The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  Jack’s eyes flicked from Wentworth’s sword to his face, just a glimpse, but he saw what he hoped to see; frustration, sweat. Jack’s arm was starting to ache, his breath was coming harder, but he could feel that Wentworth’s actions were slowing, his responses more dull. Wentworth thought he could end this with a decisive attack, but like Jack before he had succeeded only in tiring himself.

  Now, now is my moment, Jack thought. Wentworth was not reacting with the panache of five minutes before, because five minutes of this sort of intense back-and-forth was enough to tire even a fit man. Jack let Wentworth come on, let his own defense slow, let Wentworth’s blade get closer, let his own parries become more awkward. And then, as Wentworth parried in the fifth position, lunged for Jack’s chest, Jack took the blade with his own, forced it from the line of attack, and pushed off hard with his left foot, right arm firing off like an arrow from a longbow, and he saw the point of his blade pierce the loose white sleeve of Wentworth’s cotton shirt.

  Chandler, standing just to the side, raised his arm, paused a moment, then called, “Strike up your swords!” because Tucker had completely forgotten what he was supposed to say. Jack let his sword drop to his side and Wentworth did as well and though they were both supposed to remain en guarde they were both far too winded to resist the chance to rest.

  “Has Captain Biddlecomb drawn first blood?” Chandler asked. Biddlecomb’s eyes were on the rent sleeve. He was looking for the telltale bloom of red on the white cloth but he did not see it.

  “I believe not,” Wentworth said. He handed his sword to Chandler and rolled the sleeve up to beyond the point where it was torn. He turned 180 degrees, demonstrating to all that his skin was untouched, blood had not been drawn.

  “Very well,” Chandler said. “There is no blood drawn, but will you gentlemen agree that honor has been satisfied?”

  Jack and William said, “No” in virtually the same instant, but in neither case was the response overly forceful, as both men were still gasping for breath.

  “Very well,” Chandler said and Jack thought he heard a note of exasperation in his voice. “Pray, return to the center, here.” He stepped back to the point where the duel had begun and Wentworth turned and followed and Jack followed him. Tucker followed as well on the inland side, unsure of what was going on. There was nothing energetic in Wentworth’s stride, and he seemed to be limping a bit, and that would have made Jack happy if he himself was not dragging his anchors so.

  Chandler called for them to come en guarde once more. They did, the handkerchief fell, and they came at one another, the athletic grace of the first few moments of the duel all but gone. Jack hacked at Wentworth’s sword, hoping to disarm the man, or break the blade, or knock it aside just enough for him to make one little nick in the man’s skin, but Wentworth parried in the first position, elbow up, blade down, and Jack felt the shudder through his sword and his arm as steel hit steel.

  Then Wentworth brought his point up and Jack knocked it aside, thrust, had his blade knocked out of the line of attack. It was maddening, it was as if Wentworth was encased in a glass dome and every thrust, every perfectly placed attack, just bounced off. He could not get at the man. He danced back a few steps and wiped his brow. His eyes were stinging from the sweat running down into them. But he could see Wentworth’s hair and shirt were soaked as if he had just been out for a swim. His mouth was open, his eyes wide, his strength draining fast.

  They came at one another, slowly, weapons raised, and Jack was thinking that this was it, it had to end soon, because they could not go on, and he knew, just knew, that Wentworth was thinking the same. Their swords came together as each tried to take the other’s blade. Jack thrust, Wentworth stepped awkwardly back, Wentworth thrust and Jack went back. And a heavy voice cut through the quiet, through the clash of steel, the only sound.

  “Damn it all! That is enough!” It was Frost, and Jack could hear him puffing up, but he did not take his eyes from Wentworth, not for a fraction of a second, because that was all it would take, and Wentworth did not take his eyes from him.

  “Stop this nonsense! Stop it at once, I say!” Frost roared, and the two men ignored him.

  “Sir,” Chandler said, “honor has yet to be satisfied,” and the two men ignored him.

