Chapter 20 #2
Except for the steady tick of the clock on the mantel, the flickering flames in the hearth and the faint hiss of the sea wind at the shutters, the room was quiet.
Eunice drew a long breath. Then she spoke, her voice low but firm.
“If the Lord can use Rodney’s greed to break Britain’s strength, He can use the same to free Captain Haraden. I believe it.”
Martha rose and crossed to her, laying a work-roughened hand on Eunice’s shoulder. “Then hold to that, my dear. Hope’s as dear as bread these days.”
Silas nodded. “The talk in town is of victory, or at least a turn in our favor. I’ll bring any further word from the wharves. Till then, we’ll keep the lamps trimmed.”
Eunice looked toward the darkening harbor, where the tide whispered against the stones. Somewhere far to the south, she imagined the same sea washing up on a shore near a prison wall, and the man she loved hearing the same tide. “Hold fast, Jonathan,” she whispered. “The tide’s turning.”
St. Eustatius, 25 November 1781
THEY HAD LEARNED to measure time by the guards’ habits—which watch drank deep at dusk, which kept a steady eye on the quay, and which laughed too loud when a cask of rum was rolled by.
For nearly nine months those small certainties had been the prisoners’ only map of hope.
Now the map ran to one last line: the hour the sentries began slurring their words.
Jon stood on the stone floor of the weighing house and watched the moon smear itself thin across the barred window.
Around him men breathed in ragged rhythm, like a ship at anchor, coughing, muttering, sleeping in fits.
The shackles had been eased with Rodney’s departure months ago, as if the jailers had forgotten to fit them on cold wrists every night.
It could have been a kindness, or more likely sloth.
Bobby slept curled against a mortar that had once held sugar, his face thin and pale but peaceful in rest. Thorndike bent over a scrap of candlelight, tracing the shadows where the tunnel had been dug toward the outer wall.
Curtis listened, his jaw set. Chaplain McClure whispered a low prayer in the corner.
Jon looked at each face. “Tonight,” he said, and his voice, hoarse from months of little speech and less air, carried.
“We wait till the first cask goes past the guardhouse. We take two at the sentry post nearest the quay, not where the drums beat. We don’t alarm the whole garrison.
We move fast, quiet as an oncoming storm.
” His instructions reminded Jon of his days in the militia where stealth could mean victory.
Thorndike nodded. “I’ve watched the rounds for a week. The lieutenant at the east post always takes his cup then. He’ll be slow to wake.” He gripped Jon’s forearm. “We can do it, Captain. We’ll go like prowling wolves.”
Curtis spat once and gave the list: who would take which man, where the stolen cutlasses, filched months before from a careless locker and smoothed at the hafts by Bobby’s small hands, would be hidden, how the weakest among them would be carried.
The surgeon had fashioned the semblance of a litter should they need it.
Chaplain McClure’s prayer had steadied them all. Piety and planning shared the room.
They moved in a silence that seemed a betrayal of their months of noise. Outside, somewhere down the lane, the low, vulgar laugh of a guard echoed. A dog barked and was hushed. A cask scraped and the lightest clink of tankards told them the hour had come.
Thorndike slid from the stone and bent like shadow. He passed the word with a touch: one, two, three. They were not many, perhaps ten, perhaps twelve able men who still had strength and could be trusted not to flinch. But the weak and the sick were to be helped or carried.
Jon’s hand found Bobby’s shoulder. The lad woke with a quick start, and was given a strip of biscuit.
They had learned to move like sailors moving aloft: steady hands, even breath, eyes fixed on a point beyond the next step.
Two prisoners lay in wait just inside the narrow doorway.
When the guard stooped to shift the loading ramp and roll out another cask, Thorndike dropped like a hunter and closed about the man’s throat. A second hand came quick.
The other guard moved to shout, and Jon was on him.
He lunged, seized the guard’s wrist and drove a solid blow into his temple.
The musket clattered to the stones and the guard slumped, senseless.
A third sentry went down in a tangle of arms and boots before he could cry out, the cutlasses flashing long and narrow in hands made strong by years at sea.
