The French Admiral Read online

  Lewrie was pretty much on his own most of the time, since once he had come ashore the efforts of the Desperate’s crew had been dissipated by the needs of the army. Lieutenant Railsford and two half-batteries had been sent over to the Gloucester side, where the nine-pounders formed the core of Tarleton’s and Simcoe’s artillery, other than light field pieces suitable for dragoons and cavalry units. Happily, Midshipman Forrester had gone with him. Gunner’s mate Tulley, Sitwell from the fo’c’s’le and most of his men had gone into the inner defense line with the carronades and one of the nine-pounders to make up a full battery of guns stripped from lighter naval units of the same caliber. Unhappily, Midshipman David Avery had been assigned to those guns and that battery. Alan had been sent out to this rashly exposed and isolated fortification on the far bank of Yorktown Creek, and it wasn’t even a redoubt with four or more solid walls that made one feel safe. It was merely a redan, two walls connected at an angle of no more than thirty degrees. One of his nine-pounders was at the apex of the two walls, and one on each end. In between, there were two light 6-pounders from the army on their large wheeled field limbers, with only a grizzled—and forbiddingly evil-looking—sergeant in charge. He had four light 1-pounder swivel guns on the low rampart for use against troops in the open. Once they were in close, he had the support of two dozen Hesse-Cassel Jagers, and if the artillery sergeant was an evil gent, then the Jagers were very devils incarnate. Each one sported a mustache nearly the size of a marlinspike, on which they paid more keen attention than upon their uniforms. Alan was beginning to distinguish them by which way their facial hair pointed; the officer in charge of the redan wore his curled down, then up at the tips like a bow wave—that was Feldwebel-leutnant Heros von Muecke, and how Alan could pronounce that was pretty much anyone’s guess. Not that it mattered much; von Muecke could barely rumble one complete phrase in English before reverting to his native tongue and spitting saliva over the person addressed.

  His sergeant—a real sergeant (or feldwebel) instead of a bastard hyphen such as von Muecke—was a white-blonde lout named Kniemeyer, and his hairy lip appliance stood straight out, as the whiskers on a cat that was intently interested in something that moved. It was also bright red and could be recognized on a dark night. There were two corporals who were addressed only as “unteroffizier,” and if they had names, Alan had yet to discover them (not that he was all that eager to make their acquaintance—they stank like badgers), but he could recognize them by the color of their mustaches.

  Alan had Cony with him from their previous excursion into the forests, a quarter-gunner and three gun captains, three powder boys, and eighteen other men. They had been issued muskets, cutlasses, and boarding axes for their own defense should they prove necessary. But there were only so many muskets to go around, so a round dozen would have to do, and they would have to depend on the Jagers to keep the enemy off them. And that was something that the Jagers were reputed to be very good at, even if they did look somewhat silly in their red and white ticken-striped long trousers so tight around the knee and lower legs, their yellow-buff waistcoats, and the shabby rifle green tunics with the red facings. As a light company, they at least wore a recognizable tricorne hat instead of a fur cap with the metal front plate of a battalion company or guards unit. Altogether a scruffy lot, who scratched a great deal and whose idea of a bath was to smoke themselves by a fire while their clothing was smoked as well to get rid of the “gentlemen’s companions.” Alan was sure that they were steady fellows, but if they ever got the wind up and decided to flee, whatever they said in parting would be totally unintelligible, and the naval party would be left holding the redan by themselves without a clue.

  Behind the redan’s walls, and safely out of reach of the guns, they had dug some pits which they had walled in and covered to store the powder cartridges and kegs of powder they had been allowed. To keep the elements out, they had covered the mounds with scrap sails that had been tarred to make them waterproof. Behind the magazines, there was a small hollow that had been expanded into a dugout for von Muecke and Alan.

