Chapter 2

If he holds his course, sir,” Mr. Brainard said in the airless chart space, all ports and doors, all partitions doubly cloaked in covert canvas, “at a pace of about... uhm, say five knots with night-reefs aloft, he’d be here by now.” A pencilled X appeared on the ocean chart. After a moment’s thought, Brainard drew a guesstimate circle around the X. “We put about here, nor’west with the wind abeam, at ten past the hour. Held that course for one hour, tacked to east, sou’east at ten past nine of the clock. We should, if God is just, be somewhere off his starboard stern-quarters now. We should see him dead ahead, or slightly ...”

“Excuse me, sir, Mister Choate’s compliments, captain, and the hands are at Quarters,” Lewrie reported, leaning through the folds of canvas that served as a light trap for one betraying lantern that swayed and winked coin-silver bright over the chart table.

“Any sign of his lights, Mister Lewrie?” Ayscough asked.

“None, sir.”

“He’s sneaking along to trail us like a foot-pad in a London fog,” Twigg sniffed. “All the more sign he’s out there. An innocent ship would be burning her running lights.”

Evidently, Twigg and Ayscough had shared the same doubts Burgess had expressed earlier as to the identity of their dogged pursuer.

“As I was saying,” Brainard continued, marching a brass divider across the ocean chart slowly, punching a small pin-hole in the paper and turning to protractor and rule. “Do we come about to our original course in ... ahhumm ... five minutes, say, and we’ll be astern of him. He should be dead ahead, or fine on the larboard bow. I say five minutes, so we do not overrun his track in the dark.”

“Very well,” Ayscough grunted, satisfied as much as he was going to be until he could throw rocks at La Malouine and hear them go chunk. “Six after ten. Mister Lewrie, let me see your watch? Ah, with mine. My respects to the first officer, and he is to lay the ship back on our original course of sou’sou’east half south in ... four minutes.”

“Aye, sir,” Alan replied, stumbling out of the chart space to fumble his way to the passageway that led forward to the quarterdeck. He relayed his message to Choate.

“Now how the hell do I know when four minutes have passed?” Choate griped. Even the compass binnacle candle had been extinguished now, just in case. “Night black as a Moor’s arse . . .”

“I hadn’t thought about that, sir,” Alan had to admit. “Perhaps if you prised the glass cover off your watch, sir? Read it by feel?”

“Not my watch, Mister Lewrie. My wife gave it me.”

“My father gave me mine, sir,” Alan stated.

“Mister Lewrie,” Choate coaxed. “ Tis for the King!”

“Excuse me, sir, I’ll go aft into the passageway. Perhaps I’ll find a glim there, sir.”

Damned if he’d ruin a prize watch for anyone!

They were saved by Ayscough and the others coming on deck and issuing the instruction to come about. Ropes slithered and hissed through blocks. Sheaves squealed in those blocks loud as opera stars. Sails rustled and boomed, and the hull groaned loud as a storm as she adjusted to a new angle of heel, resettling her timbers in complaint.

There was nothing to see. And damned little light from the occluded stars to see by. The sliver of moon was not enough light to help pick out a man on deck were he dressed all in white.

“Keep close watch astern,” Ayscough warned. “Just in case.”

But there was nothing there, either. The only sign of motion on the sea were the taffrail lanterns in the cutter’s stern, far out ahead of them, and those almost on the rough edge of the horizon, so low were they to the water, and so far off by now after their triangular diversion. It took a sharp eye to make out that there were two and not one, foreshortened together as they were.

“Well, damme,” Ayscough muttered after half an hour had passed. “Where is that bastard? Not hide nor hair of him. Can’t even smell him. Anyone see phosphorescence from his wake ahead? No? Damme!”

“Has to be ahead of us,” Twigg insisted.

“Might have reefed for the night, same as us,” Choate opined. “Still, even at the four knots we were doing before we turned, we’d at least be abeam of them. He’d have slowed to keep his interval.”

