An Onshore Storm

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Protect your hearing better this time, Captain Bromhead?” Lewrie asked him.

  “Ah, no sir. No time to melt some wax before the guns started up again,” Bromhead replied, tilting his head far over. “Lieutenant Greenleaf said I should press my hands over my ears and keep my mouth open, but it didn’t help all that much.”

  “Let’s pray we didn’t deafen you permanently, then,” Lewrie said with a slight grin. “Join me for some cool tea, ginger beer, or ale?”

  “I’d be delighted, sir,” Bromhead gratefully told him. “I find my mouth is coated with powder smoke. Ehm … we will be looking in at Eufemia Lamezia after this?”

  “Not today, no,” Lewrie said, pulling out his pocket watch. “I think a nice, quiet night out at sea will do for us, stand off-and-on the place ’til dawn, then sail in to look it over tomorrow.”

  “Oh, good!” Bromhead replied. “Time and enough for word of what we did here today to reach the town, and make them shake in their boots at their first sight of us, haw!”

  “Aye, our arrival will, won’t it?” Lewrie said, quite pleased at the prospect. “Though, when word reaches Naples or Reggio di Calabria, I’d imagine it’ll be more anger than fear in their senior officers. In point of fact, our success here might result in some courts-martial for whoever was assigned to guard this place.”

  “Might we relish the thought, sir, that we’ve ruined Marshal Murat’s dinner,” Bromhead teased, “or, when word reaches Paris, we put Bonaparte himself off his feed, hah hah?”

  “Death, confusion, and frustration to the French!” Lewrie said, and had himself a good laugh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  There was a fairly bright moon and a clear, starlit sky the evening after they had destroyed the bridge for good and all, and, as HMS Vigilance stood off-and-on in the Gulf of Saint Eufemia, there was a celebration in the ship’s waist. Sailors and Marines lined the sail-tending gangways to look down upon the revelry. The Marine drummer boy, the flute player, and a skilled fiddler served up lively tunes and jigs, with a contribution from Cox’n Liam Desmond and his uilleann lap pipes. Spry men and ship’s boys stamped round in contre-dances, and contestants took over the midship hatch gratings to vie for which was a champion at hornpipes. Old, favourite songs were belted out, along with the slower laments for home and missing loves, but in the main it was a most cheerful evening from the middle of the Second Dog Watch ’til the 9 P.M. call for all lights to be extinguished belowdecks.

  Younger Midshipmen held their own dances and songs on the forecastle, whilst the ship’s officers looked on from the quarterdeck and the forward edge of the poop, above. There was dignity to be lost if they participated, of course, but at least they could sing along and sway, grin and laugh over the sillier songs, and carefully touch the corners of their eyes when a lament was sung.

  Lt. Dickson crammed himself into the lee corner of the poop deck, hard up against the bulwarks with an arm round one of the thick tarred mizen mast stays, looking down in wonder, and now and again glancing down to see what Captain Lewrie was doing, and thinking some hard and painful thoughts, for the day and now the evening were eye-opening.

  In his previous ships, Third Rate ships of the line, an older three-masted Sloop of War, then a 74-gunned two-decker under his distant kinfolk, he had not seen all that much combat; a shot under the bows of a fleeing merchantman or privateer, followed by a quick surrender, and one passable stand-up fight with a French corvette in the Bay of Biscay that had not lasted quite half an hour before the French captain had struck his colours, his guns fired mostly for the sake of his, and his nation’s, honour.

  Today, though, he had been in a ship that had been fired at, with explosive shells to boot, and none of his gun crews on the lower deck had paid any more attention to danger than they would of a shower of cold, cooked peas. And they served their guns accurately, too, steadily and unceasingly getting off three shots every two minutes, cheering their aim and their results when destroying the French artillery, and whooping with delight to see the make-shift bridge crumble under their weight of metal. And tonight they were singing and dancing in a manner that Dickson had never experienced aboard the other ships he had served. Oh, the recruiting posters always promised “music and dancing nightly” along with oceans of prize-money, but it was a rare thing for that promise to be observed.

