The Invasion Year (40 page)

“Then there’s all those damned
pénishes
and
caïques,
all of ’em luggers, to carry troops and supplies,” Lewrie continued. “Admiralty said there were hundreds of ’em.”

“About seven hundred gunboats and escorts of various types, and their plans are for over two thousand transports,” Peel told him with a grave look. “I’m told, though, that both Admiral Cornwallis and Admiral Lord Keith estimate that it would take two or three tides to get
all
of them to England, and with Channel Fleet, our North Sea Fleet, and The Downs combined against them, given enough warning when they at last decide to try it on, we could
massacre
them. The French just don’t have
that
many experienced sailors, and most of their guns will be manned by
soldiers
with little knowledge of naval gunnery.”

“ ’Less it’s a dead-flat calm, when they come, their artillerists will find floatin’, bobbin’, and wallowin’ boats just
won’t
sit still as solid ground, where they learned their trade, aye,” Lewrie determined, almost ready to whoop with glee, and a wish that the French
would
try. “And, they can’t send ’em out to the slaughter without the support of their Navy, and we have their proper warships bottled up in Brest and Rochefort, or in The Texel in Holland.”

“They might get out, yes … but I doubt they will enjoy it!” Peel said with a snicker, topping up his own wine from the side-board. “After all, the Frogs must man those squadrons’ guns and retain enough sailors to handle the ships …
and
reserve even more skilled artillery men for the harbour and coastal batteries that ‘Boney’ has had erected all along the Channel coast, to boot. Is God just, the French
may
plan to have their infantry aboard the gunboats work their own guns to defend
themselves
! Perhaps they work to a tight budget?”

“Two for the price of one?” Lewrie snickered back, reaching to refill his glass, too.

“There is another matter, though,” Peel admitted at last; Lewrie became wary in an eyeblink, for this was the way that Mr. Twigg had begun to introduce his previous schemes. “There are, according to one of our … sources in Paris … several hundred
more
invasion craft to figure with.”

“You’ve still agents in Paris?” Lewrie asked, stunned.

“One or two,” Mr. Peel confessed most slyly. “Once the war began last May, Bonaparte clapped a total embargo on correspondence going in or coming out of France … almost every book, newspaper, or letter’s read … but we’ve managed. We have our ways, after all. So far, we only have vague descriptions, no sketches, of this other type of craft, but everyone would dearly love to lay hands on one. You’ll be working along the French coast? Good. Do you ever come across what looks like a water-beetle with sails, you snap it right up.”

“A water-beetle,” Lewrie said with a dubious frown.

“There’s a
M’sieur
Forfait, been made inspector-general of the invasion fleet. One of Bonaparte’s pet mathematicians and scientists? Forfait earned his spurs designing and building shallow draught barges and such for use on the Seine. Some people in London think the entire idea’s as daft as bats, but … he is a
skilled
mathematician, so we can’t dismiss his work out-of-hand.”

Mister MacTavish is a skilled engineer, too, and look what
he’s
come up with!
Lewrie sourly thought.

“There are two types described,” Peel went on, leaning closer. “One’s about thirty-six feet by fourteen or fifteen feet, and will only draw about three feet of water. The second’s about fourty-six feet in length and sixteen or eighteen feet in breadth. That one is said to draw a little less than four feet of water, when fully laden. Eighty or an hundred soldiers aboard … a twenty-four-pounder gun mounted in the bows, and, from the description
may
resemble two serving platters joined together, the top one inverted, and very flat-bottomed. There are slanted berths for the soldiers in the rims of the lower platter, and they’re
supposed
to be rigged like a Schweling fishing boat … whatever the Devil
that’s
supposed to look like. Any clue?”

“Never seen one in my life,” Lewrie told him with a shrug.

“Anyway, the most intriguing part of the written description is that there’s a long box atop the upper platter that runs the length of the boat, tall enough to allow the soldiers aboard to sit below it and be sheltered from fire,” Peel said, grimacing with mock dis-belief. “Four or five abreast, and twenty or so deep, so they can sit there in the same formations they’d form in the field … Napoleon Bonaparte is very fond of the column when attacking opposing lines. Not keen on it, myself, but it’s seemed to have served him well, so far. Now, what we are worried about is whether that protective box, and the wide slope of the upper hull from the waterline up, might be
armoured
somehow. If the French
have
re-enforced these boats, they might be the principal craft to drive themselves right onto the beaches, and be proof against shot from any of our field guns or horse artillery batteries. Our fellow in Paris describes the damned things as three-fifths of their length flat, with a rise of eight feet at the ends. They could come ashore like so many walruses!”

“Armoured? With iron plate, d’ye mean?” Lewrie gawped. “That’d make ’em top-heavy as Hell. Centre of gravity, metacentric height … all that?”

“
You’ve
been reading technical books?” Peel teased.

“Ye listen to others long enough, well…,” Lewrie shrugged off. “If they’re armoured, they’d be drawin’ a lot more water than three or four feet, Jemmy. I’ll allow that the breadth of their hulls’d buoy ’em up a good deal, but not that much. And if they’re that heavy, it would take a lot more sail area than a fishing boat’s t’drive ’em.”

“The report says that they only require a crew of five or six seamen,” Peel said, dredging half a roll through the juices and gravy on his plate for a last bite. “And some sort of paddle arrangement to propel them if the wind fails. What sort? The work done by soldiers? Really, Alan … if you see one, go after it, MacTavish’s experiments bedamned.”

