· 3 October 1805 ·
H. M. S. MERLIN, AT SEA
I have a map here, Captain McIver, of the entire reef,” Nick said, pulling the scrolled paper from inside his jacket. “I made it myself so I can vouch for its complete accuracy.” Hawke, who’d been watching the relentless advance of Billy Blood from the stern windows of the English warship, hurried over to the table where Nick and McIver stood.
“A cartographer, too, are ye, boy?” asked the captain, chuckling. “Aye, you’ve that salty McIver blood coursin’ through yer veins, lad!”
Nick unfurled the handmade map and placed it on the table but the edges kept curling over, making it impossible to read. He pulled the knife from his inside pocket and used it to affix an edge of the map to the wooden table. He saw the captain wince and feared he was reacting to Nick’s casual treatment of his expensive officer’s furniture.
“That’s Bill’s dagger,” the captain said, squinting his eye and staring at the bone-handled knife. “Wherever did you get it?”
“He stuck it in my front door with a letter announcing he’d stolen my old dog, Jip,” Nick replied, feeling a jolt of anguish as he realized how much he missed his beloved dog. He wondered if Jip were even now imprisoned aboard the crimson frigate bearing down on them.
“He stuck it in my front door once, too,” said Captain McIver, ripping open the bodice of his shirt and revealing an angry red scar about six inches long down his breastbone. “Although there weren’t no ransom note stuck with it. Old Ben thought it was the end when he found me that night, but the ship’s physic just stitched me up and made me drink nothing but fine port wine for a week. Good as new in three days!”
“How’d it happen?” asked Nick.
“ ’Twas the night of that bloody mutiny,” said McIver, “when I caught old Bill here in my cabin and breaking into me locker to get his hands on those infernal time machines. I managed to get a pistol on him and get one of ’em aways from him and got that dagger in the chest for me trouble. Knocked over that oil lamp there in the scuffle, which lit them draperies and the whole cabin went alight with flames. Bill’s own coat caught fire. That’s when Ben rushed in and old Bill Blood, he lit out of here with only that second golden ball hid under his arm like a snake with his tail on fire!” The captain chuckled a bit and continued, “But, pray, let’s hear more of your plan, Nick. Lord knows we need one, and soon.” He looked toward the window. “The flaming snake returns upon us relentless now, don’t he?”
Nick nodded, flattening out his chart so all could see.
“You’ll forgive me, Captain, but your current chart is woefully inaccurate as regards our present position,” Nick said, getting down to business. “This is a chart I made of these waters by diving on each reef and noting the dimensions, depth, and exact location of each and every one. You would have no way of knowing this, sir, but from our present position there is an escape route to the north here, twixt the island and the large Gravestone Rock as we call it in my time. I’ve used it as an escape route many a time myself aboard the Stormy Petrel, running from a blow.”
The captain bent down and followed the path of Nick’s finger through the bewildering maze of reef. He nodded his head, scratching his bearded chin and considering what Nick said. It did look possible. Nick dipped the quill in the captain’s inkwell and retraced the route in black ink. Old McIver nodded, and noticed that, once inside the lee of the large rock called Gravestone on Nick’s chart, he’d be protected from Billy’s murderous short carronades. Then, he could bear north around the northern tip of the island, safely out of the reach of Blood’s long guns. Still, something about the plan was troublesome.
“Looks wide enough for the barky to pass through, boy, but how deep is this water here and here?” he asked, pointing to critical spots on the chart. “This here barky needs a good ten feet ’neath her keel, lad. Or you’ll be guttin’ her on sharp reef.”
“Runs to two fathoms all the way through, Captain,” Nick said with a smile. “No one would believe it, that close in to shore, but that’s what she is, sir. Perfect escape route.” Nick was understandably excited. Here he was, a mere boy in his twelfth summer, and he was helping a captain in Nelson’s Royal Navy plot his escape from a murderous pirate. He couldn’t help but marvel at the turns his life had taken this strange summer. If only he had his dog back, his life would indeed be perfect. Eventually, they’d have to fight Billy Blood, but right now they had to buy enough time to get McIver’s ship back in fighting trim. And his plan did just that!
It was too wondrous for words. He wondered if, at this very moment, he was writing history. Or, perhaps, rewriting it! Lord Hawke had mentioned “protecting the flow of history,” but when he thought about that too much, his head hurt. So he tried to push all such thoughts away, and decided it didn’t much matter as long as he did what was right. He saw the captain scratching his beard, tracing and retracing Nick’s escape route.
“Maybe we could fly that way, couldn’t we?” the captain mused. “But then, so could he, couldn’t he? Blood?”
“No, sir, that’s the beauty of it,” Nick said, grinning. “You’re looking at absolutely the only chart of this reef in existence. Blood couldn’t possibly have one, no matter where he traveled in time! No coastal survey could ever afford to take the time to map it the way I did that summer. As you can see, there are more twists and turns and dead ends in here than that great maze at Hampton Court! We’ll have a good head start on him, and without us to follow or the use of this chart, he’ll run afoul of something before you can trim your jib stay-sail, if you’ve got one, sir.”
“Aye, we’ve got a jib staysail. And it’s a good plan you’ve got, young Nick, and one that makes me proud to be your old relic of an ancestor. My very heart is warmed just at the sight of you, son. As I have not yet married, I didn’t expect the pleasure of gazing upon my future progeny, lad. I bless my stars.”
Nick felt the color rising in his cheeks. “Thank you kindly, sir. I, uh, never expected to have the honor of meeting you either, sir.”
