C H A P T E R 3

Lewrie’s problem was being a bit “skint” himself, short of the wherewithal to pay the outrageous prices Genoese masters or captains asked for their fishing boats. So Jester had departed Genoa in mid-July without a tender. Once at sea, though, he’d simply taken a suitable vessel.

Bombolo, her owner had named her, a tartane of only forty feet in length, tubby and broad-beamed. She’d been running along the Riviera coast, fat, dumb, and happy—Thomas Mountjoy, whose command of Italian idiom was growing by leaps and bounds, told him her name meant “A Fat Person,” and was therefore particularly apt—off San Remo. There’d been no beach to ground on, no convenient inlet into which she could slip, and Jester had cut inshore of her. She was Savoian, and empty of anything of value, save for a few casks of fresh-caught fish. But she had attempted to flee, which Lewrie wrote up in his report as the sort of “suspicious activity” Nelson’s orders had warned him to be on the lookout for.

A quick palaver, at gunpoint, with her terrified captain, and the deal had been struck. With three casks of their catch in her longboat, the captain and his small crew allowed their freedom to row away—and Lewrie’s offer of £30, in silver shillings—he’d “bought” her.

“Quoins full out. When you’re quite ready, Mister Bittfield,” Lewrie ordered.

“Number one larboard gun . . . Fire! ” Bittfield shouted. A ranging shot howled away for the tiny, extemporized “fort” sited on a low bluff overlooking the entrance to the harbor of Bordighera. A sleepy town awoke to the clap of thunder, and the crunching rattle of rocky soil and shale blasted loose from the bluff, just below the redoubt.

There was an answering bang from the shore, as one of the guns in the three-gun battery returned fire, adding a bloom of smoke to the cloud of dust that hazed the morning air below the thin flagpole and French Tricolor.

“Cold iron,” Lewrie spat to Mister Buchanon, as he saw the shot fall far short, and wide to the left by at least a hundred yards. And if the battery corrected their lateral aim, they’d still fire astern of Jester, for at least their first or second full salvos.

“Number two gun . . . Fire! ” Bittfield shouted, pacing aft as if he were firing a timed salute, with the Prussian quarter-gunner Rahl almost frantic as he scampered in advance of him, tugging and trimming the aim and elevation, casting urgent glances over his shoulder to Mister Bittfield, to see if he was still scowling at him.

A touch higher, a touch to the right, that second shot; fountaining gravel and dirt just short of the low stone rampart. An officer on horseback appeared, with one or two aides, to the right of the battery, and unslung a telescope. So close was Jester to the steep-diving shore that they could hear the faint, whistle-through-your-teeth tootle of the garrison being called to battle by fifes and drums.

“Number three gun . . . Fire! ” Bittfield barked.

“Oh, bloody lovely!” Lewrie beamed.

That shot scored a direct hit on the rampart; nine pounds of iron ball striking between the two right-hand embrasures. Poor mortar, or no mortar—perhaps the wall had been quickly erected with its stones laid as loose as a Welsh pasture fence—but when the dust cleared, down it had come, creating a fourth embrasure on the seaward side, a ragged gap, with a skree-slope of tumbled rock below it.

“Number four gun . . . Fire! ”

Down the deck the tolling went, gun after gun lurching backward on its truck carriage, to chip away at the top of the rampart, smash in low on the wall, skim just over it, or pummel the soil beneath, making a pall of dust and smoke to obscure the French gunners’ aim.

“Larboard batt’ry . . . make ready for broadside!” Bittfield cried, raising a fist in the air. “Wait for it! On the uproll . . . Fire!”

Nine carriage guns went off as one, this time, shaking Jester to her very bones, reeling her sideways to windward a foot or two. A shot amputated the flagpole, bringing down the tricolor; the rest battered down a stretch of wall, flinging rocks as big as men’s heads into space. The officer on horseback fought to control his terrified, rearing mount, and the mounted aides vanished. As the dust and smoke cleared, Lewrie could see at least one French field-artillery piece laying canted on a smashed wheel and carriage through the vast gap his guns had blown.

