King's Captain

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Besides, your name’d not draw workers, Alan,” Caroline imparted, sweeping her skirts aside to first sit on the arm of his chair … then lean back and snuggle into his lap. “Mind, we think the world of you, but …”

  He interrupted her to steal a gentle, teasing, wifely kiss.

  “Unless there’s a grand victory like Saint Vincent, most folk could care less about the war,” she told him as she nestled in. “And they forget that a week later. Why, last year, the London Mob stoned the King’s carriage! Shouting, ‘No more King, no more war, and no more Pitt’!”

  “They what?” Lewrie stiffened in outrage. “Why, I never heard the like! Be stormin’ the Tower of London next! Buildin’ guillotines and loppin’ off heads! Didn’t see that in any papers come by me.”

  Hold on, yes, I have heard the like, Lewrie reminded himself; back in London, that packet o’ penny tracts … those men at Willis’s Rooms!

  “Higher taxes, price of feeding themselves gone right through the roof, feeding their families,” Caroline mused sadly. “And all the men away, in the Army or the Navy. And, believe it or not, even these high wages they’re getting, even with a scarcity of able-bodied hands, can’t keep up. Levies on everything needful, Alan. Soap, beer, boots, clothing, on candles. Taxes on sugar, salt, coffee, and tea … not that you can still find tea for sale, ’less it’s been smuggled across from France, mind,” Caroline complained. “Bricks, tobacco, rum, windowpane glass, windows themselves … four pence, mind you, on a copy of a newspaper! I’ve heard some mine or mill workers earn eighteen pounds per annum and ten of that goes out in taxes or necessities! The same for our necessities … as I’m sure you saw in my ledgers.”

  “Aye, I did.” Lewrie winced at the year-end sum.

  “There have been rumours of riots,” she confided, nestling closer to him with a worried look. “Labouring groups organising to stop work for higher pay … though they’ve been outlawed. Along with all of that Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, croaking.”

  “Never thought I’d hear such tripe, in England of all places,” Lewrie sighed, sliding a protective arm about her. “Damme, don’t they know, do they stop working, they starve our defences? Don’t they know the Frogs are ready to come conquer us? Ungrateful curs! They wish to parlez-vous and bow to a Liberty Tree, see all the churches boarded up and turned into ‘Temples of Reason’?”

  There came a knock from the entry hall on the double-doors.

  “Beggin’ yah pahdon, sah,” Andrews’s voice came soft and melodious as he filled in for a proper butler. “But ’tis Bosun Cony’s wife come callin’, sah. Missuz Maggie? Say she got t’speak t’ya, sah. It be urgent, she say.”

  “Um, ahh …” Lewrie grunted, disentangling himself, helping Caroline up from their compromising position, so she could push her gown and her hair straight, and he could reset his waist-coat, shoot cuffs, and appear “respectable.” “Very well, Andrews, I’ll be out directly. I do declare, Caroline. Speak of the Devil, hmmm?”

  “Hardly the Devil, darling,” Caroline chuckled. “Maggie’s too dear to us to be calling her that. More-like … seeing a red-bird as sign someone’ll come unexpected. Like we believed in the Carolinas.”

  Lewrie opened the doors and stepped out into the entry-hall, to espy a worried-looking Maggie Cony, the flaxen-haired helpmeet to his old friend and compatriot. While not a classic beauty, for a country woman she was usually most fetching, in a strong, no-nonsense way … and more than a match for her absent husband.

  “Mistress Cony!” He beamed. “And young Will too! Bless me … nothing’s gone amiss since we saw you at church, has it? Something urgent, I heard?”

  Will had been detained at Portsmouth for a few days longer, just until the ship could be properly housed in a stone dry dock. Lewrie had issued leave-tickets for the senior hands, and Will should be on his way home, unless the new captain had decided not to honour them. He’d sent a thick packet of sea-letters on with Andrews and Padgett too, as they’d come on to Anglesgreen with his goods. Everything had been just fine, he’d thought … .

  “Somethin’ awful happenin’ down t’Portsmouth, Captain Lewrie, sir,” Maggie blurted out. “Coach just came with a note from Will … fetched it me at the Red Swan. He’ll not be coming home, sir!”

  “Well, damme, he shall!” Lewrie declared, “if I have to coach down to Portsmouth myself and set his new captain straight. I give you my word on that, Mistress.”

