cost.
But he said simply, “We’ll dish ’em up, sir. One way or the other.”
Some muskets and a few swivels crackled from the leading vessels, their puny challenge blanketed by the roar of Styx ’s first broadside.
Neale cupped his hands. “Mr Pickthorn! Shorten sail! Get the royals and t’gan’s’ls off her!” He watched as the studding-sail booms were hauled bodily inboard to their yards, men calling to one another as guns crashed out and recoiled below them, and a few musket balls and enemy canister scythed wickedly between the shrouds.
Bolitho said, “Mr Browne. Make to Phalarope. Engage the enemy.”
There was still time. With Styx riding astride the channel to part and scatter the enemy’s neat columns, Phalarope’s massive armament of carronades would demolish the van and centre and give them room to beat clear and join Rapid to seaward. But Phalarope was already making another signal.
Midshipman Kilburne shouted in between the explosions from each battery, “Repeated from Rapid, sir! Estimate three enemy sail to the nor’-west.” His lips moved painfully as the gun below the quarterdeck rail crashed inboard on its tackles, its crew already darting around it with fresh powder and shot. He continued, “Estimate one ship of the line.”
Allday’s palm rasped over his jaw. “Is that all?”
As if to add to the torment, the masthead lookout yelled, “Deck there! Land on th’ starboard bow!”
Bundy nodded, his eyes like stones. The Ile d’Yeu. Like the lower jaw of a great trap.
Pickthorn dropped his speaking trumpet as his topmen came swarming down the ratlines again. “Phalarope’s shortening sail, sir.”
Bolitho glanced up at Styx’s last hoist of flags. His order to Captain Emes to close with the enemy formation and engage them.
He heard Browne snap angrily, “Has she not seen the signal, Mr Kilburne?”
Kilburne lowered his glass only to reply. “She has acknowledged it, sir.”
Browne looked at Bolitho, his face white with disbelief. “Acknowledged!”
Canister screamed over the quarterdeck and punched the hammock nettings like invisible fists.
A marine dropped to his knees, blood pouring from his face, as two of his comrades dragged him to safety. Their first casualty.
A blazing lugger, ungainly and out of command, with flames darting from weapon ports like red tongues, passed dangerously down the larboard side, where the boatswain and his men waited with water buckets and axes to quench any outbreak of fire in the tarred rigging and vulnerable canvas.
Neale said flatly, “Phalarope is not responding, sir.”
“Signal Phalarope to make more sail.” Bolitho felt some of the men watching him, still unwilling or unable to believe what was happening.
“She’s acknowledged, sir.”
It was almost impossible to think with guns firing and the decks filled with choking smoke.
Bolitho looked at Neale. If he broke off the action now and abandoned the enemy, they could come about and with luck fight clear. If not, Styx could not hope to destroy more than a handful of vessels, and only then at the cost of her own people.
He stared at the other frigate as she fell further and further astern, until his eyes and mind throbbed with pain and anger.
Browne had been right from the beginning. Now there was no chance left, and it was certainly not worth losing a whole ship and her company.
He cleared his throat and said, “Discontinue the action, Captain Neale. Bring her about. It is finished.”
Neale stared at him, his face filled with dismay.
“But, sir, we can still hit them! Single-handed if we must!”
The masthead lookout’s voice shattered the sudden silence even as the guns ceased firing.
“Deck there! Three sail in sight to the nor’-west.”
Bolitho felt as if the whole ship had been stricken. No one moved, and some hands on the forecastle who had cheered the last order, believing it to be the signal of their victory, now peered aft like old men.
Perhaps the lookouts, good though they were, had been distracted by the oncoming mass of small vessels, and then the menace of larger ships hull-up on the horizon, but whatever the reason, they did not see the real danger until it was already upon them.
It fell to one of Neale’s leadsmen as he took up his station in the chains as Styx had headed towards the same shallow channel to scream, “Wreck! Dead ahead!”
Bolitho gripped the rail and watched as the men near him broke from their trance and stampeded to obey the cry to shorten sail still further, while others strained at the braces to haul round the yards and change tack.
It was possibly one of the very craft they had sunk the previous day, drifting waterlogged with wind and tide until it found its destroyer. Or it might have been an older wreck, some stubborn survivor from the chain of reefs and sandbars which guarded the Loire ’s approaches like sentinels.
The shock when it came was not sudden. It seemed unending as the frigate drove on and over the hulk, her frames shaking, until with the crashing roar of an avalanche the main and fore masts thundered down across the forecastle and into the sea. Great coils of trailing shrouds and splintered spars followed, while men shrieked and cursed as they were smashed underneath or dragged bodily over the side by the tendrils of runaway rigging.
Only the mizzen remained standing, Bolitho’s flag still flapping above the destruction and death as if to mark the place for all time. Then as the wreck tore free from Styx ’s keel and giant air bubbles exploded obscenely on either beam, it too swayed and then plunged headlong to the gun-deck.
Neale yelled, “Mr Pickthorn!” Then he faltered, aware of the blood on his hand which had run down from his scalp, and of his loyal first lieutenant who had been cut in half by one of the broken shrouds as it had ripped over him with the whole weight of the topmast stretching it like a wire.
He saw Bolitho as Allday aided him to his feet and gasped, “She’s done for!”
Then he swayed and would have fallen but for Bundy and one of the midshipmen.
Bolitho said harshly, “Clear the lower decks. Get as many wounded from the wreckage as you can.” He heard the growl of water surging through the hull, the squeal of trucks as a gun broke free and careered across the deck. “Mr Kilburne, muster all available hands and launch what boats have survived. Mr Browne, stay with the captain.”
Men were lurching out of the piles of fallen debris, confused, frightened, and some half mad as they ran blindly to the gangways.
A few marines tried to restore order, and Bolitho saw the third lieutenant, probably the only surviving one, pushed aside, his arm broken and useless, as he attempted to restrain them.
The deck gave another shudder, and Bolitho saw water seeping through some gunports as the hull tilted still further, dragged down by the great burden of wreckage alongside.
Allday shouted, “The quarter-boat is being warped round, sir.” He looked dangerously calm, and his cutlass was in his fist.
Bundy seized his chronometer and sextant, but found time to report, “I’ve got some ’ands lashing a raft together, sir.”
Bolitho barely heard him. He was staring over the broad stretch of water with its freedom somehow symbolized by the white-capped waves which stretched towards the horizon and the oncoming pyramid of sails.
Then he saw Phalarope, stern on as she braced her yards hard round, her shadow leaning over the creaming water while she went about, her gilded bird pointing away from him, away from the enemy.
Allday said brokenly, “God damn him! God damn his cowardly soul!”
A boat appeared at the tilting gangway, and another was being pulled down the side, the boatswain and a burly gunner’s mate hauling wounded and drowning men from the water and dropping them on the bottom boards like sodden bales.
Neale opened his eyes and asked huskily, “Are they safe?” He seemed to see Bolitho through the blood on his face. “The people?”
Bolitho nodded. “As many as possible, so rest easy.”
He looked at the widening array of makeshift rafts, floating spars and casks to which the survivors clung and waited for a miracle. Many more floundered in the sea itself, but few sailors could swim, and soon many of them
