The Witch’s Fleet

By John F. Corrigan and Abigail Weech

In 1807, a young, Philadelphia woman of special gifts is accused by the religious authorities of practicing the black arts. Although the investigators can find no evidence that she has ever used her talents to harm anyone, they proceed to attempt to apprehend her to stand trial.

She anticipates them – which is her way – and flees to the frontier which, in 1807, is the sleepy fishing village of Erie, Pennsylvania.

It is now five years later. 1812. The sleepy fishing village of 400 souls finds itself on the front lines of a war against the British Empire. Among them walks a young woman of special gifts. The Brits have no idea what they are up against!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663242358

John F. Corrigan

John Corrigan is a product of Edinboro University where he majored in History and Psychology, He is the author of the Gothic Romance Adventures GWEN (2000) and AIDAN (2005) and the Historical Mystery Novel THE STORYTELLERS (2019). He currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Website address : JohnCorriganAuthor.com Abigail Weech is a product of Midway University of Kentucky where she majored in Equine Management. She has been John Corrigan’s creative partner since 2016. She was the inspiration for the character Abby Weech in Corrigan’s 2019 novel The Storytellers. She currently resides in Erie, Pa. with her son Aedyn.

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Copyright © 2022 John F. Corrigan With Abigail Weech.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All of the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4234-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4236-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4235-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913440

iUniverse rev. date: 07/22/2022

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Landsman

Chapter 2 Port of Call

Chapter 3 And Then He Went Under

Chapter 4 And I as Well

Chapter 5 The Three Coins

Chapter 6 The Three Letters

Chapter 7 More Than Anyone Could Possibly Imagine

Chapter 8 The Clan of the Wolf

Chapter 9 A Disconcerted Fear

Chapter 10 It’ll Get You Too

Chapter 11 For Everything There Is a Season

Chapter 12 Hatchets and Knives, Fingernails and Teeth

Chapter 13 She’s Very Dead I’m Afraid

Chapter 14 Her!

Chapter 15 As Your Right Hand Is to Your Left

Chapter 16 Say a Prayer

Chapter 17 Frustrated Guardian Angels

Chapter 18 I Think She’s Perfect

Chapter 19 The Room at the Top of the Stairs

Chapter 20 An Evil, Knowing Grin

Chapter 21 The Hooded One

Chapter 22 The Last Patient

Chapter 23 What Does It Mean, Nancy?

Chapter 24 Almost an Island

Chapter 25 A Godforsaken Eve

Chapter 26 The Comeuppance

Chapter 27 The Handmaiden

Chapter 28 The Other Side of the Sky

Chapter 29 If I Close My Eyes, I Can See Them

Chapter 30 Lest They Think Him Mad

Chapter 31 A Fine Night’s Work

Chapter 32 A Miracle Is What It Would Take

Chapter 33 Pieces of Mouse

Chapter 34 There Is Something Strange about Her Now

Chapter 35 A Perfect Day to Fly

Chapter 36 Do birds fly for fun?

Chapter 37 Bring It On!

Chapter 38 If You Can Fog the Mirror

Chapter 39 We Do Not Curse at Miracles

Chapter 40 The Different Days of a Different Time

Chapter 41 The Mousetrap

Chapter 42 The Devil’s Daughter

Chapter 43 Is Anyone Else Alive?

Chapter 44 A Little Clutch of Lingering Souls

Endnotes

Bibliography

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go out to:

Mike Martin, Captain Sabatini and everyone with the Niagara League.

Linda Bolla and everyone at the Erie Maritime Museum, Erie, Pa.

George Deutsch at the Hagan History Museum, Erie, Pa.

Betsy MacKrell at the Erie Cemetery association

Ron Mattocks at the Crawford County Historical Society

Cover art by Patti Larson at Patti Larson Photography and Designs

www.pattilarsonphotos.com

Front piece: The Battle of Lake Erie – Getty Images

All other illustrations by Alexandria Tackett

For the people of Erie!

The descendants of heroes!

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Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers and witches …

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

PROLOGUE

WELCOME TO 1807

• Life expectancy is 60.9 years.

• The United States—once a collection of British colonies—has been an independent nation for thirty-one years.

