William Radcliff’s secretary was a plump, nearsighted man named Shadrach Spencer. William was making a complicated calculation about just how much to charge for Terranovan pipeweed in London when Spencer stuck his head into the office and said, “I beg your pardon, sir, but there is a…gentleman here whom I think you should see.”
He didn’t casually say such things: one reason he’d worked for William for more than fifteen years. “Well, send him in, then,” William said, setting down his quill. “Let’s find out what he has to say.”
As Radcliff expected from his secretary’s tone, the individual in question was no gentleman, but a backwoods ruffian who put him in mind of his distant cousin, Marcus. The man carried a parcel wrapped in cloth. He wore a wool shirt and suede breeches with fringes; no razor had sullied his cheek for several days. All the more reason to receive him as if he were the heir to a duchy. “Good day, sir. I am William Radcliff,” William said, bowing. “I fear you have the advantage of me.”
“My name is Dill, Hiram Dill.” The backwoodsman shook hands politely enough, then remarked, “Thirsty work, riding in from past the edge of town.”
“Shadrach, tend to that, would you?” Radcliff said.
“Certainly, sir.” His secretary bustled off, returning a moment later with a flagon of fine—or at least strong—gin from Nieuw Haarlem and two glasses. He poured for William and his guest.
“Your health, sir,” William said to Hiram Dill, raising his glass.
Dill drank. His eyes got wide. “I’m bound to be healthy if I pour this stuff down,” he said. “It’d poison anything that tried to sicken me, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”
Courteously, Radcliff poured him a refill. As Dill drank it down with as much alacrity as he’d shown for the first sample, William asked, “And what was it impelled you to ride in to Stuart from, as you say, past the edge of town?”
“Well, I was hunting for the pot last night, and I let fly with my shotgun at a pigeon flying by, and I bagged me…this here.” Hiram Dill had a sense of the dramatic, whatever his other shortcomings might have been. He undid the cloth around his loosely wrapped parcel.
It was a pigeon, as ordinary a pigeon as ever hatched. Atlantis boasted several varieties of extraordinary pigeons. One was cream-colored, with bright red eyes. One, too big and heavy to fly, had a feathery crest that looked like curly hair. One was a dark green bird that disappeared completely against the needle-filled branches of redwoods and pines.
But this was a plain English pigeon, like the ones that cooed and strutted in the streets of Stuart hoping for handouts. Its head was green, its body shades of gray and white. The only unusual thing about it was a bit of parchment tied around its right leg.
“A message?” William asked. Hiram Dill nodded. William asked another question: “You’ve read it?”
“Well, sure,” Dill answered. “Couldn’t very well know you needed to see it if I hadn’t, now could I?”
“No, indeed,” Radcliff said gravely. “And what does it say?”
“See for yourself,” the backwoodsman replied. His scarred and callused fingers surprisingly deft, he undid the message from the bird’s leg and handed it to William.
The fine, tiny, spidery hand defeated William’s sight, which was beginning to lengthen. He called in Shadrach Spencer. “Read this out for me, if you would be so kind.”
“Of course, sir.” His secretary held the parchment so close to his eyes, it all but bumped his nose. “It says, ‘In Stuart harbor nine ships of the line, twelve armed merchantmen, fifteen lesser ships. Sailing soon against Avalon.’”
“I am not surprised to learn we have a spy amongst us, but neither am I heartened to learn it. The iniquity some men will embrace…” William shook his head. Then he brightened. “As for you, Mr. Dill, I freely own myself to be in your debt.”
Hiram Dill didn’t say anything. His face, however, bore an expression remarkable for its cupidity. He had brought the pigeon to William for no other reason than to hear those words from his lips. William spoke to his secretary in a low voice. Spencer nodded and hurried off, as he had when Radcliff asked him to fetch the gin.
This time, he needed longer to return. When he did, he pressed a small velvet sack into William Radcliff’s hand. Radcliff, in turn, presented the sack to Hiram Dill. “With my compliments, sir.”
Judas could no more have kept from counting the wealth he’d got from the Romans than Dill could have stopped himself from opening the sack and seeing what lay inside. “Five pounds!” he exclaimed. “God bless you, Mr. Radcliff! I didn’t look for so much, and that’s the Lord’s truth, too.”
