Almost a Scandal (32 page)

She followed the sound as it grew stronger. At the foot of the mainmast, a tarpaulin covered the central hatch. She hacked away the lashing and threw back the tarpaulin to reveal two figures, their blades illuminated by the dim light of a lamp that had been knocked to the floor of the hold. Col, his jersey crimson with blood, was fighting at close quarters with a heavier man.

The sinister, metallic clash and scrape of the blades echoed up from the enclosed space, and she could hear the grunts and pants of exertion as the two men battled for their lives.

Devil take her—she had left her bloody pistol near the cathead at the bow. She could try to retrieve it, but—

She didn’t have that moment to waste. Col was already hurt. It would only take that moment for Col to weaken, or slip, for the Frenchman to find another opening and run Col through.

She would have to brazen it out. She could only tighten her suddenly damp grip on her short sword and launch herself onto the deck below with a roaring shout.

She landed hard, with an ungainly tangle of skirts, and rolled to her feet, but the diversion gave Col exactly the opening he needed. When the Frenchman whirled to face this new threat, Col was the one to see his chance, and thrust his sword home.

Over the pounding of her heart, she heard the slick, sick sound of the blade running through flesh, and the agonized grunt of pain as the Frenchman fell to the deck, his life’s blood spilling to pool silently at his feet. Yet, she was still knocked back onto her knees by the ferocious mixture of satisfaction and relief that roared through her.

A man lay dying, but it so easily could have been Col. It nearly
had
been.

“Col, are you all right? How badly are you hurt?” She turned to find the lamp, already teasing out scenarios in her head. They had caused enough destruction in the city to satisfy Captain McAlden without further endangering Col. If he needed a surgeon, they would abandon the rest of the plan, and simply cut the stern anchor and run out Le Goulet to meet with
Audacious.

“Not as badly as the Frenchman.” Col’s voice was wrung out, almost bitter with exertion, and he was bent over, resting his hands on his knees to catch his breath, his bloody sword still clenched tight in his hand. The gash across his left arm continued to bleed sluggishly, and his trousers were soaked in blood.

Sally held the lamp closer to examine the wound, which proved not to be a saber gash, but a bullet torn across the thick of the muscle of his left arm. Both the jersey and his skin were charred with the dark burn of powder. “He must have shot you at point-blank range.”

Col shook away her concern. “He missed. It just grazed me. Let’s get back to the job at hand. Load and prime the bow guns. There’s a small powder locker forward. Then we’ll see to the sails. Lively now. Someone will have heard that shot.”

“First, let me bind that, then I’ll load your guns. I’ve already loosed the sails.” She pulled up her skirts to find the cleanest portion of the petticoat to rip away for a bandage.

“Did you?” He looked up at the luffing canvas to find his own answer. “You’re not very good at taking orders.”

“I am when they’re good orders, sir.” She met his eyes directly, almost boldly, as she wrapped the linen strip tight around his arm. Let him try to tell her she hadn’t been needed, and she might be tempted to put another ball in him herself.

But he was already past the point of arguing, moving on and thinking ahead. “That’ll do, Sal. Thank you. I’m going to knock out the windows in the stern cabin for a greater draft of air, and then see if we can find more canvas and furniture to start a pile here.”

“What about him?” Sally’s eyes were drawn to the prone body of the Frenchman. “Ought we to do something for him?”

Col spared him only a glance. “He’s dead. There’s nothing to do. Get to work. We don’t have much time. That shot will have aroused attention.”

But Sally found she couldn’t be as cold-blooded as she had thought. She had seen a dead body before—it was hard not to in their world—but never one so … freshly dead. Never one in whose death she had had a direct hand. Never one she had watched die.

It occurred to her then to turn and search the shadows of the ketch’s hold. “He was alone?”

“Near as I can tell.” Col straightened and sheathed his sword. “There were no signs of any other crew. I think maybe he had been hiding out here, squatting, if you will, to escape service elsewhere.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the French fleet. “Or the army. Either way. Do yourself a kindness, Kent—don’t spare him another thought.”

