CHAPTER 4
All day Commandant Henri Lassan watched the ships pass. He watched from within one of the fort’s covered citadels and with the help of a brass-barrelled telescope that had belonged to his grandfather.
No flag flew from the fort. One of the local fishermen, trusted by Lassan, had taken his small boat to the Lacanau shoals where the British brig had taken the smack’s wind and invited the captain aboard. Rum had been served, gold paid for fish, and the fisherman had solemnly informed the enemy that the fort was deserted entirely of its old garrison. They had gone north, he said, to serve the Emperor, and only a few local militia now patrolled the ramparts. If the lie was believed then Lassan might entice the British into the range of his heavy guns, and he had cause to think the lie had worked for the brig had flattened her sails into the wind and gone southwards.
Now, instead of the brig, a vast line of grey sails flecked the western horizon. Commandant Lassan guessed the ships were eight or nine miles out to sea and he knew that he watched a British convoy carrying men and weapons and horses and ammunition to their Army to the south.
The sight made Henri Lassan feel lonely. His Emperor was far away and he was alone on the coast of France and his enemy could sail with impunity down that coast in a massive convoy that would have needed a fleet to disrupt. Except there were no more French fleets; the last had been destroyed by Nelson nine years before and what ships were left rotted in their anchorages.
A few privateers, American and French, sailed the ocean, but they were like small dogs yapping at the heels of a vast herd. Even Cornelius Killick, in his splendid Thuella, could not have taken a ship from that convoy. Killick would have waited for a straggler perhaps, but nothing less than a fleet could have broken that vast line of ships.
It was painful to see the enemy’s power so naked, so unchallenged, so ponderous. In the great holds of those hull-down ships were the instruments that would bring death to Soult’s army in the south, and Lassan could do nothing. He could win his small battle, if it came, but the greater struggle was beyond his help.
That thought made him chide himself for lack of faith and, in penitence, he went to the fort’s small chapel and prayed for a miracle. Perhaps the Emperor, marching and counter-marching his men along the frost hardened roads of the north, could win a great victory and break the alliance that ringed France, yet the Emperor’s desperation was witnessed by the fort’s emptiness. France had been scraped for men, then scraped again, and many of the next class of conscripts had already fled into the woods or hills to escape the sergeants who came to take cannon-fodder still not grown to manhood.
A clash of boots, a shout, and the squeal of the gate hinges which, however often greased, insisted on screeching like a soul entering purgatory, announced a visitor to the fort. Lassan pocketed his beads, crossed himself, and went into the twilight.
“The bastards! The double-crossing bastards! Good evening, Henri.” Cornelius Killick, his savage face furious, nodded to the Commandant. “Bastards!”
“Who?”
“Bordeaux! No copper! No oak! What am I supposed to do? Paste paper over the bloody holes?”
“Perhaps you’ll take some wine?” Lassan suggested diplomatically.
“I’ll take some wine.” The American followed Lassan into the Commandant’s quarters that looked more like a library than a soldier’s rooms. “That bastard Ducos! I’d like to pull his teeth out through his backside.”
“I thought,” Lassan said gently, “that the coffin-maker in Arcachon had given you some elm?”
“Given? The bastard made us pay three times the price! And I don’t like sailing with a ship’s arse made out of dead man’s wood.”
“Ah, a sailor’s superstition.” Lassan poured wine into the crystal glasses that bore his family’s coat of arms. The last Comte de Lassan had died beneath the guillotine, but Henri had never been tempted to use the title that was rightfully his. “Did you see all those fat merchantmen crawling south?”
“All day,” Killick said gloomily. “Take one of those and you make a small fortune. Not as much as an Indiaman, of course.” He finished the glass of wine and poured himself more. “I told you about the Indiaman I took?”
“Indeed you did,” Henri Lassan said politely, “three times.”
“And was her hold crammed with silks? With spices? With treasures of the furthest East? With peacock’s plumes and sapphires blue?” Killick gave his great whoop of a laugh. “No, my friend. She was crammed to the gunwales with saltpetre. Saltpetre to make powder, powder to drive bullets, bullets to kill the British. It is kind of our enemies, is it not, to provide the powers of their own destruction?” He sat beside the fire and stared at the thin, scholarly-faced Lassan. “So, my friend, are the bastards coming?”
“If they want the chasse-mare’es,” Lassan said mildly, “they’ll have to come here.”
“And the weather,” the American said, “will let them land safely.” The long Biscay shore, that could thunder with tumbling surf, was this week in gentler mood. The breaking waves beyond the channel were four or five feet high, frightening enough to landlubbers, but not high enough to stop ships’ boats from landing.
Lassan, still hoping that his deception would persuade the British that they had no need to land men on the coast to the south, nevertheless acknowledged the possibility. “Indeed.”
“And if they do come by land,” Killick said brutally, “they’ll beat you.”
Lassan glanced at the ebony crucifix that hung between his bookshelves. “Perhaps not.”
The American seemed oblivious of Lassan’s appeal to the Almighty. “And if they take the fort,” he went on, “they’ll command the whole Basin.”
“They will, indeed.”
“And they’ll take the Thuella.” Killick said it softly, but in his imagination he was seeing his beautiful ship captured by mocking British sailors. The Thuella would be sailed to England as a prize, and a sleek New England schooner, made to ride the long winds of empty oceans, would become an unloved coasting ship carrying British trade. “By God, they will not take her!”
“We’ll do our best,” Lassan said helplessly, though how four gun crews could resist a British attack was indeed a problem that called for a miracle. Lassan did not doubt that his guns could wreak damage, but once the British discovered the guns were manned they would soon land their Marines and surround the fort. And Lassan, because the Emperor had been greedy for men, could not defend the seaward and the landward walls at once.
The grim news made the American silent. He stared at the small fire, his hawk’s face frowning, and when he finally spoke his voice was oddly tentative. “What if we fought?”
“You?” Lassan could not hide his surprise.
“We can fight, Henri.” Killick grinned. “And we’ve got those damned twelve-pounder guns in our hold.” He was suddenly filled with enthusiasm, seizing a map from Lassan’s table and weighting its corners with books. “They’ll land south of Point Arcachon?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And there are only two routes they can take north. The paths by the beach, or the road!” Killick’s face was alight with the thought of action, and Lassan saw that the American was a man who revelled in the simple problems of warfare. Lassan had met other such men; brave men who had made their names famous throughout France and written pages of history through their love of violent action. He wondered what would happen to such men when the war ended.
“You’re a sailor,” Lassan said gently, “and fighting on land is not the same as a sea battle.”
“But if the bastards aren’t expecting us, Henri! If the pompous bastards think they’re safe! Then we ambush them!” Killick was certain his men, trained gunners, could handle the French artillery and he was seeing, in his hopeful imagination, the grapeshot cutting down marching files of British Marines. “By God we can do it, Henri!”
Lassan held up a thin hand to stop the enthusiastic flow. “If you really want to help, Captain Killick, then put your men into the fort.”
“No.” Killick knew only too well what the British would do to a captured privateer’s crew. If Killick fought to save the Thuella then he must have a safe retreat in case he was defeated. Yet in his plan to ambush the British
