Prologue
Simeon Price tried to shut out the sound of whispered prayer, and the groaning of the ship. He flopped one arm over his ear, but it was no good. He was, irritatingly, awake.
“Seasick again, Halford?” he mumbled.
The praying stopped. “Not tonight. Can’t sleep, is all.”
Simeon turned over with some difficulty in his rocking hammock. Private Sawyer Halford was a dark bulk against a line of similar dark bulks, lit up by a single lantern against the wall. The troop deck was stuffy this deep into the night, a stew of sweat and tobacco, iron and wood. Overhead somewhere, a rat scuttled.
“Thinking about what’s waiting for us when we go ashore?” Simeon kept his voice low. He’d recently been given the appointment of lance corporal, which was hardly even a rank, but it did mean that he had responsibility over Halford and a few other privates of the 74th Highland Regiment of Foot. Anyway, Simeon liked Halford.
But going ashore was going to happen, and soon. They had sailed past Cape Town, the captain charting a course that hugged the southern coast of Africa to save time, speeding by steam and sail toward war.
“I suppose so,” Halford said. “It was one thing being sent to Ireland. I knew what to expect, or I thought I did.” There was a pause, during which they both thought about what they’d seen in Ireland: the houses burned, the children so thin. “But I’d never even heard of the Xhosa before we sailed.”
“I doubt they’ve heard of you either, mate.”
Halford might have chuckled or might have sighed; it was hard to tell which in the dark. “At least when my father went off to fight Napoleon, he’d seen a picture of the bastard.” He paused, then said, even more quietly, “I’ve never killed anyone before.”
Neither had Simeon, though he’d come close a couple of times in his father’s public house back in Ealing. There had been one night in Tipperary when he had expected to be asked to kill women and old men. In the end, they had left the storehouse he was guarding without violence, gone back to their hungry beds, and Simeon had got very drunk. He had no words of wisdom for Halford tonight.
“I’m sorry I interrupted your prayer,” Simeon said quietly.
“Prayer?” Halford chuckled. “Oh, no, Price. I wasn’t praying. I always recite Shakespeare when I can’t sleep.”
“Which bit of Shakespeare?”
“It varies. Tonight, it’s the sceptre’d isle speech. From Richard II.”
Simeon was surprised. “Ah, right. ‘England, bound in with the triumphant sea, whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege of watery Neptune’… I can’t remember the next part.”
“‘Is now bound in with shame, with inky blots and rotten parchment bonds. That England, that was wont to conquer others hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’” Halford paused. “Maybe not the best choice for tonight, but it was the sea that made me think of it.”
Simeon opened his mouth to say he thought it was an excellent choice, when the ship lurched to a terrible stop, throwing him half out of his hammock.
There were shouts from above. Simeon disentangled his arm and stumbled to his feet. The hideous noise stretched on: a sickening crunch, the iron hull tearing open. The floor tilted from bow to stern. Simeon lurched through the jungle of hammocks and ropes, past the bewildered men just waking up. Out to the door and the stairs up to the deck, in his shirt and trousers.
It was a warm night, with cold stars above, the dark water below. The ship was now unnaturally still and lying at an odd angle. HMS Birkenhead was a Frankenstein’s monster of iron and wood, converted from a frigate to a troop ship, steam coming from its great black funnel and sails furled on its masts, paddlewheels on its sides. There were men shouting up on the forecastle.
“She ran onto a fucking rock,” said a passing sailor in uniform, seeing Simeon’s face. “There was a light on shore that we thought was a lighthouse – but it must have been a fire. We’re on the wrong course. The rock put a bloody great gash in the bow, and we’re stuck fast.”
“All right,” said Simeon, as the sailor seemed to be looking for some kind of resolution, from someone. “Where are we needed? On the pumps?”
“Not yet. They’re firing the engines to back us off the rock.”
“But won’t that bring more water in?”