“Mister Hyde!” Lewrie shouted, fanning in front of his face for fresh air. “Hoist the signal to Mister Knolles. Mister Buchanon, we’ll put the ship about on the larboard tack. Porter? Pipe ‘Stations for Stays’ and ready to come about!”

Little Bombolo wheeled about from her position astern and to seaward of Jester, easing the set of her conventional jib, winging out her large lateen mains’l, and bore off north for the harbor entrance. At the same time, Jester swung south into the wind, tacked, and sailed to her support, to re-engage what was left of the battery with her right-hand guns.

“Steady . . . thus,” Lewrie told the helmsmen. “All yours, Mister Bittfield!”

“Starboard batt’ry . . . ready broadside . . . on the uproll . . . Fire! ”

Closer, this time, within a quarter-mile of the shore, and even the carronades blazing away from foc’s’le and quarterdeck bulwarks. A hailstorm of round-shot savaged the entrance face of the battery, and more stone flew in the air, more gravel and dirt slipped down the hillside to patter into the sea. One shot from the French, who had gamely wheeled one of their light field guns to a spare embrasure, from that unequal combat on the sea face. A shot that went warbling low astern to raise a tiny splash seaward of Jester ’s wake. The tricolor showed itself again, risen on the stump of the flagpole by some brave soul . . . now only a little higher than an infantry regiment’s banner.

“’Ey got spirit, Cap’um,” Buchanon commented, when he took his attention off the sea to starboard for a moment.

“We’ll shoot that out of ’em, sir.” Lewrie grinned.

“Ah, ’ere’s ’at rock ledge . . . well t’starb’d. Missed it by at least a quarter-cable, sir” Buchanon grunted with professional pride. “No worries. Deep water, clear t’th’ entrance.”

With the fort so busy with Jester, and being pounded into road gravel, little Bombolo was free to breeze into the small harbor without a shot being fired at her. Around the point, behind the bluff fort, there sounded the panicky patter of musketry, fired at impossible range.

“Broadside . . . ready . . . on the uproll . . . Fire! ”

And another exchange of shots. Two French guns, this time, but still badly laid and aimed. One ball struck short, skipped twice, and struck Jester ’s starboard side, just below the mainmast chains with a dull thud. It hung for a second in the dent it had created in the oak planking just below the stout chain wale, then dribbled off to splash into the sea. The second whined overhead, not even clipping rope.

Once more the tricolor went down, as the fort shivered to the monstrous weight of iron, and the wall between the embrasures slumped. Flinty sparks, smoke, and dust flew. Then the Whoomph! of gunpowder cartridges as a reserve went off like a miniature Vesuvius, flinging rock and gravel a hundred yards offshore, creating a rising gout of smoke, and the hint of flames at its base.

“Near midchannel. Ease her, Quartermaster. We’ll enter harbor in midchannel. Mister Buchanon, hands to the braces,” Lewrie called. “Wind’s from the sou’east. Wear us for a run, with the wind large on the starboard quarter.”

Around the point and under the bluff, the land fell away toward the town on the right-hand side, the shoreline of the harbor almost a full circle, as if cut from the rocky coast with the rim of a cup, with high hills all about behind the bluff’s short peninsula. He could see that Bordighera held slim pickings. There were three shabby locally built tartanes tied up to a stone quay near the center of town, a narrow and rocky beach to the right, and a much wider, softer beach to the left of the inlet, where at least two-dozen small fishing boats no bigger than the ship’s jolly boat rested with their bows on the shingle and gravel.

Bombolo was coasting toward the quay, prompting the crews of the tartanes to flee ashore, into the streets leading uphill. But down from the battery, at least a hundred French infantry—two companies? Alan thought—that had formed a line midway between the fort and the town, were jogging townward to intercede. The mounted officer appeared again, this time at the infantrymen’s backs, his sword drawn, to spur them on.

“Mister Bittfield, that lot!” Lewrie shouted. “Load with grape and canister. Quartermaster, put your helm alee two points, to lay us closer inshore o’ those buggers.”

