Blackwell's Homecoming (Blackwell's Adventures Book 3) Page 3

  “I understand you are Captain Lord Cochrane, sir,” he said, advancing straight at his lordship. “I mean no personal offense to you, sir. Captain Blackwell, young Sa…Mr. Blackwell.” Admiral Harvey bowed to them. He heard Admiral Gambier and his secretary advancing and fury rose to his countenance. He spat out, “I never saw a man so unfit for the command of a fleet as Lord Gambier”, and stomped out of the cabin.

  The secretary came out to them, and they walked into Admiral Gambier’s apartments where the Admiral was working to subdue his anger and indignation. Admiral Harvey’s attack seemed to have aroused no sensibility in him to the hostility in the fleet, or of the ill will he’d created by not allowing one of his own officers to move forward and lead the fireship attack. Gambier focused instead on criticizing the Admiralty’s plan, calling it “A horrible mode of warfare, and the attempt hazardous if not desperate”. Then he desired Lord Cochrane to lay the details before him.

  Lord Cochrane proceeded with the logistics of the attack. Four explosion vessels and twenty-one fireships, some brought out from England and some to be prepared from captured enemy craft and transports on hand in the fleet, all to be sent against the French anchored near the Ile de Aix.

  “To cause confusion and consternation among the Enemy,” Lord Cochrane said. “And to open the way for His Majesty’s line of battle ships to burn, capture, or run the enemy’s ships on shore.”

  “The Master of the Fleet says there is insufficient depth in the Aix Roads for a line of battle ship. To say nothing of the battery on the Ile de Aix.”

  “The threat of the battery on the Ile de Aix, Sir, with respect, has been overstated. I reconnoitered in Imperieuse, the battery is in a ruinous state. I saw it from my own maintop, the inner fortification is completely destroyed. We counted thirteen mounted guns and several mortars.”

  Admiral Gambier studied the list of the explosion vessels and fireships and the officers selected to command them with a pursed countenance. Nothing concerning the attack could fall well upon him, since the whole had been planned without his knowledge. All of the seamen chosen to take part in the fireship attack would be volunteers, of course. After raising more cautions and objections, which Lord Cochrane patiently put down, Admiral Gambier turned to Captain Blackwell.

  “I do not like the assignment of a lieutenant to command the only heavy fireship we have, the 44-gun Mediator. Woolich does very well in your Valiant, for the moment. Will you take Mediator, since you are yet to return to your command?”

  Aloka was already assigned to Mediator as her second in command, and he could not help looking sharply at his father. Captain Blackwell’s expression was stony, unreadable. Aloka knew his father’s distaste for the proposed action, one he shared with most men of his age and service history.

  “It will be an honor, sir,” Captain Blackwell said.

  A bristling resentment rose up in Aloka toward Admiral Gambier at that moment.

  The first in line of the explosion vessels, the one Aloka had wished to be assigned to—aboard were Captain Lord Cochrane and his lordship’s brother Basil and Lieutenant Bissell—had blown up with a brilliant flash that revealed the enemy fleet lying at anchor south of the Ile de Aix. The explosions of the next vessels and fireships in line illuminated the confusion among the enemy, anchored close together in two rows of line of battle ships. It was a perfect night for such an attack, one that even a timid commander in chief could not refuse to sanction; very dark, a strong onshore breeze, and the tide flowing toward the French fleet. Two lighted British sloops marked the limits of the channel up which the fireships and explosion vessels raced.

  Aloka was on the quarterdeck of Mediator, the large fireship meant to break the boom the French had constructed in front of their anchored fleet. Lord Cochrane had discovered this barrier when they’d reconnoitered in Imperieuse. The boom was a formidable affair of spars, yards, beams and tubs weighted with stones and securely moored by heavy anchors and cables. Aloka admired Lord Cochrane for his care in planning the entire enterprise, it spoke of a commander concerned for the preservation of life: British life in any case. Congreve’s rockets mounted in the tops and rigging of the fireships, which were taking fire and darting through the air directionless, were not one of his lordship’s more brilliant strokes.

  Aboard Mediator Captain Blackwell was forward conning the ship, his long-time coxswain and follower, Narhilla at the wheel. A gunner, Mr. Seggess, Aloka, and Mr. Midshipman Monroe made up the remainder of the crew.

