Invasion

It was not yet noon on a beautiful early-summer's day: from first to last the action had taken just a few hours, but now it was time to leave.

CHAPTER 5

THE SUMMER SUN WAS HIGH in the sky when HMS Teazer made her way home with the others to find her anchor buoy and pick up her moorings once again. It was still warm and beneficent when Kydd returned to his ship after an immediate conference aboard Actaeon.

Teazer was to be stood down from the flying squadron due to battle-damage—much of her larboard bulwarks beaten flat and guns dismounted—and it would be several weeks before she could look to active service again.

Kydd felt the need to stay on deck in the brightness of the day, with the pleasant sight of the town and its bustle, the constant to-and-froing of scores of ships about their occasions—reality, normality. But a captain could not idly pace among the men as they worked. Reluctantly, he went to his cabin and found Renzi at the table scratching away at papers, the interminable loose ends after any scene of combat.

'A hot action,' he said, looking up.

'Yes,' Kydd muttered, slumping into his chair. Only that morning his ship had been plunged into a desperate fight for survival and here she was, an hour or two later, battered and sore but lying to single anchor in sun-kissed tranquillity.

Seeing Kydd's drawn face, Renzi laid down his pen.

Kydd went on sombrely, 'As it was necessary, m' friend.' The sheer savagery of the encounter and the seemingly unstoppable determination of the vessels assembled for their grand enterprise had unnerved him. He had also found himself quite affected by the death of young Philipon, a gay, laughing soul now removed from the world of men, and by the sight of Locust's pinnace on its way past them to land the pitiful figure of her captain, writhing under a blanket and mortally wounded. Later, no doubt, others from the naval hospital would be making their last journey on earth to the austere St. George's church in Deal.

''. . . these are times to try men's souls—but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women . . '' Renzi murmured.

'What?' said Kydd, distracted.

'Oh, naught but the rantings of an unfashionable rogue of fevered times now past.'

Kydd sighed. 'Who is your philosopher, then, Renzi?'

'His name, you may have heard it, Tom Paine.'

Kydd allowed a twisted smile. He had borne the name of the revolutionary since birth, his parents having once heard the great man speak and been caught up in the fiery rhetoric. 'So the villain can conjure some right words, I'm to say.' He sighed heavily. 'But its hard t' take. After as grim a fight as ever we've been in, what've we won? Naught but a handful o' Boney's flotilla. They say that, with this last, he's now above one thousand craft near Boulogne.' So many vessels with but one purpose—and he had seen for himself how powerless they had been against mere scores.

'Mr. Hallum, I've a yen to step ashore. The ship is yours.' Kydd picked up his walking cane and clapped on his tall yellow beaver. Renzi was delayed with ship's business and, anyway, he felt the need to walk alone, to let the calm tranquillity of the land work on his soul.

With a lazy surf hissing in the shingle, he was carried ashore safe and dry by his boat's crew. To the left was the King's Naval Yard, with its Admiralty telegraph to London even now clattering away, and the smoky fumes of the smithy spiralling up behind the high wall.

To the right, a long street faced the beach, the inns and taverns giving way to substantial buildings further on and the bright, hazy prospect of Pegwell Bay in the distance. Kydd struck out briskly, nodding to passing gentlemen and doffing his hat politely to promenading ladies, no doubt passengers from the Indiaman anchored offshore.

He turned inland towards the town proper, entering Middle Street: here, there were courts and passageways with cobbled streets and rich merchants' houses. He strolled on to High Street, with its bustling shops and markets, and his eyes caught a placard in one window:

. . . And our brave Sons invite the foe to come;

For they remember Acre's valiant fight,

When Britons put the vaunting Gaul to flight;

Remembering too, Nile's Battle...

He had been at both and felt a stab of pride. Then he noticed a recruiting poster:

Brave Soldiers! Defenders of YOUR COUNTRY! The road to glory is open before you—Pursue the great career of your Forefathers, and rival them in the field of honour. A proud and usurping TYRANT (a name ever execrated by Englishmen) dares to threaten our shores with INVASION, and to reduce the free-born Sons of Britain to SLAVERY . . . The Briton fights for his Liberty and Rights, the Frenchman for Buonaparte who has robbed him of both!

There was a hard gaiety on the air: women sported martial cockades and children strutted about, every gentleman wore his sword. The markets were thronged, and the street cries, as lusty as ever, suggested that none in this town was about to be affected by the awful forces gathering just a few leagues across the water.

The cheerful hustle lifted his spirits. Restored, he threw a coin to a begging child and returned to the seafront. The view from the shore was impressive: the crowding ships in the Downs and, just visible on the horizon, a sable-brown line that was the Goodwin Sands.

Reluctant to quit his view of the sea he strolled along in the warm sunshine and pondered the peculiar difference to be had in perspectives of it: from the rock-still shore, the land-bound saw the line of white waves acting as a boundary between the two worlds, and beyond, the sea's mystery, with ships disappearing so quickly from man's ken over the horizon to far and unknowable regions.

A sailor's prospect, however, was of being borne along on a constantly moving live quintessence without limit, the land an occasional encounter in the endless oceanic immensity.

His steps took him past the King's Naval Yard and on to Deal Castle. Part of a coastal chain put in place by Henry VIII, under much the same invasion threat, the battlements were small, round and squat. They were from an era when cannon had been changing the rules of war but even today they were manned by redcoats and ready for service.

At the top of the shingle, scores of Deal luggers were drawn up before humble cottages and huts, each of