by Jay Worrall
She did not move. “Why art thou running away?” she asked.
Charles didn’t understand the question or why she had asked it. His central concern was to get her in as protected a place as possible, and that would be below the waterline. “We are running because that is a French frigate of war. She has more guns than we do, and they are larger than ours. It would be very dangerous for us to do otherwise,” he explained as patiently as he could. He repeated, “Please take Molly below to the orlop deck or into the hold. I will send for you when it is safe.”
The high promontory of Cape Sega approached rapidly to starboard. The Frenchman had settled on a course slightly to the north of Louisa ’s, rather than directly taking up her wake. Why? Penny still had not moved, and Molly stood anxiously beside her.
“Art thou fleeing from thy enemy because Molly and I are present?” Penny demanded. “Wouldst thou stand and fight otherwise?”
Charles had to think. He had once chosen to fight another frigate larger than even this Frenchman near the mouth of a Spanish harbor. Was he being overly cautious because Penny was on board? Of course he was, but there was more to it than that. His duty was to find and provide assistance to his admiral, not to engage enemy warships. Even if he were to defeat the frigate, Louisa might be badly damaged, even crippled. And he might not prevail. “No,” he said, “in the circumstance, I would run, no matter.”
The high cliffs of Cape Sega appeared nearly even with Louisa ’s bow. The French frigate followed at just under a mile behind, still angling slightly to the north. Charles needed a moment to think about this.
“Truthfully?” Penny said. “I would—”
“DECK!” A call, almost a scream, came down from the lookout in the tops. “Straight on the bow; dead on!”
Charles stared forward over the forecastle. There, as big as life, stood a second frigate barely a cable’s length ahead, just emerging from behind the cape.
“Up helm, up helm!” he yelled at Eliot.
Louisa, already making a fair turn of speed, turned nimbly as her rudder bit and her mizzen came over. It occurred to Charles that the French captain must have been as surprised as he was. He saw that they would cross the frigate’s bow, just now beginning to turn, at almost point-blank range.
“Stephen,” he yelled down into the gundeck, “to port; fire as you bear.”
“Bear on what?” Winchester called back, his view of the frigate obscured by the forecastle. Then, as Louisa swung around, Charles heard “Oh, never mind.”
The gunports thrust open, the deck rumbling as the guns ran out. The frigate’s bowsprit hovered in the sky, slowly swinging to take up a parallel course to his own. Her port side bow quarter presented itself as Louisa’s broadside roared out in a deafening blast.
Charles heard Penny give a small cry beside him, but he kept his focus on the frigate. He saw the shot pound into the enemy bow and snap her bowsprit near its beak. To his disappointment, the remainder of her masts seemed secure. The frigate continued her turn, her own gunports flipping up, the black tubes of her cannon sliding out.
“Charles, Charles.” He heard his wife and felt her pulling on his sleeve. It was more than he could deal with.
“Goddammit, Penny,” he almost shouted at her, “get below. This is no place for a woman.” He cast a glance at the frigate’s side, fifty yards away, her guns all poking through. He was beside himself with fear for her in what would soon follow. Molly, at least, looked properly awed.
“No.” She glared back at him. “I will not leave thy side in this time of peril.”
The Frenchman fired, temporarily lost in a cloud of angry gray-black smoke. Solid shot slammed into the hull and screamed across the quarterdeck. Penny flinched but did not move. Charles fought to steady himself. He noticed Talmage approaching the quarterdeck.
“Penny,” he pleaded as calmly as he could, “if you want to help me, you cannot stay here. Your presence is too much of a distraction. I can’t think about what I am doing. Go below. I am sure the surgeon will be grateful for your assistance. Please.” If she refused, he was determined to have her arrested and escorted into the hold.
Penny stood silent, indecision on her face.
“Molly,” Charles said in desperation, “do something.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if we did as he wants,” Molly said urgently.
Penny drew herself up straight, her face ashen white. “Come, Molly,” she said icily, “the captain has ordered us downstairs.” With all her dignity, she turned and started at a walk toward the ladderway. She had never called him “the captain” in that tone of voice before.
