King, Ship, and Sword Read online

  “Hmm, sir,” Lt. Farley commented, drawing Lewrie’s attention to his First Lieutenant, whose face bore a pensive, wolfish grin. It was not the done thing to speculate, but . . .

  “I’d not get my hopes up, Mister Farley,” Lewrie had to say to him. “The Baltic powers’ve had quite enough of us. . . . The Dutch can’t put a rowing boat regatta to sea . . . and, are the French out, I doubt they’ve business in the North Sea. One’d wish, but . . . ,” he concluded with a shrug.

  “They also serve, who only stand and wait, I suppose, sir,” Lt. Farley replied, seeming to slump into his tarpaulin coat.

  “Indeed,” Lewrie said with a very bored grimace.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HMS Osprey was a saucy-looking little thing, a single-masted cutter that could spread a lone tops’l yard above her gaff mainsail if the wind was right. By the number of her closed gun-ports, she mounted no more than eight 4-pounders and was a Lieutenant’s command. She might have been bright-painted, tarred, and oiled at one time, but one year in the sometimes boisterous North Sea had taken the shine off her. Now, she was a dowdy scow, and even her sails had gone old-parchment brown. She drew alongside of Thermopylae about a cable to windward and sent her jolly-boat over with her despatches, under the command of one of her Midshipmen, and a boat crew of five.

  “I will come to your larboard entry-port, sir!” the Midshipman shouted to the quarterdeck, sporting a cheeky, wind-reddened grin on his face. “No need for ceremony for the likes of me!”

  Usually, officers—even the lowest sort of petty officers as Midshipmen—were greeted at the starboard entry-port, the port of honour, welcomed with a side-party and bosuns’ calls. In this case, though, as soon as the oarsmen in the jolly-boat had hoisted up their dripping oars, and the bow man had hooked onto the main-chains with a gaff pole, the Midshipman was scrambling up the boarding-battens to the temporarily opened port in the larboard bulkwarks, and stayed just long enough to doff his hat to the flag, to the quarterdeck, and to Lewrie, whom he espied waiting impatiently, then handed over a single folded-over letter to Lt. Farley. A second later, and he was clomping down the battens, judging his moment, and dropping back into the row boat to return to Osprey, waving his hat chearly as he put its tiller over and got his oarsmen back to work.

  “How odd, sir,” Lt. Farley commented as he came to the quarterdeck from the larboard sail-tending gangway, and handing over the lone despatch. “I expected a weighted bag . . . fresh mail from home . . .”

  What the Devil? Lewrie wondered, for the letter, though sealed with wax where the folds met, was not addressed to him, nor to Thermopylae, but bore a cryptic Number Eleven of Twenty-One. In smaller longhand script was the caution “Captain’s Eyes Only.”

  “Ah, hum,” Lewrie said. “I’ll be below, Mister Farley. Carry on with cutlass drill.”

  Once seated at his desk in his day-cabin, Lewrie broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

  Sir,

  Admiralty has informed us that a Cessation of Hostilities between Great Britain and France, as well as all her allies, has been agreed to by all parties. The preliminary Articles were signed in London on the 1st of October, with Ratifications exchanged on the 10th, and our Sovereign, His Majesty King George III, issuing a Proclamation of peace by sea and land on the 12th of this month.

  From the receipt of this Letter, you are Directed and Required to commit no Aggression towards any National ships or merchant Vessels of France, or the Batavian Republic, nor any formerly hostile vessels you may encounter. Do you currently hold any Prize, such vessel or vessels must be despatched to an Admiralty Court for a swift Adjudication; should you hold any Naval or Civilian officers or sailors from said Prize or Prizes, they are to be sent in with said Prize or Prizes on Parole, or, from a vessel not made Prize but burned or sunk, they are to be landed ashore with all due honours and all their properties.

  (for) Adm. Viscount Duncan

  “Oh, Jesus!” Lewrie dared mutter after reading that for a quick second time. “It can’t be . . . it simply can’t ! Don’t those fools in London know we’re winnin’? A year or two more, and . . . Ch-rist! Ye can’t trust the French t’keep it. Not for long!”

  “Sir?” Pettus said from the wee pantry built right-aft of the chart-space. “You need something, sir?”

