The Continental Risque (40 page)

The enemy was turning as well, turning with the
Charlemagne
, trying to bring her own broadside to bear. Together and fifty yards apart they turned north as if at the start of a race.

The Pine Tree flag disappeared behind the enemy's main topgallant sail as it came shooting down the mast, and on the quarterdeck Biddlecomb could see the yeoman of signals bending the British ensign to the halyard. That was good enough for him. Suddenly his sword was in his right hand, held over his head.

‘Fire!' All seven guns in the starboard battery fired within seconds of each other, a great deafening broadside that made the
Charlemagne
shudder and hid the other brig behind a wall of gray and acrid smoke. The last of the
Charlemagne
's guns had not even come to rest when the Englishman replied, the muzzle flashes of six guns cutting through the smoke, the round shot slamming into the
Charlemagne
's hull.

Coughing, cursing men moved like machines in the brig's waist, sponging, loading, ramming, running out. The thick cloud of smoke between the ships rolled away downwind, revealing an enemy that, like the
Charlemagne
, was running out its next broadside.

The second broadside, British and American, was fired simultaneously. The
Charlemagne
rolled to larboard under the combined shock of her own guns going off and the impact of the British iron, fired from twenty yards away. Two of Faircloth's marines were dead, and the main spring stay, shot clean through, fell across the wreckage. But it appeared, even through the smoke, that the British had taken it just as hard.

The two vessels were closing fast. In a moment they would hit; the
Charlemagne
's starboard bow against the British brig's larboard. ‘Boarders, stand ready! Starboard bow!' Biddlecomb shouted. ‘Mr Tottenhill!' he shouted to the first officer in the waist. ‘Take charge here, I'm going with the boarding party!' and with that he raced off the quarterdeck and forward.

The
Charlemagne
and the British man-of-war slammed together, bow to bow, at the same instant that each fired a broadside. It seemed as if the world were torn apart with noise and shattered wood and shuddering decks underfoot.

‘Boarders! Follow me!' Biddlecomb shouted, barely able to hear himself, and waving his sword over his head. He leapt up on the number one gun, ready to leap across to the enemy deck, then saw that he was not the only captain to have thought of this.

The crew of the British brig were gathered in the bow of their own vessel, and even as Biddlecomb prepared to board, so they were readying to leap aboard the
Charlemagne
.

‘Son of a bitch,' Biddlecomb said to himself, and then the British sailors, ten of them at least, were tossed aside as if the breath of God had blown them away. From the
Charlemagne
's tops the marines had cut them down with their swivel gun and a withering, accurate musket fire, the result of years of hunting in the Pennsylvania woods.

This was the moment, the second before they regrouped. Biddlecomb turned to his men. ‘Come on!' he shouted. Faircloth was on the deck below him, literally pushing men out of the way in his desire to be in the forefront of the attack, and behind him were those marines who had been stationed on deck.

Like a cresting wave the Americans poured over the bulwarks and onto the enemy's deck, driving the stunned British before them, sweeping them aft with a momentum that they could not resist. The ferocity in the Yankees surprised even Biddlecomb, a release of months of anger and frustration and humiliation. They screamed like savages, banging out with their pistols and thrusting with their cutlasses at the wide-eyed, terrified British sailors.

A man dropped his sword and threw his hands up, and one of the Charlemagnes hit him square in the face with the hilt of his cutlass. Then another Englishman threw down his cutlass, then another and another, and a moment later only the captain of the brig and three blue-coated officers were still fighting a desperate and futile battle aft.

‘Avast! Avast there!' Biddlecomb shouted in that tone that foremast jacks were conditioned to instantly obey. The attackers stopped and stepped back, leaving the officers alone, swords held before them.

‘Do you strike, sir?' Biddlecomb asked, pushing through the crowd of men. ‘I say, sir, do you strike?'

The captain of the brig – he was in fact a lieutenant, Biddlecomb noticed by his uniform – looked desperately around, though what he hoped to see Biddlecomb could not imagine. He was a young man, younger than Isaac, and even his scowl and his fighting countenance could not hide his generally amiable appearance. He flung his sword down on the deck and said, ‘Yes, God damn it, I strike.'

