Sea of Grey

Not one hundred yards astern in Proteus % wake, the sloop went up in a boil of flame-shot smoke, smashing in every transom window and taff-rail lanthorn glass pane. A huge, feathery pillar of water arose, bearing up planks and oars, bits of mast, seared ropes, and gobbets of flesh… to patter down amid a foetid shower of seawater!

The people on the quarterdeck got back to their feet, mumbling and working their jaws, tugging at their ears from the assault on eardrums and sinuses. A few even bled from their ears and noses.

Astern, there were now two roiled circles of white spume, with only a few identifiable bits of wreckage to be seen

'Don't s'pose there's much point in looking for survivors, is there, sir,' Lieutenant Langlie said; it wasn't a question. He looked stunned.

'No… I doubt there is, Mister Langlie,' Lewrie replied, his own ears ringing like Bow Bells. With an outward calm he did not feel, he cranked the breech of the Ferguson open, bit off a cartridge, then shoved it ball-first into the breech and cranked it shut. He primed the pan and closed the frizzen. 'Now, let's come about and see to the other two boats, sir. Place us up to windward of them, and we'll use the larboard battery. No closer than two cables to 'em.'

'Quite, sir,' Langlie enthusiastically agreed.

'Carpenter to sound the well, and inspect the transom from the bilges up. Water carries the power of explosives better than air, I'm told,' Lewrie prosed on, slinging the rifle, and turning to Andrews to take his double-barreled pistols to load and prime them, too. 'We may have a plank stove in below the waterline from… that.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

'Anyone hurt?' Lewrie called out. 'Yer bowels still work?'

His still shaken crew began to chuckle; even if more than a few were shifting their slop-trousers and clawing at their fundaments, as if their bowels had worked just hellish-fine, thankee.

'Ah, still living, Mister Winwood?' Lewrie chirped.

'Aye, sir. Never seen the like, sir,' Winwood marvelled, about as much as Winwood could sound surprised by anything. 'Why, they must be mad as a hatter to immolate themselves like that! Drunk as swine!'

'Anything t'kill oppressors, more-like, Mister Winwood,' Lewrie speculated, still working his jaw, popping his mouth open like a fish to fully restore his hearing. 'They tried t'sink us. Or die tryin'.'

'They came out here deliberately then, do you think, sir?'

'Runnin' arms and powder along the coast,' Lewrie said, shrugging in perplexity. 'The roads must be horrid, with all those mountain ranges ashore, as bad as Italy. We were told that this L'Ouverture was out to invade Spanish Santo Domingo. We might have put a spoke in his wheel for a few weeks by intercepting these… madmen. Perhaps the other two boats'll tell us more. Do we take a prisoner or two?'

Wouldn't put it past 'em, Lewrie imagined, though; sent 'em out to sink a blockading ship? Lured us in? Was it deliberate? Jesus!

Proteus wore off the wind again to due West, well clear of her previous encounter, reduced sail, and ghosted down on the two crippled boats. In the short space of time since they had maimed them, one of them, the smaller sloop, had sunk, and only her bow bobbed upright in the sea, with a few wailing survivors clinging to it. The lugger was low in the water, and people were bailing with hats, pails, and their hands, others trying to rig a jury-mast from a pair of oars atop her planked-over forepeak, attempting to spread the leach and foot of her after lugsail to the wind by extending the oars out like cat's whiskers, with the tack of the sail shinnied up the foremast. As the frigate neared the lugger, wailing could be heard, and her crew, augmented by survivors from the sunken sloop, took up arms and stood trembling but game, some levelling their muskets at an impossible range.

'Pass the word for Surgeon's Mate Mister Durant,' Lewrie said. 'He speaks good French. Those slaves once got their work orders in it.'

The larboard 12-pounders were run out and ready, the carronades and 6-pounders manned, as were the swivels. Devereux's Marines stood along the larboard gangway with their muskets, and a boarding party in Wyman's charge had cutlasses slung in baldrics over their shoulders, more muskets and pistols in their hands, and boarding pikes ready to deter any more suicidal charges.

'A point more alee, Mister Langlie,' Lewrie ordered. And their frigate veered even closer to the lugger.

'Less than a cable, sir,' Winwood warned.

'Mister Sevier… a shot from the bow-chaser! No shot across the bows… hull her if you can!'

The 6-pounder on the forecastle yapped, and its ball hit short but in line with the lugger, to carom off the sea and bound across her deck at head-height, scattering the close-packed Blacks, and killing a couple of the taller or slower ones.

'Ah, Mister Durant,' Lewrie said, turning to the Surgeon's Mate. 'Since my French is so execrable, perhaps you might try to make them see reason, and surrender. No one'll be harmed, tell 'em. I'll even let them go, once we've inspected their boat, and had a chance to interrogate them. They don't stand a mouse's chance, else. I'll set 'em ashore, unarmed, and I'll sink the boat, but they'll live. We're not grands blancs … we're British.'

'I will try, Capitaine,' Durant vowed, stepping to the bulkwark. 'Bonjour, mes amis!' he began, and slanged a long palaver in Frog.

'Reddition?' came a defiant shout at the end of that. 'Jamais!'

'Zey do not believe us, Capitaine. He say, we are all blancs, French or British, it is no matter. Zey die before zey surrender.'

'Do they have powder aboard, like the others, sir…' Langlie cautioned.

'Mister Wyman? You may open upon the lugger,' Lewrie ordered. 'One broadside only… from the main battery guns. Damn the fools!'

'As you bear… on the up-roll… fire!'

Proteus roared and shook, flinging defiance for defiance, and a new chorus of screams erupted as the lugger was shredded at such short range. As the smoke of the broadside drifted down alee and past that lugger, she was revealed as a total wreck. Her mast was gone, and the jury-rig up forrud was wiped away, along with the men who had tended it. The lugger's starboard side was shot through like a colander and she heeled with her rails awash to the sea. Of her crew…

There might have been fifty or sixty men crammed aboard, before that broadside. Now her decks were piled with offal, with the dying and dead wallowing in their own life's blood, in a coiling mass of entrails and body parts! There were some in the water, splashing about and trying to swim or grab some flotsam on which to gasp and keen.

'Now we'll close-her,' Lewrie snapped, 'before she goes under. Mister Wyman, a boarding party to search her for papers, anything. Mister Langlie, lower a boat for Mister Wyman's party.'

'Aye, sir,' Langlie parroted, though not sounding happy.

'Fetch to, sir. Stand down the larboard battery, but keep the swivels and six-pounders manned. About a cable's distance, hmmm?'

Lieutenant Wyman's boat had barely reached the stricken lugger, he'd barely had time for a very quick snatch- and-grab from her decks, before she slipped under in a welter of bubbles and foam, and sank, forcing those few members of the boarding party who'd gained her rivened deck to scramble for their lives. As she rolled over and sank stern-first, Lewrie could see that the lugger had been big enough for a coach-top and some accommodations below her main deck, with a canvas spread over a cargo hatch between the stumps of her masts. Lieutenant Wyman waved, then smiled, showing that everyone in his boat was uninjured and returning safely. Wyman steered well clear of the Blacks swimming near his boat, though, with some of his hands levelling their muskets or pistols at the bobbing heads.

'Ho, here's one, sir!' Able Seaman Inman cried from the entry-port, pointing down over the starboard side, which was now alee of the winds. Lewrie peered over to see the muscular, mahoghany-skinned man in the water below the boarding-battens and man-ropes, treading water and bleeding from the mouth, and a scalp wound upon