My dearest Husband,
We are all so immensely proud of you, far off in our King's Service. Your spring letters came at last, delighting us. Yet how immensely Hard is my continuing burden of Loneliness, how oft…
Bloody Hell, he groaned, tearing up a little as she described her own tears. He gazed at a miniature portrait, a rather good copy of the one hanging in their entry hall.
God help me, I'm such a bastard, he thought. A hound! Rakehelling about, back to my old ways. Putting the leg over just any new piece that crosses my hawse, no matter my… well, she was a rather good bit o' batter, wasn't she, that Emma? Oh, I'm such a low hound, though, to… I feel so guilty! I mean, I should feel guilty…
Hold on, though…
Hmmmm!
He recalled the free black woman, the widow he'd met in Clarence Town, in the Bahamas, after six months of exile in the Out Islands. A single afternoon of rutting, because he'd been so very lonely, too long separated from Caroline… didn't recall her name, but she had been so bloody good at lovemaking, and at restoring his spirits.
Mean t'say…! Shouldn't I feel… abject? Or something?
He felt the urge to measure his pulse, to see if he was human. Oh, well…
The children missed him sorely, he read on; Sewallis has a new tutor and is learning his letters. There was scrawled proof of that in the margins-but it was early days as to what they spelled. Hugh left a thumb-print and an even shakier X, his mark. Charlotte was now on solid foods, toddling about, taking her first steps and out of her swaddles at last. Mistress McGowan, Caroline had dismissed; she'd simply gotten too dictatorial about running the entire household. There was a scandal about Maggie Fletcher, the vicar's daughter's maidservant, Maudie Beakman jilted by the same man who'd…
The planting season had gone well, and the weather bid fair for a bountiful harvest. And old William Pitt had passed over.
"Oh, damme…" Lewrie sighed bitterly.
/ do not know how to tell you this, beloved, but Pitt is gone. Once you went to sea, the poor old dear began to fade. Lord, how sad he also seemed, prowling the house and grounds, as if in search of you, ever-napping in your chair alone, upon items of your clothing were they left out, and crying piteous ly for attention, demanding explanation of your absence. He climbed into my lap his last afternoon, as I sat and knitted bythe garden. He played with some wool, then curled up and went to sleep, and I sensed, somehow, that I should not disturb him, no matter the distraction. He woke, looked up, put one paw to my breast, and then he lay back down, uttering one last trill…
"Oh, Pitt!" Lewrie cried, dropping the letter to his lap, tears in his eyes for certain now. "Poor old beast. Poor old puss! Least your last years were peaceful. Chickens to chase… Catnip and cream, good scraps…"
God, you inhuman bastard, he scathed himself. No remorse for cheatin' on your wife… yet you cry over the death of a stupid cat
"Maybe it's all of a piece," he muttered throatily, covering his face with a dirt-stiffened towel so no one else would hear as he wept. Very possibly, for all.
V
Ne tibi tune horrenda rapax ad litora
puppem ventus agat, ludo volitans cum
turma superbo pulvereis exultat equis ulu-
lataque tellus intremit etpugnas mota pater
incitat hasta.
Let not then the driving blast carry your
ship to those dreadful shores, what
time the troop in arrogant sport fly here
and there exultant on dusty steeds, and
the ground trembles to their halloing,
and their sire incites them to battle with
the brandished spear.
– Valerius Flaccus Argonautica, Book IV, 606-609
Chapter 1
All secure!" Midshipman Anthony Braxton read off the bunting hoisted on Victory. "Fleet… Will enter Harbour!… In Columns of Divisions!"
"They're just giving us the place, then?" Lieutenant Scott marveled.
"So it would appear, sir," Captain Braxton grunted, lowering his telescope, lips snug with aspersion-perhaps at French timidity. "Captain Elphinstone's landing at the fort yonder has cowed 'em, at last. They're streaming out of their forts, inland… nor'west for those farther hills."
"Well, it beats fighting our way in all hollow, sir," the Marine captain O'Neal opined darkly as he beheld the towering heights, rough headlands and the many forts and batteries of Toulon.
"Granted, sir," Braxton grumbled, sounding disappointed, though.
"We've what, barely 1,000 Marines with the entire fleet?" O'Neal said in a softer voice to Lewrie, standing nearer the wheel. "Had this fleet tried to force a landing against opposition, we'd have lost half on the first fortifications alone."