• The population of the United States is 7,239,881.

• There are seventeen states.

• Thomas Jefferson is president.

• King George III is king of the British Empire.

• Napoleon Bonaparte has crowned himself emperor of France and is bent on world domination.

• A going rate for skilled labor is $1.00/day.

• A day laborer is paid $0.10/day.

• The lowest denomination of minted US coins is the halfpenny (ha’penny).

• The fishing village of Erie, Pennsylvania is twelve years old.

• It has a population of four hundred.

• The British Royal Navy—the most powerful in the world—has 1,017 ships.

• The US Navy has … 17.

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CHAPTER 1

THE LANDSMAN

June 22, 1807

Aboard the frigate USS Chesapeake at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay

THE LANDSMAN WAS shaking like the frightened young man he was. He had not, before this, considered himself afraid of heights, but then he had never been at heights such as these. Oh, he had worked at higher tasks sure, but those past elevations had at least the decency to hold still. The precarious perch upon which he now found himself held no such thoughtful considerations.

Nay—as he desperately clung to line and spar, these new heights rolled and pitched beneath his naked feet with sickening suddenness. Forward and then back, rising and then plunging, he struggled to hold his balance and his breakfast. He struggled to focus on his task and suppress his innate fear.

He had volunteered for this duty, as he thought it to be the toughest job aboard ship—and he was right.

I must stop volunteering, he scolded himself.

Gads! Are you Irish? The shouted voice of the able seaman posted out to his right on the yardarm now commanded his attention. The dark face of the African, Quintin Moore, erupted into a toothy grin as he beheld the stark fear in the eyes of the newcomer. I swear, I tain’t ne’er seen a man so blatantly Irish!

The landsman—the sandy-haired, freckled lad with the milk-toned skin-hardly responded to the exclamation of the able seaman. His attention was surely elsewhere, his eyes lost to the distant mist that shrouded the southern horizon.

Irishman! Quintin screamed at his new shipmate in a voice sure to drill through the Atlantic winds that swirled about them.

The landsman jerked and swiveled his head Quintin’s way. I heard yee, African!

The reply did not satisfy Quintin’s concern. The landsman wore a stunned countenance. His hands clamped the wooden yardarm with a grip that had his knuckles pressed white. Quintin had seen this before—the shock of a landsman on his first day working in the tops.

Look at me! Quintin’s voice was stern and demanding and the words uttered with enough force to penetrate any stupor.

The landsman shuddered and complied.

The ship rolled on the ocean, rising with the advance of each swell and then dropping suddenly into the following trough. Up in the ship’s rigging, the vessel’s motions were exaggerated—like being at the business end of a whip. The masts lashed from side to side and then forward and back again. Quintin, the able seaman, had become inured to the adventurous ride. To the landsman, however, the new experience was equal parts nauseating and terrifying.

To fall from this height was a death sentence carried out either by the unforgiving timber deck directly below or the man-swallowing, suffocating sea that seemed to literally reach up to snatch at him every time the ship pitched in its direction.

All that now stood between his life and that awful death was the ropewalk beneath his feet—a single run of one-inch-thick rope that hung suspended a few feet below the yardarm. Presently, this platform supported the combined weight of the African, the Irishman, and two other topmen who were working the opposite end of the spar. Their bare feet clutched at its wet, slippery fibers as best they could. The landsman now prayed to his God for its long life. His eyes drifted back to the horizon.

Do not look out there! Quintin would have smacked the inattentive landsman were he not positioned as he was just out of his reach. Look to my eyes, damn you! That’s it! That’s it! Look to my eyes right here—right now! Don’t look out there … or over there … and, whatever you do, don’t look down! Just keep your eyes here on me and this task we have before us. Do as I say and you probably won’t die this day!

Quintin Moore had stood out on this yardarm thousands of times before, setting the sails, taking them in, or just seeing to the maintenance of the heavy canvas. Many of those times had been spent in the company of some such novice landsman ordered aloft to learn at the hands of the veteran able seaman. Today was no different, and those novices no less unsure, except that this man had volunteered for work as a topsman, something rare among run-of-the-mill, quaking landsmen, even those eager to make themselves useful. So, Quintin eyed him with some small measure of respect.

