The Macedonian (Privateers & Gentlemen) Read online

  Privateers & Gentlemen:

  THE MACEDONIAN

  Walter Jon Williams

  Originally published as by “Jon Williams.”

  Copyright (c) 1984, 2012 by Walter Jon Williams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

  Privateers & Gentlemen (Historical Fiction)

  To Glory Arise

  Brig of War

  The Macedonian

  The Tern Schooner

  Cat Island

  Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

  This Is Not a Game

  Deep State

  The Fourth Wall

  Diamonds for Tequila

  The Second Books of the Praxis (NEW!!!)

  The Accidental War

  The First Books of the Praxis (Dread Empire’s Fall)

  The Praxis

  The Sundering

  Conventions of War

  Investments

  Impersonations

  Quillifer Series (NEW!!!)

  Quillifer

  Quillifer the Knight (forthcoming)

  Novels

  Hardwired

  Knight Moves

  Voice of the Whirlwind

  Days of Atonement

  Aristoi

  Metropolitan

  City on Fire

  Ambassador of Progress

  Angel Station

  The Rift

  Implied Spaces

  Divertimenti

  The Crown Jewels

  House of Shards

  Rock of Ages

  Short Stories

  Daddy’s World

  Investments (Set in the world of Dread Empire’s Fall)

  Prayers on the Wind

  Collections

  Facets

  Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

  The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

  CHAPTER 1

  The room’s design was unmistakably nautical; there was not a straight line in it, from the perfect arching curve over the stem windows to the immaculate grace of the inward-leaning bulwark— even the commodore’s table was curved, its corners rounded, set up on swooping, flowingly carved legs. The gunports were triced up; the three stern windows were open to , reveal the green Jersey shore on the horizon, and windsails were set up atop the open skylights. A fitful Atlantic breeze drifted through these apertures and provided a thankful relief against the New York early summer, occasionally stirring the stacks of papers set up on the commodore’s table, and cooling the sweat of the assembled captains in their blue and gold. They, defying the heat in their full-dress coats and massive epaulets, proceeded with the business at hand— for the business was serious, the court-martial of a brother officer for the loss of his command.

  The officer being judged was Captain Favian Markham, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and late of the Experiment brig— both man and brig famous for what had become known as Markham’s Raid, a circumnavigation of the British isles in which forty-odd enemy ships were set ablaze... famous also for the destruction of the enemy brig Teaser in a yardarm-to-yardarm fight the summer before, and famous as well for the subject at hand, the wreck of the brig on a Maine sandbank last autumn, with a loss of her first lieutenant, her pilot, and all but twenty-three of the eighty-odd men who had been aboard.

  It was June of 1814, and the nation was at war: assembling for the purposes of a court-martial the minimum number of five captains, each busy with his own wartime affairs, had taken months. During that time the accused Favian Markham had been fortunate not to have been removed entirely from duty; he’d spent the months in New London, under nominal arrest and unable to wear his sword, supervising the building of what— had the misfortune in Maine been avoided— would have certainly been his new command, the twenty-two gun ship-sloop Shark, due for completion by the first of the year. But the five captains had at length been assembled, and for the last hot, humid week had been toiling in the commodore’s cabin of the frigate President, praying for a cool breeze and sifting the evidence.

  The American service was small, and the accused captain knew most of the men who would decide his fate. The president of the court, Commodore John Rodgers, was a crusty veteran, at forty-three years of age something of an old man in this young service, the former captain of the President, unlucky (it seemed) in war and now en route to take command of the defenses of Baltimore. Favian had known him early in the war, when Favian had been first lieutenant on the United States and Rodgers, commanding a squadron that had included United States, President, Congress, and Argus, had groped his way across the Atlantic in search of a Jamaica convoy that had proved to have had too great a start on them— Rodgers had then turned around and come home, the voyage showing no profit. Rodgers, Favian knew, was a short-tempered, blustering man, vain and snappish. The heat and lengthy testimony had shortened his fuse, and he barked left and right, sending witnesses and clerks flying; but as to how this would affect his verdict Favian could form no conclusion.

  Commodore Rodgers’s decision to turn away from the English Channel, that first summer of the war, had precipitated an explosion on the part of the man sitting on Rodgers’s immediate right: Commodore Stephen Decatur, new captain of the President and commander of the New York defenses, a man for whom the word audacity had surely been coined... the greatest hero of the young Navy, and the model to every ambitious junior. Favian had reason to suppose Decatur would favor the accused: Favian had been considered a protégé of Decatur’s ever since he had volunteered, back in ’04, for the ketch Intrepid that had sailed into Tripoli harbor under Decatur’s command and burned the captured Philadelphia. The two had been linked ever since. Favian had fought alongside Decatur in Preble’s bombardments of Tripoli, leaping in hand-to-hand combat from boat to boat; he had served in Decatur’s gunboat squadron on the Delaware between wars; he had been Decatur’s first choice for executive officer of the United States, the ship that two years before had taken the British frigate Macedonian, turning her into a mastless hulk in the process, rerigged her in mid-Atlantic, and sailed her home to a jubilant American welcome.

