The Invasion Year

imparted.

“Oh!” Lt. Spendlove exclaimed as he came to the quarterdeck to relieve Merriman, a few minutes before Eight Bells. “Good morning to you all. Egad, sirs, a flat calm, is it?”

“And a fog, Mister Caldwell assures us, soon to come,” Merriman told him with a grimace.

“We’ll dispense with scrubbing decks, gentlemen,” Lewrie said, striving to put a calm face on things. “We will go to Quarters right after the people’s bedding is stowed. When the galley’s got breakfast ready, we’ll let the hands below by watches, but keep the guns manned. We’ll not be surprised by something Froggish at short range, right?”

If Caldwell’s right, and there is a fog, Lewrie thought; if it’s a good thick’un, we can’t see them, but maybe they won’t see us!

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

After an hour or so, the winds returned, the faintest zephyr off the land, sometimes from the East, then backing into the Sou’east for a few minutes, allowing Reliant to stir, to ghost ahead on her former course of Due North, barely fast enough for the rudder to bite. It was a land-breeze, for the sea was much cooler, and shed its gathered heat more quickly than did the shores, the rocky hills, and the land of France. And even before the land-breeze arose, had come the fog, and it was as thick as a hand-before-your-face London “pea- souper.” Before the sun had risen, the fog had become so thick that the belfry lanthorn and its crispness had been turned to a vague blob of light, and even the larger taffrail lanthorns right aft on the quarterdeck had gone feeble.

Lewrie had gone below long enough to scrub up, fetch the keys to the arms chests and his own weapons-find his hat and boat-cloak-then returned to the deck, to slouch in his collapsible canvas sling-chair, now and then peering aloft at the commissioning pendant, now all but lost in mist, not darkness. Now and again, once the sun was up, a bank of fog would roll over the ship, a bank so thick that he couldn’t make out the forecastle, much less the jib-boom!

He breakfasted later than the hands, taking only a bowl of oat-meal with strawberry jam and mug after mug of coffee, with goat’s milk and sugar, and a fairly fresh piece of ship’s bisquit or two soaked for long minutes in the coffee to make them soft enough to chew. And, he fretted over his ship’s vulnerability, the lack of speed with which to flee, the thickness of the fog from which gunboats could come with not half a minute’s warning.

Lewrie tried to be the sort of captain that the Navy demanded: cool, serene, and stoic in the face of danger. But that sort of pose was not in his nature, never had been in the past, and, he freely admitted to himself, might never be in future. He had to rise at last and pace the quarterdeck, hands clasped in the small of his back, hidden by the folds of his boat-cloak so no one could see them being wrung. Up the windward side, which was his alone by right and long tradition, cross the forward edge of the quarterdeck by the stanchions and nets now full of rolled-up bedding and hammocks, then aft down the lee side right to the taffrails, flag lockers, and the now-extinguished lanthorns before beginning another circuit. He paused and looked aloft, again.

“Ha!” Lewrie barked. He could see the commissioning pendant as it lazily curled, could make out the maze of rigging, sails, yards, and top-masts once more. He could even see the tip of the jib-boom. Aft, he could see the two barges and both of Reliant’s cutters under tow. A half-hour before, all he could see was the towing lines, stretching out into nothing!

“It seems to be thinning, at last, sir,” Lt. Westcott said as Lewrie joined him by the helm. With the ship at Quarters, Spendlove and Merriman were at their posts in the waist, surpervising the guns.

“About bloody time, too,” Lewrie said with relief and evident enthusiasm. “Ye can see out-board a long musket shot or better. Any idea where we are now, by dead reckoning, Mister Westcott?”

“Uhm, about here, sir,” Lt. Westcott said, stepping forward to the chart pinned to the traverse board. “Coutances should be abeam of us to windward…”

“Windward, mine arse,” Lewrie japed. “Zephyr-ward, more like.”

“With this land-breeze and ebbing tide carrying us, I have no idea how far off the coast we are, sir… sorry,” Westcott added as he traced their course with a forefinger. “Our last sure cross-bearings put us six miles off, and I’d imagine that we’ve made enough lee-way to estimate that we might be eight miles off, by now.”

“In mid-Channel ’twixt France and Jersey, aye,” Lewrie agreed. “Does this scant breeze allow, we might bear a point more Westerly. I wouldn’t want t’run her too close to Cape Carteret, and on Due North, there’s Cape de la Hague beyond that.”

He looked up to sniff the air and peer about, then returned to the chart. “This has t’burn off, say, by Four Bells of the Forenoon and the winds’ll surely shift back from somewhere in the West, so-”

“Harkee, sir!” Mr. Caldwell barked. “Did any of you hear that?”

“Hear what, Mister Caldwell?” Lewrie asked, puzzled.

“I did, sir!” Midshipman Munsell piped up. “Over yonder?” the younker said, pointing out to starboard, his mouth agape and his eyes blared in alarm.

Moo-oo-wa!

“Sea-monsters?” Quartermaster’s Mate Malin whispered to another fellow manning the helm.

“Hist!” Quartermaster Rhys snapped back.

Moo-oo-wa! came from the fog, plaintive and hackle-raising eerie, answered a moment later by a second, then a third, and a fourth further off and fainter!

If any seals turn up, we’ll tow the ship out of here! Lewrie thought; That’s just… spooky!

“Sea cows?” Midshipman Munsell shudderingly asked.

“Fog horns!” the Sailing Master exclaimed. “Trumpets of some kind, or someone yelling through speaking- trumpets.”

“Where away?” Lewrie snapped, dreading the chance that there were what sounded like four gunboats out there, trying to find each other.

Moo-wa!

“There, sir!” Munsell cried, pointing off the starboard quarter. “I think.”

Moo-wa! And that one sounded as if it was out to larboard, out to sea of them! As the other fog horns mournfully lowed, Lt. Westcott pointed at one, and Caldwell at yet another, his arms out- stretched to encompass a section of the fog, swivelling his head and hands like an errant compass needle as his best estimate.

“Sir! Sir!” Midshipman Munsell was crying, hopping on his toes in urgency. “I think I can see a light out there, to starboard, where the loudest one was!” Without being ordered, Munsell sprang into the main-mast shrouds and scrambled up the rat-lines a few feet. “There, sir! I do see a light, a tiny one!”

Lewrie and the others peered out to find it on their own.

“Waving back and forth… hand-held?” Lt. Westcott speculated. “Like someone in a small boat?”

“A fleet of fishermen, perhaps,” Mr. Caldwell mused aloud.

So long as they ain’t gunboats! Lewrie thought.

“This far off the coast, sir?” Westcott countered. “In such a flat calm, with no wind? Were they fishing boats, they would have had to set out from Coutances or some other wee port very early last night to be caught by this fog.”

“In their home waters they know best?” Lewrie scoffed. “I don’t think French fishermen’d dare come out this far, not since the war reopened. Our close blockade keeps ’em a lot nearer port, as we saw in the Gulf of Saint Malo. It does look like a hand-held lanthorn, don’t it? So whatever sort o’ boat it is, it can’t be all that large.”

Lewrie gave it a long think, then went to the break of the quarterdeck to look down into the be-fogged waist of