How Dark the Night (35 page)

The first mate nodded and set off.

Bringing her off two points brought the wind from her beam to her quarter and allowed
Falcon
to better flee before the raging gale. But it was a course, Hugh realized, that took her toward Cape Horn, not Cape Town. He prayed that daylight would bring with it an easement of wind sufficient to allow her to lie to under a backed storm jib and a trysail secured abaft the mainmast. To set those sails they would need to bring her about into the wind and keep her there until the heavy canvas could be bent on. To attempt such a maneuver now, in the heart of darkness and without a clear view of what was coming at them, might cause the schooner to veer to windward and broach, her vulnerable broadside exposed to the raging sea.

Dawn revealed a gray world of ugly low-lying clouds and menacing twenty- to thirty-foot waves capped with white spume whipped up by what had intensified into near hurricane-force winds. The entire surface of the ocean, as far as the eye could see, was flecked with white foam. Each time
Falcon
rode up a towering wave and hesitated briefly at the crest, Hugh scanned to windward, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse on the distant horizon of anything that might indicate a change of weather. But he saw no horizon. Each time, before
Falcon
plunged down into a deep watery canyon, he saw only dark skies and white seas. And the barometer continued to fall. And the wind continued to intensify.

The moments down in the trough between two towering waves, where there was no wind and all was eerily quiet, were among the most dangerous. Without the stabilizing effect of the topsails, which, had they been set, were tall enough to draw a breath of wind even at the lowest depths, the schooner slewed about as if trying to escape before the next dreadful climb into the shrieking wind that drove rain into raw flesh as though it were a torrent of pricking needles. Hugh needed all his skill, instincts, and endurance to keep
Falcon
's bowsprit in line with the mammoth westward-rolling waves.

On and on they plowed over the swells, sea mile after sea mile. In the meager light of day Hugh ordered all remaining wisps of canvas taken in. They were now running for their lives under bare poles.

Paul Shipley slogged his way aft along the starboard bulwark, seawater sloshing up almost to his waist. The starboard scuppers were no longer able to keep up with the weight of seawater swirling against them. “I've sent the first watch below, sir,” he shouted, “to snatch what rest and food they can. I'm here to relieve you, sir,” he had to almost scream to make himself heard.

“Very well, Paul,” Hugh shouted. He could not deny the bone-weary exhaustion consuming him. His efforts to hold the helm had left him weak and shaking. The wind was pushing his eyeballs back into their sockets and forcing tears from the corners of his eyes. “You, Sturgis, and I will alternate at the helm. From here on, it's one-hour shifts until this bastard has had its fill of us, one way or the other. Understood?”

Shipley acknowledged and took command of the helm.

Hugh turned his back to the wind and brought his mouth up to his mate's ear. “I'm going below to check on Pearson,” he shouted through cupped hands, referring to the injured sailor who was strapped into Hugh's bunk, “and Mr. Endicott.”

Shipley nodded, his gaze steadied forward.

Below, out of the wind, the jerks and yaws of the schooner forced Hugh to walk gingerly, holding onto or leaning against something at all times lest he be thrown onto the deck. He began to peel off his soaked oilskins and then decided not to bother; he'd be returning topside shortly. When he ran a cold hand over his face to brush away the droplets that still covered it, he tasted salt. And he still felt the sting of salt in his eyes.

“Sweet Jesus in heaven,” he muttered to himself. He had ridden out storms in the Caribbean, but in all his days at sea—in service first to the Royal Navy and then to Cutler & Sons—Hugh Hardcastle had never known the raw fear that coursed through him now that he had time to actually think rather than just react. As he inched along the bulkhead, his back against the outer side of Haskins' cabin and then his own, tossed about by the haphazard motions of the schooner, the thought came to him that many an experienced sailor had died at sea in such conditions.

