Much Ado About Lewrie Read online

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Hmm, I tend to agree with your assessment, Sir Alan,” Colonel Tarrant told him after Lewrie had summarised the highlights of his report to Admiralty. “If only, mind, to make me feel better about my losses. Up, boy! Fetch, Dante!”

  Lewrie had come ashore to post his latest mail with a mounted courier to Messina, and a visit to the hospital pavillion to see to his wounded men. Lt. Col. Tarrant had been there, doing the same, and they ended up strolling the edge of the parade ground, with Tarrant’s boisterous dog tagging at their heels, bounding and whining for play. Off he went in a dash to fetch the stick that Tarrant had hurled.

  “Dante visited the hospital?” Lewrie asked. “I’d have thought your surgeons would object.”

  “Oh, he’s welcome with my soldiers,” Tarrant said with a wee laugh, “They like him, and Dante adores everybody, and all the attention they give him. He’s come a long way from an abused, half-fed farm dog. Perhaps too far. Try as I might to convince him that his pallet by my bed is his place, I wake almost every morning to a wet tongue on my face, and five stone of aromatic dog sprawled atop me.”

  “And that’s why I keep cats,” Lewrie sniggered. “Though, in my last ship, Bisquit slept in my cabins, and preferred the Turkey carpets. When he wasn’t wandering the lower decks, looking for a handout. It’s best I left him in London with my wife and her dog, for live gunnery exercise, and battle, had him terrified down on the orlop, in a perfect shiver.”

  “Caruthers,” Col. Tarrant said of a sudden, coming to a halt as his dog pranced back with the stick in his mouth. “Damn that man. I’d wager he’s either envious, or crowing with glee to see us come a cropper.”

  Brigadier-General Caruthers commanded an infantry brigade of three regiments closer to Messina, an ambitious fellow hell-bent on doing something more glorious than drilling and practicing for an invasion from mainland Italy that would most-like never come.

  Earlier in the year, Rear-Admiral Charlton had used his ships and Lewrie’s experimental squadron to ravage the Southern Calabrian coast, from the “toe” of Italy to the start of the “heel,” and there had been enough troop transports gathered to land Brigadier Caruthers’s brigade as well. It had not gone well for Caruthers, since the ships that carried his soldiers were civilian hired transports with only a few small rowboats, so that only two of his regiments had gotten to shore. His part of the expedition had taken so long that the French had had time to march one of their brigades—foot, horse, and artillery—to drive him off, and it had been the trained, skillful gunners aboard Vigilance, and some captured French howitzers taken from a pre-invasion supply depot, that had saved his bacon. The man had gotten his battle, and his victory, after all, along with praiseful accounts of it in the London papers, and Caruthers had been mad for more of the same since, pressing Horse Guards and Admiralty for Navy-manned transports and landing barges so he could emulate what Lewrie and Tarrant were doing, on a much larger scale, of course.

  Frankly, Brigadier Caruthers would have preferred to take over the whole enterprise, absorb Tarrant’s 94th Foot into his brigade, so he could stage a full-scale invasion into Italy, and rage up and down the countryside with a proper Army of several divisions, like Wellesley, or Wellington, or whatever they were calling him these days, was doing in Portugal and Spain.

  “I’m sure we’ll hear from him,” Lewrie said with a sour look, “Perhaps a lecture on how we should have been equipped with flying artillery batteries, limbers, caissons, and horse teams, and tell us exactly how to do it.”

  “If the bloody French are deaf, dumb, and blind,” Tarrant spat, “and if they allow us a whole day to get all that ashore. He will need tents, of course … can’t have a proper camp without tents … and cookpots, ration waggons with even more horses. And, Caruthers and his officers simply have to fetch along the mess silver, and a string of hundred guinea horses to ride.”

  “He did look particularly grand astride a captured horse,” Lewrie added with a laught. “Had one shot out from underneath him, and he made sure t’stick that in in his report!”

  “Better a horse than one of your damned barges, I suppose,” Tarrant chuckled, cocking his head towards Lewrie. “Yays, I imagine that we’ll be getting an ‘I told you so’ from the man, as soon as he can gallop out to visit us. And only God knows what he’s been saying to the General Commanding at the castello to have a hand in the next raid. Take over the whole operation? Swap my regiment for one of his? God save the Ninety-Fourth if he manages that.”

