Call to Arms: Book One: A Promise of Glory

By Frederick Nolan

Davy Strong was penniless, friendless and as raw and green as the vast frontier itself when he arrived in Boston in the winter of 1775. But within a few harrowing, tumultuous moths Davy Strong would be one of the first breed of men. A man caught between the old world and the new; between the loyalties of tradition and the loyalties of the heart.

This is his story—and the story of the women who loved him: the hot-blooded Isabella, who took what she wanted, but who couldn't control her young lover; her strong-willed daughter, Martha, who could forgive him anything; even loving her own mother; and the Indian girl who lay buried in the wilderness with all his boyhood dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Mar 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370456253

Frederick Nolan

Frederick Nolan, a.k.a. 'Frederick H. Christian', was born in Liverpool, England and was educated there and at Aberaeron in Wales. He decided early in life to become a writer, but it was some thirty years before he got around to achieving his ambition. His first book was The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall, and it established him as an authority on the history of the American frontier. Later he founded The English Westerners' Society. In addition to the much-loved Frank Angel westerns, Fred also wrote five entries in the popular Sudden series started by Oliver Strange. Among his numerous non-western novels is the best-selling The Oshawa Project (published as The Algonquin Project in the US) which was later filmed by MGM as Brass Target. A leading authority on the outlaws and gunfighters of the Old West, Fred has scripted and appeared in many television programs both in England and in the United States, and authored numerous articles in historical and other academic publications.

Book preview

A PROMISE OF GLORY is a monumental saga of men whose lives were ruled by honesty and passion — and whose dreams would change the history of the world.

Davy Strong was penniless, friendless and as raw and green as the vast frontier itself when he arrived in Boston in the winter of 1775. But within a few harrowing, tumultuous months Davy Strong would be one of the first of a new breed of men. A man caught between the old world and the new; between the loyalties of tradition and the loyalties of the heart. This is his story – and the story of the women who loved him: the hot-blooded Isabella, who took what she wanted, but who couldn’t control her young lover; her strong-willed daughter, Martha, who could forgive him anything, even loving her own mother; and the Indian girl who lay buried in the wilderness with all his boyhood dreams.

Book One of the Call to Arms series

To Laurence James,

Without whom …

Arma virumque cano

There is no sound to fire the heart

And make a bonny lad to start

Like the call to come, the call to fight,

The call to do what’s fine and right.

It brings the hunter from hill and plain

The sailor home from the storm-wracked main

It brings the ploughboys from the farms

’tis the clarion sound of a call to arms.

Anonymous ballad, c.1780

One

The gale had begun to ease.

After nearly a week of foul weather, the Charlotte Wheeler had struggled her way westwards from the narrow confines of the English Channel, heading into the long swells of the Atlantic. The wind still whipped white foam off the crests of the majestic waves, but it no longer howled with the same demonic violence through the rigging, tearing at the close-reefed sails. The huge seas no longer broke clean over the small ship’s bow, rushing with dreadful power along her narrow decks.

Davy Strong had found a place tucked away near the stern of the ship where he could stand and wallow in his own misery, soaked to the skin by the November gale, fighting against the bitter sickness and his own low spirits. Even the fact that he was permitted to come above decks, thanks to the better instincts of the ship’s master, was of little comfort in such savage weather. Davy well knew that Oliver Wellbeloved had instructed the captain to keep the boy in his cabin throughout the voyage, underlining his virtual state of imprisonment. The thought of the villainous squire who had brought about his exile brought a slow pulse of anger to Davy’s mind, but it was almost instantly washed away by the bitter realization that until he reached America he was powerless to do anything about it. Alone and friendless at the age of eighteen, torn from his home and forced to leave his beloved mother behind, bound in virtual slavery to the hateful Wellbeloveds, it was small wonder that the idea of doing away with himself loomed large in Davy’s mind.

He climbed up until he could stand on the ship’s rail, hanging precariously over the slithery bulwarks, keeping contact with the Charlotte Wheeler only by one hand clutching at the tarred ratlines, staring blankly at the pitching green water that dropped away and then rose again to within a foot of his face. It would be so easy to let go, he thought, and end all the problems. No one would know or care: he knew nobody among the ship’s small crew or its twenty-odd passengers. A few minutes’ struggle, for in that icy sea no man could live longer, and then dark oblivion. He had talked to sailors who had come close to death. Many of them never learned to swim, because they believed that to do so was merely to prolong the inevitable end. The sea rose up at him and lurched away, tugging, hypnotic. He began to play a dangerous game in which temptation could be accident if he allowed it to be, releasing his hold on the spray-slick lines as the ship rose on the wave crests, and then waiting until the last possible moment before reaching again for the tenuous handhold. Each time he left it longer and later, watching the water rising towards him and ready for the dizzy lurch at its peak. Shall I? he thought. Could I?

