Paper Woman: A Mystery of the American Revolution (35 page)

Mid-afternoon,
with the sloop identified at last as the
Annabelle
and less than a mile
ahead of the
Gloria Maria
, the frigate and ship-of-the-line closed on
the brig running parallel to each other.
 
The wind stiffened, thrust waves up near the deck.
 
Sophie seized the railing, swept wind-whipped
hair from her mouth, and tugged on Jacques's elbow.
 
"Why don't those two fire on each other?"

The Frenchman
studied the ships in pursuit.
 
"The
frigate is outgunned.
 
Only under
desperate circumstances will she attack a ship-of-the-line.
 
In a fleet battle, by formality, the warship
may not attack the frigate unless provoked.
 
But we know how often ship captains follow the rules."

"And this
isn't a fleet battle."
 
David threw
a look astern.

Arriaga
returned forward from conversing with his signaler and said to David, "The
Annabelle
will not acknowledge us."

"Close the
distance."

"
Senhor
Hazelton, I remind you of her gun."

"You know
the range of that gun.
 
You can get
closer."

"Will your
competitor acknowledge you even then?
 
For all I know, the two of you hate each other enough to fight a
duel."

Sophie watched
David and the captain trade glares.
 
"Very well.
 
He isn't my
competitor.
 
My sister and I suspect two
men aboard the
Annabelle
of complicity in our father's murder."

"Ah."
 
Arriaga's shoulders relaxed.
 
"Finally I have a truth here.
 
And your real names?"

"I'm David
St. James.
 
My sister, Sophie.
 
Mathias Hale and his uncle, Jacques le
Coeuvre."

"Let us
have more of the truth now,
senhor
."
 
His gaze scoured the four of them.
 
"Are any of you spies?"

"With God
as my witness,
capitão
, no, and we want no part of this war.
 
Misunderstandings have caught us in the
middle.
 
You can get more speed from
this brig, can you not?"

The captain
gave him an unpleasant smile.
 
"Of
course.
 
It is all I can do to hold her
back in a beam wind.
 
And I
will
hear more of your truth after we have shaken loose those two behind
us."
 
He strode aft, his commands
in crisp Portuguese.

Sailors climbed
footropes under the yard and bowsprit.
 
Rather than cringe at the sight of maritime acrobatics and wonder how
men could hang on in such a wind, Sophie looked astern.
 
The sails of the frigate and warship seemed
to fill the sky.

Jacques cocked
an eyebrow.
 
"The
capitão
is
a slick one."

A grudging
smile jerked David's lips.
 
"He kept
us from getting closer until I told him the truth."

Jacques patted
his shoulder.
 
"Perhaps it was time
you met someone who is immune to the stories you spin."

The
Gloria
Maria
leaped forward, and David grabbed the railing.
 
"Look lively, Dusseau!
 
Here we come!"

Sophie
started.
 
"Say, what's that flash
of light?"

The
"boom" from the
Annabelle
's gun reached their ears in the next
second, and a ball plumed the water a thousand feet ahead of the
Gloria
Maria
.
 
"Bloody hell!
 
She fired on us!"

Portuguese consternation
erupted all over the ship.
 
A gust from
the northeast whistled around canvas and lines, and a maintopman jabbered about
the frigate and the weather.
 
At another
explosion, fainter, from astern, Mathias peered over the port railing.
 
"The frigate just fired upon us!"

"Warning
us off."
 
Jacques's expression
darkened.
 
"And the
ship-of-the-line?"

"Still not
engaging the frigate, Uncle."

"She will
bide her time and scoop up the scraps of battle.
 
We
will be the scraps if this continues."

In response to
additional commands from Arriaga, sailors redirected sails and rigging, and the
Gloria Maria
seemed to take a deep breath before settling back to her
previous speed.
 
Nevertheless, the
Annabelle
fired another ball at the brig, and the frigate responded with additional
shots.
 
Arriaga barked out more commands
and jogged forward.
 
"
Senhor
,
accept my apologies, but we will not rendezvous with the
Annabelle
.
 
For the safety of all aboard, we are
clearing the field —"

Dire
exclamations broke from the maintopman, and Arriaga strode to port for a look
northeast.
 
In the next second, the wind
veered, and with a groan of timber, the
Gloria Maria
heaved to
starboard.
 
Yards, spars, gaffs, and
rigging swung wide, sailors aloft howled and cursed while clinging on for dear
life, and the fore topgallant blew out in a bang.
 
Everyone standing forward, including Arriaga, tumbled to the
deck, and unsecured equipment rebounded amidships.

Arriaga
scrambled up and bellowed a new set of commands, echoed aft by Tomás.
 
More hands clawed their way aloft on shrouds
and ratlines to stow the thrashing sail.

David,
crouching, gaped northeast.
 
"Look
at
that
!"

A black shelf
of cloud had belched from the haze and was trundling southwest.
 
Sophie, assisted to her knees by Mathias,
squinted into a wind that tried to pummel them flat.
 
Jacques propped his elbow and jerked his head toward the
approaching squall.
 
"All ships are
too close to the coast of East Florida.
 
We cannot lie to and ride it out.
 
We will wreck on the reefs."

Scudding ahead
of the squall appeared to be Arriaga's strategy.
 
Moments later, the forestaysail set, the foretopsail set and
reefed, and all other sails furled, the brig braced herself in the angry sea.
 
Wood groaned and rigging strained as the two
sails filled with the approaching tempest, and the ship steadied in her new
bearing.

Wind slapped a
wave across the deck.
 
Sophie shielded
her face and clung to the railing.
 
"What happened to the
Annabelle
?"

"Over
here!" Mathias called from the starboard bow.
 
"Her sails blown out by that first big gust."