  With enough pine boughs and cut grass Alan could make a passable bed with his hammock spread over it for a ground cloth. There were some ditches to keep water from flowing into the hollow, and it was roofed with excess pine boards and scrap limbs, with another piece of sailcloth over it as well. Not that it was Alan’s idea of a great way to live, half in and half out of the ground. But it was the best quarters they could find to assert their rights as officers and gentlemen, and the men in both the army and navy expected officers of the gentleman caste to keep up their appearances and their separation. Von Muecke had made great expostulation about the dignitat he was due as a Feldwebel-leutnant, which was, like the rank of midshipman, half noncommissioned officer, half gentleman. To have to share quarters with a navy man, he had had to be convinced that Alan was indeed a gentleman of suitable ton and of a rank high enough so that it would not be demeaning for him to share food, company, and farts.

  He had also, once assured of Alan’s bonafides, insisted on the disguising of their dugout to the point that it was hard to find after dark if a fire were not burning at the uphill lip and entrance.

  “Gewehr!” von Muecke had spluttered, wetting down his mustache in explanation. “Die Amerikanische Jager geschutze und . . . pif pif! Sie sind todt, verstehen sie?”

  “Please speak the King’s English, you hairy twit.”

  “Ach, der English, jah! Reppel oder Franzosiche . . . sniper! Pif pif und you shot dead, verstehen sie? Oder der artillery zink zis der kommando hauptquartier . . . nein? Ah, der command post, jah. Und zey into us a feldhaubitze feur. Grosse boom, grosse todt gentlemenner, jah?”

  “Gross indeed,” Alan had said.

  Conversation was so difficult that they seldom attempted it after that beyond the usual line of duty, and Alan was careful to stand back far enough to avoid the tiny explosions of moisture after every tortured umlaut or guttural tongue trill. Come to think of it, von Muecke didn’t smell like a bottle of Hungary water himself.

  Below their position, there was a broad open plain that once had been carefully tilled farmland surrounded by the low, but steep, hills at the edge of the creek behind them. To their right was a cul-de-sac that led between two fingers of ridges, too steep to assault and only guarded by a redan of light infantry with no guns for support. Their own position was on another cul-de-sac route, a fairly open and flat dome between two more ridges, with a final bulge of land to their rear, perhaps six feet higher than their walls, and with two escape routes to the rear that swept round the dome. Immediately behind the dome of land there was one route down, not over a thirty-foot drop, but fairly steep; steep enough to require lots of horses to hoist the guns up into position onto the flat space. Behind that by perhaps thirty yards was a small bench with another drop-off as one headed east for the creek, and then the steep banks of Yorktown Creek itself. They had come down from the north to emplace their guns through a narrow cut in the first cul-de-sac, and if challenged on their front, would never get the guns out of there.

  Mayhap that is why we have so little round shot up here, Alan thought. And so little powder. The army might get their light carriage guns out in a hurry on those big wheels, but we’d play hell with the nine-pounders on their little trucks. And if we’re so all-fired important up here, where are the supporting troops to back us up?

  They had food enough for a week or so, all hard biscuits and salt meat from either army or naval stores, some rum to dole out each day at midday, and could be resupplied from the rear if one didn’t mind half-killing a packhorse or a mule in doing it. Alan and von Muecke both had the use of a mount should they need to communicate with the rear, but the more Alan had ridden about in the last few days, the less he thought of their usefulness and the hill on which they were emplaced. Oh, they had a great field of fire, but no one in his right mind would attempt to climb up in the face of the guns, not when they could go into the first cul-de-sac to the
north, where the ground was easier. Certainly no cavalry would try it.

  So he slouched on the inner side of the rampart by the hour, looking for a foe that never came and showed no signs of ever making an appearance. He became extremely bored, perhaps more bored than he could have ever become aboard ship.

  The days slipped by until a week had gone. That night it finally began to rain, after being dry for weeks. It came down in sheets and the wind rose, soaking the ground and the men huddled under their blankets. And when it no longer rained so hard that the droplets slanted into the mouths of the gun magazines, it started to pour continually, hour after soaking hour. By dawn the creek behind them was rising and making rude noises as the banks filled with the runoff.

  “Be able ta grind corn now, Mister Lewrie, sir,” Cony told him as he served him a cup of bitter “Scotch coffee” in the officer’s dugout the next morning. “All the creeks’ll be up enough.”