“You have earned it. I would say, earned it and more, did I not fear that would make you importunate,” William said with a smile. “I have known for long and long that the pirates of Avalon spied upon Stuart. How they spied upon us, no one here knew—till now.”
Hiram Dill grinned back. “I expect there’ll be a deal of pigeon hunting in town the next little while.”
“I expect you are right, Mr. Dill,” Radcliff replied. “I expect you are just exactly right. And I expect someone will be very unhappy when we uncover him for a polecat, for a lying, tricking snake in the grass.”
“What will you do to him? Something worth watching, I hope,” Dill said.
“Oh, yes.” Radcliff nodded. “I don’t know yet what it will be, sir, but I promise you that anyone who sees it will remember it to the end of his days.”
Red Rodney Radcliffe was not a happy man. When he was unhappy, he thought himself duty-bound to make everyone around him unhappy, too. “Damn it to hell, why haven’t we heard from Stuart?” he growled. “Somebody over there has his thumb up his bum. How are we supposed to know when the God-cursed fleet is sailing if they don’t send pigeons?”
“Maybe something’s gone wrong with the birds,” Ethel suggested.
“No doubt. They’ve come down poxed, on account of wasting their silver at the bird brothels. They need a better class of pigeon pimps.” Red Rodney laughed. He thought he was funny, and that was all that mattered to him.
His daughter was harder to amuse. “Maybe the fat fools back there have finally twigged to your using pigeons, and they’re shooting all the birds they see going out.”
“Good luck to ’em!” Rodney said. “They’d do better to shoot the bugger who sets the birds free.”
He meant that as a sardonic retort to put Ethel in her place. But the words seemed to hang in the air. The more he mulled them over, the likelier they felt. Ethel must have felt the same way, for she asked, “What can you do about it if they have shot him?”
“Damn all, I fear,” Red Rodney said morosely. “I’d have to get somebody else with pigeons to Stuart. That might not be easy, not if the bastards there are waiting for me to try it.”
“You could put pigeons on a scout ship up near North Cape,” Ethel said. “They wouldn’t give as much warning as birds from Stuart would, but they fly faster than any ship can sail.”
Radcliffe started to trot out all the reasons why that was a foolish notion, but stopped with his mouth hanging open. Try as he would, he couldn’t find any. Instead, he gave Ethel a big, smacking kiss. “The Devil fry me black if you won’t command the Black Hand after I’m gone. You’ve got the natural wit for it.”
“And the charm, too.” Ethel simpered. She wasn’t old enough yet to have the kind of charms she wanted. But she also wanted to take a pirate crew into battle. Even now, she would likely do a good job of it.
He tousled her hair. “Your day will come, sweetling, but not quite yet.” Ethel pouted. He took no notice of her, which was her good luck; had his temper flared, he would have made her sorry.
Instead, he called for Mick. The master of the dovecote nodded and knuckled his forehead when Red Rodney told him what he had in mind. “Aye, skipper, we can do that—damned if we can’t,” he said. “You were in a sneaky mood when you thought of it, eh?”
“I’m not to blame,” Radclif
fe said, not without pride. “It’s my daughter’s notion.”
“Well, good on Ethel, then,” said Mick, who knew which side his bread was buttered on.
That very afternoon, a pinnace slipped out of Avalon harbor. Armed with only a handful of four-pounders, the little ship couldn’t hope to outfight even the lighter vessels that would be sailing from Stuart. But she boasted a broad spread of sail, so she had a chance of getting away. And she carried several pigeons in wicker cages, so even if the enemy did run her down she could warn Avalon that danger neared.
Ethel was wild with rage when she found out the pinnace had sailed without her. “Why didn’t you let me go?” she shouted at her father. “You said I could’ve done it!”
“I said your day was coming. I didn’t say it was here,” Rodney replied.
“I say it is!” Ethel screeched.
“You can say all sorts of things,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you can back them up.”
“Who says I can’t?” She drew her pistol with startling speed and aimed it at his chest.
