As they drew nearer, Lieutenant Creed looked over at Laurence and nodded, and his boat split away towards the Maréchal, drawing half-a-dozen of the others along in its train. They had drawn alongside the Polonaise, and Laurence opened up his glass and looked: the officer of the watch was down near the stern beside the wheel, the hands on deck made sleeping humps amid the cannon on the quarterdeck, and the lookout in the near crow’s nest yawned against his arm: a ship in harbor, at peace.
Laurence nodded to Seaman Ewyll, waiting in the prow: a sturdy if stolid young man, who flung up the rope with its grappling-hook. It clanged against the rail as it seized on, and they all held still, waiting; not a breath misted the air.
The alarm was not called. Ewyll swarmed up the knotted rope, another five tied at his waist, and he flung them down quickly to the other boats: by the time Laurence made the deck, there were two dozen men already aboard the empty dragondeck, crouching low beside bales and casks, and the seven Frenchmen who had been sleeping on the deck were trussed like roasts with rags stuffed into their mouths. Ewyll and Wren were climbing into the foremast rigging after the suspended bags of the caltrops, with Captain Little and Captain Chenery gone directly after them, easy in the rigging from long mid-air experience aboard their dragons.
Laurence leaned over the side: Granby waved up from his boat, which having sent off half her men now rowed away around the other side of the Polonaise, where she faced the Maréchal, and began the critical work: they flung up ropes to men on deck to be looped over the railing, and began to draw up the chainmail netting, pillaged from the dragons’ equipage, to lie over the portholes of her guns. Laurence turned away, and leading the assembled men soft across the dragondeck halted near the stairs leading to the main deck: a man lay snoring wet and thickly beneath them, mouth hanging slackly open.
Mayhew looked at him; Laurence nodded; Mayhew and another sailor, Todd, slipped barefoot down to the main deck and around back of the stairs, and Mayhew stopped the snoring man’s mouth, pinning him down by the throat with his other hand. Laurence, looking through the steps, could see the Frenchman’s wide starting eyes ringed with white as he struggled against Mayhew’s broad hand; Todd lashed his arms to his body with rope and tied him at ankles and knees, swiftly, and they shoved him behind a stanchion and cleared the way.
Laurence crept down to the main deck, nearly on his toes, glad of the thin battered wreck of his boots. He counted off eight of the men for the fore ladderway, now almost directly before them and unattended. They seized one of the water-barrels and wrestled it on top to block the way, and hovered by it with their pistols and their knives and their cutlasses, whatever weapons they had contrived to conceal about their bodies.
The open deck now stretched away, and the watch-officer, an unlucky young lieutenant, was turning from his desultory conversation with the helmsman and coming towards the prow along the leeward side. Laurence waited, and waited; he wished to give the men in Granby’s boat as long as he could, and the men in the rigging: even half-a-minute might have invaluable worth in the present circumstances. The watch-officer paused mid-decks and looked over the rail—he was inspecting the hull, which Laurence had noted in climbing up was indeed badly barnacled: she would have benefited from a thorough scraping.
The French officer straightened again and came on, humming with an occasional stifled slide towards whistling. He stopped again, squinting out to sea—he was looking at the Maréchal, which stood between them and the shore, so that the bonfire in the city illuminated the crouching shadows of the line of men stealing across her deck.
“Britain!” Laurence bellowed out, at the top of his lungs; the young French officer jumped undignified, turning, drawing his sword, but three of the sailors were on him; he went down at once. Laurence could not look to see any more: he was running towards the aft ladderway with another eight men behind him, and they clapped another barrel over the opening just as faces appeared below, staring up alarmed.