"With the city for us, though, sir?" Lewrie scoffed gently. "I doubt they'd have put up much resistance, even if it had come to that. The Republican diehards were in the minority, thank God. And they were not to know how much we had at our disposal. Twenty-one sail with us, and God knows what over the horizon."
After rejoining Hood's fleet, it had looked to be the very worst sort of naval service-blockade duty; slowly plodding in neat ordered lines of battle from Marseilles, round Cape Cicie to Toulon and back, parading the might of the Royal Navy, jogging off-and-on that forbidding coast, in hopes that the
French might sally forth for battle. Rumours, and a "spying out," under cover of a truce mission by Lieutenant Edward Cooke of Victory, had determined that the French had at least twenty-one sail of the line in port, seventeen of them more or less ready for sea, and frigates and sloops of war, two-a-penny. But for a few fast frigates, ordered to trail their coats into the Bay of Toulon between Cape Sepet and Cape de la Garonne to tempt a response, Hood hadn't tried to enter in force, and the French had remained strangely somnolent.
Those Royalists in Toulon, though, the ones Sir William Hamilton had spoken of… they'd sent a two-man committee to Victory under a flag of truce on 23 August. Lieutenant Edward Cooke had gone ashore on the 24th, then one more time, to carry Hood's reply. Cooke had been shot at by a frigate with Republican sentiments, hailed as a hero and damn near chaired in triumph to a meeting of a Royalist committee intent on surrender, arrested by Republicans on the way back, then freed by a Royalist mob.
Again, on the 26th, he went ashore, returning with a French Navy officer, Captain d'lmbert of the seventy-four-gun Apollon, and the agreement was ratified. Toulon was theirs!
So now Cockerel was inside the Bay of Toulon, slowly heaving her way under a tops'l breeze from the south, beam-reaching towards the inner roads, just north of the peninsula which formed Cape Sepet, the southern guard of the great port, where before they would not have dared.
It helped that the revolutionary government in Paris had just proscribed Var and Provence, warning that troops and guillotines were coming if they did not immediately submit to the Republic.
The situation was what some might call interesting, to say the least. While a fair majority of Toulon was Royalist, declared for some prince now called Louis XVII, there was a moderately sized minority of Republicans, mostly the poor or the bitter, dead set against the aristocracy, the large landowners, and the merchant class. With opportunists on either hand, it went without saying. Yet the French Mediterranean Fleet held only a minority of Royalists, and a majority of Republicans. Rear-Admiral St. Mien, second-in-command, had seized forts facing the inner, Little Road of Toulon, with the crews of seven line-of-battle ships, about 5,000 men, disobeying orders of the staunchly royalist Rear Admiral, Comte de Trogoff, who actually commanded the port.
Early on the 27th, a force of 1,500 men, the greatest portion of two regiments embarked with Hood's fleet, reinforced by about 200 Marines and seamen, under the overall command of Captain George Keith Elphinstone of H.M.S. Robust, had landed at Fort La Malgue, on the right side of the spit of land that divided the Little and the Great Roads, high enough to overlook and dominate St. Julien's much-lower-set forts.
That was enough for St. Mien. His honour had been satisfied, by token resistance, so he had decamped. And now, Admiral Hood could sail in. Without a shot being fired, without a single casualty, they were in total possession of a French city, an entire French fleet, and a naval base with all its arsenals, powder mills and stocks, foundries for cannon and anchors, and immense quantities of naval stores.
"Hard to think of us taking all this, even were we fifty sail," Mister Dimmock spoke up, nodding to the Marine captain. "First, weather Cape Sepet, as we've done. And it's simply stiff with guns. There, young sirs-" he pointed out to the midshipmen with a ferrule in his hand, as they gathered about for a lesson-"near the end of the peninsula, on the highest hill of Cape Sepet, that's… what, Mister Spendlove?"
"C… Croix des Signaux, sir."
"Aye, the signals cross. That's fairly new. Semaphore tower." Dimmock beamed his approval. "The old one, the Great Tower, is further inside the harbour, near Fort La Malgue. Now, below Croix des Signaux, there's Batterie la Croix, north shore of the peninsula. Then west of that, there's Batterie des Freres… 'The Brothers'… go farther west and you come in range of Fort Mandrier, which commands the south side of the Great Road, next to the Infirmarie… sort o' like our Greenwich Naval Hospital back home, 'cross an inlet from Fort Mandrier, just at the thinnest shank of the peninsula, facin' the Golfe de la Veche. Mister Dulwer, would you anchor in the Bay of Toulon, sir?"
