By ten of the second morning, Jester was near enough to Torbay to peek inside, with a long-glass from the top of the mainmast. No sign of Admiral Howe’s fleet, though; the westernmost war anchorage was empty, which meant he was still at sea, somewhere out in the Atlantic. And so, one must suppose, were the French.
With a heavy sigh, Lewrie had been forced to come about south, and make that long board down toward France on the starboard tack; a day wasted, he thought, marching in place up and down, with no progress westward, if he wished to give the Lizard a wide berth.
But, near the start of the First Dog Watch at four p.m., the winds had begun to back southerly again, point at a time, and gain in strength. Near mid-Channel, Lewrie had summoned “All Hands” by five p.m., and brought her back to larboard tack, to make up lost ground. They continued backing, until, by the end of the First Dog at six, Jester was thrashing due west, close-hauled and flying over the wave tops like a tern.
Courses unreefed, tops’ls and royals full and straining, and the ship laid so hard-over on her starboard shoulder—where she’d heel so far and no farther—furrowing a wide bridal train of foam astern. She slashed the seas, the roar and wash of her passing, the irregular watery thudding of easily broken waves, and the hull’s shudders at each foamy, curling lumping was a sailor’s delight! A live, luff-flattening, coat-fluttering wind invaded every open mouth, filled every ear with tumult. It took four hands at the helm: Quartermaster Spenser, his Mate Tucker, and two able seamen trainees. Spoke by wary spoke, to weather or alee, with cries of “Meet her easy now . . .” Grunts of dissatisfaction when she faltered an iota from fast, if they misjudged the infinitesimal variations in wind direction, the press of a curling roller against the windward bow, the slightest swing of the lighted compass needle in the binnacle cabinet. And sighs of ecstasy, the “’At’s th’ way, lads! ’At’s me darlin’!” when Jester rode up and over a roller met with a well-timed spoke to windward, luff maintained, the near-invisible commissioning pendant streaming and crackling at its tip, the lee edges of the main course and main tops’l still barrel-curved, without even a flickering roll of a single cupful of that invigorating wind lost.
And everyone on the quarterdeck rocking and riding on horse-men’s legs, springing at the knee easy, like posting a gaited mount, smiles of pleasure, and wonder, on their faces. Duty-watch sailors, lookouts along the windward side, hooting and “whooing,” ship’s boys giggling those high-pitched, heart-in-your-throat, and heart-swelling shuddery laughs, as if they’d found a “pony” of guineas in their packet on Boxing Day. Off-watch sailors still on deck to savor this fleeting joy. Landsmen and young, first time at sea Marines staggering and reeling, whooping when a wave crest flung cold showers of spray above the bulwarks. Fiddle, fife, and tuning box from the foc’s’le, near the galley and Copper Alley, speeding through a Dublin jig, the cook and his mate beating time on small pots.
“By damn, this is sailing!” Lewrie said aloud with pleasure, his voice lost in all the bustling noises. And Hyde and Spendlove, with the two boys first class in tow and tutelage, learning how to read the marks of a knot log in the dark, crying out, “Eleven knots, sir! Eleven, and a bit!”
There was bad weather in the Bay of Biscay, Lewrie was certain, some blow responsible for this that they’d soon meet, once they made a cautious offing into the Atlantic. It might be tarpaulin weather by noon of the next day. This could not last; night winds always waned a little after sundown—but at least they remained steady.
“Dead calm by morning, Mister Buchanon?”
“’Tis my experience, sir,” Buchanon opined reluctantly, “that a brisk sundown indeed makes for one o’ two things—storm canvas an’ three reefs by midnight, or . . . a spell o’ calm an’ drizzle by dawnin’. ’Twas another red sunset, ya did note, so . . .” He shrugged.
“And which would you put your guinea on, sir?” Lewrie smiled.
“I’d say this’ll blow out in an hour’r two, sir,” Buchanon said with a rueful wince, forced to have an opinion. After a long minute spent gnawing a corner of his lips, and much sniffing and probing at the skies with his nose. “Best we enjoy it, while we can. And f’ the mornin’, well . . . a swing o’ th’ wind back toward west-sou’west. An’ maybe drizzle, Captain. Smelt a hint o’ fresh water on th’ wind, I did. Rain, f’r certain, e’en with a red sunset, but . . .”
Buchanon lay his hands on the quarterdeck rails at the netting, feeling the shudderings, letting them transmit up his arms like some dowser witching for water.
