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by Diane Carey

  “Destiny,” he spoke out.

  “Atlas,” Victor Tarkio corrected vaguely as he rowed his captor toward the vessel, which was rigged with schooner sails and two square tops’ls on her foremast.

  “What?” Gordon asked.

  “Atlas, not Destiny. It’s written right there on her bow.”

  “Oh … no, I didn’t mean the name. I meant destiny. Delphi. Fate.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mine. And yours. And hers.” Gordon knew he was taking a risk letting Tarkio row him out from the Helen’s mooring, with land just over there, not only in sight but close enough for a brisk swim. Once free in England, how then would an American escapee conceal himself? How would he find refuge and perhaps transport back to the rogue nation?

  Tarkio was better off here, in this boat, rowing around. He had nowhere to go if he jumped ship. Gordon knew, and so did Tarkio, that out on the open ocean Tarkio could at least entertain the idea of being recaptured by Americans and finding his way back home, though that hope was blunted by the simple fact that the American privateers, their only real navy, did not challenge English ships of war. That wasn’t their mission. Facing an armed vessel, they ran. They always ran away.

  As the boat drew closer, he heard the sound of hammers inside the gray hull, audible from the line of gunports, just above a thin line of white paint that ran the length of her hull.

  “This will do,” he uttered to himself as the rowboat came up close to the dove-colored hull. “Your best guess, Tarkio. How long is this ship?”

  Tarkio stopped rowing and took a good look. “’Round seventy at the hull, I suppose. Hundred fifty, maybe, with her jib-boom out. Pretty big.”

  “Pull up to her side.”

  In moments they were tied up and climbing aboard, dropping onto the battered deck, which had many broken seams and must certainly leak like cheesecloth.

  “Oy!” a shout greeted them—or perhaps it was not a greeting. A strong-looking man in filthy clothes, not a uniform, came trotting at them from the afterdeck. “You aboard for some reason?”

  Gordon had assumed his uniform would say something, but this creature was clearly not impressed. “I am James Gordon, in command of His Majesty’s Ship-of-War Helen, anchored around that spit head. You will address me properly hereon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Farquarson. Shipwright.” This beefy laborer was rough in all ways with the exception of a pair of striking emerald eyes ringed with thick black lashes much darker than his stubbly hair. He would probably tidy up well and be completely unrecognizable.

  “How did this schooner come to be here?”

  “Captured by the squadron under Admiral Cockburn, s’all I know.”

  “I know. Your assignment?”

  “Same as ever. Refit. She’s going into dry dock tomorrow, like do all the Yanks.”

  “Specifically for … ?”

  Farquarson shifted unhappily, debating whether to explain his purposes to Gordon, but then deciding not to care one way or the other. “Add bulkheads, straighten up these masts, add to the keel, shorten those tops, shift the ballast, ehm … cover the gunports so they don’t take water when they go under, reinforce the weather deck so the guns can go up there instead of the—”

  “But these will change her center of balance, her ability to move as she was built to, the steepness of her heeling?”

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? Make her less dangerous. Don’t want to turn arse-up in a puff of breeze, do you, dump a dozen men overboard?”

  “Please stop!” Gordon snapped, holding up both hands as if he could push the big man over the low-slung rail. “Please do nothing more to alter this vessel. Nothing!”

  “What?” Farquarson actually laughed. “You taking charge, then? How’re you doing that? Don’t you have some papers at all?”

  “Patience, man. I mean to take command of this ship. The only thing I want changed is her name, do you understand? I personally guarantee that you and your carpenters will be paid for this assignment, but only if you cease work today until I can secure the proper orders. Is that clear? Or shall I post a guard?”

  The bulky man shrugged. “It’s your neck, admiral.”

  “You will address me properly.”

  “Why?”

  After so many months among Royal Navy seamen whom he could punish or even hang at his will, having failed utterly to get Tarkio to do him that simple respect of class distinction, Gordon began to finally digest how poorly that tactic worked for him in the general populace.