“But,” the captain said, shaking his head sadly, “there’s one little mayfly in this perfect pie, lad.”
“What is that, Captain?” Hawke asked, poring over the chart to see what Nick could have possibly missed.
He thought Nick’s plan was not only brilliant, but it was their only way out. To attack Blood now, in their condition, leaking badly and with half their cannons out of action, was suicide. In Hawke’s mind, they desperately needed to buy time to return the Merlin to her fighting strength before even considering a close-in action with Mystère … Nick’s plan did just that.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, boys, and here’s the thing,” the captain said, clearly uncomfortable with delivering the bad news when the brave trio had come so far to be of help. “It just won’t work. I don’t know what kind of boats you’re sailing out there in 1939, but a three-masted barquentine of the kind on which you’re now floatin’, well, she ain’t built to skip around and tack on a farthing like what you be askin’ of her now, no. She’s seakindly all right but she ain’t no trick flea from the sea circus. No, sir. She’s pretty as you please on her wind, but when you ask her to perform certain navigational miracles, well, she’d never sail her ways through that serpentine escape route, never in your life, sir. No, she’ll sink first, I’m afraid.”
As if to punctuate the captain’s death sentence, and perhaps put another nail in all their coffins, they felt the sickening thud of another of Billy’s nitro-powered cannonballs slamming into the Merlin’s hull. Hawke shook his head, staring despondently at the chart and the pathway through the reef that Nick had marked with the captain’s quill in deep black ink. The captain, they plainly saw, was sadly right. With these twists and turns, and with the fluky winds this close in to shore, there was no way the big old barky could tack her way through and out. Even the brilliant Nelson couldn’t sail his way out of this one. No, they’d have to stand and fight, and a lopsided battle it would be, to a fare-thee-well.
There was a heavy and deathly silence in the cabin. Only the sound of running feet above and the muffled thunder of the crew rolling a heavy cannon from one rail to the other signaled that the Merlin was not yet ready to strike her colors and surrender.
Nick, elated only moments before, now felt the cold claw of Billy Blood tightening around his heart. He remembered the sound of tinkling silver skulls and Blood’s hooded eyes that rainy night at the Greybeard Inn, and in Billy’s eyes the look of sheer evil that shone there in the firelight.
Nick knew somehow that this was now his fight to win or lose. He placed his chin in his hands, leaning over the chart on both elbows, staring at the puzzle with all his might, willing his mind to come up with some escape from the pirate’s crushing grip. He thought hard. And then he thought harder.
He couldn’t shut out the ticking of the old longcase clock in the corner of the cabin from his ears. He shut his eyes, though, and thought as hard as ever any boy ever had. Then, when he did think of it, it was so simple that he hesitated to blurt it out, for fear of sounding foolish. He took a deep breath. “Captain, sir! Could you step over here for a moment?” Nick said, excitement in his eyes.
“What say you, Nick?” McIver asked. “You look fevered!”
“We don’t have to sail her out, Captain!” Nick cried, leaping to his feet. “No, sir! We’ll pull her out!”
The captain and Lord Hawke stared at him.
“You said pull her out, lad?”
“Aye! Tow her! You must have a few gigs or jolly boats on deck, Captain,” Nick said, excited as the plan took full hold of his mind. Four seaworthy craft and strong men to row them?”
“Aye, we’ve got four jolly boats. Two slung forward and two aft,” the captain said. “For socializin’ round the fleet and rowing the crew away should the barky sink. I, of course, go down with the Merlin,” he added proudly. “In that unhappy eventuality.”
“Well, that’s it, then!” Nick cried. “We’ll tow her through the reef with the jolly boats!”
Hawke looked at Nick, weighing the plan.
“Bless us all, I think he’s cracked it, Captain!” Lord Hawke said with a broad smile. “Yes! We’ll hitch Merlin up to all four jolly boats and pull the old girl out! Let’s fill all four launches with the stoutest lads and strongest arms we’ve got, Captain, with four stout lines to the Merlin’s bow, and tow her through the reef.”
The captain stared at him and then at Nick and then a huge grin spread across his face.
“It may work, lad, it just may work, God love you!” He beamed with pleasure. “But one thing. How do we get all the lads rowing together in the right direction? It demands a bit of witty navigation to be sure!”
“I’ve thought of that, sir,” Nick said brightly, “and I think there’s a way. What if I climbed up to the crow’s nest at the very top of the fore topmast? I could see the whole reef from there and I could direct the fellows in the jolly boats. I’d take my chart, of course, but from that height, and in this strong sunlight, I could see the dark blue path through the reef clear enough, couldn’t I?”
“Aye, you could, Nick,” McIver said. “And I could post a man at the base of the mast and another out on the bowsprit. You could shout out the directions down to them and they could call them out to the lads rowing the jolly boats!”
The two of them looked at each other, grinning, and then at Lord Hawke who now stood at what was left of the smashed stern window with the spyglass trained on Billy’s red frigate.
Looking at Blood’s bizarre flagship, he tried in vain to shut out all thought of Annabel and Alexander, but to have them so near and yet unreachable caused a deep and wounding pain in the middle of his heart. But, knowing such thoughts would only distract him as they prepared for the coming battle, he pushed them aside.
“I’d say you’ve got about twenty minutes to get those boats lowered away and pulling, Captain,” Lord Hawke said. “This Mystère is clearly a fair devil for speed and she’s run out every last cannon into firing position. Billy’s spoiling for a fight, sir, and closing fast!”
“Aye,” McIver said with a wink, “I’d say the lad here arrived in the nick of time!”