The French Admiral

PROLOGUE

T
he
French were out. Somewhere on the high seas, on their way to some deviltry in the Colonies, Admiral Comte de Grasse and as many as fourteen sail of the line were assembled. For the British, the Leeward Islands Squadron under Admiral Samuel Hood and the Saint Lucia group under Rear Admiral Francis Drake were already at sea in pursuit. Perhaps just over the horizon, the enemy could be found, and perhaps the British fleet was just hours away from one of those epic sea battles that would decide the fate of the Crown. Or, Midshipman Alan Lewrie thought sourly, we could fuck around out here 'til Doomsday.

There had been a concerted rush to get under way from Antigua, and for a while it had been exciting to see so many ships gathered together with one fell purpose, but after a few days the iron grip of naval routine had canceled out the thrill. Scouting frigates could find nothing of the enemy, and there were damned few frigates to go around to begin with.

Alan began to get the sneaking suspicion that their own fleet was ahead of the French. De Grasse had started from Martinique, south of their own bases in the Caribbean, which might have taken him longer, which was all to the good, if they were to counter any action with the French and the Rebels in combination, allowing them to get to the hinted scene of battle in the Chesapeake or Delaware bays first.

At noon sights, after almost, but not quite, finding a reasonable guess as to their position (and hurriedly fudging a more accurate fix from Avery's slate), Alan had a chance to examine the sea chart pinned to the traverse board by the wheel binnacle cabinet.

He picked up a pair of dividers and measured off a passage at slow speed inside the island chains, instead of taking the outside or windward route. There's a Frog base in Haiti, he thought, and there's the Dons with a fleet in Havana. What if this poxy French admiral stopped off for supplies or more ships? We've seen nothing in the Mona Passage or any other pass through the Bahamas. Only safe route for a fleet of fourteen sail and transports would be the old Bahama Passage, then up the coast of British Florida. Deep water for the most part, good offshore winds abeam most of the way, if not a soldier's breeze north of Savannah . . .

Alan realized with a small shock to his system that he was enjoying his speculations, which only confirmed his fears that he was beginning to fit into the Navy and gain a real interest in a career as a sea-officer. God, what a horrible fate that would be! he thought. Not that being in the Navy, at sea and thousands of miles from his usual haunts was not bad enough, and none of it his idea in the first place. He had been in uniform for four months shy of two years and lately had had to work at suppressing pride in his newfound skills, and in the mostly good repute he had created for himself as a young gentleman in training.

“Wool gathering?” Commander the Honorable Tobias Treghues asked him with a lofty sniff. If Alan disliked being a seaman more than cold boiled mutton, the captain of H.M.S.
Desperate
felt the same low regard for him.

“Wondering where the French were, sir,” Alan answered, straightening up and tossing the dividers down on the binnacle cabinet.

“How unlike you,” Treghues said, and strolled away to the windward rail for a pace before his midday meal.

Stap me, Alan thought sadly. It was bad enough before when he just thought me a rapist and a rake-hell. Now he's been addled by that French gunner with a rammer, he's turned Evangel on us. Probably start leaping about like a Welsh miner at a Wesley meeting next.

Alan sidled off to leeward to stand next to his compatriot Midshipman David Avery, a dark-haired, merry Cornish lad of sixteen, almost seventeen. He shrugged in answer to the unspoken question framed by Avery's raised eyebrows.

“Still hates you, eh?” Avery whispered with a wry grin.

“What else is new?” Alan said.

“Who wouldn't?” Avery shrugged.

“Damned good question,” Alan admitted with a soft laugh.

“Signal, sir,” Midshipman the Honorable Francis Forrester, their least favorite messmate, shouted from the stern rail. “Attend the flag, sir.”

“Mister Railsford,” Treghues bellowed. “Hands to the braces and bear up closer to the flag.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Desperate
wheeled about and beat up to windward, within hailing distance of Admiral Hood's flagship
Barfleur,
rounding up alongside to leeward in a flurry of spray. No one could fault her sail tending or shiphandling, for Treghues and his officers were as smart as paint for all the gloom aboard from Treghue's new mental state.

A gig flew across from
Barfleur,
and a flag lieutenant scrambled up the manropes and battens of the starboard side with a large envelope in his coat pocket. After a brief conference with Treghues, he was back over the side and flying back to his own ship.

“Mister Monk,” Treghues called for his sailing master, and that worthy made his appearance on the quarterdeck in his scruffy uniform. “Lay us on a course for Charleston, in the Carolinas. We have despatches for General Leslie.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Monk replied, shambling his way to the charts. “Here now, Quartermaster. Lay her due west fer right now. Hands ta the braces, smartly now. The flag's watchin'.”

“Charleston,” Avery said as they supervised their working parties for the mainmast braces. “We put in there once, Alan. Damned fun place, it was.”

“I remember it so as well,” Alan replied, almost rubbing his hands in glee. Yes, he had remembered Charleston well, too. It was full of refugees from up-country, run to the port by their rebel cousins. Cornwallis and his troops had been there, and with them had come a great flock of camp followers, traders, whores, and ladies without their husbands. When he had been on the despatch schooner
Parrot
he had had a wonderful run ashore in Charleston and didn't think things had changed much in the interim. The real problem, though, was going to be getting ashore at all. Treghues might not look kindly on giving him leave.

“Be in soundin's by tamorrer forenoon, sir,” Monk said, after he had paced off the distance from their noon position with dividers on his charts.

“Alan, did you realize that tomorrow shall be my birthday?” David told him. “And we are short of fresh meat. Now, if I talked nicely to the purser, he might find it in his heart to send me ashore with him . . . on King's business, of course!”

“And if you don't take me along with you, you're a dead man, David,” Alan warned him.