The four men set to work setting the canvas sail, unloosing it from its cocoon-like form. They worked in concert with the two other men stationed to their left on the larboard side of the yardarm.

It took less than a minute to free the canvas and unfurl it, letting it fall away and drop into place. All the while, the Irishman seemed distracted. His distant attention irked the African.

What in hell is out there? Quintin gestured toward the distant mist that cloaked the southern horizon.

Don’t you see it, African? the landsman replied without shifting his eyes from the distant fogbank. There was a whiff of wonder in his voice that caught Quintin’s attention.

See what?

The … the ghost ship. The landsman haltingly raised an unsure, quaking arm and pointed.

Quintin now noticed that the other men farther down the yardarm were looking that way too.

The African turned to see nothing except that the fog had drifted closer. I don’t see—

Then he did. Just for a fleeting second, he saw the form of a ship gliding in the mist. Then it was gone again.

Quintin hailed the other topsmen working thirty feet to his left. Did you see that?

They nodded and then one pointed down to the quarterdeck. Aye, and they see it, too!

Quintin turned and looked down at the quarterdeck where Commander Baron and his officers were studying the phantom through their spyglasses.

Here she comes! She’s making straight for us! The cry came from someone else high in the tops.

Quintin’s head spun round. She’s a Britisher, he mumbled.

What say? The landsman leaned toward him.

She’s a British frigate come calling. He turned again to the quarterdeck. And we’re in poor shape to receive her.

How so?

Our guns are stowed, and the deck is jammed with supplies for the fleet.

Are we not at peace?

Quintin turned a skeptical eye on the landsman. There’s nary a sailor afloat who doesn’t quiver a bit at the sight of the Union Jack.

Why?

You’ll see here shortly. She’s hailing us.

The British frigate closed rapidly on the USS Chesapeake. There was a sudden scurry of activity among the American crew as it grew closer.

What ship are you? a British officer called over through a bullhorn.

"The United States frigate Chesapeake," Commander Baron replied sharply.

Spill the wind from your sails. Heave to and receive my representative! The British captain’s voice was hard-set and final. It was a demand, not a request.

Identify yourself! Baron’s tone was identical.

"We are His Majesty’s ship Leopard! Make ready to receive my representative."

She’s showin’ fight! one of the American topmen observed.

What’s all this? the worried landsman queried Quintin.

They have their guns run out and their crew’s at quarters. If we don’t heave to, they’ll fire on us.

Commander Baron acquiesced, and, within minutes, a British lieutenant was standing on the Chesapeake’s main deck.

Salutes were exchanged but not pleasantries.

The British lieutenant spoke first. I am Lt. Meade, Captain. We have it under good authority that there are, among your crew, a number of Royal Navy deserters. He handed a list of names to Baron.

Of course you do. Baron spoke facetiously as he perused the list. "There are no men aboard the Chesapeake that match these names, Lieutenant." He handed the list back to the clearly skeptical officer.

Will you call your crew to assembly so that a boarding party may search among them?

No, I will not, Lieutenant. You have no right to seize a nonbelligerent ship in this manner, and you have no legal footing here. This is a ship of the United States Navy, and I intend to protest this breach in the most vigorous manner, sir.

Sir, we know these men are on this ship.

You always do, Lieutenant. This is becoming routine Royal Navy behavior. You can seize any ship at random and force the sailors aboard her to prove a negative—that is, that they have never served aboard a Royal Navy ship—which, of course, they cannot. Well, I will not be intimidated and have my crew roughed up by your press gang. Good day to you, sir! Baron instructed his commander of marines to escort the lieutenant back to his waiting longboat.

My captain will be most displeased, Lt. Meade observed as salutes were again exchanged and the discussion ended.

Mr. Nicholson, prepare to get under way and resume our mission, Baron instructed his sailing master.¹

Aye, aye, sir.

Baron wished to put quick distance between the Chesapeake and this English antagonist. Lt. Meade had not yet returned to the Leopard before Chesapeake began to move. Upon seeing this, Captain Humphreys of the Leopard ordered a single cannon shot fired across Chesapeake’s bow—a warning to go no farther.

