The French Prize (5 page)

“Feels well, sir. Helm answers right and proper.”

Jack nodded. He paced. He ran his eyes over the sails, and the time rolled past like the dark water moving under their keel.

The first hints of dawn were starting to show themselves when Noah Maguire, once just another Irishman from Cork, now an able-bodied seaman from Philadelphia, a good man at sea but a fearsome drunk ashore, came ambling aft, turned the glass, took up the bell rope, and rang out four bells.

“Maguire,” Jack called. “First light soon. Take this glass and up aloft with you.”

Maguire responded with an “Aye,” took the telescope that Jack offered, and disappeared up the main shrouds. This was a precaution that his father had often told him about, how in the naval service in times of war they would have a lookout aloft at first light, to minimize the chance that the dawn might reveal some unhappy surprise, such as a powerful enemy in the offing. Indeed, according to his father the entire ship would go to quarters at dawn, just to be ready.

Jack would not go that far. And of course there was no such thing as “quarters” in the merchant service, and since no merchantman carried any sort of weapons with which they might reasonably defend themselves, such a precaution would be pointless in the extreme. But in waters infested with French privateers, having a man aloft at dawn seemed a reasonable precaution.

It was not long after Maguire had disappeared aloft that the first gray light began to spread along the deck. The masts, hatches, the fife rails and pumps, and forward, the windlass and the heel of the bowsprit slowly revealed themselves in the gathering dawn. The sky to the east took on a pinkish hue. Just forward of the mainmast
Abigail
sported a galley, housed in a deckhouse about the size of a generous privy, and now the first puffs of black smoke began chuffing from the galley's stovepipe and whisking away forward and downwind.

It was no more than ten minutes after that, with the sun finally breaking the rim of the horizon, that Maguire sang out from aloft.

“On deck! Sail, ho! Two points off the larboard bow and all but hull down! Can't make out more than that, Mr. Mate!”

“That's well!” Biddlecomb called back. “Keep your eye on it, sing out when you can see more!”

Sail
 … Jack swallowed down a rising panic, chided himself for a coward.
You're in the West Indies, you damned fool!
he thought.
Of course there's a sail, there are more damned sails here than the damned bloody sail loft in the Royal Dockyard in damned Portsmouth!

And, inevitably, there was the image of his father, standing unmoved amid the flying metal, the hero of the War for Independency who most certainly did not urinate in his breeches at the sight of a strange sail on the horizon.

“Oh, damn it all!” Jack said, which earned him a “Pardon, sir?” from the seaman on the helm.

“Nothing, Lacey, it's nothing.”

Six bells and Jack was about to call up to Maguire to ask if he could see anything more, an undignified display of impatience and he knew it, when the captain appeared on the deck. He was still dressed in his nightshirt, as was his custom in the warmer latitudes. “Jack, did I hear something about a strange sail?”

“Two points off the larboard bow, sir, and all but hull down. That's from Maguire aloft, sir, don't know if we can see it from here.”

Asquith raised the telescope he had brought from his cabin and swept the horizon. “Yes, there's the buggerer,” he muttered. “Tops'ls, that's all I can see,” he added, then he looked aloft. The rising wind was making his thin, white hair stream out to leeward. “Still carrying the t'gan'sls, Mr. Biddlecomb?”

“I was just about to order them handed, sir,” he said, which was not strictly the truth. Actually, it was not the truth in any sense. But, motivated by Asquith's pointed hint, he called an order forward that sent men running to the foremast, casting off the topgallant halyard, hauling away clewlines and buntlines to bring the yard down to the cap.

Make us less visible from a distance, in any event,
he thought.

“Deck, there!” Maguire called down. “She's hull up now, schooner or brigantine, I'll warrant!”

Jack could take it no more. “By your leave, sir, I'd like to go aloft and have a look.”

