It was another of those fine Summer sunsets, the wind from off the North Sea just cool enough to rid the great-cabins of the warmth of the day as it wafted down through the opened windows in the coach-top overhead and through the half-opened sash-windows in the transom.
It was two days since Lewrie had discovered Fusee and her lethal cargo, and one day after Mr. MacTavish and Lt. Johns had briefed Reliant’s officers and Midshipmen. That had seemed to go well; did one consider “struck dumb” and “appalled” proper reactions. Lt. Merriman and Lt. Westcott had shared stunned looks, but would “soldier” along; Lt. Spendlove, Reliant’s Second Officer, though, had expressed his distaste for the torpedoes, calling them “infernal machines” and unworthy of a gentleman-warrior. “If they’re to revolutionise warfare at sea, sir, it will be a brute form of revolution. Does this war go on long enough, we’ll be shelling enemy cities, next,” he’d said, shaking his head in sadness. Oh, Lt. Spendlove would carry out his duties to the Tee, he’d quickly assured Lewrie, but he’d rather hoped that MacTavish and his torpedoes would prove a failure. Close blockade was the very thing, to Spendlove’s mind, just as the former First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl St. Vincent, had determined.
This evening, Lewrie would not be dining in Lt. Johns, MacTavish, or McCloud, nor any of his own people, either. He and the cats dined alone, Toulon and Chalky atop his table with their separate bowls of victuals. With no one to impress, Lewrie could dress comfortably in an old pair of slop-trousers, old buckled shoes and cotton stockings, and just his shirt and loosened neck-stock. Once Pettus removed his soup and began to fill a plate with the entree, Lewrie could take the note from Lydia Stangbourne from a pocket and unfold it to read once more.
She hoped that his assignment in Channel waters for the rest of the year would allow them to see each other again, more often, and even very often! Should he be called to London, that would be grand, and it would not involve round after round of gaming clubs; should he be back in port long enough, he must write her at once, and she would coach down so that they-
Thud! went his Marine sentry’s musket on the deck. “Midshipman Warburton… sah!”
“Enter,” Lewrie answered with a frustrated growl. There were a few times when solitude was welcome, and this was one of them!
“Mister Houghton’s duty, sir, and I’m to tell you that there is a boat hailing us, with a visitor,” Warburton announced.
“From Fusee?” Lewrie asked, scowling.
“From shore, sir… he appears to be a civilian,” Mr. Warburton told him.
Percy, come t’have my guts for toppin’ his sister? Lewrie wondered. No matter. “I’ll be on deck directly. Thankee, Mister Warburton.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Lewrie frowned, dabbed his mouth, and rose from the table, hiding Lydia’s note in a trouser pocket once more, silently damning all callers who’d disturb his supper, or ruin his good mood.
“Good God!” Lewrie said, though, once his visitor had boarded. “Where the Devil did you spring from? Hallo, Peel.”
“Sir Alan Lewrie, sir!” Mr. Peel-“ ’tis Peel, James Peel”-replied, doffing his fashionable thimble-shaped hat and bowing as grandly as he would at Court; laughing, though. “I bow to your grandeur! I’ll even kow-tow at your magnificence!”
“Now that’d be a sight,” Lewrie barked, laughing back and going to shake hands. “The last I heard from you two years ago was a letter from somewhere in the Germanies.”
“Well, soon as the war began again, things got a bit hot for me and my line of work, so the Foreign Office found something else for me to do closer to home. Damn my eyes, Lewrie, how do you keep?”
“Main-well, considerin’,” Lewrie replied. “Care for a bite or two of something? Or would ye care t’watch me eat while you sip a bit of brandy?”
“Just a dab or two of what you’re having… and the brandy!” Mr. Peel japed.
When Lewrie had first met James Peel in the Italics in 1795 or so, he had first taken him for a side of beef sent to bodyguard that old cut-throat from the Foreign Office’s Secret Branch, Mr. Zachariah Twigg. Peel was big enough for that duty; he was not quite six feet tall and “beef to the heel,” all of it lean muscle. And he could certainly look threatening with his very dark brown hair and eyes, a pair of strong hands, wide shoulders, deep chest, with the lean hips of a panther. A brainless bully-buck Peel was most certainly not, though, for he’d come from a distinguished family of the landed gentry, had a quick and clever mind, and at one time, before his cheating at cards in his regimental mess had caught up with him and forced his resignation, Peel had been a Captain of Household Cavalry-though even the Curraissiers thought that he “rode heavy.” Peel had been Twigg’s man in the West Indies during the slave rebellion on Saint Domingue/Haiti, and had aided Lewrie against the Creole rebel pirates in Louisiana, and again during the Franco-American Quasi-War of 1798-99.
“A growin’ lad needs his tucker,” Lewrie commented, watching the fellow eat part of his own supper and empty half the fresh-baked rolls in the bread barge.
