Chapter One

The Mast House, Deptford — Monday, 14 January 1782

The porter at the Deptford gate had known him since he was in skirts, and called him Mr Ward, and he did it every time Ward came down from the Office, with great care, his hand to his hat and standing back with the whole width of the gateway to spare, so that the men coming in at the morning call turned their heads to watch it done. Ward had tried, the first winter, to stop him. Tom’ll do, Mr Larkin. Tom always did. But Larkin had looked at him with real kindness and said he was sure he couldn’t, sir, not now, and Ward had understood that there was no way out of it from where he stood.

“Mr Ward.”

“Mr Larkin.”

“On the Board’s business?”

“On the Board’s business.”

“Then it’ll be the mast house,” said Larkin, “for there’s nobody else in this yard the Board’s writing to this week.” He said it to Ward, and he also said it past Ward’s shoulder to the men going in, who had all heard, as they were meant to.

A press gang was working the street outside the gate. Ward had passed it coming down Butt Lane, a lieutenant in a boat cloak and a midshipman with a lantern and eight or nine men with cudgels, waiting at the corner for any man who came to the morning call without his protection in his pocket. The yard’s people carried them, the Admiralty’s printed paper that kept a shipwright out of a ship, and showed them going by without looking; but a young sawyer called Tilley had left his in his other breeches, and Ward saw them take him. He did not fight much, but his mother did, and she came out of a doorway in her shift and hung on the lieutenant’s arm and was knocked down in the mud, and the boy was in the boat before she was up.

“Tilley’s,” said Larkin, watching it over Ward’s shoulder. “Second time this month. He’ll be in a seventy-four by Saturday, and his mother on the parish.” He turned back to his gate. “You’ll not need a protection, Mr Ward. Not in that coat.”

It was not yet light, and a low brown fog had come up off the river in the night, smelling of tar and coal smoke and the mud at the bottom of the tide, so that the lanterns at the storehouse doors hung in it without lighting anything. In the smiths’ shop somebody was already at work, and the anvil came through the fog at its own pace, as it had come through every winter morning of his life. Ward went down past the great storehouse and the officers’ houses and the end of the double dock where a frigate stood in her ribs, and he knew every step of it in the dark, and would have given a good deal not to.

He had the letter in his coat. He had copied it himself on Saturday in the Surveyor’s office at Crutched Friars, from the Surveyor’s draft, in his best hand, and could have said it over word for word. It informed the officers of His Majesty’s yard at Deptford that the captain of one of His Majesty’s ships of seventy-four guns had represented to the Board that her main mast, wrought at their yard in October last, had been sprung at about eleven feet above the partners in a moderate gale off the Start on the nineteenth of December. It directed them to examine the master mastmaker and to report whether the said mast had been wrought according to the establishment; and, if not, by whose neglect.

The last four words were not the Surveyor’s, and Ward had watched Mr Holloway put them in, in the margin of the draft, with a small neat caret, standing at the corner of Ward’s desk with his coat still on.

“You’re a Deptford man, Ward,” Mr Holloway had said, when the copy was sanded and sealed. “They’ll talk to you. Take it down on Monday, wait for the answer, bring it back to me. Don’t argue with anybody.”

“No, sir.”

“I know you won’t.” Mr Holloway had smiled at him, the smile of a patron who expects nothing for his kindness but that it be remembered. “That’s why I’m sending you.”

The mast house was the length of a ship, open at the river end, and warmer inside than out only because the wind could not get at you, and the fog came in at the open end and lay along the floor. Above it, on blocks the height of a man’s waist, the main mast for a seventy-four lay the whole length of the shed. It was a hundred and eight feet of fir, built up round its spindle out of seven pieces, bolted and coaked, fished and cheeked, bound every few feet with iron hoops driven on hot and cooled with water till they bit, thirty-six inches through at the partners. An inch a yard: Ward had learned that rule before he learned the Creed.

Mr Gedge stood at the heel of it with the letter open in his hand. He was sixty-one, and had been master mastmaker at Deptford for eleven years and quarterman before that, and had had Ward’s father in his gang for nineteen; he was short and square and bald, with a fringe of white hair that he kept cut close against the chips. He read the letter as he read everything, at arm’s length, his spectacles on the end of his nose and his lips moving on the long words, while behind him eight or nine of his men had stopped work and were doing nothing with great concentration.

He came to the end, went back to the beginning and read it again, and then lowered it and looked at Ward over the spectacles.

“Whose hand’s this?”

“Mine.”

