The Price of Glory

by Seth Hunter

  And now a string of orders as the Unicorn worked her way to windward, clawing away from that terrible shore. A flash and a bang from the fort. Fired too low now, for the shot fell just short of their stern as they clawed away. And another, with the same result. The French were firing singly now, perhaps to mark the fall of shot. The next smashed into the stern rail, showering the quarterdeck with deadly splinters. Men were down, some screaming, some silent. Kendrick, one of the new midshipmen who had joined them at Portsmouth, a boy of thirteen, had a great shard of wood sticking out of his arm. He was clutching it with the other, white-faced, biting his lip and he looked at Nathan, as if for reassurance. It took all Nathan’s will not to run to him. “Get him below,” he snapped to his steward Gabriel, who was in his usual position at his side, and he turned abruptly away, looking aloft as the weather leeches began to flutter and lift. They were close-hauled now, jammed as close to the wind as she would lie. If they were taken aback now, so close to shore …

  “Mr. Graham!” The master appeared hypnotised, gazing aloft. “Ease off a point, sir, ease her off. “

  A shot struck the muzzle of the 18-pounder nearest the quarterdeck and shattered, dismounting the gun and spraying hot metal over the crew. One man was on fire. A trail of powder ignited and flared across the deck. Tully left the helm and ran forward. His fire engine sprayed water in a great arc across the waist.

  But the sails were filled and drawing well. Too well, for they were drawing away from the shore and losing the back current; they must not stray too far from the shore. Why in God’s name could the master not see that?

  “A point more, Mr. Graham, if you will,” Nathan commanded, struggling to keep his voice calm, for the sails were feathering and they were losing way as they felt the pull of the tide once more. No response. Nathan whirled upon him but before he could damn his eyes, or give the order himself, a direct hit shattered the helm, killing or maiming both helmsmen and sending Graham flying to the deck. Worse, the foretopmast began to sway forward until with a terrible deliberation it came crashing down across the bows, bringing the foresails with it in an impossible tangle of canvas and rigging and spars—and at once the head dropped off from the wind and the frigate was swept back into the mouth of Morbihan.

  Nathan met Tully’s appalled gaze and knew with an awful certainty that they were lost, but he began to shout orders in a desperate bid to stave off disaster. One party was sent below to man the tiller ropes, and Holroyd and his people were fighting to clear the tangle of wreckage up forward, but the frigate was now firmly in the grip of the tide and it was moving them remorselessly back down the channel into the Morbihan and the guns on Point Kerpenhir. Every shot was hitting home now and several fires had started on the gundeck. It seemed a question only of whether they would be burned or battered to death. Bodies sprawled among a shambles of rigging and dismounted guns, the wounded crying out piteously but there were hardly any men spare to carry them below. Those men who were not hacking at the rigging or working the guns were fighting fires. Then, with shocking suddenness, they struck. Struck with such force that not a man was left on his feet, and with a groan like a tree crashing in the forest, the foretop came down to join the chaos on the deck below.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fire and Shot

  NATHAN STAGGERED TO HIS FEET, dazed and bloodied from his violent contact with the deck, and gazed wildly about him but even in the extremity of his anguish and pain, he knew they had struck sand and not rock, that the bottom had not been torn from the hull and that with the tide still rising there was a reasonable chance of floating free. But not at once. Not at once, and every minute they waited they would take another pounding from the guns on Point Kerpenhir—and at such close range they could hardly miss. The Unicorn was being battered to death before his eyes. He had no option but to strike.

  He looked to the stern where the white ensign flapped lazily in the warm summer breeze and called for Mr. Lamb. He appeared to be scrambling around behind the starboard carronade. Why ? Was he trying to hide? No, he had simply lost his hat. He crammed it on his head and came running aft.

  “Sir?”

