The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  We stood on the quay of the basin, the odor of drying fish nets in our noses and St. Nicolas Tower bulking against a moon of burnished silver. Davy Maffett looked and looked at the figurehead and whistled a little. Then he crossed the quay to a near-by tavern and returned with three bottles of sparkling white wine. We popped out the corks, and Davy held up his bottle toward the green-clad figure under the bowsprit. It gave me a strange tightness in my throat to see her there, smiling a faint, tremulous smile, as though she well knew what we were doing but was too much of a lady to look around at us.

  “Here’s to the Lively Lady,” Davy said. “May all of ’em want her but none of ’em catch her!”

  “The Lively Lady!” we shouted, and drank; and that was how we rechristened her.

  * * *

  One hundred and twenty men she carried, but I had not taken all of Captain Hailey’s advice, though I had taken some. All of the hundred and twenty were Americans, and I think the last ten of them to arrive in La Rochelle were the roughest and wildest of the ten dozen.

  They came in charge of Alley McAlley of the old crew, that little Irish tailor from Arundel who had signed with us because of his admiration for Jotham Carr, who had cured him of the itch. He had picked up an intelligible jargon of French and had been combing the coast towns for stranded fellow countrymen of the right, rough sort. With them he also brought, sewed into the waistband of his trousers, a letter given him in Nantes by Captain Jacobs of the Baltimore letter-of-marque schooner Kemp.

  It was from Captain Boyle; and when I saw his name written at the end, he flashed into my mind, dark and handsome and polite, standing on a carronade, his Comet slipping over the waves like a flying fish and he waving his hat at me.

  “ESTEEMED SIR AND FRIEND,” the letter said, “by good chance I have fallen across my brave friend Captain Jacobs, of the letter-of-marque schooner Kemp, Baltimore, and by him I send you my wishes for good health and success. Until the fifteenth March I shall hold station about one hundred miles west of the Scilly Isles, to intercept vessels bound into the English Channel or the Irish Sea. If it suits your wish and convenience we can keep company there or thereabouts. If not, I will run for Nantes on the fifteenth March, hoping to have a snail or two with you before refitting for another cruise. I am in a new brig, Chasseur, sixteen long 12’s, and she is able-to sail a little. If you come out, be so kind as to hoist a pair of blue pantaloons to your main peak, so there may be no mistake, and I will run up a green silk petticoat with ruffles. I am in great hopes of encountering you, and trust that if you come out, you will bring a few bottles of sparkling wine and a cheese or two. I have a partiality for the white Roquefort cheese, though any cheese will do. The more powerful the better. Accept, dear sir, the assurances of my distinguished regard.

  “THOS. BOYLE.”

  I read it again to make sure of the date and the cheese. “Get your men aboard,” I said to McAlley. “We were only waiting for you.”

  I touched my breast, feeling that little oval of mine under the outer cloth; and I bethought me of how Captain Boyle rounded the convoy, burned a British ship, and came blithely to have me for dinner with him. I thought, too, that in Captain Boyle’s company I might at least help a little to shorten this war.

  “Get your men aboard,” I said again, “I’m going to buy some cheese and wine to take to Captain Boyle on his Chasseur a hundred miles west of the Scillies.”

  * * *

  It was late in the day, with a cold westerly wind seeming to hold up the sun in a smutty sky the color of a newly blacked eye, when we rounded the point on the northerly side of the harbor and dropped our pilot.

  We knew the brig was very fast, for there was a lift to her, almost like that which I felt as a child, when I swung in the long rope swing hanging from the high oak on the far side of the creek in Arundel—a lift that caught my breath and filled me with the exultant sensation of being about to soar on and on, into another world.

  The harbor of La Rochelle is a pleasant harbor in ordinary times, and as safe as any harbor anywhere; but in 1814 it was bad because of the manner in which blockading frigates and sloops hid themselves behind the shoulders of lie de Re, and pounced on Americans coming out of shelter.

