The Continental Risque (24 page)

He sucked in his breath, and the knot of tension in his shoulders, which had been dissipating over the past five minutes, bound up again and shot sparks of pain up his neck.

It was the rebel fleet; it could be nothing else. There were two ships and three brigs, just as Dorsett had said, and they were standing in to Nassau harbor with all plain sail set. Brown felt a deep and sudden nausea, like the first pangs of mal de mer, that comes with the realization that one has made a dreadful mistake.

But President of His Majesty's Council Brown had not become the man that he was by rolling over at each adversity. The fleet was an hour away at least, and that was quite enough time to rally the militia and arm the citizens. What was more, those big ships would have to run the hail of iron that they would pour from Fort Nassau.

‘Captain, I want the signal gun by the gate fired three times to rally the militia. Send a crier through the streets as well, and I suppose send someone to alert the governor. Get a gun crew up here at once and as many more as you can muster. I believe the rebel fleet is in the offing.'

The captain saluted and was gone, and Brown turned and looked seaward again. He wondered if the masters of those little sloops realized how close they had come to being scooped up by the rebels. No doubt they did and were all running for their lives. It was odd to see three together like that, and to see them entering the harbor just at dawn. The fishermen who ran those boats were rarely that active.

‘Damn me!' Brown said out loud as he whipped the glass to his eye. Not above eight people were on the deck of each sloop, black men and white and all dressed in rags, like every Bahamian sloop he had ever seen.

But one of them, the far one, was not a Bahamian sloop at all. It was a sloop, to be sure, but the high freeboard and plumb bow bespoke a northern build, and though Brown knew little about ships, something about that one sloop said to him ‘Yankee.'

He heard feet on the soft ground and was suddenly surrounded by the gun crew. He turned to the first man he saw. ‘Quick, run and tell the captain to leave off firing the signal from the gate. We'll use the guns here to rally the militia. I believe we have an absolute herd of Trojan horses here,' Brown continued, waving toward the sloops, ‘charging into the harbor.'

From the blank looks on the men's faces he guessed that the allusion had eluded them all. ‘Look, I want to fire three of the big guns as a signal, but I want the guns shotted and aimed generally in the direction of those sloops. But not at them, mind you.'

If they are the enemy, then we may frighten them away, he thought, and if not, well, no harm done. As long as we don't hit them.

Biddlecomb had his back to the American fleet; he could not stand to watch Hopkins's solid plan crumbling before his eyes. But there was still a chance. The militia in Nassau might not recognize the fleet for what it was, or if they did, they might believe the sloops to be innocent vessels running from the obvious threat. In any event he would press on, despite his feeling decidedly unwell, until it was clear that their plan would no longer work.

‘I reckon we'll be alongside in ten minutes,' Rumstick said, and Biddlecomb nodded in agreement. Ten more minutes was all they needed, ten minutes of indecision or complacency on the part of the citizens of Nassau, and he would take the island with a minimum of bloodshed or possibly, hopefully, none at all.

He looked at Fort Nassau, low and menacing, directly off the starboard beam. He was about to tell Rumstick of the last time he had been there, back in the smuggling days, when he saw the flash of light, orange and red and yellow, a tongue of fire shooting out from the fort. And simultaneously came the belch of gray smoke, the dull roar of the gun, and a spout of water shot up between his sloop and the
Providence
.

‘I don't think we're fooling them any longer,' Biddlecomb observed.

Another of the big guns fired, sending up another spray of water, one hundred feet from the first. And then a third gun, and with it a crash and shudder as the deck trembled underfoot and the air was filled with a burst of splinters.

The cannonball had struck the sloop and torn away four feet of the vessel's low bulwark, taking with it all hope of bloodless conquest.

Biddlecomb stared in disbelief, not at the damage, which was minimal, but at the near miraculous sight of everyone still on his feet. On either side of the yawning hole in the bulwark men stood frozen in surprise and gaped at the splintered wood. The ball – it could not have been smaller than a twelve-pounder – had passed right through a knot of five men and gone on its way, leaving the crew of the sloop unscathed.

