The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  The water was as cold as though pumped fresh from the bilge of the North Pole: so cold I near opened my mouth under water to suck in my breath against the shock. I swam a few strokes; then came up with the back of my head toward the corvette, so the white glimmer of my face might not be seen in the bright starlight.

  I moved slowly away. Two boatloads of drunken sailors passed within twenty yards. A little later a boat, returning to shore, came toward me, its oars thumping cheerily in the rowlocks. I could see there was only one man in it. When I had taken three quick strokes toward him I stopped, groaning and thrashing. He backed his oars and swore, startled. I threw up an arm and went under: then rolled to the top and gurgled; and at that the boatman sculled over to me quickly and thrust an oar beneath my stomach.

  I groaned again and caught at the oar. The boatman took me by the hair and upper arm, heaving at me; and with his heaving and my scrambling I rolled over the thwart and into the bottom of the boat, lying there with chattering teeth and quietly freeing the marlin-spike from its resting place along the seam of my trouser leg, where I had tied it with spun yam.

  “Man!” he said, “ye must be froze! What are ye, fey or only drunk?” He turned the boat toward the corvette.

  I thanked God for a Scotch blue-nose; for though the Scotch have no use for Americans, neither are they inclined to waste love on the English, though they will fight for them against Americans. From what I have seen of the Scotch, they hate the English, but hate everyone else worse.

  “Not there,” I whispered hoarsely, to hide my accent from the boatman, “not to that dirty box of slave-drivers! They’ll press you and cut your hide off!” I pulled up my shirt and showed him my back, where the welts from my colting still showed blue when I was cold.

  “The bloody lobsters!” he said, pulling the boat around again. “What’ll I do with ye? Ye’ll freeze in the fields; and there’s a raft of sentries on the docks.”

  “There’s a brig lying there,” I whispered, pointing to the eastward. “If I can get aboard quiet, they’ll ship me.”

  “Losh!” he said, “there’s thirty brigs off there! What’ll ye do: try ’em all?”

  “I know her,” I told him. “Let me at the oars to keep from freezing, and I’ll be there before you could down a gill of rum.”

  When he had made way for me to come up on the seat he fumbled in a stern-locker and brought out a bottle. After sucking at it with melodious gurglings, he passed it to me. I think I let a pint slip down my throat; then, when I had given the bottle back, I fished in my soggy breeches and handed the boatman a dollar.

  “Na! I dinna want this!” he said. He took it quickly, nevertheless.

  “It’s worth something to find a friend,” I whispered, “who’ll help a poor sailor out of a pickle and keep his trap closed in the bargain.”

  “Dinna fear!” he said, pocketing the dollar. “I never saw ye.”

  When we had found the Riddle at last and nosed our way to her bow, I went up the anchor cable hand over hand and clung to the cat-head for a while, to let the thudding of my heart die down.

  The brig, except for the lap-lap under her counter and the faint clacking of a piece of loose gear, seemed heavy and dull, like a house filled with sleeping people. I went over the bulwarks at last and crept to the capstan, holding my knife and marlinspike in my left hand. Peer down the deck as I would, I could see nobody; so at length, knowing it must be done, I stepped softly toward the stern. As I passed the mainmast, I made out a figure, a small figure, leaning against the larboard rail by the cabin. I went for him, making no sound in my stocking feet. I heard him say, “What the hell you want?” Then I got my hand on his jacket and the point of my knife against his throat.

  “Easy now,” I told him. “It’s all right, only don’t talk or move.”

  “Git away!” he squeaked.

  “One more like that and I’ll slit your hawse hole,” I said, pricking him a little.

  He stayed as he was, bent rigidly backward in the attitude of a girl seeking to escape a kiss.

  “All right,” I said. “Now we’ll go see the old man. Walk down to the cabin, open the door and pull him out of his bunk.”

  “He’ll kill me!”

  “He won’t kill anyone! I’ll look after you as long as you do what I say.” I prodded him. With an anxious grunt he stepped toward the captain’s quarters.

