, the proud swell of her hips, and the soft roundness of her breasts were all displayed with a cunning which belied the modesty in her eyes. Charley Keston screwed his eye-glass into place and swallowed hard. Frank Chamberlain was clutching the edge of the table, unaware that his whitening knuckles betrayed his enthusiasm. The Birkenhead had embarked the depot companies of ten regiments at Cork on 7 January 1852. It was now 25 February and few of the subalterns on board had even spoken to a woman in two months. When choosing his guests, Morant-Barham selected those for whom the deprivation had been most severe.

  The young brunette served the men with hock and seltzer water. Then she stood before him, waiting to be dismissed.

  'There are some Victorias and half-sovs on the floor,' he said, as though it were almost too tiresome to mention. 'Pick 'em up and fetch 'em here.'

  Flushing a little and keeping her eyes lowered to avoid the eager gazes of the men, she dropped to her knees and began to search. A coin had lodged between the thighs of Ransome's breeches and there was much amusement as he insisted that she must hook it out with her own timid fingers. Frank Chamberlain ostentatiously picked up a coin and dropped it into his own lap. When the girl stooped for it, he seized her wrist with one hand, holding her while the fingers of his other circled the tips of her soft breasts.

  'Have a care, Frank,' said Morant-Barham softly, and the fierce little subaltern released her. He was prepared to be familiar with the young Barham but not to fight him.

  Presently she was searching under the little sofa, kneeling with her forehead almost on the floor. Charley Keston was confronted by the spread and rounded seat of her dark brown tights. As though the girl were entirely innocent of the effect, the plump cheeks of Janet's bottom wiggled and squirmed at him as she stretched after an elusive coin.

  'Ain't Miss Janet got a backside on her, old fellow!' said Chamberlain wonderingly to Keston.

  'She ain't a twelve-year-old virgin, Frank,' said Morant-Barham, 'which all your mess-room says is what you prefer.

  The cove who kept her before me got careless and she dropped a cub on him. She won't see twenty again.'

  'And you still a schoolboy last year!' said Ransome derisively.

  'It ain't age, Jack Ransome, it's being the master of a doxy that counts. Not that this frisky little filly ain't taught me a French trick or two!'

  Before allowing the girl to leave, he instructed her to freshen the glasses, which obliged her to lean far over the table to reach Chamberlain's. Again Chamberlain seized her wrist, looking her hard in the eyes, moulding and fingering her breasts through the tight cotton.

  'And that's where it stops, Frank,' said Morant-Barham quietly. Chamberlain became reproachful.

  'Dammit, Joey! She ain't going to be Lady Barham, is she? She ain't exactly wearing her bubbies like a young countess! A fellow can share a doxy with his chums. Where's the harm?'

  'No harm, Frank,' said Morant-Barham. 'Only when a fellow invites four chums to his cabin, and when he loses the bank and a hundred sovs and more in two hours, he ain't in a sharing mood. I know it's square, of course, only a fellow can't help being a bit down, all the same.'

  'That's gammon!' said Chamberlain determinedly.

  'No it ain't, Frank, it ain't gammon at all. If a fellow was to win back his sovs, and perhaps a bit over, there's no knowing what he mightn't do for the chums he won from. He might turn into such a jolly dog that he'd call his doxy back and let them give her what-for. There's no knowing but he mightn't.'

  They stared at him. The future Earl Barham pimping for his street girl! This was going to be an evening to remember, a story they would tell in mess billiard-rooms and club smoking-rooms when they were tired old majors and colonels on half-pay. How they went on the randy with Joey Morant-Barham, or Earl Barham as he would then be, and how they ploughed a doxy with him.

  It was Lieutenant John Ransome, the oldest of the men, who set the tone and smothered any remaining scruples in his companions.

  'You damned young rascal!' he said, almost laughing. 'You've pulled this thieving dodge before!' Morant-Barham shrugged.

  'I ain't a thief, Jack Ransome. But I ain't exactly green as a new leaf either. I know you older subalterns think any young griff ought to be, but he ain't always. And I don't ask you to share my doxy. There's a hundred soldiers' women below decks that might give you a serving of greens for the asking. Crabs and all.'

  During the pause which followed this, Ransome looked carefully at the others. Then he looked back to Morant-Barham.

  'Well, then, old chums,' said Morant-Barham lightly, 'shall we say a bank of two hundred sovs to make the wheel go round easy?'