Pistols were popping on the quay. With his telescope, Alan saw a few men in French naval uniforms, falling back from their vessels to the buildings as Knolles’s raiding party came alongside the largest of the tartanes . No more than half-a-dozen, against Knolles’s fifteen, he thought, abandoned by the rest but still game. A swivel gun banged and a uniformed Frenchman went down. A two-pounder boat gun went off aboard Bombolo, spraying canister into the front of an impressive shorefront commercial building, and dropped another. The rest at last fled, far outnumbered and outgunned.

“Loaded an’ run out, sir,” Bittfield reported. “Range ’bout two cables. Too far forrud o’ th’ carriage-gun ports, but we’re sailin’ faster’n they can trot, sir!”

“Steady, Quartermaster. We’ll stand on a little closer. Do you be ready, Mister Bittfield.”

“Ready!” Bittfield yelled to his gun captains. Tacklemen and loaders, rammermen and powder monkeys stepped dear of recoil, of the rope tackle that could ensnare a foot and have it off. Lanyards were pulled taut to the flint-lock strikers. Quarter-gunner Rahl, more used to the employment of artillery against troops in the field, scampered onto the forecastle, after directing the train of the forward-most gun.

The French soldiers were intent on getting to the quay, to stop Knolles from taking those small coasters, of getting into the town and the main square just above the quay, to volley or snipe from cover. A moment more, Lewrie thought, wondering if those local charts were right, and he had depth enough along that shore. But for the creak and groan of the hull, the swash of water, and the rustle of the wind and sails, it was, for a moment, peacefully silent. He could distinctly hear the rattle and thud of boots on the roadway, of musket butts clapping upon bayonet scabbards and sheathed short swords, canteens and metal plates and cups hung from knapsacks tinkering one another, as they jogged at the double-quick.

“Helm up to windward, Quartermaster. Lay us parallel to them,” Lewrie said at last.

“ Wait for it!” Bittfield soothed as Jester swung her bows about, and the shoreline road and its panting target appeared in the gun ports. “Wait for ittt! ” He squatted to point over the number one nine-pounder.

“Nein, Herr Bittfield!” Rahl countered from the foc’s’le. “ Der mitte kanon! Middle, zir!” He fanned his hands to mime the spread of shot of a full-dozen barrels; carronades and long guns. “ Verbreitung . . . der spread!”

Bittfield swore under his breath, but trotted aft to the waist. Wiser than the small French garrison, the Savoians of Bordighera had gone to earth, or run for the hills above their hard-scrabble little town. The dusty harbor street down which the infantry pounded, among the first shantylike outlying homes and tiny shops, was shuttered and closed, not even a dog or curious cat in sight.

“Proceed, Mister Bittfield.

“On the uproll . . . !” Bittfield screeched, drawing breath for his final shout.

The mounted officer reined in his horse savagely, making it rear once more, as if suddenly realizing he’d bitten off more than he or his men could chew. The rear-rank men at the tail of the column, the file closest to the low stone boundary markers of the shoreline road, suddenly shrank in on themselves, looking over their shoulders, hunched as pensioners.

“Fire!”

It was not over three hundred yards from ship to shore when that broadside erupted. Canister, so Army artillery texts stated, was most effective out to nearly five hundred yards. And, in Army usage, Jester carried the equivalent of three four-gun batteries—a battalion of guns!

The ship shuddered and complained with wooden groans as gun smoke blotted out the view. Ashore, it was an avalanche that swept everything away in a twinkling. Dust flew, low shrubbery wavered and frothed, and the stucco fronts of low houses and shops were dimpled and crazed to the brick beneath, and roof tiles were flung into the air, some in shards, or whole. Precious glass windows shattered, wood shutters and awnings disappeared, all those screechings and crashings lost in the terror-stricken wails—the death screams— of the infantrymen, who were scythed away. Plebeian dun stucco was splattered or sheeted with gore. The officer’s horse was flung over a waist-high fence of a pigsty, its rider—minus an arm and a leg—flung the opposite direction, and his gleaming sword did a silvery pirouette, twirling over and over.

When the smoke cleared, there weren’t a dozen Frenchmen who still stood, to stagger blindly away. For another long moment, all was quiet. Then the moaning began, the panicky yelps and whimpers of the dying, as they felt themselves over to discover their mortal hurts.