‘We’d not take it kindly, lad.’ The voice was so unexpected, the words so close to answering his unspoken thought that it came close to making David fall. He grabbed at the ropes with both hands, swinging around to see a small man grinning up at him, eyes squinted against the flying spume. Behind the small man stood another, a bearded giant, also smiling.

‘What?’

‘Said, we’d not take it kindly, me an’ Andy here. Bein’ as we’re filled to o’erflowin’ with the milk o’ human kindness, you see, we might feel it our bounden dooty to try’n save you, whether you was to care for it or not. An’ cold water is some harmful to the constitution, so I’m told.’

Both men laughed, as if at some private jest, and David frowned at them. He had seen them before, of course: it would have been impossible not to notice the bearded giant and his mischievous-eyed companion.

‘What we had more in mind for you, lad, was a warm fire an’ a bowl of hot gruel,’ the smaller of the two said. ‘Come on, lad. Lively, now.’

There was no emphasis on the words, but there was authority in the way he spoke, and before he knew that he was doing so, David jumped down on to the deck beside them, and allowed them to take his arm and lead him below. There, they forced some thick gruel into his straining stomach and warmed him by the galley fire. He learned that the wiry little man with the Scottish burr in his voice was Andrew Brennan, and his lumbering friend was a Londoner. Although his real name was Jedediah Bowman, the big man went by the curious nickname of ‘Half-Hanged’.

Bowman had once been a ‘gonoph’, or skilled thief, working the warrens around the Seven Dials area of London. In spite of his size, he could move more quietly than a hunting stoat, sneaking through the great houses of Westminster while their rich occupants slumbered. An unfortunate confrontation with a patrolling watchman whose skull proved unusually thin led Bowman before the justices and to a sentence of death by hanging: a Tyburn necktie, as they called it. But Jed had been blessed with good friends, and a good wife — a twelve-year-old whore called Betsy — and they bribed the executioner to arrange a short drop and a loose knot, so that the big man could be bled and revived by an amenable physician.

Reborn with a new nickname, Jed had decided to leave London for the wider spaces of the Colonies. When David asked him what had happened to Betsy, the big man shook his head with a mournful sigh.

‘Poor lass! That summer there were vapors rising from the Thames, and she was called to sit at the court of merry King Cholera. The bloody flux took her within a week. So I went to America alone. Ain’t been back since then, nigh twenty years. Don’t plan to tempt providence no second time.’

They had been in Scotland, they told Davy, where Brennan had taken care of what he called some family business. He seemed disinclined to talk about it. Davy was to learn that neither man talked much of his own affairs, and although they did not actually say so, it was plain they did not wish to. They did tell Davy that they had been hunting the forests of the far west of America for close to twenty years together, and it was easy to see that they were the closest of friends. Davy would discover that their minds were so much attuned to each other that they could almost exchange thoughts without speaking. The fire, the food, and their friendliness warmed David, and for the first time since he had left England, he no longer felt so alone.

The matter of Luke Hoggett came hard on the heels of that first meeting. The second mate of the Plymouth schooner was a stout man, with rubicund cheeks and twinkling blue eyes. At first glance he looked like a jolly uncle, but when you stood close you saw that the eyes had all the warmth of Arctic pack-ice, and the smile that hung around his chubby cheeks never got any further.

Twice he had bumped into Davy as he bustled about his business, each time with an oath of anger that puzzled the boy. He expected no courtesies from the crew: they were but scantily polite even to the other passengers, and Davy was quite sure they were aware of his status. Black-hearted Oliver Wellbeloved would have seen to it that they were instructed to give Davy Strong only the most minimal attention, but there was something more than that in Hoggett’s hostility. On each occasion, Davy had tried to turn the moment with a smile, but the overture had no effect on the scowling second mate.

One morning, Davy was sitting on a hatch, mending a tear in his breeches with needle and thread he had borrowed from the cook, and whistling quietly to himself. It was a tavern air that had been popular in Plymouth, about a young maid betrayed by a roving gypsy. Suddenly, he felt a great blow across the side of his head that knocked him sprawling into the scuppers, where the slopping water drenched him.

