by James Haley
“Just across the street is the office of the attorney with whom I have been speaking. Let us stop in there so I can sign the paper and have it concluded.”
“Good.” To perhaps do a good turn for Sam’s slaves was satisfying, but the infinitely better feeling was to have brought Sam himself to the doorstep of admitting that freedom even in modest circumstances was better than slavery with its security, and moreover that it was a viable possibility for those he owned. This, however, was not to be said out loud.
* * *
* * *
“How are you feeling, Captain?”
Although it was close beside the bed, the voice came to him distantly. “Is that Mr. Ross?”
“Of course, Captain.”
The dark was impenetrable, with no moonlight through the windows. “Will you bring a lantern?”
When he returned, Bliven made out his faithful, perennially troubled visage. “How is the tide?”
“Captain, we have been at sea for two days.”
“No, we were just unloading the muskets in Galveston.”
“No, sir, you were with Mr. Bandy ashore when you fainted, and they carried you back aboard. Mr. Bandy took command and had us put to sea as soon as the tide began to run.”
Bliven stirred. “I must get up.”
Ross placed his hands on Bliven’s shoulders and pressed him back into his pillow. “Not until Dr. Haffner says you may.”
“Well, then, send Mr. Bandy to me, if you please.”
It took only a moment, for he was in his cabin, and Lieutenant White had the deck. “Sam, they tell me I am ill and you had to take her out. My apologies.”
“Jesus, Captain!” He laid a hand across Bliven’s forehead and felt the sweat, at once fevered and clammy. “Will you let me send for Dr. Haffner?”
“Yes, of course.”
Sam rose and leaned over to the door of the compartment. “Mr. Ross, will you tell Dr. Haffner that the captain is awake?”
“Sam, they tell me I have been out for two days.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are we bound?”
“West and then southwest, toward Cópano. I took the liberty of reading your instructions from General Houston.”
“Yes, of course.” He raised up on one elbow. “It does not feel like we’re moving.”
“I know. Calm sea, nearly calm wind. Heavy fog, like being trapped in a cotton boll.”
There was an odd sort of knock at the compartment door, light, but kicked with a shoe, and Haffner entered bearing a cup of tea in one hand and an extra lantern in the other. “Well, now, Captain.” He gave Bliven the tea and studied him in the extra light. “This is a little better.”
Bliven took a sip and made a face. “This has quinine water in it.”
“I know,” said Haffner. “You have relapsed with the swamp fever. The quinine water will help.”
“Mr. Ross! Some sugar, if you please. That is impossible. It is barely spring, not summer. I have been in no swamps.”
Haffner sat on the edge of his berth and pressed his fingers to the inside of Bliven’s wrist. “Lie still now.” A quarter of a minute passed. “Better. Swamp fever can relapse at any time; it is unusual but not unheard of. Mr. Bandy tells me that you and he traveled extensively in recent weeks, with much time out of doors and sometimes even sleeping out of doors.” He lifted Bliven’s eyelids and then listened to his heart through a wooden tube. “You are better. It will take time, but you will be well. Mr. Ross?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Will you bring some hot water and cloths? Even a captain of taste and culture will smell like a horse when he does not wash.”
Suddenly they felt the slightest surge of movement and heard the ship creak somewhere in her timbers. “I’ll go up,” said Sam. “Excuse me.”
McKay had felt it, too; he and Sam met at the foot of the ladder and went up together. On the quarterdeck they caught just the breath of wind from the southeast, which was well, for the sails were already set on the starboard tack. They never made more than two knots—not enough breeze to disperse the fogbanks that crowded together. When they encountered a crease of clear sky, it showed moonless. Four bells of the first watch had struck, the sound would probably carry for a mile into the black silence. Sam had the wheel with McKay standing by, and they beheld a wall of fog before them thrice the height of their masts.
“It’s right glad I am,” said McKay, “we are not near any land or obstruction.”
