“Williams, take the captain my compliments, and ask may I come see him for a moment? Off you go.”
They stood quietly by the quarterdeck lee rail for a few minutes, watching a pair of seabirds skimming the wave crests in search of their morning meal. Up they wheeled suddenly, and then dropped into the water from high above like darts.
“Lieutenant Dinning,” called Williams, “captain’s compliments, and will you please lay aft. He has time for you now.” He knuckled his forehead and turned away.
“That was quick,” Dinning said. “He must’ve just finished his breakfast. Let’s go. I’ll give you a warning, though. Do not say a thing unless you are directly questioned.”
The redcoat sentry at the captain’s door stamped his boots as they arrived, turned into the cabin and announced their arrival.
“Come,” commanded a voice from inside. It was a voice Neville had rarely heard, other than when Seymour had read himself in and on Sunday mornings.
They tucked their hats under their arms and stepped into the cabin. It was an opulent room on this ship. He remembered it from his time as prize crew, but had not seen much of it since. Even though the cabin was enjoying sunlight through the stern windows, it took a few seconds for their eyes to adjust to the dimmer light of the cabin. They knuckled their foreheads.
Captain Seymour sat at a surprisingly large desk with a few papers, quills and inkpot held securely by a sturdy set of fiddles on the forward right side. Above the fixed green blotter, he held a heavy brown leather-bound ledger with gold print that simply read ‘HMS Sans Pareil’. The great man’s silver coffee service sat steaming on his left, and he gave an air of having been annoyed by the interruption. A number of small brown crumbs remained with a half-eaten biscuit and a pot of honey on a small silver plate to the right of the coffee service.
“What brings you to me this morning, Lieutenant, and who is this young gentleman?” asked Captain Seymour in a flat tone.
“He brings me, Sir. I believe I am being used merely to gain entry – something a midshipman probably couldn’t do by himself. Please look at this,” and he handed the complete package to Seymour.
“I see,” said Captain Seymour. “This is interesting. Very unusual, indeed. What is your name, boy, and where did you find this?” he asked, his demeanor changing to what appeared to Neville to be very suspicious. It would be a very unusual captain who did not wish to be in control of every detail on his ship. Here was a boy who had ‘smuggled’ something aboard that appeared to be important. Important messages come in the despatch pouch, not via some upstart delivery boy. Might this be someone’s means to undermine his authority on his own ship?
Despite being tall, Captain Seymour was not a particularly large or heavy man. Neville had not seen him to be an excitable man, but he could see a bit of uncharacteristic red rising from under his neck-cloth as he read the outer envelope and then studied the smaller one that Lt. Dinning had removed. “Well?” he demanded, giving Neville a quick dark glance.
Neville knuckled his forehead again and began, “Beg pardon, Sir. I am Midshipman Neville Burton, Sir, and I am ordered to respond only that it’s from Whitehall, and that I was directed to produce it to the second lieutenant only once this ship joined with the Channel Fleet,” just as he had said to Lt. Dinning.
Lt. Dinning added, “That’s all he told me, too, Sir,” to which Captain Seymour snapped, “I don’t believe I addressed you, Lieutenant.”
Lt. Dinning mumbled a rather timid, “Aye, Sir,” as the captain began to open the envelope addressed to him.
The captain’s face became a serious blotchy red. A dangerous red, perhaps, and he fairly hissed at Neville, “You come aboard my ship with this, and you do not trust your captain to do the right thing with it. This almost smacks of mutiny, it does.”
“I am but a messenger, Your Lordship, doing as ordered,” stated Neville as bravely as he dared, taking care to sound as humble as he could and looking the great man in the eye with the least aggression as he could command.
“By whoooom?” growled Seymour, dragging the word ‘whom’ out three times its normal length.
“With my humblest apologies, Sir, I am to say that I will tell that, Sir, if it is not obvious in the message itself, Sir.”