“I know it’s yours. I’d know your hand in the dark. I mean the words.” He put a thick finger on the end of the last line. “By whose neglect. The Board don’t say neglect. Thirty years I’ve had letters from the Board, about everything God ever let go wrong in a dockyard, and the Board says inattention. Somebody in your office says neglect.”

Ward kept quiet, and it was the first of Mr Holloway’s instructions, and the easiest.

“Well.” Gedge folded the letter small and put it in his waistcoat. “Eleven feet above the partners. Clean through the spindle and both side-trees on the weather side, by what the captain writes in a letter I’m not allowed to see. The fishes holding the top of her up like splints on a broke leg. Her people aloft all night frapping it with hawsers so she’d get into Plymouth with her masts still in her. In a moderate gale. Off the Start. In December.” He took the spectacles off. “If a moderate gale off the Start can spring a main mast I made, Tom, there’s not a ship in the Navy ought to go to sea.”

“Mr Gedge—”

“The Master’s been down already.” Gedge jerked his head towards the officers’ houses, which were invisible in the fog. “Half past six, nightcap under his hat. He says it was the weather. He says I’m to say it was the weather, he’ll say it was the weather, the Board’ll say it was the weather, and we’ll all go home.” He looked up the long pale length of the mast on the blocks. “This one’s for her sister. Same rate, same establishment, same parcel of sticks. She’s waiting on it at Sheerness. It goes down Thursday.”

One of the men behind him, a big fair man of about Ward’s age with a two-foot rule stuck in his apron string, said, “It goes down Thursday if it’s let alone.”

“I know when it goes down, Kit.”

“I’m only saying, Mr Gedge.”

“I know what you’re saying. Everybody in this yard knows what everybody’s saying. That’s Deptford.” Gedge put the spectacles away and laid his palm on the iron of the heel hoop, as he might have laid it on the neck of an old horse, and then he said, quietly, “Strike the hoops off her. The top three over the partners. Draw the bolts of the larboard side-fish and get it off.”

Nobody moved. “Mr Gedge,” said Kit, “that’s two days’ work to put back. Three. New hoops, them three won’t go on again—”

“Then it’s new hoops.”

“And the Master—”

“The Master can come down and stop me in his nightcap.” Gedge turned round, but he did not raise his voice; in all the years Ward had known him he had never needed to. “The Board’s sent its young man down to see whether I made a mast right. I’m going to show him. Strike them off.”

It took until the dinner bell, because the hoops had been put on to stay. The men set drifts against the lower edges and went at them with sledges, two at a time and turn about, and the iron rang down the length of the shed and out over the pond, a long hard note with a shiver in it that set Ward’s teeth on edge. Men came in from the sawpits to stand at the open end and watch. The first hoop moved half an inch in twenty minutes, and then went all at once with a crack like a musket.

Ward stood out of the way in his good coat and his Office shoes and a hat that had cost him nineteen shillings, and he had never in his life felt so useless in a place he knew so well. Twice his hands went to his sides of their own accord, for a tool that was not there, and the second time Kit Amner saw it and grinned. He said nothing, and that was worse.

When the third hoop was off and the bolts drawn, they got crows under the edge of the fish and levered it away, and it came off slowly, with a long sucking sound of fir parting from fir, and they lowered it to the floor. Underneath, where nobody had been meant to look again until the mast came out of the ship in twenty years’ time, lay the face of the spindle with the edge of the side-tree beside it, raw and pale and smelling of resin.

The men crowded in, and nobody spoke. A grey-headed mastmaker called Pocock, who had been in the yard longer than Gedge, put his thumb on the face of the spindle and drew it slowly down the grain, and said a word Ward had not heard since he left the yard, and never in front of anybody from the Board.

It was not hard to see, and Ward could see it from where he stood. The rings were wide, a quarter of an inch and more, where they should have been as close as the lines in a ledger. The grain did not run straight down the stick but wandered, and in one place ran clean out at the face in a long slant, so that a split started there would run out at the side instead of along the length. Under where the fish had been, where it could not be seen and should have been clear as glass, there was a cluster of knots as big as a man’s fist: three of them together, and black at the heart.

“That’s never crown,” said somebody.

“It come in as crown,” said Kit.

“It come in as crown and it went out as crown on paper,” said Pocock. “It’s Norway, or near enough. It’s worse than Norway. I’ve cut better out of a Kentish hedge.”

“Where’s it from?”

