The French Prize (6 page)

The sun was well up now, the sky a cloudless blue, the distant sail considerably less distant and clearly steering to intercept them. Maguire had replaced Lacey at the helm, and Jack gave the order, “Make your course west northwest, one half west.”

There was just the slightest catch in Maguire's response as he repeated the order back, an order that would turn
Abigail
's bow more toward the strange sail on the horizon rather than away from it, probably not the helm command Maguire was anticipating, or hoping for. His eyes shifted from sails to compass as he made the subtle adjustment of the helm. Jack called for sail trimmers to brace the yards around ever so slightly.

“Mr. Biddlecomb,” said Asquith, who had taken a place by the weather rail, “let's call up all hands, set up some temporary backstays, and get the t'gan'sls back on her.”

“Yes, sir, of course,” Jack said, giving himself a mental kick for not having thought of that himself. He turned on his heel, called for all hands, called for light hawsers to be run aloft to the topgallant mastheads and set up well taut. With the temporary backstays taking the strain, the light poles would bear the topgallant sails in winds that would otherwise threaten to snap them off. Or so Jack hoped. Even with the backstays, he knew, they would be pushing their luck.

It was here that the ship's good reputation, and the concomitant ability to ship good men, paid dividends, as on fore-, main-, and mizzenmasts the hands swarmed aloft, sending the hawsers up on a girtline, bending them on, setting them up, with never an order given by Jack or the captain. Half an hour later, the topgallant sails, which an hour before had been stowed, were set again and straining in the twenty knots of wind blowing over the starboard quarter.
Abigail
heeled further over, her plunging and yawing more pronounced under the lofty canvas, but her speed was a good two knots greater.

Jack looked across the impossibly blue water of the Caribbean. He could now see the brigantine clearly from the deck, hull up, driving hard on a starboard tack, as close hauled as she would lay. She was straining her very fabric to get at
Abigail
, a fat, lumbering merchantman, irresistible prey, and
Abigail
in turn was running for all she was worth. But not running away. And not running toward the Frenchman, either, but rather sailing for a point just beyond her bow.

What must they think we're about
? Jack wondered. Assuming this privateer had not guessed what Jack had in mind, then
Abigail
's actions would make no sense at all. Set topgallants in that wind, just so the two ships might converge even quicker? Jack hoped that his actions would sow confusion, and perhaps even suspicion or fear, in their frog-eating hearts.

“Deck, there!” Lacey called from aloft. “She's showing colors, sir, looks like the Stars and Stripes!”

Jack put his glass to his eye. A spot of color was visible at the stranger's gaff, and though it was not discernible in any great detail, Jack was all but certain it was the flag of the United States: fifteen stripes, a blue canton with fifteen white stars.

“I think not, Monsieur Jean Crapeau,” Biddlecomb muttered to himself, his eye still to the glass. He swept the horizon to the northward, hoping to see some sign of the bank, breakers, some indication on the sea's surface of where the treacherous sand might lie. But he could see nothing, so he lowered the glass and focused on the set of
Abigail
's sails, the trim of the yards, the curve of the long wake astern.

For twenty minutes the ships continued to converge, the details of the brigantine becoming more visible; the steeve of her bowsprit, the rake of her masts, the flash of water kicked up under her bow, the grayish-white mass of sails resolving into their individual components. They were close enough that Jack did not need a glass to see the Stars and Stripes come down, the Tricolor of France go up in its place, a switch that surprised no one.

The sails, Jack noted, were more white than he might expect, the square sails lacking the ubiquitous black streak down the center where they had rubbed against the dirty slush of the masts. He hoped this meant the ship was new to the Caribbean, that her master did not know about the dangerous sands lurking beneath the surface to the north. It could well mean that. Or it could mean that he had been so long in those seas he needed a new suit of sails.

Either way, this was going to be a close run thing, and it depended entirely on Jack's being able to swing
Abigail
away from the privateer before the two vessels were so close that the Frenchie's guns could do real damage, at just that point on the ocean where
Abigail
would be able to weather the sandbank and the Frenchman would not. He looked aloft. He looked at the ship closing with them. He looked at the horizon to the north, and he did not know what to do.

