by Anne Groß
They were a grizzled lot—the leftovers that hadn’t been selected to sail on the man-of-wars. Adelaide had heard them all boast of killing frogs when they thought she wasn’t within earshot, but however much a man puffs himself up when discussing the theoretical, when faced with real situations with calculably unhappy odds, all bravado disappears. Adelaide didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to see what was in store for everyone. The pinched faces of worry that the men wore made it clear.
As luck would have it, just when bad weather would afford some protection, it began to clear. A patch of clouds had parted just enough to shine a sliver of moonlight upon the glistening deck under her feet. The idea that they would slip away undetected was now a pretty fantasy. No longer a mere dot on the horizon, the privateer’s full sails loomed like the extended wings of a hawk about to pick off prey. Soon, she would luff her sails and swing alongside the Sea Otter.
“They’ll sink us,” Adelaide muttered in dread. “We’re all going to die.”
“Their goal is not to sink us,” said Mrs. Briggs, “but to render us useless. You don’t get paid for a captured ship if it sinks.”
“Will they take prisoners?” Adelaide asked. The idea was only slightly more appealing than a watery death, but not by much.
“Prisoners are a risk. Prisoners can rise against captors. Besides, most ships carry only enough to feed their own men.”
“That’s not very reassuring.” Surely the privateers would take her prisoner? They wouldn’t slay a woman simply because it was more convenient to do so, would they? And if they took her prisoner, it wouldn’t be very genteel if they didn’t also feed her. “Let us remember privateers are not the same as pirates and take heart.”
“Indeed,” said Mrs. Briggs, in a half-hearted tone.
“This is suicide,” Adelaide muttered. “Obviously we do not have the advantage here. Surely Captain Briggs sees the futility of a pitched battle? We should surrender!”
“We cannot let the Otter fall into French hands.”
“Is this ship worth all the lives you risk?” Adelaide searched Mrs. Briggs’ profile seeking any sign of indecision, any hope that she might listen to reason. “Madame Briggs. . .Gertrude, please,” Adelaide placed her hand on Mrs. Briggs’ arm. “Have a word with your husband on our behalf and on behalf of the men who follow him. Turn him away from this folly. He must surrender.”
“Folly?” Mrs. Briggs cast a cool look at Adelaide. “The Sea Otter is my home. You would ask me to turn over my home without a fight? Howard and I live and breathe these ocean waters every day of our lives. It has been our choice to do so.” She handed a cartridge to a gun captain. “I have no children. This is my family.” Her gesture encompassed the entire crew. The gun captain blushed and turned back to his job, pretending to have not heard. “No. I will not give France the advantage of my ship. I’ll sink the Otter myself if I have to,” she said.
“Here they come, ma’am!” shouted a sailor. “Take cover!”
Adelaide whipped around. The privateers’ ship was slowly erasing the horizon like curtains being drawn across a stage, sliding along their larboard side. The sound of luffing sails was an ominous pause between scenes. She stared in alarm at an enormous painted carving of a woman which was affixed to the prow. From her open dress her bare breasts jutted in an offering to Poseidon. Her black hair, whipped up above her head, gave strength to the ship’s bowsprit. Her ruby lips were drawn away from her teeth in a permanently fixed grin. Emblazoned along the bow of the ship was her name: La Damquiris. She laughed in the face of danger and her jovial spirit was unquestionably more powerful than the bloated Otter on whose back Adelaide stood.
“Fire!” screamed Captain Briggs, and the order was passed along by his officers like a lit fuse. The Sea Otter’s cannons ripped in sequence from stern to bow, the rearmost guns hitting their marks while the foremost missed, as La Damquiris hadn’t yet come full up. It was a first strike calculated to take out the opponent’s guns, but had limited effect. She continued to slide along the Sea Otter’s larboard side, slowly, taking care to remain parallel.
“Run!” Mrs. Briggs screamed. “Take these forward.” She pushed more cartridges of gunpowder at Adelaide and shoved her towards the gun crews as the order to reload crashed down from the quarterdeck. She herself ran aft, passing the cartridges into waiting hands.