  “Guy Fawkes, t’torch Parliament, Pettus,” Lewrie growled back. “The hen-heads’ve gone and signed articles of peace with the Frogs.”

  “War’s over, sir?” Pettus said with a gawp.

  “If it ain’t a sly trick . . . aye,” Lewrie grumbled. “The war’s over. Before Christmas, we all might be paid off and ‘beached,’ does it hold. Mine arse on a band-box!”

  Thermopylae paid off an’ laid up in-ordinary, Lewrie silently gloomed, still squirming with sullen anger; me, all of us, paid off, too, on half-pay, with nothin’ t’do but . . . go home? Oh, fuck me!

  Lewrie had a mental picture of the village of Anglesgreen and North Surrey in mid-winter, at Christmastide; of him sipping ale at the Olde Ploughman (for he still would be as unwelcome at the fashionable Red Swan as a whore in church, just as he would be goggled at did he attend the Divine Services at mossy, nose-high old St. George’s parish church).

  He fantasised just how long this peace might hold, and if he thought that dull blockade duty was boresome, it didn’t have a patch on farming, animal husbandry . . . or even pretending to know what he was about at civilian pursuits. At home . . . in Anglesgreen . . . with his wife, Caroline . . . forever-bloody-more, by God?

  It wasn’t just the chill of a mid-October rainy day that made him shiver! He scooped up his boat-cloak and hat, and headed out for the quarterdeck once more.

  “Mister Farley, . . . pipe ‘All Hands,’ do ye please,” he ordered.

  And as he waited for the ship’s people off-watch to thunder up to join the on-watch hands, Lewrie gazed off the larboard bows to wee HMS Osprey, already more than a league away and making a pretty way on up the Dutch coast for the next warship in the close blockade, to relay her supposedly glad tidings.

  It was cold, it was nippy, the sea was cross-patch, and dollops of cold water showered down to plop on his hat and shoulders with each roll or shudder of tops’ls and t’gallants, but, of a sudden, it was a joy. One he feared he’d lose, and never recover.

  “Ship’s comp’ny, off hats and face aft to hark to the captain,” Lt. Farley directed.

  At least they’ll be glad enough, Lewrie told himself as he began to speak; they’ve something t’go home to!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Of course, the happy homecoming didn’t happen right away. Admiralty, justifiably leery of French intentions, was loath to reduce the Fleet quickly, even though the wish to save funds and reduce annual expenditures on the Navy’s maintenance pressed some returns and de-commissionings.

  Ships of the line were the first to depart, the oldest and weariest 56s, 58s, and 64s of British Third Rate, or those warships bought in after capture from their foes. No, it was the 74-gun two-deckers of the line which were the standard, and, should war break out again, the older, smaller ships might never be put back in commission. Yet even after the weakest and oldest were gone from the North Sea Fleet, it was not a fortnight later that the 74s were called home, too, leaving the frigates, brigs of war, and older sloops of war to carry the burden of showing the flag, with two-masted lighter “despatch” sloops and single-masted cutters to bear orders and mail back and forth.

  It could be worse, Lewrie could conjure with growing impatience; we could be in the Indian Ocean, or the China Seas! Even a fast packet or frigate might require six months to bear word to Royal Navy units on far-off stations. Those ordered out to distant oceans before the peace articles were ratified, those still cruising halfway round the world, just naturally would assume that the war was still on, and would attack any enemy National ship they encountered, make prize of any enemy merchantman . . . and what the courts-martial might make of those engagements, and what the Prize Courts
could demand as damages from unwitting captains was best not thought about!

  At least Lewrie and HMS Thermopylae had learned of the peace in a matter of days; even ships on the North American Station at Halifax, the West Indies Station on Jamaica, or the Leeward Islands Station at English Harbour, Antigua, or the squadrons at Gibraltar might not know for another four or six weeks after October 12.

  So, Thermopylae still cruised through the rest of October and well into November, her stores slowly diminishing, and the North Sea, ever a beast, growing colder and windier, and the winter winds howling over the many wide and shallow banks to stir up truly immense seas in bilious grey-green rollers, white-flecked and shattering alongside in icy sheets of spray.

  They’ve forgotten we’re here, Lewrie glumly thought one afternoon as his crewmen struggled to strike top-masts and reef in, gasket and lower upper yards almost to “bare poles”; or, that bastard Nepean does know, and means t’punish me past Epiphany!

