The Invasion Year (21 page)

“Mister Spendlove’s duty, sir, and there’s a strange ship attacking the lee columns!
Cockerel
’s fired off signal rockets!”

“Here’s your excitement, Mister Simcock!” Lewrie said, rising quickly and dashing his napkin to the deck. “All hands, and beat to Quarters!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The night
was
black as a boot, but sprinkled with the fire-fly tiny gleams from taffrail lanthorns, gleams that seemed to be swinging more Easterly as the leeward columns of merchant ships shied from the threat of a raider in their midst. The
Cockerel
frigate was filling the air with up-swooshing pinpricks of bright amber lights of warning rockets, and her main-mast’s upper-most tip showed a series of fusees burning bright blue in a diamond pattern. As Lewrie gained the deck,
Cockerel
fired off two guns, their discharges eyeblink spurts of white powder smoke, shot through with amber and yellow.

“Is she taking something under fire?” Lt. Spendlove was worrying aloud.

“Making the ‘General’ signal to the convoy, more like, sir,” Midshipman Houghton commented as a Marine drummer began the Long Roll.

“Mister Westcott?” Lewrie called out.

“Aye, sir?”

“Steer Due North for the convoy’s larboard quarter, and crack on sail,” Lewrie ordered.

“Very good, sir. Quartermasters, come about to Due North. Mister Spendlove, I relieve you,” Westcott snapped, drawing a breath for his next shout to the brace-tenders on either gangway.

“Aye, and thank you, sir,” Spendlove said before dashing to his post at Quarters in the waist to supervise the guns.

Reliant
rode the ink-black seas on a beam wind at that moment, rising and surging forward, then sloughing into a wave trough and butting through with a brief loss of momentum. The frigate trembled with what felt like a stallion’s impatience at the start-line of a race as off-watch sailors thundered up from their mess and berthing deck for their posts, some in shoes but most unshod. Gun tools were dealt out, the arms chests were unlocked—that took a moment, for Lewrie had come to the quarterdeck without the keys, and had to send Pettus to fetch them—and the dull red battle lanthorns were lit down each battery, between the guns, reflecting hellish-eerie from the tubs of swabbing water. Even more tiny lights flickered to life as the slow-match fuses were coiled round the tops of the tubs and the ends lit to ignite the primer quills, should the newer flintlock strikers fail.

“Cast off your guns!” Lt. Spendlove was loudly ordering as the hands mustered by their pieces.

“Your sword and pistols, sir?” Pettus asked from behind Lewrie, almost making him jump.

“Pistols’ll be more useful tonight, Pettus,” Lewrie told him. “If there’s need t’board anything, I’ll snatch up a spare cutlass.”

“Be back in a trice, sir, then I’ll see the cats to the orlop,” Pettus promised, then ghosted away at a dash for the great-cabins.

As
Reliant
altered course, the convoy’s many lights swung away to starboard even quicker, tautening up to the wind at “full and by” to beat their way to weather, and safety.

“God, just
look
at ’em!” Lewrie muttered, groaning. “As bad as a flock o’ witless sheep!”

The somewhat orderly columns that had stretched ahead of
Reliant
when she had sailed along astern of them were now seen from a new angle, and what Lewrie could see wasn’t pretty. Viewed from the convoy’s larboard quarter, and all ships scurrying away, he could make out
no
order to it, and was put in mind of the thousands of floating lotuses and tiny oil lamps wafting down the Hooghly river during some Hindoo festival when he had been at Calcutta, so long ago.

“The ship is at Quarters, sir,” Lt. Westcott crisply reported a minute later, all his earlier gaiety vanished.

“Very well, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie replied. “Now, does anyone
see
anything out there?” He put his hands on his hips and looked up to the mizen and the main fighting tops, which were now manned by spry younger topmen, sharpshooters, Marines, and lookouts.

“Aloft, there! Sing out, do you spot something!” Lt. Westcott shouted to them with a speaking-trumpet.

Lewrie walked to the forward edge of the quarterdeck for a look-see of his own. There was the gaggle of the convoy to starboard, and there was Captain Stroud’s
Cockerel
a mile or so off the larboard bows, and there was a set of lights that he took for Captain Parham’s
Pylades
much further off, fine on the starboard bows, but … other than those he could make out nothing.

“Deuced odd, sir,” Lewrie heard the Sailing Master say to Lieutenant Westcott. “How could a privateer or frigate approach from alee? Windward’s the preferred method.”

“Is our raider a big, fast schooner, Mister Caldwell, striking from loo’rd, though, she’d be knots faster than any of the tubs we’re guarding, and can go much closer to the eyes of the wind. A schooner
could
come up to us, close-hauled.”

“Your pistols, sir,” Pettus announced as he popped up, ghostly-like, once more. “Primed and loaded.”

“Thankee, Pettus,” Lewrie said, like to jump out of his skin, again as he accepted his double-barrelled pistols and stuck them onto the waistband of his breeches by the spring clips.

How the Hell does he
do
that?
Lewrie wondered as Pettus vanished into the dark.

“Deck, there!” a lookout on the foremast shouted. “
Cockerel
’s turnin’
t’windward
!”

Lewrie peered and squinted forward; sure enough, he could make out a change in
Cockerel
’s lights. Her taffrail lanthorns were coming together, the starboard one overlapping the laboard, and the distance between her stern lights and her main-mast fusees becoming greater. By the glow of her fusees, he could barely spot some of her upper sail canvas.

