The Maid and the Mid; A Supernatural Sea Story

This is a work of fiction. It is based on a period of time in the life of Horatio Nelson, but the only facts in it are that Nelson was invalided home from the East Indies on HMS Dolphin, along with a number of other seriously ill officers, who do not feature in this story. Apart from Horace, there were only three other midshipmen on Dolphin, and none of them was named Thomas Tremaine.

The Maid and the Mid

PART I

My daughter and I watch the elaborately decorated funeral car pass from our window fronting on the Strand. The coffin in its richly-embroidered pall looks very small and slightly lost under the high, black-plumed canopy, and the application of a ship’s bow and stern to the car strike me as slightly too literal. But there is no doubt it is extraordinary. A state funeral for a commoner.

I sigh. I hope that wherever his soul resides now, it is gratified by this extravagant tribute. If only the government had seen fit to honour him thus when he was alive. Maybe he would not have made quite such a controversial figure of himself, chasing glory… I feel a long-delayed grief grab me by the throat, and I swallow, trying to force it away. I blink away the tears that threaten to smear my spectacles, and steal a look at Catherine.

She has turned out to be more beautiful than I could have imagined. Soon to be a mother herself, her golden hair, pulled back from her face and flowing in glorious waves down her back and over her shoulder, reminds me of my own when I met him. It was always my best quality, but in my youth a modest young woman kept her hair pinned up under her cap, and a man did not see it in all its glory until we were wed.

There are tears shining in Catherine’s eyes, and I slip my arm around her shoulder and pull her close. ‘Do not dare cry, love, or I shall, too,’ I admonish her.

‘I’m a goose,’ she admits, dabbing her cornflower-blue eyes with a dainty, lace-trimmed handkerchief; she has always been more ladylike than I ever was. I shall never know where those eyes came from. My eyes are blue, but with a band of hazel around the pupil, and her father’s eyes were grey. ‘I didn’t even know the man, and here I am, inclined to weep because he’s gone. I cry at every little thing lately.’

‘I daresay most of those people out there did not know him either,’ I say, rather more sadly than I intended, ‘and I see many handkerchiefs in fists. Once this child is born, you will no longer feel like crying at the drop of a pin, my darling. You may feel overwhelmed, admittedly, and sometimes exhausted, and occasionally overwrought, but you will not have time to feel sentimental.’

‘So you keep telling me.’ She looks fondly at me, and her lovely forehead creases. ‘Mama, you look positively bereft. I have not seen you look so since Papa died. Has this put you in mind of him?’

‘I never forget your father, Kate. But no; I am thinking of Lord Nelson, a long time ago.’ Looking at the street, I see the procession of mourners following the funeral car, and the crowds lining the pavements, but in my mind I see a young man, very far from home; as was I, but at least my family was with me. He was, for all intents and purposes, alone.

I spoke quietly, but this statement draws her attention away from the funeral procession like a candle flame will draw a moth. ‘What? Did you know him?!’

‘I met him. I am not sure how well I can claim to have known him…’ Perhaps not as well as I might have liked to, had circumstances been different.

She sniffles prettily, but her moment of sentiment is past, conquered by curiosity. ‘You must tell me about him! Please… was he always such an… unfathomable creature?’

‘Do you mean, was he always an heroic man with an impulsive streak, constantly seeking approbation? I suppose the foundation of a person’s character does not change much over the course of a life, but he was a very young man when I met him. We were both little more than children at the time.’

‘That does not exactly answer my question.’

Oh, she can be persistent, my daughter, and whilst she is lovely, she is far from empty-headed. It appears that I will have to tell this story, whether I can do it with composure, or not. I try to banish the image of that small, lonely coffin, because if I do not, I will certainly break down.

‘Come back to the fire, then. It’s cold here by the window, and the light will soon be gone. I’ll ask Betty to bring us tea. Would you like bread and butter, or cake?’

/

It was almost thirty years ago when my father took our family to Calcutta. Things had been very bad in Bengal, and he was to advise the new governor general, Mr Hastings. We had lived in Calcutta for almost two years when my father was called back to England. Now everything ‘was going to the Devil’, to use Papa’s words, in the American colonies, and my father was of more value to the King in London than in Calcutta. The colonists do not want to pay their taxes. Nobody wants to pay taxes; what makes the American colonists think they should be an exception?

We sailed past Ceylon and around Cape Comorin to Bombay. It seems as though it would be faster to go overland, but the mountains are impenetrable and the interior inhospitable, home to all manner of dangerous creatures. This was only the first leg of our journey home. I remembered the voyage to Calcutta two years before, and how interminable it had been… I had been thirteen when we left England, and I turned fourteen mid-way through the six-month’s-long passage. I had not minded it as much as Clarice, my older sister. She was ill every time the sea turned rough.

Reecy was not returning to England with us, though. Six months ago she had married Captain William Clark, a regular army captain—not of the East India Company, he was always quick to point out—and was expecting a baby. Captain Clark’s proposal had put my parents all afluster. They had envisioned a gentleman husband for Reecy, and while Captain Clark was indeed a gentleman, he was a military gentleman. Nevertheless, my sister and her beau won out, and they both seemed blissfully happy. I envied my sister’s freedom from our parents, just a little. She described her contract with her husband as a ‘partnership’, as opposed to a patriarchy. I hoped for the same one day.

We had to cool our heels for a while in Bombay, until a ship arrived to take us for the long haul. Bombay was a Company town, a fortified island. The Royal Navy tended to base their ships here in the wintertime, but although it was winter in England, it was summertime in Bombay. By the time we reached home, it would be summertime in London.

