Captain's Surrender Page 14

  It had never been such a struggle to avoid looking worried, and he was almost inclined to kick the ship’s cat, when the lookout spotted lanterns, and they eased gently to a halt in the shelter of Akpatok Island, where the unwounded Macedonian had dropped anchor for the night.

  He dined with Andrews in a strange state of fear and lust, barely able to give sensible answers to Josh’s questions. “Do you think we should wait for the Asp? Do you think it was an ambush—I thought so myself and decided not to try a night pursuit… Are you feeling quite all right?”

  “When I thought you had gone on ahead without me,” Peter said, quite forgetting the servants who stood behind their chairs, “my heart failed within me. I thought we were ruined for sure.”

  “Then we’ll wait for the Asp,” said Josh, giving him a look of warning and a kick beneath the table that gave him the only injury of the battle.

  Noon saw the Asp rounding the point, with Joslyn alternately shamefaced and indignant—for missing the skirmish and for them leaving him behind. During the next week they proceeded in convoy and entered the great bay itself without a sight of their prey.

  It gnawed at Josh to think he had held the enemy in his sight and let him get away. In a somewhat different way, Peter’s dazed vulnerability gnawed at him too. The old dreams that had plagued him on the Nimrod, before all this started, returned, all the more explicit for experience. It was, therefore, with a madness of relief that just as they were passing the Sleeper Islands he heard the lookout exclaim, “Strange sail, sir, two I think, sou’ sou’-west.”

  “Now we’ll show ’em, eh, sir?” said his first, Tom Dench, with an eager look, and Josh, who was desperate to give his mind something to do, other than to go on playing over last week’s solitary dinner, laughed.

  “Damn right. You may clear for action.”

  With the Indomitable at her side, the Virginie fled no more. The two French ships set sail towards him, and the vast majesty of the three-decker was like a storm cloud bearing down.

  His intent was to lay alongside the Virginie and board if he could. Fight his way through her, take her and leave the Indomitable for Peter and Joslyn. Peeling off from the convoy, he headed upwind to gain the weather gage, so that he could run down at the Virginie and force her into her protector, using her as a shield against the three-decker’s vast weight of armaments.

  But as he did so, fully concentrating on the two vessels ahead, there came a booming series of retorts from astern. Looking back, he saw three more French vessels—a ship and two brigs—slip from their concealed anchorages behind the Sleeper Islands and make for the Asp. They were the Aimable, little less than the Asp’s tonnage and better gunned, along with the Gloire and the Trounin, of fourteen guns and, he estimated, a hundred men apiece.

  He saw the Asp and the Aimable lying side by side, their broadsides hammering at one another, while the Gloire raked the British ship from the stern and the Trounin hemmed her in to leeward with a slow, measured fire at her masts, saw Peter break from pursuit of the Indomitable to go back to the Asp’s aid, and laughed. Laughed long and hard because it was his first action as a captain, and he already knew he would not come out of it alive. Whether it was an impromptu trap or a long-laid one, they had run their necks into it good and proper, and he, farthest in, had no chance at all at fighting his way out to bring the news back to the commodore.

  But Peter might. Peter or Joslyn—they were closer to the bay’s entrance. Peter, in his fast little sloop might seem unimportant to the French commander, in the same way that the Trounin and the Gloire were insignificant alone. If he broke for it, he might yet get away.

  But not with the Indomitable on his tail, and certainly not with the swift, well-sailed Virginie. Josh laughed again, sliding down the backstay onto the deck like a boy skylarking, and everything seemed clear to him, in a moment of battle vision that took him back to the tradition of his Fenian ancestors. The purpose of his life—the reason he had been born, already condemned to flame, and then allowed to love.

  “It seems that in going after the Gloire they’ve left the glory to us,” he said to young Hal, who was looking at him with the careful awe reserved for the mad. “Set all possible sail to intercept the man-of-war. They’re going to be talking about this in France into the next century.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Afterwards the crew are to get in the boats and flee to shore.”

