Chapter 311: A Galleon Among the Pines

By late morning, the flat gold had burned off the water, and the Grand Dame had disappeared from the world.

The ship was still there, of course. Forty-six guns and a galleon’s entire crew were sitting in a pocket of green water beneath the pines, where no living man could have found them with a map and a priest to help. Her draught had never agreed with any depth in the Caribbean, and today that old inconvenience was the whole point.

Her topmasts lay on deck, while her lower masts rose among the pine tops, painted in cut boughs that made them look like two more trees that had grown overnight. Ropes ran from bow and stern to the trunks, kedges held her astern, and branches and woven mats covered the channel side.

The gunports were shut and painted to match the shore, while there was no smoke, and not a lantern burned.

Across the water, on the headland, a dozen guns waited behind brush mats and painted canvas.

Between the two positions lay a bend in the channel, which concealed them both. Andros had two great entrances, one east and one west, and behind each lay a maze of passages through reefs, cays, and mangroves.

Most of those passages ended in sand. The important one led to the bay, where two thousand people had nowhere else to go, and that passage ended here.

It was a trap built by people who had spent their lives escaping traps of their own.

On the quarterdeck, behind a hedge of boughs, the old admiral watched the bend. A galleon carrying this many sailors ordinarily made enough noise to keep a market busy, but this one made none.

The old man stood on deck, and the ship knew it. The crew knew it, too, which saved him the trouble of saying much.

Roberts stood beside him, tall and solemn. "I put a question to you at that table, Admiral, and I’ll say this, two days you’ve been answering it with pine boughs, and a more thorough answer I never did receive, not from a bishop, not from my own mother. Still, I’d not be the poor soul who walks into it, mind."

Don Rodrigo answered without raising his voice. "La selva, Se?or Roberts, she has buried armies far better than this, soldiers in steel who thought themselves immortal. She flies no flag and swears no oath, so today she will bury a few little sloops, and she will not ask one single peso of the prize."

Roberts had drawn breath for his reply when the old man’s head turned a quarter-inch.

"Boats."

A moment later, the lookout among the jungle spotted them and had the good sense to pass the word down in a whisper.

"Boats, Admiral, boats, sir, out o’ the mangroves."

Three rowboats crept out of the mangroves, their oars muffled with rags, packed with men who had spent the night making their way through the jungle.

Cuffee came over the rail first, mud up to his thighs. Two workers followed him, a charcoal burner blackened to the elbows and a woodcutter built like a stump.

He reported immediately. "Admiral, there’s ships out there, plenty more than hogs on this island, and I’ve eaten every last one, I swear it! Two hundred sails! Three hundred! A man could walk to Cuba on their deck and never wet him foot!"

Roberts stretched to his full height and let his face grow longer.

"A number, Mister Cuffee, just the one. The sermon I can supply myself, thank you kindly."

Cuffee scratched the mud off his jaw and considered the sky, the Welshman, and the whole unfairness of mathematics.

The whole galleon waited.

"Eleven big ships, and a crowd of little shitty ones I didn’t count, they wore me out."

The woodcutter shouldered in, certain.

He turned his cap over twice in hands the size of shovels. "East door be shut, Admiral. Big ’un lies acrost it like a cork in a jug, two frigates alongside ’er, an’ tenders an’ store ships all backed up behind."

Cuffee snatched the report back as though someone had stolen his hat. "The west door’s where the fun is. Three more frigates, most of the sloops, and the fat boats pissing soldiers ashore like a sow dropping piglets. Redcoats by the cartload, and they’re building a landing place even now."

"Five frigates, just as Captain Tom told us. A landing besides, just as you told us, Admiral."

The old man considered this for a moment. "A man who has been robbed by a crown before, Se?or Roberts, ah, he learns the walk of the thief. How he plants his boot. The hour he likes to come. Every crown, it walks the same."

He turned, and three men who had faced hogs and hurricanes stood a little straighter.

"And the little ones, hijos, the sloops. Where are they now? Where did they sleep this morning?"

"Most be wi’ the west fleet, Admiral. But some o’ ’em slipped their cables wi’ the flood this mornin’."

