Tested by Fate

by David Donachie

  The slight swell on the 74-gun Theseus was more telling once he had lowered himself in to the ship’s cutter. That and the tide had the boat crews hauling like madmen just to get them inshore, their efforts not aided by the way the boats were lashed together to ensure they maintained cohesion. Off to the left firing broke out where he perceived the head of the mole to be, though he could not be certain of his own heading, a sharp fight with muskets, the yells of hand combat floating on the wind. Suddenly rockets shot up from behind the arc of the mole, illuminating the stone structure, showing in the harbour behind it several vessels warped right into the beach, as far away as possible from any impending harm.

  “Señor Guiterrez is expecting us,” Nelson called, naming the Spanish governor. “Let us hope he has laid out a decent table for our breakfast.”

  It was a feeble joke, but enough to make his men laugh, even those who, by the light of the rockets, could see that they were now within gunshot range.

  “Cast off,” he shouted, adding, as soon as the cutter was free of its rope, “pull like the devil, give a hurrah to let them know we’re coming, and when you get ashore remember your orders. All parties to make for the main square and wait.”

  The water before them was suddenly full of canister and grapeshot, each small ball tearing up its own patch of seawater, so heavy that it looked as though nothing could live through it. Off to his right the boats led by Captain Freemantle had already made the mole and were clambering on to the stonework, engaging defenders. Nelson’s blood was racing, as it always did when he was going into action. The thoughts he had harboured in his cabin, that this was an action from which he would probably not return, were suppressed by the sheer excitement that animated him.

  Crunching on to the soft ground that lay at the foot of the harbour mole, he was first out of the boat, the sword that had served his ancestor, Captain Gadifrus Walpole, held out to lead the charge. And charge they did, his men, screaming obscenities, firing pistols and muskets, clubbing, stabbing, jabbing with pikes, driving back the strong defence. Nelson, seeking to get everyone on to dry land, was waving his sword, yelling to cheer on his fighters, one eye noting that Josiah was fighting like a demon.

  Then he felt himself spun round so hard he nearly fell to the ground, the sword knocked from his hand by the blow. His reaction, to pick it up with his left hand, was automatic, taken before he realised that his elbow was smashed and that his right arm was hanging at an odd angle. He felt no pain, just the shock of recognising the wound and watching his own blood pump from his arm to stain the stonework, and glisten in the light from the rockets fired by the defenders. Then he fell to his knees, aware that he was going to die.

  “Father,” said Josiah, taking his upper arm in a tight grip.

  That word opened his eyes, the silhouette of his stepson outlined against the rocket-lit sky. Nelson wanted to say to him, “You have never called me that until now and I had wanted so much to hear it these last twelve years.” But he couldn’t. Instead he asked, “How goes the fight?”

  “Well …” Josiah said evasively, knowing that all along the mole, even though they had carried it, the British assault was on the defensive from a strong counter-attack launched from the town. Cannons were firing from the streets that led down to the port, while at both ends guns were still in Spanish hands, playing on the flanks of the assault. “We must get you to a surgeon.”

  “Take the town, forget me.”

  “To me, Theseus,” Josiah shouted, a call that was immediately acknowledged by half a dozen voices. “The Admiral is shot in the arm. Get him down to a boat.”

  The pain came as they raised him, so acute that he nearly passed out, but they lowered him on to the thin strand of beach, Josiah holding his arm to slow the blood flow. Then they lifted and laid him in the bottom of the boat. A rocket obliged with a strong light overhead, and that showed how much blood he was losing.

  “A tourniquet,” Josiah demanded.

  One of the men pulled off his shirt and, completely ignoring the balls whizzing past his ears, tore it and wrapped one sleeve round Nelson’s arm as a tourniquet, the remainder being fashioned into a sling.

  “I thank you, Lovell,” Nelson hissed, recognising a man who had served him on three ships. “Should I expire take a shirt from my cabin, the best you can find.”

  “You’se going to be all right, your honour, don’t you fret.”