  We were a quiet lot as we bore to the north, past La Pallice and toward Breton Pass, the seventeen-mile sound separating the lie de Re from the mainland. There were lookouts at the mastheads; and I had put ’Lisha Lord in the larboard fore chains and Cromwell in the starboard fore chains to con the brig. Jeddy and Cephas were driving the men, clearing the decks of the fitter that covers them when a craft first puts to sea, and so keeping them occupied; but they were as quiet as the rest of us, for until we were clear of the narrow channel, and the greenish half fight had thickened into a comfortable blackness, there could be no feeling of security in the mind of anyone.

  This presentiment of danger was justified as we slipped past the eastern end of the lie de Re; for the two men aloft shouted, “Sail!” sharply and simultaneously. A second later ’Lisha bellowed, “Cruiser in the lee of the island!” and in the same moment I saw her topsails dimly—topsails with such a tremendous high hoist that they could belong to nothing but a frigate.

  I remember saying to myself, “To hell with this!” for due to the narrowness of the channel, we couldn’t possibly escape a broadside if we held our course. We went about, then: almost we spun around, as if some vast hand had taken the brig by the bowsprit and turned her on her heel. I heard laughter from the men in the waist, and a whoop or two, and knew they were laughing with delight at her swiftness.

  We slipped back along the eastern tip of the island in the gathering gloom. I find it hard to make clear the feel of swiftness in a vessel. It is a little like that which comes into the body of a runner at times—a quick consciousness of lightness and suppleness, as though running were no exertion, and could be continued indefinitely. Our sloop had been a fast craft; but there was no such feel to her as to this brig, which seemed to pour herself over the waves without effort, adjusting herself to irregularities in the water like an otter gamboling in the rapids of a fast stream.

  She moved, it seemed to me, with a soft rush, a tireless swoop, a smooth unchecked flight, devoid of bumpings and squatterings such as mark the progress of slower craft. I have watched kestrels come into the wind and hang there motionless, except for a little shivering of the wings: then turn without effort and soar away on a straight, effortless flight, very rapid; and it was like a soaring kestrel that the Lively Lady seemed to move.

  There was still light in the west when we hauled our wind to pass out along the southern side of He de Re; but the light was dim and faintly greenish, which was fortunate for us. Against this dying paleness, as we opened the island, the lookouts made out two more sail, two miles off our starboard bow, running down with the wind on such a slant that they were bound to intercept us. I could feel in my bones they were British frigates or sloops-of-war, and I knew they must have learned there were American privateers in La Rochelle and so been sent to blockade the port.

  I had no love for this situation. Our canvas was new and bright; and since they had surely seen us I knew they would separate, one edging in toward the lie de Re and the other off toward the lie d’Oleron. I also knew that if either of them passed within gunshot of us, which was likely, we would get a broadside that might wing us and leave us swinging in circles on the water like a wounded duck.

  How long it was before darkness hid those two sail from us I cannot now recall. It may have been two minutes; it may have been four; but to me, watching this beautiful brig slash over the waves like a frightened swan, it seemed like an hour out of a sleepless night.

  I shouted for lanterns and called ’Lisha Lord aft to step a mast in the longboat; and while he worked at it with his men I sent a seaman part way up the foremast ratlines with a lighted lantern.

  When it was dark at last, a thick gray dark, we came into the wind and hung there. ’Lisha lowered away the boat, lash
ed its tiller, made fast a lighted lantern to the masthead, scrambled back on board, and cast her off. He shouted, whereupon the man in the ratlines doused the lantern he was carrying. The empty longboat bobbed away from us toward the lie d’Oleron, the lantern bright at its masthead. We watched it a moment, then wore ship and stood back toward the lie de Ré.

  We may have been a quarter mile off shore when Jeddy spoke and the men jumped for the topgallant clew lines and the fore clew garnets. They worked as though bawled at by the Bull of Bashan; yet I had to strain my ears to catch Jeddy’s muted whispers. “Peak and throat halyards! Jib downhaul! Rise tacks and sheets! Let go! Clew up!” I heard him whistle a shrill little whistle between his teeth and add, “Settle away the main gaff, you!”

