The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  Come along, come along … Jack thought, wishing another half a knot from the Abigail so that she might reach that spot where he calculated that she must turn, and he could go back to the deck, the blessed deck.

  Another shot, so close Jack could feel the wind of its passing. The temporary backstay set up on the main topgallant parted, giving the mast a hard jerk like it was trying to fling him off, and the long rope fell down, down, doing a weird spiraling dance as it collapsed. Had it been the weather backstay, then the topgallant mast, the sail, the yard, and Jack Biddlecomb would have followed the cordage in its plunge to the deck, but as it was the leeward stay, the mast remained thankfully intact.

  Jack thought he might puke. He had never feared the height or the motion, but he had never been at risk of being shot out of the rigging, either. The dogs are aiming for the masts! he realized. But of course they would. They would have no interest in sinking a valuable merchantman. Bring down a topmast, bring her to, sail her to France, that was the plan.

  Oh, Dear Lord! Jack thought. So distracted was he by the near miss he forgot to keep a weather eye on the sandbank.

  “Mr. Biddlecomb!” Asquith’s voice rose again from below.

  “Now sir, now!” Jack shouted. “Haul your wind, sir, close hauled!” He reached out and grabbed an intact backstay with an unseemly degree of relief at the prospect of gaining the deck. He swung over and wrapped his legs around the thick line even as Abigail began to swing onto her new heading, close hauled, as nearly into the wind as she could sail. Legs wrapped around the backstay, feet controlling the rate of descent, Jack slid down the long, tarred line until he reached the level of the rail, then swung down to the quarterdeck, ten feet from the helm.

  The Frenchman fired again and a spray of wood exploded from the mainmast fifteen feet above the deck. “Ever been under fire, Mr. Biddlecomb?” Asquith asked in the same tone he might use if he were asking after Jack’s family.

  “No, sir. You?”

  “Privateering, in the war. By God, this is making me quite nostalgic.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jack braced for the inevitable comment about his father, the amount of gunfire the Great Man had endured, but Asquith seemed too wrapped up in his own memories to think along those lines, so Jack walked down the canted deck to the leeward rail. He looked forward, down the length of the ship and the tumble of white water running down her side. Spread out ahead he could see the chop where the seas were breaking over the sandbank, hardly distinguishable from the whitecaps curling around them, and disappearing from sight around the turn of the bow. Jack wondered if he had misjudged. Perhaps they would not weather the bank at all.

  He pushed off the rail and hurried forward, past the main hatch, the foremast, the windlass, and up into the bow. The spritsail, with its larboard yardarm cocked high, blocked the crucial view of the breakers so he ran out along the bowsprit, grabbed the forestay, and held fast as the ship rose, plunged, and twisted underfoot.

  Damn it all … The breakers stretched across the horizon to a point all but directly in the ship’s path. If they could not sail higher on the wind, or if they made too much leeway, they would run their bow right into the sand, and there they would sit, waiting for the Frenchman to tow them off.

  He climbed inboard, hurried aft, calling as he went, “Hands to the braces, let’s brace her up, sharp as can be!” The men, who by now had guessed at Jack’s plan, moved fast, taking up the lee braces, ready to haul with a will, while the cook and steward lent a hand slacking away on the weather side.

  Jack gained the quarterdeck and took the weather main brace off the heavy cleat, shouting, “Haul of all!” All along the lee side the hands sweated the braces, hauling, grunting, pulling inch by painful inch as they hauled the yards farther around. Jack shook a few feet of slack into the main brace and then grabbed the wheel from Maguire.

  “Bear a hand to leeward, there,” he ordered, then slowly, slowly, turned the helm to weather and watched as the bow swung more and more up into the wind. “Well the braces, belay!” Jack called. Foot by foot the ship turned, and then the edges of the square sails began to shudder and curl, a warning that he was too close to the wind.

  “Hands on the weather bowlines!” he shouted. “Haul, you sons of bitches, haul with a will!” Eager hands cast off bowlines, hauled away, drawing the edges of the sails tight again. And that was it, Abigail was as close to the wind as she would lie. They would make it or they would not, but there was nothing more he could do.