“I’ll try and do my best.” Lewrie grinned back. “Anything else? Pick up the Golden Fleece? Slay Medusa while I’m at it?”

“What’s for dessert?” Peel asked, laughing heartily.

“I think my cook said there’s a bread pudding. Are we done on confidential topics, I’ll have my steward return,” Lewrie said, rising to go to the forward door to his cabins to speak with the Marine guard so he could pass word for Pettus and Jessop.

“Rather humble fare for a knight and baronet,” Peel mused once he’d returned to the dining-coach. Lewrie opened a covered dish.

“It comes with caramel sauce,” Lewrie said, after sticking one finger into the dish and licking it. “And don’t
you
start! It’s all a sham, anyway. Awarded for sympathy, not anything I
did.
The closest I ever got to something of note was years ago in the South Atlantic when we took the
L’Uranie
frigate. And the baronetcy … hmpf! King George was havin’ an off day, let’s leave it at that. Unless ye wish to hear the whole story.”

“Is it amusing?” Peel asked.

“Completely,” Lewrie assured him.

“Then do tell!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“It’s grand that Spain’s stayed out of the war, so far,” Peel said after supper. They had gone on deck to the taffrails of the quarterdeck so he could light up a slim
cigaro
and blow smoke rings at the night. “Do they decide to re-join the French against us, the price of tobacco will soar, and the quality will decrease. Say what you will of American tobacco, but I still think the best is from Spanish colonies.”

“Wouldn’t know much about that. Never developed the taste for it,” Lewrie said with a shrug, lounging most lubberly on the after-most bulwarks. He looked over to
Fusee,
about half a cable off to larboard. “They wouldn’t let you smoke over there, not with all the powder aboard her. We’re
much
more hospitable,” he added, grinning.

“Think those things will work?” Peel asked.

“No idea,” Lewrie replied. “I s’pose we’ll soon find out. The wind’s fair enough for us to set out tomorrow morning, and let us test the first batch. Though, after what we’ve learned of them the last few days, I think my chances’d be better were I a French
matelot
sittin’ on an anchored barge than bein’ in the launchin’ boat.”

“Well, if MacTavish’s don’t, there’s other designers’ ideas to try out,” Peel imparted with a knowing nod and wink. “There’s a fellow name of Robert Fulton … an American, who’s come up with a variation on the torpedo. Man’s just
brimming
with ideas. He claims he could build a ship driven by a steam engine. Dead-keen on steam engines, he is.”

“No thankee!” Lewrie scoffed, after a second of surprise. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t steam engines need big
fires
under the boilers? Fire, on a wooden ship? Brr!”

“Not only that, this Fulton fellow said he could also build a
nautilus,
a submersible boat that could sink down twenty or thirty feet and stay down for the better part of an hour,” Peel further told him. “A small crew, three or four, I forget which, paddle it forward in some way.”

“And do
what
with it?” Lewrie gawped, then shook his head. “The very
word
‘sink’ makes my ‘nut-megs’ shrivel. Sounds suicidal, t’me.”

“That’s what Admiralty thought, too,” Peel said with a snicker. “He offered both, just after the war began again last May. I gather that Fulton couldn’t sell his ideas to his own navy, and couldn’t raise sufficient private funds in his own country, so he flogged his schemes on this side of the Atlantic. The last card up his sleeve was the idea of explosive torpedoes, though I believe that the submersible boat and the torpedoes would have worked together, the boat towing the torpedoes under an anchored ship, and the torpedo exploding when it came into contact, whilst the submersible paddles away on the other side.”

“Not with a timing mechanism?” Lewrie grimaced. “That would take some sort of
hair-trigger
pistol, and
any
hard knock’d set it off. You wish crew for
that
thing, best look in Bedlam!”

“Admiralty’s judgement, too,” Peel said, shrugging, pausing to take a deep puff on his
cigaro
and exhale a jet of smoke. “Mind, now. All these daft schemes are William Pitt’s doing. Soon as he got back into office as Prime Minister, he pressed for offensive action, and not sit idle, waiting for the French to invade. Admiral the Earl Saint Vincent was against them, but who knows about Lord Melville. The damned things
may
turn up to be tested, do we give events long enough, or they grow dire enough.”

“Christ,” was Lewrie’s sober comment to that.

“Better us than the French, I suppose,” Peel said, laughing some more. “Before he came to London, Fulton tried to sell his schemes to Bonaparte. Went to Paris during the Peace of Amiens and got an audience with the ‘Ogre’ himself … and thank God ‘Boney’ thought Fulton’s ideas madder than a March Hare, too.”

Lewrie tried to picture what the French would have done with a submersible boat and a towed torpedo. Could people be found with more martial ardour than sense to crew the things in the first place? Then this anchorage at the Nore would lie open to a creeping, unseen danger. Portsmouth, Plymouth, Great Yarmouth, or Harwich … He had to shake his head to rid himself of the image of a peacefully anchored and sleeping warship suddenly smashed open by a titanic blast, then heeling over and sinking in minutes, aflame from bow to stern!

No thankee! At least a steam-driven ship’d give you a fightin’ chance, and stay
atop
the sea!
Lewrie thought, wondering uneasily where all this inventiveness would lead. Warfare at least had a
few
gentlemanly rules—not that Lewrie had
always
paid heed to them when needs must—but, in the main both sides went into battle with assumptions that things would go honourably, fairly, and … sporting, like knights of old at a joust. If inventiveness mated with desperation, though …

No, with any luck, such things won’t work well enough to become normal, or acceptable,
Lewrie told himself.