The King l-4

by Dewey Lambdin

  "Excuse me, sir, Mister Choate's compliments, captain, and the hands are at Quarters," Lewrie reported, leaning through the folds of canvas that served as a light trap for one betraying lantern that swayed and winked coin-silver bright over the chart table.

  "Any sign of his lights, Mister Lewrie?" Ayscough asked.

  "None, sir."

  "He's sneaking along to trail us like a foot-pad in a London fog," Twigg sniffed. "All the more sign he's out there. An innocent ship would be burning her running lights."

  Evidently, Twigg and Ayscough had shared the same doubts Burgess had expressed earlier as to the identity of their dogged pursuer.

  "As I was saying," Brainard continued, marching a brass divider across the ocean chart slowly, punching a small pin-hole in the paper and turning to protractor and rule. "Do we come about to our original course in… ahhumm… five minutes, say, and we'll be astern of him. He should be dead ahead, or fine on the larboard bow. I say five minutes, so we do not overrun his track in the dark."

  "Very well," Ayscough grunted, satisfied as much as he was going to be until he could throw rocks at La Malouine and hear them go chunk. "Six after ten. Mister Lewrie, let me see your watch? Ah, with mine. My respects to the first officer, and he is to lay the ship back on our original course of sou'sou'east half south in… four minutes."

  "Aye, sir," Alan replied, stumbling out of the chart space to fumble his way to the passageway that led forward to the quarterdeck. He relayed his message to Choate.

  "Now how the hell do I know when four minutes have passed?" Choate griped. Even the compass binnacle candle had been extinguished now, just in case. "Night black as a Moor's arse…"

  "I hadn't thought about that, sir," Alan had to admit. "Perhaps if you prised the glass cover off your watch, sir? Read it by feel?"

  "Not my watch, Mister Lewrie. My wife gave it me."

  "My father gave me mine, sir," Alan stated.

  "Mister Lewrie," Choate coaxed. " Tis for the King!"

  "Excuse me, sir, I'll go aft into the passageway. Perhaps I'll find a glim there, sir."

  Damned if he'd ruin a prize watch for anyone!

  They were saved by Ayscough and the others coming on deck and issuing the instruction to come about. Ropes slithered and hissed through blocks. Sheaves squealed in those blocks loud as opera stars. Sails rustled and boomed, and the hull groaned loud as a storm as she adjusted to a new angle of heel, resettling her timbers in complaint.

  There was nothing to see. And damned little light from the occluded stars to see by. The sliver of moon was not enough light to help pick out a man on deck were he dressed all in white.

  "Keep close watch astern," Ayscough warned. "Just in case."

  But there was nothing there, either. The only sign of motion on the sea were the taffrail lanterns in the cutter's stern, far out ahead of them, and those almost on the rough edge of the horizon, so low were they to the water, and so far off by now after their triangular diversion. It took a sharp eye to make out that there were two and not one, foreshortened together as they were.

  "Well, damme," Ayscough muttered after half an hour had passed. "Where is that bastard? Not hide nor hair of him. Can't even smell him. Anyone see phosphorescence from his wake ahead? No? Damme!"

  "Has to be ahead of us," Twigg insisted.

  "Might have reefed for the night, same as us," Choate opined. "Still, even at the four knots we were doing before we turned, we'd at least be abeam of them. He'd have slowed to keep his interval."

  "Or," Ayscough wondered aloud, "Sicard would have dashed on ahead. The cutter's lights are closer together than our taffrail posts by eighteen feet, and lower to the water. He might have cracked on more sail to catch up. Mister Choate, hands aloft. Lay out and let fall the tops'Is to the second reef. Loose t'gallants to the first reef."

  "Aye, sir. Bosun, no pipes. Topmen of the watch lay aloft!"

  "There, sir!" Hogue almost screamed from the larboard gangway ladder. "Something went between us and the cutter's lights! Two points off the larboard bows, sir!"

  "Avast, Mister Choate. Quartermaster, put your helm down. One point closer to the wind. Make her head sou'sou'east," Ayscough barked. "Hands to the braces."

  "Aye, sir," the quartermaster replied, spinning his spokes on the huge double wheel slowly. "Helm down a point. Sou'sou'east. Wind large on the larboard quarter, sir."

  "Thus, quartermaster. Steady as she goes."

  "Aye aye, sir. Sou'sou'east, thus," the man intoned.

