The French Admiral Read online

  “Um, Alan, what did the captain mean about you forcing yourself on your own blood back there?” David asked.

  “Just raving, I expect. Think nothing on it.”

  “Did that have anything to do with the way he turned against you so quickly after Commodore Sinclair took over the squadron?” David asked. “I mean you’ve never been really all that forthcoming about your past before the Navy. As your friend, it would make no difference to me, but . . .”

  “Sir George knows my father, and like me thinks about as much of him as cowshit on his best shoes. And there’s Forrester sneaking behind our backs to his uncle Sir George,” Alan said quickly. “Put those two together and you get Treghues trimming his sails to suit Sir George.”

  “My father caught me with the cook’s daughter,” David confessed in a soft voice. “She was fourteen, I was eleven. I already knew I was down for the sea, but I thought I had another year before they sent me.”

  “You precocious young bastard!” Alan laughed. “Well, did you get into her mutton?”

  “No, actually. Not for want of trying, though. And she was an amazingly obliging wench. So you see, I understand being sent off for something.”

  And now I am supposed to tell you all because you have shared a confidence with me, Alan thought, feeling weary and old for his tender years. Well, you’ll not get an admission from me, no matter how much I like you and trust you.

  “My father wanted me gone, David. I’ll not go into the reasons, but he never loved any of us, not once. To this day I am not sure what I did to finally displease him,” Alan lied glibly, “but displease him I did. And he packed me off to Portsmouth with Captain Bevan, Sir George’s flag captain, in the Impress Service then. I doubt I’m welcome back home.”

  “But he supports you well enough. I know you have a yearly remittance, a pretty healthy one, near as good as mine,” David said. “That doesn’t sound too bad to me.”

  “David, do you love me?” Alan asked.

  “Aye, I do, Alan. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had in the Navy, the best friend I’ve ever had, period.”

  “Believe me that I hold the same fraternal regard for you as well, David,” Alan said, turning warm as he realized that he really did hold David Avery as his closest and merriest friend. “But what happened back in London is dead and gone, and there’s nothing to revive it. Nor do I care to. If you truly are my friend, please believe that it is nothing that I, or you, would be ashamed of, nothing to destroy a friendship.”

  “But you don’t want to talk of it?” David sighed, partly in disappointment. “Well, there’s an end to it, then. I shan’t mention it again, or pry at you. And whatever passed between you and your father could never force me to lower my esteem for you.”

  “God bless you, David. Perhaps in future, when it is truly of no consequence or I have sorted things out and made something of myself, I shall tell you one night.”

  “Over a half-dozen of good claret and two towheaded wenches.”

  “Done!”

  At 4:00 A.M., the ship’s day officially began. Bosun’s pipes trilled the call for all hands, and the petty officers passed among the swaying hammocks, urging the men to wake and show a leg and form on deck. Pumps were rigged to draw up clean salt water to wash the decks, while the men rolled up their voluminous slop trousers above the knees and bent to the already pale timbers with holystones and “bibles” to scrub, sanding off any graying of the decks dried by tropical suns, raising up the dirt of the day before and sluicing it off into the scuppers, slowly abrading the deck a tiny bit thinner than the day before. However, wood was cheap and eventually, before they could ever wear enough away to harm the ship, Desperate would have been hulked long since or had her bottom fall away from rot and teredo worms.

  With the pumps stowed away once more, the men brought up their hammocks, each numbered and carried to its required place in the bulwark nettings, having been wrapped up tightly and passed through the ring measure so that all were as alike as milled dowels and would serve as a guard against splinters or musket shot during battle. The hands then stood to their guns, the eighteen 9-pounder cannon that were Desperate’s main reason for existence, and the two short-ranged carronades on the fo’c’s’le and the swivel guns on the quarterdeck. As dawn broke they were ready for action against any foe that appeared.

  There was nothing in sight, not from the deck and not from aloft in the crosstrees of the masts. It might be halfway into the day watch before they caught up with the fleet, but before then, not even an errant cloud on the horizon could be mistaken for a tops’l.

