“Twenty-two.” A strip of flesh tore loose, and the blood splattered. “Twenty-three!” The whip whistled again.
“He’s gone out, Captain,” said the mate.
“Complete the punishment.”
“Let me feel his pulse,” said Dr. Thayer.
George Ourry kept his eyes on the prisoner. “Complete the punishment.”
“I am the medical officer!”
“Proceed, Mr. Speel.”
The mate nodded and called for twenty-four.
Ourry said the best discipline for any crew was the punishment of one of their own. That the prisoner himself no longer felt the lash was of little consequence. Every man aboard, three hundred sailors and two hundred marines, could imagine his own back stripped of flesh in the hot sun. Ourry would allow no doctor, fresh from the grog bucket, to intervene in this demonstration of his authority.
“Twenty-five! Punishment completed. Ship’s company, on ’ats!” cried the mate.
Scrooby Doone and his brother Leyden did not put on their hats, because they were not members of the ship’s company. If they showed disrespect, this captain might flog
them
.
Ourry fixed a cold eye on the Doones until the bos’n explained that they had been sent to the Provincetown anchorage by the Loyalist Solomon Bigelow, whereupon Ourry invited them to his cabin.
While Leyden studied his reflection in the brass lamp above the chart table, Scrooby planted himself before the captain and recited his speech. “Mr. Bigelow said I should tell you Ned Hilyard’s plannin’ a smugglin’ run up to the Scusset, then overland to the sloop he keeps in the Manomet. From there, he plans to run south to New York.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Me brother and me, we… we hears things.”
“What’s he smuggling?”
“Salt.” Leyden made a face at his reflection in the brass. “Bay-shore lads been makin’ it so the army can salt they beef… if they got any.”
“Aye, and they say they’ll carry it on they backs afore lettin’ bloody British get it,” added Scrooby.
“
Bloody
British?” said Ourry.
Scrooby threw back his shoulders, and his Adam’s apple danced in time to his song. “ ‘God save our noble king. God save our gracious king. God save the king.’ ”
Ourry inclined his head slightly and allowed a smile to flicker at this pair of inbreds. “Very good.”
Leyden brought his face to within a few feet of Captain Ourry and stretched his lips like an ape. Then he pursed them as though about to kiss the captain.
“
What
is he doing?” asked Ourry.
“He likes you brass buttons. They make he face look funny. He ain’t too smart.”
“Smarter’n you.” Leyden elbowed his brother.
“Our gracious king will consider knighthood for both of you, if you have dates and times for Hilyard’s journey.”
Scrooby reached into his back pocket, then into the pockets of his waistcoat, then his hatband.
And Leyden pulled a slip of paper from his shoe. “Smarter’n him”
“No, you ain’t.” Scrooby grabbed the paper out of his brother’s hands, smoothed it, and gave it to the captain. “Mr. Bigelow says burn that after you read it. And
he’s
a smart man.”
“Tell him his intelligence is appreciated.”
The Doones tugged at their forelocks like good sailors and left. From the stern gallery, Ourry watched them raise sail and point southwest.
“You sent for me, Captain?” Dr. William Thayer knocked and stepped into the cabin.
“Do you think there are many like those two marching with Washington? Or are all the village idiots Loyalists?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Come, Doctor, I’ve allowed you ashore to tend their sick often enough. Our chaplain has preached in the sorry little churches of Truro and Provincetown. Yet no one can say how large or sturdy is this rebel vessel that sails on a Loyalist sea.”
“Those who heal the sick are welcomed wherever they go, sir, so my perspective is limited.”
“Aye. In many ways, Doctor.” Ourry stepped away from the gallery.
“Many, indeed, sir.” Thayer tugged nervously at his waistcoat and realized that one side was higher than the other. Without looking down, he began to fumble for the misplaced button.
“Trouble with the uniform, Doctor?”
Thayer dropped his hands to his sides.
Ourry poured a glass of port. “Drink?”
Thayer was somewhere in his forties, but they were hard years that had grayed his hair and splotched his skin. “No, thank you, sir.”
“We’re showing a long measure of willpower this afternoon. Especially after the outburst on deck. Or did we partake of Dutch courage?”
“The seaman will live.” Thayer’s hands returned nervously to his waistcoat. “He’s my only concern.”
