The Captain From Kirkbean

(1998)*

David Weber

Captain Sir John Paul stood on the quarterdeck of His Majesty’s seventy-four gun ship-of-the-line Torbay, shading his eyes against the Caribbean’s brilliant August sunlight. Torbay, the seventy-four Triumph, and the sixty-four Prince William, were four days out of Antigua with a Jamaica-bound convoy, and he lowered his hand from his eyes to rub thoughtfully at the buttons on his blue coat’s lapel—twelve gold buttons, in groups of three, indicating a captain with more than three year’s seniority—as he watched the sloop Lark’s cutter pull strongly towards his ship.

The cutter swept around, coming up under Torbay’s lee as the seventy-four lay hove to. The bow man neatly speared the big ship’s main chains with his boathook, and the offers in the stern leapt for the battens on her tall side. A lazy swell licked up after him, soaking him to the waist, but he climbed quickly to the entry port, nodded to the lieutenant who raised his hat in salute, and the hurried aft.

“Well, Commander Westman,” Captain Paul said dryly. “I trust whatever brings you here was worth a soaking?”

“I believe so, sir.” Lark’s captain touched his hat—no junior dared omit any proper courtesy to Sir John—then reached inside his coat. “Lark sighted a drifting ship’s boat yesterday evening, sir. When I investigated, I discovered three Frenchmen—one dead officer and two seamen in but little better shape—from the naval brig Alecto. She foundered in a squall last week … but the officer had this on his person.”

He held out a thick packet of papers. Paul took it, glanced at it, then looked up quickly.

“I, ah, felt it best to deliver it to you as soon as possible, sir,” Westman said.

“You felt correctly, Commander,” Paul replied almost curtly, then beckoned to the officer of the watch. “Lieutenant Chessman, make a signal. All captains are to repair aboard Torbay immediately!”

It was sweltering in Sir John’s day cabin, despite the open windows, as Captain Forest was shown in. Prince William’s commander had had the furthest to come, and he was acutely aware that he was the last captain to arrive … and that Captain Paul did not tolerate tardiness. But Sir John said nothing. He didn’t even turn. He stood gazing out into the sun dazzle, hands clasped behind him and lost in memory, while his steward offered Forest wine. His fixed baze saw not the Caribbean’s eye-hurting brightness but the seething gray waste of the Channel and surt spouting white on a rocky shore as Sir Edward Hawke’s squadron pursued Admiral Conflans into Quiberon Bay.

By most officer’s standards, Hawke had been mad to follow an enemy into shoal water in a rising November gale when that enemy had local pilots and he did not. But Hawke had recognized his duty to keep the invasion army gathered round nearby Vannes in Brittany, not England. Confident of his captains and crews, he had driven Conflan’s more powerful squadron onto the rocks or up the Vilaine River in an action which had cost the French seven ships of the line and almost three thousand men in return for only two of his own ships.

Quiberon had been the final triumph of what was still called the “Year of Victories,” and Midshipman John Paul of Kirkbean, Scotland, serving in the very ship Captain Sir John Paul now commanded, had seen it all. Torbay had been the second ship in Hawke’s line, under Captain Augustus Keppel, and young Paul had watched—twelve years old and terrified for his very life—as broadsides roared and a sudden squall sent the sea crashing in through the lee gunports of the French seventy-four Théséé and drove her to the bottom in minutes.

Paul would never forget her crew’s screams, or his own ship’s desperate efforts to save even a few of them from drowning, but more even than that, he remembered the lesson Hawke had taught him that day as he turned to face the captains seated around his table with their wine. Every one of them was better born than he, but John Paul, the son of a Scottish gardener—the boy who’d found a midshipman’s berth only because his father had aided the wife of one of Keppel’s cousins after a coach accident—was senior to them all.

Which means, he though wryly, that it is I who have the honor of placing my entire career in jeopardy by whatever I do or do not decide this day.

It was ironic that twenty years of other officers’ reminders of their superior birth should bring him here. Under other circumstances, I might well have been on the other side, he mused. “Traitors or no, at least the rebels believe the measure of a man should be himself, not whom he chose as his father!

But no sign of that thought showed on his face, and his voice was crisp, with no trace of the lowland brogue he’d spent two decades eradicating, as he tapped the papers Westman had brought him and spoke briskly.

“Gentlemen, thanks to Commander Westman”—he nodded to Lark’s captain—“we have intercepted copies of correspondence from De Grasse to Washington.” The others stiffened, and he smiled thinly. “This copy is numbered ‘2’ and addressed to Commodore de Barras at Newport for his information, and I believe it to be genuine. Which means, gentlemen, that I’ve decided to revise our present orders somewhat.”

