Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

  She straightened her clothing, picked up the counterpane, shook it out, draped it over him and tucked it down securely. Then she retrieved the washcloth, picked up the bucket, and let herself out of his after-cabin.

  She found her own cabin had been restored, Parrette busy folding things into her trunk. She looked up sharply, her gaze traveling over Anna, who blushed hotly.

  Parrette smiled, bringing her chin down in a decided nod of approval. Parrette knew very well what had happened, and her nod expressed her sense of the right of it.

  But all she said was, “Set that bucket down. Here is hot water waiting in that basin. I thought you might want a wash. This hot water might be all we get before the weather worsens. I will bring your meal on my return.”

  “Worsens?”

  “They say a storm is coming.”

  “I thought we were already in the midst of it,” Anna stated as she leaned both hands against the bulkhead. It felt as if the floor slanted to the pitch of a roof.

  Parrette had lifted the bucket of dirty water so it would not slosh. As soon as the pitch eased, she left. Anna busied herself with the basin of hot water. She decided against changing into nightclothes. The coming storm—her own questions—nothing seemed sure, so she put her gown back on, brushing out the wrinkles with her hands.

  Parrette reappeared with supper. Anna found she could scarcely eat it. Her eyelids burned with exhaustion, her entire body throbbed. When she could not lift the spoon again, she climbed into her cot, and was not aware of falling asleep.

  o0o

  Two bells in the middle watch, or one o’clock in the morning, Henry Duncannon woke abruptly to find Mr. d’Ivry at his bedside, candlelight flaring wildly over his drenched form in its hooded tarpaulin-jacket.

  He was instantly aware of something wrong before the master’s mate spoke: there was a high, dangerous note to the wind in the rigging, and the groan of the timbers indicated high seas.

  “Sir, Mr. Sayers’ duty, but the Spanish barky we’re towing is all a-hoo. He thinks it might be sinking.”

  Pain lanced through the captain’s body, but beneath it was a layer of well-being, of a note of happiness so unfamiliar he could not immediately define it. “I shall be on deck in a moment. Send Perkins to me.”

  “I’m here, sir, I’m here, a-waitin’ with the last of the water, and these here clothes,” Perkins said as the midshipman darted out. “And a pot of tea. It’s in me bosom, right and tight.”

  While the steward was talking, the captain eased himself out of the bunk to the deck. The wound in his thigh where the nearly-spent ball had been dug out burned as if a hot coal had been put there, and white shards of pain lanced through his head and shoulder.

  The water felt cool on his flesh, waking him thoroughly, which brought to the front of his mind brief sensory memories and images—gentle hands, of ardent kisses—of his wife pressed against him. It had happened. He had not intended it to happen, he would have said he had not wanted it to happen, but he smiled at the memory of muffled laughter at her inexpert but eager accommodation as the cot swayed and jiggled and danced, and the intensity of matched desire. He laughed under his breath as he buttoned the shanks on the thick coat the steward held out.

  His arm hurt like blazes, but he did not dare try a sling. He knew from the wild shriek of the wind and the slant of the deck that he would need both hands.

  He drank off the lukewarm tea that Perkins had worn inside his jacket for at least an hour, then sent the steward forward. Urgent as was the need to be on deck, he had to see her. For the first time, he opened the door to his sleeping cabin. Lightning flared far over the water, lighting the stern window, creating a silhouette of the still form slumbering in the cot.

  He smiled to see her there safe and warm, then closed the door soundlessly and forced his way up to his quarterdeck. The wind nearly took him over the rail. He bent double, both hands tight on the man-ropes.

  Unawares, Anna slept so deeply that she did not waken until an enormous wave of water smashed the stern windows behind her.

  She woke, startled, to see an angry gray-green sea rising nearly as high as the deck above. White foam tore across the top of the swelling billows, and whipped away on the shrieking wind.

  What was that beyond the waves? Between one and the next she caught sight of a massive bowsprit rolling, and gasped in fear. They were being chased by a Spanish ship of the line!