“Whatever’s out there, it’s got past her,” Lewrie barked. “And to windward of
us
! Harden up to windward, Mister Westcott. Lay her head Nor’east, again!”

We’re a mile up to windward more than
Cockerel, Lewrie schemed, hoping that
Reliant
might stumble upon whatever Stroud had discovered, first;
If there’s a privateer ’tween us and the convoy …

“Deck, there!” the main-mast lookout shouted this time. “Signal rockets to
starboard
! Rockets,
four
points off the starboard bows!”

“Make for the ship launching rockets, Mister Westcott!” Lewrie snapped.

“Aye, sir!” the First Officer replied. Lt. Westcott pointed out to the Nor’east as he spotted the merchantman in distress. “
Thus,
Quartermaster!” he directed the helmsmen, chopping his hand to indicate the course. “Harden up for a close reach, Bosun!”

Reliant
turned up closer to the winds, her yards braced up for more speed, and the decks canting over to leeward a few more degrees. Barely had she settled on the new course than the lookouts raised the alarm again.
More
distress rockets were being launched by other ships … further up to the Nor’east!

“
Two
of ’em, damn their eyes!” Lewrie snapped, pounding a fist on the cross-deck railings. “That’un’ll be
Cockerel
’s pigeon. We can only deal with the one off our bows.”

And, since the convoy had turned away to flee so precipitously, the merchant ship that Lewrie
could
aid was more than a mile away, and if she had let fly all her canvas, it would take
Reliant
more than half an hour to catch her, and the raider, up!

“She’s not firing any more rockets,” Mr. Caldwell commented. “I expect she’s run out of them, by now.”

“Or, she’s taken, sir,” Lt. Westcott speculated.

“Whoops, I was wrong!” the Sailing Master said. “There’s more!”

“From the same ship … or yet another one?” Lewrie wondered in rising frustration. “There’s so many stern lights, it’s hard to tell which one launched them … which one’s launching
now
!”

“Poor
Modeste,
” Lewrie heard Midshipman Houghton snigger. “She will be no help at all.”

“Aye, Mister Houghton,” Caldwell agreed, chuckling a bit, too. “She’s not so much
leading
the stampede as she is being
chased
!”

“And can’t come about without the risk of colliding with one of them … or causing a whole series of collisions,” the Midshipman further supposed.

“
That
won’t do Captain Blanding’s choler any good, sir,” Lieutenant Westcott, standing closer to Lewrie, muttered.

“It wouldn’t do mine any good either, Mister Westcott!” Lewrie replied, wryly grinning and shaking his head. “I expect we’ll hear all about it, come tomorrow.”

“Hark … gunfire, sir!” Westcott said of a sudden, head lifted as if sniffing the air like a hound.

No one aloft or on deck had seen the gun flashes, and the sound came down seconds later, after the flashes guttered out.

“Where away, the gunfire?” Lewrie yelled aloft, but no one had a clue.

“I
think
it came from larboard, sir … up to the North of us,” Westcott said with his head cocked over in puzzlement, and shrugging. “Among the stragglers from the lee-most column, most-like.”

“Gunfire!” a lookout cried at last. “Deck, there! Gun flashes
t’larboard
 …
two
points off th’ larboard bows!”

“I see it, sir!” Midshipman Houghton cried. “
There,
sirs! One of the leading ships of the lee column!”

That was even
further
away than the two merchantmen that they’d seen firing distress rockets, making Lewrie frown in concern.

“Damme, could there be
three
privateers out there?” he griped. “If there are, let’s hope that Parham and
Pylades
are close enough to help her.”

“Pray Jesus we get to grips with
somebody
!” Marine Lt. Simcock fretted from his place by the starboard entry-port on the sail-tending gangway, where a file of his Marines stood swaying with their muskets ready and loaded.

“We’ll
try
t’find you some
amusement,
sir!” Lewrie snapped back.

“Sorry, sir,” Simcock all but whispered, much abashed.

*   *   *

It took nearly that estimated half an hour to catch up with the trailing ships of the fleeing convoy, and to get close enough to one of them to speak her. “Hoy, there! This is
Reliant
!” Lewrie shouted to her from his starboard bulwarks.

“Hoy, the
Reliant
!” her master called back from the larboard side of his quarterdeck. “This is the
Avon
! Captain Quarles, here!”

“Were you the one firin’ distress rockets?” Lewrie asked him.

“Aye! A big schooner come up from loo’rd and went aboard the ship astern of us, the
Peacock
!” Captain Quarles shouted. “Poor old Cap’m Venables was boarded and took before he could signal for help! I cracked on sail, and started firing off rockets to warn the others, but there was nothing I could do for them! What took you so long?”

“Eat shit and die!” Lewrie muttered, and took a deep breath to calm himself before replying. “Where is
Peacock
now, sir?”

“Last we could see of her, she and the schooner put about onto larboard tack and headed off Sou’-Sou’west! Didn’t you
see
her, sir?”

“God dammit!” Lewrie spat, realising that the
Peacock
was lost for good. It had been the better part of an hour since
Avon
’s first rockets had been launched, since the privateer schooner had ghosted in and pounced, then tacked as soon as the boarding party had secured their prize.
Peacock
was a full-rigged, three-masted ship, and could sail no closer to the wind than six points, about sixty-six degrees. Slow as that process could be, she would now be
miles
astern of the convoy, and to dash off to rescue her would involve a very long stern-chase. If her lights were doused, Lewrie could only hope to lay his frigate on the same course of Sou’-Sou’west and thrash blindly after her in the utter darkness.