Adelaide choked as the wind blew the acrid smoke into her face. Her eyes stung and her ears rang. Nevertheless, she ran, pressing her burden into eager hands. She skirted a man who was being dragged away and the sight of him caused her to skitter sideways and gasp. As his mates hauled him down a hatch and into the protection of the ’tween decks, he looked at her with an expression of surprise. His round eyes were starkly white against his blackened and bloodied face, a casualty of his own cannon’s touch hole. For a woman who had spent her entire career peering into things that didn’t concern her, the man was a chilling reminder of the consequences of peeping into the wrong hole at the wrong time.
Suddenly the larboard rail exploded, projecting wooden shards over her head. Adelaide threw herself to the deck. Even with her eyes closed, everything was lit with white and red flares.
Opening her eyes, she blinked and lifted her head to view the carnage. The weather deck was swarming with men. One stumbled backwards and tripped over her prone body. Sprawled on his side, he frantically alternated between cradling his thigh and stretching himself lengthwise across the deck, as though trying to crawl away from his own leg, and the splinter that had speared through his thigh. Adelaide reached towards him, touched him, wanting to give him reassurance despite alarms that told her to run, and he latched on as if she was a line and he was drowning. He squeezed her wrist. He pulled himself towards her, hand over hand, along her arm.
Instantly she regretted her kindness. She shook her arm like he was a nasty thing to flick off and cringed as he sprayed spittle through his screams of pain.
Two men arrived, one man to peel his hands from her arm, the other to jerk out the splinter. Adelaide retched as they dragged the man away. And since retching caused her to turn her head, she was given an entirely new perspective on the ship. It had only taken a single pass of cannon fire from La Damquiris for morale to shatter. Men were loading muskets now, not cannons. It wasn’t about the crew any longer, it wasn’t about the Sea Otter, or “family” or even just following orders. It was about survival. One musket, one man, one life. . .
Or so it seemed, until one brave sailor put his own needs aside to mount a rescue of Adelaide. He grabbed her under her arms and grunted loudly as he tried to pull her away from the melee, only managing to slide her bottom four inches along the wet deck.
“Laissez-moi! Unhand me!” she cried.
“Heave!” he yelled to another he’d called over to join him. Adelaide slid another four inches.
“Damn your eyes!” Adelaide cried in English, hoping the curse would startle them into dropping her. It felt as though they would tear her arms from their sockets.
Suddenly, the two men flopped on top of her, flattening her against the wooden planks as the world was once again rocked by cannon fire. This time, the enemy had aimed high.
If discipline had been strained before, it was gone now as everyone on board scattered from the mainmast. It had been gouged on one side by a cannon ball, and thus imbalanced, was in a slow motion fall, its fibers stretching and popping like a thousand overbent twigs. The final loud snap was like thunder that shook the very decking and vibrated the hull. Torn rigging whipped men who were unfortunate to be in the way; the sails caught them up and swept them into the ocean. Some sailors, high up in the fighting top, managed to hold on to the mast until they were shaken off into the water. Others fell directly to the deck like dropped eggs, joining the dead already picked off by the French who crowded the rail on the enemy ship.
It was over. With the mast gone, the Sea Otter was now nothing but flotsam. The men from the Damquiris would soon board, using cannon smo
ke and the chaos to their advantage.
It was in this moment that Captain Briggs strode purposefully down the deck, his saber drawn, his eyes flashing. “To me!” he called. “Men, to me!” His chest heaved against the constraints of his linen shirt with the zeal of battle. His long hair, lifted by the wind, was lit from without by the flames of the battle.
No one with any sense moved, much less answered his call to arms.
“Where are my bloody cannons?” screamed Gertrude Briggs.
As one, the men swung their heads to view the captain’s wife striding fearlessly over the dead. “Keep firing those cannons!” she yelled. With a musket in each hand and two pistols bouncing against her hips, the sight of her ignited the hearts of the crew—an angel in white come to lead them to victory. The French could have their allegory of liberty, Marianne, with her wild hair, torn dress, and fleshy bosom. The men of the Sea Otter had Gertie Briggs. Gertie Briggs would get the job done. Gertie Briggs was courage incarnate. Gertie Briggs was a proper English lady, by God. The men rose up behind their leader.
