I stood upon a deck that took up the front half of the ship. On my left was a snarly-looking black cannon. On my right stood a set of ladder steps leading up to another deck, a higher one, which scooped back to the stern. I could just make out more men up there, minding a huge tiller.
Through the shaggy fence of branches, I saw another ship on the water, almost as large as this one, with two quill-shaped yards jabbing the sky. Massive parallelograms of canvas carried her into a crescent of anchored vessels, a line of ghosts on a moorside vigil. All the boats wore beards made of bundled saplings.
“What’s that?” I pointed at the other sailing vessel.
“The Galley Washington,” Daniel answered brusquely, “moving into defensive position. Lavengood, sheet in all you can get. By the saints, if we’re not up another point! Good ship!”
To our right was the crescent of anchored vessels, the smaller ones with one mast each, the larger ones, others like the Washington, with two. “What are all these boats?”
Daniel flopped an arm against his thigh. “Why, this, brother, is the Continental Navy! Eight fifty—four foot gunboats, a cutter, two schooners, three galleys, and the sloop you’re on. And sad you’ll be ever to have laid eyes upon it.”
“Why are they anchored? You’re not meaning to have a battle this way—”
“The gunboats are flat-bottomed and square-rigged. They can’t hope to maneuver upwind. We’ll fight at anchor.”
The sloop heeled fiercely and passed the ship called Trumbull, heading northwest, away from the place where we should be anchored.
“We’ll be nicking Revenge’s sprit at this pace,” a man at the tiller commented. He had a black bandana tied onto his russet hair and arms like tree limbs, and he used lines to control the heavy tiller with tackles.
“We’ll make anchor with one more tack,” Daniel said to him, “and come to our position on the broad reach.”
“It’ll have to be handy.”
“Say it again, Henry, that the Fates hear you over the wind.”
In defiance the wind screamed away his words. We cut past four of the gunboats, with their single masts drawing circles on the sky, sails bundled upon slanted yards. At the south of the bay, another sailing ship maneuvered in the cup of the crescent. “Who’s that one!” I asked.
“Royal Savage. Quiet, Adam. Ready about! Keep a firm turn on the pins, men. Let’s not have a repeat of that ugly little episode yesterday. Let go your jib sheets! Helm over, Henry!”
At the tiller, Henry and two other men suddenly shifted from one side of the ship to the other. Only now, as their cold-reddened toes squeaked on the wet deck, did I realize they were bare of foot. Some had tied cloth about their feet, but these men were wearing rags.
The ship’s narrow body shuddered, came to an even keel, rocked briefly on the chop. The long bowsprit bit into the north wind.
“Starboard, haul away your jib sheets!”
The crew’s heads disappeared and their elbows pummeled the air. The four triangular sails on the bowsprit whacked like wild horses, making a drumming sound, but the bow came around. The ship turned on a pin, the sails snapped full, and instantly we were faced back east, stabbing the bowsprit at Valcour Island.
“Prepare to haul that gaff down by hand,” Daniel ordered. “The sail’ll fight you. Hands to the cathead!” When some men looked confused, he added, “Show ‘em, Henry. Barrette, man the aft anchor. Men, it’s critical both anchors drop at the same time, understood?”
The man called Barrette smiled ruggedly and said, “I can forge ‘em, Daniel. Bet I can drop ‘em too!”
“Good man,” Daniel said. “Otherwise we’ll end up with our stem swung south. We must be broadside to the enemy. We’re passing Connecticut—as we come abeam of New York, we’ll strike sail and drop anchor. Almost there … wait … wait … ready … aft anchor, drop! Take in and make fast—quick, quick! Peak and throat halyards, lower away! Forward anchor, drop! Downhauls, haul away!”
I had only half a clue what he was up to, but the ship seemed to know. The big sail and the triangles fell into linenfolds, iron rings screaming on the cables, and the wind raced by without us. The anchor lines snapped with us between them. We were anchored in position, with a galley before us and the crescent of other boats behind, strapped across the bay between Valcour Island and the shoreline of New York.
