Chapter Seventeen
S ome heart of oak. One day into the crossing of the English Channel, if Neptune himself had risen from the depths and stabbed her with his trusty trident, Anna would have considered it a blessing.
For two days she would have welcomed death. It passed on the third day because of a combination of things. The first was a gallon jug—so it seemed—of a liquid so evil that it could not have been devised by the hand of man, except that it was.
‘Here you are, Miss Fontaine,’ Captain Carlisle informed her sympathetically. ‘The bosun’s mate claims the recipe has been handed down from father to son since before the pharaohs. Drink it.’
She drank, amazed that it seemed to curl up in her stomach and purr.
The other matter might have been the real reason she decided to live. ‘Allan is desperate with grief,’ Captain Carlisle told her. ‘He fears you are going to die and leave him and Pru alone.’
So, Anna appeared on deck in the early afternoon, looked around and pronounced it good. The relief in Allan’s eyes was even better than the Elixir from Hell. The Captain brought over a folding canvas chair and guided her into it. She held out her arms to Allan and tucked him close.
‘I was just seasick,’ she said soothingly. ‘I wonder if your father ever gets seasick?’
‘Surely not, Missy,’ he said quickly.
‘I will never be seasick again,’ she promised him.
The sloop sailed down the length of the blockade of coastal France and Spain.
As the weather warmed, Anna found herself on deck frequently, sitting in the canvas chair, her face to the sun.
She felt all the tension and uncertainty of winter shrug philosophically and take leave.
With Allan often asleep on her lap, she gave herself time to mourn the loss of her brother, and wonder what lay ahead with Captain Beattie.
Eight days out, an even smaller ship hailed them and hove to, a waterproof packet tossed aboard and delivered to Captain Carlisle.
The Captain spoke of the matter that evening after supper in the wardroom, where officers ate, and where they did, too. He tapped the side of his glass to get their attention. He held up the letter he had received. ‘Apparently our old friend La Guerre is roving about, gentlemen,’ he said.
‘ La Guerre ?’ she asked, confident enough among the officers to speak.
‘She’s a ship much like Captain Beattie’s French-built Swallow ,’ he explained. ‘She roams the Mediterranean like a bully, but usually that area closer to France.’
‘Now you see her, now you don’t,’ another officer said, too cheerfully to reassure Anna.
‘There will be gunnery practice tomorrow morning first thing.’ The Captain nodded to Anna and the children. ‘It will be a little noisy.’
She was routed out early in the morning by the Captain himself. ‘Dress quickly, Miss Fontaine,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
He led her down a narrow ladder and into a tiny space at the bottom of the ship, where she felt the stronger motion of water against the hull. She looked around at barrels and crates.
‘The bread room,’ Captain Carlisle told them. ‘If—and mind you, this is a big if —we find ourselves beset and under enemy fire, Miss Fontaine, I want you to hurry down here with the children.’
‘Here?’ She hoped she didn’t sound dubious, but…
‘We’ll have target practice right after breakfast. The pitch and roll will probably frighten you more than the noise,’ he told her. ‘Remember this: if you hear a long drum roll, that is called Beat to Quarters. Get down here as fast as you can and stay here until we come for you.’
Anna nodded, well aware that he saw the fear in her eyes. Perhaps he had a daughter of his own, because he rested his hand on her shoulder.
‘I will have some bandages put down here as well. We’re too small for a surgeon. If I have any wounded, I will send them here, too.’
What could she do but nod again and declare, ‘Aye aye, sir,’ which made him smile.
‘I wonder, Miss Fontaine, does our Captain Beattie have any idea how formidable you are?’
I am anything but that , she thought, then managed a smile. ‘Does any future husband really know that much?’
‘I know I didn’t! Just remember that the Jaunty is fast and nimble.’ He smiled. ‘I would hate to anger Captain Beattie if something should go crossways.’
‘We are at war,’ she said simply. ‘Don’t worry about us, sir.’
He bowed. ‘I’ll get you to Gibraltar. Breakfast now.’
Anna wondered how she was supposed to eat, knowing that her still-recovering stomach was now tied into knots. As it turned out, it didn’t matter.
