In Gallant Company by Alexander Kent Page B

just now.
    And why not? Bolitho pushed his envy aside as best he could.He himself, if he avoided death or serious injury, would soon be back in
Trojan
’s crowded belly. He thought of Quinn as he had last seen him and shivered. Perhaps it was because of the wound he had taken on his skull. He reached up and touched it cautiously, as if expecting the agony to come again. But injury was more on his mind than it had been before he had been slashed down. Seeing Quinn’s gaping wound had made it nearer, as if the odds were going against him with each new risk and action.
    When you were very young, like Couzens or Midshipman Forbes, the sights were just as terrible. But pain and death only seemed to happen to others, never to you. Now, Bolitho knew differently.
    Stockdale trod heavily across the deck, his head lowered as if in deep thought, his hands locked behind him. In a long blue coat, he looked every inch a captain, especially one of a privateer.
    Metal rasped in the gloom, and Sparke snapped, ‘Take that man’s name! I want absolute silence on deck!’
    Bolitho peered up at the mainmast, searching for the masthead pendant. The wind had shifted further in the night and had backed almost due south. If that sloop had sailed past their position in the hope of beating back again at first light, she would find it doubly hard, and it would take far longer to achieve.
    Another figure was beside the wheel, a seaman named Moffitt. Originally from Devon, he had come to America with his father as a young boy to settle in New Hampshire. But when the revolution had been recognized as something more than some ill-organized uprisings, Moffitt’s father had found himself on the wrong side. Labelled a Loyalist, he had fled with his family to Halifax, and his hard-worked farm had been taken by his new enemy. Moffitt had been away from home at the time and had been seized, then forced into a ship of the Revolutionary Navy, one of the first American privateers which had sailed from Newburyport.
    Their activities had not lasted for long, and the privateer had been chased and taken by a British frigate. For her company it had meant prison, but for Moffitt it had been a chance to changesides once more, to gain his revenge in his own way against those who had ruined his father.
    Now he was beside the wheel, waiting to play his part.
    Bolitho heard the approaching hiss of rain as it advanced from the darkness and then fell across the deck and furled sails in a relentless downpour. He tried to keep his hands from getting numb, his body from shivering. It was more than just the discomfort, the anxious misery of waiting. It would make the daylight slow to drive away the night, to give them the vision to know what was happening. Without help they had no chance of finding those they had come to capture. This coastline was riddled with creeks and inlets, bays and the mouths of many rivers, large and small. You could hide a ship of the line here provided you did not mind her going high and dry at low water.
    But the land was there, lying across the choppy water like a great black slab. Eventually it would reveal itself. Into coves and trees, hills and undergrowth, where only Indians and animals had ever trod. Around it, and sometimes across it, the two armies manoeuvred, scouted and occasionally clashed in fierce battles of musket and bayonet, hunting-knife and sword.
    Whatever the miseries endured by seamen, their life was far the best, Bolitho decided. You carried your home with you. It was up to you what you made of it.
    â€˜Boat approaching, sir!’
    It was Balleine, a hand cupped round his ear, reminding Bolitho of the last moments before they had boarded this same schooner.
    For a moment Sparke did not move or speak, and Bolitho imagined he had not heard.
    Then he said softly, ‘Pass the word. Be ready for treachery.’
    As Balleine loped away along the deck Sparke said, ‘I hear it.’
    It was a regular splash