Rondo Allegro (39 page)

His arm hurt like blazes, but he did not dare try a sling.
He knew from the wild shriek of the wind and the slant of the deck that he
would need both hands.

He drank off the lukewarm tea that Perkins had worn inside
his jacket for at least an hour, then sent the steward forward. Urgent as was
the need to be on deck, he had to see her. For the first time, he opened the
door to his sleeping cabin. Lightning flared far over the water, lighting the
stern window, creating a silhouette of the still form slumbering in the cot.

He smiled to see her there safe and warm, then closed the
door soundlessly and forced his way up to his quarterdeck. The wind nearly took
him over the rail. He bent double, both hands tight on the man-ropes.

Unawares, Anna slept so deeply that she did not waken until
an enormous wave of water smashed the stern windows behind her.

She woke, startled, to see an angry gray-green sea rising
nearly as high as the deck above. White foam tore across the top of the
swelling billows, and whipped away on the shrieking wind.

What was that beyond the waves? Between one and the next she
caught sight of a massive bowsprit rolling, and gasped in fear. They were being
chased by a Spanish ship of the line!

She flung herself out of her cot, and landed on hands and
knees in rilling water. Lightning bolts shot through her joints. Every muscle
in her body ached.

Her slippers were floating on this thin tide sweeping back
and forth. She grabbed them and crawled to her trunk. Her instinct was to fetch
out her second pair of slippers, but she looked at the water washing back and
forth, and her fingers shook as she wrestled the slippers over her bare feet.
She ran to the door, then out, but paused when she reached the outer doors to
the captain’s cabin.

The marine on duty, standing with feet braced wide, said
apologetically, “Orders is, you must stay inside, missus. It’s too dangerous on
deck, even with the man-ropes. We already lost one upper-yardman, insisted on
laying aloft with one hand a-bandaged.”

“But we are being chased, are we not?” She pointed behind.
“I saw one of the Spanish ships.”

He looked away. “We was towing it, on Admiral’s orders. But
it’s not swimming, and they’re bringing the last of the prisoners over now.”

“Prisoners!”

“Yes, missus.”

“Thank you,” Anna said, and nearly turned back to ask about
the captain. But of course he would be on deck, in spite of his wounds.

When another huge wave splashed up to the stern windows, she
retreated to sit upon her trunk. She knew if the water crashed in she would be
no better off seated on the trunk than in the cot, but that wild sea was too
frightening to be near.

Chilled, she wrung out her skirt as best she could, then
plunged her hands under her armpits. Her heart thundered with every great rise
of the ship, and each downward plunge.

It could have been five minutes or five hours later when
Parrette appeared, something wrapped in sailcloth gripped in her arms.

“It’s tea,” she said. “The cook set the fires for hot water
only, for the officers, and for you, captain’s orders. He put up a breakfast of
sliced salt beef and ship’s bread harder than a cannon ball.”

She unwrapped her cloth, disclosing the captain’s silver pot
and a couple of sturdy wooden mugs.

The two of them sat side by side on the trunk, gratefully
drinking hot tea and then determinedly gnawing through the tough meat and the
stale bread. Anna’s thoughts winged back to the long, astonishing day previous,
which had begun so terribly and ended . . . she could not
characterize it in her mind, except she smiled. So
unexpected.

She longed to see the captain’s face, to discover what it
meant to him, if anything. She stared at her fingers, the nails uneven after
the horrors of the orlop, and at her knees poking the skirt of her dove-colored
serge gown. She knew she looked no different from the outside, but she was
aware of a fundamental difference, a change of state. It might not be real to
anyone else—would it be to him?

Thump, yaw! The ship heaved at an impossible slant, then
dove downward at such an angle her stomach clenched. She willed each plunge and
rise to lessen, but they rose inexorably larger. Anna looked back, down, at the
stern windows, and flung herself away—it seemed she was going to fall through
the glass into the furious seas.

She and Parrette clung together in terrified silence until
rumbling footsteps and a perfunctory thud on the door brought in Perkins with
several men behind him. “Mrs. Capting, we’re striking down all extras,” he
said, pointing at the trunks. “Come with us. You’re to go below.”

“The captain?” she asked.