  But no. He could not ask a boy to haul down their colours, nor any of the crew. This was something he had to do himself. He moved over to the halyard but paused a moment, searching for some reason to put off the inevitable. He looked back over the stern towards the flotilla, now safe inside the waters of the Gulf, but what comfort was that when he had lost the Unicorn? He raised his eyes toward the fort above Port-Navalo. It was no longer wreathed in smoke. Then, to his astonishment, he saw the tricolour coming down from the flagstaff. And after a moment, when time seemed to stand still for him, the Union flag was run up in its place. Howard’s marines had taken the fort! And now Nathan could see them, in their red coats, standing up on the ramparts waving their black shakoes, oblivious for the moment to the fate that had befallen the Unicorn. But their success gave him heart—and pointed to the one hope he had of saving his ship. If Howard could take one fort with a parcel of marines, Nathan could surely take the other with his battle-hardened veterans of the Unicorn.

  He sought out Tully amid the confusion on the quarterdeck. He seemed dazed, a thin stream of blood running down the side of his face. Nathan gripped him by the arm and stared hard into his eyes. “Martin, are you hurt?”

  Tully shook his head but his gaze was strangely vacant.

  “We must try to take the fort,” Nathan insisted. “I am going to take as many men as I can in the ship’s boats. Martin? Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir. The ship’s boats …” Tully looked uncertainly to their stern. The four boats had been lowered before the Unicorn went into action and the tide had dragged them far out to starboard but at least they had escaped the mayhem on the frigate’s decks.

  “If I succeed you will be able to float her off on the rising tide but if I fail … Martin, if I fail, you must strike, do you understand me?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Tully half turned to go but then checked himself and turned back. “Good luck,” he said, with a shaky grin. Nathan wondered if he meant “Goodbye.”

  Another salvo from the fort, most of the rounds smashing into the hull so that Nathan swore he felt the vessel shudder at the blows she was taking and there were fires breaking out all over the deck, most of the gun crews running about with buckets of water while the guns stood abandoned, unable to bear. Fire and shot were destroying the only ship he had ever come to love, for all the troubles she had brought him.

  “Gabriel! Gilbert Gabriel there!” Nathan turned to look for his servant, but he was there already, at his shoulder. The Angel Gabriel he was called by the hands, in irony, for his character was by no means virtuous. He had been a highwayman—and destined for the rope—before Nathan’s father had snatched him from the jailhouse and borne him off to sea.

  “Bring my pistols from the cabin,” Nathan instructed him. Then, after a moment’s pause, to his retreating back: “And the letter from my desk.”

  Gabriel would know what letter he meant, though he checked a moment in his stride and Nathan knew what he must be thinking. That Nathan meant to have it with him when he died, his last word of Sara.

  Holroyd and Lamb were leading their divisions aft, pitifully thinned now and barely a hundred strong. Nathan ran his eye over them, seeing men he knew and liked, and whose lives were now forfeit to his blundering conceit, and not for the first time. Jacob Young, his coxswain, a young man of almost the same age as he but with a cheerful vitality that often made Nathan feel as old as his father; Dermot Quinn, the only survivor of the mutineers, pardoned by Nathan in fl agrant abuse of his powers and now rated Volunteer, First Class; George Banjo, the leader of the African slaves Nathan had freed in the Americas … He had been called Jorge then—at least by his owner—but the hands had anglicised this to George. How the name Banjo had been added was still a mystery to Nathan. He had enquired once and been told it was his Yoruba name, but this seemed unlikely, unless
it was an approximation. Michael Connor, the biggest man in the crew, who had been in shackles when Nathan had first encountered him on the orlop deck of the Unicorn, though it seemed the only offence he could reasonably be charged with was pissing upon the deck, whilst drunk. He still had a fondness for liquor, though he appeared to have been cured of his more noxious habit.

  Most of these men had followed Nathan into battle before in the Caribbean and it had been bad then but never as bad as this and doubtless they knew it as well as he but he told them what he required of them as if it was a perfectly reasonable option. He thought of adding something more appropriate to the occasion, some stirring words on Death or Glory, but they did not need that, and nor did he.

