Any Approaching Enemy: A Novel of the Napoleonic Wars

by Jay Worrall

  Charles felt his anger rising at Pigott’s unvarnished arrogance and felt Bevan’s hand on his arm, warning him to restrain his temper. “Fine,” he said.

  “For how long shall we wait, sir?” Bevan asked.

  “For a decent interval,” Pigott answered, then, realizing he needed to be more specific, added, “A week, I should think.”

  Charles groaned inwardly, careful not to display any emotion. “Thank you, sir,” he managed. They were then dismissed, and on his way back down the side steps, he clearly heard Bedford below him mutter, “Fucking idiot,” and felt himself in complete agreement.

  THE WEEK PASSED with agonizing slowness as the hours and watches crawled one after the other. No sails were sighted on the horizon or anywhere else, except for a solitary xebec merchantman, which flags from Emerald promptly forbade anyone from pursuing. Charles and Bevan visited each other most nights, usually after dark so that Pigott would be less likely to notice the boats going back and forth. But it was at a meeting on Terpsichore that an actual strategy was plotted.

  “Captain Pigott will certainly order us all back to Gibraltar in a few days,” Bedford said at the outset. “This cannot be allowed to transpire. Pigott does not want us to have a look at Toulon, because Emerald is in such a sad state that she must return for repairs. If he goes back alone, it will reflect badly on him, as it should. By keeping us together, he thinks it will seem as if he stood in firm command and did all he could under difficult circumstances.”

  “How do we dissuade him?” Charles asked.

  “Ah, Charlie,” Bedford said with a wink, “in the last resort, ye must go off on yer own. Find some excuse to hang back; slip off in the night or some such. Ye have the highest standing among us with old Jervie, and it’s possible ye’ll get away with it.”

  Charles did not think much of this idea at all, not that he rejected it completely. “There must be a better alternative,” he said soberly.

  “Aye.” Bedford nodded. “I suggest we try sweet reasonableness first.”

  Thus, at noon on the seventh day since Pigott had arrived at the rendezvous, Charles was prepared when the signal Make sail, course south- by-west rose on what served as Emerald’s masts.

  “Mr. Beechum,” Charles said to the midshipman standing beside him, “hoist the signal.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Beechum responded, and raised the flags already laid out on the deck, Request meeting of captains. Charles noted with satisfaction the identical flags jerking upward on Terpsichore and Pylades, and immediately went down into his waiting gig.

  Pigott scowled at the captains assembled in front of him. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  “It’s my doing,” Bedford answered, “to prevent you from making a serious mistake.”

  Charles thought the senior captain was going to explode. His face turned bright red and his eyes widened. “I’ll see you broken and put back before the mast for this, Bedford,” he snarled.

  “Just a moment,” Charles said, stepping forward. “I think you should listen to what we have to say.”

  “You’re in on this, too?” Pigott said in a voice intended to intimidate. “I should have thought you were in enough trouble already. This borders on mutiny, don’t you agree, Commander Bevan?”

  “No, sir, I do not,” Bevan answered.

  “We wish only to provide you with the benefit of our advice,” Charles asserted, trying to sound conciliatory. “It is our duty to do so.”

  “It’s only a suggestion, sir,” Bevan offered. “For your consideration. We feel it wouldn’t look good if Admiral St. Vincent doesn’t agree with the course of action you’ve chosen, especially if he discovers that each of your subordinate officers tried to talk you out of it.”

  Pigott paused with an air of indulgent sarcasm. “All right, I’ll listen,” he said grudgingly, “but be quick about it.”

  “It is quite possible,” Bedford said with a touch of anger in his voice, “that Nelson and the others have gone on to Toulon and are at this moment waiting for us there.” He held up his hands to forestall Pigott’s objection. “I didn’t say it was likely or certain,” he emphasized, “but possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible,” Pigott answered. “Anything’s possible. But in my opinion—”

  “Sir,” Charles interjected, “it’s not a question of whether they went here or they went there. The question that will be asked is what decisions you made and how many possible eventualities you took into account. For all we know, Nelson decided to take his seventy-fours to Constantinople on a whim. But it is at least as likely that the squadron went to Toulon as that it returned to Gibraltar. The point is,” he said significantly, “that you would be able to report to Lord St. Vincent that you have covered every probability.”

