The French Admiral Page 6

  Since the morning’s lesson had been from Genesis, there wasn’t much that Alan could take to heart, unless he wished to re-create the human race, and he had already had a fair head start on that issue. Thankfully, Treghues turned away to more interesting things, allowing Alan to escape with a whole skin and to take refuge in what duties he could find.

  He did not consider himself such a great sinner, not after all the examples in his life for comparison, so it was hard to reject the wave of self-pity that confronted him. When he had joined Desperate, even after a fatal duel for Lucy Beauman’s honor, Treghues had not been so badly disposed toward him, not until that French gunner had smacked him with a rammer. There had been a time when Treghues had treated him fairly, decently, had thought him a ‘comer.’ To recognize that Treghues treated everyone oddly now was little consolation.

  “Mister Lewrie,” Railsford called from aft.

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Mister Cheatham requests your assistance with the ship’s books in the holds. Do you attend him?”

  “Aye, sir, directly,” Alan answered in relief.

  Once below with their youngish purser in the bread room, Alan could relax a little, though he was sure that Cheatham had good reasons to despise him after his and Avery’s escapade. But Cheatham put him at ease almost at once.

  “The Jack in the bread room is aft in the rum stores at present, Mister Lewrie,” Cheatham said. “We shall be opening a new cask of salt meat for noon issue, and I need someone to attest as to its fitness.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Care for some beer?” Cheatham asked, waving a hand lazily at the keg in the corner.

  “Beg pardon, Mister Cheatham, but Captain Treghues has me on water and ship’s rations for the next ten days,” Alan told him, licking his lips all the same. “After yesterday, I would not like to get either one of us in more trouble.”

  “Devil take it, Lewrie. Take a stoup,” he commanded, which order Alan was only too happy to obey. He took down a wooden mug and poured himself a pint.

  “Confusion to our foes, sir,” Alan said, before taking his first sip.

  “Hear, hear!” Cheatham acknowledged, tapping a pint for himself as well. “Now, Mister Lewrie, while we have some privacy, just what have you done that would turn the captain against you so badly?”

  “I . . . I would rather that remain private, Mister Cheatham, sir,” Alan said, wondering if he had to stand on the quarter-deck nettings and tell the whole world before they were satisfied. “It is not so much what I have done, but what has happened to Commander Treghues.”

  “I will allow that he has not been himself for the last month or so,” Cheatham said, frowning between quaffs of beer. “There is a question as to whether he is in full possession of his faculties.”

  “Mister Cheatham, were we ashore in peacetime, Treghues would be confined to Bedlam, playing with his own spit.” Alan grinned.

  “No matter,” Cheatham said. “He is our master and commander, appointed over us by the Crown, and that is disloyal talk. Whether it is true or not,” he concluded, ignoring his own remark, which could be taken for the same sort of dis-loyalty. “All of us . . . Mister Railsford, Peck, the sailing master, Mister Dorne . . . look you, Lewrie, you’re a good sailor and you’re shaping well as a sea-officer. Before the captain’s . . . misfortune . . . he thought well of you. It is without credence that he could turn on you so quickly without reason. You have friends in this ship, Lewrie, and we might be able to advert your good qualities to set aside whatever the captain has formed as to his opinion of you.”

  “David Avery did not speak to you, did he, sir?”

  “Not recently, though he had expressed concern earlier,” Cheatham said, closing the bread room door for more privacy and retaking a seat on a crate. “Perhaps I could be of some aid to you.”

  “On your word of honor that it goes no further, sir,” Alan begged.

  “I must discuss it with Mister Railsford, for one, but you may be assured of my discretion. My word on it,” Cheatham assured him.

  “I was accused of rape, sir,” Alan began, feeling he had no one else to trust. He outlined how his father had snared him with his half-sister Belinda, how he had been forced to sign away any hopes of inheritance from either side of the family, and to take banishment into the Navy.

  “And you have no clue about your mother’s side of the family, the Lewries?” Cheatham asked after hearing the tale.

  “None, sir, save my mother’s name . . . Elizabeth. They said her parents are still alive, but God knows where, or whether that’s really true.”

  “Sounds like a West country name,” Cheatham surmised. “I seem to have heard the name Lewrie before in some connection, but it does not have any significance at present. Tell me about her.”