  “Damn their honor!” Frost roared again and Jack and William went at one another in the same instant, swords clashing again, blade on blade. Jack thrust, though he was sure Wentworth would avoid the tip with the nimble, quick footwork he had so far displayed. But Wentworth did not jump back, because he apparently thought Jack would do the same and the two points reached out and each caught the loose cloth of their opponent’s shirt and passed right through.

  Jack saw his blade rip through Wentworth’s sleeve right near the shoulder and he felt the blade tear across Wentworth’s flesh. In the same instant he felt Wentworth’s blade passing through the cloth of his own shirt, just at his stomach, felt the razor-sharp edge and the jagged nicks it had sustained that morning tearing the skin as it passed, lacerating his side but never piercing it.

  The both of them, Jack and William, pulled their swords free, held them at their sides, point down. Blood gleamed on the steel of both. Chandler was shouting something. Frost was shouting something. There was a roaring in Biddlecomb’s ears but he did not know what it was. Then he and Wentworth, simultaneously, sat down on the cool grass and closed their eyes.

  * * *

  Three leagues away to the east southeast and well to windward of English Harbour, Captain Jean-Paul Renaudin was also closing his eyes, and for the same reason; sheer exhaustion. His was not the exhaustion of ten minutes of extraordinary and intense effort. His was the exhaustion of a week and a half of driving men, overseeing every detail of their work, navigating a ship, planning, tamping down anxiety, and slowly stewing in fury and humiliation. It was the exhaustion of catching only a few hours’ sleep here and there as he pushed the men, watch on watch, to set a battered ship to rights.

  The fact that First Officer Pierre Barère had not been crushed to death by the falling boom was only one of a number of frustrations, and not even the worst. The fight with the American merchantman had been like nothing Renaudin had ever experienced, the shift of fortunes and emotions in those brief minutes unprecedented in his nearly two decades at sea.

  They had stood into the fight confident. L’Armançon had the heels on the American, they could sail a circle around her. Their guns were bigger, their crew, even if they lacked the discipline Renaudin thought ideal, was experienced and numerous. Their adversary was a merchantman, for the love of God! Renaudin had not really considered the manner in which they would attack, he did not see the need, and perhaps that was where the problem was, because from that moment on, things had begun to go very, very wrong.

  Renaudin stood on L’Armançon’s quarterdeck, leaning against the weather rail, his eyes closed, and played those moments out in his mind once more, and as he did so he drifted off into the edges of sleep. He swayed and began to fall forward and his eyes snapped open. To the east was the unbroken sea, the deep blue Atlantic. To the west the water faded into the lighter blue-greens of the Caribbean, and he could see on the horizon the green humps of Antigua and Barbuda, and to the southwest Guadeloupe. If those islands had been ships he would have said they were hull down, just their top-hamper showing.

  He looked aloft. The mizzen topgallant yard was standing vertically, hanging from its yard rope, and even as he watched, it tipped over to the horizontal and the hands working up there scrambled to reeve off the lifts and see the clewlines and buntlines run fair to the deck. At the base of the mast, like a vicious dog that has chased a dozen squirrels up a tree, stood Second Officer René Dauville. Not a man aloft would dare come down until the mizzen rigging was squared away to Dauville’s satisfaction.

  Movement farther forward caught Renaudin’s eye and he saw Barère emerging from the after scuttle and making his painful way toward the quarterdeck. His head was still
bandaged and he squinted in the brilliant sun after coming up from the twilight of the ’tween decks, where he spent most of his time.

  He struggled up the few steps to the quarterdeck and Renaudin made no move to help him. “Citoyen Barère, how are you doing today?” he asked when the first officer finally reached him where he stood aft.

  “Better, Citoyen, better, I should think,” Barère said. “My headaches are less frequent, a good sign, surely.”

  “Surely,” Renaudin agreed. It would have been nice had Barère been killed outright, but still the vicious blow to the head had been helpful. He had spent a week below, under the incompetent care of L’Armançon’s incompetent surgeon. The amazing thing about the surgeon, as far as Renaudin could see, was that the man did not drink. Shipboard surgeons were generally useless because they were drunks, but the medical man aboard L’Armançon managed to be useless without the help of alcohol.

