Scarborough Fair - Chris Scott Wilson [23]
Without another glance at the boy, Jones turned back to search out Alliance in the rain streaked night. He muttered curses when he saw she was almost abreast, gray pyramids of canvas shivering in the testy wind. She was still altering course in an attempt to keep her station, but Richard’s lack of headway meant if Alliance kept coming, she would run under Richard’s bows. Was Landais a fool? He could not overhaul Richard quickly enough to take up a new station on the starboard quarter.
The commodore reached for his telescope, but before he could see who commanded Alliance’s bridge the lens was already smeared with rain. Suddenly, hunched there in the tearing wind, blind, all too wary of the danger threatening his ship if Alliance did not give way as the rules of the sea demanded, Jones recalled a conversation he had held with John Adams who had crossed the Atlantic with Captain Landais. What was it he had said? “Landais knows not how to treat his officers or passengers, nor anybody else. There is in this man an inactivity and an indecisiveness that will ruin him. He is bewildered—an absent bewildered man—an embarrassed mind.”
The commodore could only hope Adams was wrong. Such a man in command of a warship could prove extremely dangerous. That was if he had a warship after the next few minutes. Alliance was drawing closer by the second, plowing through the heavy sea, spume and spray climbing her topsides to be flung across the deck. Jones grabbed a speaking trumpet and began shouting into the wind.
“Ahoy there! Alliance! Sheer off!”
There was no response.
“Alliance! Haul away! Sheer off!”
Jones’s eyes widened, ignoring the bite of the rain. Now Alliance was presenting a broadside as Richard swung slowly. What canvas he could see above her deck was quivering as she luffed up into the wind. She stood less than half a cable away, closing with every second. If he could barely see Alliance’s sails, then the chance of Landais deciphering signal flags was non-existent Was the man blind, stupid, incompetent, or all three?
“Helmsman!” Hard a starboard!” he screamed into the wind.
The sailor did not hear him, muscles bunched as he fought against the crosscurrent yanking on the rudder. Beside him the small figure of the midshipman clung to the helm, buckled shoes sliding on the wet deck. The commodore pushed his hat hard down onto his head, robbing the wind’s fingers of their prize as he pushed away from the rail. He caught the helmsman’s shoulder, the man’s taut face turning, alarm written in his streaming eyes.
“Hard a starboard, man!”
“Aye aye, sir!” he replied through clenched teeth. The current yielded for a second, the oak spokes blurring as they spun. Bonhomme Richard did not respond.
In that moment Paul Jones knew they could not escape the inevitable. He watched powerless as Richard swallowed the sea between the two ships, pile driving through the wave crests. A wind had come from nowhere to fill her sails. He felt a surge of hope as the deck plunged beneath his feet then heeled as she belatedly succumbed to the helm.
Hope died with crash of splintering timbers for’ard. It was as if Bonhomme Richard was in pain. She groaned, winced, and shuddered. Sails suddenly boomed aloft as if she was gathering her power to ram right through Alliance, butting at the frigate’s ribs like an angry bull.
The wind buffeted the commodore as he strode to the companion ladder, one hand gripping the rail while the other denied the wind his hat. Lanterns spluttered, shadows crawling like doom over the gear-scattered deck. A figure fell from a yardarm, his scream of fear already buried by the shrieking wind. Jones spared the unfortunate man a bare glance before his eyes were drawn back to the crunching of splitting timbers up in the bows. Amidships, another man lay face down between two sixteen-pounder cannon, his blue officer’s uniform sodden, awash with seawater searching escape in the scuppers. A spar somehow torn from the mainmast swung murderously to and fro scant inches