The wind still in the north, it couldn’t have been fairer for the long stretch across the Bay of Biscay to Spain and around to Gibraltar.
The far-off grey island was momentarily hidden by the white of a line-squall of rain, and when it reappeared it was appreciably further along as they passed it.
Since those days long past when, in Teazer, these were home waters, Kydd had always felt unease at passing through this foremost hunting ground for sea predators anywhere in the world. The sooner they made the open sea of the deeply indented Bay of Biscay the better he’d like it.
It was not to be.
With the craggy island abeam, a trap was sprung. From the sheltered lobster-claw-shaped inlet of Lampaul Bay sail was sighted emerging—and more, still more—on a direct course to intercept.
Kydd snatched Curzon’s telescope and steadied on the sight. Still some five miles away but in a perfect situation were at least two corvettes and a cloud of lesser craft, possibly privateers, and any number of the inshore vessels the French were employing in ever-increasing numbers to take the war to the British.
It was well conceived: the same northeasterly that was bearing the convoy southward was being used against it, for as it passed the island the crowding hunters would fall in astern of it—to windward, where they could harry the slower merchantmen at will.
And two corvettes: these were ship-rigged, like a frigate, and although smaller, a pair together could take on one, certainly of lighter register like L’Aurore. And while the smashing match was going on, the pack of smaller craft would overwhelm the few escorts and it would be a massacre.
“To quarters, Mr Curzon.”
It was plain what had happened: while the convoy was assembling in Portsmouth someone had carelessly mentioned its destination in a waterfront tavern and French agents had picked up on it, giving them plenty of time to mount their ambush.
Dillon’s face was flushed with excitement. “They’re not our boats, then, Sir Thomas?”
“No, sir, they’re not.”
“Then—”
Calloway interrupted. “From Weazel—‘Assume the weather station.’”
“Acknowledge.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
It was what he would have done, put the biggest ship between the enemy and the convoy. Lawson was thinking coolly. He, the two cutters and the schooner would stay with the merchantmen and rely on the frigate to deter.
Clinch and Willock came on deck in still-new cocked hats, each self-consciously fingering a dirk and watching Kydd gravely.
The winds were brisk and steady, the seas slight. There would be no escape in a weather change.
He took another sight: the two corvettes were standing on with all plain sail, and the faster of the lesser vessels were passing them, eager to be in the best position to take their pick of victims while the corvettes were engaged with L’Aurore.
“Sir, what will we do?” Dillon asked, in thrall.
“Do?” Kydd said sharply. “We fight! The convoy is much more important than we, sir.”
He checked himself. “This is a serious situation, Mr Dillon. You have a battle station and that is next to me. You’ll take notes of everything of importance as will assist later in writing my dispatch after any action with the enemy.”
“Yes, Sir Thomas.” The intensity of his concentration was touching.
“There’s no need to fret so. You’re not expected to bear arms or face the enemy directly, or even to give any orders. Just be sure to keep a clear head and be accurate in your observations. Nothing else, you see.”
To add point to his words he raised the glass again and calmly dictated the strength of the enemy. Dillon wrote furiously and wisely refrained from asking for explanations.
As if for the comfort of his presence, the two young midshipmen sidled up to their captain.
“Where’s your station at quarters?” he snapped.
“Well, we don’t really—”
“Go to the gunner in the forward magazine and tell him I’ve sent you.” The last thing he wanted now was a distraction.
Kydd had noticed that the corvettes were separating, revealing that they intended to take L’Aurore under fire from two sides. It was likely that, while they’d received word of the convoy and its slight escort, they had not been prepared for an accompanying frigate and were now on the defensive.
An idea was forming. “Mr Curzon—do attend on me for a moment.”
The officer approached and took off his hat.
“We’ve a good advantage, I’m persuaded.”
“Sir?”
“A fresh-fettled ship and a fine crew. I intend to make best use of this. I desire you to make known to the gun crews that what I have in mind requires they leave their guns for sail-handling and back to their guns several times. They’re to obey orders at the rush, even in peril of their lives, Mr Curzon. All depends on speed and instant execution of the manoeuvre. Is that clear?”
“Understood, sir.”
The enemy was coming on at speed. There were several substantial vessels ahead of the corvettes—two with the characteristic three lug-sails of a Brittany privateer and three brig-rigged, foaming out under a taut press of sail.
Now was the time to move.
“Haul to the wind, Mr Kendall. Hard as she can lie.”
L’Aurore curved about and laid her bowsprit precisely in the centre of the two corvettes now a quarter-mile apart, racing ahead as only a thoroughbred frigate could do.
The effect was instant. The corvettes luffed up into the wind, warily closing together then staying in position and waiting for the onrushing frigate to join battle.
Which was not what Kydd did. Instead he threw up the helm and bore down on the astonished privateer passing to starboard. Too late, its captain saw what had happened and tried to slew around but all this did was to slow the vessel and present an unmissable target.
In a pitiless broadside L’Aurore blasted the craft into splintered fragments that, after the smoke had cleared, simply littered the sea.
