Sea of Grey

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Which succeeded admirably,” Lamb prosed on, pumping away with belated joy. “Your two brave lads, who went ashore to signal?”

  “One passed over, sir. The other lost his arm,” Lewrie related, turning sombre again. “Should’ve sent older men, Commission Officers, or gone ashore myself, instead of …”

  “Weren’t to know, Captain Lewrie,” Lamb assured him. “War ain’t predictable, or clean. You pick men for such, send ‘em off with your fingers crossed, even those in a ‘forlorn hope’ to breach the walls of a fortified position, never knowin’ what the butcher’s bill will be. The sorry price to pay for holdin’ command over men. But, our duty. Should’ve seen him, Captain Blaylock, him and his ship this morning,” he told the stricken Blaylock, who stood with mouth agape in anguish. “Put out boats and rowed his ship into the shallows, and just in your ‘nick of time,’ too, else I and most of my troops would’ve been slaughtered long before you rounded the far point. Ah, but we surely know we can count on the Navy to save our hides, hey, sir? Do you let me make free with your claret, I’d admire to offer a toast to Captain Lewrie and his ship …”

  “HMS Proteus, sir,” Lewrie supplied, beaming with pleasure; and sensing salvation from Blaylock’s bile, and a court-martial.

  “Saw Major James lead a re-enforcement inland, General Lamb. I wonder how he fared?” Lewrie asked, as Blaylock’s steward fetched out another glass and poured a brimming bumper. “Is he well?”

  “Caught ‘em strung out and disorganised, he did, sir. Carved ’em thin as a roast at a two-penny ordinary!” Lamb boasted. “Gave ‘em the bayonet and ran ’em back into the woods … where your grapeshot and cannister strewed ’em six ways from Sunday! Oh, James got a cut or two, and I doubt his tailor’d approve, but he’s main-well. I will tell him you asked of his welfare?”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir,” Lewrie replied. “Brave fellow.”

  For a complete nit-wit, Lewrie qualified to himself; but even they sometimes have their uses.

  “Takes one to know one, as my granny always told me, Captain Lewrie!” General Lamb chortled. “Well, sirs! To Lewrie and Proteus, huzzah!”

  “Lewrie and Proteus,” Captain George Blaylock said in chorus, the smile on his face patently false, his teeth grinding all the while.

  “We’ll have need of that sort of support in the morning,” Lamb said, once they had tossed back their wine and the steward circulated with a cut-glass decanter to top them up. “L’Ouverture’s laddies ain’t done, not by a long chalk. Even re-enforced, we’ll be hard-pressed.”

  Think I’ll rub Blaylock’s nose in it, Lewrie maliciously thought; like a puppy in his scat. Use the upper hand now … or lose it.

  “I’d like to oblige you, Sir Harold, but I’ve fired off the last of my grape and cannister, along with an entire tier of powder kegs, and have only roundshot left. Oh, we could make up new stands of grape and bag musket and pistol balls easily enough,” he breezed off, before turning his gaze to Captain Blaylock, “ … were there some about.”

  Lamb swivelled about to peer at Blaylock, almost catching that worthy’s outraged scowl; which expression was rapidly amended to the genial, slack-lipped smile of a doting uncle.

  “Surely, Captain Blaylock, your ship’s magazines should be positively stiff with the proper munitions,” General Lamb suggested.

  “Ah,” Blaylock answered with a petulant snap of those lips as he contemplated his ship of the line being plundered a second time. “Um, I expect they are, but … now we’ve landed two more regiments and two batteries of six-pounders, this … indirect fire will be unnecessary, hmm? And, should such still be required, would it not better serve to shift Proteus to the outer harbour … now her quiver’s spent, and let Halifax take her place?”

  Go on, go on, step right in it! Lewrie inwardly gloated.

  “My carronades and chase-guns are mounted an entire deck higher than Lewrie’s, after all. Hence, less risk of accidentally firing on your soldiers, Sir Harold? And ’tis a business fraught with risk, as it is.”

  “Captain Wandsworth could recalculate his sums, I s‘pose, for Halifax’s greater height;” Lewrie allowed, as if reluctant to accept. “Damme, though, it cuts a bit rough t’be supplanted, now we’ve got it down to a science.”

  “Finish what you started, d’ye mean, Captain Lewrie?” General Lamb quite sympathetically imagined.