“Still on deck.”

Anna and Parrette were bundled down to the wardroom, where
they found the boy d’Ivry, his eyes circled a dull gray with exhaustion. His
hair was plastered to his skull as he sat down heavily at the table bolted to
the deck. “Well, at all events, it’s done,” he said.

The purser looked up from playing whist with the gunner’s
mate. “Them dons is in the hold?”

“We got them all across, near eighty of them.”

“Eighty?” Anna repeated, astonished. “For so very large a
ship?”

Mr. d’Ivry’s expression lowered. “Eighty was all they found,
after she struck her flag to
Royal
Sovereign
.” He looked unhappy, as if the day before he had not been
gleefully crowing about ‘thumping it into them, again and again.’ “Many went
over the side, and between us all, they got scooped out of the water. Those who
could float. The rest drowned.”

“Skipper set the marines in double guard on them devils,”
muttered the gunner’s mate. “That’s smart. I heared that first boatload,
gabbing away in foreign. Planning a mutiny, most like.”

The midshipman lifted a shoulder upwards. “At all events,
their lieutenant, the only one still alive, is a civilized cove, speaks
English—”

He broke off at the sound of footsteps and voices.

The crewmen rose to their feet, hands to foreheads. The
midshipman doffed a hat that was not on his head as the captain limped in,
followed by a thoroughly drenched young man in a once-beautiful Spanish
lieutenant’s uniform, the red lapels leaking color down his waistcoat as if he
bled. One epaulette had been torn off, and he had tied a handkerchief around
his hand. From the look of it, at least a couple of fingers had been broken.

“Sit, please, gentlemen,” Captain Duncannon said, his voice
hoarse. “Madame.” He nodded at Anna, the corners of his mouth lifting briefly
as she curtseyed (she could not prevent a blush), then he turned to the
midshipman. “Mr. d’Ivry. I regret that I must rescind your permission to
retire. I know this is yours and Jones’ sleep-watch, but there cannot be time
for sleep. Fetch Mr. Jones, please, and both of you report to Mr. McGowan on
the forecastle.”

While he spoke the warrant officers and their mates vanished
into the much wetter gunroom.

“Please, seat yourself, Lieutenant Suarez,” he said in
careful French, and holding out his hand toward Anna, “May I have the honor of
presenting Lieutenant Suarez? Perkins,” he called in English, “please wait upon
the lieutenant.”

Perkins stumped up to the table. His method of talking to
the Spanish officer was to speak very loudly and distinctly, as if the young man
were hard of hearing, or slow.

Under cover of their laborious conversation, Duncannon
limped to Anna, wincing at every step.

“Can you not take a moment to rest?” she asked.

His head turned in a negation. “Not until this blows out.
Sayers is up on deck, a capstan bar bound to his leg. No one will sleep until
this squall passes.” He glanced at the young officer. “He’s very low. Lost
nearly all his shipmates. I would take it kindly if you were to talk to him.”

“I would be happy to.”

He had been leaning against the table with his good hand;
the wounded arm came around, and his fingers touched hers. His hand was cold.
She gripped his fingers, but dropped her hand when Perkins boomed loudly,
“Capting says, no galley fires to be lit.”

Captain Duncannon murmured to Anna, “I had better get him
out before he talks the wretched man into a calenture.” He said, “Perkins, help
me to the ladder. I must return to my post.” He bowed stiffly to the
lieutenant.

Anna approached the Spanish lieutenant. He was not only
still grimy from battle smoke, he looked exhausted. She held one hand to the
table to steady herself as she curtseyed, wondering what to say. She understood
Captain Duncannon’s impulse to be courteous, but she hadn’t the first idea how
to speak to a man who had just lost a battle, and most of his shipmates.

She said in Spanish, “I trust and hope you shall soon be
home again.”

His dark brown eyes widened when he heard her speak his
language, and his head dropped back on the word
home
. “And when I am, it shall only be to be ordered out again to
more of this damned, purposeless war, protecting these atheistical French,
their souls to the devil. Ordered by the Prince of Peace.” His teeth showed
when he uttered Godoy’s title, his voice derisive.

Then he shook his head. “Pardon me, Senora Duncannon. I
ought not to speak so before a lady. How is it that you speak the Spanish? And
so very well?”