“Reload,” Lewrie barked, though his knees juddered as he beheld the enormity, and the suddenness, of that slaughter. “Round-shot this time, Mister Bittfield.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the master gunner muttered, in awe himself. “Mister Buchanon, hands to the braces. Ready to wear about, to the larboard tack. We’ll circle the harbor, until Mister Knolles has way on the prizes. Mister Porter? Clew up courses and tops’ls. Keep way on her with t’gallants, jibs, and spanker.”

“Fire on the town, sir?” Bittfield inquired from the gun deck. “Those fishin’ boats?”

“No, Mister Bittfield.” Lewrie grimaced. “No call to ruin the civilians’ lives. Unless we’re fired upon, that is. Andrews?”

“Heah, sah,” his cox’n replied, leaving his quarterdeck carronade.

“Three prizes, and Bombolo to manage. Take my gig, with a full boat crew, and row over to join Mister Knolles’s party. My compliments to him on his quick seizure, and he is to get them underway as soon as possible. He is to . . .” Lewrie ordered, then paused, looking astern. “He is to lay off the entrance, until I join him. I’ll be tending to that damn’ battery.”

“Aye aye, sah.” Andrews nodded, dashing off to gather the men who usually made up the captain’s boat crew.

“Sergeant Bootheby?” Lewrie called. “Mister Porter? Join me on the quarterdeck, if you please.”

“Sah!” Jester ’s most-senior Marine barked, in his best parade-ground fashion. The Admiralty put little faith in the abilities of a lowly second lieutenant to lead a shipboard detachment. Post-ships got a Marine captain, with at least one lieutenant as his assistant, while vessels below the rate such as Jester rated only a senior, but experienced, noncommissioned officer.

“Mister Porter, lead the cutter and jolly boat around from the stern,” Lewrie instructed. “Full crews for both boats. Sergeant, I would like you to take your men ashore, and spike those guns. Better yet, tumble them down the bluff, into the sea. Take powder and oil . . . so you may set their carriages alight, too. I’ll send Mister Meggs the armorer, and Mister Crewe the gunner’s mate, to assist you. We’ve shot most of the garrison to rags, I expect, so there should be little opposition.”

“Aye aye, sah!” Sergeant Bootheby bellowed fiercely, pleased to get a chance to shine at something more useful than polishing brass.

“We’ll debark your party as we sail back out toward the bluff. Five minutes, I make it, before we let you slip. Hurry.”

Lewrie looked back toward the quay as Bootheby assembled troops, calling some of them from the guns to dash below and fetch their coats and hats, spatter-dash gaiters, belts, and gear. Knolles had the lines cast off, and the first rags of sail were being hoisted.

Andrews with the gig was almost to them, and he could see shouted exchanges as his cox’n relayed his orders.

Above Bordighera, some civilians at last showed themselves, on the rocky, low-shrubbed heights. No threat there . . . yet, Alan thought grimly, as he eyed them with his glass. No sign of reinforcements, or that Bordighera had had a larger garrison. The crowd grew larger, and thinking themselves safely distanced, began to wave their fists, shout silent imprecations and curses. A few mounted men, waving swords about in the air, though they were dressed as civilians. No, there were some few men in uniform climbing up to them, stragglers from the tartanes , he surmised; in French Navy uniforms, what appeared to be a lieutenant leading them. No sign of firearms, though. Or not too many, he told himself. At that distance, it would be hard to discern a musket from a manure fork!

What could they be so angry about? he wondered. They were Savoians, conquered by Frogs, ripped away from their longtime allegiance to Sardinia!

Rather a lot of fit young men up there, he frowned; and them the angriest. Don’t tell me they prefer the Frogs, he gawped to himself! Worse than Yankee Doodles, I swear . . . !

Throw off your kings, your princes, the French cooed. Stand up and be free men, with liberty, equality, fraternity for all. Had their blandishments taken root here, in tiny, sleepy Bordighera? In spite of how butcherous the French Revolution really was, how two-faced the real motives were . . . they weren’t out to liberate Europe, they were out for conquest and domination! . . . as callous and canting . . .