The sailor shrugged. “Captain’s orders. We have to get free, he says. Says the compartments will hold.”
As if in answer, the ship came to life and heaved slowly backwards. Shouts from the front, and the bow dipped, throwing Simeon back the way he’d come. As he righted himself, he turned toward the stairs, and saw the water rising, covering the bottom of the stairwell. Those stairs led back down to the upper troop deck, where hundreds of men had been sleeping minutes before.
He slipped and slid down the stairs, into the water, wet up to his knees. The door had swung shut behind him, or he’d closed it – he couldn’t recall now. Someone was pulling at it from the inside, and he shoved, and nearly fell onto Private Halford, soaked to the skin and panting.
“There are wounded,” Halford said, and pointed back behind him, toward the bow.
Simeon and Halford waded, the ship tilting and throwing them onto each other as they tripped and slid. This deck, which had been built as a gunroom before the ship’s conversion, was full of men, all in their nightshirts and frantically crowding to the door that led to freedom. The ship’s engines were as silent as death now, and the water as cold. The fires must have gone out.
And all the while Simeon was thinking, There’s another deck below this one. Where’s the water coming in?
A man had hurt his leg – probably broken – and was trying to keep his head above water as he staggered, the ship still shuddering beneath them and the water as full of waves as though there were wind inside the ship. Simeon and Halford put their arms around the man’s shoulders and got him to the door.
Someone yelled, “Lance Corporal Price! You’re needed!”
Simeon craned his neck back to see, up on the deck at the top of the steep stairs, a young lieutenant with a frantic expression. Lieutenant Grimes, that was his name.
“The horses,” Grimes shouted down. “We cut them free but they’re thrashing and kicking up here. We can’t get anything done until we get them overboard. It’s Bedlam. Look lively!”
Simeon pushed wet hair out of his eyes. “The horses are on deck, but the men–”
“The men, unlike the horses, will stay quiet,” the lieutenant snapped.
Grimes was in the 74th Regiment, the same as Simeon. Where was Colonel Seton? Off doing something useful, presumably, which left men like Grimes free rein to issue orders.
Out of nowhere, someone slammed Lieutenant Grimes roughly down to the boards.
The figure wore a cloak, with a hood so close around his face that all Simeon could see was a square jaw, unshaven. Not a uniformed soldier, whoever he was, but he held an axe. He descended the stairs at speed.
“Come on,” the figure growled, pushing past Simeon toward the lower deck and the rising water.
“Is he–” Simeon tried to see what had happened to the lieutenant.
“I haven’t killed him yet… which might prove a mistake.”
Simeon was stunned. Cloaked men didn’t appear out of nowhere on Her Majesty’s troop ships, and they certainly didn’t knock officers down. But there was no time for questions. Whoever the stranger was, he was heading down, toward the muffled shouts and screams.
The water in the lower stairwell was blacker than the sky above. They had to pull themselves down, with the water over their heads. The door to the men’s quarters wouldn’t open. The stranger beat at the door with the axe, but the water slowed his movement. Eventually he resorted to a kind of scraping and slashing. When the wood of the door split, Simeon pushed his hands in and pulled the door apart, he and the stranger working at it until the door was splintered open and their hands were bloody and there was no air in their lungs. Then Simeon started to black out.
He lost his grip and floated to the middle of the stairwell, and hardly knew whether he was drowning or
not. Somewhere, high overhead, yellow light from the ship’s lanterns swam in his eyes. His head was free of the water as he grabbed for the steep stairs.
Then the cloaked man was at his side, pushing a coughing and spluttering soldier up into the air.
Simeon was shaking from cold and panic. He seemed to have to think about every breath. But the cloaked man was going back below, pulling himself down the thin stair rail. Who was this bloke, anyway? A stowaway? A paying passenger? A sailor out of uniform?
There would be time to think about that later. Now, every moment was a life lost or saved, and Simeon had enough air in his lungs to do his part.