At the instant the guns had fired Kydd began tacking the frigate about and took up on a course at right angles to the enemy. The leading brig was smashed to flinders by the guns on the opposite broadside, to become more floating wreckage.
The corvettes came to their senses and hardened in for a thrust together at L’Aurore but Kydd had anticipated this and wore around. A luckless privateer lugger took the frigate’s carronades at close range and was out of the fight—and still with not a shot in anger against them.
Dillon, white-faced with shock at the blast of the guns and mad frenzy of seamen racing from tacks and braces to guns and back again, did his best to keep up. Kydd calmly interpreted the action for his noting down.
All the small craft had scrambled to escape the mayhem, putting back for the protection of the corvettes. The convoy had gained a respite; there would be no wholesale falling upon the helpless merchantmen until L’Aurore had been dealt with.
With Weazel shepherding them on, the convoy forged south, but now the enemy’s force was entirely to windward and behind them and, once regrouped, could run them down as it chose.
Once past L’Aurore.
Their force was barely diminished: what Kydd had achieved was a moral victory of sorts but it would not last. The enemy was now under no illusions and would plot his moves carefully and with malice.
His frigate was considerably outnumbered and, in a fair fight against these, could not be expected to survive—but, damn it, this was not going to be fair.
He had one priceless advantage: this was the combat of a crack frigate of the Royal Navy ranged against a ragtag swarm of privateers, not a disciplined fleet.
This translated to many things: gunnery, sail-handling and, above all, command. The senior corvette captain had no means to communicate with his “squadron” for they were not trained up to signal work, and Kydd’s direct assault on the smaller craft had left them in retreat. There would be no co-ordin
ated simultaneous onslaught, which would certainly have finished L’Aurore.
Now it was the two corvettes. How could he take them on together?
As he pondered, he caught a glimpse of Brice at the forward guns, standing with his feet on a carronade slide, his arms folded: the picture of calm and fearlessness. The man might be odd in his particulars but with his seamanship and coolness in action he could look to a welcome place in L’Aurore.
Kydd deliberated on the alternatives. He believed his frigate to be not only handier but faster so he could turn the tables if he was careful. The main thing was to avoid being trapped between the two.
He glanced back at the convoy. To his surprise it was shaping course inshore to France, not out into the anonymous expanse of ocean. Then he grinned in sudden understanding. A smart move by Lawson.
He knew what to do now.
“Put us about again.”
L’Aurore went around with a will and took up in a broad diagonal pass across the path of the oncoming corvettes.
The implication was stark: either they manoeuvred to avoid a raking broadside into their unresisting bows or they stood on into L’Aurore’s fury of shot.
They broke and fell back, firing as they did so.
It was long range and most of the balls fell short and skipped. Several punched holes in the frigate’s sails but Kydd had achieved what he needed to—delay to allow the convoy to escape.
He turned. “Why, are you hit, Mr Dillon?” he asked in concern. The man was on all fours.
“Sir—one came near me, is all,” he stuttered, and picked up his fallen notebook. His hand trembled as he noted the time of the enemy’s first salvo.
“Pay no mind to the fuss and noise. You’ve a job to do and it’s an important one.”
Dillon nodded grimly.
“Ready about!” Kydd ordered. They would retain their position criss-crossing for as long as it took to allow the convoy to get away. It was working—out of respect for the frigate the lesser breed were staying behind the corvettes and the ships were safe, even now well on their way to safety over the horizon.
But for how long? Kydd knew there was one course he would take in their position that would in a stroke checkmate his strategy. He could only hope that it would be later rather than earlier that they tumbled to it.
And he knew they had when, after an hour of exchange of fire, the gap between the two corvettes began widening.
Still to windward and bows on to L’Aurore they diverged steadily until they were more than a mile apart.
“Doesn’t look so good, sir,” Bowden said, watching them.
Kydd said nothing, hoping they would not take it further—but they did.
Sacrificing their superiority as a pair, they were now so widely apart that they presented Kydd with an insoluble conundrum: they were ready to make a strike—but separately. He could go after one but meanwhile the other would get past and lead the pack to fall on the convoy.
It was no use expecting to batter one into submission then return for the other—any captain worth his salt would bear away, leading him off on a chase while the carnage was being completed by the first.
So it was payback time; the last act.
The hero of Curaçao would be pointed out in the streets as the one who, in command of a famous frigate, had allowed inferior French warships to prevail over him and decimate a convoy under his protection. An outraged public would show no mercy.
There was little he could do now, but he would play it to the end.
Putting about once more, he was not committing to one or the other, but as they came up to pass him on either side he must choose and then it would be all but over.
They came on, under full sail and determined.
It was time.
“The starb’d one on this board, I think,” he said heavily.
But then salvation came. Lawson’s inspired tactic had paid off.
In a glorious vision that brought wild cheers of relief from the gun crews, first one, then another massive shape firmed out of the grey winter haze. In stately line ahead, the battleships of Cornwallis’s Brest blockade were proceeding on their occasions, not to be troubled by the convoy’s insignificance, and only the weather escorting frigates were detached to investigate.
It was all over: the French had turned tail and were fleeing for their lives.