“Riga,” said Gedge. “Same as ever. Same ships, same marks. Come up from the Stowage in September with the wraker’s crown on the butt, the contractor’s mark beside it, the Board’s broad arrow on it the minute it was through the gate.” He was looking at the spindle and not at any of them. “There was no pond for it. There’s no time for ponds in a war. It went out of the ship and into the mast house green, and I made it up green, because the Board wanted masts. I knew it wasn’t good while I was making it. I put the worst of it under the fishes where it’d be bound, because that’s what you do with bad wood when you’re told to make a mast.” He looked up at Ward. “You want to write that down?”

Ward did not answer. He had seen an adze on the floor by the blocks, where Pocock had dropped it with its edge wrapped in sacking, and he went and picked it up.

He had not held one for four years, and it was heavier than he remembered, and it was also exactly the weight he remembered; when he unwrapped the edge and set his feet, his hands knew what to do without asking him. The shed had gone quiet, and he heard Kit say something under his breath, and somebody laugh, then stop.

He took a shaving off the face of the spindle, long and thin and the length of his forearm, curling off the steel, and let the adze down. Then he took the shaving between the fingers and thumbs of both hands and twisted it, as his father had shown him in this shed when he was nine years old, on a stick from Riga that had lain six years in the pond.

It gave a little, and he felt it go stiff against his fingers, and then it snapped across like a biscuit, the two halves curling away from each other in his hands.

He took another, deeper, from the heart of the spindle, and twisted that. It broke.

“Go on, then,” said Gedge. “Say it.”

“It breaks.”

“And what does Riga do?”

Ward looked at the two pieces in his hands. “Riga twists,” he said.

“Your father taught you that.” Gedge had not moved from the heel of the mast. “In this shed. You’d be nine.”

“You remember it?”

“I was stood where you’re stood. He took a shaving off a pond stick and made you a ring of it. Put it on your finger, sent you home to show your mother. Told you not to take it off.”

“It cracked by the Wednesday,” said Kit. “You cried.”

“I didn’t cry.”

“You cried behind the timber stacks. I was there.” Kit said it without looking up from the fish on the floor. “Your mother put the bits in the tea caddy.”

“They’re there still,” said Ward.

“I’ll tell you what he said to you, and all.” Gedge folded his arms. “He said, one day you’ll be master mastmaker, Tom, and some fool of a contractor will send you Norway and call it Riga. You take a shaving and you twist it in front of him. Then you watch his face.” He looked at the broken pieces in Ward’s hands. “Only you never got to be master mastmaker. You went for a clerk.”

“I was sent for a clerk.”

“You were. By Mr Holloway, at your father’s burying, in a black coat that cost more than your father got in a quarter.” Pocock spat, carefully, away from the mast. “Stood at the back of St Paul’s like the Board come to count the mourners.”

“He came,” said Ward. “Nobody else from the Office ever did.”

“No. He came.” Gedge took his spectacles out again and looked at them, and put them back. “And you want to know how he come to know your hand, Tom? I showed it him. The tally book. Five years you’d kept it for me, because my eyes were going and you could reckon. He was down here on the Surveyor’s business and I put it in front of him and I said, there’s a boy who shouldn’t be at the bottom of a sawpit.” His mouth moved, not quite a smile. “So you’ve me to thank for the hat, and all.”

Nobody laughed, and Ward stood with the two halves of the shaving in his hands and found he had nothing to say to that, and Gedge did not seem to need him to.

“Get the pond crab manned,” Gedge said to Kit. “Third row, far end. Before the dinner bell.”

At noon Gedge took him out to the pond. The fog had lifted a little and hung over the river in a grey roof, and under it the mast pond lay brown and still, with a skin of ice along the edges where the sun had not reached. Under the water, just under, lay the sticks, long dark shapes side by side in rows like men asleep under a blanket, chained by the butts to the piles so they would not rise and dry; the water drew the sap out of them and left the strength, and that was what a pond was for.

“You walked them once,” said Gedge. “Slip to the far piles.”

“For a dare.”

“Barefoot. The whole Amner tribe on the bank, hollering. Your father heard it in the mast house and never said a word. Went round and waited for you at the far end.” Gedge looked at the water. “Then behind the saw shed. I heard that too.”

“He said a stick turns under you,” said Ward. “You go in between two of them, they close over you. The chains keep them there.”

“Nobody sees you go,” said Gedge. “That’s right. You’d be in there till the Board wanted a mast.” He turned away from the water. “Here.”

They had a stick up on the slip already, for Kit and two others had manned the crab before the dinner bell and hauled it out of the third row, and it lay on the stones running with water, black, slimed and shining, and the chain still on its butt. It was as big as any Ward had seen, twenty-seven inches or near it: a spindle stick if ever there was one.