  She was a slovenly brig, with a foul smell about her, as if she had never been cleaned. The cabin, lighted by a dirty little pewter whale-oil lamp, was fouler still. We had no sooner opened the door than Bagley thrust his head from his berth, making chewing motions with his lips. He had on a red knitted nightcap; and what with his thin bluish face and his protuberant jaw bones, he looked like somebody thrown out of hell for meanness.

  “Knock before you come in, dum ye!” he protested; but the mate’s only answer was to lay hold of his arm and haul him over the side of the bunk. He bounced upright, a raging fury in a red flannel nightshirt.

  “Here!” he yelped at me, “what you doing here? Who be you?”

  “A fellow countryman,” I said, “in trouble and needing help.”

  He peered at me, moving his chin whiskers. “Nason!” he snarled. “You set up to be pretty high and mighty down in Portland! Better’n me, you was! You wun’t get no help here!”

  I took the ball of spun yarn from my pocket and tossed it to the mate. “Tie his hands,” I said, “then light the big lamp.”

  “By gorry!” Bagley said. “I’ll have the law on you!”

  When his hands were tied and the big lamp lit, I took the yam and tied the mate’s hands as well.

  “You’ll have a fine time doing it,” I reminded Bagley. “You’re carrying cargoes to the British!”

  He eyed me venomously. “You’re dretful pious, you are! I s’pose you ain’t doing it, nor nothing like that!” He paused uncertainly. “I thought you cleared for Spain.”

  “I did, but something happened, and I’ve seen a light. Where’s your Bible?”

  I knew Bagley to be as superstitiously religious as he was mean, so that the Bible would bind him more securely than any spun yarn.

  “Bible!” he exclaimed, watching me warily out of little pig eyes as hard as snail shells. “I wun’t trust ye, Nason: not even with a Bible!”

  I found it, at last, in a pocket beside his bunk. “All right,” I said, pushing it against his tied hands. “I’m leaving this brig: leaving it in your boat. Swear on this to lower it away for me, help me off, and keep your mouth shut for two days, so help you God.”

  Bagley glared at me. “What you think I am!”

  “A traitor!” I told him. “Hurry up and swear! I haven’t got all night!”

  “Gol dum ye!” he said. “I wun’t!”

  I pulled the whale-oil lamp from the wall, kicked the wood box from behind the stove, and smashed the lamp over it with a chunk of pine. “You’ve got one minute before I set her afire!”

  “Gimme that Bible!” the mate said.

  They took their oaths, the both of them; and half an hour later I was under the Gorgons bow in the Riddles boat.

  * * *

  I was pleased to hear from the deck above a prodigious drunken singing of hoarse voices. The chorus was so loud that Jeddy, peering down at me, could have spoken in his natural tones, I think, without fear of detection; and the disorder was so happily useful that four figures slid down the anchor cable and into my borrowed boat with what I might almost call comfort.

  We sculled softly away from that well detested vessel, then, under cover of dark, pulled hard for safety. Almost in the harbor mouth we had a great fright and an astounding piece of luck, even while we wrangled among ourselves as to whether we should set out afoot for Annapolis or capture a pink by boarding. The American schooner Nancy of Kittery, Captain Rich, which had cleared at sundown for her home port, but lay a little inside, becalmed, had caught a breeze and was running out, and in so doing almost ran us down. Captain Rich took us
on board, was astounded to find men from a town neighboring his in such a plight, showed himself a hearty patriot, swore by Job’s Turkey he’d land us safe on our mutually native soil, and kept the potent Maine oath. On the second afternoon after he made it we stepped again on Arundel ground.

  * * *

  There was nobody in sight when we crossed the creek and came again to our comfortable gray farmhouse nestled above the dunes and the curving crescent of beach: nobody, that is to say, except Rowlandson Drown, that violent-tempered man, who sat beside the front door in the golden rays of the late afternoon sun, his mottled gray face and his bull neck hunched over a chair he was mending.

  “Hey!” he said, working at the turnings of a rung with a draw shave, “you’re back quick!”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling quarrelsome inside, and glad for the opportunity of letting out on one who was against a war because it would hurt the chair trade. “Yes, thanks to the English, who have more friends around here than they rightly ought to have.”