“Ehm… you aren’t come from Mister Twigg with another of his harum-scarums, are you?” The fingers of his left hand were crossed to ward off that very occurrence, under the tablecloth.
“No, the old fellow’s done with spy-craft, and we’re the worse off for it, but… it comes to us all, sooner or later,” Peel said.
“Fading, is he?” Lewrie replied. “I recall my father mentioning he’d had a bad Winter, but when that was…?” He shrugged.
“Had several bad Winters,” Peel said between bites of pork chops. “His physicians finally told him to avoid London and its air like the plague, and Winter at his country estate in Hampstead. Oh, he’ll come down to London in the Spring, when the coal smoke’s not as heavy, but for the most part, he’s up at ‘Spyglass Bungalow’ spoiling his grand-children something sinful.”
“Thank God,” Lewrie commented, letting out a pent breath and un-crossing his fingers. “If he had wished to rope me in, I’m spoken for anyway. Something just as lunatick as any Twigg dreamt up.”
“You mean your cask torpedoes?” Peel asked with a sly smirk.
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, and besides…” Lewrie tried to wave off; with a fork full of mashed potatoes, in fact.
“Lewrie… recall! I’m Secret Branch?” Peel japed. “We know all about them, and I wish you the best of good fortune with them.”
“You’re here to check up on them?” Lewrie asked.
“God, no, not me!” Peel said, laughing. “That would be some anxious Admiralty sort, and he won’t pester you ’til you’ve had at least a few trials. No… I was making the rounds with Admiral Cornwallis of Channel Fleet, Admiral Lord Keith’s squadrons in The Downs, and one or two others, regarding the estimated numbers, types, and strengths of the invasion fleet Bonaparte’s building. Uhm, might I get a top-up of this excellent… whatever it is?”
“A single-chateau bordeaux, sir,” Pettus informed him as he did the duty. “The Captain brought several back from the Gironde.”
“You’ve numbers?” Lewrie asked. When he’d called upon the Admiralty in London, they’d given him the descriptions and some sketches of what they thought the various French invasion vessels looked like… but no idea of how they were armed, or how many he would face.
Peel gave him a cock-browed look, and a head-jerk at Pettus.
“Pettus… one of those ‘take the air on deck’ moments,” Lewrie told his cabin steward. “And take Jessop with you for a bit.”
“You are aware of the types?” Peel asked in a low voice once he was sure they were alone.
“There’s guilots, to transport horses and artillery batteries,” Lewrie ticked off on his fingers, “there’s some three-masted hundred-footer gunboats, what they call prames…”
“With twelve twenty-four-pounders,” Peel stuck in. “Though they build them so quickly, and of such light materials, that prames can’t stand against a frigate. Go on,” Peel urged with a sage nod.
“They showed me brig-rigged chaloupes,” Lewrie said, waiting.
“Three twenty-four-pounders and an eight-inch mortar,” Peel said.
“I’m told there are some lesser gunboats, two- or three-masted luggers, even cutter-rigged small ones?” Lewrie asked, pausing again for information.
“Might face only one twenty-four-pounder and an army field piece in the smallest Dutch-built ones, perhaps some older naval guns of lesser calibres in the French-built,” Peel enlightened him. He was picking his teeth as he did so.
“Then there’s all those damned penishes and caiques, all of ’em luggers, to carry troops and supplies,” Lewrie continued. “Admiralty said there were hundreds of ’em.”
“About seven hundred gunboats and escorts of various types, and their plans are for over two thousand transports,” Peel told him with a grave look. “I’m told, though, that both Admiral Cornwallis and Admiral Lord Keith estimate that it would take two or three tides to get all of them to England, and with Channel Fleet, our North Sea Fleet, and The Downs combined against them, given enough warning when they at last decide to try it on, we could massacre them. The French just don’t have that many experienced sailors, and most of their guns will be manned by soldiers with little knowledge of naval gunnery.”
“ ’Less it’s a dead-flat calm, when they come, their artillerists will find floatin’, bobbin’, and wallowin’ boats just won’t sit still as solid ground, where they learned their trade, aye,” Lewrie determined, almost ready to whoop with glee, and a wish that the French would try. “And, they can’t send ’em out to the slaughter without the support of their Navy, and we have their proper warships bottled up in Brest and Rochefort, or in The Texel in Holland.”
“They might get out, yes… but I doubt they will enjoy it!” Peel said with a snicker, topping up his own wine from the side-board. “After all, the Frogs must man those squadrons’ guns and retain enough sailors to handle the ships… and reserve even more skilled artillery men for the harbour and coastal batteries that ‘Boney’ has had erected all along the Channel coast, to boot. Is God just, the French may plan to have their infantry aboard the gunboats work their own guns to defend themselves! Perhaps they work to a tight budget?”
