The Admiral's Daughter

convenient.

His dockyard? Kydd smiled. Plymouth, big as it now was, was near dwarfed by the naval dockyard and the vast population of workers that had grown up around it, but he was feeling restless and an excuse to get away and promenade in the sunshine was welcome. 'At ten, the North Stairs,' he scribbled on the back of the note. She would know where the officers stepped ashore.

She was waiting for him, twirling a parasol and in infectious good spirits. 'Such a handsome escort for a lady,' she exclaimed, taking his arm. Since the return of Kydd and Renzi from Terra Australis Cecilia had made a remarkable recovery and was now undeniably in looks, her strong dark features catching eyes on all sides.

'Then shall we spread sail an' get under way, Cec?'

Seamen touched their hats with a grin and a grave ensign of Foot saluted Kydd's gold and blue smartly as they moved off round the wall to the Fore Street entrance. The master porter emerged from his little house and recognised Kydd with a wave, the two sentinels coming to a crashing 'present.'

'This is y'r royal dockyard, then, sis. Seventy-one acres an' three thousand artificers, not t' mention th' labouring men. I dare t' say there are more'n half ten thousand men at work before ye now.'

It gave pause, for the largest industrial endeavour in his home town, the Guildford iron foundry, could boast of no more than a few score and none other in Kydd's acquaintance had more than some small hundreds.

'What a charming chapel,' Cecilia murmured, looking at a trim little edifice just inside the gates.

'Seventeen hundred, sis, William the third.' An avenue of well-tended lime trees stretched away to a lengthy terrace of fine houses that might well have graced Bath or London. 'An' those are the quarters of the officers o' the dockyard—there ye'll find the commissioner, master shipwright, clerk o' the cheque, all your swell coves. Gardens at th' back an' offices in the front.'

But her eyes were down the slight hill to the main dock area and the towering complexity of a ship-of-the-line in dry-dock. As they approached, the scale of the sight became more apparent: soaring to the skies, her masts and yards higher by far than the tallest building anywhere, it seemed incredible that this great structure was actually designed to move.

Clutching Kydd's arm Cecilia peered over the edge of the graving dock, unprepared for the sheer grandeur of the dimensions of what she saw: the huge bulk of the vessel, the muddy floor of the dock so far below and the tiny figures moving about from under.

'I'll show ye a sight as you'll never forget,' Kydd said. 'Mind y'r dress.' He found a small flight of stone steps with an iron hand-chain that led down into the abyss. 'Come on, Cec.'

Frightened, but trusting, she clung to the chain and they descended, down and down. The sunlight faded and a miasma of mud and seaweed wafted up, thick and pungent. On the last step Kydd called a halt. 'Look now, sis.'

She turned—and caught her breath. In a giddying domination, the colossal green-streaked bulk of the battleship reared above them blotting out everything. As well, it stretched away down the dock on and on, longer than a town street, and the impression of a monstrous bulking poised only on the central keel-blocks and kept from toppling by spindly-looking shores caused a strange feeling of upside-down vertigo.

Kydd pointed past the fat swell of the hull to the further end. 'Those are our dock gates, Cec. I have t' tell ye that the other side o' that is the sea, and where we're stood is usually thirty feet under th' waves.'

'They w-won't open them while we're still here, will they?' she added, in a small voice.

'Not till I give 'em the order.' Kydd chuckled, but Cecilia mounted the steps back to the sunshine with almost indecent haste.

At the top Kydd could not resist stepping over to the adjacent dock—even bigger, the seventy-four within seeming quite diminished. 'Now this one. It's the biggest in th' world, an' the dockyard has a story about it.

'Y' see when it was built, it was designed f'r our largest ship, the Queen Charlotte of a hundred guns. But then the Frenchies built one much bigger, th' Commerce de Marseille of a hundred and twenty guns—nearly three thousan' tons. So just in time, they enlarged it an' finished it f'r the war in 'ninety-three.'

He paused for effect. 'Now, ye'll recall in that year that Vice-Adm'ral Lord Hood took Toulon an' much o' the French fleet. So this is sayin' that it's just as well they made their changes when they did, for the first ship t' use the dock was the Commerce de Marseille herself!'

Arm in arm they passed the clatter of the joinery workshops, the rich stink of the pitch house, then dock after dock, each with a man-o'-war in various stages of repair and alive with shipwright-ery and riggers.

At a substantial kiln a procession of men were withdrawing steaming planks wrapped in cloths. 'The chippies use th' steam chest t' bend their strakes round th' frames an' fit 'em by eye— that's three curves in one, I'll have ye know,' Kydd said admiringly, remembering Antigua dockyard in the Caribbean.

'Oh—the poor man!' Cecilia gasped. Peering into a sawpit she had glimpsed the lower individual of a pair who were plying a mighty whip-saw to slice a bole of oak to planks. The one above the trestle bent to saw and direct the cut while his partner, showered with chips and dust as he worked, took the other end in a dank pit the size of a grave.

'All day, an' a shillin' only,' Kydd said, then pointed out the rigging house. 'You'd not credit it, but old Tenacious has near twenty miles o' rope aboard. Goes fr'm your light tricin' line all the way t' the anchor cable, which is two feet round, if ye can believe it.'

Cecilia nodded doubtfully, so Kydd went on, 'Which is sayin' that the crew on the capstan are heavin' in seven tons weight o' cable alone, straight up an' down and stand fast the weight of the anchor.'

Seeing her suitably impressed, he changed tack. 'An' above the riggin' house we have the sail loft. Ye'll know how important this is when I say that we carried more'n four acres o' sail, and if y' stop t' think that we needs so much spare canvas, an' ropes wear s' fast, and multiply this by the hundreds o' ships we keep at sea . . .'

A broad canal crossed their path, running a quarter of a mile straight into the interior of the dockyard. Fortunately it was spanned by a swivelling footbridge. 'This is th' Camber. Right up there we have th' boat pond an' it's also where Teazer hoisted aboard her fit of anchors. An' I think I c'n find ye somethin' there tolerably divertin'.'

They turned left towards a stone building a good hundred yards square, bristling like a porcupine with multitudes of tall chimneys. A muffled cacophony of clanking, screeches and deep thumping strengthened as they