  “When do we get paid?” Farquarson asked.

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Should I?”

  “I’ll arrange that you’ll be paid in full for any work you have done or were told to do on this vessel, and that will be done within one week. I’ll give you something today as a security. But there will be some alterations I may want, so I will keep you on retainer.”

  Farquarson bobbed his straight eyebrows and frivolously waved a hand. “Take her.”

  He started back the way he had come, to stop the work going on below, which indeed did stop as soon as the big man disappeared down the main hatch.

  Gordon’s legs felt like solid iron. He had never seen himself as a man with an imagination, one who would take wild risks, yet here he was, devising a mad plan because some higher power in heaven or hell had put this American prize in his path. Here he stood upon her deck, having just given his first order aboard. And she wasn’t even his yet.

  Victor Tarkio folded his arms and coughed, or was it a sigh of some kind?

  “Yes,” Gordon muttered. “Yes, this will do what I need. The world is entirely new now. Napoleon has abdicated and sits rotting on his island, the last bit of land he can call his own. May he rot there. They still call him ‘emperor.’ Absurd … an ‘emperor’ with an empire of one island off the Tuscan coast.”

  “They say there are twelve thousand people on that island,” Tarkio recalled. “He’s even created a navy and an army.”

  “Probably to parade himself about. He makes decrees about farming. How pathetic.” Gordon glanced at him. “How do you know these things?”

  “The crew got mail from their families yesterday.”

  Swinging all the way around while testing the stiffness of a shroud cable, Gordon merrily said, “Britain has regrouped and we can now turn our attention, and our hardened military forces, on our little American problem. The Americans, with your little militia civilians stumbling from their beds to march around like dolls and pretend they know how to defend their—”

  “I know,” Tarkio interrupted. “That’s why we’re here instead of in the blockade squadron. Your own navy doesn’t need the Helen anymore. They don’t really need you anymore either.”

  “Leaves me free to pursue my own devil.” Gordon deliberately didn’t look at him. “That swaggerer has changed ships. Your man. Boyle. He has abandoned the Comet that made him famous. He left the ship behind and much of the crew.”

  “Maybe they just went home. Americans can do that, being free and all.”

  “Still, he’s left them behind.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Spies. Are you angry that I didn’t tell you when I found out?”

  Somewhat stiffly, Tarkio said, “No point to that.”

  “He’s sailing a large privateer now. A ship with black sides. A ship built only to be a privateer, like this one, to carry heavy guns and disguise herself by changing her rig like a woman changes her dress. So my sources say.”

  “Not so rare,” the American commented, holding back his true thoughts.

  “You’re wrong, Tarkio. His new ship, it is rare. And it’s new. He’s only had it a matter of weeks. He and the ship are strangers. It’s big and black, a symbol of its kind, with that American stripey flag dancing off her—we can see a ship like that. It will stand out. We can follow the viper. Hunt him down. I want to see how your Captain Boyle fa
res when facing a Royal Navy ship instead of unarmed merchant ships with inadequate crews.”

  He rubbed the base of the foremast on this captured American ship, vengeance proudly brewing within him.

  “I won’t help you,” Tarkio anticipated.

  Gordon looked at him. “What?”

  “I know what you’re planning. I knew as soon as we came around the Spithead and saw this schooner. I won’t help you destroy Tom Boyle. Put me back in chains down in the bilge. Make me a prisoner again.”

  “You won’t even work this ship? You won’t help us learn to sail … this?”

  “Did you really think I would?”

  Shaking his head a little, Gordon knew his disappointment did show. “You’ve been poisoned by that nation of turncoats. I’ve given you my trust, against my own better judgment, but I have no more expectation of devotion from you than from any other of the maggots in my crew, do I?”

  “Take them with you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Take them, your crew, the men you have now, when you go out on this ship. Don’t get new men. Take the ones you know. They’ll go with you.”