"Uhm… perhaps not, sir? Not all the time?"
"Don't sound too definite, will ye now, Mister Dulwer?" the sailing master sighed. "No, ye'd not. Too deep for the proper scope on cables, e'en do you weight 'em with gun barrels, and a rocky bottom. Levanter comes up, it throws a heavy sea from the east'rd, crost all that open water from Plage de la Garonne. Plage means beach, right, lads? Right. Now, between Batteries Croix and Freres, it's no more'n one sea mile to Cape Bran, on the north shore of the mainland. Batteries there, too… with forty-two-pounders. North tip o' Cape Sepet and Cape Brun squeeze in to mark the entrance to the Great Road. You have a little more shelter in the Great Road. It's still foul holding ground, but shallower'n the bay. West of Cape Bran, there're batteries on a high cliff, on this spit of land… here," he said, indicating the chart. "Can't rightly see it from the quarterdeck… all our fleet in the way, ha ha!"
The midshipmen made sure to sound appreciative of Dim-mock's jape.
"Then to the west of those batteries is Fort La Malgue, which we took this morning, on another steep headland. Little water-fort guards the foot of it, Fort St. Louis. West o' La Malgue, there's this peninsula… long, narrow, and steep, almost vertical cliffs. Great Tower on its tip, where it juts southerly, and pinches off the Great Road from the Little Road. Guns a'plenty there, too, mind. This narrow pass, not half a sea mile, from the Great Road to the Little. Le Goulet, Frogs call it… that's the Gullet, in real language. Across the Gullet is where the Frogs tried to make a stand this morning, northern side of the Golfe de la Veche, on Hauteur de Grasse. Big, round hilly thing just on our bows if ye care to look. Two little spurs on its tip. Southern has Fort de Balaguer… the northern Fort L'Eguillette. Lower than La Malgue, so we could've shot howitzers or mortars into them. So that's why the Frogs took French leave, ha ha!"
Another wave of laughter swept the quarterdeck, more sincere this time, over Mister Dimmock's pun, including the officers and seamen.
"The Little Road. Would you anchor there, Mister Dulwer?"
"Aye, sir," Dulwer shot back quickly.
"Aye, ye would," Dimmock agreed. "Very sheltered, fairly shallow. On the small side, though. Get out of the shallows along the shore and you don't have much room to swing. Maybe three or four ships may lie in the Little Road. Sou'west end, that's La Seyne… civilian harbour, so they take most of the available space. More batteries, unfortunately. Coverin' La Seyne is Fort Crayon. A very low shore battery in an inlet north of there is Dubrun. Then another, on the north side of the Little Road, that's Le Millaud. Powder mills there, too, I recall. Atop them all, west of town, above these marshes, is Fort Mal-bousquet, then Fort Missicy, at the foot of this other hill, below Malbousquet."
"So… where do they really keep their ships, Mister Dim-mock?" Spendlove asked, squirming with either boredom or confusion.
"Do you get past all this, into the Little Road, sir, you come about, hard t'starb'd and sail north. Through the pass in the channel booms… log and chain, stout as anything… and there's the Basin of Toulon. They can cram up to thirty sail of the line in there t'gether, bows or stern-to the quays, as most do in the Mediterranean. Fenders betwixt, so they won't chafe their gunn'ls off. Walk all day in shade along the quay, below their bowsprits… Not a stone's throw from warehouses and such. But…" Dimmock warned with a theatrical pause, "… to get into the basin, there's one damn-all tough nut still to crack, young sirs. There's the jetties, the breakwaters that make the basin. They're built so low to the water, it'd be like hitting a piece of driftwood. Laid out in a fleur d'eau… the very worst sort of coastal fort. They're hollow and bombproof, and stiff with guns. Entrance channel isn't a musket-shot wide, with forty-two-pounders to either beam. And the town's like an old king's castle. City walls are like a fort, with moats and drawbridges and gates… part of it they call Fort de France. And above it all… look up yonder, behind the town, sirs. Eighteen hundred feet high, that chain of hills are. A ravine on the nor'west… Gorge St. Antoine, and another narrow valley north. Steep, crumbly stuff. There's forts all over up yonder… with ovens for heating shot, high 'nough for accurate plungin' fire."
