‘Is that an iron steam yacht?’ Killigrew asked Lennox incredulously.
The lieutenant nodded, scowling. ‘The Vesta, Lord Newborough’s yacht. And beside it the Gondola, Lord Lichfield’s.’ He scowled. ‘Damned war tourists, come to see us risk our lives for Queen and country as if this were a blasted entertainment at Astley’s, rather than an actual war.’
‘Now I know how the gladiators of old must have felt when they stepped out into the dust of the Circus Maximus for the amusement of the citizens of Rome.’
‘Ghoulish bastards,’ Lennox grated, staring towards the yachts.
‘Oh, don’t criticise them,’ Killigrew said cheerfully, but a hard edge entered his voice as he continued. ‘Let them see what war is really like. I wish every damned voter in Britain could be here today to see it stripped of the veil of newsprint, revealed in all its bloody, horrid reality. Perhaps then, the next time our government gets into a squabble with another country over some obscure problem of international diplomacy, they’ll remember soldiers and seamen maimed or dying in terrible agony, and the widows and orphans they leave behind them, and think twice. Perhaps then they’ll start considering war a last resort, rather than the first.’
* * *
‘The Russkis have got her range now,’ Rodney Maltravers, thirteenth Viscount Bullivant, remarked with the air of an expert as another round shot slammed into the hull of the paddle-frigate HMS Penelope. ‘See that? They must be usin’ red-hot shell. Couldn’t reach her at that range, otherwise.’
‘I thought red-hot shot was used to set the ship’s timbers on fire?’ asked Lord Dallaway.
‘That too,’ acknowledged Lord Bullivant. ‘But it’s the range, that’s the thing, d’ye see?’ He turned to where Dallaway – the young man he hoped would one day be his son-in-law – stood beside him at the yacht’s taffrail. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, young feller – get your camera thingy up on deck and take some photographical pictures, damn your eyes! You won’t get a show like this every day of your life.’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ Lord Dallaway, a pioneer of the photographic art, remarked with the air of a man who very much wished it were otherwise. ‘Even with my fastest-acting photographic paper, it takes at least thirty seconds for an image to form – the splinters flying from the hull wouldn’t even register. Besides, the rocking of the deck would make everything blurred.’
The Russian gunners slammed shot after shot into the frigate’s hull. Two of the Allied ships were firing their ten-inch guns at the main fortress on the coast, trying to discourage them. Another cloud of smoke belched from one of the embrasures of the main fortress. While the general din of the engagement made it impossible for Bullivant and Dallaway to distinguish the shriek of the shot, they clearly saw timbers burst from the far side of the Penelope’s hull. In the same instant a small boat below was smashed to smithereens, killing one man instantly and throwing the rest into the waves.
‘Oof!’ exclaimed Bullivant. ‘Did you see that? Went straight through her, it did! In one side and out the other!’
‘Why the deuce doesn’t her captain move her?’ demanded Dallaway. ‘The Russkis will pound her to matchwood if he stays there much longer.’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Bullivant. ‘Looks like the damned fool’s run himself aground on a hidden shoal… look, here comes another steamer to pull her off.’
In the saloon of the yacht, the Honourable Araminta Maltravers sat in the corner and tried to blot out the voices of her father and Lord Dallaway as they watched the battle from the deck with their opera glasses. Instead she concentrated on Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, Esquire, which lay open in her lap. She was in her late twenties, a tall woman with light brown hair and a strong-jawed face, long lashes framing her cool grey eyes and a hint of freckles dusted across the sides of her nose.
‘I say, Araminta!’ Lord Dallaway’s voice sounded immediately above her. She looked up, startled, to see him peering at her through the skylight in the deck head.
‘I do not recall giving you permission to address me by my first name, my lord,’ she told him frostily.
The young aristocrat looked hurt. ‘Why ever not? I mean, we’re practically engaged as it is.’
‘No. You proposed to me – I turned you down. That does not make us “practically engaged” by any stretch of the imagination.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll come round to my way of thinking sooner or later.’