“Indeed, so,” answered Sam. They disappeared into it as into a dark room, the sheer weight of the fog seeming to quell the Gulf’s habitual chop, only a low regular swell from their port quarter and the merest bellying of the courses and topsails made them believe that they had steerage at all.
“Ahoy, there! What ship is that?”
Sam and McKay both started at the suddenness of it. The voice was clipped and the accent British, loud, but calm and imperious as only they can be. Unmistakably British.
“Where away?” whispered Sam.
“Damned if I can tell,” growled McKay. “In this blasted fog, the sound comes from all around.” They strained and squinted, descrying nothing, but obviously they had been seen or their bell had been heard.
“Run down to the captain’s cabin and fetch the trumpet, will you please?”
“Aye, sir.” McKay loped forward on his toes, making far less noise in his hard-soled shoes than normally he would have. In two minutes he returned, handing Sam the brass speaking trumpet.
Sam took it and stood aside. “Take the wheel, please.” He stepped noiselessly over to the port rail, thinking it more likely that they were being hailed from seaward.
“I say again: Ahoy there! What ship is that?” Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since Sam had been taken from his merchant ship and impressed into British service, but his memory of it was still as vivid as the white scars on his fleshy pink back. Despite the passage of years, his gall rose, for he had never seen justice for his treatment, nor recompense for the loss of his ship. And, his three years’ captivity during which he should have been delivering profitable cargoes and running his plantation was the period from which he dated the beginning of his financial downfall. Once again his contempt for all things British, their pretense, their arrogance, swelled to the fore.
Abruptly Sam put the trumpet to his lips. “This is the Texas warship Gonzales. What ship is that?”
“This is His Majesty’s warship Titania. Heave to and lower a boat!”
A hot wave washed through Sam’s body like a fever at hearing the very words of that encounter long before, his impressment, the daily threat of hanging, the sting of the cat on his back, and above all that insufferable hauteur. But worse than that he could not know who it was, for false hailing was a ubiquitous tactic on the high seas. It could be an English officer in Mexican service, of whom there were some number, or it could be a privateer on the hunt for them. That captain of the Mary Ellen had surely put into New Orleans in high dudgeon; if he had given out the story that they were pirates, the insurers would place a bounty on them and they would be hunted. In this fog he could not know who was hailing him.
“The hell I will!” Samuel bellowed back. He lowered the speaking trumpet and noticed Lieutenant White, who had come on deck at the sound of the hailing. “Mr. White, do not beat to quarters but get the men to their stations quietly. Load the guns quicker than they ever have. Go to it!”
A full three minutes crawled by, noiseless in the fog without even the slap of the usual Gulf chop against their hull.
“What!” The English accent, clipped and amplified, came back out of the dark at them. “I say again: This is His Majesty’s warship Titania. Heave to and lower a boat!”
“I say again: You go to hell, you lime-sucking son of a bitch!” Once more he lowered the trumpet and stood
close to the second lieutenant. “Elevate your forward chaser. We can’t see him to shoot across his bow, but we’ll put a shot over him.” Yeakel had come up, too, at the disturbance. “Mr. McKay, get ready to make a turn to port. Mr. Yeakel, be ready to trim your sails to match the turn.”
In another few moments White approached again. “We are ready, Mr. Bandy.”
“Very well. Mr. McKay, make a ninety-degree turn to port. Mr. White, fire the one shot when you feel him straighten out.”
They barely had steerage in the near calm, but slowly they felt her come around to the south. As she did so, Sam assayed a jumble of calculations, for these were no conditions in which to fight a full action with an unknown vessel. Once they fired the chaser, whoever it was would know that the Gonzales mounted twenty-fours. No merchant ship would have hailed them, so it was not a vessel bearing any cargo they would be interested in. If it was a privateer or a Mexican cruiser affecting to be a British warship, they would know from the deep boom of the gun that they were vastly overmatched, and would flee. If indeed it was a British man-of-war, they would know from the report of the twenty-four that they were not a vessel to trifle with.