“I am available for duty,” Talmage said.
Charles found the man’s sudden appearance almost infuriating. He’d had enough extraneous diversions, and he didn’t need any more.
“Fucking hell you are,” he swore.
The carronades on the quarterdeck barked out their thirty-two-pound balls; he saw the twelve-pounders on the gundeck being heaved forward. The two ships had settled on parallel courses, not a pistol shot apart, the wind nearly dead astern. Charles quickly looked for Pylades and found her on his port side beam. The frigate they’d spotted first was cutting across the sea several cable lengths beyond, angling to close off his escape. One at a time, Charles decided.
Louisa’s increasingly ragged broadside exploded outward, the reverberations felt through the deck. The smoke quickly blew clear, and he saw that at least one or two of the Frenchman’s guns were dismounted, one gunport beaten into a ragged gap. Her masts still stood. He turned his attention back to Lieutenant Talmage, his anger marginally controlled. “I am pleased that you have finally decided to attend your duties,” he said with not entirely intended sarcasm. “You may replace Mr. Winchester on the gundeck and send him aft.”
Talmage stood stone-faced for a moment, then spoke: “My business with you is not completed.” Then he left.
Louisa’s and the French frigate’s broadsides fired very nearly together. Charles observed additional damage to his opponent’s hull and railing. Looking upward, he noted holes in a number of his sails and a fair amount of newly cut rigging. They’ve decided on disabling our masts, he thought. Another glance at the farther frigate, and he knew that he could not afford to remain engaged as he was for long.
As soon as Winchester arrived on the quarterdeck, Charles ordered the boatswain and his mates be sent aloft to attend the damaged cables immediately. One more broadside, he decided, and they will have to bear away. No matter what, he couldn’t allow the farther frigate to reach across his bows.
As usual, the carronades with their loud bark spoke first, one well-placed shot striking the foremast near the deck. The maindeck guns and the long nine-pounders on the quarterdeck rammed out through the gunports and immediately exploded inward in clouds of smoke. Charles saw what he thought were two balls smash into the forechains near the bow and watched as the foremast lurched forward and swung down over her forecastle. It wasn’t a decisive injury, but it was enough.
“Four points to port, if you please, Mr. Eliot,” Charles ordered. As Louisa bore up, the frigate fired the half of her broadside that was not masked by the fallen topmast, though to little effect that he could see.
He shifted his attention to the remaining Frenchman slicing across the sea at an acute angle from the north. Charles judged that on their present courses, the two ships would come aboard each other a scant quarter mile ahead. He noticed that Bevan’s brig had slipped behind to cross the Frenchman’s wake and take up position athwart the already damaged frigate’s bow. He smiled as puffs of cannon smoke ballooned from Pylades’s deck while she fired her six-pounder broadside into the Frenchman’s stem.
“Double-shot the port side cannon,” he said, turning to Winchester. “Run them out and aim for her gunports.”
Winchester relayed the orders to Talmage in the waist while Charles watched the closing French frigate. Two cable lengths separated them as the ship opposite opened her g
unports and ran out her armament. In an instant, she had clouded herself in smoke, orange tongues poking through in a single orderly line. Several of the shot struck the sea, throwing up huge spouts. Two, he thought, struck the hull somewhere. The remainder screamed across the deck with angry buzzing sounds. “Too early,” Charles said to himself, “too soon.”
“Wait,” he said to Winchester. “Wait.” The two ships came up beam to beam, less than fifty yards apart. He saw the first of her cannon, reloaded, being run back out.
“FIRE!” he yelled.
Louisa’s port side cannon and carronades fired as one, leaping inward, the smoke curling across the decks.
Charles looked quickly for Bevan’s brig, still firing into the bow of the first frigate. He decided there was no point in waiting or exchanging further broadsides with the Frenchman across from him.
“Down helm, Mr. Eliot,” he ordered. “We will bear away directly.”
“Down helm it is,” Eliot repeated. “Course, sir?”