“That’s the last,” said Gedge. “Or near it. There’s two more like it at the bottom, under the others. I’ve been keeping them.”

“For what?”

“For a mast I wanted to be proud of.” Gedge wiped the slime off the butt with his palm. “Look.”

There were marks cut in the end grain, as there always were: the wraker’s mark from Riga, the crown, cut deep and sharp; the contractor’s mark, a pair of letters in a square; and the Board’s broad arrow, which went on everything that came through the gate from a mast to a nail. To one side, smaller and older, burnt in rather than cut, with the char of it still dark under Gedge’s thumb, was a leaf, a small leaf, broad at the base and pointed at the tip, very like a heart, with a short stalk.

“Your father called them hearts,” said Gedge. “Everybody did. You’ll remember.”

He did, now that he saw it, though he had not thought of it in years: the old hands on the slip, when a stick came up out of the pond, saying there’s a heart, that’s for the spindle. A heart, always, for the spindle, if Gedge had one.

“Where are they from?”

“Riga.”

“Riga’s a port. Where before Riga?”

Gedge shrugged. “Up some river in the east country. Some lord’s land, a mate off a Riga ship told me once, in the Two Brewers. They come down on rafts with the leaf already on them. I never needed to know more. I knew what they were when they came up out of the pond.”

“And they’ve stopped.”

“The autumn before last was the last parcel with the leaf in it. I’ve been eking them out since. In September the ships came in from Riga without a heart in the whole fleet. I went down to the Stowage myself and looked at every butt.” He took his hand away from the leaf. “That’s what’s in that mast. That’s what was in her sister’s, off the Start.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

Gedge did not answer at once. “I told the Master,” he said. “In September. The Master told me the Board takes what Riga sends. The contractor’s delivered according to the contract, crown Riga, so many sticks of such a size, measured at the gate by the Board’s own measurer and found correct. On paper, the Master says, it’s the same wood.” He wiped his palm down his apron. “I’m sixty-one, Tom. I’ve got a wife, a place, thirty men in that shed who’ll lose their bread if this yard gets a name. So I made the masts. I hoped the first to go would go in a hurricane in the West Indies, where nobody asks. It went off the Start. Under a captain with a mouth on him.” He looked towards the mast house. “So I struck the hoops.”

“I don’t write anything,” said Ward. “The Master writes. I carry it.”

“Then carry it. And carry this. You know how.” He held out an adze.

Ward took a shaving off the clean wood under the slime, long and thin, and twisted it, and it went round on itself like a rope. He kept twisting, and it held, and he bent the rope round into a circle and tucked the end through as his father had done, and it held. He stood on the slip in his nineteen-shilling hat with a ring of wet Riga fir in his hand, and found that his throat had closed.

The answer came at four, as the light was going, by the Master Shipwright’s clerk, a thin quick man called Fewtrell whom Ward had been at the charity school with. It came sealed, and Fewtrell put it into his hand in the passage of the officers’ house and did not let go of it at once.

“You can save Mr Holloway the trouble of the seal,” he said. “It says the mast was wrought in every respect according to the establishment, of timber supplied according to the contract, received and passed by the Board’s officers, and was sprung by the violence of the weather. It’s very well put. I put it.” He let go. “I’m to tell you from the Master that he’s sorry Mr Gedge had the trouble of striking the hoops of a mast that’s wanted at Sheerness on Thursday. If the Board’s young man has any observations of his own to make, the Master’s sure the Board will be glad to have them. In writing. Over the young man’s own name.”

“Thank you, Fewtrell.”

“He means it, Tom. Over your own name.” Fewtrell looked at him. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“No,” said Ward.

“No. I didn’t think you did.” Fewtrell went back into the house and shut the door.

At the gate the men were going out, for the bell had gone, and they came past him in the half-dark in a long stream, coats buttoned to the chin. Nearly every one had a bundle of chips under his arm, the offcuts and ends that a shipwright might carry home for his fire by an allowance so old nobody remembered who had made it: under one arm, no more. Larkin stood at the gate and looked at every bundle, and let them all through.

Kit Amner was among the last, with a good bundle, fir and oak together, and he stopped beside Ward under the lantern and shifted it to his other arm.

“Well,” he said. “You’ve had a day of it.”

“So have you.”

“I’ll have another tomorrow. Putting that mast back.” Kit looked at him sideways. “Pocock says you’ll write it was the weather.”

“I don’t write anything. The Master writes.”

