In Gallant Company (11 page)

The marine stared at the water with amazement. ‘You have done nothing to reassure me, Dick!'

Bolitho could imagine the activity aboard the pursuing sloop. She would be almost as big as the
Destiny
, he thought wistfully. Fast, agile, free of the fleet's ponderous authority. Every glass would now be trained on the scurrying
Faithful
and her strange red device. The bow-chasers were probably run out with the hope of a crippling shot. Her captain would be waiting to see what the schooner might do and act accordingly. After months of dreary patrol work, with precious little help from the coastal villages, he would see the schooner as some small reward. When the truth was discovered, and Sparke had to explain what he had been doing, there would be a double-hell to pay.

He could understand Sparke's eagerness to get to grips with the enemy and do what Pears expected of him. But Frowd's advice had been sound, and he should have taken it. Now, they would have the sloop to contend with while they hunted for the Colonists and the craft they would be using to ferry powder and shot to a safe hiding place.

There was a muffled bang, the sound blown away by the wind almost as quickly.

A ball slashed along the nearest wave crest, and Stockdale said admiringly, ‘Not bad shooting.'

A second ball ripped right above the schooner's poop, and then Sparke, who had been standing rigidly like a statue, shouted harshly, ‘
There!
What did I tell you? She's wearing! Going about, just as I said she would!'

Bolitho watched the angle of the sloop's yards changing, the momentary confusion of her sails before she leaned over on the opposite tack.

Midshipman Weston exclaimed, ‘That was most clever of you, sir. I would never have believed . . .'

Bolitho felt his lips crease into a smile, in spite of his anxiety. Sparke, no matter what mood he was in, had little time for crawlers.

‘Hold your tongue! When I want praise from you I will ask for it! Now be about your duties, or I'll have Balleine lay his rattan across your fat rump!'

Weston scurried away, his face screwed up with humiliation as he pushed through some grinning seamen.

Sparke said, ‘We will shorten sail, Mr Bolitho. Tell Balleine to close up his anchor party in case we have to let go in haste. See that our people are all armed, and that the gunner's mate knows what to do when required.' His eyes fell on Stockdale. ‘Get below and put on one of the coats in the cabin. Captain Tracy was about your build, I believe. You'll not be near enough for them to spy the difference.'

Bolitho gave his orders, and felt some relief at Sparke's sudden return to his old self. Right or wrong, successful or not, it was better to be with the devil one knew.

He came out of his thoughts as Sparke snapped, ‘
Really
, must I do everything?'

As the evening gloom followed them towards the land,
Faithful
's approach became more stealthy and cautious. The hands waited to take in the sails, or to put the schooner into the wind should they run across some uncharted sandbar or reef, and every few minutes the leadsman's mournful chant from the forecastle reminded anyone who might still be in doubt of their precarious position.

Later, a little before midnight,
Faithful
's anchor splashed down, and she came to rest once again.

‘
IT'S GETTING LIGHTER,
sir.' Bolitho stood beside the motionless wheel and watched the water around the anchored schooner until his eyes throbbed with strain.

Sparke grunted but said nothing, his jaw working up and down on a nugget of cheese.

Bolitho could feel the tension, made more extreme by the noises of sea and creaking timbers. They were anchored in a strange, powerful current, so that the
Faithful
repeatedly rode forward until her anchor was almost apeak. If the tide fell sharply, and you could not always trust the navigational instructions, she might become impaled on one of the flukes.

Another difference was the lack of order and discipline about the decks. Uniforms and the familiar blue jackets of the boatswain's and master's mates had been put below, and the men lounged around the bulwarks in varying attitudes of relaxed indifference to their officers.

Only the marines, crammed like fish in a barrel, were still sealed in the hold, awaiting the signal which might never come.

Sparke remarked quietly, ‘Even this schooner would make a fine command, a good start for any ambitious officer.'

Bolitho watched him cut another piece of cheese, his hands quite steady as he added, ‘She'll go to the prize court, but after that . . .'

