Now, what can I make o’ this? Lewrie wondered with a sly grin on his face; Mountjoy’d most-like warn me off t’make sure that Hughes stays agreeable, but … hmm!

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“By the deep, five!” a leadsman in the forechains shouted aft. “Five fathom t’this line!”

“Close enough, I think, Mister Yelland?” Lewrie said to the Sailing Master.

“Aye, sir,” Yelland agreed, sounding a tad eager to bring the ship no closer to the shore. But for a wee glim in the compass binnacle, HMS Sapphire showed no lights of any kind, and Yelland was deprived of a peek into the chartroom to consult the local chart. With its lanthorn unlit, and with no windows or ports, it would have been moot, anyway. All officers had committed the details of the coast to memory, along with the soundings.

“Mister Westcott, fetch her to,” Lewrie ordered. “And if God’s just, we should find ourselves about a half-mile off, by sunrise.”

One Bell was struck up forward at the forecastle belfry as the ship was put about to cock her up into the wind, with the jibs, staysails, and spanker driving her forward and the squares’ls laid aback to retard forward motion. It was half past four in the morning, usually the time that lookouts were posted aloft instead of standing watch on deck, the time for wash-deck pumps to be rigged and swabs and holystones fetched out to scrub the decks. This pre-dawn morning, though, was time for battle. The cutters, launch, and pinnace were being led to their stations alongside both beams, and the scrambling nets were being heaved over. In the waist, Sapphire’s Marines shivered, yawned, and shuffled their feet as they waited to board those boats, wearing full kit, muskets, cartridge pouches, sheathed bayonets, haversacks at their left hips, and full water canteens.

“Show one light to seaward, sir?” Midshipman Kibworth asked.

“Aye,” Lewrie agreed, and a small hooded lanthorn was brought up above the bulwarks and its wee door opened. Everyone on the quarterdeck peered outboard, looking for its mate, and after a long minute, there was a tiny amber glow from the transport, Harmony, announcing her position, and the fact that she, too, was fetched-to and ready to dis-embark her troops.

“Hmm, a bit further out to sea than us, sir, and further from the beach. That will make a longer row for her people,” Lt. Harcourt commented.

“Captain Hedgepeth has a touchy bottom, it appears,” Lt. Elmes quipped. “Afraid of being goosed?”

“The boats are alongside, now, sir, and we’re ready to go any time,” Marine Lieutenant Keane reported from the bottom of the starboard companionway ladder.

“Very well, Mister Keane, you may begin boarding, and the very best of good fortune go with you,” Lewrie allowed.

“Thank you, sir,” Keane replied, returning to his men.

There was a noisy bustle and the drum of boots on the deck as the Marines lined up at the entry-ports and the nets, as the sailors who manned the boats went over the side to lay out their oars ready to hand, and take hold of the bottoms of the nets to make the Marines’ descent easier.

“Once they’re gone, we’ve enough room to play tennis, or bowls,” Midshipman Fywell muttered to Kibworth, and that was true. With over fifty of Sapphire’s people seconded to the transport, the boats’ crews away to get the Marines ashore then stand guard over the beach, and the Marines themselves, the ship’s berthings below were echoingly empty.

Lewrie groped his way to the binnacle cabinet to fetch out one of the night-glasses and returned to the bulwarks to peer shoreward. A telescope for use at night presented an image upside down and backwards in its ocular, which took some getting used to. At full extension, Lewrie could see a few lights. Two were lower in the ocular, and he took those for lanthorns or torches along the stone parapet of the battery. To the left of those, actually to the right of the battery, there was a dim light in the window of a fisherman’s cottage, and one square of vertical grid. What was there?

“Bugger the bloody thing,” Lewrie muttered, lowering the telescope and relying on his eyes. Behind his back, officers and watchstanders grinned.

The grid, he determined, was a wood-shuttered window with a light inside, leaking round all four corners of the badly fitted shutters. Further up the town there were a few more lights, some half-hearted attempts at street lighting, or lanthorns hung outside some taverns or lodging houses for travellers. The windmills, the granary, and the secondary objectives were indistinct black lumps on dark grey. Puerto Banús was deeply asleep, it seemed, and even the fishermen were still a’bed, else the quays and gravelly harbour shores would be lit up with dozens of glims as nets were removed from the drying racks and stowed, rowing boats hauled back into the water, and the larger offshore boats would be hoisting sails already.

“Our boats are away, sir,” Lt. Westcott reported.

“Very well, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie replied. “Mister Kibworth? Show two flashes from your lanthorn to Harmony.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

It took another three or four minutes before the transport made a replying signal light, announcing that her boats were also away and laying on their oars, waiting for the three-flash signal to row ashore.

Two Bells were struck; it was 5 A.M.

“We’re really going to do it, by God,” Lt. Elmes muttered with rising excitement. He could not yet quite make the fellow out, but Lewrie could hear his new Hessian boots, of which Lt. Elmes was especially proud, squeaking as the Third Officer rose and flexed on the balls of his feet.

They had sailed from Gibraltar three days earlier, but once at sea, another bout of squally weather and rough seas had sprung to life, forcing the ships to stand well offshore under reduced sail, with the men of the 77th Foot at the bulwarks to “cast their accounts to Neptune” as they suffered their first exposure to the way that Harmony rode the swells. One would have thought that their long voyage from England to Gibraltar had given them some sort of “sea legs”, but, evidently it had not. They were as sea-sick as so many dogs.

Lewrie had delayed the attack one full day after the weather had moderated to let them recover, fearful of shoving them ashore and into combat, still crop-sick and puking from a ship still reeking of vomit.

As long as I’ve been at sea, the smell’d make me shit through my teeth, Lewrie thought, recalling how a kindly older sailor had put it when he’d gone aboard the old Ariadne the first time in 1780.

“A trader told me that down at Tetuán, the Arabs say that the dawn is when one may distinguish ’twixt a black thread and a white one, sir,” Lt. Westcott said in a soft voice by Lewrie’s elbow.

“Makes sense, I suppose,” Lewrie replied. “Have you tried it, yet?”

“Going half cross-eyed, but nothing yet, sir,” Westcott japed.

Lewrie went back to the binnacle cabinet to stow away the night telescope, then bent over the compass bowl’s glim to consult his watch, and found that it was twenty minutes past 5 A.M., and ten minutes to Three Bells. He stood back up and peered shoreward once more. Those large windmills could now almost be made out, a bit more distinctly.

“Three flashes, Mister Kibworth,” Lewrie snapped. “Let’s get our people on their way, before any sentries can spot ’em.”

Both ships lay about a half-mile from shore, and it would take long minutes, perhaps a whole half-hour for them to ground and land the troops, uncomfortably close to the period of muted greyness, the arrival of false dawn, when those Arabic threads could be distinguished, and a watcher ashore could espy the two ships and the boats that beetle-crawled their way to the beach.

Damme, did I leave it too late? Lewrie fretted to himself; Ye poxy fool, I should’ve sent the signal at Two Bells!