The Sea Beggars by Cecelia Holland

Author:Cecelia Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504039994
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

The crew raced around the deck, their bare feet nearly soundless on the worn boards. The mainsail and the jib went up with a rattle of salt-stiffened canvas. At once the nimble little ship answered the wind. Pieter felt her tremble under his feet like a hunting dog that hears the horn, and the sea chuckled against her side.

Jan, on the main deck below him, took the ship up a few points higher in the wind, let her fall off a little until the sails luffed, and laid her back on course, all as Pieter had shown him, to get a feel of how she was today, how the wind and the sea suited her. Pieter fought against a smile. Jan was a good sailor. The old man sucked the tobacco smoke into his lungs, enjoying the heady taste. The crew obeyed his nephew as well as they did Pieter—better, some of them, since Jan could knock them down, and Pieter could not.

He knew the guns better than Pieter; he had been at practice, while they waited for the Spaniards, and Pieter had seen him blow empty wine tuns out of the water at the distance of a cable length—no small feat, all things considered, although the guns the Spanish had been kind enough to install in the Wayward Girl were the best Pieter had ever seen and had made even Lumey envious.

Jan could shoot and he could sail, but one thing Pieter could not give him. The old man raised his eyes again to the gray lowering sky. The sun had risen but no blue showed through the veil of clouds, and near the eastern edge of the world the sky was black as mourning.

Jan took nothing seriously that he could not control himself. Pieter shook his head. Only time would teach him that.

Their work today was easy enough. The Spanish galleons were sailing up into the Channel, the wind over their sterns and their course laid for the Low Countries. The Wayward Girl, handier at sailing off the wind, would play with the huge ships like a dog with a phalanx of bulls, teasing and taunting, drawing them on. If the Spanish did nothing else, the Girl would keep them occupied while the rest of the Beggars got behind the galleons. With any luck, the Dons would lose their tempers at the baiting and try to close quarters with the Wayward Girl, and then Pieter meant to maneuver them out of formation, so that when Lumey came the four galleons would be helpless to act in unity, and easy victims of the swift and well-armed Dutch fleet.

He stood watching the sea to the south. Now he could make out the topsails of the galleons. The wind filled the pleated sails and drove on the hulls like plows through the heavy seas. Huge as they were, they could not turn too suddenly, nor turn too far, without losing the wind and going dead in the water. He was determined to make them turn, to follow him, to join in long-range shooting if necessary.

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