Adelaide, swallowed hard. It wasn’t that she was against rallying cries and inspirational speeches. She wanted to believe Mrs. Briggs could lead a charge. But Adelaide had the power of prophecy, and clear eyes. She could see they would be boarded by an overwhelming number of French criminals with blood in their eyes and hate in their hearts. And being French herself, she knew the power of the contemptuous smile affixed to La Damquiris. The privateers’ figurehead was simply stronger.
Rising to her feet, but keeping low, Adelaide slunk towards the open hatch with the hope of hiding in a dark corner in the ship’s hold. Her ears rang with the combined sounds of the exploding guns and the defiantly screaming crew. These English were crazy, she thought.
She never made it. Two men pushed a crate from the hold out onto the deck and blocked her path. The wooden lid was pried off to reveal a large cache of muskets. The overflowing powder magazine suddenly made sense: the Sea Otter was running munitions. Men eagerly swarmed past Adelaide to arm themselves just as the first of the privateers latched their grappling hooks to the rail. The acrid smell of gun smoke tickled the back of Adelaide’s throat as the shooting resumed.
Unsure of where to go, she was frozen to the spot as questions rushed through her head. Who were they shipping guns to? What was England scheming? She snapped back when a musket ball flew past her ear. Moving faster than she’d ever moved in her life, she dove under a fallen sail, still flapping in the wind like a fish landed for dinner. A fallen yardarm served to form a tent pole. She hunkered behind it, sheltered from flying projectiles.
It was pitch black, and stifling under the sail. Her sweat tickled as it rolled down her sides, feeling like fingers in the dark. She smelled her own breath. Then she smelled the breath of someone else. Instinctively, she turned towards the warmth and saw a shadowed outline of a man. Adelaide’s scream came from her stomach. Her pelvis pushed it out through her throat and her tongue threw it across her lips.
“Bloody hell. Put a cork in it, miss.”
“Qui est là? Oo eez dere?”
Adelaide squinted into the darkness, but it was what she heard that gave it away—the rhythmic click, click, click of wooden knitting needles. “Mr. Nigel?”
“Oh aye, it’s Nigel all right.” He flipped up a corner of the sail to let in more light.
“But, you are not fighting?”
“Me? Out there? Oh no, not me. A man such as myself would be dead in five seconds flat. I’ll do my fighting from here. There’s all kinds of fighting, there is. We all do our part in our own way.” The sound of knitting didn’t let up as he spoke. Adelaide struggled to understand what he was saying. She heard, “fighting from here” and “all do our part” and slowly the meaning fell into place.
“I ’elp,” she said.
Nigel hesitated, then poked around in the large ball of twine he was knitting from until he found the other loose end, which he gave Adelaide, along with a squinty eye and a grunt of professional acknowledgement. After more rustling in the dark, he produced a second pair of needles.
She slid her haunches to a spot near enough to the old sailor so that she could share his ball but far enough away that she wouldn’t smell what was coming out of his mouth as he breathed into his ratty beard. She didn’t normally object to getting under covers with strange men, but she preferred it when they were a bit younger, and a good deal more propre. Adelaide folded back another corner of the canvas sail, partly to release Nigel’s trapped odor, and partly to let in more light to see what she was doing. It also afforded her a good view of the battle, and those she would attempt to protect. The pattern she chose to knit would have to be a convoluted lace, with tight stitches in order to keep them all safe. She began casting on, and felt the spell working on her at once. Now she could breathe more deeply. Now she could think more clearly. The hemp twine flew through her fingers and lace fell in a narrow strip into her lap.
Outside of the tent, the screams of battle continued. Perversely, the disadvantage of smaller numbers didn’t stop the men of the Sea Otter. If a sailor was still standing after facing off with a privateer, he turned, and quickly found another man to fight, and if he managed to survive again, he soon engaged another, and on and on until he was finally killed. It was systematic, unthinking, and so like the English, who will always have room for another ale if it’s set in front of them.