  The Frenchman fired again, the ball passing over the quarterdeck, slicing one of the main shrouds in two, but Jack hardly registered the shot. He could hear the strain in the rigging, the sharp creaking of the hull pushed right to her limits. The breakers stretched away from the larboard bow, a great long line of roiling water.

  Once again Jack heard the dull thud of the French bow chasers, the scream of the ball, and a sharp crack as the new main topgallant backstay was parted by the shot. The line whipped off to leeward, a wild black snake, and high above, the telltale cracking of the mast. Jack looked up in time to see the topgallant sail collapse in a heap, a great tangle of broken wreckage a hundred feet above the deck.

  Abigail’s bow fell off and he turned the wheel to weather, saw the leeches of the sails flog, turned half a spoke to leeward. He felt like his guts had folded over. He braced for the impact on the sandbank. The deck jumped below his feet, the ship shuddered, the masts swayed as the keel struck, and a great scraping sound reverberated through the very fabric of the vessel.

  And then just as suddenly, they were past. Jack could see the yellow sand feet below the surface, he could feel Abigail’s speed building again as they passed over the bank and kept on going. And even as he was watching with delight as the sandbank slipped astern, he saw the French privateer strike. She was under a full press of canvas, in twenty-four knots of wind, making all the speed she would ever make, and then she stopped, her bow buried in the sand, her masts whipping forward, hanging for a delicious second, then coming down like trees with their trunks cut through.

  * * *

  After that narrow and, as Jack was willing to admit to himself, very providential escape, even the foremast jacks, the most taciturn of men and the least likely to ever dole out praise, had to admit it was a neat bit of seamanship. When they landed in Philadelphia some weeks later, tales of Jack’s cunning and ship handling, augmented as sailors will, spread like yellow fever along the waterfront and then through the city.

  For days Jack enjoyed the adulation. And then someone remarked how like the incident was to the time his father, Isaac Biddlecomb, had tricked the British man-of-war Swan onto Narragansett Bay’s Halfway Rock. That theme was taken up in the local press, Son of the Great War Hero Takes After Father, Apple Does Not Fall Far from the Tree, et cetera, et cetera, and the whole thing turned to ashes in Jack’s mouth.

  5

  The second morning that he woke in the master’s cabin of the Abigail merchantman Jack Biddlecomb was in considerably better shape than he had been the first, but he was still not exactly fresh as a new day in springtime. He felt stiff and achy and decidedly unrested. In the fitful dream he had been enduring in his last minutes of sleep, the ship had gone up against the rocks and was pounding itself to bits. When he woke enough to be convinced he was indeed awake he realized that someone was stamping rhythmically on the deck above his head.

  It was still dark and Jack had the sense that something very important was lurking just beyond his memory. The stomping continued and he shouted, “Belay that!” and happily it stopped, and behind it came the voice of his particular friend Gilbert Stiles calling down through the skylight.

  “Jack? I say, Jack, there, are you awake, old man?”

  Ah, yes, Stiles, Jack thought. He had hunted him down last night after meeting that unpleasant fellow outside his parents’ house. He had thought to look for Stiles at the Blue Goose, but then reckoned he and Stiles might not be much welcome there, after having apparently inf
licted considerable damage to that establishment. Instead, he sought him out at the Fraunces, where he correctly guessed Gilbert had found a new home.

  After formally requesting that Stiles stand as second for him, he had accepted the invitation to a drink, which soon became more drinks than he had quite intended. He had stopped, however, before he became insensible, and secretly congratulated himself on his newfound maturity. Now, thanks to that relative abstinence, the thought of fighting Bolingbroke to the death that morning was not entirely out of the question.

  “Come below, Gilbert, and stop the damned stamping!” he called, and he sat up in his bunk as he heard Stiles blunder around the narrow passage beyond the master’s cabin, then open the door and step in. He was barely visible in the weak light. Jack glanced at the aft windows and saw it was just coming on sunrise and he was grateful for his own forethought that had led him to insist on a later meeting.