  “Worse’n that, sir. Will got his leave-ticket, aye, and his new captain said ‘twas alright him comin’ on, but … Now he writes he can’t leave the ship nor the dockyards. Can’t leave Portsmouth a’tall, sir! None o’ the sailors can. There’s been mutiny in Portsmouth … nigh on the whole Channel Fleet, sir! Navy won’t take any orders t’sail, won’t stir, ’til their … demands have been met! Oh Lord, Captain Lewrie, sir!” Maggie Cony said, one hand for her son, and wringing the other in her apron. “Mutiny, sir! They’ll fetch soldiers t’put it down, an’ my Will right in the middle of it. There’ll be hundreds kilt a’fightin’ … hundreds hanged, ’fore ’tis done!”

  “Mutiny!” Lewrie gasped. “What, the whole bloody Fleet? It … that just can’t be! They’ve … mean t’say … !” He sputtered, turning to Caroline for assurance this wasn’t a nightmare.

  One ship, aye, with an ogre for a captain. Lewrie shivered, wincing as he recalled how close HMS Cockerel was to mutiny with that batch of slave-driving fiends in her gunroom and midshipmen’s berths.

  He saw Caroline shudder, but seem to shrug too, as if this was merely one more threatening event in a whole year of earth-shaking, and unbelievable, events. With all the anger and want in the land she had just spoken of, all the unrest he’d seen in those penny tracts, those Republican, rebellious screeds … !

  Labourers rioting, aye … civilians’d do such—he groped for a thread of understanding—but never the tars! Not my jacks! Irish, maybe—but the best part of the Navy—his Navy? And where might it spread?

  “Have you Will’s letter, ma’am? Good. Let me see that!”

  BOOK TWO

  Tamen aspera regun perpetimur iuga,

  nec melior parere recuso.

  Yet we endure the cruel yoke of kings,

  nor though the better man do I refuse obedience.

  —ARGONAUTICA, BOOK V, 487-89

  VALERIUS FLACCUS

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They took the shorter road down from Portsdown Hill this time beneath the furiously whirling signal telegraph station, to the slightly inland town of Portsea. It was a clear day, so Lewrie, Maggie Cony, and young Will could espy far beyond Gosport, Haslar Hospital, several forts including the one opposite Portsmouth Point—manned, the forts were. Above the walls of fortifications circling Portsmouth itself, framed ’twixt Portsmouth and Southsea Castle—pent atop the golden-galleon-spire of the Church of St. Thomas A’ Becket—lay the Fleet.

  Proud three-decker 1st- and 2nd-Rate flagships, two-decker 3rd and 4th Rates, slim frigates and sloops of war, brigs, schooners, and cutters, bulky transports converted from men-o’-war to carry troops and stores for a world-wide war; sheer-hulks and receiving ships reduced to a gantline and lower-most masts, where new-caught lubbers and seamen languished ’til a warship had need of them.

  All of them flying battle-flags, the stark, unadorned blood-red flags without the British canton! Commission pendants still streamed, but none of the flagships wore broad pendants denoting the presence of an admiral or commodore—only the battle colours, nothing national!

  Militia paraded in Portsea as their coach slowed, shunted aside to make room for soldiery and idling onlookers. There were hardly any sailors to be seen, naval or civilian. Marines in full kit stood here and there in full squads, their bayonets unsheathed and fixed under the muzzles of their muskets. Usually, a parade of troops brought out the spectators, raised cheers, the fluttering of handkerchiefs by the town women, and the tittery delight of youngsters. But not this time, Lewrie noted; now, the dolefu
l beats of drums, the clomp of crude-made boots, the clop of his coach’s horses, and the funereal rumbles from its iron-shod wheels seemed the only sounds.

  Right—into the main gate of the dockyard, and several minutes in argument with a Marine Captain, no matter Lewrie was wearing uniform; then at last proceeding past the Hard, Gun Wharf, the mast-pool, and the small Royal Naval Academy, and the Commissioner’s House, the Rope Walk—and a few more aggressively curious roving marine patrols!—until they could alight hard by one of the stone graving docks, where HMS Jester stood propped and stranded, looking like a scrofulous, dead whale. With her bottom exposed, all the sheet copper, paper, and felt ripped off, and a good third of her underwater planking stripped away for replacing, she looked more a shipwreck than a ship of war. She did not fly any flags, since she was officially out of commission, in the hands of the yards. And, Lewrie was grateful to see, she did not sport that rebellious red banner either.