‘Hold that devil’s noise, ya lackbrain fool!’ snarled the second mate, balancing effortlessly on the balls on his feet against the movement of the schooner, hands tucked into his thick leather belt. He glared down angrily at the helpless boy.

‘There was no cause for that, sir!’ Davy protested, standing up. A small spark of anger glowed inside him, and he felt the scar on his chin throb, but he quenched the thought of retaliation. That the crew no more than tolerated his presence aboard he could bear. But to incur the enmity of the second mate and thus all his comrades would make Davy’s life hell for the rest of the long voyage. So he held his tongue.

‘No cause? You whistle like a poxing dullard in a hayfield while grown men are trying to get on with their work? You’re in my way, you beardless dolt, and damned if I don’t think I’ll knock you right out of it!’

The second mate always carried a length of thick rope at his belt, its end a tight knot dark with old blood. He stepped towards Davy, swinging the three-inch thick rope menacingly, and bringing it down on the rail with a vicious flat crack. There was a small smile on his face, like a man remembering something pleasant that happened a long time ago. One or two of the passengers heard the commotion and shuffled nearer to witness the drama, but their faces were just blurs to Davy Strong. He saw only Hoggett’s eyes, hands, feet. Waiting for the man to come at him, knowing that he could not dodge the first blow, he had decided that he would duck under it and try to shield himself with an arm. Then what? Run? He could not, would not run. Nor would he stand like a dog to be whipped. Unconsciously he clenched his fists, and Hoggett smiled a wicked smile.

‘Gonna give me a fight, are you, boy?’ he hissed. ‘Strike an officer, eh? Well, I was told you was a trouble-maker. Maybe I’ll just use me chiv here on you and save the captain any more of it!’

As he spoke he shifted the rope-end to his left hand and drew a broad-bladed knife, its haft bound with waxed twine. He fell into the hunched crouch of the experienced knife-fighter, knife point low, ready for the upward slash so difficult to parry away from the groin. Davy’s blood froze: he had been long enough aboard to have heard that Hoggett had a reputation as a quick man with a blade. He raised his arms to shoulder level.

‘I have no weapon,’ he said, torn by a mixture of emotions, high among which was simple fear. Young as he was, he had always believed that he must stand up for himself, and even facing a killer with a knife in his hand, he would not cower. He raised his fists, conscious of the pointlessness of it, aware of the knot of watchers pressing closer in around them. Why didn’t someone do something? He looked past Hoggett’s death-mask smile and saw a gull hanging motionless in the wind, its wings quite still, as though it were frozen against the scudding clouds. In that momentary glance away, something happened, a ripple of movement among the watchers. The next thing he knew, the second mate was floating a foot clear of the deck, his legs kicking. Then Davy saw a great fist the size of a smoked ham gripping Hoggett’s greasy pea-jacket, hoisting him in the air as if he weighed no more than a cat. It was a considerable feat of strength and Davy knew only one man aboard the Charlotte Wheeler capable of it.

‘Drop the knife, you whorin’ dog!’ said Half-Hanged Bowman quietly, shaking Hoggett as a lurcher would a hare. ‘Or I’ll snap you across my knee like a stick!’

‘What the — Godamercy, put me down!’ yelped the sailor. ‘Put … me —’

‘The knife!’ Bowman said, an edge in his voice now. ‘And that knout in your other hand. That’s it. Andy, would you—?’

‘His knife, you mean?’ the little man said. ‘Surely.’ He picked up Hoggett’s knife as neatly as a dip lifting a gold hunter in a Piccadilly crowd, tossing it over the side and dusting his hands together as if he had just touched something less than clean. Davy watched speechlessly as Bowman lowered the furious Hoggett back to the deck, setting him gently down and patting him almost kindly on the shoulder.

‘Now, go quiet, my man,’ he told the sailor, smiling forgivingly. ‘And bother this lad again at your peril.’

Hoggett bent down to pick up the rope-end, only to step back in alarm as Brennan set a foot on it.

‘No,’ Brennan said mildly.

The seaman scowled and looked for a moment as if he might demur, but Brennan’s almost beatific smile unnerved him. He scowled and slunk away, glancing back once at Davy, Bowman, and the stocky Scot. He spat over the side and muttered a curse which was snatched away by the wind. Andrew Brennan clapped Davy on the shoulder and smiled like a schoolboy coming over an orchard fence.