  Maddeningly, after that brief, tantalizing glimpse, there was still nothing to be seen. Another half an hour passed. They allowed the hands at Quarters to stand easy, or lay down to nap on the bare decks. They rotated the lookouts to allow fresher eyes to peer into the almost Stygian blackness, searching for their foe.

  Another half-hour passed.

  "There!" Percival rasped in a harsh whisper. "Hear it?"

  Very faint, almost like a fantasy, there came a chiming.

  "Six bells o' the evening watch," Ayscough agreed. "Damme, for us to be able to hear that, he has to be up to windward of us. And not too far to windward, at that!"

  Hogue with his incredibly sharp eyes was back from larboard, tugging on the captain's sleeve, and pointing to their left, over the larboard side. The captain stood behind Hogue, letting his arm be a pointer. Ayscough sucked in a quick breath, then let it out in a sigh of contentment. "Ayyye!" he whispered.

  There was something out there. Something a little more solid than the spectral shadows that had played at the edge of their vision for the last hour, the kind that are seen but not seen, apprehended and then lost to sight the harder one peered for them. This one did not go away.

  "Helm down another half a point, quartermaster. Handsomely does it," Ayscough ordered.

  "Aye, sir," the senior quartermaster agreed, grunting as he put his weight to the spokes, and the steering tackle ropes on the wheel barrel groaned softly. Three, four spokes of larboard helm, and Telesto leaned a bit as the wind came larger on her left beam.

  "Yes!" Alan muttered. "Sir, a light!"

  It wasn't much. A tiny, insubstantial afterthought of a light. Not so much the light itself, but the outer glow it threw, like the glow of a seaport under the horizon reflected on clouds.

  "One… two…" Ayscough counted. "Yes, one at his binnacle, one forrud, that'd be by his fo'c'sle belfry. Damme, look at that!"

  A smoky brown square appeared, barely discernible from black, behind the second glimmer, an almost butcher-paper brown.

  "Captain's or wardroom quarter-gallery, sir," Alan supplied. 'They've some canvas screens or curtains over the windows, but there's a lantern behind."

  "Aye." Ayscough was almost panting with excitement. "If he…" Ayscough held up his hands, calculating angles and distance. Left hand by the brownish hint of illumination, right hand and index finger aimed at the foremost glow like a gun. "Two points off the larboard bow, and I make the range to be two cables. We've got him! Mister Choate, wake the hands at Quarters. I intend to rake him in passing with the starboard battery. Boot him right up the arse. Then wear ship and give him the larboard battery from close aboard. If we take him by surprise he'll fall right down to us. To hell with the wind gauge! He'll not be expecting us to fight from leeward."

  Alan dashed down below to the lower gun deck as midshipmen and ship's corporals passed their messages. He found Hoolahan, his Irish gunner, resting on a jute-bound bale of cloth bolts, silk bolts that were worth more money than his entire county back home. Owen, the senior quarter-gunner, was napping with his back leant against a carline post that supported the upper deck, his feet propped up on a crate of tableware worth a duke's ransom.

  "Stand by, men. We've spotted him. Starboard battery first, right up his stern, then larboard guns at twenty paces."

  They could hear gunports being drawn open overhead, and the heavy, dull rumble of gun-trucks as the eighteen-pounders were drawn foot by foot to emerge from the opened ports. They unpe
gged and opened their own. Cool night air, damp and salty, entered, making them all tremble with chill. With anticipation, and a little fear, too.

  "Ah, yes," Alan said, sticking his head out a port. Once one spotted La Malouine, it was hard to believe that she could ever have been hidden by the night. There was the wash and greenish phosphor glow of her wake. The faintest reflection of that phosphorescence on her lower hull at the waterline, and those betraying glimmers of belfry and binnacle lanterns. "Can you mark her, Owen?"

  "Uhmm… might need a set of younger eyes, sir. Here, Hoolahan, you could poach a bunny at midnight."

  "Why, so oi kin, sor!" Hoolahan grinned, ever the cheerful one. "Jus' don't let 'im be loik t' last lot. Barely got the deck clean."

  "Just look, don't prose on, boy," Owen groaned.

  "Aye, sor. Mebbe cable, cable 'un t'half now, Mister Owen."

  Telesto leaned to starboard more as she went up to windward. Gunners removed tompions, spun the elevating screws to compensate for the heel of the ship.