“No counterwaves from a roiled sea?” Lewrie inquired to press him, or coach him. “No gales in the offing?”
“Nossir, didn’t feel any.”
“And no smell of storm rack, either,” Lewrie went on, having done his own inhaling to sample the future. “No fresh-fish reek.”
“Exactly, sir!” Buchanon answered, daring to essay his first tentative smile of agreement. “Grew up in the fisheries outa Blackpool, I did, sir, an’ ’twas promisin’ days we spent mendin’ nets an’ such, when th’ granthers came back in early, not likin’ th’ smells, nor th’ way th’ waves felt on th’ bottom o’ their boats. An’ they were almost always right.”
“So,” Lewrie said, going to the chart at the traverse board. “May we count on being headed, a bit, we stay on larboard tack, all tomorrow. Wind loses its strength, but stays somewhere round sou’west, and we end up standing on west-nor’west for a day more. We miss the Lizard, gettin’ this breeze when we were ’bout mid-Channel. And . . .”
A ruler laid from an educated guess of southing at sundown— west-nor’west—a thumbnail’s crease along its edge, beyond Soundings, out into the wide trackless Atlantic.
“Well south of Land’s End, and the Scillies,” Alan concluded. “Enough sea room to weather them. If.”
“Under th’ horizon, sir.” Buchanon nodded solemnly.
“Damme, Mister Buchanon, but I think we should stand on, ’bout a hundred leagues, at least,” Lewrie told him, returning the ruler to the cabinet drawers. “Too soon a tack south ’cross Biscay, we’ll run into something perverse down there, around the latitude of Nantes or so. A nor’wester that’d force us down toward the Spanish coast near Ferrol, and I don’t wish to be embayed, and have to beat about and waste two days to weather Finisterre. We’ll take all the westing this slant’ll give us, before we alter course.”
“If it holds Cap’um,” Buchanon cautioned automatically, “aye, if it holds.”
“What the hell’s that?” Lewrie snapped, of a sudden, disturbed by a tuneful noise. “You, there! Yes, you, sirs! Stop that noise!”
The first-class boys, gentlemen volunteers, were by the mizzen stays, up on the bulwarks and clinging to the inner face of the ropes, starry-eyed little new-comes, rapt in their first exhilarating beat to windward. Richard Josephs, he was only eight, a slight, cherub-faced minnikin. George Rydell was only a year older, a dark-haired pudding. They both turned to peer at him, eyes wide as frightened kittens, and aghast that they’d done something wrong.
“Which of you was whistling on deck, sirs?” Lewrie demanded of them, hands behind his back and scowling a hellish-black glare.
“Mmm . . . me, sir?” Little Josephs piped back shyly.
“Bosun’s mate!” Lewrie howled. “Pass the word for the bosun’s mate! And get down from there, the both of you. Mister Josephs, no one, ever, whistles ’board-ship, young sir. Never! It brings storm and winds. Dares the sea to get up!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Josephs quailed, folding up on himself like a bloom at sundown, and already weeping. “I didn’t know, and . . .”
“Damn fool,” Mister Buchanon spat. “Pray God, sir . . .”
Half his life in uniform, half his life at sea so far, and Alan, and Buchanon, knew why men should never tempt Neptune with cockiness.
“Aye, sir?” Cony said, knuckling his brow as he arrived on the quarterdeck.
“Josephs was whistling on deck, Mister Cony,” Lewrie explained.
“Aye, sir,” Cony rumbled deep in his chest, all his affability gone in an instant. “Half dozen, sir?”
“Aye, and then explain to both of ’em, so they never make such a cod’s-head’s mistake on my ship again, Mister Cony,” Lewrie ordered. “Mister Hyde, you will see to it that Josephs is restricted to biscuit, cheese, and water, all day tomorrow, to drive this lesson home.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Hyde answered, smug with lore, and distaste for the error. There would be a raisin duff tomorrow at dinner, and that meant a larger portion for both himself and Spendlove.
“You, and Spendlove both,” Lewrie snapped, “you’re senior below in your mess. Kindly instruct these calf-heads more closely in ship lore, and the fleet’s do’s and don’t’s. Their future behavior, well . . . on your bottoms be it.”
“Aye aye, sir!” Midshipman Hyde flushed, and gulped. Josephs’s whiny mewlings rose above the wind-rush; that, and the sound of rope “starter” strokes, a half dozen, applied to his bottom, bent over the bosun’s mate’s knee instead of over a gun, to “kiss the gunner’s daughter.”
