Black Powder War Page 0,58
quarters." Salyer stumbled away hiding his face, which beneath his hand was blotchy red.
To Dunne and Hackley, Laurence turned and said, "Fifty lashes each; and you may call yourselves damned lucky. Mr. Granby, we will assemble in the garden for punishment at the stroke of eleven; see to it the bell is rung."
He went to his kiosque, and when Salyer came gave him ten strokes; it was a paltry count, but the boy had foolishly cut the switch from springy green wood, far more painful and more like to cut the skin, and the boy would be humiliated if he was driven to weeping. "That will do; see you do not forget this," Laurence said, and sent him away, before the trembling gasps had broken into tears.
Then he drew out his best clothes; he still had no better coat than the Chinese garment, but he set Emily to polish his boots fresh, and Dyer to press his neckcloth, while he went out and shaved himself over the small hand-basin. He put on his dress-sword and his best hat, then went out again and found the rest of the crew assembling in their Sunday clothing, and makeshift frames of bare signal-flag shafts thrust deep into the ground. Temeraire hovered anxiously, shifting his weight from side to side, and plowing up the earth.
"I am sorry to ask it of you, Mr. Pratt, but it must be done," Laurence said to the armorer quietly, and Pratt with his big head hung low between his shoulders nodded once. "I will keep the count myself, do you not count aloud."
"Yes, sir," Pratt said.
The sun crept a little higher. All the crew were already assembled and waiting and had been ten minutes and more; but Laurence neither spoke nor moved until Granby cleared his throat and said, "Mr. Digby, ring the bell for eleven, if you please," with great formality; and the eleven strokes tolled away, if softly.
Stripped to the waist and in their oldest breeches, Dunne and Hackley were led up to the poles; they at least did not disgrace themselves, but silently put their shaking hands up to be tied. Pratt was standing unhappily, ten paces back, running the long strap of the whip through his hands, folding it upon itself every few inches. It looked like an old scrap of harness, hopefully softened by use and much of the thickness worn away; better at any rate than new leather.
"Very well," Laurence said; a terrible silence fell, broken only by the crack of the descending lash, the gasps and cries growing slowly fainter, the count going on and on with their bodies slackening in the frames, hanging heavy from their wrists and dripping thin trickles of blood. Temeraire keened unhappily and put his head under his wing.
"I make that fifty, Mr. Pratt," Laurence said; nearer to forty if even so far, but he doubted any of his men had been counting very closely, and he was sick to his heart of the business. He had rarely ordered floggings of more than a dozen strokes, even as a naval captain, and the practice was entirely less common among aviators. For all the gravity of the offense, Dunne and Hackley were still very young; and he blamed himself in no small part that they should have come to run so wild.
Still it had to be done; they had known better, much better, and been reined in scarcely days before; so flagrant a breach, left unchecked, would have wholly ruined them. Granby had not been so far off, in Macao, to worry about the effect of their long travels on the young officers; the long idleness of their sea-journey followed by their more recent excess of adventure was no substitute for the steady pressure of ordinary day-to-day discipline, in a covert; it was not enough for a soldier to be brave. Laurence was not sorry to see a strong impression from the punishment on the faces of the other officers, particularly the young men, that at least this small good might come of the unhappy incident.
Dunne and Hackley were cut down, and carried not unkindly back up to the larger kiosque, and laid in a screened-off corner upon a pair of cots which Keynes had prepared; they lay on their faces still gasping softly in half-consciousness, while he with a tight mouth sopped away the blood from their backs, and gave them each a quarter-glass of laudanum to drink.
"How do they do?" Laurence asked the dragon-surgeon, later