by Diane Carey
“Bear on the full-rigger’s larboard side,” Boyle said loudly, communicating to Wade at the helm as well as Clement Cathell and his gunners and powder boys. “Fire as your guns bear, Clement!”
“Aye!” Cathell shouted back. “Fire as your guns bear!”
The ungodly loud carronades filled the darkening night and blew fire at the George. The ship’s starboard main deadeyes were blasted to pieces and the shrouds sprang free. What a hit! Several men behind the shrouds crumpled.
“Reload!” Cathell shouted without even waiting to see the full effect.
“Ready about! Helm’s alee!” Boyle called again, and again the schooner cranked around, almost under the George’s spanker boom, and came back along the other side, but this time opened the other side’s guns on the struggling Bowes.
Night folded around them, and the moon rose, almost full and very bright. Still, Boyle had a funny sense about the weather. He felt the barometer dropping and knew his luck would not hold.
“Pound the full-rigger!” he shouted. “Marines, fire at will!”
The Marines brightened and began shooting madly, doing as they had been trained to do—firing at other human beings. All over the George and the Bowes, men fell or ducked. The English ships had no Marines to fire back and had not anticipated having to fight, relying upon the Libra to defend them, which was now far out to the east and trying to crawl back into range.
“Clement!”
Cathell looked aft at Boyle.
“Ready the long guns!”
There were only two of them, one amidships on each side, but the long nine-pounders had good long reach.
“We’re ready!” Cathell called. So those were loaded and primed.
“Fire on the Libra as you bear!”
“Fire as we bear, aye,” Cathell repeated, delighted, then told his men to hold back until Libra approached close enough to make the shot a good one.
“Aim for the sprit,” Boyle suggested. “Snap her whisker stays.”
Cathell nodded, but was concentrating too hard to speak. He and two other men put their backs into aiming the long gun with the quoin and shifting the heavy gun truck.
“Help them,” Boyle said to Wade.
The Comet turned just enough to put a narrower target before the Libra, but still give the gunners what they needed.
While all that was happening, Boyle used the eye in the back of his head to calculate the positions of the Bowes and Gambier, both trying to hide behind him. He pointed back at the two ships. “Cut them up, Marines! Shake ’em to their royals!”
All bets were off. Clement Cathell’s gunners opened fire on the Libra while the Marines skittered aft along both the schooner’s rails and opened fire on the two brigs. The roar of the gun and muskets was maddening.
Boyle knew he was making de Millo’s prediction come true—that he was cutting up his four prizes to the point that they would be impossible to sail back to America. He mourned that loss on behalf of his men, but nobody seemed to mind. They were still eager at their work. Somehow they understood without his having to explain.
In the tropical moonlight the four ships engaged in maneuver after maneuver, firing broadsides at each other, the three English ships often making the mistake of shooting at Comet while the schooner was between one and another, causing damage to their own partner ships. Perhaps it was the murkiness of night or the inexperience of the commanders, but this mistake took at least an hour for them to correct. The English were completely befuddled by the way an American-built privateering ship could race in almost any direction, turn almost in place like weathervanes, and come back up in defiance of the wind itself. In that hour, Boyle’s gunners and musketeers chopped them up.
The Bowes wallowed in the water, listing badly to starboard, down a noticeable several inches by the stern, advertising that her hull was damaged below the water line. The George was even more smashed, unable to use two of her three masts, with those shrouds cut to pieces and waving around drunkenly from the mast tops. At eleven o’clock, the George surrendered.
“Order her to stay in place and wait,” Boyle told Dieter, who immediately went to the beam rail and yelled the order across. The ships were so close together that neither signal flags nor lamps were needed to communicate.
The George dropped her heads’ls and hove to, bobbing in an increasingly jumpy sea, subject to the whims of the waves, and waited as ordered. She could do little better than move her rudder this way or that in the current in the attempt to hold position.