“Toss oars!” the coxswain barked, and Captain Paul watched with carefully hidden approval as the dripping blades rose in perfect unison and the bow man hooked onto Torbay’s chains. The captain stood, brushing at the dirt stains on his breeches, and then climbed briskly up his ship’s side. Pipes wailed, pipeclay drifted from white crossbelts as Marines slapped their muskets, and his first lieutenant removed his hat in salute.

Paul acknowledged the greeting curtly. In point of fact, he approved of Mathias Gaither, Torbay’s senior lieutenant, but he had no intention of telling Gaither so. He knew he was widely regarded as a tyrant—a man whose prickly disposition and insatiable desire for glory more than made up for his small stature. And, he admitted, there was justice in that view of him.

The motley human material which crewed any King’s ship demanded stern discipline, yet unlike many captains, Paul’s discipline was absolutely impartial, and he loathed bullies and officers who played favorites. He was also sparing with the lash, given his belief that flogging could not make a bad man into a good one but could certainly perform the reverse transformation. Yet he had no mercy on anyone, officer or seaman, who failed to meet hisqqq harshly demanding standards, for he knew the sea and the enemy were even less forgiving than he. And if he sought glory, what of it? For a man of neither birth nor wealth, success in battle was not simply a duty but the only path of advancement, and Paul had seized renown by the throat two years before, off Flamborough Head in HMS Serapis, when he sank the American “frigate” Bonhomme Richard. The old, converted East Indiaman had fought gallantly, but her ancient guns, rotten hull, and wretched maneuverability had been no match for his own well-found vessel. Her consort, the thrity-six gun Alliance, could have been much more dangerous, but Alliance’s captain—a Frenchman named Landais—had been an outright Bedlamite, and Paul had entered port with Alliance under British colors.

His knighthood—and Torbay—had been his reward for that … and now he was risking it all.

He grimaced at the thought and headed aft to pace his scorching quarterdeck. If anything befell the convoy, his decision to order it back to Antigua escorted by a single sloop would ruin him, and he knew it. Worse, the orders he had elected to ignore had come from Sir George Rodney, who was even less noted for tolerating disobedience than Paul himself. But at least he also understood the value of initiative. If events justified Paul’s decision, Rodney would forgive him; if they didn’t, the admiral would destroy him.

He paused in his pacing and beckoned Gaither to his side.

“Yes, sir?”

“Lieutenant Jansen needs more men. General Cornwallis has supplied ample labor and a battalion to picket each battery, but Jansen needs more gunners. Instruct the Gunner to select a half-dozen gun captains—men with experience using heated shot.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it at once.”

“Thank you.” Paul nodded brusquely and resumed his pacing as Gaither summoned a midshipman. He heard the lieutenant giving the lad quiet instructions, but his mind was back on the scene he’d just left ashore.

It was August 25, 1781. His squadron had taken the better part of nine days to reach Chesapeake Bay, but he’d picked up two more of the line along the way, having met the old sixty-gun Panther in the Caicos Passage, and the seventy-four Russel, bound for New York after repairing damages at Antigua, off the Georgia coast. Jasper Somers, Russel’s captain, was barely two months junior to Paul, and he had been less than pleased by the latter’s peremptory order to join Torbay. Paul hadn’t blamed Somers, though that hadn’t prevented him from commandeering Russel with profound relief. But welcome as her guns were, the ship accompanying her to New York had been even more welcome. HMS Serapis had brought him luck once before; perhaps she would do so again.

Something had better do so. He had five of the line, counting Panther (which was considerably older than he was), plus Serapis, the forty-four Charon (which he’d found anchored off Yorktown with the small frigates Guadalupe and Fowey and the tiny sloop Bonetta), and Westman’s Lark. That was all, whereas de Grasse must have at least twenty sail of the line. That force could small Paul’s cobbled up command in an hour, and he knew it.

But he also knew General Rochambeau and the rebel Washington were headed south with far more men and artillery than Cornwallis could muster. If de Grasse could command the bay long enough for the Franco-American army to crush Yorktown, the consequences would be catastrophic. Efforts against the rebellion had been botched again and again, and support back home had weakened with each failure. Personally, Paul suspected the colonies were lost whatever happened, and the sooner the Crown admitted it, the better. America wasn’t Ireland. There was an entire ocean between Britain and her rebellious colonists, and they couldn’t be disarmed with the wilderness pressing so close upon them. Besides, England couldn’t possibly field a large enough army to hold them down by force forever.

But personal doubt didn’t change the duty of a King’s officer. And even if it could have, the war was no longer solely about America. It might have started there, but England now faced the French, the Dutch, the Spanish … The entire world had taken up arms against Paul’s country. One more major defeat might seal not only the fate of North America but of England herself, and Washington, at least, grasped that point thoroughly. He’d wanted the French fleet to support an attack on the main British base at New York, but de Grasses’ letters made it clear he could come no further north than the Chesapeake. Apparently Louis XVI’s willingness to aid his American “allies” did not extend to uncovering his own Caribbean possessions or convoy’s.

