The Invasion Year (45 page)

“Recall them at once, stow away whatever it is they’re there for, then get the ship under way by Noon,” Lewrie ordered.

Paying off from the winds once the anchors were up would be an easy chore, as would the long starboard-quarter slant out to sea. To turn roughly West-Sou’west to make passage to Portsmouth, though … that would be a long, hard slog almost into the teeth of the winds and take at least a day more, with a night spent standing “off and on” the coast ’til it was light enough to attempt an approach into port.

“I’ll see to it directly, sir!” Westcott vowed.

*   *   *

In his best uniform, with sash and star of his knighthood, and the Cape St. Vincent and Camperdown medals round his neck, Lewrie reported to Admiral Lord Gardner ashore … with some trepidation, it must be admitted, since Lord Gardner was reputed to be a dyspeptic and irascible officer of some age, a tetchy man who did not suffer fools at
all
gladly, and, Lewrie had heard, some described him as “composed of paper and packthread, stay tape and buckram,” for his over-attention to every little detail, no matter how niggling. Lewrie was forced to sit and wait in the great man’s anteroom for an hour before being allowed an audience.

“And you are
who,
sir?” Admiral Lord Gardner testily enquired as he gave Lewrie an up-and-down inspection.

“Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, my lord, the
Reliant
frigate. I was ordered to Portsmouth and told to deliver my orders for transfer from Sheerness to you for safekeeping,” Lewrie replied.

“You waste my time with this, sir?” Lord Gardner snapped. “Most pop-in-jay captains announce their arrival to me by letter!”

“Uhm, it’s a matter of secrecy, my lord … concerning trials of certain, ah … devices?” Lewrie tried to hint.

“What sort of devices?” Gardner sourly demanded. “Secret, you say?”

“Well, my lord … if you have not been told of them, I cannot dsecribe them to you,” Lewrie answered. “No one not engaged with them is to be allowed to—”

“
Bedamned
if you cannot, sir! What sort of foolishness is this tripe? Niles?… Niles! Come here at once, I say! There’s a lunatick in my office ravin’ about secret devices!” Gardner erupted, then hailed for an aide. At the top of his lungs, too,

Might as well give it to the town criers, too!
Lewrie thought with a wince;
Yoo-hoo! Frog spies! Harkee t’this!

A door to a side office adjoining opened and a genial-looking Post-Captain who looked to be in his early fifties entered, his brows up in query. “You called, my lord?”

“
This
imbecile … what the Devil’s your name again? This officer claims he’s ordered to give
me
his transfer order to keep it secret, and goes on about
devices
!” Lord Gardner ranted.

“Alan Lewrie, sir,” Lewrie offered, hoping that this new fellow knew more than his superior. “The
Reliant
frigate?”

“Guessin’ the name of your own ship, sir?” Lord Gardner sneered.

“Lewrie, Lewrie, Lewrie,” the Post-Captain muttered, “
Reliant,
aha!” he concluded with a snap of his fingers. “May I see them, sir?”

Lewrie handed his orders over whilst the newcomer hummed a gay tune under his breath as he read them.

“Sir Alan, sir,” the Post-Captain said at last, stepping up to offer his hand. “George Niles, Flag-Captain, and your servant, sir.”

“And I am yours, Captain Niles,” Lewrie responded in kind.

“ ’Fraid he’s the right of it, my lord,” Captain Niles told his superior. “Those infernal things built at Gosport? Captain Lewrie’s the goat charged with their testing, and Admiralty
does
wish us to see that his orders are kept safe, lest Bonaparte get the slightest inkling of their existence. All very ‘mum’s the word.’ ”

“Then why could he not just
say
so?” Lord Gardner snapped.

“I expect he’s cautioned to not say a thing about them to anyone not aware of them to begin with, my lord,” Captain Niles jovially informed the Port Admiral. “The fewer in on the things, the less odds that someone would blab, my lord.”

