Havoc`s Sword

commander of the Jester sloop, and had caught a grim 'packet' for it, no matter how successful his ruse de guerre had been. He had strictly cautioned the Mids and signalmen to haul the Tricolours down and get their own ensigns up as soon as the ports opened, but…

Halfway aloft, Lewrie thought; close enough for king's work!

He looked forward to Lt. Catterall, who stood in the middle of the gun-deck with his sword drawn and held high over his shoulder; who was looking most anxiously back at him.

'Fire!' Lewrie shouted as his true colours reached the tops.

'On the down-roll… fire!' Lt. Catterall bawled.

Three 24-pounder carronades, double-shotted with solid balls and what amounted to a small keg of plum-sized grape-shot, and thirteen 12-pounders, each loaded with two balls, went off almost as one, creating a sudden, murderous avalanche of metal, and a choking cloud of sulfurous, reeking smoke propelled windward, punctured by the flight of the shot, that only slowly drifted back over their own decks then alee, as the hands sprang to sponge and swab out, to charge and then reload the barrels, to prime the locks and begin to grunt and slave to run out for another broadside…

But another broadside would not be necessary. The schooner was a converted trading vessel with thin civilian scantlings, framed with the parsimony of a skinflint Yankee Doodle, with light timbers put farther apart than naval practice. She was a shambles!

Both masts were sheared off just above her ravaged bulwarks, and she looked like a pheasant that had been gut-shot by a lucky, close-in blast from a fowler's shotgun. Her starboard side bore so many ragged shot-holes, some right on her waterline, already gurgling and frothing with dirty spume and foetid venting air from belowdecks, that there was no hope of saving her. They'd punched her almost to a full stop, and she was already listing to starboard as if to hide her hurts!

'Hold fire, Mister Catterall!' Lewrie shouted forrud. 'No need for another. Drop it, lads… dead'un! Wait 'til we corner the next rat! Mister Langlie, helm up, and hands to the braces. Lay us close- aboard yon three-master just off our starboard bow.'

'Aye, sir!' the First Officer barked, looking greedy as he began to issue quick instructions.

'Mister Catterall, secure the larboard battery. Next victim, we will engage to starboard!'

The runt-sized full-rigged ship quavered as if shocked, before her topmen began to scramble aloft to free more sail, as hands sprang to the braces to wear her a little off the wind to run due West, winds on her starboard quarter, which obviously was her best point of sail.

'Puts me in mind of a Dutchman, sir,' Mr. Winwood commented to his captain, his face screwed up in concentration after a long study with his telescope. 'A tad shorter than your av'rage three-master, a lot beamier, and her bows bluffer…'

'Shallower draughted, too, I'd expect,' Lewrie added. 'Bound to be slow as treacle, even did she have a full gale up her skirts.'

'Won't get far, I doubt, sir,' Winwood said with a even rarer sniff of satisfaction, nigh-even pleasure; even broke a faint smile on his phyz! The usually stolid Sailing Master rubbed his hands together with a sandy rasping of a practiced tarpaulin man, inured to ropes and exposure half his entire life.

Small she might be, shabby she might be, but the merchant ship was deeply laden with something sure to be valuable. If she was Dutch, she was very far from home, and a very rare sight in the Caribbean with most of the so-called Batavian Republic's colonies occupied by British forces. Holland was occupied by the French, but it was a cooperative occupation, so Lewrie had heard; the 'ideals' of the French Revolution had found fertile soil in a fair number of Dutch hearts, who had aided the earlier American Revolution so eagerly.

Allied with the Frogs, sailing from a French port, the merchant ship Was surely up to something nefarious in aid of some joint scheme. She might be gunn'l deep with arms and munitions for Saint Domingue… she was sailing deeper into the Caribbean, not for home. She'd be what was termed 'Good Prize.'

No wonder Mr. Winwood was rubbing his hands together so gladly-he was already assessing his share of her capture and sale; it was too bad, Lewrie thought, that he was counting chickens that'd never hatch.

'Steer direct up her stern, Mister Langlie,' Lewrie ordered. 'I wish to get up to pistol-shot before we bear up and rake her.'

'You'll not try to, uhm…?' Mr. Winwood gasped, scandalised by the loss of guineas.

'Might be a frigate I saw off Basse-Terre, Mister Winwood,' he told the Sailing Master. 'No time to fetch-to, and sway out boats for a boarding-party. Well, one boat, perhaps… so we may set her afire and be certain she's a total loss. Sorry. My savings could use infusions of prize-money, too, but…'

He swung back to look at the three-master, now pinned like some struggling butterfly on Proteus'?, jib-boom and bowsprit as the frigate bore a touch alee of her, as if to intersect her course and swing about due West to present the previously used larboard battery. A flag from the Batavian Republic now flew above her tall, galleried stern windows.

It was too far for Lewrie to shout advice to the Dutch captain, though he did glare at the stout figure by her taff-rail and pushed his thoughts at him. Strike, fool… 'fore I'm forced t'kill you!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Now where is he going?' Capitaine de Vaisseau Guillaume Choundas dyspeptically said, peering out over the taff-rail of Le Bouclier as she drummed and thundered to the last of the 'orderly' chaos of a ship come to anchor into the wind. Topmen were aloft, fisting the last sails by the brails to the yards after the tops'ls had bellied flat aback when she had steered Nor'east to brake to a stop. Men of the after-guard on the quarterdeck swarmed around him to strain against the mizen tops'l and t'gallant halliards and jears to lower the yards to the cross-tree and fighting-top. More men stood by the after capstan, with the kedge anchor's messenger line already fleeted about the capstan drum, waiting for the stern kedge to be rowed out with Le Boucliers stoutest cutter and dropped. The frigate was faintly shuddering as she made a slight sternway, falling back from her best bower, paying out scope on cable run out through the larboard hawse-hole, beginning to snub to the resistance of a well-grounded anchor.

'He is having the time of his life, m'sieur,' Capitaine Desplan answered with an indulgent chuckle. 'Your pardons, but he has so many stern responsibilities, for such a spirited young man. And he serves a most demanding master, n'est-ce pas?'

Choundas painfully turned to glare at Desplan, wondering if his comments were any sort of criticism; but no, Desplan still smiled, as if he had no reason to cringe from Choundas's wrath.

'She is shabby and badly maintained, m'sieur, but that schooner handles as lively as a Thoroughbred stallion,' Desplan went on. 'Once we would have relished such sport… until stern duty, and command of ships and squadrons, forced us to growl at the world. To be that free and young, again, ah, what a brief joy. To dance with your very first little ship, m'sieur? Remember?'

'Umph,' Choundas finally allowed. 'I do, indeed. La Colombe, she was named, a despatch-boat… she, too, was an American schooner. Aptly named, she was. She flew like a 'dove.' Umph. Well…'

For a brief moment, Choundas had almost seemed human, in sweet reverie of his early days as a newly appointed Lieutenant, not even a Lieutenant de Vaisseau yet. But that moment swiftly passed, and he turned and clump-swish-ticked back to the taff-rail, glowering as little L'Impudente came about and began to gather speed to run into the port, at long last. Perhaps, Choundas thought, Jules Hainaut had suddenly remembered that the noonday meal that Captain Desplan