Simeon took a deep breath and followed the stranger back down into darkness. They found one more man thrashing, trying to get through the broken doorway in a panic. The stranger battered at the door, and this time, it opened. They pulled him out and up.
Their third descent found a man floating limp, halfway between floor and ceiling, and they pulled him out too, pushing his nightshirt off his unconscious face. The stranger rolled him to one side and then the other, shaking him, shouting at him and pushing on his abdomen, but it was very clearly no good. As Simeon and the stranger lay on the stairs, retching and coughing, a dead man lying beside them, the cloaked man gasped, “Go on. You don’t want to survive this just to be court-martialed.”
A memory leapt into Simeon’s mind. It had only been weeks ago, but it felt like years. The hot sun beating down, as all of the six hundred troops on board the Birkenhead were paraded to watch a young stoker receive his fifty lashes, punishment for leaping overboard and swimming for the coast of Sierra Leone. Punishment for desertion.
“What about you?” Simeon croaked, his throat aching and tight from their trips under water.
“I don’t answer to them,” said the man, pushing back his hood. Simeon didn’t recognize him: a middle-aged man with light brown skin, sharp cheekbones and a few days’ worth of beard on his angular chin. He was panting, his hand to his chest. “But you took the Queen’s shilling, didn’t you? So go on. There’s no one left to save down here.”
The stranger stared sidelong at him, as if it were a dare. Beneath the battered cloak, he didn’t look any more soldierly. He must be a stowaway, although for what reason, Simeon couldn’t dream. And why was he risking capture, not to mention his life, to save the men everyone else seemed to have given up for lost? What would happen to him if he went up on deck?
“I don’t know who you are, and for the moment I don’t care. I want to know you’ll be safe,” Simeon said. “Can you make it to the boats? Come on, we’ll go together, and I’ll make sure no one gets in your way.”
The man’s face contorted into a smile. “Maybe he was right about you,” he muttered.
“Who was?”
“Listen, if you ever find you want to give the Queen back her shilling, make your way to Vienna. You’ll find
us there. A brotherhood that believes in taking orders from conscience alone. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Will you remember that?”
Vienna! It seemed as unreal as Fairyland. They were on a sinking ship on the far side of Africa. He seemed unlikely to set foot on land ever again, and if he did, it would be a country where he’d never been before. Even if they survived the night, the 74th Regiment was meant to fight and die for British settlers in their attempt to subjugate the local people. A brotherhood that believed in…? Fairyland indeed.
Simeon wasn’t sure what to make of any of the stranger’s instructions, except that it was too long a speech for a man to make if he was in danger of dying. He nodded, briefly, not sure what he was agreeing to. The whole encounter seemed unreal, but everything was unreal at the moment: the screams of the dying, the water gurgling and frothing through every crack in the ship, the stink of wet coal and vomit and tar. Lieutenant Grimes was still roaring commands above. He had work to do, and more people to help. The horses would be frantic. And Simeon was, still, a soldier.
Simeon shook the stranger’s hand, in thanks and farewell, then scrambled up the steep wet stairs, suddenly dog-tired. The ship was rocking wildly, the mast swinging from one star to another.
There was Private Halford, looking as worn out as Simeon felt. Grimes was nowhere to be seen, for the moment. A few men were running from one part of the ship to another, without any apparent logic to their movements. Others, like Halford, seemed to be stunned, unsure what to do.
“The horses,” Simeon said, weakly. “I’ve got orders to see to the horses.”
“Already overboard, and swimming to shore. If the sharks don’t get them, they’ll be better off than any of us.”
“What’s next then? The boats?”
Halford shook his head, glumly. “They want us to pump. Fifty men at a go, until they tire, then the next fifty.”
“But surely–”
“We got the women and children into the cutter and launched it. That’s done, at least.”
In the rush to save the drowning down below, Simeon hadn’t thought about the officers’ wives near the stern of the ship, and their children – there must have been a few dozen all told. A couple of the women had given birth on the journey.
