“She repeats her first signals, sir,” Mr. Grace said, turning a worried eye to his captain, knowing that there was bad blood between Captain Blaylock and Lewrie already.
“We’ll explain, once in hailing distance,” Lewrie said, though feeling that he was in for a “cobbing,” no matter what he did.
Boom-boom-boom-b’boom. The drums began once more, now that the punishing guns, the ones that struck from nowhere, had ceased. A shot sounded, a thin and weak crack! from a lone musket. A desultory spatter of two more, a gust of gunfire, then the field guns began to bark anew. There was a massive shout, a challenging roar that caused a blizzard of musketry in reply, and then things fell silent again.
“Flag’s waving!” Wandsworth’s deputy, Scaiff, pointed out.
“Need us again, I expect. My my,” Wandsworth grieved wearily.
“Your midshipman fellow’s runnin’ off inland,” Scaiff said.
“Who? What?” Lewrie snapped, returning to the starboard side. “What the Devil? He’s takin’ a horse!”
“Into the woods. Curious,” Scaiff said, yawning. “That rum ye issue, Captain Lewrie? Could a poor soldier get a taste? I’m dry as dust.”
“Aye, go forrud and tell the Purser you want a tot,” Lewrie muttered, intent with his spyglass on the doings ashore, wondering why young Nicholas would go dashing off towards the trenchworks so suddenly.
“Water, sir?” Aspinall offered, coming onto the quarterdeck.
“God, yes, thankee,” Lewrie said, turning to accept a tall mug and drain half of it in one gulp.
“Fresh batch, sir. Good an’ cool from the orlop.”
“Quite fine, quite fine,” Lewrie answered, sighing with contentment, and relief. His mouth had been as dry as a private soldier’s, a man who’d been biting off cartridges all day. “Toulon’s hiding down below, I take it?”
“Down in the midships hold, sir. Like he always does. Poor ol’ puss, the guns scare him somethin’ pitiful,” Aspinall chuckled.
The sound of gunfire in the forest erupted again, louder this time, more sustained and urgent, the volleys of two-ranked soldiers on top of each other as fast as they could load, the artillery crashing a steady tolling up and down the lines.
And men were running down the short streets of the town to the docks, men in red coats bearing weapons, but bearing the corners of a series of blankets, too … jogging along as fast as they could, with wounded! Thirty or so sentries who had been guarding the diminishing piles of stores were massing, led by a sword-waving officer who looked very much like that Major James who had come aboard earlier, and were trotting double-time the other direction, into the forest.
Lewrie lifted his telescope to see better, and found a figure in white slop-trousers and a short midshipman’s coat, hatless, waving at him! It was Nicholas! And his right sleeve and hand were smeared with gore! He clung with his left hand to a side of a blanket which bore a wounded man, and tears could be seen coursing down his face in terror or grief.
“Andrews!” Lewrie roared for his cox’n. “Away my gig to shore! Mister Nicholas is coming back wounded. Hurry, man, hurry!”
“Awn de way, sah! Furfy, Sharp, you two bastids, ovah de side!”
Lewrie felt glued to the ocular of his spyglass, wishing for a stronger one, ruing his cheapness on his last shopping trip to London chandlers. Nicholas trotted—no, staggered!—closer to the end of the longest pier, four soldiers still bearing their burden—to which he clung with a whitefaced death grip—’til they reached the very end and laid it down.
Midshipman Nicholas sank to his knees beside the blanket, then lifted the man in it, taking the wounded fellow by the chin to try to shake him back to consciousness, pointing out towards their ship.
It was Midshipman Sevier … as pale as death!
“Row like the Devil, Andrews, they’re both wounded!” Lewrie bellowed, his innards churning to think that his decision might have gotten both lads maimed or killed.
“Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio te!”
The enemy’s chant seemed a cruel mockery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Boat’s comin’ alongside!”
“Pass word for the Surgeon Mister Shirley!” Lewrie shouted.
“Signallers are waving once more, Captain Lewrie,” Captain Wandsworth pointed out. “Hellish urgent-like? Do you have any cannister or grape stands remaining, I think it’s needed something desperate.”
“Very well …” Lewrie began.
“Excuse me, sir, but Halifax spells out. ‘Up Anchor’ and ‘Move.’”