  But in Barère’s case Renaudin did not mind the surgeon’s bungling. It allowed Dauville to assume the role of first officer and allowed the two of them to drive the men as if they were slaves on a West Indies plantation, not citoyens of the Republic of France and fellow revolutionaries. It allowed them to treat the men the way a ship’s crew should be treated, so far below the status of the captain and first officer that they could barely see to those lofty heights from where they stood.

  And that was important, because Renaudin was now a man possessed. He had been like a sleepwalker before, stumbling through the nightmare of his life, the destruction of his beloved navy of France, the exile of his family and his friends and fellow officers, the ceaseless propaganda from Paris. But now he was awake. The American’s guns had shaken him from his slumber. Now he was awake and he would beat that arrogant merchantman into flotsam and there was not one other thing that mattered to him.

  The fight had ended when L’Armançon’s mizzen had gone by the board. The men were running around like a herd of baboons but Renaudin kept his head, for all the fury he felt in his soul. He had ordered the launch away, with a crew of the better hands and Dauville once again in command. He ordered Dauville to follow the merchantman as far as he could, until she ran over the horizon, or until the boat was dangerously low on food or water, or until he knew where she was bound.

  He returned five days later, having achieved the third possibility, or nearly so. He had followed her for several days, and though her lead stretched out quickly and continued to grow, he was still able to keep her topgallants in sight for some time. She must have sustained damage during the fight, he surmised, as she seemed to be nursing her mizzenmast and not driving as hard as she might. Otherwise, she should have been able to put the longboat over the horizon in no time.

  Dauville followed long enough to be satisfied that she was bound for Antigua. If she were heading south she would not have kept the course she did, and most of the other islands she could be making for on that heading were French possessions, and she certainly was not bound for one of those. There were any number of harbors on Antigua where she could be putting in, but if she needed repairs, the best facilities would be found at English Harbour.

  English Harbour, of course, was British, a naval dockyard. But even after a long and bloody war, and a victory made possible only through French intervention, the British and Americans seemed to be climbing into bed with one another, to the detriment of France. It was entirely possible that the Yankee would find a welcome there.

  Renaudin was no fan of the Directoire and all that came before it, but he was a Frenchman to his very soul, and as such he could only resent the ingratitude of the Americans. Two governments born of revolution, and the Americans entirely beholden to French support for their unlikely victory, support that had nearly crippled France and led directly to the convulsions that nation had suffered. They should have stood together, but instead the Americans were cozying up to the historic enemy of both nations.

  Renaudin would always fight for the pride of France, regardless of who was claiming political leadership, and in this instance he saw the duplicity of the United States as a slap to his country, not its revolutionary government.

  While Dauville was away, Renaudin personally drove the crew, and he could see the shock and surprise they felt when their previously disinterested and disengaged captain was suddenly transformed into the most vicious and demanding of lunatics. They looked for Barère to restrain him, to remind him of their rights as citoyens, but Barère was not to be found, and no matter how often the surgeon bled him, he did not seem to improve overly fast.

  The mizzenmast was hauled alongside and anything of use was stripped off it, including the yards, sails, the mizzen top, and much of the standing and running rigging. Sheer legs had been rigged to pull the stump of the old mast and then they had made their way to Basseterre where a suitable tree, a mostly suitable tree, had been felled, shaped, and stepped in the old mast’s place. Standing rigging had been set up, the mizzen top got over, the rest of the top-hamper swayed aloft.

  It had been done at sea, save for the cutting and shaping of the mast. It had been done pretty much on the same patch of ocean that L’Armançon now occupied, the most ideal spot to intercept any ship bound from Antigua to Barbados, the American’s original destination, or so Barère had informed him. And Barère seemed to be right about these things.

  The American was most certainly at English Harbour. Renaudin did not dare take his corvette within three leagues of Antigua for fear of tipping his hand, but he took the launch in close enough to intercept a fisherman, whom he paid to take him within sight of the place. From the deck of the filthy, stinking fishing sloop he once again laid eyes on that ship that was the focus of his waking hours and filled his dreams. And so he waited.