  “Surely, you have a rebuttal argument in mind, sir,” Lewrie said. “He’d have to pare his plans back sharply if he wishes to emulate our way of doing things. Even if he did manage to get some Navy-manned transports, with the proper sort of landing barges, his troops would have to be trained, first. Time, money, sailors to man the ships and barges? Gettin’ my few was like pullin’ teeth, and I’ve been told I’d only see another the other side of Hell!”

  “My dear Lewrie,” Tarrant said, trying to ignore the dog, who was now trying to put his paws on his chest, “does it come to that, I trust you will support me to the hilt before he takes charge.”

  “Count on me, sir,” Lewrie vowed. “We’ve come to work too well together to let some interloper make a muck of things.”

  Dammit, he had come to like Tarrant! Unlike the bulk of Army officers he had met, Col. Tarrant was one of those rareties, an officer who took his chosen profession seriously, studied examples from the past, and was clever enough to emulate the successes and eschew the failures, and husband his soldiers and their welfare as if they were kinfolk. Well, perhaps the men of the 94th were, in a way, for the regiment had been raised at Peterborough and the near environs, all neighbours and fellow workers before they’d taken the King’s Shilling, as were the officers, and Tarrant.

  They worked well together, Lewrie and Tarrant, and over the months Lewrie felt that a true friendship had been formed.

  Of course, he’d back him in keeping his regiment out of the hands of glory-seeking butchers like Caruthers!

  “Here, Dante,” Lewrie coaxed the dog, patting the chest of his second-best uniform coat, “Want some ‘wubbies’? Want me t’throw yer stick?”

  “Mind, now,” Tarrant cautioned, “if I receive orders from the General-Commanding, there’s little either of us can say.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Lewrie assured him, taking the stick from his hands. Dante stood on his hind legs, pawed at Lewrie’s coat, seized the stick and got down on all fours to growl and toss his head as if killing a rabbit, then dropped it at Lewrie’s feet, looking anxious, his tail thrashing.

  “Ready, ready, set? Go, boy!” Lewrie said, hurling the stick a good twenty yards, and the dog bounded after it to almost catch it in mid-air, give it another thrashing, then lower his front end, daring them to chase after him if they wanted his prize back. Tarrant made a short mock dash as if to chase him, and Dante wheeled about and ran a wide circle round them.

  Damme, I miss Bisquit, Lewrie thought, amused, with all of his cares temporarily forgotten; Cats just don’t do “fetch”!

  * * *

  In the officers’ wardroom, Lewrie’s particular bug-a-bear was writing another of his long letters. Fourth Officer John Dickson was penning his own sour assessment of the battle at Monasterace, guarding it from the idle curiosity of his fellow officers with his left forearm. He had written one letter to his father, another to one of his principal patrons, a senior Admiral, and this one would be going to yet another patron, kin on his mother’s side of the family who held a position on the Board of Admiralty.

  Dickson was proud of his own small part of Vigilance’s landing party, and made his movement of one of the barges further up the beach to form a breakfront to refuse the left flank. “Refuse” was not a nautical term, exactly, but that was how Lt. Greenleaf, the big, noisy lout, had termed it, and Dickson thought to repeat it in his letter, to show how knowledgeable he was. He was also proud
to mention the three Frenchmen he had slain, two with his pistols at close range, and the last with his sword, bloodied in desperate combat. He had not seen the action on the other side of the seaside town when the French marched against the 94th Foot, but he had heard what other officers had said of it, when he had encountered them ashore once the squadron had returned to their anchorage. What Lieutenants Rutland and Fletcher had done with their sailors and shore parties out on the French flanks had sounded grand, but that would not do for his purposes.

  Placing the sailors of the beach guard on the firing line could have resulted in their Destruction, leaving the 94th stranded and forced back to the boats with not a single clue as to how to save themselves, in great Disorder. The enemy laid a trap which could have put paid to the whole Endeavour. The Betrayal only goes to show why it is impossible to depend on Foreigners to gather Intelligence, since there is no Faith in them, a fact that should have been Obvious to Capt. Lewrie and their hapless Foreign Office agent, Mr. Quill.