  Gabriel was back with his pistols, the pair Nathan had taken from the armoury in the Palace of the Tuileries just over a year ago—on the day the tribunes of the people had finally found the courage to rise up against Robespierre and put an end to the Terror. Thesame day he learned that Sara had been sent to her death on the guillotine.

  He took the letter and folded it into an inside pocket. Then he made his way to the larboard rail where his barge was waiting, filled already with above a score of men, and nodded to his coxswain to cast off.

  The tide now worked in their favour for the Unicorn had grounded some three or four hundred yards seaward of the battery and the four boats swept rapidly down upon it. The guns ceased their remorseless pounding of the frigate and sought out these new, more elusive targets, but they were moving so fast and so close to shore the gunners were having problems finding the range. Even so, they tried, and the water erupted in their wake and all but swamped the jolly boat as it came clear of the stricken frigate. Nathan’s barge drew swiftly level with the battery, but they were still some way off the shore and it was a desperate struggle now, for the tide threatened to carry them beyond the point and on into the Gulf. Somehow they gained the shallows under the redoubt but here was another problem: a frenzy of white water breaking over half-submerged rocks and more of Jonah’s tourbillons that threatened to drive them back into midstream and the fire of the guns. There were more than twenty men crammed into Nathan’s barge and the water was breaking over the gunwales, but with over a dozen pulling on the oars and the rest bailing furiously, they finally ground on the shingle.

  Nathan left the crew to drag the boat ashore and stumbled across the narrow strand to the cover of the rocks where he could take stock of their situation. It did not improve with proximity. The fort appeared to be built to the exact design and dimensions of its neighbour on the opposite point. A gentle slope of sandy soil and sea grass rose to the foot of the battery and though the cannon could not be depressed low enough to sweep this rise there was not a scrap of cover to shield an attacker from the inevitable musket fire. Then there was a ditch, doubtless filled with the steel spikes the French called fleur de lys and other pleasantries to impede their progress, and then a steep earthen embankment, topped by the stone ramparts. The guns had ceased firing for some reason—though it could only be that the gunners had taken up their muskets to await this new attack. Which was clearly suicidal. Under cover of smoke, or darkness, they might achieve something, but there was no prospect of the former and though the sun was now quite low in the sky it would stay light for two hours or more. And if Nathan delayed more than a few minutes the guns would inevitably resume their pounding of the Unicorn.

  He looked back at her: a sorry sight with her stumps of foremast and mainmast and the wreckage of canvas and rigging draped over her bows—and the wounds she had taken from the heated shot all along her hull. He could see some of the hands hacking away with axes to clear the debris from her forecastle and even as he watched a mass of it fell into the sea and was swept away by the current. Moments later there was a flash of flame from the 6-pounder in the starboard bow and the shot whistled high above their heads to smash into the stone ramparts above: a splendid act of defiance that cheered him a little even though he knew it could achieve nothing; not even to provide them with decent covering fire.

  He glanced along the ragged line of men crouched among the rocks with pistols and cutlasses, axes, even belaying pins, fired up, eager to go. How many of them would make it to the redoubt? Perhaps half if they were lucky, and the defenders less practised with their muskets than they were with their cannon. It was said that musket fire was so inaccurate it took the weight of a man in lead balls to kill him. Nathan had not believed this when he first heard it, in a Sussex tavern; and he certainly did not believe it now. He touched the letter in his pocket—for luck, or for the last time—drew his sword, and stepped out from behind the rock.

  He was not immediately cut down in a hail of fire. In fact there was not a single shot aimed at him so far as he could tell, though he could hear the sharp crack of musketry from above. As he scrambled over the rocks and started up the slope, he could see the cannon in the embrasures, smoke drifting out from the muzzles, but no sign of movement. A glance to left and right: Gilbert Gabriel at his side, Michael Connor and George Banjo a step or two behind, with Young and the boat crew close on their heels; Holroyd and Lamb with their two divisions in a long straggling line on each flank. It was hard going up the slope for there was very little purchase in the soft ground and he was breathing heavily, a roaring in his ears. But no roaring from the men. They advanced in an almost eerie silence, so unlike their usual tigerish charge across a deck, as if they feared to rouse the defenders from their inexplicable slumber.

