And don't go near the water,' "
Hoare muttered to himself as the gig's awkward, willing oarsmen took him back out to his own command. But now he could try to remedy Royal Duke's hopeless performance as a man-o'-war. To be sure, Hoare admitted to himself, if his cockleshell were to continue being an efficient seagoing office, she could never become a crack cockleshell. And the Admiral's prohibition against taking to the open sea, of course, violated every sailor's fear of being too close to shore. Every piece of land bore teeth. Nevertheless, he could hope she would at least cease being the Fleet's laughingstock.
With this thought, the idea that had eluded Hoare last night came home to roost. There might be a way to bring his own pinnace into play as well, thereby keeping her out of the clutch of Ernest, Duke of Cumberland.
So he could address his crew directly instead of through his Lieutenant, Hoare ordered Joy, the doddering one-eyed boatswain who had so maltreated Alecto, to muster all hands below decks, in their work space. Clay stood at his elbow-in case he faltered, he supposed-and Hoare's two new hands behind him. Hoare had cleared his feeble throat and was about to launch into his prepared speech when Joy stepped forward and forestalled him.
"Permission to speak to the Capting on be-be'alf of yer crew, sir," he said in a trembling voice.
"What is it, then, Joy? Speak up, but be quick about it, for I have much to say to you."
"The Royal Dukes wishes to make their shame an' sorrer known to you, sir. We 'ave left undone those things what we ought to have done, an' we 'ave done those things that we ought not to 'ave done, an' there is no 'ealth in us." Joy's voice was a virtual chant.
Hoare found the man's words oddly familiar. "What on earth are you getting at, Joy?" he asked.
"We're bein' bad-mouthed about the Fleet fer our lack o' seamanship, sir, an' we don't like it, and we ain't goin' to 'ave it," Joy blurted.
"The Dustbins, they're calling us." The voice came from the midst of the gathering.
"That's what I understand," Hoare said. "How do you like it?"
There was a muttering and a shuffling of feet.
"Our David Davies took on three Niobes when they threw gash on 'is uniform," said a Marine. "Showed 'em what our lads can do, 'e did."
"Pipe down, Griffith," Sergeant Leese snapped.
"Well, men-er-and women," Hoare said, "once a ship gets a name, she's stuck with it. She'll never shake it loose, no matter what. What we have to do… is change what people think of us. That will be when we show them that our Dustbin may be small, but she's a fighting man-o'-war of the Royal Navy just the same.
"Now, I'm not going to make a speech to you, because that's not my way. It can't be… As you know, I can't talk very long. What I do want to say is this: if you're willing to put those sharp wits of yours to use at a trade that's new to most of you, and turn Dustbin into a… a name we're all proud to answer to with a laugh and a cheer, we sailormen are willing to show you how.
"In fact, Admiral Hardcastle himself has given us two good, tough, experienced sailormen to back up me and Mr. Clay in whip-sorry, no whips aboard this barky- getting the old Dustbin into fighting shape.
"Bold, Stone… come forward. The scuttlebutt may have reached you that these are the men I had aboard… when we rammed the French schooner-on purpose that time, it was." There was a subdued, rueful chuckle.
"With their help and that of the old hands we already have aboard, Mr. Clay here and I will turn us into a man-o'-war we can all be proud of. We may be small, but we'll be swift, and we'll carry a sting. Are you with us?"
Hoare ended. He stopped to cough, and cough.
There were no cheers but an eerie animal growl that would have been appropriate coming from a hardened crew but which, coming from this strange assemblage of eccentrics, he had not anticipated.
"Then," Hoare said, "the first thing we'll do is warp back in to the pier and back out here again. I don't care how long it takes you, but you'll do it right before we're through if we have to do it all week. But first, Mr. Clay, we'll splice the main brace."
This spirited conclusion aroused a sound that was less a cheer than a general determined snarl.
Chapter IX
"No, Sir," Taylor told her Commander, looking up from her worksheets and taking off her spectacles. She had decoded the paper Hoare had pilfered from his Admiral's desk.
"It's a different cipher, sir, a standard Admiralty cipher. Besides, the others, the ones you gave me before, were in French, if you remember."
She stopped, as if she had now said all that was expected of her. Hoare waited.
"Well?" he whispered at last. "What's the message?"
"I can't say, sir."
"Can't you read it?"
"Of course, sir. I did."
"Well, then?"
"It is not addressed to you, sir, but to Admiral Hardcastle. It deals with Fleet movements. With all respect, sir," she added before Hoare could recover his wits or explode at her, "I respectfully submit that it be returned to the Admiral, unread."
She handed Hoare the paper, fitted her spectacles back over her ears, and returned to the document she had been studying there in the 'tween-decks work space, leaving Hoare to betake himself to his own cabin and seethe over Royal Duke's administration.
What, the Admiralty asked querulously, were these repeated indents for "grain"? Grain was not to be found in the table of authorized supplies, except as a subcategory of gunpowder. He begged leave to inform Their Lordships that the grain was to be categorized as "pigeons, for the maintenance of." He was sure that further correspondence would follow on the matter, as did night the day.
He only regained his temper by persuading himself once more that when he was through with them, he ought, indeed, to have a fighting crew as well as a thinking one, and a ship to match. In fact, the sentry at his door today was no Marine at all but a small, nimble man-Blassingame, the former pickpocket. Sergeant Leese and his entire detachment had been set ashore and marched inland, where they would remain overnight, practicing surprise attacks on suspicious outlying byres. Like the two longboats that cluttered Royal Duke's narrow deck, as many as were carried in a twenty-eight-gun frigate, his Johnnies had never been put to the use for which they had been sent aboard-making unobtrusive raids where they would have the most effect on the French. How, Hoare wondered, did Admiral Abercrombie imagine they would get into raiding position when he had forbidden Royal Duke ever to leave home? He had begun to dream of finding a useful stratagem for blooding them.
At last he had not only reconciled the gunpowder inventory and approved it but also replied to an Admiralty inquiry about the consumption of ink in his command. According to Whitehall, this would have sufficed to supply a flagship. Whitehall informed him that this simply would not do.
When he returned on deck, Hoare could see his own Alecto lying innocently astern, nameless for the moment, and looking like any other Navy-issue pinnace. He rather looked forward to the appearance of some blue-blooded booby of a Cumberland courtier, demanding to know where the yacht was that H. R. H. had commandeered.
"Lost at sea, sir, lost at sea," he would answer. "Totally dismasted."
On the day of decision a fortnight past, Hoare had put Royal Duke's people on watches, as if she were at sea. On deck, two gangs were hard at work, both officially from the watch below. Under Bold's command, one of them was easing one of Royal Duke's two longboats into her chocks. Bold's blue-black face stood out among his pupils' pale, unweathered ones like a cinder in a snowdrift.
"Handsomely, there, handsomely. Belay. You there, Lorimer. What did ye forget when they hoisted ye out of the water?"
A scrawny man, Lorimer could no more have handled an oar or served a gun than he could have taken Royal Duke to sea single-handed, yet at thirty he spurned the role of powder monkey. "A job for women or little boys," Hoare had heard him call it. Bold had noted those two longboats. Given the yacht's shortage of able seamen and oarsmen, he wanted to try a novel way of manning a boat and so had snapped Lorimer up and named him coxswain of the "red," larboard longboat.