None of which would make a successful combination against Cornwallis any less of a calamity, and Paul’s jaw clenched. He respected Rodney deeply, but the last year had not been Sir George’s finest. True, his health was atrocious, but his absorption in the capture of St. Eustatius from the Dutch and his inexplicable refusal to force an engagement in June following de Grasse’s capture of Tobago, had set the stage for the present danger.

Without control of American waters, we can’t possibly wear the rebels down, Paul thought grimly, and if the Frogs can win sea control here, they may take control of the Channel, as well. Holding it would be another matter, but they only require control long enough to land an army. And the only way to ensure that they can’t is to smash their fleet—which means fighting them at every possible opportunity even at unfavorable odds. Those who will not risk, can not win. Hawke understood that, and so should Rodney!

He shook himself. Rodney did understand, but he was a sick man who had been given reason to belief de Grasse was bound back to Europe, escorting a major French convoy. That was why he’d elected to return to England himself and sent Sir Samuel Hood to assume command at New York after Admiral Graves’ unexpected death, with only fourteen of the line as reinforcements. But Rodney’s intelligence sources had been wrong … and Sir John Paul was the senior officer who knew it.

That made it his responsibility to act. He could have taken his captured letters to New York, but Hood had strongly endorsed Rodney’s estimate of de Grasse’s intentions, and he was renowned for his stubbornness. Changing his mind could require days England might no longer have, and so Paul had taken matters into his own hands. He would compel Hood to sail for the Chesapeake by taking his own small force there and sending dispatches to announce what he’d done.

Samuel Hood was arrogant, stiff-necked, and contentious, but he was also a fighter who would have no choice but to sail south once he learned Paul had committed a mere five of the line to a fight to the death against an entire fleet. If Paul’s estimate of de Grasse’s intentions proved wrong, he could always be punished later. If it proved correct, Hood’s failure to relieve him would be an ineradicable blot on not only his personal honor but that of the Navy itself.

Paul drew a deep breath and walked to the side, looking out at his command. To a landsman, his ships must look small and fragile, isolated from one another as each lay to a pair of anchors, but he saw with a seaman’s eye. The mouth of the Chesapeake was ten miles wide, and no squadron this small could cover it all. Yet for all its size, the shallow bay was a dangerous place for deep-draft ships-of-the-line. Paul didn’t have to block its entire entrance: only the parts of it de Grasse’s heavy ships could use.

That was why Russell and Charon were anchored between the shoals known as the Middle Ground and the Inner Middle Ground, blocking the channel there, while Triumph, Panther, Serapis, Prince Willian, and Torbay blocked the wide channel between the Inner Middle Ground and the shoal called the Tail of the Horseshoe. And because they had anchored on springs—heavy hawsers led from each ship’s capstan out an after gunport and thence to her anchor cable, so that tightening or loosening them pivoted her in place—they could turn to fire full broadsides at any Frenchmen attempting to force the channels.

Unfortunately, there were two other ways into the bay. One, the North Channel, between the Middle Ground and Fisherman’s Island at the north side of the entrance, was no great threat. Landing parties and detachments from Cornwallis’ army had emplaced twelve of Prince William’s twenty-four-pounders—and furnaces to heat shot for them—on the island, and the channel was narrow enough for them to command easily.

The southern side of the Bay’s entrance was more dangerous. Lynnhaven Roads, inside Cape Henry, was shallow, but it would suffice. Indeed, it was in most ways an ideal anchorage; sheltered by the cape, yet close enough to open water for a fleet to sortie quickly if an enemy approached. But Paul’s ships were stretched as thinly as he dared blocking the channels; he couldn’t possibly bar Lynnhaven Roads as well.

What he could do was place a second battery on the western side of Cape Henry, although Lieutenant Jansen was finding it difficult to mount his guns. Simply ferrying them ashore was hard enough, for the battery consisted of thirty-two-pounders from the seventy-fours. Each gun weighed over two and a half tons, but only their three-thousand-yard range could hope to cover the water between the cape and Torbay, and at least Jansen had finally found a place to site them.

I’ve done all I can, Paul told himself, gazing out at the boats pulling back and forth across the water. Something must be left to chance in a fight … and simply finding us waiting for him should at least make de Grasse cautious. I hope.

He shook himself as the ship’s bell chimed eight times to announce the turn of the forenoon watch. His stomach growled as the bell reminded it he’d missed breakfast yet again, and he grinned wryly and took himself below in search of a meal.

“It would appear you were correct, Sir John,” Captain Somers said quietly, five days later.

