Free Web NovelChapter 32: Come Down Ye Blood-Red Roses
The shanty rose off the deck before anyone had fully decided to start it.
Good songs often worked that way. One moment they weren’t there, and the next they were rolling across a ship as though they’d started themselves.
"Oh, you pinks and posies!" James called from the wheel, pitching his voice to carry over both canvas and sea.
"Come down, ye blood red roses, come down!"
The crew answered immediately. They were loud, ragged, and nowhere near the same key.
"Them Spanish girls are pullin’ strong!" fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
"Come down, ye blood red roses, come down!"
Kit’s voice cut clean through the rest. He’d somehow found a pitch two notes higher than anyone else and put his effort to it with complete confidence.
"Kit’s stranglin’ that tune again!" somebody shouted from near the foremast.
"It ain’t strangled till it stops kickin’!"
The shanty rolled over the ship.
"Hang down me boys, it won’t take long!"
"Come down, ye blood red roses, come down!"
"Ye don’t know the bleedin’ song!" Silas yelled from somewhere amidships.
"Neither does anybody else!" Ezra shot back.
Neither of them sang the proper line.
"Sing it proper, Cap’n! Not like a man chewin’ on his own boot!" came a shout from the rigging.
That earned laughter from the deck and absolutely no improvement in James’s singing.
"I taught that verse to an entire fleet o’ Frenchmen!"
Mackerel Jim bellowed up from the gun deck, entirely unprompted, as though the song had reminded him of a story nobody had asked for.
Nobody believed him.
Everybody sang louder for it.
James let his own voice fade from the song. His attention had already drifted elsewhere, the way it often did when something more interesting caught hold of it.
The Revenge sailed off the Bloody Rose’s bow, riding low and quick through the swell. Her sails were trimmed tighter than the Rose’s crew ever seemed interested in bothering with.
"Right then." He rubbed his jaw. "Let’s see what we’re sailin’ with."
🏴 [FLEET OVERVIEW]
Bloody Rose — Flagship
Type : Brigantine
Size : Large for her class
Role : Line Combatant
Armament : 18 Broadside Guns
Status : Underway, Combat Ready
Revenge — Allied Vessel
Type : Sloop
Size : Large for her class
Role : Bombardment / Raider
Armament : 16 Broadside Guns, Mortar
Status : Underway, Combat Ready
A fleet with only two ships. I am using the term generously, and I would ask that you not allow it to inflate your sense of ego.
James couldn’t help grinning.
"Get me a fancier hat and I’ll start actin’ like an admiral."
The joke lingered for a moment before the numbers reasserted themselves.
Five Spanish sloops.
That was the problem.
And the maths didn’t leave much room for easy answers.
Two ships couldn’t sit in a line and trade broadsides with five. Not if they intended to sail away afterward.
Not unless somebody broke the enemy apart first.
The Rose was built to hold their metaphorical ground against smaller ships. Eighteen broadside guns. A hull that didn’t scare easily. The kind of ship a captain planted in one place and dared the world to move.
The Revenge was built for something else entirely. Fast enough to dart in close, drop a mortar shell exactly where it would hurt most, then disappear again before anyone could properly answer.
Anvil and hammer.
James liked that comparison far better than the complicated terms the Royal Navy had ever taught him.
The part that kept bothering him wasn’t the first two sloops.
Any competent gun crew could pin two enemy vessels in place if they held the right bearing and kept their nerve.
It was the other three.
Let them turn quickly enough. Let them swing around behind him while his attention sat elsewhere.
Then five enemy hulls firing into one brig stopped being a battle and became a slaughter.
Nobody survived a bombardment like that.
Keep moving.
Keep the enemy off position.
Stay clear of a broadside long enough that nobody got a clean rake across the deck.
Trust Thatch to be exactly where the mad bastard swore he’d be.
That was either the best plan in the Caribbean or the worst one.
It depended entirely on how much of Thatch’s talk about his guns had been confidence and how much had been bravado.
And somewhere beneath all of it sat the Rose’s own luck.
Whatever the bloody thing actually did.
He wasn’t foolish enough to build a battle plan around a perk he’d never once seen work.
Still, he carried the thought with him.
Like a lucky coin.
Men knew better than to trust such things.
They carried them regardless.
Behind him, near the third gun, Mackerel Jim was explaining to anyone willing to listen that he’d personally driven off three Guarda Costa sloops near Tortuga the year before last.
Farrow scraped at the touchhole he was inspecting and didn’t bother looking up.
The gun master snorted, "That’d make eight sloops you’ve personally seen off by my count, Jim. Spanish’ll need to build more just to keep up wi’ yer stories."
"They might." Jim sounded entirely untroubled. "I’m good for business."
Closer to the mainmast, Bert had inserted himself between two sailors fighting over a card debt from the previous night.
He handled the dispute with the calm tone of asking for the salt.
"Gentlemen, I would ask that we resolve this as civilized men. Bleeding can wait until after the negotiation, should it prove necessary."
He extended one broad hand.
A coin appeared in it a few moments later.
Apparently everyone respected the request.
At the rail, Grey had spread Thatch’s chart beside his own.
He studied the pair with offended concentration.
"These depths off the coast are wrong," he muttered, loud enough for James to hear. "Either his hand slipped, or the man takin’ them was drunk. Which would explain the depths and the writin’ both."
Without looking up, he began adjusting Thatch’s figures in his own neat hand.
He did it with the certainty of a schoolmaster marking a child’s sums.
As the afternoon wore on and the sun began sinking toward the water, the mood aboard shifted.
It always happened before a big fight. freewёbnoνel.com
The jokes came faster.
They came meaner, too.
Men laughed harder.
Hands drifted toward sword hilts more often than just habit.
Everyone could feel the horizon waiting.
Kit found James near the wheel.
The young man wore the grin of somebody already convinced the day would go his way.
"Reckon this is the climax, Cap’n. Already finished the exposition back in Nassau."
James laughed before he could stop himself.
The sort that rose from somewhere deeper than he cared to examine. The place he kept thoughts he had no intention of saying aloud.
Less than a day remained until the interception.
The Rose was ready.
The Revenge was ready.
And so was every fool currently singing about blood-red roses on the deck below.
