by David Weber
"The battery burned two of the line, sir—a seventy-four and a sixty-eight," the midshipman went on, "and a third ran hard aground trying to wear ship in the channel. Two more came into Russel's range while working their way clear—one of them lost her mizzen—and the frigate was heavily damaged on her way out."
"That's excellent news!" Paul told the panting youngster. "The first lieutenant will detail fresh oarsmen to return you to Russel, where you will present my compliments to Captain Somers and Lieutenant Hastings and tell them they have earned both my admiration and my thanks, as have all of their officers and men."
"Aye, aye, sir!" The midshipman's smile seemed to split his face, and Paul waved for Gaither to take him in tow, then turned to gaze out towards the open sea once more.
He'd seen the French straggling back out past the capes, just as he'd seen the smoke of the burned vessels . . . and heard their magazines explode. Whatever else might happen, de Grasse had learned he would not take the Chesapeake cheaply. Yet the French also knew about the northern battery now. They wouldn't try that approach a second time—especially not if the wind backed around to the east.
No, if they come again, they'll try the south or the center—or both, he told himself, turning to watch the sun slide steadily down the western sky. And when they come, they'll come to fight, not simply to maneuver around us.
He gazed out over the water, hands clasped behind him as the setting sun turned the bay to blood, and sensed the buzz of excitement and pride which enveloped Torbay and all his other ships. They'd done well, and at small price—so far—and he wondered how many of them even began to suspect how that would change with the morrow.
This time he climbed the mainmast himself. He'd always had a good head for heights, but it had been years since he'd gone scampering to the tops himself, and he found himself breathing hard by the time he finally reached the topmast crosstrees.
A hundred and eighty feet, he thought, recalling the formula he'd learned so long ago as he glanced down at the deck, still wrapped in darkness below him. Eight-sevenths times the square root of the height above sea level in feet makes . . . fifteen miles' visibility? That was about right, and he hooked a leg around the trestle and raised his telescope.
His mouth tightened. The wind had, indeed, backed further around to the east. Now it blew almost due west, and it appeared de Grasse had made up his mind to use it. French warships and transports dotted the brightening sea as far as Paul could see, but what drew his attention like a lodestone was the double column of ships-of-the-line: sixteen of them in two unequal lines, heading straight into the bay on a following wind.
He studied them carefully, making himself accept the sight, then closed the glass with a snap and reached for a backstay. Perhaps it was bravado, or perhaps it was simply the awareness that a fall to his death had become the least of his worries, but he swung out from the crosstrees, wrapped his legs around the stay, and slid down it like some midshipman too young and foolish to recognize his own mortality.
He sensed his officers' astonishment as his feet thumped on the planking, though it was still too dark on deck to see their faces. His hands stung from the friction of his descent, and he scrubbed them on his breeches while his steward hurried up with his coat and sword. Then he turned to Lieutenant Gaither with an expression which—if Gaither could see it—would warn him to make no comments on the manner of his descent.
But it wasn't the lieutenant who commented.
"Did y'see that, boyos?" a voice called from the dimness of the ship's waist. "Just full o' high spirits and jollification 'e is!"
Divisional officers hissed in outrage, trying to identify the speaker. But lingering night shielded the culprit, and their failure to find him emboldened another.
"Aye! 'E's a dandy one, right enough! Three cheers fer the cap'n, lads!"
Paul opened his mouth, eyes flashing, but the first cheer rang out before he could say a word. He leaned on the quarterdeck rail, peering down at the indistinct shapes of gunners naked to the waist in the dew-wet dimness while their wild cheers surged about him like the sea, and all the while sixteen times their firepower sailed toward them through the dawn.
It ended finally, and he cleared his throat. He gazed down at them as the rising sun picked out individual faces at last, and then straightened slowly.
"Well!" he said. "I see this ship will never want for wind!" A rumble of laughter went up, and he smiled. But then he let his face sober and nodded towards the east.
"There's more than a dozen Frogs out there," he told them, "and most of 'em will be about our ears in the next hour." There was silence now, broken only by a voice repeating his words down the gratings to the lower gundeck. "It's going to be hot work, lads, but if we let them in, the army will be like rats in a trap. So we're not going to let them in, are we?"
For an instant he thought he'd gone too far, but then a rumbling roar answered him.
"No!" it cried, and he nodded.
"Very well, then. Stand to your guns, and be sure of this. This is a King's ship, and so long as she floats, those colors" —he pointed at the ensign fluttering above Torbay— "will fly above her!"
The two French lines forged past Cape Henry, and Paul watched their fore and main courses vanish as they reduced to fighting sail. The six ships of the shorter column passed as close to the cape as they dared, bound for Lynnhaven Roads in an obvious bid to sweep up and around the southern end of his line, but the other ten pressed straight up the channel between the Middle Ground and the Tail of the Horseshoe.
He paced slowly up and down his quarterdeck, watching them come, feeling the vise of tension squeeze slowly tighter on his outnumbered men. Torbay quivered as Gaither took up a little more tension on the spring, keeping her double-shotted broadside pointed directly at the leading Frenchman, and Paul frowned as he estimated the range.