  In another two minutes’ time we were slipping along with every inch of canvas furled, as dark and silent as a deserted brig, so that an enemy vessel would be obliged to run us down, almost, in order to see us, and would, in such case, shoot by us too fast to bring guns to bear.

  There was a creaking as the head yards were squared: then we bore up before the wind and lay there, listening. There was a small moaning of the breeze in the rigging, and a slatting somewhere above us, and the lap, lap, lap of the waves against our bends. Far off to larboard we could see a pinpoint of light, blinking and blinking; then disappearing for a second; then blinking and blinking once more. We watched it and watched it, until it seemed nearly gone: only a spark now and again. We peered for it until moisture ran from our eyes and lay cold on our cheeks; and as we peered there was a flash like sheet lightning seen through a rift in a cloud: then a thud, as though someone had dropped a weight far down in our hold. We saw two lights, one close under another, rising, and knew one of the cruisers was hoisting her signal lanterns. Immediately, farther away, two more lights went up. With that I snapped at Jeddy to make sail. Jeddy shouted, and the crew sprang up from under the bulwarks, cheering and whooping; for like the rest of us they knew the cruisers had gone too far afield after our longboat to locate us again—that there was nothing now between us and the open sea, and that, once free of the land, no British cruiser ever built could overtake us.

  In four minutes’ time our sails were set and drawing and we were running to the northwest, all clear.

  XVI

  IT WAS early March still, a blustery bright day, and we were casting around in a circle west of the Scillies when we made out a sail on our weather quarter, coming down on us fast. When she proved to be a brig, we bent on the pantaloons—a pair belonging to Cephas Cluff, who was large in the bends and with next to no tumble-home about him—and ran them up. Instantly a billowing green ensign of some description went to the brig’s masthead; and Cephas, watching her through the telescope, said, “There’s ruffles on it!”

  “The Irish navy!” Jeddy shouted; and since we were delighted to encounter Boyle again, we combined business with pleasure while waiting for him to come up, hove over a cask, circled it, and banged away at it fifteen times with our lee battery, thus giving him a salute of fifteen guns.

  This brig of Boyle’s, the Chasseur, was as beautiful a vessel as it had ever been my fortune to see. She was brigantine rigged, like the Lively Lady, but with a lighter bowsprit and foremast and more of a rake to her sticks, so that she seemed to me to have a quicker and more elusive look than the Lively Lady—the look, almost, of a slender girl running hard, her head back and her stomach thrust out before her.

  When we had fired the fifteen guns, we tacked twice and came back onto the Chasseur’s course, slipping along beside her not fifty yards away, so close we could see the patches in the mainsail where the passage of a bushel of grapeshot had been repaired, and the wind-blown hair of the grinning crew that lolled, close-packed, over the hammock nettings to watch us come up, and the fluttering ruffles on the bosom of Boyle’s shirt. He stood on one of his long twelves, clutching the main shrouds and waving his bell-topped gray beaver at us.

  “Very kind!” we heard him shout. “Too many guns! Hope I can live up to the compliment!”

  He looked around at his helmsman, making a little circular movement with his hand. The Chasseur hauled her wind and ranged closer. We could hear the crackling and whipping of the green silk petticoat at her main peak, the patter of the foam clouts skittering from beneath her raking bows, and the babble of her crew as they talked and laughed.

  “Delighted you came out,” Boyle called over. “Did you bring the cheese?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll come aboard for dinner when it’s dark,” he said.

  He did not, however, for the day turned gray and dirty, and the wind shifted into the northeast. In the afternoon it stiffened to a gale, so that both of us lay-to under double-reefed mainsails. That night it eased up, and by morning the wind had come around into the south, and there was a light fog that began to burn off around ten o’clock. When it lifted we saw a sail to the southwestward; and since Boyle was the nearer to it, he hauled his wind in chase, while we bore on toward the northeast.

