The French Admiral (33 page)

“Give us a line!” Alan called, but before anyone aboard that ship could respond, she was almost out of reach. There was one more flash of lightning that illuminated her stern. And there, in proud gilt letters below the transom windows of her captain's cabin, was the name
“Desperate.”

“You planned it this way, you sonofabitch!” Alan roared, quite beside himself. His ship was getting away, and he was not in her! They had been given permission to try, and the storm would be a great opportunity to blow past the guarding frigates if they were even able to remain on station in such a gale. There would be a spate of water over the shoals, and the tide had peaked and was now ebbing out into the bay. The night was black as a boot, and it would take an especially vigilant Frog lookout to even see her until she was close aboard. And she had most of her artillery to crush anyone who crossed her hawse as she flew on by, invulnerable to any answering broadside. “Forrester, you bastard, you're aboard, I know it! Why not us? Why?”

“Easy, Mister Lewrie, sir. Le's just 'ope she makes it.”

Yes, he thought. They'll think I'm raving if I keep on. But how calm do I have to be now? We're left in the quag up to our hats, and we'll end up in chains for the rest of the war.

“Ease your stroke, Coe,” Alan ordered after taking a few deep breaths. “No sense in killing ourselves now.”

“Er, Lewrie,” Governour Chiswick said, raising one foot out of the water sloshing in the boat, “it's getting a bit deep.”

“Christ!” Alan exclaimed. “We must have been stove in. Coe, we're leaking aft, I think.”

“'Ere, sir,” Coe said after kneeling down to feel the side timbers. “They's a plank busted.”

“Take a soldier's blanket and staunch it. You soldiers, start bailing again.”

And thank you very much, Captain Treghues, for kicking me up the arse in passing, Alan thought miserably. Christ, how much worse can this get, I wonder?

The wind finally began to drop in intensity, and the rain turned into a steady downpour. The lightning and thunder drifted off into the east toward the Atlantic, and the night became generally black once more. Alan peered into the face of his watch and could barely discern by the last lightning to the east that it was after four in the morning. The water was no longer set in rollers, but was beginning to flatten out under the press of rain, and the rudder no longer kicked like a mule.

“Coe, wake 'em up,” Alan ordered, reaching over to shake his senior man awake. “I think we can begin to row in this.”

Coe woke up, sniffed the wind, and dug a hand over the side to take a taste of the water. He spat it out quickly. “Real salty, Mister Lewrie.”

“We must be far down the river, almost in the bay,” Alan said. “More reason to get going quick as we can.”

There was a ration box of ship's biscuits in the barge, along with the barrico of water, and they all had a small breakfast and a sip of the water to wake them and give them a little strength for their labors. The soldiers had small flasks of corn whiskey to pass around generously, and that woke the hands up right smartly.

They rowed up to their drogue and pulled it in. The salvaged oars were most welcome, since three had been shattered by their collision with
Desperate
as she had blown past them. As they got a way on once more, the rain began to ease off to an irritating drizzle. The river was still in spate, though, from all the rain that had been dumped into it from the swollen streams inland, plus the tidal outflow, and they made painfully slow progress. There was just the first hint of grayness to the night when Alan next looked at his watch; half past five in the morning and dawn was expected at quarter past six.

“We shall have to hurry, or we shall be spotted by the French batteries on the right, where Mister Railsford said the marines were,” he urged, though what the point of their efforts was, he did not know. Yorktown would be abandoned by then, and the Rebels and French would be ready to probe the silent redoubts and ramparts. The troops ferried to the Gloucester side during the night would probably be breaking out now.

They would miss the boat; the army would charge into the few Rebels and French on the north side and would be well away by the time Alan and his crippled barge could make it, and they would land in a hornet's nest of aroused soldiery who had been robbed of final victory. Their reception did not bear thinking about. Neither did the fact that he was in a boat slowly sinking from under him, possessing only what he had on his back or in his pockets. He had left his valuables in his sea-chest once he had gotten back aboard ship and had not come equipped for a long stay. Alan had thought there would be time to get back to
Desperate
to be part of her attempt to break out. Soon, someone unworthy would be rifling his possessions, looting his gold and thinking him dead or captured while they sailed away, showing the French a clean pair of heels.

False dawn came, a gradual relieving of the gloom, and Alan took a good look around to try and discover where the hell they were. He had to admit that nothing looked familiar.

“Land, sir, ta larboard,” Coe said.

“Yes, but damned if I can remember anything like that,” Alan said under his breath. “Here, Mister Chiswick, you have a spyglass with you?”

“Yes,” Governour replied, rousing himself from a half-sleep to offer it.

“Coe, take the tiller. Mister Chiswick, do hold me upright for a piece, if you would. ”

Alan took a good look at the land to the south. It was below Yorktown, that was for sure. Further east, his wandering eye espied some islands, and he began to get a queasy feeling. He turned his body to peer south and south-west.

“That is Toe's Point,” he told them, sitting down on a thwart, and idly pointing to the landmark.

“Is that not near the mouth of the river?” Governour asked.

“Truly,” Alan replied. “And to starboard, that is Jenkins Neck, an arm of Guinea Neck between the York and the Severn. We were blown all the way out into the bay. We're at least five miles from Yorktown and the narrows. One, perhaps two hours at the rate we're moving.”

“The army has gone without us, then,” Governour sighed. “They're to attack at first light, and we'll never catch up with them now.”

“Don't soun' like it, sirs,” Coe stuck in, cupping an ear to hear sounds from the west. “They's still at it, 'ot an' 'eavy.”

The faint sound of cannon fire could barely be heard, but it was still going on, over one hundred guns pounding away like a far-off storm.

“Jaysus!” one of the further forward oarsmen spat. “We's makin' warter up 'ere, too, Mister Lewrie.”