“It would seem you have learned your lines, boy,” he said hotly. “We will do as suggested by this envelope only because I see a seal here that I recognize. If the contents of this are not as implied, you will regret having ever touched foot on this ship.”
Looking back to the envelopes, Captain Seymour seemed to be cooling as he studied the seals and the handwriting and thought about the situation. It seemed to Neville that he saw, as the red began to subside, a slight upward movement at the corners of the captain’s lips. Seymour issued a barely audible, “He wouldn’t,” but no more.
From the smaller envelope addressed to him, Captain Lord Hugh Seymour pulled out a single sheet of paper.
Lt. Dinning seemed to be melting quietly into the shadows.
The captain began to read, and it was not long before he said, “Lieutenant Dinning, you may go. Barton, if that’s right, please take a seat while I finish this.” He motioned Neville to a side chair, and his eyes went back to the letter.
Lt. Dinning had already disappeared by the time Neville turned around.
If there had been a smile on the captain’s face, it was gone by the time Neville found his seat.
After waiting for several minutes while the captain seemed to read and re-read the letter, Captain Seymour turned to him and asked, “How do you come to be in the service of Mr. Wickham?”
“My name’s Burton, Sir, and I don’t know of a Mr. Wickham; I’m sorry, Sir.”
“Sir Mulholland, then, Mr. Burton.”
“My service is purely by accident. During my captivity on this ship before the first of June last, I was approached by a French civilian and given a letter to be secreted to Whitehall. When I delivered it, I found that it was sent to Sir William … Sir Mulholland, Sir.” His words were beginning to spill out. His nervousness was decreasing as his brain realized that he was not already out the door in irons. “Sir Mulholland is a great friend of mine, Sir, and of my mother and father. We are all of Suffolk. He had a pickpocket slip me this note whilst I was in town just a few days ago with the instructions you have heard, and here we are. I didn’t even know the letter was to be for the captain of the ship, only a second lieutenant. I thought it odd, but I had promised him to do my duty when called.”
Despite the serious look Neville had seen on Seymour’s face as he read the letter, he was sure there was a smile there. “It’s Burton, is it?”
“Yes … I mean aye, Sir.”
The smile grew slightly larger. “So it’s you,” he said at last. “I was told there was an officer aboard who had been with this ship at The Battle. However, since she was French at the time, and I selected my first lieutenant personally, I dismissed it as a bit of rubbish. You must have been with the Castor, then, and the prize crew following?”
“Aye, Sir, I was both.”
“Captain Troubridge must have thought highly of you then?”
“I wouldn’t know, Sir.”
“No, you wouldn’t, would you. Do you know how you came to return to this ship?” He paused and lifted the letter an inch off the desk, and said, “Ahhhh – no need for an answer. You were approached by a French civilian, you say? Do you have his name? Can you describe him?”
“Aye, certainly, Sir. He goes by the name Georges Cadoudal. About five foot and six or seven inches, wide-set brown eyes with bushy eyebrows, dark brown hair – quite curly. Overall, a rather wide face with a square chin, Sir, and he wore no beard. A very French look about him, if you take my meaning, Sir – always wearing his cravat – and he speaks English as clear as I do. Better than my French, for all love.”
“You speak French? You may do well here after all, Mr. Burton, if you mind your ways and learn your lessons. I should know, as I we
nt aboard ship at the age of eleven myself. Whenever you get the chance, you may report that you placed the letter in my hand yourself. That will do for now.” Neville thought he saw the addition of the slightest of a winked eye. “You may go, but I must advise you strongly about discussing any part of this with anyone.”
Before Neville was on his feet, the captain bellowed “Smythe!” Smythe, captain’s steward, was entering at the side before Neville made it to the door.
Once out on the sunlit deck, Neville felt as though the whole world looked different. He had survived his ordeal of carrying a message from Whitehall to the captain of his new ship. Despite the battles he had been through, this had somehow held greater fear. Despite the cold air, he felt a trickle of sweat run down his backbone. He had managed to walk into this himself, not just react to flying splinters and falling rigging, and he came out … what? Alive?
