Game of Bones Read online

  A Game of Bones

  DAVID DONACHIE

  To Helen, Bob, Donna, and Diane

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THOSE familiar with the Normandy coast will recognise the location of the Îles de St. Aubin if not the name. Dramatic imperatives required that the Marcoufs gained a dimension they lack in reality, though in their true incarnation in the days of sail they were more of a hazard.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SOUND was much altered, the boom of the cannon lengthened to distant, rolling thunder. But what Harry Ludlow was hearing, as he sat high in the crosstrees, was too regular to be elemental. He knew he was in the English Channel, as certain as any sailor can be that he was in deep water, and that an action was being fought outside the limited range of his vision. But more he could not say, since the white blanket of fog seemed to press against his very eyes. And, naturally, there was little wind to move him forward. Over and over, accompanied by the sound of his own clanking pumps and the annoying rattle of Flowers playing a set of bones, he heard the dull, reverberating thud, his head twisting like that of a snake as he tried to place the source.

  Looking down, the deck of Bucephalas was similarly invisible, conjuring up the impression that he was suspended in space, with no credible means of support. But he knew it was there, just as he was sure that every man, bar those pumping, would be on deck, like him searching vainly over the bowsprit, seeking some clue as to which course they should follow. Closing his eyes, Harry leant against the rough-grained wood of his upper mast. He suspected that he was close to a small corvette his lookouts had spied the previous night, a tub so slow he would have guaranteed a capture in clear weather. He was fairly certain that whatever vessels they were approaching, the range was shortening. But he’d been a sailor all his life; captain’s servant, naval officer, and now a privateer, so he was no stranger to fog. And he knew from long experience just how much it could distort sound.

  He felt the ropes moving long before Pender came to join him, but he was unaware of his identity till he spoke, his soft Hampshire burr also affected by the damp, cloying mist.

  ‘How we doin’, your honour?’ His face, deep-tanned and damp, swimming into view.

  ‘One ship is firing heavy ordnance,’ Harry replied, ‘the other something smaller. Yet they have a regularity that goes with practice. The larger cannon are more haphazard. So I think one is a substantial merchantman, lacking the crew for a proper fight.’

  ‘Could the other be a warship?’

  There was a wealth of unstated concern in that question, since avoiding such vessels was of paramount importance. Bucephalas was in no fit state to face even a modest foe. Two years away from home had done nothing for her hull, and in one sea fight she’d sustained damage below the waterline, and subsequent leakage, that demanded constant attention. Yet even in perfect trim, the reasons for steering clear of an enemy ship of war, French, Spanish, or Dutch, were obvious. Privateers made their profits from taking and selling the ships and cargoes of the King’s enemies, not from pitched battles where their only reward was glory.

  And Pender was trying to remind him, without actually saying so, that here in home waters they were as much at risk from their own King’s ships. With the war four years old, and the number of enemies that faced Great Britain multiplying, there was not a Royal Navy vessel at sea, from first-rate to sloop, that wasn’t short of its complement. Harry Ludlow had aboard Bucephalas a crew of hard-bitten, fighting sailors, all blue-water men, that any King’s officer would give his eye-teeth for. Legally they couldn’t strip men out of Harry’s ship, since he carried protections for his crew. But that very thing had happened the last time they’d been this close to home, proof that such judicial niceties were likely to result more in breach than observance. After such an absence, and in line for their fair share of the fortune Harry and the two-year cruise had earned them, his men were anxious to avoid anything that smacked of risk.

  But they had in their captain a man who could never resist the sound of gunfire. They knew he’d steer towards it, even if in the fog he couldn’t see that those very same cannon might threaten him. It was in his nature, and had marked his behaviour since the first day he took command of his own vessel, but recent events had exaggerated the trait. Harry Ludlow had suffered a grievous personal loss. The men who’d sailed with him from the Gulf of Mexico, via the port of New York, had learned one thing very quickly: the only thing that lifted his melancholy was action, especially that of the most desperate kind.

  ‘Happen we won’t see them,’ said Pender, trying to make his voice sound rational instead of hopeful. ‘In this pea soup we could sail right past, not a yardarm apart, and never know they was close.’

  ‘Helmsman!’ Harry shouted, leaning past Pender to do so. ‘Steer two points to larboard, and tell that bastard Flowers to belay on the bones.’

  ‘Captain,’ Pender growled, as those very same instruments, made from the jawbone of a right whale, gave an angry, final crack. ‘We have no need of this.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Harry replied, his voice as tight as the hand gripping the stay. ‘It could be the icing on the cake, especially if it’s that wallowing tub of a corvette we saw last night.’

  ‘A cake we might lose altogether if’n it ain’t.’

  ‘You’re not shy, are you?’ Harry hissed, using a tone of voice that he’d never before employed with this man.

  Pender’s voice was equally unfriendly. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if another asked me such a question.’