‘Nicholls!’
The door to the saloon opened almost at once, and Araminta’s maid entered. ‘Yes, miss?’ she asked with a curtsy.
‘Would you do something for me, Nicholls?’
‘Yes, miss?’
‘If I ever come around to Lord Dallaway’s way of thinking, would you put a pistol to my temple and pull the trigger?’
Nicholls considered the request. ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to put the pistol to Lord Dallaway’s temple before that happens, miss?’
‘Good thinking, Nicholls. Whatever would I do without you?’
The maid was loo fond of having steady employment to answer that one as truthfully as she would have liked, so she said nothing.
‘Don’t be like that, Araminta!’ protested Dallaway. ‘You know how much I love you.’
‘How can I forget, when you keep reminding me every ten minutes?
I wish your faculty of recollection were as well developed: you might remember the countless times I’ve told you that your feelings are not reciprocated.’
‘Well… at least come on deck and watch the battle with your papa and me.’
‘Watching a load of men in silly uniforms trying to kill one another may be your notion of entertainment, my lord. It isn’t mine, I can assure you. Now be so good as to go away and leave me in peace.’ She bowed her head over her book.
‘Araminta!’ her suitor exclaimed.
‘Nicholls?’
‘Yes, miss?’
‘The blinds.’
‘Yes, miss.’ Nicholls crossed to the centre of the room and reached up to draw the blind beneath the skylight, blotting out Dallaway’s face. ‘Will that be all, miss?’
‘Yes, thank you, Nicholls.’
No sooner had the maid withdrawn, however, than Lady Bullivant entered. ‘Araminta?’
‘Yes, Mama?’
‘What are you doing down here, reading? Why don’t you come up on deck?’
‘So I can watch a load of foolish men trying to kill one another? No, thank you.’
‘You don’t have to watch the battle. It’s a lovely day. Why not come up and get some fresh air?’
‘I’d rather not, if it’s all the same with you.’
‘You’ll hurt your father’s feelings. He arranged this trip for you, you know. We thought it might do you some good. You know you haven’t been yourself lately.’
‘Mama, that’s utter nonsense, and you know it. For one thing, Papa doesn’t have any feelings. For another, if you wanted to take me on a voyage to cheer me up, why not ask me where I would like to go? If you’d suggested the Mediterranean, I might have said yes. I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.’
Lady Bullivant grimaced. ‘All right, I’ll admit the choice of destination was your father’s rather than mine. But all the same, it really is lovely outside: the sun’s shining, the sky is blue, there’s not a cloud in the sky-—’
‘Unless you count the smoke coming from the steamers and the cannons.’
‘—and the trees look delightful—’
‘What a shame they’re obscured by all those hulking great ugly ships.’
Lady Bullivant closed the door behind her and lowered her voice. ‘You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?’
Araminta bowed her head over her book once more. ‘“Him”? Who’s “him”?’
‘You know very well whom I mean. You cannot fool me – I am your mother, after all.’
‘I haven’t given him a second’s thought in years. And anyhow, even if I were thi
nking of him, I would hardly think that bringing me to see the navy fighting a battle would help to take my mind off him.’
‘Look, even if he is out there – and we don’t know that he is – I’m sure he’ll be all right.’
Araminta looked up at her mother. ‘You know something? I hope he is out there. And I hope he gets his stupid, ugly, thick skull blown off by the Russians, and rots in Hades where he belongs!’ She slammed down her book, stood up and flounced out of the saloon. The effect was marred only marginally by her having to reopen the door to free her skirts.
* * *
Exhausted but triumphant after hauling the three guns to the battery, the bluejackets collected their dinner from the cooks of the Royal Engineers and collapsed by the tents of the camp to eat. The distant sound of shell and shot drifted up from the direction of Lumpar Bay, where the ships of the fleet exchanged salvoes with the batteries of the main fort, but the seamen had enough problems of their own and were glad that someone else was being subjected to the attentions of the Russian gunners.
