The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  And so, lying in his dark cell, listening to the fearsome pounding that the cockleshell of a ship was receiving, holding on with hands and feet to keep from being tossed to the floor, he felt a thrill, a firing of all his nerves that he rarely experienced in the well-ordered, luxurious, tailored life of breeding that was the birthright of any Wentworth of the Boston Wentworths. He would not call it fear, but it was a near relative of that emotion. And he liked it.

  Moving carefully with the roll of the ship, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, held himself in place as the ship rolled to starboard, then let the momentum of the roll to larboard pitch him out. He found a handhold on the cabin bulkhead and steadied himself, let his legs get the feel for the motion of the ship.

  Sea legs, that’s what the tarpaulins call it, he thought. I must get my sea legs.

  The Wentworths’ family butler, who had packed William’s numerous trunks, had had the good sense to include an oilskin jacket, and William had had the good sense to take it from the trunk before it and the rest were stowed below. He felt along the cabin wall until his hand fell on the slick surface of the garment. He lifted it off the hook, felt for the cabin door, and stepped out into the alleyway.

  It was not so dark there. A lantern hung at the far end, where the alley opened onto the main deck, a wildly swinging tin lantern, a metal cylinder perforated with holes that gave off the feeblest of light, but after the blackness of the cabin it seemed quite bright indeed.

  William stopped below the lantern and sorted out his oilskin and shrugged it on, no easy task with the motion of the ship threatening to toss him to the deck, and forcing him to grab for a handhold every few seconds. Once the coat was on and buttoned he staggered forward, grabbing at the ladder that led up through the scuttle just as the Abigail took a sickening roll to leeward.

  He steadied himself and looked up, and for his effort received a great bucketful of water in the face, such a cascade down the scuttle that he might have thought someone had flung it on him purposely, except that it was a greater deluge than any one bucket could hold. He spit and shook his head and thought how comic that must have appeared, his taking that water in the face, and how very many people would have delighted to see him so incommoded, Jack Biddlecomb foremost among them.

  Wentworth wiped his eyes, grabbed hold of either side of the ladder, and climbed slowly up through the small open scuttle and onto the weather deck. And there he found, to his genuine astonishment, that what he had thought was a wild scene down below was cigars and brandy in the parlor compared to the world topside.

  11

  The air was filled with water, driving sideways, and Wentworth would have been soaked instantly if he had not been soaked already. He blinked and squinted. He could not tell if it was rain or spray or both. What rigging he could see was either bar taut or whipping wildly in the wind. The ship took a hard roll to leeward and William staggered and felt himself going down. He flung out his arms, flailing for support. His hands fell on a rope, waist high and hove so tight that were it not for the coarse feel of the fibers he might have mistaken it for an iron rail.

  Now that’s damned convenient, he thought as he clung to the rope, holding himself upright on the slick deck as the ship rose and plunged. He could not recall the rope’s being there before. He wondered what purpose it served.

  Out of the dark a shape materialized, a man moving aft, his hand on the rope William gripped. A big man. The Irishman Biddlecomb had knocked senseless, he realized.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” the man said, loud, his voice a deep growl, the words respectful but the tone pure irritation. He stepped around William and continued aft. William realized then that the rope was there for just the thing he was using it for, as a handhold for moving fore and aft.

  Well, I guess even the tarpaulins don’t have their sea legs about them all the time, he thought, and the thought made him feel a bit better about his own failures in that regard, the stumbling and the water in the face.

  After even the feeble light of the hold, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the alien world on deck, but slowly it all seemed to resolve itself out of the dark, worse even than he had thought. The great, black, curling waves came rolling up out of the night, rolling up under the Abigail’s starboard bow, lifting the ship up, up, as if she might be tossed aside, then moving under her and sending her bow down in a sickening, twisting motion into the trough.

  And then the blunt, unyielding bow would strike the sea, the ship and ocean slamming into one another like some ancient contestants for this patch of watery territory. The ship would shudder to the deepest places of her oak-and-yellow-pine being, and then shoulder the sea aside, sending a great spray of salt water high in the air and dipping the rail under until the seas ran inches deep down the deck, breaking around the legs of the men working there, breaking against the great guns fixed by their lashings, like surf against outcroppings of rock on some jagged coast.