L’Aurore crept northward over a calm, glittering sea, a long swell from the west languidly rolling in as it had not a year and a half ago when these waters had echoed and resounded with the madness and ferocity of the greatest sea battle of all time. The desolate sand-spit, with, further inland, a line of cliffs and a modest tower, was gravely pointed out to gaping new hands as the very Cape Trafalgar that had given it the name.
And not much more than twenty miles further on was the great Spanish port of Cádiz—and Collingwood’s fleet, which had a stranglehold on it.
They had left the convoy at Gibraltar, watered and stored, then turned north to join the blockade and were now raising the fleet, which lay arrogantly at anchor across the port entrance.
“Flag, sir. Ocean, ninety-eight, Vice Admiral the Right Honourable the Lord Collingwood, commander-in-chief Mediterranean fleet,” Curzon intoned formally, reading from the Pennant Book.
“Thank you. My barge, if you please.”
He would pay a call and receive the standing orders that would mark the solemn accession of L’Aurore to the Mediterranean fleet. He would as well make his first acquaintance with the friend of Nelson’s who had led the lee column into the enemy line as Kydd had watched from the deck of this very ship.
In full dress uniform, shyly conscious of the broad scarlet sash and glittering star of his knighthood, he mounted the side and came aboard through the carved and gilded entry-port.
The piping died away and there, past the side-party, was the admiral.
Kydd took off his cocked hat and bowed, careful to note the height of the deckhead as he straightened.
“Captain Thomas Kydd, L’Aurore frigate, my lord.”
“Do I not spy that it were rather ‘Sir Thomas’?” Collingwood said, with a twinkle, and held out his hand. “My, but you’ve no idea how good it is to see a new face! Come below for a restorative and tell me all about it.”
As they went into the day cabin, a dog ran up to him, leaping and snuffling joyfully. “Down, Bounce,” Collingwood said, in mock severity. “Where are your manners, sir?”
The cabin was the homeliest Kydd had ever seen in a man-of-war. Miniature portraits, knick-knacks and ornaments that could only have come from a woman’s hand—it was touching in a great admiral.
“Now, sir. You’ve come to join our little band?”
“As L’Aurore and I were here in October of the year five,” Kydd said quietly.
“Yes. Well, I’m still here, you see.”
It was difficult to credit but Collingwood had stayed faithfully at this post after the great victory of Trafalgar, doing his duty by the nation, and had not once set foot on land, while others had returned to bathe in the delirium of public adulation that had followed their release from the mortal fear of invasion.
His genial face was careworn and old. It was said that while he yearned for peace and retirement the government had been too fearful to let him go for want of any with his formidable skills as a diplomat and strategist.
“Flags will give you your fill of orders, signals and so forth, so let me tell you something of how the larger situation has changed our position here.”
The dog curled up under his chair while he gathered his thoughts.
“The main purpose of the Mediterranean fleet remains the same. To deny the French the Mediterranean. To that end we’ve a close blockade of Toulon and the same at Cartagena. But there’s complications as you’d expect of Boney.
“We’ve lost Naples but we must perforce keep Sicily or the eastern Med is denied us.
“In the west we have the Barbary Deys in Morocco and similar
to be polite to, else we lose our beef and water, but further east it’s much more troublesome. The Russians have ambitions to be a player upon the world stage and have thereby sadly affronted the Turks, who consider themselves to be the reigning power in the east. As they are our allies both, it makes for tiresome dealings.”
“My lord, what of Bonaparte’s decree? What is its effect in these waters? And you are speaking to one only recently returned from the Caribbean.”
“His grand Continental System? Then it has to be said that it’s a sore trial to our manufactories and traders in their northern markets but in these parts, while we suffer his ships to moulder in port, he cannot enforce it.”
He sighed and gave a sad smile. “Here we sit, Kydd, in the full knowledge that it is in our power to lose the war for England in a single day. Yet in this peril we are given less force by far than a year ago. And all the time we are commanded at a distance by a landlubber first lord and a parcel of ninnies in government who have no conception of sea power and expect me to act upon their vapourings of the moment.”
Kydd murmured something but Collingwood hadn’t finished. “At times I wake up from a dream where I’m a circus whip, who prowls up and down to keep the wild beasts at bay, armed with nothing but a goad and a fierce look. All it needs …”
He stopped, then brightened. “But let not my maunderings spoil the hour. You’ll stay to dinner? And you shall send for your officers. Are there any performers at all? We have a very passable theatre troupe of amateurs, who display their talents upon the slightest provocation …”
CHAPTER 4
“LORD AND LADY BARRADALE,” the master of ceremonies intoned.
A portly noble in crimson and gold with silk breeches and an old-fashioned wig brought his wife forward on his arm. He made an elegant leg to the Countess of Farndon and a polite bow to the dowager countess and the earl, while his wife sank down in a curtsy.
Cecilia bobbed with a smile. “It was so good of you to come. And in this tiresome weather.”
The viscountess was sharp-faced and wore no less than seven strings of pearls over her elaborate gown. She answered in cool tones, “Our pleasure to be here, Lady Farndon. I do hope you are settling in well. I find servants can be so trying at times, don’t you?”
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