Chapter 174: The Fat Ship’s Only Trick
The sun had fallen low enough that James had to shade his eyes to look back over the water. There was nothing there, not as far as the horizon.
Havana ought to be no more than a dark smudge along the coast by now.
Yet empty was not safe. Somewhere beyond that horizon, the Guarda Costa was still sweeping the water for a galleon stolen under their noses.
James found that funny. If you wanted a proper hunt put after you, you had to rattle the bastards cage hard enough that they could not sit still afterward.
He kept a hand on the wheel and felt the ship answer the swell. She rose slow and heavy, her whole hull leaning into the water a heartbeat after a lighter vessel would have recovered.
That was the trouble with her. Forty-six guns and enough belly to carry them made her a ship built to stand and fight, or carry a cargo fat enough to sink a lesser vessel. Neither business had much use for speed.
There were only a handful of hands aboard her now, and not one of them was a navigator, seeing as James had put the last one through the throat himself less than half a day ago.
Whatever canvas they had set was staying set. There was nobody to spare for climbing aloft, reefing sail, and resetting it whenever the wind took another notion.
So they had one sensible choice left. Keep her trimmed as she was, nurse the wheel through whatever the sea decided to throw at them, and pray the wind stayed friendly.
The one trick she had learned, the absurd perk, was that she drew less water than any ship of her size had a right to. That was useful around reefs and along a coast where no man o’ war would dare follow.
Out here, with nothing but open sea around them, it was worth precisely nothing.
James laughed at it. His luck had always been good at handing him the right gift for the wrong problem, or maybe it was just the voice sense of humor.
Still, a slow ship with too few hands was better than the gallows. James had made worse bargains in his life and slept soundly afterward.
He took his eyes from the sea and looked over the deck.
Jim was sitting beside the foot of the mainmast, exactly where he had laid Kit after they cleared the harbor. One hand stayed close enough to catch the boy if the ship rolled badly.
Kit was still breathing and still unconscious, just as he had been since the fort.
The stolen coats were gone from all of them now, as there was not a Spaniard within a hundred miles worth fooling anymore.
What remained of the uniforms had been put to less respectable uses. One folded sleeve was under Kit’s head for a pillow while the rest had become rags near the pumps, torn into strips and stuffed wherever the bilge demanded them.
Down by the open hatch, Sam had his sleeves rolled up and a lantern propped against a coil of rope. He worked his way along the belowdecks, putting a flat hand against every cask worth of food.
James looked up at the mainmast.
Milagros had a line wound twice around one fist and was hauling on it as if she intended to pull the whole spar down out of pure spite. The halyard had fouled near the block, and every pull gained her another inch of rope and another mouthful of profanity.
She spat the words at the block, then switched to English.
"Fuck this rope, and fuck whoever built this ship."
The line had bitten her palms raw.
James shouted over.
"Want a hand with that, lass?"
"No. I’ll beat this pendejo rope myself before I ask you for anything."
"Aye, fair enough."
James clicked his tongue with a grin and left her to it.
She won another inch without surrendering a scrap of her temper.
Tomás came up from below, wiping his hands against his coat. He had been working the bilge pump, and the steady rhythm of it had done nothing to change his calm expression.
"Anything worth worrying over?" James asked.
Tomás shook his head.
"Nothing she cannot stand, Captain."
"Come up a minute, got a question that wants askin’."
He walked to the quarterdeck without a word.
James gestured to the horizon. "Marianne. Any notion where she’d be sittin’ right now?"
Tomás pondered for a few seconds.
"I could not say, Captain. Truly, there is no way of knowing."
He shook his head. "We are not the ship Williams would expect. A galleon this size, flying colors he would not trust, could have put him to flight before he thought to wait and see."
"And if the Guarda Costa got wind of a British sloop lingering too close to the harbor?"
"Then he would not have stayed around to ask what they thought of it."
Tomás’s expression strained. "He would have taken the Marianne into open water and kept her there, far from the harbor and farther still from us, until he considered it safe to come looking."
Sam came up from the hold in time to hear the last of it. A streak of gray powder ran across his breeches.
He leaned against the rail beside them. "Williams won’t sit on his hands waiting for us to come along and explain ourselves. He’s my quartermaster, and a damned good one. Whatever he’s doing right now, he’s doing it ’cause he reckons it’ll give us the best chance of finding each other again."
James snickered
"That’s a comfort that tells me shite."
Sam grinned, as cheerful as a man could be about knowing nothing.
"Don’t fuss over like a bride now. I trust Williams as much as you trust Cudjoe."
There was not much more to be said after that.
However he considered it, the plain fact remained. They were riding the wind, the current. and hoping both brought this great lump of a ship away from the Guarda Costa.
The sun sank lower, turning the water and sky the color of a struck match. Nobody aboard found a better answer than the one they already had.
Sam clapped a hand against James’s good shoulder, taking care not to jar the one still aching beneath his shirt. "Go below, Calloway, get whatever sleep this tub’ll let ye have. I’ve got the watch, and there’s precious little left to watch out here besides."
James accepted the advice. Now that there was nothing left to outrun, the exhaustion and ache came to him at once.
He left Sam with the lass and walked toward the captain’s cabin, his boots dragging more than he would have liked to admit.
Milagros still had one hand around the fouled line, though she had plainly forgotten the rope was there.
Her eyes were on him instead.