  James Seton, Lieutenant-Colonel of the 74th Highlanders, walked slowly along the narrow, iron-ribbed passageway which led aft from the troop-decks behind the bilge-tank. The majority of the five hundred men under his command were already asleep in the hammocks slung from the massive deck-beams overhead. Others slept huddled in blankets on the bare boarding of the deck itself. Behind Seton, at a regulation distance, walked the orderly officer, and behind the orderly officer came the orderly sergeant. Strict discipline was almost impossible on a troopship and, in some respects, undesirable. Yet in the hold, secure behind bars, lay Private Suitor, a hulking Irishman whose court-martial sentence of fifty lashes for drunkenness had been confirmed by Sir Harry Smith, Commander-in-Chief at the Cape. Tomorrow, at morning parade, the man must be roped to the triangle and flogged. Suitor was an old offender, his brawny back marked by the thin white scars of several previous ordeals.

  It was Seton who had relented so far as to allow Suitor to be visited by Fusilier Atherton, a lantern-jawed towering soldier with a Nottingham brogue, who had acquired a reputation among officers and men as leader of an evangelizing movement among the soldiers themselves, forswearing strong drink, oaths, and every form of immorality. Colonel Seton had overheard Atherton in the cell, endeavouring to comfort the condemned man, urging him to put aside the fear of the drummer's lash and to seek instead a release from the eternal pains of hell which must search the souls of the damned. And all the time, Suitor had whispered, 'Save me, Mr Atherton! Save me!' There was no fear in his voice only an urgent confidentiality, as though he were asking Atherton to show him the secret of a conjuring trick. Seton knew the game. The man guessed that Atherton might speak to Major Moxon, who was sweet on the 'evangelists', and Moxon might 'beg him off the flogging. But Sir Harry Smith had signed the order, and there was nothing that begging could do.

  The memory of all this was wakened in Seton's mind by the sound of Atherton's voice in a recess by one of the mess-deck openings, and by the sight of an unkempt young woman close by him. The girl bowed her head, eyes downcast, fingers twisting awkwardly together.

  'Ah don't know,' she said softly, 'Ah don't know that Ah could make mesel' worthy by enduring such things. There must be other roads to repent, sure?'

  'If thou art my woman thou shall endure!' whispered the tall Fusilier fiercely. His lantern-jaw seemed to hang slack of its own weight and his pock-marked face shone with the heat between decks.

  'Not here!' she looked about her in the gloom. 'Not this minute!'

  'Thou fool!' he said, with a kind of stern affection. 'This very night thy soul may be required of thee!'

  'Ay,' she said thoughtfully, and moved closer to his side.

  Seton chose not to notice. Once a commanding officer tried to regulate the affairs of soldiers and their women there was no end to it. He thought, however, that a word in Major Moxon's ea
r might not come amiss.

  Further aft, a row of glass panels offered a view of the deep well of the Birkenhead's engine-room. The massive and polished hammer-heads of the three pistons drove forward and back through their elipse with the power of trapped animals seeking escape. There was a pervasive smell of coal dust and hot oil. Through the open door of the stoke-hold, the black silhouettes of the stokers appeared against a tapestry of flame, like figures already consigned to Fusilier Atherton's hell.

  Among the polished brass and steel, the engineer officer of the watch surveyed his little kingdom, while the paddles beat their throbbing rhythm alongside the hull. The telegraph was set at 'Full Ahead' for the night as the ship cut the ocean swell towards Algoa Bay, where the first of the depot companies were to be disembarked. Chalked on a little board, for the engineer officer's information, were the locations of the senior officers on the vessel. Captain Salmond, RN, commander of the Birkenhead, was already in his cabin, having retired at the first opportunity.

  Seton turned about and dismissed the orderly officer and sergeant, returning their salutes punctiliously. It was past one in the morning, but the knowledge that his men might have to face the ubiquitous fire of Kaffir marksmen the next day had prompted this final tour of inspection. Seton's satisfaction with the quiet orderliness of his men was not equalled by general admiration for their officers. His own 74th Highlanders were well led, and some of the other infantry companies were adequately commanded, but he felt the natural antipathy of a foot soldier and a Scot towards the dandy officers of cavalry. The smooth, affluent young wastrels of the dragoons and lancers displayed a peacock arrogance which he found loathsome. As he walked slowly along the carpeted corridor, the cabins of the 12th Lancers on either side still showed cracks of light at their doors and emitted a muffled hum of voices and the occasional boisterous guffaws. A door opened, illuminating the unbuttoned figure of Lieutenant Chamberlain. With tunic open and breeches askew, the young man belched and moved unsteadily towards the infantry berths. The door closed before Seton reached it but he caught the warm stench of sour wine and stale cigar. He made no attempt to call Chamberlain back. Officers were to be reprimanded when sober. Chamberlain blundered into the cabin which he shared with Lieutenant Keston. Seton heard the voices and subdued laughter of the two young men. Thoughtfully, he entered his own stateroom in the stern of the ship. As he lay down, the engines of the Birkenhead beat their strong, soothing double rhythm. Five hundred men and their hundred and thirty women and children slept their deep final sleep.