She didn’t need Col to remind her it could have been him. She didn’t need to look at his arm to know it almost
was
him. And the night was still far from over.

But still, she couldn’t stop the strange painful heat within, like a tear along her heart.

“It’s not a game anymore, is it, Kent?”

She looked up to find Col’s eyes upon her, that hard meticulous attention. “It never was. I’m not soft, Col. Only human.”

He nodded and blew out his breath. “Then perhaps you’ll understand why I needed you to stay in the damn boat.”

His twisted logic made her smile. And apply some twisted logic of her own. “Of course. For the same reason that I needed to get out of it. Now, shall we get to work?”

“By all means.”

Neither of them had conceded anything, and yet they seemed to be in accord—they worked better as a team than they did alone.

Another thirty minutes of work piling up rotten canvas and old furniture, spilling out powder and lamp oil, and they were almost ready to get under way. It only remained for them to hoist the spanker sail at the mizzen and cut the stern anchor, before Col took the wheel and steered directly for the largest ship of the line, a seventy-four-gun warship, standing at the head of the French fleet’s anchorage.

They had to time it just right, to set the fire with enough time to engage the whole vessel, to gauge the wind and set the helm so that it would carry the fireship into the fleet, and to be able to abandon the ship with enough distance to escape themselves. There was almost no margin for error.

“Ready, Kent?”

“Aye, sir.”

Col’s eyes were everywhere—checking the fill of the sails, gauging the closing distance to the fleet, calculating their progress over the water. “Light it.”

Sally threw the lantern down through the main hatch and watched as the flames caught hold immediately. Heat built in no time, and she backed away from amidships, retreating toward the helm, as the flames licked over the combing of the hatchway.

This time, when Col ordered her into the safety of the boat now tailed off the stern, she was glad to go, though she was less glad to again wait for Col, and worry for his safety. Every moment brought another chance for a misstep. The ship was becoming enveloped in fire. The drifting smoke stung her eyes and the heat of the flames built so she could feel it through the hull of the ketch. Above her head, the fire climbed into the rigging, and the canvas of the mainsail began to dance with flame, while the draft from the conflagration below pushed hot air into the topsails and propelled the ketch onward. And still Col steered the vessel closer and closer to the anchored fleet.

“Col?”

She had just run out of all patience when he came sailing over the taffrail above her head to cleave the water with a nearly silent dive. He bobbed to the surface a dozen yards away, calmly treading water as he waited for her to cast off and row out to him.

“Devil take it, Col. Did you catch fire?”

“I may have done,” he said as he grappled his way into the boat. “I didn’t stick around to find out.” He paused, dripping cold water and trying to catch his breath. “Pull hard away.”

She did so, putting her back into it and concentrating on moving as fast as she could at an oblique angle from the fireship, so they could hide among the other vessels dotting the bay and not be seen by the sharp eyes of the fleet behind.

In the stern sheets, Col looked exhausted and drawn. Combined with the pain of the wound and the blood loss, the strenuous preparations to launch the fireship had taken it out of him. And still there was the American schooner to take.

“How’s your arm?” The saltwater of the bay had washed away the worst of the blood, but there wasn’t light enough to see if the bleeding had stopped entirely.

“I’ll live.” But his voice was growing thin and streaked with pain.

Behind them, the alarm had finally gone up in the fleet. Bo’sun’s whistles calling for all hands pierced the night, and crewmen appeared with pikes and oars to try to fend the fireship off. But the flames had almost entirely engulfed the ketch, moving higher and higher in the rigging until at last the topsails had caught fire, and the tongues of flame all but leapt from spar to spar and ship to ship.

They had done it. Together they had put the French to rout. They had accomplished what they had set out to do.

But they themselves were still in danger. She didn’t like to think what still might happen if they tried to take the American schooner. Especially when there were other alternatives to hand.

“Compliments of the oars, Mr. Colyear, I thought you might like to know the French fleet is on fire.”

He didn’t want to smile, but as he looked over his shoulder at the scene, and then back at her, the corners of his mouth stove in. Just enough to encourage her, and give her heart. It was a begrudging smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Thank you for that report, Mr. Kent.”

