Dewey Lambdin - H.M.S. COCKEREL

Apart from Toulon, where sunlight dappled and sparkled, and the clouds scudded, the headlands and hills appeared to glow gold and umber, the tiled terra-cotta roofs were lit flamine red, and the very least cottages of Var and Provence were exotically lambent.

But not Toulon.

Around Toulon there seemed a pall, an ominous trick of lighting, as if the capes, the headlands, the bays and massive hills-mountains really, Lewrie decided-were shrouded by a funereal gloom, as if some storm clouds must hang perpetual. As if, for some malevolent reason, her harsh greyness of stark granite forts was forever deprived of any warmth, or hope, of Mediterranean sunshine. Pent from the lushness of her hinterland by grimly looming, bare and lifeless mountain masses, and begirt with the sinews and engines of warfare.

With the ship well in hand in a deep-water fairway, Lewrie took time to peer at the chart Mister Dimmock had left tacked to the traverse board, looking past his usual sailor's concerns of depths, bearings and seamarks, to the hills beyond.

Toulon was girded by a host of lofty fortresses and redoubts: St. Antoine, St. Catherine, Artigues, Pharon, La Garde and La Vallette, and a myriad of lesser forts, redans, batteries and strongpoints which guarded the forbidding mountains, the narrow valleys between, and the passes and gorges. The terrain was fairly open to the east, sprinkled with villages and chateaux, gently rolling and benign along the Plaine de la Garde divided by a narrow ridge that ran west-to-nor'east above the road to Hieres, before the mountains shouldered into the coast, above Forts St. Catherine and La Malgue.

On the western approaches, from the pass at Ollioules through which the Marseilles road debouched, was a harsher coastal plain, this one puckered, pimpled and stippled with many mountain spurs, crab-like hills and rugged prominences, and the roads wound snake-like to conform to them.

Fifteen miles, he marched off with a pair of brass dividers on the chart; fifteen miles of perimeter and approaches which had to be garrisoned and guarded, manned with troops and guns, if the coalition was to hold Toulon.

Say Naples sends their promised 6,000, like the treaty said, he speculated-though what little he'd seen of Neapolitan troops, and that with an untrained sailor's eye, hadn't impressed him that much. And were their Military Commissariat anything like what Mister Husie had reported after visiting their naval supply establishment, then it was perhaps a cut above a barking shambles. But not by much.

Sardinia, they're down for 50,000 men-say we get a tenth of that army we're paying good golden guineas for. Spain, of course…?

Why of course! he snickered to himself, still amazed that they were now firm allies. Correction-just "allies." Just this morning, the Spanish fleet had come up over the horizon at last, like a Jack-in-the-Box, rushing in untidy order to enter harbour at the same time as the Royal Navy. Troops aboard, he wondered? Sure to be. Have to be!

Spain had a huge army, but a narrow, rugged border with France along the daunting Pyrenees. Poor and downtrodden as their peasants were, as arrogant and stiff-necked-as benighted!-as their top-lofty aristocracy was, it was in Spain's best interests to send a big contingent quickly, to stamp the French Revolutionaries into the floor like cockroaches, before any of that "Rights of Man" egalitarian bumf caught on in Spain itself. He thought 10,000 men would be a safe wager. And English regiments, that went without saying. There were men at Gibraltar, and with Spain allied, there'd be no reason to keep them there, no worry about a siege such as the one his father'd gone through when he'd won his knighthood, in the last war but one. Troops out from home, too, if Lords Dundas and Grenville had been scheming this one up as long as Sir William Hamilton had alluded. Bags of 'em!

Austria? Well, maybe too busy on France's eastern borders, Alan decided; they and the Prussians would mass to walk into France along the traditional routes, but part of the Austrian Empire was in northern Italy, so surely… another 6,000 or so, cutting west from Genoa or Leghorn? Or get us to escort transports from there, and bring 'em direct. And quick, he decided. It'll have to be quick, or… soon as they get word from us!

That brightened his prospects for a moment. Despatches would go home, to all the allies. To Naples, for certain. Cockerel might sail on the next morning. He could go ashore again, visit Emma Hamilton one more time. Emulate some of those erotic Etruscan fragments they'd seen in their gallery of choice, the ones with the cavorting…

Well, maybe that's not a good idea, he sighed, leaving the chart: wondering again where his conscience was hiding, or if he, in truth, had one. Once was enough… took the edge off. Every six months'r so…?

His brief enthusiasm left him, and he shivered inexplicably to a brisk African wind on his left shoulder that gave no warmth.

Hellish gloomy damn' place, he concluded.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," he muttered.

"Sir?" the senior helmsman inquired, shifting his quid to another cheek.

"Nothing," Lewrie granted. "Steady as she goes."

Perhaps it was just as well that Captain Horatio Nelson's sixty-four-gunned Agamemnon bore the word to Naples, Lewrie thought. With the French Mediterranean fleet captured in one fell swoop, all her proud, large line-of-battle ships in the bag, the more impressive British liners were freed to make the diplomatic calls about the region-those ships captained by men of greater stature and diplomatic experience.

Cockerel idled about in the Golfe du Lion for a few days to keep an eye on Marseilles, round Cape Cicie to the west, before that pointless task was undertaken by a small squadron of British 74's, and she returned to Toulon. There was nothing much to guard against, since only a scattered handful of French frigates and corvettes were still free to operate, and those few were alone, uncoordinated and fearful.

