The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  “But,” I said, “it’s—I’ve carried it—you can’t—”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “It was in my coat when I sailed. It had slipped through a hole in the pocket. I’ve never let it out of my hands. It brings me luck!”

  “Luck! Lud! It brought me more talk than was ever caused by the Great Plague! Now there’ll be no more of it.” She hummed a tune under her breath.

  “You mean you’ll tell your husband you’ve found it, and he’ll stop talking?”

  She nodded, without interrupting her humming.

  “Stop a minute,” I said. “Shall you tell him how I happened to have it? And where I was carrying it?”

  “Of course,” she said, looking abstractedly at the masthead.

  “Well,” I told her, “if you’ve been talked at till you’re sick of talk, as I suspect you are, I’d give the matter more thought. I think it would be safer with me. It’s brought me luck, and I’ll try to see no harm comes to it.”

  The man at the masthead shouted, “Sail on the larboard beam!” The fog, I saw, was lighter; much lighter; but still there was no breeze to speak of.

  Peer into the fog as I would, I could make out nothing.

  There was confused shouting near the forecastle. ’Lisha Lord came aft to say the lookout had caught sight of a craft with two royals when the fog lightened for a moment. How far away, ’Lisha said, he was not sure. A mile; maybe less: maybe more.

  “Was he sure of the two royals?” I asked him. If there were two it couldn’t be the Chasseur. She was a brig-schooner like ourselves and carried only one.

  “He says two,” ’Lisha insisted.

  We peered to larboard, but the fog hid what lay beyond us. We could see it drifting like smoke above the water, with little rents and alleys in it, as though it were being pushed aside, here and there, by objects invisible to us.

  While we stared and stared into that blank gray wall, our mouths open and our muscles tight from our anxiety to sharpen our senses a muffled, cottony thud struck our eardrums like a ghostly finger pressed against them. We seemed to float in a thick, motionless world—a world without breath or life; and as we waited so, a burst of cavernous thuds tumbled on each other’s heels irregularly, like the distant barking of two monstrous dogs.

  I knew on the moment what had happened, as surely as though I had looked through the curtain of fog and seen it. The Chasseur had blundered into an enemy craft of some sort; and what would happen to her, with no breeze for maneuvering, God alone could tell. In no other way could the matter be explained, and our duty, as I saw it, was to find out whether it was indeed so. There were two ways, I knew, of finding out. I could send away our boats loaded with boarders; or I could run out the sweeps and move the brig herself in range. Since the Lively Lady moved easily, I figured she might be swept up almost as quickly as the boats could be manned and got away and rowed to an attack: also I felt that our guns would be needed, and if I depended on boats, the guns would be useless.

  “Get out the sweeps, clear the waist of lumber and pipe to quarters,” I told ’Lisha Lord.

  He ran down the deck. Irrelevant thoughts popped into my head, such as that ’Lisha was from Bath and as smart-looking an officer as could be found on any British man-of-war, and that we were lucky to have him to point our guns. The brig was a turmoil of running and shouting, with the shrilling of the bos’n’s whistle threading through it, as is always the case in a sudden call to quarters; and over everything continued the hot, sepulchral roaring of the guns, pressing thick, moist air against our faces.

  Jotham Carr ran past, to turn my cabin into a hospital, Tommy Bickford at his heels to stow my dunnage and bring me my fowling piece. The thought of the fowling piece put Sir Arthur into my head, so I caught Tommy by the arm and turned to Lady Ransome, who had been wiped from my mind by the thudding of the guns. From the waist came a disquieting baa-ing and cackling, as the men hove the livestock over the bulwarks; but there was a faint fixed smile on Lady Ransome’s lips, a smile that would stay there, once she had put it on, it seemed to me, even though the whole world fell to pieces around her.

  “Go with Tommy,” I told her. “Get your husband and Captain Parker. Tommy’ll take you below, where there’ll be no danger. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said.

  I knew there was something I wanted to ask her, but there were too many things on my mind, such as how these other vessels might be lying, and whether ’Lisha had kept shot hot in the galley, as he had spoken of doing. She stared at me over Pinky’s head, and while I was trying to remember what I wanted to say, I saw Captain Parker step on deck. Behind him was Sir Arthur, weak looking and the color of the little sponges that grow in the rock pools of Arundel, near low-water mark; so I knew he had been made ill by our wallowing in the calm. As they appeared a burst of gunfire stopped them in their tracks.

