Chapter 118: A Brilliant Plan, Probably
James heaved the wheel over with all his strength, swinging the Rose’s bow back toward the Falmouth while the ship fought to recover from the punishment she’d just taken. The deck still lurched beneath their feet while smoke rolled across the guns.
Even before it began to clear, Cudjoe already had sailors move with buckets and coils of rope, driving them into place with authority. He never needed to shout twice.
"Get that man below and get another on the gun, we’ve nae time to mourn him proper!"
Briggs moved through the shattered deck without a word. He did not need them, one look from him was enough to send sailors scrambling toward the next job.
An entire battery now worked with less crew that had served it only moments earlier, and no one wasted precious seconds counting who had not gotten back up.
Nearby, Mackerel Jim had a bloodied topman tucked beneath one arm, dragging him away from the nearest cannon while the wounded sailor screamed through clenched teeth.
"Easy now, lad, easy."
Jim hauled him across the planks as if he weighed no more than a sack of provisions. "I took a splinter clean through the thigh off Tortuga once, bigger than yer whole leg, mind, and I danced a jig on it before sundown. Ye’ll be dancin’ by supper, wait and see."
The topman stared at him as though Jim had finally lost what little sense he’d ever possessed.
Jim would have insisted that was exactly the point.
Not far from them, Bert finished tying off a wounded sailor’s arm with a length of cloth, pulling the knot snug while Edmund braced the man by both shoulders.
"I would suggest, Bert, that a tourniquet applied too far from the wound itself does the patient little service."
"A fair observation."
Bert shifted his grip without the slightest hint of urgency. "Though I confess I have rarely practiced surgery under quite these conditions."
Nearby, Wesley had already knelt beside another wounded sailor without anyone asking him to. His hands were busy before anyone else noticed.
"Certainly," he replied, agreeing to a conversation he plainly had not heard a single word of.
Hobbs had another sailor pinned beneath one knee while he worked a jagged piece of oak from the man’s calf with a knife that looked older than most of the crew.
He paused only long enough to take a pull from his rum bottle before pouring the rest straight into the wound without asking. The sailor howled loudly enough to compete with the guns.
"Quit yer moanin’."
Hobbs corked the bottle and went back to work. "Rum’s rum whichever end it’s servin’. Ye’ll thank me once ye stop screamin’ about it."
High above, Ned wrestled with a parted rope. His hands shook badly enough that he nearly lost it twice.
Kit scrambled past him along the yard as though the battle existed solely for his entertainment, letting out a whoop every time a cannonball passed close enough to feel.
"That’s ten near misses I’ve counted, Ned! Ten! A man could get famous countin’ misses if the countin’ itself was dangerous enough!"
Below them, Tomás worked the rope with some grave devotion he might have given a hymn book, as though the rigging were an altar and the mast a kind of stern, splintered cathedral. He called up corrections in that mild voice of his, while the deck pitched and the guns roared like the devil himself had been loosed in the hold.
"Left hand first, Ned, then the right, or you will lose both together."
Ned obeyed him without a second thought, which was a fine enough wonder on its own. Yet there he was, a church boy from Pensacola who had somehow turned into one of the seasoned hands, speaking like he had salt in his veins and tar in his beard, and making old seamen follow his lead as if he had been born doing it.
Farrow had the gun crews back to their stations before the smoke even vanished, driving them into place with a voice like a whipcrack.
"Back to yer guns, ye shite-eatin’ laggards! Do I have to drag every one o’ ye by the ear?"
Some powder monkey was still blinking through the smoke when Farrow caught and shoved him toward the nearest carriage.
"Do ye mean to stand there waitin’ for the devil to take yer place?"
He barked. "Load that piece, prime it, and make it count. We’ve no time for prayers now."
"Aye, aye," one of the sailors gasped, hauling himself upright.
"Not aye, aye, me, lad," Farrow snapped back. "Say it to the gun, and say it quicker."
Near the mortars, Anne’s voice cut clean through the chaos as she hauled her own crew back into place. She did not trust a soul but herself to check the elevation.
"Out o’ my way!"
