Read Chapter 34: Storms of Belief

The wind came from nowhere. One moment the Raven rode a steady southwest swell, her patched sails drawing true; the next, the sky turned the color of a bruise and the sea rose up like a living thing.

“All hands!” Hartley roared over the first crash of thunder. “Strike the mainsail! Batten everything down!”

Too late. The squall hit them like a broadside, shrieking through the rigging and snapping the foremast stays. Canvas tore loose and whipped into rags. Men screamed and clung to whatever they could find as the Raven heeled hard to port, shipping a wall of green water over the rail.

Hartley fought his way to the wheel, where Jenkins wrestled the spokes with a face gone white. “She won’t answer, Captain! The rudder’s fouled!”

“Then hold her steady as she comes and pray we ride it out!” Hartley grabbed the wheel beside him, muscles screaming as the storm tried to tear it from his grip. Rain lashed his face like buckshot. Three miles to the lee shore—he could see the white line of breakers foaming against the coast of Ireland. If the ship drove onto those rocks, they were all dead men.

Another gust, harder than the first, struck them abeam. The Raven groaned like a creature in agony. From the main deck came a crack like a musket shot, and then the terrible sound of a hundred feet of timber groaning and giving way. The mainmast swayed, held for a heartbeat, then toppled with a crash that shook the deck under their feet, dragging yards of rigging and canvas down with it.

“There goes the mast!” shouted Benbow from somewhere aft. “God help us, there goes the bloody mast!”

The ship lost all way. Without sail, without steerage, she rolled broadside into the trough, and the next wave came over the stern and swept a man off the helm platform. Hartley saw him go—one of the new lads from Dartmouth, name forgotten, face a mask of terror as the sea swallowed him whole.

The crew broke. Not all at once, but fast. Men who had stood steady through gunfire and boarding actions now dropped their lines and crouched against the deck, hands over their heads, or ran for the hatches to get below. A knot of them gathered near the shattered base of the mainmast, shouting at each other, fists pointed at Hartley.

“We’re done for!” one of them screamed, and Hartley recognized the voice of the bosun’s mate, a hard man named Croft. “She’s lost her mast and the shore’s to leeward! We might as well take our chances in the boats and be done with it!”

“Boats won’t make it in that sea!” Hartley shouted back. But Croft wasn’t listening, and neither were the dozen men clustered behind him. They had the look of men ready to make a choice—the kind of choice that ended with the captain in irons and the ship abandoned to fate.

Another wave hit. The Raven yawed violently, and Hartley used the momentum to take three steps across the deck before the next roll threw him into Croft’s midst. He caught the bosun’s mate by the throat, pressed him against the stump of the mainmast.

“You’ll stand this watch or I’ll throw you overboard myself,” Hartley spat through rain and salt. “We’re not dead yet, and I’ll not have you killing us sooner with panic.”

“Then how do you save us, Captain?” Croft’s voice shook, but his eyes held a desperate defiance. “What magic have you got left?”

Before Hartley could answer, a woman’s voice cut through the howl of the wind.

“He has God, and so do you.”

Isabel stood at the break of the quarterdeck, soaked to the skin, hair plastered to her face, hands raised. In the livid storm light she looked like a figure from a cathedral window—some avenging saint or fierce prophet. The wind tore at her skirts, and she did not give ground.

“Listen to me!” She climbed onto a water cask that was rolling loose against the rail, impossibly balanced. “I saw the mast come down, and I saw your faces. You think God has turned His back on you because the sea is angry. But I tell you, He tests those He loves, and this ship has not sunk yet. This ship still floats, and her crew still breathes, and that is no accident. That is Providence.”

A few men crossed themselves. Croft looked from Hartley to Isabel, mouth open.

“Did you not pray, each of you, before you came aboard?” Isabel’s voice rose, fierce, unbroken. “Did you not ask for safe passage? Then believe, here and now, in the same breath that you drew then. Your Captain has brought you through fire and Spanish iron. Do you think he will let a little water finish you?”