Bombay was very clean and well-ordered, but quite martial. I did not see as many native faces as in Calcutta, apart from the sepoys, the native soldiers. And there were few people with which to socialise, apart from the Company officers. There were far fewer women here than in Calcutta, and none my own age; I was quickly bored to tears.

I had always been of the opinion that a ship was a ship, but I was underwhelmed by HMS Dolphin. A 24-gun full-rigged ship, she was the smallest class of frigate, and had she been a person, I would have said she looked ailing. Tobias, my older brother, told me that was a good thing; pirates would leave her alone, because she was no prize.

My brother could always be counted on to say something unsettling.

It was on account of Tobias that I made Horace’s acquaintance at all, so I suppose I shouldn’t be sardonic, but Tobias and I always did enjoy baiting one another a little. When we were young, Clarice was always ‘Reecy’, and I was ‘Annie’, but Tobias was always Tobias, never ‘Toby’. He would not have it, and I was sometimes frustrated by his stubborn rejection of this harmless familiarity.

On our first night at sea, on deck by the bow, Tobias told me the legend of the Flying Dutchman. I suppose he’d thought me too young when we journeyed to Calcutta, and had been holding it gleefully in reserve for our voyage home. Either that, or he’d learnt it since.

‘She’s a phantom Dutch East Indiaman, lost off the Cape of Good Hope almost twenty years ago, with all hands, in a raging sea. She’s manned by spirits, and they say that if you see her, it foretells your doom,’ he said in a confidential voice, as we looked out over a calm sea, where mist was beginning to gather.

I shivered deliciously. Without much effort I could imagine her materializing out of the mist, her sails in rags.

‘They say that her masts and yards glow with a ghostly light, and her crew is damned to sail the seas forever,’ Tobias continued spookily. ‘If you see her in a gale, you’ll go to the bottom with her. We shall sail right past the position where she went down, you know…’

‘Alright, that’s quite enough,’ I told him, swatting his shoulder.

He gazed around. ‘Imagine how many people have died on this ship,’ he whispered dramatically.

‘People die everywhere, Tobias. If we all became spirits the entire world would be teeming with ghosts.’

‘But if nobody ever became a ghost we wouldn’t have any stories about them, would we?’

That was not meant to be a question, and he made sure to be gone before I came up with a rejoinder. Tobias liked to have the last word.

It was late, and Mama was asleep when I got up to use the necessary. There was a chamber pot provided in the cabin from which we had displaced the first lieutenant, but I didn’t like to wake Mama, I told myself. Truthfully, that was something of a disingenuous excuse. I have always been fastidious about using the pot, and would not do it unless there was no alternative, or the weather so foul it would be foolish to go out to the privy. I do not like the idea of someone having to empty my body waste. Reecy used to tell me that we all have our lot in life, and someone’s lot is to clean the chamber pot, but she couldn’t convince me. Until we lived in Bengal, that is, and we were warned always to check the privy for dangerous creatures before we went in, especially at night. I learnt to use the chamber pot then, but I always felt exposed and uncomfortable.

The place where the ordinary sailors do their business is on the beak head, but there’s an enclosed seat-of-ease just aft of the bulkhead, for the midshipmen and junior officers. We’ve been afforded the privilege of using that.

I tapped hesitantly at the door. What if there was a person inside? It was very dark on this deck at night, and to come across anyone in this gloom would be unsettling. Tobias’ story about the phantom ship sailed suddenly into my head, most unwelcome.

Hearing nothing, I pushed open the door and quickly did what I needed to do. I did not want to be discovered here any more than I wanted to discover someone else. It was as dark as a root cellar at midnight in there, too.

On our outward passage, Tobias, true to his usual form, had pointed out the pissdale, where the sailors make their water. ‘Why do they not just do it over the side…?’ I had whispered.

‘Probably because it would be an affront to the King’s honour to go into battle in a ship with piss-streaks down her sides,’ Tobias murmured conspiratorially in my ear, and I had snickered silently into my mitt. I admit, rather shamefacedly now, to having stationed myself inconspicuously near the pissdale, trying to catch a glimpse of a man’s thing, but I never did. I probably was not inconspicuous at all.

I am sure it was only my subconscious mind that made me think then of Mr Tremaine, the handsome dark-haired midshipman with the flashing brown eyes. I had made his acquaintance that afternoon. Thomas, his first name was, but I had heard one of his fellow midshipmen call him ‘Tommy’, and it lodged in my memory. Thus it was that I was thinking of Tommy as I exited the necessary. I suppose it would have been worse had I been thinking about the Dutchman.

I made sure the latch was caught, so the door wouldn’t swing open and bang as the ship rolled. Her movement was more pronounced than it had been when we retired, and the single night-lanthorn swung from its beam, conjuring shadows that loomed and retreated from the lanthorn’s light. I had put one careful foot forward when I heard the sound.

It was a low moan, barely audible, but it made my hair stand on end. I froze, completely unable to move my other foot.

It came again, a drawn-out ‘Ohhhhh…’ There might have been the breath of a word in the groan at the end, but I didn’t stay to listen. I nearly lost my slipper as I bolted, scampering down the deck as fast as I could go without careening into anything in the gloom.

Lying in our berth next to my mother, once my heart stopped pounding and my breathing had returned to normal, I considered the sound. It had almost sounded like a plea. The spirit of some poor tar pleading with the gods, or demons, for his life? It was fine to entertain scary stories here, safely stowed away in our tiny cabin, but unless I wanted to use the chamber pot at night for the next six months, I had better get to the bottom of that noise pretty quickly.