The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  “I do,” Bolingbroke said. No seaman would venture from an American port without them, for all the good they might do.

  “You have them on you, then?” Tillinghast asked. Bolingbroke looked at him, looked at Rumstick, said nothing. He did not need to speak. They knew the answer.

  “Very well,” Rumstick said, “that’s enough of that. Tell us, Bolingbroke, who paid you to do what you did.”

  Bolingbroke said nothing. Some might have felt honor-bound to keep their mouths shut, but in Bolingbroke’s case he was silent because he did not know the answer to Rumstick’s question. He did not know who hired him. And he did not know how to make Rumstick believe that.

  “Eight bells,” Rumstick said. “Time’s up. Mr. Tillinghast, pray take our friend on a boat ride. My compliments to Captain John Carney, who commands the squadron presently at the Capes.”

  Tillinghast let out a low whistle. “Mad Jack Carney’s there, is he?”

  “The very man to teach young Bolingbroke here the ways of the king’s service.”

  Tillinghast grabbed Bolingbroke’s collar and the words came tumbling from Bolingbroke’s mouth like a sluice gate had been opened up. “Stand off, stand off, I’ll tell you, damn you,” he all but shouted. Tillinghast let go of his collar. Rumstick leaned back and folded his arms. Bolingbroke glanced around for no reason at all but to stall for a second more.

  “See here,” he began, “the truth is, I don’t know who it was. Some villain from the docks. Not a talkative cove, I never even got his name. I don’t know who sent him.”

  Rumstick shook his head. Tillinghast grabbed Bolingbroke’s collar. More words exploded from Bolingbroke’s throat. “Wait! There was…” He reached back desperately into his memory, which was really rather good. “There was a name, this son of a bitch did say one name once, it’s all I know. Ness. It was Ness. He said, ‘Mr. Ness knows you’d fancy putting a bullet in Jack Biddlecomb, and he’ll even pay you to do it.’ That was the only name he said, and only the one time.”

  “This fellow who was speaking for Ness, where would we find him?” Rumstick asked.

  “Don’t know. I swear I don’t know. Never seen him before or since.” Bolingbroke was not sure what real, sincere truth sounded like, but he hoped that it sounded like the words he blurted out, because they were indeed the truth, and he knew of no other way to convey that fact. Rumstick and Tillinghast exchanged glances. Bolingbroke thought he saw Rumstick give a little nod, barely perceptible.

  “Bolingbroke, I certainly hope you’re telling me the truth,” Rumstick said.

  “I am, I swear to God I am,” Bolingbroke said, too quickly and too emphatically to lay claim to any remaining dignity.

  For a long and terrible moment Rumstick just looked at him, looked right into his eyes. Bolingbroke tried to hold his gaze, but it was like looking into the sun, too painful to hold for long. And then Rumstick said the words Bolingbroke most wanted to hear of any in the world, said them so low that Bolingbroke almost didn’t hear them at all.

  “Get out of here, Bolingbroke. And do not cross my path again.”

  And the next thing Bolingbroke could recall, he was running down the dark, predawn street toward the waterfront, the frantic dash from Rumstick’s parlor and out the door forever lost to his memory.

  14

  It had taken less than a minute for the aftermost six pounder on the larboard side to break free, and with the momentum of sixteen hundredweight of iron loose on a heaving deck, it took only a minute more to destroy the Abigail’s steering gear and tiller. It took nearly two days to get the hated thing back in place. Where the ringbolts had torn clean out, the bulwark had to be repaired and reinforced, no easy task on the still rolling deck, with spray like torrential rain flying aft as the bow shouldered the confused seas.

  The first order of business was to sort out the steering gear. Happily, while the wheel, drum, and mounts had been torn clean out of the deck they had not been smashed to shivers, which made repairs a simple matter of remounting the helm and reinforcing it where it had suffered damage.

