loosening his sword. 'Bonden, where are my pistols?'
There was Killick at his side, holding an old pair of shoes and a coat over his arm. 'You can't go in your best silver-buckled shoes, your honour, nor in your number one coat,' he kept saying in an angry whine. 'It won't take you a minute to change.'
'Nonsense,' said Jack. 'Everyone else is going in his best, so why should I be left out?'
The Venus' soldiers were firing from her stern, but it was too late. The Boadicea ranged alongside, Jack said
'Fire,' and the Boadicea's grape swept the Venus's deck at head-height and in the smoke graphics flew over the side; topmen ran out and lashed the Frenchman's yardarms tight; their bows ground together, and Jack roared 'Africaines away.' A moment later their sterns swung in, and the two ships lay side by side.
For a full minute he stood at the head of his boarders, while the Marines behind him plied their muskets as though they were on parade and the small arms men in the tops kept up a fire on the guns. A full minute of vast din and shouting forward, the crackle of pistols and the bellow of a carronade that the Africaines had turned into the waist of the Venus. Then he cried, 'Boadiceas, come along with me,' vaulted on to the torn hammocks, leapt sword in hand across to the shrouds of the mainmast, slashed the boarding netting, slashed at a head below him, and so down to the Venus's quarterdeck, followed by a cheering mass of seamen.
Before him stood a line of soldiers--the seamen were in the waist, facing the Africaines' furious attack and in the second before the wave of Boadiceas broke over them a little terrified corporal lunged at Jack with his bayonet. Bonden caught the muzzle, wrenched the musket free, flogged three men flat with the butt and broke the line. On the deck behind the soldiers lay several bodies--officers--and in the momentary pause Jack thought he saw a French captain's uniform. Then the aftermost group on the larboard gangway, led by a young officer, turned and came for the Boadiceas with such a rush that they were swept back to the wheel, and the next few minutes were a furious confusion of violence, cut and parry, duck the pistol, kick and thrust and hack.
But the Venuses were no match for the boarders; they were oppressed and hemmed in by their own numbers; they were worn out by their long night's battle and the toll that had followed it; their spirits were crushed by the sight of the Otter and the Staunch coming up fast, and by the certainty of eventual defeat. A body of Croatian soldiers, who had no real concern with the quarrel, leapt down the now unguarded main hatchway; others followed them, seeking safety below. The remaining Frenchmen on the gangway made a last desperate charge, and a short, broadshouldered seaman with a knife grappled Jack round the waist. Jack dashed his hilt into the seaman's face, trampled him down, broke free; and there in the clear space by the fife-rail stood an officer, offering his sword and pointing aft, where a boy was hauling down the colours.
Through the enormous cheering that spread from the Vinus's quarterdeck to the Boadicea, Jack roared out, 'Vast fighting, there. Forward there, Africaines, 'vast fighting. She's struck.'
Men fell apart, stared impersonally at one another, and moved slowly away. The extreme tension died with extraordinary speed and within moments a new relationship had established itself, a kind of primitive social contract- men could no longer hit one another.
Jack accepted the officer's sword with a civil bend of his head and passed it to Bonden. The man he had trampled upon got to his feet without looking at him and stumbled away to his shipmates, who were standing where the battle had left them or who had gathered in little groups by the lee-rail, silent, as though the act of surrender had drained their spirit away, leaving them quite numb.
Still the Boadicea was cheering, and the exultant din was echoed by the Bombay, a quarter of a mile away: she had reholsted her ensign, and her crew was skipping and waving and roaring all along her side and in her tops.
'Commodore Hamelin?' said Jack to the officer, and the officer pointed to one of the bodies close by the wheel.
'I was sorry about Hamelin, however,' said Jack, as he and Stephen sat over a late dinner. 'Though when you come to think of it, a man could hardly ask better.'
'For my part,' said Stephen, 'I could ask for very much better. A grapeshot in the heart is not my idea of bliss, and I should do my utmost to avoid it. Yet your grief does not affect your appetite, I find: that is the eighth chop you have eaten. Nor, which strikes me with peculiar force, do I find that this battle has produced the melancholy reaction I have so often noticed in you.'
'That is true,' said Jack. 'An action clears your mind amazingly, for the moment; but afterwards the black dog comes down. The butcher's bill, the funerals, the men's widows to write to, the mess to be cleared up, the knotting and splicing, the pumping--you feel done up, hipped, as flat as ditch water; though there is more to it than that. But this time it is different. To be sure, we have come off scot-free or very near, but that is not the point. The point is that this dust-up is only the beginning of the real action. Africaine will be ready for sea on Tuesday: with the spars preparing at St Paul's and what we have captured today, Venus and Bombay will not take much longer, working double tides--their hulls would already pass a survey, you know. That is four capital frigates, plus the Windham, three good sloops, and all our armed transports: while on their side they have only Astree and Manche ready for sea. Bellone and Minerve must certainly be heaved down; and Iphigenia and Nereide arc little use to man or beast even when they are repaired. They have lost their commodore; and the captain of the Astree at least is a booby. And where is their spirit? No: I tell you what, Stephen, by the end of the week Keating and I will carry out our plan--that will be the real action, what I call the real action; and I don't care how glum I grow after it.'
'Well, my dear,' said Stephen, 'politically Mauritius was ready to fall like a ripe plum, or mango, even before the Ile de la Passe; and now that you have repaired the disaster and more, I believe you may install Governor Farquhar at Port-Louis within a week of landing your troops.'
CHAPTER TEN
'You have been very much in my mind these days, sweetheart, even more than usual,' wrote Jack, continuing his serial letter to Sophie, a letter that he been building up to its present bulk ever since the Leopard had sailed from St Paul's for the Cape, his last contact with the flag, 'and I should certainly have wrote, had we not been so uncommon busy. Since Monday morning we have been on the run, with all hands turning to, to make the squadron ready for sea; and such a sawing of carpenters, a thumping of caulkers, and a busyness of bosuns you never heard in your life. Poor Trollope, an active officer but of a bilious turn, was overcome with a sunstroke, while a black blacksmith, that had wrought eighteen hours on a stretch, was carried off in a dead swoon, quite grey. But now it is done. Now we are at sea, sinking the land as the sun comes up'--he looked, smiling, out of the Boadicea's stern window, and there in her wake, two cable-lengths away, he saw the Vinus, her sails pearly in the growing light; beyond her he could make out the Africaine, and far to leeward the last three transports. As the pendantship, the Boadicea was sailing in the middle of the squadron with the Bombay and the Windham ahead of her, the Staunch, the Otter and the Grappler far up to windward, and under her lee the transports, comfortably full of soldiers- 'and a very respectable body we are. It is true some of our masts would make the dock-yard mateys stare, but they will serve: they may not be very pretty, but they will serve. We took many of the spars out of
