The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  “Sure, and one scream from you and here comes the mate to box me good, and carry you back to the great cabin!”

  “All right, then, you tell me where.”

  There was only one place aboard that small merchantman that might be reasonably secure from Waverly and the mates, where two men might beat each other senseless with no interference. That was the forecastle, the forbidden place, forbidden to Jack. But he was in the grip of anger and despair now, and the boundaries set by Waverly were the last of his concerns. And so, just minutes after eight bells had rung out in the night watch, after the larboard watch, Bolingbroke’s watch, was relieved, Biddlecomb made his silent way out of the cabin he enjoyed aft, crossed the dark and rolling deck, and climbed below to the forecastle, his first visit to that wicked den.

  There were half a dozen men there, just the off watch, and the steward and cook who had heard about the fun and turned out to watch. Biddlecomb clenched his fists so that no one would see his hands shake. He hoped he would not puke. He had never been more frightened in his life. Climbing aloft at sea for the first time was nothing to this.

  Jack’s feet hit the deck and he turned and looked around the fetid space. There was one lantern hanging from the overhead, spilling a feeble pool of light on the planks underfoot and leaving most of those quarters, the berths and the sea chests and the gear hanging from hooks, in deep shadow.

  Bolingbroke stood on the other side of the patch of light. He looked bigger than Jack remembered. But Jack noted with some satisfaction that he stood alone, that the rest of the crew seemed not much interested in his success or failure. If he, Jack, was an outcast here, if the men were indifferent to his fate, then the same apparently was true for Bolingbroke.

  Jonah took a step toward him. “I’ll give you a chance to apologize to me, here, in front of the others,” he said.

  “Sod off,” Jack said, the most foul invective he could make himself say, though by then there were few profane words he had not heard.

  Bolingbroke took a step forward and swung and Jack stepped back and made a feeble swipe in return. Bolingbroke dodged it with ease, stepped in again. He made a jab with his left, which Jack deflected. Then Jack felt Bolingbroke’s right fist connect with his stomach, connect with enough force to lift him from his feet, and he knew he was in trouble.

  He landed, doubled over, and staggered back until he hit the bulkhead, which helped hold him upright. He knew he had to stand, to get his arms up to ward off the next blow, but he could not make his body do that, and so Bolingbroke’s fist was unimpeded as it struck him right across the face, twisted him around, and deposited him on the deck.

  The pain was radiating out from two points now, and Jack had the idea that he might lie there on the deck a bit, but Bolingbroke’s shoe connected with his stomach and blew the wind out of him, so that now along with the agony of the blows he was gasping for breath, flailing to draw air into his lungs. Another kick, this time to the chest, and Jack was curled up in a ball.

  He opened his eyes and from that odd angle saw Bolingbroke coming at him again, but before his cocked leg could deliver another blow he was grabbed by a few of the others and dragged back. Jack heard someone say, “That’s enough, you beat him too bloody, that son of a bitch Waverly will have us all for it.”

  There it was. The foremast jacks would see him spared because he was Waverly’s boy, under Waverly’s protection. Jack felt a rage run through him that drove him to sit up, drove him to gain his feet and, with blood spewing from his mouth, still half hunched over, fling himself at Bolingbroke once again.

  He did not get far in that, maybe two steps before he was grabbed by the watching men as they had grabbed Bolingbroke. “Well,” someone said, “ain’t he the little hero, just like old daddy!” They shoved him up the ladder and they were laughing as they did. The fight had earned him no respect in the forecastle, and when Waverly asked him about the bruises, and he swore to all that was holy he had fallen down a hatch, that bought him no respect, either.

  He earned only one thing from that fight and that was a nickname, Little Hero. From that night on, whenever he was out of the earshot of Waverly or the mate, he was Little Hero, a mocking, hateful sobriquet. Little Hero. Isaac Biddlecomb’s son, Amos Waverly’s boy.

