The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) Read Online Free

clothing when a wooden club caught him firmly above the
right ear and dropped him neatly to the cobblestones, unconscious but not
severely hurt, a very tidy, professional job.

 

Book One: A Poor Man
at the Gate Series
    Chapter Two
     
    His head hurt; it throbbed; when he felt very gently
behind his ear it was tender.
    “Some bastard hit me!” The sound of his voice gave
him a headache; he closed his eyes again. It put the seal on a bad week, he
felt, the whole world was against him, was creeping up behind his back.
    Reluctantly, he decided he should make some effort
to find out what had happened, discover the worst, whatever it might be – if he
was in prison he might as well know at once, and start to prepare his mind for
a fairly rapid hanging.
    It wasn’t as bad as it might have been – he was
lying on a wooden floor, not stone, and there was a thin palliasse underneath
him and a rough woollen blanket drawn up to his chin. Some effort had been made
to look after him, but he wasn’t in the room he had taken in the Horseshoes Inn.
    He was wearing his new clothes, and the boots he had
bought the previous day; knowing it must be a waste of time, he checked his
pockets. No purse. Thirty guineas up the spout – six months and a dozen runs it
had taken to put that much together, saving every penny his dad had given him,
spending nothing, risking his neck, all for some thieving bugger to grab and
piss up against the wall! A hundred and he had been going to buy his own boat,
then he could have gone out with his dad seining rather than drifting, more
than doubling their catch, with a bit of luck. He swore, then shrugged, at
least he was alive and what he had made once he could do a second time, easier
for knowing a bit more about the way the world worked now; in any case, he
wouldn’t ever be going out with dad again and it didn’t seem likely he would be
doing much fishing for a while yet. He stood up and stumbled as the floor
pitched.
    It was a deck, he was at sea, shanghaied.
    Not the navy – if a press gang had taken him and
somehow got him on board a man of war then he would be waking up in a crowded
mess-deck, not on his own in a cabin or store-room like this. He sat down again
to think.
    He had to get out of England, that was given, and he
had to stay away for a year or two, until the hue and cry had died down; when
he came back it must not be to the fishing in Dorset, and it might be better
not to come back at all. He had no money now, could not buy a passage out, so
he had to sign on as a seaman, as a forecastle hand, which had always been on
the cards; he was on a ship already, one that had taken some pains to get him
on board and was hardly likely simply to let him go again. Wiser to make the
best of it – he’d got some of what he wanted. He just hoped it wasn’t the
whaler – a three year run to the Great South Sea by way of Cape Horn was not
the way out he would have chosen, though he would be a thorough-going deep sea
sailor by the end of it.
    The door cracked open – he had not bothered to try
the handle, it had to be locked and they weren’t about to forget him and leave
him to starve, nor would they leave him long in idleness.
    A cautious voice called in to him.
    “You awake?”
    “Yep.”
    “You want to come out, then?”
    “On me way.”
    He walked slowly out of the small cabin, hands
showing clear and empty – no knife or bottle or billy - glanced about him. He
was below decks, had been kept in a bos’n’s store by the looks of things, hard
up in the bows, a paint room, maybe; possibly purser’s lazaretto, but neither
should have been empty, leaving harbour. He could just see a figure in the half
light, pointing him to a ladder.
    He blinked in the sunlight, his head complaining at
the brightness; he wondered if this one was the bloke who had hit him, decided
to let it wait – he would find out in time and he wasn’t too concerned anyway,
what was a thump on the head after all that had