  Greased slides whispered as the short, brutal thirty-two-pounder carronades were run out. Iron wheels creaked as the lay of the barrels was corrected. "Oi kin smell 'er now, sor. Gahh, bloody Frog stink!" "As you bear!" a voice shouted. "Fire!"

  It crossed Lewrie's mind that this ship had better indeed be La Malouine, and not some parsimonious merchantman that begrudged even a ha'porth of whale-oil for lanterns.

  The starboard twelve-pounder chase gun barked as the forecastle ranged even with the strange ship's stern, sending a hellish finger of pink-and-coral flame into the night, fuzee-flashing just how near they were to their target, and how large she bulked. There were not a hundred yards between them! Then the larger, deeper-throated eighteen-pounders spoke, loud as thunderclaps from a lightning bolt's near miss. Shot after shot as each barrel came even with the foe, more pink-and-coral flames, more red-and-amber sparks of half-spent gunpowder. Clouds of foul-smelling smoke wafted downwind, wreathing about the other ship.

  "Ready… cock your locks… as you bear… fire!" Lewrie intoned. The forward-most carronade belched with a fiery eructation, whipping backward on its greased slide quick enough to shriek wood on wood, and set the grease smoking. Most satisfying deep bangs of guns going off, followed immediately by the crash of heavy iron hitting timbers, the moaning wail of oak and teak as scantlings were shattered, and the thonk of balls ranging down the entire undefended length of the hull inside their target. Shattering tableware and vases, ripping precious cargo of wallpaper, silks, teas apart in aromatic clouds. Ripping men apart as they hung close-packed as sausages in a butcher's window in their hammocks. Killing men with the air of their passage without making a mark upon them. Breaking at last into savage iron shards among a sleet-storm of broken beams and frames, which in those enclosed spaces below decks would whirl and maim as ruthlessly as irate, razor-tipped sparrows.

  "Now, ready the larboard battery!" Lewrie yelled as the last of their carronades had recoiled inward. Ports slammed open, making space for the wide-mouthed barrels to be run out. "Hull the bastards when I give the word, Owen."

  "Aye, sir," Owen replied around the stem of his pipe. "Now, gun-captains, lowest elevation, an' wait for the down-roll! Wads atop your ball, rammer-men! Don't dribble the damn things out now!"

  The ship creaked ominously as she slewed about. Cargo made dry rustling sounds as crates and bundles shifted slightly against restraining ropes and baffle-boards. The helm was put over so quickly Telesto churned the sea to a green-white froth of phosphor and foam, being over-steered so that she would slow down and not run her jib-boom and sprit into the stern of the enemy. She went wide off the wind as her deck-hands strained to loose sail and haul the yards around to gain speed, no longer working slack with the sea but beginning to oppose its will with her own desire for a faster pace.

  Then she was brought back up to the wind a couple of points, to steady on a parallel course to the stranger, to steady her own decks for a surer gun-platform.

  "Half a cable!" Lewrie estimated, leaning out one of the ports alongside the cold iron barrel of a carronade. The larboard chase-gun banged, and he ducked back inboard quickly. "Wait for it!"

  Eighteen-pounders roared out their challenge, lighting the sea amber and bright red between the two ships, giving him short snatches in which to see the other ship. It was La Malouine! He'd stared at her long enough for seven months to recognize every tar stain!

  "Cock your locks… stand by… on the down-roll… together… Fire!"

  All four larboard carronades took light as one. There was some spectacular noise that had everyone's ears ringing, a brilliant burst of light worthy of a lightning strike, fading from bright yellow to a dull burgundy, and a wave of burnt powder rushed back in the ports as bitter as rotten eggs. With the wind fine on their larboard quarter once again, most of it blew away past the bows, but enough was blown back onto the lower gun deck to be-fog them and set them all wheezing.

  Damme to hell, but I love artillery, Alan exulted silently! The power, the noise, even the stink of 'em! And what they can do.

  "Yes, by God!" he crowed, leaning out the port once more. In the after-flash of the last eighteen-pounder, he could see large ragged rents in La Malouine's lower hull, one right on the waterline that sucked and blew spumes of foam as the waves rushed past the hole, the other three higher up in her chain-wale. They'd nailed her 'twixt wind and water, shattering her main-mast's starboard chains, that complicated array of dead-eyes, shroud-tensioners, heavy horizontal timber through which the stays for the lower mast threaded and terminated.

  "Reload!"