He and Paul stood gazing at a chart of the Chesapeake while Torbay creaked softly around them, and Commander Westman stood to one side. Fitting that Westman should be the one to sight de Grasse’s approach, a corner of Paul’s brain mused, but it was a distant thought beside the strength estimate Lark had brought him.

Twenty-eight of the line. Six times his strength, and no sign of Hood. It was one thing to know his duty, he found; it was quite another to know a desperately unequal battle which had been only a probability that morning had become a certainty by evening.

“What d’you expect them to do?” Somers asked, and Paul rubbed his chin, eyes fixed on the chart in the candlelight.

“They’ll scout first,” he said. “For all de Grasse knows, we’re the entire New York squadron. But he won’t need long to determine our actual strength, and` I expect he’ll try a quick attack then. He’ll have the flood only until the end of the morning watch; after that, the ebb will make the channels even shallower.”

“Um.” It was Somer’s turn to rub his chin, then nod. “I think you’re right,” he said, and grinned suddenly. “I was none too pleased when you pressed my ship, Sir John. Now—”

He shrugged, grinning more broadly, and held out his hand.

The morning was cool but carried promise of yet another scorching afternoon as Paul came on deck. Although the ship had cleared for action before dawn, he’d taken time for a leisurely breakfast. It hadn’t been easy to sit and eat with obvious calm, but this would be a long day, and he would need all his energy. Even more importantly, Torbay’s crew must know he was so confident he’d seen no reason to skip a meal.

If only they knew the truth, he mused, and glanced at the masthead commission pendant to check the wind. Still from the west-southwest. Good. That would make it more difficult for any Frenchman to creep around Cape Henry into Lynnhaven Roads.

He lowered his eyes to the guard boats pulling for their mother ships. The French were scarcely noted for initiative in such matters, but in de Grasse’s shoes Paul would certainly have attempted a boat attack, for the French squadron had more than enough men and small craft to swamp his vessels. However unlikely Frenchmen were to make such an attempt, he’d had not option but to guard against the possibility, and he hoped de Grasse would delay long enough for those boat crews to get some rest.

He looked up once more to where Lieutenant Gaither perched in the mizzen crosstrees. Paul would have preferred to be up there himself but that would have revealed too much anxiety, and so he had to wait while Gaither peered through his telescope. It seemed to take forever, though it could actually have been no more than ten minutes before Gaither started down. He reached the deck quickly, and Paul raised an eyebrow in silent question.

“More than half of them are still hull down to the east-sou’east, sir,” Gaither replied, “but a dozen of the line—all two-deckers, I believe—and two frigates are four or five miles east of Cape Henry. As nearly as I can estimate, their course is west-nor’west and they’re making good perhaps four knots.”

“I see.” Paul rubbed his chin. De Grasse’s maneuvers showed more caution than he’d dared hope for. He himself would have closed with all the force he had, yet he had to admit that, properly handled, a dozen of the line would more than suffice to destroy his squadron.

Assuming, of course, that the French knew what to do with them.

He squinted up at the cloudless sky. The flood would continue to make for another three hours, during which the rising tide would be available to refloat a ship which touched bottom coming in. In his enemy’s place, Paul would have begun the attack the moment the tide began making, but it seemed the French had no desire to attack. Their course was for the North Channel, apparently in order the exploit the “unguarded” chink in Paul’s defenses rather than risk engaging his outnumbered, anchored ships. Yet it would take them at least three hours just to reach the channel, and when they got there …

“Thank you, Mr. Gaither,” he said after a moment, and his cold, thin smile made the quarterdeck gunners nudge one another with confident grins. He could be a right bastard, the captain. He had a tongue that could flay a man like the cat itself, and he used it with a will. But that very sharpness lent his praise even more weight, when he gave it, and the storm or fight that could best him had never been made.

Lieutenant Wallace Hastings of HMS Russel and his work parties had labored frantically for six days to build the battery. In fact, he’d never thought they could finish it in time, but people had a way of not disappointing Sir John. Or, at least, of not disappointing him more than once. And so now, Hastings and his gun crews—each with a core of navel gunners eked out by artillerists from Lord Cornwallis’ army—waited as another slow, thunderous broadside rippled down Russel’s side.

Water seethed as the roundshot slashed into the sea like an avalanche. They landed far short of the thirty-six-gun frigate gliding up the North Channel under topsails and jib, but the Frenchman altered course still further towards the east to give the seventy-four a wider berth. Which just happened to bring him less than six hundred yards from Hasting’s gun muzzles.

It had been Sir John’s idea to disguise the battery’s raw earth with cut greenery. Personally, Hastings had never expected it to work, but it seemed he’d been wrong. More probably, Russel’s ostentations efforts had riveted the French ship’s attention, distracting her lookouts from the silent shore under her lee. Whatever the explanation, she was a perfect target for Hasting’s gunners. Accustomed to the unsteadiness of a warship’s pitching deck, they’d find hitting a ship moving at barely two knots from a rock-steady battery child’s play. But Sir John’s orders had been specific, and Hastings let the frigate slide past unchallenged, then spoke to the man beside him.

