Cast Adrift - Book 01

Finally, he heard Matthew's whispered "there it is." A boat was putting off from the L'Empereur, and he could see Caroline waving gaily to the officers and men of the French ship as it pulled away.

"Thank God," he breathed in her ear as she was hoisted aboard in a makeshift sling and Laphin came climbing up the side ropes. "I was so scared. What did you learn, Laphin?"

"It weren't me, sor," said the Guernseyman, still itching at his makeshift merchant captain's coat. "She had them give 'er a tour of the whole place while I sat and drank brandy with the captain, Captain Marchand it was."

"The ship is brand new and they are quite proud of it," Caroline said quietly. "They have forty-four guns and four carronades. A crew of 200 serving together for the first time. The captain would have rolled out the guns for practice if I had not dissuaded him, although he confided that it would be a fairly ragged practice. The guns are new, apparently, and the crews new to them. And they did leave Brest so hastily, it seems, that they had not yet received their complement of soldiers."

"So there will be nobody in the rigging when we attack," William said with a grin. "And inexperienced gun crews as well. Excellent. Caroline, you were marvelous. How was the dinner, Laphin?"

"Oh, quite good, sor. Much like we used to eat at 'ome."

"And they were impressed with you and your new wife?"

"Quite impressed with Madame Laphin." The seaman finally cracked a grin. "I didn't have to say hardly anythin' at all, sor. They never took their eyes off of her." "William, what did you mean when you said attack?"

When William turned to answer her question, Caroline saw the same smile on his face that she had first seen in her Dartmouth house, after he had maneuvered the attorney Digby into challenging him to a duel.

"Another day of keeping company with our French friends will be absolutely fatal," William explained. "Then again, if we part company, even tonight, they will sound the alarm and catch us quite easily. And if we wait until morning, they will send us into Brest under their guns. No, our only chance, it seems to me, is to take the battle to them tonight. They will reduce sail tonight in this wind, just as we have done. But we shall wait until the very middle of the middle watch and pack the sail on again. When we catch up, we will send a broadside into them from the starboard guns, and then board them, every last one of us, in the confusion. I will have to ask that you and Lucy wait in the forepeak, Caroline. It is the safest place on the ship."

"But we only have sixteen guns!" Caroline protested. "You cannot attack a forty-four gun frigate with only sixteen guns."

"Perhaps not. But otherwise we are prisoners in Brest for the duration, eh, Mr. Wainwright?"

"Quite true, miss," the lieutenant bowed to his captain's request with his own smile flitting across his usually saturnine features.

"Very well," Caroline sighed. "And who will be steering the ship while every last one of you is away?"

"Ah. We will leave young Fletcher behind."

"Thomas Fletcher? He is just a boy!"

"Yes, Caroline. But almost man-sized now. If he were any older, he would be boarding with the rest. As it is, we will not be able to reduce sail before we board, so he will be forced to keep the Wallace from outsailing our enemy. Proper fools we should look if the sun rises tomorrow and finds us all aboard the L'Empereur with no English ship in sight."

Our ruse, however, had the unfortunate effect of requiring that we spend additional time in company with the French ship, and as we neared the French coast, I determined that it would be necessary to attempt to board her. During the middle of the night, we fired our starboard guns upward into her gun deck, which had the salutary, although at the time unknown, result of sending a substantial number of her guns rolling across her gun deck, and of filling her main ladderway with debris from the upper deck.

As a result, most of the French sailors who were below decks at the time we boarded proved unsuccessful in reaching us before the battle was over. This, along with the bravery of the Wallace's men, no doubt accounts for our small casualty list: one dead (Able Seaman Caleb Jones was killed by a French pistol) and twelve wounded. The battle that followed aboard the French vessel lasted less than half an hour, and ended with the surrender of Captain Edouard Marchand's sword to me at three minutes past three o'clock in the morning.

