The French Admiral

What are your men doing to those beams?'

'Drilling holes,' Alan said. 'We're ready, except for the keel pieces to add weight and stability. See the boreholes through the existing keels? We'll bolt these on.'

'With what?'

'Pine dowels, slightly oversized and hammered into the boreholes. Like the bung in a beer barrel. Should hold for long enough to get us over to the eastern shore and round the capes,' Alan said.

'Metal would be better, would it not?' Burgess asked.

'We found some flat angle-iron forged with holes in it for various uses, and some bolts, but nothing long enough to go all the way from side to side. They'd have to be nine or ten inches long.'

'Thought I heard a disturbance upstairs last night. Did the fair Miss Nancy treat you well?' Burgess leered.

'No, she threw me out, along with a shower of glassware and stuff,' Alan admitted ruefully. ''Twas a bad idea after the ambush.'

'Ah, well.'

'Shit,' Feather spat as the dowel he had shaped splintered as he tried to drive it into the first hole in a beam before lifting it up to fit against the keel member. 'This 'ere pine's too light, sir. Even do we get it tamped down wi'out breakin', I wouldn't trust 'em in a seaway.'

'What about a musket barrel?' Burgess suggested, kneeling down to look at one of the beams. 'There's hunting guns and those French muskets to use. With a vise and a file, we could cut down some lengths to fit into the holes. And then, if some of those bolts are large enough, we could force-thread them down into the barrel bores. That would hold your angle-iron plates on to spread the load if they flex.'

'An' iffen the bolts and plates fall off, sir, the musket barrel'd still be snug enough inside ta 'old.' Feather smiled, revealing what few teeth he still possessed.

'Well, this isn't going to work.' Alan frowned, angry at the delay. 'We have to give 'em a try.'

Using a piece of string, Feather measured the extreme width of a beam, knotted it carefully, and headed for the barn and carpenter shop to measure off lengths of musket barrel to file off. Queener left off the work with an auger and went with him. He was back in moments with one of the French muskets, trying it in the boreholes already made. With a piece of chalk, he scribed circles inside the marks already made on the shaped beams to show the size of the bore necessary, and dug into the wooden tool box to find an auger with a smaller bit, and to try various bolts until he found some that could be wound down the barrels.

The musket barrels worked well. They were driven down into the holes with mallets until they were flush, and the angle-iron plates were fitted on. Then the bolts were cranked down into the barrels, cutting their own threads in much the same fashion that a weapon was rifled by a worm-borer. After four hours of filing and sawing, drilling, and turning, the barges were ready to be put back on the water. They were now as seaworthy as they could be made without starting from scratch in their construction. Borrowing a few soldiers for muscle power, they shoved them back off the X-shaped bow cradles onto the sand and mud, then hauled them into the still waters of the inlet.

'Hurrah, it floats!' Alan exulted as his crew cheered.

Coe and a small crew scrambled into the nearest barge and got to work to pole her out into deeper water where she would truly be floating, instead of resting with her lowermost quick-work on the mud.

'Try sailing her while you're out there,' Alan ordered. 'There's a high tide, and enough water in the cove to see how she handles.'

'Aye, sir.'

'Thank you for your timely suggestion, Burgess,' Alan said to the soldier. 'For better or worse, now we can do no more. Best start fetching food and whatever down from the barns so we may be ready to sail as soon as it's dark.'

'I have never heard a better thing in my life,' Burgess said, and trotted back toward the house. Alan turned back to the water and sat on a stump to watch how Coe was doing. The boat had a slight way on her from their last bit of poling as they raised the pair of lug sails. They were cut short but full so as not to overset the boat with too much pressure too high above the deck and her center of gravity. The barge paid off the wind for a while, then began to make her way forward. She heeled over more than Alan liked to see by the light wind in the inlet, but she was sailing. A few more hands to weather should counteract her tendency to heel, he thought, and heavier cargo of provisions and passengers would help.

The boat made a lot of leeway, but as soon as Coe and his men put the leeboards down and they bit into the water, she began to hold her own, no longer sloughing downwind at such an alarming rate.

'Damme if they don't work,' he told Feather, who was standing by him. 'I shall put you and your man in my report when we rejoin the fleet.'

'Queener, sir. Name's Nat Queener,' the old man stuck in, taking a pause in his tobacco chewing to nod and speak for himself.

'Well, it was handily done and damned clever work,' Alan said.

'Thankee, sir, thankee right kindly.' Queener bobbed, tugging at his forelock, or what was left of it, and Alan was struck once more by how little he had known about most of the men—not Coe or this Queener or Cony, wherever the devil he was at this moment, even after all those months on Desperate. Queener was too old and frail to play pulley-hauley at fores'ls or halyards, or take a strain on a tackle, too spavined by a hard life at sea to go aloft any longer, but he was a good member of the carpenter's crew and knew two lifetimes' worth about boats. The Navy was full of such oldsters, and Alan vowed that he would not overlook their talents or their contributions again if given a chance.

Coe tacked the barge about and came back up the inlet at a goodly clip, the once ungainly barge now behaving like a well-found cutter. He bore up to the prevailing winds to try her close-hauled, but there was not enough width to the inlet, or wind, to judge her behavior. The best that could be said was that the boat was tractable. She would not win an impromptu race from anchorage to stores dock, but she could be sailed safely and would perform like a tired dray horse to get them off the Guinea Neck and out to sea, which was all they asked of her.

Coe finally brought her up to the shallows at the mouth of the creek, handed the sails and raised the leeboards, and let her drive onto the mud and sand in the shallows gently with the last of her forward motion. He and his crew waded ashore wearing smiles like landed conquerors.

'Them sodjers is acomin', Mister Lewrie,' Feather said, directing his attention inland to a file of riflemen bearing the first boxes and small kegs of water, cornmeal travel bread, boiled and jerked meat, and the dried powder and ball cartouches.

'Feather, see to loading the boats and then make sure the hands have their dinner,' Alan instructed. 'We plan to leave on the falling tide around half past four or so while there's still enough water in the inlet to float 'em out easy.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Governour Chiswick was there with the advance party, his face set in what Alan recognized by enforced association as bleak anger. He waved for Alan to join him and stalked a way up the brambled bank of the creek for privacy.

'We have trouble,' Chiswick whispered. 'That damned Hayley brat is missing. Little bastard took off sometime in the night. So you know where he headed.'

'Jesus,' Alan said, 'how did he get past your guards? I thought you had the neck watched so a mouse couldn't escape?'

'Keep your voice down, damn you,' Governour warned. 'We don't need to panic your sailors, or my people. And yes, he shouldn't have been able to get through, but he stole a rifleman's tunic and the sentries didn't remark on him strolling right past them. We'd better get out of here, now, before he can bring troops down here from Gloucester Point.'

'We could pole out into the marshes by Big Island, but we'd be naked as dammit until the sun went down. There's not cover enough out there for a snake. Night is the best time.'

'Now is the best time, Alan,' Governour insisted. 'Unless you want to be killed or captured. After yesterday's ambush, I doubt if anyone is going to offer quarter to us, not if they belong to the same unit as those men we shot down.'