  Vigilance was a highly effective warship, and evidently a happy ship, too, with every hand well-trained and proud of their roles, and of their ship, without being driven to it like dumb cattle too ignorant to understand the finer sentiments of patriotism, service, and dedication that only men like himself could understand, or feel.

  The Master at Arms and his Ship’s Corporals finally took up their lanthorns and called for all other lights to be doused at Two Bells of the Evening Watch, raising good-natured complaints among the revellers as the off-watch hands went below to roll into their hammocks for a few hours’ sleep, and the instruments were put aside.

  Dickson had the Middle Watch, Midnight ’til 4 A.M. that evening, so he slowly sauntered down to the quarterdeck to go below to the wardroom for a short rest, himself, listening to the Sailing Master grumble over the last puffs from his pipe before tapping the bowl’s contents overside, and the low banter of his fellow officers.

  “Goodnight, Captain sir,” Dickson dared say to Lewrie.

  “Ah, goodnight to you, Mister Dickson, short though your rest will be,” Lewrie said back, as pleasantly as he bade the others. “I’ll wish t’be wakened at Eight Bells.”

  “Aye, sir,” Dickson replied, touching the front of his bicorne hat in parting salute, and feeling as if he was accepted aboard as a full member of the wardroom, and the crew, with no grudge held against him. So long as he did not muck up.

  * * *

  “Beg pardon, sir,” Midshipman Charles Chenery said as soon as Lewrie stepped out onto the quarterdeck after his breakfast, “the men wish a favour, sir.”

  “And what would that be, Mister Chenery?” Lewrie asked him.

  “Ehm … the crew would like permission for a broom to be lashed to the mainmast truck, in sign of another clean sweep, sir,” Midshipman Chenery said. “So the French in Eufemia Lamezia see it, and know who we are.”

  “And they put you up to the asking?” Lewrie wondered, grinning. “Why not Midshipmen Langdon, Cummings, or Upchurch? They’re the eldest. Even the Bosun, Mister Gore?”

  “I would suppose, ehm, because I am your in-law, sir?” Chenery said, tucking his chin into his shirt collar.

  “Well, no harm in the doing, I suppose,” Lewrie told him. “But, whoever goes all the way to the truck I conjure to do it most carefully. No sense falling to their death, hear me?”

  “Aye, sir!” Chenery answered with a relieved grin.

  “And Mister Chenery,” Lewrie added, stopping him from dashing to the waist, “just because we are in-laws, I’ll not have our people thinking that you can work your way with me for any damnfool request. Make sure they know it.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Ah, good morning, Captain Bromhead,” Lewrie said to the Army officer as he made his way to the quarterdeck by the same ladderway that Chenery took to descend. “Ready to smoak out Eufemia Lamezia? We have worn about to sail in close. There’s a sea chart and a landsman’s map in the chart space we can refer to.”

  “Ready and willing, sir,” Bromhead told him, “though I may wish to borrow a stronger telescope than mine.”

  “Of course, sir,” Lewrie told him, then turned his attention to the base of the mainmast trunk, where a fifteen-year-old topman took up a fresh broom, lashed a few turns of light rope round it, and then bound it to his left arm, as other sailors gathered round to cheer him on. Lewrie felt a shiver in his groin as the young fellow sprang to the top of the windward bulwarks, swung out onto the mainmast stays and rat-lines, and began to climb, as agile as an ape.

  Better you than me, Lewrie thought. In his Midshipman days he had spent half of each watch
he stood aloft in the rigging, making or taking in sail alongside the hands, and he had hated every bloody minute of it! Up to the cat harpings where the sets of shrouds crossed each other, out to hang upside down like a true sailorman from the futtock shrouds where larboard shrouds dead-eyed on the starboard side of the fighting top, a claw up and over the rim, then up the narrower shrouds to the cross-trees, then onward to work on the royals and the t’gallant yards. But, he had never, even for a hefty wager or a challenge, shinned up to the mainmast truck, or even thought of standing upright on the wee button cap, hundreds of feet aloft with nothing to grab on to for support as the ship swayed and the wind gusted!

  “Watch this,” Lewrie told Bromhead, pointing the feat out to him. “And say a prayer?”

  “Whatever is he doing?” Capt. Bromhead gawped. “Oh, my word!”