  Abigail was too small to carry a carpenter, a single individual with the expertise and authority to take charge of this task, so every man aboard who knew which end of a saw to hold and could tell a piece of oak from a ball of oakum designated himself an expert, and appointed himself to the role of carpenter or carpenter’s advisor. They hammered, sawed, argued, and undermined one another until Jack, who knew as much about woodworking as any man aboard, which was no great amount, stepped in and took personal oversight, and from there the work progressed much quicker.

  Once the wheel was remounted they turned to the wayward gun and its gunport. Not only did the damaged bulwark need repair, but each of the other guns had to be unlashed and the ringbolts carefully inspected to see that such a thing could not happen again. When Jack was at last satisfied that all was well, and that they were reasonably safe from any further errant ordnance, they unlashed the truant gun and with handspikes and handy-billys they hove it back onto its wheels. Then slowly, carefully, laboriously they bullied it back to its assigned gunport.

  In the course of the forty or so hours that that evolution took, the seas settled down, the wind came fair and dropped to a steady twelve knots, and the sun made a welcome appearance. Soon the Abigail looked more like a floating tenement than a ship, with clothing and bedding flogging in the rigging and drying in the blessed heat. Jack took a noon sight and found they had been driven a hundred miles or so to the northwest, not so bad as he had feared, and if the wind held they would lose no more than two days’ sailing.

  The loss of two days, however, seemed of great concern to Mr. Charles Frost, who hovered over Jack’s shoulder as he walked his parallel rules across the chart and marked the fix with his pencil.

  “Two days, you say?” Frost asked, not for the first time. “Two days delay in when we might make Barbados?”

  “Two days. Maybe less. But you’re no stranger to the sea, Mr. Frost. You know well enough there’s no predicting these things. The winds are as reliable as winds will be this time of year, but we could still have a calm that sees us wallowing for the better part of a week.”

  “Of course, of course,” Frost said. He looked down at the chart again. “Your course will be what, then?”

  The correct answer was “whatever damned course the wind will allow for us to get to Barbados,” but Jack sensed that Frost did not want to hear that, so he traced an arced line with his finger from the latest fix to their destination, avoiding all obvious landmasses along the way. Frost nodded, and he seemed pleased. “Good, good, let the god of storms send us a fair wind, then!”

  “Indeed,” Jack said with what enthusiasm he could find. He was not at all comfortable with this, any of it. A ship’s master, he felt, should maintain a certain degree of aloofness. Aloofness, of course, was not his nature. It was so much not his nature that he had had to purposely cultivate it when he became a first mate, an office that also required one to stand apart from both the herd in the forecastle and the better sort in the passengers’ cabins.

  Aloof captains did not discuss their navigation or intended routes with anyone, passengers foremost. Had Wentworth even asked to see the chart, Jack would have given him such a display of aloofness as the world had not yet witnessed. But Frost was different. He was, for one thing, a known friend of Oxnard’s, which Wentworth was not. How much deference that should buy him, Jack was not sure.

  And there was also the undeniable fact that he liked Frost, liked his open, jocular manner. But Jack also harbored a natural defensiveness, the result of his age and the fact that he was only a few weeks into his first command. He was sensitive, very sensitive, to any hint of Frost telling him how to run his ship. But thus far the passenger had said nothing to cause offense. It was a very confusing situation, social rocks and shoals through which Jack found the navigation tricky in the extreme.

  The runaway six pounder had been secured, the men fed their dinner, t
he afternoon watch settling in to their stations, when Frost approached Jack with the suggestion that they begin exercising with the guns. Try as he might, Jack could think of no excuse to not do so, so he told Tucker to call all hands aft. The off watch was engaged in ship’s work, so most of the company was already on deck or aloft, and it took little time for them to assemble just forward of the mizzen.

  “See here, men,” Jack began. “I suspect you’ve noticed that the Abigail now boasts a broadside of guns. We’re standing into the Caribbean, and it’s no secret the Frenchies have been making prizes of American ships. We won’t let that happen to us. We’ll defend ourselves. And to see we are able to do that, Mr. Oxnard has sent along Mr. Frost here, who you know, and who is a hand at the great guns. We will commence now with exercising them, and Mr. Frost will instruct you in what you need to know so you don’t all end up rotting in some parlez-vous prison.”

