“A growin’ lad needs his tucker,” Lewrie commented, watching the fellow eat part of his own supper and empty half the fresh-baked rolls in the bread barge.
“Ehm… you aren’t come from Mister Twigg with another of his harum-scarums, are you?” The fingers of his left hand were crossed to ward off that very occurrence, under the tablecloth.
“No, the old fellow’s done with spy-craft, and we’re the worse off for it, but… it comes to us all, sooner or later,” Peel said.
“Fading, is he?” Lewrie replied. “I recall my father mentioning he’d had a bad Winter, but when that was…?” He shrugged.
“Had several bad Winters,” Peel said between bites of pork chops. “His physicians finally told him to avoid London and its air like the plague, and Winter at his country estate in Hampstead. Oh, he’ll come down to London in the Spring, when the coal smoke’s not as heavy, but for the most part, he’s up at ‘Spyglass Bungalow’ spoiling his grand-children something sinful.”
“Thank God,” Lewrie commented, letting out a pent breath and un-crossing his fingers. “If he had wished to rope me in, I’m spoken for anyway. Something just as lunatick as any Twigg dreamt up.”
“You mean your cask torpedoes?” Peel asked with a sly smirk.
“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, and besides…” Lewrie tried to wave off; with a fork full of mashed potatoes, in fact.
“Lewrie… recall! I’m Secret Branch?” Peel japed. “We know all about them, and I wish you the best of good fortune with them.”
“You’re here to check up on them?” Lewrie asked.
“God, no, not me!” Peel said, laughing. “That would be some anxious Admiralty sort, and he won’t pester you ’til you’ve had at least a few trials. No… I was making the rounds with Admiral Cornwallis of Channel Fleet, Admiral Lord Keith’s squadrons in The Downs, and one or two others, regarding the estimated numbers, types, and strengths of the invasion fleet Bonaparte’s building. Uhm, might I get a top-up of this excellent… whatever it is?”
“A single-chateau bordeaux, sir,” Pettus informed him as he did the duty. “The Captain brought several back from the Gironde.”
“You’ve numbers?” Lewrie asked. When he’d called upon the Admiralty in London, they’d given him the descriptions and some sketches of what they thought the various French invasion vessels looked like… but no idea of how they were armed, or how many he would face.
Peel gave him a cock-browed look, and a head-jerk at Pettus.
“Pettus… one of those ‘take the air on deck’ moments,” Lewrie told his cabin steward. “And take Jessop with you for a bit.”
“You are aware of the types?” Peel asked in a low voice once he was sure they were alone.
“There’s guilots, to transport horses and artillery batteries,” Lewrie ticked off on his fingers, “there’s some three-masted hundred-footer gunboats, what they call prames…”
“With twelve twenty-four-pounders,” Peel stuck in. “Though they build them so quickly, and of such light materials, that prames can’t stand against a frigate. Go on,” Peel urged with a sage nod.
“They showed me brig-rigged chaloupes,” Lewrie said, waiting.
“Three twenty-four-pounders and an eight-inch mortar,” Peel said.
“I’m told there are some lesser gunboats, two- or three-masted luggers, even cutter-rigged small ones?” Lewrie asked, pausing again for information.
“Might face only one twenty-four-pounder and an army field piece in the smallest Dutch-built ones, perhaps some older naval guns of lesser calibres in the French-built,” Peel enlightened him. He was picking his teeth as he did so.
“Then there’s all those damned penishes and caiques, all of ’em luggers, to carry troops and supplies,” Lewrie continued. “Admiralty said there were hundreds of ’em.”
“About seven hundred gunboats and escorts of various types, and their plans are for over two thousand transports,” Peel told him with a grave look. “I’m told, though, that both Admiral Cornwallis and Admiral Lord Keith estimate that it would take two or three tides to get all of them to England, and with Channel Fleet, our North Sea Fleet, and The Downs combined against them, given enough warning when they at last decide to try it on, we could massacre them. The French just don’t have that many experienced sailors, and most of their guns will be manned by soldiers with little knowledge of naval gunnery.”
“ ’Less it’s a dead-flat calm, when they come, their artillerists will find floatin’, bobbin’, and wallowin’ boats just won’t sit still as solid ground, where they learned their trade, aye,” Lewrie determined, almost ready to whoop with glee, and a wish that the French would try. “And, they can’t send ’em out to the slaughter without the support of their Navy, and we have their proper warships bottled up in Brest and Rochefort, or in The Texel in Holland.”
“They might get out, yes… but I doubt they will enjoy it!” Peel said with a snicker, topping up his own wine from the side-board. “After all, the Frogs must man those squadrons’ guns and retain enough sailors to handle the ships… and reserve even more skilled artillery men for the harbour and coastal batteries that ‘Boney’ has had erected all along the Channel coast, to boot. Is God just, the French may plan to have their infantry aboard the gunboats work their own guns to defend themselves! Perhaps they work to a tight budget?”
“Two for the price of one?” Lewrie snickered back, reaching to refill his glass, too.
“There is another matter, though,” Peel admitted at last; Lewrie became wary in an eyeblink, for this was the way that Mr. Twigg had begun to introduce his previous schemes. “There are, according to one of our… sources in Paris… several hundred more invasion craft to figure with.”
“You’ve still agents in Paris?” Lewrie asked, stunned.
“One or two,” Mr. Peel confessed most slyly. “Once the war began last May, Bonaparte clapped a total embargo on correspondence going in or coming out of France… almost every book, newspaper, or letter’s read… but we’ve managed. We have our ways, after all. So far, we only have vague descriptions, no sketches, of this other type of craft, but everyone would dearly love to lay hands on one. You’ll be working along the French coast? Good. Do you ever come across what looks like a water-beetle with sails, you snap it right up.”
“A water-beetle,” Lewrie said with a dubious frown.
“There’s a M’sieur Forfait, been made inspector-general of the invasion fleet. One of Bonaparte’s pet mathematicians and scientists? Forfait earned his spurs designing and building shallow draught barges and such for use on the Seine. Some people in London think the entire idea’s as daft as bats, but… he is a skilled mathematician, so we can’t dismiss his work out-of-hand.”
Mister MacTavish is a skilled engineer, too, and look what he’s come up with! Lewrie sourly thought.
“There are two types described,” Peel went on, leaning closer. “One’s about thirty-six feet by fourteen or fifteen feet, and will only draw about three feet of water. The second’s about fourty-six feet in length and sixteen or eighteen feet in breadth. That one is said to draw a little less than four feet of water, when fully laden. Eighty or an hundred soldiers aboard… a twenty-four-pounder gun mounted in the bows, and, from the description may resemble two serving platters joined together, the top one inverted, and very flat-bottomed. There are slanted berths for the soldiers in the rims of the lower platter, and they’re supposed to be rigged like a Schweling fishing boat… whatever the Devil that’s supposed to look like. Any clue?”