Page 3
S he emerged from the receding bank of mist like a ghost ship.
The air was dead calm, the water smooth as glass.
The lines of her rigging were frosted with dew and glistened with a million pinpricks of light as the first rays of the morning sun found her.
She had originally carried four masts, but the mizzen and fore were badly damaged, the latter cracked off halfway up the stem and folded over on itself, suspended in a harness formed of its own ratlines.
What few scraps of canvas she carried were reefed, as if she knew she was going nowhere fast. The huge mainsail hung limp, half of it in tatters, the rest valiantly patched wherever it was possible and bolstered by a new array of lines and cleats to give it some hope of catching any breeze that might whuff by.
There was more damage scarring her rails and hull, and she was listing heavily to starboard, weary with the weight of all that hope.
Captain Jonas Spence frowned through the thick wire fuzz of his eyebrows. “I see no lanterns. No signs of life on any of her decks.”
His second-in-command, Spit McCutcheon, duplicated the frown but he was not looking so much at the silent galleon as he was the dense gray wall of fog behind her.
“There could be a dozen ships out there, lyin’ in wait, an’ we’d not know it,” he muttered through the wide gaps of his front teeth.
“’Tis just the kind o’ trap a bloody-minded Spaniard would set.
Use one of our own as bait to lure us in, then”—he leaned over the rail and spat a wad of phlegm into the water twenty feet below— “pepper us like a slab o’ hot mutton. ”
Spence’s frown deepened, the lines becoming crevices in a face already as weathered and hardened as granite.
He was a tall bull of a man, as broad across the beam as his ship, as bald as the pickled gull’s eggs he ate by the crockful.
“Mutton?” He glared at McCutcheon. “Did ye have to say mutton, ye flat-nosed bastard? Now I’ll be havin’ the taste of it in my throat the whole blessed day long. ”
As if to verify the prediction, his stomach gave an angry rumble, one heard by most of the group of crewmen gathered behind them on the forecastle.
Several smiled, despite the tension. Their captain’s appetite and capacity were infamous, and when his belly protested a lack, it was like the ominous grumbling from a volcano.
“Mutton.” Spence snorted again and raised his hand to his eyes, shielding them against the molten silver glare of what little dull light did manage to break through the dissipating clouds.
He took a slow, careful sweep along the half of the horizon that was clear, halting when he came upon the ghostly galleon and the gray miasma of mist behind it.
“We’ll send the jolly across,” he decided.
“If there are a dozen papist bastards out there, they’ll be goin’ nowhere, either, in this cursed calm.
An’ if she’s genuine, there might be souls aboard who need our aid.
Helmsman! Ye’d best haul us in. Keep a square or two aloft for steerage in case a wind does come along. ”
The order was relayed and almost immediately there were men clambering nimbly up the shrouds and steadying themselves on the yards while others released the tension in the rigging lines and allowed the sails to be reefed and lashed to the spars.
It was slower work than normal, for the sails had been well soaked with seawater to swell the canvas and take advantage of any breath of air.
They had been becalmed three days now, and aside from the occasional cat’s paw that scudded over the surface of the water, they had drifted no more than a league or two in that time.
That was why, when the dawn began to melt away the morning mist, the sight of another ship standing so close at hand had tightened more than a few sphincter muscles.
Nearly every one of the Egret’s crewmen lined the rails; none had moved away over the past hour, few had raised their voices above a whisper.
They were still in dangerous waters and without wind to move them, they would be easy pickings for enemy gunners.
The low, thick ceiling of cloud that had hung over them for the same three days had made it near impossible to take any kind of a reading from the sun during the day or from the stars at night.
The helmsman’s best guess to their position had them stalled square in the middle of Spain’s busiest shipping lanes.
They were homeward bound, still four weeks out of Plymouth; low on victuals and fresh water, lower still on any inclinations they might have to engage a strange vessel in enemy water.
They had heard rumors, before their departure from the Caribbean, that King Philip’s plate fleet had cleared Hispaniola two weeks before them.
The huge galleons, burdened by the gold and silver mined in Panama and Mexico, would be slower moving than the Egret , and it was not inconceivable they could have caught up.