  She flung herself out of her cot, and landed on hands and knees in rilling water. Lightning bolts shot through her joints. Every muscle in her body ached.

  Her slippers were floating on this thin tide sweeping back and forth. She grabbed them and crawled to her trunk. Her instinct was to fetch out her second pair of slippers, but she looked at the water washing back and forth, and her fingers shook as she wrestled the slippers over her bare feet. She ran to the door, then out, but paused when she reached the outer doors to the captain’s cabin.

  The marine on duty, standing with feet braced wide, said apologetically, “Orders is, you must stay inside, missus. It’s too dangerous on deck, even with the man-ropes. We already lost one upper-yardman, insisted on laying aloft with one hand a-bandaged.”

  “But we are being chased, are we not?” She pointed behind. “I saw one of the Spanish ships.”

  He looked away. “We was towing it, on Admiral’s orders. But it’s not swimming, and they’re bringing the last of the prisoners over now.”

  “Prisoners!”

  “Yes, missus.”

  “Thank you,” Anna said, and nearly turned back to ask about the captain. But of course he would be on deck, in spite of his wounds.

  When another huge wave splashed up to the stern windows, she retreated to sit upon her trunk. She knew if the water crashed in she would be no better off seated on the trunk than in the cot, but that wild sea was too frightening to be near.

  Chilled, she wrung out her skirt as best she could, then plunged her hands under her armpits. Her heart thundered with every great rise of the ship, and each downward plunge.

  It could have been five minutes or five hours later when Parrette appeared, something wrapped in sailcloth gripped in her arms.

  “It’s tea,” she said. “The cook set the fires for hot water only, for the officers, and for you, captain’s orders. He put up a breakfast of sliced salt beef and ship’s bread harder than a cannon ball.”

  She unwrapped her cloth, disclosing the captain’s silver pot and a couple of sturdy wooden mugs.

  The two of them sat side by side on the trunk, gratefully drinking hot tea and then determinedly gnawing through the tough meat and the stale bread. Anna’s thoughts winged back to the long, astonishing day previous, which had begun so terribly and ended . . . she could not characterize it in her mind, except she smiled. So unexpected.

  She longed to see the captain’s face, to discover what it meant to him, if anything. She stared at her fingers, the nails uneven after the horrors of the orlop, and at her knees poking the skirt of her dove-colored serge gown. She knew she looked no different from the outside, but she was aware of a fundamental difference, a change of state. It might not be real to anyone else—would it be to him?

  Thump, yaw! The ship heaved at an impossible slant, then dove downward at such an angle her stomach clenched. She willed each plunge and rise to lessen, but they rose inexorably larger. Anna looked back, down, at the stern windows, and flung herself away—it seemed she was going to fall through the glass into the furious seas.

  She and Parrette clung together in terrified silence until rumbling footsteps and a perfunctory thud on the door brought in Perkins with several men behind him. “Mrs. Capting, we’re striking down all extras,” he said, pointing at the trunks. “Come with us. You’re to go below.”

  “The captain?” she asked.

  “Still on deck.”

  Anna and Parrette were bundled down to the wardroom, where they found the boy d’Ivry, his eyes circled a dull gray with exhaustion. His hair
was plastered to his skull as he sat down heavily at the table bolted to the deck. “Well, at all events, it’s done,” he said.

  The purser looked up from playing whist with the gunner’s mate. “Them dons is in the hold?”

  “We got them all across, near eighty of them.”

  “Eighty?” Anna repeated, astonished. “For so very large a ship?”

  Mr. d’Ivry’s expression lowered. “Eighty was all they found, after she struck her flag to Royal Sovereign.” He looked unhappy, as if the day before he had not been gleefully crowing about ‘thumping it into them, again and again.’ “Many went over the side, and between us all, they got scooped out of the water. Those who could float. The rest drowned.”

  “Skipper set the marines in double guard on them devils,” muttered the gunner’s mate. “That’s smart. I heared that first boatload, gabbing away in foreign. Planning a mutiny, most like.”

  The midshipman lifted a shoulder upwards. “At all events, their lieutenant, the only one still alive, is a civilized cove, speaks English—”

  He broke off at the sound of footsteps and voices.

