Lightning flickered, so fast that sweaty gunners were frozen in a jittery series of tableaus as they thumb-stalled the vents, swabbed hot barrels, inserted the flannel powder charges, and rammed them home, once removed from the wood or leather cannisters that the youngest and quickest lads, the powder monkeys, brought in scampers from the magazine. Balls were snatched up from the shot-garlands, gun-captains no longer concerned with perfect roundness or freedom from rust or scales, just load A solid thump from a flexible rope ramrod to seat them, a quick shove to tamp down wet wadding, perhaps a final chore by a ram-merman to seat a sack of grapeshot, musket balls, or langridge, atop ball, and it was time to pulley-haul, again.
Up to the port sills, an overhaul of the run-out tackle and the breeching ropes, then a leap for the train-tackle, maybe the employment of crow-levers and handspikes to shift the whole gun and carriage just a bit to left or right. Some fiddling with the elevating quoin block under the heavy breech to make sure that the piece pointed true at the blackness of the enemy’s hull, as low as possible, and a leap away from the gun, feet well clear of tackle and ring-bolts on the deck, lest the men lose their feet as if scythed away, the gun-captain off to one side with his left arm high to show ready, right hand grasping the trigger line to the cocked flint striker, the priming powder in the touch-hole, and… BLAM! to begin it all over, again, quick as panting, and bare-chested, men could serve their brutal pieces.
Fuck proper aim, at this range, fuck drill and showiness; just fire, load, and keep firing, no matter what was happening around them.
A hard strike, low on the waterline it felt like, with Proteus shuddering as if gut-punched, and almost a human groan forced from her timbers. Another slamming hit, and more larboard bulwark went flying in tatters, a yard’s length of oak turned into arm-long, prickly splinters like gigantic, well-chewed toothpicks that whirred and fluttered with the sound of frantic birds’ wings, some lashing and spearing men’s bodies as they went, and raising a chorus of disbelieving screams.
A sudden lull, a horrified, hushed second, before Lt. Catterall could be heard screeching raspy for them to “by broadside …fire, and murder the bastards!” and Proteus shuffled to starboard to that shove of directed explosions a few feet alee.
And all Lewrie could do, by that point, was pace, observe, and behave stoically, for now that both warships were close-aboard of each other on the same course, their jib-booms and bowsprits almost level with the other, and the range down to less than sixty yards, it was up to his trusted warrants and petty officers, the steadiness of his gun-captains, the stolid courage of officers and midshipmen, the speed and stamina of his crew, despite the horrors they could see on every hand. Did he die, the next minute, it would make no matter. This was what a captain had to do, and no amount of hopping about, waving sword, and crying, “Damn my eyes!” could change a thing ‘til it was concluded.
And there were horrors.
A decapitated Marine hanging half off the chewed-up gangway, to spurt, then ooze, his blood onto the gunners below, making the deck so slippery that a second bucket of sand had to be cast. The young Marine drummer boy’s corpse, and his shattered drum, was slung against the main mast trunk, soon to be disposed of overside through a lee gun-port, to make fighting room. Half the crew of a quarterdeck 6-pounder was gone, strewn like bloody piles of laundry amidships. Another sailor from one of the engaged-side carronades was being carted below on a mess table by the Surgeon’s loblolly boys, gasping like a landed fish with a two-foot length of bulwark splinter in his chest.
Somewhere, in all the bedlam, Lewrie could hear the sawing of a fiddle, a mad rush of improbable sound that soared now and again above the deafening, ear-hammering din; but then, all ships’ fiddlers were as mad as hatters, as daft as March Hares. Lewrie looked forward, down the main deck between the guns, and saw their fiddler capering a horn-pipe or jig to his own urgent music… over and over, he played, what sounded like “Pigeon on the Gate,” and beaming and cackling fit to bust!
Another hard hit! Another flickering, whining, keening flight of wood splinters, and Lewrie staggered, again, pausing in his pacing. God, but he wished to draw his sword, bark orders, shout encouragement, do something useful! Instead, he pulled out his watch and opened the ornately-engraved lid, grunting in utter surprise to see that the fight had gone on for over half an hour since the first broadsides were fired! He clicked the lid shut, carefully put the watch back into the pocket of his waist-coat, then paced over to the compass binnacle.
Due West, and away from the convoy, which, the last he had seen, had been steering Nor’west by West, escaping as he delayed the frigate. A quick look over at the French, and he walked the few feet aft to the Quartermasters on the helm. “Another half-point to weather, lads. Get us up closer, still.”
