The French Prize (37 page)

“These fellows, the officers in Adams's administration, they are most of them holdovers from Washington, are they not?” Ezra asked, his thoughts setting a new course.

“They are,” Isaac said.

“And so I would imagine Hamilton had a hand in their selection. He might still have some influence over them.”

“Might? Surely does, I would think. Wolcott of the Treasury and McHenry in particular are acolytes of Hamilton. He may well control them like puppets, and you can be sure that won't be to President Adams's benefit.”

“No…” Rumstick said, his mind continuing down this new line of thinking. But he was being rude, and he knew it. He was there to visit his friend, so he turned to Isaac and said, “Now, pray, give me all the gossip about progress with the navy.” With that he could see in Isaac a renewed enthusiasm. He sat up a little straighter and launched into a subject of which he was genuinely knowledgeable, genuinely passionate.

And Ezra listened, nodded, even made the odd comment, but his mind was elsewhere, on Hamilton, Oxnard, a battery of six pounders.

*   *   *

Jack Biddlecomb was thinking about his father. It was early, dawn was still an hour away, and he was washing his face in the basin on the sideboard, pulling on his shirt and breeches, and thinking about his father. Any business that involved a sword made him think of Isaac. In his mind the connection was organic, swords and his father indivisible.

Jack's grandfather, John Biddlecomb, had been a soldier. Jack never met him. His father hardly knew him. John Biddlecomb died fighting with Wolfe in Quebec in '59. Isaac was eleven then. He had accompanied his father to Canada, had been beside him when he died.

In those earlier years of his father's childhood, on the little farm they owned in Bristol, Rhode Island, John had taught young Isaac the use of weapons, had labored to pass on skills he himself had gained through hard use. Isaac proved to have a modest ability with musket and pistol, and at best a moderate interest in them. But the sword was a different matter.

Young Isaac had felt an affinity for steel and shown a concomitant skill with a blade. John Biddlecomb recognized this, encouraged it, worked Isaac through various drills with swords carved from oak barrel staves. And when Isaac had skill enough that he could be trusted to wield a blade in practice without being a danger to himself or his instructor, John switched to short swords with the points dulled and corked. After a particularly prosperous year, Jack's grandfather had ordered a pair of the newly fashionable foils from London, their tips nail-headed and blunt, steel of such good quality that the weapons were still in use at
Chez
Biddlecomb.

All these things Jack remembered as he tucked his shirt into his breeches. He looked at his coat draped over the back of a chair and decided against putting it on. It was already warm, and he would only have to take it off again for the fight.

Instead, he picked up the sword and belt that lay on the bed and drew the weapon from the scabbard, let the light of the candle play off the lovely polished steel. The sword had been a gift from his father for his sixteenth birthday, though he had been nearly seventeen by the time he made it back from his various voyages to the family's home to be presented with it. He and his father had been fencing since Jack was five and old enough to hold his own oak-stave sword.

Jack held the sword straight out, felt the weight and balance in his hand, the excellent grip. Beautiful, beautiful. He thought back to those summer days fencing on the lawn at Stanton House, or in the big parlor with the furniture pushed aside. The past six or seven years had not been good between him and the old man. Jack set his own course, and his father did not approve. Jack was impetuous, often acted without thinking, and he knew it, and his father did not approve. Jack rejected all that he had grown up with: the money, the Biddlecomb name, the privilege that came with having a famous father, and Isaac did not approve.

But those early days had been good. Those days when Jack was young and his father had come home from sea to remain ashore and Jack could revel in the way other men looked at his father, the respect and even awe with which they regarded him. He had shown Jack the basics of fencing and the two of them had gone at it, wooden swords and then foils flashing, clattering, until they had collapsed with exhaustion or laughter or both. Jack had demonstrated all of Isaac's innate skill and then some.