  “Well, Jack, I didn’t care to go stumbling about the ship, not knowing at all who might be below stairs,” he said.

  “So instead you stomp on the deck like some madman? The rats in the hold will be sending me a round-robin in protest of your noise, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “You should be more grateful, Jack. By the looks of it you would have slept right through your engagement if I had not woke in time to fetch you.”

  Jack assessed Stiles’s condition and decided, far from waking in time, his second had never actually gone to bed. He and Stiles were the same age and had been friends for four years, since Jack began shipping out of Philadelphia. Stiles was not a mariner, but had worked for various merchants and was now one of several bright young men who handled the books for Robert Oxnard, which afforded Jack a view of the carrying trade he could not get from the quarterdeck. Stiles was good-looking and fashionable in a faux macaroni sort of way, his clothes and his lifestyle always outstripping his income.

  Jack clambered out of his bed, washed his face, combed his hair, changed his shirt, pulled stockings, breeches, and shoes on, tied a stock around his neck, buckled his sword belt around his waist, slipped into coat and hat, and led Stiles topside into the cool of the predawn hours of spring.

  They crossed the gangplank to the wharf and then headed off into the city, making their way through still-slumbering streets to the General Washington Tavern, which served a tolerable breakfast. Stiles pointed out that, as Jack’s second, he could not allow him to kill Bolingbroke on an empty stomach, nor could he himself bear witness to it with never a cup of coffee in him. Stiles felt sure that he had read somewhere that protocol dictated the combatant should pay for his second’s breakfast.

  Meal finished, they emerged onto busier streets and walked south toward Southwark, past the boardinghouses and taverns and shops that catered to the lower sort. “This is all a terrible bother,” Stiles said as they reached Second Street and made their way toward the meeting place, which was not so much agreed upon as assigned by Bolingbroke. “We have the flour arriving today, you know, and you’ll need to get it stowed down ahead of the barrel hoops.”

  “Yes, I know,” Jack said. “And yes, this business is a terrible bother. I don’t know why Bolingbroke should suddenly feel the need to stick a sword in me, but there you have it. I’ll try to be quick about it.”

  They could see the others already in the empty lot, standing amid the forlorn clumps of weeds; Jonah Bolingbroke and the unpleasant fellow who had accosted Jack outside his parents’ home, and another fellow in homespun, a wooden box in his hands, whom Jack did not recognize. He and Stiles cut across the lot to join them.

  “Bolingbroke,” Jack said. “You are looking well.”

  “You made it,” Bolingbroke said, taking an ostentatious glance at his watch. “I had thought you might not,” but Jack could hear that his heart was not in the gibe. He looked a bit pale, and Jack wondered if he might be afraid.

  “Never in life would I miss a chance to run a sword through you,” Jack assured him, “nor would I be so impolite as to refuse your invitation to do so.”

  “Sword?” Bolingbroke said. Jack was looking up into Bolingbroke’s eyes, which reminded him again of how big the fellow was, a bit over six feet and with a physique earned by spending ten of the twenty years he had been alive at hard labor, mostly, but not entirely, on shipboard. Being a seaman and having the name Jonah was an awkward combination, and Biddlecomb wondered if that was in part why Bolingbroke’s attitude and general demeanor developed as it had.

  The man in homespun stepped up and opened the wooden box as if offering Jack a cigar. “Pistols, sir; a matched set, but you may take your choice.”

  “Pistols?” Jack said. “Now, do you see, Jonah, this is exactly why people dislike you so.”

  “What?” Bolingbroke protested. “It’s a perfectly honorable weapon.”

  “But why do you get to pick, is my question. First you dictate where we’re to meet and now you presume to choose the weapons as well? What if I want to fight with swords, what then?”

  Bolingbroke looked confused. “Someone has to choose,” he offered.

  “Well certainly, it’s just that you assume the choice is yours. Isn’t there some protocol for this? Stiles, how is this sort of thing supposed to work?”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Gilbert protested, “but I had thought it was the aggrieved party who gets to choose.”