‘When someone comes at you with a knife, and you ain’t got one yourself, Davy, there’s only one thing you can do,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Try an’ distract him,’ Half-Hanged Bowman replied, without the shadow of a smile.

Two evenings later, Davy Strong had cause to remember their words. There had been a little rain earlier in the evening, just after the serving of the meal of pan-warm slops and crusty bread. The Charlotte Wheeler was still close enough to the land for the food to have retained a trace of its original freshness, and Davy had eaten well, knowing that as time went by there would be a marked deterioration. Since Bowman’s intervention in his affray with Hoggett, Davy had kept well clear of the malevolent second mate, although on several occasions he had turned quickly to see Hoggett watching him. Once he had observed Hoggett glaring at Bowman’s broad back, and wondered whether the big man was aware of it, and if he should warn him.

As he paced the quiet deck in the still night, with only a sliver of moon bouncing light off the glittering sea, Davy was feeling better than he had since the death of his father. It had been a bad year, a time of poverty and struggle, with his mother’s health rapidly deteriorating. Mary had never been a robust woman, and the death of her treasured John had been a bitter blow to her, one which seemed to drive her mind ever further away from day-to-day reality. It was a time during which the evil Oliver Wellbeloved and his foul-minded son had brought Davy and his mother bitter revenge in the guise of charity. He recalled the parting words that Magistrate Oliver Wellbeloved had spoken to him as he was being taken aboard the Charlotte Wheeler that chill November morning.

‘Do not make the mistake of ever coming back here to England, boy. For if you do I shall see to it that you rot in Plymouth jail for the rest of your days!’

‘One day I will find you,’ Davy said defiantly. ‘One day I’ll make you pay for your treachery!’

Oliver Wellbeloved had laughed out loud.

‘You? You are nothing, David Strong. You always were nothing and you always will be. Worthless! Nothing!’

The curl of the lip on that shining skull of a face flashed across Davy’s mind, rekindling his anger, his silent vow of revenge made as the little schooner has raised anchor and slid silently out of Plymouth harbor. Davy’s father had always said that Oliver Wellbeloved resembled a well-accoutered corpse, making mock of the elegant black clothes the man always wore. Aye, Davy thought; a well-accoutered corpse you’ll be, damn your black soul. Wait till I tell my story to my brother John in Boston. Then there’ll be an accounting. The thought made him relax with a wry grin, and he noticed that Brennan had joined Bowman in taking a constitutional around the decks to escape the stuffy air of their crowded quarters. Their cabin was scarcely larger than the cubicle which had been allotted to Davy; there was little enough room for passengers on a schooner as small as this.

Davy was about to step forward and join the two men when his eye caught a movement in the shadows just aft of the mainmast. He swallowed his call of greeting and watched with narrowed eyes. A chill touched his heart as he realized that the moving shadow was the figure of Luke Hoggett, who was sliding towards Brennan with sinuous caution. Hoggett moved lightly for a man so heavy set, and there was something infinitely sinister in his slow creeping approach, like a mime Davy had once seen in a Plymouth fair. Any sound Hoggett might have made was drowned by the noise of the sea bubbling in the bone of white foam beneath the bows, the creaking of the yards and stays. Brennan was staring out across the dancing ocean, both elbows on the rail, chin cupped in his hands, lost in private thoughts. The pale sliver of the moon struck light off something in Hoggett’s fist; the unmistakable dull glint of a knife blade.

The seaman was a bare five paces from the unsuspecting Brennan when Davy drew his sword from its scabbard in a whisper of sound and ran silently at the second mate, blade balanced in his right hand. Hoggett caught a breath of the sound of his approach and whirled around, jaw agape with surprise, eyes white in the faint moonlight. The movement threw Davy slightly off his aim and altered the angle of his sword stroke so that instead of striking Hoggett’s upper arm, the blade snagged among the heavy brass buttons of Hoggett’s thick topcoat. There was still enough power behind the blow to jar the knife from Hoggett’s hand, but not enough to slice through the heavy serge and disable him.

Instinctively, Davy stepped back, startled by the man’s hiss of rage. In a flash, Hoggett swept up the blade from the deck and came at him with a wide swiping slash that made Davy jump back, flinching.

