“Aye,” Lewrie agreed, still a bit glum.
The muted music from the ship’s fiddler and a fifer came to him, playing “Molly Dawson” at a lively beat, and there was a cheer raised as the red-painted and gilt rum keg got fetched up from below.
“Think they’ll get better at it, sir?” Pettus asked as he came back with a tall tumbler of cool tea, lemoned and sugared to Lewrie’s likes.
“They’d better, or I’m wastin’ everybody’s bloody time.”
* * *
The weather did get up for the next two days’ running, forcing both ships to keep well out in deeper, open waters, with lots of rain and stiff quarter-gales keening in the rigging. The cancellation of training gave Lewrie enough time to sift through every detail of his plans for teaching lubberly soldiers.
Loath as he was to admit it, he had put the cart before the horse, expecting too much too quickly. “River discipline!” he had blurted out over supper alone in his cabins, feeling much like Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” in his bath water.
Fresh-caught landsmen rounded up by the Press, new-come volunteers, were never expected to be slung aboard a warship and forced to man the guns, tend to the braces, sheets, and halliards, scale the ratlines, take on the perilous passage by the futtock shrouds to the tops, and lay out on the yards, right off. It took weeks safely anchored in port to introduce them to the rudiments before any captain would dare set sail, not just trusting to luck to make a safe passage.
Once the weather cleared, Lewrie ordered both ships back to Gibraltar, and came to anchor near the New Mole. The soldiers were sent ashore to their temporary barracks for a day and a night, fresh rations were fetched aboard Sapphire and Harmony, and both crews were allowed shore liberties before getting back to business.
Then, in the calm waters of Gibraltar Bay, the landing boats were led round to their stations, and the soldiers were ordered over the side, without muskets to impede them at first. Into the boats and sit for a while, then out of the boats and back on deck. A break for water, and they were ordered to do it all over again, several times in the first day, to the point that Harmony’s decks could be cleared in a quick ten minutes.
The next day the drills were done with muskets and all accoutrements, all day long less intervals for water, rum, mid-day meals, and the soldiers were only released from practice late in the afternoon, just before the second rum issue. With a steady, unmoving deck and boats that did not pitch and heave about, the soldiers’ time got even better.
On the third day, the boats were manned, the nets deployed, and the soldiers scrambled down to their places, but this time, the boats rowed off to form line-abreast and stroked in to within close pistol-shot of the quays to glide in so the soldiers could exit over the bow platforms, form by platoons on the town’s dockside street, then get back into the boats and return to the transport to scramble back aboard to do it all over again. Those evolutions raised a great deal of mirth and curiosity in the town, and a lot of good-natured joshing from the town Provosts, dock workers, and off-duty soldiers of the garrison, and some sharp-eyed, calculating looks from civilian men.
Spies, agents, and informers be-damned, Lewrie thought, shaking his head over the necessity, sure that there were several powerful telescopes on the other side of the bay at Algeciras the like of Thomas Mountjoy’s, watching their every move and wondering what it was about.
There might be dozens of Spanish greengrocers and fruiterers on their way back across The Lines emulating the American rebel, Paul Revere, shouting, “The British are coming!” he imagined, and a grain merchant or three crying, “Two if by sea!”
Then, for the next two days, all sailors and soldiers were left to idle, only forming up and entering the boats after the nights had fully fallen, with all glims and lanthorns extinguished. That wasn’t to prevent the Spanish seeing them practise, but to get the soldiers used to the drill as if in a moonless, overcast black night at sea.
By then, the men of the 77th could perform the evolutions just as efficiently and quickly as Sapphire’s Marines could, and Lewrie was at last a lot more sanguine of their chances.
It was time to see Mountjoy for a mission.
* * *
“Puerto Banús looks promising,” Mountjoy decided after sifting through his latest reports and agents’ sketches. “Look here, there’s a battery to the left of the harbour entrance, about twenty feet higher than the town itself, on a little pimple of a rise. It’s an open redan, a stone semi-circle mounting only three eighteen-pounders, or the Spanish equivalent, in weight of metal.”
“That’d be about fifty gunners and officers, in all,” Lewrie estimated. “I can keep them occupied with gunfire.”
“About what my informer observed, yes,” Mountjoy agreed. They were out on his rooftop gallery, screened by the canvas awning, and enjoying a decent breeze that cut the day’s heat, bent over the iron table before the settee. “Now, there’s a good, broad beach over here to the right of the harbour. Some scattered houses, as you can see, and the report is that small boats are drawn up on the shingle behind it for the night, in the outer part of the harbour. Groves of trees to the right of that, then three windmills to grind grain, and a granary further inland by about an hundred yards. Behind that is the town proper, and the houses are close together. I’m not sure if we should go much beyond the granary.”
“Street fightin’, in the dark, with a surprise round every corner, in every window? Aye, we’ll burn the granary and the mills, and call it a good day’s work. Though I’d like t’spike those guns,” Lewrie said. “Has your informer gotten a good look at the battery?”
“Not too close, no,” Mountjoy said, with a shrug. “But he did see a doorway on the backside of the rise where their powder magazine must be, sunk underneath the battery. His sketch shows a long wooden barracks a little way behind the rise, and an old stone fisherman’s house off to the right of that and a little more inland, where the officers lodge, is my guess.”
“Damme, I could put my Marines to that, arm the men who handle the boats to aid them, and take the place,” Lewrie schemed. “There is a good beach in front of the battery, isn’t there? Damme! Once we surprise the Dons and drive ’em off, loose gunpowder scattered on the guns’ carriages’d set ’em alight and burn ’em up. Hell, we lay a powder train to the magazine, and it’d blow the whole thing sky-high!”
“Hmm,” Mountjoy considered, frowning. “Far be it from me to tell you how to spread the requisite mayhem, but … might that be a tad too enterprising, right off? If they keep a good watch, and there is any sort of moonlight, they’d be ready for you.”
“The most important objective is the battery,” Lewrie countered. “If it’s taken and destroyed, the Spanish will have to waste effort and money replacin’ it … drawin’ troops for a larger garrison, military engineers, and new artillery pieces. Stone workers to lay a stronger, bigger emplacement, hey? No, the battery’s the main course, and the mills and granary are the lagniappe, as they said in Louisiana … the ‘little something extra’. We land everyone against the battery, and deal with the rest after, with any opposition already eliminated.”
“Well, we did promise Sir Hew we’d whittle down any possible re-enforcements sent to General Castaños,” Mountjoy said with a sigh, leaning back into the settee’s cushions. “I’ll put Deacon to copying the sketches so all officers involved can have them. How soon might you need them?”
“No tearing hurry,” Lewrie said. “I’ve let the soldiers ashore to their barracks for a day or two as a reward, and my own people are due shore liberty, by watches. Say, two days from now? We’ll get the officers together for a briefing before we set off. And, I’m in need of fresh laundry. Ehm, you wouldn’t have a second objective in mind fairly close to Puerto Banús, would you?”
“Not right offhand, no,” Mountjoy promised. “I think just the one raid will suffice, for now. Babies must crawl before they learn to walk, after all. Let’s get the rough edges smoothed down before we hit our stride.”