  Wentworth stared. He could not pull his eyes away. The sight was magnificent, frightening and awe-inspiring, wonderful and sickening all at once. He had never seen anything like it, or felt the wild surge of power the great seas bore on their backs. He smiled, got a mouthful of water, half rain, half spray, and spit it out on the deck, aware that that was probably the first time he had ever spit in public, even if no one was paying attention.

  He turned and looked aft. There was the faintest of lights there, and William guessed that the fellow steering the ship needed illumination of some sort by which to see the compass. Two fellows, actually, the wheel was double-manned now. He could just make out the shape of Jack Biddlecomb, perhaps twenty-five feet away, standing pretty much where he had been standing when William had last been on deck.

  Has he left that spot at all? William thought. Jack was now wearing an oilskin coat and a hat, and William wondered if he had gone below stairs to fetch them or if he had that horrible little weasel of a steward bring them on deck. He could make out something odd about the rigging on the mizzenmast, but it took a minute of squinting and blinking before he realized that they had tied a cloth of some description to the heavier ropes, and that must be providing some degree of shelter to Biddlecomb and the helmsmen.

  For the second time that day Wentworth’s curiosity overwhelmed his natural inclination to avoid the likes of Biddlecomb, or to give Biddlecomb the satisfaction of showing himself to be ignorant on any subject. Hands on the taut rope, he made his way aft, pausing as the ship rolled hard to windward, threatening to pull his grip free, then tumbling along as the ship plunged down again.

  It took what seemed an inordinately long time to cover the twenty-five feet back to the helm, but he was rewarded with a look of surprise on Biddlecomb’s face when the captain realized who it was moving aft. Wentworth stepped into the lee of the canvas lashed to the rigging and suddenly the noise and the flying water diminished by half.

  “Captain!” Wentworth shouted. “It would appear you have your storm now!”

  “A damp evening, Mr. Wentworth, to be sure!” Biddlecomb shouted back.

  “Have you…” Wentworth began, paused to spit out a mouthful of water, began again. “Have you ever seen a storm so fierce as this?” he shouted.

  Once again Biddlecomb gave him that curious look, the look of vague amusement, and Wentworth felt himself flush with irritation and annoyance for allowing Biddlecomb the upper hand. “We’re still carrying fore and main tops’ls!” Biddlecomb shouted, as if that was some sort of an explanation. “This is far from what I would call a terrific storm. But if it is any comfort to you, it promises to get tolerably worse in the next few hours. We shall be handing the fore tops’l directly.”

  “Handing?” Wentworth shouted.

  “Furling! Tying it up to the yard!”

  Wentworth looked up, toward the foremast, but the sail was lost in the night. He could see someone coming aft along the lifeline and he thought it to be Mr. Tucker, the mate. Wentworth staggered as the Abigail took a particularly
ugly roll, released the lifeline, and leapt for the weather shrouds, taking a firm grip on the heavy, tarred, unyielding rope as Tucker came aft. Biddlecomb was shouting to Tucker, though no more than a few feet separated the men, and Wentworth heard him say, “Let’s hand the fore tops’l, Mr. Tucker, and we’ll see how long she’ll bear that fores’l!”

  “Hand the fore tops’l, aye, sir!” Tucker shouted and headed back the way he had come.

  It was clear to Wentworth even from the few words they had thus far exchanged that Biddlecomb was in no mood for conversation, which Wentworth could understand, even if he didn’t care. “Captain!” he shouted. “Surely you don’t mean the men will climb up there?” He pointed in the general direction of the fore topmast.

  “I do. I know of no other way to hand a sail.”

  “That’s madness!” Wentworth shouted. He had never really thought about what the tarpaulins would do in a truly biblical storm, because he never put much thought into what the lower sort did, as long as they continued to do it. Had he thought about it he would have guessed they would all huddle below and drink themselves to insensibility until either the storm passed or they all drowned. But apparently not.

