Cross of Fire (48 page)

‘No,’ Howard stood, dropped the chains, kicked them to a corner. ‘Not mad. He has let you go. He has readied the ship.’

‘To fly into a hurricane! After his damned pirate! And he wants his officers to make scarecrows!’

Howard plucked his shirt cuffs.

‘To be fair he wishes
you
to fill the sacks. I will charge the long-guns. And he has let me speak to you at least.’

Manvell joined him in standing, put a hand to his shoulder.

‘Then we shall speak, Thomas, in the moments he has spared us. Our position is both privilege and duty, you know this? Our privilege is to look after the men around us. Souls not able to speak for themselves. How goes the ship?’

‘All willing. He brings them a fight. And gold at the end of it.’

‘And how do we get out of Typhon’s fury? Buy our passage? We will only be giving coin to Charon.’

Howard took the hand from his shoulder.

‘Have you been drinking, sir?’

‘How does one board a ship in a storm, Thomas? It is only the pirate’s destruction he seeks. There will be no gold.’

‘So we will sink the pirate. That was always our mission.’

‘No. He
declared
it our mission. We were to meet Ogle and Herdman. Hunt Roberts and Devlin. Three king’s ships protecting the waves. There was nothing of gold, nothing of chasing into storms.’

‘So how would you have it?’

Manvell bit his thumb, stroked his wrists.

‘I would see it as my duty and privilege to those who cannot speak, to take a ship away from the hurricane. Let the pirate be dashed. What would we gain?’

‘A rope. For mutiny.’

‘Nonsense. A martial court hangs more paper than men. The storm will be our defence.’ He gripped Howard like a brother.

‘We could take the ship, Thomas! It is our right. For our duty and privilege. No mutiny for vanity or glory. For sense!’

‘Are you afraid, Christopher?’

Manvell released him, held the lantern’s sway and steadied their shadows.

‘No, Thomas,’ he said ruefully. ‘I am only afraid that when the inquisition comes I would not be able to defend my captain’s actions. Or my own.’

Thomas broke their coffin of a cabin by spreading open the door, the marine outside waiting, pretending not to have heard as if the thin door opened on another universe.

‘We have less than an hour now for you to make these sacks, sir. I have afforded all apprentices and servants to you.’

Manvell let go the light, watched its wild swing.

‘Can I carry my sword, Lieutenant?’

Howard put his tricorne to his head for the cocks would run the water away from his shoulders.

‘I would advise it, Christopher. And I permit.’ He smiled, hoped he saw the same in return, and vanished from the doorway.

Even within the rising wind and rolling waves over the fo’c’sles, the toll of two ship’s bells could be heard by both crews. They stilled and looked across the swells as if they were only men at their ploughs in the field and the sound were just from the distant church of another village.

Pirate and king’s man held at their stations to listen. The bell summoning. The bell warning. It marked the hour. Its morose peal came at the same hour on days in port, the same hour on days with white-water at the gunwales. And it might always mark their last hour, so listen well.

The bell tolled slow and unnatural in their thoughts, its reverberation surely the cause of the tremble in their working hands, and it signalled the edge of the storm spitting at them for daring to enter.

The rain swiped razors across their sight, slashed from every corner of wood. The courses above were wrestled by enraged spirits, the men at their ropes deceived that they had some control over the wrath of nature, having long forgotten that civilisations before their own revered its fury as a conclave of gods. Nature was too variant and powerful to be the whim of a single malevolent force.

‘She’s still coming!’ Peter Sam, amidships, shouted to Devlin on the quarterdeck. ‘Chasing! To our forefoot!’

Devlin exaggerated a nod to show he had heard.

His enemy chased to cross them at the nearest distance – across their starboard side. A good move if she had bow chasers, as Devlin would have done, but he could see no guns there.

She was conning into her three-thousand yard range, jumping like a horse raised for the flats, powering hard but leaning away. Her broadside high, as she wished, her long-guns not threatened by the water. He would have to change that.

He had a minute to him. Half of that to decide not just his own action but that which was centred in his foe’s mind.

A bluff. The prow cutting to make him turn away from the storm, helm-a-lee, and run. And some advantage in that, for the
Shadow
’s
stern guns could bite and she would have the wind at her back. The bluffer lines of his girl would gain three knots to his enemy’s hulk.

But that would be running. And no-one who had ever seen the
Shadow
had seen her stern.

Or not a bluff. Coming into range. With the weather gage she would take the wind from the
Shadow
’s
lee, put her helm down and those ports would open and those long-twelves would stare at French strakes again.

His minute was almost done. He looked fore to the storm, the sea black as the sky. They might catch some warmth from their enemy before they made that maelstrom.

He went to the ear of the black sailor at the helm.

‘Match his two-points. Across his bows.’