“Pleasure, sir. But if I may?”

“Yes, Kent?”

“Compliments of the oars, sir, but seeing as you’re still leaking blood like a bleeding pin cushion, might I make a suggestion?”

His answer was as wry as it was weary. “You will anyway.”

“If I had taken one on my fin, I shouldn’t want to tangle with any Americans. Nasty, those Yankees are. Stubborn and particularly possessive about their ships.”

“Are they?”

“They are, sir.” She made a slight correction with her larboard oar to take them in the direction she had in mind. “If I were shot to pieces and leaking blood like bilge water, I would steal that rich man’s yacht, there, instead of trying to tangle with and outwit Americans.”

Col pivoted slowly to regard the vessel she had indicated with a toss of her chin. “That one?”

“That one,” she confirmed. It was a sleek yacht of about sixty feet of keel, dark and battened down. A pleasure craft, a rich man’s toy, left to sit and gather barnacles during the long days of war. “You could sail all the way to the Bahamas in that one, like a French grandee.”

Nothing could stop his smile now. It was so broad, they both could have sailed away on it. “Well, then, Kent. It’s a good thing I’ve always wanted to be a grandee.”

Chapter Nineteen

It was a relatively simple thing to steal a rich man’s sloop. The state of its cables and lines, and the stiffness of the canvas sails, told Col that the vessel had been riding unattended at its mooring for a very long time—in a time of war, men could spare no thought for leisure.

Yet, however long it had been out of trim, the sloop could still sail—at least long enough to get them offshore to meet up with
Audacious.
With no crew aboard with which to fight, they had only to slip the mooring and sail away.

Col gritted his teeth against the stinging ache in his arm, and hauled up the mainsail, but he was glad enough to take the wheel when Kent told him she could manage the jib on her own.

In such a hampered state, he was content to set only the few sails necessary to propel them forward. The fore and aft rig of the sloop meant they could sail nimbly against the wind, and through the narrows of the Goulet passage with only the jib and main.

There was no need for any kind of subterfuge, as around them other vessels were slipping out as well. Fisherfolk and traders alike were willing to chance the enemy’s offshore blockade in a effort to save their livelihoods from being consumed by the conflagration that seemed to have spread to the harbor. Col eased out the main sheet and fell in behind a swift, lug-rigged
chasse-marée.

Sally Kent came aft to where he stood at the wheel, looking for all the world like a hardworking fishwife and not the languid, kept lady of a grandee. She was constantly working, trimming the set of a sail, or coiling lines as she came, her eyes no doubt cataloguing every peculiarity of the
chasse-marée
’s unusual rig.

“Have you never seen a
chasse-marée
before?” He still kept his voice low—sound traveled strangely over water, and there was no need to court any further danger through carelessness. He’d had more than his fill for one day.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “A smuggler, I reckon, since he doesn’t stink of fish.”

“We’ll be chasing him down in
Audacious
come tomorrow.”

Sally gave him a quick little smile in appreciation of life’s strange little ironies. “Shall we cut out the wait and simply go after him now?”

He smiled back. “I think we’ve done enough for one night. We’ll sail northwest toward Ushant and hope to meet up with
Audacious,
or another British ship, by daybreak.”

She took a place just abaft him as they cleared the land and parted ways with the other vessels—a moonlit specter of a lieutenant, dutifully awaiting his orders. But now that all the activity and exertion of passing through the narrows was behind them and they had reached the open roads of the sea, he could no longer hold off the aching exhaustion. The burning pain in his arm where the Frenchman’s ball had ripped a raw strip from his skin intensified, until his whole left side felt as if it were still on fire.

As if she could read his thoughts, Sally indicated his arm with a quick toss of her chin. “You need to get out of those wet clothes. And that needs to be attended to.”

“It’ll do till we get back to
Audacious
. But I won’t say no to getting dry.”

“I stowed your clothes below.” She indicated the small cabin just forward. “I’ll take the wheel while you change. Although for my part, I’ll be glad to be rid of these skirts. I had a devil of a time in the rigging of that ketch. It’s half a wonder that I didn’t come to grief then and there.”