The Price of Glory

by Seth Hunter

  “Good luck, Mr. Tully,” Nathan called out to him as he went over the side. “We will do our best to distract him for you.”

  The boats had barely vanished into the darkness when a sudden gust laid them over almost on their beam ends and threw Nathan sprawling into the scuppers.

  “Very well, Mr. Perry,” he said, when he had found his feet and wiped the blood from his lip where he had knocked it against one of the quarterdeck carronades. “You may shorten all the sail you like.” He grinned bashfully at him, even with the pain in his lip, but the master was already turning away and roaring again.

  “Topmen aloft, reef and lay in!”

  Nathan was worried for Tully and his boats, bobbing about in the darkness off an unknown shore and a gale coming on. And there was no certainty that the brig had followed them. They had got in the royals and topgallants and were putting the first reef in the courses when Mr. Lamb cried out that he had sighted her, standing out from the point directly off their larboard beam. Nathan still could not see a thing but he took the midshipman’s word for it.

  “Very well, Mr. Duncan,” he said, “run out the guns.”

  The gun crews were shorthanded with so many hands aloft and the boarding party away, but Nathan only meant to make a show of it. There was no chance of hitting her at this range and in the darkness, but the more attention that was paid to him the less chance they had of noticing what was coming up on their weather side.

  He heard the squeal of the trucks as the guns were run out.

  “Remember, now, you are to load with cartridge only,” Mr. Duncan was fretting in a harsh, low voice, repeating the instruction all along the gundeck, as if he was afraid it might carry to the brig in the darkness off their quarter.

  “Where away, Mr. Lamb?” Nathan sang out to the midshipman with the eyes.

  “There, sir!” Pointing frantically towards the headland as if he could not believe she had not been seen. “Directly amidships.” And at last Nathan saw her … Creeping along the foot of the headland, the sly dog, and so close to shore; the charts must be wrong. He must be able to go in closer … But too late now, he could not be firing upon his own boats. He felt another gust of wind on his cheek, nothing like as bad as the last one, but it was fair warning.

  “Ease your helm,” Nathan ordered, for the brig had drawn a little ahead of them now. And as they fell off the wind: “Fire at will, Mr. Duncan.”

  The guns went off at five-second intervals and in the brief flashes Nathan saw the brig’s topsails outlined against the cliff. He could not see his boats. They must be right in among the rocks.

  “Shall we fire again, sir?” Duncan requested.

  “Yes, Mr. Duncan, and keep firing until I instruct you to stop,” Nathan commanded him sharply. He supposed the first lieutenant must bemoan the waste of powder, but it was not he who was paying for it. Then, in the pause before they resumed, he saw the flash of small arms on the deck of the brig and heard the sharper crack of pistol shots. Moments later, he saw the light at her stern: the signal that Tully had taken her. A cheer rose from the guncrews and even some of the men aloft.

  “Belay there!” the first lieutenant roared but there were grinning faces all round and a few minutes later the brig, ablaze now with lights at stem and stern, came heading towards them across the bay, towing the Unicorn’s boats behind her.

  “She is the Bonne Aventure privateer,” Tully informed him when he had come aboard. “Eight guns. Six swivels. Crew of sixty-five.”

  “Well done, sir,” Nathan congratulated him with a broad grin. It was the first prize the Unicorn had taken in all her long voyaging back and forth across the Atlantic. “Very well done. And did they put up much of a fight?”

  “Not to speak of it, sir, for they did not spot us until we were safe over the side. We have two men wounded, neither of them serious. They lost a half-dozen before they decided to throw up the sponge.” For once he sounded almost as excited as Nathan.

  “And she is a privateer?”

  “Well, the captain has a letter of marque from the French authorities but he is more of a pirate in my opinion. She was making for San Remo, which has been her base for the best part of a year, and most of her crew are Genovese: smugglers, I would say, taken to buccaneering since the war.”

  “Even so, I would have thought they would have put up a better fight than that.”

  “Well, I did have my sword at the captain’s throat,” Tully explained diffidently, “and he may have been anxious not to provoke me.”

  “That would make a difference,” Nathan agreed. “And what condition is she in?”

