The King's Marauder

by Dewey Lambdin

  Sapphire was slowly bowling along under tops’ls, fore course, spanker, foretopmast stays’l and inner and outer flying jibs, making an easy six or seven knots.

  “Mister Harcourt,” Lewrie called down to the quarterdeck. “I will have the main course spread.”

  “Aye, sir!” Harcourt crisply replied, lifting a brass speaking trumpet to call for topmen to go aloft to cast off brails, and for halliards and clews to be manned.

  Yelland said true dawn’d be ten minutes past six, Lewrie told himself, pulling out his pocket watch. He looked aft into the East, just in time for false dawn to depart, and see the first golden blush of sunrise, which painted the horizon and clouds with deep crimson; “Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning”. There would be more dirty weather to come, and he hoped that they captured the stranger in good time, so he could get his ship out into deeper waters before the new bout of foul weather caught up with them.

  “Hull-up, there! Deck, there, th’ sail’s hull-up, and bows-on, still one point off th’ starb’d bows!” the foremast lookout cried.

  Not tryin’ t’get away? Lewrie thought, finding that puzzling. If her master had any sense, and there was a single pair of eyes over there, she would have hauled her wind long since.

  “Damned if I don’t think she is making straight for us, sir!” Lt. Harcourt called up to Lewrie from his post below, looking eager, but perplexed. “Shall we alter course, sir?”

  “No, stand on as we are, Mister Harcourt,” Lewrie decided. “If she’s that blind, I’ll oblige the fool.” He closed the tubes of his telescope and descended the starboard ladderway. “I’ll be aft. Keep me informed, while I have some more coffee, and a bit of breakfast.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Once in the great-cabin’s dining-coach, Pettus poured him a fresh cup of coffee. There was a plain white china creampot filled with a few fresh squirts from the nanny goat up forward in the manger, and Pettus had shaved off some sugar from the cone kept in Lewrie’s locking caddy. Yeovill swept in with his food barge even as Lewrie took his first sip, apologising for the sparseness of breakfast, seeing that it was a Banyan Day and all, but he did set out a steaming bowl of oatmeal with a plop of stale butter and treacle, and a boiled egg on the side.

  The Marine sentry who guarded the cabin doors stamped boots, slammed his musket butt on the deck, and bawled, “Midshipman Harvey, SAH!”

  “Enter!” Lewrie called back.

  “Ehm, Mister Harcourt’s duty, sir, and I am to say that the strange sail is still bows-on to us, and shows no sign of fleeing us.”

  “My compliments to Mister Harcourt, and he is to stand on. Have the hands eat, Mister Harvey?” Lewrie asked the young Mid.

  “I believe they have, sir,” Harvey replied.

  “The last look I had of our odd stranger, she’d didn’t appear t’be much of a threat, but I’d admire did Mister Harcourt lead and prepare the six-pounders on forecastle and quarterdeck, and have the Marines turned out under arms.”

  “Very good, sir!”

  “Bless me, Mister Harvey,” Lewrie brightened, peering closely at the Midshipman’s face, “but do I note that you are in need of a shave?”

  “Ehm, yes, sir!” Harvey proudly admitted, stroking his upper lip with a finger.

  “A trim of your locks might not go amiss, either, Harvey,” Lewrie said. “Carry on.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Ye wouldn’t have one o’ Chalky’s wee sausages t’spare, do ye, Yeovill?” Lewrie asked, enviously eying the cat at the foot of the table with his head deep in his food bowl.

  “Always, sir,” Yeovill said with a twinkle in his eyes.

  Happily chewing away, Lewrie returned to the quarterdeck with his telescope to look outboard at their strange, fearless oddity which was now only about two miles off, and still coming on as bold as a dog in a doublet.

  “Damn my eyes, but I could swear she looks familiar,” the First Officer, Lt. Westcott, who had come up from the wardroom, vowed. “Now where…?” he wondered.

  “She appears just another of the typical coasters hereabouts, Mister Westcott,” Lt. Harcourt said with a shrug, “though her wish to be captured is odd.”

  But, by the time that both ships had closed to within one mile of each other, Lewrie had a sneaking feeling that they had seen her once before, too.

  “What’s that?” Harcourt barked, lifting his glass to give her another close look. “God’s Teeth, there’s someone waving a British Jack over yonder!”

