Reefs and Shoals (9 page)

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“One would think that some damned fool was whistling,” Mister Caldwell, the Sailing Master, gruffly muttered as he peered at their pencilled-in track in the chart-space in Lewrie’s cabins. “Or, someone’s snuck a woman aboard.”

The Westerly winds had churned up the sea nigh to a slow boil, with vast grey-green rollers nearly as tall as the main course yard, a sickly snot-green sea that shed stinging blizzards of spray pellets from every wavecrest, even foamy dollops that tumbled and flew from wave to wave like fleeing rabbits. The smell of fresh fish was prominent, the reek that came from storm-wrack, as if the sea below them was stirred right to the bottom.

“Bosun Sprague didn’t sneak
his
wife aboard, did he?” Lieutenant Westcott asked, striving for amusement, though his lean, harsh face and four days of stubble showed nought but grimness and a lack of real sleep; especially so in the eerie, swaying glare of the overhead lanthorn which cast long shadows over the chart.

“I have it on good authority that the official Mistress Sprague resides in Chatham … and the Bosun can’t abide the harpy baggage,” Caldwell told Westcott with a nasty cackle. “So, whoever that doxy was he had aboard as his ‘wife’ in Portsmouth, she was young enough to be one of his daughters.”

“Mistress Sprague’s presented the Bosun with nothing
but
girl children, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie stuck in. “Half a dozen now, or so I heard. No wonder he stuck with the Navy so long. Hmmm … we are in need of a backin’ wind. Does the current one veer into Due West, we’ll be on a good course for Spain.”

From the moment that their frigate had cleared the Isle of Wight into the Channel, while they still had clearly visible sea-marks, the chip log had been cast each half-hour, and an officer of the watch had pencilled in the course and the rate of knots recorded. The skies had been solidly overcast when they departed England, and they hadn’t seen even a brief glimpse of the sun since, so their progress and position were pretty-much By Guess and By God, all by Dead Reckoning.

The recorded course was a staggering, stuttering series of X’s strung along a jagged line, some close together, some X’s further off from each other where they’d had a good run and turn of speed.

“Not to borrow trouble, sir,” Westcott glumly said, “but does the wind veer close to a Sou’wester, we may have to wear, even in this, else we fetch up somewhere East of Corunna and Cape Finisterre.”

“It could go Sou’westerly, sir,” Caldwell cautioned. “So long as this Arctic gale rules, another day or so with any luck, we’re making ground West’rd, but does it blow out, a Sou’westerly’s not unknown in Biscay.”

If that happened,
Reliant
would have no choice but to wear. A Sou’westerly would smack them right in the mouth, and paying off would drive them even deeper into the “sack” between the long right-angled trap of the French and Spanish coasts. Square-rigged ships could not sail closer than sixty-six degrees to the true wind.

“We’re too far North at the moment to meet Sou’westerlies,” Lewrie said after a long moment, in which he used a ruler to measure from their latest cast of the log to the edge of the chart. “We’re still round the fourty-seventh latitude, so we’ve bags of sea-room, but it’s
longitude
that’s wanting. Now if…”

Their frigate smacked into yet another wave with a deep hollow boom, and rolled back onto her larboard side, then rose up, shedding tons of seawater, and wriggling a bit more upright with a sickening twist, making them all cling to the flimsy chart table and shuffle their feet to keep upright.

I won’t gag, or spew,
Lewrie commanded himself, though he had a feeling that he was damned close to doing so. He tried to recall when it was that he had been in such foul weather, and in such a predicament, and realised that it had been years.

I’m worried
 …
worried and scared,
he admitted to himself, alone;
I wouldn’t trust mine arse with a fart, right now. Nor a gag, either! Why didn’t Father shove me into the bloody Army, instead? Oh, aye
 … ’
cause he was too cheap!

Lewrie looked to his liquid barometer for inspiration, but the blue-dyed water in the fat lower flask was still rather high up the upper tube, about as high as his last peek at it an hour before, when he had made a chalk-mark slash upon it. The storm’s pressure was still low, allowing the fluid to creep upwards; no higher yet, thank God!

“About all we may do for now, sir, is ride this out and hope for the best,” Mr. Caldwell concluded.

“Even with bare yards and storm trys’ls,” Lt. Westcott added.