  The crewmen rose to their feet, hands to foreheads. The midshipman doffed a hat that was not on his head as the captain limped in, followed by a thoroughly drenched young man in a once-beautiful Spanish lieutenant’s uniform, the red lapels leaking color down his waistcoat as if he bled. One epaulette had been torn off, and he had tied a handkerchief around his hand. From the look of it, at least a couple of fingers had been broken.

  “Sit, please, gentlemen,” Captain Duncannon said, his voice hoarse. “Madame.” He nodded at Anna, the corners of his mouth lifting briefly as she curtseyed (she could not prevent a blush), then he turned to the midshipman. “Mr. d’Ivry. I regret that I must rescind your permission to retire. I know this is yours and Jones’ sleep-watch, but there cannot be time for sleep. Fetch Mr. Jones, please, and both of you report to Mr. McGowan on the forecastle.”

  While he spoke the warrant officers and their mates vanished into the much wetter gunroom.

  “Please, seat yourself, Lieutenant Suarez,” he said in careful French, and holding out his hand toward Anna, “May I have the honor of presenting Lieutenant Suarez? Perkins,” he called in English, “please wait upon the lieutenant.”

  Perkins stumped up to the table. His method of talking to the Spanish officer was to speak very loudly and distinctly, as if the young man were hard of hearing, or slow.

  Under cover of their laborious conversation, Duncannon limped to Anna, wincing at every step.

  “Can you not take a moment to rest?” she asked.

  His head turned in a negation. “Not until this blows out. Sayers is up on deck, a capstan bar bound to his leg. No one will sleep until this squall passes.” He glanced at the young officer. “He’s very low. Lost nearly all his shipmates. I would take it kindly if you were to talk to him.”

  “I would be happy to.”

  He had been leaning against the table with his good hand; the wounded arm came around, and his fingers touched hers. His hand was cold. She gripped his fingers, but dropped her hand when Perkins boomed loudly, “Capting says, no galley fires to be lit.”

  Captain Duncannon murmured to Anna, “I had better get him out before he talks the wretched man into a calenture.” He said, “Perkins, help me to the ladder. I must return to my post.” He bowed stiffly to the lieutenant.

  Anna approached the Spanish lieutenant. He was not only still grimy from battle smoke, he looked exhausted. She held one hand to the table to steady herself as she curtseyed, wondering what to say. She understood Captain Duncannon’s impulse to be courteous, but she hadn’t the first idea how to speak to a man who had just lost a battle, and most of his shipmates.

  She said in Spanish, “I trust and hope you shall soon be home again.”

  His dark brown eyes widened when he heard her speak his language, and his head dropped back on the word home. “And when I am, it shall only be to be ordered out again to more of this damned, purposeless war, protecting these atheistical French, their souls to the devil. Ordered by the Prince of Peace.” His teeth showed when he uttered Godoy’s title, his voice derisive.

  Then he shook his head. “Pardon me, Senora Duncannon. I ought not to speak so before a lady. How is it that you speak the Spanish? And so very well?”

  He was still standing, also holding onto the table.

  “Shall we sit?” she asked.

  He moved like an aristocrat, but even so he could not entirely mask plain human tiredness as he fell into his chair. His head turned, and she saw that he was probably a year or two even younger than she was—scarcely any beard.

  “I have traveled to many cities in Spain,” she said, before she remembered that she was not supposed to be a lowly performer.

  But either he was too polite to ask why, or more likely he was too exhausted to take any interest in her motions. “My country,” he said, “is the most beautiful in the world, and the greatest. But the rot is at the top, and will continue to destroy us unless we attend to it.” Again he caught himself, and he asked politely what she had seen.

  She described the Roman theater of Merida, the Moorish palace in Seville, the beauties of Madrid, which brought the lieutenant’s chin up in pride. For a short time they discussed opera and Spanish dance, but after a remark about how Spanish dance was like the duel, once again he strayed to the war.