“Does Admiralty not trust
me,
Niles?” Lord Gardner yelped, still wroth and in high dudgeon.

“Merely ‘need to know,’ my lord,” Captain Niles pooh-poohed to calm the fellow. “I’ll see to Captain Lewrie, if I may, sir. There are his orders, here, to file away … more like
squirrel
away? If you will come into my office, sir, I do believe there are separate orders specific to your ah, mysterious duties.”

*   *   *

“Thank you for rescuing me, sir,” Lewrie told Niles once they were in his side office with the door closed on the Port Admiral’s.

“His bark is much worse than his bite, Sir Alan,” Captain Niles told him with a sly grin. “Unless one
deserves
a nipping, and then he
can
latch on like a bulldog and gnaw a limb or two right off, ha ha! Yes, I have them here, sir. ‘Captain’s Eyes Only,’ and all that nonsense. Here you are, sir.”

Lewrie took the folded-over, wax-sealed, and ribbon-bound letter from Niles, which was also marked “Most Secret and Confidential” in bold writing.

“Do
you
know what it’s about, sir?” Lewrie dubiously asked.

“Even if I did, I’d forget it the moment you leave my office, Sir Alan,” Niles said, chuckling. “I will admit to curiosity, though. You are not the first officer to call upon us with secret orders waiting for him, you know. The other fellow, Captain … well, I gather you and he are to work together on whatever it is that Our Lords Commissioners deem so vital. Mind, I forgot him and
his
packet as soon as
he
left my office, too, ha ha!”

“Then I shall be on my way at once, Captain Niles, so you may forget my arrival, as well!” Lewrie japed.

“Goodbye, then, Captain ‘Whoever,’ and good fortune,” Niles said with another sly look and a glad hand.

*   *   *

Lewrie was back aboard
Reliant
just a tick before 11 of the morning, and got himself comfortable before opening his newest set of sealed and secret orders. With a tumbler of cool tea with lemon juice and sugar near to hand, he broke the seal and read them.

They were much like the first when he’d learned of those cask torpedoes; he was required to take upon the charge and command of the trials, to serve as escort and guardian of the hired-in-for-the-purpose collier
Penarth,
commanded by one Lieutenant Douglas Clough …

“
Penarth
 … ain’t that Welsh?” he puzzled with a frown. “Sure t’be, if she’s in the coastal coal trade. And this Douglas Clough? A Scot? Lord, I hope he’s better than the last two. I
think
Penarth is close t’Cardiff. ‘Aid to the best of your abilities the officer placed in charge of the trials’… no, it
can’t
be!”

“Midshipman Grainger,
sah
!” the Marine sentry bellowed.

“Enter,” Lewrie bade, quickly stowing away his letter.

“Captain, sir, there is a boat coming alongside, with a Post-Captain aboard,” Mr. Grainger told him. “The First Officer has been alerted, and the side-party mustered.”

“I will come on deck, Mister Grainger, thankee,” Lewrie said, already almost sure who it was that had come calling.

He arrived on the quarterdeck, standing near the beginning of the starboard sail-tending gangway and the entry-port, waiting to see if his suspicions were true. As the upper tip of the standing “dog’s vane” on the caller’s hat peeked over the lip of the entry-port, the bosun’s calls began to tweedle, the hastily gathered Marines and sailors saluted, and a grim, jowly face emerged beneath the hat, then the upper body of a stocky, paunchy Post-Captain who wore his own hair in a grey fluff either side of his ears, with a long old-style seaman’s queue over the back collar of his coat.

“Cap’m Joseph Speaks … come aboard to speak with your Captain Lewrie,” the fellow announced in a loud voice as he doffed his cocked hat to one and all, scowling or grimacing most un-congenially.

“Welcome aboard
Reliant,
sir,” Lt. Westcott rejoined.

“Welcome, Captain Speaks,” Lewrie seconded, stepping forward with his own hat lifted.
So
that’s
what he looks like,
he thought.