  Parker shot a quick look at the fog that hemmed us in; then peered at the men casting loose carronade slides, tricing up ports, manning the sweeps, and running like ants with shot, powder, water pails, rammers, and muskets.

  “Look here,” he said, stepping up to me, “what’s happening here?”

  “Nothing you need worry about. Go below with Lady Ransome.”

  Sir Arthur’s face was green. “Ow!” he said. “I can’t permit this.”

  I remembered, then, that I had wanted to speak to Lady Ransome about the miniature; but now it was too late.

  “Take your husband below,” I told her, “and be quick about it. Keep the dog. He’ll be company. Don’t let him loose. He likes the guns.”

  She nodded, a bright nod, and went away with Tommy, the two Englishmen following her, and Pinky peering back at me from around her arm.

  Moved by the sweeps, the brig was swinging to larboard, toward the hoarse bellowing of the guns. I told myself we must see the vessels soon, since they could see each other; that it was the Ransomes’ own fault, getting into this trouble; that if they hadn’t wanted trouble, they should have stayed in England, where they belonged; that I hadn’t lost a man so far, only poor Sip; that my mother would say that what I was doing was all right, if she were here. That’s the way of it with me, I’m sorry to say: When close to trouble, I can only think small thoughts that have next to no bearing on the matter in hand.

  A spout of water shot thirty feet in the air off our starboard quarter, giving me a picture of how they lay, broadside to us and two cable lengths ahead. The gun crews, silent at their stations, pointed and whispered when they saw the spout. We swept off to larboard again, so we could come up under their bows or stems, in a position to rake. I felt movement in our topsails, the beginning of a light breeze. In the same moment the lookout shouted again, and as he shouted we saw them dimly, their top-hamper showing through the dissolving fog, their hulls hidden, except for patches here and there, in layers of smoke.

  We came around more, until we lay broadside to them, our bow to the westward. They were pointed northeast, a pistol shot apart. The nearer one was a ship-rigged sloop-of-war, a corvette, with British colors at her peak. Her foretopmast was cut through at the head, its spars and gear lolloping from the cap in a tangle. The mizzenmast trailed over the counter, with the jagged stump of the mast rising from the wreckage. Through the smoke we saw her people hacking away with axes to clear the decks.

  Yet there was life in her, and plenty of it. The Chasseur, dimly seen through the smoke, seemed a ragged wreck of the swift brig that had skimmed the waves beside us on the day before, though I well knew that a vessel, though apparently cut to pieces, could be nobly patched by a skillful crew in an hour’s time. Her main-boom was shot through, her foretopgallant yard was broken in the slings, and her bowsprit dangled in splinters and festoons from her stem. Her sails were riddled and shredded from the passage of grape and round shot, so I knew the Britisher’s gun crews were shooting too high. In the moment when the two craft became clear to us through the thinning fog, a man pitched over
the side of the Chasseur’s maintop, hung by a knee; then sprawled downward to the deck, turning slowly in the air and vanishing in the smoke.

  “Get at them with muskets,” I told Jeddy, “whenever our people can shoot without hurting the Chasseur. I want no gun fired till we can rake.”

  The breeze died again, and the guns roared thunderously, almost in our ears. A little futile spattering of musketry set in from our tops. The men were under the bulwarks, stripped to the waist; for even in cold weather there is a feeling of greater security if no coats or shirts hamper the arms or shoulders, and if belts are pulled tight at the waist to ease the shrinking in the stomach that comes with fighting.

  Our eyes burned and watered with the fierceness of our peering, for there’s no time to meditate when creeping into position within easy range of an enemy, waiting for the gunfire you know must come. And creep we did; for though the men drove the sweeps through the water until it whirled and sucked, we seemed to he motionless in the oily chop, except for the lifts and lurches of the brig as the waves had their will of her. Yet we moved; for there was a sheep pen clinging against our side, with three half-dead sheep in it; draggled, wretched, staring-eyed beasts that blatted and blatted as the cold Channel chop slapped unendingly at them; and this pen moved slowly backward from our waist.

  We had swept a little beyond the Britisher before she opened fire. It may be that between the men needed to work her guns and muskets against the Chasseur and those who chopped at her tangles of spars and cordage, she had no men to waste on us, or she may have hoped to force the Chasseur to strike and then engage us. Whatever the reason, we were nearly ready to turn again and sweep under her stem when she let go her starboard battery.