  “What’s this? Are you giving me advice?”

  “It’s your advantage.” Tarkio turned and leaned back with his legs against the deckhouse as if he had been there all his life. For this moment, he was back on home soil. “You think you can’t trust your own crew, so you put your life in the hands of a captured foreigner. These hands. I could’ve strangled you a hundred times. Easier, I could’ve let the elephant crush you.”

  “Are you sorry you didn’t?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?” The question erupted without the reins Gordon had used inside himself to hold it back before this. “It makes no sense! You had the perfect opportunity. Why would you kill the animal instead of me?”

  Tarkio stood there for a moment and seemed to be waiting for Gordon to figure it out for himself, as if it were written somewhere and all the young commander had to do was find it.

  When nothing happened, Tarkio spoke more quietly. “Because you fight for a purpose that’s clear to you. Not because you think Americans are vulgar dogs or a nation of mutineers, or you’d never have taken me as your steward. Even if you don’t like us, that’s not enough to make you into a killer. You’re not fighting because some admiral ordered you or because you want to climb the ranks and impress the fancies at a dinner party. You’re not a fop and you don’t care if you look absurd as long as things get done. The crew respects that about you.”

  Taken by surprise, Gordon discovered that he could neither move forward nor away.

  “Even Moycroft,” the American continued. “But you’ve never stepped forward of the mizzen to discover that most of them are just as loyal to England as you are.”

  “They’re drunkards and pressed men,” Gordon said. “Why should they be loyal?”

  “Because you are. You don’t want to spend your life in a Royal Navy sweatbox any more than they do. But here you are anyway.”

  Squinting, Gordon felt his throat grow tight like an embarrassed little boy’s, so tight that he couldn’t respond.

  “Never thought of that?” the enigmatic Tarkio went on. “That the attitude of the captain could sink into the crew, even drunkards and pressed men? Don’t you know they’ve been watching you? Deciding whether or not to die for you? You don’t give them the respect of holding the same cause in their hearts as you hold in yours.”

  “Stop,” Gordon managed.

  But Tarkio did not. “And me. Why do I protect you? Why didn’t I poison your food or strangle you in your bunk?”

  “I would’ve done it to you.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Tarkio said with a revealing smile. “We’re not so different, all of us, you and me, American and English. There will always be some bit of England about America. After this is all over, England will discover we’re pretty much related for all time. I hope we never fight again after that. Not against each other, anyway. It shouldn’t be like this between children of the same womb.”

  Gordon noticed his hands were shaking. He clutched them into fists and pressed them against his thighs. “Why are you speaking of these things? After all the months, why now?”

  “If you put me in chains and I’m not there to protect you, remember this,” Tarkio told him firmly. “Your crew saw you run out in front of a monster to defend your ship. Just like England, running out in front of Bonaparte and standing alone.”

  The American walked to the rail of this captured princess and gripped a shroud, seeming the perfect idealization of a sailor, as if he had been painted there in watercolors.

  “We do understand,” Tarkio said. “So when you face your foe, stop looking over your shoulder like a man with no friends. That’s my advice.”

  Attack!

  UPPER MARLBORO

  MONDAY, AUGUST 22

  WILLIAM BEANES HAD SEEN war before and had not enjoyed it. His role as a surgeon in the Revolutionary War involved frantic attempts to save lives of men whose gore was flowing out from their bodies, and if he could save them, to patch those bodies together from the tattered pieces and hope against the odds that they did not die later after months of indelible pain.

  As the enemy marched into Upper Marlboro from the North Road, he was there holding a flag of truce. A few other citizens stood with him, hoping to ameliorate the destructive bent taken by the British Army bullies in so many communities. As Upper Marlboro’s leading citizen, he carried the white flag himself and led the little group of Americans to the front line of the impressive enemy force and stopped before the officers in the front line.

