“Erm…exactly,” Pelham admitted with a petulant snap of his jaws. “Got it in one, Captain Lewrie! Now, we also know that France has sent out yet another man to keep an eye on L’Ouverture, Laveaux, and Sonthonax, see which way the wind is blowing, and determine which of them gets the chop, and try on Rigaud as a replacement, if he gets displeased with L’Ouverture.”
“So if Rigaud looks as if he’ll go the distance, Choundas and this new man do the dirty work for us?” Lewrie asked, his head cocked over in disbelief. “Mean t’say, they back Rigaud, we let ’em? Just get out of their way? Help Choundas along?”
“Well, at the least, turn a half-blind eye,” Mr. Pelham chuckled, after a long ponder. “So long as things go our way, that is.”
“Mine arse on a band-box!” Lewrie all but yelped.
“I know that Guillaume Choundas is your particular bête noire, Captain Lewrie,” Pelham dismissively said to soothe him, patronisingly, “and you’d like nothing better than to carve him into cutlets, but…the old monster’s played the cat’s-paw for France, so who’s to say he can’t be our cat’s-paw for a bit, and all unwitting? Wouldn’t that be delicious? Oh, decimate his privateers should you meet them, it goes without saying. Gather information from the prizes you might take, in particular any written directives from Choundas himself, so we can do a bit of forgery to sow distrust and confusion, should the need arise…and, do you meet up with one of his men o’ war, of course you will be free to engage her, and fetch me prisoners to interrogate. Can’t let Choundas think he’s a completely free hand, ha!”
“One would hope not, sir,” Lewrie gruffly said, most unamused.
“You’re here, he’s here, you know he’s here, and we will make sure that he knows of your presence, does he not already,” Mr. Pelham cackled with glee from his schemes. You’re his nemesis, too, ye know. The temptation to do for you, on his part, must distract him from the proper discharge of his mission. That, and your preying upon his too-few ships, will blunt whatever aid he can deliver either L’Ouverture or Rigaud, making Britain, in the end, appear the best choice to whoever wins over yonder. Either one, really,” Pelham confessed, almost whispering to impart his inside knowledge once again, “so long as he is dependent upon the Crown for his continued peace and prosperity. I do believe we might even tolerate an independent, abolitionist, Black Republic to gain that end, Captain Lewrie.”
“But preferably under Rigaud,” Lewrie said, sniffing sourly in world-weary amazement at that revelation.
“Of course,” Pelham answered, shutting his eyes and nodding as if saying “Ever and Amen” in his family’s pew-box.
“Slave or free, no matter?” Lewrie pressed, a dubious brow up.
“Mmm,” Pelham uttered, nodding again over steepled hands, as if the re-enslavement of nearly 300,000 people was simply a cost of doing business. “As to that, this new man out from Paris is just the fellow to stir that pot. General Hédouville. Have you heard of him, Captain Lewrie?” Pelham asked expectantly, as if preparing to be clever again.
“Not in this life, no,” Lewrie slowly intoned, preparing himself.
“Hédouville’s a bloodthirsty butcher,” Pelham was happy to say. “Conquered the Royalist enclaves in the Vendée region in the early days of their Revolution…rather brutally. A ‘Monsieur Guillotine’ and a real terror. He’ll sort things out in quick order, most-like. Get the colony aboil, likely purge Citizen Sonthonax, perhaps even Laveaux as well. We still have got agents and influence on the island to prompt Hédouville to do just that. And, launch Rigaud at L’Ouverture if God is just, and our slanders take root,” Pelham sniggered. “He’s the new power over yonder, is Hédouville.”
Lewrie looked away towards Peel, rolling his eyes, just about fed up with Pelham’s “how shall we torment the headmaster?” titterings. He found an equally unimpressed ally in Peel, whose blank attentiveness relaxed enough to curl up his lips in the faintest of weary smiles.
“Hédouville is reputed to be blunt, direct, and quick off the mark,” Peel said. “Once he’s made up his mind, he’s very hard to divert. Much like a Spanish fighting bull, beguiled by the cape. None too clever, really, but a force of nature once set in motion. The ideal instrument for the Directory.” Peel had a clever simper of his own. “We pour our subtle poisons in his ears, and mayhem and disorder will surely follow, in short order.”