Two thousand yards, he thought. Call it another twenty minutes.
He paused and turned his eyes further south, where the other French column was now coming abeam of Cape Henry.
Any time, now . . .
A brilliant eye winked from the still-shadowed western side of the cape, and the ball howled like a lost soul as it crossed the bow of the massive three-decker leading the French line. A white plume rose from the bay, over five hundred yards beyond her—which meant she was well within reach of Lieutenant Jansen's guns—and then a long, dull rumble swept over the water as two dozen thirty-two-pounders bellowed.
Screaming ironshot tore apart the water around the French ship, and Paul's hands clenched behind him as her foremast thundered down across her deck. She staggered as the foremast dragged her main topgallant mast after it, and a second and third salvo smashed into her even as she returned fire against the half-seen battery. Smoke curled up out of the wreckage as the heated shot went home, or perhaps a coil of tarred cordage or a fold of canvas had fallen across one of her own guns as it fired. It hardly mattered. What mattered was the sudden column of smoke, the tongues of flame . . . and the French squadron's shock.
Despite the distance, it almost seemed Paul could hear the crackling roar of the French ship's flaming agony, and Jansen shifted target. Smoke and long range made the second ship a difficult mark, but her captain was no longer thinking of difficulties the defenders might face. His squadron had lost two ships-of-the-line to fire the day before; now a third blazed before his eyes, and he altered course, swinging desperately north to clear the battery.
But in his effort to avoid the guns, he drove his ship bodily onto a mud bank. The impact whipped the mainmast out of her, and the entire line came apart. Choking smoke from the lead ship cut visibility, deadly sparks threatened anyone who drew too close with the same flaming death, and the second ship's grounding made bad worse. If one of them could run aground, then all of them could . . . and what if they did so where those deadly guns could pound them into fiery torches?
It was the result Paul had hoped for, though he'd never dared depend upon
it. But even as the southern prong of the French thrust recoiled, the northern column continued to close, and he studied his enemies almost calmly. Did they intend to attempt to pass right through his line? The width of the channel had forced him to anchor his ships far enough apart to make that feasible, but such close action was against the French tradition, and getting there would allow his ships to rake them mercilessly as they approached. On the other hand—
He shook himself and drew his sword, watching the range fall, and the entire ship shivered as her guns ran out on squealing trucks. Each gun held two roundshot—a devastating load which could not be wasted at anything but point-blank range, and he didn't even flinch as the lead ship's bow chasers fired. Iron hummed over the quarterdeck, and he felt the shock and heard the screams as a second shot thudded into Torbay's side and sent lethal hull splinters scything across her lower gundeck. Another salvo from the chasers, and a third. A fourth. The range was down to sixty yards, closing at a hundred feet per minute, and then, at last, his sword slashed the air.
"Fire!" Lieutenant Gaither screamed, and whistles shrilled and Torbay heaved like a terrified animal as her side erupted in thunder.
"That's the best I can do here, Captain," Doctor Lambert said pointedly as he tied the sling. The implication was plain, but Paul ignored it. A French Marine's musket ball had smashed his left forearm, and he feared it would have to come off. But for now the bleeding had mostly stopped, and he had no time for surgeons with three of Torbay's seven lieutenants dead and two more, including Gaither, wounded.
At least Lambert is a decent doctor—not a drunkard like too many of them, he told himself as he waved the man away. The doctor gave him an exasperated look, but he had more than enough to keep him occupied, and he took himself off with a final sniff.
Paul watched him go, then looked along the length of his beautiful, shattered ship. It wasn't like the French to force close action. They preferred to cripple an opponent's rigging with long-range fire, but these Frenchmen seemed not to have known that.
Darkness covered the carnage, but Paul knew what was out there. De Grasse's northern column had sailed straight into his fire. Some of its ships had closed to as little as fifty yards—one had actually passed between Torbay and Prince William before letting go her own anchor—and the furious cannonade had raged for over four hours, like a cyclone of iron bellowing through a stinking, blinding pall of powder smoke. At one point both of Torbay's broadsides had been simultaneously in action with no less than three French ships, and Paul doubted that all of the survivors of his line together could have mustered sufficient intact spars for a single ship.
But we held the bastards, he told himself, standing beside the stump of his ship's mizzen. It had gone over the side just as the surviving French finally retreated to lick their wounds, and he made himself look northward, despite a spasm of pain deeper than anything from his shattered arm, to where flames danced in the night beyond Prince William. HMS Serapis was still afloat, but it was a race now between inrushing water and the fire gnawing towards her magazine, and the boat crews plucking men from the bay looked like ferrymen on the seas of Hell against the glaring backdrop of her destruction.
But she would not go alone. Two French seventy-fours had settled in the main channel, one the victim of Torbay's double-shotted guns, and Paul bared his teeth at them. Their wrecks would do as much to block the channel as his own ships—probably more, given his command's atrocious casualties. Torbay had over three hundred dead and wounded out of a crew of six hundred. Neither the wounded's heart-breaking cries nor the mournful clank of her pumps ever stopped, and exhausted repair parties labored to clear away wreckage and plug shot holes. It was even odds whether or not she would be afloat to see the dawn, for she had been the most exposed of all his ships and suffered accordingly.