  “Well, there, you see,” Jack said. “And I am the aggrieved party.”

  “You?” Bolingbroke said. “Of course, you would think you are the aggrieved party, you arrogant son of a bitch. Always think everyone should be tugging their bloody forelocks to you, Your Highness Biddlecomb.”

  Jack shook his head, a gesture more of pity than disagreement. “Jonah, Jonah,” he began, but the rumble of a coach and the clap of four sets of hooves in the quiet morning interrupted the thought. The sound of a wagon, heavy laden with barrels, drawn by some unhappy draft animal, was common enough in Southwark, but the sharper, sophisticated clatter of a coach-and-four, especially at that hour, made all heads turn.

  Horses and carriage came into sight as they passed the battered clapboard house on the corner and emerged into the open space created by the vacant lot; a fine matched team pulling a black-lacquered coach with a coat of arms on the door. “Oh, damn,” Stiles said out loud.

  The driver reined the horses to a stop and the door flew open and Robert Oxnard leapt out, a large and frenetic man, more energetic than his frame would suggest. He walked quickly across the lot, tall polished black boots parting the high weeds like a ship buffeting its way through brash ice. “What, ho?” he called when he was still some yards away from the duelists. “What’s all this? Come, come, we have no time for such nonsense.”

  He stepped up to the group of them like a father who has caught his boys in some mischief of no great consequence. “Stiles? Do you not have a place of employment?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Oxnard. As of yesterday, I did.”

  “Well, I suggest you get yourself off to it, if you wish for that advantageous arrangement to continue. Mr. Bolingbroke, I have no doubt you have more pressing matters to attend to.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bolingbroke said. Bolingbroke was filling a second mate’s berth aboard a merchantman of 350 tons, and though the ship was owned by one of Oxnard’s rivals, Oxnard was still a man to be obeyed, because Oxnard could easily end the career of any man in the carrying trade if he so chose.

  Having given his suggestions for how the others might more profitably spend their morning, Oxnard put a big arm around Jack’s shoulders and half guided, half pulled him across the lot toward the carriage. There was never a question of whether Jack wished to go with him, because it never occurred to Oxnard that anyone might have designs that were in conflict with his, and if it ever did occur to him, he would not care.

  “We must get us down to the Abigail, Jack,” Oxnard said as they walked. “You sail for Barbados by week’s end, you have a considerable amount of work yet to do. Also, I have a s
urprise for you. Flour is coming aboard today as well, though that don’t answer for a surprise. No, this is much better, as you’ll see!” The merchant kept up his running monologue the full length of the empty lot, then opened the door of the carriage for Jack. As Jack settled into the soft leather seat he glanced back the way he had come. The others were heading off in their various directions; Stiles back toward the waterfront, setting a course no doubt for the offices of Oxnard and Company, Limited, Merchants, housed on Chestnut Street. Bolingbroke and the unpleasant fellow were ambling off toward the Southwark docks, and the one in homespun was walking west. Oxnard was still talking.

  “The flour, when you get to Barbados, Jack, the flour will be at a premium. I hear from a ship just returned…” But by then Jack had again stopped listening, and was simply making grunting sounds of comprehension and nodding his head as if it was some sort of mechanical device designed to move at regular intervals.

  What on earth just happened here? Jack wondered. This whole issue of Bolingbroke challenging him to an affair of honor, of all things, was odd enough, but Oxnard’s arrival made the whole situation positively otherworldly.

  Oxnard’s carriage had the finest suspension that could be had in North America, but even that was not proof against Philadelphia’s rutted and cobbled streets, and the jouncing and shuddering prevented Jack from concentrating on much of anything until they drew to a stop on the wharf to which Abigail was tied. The sun was not two hours up, but the waterfront was already a bustle, carts and drays rolling past, mates shouting orders, the squeal of tackles as cargo came aboard, carpenters pounding, hacking, sawing, seamen scrambling aloft to cast off sails and let them dry to a bowline.