“Well, you seem to have it all arranged,” Lewrie said, surrendering to Fate; especially when it seemed he had so little choice, else. “My congratulations on a most knacky plan, sirs.”
“Well, thankee, Captain Lewrie,” Pelham smirked, overcome by the required, befitting modesty of an Englishman accused of being too clever by half, no matter how well it secretly pleased him. “Not all my doing, but…”
“Hopefully,” Peel said, rising at last as if the tedious task was outlined well enough for even Lewrie to follow it, “this may make up for the fact that, since this war began in ’93, we’ve lost untold millions of pounds, and over one hundred thousand men trying to take all the French ‘Sugar Isles’…half of ’em dead and wasted, t’other half so fever-raddled they’re unfit for future service. Damn ’em, all these tropic pest holes. Look so beguiling, but…”
And Pitt and Dundas didn’t see that goin’ in? Lewrie cynically asked himself as he got to his feet as well. It ain’t like the French could hold ’em if their fleet can’t get t’sea. Better we’d blockaded ’em, let ’em rot on the vine, so the Frogs didn’t get ha’pence o’ good from ’em.
But it didn’t appear likely that the Prime Minister, nor the Secretary of State for War, would have asked him his opinion then, or would much care for his chary opinion of them now. No, they were too damned “brilliant,” too full of themselves, just like their wee minion Pelham. He felt it would be an excruciatingly frustrating adventure.
“Orders for me and my ship, then, sirs?” Lewrie asked.
“As I earlier stated, Captain Lewrie,” Pelham energetically said, shooting upright and resetting the cut of his cuffs and waist-coat, playing with the lapels of his coat to tug them fashionably snug across his shoulders and the back of his neck. “Raid, cruise, make a right nuisance of yourself versus Choundas’s ships. I have arranged a roving, open brief for you with Admiral Parker, so…wherever, and whenever you and Mister Peel wish, or are led by the evidence you may discover. I am not squeamish as to the means you employ. So long as the end is attained,” Pelham coldly stated.
That sounded promising, even was he saddled with Peel as supercargo, a slab of “live lumber” who would surely, sooner or later, try to boss him about as if he were in actual command.
“Oh…joy,” Lewrie growled in a monotone, looking at Peel.
“I promise I’ll be gentle, captain, sir!” Peel chuckled, voice pitched high and virginally sing-song, drawing Lewrie’s wry amusement.
“And Choundas,” Lewrie insisted, wary of oral instructions from such a man as Pelham. “What of him, for now? Do I just watch, stand aloof ’til we get what we want from his efforts, or…?”
“As Mister Zachariah Twigg once instructed you, in the Mediterranean I believe it was, sir,” Pelham intoned, high-nosed and for once in deadly earnest, “you are, sir, given opportunity, no matter how early or late in our plans, ‘to kill him dead,’ and put paid to his noxious existence.”
“Well, good God, why didn’t ye just say so!” Lewrie exclaimed in great relief, forced to laugh out loud at such long-delayed end to such a tortuous preamble. “Could’ve saved us all the palaver.”
“Guillaume Choundas, sir,” Pelham piously declared, “is still possessed of such demonic cleverness that, despite his monstrous soul, and his ogreish appearance, he was not sent out here by his masters as an exile. Mister Twigg, and Captain Peel, both have stressed just how dangerous he remains. Most-like, does he fail out here, that’s an end to his usefulness to them, but…we cannot take the risk of him popping up somewhere else, in future. His head on a platter might mean a knighthood to th
e one who fetches it. As Salome was rewarded when she brought King Herod the head of John the Baptist.”
“B’lieve she’s the one demanded Saint John’s head, after Herod saw her dance, sir,” Mr. Peel corrected, coughing into his fist.
“Quibble, quibble, quibble,” Pelham groused, waving off petty, inconsequential facts, and laughing at his mistake. “It don’t signify, Mister Peel. Lewrie gets my meaning.”
“Indeed I do, sir,” Lewrie vowed, though irked by Pelham’s iffy lure and mixed messages, as if he needed any further incentives to pursue Choundas, or was so venal as to fall for such a faithless promise.
“Working together, again, after all this time, sir,” Peel said, feigning fond reverie, making Lewrie stifle a lewd comment and a snort of sarcasm. They’d gotten on much like mating hedgehogs, really; testy and spiky. “What jolly times they were!”