At the after cabin door he knocked once, twice. When there was no reply, he opened the door and stepped inside. In the dim light admitted by the thick wooden shutters secured over the stern windows he saw the two wingback chairs lying upended against the starboard bulwarks amid papers, files, books, and broken glass and china. The sudden shock of a wave smashing against the hull sent him lurching and reeling like a drunken man. He grabbed hold of the back of the sofa just in time to break his fall. On the bed nearby, Jack Endicott lay on his right side with his back to Hugh and his knees drawn up into fetal position. The stench of vomit filled the stale air. Although the after cabin contained its own private head emptying directly into the sea, Endicott had not made it there. Or, Hugh suspected, had not tried to make it.

“Jack?” Hugh called out tentatively. No response.

“Jack!” he said in a louder voice.

Endicott emitted a low guttural groan.

“Anything I can do for you, Jack?” Hugh did not expect an answer. There was nothing he could do for Endicott.

Endicott responded with two weak backhanded motions of his left hand. His message was clear: Get the hell out and leave me alone.

“Right,” Hugh said with forced good cheer, his own innards roiling from the rank odor. “I'll check back later. Chin up, Jack. We'll soon be out of this slop.”

Hugh sidestepped from the after cabin to the door of his own cabin, where he braced his legs and waited. During the brief lull at the bottom of a trough he quickly opened the door and lurched in.

He had to pause a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Unlike the after cabin, the first mate's cabin had no windows or portholes to shutter, and the aft hatchway was closed tight, permitting only drips of water to ooze through. The only other light normally available belowdecks passed through a scuttle, also used for ventilation, secured into the deckhead above. But the scuttle had been covered with a deadlight to prevent water from sloshing below. In the darkness, with the violent pitching and rolling of the schooner and the otherworldly creaks and groans of her timbers as she took one harsh blow after another,
Falcon
's main deck seemed like a Stygian realm of the dead and dying rather than the well-designed interior of a graceful schooner.

“Captain,” Hugh heard Pearson weakly rasp. He made his way over to the bunk and dropped to a knee, clutching the retaining edge of the bunk as a handhold. “How are you doing, Nate?”

“Fine, sir,” Pearson replied, but even in the poor light Hugh could see that was not so. The sailor's face was as white as the pillow his head rested on—the part of it that was not splotched in red—and the brown hair on one side of his head was matted in blood. Hugh grabbed a shirt of his that had fallen from its peg onto the floor and crawled over to the wide-bottomed barrel containing fresh water, which surprisingly had remained upright. He soaked the shirt in the water and then half-filled a cup whose handle had been attached to a hook secured to the tub. He crawled back to the bed, snaked his arm under Pearson's neck, and gently lifted his head. “Drink,” he said.

Pearson brought both hands to the cup and drank greedily before a hard roll of the schooner wrenched the cup from his grasp. “Thank you, sir,” he said as Hugh laid his head back down. “That did the trick.”

Hugh dabbed at Pearson's bloody head with the wet shirt. He could not determine the extent of the wound, only that the cloth had absorbed
fresh blood. He withdrew a small sailor's knife from its sheath at his belt and cut away a sleeve. This he wrapped around Pearson's head, over the wound. As he rose carefully to his feet, Pearson again mumbled, “Thank you, sir.”

“You're welcome, Nate,” Hugh said. “Rest easy. I'll be back,” he added before working his way out of the cabin. Just as he reached the companionway leading up to the weather deck,
Falcon
slewed hard to leeward. Stumbling forward, Hugh seized a lower rung of the ladder and hung on for dear life until the schooner had gone over as far as she would and slowly began to right herself. When she was back on an even keel, more or less, he pulled himself laboriously up the ladder.

On deck, his first impression was that the wind had eased a knot or two during his stint belowdecks. Paul Shipley, still at the helm, confirmed that impression.

“I think we've seen the worst of it, sir,” he said. “She's beginning to moderate. The wind, that is, not the sea. And sir, the garboard strakes are leaking. Patten went down in the hold for a look, and he reports we're taking in water. Nothing to be overly concerned about yet, I should think.”

“Shit,” Hugh cursed aloud, although he was not surprised by Seaman Patten's report. The garboard strakes were the first planks rising from the keel and were the hardest to caulk. If seawater were to seep into a vessel during a bad storm, every sailor worth his salt knew it would likely be through the garboard strakes.

