A few of them laughed. Adam peered at the horizon, or where it should be.
"I shall go around the ship, Aubrey." He snapped his mind shut to the letter that she would never see. Then you may beat to quarters and clear for action! "
The cards were down.
"Ship cleared for action, sir." Martin watched his captain standing by the tightly packed hammock nettings.
"Very well." Adam stared up at the sky. It was paler now, and the sea's face was showing itself beyond the bows, with the occasional hump of an unending roller lifting the deck very slightly before passing away into the remaining shadows.
Faces took on shapes and identities: the men at the nearest eighteen-pounders already stripped to the waist, the gun captains and older hands quietly explaining the workings of their particular division, as if all the others were unimportant.
Lieutenant Baldwin's marines were settling into place at the nettings, while others were already aloft in the fighting-tops, ready to shoot down on an enemy with their muskets or the deadly swivel guns mounted on each barricade. Almost everybody would soon be visible except for two men in the sickbay who were too ill even to work the pumps if required.
The marines' coats looked very dark in the poor light. It seemed quiet, unusual not to hear Sergeant Deacon's rasping voice chasing them, making certain that nothing was amiss.
Old Partridge glanced suspiciously at the released prisoner, Richie, who was standing beside the captain's coxswain.
Adam knew the sailing-master did not approve but had decided to ignore him. It was little enough, perhaps all they had. Jorston, a master's mate due for promotion, was up in the cross trees with a telescope, although his instinct, his sailor's cunning, was far more valuable.
It was getting brighter much faster now, and Adam saw several seamen at their guns peeking out to see what was happening.
He searched his mind for last-minute faults, or obstacles he had overlooked. But his thoughts were empty now; his limbs felt loose and relaxed. It had often been like that for him before a sea-fight.
He almost smiled. How they would all laugh if there was no enemy ship here, or they found only some innocent trader who had put in for repairs. Unlikely, he told himself. Mauritius was only a day's sailing away for an average vessel. He thought of the powerful Unity. Beer would be very wary of risking her in such a dangerous place.
He saw Partridge murmuring with his other master's mate, Bond. They looked like a pair of conspirators.
"Who have you put in the chains, Mr. Martin?" Only the clipped formality gave any hint of his awareness, the scent of peril.
"Rowlatt, sir."
A face came into Adam's mind. Another one who had been aboard since the beginning.
"Good man."
He crossed to the chart-table, which Partridge had brought up from below, and beckoned to Richie. "Show me again."
The tall bosun leaned over the chart and touched it gingerly with his finger.
"It looks about right, sir. The lagoon is on the sou'-eastern corner, an' the reef runs out for about two miles. The other side of the entrance has more rocks." Surprisingly, he looked up at the great red ensign streaming from the gaff.
A true seaman, Adam thought. To sail clear of the long reef would mean that he would have to tack repeatedly to enter the lagoon, which appeared to be shaped like a great flask. Richie had not been studying the flag itself but was gauging the wind that was lifting it towards the mizzen mast. It would be easier for any ship to quit the lagoon with the south-westerly wind holding so steady. To tack back and forth to get inside would be a lengthy, not to say hazardous, business.
He looked at Richie's strong profile. A man with a history, but there was no time to think about that.
He asked sharply, "On this course you say we could pass through the reef with barely a change of tack?" He could feel Martin and Dunwoody watching him and knew that Partridge was frowning with doubt.
"That's what we done when we came afore, sir. There's a gap in the reef, and a cluster of rocks on the far side." He shrugged. It was all he knew. "The cap'n used to keep them in line, on the same bearing he called it."
It was not the kind of thing he could invent, Adam thought. But everything he had learned since he had first joined his uncle's ship as a midshipman had given him this inner wariness. As a watch keeping officer and now as a post captain he had always mistrusted a reef, especially with the wind astern and fewer chances by the minute to avoid running aground.
Richie was staring at him, anxiety, hope, even fear returning to his eyes.
It would be useless to threaten him. Dangerous even.
He thought of the Eaglet's master down below under guard. He had made this same approach, probably more times than Richie knew. He would be listening, wondering, perhaps even hoping that Adam would see his beautiful Anemone transformed into a wreck, mast less with her keel broken on a reef.
He said, "Begin sounding, if you please! "
He watched the leadsman in the fore chains begin to heave on the heavy lead and line, until it lifted high above the creaming bow-wave and began to swing over and down again in one great circle. The seaman was a good leadsman and looked unconcerned as the apron took the whole weight of his body.
It was still too poor a light to see the lead leave his control and fly away ahead of the beak head and the raked hull below.
"No bottom, sir! "
Partridge said gloomily, "It'll soon shelve, sir! " To his mate he whispered, "I'll gut that bastard if he's leadin' us on to the reef! "
Adam walked away from the others and recalled his tour around the mess-decks before the hands had been called to quarters. There had been several familiar faces, but most of them were strangers still. Perhaps he should have tried harder to bridge the gap instead of making them perfect their sail and gun drill? He had dismissed the idea. His uncle had always said that teamwork alone could bring the respect of one man for another. But loyalty had to be earned.
He saw the youngest midshipman, Frazer, who had joined the ship at Portsmouth, full of eagerness and excitement. Now he was thirteen, but looked younger than ever. He was staring at the sea, his hands opening and closing around his puny dirk, lost in thought.
"Here comes the sun! " But nobody answered.
Adam saw it pushing the last shadows from the deeper troughs, making them shimmer like molten glass. Hereabouts the ocean had undergone a sea-change, the surface pale green, with a mist lingering above it, moving with the wind so that the ship seemed to be stationary.
The first sunlight laid bare the deck, the gun crews with their rammers and sponges, and the tubs of sand that contained slow-matches in case the flintlocks failed. There was more sand on the deck below the gangways, so that men should not slip if water came inboard. Adam tightened his jaw. Or blood. It seemed bare overhead with the big courses brailed up to give a clearer vision and to reduce the risk of fire. In a ship like this, with tar and under-dry planking, even a burning wad from one of the guns could be dangerous.
Colour came seeping through the rigging: the marines' coats were scarlet again, their fixed bayonets glinting like ice.
He looked narrowly along his waiting gun crews, and at the others who would trim the yards, men and boys of all ages and from every background. He had asked some of them about themselves when he had done his rounds before dawn. Some had been shy, then eager to talk; others had crowded closer to listen. Many had just watched him: their captain, the symbol of their hardship, their captivity as they might see it. Men mostly from the south and western counties of England, from farms and villages, and a few who had been unlucky enough to be caught by the press gangs in a sea-port.
The cry from the master's mate from the cross trees was loud and clear.
"Breakers ahead! "