Bowes hadn’t surrendered yet, but she was clearly out of the action. Seeing the George reasonably give up, the Bowes almost immediately did the same. Dieter ran up the signal flag to hold place.
“Let’s get a crew over there,” Boyle said when Dieter asked what was next. “Take possession for sure.”
“They gave their words of honor,” Dieter reminded.
“Just to be sure.”
Dieter quickly assembled a prize crew, taking away a few of the gunners from active duty, and a quartet of Marines. A boat was put in the water for them; the Libra came barreling back on a good wave just on the other side of the Bowes.
“What’s he doing?” Dieter growled, but he could sense something.
On his last word the Libra opened up her forward guns and piled a horrible explosion into the Bowes.
“Damn! Denying us the prize!” With a gazelle’s leap, Dieter raced for Comet’s forward shroud and climbed it to see what the damage was on the other side of the Bowes.
Boyle watched while keeping one hand extended to Wade for subtle helm changes. De Millo was trying to protect the Bowes by denying it to the privateers, probably hoping to save at least the cargo of wheat aboard.
“Meet him on the other side,” Boyle told Wade. “Position to rake her.” He raced forward to meet Cathell and get the starboard guns ready. There were only seconds, no time for relaying orders.
Comet sped past the stumbling Bowes more quickly than Libra came past on the other side, and the soft-handed Wade and the two men helping him with the tiller tackles turned the ship in front of the Bowes so close to the sprit that Boyle could’ve spat on it. In moments the Comet was abeam of Libra’s bow.
Boyle waited until the Libra went down into a trough and shouted, “Forward guns, fire!”
The starboard carronades barked. The man-of-war lurched as the iron balls slammed into her forward deckhouse, crashed through it, came out the side and mowed down the gunners and sail-handlers on the length of the larboard side. Then one ball got stuck somewhere and two others continued crashing through the bulwarks and into the ocean. The Libra’s deck was in splinters.
But as the Comet blew out of her way, Libra came up close and a keen-eyed Portuguese gunner opened fire.
The single blast so close by was as accurate as a bullet. It glanced off the foremast just above the pin rail and smashed a gun on the larboard side.
Comet wobbled sickeningly.
Dieter called, “The mast!”
“Oh, vetch!” Tom Boyle snarled.
He didn’t have to give an order. In seconds Dieter had the fores’l brailed in to take pressure off that mast.
Libra passed behind the schooner and distance opened very fast between them. Boyle signaled to Wade, and the Comet bore away on a course impossible for the square-rigger to follow. When the distance was good and wide, Boyle called, “Fall off!”
The schooner immediately turned and went off the wind. Her sails luffed and fell into confusion. The ship dropped into a trough and rested there just as the moon went away. Clouds were moving in.
“Is anyone killed?” Boyle called. “Anybody dead? Find them!”
Everyone looked about, oddly silent as his words bounced around the ship, until finally Clement Cathell shrugged and said, “I’m dead.”
A roll of appreciative laughter rippled through the filthy, bleeding, and exhausted men. No one called his attention to a corpse. Grateful for that, he began thinking about the condition of the ship.
“Damage reports, anybody,” he called, but he was mostly interested in what was going on forward, where Dieter already had a lantern shined on the base of the foremast. In an instant, Boyle was there himself.
“It’s sprung good,” Dieter said.
In the stark lamplight, Boyle ran his hand up and down the front part of the mast, and there found a crack wide enough for a finger to fit in.
“Get the tops’ls down and house the topmast,” Dieter said. “Put some gammoning around this until we can tend it better.”
“Either we put to shore and hunt for a new mast—”
“We need a fir tree. This is the tropical jungle. We’ll hunt all year in that leachy rot before we find one. We’ll fish it and gammon it tight with the winch. Do we have a spar the right diameter?”
“I doubt it. We’ll have to go ashore like it or not.”
“That’s easier to find than a whole mast. Find one a good two fathoms long at least. Longer, if you can. On second thought, get two or cut a good one in half. We should reinforce with a fathom below the deck also.”
