Signal Close Action (21 page)

He saw a man darting towards him, an upraised pistol aimed at his chest. In those split seconds he shared the moment with the unknown French sailor. He had a thin dark face, teeth bared in frantic concentration as he took aim. Bolitho was too far away to reach him with his sword, and his arm ached so much from fighting his way through the yelling press of men that he felt he could not raise it even to defend himself.

The blade of a heavy cutl
ass cut downwards across his vision, so fast that it made an arc of silver in the hazy sunlight.

The French sailor gave a shrill scream and lurched away, staring with agonised horror at the pistol still gripped with his own hand on the far side of the deck.

Allday ran to Bolitho's side, the cutlass edge red against his coat.

'A moment, sir!
'

He ducked under two fallen spars and hacked the wounded man across the neck, felling him with no more than a sob.

He said between gasps, 'Better'n letting him live with one hand!'

Bolitho shouted,
'Fall back,
lads!'

A few more minutes and they could take the French ship.
He knew it.
Just as he knew that the other seventy-four was probably working round again to pour a broadside into
Lysander
before she was able to return the fire.

'Fall back!'

The cry ran along the bloodied decks and mingled with the cheers of Leroux's marines, some of whom were squatting in
Lysander's
beakhead picking off their enemy like wildfowlers in a marsh.

Many hands reached out to haul the boarders back into
Lysander's
protection, as with a splintering, jerking symphony she tore free from her opponent's fallen spars and shrouds and swung heavily downwind.

The lower gun deck erupted in one more savage broadside, the thirty-two pounders smashing into the enemy's side and making the holed and battered timbers shine with tiny tendrils of blood which ran freely from her scuppers.

Pascoe yelled,
'Huzza!
Huzza for the commodore!'

Bolitho strode aft, taking his hat from a grinning, pigtailed seaman who had somehow managed to retrieve it from the vicious fighting.

Herrick greeted him hoarsely, his eyes moving over him as if anticipating some terrible wound.

Bolitho asked, 'Where is the other one ?'

Herrick pointed vaguely over the larboard quarter. 'Standing off, sir.'

'I thought she would.'

Bolitho looked from foremast to quarterdeck. The fore topgallant mast had gone, and several guns lay upended. There were plenty of shot holes along the upper deck, and the busy thuds of hammers, the dismal clank of pumps, told him that there was damage enough below the waterline also.

He said, 'Get the ship under way.'

He saw Pascoe kneeling beside a dying marine. Holding his hand and watching his face losing its understanding and recognition.

Grubb peering at his compass, and his new helmsmen staring fixedly at the flapping sails and waiting for them to respond, their bare feet slipping on blood.

The marines falling back from the hammock nettings, checking their muskets, their faces dull now that the fight had gone out of them.

Midshipman Luce using one of his flags to staunch the terrible wound in a man's thigh. The wounded seaman peering up at him, repeating like a prayer, 'Promise you'll not send me to the orlop, Mr. Luce!'

But, like ghouls, their aprons scarlet, the surgeon's assistants came for him, carrying him bodily down to the horrors of the orlop deck.

Bolitho saw it all and more. Like so many, that seaman who had faced the terrible demands of battle was unable to accept the horrors of a surgeon's knife.

Grubb muttered, 'She's answerin', sir.'

'Steer nor'-east.' Bolitho looked up as the wind explored the holed sails. 'And signal
Harebell
to stay in close company.' He wondered briefly how Inch had felt as an impotent spectator.

Herrick came aft and touched his hat. 'We beat 'em, sir.'

Bolitho looked at him. 'It was no victory, Thomas.' He listened to a man sobbing from the deck below the rail. Like a young boy. A child, with all defences gone. He added quietly, 'But it has shown all of us what we can do.' He nodded to Leroux as he walked past with his sergeant. 'And next time we will do that bit better.'

He walked to the poop ladder and paused halfway up it to look for the enemy ships. With missing masts and spars, and their attendant snares of trailing rigging, they made a sorry sight.