"Went creepin’ off into the channels."

The old man said nothing for three breaths, and the whole ship held its breath with him. "The crown knows this island, Se?or Roberts. For two hundred years she has known it, but the bay, never, she has never found the bay. And a sloop that rounds that bend, she will find it, and a sloop that finds it..."

He let the sentence hang, then set it down gently.

"... must not go home. Not one. Not one plank."

Roberts looked at him, then nodded. "A broadside will spread a good league on a morning flat as this, Admiral, and further if the Almighty’s feeling generous. Every frigate on this coast will hear us talking."

"Let her carry, let her carry far."

He gave no reason, and no one on the quarterdeck dared ask for one. "The evidence, Se?or Roberts, is there on the water, it comes with the tide, like all things worth the waiting. To your stations, all of you, and let there be no noise aboard this ship that I have not made. You have done well, hijos, muy bien. Back to your trails now, and go with God. Cuffee, the tallest pine on the headland, she is yours."

The orders traveled down the ship faster than a shout could have done it, though no one could have explained how. The boats slipped away, two into the jungle and one across the narrows, while Cuffee climbed the tallest pine on the headland.

The crew came up from the dark, barefoot, with tar and rot still on their breath, and found their stations by feel. Rags went on every truck and tackle so the guns could run out without noise, while the slow match lay in its tubs, still unlit.

Twenty-three guns on the channel side were loaded with round shot low for the hulls and chain shot high for the masts, with a charge stacked beside each gun. The Bonebreakers hauled the heaviest pieces into position by hand, while the Crows lined the boarding with pistols and billhooks.

Bran walked across them and whispered. "Look you, bach. First one of you boyos to sneeze, I’ll have his hide for a hearthrug, so I will, and wipe me boots on it after, and sleep sound."

At the fourth gun, a gunner bent down and whispered to his piece. "Easy now, me lady. Easy, me beauty. Spread yerself wide for the King’s lads, take every inch they got to give. An’ when we’re done, Tuck’ll rub yer down himself, soft as a christenin’ gown, an’ wash yer in rum."

In that silence, a whisper could carry the length of the ship, and Roberts answered in a low, mild voice. "Tuck. Two shillings, if you please. One for the language, and one for the lady, see. A gun has her reputation, whatever you may think, I’ll thank you to leave her good name out of it."

"Aye, sir. Beggin’ yer pardon, sir. An’ you, ma’am, beggin’ yers an’ all."

Across the water, the dozen guns lay loaded and cold behind their mats. Runt sailors and militia crouched beside them, and Vallon, a Frenchman in a ditch, hated every mat.

The whole plan rested on three signals. Cuffee, high in his pine, would shake a rag once for every sloop he spotted. A pale cloth on the Dame, hidden from anyone out on the water, would tell the battery to stand ready, and the Dame’s first broadside would be the signal to fire.

The old man spoke once more, gently, and every sailor on deck heard him. "Until I speak, the guns sleep. A man who coughs, he wakes them, and the man who wakes them, hijos, I put over the side. Alive, so that he has time to think about it."

High in the pine on the headland, a rag shook. It shook once, then twice, then thrice before stopping.

A pale cloth rose on the Dame, visible only from the headland. The slow match came out of the tubs and caught fire, leaving a row of small red eyes across the channel side, where twenty-three iron mouths waited behind their painted lids.

Then the sloops appeared around the bend with the stream, three King’s ships in a line, their sails brailed up. They were small, sleek, and full of boys who had been told they were only going scouting.

A boat crept ahead with a leadsman in the bow, and a lad aboard the leading sloop looked straight at the Dame and saw only a hillside.

"By the de-e-ep, six! Clear water, sir, an’ nowt in it but fish!"

The lead sloop’s bowsprit crept within a cable’s length of the Dame. Three little ships drifted politely into the trap, while every gun captain on the channel side watched the admiral.

On the quarterdeck, he raised his hand. The parrot on his shoulder, a bird with complaints on everything from Columbus to the weather, kept them all to himself.

The sloops came on.

The old conquistador’s hand remained raised.