The Captain's Wives

by Malcolm Macdonald

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Frank Morgan, captain of the bargue Pegasus, always claimed he had two wives. The deeply respectable Hilda back in north London - and the sea. But in the spring of 1885, outward bound for Boston with a cargo of cheap furniture and poverty-stricken Irish emigrants, a new and overwhelming emotion enters his iron-disciplined life. Teresa O'Dee is young, lovely and with a spirit that awakens unnerving, long-buried memories of times past. A the age of sail gives way finally to steam, everything in Frank Morgan's life is about to change...

Release date: October 10, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 576

Sample

CAPTAIN MORGAN WOULD NOT even let the gangway near the ship until the second mate had confirmed that the after breast rope was secure. He was a stickler, Morgan. Any other captain of a five-masted barque with a fast cargo for Boston would risk head and stem lines only, with perhaps a forward spring; and he’d raise the gangway the moment any one of them was fast. But not Morgan. Not even with this onshore wind to pin the ship to the quay.

The shore gang was annoyed. The raising of the gangway was the last chore of their day. They had the afternoon off – or they were going to take it off, anyway, to watch Cork play Youghall in the most important match of the season. One of them gave a sour nod in the Captain’s direction. They all knew Morgan and feared the reach of his temper. “That fella,” he said, “wouldn’t give you the …” He was about to say, “the steam off his own piss,” when he realized that a group of females was standing within earshot. “Wouldn’t give you the time of day,” he concluded lamely.

They nodded and heaved their shoulders and contained their impatience as best they might; sure, what could anyone do about it, anyway? A captain was a captain; the next one up was God. Not that Morgan looked like anyone’s idea of a god. Declan Kennedy, the oldest of the dock porters, who’d served in the Royal Navy long ago and had mounted guard on Elba, always said Morgan was the nearest thing to Napoleon he ever met. The others couldn’t see it, of course, because all they knew of Old Boney’s appearance was from prints; and, apart from the fact that both men were small in stature, the outward resemblance was slight. But when you drew near to the man you began to feel what old Declan meant – and to know something of the powerful and frightening magnetism of the old dictator of Europe.

For Captain Morgan, Captain Francis Brandon Morgan, seemed to carry about with him a kind of lethal electrical charge; the air immediately about him held an indefinably vibrant quality that kept you at bay – like the bars around the tiger cage in the zoo. Indeed, the comparison is apt, for there was something very tiger-like about the man. His head was sleek, close-cropped and clean-shaven, with curiously pointed ears that lay back against his skull. His eyes, which were deep and piercing, seemed never to rest; and even when his back was turned you dared not slacken your effort, for, like the tiger, he could turn and pounce in the blink of an eye.

The porters stared up at him until his merciless gaze fell upon them; then they looked away, shuffled their boots uneasily in the mud of that damp March day, and hankered after something, anything, at which they could seem busy. Happily for them, the group of females caught Morgan’s attention next. Steerage passengers, of course. The only sort that ever seemed to emigrate from this wretched country. He eyed them with that impersonal curiosity all old seadogs acquire when they stare at females ashore. Not that he considered steerage women to be fair game. Indeed, he’d keelhaul the man who laid an unwelcome finger on any one of them. But they weren’t like ladies; you could look them over easily, and without impertinence.

“I’d take a hose to that lot, Cap’n,” Tony Wheeler, the First Officer, commented. He had the reputation of being the one man aboard Pegasus who did not go in fear of Captain Morgan; in fact, he was just as terrified as everyone else, but he masked it with a respectful bonhomie that deceived them all, even Morgan. Indeed, it was Morgan who held Wheeler in slight awe – one of the few men he’d met in his long career as ship’s master who knew how to stand up to him, and not in any pugnacious way but simply by behaving as if there were nothing there that especially needed standing up to.

“You’ve Irish blood yourself, Mr Wheeler,” he growled, still running his eye over the females.

But whatever the officer may have replied, Morgan heard none of it. Suddenly his blood stood still, his heart dropped a beat, and his knuckles whitened on the rail.