  “Mr Nisbet, now that Lovell has given up his shirt, do not let the purser dock his pay warrant.”

  Nelson heard those words, but no one else did. They were too busy heaving the boat off the sand so that it would float, grunting and cursing as they rocked and pushed.

  “Man the oars,” Josiah said, as they got it into the sea. “Set me a course to go under those guns. We must make dark water.”

  Nelson was in a state of suspended animation. Yet he was compos mentis enough to admire Josiah’s thinking. To row straight out to sea, with the sky still illuminated, was to invite every cannon left on the mole to take a shot at them. Josiah had them row under those very guns, so close they could not depress enough to reach, aware that their attention would be concentrated on what they could see far off, not at the water twenty feet below them. Once out of the arc of light, he put down the tiller and headed out to sea, before handing it over to another so that he could attend to his stepfather.

  “How fare you?”

  It was a weak left hand that lifted his great uncle’s sword. “I still have my weapon.”

  “Your arm is shattered, sir.”

  “I saw, Josiah.” He let go of the sword to clutch his stepson’s hand. “I thank you. You have shown great ability tonight. Your mother would be proud of you. I know I am.”

  “It would be better to rest, sir,” said Josiah, taking off Nelson’s hat to put it behind his head. “You will need all your strength for what is to come.”

  “An amputation, at the very least.”

  “The surgeon may be able to save it.”

  The shake of the head was firm. “I have witnessed more of wounds than you, and I have looked at this one. Can you raise me a bit, so that I can see?”

  Hands got him to an upright position, so that he could look back to the shore, a place of flame and fire, sound and fury. He had only been upright a minute when a great flash lit the sky to the right of the boat. Nelson saw the silhouette of the decked cutter Fox, heard the flimsy timbers tear under the sudden weight of the salvo that struck her hull. Her masts, lit by the flares from the shore, immediately tilted over towards the sea.

  “Fox going down, your honour,” called one of the men. “Her larboard bulwark is shipping water already.”

  The shouts floated across the water, the cries of men, ghost-like apparitions in the blue lights, screaming for salvation as they jumped into the sea.

  “Survivors!” cried Nelson. “Steer for survivors!”

  “Your—”

  Josiah never got a chance to finish his plea. Nelson might be gasping, but there was no doubting what he said. “That, sir, is an order.”

  Josiah changed course to set the boat in among the flailing figures in the water, his men shipping oars each time they got a chance to haul some poor near drowning soul inboard. The need to save seamen seemed to revive Nelson, so that he could sit up without assistance to ensure that the search was thorough. He took no account of his wound. There were other boats, which depressed him, since they could only be returning from the shore, where the firing was dying away. Men were calling out for those still in the water to alert the rescuers to their presence, but all response had ceased so they began to row again for the fleet.

  “Ship ahead, your honour,” said the shirtless Lovell, after about forty minutes. “I think it be the Seahorse.”

  “Steer for her and call for a seat from the yard,” said Josiah.

  The left-hand grip became like a vice, the voice like a whip. “No!”

  There was no sound of firing now from the shore, and no feu d
e joie to indicate a British triumph.

  “You must have the attentions of a surgeon,” Josiah insisted.

  “Not the Seahorse. The man is a butcher and a drunk. Besides, Freemantle’s wife is aboard, barely wed six months and too young to witness this. I could not face her without news of her husband. Get me to Theseus.”

  “Time is not on your side, sir.”

  “Do as I say, Josiah,” Nelson said softly. “Let me be the judge, and if I do expire, take no blame upon yourself.”

  Midshipman Hoste heard the shout, the hail Theseus a strong one, and he recognised the voice as that of his mentor and admiral. Within two minutes he saw Nelson, arm still in a sling, jump for the side, haul himself aboard with one hand to stand on the deck, his eyes bright.

  “Tell the surgeon to get his instruments ready, Mr Hoste, for I know I must lose my arm, and the sooner it is whipped off the better.”