  “Drogue is ready, sir,” Lt. Farley reported, looking half like a drowned rat in his sodden tarpaulins.

  “See to its deploying, Mister Farley,” Lewrie ordered, even more of a drowned rat in a camphor-and-rotting-hide reek of his own, for it was so chilly he’d had to dig out some of his furs from the solo dash into the Baltic weeks before the Battle of Copenhagen.

  The frigate had thrashed out fifteen miles to seaward from the shoals of the Dutch coast before the gale had turned into a shrieking Nor’westerly storm, against which Thermopylae could make no progress. Their only choice was to lie-to under try-sails and a thrice-reefed main tops’l, letting out a canvas sea-anchor to check her inexorable drift sternward towards those sand and mud shoals ’til the storm blew itself out . . . and pray that it did before they were run aground and wrecked. Pray most earnestly!

  “The bare yards will act like sails,” Lt. Farley hopefully said, peering upward. “ ’Gainst a wind like this, well . . .”

  “Quite so, Mister Farley,” Lewrie replied, though still wondering if Sir Evan Nepean, the long-time First Secretary to Admiralty (no fan of his) who had served the former First Lord, the Earl Spencer, and now served Admiral Lord St. Vincent, “Old Jarvy,” might not wish that he come a cropper; Nepean had despised him more than cold, boiled mutton for years, and Lewrie’s acquittal at King’s Bench for the crime of stealing a dozen Black Jamaican field slaves to man his old ship must have set Nepean’s teeth grinding in frustration. Could Nepean be that petty? Lewrie asked himself; for damned sure, I certainly could be!

  “Full ‘trick’ for the Quartermasters on the helm, sir,” Lewrie snapped as the buoyed sea-anchor was paid out over the bows. “Trouble always seems t’come with inattention . . . when fresh hands take over.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The sea-anchor was a modern one, a large canvas cone held open with an iron barrel hoop worthy of the largest water butt, weighted to keep it under the surface with a light iron boat anchor, at the end of an hundred-fathom cable of four-inch manila. As the cable was let out it felt ineffective for the longest time, ’til the painted buoy bobbed up about one hundred yards ahead of the bows, and the cable went taut, hauling Thermopylae’s bows closer to windward.

  “Brace yards close-hauled to weather on the larboard tack, Mister Farley,” Lewrie ordered, his left hand shoved into the pocket of his fur parka . . . with his fingers secretly crossed. He had never in his naval career been reduced to using bare yards as substitutes for proper sails, so it was an experiment to him—a life-or-death experiment! Pray God my sham doesn’t catch up with me . . . with us! Lewrie silently wished, for he had never been one of those gladsome sailors who revelled in heavy weather, had never become so thoroughly salted as a tarry-handed “tarpaulin man” a fearful crew should look to as their sure and certain hope of salvation. In 1793, when the war with France had begun, after four idle years ashore playing an equal sham of being a farmer, his first daunting sight of HMS Cockerel’s intricate rigging had made Lewrie quail and had left him gawping and grasping for even the proper terms to call them, and many hours off-watch in his little dog’s-box cabin poring in secret over his tattered copy of Falconer’s Marine Dictionary and other beginners’ guides, to keep from being revealed as an utter fraud, and a cack-handed, cunny-thumbed dangerous lubber!

  “That seems to ease her, sir,” Lt. Farley said at last, sounding as if he’d been holding his breath to see if the sea-anchor and braced bare yards would really work.

  “How’s her helm?” Lewrie asked Beasley, the Quartermaster of the Watch, and his Mate, Elgie, who stood braced wide-stanced either side of the double-wheel drum and spokes.

  “Stiff, with th’ relievin’ tackle rigged, sir,” Beasley replied, shifting his quid of tobacco to leeward, “but she’s steadyin’, aye.”

  “Very well, thankee,” Lewrie said. “Mister Furlow?” he called for the Midshipman. “Pass word to my steward, Pettus, and Desmond, my Cox’n, and I’ll have my deck-chair brought up.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Furlow answered, then stepped to the break of the empty hammock nettings—the ship’s people needed their dry bedding for their scant hours belowdecks between calls for All Hands—and bawled the summons to men in the waist.