  And then it came out, what a disaster it had been from the beginning. Everything, from the stupidity of weaving together the Spanish ships with the French (“Because Villeneuve feared we would run. We! I was with the admiral at Toulon, as a ship’s boy. It was not we who have run from battle.”) to Captain Infernet’s noble, mad dash to rally what was left of the Combined Fleet. “And it might have answered, had the others followed . . .”

  As the lieutenant talked on, Anna remembered Villeneuve’s bitter complaints about his allies. She did not pretend to understand the young man’s words about strategy, wind, or artillery, but she sensed in his fatalistic language, so different from what she had heard at Admiral Lord Nelson’s table, that while the British had fought to win, from commanders to sailors, perhaps the French and Spanish commanders had fought because it was their duty to fight, and those under their command level had fought to live. Who would choose to make a “noble, mad” dash for a cause in which they had no faith?

  She was glad when Perkins brought some food and drink. The lieutenant was given one of the captain’s best bottles of wine, which he drank steadily as he grimly tried to work his way through a stale biscuit and a hunk of unsoftened salt beef straight from the cask.

  After his fourth glass of wine, his eyes actually rolled, and Anna said, “Pray excuse me.”

  She got up and made her way to the galley to seek water. Perkins and the cook were there. She was given a cup from a barrel, which she drank off while standing there, and when she returned, she found Lieutenant Suarez asleep, his head resting on his crossed arms.

  She withdrew to the gunroom, pressing against a bulkhead as the ship gave a violent yaw, water dripping from the working timbers. She nodded at the marine sentry, smoke-streaked still, his hair unpowdered. But his musket gleamed as he stood guard at the ladder.

  That was the last conversation for what became an endless stretch of terror as the storm built inexorably into a wild, howling hurricane. Parrette also sat in the gunroom, quietly telling over her rosary, her eyes closed; even the warrant officers had vanished to tend to the ship either on deck or from the hold.

  Anna shut her eyes, trying to compose herself to rest until Mr. Leuven, looking old and ill, appeared. “I beg you, ma’am, if you can tend the sick-berth, I can look after the cases coming down with storm-wounds. We are devilish hard-pressed.”

  Anna made her way into the sick berth, while Parrette went below to lend a hand with the wounded. The space with its close-packed cots and swinging hammocks was thick with a fug tinged with the aroma of spirits. On a chalk slate s
imilar to the one Anna had seen on the binnacle were scrawled directions for the various cases.

  There was little she could do beyond change bandages at intervals, dousing each with the splash of whisky. The patients endured this treatment because they were also permitted a dollop of said whisky, eked out with water, in a wooden scupper that they all shared around.

  At Anna’s appearance, they brightened considerably, the least wounded plucking at coverings to make themselves somewhat decent, and one or two even pushing back filthy tangled hair, and fingering bristle on chins and upper lips that would not be shaved any time soon.

  She saw all those eyes on her, some dull with pain and desperation as the room pitched mercilessly, water dripping down, and others shy, or bright with expectation. Midshipman Bradshaw’s eyes glittered. When she reached his cot, she saw that he was flushed with fever, and complaining of thirst.

  “He cannot have his dose until the watch bell, and that foot bandage gets changed,” Mr. Gilchrist said, one thin hand pressed to his bandaged ribs, several of which had been cracked by falling debris.

  Anna’s memories of torturous thirst during the relentless heat in Spain caused her to reflect that fever must feel very like, and what could be the harm in drinking? “Then we shall declare the watch change now,” she stated. “Since I hear no bells ringing.”

  She made her way around the beds, not only dispensing bandages and whisky-laced water, but trying to find a part of sheets or blankets not damp, wiping a cool cloth over flushed faces, and listening to fretful comments.

  At the end, she groped her way to the stool set by the hatch, directly under the swinging lantern. Mr. Bradshaw, lying nearby, reached his fever-hot hand to take hers. She understood it was comfort he sought, the unspoken comfort that could only be vouchsafed by touch.

  “Would you tip us the foreign song?” he asked, seeing her questioning gaze.

  “Foreign song?” Anna repeated.