“Your insubordination would be
my
concern, but I’ve received information on Ned Hilyard, which makes
you
a rather insignificant matter.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I can punish
you
any time, simply by cutting off your grog. But Hilyard’s been slipping my noose for two and a half years now, raiding merchantmen from the Saint Lawrence to the Indies, running food to the armies in the south, hiding himself in bays and inlets whenever he’s at home…. All of this reflects rather badly on me, you know.”
“Yes, sir.” Thayer found the misplaced button. He adjusted it and those below it and smoothed his waistcoat. “A captain cannot afford bad reflections, either from those he blockades or from his medical officer.”
“Now that you’ve straightened your buttons, polish them so that
they
reflect well on
you.”
Ourry glanced out at the coastline and the few shacks of Provincetown. “There is little enough honor here, Doctor. Bringing a privateer to justice will satisfy our… nobler instincts.”
vi.
Rock Harbor nestled in the elbow of Cape Cod, in the south precinct of Eastham, two miles east of the place that was still called Jack’s Island in spite of the best Bigelow efforts to rename it. Ned had moved his family here because Billingsgate had proven to be a vulnerable place, and the narrow channel through these flats made Rock Harbor safer haven than most. Shallow-draft vessels might ground on low tide, and no frigate could come within cannon shot.
Torches of tallow-soaked marsh grass sputtered and spat, and a dozen men hurried to load the
Serenity
.
“There’s a tide waitin’ to turn,” said Sam.
“Where’s your pa?” asked Square Stubbs.
“Sayin’ goodbye to Ma.”
Stubbs laughed. “Quite a man, fillin’ his wife’s belly at his age.”
“You’re speakin’ of my
mother.”
“And a fine woman she is.” Stubbs rolled a barrel of salt to the hold. “But it’s your pa who’s—”
“Load salt, Stubbs.” Sam was now fifteen, tall, bony, better proportioned by the month, and more experienced than men twice his age. He had fired six-pounders at merchantmen off Nova Scotia, lost his virginity to a Dutch whore on Saint Eustatius, faced the dirtiest weather on the Atlantic. He missed Charlie Kwennit, who’d gone off to stand with the Mashpee Indians in the Continental Army, but Stubbs was still there, as square as ever, and Sam was thankful for it.
“Sammy,” Stubbs was saying, “you have to admire a sixty-one-year-old man who can still—”
“Enough of that!” Ned Hilyard strode out of the shadows, his wife close behind.
“Take care of him, Square Henry,” said Marie. “I would not have our new baby born while his father and brother rot on a British prison ship.”
“Nothin’ more than a little night sail up the Scusset,” said Stubbs. “Child’s play.”
And the
Serenity
slipped away at midnight, beneath a cloud-covered sky, on a calm sea.
Sam stood at the bow and watched for British boats. His eyes had adjusted so that he could distinguish three shades of black—dark for the sky, darker for the sea, and darkest for the land to the south. They were abreast of Jack’s Island now, where lived a few farmers of Bigelow blood and a hundred head of Bigelow cattle that seemed suspiciously safe from British shore parties.
He stared into the darkness and allowed his resentment to boil, as it always did when he thought of the Bigelows. One day, when the Hilyards had built a fortune from privateering, he would take the Bigelows’ land and marry their daughter and give them the comeuppance they deserved for all that—
The shot exploded at such close range that the
sound
nearly knocked Sam Hilyard to the deck. Two more shots burst, one from either side, and in the orange nightmare flashes, Sam saw six British longboats with bow-mounted four-pounders racing out of Nauseiput and Jack’s Creek like a pack of dogs.
“Man your guns, lads!” Ned grabbed one of the swivels he kept shotted at the transom, touched a quick match, and the gun thundered. He was answered by musket fire that tore across the deck and killed two of his sailors.
Sam and Square Stubbs worked furiously to load one of the six-pounders. They had not been ready for this.
“Where did they come from?” cried Stubbs.
“It’s my fault,” answered Sam. “I missed ’em.”
“No mind. Just load.”
They rammed the powder cartridge into the gun, then the ball. Stubbs primed the gun from a powder horn, and they ran it just out as the first longboat bumped the hull.
“Tilt ’er!” cried Stubbs.
Sam advanced the quoin to lower the angle of the shot, then Stubbs fired the hole. The gun flashed, covering the attackers in smoke and thunder, but the ball shot over their heads and buried itself in the mud.
“They’re too close!” cried Sam.
