“On the contrary,” he said. But he didn’t say anything more.
She pulled a chair from the table across the floor to her spot beside the fireplace, determined this time to keep her mouth shut. He could sense this or something like it about her, and after they both settled with mugs of tea Buchan talked to her about his childhood in Scotland. He told her about his father who was a navy officer himself and had died of a simple cut to the hand when it turned black with infection and the subsequent fever brought him down. His mother had remarried within the year and he could see now it was a practical decision and he had forgiven her for what at the time he thought of as callousness or indiscretion. He had joined the navy as a cabin boy then, to punish her, and she was unable to refuse permission having so recently disappointed him by taking a new husband. She ’d wept for days before he left. He said he had yet to forgive himself for that selfishness.
“You were a child,” Cassie said.
“It was cruelty, nonetheless. I knew what I was about, and make no mistake, I wanted to cause her the same pain she’d caused me. Simple revenge. And it was something I quickly came to regret.”
He was employed as a servant for the Warrant Officer, a James Richardson, who was quartered in a canvas-sided cabin along the wall of the lower deck with his wife. The rest of the low-ceilinged room was occupied by two hundred men and boys who slept in hammocks strung above the cast-iron cannon. The only light entered through the gun ports, which were sealed in rough weather. The sailors rarely bathed. Their clothes were washed every other month in a bucket of sea water after being bleached in urine collected in a barrel. The stench of dry rot and bilge and human waste fogged the air.
Buchan and the other ship’s boys were quartered with the midshipmen in the cockpit of the orlop deck below the waterline. Many of these officers-in-training were not much above Buchan’s age, eleven and twelve years old, and they tormented and bullied one another and the other boys aboard ship. Because Buchan was Scots and among the youngest in service, he was a favourite object of their attention. They cut his hammock down while he slept, stole his clothes and his food, set upon him in groups of two and three and roughed him up. Buchan was beside himself with frustration and rage. He had bargained away his half rations of beer and grog in return for some peace, but to little effect.
It was Mrs. Richardson, who had been going to sea with her husband for years, who set him straight on the steps he needed to take. She procured a starter for him, a length of knotted rope used to rouse men from their bunks in the morning. Together they decided on a midshipman named Marryat, not the worst of his tormentors but a boy about his size who was rumoured to suck his thumb in his sleep. Buchan made his way to the orlop deck just before dinner when most of the midshipmen were at table. He walked directly to Marryat and pulled him backwards onto the floor, then proceeded to beat him with the starter. The other midshipmen gathered around them, shouting wildly, but they offered their companion no assistance. When it became clear Marryat was incapable of defending himself, they shifted their allegiance to Buchan and cheered him on. The rope raised welts on the boy’s face and forearms and Buchan pulled his shirt over his head to mark his back and chest, the knots drawing blood where they struck. Only when two of the older midshipmen decided Marryat was in danger of permanent injury did they pull him clear. Buchan was caned and then mastheaded for the attack, lashed to the cross-trees of the topmast for the better part of a day, but the worst of the persecution he suffered came to an end.
“How old were you, Lieutenant?” Cassie asked him.
“I was ten. And I doubt I would ever have gone back to sea if not for Mrs. Richardson,” Buchan said.
“I find it difficult to imagine that a mother with any feeling for her child would have allowed you to return to such disgraceful conditions.”
He smiled at the strength of the emotion in her voice. She seemed genuinely affronted. He said, “Of course my mother heard nothing of this.”
“I see,” Cassie said. “Of course.” After a moment she looked up from her lap. She asked if his mother ever forgave him for leaving the way he did.
Buchan shook his head. “We never spoke of it before she died,” he said. “I feel sometimes as if I’m father to the memory of my mother as I now hold it, a woman abandoned first by her husband and then by her son. The thought of her clings to me like an unhappy child.” He looked up at the ceiling. “When the dead have been wronged they never leave you quite, even if you might eventually wish it.”
Cassie turned her head away and then stared into her mug.