He was still standing, also holding onto the table.

“Shall we sit?” she asked.

He moved like an aristocrat, but even so he could not
entirely mask plain human tiredness as he fell into his chair. His head turned,
and she saw that he was probably a year or two even younger than she
was—scarcely any beard.

“I have traveled to many cities in Spain,” she said, before
she remembered that she was not supposed to be a lowly performer.

But either he was too polite to ask why, or more likely he
was too exhausted to take any interest in her motions. “My country,” he said,
“is the most beautiful in the world, and the greatest. But the rot is at the
top, and will continue to destroy us unless we attend to it.” Again he caught
himself, and he asked politely what she had seen.

She described the Roman theater of Merida, the Moorish
palace in Seville, the beauties of Madrid, which brought the lieutenant’s chin
up in pride. For a short time they discussed opera and Spanish dance, but after
a remark about how Spanish dance was like the duel, once again he strayed to
the war.

And then it came out, what a disaster it had been from the
beginning. Everything, from the stupidity of weaving together the Spanish ships
with the French (“Because Villeneuve feared we would run.
We!
I was with the admiral at Toulon, as a ship’s boy. It was not
we
who have run from battle.”) to
Captain Infernet’s noble, mad dash to rally what was left of the Combined
Fleet. “And it might have answered, had the others followed . . .”

As the lieutenant talked on, Anna remembered Villeneuve’s
bitter complaints about his allies. She did not pretend to understand the young
man’s words about strategy, wind, or artillery, but she sensed in his
fatalistic language, so different from what she had heard at Admiral Lord
Nelson’s table, that while the British had fought to win, from commanders to
sailors, perhaps the French and Spanish commanders had fought because it was
their duty to fight, and those under their command level had fought to live.
Who would choose to make a “noble, mad” dash for a cause in which they had no
faith?

She was glad when Perkins brought some food and drink. The
lieutenant was given one of the captain’s best bottles of wine, which he drank
steadily as he grimly tried to work his way through a stale biscuit and a hunk
of unsoftened salt beef straight from the cask.

After his fourth glass of wine, his eyes actually rolled,
and Anna said, “Pray excuse me.”

She got up and made her way to the galley to seek water.
Perkins and the cook were there. She was given a cup from a barrel, which she
drank off while standing there, and when she returned, she found Lieutenant
Suarez asleep, his head resting on his crossed arms.

She withdrew to the gunroom, pressing against a bulkhead as
the ship gave a violent yaw, water dripping from the working timbers. She
nodded at the marine sentry, smoke-streaked still, his hair unpowdered. But his
musket gleamed as he stood guard at the ladder.

That was the last conversation for what became an endless
stretch of terror as the storm built inexorably into a wild, howling hurricane.
Parrette also sat in the gunroom, quietly telling over her rosary, her eyes
closed; even the warrant officers had vanished to tend to the ship either on
deck or from the hold.

Anna shut her eyes, trying to compose herself to rest until
Mr. Leuven, looking old and ill, appeared. “I beg you, ma’am, if you can tend
the sick-berth, I can look after the cases coming down with storm-wounds. We
are devilish hard-pressed.”

Anna made her way into the sick berth, while Parrette went
below to lend a hand with the wounded. The space with its close-packed cots and
swinging hammocks was thick with a fug tinged with the aroma of spirits. On a
chalk slate similar to the one Anna had seen on the binnacle were scrawled
directions for the various cases.

There was little she could do beyond change bandages at
intervals, dousing each with the splash of whisky. The patients endured this
treatment because they were also permitted a dollop of said whisky, eked out
with water, in a wooden scupper that they all shared around.

At Anna’s appearance, they brightened considerably, the
least wounded plucking at coverings to make themselves somewhat decent, and one
or two even pushing back filthy tangled hair, and fingering bristle on chins
and upper lips that would not be shaved any time soon.

She saw all those eyes on her, some dull with pain and
desperation as the room pitched mercilessly, water dripping down, and others
shy, or bright with expectation. Midshipman Bradshaw’s eyes glittered. When she
reached his cot, she saw that he was flushed with fever, and complaining of
thirst.