“We’ll load in ten minutes, Mr. Gray,” he told Russel’s gunner, never taking his eyes from the first French seventy-four following in the frigate’s wake.

It was impossible for Paul to see what was happening from his position at the extreme southern end of hsi anchored formation, but eh rumble of Russel’s broadsides said his plan seemd to be working. Now if only—

His steady pacing stopped as fresh thunder grumbled from the north.

The twenty-four pounder lurched back, spewing flame and a stinking fogbank of smoke. Russel’s gunner had spent five minutes laying that gun with finicky precision, and Hasting’s eyes glittered as the totally unexpected shot struck below the seventy-four’s forechains and sudden consternation raged across the Frenchman’s deck. The fools hadn’t even cleared their starboard guns for action!

Smoke wisped up as the red-hot shot blasted deep into bone-dry timbers, and panic joined consternation as the French crew realized they were under attack with heated shot. And that the British gunners had estimated their range perfectly.

“Load!” Hastings snapped, and sweating men maneuvered shot cradles carefully, tipping fat, incandescent iron spheres down the guns’ bores. Steam hisses as they hit the water-soaked wads protecting the powder charges, and the gun crews moved with purposeful speed, making final adjustments before the sizzling iron could touch their pieces off prematurely. Hand after hand rose along the battery, announcing each gun’s readiness, and Hastings inhaled deeply.

“Fire!” he barked, and twelve guns bellowed as one.

The French seventy-four Achille quivered as more iron crashed into her, and rattling drums sent gun crews dashing from larboard to starboard. They cast off breech ropes, fighting to get their guns into action, but eh hidden battery had taken Achille utterly by surprise, and men shouted in panic as flames began to lick from the red-hot metal buried in her timbers. Bucket parties tried desperately to douse the fires, but the surprise was too great, time was too short … and the British aim was too good. Not one shot had missed, and panic became terror as woodsmoke billowed. The flames that followed were pale in the bright sunlight, but they roared up the ship’s tarred rigging like demons, and the horrible shrieks of men on fire, falling from her tops, finished off any discipline she might have clung to.

Officers shourted and beat at mean with the flats of their swords, battling to restore order, but it was useless. In less than six minutes, Achille went from a taut, efficient warship to a doomed wreck whose terror-crazed crewmen flung themselves desperately into the water even though most had never learned to swim.

Achille’s next astern, the sixty-eight Justice, managed to clear away her starboard guns, but the battery’s earthen rampart easily absorbed her hasty broadside, and then the British guns thundered back. Every naval officer knew no ship could fight a well-sited shore battery, and Hastings smiled savagely as he and his men set out to demonstrate why.

“Captain Somer’s compliments sir, and the enemy have been beaten off!”

The fourteen-year-old midshipman was breathless from his rapid climb up Torbay’s side, and the seamen in his boat slumped over their oars, gasping after their long, hard pull, but every one of them wore a huge grin, like an echo of the cheers which had gone up from each ship as the boat swept by her.

“The battery burned two of the line, sir—a seventy-four and a sixty-eight,” the midshipman went on, “And a third ran hard aground trying to wear ship in the channel. Two more came into Russel’s range while working their way clear—one of them lost her mizzen—and the frigate was heavily damaged on her way out.”

“That’s excellent news!” Paul told the panting youngster. “The first lieutenant will detail fresh oarsmen to return you to Russel, where you will present my complements to Captain Somers and Lieutenant Hastings and tell them they have earned both my admiration and my thanks, as have all of their officers and men.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” The midshipman’s smile seemed to split his face, and Paul waved for Gaither to take him in tow, then turned to gaze out towards the open sea once more.

He’d seen the French straggling back out past the capes, just as he’d seen the smoke of the burned vessels … and heard their magazines explode. Whatever else might happen, de Grasse had leaned he would not take Chesapeake cheaply. Yet the French also knew about the northern battery now. They wouldn’t try that approach a second time—especially not if the wind backed around to the east.

No, if they come again, they’ll try the south or the center—or both, he told himself, turning to watch the sun slide steadily down the western sky. And when they come, they’ll come to fight, not simply maneuver around us.

He gazed out over the water, hands clasped behind him as the setting sun turned the bay to blood, and sensed the buzz of excitement and pride which enveloped Torbay and all his other ships. They’d done well, and at small price—so far—and he wondered how many of them even began to suspect how that would change with the morrow.

This time he climbed the mainmast himself. He’d always had a good head for heights, but it had been years since he’d gone scampering to the tops himself, and he found himself breathing hard by the time he finally reached the topmast crosstrees.