He stepped down.

‘Lawson! Any sail to make that storm! Peter Sam! Hartley! Starboard guns. Run ’em out!’

Chapter Thirty-Eight

‘She’s coming about!’ Jenkins yelled for all, spitting out rain and slapping his face. ‘I see gun crews!’

‘She do not have the range,’ Coxon said.

‘Maybe “she” do not know that!’

‘He’s keeping to the storm. Thinks we won’t follow.’ Coxon went to the rail, gripped the wet wood and looked fore to his bow and the black wall.

Jenkins slipped his way to join him, the deck already awash before the storm.

‘He knows we can’t,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. If we head east now we can rake his stern as he goes. Bring down something.’

Coxon said nothing. The veil between the two ships was too opaque, yet he sought the familiar figure about her.

Spraybows shimmered in the spindrift running off her freeboard, off the tops of the whitecaps bucking them both, a Viking Bifröst bridge between them. He strained his ear over the side, closed his eyes.

‘Listen!’ He pulled Jenkins to him. ‘You hear?’

Jenkins took off his hat and tried to block out the wind and rain from one side. At first he could hear nothing but his complaining ship being shaved by the wind. And then it came, but he did not believe.

‘A fiddle! Pipes? Flutes?’

‘Two fiddles,’ Coxon said. ‘And fifes. He wants us to think they are enjoying. That they can yawn and afford to play while they fight. If they start to sing then we will know we have them worried.’

Jenkins put back his hat and gaped up at the black wall stretching above their masts. The sea and the sky formed one monstrous wave bearing down on their eggshell world.

‘Get the sergeant,’ Coxon said to the back of Jenkins’ head. ‘Get him to play us a drum. A beat to quarters. Make them hear
that
. Tell Howard to run out his guns.’

‘But not to the storm, Captain?’ He saw that Coxon’s grip was white against the rail, his feet never moving despite the ever-changing camber.

‘Let him taste our chain. Then we will load with shot from both decks. See if he likes the storm then.’ He went to the rail above the deck, found a midshipman yet tasked.

‘Get below and bring me Kennedy, boy. I’ll have the pirate beside me now!’

Jenkins watched him parade the rail, no care for the battering rain, hands clasped behind, estranged from the light being sucked from the ship, the fo’c’sle already in darkness, a black line being drawn athwart like the creep of sun on a dial. He dashed to stand by the mainmast, already in shadow, and waved the stout sergeant from his cowering under the quarterdeck.

Devlin strode behind his guns.

‘Quoins out, Hartley!’ he bellowed and Robert Hartley blew a kiss on his smouldering linstock. No more time remained to delay the removal of the aprons from the guns’ vents that protected from the rain; the tampions were already out, the ports raised. Their opponent had the advantage of his guns below deck, no concern about drenching. Hartley had four men to a gun, behind a wall of hammock netting. The quoins away would make slight difference. Even fully raised and with the timing of the great swells’ uproll his nine-pounders were on the last drop of their range. Their shot would become part of the coral and not part of their foe’s supper. Still, like the first smoking pipe and rum of the day, one had to get it over with.

And just the sound and sight of it might break some nerve over the way.

Devlin stood at the starboard quarter with Hugh Harris and his quartet plucking merrily and beating their feet. He could hear the urgent drum from over the hills of water. A response to his music to evoke a column of soldiers walking towards them over the waves.

He watched his guns roll out, their trucks squealing like the scrape of the fiddles. A sound not heard for months, a fine sound. It had eagerness about it, like children at play.

Nine guns on the weatherdeck and Hartley timed them in three rounds on three uprolls. Seconds between the discharges when men could uncover their ears and set to reloading the first.

The iron punched, the guns flew back hissing and steaming against the rain and Hartley passed his linstock and picked up another from the bucket to the quarterdeck, passing his captain with a wink. Devlin watched the shot cut and curve high through the downpour.

Only those suffering the weather on the
Standard
saw the spikes of flame, those below, by their guns, heard the nine cracks no louder than the distant barks of dogs.

Coxon saw Jenkins duck by the mainmast and men follow. Coxon stood straight, the privilege of office being to stand on the open quarterdeck, protected only by the bulk of hammocks secured around the rails.

He watched the shot plunge like black terns into the white waves, hundreds of yards from their wood, and nodded down to the midshipman by the companion to order Howard to fire his twelves. The midshipman vanished and Walter Kennedy appeared in his place, blinking against the rain, and Coxon motioned the pirate to join him.

Devlin watched his enemy’s strakes lean and run wet as the uproll heaved the behemoth over its back. Still too far, too high a sea to spy the guns. When they went down she was swallowed up to her fighting sail, the sea coming from them to engulf the pirate, and then the
Shadow
came up and the ship was closer again.