It should have been for later. If and when Narval tried to force the entrance to the bay, the smoke was to have confused her gun crews so that Tempest could draw her to close action while she was near the reef. But that was before this had happened. Anyway, the wind might have changed and reversed the advantage.
Herrick said, “Lady Luck is with us, sir.”
Then with a wave to the quarterdeck he lowered himself into the big launch. The two boats began to pull away immediately, the oars’ speed indicating the measure of time and survival.
In the cutter, Jack Miller, boatswain’s mate, crouched intently by the tiller, a boarding axe protruding from his belt.
Allday said softly, “God help those buggers if he gets amongst ’em!”
It would take over half an hour for the boats to get anywhere near the anchored vessel. The smoke had to stay as thick as ever until then. Also, the schooner’s crew must not suspect that anything untoward was happening.
Bolitho said, “Mr Borlase, we will commence firing with the starboard battery. Load and run out, if you please.”
Borlase stared at him anxiously, a nerve jumping in his neck. “At what target, sir?”
“To the right of the schooner. I want them to see our shots dropping short. It will make them believe in their safety, also that we are not attempting to weigh anchor and use the smoke ourselves.”
Minutes later the starboard twelve-pounders crashed out one by one in a slow broadside, the smoke rolling downwind to join the rest. The schooner had all but vanished beyond it now, and when Bolitho looked for the two boats he saw only the wake of the rearmost one, the hulls, like the headland, completely hidden.
He pulled out his watch. The sun was well up, and no longer could they rely on shadows to protect the settlement. He wondered briefly what Raymond was doing. If he was thinking of Viola.
“Signal from the hilltop lookout, sir!” Fitzmaurice had his telescope to his eye.
Bolitho walked beneath the mizzen shrouds and shaded his face against the growing glare. The stench from the burning hillside was bad enough here, what it was like in the boats was hard to imagine. He felt sick and suddenly dizzy, and wished he had taken Allday’s offer of breakfast.
He felt angry with himself. Well, it was too late now.
He saw the flash of light from near the hilltop, the reflected sun caught in a mirror, as he had seen the foot soldiers do it in America. It was limited but very quick, provided you had invented enough simple signals well in advance.
Fitzmaurice said in his haughty voice, “Sail to the north, sir.”
Bolitho nodded. It was like the start of a great drama in which no one was certain of his role. The sail must be the Narval, sweeping down from some hiding place in the north, expecting to find the schooner in sole possession of the bay or its approaches.
He tried to remember the time on his watch. Where the two boats would be. How long before the other ship hove in sight around the headland.
He moved to the rail above the gundeck and watched the twelve-pounders being hauled up to their ports again.
Swift was looking aft towards him. “Again, sir?”
Bolitho heard Lakey say, “Can’t see nothing of the schooner or the reef now. God, what a fog!”
Allday was standing by the companion, his arms folded as he watched the idle crews around the quarterdeck guns. He turned to watch the captain and saw him stagger and almost fall. Everyone else was watching the smoke or the men at the twelve-pounders.
He reached Bolitho’s side in three strides. “I’m here, Captain. Easy now.” He looked at Bolitho’s face. It was shining with sweat, and his eyes were half-closed as if in terrible pain.
Bolitho gasped, “Don’t let them see me like this!” He swallowed hard, his arms and legs shivering violently in gusts of icy cold. As if he were on the deck of a North Atlantic patrol.
Allday murmured desperately, “The fever. It must be. I’ll fetch the surgeon.” He saw one of the seamen staring and barked, “Watch your front, damn you!”
Bolitho gripped his arm and steadied himself. “No. Must hold on. This is the worst time. You must see that!”
“But, Captain!” Allday was pleading. “It’ll kill you! I’ll not stand by and let it happen!”
Bolitho took a breath and thrust himself away from Allday’s support. Between his teeth he said deliberately, “You . . . will . . . do . . . as . . . I . . . tell . . . you!”
