“Saving the Army, is it?” Chalmers gruffly asked with a confused look on his face. “I was only told that a convoy forming here was in need of additional escorts, and my Commodore offered my ship for the task. Frankly, I’d hoped I’d be bound for England, but…”
“You heard that we have two armies in Spain, sir?” Lewrie asked him. “Good. Well, so do the Frogs, and Napoleon himself is over the border with nigh a quarter-million troops. We’ve less than thirty thousand, somewhere round Salamanca, we think, smack in the middle of the Spanish mountains in Midwinter, runnin’ for Vigo or Corunna, we hope, t’get taken off before ‘Boney’ catches up with ’em. We’ve sixteen troop ships, and have t’get ’em North as soon as dammit, or we lose the whole army. London’s sendin’ more, but how soon they arrive is anyone’s guess. And, welcome to Gibraltar, by the way,” he concluded with a cynical grin.
“Egad!” was Chalmers’s drawn-out, stunned comment. “Then, it appears that we must be about it, what?”
“Amen!” Hugh Lewrie whispered, though still looking off to follow Maddalena’s receding figure. To Lewrie’s eyes, the lad didn’t look disappointed in his sire, but … appreciative.
“Let’s get on to the Convent, then,” Lewrie suggested, “and let General Drummond fill you in. There’s little he can do to help, from here, and explainin’ it to you will make him feel better, I’m sure.” He led off but Chalmers paused long enough to send Hugh back to the boat, and back to the ship.
“I hope to dine you and the Commanders off our two other ships aboard this evening, Captain Chalmers,” Lewrie bade, “and I wonder if you might allow my son to come, too. Catch up on old times, and see some of my retinue he knows.”
“It would be grand to see Desmond and Furfy, again,” Hugh said, casting a pleading look at Captain Chalmers.
“Well, somebody has to sit at the bottom of the table and pose the King’s Toast, I suppose,” Chalmers relented.
“Chalky’ll be glad t’see ye, too, Hugh, him and Bisquit. He was a good companion when I was laid up healin’ at Anglesgreen last year,” Lewrie said. “And, you can fill me in on what you’ve heard from Sewallis, and what he means by claimin’ he’s become a champion dancer, hah!”
“I look forward to it, sir,” Hugh said, beaming as he doffed his hat to his Captain and his father, and dashed back to the boat.
* * *
A whole two minutes passed in silence as Lewrie and Chalmers ascended the cobbled street uphill towards army headquarters.
“I am given to understand that your eldest son is also in the Navy, sir?” Chalmers at last enquired. He didn’t sound too pleased.
“He is,” Lewrie had to admit. “He’s spent the last five years aboard two-decker seventy-fours. He’s twenty-one, now, but lacks the last two years before he can stand for his Lieutenancy. His present ship pays off next year, and I hope he’s appointed into a brig-sloop or something below the Rates. I’ve always thought that smaller ships are the best schools for seamanship.”
“How did he…?” Chalmers asked, curious. In proper British families, it was the younger sons who went off to the Army, Navy, or the Church, sparing the heir and guarantor of the continuance of the family line.
“Sewallis found a way round me and his grandfather, and wrote an old friend of mine, gaining his own berth,” Lewrie sketchily explained, leaving out the lad’s forgeries. “He saw us sendin’ Hugh off and wanted his own chance to get vengeance against the French for the murder of his mother during the Peace of Amiens. They were shooting at me, but hit her, instead, the bastards.”
“Ah?” Captain Chalmers commented, sounding as if he found the account a bit too outré. “I do recall a comment your son, Hugh, said once. Tried to murder you? Who, and why?”
“Napoleon’s orders,” Lewrie told him. “Though I still don’t know why or how I rowed him at a levee at the Tuileries Palace in Paris. He fussed about our keepin’ Malta, interferin’ in how he was runnin’ Switzerland, why we hadn’t sent him a proper ambassador yet, and I suspect it was the sword exchange that pissed him in the eye,” Lewrie supposed, explaining how he had swapped half a dozen swords of dead French Captains and officers for the one he’d surrendered to Napoleon the first time he’d met him at Toulon in ’94, when he could not give Napoleon his parole and abandon his surviving crew, some of whom were French Royalists, sure to be executed on the spot.
Captain Chalmers followed all that with many a sniff or gasp, as if the tale was just too fabulous to be believed.
“That night, Caroline and I were warned t’flee Paris if we valued our lives, and made it to Calais before they caught up with us,” Lewrie related, leaving out the juicier parts concerning wigs, and costumes, play-acting, and the aid they’d gotten from a man who’d whetted his skills during the Terror of ’93, and styled himself the Yellow Tansy; Chalmers already sounded dubious enough.
“Whatever it was I did to set him off,” Lewrie concluded with a grin, “I pissed him in the eye once. With any luck at all, do we pluck our army from his clutches and get ’em clean away, we’ll piss him in the eye, again!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
When Lewrie’s little convoy had at last sailed from Gibraltar, its pace was heart-breakingly slow. It took a few days to breast the in-rushing current through the Strait, short-tacking into the stiff Winter winds, then bashing Westward many leagues to round Cape Finisterre and gain enough sea-room to avoid being blown onto a lee shore.
Once safely far out at sea, the struggling ships should have been able to turn North on a beam wind and rush on to Vigo, where information had it that part of the army was being evacuated, but the prevailing Westerlies turned into one howling gale after another, and the seas were steep, forcing all ships, transports and escorts alike, to reduce sail, brailing up to second or third reef lines, striking top-masts, and slowing them even more, and scattering them wide over many miles of sea. Even stout and slow HMS Sapphire, at over 1,100 tons burthen, rolled, pitched, and hobby-horsed like the merest wee gig, pricking every hand’s ears in dread to the great groans and moans of her hull timbers and masts, to the thundrous slamming and jerking each time the bows ploughed into the tall, disturbed waves, flinging icy water high over her beakhead rails and forecastle, and anyone in need of the “seats of ease” for their bowel movements risked being flung right off the ship!
No matter how tautly the deck seams had been tarred, the upper gun-deck berthing dripped cold water on hammocks, blankets, and wildly swaying men who tried to snatch a few hours’ rest from it all. Wood buckets were used for toilets, but no matter how often they were taken to the weather deck, dragged overside to clean them, then hauled back in, the stench became almost unbearable. The sailors who berthed on the lower gun deck might be drier, but their air was even closer, and foetid, to the point that serving watches in the open air, rain and cold and spray, was reckoned refreshing.
Despite tarred tarpaulin over-clothing, everyone’s shirts and trousers got soaked when on deck or aloft tending sail, and there was no way to dry anything out below, or in the great-cabins or the officers’ wardroom, either, and every morning’s sick call featured people with salt-water boils where their salt-crystal laden clothes chafed them raw. Even boiling rations in the swaying, rolling, pitching galley proved extremely risky. Christmas supper was a Banyan Day, with only oatmeal, cheese, hard ship’s bisquit, small beer, and a raisin duff for each mess to liven it.
Lewrie was amazed each raw dawn to see that all sixteen of his transports were still with him, and that Undaunted, Peregrine, and Blaze were still with him, dutifully chivvying stragglers back into their columns and urging the more widely scattered ships to rejoin.