‘Now that was some lucky,' said Rumstick.

‘A foot lower and that would have been right in the hold,' Biddlecomb said. ‘I doubt the scantlings on this little thing could stand up to a heavy gun like that.' The cloud of gun smoke was lifting off Fort Nassau in a solid blanket and drifting away downwind. ‘I don't want to think what a twelve-pounder ball would do to those poor bastards down there.'

He did not want to think of it, but he did; a twelve-pound ball tearing through the sloop's frail sides, tearing into the mass of close-packed, helpless men. The whole ship would be a slaughterhouse in minutes.

He swept the walls of Fort Nassau with his telescope. He could see no further activity, but that did not mean that it was not happening, that more guns were not being loaded and run out. He would need another ten minutes to lay his sloop alongside and disgorge the marines, and in that time, firing from the stable platform of the fort, the defenders could blow him out of the water.

‘Any signal from the flagship, Mr Rumstick?'

The second officer was silent for a moment as he squinted aft through his telescope. The fleet was not far off, just over half a mile, but it was difficult to see without full daylight. ‘Hard to say, Captain,' he said at length. ‘Course, the signal to disengage, which is what I reckon I'm looking for, is a white flag at the ensign staff. And since we're looking bow-on, I can't see the ensign staff, which, as you might recall, is on the taffrail. I guess old Hopkins didn't figure on this case.'

‘You men,' Biddlecomb called forward. ‘Get some lumber and shore up the bulwark there. Nail something over the hole.' It would not do to let the men mill about unoccupied, waiting for the next murderous hail of fire.

Lieutenant Faircloth crawled out of the forward hatch and walked aft. He had left his bottle-green jacket below and thrown a filthy blanket over his shoulders to hide his perfectly white shirt from watchers ashore. He stepped aft, glancing curiously at the missing section of bulwark. ‘Trouble, sir?'

‘Possibly. We've not done too well as far as surprises go.' Biddlecomb indicated with a jerk of his thumb the American fleet less than a mile astern. He hoped that he did not sound even half as nervous and angry as he was. His shoulders ached with tension as he braced for the fusillade that would murder the poor men below.

‘Oh, dear, a bit of miscalculation, what?' Faircloth said. ‘Are we to proceed with the plan?'

‘Until Hopkins signals otherwise. Though I think we can abandon any hope of pulling this off without bloodshed.'

‘Here, sir,' Rumstick said. ‘They're running something up the jack staff, where we can see it. There's a bright boy … white flag, sir. Disengage.'

‘Thank God, before the butcher starts running up his bill. Forward there,' Biddlecomb shouted along the deck, ‘we're going to bear up. Hands to sheets.'

‘Shall I signal the others, sir?' Rumstick asked.

‘Yes. And damn the idiot flags, just shout to them.'

Rumstick put the speaking trumpet to his mouth and shouted, ‘Stand by to bear up. We are disengaging!' and from the first sloop, and then the second, the response ‘Aye!' floated across the water.

‘Port your helm,' Biddlecomb ordered the helmsman, who pushed the tiller to larboard. The sloop swung up into the wind and the sails were drawn in tight as she turned close-hauled to retrace her course out into the Caribbean. Fort Nassau was over the larboard beam now, silent and menacing. In their wake the other two vessels, the
Providence
and the second captured sloop, swung around, and together the three Americans took up their headlong and ignominious flight from Nassau harbor.

‘I told you to miss them, you stupid idiot, whoreson bastard!' Brown shouted at the gunner, now standing twenty feet below him on the parade ground.

The first two shots had fallen perfectly between the lead sloop and the second, sending spouts of water high in the air. But the third had scored a direct hit, smashing a huge section in the vessel's bulwark and killing the Lord only knew how many men. If that sloop was some innocent Bahamian trader, perhaps running for the protection of the fort, then Brown would have some tricky explanations ahead of him, and he was not certain that even his quick tongue was up to the task.

‘It were an accident, sir,' the gunner wailed from below the rampart. ‘I've never hit nothing before in my life. But look at this gun, sir! What am I to do about this?'