Moreover, these plate fleets traveled under heavy escort from India guards whose decks bristled with guns of all sizes and calibers, whose captains had no compunctions about attacking stray ships and collecting English crews to enslave in their galleys.
McCutcheon’s concerns were genuine and Spence took his wiry mate’s counsel to heart.
Spit had been on the sea more years than most ships in the English fleet.
What few spikes of hair he had sticking out on his scalp and chin were gray, and if he stood on tiptoes the top of his head might reach Spence’s armpit.
They had been together nigh on fifteen years, one of the oddest couples on the Main, and known by nearly every merchant and investor in Plymouth for the quality of sugarcane rum they ran up from the Indies.
The Egret was armed, as any reasonably minded merchant trader should be, and had seen her fair share of fighting, mostly against Spanish and Portuguese privateers who objected to Spence’s interference in their trade monopolies.
But as any Englishman knew, a man was only as good as the ship he sailed.
Both the Spanish and the Portugee had clung to the centuries-old design of square-rigged masts, which meant they could sail only where the wind took them.
English vessels were fore-and-aft rigged on all but the main square sail, adding maneuverability in the yards that allowed them to sail circles around more cumbersome galleons, which could only watch and grow dizzy.
The wounded galleon before them was definitely English in design and flew the Cross of St. George on what was left of its topmast, though it was as tattered and charred as her other pennants.
“Below Aulde George, there,” Spence said, narrowing his amber eyes to bring the topmast into better focus. “Do ye recognize the pennon? ”
“Crimson on black. A stag, or a goat, I make it.” McCutcheon shook his head. “The crest is not familiar to me.”
“Aye, well, it feels like it should be familiar. At any rate, she’s no simple merchant wandered too far from home.
She’s showin’ ten bloody demi-cannon an’ fourteen culverins in her main battery as well as falconets and perriers fore an’ aft.
” Spence pointed at the monstrous thirty-two-pounders snug in her waist and added out the side of his mouth, “I’ll wager whoever her master is, he’s not one to haggle over the price o’ trade goods. ”
“Mayhap she’ll have shot to spare an’ a tun or two o’ powder if her magazine is not underwater.” McCutcheon’s graveled voice did not betray too much optimism. “Or if she did not use it all gettin’ herself in such a condition.”
Spence straightened and scratched thoughtfully at the violent red beard that foamed over his chin.
It was a cool morning, yet there was a faint sheen of moisture across his brow, glinting off the bald dome of his head.
He kept staring at the limp pennant that hung so forlornly in the still air.
Something about it was nagging at the back of his mind.
Something was making his skin itch and his ballocks tighten—a sure sign of trouble ahead.
“Well, we’ve no choice but to take a look. An’ no harm in passin’ by the armory on the way.”
“Aye,” Spit grumbled, and passed the order over his shoulder. “Cutlasses an’ pistols, ten shots apiece. Lewis, Gabinet, Brockman, Hubbard, Mawhinney—” He paused in naming the best musketmen on board and his wizened gaze settled on one particularly expectant face.
The amber eyes of the captain, which more often than not twinkled with mischief and good humor, had not retained their joviality in his offspring.
Solemn and serious most times, Beau Spence’s eyes were large and fiercely proud and more often than not brought to mind a tigress stalking its prey.
Thankfully, neither the captain’s ponderous girth nor the shocking red fuzz that dominated his walrus-like features had been passed to his daughter.
Beau’s hair shone with only hints of red in the brightest of sunlight, and then only on the rare occasions she left it unplaited.
Most times she kept the rich auburn braid bound as tightly as her doublet, which, though considerably smaller in size than any other garment on board, did a fair job in flattening and smoothing any distractions that might lure a lecherous eye from his work.
Moreover, being the only woman on board a ship full of lusty-minded men, she had shown no hesitation or lack of skill in using the razor-sharp dagger she wore strapped about her waist, or—as one poor gelded bastard had discovered—the wickedly thin stiletto she kept sheathed in the cuff of her boot.
Table of Contents
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- Page 3 (Reading here)
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