Bolitho looked away, but it was another jumping fish which had caught his eye. He must not think about
afterwards
. For Sparke it would mean almost certain promotion, maybe a command of his own, this schooner even. It was obviously uppermost in his mind just now.

And why not? Bolitho pushed his envy aside as best he could.
He himself, if he avoided death or serious injury, would soon be back in
Trojan
's crowded belly. He thought of Quinn as he had last seen him and shivered. Perhaps it was because of the wound he had taken on his skull. He reached up and touched it cautiously, as if expecting the agony to come again. But injury was more on his mind than it had been before he had been slashed down. Seeing Quinn's gaping wound had made it nearer, as if the odds were going against him with each new risk and action.

When you were very young, like Couzens or Midshipman Forbes, the sights were just as terrible. But pain and death only seemed to happen to others, never to you. Now, Bolitho knew differently.

Stockdale trod heavily across the deck, his head lowered as if in deep thought, his hands locked behind him. In a long blue coat, he looked every inch a captain, especially one of a privateer.

Metal rasped in the gloom, and Sparke snapped, ‘Take that man's name! I want absolute silence on deck!'

Bolitho peered up at the mainmast, searching for the masthead pendant. The wind had shifted further in the night and had backed almost due south. If that sloop had sailed past their position in the hope of beating back again at first light, she would find it doubly hard, and it would take far longer to achieve.

Another figure was beside the wheel, a seaman named Moffitt. Originally from Devon, he had come to America with his father as a young boy to settle in New Hampshire. But when the revolution had been recognized as something more than some ill-organized uprisings, Moffitt's father had found himself on the wrong side. Labelled a Loyalist, he had fled with his family to Halifax, and his hard-worked farm had been taken by his new enemy. Moffitt had been away from home at the time and had been seized, then forced into a ship of the Revolutionary Navy, one of the first American privateers which had sailed from Newburyport.

Their activities had not lasted for long, and the privateer had been chased and taken by a British frigate. For her company it had meant prison, but for Moffitt it had been a chance to change
sides once more, to gain his revenge in his own way against those who had ruined his father.

Now he was beside the wheel, waiting to play his part.

Bolitho heard the approaching hiss of rain as it advanced from the darkness and then fell across the deck and furled sails in a relentless downpour. He tried to keep his hands from getting numb, his body from shivering. It was more than just the discomfort, the anxious misery of waiting. It would make the daylight slow to drive away the night, to give them the vision to know what was happening. Without help they had no chance of finding those they had come to capture. This coastline was riddled with creeks and inlets, bays and the mouths of many rivers, large and small. You could hide a ship of the line here provided you did not mind her going high and dry at low water.

But the land was there, lying across the choppy water like a great black slab. Eventually it would reveal itself. Into coves and trees, hills and undergrowth, where only Indians and animals had ever trod. Around it, and sometimes across it, the two armies manoeuvred, scouted and occasionally clashed in fierce battles of musket and bayonet, hunting-knife and sword.

Whatever the miseries endured by seamen, their life was far the best, Bolitho decided. You carried your home with you. It was up to you what you made of it.

‘Boat approaching, sir!'

It was Balleine, a hand cupped round his ear, reminding Bolitho of the last moments before they had boarded this same schooner.

For a moment Sparke did not move or speak, and Bolitho imagined he had not heard.

Then he said softly, ‘Pass the word. Be ready for treachery.'

As Balleine loped away along the deck Sparke said, ‘I hear it.'

It was a regular splash of oars, the efforts noisy against a powerful current.

Bolitho said, ‘Small boat, sir.'

‘Yes.'

The boat appeared with startling suddenness, being swirled
towards the schooner's bows like a piece of driftwood. A stout fishing dory with about five men aboard.

Then just as quickly it was gone, steered or carried on the current, it was as if they had all imagined it.

Frowd said, ‘Not likely to be fishing, sir. Not this time o' day.'