"What an effort they put into this place," Lieutenant Clement Braxton commented, with a whispery whistle of awe. "Marshes… seepy springs, I've read, everywhere one looks. And no low tides to give them time to dig or lay foundations. It's an engineering masterpiece."
"Aye, Mister Braxton, yer correct, sir," Dimmock agreed heartily. "Can't wait to get ashore an' look it over, myself. East side of the basin, they keep the lesser ships o' war, frigates and such. Shipyard and launchways, graving docks. And there's a drydock that'd rock you back on your heels, too. Brute of a thing. Think of how they managed to build that, sir! Seal it, and pump out with convict labour, I think. Aye, sir… Toulon mayn't be the world's best harbour t'lie in, but… it's the world's most fortified, and most impressive built! Well, end of yer geography lesson, lads. Back to your stations. We're sure to come to anchor before the hour's out."
"From the sea and the land," Lewrie commented, coming to join them as the midshipmen scattered. "Hellish fortified."
"Better for us, when it comes to holding it, sir," Captain O'Neal agreed.
"Nine fath'm! Nine fath'm t'this line!" a leadsman called from the larboard foremast chains. Cockerel drew three fathoms, when deep laden.
"Steady as she goes, quartermaster." "Aye, aye, sir, steady'z she goes."
A weak sun shone that day, for a wonder, as if in celebration of their bloodless victory. Quite unlike the weather of their short blockade, which had shipped green seas, and gale-force winds at times, scattering the squadrons and straining their masts nigh to snapping. Watery, wan sunlight reflected from the charcoal blue sea of the Great Road, wave-motes of light dancing on the sides of the massive warships, and dun sails and dull colours were stage-lit to an artist's whiteness or sheening brilliance, as if posed for a commemorative oil.
During those rare moments of clear weather, Southern France had appeared rather attractive, Lewrie'd thought; much like Naples, though, in rockiness and semi-sere harshness. Whenever they'd gone close inshore, he'd espied hamlets and fishing villages that seemed cheerful enough. And, on the slopes of Southern France, there was a softer and lusher palette of greens than Naples could ever boast, more verdantly bright, less dusty and muted. From high summer, thatchy tan to spring-shoot green,
the grasslands, vineyards and forests, olive groves and pastures seemed to roll and tumble as they were brushed by some bright scudding clouds' shadows.
Apart from Toulon, where sunlight dappled and sparkled, and the clouds scudded, the headlands and hills appeared to glow gold and umber, the tiled terra-cotta roofs were lit flamine red, and the very least cottages of Var and Provence were exotically lambent.
But not Toulon.
Around Toulon there seemed a pall, an ominous trick of lighting, as if the capes, the headlands, the bays and massive hills-mountains really, Lewrie decided-were shrouded by a funereal gloom, as if some storm clouds must hang perpetual. As if, for some malevolent reason, her harsh greyness of stark granite forts was forever deprived of any warmth, or hope, of Mediterranean sunshine. Pent from the lushness of her hinterland by grimly looming, bare and lifeless mountain masses, and begirt with the sinews and engines of warfare.
With the ship well in hand in a deep-water fairway, Lewrie took time to peer at the chart Mister Dimmock had left tacked to the traverse board, looking past his usual sailor's concerns of depths, bearings and seamarks, to the hills beyond.
Toulon was girded by a host of lofty fortresses and redoubts: St. Antoine, St. Catherine, Artigues, Pharon, La Garde and La Vallette, and a myriad of lesser forts, redans, batteries and strongpoints which guarded the forbidding mountains, the narrow valleys between, and the passes and gorges. The terrain was fairly open to the east, sprinkled with villages and chateaux, gently rolling and benign along the Plaine de la Garde divided by a narrow ridge that ran west-to-nor'east above the road to Hieres, before the mountains shouldered into the coast, above Forts St. Catherine and La Malgue.
On the western approaches, from the pass at Ollioules through which the Marseilles road debouched, was a harsher coastal plain, this one puckered, pimpled and stippled with many mountain spurs, crab-like hills and rugged prominences, and the roads wound snake-like to conform to them.
H.M.S. COCKEREL l-6 Page 22
