The French Prize (13 page)

“And how might you have handled such a situation?” Jack asked.

“I don't know,” Wentworth said, and he seemed to genuinely consider the question. “I'm sure I don't know. Not fisticuffs. I suppose I would have shot him.”

“Shot him? Indeed?” Jack asked. “Do you always stand ready to shoot a man?”

“One likes to be prepared,” Wentworth said.

Before Jack could make reply he heard Tucker sing out, “That's well the larboard warps!” and he saw that it was time to shift the lines to the next posts, thus ending their discussion. The warps were moved farther out into the river and the
Abigail
hauled bodily up toward them, but they had not half cleared the distance when Jack saw that he could brace the topsail yards hard up on a starboard tack and clear the warping post with ease. He ordered the sails sheeted home and hands to the halyards and a moment later the topsail yards began their jerky travel up the well-greased masts.

The breeze found the canvas, made it ripple and snap, and then filled it and held it in that long, gentle, elegant curve that a well-set topsail makes, a shape so fine and perfect that to the sailor's eye there is that same allure that a shapely female form might spark.
Abigail
heeled a little to larboard. “Ease your helm a bit,” Jack said to the man at the wheel, a new hand but one who seemed to know his business.

The bow swung a bit to the left, the bowsprit sweeping past the distant shore like an accusing finger. With a series of even jerks the fore staysail crawled up the stay and spread to the wind. The water made a gurgling sound down the length of the hull. They were under way and making way, a fair breeze and an ebbing tide, headed for the sea. They were free of the land. And Jack was in command. And Jack was supremely happy.

 

9

Rumstick wanted to speak to Bolingbroke before Jack sailed. Jeremiah Tillinghast was well aware of that. Rumstick had a notion that something was amiss, and he had a nose for such things. If something was acting, if forces unknown to Jack Biddlecomb were working in the shadows, then Rumstick wanted it known and fixed before Jack went to sea. It was Tillinghast's job to bring Bolingbroke to Rumstick before the
Abigail
cast off. He almost made it.

He found Bolingbroke in a nasty excuse for a tavern on the Southwark waterfront two days after the aborted duel, still telling the story of how Jack Biddlecomb had backed out of an affair of honor. “Seen me with pistol in hand,” Bolingbroke concluded, “and the sorry sod turns and runs. Just runs. Might have pissed himself, I couldn't tell.”

“Just shoot the bastard,” one of Bolingbroke's companions suggested, “just shoot him right in the back as he run. That's how I would have played it.” This fellow, Tillinghast could see, was a little unclear on the “honor” part of “an affair of honor.”

Bolingbroke's fellows, these hangers-on, were the problem. Bolingbroke seemed to have money, more than Tillinghast would have thought him good for, and that meant he had friends aplenty eager to hear his tales as long as he kept the flowing bowl flowing. Tillinghast could certainly have rounded up enough companions of his own to soundly thrash the lot of them in a brawl; he did not think Bolingbroke's friends would be too eager to risk serious injury in his defense; but the business had to be conducted more subtly than that.

If Bolingbroke was part of some bigger affair, then taking him up in a messy way might send ripples of alarm through whatever faction was behind it. Bolingbroke had to be plucked like a tick from a dog's neck. Ideally, he would be cowering before Rumstick and eagerly spewing information before his absence was even noticed.

Tillinghast followed him back to the rooming house that served as his temporary residence, but there was no opportunity to grab him unobserved. He returned the next day to speak with the particularly unhelpful keeper of the rooming house, who, after a silver dollar, hard money, had rendered him a bit more loquacious, would say only that Bolingbroke had cleared out that morning, having taken a berth on a ship just then loading for Jamaica.

It was a matter of half a day's inquiry to find the ship that Bolingbroke had signed aboard, but that information did Tillinghast little good. If plucking him out of a tavern or a rooming house was a tricky business, then extracting him from amid a ship's company was all but impossible.

That left Tillinghast with the singular option of waiting to catch Bolingbroke by himself, which he did at last when Bolingbroke made a somewhat furtive exit from the ship. It was just shy of midnight, eight days after the meeting with Jack, when Bolingbroke came slinking down the gangplank. And Tillinghast, happily, was as he often was: lurking in the shadows, watching.