But all hesitation became moot when they saw the bow light up in flame as the chaser fired with a concussive blast, the masts and rigging and all the deck accoutrements silhouetted against the fireball that dimmed and dissipated thirty yards distant from the ship.
Agonizing moments crept by as they wondered whether the British captain would follow the famous Royal Navy custom of threatening to answer a single shot with a broadside. A breath of wind lifted enough of the fog to make her out, a brig, eighteen or twenty guns, two hundred yards south of them. Slowly at first and then unmistakably, they saw her turn away to the south. “Damn your manners,” the voice floated over to them. “You are very unfriendly.”
“Mr. Bandy, your trumpet, please, sir.” He spun around to see Bliven, washed and in uniform, pale but in command of himself.
Sam’s alarm approached mortification. “Did I act wrongly?”
“No, Sam! Not in the least, but I sense an opportunity. If I can go over and parley, he will put it in his log, and we will have established the presence of a Texas warship at this place and date, further masking our true identity, if that should ever prove useful.”
Sam laughed softly. “Well, I’m damned if you are not smarter sick than I am when I’m healthy.”
Bliven strolled to the port rail and put the trumpet to his lips. “Ahoy, British warship Titania. This is Captain Putnam, Texas warship Gonzales. Come back about, if you please, sir. We will send a boat.”
“Very well!”
“Mr. Yeakel, get some oarsmen together and lower the cutter. My gig would do, but this will make more of an impression. Oh, hell! They’re British—Mr. Bandy, run below and bring me some of that local tea that Dicey prepared for me. I’ll see if I can’t ingratiate myself to some little degree.”
As a precaution, he had Yeakel lower a line for him to hang on to as he descended the boarding ladder, for he did not feel steady. One of the crew helped him to his seat in the waist as they pushed off, the oars dropped, and they crossed with stately sweeps.
“By God, sir,” said the British captain as they met, saluted, and shook hands. “I have heard that you Texians are an irascible lot, and sink me if you did not bear out your reputation.”
“My apologies, Captain. You cannot be unaware that we are at war with Mexico, and we could not be certain of your true identity. False hailing, I need not tell you, is coin of the realm out here. I am Captain Putnam, at your service, sir.”
“Captain Wade, your servant, sir. Well, then, how could you be so certain of our identity as to come over?”
“Only a verified Englishman would swear at our manners.”
Wade threw his head back and laughed. He was of rather less than medium height, with tufts of red hair curling from beneath his bicorne, and pronounced blue eyes. He was remarkably broad across the chest and showed not an ounce of fat anywhere. “Will you come below and have a drink with us?”
“I would be delighted, Captain. In point of fact, as you are English, I have brought you a little gift in apology for my lieutenant’s rudeness.”
“Have you, now?”
“Are you aware that there is a species of tea that grows wild in Texas?”
They reached the foot of the ladder and Wade turned, his blue popped eyes flung open wide. “I have never heard of this.”
“It is not widely known, but I have a mind to open a commercial venture in it.” He pulled from his pocket the folded paper Sam had given him. “Have a whiff.”
Wade leaned forward and inhaled. “Well, I am dashed! I had thought you would prefer rum or whiskey, but we shall have some tea instantly. This is the damnedest thing I ever heard of. Mr. Kenyon!” he called forward to a man in a white apron at their camboose. “Tea service to my cabin, if you please!”
* * *
* * *
Four bells of the middle watch had rung when Sam saw lanterns moving on Titania’s deck and then made out their cutter as it eased back with regular sweeps of its oars. Bliven mounted the boarding ladder cautiously but unaided. Sam gave Bliven a quick salute as they met at the boarding gate, and they walked slowly back to the quarterdeck. “We were getting worried. I was about to send over a skirmishing party to rescue you. How was your gala?”
“Their captain is a gentleman. I believe even you would have liked him.”