In the next instant, the entire length of Leopard’s larboard side erupted in fire, flame, and death. The deafening roar of the broadside almost drowned out the shrieks and screams from the Chesapeake, which were both immediate and pitiful.

Thirteen cannonballs ripped into the American ship, raking her from bow to stern. Arms, legs, and heads flew through the air on a pink cloud of vaporized blood. Wood splinters shredded the crew and severed ropes and sails. Sixty feet up, the rope line that supported Quintin and his mates was cut away by shrapnel. The two topmen to Quintin’s extreme left were no longer there. Their mangled bodies dashed against the wooden deck below.

The African would have joined them if not for the quick hands of the landsman. Having been clamped to the yardarm by his grip of fear and not truly trusting the integrity of the ropewalk, he had not dropped like a stone when that rope had suddenly cut away beneath them. He now hung from the yardarm by his left armpit while his right hand held fast to the African, who swung helplessly.

I demand that you strike your colors, sir! Captain Humphrey screamed through his bullhorn at the reeling American ship.

Aboard the Chesapeake, all was chaos. Commander Baron lay bleeding and incoherent. His bloody, writhing form represented his ship succinctly.

His shocked first lieutenant processed the scene about him through a haze of utter horror as he assumed his first command. Hardly a man was left whole. Clouds of acrid gun smoke burned in his eyes, and he wiped vigorously at the water that cascaded down his cheeks—lest they be thought tears. The Chesapeake’s guns and ammunition had been stowed away to make more room for the mountain of supplies that now littered the main deck. He ran to the mizzen and yanked down the Stars and Stripes.

The USS Chesapeake surrendered.

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High above the mayhem, two souls struggled to remain in this world. The landsman was being slowly torn in two. His left arm slung around the yardarm, he hung swinging in the wind, with the African dangling as deadweight from his right clenched fist. The landsman had him by the shirt collar. The African hung helpless and dazed. His chin had come down hard on the yardarm as the severed ropewalk below him fell away. The blow had knocked him senseless. He could taste blood, as his teeth had chomped into the inside of his cheek. In his dazed state, he looked down upon the bloodied main deck with its ghastly display of body parts, dead men, and other human forms bent in agony. Through their midst, red-coated British marines now moved uncontested.

Above him, he could hear the landsman cry out for God’s mercy as his left shoulder separated. Quintin knew his time was short. The landsman had already held onto him longer than he thought possible. He was living borrowed moments.

Captain Humphrey took possession of the Chesapeake in the name of the king. Doctor, see to these men. Assist their surgeon however you are able, he barked at his own ship’s surgeon.

The British Marines went on about the business of assembling the remaining American crew. The list of names surfaced once again, and a small committee began examining each American for health and physical traits. One man began to struggle with the British Marines, and he was quickly laid out with a rifle butt.

This is Ratford here! A British officer recognized the prostrate form.

We found him hiding in the coal bunker, sir, a sergeant of marines added.

"Take him aboard the Leopard and clap him in irons!"

None of the other four are here, sir.

That’s all right. We have Ratford, and there’s four or five others here I like the cut of.

These are Americans! the American first lieutenant exploded. You have no rights to them!

Can they prove it? Captain Humphreys challenged. They look like deserters to me.

You bastards! the first lieutenant cursed them.

A British Marine sergeant had moved quickly to silence the officer when he was stopped in midstep by a plaintive shriek. "Father!"

The cry melted down upon those gathered on the deck as if it had been uttered from somewhere in heaven. It echoed from the forecastle to the quarter deck and eventually off of the Leopard.

All fell silent. All looked skyward.

It was only then that they noticed the drama being enacted up in the riggings—two men dangling precariously, about to fall to their deaths.

Quintin! One of the American sailors gasped and broke free of the British Marines.

Stop that man, a British officer ordered, and a half dozen red-clad marines grabbed at him.

But the tall, dark-skinned able seaman cast them off with a powerful sweep of his arms. "That—the elder African gestured to the tops just as a British rifle was about to make its heavy presence felt—is my son up there."

Stand down! Captain Humphreys commanded, and the British Marines backed off. Let him go!