  “Fall out the hands from quarters, Mister Railsford.” Treghues gave the order from the quarterdeck nettings overlooking the waist of the upper deck. “Pipe the hands to breakfast.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but who is midshipman of the watch?” Alan asked Railsford.

  “You had the middle?”

  “Aye, sir, both of us. And we shall have the forenoon as well.”

  “Get you below and eat, then,” Railsford said. “Might as well get into working rig, too, or your shoregoing clothes are going to get too dirty.”

  They stumbled down to the lower deck and aft, past the marine compartment to their tiny midshipman’s mess, which was right forward of the master’s cabin and the first lieutenant’s. Young Carey was there already, digging into a bowl of gruel liberally mixed with salt meat and crumbled biscuit, slurping at his small beer with evident enjoyment. His eyes lit up as he saw them, not having had the chance to ask them how much trouble they had gotten into.

  Midshipman the Honorable Francis Forrester was also there, round and glowing even though the morning was still cool, and also busily feeding. Cater-cousin to their captain, one of the original midshipmen from her commissioning, nephew to their squadron flag officer, Sir George Sinclair; an airily superior young swine they could have gladly dropped over the side on a dark night.

  “I had hoped you had stayed in whatever sink or stew you had discovered in Charlestown,” he said between bites. “Was it worth it?”

  “We had a wondrous meal the like of which you would have considered a snack,” David told him, stripping out of his good uniform. “We drank some rather good wine, and then we repaired to a most exclusive buttock shop and rantipoled about until we had exhausted their entire stable.”

  “Don’t waste a description of the women on him, Avery,” Alan said as he dug into his chest for working-rig quality uniform items. “Didn’t you know that Francis is still an innocent in that regard? Come to think on it, I cannot remember ever seeing evidence of his manhood, and there’s not a scrap of privacy in this mess.”

  “Well, from what I hear, you’ll be paying the price for your little escapade,” Francis retorted hotly, but unwilling to try his arm against the two of them—they had bloodied his nose more than once in the past. “Hope you enjoy watch and watch. Hope you like watching me enjoy a good bottle of wine while you sip your water.”

  “You’re a swine, Francine,” David said. “A portly sow with two teats.”

  “Goddamn you!” Forrester roared, almost ready to rise, in spite of past experience.

  “Blaspheme a little more softly, please,” Alan said. “Before the captain decides to share the misery out. He’s not in the best of moods today. Come to it, neither am I, so watch yourself and walk small about us.”

  They sat down to their bowls of mush, and the mess steward set out a pitcher of water before them, eyeing them with a certain sadness.

  “Have a heart, Freeling,” Alan entreated. “Slip some small beer our way, won’t you?”

  “Oh, ah god a ’eart, Meester Lewrie, zur, bud iffen ah dew, ah won’ ’ave no ’ead when ’a capum ’ear of eet,” Freeling responded.

  “Bloody hell!” David said, taking a sip. “At least it’s not wiggling today.”

  “Not even half brown. A good vintage,” said Alan.

  It was around three bells of the day wa
tch, just after gunnery exercises, that Desperate caught sight of the fleet on the horizon to the north-east, after a good sail north along the coast with a soldier’s wind. They were now roughly parallel with Cape Fear, slanting landward at a shallow angle to eventual land-fall at Cape Henry and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, to peek in and see if the French had arrived.

  Alan was in the rigging with a telescope, clinging to the shrouds with arm and knee crooked, leaning back onto the ratlines just below where the futtock shrouds began below the maintop.

  Well, no one’s sunk while we were gone, he decided, counting the ships. There was Admiral Drake’s small group of ships up from St. Lucia, now free of keeping guard on the French base in Martinique and very far from familiar waters; there was Princessa, the flagship, Terrible, Ajax, Intrepid, Alcide, and Shrewsbury. Further north he could espy Admiral Hood’s flag flying on Barfleur; also Invincible, the Alfred, Belliqueux, Monarch, Centaur, Montagu, and Resolution riding in her wake. Fourteen sail of the line all told, and too few attendant frigates, as was usual. If the rumors were correct, and de Grasse had brought fourteen sail out of Port de France and had not picked up other ships at Cape Francois or Havana, then they would be evenly matched ship for ship in line of battle once they fell on their enemy.