“South-by-east. We’ll let him try a stern chase if he wants it. Mr. Sykes.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Signal to Pylades to break off and assume station to windward.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Stephen,” Charles said, “secure the guns and put as many men to work in the rigging as necessary. We will run.” He had not even looked to see what damage the Frenchman had suffered.
Louisa’s turn took the enemy frigate unprepared, and it was several moments before her sails braced around to take up his wake. Charles ordered as much sail as he thought the state of her rigging could support, adding more as the repairs to stays, lines, and halyards were completed. She ran easily, with the wind fine on her starboard quarter. For a time the French frigate closed marginally to a quarter of a mile behind. Charles breathed easier as it became apparent that she carried no bow chasers. The distance steadied as more canvas was added, and gradually, Louisa and Pylades began to draw away. The sun dipped low in the west; darkness tinted the eastern horizon. With the last of the light, the Frenchman wore around and began the long beat back to Malta.
“Mr. Sykes,” Charles said, “if you would be so kind as to call on the cockpit and inform Mrs. Edgemont and Miss Bridges that their presence would be welcome on quarterdeck, with my compliments.” He was not altogether looking forward to the reunion with his wife.
SIX
“IT WILL MEAN ADDED RESPONSIBILITY, MR. BEECHUM,” Charles said. “You will have to stand a regular watch schedule.”
“Yes, sir,” Beechum answered.
“You do know that it is a temporary assignment? I haven’t the authority to promote you on my own.” Charles sat at the table in his cabin, the women having been banished to the deck above. Beechum sat opposite him.
“Yes, sir. I understand,” Beechum answered, sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair, absurdly eager.
“If your performance is satisfactory, I will recommend to the admiral that the step be made permanent. It’s possible, probable even, that he won’t approve it without an examination. Still, it won’t hurt to have it on your record.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Beechum said earnestly. “I want to say that I appreciate your confidence, sir.”
“Lieutenant Winchester will inform you of your duties.”
“Yes, sir,” the young man said, rising and taking up his hat. With a second “Thank you, sir,” he backed out of the cabin.
Charles sat for a moment longer, savoring his too rarely found privacy. Beechum would do well, he thought. If not, it wouldn’t be for lack of effort. He looked around his cabin and grimaced. The flotsam of Penny and Molly’s occupation was much in evidence. Penny’s traveling luggage lay in his sleeping cabin, covered by a growing pile of petticoats and stockings and other ladies’ garments. Molly’s were stacked on the seat under the stern windows. A shawl lay folded over the back of a chair, a bonnet draped carelessly from his desk. There was a dainty pair of shoes jumbled in a corner where they had been kicked. Attwater insisted that such items remain where they were; he claimed the women fussed at him when they couldn’t find their things.
Grudgingly, Charles pushed his chair back from the table and stood. Collecting his hat and sword from their pegs on the bulkhead, he exited the cabin, nodded to the sentry, and went out. Stephen Winchester touched his hat as Charles mounted the ladderway to the quarterdeck. “Have you talked to Beechum?”
“Just this moment,” Winchester said.
“Stephen, you’re the official first now,” Charles said. “I’ve entered it in the book. Beechum is acting second. I’ve listed Talmage as a supernumerary.”
Winchester nodded in acknowledgment but said nothing.
Charles proceeded across the deck to Penny, who stood waiting for him expectantly by the weather rail. When he arrived, she placed her arm in his. “Did everything go well with Isaac Beechum?”
“Quite well,” Charles said. She’d been on board ten days now, and not for the first time, he wondered about her and her thoughts. She had not reacted the way he’d thought she would two days before, when they had gotten into the running fight. She hadn’t protested the cannon fire, hadn’t sought safety for herself when they were fired upon, hadn’t insisted on anything except that she remain by his side. Most surprisingly, when Louisa was well out of harm’s way and he had allowed her and Molly back on deck, she had not been outwardly angry. She had looked at him carefully to see if he was injured and felt his arms and chest in case he was secretly bandaged.
“Thou art fortunate,” she’d said when satisfied. “There would have been no end to my displeasure if it were otherwise.”
