"Mr Leighton," Wallace said, and the lieutenant stepped across the quarterdeck and saluted. "We'll send a boarding party to see what's happened over there. Clear away the..." He almost said "the longboat" before he remembered that they had no longboat. They had not had an opportunity to replace their largest boat since it was stolen by Biddlecomb. Biddlecomb. Wallace felt again the anger and the humiliation of having his prisoner escape and take the Rose's boat with him.
"Clear away the barge. Barge crew to be fitted with pistols and cutlasses. Send..." Wallace considered the number of marines that he could fit in the barge. He would have sent thirty in the longboat.
"Send fourteen marines with them," he said at last. Ten men in the barge crew and fourteen marines. That should be quite sufficient to subdue any resistance, particularly as it seemed no resistance would be offered.
"Aye, aye, sir," Leighton said, and then asked, "Shall I take charge of the boat?"
"No. Wallace knew just the man to zealously carry out this duty. "Mr Norton," he called down the deck, "you will take charge of the boarding party."
The Icarus's shattered main yard had left in its wake a great hole in the weather deck, and through that rent Biddlecomb could see the stars overhead and the main shrouds as they strained to hold the crippled mast upright. The wounded men, the five that they had located who could not walk but were still alive and still had a chance to remain so, had been moved to the gangway, just forward of the hole, and their moaning seemed much louder now. Farther aft the mainmast groaned with each roll of the ship, and the water of Narragansett Bay poured into the battered vessel and lapped around the ankles of the men huddled in the tween decks.
Biddlecomb looked over the massed crew, barely visible in the dim light. There were just over thirty left, less than half of the Icarus's original company. Their faces were dark and streaked with sweat and powder smoke, and their hands moved nervously over the muskets and pistols and cutlasses that they held at the ready. Barrett was there, his face streaked with blood, a cutlass in his hand. He looked very old. Appleby stood behind him, his jaw set, his hands trembling. This was the final, forlorn hope, and each man knew that full well.
There was a shuffling overhead, the muted sound of someone crawling across the deck, and then Rumstick appeared in the hole. He stepped down onto the chests piled on the deck and then down onto the deck itself. "She's hove to," Rumstick said sotto voce. "It sounds like they're putting a boat over the side, but I couldn't tell for certain."
"If they're hove to, then they'll come take a look. It only stands to reason," Biddlecomb said with an assuredness that he did not feel.
"You men—" he began to say when the Icarus lurched to starboard, the hundreds of tons of water that filled her sinking hull shifting, threatening to roll her over. Men flailed their arms in an attempt to maintain balance as the ship rolled. A cutlass dropped to the deck. In the dark a voice shouted, "Son of a bitch!" Biddlecomb could see wide eyes staring around the dark space. The fear was a tangible thing; not the fear of the coming fight but the fear that the Icarus would roll over entirely and take them all down with her.
As Biddlecomb opened his mouth to speak again, the low groaning of the mast overhead grew suddenly louder, higher, the sound of rending wood filling the tween decks. The brig rolled farther as the mast collapsed; they could feel the water surging around their feet. "God damned it!" a man shouted, his voice high-pitched with panic. He flung his pistol aside and clawed his way through the waiting men, scrambling desperately for the hole and the deck above.
"Stay down, you idiot!" Rumstick hissed through his teeth, grabbing the man by the shirt and pulling him back into the tween decks.
"The ship's capsizing!" the man said, his voice starting at a whisper and building before Rumstick punched him in the side of the head. The sound was like a wooden mallet striking a rotten plank. The man went limp.
Biddlecomb heard a tearing sound, low down on the hull, and he knew that the chain plates were ripping from the brig's side. He gritted his teeth. His hand clamped on to his cutlass's grip, and he tried to prepare himself for the death that would come when the brig rolled over, the drowning death that every seaman has with terror contemplated.
And then the mainmast fell, plunging over the side. The Icarus came upright again, and Biddlecomb could tell that she was riding higher in the water, relieved as she was of several tons of spars and rigging. A murmur ran through the waiting men, and Biddlecomb did not need to hear the words to understand their sense of relief.
"They better get here fucking quick or there won't be nothing left to board," Rumstick growled. He grabbed the unconscious man at his feet and hefted him up through the hole in the deck, depositing him with the other wounded men. A voice drifted across the water, as clear as if it were addressing them.
"Right, she looks stable now. Give way."
The men in the tween decks were silent, completely silent, each man listening to the sound of oars grinding in tholes and the sound of water churned by the oars' blades, getting closer, audibly closer.
"You men know what to do," Biddlecomb said in a whisper. "Wait for my signal. Not a sound until then." He looked around the dark space and grim faces nodded back at him. He looked at Rumstick at his side and towering over him. Rumstick held a cutlass in one hand and a boarding ax in the other. He met Biddlecomb's eyes. His expression was set and determined.
"It's a better way to die than hanging," Biddlecomb said.
"That it is," Rumstick said.
Three feet away, on the other side of the hull's planking, the frigate's boat bumped alongside, the sound loud in the narrow tween decks. "Marines, follow me," the voice said. "Weapons at the ready. Shoot anyone who offers any fight, we'll suffer no trouble from this lot. Jones, stay with the boat. The rest of you bargemen up after the marines." Boots thumped against the hull as the marines clambered up the boarding steps, then thumped overhead as the marines spread out across the deck.
Biddlecomb stepped farther back in the shadows, his eyes fixed on the hole overhead, but nothing was visible there beside the stars. The sound of the marine' boots on the boarding steps was replaced by the lighter sound of the sailor's shoes, and finally no more people were coming aboard and the deck overhead was alive with men searching fore and aft. How many? Biddlecomb could not guess.
There was another voice from forward. "Nothing but dead un's here, lieutenant, and them wounded bastards by the gangway."
"Good." The first voice again. The lieutenant apparently. "Send some men to search below. Start at that forward scuttle and sweep aft."
Biddlecomb felt a stirring among the men. They were ready to go, but this was not the moment. He held up his hand. Not yet. Another minute, when half of the marines were below and half on deck. That was the time.
Boots sounded in the forward scuttle as the marines moved down into the tween decks. "Spread it out there, spread it out, keep your eyes open," he heard someone say. The first of the marines stepped aft and Biddlecomb saw his own men looking anxiously around.
"Hey... what?" a voice called in the dark, then, louder, "Hey there!" and the moment was on them.
"Go! Go! Go!" Biddlecomb shouted as he leapt onto the piled sea chests and burst through the hole onto the deck overhead, Rumstick beside him, the rest of the Icaruses at their heels. There were men standing about the deck, sailors and marines, and close by he saw looks of surprise and muskets coming up to shoulders. But the Icaruses were spreading out, facing fore and aft, and their pistols and muskets went off in a great volley, and a half dozens of the boarders fell in heaps among the wreckage.