Enemies at Every Turn Read online

  As this was carried out, the way came off the ship and he fixed the fellow standing in his telescope, which turned the distant figure into a close-up face and an outstretched arm, wearing a perplexed expression in his now stationary boat.

  ‘Pick the bones out of that,’ he said to himself as he heard the anchor splash into the water.

  The cutter immediately swung on the tide, which was rising, stern to the shore, but the hands were not waiting for it to settle; the required cable, wrapped around the windlass, was being fed out of the stern hawse hole, to be run along the deck, and Dorling had put a party ready to bend it onto the anchor cable.

  ‘Rackham did not know what he had, Michael.’

  Pearce said this as the keys were returned and he watched those he now commanded working with a will, cooperating in a way that spoke of long sea-time, mutual trust, as well as faith in the man telling them what to do – a belief he was not sure he shared.

  ‘He never stopped to find out, the heathen.’

  Looking back to the enemy boats, he saw that their oars were working again and intensely, which led Pearce to suspect whoever was in command had worked out what he was up to. They had also split up, which he had anticipated, two heading inshore to come onto his stern, the others aiming for the prow. Right now he had to let them be, every man aboard was occupied, but having cleared for action prior to entering the bay, his guns were ready to be loaded and fired in half a minute, if that.

  ‘Anyone able to fire a musket to me!’ he shouted as soon as the work began to slack off. ‘The rest on the capstan or man your guns as directed. I want them loaded and ready to fire on both sides.’

  Two fellows came to him, knuckling their foreheads, an act he had to stop himself from barking at, for he was not one to revel in unnecessary courtesies. He led them into his cabin, where the musket rack was open, the chain that ran through the trigger guards hanging loose, half a dozen weapons with the short-sea-service barrels that rendered them near to useless at any range over fifty yards.

  ‘Load and prime them all, take them out on deck and lay them where they will not kill or maim one of our own. Also, take the means to reload.’

  Opening his desk, Pearce pulled out his own pistol, powder horn and cartouche of balls, while through the deck came the rumbling sound of guns being run in for loading, then run out for firing. Once the muskets were loaded, his pistol also, he led the musketeers back on deck, calling to the fellow who had been conning the ship to leave the wheel and make himself useful elsewhere.

  Then, with a glance over the side that told him how little time he had, he looked along the deck to the men crouched beside their guns, with the captains peering through the ports at angles which indicated they would struggle to hit anything.

  ‘Mr Dorling, stand over the hatch if you will and relay my commands. Jack, to me as a messenger.’

  Pearce could feel the tension in the whole crew but it was not something to bring on concern, for it seemed caused more by eagerness than any hint of trepidation; these fellows were game for this and that in turn lifted his own spirits. He would not escape without damage, they might even see men dead and wounded, him included, from flying bits of wood or rigging as much as from a cannonball, but it was not going to be what those Frenchmen had anticipated: a one-way contest.

  ‘Stern first, I reckon,’ he said to Jack, before he called to his musketeers to head to that station. ‘Heads below the bulwarks and do not open fire until the cannon in those boats have done their business, but once they have discharged their ball I want you to make it as hard as you can for them to reload, and don’t worry too much about aim. A ball flying past an ear will do as much to disturb their efforts as an actual wound.’

  The command went out and those on the windlass began to haul, bringing the stern of the ship round so that it lay square on to the making tide, this as the first of the armed boats fired. The thud as the ball rammed into the planking was replicated by a shudder that ran right through the ship, accompanied by the sound of smashing wood, but luckily, if there were splinters they stayed below the level of the bulwarks.

  Slowly, as the stern came round, a second ball struck home, this aimed higher and taking out a great chunk of timber, most of which flew too high to do damage, but not all, and one sliver, shaped like a yard-long sword blade, shot across the deck slicing through ropes, but thankfully missing flesh.

  ‘Muskets, now!’