It couldn’t be. It was. Yet it couldn’t be. His mind teetered in a daze between what he saw and what he knew. She was dead – surely she was dead? Anyway, she’d be … what? Twenty years older than that one. But he could not take his eyes off the girl down there on the quay. Jenny to a T, to the last curl of her rich red hair. Trick of the light. It must be.

At that moment the girl herself looked up at him. Or perhaps she was merely surveying her home for the next two weeks? Telepathy or chance? Dear God, what did it matter? Those eyes transfixed him. Pale green eyes, languid, intelligent, just like hers. It could not be chance, or life itself was all chance. If this were an accident, then so was his very existence.

“Cap’n?” Wheeler prompted at his elbow. The after breast was secure – had been secure for the past minute or more.

“Oh … yes,” he muttered. “Raise the gangway.”

Wheeler and the young cadet exchanged bemused glances.

The familiar routine of the ship crept between Morgan and … he would not call her Jenny, he would not even think of her as Jenny. The familiar routines crept between him and that apparition on the quay. “And bring to me any man who lets it foul the side.”

The threat brought an odd sort of ease to the quarterdeck; whatever excursion Cap’n Morgan had taken, he was now back. The world, like Pegasus, was on an even keel again. Then it was “Is the leadsman in the chains?” and “Aye, Cap’n!” and “Is his line freshly marked?” and again, “Aye, Cap’n!” – as if they didn’t sail in and out of Queenstown a dozen times a year.

He gave the new passengers no more than half an hour to come aboard, get stowed, and say their farewells – all those well-intended promises to write soon and come back one day, from people who would probably never set pen to paper nor glimpse the Atlantic again.

He needed every minute of it to prepare Pegasus for getting under way, what with a stiff “soldier’s” wind on her port beam, pressing her to the quay, and an adverse tide that would have her fouling a naval cutter astern within minutes. A less skilled captain, faced with such a tight departure, would warp her between the quay and two of the buoys in the tideway; but not Morgan. He knew he could take her out under shivering canvas to open water, and the crew would expect no less of him.

Pegasus was the very latest design for a fast merchantman, with five masts and split sails all the way to the top; and even her topsails could be reefed from the deck. Shaw & Eggar, owners of the line, had put Morgan in charge because no other captain would test a ship to the limits without hazarding a single life – much less the ship and her cargo. On this run that cargo consisted almost entirely of cheap, machine-carved furniture for the American West, so she was heavily ballasted with casks of ale, sent round the world to age and mellow.

“All set, Cap’n.” Wheeler waited for the command

Morgan ran an eye over the sails. Every yard was braced abox, sharp up, and every square foot that could safely be set was carried. She was now moored only by her head rope and after spring. He grunted approvingly. “Let go forr’ard.”

The order went forward. They had to wind in double-quick time to get enough slack to slip the rope off the bollard on the quay. The moment she felt herself free she tried to run aback, but the after-spring hawser held her and the tiderace got in against her starboard quarter and swung her closer to the wind. Soon she was facing the Queenstown roads. Her canvas shivered as the wind began to spill from a sharper angle. “Set jib and spanker,” Morgan ordered. “Let go aft.” To the quartermaster he added, “Keep her helm alee.”

From the calm of his voice and the quiet, measured response of the men, the casual onlooker might have assumed this was the easiest routine in the world for getting under way. One would have needed to look very closely to see that half the crew was either holding its collective breath or mouthing a prayer in silent unison. For one long agonizing moment an equal battle waged between wind, water, and the Captain’s will. The sails quivered, the tidal rip curled against her starboard timbers like softwood passing beneath a planing machine, and Morgan stared out, down the estuary, looking for a contradiction in the wind that might yet upset all his fine calculations.

“By the mark five!” sang the leadsman.

It was almost as if Pegasus had been waiting for some such news – that there was a good enough depth beneath her – for she now answered to the wind. She nosed forward so that her stern, no longer pinned to the quay, began to dip and slew. At once the bow moved off the wind. “Starboard your helm,” Morgan barked, but Abe Rogers, the quartermaster, was already there, bringing her alee again; having steered Pegasus through her trials in the Solent and then most of the way to Ireland, he now knew how she would respond even before she herself had quite made up her mind. She cleared the quay by inches. He checked her when she was still a point or two off her true course and she steadied perfectly. And then she really began to move.