  Toward noon we made out a column of smoke in the southwest and concluded Boyle had found his chase to be a small craft of little value and so set her afire. A little later the shreds of mist in the northeast cleared away still more, and we made out a large ship off our lee bow, heading in a southeasterly direction—a magnificent, freshly painted, high-sided vessel, bearing all the earmarks of a merchantman. When she ran from us, as she soon did, we knew we were right and so piped all hands to quarters.

  We came up on her fast, and I could see she was armed with stern chasers. Therefore I kept off and sailed past her, sending extra muskets and loaders to Moody Haley and Moses Burnham and the rest of the sharpshooters in our tops. Then I came down on her bows, wore across them in a raking position, fired a gun, and shouted to her to heave-to. Instead of this she attempted to wear in order to give me a broadside. This she could not do, because of our speed; for, seeing what she was about, I came up into the wind very sharp and crossed her bows again, wearing immediately afterward. Even then she would not strike, thinking perhaps that because I was moving straight away from her I was running. Therefore I turned once more and ran back to windward of her. As we came up, ’Lisha Lord shouted to the men in the tops, and they opened on her with muskets. We saw man after man go down at her guns, so that when her broadside let off it was ragged and useless, and the shot passed around us and over us. Also two men in succession were shot down at her wheel, and an officer on the quarter-deck slipped to his knees, clutching at his shoulder. Immediately after, a man ran out from the cabin hatch and hauled down her colors, and she slowly hove-to, at which we came about and ran up to leeward of her, with our crew shouting so triumphantly and stamping so delightedly at their good fortune as to drown the slatting of the reef points against the mainsail. Nor was my own pleasure any less than theirs, for we had suffered no damage whatever in the encounter, and the Lively Lady had outsailed her bulky antagonist as readily as my little dog Pinky runs in circles around a cow.

  I boarded her myself, to see what disposition to make of her people as well as what manner of prize crew to put into her; and I had no sooner stuck my head above her bulwarks than I hankered for her myself, because of her cleanliness and her broad, scoured decks, splotched here and there with the red stains that had resulted from our musketry fire.

  Even before I made a move to take possession I began to plan how I could have her for my own some day.

  Five men were laid out in the shelter of the main hatch, and the remainder of her people, gathered around them, glowered at us as we came over the side. The officer who met us, a young man, seemed to expect harsh treatment; for his lips were pressed tight together and his face was pale.

  “Captain?” I asked him.

  He cleared his throat. “Second officer. The first was shot through the shoulder. The captain went to his cabin when—when we struck.” “Lower away your longboat,” I ordered, “and send your men aboard my brig. What is this ship?”

  “
The Pembroke, West Indiaman,” he said, getting a little color back in his face, “London for Port-au-Prince.”

  “Well, get your boat away. I’m putting a prize crew aboard.”

  I left Jeddy in charge of the deck and went to the cabin. I had heard about the richness of big West Indiamen, but I had never been aboard a wealthy Londoner before; and here was one indeed. She was 540 tons: a roomy, comfortable ship; and when I stepped into the cabin, I was staggered by what I saw. Two silver lamps were hung on long silver chains; and beneath the lamps was a dining table, covered with gold brocade weighted at the corners with silver tassels. Behind the table rose the rudder case, carved and colored to represent a close-packed stand of bamboos; and these, at the top, branched out in feathery green fronds, all carved out of wood, which spread interlaced across the ceiling. Behind that, in turn, were the stem windows, hung with blue brocade. The cabin walls were paneled with gray wood, some of the panels filled with mirrors edged in gold, so that the bamboo of the rudder case was reflected back and forth. Doors let into side berths, three doors to a side; and in a recess stood a piano colored gray to match the cabin panels. There was a scarf, a green scarf, across the piano bench; and it seemed to me I caught from it a singular delicate fragrance.

  A sallow-faced man sat at the table, his chin sunk on his chest, staring at a handful of papers that lay before him. When I came in he rose and bowed, a quick, angry bow, as though he would rather be whipped than do what he was doing.

  “Captain,” I said, “I must ask you to take whatever personal belongings you require and go at once aboard my brig. Do you have passengers?”

  “You have the authority for this, no doubt?”