The Invasion Year

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Before boarding one of Reliant’s cutters for the long row out to Penarth, Lewrie had time enough for a private moment with Lieutenant Westcott.

“Should Captain Speaks make mention of it, some of your family are down to Portsmouth to see you, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie muttered to him. “Which took you ashore. He might have a ‘down’ on ye, else.”

“Thank you for covering for me, sir,” Westcott said with a wide grin, not one of his usual quick flashes.

“And was a good time had by all?” Lewrie japed, with a leer.

“ ‘All’ did, sir,” Lt. Westcott cheerfully confessed, “and we’d have had a better, had Faulkes not found me. The lady’s most obliging and fetching, a recent widow of an apothecary. Sold up the business to another, but didn’t manage to gain all that much security. Thank God she can still afford to send the son off to a schoolmaster… with his dinner pail. Hours and hours on her hands, alone, most days?”

And yours on her, Lewrie told himself, chuckling at the image.

“Whatever shall I do with you, Mister Westcott?” Lewrie teased.

“Swear I’m an abstinent and celibate Christian, should bully-bucks come and ask for me, sir!” Westcott rejoined. “And that I’m not here!”

Penarth was a two-masted brig, fitted with shorter mast stubs to serve as crane supports, one aft of her foremast, the other forward of her main-mast, from which jib-arms could swing. She had much more freeboard than Fusee, the result of a much deeper hold for the coasting coal trade, and slab-sided, with none of the tumblehome designed into warships to reduce top-weight; her boarding battens were vertical, and a hard climb right over her bulwarks to an in-board set of steps, with no proper entry-port.

“Welcome aboard, sirs,” her “captain” said. Lt. Douglas Clough was indeed a Scot, but without a Highland “sawney” accent. He was red-haired and pale-complexioned, though, his hair, when he doffed his hat, frizzy and tightly curly-wavy. Clough was an odd-looking bird, for his forehead receded at a pronounced slant from a heavily beetled ridge of brow, his large, stubby nose almost matching the angle of his head so that it appeared that they were one precipitous slope.

“Captain Speaks has spoken… has explained the nature of the catamaran torpedo to you, sirs?” he asked.

“Only that they are a form of torpedo, sir,” Lewrie said for all.

“Let’s show them, Clough,” Captain Speaks grunted.

“This way, sirs. We keep them in the hold, out of sight. Nice and dry ’til deployed. If you will all follow me?” Clough bade.

Someone had done some modification work on Penarth to lengthen her main midships hatchway, perhaps turning two into one, and removing some cross-deck bracing timbers. They clambered down yet another very steep ladder into the belowdeck gloom, lit only by a pair of lanthorns built like the light rooms found in a warship’s powder magazines.

“Here they are, sirs,” Lt. Clough proudly announced, pointing to two large boat-like objects, one to either side of a narrow aisle running fore-and-aft. The objects were covered with tarred canvas on the outside, tapering bluntly at either end, and put Lewrie in mind of gigantic cigarros of the same colour as aged tobacco leaf.

“What are they?” Midshipman Rossyngton wondered aloud.

“Catamaran torpedoes, young sir!” Captain Speaks snapped back.

“We’ve eight aboard at the moment,” Lt. Clough explained. “Two here, two more forward on this temporary deck, and four more below in the lower hold. A catamaran torpedo is twenty-one and a half feet in length, much like a ship’s boat in size, three and a half feet in beam. They taper to blunt ends, with a slight rise a’low and a rise aloft, ha ha! The main mid-section is basically a sealed wooden chest, with the interior lined with lead to make it water-proof, and all the seams soldered to prevent any leakage once they’re in the water. They’re flat on the bottom and the top, though they do have a slight curve to their sides.”

“Much better than any creation but Fulton’s copper spheres,” Captain Speaks told them, as if they were his own idea.

“If they’re sealed, sir, how does one manage to set the timer and cock the igniting pistol?” Lt. Merriman, who had had more experience than the others with such devices, enquired, clambering up onto a cradle in which one of the torpedoes sat for a closer look.

“See that stand-pipe in the top?” Clough pointed out. “There’s a water-tight tompion at its mouth. When one removes the tompion, the starting lines are attached to it, and all one has to do is give both a good, hard yank, and one is in business, sir.”

“Aye, we’ve dealt with that before, sir,” Lt. Westcott said to their host, “but… how do you set the clock? You can’t get a hand down that pipe.”

“They’re already set, sir,” Clough replied with a confident grin. “Some for as short as fifteen minutes, some for half an hour. The pistols are loaded and primed, as well.”

“Mean t’say, they’re ready t’go?” Lewrie gawped, aghast, with a shrivel of his “wedding tackle.”

“Soon as you yank the cords, sir,” Clough told him.

“And they’re already filled with gunpowder?” Lt. Spendlove said with a worried frown.

“With such a tiny access point as the stand-pipe, sir, there is no way to load them at the last minute,” Captain Speaks spoke up. “Aye, they’re loaded.”

“Ehm… how much gunpowder, sir?” Midshipman Warburton asked.

“Fourty kegs, young sir,” Clough announced.

“Jesus!” one of the Mids whispered.

“All up, they weigh two tons each,” Captain Speaks said. “We must use Penarth and her stout hoisting gear to lift them out and put them in the water. A two-decker seventy-four was not available,” he added, almost making a jest; a very dry one.