  “She was supposed to have bedded my father before he went off to Gibraltar in the last war, where he won his knighthood, but he left her with nothing,” Alan said. “He always told me she was whoring before he came back and had died on the parish’s expense. He found me in the poor house at St. Martin’s in the Fields and took me in, and signed the rolls to claim me. I don’t even know what she looked like.”

  “But you bear her maiden name.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “So perhaps he did not marry her, but felt some remorse to learn that she had died in his absence and left him a boy child.”

  “Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby never had any remorse about anything, sir.” Alan laughed without humor. “I remember a big man coming to claim me and taking me in a coach. First time I ever saw the inside of one. Next thing I knew I had the best of everything. Except for affection, that is.”

  Damme, I’m getting maudlin as hell just thinking about this, he thought, feeling a wave of sadness sweep over him such as he had not felt for two years.

  “Perhaps you are worth something to somebody, else why keep you?”

  “That might explain why I was set up with Belinda, and caught red-handed in bed with her by so many people, especially our solicitor and the parish vicar as well, sir!”

  Alan thought a while. “You mean my mother’s people may have had money?”

  “No way to tell, not out here,” Cheatham said. “But my brother works in the City, at Coutts’ Bank. I could write him and let him make some inquiries on your behalf. If you were set up, as you put it, it would clear your repute with the captain and put your own mind to rest as well. If your father has recently come into money or land through your maternal side, that would be proof positive.”

  “It must be!” Alan was thrilled. “Why else would he send me off with a hundred guineas a year and force me to sign away inheritance on both sides? Sir Hugo never did anything that didn’t show a profit. God, Mister Cheatham, if only you could do that! You don’t know how miserable I have been, not knowing why I was banished. I admit I was a strutting little rake-hell. And given half a chance, I probably would be again, to be honest. But nothing as bad as they were, at any rate!”

  “Then we shall attend to it directly.” Cheatham smiled at him, and the smile automatically raised Alan’s suspicions as to his motives. Damme, what’s in it for him, I wonder? The life I’ve lived, there’s no way to know when someone really means friendship, except for David.

  “Um, I was wondering, sir, why would you . . .” he began.

  “Because whether you can realize it or not, you have friends in this ship and in this world, Lewrie.” Cheatham anticipated him: “Railsford thought you’d be squint-a-pipes about it. Do you really think yourself so base as not to be able to garner trust and friendship from others?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said without pausing to think, and felt his eyes begin to water with the truth of it. Until he had gotten into the Navy, he had never had a real friend, never had a word of approval from his father, his half-relations, or tutors. Now here were people ready to make supreme efforts on his behalf to uphold his honor and good name—what there was of them—and go out of their way to set
tle all the nagging questions in his mind about his heritage. Too much was happening to keep his feelings in check.

  “God, Mister Lewrie,” Cheatham said, almost in tears himself, “I had no idea, my boy! Forgive me. You do have friends who care about you—not just people with influence who will be good for place or jobbery.”

  “I am beginning to realize that, sir.” Alan shuddered. “Back home, there was no one I could turn to. Jesus!”

  “What?”

  “In a way this is so disgusting, sir.” Alan smiled in self-deprecation. “Who would have thought that of all places, I would find . . . a home . . . in the bloody Navy! I’ve spent the better part of my service scheming to get out of it!”

  “Why would you, when you’re so deuced good at it?” Cheatham asked. “Oh, I suppose it is natural to be suspicious, growing up a London boy in such a household as you described, but there is good in this world, and you have some of it in you.”

  “A streak perhaps,” Alan allowed. “A thin one, sir. I doubt I’ll be buried a bishop.”

  “Who can say what you’ll amount to?” Cheatham said, cuffing him on the head lightly. “No, I would not go so far as to say you could ever take holy orders. But you are who you make of yourself, not what others have told you you are. Think on what you have accomplished in the short time you have worn King’s Coat—other than wenching and brawling your way through the streets of Charleston, of course. Consider the people you know that think well of you. You could not have earned their approbation without being worthy.”

  I don’t know about all that, Alan thought. You’ve never seen me toady when I’ve my mind set on something. Still, there was the good opinion of Admiral Sir Onsley Matthews and his Lady Maude; also their lovely niece, Lucy Beauman, who was all but pledged to him. And then there were Lord and Lady Cantner, whose lives he had saved in the Parrot. There were probably as many others who hated the sight of him, but he wasn’t particularly fond of those either, so to hell with them.

