Captain's Surrender by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online Page A

watery voice, struggling to lift the closest man to him—he hadn't the strength to lift the seaman's head and shoulders. "Someone help me! Oh!"
Noticing his own wound, he gazed at it, swaying, before his eyes rolled back and he fell. Andrews made an instinctive movement towards him and stopped, his face grim, before deliberately turning away to lift Mundy onto a hastily improvised stretcher. It was Chips, the ship's carpenter, who knelt by the wounded boy's side, trying to find a place to press on the wound without driving the jagged brass further in. There was a smell of charring flesh. All of the shrapnel was still red hot.
Emily tried to move forward, and only then realized she was shaking so hard she could hardly stand upright. A rage that felt almost like a religious experience overwhelmed her, sweeping her along before it. "He said, " she hissed between her teeth, clamping them together between words to still their chattering, "he said it wasn't safe! He said it! Why didn't you listen?"
"Too bloody right, missy!" Suleiman "Sully" Chips looked up with cannon fire in his eyes. He was a slender man with the build of a jockey, whose deep, almost blue-black skin had fascinated Emily on sight. He had been so amused by her regard that he expanded on it at every meeting with a yet more implausible story of his native land.
In this place of oppression and silence, he had been—like Hawkes—one of the few comfortable acquaintances Emily had made, and she thought him too gentle, too good-humored for the life. Now, however, there was nothing gentle about him; the veins stood out in his neck as he hurled himself forward at the captain. He never got close; recognizing the signs of a man pushed too far, he was suddenly surrounded by fellow sailors, trying to calm him down or, failing that, to drown out his accusing voice.
"Chips, leave him be."
"Come back here to the boy; we've to move him."
"Let it go! Sully, let it go!"
But Suleiman would not let it go. He drew himself up to his full height of five-foot-one and in a loud voice demanded, "Aren't none of you angry ? Han't any of you got the guts the young missy's got? We all fucking know who killed these men. We all know it! Han't any of you the stones to stand up and make it stop?"
"Leave. Now." The second lieutenant came up beside Emily, his hand on his sword, loosening it in its scabbard. At the sight she realized the peril—imagined the gun deck erupting into violence. The officers were armed with swords, and marines were even now filing in behind them with rifles and bayonets in their hands, but the men had cannonballs and cartridges of gunpowder. If it came to a fight, she could vividly imagine the carnage. So close they lived to this avalanche of barbarism. Her glorious anger faded at the thought, and fear replaced it. She shook out her skirts, squeezed between the line of rifles and ran away, feeling cowardly and humiliated and desperately afraid.
    Chapter 6
"Are..." After the rigors of punishment day, Walker had retired to his cabin to rest, and Summersgill found Peter Kenyon standing very stiffly on the quarterdeck in the isolation of profound shame. "Are you well?"
He couldn't tell whether the rigid posture was due to pain or to the unbearable affront to his dignity, but he suspected the latter. It was a matter of embarrassment even to himself to acknowledge the atrocity.
Kenyon had observed that some leniency might be possible in the sentencing of Suleiman Chips, "a good man, overcome by a temporary fit of grief", and on hearing Walker sentence him to keelhauling, had objected that keelhauling had been banned by act of parliament some years ago as too barbaric a punishment for naval use.
One could argue that he had known the risk he was taking, speaking up—the captain's warning was unequivocal—but nevertheless not a single man on board had imagined Walker would really go through with his threat. It tore a hole in the laws of nature to suppose an officer and a