  Pigott’s eyes shifted to the right and then to the left as he considered this. “All right,” he said after a moment. “All right, I will admit to finding some merit in your argument. I will allow one of you to sail for Toulon. But if there are no ships of the squadron present, you must return direct to Gibraltar.”

  “I would be pleased to go,” Bedford offered immediately.

  Pigott looked at him with a certain satisfaction. “No,” he said. “I’ll send Louisa, she’s expendable.”

  Charles shrugged off the implied insult. There was one additional thing he wanted, but he wasn’t sure how to go about asking for it. He decided to try flattery. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I think you’ve made a wise decision. Naturally, I will require the services of Commander Bevan and his brig.”

  “Why is that?” Pigott asked suspiciously.

  “I’m sure you’ve anticipated this, sir,” Charles said in his most pleasant tone. “In the event any of the squadron are encountered, they will require someone to carry dispatches back to the fleet. Pylades is well suited for that kind of task.”

  Pigott reluctantly nodded his agreement, evidently not much caring what Bevan did. “But I warn you: There will be no excursions. You’re to return straight to Gibraltar if there are no British warships present.”

  “Of course, sir,” Charles answered agreeably. “We will return immediately in the event there is no indication of Nelson’s whereabouts. You have my word.”

  Bedford waited in his gig while Charles and then Bevan climbed from Emerald’s side steps into their own craft. “Fucking idiot,” he muttered to no one in particular. To Charles, he said, “Ye be the lucky one. Get under way before he changes his mind.”

  “The moment I set foot on my deck,” Charles answered. “And thank you, sir.”

  Bedford touched his hat. “I wish you luck and Godspeed,” he said, then nodded to his coxswain.

  Daniel Bevan lingered for just a moment, looking curiously across at Charles. “Constantinople?” he asked.

  “It’s not impossible,” Charles answered.

  Charles climbed through Louisa’s entryport in a cheerful frame of mind. Winchester was at the side to meet him. “How did it go?” he asked.

  “Better than anyone had any right to expect, Stephen,” Charles answered. “Send the hands aloft. All plain sail; full-and-by. Course north-by-east.”

  “Toulon?” Winchester asked with a smile.

  “Toulon,” Charles answered with a larger one. “And better yet, signal to Pylades, if you please, Keep station to leeward. Daniel’s coming with us.”

  “Bribery?” Winchester asked.

  “Closer to blackmail,” Charles answered.

  THREE

  “DECK THERE. LAND HO, DIRECT FOR’ARD THE BOW.” A thin mist clung to the water’s surface like soft down in the early light. Charles collected his glass from the binnacle. He went down from the quarterdeck and walked forward along the waist. Near the bow of the ship, he mounted the starboard railing and started to climb the ratlines fastened across the foremast shrouds. Two thirds of the way up, he stopped, hooked his elbow through the ropes, and raised the telescope to his eye. In the distance, the dark speck of Cape Sici
e, resting on the soft white carpet, danced in his lens. He lowered the glass and arched his head back to speak to the lookout in the tops, fifteen feet above. “How far would you say, Tom?”

  Thomas Stutters’s head appeared over the edge of the platform. “Good morrow to ye, Cap’in, sir,” he said conversationally. “Hard to tell wif the fog. I’d say three, four leagues, near enough.”

  “Thank you,” Charles said, “and a good morning to you, too.” He swung around sideways on his perch until his eyes fell on Pylades, a seemingly ethereal craft ghosting over the sea-mist, two cable lengths away. After a moment a familiar figure in the brig’s foremast shrouds came to his attention. “Hello, Daniel,” he hollered across the gap and waved his arm. Daniel Bevan looked out and waved back. Satisfied, Charles glanced forward, saw that the distant heights of France had turned golden in the first rays of the sun, and descended to the deck.

  The vapor quickly burned off with the rising warmth of the day. Louisa and Pylades glided under the ragged bluffs of the cape, far enough out not to invite any cannon fire from the batteries along the shore. The land fell away and then ran roughly eastward for another five miles to a second headland at Cape Cepet, which marked the entrance to the outer roads of the great naval port of Toulon, with its backdrop of rugged sandstone hills liberally speckled with the new greens of spring.