Daniel faced his crew down on the gun deck. “Cockbill the tops’l yard. Clear for action, boys, ready every gun. Get that canopy up and the pine boughs on top of it! Get it over the forward guns if you can. Handily now! Wind’s from the north!”
Around us, shivering, the men scratched to their work. Eyes ferocious, lips flat, Daniel Dickenson finally turned to give me the attention he had avoided. “Come for last rites?”
“I brought a parcel from your mother.” Rather clumsily, I climbed the nearly vertical steps, holding ropes that were fastened in the fashion of a handrail. Still Daniel had to clasp my arm and pull me to the upper deck. Bracing my legs, I fished through my coat, hoping the ride upon the ship’s flank had not claimed the bundle. Good, here it was.
He did not take it. “You came from Connecticut to bring mail?”
My brother-in-law leered at me through a flop of brown hair beating his cheekbone. I scarcely recognized him. Four months ago he had gone to answer the call for experienced sailors and wrights, rosy-cheeked and well-clothed, umber hair bound at the back of his neck like a gentleman. The wraith before me was gaunt, waistcoat ratty, breeches patched, day coat completely missing. His hair was long and lusterless, gone dark as oak bark. Scratched, bare arms protruded from torn sleeves as if someone had dressed a cadaver. Upon his feet were Indian moccasins, worn to parchment.
“What happened to you?” I whispered.
“Camp fever,” he said. “Typhoid, malaria, and four months round-the-clock toil to construct these gunboats and galleys, launching a new vessel by the week.”
“Where are the riding boots I gave you? And the white linen shirt Eloise made?”
“Traded the boots to Indians for cornmeal in August. The shirt was burned off at the blacksmith’s forge making the anchors. Glad I am to have this brown hunting shirt and waistcoat.”
He stopped talking as two men came to his sides, one being the man from the tiller called Henry. They were the only two men not rushing to some task of preparation.
“First mate Henry Hardie,” Daniel began, “and Doctor Stephen McCrae. My wife’s brother, the parson Adam Ghent. What he’s doing here is a mystery.”
I bowed low, and would’ve tipped my tricorn if I’d still had it after my little ride. “Every navy needs a chaplain. I’m here to lead morning prayers.”
“We only have one morning left,” Daniel said cryptically.
The two other men said nothing. I knew how I must appear to them, with my blue wool coat and white neckerchief stuck with crumpled autumn leaves and pine needles, windburn russeting my thin ivory face, blond hair blowing into my eyes. Daniel had always likened me to a parakeet, his height but a third less his weight. Today, braced on many sides by the frosted Adirondacks, we stood on the deck of a fighting ship in a very strange equity, surrounded by fifty half-frozen carpenters, shipwrights, sailmakers, ropeworkers, ironsmiths, powderboys, and militiamen, and not one to bring me tea or buff my buckles.
“What is this boat we’re on?” I peered up at the hundred feet of single mast. “Did you build this too?”
Henry Hardie tightened his folded arms. Under his black bandana, one eye tended to squint. “She’s a Canadian provincial sloop they used to guard the lake for the redcoats. The General went and captured her from the British at St. John’s last May.”
“All of five years old,” McCrae added, “and she’s the grand dame of our fleet. Until today, she was the biggest ship on Lake Champlain.”
“What’s different about today?”
“Wind’s from the north,” Daniel blurted.
There was that phrase again. What coul
d that mean? But instead, I asked, “Is this the George? I’ve heard several names.”
“The General doesn’t name our ships after people, like the Kings admirals do. She’s a Yankee sloop now.”
“But I saw a ‘sloop’ on an embroidery once. It had three masts.”
Hardie shifted his cold feet. “The British call any ship a sloop which has a single gun deck. Three masts is ‘ship-rigged.’ This girl’s a ‘sloop rig.’ One mast.”
“Congratulations, Adam,” Daniel snarled. “You now know more about sailing ships than most of these men here.”
“Come now,” I shivered. “What should we call her, then? And shouldn’t I present myself to the captain while we rest at our anchorage?” I made a little practice bow at the waist.
Behind Daniel, Hardie cocked a hip. The man called McCrae smirked ironically.
