The French Prize (44 page)

They were right to windward of Guadeloupe. Jack could see the high, dull green mountains at the center of the island looming above the horizon. They were a hundred nautical miles or more from actually running up on the island's sandy beaches, but that was not that far as measured at sea, particularly not with the wind and current setting them down on shore and them with no way to sail clear, not at least before the considerably damaged rig was set to rights.

And that was no simple job. It was not just a matter of clearing the wreckage away. When the main topmast and the topgallant came down they tore out great quantities of running rigging in their plunge to the deck; braces, bowlines, lifts, clewlines; not to mention the shrouds, backstays, and forestays that had been pulled out or shot through, without which the masts would not bear the pressure of the sails. It all had to be knotted, spliced, or replaced before
Abigail
could sail, fight, or beat clear of a lee shore. Incredibly,
L'Arman
ç
on
had suddenly dropped to number three on Jack's list of most immediate threats to his life and the lives of his men.

*   *   *

Bar
è
re was dead. That at least was a good thing. Renaudin had had the supreme satisfaction of seeing it, close up. But he had been wounded in the process, and Bar
è
re did not die by his hand, and that tempered his pleasure.

It had happened near the end of the fight, a fight that had been going just as Renaudin hoped, though to be sure the Americans were better prepared for battle than he had expected them to be. If ever one needed evidence of the perfidious nature of the Americans and the British, here it was. The Americans had sailed to Antiqua, which meant they had turned to the British navy for help. The British navy. The same navy that France had fought in those very waters to defend the United States, the navy that had made Renaudin a prisoner while he fought for American freedom, and the British had not only repaired their ship but also doubled the armament and crew. Incredible.

Renaudin did not like to think that Bar
è
re and the
Directoire
could be right about anything, but he could not argue with this clear example of American treachery.

In the end, however, it did not matter, because Renaudin did not see this as an issue of international relations, or republicanism versus monarchy, or the world's attitude toward the new French Republic or the
Ancien R
é
gime
. For him, this was personal. For nearly a decade his professional pride had been smothered under a blizzard of orders, propaganda, and useless revolutionary officers sent out from Paris. His honor had been slumbering, and this impudent American had woken it up, and now he was focused entirely on crushing him, to the exclusion of all else.

He and Dauville had driven the bastards on the lower deck hard, watch on watch, pushing them through gun drills and sail-handling drills. They had met protests and grumbling with fists and belaying pins. And the drills paid off. The first broadside, fired point-blank range into the American, who once again thought himself so clever in his quick ship handling, had been devastating. One gun upended, the thin strakes of the merchantman punched clean through. They had come under the American's stern and fired again, right through the transom, the most satisfying volley of roundshot Renaudin had ever fired, his guns twice as powerful as those the American mounted.

The American had flown up into irons, rocked by the onslaught, and Renaudin had worn around to come back and end it, the
coup de gr
â
ce
, as the American flatted in his headsails and cast onto a starboard tack. That was when it happened. Bar
è
re was shouting something, Renaudin managing to ignore him, until Bar
è
re took a grip on his forearm and turned him so they were face-to-face, Renaudin with his back to the American ship.

“See here,
Citoyen
Renaudin!” Bar
è
re said, his finger raised as if admonishing a child, but Renaudin was still too stunned by the fact that the man had had the audacity to actually grab him by the arm and spin him around that he could not speak.

“You have your orders, straight from the
Directoire
, by way of me, who speaks for the
Directoire
,” Bar
è
re spluttered. “You are
not
to destroy this ship, you are to capture it.” It was apparently clear even to Bar
è
re what Renaudin had in mind. “You will call for them to strike before you fire another shot, is that understood?”

Renaudin's shock dissipated but he still did not speak. Instead he reached for the pistol in his coat pocket, thinking that the weapon could express his feelings better than any words. But just as his hand found the walnut grip of the gun, he felt a burning on the top of his ear, heard a loud buzz like a swarm of bees, and a round hole appeared in Bar
è
re's forehead. His mouth flew open and the back of his head exploded in a spray of blood. It was just as Renaudin had always envisioned it.

Bar
è
re's blood sprayed over the helmsman, who flinched at the sight, and Bar
è
re was flung backward. He crashed against the barrel of the helm, hung there for a moment, and then slumped to the deck.

At that moment the burning in Renaudin's ear became a pain like a knife thrust. He reached up and felt warm, wet blood on his fingers. He turned and looked across the water at the American.
The rifleman
, he thought. The damned rifleman who had shot down his helmsmen and the
enseigne de vaisseau
the last time they had tangled. This time he nearly took down the captain and the first officer in a single shot. Instead the bullet had clipped Renaudin's ear on its way to taking off the back of Bar
è
re's head.

Renaudin looked back at Bar
è
re's immobile form. His eyes were open and crossed, giving him an expression that might have been comical if not for the gore and great quantities of blood soaking his uniform and the deck below him. Renaudin felt the rage building. All of this, all the humiliation, the death, the insanity, Bar
è
re had brought it all.

Straight from the
Directoire,
by way of me, who speaks for the
Directoire …

“Bastard!” Renaudin shouted. He stepped across the deck and kicked Bar
è
re's body hard, then kicked him again, but the dead man only slumped over in a most unsatisfying way. Renaudin grabbed him by the collar of his coat and hefted him up, surprised at how light the man was. He half carried and half dragged him over to the taffrail, hoisted him up, and flung him over, watching with satisfaction as the man spun through the air, slowly twisting as he fell the fifteen feet to the sea, then hit with a splash that hid him from view for a moment before he bobbed up and settled, face up, still wearing that expression of surprise. Renaudin hoped he might see a shark set into that despised corpse.