To time this right, he had to be aloft, where he could see the sandbank, but he did not want to leave the deck, and he did not really trust anyone to handle the ship the way he wanted it handled. But he could not be in both places.

“Captain,” he said, deciding in that moment, “I am going to the mainmast head to keep an eye out for that bank.”

“Very well,” Asquith said.

Jack hesitated, unsure how to say the next thing, which was not at all a proper thing to say to one's captain, but Asquith spared him the awkward moment. “Sing out when we should haul our wind,” he said, “and I'll set her full and by.”

“Very good, sir, thank you,” Jack said, stuffed his hat in its familiar place in front of the binnacle, and raced aloft once more. The topgallant sails were set again, so Jack continued up the topgallant shrouds until he was able to throw a leg over the narrow yard, his heel resting on the stiff canvas that bulged with a bellyful of wind. He settled there and ran his eyes around the scene above and below.

The sky was a great dome, stretching horizon to horizon. Off to the east was the green and rugged hump of land that was Montserrat, and to the north, Antigua. He looked down to the deck below. From that perspective it always seemed impossible to him that the ship was able to remain upright; seen from aloft it appeared too top-heavy, as if it should roll over under the weight of the masts and yards.

Jack turned his eyes to the more pressing business for which he had made the long climb to the masthead. There, off to leeward and off the larboard bow, the French privateer was plunging along, bow rising and coming down in a welter of spray as it met each sea in succession. If they maintained this heading for another forty-five minutes, the Frenchman and
Abigail
would literally run into one another.

Off to the north he could see it now, the bank, a yellowish tan stretch of sand just below the surface, a great, sleeping beast ready to wake and snatch the keels of unwary ships. The endless waves swept over it, throwing up breakers that in calmer air would have been as easy to read as a tavern sign, but with the whitecaps kicked up by the building wind and flashing across the surface of the ocean, they were not so obvious.

Do you see that, Jean Crapeau?
Jack wondered. The Frenchmen would only see it if they had a man aloft and he was keeping a bright lookout. Jack calculated the speed, the wind direction, the relative bearing of the eastern end of the sandbar. Another five minutes on this course and then they would swing around to starboard, bear up, full and by, and scrape past the sand with the Frenchie too far downwind to weather it.

He looked back at the Frenchman, saw a jet of gray explode from the bow, which he took to be spray kicked up by the hull, and then two seconds later came the muffled thump of the gunfire, the scream of flying metal, and a ragged hole appeared in the fore topgallant sail, forty feet ahead and a little below where he stood.

“Damn my eyes!” Jack shouted with surprise because he knew no one could hear him. He felt something in his bowels loosen up. He had been ready for the possibility of a few long shots from the Frenchman, but he had not thought they would get so close that their shot would be up among the topgallant gear.

His eyes were still on the hole in the fore topgallant sail when the sound of the gun and the scream of the roundshot embraced him once again and then the whipping sound of the foretopsail brace parting. The fore topsail slewed around a bit, but it was mostly held in place by the fore yard and the fore topgallant. He looked down to the deck, mouth open to shout orders, but he could see figures already heaving spare cordage up from the boatswain's locker to reeve off a new brace.

“Mr. Biddlecomb!” Asquith's voice came up clear and strong from the quarterdeck. “Now would be a fine time to haul our wind!”

Jack looked out toward the bank, and every bit of him, down to his kidneys and liver, wanted to turn the ship at that instant and run for safety. But it was not time.

“Five minutes more, sir!” he shouted down, and that was greeted by silence at first, and then Asquith called up, saying, “Five minutes and not a second more, Mr. Biddlecomb!”

It's not some favor you're doing me
, Jack thought peevishly, but that thought was cut short by another shot, the ball making its noisy passage between fore- and mainmast but striking nothing. Jack's father had described often enough the weird buzzing scream made by passing roundshot, and as a young boy Jack had always tried to imagine what it must sound like. He had often enough, in the younger days, pictured himself standing as brave and unmoving as his father on a quarterdeck with the iron flying freely. But those fantasies had fled long ago, and here was the reality at last, no longer welcome or looked for.