  Towing behind Mediator was a four-oared gig, bumping over floating debris and waves caused by the vessels already exploded. Captain Blackwell had the difficult task of judging their distance from the boom and the enemy fleet, and ordering when to light the fuses. Beneath their feet, on the lower deck, were long wooden troughs laid fore and aft. Crossed over these athwart ships were more troughs, filled with tarred canvas, oakum, and gunpowder. They’d even doused the whole with turpentine taken from enemy merchants. Below and amidships were large casks packed with gunpowder, standing on end and lashed together with cables, surrounded by grenades and several hundred shells. Mediator was a sailing bomb.

  “Light the port fires!” Captain Blackwell called.

  Aloka, Mr. Seggess and Mr. Monroe immediately went to work firing the fuses. Captain Blackwell and Narhilla were securing the wheel with lines to keep her on her course. Straight before them was the enemy fleet, several French line of battle ships were falling on board one another in their haste to move away from the burning vessels. Aloka’s heart leapt to see the enemy’s force so close.

  “Mr. Seggess, Mr. Monroe, Narhilla, into the boat,” Aloka ordered.

  He waited with a pounding pulse until the men were looking up at him from the gig. Aloka turned and shouted, in defiance of his fear, “Straight at ’em, Father!”

  An explosion amidships and a consuming roar. Captain Blackwell was flung into the air and over the side. Next moment Aloka was in the water. The strong wind had halved the time of the fifteen minute fuses. Mediator held her course, blowing up as she went. Ragged wood, barrel staves, shredded canvas were in the water with Aloka. The severed head of Mr. Seggess floated near him just under the surface, impaled on a pike like whack of planking jutting out from the port cover of a gun. He dove underwater, swimming, swimming up channel against the tide.

  Shouts when he surfaced. “Mr. Blackwell! Mr. Blackwell!”

  Aloka stroked over to the gig, grasped both gunnels of the craft, and heaved himself inboard.

  “Where’s the Captain?”

  “Missing, sir. Captain and Mr. Seggess are missing.”

  “Mr. Seggess is dead. Pull down channel.”

  “Oh no, sir. We must make for the frigates.” Mr. Monroe looked imploring. “We shall be fortunate to reach them with this tide race. We must start now.”

  “Bugger that!” Aloka threw himself back over the gig’s gunwale.

  “Oh, Christ!” Mr. Monroe cried. “Oh, the Savage!”

  Narhilla had already shipped his oars and was following Aloka. Aloka swam off in a diagonal to the channel, the tide pushing him and the following gig closer and closer to the enemy. There was no more boom, Mediator’s weight, the explosions, and wind and tide had combined to break it. The water thickened dangerously with casks, spars, planking, canvas. Aloka surfaced underneath dangling legs in the water. He grabbed the back of the man’s sodden blue jacket and pulled him face up. “Father! Hang on, do you hear?”

  Swimming backward, clutching Captain Blackwell round the chest with one arm, Aloka met the gig. He heaved and Narhilla hauled, and they brought Captain Blackwell into the boat.

  “Face down, over the thwart!” Aloka ordered.

  They pounded upon Captain Blackwell’s back. He coughed and belched out a quantity of water and moaned. On his right side Captain Blackwell’s clothing was completely burned away, and the skin of his exposed arm, shoulder, and neck looked as though it had been flayed.

  “Good Lord,” Mr. Monroe
breathed.

  “Help me move him into the stern—”

  Captain Blackwell pushed himself upright with his good arm, and croaked out, “Tiller.”

  They understood him, and handed Captain Blackwell aft where he took hold of the tiller with his good arm.

  “First trick. Ship your oars.”

  Aloka and Narhilla pulled the entire way back to the British frigates. Mr Monroe remained in the stern, bailing and trying to keep Captain Blackwell upright, in the end taking the tiller. Aloka needed all his considerable strength, pulling against the headwind and tide. Constantly before him was the sight of his father struggling, so wounded, to keep control of the tiller, to sit upright. Captain Blackwell must be brought to one of the frigates, to medical attention. Aloka gritted his teeth and pulled, wishing to make the gig cleave the water like a native canoe, pushing down his own terror as they navigated between fireships aflame before and behind them, with fiery rockets shrieking overhead.