“Stuff another blanket into it and hope for the best.”

“We're makin' pretty fast, now, Mister Lewrie,” Coe whispered to him as they sat together by the tiller bar. “Th' 'ole damn wale musta been smashed. Might not make five mile. An' even agin easy current, th' 'ands is 'bout played out.”

“Might consider putting in and resting first?”

“Could be, Mister Lewrie,” Coe agreed.

“Sail ho!” one of the oarsmen shouted, pointing aft. Alan turned to see a tops'l above the horizon. That would be a French frigate beating back to station in the mouth of the York, he decided. They might have an hour to get under cover before even a boat so low in the water could be seen.

The French and Rebels are around York, and the Frog ships are to the south and east. We'd best go into Jenkins Neck. Only foragers there.

“We'll put in on Jenkins Neck,” Alan announced to his weary crew. “We have to make repairs before going back to Yorktown. Ashore, we can dry out and get some rest. It will be dark before it's safe to be seen this far down the river, so you all can get some sleep.”

Alan put the tiller over and urged his men to ply their oars for one more effort. They were shivering cold and resembled a pack of drowned rats worn down to the bone by all that had been asked of them during the night, and by their fears. But they were seamen, which meant that they were resilient, and if allowed time to rest up and get some warm food down, could do it all over again the next night.

They steered in for a small, marshy island at the tip of the tiny peninsula known as Jenkins Neck. Alan kept trying to picture the chart that Mister Monk had shown them the night before. They had concentrated on the region of the narrows and the Gloucester Point area, but it had been fully open on the desk, and Alan had glanced at it. The east end of the Gloucester peninsula was all salt marshes and low sandspits, threaded with creeks and rills like a river delta. There was a low island, known as Hog Island, ahead of them. A little further upriver was a tiny spit of hard sand known as Sandy Point, a tiny cay connected by a tidal flat to Jenkins Neck; and to the western end of the neck, there was a large creek or inlet—two actually, one being grandly named Perrin River merely because it was a broader inlet than the other. Alan remembered seeing some tumbledown wharves along the shore; tobacco loading docks for the many shallow coastal traders who worked the Chesapeake during the growing seasons. He knew there would be less than three feet of water along that shore, even at high tide. They would have to be careful not to ground their barge on the mud until they had found some place sheltered in which to hide the boat and lay up while it was being repaired. There would be enough scrub pine in the thickets to cover them, and further inshore there might be something they could use to caulk or plug the holes in the barge's side.

“Mister Chiswick, give me your studied military opinion about something,” Alan requested of the weary infantryman, which brought Governour's head up from his bleak study. “We could land on this shore along the river, but there are wharves, as I remember, and we might not wish to draw much attention to ourselves. Or, we could head north about Hog Island here and land in the marshes or on the far side of Jenkins Neck. Which would you prefer?”

“Each wharf is connected to a plantation,” Governour told him. “That means Rebels. It might be better to hide in the marshes, but then I doubt if you could find what you need to repair the boat in those. I'd try the marshes, though, if we can find some high ground that is dry. My powder is soaked, and we could not fight off a pack of children now.”

“Very well, the marshes it is,” Alan agreed. “There is sure to be an inlet that leads to dry ground somewhere. And it's out of sight from those Frog ships in the river.”

Once more, he turned the tiller to larboard to steer the boat into the gap between Hog Island and another sandspit whose name he could not remember. There would be immediate cover behind them, at least.

“Boat, sir!” the bowman croaked.

“Hellfire and damnation!”

“Looks like it's stuck in the mud, sir.”

Lewrie rose to his feet to use Chiswick's telescope once more as the hands ceased rowing for a much-needed respite.

“Looks like one of our barges,” Alan said. “Canted over in the mud on yonder tidal flat, but there's no one about it.”

“Spare plank, sir.” Coe brightened. “Ready-cut an' shaped.”

“Right you are, Coe.” Alan laughed. “Men, we are about to take a prize. Doubt if an Admiralty Prize Court would give us tuppence for her, and no head money, but she's ours. Give way.”

They rowed up close enough to the stern of the abandoned barge so that a hand from up forward could splash into the water and wade over the mud flat to the barge. He clambered into her and poked around.

“One o' ours, she is!” he called back. “They's blood on her, sir.”

“God save us,” Coe muttered softly.

“Hoy!” a man called from the low sandspit beyond the abandoned boat, standing up from the sedge and sea oats and waving a musket. “Hoy!”

“That's a British sailor, by God!” Alan exclaimed. “Hoy yourself!”

“Mister Lewrie, sir?” the stranded seaman yelled back. “Mister Feather, 'tis one o' our boats come fer us!”

They turned about and stroked to shore on the sandspit, grounding the bow into the beach as more of the boat's party came down to the shore to greet them. Feather was there, his head now wrapped in a bandage, some North Carolina Volunteers half caked with sand and mud, and half a dozen sailors from
Desperate.
Alan was relieved to see Burgess Chiswick, too.

“What happened to you, Mister Feather?” Alan inquired after they had gotten their own boat firmly beached.

“When 'at gale blew up, I got lost, sir,” Feather admitted.

“So did we. We were blown all the way out into the bay.”

“We got ashore on Gloucester, but 'twas beyond the lines on the right, an' we tangled with them French marines. Nobody's firelocks wuz worth a shit, an' they like ta cut us ta pieces with bayonets an' such. We drove 'em off an' got away, but I lost 'alf a dozen men adoin' it, an' mebbe 'alf a these soljers. Only 'ad the five oars left, so we couldn't do nothin' 'bout gettin' back upriver, an' tried ta 'ide in 'ere, but we grounded when the tide started agoin' out,” Feather reported.