“Then I am twice charmed,” he’d answered, “uninjured and beloved.”
Charles looked out over the rail and scanned the surface of the sea. In the distance off the stern lay the receding dot of land that was Cape Passero, the last extremity of Sicily, soon to sink entirely below the horizon. Louisa’s course lay one point southerly of due east, with the wind steady from the west, and was making a fair turn of speed—near ten knots, by the last casting of the log, and without even her studding sails set. If he leaned out over the rail and looked forward, he could just see the edge of her bow wave curling out from the stem. Pylades surged alongside, two hundred yards to port. Bevan flew every scrap of canvas that she would carry and still struggled to keep up. Pylades, Charles had observed, was not a particularly fast sailer on any point of the wind. She could lie a half-point closer to it than Louisa, however, and make more headway with her canvas braced up tight. At present the wakes of the two ships lay in straight parallel lines westward as far as the eye could see. Their course would carry them in two or three days to the southern tip of the Peloponnesian peninsula and into the waters of the Ottoman Empire. But he wasn’t looking for land, Turkish or otherwise. The lookouts in the tops had specific instructions to search the horizons for sails, in particular the westward-bearing sails of merchantmen or friendly ships of war that might reasonably carry news of Nelson’s squadron were it farther east.
There was the other question that he frequently returned to. Was it such a good idea to be sailing the length and breadth of hostile waters with Penny and Molly on board? He knew that it exposed them to unnecessary danger and, at least partly as a consequence, made him more cautious. But it was not as simple as that. The dangers were such that he could avoid them if he chose … probably. And, the thought came to him, he didn’t fully understand why she had come, or for what length of time she intended to stay. She’d said in Naples that she wished to visit “for a time.” How long was a time? He often found the workings of women’s minds difficult to follow. Penny’s were sometimes unfathomable. Could he ask her? Not directly, he thought. He couldn’t say “How long are you planning to stay?” or “When do you think you’ll be leaving?” She might take that to mean that he didn’t welcome her company. No, he would be more subtle.
“How are you enjoying your time on Louisa?” he asked when
she came onto the deck. His tone was one of polite interest.
“Very well,” she answered. “It’s so beautiful. I am very happy to be with thee. Dost thou not agree?”
“Certainly,” Charles said, smiling at her. “I’ll be disconsolate when you have to leave.”
“As will I,” she answered, smiling back at him.
Charles realized that he was rather quickly reaching something of an impasse. He cleared his throat. “Yes, it’s delightful having you and Molly on board … for this time,” he continued hopefully.
She looked out over the sea and squeezed his arm but said nothing.
He steeled himself. “How long do you think you will be able to stay?”
Penny’s eyes remained focused on some indefinite point on the horizon. “For a time,” she said after a moment. “As long as necessary. Dost thou wish me gone?”
“No, no,” he said quickly. “I am very pleased …” His mind turned a corner. “Necessary for what?”
She stepped apart from him and looked around to see if they might be overheard. “I thought thou knew. I came to be with thee … as thy wife … so that thou and I might conceive a child.”
“Oh,” Charles said, “I see.” He paused for a long moment, then put his head close to hers and whispered, “How will you know?” He had some thought that it would be months before she became large enough in the belly to notice.
She took a deep breath and explained it to him in low tones. Charles felt as if he were being made privy to the mysteries of some obscure cult. The only thing he knew, or was sure that he wanted to know, when she finished was that there would be some indication within two weeks of their progress thus far.
“I must also converse with thee about thy lands in Tattenall before I depart,” she said afterward.
“All in good time,” Charles answered, then remembered that he had to speak with Eliot about their course.
EARLY IN THE afternoon watch, the lookout in the foremast tops shouted down that he’d seen two sail headed westward five leagues off to the southeast. Charles ordered Louisa’s course altered to intercept them and signaled Pylades to follow. In time, the pair of sail became visible from the deck and were determined to be a snow and a brigantine, both of which ran up the blue and gold flags of Sweden as soon as the English warships came into view.
