Man Of War

Rupert could make sail; and he willed, unspoken, for hands to pull even smarter for their wooden world – his wooden world.

He had waited a long age for this moment, for command of a first-rate; waited in fading expectation. Well, it were better come late than never. And so now he sat silent, perhaps even inscrutable (he could hope), in undress uniform beneath his boatcloak: closed double-breasted coat with fall-down collar, double epaulettes for his post seniority, with his India sword hanging short on his left side in a black-leather scabbard; and within a couple of cables’ length of another great milestone of his nautical life.

At their dinner at the United Service Club (when was it – all of six months ago?) he had told his old friend Major Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons that he was certain another command would not come: ‘There will be no more commissions. I shan’t get another ship. They’re being laid up as we speak in every creek between Yarmouth and the Isle of Wight. I shan’t even gain the yellow squadron. Certainly not now that Clarence is Lord High Admiral.’ For yes, he had been commodore of a flotilla that had overpowered Rangoon (he could not – nor ever would – claim it a great victory, but it had served), and he had subsequently helped the wretched armies of Bengal and Madras struggle up the Irawadi, eventually to subdue Ava and its bestial king; but it had seemed to bring him not a very great deal of reward. The prize-money had been next to nothing (the Burmans had no ships to speak of, and the land-booty had not amounted to much by the time its share came to the navy), and KCB did not change his place on the seniority list. Their lordships not so many months before had told him they doubted they could give him any further active command, and would he not consider having the hospital at Greenwich?

But having been, in words that his old friend might have used, ‘in the ditch’, he was up again and seeing the road cocked atop a good horse. The milestones would come in altogether quicker succession now.

And what a sight, indeed, was Rupert! Even with sail furled she was the picture of admiralty: yellow-sided, gunports black – the ‘Nelson chequer’; and the ports open, too, of which he much approved, letting fresh air circulate below deck; and the crew assembling for his boarding (he could hear the boatswain’s mates quite plainly). What could make a man more content than such a thing? He breathed to himself the noble words: gentlemen in England, now abed, will think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

There was one thing, of course, that could make a man thus content: the love, the companionship at least, of a good woman (he knew well enough that the love of the other sort of woman was all too easy to be had, and the contentment very transitory). And now he had that too, for in his pocket was Miss Hervey’s letter.

Why had he not asked for her hand years ago? That was his only regret. He felt a sudden and most unusual impulse: he wished Elizabeth Hervey were with him now. Yes, in this very place, at this very moment; to see his ship as he did, to appreciate her lines and her possibilities – their possibilities, captain and his lady. Oh, happy thought; happy, happy thought!

They closed astern of Rupert – Peto could make out her name on the counter quite clearly now – and he fancied how he might see Elizabeth’s face at the upper lights in years to come. When first he had gone to sea, a lady might have stood at the gallery rail, but galleries had fallen from fashion. A pity: he had always loved their airy seclusion. The Navy Board was now building ships with rounded sterns, and sternchasers on the upper decks (Admiral Codrington flew his flag in one of these, the Asia). And about time, too, was Peto’s opinion, for a stronger stern and a decent weight of shot to answer with made raking fire a lesser threat. But in his heart he was glad to have command of a three-decker of the old framing: she was much the finer looking (in truth, his own quarters would be the more commodious too); and he certainly had no intention of allowing any ship to cross his stern.

His cloak fell open, and in pulling it about himself again he noticed his cuff: Flowerdew would be darning it within the month. But that should be of no concern to him. He was not – never had been – a dressy man. If the officers and crew of His Majesty’s Ship Prince Rupert did not know of his character and capability then that was their lookout: no amount of gold braid could make up for reputation. His service with Admiral Hoste, his command of the frigate Nisus, his time as commodore of the frigate squadron in the Mediterranean, and lately his command of Liffey while commodore of the flotilla for the Burmese war – these things were warranty enough of his fitness for command of the Rupert.

