wait; said they’d come out of port before I had time to make another circuit,” James was saying, out of the corner of his mouth and somewhat muffled by toast, while Sutton attempted to sketch the scene on a piece of paper. “I hardly believed him, but sure enough, by Sunday morning out they came, and we met them off Cape Trafalgar early on Monday.”
He swallowed down a cup of coffee, all the company waiting impatiently for him to finish, and pushed his plate aside for a moment to take the paper from Sutton. “Here, let me,” he said, drawing little circles to mark the positions of the ships. “Twenty-seven and twelve dragons of ours, against thirty-three and ten.”
“Two columns, breaking their line twice?” Laurence asked, studying the diagram with satisfaction: just the sort of strategy to throw the French into disarray, from which their ill-trained crews could hardly have recovered.
“What? Oh, the ships, yes, with Excidium and Laetificat over the weather column, Mortiferus over the lee,” James said. “It was hot work at the head of the divisions, I can tell you; I couldn’t see so much as a spar from above for the clouds of smoke. At one time I thought for sure Victory had blown up; the Spanish had one of those blasted little Flecha-del-Fuegos over there, dashing about quicker than our guns could answer. He had all her sails on fire before Laetificat sent him running with his tail between his legs.”
“What were our losses?” Warren asked, his quiet voice cutting through the high spirits of their excitement.
James shook his head. “It was a proper bloodbath and no mistake,” he said somberly. “I suppose we have near a thousand men killed; and poor Nelson himself came in a hairsbreadth of it: the fire-breather set alight one of Victory’s sails, and it came down upon him where he stood on the quarterdeck. A couple of quick-thinking fellows doused him with the scuttlebutt, but they say his medals were melted to his skin, and he will wear them all the time, now.”
“A thousand men; God rest their souls,” Warren said; conversation ceased, and when finally resumed it was at first subdued.
But excitement, joy gradually overcame what perhaps were the more proper sentiments of the moment. “I hope you will excuse me, gentlemen,” Laurence said, nearly shouting as the noise climbed to a fresh pitch; it precluded any chance of acquiring further intelligence for the moment. “I promised Temeraire to return at once. James, I suppose that the report of Bonaparte’s demise is a false one?”
“Yes, more’s the pity: unless he falls down in an apoplexy over the news,” James called back, which roused a general shout of laughter that continued by natural progression into a round of “Hearts of Oak,” and the singing followed Laurence out the door and even through the covert, as the song was taken up by the men outside.
By the time the sun rose, the covert was half empty. Scarcely a man had slept; the prevailing mood could not help but be joyful almost to the point of hysteria, as nerves which had been drawn to their limits abruptly relaxed. Lenton did not even attempt to call the men to order and looked the other way as they poured out of the covert into the city, to carry the news to those who had not yet heard and mingle their voices into the general rejoicing.
“Whatever scheme of invasion Bonaparte has been working towards, this must surely have put paid to it,” Chenery said exultantly, later that evening, as they stood together on the balcony and watched the returning crowd still milling more slowly about in the parade grounds below, all the men thoroughly drunk but too happy for quarreling, snatches of song bursting out occasionally to float up towards them. “How I should like to see his face.”
“I think we have been giving him too much credit,” Lenton said; his cheeks were red with port and satisfaction, as well they might be: his judgment to send Excidium had proven sound and contributed materially to the victory. “I think it clear he does not understand the navy so well as the army and the aerial corps. An uninformed man might well imagine that thirty-three ships-of-the-line had no excuse to lose so thoroughly to twenty-seven.”
“But how can it have taken his aerial divisions so long to reach them?” Harcourt said. “Only ten dragons, and from what James said, more than half of those Spanish—that is not