The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) (6 page)

“Dirty bastards! Making real pigs of themselves, you
can bet, Tom!”

Tom looked his ignorance.

“The family, Tom – the wife and any daughters will
be there. No way of stopping it happening. Who’s here? John! Go and shout to
the Coles to get back here, will you.”

Murray trotted slowly to the house, called from a
distance, not wanting to go inside, keeping his hands clean by not seeing what
had happened.

The six appeared, slowly, stretching and grinning.

They ran to the jetty, jumped the railing of the
brig and crossed to the Star. The Coles brothers walked straight up to Smith,
dropped a heavy bag on the deck.

“Bloke ‘ad got a bit of a safe in there, Jack. I
reckon ‘e’d got a thou’ in gold there – didn’t count it, though, just put it
all in the bag, like, so’s to be fair.”

“Right, thanks, Joby – that was the right thing to
do, we’ll count it now, out in sight where everybody can see. Is that what took
you so long, putting this in the bag?”

Smith grinned, knowing that all six wanted the
chance to brag, to swagger, to boast – to clear their minds of any feelings of
guilt by making a parade of their acts.

“Nah – ‘e’d got ‘is missus there, as well, and a girl,
just about big enough, she was, old enough to learn what it’s all about. I ‘ad
both of ‘em twice, didn’t I, Jarge?”

Tom listened, said nothing, did nothing as the six
took their turns in boasting.

They cast off and sailed for Antigua, making a quick
passage; the Admiralty Court obligingly condemned their prizes and assumed the
slaves to have been on board the largest, for, strictly speaking, a Letter of
Marque conveyed to its holder the right to take maritime traders and thus could
be argued not to authorise expeditions on land – but there was a shortage of
labour on the plantations, for freemen would not work alongside slaves, no
matter what wage was offered, and so the taken field hands were too valuable to
be the subject of mere legal quibbling.

A single share came out at twenty-five pounds.

Tom sat on deck after the pay-out and looked at the
ninety-five golden guineas and the five shillings in silver he had just
received, then tenderly felt his face; it was worth it, he supposed, but only
just. He tucked the coins into his purse and tied the string in a double knot
before hanging it round his neck; this money was too hard earned to be thrown
away on whores and rum.

Later in the day he discarded the bandages to his
face and nerved himself to look in a mirror, dreading what he might discover –
he was still only seventeen, after all. His left eye drooped a fraction at the
corner and a clean-edged scar broadened to the width of a finger across his
cheek, tapering down to his mouth, which turned up a little now in a lop-sided
grin. It was not as bad as he had feared, made him look older, a man not a boy,
harder perhaps, but not dreadfully disfigured; he had not shaved in three
weeks, for obvious reasons, and was sprouting a moderately respectable ginger fuzz,
streaked with white immediately over the scar. He dug out his razor, shaved
partially, leaving a pair of mutton chop side whiskers, concluded he looked
like a prat and finished the job except for much longer sideburns than had been
his wont; he decided that casual acquaintances from Dorset – and he had no
other – would be very hard pressed to recognise him now, which was not too bad
a thing, as he had no wish ever to be known again in England.

Smith called the boarders to report on the following
day, the little boy messengers earning their pennies and bringing twenty of the
two dozen back with them. It had been intimated to him that the crew approved
of the freemen, believed they had pulled their weight and more and felt they
should be asked to sail again on a regular basis as single share men with a
leading hand selected from their number at one and a half.

Joseph led the nineteen who had come back with him,
quite naturally taking the front; Smith welcomed them and told them of their
new status and money, to their surprised pleasure. Their twelve pounds ten
apiece had made them cash-rich in their community, especially when added to
their initial five guineas – now they could hope to more than double that over
the next few months. The four who were staying ashore had all had girls with a
claim to a piece of land, were now settling with their wives and the pair of
goats and seed and shovel and prong and hoe and table and chairs for their hut
that their wealth had procured for them; those who sailed again had wider
ambitions – the stock for a small trade store or the purchase of a few fertile
acres on which they could raise a sugar crop of their own, the foundation for a
respectable future - if they lived.

Four more young men stood on the quayside,
hopefully.

“They’s the brothers of the four who gone, Master
Tom,” Joseph explained.

Smith waved them aboard, acting in the absence of
the captain who had used his personal share of the prize money to progress from
gin to smoother white rum and who could be heard occasionally, shouting or
singing in his cabin. The ship’s share had been set aside in a more sober
moment, remained in an account at the prize-agents, disbursed against Smith’s
signature for stores.

Brief discussion sent them south again – the
northern waters had proved barren once, would most likely do so in future,
there was no point going there. They decided to touch at Guadeloupe first,
poorer though it was as an island, then by-pass Martinique and make for the
Spanish waters off Trinidad and the Main before looking at the Dutchmen in
their little islands; Martinique, obviously rich, might nonetheless be a little
hot for them, though they would keep an eye wide open as they crossed its
sea-lanes.

Tom set to train up his boarders – he had given a
little thought to their performance on the schooner, had decided they had been
much too casual and disorganised – even half a dozen men with muskets and
pistols firing from concealment could have killed them all. It was an unlikely
event, but it might be better not to regret their bad luck afterwards and
explain that it really should not have happened. He had discovered four big old
horse-pistols in their armoury months before, had put them to one side as too
clumsy to bother with, a foot in the barrel and slightly greater than one inch
bore, more like small blunderbusses than true hand-guns, but they could be
useful he decided, used properly. He selected the four biggest of his men and
showed them how to load with three-quarters of an ounce of black powder and two
ounces of buck shot, eight big slugs of lead to each charge; they kicked like a
mule, but strong men using both hands could keep them horizontal and fired
together they would discourage any armed opposition in the narrow confines of a
ship’s decks.