  Decatur had spent the trial leaning back in his chair, his black eyes half-closed, a grim smile often visible through the close-cropped, curly black beard. The beard, recently grown, gave Decatur a faintly piratical appearance, somehow subverting the clean-shaven, gold-laced dignity of the court, as he must have known it would— Stephen Decatur had always known how to stand out in a crowd.

  Sitting on Decatur’s right was another old shipmate, Captain Charles Stewart, another magic name connected with the Mediterranean and Tripoli, another of the generation of officers known as “Preble’s boys.” The red-haired Irishman was a friend, pressed onto the court-martial while traveling to Boston in order to take command of the Constitution. Stewart, oddly enough, had once commanded the vessel Favian had wrecked; back in the year 1800 he’d captured the Deux Amis, as well as the Diana commanded by Hyacinthe Rigaud, a Haitian pirate known as the King of the Picaroons. Favian knew that, despite the amused, somewhat impudent way in which Stewart chose to regard the world, he was unquestionably one of the most dangerous men in the Navy, and possibly the most intelligent.

  On Rodgers’s immediate left was a man Favian did not know well, Captain Jacob Jones; even though Jones was currently stationed in New London, Favian had not seen him often, as Jones seemed to spend most of his time in transit from one place to an
other, inspecting the condition of the squadrons on the Great Lakes and on Champlain, writing memoranda to Washington on the construction of the steam battery in New York... Jones, even though he had not been to sea in a year, was a very busy man.

  Jones was a long-nosed man of forty-six, which made him older than anyone else on the court, older even than Rodgers; he had practiced medicine and law before entering the Navy at the very advanced age of thirty-one. He had served in the Mediterranean but Favian had not known him there, for Jones had been on the Philadelphia when it was captured; he’d spent most of the war in a Moorish jail. At the opening of the current war he’d commanded the Wasp sloop in her celebrated action with the crack brig-sloop Frolic, which he had shot to pieces in about twenty minutes, killing or wounding ninety of her 107-man crew.

  In one of the coincidences of which war is so fond, Wasp had that very afternoon been captured by the British Poictiers, a seventy-four-gun liner that could have turned her into driftwood with a single broadside, and which, due to battle damage, she could not escape.

  Despite their lack of acquaintance, Favian was well aware of the ties that bound him to Jones: there was the Philadelphia, which Jones had helped to surrender and which Favian had helped to burn; there was the very neatness of the Wasp-Frolic action, imitated by Favian’s own fight with the Teaser. More importantly there was the Macedonian, which Decatur and Favian had captured, and which Jones now commanded. Macedonian currently sat on the Thames river mud at New London, bereft of its crew, which had been transferred to Isaac Chauncey’s command on Lake Ontario. Macedonian would not be sailing anywhere soon, and so Jones, with little to do but run errands for the secretary of the Navy, had been pressed onto the court-martial board.

  The only man on the board of captains with whom Favian was not acquainted at all sat on Jones’s left; he was Commodore Lewis, a thin, beak-nosed Tartar of a man subject to temper and indigestion. He had spent the war in command of the New York flotilla of gunboats, which could scarcely have improved his disposition— while every other man present had been given his chance for glory and prize money, Lewis had spent his thankless hours rowing over the waters of New York harbor and Long Island Sound, hoping that a sudden calm might strand an enemy merchantman within reach. Apparently a few such merchantmen had been so stranded, and the prize money might have provided some comfort; a few months ago there had been a neat action with the frigate Maidstone at Goshen Point, in which two score of American coasters, covered by the gunboats, had escaped capture; but if this feat had granted Lewis any relief from his discontent, it was impossible to tell. Lewis, like Rodgers, had continued to snap out at every witness, at the clerk, at the deputy judge advocate, at the marine guards. Favian could not help but conclude that the man would oppose acquittal; he was so obviously opposed to everything else.

  Such were the men who were to judge Favian’s conduct; such was the complex network of friendships, rivalries, envies, duties, scars, acquaintances, comradeships that bound them together in service to the Navy. Six of the Navy’s twenty active captains— over one-quarter of the senior officers currently on service— were gathered in the commodore’s cabin of the President, participating in the court-martial of one of their number. No wonder it had taken so long to assemble them. If the British somehow managed to enter New York harbor and cut out the President, it would be a crippling blow. The room glittered with gold lace, epaulets, and the decorated hilts of presentation swords, and every man on the court-martial but Jones and Stewart was wearing the silver stars of a commodore on his shoulder straps.

  There was something odd that happened to men like these, Favian thought, when assembled in full uniform and in one another’s presence, when they were made so aware of their own power and privilege. The loyalties and friendships somehow grew less clear; or perhaps they were submerged beneath the one crucial loyalty, to the Navy. Considerations of friendship would have little place, Favian knew, once the Navy and the Navy’s good demanded a sacrifice. Stephen Decatur and John Rodgers had been friends with James Barron, but they had voted against him after the affair with the Leopard, knowing the friendship would end in bitterness— and so it had.