  “Will you go up there?” Wentworth shouted.

  “That is no longer my place, Mr. Wentworth!” Biddlecomb replied, also shouting above the shriek of the wind, awkward conditions for discourse. “I am one of your middling sort who now thinks himself a gentleman, and as such I will not haul with the mariner!”

  Wentworth opened his mouth to protest but Biddlecomb cut him off. “See here, Wentworth, I have no time for this! It would be better was you to go below, but if you will not, pray understand that if you’re hurt, at best we can stuff you down the hatch. If you go overboard we can do nothing at all. Now, please forgive my discourtesy!” With that he turned and worked his way a few feet aft to where the helmsmen wrestled with the wheel and, leaning close to the binnacle, studied the set of the compass.

  As a matter of reflex Wentworth ran those words over in his mind to determine if they called for his demanding satisfaction. They were dismissive, to be sure, but were they insulting? And if they were, could Wentworth forgive them, based on the fact that Biddlecomb’s ship was clearly falling apart around him, and he was no doubt extremely frightened. Generally, Wentworth did not feel extenuating circumstances should excuse another’s behavior.

  The ship rolled again, a deep, stomach-turning, twisting roll that set the masts to swaying and the rigging slatting and banging, and Wentworth recalled that Biddlecomb had claimed the men would actually be induced to climb up into the rigging and hand the fore topsail, those drunken, miserable insubordinate malingerers risking their necks to save a bit of Oxnard’s canvas. Wentworth thought it very unlikely.

  He waited until the ship hit the trough and the seas cascaded down the deck, and as she rolled back, as she came onto an even keel for a second or two, ready to crest the next roller, Wentworth launched himself from the mizzen shrouds and grabbed up the lifeline and staggered forward. When the Abigail’s men refused to obey orders and knocked Tucker on the head and retreated below, Wentworth wanted the satisfaction of seeing it all.

  He moved forward. The storm, he realized, was indeed growing worse. The note that the wind made as it tore through the rigging was pitched higher, the motion of the ship more pronounced. As the next roller came up under her and her bow rose to meet it, it hung there for a long and uncertain moment, as if ship and sea were pausing to decide if this should be an end to it. And then the bow plunged down again, the angle more pronounced, the impact with the sea making the vessel shudder in a way she had not done before.

  Once again the seas came over the bow, not inches deep this time but feet deep, a great Red Sea on the charioteers arrayed around the deck, and even Wentworth, standing amidships, found himself buried up to his knees. His shoes, stockings, and breeches were soaked through, and though his oilskin had been doing a noble job of keeping the water at bay, it, too, was losing the battle, the cold rain and spray working its way down his collar, soaking his coat, waistcoat, and shirt.

  The foremast hands were standing in clusters, a cluster to larboard, a cluster to starboard, a group at the base of the mast. The water rushed along the deck and the men at the larboard rail were waist deep in it as the new bulwarks held the boarding seas in like a cistern before they could gush through the open gunports. The men were hauling on the rigging, pulling, swaying, staggering from the impact of the water. Wentworth looked aloft and he thought he could see the sail being hauled up like a curtain to the yard, but it was so dark it would have been hard to see even if the flying water was not blinding him.

  Whatever ropes the men were hauling, they apparently had hauled enough. They made them fast and then began working their way up to the weather side, moving slowly and deliberately from one handhold to another, seemingly oblivious to the seas crashing around their legs and sometimes swirling up to their waists.

  If that sail is hauled up, I’m sure there’ll be no need for them to climb up there, Wentworth thought, but even as he considered it, the first of the men grabbed hold of the weather shrouds, climbed up on the pin rail, up onto the bulwark, then stepped onto the ratlines and made his labored way aloft.

  My dear Lord … Wentworth thought as he watched another and another of the men make the same tricky move from deck to shrouds. He had seen them do this before, when the weather was fair, and they all but ran as they headed aloft, but this was something very different. Each step was a labored motion, and when the ship rolled to weather and threatened to fling them off the ropes and into the black cauldron they clung tight and did not move, and when the ship rolled the other way and pressed them into the shrouds they scrambled up, one, two, three ratlines, using the slingshot motion of the ship to ease their way. And so they went, nearly all the hands, by Wentworth’s count, up aloft to battle with the fore topsail, which he could hear flogging and slamming in a most discomforting manner.

