He was transfixed by the burning brig, and a hush fell over the deck as the men turned to see the end, silencing Claghorne as he, too, turned to stare.
It was a terrifying and heartbreaking sight for sailors to see a ship burn, even an enemy. The brig had been especially pretty, long and lean and fast, golden oak hull with a jaunty red stripe, black wale and bold figurehead, picked out with gold leaf on her rails and entry port and transom carvings. Now she was a smutty lamp-bowl of a hull that served as the vessel of a raging conflagration.
Men could be seen tossing over kegs and hammocks, coops and hatch gratings, anything that would float … their boats had burned. Crewmen were splashing into the sea and calling out as the heat became unbearable, and a hot glow could be seen through her open gun ports. Over the loud whooshing roar of the fire they could hear thin screams as men were roasted to death, or pleaded for mercy on their souls as they hung on for just a moment more of life before going into the sea—few sailors of any nation could really swim, and Parrot could not approach that raging furnace to save them without risking her own safety.
The fight drained out of Lewrie, sucked dry now by all the terror and the tension, and Claghorne’s heart-stopping prediction of a court-martial. He had been wild with passion, leaping and screaming obscenities at the French, raving with all his strength in a berserk release. His headache was back with a vengeance, after all the waiting and hoping that the French would come close enough to be hurt, staring hard over the glittering ocean and hurting his eyes trying to see everything at once. His limbs seemed to have turned to water.
Just like after that fight in Ariadne, he reminded himself, so tired he could barely stay erect. Is it always going to be like this?
“Well done, my boy,” Lord Cantner said, his voice cracking with emotion as he pumped Lewrie’s hand. “Goddamn wonderful job.”
“Thank you, milord, thank you.”
“God bless you, Mister Lewrie,” Lady Cantner added, looking at him with open adoration, that roving look back in her dark eyes. Her chest heaved magnificently.
Once they were ashore on Anguilla, and her lord asleep some night before they sailed, her eyes told him it could be arranged, but at the moment it didn’t seem to matter much to him.
He also knew, or felt, or hoped that Lord Cantner’s influence would stop any court-martial. After all, he was alive and still free to sail for England. The less said about Claghorne’s lack of wit at finding a way to avoid or defeat the privateer the better. A court-martial would be as much a condemnation of his striking the colors as Alan’s disobedience, and striking before doing your utmost to fight was also a hanging offense. Had he not learned, even in his short career in the Navy, that victory had a hundred parents, but failure none?
A rich and influential peer could have things done his own way, as they usually ended up doing. If Claghorne was possessed of any wit at all he would write his report taking credit for the idea, excusing the breach of honor as necessary to save the lord and his lady and all the secrets in his head, giving Lewrie grudging allowance for being a brave little fellow who followed orders well.
“Mister Lewrie?” Lord Cantner asked in a faraway whisper. Alan could not hear him through the ringing in his ears. Too much noise of the guns, he thought. But he seemed so far away, and it was hard to focus on the lord’s phiz. It also seemed to be getting dark awfully early …
He realized he was seated on the deck, shivering all over.
Why are they looking at me like that? he wondered. Haven’t the bastards ever seen a hero? But there was no answer.
Chapter 10
There were many strange and awful dreams that bothered him as he swam in the delirium of a raging fever. He and Mrs. Hillwood romped in the maintop while Marines threw buckets of seawater on them by the numbers and Captain Osmonde called the pace with a fugleman’s cane. Tad toasted cheese on burning sails for him and asked if he wanted his shoes blacked. Keith Ashburn and Shirke bought him a half-dozen bottles of claret, but he couldn’t drink with them, for their heads were skulls with clacking jaws and the wine ran down their chests like black ink.
Lieutenant Harm and Mr. Pilchard and Margaret Haymer danced together, comparing wounds. His sister Belinda was a figurehead on a ship of the line, and the sailors fondled her bare breasts as they sat on the beakhead rails to relieve themselves. Chapman hopped one-legged down the Strand with a beautiful young girl in a blue gown in search of a bookseller’s, and he could not catch them no matter how hard he ran. Sir Hugo and Sir Richard Slade chased him down an endless work gangway, waving their pricks at him.
He found himself flying low across sparkling wavetops with a crowd of pelicans who knew how to do spherical trigonometry in their heads, and he jeered with them at the seagulls, who had to use slates. Captain Bales was served at dinner by a nude Lady Cantner with an apple in her mouth. Alan was made post, but his ship was a hundred fathoms down off Nevis, and the wind kept shifting all about the compass. Kenyon and some admiral stood together in full uniform but no breeches and told him what a brute he was to harm the French, who were only two inches tall and crawled all over him. He was in a cart on his way to Tyburn to be hanged, and with his jeering friends telling him to die game, there was an elfin face framed in honey gold ringlets staring up at him and telling him to keep his wig on straight, while a fiddler did a bad rendition of “Portsmouth Lass” and Claghorne and seaman Crouch shoved on the capstan bars, and some very ugly old woman sold poking sticks to the gentry who wished to have at him.
He dreamed he had Yellow Jack and had turned the color of a Quarantine flag, all his hair falling out in his eyes, and a beautiful young girl tenderly bathed his face, softly saying “you sonofabitching bastard” over and over, and he had an erection because her eyes were the color of the ocean in a shallow island harbor, and Cassius rang a tiny silver bell so everyone could come and marvel.
Then there was a dream of a cool room, dim and quiet and still, with some kind of bars slanting one wall, and that one lasted for a while. The walls looked like plaster instead of the lathed partitions of a ship, and there might have been pictures on the walls but they were hard to make out because there seemed to be some kind of fog about him.
I’m in a house, he told himself dreamily, after pondering it a long time. I’m in bed in a house. So what happens after that? Slow sort of dream, compared to the others …
He could not move but he could blink and shift his vision to discover what seemed to be two sets of louvered doors on one wall at the foot of the bed he occupied. The light from outside was what was making the bar patterns on the wall.
They are not prison bars, he decided, shifting his eyes to a closer vantage of his body. He could see his arms on the sheets, so Boggs had not cut anything off. He tried to raise his arm but it would not move, and he sighed as he realized he had little control over this dream. He tried to shift a leg, and felt cool linen pressing down lightly all over him. I am in bed, in a house, nude, and not in jail. Lots of possibilities to this … hmm.
It was such a pleasant prospect that he dreamed he went right back to sleep to mull things over. When he dreamed that he awoke, it was much lighter. Then he saw that the fog about him was an insect net of very fine gauze around his bed, that the louvered doors led to some sort of veranda or patio. This time, he could move a hand and reach down to feel his groin. Yep, still got my wedding tackle. Nice room. Nice furnishings. Too good for a debtors’ prison, and it’s too quiet for a hospital. It was cool, and a hint of breeze came through those louvered doors, bringing the sound of surging waves on a beach, and he didn’t think it was Brighton. There was a decided salt-and-iodine tang to that breeze, and it was so bright beyond the louvers that he thought he might be somewhere in the tropics, maybe the West Indies.