Sophie,
Jacques, and David joined him at the leeward railing.
 
A scant thousand feet away, the
Annabelle
's crew worked on
their sails.
 
The
Gloria Maria
slipped past, stabilized by foresails and expert hands on the tiller.
 
Three miles northeast, the squall bore down
on the frigate and warship, all hands aboard both ships still lowering and
furling sails.
 
Sophie shook her head.
 
"The squall will be upon the
Annabelle
in minutes."

A dark-haired
young man, likely André Dusseau, appeared on deck to offer what aid he could to
the captain and crew of the sloop.
 
An
elderly man climbed up after him, the third member of Hernandez's trio.
 
A band of rain passed between the two ships
as he turned around, preventing their getting a clear look at him, but Sophie
blinked and gasped, her soul brushed by phantasm.

Beside her,
Mathias stiffened.
 
"Am I seeing
things?"

"
Mon
dieu
, not unless I am, too."

"I know
what I
think
I saw."
 
Sprayed by rain, David rubbed his eyes and gaped, trying to penetrate
the rain.

Wind deposited
globs of seaweed tangled with small fish on deck, and tepid rain tasting of
seawater soaked the passengers.
 
They
gripped the railing.
 
Rain curtained off
the
Annabelle
, but not before they spotted the sloop once more, her
sails dropped and furled, her mainsail at last set.

Tomás stumped
forward drenched, his Spanish sounding soaked.
 
"¡
Abajo
! ¡
Abajo
!"
 
He motioned them below.
 
Passengers washed overboard were bad for business.

Just before
Sophie headed down the companionway, she spied the squall swallowing the
frigate and warship.
 
Tomás shoved the
hatch closed behind her and her party.
 
Slammed from one side to the other in the belly of the storm-tossed
brig, the four of them traded stunned glances in the gloom of a dingy lantern
and gathering night.
 
Bitterness and
apprehension carved through David's expression.
 
"God
damn
it all to hell."

Chapter Twenty-Seven

IN THE
ADJOINING cabin, where they'd stored their gear at the beginning of the night,
a small object bounced on the floor and progressed to smaller and smaller
bounces until it, along with other loose objects, clattered to the wall on the
port side.
 
When the
Gloria Maria
rolled back the other way, the loose objects in the cabin mirrored the
motion.
 
The pattern repeated so many
times that Sophie lost track of how long it had gone on.

She imagined
powder, balls, and splintered arrows smeared on the floor with the contents of
the chamber pot, a sort of storm stew.
 
Amazing that she could hear anything from the other cabin for the shriek
of the wind.
 
She and her companions
hugged the floor to avoid being flung into each other.
 
They'd puked several times, except Mathias,
who must have purged the instinct from his system the previous day.
 
No one spoke.

Through the wind's
howl, she heard another band of rain lash the hull.
 
Yanked about like a splinter being pried from Poseidon's thumb,
the fragile wood-and-canvas
Gloria Maria
reared up and slammed down what
felt like fifty-mile-high mountains of ocean, jarring Sophie until her jaw
ached.

Right after the
lantern had extinguished, plunging them into night spiked with pink and blue
lightning, they'd heard a mast crack, loud as cannon shot, followed by the
collapse and wreckage of rigging and spars on the deck.
 
Sophie imagined Arriaga and his crew swept
overboard then and the brig — her rudder lost, her two foresails blown out —
batted along by the storm like a ball of yarn in a kitten's paws.

Entrenched in
seasickness, nothing left in her stomach to vomit after half a night, she no
longer cared what became of them.
 
Let
the
Gloria Maria
impale herself upon the reefs of East Florida and
plunge them to the bottom of the Atlantic.

The ordeal felt
worse for her, having glimpsed a specter who looked hauntingly like her father
stranded aboard the
Annabelle
, moments away from being pounded by the
black squall.
 
Logic told her it
couldn't have been Will.
 
She'd seen his
burned corpse.
 
But her eyes had
contested logic — not only
her
eyes, but also those of her
companions.
 
Perhaps they'd each been
granted the illusion in denial of death and destruction.

For the odds
were against the sloop picking up enough forward speed to stay ahead of the
squall.
 
Considering the thrashing the
Gloria
Maria
endured, surely the
Annabelle
had foundered hours before,
along with all aboard her and two-thirds of the rebels' bribe to Don
Alejandro.
 
Likely none of them would
ever see the two men who'd partnered with Hernandez again.

On they rose
and plunged through the tropical storm, neither capsizing nor running aground,
until at length the rain and wind abated from the port quarter and astern.
 
Jacques groaned in the darkness.
 
"It feels as though the wind has
shifted."

Mathias
squeezed Sophie's hand gently before speaking.
 
"Yes, it seems to be coming from starboard now, but no comfort in
that.
 
We're still being walloped in
these waves."

"From the
starboard —
mon neveu
, do you not understand?
 
If we are still traveling south, a wind from starboard is coming
from the west."

David
groaned.
 
"Meaning what, Uncle
Jacques?"

"Meaning
that perhaps we have seen the worst of it.
 
I have heard men speak of riding out these storms.
 
Nearly always the wind switches from the
east to the northeast, and then, when the worst is passing, the wind comes from
the west, until finally it returns to the southeast or east."

They stayed
quiet awhile longer, listening while the wind abated.
 
David broke the hush with what was on everyone's minds.
 
"The visibility was poor, but we all
saw what looked like the old man aboard the
Annabelle
.
 
Suppose it really was him.
 
No, no, hear me out.
 
I've gone over and over this.
 
While we were at Zeb's dance, suppose the
old man and his cohorts unearthed Elijah Carey's corpse, transported it to
MacVie's land, swapped the clothing, then burned it?"