“Well, there you are, then!” Pelham concluded, pleased that their pairing, and their plot, was off on a good footing. Or so he blithely assumed. “Let us not waste a single hour.”
“Uhm…best let me avail myself of that ‘Miss Taylor,’ after all, Mister Pelham,” Lewrie said, changing the subject before he broke out in peels of laughter at just how dense Pelham really was.
“That horrid stuff, Captain Lewrie?” Pelham asked, aghast.
Lewrie soaked his handkerchief from the decanter and began to sponge his hat. “I told you the Navy finds it useful.”
Chapter Seven
“It was pleasant and delightful,
one midsummer’s morn,
when the green fields and the meadows
were buried in corn.
The blackbirds and thrushes
sang in every tree.
And the larks they sang melodious
at the dawning of the day…”
It was a “Make and Mend” afternoon, following the noon meal for the hands. All stores had been laded, the aired sails, hung wind-less and slack, had been furled and gasketed, and an hour’s small-arms drill had been performed. Now the crew of HMS Proteus could “caulk or yarn” and tend to their own devices, tailor their issue clothing, shave, wash, and scrub to be presentable at Sunday Divisions, play board games, have an on-decks smoke, do carvings or mere whittling whilst they nattered of this and that, nap or sing, as suited their too-brief freedom.
“The sailor and his true love
were out walking one day.
Said the sailor to his true love,
I am bound far away.
I am bound for the Indies
where the loud cannons roar,
and I’m going to leave my Nancy,
she’s the girl that I adore…
And I’m going to leave my Nancy,
and I’m going to leave my Nancy…”
Even with the duck awnings rigged over the quarterdeck and the waist, it was too warm for chanteys, horn-pipes, or reels, so the hands sang a sad forebitter, with both fiddlers, a boy on the tin whistle, and Liam Desmond droning under them, with his uilleann pipes. Desmond was a cosmopolitan sort, for an Irishman; he’d play the English tunes as readily as any from his own sad island. And “Pleasant and Delightful” was as teary a ballad of love and loss and long partings as anyone could wish for. He was equally open to Allan Ramsey’s version of “Auld Lang Syne” roared along with “Hey, Johnny Cope” to sneer at an English general who’d run from Bonnie Prince Charlie back in 1745, with the few Scots aboard, turn up a weepy, lugubrious version of some Welsh dirge, or wheeze out gay horn-pipes with equal ease. He was a treasure.
Lewrie gratefully stripped out of his formal shore-going togs, completely pulled out those offending shirt-tails, and rolled up his sleeves above the elbows. With his neck-stock discarded and the front of his shirt undone, he called for a mug of cool tea from his steward, Aspinall, who brewed it by the half-gallon each dawn on the griddle in the galley; weak, admittedly, given the cost of good leaves, with lots of sugar (which in the Sugar Isles was nigh dirt-cheap) and a generous admixture of the rob of several lemons, also available for next to nothing. Let stand to cool before jugging, it made a fine thirst-quencher.
Though Lewrie did suspect that, once jugged in his large pewter pitcher, his mid-morning libations might be part of the brew from the previous afternoon’s. There were some days, such as today, when that decoction could almost stand on its hind legs and toddle.
“Mister Padgett sorted yer paperwork, sir,” Aspinall told him. “And there’s letters, too, off that packet brig come in yesterday.”
“Ah, excellent!” Lewrie enthused, rubbing his hands with false gusto at those tidings. For the last year, no letters from home were good news. And damme, but wasn’t there a tidy pile of them, though, all thick and thumb-stained, the outer sheets whereupon the addresses were enscribed, the stamps affixed, and the wax seals poured, were now sepiaed with handling and sea transportation.
No, his official correspondence always took precedence. It was safer that way. The personal could abide for a piece more, after the long passage that fetched them. Whatever new disaster, insult, or calumny they contained were at least five or six weeks old, and any reply to them would take even longer, no matter how scream-inducing.
“Said the sailor to his true love,
well I must be on my way.
For the tops’ls they are hoisted,
and the anchor’s aweigh.
Our warship stands waiting,
for the next flowing tide,
but if ev-ver I return, again,
I would make you my bride…
But if ever I return again,
but if ever I return again….”
“In good voice, t’day, sir,” Aspinall commented.