The American seaman now bolted to the rail and then raced up the rat lines. He gained the tops in impressive time and was soon out on the lower yardarm just below his swinging, concussed son.

Drop him to me, Irishman!

The landsman gladly complied. Two other able seamen had arrived at his station and assisted his rescue as well. Within fifteen minutes they were safely carried below to the surgeon’s sick bay.

Very well then, Lieutenant. Captain Humphreys rubbed his hands together. We’ll take Ratford, these four; and, oh yes, we’ll take that most impressive African.

You barbarous swine! The American first lieutenant lunged at Humphreys but was stopped at the tip of a British bayonet.

And so, as Quintin Moore lay below, lost to unconsciousness, his father, able seaman Jabari Moore, was pressed into Royal Naval servitude.²

The Franciscan

Meanwhile

In Philadelphia

Father Egan had been summoned by messenger to appear before His Excellency Bishop Michael Egan, and he arrived by carriage accordingly at the appointed time.

He was shown into the cavernous cathedral, where he found the bishop kneeling in prayer in the front pew. The good father genuflected dutifully in the aisle and then settled in next to His Excellency, performed the sign of the cross, and joined his superior in prayer.

We have chased her into the shadows, Walter, the bishop whispered in a voice just barely audible to his new companion.

You know where she is then? Father Walter Egan, the bishop’s youngest brother, replied with more than a little surprise in his voice.

We know where she is not—which is anywhere near here. For that, we thank Almighty God.

Do we have knowledge of where she has gone?

She has retreated out to the periphery of civilization—somewhere along the shores of the Great Lake Erie.

There was a moment of thankful silence as both men offered appreciative prayers toward their creator.

For Father Egan, however, a sickening queasiness soon turned his insides into quaking jelly. All at once, he knew his new assignment—his mission, the reason he had been sent for. The knuckles of his folded hands whitened as his prayers grew most fervent.

Bishop Egan did not look up from his folded hands as he issued his ultimate order. And when you find her, destroy her!

The shadow of a ghost

Late that night

The mouth of Presque Isle Bay, the southern shore of Lake Erie

She moved through the moonlight like the shadow of a ghost. In the gentle summer wind, her canvas coat rustled about her as its deep hood shrouded her features in dark mystery. In comparison, her footsteps issued hardly a sound as her boots pressed lightly into the beech of gravel and sand.

She inhaled the clean night air deeply and held it. It was at once sweet with summer scents and full of the unmistakable, clammy mix of fish, sodden driftwood, and thick seagrass.

She now stood at the very tip of what the locals called Presque Isle Peninsula and studied the four cardinal directions.

Toward the western horizon, a full setting moon shone a luminescent path across the tranquil lake, igniting the water to shimmer and sparkle. She allowed her senses to take in this magic moonscape as best they could. She finally exhaled with a contented sigh and looked off to the north, where the star-laden night sky dropped down to meet the pitch-black horizon.

To the east, a flock of geese flapped by on their way north to Canada. They were far off but shone white in the moonlight. As she admired them, she noticed an owl, much closer and coming her way. As he arrived overhead, he began to circle her, gazing down and eyeing her with curiosity.

Hello, dear Strix! she called up to him.

He did not reply but continued to circle.

She turned to the south and studied the distant lights of her new home—two miles distant. Hello, Erie! You do not look like much from out here.

Huddled together along a line of bluffs fifty feet above the bay sat the houses, shops, and drinkeries of the little fishing village of four hundred souls—–Erie, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t much more than a small clutch of cabins and simple plank buildings, where faint yellow lights flickered from the windows and wisps of smoke coiled lazily up from the chimneys. Just to the east of the village, sitting even higher on its own cut of bluff, a log blockhouse stood sentinel in the night.

How so unlike Philadelphia you are, she muttered and then looked back up at the owl. I know, Strix. That would be a good thing for me, would it not?

She turned back to the water and to the task at hand.

The shallow wrinkles of the quiet lake lapped at her feet as she looked off to the north. They tell me Canada is out there somewhere, Strix.

The owl lighted on a nearby tree branch and hooted his reply.

She smiled. I take that for a yes then.