  But to Wentworth, it was all discomforting. Any reasonable man, of course, would have been discomforted by the fact that the ship was caught in an epic storm, laid nearly on her beam ends with every massive wave, shipping tons of water that ran like a swollen river down her deck and threatened to carry all away before it. But none of those things bothered him, not really. He was bothered by the sight of the men climbing aloft, and the thought that he himself might not have the nerve to do it.

  Nonsense … he told himself. If it was his business to climb up into the rigging then he would climb up into the rigging. If he remained on deck it was simply because he was born to a higher station, and a man of his position and native ability did not debase himself with brute labor.

  An excuse, a weak excuse … he chided himself. Of course he could climb up there with them, the damned bloody tarpaulins—there most assuredly was nothing they could do that he could not.

  Biddlecomb is not climbing aloft … he reminded himself. Even he feels it’s below his station. But Biddlecomb’s words had suggested that he had, in the past, gone aloft in such a storm. Wentworth loosened his grip on the lifeline, took a step toward the shrouds, then stepped back again and renewed his hold on the rope.

  No. He would not.

  But not for want of courage. He was satisfied that it was not fear that kept him on deck. Rather, it was the absolute certainty that once he was up aloft he would have no notion of what to do, a humiliating circumstance. He could face the possibility of an ugly death, but embarrassment was more than he was willing to risk.

  Soon the men climbing aloft disappeared into the darkness and Wentworth turned and made his way aft once more. The wind was like a solid thing that pushed him sideways, hard against the lifeline as he struggled along. What little regularity there had been in the ship’s motion seemed gone now, and she rolled and bucked and heeled with no method to the madness. The great seas lifted her bow and tossed her aside and she lay down on her leeward side, the water boiling up through the gunports,
the masts groaning even over the cumulative noises of ship and storm.

  Wentworth was thrown against the lifeline as the ship rolled farther than she had rolled yet. He hung there and they paused, man and ship, and Wentworth wondered if she would come up again, or if she would lie there on her beam ends until another sea rolled her over completely. But then, with a slow and deliberate motion, a fighter knocked down but unwilling to stay down, Abigail shook off the tons of seawater on her deck and slowly stood again, ready for the next.

  William had nearly reached the mizzenmast before he could make out Biddlecomb standing where he had left him, one hand on the lifeline, unmoving, and Wentworth resisted a natural tendency to find something comforting in the captain’s stolid aura of command. Wentworth paused, not sure of where he should go. He could not stand the thought of going below with all this happening on deck, but he did not think he was particularly welcome on the quarterdeck. Wentworth, however, did not much care where he was welcome and where not, so he made his way further aft and resumed his place at the mizzen shrouds, sheltered by the cloth lashed there.

  Biddlecomb did not move, only glanced over at him, then turned and shouted something to the helmsmen, but the words were whipped away from Wentworth’s ears by the banshee wind. They stood there, Wentworth and Biddlecomb, unmoving save for the constant effort required just to keep their feet. The ship rose and the men at the helm turned the wheel hard, eased it, turned it the other way. The bow plunged down again, scooping the seas and sending them cascading down the deck until, to Wentworth’s astonishment, there was never a plank to be seen, the entire deck was submerged, masts and fife rails rising up as if from the bottom of the sea.

  Incredible …

  Abigail rolled and the water broke against the bulwark and jetted out the gunports around the muzzles of the guns and everything groaned and clattered and roared and screamed. Then the ship rolled again, rolled hard as a big comber came up under her bow, rolled far over on her beam ends so Wentworth was sure the main yardarm had gone in the water. She hung there, then rolled back, and as she did another wave broke over her weather bow and a great surge of black water came tearing down the length of the deck. Wentworth twined an arm through the mizzen shrouds and grabbed hold with both hands. He heard Biddlecomb shout a warning to the helmsmen.