  There was a whirring and rattling of grapeshot above us as the smoke jetted irregularly from her side, a small downrush of severed tackle, and the rasping shudder that comes from being hulled with solid shot. I moved forward to reassure the men, but they stayed where they were, those at the sweeps pushing hard; the men under the bulwarks lying tight, some with their arms over their heads to guard against splinters, and some with their faces screwed around toward the quarter-deck, grinning.

  I could see the Britishers ramming home charges at the starboard ports. We would have two minutes, I knew, before the next broadside: maybe three, and maybe even four. I could make out officers on the quarter-deck as the smoke drifted away; and I wished, as I had never wished for anything in my life, for a breeze to drive us around under her stern so we could rake them off.

  ’Lisha Lord moved from gun to gun in the waist, tinkering with them, almost like a woman prodding at her hair, striving to get it just so. Suddenly he straightened, whirled, and jumped for the quarter-deck.

  “By God!” he shouted, “it’s the Gorgon! It’s the damned old Gorgon!”

  She let off at us again, as though in protest at ’Lisha’s words. We felt the push of air against us, and a hellish clattering and whirring all about us, so I knew she had pointed her guns better. To this day I cannot kick a gray-winged grasshopper from the dune grass of Arundel in late summer without feeling my heart turn over in my breast; for their whirring is like that of flying wood splinters ripped from masts and yards and bulwarks by round shot. I could see splinters pass in a shimmery yellow mist, and felt a quick ache in my left shoulder, where a small splinter had driven into me, point first.

  The men at a starboard sweep were sprawled on the deck, knocked there when the sweep was shattered by a round shot. Our foretopmast swayed, then buckled with a sound of rending timber, and hung loose and draggled. A man toppled over the edge of the foretop, twisted in mid-air and clung by his hands. I saw Moody Haley reach down, clutch him by the back of his shirt, and heave him back into the top. One of the men crawled out from beside a carronade. Blood gushed in spurts from his neck. He reached the musket stand by the main hatch, pulled himself to his feet, then fell again and lay still, a black stream moving slowly from under him.

  Jeddy hustled a new sweep to the starboard sweepers, and Rowlandson Drown bawled at his men to cut away the foretopmast. I pulled the splinter from my shoulder, thankful when it came out easily from the bone, and told Pomp to put over the helm.

  “All ships look like the Gorgon to you,” I reminded ’Lisha. Automatically I figured that if nothing happened to us we would be in a position to rake in three minutes.

  “Like hell they do!” ’Lisha said, his voice shaking as if with cold. “That’s the Gorgon! I thought it was the Gorgon when I got a look at her through the fog! Now I know it! Look at her maintop netting, made in diamonds! That’s mine, by God! I made it!”

  It was in diamonds, as he said; and as I peered at her, wrapped in smoke and littered with her tangled top-hamper, it seemed to me I could recognize, on the quarter-deck, the burly figure of Captain Bullard-Jones.

  Smoke gushed from her starboard battery once more. “One—two —three!” ’Lisha counted, above the howling and rattling that followed the discharge. “Three! They can’t bring the others to bear!”

  “Give ’em a gun,” I said. “Keep it away from the Chasseur.” I thanked God, as ’Lisha jumped for the long gun, that the Gorgon had been able to bring only three to bear; for these three had left a ragged, furry hole in our mainmast, shattered the bottom of our longboat, and stretched Rowlandson Drown on the deck; while something, though there was no way of knowing what at the moment, had happened to our steering gear. The wheel had whirled suddenly in Pomp’s hands, throwing him to the deck with wrists half broken.

  I saw Jeddy run to Rowlandson and pull at his arm, looking at his face; and from the way he let his arm drop and turned away I knew Rowlandson was dead.

  ’Lisha worked at his gun, squinting and squinting. The deck jerked as he fired, and in the same moment the sternmost gun of the Gorgon’s starboard battery, struck fair on the muzzle by ’Lisha’s shot, kicked backward and exploded.

  The crew of the long gun leaped like jumping jacks, sponging and loading. “Load with one shot!” I heard ’Lisha tell them. “There’s a hot one goes on top.”

