Rondo Allegro (37 page)

“Get those who can shift into the sick berths,” he said. “I
want to see Robert first, in case they throw him over the side.” And to old,
grizzled Perkins, the captain’s steward, “Take this cup. Get this dose into the
captain. Don’t tell him it is laudanum; he will try to refuse, to stand a
watch, but he must rest. That wound on his head mislikes me.”

Perkins departed, followed by Michel and Mr. Gates with an
unconscious sailor.

Parrette put out a hand to stop her son. “Young Leuven?”

Michel’s smoke-stained face turned her way. “Killed,” he
said in a dull voice. “The first one. The splinter that did for him was the
captain’s first wound.” He jerked his head to Mr. Gates, and they moved out
with their burden.

Parrette said, “Anna, come into the hold. You must shift
your clothes.”

“We both must,” Anna said, sick at the sight of her ruined
dress.

Parrette lowered her voice. “Your work is not yet done. The
weather is worsening. We must get all the wounded bound into their hammocks or
cots. And you,” she added, “must tend your husband.”

Anna had no strength to protest, and what could she say?
She did not feel in any respect a wife, but everyone regarded her as one.

Gripping a pail of unused water, she followed Parrette into
the hold. She ran her thumb along her fingers, and then peered down at her
blood-crusted hand by the flickering light of the lantern that Parrette held
high.

The ring was gone. Probably somewhere in that horror of an
orlop. She could not bear to return. Perhaps someone might find it, someone
inured to the aftermath of war.

Parrette continued into the hold, poking through the boxes
and barrels until at last they found their trunks. Each set down her bucket of
water. They were alone, though footsteps could be heard above.

They hurried out of their clothes, and Anna gratefully
plunged her hands into her bucket. The cold liquid was shocking. Anna scrubbed
feverishly over every inch she could get at—she felt could not scrub enough.
She left off only when she discovered she was rubbing her skin raw. She
scrambled into fresh clothing, as Parrette blocked her from view of the ladder.

Parrette bent to pick up their discarded garments.

Anna said fiercely, “Fling mine overboard. Or I will do it.
I will never wear that gown again.”

“I will put it to soak,” Parrette said tonelessly. “There
are other uses for the cloth.”

Anna heard no rebuke in her voice, but her throat ached, and
her eyes burned with unshed tears. “I beg pardon. I . . .”

“We both must take food. We will need our strength, and Lt.
Sayers said before he collapsed that the captain ordered a meal be shared out.”

“A meal.” For the first time since the cannon had begun to
fire, Anna began to wonder about the wider world—the upper deck, the weather
deck, the battle. She forced herself not to blurt questions that she knew
Parrette could not answer, and picked up her bucket.

They emptied the buckets into the scuttle, and Anna began to
make her way slowly upward. The roar of cannon had gone silent, but the ship
was filled with noise: hammering, sawing, the shout of voices, the thump of
footsteps. The cry of wounded.

She heard the noise before she saw the shocking aftermath of
battle. Where she had only seen scrubbed order was a chaotic tangle of rope,
wood, iron, sailcloth. Crimson spatters, streaks, and splashes marred wood,
rope, sailcloth.

Lanterns hung everywhere against the dying light, as the
boatswain oversaw the most desperate of the repairs. The captain’s cabin was
still missing, except for his cot, and the checkered canvas deck cover that
someone had unrolled. He lay in his cot, the steward Perkins bent over it as he
helped the captain drink.

Perkins looked up at her approach. He touched his forehead,
and said, “Ma’am. If you’ll bide here, I can fetch the portable soup, which the
cook has in hand. Carpenters is bringing up the bulkheads as soon as they get
the hull patched forward, as it’s coming on to blow.”

‘Coming on?’ The wind howled through the rigging, and the
ship rose and fell on great swells. She could see through the tangle amidships
forward. Men crawled in the rigging, using ropes and tackles to lift and lower
spars.

“He’s dead.”

The voice was almost too soft to hear.

Anna turned. The captain swung in the cot, his dark hair
lying over his bandaged brow. “He’s dead,” he murmured again, and Anna bent
closer. His pupils were so large they swallowed the rest of his eyes, in the
indifferent light a color impossible to discern.