“By the deep six!” sang the leadsman, now from the starboard bow.

“Brace round the head yards,” Morgan commanded. And again he was anticipated, with both watches ready to haul on the sheets the moment the command came. “Port your helm, Mister Quartermaster. What’s her bearing?”

“South-east by south, Cap’n.”

“Steady at that!”

For a moment she was taken aback but as the head yards swelled she leaped forward once more, eager to clear the point of Haulbowline Island and race for the ocean again, her one true element. Her masts strained, the timbers lifted beneath their feet … she was like a mighty horse, her namesake, galloping in strides a mile long. The thought was on Wheeler’s mind as he relaxed and said, “She was well named, Cap’n.”

“Who?” Morgan grunted, staring hard at the passengers; they were being allowed back on deck now that the sailing was plain.

“Pegasus.” Wheeler was embarrassed at needing to explain.

“To be sure.” The Captain’s tone of voice was absent minded.

“Leave to stand down the starboard watch, sir?” the bosun asked; that, too, should not have been necessary.

“To be sure,” Morgan repeated, never for one moment taking his eyes off the emerging stream of passengers.

THE LIFE HILDA MORGAN now enjoyed was exactly the life she had planned from the moment when, sometime in her fifteenth year, she had been capable of planning anything beyond her immediate future. Its elements included: an adoring husband who was away most of the year; three dutiful children, two sons and a daughter, a decent house in one of those delightful, leafy, urban villages that surround London; half a dozen loyal and trust-worthy servants; and a goodly circle of respectable and amiable friends. And now she had it all. Why, therefore, did she so often sit at her boudoir window these days, gazing out at the houses opposite, feeling herself possessed by the notion that the lives they enshrined was in some indefinable way richer than hers? What ingredient, if any, had she failed to incorporate into her wonderful scheme of things?

None that she could think of; on the contrary, time had fleshed out its elements in a most satisfactory manner.

The adoring husband was a sea captain – and not just any old sea captain, either. In fact, she had been told on more than one occasion, and by more than one who should know, that Francis Morgan (she did not like the bluff “Frank”) was probably the finest captain in the entire British mercantile fleet (which automatically made him the finest in the world, of course). Even twenty years ago, as a mere second officer, he was already talked about on “the Baltic” as a man to mark; otherwise, to be sure, her father would never have invited him to dinner. How flattered she had been when he began paying her court. Never mind her friends’ sneers – that any young officer who failed to court the daughter of the chairman of the Baltic Exchange would be a fool – she knew, from the tremor in his voice, the anguish in his eye, the utter awkwardness that replaced his normally brusque and jaunty manner when in her presence … she knew that a bewitchment more ancient than ambition bound Francis to her.

Not that she understood it, that strange magic which held the sexes in thrall to one another, often against their better judgement and self-interest. (Though happily such degrading mutual slavery was not the case with her and Francis.) She was not sure she even wanted to understand it. She regretted those necessary little rituals by which men refurbish their adoration and the race renews itself. Ever since Daphne Troughton, as she then was, had whispered the Awful Truth to her, the day they flew their kites on Highbury Fields, she had been terrified of marrying a man who was not of the very finest type – by which she meant one who would trouble her as infrequently as possible; her family’s connections with shipping had naturally made the choice of a seafaring man doubly desirable, given her feelings on the matter.

Francis had been very good about it. And she had rewarded him with three fine children – or youngsters they were by now. In fact, Neil, at twenty, was really a young man; and as for Lawrence, why it seemed only yesterday he had started shaving – and here he was, eighteen next month already. How swiftly childhood fled, even though some particular days of it had dragged like centuries!

They had even arrived in the order she had planned: two boys and a girl – Neil and Lawrence, the apples of their father’s eye, and Kathleen, her mama’s own little darling … For some reason her contemplation of her perfect little family (such a sensible number for an intelligent couple to have, such an example to the poor) failed to bring its usual glow of satisfaction. Clouds were beginning to intrude upon that hitherto sunstruck scene.