  But with Railsford, Cheatham, and, most likely, Mr. Dorne to improve his chances, and even Mister Monk’s professional acceptance as a seaman, and the willing cooperation of the other warrant and petty officers who took him at face value, there was suddenly a lot less to fear than he had thought. He took another deep draught of beer, and his prospects suddenly seemed that much brighter.

  “I cannot tell you how much this means to me, sir,” he told Cheatham. “I was despairing that I would be chucked onto the beach to starve if it was up to the captain alone. Maybe there’s an answer in my past that would force me to think I’m someone better than the image I have formed of myself ere now. But I’m not betting on it, mind. What if I’m much worse than what I know of myself now?”

  “That’s our Lewrie,” Cheatham said kindly. “As chary a lad who ever drew breath. Now let us take a peek into this salt beef cask to see if it’s fit to eat, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 2

  On the 25th of August, 1781, Desperate went inshore once more, to Cape Henry in the Virginias, acting as the eyes of the fleet. Should she run into danger, there was another frigate with her with much heavier artillery to back her up, but being of deeper draft she wasn’t much help close inshore.

  “Passage’ll be ’bout a mile off Cape Henry,” Mister Monk said, referring to one of his heavily pencilled and grease-stained charts by the binnacle. He was partly teaching, partly talking aloud to himself. “Far enough offshore ta avoid the Cape Henry shoals, an’ ’bout two mile off a the Middle Ground. Ya young gentlemen mark the Middle Ground? Silt an’ sand shoal.”

  Forrester, Avery, and Lewrie peered over his shoulder to mark it in their minds, while Carey, who was much shorter, wormed his way through to peek almost from Monk’s capacious armpit.

  “What about north of the Middle Ground, sir?” Carey asked, turning his gingery face up to their sailing master. “Up by Cape Charles?”

  “No, main entrance is this’n, south o’ the Middle Ground. To the north of it, ya’d never know how much depth ya’d have, wot with the scour. At high tide, ya might find a five-fathom channel, ’un then agin ya could pile her up on a sand bar in two, so deep draft merchantmen an’ warships use the south pass. With our two-and-a-half-fathom draft, we’d most like be safe up there, but anythin’ bigger’n a fifth-rate’d spend a week gettin’ off.”

  “It’s big once you’re in, though,” Avery observed, looking at the chart past the entrance they were discussing.

  “Like the gunner told the whore,” Alan whispered.

  “Let’s keep our little minds on seamanship, awright Mister Lewrie?”

  “Aye, Mister Monk, sir,” Alan replied with an attempt at a saintly expression.

  “Now look ya here,” Monk went on, tapping the chart with a stub of wood splinter for a pointer. “Once yer in, there’s Lynnhaven Bay. Un from Cape Henry ta Old Point Comfort, due west, mind ye, ya got deep water an’ good holdin’ ground. But—and mind ya this even better—from ’bout a mile north o’ Point Comfort an’ from there up ta these islands at the mouth o’ the York River, ya got shoal water at low tide, and this shoal, they think, sticks out damn near thirty miles east, pointin’ right at the heart o’ the entrance. So ya can never stand too far in at low tide or on a early makin’ tide without ya choose Lynnhaven Bay er bear off west-nor’-west for the York, er up nor’-west into the bay, itself.”

  “So the best places to base a fleet or squadron would be either in Lynnhaven Bay or in the mouth of the York, sir,” Avery said.

  “Right you are, Mister Avery, right you are.”

  “Which is why Cornwallis and his army have marched north from Wilmington in the Carolinas, to set up a naval base to control the Chesapeake,” Alan said, marveling.

  “Un right you are, too, Mister Lewrie.” Monk beamed, proud of his students. “Either way ya enter, ya got ta choose Lynnhaven Bay, York River, er further up, but if ya take that route, ya gotta be aware o’ this here shoal comin’ outa the north shore o’ the Gloucester Peninsula north o’ the York, so that cuts yer choices down even more. I’d never stand in further than ten miles past Cape Henry afore choosin’, and God help ya you ever do otherwise yerselves if yer ever in command o’ a King’s ship, Lord spare us.”