Well, there was Holland. Sensible damned people, peaceful, and prosperous. In point of fact, rather a damned dull people, the ones he had met. Yet thousands had been elated to see their nation conquered, a Batavian Republic proclaimed, and thousands more had enlisted in the army, to fight alongside the Frogs. What on earth, Lewrie puzzled; it don’t make sense, the allure the Frogs had on people!

He lowered his glass as the quartermasters steered Jester along the western beach, crabbing up into the wind and preparing to tack, to make a short board across the harbor toward the peninsula, and those bluffs, where the shattered battery still smoldered. The winds were scant, as usual, and she barely ghosted. Across her bows, Lieutenant Knolles aboard Bombolo was leading out their prizes toward the entrance channel. Waving and shouting in glee. Lewrie counted heads. Not a single man down, no casualties! That’d make good reading in his report.

“We could wear off th’ wind, sir,” Buchanon suggested. “Or we could fetch-to. Light as ’is wind be, do we bare a jib or th’ driver, it’d be as good as heavin’ in on a spring line, ’thout anchorin’.”

“Fetch-to, Mister Buchanon,” Lewrie decided. “So we may keep the larboard battery directed at the shoreline road. Should that mob work up its courage, the sight of our guns should daunt ’em.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Landing party’s ready, sir!” Porter reported.

“Away, the landing party, Mister Porter.”

Now he could do nothing but wait. Oh, a dashing captain might go ashore himself. That made hellish-good reading in reports, too, at the Admiralty. Made for good fiction, Lewrie snorted in derision; the plucky, aspiring young captain at the head of his troops, doing what a junior officer was hired on for. Lieutenants were expendable; and he’d been “expended,” or nigh to it, often enough in his past to know that, now hadn’t he? Under the right circumstances, he still might have to exert himself beyond his captain’s role. But if one wished officers in one’s wardroom to aspire, one gave them first shot at the sharp end of the dirty stick, and didn’t go about trying to hog all the glory at their expense. How else were they to rise, without getting their name mentioned in dispatches? They usually resented that type of captain.

A quarter-hour of fidgeting and fretting that his plan misfired, that he hadn’t thought of everything. A captain’s proper duties, Alan glowered, worrying without showing it; about French cavalry, a battalion appearing over the heights, a battery of siege guns that might just be in-transit on the coast road toward San Remo and pop up to take Jester under fire, forcing him to sail off or lose her, abandoning the Marines. Survivors lurking in the kinky shrubs behind the battery, sniping and skirmishing. A French warship happening by out to sea, espying smoke from the bluff, and . . . That damned mob gathering its courage?

At last!

Smoke curling and wavering over the battery. Thicker smoke and the red flicker of flames as field carriages, wheels, limbers, and shot and powder caissons were set ablaze. A gun barrel, man-hauled by rope about its cascabel, went rumbling down the steep slope of the entrance face, to tumble and roll, turning muzzle-up as the heavier weight of the breech dragged it. And trailing a plume of dust, gravel, and rock behind it as it fell, so that it looked as if it reeked powder smoke after being fired. A second followed it, and with his telescope, he could determine that Meggs and Crewe had done a very thorough job of it; trunnions blown or hammered off, making it impossible to mount it on a carriage again, even should the French recover it from the shoal beneath the bluffs.

As overburdened as the supply roads already were, useless but valuable guns sent back to a foundry to be recast or repaired might be an even greater delay to the French, taking precious draught animals from moving things forward! Lewrie strongly suspected they’d rust out where they lay, alongside the detritus of Roman triremes, till the Last Trumpet, too hard to dredge for, or raise.

Bootheby and his Marines appeared, a slim scarlet snake curving down the bluff road. A fife and drum playing, a short column of twos tramping in good order, with skirmishers thrown out ahead and to both sides. And sailors in slop clothing a shambling blot in the rear. A five-minute march, and they’d be at the boats again. Lewrie heaved a huge sigh of relief. It was almost done. He turned to look at Bombolo, which drifted bare-poled about one cable seaward of the channel. There was no signal from her that an enemy ship had come into sight, either!

That mob . . .