Neil should not have been quite so reluctant to take up his cadetship on the Orestes. That had wounded Francis, though he hadn’t said so openly. Orestes was the flagship of the Union Line and Neil’s father and grandfather had put their own credit in the balance to get him the position; in the circumstances he might have shown just a little more gratitude. (Also, to be fair, the Union Line could have shown just a little more understanding. True, Neil’s mistakes had been costly, but a beginner can’t be expected to get everything right from the word go, can he?)

When it came to filial gratitude, Lawrence had behaved little better. All his life he’d known he was intended for the Baltic; one day he’d be chairman there, too, like his grandfather – just as Neil would one day inherit his father’s reputation as the finest of masters in the Mercantile Marine. It was all very well for Daphne to wax philosophical and say airily, “’twas ever thus … ever since the Ancient Greeks, anyway.” (Oedipus, was it? Daphne had spent far too much of her youth reading the most unsuitable literature – and still did, come to that.) One more episode like last Saturday, when Lawrence and his unsavoury chum Billy Attwater had spent the afternoon in the dinghy they’d built, racing the Hansa down to Tilbury (the very ship whose manifest Lawrence ought to have been tallying!) … one more drama like that and Lawrence would be out on his ear. What was so difficult about being at your desk at the appointed hour on the appointed days and carrying bids to agents and owners and bringing back their replies and keeping proper records of everything? Yet to hear the lad talk about it you’d think they were asking him to leap over St Paul’s every day and twice on Sundays.

Thank God for daughters! Kathleen at least was the one nugget of unalloyed gold among her children. She had more faculty than both her brothers put together, if truth were told – and why should it not be told in this day and age, Hilda wondered? There seemed to be nothing the girl could not pick up once she set her mind to it. In fact, the difficulty with Kathleen – the only difficulty – was in steering her away from unsuitable things for a girl to pick up, like navigation when Neil had all those difficulties in understanding it, or obscure systems of weights and measures when Lawrence had come home complaining about “tons-tallow and tons-cubic and tons-my-eye-and-Mrs-O’Grady.” You only needed to watch her looking up things like that in Parnall’s Handy Household Reference and you could actually see her eyes darting here and there about the page, sorting it out at a rate of knots, like a card player’s eyes when arranging a new-dealt hand. She always beat her brothers at cards, too, because she had memorized all the mathematical chances of getting this or that winning combination – until Lawrence had twigged, of course. Now he usually scooped the kitty.

And yet, for all her cleverness, Kathleen remained so modest and biddable, so unspoiled, such a sensible girl, as everybody said of her. Not even Daphne, who always thought the jovial worst of everyone, could fault Kathleen. She had to content herself with vague warnings like, “one day that girl will confound us all. Wait till she turns sixteen!”

Only three months to go now!

But Daphne was wrong. Kathleen wouldn’t change. Yes, thank God for Kathleen. And thank God, too, that the remainder of her girlhood vision was intact: the fine home, the loyal servants, the good friends.

Highbury had been a natural choice for the Morgans, quite apart from the fact that Hilda herself had grown up there. For some reason, without anyone on the Baltic convening a committee and deciding it should be so, this particular village on the fringe of London had attracted large numbers of people “in shipping.” Not Old Highbury, where Daphne and Brian Dowty lived – up around Highbury Fields. That area had enjoyed its heyday a century earlier and was now past it, a little raffish, in fact. Not absolutely raffish, of course, or not even Daphne would live there, but relatively so, when contrasted with the extremely respectable people who lived in Highbury New Park. It was a wonderful sight on a warm Sunday in summer to see them all parading to and from St Augustine’s to hear that fine preacher, the Rev. Prebendary Gordon Calthrop preach his impressive sermons. Up and down they went, with their tall toppers ironed and polished, their black tail coats brushed and brushed again, their lovat-grey trousers still warm from the press, set off by the blinding white of their ties and waistcoats, and their yellow or mauve gloves spotless, their black boots vying to outshine the silver knobs of their canes, and the flowers in their buttonholes fresh snipped from the conservatory on their way out … it was a brave and beautiful sight. One wag had called it, “the Baltic at prayer.”

