The French Admiral

after the barge had steadied and no longer threatened to go arse over tit. 'And don't ask me where we are, because I ain't got a clue. Best I can say is out in a boat on the water.'

'Wish we'd liquored our boots before this journey,' Governour said with a sudden grin. 'Do much of this?'

'First time for everything,' Alan confessed.

'Scared me so badly I would not have trusted mine arse with a fart,' Governour said. 'I'm not a strong swimmer.'

'You're doing better than I. I can't swim a stroke. Most sailors can't,' Alan replied. Unconsciously his hand crept into his shirt to feel the small leather sack hung around his neck. On Antigua, Lucy Beauman had given it to him after one of her more trusted older slaves, Old Isaac, had made it for him. It was reputedly a sure protection against drowning or other dangers of the sea. He had been leery of it, since it smelled somewhat of chicken guts and other cast-off organics when first presented to him, but for her sake he had tied it about his neck and had forgotten its presence until then. Whatever it contained, it was desiccated and only rustled now and again when jostled. Not that he was exactly eager to inspect the sack's contents. Some things were best left unknown.

'Coe, can we get the hands back on the oars for a while? Just to keep from being blown out to sea?' Alan shouted over the howl of the wind.

'Aye, sir. Mebbe four at a time'd be best.'

'Do so, then. I don't like making sternway this fast.'

'Four men ta the oars, smartly now. You four.'

There was no sign that the storm was going to cease, though. It blew as hard as a hurricane, and the rain sheeted out of the sky as though it had been flung by a hateful god. Even when the lightning zigzagged on either hand, they could not see far enough to find anything familiar. The barge might as well have been driving up the Loire River in France for all they knew.

'Wossat?' one hand at the bows called, waving off into the night in the general direction to larboard.

'Where?'

'Two points offen th' larboard bow!'

As Alan peered hard into the driving rain, he saw a shadow appear, a shadow that looked taller and wider and thicker as it approached.

'Coe, out oars now!' Alan screamed when he determined what the strange object was. 'Row for your lives!'

It was a ship, perhaps blown free of her anchors upstream in the anchorage and running wild for the sea under the press of wind. And it was headed directly for them. If they did not get out of the way, their barge would be trampled under her forefoot and snapped in two.

'Row, damn you, row! Ahoy, the ship! Ahoy, there! Have you no eyes, you stupid bastard? Anyone have dry priming? Fire into her!'

No one did; all the firearms in the boat were soaked. All they could do was scream and thrash with the oars. The barge was under the jib-boom and bowsprit. An oar was shattered on the hull of the strange ship. The stern bumped into her hull just below the larboard forechains, and a white face appeared over the ship's rail, staring down in surprise. Then they were seized by her creaming bow and quarter wave.

The barge thumped her stern heavily on the ship once more before being swirled out of reach, shoved aside like a piece of floating trash, and the ship proceeded on. In a flash of lightning, Alan could see that she was not running free, but was under way, with a foretops'l rigged loose, the yard resting on the cap of the foretop, and the sail billowing and straining against a crow-footed 'quick saver' to keep the sail from blowing out too far to the horizontal.

'Ahoy, you duck-fucker!' Coe shouted from leather lungs.

'Ahoy!' came the answering cry through a speaking trumpet.

'Give us a line!' Alan called, but before anyone aboard that ship could respond, she was almost out of reach. There was one more flash of lightning that illuminated her stern. And there, in proud gilt letters below the transom windows of her captain's cabin, was the name 'Desperate.'

'You planned it this way, you sonofabitch!' Alan roared, quite beside himself. His ship was getting away, and he was not in her! They had been given permission to try, and the storm would be a great opportunity to blow past the guarding frigates if they were even able to remain on station in such a gale. There would be a spate of water over the shoals, and the tide had peaked and was now ebbing out into the bay. The night was black as a boot, and it would take an especially vigilant Frog lookout to even see her until she was close aboard. And she had most of her artillery to crush anyone who crossed her hawse as she flew on by, invulnerable to any answering broadside. 'Forrester, you bastard, you're aboard, I know it! Why not us? Why?'

'Easy, Mister Lewrie, sir. Le's just 'ope she makes it.'

Yes, he thought. They'll think I'm raving if I keep on. But how calm do I have to be now? We're left in the quag up to our hats, and we'll end up in chains for the rest of the war.

'Ease your stroke, Coe,' Alan ordered after taking a few deep breaths. 'No sense in killing ourselves now.'

'Er, Lewrie,' Governour Chiswick said, raising one foot out of the water sloshing in the boat, 'it's getting a bit deep.'

'Christ!' Alan exclaimed. 'We must have been stove in. Coe, we're leaking aft, I think.'

''Ere, sir,' Coe said after kneeling down to feel the side timbers. 'They's a plank busted.'

'Take a soldier's blanket and staunch it. You soldiers, start bailing again.'

And thank you very much, Captain Treghues, for kicking me up the arse in passing, Alan thought miserably. Christ, how much worse can this get, I wonder?

The wind finally began to drop in intensity, and the rain turned into a steady downpour. The lightning and thunder drifted off into the east toward the Atlantic, and the night became generally black once more. Alan peered into the face of his watch and could barely discern by the last lightning to the east that it was after four in the morning. The water was no longer set in rollers, but was beginning to flatten out under the press of rain, and the rudder no longer kicked like a mule.

'Coe, wake 'em up,' Alan ordered, reaching over to shake his senior man awake. 'I think we can begin to row in this.'

Coe woke up, sniffed the wind, and dug a hand over the side to take a taste of the water. He spat it out quickly. 'Real salty, Mister Lewrie.'

'We must be far down the river, almost in the bay,' Alan said. 'More reason to get going quick as we can.'

There was a ration box of ship's biscuits in the barge, along with the barrico of water, and they all had a small breakfast and a sip of the water to wake them and give them a little strength for their labors. The soldiers had small flasks of corn whiskey to pass around generously, and that woke the hands up right smartly.

They rowed up to their drogue and pulled it in. The salvaged oars were most welcome, since three had been shattered by their collision with Desperate as she had blown past them. As they got a way on once more, the rain began to ease off to an irritating drizzle. The river was still in spate, though, from all the rain that had been dumped into it from the swollen streams inland, plus the tidal outflow, and they made painfully slow progress. There was just the first hint of grayness to the night when Alan next looked at his watch; half past five in the morning and dawn was expected at quarter past six.

'We shall have to hurry, or we shall be spotted by the French batteries on the right, where Mister Railsford said the marines were,' he urged, though what the point of their efforts was, he did not know. Yorktown would be abandoned by then, and the Rebels and French would be ready to probe the silent redoubts and ramparts. The troops ferried to the Gloucester side during the night would probably be breaking out now.

They would miss the boat; the army would charge into the few Rebels and French on the north side and would be well away by the time Alan and his crippled barge could make it, and they would land in a hornet's nest of aroused soldiery who had been robbed of final victory. Their reception did not bear thinking about. Neither did the fact that he was in a boat slowly sinking from under him, possessing only what he had on his back or in his pockets. He had left his valuables in his sea-chest once he had gotten back aboard ship and had not come equipped for a long stay. Alan had thought there would be time to get back to Desperate to be part of her attempt to break out. Soon, someone unworthy would be rifling his possessions, looting his gold and thinking