Josephs almost yelped like a whipped puppy at the last but one, forcing Cony to stop and shake him by the arm by which he restrained him. “Quiet, lad,” he told him, almost gently. “Nothin’ personal . . . but real seamen don’t cry out. Else it’ll be six more, see? Take the last’un like a man.” And Josephs did, though in utter misery, as if everything in life had just betrayed and abandoned him, which prompted Rydell to purse his lips and inhale.
“Don’t!” Lewrie warned. “Find a new way to express yourself!”
“Oh!” Rydell all but swooned, half knocked off his feet by a further warning nudge from Mr. Hyde. “Oh God, sir . . . !”
“Half dozen d’livered, sir,” Cony announced.
“Thankee, Mister Cony. I trust that’ll be all,” Alan told him sternly; though he could not quite resist a tug at the corner of his mouth, the constriction of one eyelid in a surreptitious wink. Which gesture was answered in kind, as Cony doffed his cocked hat.
From time immemorial, boys had been beaten to make them mind, or learn. Boys at sea, more than most, to drive their lessons home. It was a harsh world at sea, and it was better to be harsh right off, than watch the chubs get themselves maimed or killed, or hazard the ship, through inattention, ignorance, or skylarking. Spare the rod and spoil the child, the Good Book said, after all. And within one hour of reporting aboard his first ship, so long ago, Lewrie’d learned that simple Navy truth. Some days, his entire first year at sea, even as a half-ripe lad of seventeen, they’d been signal days when his own fundament hadn’t felt a captain’s, or a lieutenant’s, wrath.
“You two do come wif me, now,” Cony snarled, putting back on his fearsome bosun’s face. “Th’ more ya cry, th’ less ya’ll piss . . . n’r bleed, later. An’ mind close t’wot I’m goin’ t’tell ya . . .”
A faint, half-felt drumming against the larboard bows as the sloop of war faltered, as she met a wave instead of cocking her bows gently up and over. A hiss of spray and a cream of foam breaking on the catheads and the forrud gangway. And a disappointed sigh from Mister Spenser on the wheel. There was a grouse-wing beat aloft, a soft, suspiring whisper, as the luffs of fore and main square sails shivered a lazy furling down to the leeches. Headed!
“Damn ’at boy,” Buchanon spat as he witnessed the wind’s death.
“Damn’ quick response from old Aeolus.” Lewrie frowned, trying to be philosophical about it. Nothing good lasted forever, after all!
The tiller ropes about the wheel-drum creaked as Spenser and a trainee were forced to ease her off the wind as it faded, as the ship sloughed and sagged to a closer, almost weary companionship to waves and sea. The apparent direction of the wind had veered ahead almost half-a-point, for ships working close to weather made half their own apparent wind, backing the true wind slightly more abaft at speed.
“West-nor’west, half north’z close as she’ll lay, sir,” the quartermaster said, with the frustrated air of a man who’d still won small on his horse that placed, but had lost almost as much on the one he’d backed to win.
“West-nor’west, half north it is, then, Spenser. Full-and-by,” Lewrie agreed, just as frustrated. He leaned into the orb of candlelight from the compass binnacle lanthorn. Both their faces were distinct in the growing gloom, as if separated from their bodies.
Still, Alan supposed, with a petulant grunt; we’ll weather the Scillies, and Land’s End. Few leagues closer inshore, but . . .
“Grand while it lasted, though, was it not, Mister Spenser?” Alan commented easily. “A glorious, dev’lish-fine afternoon’s sail.”
“Oh, aye . . . ’twoz, Cap’um,” the older man replied, his eyes all aglow deep under a longtime sailor’s cat’s feet and gullied wrinkles. With the sound of a gammer’s longing for a long-lost youthful love, he ventured to comment further. “A right rare’un, sir. Damn’ at lad.”
“Another cast of the log, if you please, Mister Hyde,” Lewrie called aft, stepping into the gloom. Eight Bells chimed up forward; the end of the Second Dog, and the start of the Evening Watch. “Mr. Buchanon, you have the watch, I believe, sir?”
“Aye, sir. Send th’ hands below, then?”
“Aye. Nothing more to savor tonight.” Lewrie sighed, moving to the windward bulwarks.