  Lewrie knew he could trust his First Officer, Lt. Dick Farley, his Second Lieutenant, James Fox, as well, to do their best for their ship, but . . . should things go completely to shambles, he felt he had to be present. Even if he had to engage in one more of his eccentricities. A proper Royal Navy captain should be so stoic a paragon as to stand and pace the windward side of the quarterdeck to set a stout example and inspire confidence . . . even did he not have the first clue. Lewrie, though, had always been an idle sort. So, after the canvas and wood collapsible deck-chair had been fetched up, spread out, and lashed securely in place, Lewrie sat himself down in it, spread a scrap of oiled canvas like a blanket to keep the sleeting, showering spray off him, and sprawled his booted legs out, as seemingly at ease as a passenger aboard an East Indiaman on a fine morning, and a calmer ocean.

  Or, as much at ease as a man could appear as the frigate heaved her bows skyward with showers of salt spray cascading over her, then plunging like a seal with her jib-boom and bowsprit and beakhead rails under, and even larger bursts of white-out clouds of spray bursting to life, and the very fabric of the ship thundering, juddering, and groaning like a tormented ghost at each plunge or rise.

  Lewrie tucked his chin down, slanted his hat firmly down atop his eyebrows, and even tried closing his eyes. No, sir! he decided after a minute of that; eyes on the horizon . . . wherever that is, or I’ll go sick as a dog! Which thought made him smile in spite of the circumstances, the well-contained fear, and the danger of wrecking; it would not inspire confidence in the crew if he had to “cast his accounts to Neptune”!

  “Some hot broth, sir?” Pettus asked, looking as if the very idea of victuals would empty his stomach, too, but he had to offer.

  “I’m fine for now, Pettus, but thankee for asking,” Lewrie let on with a forced smile. And damn his eyes for the very mention, Lewrie thought, feeling a brief spate of biliousness that made him belch. “Ah, hmm! Bloody brisk, ain’t it, Mister Farley?”

  “Amen to that, sir!” Farley shouted back, sounding pleased; as if he was truly one of those odd’uns who relished foul weather. “Off-watch hands below, now, sir?”

  “Aye, make it so, Mister Farley. Let ’em dry out and thaw out for a spell,” Lewrie decided. “Hot broth for them, if Sauder thinks he can trust a fire in the galley.”

  “I will see to it directly, sir,” Farley agreed.

  Lewrie doubted the roughness of the storm would allow fires to be lit below, but perhaps the offer might mollify Thermopylae’s people. With no recall in the offing, they were sullen enough already. For better or worse, this storm, and the risk of drowning in the surf of a Dutch beach, would take their minds off thoughts of de-commissioning and freedom.

  Damn Nepean, Lewrie fumed inside, again, as the ship
shuddered and tossed, and the storm showed no signs of easing; it’d please him did we all drown!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Dog Watches came and went with no relenting of the storm; full dark, as black as a boot, and the Evening Watch was a roaring and soaking horror. So much spume, spray, and solid waves broke over the weather decks that the tar and oakum in the seams between the planking could not keep out a constant drizzle on sleeping off-watch men and their violently swaying hammocks. From the sick-berth and livestock manger under the forecastle right aft to the great-cabins, the decks bore puddles that were swept to either beam and fore and aft, so that the black-and-white enamel-painted chequered canvas deck covering in Lewrie’s cabins became as slick as the marble tile design that it emulated, and the good Turkey or Axminster carpets had long been rolled up and stowed atop the transom settee.

  It was only at Two Bells of the Middle Watch that the winds and seas seemed to ease, and the vast explosions of spray over the bows with each thundering, timber-cracking plunge diminished, allowing Lewrie to go below at last for a cold glass of tea, some cheese and a couple of soaked pieces of ship’s biscuit . . . eaten in the gloom of a single candle, and the weevils in the biscuit considered “out of sight and out of mind.” His bedding in the wide-enough-for-two hanging bed-cot was cold and damp despite an oiled canvas covering, so Lewrie, in all his clothes, tried to nap on the starboard-side collapsible settee for an hour or two.

  It was hopeless, of course, for the settee was only long enough for two, only deep enough for sitting, and that in the proper mode of the age, which was to say erect, and mostly on the forward edge. He ended in a sprawl with one leg up, the other braced on the deck cover, and thought he’d wished his man Pettus a rest of his own, and to wake him should anyone need him before dropping off in a slouched, snoring bundle.