A hundred and eighty feet, he thought, recalling the formula he’d learned so long ago as he glanced down at the deck, still wrapped in darkness below him. Eight-sevenths times the square root of the height above sea level in feet makes … fifteen miles’ visibility? That was about right, and he hooked a leg around the trestle and raised his telescope.

His mouth tightened. The wind had, indeed, backed further around to the east. Now it blew almsot due west, and it appeared de Grasse had made up his mind to use it. French warships and transports dotted the brightening sea as far as Paul could see, but what drew his attention like a lodestone was the double column of ships-of-the-line; sixteen of them in two unequal lines, heading straight into the bay on a following wind.

He studied them carefully, making himself accept the sight, then closed the glass with a snap and reached for a backstay. Perhaps it was bravado, or perhaps it was simply the awareness that a fall to his death had become the least of his worries, but he swung out from the crosstrees, wrapped his legs around the stay, and slid down it like some midshipman too young and foolish to recognize his own mortality.

He sensed his officer’s astonishment as his feet thumped on the planking, though it was still too dark on deck to see their faces. His hands stung from the friction of his descent, and he scrubbed them on his breeches while his steward hurried up with his coat and sword. Then he turned to Lieutenant Gaither with an expression which—if Gaither could see it—would warn him to make no comment on the manner of his descent.

But it wasn’t the lieutenant who commented.

“Did y’see that, boyos?” a voice called from the dimness of the ship’s waist. “Just full o’high spirits and jollification ‘e is!”

Divisional officers hissed in outrage, trying to identify the speaker. But lingering night shielded the culprit, and their failure to find him emboldened another.

“Aye! ‘E’s a dandy one, right enough! Three cheers fer the Cap’n, lads!”

Paul opened his mouth, eyes flashing, but the first cheer rang out before he could say a word. He leaned on the quarterdeck rail, peering down at the indistinct shapes of gunners naked to the waist in the dew-wet dimness while their wild cheers surged about him like the sea, and all the while sixteen times their firepower sailed toward them through the dawn.

It ended finally, and he cleared his throat. He gazed down at them as the rising sun picked out individual faces at last, and then straightened slowly.

“Well!” he said, “I see this ship will never want for wind!” A rumble of laughter went up, and he smiled. But then he let his face sober and nodded towards the east.

“There’s more than a dozen Frogs out there,” he told them, “and most of ‘em will be about our ears in the next hour.” There was silence now, broken only by a voice repeating his words down the gratings to the lower gundeck. “It’s going to be hot work, lads, but if we let them in, the Army will be like rats in a trap. So we’re not going to let them in, are we?”

For an instant he thought he’d gone too far, but then a rumbling roar answered him.

“No!” it cried, and he nodded.

“Very well, then. Stand to your guns, and be sure of this. This is a King’s ship, and so long as she floats, those colors”—he pointed at the ensign fluttering above Torbay—“will fly over her!”

The two French lines forges past Cape Henry, and Paul watched their fore and main courses vanish as they reduced to fighting sail. The six ships of the shorter column passed as close to the cape as they dared, bound for Lynnhaven Roads in an obvious bid to sweep up and around the southern end of his line, but the other ten pressed straight up the channel between the Middle Ground and the Tail of the Horseshoe.

He paced slowly up and down his quarterdeck, watching them come, feeling the vice of tension squeeze slowly tighter on his outnumbered men. Torbay quivered as Gaither took up a little more tension on the spring, keeping her double-shotted broadside pointed directly at the leasing Frenchman and Paul frowned as he estimated the range.

Two thousand yards, he thought, Call it another twenty minutes.

He paused and turned his eyes further south, where the other French column was now coming abeam of Cape Henry.

Any time, now …

A brilliant eye winked from the still-shadowed western side of the cape, and the ball howled like a lost soul as it crossed the bow the massive three-decker leading the French line. A white plume rose from the bay, over five hundred yards beyond her—which meant she was well within reach of Lieutenant Jansen’s guns—and then a long, dull rumble swept over the water as two dozen thirty-two-pounders bellowed.

Screaming ironshot tore apart the water around the French ship, and Paul’s hands clenched behind him as her foremast thundered down across her deck. She staggered as the foremast dragged her main topgallant mast after it, and a second and third salvo smashed into her even as she returned fire against the half-seen battery. Smoke curled up out of the wreckage as the heated shot went home, or perhaps a coil of tarred cordage or a fold of canvas had fallen across one of her own guns as it fired. It hardly mattered. What mattered was the sudden column of smoke, the tongues of flame … and the French squadron’s shock.