  The popping sound of them firing, half a dozen quick rounds, frustrated Pearce slightly; he would have preferred the shots to be more spaced, but there was nothing he could do but order a reload and a move to the bows, and that would take time. The bringing round of the stern was so slow as to feel dreamlike and it was taking place while the boats that had headed for his prow were free to inflict damage.

  ‘Keep your heads down, lads,’ he shouted, feeling very vulnerable, that being something his position obligated him not to do.

  It was odd the way the two balls swished past in the air, low certainly but hitting neither side nor upper works. Then Pearce realised the sods were aiming to part his anchor cable or cut the spring and if that happened he would be in real trouble; clearly his opponent was no fool.

  ‘Fire as soon as you bear,’ he called, knowing there was no time for fancy gunnery, ‘then man the guns to starboard at the double.’

  Moving to look over the side, he watched as each cannon fired in turn, as interested in the effect on men struggling to load their own weapon as in the water that was churned up around them, turning from blue to spouts of white, at which point Pearce reckoned he had erred, given the range. Also the Frenchmen were rowing, not reloading, to get away from a broadside and back to attacking prow and stern.

  ‘Jack, below to Mr Kempshall the gunner and say I want the cannon loaded with grape. And while you’re below see if the second twin needs to report any damage to the hull.’

  The starboard salvo, with more time to aim, was a deadlier effort by far, one of the boats, too slow despite its best efforts, disintegrating as a ball hit the side and split open the strakes like matchwood. With the weight of the gun, what remained went down like a stone, leaving flaying in the water men who could not swim by the look of their struggles and it was also the case that their comrades, busy reloading, were ignoring their cries for help.

  The other boats had got out of his arc of fire and were safe to prepare a second salvo from their cannon, except for the odd musket ball. Pearce waited till his own cannon were reloaded, then called to his young master.

  ‘Mr Dorling, first I want that cable to be let fly below, and secondly the cannon to fire on my command.’

  They were not anticipating such a manoeuvre and were working their oars in those boats to hold their positions while getting the muzzles lined up to do real damage. Pearce could see them jacking up the weapons to fire low and knew the intent was to hull and seek to sink him, but they had failed to see that the tide, originally making slowly, had increased its rate of flow, perhaps something to do with the nature of the shallows, he did not know.

  What he did was what decided the action; on his command the cable was let fly, and with the spring suddenly released HMS Larcher spun much more quickly back to its original position with the prow facing out to sea. The men in the gunboats had too little time to avoid what was coming, even if the Frenchman in charge saw the danger and had his men hauling hard on their sticks.

  ‘Fire!’

  The two boats to starboard were swept with grapeshot in such quantity and at such a range that nothing could have survived it unscathed, and no one did. They got the third enemy with a rolling broadside as it was pulling furiously away, leaving three boats floating uselessly in the water, full of men who were either dead or dying, the oars as useless as they and their craft now drifting inshore.

  ‘Man the boats. Let us see if any of those poor fellows have survived.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There had been no comfortable sojourn for Toby Burn
s in or laying off Bastia, no time to relax after the travails of investiture and capture; the news of the failure of Sir William Hotham to keep the French bottled up in Toulon had Lord Hood weighing immediately to join his second in command’s squadron so they could face the enemy with enough force to crush them. Whoever commanded the French fleet was neither fool nor martyr – as soon as his screen of frigates alerted him to the presence of a superior foe, he retired to safety.

  With Nelson gone off to Gibraltar to refit, Toby was thankfully back aboard HMS Britannia, even if it was a far from happy vessel, given the dressing-down its flag officer had received from the C.-in-C. and the way Hotham’s mood seemed to permeate the ship to the point where even the planking groaned.

  Hood had berated him in a voice so loud that his words had been heard on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory and naturally the insults had been relayed with glee to the men in Hotham’s barge, who in turn had passed them on to their shipmates.