  “Bowen’s dead, sir,” said Ralph Millar, reading from the list he had in his hand. Nelson was sitting in a chair, one sleeve empty and pinned to his coat, his eyes showing the grief he felt for a lost friend, as well as the pain from his wound. Theseus was engaged in a bombardment, beating to and fro in front of the town. “Captain Freemantle is under the care of his surgeon with a wound that may well carry him off.”

  “Not that, Millar, not with Betsy so newly wed to him.”

  “She is tending to him as well, sir. If anyone can provoke his vital spirit to pull him back to health, it is she.”

  “Boat coming off, sir,” said Hoste, popping his head round the door. “Captain Troubridge in the thwarts.”

  When he stood up, Nelson felt weak, grateful that he was in Millar’s cabin, which led straight on to the quarterdeck, rather than his own, one deck below. Tom Allen tried to assist him, and was shooed away like a foolish cat. As he emerged, he was aware of the eyes of the crew upon him. Giddings, his coxswain, was close, his gaze full of concern.

  “I’m no use for fishing now, Giddings,” he said. “I fear if I am shipwrecked like Crusoe you will have to come with me or I shall starve.”

  “’Twould be an honour to serve you wherever, sir.”

  Nelson had to turn away then, and it was not the pain he felt that nearly made him cry.

  “Captain Troubridge had no choice but to surrender, sir. He was outnumbered a hundred to one.”

  The Earl of St Vincent managed a grim smile on that pug-like face of his. “No blame attaches to any one of your officers, and I have nothing but praise for your actions.”

  “The losses, sir.”

  “We cannot make war without them, Admiral Nelson.”

  Nelson knew his commander to be a more callous man than he. St Vincent never showed much in the way of emotion, gruff kindness being the best Nelson could expect.

  “I have written out orders for Seahorse to take both you and Captain Freemantle home.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I would say to you that, my affliction notwithstanding, I am fit for duty.”

  “I hope you are, Admiral Nelson. I want you back under my command as soon as you feel up to a return. And I would suggest that the sooner you are gone, the sooner that will be.”

  Chapter Twenty

  1798

  RETURN NELSON DID, to the blockade off Cadiz six months later, with his rear admiral’s flag flying above HMS Vanguard. St Vincent was delighted to see him, matters in the Mediterranean having gone from bad to worse. News had come of a fleet of twelve French ships-of-the-line ready to depart from Toulon; infantry and cavalry being loaded into four hundred transports that this fleet would escort. Bonaparte, who had done so much to save the Revolution from collapse, was on the move, destination unknown. Nelson’s task was to take a detached squadron back into the Mediterranean, find Bonaparte, his warships and transports, and sink them, an assignment that had caused a furore at home, where several senior admirals were incandescent with rage that such a task should be given to so junior an officer. St Vincent was happy. He wanted ability, not seniority.

  “I am obliged to ask if you are fully recovered, Admiral Nelson.”

  Nelson could never get over the way he was treated by his beagle-eyed commander-in-chief. It was common knowledge that St Vincent was at the mercy of constant headaches, which partly explained his normal behaviour: orders barked, insults heaped, and professional reputations traduced in this very cabin. Suggested courses of action from his junior admirals or captains were generally met with withering sarcasm, any failure of his exacting standards brutally excoriated.

  There were things this 63-year-old bachelor believed with all his heart: that the best way to clap a stopper on mutiny was a swift hanging; that any officer who showed slackness in the way he handled his ship should be sent home; that a man once married was lost to the service and near to useless as a commander; that one Englishman in a ship was worth ten of any enemy. Yet Nelson was shown nothing but kindness, which had preceded the loss of his arm, and he had even heard Josiah, who stayed on the station and now had his own ship, praised for the way he emulated his illustrious stepfather. As a member of the inshore squadron blockading Cadiz he had distinguished himself in three separate small-arms actions.

  St Vincent showed a hard carapace to the world, but was more emotional than his visitor knew. He loved Nelson for his zeal, for his determination to fight whenever the opportunity to strike presented itself, for his ship handling which was of the highest, and not least for his own earldom, which would have gone begging had not Nelson risked all at the battle from which St Vincent’s title came.