  There was a time when Harry Ludlow would have quickly apologised. But then there had been a period, seemingly distant now, when he would never have thought such a thing, let alone said it. Too much time alone had changed him. What his brother James, now on deck and as worried as the rest of the crew, termed introspection. Pender didn’t care a toss what it was in Latin, Greek, or double Dutch. To him it was a bad mood that threatened them all, an excuse for him to indulge in the very limits of the customary relationship he had with his captain, and chastise the man.

  ‘We don’t need icing. And I don’t need fighting to ease my sleep.’

  ‘Go back on deck, Pender,’ Harry replied calmly. ‘And that, just in case you are in any doubt, is a direct order.’

  The temptation to stay and argue was overwhelming, but Pender knew it would be fruitless. Whatever bond had existed between the
m was no longer there. What had happened in New Orleans had changed that, just as it had altered Harry Ludlow. The man who loved life and laughter and could calculate danger to the inch was no more. Gone was the captain who cared not only for his crew’s welfare but for their good opinion.

  ‘And, Pender,’ Harry added, as the man who’d once been his servant, and until recently been a friend, turned to leave, ‘you mistake your position. You will in future remember that I am the captain of this ship. We may not be a naval vessel, but that does not deny me the right to impose discipline, to the extent of flogging someone if required.’

  Pender was too shocked to respond, a most unusual state for a man who prided himself on never bowing to authority. And he was hurt, something Harry Ludlow would have seen if he’d turned to look. They’d been together for nearly five years, the only break enforced by unfortunate circumstance, and in that time they’d been through all manner of exploits. The man threatening him with a flogging had sailed halfway across the world to rescue him, and a goodly portion of his crew, from the hell of a King’s ship. Pender slid down the backstay, and as he descended the lump in his throat seemed to grow to match the anger that swelled in his breast.

  On deck, with the heat from below thinning the fog slightly, it was easier to see both people and objects. The men had been looking over the side all right, but they turned to gaze at him in an anxious way that indicated their concerns. James Ludlow, standing by the binnacle, approached him as he landed, just as Harry, hearing another boom of cannon, louder this time, called down for a second slight alteration to the course.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He reminded me of a captain’s rights in the article of punishment, one which, if he saw fit, goes as far as letting the cat out of the bag.’

  James didn’t gasp, a melodramatic device adopted by some members of the crew, since there was no real surprise in what Pender was saying. Sharing the great cabin with Harry these last weeks, as they’d crossed the Atlantic without the sight of so much as a fishing smack, had been an increasingly unpleasant experience, in which his normally considerate brother had turned into a waspish pest. Though in the confines of the ship his company was hard to avoid, James had done his very best, trying to reduce his presence in the cabin to that of nothing more than sleeping. Harry ate alone, stared out of the casement windows at the wake in utter silence, and banned everyone from proximity while he walked the quarterdeck. When altering sail or giving orders he generally behaved like the kind of martinet naval officer he’d often claimed to despise.

  ‘I think he’ll only be happy if we’re sunk,’ James replied.

  ‘If he wants he can jump from where he sits now,’ said Pender bitterly. Yet more booms erupted, seeming now to move the air around them, causing him to pause. ‘And with my blessing, as long as he takes care to find the deck.’

  James put a hand on Pender’s shoulder, his voice low and compelling. ‘It is a temporary thing, an attack of melancholia brought about by his loss. It will pass, in time.’

  ‘You said that in the Gulf when we took on them two armed merchantmen,’ Pender replied, looking around the ship, though the scars of that engagement where hidden by the mist.

  They’d had an even closer shave in the Florida Channel, crossing swords with a Spanish frigate. If the wind hadn’t turned foul, so that the Dons couldn’t get across their hawse, they’d not be here, talking now. James was well aware that the crew’d had to pump ever since that day just to keep a check on the water level in the well. All that labour for damage that had Harry been a little more patient could have been fixed in New York.

  ‘It’s only by God’s good grace,’ Pender continued, ‘that we crossed this far without sighting a ship-of-the-line to attack. And now, when every man aboard can smell the peat of his own home fire, with a King’s ransom to be shared, he’s steering a course that might see us all pressed or sunk in sight of the shore.’

  As he spoke, making no attempt to lower his voice, the murmurings of the crew changed to growls. Flowers started to rattle the whalebones again, his sharp, staccato rhythm a perfect foil to their mood. They were edging towards the pair by the shrouds, as if by proximity they could enforce some kind of collective action. James was about to speak, to reassure them, when Harry’s voice, louder now, called out.

  ‘Two ships fine on the starboard bow. I can only see their topmasts, but they’re there for certain. Take station on the larboard guns and prepare to fire as they bear.’

  The hesitation was minimal. But it was palpable, which made James wonder just how these men would behave if it actually came to a fight. Nor was he sure whether it was ingrained discipline, fear, or Pender’s voice repeating the command which had them doing as Harry had ordered. But once the spell was broken they moved quick enough, well aware that whatever they were about to engage in, it could only be made worse by tardiness.