He made himself walk slowly to the nettings, and curled his fingers into them as he tried to control his shaking body.
He said, “Tell them to continue firing.” The din might help, if only to keep their minds off him.
The crash of the broadside thundered across the water, the balls going downwind into the smoke.
He heard himself say, “Please God let Thomas succeed. We cannot move with so few hands.” The words spilled out of him and he could not prevent it. “No way to die.” He let go of the hammock nettings and walked carefully to the compass. “We’ll have to lie here and fight!”
A blurred shape hurried past, carrying a shot-cradle. It paused and then turned towards him. It was Jenner, the American.
“Couldn’t help but hear what you said, Cap’n.”
He seemed to swim in Bolitho’s vision as if under water.
“I heard tell of somethin’ durin’ th’ war. Of an English captain who was so short-handed his sloop was almost run ashore and taken by the Frenchies. I also heard tell that the captain was you, sir.” He ignored Allday’s threatening look and added, “You used wounded soldiers instead, right, sir?”
Bolitho tried to see him properly. “I remember. In the Sparrow.” He was going mad. It had to be that. Speaking like this about the past.
“Well, I got to thinkin’, why not use them convicts?”
“What?” Bolitho stepped forward and would have fallen but for Allday.
“I just thought . . .”
Bolitho seized his wrist. “Fetch Mr Keen!”
Keen’s voice came from his side. “I’m here, sir.” He sounded worried.
“Send the other boats ashore immediately and go with them. You worked at the settlement, they know you better than the rest of us.” He leaned closer and added fervently, “I must have men, Val.” He saw Keen’s expression and knew he had used Viola’s name for him without realizing it. “Do what you can.”
Keen said despairingly, “You’re ill, sir!” He glanced at Allday’s grim features. “You must have caught . . .”
“You’re delaying!” He pushed him away. “Get them here. Tell them I’ll try and obtain their passage back to England. But don’t lie to them.”
The guns crashed out again, the trucks hurling themselves inboard on their tackles.
“Enough.” Bolitho tugged at his neckcloth. “Cease firing. Sponge out and reload.”
He saw the surgeon standing directly in his path, his face grave as he snapped, “You will go below, sir. As the surgeon it is my duty . . .”
“Your duty is on the orlop!” He dropped his voice. “Just fetch some drops, anything to keep my mind alive. A few more hours.”
“It will certainly kill you.” Gwyther shrugged. “You are a stubborn man.”
Bolitho walked unaided to the weather side and stared at the nearest land.
“I’m so cold, Allday. Some brandy. Then I will be myself again.”
“Aye, Captain.” Allday watched him helplessly. “At once.”
Lakey had been near the wheel with his quartermaster and had seen Keen’s anxiety and the hasty arrival of the surgeon. As Allday hurried to the companion he opened his mouth to ask what was happening. Allday always knew. Instead, he turned away, unable to believe what he had seen.
Mackay, his quartermaster, spoke his own thoughts aloud. “In God’s name, Mr Lakey, there were tears in his eyes!”
“Avast, Mr Herrick! I can hear the buggers!”
Herrick lifted his arm and the muffled oars rose dripping on either side of the launc
h. He hoped that Miller, following closely astern, would have his eyes open and not collide with them.
He heard the distant murmur of voices, then the clang of metal. He swallowed hard and made a circular motion above his head with his sword. They must be almost up to the schooner, but because of the smoke could see nothing. Earlier they had seen her masts poking through the drifting fog, and Herrick had been thankful that nobody had had the sense to send up a lookout.
The men in the boat shifted uneasily, watching his face. Their eyes were red-rimmed from the smoke, and their bodies stank from its filth and greasy persistence.
Herrick looked at those nearest him. Grant, a senior gunner’s mate, who came from Canterbury, not that far from his own home. Nielsen, a fair-haired Dane, who shared an oar with Gwynne, the young recruit he had got from the Eurotas. He knew them all, as he did those in the other boat.