  Thus Sir William, who knew very well that what had happened in Hood’s great cabin was no secret, had been taken back to his own ship by a crew of bargemen who made little effort to hide their knowing smirks, for he was not loved. From then on, for the next few days, every excursion he made on to the deck led to a change of attitude, a sudden silence so palpable it could only be occasioned by his presence.

  The sight of a sloop, with a flag aloft telling the fleet it was carrying despatches, lifted the mood, for that meant letters from home as well as official correspondence. Even Hotham felt relieved by that; in amongst whatever mail there was would be the replies from his political supporters to his views of the way Hood was conducting operations.

  There was even a faint hope in his breast that they had managed to contrive at the old sod’s removal and his own elevation to command, so his barge was despatched to collect Britannia’s mail, rather than waiting for a boat from Victory to effect delivery.

  Such a response did not go unremarked upon in Hood’s own cabin; indeed, the air was blue with insults and not all of them directed at Hotham. The admiral was reading his own despatches from both the Admiralty and Downing Street without anything in the way of joy. It took care to discern praise between the lines of such official documents but it should be visible, and there was no evidence in them that his masters entirely approved of his actions.

  Hotham was made much happier by his own private letters; matters were moving in his direction – Hood was not popular even amongst the ranks of his Tory confrères, for he had been intemperate in his demands and too brusque in his remarks to men like Dundas who found it easy to see an insult in any suggestion they were lax in the country’s interests. While removal was, as yet, out of the question for Hood, the mood was encouraging.

  The person least pleased with the contents of the mail sack was Toby Burns, though he was surprised to receive three packets. There was a letter from home which was the first to be opened, from his mother, wishing him well but wondering why he had not written to relate how he was faring to a family that worried for his well-being – obviously his own letter home had yet to arrive.

  The next he opened with some trepidation, coming as it did from his Aunt Emily; he had some notion of what it might contain even before it was read, and in this he was not wrong. It was nothing less than a demand he tell the truth about both her husband and his own part in covering up his crimes. There was some guff about his eternal soul, as if God would care, a tone that grated so much he threw it unfinished to one side.

  It was thus in a state of some annoyance that he opened the third letter from some legal fellow called Lucknor with a faint hope that it might contain news of a surprise bequest. When he read what it said it went near to stopping his heart, for, careful as it was in its legalese language, it was nothing less than a copy of that which he had just discarded, with one word striking home like that musket ball that had grazed his arm and that was ‘perjury’.

  He had to peruse it several times to make sense of the fact that this Lucknor fellow, a Grey’s Inn lawyer, was not actually accusing anyone of that crime, he was only hinting that such an offence might well have been committed out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to a relative. This unfortunately did not militate against the transgression of the law, which came down severely on those who committed such an offence.

  For a youngster lacking a quick brain, who had not shone at his school – his number work had been slow and his Latin and Greek close to dire – to extract a complete understanding of what was being said took time, and it was only much later, when he was on duty as midshipman of the watch, standing by the binnacle with only the light of that illuminating the quarterdeck and nothing happening but the odd toll of the ship’s bell, that the full import of what Lucknor had alluded to struck home.

  A court case was being prepared, but by whom? His Aunt Emily came first to mind, but that he dismissed after short consideration, which left only one person who might initiate such a charge: John Pearce. That was a name and a person Toby Burns had come to hate ever since he had first clapped eyes on the bugger. How pleasant it would have been to strike him that first day of sighting, as Ralph Barclay had done, and why, when they were both cast ashore in Brittany, had the sod not drowned, but survived to become his bane?

  ‘Mr Burns,’ growled the officer of the watch, ‘I have asked you twice to mark our change of course on the slate.’

  God in heaven, the youngster thought, I was so lost in fear I did not even register that we had worn ship. Always quick to blame others for his failings, that was another mark and curse he put against the name of John Pearce, though thinking on that produced no notion of what to do about the lawyer’s letter.