She snapped, shouldering past a man who had no business standing where he was. "If you’re meant for a broom, I’ll fetch ye one. If you’re meant for a gun, then get to work!"
One of the hands tried to take the elevation from her.
Anne shot him a look that could have curdled rum. "You want to tell me how to lay a mortar, do it after we’ve put a hole through that blasted bastard’s deck."
He shut his mouth at once.
She planted a boot by the carriage and checked the angle herself, one hand on the gun, the other already brushing grit and smoke from the sighting marks.
"Wind’s gone sour," she muttered.
"Aye," said one of the gunners beside her. "The sea’s all but dancing under us."
"Then let it dance, I’m not askin’ the sea’s blessing."
She glanced back toward the crew. "Powder, quick now. And mind you do not spill it like green boys in a gin shop."
James caught her eye through the drifting haze.
"Think ye can put another through her forward hatch, lass, or was the first one luck?"
"Luck’s for men who miss."
Anne checked the fuse with complete concentration. "Give me some room and I’ll show you exactly whose aim needs improvin’."
"That an offer?"
"That’s a warnin’, James. Stand close enough and you’ll lose somethin’ you’re fond of."
James laughed despite the smoke burning his eyes.
"Fire when ready, then. Wouldn’t dream of keepin’ ye from provin’ a point."
"Ready."
Anne touched off the mortar before he’d even finished speaking, as if determined to prove herself twice over.
The sister shells crashed onto the Falmouth’s forward deck with a deafening crack. For the briefest instant nothing happened, then the deck burst apart in a roar of splintered oak, shattered gun carriages, and men thrown through a cloud of burning debris.
Flames rolled outward from the blast, swallowing coils of rope and loose canvas in a heartbeat while jagged timber scythed across the gun crews.
The smoke from the mortars shot had scarcely begun to thin before the wind shifted. It caught the haze and tore it across the sea as the swells beneath the ships started to build, each one steeper than the last.
Within moments the Rose was climbing and dropping over water that seemed to have woken all at once.
Rain swept over them in a solid sheet, slanting hard enough to sting bare skin and blur the world beyond a few dozen yards. The grey sky merged with grey sea until the horizon vanished entirely, and voices that had carried the length of the deck moments before were swallowed by the storm, forcing men to bellow into one another’s faces just to be understood.
The Fortune fired a broadside through the turbulent weather, and James watched most of the shot vanish into a wave that hadn’t existed moments before. Water rose to swallow iron that would have struck cleanly in calmer seas.
"Starboard battery, fire as she bears!"
The Rose answered a heartbeat later, but she found little more success. The deck pitched violently beneath the gun crews, sending their shots high above the Falmouth.
The Falmouth returned fire at both ships in turn, yet for the first time since the battle began, the guns themselves mattered less than the sea. Distance and towering waves swallowed shots that should have torn into timber.
Sailors slid across planks made slick by rain and blood alike while gun crews cursed an enemy they could not shoot back at.
"You might as well ask me to thread a needle in a gale!" Anne shouted.
Rain plastered Anne’s hair to her cheeks and drove her shirt tight against the swell of her back and chest, the wet cloth clinging to every curve as she braced both hands on the mortar carriage.
James understood exactly what she meant.
He simply did not care.
Rain streamed down his face while the Rose bucked beneath him like a sea monsters, but somewhere beneath the fear any sensible man ought to have felt, excitement surged instead.
The storm, the battle, and the sea were all trying to kill him at once, and none of them had managed it yet. He could not remember the last time he’d felt more like himself.
Peering through the downpour, he watched what remained of the old duchess. Fresh scars marked her from bow to stern even if the rain smothered fires before they could spread, and whatever resolve remained among her crew was beginning to fail.
One clean hit in the right place might accomplish what they had not.
James signaled the Fortune again, but rain snapped at the flags until they were little more than whipping strips of color, and for a moment he thought the message had been lost. Then, through the downpour, Crick answered.
Both ships turned together, curving wide through the rain before they closed on the Falmouth from opposite sides. It was a trap meant for a captain quick enough to evade one attack, but never both striking together.
James grinned into the rain.
It was, as always, his favorite kind of idea.
The kind considerably more likely to get him killed than not.