  He gazed up at the highest-ranked officer, a tall and handsome aristocrat, who was right out in front, glorious in his red uniform, white breeches and Ostrich-plumed hat, riding an absolutely stunning pure-white Arabian horse that clearly was a personal steed, not an Army mount. It might’ve been a commandeered animal, but to Beanes’ experienced eyes the officer could control the creature with barely a touch of the reins, indicating that he was used to the horse and the horse was used to him.

  Behind him a few paces was another officer on a red horse, a wiry man with a severe face and intelligent eyes, clearly keeping back from his superior, but also clearly a close aide. And after them, dozens upon dozens of British marching men, not boys, but men of obvious experience, comfortable in their roles, at ease with their weapons, and looking at the Americans with a sense that they were completely entitled to invade here.

  There were only a few dozen houses in Upper Marlboro’s rolling hills, aromatic with fields of hay and tobacco, meadows with grazing sheep and its ancient woodlands. Beanes himself owned considerable land and of course the gristmill. In a considered effort to keep it all from being set afire, Beanes waved his white flag and adjusted to the inevitable. He straightened to attention and gave the officer a snappy salute, or his best version of one.

  He rolled out his favorite Scottish accent. “Welcome aboard, sir. Doctor William Beanes at your service. You are welcome in our humble village.”

  “I see nothing humble here,” the high-ranking gentleman commented. “You’re a physician?”

  Northern Irish aristocracy, that accent.

  “A surgeon,” Beanes answered, wondering now whether the Scots accent was helpful.

  The officer steadied his horse with one hand upon its withers. “I am Major General Robert Ross, commanding Wellington’s Invincibles and Royal Marines.”

  “Welcome to you, Major General Ross. I would like to offer my house at Academy Hill as your headquarters. I have a reputable wine cellar, a farm, milk, bread, and victuals. Your brigade can be comfortable camping in this field. You may take leisure.”

  “Why should you do this so lightly, sir?”

  “I am not in favor of this war and disapprove of the president’s decision to wage it. I am British by blood and believe our nations should be amicable. I begin my philosophy in my own home and live
what I preach. Thus I welcome you and offer you the comforts of Upper Marlboro. We are not all war hawks and savages.”

  “Very well, I suppose.” Ross nodded toward the officer behind him on the other horse. “This is Lieutenant George De Lacy Evans. He will be your liaison. I will convene a council of war here and plan my next movement.”

  Comfortable enough with Beanes and the countenance of the other townsmen standing with the doctor that he had revealed his lack of a decisive plan, Ross flexed his shoulders.

  “If I may, sir,” Lieutenant Evans spoke up—also Irish— “this would be an opportunity to collect Admiral Co’burn and bring him here for your counsel.”

  “Let me have a day to ponder.”

  Evans seemed irritated, but said, appropriately, only, “Yes, sir.”

  Co’burn, the lieutenant had said. The English pronunciation for Cockburn. Cockburn, the devil of Chesapeake Bay, the plunderer himself, the devastator. Coming here.

  “Doctor … ‘Banes,’ did you say?” Ross asked, pronouncing it in the old way as Beanes did.

  “Yes, General, sir.”

  “You and your party will be considered spies if we are betrayed while we camp here. You will also be under guard at all times. That said, we accept your gracious hospitality and will spare your private properties of retaliation for the reprehensible behavior of Americans in Canada and the west, that your countrymen learn cooperation reaps rewards. Lead on.”

  Surrounded

  GEORGETOWN

  AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 24

  POLLY KEY PACED THE terrace of steps in front of her house, her heart thudding so hard that her chest hurt. Her body trembled with a hundred unfading fears, for she was watching her neighbors on the street, militia, soldiers, cavalry, running for their lives. Horrifying to see these people fleeing, compelled by the dread that had been gathering for so long. Her hands trembled, her stomach churned, and her mind would not quiet from imaginings of what was happening now and what would come tomorrow.