Daniel hung his arm around the gigantic folded sail with its two wooden strakes spearing back beyond the stern into the night. “This is the Sloop-of-war Enterprise. I’m captain. And this isn’t an anchorage. It’s a coffin.”
Directly in front of the anchored sloop, the hogbacked scrub brush of Valcour Island wrecked the wind that raked down her spine, causing unearthly chop in the bay. While at anchor, we climbed down to the gun deck to get out of the frigid wind. Men around us began to huddle beside the sloop’s twelve four-pounder cannons. Wordlessly they stacked hand-chilling iron balls upon shot racks.
Out there, on the bay, the line of little ships clinked and wobbled, held in place by a complex of cables and anchors. On a few of the ships, like this one, men were mounting canvas canopies and thatching them with evergreen boughs, releasing a Christmastime aroma through the pitch and black powder.
So this was the Continental Navy. What a thin line indeed we made.
Bracketed by his two friends, Daniel glared at me. “I charged you to stay in New Haven and take care of mother and Eloise.”
“I’m caring for Eloise best I know how—by making sure her husband comes home safe. As for your mother, she takes care of herself.”
I held out the bundle of burlap from Daniel’s mother, no bigger than a holiday pudding, tied with twine, sealed by a dot of candlewax with a shank of cat hair pressed into it. Still he did not collect it.
“There she is,” he commented dryly. “Hello, Mother.”
“Let’s open it, then.” McCrae reached for the parcel.
Daniel slapped his hand down. “Are you mad? You’ve no idea what might crawl out of that.”
“Get him, Henry.”
At McCrae’s order, Henry Hardie scooped Daniel’s elbows from behind and dragged him backward while McCrae snatched the parcel from my hands.
“Here now!” Daniel bellowed. “This is serious! The Royal Navy’s been spotted! We must prepare to receive them!”
Two more men, whom I would come to know as Lavengood and Thorsby, sprang to hold Daniel back while his possessions were pillaged. I was surprised at their insubordination. This was nothing like the stiffly proprietous British soldiers patrolling the Colonies. Especially the impudent young doctor—he surprised me.
“Won’t take a moment.” McCrae cut the string with a copper knife. On top of a cannon the parcel unfolded itself, spilling an odd collection of candles, twigs, dried flowers, and a fist-sized bag made of animal skin and stuffed full, dangling from a leather thong. “Whats this bag?”
“It’s called a crane bag,” I explained. “Daniel’s mother is somewhat of a—an apothecary.”
“Doesn’t smell like medicine.” McCrae let Hardie smell it too, then the big bearded man named Rochon.
“She told me it’s purifying incense,” I explained. “Cedar, sandalwood, sage, rose oil, and salt is what she mentioned.”
Rochon looked at Daniel. “Why would your mother send that?”
“Because she knows lake water stinks. Put that away!”
“Where did she find a crane to skin?”
“It’s probably some poor quail she slaughtered. All of you, this is folly. There’s a battle coming!”
Unbelievably, the crowd around the flap of burlap was growing rather than shrinking. Struck me that, for these men, there’d been a battle coming for months and they hadn’t the energy to believe the moment had finally arrived. The distraction of a parcel from home, anyone’s home, was too magnetic not to give it a minute or two of what little they could spare.
“Look at the tiny bell,” Hardie said, pointing at the clutter now revealing itself. “And a black candle.”
“And a green one,” McCrae noted. “Does the color mean something?”
When Daniel wouldn’t answer, I did. “She said that in olden times bells were rung to bless the souls of the dead.”
Lavengood’s face snapped up. “Does that mean she thinks we’ll die?”
“No!” Daniel bellowed. “Pity’s sake, Adam!”
“What’s it mean, then?” Thorsby asked.
Daniel hesitated, shifted, and was finally released by the men holding him. Sagging, he admitted, “All right, well, it asks the favor of those on the other side of the Veil.”
“What veil?” Hardie demanded.
“The Veil. Between this world and the other. It’s a superstitious woman’s folly! You can tell by the ingredients she’s living in a dream!”
“Can you?” McCrae opened the crane bag and, shielding it with one hand, spilled the contents onto the frame of the cannon truck. “Here’s blue flower.”
