For King or Commonwealth by Richard Woodman Read Free Book Online Page B

its influence his agonizing over Katherine had faded entirely from his mind which, or so it seemed to him through the long hours of that intense forenoon, was serenely calculating, as though elevated beyond the plateau of fearful anticipation that he guessed many of his men were enduring as they held their fire, as instructed. He had first experienced the sensation earlier that morning, when he first realized the extent to which the conditions favoured him. The north-easterly breeze he had foretold without much trouble from the omens in the sky off the Smith’s Knoll, but its temperature he could not have guessed, nor the dense sea-smoke that was its consequence.
    As he lowered his speaking trumpet after hailing the third merchantman he called softly down to White and Lazenby in the waist, ‘Make ready, gentlemen. The next is ours to gull.’ And then, walking quickly aft to the taffrail he simply called out to the coxswain in the boat hidden astern in the low sea-smoke, ‘What sounding?’
    The coxswain responded as he had been coached. ‘By the mark five, sir.’
    â€˜Cast well to starboard!’ Faulkner called, maintaining the fiction of sounding to test the depth of water, but instead of taking a cast with the lead, the man put the boat’s tiller to port and the longboat sheered out on the
Phoenix
’s starboard quarter while her crew blew on their slow-matches.
    Faulkner nodded to the man at the wheel, and he too did as he was told without an order that might have carried the deceit to their quarry now only yards away, downwind. The
Phoenix
veered in her course, as though sloppily handled and prompting a hail from the merchantman next in line.
    â€˜Mind your helm there!’ Faulkner roared in the mock admonition that was the signal for the boy to prepare the ensign halliards. Faulkner watched the lad until he was ready, with the King’s ensign bent on the same line that held the cross-and-harp aloft. Satisfied, he watched the anchored merchant ship that was suddenly very close as the light breeze and the strong tide swept them past.
    â€˜Now, gentlemen, now!’
    From the waist rose a rolling concussion as each gun was fired into its hapless victim. The noise was punctuated by the heavier thud of the charge in the coehorn as the smoke of the guns’ discharges hung almost motionless above them, partly obscuring Faulkner’s view of the merchantman. Only her upper masts and yards rose clear into the bright blue sky and then the shell, lifted by no more than a few pinches of black powder, burst in a vivid, blinding flash. The crash of the detonation was followed by a series of unidentifiable noises as shell fragments indiscriminately struck rope, wood, iron and human flesh, not all of it aboard their quarry. Faulkner himself felt the sharp, searing slash of an iron splinter as it scythed across his cheek so that he felt the heat of it as it gashed him, followed by the warm trickle of blood. Of this he took little notice, eager to see whether their last stratagem had taken effect.
    Delayed some seconds after their own passing, as the air was filled with the screams of the wounded and the cries of horror at the outrage being perpetrated against them, the towed longboat swept alongside the anchored vessel. Into a porthole, opened as Faulkner had anticipated, to air the ship, the longboat’s crew tossed one of their fused packages. Another was lodged on the ship’s starboard main chains so that, as they drew past, Faulkner saw the combustibles burst into flame and the fires take hold.
    Faulkner had a clear view of the stern now and saw where a man, probably the ship’s master engaged in the very act of opening his bowels, thrust a pistol muzzle through the glass of the privy to take a potshot at him. He ducked the ill-aimed ball and waved.
    â€˜Damn you!’ came the furious response. ‘Who the devil are you?’
    â€˜The
Phoenix
of the King’s