“Or,” Ayscough wondered aloud, “Sicard would have dashed on ahead. The cutter’s lights are closer together than our taffrail posts by eighteen feet, and lower to the water. He might have cracked on more sail to catch up. Mister Choate, hands aloft. Lay out and let fall the tops’Is to the second reef. Loose t’gallants to the first reef.”

“Aye, sir. Bosun, no pipes. Topmen of the watch lay aloft!”

“There, sir!” Hogue almost screamed from the larboard gangway ladder. “Something went between us and the cutter’s lights! Two points off the larboard bows, sir!”

“Avast, Mister Choate. Quartermaster, put your helm down. One point closer to the wind. Make her head sou’sou’east,” Ayscough barked. “Hands to the braces.”

“Aye, sir,” the quartermaster replied, spinning his spokes on the huge double wheel slowly. “Helm down a point. Sou’sou’east. Wind large on the larboard quarter, sir.”

“Thus, quartermaster. Steady as she goes.”

“Aye aye, sir. Sou’sou’east, thus,” the man intoned.

Maddeningly, after that brief, tantalizing glimpse, there was still nothing to be seen. Another half an hour passed. They allowed the hands at Quarters to stand easy, or lay down to nap on the bare decks. They rotated the lookouts to allow fresher eyes to peer into the almost Stygian blackness, searching for their foe.

Another half-hour passed.

“There!” Percival rasped in a harsh whisper. “Hear it?”

Very faint, almost like a fantasy, there came a chiming.

“Six  bells  o’   the evening  watch,”  Ayscough  agreed. “Damme, for us to be able to hear that, he has to be up to windward of us. And not too far to windward, at that!”

Hogue with his incredibly sharp eyes was back from larboard, tugging on the captain’s sleeve, and pointing to their left, over the larboard side. The captain stood behind Hogue, letting his arm be a pointer. Ayscough sucked in a quick breath, then let it out in a sigh of contentment. “Ayyye!” he whispered.

There was something out there. Something a little more solid than the spectral shadows that had played at the edge of their vision for the last hour, the kind that are seen but not seen, apprehended and then lost to sight the harder one peered for them. This one did not go away.

“Helm down another half a point, quartermaster. Handsomely does it,” Ayscough ordered.

“Aye, sir,” the senior quartermaster agreed, grunting as he put his weight to the spokes, and the steering tackle ropes on the wheel barrel groaned softly. Three, four spokes of larboard helm, and Telesto leaned a bit as the wind came larger on her left beam.

“Yes!” Alan muttered. “Sir, a light!”

It wasn’t much. A tiny, insubstantial afterthought of a light. Not so much the light itself, but the outer glow it threw, like the glow of a seaport under the horizon reflected on clouds.

“One . . . two . . .” Ayscough counted. “Yes, one at his binnacle, one forrud, that’d be by his fo’c’sle belfry. Damme, look at that!”

A smoky brown square appeared, barely discernible from black, behind the second glimmer, an almost butcher-paper brown.

“Captain’s or wardroom quarter-gallery, sir,” Alan supplied. ‘They’ve some canvas screens or curtains over the windows, but there’s a lantern behind.”

“Aye.” Ayscough was almost panting with excitement. “If he ...” Ayscough held up his hands, calculating angles and distance. Left hand by the brownish hint of illumination, right hand and index finger aimed at the foremost glow like a gun. “Two points off the larboard bow, and I make the range to be two cables. We’ve got him! Mister Choate, wake the hands at Quarters. I intend to rake him in passing with the starboard battery. Boot him right up the arse. Then wear ship and give him the larboard battery from close aboard. If we take him by surprise he’ll fall right down to us. To hell with the wind gauge! He’ll not be expecting us to fight from leeward.”