  “Sir!” Lieutenant Dench drew himself up in protest. He was a long-term sailor fated to serve under young idiots and to try and teach them their duties. “We can’t win, but there’s no shame in surrender.”

  “Get the lads to the boats, please, Lieutenant. And then you may set me a fire in the hold. I’ll man the helm myself.”

  “Sir,” said Dench, looking as though his dog had died. “Please, sir, you don’t have to…”

  “My mind is quite made up.” Josh smiled. “Give my regards to Commodore Dalby when you see him again, and my will is in the right-hand drawer of my writing slope in my lodgings. Good luck to you.”

  Peter had come alongside the Gloire. Caught in the crossfire between the Seahorse and the Asp the little brig was being scientifically taken apart. Blood poured from her scuppers and painted her black sides crimson, staining the sea beneath her. He had shot away the rudder, and when the main mast fell, leaving her without the ability to get under way or to steer, he left her wallowing, bore up and began to do the same to the Trounin.

  In the pause, when he cast off the boarding cables that held Gloire close so that Seahorse’s guns could do maximum damage, he could hear the deeper roar of the Asp’s guns, the answering bellow of the Aimable. Aimable’s broadsides were heavier but less rapid and less well aimed. Asp, with her mizzenmast trailing like an anchor in the sea and her own pouring spouts of blood, still seemed to his eye to be holding her own.

  Now he pushed away from the Gloire, and barely able to find a wind, he used the Asp’s side to pull the Seahorse around and creep up upon the Trounin like a snail.

  But the Trounin was fresh—from her position on the Asp’s stern she had suffered only a little bruising from the stern chasers, and the nine great guns of her starboard side began a lively battering of Peter’s poor ship—already more than half a hulk, tattered sails strewn over her cannons and the corpses of her men.

  “Sir, they’re saying it’s hopeless,” Lieutenant Howe cried, loud enough to be heard from heads to stern gallery. “Even if we take the Aimable, how will we ever stand against the three-decker? They’re saying it’s being held in reserve to crush us when we’ve used our last strength here.”

  “Are they indeed?” He wished that for once he could act like a common tar and punch the stupid man in the mouth. “Well, you may tell them that it’s possible the Indomitable may take us, but it’s certain that I shall shoot the first man who leaves his post myself.”

  A roar and a crash, and for a moment he had no idea what had happened, until Howe leaned forward and plucked the oak splinter—a foot and a half long—out of Peter’s side. A brief wave of dizziness went over Peter as, with a ponderous, grating slide, the Asp seemed to shake herself and glide gently forwards. When the Aimable tried to follow, her one standing mast bent under the strain of sail, and the backstays parted. The great, six-ton timber came crashing down upon her men, and upon the Seahorse’s head, driving it under the waves. Seas began pouring aboard, and as the Trounin’s gunners kept up a relentless fire, the Seahorse’s men abandoned their cannon to shift the dead weight before it sank the ship.

  Thus tangled, Peter saw the Asp make sail, getting away. He wished Joslyn well, hoped he would escape with news of this unexpected fleet, this French occupation of what was, by treaty, British land. Only how would the Asp escape the Indomitable, which had been hanging back all this time, waiting to strike only if it proved necessary to do so?

  Peter’s next few moments were taken up with the capstan, with rigging ropes around the Aimable’s mast and slowly winching it
off the deck—the piper piping all the while, the men huffing shanties as they pushed at the long levers, and shot screaming aboard from both French ships.

  There was a strange light in the smoke, like the rising of a sun, and at the same time, a knocking on the sides of the ship as British seamen began to come aboard up the main chains. “Sir! Sir!”

  They were the Macedonian’s men, some of them still with the jaunty straw hats and the ship’s name embroidered in glinting gold on the ribbon.

  “Just you watch, sir. Just you watch.”

  “The water is above the cable tier, sir,” said Howe quietly, catching something of their awe. “And still gaining. If we don’t send men to the pumps now, we will sink within the next quarter of an hour.”