“Midshipman Grainger, SAH!” the Marine sentry outside the door to the great-cabins shouted, his usual piercing cry almost swallowed by the din of wind, rain, and the working of the hull. With luck, he might have been allowed a tarred tarpaulin coat with which to tolerate the elements.

“Enter!” Lewrie shouted back, louder than usual, too. He and the others staggered out from the tiny chart space, clinging to light deal-and-canvas partitions. Grainger entered, sopping wet and looking as miserable as a drowned rat.

“Mister Merriman’s duty, sir, and I am to report that several of the fore and main-mast shrouds are slackening,” Grainger said.

“Well, damn,” Lewrie spat. “It seems we must wear, after all.”

There was no safe way to adjust the necessary tension of the mast shrouds unless the immense load was taken off them, even on good days. Their weather shrouds must become lee shrouds, if they wished to keep the masts standing.

“Aye, sir,” Lt. Westcott regretfully agreed.

“My compliments to Mister Merriman, Mister Grainger, and he’s to have ‘All Hands’ piped,” Lewrie ordered. “With your able assistance, of course, Mister Westcott … Mister Caldwell?”

“Of course, sir.”

“I’ll fetch your foul-weather rig, sir,” Pettus, his cabin steward, offered, staggering from one piece of furniture to the next, and looking a tad green. Lewrie looked aft into the gloom of his cabins. His cats, Toulon and Chalky, were curled up on his bed-cot’s coverlet, like two furry loaves of bread, bristled up and moaning in misery. To larboard, his young cabin servant, Jessop, was on his knees inside the quarter-gallery toilet, with only his shoes and shins showing, bent over the “seat of ease” and making offerings to Neptune; rather loudly.

“Carry on, Jessop!” Lewrie called out.

“Ah … aye, sir,” the lad muttered back, between gags.

Once bundled into tarred canvas coat and hat, Lewrie staggered forward, steeling himself for a second or two before opening the door to the weather deck. When he did so, it was like barging out into utter chaos: the force and howl of the wind, the sudden chill of it, and the stinging volleys of sea spray that pinpricked his hands and face. Here, too, was the full sound of the storm, and the hiss and thunder of the waves, and the alarming groans of the hard-pressed masts, and the booming of the hull as the frigate fought the sea.

Off-watch sailors were swarming up from the relative warmth and security of the gun deck where they berthed and messed, adding to the sense of confusion as Lewrie managed to clamber up to the quarterdeck.

“Sorry about this, sir, but we
must
wear,” Lt. Merriman said, his mouth close to Lewrie’s ear.

“Aye,” Lewrie shouted back. “If you think the weather shrouds will hold ’til we’ve got her round on larboard tack!”

“I believe they will, sir,” Merriman hopefully replied.

At present, their frigate laboured heavily, even though the mizen tops’l had been taken in, as had the main course. The fore course and fore and main tops’ls were close-reefed, and the jibs up forward had been replaced by the fore topmast stays’l. Above the quarterdeck, the spanker had been reduced, and the mizen stays’l had been rigged.

Leave the tops’ls, for now,
Lewrie speculated;
they’re higher up than the wavetops, and can still catch wind. The fore course’ll get us round the quicker. Send up the main topmast stays’l, again? Hmm. Oh God, all these bloody years at sea, and I
still
feel like a total fraud!

He’d not wished to go to sea and be all “tarry-handed”, but his father had seen to that, “crimping” him into the Navy at seventeen, and
years
behind his peers in experience—for God’s sake he could not even
swim
!—and even the ten-year-olds in his first mess had known
bags
more than he had, and his bottom had paid the price for not “knowing the ropes” from expasperated officers; and all his career he felt as if he had never quite caught up.

There had been a series of small ships, where things were much simpler, where little was expected of a lowly Midshipman. Surely, he had had no business at all becoming old Lt. Lilycrop’s First Officer in the
Shrike
brig, where his first few months had been an embarassing pot-mess of ignorance and re-learning of his trade. There had been a whole year of shore idleness between the end of the American Revolution and his assignment aboard
Telesto,
and the jaunt to the Far East and China in ’84, and when he’d come back and gotten his first command, the little
Alacrity,
in ’86; just enough time to forget almost everything! By 1789, after paying
Alacrity
off, there had been years of bucolic peace ashore, with wife and children on their rented farm at Anglesgreen, and once more all he’d learned of the sea had sloughed away ’til 1793 and the war with France. When he’d reported aboard the
Cockerel
frigate as her First Lieutenant, he’d felt as overawed and unready as the rawest fresh-caught landlubber, unable to recall the proper names for things without long hours secretly poring over his frayed, illustrated copy of
Falconer’s Marine Dictionary,
just as he had done when first aboard a warship in 1780!