  The first frigate they encountered Aloka shouted to Mr. Monroe to come alongside. Captain Blackwell was slumped insensible in the stern. It was their own ship Imperieuse, and her people immediately brought them aboard.

  Mercedes awoke so much refreshed and eased that she was almost ashamed of her desperation in leaving the ballroom the evening before. She’d slept well into the morning, and once dressed she found Edward installed in the downstairs library behind a desk piled with books and papers.

  “I am sorry to have dashed off last night,” she said, as she tied Edward’s stock for him. “Is Emma yet abed?”

  Edward shot up from his chair, yanking the cloth from Mercedes’ fingers. He looked at her in horror, and then bolted from the room.

  He ran up the stairs, Mercedes following behind, and flung open the door of Emma’s bedchamber. They both walked in to an unoccupied room, the bed still made up.

  “I am so sorry, Mother,” Edward stammered. “I came away, I forgot—”

  “Do you mean to say you left without Emma? She has not been home all night?” Mercedes’ voice rose high and shrill toward the last.

  Edward’s frightened expression told her all, and for once she could not contain herself. Mercedes grasped him by the lapels of his coat and shook him. “How could you? How could you leave your sister alone? Where is she? Oh, Dios mio.”

  Mercedes sank into a chair and stared at Emma’s empty bed. A parent’s worst fear. London was such a big, sprawling, wicked city. It could swallow the child she loved and had raised so tenderly, because she had been so weak as to leave her alone in it. Mercedes did not notice when Edward left the doorway of Emma’s room, and Mr. Martinez appeared in his place.

  “Hija,” Severino Martinez said, approaching her chair. “Shall you send for the Captain?”

  Captain Blackwell had always trusted her with the care of their children, saving Aloka, of course, who’d gone to sea when still a boy. The ache in her heart was matched by the throbbing pain in her breast, making her gasp. “No, with all the will in the world a message could not reach him for weeks. And for him to return? No, I will not sit with arms crossed. But how to find where she’s gone!” Mercedes and Severino Martinez stared at one another. Mercedes’ mother, Arabella de Aragon, had run away from the life her family had planned for her, and pursued her own wild, reckless course. “I cannot send to the Marlboroughs to inquire if they might have seen my daughter. Such a thing could ruin her.”

  “Will you hear my advice?”

  “I should like it of all things, Tio. I feel unequal to this, to tell truth.”

  “Hold on, girl. Do not despair. You must take one of the Captain’s men into your confidence. That McMurty is a sly, insinuating fellow, and loyal to Captain Blackwell and this family. There is nothing servants do not see. Send him to make the round of the footmen and coachmen from last night. We pick up traces of her, then we make another plan.”

  Mercedes had been on the receiving end her whole life of Mr. Martinez’s ability to retrieve errant females.

  “Do you think he can be discreet? It is of the first importance it not be known I have lost Captain Blackwell’s daughter.”

  “Calm yourself, girl,” Mr. Martinez reached out and took Mercedes’ hand. “McMurtry loves Emma too.”

  “Oh, Tio.” Mercedes sobbed. “Let it be so. Que Dios nos ayuda.”

  Severino Martinez patted her hand kindly. He turned and jerked his head at Edward, who came and took his place.

  “Asses’ milk?”

  “Aye, Missus, ten gallon of it, delivered to the servant’s entrance and taken in by that cully John Bargeman. Certain unsophisticated coves believe as how elegant females must always bathe in asses’ milk. Then Severino and me, we lay hands on one Spotted Dick, an awkward sod as was bringing provisions to the house.” McMurtry paused and rubbed bruised knuckles. “We persuaded him to let us in on the caper, like. We’re near certain sure without actually clapping eyes on her he has our Miss Emma. He ain’t right in his top hamper, John Bargeman, do you see?”

  Mercedes put her face into her hands and Severino Martinez shook his head, casting McMurtry a withering look.

  McMurtry hastened on. “That’s not as whose to say he’d harm our Miss. John Bargeman may be a half wit but he fair worships Captain Lord Cochrane, and—”

  “Thank you, McMurtry, I am infinitely obliged to you. I’ll pass the word when we’re…when we—”

  “Right, Missus. Choose your weapon and wait for the word.” McMurtry knuckled his forehead and walked out of the parlour.