The gun was something of a problem. The recoil had torn the ringbolt, to which the breeching was attached, clean out of the crumbling wall, and both gun and carriage, a total of about thirty-seven hundred pounds, had flown backward off the rampart and plunged twenty feet to the parade ground below.

The other two guns had remained in place, but just barely. The ringbolts on their breechings, though they had held, had been jerked halfway out of the wall. If fired again, they would inevitably join their comrade, lying on its side on top of the shattered remnants of its carriage. As formidable as the battlements of Fort Nassau appeared, the great guns, it seemed, would be good for no more than one or two shots apiece at most before they hurled themselves off the gun platform. Brown wondered if anyone else – the invading Americans, for instance – knew that.

He turned his attention from the disabled gun – he had no time for that now – and looked out over the stretch of water sandwiched between New Providence and Hog Island. The sloops had not changed course, sailing inbound in a loose formation. ‘Damn your eyes to hell,' Brown muttered another curse at the unfortunate gunner and his lucky shot. Someone was nailing a board over the hole that the gun had blasted in the vessel's bulwark.

And then, suddenly, like a gift from heaven, the three sloops spun on their heels and headed back the way they had come. There was nothing ragged in the movement, it was perfectly coordinated and clearly done on some signal.

Brown wanted to cheer out loud.

Such an evolution could only have come from naval vessels, working in consort. They were Trojan horses after all, and he had not allowed Nassau's wall to be knocked down. Not much separated the hero from the goat, but in this case at least he had come out the former.

As his elation subsided, he became aware of the commotion on the far side of the fort and coming closer. He turned from the joyful sight on the water to see what was going on.

Governor Browne had arrived, and trailing behind him like the tail of a shooting star was the omnipresent Babbidge and a dozen militiamen representing those wealthiest islanders who lived close to Government House.

The governor himself might have made an imposing sight, with his cartridge belt and powder horn around his shoulder and his beautiful musket clenched in his meaty hand. The effect was ruined, however, by the worried expression on his face, bordering on terrified, and the fact that he was still in his nightshirt.

The long white garment hung down to his knees, and the fringe, along with his legs (surprisingly thin for so big a man) and his deerskin moccasins, were covered with mud and dust. His head, generally topped with a wig, was bare, and his short hair stood up straight in all directions, making his scalp look very like a sea urchin.

‘Brown, Brown, there you are,' the governor said, huffing across the parade ground and clambering up the steps to the rampart. ‘What the devil is going on? Are we being invaded?' He was breathing fast and his face was far redder than usual.

‘There, sir,' President of His Majesty's Council Brown pointed grandly at the retreating sloops. ‘Those three vessels. I suspect their holds were crammed with rebel soldiers. As you can see, I have driven them away.'

‘Yes, indeed … Why do you think they had soldiers aboard?'

‘Because, Governor, yonder is the American fleet.'

‘Oh, sweet Jesus,' the governor said as he followed Brown's pointed finger to the ships, a formidable-looking force, standing into the harbor.

But even as he said the words the Americans began to change course. On some unseen signal the two ships and three brigs swung away from the watching men. They turned north, presenting first their broadsides and then their sterns to Fort Nassau, heading back the way they had come. The three sloops followed a quarter mile astern, sailing line ahead out of Nassau harbor.

‘Well, they're not going for good, I can assure you of that,' the governor said as new apprehensions replaced the relief he had just experienced. ‘Look, Chambers is over there with his sloop, what is it? The
Mississippi
… what is it?'

‘
Mississippi Packet
, sir.'

‘Right. Let's get the gunpowder aboard her, send it off to Florida, keep it from falling into the hands of the damned rebels. Yes, we'll begin immediately, before they return. Show those damnable rascals.' The governor turned to the crowd of militia below on the parade ground, which even since his arrival had increased in size, and began to issue orders.

‘Sir,' said Brown, stopping him in midsentence. ‘I beg you, consider this. If you send the sloop out now, in broad daylight, there is a better than even chance the rebels will see it and intercept it. Then we are defenseless, and they will both have the powder and be enraged at our attempt to keep it from them.'