  “Be able to drown in mud as well, Cony,” Alan grumbled.

  “That, too, sir.” Cony smiled. The man was blissfully happy; off the ship and away from the harsh discipline, out in the woods and in his element again, which was heaven for a former rustic and poacher. He was short and slim, a dirty blonde young man only a few years older than Lewrie, and claimed that he was from the West country, born and raised east of Offa’s Ditch near the Welsh border, but didn’t have the irritating burr of Zedland, only the lilting, musical accent of a Welshman. That was perhaps where he got his hawk’s nose and sharp features. Yet he was handsome in his own way, as handsome as a common lad could expect to be. He was baked and seared a light teak color, like everyone else in Desperate after two years at sea. Still, rated for service on the guns and the decks, he was barely considered an ordinary seaman.

  Alan had never really noticed him before. Cony had never stood out at anything, believing in the safety of mediocrity and the center of his own mob instead of standing out. Yet Cony had a certain intelligence and had latched onto Alan after the harrowing experience at the Rebel farm, perhaps hoping to strike for mess steward to replace the awful Freeling. He had almost unconsciously taken up the duties of hammock man, seeing to Alan’s needs and comforts once they had gotten ashore.

  “Beggin’ yer pardon, Mister Lewrie, but would ya admire a hare fer yer breakfast, then?” Cony offered out of the blue.

  “Rabbit?” Alan gaped, now fully awake. “I would think hunting in this rain would be terrible.”

  “Set some snares back on t’other side of the hills, sir,” Cony said.

  “A poacher on two continents are you, Cony?”

  “Aye, sir. You’d have to share with the hairy gentleman, but ’tis a fine, fat rabbit.”

  “And I expect you have a second laid by for your own breakfast?” Alan teased.

  “That I do, sir,” Cony replied without shame, showing the natural guile of the admitted scrounger and woodsman.

  “In that case, it sounds hellish good.”

  “’Tis on the spit at this minute, sir.”

  Alan nodded his thanks and Cony slipped out of the dugout, leaving Alan to finish his burnt-bread imitation coffee, which was at least hot enough to get him started for another morning of drudgery. He dressed quickly and threw a tarpaulin watch coat over his shoulders for a rain cover and went outside to inspect his battery and the redan.

  The cook fire was burning for the men’s morning meal and the iron pots were simmering up gruel and chunks of salt meat. The artillerymen and Jagers had individual squad fires burning. The smoke lay close and heavy to the ground like a morning mist. The rain no longer poured down in buckets, but now drizzled endlessly and miserably from a pewter sky. Only half the open fields could be seen below them, and the far woods were lost in fog or mists.

  “Mornin’, Mister Lewrie, sir,” Knatchbull the quarter-gunner said as he emerged from the dugout.

  “Morning, Knatchbull. How do the hands keep?”

  “Damp right through, sir,” the man replied, knuckling his forehead in rough salute. “We could use some sailcloth er tarpaulin, sir, ta kivver up the sleepin’ spaces.”

  “I shall request of some after breakfast,” Alan said, studying the small tents the Jagers and the army artillerists had erected. “Perhaps some tents would keep the rain off. How about our guns?”

  “I’m that worried ’bout the breechin’ ropes, sir,” Knatch-bull said. “Iffen ya could take a squint, sir. Them posts we sunk ta serve ta attach the breechin’ ropes an’ side tackles an’ sich’re in mud now.”

  “Are they shifting?”

  “Not so’s ya’d notice, Mister Lewrie, but they will iffen ya sets light ta a powder charge ta fire a gun.”

  “I doubt if we could find a dry cartridge this morning, anyway.”

  “Aye, sir, sich a day it is.”

  “Guten morgen, herr mittschiffesmann Lew-rie,” van Muecke dribbled. “Eine schreckliche tag, nicht wahr?”

  “It is when I have to decipher that,” Alan mumbled under his breath, but saying out loud, “Good morning to you, Mister von Mooka.”

  “Muecke,” the soldier corrected. “Fon Mehr-keh, verstehe?”