Lt. Dinning, still on duty on the quarterdeck, noticed him and beckoned him up. Taking Neville aside, and as far out of the hearing of others as he could, he asked, in a hushed tone, “What on earth was all that about, Mr. Burton. How do you come about acting the bloody royal messenger?”
“I’m sorry, Sir, but it’s not something I am allowed to talk about, even though my part is really just what it looks like – a messenger.”
“Next time you have a delivery to make, I think I’ll ask you to seek another’s help. That didn’t improve my chances with the captain, methinks.”
“I am sorry, Sir.”
“Well, you’d better get back to your station. Look there,” he said, pointing to a man loitering in the waist. “What’s he doing there? You might need to get your bo’sun’s mates to keep their starters handy.” With that, he resumed his pacing of the quarterdeck.
Neville found the blockade of Brest worse duty than Toulon, though the concept was the same. The weather was harsher; colder, for sure, and the waves bigger. Here he was with the offshore squadron, with essentially nothing to see other than the ocean, the other ships in the blockade, and the creatures of the air and sea. With the inshore squadron at Toulon, he could see the hills and Toulon’s white villages. If weather permitted at all, exercise of the great guns was the norm. At least the gun crews were beginning to fully understand their duties and handle the guns well.
The days ran on and together, the men dragging themselves up the ratlines day and night to accomplish one sail change after another. The first lieutenant constantly hounded the lieutenants and the midshipmen to get their men moving in response to endless signaling from the flagship to keep themselves on station.
The ordeal seemed worst for Lt. Summers, who had Duckett and Black to help him on the larboard watch. Both Summers and Duckett seemed to have a difficult time understanding the very basics of their sailing duties. Marston was obviously not pleased with Duckett, either. He did not seem to be learning very quickly or to be adapting well to ship life. His quick temper did not usually boil over, just flustered him to the point of confusion. It was obvious that he didn’t enjoy being aloft, calling for some seaman to climb for him whenever possible. With poor direction, the men did not perform well. After a few dozen reprimands for doing poor work, the men backslid to doing exactly what they were told, rather than what they knew they should, and the ship was handled poorly whenever the larboard watch was on duty. Summers was then badgered severely by Marston.
Weariness did not preclude midshipmens’ lessons. Navigation, and the mathematics that went with it, could not be ignored, nor the principles of sail. Mr. Blunte, for all his brusqueness, was a good teacher. Neville felt that he could find his way home from almost anywhere on earth, yet he would comfortably leave the navigation to Simms if it were necessary. On the other hand, he doubted that he would trust himself to the other mids, and was dumbfounded that Summers could have passed for lieutenant without some sort of assistance.
In addition to his regular studies, Neville had determined to improve his French and, using the book Dr. Mills had given him, did what he could to improve his vocabulary. One day in winter, he was advised that one of the seamen in his watch ‘should be observed carefully, as he is of French descent’. It was not unusual for a ship as large as the Sans Pareil to have foreigners among its crew. They had three Spanish aboard, one Swede, five Italians, and four Jamaicans. Neville learned that the Frenchman was actually an Englishman who had spent much of his young life in France with his father in the wine trade. He’d learned the language fluently in order to act as the family’s buyer. When the revolution began, and the family business was taken from them by the new regime, he’d fled for home and vowed to do what he could to help restore France to some state of normalcy. The man, John Frere, had been pleased to have an opportunity to speak French with anyone at all, becoming Neville’s de facto tutor. Mr. Frere was amused with Neville’s pronunciation of many of the words from his book, but he was patient. He would explain nuances of speech or idioms that Neville encountered and, in fine weather when the larbowlines were on duty, might sit at the crosstrees and just talk, speaking French rather than English.