  It was humiliating and intolerable and there was only one way out, one way that would relieve him of that awful name and the self-doubt Bolingbroke had so skillfully and viciously planted. He could think of only one course by which he might discover if he really was no more than the son of Isaac Biddlecomb, child of privilege, unable to navigate the wicked world as Bolingbroke did, or whether he could make his way on his terms alone.

  The passage had not been unfruitful. Jack now had knowledge enough to ship as an ordinary seaman, and he would do so once he had the years and the size. Until then, boys who knew the head from the halyard were always wanting aboard. He was encouraged, as they stood into the harbor in Lisbon, to see the vast array of shipping at anchor there, and the number of vessels of all size that flew the Stars and Stripes at the mizzen gaff.

  In casual conversation with Waverly he discovered that they would not be lightering the cargo off but rather warping alongside a dock, when the space was ready to receive them. When they did, and when Waverly had gone ashore for business or drinking or whoring, Jack did not know which, Jack packed up one suit of decent clothing, his ditty bag, his blue jacket and his tarpaulin hat, a blanket, and eating utensils, wrapped them all in his oilskins and bound them well.

  Knowing where Waverly kept the specie he carried for business purposes Jack paid himself what he reckoned were fair wages for the work he had done. Once it was well dark and he was sure the steward would not surprise him, he climbed out the stern window, and from there it was easy enough to reach the after dock fast and climb, monkeylike, to shore.

  In canvas trousers and a checked shirt, a tarpaulin hat on his head, Jack was all but indistinguishable from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other sailors who roamed that port city, who moved with ease from ship to ship, forecastle to forecastle, with nothing but their labor and knowledge to sell, no community to which they must answer, save for the free-flowing community of mariners who washed up in every place that bordered salt water. The seamen’s cocky swagger, the way they wore their clothes, cocked their hats, the way the half-fathom of ribbon on the hat’s crown hung over their left eye, these were not things that could be faked, but Jack was a full-fledged member of that tribe now, and there was nothing false in his carriage.

  He headed off down the quay, determined to remake himself, authentically, in the image he had embraced.

  16

  The storm that swept up from the Caribbean and wrenched the after six pounder from its new-made gunport on the Abigail’s side visited destruction on a number of other vessels unlucky enough to also be at sea and in its path.

  A dozen fishing boats, whose captains thought they had time enough for one last haul of the nets before racing for the sand-fringed safety of their harbors, were lost without a trace, vanished as if they had never existed. A Spanish snow carrying sugar, rum, and fruit was dismasted. Her listing hulk was seen three days later by a homeward-bound Englishman and towed into Antigua, her crew insensibly drunk, most of them passed out amid wine bottles, pools of rum, and piles of plantain skins.

  And the small French corvette L’Armançon, originally attached to the naval base at Brest, now making its home at Port-au-Prince, lost her main topmast and main topsail yard. More inexcusably, her foresail was pulled from its gaskets and beaten to rags before any of the reluctant, argumentative crew, illiterate seamen now marinated in revolutionary fervor, could be made to lay aloft and restow it.

  But unlike the fishing boats, the generally well-found corvette had survived the storm, and with the seas gone down and the Caribbean sun once again baking the white planks of her deck, repairs were well under way. By the mizzen fife rail, silently watching the progress aloft, stood Captain Jean-Paul Renaudin
. Once, as a prisoner of the English, Renaudin had seen a Punch-and-Judy show, and he had to admit that the work going on in L’Armançon’s maintop resembled nothing so much as that.

  At another time he might have found himself fully engaged in the frustrating, ultimately futile task of trying to get the men to move faster. They had been hours just getting the topgallant mast and yard down, and another hour sending the remains of the old, shattered topmast to deck, an absurd waste of time. But in this instance he did not look on it as his particular problem.

  Pierre Barère, L’Armançon’s first lieutenant, had taken it upon himself to drive the men on, shouting orders from the deck, personally taking a bar on the capstan to raise the shattered mast enough to remove the fid, reminding the men of their duty to the Revolution. Renaudin could not help but smile. Five months before, Barère had been a chief mate aboard some miserable, inconsequential merchantman. He had been given this great elevation to naval officer, and a first lieutenant, no less, more for his revolutionary zeal than for his seamanship, which was minimal, or for his fighting prowess, which was untested. Barère did not know what a real man-of-war’s crew was, but it was not this.

