’Tis a song of a gallant ship that flew the stripes and stars,
And the whistling wind from the west-nor’west blew through the pitch-pine spars,
With her sta’board tacks aboard, my boys, she hung upon the gale,
On the autumn night we raised the light on the old head of Kinsale.
He was interrupted by Wright crying, “There it is, sir, there it is! The island, fine on the starboard bow.”
I ran forward to see. There—a hint of a green glow, less than half a mile away, and just above it the orange spark of a lantern. It winked out and then shone again, as Horne closed and opened the shutter of his lantern. Wright flashed back at him and Horne’s light went out.
Not time yet to turn away. I went back to the quarterdeck. A ball from the frigate’s bow chaser skimmed the sea, near enough to sting the back of my hand with spray. I leaned out over the starboard rail, peering forward. Five hundred yards . . . two hundred . . . I thought I could hear the hiss of the reef.
Another ball came across. With a shriek and a clang it knocked the stern lamp clean away, leaving behind it a tang of hot metal and a ringing in my ears.
That’s fine, that’s fine. I pressed the heel of my hand against the ripped skin of my cheek. But I wasn’t fine. Something was lodged in my face: a smoking shard of brass from the lantern. My mouth was filled with gobbets of seared blood and bits of broken tooth. It didn’t hurt yet.
“In the bow, there,” I called to Wright. “Show the light again!”
The words came out wrong as ejecta spilled down my chin and throat, but an intermittent glow forward showed that Wright was working the door of his lantern open and shut, open and shut, projecting its beam toward the island and cutting it off again. Two flashes, a pause, two more. Onshore, a bobbing lantern dawned bright.
No need to dowse our stern lantern, it being blown away and all. The frigate would bite at the bait, or she wouldn’t. Another ball rumbled overhead, and I clenched my neck and shoulders lest I shame myself by ducking.
“Hard over!”
Tomahawk swung to larboard. I looked over the rail. Great golla mighty, I’d cut it so fine that our wake rebounded from the reef and broke against our side. I looked over my shoulder.
The frigate continued on her course, continued, continued . . . then came shouts and consternation as her crew realized our deception. She threw her rudder over, coming about to larboard. Heartsick, I realized she might make it.
Then Horne fired the carronades in his island battery. For an instant, orange flames lit the beach, the guns, and the men on shore.
The frigate wavered. Her spanker spilled its wind and her headsails hauled her head back toward the reef.
She struck.
Like a pair of dancers in unison, her fore and main-topmasts sagged in the middle, bowing forward, held aloft at first by her rigging and then toppling as inertia carried them along, her topgallant and royal masts still upright but sinking serenely at first before plummeting like huge javelins to her deck, all cascading in a shower of soaring canvas and whipping cordage and sparks from her proud masthead lanterns. Her bow rose, oak and copper shrieking against coral as she crested the reef; then she came to rest, cockeyed and askew, with little pieces of her floating around in the firelight.
Even the wind fell silent.
And then came a great crack that I felt through the sea, through the deck beneath me, as the frigate’s back broke under its own weight. Her bow nosed down over the jagged reef and the rest of her slid sternward toward the sea. There was another silence then, a grim, determined silence, as what was left of her crew settled into the business of making their way ashore, backlit by the fires set by her fallen lanterns. In the glow, I saw Tomahawks helping the French matelots across the lagoon between the coral and the sand, hauling in lines from the men still aboard, and setting the dejected survivors down beneath the twin maws of the carronades.
The hump of the island came between us, but I saw the flames rush up the frigate’s tarry shrouds, rising into the sky and silhouetting the low island in a halo of fire. Peebles and Gundy were looking to me for orders, but I found myself unable to speak. My mouth hung open and bloody drool slobbered down my shirtfront. The world was turning upside down. How peaceful it would be to sprawl on the sanded white deck, the smooth deck gleaming in the starlight, as the blood oozed out of my face and spread around my head like a gory crown.
“Do ’ee ail, zur?” shouted Gundy. He was hollering like I was away off on a mountain someplace.
“I’m bully!” It came out Eye boo ee. I sounded like a monkey. I probably looked like one, too, the way he stared at me.
He pointed toward the beach. “Us got bettermost of the Vrenchmen, zur. I reckon they’ll be wantin’ to come aboard, an’ not for a dish of tay.”
