"What an effort they put into this place," Lieutenant Clement Braxton commented, with a whispery whistle of awe. "Marshes… seepy springs, I've read, everywhere one looks. And no low tides to give them time to dig or lay foundations. It's an engineering masterpiece."
"Aye, Mister Braxton, yer correct, sir," Dimmock agreed heartily. "Can't wait to get ashore an' look it over, myself. East side of the basin, they keep the lesser ships o' war, frigates and such. Shipyard and launchways, graving docks. And there's a drydock that'd rock you back on your heels, too. Brute of a thing. Think of how they managed to build that, sir! Seal it, and pump out with convict labour, I think. Aye, sir… Toulon mayn't be the world's best harbour t'lie in, but… it's the world's most fortified, and most impressive built! Well, end of yer geography lesson, lads. Back to your stations. We're sure to come to anchor before the hour's out."
"From the sea and the land," Lewrie commented, coming to join them as the midshipmen scattered. "Hellish fortified."
"Better for us, when it comes to holding it, sir," Captain O'Neal agreed.
"Nine fath'm! Nine fath'm t'this line!" a leadsman called from the larboard foremast chains. Cockerel drew three fathoms, when deep laden.
"Steady as she goes, quartermaster." "Aye, aye, sir, steady'z she goes."
A weak sun shone that day, for a wonder, as if in celebration of their bloodless victory. Quite unlike the weather of their short blockade, which had shipped green seas, and gale-force winds at times, scattering the squadrons and straining their masts nigh to snapping. Watery, wan sunlight reflected from the charcoal blue sea of the Great Road, wave-motes of light dancing on the sides of the massive warships, and dun sails and dull colours were stage-lit to an artist's whiteness or sheening brilliance, as if posed for a commemorative oil.
During those rare moments of clear weather, Southern France had appeared rather attractive, Lewrie'd thought; much like Naples, though, in rockiness and semi-sere harshness. Whenever they'd gone close inshore, he'd espied hamlets and fishing villages that seemed cheerful enough. And, on the slopes of Southern France, there was a softer and lusher palette of greens than Naples could ever boast, more verdantly bright, less dusty and muted. From high summer, thatchy tan to spring-shoot green, the grasslands, vineyards and forests, olive groves and pastures seemed to roll and tumble as they were brushed by some bright scudding clouds' shadows.
Apart from Toulon, where sunlight dappled and sparkled, and the clouds scudded, the headlands and hills appeared to glow gold and umber, the tiled terra-cotta roofs were lit flamine red, and the very least cottages of Var and Provence were exotically lambent.
But not Toulon.
Around Toulon there seemed a pall, an ominous trick of lighting, as if the capes, the headlands, the bays and massive hills-mountains really, Lewrie decided-were shrouded by a funereal gloom, as if some storm clouds must hang perpetual. As if, for some malevolent reason, her harsh greyness of stark granite forts was forever deprived of any warmth, or hope, of Mediterranean sunshine. Pent from the lushness of her hinterland by grimly looming, bare and lifeless mountain masses, and begirt with the sinews and engines of warfare.
With the ship well in hand in a deep-water fairway, Lewrie took time to peer at the chart Mister Dimmock had left tacked to the traverse board, looking past his usual sailor's concerns of depths, bearings and seamarks, to the hills beyond.
Toulon was girded by a host of lofty fortresses and redoubts: St. Antoine, St. Catherine, Artigues, Pharon, La Garde and La Vallette, and a myriad of lesser forts, redans, batteries and strongpoints which guarded the forbidding mountains, the narrow valleys between, and the passes and gorges. The terrain was fairly open to the east, sprinkled with villages and chateaux, gently rolling and benign along the Plaine de la Garde divided by a narrow ridge that ran west-to-nor'east above the road to Hieres, before the mountains shouldered into the coast, above Forts St. Catherine and La Malgue.
On the western approaches, from the pass at Ollioules through which the Marseilles road debouched, was a harsher coastal plain, this one puckered, pimpled and stippled with many mountain spurs, crab-like hills and rugged prominences, and the roads wound snake-like to conform to them.
Fifteen miles, he marched off with a pair of brass dividers on the chart; fifteen miles of perimeter and approaches which had to be garrisoned and guarded, manned with troops and guns, if the coalition was to hold Toulon.
Say Naples sends their promised 6,000, like the treaty said, he speculated-though what little he'd seen of Neapolitan troops, and that with an untrained sailor's eye, hadn't impressed him that much. And were their Military Commissariat anything like what Mister Husie had reported after visiting their naval supply establishment, then it was perhaps a cut above a barking shambles. But not by much.
Sardinia, they're down for 50,000 men-say we get a tenth of that army we're paying good golden guineas for. Spain, of course…?
Why of course! he snickered to himself, still amazed that they were now firm allies. Correction-just "allies." Just this morning, the Spanish fleet had come up over the horizon at last, like a Jack-in-the-Box, rushing in untidy order to enter harbour at the same time as the Royal Navy. Troops aboard, he wondered? Sure to be. Have to be!
Spain had a huge army, but a narrow, rugged border with France along the daunting Pyrenees. Poor and downtrodden as their peasants were, as arrogant and stiff-necked-as benighted!-as their top-lofty aristocracy was, it was in Spain's best interests to send a big contingent quickly, to stamp the French Revolutionaries into the floor like cockroaches, before any of that "Rights of Man" egalitarian bumf caught on in Spain itself. He thought 10,000 men would be a safe wager. And English regiments, that went without saying. There were men at Gibraltar, and with Spain allied, there'd be no reason to keep them there, no worry about a siege such as the one his father'd gone through when he'd won his knighthood, in the last war but one. Troops out from home, too, if Lords Dundas and Grenville had been scheming this one up as long as Sir William Hamilton had alluded. Bags of 'em!
Austria? Well, maybe too busy on France's eastern borders, Alan decided; they and the Prussians would mass to walk into France along the traditional routes, but part of the Austrian Empire was in northern Italy, so surely… another 6,000 or so, cutting west from Genoa or Leghorn? Or get us to escort transports from there, and bring 'em direct. And quick, he decided. It'll have to be quick, or… soon as they get word from us!
That brightened his prospects for a moment. Despatches would go home, to all the allies. To Naples, for certain. Cockerel might sail on the next morning. He could go ashore again, visit Emma Hamilton one more time. Emulate some of those erotic Etruscan fragments they'd seen in their gallery of choice, the ones with the cavorting…
Well, maybe that's not a good idea, he sighed, leaving the chart: wondering again where his conscience was hiding, or if he, in truth, had one. Once was enough… took the edge off. Every six months'r so…?
His brief enthusiasm left him, and he shivered inexplicably to a brisk African wind on his left shoulder that gave no warmth.
Hellish gloomy damn' place, he concluded.
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," he muttered.
"Sir?" the senior helmsman inquired, shifting his quid to another cheek.
"Nothing," Lewrie granted. "Steady as she goes."