  They were three-quarters there and still the gunners did not fire. For a moment Nathan wondered if their attention was so fixed upon the Unicorn they had not perceived the danger advancing from below. But if this was so why were they not firing upon the ship? No, it had to be from a perverted sense of amusement: waiting until their attackers were almost upon them before obliterating them with one devastating volley.

  Yet still he could not see their muskets.

  They reached the ditch. Nathan paused, every nerve tensed for an eruption of flame and smoke all along the ramparts and the terrible impact of a musket ball at close quarters. But still the French held their fire. Dimly he heard the sound of shots, even shouts and the clash of steel, but wherever they were coming from it was not from the battery.

  The ditch was too wide to jump. But it contained no mantraps, no steel spikes, nothing more alarming than mud and nettles. Down they went in an untidy wave and up the other side, breathing heavily, even growling a little now, like a great predator closing in on its kill. But still no roar. Now the embankment, steeper, much steeper than the slope leading to it, so they were forced to scramble on all fours, pistols in their belts, knives, even cutlasses clenched between their teeth.

  Nathan felt a sudden fierce exultation, fed by the impossible belief that they had taken the defenders by surprise. Smoke still drifted from the mouths of the cannon that had played such havoc with his ship and he wondered if the gunners possessed no other means of defence and were waiting for the moment the attackers appeared in the embrasures before they blew them apart with 12-pound heated shot. But for all the damage they had inflicted on the poor Unicorn, they could only destroy a dozen or so at such close range—one of whom would be him, of course, for he was a pace ahead of Connor and the Angel Gabriel. And now came the roar as the wave broke upon the parapet and they were clambering through the gaps, climbing over the cannon, cracking shins, burning hands and legs on the searing hot metal.

  And the roar dying in their throats as they saw what awaited them on the other side.

  The interior of the redoubt was filled with a struggling mass of men, fighting hand to hand with swords, pikes, axes and muskets, even a few pitchforks: fighting with a deadly, furious intensity over the bloody corpses of the fallen, and not a one of them aware of the attackers pouring through the gaps in the walls. Nathan paused on the gun platform, staring in wonder at this bizarre spectacle. Had the defenders fallen out among themselves? But what could possibly have provoked such a fratricidal b
loodbath? There was little to distinguish the combatants: most were fighting in their shirt-sleeves, some stripped to the waist, though there were a few blue uniforms here and there, similar to those worn by the French National Guard—the citizen soldiers of the Republic—so it might reasonably be supposed that whoever was fighting them must be his allies. Yet he was loath to pitch his own men into such an affray when they might so easily be attacked by both parties, simply on the grounds that they were unknown to either, as happened in many a water-front brawl. He glanced down the line of ordnance: all in good order with powder and shot beside each gun, braziers glowing in the fading light; rammers and swabs and all the other tools of the gunner’s trade lying abandoned in their midst.

  He sought out his two subordinates, Holroyd and Lamb, and instructed them to select a suffi cient number of the hands and turn two of the cannon upon the warring parties.

  “And load with canister,” he added, for he could see this commodity stacked up in quantity next to the powder kegs and the neat piles of round shot.

  While a score or so of the hands devoted themselves to this enterprise, Nathan gave his attention once more to the battle. The Blues, heavily outnumbered, were fighting in small groups, back to back, though still giving a good account of themselves and clearly determined to fight to the death. And judging from the number of corpses strewn across the further ramparts, this had been the fate of a good many of their number. Nathan deduced that the attackers had stormed the fort by that particular route and that the gunners had ceased pounding the Unicorn to take up their swords and muskets to confront this new threat at their rear. Their best course now, it appeared to him, was surrender but they were obviously made of sterner stuff than he for even as he watched, one of their number began to call out: “A moi, mes enfants …” and the other groups began to fight their way through to him to make a kind of phalanx in the centre.