She held a wooden bucket in her right hand and now knelt to fill it full of moon water. As she did so, her bended knee touched the water, and she suddenly sobered and recoiled in fear.

She pulled away from the water and stared with mouth agape back to the north and the dark void at the end of the stars. She closed her eyes, but nothing at first appeared.

As long as she could remember, she had been prone to visions. She could neither control them nor conjure them. Indeed, they conjured her—and in their own good time.

With halting caution, she moved back to the water and knelt at its edge. She stared down into its liquid depths in dread, for it had suddenly become alive with evil. She sensed a sinister presence lurking in its depths.

Slowly, she reached out to it and allowed her fingertips to break its surface. The tingle of an evil current as powerful as it was unexpected caused her to recoil instinctively. She sensed dark, cold doom—and things worse.

She closed her eyes again, and this time she saw the shadow of an evil, humorless grin sketched across the inner canvas of her eyelids. Soon, a pair of china-blue gimlet eyes joined it and leered at her.

She now knew what it was—and she trembled. She kept her eyes closed and her hand in the water as she fought a rising tide of fear.

Fifty miles to the north, on Lake Erie’s northern shore, a similar being had come to the water’s edge at midnight on the night when the moon was full to fetch a bucket of the magic moon water. The two night creatures had dipped their hands into the water at precisely the same time—and thus made contact.

They now each peered out into their featureless horizons and studied their distant reflections. Each stood transfixed by the other.

She pulled her hand from the cold water, filled her bucket, and paced away from the shimmering lake. She looked back to the moon and closed her eyes again. This time, she could see the outline of a great ship silhouetted against it. Next, she looked to the south and the flickering lights of her new village.

She closed her eyes again, but this time saw only tears.

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CHAPTER 2

PORT OF CALL

Five years later, August 24, 1812

Casablanca, Morocco

THEY HAD JUST been paid two months’ worth of back wages from the United States Navy. The crew of the frigate USS John Adams bid adieu to the paymaster’s boat and collected themselves for much needed liberty on the filthy, crime-ridden, decadent streets of Casablanca.

They poured down the gangplanks like the freemen they were—young, freshly moneyed, and lusting for all that Casablanca had to offer.

Stay by me, Irishman, Quintin Moore advised his pale shipmate. I’ve things to show ya here that will age the boy out of ya—and right quick.

The Irishman and the African traded knowing smiles. Five years at sea aboard their new ship had knit them tight as thieves. Quintin had spent many a late night at sea speaking in wishful tones about Casablanca. The Irishman had been his sympathetic listener.

In those quiet moments, each had learned about the other, sharing family histories and youthful experiences. The African had quickly insisted that the man to whom he owed his life call him Q instead of Quintin. And to Q the Irishman was known as J. J.—for John James.

The two of them had forged a blood bond between them while hanging at the edge of death that day above the Chesapeake’s bloody decks. It now carried them forward as brothers into the great unknown that was each new day.

The landsman had long ago shed that title as he mastered the craft of the seafarer and had worked his way up the rankings to ordinary seaman and, finally, able seaman. He no longer answered to the occasional call of landsman, but the moniker Irishman had stuck like tar, and he wore it like a tattoo.

Quintin led the way and did not wander. He forged his path through the crowded city streets like a man on a mission. The Irishman followed dutifully in his wake. Behind him, a handful of crewmates kept pace, for they, too, had heard Quintin’s tales and hungered to see for themselves.

It was not more than two city blocks down a well-traveled side street. A placard hung above the door written in a language that none of them could understand. As they drew near, the wooden door burst open, and a man flew out, propelled by muscled arms, face-first into the filth of the street. Quintin paid him little mind and held the flung-open door in place for his friend to enter.

The Irishman entered a darkened world of intoxicating smells and alien music. It took his eyes some time to adapt from the evening sun of the street to the lantern and candle glow of this exotic, windowless cellar he now crept down into. He slowed to a stop to survey the large room, but the African pushed him forward.

This way, J. J. Quintin weaved his way toward an open table with his shipmate on his heals.

A young boy wiped away the spilt alcohol from the tabletop as the two seamen settled around it.