  Rowlandson Drown picked a sliver of hickory from his draw shave. “Do tell!” he said, looking quickly at ’Lisha Lord and Cromwell and then fastening his eyes on Jeddy.

  “You’re damned right,” Jeddy said, watching Rowlandson with round, unblinking eyes. “They licked me twice, once with a cat. You’d be real friendly with the British, I suppose, if they took a cat to that fat back of yours!”

  “You keep out of this,” I warned Jeddy. Then I turned to Rowlandson. His face had grown darker, so I knew violence was rising in him.

  “Jeddy was whipped,” I told him, “and I was whipped too. That isn’t much. We can pay ’em back for that. But you know what they did to me, Drown? They came aboard my brig and called me a lying, tricky Yankee. They tried to kill my little dog Pinky. Then they pressed me; me, her master! Took me right off my own vessel, by God! Said I was a Britisher! Said my dog Pinky was British! Said Tommy Bickford was British because we couldn’t breed people like Tommy in our filthy country. Maybe you’d like to say a word or two for the English, Drown.”

  His face grew darker, and he grunted at me, a groaning sort of grunt that made his shoulders heave.

  “Now,” I said, wagging my finger in his face and marking the little lump on the side of his jaw where I proposed to hit him, “I’m going to take out a privateer against the British; and if God’s good to me, I’ll pay ’em back for what they did; and what’s more, I’ll take every opportunity to deal harshly with any man who tries to tell me the British are friends of ours. That’s what Caleb Strong, the Governor of Massachusetts, has been telling us for years, Drown, and I’ve believed him. Now I know he’s a liar, and as much my enemy as the English. All the ministers and merchants of Boston have been talking like Strong, Drown, and I was fool enough to trust ’em! I trusted the Timothy Pickerings and the John Lowells and the Francis Blakes and the Harrison Gray Otises, Drown; but now I’ve got the welts of a British colt on my back, and I know better! I know they’re all liars; and if you hold with Caleb Strong and the Boston Federalists, Drown, you’re a liar as well!”

  Just as I was about to hit him he dropped his head. “Your little white dog? They tried to kill your little white dog?”

  “Yes,” I said, hoping he’d have to be carried home on a shutter.

  He tinned back to the chair and picked up his draw shave. “Well,” he growled, “I’m a good cabinet worker, which is a more valuable trade than carpenter, and I’m as good a carpenter as any man, and a damned sight better than most I can name, so I’ll ship as carpenter on your privateer.”

  “Carpenter?” I said, taken aback by the suddenness with which his sentiments seemed to have altered. “I don’t want a carpenter!”

  He turned on me, snarling. “You got to have a carpenter,” he said violently. “You got to cooper and uncooper your water barrels and fish your busted masts, ain’t you?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I guess I have.”

  “I guess you have!” Rowlandson Drown sneered. “I can carpenter and I can fight. If you got any good reason why I shouldn’t ship as carpenter, I got some money saved, and I’ll buy some shares in your privateer! I’ll buy ’em anyway, by gosh!”

  The five of us stared at Rowlandson, who growled and grumbled to himself, wobbling the chair on its front legs to make sure it was stout and rigid. Before I could say anything I heard a familiar clicking sound. I looked up to see my mother standing in the front yard, one hand on her hip and the other rattling the string of cat’s-eyes at her throat. She smiled a pleasant, one-sided smile.

  “Welcome home,” she said.

  XI

  PEOPLE knew nothing about vessels, my mother told me when we got to arguing about the proper sort of craft for privateering. “You can’t expect a man who hasn’t been to sea,” she said, “to know or care that a sloop-of-war isn’t a sloop at all, but a brig or a ship, and that she’s a corvette at the same time because her guns are all on one deck, whereas those of a frigate are on two decks, and those of a line-of-battle ship on three. I tell you that for every man who knows a full-rigged brig has two masts with square sails on both, whereas a brigantine is square rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the mainmast, there are twenty thousand who can tell you nothing about a brig except that she’s a ship, which she isn’t. Who knows, do you think, that a corvette carries a crew of a hundred and fifty, and a frigate a crew of five hundred, and a line-of-battle ship a crew of a thousand, whereas a 700-ton armed merchant ship carries only twenty-five or thirty? Nobody, or next to nobody!”