“Aye aye, sir!” stoic older Austen agreed, shifting a dry quid of tobacco to his other cheek. Zip-zip-zip! A musket ball thudded off the forward wheel, taking a divot of ash with it, and sudden splintery quills arose from the deck as other musket shots missed. Mr. Motte, on the after wheel, gave out a sudden shriek and dropped as if pole-axed, with a musket ball in his neck.
“Another helmsman, here, Mister Langlie!” Lewrie barked, gulping down nausea, and shock, then turning away, as he must! “By God, those people are beginnin’ t’make me angry! Still with us, Mister Langlie?”
“Aye, sir. ‘Nother helmsman on the way.”
“Swivel-guns in the tops t’open on theirs, as we get closer!” Lewrie snapped, wishing he had his Ferguson, his fusil musket, or even his Girandoni air rifle.
Hell with this stoic shite, he determined; I’m gonna kill some of those bastards, myself! as he drew out his first double-barreled pistol to check the dryness of its priming.
“We’ve been hulled, several times, sir,” Lt. Langlie said, after he had done as Lewrie directed. “The Carpenter reports better than one foot of water in the bilges, so far, and at least five shot-holes, that he can see near the waterline. He also found an intact round-shot, sir. An eighteen-pounder, wedged in a starboard timber.”
“I thought yon Frog was hitting rather hard,” Lewrie said, with a wince; he’d been sure that Proteus and the foe were of equal calibre and weight of broadside. But, perhaps the slowness of the French gun crews had given him that impression. “Making fast, is the water, sir?” he asked Langlie.
“Not too quickly, sir…not yet,” Langlie said with a shrug.
“Have to live with it, for a while, then,” Lewrie decided. “No hands may be spared for the pumps, ‘til it gets a lot worse. Have any more joy for me, Mister Langlie?”
“Mister Adair reports that the larboard six-pounder on the forecastle is dismounted, too, sir,” Langlie added, looking grim and quite grey from head to foot with powder residues. “As is Number Two twelve-pounder, and Number Eleven in your cabins, from our larboard battery.”
“I’ll take joy from thinking that the Frogs are having a worse night than we are, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie had to shout in his ear, as several guns below their feet erupted together. “Must have not had an impressive raiding cruise…if they felt the need to toe up and slug it out! Honour and glory, ‘stead o’ loot? Not their, ha!…forte!”
Lewrie said it with a fatalistic shrug of his own, to think they would continue to batter each other, perhaps for hours, but Lt. Langlie could see the feral rictus of a smile on his captain’s face, take note in a flash of lighting that Lewrie’s usually merry blue eyes were gone cold, Arctic grey, and snapping with battle joy.
“Carry on, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie said, clapping his First Officer on the shoulder. “Pour it to ‘em. The French aren’t much good at this sort of yardarm-to-yardarm fight. Give it time enough, and they will lose their nerve, long before us. Hammer ‘em, lads!” he shouted to the gunners, all that stern stoicism the Navy required gone at last. “Hammer ‘em, and shatter their bloody bones! Pour it on, pour it on!”
“And damned be he who first cries, ‘Hold, Enough!’” he t
hought, becoming gun-drunk on the bitter powder fog, and the heart-stopping, lung-shaking roar from his beloved artillery.
“Damned be he,” “damned be him”? Never could keep that straight, he told himself with a deprecating chuckle and a faint grin, which, in the ruddy Hellfire flashes of Proteus’s guns, looked positively wolfish. Whichever’s right, by God it won’t be us!
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Oh, Jaysus, oh, Jaysus!” an Irish sailor whispered as he stood behind the starboard bulwark, a bare-bladed cutlass jammed into a wide belt, a clumsy-looking pistol stuck into a pocket of his slop-trousers, and gripping a Brown Bess Sea Pattern musket. In addition to all that, a keen-pointed boarding pike rested upright against the rack of belaying pins near the main mast’s stays. He looked up and down the rainy gangway at his mates, similarly armed, who crouched down out of sight, and felt the need to cross himself. “Mither Mary, comfort me…!”
“Arr, stop yer gob, Paddy,” one of the hidden chid him. “Where away, now?”
“M…musket-shot, Oi thinks,” the Irishman said with a shudder as lightning crashed bright ghoul-blue and lit up the sea, showing the dark frigate closing rapidly. Sailors stood atop her bulwarks, up her larboard shrouds, with even more crowding elbow-to-elbow along her sail-tending gangway…every mother-son of them waving cutlasses, hooting, jeering, and whooping fit to bust. Like Beelzebub’s demon army!