“Get ready to fight ’em by—” A musket ball caught Stubbs in the eye. He turned, as if he might say something, then collapsed.
The terror made Sam’s balls rise into his gut. After their first victories, he had never been frightened in a raid. And with every success, experience had burnished the confidence of youth. Now, in the smoke and noise of a nightmare, he knew that even young men died.
The marines came over the starboard bulwark, driving their bayonets into the Yarmouth men at the second gun. Five muzzles flashed from the stern, and three marines fell to Serenity’s old duck’s foot pistol. Sam grabbed a worming iron and started aft, to die at his father’s side.
But a musket butt smashed into his head and the world went black.
vii.
“ ’Ere we is in the gut of the whale, like Jonah ’imself, in the gut of the whale. Breathe deep the good stink, lads, breathe deep and breathe well, for there’s no smell quite like it. ’Tis the belly of ’ell.”
“Shut up, you bloody fool.”
Chains clanked, as though someone were trying to pull free from something. “Call me a fool and I’ll choke you to death, choke you to death, to death. Call me a fool and I’ll choke you to death. I’ll squeeze your damn throat till you can’t take a breath.”
The darkness was so complete and smothering that Sam Hilyard thought he was in the grave.
“I’m Miffle,” said another voice. “I broke the back of one of me mates in a fair fight. John Judge, he’s a deserter, and Barmy Burt, ’e’s just Barmy. What about you?”
Did they mean him? Sam wondered. And who else?
“We… we’re privateers.”
“Pa?” said Sam. “Is that you?”
“Sammy? Thank Christ.”
Sam’s senses were coming back to him now. He could not see, but he could hear, and most certainly could smell the stench of the place, wherever it was, and feel the throbbing in his head and the chafing at his wrists and ankles. He was in irons. And there were giant iron chains all around him.
“So your name’s Sammy?” said Miffle.
“Sammy, Sammy, blippy, blammy, a fine-lookin’ lad with a buggerin’ bum.”
Ned Hilyard growled, “Anybody who touches that lad—”
“Easy, mate,” said Miffle. “We all done somethin’ to earn this ’ole. We’re all criminals in the eyes of the Lord.”
“In the eyes of the Lord? Are… are we dead?” asked Sam, with less panic than he would have expected.
“We might as well be,” said Miffle.
“Am I blind?” asked Sam.
“No. We’re in the cable tier,” said Ned, “the cable tier of the
Somerset.”
From the corner there came a burst of hysterical laughter.
“Shut up,” said John Judge the deserter.
But the laughter went on with another rhyme. “We live in the tier with shit and with snot. We drinks the bilge water when the weather gets hot.”
“That’s why ’e’s barmy,” explained Miffle.
“Aye, there’s piss in it. We can’t ’elp it, though. We gotta piss somewheres.”
Sam felt the physical presence of his father, to the left of him. He moved in that direction until his chains stopped him. “Pa, we got to get out of here. We got things to be doin’.”
Burt’s laughter vibrated in the blackness.
There was neither day nor night in the hole where the anchor chain was stored, for there was no light. Sam did not know how long he and his father stayed there with Miffle, John Judge the deserter, and Barmy Burt. They talked. They slept fitfully. Only the meals of salt beef, water, and biscuit gave rhythm to time.
And the darkness took on weight, like black wool pressing against Sam’s face. There were times when he thought he could not breathe, times when he was sure he was blind, times when he found himself smiling as Burt began to laugh at nothing. Of their capture he remembered only the sight of Square Stubbs, one eye staring as blood poured from the other. His dreams of privateering riches faded before the simple need to survive.
“Pa, I want to go home.”
“So do we all,” said Miffle.
“ ’Ome,” said Judge, “or Truro, or anyplace where a man”—his chains clanked in the darkness—“where a man can be free.”
Then came the laughter again. “I want to go ’ome, go ’ome, go ’ome, and get me dick stroked by a ’and not me own.”
“Shut up,” said Miffle.
“Think on your ma.” Ned’s voice came calmly out of the blackness and embraced his son. “Think about the bright sun… the sea… a fair wind.”
Barmy Burt farted and laughed.
Sam imagined himself at the helm of the
Serenity
, and for a time his mind was free of its hell. It soared through layers of blue. It soothed itself beside the rhythmic surf. It wandered the dunes of Billingsgate and led him to a place where Hannah waited in the sunlight.