'Mr Rogers,' he hailed, 'I directed you to attack the invasion craft!'
Rogers waved airily behind him. 'Mr Q's gone in pursuit, sir.' The first lieutenant's unconcern was infuriating.
'You may take possession, Mr Rogers, and retain the quarter-boat. Direct Gorton and Mount to follow me in the launch!'
Rogers's crestfallen look brought a measure of satisfaction to Drinkwater, then they were past the brig and Drinkwater realised he had not even read her name as they had swept under her stern windows. Tregembo swung the boat to larboard as the invasion craft came into view.
Smaller than the brig and clearly following some standing order of the brig's commander, they had made off under oars as soon as Rogers's attack materialised. They were about a mile and a half distant and were no longer headed away from the brig. Seeing they were pursued by only a single boat they had turned, their oars working them round to confront their solitary pursuer. Mr Quilhampton's quarter-boat still pressed on, about half a mile from the French and a mile ahead of Drinkwater.
'Pull you men,' he croaked, his mouth suddenly dry; then, remembering an old obscenity heard years ago, he added, 'pull like you'd pull a Frenchman off your mother.'
There was an outbreak of grins and the men leaned back against their oars so that the looms fairly bent under the strain and the blades flashed in the sunshine and sparkled off the drops of water that ran along them, linking the rippled circles of successive oar-drips in a long chain across the oily surface of the sea. Drinkwater looked astern. The white painted carvel hull of the big launch was following them, but it was much slower. Drinkwater could see the black maw of the carronade muzzle and wished the launch was ahead of them to clear the way. The thought led him to turn his attention to the enemy. Did they have cannon? They would surely be designed to carry them in the event of invasion but were they fitted at the building stage or at the rendezvous? He was not long in doubt. A puff of smoke followed by a slow, rolling report and a white fountain close ahead of Quilhampton's boat gave him his answer. And while he watched Quilhampton adjust his course, a second fountain rose close to his own boat. For a second the men wavered in their stroke, then Tregembo steadied them. An instant later half a dozen white columns rose from the water ahead.
Beside him Tyrrell muttered, 'My God!' and Drinkwater realised the hopelessness of the task. What could three boats do against ten, no twelve, well-armed and, Drinkwater could now see, well-manned boats armed with cannon. One carronade was going to be damn-all use.
'Stand up and wave, Mr Tyrrell.'
'I beg pardon, sir?'
'I said stand up and wave, God damn you! Recall Quilhampton's boat before we are shot to bits!'
'Aye, aye, sir.' Tyrrell stood and waved halfheartedly.
'I said wave, sir, like this!' Drinkwater jumped up and waved his hat above his head furiously. Someone at the oars in Quilhampton's boat saw him.
'Swing the boat round, Tregembo, I'm breaking off the attack.'
'Aye, aye, zur,' Tregembo acknowledged impassively and the barge swung round.
He waved again, an exaggerated beckoning, until Quilhampton's boat foreshortened in its turn. 'Pull back towards the launch.' He sat down, relieved. Ten minutes later the three boats bobbed together in a conferring huddle while, nearly a mile away, the French invasion craft had formed two columns and were pulling steadily eastwards.
'Well they've lost a brig, sir,' said Mount cheerfully. A ripple of acknowledgement went round the boat crews, a palliative to their being driven off by the French.
'Very true, Mr Mount, and doubtless we'll all be enriched thereby, but the smallest of those péniches can carry fifty infantry onto an English beach and you have just seen how well they can hold off the boats of a man-of-war. If the French have a few days of calm in the Channel it will not matter how many of their damned brigs are waiting to be condemned by the Prize Court, if the Prize Court ain't able to sit because a French army's hammering on the doors.' He paused to let the laboured sarcasm sink in. 'In carrying out an attack with a single boat you acted foolishly, Mr Q.' Quilhampton's face fell. Drinkwater rightly assumed Rogers had ordered him forward, but that did not alter the fact that Drinkwater had nearly lost a boat-load of men, not to mention a friend. It was clear that Quilhampton felt his public admonition acutely and Drinkwater relented. After all, there was no actual harm done and they had taken a brig, as Mount had pointed out.
'We have all been foolish, Mr Q, unprepared like the foolish virgins.'
This mitigation of his earlier rebuke brought smiles to the men in the boats as they leaned, panting on their oar looms.
'But I still have not given up those invasion craft. By the way, where's Mr Gorton?'
'Er… he was wounded when we boarded the brig, sir.' Quilhampton's eyes did not meet Drinkwater's.
'God's bones!' Drinkwater felt renewed rage rising in him and suppressed it with difficulty. 'Pull back to the ship and look lively about it.'
He slumped back in the stern of the barge, working his hand across his jaw as he mastered anger and anxiety. He was angry that the attack had failed to carry out its objective, angry that Gorton was wounded, and angry with himself for his failure as he wondered how the devil he was going to pursue the escaped invasion craft. And the parable he had cited to Quilhampton struck him as having been most applicable to himself.
Chapter Five
Ruse de Guerre
Captain Drinkwater's mood was one of deep anger, melancholy and self-condemnation. He stood on the quarterdeck of the 16-gun brig Bonaparte, a French national corvette whose capture should have delighted him. Alas, it had been dearly bought. Although surprised by the speed of Rogers's attack, the French had been alerted to its possibility. Two marines and one seaman had been killed, and three seamen and one officer severely wounded. In the officer's case the stab wound was feared mortal and Drinkwater was greatly distressed by the probability of Lieutenant Gorton's untimely death. Unlike many of his colleagues, Drinkwater mourned the loss of any of his men, feeling acutely the responsibility of ordering an attack in the certain knowledge that some casualties were bound to occur. He was aware that the morning's boat expedition had been hurriedly launched and that insufficient preparation had gone into it. The loss of three men was bad enough, the lingering agony of young Gorton particularly affected him, for he had entertained high hopes for the man since he had demonstrated such excellent qualities in the Arctic the previous summer. It was not in Drinkwater's nature to blame the sudden onset of fog, but his own inadequate planning which had resulted not only in deaths and woundings but in the escape of the invasion craft whose capture or destruction might have justified his losses in his own exacting mind.
But he had been no less hard on Rogers and Mount. He had addressed the former in the cabin, swept aside all protestations and excuses in his anger, and reduced Rogers to a sullen resentment. It simply did not seem to occur to Rogers that the destruction of the invasion craft was of more significance than the seizure of a French naval brig.
'God damn it, man,' he had said angrily to Rogers, 'don't you see that you could have directed the quarter-boats to attack the brig, even as a diversion! Even if they were driven off! You and Mount in the launch could have wrought havoc among those bateaux in the fog, coming up on them piecemeal. The others would not have opened fire lest they hit their own people!' He had paused in his fury and then exploded. 'Christ, Sam, 'twas not the brig that was important!'