She pulled back from the window as a wave splashed across her face, and a chill swept the room, numbing her fingers. She fumbled a moment trying to secure the latch, then gave up and turned to head for the door. If we're all to die, she told herself, I want to be up with Hugh, on the quarterdeck. Oh God, why now? After all we've been through?
As she passed the lantern, she noticed Serina, still bent over the African, still mumbling the strange words. . . .
"Do you know what's about to happen to us all!" The frustration was more than she could contain. "Come back over here and take a look."
When the mulatto merely stared at her with a distant, glazed expression, she strode to where she knelt and took her arm, pulling her erect. While she was leading her toward the open window, she heard a deep groaning rise up through the timbers of the frigate and knew the cannon were being run out. Winston had ordered a desperate gamble; a possible ordnance duel with a warship twice the burden of the Defiance. Moving the guns now, when the seas were high, only compounded their danger. If one broke loose from its tackles, it could hurtle through the side of the ship, opening a gash that would surely take enough water to sink them in minutes.
"Do you see, senhora?" She directed Serina's gaze out the open windows. "If you want to pray, then pray that that man-of-war doesn't catch us. Your African may soon be dead anyway, along with you and me too."
"What . . . will they do?" The mulatto studied the approaching warship, her eyes only half seeing.
"I expect they'll pull alongside us if they can, then run out their guns and . . ." She felt her voice begin to quiver.
"Then I will pray."
"Please do that." She whirled in exasperation and quickly shoved her way out the door and into the companionway. As she mounted the slippery ladder to the quarterdeck, she felt John Mewes brush past in the rain, bellowing orders aloft. She looked up to see men perched along the yards, clinging to thin ropes in the blowing rain as they loosened the topgallants. The Defiance was putting on every inch of canvas, in weather where any knowing seaman would strike sail and heave-to.
"Good God, Katy, I wish you'd go back below decks. The Gloucester must have spied our sail when we doubled the Point." Winston's voice sounded through the rain. He was steering the ship all alone now, his shoulder against the whipstaff. Off the portside the English warship, a gray hulk with towering masts, was rapidly narrowing the distance between them.