Captain Briggs himself was a striking figure, backlit by the moon as he fired shots into the melee. Each time he got off a round, he passed his musket behind him to his wife, who had a freshly loaded musket to take its place. She would then reload the emptied musket to have it ready for him when he was ready to trade again. Adelaide found their efficiency strangely romantic. She swallowed a pang of jealousy. The captain had never been within her reach. He had merely been toying with her to excite his wife. It had been a ploy for more demonstrative affection. That knowledge didn’t stop Adelaide from wishing she, too, had the kind of love that Gertrude and Howard Briggs had for each other. Even so, not for a million emerald scarabs would she ever dream of standing in the midst of a losing battle to load muskets for a man.
No, she wasn’t being fair to herself, she thought. She’d done her part. She’d run gunpowder while under fire, and she didn’t do it for any one man. She did it for an entire crew. That was more noble, wasn’t it? Adelaide wasn’t sure. There had been a certain amount of self-preservation involved in passing out gunpowder to outfit the cannons, but that knowledge seemed to diminish her bravery. She wondered if she shouldn’t still be running powder.
She looked away from the captain and his wife. Tears, unnoticed, dropped onto the small pile of lace that was growing in her lap. Click, click, click. The knitting needles set a rhythm underlying the screams of the dying, the clash of steel upon steel, the sickeningly wet thuds of musket stocks against skulls. It was a devil’s orchestra. These men weren’t noble. They weren’t brave. These were useless deaths of ignorant men who were fighting for a ship they had already lost.
Even a spider has the sense to give up and hide when her web is being destroyed by a broom. A dog will cower and lick your hand when all is lost. But these men were more unthinking than animals. Their continued resistance to inevitable loss was causing the destruction of everything.
Adelaide knew these thoughts weren’t helping her cast the protection spell she knitted, so she tried to close her ears while opening her heart.
It is an age-old contradiction—an open heart creates a vulnerability, but a closed heart is powerless. One may attempt a balance, but the heart isn’t a door that can be simply left ajar. There is no keyhole, no crack beneath the door. You either feel, or you don’t feel. You either hear the pain of others and react with strength or cowardice, or you close your heart and don’t react at all. It was a lesson Adelaide had to learn over and over again. She desperately wanted to block the battle from her entire consciousness, and had, in fact, successfully blocked herself
from the sight of it, but her hands wouldn’t allow her to close her heart. Each knot she created in the lace was a crewman, and as she twisted and lifted the stitches, the men twisted and lifted in her thoughts.
A scream, long and piercing, caused her to drop three stitches and tangle an especially tricky yarn over. Adelaide looked up from her work. In the dark, she could see Nigel genuflecting. Instinctively, Adelaide mumbled a prayer to the Holy Mother for a blessing—Isis, Mary, Gaia, all the faces and names of the same deity, all responsible for drawing the grief-stricken to their breast for comfort. The Sea Otter was gone. The scream from Gertie Briggs announced that her captain was gone.
Reluctantly, Adelaide peered outside again. A large circle of strange men stood on the forecastle, hats in hand, weapons down. With the exception of the moans for mercy from the dying men, all was quiet. The fighting had stopped. All over the ship, bodies were strewn about in careless poses, arms and legs at awkward angles.
A tall man in a stiff uniform doffed his tricorn hat as he approached the cluster of men. An opening was made to accommodate the man, giving Adelaide clear view of the scene at the center of the circle. A gasp of pity caught in her throat as Mrs. Briggs, crumpled and diminished, was revealed. She cradled the head of her husband; his blond curls pooled in her lap. Draped about her were the ruined folds of her gown, stained red as she pressed the cloth against her captain’s chest to staunch his draining blood. Her wails made the men shift, embarrassed and uncomfortable in their sympathy. Few could lift their heads to look at her, yet none of them could turn away.
“Madame,” said the man with the tricorne hat. “My deepest condolences. I salute the courage and strength of your husband. . .” he trailed off. Mrs. Briggs didn’t seem to notice. He waited for a moment, perhaps hoping she’d stop weeping, then turned to another at his side—a young lieutenant, based on his epaulette. “Take her below. Make sure she’s given every courtesy.”