Isaac had even hired a fencing master to visit their home and bring the instruction to a new level, and together, father and son, they had practiced the drills, the footwork, the blade work, under the sharp eye and lisping instruction of Sir William Wilde, Fencing Master to the Aristocracy. It was only years later that Jack came to understand that the “Sir” was as phony as the man's credentials, but for all that, he knew fencing and he knew how to instruct and he left the Biddlecombs much better off, swordplaywise, than he had found them.

His father had made that very point about Wilde's good influence on that June day, in Jack's eleventh year, when Jack for the first time had defeated his father's blade decisively, had struck Isaac in the chest with a flawless lunge that bent the steel in a lovely arc and left his father gasping and looking down at that perfect hit. Had it been a sword, uncorked, and not the foil, Isaac would have been dead already.

Jack stepped back and lowered the weapon, as surprised as Isaac had been. Isaac took two steps toward him, put his arm around Jack's shoulder, and squeezed. “Well done, son, well done!” he said. “You've bested the old man at last!”

Jack did not know what to say. He nodded in agreement.

“See,” Isaac said, “I only had my father to instruct me, and only for a short time. I picked up what I could but never had the benefit of the regular instruction you've enjoyed. And that's as it should be, because the Biddlecombs have a different place in society now.”

It was the same with the sailing. More so, because Isaac needed no outside instructor to help him teach his boy about the ways of wind and water, tides, currents, rudder, sails. The Biddlecombs seemed to accumulate watercraft so fast Jack's mother would joke about the boats breeding in the spring. Canoes, rowing boats, punts, bateaux, boats with sailing rigs, small sloops, they all seemed to find their way to the Biddlecomb dock, or upside down in the yard, or shoved into one of the outbuildings. There was never a dearth of boats to sail, and never a want of enthusiasm for sailing them.

If Jack loved fencing, he was mad about sailing. From his earliest days he and his father would be out on Narragansett Bay, tacking and jibing, running, reaching, sailing the rail under one or another of the boats. Indeed, Jack's earliest memory was of sitting in the bilge of some boat—he could not recall which—his bottom wet with the water sloshing around and looking up at his father, smiling, his eyes moving from the sail to the bow, to windward, to leeward. A sailor's eye, a weather eye. He had loved his father so profoundly at that moment.

Year by year, boat by boat, Jack learned the ways of wind and sea. By the age of nine he was taking his parents and siblings out on the water, insisting they were passengers, no more, insisting that every aspect of handling the boat was his alone. And he did it, did it well, brought them to where they were bound, whether it was a picnic on Hog Island or Prudence Island, or a run down to Newport. “Captain Jack,” his mother called him, to his secret delight, or, “my sweet little sailor-boy,” with which he was less thrilled.

The thrust-to-the-chest moment in Jack and Isaac's sailing life came when Jack was still ten. It came on an August day, a perfect day, if perhaps a bit lighter of wind than they might have wished. His father had acquired two identical boats from whatever magic place boats seemed to materialize, twelve-foot jolly boats with lug rigs, and he and Jack had taken to racing them in Bristol Bay or out between Prudence Island and Pappasquash Point. They had been at it for months, at least several times a week, and Jack had loved every bit of it; it was companionship with his father and command of his own vessel, diminutive though it might be, all at once.

But when it came to racing, he did not win. For all his concentration, for all the minute sail trim and delicate hand on the tiller, he could not coax more speed out of his boat than his father could, regardless of the conditions, and Isaac would give a good-natured laugh as his boat glided over whatever imaginary finish line they had agreed upon, a boat length or more ahead of Jack. And Jack would try to tamp down his frustration.

It was different on that day in August. It did not start out different, not in any way. They had crossed the starting line on starboard tack and perfectly even, but despite the light winds favoring Jack, who weighed half of what his father did, Isaac was able to inch his boat to weather until he had half a boat length on him. And then a full boat length, and drawing ahead as they worked their nimble white craft to weather, tack on tack, like cavalrymen fighting on horseback, jockeying for position.

Jack had tacked around to larboard, hoping to creep up on his father, but Isaac had tacked above him, covering him, giving him no room to pass. Isaac handled his boat the way a master violinist handled his instrument, and he sacrificed not an inch with every tack he made, and Jack could only try to emulate that.