The other officers also dropped their swords to the deck, though with not quite as much violence. Then the captain stooped over and picked up his sword and handed it to Biddlecomb.

‘No, thank you, I beg you, keep it,' Biddlecomb said, and smiling added, ‘I have one of my own.'

The captain of the brig nodded and looked much relieved, slipping his sword back into its scabbard. His expression suggested that he did not know if Biddlecomb's comment had been a joke. ‘I am Lt Edward Sneyd, of His Majesty's armed brig
Bolton
. I congratulate you on your victory.'

‘I am Capt. Isaac Biddlecomb, of the Continental brig-of-war
Charlemagne
, and I thank you.' He turned to issue orders to Faircloth and Rumstick, who now flanked him, and his eye caught a bundle of cloth wedged against the bulwark of the quarterdeck. ‘Pray, sir, where did you get that flag? The pine tree with the motto An Appeal to Heaven?'

‘That's one of your rebel flags, ain't it?'

‘It is one of our Continental flags, yes, but I was curious as to where you saw it to get the idea to copy it.'

‘That was given to me by Capt. Tyringham Howe of the frigate
Glasgow
just before I set out on this cruise. In hopes that it would be of some help in fooling you,' he added with a touch of bitterness.

‘Howe? I thought William Maltby was captain of the
Glasgow
.'

‘He was,' said Sneyd, ‘until he had the bad luck to lose a rebel prize as well as a storeship from a convoy he was escorting. Actually, that flag was from the rebel prize. Maltby left it on board the
Glasgow
when he left. I suppose he didn't care to be reminded of the incident.'

‘Bring that here,' Biddlecomb said to a seaman standing beside him.

The man snatched up the flag and handed it to him. He ran the heavy cloth through his fingers. There was that familiar pine tree with the black smudge from the time the flag had got caught up under the topmast backstay, and the small patch the sailmaker had sewn over a tear near the fly. Biddlecomb smiled a broad smile. It was the
Charlemagne
's flag. They had taken it back.

The change in the ship's mood was extraordinary. The Charlemagnes could not have been happier if they had been shipwrecked on an island of beautiful women and functional distilleries. Men moved faster, laid aloft faster, chided each other with good-natured banter, and lied outrageously about their exploits while boarding the
Bolton
. To listen to them one might think that no one had remained aboard the
Charlemagne
during the fight, and that all had cowered in fright save for the man who happened to be speaking at the moment.

And nothing put Amos Hackett in a more foul and desperate mood than the jubilation surrounding him. He sat at dinner that afternoon hunched over his food, scowling at the rough mess tabletop, while his five messmates ate in silence, terrified by Hackett's black humor.

‘You've got nothing to worry about.'

Hackett looked up quickly, startled that someone would dare address him. It was Fletcher, stupid Fletcher, standing there grinning at him. ‘Ain't no one but me saw you hanging back today, pretending you was hurt, and I won't tell.'

Hackett stared at the man until Fletcher began to shift nervously, until he became aware that the crew's general good mood did not necessarily make it safe for him to approach in this manner. ‘Is that some joke, Fletcher? Are you making a joke?'

‘Well, I …' Fletcher stammered, taking a step back. Hackett felt the pressure building inside, the bulkhead about to burst. He stood up and whipped the sheath knife out of his belt. Fletcher stepped back again, dropping the bucket of food he was bringing to his mess table, and pulled his own knife out, holding it before him with trembling hand.

‘Is that a joke?' Hackett asked again, advancing. The tween decks was silent now, the buzz of happy conversation gone as the men watched the confrontation.

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean nothing.'

‘You meant something, you son of a whore.' Hackett stabbed out at Fletcher, and as he did, a big hand clapped on to his wrist and held it fast.

‘Leave him be, Hackett,' Woodberry said. Hackett stared at him, jerking his wrist back and forth, but he could not break Woodberry's grip. He could not believe the strength of the hand that had only a month before been broken. He could still see the vestiges of the bruises on Woodberry's face from the time in New Providence that he and Allen and the others had caught him alone in the cable tier and had beaten him half to death. Biddlecomb's little spy on the tween decks.