“Right.” He went off to get a repair crew together.
“Tom,” William Wade called from the tiller. “The other brig is signaling.”
Boyle squinted over the water through the dimming moonlight. Gambier had struck her sails and was hoisting a flag of surrender. He looked now in the direction of the Libra and saw that the Portuguese man-of-war was presenting only her stern—the only part of the ship left that hadn’t been turned to pudding—and was making all possible sail to get away.
“I see why. De Millo’s given up on them.”
“Don’t blame him,” Cathell said.
“There goes my goblet of the doctor’s wine.”
“We’ll drink their health with rum.”
“I’ll write to the Portuguese government and tell them of Captain de Millo’s courageous defense of his charges. He deserves that, I think. Well done, everyone. Clement, well done, very well, on the gunnery.” Boyle went aft, giving the hearty well-dones to every man if possible and noting in his mind the visible damage on deck and the condition of the wounded who hadn’t yet been taken below.
On the command deck, well astern of everyone and everything, he patted Wade on the shoulder and said, “Superior work, Will. I’ll take it for a while.”
Alone, he touched the long wooden tiller. He felt the current below the surface push and pry at the rudder as the ship bobbed on choppy waves. They would still need a tree with a good girth and a strong grain to hollow out and lash to the cracked part of the foremast. Within easy sight even in the dark, the three English ships bobbed also, sails mostly furled, waiting for Boyle to give them their orders.
He watched them hypnotically. His only comfort came from the machinelike work going on around him as the crew cleared their heads and set about repairing the hammered rails and hull. The rigging was in fair shape, maybe a splice needed here or there. They were taking care of it. They knew their jobs. Working would be good for them after so many hours of tensions and guessing and battle.
Boyle stalked the afterdeck, smoldering. Minutes stretched out into more time, but he did not keep track.
“All right, Tom?”
Dieter again, checking on him the way he checked on everything, every stitch, every nail. Having asked, he waited instinctively until the captain arranged his own thoughts.
Finally, Boyle drew a sigh of frustration. “It’s not enough.”
“Not enough of what?”
Being a man of practicality and a first mate, someone who’s entire world consisted of details, Dieter wanted specifics.
“We’re not doing enough damage,” Boyle told him. He had at last narrowed in on what had been bothering him since … well, since Baltimore.
“Oh, lovely,” Dieter rasped, his throat burned by gun smoke. “My captain’s turned daffy. You don’t recall cutting up all four of those—”
“We can only sting the Crown, John,” Boyle told him. “Deprive them of a dozen ships and cargoes here and there, but they have ships all over the world in their empire and all you or I can do is prick them. I want to slice them open. I want to strangle them. Make them choke. I want to hear them gasp.”
Dieter thought about that, but could make no sense out of it. “How?”
The Home of Francis and Mary Key
THE HOME OF FRANCIS AND MARY KEY
GEORGETOWN, WASHINGTON, DC
MAY 3
THE KEYS WERE EXPECTING guests, but not the one who appeared at the Bridge Street entrance in the early evening, just as the sun sank behind the neighborhood of Georgetown, nestled on the Potomac in the cradle of Washington, DC.
Frank Key answered the door in the tidy entrance of the brown-brick house that also held his law office in its wing, with a greeting on his lips intended for a joyous friend, and instead found himself facing a short red-haired woman in her fifties with a shabby cotton cap and a lace shawl that needed cleaning. She carried with her a bitter odor, perhaps of a stable or butchery. Her face was almost as red as her hair, she had one eyebrow going over both eyes, and there was something familiar about her the longer he looked. He never got a chance to invite her in. She simply spun inside as if she had lived there for years.
He almost had the door closed when it was shoved open again, and in came two burly men with chests like barrels and very unhappy faces.
“Oh—” Key backed away as the two men came all the way in.
The door hung open.
“You’re Mr. Key,” the woman declared as she swung to face him. Her skirts were saturated with filth and urine from the street, indicating that she had not had her hands free to hold them up. In fact, her hands were hidden under the shawl.