The bore of any firearm pointed straight at you seemed six or eight times as wide as it really was. Red Rodney made no sudden moves. Furious as she was, Ethel might have squeezed the trigger first and thought about it only afterwards—which would have been rather too late for him. “Put that thing away,” he said. “She’s already sailed, and she’s miles from here by now. I can’t call her back.”
“Not fair!” Ethel wailed. The pistol swung away from Red Rodney. He darted forward and grabbed her wrist. The gun went off. Something smashed. He didn’t see what, and he didn’t much care. As long as that heavy lead ball didn’t thump into him…
Ethel was tough and brave and strong—and not nearly big enough for any of that to do her the least bit of good. Rodney got her over his knee and smacked her behind. Her wails—or maybe the pistol shot—brought people on the run. “Only a mistake,” Red Rodney told them. “She’s finding out better now.”
“Oh, no, I’m not!” Ethel yelled.
“Oh, yes, you are, by God!” Her father continued to apply himself to her seat of learning. “You don’t aim a damned gun at somebody unless you aim to kill him. And you’d damned well better not aim to kill the bastard who spawned you. Have you got that, you little hellcat?” He did his best to make sure she’d got it.
By her tears, by her red, blotchy face, and by his own hot, red palm, his best was plenty good. He didn’t stop, though, until she sobbed, “Enough, Father! Enough!”
That took longer than he’d thought it would. He admired her strength to hold out—but he would have gone to the rack before he said so. “Mind from now on. Do you hear me?” he growled.
“Yes, Father.” She stared down at the floor. She didn’t try to sit down after he let her go; he suspected she would sleep on her stomach when night came.
“This isn’t a game, dammit,” Rodney Radcliffe said roughly. “This is a war. If the buggers in Stuart win it, they’ll knock Avalon flat and they’ll hang everybody they can catch. You had a notion that gives us a better chance. I’m going to use that notion the best way I know how, with you or without you. I don’t have room to do anything else. Have you got that?”
“Yes, Father.” Ethel kept her eyes downcast.
“All right, then. Remember it.”
“Oh, I’ll remember, Father.” She looked him in the face then. “You don’t need to worry about that.” She turned and walked away. Red Rodney felt as if a goose—or, by the weight of the strides, a honker—had just walked over his grave. No, Ethel wouldn’t forget till she was dead or he was. And her expression told only too clearly which one of those she wanted.
Royal Navy ships carried Royal Marines: bullocks, sailors called them with affectionate scorn. They were tough, stolid men in red uniforms who fired from the fighting tops and led boarding parties and raiding parties. The ships of the line from Nieuw Haarlem had similar contingents aboard. The Dutch marines might have been stamped from the same molds as their English counterparts, save only that they wore different clothes.
William Radcliff’s merchantmen normally took no marines with them. Traders fought only in emergencies, not as a matter of course, and couldn’t afford so many mostly idle hands aboard. Everything that happened between Stuart and Avalon, though, would be in the nature of an emergency. William recruited hunters from all over English-speaking Atlantis. They would not be so well disciplined as their counterparts in the men-of-war, but he thought they would serve.
His distant cousin Marcus Radcliffe came to Stuart at the head of a company of sixty backwoodsmen. They had no uniforms. Each wore what suited him and carried the kind of musket he liked best. If they came from a mold, it was not from the one that had produced the English and Dutch marines.
Marcus gave William a salute that would have provoked an apoplexy in a sergeant of Royal Marines. “Well, coz, here we are,” he said. “Hope we can give those pirates a bad time one way or another.”
“One way and another, I suspect,” William said. Yes, the backwoodsmen were sadly short on spit and polish. He thought they could fight anyway, and wished the rest of his recruits left him as confident. “From now till the fighting’s over, you’re a captain, with a captain’s pay.”
“Good,” Marcus said matter-of-factly. “I don’t chase silver as hard as you do, but I don’t scare it off when it ambles into my sights, either.”
“Fine. I’ll put you and your men into the Pride of Atlantis.” William pointed to the ship. “And do you recollect what we spoke of when last you visited Stuart?” He didn’t go into detail, not when he hadn’t yet tracked down the pigeon fanciers who kept Avalon informed of what went on here.
