CHAPTER ONE
He drove the frigate so hard he nearly had the sticks out of her. Every day at least two hundred miles passed beneath Macedonian’s keel, and then he drove her harder. He was shaping his course for New Orleans.
Strictly speaking, Macedonian was not his to command. He had not been appointed to the ship by the Secretary of the Navy— when her previous captain was ordered away from a ship complete and ready for sea, he’d read himself aboard, then taken her out of New London in the face of an October storm, past the British blockade, and out to the freedom of the seas.
Captain Favian Markham had been aboard less than a month. Rail thin, dyspeptic, and four inches over six feet, he stood alone on the quarterdeck, a stranger to most of his officers and crew— and he drove them all without mercy, his eyes upturned to the masts and yards, his mind filled with calculations to get more speed out of her.
He drank coffee by the gallon and barely slept at all— he forever sent crewmen to the sheets or braces to make a trifling adjustment, to man the weather main and lee crossjack braces, to fuss with the studding sail guys and the squilgees... he watched intently as the upper masts groaned with every gust, a sound to make every aboard shudder as they envisioned the masts tearing right out of her in a ruin of splinters and canvas. Favian Markham watched as the chesstrees moaned and the hull worked, as seawater jetted through the strained seams— and then when the hairs on the back of the sailors’ necks were erect, anticipating the topgallants all going by the board, the captain would call up the watch and calmly order them to lay aloft, put on the lift-jiggers, and stand by the booms to rig the starboard topgallant studding sails. The watch would go aloft half convinced that they were doomed, that their very silhouettes on the yards might catch enough wind to bring the whole complex system of masts and rigging down.
The crew were terrified he’d kill them all and roll the ship under. They knew he’d lost one ship already.
It was small comfort that Macedonian’s voyage had been successful. Off Antigua Macedonian had crept up on a British corvette at night, and captured her with scarcely a casualty— but ever since parting company from the capture, Macedonian had been flying west as fast as her canvas wings could carry her. Flying until in a brilliant October dawn, beneath wheeling seabirds tinged pink by the sunrise, the dark, low mass of the Mississippi Delta appeared off the starboard bow.
When the frigate lay for four hours off the Southeast Pass of the Mississippi waiting for the tide, Captain Markham was gratified to see the crew standing by the rail fidgeting, as impatient as he to get the Father of Waters under the keel. Even the tide didn’t add enough to the fourteen foot over the bar: Macedonian was kedged over only after pumping out most of her water and shifting some supplies into the boats, and then had to work its way up the long river— a frustrating and difficult job, for soon it was night and there was no pilot available..
In the morning the frigate anchored under the guns of Fort St. Philip on the Plaquemines Bend, seventy-five miles below New Orleans, and Favian, his boat’s crew, Lieutenant Eastlake and Midshipmen Lovette and Stanhope, impatient with the slow journey in the frigate, took swifter passage on the pilot boat Beaux Jours, hailed just after dawn as it was heading downriver to the Head of the Passes.
Favian, happy to let another captain do the work, spent the journey in his bunk asleep, using as a pillow a satchel of British documents taken from the Carnation. The sleep was dreamless, obliterating, and totally free of interruption. He was oblivious to the stamping of the crew, the movements of the other passengers, the sound of the mainsheet block being shifted over his head, the final splash of the anchor and the roaring of the cable— oblivious of everything until the hand of Lieutenant Eastlake came mercilessly on his shoulder and shook him awake.
“Captain Markham,” came the calm, Virginian voice. “We have arrived.”