  The topman made it to the cross-trees, shared a joke with the lookout posted there, then went on up ’til he was wrapped round the mast top, shinning that slim pole, then removing the broom’s lashings from his arm to transfer them to the truck, with the broom straw jutting skyward. Then, with equal agility, he descended to land on the sail-tending gangway to loud whistles, cat-calls, and applause.

  “Mister Acford,” Lewrie bade the nearest Midshipman on the quarterdeck, “do you go find that game fellow’s name and tell him he’s a full measure of rum this morning, no sippers or gulpers.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “He did that for rum, sir?” Bromhead marvelled.

  “For pride of the ship, sir,” Lewrie corrected him.

  * * *

  Once Vigilance closed the coast, though, and cruised only one or two miles offshore of Eufemia Lamezia, the prospects for a raid to burn the backup of supply convoys looked less than desirable.

  For one, what beaches there were appeared too shallow for landings. There were rocks awash fronting the most promising one on the north side of the port’s entrance channel, leaving only two narrow and dubious passes through them and the lively surf to the beaches, which looked little deeper than two barges’ length before they ended in even more rocks, and what looked to be a rather steep scree slope up to the hill behind them.

  On the southern hill which dominated the entrance to the town and its harbour, that enigmatic black square that Lewrie had found on the land map could be a fort.

  “Old, stone-built,” Capt. Bromhead muttered, peering shoreward with a borrowed glass, “walls sure to be thick. An old monastery, or nunnery, perhaps? Might not be a fort. The windows…”

  “Not arrow slits,” Lewrie commented.

  “No, too big for archers or crossbowmen, but just about big enough for light cannon,” Bromhead said, sucking his teeth. “If anyone thought to put troops and guns in there. And the slopes up to it…”

  “Totally un-suitable,” Lewrie decided aloud. “Too steep for men to climb easily, and the beaches below the hill are even worse than the ones to the north. You could land the whole battalion, perhaps, but you’d have to spend all the morning securing that place and the heights, and by then all the convoys would have scampered, and we’d have nothing t’show for it.”

  “And if the French have thought to guard the town with troops, we’d lose a lot of men for that nothing,” Capt. Bromhead agreed with a strong moue of dis-appointment. “And your armed sailors, hah! Why, there’s barely enough room on the southern beaches for them to stand!”

  “Even a cutting-out party using two of our barges to sail in in the wee hours might have a rough go of it,” Lewrie said, collapsing the tubes of his telescope with a finality, and a faint hiss from the air inside. “I doubt there’s anything worth taking in there, some fishing boats and such. We’ve convinced the French that sending supplies by sea is out.”

  “If we wanted to burn road convoys, sir,” Bromhead said, “then it would have to be done from inland, and I doubt if the local partisans are well-armed enough, or determined and organised enough, to do it. A nice suggestion, but…” he said, tossing up his hands with futility.

  “Back to Milazzo, then, and see what else our spies have come up with,” Lewrie agreed. “Mister Grace? Bring the ship onto the wind and shape course for Milazzo.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  At least we can still crow over our “clean sweep” broom, Lewrie thought.

  * * *

  It felt a lot less victorious the next morning when Vigilance came to anchor in the bay off the 94th Regiment’s encampment, for it was drizzling a dull, steady rain from clouds so low and slow-scudding that the usually visible snowcap of Mount Etna was hidden in fog. A grey haze hung over the land, the forests and olive and fruit groves, mingling with the smoke from the Army’s cookfires, turning lush Sicily to the drabness of an Irish coastline.

  As soon as the anchors were set, and the yards squared away to the Bosun’s satisfaction, Lewrie went ashore with Capt. Bromhead to report to Col. Tarrant, and it was a miserable boat ride, for the morning was too warm to wear a boat cloak against the rain, so Lewrie and Bromhead had to suffer a soaking. Once on the make-shift pier, Lewrie looked back at his ship and heaved a sigh, for the upright broom at the masthead looked vain on such a day.

  From long use, there was a path through the grain stubble in the field that had been taken over for the camp, and it was muddy, with a puddle here and there, as if the rain had been heavier overnight.