One of the men near Croft laughed—a short, disbelieving bark, but a laugh nonetheless. Another man dropped his hands. Croft’s shoulder relaxed under Hartley’s grip.

“All right.” Croft’s voice cracked, but he turned to face the crew. “All right! You heard the lady! God ain’t done with us yet, and neither is the Captain. To the pumps! Clear that wreckage! Move your bloody arses!”

The spell broke. Men scrambled to obey, clearing the fallen mast, manning the pumps, rigging a makeshift storm sail from a spare topsail. Isabel slid down from the cask, swaying, and Hartley caught her elbow before she fell.

“I didn’t know you were a preacher,” he said, voice raw.

“I’m not.” She looked at him, and he saw that her fear had been real, her hands trembling. “But I prayed, and I meant it, and so I spoke the only words I had. Will they hold?”

“Long enough to try.” Hartley looked seaward. The storm had not broken, but the wind had begun to shift, turning the rain from horizontal to slanting. The sea was still savage, but there was a new quality to the air—a lull, a pressure change that he recognized.

“We’re entering the eye,” he said. “We’ll have a half hour of near stillness before the back half of the storm hits. Look alive, rig what we can in that time.”

The eye came on fast. The wind died to a whisper, and the rain ceased, leaving a surreal calm. Grey walls of cloud towered around them, uncanny as the gates of Hell, and in that hush the Raven floated becalmed amidst a carpet of debris and foam.

Barnaby called from the bow. “Captain! Ships to the north! Look—the whole bloody sea is full of them!”

Hartley climbed the remains of the mainmast, gripping the splintered wood, and stared north through the faint drizzle. There they were—dozens of tall hulls, sails furled, fighting the same storm. He counted masts, picked out standards. The crimson and gold of Castle and Leon. The crosses of Aragon.

The Spanish Armada. Scattered. Battered. Whole squadrons separated from each other by miles of churning water. He saw one galleon with her foremast gone, another wallowing low with obvious damage to her hull. They had been caught in the same blow, and they had fared no better than the Raven.

“They’re broken,” Benbow said quietly, coming to stand beside him at the rail. “Look at them, Captain. A third of their strength crippled or overboard. If Howard were here now, he could roll them up like a carpet.”

“Howard isn’t here.” Hartley’s mind worked fast. “But those ships are. And if they’re as damaged as they look, they won’t be able to run.”

He turned, scanning the scattered Spanish fleet with new eyes. They thought they were safe—nobody comes out in the back half of a storm. They’d be at their prayer books, checking their damage, counting their dead. And one battered English privateer, its mast retied and its crew furious, might do more damage than a fleet in that confused mass of men and timber.

“Mr. Jenkins,” Hartley called. “Set a course for the nearest cluster. We’re going through them.”

Isabel stepped up beside him, following his gaze. She saw what he meant, and a spark lit in her eyes.

“We strip the storm’s veil from the Armada’s face,” she said, “and give them a taste of English desperation.”

Grim’s voice came from below, sharp with pleading. “You’ll get us all killed! They’ll board us, hang you as pirates! That’s not a fight, that’s a death sentence!” But a rope had been run to the prisoner’s wrists, and his protests went unheard.

Hartley clapped Benbow on the shoulder. “Get me a full spread of what we have for powder. We’re not running from this storm. We’re delivering its message in iron.”

Beyond the Spanish ships, through a rent in the cloud wall, Hartley caught a glimpse of green coast—the mouth of a wide river, and sitting in its sheltered approach, a handful of English hulls flying Howard’s flag. Baltimore. They were barely a league from safety, and between them and that harbor stood the entire scattered might of the Spanish fleet.

He met Isabel’s eyes. “Get below. Take Grim and lock yourself in the cabin.”

“No,” she said, drawing a knife he hadn’t known she carried. “When the fighting starts, I’ll be with you.”

Hartley looked at her for a long moment, then nodded once.

“So be it.”