“Two for the price of one?” Lewrie snickered back, reaching to refill his glass, too.
“There is another matter, though,” Peel admitted at last; Lewrie became wary in an eyeblink, for this was the way that Mr. Twigg had begun to introduce his previous schemes. “There are, according to one of our… sources in Paris… several hundred more invasion craft to figure with.”
“You’ve still agents in Paris?” Lewrie asked, stunned.
“One or two,” Mr. Peel confessed most slyly. “Once the war began last May, Bonaparte clapped a total embargo on correspondence going in or coming out of France… almost every book, newspaper, or letter’s read… but we’ve managed. We have our ways, after all. So far, we only have vague descriptions, no sketches, of this other type of craft, but everyone would dearly love to lay hands on one. You’ll be working along the French coast? Good. Do you ever come across what looks like a water-beetle with sails, you snap it right up.”
“A water-beetle,” Lewrie said with a dubious frown.
“There’s a M’sieur Forfait, been made inspector-general of the invasion fleet. One of Bonaparte’s pet mathematicians and scientists? Forfait earned his spurs designing and building shallow draught barges and such for use on the Seine. Some people in London think the entire idea’s as daft as bats, but… he is a skilled mathematician, so we can’t dismiss his work out-of-hand.”
Mister MacTavish is a skilled engineer, too, and look what he’s come up with! Lewrie sourly thought.
“There are two types described,” Peel went on, leaning closer. “One’s about thirty-six feet by fourteen or fifteen feet, and will only draw about three feet of water. The second’s about fourty-six feet in length and sixteen or eighteen feet in breadth. That one is said to draw a little less than four feet of water, when fully laden. Eighty or an hundred soldiers aboard… a twenty-four-pounder gun mounted in the bows, and, from the description may resemble two serving platters joined together, the top one inverted, and very flat-bottomed. There are slanted berths for the soldiers in the rims of the lower platter, and they’re supposed to be rigged like a Schweling fishing boat… whatever the Devil that’s supposed to look like. Any clue?”
“Never seen one in my life,” Lewrie told him with a shrug.
“Anyway, the most intriguing part of the written description is that there’s a long box atop the upper platter that runs the length of the boat, tall enough to allow the soldiers aboard to sit below it and be sheltered from fire,” Peel said, grimacing with mock dis-belief. “Four or five abreast, and twenty or so deep, so they can sit there in the same formations they’d form in the field… Napoleon Bonaparte is very fond of the column when attacking opposing lines. Not keen on it, myself, but it’s seemed to have served him well, so far. Now, what we are worried about is whether that protective box, and the wide slope of the upper hull from the waterline up, might be armoured somehow. If the French have re-enforced these boats, they might be the principal craft to drive themselves right onto the beaches, and be proof against shot from any of our field guns or horse artillery batteries. Our fellow in Paris describes the damned things as three-fifths of their length flat, with a rise of eight feet at the ends. They could come ashore like so many walruses!”
“Armoured? With iron plate, d’ye mean?” Lewrie gawped. “That’d make ’em top-heavy as Hell. Centre of gravity, metacentric height… all that?”
“You’ve been reading technical books?” Peel teased.
“Ye listen to others long enough, well…,” Lewrie shrugged off. “If they’re armoured, they’d be drawin’ a lot more water than three or four feet, Jemmy. I’ll allow that the breadth of their hulls’d buoy ’em up a good deal, but not that much. And if they’re that heavy, it would take a lot more sail area than a fishing boat’s t’drive ’em.”
“The report says that they only require a crew of five or six seamen,” Peel said, dredging half a roll through the juices and gravy on his plate for a last bite. “And some sort of paddle arrangement to propel them if the wind fails. What sort? The work done by soldiers? Really, Alan… if you see one, go after it, MacTavish’s experiments bedamned.”
“I’ll try and do my best.” Lewrie grinned back. “Anything else? Pick up the Golden Fleece? Slay Medusa while I’m at it?”
“What’s for dessert?” Peel asked, laughing heartily.
“I think my cook said there’s a bread pudding. Are we done on confidential topics, I’ll have my steward return,” Lewrie said, rising to go to the forward door to his cabins to speak with the Marine guard so he could pass word for Pettus and Jessop.
“Rather humble fare for a knight and baronet,” Peel mused once he’d returned to the dining-coach. Lewrie opened a covered dish.
“It comes with caramel sauce,” Lewrie said, after sticking one finger into the dish and licking it. “And don’t you start! It’s all a sham, anyway. Awarded for sympathy, not anything I did. The closest I ever got to something of note was years ago in the South Atlantic when we took the L’Uranie frigate. And the baronetcy… hmpf! King George was havin’ an off day, let’s leave it at that. Unless ye wish to hear the whole story.”
“Is it amusing?” Peel asked.
“Completely,” Lewrie assured him.
“Then do tell!”