‘I’m goin’ to slit your gullet to your arse, you little bastard!’ Hoggett hissed, edging nearer to Davy in that peculiar, crablike crouch he had adopted on the earlier occasion, his eyes ready for any movement of the sword. Davy knew that if Hoggett got in close, his advantage of reach would be gone, for Hoggett could use the short blade much faster and to much more vicious effect close in. Davy shifted his feet, looking for the moment and the place to lunge. His mind was quite empty, but this time he was not afraid. He knew that to delay any longer was to invite his own death, and yet something still stayed his hand. This was not the same as practicing against an opponent with a waistcoat padded with straw and a buttoned blade. This was mortal combat on the slippery deck of a rolling ship, against an enemy whose eyes were flooded with murder.

‘Ain’t got the ballocks for it, eh, sonny?’ sneered Hoggett, spotting Davy’s hesitation and divining the reason for it. His breath rasped steaming in the cold night. Then he feinted as if to move right and came forward all at once with the knife horizontal, ducking low under where he expected Davy’s blade to be. But Davy had foreseen the ruse and slashed out hastily with the sword. The blade struck Hoggett just below the hairline, hacking the scowling brow open and jarring Hoggett backwards on his heels, arms going up for balance as the bright blood cascaded down his face. As he reeled back, Davy saw the small figure of Andy Brennan materialize behind the seaman, and there seemed to be a small collision as Hoggett went backwards against the small Scot’s wiry frame and then fell forward face down on to the deck of the ship like a sack of dirty laundry. His fingernails scrabbled feebly on the holystoned wood and then he was still.

Davy stared in disbelief, hardly aware that he still held his sword in his hand. Hoggett looked strangely small and deflated at his feet.

‘I thank you, lad,’ Brennan said, and Davy saw now that he had a thin-bladed flensing knife in his hand. Brennan stopped to wipe it clean on Hoggett’s jacket before sliding it into a sheath on a loop around his neck that he stowed down his collar in the small of his back. Then he grinned at the shaken boy.

‘He would have spitted me first, and then no doubt tried for Half-Hanged, ’ he said. ‘Likely we’d have both been eyeless in the deeps before the turning of the moon.’

‘I saw him … and then —’

‘You were smart not to call out, Davy. A shout would have been to no avail. He’d have jumped me while I was staring out to sea like a lovesick booby.’

‘I thought I’d —’

‘Killed him?’ Brennan said. ‘Well, not quite, lad. That’s one o’ the troubles with swords. They ain’t quite as definite as a knife.’

A great shadow appeared at his elbow, making Davy jump. He had not heard the slightest sound, yet there was Half-Hanged Bowman beside him, looking down without pity at the limp corpse.

‘Time for talkin’ later, friends,’ he whispered. ‘You, lad, keep an eye skinned.’

‘Aye,’ said Davy. He kept a nervous watch while the two men mopped up the thin pool of blood under Hoggett’s body: it looked black in the dimming moonlight.

‘All clear, lad?’ Brennan hissed.

‘Aye,’ Davy said. ‘But what’s afoot?’

For answer there was a faint ploshing sound, as of something bulky slipping over the side of the ship into the passing ocean. He did not need to ask more. If it had not been for Brennan, it would have been he whose body would now be bobbing in the wake of the Charlotte Wheeler instead of Hoggett’s. He owed these two men his life. He said as much to them later, as they shared a beaker of rum below decks. Davy sat hunched over, hoping that they would not notice how his hands and legs were trembling.

‘Don’t brood on it now, Davy lad, ’ Brennan said. ‘The man needed killing.’

‘I … suppose so,’ Davy said slowly. ‘And yet … I couldn’t do it. Just for a moment there … even knowing he was going to try to kill me. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t bring myself to kill.’

‘Killing’s like anything else,’ the little Scot said. ‘It’s a trade you have to learn.’

Two

The light rain stung his eyes as he stepped out on the deck of the schooner, feeling the damp wood cold on his bare feet. A grey mist made it difficult to see further than the shrouded bulwarks and the base of the mast which disappeared above his head.

David Strong hadn’t been sure at first what had woken him. Something had changed; something that brought him out into the coolness of the morning, picking his way between the slumbering figures of his fellow passengers.

As soon as he reached the deck, David realized that the long, rolling, pitching movements of the Charlotte Wheeler had altered. The schooner was still moving, but now it was a chopping, shuddering motion that made her yaw from side to side, her timbers creaking as if in fresh anguish.

