King's Captain

by Dewey Lambdin

  “But, sir!” Handcocks began to beg, then broke off as he got his pride up, biting back what else he might have said, gnawing on his cheek lining, as stoop-shouldered as a man already convicted.

  And there was Seaman Bales … Rolston, really. Lewrie had yet to dredge up his Christian name, after all these years, when they had been midshipmen together aboard HMS Ariadne, under Captain Bales, so long ago in 1780! Bales, even in chains and shackles, still exuded an air of coolly aloof superiority, a sneering “damn yer blood” glint to his harsh phyz. Even without the beard, Lewrie would have had no clue as to who he was. Perhaps someone else in the Navy might’ve. Lewrie had made sure that his report had contained Bales’s secret identity … with what few hints he’d gleaned about his prior service, the boasting he’d made when first they’d shifted Proteus to the double crescent anchorage, that he’d once been a Master’s Mate.

  Bales/Rolston glared daggers at him. Lewrie felt happy enough to return him what was known in the Sea Service as a “shit-eatin’ grin.”

  “You really plan this, Rolston?” he idly enquired, taking a few steps closer. “Right from the start, did you? One of the schemers in Sandwich?”

  “Why should I tell you anything, Lewrie?” Rolston sneered back. “Keep wondering … and the Devil take you, as I’m sure he will sooner or later.”

  “Rather think he’ll see you first, you dog.” Lewrie continued to grin, enjoying goading him. “Did you really come off a frigate up at Chatham … Hussar, was she?”

  Bales sniffed in derision, but nodded in the affirmative.

  “Just an Able Seaman … after all these years,” Lewrie taunted. “Found your proper level, I s’pose. Yet a naval career begun with such promise … my, my,” Lewrie snickered, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Keith Ashburn … you remember Keith, don’t you, Rolston? Post-Captain into the Tempest frigate. And that was in ’94 in the Med, so he’s sure to have risen higher by now. Young Shirke, I heard he got command of a brig o’war last year … made Commander. Even Bascombe, that idiot, he’s a Lieutenant too. Yet you, on the other hand …”

  “You ruined my career for me, you sonofabitch!” Rolston growled, lifting his shackles as if he still wished to strangle his tormentor but was held by the Marines as his side.

  “Ruined it yourself, Rolston … when you pushed that topman off the tops’l yard.”

  “I never pushed him; he fell!”

  “Gibbs, that was his name, aye,” Lewrie chirped. “Been ridin’ him for weeks, puttin’ him up on charges as I recall, threatened he’d be flogged, were he the last man off the yard again …”

  “He fell. He was clumsy, I tell you! You were the one called it murder, starting your vicious rumours, backbiting in our own mess … !”

  “Never a bit of it.” Lewrie frowned, though that was close to how he recalled it, for he’d taken an instant dislike to Rolston, the moment he’d shown up with Ariadne’s boat to fetch him out to the ship his first morning in the Fleet. “You were guilty as sin.”

  Never came right out and said it, mind, Lewrie qualified; but I did beat all ’round it! Take him down a peg … got out of hand.

  “By God, I’ll settle for you yet, Lewrie! You always were the worst sort of bastard!” Bales snarled.

  “Aye, and you tried, right after Captain Bales chid you to take better care of your people aloft! Came at me with your dirk … in the midshipman’s mess, ’fore a half-dozen witnesses!” Lewrie retorted, in sudden, gloating heat. “Tried to murder me, by God! That’s what got you broken, Rolston. That’s what cost you your career! Signed aboard another ship under another name, did you? Rose to Master’s Mate, did you crow … well, what stupid, criminal thing did you do there to end up nothing but an Able Seaman? You try to murder someone else?”

  “Go fuck yerself … mate.” Bales chilled, closing down against any more abuse. He glowered at his wrist shackles for a moment, shook them as if seeing them for the first time. Lewrie had almost turned away to other things, but was caught by a harsh mutter.

  “Whip-Jack sham of a sailor you were, Lewrie. Still are for all I know.” Bales spat, shrugging as he realised his defeat. “Come with your rich purse, your allowance, your lordly airs … your nose in the air, and your hands soft and clean! Nothing but sneers for the rest of us, the ones who cared for a commission. God, I can’t tell you how much I despise you! You and all your privileged sort! All I ever had was ships and the sea, and hopes to advance, but you scuppered those, didn’t you? Ran into your sort all my born days, thinking men before the mast less than animals! Tools that speak, long as they don’t dare speak back! Ludlow, you … you’re all alike when you get down to it. Cruel, dismissive, sneering … officers!”

