King, Ship, and Sword

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Do you imagine, sir, that the reason the French sailed North-about the islands is a result of navigational error?" Lt. Westcott mused in a low mutter as they stood by the starboard bulwarks, near the beginning of the sail-tending gangway, with their telescopes extended as dawn began to break.

"We know they're cunny-thumbed and cack-handed the first days they manage t'get out t'sea, but… that cack-handed?" Lewrie gawped.

"Thirty miles at the most off their intended landfall after the passage from Cape Franзois… about thirteen hundred miles, all told, would be acceptable to most mariners, if their chronometers were out by a few seconds," Westcott speculated. "Or they ran into a contrary slant of wind for a day or so, and their Dead Reckoning was off by just a tick."

"Just so long as they manage t'find their way back down to us, I could give a bigger damn," Lewrie said in a soft growl, teeth bared in a whimsical smile. He lowered his glass and looked about the decks. HMS Reliant, all their ships, were darkened, their taffrail lanthorns extinguished, with only tiny glims burning by the sand-glasses at the forecastle belfry for a ship's boy to determine the half hours to ring the watch bells, and a hooded one in the binnacle to illuminate the compass for the helmsmen, Sailing Master, and Officer of the Watch.

They were all at Quarters, rousing the crews at the end of the Middle Watch at 4 a.m. and omitting the deck-scrubbing with holystones or dragged "bears," or the rigging of the wash-deck pumps. Hammocks had been stowed in the stanchions down the tops of the bulwarks on either beam, rolled snug to pass through the ring measures and used as protection from small-arms fire and splinters. The hands had been fed early, then summoned to Quarters a little after 5 a.m., and the galley fires had been staunched.

There had been time for Lewrie to sponge off with a pint of water and some soap, to shave, then dress in clean underclothes, with silk shirt and stockings. In hopes of what the day would bring, he and his officers and mids were dressed in their best uniforms, with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides.

Chain slings were rigged aloft on the yards to keep them from crashing down if shot away; anti-boarding nets were laid out down both sides, ready to be hoisted; gun-port lids creaked open and softly came thumping back with the easy roll of the frigate as she crept along under "all plain sail," with the main course at two reefs, ready for hauling up clear of catching fire from the discharges of their own cannon.

And men stood swaying by their pieces, gun-tools in their hands. Powder monkeys had the first cartridges in their leather carriers as they knelt, facing the guns down the centreline. Lt. Simcock's Marines were fully kitted out in red and scarlet, white breeches and knee-high black denim spatterdashes, white cross-belts and black leather accoutrements, standing down either gangway behind the bulwarks and hammock nettings, waiting. Below, in the waist, aft in Lewrie's great-cabins, tiny red battle lanthorns glowed, guardedly out of sight from out-board, from a foe's sight. The slow-match coiled round the water tubs between those guns had not yet been lit; if the flintlock strikers failed to ignite or broke a flint or spring, the fuse could light the feather quills in the touch-holes, sparking off the fine-mealed priming powder.

"We'll be silouetted against the dawn, I suppose," Lt. Westcott said on, rocking on the balls of his booted feet.

"Good odds," Lewrie agreed, grunting. "No helpin' it. Pray the Frog lookouts are blind, or late in bein' posted aloft, 'stead of the decks. Gives us five minutes more t'close em?"

"They go about, we'll just chase them," Westcott said, sighing as he lifted his telescope again to peer ahead off the starboard bows.

Lewrie looked up, but could not quite see the long, lazy whipping of the commissioning pendant. The wind was scant that morning, a touch cool on the skin from the starboard quarter; they were angled enough off the winds to be able to feel the wind, for once. He turned and peered aft at Modeste. She was a large, dark shadow, as wide and bluff as a baleful barn, her grey, weathered sails eerily rustling to the wind's vagaries, equally dark against the pre-dawn gloom. She was only a little over a cable's distance astern, yet Lewrie had to recall what she looked like bows-on, with little more than the faint mustachio of foam under her forefoot, that creamed to either side of her bows, to positively mark her place.