  “Spotted Dick says the house is buttoned up like a fortress, ready for a siege,” Mr. Martinez said. “Sand bags on the first floor. I don’t know how many men we’d need to break in.”

  “We cannot recruit a file of men and cannonade Lord Cochrane’s house. It must be done quietly. If only we could surprise him, gain admittance to the house.”

  “I can get us in,” Edward said. The timber of his voice changed. “Open this door, John Bargeman, goddamn your eyes,” Edward said in a perfect imitation of Aloka’s accents. Then in Lord Cochrane’s aristocratic Scots, “Do you no ken the Master? Open this door.”

  “That caps it,” Mercedes said. “Tonight late we shall go in. After he has had a chance to drink his grog.”

  “You cannot mean to go yourself?”

  “I do too, Tio. Edward and you and I and McMurtry. We must arrange what to do with the man, we cannot have him spreading this tale about London.”

  “Estas loca, hija. But don’t trouble yourself for John Bargeman. McMurtry and his cousin Clark fixed up a berth for that one. We need at least two more for the subduing part.”

  “I think what he’s saying, Mama, is that it cannot be done by two old men, a half-wit, and a sick woman.”

  “So long as they do not see Emma,” she said, “you may bring the fleet.”

  When Severino Martinez had gone out to arrange matters with the seamen, Mercedes said, “I suppose I am fooling no one, then?”

  Edward had put off the morning callers, mostly gentlemen Emma had danced with, saying ‘Mrs. and Miss Blackwell are indisposed’. There had been one very interesting interview Edward did not tell Mercedes of because it did not bear upon Emma, who was the whole object of her attention and concern.

  “I beg you will see a physician, Mama.”

  “As soon as Emma is back. How I hope…” Mercedes bowed her head, trying to master her fears. “Come, Edward. A la espada.”

  Both her children knew how to handle a sword. Mercedes had considered fencing lessons as essential a part of their education as dancing. She returned after changing her outfit to spar with Edward, unaware her face was set in a grimace of pain.

  Mercedes was dressed in volunteer’s attire, a relic from a previous day. She was made to stand in the back, behind McMurtry and Mr. Martinez. Edward was at their head, pounding upon the front door of Lord Cochrane’s Harley Street townhouse.

  At last they heard, called through the door in a strong seaman’s voice, “G
o away. His lordship ain’t t’home.”

  “His lordship bloody well is to home. Open this door, John Bargeman!”

  Scrabbling was heard the other side of the door and it was flung open. Edward immediately stepped inside, grasped John Bargeman by the front of his coat, and gave him such a crack to the head—with his own head—they both staggered backward like struck billiard balls. McMurtry and Mr. Martinez rushed in, caught John Bargeman beneath his arms and dragged him backwards toward the servants’ regions. McMurtry dealt him a few more sharp raps with a cudgel on the way.

  Mercedes closed the street door, and began shouting for Emma. McMurtry had by this time let his cousin Clark and his mate in through the kitchen entrance. Between them they had John Bargeman well in hand.

  Edward tried to raise his voice to call for Emma, but mainly he staggered in a circle holding his head. Mercedes ran up the stairs, calling frantically, and at last when she stopped to take breath, she heard an answering, “Mamaaaaa!”

  She tore through a bedchamber and dressing room, and found a little locked room beyond. Mercedes turned the key and Emma burst out upon her. Clutched in one hand was a great heavy silver candlestick, and she still wore her ball gown. It was by now quite frowsy and disarrayed, giving her a lunatic appearance, and she swayed on her high heeled pumps. They fell into an embrace and a babble of exclamations and questions that went unanswered. Within moments Mercedes declared, “Vamos, vamos!”

  They ran downstairs, Mercedes crying out, “Don’t sit down, Edward!” He was weaving toward collapse upon one of the steps.

  Edward jerked round toward them. “Oh, Emma! Oh so sorry!”

  “Never you mind it, dear, dear Edward,” Emma cried, grabbing his wounded head and smacking him a kiss.

  “Lord, you smell like —”

  “Sour milk. Because why? Because that goddamn—oh, Mama!”