  “Oh in good shape, sir, as far as I can tell, and armed with eight-pounders.”

  They would almost certainly buy her into the fleet. Nelson had been complaining he did not have enough gunboats that could run close inshore. Nathan began to do sums in his head. He might count on a thousand pounds if he was lucky.

  “There is something else I should like to report, sir,” said Tully. “In private.”

  Nathan looked into his face.

  “Very well. Let us go below.”

  When they were in Nathan’s cabin, Tully reached into his pocket and took out a velvet purse. He emptied it carefully upon the table. Nathan stared.

  “I did not want them rolling about the deck in the dark,” said Tully dryly, “or we might have had a riot on our hands.”

  Nathan picked up one of the stones and held it up to the light between his finger and thumb. It was oval in shape and about the size of his thumbnail, cut into a score or so of facets. “Are they real?” he said wonderingly.

  “Well, I am not a jeweller. The captain of the Bonne Aventure assures me they are.”

  “Where did he get them?”

  “He did not say. But I think we may take it they are a recent acquisition or he would not have kept them aboard the brig. They took a barca-longa off Île de Levent, according to the crew, carrying a Jewish family from Genoa fleeing the war. I would think it came from them.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  But Tully only inclined his head. “I doubt we will ever know,” he said.

  Nathan looked at the jewels again. He was having trouble keeping his eyes off them. There were ten of them in all. A blue sapphire set in garnets that might have been worn as a brooch, a pair of emerald earrings, a ruby pendant set in silver filigree and the rest diamonds.

  “They must be worth a fortune,” he said.

  “The captain thought so. He offered me half if I would let him keep the rest.”

  Nathan subjected Tully to serious scrutiny but he did not appear to be speaking in jest.

  “He asked to speak with me alone in his cabin. He had them in his desk—knew we would have found them. ‘A straight division of the spoils,’ he said, ‘and you do not speak of it.’”

  Nathan grinned at him. “I knew you were too honest to make a decent smuggler.” He swept the gems back into their velvet pouch and raised his voice. “Gabriel! Gilbert Gabriel there! We had better get the purser to make a record of this,” he said to Tully, “before I am tempted to offer you the same deal.”

  “I was counting on it,” said Tully. “Oh, but there is something else. There was an Irishman among the crew.”

  Nathan winced. “Hell, Martin, if he has been serving the enemy … You know how much I hate to hang a man. I had much rather you had cut his throat.”

  But Tully was shaking his head. “He says he was pressed into service,” he said. “After being shipwrecked.” He was smiling as he watched Nathan’s face. “On the coast, just west of Monaco—in a brig called the Childe of Hale.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I had him brought aboard. I thought you would wish to speak with him. Young Anson has him in charge.”

  “Ask the purser to come and see me,” Nathan instructed Gabriel who was waiting on him at the door. “And ask Mr. Anson to bring down the seaman that is with him.”

  “Do you wish to speak with
him alone?” Tully enquired tactfully. “No, you might as well stay and hear this,” Nathan told him, “as you know so much already.”

  The seaman’s name was Flynn. Matthew Flynn from Dublin. And a most nervous, garrulous Dubliner he was, too.

  “I swear to God, sor,” he said, “I would never have raised a hand against a man in the King’s Service. You know that, don’t you, sor?” He appealed to Tully. “You seen me knock one of them on the head for you. I knocked one of them on the head for him, sor,” he assured Nathan, “soon as I knew they was King’s men come aboard.”

  “Very well, Flynn. Tell me the truth and it will not go hard for you.”

  “I swear to God, sor, every word is the honest truth.”

  “So what about the Childe of Hale?”

  “Oh, is it that?” He sounded relieved. “Oh, that was my last ship, sor. Wrecked off the coast hereabout. That is when I fell into the hands of the Frenchies, sor.”

  “And you had sailed out of Genoa, had you not? Bound for Leghorn.”

  “We had that, and right into the bitch of a storm, the worst …” He gave Nathan a shrewd look. “But how did you know that, sor?”

  “Never mind how I knew it. What happened to you? Did you run before it?”

