The Stuart Sapphire Read Free

screamed and dropped the oar.
    Tam saw it floating away and cursed him steadily.
    ‘Why did you let it go? What did you do that for?’
    ‘My hands – they’re sore. Look at my blisters.’
    Tam had no desire to see his wounds; he could have cheerfully added to them by strangling him, but instead he was considering a more urgent problem: how the prevailing offshore wind might help them reach land with only one oar.
    Suddenly, like some miracle of prayers answered, the horizon was no longer deserted as the dark shape of an approaching ship loomed into view.
    A three-masted frigate was heading rapidly in their direction.
    The boy stood up, regardless of the effect on the balance of the boat, and yelled:
    ‘Help! Help!’
    ‘Sit down, you idiot. They can’t hear you. And you’ll have us in the sea. Do as I say.’
    The boy sat down wearily, nursing his hands and sobbing quietly.
    ‘Stop that – when they get nearer, then you can start shouting and they’ll see us and hear us.’
    Tam was not, however, totally confident about that either and wished he had something, a lantern, any kind of light to show the ship bearing down on them where they were.
    It was certainly gaining on them, moving very rapidly, and a feeling of horror added to their danger. This was nolonger a frigate homeward bound but a crippled and dying vessel, masts dangling, sails ripped. What concerned him most was that although the tide and the prevailing wind were driving it towards the shore – and them – the crash of breaking timbers indicated that it was also sinking rapidly.

Chapter Two
    Thanks to the deft use of his telescope by the captain of a small merchant vessel on its way along the Channel, the fishermen of Brighton had been alerted to the plight of a Scottish frigate, the
Royal Stuart
, adrift and heading landwards.
    This promising drama had succeeded in summoning George, Prince of Wales, newly created Prince Regent in his mad father George III’s sad decline, from the arms of his latest conquest, Sarah, Marchioness of Creeve, presently sated and asleep in his bed.
    Attired in one of his more spectacular naval uniforms, chosen at random, he had joined other spectators in the fading light of a summer evening where a canopy had been hastily erected on the promenade to protect the royal viewers from the townsfolk’s vulgar gaze.
    This measure also offered protection from the thieves who inhabited Brighton’s ever-growing underworld which, like fleas on a dog, had now settled happily in the area surrounding the Marine Pavilion.
    A royal court meant royal pickings and twilight wastheir friend, with enough illumination to assist cutpurses in such an audience of eager spectators, yet enough dusk to make sure they slipped away unobserved. For all knew the price of capture, the gibbets chain-rattling their burdens on high ground above the town, a grisly testament to the cost of failure.
    As for the royal courtiers, the solemn sight of a sinking ship had already ensured a brisk trade of their own. Bets on how long it would take the ship to sink beneath the waves, and whether there would be any survivors and most of all how many might be expected to reach the shore alive. An entertainment that was considerably more exciting than watching fowls or animals tearing each other to pieces, or even the bloodier, brutal human boxing matches. True, the latter had a certain secret appeal to many of the court ladies as a more stimulating experience than the daily boredom of gown-fittings and Court gossip.
    Here was novelty indeed, a new kind of entertainment with many human lives in hazard, and an air of excitement prevailed as, for those addicts to gambling on anything and everything, there was already a clerk seated in his carriage busily taking promissory notes.
    Amongst the more fervent, the prince had challenged George ‘Beau’ Brummell: ‘100 guineas against the ship sinking within the next half hour.’
    The response: ‘Give you 200 guineas