  Jack looked out over his people, pleased with the degree of inspiration he had managed to bring to his words, confident that beneath the looks of vague indifference the men were genuinely ready to take on this new task. He looked to his right and saw Wentworth leaning against the bulwark, the expression on his face one of smug amusement, and Jack’s good feeling collapsed like a waterspout. He was never too comfortable with rousing oratory, and he guessed that Wentworth found him ridiculous, and that in turn irritated him greatly. “Very well, Mr. Frost, I leave them to you,” he said.

  Frost stepped forward, clapped his hands and rubbed them together, and with that single gesture grabbed the men’s attention as if he had hypnotized them, because Frost was a man who commanded attention. Jack could see all hands perk up with interest, and he knew Frost had several advantages over him. The men knew Frost and liked him, he having already made his presence felt fore and aft, and they had no reason to fear him as they had to fear their captain. He was a passenger. He had no authority.

  What’s more, this was a novelty, playing with cannons. As a rule, sailors did not much cotton to novelty, they did not care for anything with which they were not entirely familiar. Anyone who tried to serve them food that was hitherto unknown in the forecastle, for instance, would soon learn as much. The sea was changeable enough for any man; those who sailed it did not need other surprises visited upon them. But this was something else, because it involved firing guns and it took them away from the chipping of rust and tarring and slushing and rousing out casks of this or that, the daily tedium and bane of the sailorman’s life.

  And Frost knew how to instruct in the exercising of the great guns. In his grand, jovial, embracing way he took the men through the steps, set up a model gun crew, used them to demonstrate to the others casting loose the guns, leveling the guns, removing the tompions, loading with cartridge, shot, and wadding. When all was in readiness the gun was run out and Frost jabbed the priming wire down the vent, filled the vent with powder, touched it with the glowing match. With a shattering, satisfying roar the six pounder bellowed and leapt back against its breeching, blowing a horizontal column of smoke and flame and iron shot straight out over the sea, and the men, despite themselves and their studied cool, cheered as if Frost had performed an act unparalleled in the modern age.

  Then, with his expansive bonhomie undiminished, indeed rather augmented by the men’s enthusiasm, Frost took them through sponging the gun with the vent securely covered, which brought them right around to once again loading with cartridge. This the men were more than eager to do, eager to see the big gun roar to life again. But Frost had other plans, and rather than reload the gun, he divided the men into the gun crews so that they might each try a hand at the exercise.

  This proved more difficult. Abigail had seventeen souls aboard, passengers included. Biddlecomb, as captain, had no business messing with the guns. For purposes of combat he designated Oliver Tucker as helmsman and set Lucas Harwar to join one of the gun crews. Barnabus Simon, the steward, was given the sponge for the aftermost gun, and the cook, Israel Walcott, was driven from the caboose and made to act the part of powder monkey, supplying the guns with the tight-filled flannel cartridges. This he did at a sullen, shuffling pace while issuing a steady stream of curses, protests, and invectives, loud enough to be heard, not so loud as to constitute insubordination.

  With Frost joining in there were thirteen men to man a single broadside of three guns with a grudging powder monkey to supply them all. They could fire the larboard guns or the starboard guns, but not both at the same time, and even then they had barely enough to make the guns speak and no one left to see to the sails or any other task that might be required, but there was nothing for it. Oxnard, in the way of merchant ship owners the world over, wanted his ship protected but did not want to put out the money required to do so.

  William Wentworth did not volunteer to join in. When Jack turned to him again, Wentworth held up his ridiculously bandaged hands, gave an ironic smile, and said, “My apologies, Captain, but, doctor’s orders, you understand.” Beyond that he did not utter a word during the entire exercise, simply watched the goings-on, and save for that one flash of amusement at Jack’s speech, his expression was inscrutable.