Halford continued, “We tried to get the bigger boats down into the water. Rusted winches and rotten ropes – the boats are no good to us, that’s the long and short of it. Can’t get two of ’em off the ship with the winches busted, and the third was swamped when the rope broke.”
“No good at all?” Simeon was shocked. Dozens of people, maybe hundreds, could have fitted into those boats.
“The rest of us, we’re to stay on board and pump out the water.” Halford paused. “Do you… do you think that’s what we should do?”
Simeon tried to think. He was wet and cold, and couldn’t seem to stop his shoulders from shaking.
The ship juddered backward and there was an all too familiar crunch and scream of iron against stone, a crack of wood breaking. The ship tipped backward this time, as water rushed into a fresh hole, this one in the stern.
Captain Salmond strode toward them, the way only a sea captain could stride on the watery deck of a swaying ship. His dark hair was wild, and so were his dark eyes.
“She’s going down,” he said. “Anyone who can swim for it, do so.”
With an aye-aye or two, a few men scrambled to find a place to jump overboard. Halford and Simeon climbed up to the poop deck and clung to the railing. The unbalanced ship was rocking wildly; sometimes the sea was a few feet away, and sometimes it was a great deal further. The prospect of diving was terrifying, but the captain was right. If they stayed on board, the suction of the ship as it went down would pull them under, or they’d be caught in the rigging, and they’d have no chance of swimming to shore or surviving long enough to be rescued.
They climbed the railing as if it were a ladder, and Simeon considered stripping off his wet clothing. It would be a terrible sunburn, on the coast of the Cape, if he made it that far. Instead, he tucked his shirt well into his trousers, to keep the thing from billowing and dragging in the water.
“Beat to quarters!” came a scream from behind them. “Beat to quarters!”
They turned to see Lieutenant Grimes, and all the surviving men, half of them in uniform and half in their shirts, standing as steady as they could on the tilting deck.
You took the Queen’s shilling, the stranger had said. Simeon had wanted to become anonymous, to make a quiet living, one man in a crowd. It was either north to Manchester and a factory or off to the army, and the army had seemed less likely to result in injury. He’d wanted to stop thinking, to stop making all the wrong decisions. To stop making any decisions at all.
But under the stars of the far side of the world, on a breaking ship full of the newly drowned, Simeon found himself saying, “The captain’s orders were to swim for it.”
“And I say beat to quarters, damn you!” The lieutenant took a few unsteady steps to them, and spoke quietly, almost intimately, as though showing the great patience he had for this insubordinate lance corporal. “If these men swim, they’ll swim to the two lifeboats out there, which are full of women and children. They’ll try to get into the boats, and they’ll swamp them.”
“Or,” Simeon said through gritted teeth, “they won’t do that, because they aren’t monsters. If they swim, they have a chance.”
The lieutenant whirled on his heel and yelled, “Beat to quarters! Stand firm, and stand for Her Majesty! Men, you can be proud of this moment. You have carried out your orders calmly. All has been done with the utmost regularity.”
Halford slid down off the rail and followed the lieutenant toward the ranks of men, who were indeed standing in silence, dripping and staring.
“
The utmost regularity,” repeated the lieutenant, and then the ship broke in half.
It sounded like a cannon and felt like an earthquake. The great black funnel came crashing down, right on top of several men, including Private Halford. Simeon ran forward but as he reached for Halford, the private’s body skidded down the rocking deck, coming to rest at the lieutenant’s feet. Dead eyes stared up at the officer, blood poured from his lifeless head. Halford wouldn’t have a chance to worry about killing a man.
All of the shouts and groaning had stopped. The only men left alive were holding on and staring at each other. The world was silent for a moment.
“Beat to quarters!” screamed the lieutenant again, as the two halves of the ship slipped and groaned, each in its own direction, down toward the sea. Men grabbed for the yardarm, for the masts, for anything. “Beat to quarters!”
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