“We've manned the pumps?” Hugh asked, already knowing the answer. He had heard the clanking amidships when he had been below.

“We have, sir. Sturgis is down there now seeing to it and assigning shifts. We're holding our own, I believe. We can recaulk in Cape Town—Hang on, sir!”

Falcon
, riding the cusp of a wave, took a sudden sharp dive, careening down the wave's leeward slope toward the trough. Hugh lunged for the railing and hung on with one thought in mind:
Falcon
's hull. She could not many more times run bow-on down a wave like a lone lancer charging a Mongol horde and survive. He dared not contemplate how long the schooner could continue this fight, especially now with water coming in.

“I've got the helm, Paul,” he said in the lull. “Your hour is up. Go below and advise Sturgis that he's next. I'll hear his report when he comes on deck.”

Shipley nodded. When the wheel was firmly in the grip of his captain, he waded forward toward the aft hatchway, keeping a hand on the starboard railing for balance. Hugh watched him disappear below and
then peered forward at the next wave in battle array. It seemed considerably taller and steeper than the others, more ominous; and something else was different, too. Unlike previous ones, this wave towered so high that it seemed primed to collapse under its own crushing weight. Now on the high upward roll, Hugh faced a nearly vertical slope with grayish-white spume dancing on its cap, as though challenging the impudence of the puny block of wood bobbing up and down like a cork on the endless expanse of angry gray water and white foam.

Alone on the weather deck, Hugh felt a chill run down his spine. “Come on, you beautiful bitch,” he muttered, urging
Falcon
to Herculean efforts. He hunched over the wheel and gripped its spokes with all his might, fighting to keep the bowsprit dead-on in line with the wave's monstrous roll, painfully aware that one small error at the helm could spell instant disaster. Up, up the schooner climbed, until at the very peak of the wave she hesitated, giving her captain a quick sweeping vista of the South Atlantic and a glance to windward that disclosed a brighter sky on the far eastern horizon and thin shafts of golden sunlight streaking down through breaks in the distant grayish-black clouds.

Mesmerized by the sight, Hugh's attention was jolted back when he felt
Falcon
's bow tip downward, toward the abyss, and heard the ferocious thundering roar that came at her from behind, a gargantuan wash of foaming-mad seawater that sounded like every demon in Hell was shrieking down upon them. The cresting wave crashed over the schooner's stern in a cascade of water so powerful that it plucked Hugh Hardcastle from his place at the helm as though he were a twig and propelled him down the full length of the schooner, his body ricocheting off masts sprung from their shrouds and stays and snapped off like matchwood. Hugh slammed hard against the forward larboard bulwarks, and from there was carried up and over her forecastle and bow, feet-first as though spurting from a colossal spigot.

Underwater for what seemed like hours, his bearings utterly askew, Hugh managed to claw his way upward. He broke the surface gasping, thrashing, sputtering, drawing air deep into his tortured lungs. He spotted a broken mast floating nearby and sidestroked over to it, pain searing through his body with each stroke. Draping his left arm over the spar, he treaded water as best he could and searched wildly for
Falcon
to shout out a cry for help. He found her, lying over on her beam-ends, a crippled gull shorn of its wings, and nary a soul visible anywhere on her or around her. As Hugh watched in abject horror,
Falcon
gradually settled into the foaming sea, water pouring into her from every quarter, until her bow lifted,
drawn down by the weight of water filling her spacious after cabin. For brief, agonizing moments her bowsprit remained, pointing skyward as if in silent tribute or final farewell. Then, on a steep uproll, a wave washed over the bowsprit and it too slipped from view, leaving Hugh Hardcastle adrift and forlorn upon a cold, desolate sea.

Fourteen

Hingham, Massachusetts

June 1808

O
N THE DAY BEFORE
the Atlantic claimed
Falcon
, Katherine Cutler took a bad spill on the front stairway in her home on South Street. Richard heard the sickening thuds and rushed to her side. After first checking for broken bones and finding none, he cradled her in his arms and carried her, barely conscious, to the four-poster in their bedroom. When he was satisfied there was nothing more he could do for her, he raced down the stairs and out the front door in search of Dr. Prescott.