We had rounded the reef. Close on the starboard side lay the dark dunes, with the frigate’s burning rigging towering up behind. Over the low ridge came Horne and the rest of the Tomahawks, backing up with their muskets at the ready as a mob of Johnny Crappos advanced warily on them. I could even see Doc, hopping along on one leg.
“Edge in.”
I couldn’t hear my own voice properly, and streaks of pain from the effort of talking clearly dazzled my eyes.
“Tend . . . your guns, Mr. Peebles,” I called. “Carronade . . . canister . . . train it around—” I made a circular motion with my hand. “Sta’board.”
I went to the rail. “Mr. Horne!” I found if I held my jaw in place I could make it work right. “We’re com’ for you!”
He turned toward me in the flickering light and waved his cap. Below him, in the cove, the jolly boat shoved off. It was too crowded for rowing, and the men paddled with their hands or pieces of planking. The rest of the Tomahawks bunched up behind Horne on the beach—sailors as a rule don’t know how to swim—till he began grabbing them by the scruffs and heaving them into the sea. That set off a splashing stampede in the wake of the jolly boat. A couple of foremast jacks stayed with him, holding the enemy at bay with their muskets, but as the beach emptied of Americans it began to fill with Frenchmen—which it didn’t take them long to discover that the retreating Tomahawks had left their muskets in the sand.
A wave of shouts and screams washed over me as my full hearing returned. I heard the whoosh of years-dry wood going up in flames and the squealing groan of the frigate’s hull still slipping slowly down the reef. I heard the cries of the dying and the doomed.
Tomahawk’s keel shushed along the sandy bottom. “Come la’board a point!” She slithered free. I looked to my lads in the water. Someone heaved them a line and someone caught it, and at last they come pouring over the side.
A shot from the beach buzzed by.
Horne and his last two Tomahawks were in the water, swimming steadily toward us. Then a hand reached up: Horne, climbing into the mainchains. He reached back and pulled the other two men out of the sea.
A musket fired on the beach: first the flash in the pan, then the orange blossom at the muzzle. Another ball flicked past.
“They’ve found the muskets, sir,” called Peebles. He stood at the carronade.
“Thank you, Mr. Peebles.”
“Look at the enemy, sir, milling around like lambs in a pen—oh, what a target! Any reply, sir?”
They still had fight in them. It was my duty to destroy them. “No.”
“Me cabbun, zur,” said Gundy, “what course shull I staar?”
“Any course, I don’t care.” No, that wouldn’t do. I looked at the stars, felt the wind and the loom of the land. “Keep her thus.”
Gundy steered us away from the island. I heard another musket shot, but who knows where the ball went. And here was Horne, with his long braids hanging heavy with seawater.
I returned his salute. “Good job, Mr. Horne,” I said. Though you might’ve saved the tarnal muskets and powder, or throwed ’em in the sea before abandoning them, I was thinking, when the frigate’s magazine exploded with a flash so bright and
prolonged that I could see the Breeze in its glare, thrashing up from the south toward us with her guns run out. Then came a deep roar that swallowed sound, as if a pair of mighty hands had clapped me over the ears. The hump of the island protected us from most of the shock, but chunks of flaming timber rained down on us.
“Put out them fires! Mr. Peebles, look alive on the sta’board side!”
The Breeze had the advantage of us, what with the flames lighting us up from behind, but the clouds had parted and the slender crescent moon had risen. I couldn’t see her, but . . . there!
“Two points to la’board.” I could see her bow wave. Good enough.
“Two points la’board, aye aye, zur.”
That brought the guns to bear, but the Tomahawks didn’t know teacups from pisspots after their unaccustomed bath, and the Breeze fired first. The four sparks of her starboard broadside seemed like fairy lights compared with the blazing wreck astern, but the iron they fed us was real enough. Someone forward howled as the shots hit home.
I raised my speaking trumpet. “Mr. Peebles, I could use them guns.”
He waved his hat, and I could hear his piping voice: “The long guns, fire!” The thin crack-crack-crack of our starboard three-pounders answered the sloop.
I didn’t see where the shots went. All that mattered was that the French knew we were shooting back. Maybe some of them would keep their heads down instead of tending to their work.