Come along, come along
 … Jack thought, wishing another half a knot from the
Abigail
so that she might reach that spot where he calculated that she must turn, and he could go back to the deck, the blessed deck.

Another shot, so close Jack could feel the wind of its passing. The temporary backstay set up on the main topgallant parted, giving the mast a hard jerk like it was trying to fling him off, and the long rope fell down, down, doing a weird spiraling dance as it collapsed. Had it been the weather backstay, then the topgallant mast, the sail, the yard, and Jack Biddlecomb would have followed the cordage in its plunge to the deck, but as it was the leeward stay, the mast remained thankfully intact.

Jack thought he might puke. He had never feared the height or the motion, but he had never been at risk of being shot out of the rigging, either.
The dogs are aiming for the masts!
he realized. But of course they would. They would have no interest in sinking a valuable merchantman. Bring down a topmast, bring her to, sail her to France, that was the plan.

Oh, Dear Lord!
Jack thought. So distracted was he by the near miss he forgot to keep a weather eye on the sandbank.

“Mr. Biddlecomb!” Asquith's voice rose again from below.

“Now sir, now!” Jack shouted. “Haul your wind, sir, close hauled!” He reached out and grabbed an intact backstay with an unseemly degree of relief at the prospect of gaining the deck. He swung over and wrapped his legs around the thick line even as
Abigail
began to swing onto her new heading, close hauled, as nearly into the wind as she could sail. Legs wrapped around the backstay, feet controlling the rate of descent, Jack slid down the long, tarred line until he reached the level of the rail, then swung down to the quarterdeck, ten feet from the helm.

The Frenchman fired again and a spray of wood exploded from the mainmast fifteen feet above the deck. “Ever been under fire, Mr. Biddlecomb?” Asquith asked in the same tone he might use if he were asking after Jack's family.

“No, sir. You?”

“Privateering, in the war. By God, this is making me quite nostalgic.”

“Yes, sir.” Jack braced for the inevitable comment about his father, the amount of gunfire the Great Man had endured, but Asquith seemed too wrapped up in his own memories to think along those lines, so Jack walked down the canted deck to the leeward rail. He looked forward, down the length of the ship and the tumble of white water running down her side. Spread out ahead he could see the chop where the seas were breaking over the sandbank, hardly distinguishable from the whitecaps curling around them, and disappearing from sight around the turn of the bow. Jack wondered if he had misjudged. Perhaps they would not weather the bank at all.

He pushed off the rail and hurried forward, past the main hatch, the foremast, the windlass, and up into the bow. The spritsail, with its larboard yardarm cocked high, blocked the crucial view of the breakers so he ran out along the bowsprit, grabbed the forestay, and held fast as the ship rose, plunged, and twisted underfoot.

Damn it all
 … The breakers stretched across the horizon to a point all but directly in the ship's path. If they could not sail higher on the wind, or if they made too much leeway, they would run their bow right into the sand, and there they would sit, waiting for the Frenchman to tow them off.

He climbed inboard, hurried aft, calling as he went, “Hands to the braces, let's brace her up, sharp as can be!” The men, who by now had guessed at Jack's plan, moved fast, taking up the lee braces, ready to haul with a will, while the cook and steward lent a hand slacking away on the weather side.

Jack gained the quarterdeck and took the weather main brace off the heavy cleat, shouting, “Haul of all!” All along the lee side the hands sweated the braces, hauling, grunting, pulling inch by painful inch as they hauled the yards farther around. Jack shook a few feet of slack into the main brace and then grabbed the wheel from Maguire.

“Bear a hand to leeward, there,” he ordered, then slowly, slowly, turned the helm to weather and watched as the bow swung more and more up into the wind. “Well the braces, belay!” Jack called. Foot by foot the ship turned, and then the edges of the square sails began to shudder and curl, a warning that he was too close to the wind.