  “Aye, something like that, Sir Harold,” Lewrie said, making his “confession” seem a hard-drawn thing. “Then there’s the excitement, I must allow. Blockade work was gettin’ boresome in the main, and then here came this marvelous chance for real action, and … for us to up-anchor and move down-harbour as a guardship … well. We’d be worse than useless. Not patrollin’, not makin’ a contribution … .” he concluded, all but piping at his eyes in sadness over “not doing his bit.”

  “Since Proteus has exhausted her magazines,” Blaylock said, getting a sly-boots look on his phyz that Lewrie, for a moment, dreaded with crossed fingers hidden in his lap. “There’s no reason for Lewrie to idle here, at all. Halifax can handle anything that arises.”

  Got you, ya greedy, glory-huntin’ bastard! Lewrie thought, trying not to leap up and whoop in gleeful triumph. It’ll be the onliest way that barge of yours gets your name in the papers!

  “Oh, sir, now … !” he pretended to protest; not too loudly.

  “Perhaps a quick return to Kingston would be in order, Captain Lewrie,” Blaylock casually suggested. “To replace your lacks, hmm?”

  “Surely, there must be someplace closer, someplace not so deep down-wind o’ the Trades, though, sir,” Lewrie grumbled. “That would take Proteus far from her patrol area, and at such a parlous time …”

  He left off the “tsk-tsk” inherent in his “respectful” gripe.

  “Then down to Port-Au-Prince.” Blaylock brightened. “There’s a storeship in port now, which freed my ship to escort the convoy here, and guard the evacuation of Gonaives and Saint Marc. Got my guns back, too,” he added with a prissy “so there” sniff of retribution.

  “Well, if needs must, then of course, sir,” Lewrie said, almost tailwagging eager to serve, no matter how humbly. “Wherever we are needed.”

  “Do you sail in the morning, then, Captain Lewrie,” General Lamb told him, “I’ll send a letter of appreciation aboard your ship before you depart, expressing my undying thanks for your actions today. And a copy to your Admiral Parker, as well … to let him know what a paragon he has in his command.”

  “You do me too much honour, Sir Harold,” Lewrie vowed modestly though eating up such approbation like plum duff. That letter would get posted in the news back home, getting his name in the papers!

  “Nonsense.” Sir Harold waved him off. “Captain Blaylock can write a properly appreciative report of his own, hey Captain Blaylock?”

  “Why, I …” Blaylock responded, mouth agape in high dudgeon and shock for a raw second, before turning bland and agreeable once more. “But of course, Sir Harold. Anything to oblige,” he stated, obviously weighing the cost of a refusal against the present goodwill of a rich and knighted senior officer.

  “Do you wish, then, to take my anchorage tonight, sir?” Lewrie prodded, shamming some more eagerness. “There’s still enough light …”

  “You would not mind, sir?” Blaylock asked, leery of his offer to cede the place of honour so quickly.

  “It will give Captain Wandsworth more time to do his sums before dawn, sir,” Lewrie replied, rising as if dismissed, the decision having already been made. “And, being toothless, I can accomplish no more.”

  “Makes sense, sir,” General Lamb commented, nose in his glass.

  “Aye, up-anchor and stand down below the port, Captain Lewrie,” Blaylock said, draining his glass and rising to his own feet as if to begin the evolutions for moving his ship that instant. “Do let me walk you to the deck, Captain Lewrie.”

  “An honour, sir,” Lewrie replied, lying most pleasantly.

&nbs
p; Blaylock, for Lamb’s benefit, even went so far as to thread his right arm through Lewrie’s left, as if they were now as close as cater-cousins on the way to the door.

  “Do not make the mistake of trying to best me again, Lewrie,” Blaylock muttered from the side of his mouth once they were out of Sir Harold’s earshot, still beaming like an admiring papa. “I’ve years more experience at Navy politics than any jumped-up, ill-bred jackanapes of a ‘dashing’ frigate captain. You finagled me once back in Port-Au-Prince, and robbed me of guns. I s’pose you think you did it again, tonight, hmm? Well, let me tell you something. Oh, I will pen you a modicum of praise for your damn-foolery, but stress the horrid risk you ran of killing our own troops, and one never knows, does one … the Samboes just might’ve had artillery in those woods, and any casualties from grape or cannister I can always lay at your feet, and there goes your good odour … boy!”

  “Don’t you run the same risk, sir?” Lewrie pointed out. “After all, it’ll be your guns, tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s accidental dead can always become yesterday’s dead … on paper, Lewrie,” Blaylock whispered, evilly beaming. “And just who d’ye think will do the writing once you’re gone … Lewrie.”