  And sending men to the pumps would mean abandoning the guns. Would mean…

  But he couldn’t fail. He had never failed; it wasn’t in his nature. Peter Kenyon did not…

  The wind, blowing the Trounin’s smoke back over it, briefly cleared a patch of brilliant sea, and he saw it all with minute clarity—the Macedonian in flames, driving into the Indomitable’s bowsprit. Her sails were sheets of fire, and her decks blacker than pitch. The Indomitable’s rested, eager crew were trying to fend her off with oars and poles but the wind drove her back each time. If he squinted his streaming eyes, Peter could imagine the figure at the helm, holding it steady, not letting them brush off this kiss of death. And then flame leaped the gap, the Indomitable was on fire too.

  “Oh, my God, please, no!” he said, and something cracked deep inside the Macedonian’s hull. Her masts flew into the air like the stems of rockets and a white sphere of fire too intense to watch pushed out of her, bursting her into tumbling, jagged shards, blowing a hole in the Indomitable large enough to row a captain’s barge inside.

  The Indomitable tilted, men flinging themselves off her into the sea, tilted again, filled with water and sank. There was nothing left of the Macedonian at all but strewed wreckage. Peter pressed his hand to his side, where the blood from his wound was making his shirt feel uncomfortably cold, and staggered, fighting for breath, for sense, for the right words.

  “Strike our colors,” he said at last in a small, dead voice. Yes, dead—Josh was dead, so what did it matter? “Tell them we surrender.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Well, Captain, you will give me your parole and be free as a guest in my house, or not, and spend the summer down in a jail cell. It’s your choice, I don’t very much mind either way.”

  The destruction of the Indomitable had caused feelings to run high in the French fleet. A three-decker, she had gone to the bottom with over a thousand men onboard, broaching to in seconds, and though all the ships on the bay had been pouring with the blood of the dead, Peter could understand the horror. To sink with no hope of quarter, it was not one of the accepted risks of the game.

  As a result of Josh’s ferocious action, Captain Duarte of the Aimable, expecting a counterstrike as soon as Commodore Dalby could send one from Bermuda, and with considerably fewer working vessels to meet it, did not feel confident of his ability to keep his prisoners alive during the long journey back to France, where they would be incarcerated until they could be exchanged for French prisoners of equal value. He had therefore sailed to Boston and pressed them upon his unsuspecting American allies.

  It was in the back of Peter’s mind that he should refuse to give his parole. He should be working, even now, to escape and return home. But something had broken in him, and he was not certain even what it was, let alone how to mend it.

  “Mr. Ward,” he said, when the silence had grown so deep they could both hear the cries of the dockers in the harbor, “I give you my word as an officer and a gentleman that I will not attempt to escape until I am released, either by fair exchange or by the end of the war.”

  “Can’t say fairer than that.” Ward, a portly, businesslike man, seemed to have come in for this duty by virtue of having a large house and a French wife who wrote revolutionary pamphlets. Peter suspected the duty was little to his liking, and the relief at not having to turn jailer was apparent on Ward’s round red apple of a face.

  “May I write to my friends in Bermuda?” Peter asked after another pause in which both men felt they should be saying something but neither knew what. “I…there is unhappy news to tell to many, which I would wish them to hear from a more sympathetic source than the naval gazette.”

  His calm began to fracture at that sentence; he could feel the cracks spreading out from it, as they spread from an incautious foot stepped on thin ice. He was fragile at present, but beneath him the cracks were widening above the plunge into icy depths. He tried to ease away from the flaw but could not. It spread and spread beneath him, and he tensed for the sudden final break.

  “Of course. Just go on into the drawing room. I’ll have Nancy bring you paper. I heard about the fight, of course. Don’t let my wife hear me say this”—he shook his head at the thought, his eyes shining—“but that must have been something! A French ship of the line and a little, tiny thirty-two? Hoo! I don’t mean to be unpatriotic, but that was a brave man.”

  “Yes.” Peter was startled into a small smile. “Yes, he was. He was my particular friend, but I had no idea he intended anything so rash or so…so glorious.”