“He can go bugger himself!” Lewrie snapped. “Second hoist for Halifax … make ‘request all your cannister and grape-shot.’ That’ll keep that pestiferous bastard busy, Mister Grace. Well? Run and send it!” Lewrie growled, noting Grace’s wide-eyed goggling of the stir by the entry-port, where Sevier and Nicholas were being hoisted aboard.
“Aye aye, sir,” Grace gulped, and dashed for his flag locker and halliards.
“Mister Foster? Break open the shot lockers and make up charges for the guns, quick as you can, and keep it coming ’til it’s completely gone,” Lewrie said, wanting to dash to the entry-port himself to see to Sevier and Nicholas. Things were coming too thick and fast to suit him, unlike the long minutes of an evolution at sea.
“Charge yer guns … shot yer guns …” a grizzled quarter-gunner was intoning to his weary crews, who had set their rum rations down on the quarterdeck, that priceless elixir of ease abandoned for a rare once, in the face of need. Other crewmen who had gone forward for their rum ration had gulped it down then returned to their posts, their prime moment of relaxation and jollity stolen by stern Duty.
Wandsworth and Scaiff fiddled and calculated, gazing heavenward and counting on their fingers, muttering and whispering to themselves before reaching a mutual decision. A quick trot down the deck to see to the elevation, and …
“By broadside … fire!”
The 6-pounder long guns and the stubby 24-pounder carronades lit off together, shuddering Proteus anew, refogging her in a reeking pall of powder smoke, and making everyone’s ears ring. Seconds later, the sound of musketry ashore rose in volume, crackling down the line of trenchworks like the advance of a brushfire, with the crisp sound of burning twigs. There was a roar of several light field pieces, then a howl of human voices raised in rage or fear or glee, the daft bray of a foxhunting horn to urge them on, just before another musket volley.
“Samboes broke the entrenchments,” Wandsworth found time to say, tugging at his ear again, “and I think we just saw ’em out. Where your midshipman was wounded, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Mister Langlie, you have the deck,” Lewrie said, going to the gangway where Sevier was being hoisted inboard.
“Easy with him, lads,” Mr. Shirley was saying, already clad in his “butcher’s apron” of light leather for surgery, his sleeves rolled to the elbows. The grey army-issue blanket was lowered to the deck, already half soaked in gore, and Mr. Shirley sadly shook his head for a moment as the loblolly boys transferred Sevier’s body to a carrying board, an eight-man mess table with rope straps to bind the patient to it, and other rope straps for lifting.
Shirley looked up at Lewrie and grimaced in sadness with another wee shake of his head. Sevier had been savaged by thrusts from bayonets or swords; the cloth and lace of his shirt, the flap of his white breeches were cut open, baring the hideous wounds beneath, cloth stained bright red over purpling puckers and slashes. His face was a new-paper white, his eyes unfocused, and his breath a faint, labouring wheeze, with small flecks of foamy blood on his lips.
“Mister Durant, Mister Hodson … see to Mister Nicholas, while I see Mister Sevier below,” Shirley said, getting to his feet and leading the loblolly boys and their burden to the gun-deck ladder.
“What happened, Mister Nicholas?” Lewrie asked the terrified boy, who stood and shuddered, all but blubbering, as blood dripped from his injured arm.
“S
-Samboes, sir,” Nicholas replied between chattering teeth, “Hundreds of ’em! Broke the line. They were in the trenchworks with knives and bayonets, killin’ our people left and right, and laughing fit to bust, sir! Jemmy, he … him and the Army signallers against a dozen, and him with just a pistol and his dirk! They got that far behind our lines, sir, before … I saw one of the signalmen running and shouting they were all being slaughtered, and I …”
What little Mister Nicholas needed, first of all, was a hug and a lap, Lewrie thought, but that was impossible; he was a “gentleman volunteer,” a future officer.
“I tried, sir, honest I did!” Nicholas wailed, fresh tears coursing down his cheeks, cutting clean runnels in the filth on his face as he shivered, trying to remain “manful” before the ship’s people. “But they were jabbin’ him and cuttin’ at him after he was down, before we got there, and then they came for me, and they were so big and horrid, sir, and if the soldiers hadn’t come … I lost my dirk, sir. I looked for Jemmy’s, too, but they took it ’fore they were run back across the trenchworks. I’m sorry, sir! I lost my dirk!”