‘Red’ Hughes massaged his blistered and bloody feet. His nickname referred not to his hair – which was a mass of tight, black curls – but to his habit of spouting communist dogma at the least provocation.
‘How far do you reckon we dragged those guns today?’ he asked Molineaux.
‘Tom Tidley reckoned it at four and a half miles when we surveyed the route yesterday.’
‘Four and a half miles!’ groaned the Welshman. ‘Felt more like four and a half hundred miles to me.’
‘I heard Cap’n Hewlett say we’d achieved a feat unprecedented in the annals of naval history,’ said Endicott.
‘Oh, yur?’ Molineaux asked sceptically. ‘What was that? Getting Red to pull his weight for once?’
Hughes scowled. ‘Kiss my bum, Wes!’
Endicott lay back on the ground and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘I’ll be glad when they pipe “down hammocks”,’ he sighed. ‘I think I’m going to sleep for a month after today.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Molineaux. ‘Don’t get too comfortable, will you, lads? There’s another three guns to bring up tomorrow.’
Endicott groaned.
‘Another three guns?’ said Hughes. ‘You’ve got to be joking! You know what this is, don’t you? Exploitation of the working classes.’
‘Stow it, Red!’ warned Molineaux. ‘It’s bad enough breaking our backs dragging guns up for the sodgers, without having to listen to your commie claptrap at the end of it. It ain’t as if the officers didn’t bear a hand.’
It was sixteen years since he had joined the navy. A ‘snakesman’ in his youth, he had signed on board HMS Powerful to evade the peelers, intending to desert at the first opportunity. Funny how things rarely turned out the way one expected. In those days, of course, you joined a ship for a voyage, a commission of three years if it was a navy ship, but you did not ‘belong’ to the navy. You could pick and choose which captain you served under, and if you liked the life you could join a new ship after the old one paid off, following a suitable break to blow all your earnings on booze, gambling and whores.
But it was all changing now. Anticipating the difficulty it would have finding experienced seamen for the fleets in time of war, the Admiralty had finally become convinced of the need for continuous service: nowadays you joined the navy for ten years minimum. They were in the middle of the changeover period, with both old and new systems in place. Many of Molineaux’s shipmates had signed on as ten-year men, but the petty officer was reluctant to commit himself. The pay was better if you signed on as a ten-year man, and you could still choose the ship you served on for your first commission. But after that you went to whichever ship the navy sent you to. Molineaux preferred to size up a captain before he decided whether or not he wanted to serve under his command. Hell, for all he knew, they might send him back to the Arctic! Besides, ten years… it seemed such a long time. He liked the navy; he just was not sure he liked it that much. He would be in his forties by the time he got out.
On the other hand, his one ambition in life was to be made a boatswain, and there was no getting away from it: the ten-year men would always be preferred to short-service volunteers when the Queen’s warrants were handed out. Still, he had three years’ grace in which to make up his mind.
He glanced across to where the French soldiers were setting up another camp nearby, pitching their tents wherever they could find space. Chasseurs in sky-blue coats and red képis bustled to and fro, heading out on patrol or to relieve picquets, while more and more seemed to march up from the landing point with every passing moment. Foraging parties marched into the camp driving herds of cattle, which were promptly butchered at a large tent set up as a slaughterhouse to provide meat for the troops.
Endicott saw a vivandière in a bluejacket and red pantaloons, a cask of brandy in the small of her back and a brace of pistols at her hips. He blinked, and rubbed his eyes as if in disbelief. When he opened them again, the apparition was still there, no matter how much he blinked. She was selling tobacco to a couple of infantrymen, while a burly soldier stood on guard by her stall to make sure none of the rough and licentious soldiery took advantage. Molineaux wondered who made sure the guard did not take advantage.
‘Hey, Wes!’ called Endicott.
‘What?’
‘That feller’s a judy.’
‘Yur – she’s a vivandière.’
‘Come again?’
