The French Admiral (6 page)

My God, I came back aboard with my prick damn near hanging out, he groaned. After those men attacked us, I never did up all my buttons. No wonder Treghues was thundering at me like he was.

Bad as the captain's opinion of him was at that moment, bad as it could get in the future (and Alan wondered if such a thing were possible), he could not restrain a peal of laughter at the picture he must have made.

“If you have discovered a reason for glee, by God I'd appreciate you letting me share it,” David said from the darkness of the quarterdeck, almost invisible except for the whiteness of his breeches, shirt, and coat facings.

“Did you notice that I was a bit out of uniform when we were aft?”

“No.”

“Had my breeches up with one bloody button, that's what!”

David broke into a hearty laugh as well. “You mean to tell me you went in there looking like something out of
The Rake's Progress
and you didn't know?”

“Me and my crotch exposed, you and your head bandaged—we must have seemed like the worst Jack Nasty-Faces Treghues had ever laid eyes on!”

They went forward to inspect the lookouts and to get away from their captain's open skylight, in case he was still awake and now busily inscribing their names in his book of the eternally damned.

“God, I am laughing so hard my ribs ache,” Alan said, stumbling about the deck over ring-bolts and gun tackle and damned near howling, which upset the watch since they weren't in on the joke.

“I have tears in my eyes, I swear I do,” David chimed in, pulling his bloody handkerchief out of his pocket and applying it to his face.

“Ah!” Alan heaved a great breath to calm down. He stopped laughing. “I would suppose we had better savor this. It's the last laugh we shall have for a long time.”

“Worth it though, stap we if it wasn't. Here now, Lewrie, next leave is on me, my treat.”

“Good. And I shall let you go first in the morning. In the beginning, the . . .”

“No, no, you'd be so much better at the Bible than me,” David said, calming himself. “You've probably already violated half of it. Besides, why get us into more trouble by a report of blaspheming?”

“You're right,” Alan agreed, leading them back aft.

“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 watch, 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.