  “You will, of course, sir,” Lewrie levelly responded.

  “That’s right, that’s exactly right!” Blaylock softly crowed.

  “Unless it’s Sir Harold writing Admiral Parker, should you kill some of his men, sir,” Lewrie pointed out. “Then it’s on your head.”

  “Ah, but in my case, Lewrie, t’will be an unfortunate accident, a mistaken signal from Army artillerymen.”

  “Well, since you seem to have everything covered, sir, I’ll go back aboard Proteus and shift anchor,” Lewrie said, outwardly uncaring and eerily calm in the face of such a threat.

  “Goodbye, little boy-captain.” Blaylock sniffed. Again, for the benefit of General Lamb, he raised his voice for a proper parting sentiment. “Have a safe and quick voyage to Port-Au-Prince.”

  “Thankee, sir,” Lewrie said, conversationally loud as well, but dropped his voice to a whisper again as he stuck out his hand, forcing Blaylock to take it to make a decent show. “Before I go, though, you should know, sir … without grape or cannister, Proteus cannot guard the harbour tonight.”

  “Against what?” Blaylock asked, with a snort of derision.

  “Cutting-out expeditions by L’Ouverture’s men, sir. An attempt to blow you sky-high, sir.”

  “Oh, tosh!” Blaylock actually giggled at the very idea.

  “You did not read my report about the four boats we intercepted, sir? When they saw that they could not escape us, they turned and lit their cargoes of powder, tryin’ to take us with ’em. They’ve dozens of small boats up and down the coast, I’m bound … out of reach of the Army’s trenchworks. Who knows what they’ll be up to, now they have been stung so bad by naval gunfire … hmmm, sir?”

  Blaylock looked as if he’d sneer for a moment, dismissing such a threat, but then went blank as he realized that it was possible, and that his precious ship was now at the point of danger.

  “By God, you … !”

  “Do you have your report aboard by Six Bells, sir, to accompany Sir Harold’s, I b’lieve I can breast the slack of the tide and work my way out on the land-breeze. If you please, sir.”

  Didn’t think o’ that, didya? Lewrie gloated some more; the first ship out of here’s mine, carryin’ your damned despatches.

  “By God, I’ll have your arse for this, Lewrie!”

  “If you say so, sir,” Lewrie rejoined, his voice dead-level and his eyes going from calm blue to steely grey. “If you say so.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Port-Au-Prince was a much more crowded harbour than when Proteus had last lain there, and this time, when sailing down the north channel past Ile de Gonaves, instead of the exotic and otherwordly cries of a myriad of brightly coloured island birds, the overlying sounds were of distant field-pieces, thumping flat and hollow, the faint crackle from musket volleys, and the brooding, menacing thud of voudoun drums.

  An ancient stores ship, HMS Grampus, lay at anchor. Once a tall and proud 2nd Rate of 90 guns, she was now a tar-smeared and filthy old barge, little better than a mastless receiving ship or prison hulk, so bereft of upper masts that Proteus’s people could conjure that the only way the old warrior could have gotten over from Kingston was under tow.

  “Cain’t see dot L’Oi—dot Songbird we took, sah,” Cox’n Andrews pointed out, shading his eyes to scan the crowded harbour.

  “Well, damme, I’d hoped …” Lewrie said, having counted on the prize being there, so he could get Lieutenant Catterall and Midshipman Adair back aboard to re-enforce his depleted petty officers and leaders. “Mister Coote?” he called, shrugging it off. “You’ll take the cutter under Mister Elwes to Grampus, once we’re anchored. Grape shot, cannister makings, and powder first, mind. We’re naked without them”

  Their last night at Mole Saint Nicholas, without grape or cannister, he’d paced and fretted a move by L’Ouverture’s men with an armed double watch on deck, armed Marines in the fighting tops, and both eyes skinned for any suspicious shadow or drifting log in the water, worried that his malicious warning to Captain Blaylock had been borrowing trouble for himself.

  “Mister Langlie, once Mister Coote returns, begin loading. I’ll be ashore, to find out what aid we may render. Or what we’re to do.”

  “Aye, sir. Though I don’t suppose they’ll ask for indirect fire here,” Langlie commented, taking off his hat to mop his forehead with his coat sleeve. “Our Army’s too far inland for that.”

  “And I doubt General Maitland’s staff runs to lunatics, such as our friends Wandsworth and Scaiff,” Lewrie replied, softly japing him.