Rum! Quintin held up two fingers to a serving wench who had looked their way, and she nodded as she spun off toward the bar.

The place was abuzz in a level of activity that the Irishman guessed never slowed. Around him sat sailors from a dozen nations. They were loud and crude and well liquored. The maids who worked the tables were winsome, pleasingly dressed, and round in all the right places. They played the room the way a bullfighter toys with a bull—taunting, flirting, dodging; winking, smiling, retreating; advancing; collecting. All was under the watchful eyes of a squad of well-armed Turks who threatened instant and copious pain to those who might cross the line.

The rum arrived in short order, and Quintin placed generous coin into the young lady’s palm. Their eyes met, and Quintin flashed his smile. There’s more where this came from, girl.

She smiled back and winked before retreating, back into the rush of the room.

The Irishman reached for his pouch, but Quintin waved him off. Your money’s no good here, J. J. This night’s on me.

The Irishman acquiesced. The two men had healed physically from their wounds received at the hands of the British Navy that black day back in 1807, but J. J. worried that his friend held still deeper wounds to mend. The African had grown prone to fits of rage, where he showed his quick temper and might pick a fight over any unintended slight. In addition, he was known to tumble into sulking moments of quiet melancholy, where he grieved and sometimes wept. Whether his father lived or had died, he did not know. True agony came from the realization that he may never know. Both men felt that this night would do them good.

Quintin downed the rum and ordered another. The Irishman sipped and stared through the smoky screen that swirled around him. He had visited other ports of call and seen the dingy drinkeries that catered to the sailor, but they were not like this. In those other watering holes, the women were from the streets—the dregs of femininity. They hung on a man and would do anything for a bottle. Anything!

In stark contrast, the women who now floated through his field of vision were most uncommon, indeed, almost a separate species from those other bar wenches. They were all of rich Mediterranean blood, not a flaxen hair among them. They all were wrapped in flowing silks, cut and slit here and there to reveal tempting glimpses of tight skin, each a slightly different shade of dark. They wore painted faces crafted to accentuate alluring eyes. The affect was most magnetic. The establishment was designed to separate men from their money, and each patron did so willingly.

Narragansett! Quintin yelled toward the entryway and waved his arm high above his head.

Does he see us? the Irishman wondered.

No. He hears me, but he’s bat blind, and that’s a fact. Quintin shook his head and moved to get up.

I’ll fetch ’im. J.J. moved from the table.

A bottle! Quintin called to their wench. And another cup!

She nodded.

The bottle arrived at the table at the same time as Quintin’s shipmates.

Each transaction was pay as you go, and, once again, the Irishman went for his money.

Uh-uh. I told you. Quintin smacked at J. J.’s hands, knocking his purse to the table, where it pulled open and his cash spilled out for all to see. Considering the meager pay of a sailor, the display was impressive and not lost on those who eyed it.

Quintin quickly scooped it out of sight and returned it to his friend. Oh, you don’t want to be flashin’ that—not here. That may impress the wench, but there’re other eyes in the room that will look at ya as a target now.

J. J. glanced sheepishly about, but it seemed all eyes were on other gaudy displays than his.

Pohig! The African threw his arm around his native shipmate and shook him in welcome. Quintin had just thrown down his third shot of rum and was beginning to feel it. We topmen stick together!

The smiling Narragansett shook as he weathered another man hug from his African mate. He had taken the seat to Quintin’s right and just to the left of the Irishman. Their seats were pressed somewhat together so all three could have a good view of the saloon.

I like it when you sit next to me, Pohig. J. J. winked down at him. You make me look taller.

Pohig mimicked the Irishman’s smile and offered a laugh, even though he stood, unsure his friend was joking.

Quintin and J. J. were of average stature, with the African standing about an inch shorter. Their Narragansett shipmate was a good half a foot shorter still. All three were trim and sculpted, though, like men who spend their waking hours in strenuous physical labor usually are.

An hour disappeared, with the three lost to the world of visual delights. No one was counting, but when the second bottle arrived, the Irishman recollected that he was only halfway to the bottom of his third cup, while Pohig was nursing his. Quintin was soaking it up in rapid order.

Pohig pointed toward the entryway, where they