  Now Barère left off the supervision and came aft. “Citoyen Renaudin,” he said, and Renaudin was certain he said it as much to irritate as to solidify the egalitarian nature of the ship. “I think we shall see the topmast down directly. We were fortunate we did not lose more top-hamper in such a storm.”

  “The topmast was rotten,” Renaudin said. “It was rotten when the dockyard put it in.”

  Barère made a disapproving face. With the naval dockyards fully under the control of the revolutionary government, he did not like to entertain the thought that those in charge might be corrupt, incompetent, self-serving malicious swine, even though they clearly were. He certainly did not care to have that suggestion spoken out loud.

  Renaudin wished very much to be rid of Barère, but he had no idea when or how that might happen.

  L’Armançon had sailed from Brest late in the season in ’93, just as La Terreur, the Terror, was spreading out from Paris like the cancer it was, before the sans-culottes of the Parisian Armée Révolutionnaire had arrived in Brest to set up their Surveillance Committee and their Revolutionary Tribunal. That timing had been fortuitous. Despite his years of good service, Renaudin was not sure he would have survived long in that fetid atmosphere. Not because of who he was—a good, active, and experienced naval officer—but because of who he had been born.

  When Citoyen Renaudin had begun his naval career and his impressively quick rise to command, he was still known as Jean-Paul, Chevalier de Renaudin, a title he no longer flaunted or even mentioned, the better to keep his head firmly mounted upon his neck. His career had begun with his appointment, at age fourteen, as enseigne de vaisseau aboard the 104-gun ship-of-the-line Ville de Paris, commanded by François-Joseph Paul de Grasse-Rouville, Marquis de Tilly, Comte de Grasse, a dear friend of Renaudin’s father, the Comte de Renaudin.

  Young Enseigne Renaudin had served as signal officer during the Battle of the Capes, that great melee that had ultimately decided the American War for Independency. He was still aboard Ville de Paris during the less successful engagement called the Battle of the Saints, and had spent some small time as a prisoner of war to the British before being paroled back to France.

  Barère was talking again. “I have explained to the men what our mission is, its importance, and now they work faster,” he said. “Free men will work hard if they know the reason of it.”

  They’ll work hard if they know there’s a damned good flogging waiting for them if they don’t, Renaudin thought, but he did not say as much. Instead he said, “Perhaps you should tell me what our mission is. Then perhaps I’ll work harder as well.”

  Barère smiled, that insufferable smile of his. “Ah, Citoyen Captain,” he said, “you know what you need to know, and any more would only serve to distract. We must find the American, that is what you need to know.”

  Renaudin just nodded and said nothing. He was not really listening to Barère’s words. He was too distracted by the anodyne thought of shooting him in the head. He had seen enough men shot that he could picture it perfectly; the hole in the forehead, the instantaneous look of wide-eyed surprise, the spray of blood and bone from the back of the skull. He found the image lovely and comforting.

  Unfortunately, the warm feeling that came with such daydreams was cooled by the knowledge that he would not really do such a thing, because doing so would likely lead him right to the guillotine. Unless it was done under the cover of a desperate battle.

  Barère was more than just a first officer. He was the handpicked representative of the revolutionary government, the Directoire. He was there because men such as Renaudin presented a dilemma for the Jacobins. Through bloody trial they had found that any man who could march, who could be filled with the fire of revolution, and was not a complete imbecile could be made into a soldier. But that was not the case when it came to manning the ships of the French navy.

  It took years of experience to make a good sailor, and more to make a good naval officer. But the French navy, even more so than the British, had been officered by the aristocracy, and they had made themselves scarce when the Revolution turned ugly. Most of Renaudin’s fellow captains (as well as most of his family) became émigrés. In post-revolutionary France, experienced naval officers were rare birds indeed.