  “Ah, but you wished to be an officer, Rolston!” Lewrie snapped, seeing how he could stick the last inch of spite in and give it one last twist. “All you are is envious, not admirable. All your years before the mast and hating every minute of it, every man-jack you had to serve with and play up matey …’cause you were never matey with any one, as I recall, Rolston. You despised ’em most-like; you seethed at being ordered about by mast-captains and mates who didn’t have a tenth o’ your intellect, didn’t you. God help the Navy had you made a commission, for you’d not have been a whit kinder to a ship’s people than Ludlow was. You are a Ludlow, deep down, Rolston. Onliest trouble is you never had the chance t’be a bastard! I took joy of suspecting that you pushed Gibbs, aye, ’cause I didn’t like you then, and I don’t like you now. If that spurred you to try and kill me, then it was the best service I ever did the Navy ’cause it kept you from abusing sailors … maybe even killing more of ’em as the worst sort of officer!”

  “Listen, Lewrie, you … !” Rolston blanched.

  “Gag him, Private,” Lewrie ordered his marine guard, “’til he’s aboard the lugger. I think we’ve all heard enough of this murderous bastard’s guff!”

  The boats were now beginning to transfer the doxies, leaving the prime ringleaders for one last, well-guarded load. Lewrie went over to say his last goodbyes. Since they were expensive goodbyes, he felt he should get his money’s worth! He took a soft, bosomy hug from Miss Nancy, pecked her on the cheek, and wished her well, assuring her that his solicitor would have their money ready for them. And did Nancy actually return to Sheerness for a pay-out with the others, he would be damned surprised. He’d heard of honour among thieves, but how far that stretched, well … Perhaps they’d go in a well-armed committee, keeping a wary eye on each other ’til they had bank notes in hand?

  “G’bye, Cap’um Lewrie, sir,” Sally Blue said, most mournfully, working up tears in her eyes as she came to take her turn down the battens. She’d gathered up her few pitiful belongings in a scraped-bald carpet clutch-bag and was turned out in a fresh gown and hat Lewrie had not seen ’til then. Scrubbed up, too; and even in the nigh-darkness, she looked as chaste and missish as any squire’s daughter of a Sunday.

  She opened her arms, but Lewrie was twice-bitten and thrice shy by then. Yet the woebegone disappointment on her gamin face caused by his refusal made him relent, despite his fear of being pick-pocketed to instant poverty. He smiled, cocked his head, and held out his arms in welcome. She stepped close and, to his considerable alarm … and sudden thrill, it must be admitted … ground her things and groin against him with a puckish twinkle, bestowing a gentle buss near Lewrie’s gawping lips.

  “So long, Sally Blue,” he said, still trying to stay aware where her free hands might roam. “Take ye joy … Have a safe voyage, and a good life after. Thank you again for all you did to get me back my ship. Never forget you, m’dear … there’s a sweet young chit.”

  “You come back to Sheerness, Cap’um Lewrie,” Sally Blue whispered hot and alluring in his ear, enveloping him in a faint hint of a fresh-dabbed scent in her hair, “you come look me up at Checquers, th’ public house? Sometime at th’ Crown an’ Anchor, but that’s no place fer a fine feller like yerself … Jus’ leave a note. La, yer such a kind an
’ gallant gennleman … don’t git much chance t’meet such in my line o’ work. What ya said ya wrote them swells ’bout me?” she cooed as she fell back a half-step to lay hands on his shoulders and look up searchingly into his eyes. “Don’ forgit h’it’s Sally Caruthers, not Sally Blue … same as ya wrote down to yer banker man. Send fer me an’ I’ll come runnin’ … an’ I’ll treat ya to a wondrous time whene’er yer in port. ’Long as ya don’t ask me t’come out t’your ship no more. Kinda lost me taste fer that …” Sally said with a frazzled moue and a gentle chuckle.

  “I quite understand, Sally … Mistress Caruthers.” Lewrie smiled back as he let go of her, stepping back to doff his hat to her as fine as he would to any lady-guest. “We’ll see, perhaps …”

  He did not say that most-like he’d never seek her out or send her a bidding note … but then, he didn’t exactly say that he wouldn’t either, for she was a wee, fetching thing, slim and pretty, like a rose grown on a dung-heap, and sure to be as bouncy and exuberant as a half-broke colt.

