The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle

by Diana Gabaldon

  Captain Hickman’s high nasal voice came piercingly from the deck. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the response was immediate; feet thumped to and fro on deck, and the ship shifted suddenly, turning as her sails were adjusted. The chime and grunt of shot being lifted and the rumble of gun carriages echoed through the ship. Apparently, the weather gauge was still ours.

  I could see a fierce excitement light Ian’s face and rejoiced to see it, but couldn’t help voicing a qualm or two.

  “You haven’t any hesitation about this?” I said to Jamie. “I mean—after all, he is a dog.”

  He gave me an eye and a moody shrug.

  “Aye, well. I’ve known battles fought for worse reasons. And since this time yesterday, I’ve committed piracy, mutiny, and murder. I may as well add treason and make a day of it.”

  “Besides, Auntie,” Ian said reprovingly, “he’s a good dog.”

  Weather gauge or no, it took an endless time of cautious maneuvering before the ships drew within what seemed a dangerous distance of each other. The sun was no more than a handsbreadth above the horizon by now, the sails were beginning to glow a baleful red, and my chastely pristine dawn looked like ending in a wallowing sea of blood.

  The Teal was cruising gently, no more than half her canvas set, less than half a mile away. Captain Hickman stood on the Asp’s deck, hands clenched on the rail as though it were Stebbings’s throat, wearing the look of a greyhound just before the rabbit is released.

  “Time you went below, ma’am,” Hickman said, not looking at me. “Matters will be hotting up directly here.” His hands flexed once in anticipation.

  I didn’t argue. The tension on deck was so thick I could smell it, testosterone spiced with brimstone and black powder. Men being the remarkable creatures that they are, everyone seemed cheerful.

  I paused to kiss Jamie—a gesture he returned with a gusto that left my lower lip throbbing slightly—resolutely ignoring the possibility that the next time I saw him, it might be in separate pieces. I’d faced that possibility a number of times before, and while it didn’t get less daunting with practice, I had got better at ignoring it.

  Or at least I thought I had. Sitting in the main hold in near-total darkness, smelling the low-tide reek of the bilges and listening to what I was sure were rats rustling in the chains, I had a harder time ignoring the sounds from above: the rumbling of gun carriages. The Asp had only four guns to a side, but they were twelve-pounders: heavy armament for a coastal schooner. The Teal, equipped as an oceangoing merchantman who might have to fight off all manner of menace, fought eight to a side, sixteen-pounders, with two carronades on the upper deck, plus two bow chasers and a stern gun.

  “She’d run from a man-o’-war,” Abram explained to me, he having asked me to describe the Teal’s armament. “And she wouldn’t be likely to try to seize or sink another vessel, so she wouldn’t ship tremendous hardware, even was she built for it, and I doubt she is. Now, I doubt as well that Captain Stebbings can man even a whole side to good effect, though, so we mustn’t be downhearted.” He spoke with great confidence, which I found amusing and also oddly reassuring. He seemed to realize this, for he leaned forward and patted my hand gently.

  “Now, you needn’t fret, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. Fraser said to me I must be sure to let no harm come to you, and I shall not—be sure of that.”

  “Thank you,” I said gravely. Not wanting either to laugh or to cry, I cleared my throat instead and asked, “Do you know what caused the trouble between Captain Hickman and Captain Stebbings?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he replied promptly. “Captain Stebbings has been a plague on the district for some years, stopping ships what he hasn’t any right to search, taking off legal goods what he says are contraband—and we take leave to doubt that any of it ever sees the inside of a Customs warehouse!” he added, obviously quoting something he’d heard more than once. “But it was what happened with the Annabelle, really.”

  The Annabelle was a large ketch, owned by Captain Hickman’s brother. The Pitt had stopped her and attempted to press men from her crew. Theo Hickman had protested, resistance had broken out, and Stebbings had ordered his men to fire into the Annabelle, killing three crewmen—Theo Hickman among them.