  “Whatever.” Alan shrugged and waved it off with a hopeless grin. “Any sign of the enemy this fine morning?”

  “Nein, mein herr. Ich habe . . . I have der scouts aus also.”

  “Powder dry?”

  “Jah, oder zuh primings sind . . . sput!”

  If he does that one more time he’ll hit my coffee, Alan thought, protecting his mug from the small shower of spit that had accompanied the sound effect of a squibbed priming.

  “My hammock man Cony has a rabbit for us to share, Mister . . . Fon Mee-key. We shall have a decent breakfast, at any rate.”

  “Ah, eine rappit? Eine hase? Wunderbar!”

  Alan wandered off to the forward artillery piece of the redan to look over the bleak countryside, shivering slightly. It had seemed like summer over the last week, not as fierce as the Indies, but warm enough during the days. Now, with the rain coming down as though it would never cease and the fogs blanketing those sharp hills and tree tops, it felt more like true autumn, more seasonal for the last of September. It also made those far hills and trees seem more forbidding than before, more wild and uncivilized. Every good Englishman that got a plot of ground, an estate, or a farm spent countless hours shaping and weeding, cutting back thickets and removing underbrush, reforming Nature into gentle and civilized gardens and fields as orderly as a Roman villa. It was Man in charge of Nature, announcing his sovereignty and superiority over the dumb beasts and the wildness. But here, there was so much Nature, it was inconceivable that anyone could even begin to make a dent on it, and it made Alan feel puny and insignificant. And there were thousands of miles of this sort of wilderness stretching off to the Piedmont and beyond, into God knew what sort of savage remoteness, a country that might just stretch to Asia; limitless as a map of Russia, as wide as the mighty Atlantic Ocean and just as trackless and harsh, deluding the traveler with its lush or rugged beauties, just as the sea deluded the unwary.

  “God, get me out of this beastly place!” Alan softly said. “It’s driven the Rebels mad, every one of ’em, and it’s out t’get me!”

  After half the hare for breakfast, Alan had his mount saddled and took a long ride to the north to seek out supplies for his battery.

  He came down off the front slope and rode at the edge of the hill line into the next cul-de-sac north, perhaps a quarter mile, seeking the small draw at its north end for passage through the convoluted terrain.

  “Halt, who goes thar?” a voice challenged from the mists.

  “A damned wet sailor!” he called back, after he had gotten over his sudden fright. Under his tarpaulin coat he had his pair of pistols, the ones bought nearly two years before in Portsmouth, but they had lain unused except for a cleaning and oiling; midshipmen could not wear their own iron except for a useless dirk, and once battle was joined he had never had a chance to go below for them. They were
still next to useless under the folds of the tarred coat, but he had reached for them.

  “Watch wot yer adoin’ with yer hands, thar, sailor,” the invisible watcher shouted back. “Ride up an’ be reco’nized!”

  “Ride up where, damn you?” he said. In reply, a soldier got to his feet from the bushes not thirty paces away to his right, holding a rifle at full cock and ready to fire.

  How can a man in a red coat be so invisible? Alan marveled, reining his horse about to walk up near the man. He thought that he recognized the uniform. “North Carolina Volunteers?”

  “That we are. Now, what in hell’re you?”

  “Midshipman Alan Lewrie, from the redan to the south.”

  “Open that coat an’ let’s see yer true colors.”

  Alan unlaced the coat and pulled it back to reveal the navy uniform, the white collar tabs of a midshipman and the anchored buttons.

  “Guess yer wot ya say ya are. Where ya agoin’?”

  “To find some tents for my men and tarps for my guns.”

  “Gonna ride through that thar draw, wuz ya?”

  “I am an officer,” Alan reminded the man, stretching his rank, and snippish at the casual affront to his “dignity.”

  “I kin see that.” The man nodded in agreement, lowering his rifle and taking it off cock. He began to wrap an oily handkerchief about the firelock and frizzen to keep his priming dry. “But ya ride up thar an’ somebody’d put a ball in yer boudin’s afore ya could say Jack Sauce!”