The dawn didn’t break cleanly over Crown-Reach. It filtered through a low ceiling of coal smoke and sea fog. That turned the estuary water the color of tarnished pewter.
In the center of the Deep Anchor Basin, floating in eleven feet of slack tide, rested the hull of the four-hundred-and-eighty-ton frigate.
Four heavy kedge anchors held her dead in the pool. Iron mooring cables, their two-inch links rusted red and dripping with green harbor slime, ran from her bow and stern bitts to the massive granite mooring rings embedded in the public seawall. She was motionless, but thick curls of white steam still rose from her charred waterlines, carrying the bitter smell of cooled charcoal, wet ash, and boiling river silt.
The fire on Slipway Four had done what twelve years of office audits had failed to do. It had burned away the lie.
The Baltic pine planks that Master Shipwright Brand had nailed over the frigate’s upper works to disguise her as a merchant brig were gone, reduced to heaps of gray clinker in the basin mud. The heavy coats of black lead disguise paint had blistered and peeled away in the heat. He dropped into the tide in blackened scabs the size of dinner plates.
