The Price of Glory (33 page)

“And was you ever in action against the Turk?” asked Tully with interest.

A snort from Mr. Anson, who was susceptible to the giggles and for some reason seemed to find this amusing. He pretended to have choked upon a sausage and Mr. Lamb, who was aware of his weakness and encouraged it whenever possible, patted him solicitously upon the back.

“Regrettably I was not,” replied Duncan, “being taken with the dysentery off Yevpatoria and I was like to be shite for the kites, as the Khazaks say …” a strangled cry from Mr. Anson “had I not been shipped home in an English vessel we encountered off Sevastopol.”

Nathan suspected the first lieutenant of playing to the gallery for both young midshipmen were now thoroughly discomposed. He wondered if it was bad for discipline but decided he was getting old. He was contemplating whether he should have a second helping of the bacon and sausage or move directly on to the preserves when young Quinn entered with Mr. Holroyd's compliments and he was very sorry to interrupt the captain's breakfast but thought he should come up on deck to look upon a sail that was giving him cause for concern.

By the time Nathan had climbed into the maintop, Holroyd's concern had become more apparent, even to the naked eye. She was a ship-of-war—Nathan could just make out her topgallants and royals—hull up on the horizon at a distance of between three and four miles to the south-west and bearing down on them with all the sail she could make.

“She changed course even as we first sighted her,” the lieutenant reported. “I cannot make out her colours, even with the glass, but I thought it better to be more safe than sorry.”

“Quite right,” replied Nathan, though his stomach expressed displeasure. He took the glass and steadied it upon her. She was ship-rigged, almost certainly a frigate, and quite a large one. As Holroyd had indicated her colours were quite obscured, if indeed she was flying them, and there was no other clue to her identity. The chances were she was British even so close to the shores of Provence for the French fleet had been well worsted off Genoa no more than a few months since and rarely ventured out of Toulon. But Admiral Jervis kept a loose blockade in the hope of tempting them out again and it was not unknown for the odd cruiser to slip past the few pickets he had placed there.

“What was her course when you first sighted her?” Nathan enquired.

“Nor'-nor'-west,” replied Holroyd promptly and with a subtle significance in his tone. “About six points to the wind.”

Nathan took his eye from the glass and gave him a searching look, though Holroyd was unlikely to have got it wrong. Even so, six points was about as close to the wind as any square-rigged ship could lie and would only be contemplated if she was involved in a chase or setting a direct course to her destination. And in this case, nor'-nor'-west would take her on a direct course to Nice or possibly Menton, where Buonaparte was known to have his headquarters.

Still, this did not mean a great deal. She might have been sent by Jervis to look in on either port or clawing her way up the coast and sailing as close to the wind as she dared.

“Break out the ensign and hoist the private code,” he said.

Holroyd had already consulted the code book and the flags were bent on to the halyard. Nathan watched as they were run up. The two ships were still at some distance but the signal should be clearly visible with the glass. He raised his own. Nothing. She was still coming on and still he could not see her colours.

“Very well,” he said, reluctantly. “Beat to quarters.”

His orders were to avoid combat until he had safely delivered Grimaldi to Genoa
unless such combat were unavoidable or could be contemplated without compromising his mission.
Nathan silently cursed whichever underling at the Admiralty—if it was not the First Lord himself—who had added this caveat, for it threw the onus straight back upon him. Clearly it would compromise his mission to engage with a ship of the line, but where did he stand with a ship of the fifth- or sixth-rate? Could he contemplate a fight with a 32-gun frigate, with which the
Unicorn
was equally matched, but not one of 36 guns? Indeed, even an unrated brig or a gunboat might inflict considerable damage in the uncertainty of battle. A lucky shot might carry away the
Unicorn
's rudder or a mast and she might be driven upon the shore. Or she might catch fire, for it was rumoured that the new Directory in Paris had instructed all their ships to use heated shot. And unless he made his esteemed passenger crouch like a rat on the orlop deck, a stray shot might, heaven forefend, take off his head. Would the Admiralty find the
Unicorn
's captain culpable in such a circumstance? Without a doubt.

