The Invasion Year (41 page)

“Penny for your thoughts,” Peel prompted upon seeing how silent and pensive Lewrie had become.

“Wonderin’ what Fulton’s torpedoes are like, compared to ours,” Lewrie dissembled; it wouldn’t do to sound fretful, even with a friend. That would be “croaking,” and might give Peel the impression that he’d no faith in MacTavish’s torpedoes and would not do his utmost to test them fairly.

“Smaller, I gathered,” Peel told him, flicking an inch of ash over the stern. “Small enough to be rolled over the side of a boat … spherical, made of copper. I think they’re to be deployed in pairs, with a line buoyed with cork blocks like a fishing net, between them. Other than that, the clockwork timers and cocked pistols to set them off are similar to MacTavish’s. This very moment, there’s probably a captain like you charged with experimenting with Fulton’s version. A competition ’tween the two versions, if you will.

“And of course, old man,” Peel sarcastically added, assuming an Oxonian accent, “can’t let the old-school side down, you know! Better the winner is British, than a benighted ‘Brother Johnathon’ from
New
England, what?”

“Yoicks, tally-ho, and all that?” Lewrie smirked.

“Win for ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ ” Peel laughed back. “Unless the damned things turn out to be a pile of manure.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The first cask torpedo was tried out in English waters, just off Mersea Island and the mouth of the Blackwater river, where the North Sea tides ran particularly strong, and the ebbs left miles of exposed mud flats.
Reliant
stood guardian to the
Fusee
bomb as she worked her way within a mile of shore as the tide began to flood, and it was Lieutenant Johns and Mr. McCloud who saw to its priming, its lowering into the waters, and its towing behind one of their new thirty-two-foot barges.

Lewrie had himself rowed over to
Fusee
to watch, and stood with Mr. MacTavish whilst the evolution was carried out.

“They will be setting the timer … drawing the cocking line to the pistol … and letting it go!” MacTavish narrated, a telescope to his eye, like to jump out of his skin with excitement. “McCloud and I agreed to set the clockwork for half an hour. No specific target, just a trial of all the various elements, you see, sir.”

He’ll piss his breeches, does he have t’wait for half an hour,
Lewrie cynically thought, a telescope to his own eye. The twelve-oar barge was wheeling about, fending off from the torpedo with a gaff and re-hoisting its lug-sails … in understandable haste, he also noted.

MacTavish, for all his seeming urbanity,
did
closely resemble a squirming, tail-wagging, circling puppy which would piddle in excitement. He collapsed the tubes of his glass and became rivetted to his pocket-watch, a fine one that had a second hand in addition to the usual minute and hour hands. The fellow paced, stewed, fretted, peered at his watch, and fussed with the set of his coat and waist-coat, his neck-stock, and (unconsciously) his crutch.

The barge returned, Lt. Johns and McCloud came upon deck, and the boat crew led her aft for towing. Long minutes passed. As a half-hour slowly ticked by, Lt. Johns and McCloud caught the fidgets, too, coughing and ahumming and now and then putting their heads together with MacTavish for urgent whispered conversations.

Lewrie looked at his own watch. If MacTavish was right, their torpedo would explode in five minutes. He lifted his telescope again, looking for the device, but could not find it any longer. That black-painted upper hemisphere hid it from sight most effectively, even with a slight chop and bright sunlight shining off the white-glittering wave tops; the damned thing should have had a ring of revealing foam around it.
Unless it had sunk, of course,
Lewrie thought.

“Ehm, sirs…,”
Fusee
’s Midshipman piped up, coughing into his fist for attention. “Sirs? Ahem? That trading brig coming out from the river. Should we warn her off, or something?”

Lewrie wasn’t the only one who raised a telescope, or scrambled for one. Sure enough, a small two-masted merchantman was rounding the point east of Bradwell Waterside and standing out to sea, sails trimmed to broad-reach the Nor’easterly breezes.

