The Baltic War(284)

"Okay, everybody!" Harry hollered. "Take battle stations! We'll be coming in sight of Sheerness any minute now!"



Melissa stared at Rita.



Rita stared at Harry.



"Hey, Captain!" Rita hollered. "Could you puh-leese explain a little more clearly exactly what 'battle stations' consists of? Y'know—for us women and kids?"



Harry gave her a quick grin. "Mostly, it means you keep your heads below the gunwales—or whatever you call 'em, on a barge like this—and get ready to jump overboard first, if she starts to sink."



"Sink," said Melissa. She leaned over the rail and looked at the waters of the Thames. "How deep is it here, anyway?"



"Got no idea, Ms. Mailey," replied Harry. "Look at it this way. There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that this barge is probably heavy enough to absorb one or two rounds from whatever guns they've got on whatever ships they've got stationed at the dockyard. The bad news is that one or two rounds is about the limit, too. If Rita's brother ain't there in time to take out them warships, we're screwed."



Several of the Warder women were looking worried, now. "None of us can swim very well, Lady Mailey," said Patricia Hayes. "The children, not at all." She gave the distant shore of the river an apprehensive glance. "That's a far ways."



In point of fact, Melissa knew, if the barge sank then even very good swimmers would face a real challenge. They were now well into the estuary of the Thames, and you couldn't really call it a "river" any longer. It was more like a small bay. At a guess, although she wasn't particularly good at estimating distances, they were at least a mile from land.



"Right," said Rita, suddenly moving purposefully. "Let's set about rigging up some sort of rafts. Or flotation devices, at least. Harry, I suppose it'd be too much to ask if you brought life vests with you, amongst all that other stuff you somehow managed to smuggle into England."



"No, sorry." Harry's smile contained as much in the way of apology as that of a crocodile, admitting that, no, it hadn't thought to bring napkin rings to the feast. "We pretty much concentrated on stuff that goes bang and boom, y'know."



"Don't remind me," muttered Melissa, who was also rising from her seated position, though much more awkwardly than Rita. The combination of the adrenaline from the escape and the hours they'd spent since, crammed into a barge, had left her feeling every day of fifty-nine years old.



On the bright side, if you chose to look at it that way, the fact that they'd made their escape from the Tower at dawn meant that it was no later than midafternoon once they reached the estuary. So at least they weren't fumbling in the dark.



The flip side of that, of course, was that any enemy warships lying in wait at Sheerness wouldn't be fumbling in the dark, either.



One or two rounds, and down she goes. Melissa wondered how long it took a warship to fire two rounds from whatever cannons they carried. She wasn't about to ask, however, since she was darkly certain that whatever the answer was, it would be extremely depressing.





"And there's Sheerness," murmured Captain Baumgartner. He brought up his eyeglass. "Now let's see how many ships they've got that aren't still at anchor."





To Rita's surprise, Thomas Wentworth came to give her some assistance. That was the first thing she'd seen him do since the barge left the Tower except stare off into whatever inner space he'd gotten lost in.



True, he wasn't much help. Whatever skills the former chief minister of England's government possessed—a great many, of course—they clearly didn't include being a handyman. Not that it made much of a difference. Rita soon realized that the "flotation devices" she was jury-rigging out of whatever odds-and-ends she could find on the barge weren't going to be of much use beyond whatever psychological solace they brought to the Warder folks. She wouldn't have trusted these things in a swimming pool, back up-time. If they went into the water, most of them were going to drown, it was as simple as that.



Still, she was glad to see some spirit come back to the man. Now that it was all over, and especially with the sharp contrast that Sir Francis Windebank and his mercenary goons had provided during the final period, she looked back upon Wentworth's role in those long months of captivity and remembered simply his invariant courtesy and graciousness.



"I'm afraid it's not much," Wentworth said to her quietly, once they were done.



"No, it isn't. On the other hand, I don't think we'll need to find out, either."



He cocked an eyebrow at her. "You've that much confidence in your navy?"