“You—Simpson and Hawkins—grab them grapnels and get ready to heave ’em. Boarders, now! Boarders, grab you a tomahawk and a cutlass, for we’re fixin’ to pay a call. Gundy, bring us alongside!” I jammed Juge’s hat down firmly on my head. Then I drew my death’s-head blade and wrapped the sword knot around my wrist.
We crashed starboard bow to starboard bow, scraping along side by side till we fetched up nose-to-tail. The Frenchmen tried to boom us off with their sweeps, long oars that were too slender for the task. They began to snap as our two hulls surged together. Simpson and Hawkins swung their arms, and our grapnels soared aloft. They fetched their lines in taut and bound us together.
“The carronade—fire!” yelled Peebles. Twelve pounds of lead on top of a twelve-pound ball of iron slapped the Frenchmen away from the Breeze’s rail.
I set Juge’s hat on the deck for safekeeping. Then I was balancing on our own rail, feeling the send of the sea between the schooner and the sloop, listening to the hulls grinding together. I raised my sword. My nostrils filled with the salt of the sea and bitter gun smoke. And then the moment was right—leap now or live in shame—and I was down in the sloop’s waist and the Tomahawks poured across behind me.
The short blade of a cutlass came at me out of the dark. My sword arm was up without my thinking about it. The blade ran down mine on the outside. I stepped in and drove my head up into the Frenchman’s chin. He fell. Simpson and Hawkins loomed reassuringly on either side of me. I looked for Horne. There—scything his way through the Frenchmen with his broadax and heading for the Breeze’s quarterdeck.
“Follow me!” I couldn’t hear my own voice in the din. I grabbed Simpson’s sleeve, but he sagged to his knees. The Frenchman who’d killed him looked up in terror as Hawkins sprang in front of me and grabbed him by the throat. Hawkins’s cutlass swept down, and came up and swept down again, flinging a spray of hot blood through the air. On my right I saw Wright plant his tomahawk in a man’s head and then the heaving crowd swallowed him up. I saw Peebles with his dirk in his hand, trying to get past Gundy’s restraining arm.
I flailed away in front of me till a space cleared and I ran up to the quarterdeck. There was Corbeau up on the binnacle, waving his sword around, and nobody paying attention but me. I slipped around behind him. He was hollering in French, I didn’t hear what. I brandished my sword at the man at the tiller and he ran away. And there I was, all alone with Corbeau, and him with his back to me. I grabbed him by the waistband and yanked.
His britches come right down, which got his attention in a hurry. He shot me a startled look, reached for his britches, and tried to leap away from me all at once, but he got all tangled up in himself and fell smack into Horne’s arms. It was a tossup about which was more surprised. They both jerked their faces away from each other, staring.
“Just hold him!”
I jumped to the rail, trying to sort through the halyards in the uncertain light; and then I said the hell with it and swept my sword through them all. The Breeze’s colors came tumbling down.
The Tomahawks roared, overwhelming the French crew and herding them forward, and then Frenchmen were dropping their weapons and throwing up their hands. There were a lot fewer of them left than I expected. The Tomahawks ranged through the little crowd, kicking weapons aside and pushing the prisoners into the bows.
Then I heard a squalling, the crowd parted, and O’Lynn emerged from it with a roaring bundle in his arms. “Found the wee nipper behind the windlass, sor,” he said, and there with his arms wrapped around the Irishman’s neck was little Freddy Billings, the Breeze’s smallest boy, hollering that he wasn’t a pirate and blubbering fit to drown us all.
And there I was, with my sword in my hand and no one to stick it into. I leaned against the mast, trying not to breathe through my broken teeth. Just the touch of the air on them hurt like sweet bejeebers. O’Lynn clucked over Freddy in Irish and lifted him over the rail into the Tomahawk and took him below. Horne handed me a sword.
“Mr. Corbeau’s, sir.”
“I don’t want the blame thing.” Horne looked hurt, and I wished I hadn’t said it. I slipped my own blade into its scabbard. The bodies along the deck seemed to writhe in the flickering light of the frigate burning over yonder. The faces stared at nothing. I took Corbeau’s sword from Horne and threw it overboard.