  He thought to describe Quill in the worst light, how gawky and book-ish a spectre he was, too trusting and ineffective, instead of the intrepid sort of spy needed in such a post.

  “Scribble, scribble, scribble, hey Dickson?” Lt. Greenleaf teased as he pulled a clean shirt over his head after a scrub-down with a sponge and some shore water. “I swear, I never knew a fellow more fond of ink! You write more than the Captain’s clerk, Mister Severance, haw haw!”

  “Aye, admit it, Dickson,” Lt. Grace, the Third Officer, said, looking up from a novel he was reading at the other end of the mess table that sat down the centreline of the wardroom’s deal-and-canvas “dog box” sleeping compartments, “You’re desperately sweet on some young miss back home.”

  “As I said before, I send one long letter to my father, and he separates out the parts addressed to mother, brothers and sisters, and cousins,” Dickson easily lied, though he did shift his arm to guard it more closely, wary of their curiosity which could expose his intent. Frankly, he felt irked with their presence, but there was no other place where he could write barring his small bed box, and hiding himself there, behind a louvred and insubstantial door, would raise even more suspicion. The finished pages were face-down on the mess table, secured under his right elbow. “At least I now have something to write about, as I’m sure you have as well. Let my family know that we’ve had a battle, and that I’m well.”

  He would have said something disparaging about Monasterace but bit his words off, sure that his messmates thought much better of it than he did.

  “Ah, there I was, surrounded by Frogs with levelled bayonets, my barkers empty, my sword broken,” Greenleaf hooted in mirth, “and me an inch away from being a pin cushion? Why, they killed me, of course. But then…!”

  “Slew seven with one blow!” Lt. Farley, the First Officer added, laughing out loud. “Seven, no…’twas ten!”

  “And the cowardly French ran like hounds,” Greenleaf roared.

  “We all gave creditable accounts of ourselves,” Dickson said in a drawl. “Could have been much worse.”

  Farley, who had been aboard Vigilance and had not taken part in the landings, frowned as if Dickson had slighted him, which did not signify to Dickson; he didn’t really care a fig for any of them, and was just waiting for the day when his kin and his patrons plucked him out of this shambles and found a berth for him in a fine frigate, where he really belonged, where his natural superiority of breeding and experience would let him shine.

  “What are you reading, Grace?” Greenleaf asked as he sat down at the mess table and began to shuffle a greasy old pack of cards.

  “An old Smollett … Peregrine Pickle,” Grace told him. “The Surgeon, Mister Woodbury loaned it to me.”

  Greenleaf’s response was a gruff, inarticulate grunt. He laid out a row of cards to begin a hand of solitaire.

  Their fun was over, and Dickson could get back to criticising Captain Lewrie, Quill, the Italians, and the whole experiment that was sure to fall apart the next un-looked-for blow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nothing else for it, then, Lewrie thought; We did our best to put a polish on it.

  His report, what Col. Tarrant wrote to Horse Guards, and what the officers off the transports had said in their reports might put a good light on their actions, or nothing would deflect blame from official quarters. And, what Lewrie’s detractors would make of it was what Lewrie feared most.

  He’d learned from several sources, his long-time compatriot James Peel with Foreign Office’s Secret Branch, chief among them, that there were officers in the Royal Navy with whom Lewrie had served in the past, that were definitely not his admirers. Even a man he’d held as a good friend from his Midshipman days, Keith Ashburn, thought him … “insouciant,” a slacker who did not take the stern duty of being an officer, a Post-Captain in the Royal Navy, seriously, counting on luck to get by, and sure to foul up and get a lot of good men killed, someday.

  Others were jealous of that luck, of his prior successes when it came to prize-money, in being in the right place at the right time to be in combat, and to be mentioned in Despatches. His son Hugh’s Captain Chalmers of the Undaunted frigate, thought Lewrie a Corinthian, a rake-hell, a reckless fellow who openly kept a mistress at Gibraltar and Lisbon, and certainly not a Respectable Person, and not much of a Proper Christian, either. Fellow Mids, fellow Lieutenants whom he had outshone, grumbling under their breaths and waiting for a chance to get their own back.