“Did they choose something cheerful,” Lewrie grumbled, “I s’pose so.” He had to admit, though, that the chorus of rough seamen’s voices did have a more-pleasing harmony than usual, detecting the shyly, hesitantly offered basses and near falsettos from his “liberated” ex-slave sailors. The tunes and words were new to them, almost alien, and their command of the King’s English marginal, yet his Black sailors had an uncanny ear for harmony. Even their unaccompanied work songs he heard when riding past cane fields ashore had been spot-on, whatever tune it was they’d sung, sometimes hauntingly so.
“Mister Motte, the Quartermaster, you can hear him there doin’ the solo part, sir,” Aspinall went on. “He says it come from the ’60s, it did, when our Navy invaded Cuba in the Seven Years’ War.”
“Umhmm,” Lewrie said with a nod over his paperwork, a tad irked, and peering owlishly at Aspinall’s interrupting maunderings.
Aspinall took the cue, and ambled back into his day-pantry with a damp dish-clout in his hands. There to sing along under his breath, just loud enough to make Lewrie twitch his lips and furl his brows.
Damn his hobbies! Lewrie gravelled to himself; first ’twas rope work and sennet, now…
“Then a ring from off her finger,
she instant-lye drew,
saying ‘take this, dearest William,
and my heart will go, too’…”
“Bloody hell,” Lewrie muttered. “Aspinall?” he called.
“Sir?” A small, chastened voice, that.
“It’s ‘make and mend.’ Do you wish t’join the hands up forrud and sing, ’tis your right. I’ll have no need of you for a while.”
“Er, thankee, sir, and I’d admire it,” Aspinall cried, hastening out of his pantry, and his apron, to dash forward to the door that led to the main deck, an ever-present notebook and pencil now in hand so he could jot down the words and annotate the tunes’ notes.
“Hmmpfh,” Lewrie sniffed, tetchily relieved. “Peace an’ quiet. Ooff!”
No sooner had Aspinall departed than Toulon, his stalwart black-and-white ram-cat, now grown to a muscular one-and-a-half stone, hopped into his lap.
“Well, damme,” Lewrie softly griped. “And why ain’t you caulkin’ the day away…the way your tribe’s s’posed to, hmm? Missed me, d
id ye? There, there, ol’ puss, yes, yer a good’un. Rroww?”
Toulon braced himself on his hind legs to get right up against his face and rub cheeks and chin against him, play-nip at his chin and paw his collarbone for attention, grunt-mewing most-plaintive. It took a good ten minutes to cosset him, and then Toulon became a heavy, hot, and furry chest plaster which he had to stroke one-handed, and read his naval letters with the other. Toulon closed his eyes and couched his large head on forepaws high under Lewrie’s jaws, all a’rumble and now a’bliss, his wee breath tickling at the hollow of his master’s throat.
“You’re not going to sleep, there, d’ye know,” Lewrie chid him.
“Mmrrf.” Damn’ nigh petulant, and “I will if I’ve a mind.”
The official “bumf” done at last, Lewrie set the last enquiry aside and eyed the pile of personal letters. Padgett, his clerk, had already written up replies for him in answer to the business matters; they merely awaited his signature. Getting to the quill and inkwell, shifting Toulon, though, would be the very Devil after his two days of absence. Lewrie sidled in his chair, squirming and reaching out with his right hand to haul in a fat personal letter without waking Toulon, fingers scrabbling cross the desk…
“Mmarr.” You heartless bastard, the ram-cat fussed as he was deposed. He was suffered to arch, slit his eyes, yawn, and curl about in his master’s lap as Lewrie at last got both hands free with which to break the seal on a missive from his father, Sir Hugo St. George Willoughby, and unfold its several sheets. His, at least, were safe to read.
“Does he displease, you can eat it later,” Lewrie promised his cat, who was already eying the crinkly paper with some interest.
“My dearest wastrel son,” Sir Hugo’s epistle began.
“I must really be in trouble back home,” Lewrie deduced. “Still, rather.”
“Greetings and Salutations to you, avidly gathering the flowers of the sea, far off in the Caribbean! I trust your Flowers, meaning to say, prize-moneys, blossom nicely, and that your Constitution, ever a Corinthian ‘weed’s’ hardiness, continues to Thrive. Pardon, pray, any discontinuity to this letter, but, the most momentous News having just arrived, I needs must convey it straightaway as the first item of interest, my previous first page be hanged.
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