  Charles had posted lookouts at all three mastheads and scanned the sea’s surface himself with his eyes and his glass. He found no sign of Nelson or the other two British seventy-fours or, indeed, warships of any kind. Louisa sailed as close as he dared across the four-mile-wide mouth of the harbor, carefully skirting the squat forts with their rippling tricolor flags on either side of the entrance. A few ships lay anchored in the road, small merchantmen of different types and nationalities, but no warships or troopships or any activity remarkable enough to excite interest. When they had progressed far enough to see into the military harbor, he found it relatively empty. A number of craft lay moored to the quays, some with standing masts but few with their yards crossed.

  Charles snapped his telescope closed with a sinking feeling. Two things were abundantly clear—Nelson was not at Toulon, and neither was the French fleet.

  “Mr. Beechum!” he shouted.

  “Yes, sir.” The midshipman came running from the forecastle, breathing heavily.

  “Send this signal to Pylades: Captain report on board. ”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Daniel Bevan arrived from over the side within the quarter hour. “What do you think?” Charles asked without preamble.

  “There’s no squadron, that’s a fact,” Bevan answered. “Maybe they did go to Gibraltar.”

  “There’s no French, either,” Charles observed.

  “So?”

  “Do you remember, back at Cádiz, months ago, I told you about this American and his two women?”

  Bevan scratched his chin thoughtfully. “They said something about a big French fleet and lots of transports.”

  “At?” Charles prompted.

  Bevan’s eyes brightened. “Toulon. So you think the French are out in force, and Nelson’s after them with his three seventy-fours?”

  “It would be like him,” Charles said.

  “I don’t think,” Bevan observed, cocking an eyebrow, “that Pigott is going to like this one bit.”

  “Sod Pigott,” Charles said seriously.

  “I don’t think that will help,” Bevan answered. “Besides, we don’t know where they’ve gone.”

  “No,” Charles said. “I don’t know where the French have gone, and I don’t know what Nelson has done. But I do know whom to ask.”

  Bevan looked at him blankly. When Charles pointed toward a number of scattered fishing boats in the lee of the Giens Peninsula, he smiled.

  “I speak a little French,” Charles said confidently. “I’ll buy some fish and see what I can learn. You return to Pylades; I’ll let you know.”

  With Stephen Winchester at his side, Charles called down to a very frightened fisherman seated in his smack close up against Louisa’s lee side: “Misseur, av-e-vou le poi-son poor vent?”

  “Quoi?” the wiry man in a filthy woolen sweater, heavily patched trousers, and a weeks-old beard said, looking up at him with an uncomprehending and toothless grin.

  Undeterred, Charles glanced again at his pocket French dictionary. “Vent-a-vous le poi-son, see-vous-plait?” he shouted in a much louder voice in order to be clear.

  “Non comprend pas, Capitaine,” the man responded with a truly expressive shrug.

  Charles held out a gold sovereign by the tips of his fingers. “Poi-son?” he yelled.

  This was understood. “Oui, oui,” the man said and, rummaging around in the bottom of his boat, came up with three large fish that he held out by their tails.

  “Entrez, see-vous-plait,” Charles said, gesturing broadly for the man to come aboard. He turned to Winchester. “Get Beechum, will you? He at least speaks Spanish. That should be of some help.”

  “Actually, Charlie, I speak French quite well,” Winchester answered.

  “Really?”

  “Better than you.”

  The fisherman climbed nimbly over the side with his three fish and an odor that, in England, would have made him exempt from the press.

  Charles smiled graciously. “Invite him down to my cabin,” he said to Winchester. “We’ll offer him some refreshment.”

  It took two hours for Charles to be rid of the fisherman and two weeks for his cabin to be free of the smell. For his golden coin—which probably could have bought the man’s boat, his wife, and all his children, as well as his catch—Charles received three large sea perch and the knowledge that on the first day of the storm, all of the French warships—in number more than the fingers of two hands—and an inexpressibly large number of transports had slipped out of the harbor and sailed toward the east. Some weeks later—how many weeks the fisherman was vague about, but pretty comfortable it was a Sunday—three English warships, with two lines of gunports each, arrived from the south. They also bought fish, much fish, but regrettably, not the fisherman’s fish. A few more days, and ten (two hands) additional English ships arrived from beyond Cape Sicie. All had two rows of guns. Then, “poof” (this came during the second bottle of wine and was accompanied by impressive hand gestures), the English departed, also to the east. To Genoa, it was said. This was only two, three days previous.