  “That, too, sir,” Langlie chuckled, turning his attention to the draw of the sails and their course. “Half a point a’weather, helmsman.”

  Two hours of mopping his face, swatting flies and pesky mosquitoes, dipping up water now and then from the communal bucket at General Maitland’s headquarters, and Lewrie had even less of a clue as to what Proteus should do once she was re-armed.

  At last, coming from a tall set of double louvred doors leading to a parlour converted to offices, he spotted a blue-and-white uniform not worn by the Royal Artillery but by a Post-Captain of his own service, and Lewrie practically pounced on him, naming himself.

  “Captain Lewrie, is it?” the officer asked, once he’d spoken.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Nicely … of Obdurate,” the officer replied, and his name fit him most appropriately. Nicely was a square older fellow with pepper-andsalt hair, still thick and wiry, a man possessed of the merriest blue eyes and a permanent tan, his countenance fixed in perpetuity in a benign half smile, as if pleased as punch with his place in the world, his lot, and the progress of all that he surveyed.

  “You’re senior officer present, sir, I take it. Any orders for me?” Lewrie asked. “Askin’ of the Army, well …”

  “You were off to patrol the north shore,” Nicely mused, fingers to his lips to recall him, before snapping his fingers as he got it.

  “Aye, sir, but we put into Mole Saint Nicholas a few days ago, and shot away all our grape and cannister. Now that Grampus is here, and we may re-arm—”

  “Shot it all away? Tell me,” Nicely said, leading him by dint of personality down the hall towards the front doors. After he’d related the whole tale, Nicely let out a loud “Whew!” of amazement.

  “Damme, but you’ve been a busy lad, Captain Lewrie. You have a written account? O’ course you do. Give it me. That laving bowl and the bucket’s fairly fresh. Avail yourself whilst I look this over.”

  Lewrie swabbed his face and neck once more, and ladled up a dipper of water, sipping off half and using the rest to swirl the dipper’s ladle clean before slinging it on the stone steps of the commandeered mansion, where the water steamed on the hot, sun-heated stones.

  “Damn! Ar
e they trying to shift supplies east to invade Santo Domingo, the best use for your ship would be right back on the station you left!” Nicely grumbled, fanning himself with the sheaf of paper in their airless oven of a hallway. “No love for the Dons, understand, but I wouldn’t wish L‘Ouverture on the demons of Hell. Soon as they’re in charge here, they’ll be over the border quick as you can say ‘knife,’ and God help the Spanish, then. This … indirect fire may prove useful here in a few days. I’m afraid I must order you to stay, Lewrie.”

  “I understand, sir,” Lewrie answered, nodding and smiling as he contemplated another visit ashore, and a rencontre with that Henriette. With a qualm, too, for this time, should he have to fire over the head of British troops, he wouldn’t have Wandsworth or Scaiff to “carry the can” should things go wrong. Perhaps Captain Blaylock would get his wish after all, and he’d end up slaughtering British soldiers by error! His error! Quickly followed by a court-martial, Blaylock testifying that he’d “told him so,” and …

  “Excuse me, sir, but you said …” Lewrie plumbed at last. “If L’Ouverture is in charge? Of Port-Au-Prince?”

  “Should have said ‘when,’ rather,” Nicely told him, turning sombre. “Mole Saint Nicholas re-enforced with troops from Saint Marc and Gonaives … thereby ceding those little ports to L‘Ouverture, do you see. Us here in their South Province and West Province concentrating forces at Port-Au-Prince and Jacmel, on the south coast. We’ve given up Little and Grand Goave, Arcahele just north of here …’twas that or get their garrisons massacred. L’Ouverture’s unleashed his armies on us in an allout effort, and frankly the swarthy little bugger is beating our poor Army like a cheap drum, Lewrie. Your coming here is much like ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire.’”

  “Well, damme!”

  “Couple of days back, it was run or die, up at Croix de Bouquets … routed Maitland’s troops and ran ‘em clean out of the Plain de Cul-de-Sac,” Nicely explained. “Flank units gave way under hellish swarms of ’em, then the center lost heart and scampered before they could be cut off and encircled. Abandoned guns, caissons … wounded? That’s not over five miles from here. Our six or eight thousand healthy and present, ’gainst fifty or sixty thousand of theirs? Damme, I suspect we’ll be asked to evacuate the Army in a few days. A total muddle, Lewrie. Complete and utter.”