Lewrie forced himself to enter the magazine, crouched low under the coiling smoke, coughing his lungs out, even so. The felt screen in the doorway was still wet and cool, the door slimy with water. Farther aft, the wooden bulkheads were only slightly warm yet. He felt over a pile of paper cartridges, sickly slick and tacky with water. He worked in the dark-Bittfield, their senior gunner's mate, had extinguished all the lanterns in the glassed-in light room which usually illuminated the magazine. Lewrie's feet slipped and slid in a slurry of wet gunpowder, gritty but soaked. He almost wet himself when he realised it. Normally, only felt or list slippers could be worn in the magazine to avoid sparks; no matter how careful the yeomen of the powder were, a small amount always spilled, and one scrape of shoe leather could set it off like a bomb! He heard trickling water.
God, yes! Forward there was a tin-lined water tank, used by the galley to fill the steep-tubs to simmer rations, and as a fire reserve. Bittfield had axed his way through the overhead planking and punctured it, hang the risk of a spark when his steel axehead had bitten into it. The tank was slowly emptying itself into the magazine, gurgling in shoe-heel deep. He felt the massive kegs in the dark. They were wet to the touch. Though Lewrie felt his "nutmegs" had shriveled up to the size of capers, he decided that the magazine would be safe just long enough for them to get away before it blew. There was double-banked timber on all sides, top and bottom, which would only smoulder and char… for a while. His hideous duty done, he quite happily fled. "All clear, sir," Lisney coughed and wheezed at him when he came forward to the companionway, where there was at least the hope of air and a little light. Lisney was fuming that he'd taken so long, that he could not flee himself until Lewrie did.
Can't say that I blame him, Alan thought.
"Hatchets," Lewrie barked, between coughs. "Take the ladders, too. Break 'em loose, then we'll haul 'em up after us."
"Aye, sir," Lisney whined, impatient to be away. "Hoy, lads!"
It was a matter of seconds to break the ladders free, to scamper to the gun deck, then sling them upward and to the side. Lewrie followed them to the larboard side, the lee, and looked over. There was no more he could do. It was time to go.
"Half of 'em sir," Spendlove wailed, standing on the fore-chain platform, clinging to taut stays. "They just lit out for the beach, and I couldn't stop them! Didn't wait to help, or…"
"It's alright, Mister Spendlove," Lewrie said, peeling off his uniform coat. "They can't help it."
He swung a leg over the bulwarks and stepped down beside Spendlove, on the chain platform. It was only eight or so feet more to the water, but it looked one hellish-far drop. Terrified as he'd been down in the magazine, well… it didn't hold a candle to this!
No wonder they lit out, he shuddered, taking a look aft along the floating battery's side. She was slightly down by the stern, and fires raged unchecked aft, snarling like famished dogs over the forward edge of the quarterdeck, beginning to eat at the gangways on either beam, and the after-half of the gun deck was sizzling with low sheets of flamelets.
And shells were still falling from Fort La Garde, bursting above her, splashing down all about the cove, close aboard. One came down in a knot of swimmers and paddlers, clinging to any old sort of flotsam by the beach. Up rose a pillar of water, mud, gravel… men, or pieces of men; broken coop crates and bits of timber. When the feather collapsed, there weren't four heads to be seen still afloat!
"Mister Scott, sir," Spendlove cried, tears running on his face.
"Yes?" Lewrie asked, staring at the sea below him with foreboding.
Dear God, if I can't find something solid to cling to…! Alan shuddered.
"Dead, sir!" Spendlove shouted, as if in accusation. "Blown to… dear God, sir, there were bits of him, scattered…" He pointed aft to the raging furnace of the quarterdeck, where Scott would have taken himself, to ready 74U to up-anchor. Spendlove's shirt front was wet with breakfast, his terrified reaction to his first dead men.
Lewrie could but nod at that sad news, more concerned with surviving himself at that moment, gazing like a hypnotised rabbit under a snake's steely glare, at the sea. Hungry waters lapped and gurgled with what sounded like glee against the side, as if they'd been waiting for him for a very long time.
"See to the men, Mister Spendlove. Get as many ashore as you can," he ordered. "Be calm. They'll need that." "Aye, sir," Spendlove gulped, fighting back bis own fears. Waist-coat too, I s'pose, Lewrie surmised; good broadcloth, it'll soak up water like a sponge. He peeled it off and cast it away. Lewrie undid the buckle of his neck-stock and lace front to toss them away, too. This day, he wore old cotton stockings, his worst-stained pair of cotton breeches, the working pair he' d had run up out of sailcloth.
It struck him that they were French, and he giggled. Serge de Nimes, they called the fabric… sailcloth. Bloody Frogs invented it, didn't they? But he could not recall what the French called "sails." Vela? No, that was Latin.
Weak and shuddering, feeling a bit faint at his prospect of drowning, chilling all over, feeling his knees buckling, and his death grip on the stay slipping, he imagined he was already a spirit, a shade, freed of his body's mortal husk, outside of himself and distanced from the world. His ears were ringing, not from an excess of noise but from an almost total lack of sound. A shell burst, its fuse wrongly selected, right over the bluffs, and he could barely hear its barking Crack!
"Sir, sir!" from far away. "Mister Lewrie, sir! 'Old on, Mister Lewrie, I'm a-comin'!"
And there was Cony, paddling and treading water at his feet. So far below, though!
"Got ya somethin' f 'ang onta, sir," Cony promised. There was a small, rectangular hatch grating from a limber hole off the orlop deck, a bar to intruders who had no business secreting themselves in the dark recesses of the bilges or the carpenter's walks; cross-hatched of wood two-by-four, with ventilation squares. It'll float like anythin', sir! Ya gotta jump on down, Mister Lewrie. I'll be right 'ere, no worries."
"Ah…" Lewrie said, grimacing with fear that looked like a grin.
"She's burnin' damn' fierce, Mister Lewrie, she'll blow sky-high any minute now," Cony insisted, swiping water and soaked flaxen hair out of his eyes. "Ever'body else'z off 'er, sir, ain't no reason t'stay no longer. Come on, sir!"
Lewrie sat down on the fore-chain platform, easing his buttocks to the edge, his toes dangling, terror-breaths whooshing in and out, as if the next would be the last.
"God love ya, Mister Lewrie, sir," Cony coaxed, his face crimped with worry. "All these years t'gether, I don't mean t'lose ya now. Wot I tell y'r good lady an' y'r kiddies, if I went an' lost ya? Come on, sir! 'Old y'r nose an' slide off! I'll be right by y'r side, swear it by Jesus, I do, sir!"
Well… he sighed. He clapped his cocked hat firmly on his head, took a deep breath, held his nose, compressed his lips, took one last fond look at the bluffs-and let go of the stay.
He fell, he splashed like a cannon ball, arrowing down… down, and down, wanting to scream, blinded by brine, forever lost, lungs aching, wishing he'd taken a deeper breath, deep enough to last forever…
"Shit!" he yelped as he broke surface, felt light and air on his face, felt Cony's hand on his shirt collar. Retching and coughing from smoke, from water in his mouth, his eyes, weeping with salt-water sting and pure, semi-hysterical relief.