No one meant to kill; they meant to be quick and stay quiet.
A sentry dropped into a heap, breathing hard, his head bleeding from the blunt of a handspike.
Another was bound with his own scarf. The air was thick with the iron scent of blood, but the night swallowed most noises.
Carts loaded with rum casks continued to scrape past the post as if nothing had happened.
“Easy, lads,” Jon murmured as they slipped past the corner. “No talking now unless I speak first.”
They moved through the lane like ghosts with one purpose.
Jon’s chest hammered, and in the hollow between his ribs his anger and fear braided into a single rope of will.
At the courtyard gate they found one door unbarred, a favor from a Dutch friend who had bribed a soldier earlier that week.
Then they slipped through into the dark streets beyond.
The Dutch had remembered them. That was what had kept the plan breathing.
Women with covered heads waited by a house along the lower quay road, bearing bowls of stew so thin Jon could have wept.
One woman, who introduced herself as Anna de Graaff, handed him a bowl.
“For you, Captain.” Jon thanked her and made sure Bobby and Joshua ate first.
They were given cloaks and false passes and a place to lay the worst of the sick.
The Dutch provided other things, too: a clever map of sentry paths, a woman who knew which sentries might be paid to look the other way, and most precious of all, a small boat hidden among the seagrass that might take them round the headland if the sea proved calm.
They had not tried to carry every prisoner.
The weighing house held men beyond their strength.
Those who could walk were helped. For those who could not, the Dutch agreed to bribe the guards for leniency.
It was the hardest choice Jon made, one he would carry always.
As they threaded the narrow alleys, men they had stood beside kissed the hands of the Dutch women helping them, leaving them to tend those who could not move.
In the gray before dawn they crouched in a thicket above a cove, salt spray stiff on their faces, the muscles of their legs drawn taut as rope.
Bobby shivered and mouthed the names of his mates.
Jon counted heads and found them all where they needed to be.
Finally, his chest unclenched enough to take a breath that tasted of the sea.
From far out at sea, as the dawn broke, Jon heard the thrum of oars, the creak of tackles.
A low thunder of sound, like surf under a storm.
He and those with him watched as masts rose on the horizon, first dim and then white and bright.
Jon’s heart raced. It was the French squadron.
“The French!” he whispered hoarsely. Their sails filled low and steady under the wind.
Minutes later, guns answered with a single, rolling note as the French drove straight into the harbor.
Before long, a sharp staccato, a single volley of rifles, came from the headland, then a confused roar.
Men on the ridge, a landing force who must have been sent ahead, shouted in French as the tricolor flag rose and the Union Jack tumbled.
In the settlement below, redcoats scrambled, surprised and scattered as the Marquis de Bouillé’s men came swiftly ashore.
A cheer broke from some corner of the island, small and raw, like a voice finding its throat after a long silence.
Jon felt something loosen inside him, a muscle long clenched given back to him.
He watched the French sailors coming ashore and turned to his men.
They had slept in dirt-worn clothes, unwashed since spring.
They had lost comrades. Yet their eyes shone with the same unsinkable courage and love of country that had carried them through broadsides and bilges. “We have prevailed.”
The French officers came in small boats to the quay, and Jon and his officers went to meet them.
Their saviors moved with the quick courtesy of men who had taken armies.
Men in dark blue coats trimmed in gold shook hands with bandaged men of Salem and Boston as if business and mercy belonged to the same hour.
Bouillé’s aide spoke through an interpreter.
“Arrangements will be made to send the American men aboard French transports bound north to neutral harbors. The wounded will be tended by our own surgeons. And the guilty who plundered will be answered in due time.” He turned to go and then, turning back, added, “You might like to know that Rodney’s convoy with his plunder never made it to England.
We captured it near the Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall.
It will serve to help France aid America. ”
Jon nodded, supposing that was some comfort. “Merci.”
When the French were told the captain of the Pickering was among the prisoners, one of Bouillé’s lieutenants came to Jon. “Regretfully, Captain, we cannot give you back your ship. The English have already taken her, but we can restore to you your life and the lives of your men.”