  “And there are no markers or aids to navigation?” Forrester asked.

  “Nary a one, sir,” Monk replied. “Mosta the shippin’ roundabouts is shallow draft coasters an’ barges ta serve all these tobacco wharfs on the plantations, er carryin’ trade ta Williamsburg further up the James, so up ta now, there wasn’t no need fer ’em. But, up the James er up the York, er way up the Bay, it’s the world’s best anchorage ta my thinkin’ for a fleet.”

  “Then why haven’t we set one up here before, sir?” Carey asked.

  “There’s not much ta the Continental Navy, in spite o’ that fight we had in the Virgins last month. Biggest threat was de Barras up in Newport, an’ the North American Squadron covers them. Most o’ the fightin’ was around New York or down in the Carolinas. But now this bugger de Grasse is on his way here, we’ll control the place.”

  “And with ships here in the Chesapeake, we’d be free to range from way up here on the Patowmac and Baltimore down to Norfolk and the entrance,” Alan said, smiling. He could see what Clinton and Cornwallis had in mind. “We’d cut the communications from Washington and Rochambeau to his southern forces.”

  “A nacky plan, ain’t it?” Monk said, as though he had thought of it himself. “So ya all look sharp as we work our way inta the bay, and y’ll see the Middle Ground, all swirly like a maelstrom sometimes. Two leadsmen in the foremast chains by four bells o’ the forenoon, now we’re in soundin’s. And we’ll lower a cutter an’ sound ahead, too, as we’re comin’ in on the ebb tide.”

  “Let me,” Carey volunteered, almost leaping in eagerness.

  “Aye, the boat’s yours, Mister Carey. Ya put these younkers ta shame sometimes, so ya do!”

  “And the leads, sir?” Alan asked.

  “Do ya
take yer copy o’ the Atlantic Neptune an’ place yourself in the foretop, Mister Lewrie. Mister Avery, y’ll be with the hands in the forechains. Un Mister Forrester, I ’spect the captain’ll wish ya ta be on the quarterdeck ta handle any signalin’.”

  “Aye, sir,” Forrester said with a smug grin.

  Desperate was ready for any trouble entering the bay. The hawse bucklers were removed and cable ready to run at bow and stern, both the best and second bowers seized to their lines, and a kedge and a stream anchor on the stern should she have to maneuver herself off a shoal with muscle power.

  “Cape Henry, sir,” Monk said to Treghues on the quarter-deck. “I’d feel better a point ta starboard if ya so mind, sir.”

  “Hands to the braces, stand by to wear a point to starboard!” Treghues shouted, then turned to Lieutenant Railsford. “Brail up the main course now and get a little way off her, but leave the tops’ls for now.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  With guarded caution that to an outsider might still have seemed almost dashingly rash, Desperate made her way to the entrance, arrowing almost due west down the three-mile-wide channel, past the disturbed water of the Middle Ground, past the tip of Cape Henry into Lynnhaven Bay. Beyond, the Chesapeake was a sparkling sack of water, nearly devoid of shipping but for a few small British ships servicing the troops ashore, along with a large frigate, the Charon, a sloop of war just slightly smaller than Desperate, the Guadeloupe, and some small armed cutters and store-ships drafted from the coastal traffic.

  Desperate finally idled close enough to Charon to be able to speak to her, and from her commander Captain Symonds they discovered that the French were nowhere to be seen as of yet. There were some armed gunboats working further up the bay near Annapolis to keep some Continental infantry units from taking to the water in some homemade barges.

  They also learned that Symonds and Cornwallis had rejected Old Point Comfort west of Lynnhaven Bay as the naval base. The bay would be too exposed to the coming hurricane season, and the land around Old Point Comfort was too low and marshy to be fortified—was barely two feet above high tide. A French ship, with her higher mounted guns, could drift right down on any battery established there and shoot it to pieces. Instead, Cornwallis would fortify the south bank of the York River just east of the town of York and the narrows at Gloucester Point. The land was much higher there, with steep bluffs to discourage any attempt to storm them, and batteries dug into the bluffs could return the favor to a ship of any force that attempted to get close enough for cannon fire. They would also be free of the marshes and their agues, and would have several choices of streams for fresh water if they had to hold out for any length of time.