Peril on the Sea (6 page)

“No, sir, before that we encountered a rich Spanish ship, off the Algarve, on her outward voyage, filled with sheep and chickens.”

That, thought Sherwin, explained the meal he had most recently eaten.

“We were beating to windward to close in on her, sir, and a culverin charge struck me in the face.”

“How was it you survived?”

“The gun was filled with nails and scrap iron, sir, but we were almost out of range and it only kissed me.”

Sherwin gave a low whistle of appreciative amazement. “Bartholomew, you were very lucky.”

“That's why I believe, sir,” came the reply, “the captain wants us together.”

“Because you might bring me luck?”

“Because we are both lucky, sir, to be alive.”

“Or unlucky enough,” Sherwin suggested, “to have experienced all-but-mortal calamity.”

“Or that, too, sir. I think the captain wants to discover which.”

 

SAILORS ON THE
PATIENCE
had been clothed in slop-breeches of no great quality, but the crew of Fletcher's ship wore the finest richly dyed fustian, and every buckle was silver, or silver plate, and brightly polished.

The
Vixen
's boatswain was a quick, slight man named Tom Lockwood, with a short yellow beard and a way of being able to be on one side of the ship and then the other with a flea's alacrity. The boatswain was in charge of the sails and the rigging, and much of what a person saw when he gazed around above decks. He called seamen to
their various duties and, after the captain and the first mate, the boatswain was the most able mariner on the ship.

Lockwood responded to Highbridge's quietly voiced commands with a short signal on his boatswain's call, a brass pipe with a shrill but pleasing sound.

Lockwood must have noticed the apprehensive look in Sherwin's eye. “We'll sail her across meadow and field, all the way to Exeter, sir,” he said with a laugh, “and be there by candle-time.”

“I have no doubt,” said Sherwin, hanging on to the port gunwale in anticipation of what he expected to be a ferocious collision with the shore.

The boatswain's mate was a man named Randall Nittany, with blue eyes so keen and a gaze so steady he gave the impression of being able to see through several fathoms at a glance. He was appointed to smell the ground, as the boatswain put it—using a weighted line to plumb the water and report how rapidly the sea bottom was rising to meet the keel.

 

THE
VIXEN
surged toward the shore, and through either luck or astuteness she avoided the foam-covered rocks on either side of the modest inlet. She was close to the shadow of a high embankment of earth before her keel kissed the bottom. The masts and the rigging shook, timbers groaned, and Sherwin nearly lost his footing.

The captain gave a nod to Highbridge, and the dark-mantled first mate spoke to the boatswain. The boatswain's
call pronounced a staccato message, and sailors responded at once, several men leaping over the side and using ropes to pull the ship very much higher onto the beach, aided by the flood tide and the surging gale.

 

THERE WAS LITTLE obvious outward reaction to the presence of a new shipmate.

Sherwin pulled, hand over hand, with his novel companions, and there was a quality of cheerful teamwork to the effort. But there was a quality of suspicion in the sideways glances of a few of the seamen, too, as Sherwin betrayed some clumsiness at hauling on the line.

Sherwin believed that he understood why.

In a world of instant death, the idea of luck was more essential to a mariner than to a townsman. Sherwin and Bartholomew were both questionable, having survived their respective misfortunes. They might be the best sort of shipmates to have on board, blessed with an additional power to survive. Or they might be just the opposite, the kind that attracted trouble.

Securing the ship upon the shingle and sand of the beach was a matter of careening her, and that was accomplished by men pulling on the rope attached to the masts and hauling with a unified effort. Sherwin joined in, as did everyone but the captain, who stumped along the shore, with his gaze to seaward, and Highbridge, who stood with one hand on the ship's prow like a man calming a nervous mare.

The ship very gradually heeled over.

The task was achieved to the singsong
heave, oh,
with a firm emphasis on the
oh
. The ship took on her new position as required, leaning on her side, and although the masts bobbed forlornly and the ratlines went slack on the downward side and taut on the other, the ship appeared sturdy enough to weather the indignity of exposing the barnacles and sea growth of her keel.