Alan dashed down below to the lower gun deck as midshipmen and ship’s corporals passed their messages. He found Hoolahan, his Irish gunner, resting on a jute-bound bale of cloth bolts, silk bolts that were worth more money than his entire county back home. Owen, the senior quarter-gunner, was napping with his back leant against a carline post that supported the upper deck, his feet propped up on a crate of tableware worth a duke’s ransom.

“Stand by, men. We’ve spotted him. Starboard battery first, right up his stern, then larboard guns at twenty paces.”

They could hear gunports being drawn open overhead, and the heavy, dull rumble of gun-trucks as the eighteen-pounders were drawn foot by foot to emerge from the opened ports. They unpegged and opened their own. Cool night air, damp and salty, entered, making them all tremble with chill. With anticipation, and a little fear, too.

“Ah, yes,” Alan said, sticking his head out a port. Once one spotted La Malouine, it was hard to believe that she could ever have been hidden by the night. There was the wash and greenish phosphor glow of her wake. The faintest reflection of that phosphorescence on her lower hull at the waterline, and those betraying glimmers of belfry and binnacle lanterns. “Can you mark her, Owen?”

“Uhmm ... might need a set of younger eyes, sir. Here, Hoolahan, you could poach a bunny at midnight.”

“Why, so oi kin, sor!” Hoolahan grinned, ever the cheerful one. “Jus’ don’t let ‘im be loik t’ last lot. Barely got the deck clean.”

“Just look, don’t prose on, boy,” Owen groaned.

“Aye,  sor. Mebbe cable, cable ‘un t’half now, Mister Owen.”

Telesto leaned to starboard more as she went up to windward. Gunners removed tompions, spun the elevating screws to compensate for the heel of the ship.

Greased slides whispered as the short, brutal thirty-two-pounder carronades were run out. Iron wheels creaked as the lay of the barrels was corrected. “Oi kin smell ‘er now, sor. Gahh, bloody Frog stink!” “As you bear!” a voice shouted. “Fire!”

It crossed Lewrie’s mind that this ship had better indeed be La Malouine, and not some parsimonious merchantman that begrudged even a ha’porth of whale-oil for lanterns.

The starboard twelve-pounder chase gun barked as the forecastle ranged even with the strange ship’s stern, sending a hellish finger of pink-and-coral flame into the night, fuzee-flashing just how near they were to their target, and how large she bulked. There were not a hundred yards between them! Then the larger, deeper-throated eighteen-pounders spoke, loud as thunderclaps from a lightning bolt’s near miss. Shot after shot as each barrel came even with the foe, more pink-and-coral flames, more red-and-amber sparks of half-spent gunpowder. Clouds of foul-smelling smoke wafted downwind, wreathing about the other ship.

“Ready . . . cock your locks ... as you bear . .. fire!” Lewrie intoned. The forward-most carronade belched with a fiery eructation, whipping backward on its greased slide quick enough to shriek wood on wood, and set the grease smoking. Most satisfying deep bangs of guns going off, followed immediately by the crash of heavy iron hitting timbers, the moaning wail of oak and teak as scantlings were shattered, and the thonk of balls ranging down the entire undefended length of the hull inside their target. Shattering tableware and vases, ripping precious cargo of wallpaper, silks, teas apart in aromatic clouds. Ripping men apart as they hung close-packed as sausages in a butcher’s window in their hammocks. Killing men with the air of their passage without making a mark upon them. Breaking at last into savage iron shards among a sleet-storm of broken beams and frames, which in those enclosed spaces below decks would whirl and maim as ruthlessly as irate, razor-tipped sparrows.

“Now, ready the larboard battery!” Lewrie yelled as the last of their carronades had recoiled inward. Ports slammed open, making space for the wide-mouthed barrels to be run out. “Hull the bastards when I give the word, Owen.”

“Aye, sir,” Owen replied around the stem of his pipe. “Now, gun-captains, lowest elevation, an’ wait for the down-roll! Wads atop your ball, rammer-men! Don’t dribble the damn things out now!”