  It was so large a problem that his own paled in comparison, and he knew that he was looking forward to the battle with a certain relish, at that time in the uncertain future when upwards of thirty massive warships would come up within pistol shot of each other and begin to blaze away with every gun available.

  Alan had seen single-ship actions since being almost press-ganged into the Navy, and such events as a fleet battle happened too rarely to be missed. He knew he had an extremely good chance to survive it, if it did occur, since frigates would not stand in the line of battle, but would be in the wings, repeating signal hoists and ready to rush down and aid some crippled larger ship. This battle, if it came soon, would truly decide the fate of the rebellion. Without the French fleet, there wasn’t a ship on the coast that could stand up to the Royal Navy, and the blockade of their coast could check the last imports and exports that kept their miserable efforts in the field. This would be the crushing blow, and when it was over, everyone on the losing side would sue for peace, and Alan could go home to England. Maybe not to London, not as long as his father was alive. But he could take off naval uniform and begin to live the life of a gentleman once more, so he had a personal stake in victory and frankly, could not even begin to imagine any other result.

  Then, no matter what career was open to him after getting out of the Navy—which had treated him so abominably—he could brag for the rest of his life that he had, by God, been there! Sword in hand, making every shot count, eye-to-eye with the Frogs, pistoling mounseers right and left, or whatever else his imagination could do to enliven an observer’s role as the tale grew with the telling.

  I’ll probably bore some people to tears with it. He laughed. There I was, hanging upside down from the clew garnets, four third-rates on either beam! Harro for England and St. George and pass the bloody port if you’re through with it! And the best part of it all is, I’ll be safe as bloody houses for a change, instead of scared fartless.

  Unwinding his limbs from his precarious perch, Alan clambered down to the starboard bulwarks along the gang-way and jumped the last few feet to move back aft to the quarterdeck, where Treghues, Railsford, and Monk were plying their own telescopes to survey the immense power spread before them.

  “Still fourteen of the line, sir,” Alan said to Railsford.

  “Be more than that when we reach New York.” Railsford grinned at him. “Admiral Graves can add at least seven more, plus frigates. We shall have this Count de Grasse on a plate, mark my words.”

  “Mister Railsford, signal the flag there was no sign of the French at Charlestown.”

  “Mister Forrester!” Railsford bellowed.

  “Sir?” Forrester called, running from the taffrail flag lockers.

  “Signal ‘negative contact.’ Make sure Princessa or one of the repeating frigates replies with a matching signal.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The signal system, even with special contingencies included by Admiral Rodney before he departed the Indies, was meager almost to the point of muteness. Many signals were guns fired either to windward or leeward, ensigns hoisted from various masts, perhaps a certain colored fusee burning after dark. There were only so many signal flags, and each had a meaning mostly laid down in the Fighting Instructions, so anything that did not do with bloody battle took some ingenuity to convey. Usually it resulted in such confusion that ships sidled down to speak to each other at close range anyway, and captains developed their lungs by shouting and bawling at each other through speaking trumpets, making their choler permanent.

  Today was no exception. A red ensign hoisted from the windward foremast, and a blue signal flag at the gaff of the spanker was not understood as ‘negative contact’; negative something, maybe, but what? The nearest frigate, the Nymphe, hoisted another flag that stood for “interrogative.” Nymphe then lowered the interrogative and raised another which ordered Desperate to close with her. Since Nymphe was commanded by a post-captain and Desperate, as a sixth-rate, boasted only a commander, they had to yield their advantage to windward and come down to her, which would result in a long hard beat back to their assigned position once the message had been passed and understood.