  Aloft Harry felt his spirits lift as the fog thinned slightly. Bucephalas was drifting along on one of the numerous ever-changing currents of the Channel, the slight warming caused by a more southerly flow just enough to provide faint vision. The thin trace of the two ships’ upper masts, hidden a moment ago, were now like spiders’ webs right ahead. Peering forward to look at the pennants made him feel even happier. He recognised one as French, and the other as the flag of the East India Company. The enemy ship’s masthead was lower than the merchantman, a good indication that it must be the corvette, either a privateer like him, or a navy ship on a speculative cruise. Whatever, it was a worthy opponent, one that would occupy all his thoughts as he sought to best her, so that the images that had occupied his mind these last weeks would be blotted out.

  The fog, still thick closer to sea level, made it hard to see the state of the action. John Company ships, big ocean-going vessels, were well armed. They had to be in order to survive the long voyage to and from India, where the threats to their security started as soon as they weighed, and didn’t diminish until they dropped anchor in the Hooghly. But their crews, numerous by normal merchant service standards, were not of sufficient numbers to both fight and sail the ship, and certainly too few to defend against a determined and well-executed attempt to board by a heavily manned enemy.

  Judging by the twin sets of topmasts, edging slightly closer, that was the objective of the Frenchman, using the lee and shallower draft of the larger, drifting vessel to reduce the gap. And in the light airs that kept the fog in place, the Indiaman was short on options to avoid such a fate. What sails they had aloft hung limp in the moist air, only occasionally ruffled as a wisp of breeze lifted the edge. And all the while the guns boomed out, the blast thudding into Harry’s ears, and the smoke adding a different hue to the mist which obscured the decks.

  Nothing in their actions indicated that they’d seen him approach. Harry Ludlow prided himself on being tactically astute. So in a situation where hard information was lacking he normally favoured caution. With very little wind and no idea of precisely how matters stood, he’d no way of ensuring that when he did engage, both ships would not assume him to be an enemy and turn their guns to face this new threat. He could find himself caught between two fires, bombarded as much by his fellow-countrymen as his enemies. But with the exhilaration that now suffused his whole being, he didn’t care. There was a fight to engage in, with the risk of success, death, or mutilation. For a man in his mood, that was more than enough.

  ‘Lookout aloft,’ he yelled, aware that he could do nothing more from up here. In any engagement his place was on deck. The man got his orders from a captain already sliding down towards the deck, simple instructions to keep an eye on the masts, and tell him if they showed any sign of becoming entangled.

  Landing with a thud, he looked around, checking as much as the mist would allow that all his men were in place. The quarterdeck was empty, no one willing to risk their captain’s wrath by encroaching on his preserve by so much as a strake of planking. He called to the helmsman, ordering him to steer the ship, which
was crawling through the water, so as to take him to the blind side of the Frenchman. He might not make it, might not get the chance to put an unexpected broadside into her hull before they collided. So be it.

  It was at that moment Harry Ludlow realised he was unarmed. Pender, normally present at his side, was nowhere to be seen. And the weapons that his servant habitually had ready were missing too. James was likewise absent, the artist brother who always had his sketch-pad ready at a time like this, so that the earliest image of the action could be recorded accurately. Those of the crew he could see, men prone to look aft on these occasions to discern in their captain’s eye the state of the approaching battle, were staring fixedly forward.

  He’d served on ships with unpopular captains. He knew full well what this meant. But he didn’t give a toss. All his attention was taken up with the ethereal shapes which suddenly loomed up at Bucephalas out of the fog, the outlines of the two battling ships, now so close together that the merchantman could very well have already been boarded. He lifted a finger to feel the faint wind, and gazed aloft, doubtful that either it, or the fickle Channel current, would carry him beyond the Frenchman with any chance of maintaining surprise. Better to get off some early roundshot and force the enemy to respond. Turning round, Harry stepped behind the helmsman and pulled a cutlass from the rack, issuing simultaneous orders to port the helm.

  ‘Larboard battery, fire as you bear.’

  ‘Which ship, Captain?’ called one of the senior gun captains.

  ‘Damn you, you fool!’ Harry shrieked. ‘Can’t you see that the largest one’s an Indiaman? Fire at the bastards in the corvette, then stand by to board.’

  Bucephalas swung round on a southerly course, to crawl, parallel, down the Indiaman’s side, guns trained right forward. The Frenchman was half hidden behind the Company ship, set at an angle across her stern, showing everything abaft his own mainmast to Harry’s gun crews. The sound of battle, of sword on sword, of men screaming and swearing drifted towards them through the mist. As each gun captain saw, peering through the port, the shadowy outline of the corvette’s stern, he pulled on the flintlocks, sending balls crashing into the other ship.