The French Prize (28 page)

He reached up over the edge of the top, got a good grip on the topmast lanyards, and hauled himself up and over. He swung inboard and found his footing on the small, crescent-shaped structure, steadied himself with a hand on the topmast shrouds, and surveyed the scene. Things had not changed in any material way since he had left the deck. The Frenchman was mostly hidden by the sail on the aftermost mast, but he could see the ship was still astern of them and getting closer, and Biddlecomb was still running like a dog with its tail between its legs.

“You'll have to do some bloody thing soon,” William said, pleased to be able to speak out loud where no one could hear, a luxury he had generally taken for granted before being thrust aboard the tiny, tight-packed
Abigail
. Talking to himself was one of his great outlets, and he missed it terribly.

He crouched down and leaned outboard, but with the ships as they were he could not get a shot at the Frenchman without shooting a hole through the sail, which would not be welcome, he guessed, nor would it be very effective. It was one thing to fire roundshot or a stand of grape without careful aim, it was another to shoot a tiny .62 caliber ball. In any event, he could not fire until Biddlecomb did, because in this instance anyway Wentworth had decided to follow orders.

Wentworth widened his stance, let go of the shroud, and grabbed up the powder horn, silver inlaid with a brass measure on the end. It was a familiar gesture; he had owned the gun for eight years and with it had terminated the existence of many living things, though never a human. He poured a measure of powder down the grooved barrel. He held the gun up, removed a greased patch from the patch box in the butt of the gun, and pulled a smooth, cool lead ball from his shot pouch. He laid the patch over the muzzle of the gun and it blew away in the breeze. He cursed, pulled another patch from the box, held it in place with his thumb as he positioned the ball on top and shoved both of them partway down the barrel.

With a practiced flip of his wrist he pulled the rammer free and began to bang the ball and patch down the barrel. The patch would grab the rifling as the ball came out and impart a spin to it, giving the gun its legendary accuracy, but it made for hard going as he loaded. And it would only get worse as powder residue built up and made the fit tighter still.

After some pounding he felt the bullet was home, so he pulled the rammer out and returned it to the slot under the barrel. He flipped open the frizzen, primed the gun, and closed the pan. He rested the butt of the gun on the wooden slats of the top and looked astern once more. Nothing had changed.

“You damn well better do something bloody soon,” he said. Having seen Biddlecomb in command during the storm, Biddlecomb, who stood unflappable as the ship seemed to come apart around him, who charged into the rigging to cut the sail free as the ship was going over, who ordered men aloft into the maelstrom with never a second thought, who had leapt like a cat onto the loose cannon, Wentworth had come to think of the man as bold and decisive. He might even have seen in himself a touch of envy if he had explored his feelings that deeply, which he generally did not.

But now Biddlecomb appeared to be immobilized by indecision; this Frenchman was a snake, and Biddlecomb a rabbit transfixed by its stare.

And then around the edge of the sail Wentworth saw the Frenchman alter course, swinging off to one side, and as he did, one of his cannons blasted out, and through the rumble of the shot came the sound of rent wood below. He stepped to the forward edge of the top and looked down. He could see a straight line of destruction through the boat on the hatch directly below him, delineating where a roundshot had passed clean through. And then he saw the hole in the bulwark where it had first made landfall aboard
Abigail
. A sailor was standing by the hole, the ball having only by inches missed cutting him in two.

From below and behind he heard Biddlecomb's voice shout out, and suddenly the ship, which had been like a frozen tableau, exploded into action. The sails began to wheel around as men on deck hauled away, the sails that Biddlecomb called “stuns'ls” disappeared, the big sail just below Wentworth's feet was hauled up, and the ship slewed around to larboard. It happened so fast, and was so unexpected, at least to Wentworth, that he had to lash out and grab a topmast shroud to avoid being tossed from the maintop.

Then the guns went off, one, two, three, in a great and satisfying concussion and Wentworth shouted over the blast, “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!” He was grinning, an unseemly expression, but there was no one there to see so he kept right on.

