stood guard as a representative from each mess collected bread, uncooked potatoes and fish from an orderly in the shack. The food was then taken to cauldrons to be boiled by those prisoners who’d been nominated for kitchen duty. Each mess then received its allocation. Fouchet was the representative for Hawkwood’s mess.
Lasseur stared down at the contents of his mess tin. “Even Frenchmen can’t make anything of this swill.” He nudged a lump of potato with his wooden spoon. “I shall die of starvation.”
“I doubt you’ll die alone,” Hawkwood said.
“It could be worse,” Fouchet said morosely. “It could be a Wednesday.”
“What happens on Wednesdays?” Lasseur asked, hesitantly and instantly suspicious.
“Tell him, Millet.” Fouchet nudged the man seated next to him, a sad-eyed, sunken-chested seaman whose liver-spotted forearms were adorned with tattooed sea serpents.
The seaman scooped up a portion of cod and eyed the morsel with suspicion. “We get salted herring.” Millet shovelled the piece of fish into his mouth and chewed noisily. He didn’t have many teeth left, Hawkwood saw. The few that remained were little more than grey stumps. Hawkwood suspected he was looking at a man suffering from advancing scurvy. Hardly surprising, given the diet the men were describing.
Lasseur regarded the man with horror.
“We usually sell them back to the contractor.” The speaker was seated next to Millet at the end of the table. He was a cadaverous individual with deep-set brown eyes, a hooked nose, and a lot of pale flesh showing through the holes in his prison clothes. “He gives us two sous. The following week, he returns the herring to us so that we can sell them back to him again. Most of us use the money to buy extra rations like cheese or butter. It helps take the taste of the bread away.”
Lasseur picked up a piece of dry crust. “Call this bread? This stuff would make good round shot. If we’d had this at Trafalgar, things would have been different.”
“What do you think the British were using?” Fouchet said. He lifted his piece of bread and rapped it on the table top. It sounded like someone striking a block of wood with a hammer. He winked at the boy, who up to that moment had been trying, without success, to carve a potato with the edge of his spoon. “Give it here,” Fouchet said, and solved the problem by mashing the offending vegetable under his own utensil. He handed the bowl back and the boy smiled nervously and resumed eating. He was the only one at the table not to have passed comment on the food.
“Do they ever give us meat?” Hawkwood asked.
“Every day except Wednesdays and Fridays,” Millet said, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “Don’t ask what sort of meat it is, though. The contractors keep telling us it’s beef, but who knows? Could be anything from pork to porcupine.”
Fouchet shook his head. “It’s not porcupine. Had that once; it was quite tasty.”
Lasseur chuckled. “How long have you been here, my friend?”
Fouchet wrinkled his brow. “What year is it?”
Lasseur’s jaw fell open.
“I’m joking,” Fouchet said. He stroked his beard and added, “Three years here. Before this I was on the Suffolk off Portsmouth.” He jabbed a finger at the tall, hook-nosed prisoner. “Charbonneau’s been held the longest. How long has it been, Philippe?”
Charbonneau pursed his lips. “Seven years come September.”
Seven years, Hawkwood thought. The table fell quiet as the men considered the length of Charbonneau’s internment and all that it implied.
“Anyone ever get away?” Hawkwood asked nonchalantly. He exchanged a glance with Lasseur as he said it.
“Escape?” Fouchet appeared to ponder the question, as if no one had asked it before. Finally, he shrugged. “A few. Most don’t get very far. They’re brought back and punished.”
“Punished how?” Hawkwood pressed.
“They get put in the hole,” Millet said, removing a fish bone from between his teeth and flicking it over his shoulder.
Hawkwood scraped his lump of cod to the side of his mess tin. “Hole?”
“The black hole.” Millet’s tone implied that he could only have meant the one hole and Hawkwood should have known that.
Fouchet laid down his spoon. “It’s a special punishment cell; makes the gun deck look like the gardens at Versailles.”
Across the table, Lasseur considered the description. He stared hard at Fouchet and said, “What about the ones who got away, how did they do it?”
Fouchet shrugged. “You’d have to find them and ask them.”
“You don’t know?” Lasseur said.
“Sometimes it pays not to ask too many questions.”
“You’ve never considered it?”
The teacher shook his head. “It’s a young man’s game. I don’t have the energy. Besides, the war won’t last for ever.”
“The Lord loves an optimist,” Charbonneau muttered, scratching the inside of his groin energetically.
Lasseur pushed his tin to one side. “I have to ask, Sébastien: how, in the name of the blessed Virgin, did someone like you end up in a place like this?”
Fouchet smiled, almost sadly. “Ah, if you only knew how many times I’ve asked myself that very same question.”
“You going to eat that?” Millet sniffed, indicating the remains of Lasseur’s fish.
Lasseur gave him a look as if to say, What do you think? He then watched, fascinated, as the seaman reached over and, with grubby fingers, helped himself from the tin.
“I committed an indiscretion,” Fouchet said. “I was a professor of mathematics at the university in Toulouse and I had a liaison with the wife of one of my colleagues. He did not take kindly to the title of cuckold and insisted on calling me out. Unfortunately for him, I proved the better shot. His friends took it rather personally. They had influence, I did not. I lost my position, along with what little that remained of my reputation. When I applied for alternative teaching posts, I found doors were shut in my face. I sought solace in the grape; a panacea not exactly conducive to the furtherance of one’s career. That would have been the end of it, had it not been for a miracle.”
“What happened?”
A rueful smile split Fouchet’s creased face. “I was conscripted.”
The grins began to circulate around the table until Millet, who started to laugh, forgot he was still trying to digest Lasseur’s discarded cod. He was turning red when Charbonneau slapped a palm between his shoulder blades, bringing him back to the vertical and the rest of the table to their senses and reality.
Hawkwood guessed Fouchet’s situation wasn’t unique. The latter’s reference to the hulk’s self-founded academy and the standard of workmanship he’d observed looking over prisoners’ shoulders as he’d traversed the gun deck was proof of that. It was one of the notable differences between the British and French forces. Whereas Britain swelled the ranks with volunteers – which in many cases meant felons and homeless men looking for a roof and a meal – Bonaparte’s troops contained a large portion of conscripted men from all walks of life. In all likelihood, there were probably as many skilled craftsmen and teachers among the mass of prisoners on board Rapacious as there were in any of the small towns lining the shores of the surrounding estuary.
“I see you favour your right leg,” Lasseur said. “You were wounded?”
Fouchet smiled. “Musket ball; just below my knee.” He tapped the joint. “It’s the devil in cold weather; doesn’t work too well in the damp either.”