"That'd be just enough visibility for us to warp out and row," Lewrie speculated, tossing away his ruler and dividers. "Sound our way down to the entrance in the log boom, then set course through the Gullet. Hug the coast all the way, so they won't even know we're in place until the first shell. Let's be at it, then. Cony, my respects to the bosun, and he's to sound 'All Hands.' Stations for leaving harbour."
"I think I can see now," Lewrie enthused, aloft in the fore-top. It had been hours before they could make anything out farther off than a quarter-mile, and had more felt their way east, than anything else. But they had TMe anchored now in four fathoms of water, east of St. Margaret in a little cove where the Hieres Road ran close along cliffs which were much lower than the rest of that daunting coast, where that road dipped between two hills into a depression. "That's it, I think."
"Has to be La Garde, sir," Lieutenant Scott muttered, spying the place out with his own telescope. "Now the fog's burned off enough… sure to be. The only hill west of the ridge. Circular central keep, with four arms and circular ends. Just clear enough…"
Scott traded his telescope for a sextant and slate.
"I make it a mile and three-quarters, sir," he concluded. "And it appears we're anchored broadside-to."
Lewrie looked at his watch: quarter 'til ten in the morning and nothing stirring yonder, due to the fogs. The French had been bunded as effectively as everyone else on such a gloomy morning. There was a wind up now, from the sou'west, blowing into the cove quite briskly, and rattling a chop against the base of the cliffs, ruffling wavelets over the wide, shingly beach to their right. A wind which would blow their powder smoke away quickly, making it difficult for the French to discover their position. It might even take them a while to find that it wasn't a new mortar battery installed at Fort St. Margaret itself!
"Let's give it another quarter-hour, Mister Scott. Let Don Luis have a peek at it, and then we'll open fire," Lewrie decided.
"Aye, sir. I'll fetch him."
By the time Don Luis de Esquevarre, his aspirante and sergeant-gunner Huelva had ascended the mast, though, the fog had been blown clearer. Fort La Garde was no longer nebulous, but sharp-edged in the telescopes, and Don Luis was eager to open upon them at once, pleading that it would take hours to further reduce the place. It was a masonry fort, after all!
"Bueno," Lewrie grinned, clapping Esquevarre on the shoulder. "We begin, Don Luis. Si. Fuego."
Lewrie went back to the deck by a standing backstay while Comandante Esquevarre and his aides had to use the lubber's hole in the top and clamber down the ratlines and shrouds with landsmen's clumsiness. A full ten minutes was spent inspecting safety precautions, just to be sure no one had omitted a step in the drill due to overfamiliarity or boredom. The gun deck was running with water from the pumps, the companionway to the orlop was trickling sea water, the magazine passage was wetted down from overhead to decking, the felt screen was soaked, the hides were up in the laboratory aft… Only four kegs of powder were aft to fill shells at any one time, the excess covered with wet haircloth, the fuse chest covered except for extraction of the called-for timing. Thirty-two-pounder great-guns empty and tompioned, bowsed up to the port sills, and only two sets of slow match burning in the mortar well, properly guarded.
"Garguen los morteros," Esquevarre ordered. "Garguen a bombardear."
The left-hand mortar was prepared, the touch hole reamed out and primed with fine-mealed powder. The tallow seal was scraped off the top end of the fuse. "Fosforo… preparado… fuego!"
Another day of noise and smoke had begun.
"Over… and left, sir!" Mister Midshipman Spendlove shouted down from the fore-top. "At the foot of the hill!"
"Close, for a first try," Lewrie beamed, as the aspirante told his commander what that meant in Spanish. Esquevarre fiddled with the traverse a touch, cranked in a tiny change in elevation for the right-hand mortar whilst the left hand was being thoroughly swabbed out. Up came a powder charge. Out came a fixed shell.
"Fosforo… preparado… fuego!"
Blam went the world, loud as thunder at one's elbow, rocking the floating battery so hard it felt like she'd been hit with a substantial slab of cliff.
"On target! Right in the center, sir!" Spendlove screamed with delight. "Spot-on! Yayy, give 'em another!"
"Carry on, sir," Lewrie laughed. Damme, but we've gotten main-good at this service, he thought smugly, going to the ratlines to go aloft to enjoy the morning's work.
With French and British help to do the carrying, they got into a rhythm of one shell a minute. It took the French at least ten to even begin to respond, and their first shots in reply were directed at the closest coastal fort, St. Margaret, just as Lewrie had thought. And he didn't think the small garrison there enjoyed being taken for the goat.
Within an hour of hot practice, the fire from La Garde began to slack off. It had been furious for a while, shells dropping all over on the cliffs, on either side of the saddle between the hills, probing far afield, into the cove and upon the beach as they shot over initially.
Then the first shell came singing overhead with a whistling moan. It landed far out to sea, perhaps half a mile away, to splash a feather of spray, then burst. A minute later there came a second, also an over, more off the bows, to their right, but closer in.
"They're correcting to our smoke," Lewrie sneered to Spendlove as yet a third shell followed the same path, and blew up close to shore but far to the right, almost dead on their bows. The wind was veering, more from the west now, ragging then-stupendous powder pall eastward, lower to the water before it collided with the back eddies off the bluffs, so it might appear to the French that a gun-boat was hidden in a cove even farther east, where it at last arose beyond the lip of the cliffs.
"Just as long as they can't see our fore-top, sir?" Spendlove inquired, full of good cheer. Nothing tremulous to that young man's tone!
"It's barely over the saddle, e'en so, Mister Spendlove," Lewrie chuckled. "And with no topmast standing?"
"Preparado… fuego!" BLAM!
They turned to the next fall-of-shot. They were firing 3,080 yards: twenty-seven seconds of flight time for a shell, with a quim-hair less than a six-inch fuse, and four drams shy of twenty pounds of powder down the chamber of the mortar. Zele was shuddering like a kicked hound to each shot. In the fore-top that resulted in a shock, then a sway, judders so short and sharp it felt like the mast was going to be kicked out of its step far below on the keel.
'Twenty-five… twenty-six… twenty-sev… hit!" Spend-love said with glee, as he had every shot of the morning, hit or miss.
Brumm! La Garde groaned, as a section of tumbled wall was blown out, massive blocks of masonry sent flying like so many rooks, scared from one gleaning to the next by a farmer's fowling piece. Dirty rags of smoke gushed out behind them, gunpowder-tan at first, then darkening as other things began to burn in the aftermath of a magazine strike to grow to a spreading, wind-flattened pillar of smoke worthy of a burning city.
And a shell splashed down behind Zele, out to sea on her starboard side. But close enough to rock her when the fuse burned down underwater and made it explode as it sank to the rocky bottom.
"Found us," Lewrie frowned. "Well, it only took the clowns over an hour, this time. That may have been their parting shot, though."
Esquevarre kept on throwing a shell a minute at La Garde. Once more, though, there was a shell thrown back-two, in fact One burst on the beach, scooping up a hail of gravel to add to its shattered iron cloud of shrapnel. Rocks and metal slivers pattered in a rain into the sea between the beach and the larboard bows. The second shell struck in the middle of the cove, equally between their floating battery and shore. And even on the fore-top, Lewrie and Spendlove were doused by spray.