He recalled then that he was not supposed to be sightseeing, that he had “laid aloft” with a purpose, and the blast from the great gun was his signal to fire at will.
Abigail
was presenting her larboard side to the Frenchman, so he stepped to the larboard main topmast shrouds and thrust the rifle between them, resting the barrel on a ratline of a convenient height. He looked down the length of the winking steel tube toward the enemy beyond. The great blankets of sails,
Abigail
's and the Frenchman's, made it damned hard to find a target.

One of the Frenchman's sails, one of those forward, had collapsed, perhaps shot down by
Abigail
's broadside, and Wentworth could see a figure in white duck pants and a checked shirt making his way along the bowsprit, laying out to do something or other, secure the sail or cut it away or fix the rigging. Wentworth had no idea of what he was about, but the man was a target, and he could find no other.

He lined the end of the barrel up with the man's checked shirt and let his breathing settle, tracking him with the gun as he moved along the bowsprit. The French ship was plunging up and down and the
Abigail
was rolling and the man was moving outboard; three separate motions for which to compensate, a shooting conundrum that Wentworth had never encountered.

And another problem he had never had to consider before. This was a human being at which he was pointing his gun, a gun with which he generally did not miss. When Biddlecomb unleashed his cannon fire, he was killing randomly, anonymously, aiming at a ship and killing anyone who happened to be in the way. But Wentworth was picking the individual he meant to shoot, and if he succeeded he would see him die, the direct result of a conscious decision.

Wentworth had wounded men in duels, but never killed one. He had often considered how he might react to taking a man's life. He never thought it would bother him. But now he was not so sure.

He finger eased against the trigger. The French ship plunged down and the man on the bowsprit grabbed hold and Wentworth tracked him, putting more pressure on the trigger. Then he heard Biddlecomb shout again from below, felt the
Abigail
turning once more, a new element of motion in this world where everything was moving. He cursed, lined the gun up with the target, and pulled the trigger as
Abigail
rolled away to leeward. He saw the heavy black line above the French sailor's head cut nearly in two, saw the man look up sharp toward the
Abigail
's rig, then turn and race back inboard. A few seconds more and the sailor and the Frenchman's bow were lost from sight as the
Abigail
turned.

“Damn it!” Wentworth said out loud. Any moral qualms he might have had about shooting the fellow were lost in his frustration at missing. Indeed, the alacrity with which the sailor had raced off the bowsprit would have been funny if Wentworth had not been so annoyed.

He threaded an arm through the shrouds to steady himself and went through the process of powder, patch, and bullet once again. He primed the gun and looked up, ready for another go at the Frenchie, but the Frenchie was gone. For a moment Wentworth stared dumbly at an empty ocean. Then he swiveled around and saw the Frenchman on the starboard side and realized the
Abigail
had turned a half circle while he was focused on loading his weapon.

He stepped across the maintop and rested the gun on a ratline on the starboard side and looked over the barrel as he swept the deck. There were any number of men there, standing ready to haul at the lines or working the guns, which were not below decks as Wentworth had seen on larger ships but right there in the open. The crew was considerably bigger than that of the
Abigail
, but that was how things were, he understood. Penny-pinching merchant ship owners would scrimp in every way they could: the fewest men, the cheapest food, the minimum of maintenance to their ships, if it meant an extra sou in their pockets. The navy, in turn, fed at the trough of public money and did not care how much it consumed.

Wentworth ran his eye over the Frenchman's crowded deck, let his arms and legs absorb the motion of the ship, let the gun sway naturally. The trick, he could see, would be to work with the combined motions of the ships, not fight them. Let the gun move into the firing position, pull the trigger a fraction of a second before the sight was on the target.

“Now, which one of you bloody damned Frenchmen should die first?” he asked out loud.
Abigail
was turning but the Frenchman was sailing on, and it seemed to Wentworth that in a moment the Frenchman would be able to fire into
Abigail
's stern, and
Abigail
, with never a gun pointing in that direction, would be helpless.