Corbeau averted his eyes from my oozing jaw and gazed around at his lost command. “Ah, well,” he said, playing the philosopher, “such is the way of war, n’est-ce pas?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “We ain’t at war. Are the Americans below?”
“This is the question I dread.” He squared his shoulders. “I am sorry to say that when we regained possession of our sloop, we transferred our American guests to La Flamme— that frigate which you lately have so unceremoniously blown up. Such an unfortunate name.” His jaw trembled as he glanced toward the fire in the distance. He swabbed his face with a powder-stained handkerchief, and said, “Your pardon, monsieur. I have the grain of gunpowder, perhaps, in my eye.”
“You ought to watch where you look then,” I said.
Freddy’s voice rose up from the Tomahawk’s ’tween-decks, wailing that he didn’t want to get into any durned old hammock, and I nearly ordered him up a spanking till I realized I was just sore at him for being the last of the Breezes. Breezes, Suffisants—whatever Peter had done with which, they were all muddled in my mind. There was a sickening emptiness in my chest. All the fellows—friends, strangers, enemies—all gone in a puff of smoke. At least their families would be spared the shame and expense of a trial, and small comfort that would be. But maybe it was a comfort. I’d just as rather not have to watch Peter hang, which is what he might’ve ended up doing if I had arrested him.
“But what am I saying?” Corbeau tucked his handkerchief into his sleeve. “There are two Americans still in board. I am surprised they have not come up on deck. The last I see him, M’sieur Crouch is on his way to the magazine—”
We stared at each other for a second till we could get our feet going, and then we were both running for the forward hatch. A flash lit up the companionway as we jumped down it—I near about swallowed my heart, expecting to be launched into the forever—followed immediately by a bang, and after a pause a shriek, and then a billow of smoke rising from the narrow passage that led to the sloop’s store of gunpowder. Out of the smoke a man staggered. His face was a blackened mess and his hands were gone. His charred tongue worked in the bloody hole of his face, and then he fell to the deck.
He sti
ll moved, waving a stump as if to beckon me closer. His breath came out of him in a bubbling squeak as I knelt beside him.
“Peter Wicked,” he rasped, so hoarse and faint I could barely hear. He mumbled something else. I bent my head close, but he was dead.
I followed Corbeau back up the ladder and across the deck and down the after hatch into the Breeze’s cramped stern cabin. A lone candle flickered on the desk; and at the desk, with a battered calico cat growling by his side and with a pistol in his hand, sat a tall, gaunt man in his shirtsleeves.
Corbeau went to him. “You are well, my friend?”
Peter nodded, looking at me.
“Yes? I will leave you then to the privacy,” said Corbeau. “Do not worry if I am to escape,” he called as he mounted the ladder. “I consider myself to be once more under the arrest. You will note I never once left M’sieur Wickett’s company, even after I am returned to my countrymen.”
The right side of Peter’s face was stained—with burnt gunpowder, I realized as I leaned forward to look—and blood oozed from a blackened crease in his forehead. Dark speckles surrounded a splintered place in the bulkhead to his left.
“I don’t suppose you’d lend me a pistol,” he said. He glanced down at the one in his hand and set it on the desk. “There was a great lurching, and I seem to have missed.”
He pulled his kerchief out of his sleeve and pressed it against his forehead.
SEVENTEEN
The Tomahawk and the Breeze lay hove-to abreast of each other along the golden streak cast by the rising sun on the sea. Fine on the larboard bow, the limestone cliffs of Cape Rojo, the southwestern tip of Porto Rico, showed as white patches through the haze. The cape bore northeast by north, distant four leagues, which I’d written down on a piece of paper along with the rest of my instructions.
“The Mona Passage ain’t as bad as its reputation, Mr. Peebles,” I said. “Just you keep in our wake and no harm’ll come to you.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
I never seen a kid look so small as he did there on the Breeze’s quarterdeck. “The weather should be fine for most of the day,” I said, “with maybe some rain and a blow commencing along about the second dogwatch.” I hadn’t tried the Mona Passage before, neither, not on my own, and my only practical knowledge of it was a single memory and what the sailing directions said to expect—namely, light airs in the morning, squalls in the afternoon, and a blow at night. “You don’t want to run all the way down to loo’ard of Hispaniola and then have to beat back up through the Windward Passage, do you?”
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