“Of course, Mr. Biddlecomb, of course,” Asquith said. Jack took off his hat, a moderately high-crowned, round-brimmed affair, and stuffed it between the binnacle box and the aft skylight, shed his coat, and swung himself up into the main shrouds. Climbing aloft, up the hundred or so feet of a swaying, plunging mainmast, over the futtock shrouds that ran at a sharp angle from the shrouds to the edge of the maintop, up and over and up the topmast shrouds, it warranted no more consideration than climbing a set of stairs and, young and fit as he was, took only a bit more effort.

He reached the topmast crosstrees and continued up the topgallant shrouds. Had the topgallant sail still been set, he would have had to climb all the way to the masthead to see over it. But by his orders (and he could feel that the wind had indeed built considerably, and knew he should have taken in the topgallant sail an hour before) the yard had just been lowered, the sail clewed up. Jack could feel the vibration in the mast as somewhere below him two hands were climbing aloft to stow it.

Five feet up the topgallant shrouds Jack swung inboard and stepped onto the mast cap. Maguire, perched in the ratlines to leeward, handed him the telescope and pointed toward the western horizon. Biddlecomb could see the sails now, whitish gray with a geometric appearance that showed they were not clouds but rather something made by the hands of man, barely visible against the dawn sky. Fifteen miles or so of rolling, deep blue water separated the two vessels.

Jack wrapped an arm around the topgallant mast. The tallow slush applied to the wood to ease the topgallant yard's travel was sticky and black and fouled his linen shirt, but there was nothing for it. He held the telescope to his eye, swept the horizon until the sails came into view. He twisted the tube, bringing them into focus.

“Hmmm…” he said.
Schooner or brigantine
 … Maguire was right about that. He could make out no details, just the general profile of the distant vessel, but he had seen ships enough that he could tell a great deal from what to a landsman would be just an innocuous shape on the horizon. And he did not like what he saw. There was a pronounced rake to the masts, and the sails had a towering quality, suggesting a lofty ship. A ship built for speed. Such as a privateer might be.

On the other hand, she seemed to be under easy sail and making toward the northward, not on a course to intercept. Jack lowered the glass. “Has she altered course at all, or made any sail change?” he asked.

“Not what I've seen, sir,” Maguire said. John Burgess and an ordinary named Ratford came swarming up over the crosstrees and out along the topgallant yard, gathering up great armfuls of the beating canvas and bundling it up on the yard.

“Hmmm…” Jack said. He raised the glass again. The sails had a pink hue, shading by the rising of the sun.

He hasn't seen us yet, the blind buggerer
 … Jack thought. From the schooner's perspective
Abigail
would be right in the sun and the blazing dawn light was hiding them.

We'd better turn and run like the devil was on our arse
, he thought. It was not his decision, of course, but he reckoned that Asquith would do as he suggested. Not that it was quite as simple as that. This brigantine son of a whore was downwind of them, which meant the only way to run was a beat to windward. Any other point of sail would put the two ships on headings that would eventually intersect. But from the lean, weatherly look of the stranger, there was no chance that the tubby old
Abigail
would ever outrun them on a taut bowline.

Still, if they were to haul their wind now, run off to weather while the sun was in the stranger's eyes, they might put enough distance between them that the privateer, if such he was, would never close it. They might be gone over the horizon before the Frenchie even knew they were there.

“Oh, he's seen us now,” Maguire said. Jack put the glass back to his eye. He could see the distant ship was altering course, turning toward them, and he saw the gray patch of sail grow taller as they set more canvas.

Damn
 … Jack wanted nothing more than to curse out loud, but he knew better than to let his building panic show in front of Maguire or any of the men. Still, he could not help thinking about what a French privateer could mean. Rotting in a prison while some wild-eyed radicals decided the fate of the ship, cargo, and crew. Fever, dysentery, starvation. The guillotine, perhaps. With everything blowing to hell in France, that possibility did not seem too farfetched. Jack swallowed hard.

And then he had an idea.

 

4

Jack handed the glass to Maguire, grabbed a windward backstay, and slid down to the deck. The captain had gone below, and Jack was morally certain he was seated in his day cabin with a cup of tea and two slices of toast with butter and jam. It was his custom every morning, and Asquith was not the sort who liked to vary his routine, no matter what was happening beyond the confines of the ship.