“Who is dead?” she asked. “Did you mean your clerk, Mr.
Leuven?”

“Nelson,” the captain murmured, still in that slow voice.
“Neville shouted it over his taffrail. Running messages. From Collingwood. No
one could see signals for the smoke. Sharpshooter, he thinks from
Redoubtable
.”

“I am very sorry to hear that,” Anna said, sorrow crowding
her heart. Though she had only met Admiral Lord Nelson the once, she vividly remembered
his gentle smile when he uttered those words about instruments. He would feel
no cold steel cutting into his flesh now.

“Duff, too. I breakfasted with him and his boy this morning . . .”

“The little boy?”

“I do not know.” He struggled to sit, winced against the
bandage that bound his left arm to his side, and fell back. “McGowan. Away in
boats. I need to get up. I need to see . . .” His right hand
fumbled over the edge of the cot.

She moved instinctively near, and his fingers, hot and dry,
grasped her wrist with surprising strength, but almost at once he let her go.

“I will go find out any news. Pray rest here,” she said.

“I can’t . . .”

Perkins arrived as the captain struggled up again. Holding
the tray expertly with one hand, the man pushed the captain down again. “Now,
capting, sir, the surgeon says you cannot get up this day. You’re to eat this
here soup, and sleep a watch.” He jerked his chin at Anna. “Your missus will
cast her glims over the rail, and see what there is to see.”

Anna said, “I will do it now.”

She turned away, almost bumping into a party of carpenter’s
mates carrying bulkheads. She ducked around them and ran up to the quarterdeck,
her head panging at each step.

When she reached the rail, she stopped in shock. In the
fiery, cloud-streaked sunlight she saw nothing but destruction in all
directions. Debris floated on the water, and small boats. There seemed to be
people in the water as well, some clinging to snarls of rigging and wood, as
little boats plied about, pulling them up.

The damage to
Aglaea
had looked terrible to her when she first glanced along the deck, but when she
saw the wrecks listing dangerously, some completely dismasted, she began to
comprehend how lucky they had been to escape relatively lightly.

“Pass the word for the skipper’s wife!”

The words echoed down the ship. Little Mr. Corcoran
appeared, almost unrecognizable but for his small size in the uniform much too
large. He was streaked with dirt and smoke, his voice shrill. “Come away along,
ma’am, it’s
Belleisle
’s long boat, if
you please.”

“Why do you require me?” she asked, following him carefully
over the debris and the wood and rope being laid out for repair work.

“It’s in want of the female, that is, they think she’s
gabbling French, but it’s a kind we none of us can make head nor tails of.”

They reached the larboard rail in the bow, where Anna gazed
down into a boat crowded with people. She recognized tattered remains of French
sailor’s clothing on some. At the very front, a bedraggled figure sat, nearly
lost in a pea coat that obviously did not belong to—
her
?

“She was in the water, ma’am,” a tall, thin lieutenant
called up to her. “Someone says you can parse the lingo?”

The woman lifted her head. Anna could only make out straggling
dark hair and a pair of bruised-looking eyes. Anna called down in French, “They
wish to know who you are, why you were in the water?”

The woman clasped thin hands together. “I am Jeanette
Caunant,” the woman cried in rapid village French. “I worked aboard the
Achilles
, dressed as a man. I take the
powder to the guns. It was so I can stay with my husband, but the ship, he is
afire, and they say we are sinking—that my husband is dead—and I cannot swim!
That I can stay afloat if I throw off my clothing! This I did, and when the
lead was melting, I hurled myself into the water, where a man, blessed by the
angels, he gave me an oar to clasp. And so it was I floated on the sea until
these English in this boat, they plucked me out of the water, and put this coat
about me!”

Anna repeated it all to the lieutenant, who saluted, turned
to a harassed young midshipman struggling with a pencil and a damp logbook, and
said, “She’s off the
Achilles
,
running powder, married. She goes to the
Pickle
as a seaman. Oars out!” And as the heavily laden boat labored away, the
lieutenant called, “Thank you, ma’am!”

Anna turned away. French again, and that accent—for a moment
she did not see the grisly wreckage of battle, but the coast of France in
spring, the swallows rustling in the eaves.

But France’s coast had also suffered, the shadow of the
Vendee behind the wariness, the angry voices, the poverty.