  His hands felt the need to twitch though, to see if he still had his watch, chain, fob, coin-purse, pocket-knife, loose change, his silk handkerchief, his breeches’ buckles, or even his horn comb! She laughed again at his strangled look, a quite fetching titter as she looked him up and down as if to fix him in her memory, biting on her lip.

  “No fear, Cap’um Lewrie, sir.” She beamed. “Didn’ take nothin’ … Not this time. You’re too fine a man t’pilfer. Well … bye, Cap’um Lewrie. Fer now?”

  “Adieu, Mistress Caruthers.” He bowed. “Milady.”

  “A … ah-doo, Cap-tain Lewrie,” she pronounced more or less correctly, dropping him a deep curtsy and a graceful incline of her head that would not have been out of place on the Strand, or at St. James’s Palace. “ … ’til we meet again, good sir,” she hinted from beneath her bonnet’s brim.

  Ah, a sweet chit, he thought as he handed her to the entry-port gate, as she swept her skirts to turn outward and lower herself over-side by battens and man-ropes. Tryin’ t’gain manners and style. I just might look her up …

  “Arr, ye keep yer fuckin’ eyes awrf me bum, ya googlin’ shits!” Mistress Sally “Blue” Caruthers chid the boat-crew below, as she heard their appreciative moans and whistles. “Ain’ none o’ yew gettin’ e’en a ‘fingerlark,’ so hush yer gobs!”

  Then again … perhaps not, he sighed with a wry grin.

  At last, the final boat-load of women and sailor’s children had gone. The darkening seas were getting up a tiny bit more boisterous, and the wind was backing from due North a wee touch more with each gust … presaging a switch to Nor-Nor’east in an hour or so perhaps. Lewrie was anxious to get underway, make an offing from the shoaling coast before he was caught on a lee shore at night. And it would be safer for the lugger to get into port before the rising, shifting wind raked up rollers over the bars, which might poop her.

  The last boat-load, though … he simply had to stay on the gangway to watch Handcocks, Morley, and Rolston go, along with two more of the green-cockaded committeemen. Everyone did, it seemed. No sailor wore their red cockades any longer. Once Proteus had escaped for sure, her wake had blossomed with their discards, and their frigate’s creamy stern-froth had resembled a sea-bride’s train on a bloom-strewn church aisle.

  Bales … he was still unable to call him Rolston! His ancient dislike of the boy he’d been so long ago had been dismissed from Lewrie’s ken ages before … he despised the twisted, jealous, radical hell-spite the man had become in his latest guise.

  “Once the boat’s returned, Mister Wyman, ready the hands to recover the boats and stow them on the cross-deck tiers,” Lewrie said.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Lt. Wyman piped from the companionable dark. A number of hand-held muscovy-glass lanthorns along the rails threw amberyellow moon-glades so the hands could see what they were doing, and Captain Vernish’s lugger’s lights competed to turn the patch of sea between them into a gently heaving, glittering sheet of molten gold.

  Him and the others gone, Lewrie decided as the ringleaders got pushed to the open gate of the entry-port, then this ship’ll be clean, untainted … like I told the hands, the slate erased. Then we make of her what she should be. What Proteus deserves to be, he mused.

  Handcocks went down the battens, chains clinking at every step. Then Private Mollo, stripped of his red tunic, for he didn’t deserve to wear a real Marine’s jacket. Morley next, complaining and whining, as he descended to a sure death a few days or weeks away, once the Court Martial Jack was hoisted at the Nore.

  The crew lined the larboard side, perched in the lower shrouds, or hung half-over the gangway bulwarks for a better view of the departure of their tormentors, their fallen heroes. A few of the stauncher loyalists hooted softly as they left, some of the particularly threatened or browbeat, but most were still just too numb—or too unsettled—to utter a peep.

  “Go on then, ya bugger,” Corporal Plympton urged Rolston, the last of them. “Think we got all night for th’ likes o’ you?”