  “I’d go aboard,” he told an idling yard worker by her brow, eyeing that shaky-looking gangplank which led from the lip of the dock to her starboard entry-port, perched rather high-ish above the floor of the graving dock and all its accumulated trash, muck, and filth, in about a foot of verminous-looking harbour water. A few rare workmen pretended to do something constructive beneath her.

  “You her cap’um, sir?” The dock worker yawned.

  “Her last captain,” Lewrie explained.

  “’Ey ain’t too fond o’ awficers come callin’, sir. But ye c’n try.” The man shrugged.

  “Hoy, Jester . !” Lewrie shouted, about halfway across that brow.

  Several heads popped up over the sail-tending gangway bulwarks, where a harbour-watch party evidently had been loafing. A few sailors mounted to the quarterdeck, hands in their pockets and their hats far back on their heads.

  Damme! Lewrie fumed; no warrant or petty officer standing deckwatch? And common seamen, walking the quarterdeck without leave?

  “Permission to come aboard, to visit …” Lewrie called over.

  “Denied, sir … sorry,” a strange voice rasped back. “Beggin’ yer pardon, sir, but … there’ll be no officers return aboard ’til all our grievances been settled.”

  Lewrie went colt-eyed at that reply, his eyebrows up to his hat brim in shock at being spoken to so by a common seaman. Damme! Lewrie gawped again, taking a closer look; that saucy bugger’s armed! He had himself a closer peer at the sailors who’d been lazing on deck before, and those who’d come up to see the commotion. Wide baldrics were hung over their shoulders, supporting scabbarded cutlasses. Pistols poked from their waistbands, most piratical; and those who served as watch or side-party held muskets and sported cartouche boxes!

  “None of your officers are aboard then?” Lewrie puzzled aloud. “And they gave you the keys to the arms chests? Not even a midshipman left?”

  “Nary a one, sir,” the strange seaman shouted back. “All sent ashore, just after the delegates of the Fleet decided. Bosun an’ the Master Gunner’z in charge, sir. Charge o’ th’ arms too, sir. And … beggin’ yer pardon again, sir, but … we vowed no Commission Officer’s to come aboard ’til …”

  “I am Commander Lewrie … Jester’s last captain,” Lewrie stated, moving forward a few feet along that rickety gangplank. “I’ve come to see your Bosun, Mister Cony. I’ve brought his wife and child along … there they are, yonder.”

  “Oh, a social call then, sir!” The leading sailor brightened. “In ’at case, aye, ir … come aboard. Passin’ th’ word for th’ Bosun!”

  Several of the mutinous hands relayed that shout to summon the Bosun on deck, as Lewrie waved Maggie and little Will forward to join him. “Side-party … ! Present … !”

  They would offer him a proper salute then, though the muskets were most-like loaded, if not primed, as well! Lewrie took it, doffing his hat to the quarterdeck and side-party as if Jester was still a ship in proper hands … and everything was normal!

  “Maggie, darlin’!” Will Cony shouted, as soon as he had gained the deck. He rushed up to help her the last few steps inboard through the entry-port. Maggie swept him into a fierce, protective hug just as quickly, with little Will clinging to his father’s leg like a limpet to a rock. The armed sailors, their duties done, lowered their muskets to lean on, and cooed and chuckled softly, breaking into fond smiles!

  “Cap’um, sir!” Will exclaimed, after he’d scooped his child up to eyelevel, still with one arm about his wife. “God o’ Mercy, sir … ’twas ’opin’ yew’d come. An’ thankee f’r bringin’ Maggie an’ little Will. Didn’ know when I’d see ’em again, f’r all this …”

  “Will, damme … just what in Hell is all … this?” Lewrie asked.

  “Will ya be ’avin’ a seat, sir? Th’ explainin’ll take a piece. Hoy, this’s Mister Tuggle … new Master Gunner. Mister Tuggle, could we fetch up table an’ chairs … any sort o’ seats? This is my old cap’um, Commander Lewrie, Mister Tuggle.”

  “Sir,” the Master Gunner intoned, straightening himself like a “piss and gaiters” sergeant of marines. “Pleasure t’meet ye, sir. We know ye for a fair-minded man, sir. Of yer old warrants and petty officers … name in the Fleet, sir?”