Despite the distance, it almost seemed Paul could hear the crackling roar of the French ship’s flaming agony, and Jansen shifted target. Smoke and long-range made the second ship a difficult mark, but her captain was no longer thinking of difficulties the defenders might face. His squadron had lost two ships-of-the-line to fire the day before; now a third blazed before his eyes, and he altered course, swinging desperately north to clear the battery.

But in his effort to avoid the guns, he drove his ship bodily onto a mud bank. The impact shipped the mainmast out of her, and the entire line came apart. Choking smoke from the lead ship cut visibility, deadly sparks threatened anyone who drew too close with the same flaming death, and the second ship’s grounding made bad worse. If one of them could run aground, then all of them could … and what if they did so where those deadly guns could pound them into tiery torches?

It was the result Paul had hoped for, thought he’d never dared depend upon it. But even as the southern prong of the French thrust recoiled, the northern column continued to close, and he studied his enemies almost calmly. Did they intend to attempt to pass right through his line? The width of the channel had forced him to anchor his ships far enough apart to make that feasible, but such close action was against the French tradition, and getting there would allow his ships to rake them mercilessly as they approached. On the other hand—

He shook himself and drew his sword, watching the range fall, and the entire ship shivered as her guns ran out on squealing trucks. Each gun held two roundshot—a devastating load which could not be wasted at anything but point-blank range, and he didn’t even flinch as the lead ship’s bow chasers fired. Iron hummed over the quarterdeck, and he felt the shock and heard the screams as a second shot thudded into Torbay’s side and sent lethal hull splinters scything across her lower gundeck. Another salvo from the chasers, and a third. A fourth. The range was down to sixty yards, closing at a hundred feet per minute and then, at last, his sword slashed the air.

“Fire!” Lieutenant Gaither screamed, and whistles shrilled and Torbay heaved like a terrified animal as her side erupted in thunder.

“That’s the best I can do here, Captain,” Doctor Lambert said pointedly as he tied the sling. The implication was plain, but Paul ignored it. A French Marine’s musket ball had smashed his left forearm, and he feared it would have to come off. But for now the bleeding had mostly stopped, and he had no time for surgeons with three of Torbay’s seven lieutenants dead and two more, including Gaither, wounded.

At least Lambert is a decent doctor—not a drunkard like too many of them, he told himself as he waved the man away. The doctor gave him an exasperated look, but he had more than enough to keep him occupied, and he took himself off with a final sniff.

Paul watched him go, then looked along the length of his beautiful, shattered ship. It wasn’t like the French to force close action. They preferred to cripple an opponent’s rigging with long-range fire, but these Frenchmen seemed not to have know that.

Darkness covered the carnage, but Paul knew what was out there. De Grasse’s northern column had sailed straight into his fire. Some of its ships had closed to as little as fifty yards—one had actually passed between Torbay and Prince William before letting go her own anchor—and the furious cannonade had raged for over four hours, like a cyclone of iron bellowing through a stinking, blinding pall of powder smoke. At one point both of Torbay’s broadsides had been simultaneously in action with no less than three French ships, and Paul doubted that all of the survivors of this line together could have mustered sufficient intact spars for a single ship.

But we held the bastards, he told himself, standing beside the stump of his ship’s mizzen. It had gone over the side just as the surviving French finally retreated to lick their wounds, and he made himself look northward, despite a spasm of pain deeper than anything from his shattered arm, to where flames danced in the night beyond Prince William. HMS Serapis was still afloat, but it was a race now between inrushing water and the fire gnawing towards her magazine, and the boat crews plucking men from the bay looked like ferrymen on the seas of Hell against the glaring backdrop of her destruction.

But she would not go alone. Two French seventy-fours had settled in the main channel, one the victim of Torbay’s double-shotted guns, and Paul bared his teeth at them. Their wrecks would do as much to block the channel as his own ships—probably more, given his commands atrocious casualties. Torbay had over three hundred dead and wounded out of a crew of six hundred. Neither the wounded’s heartbreaking cries nor the mournful clank of her pumps ever stopped, and exhausted repair parties labored to clear away wreckage and plug shot holes. It was even odds whether or not she would be afloat to see the dawn, for she had been the most exposed of all his ships and suffered accordingly.

Prince William was almost as badly battered, and Captain Forest was dead. But his first lieutenant seemed a competent sort, and Triumph, despite heavy damage aloft, had suffered far less in her hull, while the ancient Panther had gotten off with the least damage of all. If he could only keep Torbay afloat, perhaps they could still—

“Sir! Captain! Look!”

The report was scarcely a proper one, but the acting second lieutenant who’d made it had been a thirteen-year-old midshipman that morning. Under the circumstances, Paul decided to overlook its irregularity—especially when he saw the French officer standing in the cutter with a white flag.

“Do you think they want to surrender, sir?” the youngster who’d blurted out the sighting report asked, and Paul surprised himself with a weary laugh.