  “Play with your fancies: and in them behold upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing; hear the shrill whistle which doth order give to sounds confused,” Mr. Dorne, their nattily attired surgeon, was emoting as roundly as Garrick in Drury Lane. “Behold the threaden sails, home with the invisible and creeping wind, draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, breasting the lofty surge!”

  Oh Christ, he must have aired his wig again, Alan thought.

  “Henry the Fifth!” Railsford barked with glee. “Quite appropriate!”

  “Oh, do but think you stand upon the rivage and behold a city on th’ inconstant billows dancing; for so appears this fleet majestical, holding due course for Harfleur.” Dorne ran on, now striking an oratorical pose, to the amusement of the assembled officers. Even cherubic Lieutenant Peck of the marines was smiling as though in fond memory, but being a marine, Alan was not sure that grin had anything to do with Shakespeare. Probably thinking on the last orange-vending wench he fondled in a theatre.

  “Sounds most powerful like it, indeed sir,” Monk agreed.

  “Now you tell me, Captain, that the Bard did not do some time in the sea service,” Dorne crowed.

  “Follow, follow, grapple your minds . . .” Treghues began with some enthusiasm, but then stumbled and groped, not so much to remember the verse as to wander off the subject entirely, as though something else had caught his attention. He raised his telescope to look at Nymphe once more.

  “Follow, follow, grapple your minds to sternage of this navy,” Forrester recited, unable to resist the temptation to toady with his betters or show off his excellent education. “And leave your England as dead midnight still, guarded with grandsires, babies and old women, either past or not arrived to pith and puissance, for who is he whose chin is but enriched with one appearing hair that will not follow these culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?”

  “Hah, hah, young sir, a scholard lurks!” Dorne shook with pleasure. “You are most familiar with him, I grant you.”

  “Aye, sir.” Forrester beamed, trying to put on an air of modesty. “Especially Henry the Fifth, and that passage, which deals with the Navy.”

  “And when do you get enriched with that one appearing hair, Forrester?” Carey asked, with all the carrot-headed innocence that only the youngest midshipman could get away with.

  “You would do well to grapple your mind to your duties and making something of yourself, young sir,” Treghues said, shutting off their open enjoyment of Carey’s dig. “Better indeed to emulate Forrester than be japin
g and frivolous! Or you shall never live long enough to grow that one appearing hair in my ship.”

  Poor Carey flinched as though he had been slapped in the mouth, and his eyes welled up in an instant. “I am sorry, sir,” he quavered, on the edge of losing all control. Carey spun away and almost ran to leeward to be as alone as a completely humiliated and hurt thirteen-year-old boy can be on a ship.

  Had discipline allowed, the assembled officers and warrants might have given an orchestrated chorus of groans at the harshness with which Treghues had chastised Carey for such a harmless remark. Even Treghues realized that he had gone a little too far, for he barked at them to be about their business and not stand about like cod’s-heads.

  Poor little get, Alan thought. Still, it’s better him than me for a change, and he has been getting away with a lot lately.

  “Don’t stand there making gooseberry eyes at me, Lewrie,” Treghues blustered. Alan realized he had raised his eyebrows in surprise at Carey’s humiliation and Treghues considered it a reproof. “I doubt you know any Shakespeare at all, do you?”

  “A little, sir,” Alan replied, trying desperately to remember some.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Um, uh . . .”

  “As I thought,” Treghues said primly. “By the heavens, you’re a rogering buck with no wit at all, aren’t you? What was the last book you read? The guide to Covent Garden women? That Cleland trash?”

  The last interesting one, yes, Alan had to admit, if only to himself. “A book, well, a chapbook really, about naval battles, sir.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “A man named Clerk, sir. A Scot. Avery’s father sent it.”

  “A Navy officer?” Treghues asked sharply.

  “No, I don’t think so, sir, but it was a most interesting—”

  “And I suppose you think that makes you equal to an admiral now, does it, just like this store clerk?”

  “His name is Clerk, sir—”

  “Fictional trash,” Treghues sneered. “Bend your mind to your duties, sir! Take to heart what you read in the Bible this morning. Scotsmen, of all things!”