  “We did that. And was like to run on Cap Ferrat, so the skipper, he thought to beach her.” He scowled. “I tell you, sor, you could not see a blessed thing for waves and spray. I never seen the like. I thought we was done for.”

  “But you survived.”

  “Yes, sor. God and the Holy …” He recalled that he was among Protestants. “Praise God we did, sor. For he run her close in upon the shore before she went over and we run up along the masts to the shore like rats, we did, and we watched her break up from the shore in the pouring rain, like drownded rats it was.”

  “And the passengers?”

  “Sor?”

  “You had passengers aboard, I believe.”

  “Aye, we did, sor. Two men and two women and two little ones. A boy and a girl they was.”

  “The Grimaldis.”

  “Was that their name? I did not catch it, though I knowed they was Italian.”

  “What happened to them, Flynn? Did they go down with the ship?”

  “Oh no, sor. No. I see what you’re driving at. No, we got them ashore, sor. We would not save ourselves and leave them in the ship at the mercy of the wind and the waves, Christ Jesus, no.”

  “You got them ashore.”

  “Every man jack of them, sor.”

  “And then what?”

  “Sor?”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Well, when the rain eased off a bit, like, the skipper thought as we would try to get along the coast ‘cos we knowed we was not far from the border. Only the devil of it was the French nabbed us as we was trying to slip past the Rock—a cavalry patrol it was—and locked us up in the fort there and that was when they made me take service on the Bonne Aventure, only that they knew I was from Dublin and inclined to think the worse of me for it, but I would never …”

  “And what of the Grimaldis? Were they taken with you?”

  “Oh no, sor. No. I take your meaning. No, they decided to go a different route. Inshore like. The old man, he was not looking so chirpy, do you see, and they said as there was a monastery that would take them in, a few miles up from the coast, run by the Benedictines. They seemed to know it pretty well, from what they was saying to the skipper, that part of the coast and all. I reckon we should have gone with them but the skipper was all for trying to get back over the border, the idyot.”

  Nathan leaned closer to him.

  “Now Flynn,” he said. “I want you to tell me the exact truth and don’t flannel with me. Did you tell the French this?”

  “No, sor, I did not. For whatever else I am, I am no informer. Nor was I ever asked.”

  “So the French never suspected there was anyone else with you?”

  Flynn shook his head.

  “And this was what—about three weeks ago?”

  “Three weeks to the day, sor, I can tell you straight. No, that is a lie. Three weeks and a day it was.”

  “Very well, Flynn. But if I find you have been lying to me you will be for the high jump. In the meantime, as you had no violent objection to serving with the French you can attempt to redeem yourself with King George.” The seaman closed his eyes. “Come, sir, it is better than hanging and I will cut you in for a share of the prize money for the Bonne Aventure as you knocked one of them on the head. I will have you rated ordinary seaman and we will see how you go along.”

  When Nathan went up on deck the weather was much worse and they were standing out from the cape with the brig close behind under shortened sail.

  “I would like to send down the topgallant yards, if you will let me, sir,” said Mr. Perry, “and close reef the topsails.”

  “Very well, Mr. Perry, make it so.”

  He sought out the first lieutenant. “I am going to give Mr. Tully the Bonne Aventure to run up to Voltri,” he told him. “But I would like us to stand off Monaco for a day or so, for I may have business ashore.”

  He saw the look on the lieutenant’s face and turned away to hide his own, but then there was a sudden flash of lightning and a cry from one of the lookouts in the tops, quite obscured by the clap of thunder that followed.

  “Sail ho!” he cried again when the thunder had stopped rolling off the cliffs. “Three points off the starboard bow.”

  Nathan’s head jerked round and he stared in disbelief, as if there could be another vessel so reckless as to venture so close inshore on such a night. And then the lightning flashed again and he saw it, frozen in his mind’s eye like an engraving, bearing down on them about two miles off the Rock of Monaco. And he knew her in an instant.