  And all of them had powerful, well-placed patrons and kinfolk who could blight anyone’s career, even a Nelson or Pellew, if they supported their protégés, or their sons, cousins, or favourites!

  What did Lewrie have for patrons? Junior Admirals who had been Captains when he knew them, Captains more senior to him who flew a broad pendant as a Commodore, an old friend in Lord’s whom he’d known at Harrow, a supportive older man in the Commons, some few gentlemen in middle-rank public service offices; all the old Admirals that he could have counted on were long-retired and no longer influential, or they were no longer alive. So, who could speak up for him, now?

  It must here be noted that Alan Lewrie had never been a fellow big on introspection. He’d been a thoughtless, idle rake-hell and a Buck-of-The-First-Head with no clue to the next morrow before he had joined the Royal Navy—well, in point of fact dragooned into life at sea by his own father, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby who’d needed Alan far overseas and a year out of touch so he could use Alan’s inheritance from his late mother’s side of the family to pay off his creditors before they called in his debts and slung Sir Hugo into prison.

  Alan Lewrie was a fellow who would never be thought of as “too clever by half”; that was a trait of the Scots, who tended to be much better educated than English gentlemen, and both cleverness and well-educated were shunned by fellows like Lewrie like the Black Plague!

  Besides, he had learned early-on to doubt the use of cleverness. Every time he had imagined that he had the upper hand, a clear view into things, Dame Fortune had always come down from Mount Olympus and kicked him in the arse, just to let him know that he was not a “sly-boots” and would never be.

  It did not help Lewrie’s fretting to recall how callow and ignorant he had been when reporting to his first ship, HMS Ariadne, in 1780. That could make him wince to this day! There were twelve-year-olds in the Midshipman’s cockpit on the orlop who’d known bags more than he did. Lewrie had learned his knots, the rigging, sails, a passable smattering of navigation, had survived his many trips aloft despite his shivers of dread of becoming a bloody, burst bag on the deck if he lost a handhold, or a skitter of the footropes.

  For Christ’s sake, he, like most of the hands brought aboard by the Impress Service, the tavern “rondys” for volunteers, or by hook or by crook, he could not swim a single stroke!

  No, real introspection might be asking too much of Alan Lewrie, but he did know himself and his nature, after a fashion, and he did not, could not, take himself too
seriously, for at least he knew his faults, his lacks as a Proper Commission Sea Officer, and as a man, but he could deal with them, and sometimes laugh at himself, even if he sometimes felt himself to be the hugest fraud.

  Lately, junior officers who served with him, who had been Mids aboard some of his early commands, surprised him by expressing trust in his knackiness, and in how able he was when it came to engaging the enemy, in how he went about commanding a warship.

  More fools, they, he scoffed to himself, wondering what they would say or think of him if they really knew him; Still, give a dog a good name, and he can go far. Until he mucks things up for everyone to see!

  It was almost enough of a conundrum to make him gnaw on his fingernails, sulk and mope, pace ’til his feet hurt, or …

  Go fetch his long-abandoned penny whistle from one of his sea chests, and try to tootle a few simple tunes to get back in practice. A loss by foul betrayal or not, there was little that he could do about it, now, and either he would be exonerated or not; brought low and shamed as a failure, or not, relieved or recalled, or left in command and told to carry on.

  It didn’t bear thinking about—so he didn’t.

  The tune of “Pleasant & Delightful” wafted upwards through the opened windows of the great-cabin’s coachtop on the poop deck, out past the quarterdeck door, and faintly muffled down through deck beams to the officers’ wardroom below; stumbling and with some awkward notes due to bad fingering. The Marine sentry at the Captain’s door began to whistle under his breath with a faint grin on his face.

  Liam Desmond, Lewrie’s “Black Irish” Cox’n, drawing a drink of water from the scuttlebutt in the waist, winced a bit, for he was a very musical fellow on his uillean lap-pipes. “Been a while since he’s played, A little rusty, he is.”