In particular, I must commend to your Lordships the efforts of Lieutenant Andrew Wainwright, Midshipmen Arthur Rutledge and John Chapman, and my coxswain, Matthew Cooper, without whose efforts my name would have been added to the list of the dead and wounded.

The French lieutenant had borne down on him, his sword raised high for a lethal slice. He had just turned back to the fray minutes before, after a glance over the side had shown him an alarming sight: the Wallace was drifting aimlessly to port, away from the L'Empereur, the idiot boy he had left as helmsman apparently paying little attention to the position of the two ships.

"Hard a-starboard, Fletcher, you ass!" he bellowed as loudly as he could over the sounds of the fierce fighting on the French ship's exposed decks. In half a minute he was engaged again. He parried two more pike thrusts offered by one of the French seaman before thrusting his sword into the man's stomach. And then he had slipped and fallen, attracting the attention of the French officer who eagerly seized his opportunity to kill the English commander. That man had rushed toward him, and only Cooper's well-timed hurl of his boarding axe had deflected the Frenchman's aim enough to allow William to roll out of harm's way.

And even that would have counted for nought, since the Frenchman recovered quickly and Cooper was in no position to render any further assistance, if the entire ship hadn't been rocked by a hard collision with the Wallace. It was enough to throw the young French lieutenant to his knees, allowing William sufficient time to recover his own sword and drive it through the poor man's thigh.

And then, just as quickly as it had begun, the battle had ended, the French captain having finally barreled out of his cabin with his pistol, only to be knocked down by Paul Laphin and dragged over to where William was surveying the scene on deck. By then, his men had pulled one of the upper deck carronades into position against the aft ladderway, and his Marines had surrounded the fore ladderway, effectively eliminating the chance for French reinforcements to storm the deck. Captain Marchand eventually returned to consciousness and was asked for his surrender. After his own quick survey of the situation, he withdrew his sword from its sheath and offered it to William.

William had jumped back down to the Wallace after leaving a substantial prize crew aboard the French ship. He looked up at the wheeldeck, smiling to himself as he looked toward the helm. The boy might have paying scant attention earlier, but his response to William's "Hard a-starboard" had been hard enough to save his captain's life. Another look, in fact, suggested that it might have not have been inattention at all. The lifeless body of a French seaman was sprawled across the rail. Another lay groaning nearby, a first jammed into his bloody stomach.

"So, you young whoreson," William roared happily. "You got your first taste of combat, eh?"

"Indeed," a high-pitched voice responded, as the figure at the wheel took off its hat and shook out its long, dark hair. "And if you call me a young whoreson again, dear brother-in-law, I shall quite happily take you up on your previous offer to tow me back home in your jolly boat."

It is with equal parts of mortification and delight, however, that I must give pride of place to one sailor in particular. I had assigned ship's boy Thomas Fletcher to the wheel, and when one of his legs was taken off just above the ankle by the only cannon that the French were able to bring to bear, he had the presence of mind, despite fainting twice along the way, to make his way to the ship's forepeak. There he explained the desperate situation to Mrs. Stanhope, who donned a pair of trousers and a shirt, both belonging to my coxswain, that she and her maid had just finished repairing as they awaited the outcome of the battle in a place of safety. Instructing her maid to see to Fletcher, she took his hat and pistol and hurried back to the wheel, where she was just in time to respond to my shouted command to turn the wheel hard a-starboard.

That alone would have entitled her to the unending gratitude of the officers and crew of the Wallace. However, Mrs. Stanhope was not finished. Without the knowledge of those of us on the deck of the L'Empereur, two French seamen had dropped to our ship as the battle raged. They advanced on the wheel. In the darkness, wearing a hat, shirt, and trousers, I have no doubt that Mrs. Stanhope looked very much like the youngster they might have expected.

"Allors, vous êtes le lâche ils encore derrière," the first Frenchman said.