  For she was the Brutus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Brutus Redux

  AND NOW THE RAIN came: wind and driving rain straight off the mountains with chips of ice in it like splintered bone. Nathan felt them on his cheek as he stood at the weather rail, his feet braced on the steeply canting deck as the Unicorn took the wind on her quarter. It was in his mind to fight for sea room and then he could think of fighting the Brutus but with every flash of lightning he could see her bearing down on them, a white phantom off their weather bow, and closing fast. He looked back to the Bonne Aventure clinging to his stern and heeling hard over as she came round the point, so hard the gunports on her lee side were almost awash. And he froze at the rail as it came to him, heedless for a moment of the biting wind, remembering the last time he had met the razee off Capo Mele in seas far calmer than this. And yes, he thought, it could be done.

  He looked once more to the Brutus, seeing only the white water at her bow and the ghost of a sail, but he could divine her captain’s intention as clearly as if it were his own. He was planning to cross the Unicorn’s stern, cutting between the frigate and the Bonne Aventure, and then he would come up on Nathan’s lee and run alongside him, out into the open sea, savaging him time and again with the weight of that massive broadside. He would go for the Unicorn’s rigging with chain shot and then when she was crippled, pound her with round shot and grape until she struck, or was swept, a dismasted hulk, back onto the rocks of Cap Martin.

  “Mr. Perry!” The master came staggering up the sloping deck to him, holding on to his hat with one hand and his speaking trumpet with the other. Nathan brought his mouth to his ear and raised his voice: “Do you bring us two points into the wind, for I am going to try to pass him on his lee side.”

  The master appeared so much like a gargoyle with his astonished expression and the rain streaming off his hat that Nathan clapped him on the shoulder, grinning. “Go to it, Mr. Perry, and when we have passed him I want you to fall off the wind and come back at him on the same side.”

  Nathan left him to think about this, for indeed it needed thinking about, and sought out Mr. Duncan to tell him what he intended so that he might
pass it on to the rest of the officers and they to the gun crews: he did not want any confusion once they were engaged and could not hear themselves think. Duncan appeared to take it in, when it had been explained to him twice, but Nathan could not help but wish that Tully was still first lieutenant for he would grasp a plan upon the instant and as often as not come up with an improvement.

  They ran out the guns, and Nathan forced himself to wait calmly at the rail with his hands clasped behind his back while every atom of his being urged him to be helping heave them into position—and load and fire them too, for his nature was too impatient for this watching, waiting game.

  A series of flashes rent the night sky like a rippling broadside and he saw the razee again, barely three or four cables lengths off his starboard bow, and so clearly now he could make out the head of Brutus, staring out at him with his white face, open-mouthed, wide-eyed in consternation—just as her captain might appear as he noted the Unicorn’s altered course. But he still had time to fall off the wind. Nathan strained his eyes into the darkness, peering at that white crest at her bow, so close now, so very close. Would he? No. He was coming on, intent on his own plan to cross their stern. And the Unicorn was still coming round, taking the wind on her beam now and heeling hard over—Nathan prayed they did not take another gust—and finally he saw the razee’s bow swing towards him as she saw her danger; but too late, much too late.

  “Fire as you bear, Mr. Duncan!” Nathan roared as he braced himself at the rail. A seemingly endless wait, an unbearable wait, until the first gun fired—and he could have howled with frustration as he saw her bow still coming round, but they passed her so swiftly it was over in a matter of seconds, each gun firing so fast upon its neigh-bour it was impossible to tell them apart and then they were back in the dark, rushing upon the Rock of Monaco.

  “Now, Mr. Perry!” bawled Nathan with all the breath of his being, but the sailing master had the speaking trumpet to his lips and the two helmsmen were heaving hard down upon the wheel, bringing their head out to sea; the hands that were not at the guns heaving at the braces and those that were racing across to the larboard side to heave out the ports. Already they were falling off the wind, further, further; Nathan felt the deck heel hard over as she took it on her larboard quarter. Another flash of lightning, tearing the black shroud of a sky, and he looked for the Brutus but could not see her. He could run if he wished, run for the open sea, but he felt a savage lust for battle, for he knew now that he had been right. The razee had fired back at them but only with the guns on her forecastle and quarterdeck. She was heeling much too far to leeward to fire those big 18-pounders on her main gundeck, or even to open the lower gun-ports. The inherent flaw in the design. And it would do for her yet.