The martial beat of the drum rolled out across the still waters and within seconds the starboard watch was pouring up from below. Nathan's breakfast party disgorged upon the quarterdeck, looking as bloated as he felt. The Angel Gabriel would be in a terrible stew as they cleared the decks for action, the great lumbering oafs crashing about the captain's cabin, taking down the bulkheads, breaking up his table into its several pieces, tearing up his carpet of chequered canvas, the precious porcelain bundled into its straw. And the drum beating and the rumble and squeak of iron upon timber as they ran out the guns. The shouted orders and the scamper of running feet. The scrambling up the ratlines and out along the yards. The heavier clumping tread of the marines in their red coats with their blancoed belts and their polished brass and their muskets. It all seemed so wrong somehow, so utterly alien, on this golden morning, and the two beautiful white ships in their sparkling pool of blue water and the snow upon the distant mountains. And the drum beating.

Nathan looked back at the approaching vessel, still cracking on apace. He could see the gunports now—a surprising number of them for a single-decker … He had a moment of deadly suspicion before he raised the glass and then he knew. She was a razee, or to give it the correct French term, a
vaisseau rasé,
a two-decker ship of the line “razeed down” to make a large, single-deck frigate. There were only three such ships in the British Navy—the
Anson,
the
Indefatigable
and the
Magnanime
—and to Nathan's certain knowledge none of them was serving in the Med. There was just a faint possibility she was a Spaniard or a Neapolitan but Nathan very much doubted it. She was a Frenchman; he would stake his shirt on it. He even thought he knew which one, for he knew every ship in the French fleet by heart: her name, her rating, her history, even, in many cases, the name of her captain. He tried to focus on the figure-head at her bows but she was still too distant. He counted the gun-ports again and nodded to himself in silent confirmation. She was the
Diadème
. No, that was in her previous life. The
Brutus,
she was called now, for she had been born again since the Revolution. She had been launched as a 74-gun ship of the line back in the fifties and seen service in the Seven Years War and the American War; if he was not much mistaken she had fought with De Grasse at the Battle of Chesapeake Bay which had delivered Yorktown to the combined armies of Washington and Lafayette, effectively sealing the fate of the colonies. But in 1792—Year 1 of the Revolution—she had been renamed the
Brutus,
for in Republican circles Brutus was an honourable man, and shortly after razeed to a 42-gun frigate. A brute of a frigate.

The one thing Nathan did not know was the calibre of those guns. As a ship of the line she had mounted twenty-eight 36-pounders on her lower gundeck with thirty 18-pounders and sixteen 8- pounders above. But now he was not sure. He cursed himself for his ignorance for it mattered a great deal. He wondered if any of his officers knew. He looked down to the quarterdeck and saw them staring up at him; those who were not staring out towards the distant frigate on their starboard quarter. But this was a waste of time; he was fooling himself and he knew it. Whatever the size of her guns and for all the ambiguity of his orders he could never persuade himself, much less their lordships, that a fight with a 42-gun razee could be contemplated, to use their own term, without compromising his mission.

For all the anguish it would cause him—and the respect it would lose him with his new officers and those of the crew that had not been with him when he had fought the
Virginie
—he had to run.

He glanced up and around him at the sail he was carrying and then out towards the enemy. He guessed they were fairly matched for speed but little by little she was closing upon them and he thought he knew why. She was sailing large with a quartering wind—perhaps three-and-a-half or a full four points off her quarter—almost certainly her best point of sailing, while the
Unicorn
was sailing parallel to the coast with the wind almost directly astern. If each ship held steady to its present course, the
Brutus
would soon be within firing range and being French she would fire into their rigging with a fair chance of bringing something vital down. Then she would close with them and with her heavier broadside she would have a clear advantage.

