‘Your first sea battle, my lord!’ cried Hugh Seymour loudly and heartily. ‘I wish you joy of it!’
Joy was not the principal emotion Ned Wilden was feeling as he stood on the quarterdeck of Sans Pareil surrounded by Seymour, several of his seven lieutenants, midshipmen, warrant officers and others. One of the scouting frigates had sighted the French fleet early on the previous morning, the enemy ships coming away from Belle-Île, some forty miles distant, with their course seemingly set for Brest. Bridport had signalled for Sans Pareil and five other ships known for their particularly good sailing qualities to move ahead of the flagship and lead the pursuit of the enemy fleet, then some twelve miles away. Seymour was all business, giving his orders briskly and without any of the tedious prolixity that Ned Wilden had often witnessed at the Admiralty table or in the clubrooms of Pall Mall. The officers and men of Sans Pareil, including the boy warrior Jack Kenton, plainly worshipped this Hugh Seymour, a version of the man that Wilden had never encountered before. But as the prospect of battle grew ever more imminent, so the bloodline of the knightly and warlike Saint Maurs of Wolf Hall shone through ever more clearly in their descendant.
All the while as Sans Pareil and her consorts closed the French fleet, Wilden’s constant attendant, the impossibly young Midshipman Kenton, was jabbering delightedly but incomprehensibly about the likes of luffing up, fore topgallants and other such nautical gibberish. Wilden needed to divert him, or at least to get him speaking words and sentences that bore some resemblance to the King’s English.
‘Will it be the first battle for you too, Mister Kenton?’
‘Oh no, my lord! I was on Barfleur last year at the Glorious First. Captain Collingwood commended me most generously to Lord Howe, most generously indeed, and Black Dick – sorry, sir, Lord Howe that is – he was most kindly to me. Before that I was on Crescent with Captain Saumarez when we beat the Réunion, afterwards on Artois with Captain Nagle when we took the Révolutionnaire. The lads in the gunroom call me Lucky Jack Kenton, I’ve seen that much action. More than most post-captains, Lord Hugh reckons, and there’s only been two years of war.’
‘Then I pray that your luck holds, Mister Kenton, and that some of it rubs off on me.’
The boy grinned.
‘Don’t fret, my lord. We’ll look after you, Lord Hugh and I.’
All through the day of the twenty-second of June the British ships pursued the enemy, but the winds were light and sometimes entirely lacking, making it a day of frustration for every man in the fleet. Now, though, on the morning of the twenty-third the sun was coming up over the far distant French mainland, and Wilden, a great lover of his bed, realised to his surprise that he had gone the entire night without sleep.
For there, there, was the enemy. There was the French, the loathsome Tricolour of their murderous republic in plain sight. Some five miles away, the distance between the two fleets having more than halved during the night despite the negligible breezes that both Seymour and Kenton bemoaned. Wilden felt an unfamiliar emotion, perhaps one-third anticipation, one-third raw hatred, one-third even rawer fear. Since the war began, the French had always been remote, a distant foe as invisible and inhuman as Satan or the ghost in The Castle of Otranto. There had been Frenchmen galore in London, royalist exiles torn from their homes and native country, and Wilden had come to know many of them well, especially during the recent preparations for the Quiberon expedition. But the French republicans, the fanatics, the Jacobins, the so-called sans-culottes, were a different matter. It had been relatively easy to imagine stratagems to defeat these faceless foes, the blood-crazed atheists who had guillotined their king and queen, but Wilden had never really imagined what it would be like to look a French republican in the eye or even just to see their flag flying from the hulls of their men-of-war.
Yet now, there they were.
The drummers beat to quarters and the men of Sans Pareil took up their positions at their battle stations. Many of them were smiling, their faces bright with anticipation of the action to come.
‘Trust the Frenchies to run, my lord!’ exclaimed the grinning Kenton with a blend of disdain and childish enthusiasm. ‘Cravens, every man of ’em!’
‘Cravens with a purpose, Mister Kenton,’ said Lord Hugh Seymour, lowering his telescope. ‘Villaret’s trying to draw us onto the lee shore, force us to turn away and give him a clear run into Lorient. Many a fine hull’s perished on Brittany’s cliffs. But that won’t concern Lord Bridport, mark my words!’
As Sans Pareil and her consorts slowly drew ever closer to the retreating French fleet, it became evident that one of the enemy ships was falling well behind the others.
‘That’s the old Alexander, my lord,’ said Kenton. ‘She was one of ours until the Frenchies took her last year. Always a shocking sailor, the old Alex, so she can’t have been any better for the Frogs. That’s Orion and Irresistible making to leeward to engage her.’
Wilden looked at his young mentor in astonishment.
‘You can tell them apart? You can tell one ship from another at this distance?’
‘Aye, of course! Begging your pardon, my lord.’