Surprisingly, Sparke was almost jovial as he said, ‘They are just testing us. Seeing what we are about. A King's ship would have given them a dose of canister or grape to send them on their way, as would a smuggler. I've no doubt they've been passing here every night and day for a week or more. Just to be on the safe side.' His teeth showed in his shadowy face. ‘I'll give them something to remember all their lives!'

The word went along the deck once more and the seamen relaxed slightly, their bodies numbed by the rain and the raw cold.

Overhead the clouds moved swiftly, parting occasionally to allow the colours of dawn to intrude. Grey and blue water, the lush dark green of the land, white crests and the snakelike swirls of an inshore current. They could have been anchored anywhere, but Bolitho knew from his past two years' service that beyond the nearest cape, sheltered by the bay and the entrance to the Delaware River, were towns and settlements, farms and isolated families who had enough to worry about without a war in their midst.

Bolitho's excitement at being at sea again in the calling which had been followed by all his ancestors had soon become soured by his experiences. Many of those he had had to fight had been men like himself, from the West Country, or from Kent, from Newcastle and the Border towns, or from Scotland and Wales. They had chosen this new country, risked much to forge a new life. Because of others in high places, of deep loyalties and deeper mistrusts, the break had come as swiftly as the fall of an axe.

The new Revolutionary government had challenged the King, that should have been enough. But when he thought about it honestly, Bolitho often wished that the men he fought, and those he had seen die, had not called out in the same tongue, and often the same dialect, as himself.

Some gulls circled warily around the schooner's spiralling masts, then allowed themselves to be carried by the wind to more profitable pickings inland.

Sparke said, ‘Change the look-outs, and keep one looking to seaward.'

In the strengthening light he looked thinner, his shirt and breeches pressed against his lean body by the rain, shining like snakeskin.

A shaft of watery sunlight probed through the clouds, the first Bolitho had seen for many days.

The telescopes would be watching soon.

He asked, ‘Shall I have the mains'I hoisted, sir?'

‘Yes.' Sparke fidgeted with his sword-hilt.

The seamen hauled and panted at the rain-swollen halliards until, loosely set, the sail shook and flapped from its boom, the red patch bright in the weak sunlight.

The schooner swung with it, tugging at the cable, coming alive like a horse testing bit and bridle.

‘Boat to starboard, sir!'

Bolitho waited, seeing what looked like the same dory pulling strongly from the shore. It was unlikely that anyone would know or recognize any of the
Faithful
's company, otherwise the recognition patch would be superfluous. Just the sight of the schooner would be enough. Bolitho knew from his childhood how the Cornish smugglers came and went on the tide, within yards of the waiting excisemen, with no more signal than a whistle.

But someone knew. Somewhere between Washington's army and growing fleet of privateers were the link-men, the ones who fixed a rendezvous here, hanged an informer there.

He looked at Stockdale as he strode to the bulwark, and was impressed. Stockdale gestured forward, and two seamen swung a loaded swivel towards the boat, while he shouted in his hoarse voice, ‘Stand off there!'

Moffitt stepped up beside him and cupped his hands. ‘What d'you want of us?'

The boat rocked on the choppy water, the oarsmen crouched over with the rain bouncing on their shoulders.

The man at the tiller shouted back, ‘That Cap'n Tracy?'

Stockdale shrugged. ‘Mebbe.'

Sparke said, ‘They're not sure, look at the bloody fools!'

Bolitho turned his back on the shore. He could almost feel the hidden telescopes searching along the deck, examining them all one at a time.

‘Where you from?' The boat idled slowly nearer.

Moffitt glanced at Sparke, who gave a curt nod. He shouted, ‘There's a British man-o'-war to seaward! I'll not wait much longer! Have you no guts, man?'

Frowd said, ‘That's done it. Here they come.'

The open mention of the British sloop, and Moffitt's colonial accent, seemed to have carried more weight than the scarlet patch.

The dory grated alongside and a seaman caught the line thrown up by one of the oarsmen.

Stockdale stood looking down at the boat, and then said in an offhand manner which Bolitho had not heard before, ‘Tell the one in charge to step aboard. I'm not satisfied.'