Read Online Any Approaching Enemy: A Novel of the Napoleonic Wars by Jay Worrall - Free Book Online Page B

a noticeably slower rate of fire. After a time, he left Winchester to work on the problem while he went to receive the boatswain’s and purser’s daily reports. Eliot, he noted, had the watch. He saw no sign of Talmage, who normally would have been on deck. As soon as he was free, he decided to go below to the officers’ wardroom and speak to Talmage before the situation between the two of them became strained. He found the lieutenant seated alone at the wardroom table with a partly full bottle of wine in front of him.
    “May I sit?” Charles asked.
    Talmage looked up and then pushed his chair back as if to stand.
    “Sit, sit,” Charles said, gesturing with his hands. “This is not an official call.” He pulled out a chair and lowered himself into it.
    “Sir,” Talmage began, slurring the word.
    Charles lifted his hand. “I must apologize about our conversation yesterday. I’m afraid that I may have left the impression that I do not appreciate your services. I assure you that this is not so.”
    “Sir,” Talmage repeated, rubbing a hand across his face. With an effort, he said, “I am only trying to do my tudy.”
    “I can well imagine how you feel,” Charles said, after taking a moment to untangle “tudy.” “Coming from
Victory,
with all the bustle and confusion there, you probably find this something of a challenge.
Louisa
is a very small ship in comparison, with different kinds of problems.” Despite a certain blankness in his lieutenant’s expression, Charles felt that he was making progress. He went on, “You know, it’s only a little over a year ago that I was a lieutenant myself. I have a certain way of doing things that may not suit everyone. I’m sure that we will both adjust in time.”
    Talmage nodded somewhat dully. “I only want do to my tudy,” he repeated. Then, apparently thinking he might have left something out, he added, “efficiently,” and another word that might have been, “unhappy,” although in what context, Charles could not imagine.
    Charles glanced at the bottle. “Is this all you’ve had to drink?” He held the bottle up to the light and saw that it was about three parts in four empty. That wasn’t so bad.
    Talmage bent down to reach under his chair and came up with a second bottle, and then a third, both devoid of liquid. “Sead doldiers,” he explained without emotion.
    “I see,” Charles said. “You’ve certainly done yeoman’s work here. Can you stand?” He signaled to a wardroom servant, and the two men helped the lieutenant into his cabin, out of his uniform jacket and shoes, and onto his cot. “I expect you on deck tomorrow morning as usual,” he said, but realized that in all probability, none of his words had made much of an impression. “Fetch a bucket and put it beside the bed,” he said to the servant in an effort to be helpful. “I expect he’ll soon be returning most of the wine, and his dinner, too.”
    The following dawn came golden bright under scattered white-bellied clouds and over the same placid blue seas. Talmage arrived on deck with the forenoon watch, red-eyed, pale, and tight-lipped. Charles greeted him with an observation about the beauty of the day and received a grunt in reply. A second gesture to open normal communications received a similar acknowledgment. Charles found this annoying but decided that his lieutenant probably needed a little time to recover his sea legs, as it were. He let it go and spent the remainder of the watch with Winchester, exercising the men at the guns, trying various combinations of wormers, spongers, loaders, and rammers. Reluctantly, he came to the conclusion that there were only so many ways to serve a cannon and that trying to overrefine it probably did more harm than good. He did discover, almost by accident, that if a fiddler were playing “Rule Britannia,” the crews would get into a kind of rhythm, and the faster the fiddler played, the quicker the guns went in and out. He tried