“Yes … I know you, do I not?” He kept an eye on the two; all he could think to call them was ruffians. They hadn’t done anything. They just looked as if they wanted to.
“I’m Mrs. Verity Flett. I clean the floors at your church and look after the char and the candles. St. John’s Parish Church.”
“Of course, yes. How may I—”
She leveled her small marbly eyes on him and peered fiercely from under that eyebrow. “You are a pious man of charity and good works. You visit the sick. You minister to criminals in the jail. You do errands of Christian mercy. You deliver sermons. You write hymns.”
She suddenly stopped.
He waited, glanced at the two bulls standing silent at his doorway, but finally sputtered, “Um … I do …”
“You’re humble in the service of the Savior Jesus, you’re in his glory. And all that.”
“Is there some way I may help you, Mrs. Flett?”
She looked at the two men, steeled herself, and drew her shawl away from her bosom. There she cradled a tiny bundle the size of a kitten. With one hand she drew back the bread cloth in which the bundle was wrapped, there to reveal a tiny head no bigger than a peach. At first it seemed to be a doll, a child’s toy, but in a single moment of crushing truth Key realized it was not a doll at all.
“God save us!” he gasped as his chest constricted.
“This is my grandson,” Mrs. Flett said. “He’s dying. Save his soul. Baptize him, Mr. Key. I beg it.”
The level of determination in her unbalanced little face left no room for alternatives.
She saw in Key’s face that he was trying to invent other ways to solve this dilemma, other places for her to go, better people for the task, and she instantly added, “There’s no time. Do it now. We beseech it.”
“But I’m—I’m not ordained!”
“Any breath might be his last.”
“But where’s the mother? The father?”
“The mother’s down in the bed and he’s right at your door.”
In his spinning mind, Key couldn’t figure which of those men fit that role. In a mad instant he decided they must be brothers. The father and the uncle.
He looked at them. “Get water!”
Never be
fore had he seen a man of that bulk move so fast. The other one stood in the doorway and dragged off his hat.
“Give him to me.” Key reached for the infant, clumsily. There was hardly any substance to the tiny package. Though he had experienced five precious infants of his own, he had never seen any this small, this impossibly frail. Tiny blue hands no bigger than grapes flared out at his touch.
As he and the woman crudely arranged the bundle in his arms and exposed the cherubic face, another man came down the steps between the doorway and Bridge Street.
Key had forgotten anyone else was expected.
“Good evening. What’s—” Captain Tom Boyle, otherwise a most welcome presence, added a sudden gravity to the moment. He looked around, then paused over the countenance of the buffalo at the doorway and the other one who just now returned with a china tea cup of water. He pulled his own hat off and stepped in, and deliberately stepped to Key’s side.
“Frank, you all right?”
“Tom, please come in.”
The captain moved closer, until their arms touched. “Do we need to repel boarders?”
“No … one moment.”
Mrs. Flett reached up—way up—and seized the hat of the other man who had come with her. “Cap off, brat.”
“Yes, mum,” the man squeaked.
Key drew a shuddering breath and sighed it out, trying to clear his mind and collect his thoughts at the same time. Even so, he stumbled for the rights words. He closed his eyes and steadied himself. He could not address God in a rattling voice.
“Heavenly Father, we thank thee that by the Holy Spirit you bestow upon this innocent child your forgiveness and raise him to new life in grace … Enfold him in your arms and keep him safe in your mercy. Sanctify this water, we pray … that he is cleansed from sin and born again to rise at the right hand of Jesus Christ, our savior.”
Key dipped his hand into the water and let the cool liquid drizzle over the infant’s little face and hairless head, and he spoke to the baby. He thought for a moment that he was the only help for this helpless one, yet around him stood the infant’s family, desperate to save him, but helpless themselves. Born too early, though he looked like nothing more than an idea unfulfilled, he was a full human being, exactly right for his age. He was surrounded by all these, who wanted him to live.