Mrs. Stanhope lost not a moment in replying: "Non, monsieur. Je suis la veuve du Geoffrey Stanhope de lieutenant et la mère de son fils." She pulled Fletcher's pistol from her waistband and coolly shot the Frenchman in the chest. The second Frenchman looked on, stunned, as his comrade fell forward against the railing, and Mrs. Stanhope calmly seized the first man's pistol from his waistband and discharged it into the stomach of the second. The first Frenchman died; the second has recovered, as has young Fletcher, both of them in large part due to Mrs. Stanhope's care on the voyage home.

William had pieced together that story from Lucy, Fletcher, and the wounded Frenchman when the latter two were not busy feigning additional pains to attract the attention of their very attractive nurse. Lucy, meanwhile, was acting as a nurse aboard the French ship, where Matthew Cooper, not surprisingly, was part of the prize crew.

It was certainly the most exciting letter he had ever drafted to higher authority, and he had no doubt that its contents would be prominently featured in the next Gazette. He finished the letter, putting in the relative strengths of the French and English ships, and of their crews. Their Lordships would like nothing more than a victory over a new French frigate named for the Emperor, unless it was a victory by a far more lightly gunned ship with a much smaller crew. With a smile he handed it to his steward, to give to one of the coasters that they had stopped off the coast of England. It would take the Wallace and its prize another two days to beat slowly into Portsmouth, but by then the news would have echoed throughout the streets of London, and up and down the coast of England.

**********

Captain Stanhope studied himself in the mirror of a small room in St. James Palace. He was wearing his best uniform, of course, carefully cleaned and brushed by his steward.

"Yes?" he said to the knock at the door.

Matthew stuck his head in.

"Time, sir."

"Mrs. Stanhope?"

"She's ready, too, sir," Matthew answered, his face beaming with pride.

William pulled open the door in time to see his coxswain give a large exaggerated wink to Lucy Burton, who occupied a similar spot outside the door of the room across the great hallway. That door was pulled back as well, and Caroline stepped into the hallway and curtsied to her brother-in-law, a small smile playing across her lips.

"You look lovely, Caroline," William said simply as they met in the middle.

"I don't believe I have ever even seen anything this fine in my life," Caroline said, "let alone owned anything. Oh, William, I feel such a fraud."

"A fraud?" William's astonishment was genuine. "Caroline, on the way here, I saw a boy and a girl in the street. The boy pulled out a stick and said, 'so you are the coward they left behind,' and the girl answered, 'no, I am the widow of Geoffrey Stanhope and the mother of his son.'

Caroline smiled.

"And then she hit him with a rock and sent him bawling for his mother."

Caroline burst into laughter, and William turned to the right and offered her his left arm.

The elderly attendant at the entry to the main room of the palace had announced guests on many previous occasions, but he could not recall a more complicated set of instructions. The gentleman was Captain Lord William Stanhope. And the lady with him was Mrs. Stanhope, although he would be required to pause slightly, to emphasize that the connection between the two was not one of marriage.

If they were not married, he thought to himself as he bounced on the balls of his feet, why are they attending together?

Then he saw them, the captain's face eminently familiar from the numerous broadsheets posted in shop windows all over London. He opened the doors, and roared out "Captain Lord William Stanhope!" That quieted perhaps half of those already in attendance.

And quite suddenly his mind went blank, and he stared at his hands. He remembered that a pause was required, but not the reason for it. And he had already put the cards in his pocket; he had never needed to look at them before once he had memorized them. Finally, he looked back up at the woman, whose rendering, he suddenly realized, he had also seen in those very same windows. She was very patiently waiting for her own introduction with a gentle, knowing, and forgiving smile spread across her face.

"And Caroline Stanhope, the Lioness of the Bay of Biscay! La veuve du Geoffrey Stanhope de lieutenant et la mère de son fils!"

The chamber went absolutely silent, for just a moment, and then roared to life. Caroline entered on William's arm, with just a glance up at the balcony where Lucy and Matthew were basking in the reflected glow of the ceremony.

"All right," she said quietly in a good-humored voice pitched just loud enough to reach William's ears above the applause. "Perhaps not a fraud after all."