  “Oh God, no!” Bromhead exclaimed as they neared Col. Tarrant’s headquarters. “No, dog, no! Down! Down, I say!”

  Tarrant’s hound, Dante, was overjoyed to welcome them, bounding at them with his tongue lolling out, and his large paws and forelegs seemingly made of mud. Bromhead’s admonitions did no good, for the hound stood on his hind legs, planted his paws on Bromhead’s fairly immaculate uniform coat, and tried to lick his face.

  “Down!” Bromhead barked loudly, shoving the dog aside. “Damn your eyes! Down!” he roared in a voice that could be heard over the sound of a pitched battle.

  Dante whined, backed off, and looked at Lewrie.

  “Don’t even think of it!” Lewrie growled, pointing a finger.

  The dog galloped off towards the headquarters, barking madly as if to announce their arrival, and after a moment, Col. Tarrant did step out onto his covered front gallery and wave to them.

  “Aha! You two have come in ‘Pudding Time,’ sirs,” Tarrant said as Dante padded circles round his master, tail and hind end wiggling. “Mister Quill came into camp last night, looking for you. Come in, come in, and dry out.”

  “Capital!” Lewrie said at that news. “Let’s hope he’s brought us useful information. Ehm, you don’t have a boot scraper, do you?”

  “I’ve no carpets to worry about, Sir Alan, just plain sawn wood boards,” Tarrant told him with a laugh. “Do come in. Hang up your coats to drain, and we’ll sample a keg of ale just come from England. Mail from home arrived with it, by the way. Yours is at the officers’ mess, Bromhead, and yours, Sir Alan, is aboard Bristol Lass.”

  They entered, though the air was warmer indoors than out, even with all the canvas covers on the windows rolled up. Tarrant’s man, Corporal Carson, was there in a twinkling to take their hats and wet coats for a sponge-down. Col. Tarrant himself fetched three tall mugs from a sideboard and meticulously tapped the keg, leaving everyone a nice one-inch head on their ales.

  “Now, what have you two been up to?” Tarrant asked after taking a deep sip of his ale. “Tell it all to me.”

  He was delighted to hear that the bridge re-construction had been completely scotched for a good, long time, but had to sigh with dis-appointment when Bromhead described Eufemia Lamezia.

  “It’s simply not on the cards, sir,” Bromhead told him. “By the time we’d get our troops atop either of the hills, the supply convoys would have dispersed, and if their escorts combined and stayed to give us a fight, it would be too costly for us.”

  “We up-dated the charts and maps,” Lewrie added, “and we made a few sketches of what the place looks like from
the sea. He’s right, it’s not worth the candle, Colonel.”

  “Well, that’s alright,” Tarrant replied. “It sounded tempting, at first. Mister Quill has gotten word from his agent over there that he’s having trouble keeping the local partisans to do much more than make pin-prick raids, even with their new arms, and if we did land at Eufemia Lamezia, we’d have no help from them. They seem satisfied to ambush foraging parties and mounted messengers, then melt away as if scared by their own daring.”

  “Has Mister Silvester managed to send us copies of the orders and such from those messengers, sir?” Lewrie asked.

  “A few, of little import so far,” Col. Tarrant told him, after another sip of his ale. “Whoever’s in charge of re-building the bridge has boasted of his progress, and his defences, and his superiors are confident that they can use the coast road from Naples soon in the future, hah hah! Well, you put paid to that!”

  “Captain Lewrie said he smelled a courts-martial for that fellow,” Bromhead said with a wee laugh. “And, now that we’ve scouted out the approaches to Eufemia Lamezia, the French might have to think it’s at risk, and waste troops to garrison the place. Fewer troops available for other places we might attack. Or, troops for convoy escorts.”

  “Good thinking, Bromhead, yes,” Tarrant said in praise of the idea.

  “What has the regiment been doing in my absence, may I dare ask, sir?” Bromhead said, shifting in his chair to cross his legs.

  “Besides the usual close-order drill?” Tarrant answered with a grin on his face. “Why, we held a little route march. Just got back last night before the rain set in. About fifteen miles east near the beaches we practiced on, went into camp, dossing down rough overnight, then marched back here the next morning. Hah! Our poor sutlers and vendors! You never saw the like!”