“Fook if they are!” the hidden sailor spat, after a quick peek. “Still ‘arf a cable off. No wonder th’ doxies don’t fancy ye, Paddy. Cain’t judge distance worth a tinker’s dam. Tells ‘em ‘e’s got seven inches, an’ th’ hoors kin only mark three, har har!”
“Wait fer it!” the First Mate was intoning from the quarterdeck. “Wait fer it! Ever’body stay hid, ‘til th’ cap’m says ‘leap,’ there.”
“Gonna kill us all,” Paddy whispered, his lips trembling, and a hand clawing inside his sodden shirt for his rosary. “Gonna…!”
“Hesh, lad!” an older shipmate hissed. “Buck up, laddy.”
The frigate sidled down upon them, no matter the futile alteration of course, the dangerous release of reefed sails. But, her gun-ports were still closed, and did not flap open to her rolling motion; they weren’t even freed…yet. It would be a boarding, hull pressed and grinding against hull.
“Wait for it…almost there!” the First Mate shouted, again.
“Heu!” a harsh voice came down to them on the noisy wind, from the foe. “Voici le frigate Vesuve, à Marine Français! ‘Eave to, z’ere, et surrendre. Vous not, ve fire on vous, comprendre?”
“We cannot heave-to in this weather, you no-sailor, you!” Capt. Weed could be heard shouting back through a speaking-trumpet. “We must keep a way on, downwind. Comprendre?”
“Surrendre, vite vite!” came the harsh answer as the Vesuve continued to close. “Take in votre voiles…you damn’ sails!” And, in seeming obedience, some free sailors began to clew up tops’ls, as the French frigate shuffled down within mere yards of them. And, the gun-ports were still shut! French sailors at bow, stern, and amidships on her bulwarks appeared with heaving lines and grapnels to bind the two ships together.
“We’re all gonna die, damn yer blood!” Daniel Wigmore said from chattering jaws, snuffled, and wiped his nose on his coat sleeve.
“Aw, you lived too long, anyway, you old fraud,” Weed told him. “Jamaica’s but five miles off, and coming hard. Who knows? With any luck at all, you’ll live, and reap a year’s free advertisements from this. Wait for it …!”
“Thousands o’ th’ buggers, though….”
” Hundreds, anyways,” Capt. Weed professionally noted; he’d had his own start in the Royal Navy during the American Revolution. “And, I do think I see half her crew or better still below her gangways, on her starboard guns, and such. They mean to send a fair-sized boarding party to us, yet keep enough men in-hand to stall Jamaica whilst they make off with us. This just might work, after all!”
The heavy grapnels flew, biting into Festival’s timbers as the Vesuve came to within hand-shaking distance.
“Now, by God!” Capt. Weed howled. “Now! Up, and repel boarders! Gun-ners…fire!”
French sailors were leaping across the empty air between ships, howling in glee, or swinging in piratical fashion on freed lines, but were countered by the acrobats’ and aerialists’ nets hung from the tips of the yardarms, pinning themselves against them like flies glued to a spider’s web, and their victory cries turned ugly and harsh.
But, then the muskets began to bark and flash, as pistols were emptied right in their faces, as cutlasses and small-swords and sabres were thrust into the bellies of those clambering upon the nets…as the puny old cast-off artillery pieces, double-shotted with scrap metal, musket balls, and grape, erupted, quoins fully out and aimed up high to scythe the French frigate’s bulwarks and gangway. Rusty swivel-guns in the tops yapped, pointing down at acute angles at the gangway, as well, and French sailors were suddenly screaming in pain and terror as they were plucked from the rails, caught in mid-swing, and dropped in the foaming mill-race between the hulls, to be crushed or drowned!
“Tarakans!” Whoosh. “Nasyekomayehs!” Whoosh. “Peesas!” Whoosh. “Cockroaches! Insects! Pricks!” Eudoxia Durschenko shrilly hallooed, each curse a punctuation to a loosed arrow. “Chyepooha!” Whoosh, and that for rubbish! as another broad-point hunting arrow skewered a well-dressed man, with a fore-and-aft bicorne hat and a costly sword, who’d gained Festival’s bulwark and was chopping at the nets. He screamed as he looked down to the doom buried deep in his chest, eyes widened by utter astonishment that he’d be slain by such an ancient thing, just before he tottered backwards and disappeared between the grinding hulls!
“Snova, girl!” her father bellowed. “Again, and again!”