 

THERE WAS A FURTHER FORMALITY that did much to ease what might have been the lingering doubts of a few of Sherwin's new shipmates.

Highbridge opened a large, leather-bound book, placed it out of the wind, in the shadow of the ship, and anchored the pages with stones from the shingle-strewn beach.

The first mate was quietly reserved, as before, and he dipped a quill into an inkhorn with a grave manner. He said, “If you will write your name, sir, alongside all of ours.”

By signing the ship's articles, Sherwin knew, and by joining the vessel's company, he was entitling himself to share in a percentage, however small his fraction, of her earnings. He was also committing himself to profit by the prizes taken by a captain of no great virtue, a man who did not balk at robbing his own countrymen. And Sherwin could foresee a cloudy future, his reputation tainted.

But he could also see himself becoming the confidant of a captain who knew more of the world than nearly any
other mortal. Sherwin had already agreed to write this man's story, a tale any person in the world would be sure to find fascinating.

And even more exciting, in Sherwin's view, he saw the possibility of a war against Spain, with Captain Fletcher playing an essential role, and Sherwin there to earn his portion of renown.

Besides all that, there was money to be won.

Sherwin was aware that he was being watched as he took the quill in hand. He read the articles, which had been penned with a Greenwich clerk's steady hand. He would receive his share, like the other officers of the ship, of one-twentieth of her prizes—far more than an able seaman, and as much as the surgeon.

The final phrase caught his eye:
God save and defend Her Majesty
.

Sherwin signed willingly, and with a thrill, believing that with the squeaking of the quill against the broad page he was already embarking on the defense of his country.

T
HE RAIN HAD CEASED, and the sun made inroads into the overcast clouds. The shore resembled bread that had been broken and scattered, with some round loaves remaining intact and others crumbled into chunks of brown crust.

Sherwin felt dismay at the manner in which the vessel, so stalwart at sea, appeared utterly helpless on shore. She was, even so, an impressive ship. The
Vixen
was a type of vessel made popular by Fletcher's rival privateer John Hawkins, who had found that the old-fashioned carracks with their towering forecastles were less seaworthy than a ship with more modest lines. Like most such galleons, the
Vixen
had three masts, square-rigged on her fore- and mainmast, with her mizzen mast, nearest her stern, rigged for a slanting sail.

Sherwin took the opportunity to look into the gaze of her figurehead, the carved image of a woman with blue eyes and black hair, one arm sweeping across her breast in
modesty or self-defense. This hand held two arrows, and the figure's outlines were well coated with paint, down to the gilded points of the arrowheads. Sherwin had rarely seen a statue of any kind—the churches had been cleansed of the images of saints during the religious upheaval well before Sherwin's childhood, and looking at this larger-than-life image stirred his deepest deference.

Captain Fletcher crunched across the shore to join Sherwin gazing at the carved figure, who in her nearly horizontal position looked like a matron whose dignity was nearly under doubt.

“I had this ship shadow-built to my design, some twenty years past,” said Fletcher.
Shadow-built
meant that no drawn plan had been used, only the exacting vision of the builder.

Sherwin knew something of boatwrights, having grown up around the wherries and scull-boats of the river Thames. The construction, out of a single vision, of a ship like the
Vixen
struck Sherwin as nothing short of marvelous.

“Is the ship as fine as you had hoped?” Sherwin asked.

“She is the very echo of my dream,” said the captain, gazing at the vessel with an air of affectionate pride. “When it came to this stalwart maiden, the figurehead, the carver followed my orders, but he wanted her to clasp a cross.” He gave the wooden figure a caress. “He was an older man with, I think, antiquated religious sympathies. I thought arrows were more fitting.”

The captain added, without pause, or change of tone, “We are being watched.”

 

A HEAVILY CLOAKED FIGURE was observing the ship from the summit of the cliff, a young woman, Sherwin judged, with light brown hair.