  In Lewrie’s ocular, there was a Red Ensign being wig-wagged at them by someone amidships of her starboard rails, and other people on her decks were waving hats, coats, and shirts at them as if very glad to see them! A moment later, and the strange vessel handed her foresail and began to round up into the wind, hauling her mainsail taut and setting her jib cross-sheeted to fetch-to.

  “Damned if we haven’t seen her before,” Lewrie exclaimed. “We took her a month ago. It’s that same filthy old grain barge! Close her near as you may, Mister Harcourt, and prepare to fetch-to.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Harcourt replied, sounding even more perplexed.

  * * *

  Within a quarter of an hour, both ships were cocked up into the wind, and a rowboat manned by two oarsmen and a tillerman, with two passengers aboard, was stroking for Sapphire’s starboard entry-port.

  “Side-party to render honours, sir?” Lt. Harcourt enquired.

  “They don’t exactly look Navy t’me, sir,” Lewrie said, looking the newcomers over. “Let’s wait ’til we know who they are.”

  The rowboat hooked onto the mainmast channel platform and two men scrambled up the boarding battens to the open entry-port, making Lewrie wonder if King Neptune’s scruffy court had come to call, for both were most oddly dressed, and looked more like itinerant Gypsies.

  “Hola, señores!” the first aboard gaily called out, sweeping off a shapeless felt hat to make an exaggerated low bow. He wore a cracked pair of buckled shoes with no stockings, grease-stained and tar-stained slop-trousers, an equally-dirty shirt and a waist-coat made of tan leather. “Hola, amigos! I, Vicente Rodriguez … better known as John Cummings … greet you. I am master of the Gallegos, the splendid ship you seized for me!” He did so in a Spanish accent, then in an accent that put Lewrie in mind of Kent. “And you there on the quarterdeck, I assume would be the gallant Captain Lewrie? Greetings from Mister Thomas Mountjoy, who also expresses his thanks for his fine new vessel!”

  “Has the circus come to town?” Lt. Westcott grumbled under his breath.

  “I’d wait for the jugglers, first,” Lewrie muttered back, then stepped forward to greet Rodriguez/Cummings. “Welcome aboard, sir. However you name yourself,” he said, offering a hand.

  “Allow me to name to you my compatriot, sir,” Rodriguez/Cummings announced, turning to the other new arrival, who had held back behind the loquacious Cummings, peering about with a top-lofty air as if he was amused by it all, or found Sapphire a low-class pigsty. “Mister Romney Marsh, a man of so many identities that they are impossible to enumerate. Romney, this is Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Baronet.”

  “Honoured t’make your acquaintance, sir,” Mr. Marsh said in a clench-jawed Etonian accent, the sort that usually got right up Lewrie’s nose. Marsh offered his hand, then quickly switched to a Bow Bell’s Cockney, “an’ ’aven’t I ’eard o’ you, your ’onour, sir, hah hah!”

  “Mister Mountjoy sent for assistance to expand the reach of his posting, sir,” Cummings elaborated. “We arrived at Gibraltar only one day after you left port.”

  Lewrie only half-heard that; he was still goggling at Marsh, who had just as quickly turned Spanish and was singing some song with a daft grin on his face, lisping away like the haughtiest Castilian.

  Bloody lunaticks, the both of ’em! Lewrie thought.

  “Ehm … shouldn’t we be discussing such in private, Mister Cummings?” Lewrie asked. “‘Under the rose’, all that?”

  “Well, we shouldn�
�t stay too long in company with your ship, lest watchers ashore associate Gallegos with the Royal Navy,” Cummings said, “but, perhaps a few minutes, over a glass of something?”

  “That great American, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote that ‘wine is God’s way of telling us that he loves us, and wishes us to be happy’,” Romney Marsh cited, turning his face angelic. “Yes, make us happy, please do, Sir Alan!”

  “This way, then, gentlemen,” Lewrie bade. “Mister Harcourt, we will remain fetched-to a while longer. Alert me does a strange sail turn up.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lt. Harcourt replied, trying not to laugh at the continuing antics of the mysterious Mr. Marsh, who was practising some dance steps, and humming to himself.

  * * *

  “Wine, Pettus,” Lewrie requested once they were all seated in the starboard-side settee area. “Tea for me.”