The boarders talked the matter over and agreed that
the four pistoleers should stand at Tom’s shoulder, should fire at his command
then fall back to reload and be directed by Joseph as needful thereafter. The
remainder would be held in three groups, two of six and one of seven, generally
speaking to take bows, midships and stern respectively unless they were given
other orders as occasion arose. They liked the idea of knowing exactly what
they must do – it made them feel like proper fighting men, sea-soldiers rather
than amateur roughs hired on for the occasion.

They circled Guadeloupe, saw nothing other than a
tiny schooner fleeing south, twenty tons at most, too small and too fast to
attract their attention. Smith thought it might have been a government boat, a
small despatches carrier, the sort they sometimes called an aviso; no profit in
it at all. The cloud was thick, the night pitch-black and they hove-to in deep
water, preferring to close the shores of Martinique in daylight – they had to
pass the island on their way south and it seemed only sensible to take a look
at the shoreline as they went by; additionally, Smith was not entirely certain
in his dead reckoning – they had no access to naval charts and could only guess
at the nature or speed of any local current between the islands.

Dawn brought a small sloop into their waiting arms,
a national ship they thought, for she had a three pound chase gun and a dozen
swivels on the beam, although she had only a crew of six, on passage perhaps,
transferring from one command to another; she was no more than a forty tonner,
but might well be a useful tender in the islands, able to poke her nose into
the shallowest of inlets. The officer in command was a young man, a lieutenant
at most, maybe a warrant officer, and slack in his duties to be taken by
surprise at first light. Be that as it may, he surrendered instantly, put up no
fight at all, and told them of a half a dozen or so of island boats becalmed in
a small bay just north of Diamond Rock, all waiting for the wind to turn
sufficiently for them to weather the headland and make their final leg into the
safety of the harbour. He spoke very good English and they could understand him
easily.

Smith clapped on all sail, left the sloop with a
prize crew of four aboard and instructions to follow in their wake.

They found seven vessels in the bay, six of them
heavily laden island brigs and schooners; the seventh, also a brig, inshore of
them all and sheltered by them, waited a few minutes until Star was committed
and actually in the horns of the bay before clapping on all sail, at least
fifty men appearing in the rigging, and heading directly towards the Star.
Belatedly, Smith noticed that the wind seemed quite strong just here, and even
the clumsiest of merchant hulls could have held a southerly tack. The Frenchman
pointed up a little more and disclosed seven portlids rising and a broadside of
eight or nine pound cannon running out.

Star could not tack without opening her quarter to
that broadside; there was insufficient room in the bay to wear; if she tried to
cross the brig’s bows she was as likely as not to be rammed, for being too
slow. Blaine staggered on deck, assessed the situation and shouted a series of
meaningless orders, hopelessly gone.

Smith ignored his captain, called the chaser to
shoot and the larboard broadside to run out, hoping to cause enough damage to
slow the French sufficiently to scrape past and away, to run, although he
doubted it was possible. They had no grape – it had been too expensive – and
could not really hope to cut up her rigging sufficiently to slow her, but he
could see no alternative. They were unlikely to come out of this alive he
feared – the Coles’ activities on shore guaranteed that they would be treated
as pirates and hanged out of hand if they were taken.

Their own broadside did very little harm that they
could see, while the French fired seven aimed shots into their foremast, high
and precise and bringing down the foretopsail yard. They slowed instantly.

“Helm over, Jack,” Tom called, “ram ‘er, get on
board before they can hit us. We might do a bit more damage that way.”

Smith shrugged. “All hands to board!”

He swung the helm hard over, sails flapping in
confusion, crabbed down on the French bows a couple of minutes before her own
boarders expected to be in action.

Tom led his party over the rail, hauling out his
pistols and firing into the sixty or seventy men milling in the waist, sorting
themselves out into an organised defence. He heard the horse-pistols cough
beside him and a four-pounder fired from Star’s deck. He had just enough time
to close the gap, to run into the French before they could get onto the front
foot and start to press forward with their superior numbers. He drew his hanger
and gripped it in both hands, swinging it like a butcher’s pole-axe and
roaring.

There was an officer at the head of the French,
sword held in classical fencing mode; Tom slashed and missed, ducked, twisted
to one side and kicked him between the legs as he lunged and swiped down at his
head as he doubled over, a great meaty crunch rewarding his efforts. To his
left another swordsman was offering a high parry to Joseph’s cutlass; a slash
at waist height opened his guts, left him screaming. A matelot not a foot away,
a head butt into his face and knee up, brawling, gutter fighting, kick him as
he dropped then lunge with his hanger at the half-turned back of another who
was cutting at one of the freemen. The French were navy, regulars who knew the
correct ways of doing things and expected to be met by formed ranks with
cutlasses properly opposed; they were taken aback by the gutter rats swarming
over them.

Pushing forward, never letting them get organised,
driving them back so that they thought they were losing; kicking, screaming,
gouging, clawing just as much as using their swords; never letting them use
their numbers and discipline and training.

The horse pistols fired again, from the side,
cutting into the French from an unexpected angle, disconcerting them a little
more as well as knocking down three men. Another officer, the captain maybe,
flashily uniformed with lace and braid, his sword scoring across Tom’s ribs as
he frantically dodged to his left, hurting; the hilt of his own sword up and
into the man’s mouth, breaking teeth, him recoiling with the pain, hand going
up to his agony, a great wheeling slash cutting him almost in half, blood in a
huge gout, men jumping back on either side, horrified. A few hands dropped; one
terrified man, his face covered in his captain’s blood, blinded by it, shouted
for quarter; a dozen others realised they had lost, they must have, joined in
the cry, and suddenly the fighting had stopped.