  Charles thanked the man, gave him his coin and the remainder of the second bottle of wine, then guided him back to the entryport. With many a “merci” and “bonne chance” and “vive les Anglais,” he went over the side.

  “We will pass within hailing distance of Pylades, if you please,” Charles said to Winchester.

  THE TWO BRITISH warships started immediately eastward, skirting the Hyeres Islands, and by nightfall they hove to well south and east of Cape Lardier, marking the seaward limit of the Bay of Cavalaire. Charles invited Bevan to supper by signal flag. “Yes, I know, sir,” Beechum had said promptly when Charles approached him, “Captain report on board. I keep it ready.”

  While he was thinking of it, Charles asked Winchester as well and requested that he pass the invitation to Talmage. He was aware that he had not seen the first lieutenant on deck in the past several days.

  “That would not be advisable,” Winchester replied. “Mr. Talmage is indisposed.”

  “Is he ill?” Charles asked.

  “No, not exactly.”

  Charles paused. “Has he been drinking?”

  “It is not my place to say,” Winchester answered carefully. “Mr. Talmage is an officer and a gentleman. It would be inappropriate for me to comment on his behavior or to speculate on the reasons for it.”

  “Thank you,” Charles said, understanding exactly what Winchester had told him. Intended or not, Charles had called into question Talmage’s abilities, and the lieutenant had taken it personally, perhaps even as an affront to his honor. Charles accepted that
it was at least in part his responsibility. He had been careless in his speech and insufficiently considerate of Talmage’s feelings. The man must have led a relatively sheltered existence on Victory. He was certainly ill prepared to be the first on a frigate. The whole thing was becoming irksome. Still, Charles thought, he should have been more careful. He had created an awkward situation, and he sensed that it was not going to be all that easy to repair. He looked back at Winchester. “You’ve been doing double duty on watch?”

  “Eliot helps.”

  “All right,” Charles said, “write me into the schedule. I’ll stand one watch a day. We’ll have to make some adjustments.”

  “That would be welcome,” Winchester said.

  “I’d still like your company at supper.”

  “Honored,” Winchester answered. He paused. “You know, it’s not your fault, Charlie. This has been coming since we left Gibraltar. Talmage knows he has shortcomings. He just doesn’t want to face them.”

  AT DAWN THE next morning, Louisa and Pylades continued northeast-ward along the mountainous coast, Louisa sailing three or four miles from the shore and the smaller brig a similar distance farther out. In this way they stayed in easy contact and covered a reasonably broad swath of the sea. Charles looked into every midsize bay and harbor as they passed to assure himself that they held no captured or damaged British warships, in case that had been Nelson’s fate. Saint-Tropez and Sainte-Maxime on the Bay of Saint-Tropez were empty except for fishing boats and a few small coastal traders. The same was true for Fréjus, which they reached by late afternoon. The harbor at Cannes contained a medium-sized Arab merchantman but no warships. Nightfall found them hove to several miles beyond the barren Saint-Honorat Island, with its ruined monastery. And so it went the next day, past Antibes and Nice and Monte Carlo, beyond the border of the French Republic and into the Ligurian Sea.

  Charles spent the days mostly on deck, sporadically talking with Eliot and Winchester, watching the shoreline as it passed, and considering what he should or should not do about Talmage. That the lieutenant considered himself injured, there was no doubt. It was touchy when a man felt his honor slighted. That was why, on land, duels were fought; blood sometimes seemed the only remedy. Not terribly long ago, duels were common enough among sea officers as well, until the king expressly forbade the practice. Also forbidden was any junior officer calling out a senior, for reasons that were all too obvious—creating a vacancy for one’s own advancement, for example. The Articles of War were inflexible on the subject, stipulating the penalty of death for the offender. For the present, Charles decided, it was probably best to do nothing. He had often heard it repeated, time heals all wounds, and he had plenty of time. Talmage would eventually come to see that no insult had been intended, and everything would be back to normal. And if not? Well, that wasn’t so bad. First lieutenants went absent from their posts all the time. Usually, they were killed in battle or died of some disease. Charles knew of one case in which a first had so infuriated his captain that the man promptly shot his subordinate dead. Of course, the captain had been severely reprimanded.