They were barely seated at the table and Allan reaching to sugar his porridge when they heard someone on deck shout, ‘Beat to Quarters! La Guerre on the starboard beam!’ She held her breath at the sound of the continuous drum roll, which brought Captain Carlisle immediately to his feet.
He turned to her only long enough to shout, ‘Bread room! Remember what I told you,’ then ran from the wardroom. In mere seconds, only the three of them remained.
When the children looked at her with such trust, Anna knew the horrible responsibility of being the all-knowing adult, when the truth was that she knew nothing. She grabbed the lantern Captain Carlisle had hung on a hook. ‘Follow me, my dears.’
They waited long enough for every man who wasn’t already on deck to dash up the companionway, then took their turn, going down instead of up.
Pru fell the last few rungs as the Jaunty started to dart about.
It took no imagination to understand that the sloop of war was dodging and evading a more powerful enemy.
Bless the children. They were quiet and obedient. Anna hung the lantern on a hook above them and sat down. She gestured to Allan and Pru, who tumbled into her lap. She felt their shivering, and hugged them tight.
Pru, brave Pru, wet the front of Anna’s dress with her tears. ‘It’s the noise!’ she cried, as the carronades above them fired.
It was the noise, even though the rational part of her mind reminded Anna that noise itself wouldn’t kill them.
She longed to be on deck with the crew, able to see what was going on, and not down below, waiting for a cannonball from the La Guerre to blast them apart.
She thought of Captain Beattie, who depended on her to guard his son.
Even more than that, she wanted his arms around her .
Up until now, war had been a distant distraction.
The death of a much-beloved brother had brought it closer, and now she was in the middle of it.
John Beattie, where do you get your courage?
she asked, the air becoming heavy now with the smell of gunpowder.
Spare me a little, please , wherever you are .
The Jaunty dodged nimbly again. One of the crates of bread tumbled down, cracking open and shooting out pilot bread. ‘At least we won’t starve,’ Allan announced, which, God be thanked, made Anna smile.
Her smile lasted only until the hatch opened and a sailor pushed in a wounded man. ‘Bandage him, miss,’ he said, then left them.
With what? she asked herself, remembering Captain Carlisle’s comment that he would provide bandages before their gunnery practice, which had suddenly turned into the real thing.
‘Pru, you hold onto Allan,’ she ordered, as she crawled the few feet to the wounded man, bleeding from a wound on his thigh.
Drat him, if he didn’t regard her as hopefully as Allan had looked at her earlier.
I don’t know anything , she wanted to tell him, obviously not what he wanted to hear, so she said nothing. Think, Anna .
Some god of wisdom must have taken her under his wing because she knew what she should do, the only thing. No time to be a baby about it. She stood up and braced herself against a keg.
‘You’re going to get an eyeful,’ she warned the sailor, who clutched his thigh. She lifted her dress and untied her petticoat.
Wouldn’t you know it; the wounded man was the embodiment of all those ribald jokes about sailors. ‘I’ll die a happy man, miss,’ he managed to gasp, and then winked at her.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ she scolded as she smoothed down her dress. She glared at him, then ripped her petticoat into strips as the guns roared and the Jaunty shuddered when a cannonball crashed into the ship somewhere.
Terrified, she mentally flogged her fear into a corner of the bread room and dared it to move.
Ignoring the noise, she made a pad of one long strip.
The sailor nodded and pulled apart his ripped trousers, giving her an eyeful, too.
She pressed the pad against the jagged hole in his thigh and wound her petticoat strips tight around it.
‘Looks good, miss,’ he told her, shouting to be heard above the noise of battle. ‘Knot it tight on top of the pad, there’s a good girl.’
She did as he directed, then looked around for something to cover him. He pointed to a scrap of sailcloth. Pru tugged it out, and Anna placed it on his lap. She heard other men on the ladder, panicking to think of more wounded. They continued on by, running into the hold.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We’ve been hit twice. Hear it?’
She listened, then heard a rhythmic clank. ‘What is it?’
‘The pumps, ma’am,’ he told her, sounding so matter-of-fact, when she wanted to run in circles like a crazy person. ‘Getting t’ water out.’
‘What now?’
She didn’t know how a wounded man could grin, but he did. ‘We hope that Neptune likes the Royal Navy more than he likes the French.’