“What kind of name is Titania? I don’t see anything especially titanic about a brig of maybe seven hundred tons.”
“No, no, Titania was a fairy queen in a play by Mr. Shakespeare. She is named aptly enough.”
“Oh, well, then!” said Sam grandly, and huffed. “What is a dainty British fairy queen ship doing in these waters?”
“In fact, they just deposited a new consul or somebody in Matamoros. Diplomatic maintenance, dispatches, and the like.”
“How did your talk go?”
“Extraordinarily well. The captain is a young shaver of a thing named Nicholas Wade. Very powerful, though—strong as a bear. If we threw him a line, he could probably hold us in tow with his bare hands. Pretty frightening, actually.”
“Did you learn anything useful?”
“Well, he is a proper Englishman, but he has had cousins in Texas these past few years with whom he has been in correspondence, and he has quite a lot of sympathy for the colonists’ difficulties. So I was spared the usual imperial huffing.”
“Well, thank the Lord for that.”
“He is of the opinion that very little in Britain is happening, politically or in foreign policy—indeed, even socially. It seems the whole country has come to a standstill waiting on the old king to die. Says he is a hateful old lecher, universally despised, as was the king before him. And next in line is his niece, a young lady named Victoria, not even close to twenty yet. There are grave concerns whether she can get the country in hand.”
“Good morning, Captain.” It was Evans Yeakel who met them on the quarterdeck.
“Good morning, Bosun. How are you faring deep into this night?”
“Very well, sir. I heard you coming back aboard. We are ready for your orders.”
“Good man, well done. Make all sail, west-sou’west for the moment. Mr. Bandy will give you an exact course momentarily.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Mr. Yeakel?”
“Sir?”
“That silver whistle about your neck. Does it still function?”
“Yes, sir, my apologies that I was not on deck to pipe you aboard. I was tending to something below. Wait.” He raised the whistle to his lips and blew the captain’s accolade, quickened to something less than a second. “There. All right, all sail, yes, sir.”
Sam spun around to avoid horse laughing in Bliven’s face. “Texas
Navy, Captain,” he said when he recovered his breath. “Less formal.”
“I am well reminded. Mr. Yeakel?”
“Sir?”
“Set your stuns’ls, if you please. We are in a hurry. And tell Mr. Hoover that I am sorry to wake him but I need tea for quinine water right away.”
“Aye, sir.”
Sam was suddenly solicitous. “Are you all right, Captain?”
“I have been worse, but it has taken some effort to put up such a hale appearance.” He coughed, deep but hollow.
“I understand. Let’s get you below.” They went forward to the ladder. “Back to this princess girl for a moment, I am curious. What will they do if it turns out she is not capable of governing the country?”
“In fact, Captain Wade made a very odd assertion. He says that in such an event, there is wide public sympathy to try their hand at a republic.”
“No!”
“Believe it or not. I mean, you’d think one commonwealth would have been enough for them. Listen, how well do you know the port of Cópano?”
“We know it is in Mexican hands.”
“Yes, but anything not within the bar is in our hands. Captain Wade made free to tell me that when he was lately in Matamoros, he surmised that it had become the principal staging area for the Mexicans for supporting their armies in Texas. Of the greatest interest to us, he saw a long file of field guns on the wharf that looked ready to be transported, and the only place in Texas that they could go is Cópano. If we can beat them there, they will find us waiting.”
Sam looked up at the men aloft, lashing stuns’l yards and creeping cautiously out to set the canvas. “Why would he tell you such a thing? Are you quite certain he was not giving you misdirection of some kind?”
“I surely wondered about it. The English seldom take a side in other countries’ wars; it is more their game to play both sides against each other and profit from the conflict. But Wade seemed quite frank in his opinions. Besides, he is not leading us into a course we would not otherwise undertake. Any Mexican arms that do not come overland must land at Cópano, and that is where I intend for us to be.”