Something tall and dark loomed above them, and as they drifted beneath the schooner’s long jib boom they almost became entangled in her anchor cable.
Not a second left for hesitation. Herrick snapped, “Grapnel! Boarders away!”
Then, pushed and jostled by his men, Herrick fought his way up and over the bulwark, seeing faces above him, and hearing the muffled voices change just as quickly into violent yells and oaths. Pistols banged, and a seaman fell back into the launch, knocking another down with him.
Herrick sat astride the bulwark, seeing it all through the drifting smoke. The massive gun, the additional tackle it had needed to restrain it on the narrow deck. A man ran at him with a cutlass, but Herrick twisted it with his hilt and flicked it clattering into the scuppers. Now he had both feet inboard, and slashed the man across the face and neck before he could pull out of his charge.
They were outnumbered, but with trained determination the Tempest’s men made a tight little wedge, backs to the bulwark, their feet already slipping in blood as they clashed together with their enemy.
The clang of steel, the fierce, wild cries of the men, were matched by the screams of the wounded and dying.
But from right aft came the thud of another grapnel, and Miller’s men swarmed over the taffrail yelling and cursing like fiends. Steel on steel, the pent-up fear and hatred bursting in a tide of unrestrained killing. Men rolled upon one another, fighting with dirks, cutlasses, axes, or anything which would beat a man into submission.
Herrick parried a sword aside and realized it was the bearded man who had met Bolitho under a flag of truce. He was even bigger near to, but Herrick had endured enough.
He had never had much time for the fancy swordsmanship of men like Prideaux, or from what he had heard, Bolitho’s dead brother, Hugh. He was a fighter, and relied on his strength and staying-power to carry him through.
He took the man’s heavy sword just six inches above his hilt, forcing him round, but keeping both blades crossed.
The bearded giant shouted, “You bloody bastard! This time you die!”
Herrick’s eye flickered to a patch of blood on the deck, and thrust his hilt away from him with all his strength. He saw the cruel grin of triumph on the man’s face as he was allowed to draw back the full length of his blade. Then it altered to sudden alarm as his heel slipped on the fresh blood, and for a mere second he was off balance.
Herrick thought suddenly of the tiny scene he had watched through his telescope. The terrified French officer, his throat cut in the twinkling of an eye. Like a slaughtered pig.
“No, you die!”
His short fighting-sword seared diagonally across the man’s stomach, just above the belt, and as he dropped his weapon and clutched the torn wound with both hands, Herrick hacked him once and hard on the neck.
There was a wild cheer, and Miller, his axe red in his filthy fist, yelled, “She’s ours, lads!” It was done.
The cheers altered to cries of alarm as the deck gave a violent shiver and threw several men kicking amongst the dead and wounded.
Herrick yelled, “The reef! They cut the cable!”
There was another great lurch, and part of the mainmast thundered across the deck and crushed Gwynne dead, his mouth still open from calling.
Herrick waved his sword. “Fall back! Man the boats!”
He heard the water swilling through a nearby hold, the sounds of loose cargo and stores being hurled against the bulkhead. The reef would make short work of her, and anyone stupid enough to remain aboard.
Carrying the wounded, and kicking the pirates’ weapons into the water, the seamen retreated to their boats.
Half-mad at the swift change of events, some of the pirates, and several whom Herrick guessed to be Frenchmen from the Narval, turned on each other, while with each violent lurch the schooner lifted and ground still further on to the reef.
Miller’s cutter discharged its swivel gun for good measure as they pulled away.
Herrick shouted, “To the ship! Give way all!”
He held his breath as a great shoulder of shell-encrusted reef rose out of the sea almost under the bows. He waited for the crash, the inrush of water, and then as the boat pulled clear he turned his thoughts to his men. Poor Gwynne. A volunteer for so short a time. He looked at Nielsen, the young Dane, rocking from side to side, his face ashen with agony. He had dropped his cutlass, and one of the pirates had lunged at him with a sword. Nielsen had seized the swinging blade with both hands, and had hung on even as his attacker had pulled the razor-edged weapon through his palms and fingers.