The ship creaked ominously as she slewed about. Cargo made dry rustling sounds as crates and bundles shifted slightly against restraining ropes and baffle-boards. The helm was put over so quickly Telesto churned the sea to a green-white froth of phosphor and foam, being over-steered so that she would slow down and not run her jib-boom and sprit into the stern of the enemy. She went wide off the wind as her deck-hands strained to loose sail and haul the yards around to gain speed, no longer working slack with the sea but beginning to oppose its will with her own desire for a faster pace.

Then she was brought back up to the wind a couple of points, to steady on a parallel course to the stranger, to steady her own decks for a surer gun-platform.

“Half a cable!” Lewrie estimated, leaning out one of the ports alongside the cold iron barrel of a carronade. The larboard chase-gun banged, and he ducked back inboard quickly. “Wait for it!”

Eighteen-pounders roared out their challenge, lighting the sea amber and bright red between the two ships, giving him short snatches in which to see the other ship. It was La Malouine! He’d stared at her long enough for seven months to recognize every tar stain!

“Cock your locks ... stand by ... on the down-roll ... together ... Fire!”

All four larboard carronades took light as one. There was some spectacular noise that had everyone’s ears ringing, a brilliant burst of light worthy of a lightning strike, fading from bright yellow to a dull burgundy, and a wave of burnt powder rushed back in the ports as bitter as rotten eggs. With the wind fine on their larboard quarter once again, most of it blew away past the bows, but enough was blown back onto the lower gun deck to be-fog them and set them all wheezing.

Damme to hell, but I love artillery, Alan exulted silently! The power, the noise, even the stink of ‘em! And what they can do.

“Yes, by God!” he crowed, leaning out the port once more. In the after-flash of the last eighteen-pounder, he could see large ragged rents in La Malouine’s lower hull, one right on the waterline that sucked and blew spumes of foam as the waves rushed past the hole, the other three higher up in her chain-wale. They’d nailed her ‘twixt wind and water, shattering her main-mast’s starboard chains, that complicated array of dead-eyes, shroud-tensioners, heavy horizontal timber through which the stays for the lower mast threaded and terminated.

“Reload!”

La Malouine was not as asleep as they had thought. Her side lit up in flashes as well, her twelve-pounder cannon returning fire, but not as organized as the ship-killing broadside they’d just delivered. Here a forward gun, there a piece in her wardroom aft, then two guns from her waist together.

“Musta kept ‘alf their hands at Quarters t’ fire that quickly, sir,” Owen guessed. Usually it took ten minutes for even a Royal Navy vessel to clear decks, load and run out their batteries. “Mighta been plannin’ on doin’ the same for us this night.”

“There’s a biter bit, boi God!” Hoolahan whooped.

Then the gun-captains were standing back from priming their carronades, fists in the air while their excess hands tailed on the tackles to haul the guns up to the port-sills once more. The upper deck guns began to howl again, and it was time for another crushing broadside.

Five, six times, they fired—about ten minutes of battle at the hottest pace the crews could sustain for a short time. Slowly, the return fire from La Malouine slacked off. She was not built to take such punishment. She was a merchant ship, with wider-spaced timbers and lighter scantlings of perhaps no more than six inches thickness. Strong enough to protect her in storms, against rocks and shoals, and to stiffen her when she was laden with cargo, but not enough to guard her vitals when heavy iron was flying. Even the toughest oak or teak gives way when hit with eighteen pounds of metal at twelve hundred feet per second at such short range.

Telesto had been built to bear twenty-four-pounders on her lower deck, twelve- or eighteen-pounders on her upper deck, and her sides were ten to twelve inches of seasoned English oak laid over much heavier and thicker framing spaced closer together. She had been laid down for warfare. Some of La Malouine’s twelve-pound balls hurt her, even so, but she was built to take much heavier battering and live for hours in the line of battle.