Nathan went down the ratlines considerably faster than he had climbed them. If he was to keep ahead of her, and well out of range, he had to alter course, to bring the wind further round on his own beam and run to the north-east. But there was a problem with that. He could see it written on the face of his new sailing master even as he reached the quarterdeck and gave the order and he could see it in his own mind's eye as clearly as if he were looking upon the chart. For five miles ahead, jutting out from the mountains, was the long, jagged spur of Capo Mele and the new course he had set would bring them running down upon it within the hour.

T
HE
UNICORN
HAD
SPREAD
HER
WINGS
.
With topmast and topgallant studding sails set on the fore, her spritsail stretching forward along that slender neck of a bowsprit, she might have been taken by some watcher upon the shore for a great white swan, Nathan thought, speeding across the still blue waters of the bay before taking flight to soar over the cliffs of Capo Mele.

If only. For every few minutes brought her another few hundred yards closer to disaster at the foot of that menacing spur: distinct now despite the haze, at a distance of about a mile and a half off their starboard bow. Nathan dragged his eyes away from the line of gently breaking surf and looked back toward their pursuer, at much the same distance in a diagonal line from their stern. That distance had hardly wavered since their change of course. For all his studdingsails and spritsails, for all the other little tricks in his book: lower lifts, braces and trusses hauled as taut as possible, topgallant clewlines set up tight, top-burtons and preventer lifts rigged and the mainsail weather-clewed to take full advantage of that quartering wind, the frigate could not lengthen the distance between them. The
Brutus
clung on grimly, neither gaining nor falling away. The same mythical watcher upon the shore would have imagined her driving the
Unicorn
before her into the deadly enclosure formed by that curving line of coast. Not so much a swan now as a farmyard goose to the slaughter.

But not so helpless. Nathan looked to his guns, the double line of 18-pounders, run out on each side, but manned only upon the starboard: double-crewed, nine men to each gun, and instructed for once to aim high, like a Frenchman, in hopes of bringing down a topmast or spar. He had drilled them at great expense in powder until they could load and fire in a little under two minutes. Not quite the three broadsides in five boasted of a crack frigate but not far short. Still, there was no denying that the
Brutus
was by far their superior in firepower. Even if she had sacrificed the heavy 36- pounders on her lower deck when she was razeed, Nathan was prepared to wager that she carried the same number of 18- pounders as she had during her previous incarnation as a third-rate, plus twelve 8- pounders as secondary armament on quarterdeck and forecastle and half as many carronades—or the mortars favoured by the French marine. A significant advantage, if she could fire them as fast. True, the French were not renowned for their rate of fire. Penned into harbour by the British blockade for months on end, they had precious little opportunity to practise with the long guns. How fast and accurately the
Brutus
could fire would depend on how long she had been out on her recent cruise and, of course, upon the quality of her crew. But for all the prejudices of his fellow captains—and among his own men, for he knew how they talked—Nathan saw no reason for the French to be any better or worse than British seamen, either at sailing the ship or firing the guns.

He caught the eye of Mr. Perry—a more phlegmatic being than either of the two sailing masters who had preceded him—but he sensed the anxiety behind that stoic front, for it was a difficult manoeuvre that Nathan intended and it only needed one serious mistake or a fouled rope or a lucky shot from the
Brutus
to confound them utterly.

Nathan felt a familiar recklessness come over him. “Ready, Mr. Perry ?”

He saw the answering glint in the older man's eye.

“Ready as I'll ever be, sir.”

Tully was biting his lip thoughtfully as he raised his eyes aloft. He would be worried about those studdingsails. He was a far better seaman than Nathan would ever be and less inclined to take risks, for he knew all the things that could go wrong, especially with this amount of canvas aloft. But then sometimes it was better
not
to know …

“Very well, Mr. Perry.”

“Port your helm!”

The two helmsmen spun the wheel and Nathan watched tensely as the bow came round to starboard; further, further, but still the frigate stretched her slender neck towards that executioner's block of a headland. He saw the waves breaking lazily over the rocks at the point, launching themselves playfully into the air and falling back.