He followed Bolingbroke down Second Street to Southwark, then up South Street and a left onto Fourth, the neighborhoods becoming more notorious by degrees. They had gone another two blocks before Tillinghast guessed at his destination, and when Bolingbroke turned into a narrow alley strewn with broken barrels and half-stove packing crates and sundry garbage, Tillinghast saw he was right.

Three granite steps leading to a single door in the back of one of the brick row houses, a lantern burning feebly above it, marked the unlikely entrance to one of the city's more well-respected brothels. A knock, a few hushed words through a half-open door, and Bolingbroke was inside.

I'd reckon this establishment a bit rich for that son of a bitch's blood,
Tillinghast thought. Tillinghast knew the place by reputation only, but the reputation had always been that it was no half-dime-a-throw sort of house.

The creature seems to have money to toss about …

Tillinghast found a dark place not too far from the door from where he could watch and still remain unseen in the shadows. From there he saw one man make his sheepish entrance into the building, and two leave. Neither was Bolingbroke, but one Tillinghast recognized as a member of Congress.
And these damnable Republican dogs say our tax dollars are not well spent,
Tillinghast thought as the man stumbled off into the dark.

It was not above forty-five minutes later that Bolingbroke appeared, stepping slowly, reluctantly from the door. He looked up and down the alley with a wariness that made Tillinghast wonder if he realized he was being watched. It was pointless to try and sneak up on him, so Tillinghast took the other tack, stumbling out of the shadows, weaving toward the brothel door, the least suspicious of approaches.

They passed one another just ten feet from the door, and as they did, Tillinghast straightened, turned, and said, calm and sober, “Bolingbroke? A word, if I may?”

Bolingbroke stopped and turned. His eyes were wide, his face more panic-stricken than Tillinghast would have thought was quite appropriate for the pacific tone he was taking with the man. He shook his head, took a step back toward the wall that formed the east side of the alley. “No, no…” he said. He turned, his back hunched, his hands resting on the edge of the remnants of a wooden crate.

“See here,” Tillinghast began, but Bolingbroke straightened and turned in one motion, the crate in his hands, and smashed it into Tillinghast's shoulders and head. Tillinghast felt a laceration open up on his cheek as he stumbled back, a minor wound compared to the humiliation he felt at allowing this little puke to fool him in that way.

He heard Bolingbroke's feet taking off down the alley. He tossed off the broken slats of the crate and ran after him, wondering if he had any chance against the younger man in a flat-out footrace. But again Bolingbroke did what Tillinghast did not expect, and rather than head for the end of the alley he bounded back up the brothel steps and through the door, Tillinghast right behind.

Bolingbroke was halfway down the hall by the time the startled doorman, some great heap of muscle in an ill-fitting suit, had taken two steps in his direction. He succeeded in blurting out, “Here, now—” before Tillinghast charged in behind him and rammed him in the small of the back. Tillinghast heard the man grunt and had a glimpse of him lifting from his feet and coming down on some silly little table against the wall, which he turned into kindling on his way to the floor. Then Tillinghast was past, his eyes on Bolingbroke's blue jacket, which had ducked into the sitting room on the side and was just then leaping a sofa between two startled young women and their even more startled uncles.

Tillinghast followed right behind, putting a foot on the sofa, launching himself over the back. He had a glimpse of young women lounging about the room, men of various ages with stocks undone and legs splayed in casual repose jerking upright in surprise, a cloud of smoke hanging low, the sharp smell of liquor and perfume. And then he was following Bolingbroke out the back door of the room. He had no more than a glimpse of Bolingbroke's white duck trousers as the man disappeared through another door at the far end of the hall.

What he might find on the other side of that door Tillinghast did not like to think on, but he thundered down the hall and swung himself through the door and found it was a set of stairs leading to an uninviting cellar below. He took the stairs two at a time, landed on the dirt floor at the bottom. There were lanterns hanging from low floor joists casting a weak light around the place. Tillinghast looked right and left. Bolingbroke was not to be seen. He stepped cautiously off to his left, around a pile of what he guessed was old furniture with a tarp draped over it. He could feel cool, fresh air wafting through the musty space. He came around the tarp-covered pile. A door hung open, and through it Tillinghast could see the steps that led up to the street level.