‘A vivandière. They sell fancy goods and stuff to the Frog sodgers.’
‘And their army allows it?’
‘They’re employed by the army. The Frogs are into all this equality for blowers stuff. Why, yer vivandière’s practically a woman sodger. ’Cept she don’t do any fighting, of course.’
‘She’s wearin’ kecks.’
‘They’re called “bloomers”, shipmate.’
‘Bloody disgustin’, I call it. Eh, she’s not bad-lookin’, though but. Have you ever noticed how lasses from Cat’lic countries always make more of themselves than lasses from countries where they’re all psalm-singing Methodies? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that your Paddy, Frog, Wop or Dago judy is actually better looking than an English, Scowegian or sauerkraut-eating haybag; just that they take more pride in their appearance.’
‘Do you mind? My lass happens to be a sauerkraut-eater!’
Endicott did not seem to hear him. ‘I reckon their religion must have summat to do with it. Y’see, yer Cat’lic lass, she believes she can sin as much as she likes, but as long as she goes to confession and says as many “Hail Mary’s” as the priest tells her, all her sins will be forgiven and she can still get into heaven. But yer protestant lass, there’s nowt she can do to extrapolate her sin, so she’s got to behave herself. Only Cat’lic judies are up for it all the time… what’s wrong, Wes? Why are you looking at us like that?’
Molineaux shook his head, torn between wonderment and disgust. ‘Do you have to think hard to come up with so much gammon, or does it just come naturally?’
Endicott shrugged. ‘I’m just sayin’, like.’ He nodded to the vivandière. ‘Eh, what do yer reckon me chances are wi’ that one?’
‘About ten thousand to one – and that’s before I take into account the fact you don’t speak a word of French.’
‘I can speak French. Well, a bit. Anyhow, who needs to speak the lingo? The language of love is understood all around the world.’
‘Now, don’t go making trouble, Seth. The Frogs won’t like it if a British seaman starts trying to get spoony with one of their lasses.’
‘Hey, if she’s up for it, she’s fair game. Watch and learn, Wes: you’re about to see a master at work.’ Producing a comb from his pocket, Endicott walked over to the vivandière’s stall, trying in vain to tame his tangled locks.
‘’Afternoon, Molineaux.’
The petty officer turned and saw Killigrew walking towards him. ‘’Afternoon, sir.’
&n
bsp; The commander glanced across to where Endicott was leaning across the vivandière’s counter to whisper in her ear. ‘Is Endicott getting something from that vivandière?’ he asked.
‘Yur, right!’ snorted Molineaux. ‘In his dreams, maybe.’
‘I didn’t know he spoke French…’
The vivandière straightened with a shocked expression on her face, and gave Endicott a stinging slap across the cheek.
Molineaux chuckled. ‘Oh, I think he made himself understood.’
As Endicott reeled from the stall, the soldier set to stand guard over her grabbed him by the neckerchief and delivered a powerful punch to his nose. The seaman staggered back almost as far as where Molineaux and Killigrew stood. Despite the blood that poured from his nostrils, Endicott was back on his feet in an instant. He would have flung himself at the soldier to avenge the assault if Molineaux had not grabbed him and dragged him away in the interests of maintaining the Anglo-French alliance.
‘Pardonnez-vous mon ami, mam’selle, m’sieur,’ he called over his shoulder at the vivandière and her guard. ‘II est un crétin.’
Killigrew handed Endicott a linen handkerchief to stanch the flow of blood. ‘What did you say to her?’
‘I don’t understand it, sir.’ The Liverpudlian looked genuinely bewildered. ‘I only asked her if she’d let us kiss her.’
‘Oh, Lor’!’
‘All right, maybe I were being a bit ’ard-faced, but not enough to justify a smack in the gob!’
‘Do you want to tell him, Molineaux, or shall I?’
‘Seth, when a Frenchman says he wants to kiss a woman, he doesn’t mean he wants to kiss her.’
Killigrew’s Run Page 4
