Bouverie swallowed hard. “Clod!” He strode to the opposite side. “Mr Lomax! Where away?”
Avery licked his lips, tasting the brine. A single shot. It could only mean one thing, a signal to heave-to. He stared at the horizon until his eyes throbbed. Every morning since leaving Malta it had been like this. As soon as Unrivalled was sighted Bouverie would make a signal, as if he was always trying to catch them out. Without looking he knew that the first signal of the day was already bent on, ready to soar up to the yard, when most ships would have been content to remain in close company. He shivered, from more than the rising wind, recalling Adam Bolitho’s impatience at the meeting when doubts had been voiced about the brigantine. Only some ridiculous obsession, something to command attention, to impress. Not any more.
He heard the first lieutenant say, “Unrivalled must be off her station, sir!”
“I know that, God damn it! We are to alter course when…”
He turned towards Avery. “Well, what do you think? Or do ‘passengers’ have no opinions?”
Avery felt very calm.
“I believe Unrivalled has found something useful, sir.”
“Oh, very diplomatic, sir! And what of Captain Adam Bolitho? Does he truly believe he is above obeying orders, and beyond the discipline that binds the rest of us?”
An inner voice warned him, take care. Another insisted, you have nothing more to lose.
He said, “I was with Sir Richard Bolitho at Algiers, sir. Things have changed since then. If we attempt to enter without permission…” He glanced round, seeing the first touch of gold spill over the horizon. The moment he had always loved. But that, too, was past. “This ship will be destroyed. Your ship, sir, will be blasted apart before you can come about. I have seen the anchorage, and the citadel, and some of the fanatics who control those guns.”
“I have faced worse!”
Avery relaxed. He had always been able to recognise bluster.
“Then you will know the consequences, sir.”
Bouverie stared at him. “God damn you for your impertinence!” Then, surprisingly, he grinned. “But bravely said, for all that!” He looked at the clearing sky as a voice yelled, “Sail on the starboard quarter!” The merest pause. “Two sail, sir!”
Bouverie nodded slowly. “A prize, then.”
The first lieutenant climbed down from the shrouds with a telescope.
“She’s a brigantine, sir.”
Avery looked at his hands. They were quite still, and warm in the first frail sunlight. They felt as if they were shaking.
Bouverie was saying, “No, not that signal, Mr Adams.” He took a glass from the signals midshipman and steadied it with care. He was studying Unrivalled’s topsails, like pink shells in the clear light, although the sun had not yet revealed itself.
“When she is on station again, make Captain repair on board.”
Avery turned away. How many times would Adam Bolitho read that signal with different eyes from other men? When his uncle had called him to his flagship to tell him of the death of Zenoria Keen. We Happy Few… It had been their secret.
Bouverie said, “Breakfast, I think. Then we shall hear what our gallant Captain Bolitho has to say.” The good humour seemed even more volatile than his usual mood. “I hope it pleases me!”
But, out of habit or memory, Avery was watching the signals party bending on the flags.
Bouverie sat squarely in a broad leather chair, hands gripping the arms as if to restrain himself.
He said, “Now, Captain Bolitho. In your own words, of course. Share your discoveries with me, eh?” He glanced towards his table where Avery was sitting with a leather satchel and some charts, while beside him the ship’s clerk was poised with his quill at the ready. “For both our sakes, I think some record of this conversation should be kept. Sir Graham Bethune will expect it.”
Adam Bolitho walked to the stern windows and stared at his own ship, her sheer lines and shining hull distorted in the weathered glass. Hard to believe that it had all happened so quickly, and yet it was exactly as he had imagined when he had ordered Unrivalled’s change of course. They had all thought him mad. They were probably right.
He could recall the calm, professional eye of old Stranace, the ship’s gunner, when he had explained what he required. Stranace was more used to the deadly quiet of the magazine and powder store, but like most of his breed he had never forgotten his trade, or how to lay and train an eighteen-pounder.
It must have taken the brigantine’s people completely by surprise. Day in, day out, following the two frigates, knowing almost to the minute when they would reduce sail for the night, then to see one of the quarry suddenly looming out of the last, lingering darkness with every sail set, on a converging tack with no room for manoeuvre and no time to run…
One shot, the first Unrivalled had fired in anger.
Adam had watched the splash, the succession of jagged fins of spray as the ball had skipped across the water no more than a boat’s length from her bows. He had touched the gunner’s shoulder; it had felt like iron itself. No words were needed. It was a perfect shot, and the brigantine, now seen to be named Rosario, had hove-to, her sails in confusion in the wind which had changed everything.
He heard the quill scratching across the paper and realised he had been describing it. He looked again and saw the brigantine’s outline, more like a blurred shadow than reality. Unrivalled had put down two boats, and they had done well, he thought, with the lively sea, and their movements hampered by their weapons. Jago had been with him. Amused, but deadly when one of Rosario ’s crew had raised a pistol as the boarders had flung their grapnels and swarmed aboard. He had not even seen Jago move, his blade rising and falling with the speed of light. Then the scream, and the severed hand like a glove on the deck.
Lieutenant Wynter had been in the second boat, and with his own party had put the crew under guard. After Jago’s example there was no further resistance.
Rosario was Portuguese but had been chartered repeatedly, at one time by the English squadron at Gibraltar. The master, a dirty, unshaven little man, seemed to speak no English, although he produced some charts to prove his lawful occasions. The charts, like Rosario, were almost too filthy to examine. As Cristie later remarked, “By guess an’ by God, that’s how these heathen navigate!”
A sense of failure then; he had sensed it in the restlessness of the boarding party, the apparent confidence of Rosario ’s master.
Until Wynter, perhaps the least experienced officer in the ship, had commented on the brigantine’s armament, six swivel-guns mounted aft and near the hold. And the smell…
Adam had ordered the hatches to be broached. Only one cargo had a stench like that, and they found the chains and the manacles where slaves could be packed out of sight, to exist, if they could, in terror and their own filth until they were shipped to a suitable market. There had been blood on one set of irons, and Adam guessed that the wretched prisoner had been pitched overboard.
He had seen Wynter’s eyes widening with shocked surprise when he had said coldly, “A slaver then. Worthless to me. Fetch a halter and run this bugger up to the main-yard, as an example to others!”
Wynter’s expression had changed to admiring comprehension when the vessel’s master had thrown himself at Adam’s feet, pleading and sobbing in rough but completely adequate English.
“I thought he might remember!”
Confident and less gentle, they had continued their search. There was a safe, and the gibbering master was even able to produce a key.
Adam turned now as Avery opened the satchel.
“ Rosario had no papers as such. That alone makes her a prize.” He smiled faintly. “For the moment.”
Avery laid out the contents of the satchel. A bill of lading, Spanish. A delivery of oil to some garrison, Portuguese. A log book, crudely marked with dates and what could be estimated positions. Some shadowed Unrivalled.
Bouverie said abruptly, “Many such men are paid to spy and inform their masters of ship movements, theirs and ours.” He gave the characteristic nod. “But I’ll give you this, Bolitho. You did not imagine it!”
Adam felt the sudden surge of excitement. The first time since… He said, “And there is a letter. I do not speak French, but I recognise it well enough.”