“Sir!” It was the helmsman and there was an urgent tone in his voice. Renaudin spun around. The American, who had been bearing up as if to pass astern of
L'Arman
ç
on
, was now falling off again, apparently looking to pass ahead, and in doing so threatening to take
L'Arman
ç
on
's head rig clean off.

“Merde,”
Renaudin said. “Bear up, bear up!” He saw
L'Arman
ç
on
's bow swing to larboard but already it was too late. The end of the jibboom was reaching out over the American's foredeck and the corvette was driving closer still. Renaudin felt a gentle thump as the two ships locked together and
L'Arman
ç
on
's way was checked.

Ren
é
Dauville came racing aft, his face streaked with soot, a tear in his blue coat. “Sir, where is Bar
è
re?” he shouted.

“Dead,” Renaudin shouted back. “Get a boarding party, right up that bowsprit and see if you can't get aboard that whoreson!” Renaudin could see the American sailors hacking at
L'Arman
ç
on
's rigging, could see the jibboom twisting dangerously under the pressure being exerted by the American ship.

“Aye, sir!” Dauville shouted, but before he could turn, Renaudin stepped closer and said in a lower tone. “Do not lead the boarders yourself. Send an
enseigne de vaisseau
to lead it.”

“Sir, I must protest…” Dauville began, but Renaudin was thinking about the rifleman. He could not afford to lose his second officer. First officer, now.

“That is an order, Lieutenant Dauville, a direct order, understand?”

“Aye, sir,” Dauville said, not mollified, and ran forward. And five minutes later, Renaudin was vindicated in his decision when the damned rifleman dropped the
enseigne de vaisseau
into the sea, and the rest of the boarders, cowards to a man, turned and fled.

Then the American ship, twisting in the breeze, snapped
L'Arman
ç
on
's jibboom and wrenched the bowsprit sideways until it was hanging like a broken wing. Renaudin ordered the spanker backed, and as
L'Arman
ç
on
turned under the pressure of that sail they gave the arrogant, cheering bastards a broadside they would remember. He ordered Dauville to personally aim each gun for Dauville had brought down the American's main topmast. But without the headsails they had been unable to check
L'Arman
ç
on
's swing. The corvette turned up into the wind and the fore topmast came down around their ears.

And here they lay, crippled, frantically trying to sort things out, to get steerageway at least, as a half mile away the Americans tried to do the same. Because the American master knew, as Renaudin did, that the first ship to get under way was the ship that would bring the other in as a prize of war.

They worked like madmen, the newly disciplined crew, and Renaudin and Dauville drove them in the manner to which they were becoming accustomed. At such times, a mariner's world closed down to the space between the bulwarks and straight up into the rigging, as if nothing existed beyond the gunwales or above the trucks of the mast. At first Renaudin would glance over at the American now and again, to see the state of their readiness, but he soon realized they were making no more progress than he was, and he stopped looking.

And so it was several hours after the battle that he happened to look out to the east. He was actually looking at the bowsprit to see what progress was being made there, and it happened that the bow, which had been swinging all over the compass, was pointing east at that moment. Looking past the bow, Renaudin saw for the first time the long black line creeping up over the horizon, the great heaps of clouds building above it, the sign, well known to a man who had spent as much time in the West Indies as he, of a quick-moving and brutal storm.

He looked over the wreckage strewn around
L'Arman
ç
on
's deck, the rigging hanging in shreds above his head.
“Merde,”
he said for the second time that day.

*   *   *

By the time the sun was near to setting, the ugly black clouds, which earlier had been confined to the eastern horizon, were spread overhead, with the leading edge of the storm off to the west of them, making for a weird red-and-yellow sunset that bathed Guadeloupe, closer now by thirty miles, in its unearthly light. The Abigails were exhausted but their efforts had barely slacked because every man aboard could now see what they were in for. They needed no encouragement from Biddlecomb or Tucker to step it up. The black sky and the dull gray water, the breaking waves flashing dull in the fading light, the first stirrings of a cold wind like a spirit wafting by, these were enough to provide all the motivation needed.

“Adams, Fowler, take a turn there!” Jack shouted to two of his seamen tending the fore topgallant heel rope. The hands had turned their attention to getting the remaining topgallant masts and yards down on the deck, reducing the weight and windage aloft in preparation for the storm, but those two were getting sloppy in their exhaustion. If the line got away from them, the mast would come crashing down. “We don't need it to come down that damned fast,” Jack added, as Fowler took a turn of the line around a belaying pin.

The debris had been cleared, the rigging knotted and spliced. Frost seemed to have disappeared after Jack broke off the fight with
L'Arman
ç
on
, but soon he was back on deck, fussing about the cannons, seeing they were double-lashed, then checking them and checking again. The topgallant yards were down and Tucker was seeing the mizzen topmast down to deck, and Jack was seeing to the fore topgallant. The fore topsail was triple-reefed, a narrow strip of canvas quickly being lost from sight in the gloom. The mainsail was also reefed, though Jack did not imagine they would hold on to that for long.

Abigail
had way on at last, driving along under the reefed topsail, mainsail, fore staysail, and the spanker with a balance reef. She was plunging into the chop, pitching and throwing up spray as the wind built and the seas came on, steep and breaking, and getting steeper still.

“Deck there!” a voice called from the mizzen top, one of the British hands. “Lost her, sir!”

Jack had sent him up there to keep an eye on
L'Arman
ç
on
. For all their worry about the storm, she was still a threat as well, she had to be considered. If her captain felt particularly ambitious he might fire a ball into
Abigail
as they were struggling to claw away from Guadeloupe. It would not take much damage to the rigging to put the merchantman in serious jeopardy.