Day of Honor 01_ Ancient Blood - Diane Carey [86]
Except for the little child drowsing at the hearth, Picard and the men were alone for the first time since coming here.
“This is unacceptable!” Midshipman Nightingale seethed. “We’re in an enemy camp!” He appealed first to the seamen, who only stared at him, then turned to Picard. “Sir!”
“We’ll look around,” Picard said evenly. “There will be absolutely no action until and unless I order it. Is that clear?”
The two sailors instantly responded, “Aye, aye, sir.”
But the two officers had said nothing, and Picard wasn’t opening that door without confirmation of his authority, despite the conditions.
“Mr. Leonfeld?” he prodded. “Mr. Nightingale? Is it clear?”
All eyes shifted to the grenadier. Sandy’s golden hair twinkled like stars in the firelight. “Clear, sir,” he moped finally.
On that cue, young Edward Nightingale echoed, “Aye, sir.”
Picard stood up and indulged in a surge of reckless excitement.
“I’ll hold you to it. Because we’re going to recapture our ship.”
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms— never—never—never!
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham
Chapter Sixteen
“MAKE FAST TWO!”
“Make fast two, aye!”
“Take up three! Make fast one!”
“Aye, sir! One’s fast!”
“Let out four!”
“Four, out!”
“Line three, wake up, man! Take up that line!”
A grind of wood against a dock … the slap of water somewhere below … the creak of broken yards.
Itchy.
The wool breeches felt as if they had chunks of wood floating in the weave. The cotton shirt lay stiff against Picard’s neck and shoulders, beneath a rather loosely fitted linen waistcoat.
He wanted to scratch, but in an impolite place. And he was hurrying along a public street. And there were women.
In fact, it seemed the whole town had turned out at the docks to rejoice at the tying-up of His Majesty’s Ship Justina.
And a pathetic sight it was. Now, in the dimness of predawn, Picard could see just how much damage had been sustained by the frigate, such as he had not been able to see at night from a distance. The ship and crew had evidently put up more of a fight than he had been able to measure from the shoreline, for she was brought in with canistershredded sails hanging torn from smashed yards broken in two or three places, and part of the bow stove in from a cannon ball. Luckily, above the wateriine.
Justina was by far the largest ship in this demure marina, including the boats being worked on or converted in the boatyard. All around were craft the size of the spider catchers, as well as utilitarian fishing craft and loading barges. This was a small port, but a working and busy one.
At his right side, Alexander pressed close to Sandy Leonfeld. To his left, Mr. Nightingale and the two deckhands crowded the wooden fence that funneled down to the two narrow docks. No one said anything as they watched their ship nudge up to the dock, crewed by colonists in common clothing and a half dozen blue-jacketed Delaware Light Infantry militiamen. And their long-barreled rifles. And flintlock pistols. And the cannons on board the ship.
Those uniformed men, and the ones waiting on the shore, Picard guessed, must be of the battalion authorized by the Delaware Committee of Safety, which Sandy had mentioned. Picard had harbored disparagements about them, about how he was of an advanced era and could have vaporized them without a thought if he had a single phaser, but now he looked at them, saw the familiarity with which they handled those long guns, and the strapping, survival build of their bodies. These were neither the coddled aristocracy who lived above the streets of Europe nor the emaciated masses who starved below. These were strong, hardened, frontier-taming Americans, who had taken this wild young seacoast and whipped it into a burgeoning civilization, and who, Picard knew, would do much more in the decades to come.