The Admiral's Daughter

He caught his breath: this was Cornwallis and the Channel Fleet—ships-of-the-line on their way to clamp a blockade on the great port of Brest and thereby deny Napoleon the advantage of having his major men-o'-war at sea on the outbreak of hostilities. The grey silhouettes firmed; the stately seventy-fours passed by one after another, only two reefs in their topsails to Teazer's own close-reefed sail and disdaining to notice the little brig-sloop.

The grand vision disappeared slowly to leeward across their stern. Kydd felt a humbling sense of the responsibility they held, the devotion to duty that would keep them at sea in foul conditions until the war had been won or lost.

'We've made our offing, I believe,' Kydd threw at Hodgson. 'Stations t' stay ship.' Now was the time to put about to clear Start Point for the claw eastwards.

Kydd was grateful that a brig was more handy in stays than any ship-rigged vessel but he had to make the best of the situation caused by their hasty departure. 'You'll be boatswain, Mr Hodgson, an' I'll be the master.' As well as the absence of these vital two warrant officers, he had a raw and short-handed ship's company.

They wore round effectively, though, and set to for the thrash up-Channel. With no shortage of wind, they would be in position to seaward off Le Havre at dawn the next day.

However, Kydd was uncomfortably aware that nearly all his sea service had been in foreign waters; the boisterous and often ferocious conditions of these northerly islands were unfamiliar to him. The morning would tax his sea sense to the limit: all he had of the approaches was the small-scale private chart of Havre de Gr'ce of some forty years before, published by Jeffreys, with barely sufficient detail to warn of the hazards from shifting sandbanks in the estuary.

Daybreak brought relief as well as anxiety: they were off the French coast but where? Small craft scuttled past on their last voyages unthreatened by marauders and paid no attention to the brig offshore under easy sail. Kydd had ensured that no colours were aloft to provoke the French and assumed that if any of the vessels about him were English they would be doing the same.

He steadied his glass: rounded dark hills with cliffs here and there, the coast trending away sharply. From the pencilled notes on the old chart he realised that these were to the south of Le Havre and Teazer duly shaped course past them to the north. They would be up with their objective in hours.

His instructions were brief and plain. He was to make the closest approach conformable with safe navigation to Honfleur further up the river, then send a boat ashore to make contact with an agent whose name was not disclosed but whose challenge and reply were specified. It would mean the utmost caution and he would need to have men with a hand-lead in the chains as they entered the ten-mile-wide maze of channels and banks in the estuary.

They closed slowly with the land; the wind was now moderating and considerably more in the west. Then he spotted a sudden dropping away and receding of the coastline—it was the sign he had been looking for: this was where a great river met the sea, the mouth of the Seine. Paris, the centre for the storm that was sweeping the world into a climactic war, was just a hundred miles or so to the south-east.

In the forechains the leadsman began to intone his endless chant of the fathoms and deeps below: the Baie de Seine was a treacherous landscape of silted shallows and other hazards that could transform them into a shattered wreck, but that was not Kydd's greatest worry. As Teazer busily laid her course into the narrowing waters, who was to say that the peace had not ended while they were on passage, that behind the torpid quiet of the just visible fortifications ahead soldiers were not casting loose their guns and waiting for the little brig to glide past?

The firming heights of Cap de la Heve loomed on the north bank of the estuary; the chart noted the position closer in of the Fort de Sainte-Adresse, which lay squat atop the summit of its own mount, but their entry provoked no sudden warlike activity. The huddle and sprawl of a large town at its foot would be the main port of Havre de Gr'ce; their duty was to pass on, to lie off the ancient village of Honfleur on the opposite bank and make contact with the shore.

Uneasily Kydd conned the ship in. His chart was at pains to point out the menace of the Gambe d'Amfard, a sprawling, miles-long bank that dried at low water into hard-packed sand, lying squarely across the entrance. He glanced over the side: the turbid waters of the Seine slid past, murky and impenetrable.

He straightened and caught Hodgson looking at him gravely, others round the deck were still and watching. If the venture ended in failure there was no one to blame but the captain.

Kydd began to look for little rills and flurries in the pattern of wavelets out of synchrony with their neighbours, the betraying indications of shoaling waters. A deep-laden cargo vessel was making its way upriver and Kydd fell in to follow, carefully noting its track. A passing half-decked chaloupe came close to their stern and the man at the tiller hailed them incomprehensibly; but his friendly wave reassured Kydd as they passed the batteries into the confines of the river mouth.

Honfleur was five miles inside the entrance, a drab cluster of dwellings round a point of land. Kydd sniffed the wind: it was still unsettled, veering further, but if it went too far into the west they stood to be embayed or worse. 'Stand by, forrard!' he snapped.

He turned to the set-faced Hodgson. 'Take th' jolly-boat an' four men. There'll be one in th' character of an agent looking f'r us somewhere in th' town.' He moved closer, out of earshot of the others, and muttered, 'Challenge is 'peur,' reply 'degout,' Mr Hodgson.'

'S-sir? Purr and day-goo?' the lieutenant asked hesitantly.

'That's fear an' loathin' in the Frenchy tongue,' Kydd said impatiently.

'Ah, I see, sir. Fear and loathing—yes, sir.'

' Peur and degout, if y' please!'

'Purr and day-goo. Aye aye, sir!'

Kydd smothered his irritability: it had not been so long ago that he was equally ignorant of French, and if the agent was wise, allowances would be made for uncultured Englishmen.

'And, sir,' Hodgson held himself with pathetic dignity, 'perhaps it were best that I shift out of uniform while ashore?'

Kydd hesitated. 'Er, I think not. How will th' agent sight ye as a naval officer else?' He refrained from