“And will Your Grace be wanting the Spanisher knight, as well?” inquired Sir Calum.
Bass shrugged. “Why not? He swings steel hard and true, nor is he a poor shot. Yes, summon Don Diego back to me here, too.”
In her present mood and frame of mind, he was bedamned if he was going to leave Krystal Foster nee Kent in command of a baker’s dozen of the savage, conscienceless galloglaiches who would consider her wish to be their commission to wreak any barbarity that came into her head, simply because she happened to be the wife of their chosen warleader, Bass Foster. To do such would be akin to giving an idiot child a brace of loaded horse pistols to play with.
And that brought to mind another troubling thought. Just what kind of pampered, overprotected. arrogant little monster was such a mother going to make of their son, Joe Foster? It would be wise, he thought, before he set sail for Ireland, to arrange for the boy’s fosterage. And the sooner the better, for the boy’s sake. Krystal would pitch a first-class bitch, without any shred of doubt, but by then he would be at sea or in Ireland and it would be his orders that would be obeyed, not hers.
He also would need to make time to write to Hal, enclosing along with that letter another one addressed to Jenny Bostwick, accompanying a small, expensive gift or perhaps a purse of gold to pay something toward her suffering at Krystal’s hands. So much to do already and so little time left in which to do it was he to adhere to King Arthur’s schedule. And Krystal was, as usual now, not helping him one damned bit.
Captain and Sailing Master Edwin Alfshott, Walid Pasha, Fahrooq, Sir Liam Kavanaugh, and some score of senior gun captains from the two galleons and the large caravel that made up the backbone of the private fleet of His Grace Sir Bass, Duke of Norfolk, stood or sat or squatted around a man who stood lounging against a long eighteen-pounder bronze culverin.
The tall, spare, heavily freckled, brown-haired man, but recently knighted and ennobled and still most unsure of himself in those new usages, was the royal gun founder, Sir Peter Fairley. He was come down from York to personally demonstrate a new and much safer method of firing cannon and mortars.
The culverin had, under his supervision, been fully charged with propellant powder and several thick wads, but no shot, for these coastal waters wherein the ships lay at anchor were heavily traveled, and no one wished to chance hulling or demasting some hapless, helpless fisherman by accident.
When the gun captain made to prime the piece, however. Sir Peter waved him away and instead thrust what looked a little like a large key made of brass wire and sheet copper into the touchhole. Next he engaged a small brass hook at the end of a slender cord some four or five yards long to a smaller ring set within the larger ring of the “key,” just above the copper cylinder that now plugged the touchhole of the loaded culverin. He laid the loosely coiled cord atop the the lavishly carved and ornamented breech of the French-made piece, just forward of the cas-cabel, which on this particular tube was in the shape of a stylized gargoyle’s head.
Beckoning to Fahrooq, whom he had come to know and to like over the past months, he had him take hold of the end of the cord, play it out to its full length, and then, taking a stance to the side and rear of the culverin, take up the slack and, with his hand at waist level, give the cord a sharp jerk.
All eyes were, of course, on the Turkish officer, so not a few men jumped, startled, when the culverin roared and bucked backward, straining against the recoil ropes and belching a smoking wad from its ornate muzzle on a long stream of fire.
After he had gained more than mere grudging attention from the gun captains. Sir Peter had them gather around closer and, with fingers that were big and work-stained and scarred, but still sure and rock-steady, he rapidly dismantled a brace of the friction primers and showed all of them the very simple works.
“Now, see here boys,” he said, “ain’t nothing magic to thishere deevice. Thishere big ring of heavy-gauge brass wire don’t mean nothing, it’s just there to give the gunner a handle and to pertect the little copper ring, is all. If you wants them off for some reason, all you got to do is this.” He demonstrated.
“What matters here is the littler ring, the copper one, the tube, and what’s inside of it.” Peeled open, an unsoldered tube showed within a tightly coiled steel spring held in compression by the shaft of copper that depended from the smaller ring above, the shaft being split near its lower end. then bent up under the lowest coil of the tempered-steel spring.
“You see, fellers,” Sir Peter Fairley went on. “this stuff what looks like dried paste inside here is stuff that takes fire real easylike. a whole lot easier then even fine-grain gunpowder does. The outsides of thesehere springs has done been made rough after the tempering by filing, and it’s little pieces of flints and pyrites is held hard against the springs by the filling compound, so when the ring and its rod is jerked out and the spring ain’t being held tight no more, it strikes sparks and the sparks sets off the compound and that shoots enough fire into the main charge for to fire the gun.”
After examining two of the primers for a while. Fahrooq had the gun crew on duty swab and reload the waiting culverin. Once he had probed the touchhole, he inserted one of the primers picked out at random from the box Sir Peter had brought, attached the lanyard hook, took a stance, took in the slack, then gave a sharp jerk.
The copper pin came out, the gun again roared and bucked back, the device itself rose up a couple of inches, then settled back into the touchhole.
“Very nice. Sir Peter,” the Turk said. “But the thing is mechanical, and all mechanical objects fail to function on occasion. How often do these fail, and what is a gunner to then do when such a failure occurs?”
Sir Peter nodded. “Of all the testing we done done up to York, Fahrooq—and it’s been considerable, too—something less than one and a quarter out’n ever twenny has either not ignited at all or hung Tire or not throwed enough fire to set off the gun charge, and we done tested it on ever’thmg from cannon-royals to old, antique ribaltikins, too, including some of my breechloading chasers. But hell, man, was one to fail, just pop anothern in, quick. If it ain’t anothem to hand, well, the gunners still got their flasks of priming powder and linstocks, ain’t they?
“Look, fellers, I ain’t saying that thesehere is the best things to come down the pike sincet wheellocks, but used right, they sure oughta make things a mite easier for the crews manning guns down on the main battery decks. Another thing, too—when you gets shorthanded during a fight where each gun is firing point-blank, maybe, and don’t gotta be laid individual-like, a rating can have the guns charged, use thesehere primers, and shoot all or half of a broadside, all at the same time, with just one jerk of the lanyards.”
On hearing this, Walid Pasha, Edwin Alfshott, and Sir Liam looked at each other and nodded. Win, lose, or draw, this new system seemed at least worth a try.
Sir Peter kept the duty gun crew busy, allowing the assembled gunners and officers to personally use the entire box of primers he had brought along on not just the long eighteen-pounder but on some of the heavier pieces on the gun decks below. Not once during the afternoon did any of the devices fail to produce immediate results of a positive nature.
In a private postprandial conversation with His Grace Sir Bass Foster. Duke of Norfolk, at Norwich Castle, that night. Sir Peter said, “Bass, old buddy, your ship captains and their officers is a whole lot nicer, smarter bunch then the hidebound old assholes runs King Arthur’s siege train is. Damn near ever one of the siege gunners liked my primers a whole lot, was looking forward to using ’em, they allowed, seeing that they’d even fire great big old fucking bombards, real old ones. too.
“But then when I showed them off to the fucking officers, they never stopped frowning and all and turned them primers down flat. What they all said, when it was boiled down, was that if portfires was good enough for their great-granddaddies, they was good enough for them and the gunners. Now don’t that beat all. Bass?”