  He ran down the deck toward the galley, slapping at the gun crews. “Steady as a rock!” he shouted. “We’ll never have no such gun platform again! Right into her guts, boys!”

  We crept in and crept in, closer to the Gorgon’s stem, but slowly: as slowly, almost, as the moon comes up beyond the brown rocks of Cape Arundel. Her masts, wrapped in a tangle of sails, spars, shrouds and running rigging, drew closer together as we brought them in line, and up through them rose white wreaths of smoke from her guns; for still she hammered at the Chasseur, and still the Chasseur hammered back, though the roars of both had a labored, weary slowness.

  'Lisha ran from the galley, behind him two men with pails.

  I saw a long gun emerge from one of the Gorgon’s stem ports and slowly come to bear on us. My muscles were tight as barrel hoops, and I wanted to crouch behind the bulwark for a second—for half a second even—to do anything except stand and wait.

  ’Lisha Lord shouted to the gun crews of the long guns. They dumped the shot from the pails into their guns, and ’Lisha ran for the forward carronades.

  The Gorgon’s stem gun bellowed at us. It was langrage—old iron and bolts and pieces of kettles and nails—and it screamed around and over us as though the sky were filled with angry cats.

  ’Lisha’s first shot went through the cabin windows of the Gorgon. His second smashed her rudder. Our men came up cheering from behind the bulwarks, all a-drip from waiting. They cheered and swabbed and cheered, and last of all ’Lisha ran to the long guns loaded with hot shot.

  Perspiration dropped from Jeddy’s chin as he shook his fist at the Gorgon and screamed at her, in a shrill, cracked voice, to strike her colors.

  The long guns roared out of a welter of white smoke. Aboard the Gorgon we heard a muffled, anguished cough, as though some great hulk of an animal had coughed in deathly sickness. The smoke lifted; the cough died; then rose immediately into a roar. The wreckage
of her mainmast and mizzenmast reeled; and up from her midship section sprouted a bell of planks and cordage and men and gear, a bell that blossomed into a mushroom of smoke and suddenly climbed up and up into a flame-shot column, in which moved black, broken objects, turning slowly as they mounted.

  A strange silence came down upon us and on all the sea as well. It was silence, and yet not silence; for in the distance there was a rushing noise from within the column of smoke that still mounted upward from the Gorgon, until it seemed to hang over us like an enormous maple tree in full leaf. We heard a rasping and creaking from our damaged top-hamper, and a sickening moaning from a wounded man in the foretop.

  “Lower away the boats,” I told Jeddy. There was a walloping splash hard by our counter, and thumps here and there on our deck, followed by a rush of falling fragments, hurtling down at us from the sides of that cone-shaped cloud.

  The hull of the Gorgon had opened out like a melon suddenly dropped on the ground, but now her bow and stem came upright again. The opening seemed about to close; then slowly and wearily widened once more; and the bow and stern, wavering and groping as though feeling their way beneath the surface, settled deeper and deeper into the gray water of the Channel until it came to us suddenly that they were entirely gone: that there was nothing left of the Gorgon but a welter of planks and broken spars and splintered fragments, with heads here and there among them, and over them a vast, ever spreading umbrella of smoke. From those heads among the wreckage there rose a faint, thin piping, like the distant calling of young frogs such as we hear in Arundel on warm nights in the spring of the year.

  XIX

  THE men were knotting and splicing the rigging, plugging the shot holes in our hull and nailing lead over them, and making ready to fish our wounded masts and spars as soon, almost, as the boats had been lowered away; for they knew, as well as I, that the English Channel was no place in which to waste time celebrating a victory, especially when we were helpless as a shark with his tail cut off. We would be fit to maneuver, I knew, in a half hour’s time if there was nothing to worry us but our masts and spars and rigging; for no seamen in the world are so quick and handy at repairing ship as are American seamen. But in addition to our top-hamper we had our rudder to consider; and when we came to look at it we found we had no rudder at all, the rudder post having been cut by a shot, and the whole machine having wrenched away. Thus we couldn’t move until we made a false stempost, or preventer stempost, reeved a rudder of plank to it, fixed it in place, and fastened the false rudder in turn to the main chains by guys and tackles. This is the devil’s own job, and we laid out the necessary gear on the quarter-deck, to save time and trouble; and into this turmoil came Sir Arthur Ransome and his wife and Captain Parker.