“I’ll call, should . . .” Buchanon began, then wrenched his mouth in a nervous twitch, to keep from speaking aloud a dread that should best remain unspoken. Aeolus, Poseidon, Erasmus, Neptune, Davy Jones . . . by whatever name sailors knew them, the pagan gods of the wild sea and wind had, like e’en the littlest pitchers, exceedingly big ears! And like mischievous and capricious children, could sometimes deliver up from their deeps what sailors said they feared most.
Uncanny, it was, though—whistling on deck usually fetched a surplus of wind, rather than the lack. Gales and storm that blew out canvas, split reefed and “quick-savered” sails from luff to leech in a twinkling, leaving nothing but braces and boltropes. Never a fade, though, never a dying away. Nor one so rapid.
Perhaps tomorrow, Lewrie fretted; comeuppance comes tomorrow!
“Sir, we now log eight and one-quarter knots,” Hyde reported at last, sprinkled with spray and damp from the knot log’s line.
“Thankee, Mister Hyde.” Lewrie nodded, keeping his gaze ahead toward the west. Aye, we had ourselves a rare old thrash to weather, he thought; nigh two hours at ten to eleven knots! That’s at least twenty more sea miles made good, due west, till . . . damn that boy!
At sundown, winds usually faded, replaced by night winds that might not be so stout, but usually remained steady in both vigor and direction. Clear weather winds did, at least.
And pray Jesus, that holds true, he grimaced. Stays like this the rest of the night . . . fade around sunrise, of course, for a bit, but that’s nine hours at eight knots—say another seventy or so to the good. And only half a point to loo’rd of the best course I can hope to make. If the wind didn’t get up, and make us reef in. If we don’t get headed! Comes westerly again tomorrow, we’ll either fall afoul of Ushant down south, or Land’s End or the Scillies up north!
He decided to do his further pondering over charts in his great-cabins, where he could worry and smolder in private.
“Good evening to you, Mister Buchanon,” Alan said, touching the brim of his hat in salute. “I wish you joy of the evening, sir.”
“And a peace . . . ahem! And a good night to you, too, sir.”
Lewrie nodded firmly at Buchanon’s sensible reticence, and his rephrasing, then took himself to the larboard ladder to the gun deck.
Dispatches aboard, too valuable to lose, he mused; Frogs out in fleet strength . . . wind most like to die away to nothin’, head us again . . . or come up by the bloody barge load, and . . .
Damn that boy!
C H A P T E R 4
Surprisingly, the winds did no such thing, the third day upon passage. There was mist, to be sure, ligh
t sunrise winds that slatted sails for a while, but most cooperatively backing to the southwest or south-southwest again. Clouds stayed low and cream-jug pale for most of the day. At the end of the Middle Watch, when the crew was summoned to scrub and sluice, then stand Dawn Quarters, there was a lot of dew, the mists riming everything with damp. Sunrise wasn’t ominously red. The fog and mist dispersed, but never quite disappeared, limiting visibility to a scant four miles around Jester, even from the crosstrees. Noon sights were educated guesses of how high that diffuse, cloud-covered sun ball was, but the consensus of results on the quarterdeck, except for Mister Spendlove’s, which placed them somewhere on the same latitude as Iceland, showed them weathering the Scillies and Land’s End. And dead reckoning, and the record of the knot log, suggested a position beyond the Scillies— almost one hundred nautical miles west of the Lizard since yesterday noon.
And, with the wind backing southerly, Jester could come back to due west again, though only at seven or so knots on a light, tantalizing wind, and stand even farther out into the Atlantic.
And the sea. It was almost calm, mashed flat by a humid, and rather pleasant warmth, glittering and rolling, folding and curling not over three to four feet, more mirrorlike, more oily and without ripples; though the long Atlantic rollers made themselves felt. The ship rose and fell slowly and grandly, lifted, her entire length, by the long period of the scend, instead of hobbyhorsing. When pitch she did, or roll, it was a slow, creaky procedure, quite predictable and almost pleasant for all but the landsmen and new-come Marines, who “cast their accounts to Neptune” over the leeward rails. Faint wake astern, barely a bustle of disturbance down her flanks as water churned sudsy close aboard, and her forefoot cut clean and sure into the round-topped rollers, to part them with hardly any fuss at all.
Uncanny, Lewrie thought warily. Retribution’s coming, sure as Fate. They’re toyin’ with us. Soon, it’ll be roarin’. When we least expect it. Damme, I hate surprises!
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