“Monk’s Hood,” Daniel fumed. “Just a plant in her garden!”
“What about these others?” McCrae asked.
“She embarrassed me all my childhood with her nonsense!”
Hardie peered curiously. “What can it hurt to tell us, Daniel?”
A flash of empathy raced through Daniel’s dark eyes at the men’s hunger for distraction. Making a grumble in the bottom of his throat, he took a step closer, but did not touch the contents of the little pile, as we all used our bodies to made a windblock to keep the bits from blowing away.
“Nightshade,” he reluctantly began, “dried white rose … devilvine and foxglove—there, you see how silly she is? All this is from her moonlight garden. It’s coming into morning! The battle will occur in broad daylight.”
“Could she have an idea about the night?” I asked. “Perhaps your enemy fleet will arrive after dark.”
He threw his arms wide. “Feel that wind? They’ve got it at their sterns! They’ll be here any time. She had no idea I would engage the British at all, yet she sends me a bag of moon-ruled herbs. Once the enemy fleet passes south of the bay mouth, Royal Savage will go out and lure the British upwind into Valcour Bay and we will fight under a cold noon sun, if, with God’s grace, they don’t already know where we are and try to come in from the northern strait. Either way, we fight under the sun. So much for the moon.”
McCrae held up a sprig. “Is this a moon flower too? And pinecones and acorns. What’s this one?”
“Dried apple. Cedar, hemlock, rowan—tree magic! She’s sent the whole forest! And here I am on the water!”
“Here’s a stone,” Hardie pointed out. “White one.”
“Moonstone,” I told him. “She said it was for rising above trouble. The St. John’s wort is for invincibility. The thistle and staghorn are for protection too.”
“We’ll take it,” LaMay sputtered. The other men grumbled an ironic laugh.
I turned to Daniel. “What does it all mean when it’s put together? You might as well tell us, for the entertainment value.”
The men nodded and rumbled encouragements.
Spearing me with a terrible glower, Daniel shifted his weight on the bucking deck. “Uch, all right…. It’s a charm of concealment.”
The men seemed to like that. Daniel seemed to hate it.
“She said she wanted to make a flying potion,” I told him, “but that you always refused it before.”
He pressed one hand to his forehead. “It’s not that you fly, my friend, it�
�s that you think you fly.” He clapped his hands once, sharply. “Men, get to your guns! Load up! Grease the trucks! Pile the shot on the starboard racks. The enemy’s been spotted, save your souls! Get cracking before we freeze in place!”
The men splintered off. Daniel stomped down the deck, scooped up a line, and began to coil it. I was left shivering in the waist of the sloop. Around me the ship creaked and rolled upon the bay’s chop. Above, the morning sky lightened, but an ugly light.
After gathering up the crane bag, candles, bell, and the other contents of the burlap bag, I waddled after him. “Daniel, it’s injudicious of you to scoff at your mother this way.”
“In what manner should I do it, then?”
“Don’t be cranky. These fears aren’t trivial for her. She’s told me she’s had them since the day you were born. Please pay them some attention, for my sake? I’ve come so far.”
“You entertain too easily a woman’s fears.”
“But what is the symbolic message of these things she sent? I’d like to know, in a professional capa—”
“You’re a chapel minister! Why would you care what a thistle means to a pagan?”
“She says this is a critical time for you. She read signs—”
“Signs?” He slammed the coiled line to the deck and started stacking round shot. “Birds flying backward? Water running uphill? Butterfly eggs turning black? Do you see that schooner out there? They’ve just spotted our enemy. I have reality to deal with.”
Pausing, I changed my tone of voice. “I came also because of signs I’ve seen myself. Daniel, I grieve to tell you … George Washington has evacuated Long Island and New York.”
A shot slipped from his hand and thumped hard to the hollow wood. It rolled away. Daniel was suddenly still. So were many men within sound of our voices. The change was sobering.
He did not look at me, but gripped a swivelgun on the ship’s rail as if to steady himself. “That’s … grim news, brother.”
Nearby, Hardie pulled his bandana lower on his forehead. “It means we could be caught between an advancing army either from Canada or also up the Hudson.”
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 2
