The Flag of Freedom Read Free Page B

confident about handing them over fully loaded in case they went off by accident.
    When the smoke cleared she saw that the renegade was grinning at her, but now in something more like admiration than mockery. She tossed the empty pistols on the deck. She had made as much of a point as was available to her and was under no illusions that it would make a great deal of difference.
    She was in the hands of the Devil – again – and the future would require some very hard bargaining indeed.

Part One
The Prisoner of The Rock

Chapter One
The Black Sheep

    T he British Mediterranean fleet off Cadiz, 7 July 1797. A Sunday, and the ships were rigged for church, though it was not the chaplains who read the lesson, nor was it from
The Book of Common Prayer
:
    If any person in or belonging to the fleet shall make, or endeavour to make, any mutinous assembly upon any pretence whatsoever, every person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the sentence of the court martial, shall suffer death.
    The solemn voice of the Flag Captain rang out across the sluggish waters, and in the silence that followed, other, more distant voices could be heard, as if echoing down the long line of fighting ships.
    â€¦
shall suffer death
…
death
…
death
…
death
.
    The Articles of War, as devised by the LordsCommissioners of the Admiralty, left little room for compromise, and as if to emphasise the point, the four corpses hanging from the yardarms of the flagship twisted a little on their ropes to provide a creaking chorus to the sombre lesson from the book of
King’s Regulations
; the ships gently rising and falling on the slight swell like bobbing gulls, and the men standing grim and silent at their divisions.
    The main deck of the flagship was unusually crowded, for the Admiral had ordered that every ship in the fleet should send two boatloads of seamen to witness the punishment meted out to their former comrades. And so they had. But no one looked at the bodies swinging from the yardarm. As if by common consent, every eye was averted from the bloated and discoloured faces. Instead, the gaze of a thousand men was fixed upon the quarterdeck where the Admiral stood at the side of his Flag Captain with the rest of the ship’s officers in support – and four ranks of red-coated Marines providing a solid wedge of bayonet and muscle between rulers and ruled.
    Among the officers stood a man wearing the uniform of a Post-Captain. It was an ill-fitting uniform, for it had been borrowed for the occasion from one of slighter build, and this, together with certain other of his features, gave him an air of slightly awkward individuality. He was a month short of his twenty-ninth birthday but looked younger – younger than many of the lieutenants and even some of the midshipmen aboard the flagship. His hair was dark and his countenance more swarthy than was the norm among those honest, red, perspiring English faces: he might have been a Spaniard or, worse, a Frenchman – amisfortune of which he was more than usually aware at this critical moment in his career.
    His name was Peake. Nathaniel Peake. But his friends called him Nathan, and despite his appearance he was an Englishman – or at least half of one on his father’s side – and as loyal a subject of King George, at least in his own estimation, as any man afloat. (He could not speak of those ashore, being but little acquainted with the breed.) Despite the uniform, he was at present without a command: his ship, the
Unicorn
, having run upon the Rock of Montecristo and foundered with all hands while he was on business ashore – a circumstance which could also be construed as an offence under the Articles of War.
    He had been summoned to the flagship for an interview with the Admiral, and while it was unlikely to turn out as badly as it had for the four men swinging at the yardarm, he could not help but consider that the present occasion was not