Jack ran his eyes over the sails, nodded to Lacey at the helm. “Steady as she goes.”

“Steady as she goes, aye.”

Jack disappeared down the scuttle, down to the little space set aside for navigation, just forward of the bulkhead that separated the master's cabin from the rest of the lower deck. Spread out on the small table was the chart of that corner of the ocean, and spread across the chart, the smooth arc of pencil marks, tiny dark points representing
Abigail'
s real progress along her watery track.

They had been dead reckoning through the night, making calculations of the ship's position based on her speed, course, the leeway she made, and any currents setting through. Which meant her current position was a guess. A highly educated guess, to be sure, but a guess just the same. With the coming of daylight, however, Jack would be able to take bearings on Montserrat and Antigua to the east and more perfectly establish exactly where they were.

He traced his finger along the chart. Northwest of their fix, north of their intended track, he saw the faint circle he had drawn on their voyage outward bound, two weeks before. The single word he had written in pencil.
Bank
.

“Jack, what's acting?” Asquith came out of his cabin. He had pulled on breeches and stuffed his nightshirt into them. He was still wiping his mouth with a linen napkin.

“Schooner or brigantine, sir, and a lofty one by the looks. She altered course in our direction when she saw us, which don't look good.”

“No … no it does not,” Asquith agreed, though he did not seem terribly concerned. Jack figured the old man was either too cool to show any worry, or getting too infirm to recognize the danger. In the way of first mates, Jack reckoned it was the latter.

“So, here's what I was thinking, sir,” Jack went on, speaking slowly. “We won't outrun him on any point of sail. But see here…” He pointed to the pencil line representing the bank. “You recall this, from when last we passed this way?”

“Yes, I recall,” Asquith said. It was a sandbar, reaching up from the bottom to just a few feet below the surface of the sea, shifting and unmarked on any chart, one of the great hazards of navigation in that part of the world. It was invisible from deck level, and Burgess just happened to have spotted it while aloft seizing new ratlines on the larboard topgallant shrouds.

“Well, sir,” Jack continued, “my thought was, if we set our course thus…” He traced a line on the chart with his finger that moved from the
Abigail
's current position to a spot just to leeward of the bank. “We could haul our wind and scrape past this bank, still on a starboard tack. This other fellow would make to overhaul us thus…” Jack now traced out the most reasonable course for the stranger to take, if he was indeed trying to intercept
Abigail
. “But if we make him fall off more trying to intercept us, he'll never weather the bank. Either he would tack and tack again, which surely would give us time enough to sail away, or, with any luck, he would not know the bank was there and run aground.”

Asquith looked at the chart and said nothing.

“Do you understand, sir?” Jack asked.

“Of course I understand, I've not gone soft in the head quite yet, you know,” Asquith snapped. “This is all very well, but it means maintaining our present course for an hour or more, which means he gets damned close to us before we haul our wind.”

“Yes, sir, that's right, but there's nothing for it. If we make a simple footrace of it, we lose. If we can hang him up on this sandbank, we might get away yet. If not, it hardly matters if we are taken within the hour or four hours from now.”

That was the simple fact of the matter. It was geometry really, nothing more. The ships were sailing straight lines, the sides of a triangle that must meet at a fixed point. The direction of the wind, the direction in which the ships could sail in relation to that wind, the location of the submerged sandbank, they were all factors in the geometric puzzle, nerves and seamanship the human aspects of the equation.

Asquith sighed. “You make a point, Jack, you make a point. If we do nothing, we are taken, and it hardly matters how soon. Very well, we shall try this trick of yours.” He sounded resigned and not particularly hopeful. “It will be Mr. Tucker's watch soon, but I'll ask you to keep the deck,” he added. “I don't think Mr. Tucker will object to having this cup taken from his hands.”

“No, sir,” Jack agreed. He bent over the chart, marked his course, walked the line to the compass rose with the parallel rule. By the time he looked up, Asquith was already gone, up the ladder to the quarterdeck. Jack followed behind.