tunnel. Even if a man had succeeded in severing one of them, he would have been cut to bloody tatters as the cable whiplashed.
There was only one means, one sure means, and she quailed at the thought of what would happen if it got out of control, and if Black Joke was not very swiftly alongside to render assistance with her steam-driven pumps and hoses. She had once already rejected the idea of using fire, but now with help so close astern, with the last chance rapidly fading, she was ready to accept any risk.
She reached across and pulled off the wooden bunk one of her grey woollen blankets and wadded it into a bundle, then she stood up and lifted the oil lamp from its gimbals in the deck above her. Her fingers were clumsy with haste as she unscrewed the cap of the oil reservoir in the base of the lamp.
She soaked the blanket, and then looked round for anything else that was inflammable, her journals? No, not them, but she pulled her medical manuals out of the chest and ripped the pages out of them, crumpling them so they would burn more readily, and she made a sack of the oil-soaked blanket and wadded the paper into it.
She stuffed it down the hatch and it fell across the straining rudder lines, and entangled itself in the iron pulleys.
The mattress on the bunk was filled with coir, the dry coconut fibre would burn fiercely; she dragged it off the bunk and pushed it into the hatch. Then the wooden slats off the bunk followed it, then the navigational books from the narrow bookshelf behind the door. She looked about her swiftly, but there was nothing else in the cabin that would burn.
The first Swan Vesta that she dropped burning down the hatchway flickered once and then went out. She tore the end sheet out of her journal and twisted it into a spill, when it was blazing strongly she let it fall into the dark square opening, and as it floated down it illuminated the gloomy recesses of Huron's bilges, and the rough planking of her underbelly.
The burning spill landed on the oil-soaked blanket, and pale blue flames fluttered over it as the evaporating gases flashed off, then a crumpled ball of paper caught and little orange flames peaked up and danced merrily over the blanket and the linen covering of the mattress.
A rush of heat came up through the hatchway, scorching Robyn's cheeks, and the sound of the flames was higher than that of the rushing seas along the outside of the hull.
Using all her strength, Robyn swung the hatch cover over and let it drop back on to its seating with a thump that alarmed her anew, but immediately the sound of the flames was cut off.
Panting with the effort and a savage excitement, Robyn backed away and leaned against the bulkhead to rest. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that the blood in her ears nearly deafened her, and suddenly she was afraid.
What if Black joke had abandoned the unequal contest, and there was nobody to rescue the eight hundred miserable souls chained below Huron's decks before the flames reached them?
That first wild assault of the wind, as it came boiling down off the mountains, had settled to a steady blast, not so furious, but constant and reliable.
There will be no flukes or holes in this gale of wind, Mungo thought with satisfaction, pausing in his pacing to look up at the small scudding wind-torn shreds of cloud that seemed to scrape the tops of his masts, and then turning to survey an indigo Atlantic that stretched to every corner of the horizon, dark with the wind rush and dappled with the prancing white horses that curled from every wave crest.
His leisurely survey ended over Huron's stern rail. The land was already out of sight, so swiftly had Huron run the great flat-topped mountain below the horizon, and Black joke was hull down. Only her topsails showed, not a trace of furnace smoke.
The absence of smoke puzzled Mungo a little and he frowned, considering it, and finding no plausible answer, he shrugged and resumed his pacing. Black Joke would be out of sight, even from Huron's towering masthead, before sunset, and Mungo was planning the evolutions he would make during the night to confuse thoroughly any pursuit, before settling on to his final course to run through the doldrums and cross the equator. Deck, masthead. ' A faint hail reached him, breaking his line of thought, and he stopped again, threwback his head and with both hands on his hips stared up at the masthead as it dipped and swung across the sky.
Tippoo answered the hail with a bull bellow, and the look-out's voice was strained, his anxiety evident even against the wind and at that remove. Smoke! 'Where away? ' Tippoo's voice was angry, the reply should have given both distance and bearing from Huron already every man on Huron's deck was twisting his head to sweep the horizon. Dead astern. 'That will be the gunboat, Mungo thought comfortably. 'She's got her boiler going again, and much good may it do her. ' He dropped his fists from his hips and took one more pace before the look-out's voice rang out again. Smoke dead astern, we are trailing smoke! ' Mungo stopped dead in his tracks, his foot still an inch from the deck. He felt the icy spray of fear chill his guts.
Fire! ' bellowed Tippoo.
It was the one most dreaded word to men who lived their lives in the tinder hulls of wooden ships, whose seams were caulked with tar and pitch, and whose sails and rigging would burn like straw. Mungo completed that suspended pace, spinning on the ball of his foot as it struck the deck, and the next pace carried him to Huron's rail. He leaned far out, peering back over the stern , and the smoke was a pale wisp, thin as sea fret, lying low against the dark blue sea, drifting away behind them, and dissipating even as he watched it.
Dry oak planks burn with a fine clean flame and little smoke, Mungo knew that, he knew also that the first thing he must do was starve the flames of air, heave the ship to, to reduce the wind of her passage while the extent of the flames could be explored and the ship's pumpsHe turned again, his mouth opening to begin shouting his commands. The quartermaster and his mate stood directly ahead of him, both of them balancing easily before the massive mahogany and brass wheel. Larger than the driving-wheel on a steam locomotive, it required the strength of two men to hold Huron's head in this wind and on this point of sailing, for the huge spread of her canvas was opposed by the massive oak and copper rudder under her stern .
Down in the steering tunnel, the flames were being fed by the strong breeze that the canvas scoops on Huron's foredeck were directing down into her own slave-decks in an attempt to keep them sweet.
The draught forced its way through the companionways and ladderways, through the ports and cracks in Huron's bulkheads, and this steady breeze at last found its way into the long narrow tunnel that housed her steering-gear.
The bright rustling flames were almost smokeless, but intensely hot. They frizzled the loose fibres of hemp off the thick hairy rudder lines, and then swiftly blackened the golden brown cords, began to eat through them so that here a strand parted with a snap that was lost in the rising crackle of burning timbers and the strand unravelled,