Kenton’s expression conveyed a mixture of pity and contempt in equal measures. The midshipman’s unspoken reply, you mean you can’t?, hung in the air. The notion that a man entrusted with the office of a lord of the Admiralty could not tell individual ships apart was obviously anathema to the tiny midshipman, and Wilden felt a pang of shame. This mere child, this stripling who had been a babe in arms only a very few years before, knew far more of seamanship and warfare than the fifth Baron Wilden ever would. He was already a veteran of three engagements and was surely on course for a glorious career to rival and perhaps exceed Seymour’s. Men five times his senior knuckled their foreheads to salute Jack Kenton whenever he passed them by or gave them a command. In return, Kenton knew all of their names and had a word for each and every man, words delivered with that elusive combination of good humour, unquestionable command and detached dignity that Wilden had come to recognise in Hugh Seymour and most of the lieutenants of Sans Pareil. Ned Pardew had been the fifth Baron Wilden since the day of his birth, but he was never as at ease with his social inferiors as Jack Kenton was until he was perhaps twice the age the boy was now. In truth, Wilden suspected that the young midshipman might very well already possess more assurance, innate air of command and respect from his inferiors than his noble and vastly senior charge.
Yet Wilden was about to step into Kenton’s world, Seymour’s world, Bridport’s world. The world of Mars, the world of battle. A world for which he was manifestly unsuited. Seymour had suggested that Wilden might wish to spend the duration of the coming engagement down on the orlop deck with the surgeon, but he had indignantly rejected the suggestion. Part of him wanted nothing more than to be in the lowest, safest part of the ship, for Ned Wilden was not a man in whose breast the flame of martial ardour had ever burned brightly. But a peer of England, and a lord of the Admiralty to boot, had to set an example of courage to the lower orders. Besides, he would not allow Hugh Seymour the satisfaction of seeing him scuttle below decks at the first sniff of action, giving Seymour an anecdote at Wilden’s expense that would delight many a bibulous gathering in the clubs of Mayfair. Besides, the prospect of spending several hours in the makeshift surgery on the orlop appalled a man who had always been revolted by the sight of blood. So Ned Wilden had smiled condescendingly and told Seymour that he was proud to stand, and if necessary die, beside the gallant tars of Old England. But he knew all too well that this bravado would mean one thing.
He was about to experience his first battle.
The mighty Queen Charlotte of one hundred guns was leading the British line, closely seconded by Orion, Seventy-Four. Sans Pareil and the other fast ships were close behind, Bridport’s flagship and the rest of the fleet some distance astern. The British fleet, like the French retreating ahead of them, had all sail set to try and catch the light winds, incessantly making adjustments to respond to each slight change in the negligible breeze, but even so the movements of the ships of both fleets were painfully slow. The French were trying to run for the Île de Groix, an island of only a few square miles with cliffs fringing its northern half, now little more than a mile or two away from the French vanguard. Kenton kept up a running commentary, but even the garrulous child was silent for long periods when nothing at all happened. At last, though, the ship the French called the Alexandre came within range of Bridport’s van. She put up a show of resistance from her stern guns, but the frigate that had been sent to tow her to safety swiftly abandoned the attempt when the leading British ships opened fire. Wilden watched, astonished, as Queen Charlotte’s broadsides, then those of Orion, finally poured into the stricken enemy ship, the cacophony of the guns giving Ned Wilden his baptism in a fight at sea.
Sans Pareil was coming up as rapidly as the feeble breezes allowed, but Seymour showed little inclination to engage the shattered Alexandre in his turn.
‘Isn’t she an easy prize, Admiral?’ asked Wilden, assuming the deference to which he knew Seymour was entitled on his own quarterdeck.
‘Aye, easy enough, but so easy she’ll keep. Our duty is to second Queen Charlotte, and that means we have two targets, one after the other. See that big three-decker with the Tricolour at her main, my lord? That’s their flagship, Le Peuple, one hundred and twenty gubs. That’s Villaret himself. So he’s our man, and he’s what Douglas in Queen Charlotte will have in his sights. But first, my lord, we need to grapple this fellow ahead, the one the brave old Charlotte’s now engaging. And that means Mister Kenton, here, needs to return to his station.’
Kenton saluted his admiral, nodded and smiled to Wilden, and said, ‘I wish you all good fortune, my lord, and will look forward to toasting our triumph with you.’
The boy’s cheeriness infected even the unemotional Wilden, who grinned in return.
‘I am obliged to you, Mister Kenton, and will most certainly hold you to that promise.’
Then Lucky Jack Kenton saluted Ned Wilden and went forward.
It was difficult to hear Seymour’s and Kenton’s words, or even his own, for the guns of Queen Charlotte and her French opponent – the name at the stern, now visible, revealed her to be Le Formidable – were now thundering. Wilden was accustomed to the storms that frequently rolled over into Shropshire from the Welsh hills, but he had never seen or heard anything to resemble the apocalyptic spectacle unfolding before him. The scene assailed all of his senses, for now, although the south-easterly wind carried away most of the fog of battle, he could smell the bitter tang of gunpowder. Surely battle at sea could not get more hellish?