  Renaudin remained part of that small and endangered flock. He was a good officer who rose to capitaine de frégate under the Ancien Régime. Having absorbed a good deal of the philosophy of the rights of man while on the American station, and having seen George Washington himself when the great man visited de Grasse aboard the flagship, Renaudin had genuine republican leanings. He supported the Estates General in 1789 and the National Assembly after that. Renaudin was second cousin to the Marquis de La Fayette though he was no more likely to mention that relationship now than he was to mention his title. Years before he and the young hero had enjoyed long conversations about questions of liberty and equality and all that. La Fayette had had a big impact on Renaudin’s thinking.

  By the time the fleets of Great Britain and revolutionary France engaged in what the British called the Glorious First of June, and to the French was known as Combat de Prairial, Renaudin was thirty-one and commander of the lovely 620-ton, twenty-eight-gun frigate Médée. Being a frigate, Médée did not stand in the line of battle with the great capital ships, but rather hung on the flanks and relayed signals and got in what blows she could. Still, some glory from that engagement, in which both sides claimed victory, shone upon Renaudin.

  It shone, but not so very brightly. Bright enough, perhaps, to keep his neck out of a guillotine at a time when so many of the Second Estate were being loaded into the tumbrels and rolled off to the city squares. Through it all Renaudin remained true to what he was, a naval officer of France. At first he remained because he believed in the Revolution. Later, when he could no longer deny the grotesque turn the movement had taken, he stayed on because he still loved the naval service as he loved his home.

  And finally, though he would not admit it to himself except in the most oblique and cursory way, he remained because he was afraid to go, afraid to stay, paralyzed by an inability to take a bold step in any direction.

  The Directoire did not trust men like Renaudin but they needed them, because Renaudin knew his business. Being stationed in the Caribbean had spared him the worst of the horrors on French soil, la Terreur. Indeed, the fact that he now commanded a vessel as insignificant as L’Armançon, a corvette mounting ten twelve pounders and two sixes on the bow as chasers, a punishment for his suspect heritage, may have helped him escape notice. Every year or so some unnamed bureaucrat in the naval administration sent a new first officer of known allegiance to the revolutionary government to replace the previous one who had been recalled, or died of yellow jack, or met with some other fate. That new officer would assiduously monito
r Renaudin’s loyalty and that of his men, until something untoward happened to end his commission.

  Barère was the latest of these but he was different, in that he carried not just orders but secret orders. Whether he was genuinely instructed not to share them with Renaudin until he felt it was necessary, or if he was doing so just to plume up his own importance Renaudin did not know, but the end result was the same.

  “We have not lost sight of the launch, have we?” Barère asked. Renaudin looked at him with curiosity. He seemed to be growing increasingly anxious, waiting for the events he had put in motion to unfold. Renaudin did not know the man well, so he did not know if this was a genuine character flaw, or if his mission was such that failure was a path to the guillotine.

  “Masthead, there!” Renaudin shouted. “What do you see of the launch?” The most that Barère would reveal was that they were to patrol the Mona Passage and keep watch for an American merchantman. To cover more territory Renaudin had sent his second officer, René Dauville, off with the launch, with instructions to stay within sight of L’Armançon and keep an eye on the far horizon.

  The lookout was settled on the fore topgallant yard, now the highest spot aboard the corvette, and he swung his glass off to the north. There was a moment’s pause before he reported, “Launch is making for us, it looks like.”

  Renaudin pressed his lips together and stifled an almost physical need to scream his displeasure aloft. The idiot on lookout should have reported the very instant the launch altered course to intercept L’Armançon, but he was likely dreaming of the day when the leveling effect of the Revolution would see him made an admiral, and wear shoes on his feet, and so was not paying attention. Revolution, republicanism, these things were tailor-made for the malingerers, whiners, and sea lawyers of the lower deck and they took to it like they took to salt water.

  “The launch is making for us?” Barère asked. “What could this mean?”