"You really can walk in their shade," Lieutenant Barnaby Scott commented as they toured the basin a few days later.

Everywhere there was bustle. Proud French ships were being stripped of their guns and powder, rowing boats worked like a plague of water-beetles to carry captured supplies out to the Spanish and British ships. And a horde of curiosity seekers such as Lewrie and Scott had come ashore to gawp over all they'd won so easily, and crow with elation.

And from the moment their cutter had touched a quay, they'd been gawped at in turn, cheered by Royalist Toulonese, gushed over by women and men with white Bourbon cockades on their coats or their hats. Any restaurant would kick Frogs out to seat them and fete them, any desire they had was fulfilled (mostly), and they couldn't seem to buy a drink in the town- it was given with bubbly expressions of gratitude. "Damn' friendly lot," Barnaby Scott opined. "For Frogs." There was martial music, clattering hooves on cobblestones and the heavy drumming of field-artillery carriages and caissons as a Spanish half-regiment paraded by above the basin, on the main water street.

"S'pose we should be about our shopping," Lewrie shrugged, still uneasy with the concept of friendly Frenchmen. Besides, ambling about by themselves, surrounded by convict labourers in their filthy slops and irons, surrounded by milling packs of truculent and beetle-browed French sailors who were most pointedly not wearing Royalist cockades, and who hawked and spat behind their backs, or muttered sneering words behind their hands as they passed… well, they might be disarmed and supposedly harmless, but Lewrie didn't want to take the chance of risking the drunkest or the surliest of them. No matter how near help, in the form of Royal Navy working parties or Marine sentries, might be.

On the northern shore of the basin's quays, it all spread out before them as they stopped and stood, gazing down upon the pool of water between the jetties and the warehouses, dry dock and arsenals: A host of docked warships, frigates, corvettes, gunboats, floating batteries (that looked more like ancient oared war galleys), 74's and 80's of the line, and two monstrous 120-gun ships of the 1st Rate, so huge they dwarfed all others, even British 1st Rates.

"Comfortin' to know we'll have use of all these," Lewrie said on. "Frogs build damn' good ships. Finer entries, leaner quick-work… sail faster than ours, and that's a fact. Always have."

"Ah, 'tisn't the ship makes the difference, sir," Scott scoffed, a trifle bleary from all the "gratitude" he'd taken aboard." Tis men who decide a battle. Frogs've never had the stomach for fighting, not at musket or pistol-shot, broadsides to broadsides. Lay off, so please you, and fire at your rigging! Pack o' spineless, snail-eatin' Mollies, they are. Frog-eatin' butt-fuckers. All they know how to do is mince!"

"A little less of it, Mister Scott," Lewrie cautioned. "Those near us aren't mincing, exactly. Why don't you smile and nod?"

"Shit on 'em, sir," Scott sneered. "Shit on 'em! I was raised t'hate a Frenchman worse'n 'Old Scratch' himself. Hate 'em worse than Dons, when you get right down to it. Damme if I'll pander to any Frog, no matter he's licking mine arse to save his. Let 'em bring on their guillotines, I say! Cut the odds down for us first, and we'll sort out the survivors later. And spare the world any more of 'em."

"I truly do despair of you, Mister Scott," Lewrie replied sternly, not for the first time. Bluff, humorous and "me-hearty" as Scott could be, he had a surly side when he'd been tippling. Which he did about as often as the unfortunate "Little Left-enant Do-Little," Banbrook, in the past month or so, Lewrie had begun to notice.

As that other unfortunate, Lieutenant Clement Braxton, had tried anew to ingratiate himself with his own messmates after his father's illness, it had been Scott who'd still have no truck with him. Which made it harder for the others to relent, to realise that the son was nothing like the sire, and accept his shy and clumsy offerings.

"I despair of the whole shitten mess, sir," Scott gloomed, taken by a Blue-Devil mood of a sudden. "Braxtons and Brax-tons, then even more Braxtons, generation unto generation, pestiferous as Frogs in-"

"Shut up," Lewrie snapped.

"Sir?" Scott looked at him owlishly, like Falstaff called down by a drinking partner. But he did shut up, at least.

"If you cannot control yourself, sir, go back aboard."

"You'd deny me a few hours of peace, of freedom from our tyrants, sir?" Scott wheedled, sounding genuinely hurt. "Send me back to more-"

"Shut up, Mister Scott!" Lewrie snarled. "I mean it. Aboard or ashore, there'll be no more of that talk. Sets yourself a bad habit. Carp all you like two years from now, when the commission's over, but manage yourself now, sir."

"Mister Lewrie, you hate 'em as much as I do, as much as we both hate Frogs and Dons, I know it, so-"

"Sir, will you obey me?" Lewrie demanded, suddenly fed up with it; with Scott, with his impossible task. And begrudging his own few hours of freedom, interrupted by a maundering, half-drunken pest. Scott was, he'd imagined-'til now, at least-a kindred spirit. Cynical, sarcastic, wryly funny to talk to, a rakehell and a rogue. But no, Scott had a deeper, darker streak that he didn't much care for.

"Very well, sir," Scott replied stiffly, drawing himself up to a full height, doffing his hat in salute. "I'll say no more. I trust you may excuse me, then, sir? Since you find my company distasteful, I will spare you any further… I will take my leave, sir."