  There had been considerable public outcry over this, and an effort was made to bring Captain Stebbings to justice for his deeds. The captain had insisted that no local court had the right to try him for anything, though; if anyone wished to bring an action against him, it must be done in an English court. And the local justices had agreed with this.

  “Was this before war was declared last year?” I asked curiously. “For if after—”

  “Well before,” young Zenn admitted. “Still,” he added with righteous indignation, “they are cowardly dogs and ought be tarred and feathered, the lot of them, and Stebbings, too!”

  “No doubt,” I said. “Do you think—”

  But I had no opportunity to explore his opinions further, for at this point the ship gave a violent lurch, throwing us both onto the damp floorboards, and the sound of a violent and prolonged explosion shattered the air around us.

  I couldn’t at first tell which ship had fired—but an instant later, the Asp’s guns spoke overhead, and I knew the first broadside had been from the Teal.

  The Asp’s reply was ragged, the guns along her starboard side going off at more or less random intervals overhead, punctuated by the flat bangs of small-arms fire.

  I resisted Abram’s gallant attempts to throw his meager body protectively on top of mine and, rolling over, got up onto my hands and knees, listening intently. There was a lot of shouting, none of it comprehensible, though the shooting had stopped. We appeared not to be leaking water, so far as I could tell, so presumably we had not been struck below the waterline.

  “They can’t have given up, surely?” Abram said, scrambling to his feet. He sounded disappointed.

  “I doubt it.” I got to my own feet, bracing a hand against a large barrel. The main hold was quite as crowded as the forward one, though with bulkier items; there was barely room for Abram and me to worm our way between the netted bulk of crates and tiers of casks—some of which smelled strongly of beer. The ship was heeling to one side now. We must be coming about—probably to try again. The wheels of the gun carriages ground on the deck above; yes, they were reloading. Had anyone yet been hurt? I wondered. And what the devil was I going to do about it if they had?

  The sound of a single cannon-shot came from overhead.

  “The dog must be fleeing,” Abram whispered. “We’re chasing him down.”

  There was a long period of relative silence, during which I thought the ship was tacking but couldn’t really tell. Maybe Hickman was pursuing the Teal.

  Sudden yelling from overhead, with a sound of surprised alarm, and the ship heaved violently, flinging us to the floor once again. This time I landed on top. I delicately removed my knee from Abram’s stomach and helped him to sit up, gasping like a landed fish.

  “What—” he wheezed, but got no further. There was a hideous jolt that knocked us both flat again, followed at once by a grinding, rending noise of squealing timbers. It sounded as though the ship was coming apart around us, and I had no doubt that it was.

  Shrieking like banshees and the thunder of feet on deck.

  “We’re being boarded!” I could hear Abram swallow, and my hand went to the slit in my petticoat, touching my knife for courage. If—

  “No,” I whispered, straining my eyes up into darkness as though that would help me hear better. “No. We’re boarding them.” For the pounding feet above had vanished.

  The yelling hadn’t; even muffled by distance, I could hear the note of insanity in it, the clear joy of the berserker. I thought I could make out Jamie’s Highland screech, but that was likely imagination; they all sounded equally demented.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven … Our Father, who art in heaven …” Abram was whispering to himself in the dark, bu
t had stuck on the first line.

  I clenched my fists and closed my eyes in reflex, screwing up my face as though by sheer force of will I could help.

  Neither of us could.

  It was an age of muffled noises, occasional shots, thuds and bangs, grunting and shouting. And then silence.

  I could just see Abram’s head turn toward me, questioning. I squeezed his hand.

  And then a ship’s gun went off with a crash that echoed across the deck above, and a shock wave thrummed through the air of the hold, hard enough that my ears popped. Another followed, I felt rather than heard a thunk, and then the floor heaved and tilted, and the ship’s timbers reverberated with an odd, deep bwong. I shook my head hard, swallowing, trying to force air through my Eustachian tubes. They popped again, finally, and I heard feet on the side of the ship. More than one pair. Moving slowly.