Marcus nodded. “I’m not likely to forget. Come the time, you won’t find us behindhand. You may count on that.”
“Good. I didn’t think I would find you so, and I intend to count on it.” William sketched a salute, then made his way down to the Royal Sovereign.
“The admiral!” the boatswain cried, and piped him aboard. All the men on deck saluted as he came up the gangplank. The naval salute was knuckles-out, so the person honored couldn’t see a sailor’s pitch-dirtied palm.
Among the men saluting on deck was Elijah Walton. “We await your orders, Admiral,” he said with no irony William could hear.
Standing by him was the Royal Sovereign’s captain, a red-faced veteran mariner named Adam Barber. He was the man with whom and through whom Radcliff would have to work. “Take us out of the harbor, Mr. Barber,” William said, wincing at his accidental rhyme. “Once we’re on the open sea, we’ll have the leisure to shake ourselves out into a proper line.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Barber replied. He shouted the necessary orders. Signal flags fluttered up the lines to let the other ships know what they were supposed to do. Were pigeons flying out of Stuart even now, letting the corsairs of Atlantis know their doom was on the way? Men with shotguns waited southwest of the city, but the odds of stopping the birds were slim, and William knew it.
Sweating, swearing sailors hauled up the anchor and the heavy rope that attached it to the ship. Slowly, slowly, they made the capstan turn. The noise it made was half rumble, half squeak. Their chanty, rising over that noise, was loudly and jauntily obscene.
Sails unshrouded. The masts and spars filled with canvas like a tree—an imported tree in Atlantis, where most of the natives were evergreens—coming into new leaf in springtime, but a thousand times faster. The Royal Sovereign slid away from the pier, slowly at first but then with more speed and more confidence.
“Nothing like getting under weigh, is there?” William said.
“Well, sir, I don’t think so, and that’s a fact,” Captain Barber replied. “I suppose other folks can have other notions.” He turned to the pilot, a Stuart native who knew the waters of the harbor as intimately as he knew the contours of his wife’s body. “I place myself in your capable hands, Mr. McCormick.”
“And I’ll try not to make you so
rry for it, sir,” David McCormick answered. As the Royal Sovereign slid past a clump of barrel trees, he swung the wheel a couple of spokes’ worth to port. “The deeper channel here lies this way. We’d likely not go aground anyhow, not unless the tide were lower, but all the same—why take the chance, eh?”
“If I have to take a chance in battle, that’s one thing,” Barber said. “It comes with my station, you might say. Taking a chance on the way to battle…is something I don’t care to do, thank you very much. Choose the deeper channel every time, sir.”
“That is well said,” William Radcliff put in. “Enough danger we can’t steer clear of. What we can avoid, best we do.”
Captain Barber eyed him in some surprise. “Meaning no offense, sir, but you have better sense than I was led to believe.” Elijah Walton tried to hide in plain sight.
“Well, perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t,” William said. “Either way, though, we’d do best to save our fighting for the pirates. Quarreling among ourselves won’t get us anywhere but into trouble.”
Red Rodney Radcliffe waited for a pigeon from Stuart letting him know the enemy fleet had sailed. He waited and waited, but no bird came. Something was wrong. He didn’t know what, but something was. William Radcliff wouldn’t wait, not with all his ships assembled.
“They must have caught your bird fancier,” Jenny said when the pirate chief grumbled about it.
“Too bloody right they have,” Rodney said gloomily.
And if they had, what did that mean? It meant he was waiting and waiting for a message he wouldn’t get. It also meant he was damn lucky he’d sent that pinnace north. God bless Ethel, he thought. Without the little ship and the birds aboard it, his unloving and unloved cousin’s ships might have come up to Avalon unannounced and undiscovered.
A surprise would have meant disaster, nothing less. The whole point of fighting the enemy men-of-war was keeping them far away from the corsairs’ base. If they took Avalon…If they did, individual pirates and pirate ships might go on here and there. But the present order of things, where the freebooters were almost a nation and where their vessels ruled the Hesperian Gulf, would die.
Opening Atlantis Page 23