“Whyever should I do that?” David queried.

“'Cause I know where the likely whores and widows are,” Alan reminded him with a simper.

“You've missed your calling.” David smiled. “You'd make a devilish grand pimp.”

“You're not the first to think that,” Alan heartily agreed. “And it's still early days in my career, isn't it? Now get onto Mister Cheatham before he picks somebody else. Tell him we both volunteer.”

The next morning
Desperate
stood in toward Charleston, with the spires of the churches marking the safe passage as range marks. They had been painted black by the Rebel defenders in last year's siege, but if anything, they had stood out even more prominently than when painted white, so
Desperate
had no difficulty finding the channel. Alan was turned out in his best uniform, as was Avery, while Forrester and Carey were in their usual working rigs. A copy of de Barres'
Atlantic Neptune
was in Alan's hands, the sketch book of all major towns and headlands of the American coast. It had set him back seven guineas, but it had been worth it to show the sailing master and the others a keenness at the sea trade which he did not always exemplify. He tucked the book under his arm and plied his quadrant to measure the height of St. Michael's spire, which lay just above their bows. He took the height of Charleston Light to the stern and ascertained that they were in the right path for a safe passage over the bar between the forts. With some quick calculations on a slate, he could find a rough position on the small-scale harbor chart that Mister Monk had laid out on the traverse board, and it was pleasing to see that his guess was very close to Monk's quickly pencilled X.

Cottle, Commander Treghues's coxswain, came up on deck in his best blue jacket with shiny brass buttons, his red-and-white-striped loose slop trousers clean, and his feet encased in new cotton stockings and freshly blacked shoes with silver buckles. The boat crew gathered round him and Cottle eyed them keenly so their appearance would not shame their captain or the ship when they went alongside the pier to carry Treghues to meet the port authorities with letters and documents.

“Hawse bucklers clear, sir,” Toliver, one of the bosun's mates reported after coming aft from the fo'c's'le. “Best bower ready to drop, and a kedge ready in the stern.”

“Let her swing nigh stern-first ta the town afore ya let go that kedge, mind,” Monk said, almost as an afterthought. Charleston was a nasty harbor for all its size. On the way in, they had passed small islets and stretches of salt marsh where men were dredging for oysters only knee-deep in water, or loafing on sand spits that would be under water at high tide. “Safe across the bar now, sir,” Monk told Treghues.

As if in confirmation, a hail from the leadsman in the fore-mast chains called out a safe depth of six fathoms. His next cast was half a fathom more, and everyone could breathe easily.
Desperate
drew slightly less than three fathoms amidships when properly loaded and provisioned.

“Are we getting ashore?” Avery asked after he had come aft from his duties with the ship's boats.

“No one has told me anything of yet,” Alan said softly. “But if Treghues is going ashore, we shall be here for a while at least. Surely, we would not pass up the chance for firewood and water.”

“Lord, it's hot,” Avery complained, plucking at his broad-cloth coat and waistcoat. “And you can smell the fever in those marshes.”

“In daytime, and with a sea breeze, we have nothing to fear,” Alan told him. He had suffered a serious bout of Yellow Jack aboard the
Parrot,
and had picked up enough lore about tropical miasmas for a lifetime. “Our old sawbones assured us the feverish elements only rise at night, with the mists. Just pray the biting flies don't find us. Last time I was here, the wind was off the shore, and I thought I'd be eaten alive.”

“Maybe it's the flies cause fevers,” Avery said.

“Don't be a superstitious ass,” Alan said, only half in jest.

“Maggots are created in rotting meat, and I've not heard much good about maggots,” Avery countered. “Except for eating pustulence in wounds.”

“My God, but you're a cheerful creature this morning.” Alan exploded in a shuddery laugh.

“A little more attention to your duties there, young sirs,” Treghues said in passing, glaring at both of them evilly, with a lingering glance on Alan.

“Aye, aye, sir,” they answered dutifully.

“'Bout a mile off the wharf now, sir,” Monk said, straightening from his latest calculation with his sextant.

“Short enough row,” Treghues said, not seeing the glum expressions of his boat crew, who faced a long, hot pull ashore. “Take in tops'ls and round her up into the wind.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Desperate
came about under reduced sails. The best bower dropped into the harbor and raised a circle of muddied silt on the surface as it bit into the mud of the bottom. She paid back from the light wind with a backed tops'l until snubbed by tension on her anchor cable. The stern kedge-anchor was let go, and hands at the capstan took her back up toward her bower until she was held with equal grip by both anchors, bow pointed outward from the town for her eventual departure.

Even as she was making sternway to drop the kedge, Treghues's gig had been led around to the entry port, and Cottle had received his captain into her. Before the tops'l had been taken in aloft, their captain was well on his way ashore to deliver his messages and inquire about the whereabouts of the French.

“Bosun, lead the cutter round for the purser,” Lieutenant Railsford, the first officer (and only commissioned lieutenant) called. “Mister Cheatham, you'll mind my own wants, I trust?”

“Indeed I shall, Mister Railsford,” Cheatham said.

“And I believe you mentioned the need for two of the young gentlemen to assist you?” Railsford went on, looking at his younger charges, and noting how well turned out Avery and Lewrie were in comparison to the rat-scruffiness of little Carey or the porcine Forrester. “Can't let the image of
Desperate
down now, can we? Mister Lewrie, you shall take charge of the cutter and assist the purser ashore. And since I believe that today is your birthday, Mister Avery, you have my permission for a short spell of shore leave. Mister Lewrie may join you in your celebrations, but they had best be damned short, if you get my meaning?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” they both answered. The captain's clerk was asked to write out two leave tickets for them, giving them until the end of the first dogwatch around sundown in which to enjoy the pleasures of the town.