A gentleman’s blade, be it inherited sword or humble dagger, was part of his honour; to Nicholas., he had failed miserably at saving his fellow midshipman and friend, had been bested and wounded when faced with face-to-face combat, and, to top it all, had lost his blade. Sure sign of failure, perhaps even a sign of cowardice, to drop it and run.
The 6-pounders and carronades bellowed again; Lewrie had to wait to speak ’til the echoing roar passed.
“No matter, Mister Nicholas,” he said, touching Nicholas on his left shoulder. “You went to his aid like a brave fellow, and helped the Army stop their charge after he rushed to yours. Then you brought him back aboard, so he could be among his shipmates. No shame in any of that.”
So he can most-like perish among his shipmates, Lewrie thought.
“Now, let the surgeon’s mates tend you,” Lewrie said, giving him another reassuring pat on the shoulder before returning to the quarterdeck. But he could hear Mr. Nicholas’s cries when they tried to peel his coat off, to cut his shirt sleeve away and lift the cloth from the wound; Nicholas sounded like one of his sons after skinning a knee, and nowhere near a stoic young “gentleman volunteer.”
“Ready way up there?” Wandsworth was shouting to the gunners on the foc’sle. “Ready, here? Fire!”
Midshipman Grace interrupted Lewrie’s gloomy thoughts. “Halifax has hoisted another signal, sir. It’s ‘Captain Repair on Board.’”
“We still fly ‘Unable’ and ‘Am Engaged,’ Mister Grace?” he asked, hands in the small of his back.
“Aye, sir.”
“Haul ’em down, then rehoist ’em in reply,” Lewrie said with a snarl. “He don’t like that, he can go fuck himself.”
“Uhm … aye, aye, sir!” Grace said, blushing and tittering.
By dusk, when the wagging signal flags could no longer be read and Proteus had shot away her last stand of grapeshot, her last cannister of musket balls, even the lot scavenged from pre-made loads for the 12-pounder great-guns, the ship fell silent.
Halifax had not responded to her call for shot, but had anchored about a cable’s distance away in deeper water, along with the merchant ships she had escorted into Mole Saint Nicholas.
Rather surprisingly, those hired ships had become beehives of activity, disembarking boatloads of soldiers who were quickly rowed to the beaches and quays, followed by heaping piles of supplies, ammunition, and field guns.
When the last shot had been fired, Lewrie called for his cox’n and boat to be rowed over to Halifax. Pointedly, he did not change to a clean uniform, nor scrub his face and hands; the greyness of his uniform from the gun smoke fog would speak for him.
“Excuse me, sir,” Mr. Shirley said, just before he could leave the quarterdeck for his gig, and a salute from the side-party. “That poor lad Sevier passed over, sir. And Mister Nicholas … the slash on his arm quite shattered it. We had to take it off, just below the shoulder, Captain.”
Lewrie blanched. “Nothing else to be done?”
“No use of it, now, sir,” Mr. Shirley replied, “and no feeling in it at all. Half-severed, already, and why he didn’t exanguinate on the dock before your boat fetched him is a wonder, Captain.”
“Very well, then, Mister Shirley,” Lewrie said with a mournful sigh. “You did your best for him … for them both. Thankee.”
“We were lucky with you, sir,” Shirley admitted. “Those boys, well … there’s only so much modern medicine may do, sorry to say.”
“Well, then …” Lewrie lamely said in answer, unconsciously massaging his left arm, and turning away.
“Damn you, Captain Lewrie! Damn you for blatant insubordination and arrogance!” Captain Blaylock howled, as soon as Lewrie had been let into his great-cabins under Halifax’s poop. “You frigate captains are all alike, damn your blood … swaggerin’ cock-a-hoops who think they hung the bloody moon! I will lay formal charges before Admiral Parker and see you court-martialed! I’ll see you broken, d’ye hear me?”
“That is your right, sir,” Lewrie wearily replied, prepared for a “cobbing” since mid-afternoon, and steeled beforehand for any abuse that the choleric Captain Blaylock had in his shot-lockers. “It will also be my right to point out to the court that I was unable to clear the mooring, since I was engaged in supporting the Army ashore. With testimony from the Royal Artillery officers aboard at the time, or the testimony of Brigadier Sir—”
“Blazing away at nothing!” Blaylock bellowed back. “Firing off blank charges, just to excuse your insolence! Firing blind!”
