Blessed Isle by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online

Cornwall . And Ben Hough, one of the jailers, also out of the Cornwall . They are asleep, but I can rouse them if you wish.”
    “No, let them rest. I’ve no doubt they need it.” “If, under Providence,” Mortimer went on with a careful note of hope, “we are permitted another week of calm, then I believe I should be able to provide you with a further nineteen convalescents, capable of light duties.”
    “Very well,” I said, quailing inside. Six exhausted men to handle a three-masted ship as she negotiated her way into an unknown harbour in potentially foul winds? Yet we could not stay at sea. Not here in this perilous southern ocean, where storms came as regular as the tick of a clock.
    As I thought this, there came again that deep, indistinct groaning from the hollow of the hold beneath us—the rattle of chains and something that sounded almost like speech. My wits had settled and this time, though the hair still stood up on my arms, I took a lantern from its nail in the bulkhead and edged slowly down the ladder. The noise stilled. The light ran away from me, illuminating the ribs of the hull like the belly of a whale and revealing blackened, shabby, hunched things that moved, shuffling forward until their chains twanged taut. Their eyes glistened with the flame of my lamp.
    “Get us out of here!” He was a flash of teeth in a tangled beard. A distinguished-looking man once, perhaps, but goblin-like in that half-light. I’ve never seen eyes before or since that had such a red light in them, but his words were reasoned enough. “Please, Captain! You are the captain, ain’t you? Please, we can help! Just let us out.”
    “You’ve been fed?” I asked, while inside, my heart seemed to turn to brass, its beat jerky and far more terrified than it had ever been facing the French.
    “Oh aye,” said he. “And watered like cattle when they could spare the time. But we’ve all had the fever, ain’t we, and come out the other side, fit and healthy, and you need us.”
    I didn’t like his smile. The records of his offence had gone down with his ship, but if he had not done murder in the past, I believed he was contemplating it now.
    “I will think on it,” I said, and went out into the open air with the sense that I was running away.
    “There are three-and-twenty of them, sir.” Garnet had followed me, and now he leaned into the wheel for support. “Twenty-three men, with nothing to look forward to at our destination but dust and chains. And six of us. If there’s a single man among them with knowledge of navigation, we’d be signing our death warrant to let them free.”
    I took a glass and climbed to the mainmast topmast yard, scouring the three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon for land. Given nine days running before a wind of twelve knots or more, we must have rounded the Horn in the storm. America should lie to the east—the long hospitable coast of Chile, where we could land and nurse our invalids back to life, rest and eat and regain our strength, and draft in any adventurous Chilean lad who cared to sail with us. If there was but a blue, cloudlike shape on the edge of sight, a change in sea and clouds, we might yet be saved.
    A smudge darkened the edge of the world to starboard. My heart leapt into my dry throat as I peered and peered through the little circular window at that low . . . ridge of hills in the distance? Or might it be a reef? Was there a line of white beneath it where the surf broke on the shore? The log had gone over the side in the storm along with the midshipman who had been trying to read it. All I knew was that we had been tossed like a thrown stone steadily west northwest. How far we had travelled I had no idea, and would not until the skies cleared enough to show us the moon. But it could be America, over there. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility. God almighty, have mercy on this sinner now . Let it be land. Please, let it be land.
    The wind blew still nor’