  In dumb show the men loaded, ran out, fired, sponged, reloaded. No gunpowder was burned, no match glowed orange, there was no sound save for the grunt of the men hauling the guns up the sloping deck, the squeal of the gun carriage wheels, and the eternal sound of slapping rigging, creaking spars, and water rushing down the sides.

  Charles Frost had an impeccable sense for the mood of the men, and he gauged the moment perfectly when they were done with that nonsense for the day, when the novelty was gone, when the change of routine moved from engaging to irritating. When he saw that happen he ordered one last round, a live round, with gunpowder and shot, and once again the entire situation was changed up, the interest renewed. And when that one rolling broadside was fired, slowly, with ample precaution to avoid crushed feet or arms blown off, then the guns were secured and the men left wanting more.

  And that was good, because more they got, the next day, and the next, and on after that as Frost drilled them in the afternoon watch, from the end of dinner to the start of the first dog watch. The men moved happily to their assigned stations, eager to see what new incentive Frost might offer up—a silver half-dollar to each man on the fastest gun, the chance to fire at an empty barrel with a tot of rum to the gun crew that first blew it out of the water.

  This act of going to fighting stations, Jack knew from a long and often unwilling association with naval affairs, was called “quarters.” A list of such stations, if he was inclined to make such a thing, which he was not, or if he thought it necessary, which he did not, would be called a “quarter bill.” He knew that a quarter bill would designate some men to double as sail trimmers, some to go to the pumps if needed, some singled out for boarders. Such a thing might make sense aboard a man-of-war, with its crew numbering in the hundreds, most of whom were simply interchangeable parts like the components of a gun carriage or a treble block, but it did not make sense aboard the diminutive Abigail.

  As it was, all this loading and running out and firing and general martial activity was getting far closer to the world of Isaac Biddlecomb than Jack Biddlecomb cared to get. He had quite purposely sailed a reciprocal course from the Great Man, a course on which he had been set by Jonah Bolingbroke not so many years before, though it sometimes felt to Jack like several lifetimes past.

  * * *

  The trouble had started at Jack’s birth, or before that, possibly.

  Whatever it was that made Isaac Biddlecomb the man he was, the hard and the soft of him, strength and weakness, brilliance and folly, that was the stuff of which his son Jack was made as well. The fact that they had been born into different worlds did not change that truth. Isaac, born to a former soldier turned farmer of a small part of Rhode Island’s sandy soil, was orphaned at the age of twelve. His mother died in childbirth. His father, wrecked by grief, rejoined his regiment and took a French bul
let at Quebec. Isaac was then taken under the wing of William Stanton, but Stanton did no more than give him work in the man’s world of the forecastle until Isaac’s native genius for driving ships and men had revealed itself, and he took his first steps onto the quarterdeck.

  Isaac Biddlecomb was born in the British colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Jack was born in the state of Rhode Island in the United States of America, in the middle of a war to determine if those united states would remain a sovereign nation or return to their former status as colonies of England. Jack’s mother, Virginia Biddlecomb née Stanton, William’s daughter, was heir to a great fortune that the war did not diminish. Indeed, through the quasi-patriotic and thoroughly profitable enterprise of privateering, Jack’s grandfather actually managed to increase his wealth during eight years of conflict.

  By the time Jack was old enough to have some understanding of the wider world the war was over, his father was lauded as a great hero of that war, and his mother had somehow produced a baby sister. Jack would not come to appreciate until many years later just how comfortable their situation was, particularly in light of the great fiscal devastation visited on so many others by the War for Independency.

  In his ignorance he enjoyed a childhood free from want. During much of his younger days his father was gone, off to sea, but when Jack was eight Isaac came ashore permanently to be with his family and oversee the growth of Stanton and Biddlecomb, Merchants.

  Isaac, naturally, wanted everything for Jack that he himself had not enjoyed: a family home, education, social standing, and the graces expected of one who occupied that station. Jack, naturally, wanted none of it. Like his father, he longed for the sea. A series of tutors managed to plant the seeds of Latin, sprout translations of Caesar, the words of Shakespeare, husband the young shoots of an appreciation for music, but they found the soil rocky and inhospitable.