  When Favian faced these five in their gilt-edged lapels and epaulets, he knew he was not facing a board composed chiefly of old friends and acquaintances, but facing rather the Navy incarnate. The loyalties here ran to the Navy for which they had all risked their lives; though each would use his private knowledge of Favian to reach their judgments— it was unfair, he supposed, that all these interweaving webs of friendship should be so used, but unfair in what sense? It was unfair, Favian supposed, that each might be prejudiced by previous acquaintance; but Favian himself was inclined to think the other way, that it was manifestly unfair of the Navy to use his friends and acquaintances’ knowledge of his character for the Navy’s iron purposes. Yet he was himself a Navy man, he supposed, by habit and training if not inclination, and he understood the necessity— but that did not end the resentment.

  Despite having an understandable interest in the trial’s outcome, Favian found his attention wandering frequently, and he suspected that of the men in the room only the clerk, who had to write everything down, was paying proper attention. Lord, this was a tedious business! First the paperwork— for a brig that had been lost with its log and every record it contained, there was an almighty great deal of it: a copy of the report of the surveyors who had found Experiment sound and seaworthy when it had been refloated in 1812, Favian’s reports finding her ready for sea and pronouncing himself satisfied with her equipment, a copy of Favian’s official report of Markham’s Raid, together with an itemized list of the damage suffered during the fight with the Teaser (“Item: one carronade slide, 18 lb., cracked by glancing roundshot, gun itself undamaged.”) and Favian’s official comment that, with some minor repairs, some knotting and splicing and patching of torn sails, Experiment would be ready for sea.

  The deputy judge advocate— in effect the prosecutor— a short, pugnacious civilian attorney named Robinson, said to be a particular protégé of Aaron Burr, had tried to make the most of this. He had leaped to his feet, and with a flowery address that would have sent an entire roistering Irish wake to sleep, pointed out that the weight of the written evidence produced thus far showed that Experiment had not foundered from any fault in its construction, but rather from another cause. “Error on the part of its officers,” Robinson had concluded, “ought not, by any means, to be excluded.”

  “This court is capable of drawing its own conclusions, God rot you,” Commodore Rodgers interrupted. “And this court will also be mighty obliged, you poxed bastard, if you deliver us no more speeches. Don’t write that down.” This last was addressed to the clerk.

  Robinson’s eyes almost leaped from his head, but he mastered himself well, considering that he was unused to the manners of the older generation of Navy officers. “I shall endeavor, sir, to adopt the laconic mode,” he said.

  “Just be brief with it,” Rodgers had said, muttering “you pompous little shit” under his breath.

  The deputy judge advocate, from that hour, had kept almost entirely to question and reply, assuming it the way to the president’s heart, and Rodgers’s comments had been chiefly confined to directing the witnesses to speak up and telling the clerk not to write down his profane asides. Favian saw the way the wind was blowing and concluded that it was favorable. He had not hired an attorney to aid in the defense, and it seemed that Rodgers had a grudge of long standing against attorneys, dating, probably, from the month-long Barron court-martial five years before, on which Rodgers had also sat as president. Favian, too, kept his remarks short and to the point.

  Once the court had sifted through the written evidence, Favian called his witnesses: the quartermaster on duty at the time of the wreck; the acting bosun, Gable, a short-tempered man built like a prizefighter who demonstrated no discernible awe at the massive array of gold and braid; the corporal of marines (the sergeant having drowned);
a master’s mate; the two helmsmen; the two surviving midshipmen, Stanhope and Tolbert, the third mid— Dudley, little fifteen-year-old Dudley— having been drowned, lost with Hibbert, the lieutenant, and the two dozen men who had been clinging to the foremast when it had torn loose and gone on the rocks.

  The evidence was clear and positive: Experiment had driven ashore the enemy privateer Loyalist during a rising gale, and then in attempting to escape the clutches of the coast had been driven by a backing wind toward a cape. With no room to wear around and no possibility of tacking, Favian had club-hauled her and got her off— an unprecedented maneuver, Midshipman Stanhope reported, club-hauling a brig off a lee shore and destroying a clipper-privateer in the same afternoon.

  “God damn your scholarship, sir,” Rodgers said. “Don’t write that down.”

  Stanhope begged the commodore’s pardon and continued, remarking that if the wind had not veered six points Experiment would have got off scot-free, and before Rodgers could damn his opinions Robinson leaped in to point out that Stanhope’s remark assumed as true what the court-martial was assembled to discover and was therefore inadmissible— so Rodgers damned Robinson instead and ordered Stanhope’s conclusions inserted in the record, remarking between curses that Stanhope was a fucking officer and perfectly capable of reaching an opinion regarding a fellow officer’s seamanship.

  Robinson was so cowed, or so amazed, by this performance that it was left to Captain Lewis to elicit the information that Midshipman Stanhope’s tenure in the Navy had been short; that he was a new-made midshipman when Experiment had first got to sea in late March of 1813, and so his entire sea experience had been during the few months before the brig had been wrecked. “We may judge, from Mr. Stanhope’s experience, just how greatly to value his opinions,” Lewis concluded blackly.