And there was a new taste to the air; heavier and different. Davy made his way forward, peering out through the dawn fog on the larboard side. He could hear the sea chuckling beneath the figurehead and just make out the whiteness of the foam against the dark green waters.

He heard a sound on the deck close behind him. His hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, chill to his fingers. Turning, he saw the grinning face of Andrew Brennan, woolen cap set at a rakish angle and glistening with droplets.

‘You smell the land, Davy lad?’ Though Brennan had left his native Highlands of Scotland and gone to Virginia twenty years ago, in the summer of ’’’, Brennan still retained the soft burr of the purple hills.

‘Is that what it is?’

‘Aye, lad,’ Brennan said. ‘After fifty-one days, the rolling waves of the Atlantic are behind us. These are the seas close to shore.’

‘I felt it too.’

The little man nodded, wrinkling his nose. ‘I can smell my country, boy. I smell rivers and trees, far green places. Forests where a man may walk for twenty miles and never see the other side. That’s for me.’

‘But you’ll stay in Boston?’ asked Davy.

‘Long enough to see you settled with your brother. Long enough after that to get provisions for Half-Hanged and myself. Then we’ll be away.’

During the voyage David Strong had passed many hours in the company of Andy Brennan and Jedediah ‘Half-Hanged’ Bowman. They were a seemingly ill-matched couple. Yet the tales of the adventures they had shared in the wild woods of America had fired the blood of the eighteen year old. Fights against ferocious animals and heathen savages with exotic names: Iroquois, Algonquin, Mohawk and Shawnee.

‘That is Boston, out there?’ asked Davy, pointing through the impenetrable fog around the schooner. On their right they could hear the monotonous chant of a man casting a lead, throwing out the knotted line with a distant plop, and running it through his fingers, calling out the fathoms of water beneath the keel of the Charlotte Wheeler to Captain Howell on the bridge.

‘Close.’ Brennan said. He raised his voice. ‘Ben! How far to our docking?’

The sailor broke off from his task for a moment to reply to Brennan. ‘This poxing mist came with the sun,’ he growled. ‘An hour and it will be gone, but meanwhile we feel our way in with clear spars.’ He gave a hawking cough and spat across the bows. A fluttering wind rattled the shrouds, making Davy shudder and wish that he’d donned a warmer coat before leaving the heat of the foc’sle.

‘But how long?’

‘An hour before we can see. Then an hour more before we can tie up snug at the wharf. We beat in north and east -somewhere ’twixt George and Rainforth’s Isles.’

Brennan stood closer to Davy Strong, rubbing his hands together against the morning’s cold. ‘They call this the Nantaskett Road, boy. I guess that we lack but ten miles from Boston.’

Davy stood silent, his mind wandering back to England, thinking over the strange and cruel chain of events that had brought him halfway across the world on this pitching ship to find his brother.

It was ten years since John Strong had sailed to the new world to make his fortune: ten years since David had seen him. There would be so much to tell his brother, he thought, tales that would make his eyes flash with anger. Twenty-four years older than David, the fruit of an earlier marriage, John had always been a hero to the boy. He remembered him so clearly, hot-headed john, always ready for a fight. He talked of him often to his new friends, enthusing about his brother with all the fervor of hero-worship as they sat crammed together at the end of a swinging table, its edges raised to keep the battered tin plates and mugs from sliding off on to the deck as the schooner pitched on the long, endless rollers.

The fresh meat had long since run out and the cook had been reduced to serving this passengers bowls of lukewarm greasy stew made with salt beef and shriveled root vegetables.

David picked at the food, tapping a biscuit on the swaying table to jar out the burrowing weevils, shaking his head at Half-Hanged’s appetite.

‘How can you eat this stuff?’ he said. ‘It’s vile.’

Bowman looked up and grinned. ‘If you’d been in Newgate with no friends, as I have, and lapped stale water from the cracks in the stone, you’d learn as I did to eat what you can when you can, Davy. Even such poor vittles as these.’

‘I remember once a butcher sold some bad meat to my mother,’ David said. ‘My father was away in Bideford on business. This fellow not only sold her mutton green and near crawling, but kept pestering her to lie with him. Until my brother heard of it.’

‘Ah,’ Brennan said, with a glance at Bowman. ‘Your brother.’ Bowman met his glance but said nothing, picking at his teeth with the point of his knife to dislodge a stubborn thread of gristle.

‘John went to the town and beat the villain bloody with the flat of his sword. Then, while three of his friends held the butcher down, John fed him the most rotten pieces of meat, maggots and all.’