“Could she be anywhere near your torpedo, Mister MacTavish?” Lt. Johns fretted aloud.

“What was the rate of the tide, Mister McCloud?” Lewrie asked the artificer. “In half an hour, could it have…?”

“Nae muir than four or five knots, I judged eet, sae…,” McCloud tried to shrug off.

“Pencil and paper!” MacTavish cried.

“My slate, sir?” the Midshipman offered.

“Think we
should
warn her off?” Lewrie suggested.

“Warn her, aye, sir!” Lt. Johns hurriedly agreed.

“How?” Lewrie further asked. “You have signal rockets?”

“We could fire a gun!” Johns barked, turning to order his small crew to man one of
Fusee
’s puny 6-pounders.

“And what’ll they make o’ that?” Lewrie snapped.

“I … don’t know, sir!” Lt. Johns replied, stunned to inaction.

“Five knots’ drift for half an hour, that’s two knots’ progress … on a course roughly Northwest…,” MacTavish was mumbling half to himself, a stub of chalk squeaking loudly on the Midshipman’s borrowed slate. He paused to raise an arm to where he judged the torpedo first had been released, his other arm to mark a rough course of drift; then he fumbled to trade slate and chalk for his telescope once more. “Well, damme, I think … yes, it’ll be wide of the mark.
Sure
to be wide of the mark.”

Once clear of the shoals, the little merchant brig hardened up a point or two to the winds to sail on a beam reach, angling further out to sea, as if to pass well to windward of the anchored bomb and frigate, without a clue or a care in the world.

“Safe as sae meeny houses,” McCloud predicted, his thumbs stuck in the pockets of his waist-coat. “We’ll miss her by a mile or—”

BOOM!

A gigantic column of spray and foam liberally mixed with dark clouds of exploded gunpowder sprang up from the sea … tall enough to tower over the brig’s mast-head trucks, between her and the shore.

“Oh shit,” Lewrie breathed.

Hope her owner has insurance,
he further thought.

“One half-hour to the minute, sirs,” the Midshipman meekly said.

“My
God
!” from MacTavish.

“Weel, hmm,” from McCloud.

A shiver in the sea from the explosion was transmitted to
Fusee
to rattle her blocks, up through her hull to the tiny quarterdeck, to make the oak planks shudder for a second or two.

“What have we done? Dear Lord, what have we done?” Mr. MacTavish was almost whimpering, about ready to tear his hair out by the roots.

“Weel, eet
deed
wirk, sir, sae…,” McCloud tried to comfort him.

Lewrie took another long look. The merchant brig had hardened up to a close-reach; it was the wind pressing her sails that made her heel over more steeply, not the blast of the torpedo. She sailed off to their right-hand side, revealing that titanic column of spray and foam that was collapsing upon itself like a failing geyser, at least a mile inshore of the brig, but closer to the mouth of the Colne river than the centre of Mersea Island, as MacTavish had planned.

“That’ll put the wind up him,” Lewrie commented sarcastically. “Perhaps the whole coast. Mister MacTavish, did you or Admiralty warn the locals of your trials?”

“Well, of course not, Captain Lewrie!” MacTavish snapped back. “They are to be secret!”

“Well, it don’t look too secret, now,” Lewrie told him with a wry grin as he lifted his telescope once more. What fishing smacks that had been out off the coast were haring shoreward. Signal rockets were soaring aloft from Clackton-on-Sea, and a semaphore tower’s arms were whirling madly, the large black balls at their ends passing on a message to somewhere most urgently.

They were a bit too far offshore to see or hear the alarm their torpedo’s explosion had caused, but Lewrie could only imagine they had stirred up a hornet’s nest; militia drums would be rattling, mustering bugles would be ta-rahing, and the womenfolk would be dashing about in a dither, sure that the mysterious blast had been a fiendish French device, sure sign of imminent invasion!