Grant, the old gunner’s mate, showed his tobacco-stained teeth in a tired grin. “We done it, sir. One down.” He turned as the schooner rolled over in a welter of spray. “’Nother to go.”
“Aye.” Herrick looked along the boat, sharing their pain and their pride. “Well done.” He thought of Bolitho and what he would say.
It was only a beginning, but they had shown what they could achieve.
18 ON THIS DAY
BOLITHO made himself stand very still as Herrick hurried aft towards him. The nausea came and went, and several times he thought he was going to fall to the deck. And yet he was acutely aware of what was happening around him, as if he could see without being seen. As if he were already dead.
Even his voice seemed to come from far away. “Thank God you are safe, Thomas!” He looked towards the gangway where the boatswain’s party were helping some of the scarred and battered seamen up from the boats.
Herrick said, “They did well. When that smoke clears you’ll see naught but a few spars across the reef. I lost three good hands though . . .” He stopped short and saw Lakey trying to signal him.
Then, as the exhaustion and fury of the fight left him, he looked closer at Bolitho.
He said, “I—I’m sorry, sir. I was thinking of myself.” He did not know how to continue. “You must go below. At once.” He studied the firm line of Bolitho’s jaw. Like that of a man preparing for the first touch of a surgeon’s blade. “How could this have happened?”
Voices called from forward, and he turned, off guard and confused, as he saw the remainder of the ship’s boats moving slowly from the shore. They were packed beyond capacity, bodies lumped over the oars and gunwales like sacks of grain, with only inches of freeboard above the water.
Borlase said hoarsely, “Convicts. He sent for them.”
“Yes.” Bolitho walked slowly to the side to watch the first boat hook on.
The drops which the surgeon had allowed him had given him a small relief, and Allday’s brandy lingered on his throat like fire. He had to blink to clear his vision as the convicts scrambled awkwardly on to the gangway and through the boarding nets. Against his own men he could see little difference. He felt a sudden sense of urgency. He must talk with them. Tell them. He saw Keen coming towards him and waited for him to speak first. He felt he had to save every breath. Each small effort brought the sweat across his body in a flood.
Keen said, “The marine sentries think that the schooner may have landed spies in the night, sir.” He glanced helplessly at
Herrick. “They’re not certain, but it’s possible.”
Bolitho waited for the next spasm of giddiness to pass. “I feared as much. They could lie hidden for hours, days.” The bitterness crowded into his tone. “They will soon see through our pathetic disguises.” He walked to the rail and looked at the gun-deck, at the jostling figures below him.
Herrick said quickly, “Let me, sir. I’ll tell them what they must do.”
“No.” He did not see the despair on Herrick’s face. “I am asking too much of them already, without . . .” He swayed and added, “Thomas, old friend, if the enemy knows of our weakness, we are done for. They will pound us to pieces while we lie at anchor. We must meet them in open water. To do that we need men. Any men.”
He looked at the sky, the streaming pendant high above the deck.
“There is little time. When I have spoken to these people you will withdraw our remaining pickets from the island.” He spoke slowly and with great care. “Whichever of these people wishes to go ashore, have them taken there before we weigh. With this wind, the Narval will be around the headland before noon. By then I intend to be in the best position I can find.”
He swung away and raised his voice. “Listen to me, all of you! A French frigate is coming to engage this ship, and she will most likely have another vessel to support her. I am shorthanded, more so now because of losses against that pirate schooner. You have no cause to love the authority which brought you to this place, nor have you a firm promise that I can get you passage home to England, if that is what you want.”
He turned slightly towards the sun so that they would think he was shutting his eyes against the glare and not to control a bout of nausea. “But you have seen what Tuke and his men have done, and will do if they overwhelm this ship. Your support may do no more than delay a defeat. But without that aid we are already dead men.”
There was a pause and he could almost feel their torn emotions.
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