  As a table from the officer’s gunroom, some chairs or kegs were fetched, there came a parade up from below: Mr. Reese, Mr. Paschal, and Mr. Meggs—Hogge the Gunner’s Mate, the “Dutchie” Mr. Rahl, some of the hands who’d served this ship since the very first—all smiling in welcome and in pleasure of the rencontre—though a tad sheepish, Lewrie noted as he took a seat at the table, after acknowledging their helloes.

  “Small beer, sir?” Cony offered. “Ah, ’ere we go, sir. Need a ‘wet,’ I s’pose. Mind ‘at keg, Maggie. ’Tis tarry, but ‘twill ’ave t’serve f’r yer seat … an’ sure t’be bad f’r yer ’andsome new gown, me love. Will, do ye climb up on yer daddy’s lap, whilst we ’ave ourselves a yarnin’? Do ye not mind me sitting, ’at is, sir … ?”

  “Aye, seat yourself, Will. This isn’t official. And after so many years together …” he said with a shrug and a smile. “I’m not here in any capacity ’cept to see you away for home like your leave-ticket allows. Not to meet with any, uhm … what-you-call-’ems.”

  “Delegates, sir.” Cony fidgeted a bit, his eyes going cutty as a bag of nails. “Fleet Delegates an’ … ship delegates.”

  “Right.” Lewrie nodded, taking a sip of the beer before him. “Delegates. I’m not representing anyone, so … this is personal.”

  “Well, sir …” Will sighed, scratching his head. He took himself a deepish quaff before continuing. “This’z a tad, uhm … well …”

  “Well?” Lewrie joshed. “A deep subject, that.”

  “Aye, sir … aye.” Will nodded sagely, mustering up a chuckle of his own for a second. “But, uhm … d’ye see, Cap’um. Me … an’ Mister Tuggle, uhm … Mister Reese, an’ Sadler, sir … we are th’ delegates. Got elected, like, by the rest o’ th’ ’ands.”

  “Oh, Will, my God, what’s t’become o’ ya?” Maggie gasped aloud, hands to her mouth. “Tell me they don’t know it yet!”

  “Signed our names, Maggie … right out in th’ open, like. Same as th’ rest.” Cony winced, taking another duck-and-cover sip of beer.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Lewrie groaned. “Why in Hell?”

  “Day’r two after ya left th’ ship, sir.” Will wriggled about as he began to explain, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “See, these petitions come aboard from th’ line-o’-battle ships, all signed by ev’ry liner in Channel Fleet. Boats visitin’ back an’ forth, folks lookin’ up ol’ shipmates … ya know how ’at is, don’t ya, Cap’um, why a body’d not think o’ thing of h’it. First off, they waz about pay … Mister Tuggle, show th’ cap’um ‘at first ’un we got.”

  “Uhm, er … here, sir.” Tuggle complied, rather warily. “D’ye see, sir, ah … Commander Lewrie? Hands haven’t been paid, Lord knows how long, nor how far in arrears, not the six months usual. And with
the redcoats gettin’ a rise in pay two years ago too, well …”

  He handed over a document. Lewrie scanned it, feeling like he should be using tongs, not fingers. This could surely burn up a Navy career like a fireplace ember would consume a carpet! He did smirk at it though; for it was Admiralty paper, water-marked with “GR”—the monogram for Georgius Rex!

  To the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. THE HUMBLE PETITION of the seamen aboard His Majesty’s Ship in behalf of themselves and all others serving in His Majesty’s fleets

  Humbly Sheweth

  THAT your petitioners must humbly intreat your Lordships will take the hardships of which they complain into your consideration, not in the least doubting that Wisdom and Goodness will induce your Lordships to grant them a speedy Redress.

  It is now upwards of two years since your Lordships’ petitioners observed with Pleasure the Increase of Pay which has been granted the Army and Militia, and the separate provision for their wives and families—naturally expecting that they should in turn experience the same Munificence, but alas, no notice has been taken of Them, nor the smallest provision …

  The petition went on to state most assuredly that the seamen of the Royal Navy were His Majesty’s most loyal and most courageous men, especially in such trying times, when their country called them to … “so pressingly advance once more to face her foes …” With what additional vigour and happy minds they would fly to their duty should they know that they’d be paid more money, in line with the increases the Army (and the idle Militia) got—and pointed out that the Navy hadn’t gotten a rise in pay since the times of Charles I!