Not that it was any business of the officers and crew: he, Sir Laughton Peto KCB, held his commission from the Lord High Admiral himself. These things were not to be questioned, on pain of flogging or the yard-arm. Except that he considered himself to be an enlightened captain, convinced that having a man do his bidding willingly meant that the man did it twice as well as he would if he were merely driven to it. Though, of course, it was one thing to have a crew follow willingly a captain who was everywhere, as he might be in a frigate, but quite another when his station was the quarterdeck, as it must be with a line-of-battle ship.Nisus had but one gun-deck; in action the captain might see all. Rupert had three, of which the two that hurled the greatest weight of shot were the lower ones, where the gun-crews worked in semi-darkness, and for whom in action the captain was as remote a figure as the Almighty Himself. The art of such a command, he knew full well, was in all that went before, so that the gun-crews had as perfect a fear of their captain’s wrath – and even better a desire for his love – as indeed they had for their heavenly maker. If that truly required the lash, he would not shrink from it, but at heart he was one with Hervey in this: more men were flattered into virtue than were bullied out of vice. Besides, in these days of peace, the press gang and assize men were no more: the crew were volunteers. The old ways had gone.

A huge blue ensign hung from the stern flagstaff (Sir Edward Codrington was Vice Admiral of the Blue), the onshore breeze merely ruffling its points. Peto could see the smaller Union flag billowing a little more from the jackstaff on the bowsprit: it would have been hoist as soon as the anchor was dropped, and would be hauled down again as they got under weigh, for it would otherwise foul the jibs and fore-staysails. The familiar and reassuring routine! Yes, it was good to be drawing near one of His Majesty’s warships again – the only three-decker in Codrington’s combined fleet: 120 guns – thirty-six more than the biggest line-of-battle ship the Turks could dispose, one whole deck of eighteen-pounders. The expense of taking a first-rate to sea was prodigious: their lordships at the Admiralty were always reluctant, therefore, to bring a three-decker out of the Ordinary. And soon his own pendant would be streaming from the main mast! He was most conscious of the investment in his charge.

‘I could not find better hands on the Post List,’ the Duke of Clarence had said when he told him he was to have her. The compliment had startled Peto, for he had been of the decided conviction that the new Lord High Admiral had no very high opinion of him (because, he had told his old friend Hervey, he himself had no very high opinion of Clarence); but, advanced as he was on the Post List, and having served – he trusted he did not flatter himself – with distinction and honours in the late war with Ava, why should he not have command of this wooden fortress, whose broadsides were the equal and more of Bonaparte’s grand battery at Waterloo?

‘Boat your oars!’ came the reedy voice of the young midshipman as the barge neared the gangway on Rupert’s starboard, lee, side, recalling Peto to the lonely state of captain of a first- rate.

Peto glanced at him, studied him for the first time – a mere boy still, not yet sixteen perhaps, but confident in his words of command and boat handling. He had blond curls and fine features – so different from the Norfolk lad of fourteen that he himself had been as midshipman in the early years of the ‘never-ending war’. He had never possessed such looks, as would delight fellow officers and females alike or earn the seaman’s habitual esteem of the patrician. Big-boned he was: ‘hardy-handsome’ his mother had called him, which was not handsome at all in her reckoning (or so he had supposed). But Elizabeth Hervey had not rejected him. No; not at all. Indeed he thought that Miss Hervey had once actually made eyes at him – in Rome, many years ago. Oh, how he wished he had recognized that look (if look indeed it had been – preposterous notion!).

He snapped to. Belay the thought! For he could hear the boatswain’s call.

In Rupert’s lee the water merely lapped at the towering wooden walls. With oars now vertical the midshipman steered the barge deftly to the side, and Peto stepped confidently onto the lowered gangway as yet she ran in. He would have been content to scramble up the ladder to the entry port on the middle deck, as many a time he had, for he fancied himself as agile still as when he had been a midshipman; but he was pleased nevertheless to come aboard this way, with less chance of missing a footing or losing his hat in a sudden