Highbury was far enough from the West End for its decadence and “Fashion” to hold no influence; and it was near enough to the City for a gentleman to walk it in half an hour, as many of the younger ones did, gaining in both health and purse thereby. Hilda’s father, of course, kept to the old tradition, riding his mare the half mile to Canonbury Station, followed at a respectful distance by his groom, who would then lead the horse home again. People could still set their watches by “old Victor Watson” each morning. But it was still sufficiently apart from the great wen of London, City or Westminster, to support a life of its own. Anyone who was anyone belonged to one or other of the two big societies – the Philharmonic and the Dramatic; Neil had sung in the former before going away to sea, and Lawrence was one of the great back-stage stalwarts of the latter. The Highbury Athenæum was jam-packed when either group put on a performance, and people came from as far afield as Hampstead and Walthamstow. Charles Brightman was chairman of the “Phil” and his brother Fred took the lead in the Dramatic; Brightman Bros was one of the leading shipping lines – so it just showed there was no better place than Highbury in all the world for a family whose interests lay in mercantile affairs.

Hilda, at her boudoir window, looked up and down Highbury New Park with quiet satisfaction. For all that it was a small, self-contained community – perhaps even a little tight and inward-looking (she would allow Daphne that much of a sneer) – it was also undeniably cosmopolitan, even more so than the West End, which liked to boast of being the ultimate in that line. Why, at that very minute, Mr Camille Abbati and Mr Franz Hinzer drove by in an open gig – brave men, considering the rawness of the day. They were the two leading chartering agents in the Azoff, Black Sea, and Danube trades. She gave them a dignified nod but, though they seemed to be looking at the house, they were talking and gesticulating in that endearingly quaint, foreign way of theirs and did not notice her.

She glanced at her clock; gone eleven. Rather late for them, surely? And Abbati’s house was up in Aberdeen Park, so why was he driving down this way? She must mention it to Daphne at choir practice tonight; Daphne loved to spin grand and impossible conspiracies out of such chance sightings.

Thoughts of the choir, and its offshoot the Phil, brought her to the last item in her tour d’horizon of achieved ambitions: good friends. Most people were lucky if they could number them on the fingers of one hand – really good friends. But Hilda would need all her fingers and all her toes for the task, and still want more for the tally. First there was the choir and the Phil, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively, where her clear and reliable soprano earned her the occasional solo part; there she had at least half a dozen close friends. Then, on Wednesdays, came the Dramatic, where her green eyes, fair hair, and aesthetically dreamy expression brought her parts a good ten years younger than her true age; and there, too, she had several close friends of both sexes. Other days brought her into yet other circles. On Mondays it was the Highbury Missionary Society, which supported two missions, one in Darkest Africa and the other in even darker Whitechapel, just down the road. On Friday afternoons it was Clothing for the Poor, after which she always needed a good bath, and then – the one sheer indulgence of the week – the whist drive in the Meeting House at the bottom end of Highbury Crescent. It was mostly ladies who played there, with a sprinkling of a few retired gentlemen; the husbands were either away at sea, like Francis, or “on the Baltic,” and Friday evenings were busy ones for anybody in the City, being the traditional evenings for banquets and testimonials.

It was amazing, really, how few of the friends in one circle overlapped with those in another. Only Daphne. She was in everything except Clothing for the Poor; her pet charity was Distressed Gentlewomen, where she claimed to be picking up tips for her own old age. Otherwise there were fewer than half a dozen duplications among all Hilda’s various circles of friends – and yet all lived within less than one square mile of each other! She often wondered what would happen if she gave a grand garden party one summer and invited all of them to mingle. Of course it was impossible; there were ladies, or females, in all her circles with whom she got on splendidly but with whom it would be unthinkable to mix socially. Hilda prided herself on her ability to get on with people, especially those with whom it was inconceivable she should mix; she wished there were some way of drawing more attention to the fact, so that the members of all her various circles would understand how extremely progressive and tolerant she was. Most of them, she felt sure, assumed it was some especial quality in themselves, rather than in her, that forced her to accept them.

She rose from her chair in the bay window and was just about to cross the room to the door when a movement along the street caught her eye – a young girl walking along hand in hand with an older woman. A second or two later they resolved into Kathleen and Miss Kernow, her teacher at the Highbury Grove Academy for Young Ladies. With a quick, guilty glance up and down the street, she raised her binoculars to her eyes; normally she did not use them until the evening twilight rendered her invisible to other binocular users among her neighbours, of whom there were many.

