bowsprit would parry with Unrivalled’s jib-boom.
“As you bear!”
He saw the Tetrarch’s canvas billow and fill, the bright Tricolour showing itself briefly beyond the braced driver. What did the flag mean to those men, he wondered? A symbol of something which might already have been defeated.
He thought of Frobisher, the cruel twist of fate which had brought her and her admiral to an unplanned rendezvous with two such ships as this one.
“Fire!” He watched the first shots tearing through the enemy’s forecourse and topsails, and felt although he could not hear the sickening crash of falling spars and rigging.
Like Anemone…
But she continued to turn, exposing her broadside and the bright flashes from her most forward guns. Some hit Unrivalled’s hull, others hurled waterspouts over the side, where gun crews were working like fiends to sponge out and reload.
He heard Lieutenant Luxmore of the Royal Marines yelling a name as one of his marksmen in the maintop fired his Brown Bess at the enemy without waiting for the order. At this range, it was like throwing a pike at a church steeple. The madness. No one could completely contain it.
There was a wild cheer as with tired dignity Tetrarch’s foretopmast appeared to stagger, held upright only by the rigging. Adam watched, unable to blink, as the mast seemed to gain control, tearing shrouds and running rigging alike as if the stout cordage were made of mere twine, the sails adding to the confusion and destruction until the entire mast with upper spars and reeling foretop spilled down into the smoke.
Only a part of his mind recorded the shouts from the gun captains, yelling like men possessed as each eighteen-pounder slammed against its open port. Ready to fire.
He moved the glass very slightly. There was a thin plume of smoke from the main deck of the other ship. Any fire was dangerous, in a fight or otherwise, but with holds full of gunpowder it was certain death. He glanced at Unrivalled’s upper yards and the whipping masthead pendant.
“Fall off a point!”
He saw Massie staring aft towards him, his sword already half raised.
There was no room for doubt, less for compassion. Because that captain could be me.
Tetrarch was still turning, her bows dragging at the mass of fallen spars and cordage. There were men too, struggling in the water, calling for help which would never come.
The next slow broadside would finish her. At almost full range, high-angled to the rise of the deck, it would smash through the remaining masts and canvas before Tetrarch’s main battery could be brought to bear.
“As you bear!” It was not even his own voice. He thought he saw the sun lance from Massie’s upraised blade, and somehow knew that the gun crews on the larboard side had left their stations to watch, their own danger forgotten.
He stiffened and steadied the glass again. This time, he knew it was his own hand shaking.
“Belay that order!”
There was too much smoke, but certain things stood out as clearly as if the enemy had been alongside.
The forward guns were unmanned, and there were figures running across the ship’s poop and half deck, apparently out of control. For an instant he imagined that the fire had taken control, and the ship’s company were making a frantic attempt to escape the imminent explosion.
And then he saw it. The French flag, the only patch of colour on that broken ship, was falling, seemingly quite slowly, until somebody hacked the halliards apart so that it drifted across the water like a dying sea bird.
Cristie grunted, “Sensible man, I’d say!”
Someone else said harshly, “A lucky one too, God damn his eyes!”
Tetrarch was falling downwind, her main course and mizzen already being brailed up, as if to confirm her submission.
Adam raised the glass again. There were small groups of men standing around the decks; others, dead or wounded it was impossible to tell, lay unheeded by the abandoned guns.
Midshipman Bellairs called, “White flag, sir!” Even he seemed unable to grasp what was happening, even less that he was a part of it.
“Heave-to, if you please!” Adam lowered the glass. He had seen someone on that other deck watching him. With despair, hate; he needed no reminding. “Take the quarter-boat, Mr Galbraith, and pick your boarding party. If you find it safe for us to come alongside, then signal me. At any sign of treachery, you know what to do.”
Their eyes held. Know what to do. Unrivalled would fire that final broadside. Any boarding party would be butchered.
Galbraith said steadily, “I shall be ready, sir!”
“A close thing.”
“We would have run them down, sir. The way you handled her…”
Adam touched his sleeve. “Not that, Leigh. I wanted them dead.”
Galbraith turned away, beckoning urgently to one of his petty officers. Even when the quarter-boat had been warped alongside and men were clambering down the frigate’s tumblehome, he was still reliving it.
The Captain had called him by his first name, like an old and trusted friend. But more, he remembered and was disturbed by the look of pain on the dark features. Anguish, as if he had almost betrayed something. Or someone.
“Bear off forrard! Give way all!”
They were dipping and rising over the choppy water, the boat’s stem already clattering through drifting flotsam and lolling corpses. Galbraith shaded his eyes to look up at the other vessel, huge now as they pulled past her bows, seeing the damage which Unrivalled’s guns had inflicted.
“Marines, take the poop! Creagh, put your party below!” He saw the boatswain’s mate nod, his weather-beaten face unusually grim. He was the man who had first recognised Tetrarch, and perhaps remembered the blackest moment in her life, when she had been surrendered to the enemy.
Sergeant Everett of the marines called, “Watch yer back, sir! I’d not trust a one of ’em!”
Galbraith thought of the captain again. It might have been us. Then he lurched to his feet, one hand on the shoulder of an oarsman in this overcrowded boat, his mind empty of everything but the grapnel thudding into the scarred timbers and the hull grating alongside.
“With me, lads!”
Within a second he might be dead, or floating out there with the other corpses.
And then he was up and over the first gunport lid, tearing his leg on something jagged but feeling nothing.
There were more people on deck than he had expected. For the most part ragged and outwardly undisciplined, the sweepings of a dozen countries, renegades and deserters, and yet… He stared around, taking in the discarded weapons, the sprawled shapes of men killed by Unrivalled’s slow and accurate fire. It would need more than greed or some obscure cause to weld this rabble into one company, to stand and fight a King’s ship which for all they knew might have been expecting support from other men-of-war.
He thought of the hand on his sleeve, and pointed with his hanger.
“Where is your captain?” He could not recall having drawn the blade as he had scrambled aboard.
A man stepped or was pushed towards him. An officer of sorts, his uniform coat without facings or rank.
He said huskily, “He is dying.” He spread his hands. “We pulled down the flag. It was necessary!”
One of Creagh’s seamen shouted, “Fire’s out!” He glared at the silent figures below the poop as if he would have cut each one down himself. “Lantern, sir! Knocked over!”
The ship was safe. Galbraith said, “Run up our flag.” He glanced at Unrivalled, moving so slowly, the guns like black teeth along her side. Then he looked up at the squad of Royal Marines with their bayoneted muskets. They had even managed to depress a swivel-gun towards the listless men who were now their prisoners. A blast of canister shot would deter any last-minute resistance.
Sergeant Everett called, “Captain’s up here, sir!”
Galbraith sheathed his hanger. It would be useless in any case if some hothead tried to retake the ship. The groups of men parted to allow him through, and he saw defeat in their strained features. The will to fight was gone, if it had ever been there. Apathy, despair, fear, the face of surrender and all it represented.
Tetrarch’s captain was not what he had expected. Propped between one of his officers and a pale-faced youth,