  I leapt to my feet, grabbed Abram, and hauled him bodily up, propelling him toward the ladder. I could hear water. Not racing along the ship’s sides; a gushing noise, as of water gurgling into the hold.

  The hatchway had been closed overhead but not battened down, and I knocked it loose with a desperate bang of both hands, nearly losing my balance and plunging into darkness but luckily sustained by Abram Zenn, who planted a small but solid shoulder under my buttocks by way of support.

  “Thank you, Mr. Zenn,” I said, and, reaching behind me, pulled him up the ladder into the light.

  There was blood on the deck; that was the first thing I saw. Wounded men, too—but not Jamie. He was the second thing I saw, leaning heavily over the remains of a shattered rail with several other men. I hurried to see what they were looking at, and saw the Teal a few hundred yards away.

  Her sails were fluttering wildly, and her masts seemed oddly tilted. Then I realized that the ship herself was tilted, the bow raised half out of the water.

  “Rot me,” said Abram, in tones of amazement. “She’s run onto rocks.”

  “So have we, son, but not so bad,” said Hickman, glancing aside at the cabin boy’s voice. “Is there water in the hold, Abram?”

  “There is,” I replied before Abram, lost in contemplation of the wounded Teal, could gather his wits to answer. “Have you any medical instruments aboard, Captain Hickman?”

  “Have I what?” he blinked at me, distracted. “This is no time for—why?”

  “I’m a surgeon, sir,” I said, “and you need me.”

  Within a quarter hour, I found myself back in the small forward cargo hold where I had roused from my fainting spell a few hours earlier, this being now designated as the sick bay.

  The Asp did not travel with a surgeon, but had a small store of medicinals: a half-full bottle of laudanum, a fleam and bleeding bowl, a large pair of tweezers, a jar of dead and desiccated leeches, two rusty amputation saws, a broken tenaculum, a bag of lint for packing wounds, and a huge jar of camphorated grease.

  I was strongly tempted to drink the laudanum myself, but duty called. I tied back my hair and began poking about among the cargo, in search of anything useful. Mr. Smith and Ian had rowed across to the Teal in hopes of retrieving my own kit, but given the amount of damage I could see in the area where our cabin had been, I didn’t have much hope. A lucky shot from the Asp had holed the Teal below the waterline; had she not run aground, she would likely have sunk sooner or later.

  I’d done a rapid triage on deck; one man killed outright, several minor injuries, three serious but not instantly life-threatening. There were likely more on the Teal; from what the men said, the ships had exchanged broadsides at a distance of no more than a few yards. A quick and bloody little action.

  A few minutes after the conclusion, the Pitt had limped into sight, her contentiously mixed crew having evidently come to a sufficient accommodation as to allow her to sail, and she was now occupied in ferrying the wounded. I heard the faint shout of her bosun’s hail over the whine of the wind above.

  “Incoming,” I murmured, and, picking up the smaller of the amputation saws, prepared for my own quick and bloody action.

  “You have guns,” I pointed out to Abram Zenn, who was rigging a couple of hanging lanterns for me, the sun having now almost set. “Presumably this means that Captain Hickman was prepared to use them. Didn’t he think there might be a possibility of casualties?”

  Abram shrugged apologetically.

  “It’s our first voyage as a letter of marque, ma’am. We’ll do better next time, I’m sure.”

  “Your first? What sort of—how long has Captain Hickman been sailing?” I demanded. I was ruthlessly rummaging the cargo by now, and was pleased to find a chest that held lengths of printed calico.

  Abram frowned at the wick he was trimming, thinking.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “he had a fishing boat for some time, out of Marblehead. Him—he, I mean—and his brother owned it together. But after his brother ran afoul of Captain Stebbings, he went to work for Emmanuel Bailey, as first mate on one of his—Mr. Bailey’s, I mean—ships. Mr. Bailey’s a Jew,” he explained, seeing my raised eyebrow. “Owns a bank in Philadelphia and three ships as sail regularly to the West Indies. He owns this ship, too, and it’s him who got the letter of marque from the Congress for Captain Hickman, when the war was announced.”

