The Great Mold Loft of the Crown-Reach Shipyards smelled of seasoned white oak, boiled pine rosin, and the cold salt air of the outer roadstead.
Sixty feet wide and two hundred feet long, the loft floor was an unbroken expanse of white pine, planed flat and scrubbed with lye until the timber shone pale as bone. Scored into the wood were hundreds of curved lines. The full-scale lofting offsets, diagonals, and waterlines from which three ages of royal frigates had been shaped. Through the high embrasures on the seaward wall came the rhythmic slap of the ebb tide against the granite sills of No. 1 Drydock.
Down in the basin, propped on oak bilge-blocks, lay the frigate Sovereign’s Pride.
Her black contraband paint had been scraped from her starboard quarter. She exposed the sound, golden heart-timber of her English oak strakes. Work frames surrounded her bows, where riggers were unrigging the false topmasts Brand’s men had used to disguise her as the merchantman Sea-Gull.
Outside the loft, silence hung over the royal shipyards. For eighteen days, not a single caulking mallet had struck timber. Three thousand shipwrights, caulkers, sawyers, riggers, and blacksmiths stood across the gravel aprons and drydock copings, arms folded across canvas aprons, their eyes fixed on the double doors of the loft.