Prince William was almost as badly battered, and Captain Forest was dead. But his first lieutenant seemed a competent sort, and Triumph, despite heavy damage aloft, had suffered far less in her hull, while the ancient Panther had gotten off with the least damage of all. If he could only keep Torbay afloat, perhaps they could still—
"Sir! Captain! Look!"
The report was scarcely a proper one, but the acting second lieutenant who'd made it had been a fourteen-year-old midshipman that morning. Under the circumstances, Paul decided to overlook its irregularity—especially when he saw the French officer standing in the cutter with a white flag.
"Do you think they want to surrender, sir?" the youngster who'd blurted out the sighting report asked, and Paul surprised himself with a weary laugh.
"Go welcome him aboard, Mr. Christopher," he said gently, "and perhaps we'll see."
Christopher nodded and hurried off, and Paul did his best to straighten the tattered, blood- and smoke-stained coat draped over his shoulders. He would have sent his steward for a fresh one if any had survived the battle . . . and if his steward hadn't been dead.
The French lieutenant looked like a visitor from another world as he stepped onto Torbay's shattered deck. He came aft in his immaculate uniform, shoes catching on splinters, and enemy or no, he could not hide the shock behind his eyes as he saw the huge bloodstains on the deck, the dead and the heap of amputated limbs piled beside the main hatch for later disposal, the dismounted guns and shattered masts.
"Lieutenant de Vaisseau Joubert of the Ville de Paris," he introduced himself. His graceful, hat-flourishing bow would have done credit to Versailles, but Paul had lost his own hat to another French marksman sometime during the terrible afternoon, and he merely bobbed his head in a curt nod.
"Captain Sir John Paul," he replied. "How may I help you, Monsieur?"
"My admiral 'as sent me to request your surrender, Capitaine."
"Indeed?" Paul looked the young Frenchman up and down. Joubert returned his gaze levelly, then made a small gesture at the broken ship about them.
"You 'ave fought magnificently, Capitaine, but you cannot win. We need break through your defenses at only one point. Once we are be'ind you—" He shrugged delicately. "You 'ave cost us many ships, and you may cost us more. In the end, 'owever, you must lose. Surely you must see that you 'ave done all brave men can do."
"Not yet, Lieutenant," Paul said flatly, drawing himself to his full height, and his eyes glittered with the light of the dying Serapis.
"You will not surrender?" Joubert seemed unable to believe it, and Paul barked a laugh.
"Surrender? I have not yet begun to fight, Lieutenant! Go back to the Ville de Paris and inform your admiral that he will enter this bay only with the permission of the King's Navy!"
"I—" Joubert started, then stopped. "Very well, Capitaine," he said after a moment, his voice very quiet. "I will do as you—"
"Captain! Captain Paul!"
Excitement cracked young Christopher's shout into falsetto fragments, and Paul turned with a flash of anger at the undignified interruption. But the midshipman was capering by the shot-splintered rail and pointing across the tattered hammock nettings into the night.
"What's the meaning of—" the captain began, but his scathing rebuke died as he, too, heard the far-off rumble and strode to Christopher's side.
"See, sir?" the boy demanded, his voice almost pleading. "Do you see it, sir?"
"Yes, lad," Paul said quietly, good hand squeezing the youngster's shoulder as fresh, massive broadsides glared and flashed beyond the capes. My God, he thought. Hood not only believed me, he actually attacked at night! And he caught the Frogs just sitting there!
He watched the horizon for another moment, and then turned back to Joubert.
"I beg your pardon for the interruption, Lieutenant," he said, taking his hand from Christopher's shoulder to wave at the growing fury raging in the blackness of the open sea, "but I think perhaps you'd best return to your own ship now."
Joubert's mouth worked for several seconds, as if searching for words which no longer existed. Then he shook himself and forced his mind to function again.
> "Yes, Monsieur," he said, in a voice which was almost normal. "I . . . thank you for your courtesy, and bid you adieu."
"Adieu, Monsieur," Paul replied, and then stood watching the lieutenant and his boat disappear into the night.
Other voices had begun to shout—not just aboard Torbay, but on Prince William and Panther and Triumph as well—as what was happening registered, but Paul never turned away from the hammock nettings. He gripped them until his hand ached, listening to the thunder, watching the savage lightning, knowing men were screaming and cursing and dying out there in the dark. A night battle. The most confused and terrifying sort possible . . . and one which favored Hood's superbly trained ships' companies heavily.
And then the cheering began. It started aboard Prince William, and his heart twisted at how thin it sounded, how many voices were missing. But those which remained were fierce. Fierce with pride . . . and astonishment at their own survival. The cheers leapt from Prince William and Panther to Torbay and Triumph, and he knew the same bullthroated huzzahs were rising from Russel and Charon and the batteries. The deep, surging voices tore the night to pieces, shouting their triumph—his triumph—and he drew a deep, shuddering breath.