Four hundred bloody pounds o’ gunpowder? Lewrie goggled, horrified. Unconsciously he stepped back from the torpedo he’d been inspecting, but there was another of the monsters at his back. He looked up to the patch of sky framed in the large hatchway most longingly, as he tried to grasp the idea that he was standing amid thirty-two hundred pounds of explosives, all just waiting for a stray spark. MacTavish’s poor cask torpedoes couldn’t hold a candle to these!

“Set at fifteen minutes only, Lieutenant Clough, it would be necessary to tow them in quite close before releasing them,” Spendlove the skeptic said, his face grim. “Even a strong tide run didn’t take our previous experiment in as quickly as we wished. Unless they have a method of motive power you’ll be telling us about?”

“They float in on a making tide, sir!” Captain Speaks grumbled. “The boat-like shape of their hulls is what will make them faster than any damned cask, or set of spheres!”

“Or, they’ll swirl end-for-end like twigs in a mill-race,” was Lewrie’s skeptical comment. “Or turn beam-onto the tide like logs.”

“Beam-to the tide, sir,” Lt. Merriman added with his head laid over to one side in contemplation, “there’s more surface area, like a two-decker’s hull freeboard, for the tide to push against. It might waft them in a bit quicker, but…”

“Drogues, Mister Merriman?” Lt. Westcott quipped with a wink.

“And a fixed rudder, perhaps, sir.” Merriman grinned back.

“What the Devil are you talking about?” Captain Speaks asked.

“Will the civilian designer or fabricator be sailing with us, sir?” Lewrie asked Speaks.

“I’m given to understand that he will not,” Speaks told them, frowning over whether that mattered. “Busy building even more of the things, I imagine. Why do you ask, sir?” he asked, rather archly.

“Mister Westcott and Mister Merriman gave the matter a bit of thought after our first, unsuccessful trials with cask torpedoes, sir. They came up with an idea for un-manned ship’s boats, decked over and rigged to sail in,” Lewrie explained. “These catamaran torpedoes are a form of boat, as Mister Clough said, a semi-submersed one. I wondered if we could… make some modifications to them without express permission from their designer, or would we have to wait ’til whoever it is mulls our ideas over and approves them, sir.”

“Modifications?” Captain Speaks gravelled, grimacing as if the word was a sort of blasphemy. “What sort?”

“First of all, sir, a fixed rudder at the, ah… whichever end one names the stern, sir,” Lt. Merriman eagerly contributed. “An oar or sweep extending from the stand-pipe down the top and over the end? That might help them stay on course once released. And a sea-anchor rigged from the bow-end, deployed and allowed to fill, and its tow-line to go taut before the torpedo is set free would drag the torpedo inward, sir!”

“Since one can’t rig a mast and sail on it, sir-,” Lieutenant Westcott attempted to add, but Speaks cut him off short.

“I am tasked… we are tasked to make experiments with the torpedoes as built and delivered to us, sirs!” Speaks snapped. “We will make a go of what we have to work with. We will prove them useful, as they are, sirs! Got that?”

“We do, sir,” Lewrie replied, speaking for all again.

“Now, should they not produce the desired results in their current form, we might suggest improvements to their designer and the yard at Gosport,” Speaks relented and allowed, a long moment later. “For now, though, let’s be about the task at hand. Lieutenant Clough and his people are ready for sea. Are you as well, Captain Lewrie?”

“I am, sir,” Lewrie told him.

“Last-minute lading to be concluded by the end of the First Dog today, and we shall sail by dawn tomorrow, the wind depending,” Speaks ordered. “We shall be trying them North of the Channel Isles, mostly off Guernsey. Too damned close to spying French eyes for me, but… those are my orders. We done, gentlemen? Have Mister Clough and I satisfied your curiosity?”

Not in the slightest, Lewrie uneasily thought, but was forced to say that he and his officers were ready and willing.

“Excellent!” Captain Speaks barked, in happier takings, leading the way to the weather deck, fresher air, and a dubious sort of safety.

“Ehm… Captain Speaks seems dead-keen on them, does he not, sir?” Lt. Westcott said once they were back aboard Reliant and standing on the quarterdeck together, a bit apart from Spendlove and Merriman.

“Driven,” Lewrie glumly agreed, cautious to not be heard making unfavourable comments about a senior officer; it just wasn’t done!

“One hopes they go boom as advertised, sir, on time and all that…,” Westcott went on in a guarded mutter, heaving a leery shrug. “If they don’t, one also hopes Admiralty allows modifications. If not, I fear that Captain Speaks takes the project too seriously, sir?”

“Privately, Mister Westcott, we may think what we wish, but for the hands, we’ll just to have to ‘soldier on,’ ” Lewrie told him, tapping a finger on his own lips. “Make the best of it without quibbles?”

“ ‘Growl we may, but go we must,’ aye, sir,” Westcott said with a resigned sigh.

“It’d be best did we not even growl, sir,” Lewrie japed.

“Aye, sir, aye, sir, two bags full!” Westcott quipped back, and clicked his heels together as he raised two fingers to his hat.

If they don’t work… and I’m pretty sure they won’t, Lewrie thought as Westcott and the others made their way below to take their ease for an hour or so; there’ll be Hell t’pay. And do we raise our suggestions again, will Speaks be desperate enough t’listen, or will he snap all our heads off?