“I am not well pleased by having a witness,” said Captain Fletcher, “especially when my pretty ship is lying on her beams. I hope to be at sea again by midnight, after the next flood tide. Until then a visit by a port constable or one of his tipstaves would be unwelcome.” Tipstaves were a constable's attendants, notorious for putting their staves to rough use.

“Is concealment so very important?” asked Sherwin.

“We need secrecy while we heal. Do you see this wound,” added the captain, “there below the waterline?”

The captain indicated a tear-shaped gash below the gunports, like a long single claw mark ending in a round hole. As matter-of-fact as the wound was, exposed to the daylight, Sherwin's breath caught at the sight, the secret wound looking small but mortal.

“Made by a Spanish gun firing ten-pound shot,” said the captain. “It pains me to see such an injury. The carpenter and his mate will have her mended, under my care, but we've been taking on water, and with the trouble to come we can't let the damage go untended. She'll be seaworthy again by nightfall, but until then we are vulnerable.”

“What,” Sherwin found himself asking, hoping that he already knew the answer, “is the trouble that is bound to come?”

“A great fleet, as men describe it,” said the captain. “The largest navy ever to set sail, if the drain of shipwrights from Porto to Parma, from what I hear, is any evidence. This would be the greatest sea force of all time—a historic armada—if the reports are true.”

To hear the possibility so described gave Sherwin a quiet thrill—and a surprising degree of dread, too.

“And you'll want the
Vixen
to be fit so you can join the battle,” said Sherwin, sure that he understood the captain's meaning.

“What I hope to be, when the fury begins,” responded the captain, “is as far away as possible.”

“We are not, I hope, a white-livered ship,” said Sherwin. It would not be polite or even wise to say
cowardly
.

“Do you think cowardice has any meaning for me,” said the captain, “or courage, for that matter? While the entire world is gathered to spoil the sea with blood, we'll slip north to pluck a few ocean geese off Bristol, or Liverpool.” He stopped to consider his remarks, and then he added, “Although I would enjoy getting my hooks into a Spanish prize.”

Highbridge had joined the two of them, and listened to the captain's comments with a keen look in his eye, although he made no effort to join in the conversation.

For his part, Sherwin was badly surprised to hear the
captain's blithe dismissal of defending his country. And this surprising outlook certainly dashed Sherwin's enthusiasm at putting his life into the captain's hands.

Sherwin recovered his good humor. He allowed himself to chuckle. “I do not believe you, sir, if you will forgive me. If the need arises, you will be as stalwart as any of the Queen's subjects—and more fervent, I am sure.”

He knew that some men pretended to be foolish to hide their actual cunning, or to make themselves agreeable. Other men pretended to be kind in order to mask their cruelty. Captain Fletcher was surely hiding an ardent, if perhaps discomfiting, love of his country by pretending to be purely interested in personal gain.

“Why, then, good Sherwin,” replied the captain, “I hope no war comes. Otherwise, you will find me very disappointing.”

Sherwin was about to express further good-natured skepticism when the captain interjected. “Oh, damn me—she has vanished.”

The womanly figure was no longer on the cliff.

“I was going to invite her down so I could tell her lies about who we are and what we are doing.” The captain added, “It has been many a month since I spoke to a lady.”

Captain Fletcher set a lookout on the cliff, the sharp-eyed Nittany, and he also sent three groups off to forage in different directions. Sherwin and Bartholomew were assigned to a group composed of Sergeant Evenage and a seaman named Giles Tryce.

 

BEFORE SHERWIN'S TEAM of foragers departed, Highbridge beckoned silently to Sherwin.

The first mate had a wooden box under his arm. He set the container down on the stony beach and pried it open.

“I would be most pleased,” said Highbridge, “if you carried this.”

Highbridge gave Sherwin a dag—a heavy, large-bore pistol.

It was a sturdy weapon, made of stag ivory and iron, decorated with pretty silver patterns. The firearm was very much like the one Evenage had been cleaning earlier, except even more beautiful.

“This belongs to me,” said Highbridge. “I am loaning it to you, during the duration of your stay aboard the
Vixen
. The sight of such arms impresses shipmates and villagers alike.”