The men of the Icarus took up a rousing cheer, yelling and hooting and shouting insults and waving to their departing officers.
Biddlecomb stepped up to the quarterdeck where Rumstick and Wilson and Barrett stood clustered around the taffrail, watching the strange raft bobbing astern.
"That were excellently well done, Isaac!" said Rumstick, slapping Biddlecomb painfully on the back.
"Let's see if it works," Biddlecomb cautioned, and the four men looked astern again.
The Cerberus completed her swing to starboard and let loose with the bow chaser. Biddlecomb saw the ball skip once on the sea, then again, just abeam of the Icarus, before it disappeared. They were shooting low, shooting for the rudder. Or the quarterdeck.
"That couldn't have missed them two by much," Barrett said.
Apparently it had not, for Smeaton was now standing on the raft, frantically waving the white flag. The Cerberus was a quarter mile from him now, swinging to larboard to bring the next bow chaser around.
It occurred to Biddlecomb, as he watched the two figures on the grating dwindle astern, that he might now be responsible for the deaths of two more men. If the Cerberus did not see the grating, then they would run it down, and even if they did, they might well opt to ignore it and continue the chase. Once night fell, the raft would be lost and Pendexter and Smeaton would not live long on the winter sea. Were the lives of two lieutenants worth more to the captain of the Cerberus than catching this brig that had eluded them before? That question would be answered in the next few moments.
Biddlecomb focused his telescope on the frigate's quarterdeck. He could make out individual figures, patches of blue standing here and there. And suddenly the quarterdeck was a flurry of activity, the blue patches running in every direction. Biddlecomb took the glass from his eye. The frigate was still turning to larboard. The bow chaser fired and the ball whistled overhead, but the frigate did not check her swing. Her courses flogged and were hauled up to the yards, and the studdingsails collapsed and disappeared. The main yards swung around and the sails came aback.
"She's heaving to," Biddlecomb said softly. The Cerberus was stopping to pick up the unknown officers on the raft.
"She's heaving to!" Rumstick shouted down the deck, and the men began cheering louder than Biddlecomb had ever heard before.
Biddlecomb put the glass to his eye. A boat lifted off the booms and swung out over the frigate's side. He looked west to where the sun was setting over Long Island. Half an hour more and they would be beyond their enemy's grip.
It did not take the Cerberus's men ten minutes to launch the boat, retrieve Pendexter and Smeaton, and sway the boat aboard again, but in that time the Icarus had gained half a mile on the frigate.
"That was nice work, launching and recovering the boat," Biddlecomb said, a touch of smugness in his voice, "but I doubt they can make up the distance they lost."
And then the Cerberus erupted in smoke as she fired her full broadside at the Icarus. The shriek of the round shot was deafening. Wood and metal fragments flew as the balls struck the hull. Forward a man screamed in agony and then was silent, and his cry was replaced by a rending, shattering sound from overhead.
Biddlecomb looked aloft. The main topgallant mast leaned forward, swaying with the roll of the brig. Then the weather backstay parted and mast and yard, sail and studdingsails, fell forward. The yards on the foremast jerked and swung wild as the falling wreckage tore away the braces.
"God damn me for a fool! Why didn't I see that coming!" Biddlecomb shouted. "Wilson, Rumstick, get some men aloft and clear that wreckage, just cut it away, and reeve off new running gear, fast as you can. Barrett, supervise the waisters."
The three men ran forward and Biddlecomb turned aft. The Cerberus was under way again, resuming the chase of her now crippled prey. But her momentum was gone, and she would have to set her courses and studdingsails again, and after taking in sail as fast as she had, the gear would be in a disarray and the sails would not be set with the usual alacrity. He turned his back to the frigate. Staring at her would not help.
The seamen aloft cut the topgallant sail free from the yard, and Biddlecomb watched it flutter away, the heavy canvas born easily by the gale. Biddlecomb heard a splash forward and the shattered topgallant mast appeared at their wake, followed by the topgallant yard. Rumstick was already seeing the spare mast and yard readied for swaying aloft.
Biddlecomb looked up at the Cerberus and realized that the light was quickly fading. The starboard bow chaser fired, its muzzle flash brilliant in the twilight, but Biddlecomb did not see where the ball fell.
He turned and looked to the west. The sun was gone, leaving only a red tint on the gray and black sky overhead. And there was Montauk Point, just abeam.
"Hands to braces, what braces we got left!" Biddlecomb shouted. "Larboard, three degrees," he told the helmsman.
The Icarus began to swing toward Montauk Point. Biddlecomb would shave the land, closer than most would dare. He looked astern for the last time. The Cerberus was nearly lost in the gloom.
He had won. He had eluded Cerberus. He had now only to sail the gauntlet of Narragansett Bay and he was home, and with that thought he wondered if he had flanked the keeper of the gate only to charge straight into hell itself.
Chapter 28.
The Gates of Hell
THE MOON CREPT HIGHER AND HIGHER, and in the pure, cold air it illuminated the Icarus and Rhode Island Sound to a surprising degree. Block Island had disappeared astern an hour past, and for the moment the lookouts could see nothing on the horizon but water, and that was all that Biddlecomb wished to see.
Overhead the main yards swung around and the sails filled and the Icarus gathered way once more. Biddlecomb looked over the larboard side. The Icarus's gig, carrying Dibdin, Bolton, and two others whose loyalties had changed once again, was pulling away from the brig. In ten hours they would be in Newport.
Biddlecomb remembered how Bolton had screamed as three men dragged him down into the gig, and the memory made him smile. Bolton had thrown in entirely with the mutineers, he was as guilty as any of them, and it was with pleasure that Biddlecomb handed him back to the Royal Navy. Dibdin, he knew, would make certain that Bolton's cooperation was brought to light. Biddlecomb doubted that it would be above a week before the former stewards was choking out his life at the yardarm.
"You're a strange man, Biddlecomb," Dibdin had said as the two men stood in the waist watching Barrett supervise the preparation of the gig. "I thought that when you was first brought aboard. You're no foremast jack, are you?"
"I was once, a long time ago. Sixteen years. The last time I sailed this way I was master of a merchantman."
"Sixteen years ain't so long to go from the lower deck to the quarterdeck, especially not in your age. Most men don't do it in a lifetime."
"I was lucky."
"You held this rabble together, which is more than two commissioned lieutenants and three warrant officers could do. How is it you came to be pressed as a common seaman?"
As the gig rose from the chocks, Biddlecomb told his story that began in those same waters aboard the little Judea so many months ago, and the further he went in relating the tale, the angrier he became; angry with himself for his stupid mistakes and angry at the circumstances that had ruined his carefully structured life, and above all else angry at the British, whom, he realized, he had come to regard as the prime movers of his misfortune. He stood in silence for a moment, allowing his bitterness to subside.