The Invasion Year

The barge returned, Lt. Johns and McCloud came upon deck, and the boat crew led her aft for towing. Long minutes passed. As a half-hour slowly ticked by, Lt. Johns and McCloud caught the fidgets, too, coughing and ahumming and now and then putting their heads together with MacTavish for urgent whispered conversations.

Lewrie looked at his own watch. If MacTavish was right, their torpedo would explode in five minutes. He lifted his telescope again, looking for the device, but could not find it any longer. That black-painted upper hemisphere hid it from sight most effectively, even with a slight chop and bright sunlight shining off the white-glittering wave tops; the damned thing should have had a ring of revealing foam around it. Unless it had sunk, of course, Lewrie thought.

“Ehm, sirs…,” Fusee’s Midshipman piped up, coughing into his fist for attention. “Sirs? Ahem? That trading brig coming out from the river. Should we warn her off, or something?”

Lewrie wasn’t the only one who raised a telescope, or scrambled for one. Sure enough, a small two-masted merchantman was rounding the point east of Bradwell Waterside and standing out to sea, sails trimmed to broad- reach the Nor’easterly breezes.

“Could she be anywhere near your torpedo, Mister MacTavish?” Lt. Johns fretted aloud.

“What was the rate of the tide, Mister McCloud?” Lewrie asked the artificer. “In half an hour, could it have…?”

“Nae muir than four or five knots, I judged eet, sae…,” McCloud tried to shrug off.

“Pencil and paper!” MacTavish cried.

“My slate, sir?” the Midshipman offered.

“Think we should warn her off?” Lewrie suggested.

“Warn her, aye, sir!” Lt. Johns hurriedly agreed.

“How?” Lewrie further asked. “You have signal rockets?”

“We could fire a gun!” Johns barked, turning to order his small crew to man one of Fusee’s puny 6-pounders.

“And what’ll they make o’ that?” Lewrie snapped.

“I… don’t know, sir!” Lt. Johns replied, stunned to inaction.

“Five knots’ drift for half an hour, that’s two knots’ progress… on a course roughly Northwest…,” MacTavish was mumbling half to himself, a stub of chalk squeaking loudly on the Midshipman’s borrowed slate. He paused to raise an arm to where he judged the torpedo first had been released, his other arm to mark a rough course of drift; then he fumbled to trade slate and chalk for his telescope once more. “Well, damme, I think… yes, it’ll be wide of the mark. Sure to be wide of the mark.”

Once clear of the shoals, the little merchant brig hardened up a point or two to the winds to sail on a beam reach, angling further out to sea, as if to pass well to windward of the anchored bomb and frigate, without a clue or a care in the world.

“Safe as sae meeny houses,” McCloud predicted, his thumbs stuck in the pockets of his waist-coat. “We’ll miss her by a mile or-”

BOOM!

A gigantic column of spray and foam liberally mixed with dark clouds of exploded gunpowder sprang up from the sea… tall enough to tower over the brig’s mast-head trucks, between her and the shore.

“Oh shit,” Lewrie breathed.

Hope her owner has insurance, he further thought.

“One half-hour to the minute, sirs,” the Midshipman meekly said.

“My God!” from MacTavish.

“Weel, hmm,” from McCloud.

A shiver in the sea from the explosion was transmitted to Fusee to rattle her blocks, up through her hull to the tiny quarterdeck, to make the oak planks shudder for a second or two.

“What have we done? Dear Lord, what have we done?” Mr. MacTavish was almost whimpering, about ready to tear his hair out by the roots.

“Weel, eet deed wirk, sir, sae…,” McCloud tried to comfort him.

Lewrie took another long look. The merchant brig had hardened up to a close-reach; it was the wind pressing her sails that made her heel over more steeply, not the blast of the torpedo. She sailed off to their right-hand side, revealing that titanic column of spray and foam that was collapsing upon itself like a failing geyser, at least a mile inshore of the brig, but closer to the mouth of the Colne river than the centre of Mersea Island, as MacTavish had planned.

“That’ll put the wind up him,” Lewrie commented sarcastically. “Perhaps the whole coast. Mister MacTavish, did you or Admiralty warn the locals of your trials?”

“Well, of course not, Captain Lewrie!” MacTavish snapped back. “They are to be secret!”

“Well, it don’t look too secret, now,” Lewrie told him with a wry grin as he lifted his telescope once more. What fishing smacks that had been out off the coast were haring shoreward. Signal rockets were soaring aloft from Clackton-on-Sea, and a semaphore tower’s arms were whirling madly, the large black balls at their ends passing on a message to somewhere most urgently.

They were a bit too far offshore to see or hear the alarm their torpedo’s explosion had caused, but Lewrie could only imagine they had stirred up a hornet’s nest; militia drums would be rattling, mustering bugles would be ta- rahing, and the womenfolk would be dashing about in a dither, sure that the mysterious blast had been a fiendish French device, sure sign of imminent invasion!

“Good Lord, sir, do you imagine that the locals might think our torpedo was a…?” Lt. Johns gasped, aghast at the implications.

“I’m going back aboard Reliant, Mister Johns,” Lewrie told him, wishing he could wash his hands of the entire endeavour, that minute. “I think the best action on our part would be to slink away… very quietly and quickly, and practice saying’, ‘Who, me?’ ”

“And declare my torpedoes a failure, sir?” McTavish said with a snort; now that the brig had escaped all harm, he was back on his high horse.

“It did work, sir,” Lewrie rejoined, “But I don’t think more trials on our coast are a good idea. You wish to try them in the conditions they’ll face if accepted? Better we go mystify and frighten the French, in a real Channel tide-race.”

“Well, right, then… in the Channel, yes,” MacTavish relented. “Yes, it did work, didn’t it?” he declared, beginning to strut a bit in pride of his invention. “Boulogne, perhaps. The harbour where they’re marshalling their forces.”

“Uhm, perhaps someplace less well-defended, first,” Lewrie said. “Let me think of something. For now, Mister Johns, get under way and follow me at two cables’ distance. We’re off for France.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Lt. Johns enthused, all but licking his chops.

And get as far away from the results of our handiwork as we can! Lewrie thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Are you quite sure this is a good idea, sir?” Lt. Westcott had to ask one more time, just before Lewrie departed the ship. “I could go in your place.”

“Our people are still leery of the damned things, sir,” Lewrie replied, patting himself down for essential items before going down to one of their cutters, where his Cox’n, Liam Desmond, and his boat crew awaited him. “I can’t ask any of them t’deal with ’em if someone does not lead the way. Don’t worry, Mister Westcott… do we launch enough of them, your turn will come.”

“Very well, sir,” Westcott said with a resigned sigh. “Best of luck, sir.”