Finally, they were moving downhill, the mounted men leading them. Nothing like an army, it was still a righteous but disordered mob, with women and children alongside. No fight in them, Lewrie thought with even more relief; they just want a good excuse to shout. Probably hasn’t been this much excitement in Bordighera since the Crusades, he allowed himself to chuckle.

And along the eastern shore road, where the two French companies had been slaughtered. Hullo, there were Bordigherans there, he started. No, no threat in them, either. Old women in black, a few younger women in gayer gowns, some gaffers and kids.

Keening and wailing over the broken dead, some of them.

The wind brought thin screams, wails, and prayers to Jester, as civilians raised their hands in supplication, beat their breasts, and wrenched at their undone hair, throwing their heads back to howl like hounds in mourning.

“’Ey’ve profesh’nal mourners back home beat all hollow, sir,” Buchanon grunted, as the civilians began to drag off the badly wounded, or prop up those lesser hurt and get them to their feet to stagger off, crying and weeping with agony.

“Might give these local lads a bellyful of war, Mister Buchanon,” Lewrie spat. “ Were they of a mind to volunteer before, well . . .”

“Mourners, my eyes, sir!” Buchanon said with an outraged snort. “Looters, more like. Look yonder, sir.”

Sure enough, once Lewrie raised his telescope again, he could see pockets being turned out, boots and stockings stripped off, the bloody knapsacks being rifled. Taking his first close-up look at his handiwork, Lewrie could view horribly wounded men being rolled over, so the looters could get at their valuables, flailing their hands weakly, or screaming in protest, shaking their heads to be left alone to die, in peace. Those hands being stripped of rings, bloody purses, or tobacco pouches torn away from punctured waistcoat pockets. Urchin children quarreling over corpses, and their pitiful wealth, like buzzards. A few of the younger women honestly grieved, and took no part in looting.

Simple little fishing-town girls, Lewrie thought, bedazzled by romantic young soldiers, so exotic, from so far away, bragging about booty and plunder and glory. When conquered, there were always those who’d snuggle up to the victors who could offer power, money, or food when everyone else went hungry. Or could offer novel adventure, love . . . yet even a few of those weeping young girls had the common sense to pick their dying lovers’ pockets. For mementos. Or a token of security for their own precarious futures.

“Mister Bittfield!” Lewrie howled. “A round-shot over their heads! Well over, mind. But scare those harpies off!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Boom! went a larboard nine-pounder, its ball a rising black dash-mark aimed with the quoin below the breech fully out. A redoubling of the wailing ashore, but for their own safety now as they scattered, running in all directions, skirts hiked up to their knees. The shot struck earth a full mile away, but they weren’t to know that. Again, the road was as empty of life as it had been just after the broadside.

Another, larger boom! atop the bluff, as the assembled powder charges and spare kegs exploded. Another Vesuvius-like eruption that flung charred gun tools and carriage timbers into the mid-morning sky, and a patter of rock and gravel that rained down as far as the Marines re-embarking on the narrow beach.

The mob, which had been so intent upon re-entering their town, perhaps advancing toward the battery, had also scattered to the four winds. Bordighera was as devoid of people, of a sudden, as Stonehenge.

Five minutes more, Lewrie swore, pulling out his watch in spite of his best intentions to appear calm and unruffled. The boats would be back alongside, the people aboard, and he could quit this horrible place. And he didn’t much care if those three tartanes were full of gold bullion. He didn’t much care for the taste in his mouth.

• • •

“All well, Sergeant Bootheby?” he asked, as the last Marines and sailors gained the gangway, and the boats were led astern for towing once more.

“Not a scratch, sir!” Bootheby boasted, his grizzled bear-face glowing with pleasure in a soldier’s proper job well done. “And thank you, Captain sir! From me and all the lads. That were a rare treat, sir. Anytime, sir. We’re ready, anytime.”

“Damn’ well done, Sergeant, and aye, I’ll keep that in mind,” Lewrie promised, smiling now that they could depart. “Mister Buchanon? Hands to sheets and halliards. Hands to the braces. Get sail on her, and get us underway. Once around the point, and well offshore, set a course for Vado Bay.”

“With pleasure, sir,” Buchanon agreed, working his mouth as if he’d been chewing on something disagreeable, too.