“Bast’rd, yew mine!” Rodney swore as he took careful aim from behind the poop deck’s bulwarks, alongside the clowns firing one of the swivel-guns. His target was an older man, maybe a petty officer, who was shoving French sailors forward. The musket shoved him in his good shoulder as he fired, and that petty officer died so quick he didn’t even have time to clap a hand to his chest, where a .75-calibre ball smashed his heart, and fell off the gangway to sprawl atop one of the cannon. The clowns, in full white-face—their war-paint, they said!— whooped over his accuracy as they charged their rail-mounted shot-gun for another round. “Got you, yeah!” Rodney cheered, too, as he tossed the musket to the rear, and flapped his right hand to demand a fresh weapon from the little blond acrobat girl who was loading for him. This weapon was one of Durschenko’s Pennsylvania rifles, like the ones that he and Proteus’s Marine marksmen used from the tops in action, and he smiled an evil little smile as he brought it forward, over his injured left forearm for a rest, and drew the dog’s-jaws back to full cock. There, on the quarterdeck! That was an officer, for sure, he reckoned, all bellow, gilt-and-beshit. “You mine, butt fuckah!”
Lashed together, hulls grinding paint, tar, and linseed oil off, the French were but briefly daunted. The unexpected check was like a red flag waved at a bull, enflaming their blood lust. Swords chopped through nets, slashing suspending ropes, and parts of the netting came down at last, allowing a small flood of boarders to gain footing along Festival’s gangway.
” Vaya con Dios, amigos,” Jose whispered as he removed muzzles from his bears, and cuffed them hard on their snouts to enrage them. “Go, hasta luego, niños! Eat Frenchmen!” he directed, pointing, then shoving them in the right direction. Fredo and Paulo might not have been all that hungry, or all that enraged, either, perhaps imagined a time free of their constricting muzzles was a time to play. Whatever they made of it, the pair of brothers, usually as gentle as baa-lambs as Jose had promised, made a distinct impression on the French sailors who had gained the gangway as they loped towards them on all fours with their mouths open, their fangs flickering in the back-flashes of the lightning, and their claws skittering rather loudly on the oak planks!
&nbs
p; It didn’t help that Jose, in his second role as knife-thrower, was whickering butcher-knives at the French as he ran behind his bears, and shrieking curses, aiming to hit for a change, not outline the girl who spun on his large wooden wheel with near-misses!
“Ilya, mean old son of bitch,” Arslan Durschenko cooed into one ear of his lone adult lion after he had led him up from his cage down in the upper hold. “Ya lyubeet tiy, syegda. Lovink you, always, even if you no damn’ good. Chase there, da? Want head for bitink? There, Ilya, there! Sweet meat, Fransooski bastards!”
The lion whuffed at the din of combat, of clashing swords, and howling men, his mane shivering at every discharge of musket or pistol. Ilya was old, as old as poor, dead Vanya, and he had never had what one might call a sweet disposition. His rheumy eyes lit up with an ancient joy, though, and, free for once of a controlling leash and collar after Durschenko removed it and gave him an encouraging slap on his rump, the lion just had to do what a lion had to do. He leaped from the weather deck to the gangway with the spryness of a young male, huge hind paws not even having to scrabble at its edge, found himself a victim on the gangway, and rose up to drape his front paws on a man’s shoulders, his gaping, fang-filled mouth inches from his nose as he let out a roar!
Thankfully for Festival’s crew, Ilya’s first choice was French, though nothing about lions was gilt-edged guaranteed. The French tar shrieked, sword clattering to the deck in terror, and fainted away, a good thing for him, for Ilya didn’t think that was very much fun, nor was it even tasty, so he rose up again and began slapping those plate-sized, sharp-taloned paws about to right and left, this time draping himself on the sole remaining trio of Frenchmen who hadn’t been swatted into bloody tatters, and took himself a lovely mouthful of face!
“Stay th’ Divil away f’um me, ye bastards!” Paddy was shouting, musket emptied into one man, pistol emptied into another, then used as a club to shatter a third’s skull. His boarding pike had been lost in a Frenchman’s belly, a man who had joined his shipmates in the sluice between the hulls, and he was now reduced to whirling his cutlass like a frantic St. Catherine’s Wheel, and he was holding off two sword-armed enemies by creating a steel fan in front of him, but his arms were now growing lead-heavy and weak. “I don’t wanna die, Jay-sus, Mary, an’ Joseph! Don’t hurt me, or Oi’ll kill ye! Go-od damn!” he gawped.
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