But despite taking heavy damage in its masts and sails from the Frenchman’s guns, Queen Charlotte was already pulling ahead, her captain, a valiant Scot named Andrew Snape Douglas, intent only on duelling Villaret himself in the flagship Peuple. Seymour was fully engaged in giving his orders, all of his quarterdeck officers were absorbed in their duties, and Kenton was nowhere to be seen. Seamen scurrying hither and thither bumped into Wilden, knuckled their foreheads, gave him a perfunctory ‘sorry, m’lud’ and returned to their stations. Suddenly Wilden felt desperately alone, all too obviously a civilian thrust into a strange, perilous world for which he was not equipped and where he was not welcome. He was not even wearing a sword, a weapon he detested. He had his pistols, but they were intended to ward off London’s footpads and not France’s wooden leviathans nor the hundreds of atheist fanatics they carried. He was an encumbrance to every man on Sans Pareil, a useless passenger, an obstacle pointlessly occupying a space on the deck where a fighting man could be. He was of even less use than a widow’s man, those fictitious entities entered in ships’ books so their wages could be allotted for the relief of widows of those who fell in battle.
Sans Pareil was coming up level with Le Formidable, and even a lubber like Wilden could plainly see the terrible toll the French had already paid in their duel with Queen Charlotte. Shot holes peppered the enemy ship’s hull, her upperworks and rigging were desperately torn, bloodied bodies and parts of bodies were being thrown over the side, and a small fire had broken out on the poop deck. Astern and minute by minute, Bridport’s Royal George and the other, slower ships of the fleet were coming up to join the fray. Wilden watched, fascinated, as the starboard gun crews of Sans Pareil ran out their weapons and awaited the order they knew was coming. He saw Seymour staring intently at the enemy, judging distance, speed, wind, pitch and roll. Then the command –
‘Fire!’
More hellish by far. Wilden felt the entire hull of Sans Pareil shudder as the cannon recoiled. The flames spewing from the gun barrels were truly a vision of the infernal underworld. He thought for several moments that the broadside had surely rendered him deaf, and thanked God as he began to hear the cheers of the gun crews and the orders of their officers. The men were already reloading the guns, intent on reducing Le Formidable to matchwood. The fire on the French ship’s poop deck was now raging unchecked, and Wilden glimpsed blazing bodies immolated in the flames. But the French still resisted. The answering broadside was far feebler than that fired by Sans Pareil, but Wilden felt the impact as several shots struck the stout English oak of her starboard side. A shot severed a shroud no more than a few feet from him. A man fell to the deck, screaming with pain and clutching his stomach. None went to his aid, so Wilden ran to him, lifted him, and nearly spewed at the sight of the fellow’s guts, exposed through an ugly wound.
‘Oh Jesu,’ cried the wounded sailor, ‘oh Jesu, oh Jesu – that my Abigail be made a widow…’
Wilden looked about desperately.
‘You men!’ he shouted to two of the nearest gun crew. ‘Get this man to the surgeon!’
‘’E’s already gone, m’lud!’
‘We can’t leave our posts, m’lud!’
Wilden looked back down at the wounded man. But his eyes were frozen open, staring not at Wilden or his shipmates but into eternity. The men of the gun crew had already turned away, intent only on readying their weapon for the next broadside. Reluctantly, Wilden laid the corpse on the deck, stood, and looked around him. The deck of San Pareil was full of men attending remorselessly to their duties, their efforts punctuated by orders from those in authority. The air was thick with gunsmoke and the thicker black clouds rolling over them from the fire aboard Le Formidable. There were occasional shots from muskets and swivel guns, but for the moment the main batteries of the two combatants were silent. Sans Pareil was slowly moving away from her shattered opponent.
‘My lord! My lord, are you hit? Are you wounded, sir?’
It was Lord Mark Kerr, the sixth lieutenant, his cutlass held firmly in his hand. Of all Sans Pareil’s lieutenants, he was the only one who had shown no interest in overtly soliciting the lord of the Admiralty for advancement. But as a younger son of the Marquess of Lothian, who owned vast tracts of the Scottish border country, Lord Mark’s success in life was undoubtedly assured regardless of any intervention from elsewhere, so he had no need to fawn on anyone.
‘Wounded? No…’
Wilden looked at his hands and arms, then down to his chest, and saw that he was thoroughly smeared with the blood of the man who had died in his arms.
‘The blood of another,’ he said. ‘I am unhurt, Lord Mark.’
‘Thank God! But sir, Lord Hugh urgently requests that you go below at once!’
Wilden glanced across to the burning poop deck of Le Formidable. Despite the precariousness and sheer terror of his situation, he found it impossible to suppress a smile. As captain of Sans Pareil, Seymour was perfectly entitled to order Wilden to go below. Come to that, he was perfectly entitled to order his fellow Admiralty lord placed in irons. It was even possible that by couching it as a request rather than an order, Seymour, a man whom he had damned without reservation until so very recently, was genuinely driven by concern for Wilden’s safety. But Seymour, the consummate courtier, would not dare take the risk of treating a known confidante of the prime minister so rudely as to order him or incarcerate him.
‘My compliments to Lord Hugh, Lieutenant,’ said Wilden, ‘but I am perfectly comfortable where I am.’
‘As you say, my lord. But I reckon the battle is going to get a good deal hotter.’