Daniel’s ship, the Orion, was frequently visible, for she sailed two ships ahead of them in line. No communication was possible other than letters, though. On an unusually calm day, if there was reason for the captain to be called to the flag, there would at least be a bit of different activity: backing sails, boats swayed out, and piping the captain over the side. A few hours of quiet ensued, with the ship riding peacefully on a calm sea, before it was time to pipe the captain aboard again.
There was news on the first day of June that Captain Seymour had been promoted to Rear Admiral effective that day, the first anniversary of the ‘Glorious First’. There were rumors that it would signal some sort of celebration, which Jack Tar would always associate with at least one extra tot of spirits. Yet, of more importance to Neville, the despatch bag brought him letters – several letters – proving that Mary had been writing at least weekly, as he had. The moment he was off watch, he went below and began to read.
My Dearest Neville,
2 January, 1795
I wish you a Happy New Year. I hope that we will see each other soon in this year! Christmas passed well here at our house. Father found the largest goose ever this year, and we ate it with a wonderful figgy pudding. I do hope the Navy served you a proper meal for Christmas.
We had a bit of snow the day before, and it covered the common like a white blanket. Boxing Day went nicely as well, and it brought the sun to melt off the snow; so now we have that dreadful mud everywhere. The sun shone with great promise on the New Year’s Day, however, and my thoughts went to you again, . . . etc., etc., etc.
************
My Dearest Neville,
9 January, 1795
I miss you very much these cold winter days. My longing for you was made the stronger this last week when Gage departed. His wound healed, and they pronounced him fit to go. Your sister was most upset, although she knows he must.
We sat for several hours by a warm fire and spoke of you military men. He is posted for the very southernmost bit of land in Africa – Cape Town in South Africa – where I suppose there will be another great battle with the French. Or, maybe it is to be the Dutch this time . . . etc., etc., etc.
With deepest affection, Mary
************
My Dearest Neville,
18 January, 1795
The wind off the North Sea has been horrible this last week, but there have been no snow or ice storms as there are some years. In the event your sister has not written of it (and I doubt your mother would), Elizabeth thinks the situation between her and Mr. Blake is becoming warmer, if you understand me.
I do not wish simply to pass along gossip or to alarm you in any way, for we think him a wonderful man with only the best of intentions, but do not be surprised if you receive some notice of a more lasting bond between them. Your sister is staying with her, despite the Halls’ protestations (for they enjoy her very much), because s
he would otherwise be alone . . . etc., etc., etc.
With my deepest affection, Mary
************
The next day, the joy of his letters was almost forgotten. The weather in the Bay of Biscay turned normal … that is to say, most unpleasant. They were out on the yards again, shortening sail three times in the first watch. Supper had been cold. The ship retuned to its normal pattern of gunnery practice, wearing ship, sail changes, and signals to keep station.
“Dismissed,” ordered Lt. Marston at the conclusion of church on Sunday, twenty-first June. From there, the officers trooped aft to take noon sights. That being done, and the captain having ‘made it noon’, Lt. Marston passed word for all lieutenants and midshipmen to report to the wardroom.
Neville noticed that Sailing Master Blunte was there as well, but not the doctor. Marston entered before the captain. He called them to attention, squinting around the room to see that they were all there. Captain Seymour followed him in, looking as if he were about to address Parliament. He had nothing out of place or a wisp of any lint on his dark blue uniform.
“You may sit,” he announced, and Neville returned to his perch on one of the larboard twelve-pounder cannons that was neatly hidden by a tarpaulin cover.
“The essence of my orders, gentlemen, is this letter from the Navy Office,” he said, raising it for all to see. He then read from it:
“To: Sir Lord Hugh Seymour, Captain, HMS Sans Pareil
I would not presume to give orders, or even to modify those which you have been given by Lord Bridport (Admiral Hood), as you sail in defense of Britain in the Channel. My purpose with this unusual message is to pass to you certain intelligence we have received regarding the probable activities of the enemy, and my most humble request for assistance in a discreet mission.
The Glorious First Of June (Neville Burton: Worlds Apart Book 1) Page 23