La Malouine had drifted down closer to her, as Captain Ayscough had predicted she would. Perhaps her helmsmen had been scythed away by the quarterdeck twelve-pounders, the two-pounder swivel-guns, and the muskets of Chiswick’s sepoys. Perhaps her crew had been so decimated that no one could tend her braces, or be spared from the gun battery to go aloft and loose more sail. Now the range was almost hull-to-hull, and when the carronades erupted, shattered wood came flying in the ports at once, making more hazard for Lewrie’s crews than anything that the French had done yet.

“Mister Lewrie!” one of their midshipmen yelled from the after companion-way. “Close your ports, secure your guns, and come on deck for the boarding party, please sir!”

“Aye aye.”

They gained the upper deck, dug into the open weapons tubs at the base .of the main-mast and fetched cutlasses and pistols. This time, Alan had his own pistols: the small pair he’d purchased long ago in Portsmouth when he first kitted out as a midshipman, and a brace of dragoon pistols he’d carried away from Yorktown. He checked the primings and stuffed them into the Hindoo cummerbund he still wore, drew his sword, and led his party to the larboard gangways where Chiswick’s troops were still firing away with their muskets.

“Grapnels, bosun!” Choate was yelling. “Form up, lads! Stand ready! Lower the boarding nettings. Now, away boarders!”

With a concerted howl, they were up and over their own bulwarks, leaping onto La Malouine’s bulwarks across the gap created by the tumble-home of the two hulls. There was an irregular volley of pistol and musket fire as the French met them. Men shrieked and clawed at sudden hurts, lost their footing or their handholds and fell into the narrow tide-race between the ships to be crushed to death as the hulls ground and bumped together every half-minute or so. Pike-heads stabbed up at them, stopping leapers in mid-air. One sailor screamed as sharp iron found his belly, his weight dragging the shaft of the pike down atop the bulwark. The wielder must have been a strong man, for he held the sailor there, kicking wildly and vomiting blood and half-digested rations before he slipped off and fell howling between die hulls.

Lewrie leaped, banging one knee on the ship’s side, getting one foot on the Frenchman’s bulwark, and a precious handhold on a loose stay that felt like it was half shot-through and ready to come free at any second. He had a brief glimpse downward at the bloody water foaming between La Malouine and Telesto, saw a man’s head crushed as flat as a frying pan, an imploring arm and hand waving madly at him as another drowned below the surface, trapped by untold tons.

He hauled hard on the stay to throw himself forward out of danger, and stumbled to his knees to the deck. Ignoring the pain in his knee, he rose up and started swinging his sword for his life! A man tumbled into him from behind, knocking him flat once more. Then there was a volley of shots that cleared the deck around him for a moment, allowing him to get to his feet.

“At ‘em, Telestos!” He yelled. A French sailor came at him with a pike leveled like a charging cavalry lancer. A quick move to parry from left and below, pushing that wicked pike-head away to his right and past his shoulder, then a riposting thrust at the belly.

The Frenchman screamed almost in his ear, a foot of Gill’s best English steel in his entrails, lost his grip on the pike, and dropped away like a spilled sack of meal, almost dragging Lewrie with him as his ravaged stomach muscles tried to clench around the blade. Alan had to plant a foot on the man’s chest and thighs to drag his sword back out, bringing forth the slithering horrors contained within.

Dark faces with swarthy mustaches and whiskers came raving on La Malouine’s, gangway. Chiswick’s sepoys, less practiced at boarding and slower to cross over. Now that the seamen had cleared them some room, they were trotting forward and aft, bayonets fixed, and their havildars shouting encouragement.

“Mam, maro ghanda Fransisi!”*

*”Kill, kill the dirty French!”