“
Achilles
exploded,”
Mr. Corcoran said, and in triumph, “we thumped it into ’em, ma’am. We thumped
it into ’em good, and we won.”

“Corcoran,” d’Ivry called hoarsely. “If you are quite done
showing away, it’s nearly eight bells, and there is the muster to be made, now
the shot holes are plugged. Pray summon the men of your division.”

Mr. Corcoran bounded over the debris and vanished in the
direction of the gun deck.

As d’Ivry spoke to Anna, she saw in his thin face shadows of
the lines that would mark it if he lived long enough to become a man. “The
captain requests your presence, ma’am,” he said formally. “He insists on
rising, on giving our three dead the proper send-off, before the weather turns
foul. We are in for an uncommon blow.” He glanced at the limb of the sun
vanishing, blood-red, under tangled clouds of livid crimson and violet.

The entire ship’s crew—those not too wounded to
rise—gathered in clumps, the lanterns casting a forgiving golden glow along the
ruin of the deck. The three dead had been sewn into hammocks.

Perkins had supported Captain Duncannon to the upper deck.
The captain leaned heavily on his steward, who had managed to ease his coat
over his bandages. Anna was going to join him, but the strict rows of the
officers (those able to stand) and the mass of men suggested a ritual, one that
bound the shipmates into a whole that did not include her, and so she remained
on the companionway, behind the knot of warrant officers’ mates.

On the quarterdeck, Perkins helped the captain open his
Bible. The ship yawed, the masts above describing an enormous arc against the
cloud-streaked sky. Wood creaked and blocks clattered as the ship plunged down
and down. Anna watched the company sway with the pitch, then lean as the prow
aimed toward the sky, water streaming off both sides.

“Hats off,” the officer of the watch bawled.

Every head was bared. The captain read the service, but all
Anna could hear from her distance was the cadence of the words, nearly
smothered by the wash and hiss of the sea. But those words seemed to comfort
those who could hear, before the three were committed, one by one, to the deep.

Another rise of the prow caused Anna to clutch at the pitch-covered
ropes behind her, and then the ship dropped into a valley between gray-green
waves. The Captain swayed, and Perkins caught him. McGowan and Perkins helped
the captain down to his cabin, which had been put together again, though bare
of any furnishings save that swinging cot.

Anna followed, one uncertain step at a time. She was unsure
where she ought to be, what she ought to do, until Perkins looked round, and
his heavy brows lifted with relief when he saw her.

Anna passed the smoke-streaked marine guard, whose stubbly
chin and red-rimmed eyes testified to the day’s immense labors. His gaze
flicked to her, and his face relaxed minutely. Anna tipped her head in greeting,
wondering if it was a relief to sink back into order after the chaotic
exertions of the day.

“Ma’am,” Perkins said. “He needs his dose. We only got half
into ’im.” He pressed a wooden cup into her hand.

She took the cup, and watched after he ran down toward the
galley.

Parrette was nowhere in sight; everyone was busy. The sense
of relief, almost a holiday relief, when she first came topside had vanished
with the sun, and the disappearance of the dead into the water.

Anna closed the door behind her, to shut out as much noise
as she could, and stepped toward the captain’s cot, but pitched into the
bulkhead when the ship yawed. Her shoulders bumped the carving in the wall as
she braced herself, knees locked, her hands tightly holding the cup to keep it
from spilling.

The steady swell was building, or maybe it was her own
exhaustion. When the floor slanted the other way, she ran the few steps and
caught herself against the swinging cot, and did her best to steady it.

Captain Duncannon lay with his eyes shut. The lantern swung
behind her, and as her shadow crossed his eyelids, he opened his eyes. He saw
her, and turned his head minutely, his eyes narrowing.

“Please drink this.” Anna slid her fingers under the curve
of his neck, a gesture well remembered from her father’s last days. She lifted
his head, and in spite of the sway of deck, bed, and light in three distinct
parabolas, she held him steady enough to get the rest of the cup into him, sip
by sip.

Then she gently laid his head onto the pillow, her fingers
sliding through his hair. It was unexpectedly fine, in spite of its tangled
state, the grit of brine, of dripping pitch from the rigging, of smoke.