“That can't be a good thing,” he said. Standing behind one of the guns was a figure in a blue uniform and he seemed a likely target. Certainly it would be more advantageous to kill an officer, Wentworth thought. He felt the ship move under him, lined the gun up with the Frenchman in blue.
Abigail
rolled and the Frenchman rolled and the gun swept past its target, paused and began to roll back.

A poor marksman, even a mediocre marksman, would have fired when the rifle was aiming at the target, but Wentworth was neither of those things. He understood that the target would continue to move as the bullet sailed across the space separating him from the gun. He paused as the French ship rolled toward him, and he squeezed the trigger while the rifle was still pointed at the Frenchman's deck, a foot to the right of the man in blue.

Such niceties would have been a joke with a musket, and even with most rifles, but the shot from the Jover and Belton was straight and true. The spinning bullet traversed the space between the ships in a fraction of a second, and in that fraction of a second the French ship rolled to leeward and carried the officer, quite unaware of the flying lead, right into the path of the bullet, which struck him square in the chest.

From his perch in the maintop Wentworth saw the man knocked from his feet and flung back on the deck, and he was close enough and the planks of the deck were white enough that he could see the streak of blood that landed there in the wake of the bullet.

He straightened and smiled, satisfied with that damned fine shot, not struck in any profound way by the fact that he had just ended another man's life. Then the forward-most cannon on the Frenchman's broadside fired, a deep boom, much deeper than the previous guns, or
Abigail
's, and a great jet of gray smoke shot from the muzzle, and then the next gun and the next. From his perch he had a good view of
Abigail
's quarterdeck, the starboard side, in any event, the larboard being hidden by the sail they called the mizzen. Wentworth could see significant chunks of wood torn from the rails as one after another the Frenchman's guns fired into the
Abigail
's stern, and
Abigail
unable to fire back.

He watched, astounded. The Frenchman seemed to be tearing the
Abigail
apart. The rail behind the helmsman exploded in a burst of shattered wood and Biddlecomb went flying back across the deck and landed splayed out on the cabin top.

“Oh, dear God!” Wentworth shouted and then the mizzen sail and the spar that held it collapsed to the deck, falling in a great heap of canvas and wood and rope and Wentworth stood there, feeling impotent, his ship being blasted apart and not a thing he could do about it.

“You have a gun, you damned idiot!” he said to himself and his hands moved swiftly through the familiar drill: powder, patch, ball, rammer. After the fouling from two shots the patch and ball were harder to pound down, and Wentworth was sweating by the time he felt the charge hit the bottom of the barrel. He replaced the rammer and looked up again. Once more the entire situation had changed. The Frenchman was still to windward of
Abigail
and turning, bringing the guns on her other side to bear. They were taking in their own lower studdingsails and hauling up the big mainsail, and this opened up Wentworth's view of the deck, allowing him to see clean aft to the quarterdeck.

There were several men there who looked to be likely targets, men in blue uniforms, cocked hats on their heads. They strode back and forth, but slowly, as if this was an outing aboard a yacht, and Wentworth did not think it would be so much of a problem to drop one of them, at least.

He set the gun on a ratline and once again looked over the barrel, sweeping it along the quarterdeck. And then he noticed, behind the officers, the two seamen at the helm, one on either side of the wheel and turning it as the ship turned under them, but remaining otherwise rooted in place.

“Perhaps one of you would make a more efficacious target,” Wentworth said and shifted his aim. He had the feel of it now, the way the two ships moved, the extent to which he had to let the motion of the vessels dictate the moment he squeezed the trigger. He lined up on the helmsman on the starboard side, having a somewhat clearer sight on him, let the ships roll away, let them begin their slow roll back. The rest of it, the battle, Biddlecomb's apparent death, the fact he had just killed a man, it was all gone from his mind, and every part of him, conscious and unconscious, was absorbed in that moment, that geometric problem of motion and distance, velocity and time. His world had closed down to that invisible line between the muzzle of his rifle and the man at the Frenchman's helm.