 

Percival and McTaggart were headed forward with a large pack of seamen, teetering their way over the boat-tier beams to get to the larboard side as well. Alan spun about and led his men aft. Where it came from, he had no idea, but there was now some light on deck, enough to see the party of Frenchmen rushing to defend their quarterdeck. It was disconcerting to see Marcel Monnot in their lead, the sailor he’d spoken to on the docks one morning. But Monnot had a cutlass in his hand, and he began hacking away at an English sailor.

Lewrie let his hanger dangle from the wrist-strap, pulled out his first dragoon pistol and pulled it back to full cock. Stepping forward with his men, he took aim and let fly. The fight with Monnot swirled out of his aim, but another Frenchman was struck by the ball in the chest, plumping a sudden burst of scarlet on his white shirt front and dropping him out of sight. He drew his second pistol and shot a hulking French seaman right in the face, who gave a great howl and flipped over backward, making a gap for more English sailors to dash forward and crowd the French back. Cutlasses sang and whished in the air, ringing steel on steel. Pikeheads and bayonet points stabbed out in short thrusts.

Then there was Monnot again, leaping back into action and hewing a sailor down, pushing forward and leading more of his hands with him against everything.

“Vous!” he exclaimed, spotting Lewrie. “Espece de salaud!”

“Strike, Monnot! Throw down your sword! It’s over!”

“Va te faire foutre!” Monnot cried, throwing himself forward.

Lewrie jerked his wrist and brought his sword into his palm, leading with a thrust that Monnot beat aside, but the speed of it made him drop back a pace. Alan stamped forward, countering a hard counterswing of Monnot’s cutlass blade. They were too hemmed in by struggling bodies to do anything more than beat at each other vertically after that. Bayonets stabbed on either side, and Frenchmen were dying, going down as the sepoys loaned their strength to shove their foes backward and upward to the quarterdeck, beginning to thin them out enough for Lewrie to have more fighting room.

It was disconcerting to fight a man he knew, even slightly. He had nothing against Monnot personally, so it felt less like a duel. A stranger he could have crossed swords with gladly. But it was his life to not kill him. Monnot was monstrously strong. A bit unskilled with a more gentlemanly smallsword, perhaps, but ruthlessly competent with a cutlass, his wrist hard as an iron anvil.

Monnot fetched up against the ladder that led to the quarterdeck, last of his men still standing on the gangway, and he howled in glee as he swung his sword in the full cutlass drill. There!

An opening, as Monnot swung backhanded, fumbled backward to take a step up the ladder, still facing his foes. Lewrie leaped for him, raising his sword to block a further swing, but ramming the lion-headed pommel of his sword into Monnot’s mouth!

The man stumbled onto his back, one hand grasping at the rope balustrade of the ladder, thrusting with his cutlass, a thrust which Lewrie parried off low, and then he was inside Monnot’s guard with a backward slash of that superbly strong and razor-honed hanger across the man’s belly and chest.

Monnot howled again, reaching upward to take Lewrie’s throat in one hand, drawing his cutlass back with the other. Alan started turning purple as he reached out to take Monnot’s sword-arm wrist in his hand and hold off a killing blow, drawing his hanger back behind his knee to turn it upward, and thrust the point into the Frenchman’s jaws. Up through throat skin, through the tongue, into the sinuses and the brain! Monnot grunted and twisted like a piked fish, bumping down the steps of the quarterdeck ladder one at a time, dragging Alan with him with one hand yet gripping his throat in a final, inhuman spasming strength!

Sailors and soldiers dashed past them while Alan was dragged to his knees, gasping for air and watching the world go dim, until at last Monnot’s heels began to drum on the deck, and his hands lost all strength. His eyes flared once more with anger, then rolled up into his head and glazed over unblinking. Alan rocked back onto his heels and gulped great lungfuls of air, massaging his throat with one hand and tugging his sword free with the other. He felt like shooting the man, just to make sure he was dead, not shamming until he’d stepped over him to ascend to the quarterdeck, then strike him from behind!

He settled for a slash across Monnot’s throat as he sprang up and rushed aft, getting away from the brute as quick as he was able.