  “I thought we were speaking of a proper vessel to be a privateer,” I ventured to remind her.

  “So we were. Let me repeat you’re aiming too high when you think to use a brig for a privateer. Also a Baltimore clipper schooner’s no good, because she’ll crush like an eggshell if you undertake to lay her alongside a heavy ship in any kind of sea. They’re too delicate, these Baltimore clipper schooners. Furthermore—”

  “But if we wait for the Neutrality to come home,” I interrupted, “we can add to her speed. She’s familiar to me, and it’ll be a great saving of money.”

  My mother snorted. “It won’t be a saving of money if a British sloop-of-war makes sail in chase of you and your topmast carries away. Listen to my arguments, now, and remember I know more about sailing and war than you do. No doubt you consider yourself almost better than Stephen Decatur; but you must bear in mind it was little longer ago than yesterday that I was paddling you with a hairbrush to keep you out of the cooky jar.”

  “Go ahead,” I told her. “You’ll be telling me I’m still a child when I’m sixty years old.”

  “It may be,” she admitted, smiling her one-sided smile, “but let’s stick to the matter in hand. You say you care less about taking prizes than about harrying the British and sinking their ships.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but at the same time I wish to overlook no opportunities to enrich ourselves at their expense.”

  “Certainly not,” my mother said. “You’d be a fool if you did! At any rate, you wish to capture and sink Britishers. Now I’ve marched with fine fighters in my day; and they’ve all persisted in saying that the true art of war is the art of ambushing and surprising your enemy, and of inflicting the greatest possible loss on him at the least cost to yourself.

  “If you attempt to carry this theory into sea fighting, you’ll find few ways to ambush and surprise an enemy. You can do it by night attacks, which are dangerous unless you’re sure of the enemy’s strength. You can do it by sending your boats into a harbor under cover of dark and cutting out an enemy craft; but that’s even more dangerous. I’ve given the matter some thought, and it seems to me the surest method of surprising British ships would be to lead them to hold you in contempt—to underestimate your strength. I think it’s the surest method, because the British have always underrated us as opponents and always will, so it’ll take no great skill to lead them astray.

  “Suppose, now, you privateer in our own brig.
In the first place she must be rerigged, so to be speedier. Then you must raise a crew of a hundred men for her, or a hundred and twenty; for it’s impossible to do with less if she’s to be properly fought; and you must find supplies for these men, which is no child’s play. Then, when you’ve got to sea, you’ll be the prey of every British frigate and sloop-of-war that sights you; for any brig is a good prize, and they’ll chase even a small one as long as they can keep her in sight.

  “On the other hand, if you go out in a smaller craft—a sloop, say— you can get along with fewer men; you can come down all unsuspected on some lordly merchantman and blow him out of water just as he’s preparing to be gracious and give you your latitude and longitude. You can tack three times, if you’re caught in a box, to anybody else’s once. You can sweep out of gunshot if you blunder into an enemy in a calm. You can depend on prizes for much of your supplies; and frigates and sloops-of-war won’t waste time on you if they see you have any chance at all of getting away.”

  “Then you give the word I must use a sloop?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said, working her fingers in and out of her cat’s-eyes. “Go somewhere and get a strong, fast sloop of about sixty tons burden, and you’ll have a craft that can be handled by a few men. Thirty or forty can fight her as well as a hundred and twenty could fight our brig, and she can be made to look as harmless and unimportant as a porgy fisherman. Yet she’ll carry enough guns, and there’ll be room for all of you as well as for a fair load of prisoners in case of need; and if she’s the right sort of sloop there’s no British-built vessel of any size whatever that can catch her.”

  So the end of our argument was that I was to get a sloop; and we had no sooner decided on it than I took Jeddy and ’Lisha Lord and Cromwell, and started off toward Salem and Boston to see what we could find.

  I thought to leave Tommy Bickford in Arundel; but he spoke his mind to my mother to such good purpose that she told me to take him along, she having a weakness for the boy because of the manner in which his father had dragged my father ashore through a shower of bullets at Valcour Island, and also because he was a handsome, polite boy with a broad smile that won the women, and the men too, for that matter.