‘Must have been a big fellow,’ Brennan observed. ‘To need three to hold him down.’

‘John vowed he’d cut off the villain’s ears and make him eat them if he ever tried such tricks again.’

The ship pitched and suddenly seemed to drop twenty feet down. Everyone grabbed for their plates and mugs, and not a few ran hastily for the deck, covering their mouths with their hands as they went.

‘You must have been pretty young when your brother was doing all these things, lad,’ Brennan said.

‘That’s so,’ David said. ‘John always looked after us. Me, especially. He wasn’t afraid of anything.’

‘You think it brave, Davy, to teach some poxy butcher manners?’

‘Oh, that was just one instance,’ David protested, sensing that they were teasing him. ‘There were lots of times. Like with Seamus Gower.’

‘Seamus Gower?’

‘He was the son of a chandler in Plymouth, and no good into the bargain. John had a friend who was a farmer and he heard that Seamus was swiving her in the hayloft every Friday while his friend was away at the market.’

‘An old tale that, lad,’ Brennan said, draining the mug of small beer. ‘Many a cat plays a lively game while the tom is out a-hunting.’

‘Aye, perhaps,’ David said. ‘But John was not one to sit by and allow it. He and half a dozen of his friends hooded themselves in sheets and caught Gower on his own. He fought hard and near broke clear, nearly splitting John’s skull while he was at it. But John went after him and brought him down.’

‘Killed him, Davy?’

David shook his head in reply to Bowman’s question. ‘That’s not John’s way. He’s too noble to kill someone in cold blood. No, he beat Gower senseless with the hilt of his sword. Then he led the others in breaking the rogue’s knees, despite his own injury. That scoundrel never walked straight thereafter.’

Once again David saw Brennan look at Bowman, but no expression crossed the face of either. There was a moment’s silence in which they could hear the pattering of bare feet on the decks above their heads, and the creaking of the timbers as the schooner yawed to larboard.

‘Puts me in mind of you an’ that one-eyed Mohawk three winters back,’ Bowman said to Brennan finally.

‘One-eyed Mohawk?’ David said, wide-eyed. Much as he loved to talk about John, he loved even more to hear the stories these two told of their adventures in the backwoods. John would have made them a good companion, he thought. The same boldness, the same disregard for danger was in him.

‘I’ll tell you the story, shall I?’ Bowman said. ‘How this little cock’s comb here an’ me caught them Mohawk tigers by the tail?’

‘Go on,’ David said, wishing he knew more stories about John he could tell them.

‘’Tis a short tale, quickly told,’ Bowman smiled. ‘We’d been troubled by some Indians taking game from our snares. Andy caught three of ’em, Mohawks all, and shot to frighten them off. We wanted no killing, no feud with them.’

‘Aye, but they didn’t frighten,’ Brennan said, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. ‘Came right on after me, till we were rollin’ around in a great thicket like a feller with three whores in a bed. This way went my musket, and that way went us.’

‘And then one of them struck his leg a shrewd blow with a stone ax,’ Bowman said. ‘I was a full three miles off and still heard Andy’s howl.’

‘Bad?’ asked Davy. Brennan grinned.

‘Middlin’,’ he said.

‘Middlin’, is it?’ Bowman snorted. With a clear inch o’ jagged bone stickin’ white through the skin.’

‘You fought on with a broken leg?’ David said, not sure whether this might not be one more of Bowman’s tall tales. ‘How could you get away?’

‘I got this little knife I keep behind my neck, lad,’ Brennan said. ‘I slit the throat of the one who’d hit me. Damned me if his blood didn’t fill up my glims so I couldn’t hardly see the t’other. But I managed to bury my blade in the second one’s gut. He ran off yelpin’ like a dog, tearin’ the hilt right out of my fingers.’

‘Which left him an’ the one-eyed Mohawk tusslin’ on the edge of the stream,’ Bowman said.

‘You fought on?’ David said. ‘Wounded like that?’

Brennan shrugged. ‘You either gives up or you fights on.’

‘With neither musket nor knife,’ Bowman observed.

‘Hell,’ Brennan grinned. ‘I jest grabbed him by the gonads and twisted. He went up in the air like a salmon goin’ to the spawnin’ grounds, and when he come down, I got my arm around his neck and strangled the bastard.’

David waited, watching Bowman and Brennan for more detail, but they were silent, locked in their own memories.

‘And that was