Sir Francis and some of his petty officers strapped on their half armour, light cavalry cuitasses and steel pot helmets. Sea salt had rusted them and they were dented and battered from other actions.
In short order the ship was readied for battle, and the crew armed and armoured. However, the gun ports were closed and the demi-culver ins were not run out. Most of the men were hustled below by Ned and the other boatswains, while the rest were ordered to lie flat on the deck concealed below the bulwarks. No slow-match was lit the glow and smoke might alert the chase to her danger. However, charcoal braziers smouldered at the foot of each mast, and the wedges were knocked out of the gun ports with muffled wooden mallets so that the sound of the blows would not carry.
Aboli pushed his way through the scurrying figures to where Hal stood at the foot of the mast. Around his bald head he wore a scarlet cloth whose tail hung down his back, and thrust into his sash was a cutlass. Under one arm he carried a rolled bundle of coloured silk. "From your father." He thrust the bundle into Hal's arms. "You know what to do with them!" He gave Hal's pigtail a tug. "Your father says that you are to remain at the masthead no matter which way the fight goes. Do you hear now?"
He turned and hurried back towards the bows. Hal grimaced rebelliously at his broad back, but climbed dutifully into the shrouds. When he reached the masthead he scanned the darkness swiftly, but as yet there was nothing to see. Even the aroma of spice had evaporated. He felt a stab of concern that he might only have imagined it, "It is only that the chase has come out of our wind," he reassured himself. "She is probably abeam of us by now."
He attached the banner Aboli had given him to the signal halyard, ready to fly it at his father's order. Then he removed the cover from the pan of the falconer. He checked the tension of the string before setting his longbow into the rack beside the bundles of yard-long arrows. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Below him the ship was unnaturally quiet, not even a bell to mark the passage of the hours, only the soft song of the sails and the muted accompaniment of the rigging.
The day came upon them with the suddenness that in these African seas he had come to know so well. Out of the dying night rose a tall bright tower, shining and translucent as an ice-covered alp. a great ship under a mass of gleaming canvas, her masts so tall they seemed to rake the last pale stars from the sky.
"Sail ho!" he pitched his voice so that it would carry to the deck below but not to the strange ship that lay, a full league away, across the dark waters. "Fine on the larboard beam!"
His father's voice floated back to him. "Masthead! Break out the colours!" Hal heaved on the signal halyard, and the silken bundle soared to the masthead. There it burst open and the tricolour of the Dutch Republic streamed out on the southeaster, orange and snowy white and blue, Within moments the other banners and long pennants burst out from the head of the mizzen and the foremast, one emblazoned with the cipher of the VOC, die Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United East India Company. The regalia was authentic, captured only four months previously from the Heerlycke Nacht. Even the standard of the Council of Seventeen was genuine. There would scarce have been time for the captain of the galleon to have learned of the capture of his sister ship and so to question the credentials of this strange caravel.
The two ships were on converging courses even in darkness Sir Francis had judged well his interception. There was no call for him to alter course and alarm the Dutch captain. But within minutes it was clear that the Lady Edwina, despite her worm-riddled hull, was faster through the water than the galleon. She must soon begin to overtake the other ship, which he must avoid at all costs.
Sir Francis watched her through the lens of his telescope, and at once he saw why the galleon was so slow and ungainly: her mainmast was jury-rigged, and there was much other evidence of damage to her other masts and rigging. He realized that she must have been caught in some terrible storm in the eastern oceans which would also account for her belated arrival off her landfall on the Agulhas Cape. He knew that he could not alter sail without alarming the Dutch captain, but he had to pass across her stern. He had prepared for this. he signed to the carpenter, at the rail, who with his mate lifted a huge canvas drogue and dropped it over the stern. Like the curb on a head, strong stallion it bit deep in the water and pulled up the Lady Edwina sharply. Again Sir Francis judged the disparate speeds of the two vessels, and nodded with satisfaction.
Then he looked down his own deck. The majority of the men were concealed below decks or lying under the bulwarks where they were invisible even to the lookouts at the galleon's masthead. There was no weapon in sight, all the guns hidden behind their ports. When Sir Francis had captured this caravel she had been a Dutch trader, operating off the west African coast. In converting her to a privateer, he had been at pains to preserve her innocent air and prosaic lines. Only a dozen or so men were visible on the decks and in the rigging, which would be normal for a sluggish merchantman.
As he looked up again the banners of the Republic and the Company broke out at the Dutchman's mastheads. Only a trifle tardily she was acknowledging his salute.
"She accepts us," Ned grunted, as he held the Lady Edwina stolidly on course. "She likes our sheep's clothing." "Perhaps!" Sir Francis replied. "And yet she cracks on more sail." As they watched, the galleon's royals and topgallants bloomed against the morning sky.
"There!" he exclaimed a moment later. "She is altering course, sheering away from us. The Dutchman is a cautious fellow."
"Satan's teeth! just sniff herV Ned whispered, almost to himself, as a trace of spices scented the air. "Sweet as a virgin, and twice as beautiful."
"It's the richest smell you'll ever have in your nostrils." Sir Francis spoke loudly enough for the men on the deck below to hear him. "There lies fifty pounds a head in prize money if you have the notion to fight for it." Fifty pounds was ten years of an English workman's wages, and the men stiffed and growled like hunting hounds on the leash.