Free Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key by Kage Baker Page B

down!”
    “No!” Mr. Tudeley clung like a limpet to his perch. “No!”
    “We’ll get struck!”
    “No!”
    “I’m not staying!”
    “No!”
    Giving up, John groped over the edge for the futtock-shrouds and swung himself down. In his descent he was tilted far over one way, so that for a second he lay prone on the shrouds, and then so far the other way he was swung out in the air hanging on by his hands only, as his feet kicked the clouds of flying water. He expected any moment for Mr. Tudeley’s body to come hurtling past him, but it never happened. When his feet found the chains at last he peered up and glimpsed Mr. Tudeley up there still, silhouetted by a flash of lightning, screaming curses at God or Fate or the sea.
    Waves warm as bathwater were breaking over the deck now, sheets of foam pocked by the relentless rain, and the high squealing wind was no less loud down on deck. John groped his way down from the chains and hung on to the rail. Sodden figures clung to anything standing, gasping for air as each wave receded, putting their heads down to endure the next that swept over them; he saw three men at the tiller, straining with bared teeth to steer a course, but he knew the
Harmony
must be driven ashore now. He looked around to see it he could make out the coastline, but another flash of lightning came.
    When John opened his dazzled eyes he saw the rock, the only black and steady thing in that churning surging white nightmare. There it was to starboard. The
Harmony
seemed to dance round it. There it was to larboard, and then the
Harmony
struck, with a sound louder than the thunder or the wind, the loudest sound John had ever heard in his life, the rending splintering crunch that meant it was over.
    He was choking under water in the scuppers. He rolled over into air, peering up the deck which sloped above him steep as a mountainside. He began to scale it, hand over hand, past other soaked and struggling men. A wave the size of a house came over them, scouring down the deck. John caught hold of the edge of the companionway and held on. When he came up for air and drank in breath, he found himself staring into Mrs. Waverly’s gray eyes. Her face was white, her hair down around her shoulders, streaming like amber seaweed.
    “I will not die in there,” she said, inaudibly but John read her lips. She looked beyond him and John turned to see what she was staring at.
    Sejanus and the mulatto were working at the ship’s boat, unlashing it from its cradle. No one was attempting to stop them, or help them; every man left on deck was making his slow determined way hand over hand to the companionway, shoving past Mrs. Waverly as they flopped inside.
    “Anslow!” roared John, as Anslow slid past him. “The boat!”
    Anslow shook his head, with a sick grin. “The rum,” he said, and vanished below, to get as drunk as he might before the sea got him. Mrs. Waverly screamed and John half-rolled to see another wave coming at the
Harmony
, charging at her bows, spume high as a cathedral, a white cliff looming. It took forever to break, but when it did it lifted the bow of the Harmony, tilting her on her beam-end before dropping her with a crash as it flooded over the deck. Sejanus, the mulatto and the boat all vanished in a confusion of shattered water and noise; John looked up and saw the prow of the boat coming at him. He grabbed it and shoved it away. The water receded and the
Harmony
settled again with a grinding lurch. The boat lay in the scuppers with Sejanus rolling in it. He looked stunned, struggled feebly.
    Mrs. Waverly pushed herself from the companionway and slid down the deck to the boat. John let go and slid after her. He could hear planks splitting now, and a crack as the fore topmast broke and came crashing down, trailing all its rope and blocks. Mrs. Waverly scrambled nimbly over the gunwale into the boat and John hauled himself in after her. He lay there exhausted a moment, looking at her wet bare