  “Oh, but the sun is below the yardarm, Sir Alan,” Marsh said, “since it has just arisen. Ah, you have a cat! Hallo, puss. Venir, el gato bonito!” he crooned with his head over to one side.

  Chalky would have none of it; he crouched down with his tail tucked round his front paws near the wine-cabinet.

  Someone in here’s got some sense, Lewrie amusedly thought.

  “You’re re-enforcing Mountjoy, you said, Mister Cummings? He said he had a man coming to command his boat, should I be able to get him one,” Lewrie asked, by way of beginning, and getting their meeting over quickly, so he wouldn’t have to deal with them for long.

  “And, you did a splendid job of it, sir,” Cummings replied as Pettus fetched a bottle and two glasses of a smuggled Spanish white. “Yes, I’m to play-act a local trader, bearing goods smuggled out of Gibraltar, which as you know, thrives despite the regulations against it. I’ve always played around boats, I’ve always had a good ear for languages, and especially for Spanish and Portuguese, and the regional dialects. Nowhere near Marsh’s talents at it, but I cope. We’re to enter Spanish ports all along the Andalusian, Murcian, and Catalan coasts, ostensibly to trade, but also to pick up reports from agents in place, along with tavern talk. Carry instructions from Mountjoy, that sort of thing, find answers to questions, and fill in the gaps in what we know, and don’t know.”

  “A dangerous business,” Lewrie commented as Pettus brought him a tall glass of cool tea with lemon and sugar.

  “As you’d know best yourself, Sir Alan,” Romney Marsh said in a secretive whisper, leaning a tad closer than Lewrie liked. “We were told of your doings up the Mississippi to Spanish New Orleans a few years ago, and how you scotched that Creole pirate business. Mister James Peel sends his regards. His fondest regards.”

  Marsh said that in yet another guise, this time sounding like the idlest, most affected courtier at St. James’s Palace with the grandest airs. Lewrie didn’t much care for simpering, either!

  “Not all that dangerous, Captain Lewrie,” Cummings stuck in, “for my brief doesn’t require that I meet our agents face-to-face, but deal with drop-points where their reports are secreted. And Mountjoy is counting on the luxury goods we carry to make our presence welcome. I also have enough bribe money to mollify even the most-corrupt Spanish authorities. Marsh here has the more dangerous job…”

  “Volunteered for it, gladly,” Marsh said in a loud boast, “for God, King, and Country. And, for the thrill of it all.”

  “He’s to go to Madrid, and nose about,” Cummings said in awe of the mission, and Marsh’s daring.

  “And get back, I presume?” Lewrie dryly asked.

  “Contact whom I can among the influential in Madrid who oppose the French, and the Godoy administration,” Marsh preened, all but buffing his fingernails on the lapels of his waist-length leather jacket, “gather impressions of the sentiments of the common people and tradesmen, soldiers, and such. Perhaps influence whom I can, as well, and spread a little sedition. Then, get back to the coast and wait for Señor Rodriguez an’ heez feelthy barca to peeck me up, comprender?” he said, slipping into a Spanish accent once more.

  “And how may I aid you two in that?” Lewrie asked, imagining that they would have steered well clear of Sapphire at first sight if they didn’t need something.

  Just like gettin’ roped in by Zachariah Twigg as useful to his schemes ages ago in the Far East, Lewrie sourly thought; There’s never an end to it! There’s always something more!

  “You’ll note, sir, that we’ve a large horizontal patch of new, white sailcloth in our foresail, from luff to leech,” Cummings told him. “By that sign you will know us, hah hah! If we must meet I will show a very badly faded, but perfectly strong, red jib, and you can pretend to chase me out of sight of land, and any watchers. Do you encounter us along the coast, and we’re anywhere near a port, I’d like you to chase after us … clumsily, so I can put in and escape, to the congratulations of other Spanish mariners, do you see?”

  “That’s all?” Lewrie asked, both puzzled and relieved.

  “That’s the nub of it, Captain Lewrie,” Cummings said, tossing up his hands and grinning. “Now, over on the Atlantic coast, round Cádiz, we’ll have to take our chances with our blockading ships, ’til Mister Mountjoy can get word to the Admiral commanding … Saumarez, the last I heard … but I’m still not sure if we’ll be sent there in the near future. What’s left of the Franco-Spanish combined fleet is still sulking in port, there, and the city’s an armed fortress, so we have very few assets in Cádiz, and getting an agent, or agents, sneaked in is even more difficult.”

