She was silent for a long moment. “What shore is it, Kin? Where are we now?”
It irritated me that I had not thought to ask Tilly, for it was always important to have a location, and I could only surmise it was somewhere north of that coast of which I knew a little. Perhaps north of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
After saying as much and warning her we might be in a boat erelong and to dress warmly, taking whatever she might need that could be easily carried, I went on deck.
It was cold and windy there. The sails pulled well, and we were tacking across the wind, working in toward shore, and well I knew how a mariner dreaded sailing along a shore at any tune, let alone at night. When landsmen write of such things, they always tell of the first mariners hugging the shore, which is utter nonsense and something no seaman in his right mind would do. The open sea has fewer dangers.
John Tilly loomed near me. “She’s back there and closing in. I saw a mast draw a black thread across a star.”
“It might have been a bird.”
“Might have been, but it was not.”
“Is not Maryland somewhere about here?” I asked.
“It is, and a coast of which I know little. Always along here I am well at sea and wanting only more sea room. Yet I hear there are islets and reefs, offshore winds. Who knows?”
No darker night had I seen and no blacker a sea. The wind held steady, and the Abigail was sailing well. I walked to the taffrail, standing over where Diana must be, and looked astern.
Nothing.
Only the night, only the darkness, only the wind and the sea. Occasionally a star showed among scudding clouds. And then, suddenly, she was there coming up alongside like a black ghost from a black and glassy sea. She was at our stern, her bowsprit dangerously near, and I saw a huge man with a black beard making ready to swing a grapnel. They would board us then.
He swung the grapnel, and I shot him. I never recalled drawing my pistol, only the flare of the gun and the startled look of the man as the ball took him in the chest. He fell forward, his grapnel going wild, and then she was alongide us, and her men were swarming over.
Somewhere I heard Tilly shout, and from our guns there was a belch of flame. I saw a section of bulwark go flying, heard a man scream, and then all was flames and fighting. I fired again, my second gun; it was knocked from my fist, and I smashed the man in the mouth and drew a knife, plunging it deep in his side.
Then I had a sword out, shifting the knife to the other hand, Italian style, and I went among them, cutting, slashing, thrusting. Men were all about me, and it was a wild corner of hell we were in.
A man went down beneath my feet grasping wildly at my legs, and I kicked free and fought clear of the mass. Tilly had rallied some of his men around him, and they were encircled by attackers. Yet the broadside had done its work, delayed though it had been, for flames were leaping up from fires aboard their ship, and I could see men dancing about fighting the fire that suddenly leaped to the sails, which went up in a great billow of flame like an explosion from a powder magazine.
Flaming bits of canvas fell, and one man, his clothing afire, leaped over into the dark, rolling sea. One glimpse I had of him, musket raised to fire when the sail caught and the flame leaped up at him like a great hand with a dozen fingers. I saw his eyes distended with horror, and then the flame was all about him, and he plunged from the topmast into the sea, screaming all the way.
Desperately I fought my way to the ladder and down it to the door that opened from the great cabin to the deck.
It swung wide, and I plunged through. A man opposed me, a man with rings in his ears and broken teeth, a man who swung a cutlass at my head. I parried the blow and went in with the dagger, and it took him in the ribs. His foul breath was an instant in my face, and then he slid down me to the deck, and I stepped over him into the cabin.
Diana stood there, her back to the bulkhead, tall, lovely, and perfectly still. Eyes wide, she faced a man whose back was to me, but I recognized him instantly. It was Joseph Pittingel.
“So now,” he said to her, “I shall kill you!”
“First try to kill the man behind you,” she told him coolly. “I think him too much for you.”
“Such a paltry trick!” he sneered. “I think—”
Then something in her eyes did make him turn, and he reacted instantly. Foolishly I had expected him to speak, to warn, to threaten, to beg, I know not.
He lunged, sword in hand, and the blade might have taken my life but for the pistol I had thrust empty into my belt. The blade struck it, and before he could move again, my own blade had smashed his aside. He thrust wildly at me, eyes bulging with hatred and fury. My ringers turned the blade off mine, and I held my blade up and ready. He came at me again, then stopped suddenly, and turning his sword, raised it to slash sideways at Diana!
She stood, back to the bulkhead, nothing between her and the swinging sword edge. I struck swiftly up between arm and body, and my blade caught him only in time, cutting deep into the muscles that held arm to shoulder. His blade flew from his fingers, narrowly missing Diana, and fell with a clatter to the deck.
He turned on me, blood streaming down his half-severed arm.
Ignoring him, I held out my hand. “Diana? Shall we go now?”
CHAPTER XIX
We reached the deck, and Tilly was there and a half-dozen others he had rallied about him. The fighting was over, and a body rolled in the scuppers; another hung limply on a bulwark, and even as I looked it slid off the bulwark and lay sprawled upon the wet deck.
The black ship was blacker still and far down in the water, her decks awash. She lay there, a cable’s length away, and we could see a few men about the deck.
“How is it, John?” I asked Tilly.
“Bad—bad,” he said. “She’s been hulled, I think, and will go down.”
Our deck had an ugly feel to it, a heavy, sullen feel that I liked not “Will she make the shore?” I suggested. “If we could get some sail on her—?”
“Aye, I was thinkin’ o’ that. Would you take the chance? It would be safer than the boats, and at least we can have a go at it.”
He started to give the orders, but the crew were already moving.
“What of them?” I asked.
He glanced toward the sinking Vestal, if that was indeed who she was. “They’ve the same chance we have, and they came looking for it. Let them bide.”
Leaving Diana on the quarterdeck, I went along forward, picking things up and making her shipshape. The two bodies left on the deck were only that, the life gone from them, so I dumped both overside. I found a pistol upon the deck and thrust it behind my waistband. We were moving, and the man at the wheel had put the helm over.
We were taking on water, and it was a wild chance we took to make for the shore. What if we hung up on a sandbar off the coast? Yet there was a chance to save both crew and ship as well as the cargo, and the ship was the Abigail, almost a part of our family.
Yet she had a sullen feel to her, and I liked it not. “Stand by,” I told Diana. “I must know where you are if the worst comes. We’ll make the shore together.”
“Or drown,” she said.
“We’ll make the shore,” I said, “for I am wishful of taking you to my cabin in the mountains yonder, the far blue mountains, as my father called them. And we’ll make it, too. I will need sons to seed the plains with men and build a country there, a place with homes.”
She could carry but little sail, but we moved, and somewhere off to the westward was land, a lee shore but a shore. Once the canvas was set, there was little we could do except to wait. Slowly the remaining sailors came on deck, each with a small parcel of his belongings.