“Of course there's a bloody back way out of a place like this!” he said out loud, disgusted by the great chain of blunders he had committed that night.
Damn Bolingbroke
, he thought,
of course he would know where the back way is!

He heard footfalls on the steps behind him, and had no doubt it was the doorman, having recovered his breath and coming for his pound of flesh. Tillinghast sighed and headed for the door in Bolingbroke's wake.

*   *   *

The tide carried the
Abigail
swiftly down the Delaware River, but the breeze pushed her more swiftly still, so rather than simply drifting down to the bay, they enjoyed the benefit of steerage. That made the passage less stressful than it might otherwise have been, because having control, however illusionary it might be, was always more comforting than simply being swept along. Jack kept the quarterdeck, conning the vessel as needed, though the way was clear and the shipping not too numerous and for the most part he was not much needed at all.

He looked out over the shoreline, the stands of trees and the rolling fields turning an early-spring green. Windmill Island, League Island, Mud Island with Fort Mifflin and the new construction there. He could not pass that way without thinking of the brutal weeks of fighting that his father and Uncle Ezra and the others, the sailors of the ridiculous Mosquito Fleet of 1777, had endured in their vain attempt to keep the mighty Royal Navy at bay. It was heroic, almost beyond description, night after night in their little ships taking on the massive men-of-war. In the end it had been for naught, though it was heroic nonetheless.

But that generation, those who had won independency, were not lacking for admirers and hagiographers, and Jack did not much feel the need to add his hosannas to the rest. His father knew how he felt. Or he should, in any event. That was enough.

“A propitious start to the voyage, Captain, wouldn't you say?” Charles Frost called, emerging from the after scuttle onto the quarterdeck and pulling Jack from his reverie.

“All's well that begins well,” Jack said. “No, forgive me, that's not how it goes at all. In any event, yes, a fine start, and we'll carry this tide for the next five or six hours, I should think. Your quarters, you find them accommodating?”

“Goodness, yes!” Frost said with enthusiasm. “The good Mr. Tucker has seen to doubling the space. I've made many a sea voyage, Captain, and I can tell you I have never had so commodious a cabin in so small a vessel. Beg your pardon, of course, I mean no disrespect to your command, sir.”

“Nor did I take it as such,” Jack assured him. “
Abigail
is of no great size, I'll warrant, but she's a fine sea boat.”

“She is that,” Frost said, and then, in a different tone, went on. “Mr. Wentworth, I'm afraid, was a bit put out that my cabin was rendered so spacious and his was not.”

“Well, we can only make so many changes, you know. Who knows how many cabins we shall need for the voyage back?” Jack, of course, had had nothing to do with altering Frost's accommodations, though he was sorry he had not thought of it first, so he could at least give himself credit for Wentworth's discomfort.

As Jack had predicted, they did carry the tide for another five hours, but as the ebbing current began to grow weak with age they found the wind began to fail as well. Jack could see that they would soon be swept back up the bay just as they had been swept down, so he worked the ship over to Deep Water Point on the western shore and came to anchor with the best bower in four fathoms of water.

He felt keenly an obligation to invite Frost and Wentworth to the cabin for dinner, at least once at the start of the voyage. It was one of those duties owed by a ship's master to his passengers when the passengers were of the better sort. It was also true that Frost was a particular friend of Oxnard's, so it would do Jack no harm to get in his good graces. On the other hand, he felt oppressed by the many things still to be done, and did not feel he had the hours to devote to being a proper host.

What's more, it seemed a bit silly, dinner at sea, when they were in fact at anchor within ten leagues of where they had started, at a place where a man with a good arm might actually throw a biscuit onto the shore. And truly he did not really want to dine with them and play the smiling, gracious host, not for Wentworth's pleasure, in particular, so he made his excuses and bought himself an extra day.