God help ’em all,
he thought;
lookin’ to
me
t’keep ’em safe!

“All hands are on deck, sir,” Lt. Merriman reported.

“Very well, Mister Merriman, have Bosun Sprague pipe ‘Stations for Wearing Ship’,” Lewrie said, after a deep breath and shrug into his foul-weather rig. “Let’s be about it. The men are getting cold.”

“If I may, sir?” the Sailing Master, Mr. Caldwell, intruded before Lt. Merriman could raise his speaking-trumpet to his lips. “I’ve been studying the set of the waves, and believe they’re coming in sevens, with the seventh the most forceful. Once that one is past, we’ll have an easier go.”

“Very well, Mister Caldwell. Carry on, Mister Merriman, but do you wait to issue your first order ’til the seventh has passed, as the Sailing Master directs,” Lewrie said.

“Here it comes, Mister Merriman,” Caldwell warned.

“Stations to Wear!” Merriman bawled out the preparatory orders. “Main clewgarnets and buntlines … spanker brails, weather main and mizen cro’jack braces! Haul taut and stand by!”

Reliant
butted through a creaming, humping wave at a slant with a
thrum
and groan, surging upward toward its crest as the wave billowed under her keel, hobby-horsing upwards, then pitching bows-down into the trough with a roar.

“This is the one, sirs!” Caldwell shouted excitedly, as if he enjoyed heavy-weather sailing. His seventh wave marched down to the frigate, humping higher like a steep hill, its crest fuming white and its lee slope mottled with rippling circular eddies. “Whoo!”

“Up mains’l and spanker!” Lt. Merriman screeched once the ship had staggered up, over, and down into that great wave’s trough. “Clear away after bowlines! Up helm!”

Reliant
fell off quickly, shoved by wind and waves to lie abeam the sea for a bit, slowly, so very slowly falling alee and taking that howling force on her starboard quarter.

“Overhaul the weather lifts! Man the weather headbraces! Rise, fore tack and sheet!” Merriman cried.

Further, further off the wind, ’til it was coming just about dead astern, and …

“Clear away head bowlines!” Merriman howled. “Shift over the headsheets, and lay the head yards square!”

Now the wind was clawing at their ship’s larboard quarter, and she was coming round, wallowing and rolling, but on larboard tack.

“Man main tack and sheet! Clear away the rigging! Spanker outhaul! Clear away the brails!”

“Haul aboard! Haul out!”

“Mind yer helm, there!” Lewrie cautioned as she swung up closer to the wind and seas.

“Brace up head yards!” Lt. Merriman ordered, looking and sounding calmer than when he began the evolution, now that
Reliant
had crossed from one tack to the other. “Overhaul weather lifts, and haul aboard!”

“Nicely done, sir!” Mr. Caldwell congratulated.

“Thankee, sir,” Merriman replied, quite pleased and relieved, then turned to deliver his last trimming-up orders. “Steady out the bowlines! Haul taut weather trusses, braces, and lifts!”

“And, here comes the bloody seventh wave, again,” Lewrie said just as the larger, fiercer wall of water humped up before them. The ship heaved up and over, then down into the trough, where she wallowed as the wave stole the wind from the tops’ls for a moment before bowling astern.

“Clear away on deck, there!” Lt. Merriman ordered.

“Mister Westcott,” Lewrie bade. “Let’s go forrud and see to the shrouds. Rhys, how’s her helm, now?” he asked the Quartermaster of the watch at the wheel. “Can you hold West-Nor’west?”

“Aye, sir. Fair balanced, she be. Not too crank, nor griped.”

“Very well,” Lewrie said with a firm nod. “Full and by, and none to loo’rd. Ready, Mister Westcott?”

“Aye, sir,” Westcott replied with a brief flash of teeth. “I’m as wet as I’ll ever be. Bosun Sprague? Hands to the lee bulwarks.”