At least Kathleen did not seem ill, though her face had an unusual pallor and she walked with a strange, almost mincing step quite unlike her usual, confident stride. They halted. Miss Kernow said something to her. Kathleen shook her head and gave a brave little smile. The teacher linked arms with her and they resumed their walk at an even gentler pace. But now they were no longer teacher and pupil; they were woman and woman.

A dread premonition seized Hilda in that instant; the unalloyed gold, she felt, was about to show the first sign of tarnish.

MORGAN STIRRED IN his bunk, harried by a dream in which he was left single-handed in charge of a vessel very like Pegasus except that it kept growing new masts behind his back. At length he awoke, filled with a sense of unease. The masts. There was something about the masts. When he first went to sea there had been little difference between the construction of a merchantman and a man of war, at least as far as their solidity was concerned. The masts on both would stand firm even in a collision. But now, with each new merchantman they built they shaved her masts, split her sails, and cut her crew – all to make her lighter, leaner, and better able to compete with steam. The five slender, graceful masts of Pegasus worried Morgan out of his dreams.

He lay in his bunk and listened as they creaked in their stepping, not the deep bass creak of the mighty oak trunks of yore but the shrill contralto of …

The word contralto made him think suddenly of Daphne Dowty, a name that added naught to his comfort. Just because she was Hilda’s childhood friend and lived so near to them in Highbury, it did not make a suitable companion of her. Fortunately, dear Hilda had a mind of her own but even so, a dripping tap could wear down stone in time. Daphne was to blame for the unruliness of both Neil and Lawrence; he couldn’t prove it in a court of law, but her disparaging little remarks about Duty and Authority all through their childhood cannot have failed to leave its mark on their impressionable young minds. Thank heavens for Kathleen. She had more sense than …

How had he wandered from masts to Kathleen? He shook his head as a man may jiggle a faltering timepiece. Masts. Stick to the masts.

Faculties within him that persisted through his slumbers told him Pegasus had not tacked for an hour or more. Her slight but steady list to port said she was running before a half-gale, fine on her starboard quarter. Not much for the watch to do but show as much canvas as she’d bear and, keeping all yards braced round, hold the tension in her sheets within limits. “Farming,” as they called it. Must be close to the upper limit now, he thought. Every time she checked at the foot of an adverse swell, he could hear her masts groan at the strain. Four bells rang. But which watch? He reached for his chronometer, intending to carry it to the moonbeam at the porthole, when he heard McLennan, the First Mate, cry, “Haul up the mains’l weather clew!”

Six o’clock, then. Dawn soon enough – and the wind obviously getting up. He should do the same. Little point in trying to snatch another half-hour.

He rose, shaved in ice-cold water, and dressed, wincing as the imperfectly removed stubble on his adam’s apple grated against the stiffly starched collar. The glass stood at thirty-two inches – nothing ominous for the time of year, except that yesterday it had stood at thirty-three.

“Morning Number Two,” he grunted as he went on deck.

“Morning Cap’n. All’s well.” Feehan, the Second Officer, moved to the starboard rail. Like many new ships of that time, the Pegasus was commanded not from the quarterdeck (except in harbour) but from a bridge, amidships.

Morgan noted with approval that all topsails and t’gallants were already taken in; he put his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon. The sky, though cloudless above, was ominous on the port bow; there a huge black hole in the sky was just starting to swallow the setting moon.

It looked as if they might be heading just north of a big one – which the strengthening wind confirmed. The only other vessel in sight was a steamship, a huge merchantman of about five thousand tons, hull down on the starboard quarter. A heartening vision, with a sky like that coming up.

He lowered his binoculars and went down the companionway to the foredeck; as he made his way forr’ard he checked the occasional wedge in the cleats on the hatch combings. None was loose, of course; if it had been, the cook would already be frying someone’s liver for breakfast. Morgan used the heads and then went up to the “policeman” on the fo’c’sle deck.

“Davidson, isn’t it?” he said, knowing very well that it was. “How long have we had her for company?” He nodded toward the merchantman astern, now visible only by her smoke.

“We picked her up just after one bell on this watch, Cap’n. Then she was a few points to starboard.” He gestured almost dead ahead.