“Jesus Christ!” he muttered, once he’d gained the deck. No wonder it was light enough to see! La Malouine was on fire! After lights-out aboard any ship, it was the officers aft who could keep a lantern or two burning past nine p.m., and their gunfire must have overturned a lamp, killed a gun-captain who had dropped his smoldering slow-match onto something flammable. Smoke drifted and curled from between the deck planks. Pounded tar to waterproof the joins was running slick and hot, sticking to his shoes. One corner of the poop deck farther aft already showed gaps through which tiny flames licked. He turned to see if Telesto was safe, and saw no sign of fire. But amidships, in La Malouine’s waist, there was a bright red glow under the tarred canvas that covered the midships cargo hatches and companion-way hatches. Even as he watched, the tarred canvas took fire with a sullen whoomp and disappeared in a sooty shower, and long, licking flames leaped aloft with a roar like a bellows had been applied to a forge!

“Back to the ship!” Choate was yelling, waving their men back to Telesto with his sword. “Move, lads, if you don’t want to burn!”

There was no greater fear for a sailor than fire aboard ship.

Once it got a good hold on the dry timbers, the tarred ropes, greased running rigging and canvas sails, a fire was almost impossible to extinguish. In the blink of an eye, a ship could flash into a ruddy horror, roasting her crew, who would be fearful to abandon her until the last minute, for most sailors could not swim.

“Back!” Alan yelled. “Back aboard our ship, stir yourselves!”

They were lucky to make it, for the small crew that had stayed aboard Telesto were chopping and sawing at the grapnel ropes even before everyone could reach the rails to prepare themselves for the leap.

It was a panic. Sepoys crowded the rails, their eyes rolling in fear, ready to abandon their weapons in their haste to flee. Chiswick was raving back and forth, shouting at them in Hindee and pushing muskets back into their hands, arranging a party of some of his largest men to literally throw some of the Others across to Telesto’s bulwarks, to be caught by seamen.

La Malouine was keening as the flames began to roar in earnest, the sound a soaked river rock makes when placed in a camp-fire. Men wounded and unable to move were screaming and gibbering in terror.

“Damnit!” Alan sighed, sheathing his sword. He picked among the bodies, searching for his own. The dead he could do nothing for, but there were surely some English wounded that simply could not be left behind to suffer.

“Oh, God, sir!” Archibald, the condom-maker, keened shrill as a frightened child as he lay on the gangway with blood soaking his leg. “Help meeeee!!!”

“I’m here, Archibald, Let’s go!”

He got him to his feet, an arm around him, and half-dragged him to the rail, yelling for help. Hodge, the topman, came swarming over to them with a free line, and quickly whipped a loop in it. They got Archibald seated in it and let it swing. Even if he bashed his head in on their ship’s hull, he was away. Cony returned with it as they began to search.

“Telestos!” Lewrie called, almost choking on the stink of burning cargo below decks. Singed tea leaves swirled around him like a plague of locusts. “Hoy, Telestos! Sing out and we’ll save you!”

A gut-shot French seaman raised an imploring hand from the deck, terror in his eyes. They passed him by. He was not one of theirs. Hodge drew a heavy belaying pin from the railing and did the man the favor of knocking him senseless so he’d know less about his immolation.

“Don’t think they’s any more of our’n, Mister Lewrie!” Cony said, tugging at his sleeve.

“Lewrie, leave it!” Ayscough called from their ship. “Leave it or die over there! I can’t keep station on her any longer!”

Flames were shooting up the main-mast now, furled sails bursting alight, standing and running rigging covered with tiny shoots of fire like some expensive holiday illumination.

“Good enough for me,” Lewrie responded, climbing over the rails.

They threw them lines, and they swung across, suspended from gant-line blocks and yard-tackles. Lewrie thrust out his legs to take the shock of impact, but it knocked the wind out of him anyway. He dangled for a moment against the hull by the gunports until someone reached over and grabbed him by the collar to haul him up.