“That’s what I told Pocock. I said, Tom don’t write it, Tom carries it. That’s what they got him the coat for.” There was not much malice in it, and he said it as he might have said the tide was making. “If the Board wants a neck it’ll be old Gedge’s, because his is nearest. Same as Joe Mead’s legs were nearest when the sheers went in March. The yard gave his wife a guinea and the chips. He’ll be out on the Broadway with his tools in a bag. You’ll have carried the rope up to Crutched Friars in your good hat.”

“Kit—”

“I know. You don’t make the rope.” Kit looked at the bundle under his arm, and then he held it out. “Here. For your mother. She’ll want it, this weather.”

Ward looked at it, and at the gate Larkin had turned his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “Not out of the gate. Not in this coat.”

“No,” said Kit. “You can’t, can you.” He tucked the bundle back under his arm. “I’ll take it round myself. I’m going that way.” He went off through the gate, and Larkin let him through without a glance at Ward; it was the first time in four years.

He came home the back way, past the Victualling yard, where they were killing for the fleet and the long sheds were lit with lanterns. Beasts bellowed in the pens behind the wall, and the stink of blood and dung came over it, and down the kennel of Butt Lane ran a slow dark stream that the children jumped for a dare. The house was two rooms over a cordwainer’s shop, and his mother had the fire going, with chips on it.

“Kit Amner brought them,” she said, before he had his coat off. “He said you couldn’t.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I know you couldn’t. I’m not a fool.” She took the coat from him, shook it and hung it on the peg behind the door where it would not take the smoke, and she did that every night, as she banked the fire. “He said Mr Gedge struck the hoops off a mast for you.”

“Not for me.”

“He said for you.” She came back to the fire. Sarah Ward was a small woman, grey before her time, with hands that were never still: they sewed slop shirts by the dozen for a man in the Broadway who sold them to the purser of every ship that fitted out at the yard; when they were not sewing they were mending. “He says there’s talk in the yard. He says you took up an adze in your good coat in front of thirty men.”

“I took off a shaving.”

“In your good coat.”

“Yes.”

She sat down across the fire from him, and he took the broken shaving and the ring out of his pocket and laid them on the table between them, side by side, as his father might have done. She looked at them and did not touch them.

“That’s what your father did,” she said at last. “With the good ones. Yours is in the caddy still.” She did not get up to show him. “Tom. What are you going to do?”

“Give Mr Holloway the Master’s letter in the morning. That’s all I’ve been told to do.”

“That’s not what I asked you.” He let that go by.

“Nobody from the Office ever came to a Deptford burying before or since,” said his mother. “Not for a mastmaker. He didn’t have to come. He came.” She was not crying. “I cried at that church door, Tom. Not for your father. For you, because you’d got out. Fifty pounds a year. Your father never saw fifty pounds together in his life. I’m not telling you what to do, Tom. I’m telling you what it cost.”

“I know what it cost.”

“Then tell me this. Who does it hurt, if you say nothing?”

He thought about it, because it was a fair question, fairly asked. Gedge with his palm on the heel hoop, and Kit with the bundle of chips. A hundred and eight feet of fir going down to Sheerness on Thursday in a lighter, while Fewtrell’s very well put letter went up to Crutched Friars beside it; both saying the same, both true on paper.

“Nobody,” he said. “Till it blows.”

He sat up after she had gone to bed, with the candle and what was left of the fire, and took out his pocketbook. He had bought it the week he got his stool, from a stationer in Leadenhall Street, for more than he could afford, because he had thought a clerk ought to have one: calf, with a brass clasp and ruled leaves and a pencil in a loop down the spine. He had written in it since as a clerk writes, the date and the place, what was done and by whom, and what it came to, and never anything else. It was not a diary. It was an account.

He opened it at a clean leaf and wrote, in the hand Mr Holloway had liked:

Monday 14th January. Deptford. The main mast for the second ship, wrought October last, opened at the three hoops over the partners by order of Mr Gedge, in my presence. Spindle and side-tree wide in the ring, the grain running out, knots under the larboard fish. Received in September as crown Riga. A shaving taken from it breaks.

An old stick from the pond, received autumn 1780, with a leaf burnt on the butt: a shaving twists.

Then he took the pencil out of its loop and, in the margin beside the last line, drew the leaf as nearly as he could, the size it had been on the butt: broad at the base and pointed at the tip, with its short stalk. At Crutched Friars they taught you to copy a mark to the line when you did not yet know whether it mattered, and it was the one lesson of theirs his father would have understood. He laid the ring between the leaves beside it and shut the clasp and pinched out the candle. It was a leaf. He did not know of what tree.