Free The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1) by Andrew Wareham Page A

again, from the side,
cutting into the French from an unexpected angle, disconcerting them a little
more as well as knocking down three men. Another officer, the captain maybe,
flashily uniformed with lace and braid, his sword scoring across Tom’s ribs as
he frantically dodged to his left, hurting; the hilt of his own sword up and
into the man’s mouth, breaking teeth, him recoiling with the pain, hand going
up to his agony, a great wheeling slash cutting him almost in half, blood in a
huge gout, men jumping back on either side, horrified. A few hands dropped; one
terrified man, his face covered in his captain’s blood, blinded by it, shouted
for quarter; a dozen others realised they had lost, they must have, joined in
the cry, and suddenly the fighting had stopped.
    Tom glanced about him, immensely weary, the fight
had used up a day’s energy.
    “Joseph, get them below! Quickly, push them into
their wardroom, cram them together so they can’t move.”
    He turned, picked out sailors from the Star, sent
them in pairs to take the huddled merchant hulls who had stayed to watch the
fun, had been promised a grandstand view of the hangings and now were too frightened
to run.
    Ten minutes of frantic action, pushing and shouting
and chasing their captives into safe custody.
    The Star had torn loose from the Frenchman, was
threatening the merchantmen, John Murray stood by the wheel and apparently in
command; as he watched there were a dozen of splashes at her side – it seemed
that some of the French had managed to board her and had been killed there.
    They took half of the crew from each of the
merchants and set them under guard on the Star’s deck; the island boats were
almost always crewed by a family together, fathers and sons and brothers and
cousins side-by-side and now hostage for each other’s good behaviour. They left
one man from the Star aboard each as a prize-master, having too few uninjured
bodies to do more, and turned their heads northwards. Tom found he was in
command, for Blaine and Smith and the two prize-masters had died at the front
of the fight, leading their men, as was only right. John Murray told the tale
of what had happened behind him on the Star’s deck.
    “Me and they Coleses was towards the stern when you
went over the bows, Tom, and before we could get up to join you there was a
couple of dozen Frogs on board. They killed the captain straight off, because
‘e didn’t know ‘is arse from ‘is elbow, ‘e was that pissed. Smithy got one in
the guts at the same time. They Coleses went in with cutlass in one ‘and, those
bloody knives of theirs in t’other and one of the Frogs shoots George down in
the first rush; Joby went bloody mad then. Just run in to ‘em, ‘e did, swinging
knife and blade and going straight through ‘em; they stuck ‘im with a cutlass
before ‘e’d made a yard and ‘e didn’t take no bloody notice, just kept goin’. I
reckon ‘e killed a dozen before ‘e dropped with no blood left in ‘im. Dick and
Luke was with me, and we all three got our pistols and a blade and we went in
behind ‘im and finished off the job. Come the end of it there ain’t no more
than the three of us left on Star, and it don’t look like you lot came out a
lot lighter, do it?”
    “Not as bad as it looks, John. Three of my boys are
dead and five more are chopped up a bit, but the buggers knew how to fight,
mate – they’ve earned their money.”
     
    They made Antigua in convoy, six merchant hulls and
two national vessels making an impressive display and bringing any number of
sour comments from the navy, all of whom were stretched to the full on convoy
duty and had not had the chance to go cruising for a year and more. The admiral
bought in the two national ships and crewed them with promoted young men from
his favourites’ ships and sent them off to work the small islands and cays,
theoretically to suppress the pirates who hung about the shallow waters, but he
too was missing