  “Oh, I suppose I could, if asked,” Marsh slyly boasted. “What is one more priest among many, one more sandalled peasant droving his pigs to market, or a proud hidalgo on a fine horse?”

  “Marsh can portray himself as Catholic as the Pope himself!” Cummings bragged. “He can conduct any rite, or a Mass, in Latin and Spanish. I’ve seen him do it, to practise.”

  “The benefits of a classical education, Cummings,” Marsh said, “and a … dare I say, a widespread, catholic interest. Small C ‘catholic’, mind. Church of England, myself, and damned proud of it!”

  “One never knows just who he is when he comes down to breakfast,” Cummings said with a laugh. “Costumes, wigs, false beards, and mustachios…”

  “Well, it’s said that ‘clothing makes the man’,” Marsh airily stated. “Amateur theatrics was my chief delight at school, and with the help of Secret Branch, I’ve honed my skills by studying under the very best in Covent Garden and Drury Lane.”

  He’s daft as bats! Lewrie thought, amazed at his smug expectations.

  “Do you ever want for droll amusement when in London, Sir Alan, you must attend Pulteney Plumb’s Comedic Revue in Drury Lane,” Marsh imparted, leaning close once more as if touting a sure-thing long shot horse at Ascot.

  Lewrie, in mid-sip of his tea, spluttered a gulp in his lap!

  He’s deader than cold, boiled mutton! Lewrie thought; Soon as he steps ashore, the Spanish’ll be askin’ him if he’s up for a match of cricket! Pulteney bloody Plumb, of all the…!

  Once he calmed himself, all he could say in reply was, “Seen it.”

  “Man’s a genius, as is his wife,” Romney Marsh praised.

  Lewrie thought that perhaps James Peel hadn’t told Cummings or Marsh all about Lewrie’s past, or his association with Pulteney Plumb during the Peace of Amiens, when he’d somehow insulted Napoleon Bonaparte at a levee in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, and had to flee for his life to Calais, pursued by police agents and soldiers, and it had been that daft fool Plumb and his wife who had spirited Lewrie and his wife clear cross France in a variety of costumes and guises, re-living his younger days of doing the same thing for condemned French aristocrats as part of a larger secret collaboration, and naming himself the “Yellow Tansy”!

  Lewrie had to grudgingly admit that Plumb had gotten them to the coast, where a schooner was waiting to bear them to Dover, as it had during The Terror in 1793 for the Yellow Tansy, the Ruby Begonia, or other human smugglers of that coterie. It had onl
y been bad luck that the French had caught up with them as the schooner’s boat was in the surf, just feet from showing the French a clean pair of heels.

  Less he knows, and the less said of Plumb, the better, Lewrie thought, almost snarling his displeasure.

  “You show a red jib, I chase you out to sea for a ‘rondy’, and if not, I pretend t’chase you. Got it,” Lewrie summed up. “D’ye need chasin’ today?”

  “It would not hurt, I suppose,” Cummings said. “We’re bound to Estepona, first, then Almeria, then Málaga, where we land Marsh. The roads are better from there to Madrid.”

  “Not Estepona,” Lewrie quickly cautioned. “Your ship’s master and crew I let go free, there, and they’d have you hung for piracy as soon as they recognise her. But, let’s be about it, before someone ashore sees us together.” He set aside his glass of tea and rose to bring matters to a welcome close.

  * * *

  They saw Cummings/Rodriguez and Romney Marsh/The Multitude off without a side-party or debarking honours, though Lewrie doffed his hat from the lip of the entry-port as they scrambled down the battens to their waiting rowboat, thinking that he might see Cummings again, but Marsh? The odds were definitely against it. There were some people who were just too confident to live!

  Oddly, when the boat was about one hundred yards off, Marsh took off his narrow-brimmed hat and waved back at Sapphire, shouting “Floreat Etona!”, for some reason or another.

  “We’ve one of his fellow Etonians aboard?” Lt. Harcourt wondered aloud. “Who, I can’t imagine.”

  “The Captain, very briefly, before he was expelled,” Westcott informed him from the corner of his mouth in an amused whisper.

  “Expelled? For what?” Harcourt asked, surprised.

  “You’d have to ask him,” Lt. Westcott said, with a snicker.