“Good Lord, sir, do you imagine that the locals might think our torpedo was a…?” Lt. Johns gasped, aghast at the implications.

“I’m going back aboard
Reliant,
Mister Johns,” Lewrie told him, wishing he could wash his hands of the entire endeavour, that minute. “I think the best action on our part would be to slink away … very quietly and quickly, and practice saying’, ‘Who, me?’ ”

“And declare my torpedoes a failure, sir?” McTavish said with a snort; now that the brig had escaped all harm, he was back on his high horse.

“It did work, sir,” Lewrie rejoined, “But I don’t think more trials on
our
coast are a good idea. You wish to try them in the conditions they’ll face if accepted? Better we go mystify and frighten the French, in a real Channel tide-race.”

“Well, right, then … in the Channel, yes,” MacTavish relented. “Yes, it did work, didn’t it?” he declared, beginning to strut a bit in pride of his invention. “Boulogne, perhaps. The harbour where they’re marshalling their forces.”

“Uhm, perhaps someplace less well-defended, first,” Lewrie said. “Let me think of something. For now, Mister Johns, get under way and follow me at two cables’ distance. We’re off for France.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Lt. Johns enthused, all but licking his chops.

And get as far away from the results of our handiwork as we can!
Lewrie thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Are you quite sure this is a good idea, sir?” Lt. Westcott had to ask one more time, just before Lewrie departed the ship. “I could go in your place.”

“Our people are still leery of the damned things, sir,” Lewrie replied, patting himself down for essential items before going down to one of their cutters, where his Cox’n, Liam Desmond, and his boat crew awaited him. “I can’t ask any of them t’deal with ’em if someone does not lead the way. Don’t worry, Mister Westcott … do we launch enough of them, your turn will come.”

“Very well, sir,” Westcott said with a resigned sigh. “Best of luck, sir.”

“Thankee, Mister Westcott.
Reliant
is yours for the time being. Keep her off the mud,” Lewrie said, first formally, then with a laugh. He doffed his hat, then descended the man-ropes and battens to the boat, leaping the last few feet to stumble into the arms of his oarsmen, and then scrambling aft to its stern-sheets, by Desmond.

“Shove off, bow man,” Desmond ordered, his voice muted in conspiratorial fashion. “Out oars, starboard, and make a bit o’ way … out oars, larboard, and pull t’gither! Set the stroke, Pat.”

Reliant
and
Fusee
had closed the French coast after full dark, creeping in with leadsmen in the fore chains sounding the depths to a distance of two miles offshore, where both had anchored to single bowers, both vessels completely darkened. Despite the mugginess of a warm Summer night, all the oarsmen had been ordered to wear their dark blue jackets and tarred black hats, just as Lewrie had donned his old plain coat and doubled it over his chest to hide the whiteness of his shirt. The night was so dark that the only way Desmond knew how to steer for
Fusee
was to make out the foam breaking round her waterline.

The shore was much easier to see, even two miles off, for the towns of St. Valery sur Somme and Le Crotoy were lit up with street lanthorns or storefront lamps, one town to either side of the mouth of the Somme river and the deep bay axed into the shore between them. It was easier, too, to make out the many riding lights of an host of anchored
péniches
and
caïques
in the small harbours and up either bank of the river; so many wee riding lights that the flotillas resembled an extension of the towns that had flooded down the shoreline to fill the entire bay.

“Mister Merriman still behind us, Desmond?” Lewrie asked, looking astern.

“Seems t’be, sor,” Desmond replied after a quick peek for the splash of oars—darkened oars, not their usual natty white and gay blue. Even both cutters’ hulls had been smeared with galley soot.

Lewrie patted himself down once more, seeking his small boat compass, the hilt of his hanger, and his pair of double-barrelled pistols, his powder flask and leather pouch for spare cartouches. How he could
read
his compass without a candle would be another matter.

“Hoy, the boat!” someone called as they neared
Fusee
.