Eliza had suspected very early that the one-armed man might be some sort of a godsend, and was now convinced of it. She hitched up her skirt, snaked a leg under her bed, caught her bag-handle on the point of her slipper, and jerked it out. Turning to the open window, she paused for a few moments to time her breathing, and the rolling of the seas; then she tossed out the bag, and it landed square in the middle of the rowboat. Then she turned around. Flail-arm, it seemed, had fastened his gaze upon Brigitte with a look that seemed to say, “I mean to throw you out next, mademoiselle,” and she had declined the honor. Now he was trying to get one arm about her waist (a factitious narrowing of Brigitte’s midsection, owed to laces and whalebones). Few men were big, strong, and reckless enough to pick up Brigitte and toss her, when she was not of a mind to be. This fellow had been, prior to the loss of his arm. As matters stood, they were evenly matched, unless he elected to beat her senseless with the terrible flail first. And this he was not of a mind to do; though he was plainly enough tempted, Eliza thought she could see a tenderness about his eyes. And so a dire, ungainly, loud struggle, destructive of property and of the dignity of the participants, ranged all across the cabin.
“Brigitte!” Eliza called, at a moment when the one-armed man had tripped over his flail and was slow getting up. Brigitte raised her hot gaze from the intruder and looked up to see Eliza framed in the window. “You may stay and flirt with him all you want, or take him to bed for all I care! But I am departing and shall await you below.” And then she vanished from Brigitte’s sight.
In spite of herself she let out a yell just before she hit the water. Then she was speechless for a moment, it was so cold; but before more than a few moments had passed, she began paddling toward the wee boat, as best she could. She did this partly out of a thought to the Interview Question, and partly out of fear that Brigitte and Monsieur Flail-arm might hurtle down atop her at any moment. Heavy splashes behind her confirmed that she’d made the correct choice.
To get four sopping femmes aboard so small a boat was no simple thing. Flail-arm, as soon as he’d gone into the water, had prestidigitated another sharp object and severed the line linking the rowboat to Meteore, and the gap between them had begun to widen. Eliza glanced up at her stolen jacht only once. She saw English marines at the poop-deck rail, and English marines in the windows of her cabin (for they had finally got past Brigitte’s improvisations). One of them had the bad manners to aim a pistol down at Flail-arm. But just then a boom sounded from not far away, and something whined over their heads and ripped two pounds of oak out of the railing. The marines jumped back, and some flung themselves to the deck. Eliza followed Flail-arm’s startled gaze across the water and spied a boat coming on rapidly, under full sail.
Eliza was no great aficionado of ship-types, and made a practice of quitting any conversation in which the men drifted off into, and got stuck on, ship-prattle. But at a glance she guessed this one was eighty feet long. It had no transom and no superstructure, had two masts, was lug-rigged. In Holland it might have gone under the name of galjoot. In any case, it was a coastal trading-ship, adequate to cross the Channel, and it was obviously armed with at least one swivel-gun. The shot they had fired at the English marines had been mostly for effect. Never could this little smuggler’s craft have challenged Meteore, had Meteore been under sail, and properly manned; but as matters stood, the galjoot had enough sting in her swivel-guns to give the English second thoughts about standing in plain view and taking pot-shots at Men Overboard. Eliza had spied the boat a few minutes ago, and hoped it might be the one she had hired; this confirmed as much. It made no effort to pursue Meteore, but wore around so as to make itself a barrier between Meteore and the rowboat, and then released the air from its sails. Arbalete (for that was the name painted on her bows) approached with a curious mixture of charity and hostility, on the one hand flinging out lines for the ladies to snatch from the air, or rake up out of the water, on the other hand keeping loaded muskets at the ready. The only part of this morning’s proceedings that they had been led to expect was that they might be collecting an anonymous passenger from the vicinity of Meteore. All else-the assault of the English longboats, the apparition of the flaming Soleil Royal, and Flail-arm with his rowboat-had been unexpected. Eliza was already dreading the re-negotiation of the deal that probably lay ahead with the captain of Arbalete. That it had even ventured this far into the melee could probably be attributed solely to a bloke standing amidships holding a musket: Bob Shaftoe.
“All is well, Sergeant Bob. No, I don’t know who he is. He is a mute, or something. But he seems well-intentioned. The worst I can say of him is that he is more forthright in his methods than would be considered proper at Versailles.”
“I have noted him about the waterfront, spying on Meteore,” was Bob’s answer.
“Come to mention it, so have I,” said Eliza, “but lacking your penetration, sir, I could not make out whether he was spying, or merely satisfying his curiosity.”
“Perhaps lovely Duchesses are more accustomed to being stared at for hours at a time than mangled Sergeants,” Bob said. “To me it looked like spying.”
“As perhaps it was, Sergeant Bob; but this morning he has been of service to a boat-load of women.”
“Is it to be you alone, or the entire boat-load?” demanded the incredulous Monsieur Rigaud, Captain of Arbalete. Until this point, he had been preoccupied by the spectre-even more terrifying to a ship-captain than to any other sort of person-of the Soleil Royal drifting past them with gouts of flame spurting from her hundred gun-ports. Rigaud seemed at last to have convinced himself that the English, before setting fire to her, had extracted her stores of gunpowder-i.e., that they wanted her to burn for a long time, make a memorable spectacle for the citizenry of Cherbourg, and perhaps set fire to a few other ships-not simply blow up. If he was right, then the danger to Arbalete was past, for the flagship had unequivocally drifted beyond them. He had, accordingly, turned his mind to a threat almost as dire: an onslaught of female passengers.
“Only I,” said Eliza, and slung her bag at Rigaud’s head.
This was news to the other women, and caused a little flurry of gasps and outcries. Eliza considered trying to explain matters. Mommy must run off to England and steal three tons of silver. Instead she reached up-for the rowboat was grinding against Arbalete’s side-and let Bob seize one of her hands, and a French sailor the other. The weight came off of her feet. She was hoisted aboard Arbalete like a bale of silk. “Lovely Brigitte,” she called, “I hope that one day you will forgive me for now pressing you in to service as galerienne. But you must get in to shore before matters get any worse; and this man, I am afraid-”
“Rows in circles. The same had occurred to me, my lady.” Brigitte seized the oars.
“We shall keep our swivel-guns charged, and watch you in to the shore,” volunteered Monsieur Rigaud, who had become considerably more pliant now that the rowboat full of women was working away from Arbalete.
“Send a despatch to Captain Bart in Dunkerque,” Eliza called.
“Saying what, Madame?”