Lysander's
company had done well in their first battle together. But to attempt more, even though he had been tempted, would have invited disaster.

Allday climbed up beside him.

'It feels strange, sir.'

Bolitho looked at him. Allday was quite right. Before, they had been kept too busy after a sea fight to brood or to find pain in misgivings. He saw Herrick. The captain. The man who really counted just now.

Allday sighed. 'They did proudly, all the same. There's a different
air
in the ship.'

Bolitho walked slowly aft to the taffrail, letting the wind explore his stained clothes and aching limbs like a tonic.

Harebell
was tacking across the larboard quarter, very clean and bright in the glare.

He pulled out his watch. The whole battle had taken less than two hours. Some corpses drifted astern, pale-faced in the clear water, and he guessed they were some of the French boarders who had fallen in the attack. And what of their own bill ? How many lay dying or awaiting burial ?

Two seamen ran along the poop, marlin spikes in their hands as they peered round for ropes which needed repair. For them it was over.
For
now.
They chatted to each other, thankful to be whole, grateful to be alive.

Bolitho watched them in silence. Perhaps Herrick was right. About people in England who did not spare a thought for men like this.

He nodded to the two seamen as he strode to the ladder. If it were the case, he decided, then it was their loss. For men such as these were worth a thought, and much more beside.

8
Aftermath

J
oshua
M
offitt
, the commodore's personal clerk, tapped his teeth with a pen and waited as Bolitho leaned back at his desk and took another swallow of coffee.

Bolitho let the strong black coffee explore his stomach, and tried to concentrate his mind on the report he was dictating for the admiral. If it would ever be sent. If it would ever be read.

He knew Moffitt was watching him but was almost used to his strange opaque stare by now. In the sleeping cabin he could hear Ozzard, his servant, making up the cot, his feet barely audible on the deck, and wondered at the fates which had made these two men fill their present roles. It would be better for them both if they were reversed, he thought. Ozzard, who attended his daily wants, from shaving water to a clean shirt, had been, it was said, a lawyer's clerk. He certainly had education, more than some of the officers. Moffitt, on the other hand, whose duties involved the careful writing of every order and despatch, of noting down each of Bolitho's personal signals and instructions for the other captains in the squadron, was a product of the slums. He had wispy grey hair and glazed staring eyes which peered out from his parchment face like those of a man near to death. Or, as Allday had remarked unsympathetically, 'I've seen better looking rogues dangling on a gallows!'

From the little he had been able to discover, Bolitho had learned that Moffitt had been in a debtors' jail, awaiting transportation to the new penal colony at Botany Bay. A hopeful lieutenant with a courts warrant for encouraging recruitment to His Majesty's Navy as a direct substitute for transportation to the other side of the world, had arrived at the jail, and with several others Moffitt had begun a new life. His first ship had been an eighty-gun two-decker, and in a brief skirmish off Ushant her captain's clerk had been killed by a stray musket ball. Moffitt had used the opportunity well, and had made yet one more change in his affairs by assuming the dead man's duties. Transferred to
Lysander
at Spithead, he had been ready and willing to offer himself as commodore's clerk, unless or until a better fitted person could be found. The rush to get the ship ready for sea and complete all repairs in time to receive Bolitho's broad pendant had allowed Moffitt to slip into his new role with barely a ripple.

Bolitho looked into his cup. It was only too easy to send Ozzard to make fresh coffee. It was one of his weaknesses. But he would stick to his rule and try to eke out his supply as long as possible.

He heard the insistent thud of hammers and the rasp of saws. The work of repairing the damage was still going on without a break. This was the morning of the fourth day after the battle.
Lysander,
with the sloop and the prize in company, had continued in a slow north-easterly crawl, the hands turned-to until there was no proper light in which to work, to get her ready to fight again when required.