  “Monsieur Dauville!” Renaudin called.

  Dauville turned on his heel. “Sir?”

  “Once the mizzen is squared away we will clear for action and exercise the great guns. Dumb show only, no powder. We shall remain cleared for action and the men may sleep at quarters.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Dauville said crisply.

  Barère took a step closer. “Citoyen Renaudin,” he said, his voice raspy and noticeably weaker. “Allow me to remind you of the orders from the Directoire—”

  “Masthead, there!” Renaudin shouted, ignoring Barère, mostly because he knew it drove Barère mad. “Do you see the fishing boat?”

  After his look into English Harbour, Renaudin had decided to retain the fishing boat, assuring the owner and his small crew that he would pay for the boat’s use, a promise that did little to mollify them, but Renaudin did not care. He kept the fishermen aboard L’Armançon as grudging guests and sent the smack off under the command of an enseigne de vaisseau to keep an eye on the vessels outward bound from Antigua. The enseigne de vaisseau was young but he was bright and competent, and there was no man aboard L’Armançon who would not recognize the American merchantman.

  “Boat’s still in sight, sir!” the masthead lookout shouted down. “No change! No signal!”

  “Citoyen!” Barère said again, his tone more insistent, demanding to be heard. “Do not forget your orders, as I related to you, from the Directoire. You are to fight the American and you are to suffer some damage, but you are to take him without destroying him. Am I clear?”

  “We tried that last time, Citoyen Barère, and it did not work out so well for us.”

  “Then I hope you learned a lesson. I hope you have devised some way to claim victory over a lightly armed merchant vessel, because I assure you, Monsieur, the Directoire will not look kindly on yet another failure. Do you perceive my meaning?”

  “Oh, yes,” Renaudin said. In his mind he felt the snap and kick of the pistol, saw the back of Barère’s head blow apart. “I perceive your meaning very well.”

  26

  Among the spectators at Jack and William’s duel was the surgeon from His Majesty’s Ship Warrior, whom Chandler had asked be present, an unnecessary request given that, like his f
ellow officers, the surgeon would never have missed the fun of watching two Yankee Doodles go after one another with swords. He addressed the combatants’ wounds, which were minor and required only bandaging. Chandler made the two exhausted men agree that honor had been satisfied. They shook hands, also on Chandler’s insistence.

  “Well fought, Captain,” Wentworth said.

  “And you, Mr. Wentworth,” Biddlecomb said. They spoke in tones that were stilted, overly formal, what one might expect of two men who had spent the morning trying to run one another through.

  They returned to English Harbour; the combatants, the seconds, the sizable crowd who had turned out for the affair. Jack went back to work on the Abigail. Wentworth, for lack of anything better to do, began to drink and to marinate in his various concerns. The officers of the Warrior continued to hope Captain Wallace would see his way to bribing the dockyard superintendent to speed up work on the seventy-four, and her crew continued to hope he would not.

  Two days later, when Abigail’s hands began heaving the windlass to bring the anchor cable to short peak and prepare to weigh, the laceration on Jack’s side was still sore and restricting his movements. He was standing on his quarterdeck in his favorite spot at the starboard rail, just forward of the helm. He looked down the length of the deck, and what he saw was very different from what he had seen from that same spot on the day they had put out from Philadelphia.

  That sight had been odd enough, with six new guns run out through six fresh-cut gunports, but this was something new entirely. Rather than a cluster of guns aft there were now six guns per side, a dozen great guns evenly spaced fore and aft. Rather than a handful of merchant sailors he now had thirty or more men on the crew, twenty of whom were experienced men-of-war’s men, hands from a sloop-of-war that had been condemned, stranding them in English Harbour. They were slated to be put on Warrior’s books, but somehow the dockyard superintendent had shipped them aboard Abigail, with the understanding that their passage back from Barbados would be paid for by Mr. Frost.