  Rolston would go game. He sneered a faint smile of disdain for the gathered seamen, chin-high and clearly disgusted, as if to wonder out loud why he’d ever thought he could make a revolution with such a poor grade of malleable clay, trying to stare individuals down, and make them duck and cringe in shame they’d failed him. Stiffly, he shuffled in leg and wrist chains, his back straight, as if he was determined to face his music with the innate superiority and courage of a Commission Sea Officer, a cultured, educated gentleman—which to his lights he’d always been—but for Admiralty’s “Guinea Stamp.” He twisted his neck, straining the cords of his throat like a man fighting a tightening noose, and his badly tied gag fell away.

  “Damn the lot of you!” Rolston gravelled, silencing what half-hearted jeering there’d been. “Faithless cowards. Weak as water. To think I believed you were men worth saving! But you never were. You will always be sheep … you’ll always buss the rich folks’ arses.”

  He turned his back outwards, shuffled his feet so the chains on his ankles wouldn’t tangle on the entry-port lip, took hold of the man-ropes, and began to descend, glaring fire-and-brimstone at them. Lewrie stepped closer to the port gate to make sure that Rolston was well and truly going away, happy to see the back of him.

  Lewrie felt a brush along his right boot, heard a faint grumble in Toulon’s throat as he moaned and spat, as if even a cat could recognise evil when he saw it.

  Clank-shuffle-thud … clank-shuffle-thud, Rolston jangled, taking his eyes off the unfaithful sailors to peer over one shoulder, to see where to place his feet below the gun-ports and wale; and men in the cutter were shuffling to make room for him on a centre thwart. He glared back up once he was sure of his footing, stepping down with an old sailor’s expertise, now he’d found a rhythm.

  “Oowww!” he yelped, of a sudden, and his hands on the man-ropes flew open, his eyes widening in surprise.

  “Shit!” Softly, from the bow-man in the cutter when he let his boat-hook slip off the dead-eyed shrouds on the main-chain platform and the cutter began to drift free, though its stern was still secure to a painter. He stabbed out and down … and missed!

  Rolston stabbed out too, got his right hand around a man-rope, with a petulant frown and child-like purse of his lips at almost falling, getting dunked, eyes slit upward to see if anyone had dared kick him or prick him.

  Then Proteus heaved a bit, as a rogue swell lifted her, rolled to larboard as if bowing alee. Below, the oarsmen were dipping their free-side oars at Andrew’s direction to stroke her back to the hull where the bow-man could hook on once more, but it was as if everyone had caught a cramp as their looms tangled in confusion. Proteus … a few degrees from horizontal, and Rolston’s feet went out from under him as if the battens were slick with tallow or hoared with sea-ice!

  He dangled by that one hand, swinging his feet for a place to stand, swinging his left arm to a grip on the left-hand man-rope, then the right one below
his precarious grip.

  “Aahhh … !” he yelped again, as the seamen on the bulwarks and shrouds gasped or moaned with alarm. Bosun’s Mate Towpenny scrambled past Lewrie to the top step of the battens to reach down, when no one else looked like they’d help him. “Well, damme … !”

  Toulon moaning and spitting, bottled up and arch-backed. Leaping atop the bulwarks before Lewrie and balancing easy on four close-placed paws.

  “Ahhh!” Rolston cried again, his right hand flying open as if he’d grasped a red-hot poker. And fell, his yelp of pain and incredulity turning to a thin, disbelieving scream. He plunged into the gilt-lit sea in a huge eruption of foam and spume, like a moth seared from the air into a blossom of yellow flame-points in a chandelier! Down Rolston went into the gap ’twixt ship and cutter, oarsmen and bow-man swinging oars out to probe for him underwater, for him to grab, should he meet up with one.

  As the splash plume subsided like a guttering candle flame, the mutineer corked back to the surface, as most divers must at least once, hands stretched high as if in supplication. He heaved a great gasp of air, even as another wide welter of spray erupted ’round him—as if a beast had risen from the great deeps, expelling its whale-breath after an abyssal sounding.

  “Nnoo!” Rolston screamed, disbelieving, accusing eyes locked on Lewrie, above him, cut off suddenly as he was dragged back down in an eyeblink by the weight of his shackles and chains.

  “Holy … !” Lewrie gasped, feeling his nape hairs bristle with a sudden terror. He barely heard the shocked tumult that gusted through his sailors, barely heard the long, eerie moan from his cat, right by his left elbow, over the distant, rushing ringing in his ears.

  All that remained was a spreading, fading grey-white target of roiled water, with a bull’s-eye of the palest, winking lanthorn-amber … like a sea-beast’s eye, that faded away to ripples.