“Indirect fire, sir … lofting grape and cannister to harass the slave troops,” Lewrie pointed out.
“There’s no such bloody thing!”
“There is now, sir,” Lewrie responded, almost ready to chuckle in genuine insolence, too tired and sad to let Blaylock’s insults get to him. The only thing that irked was the presence of Halifax’s lieutenants, summoned aft to watch their captain take the hide off an upstart. Lewrie snuck a peek from the corners of his eyes at them; some of the six seemed to enjoy the show, though the much put-upon Duncan and others seemed ashamed of the spectacle, their eyes on the painted deck covering. Disputes between Post-Captains, personal or professional in nature— most especially taking another officer to task or upbraiding a midshipman, petty officer or mate—was not to be done in public. If there was no way to find privacy, it was to be done out of earshot, with no noticeable vitriol or raised voices.
Good officers, good captains don’t do it this way, Lewrie told himself; but Blaylock, well … says it all, don’t it?
“It’s impossible, damn your eyes!” Blaylock insisted.
“Then I suggest you ask of Captain Wandsworth, Royal Artillery, sir,” Lewrie coolly rejoined. “He’s rather proud of what we did, and is simply panting t’write a paper on it for the Royal Society. Oh, I dare say he’ll take all the credit for it, call it the Wandsworth System of Supporting Fires, but he needed Royal Navy guns to do it, sir.”
Lieutenant Duncan and three others stifled smirks of glee, even snorts of taboo laughter. There then came a rap on the door.
“Come!” Captain Blaylock snarled, and a wary-looking midshipman entered the great-cabins. “Well, what the Devil is it?”
“Excuse me, Captain sir, but Brigadier General Sir Harold Lamb has come aboard, and …” the boy managed to stutter.
“Well then, fetch him in, damn yer eyes!” Blaylock snapped.
The midshipman gulped, reddened, and dashed out of sight, coming back a long moment later to hold the door open while an Army officer and an aide-de-camp entered the great-cabins, ducking under the beams overhead, and almost managing not to knock their white wigs askew, or bang their noggins on the polished oak.
“Captain Blaylock?” the general officer in all the gilt lace and gimp enquired, fanning his sweaty face in the close warmth of the cabins.
“Sir Harold, sir … we
lcome aboard,” Blaylock said, turning as unctuous as anything and practically oozing from behind his desk to go seize the brigadier’s hand. “A glass of something cooling, hey? Well met, sir, well met. Our arrival was more than welcome, I’m bound.”
“And without notification, Captain,” General Lamb said. “Yes, I am a touch dry.”
Blaylock snapped his fingers at his steward, who sprang to the wine cabinet for glasses and claret.
“I’ve despatches from General Maitland for you, Sir Harold. He related to me, verbally, though”—Blaylock all but simpered to be “in the know” from the elevated Maitland’s own lips—“that your troops were to be re-enforced with the garrisons of Gonaives and Saint Marc. We picked them up on our way, d’ye see. The other small ports twixt here and there were to concentrate on Port-Au-Prince. From the sound of it ashore as we arrived, I got my convoy in just in the nick of time, haha!”
Sir Harold took a seat without being bade, opened wax seals upon his orders, and shifted under a coin-silver overhead lanthorn to read them quickly, reaching into his ornate coat for a pair of spectacles that he held close to the page like a quizzing glass. He looked up briefly as Blaylock’s steward placed a glass of wine on a small round table by his chair, nodded his thanks, then returned to his letters, a deep frown growing on his wrinkled face.
“That should be all, gentlemen, you may go,” Blaylock said to his lieutenants. “You too, Lewrie. I will send you a letter aboard in the morning,” he warned, turning pointedly frosty and stern.
“You’re Captain Lewrie?” Sir Harold brightened, lowering letter and specs and rising to his feet, dodging a deck beam at the last moment as he came to Lewrie, hand out. “Spoke to Wandsworth. God bless you, sir, you and your ship! Never seen the like in thirty years as a soldier! Without your good offices, I dare say my lines would be completely rolled up by now, and an entire regiment massacred!”
“’Twas a risky experiment, General,” Lewrie said, shaking hands with Lamb. “But with your Captain Wandsworth’s able and eager direction, him and his aide Lieutenant Scaiff, we thought it worth trying. Spur of the moment, all that?”
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