  “I see,” I said, more than slightly taken aback. “But this is Captain Hickman’s first cruise as captain of a sloop?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But privateers don’t usually have a supercargo, do you see,” he said earnestly. “It would be the supercargo’s job to provision the ship and see to such things as the medical supplies.”

  “And you know this because—how long have you been sailing?” I asked curiously, liberating a bottle of what looked like very expensive brandy, to use as antiseptic.

  “Oh, since I was eight years old, ma’am,” he said. He stood a-tiptoe to hang the lantern, which cast a warm, reassuring glow over my impromptu operating theater. “I’ve six elder brothers, and the oldest runs the farm, with his sons. The others … well, one’s a shipwright in Newport News, and he got to talking with a captain one day and mentioned me, and next thing I know, I’m one of the cabin boys on the Antioch, her being an Indiaman. I went back with the captain to London, and we sailed to Calcutta the very day after.” He came down onto his heels and smiled at me. “I’ve been a-sea ever since, ma’am. I find it suits me.”

  “That’s very good,” I said. “Your parents—are they still alive?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. My mother died birthing me, and my pa when I was seven.” He seemed untroubled by this. But after all, I reflected, ripping calico into bandage lengths, that was half his lifetime ago.

  “Well, I hope the sea will continue to suit you,” I said. “Do you have any doubts, though—after today?”

  He thought about that, his earnest young face furrowed in the lantern shadows.

  “No,” he said slowly, and looked up at me, his eyes serious—and not nearly so young as they had been a few hours ago. “I knew when I signed on with Captain Hickman that there might be fighting.” His lips tightened, perhaps to keep them from quivering. “I don’t mind killing a man, if I have to.”

  “Not now … you don’t,” said one of the wounded men, very softly. He was lying in the shadows, stretched across two crates of English china, breathing slowly.

  “No, not now, you don’t,” I agreed dryly. “You might want to speak to my nephew or my husband about it, though, when things have settled a bit.”

  I thought that would be the end of it, but Abram followed me as I laid out my rudimentary tools and set about such sterilization as could be managed, splashing out brandy with abandon, ’til the hold smelled like a distillery—this to the scandalization of the wounded men, who thought it waste to use good drink so. The galley fire had been put out during the battle, though; it would be some time before I had hot water.

  “Are you a patriot, ma’am? If you don’t mind me asking,” he added, blushing with awkwardness.

  The question t
ook me back a bit. The straightforward answer would be “Yes, of course.” Jamie was, after all, a rebel, so declared by his own hand. And while he had made the original declaration out of simple necessity, I thought necessity had now become conviction. But me? Certainly I had been, once.

  “Yes,” I said—I couldn’t very well say anything else. “Plainly you are, Abram. Why?”

  “Why?” He seemed staggered that I would ask, and stood blinking at me over the top of the lantern he held.

  “Tell me later,” I suggested, taking the lantern. I’d done what I could on deck; the wounded who needed further attention were being brought down. It was no time for political discussion. Or so I thought.

  Abram bravely settled down to help me and did fairly well, though he had to stop now and then to vomit into a bucket. After the second occurrence of this, he took to asking questions of the wounded—those in any condition to answer. I didn’t know whether this was simple curiosity or an attempt to distract himself from what I was doing.

  “What do you think of the Revolution, sir?” he earnestly asked one grizzled seaman from the Pitt with a crushed foot. The man gave him a distinctly jaundiced look but replied, probably in order to distract himself.

  “Bloody waste of time,” he said gruffly, digging his fingers into the edge of the chest he sat on. “Better to be fighting the frogs than Englishmen. What’s to be gained by it? Dear Lord,” he said under his breath, going pale.

  “Give him something to bite on, Abram, will you?” I said, busy picking shattered bits of bone out of the wreckage and wondering whether he might do better with a swift amputation. Perhaps less risk of infection, and he would always walk with a painful limp in any case, but still, I hated to …

  “No, that’s all right, mum,” he said, sucking in a breath. “What do you think of it, then, youngster?”