Damme, is she… fuzzy? Lewrie thought, pinching the bridge of his nose and rubbing his eyes as false dawn only slightly began to grey the horizon astern, revealing charcoal-sketch impressions of the ships aft of Reliant. Are my eyes goin'? he wondered; No, its mist! Mine arse on a bandbox, of all the shitten luck!

The false dawn sketched his own decks as he looked forward, gave slightly more detail of artillery, sailors, sails, rigging, and masts-all misted with a thin pre-dawn fog!

"Land Ho!" a lookout shouted down. "Island on th' starb'd side! Two point off th' starb'd bows! Five mile off!"

"The Sou'west tip of the last Chandeleur," Lewrie growled as he went to the Sailing Master's chart. "Be-fogged, though, we're closer than five miles, if he can see it. Three miles, more-like, sir?"

"It appears to be a thin fog, sir," Mr. Caldwell, the Sailing Master, cautiously pointed out, using dividers to measure possible distances, then lean closer and peer at the depth notations. "Still in deep water, sir, do we hold to this course."

"Mist or fog, however thin, though," Lt. Westcott fretted near them, fingers flexing on the hilt of his scabbarded sword. "We could miss them in it, even so, sir."

"Should've remembered," Lewrie muttered, turning away to pace to the forward edge of the quarterdeck. He chid himself for forgetting that the coasts hereabouts were so low-lying and marshy, the summers as humid as Canton, Calcutta, or the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a cooler sea air just naturally bred fogs and mists.

"Deck, there!" the lookout shouted once more, just as the first hints of true dawn and the first colours could be ascertained. "Ships! Four ships, hull-up… fine on th' starb'd bows!"

"Mister Grainger!" Lewrie bellowed over his shoulder as he lifted his telescope to peer out-board, a sense of relief, of success, beginning to fill him. "Hoist to Modeste… 'Enemy In Sight'!"

"Aye aye, sir!" the fifteen-year-old piped back.

Four Bells chimed from the foc's'le belfry; 6 a.m. and it was true dawn at last; close enough to the exact time for sunrise noted in the ephemeris. Grey murk retreated Westward as brightness surged up from the East. Coastal waters went from black to steely grey, then to dark blue with flecks of white. There were thin clouds and the first pale smears of blue skies. There was the mist, of course, a pearlescence to the West, closer to the shore, where it would be thicker.

"Next hoist to Modeste, Mister Grainger," Lewrie ordered as he returned to the helm. "Make it 'Four Ships, Fine On Starboard Bows.'"

"Aye, sir."

"Tip of the last o' the Chandeleurs here," Lewrie eagerly said, jabbing at the chart. "We're about here, and the French are… there! Do we bear off a point or two to larboard, and we'll have them on our starboard beams, bows-on to us, and open to rakin' fire. Or we hold t'this course, and we barge into them, bows-on to their larboard batteries."

"Up to Modeste, that," Lt. Westcott commented, shrugging.

"Aye, but I'd prefer to haul off… place ourselves 'twixt them and the East Pass into the river," Lewrie schemed aloud. "They'd have to fight through us or go about and run back the way they came, with Breton Island t'larboard, and the waters shoalin' fast, the closer to Biloxi or Lake Borgne they go. They fight us or they go aground, up yonder, and strike their colours."

"They're hull-up already?" Lt. Westcott said, looking dubious. "Surely they've spotted us, round the time we spotted them, sir."

"Aloft, there!" Lewrie shouted, cupping his hands about his mouth. "Have they turned away? And what is the order of their sailing?"

"Sailin' as before, sir!" the lookout replied. "Same course! A two-decker leadin'… then a frigate, another two-decker, and another frigate, the hind-most! Makin' sail, sir!"

"They've seen us, right enough," Lewrie told his officers. "On a tear t'get into the Delta, to the Head of Passes, before we can close 'em! And in the same order as they were last night, with their troop ship to leeward so they could protect her."

"She'll turn away," the Sailing Master speculated.