  “Your friend, was he?” Ward rocked back on his heels. He wore no wig, so to Peter he seemed always informal, but the look in his pale eyes was unmistakably kind. “Well then, I won’t say that all this could have been avoided if Westminster had chosen to treat with us like civilized men. How they ever thought they could beat us into submission is probably as much a mystery to you as it is to me. So go and write your letters, son, and mourn your dead. You won’t be the only man doing the same.”

  Peter considered the justice of this rebuke as he worked his way through the letters of condolence. His handwriting grew progressively shakier as his grief insinuated itself under his guard.

  He had never failed in anything, and yet when had he ever done anything but what was expected of him? He had great sympathy for the colonists’ desire for self-rule, but when had he ever said so? When had he ever stood up for those things that really meant something to him? He had not. He had chosen always do to what everyone else thought was right, not what his own heart told him.

  And in doing so—he put the pen down, rubbed his stinging eyes, telling himself it was fatigue that made them burn—he had rejected the one thing in his life that had ever made him completely happy.

  He looked out at the sea, the ships in the harbor visible and yet so far away, and wondered if he could pray. He wanted to pray, “Oh, God, please, don’t let him have done this because of me, because I hurt him, because I put an end to something that he said must end.”

  Pulling a fresh sheet of paper towards himself, he took up the pen again and began to write. My dear Mr. Summersgill, I am happy to inform you that I am alive and well, though confined. I am under house arrest in the dwelling of a worthy gentleman of Boston named Mr. Ward. I am quite comfortable and lack nothing but my freedom.

  I am including here my wish that you should have power of attorney over my small estate in Bermuda and beg leave to ask you to see that my servants are paid and are not in distress in my absence.

  Peter wondered if he should express some conventional sentiments of attachment to Emily, but his disordered thoughts rose up against such base hypocrisy. When the world lay at his feet, it had seemed natural that every prize should be his, but now he wondered if she even liked him, and more, he wondered if—beyond a basic physical appreciation of her charms—he even liked her. How much did he know about her? Not half so much as he had known about Josh, and he had cared not half so much to know.

  Please pass on my love to my mother, and the reassurance that I am as well as it is possible to be, though I may not be able to send her the bird-of-paradise feathers she asked for in her last. My regards to Emily, and I remain, sir,

  Your most obliged ser
vant,

  Peter Alexander Kenyon.

  Folding up this last letter and sealing it left him finally with nothing to do. He bowed his head into his hands and closed his eyes. He wanted to pray, “Please, tell him I loved him,” but he was not sure God would allow him such a prayer. Suicide and sodomite, was Joshua Andrews even now in Hell? If he was, what then? What then became of all the things Peter had fought for? If God himself was an unjust tyrant, and the navy only an instrument of oppression, and good and love not possible in the world, not worth striving or fighting for, what then was the point of being Peter Kenyon? What then was the point of anything?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Josh was in Hell. He could see the blood pulse scalding through his closed eyelids, feel his skin tighten beneath the licking flames. When he breathed the air was molten lead; when he tried not to, he smothered and panic forced him to open his mouth and gasp the boiling metal once more.

  There had been flames and then cold, striking to his heart like a lance of ice. Then darkness. Now Hell tossed like a boat on rough water, and his voice shocked him as agony tore the outcry from him unwillingly.

  Voices spoke above his head—a man and a woman—but he could not understand the language. There was a pleasant, rhythmic noise, accompanied by the drip of water and a large rustling full of birdsong. Then small hands pulled him into a sitting position, spread something cool on his achingly tight, tender face, and he found himself cradled in a woman’s embrace. “Sleep,” she said, her voice full of reassurance. “You are safe.”

  He thought of his mother and of the gentleness of Irish skies, gray as an arch of pearl. He fell asleep again, yearning for a day of long, cool Irish rain.

  When next he woke, he was being lifted out of the boat onto the bank. There were male arms about him and his head lolled against a strong shoulder. With great labor he managed to haul up his eyelids for a moment, to find his face nestled into another man’s neck, cushioned by a long fall of ebony hair, glossy and soft.