  La Malouine was not as asleep as they had thought. Her side lit up in flashes as well, her twelve-pounder cannon returning fire, but not as organized as the ship-killing broadside they'd just delivered. Here a forward gun, there a piece in her wardroom aft, then two guns from her waist together.

  "Musta kept 'alf their hands at Quarters t' fire that quickly, sir," Owen guessed. Usually it took ten minutes for even a Royal Navy vessel to clear decks, load and run out their batteries. "Mighta been plannin' on doin' the same for us this night."

  "There's a biter bit, boi God!" Hoolahan whooped.

  Then the gun-captains were standing back from priming their carronades, fists in the air while their excess hands tailed on the tackles to haul the guns up to the port-sills once more. The upper deck guns began to howl again, and it was time for another crushing broadside.

  Five, six times, they fired-about ten minutes of battle at the hottest pace the crews could sustain for a short time. Slowly, the return fire from La Malouine slacked off. She was not built to take such punishment. She was a merchant ship, with wider-spaced timbers and lighter scantlings of perhaps no more than six inches thickness. Strong enough to protect her in storms, against rocks and shoals, and to stiffen her when she was laden with cargo, but not enough to guard her vitals when heavy iron was flying. Even the toughest oak or teak gives way when hit with eighteen pounds of metal at twelve hundred feet per second at such short range.

  Telesto had been built to bear twenty-four-pounders on her lower deck, twelve- or eighteen-pounders on her upper deck, and her sides were ten to twelve inches of seasoned English oak laid over much heavier and thicker framing spaced closer together. She had been laid down for warfare. Some of La Malouine's twelve-pound balls hurt her, even so, but she was built to take much heavier battering and live for hours in the line of battle.

  La Malouine had drifted down closer to her, as Captain Ayscough had predicted she would. Perhaps her helmsmen had been scythed away by the quarterdeck twelve-pounders, the two-pounder swivel-guns, and the muskets of Chiswick's sepoys. Perhaps her crew had been so decimated that no one could tend her braces, or be spared from the gun battery to go aloft and loose more sail. Now the range was almost hull-to-hull, and when the carronades erupted, shattered wood came flying in the ports at once, making more hazard for Lewrie's crews than anything that the French had done yet.

 
"Mister Lewrie!" one of their midshipmen yelled from the after companion-way. "Close your ports, secure your guns, and come on deck for the boarding party, please sir!"

  "Aye aye."

  They gained the upper deck, dug into the open weapons tubs at the base.of the main-mast and fetched cutlasses and pistols. This time, Alan had his own pistols: the small pair he'd purchased long ago in Portsmouth when he first kitted out as a midshipman, and a brace of dragoon pistols he'd carried away from Yorktown. He checked the primings and stuffed them into the Hindoo cummerbund he still wore, drew his sword, and led his party to the larboard gangways where Chiswick's troops were still firing away with their muskets.

  "Grapnels, bosun!" Choate was yelling. "Form up, lads! Stand ready! Lower the boarding nettings. Now, away boarders!"

  With a concerted howl, they were up and over their own bulwarks, leaping onto La Malouine's bulwarks across the gap created by the tumble-home of the two hulls. There was an irregular volley of pistol and musket fire as the French met them. Men shrieked and clawed at sudden hurts, lost their footing or their handholds and fell into the narrow tide-race between the ships to be crushed to death as the hulls ground and bumped together every half-minute or so. Pike-heads stabbed up at them, stopping leapers in mid-air. One sailor screamed as sharp iron found his belly, his weight dragging the shaft of the pike down atop the bulwark. The wielder must have been a strong man, for he held the sailor there, kicking wildly and vomiting blood and half-digested rations before he slipped off and fell howling between die hulls.

  Lewrie leaped, banging one knee on the ship's side, getting one foot on the Frenchman's bulwark, and a precious handhold on a loose stay that felt like it was half shot-through and ready to come free at any second. He had a brief glimpse downward at the bloody water foaming between La Malouine and Telesto, saw a man's head crushed as flat as a frying pan, an imploring arm and hand waving madly at him as another drowned below the surface, trapped by untold tons.

  He hauled hard on the stay to throw himself forward out of danger, and stumbled to his knees to the deck. Ignoring the pain in his knee, he rose up and started swinging his sword for his life! A man tumbled into him from behind, knocking him flat once more. Then there was a volley of shots that cleared the deck around him for a moment, allowing him to get to his feet.