He landed in a heap on the larboard gangway, almost getting trampled by sail-trimmers as they heaved on the yard braces to get the ship underway. He could barely hear the shouted commands over the roar of the fire aboard La Malouine.

“Ya awright, sir?” Cony asked, helping him to his feet, and disentangling him from the gant-line block and three-part loops of line. “Christ, wot a mess!”

When he had a chance to look back at their foe, once Telesto was far enough to leeward that she wouldn’t catch fire herself, he could see that the French ship was alight from taff-rail to the tip of her bow-sprit. Her upper yards were raining down in chunks like dripping embers. No matter that they were heavy, they were almost floating against the fierce, roaring up-draft of the fires. Now and again, there was a bright, blue-white flash and dull thud as a powder cartridge burst, or a loaded gun took light. Sparks would fly against a yellow-white cloud of powder, making La Malouine look even more like carnival fireworks.

Men dribbled from her, too. Men whose clothing, whose very flesh had caught fire, and swarmed staggering and blind in unspeakable agony, swathed from head to toe in greedy, gnawing flames like animated torches. They keened and howled, reeled and dropped out of sight. Or tumbled over the bulwarks of their ship to raise great splashes in the water alongside, where only a greasy smoke and a circle of foam marked their passing.

They dropped into the water beside others who floundered and thrashed in the glowing amber water, thrashing clumsily for any bit of flotsam to support them before they drowned. Pleas for help went unnoticed, cries to God went unheard, amidst all the screaming and wailing, amidst the crackle and roar of the flames.

La Malouine had had four ship’s boats, all nestled on the tiers that spanned the waist between the gangways over the upper deck, and three of them now roasted like unattended steaks on a grill. The fourth was in the water, one side charred black and half sunk, reeking with smoke. Half a dozen men clung to her, and two sat on her after-most thwart, fighting the others to prevent them climbing in and swamping her. There was one large, grid-worked hatch cover in the water, and more men clung to the sides, while others who could swim splashed in its direction. Out of La Malouine’s crew of roughly one-hundred-fifty men, not thirty could be discovered alive now.

“Oh, Christ, sir, look!” Cony shuddered.

Dark, triangular fins cut the glassy, illuminated red-and-amber waters. Sharks! Lewrie winced with a sudden cold chill as a fin went underwater just behind a struggling man. That man suddenly shot out of the ocean as if he’d been tossed by a bull, screaming louder than he could have thought possible from anyone’s throat, setting off more panic among the survivors. Pale white fish bellies rolled with him as they seized upon his flesh, bit and shook like bulldogs to tear off huge chunks of living meat! More fins darted in from nowhere, summoned God knew how from the depths. More men thrashed and wailed as they were taken. The survivors who had been clustered around the half-sunk boat swarmed up on it in a wave, climbing over each other in their haste, as the boat rolled on its beam ends and capsized.

There was no time to put boats down. Telesto’s crew lifted up their own curved, grid-work hatch-covers and tossed them in as Ayscough had her steered through the thickest pack of Frenchmen. The tail-ends of halyards, lifts and braces were slung over so that those that could might reach them and climb to safety, and life.

But it was futile. Three French sailors who could swim climbed aboard, shaking in terror. Perhaps three more made it to the floats. By the time Telesto had sailed on past, wore ship and came back into the area, there was no sign of living men around the overturned boat, and not seven altogether on all the floating hatch-covers, girded round entirely by circling fins and face-down bodies that one by one were taken under. There had to be a thousand sharks by then around La Malouine, striking at anything whether it moved or not—paddles, broken oars, charred flotsam or discarded clothing—it made no difference to them.

La Malouine burned for two hours before she went under, still a spark on the horizon by the time Telesto found her cutter and took her back aboard. She finally winked out around two in the morning, about the time Mr. Twigg finished interrogating the shattered remnants of her people.