  The man being cursed had just come back aboard a lantern-lit HMS Larcher with his party of armed seamen, having scoured Noirmoutier from the tip to the flooded causeway linking it to the mainland to ensure he could not be surprised again. Happily, the men who had manned those boats, only four of whom had any prospect of survival, constituted the sole evidence of French force on the island.

  They were now being cared for aboard his ship, having been questioned, while his interrogation of the inhabitants, exclusively fisherfolk, had assured him that the chances of any warship coming by, outside of one seeking shelter from a storm, were remote. The island lay between the main French Atlantic ports and was pretty barren, barely anywhere significantly above sea level and continually swept by westerly gales.

  They had come across a deserted chateau, a high, square and turreted building with an outward defensive wall. It had once housed a local aristocratic landowning family, but they had fled, as had the priest from the abandoned church nearby. There was also, on the northern shore, a redoubt with cannon to cover the approaches to the anchorage, although it contained neither men to man it nor powder and shot to work the cannon.

  ‘You will have the ship as from first light, Mr Dorling, for I will be going ashore.’

  They were, by the very nature of their location, dining on fish, which Michael, showing a skill Pearce had not known he possessed, had poached in an infusion of herbs he had picked while they traversed the island, the whole wrapped in seaweed to keep it moist. The wine which they drank with it was chilled from immersion in the sea, though even that did little to elevate it, Rackham, the purchaser, being no connoisseur in that department.

  ‘It is as well you know the nature of my assignment, too, for you will be the sole judge of what to do should anything untoward occur.’

  With a round kind of face not much given to being expressive, it was hard to tell if such a responsibility worried Dorling, but Pearce had to take into consideration that a man of his calling was not accustomed to dining with his commander and might thus be full of caution merely for his manners.

  ‘You will need to keep a sharp eye out for any threat to seaward and have the anchor hove short at all times for a rapid exit.’

  ‘It would be best, sir,’ Dorling said, after a thoughtful pause and a mouthful of cod, ‘to put a pi
cket with a boat at that redoubt you mentioned to keep a lookout for ships in the offing.’

  ‘A splendid notion,’ Pearce replied, wondering why he had not thought of that, but he was quick to add his own idea. ‘Get the gunner to make up a charge for one of those cannon, with powder and slow match to set it off, to be used if the danger is pressing.’

  ‘If the wind turns foul, Your Honour?’ Dorling asked, his round face full of doubt.

  ‘You have all the power which I am commissioned to exercise and that includes the authority to surrender the ship should there be no choice. Do not, for the sake of pride or my reputation, risk the welfare of the crew in an impossible fight.’

  ‘I am not sure Captain Rackham would have said likewise, Your Honour.’

  ‘He is not here, I am! Now I suggest I need a good night’s sleep, so I will leave you to organise the watch.’

  And sleep he did, not that Pearce had untroubled slumbers; it was unlikely to be the fish, maybe too much indifferent and sour wine, but he had frantic dreams in which he was being pursued through the streets of London by a gang of faceless men intent on doing him harm.

  Codge had not rushed to put the screws on Denby Carruthers; why bother when he had his man dangling on the end of a rope? He had waited and let the alderman sweat for over near a fortnight, knowing that to do so would increase the price he intended to extract for his silence. There had been no more messengers, no contact at all, until the time had come to press and then he just called unannounced.

  Expecting his man to dread his presence, Codge was surprised at the lack of apprehension – Carruthers was brisk to the point of being brusque, so all the words Codge had replayed time over time in his mind were never given an airing, for he was unable to comprehend the way his mark perceived the problem he represented.

  He was dealing with a man of business who faced investment choices every day and was accustomed to dealing with them swiftly, knowing that with trade there was always a gamble, as likely to lead to loss as profit, success coming from a higher incidence of the latter. He was also a man who had surmised this delaying game for what it was and he also suspected that Codge had never, in his life, possessed any great sum of money; for all his arrogance, he was no more than a petty thief.