Jack's eyes were everywhere; to weather, to lee, on the sails, on his father's boat, on his course. That was his father's training. And so Jack did not miss the cat's paw of wind coming from the west, the telltale ruffle of water as the small gust approached. He waited for his father to tack around, to pick up the lift that would come with the breeze before Jack did. But he didn't. Happy with his lead, Isaac maintained course and speed as Jack swung his tiller in an arc, set the sail flapping through the wind.

He caught a glimpse of Isaac looking back in surprise as the cat's paw enveloped his son's boat, heeled it over, set the water gurgling down its side. Jack leaned to weather to hold the boat straighter and felt the little burst of speed. A second or two later the cat's paw found Isaac's boat, but it was too late. Jack had head reached on him, tacked to cover, and two minutes after that he crossed the line they had agreed upon, between Providence Point and the old battery, his father trailing astern.

Isaac luffed up beside him, his arm raised in congratulations. “Well done, Jack, well done!” he said, and there was genuine pride in his voice, and a touch of sadness as well. Jack was surprised by the sadness, because he imagined it was a sadness born of losing, and he had thought his father a bigger man than that. But when he related the story to his mother, she had put her arm around him and said, “Of course your father was sad. Not about losing. About what it means. Which is that you are growing up.”

All this Jack thought about as he dressed, such reminiscing a rare indulgence for him, until he was interrupted by Oliver Tucker, who tapped lightly on the door and said, “We best be going, sir.”

“Very good,” Jack said. He buckled the sword belt around his waist, adjusted the way the weapon hung, then blew out the candle, and in the gathering light of dawn followed Tucker, his second, down the stairs and out onto the road.

They walked toward the quay, then Tucker led the way to a wide path that ran off in the other direction and Biddlecomb followed. “Tucker,” Jack said after a few minutes of walking through the thick forest, “do you have any notion of where you are going?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I met with Mr. Wentworth's second and we agreed to this place.”

“Very thorough, as usual,” Jack said. If he was killed, Tucker would take command of
Abigail
. Jack wondered if he would be pleased with that, and guessed he probably would not. Tucker was a good mate, but Jack did not think he could find Barbados if there was a trail of breadcrumbs floating on the sea.

At last the forest opened out into a clearing, a wide-open area with short grass that ran down to a sandy beach and the ocean beyond. They were on the south side of the island and the heights to the west had the place still in deep shadows. But Jack was certain they were where they should be, because Wentworth was there with his second, and Lucas Harwar and John Burgess and Noah Maguire and most of the other Abigails, as well as most of the officers of the
Warrior
and several of the senior dockyard officials, entertainment being hard to come by on that island.

Jack took his place on the open ground thirty feet from Wentworth. Wentworth's second, he saw, was the British officer, Chandler, which was no surprise. The only Americans on the island were the Abigails, who certainly would not second a man who wished to run their captain through.

It was warm but not hot, and the light was growing with each passing minute. It was a perfect morning for a duel. And then the calm was ruined by the booming, familiar, unwelcome voice of Charles Frost, pushing his way through the crowd of onlookers.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, pray, stop this madness,” his said, his tone somewhere between a command and a plea. “Captain Biddlecomb, killing your passengers is not really the thing, you know. It will not do your career any good.”

“Mr. Frost, please do not interfere in this,” Jack said, his exasperation unchecked. Frost turned in the other direction.

“Mr. Wentworth, please see reason, if any harm comes to Captain Biddlecomb we will never reach Barbados!”

Before Wentworth could reply, Lieutenant Chandler broke away and crossed the ground to where Frost stood. He spoke low, Jack could not hear what he said, but there was no mistaking the forceful and unequivocal manner in which he addressed the big man. Frost listened, frowned, but then he turned and stamped back to join the others.

Jack unbuckled his sword belt, drew the blade and handed it to Tucker, who took it awkwardly. “Ah, and what am I to do with this, Captain?” Tucker asked. He did not have much experience with this sort of thing.