King, Ship, and Sword

Lt. Spendlove leaned over the chart to where Lewrie's finger rested, seaward of the passes but South of the Chandeleurs, windward of Breton Island and the Bay Ronde.

'There by first light tomorrow, Mister Spendlove,' Lewrie said, feeling his excitement rising. 'I think we've got 'em!'

'Uhm… beg pardon, sir, but… how do we inform Modeste and Cockerel?' Spendlove asked, delighted, wolfishly excited himself, but a bit mystified. 'Once it's full dark, none of the night signals will be able to convey any sort of message.'

'We go tell him, Mister Spendlove!' Lewrie crowed. 'We barge up to him, invite ourselves to supper, and tell him! After all, where he is steering, the course we must steer to meet up with him, and a course t'place us where we need t'be, is pretty-much the same!'

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Do you imagine, sir, that the reason the French sailed North-about the islands is a result of navigational error?' Lt. Westcott mused in a low mutter as they stood by the starboard bulwarks, near the beginning of the sail-tending gangway, with their telescopes extended as dawn began to break.

'We know they're cunny-thumbed and cack-handed the first days they manage t'get out t'sea, but… that cack-handed?' Lewrie gawped.

'Thirty miles at the most off their intended landfall after the passage from Cape Franзois… about thirteen hundred miles, all told, would be acceptable to most mariners, if their chronometers were out by a few seconds,' Westcott speculated. 'Or they ran into a contrary slant of wind for a day or so, and their Dead Reckoning was off by just a tick.'

'Just so long as they manage t'find their way back down to us, I could give a bigger damn,' Lewrie said in a soft growl, teeth bared in a whimsical smile. He lowered his glass and looked about the decks. HMS Reliant, all their ships, were darkened, their taffrail lanthorns extinguished, with only tiny glims burning by the sand-glasses at the forecastle belfry for a ship's boy to determine the half hours to ring the watch bells, and a hooded one in the binnacle to illuminate the compass for the helmsmen, Sailing Master, and Officer of the Watch.

They were all at Quarters, rousing the crews at the end of the Middle Watch at 4 a.m. and omitting the deck- scrubbing with holystones or dragged 'bears,' or the rigging of the wash-deck pumps. Hammocks had been stowed in the stanchions down the tops of the bulwarks on either beam, rolled snug to pass through the ring measures and used as protection from small-arms fire and splinters. The hands had been fed early, then summoned to Quarters a little after 5 a.m., and the galley fires had been staunched.

There had been time for Lewrie to sponge off with a pint of water and some soap, to shave, then dress in clean underclothes, with silk shirt and stockings. In hopes of what the day would bring, he and his officers and mids were dressed in their best uniforms, with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides.

Chain slings were rigged aloft on the yards to keep them from crashing down if shot away; anti-boarding nets were laid out down both sides, ready to be hoisted; gun-port lids creaked open and softly came thumping back with the easy roll of the frigate as she crept along under 'all plain sail,' with the main course at two reefs, ready for hauling up clear of catching fire from the discharges of their own cannon.

And men stood swaying by their pieces, gun-tools in their hands. Powder monkeys had the first cartridges in their leather carriers as they knelt, facing the guns down the centreline. Lt. Simcock's Marines were fully kitted out in red and scarlet, white breeches and knee-high black denim spatterdashes, white cross-belts and black leather accoutrements, standing down either gangway behind the bulwarks and hammock nettings, waiting. Below, in the waist, aft in Lewrie's great-cabins, tiny red battle lanthorns glowed, guardedly out of sight from out-board, from a foe's sight. The slow-match coiled round the water tubs between those guns had not yet been lit; if the flintlock strikers failed to ignite or broke a flint or spring, the fuse could light the feather quills in the touch-holes, sparking off the fine-mealed priming powder.

'We'll be silouetted against the dawn, I suppose,' Lt. Westcott said on, rocking on the balls of his booted feet.

'Good odds,' Lewrie agreed, grunting. 'No helpin' it. Pray the Frog lookouts are blind, or late in bein' posted aloft, 'stead of the decks. Gives us five minutes more t'close em?'

'They go about, we'll just chase them,' Westcott said, sighing as he lifted his telescope again to peer ahead off the starboard bows.

Lewrie looked up, but could not quite see the long, lazy whipping of the commissioning pendant. The wind was scant that morning, a touch cool on the skin from the starboard quarter; they were angled enough off the winds to be able to feel the wind, for once. He turned and peered aft at Modeste. She was a large, dark shadow, as wide and bluff as a baleful barn, her grey, weathered sails eerily rustling to the wind's vagaries, equally dark against the pre-dawn gloom. She was only a little over a cable's distance astern, yet Lewrie had to recall what she looked like bows-on, with little more than the faint mustachio of foam under her forefoot, that creamed to either side of her bows, to positively mark her place.

Damme, is she… fuzzy? Lewrie thought, pinching the bridge of his nose and rubbing his eyes as false dawn only slightly began to grey the horizon astern, revealing charcoal-sketch impressions of the ships aft of Reliant. Are my eyes goin'? he wondered; No, its mist! Mine arse on a bandbox, of all the shitten luck!

The false dawn sketched his own decks as he looked forward, gave slightly more detail of artillery, sailors, sails, rigging, and masts-all misted with a thin pre-dawn fog!

'Land Ho!' a lookout shouted down. 'Island on th' starb'd side! Two point off th' starb'd bows! Five mile off!'

'The Sou'west tip of the last Chandeleur,' Lewrie growled as he went to the Sailing Master's chart. 'Be-fogged, though, we're closer than five miles, if he can see it. Three miles, more-like, sir?'

'It appears to be a thin fog, sir,' Mr. Caldwell, the Sailing Master, cautiously pointed out, using dividers to measure possible distances, then lean closer and peer at the depth notations. 'Still in deep water, sir, do we hold to this course.'

'Mist or fog, however thin, though,' Lt. Westcott fretted near them, fingers flexing on the hilt of his scabbarded sword. 'We could miss them in it, even so, sir.'

'Should've remembered,' Lewrie muttered, turning away to pace to the forward edge of the quarterdeck. He chid himself for forgetting that the coasts hereabouts were so low-lying and marshy, the summers as humid as Canton, Calcutta, or the Ivory Coast of Africa, and a cooler sea air just naturally bred fogs and mists.

'Deck, there!' the lookout shouted once more, just as the first hints of true dawn and the first colours could be ascertained. 'Ships! Four ships, hull-up… fine on th' starb'd bows!'

'Mister Grainger!' Lewrie bellowed over his shoulder as he lifted his telescope to peer out-board, a sense of relief, of success, beginning to fill him. 'Hoist to Modeste… 'Enemy In Sight'!'

'Aye aye, sir!' the fifteen-year-old piped back.

Four Bells chimed from the foc's'le belfry; 6 a.m. and it was true dawn at last; close enough to the exact time for sunrise noted in the ephemeris. Grey murk retreated Westward as brightness surged up from the East. Coastal waters went from black to steely grey, then to dark blue with flecks of white. There were thin clouds and the first pale smears of blue skies. There was the mist, of course, a pearlescence to the West, closer to the shore, where it would be thicker.

'Next hoist to Modeste, Mister Grainger,' Lewrie ordered as he returned to the helm. 'Make it 'Four Ships, Fine On Starboard Bows.''

'Aye, sir.'

'Tip of the last o' the Chandeleurs here,' Lewrie eagerly said, jabbing at the chart. 'We're about here, and the French are… there! Do we bear off a point or two to larboard, and we'll have them on our starboard beams, bows-