“Cap’m Lewrie?” Speaks said, taut-lipped, drawing out “Lewrie” a second time as if in disgust.

“Aye, sir,” Lewrie replied, bland-faced.

“Where in the Hell are my bloody iron stoves?” Speaks barked.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Honest t’God, sir, that’s the last I saw of ’em,” Lewrie told the older fellow as they sat in
Reliant
’s great-cabins with a pitcher of cool tea before them on the low brass Hindoo tray table before the starboard-side settee. “What Pridemore did with ’em’s
his
doin’, and I haven’t a clue where he, or the stoves, are now.”

“
Thermopylae
was sent off to the East Indies last May when the war started up again,” Captain Speaks gravelled, “and Pridemore, one of her Standing Officers, went with her. What the Devil anyone would need heating stoves in Calcutta or ‘Sweatypore’ boggles the mind, but
someone
owes me for them,” he doggedly insisted.

“It’s possible that Pridemore leased a couple to the Standing Officers of other laid-up ships, sir,” Lewrie speculated, “or sold ’em outright, expectin’ that you’d not recover? They could’ve gone to a scrap-iron monger, or the dockyard offices, on the sly, but I … you
have
been in touch with my solicitor in London, Mister Mountjoy?”

“All stand-offish petti-fogging and legalese,” Captain Speaks said, almost snarling. “Look here, sir … we can settle this like gentlemen. They’re worth fifty pounds each on today’s market.…”

“They were worth thirty-five pounds when you bought ’em, sir,” Lewrie gently objected, sure he was getting gouged.

“Noted there’s a war on, sir?” Speaks snapped back. “The price of iron’s up, and civilian iron goods are in shorter supply, so did I wish to replace them, that’s the going price. You give me a note-of-hand for two hundred pounds, and we’ll call it quits, and it’ll be up to you to redeem the sum from that sharp-practiced ‘Nip-Cheese’ Pridemore. Sue
him
in a Court of Common Pleas!”

I
am
bein’ gouged!
Lewrie felt like yelping.

“And how’s your parrot, sir?” Lewrie asked instead, to delay his agreement, which he would
have
to make. “Still gabbin’ away?”

“Hellish-fine, and of no matter, sir!” Captain Speaks rejoined. “I hate to state it this way, Captain Lewrie, but I am senior to you by five years on the Navy List, and your immediate superior in this endeavour with the torpedoes, so consider how much better we will rub along with each other with the debt settled … without my having to take
you
to Common Pleas, hey?”

“But it wasn’t my fault!” Lewrie insisted, immediately thinking how lame that sounded, as if he was back at a school from which he was not
yet
expelled.

“You trusted the wrong person, and yes, it is,” Speaks growled.

“Oh, very well,” Lewrie said after a long moment and a great, resigned sigh. He could afford it, after all; it wasn’t like the loss of two hundred pounds would leave him “skint.” He took a long sip of cool tea to slake a suddenly-parched throat, rose, and went over to his desk to scribble out a note-of-hand to Speaks. “You’ll still have to send this on to Mountjoy, in London. He’s my shore agent and estate agent,” he told the testy older fellow. “There’s not a jobber who’ll give you full value in Portsmouth … they’re all retired Pursers,” he wryly japed. He fully expected that Speaks would hand his note to a local banking house, get his money in full, then
they
would send the thing on to Mountjoy, who’d turn it in to his bankers at Coutts’, and everyone would be square. “Here you are, sir,” he said as he returned to the settee. Captain Speaks took it, squinted hard at it as if suspecting a ruse, then grunted, nodded in satisfaction, and shoved it into a side pocket of his uniform coat.

“You’d done that at the very beginning, Captain Lewrie, and we would have each saved a pretty penny on stationery and postage,” the heavyset chap commented, baring his teeth for a moment in a triumphant grin. “Now, sir … you know what a torpedo is?”