‘Let go of me, you bastard, or I'll get Tottenhill to lock you down again, you sodding bastard.'

‘You will, hey? Captain's back on board now, and Mr Rumstick, so you can't go and get your little son of a whore Tottenhill to do your bidding this time. It's only you and me here, Hackett.' Woodberry let go of Hackett's wrist, and in the next instant he had his own sheath knife in hand, and unlike Fletcher he held it with a confidence born of long practice, moving it slowly back and forth like a snake ready to strike and beckoning with his other hand.

Hackett was aware of the crowd closing in, the men forming a circle around them, ready for more blood sport, not sated by the morning's fight.

‘Of course you're ready to fight, you bastard,' Hackett said. ‘Even if you win, nothing would happen to you. Your little Biddlecomb would protect you, but me, I'd hang for killing you, you Yankee bastard.'

‘It'd be worth it, wouldn't it, Hackett, just to put your knife in me? Come on, then, give it a try.'

‘Sod off, you bastard,' Hackett said, slipping his knife back into his sheath. ‘And you, steer clear of me,' he added to Fletcher, kicking him hard in the side and then sitting at his mess table again.

‘We'll be ashore soon, Hackett,' Woodberry said, putting his own knife away, ‘and then you'll dance to my tune.'

‘I said sod off,' Hackett snarled, and the crowd dissipated as quickly as it had formed.

This was not a good situation. They
would
be ashore soon, Woodberry was right about that, and it would only be a matter of time before Woodberry caught him alone, before he would have to fight the Yankee one-on-one. Woodberry outweighed him by three stone and was strong and quick. In a fair fight Hackett was a dead man, and he knew it.

And even if Woodberry did not get him, Biddlecomb would. Far from being discredited, the captain was some kind of hero again, and the crew's morale was as high as it had ever been. Biddlecomb would be able to do whatever he wished once they made landfall.

‘See here, what did I say?' Hackett growled at the other men in his mess. ‘And doesn't Woodberry look forward to getting ashore? They've got it in for us. Biddlecomb'll leave every one of us poor bastards on the beach, a thousand miles from home and no pay or prize money. That's why he shipped us, so he could leave us off and only him and his Yankee friends to share the prize money, and us doing the worst of the fighting today.'

‘Tottenhill tell you that?' asked Allen.

‘Of course he did. Biddlecomb's got it in for him too, that's why Totty wants us North Carolina men to stick together. And we almost had it set that the commodore was going to drum Biddlecomb out, and now he gets lucky with this rutting brig that practically gives up once it sees us.'

That last statement sparked a sufficient amount of muttering among the men that Hackett was able to dig into his dinner and let the talk run high among them.

‘So what can we do?' one of the mess asked.

‘Nothing,' said Hackett. ‘Not one damned thing. As long as Biddlecomb looks like the admiral of the fucking ocean blue, there's nothing we can do. Except hope that some time between now and when we anchor he does something stupid again and the commodore wants to get rid of him once and for all. It's him or us, boys.'

It seemed a desperate situation indeed, but Hackett, in his own way an eternal optimist, could still see some possibilities.

The prize had demanded a prize crew. He had hoped initially that Rumstick would be sent away in command, but that job had been given instead to Sprout, the bosun. But the rest of the men sent to the
Bolton
, almost without exception, were Yankees. Most of the North Carolina men, and the former prisoners from Philadelphia, most of the men who would do Hackett's bidding with a few chosen words, were still aboard the
Charlemagne
.

They were in New England waters. They would be anchored soon. But they were not anchored yet.

Hackett felt a glimmer of hope break through his black mood. As long as they were at sea, there was still an opportunity for mischief. He could still bring Biddlecomb down.

And now with Biddlecomb's threats of discharge or worse hanging over his head, and Woodberry's threats of violence, destroying Biddlecomb was no longer something he might do for amusement. It was something he had to do to survive.

The sun was approaching the horizon, the evening was warm with no more than six knots of breeze, and Block Island, five miles to the west, seemed to glow with the orange light of the sun illuminating it from behind. Isaac Biddlecomb could not recall a time when he had been more content.