In his mind's eye he could see the chart when he had examined it before his meagre breakfast. They had been forced to maintain a very slow progress. Tattered sails had had to be sent down from aloft for repair or replacement from their stocks. The jib boom had been almost entirely refashioned after its thrusting collision with the French seventy-four, and he could join with Herrick's report in complimenting Tuke, the carpenter, for his energies and devotion to perfection.

Herrick quite rightly had written well of Lieutenant Veitch. The third lieutenant had controlled the gunnery throughout the battle, but more than that, he had decided, without calling for permission or advice, to double-shot some of his guns to help the carronade's attack on one of the enemy ships. Double-shotting was a risky thing under perfect conditions and with experienced seamen. Yet Veitch had managed to keep his head enough to select such men from disengaged guns and use the bombardment to maximum effect. Midshipman Luce, Yeo, the boatswain, and Major Leroux, all had been placed on the captain's record for Bolitho's approval.

On the other side of the coin,
Lysander
had lost thirteen dead, either in the battle or later of their wounds. The surgeon had reported another five who might die at any moment, and ten who would almost certainly be fit for duty with any kind of luck.

The enemy had probably lost far more, as well as the hurt of being driven off by a single ship. But where men were concerned it was of little comfort. They had weeks, perhaps months yet to endure without additional support. Muscle and bone were more important than hemp and oak frames, and men themselves more vital than all besides. He tried not to think of his own report, as yet unfinished at Moffitt's bony elbow.

The clerk asked, 'Will we continue, sir ?' His voice, like the man, was thin and scratchy. His entry in the muster book described him as being aged thirty-eight. He looked nearer sixty.

Bolitho eyed him gravely. 'Where did we get to ?'

The pen moved across the papers.
'During
the
action
the
ship was
under
control
the
whole
time,
and
only
when
entangled
with
the second
French
vessel's
rigging
was
she
forced
to
lose
way.'
The opaque eyes were level again. 'Sir ?'

Bolitho stood up and walked to the quarter gallery, his hands behind his back. He could not keep Herrick's face out of his thoughts. In the battle, at the moment when a collision had shown itself unavoidable. That was the moment. It stood out even above the thunder of gunfire, the awful cries, the twisting scarlet patterns around the wheel. In those vital minutes Herrick had hesitated. Worse than that, at a time when the French had taken the initiative, and might have used it to attack the ship from either side, he had made a wrong decision. It was like hearing his voice, here in the cabin. The anguish as he had ordered Gilchrist to repel boarders. And it had been the wrong order. Defensive action at that stage could have broken
Lysander's
morale, quenched her people's willingness to do battle, as easily as if their flag had been torn down before their eyes.

He forced himself to think of Herrick as the captain of his ship. Not as Thomas Herrick, his friend. In the past he would have despised any senior officer who had used friendship to cover up failure or incompetence. But now he knew that choice was not that easy, nor so free of prejudice. Herrick had almost pleaded with him not to leave the quarterdeck to join the fighting in the bows. Fondness for him, or a desire to keep his advice and determination close by, or both, the effect could have meant complete disaster. Bolitho had noticed, if only in hindsight, that the French captain had remained aft during the time when
Lysander's
boarders had been carving a bloody path through his men. How would the fight have gone, he wondered, if the French captain had rallied his men in the forefront of the struggle, even at the expense of his own life, while his British counterparts had stayed clear and in comparative safety ?

He leaned his hands on the sill below the salt-stained glass. Herrick was no coward, and could no more display disloyalty than he could betray his sister. But up there, on the quarterdeck, when he had been most needed, he had failed.

Bolitho said shortly, ‘I’ll
finish it later, Moffitt.' He turned and thought he saw a quick gleam of curiosity in his eyes. 'You may copy out what we have already done.' It would keep Moffitt busy and the report at arm's length for a bit longer.

There was a tap at the screen door and Herrick stepped into the cabin.

‘I
thought you would like to know at once, sir.
Harebell
has signalled that she has sighted two sail to the east'rd.' His blue eyes moved briefly to Moffitt at the table. 'It will most likely be the rest of the squadron.' He added bitterly,
'This
time.'