“Go welcome him aboard, Mr. Christopher,” he said gently, “and perhaps we’ll see.”

Christopher nodded and hurried off, and Paul did his best to straighten the tattered, blood-and smoke-stained coat draped over his shoulders. He would have sent his steward for a fresh one if any had survived the battle … and if his steward hadn’t been dead.

The French lieutenant looked a visitor from another world as he stepped onto Torbay’s shattered deck. He came aft in his immaculate uniform, shoes catching on splinters, and enemy or no, he could not hide the shock behind his eyes as he saw the huge bloodstains on the deck, the dead the heap of amputated limbs piled beside the main hatch for later disposal, the dismounted guns and shattered masts.

“Lieutenant de Vaisseau Joubert of the Ville de Paris,” he introduced himself. His graceful, hat-flourishing bow would have done credit to Versailles, but Paul had lost his own hat to another French marksman sometime during the terrible afternoon, and he merely bobbed his head in a curt nod.

“Captain Sir John Paul,” he replied. “How may I help you, Monsieur?”

“My admiral ‘as sent me to request your surrender, Capitaine.”

“Indeed?” Paul looked the young Frenchman up and down. Joubert returned his gaze levelly, then made a small gesture at the broken ship about them.

“You ‘ave fought magnificently, Capitaine, but you cannot win. We need break through your defenses at only one point. Once we are he’ind you—” he shrugged delicately. “You ‘ave cost us many ships, and you may cost us more. In the end, ‘owever, you must lose. Surely you must see that you ‘ave done all brave men can do.”

“Not yet, Lieutenant,” Paul said flatly, drawing himself up to his full height, and his eyes glittered with the light of the dying Serapis.

“You will not surrender?” Joubert seemed unable to believe it, and Paul barked a laugh.

“Surrender? I have not yet begun to fight, Lieutenant! Go back to the Ville de Paris and inform your admiral that he will enter this bay only with the permission of the King’s Navy!”

“I—” Joubert started, then stopped. “Very well, Capitaine,” he said after a moment, his voice very quiet. “I will do as you—”

“Captain! Captain Paul!”

Excitement cracked young Christopher’s shout into falsetto fragments, and Paul turned with a flash of anger at the undignified interruption. But the midshipman was capering by the shot-splintered rail and pointing across the tattered hammock nettings into the night.

“What’s the meaning of—” the captain began, but his scathing rebuke died as he, too, heard the far-off rumble and strode to Christopher’s side.

“See, sir?” the boy demanded, his voice almost pleading. “Do you see it, sir?”

“Yes, lad,” Paul said quietly, good hand squeezing the youngster’s shoulder as fresh, massive broadsides glared and flashed beyond the capes. My God, he thought. Hood not only believed me, he actually attacked at night! And he caught the Frogs just sitting there!

He watched the horizon for another moment, and then turned back to Joubert.

“I beg your pardon for the interruption, Lieutenant,” he said, taking his hand from Christopher’s shoulder to wave at the growing fury raging in the blackness of the open sea, “but I think perhaps you’d best return to your own ship now.”

Joubert’s mouth worked for several seconds, as if searching for words which no longer existed. Then he shook himself and forced his mind to function again.

“Yes, Monsieur,” he said, in a voice which was almost normal. “I … thank you for your courtesy, and bid you adieu.”

“Adieu, Monsieur,” Paul replied, and then stood watching the lieutenant and his boat disappear into the night.

Other voices had begun to shout—not just aboard Torbay, but on Prince William and Panther and Triumph as well—as what was happening registered, but Paul never turned away from the hammock nettings. He gripped them until his hand ached, listening to the thunder, watching the savage lightening, knowing men were screaming and cursing and dying out there in the dark. A night battle. The most confused and terrifying sort possible … and one which favored Hood’s superbly trained ships’ companies heavily.

And then the cheering began. It started aboard Prince William, and his heart twisted at how thin it sounded, how many voices were missing. But those which remained were fierce. Fierce with pride … and astonishment at their own survival. The cheers leapt from Prince William and Panther to Torbay and Triumph, and he knew the same bullthroated huzzahs were rising from Russel and Charon and the batteries. The deep, surging voices tore the night to pieces, shouting their triumph—his triumph—and he drew a deep, shuddering breath.

But then he thrust himself upright and walked to the quarterdeck rail, and the cheers aboard Torbay faded slowly into expectant stillness as the men still standing on her shattered decks looked up at their captain.

Sir John Paul gazed back at them, good hand resting on the hilt of his sword, exhausted heart bursting with his pride in them, and cleared his throat.

“All right, you idle buggers!” he snapped. “What do you think this is—some fine lord’s toy yacht? This is a King’s ship, not a nursery school! Now get your arses back to work!”

The End

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