Captain's Surrender by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online

been on their knees before dawn, scrubbing the decks, pumping up the salt water, scouring the planks with holystones and flogging them dry with bundles of rags. Now they worked like Trojans in an inferno that would undo any man's strength, and faces that had been alight with the glory of the great guns were beginning to look numb and closed with exhaustion.
Outside, boat crews labored to pull rafts of barrels far forward into position to float past as targets, and in the brief break while Walker was scowling at his watch, Emily noticed two of the gun captains surreptitiously debating. Mr. Anderson, tears in his eyes, his pasty white face whiter still with fear, was whispering urgently to Mr. Andrews. As soon as Walker looked up, the child flinched away, shaking his head emphatically.
Finally, Andrews patted Anderson on the shoulder and strode down the awfully bare corridor of planks between the gasping gun crews, Walker's disapproving eye resting on him the whole way.
"You have something to say, mister?"
"Aye, sir. Mr. Anderson feels that number six is dangerously overheated, sir. I've looked at the piece and I concur. The touch-hole is almost white hot."
"And Mr. Anderson did not have the guts to report this himself?"
"Sir, he..."
"Don't think I haven't noticed how you mollycoddle these boys, Andrews." Walker narrowed his eyes and thrust his face forward. In response, Mr. Andrews drew himself up with an unconscious, pugnacious quirk to his mouth. More like one of the wild Irishmen who roamed the streets of St. Giles half-cut and looking for a fight, Emily thought, than like a sober officer of His Majesty's Navy.
Seeing the physical threat failing, Walker changed tactics. "Or is it something else, eh," he asked, raising his eyebrows, "that makes you so tender of the little lads? Well, Mr. Andrews, I hanged a man just the other week for that." Emily watched with interest as the young man's face paled with shock at this, and she wondered what the captain was suggesting. Not ... Oh, no, surely not. Oh, that was beyond the pale! What a vile thing to be accused of, no wonder he looked so appalled.
From her own experience with the boys, there wasn't a jot of truth in it, but someone was bound to believe it. Someone was bound to "explain" the offense to the children, and thus pollute their life with one more nightmare. Someone was bound to bump into Mr. Andrews in the dark between decks and give him a beating, just in case. What a vicious man Walker was, and how inventive with his methods of control. Lord, how she did despise him!
"No, until Mr. Anderson grows the balls to make his own decisions, he cannot expect me to listen. Dismissed."
The targets were let loose. The note of the cannon was different as they bellowed—they leaped as they recoiled, the chains that held them to the hull twanging taut, the impact of their weight making the whole frame of the ship shudder. There were worried faces as the crews jumped out of their way, yelling and cursing as men began to burn themselves on the hot metal. In snatched intervals of silence, there was a delicate, metallic pinging noise.
She was just beginning to wonder whether it would be a good time to leave when number six exploded.
The din was staggering. The flame even more so. A wave of incandescent heat washed over her, and a thrumming sound passed her left ear. Her world paused strangely, so that between the explosion and the first scream there seemed a slow, infinite time in which to think but where movement was suspended.
Then someone shoved past her, bucket in hand, and everything resumed its usual pace. She turned to find the deck aflame—a seething chaos of men pouring water, stamping on fire with their bare feet. The crew of number six lay scattered around it, broken and as red as the cannon itself.
Little Anderson was taking the pulse of a man, apparently unaware of the shard, thick as an ax blade, embedded in his own thigh. "Mundy and China George are alive," he cried in a