  “I am, sir, in better health now than when I left for Tenerife.”

  “Then the bosom of your family has done you the power of good.”

  “It has, sir.”

  “You may have Alexander and Orion, Captains Ball and Saumarez,” St Vincent continued breezily. “They and a squadron of frigates will see you into the Mediterranean, and I will reinforce you as my situation permits.”

  Nelson pondered those names. Saumarez he knew of old, a good-looking Guernseyman, a fine seaman whose main problem was his own awareness of his appearance. He was always immaculately attired and had a reputation as a man who could paint the whole ship without a speck of it marring his dress uniform. Ball, he was disposed to dislike. He had met him in St Omer all those years before, and bridled for the man’s unwarranted attentions to the lovely object of Nelson’s affections, Kate Andrews.

  “Send me fighters, sir,” insisted Nelson, “for I intend to find the enemy and send both Bonaparte and his Italian army to the bottom of the sea.”

  “Do that, Nelson, and we’ll take our seats in the Lords together.”

  They discussed plans to co-ordinate if it turned out that Bonaparte was heading for the West Indies. With cavalry aboard that was unlikely. But, then, he was unpredictable by reputation, and successful to an astonishing degree. Never one to waste time, Nelson’s squadron fired their salutes, formed line, and set their course for the Straits of Gibraltar. With a fine topgallant breeze they entered Rosas Bay under the towering rock, to anchor, replenish their stores before proceeding into the Mediterranean.

  In Nelson’s heightened imagination, exiting one sea to enter another was like cutting a chord. He was leaving behind one set of doubts to be replaced by another. He knew—despite all the efforts he made to convince himself that it was otherwise, despite all his protestations to anyone close enough to hear him that she was the object of his deepest regard—his relations with Fanny had not been resolved.

  The homecoming, or rather his journey to Bath to meet wife and family, had been muted. Nothing Nelson had written to tell Fanny of his wound would have had the same effect as the writing itself, a left-handed indecipherable scrawl that Fanny openly admitted had reduced her to tears. Her husband could not confess that the loss bothered him too, or that the wound hadn’t healed properly. He still, mentally, reached for the quill with the missing right arm, was surprised to look and see that, although his brain had issued the comma
nd, and he could feel his right arm moving, nothing was there. That and his constant pain had to be hidden from Fanny to avoid another bout of weeping.

  Right handed or left, in four years away, none of his letters home ever intimated that his regard for Fanny had wavered, neither from Naples, in that silly infatuation with Lady Hamilton, nor even from Genoa when he had gone further and transgressed his marriage vows. He had always written to her as his loyal wife, bosom companion, and lifelong partner. The simple truth was that he didn’t know his own mind, and since he was disinclined to discuss it with anyone he was unaware of how common such a notion could be. He wasn’t even sure if the doubts still existed, the mere act of homecoming lending deep sentiments to his feelings. The dread he had had at seeing her again when he had set out four years ago had faded.

  Their meeting had been marked by a gentle touch of lips on cheek. Yet that had satisfied him in a way he found hard to define, making him realise that there was more than one strand to his personality. The part that craved action and excitement found Fanny trying: the part that loved domesticity, a blazing hearth, gun dogs, and the idea of rubicund children conjured up an image of her as the perfect companion.

  Davidson had done a sterling job as his prize agent, and while he wasn’t rich he certainly had enough money to live in comfort. His old friend had also done a sterling job for himself, marrying a very pretty and vivacious lady, who had promptly presented him with golden-haired twins, something to make the father manqué in Nelson truly envious.

  One worry had been laid to rest: the failure at Tenerife was seen as folly, except by those who actively disliked him. Most people he had met, and all of the press, while they had harped on about the loss of the Fox and some hundred members of the crew, had concluded that it stood as a heroic failure, a defeat caused more by poor intelligence on enemy strength and the Admiral in command having been asked to do too much with too little.