"Why, so oi kin, sor!" Hoolahan grinned, ever the cheerful one. "Jus' don't let 'im be loik t' last lot. Barely got the deck clean."
"Just look, don't prose on, boy," Owen groaned.
"Aye, sor. Mebbe cable, cable 'un t'half now, Mister Owen."
Telesto leaned to starboard more as she went up to windward. Gunners removed tompions, spun the elevating screws to compensate for the heel of the ship.
Greased slides whispered as the short, brutal thirty-two-pounder carronades were run out. Iron wheels creaked as the lay of the barrels was corrected. "Oi kin smell 'er now, sor. Gahh, bloody Frog stink!" "As you bear!" a voice shouted. "Fire!"
It crossed Lewrie's mind that this ship had better indeed be La Malouine, and not some parsimonious merchantman that begrudged even a ha'porth of whale-oil for lanterns.
The starboard twelve-pounder chase gun barked as the forecastle ranged even with the strange ship's stern, sending a hellish finger of pink-and-coral flame into the night, fuzee-flashing just how near they were to their target, and how large she bulked. There were not a hundred yards between them! Then the larger, deeper-throated eighteen-pounders spoke, loud as thunderclaps from a lightning bolt's near miss. Shot after shot as each barrel came even with the foe, more pink-and-coral flames, more red-and-amber sparks of half-spent gunpowder. Clouds of foul-smelling smoke wafted downwind, wreathing about the other ship.
"Ready… cock your locks… as you bear… fire!" Lewrie intoned. The forward-most carronade belched with a fiery eructation, whipping backward on its greased slide quick enough to shriek wood on wood, and set the grease smoking. Most satisfying deep bangs of guns going off, followed immediately by the crash of heavy iron hitting timbers, the moaning wail of oak and teak as scantlings were shattered, and the thonk of balls ranging down the entire undefended length of the hull inside their target. Shattering tableware and vases, ripping precious cargo of wallpaper, silks, teas apart in aromatic clouds. Ripping men apart as they hung close-packed as sausages in a butcher's window in their hammocks. Killing men with the air of their passage without making a mark upon them. Breaking at last into savage iron shards among a sleet-storm of broken beams and frames, which in those enclosed spaces below decks would whirl and maim as ruthlessly as irate, razor-tipped sparrows.
"Now, ready the larboard battery!" Lewrie yelled as the last of their carronades had recoiled inward. Ports slammed open, making space for the wide-mouthed barrels to be run out. "Hull the bastards when I give the word, Owen."
"Aye, sir," Owen replied around the stem of his pipe. "Now, gun-captains, lowest elevation, an' wait for the down-roll! Wads atop your ball, rammer-men! Don't dribble the damn things out now!"
The ship creaked ominously as she slewed about. Cargo made dry rustling sounds as crates and bundles shifted slightly against restraining ropes and baffle-boards. The helm was put over so quickly Telesto churned the sea to a green-white froth of phosphor and foam, being over-steered so that she would slow down and not run her jib-boom and sprit into the stern of the enemy. She went wide off the wind as her deck-hands strained to loose sail and haul the yards around to gain speed, no longer working slack with the sea but beginning to oppose its will with her own desire for a faster pace.
Then she was brought back up to the wind a couple of points, to steady on a parallel course to the stranger, to steady her own decks for a surer gun-platform.
"Half a cable!" Lewrie estimated, leaning out one of the ports alongside the cold iron barrel of a carronade. The larboard chase-gun banged, and he ducked back inboard quickly. "Wait for it!"
Eighteen-pounders roared out their challenge, lighting the sea amber and bright red between the two ships, giving him short snatches in which to see the other ship. It was La Malouine! He'd stared at her long enough for seven months to recognize every tar stain!
"Cock your locks… stand by… on the down-roll… together… Fire!"
All four larboard carronades took light as one. There was some spectacular noise that had everyone's ears ringing, a brilliant burst of light worthy of a lightning strike, fading from bright yellow to a dull burgundy, and a wave of burnt powder rushed back in the ports as bitter as rotten eggs. With the wind fine on their larboard quarter once again, most of it blew away past the bows, but enough was blown back onto the lower gun deck to be-fog them and set them all wheezing.
Damme to hell, but I love artillery, Alan exulted silently! The power, the noise, even the stink of 'em! And what they can do.
"Yes, by God!" he crowed, leaning out the port once more. In the after-flash of the last eighteen-pounder, he could see large ragged rents in La Malouine's lower hull, one right on the waterline that sucked and blew spumes of foam as the waves rushed past the hole, the other three higher up in her chain-wale. They'd nailed her 'twixt wind and water, shattering her main-mast's starboard chains, that complicated array of dead-eyes, shroud-tensioners, heavy horizontal timber through which the stays for the lower mast threaded and terminated.
"Reload!"
La Malouine was not as asleep as they had thought. Her side lit up in flashes as well, her twelve-pounder cannon returning fire, but not as organized as the ship-killing broadside they'd just delivered. Here a forward gun, there a piece in her wardroom aft, then two guns from her waist together.
"Musta kept 'alf their hands at Quarters t' fire that quickly, sir," Owen guessed. Usually it took ten minutes for even a Royal Navy vessel to clear decks, load and run out their batteries. "Mighta been plannin' on doin' the same for us this night."
"There's a biter bit, boi God!" Hoolahan whooped.
Then the gun-captains were standing back from priming their carronades, fists in the air while their excess hands tailed on the tackles to haul the guns up to the port-sills once more. The upper deck guns began to howl again, and it was time for another crushing broadside.
Five, six times, they fired-about ten minutes of battle at the hottest pace the crews could sustain for a short time. Slowly, the return fire from La Malouine slacked off. She was not built to take such punishment. She was a merchant ship, with wider-spaced timbers and lighter scantlings of perhaps no more than six inches thickness. Strong enough to protect her in storms, against rocks and shoals, and to stiffen her when she was laden with cargo, but not enough to guard her vitals when heavy iron was flying. Even the toughest oak or teak gives way when hit with eighteen pounds of metal at twelve hundred feet per second at such short range.
Telesto had been built to bear twenty-four-pounders on her lower deck, twelve- or eighteen-pounders on her upper deck, and her sides were ten to twelve inches of seasoned English oak laid over much heavier and thicker framing spaced closer together. She had been laid down for warfare. Some of La Malouine's twelve-pound balls hurt her, even so, but she was built to take much heavier battering and live for hours in the line of battle.
La Malouine had drifted down closer to her, as Captain Ayscough had predicted she would. Perhaps her helmsmen had been scythed away by the quarterdeck twelve-pounders, the two-pounder swivel-guns, and the muskets of Chiswick's sepoys. Perhaps her crew had been so decimated that no one could tend her braces, or be spared from the gun battery to go aloft and loose more sail. Now the range was almost hull-to-hull, and when the carronades erupted, shattered wood came flying in the ports at once, making more hazard for Lewrie's crews than anything that the French had done yet.
"Mister Lewrie!" one of their midshipmen yelled from the after companion-way. "Close your ports, secure your guns, and come on deck for the boarding party, please sir!"