"She'll press on, even if the others engage us," Lewrie countered. "She's too close to the end of her passage t'do else. Mister Westcott, shake the reefs from the main course and drive her, hard. Helmsmen… helm up, and steer West, Nor'west."

Just pray Jesus that Blanding sees what I intend, and dont interfere! Lewrie thought, peeking astern in dread of anxious bunting.

"One can see them from the deck, sir!" Midshipman Grainger cried from the starboard mizen shrouds and a perch most of the way up them. Lewrie raised his telescope, focussed, then… By God, there they are! he exulted in silence. They were real, not Will-O'-The-Wisps, and not more than six or seven miles off.

I was right! Lewrie felt like shouting; this Frog did hide his arse behind the Chandeleurs, or gave himself the option of landing his troops up North. Damme… I was right? What's the world comin' to?

Inside that pearly mist, there were four complete sets of sails, rustling like spooks on the scant winds; there were darker smudges of hulls below them, and the mast-heads! They were above the mist and clear as day… now only five miles off, he reckoned!

"Deck, there!" a new voice called. Midshipman Rossyngton had gone aloft to join the lookouts, and it was his thin piping that they heard. "Lead two-decker stands on! The trailing ships haul their wind! One point off the starboard bows! Avast! Moving to two points off!"

Lewrie could see the hair-thin mast-heads pivotting, aligning themselves atop each other, as the three French warships came about to point roughly bows-on to their own line of battle.

They're lasting! Lewrie realised; sailin a bow-and-quarter line… oblique to us! Clever devil, yonder.

The French would close them, with a frigate nearest to them and their two-decker 74 perhaps a cable further away, off the frigate's larboard quarters, and the trailing frigate even further away, off the 74's larboard quarter, like the last three fingers of Lewrie's left hand.

"Worn to larboard tack, sir?" Mr. Caldwell said, scratching his scalp with a pencil stub, up under his hat. "They'll have to come off the wind 'fore they can cross our bows and rake us."

"A clever way to close the range quickly," Lt. Westcott mused.

"No, sirs… not clever at all!" Lewrie suddenly whooped, all but startling his First Officer and Sailing Master. "A new signal for Modeste, Mister Grainger… 'Submit… New Course… West by North. Enemy Is Lasking on Larboard Tack'!"

"Aye, sir!" Grainger replied, hustling back to his duties by the flag lockers, perplexed by the term.

"He should've changed course no more than two points, in line-of-succession, not all at once," Lewrie pointed out. "That would've placed him cross our bows, but no… he had 'em all wheel as one and wear to larboard tack. We turn more Westerly, he'll barge up to us with all of our guns directed at the nearest frigate, and the two-decker's fire is masked… as is the trailin' frigate's!

"They stay as they are and think t'sail down our starboard beam for broadsides on opposin' tacks, they're stacked on top of each other, 'less the followin' ships luff up in order t'fall in trail of the lead ship!" Lewrie urgently explained, arms swinging and his hands clapping before him, almost skipping about the deck in glee.

"And, do they come back to their original course, they'll end up bows-on to our line, and under raking fire from all four of ours!" Lt. Westcott quickly grasped. "Just too clever by half, the poor bastard."

"Now, let's all pray Captain Blanding sees what we see," Lewrie replied, turning to peer intently at Modeste's signals halliards. "The troop ship might escape us whilst we're engaged with these three, but I s'pose it can't be helped. Better for us, had Cockerel or Pylades led our line."

If Captain Blanding sent one of his lighter 32-gunned frigates off in chase that instant, from the rear of their line, it would take hours for one of them to fetch the two-decker transport into even long gun-range… perhaps only a few miles off Pass a La Loutre, or have to chase her right up to Fort Balise and the Head of Passes in what, at the moment, was still officially Spanish territory!

"Signal, sir!" Midshipman Grainger crisply reported. '"Form Line of Battle… Course West by North… With All Despatch'!"

"We've got 'em, Mister Westcott!" Lewrie exulted with a growl. "By God, we've got em!"