Lewrie! The Proteus frigate! It was inconceivable that Lewrie, that swaggering, irreverent, and bawdy brute, could be that clever, that he had appeared by mere coincidence! Surely, he had been aided, aimed by his betters, his masters. The Dutchman, Haljewin’s, feeble excuses and attempt to point the finger somewhere else just might have a grain of truth to them. Choundas dismissed Lt. Mercier’s presence as utterly as he ignored the droning flies, in speculation of betrayal and treason done by someone close to Governor-General Hugues, or close to himself.
It would have to be someone on Guadeloupe with access to secret signal books, the new private signals that had come out from France in this very ship! Someone who could get access to fishing boats so they could be smuggled to the lurking British, or pass them to a spy already in place who could make the arrangements. Someone who had seen a copy of Kaptein Haljewin’s cargo manifests of all they sent to bolster General Rigaud’s forces, the largesse to buy his allegiance once Citizen Hédouville got ashore on Saint Domingue and contacted Rigaud with the Directory’s proposal to make him the new ruler…in the name of France.
The British…such a perfidious race, thinking themselves so very clever and subtle, Choundas thought, sneering. Had they intended to flaunt Lewrie in his face to divert him from his plans, as if he was so brainless, so driven by a need for revenge that he’d fly after him, mewl in mad circles like a kitten chasing a streamer of wool yarn?
Well, he’d see about that, the fools! He shifted his good leg under him and slid off the gun breech, bracing himself erect with his cane.
“Maître?” he heard Lt. Hainaut say by his side. Lt. Mercier had departed, perhaps minutes before after suffering his inattention. “I thought you could use some refreshment,” he added, offering a shiny pewter mug, and an arm on which to lean, but Choundas brushed him off, to make his own way to the break of the quarterdeck nettings, creaky in his joints from long stillness, and long-ago maiming.
Clump-shuffle-tick…clump-shuffle-tick, ’til he could lean upon the railings and discard his cane, with the ever-solicitous Hainaut at his elbow the whole way.
“Watered wine, m’sieur. Quite cool,” Hainaut tempted.
Choundas turned his head to study him for a moment. There was a subtle difference to Hainaut’s voice, to his demeanour; not quite so much smarmy deference as he usually displayed, which deference always secretly amused Choundas, to see his protégé toady so eagerly, yet be so ambitious and scheming, and imagine that he disguised it. Now he sounded…smug. Pleased with himself, of a certainty, but self-confident as well. Daring to be his own man, not Choundas’s, was he?
“Merci, Jules,” Choundas allowed, reaching out for the pewter mug, now that his hand was free, and took a long gulp or two.
“All those poor men…never had a chance, m’sieur,” Hainaut mourned, removing his hat (rather the worse for wear, Choundas noted) and shaking his head sadly, as if honouring the dead and wounded.
“A waste of good material, Jules,” Choundas growled. “But we will be free of them by dawn. Had we met les anglais far out at sea we would be cursed with them for days. After all, good Catholic widows cannot re-marry until some bit of their dead husbands is shipped for burial in France,” Choundas said with a dismissive sing-song. “In the dirt, with the worms! Following the old customs and superstitions we would have been forced to bury them in the gravel ballast belowdecks until we came into port. Peu! What ancient…idiocy!” he scoffed.
“Eu, merde,” Hainaut grimaced in seeming agreement.
“The ‘Bloodies’ shove their dead out a gun-port without even a kind word,” Choundas casually informed him between appreciated sips of his wine. “Those too mangled to live, they bash on the head with gun-tools or mallets, then shove them over, unconcious, to drown. That is British…mercy, hein?”
“We must avenge them, m’sieur,” Hainaut vowed with some heat to his voice. “We must strike back. We cannot let this pass unanswered.”
Choundas eyed him more closely. Hainaut’s zeal for vengeance sounded suspiciously like true conviction, not one of his usual poses. What had gotten into the lad? Choundas had to wonder.
“All in good time, Jules,” Choundas promised with a sly smile. “But I shall not be diverted by such a silly, sentimental passion.”
“Even if it was that salaud, Lewrie, m’sieur? I saw him plain, close enough to read his ship’s name, close enough to recognise him at once,’ Hainaut declared, half-questioning, but mostly boasting in case his master had forgotten how bravely he had shown.
Choundas uttered an evil little laugh, turning his gaze on his aide, the sort of appraisal that would shrivel the scrotums of braver men. Choundas had seen L’Impudente’s attack. Jules had never gotten quite as close as that, but…was there anything praiseworthy to the whole disastrous day, his terrier-nip charges had seemed to drive away the ‘Bloodies,’ in the eyes of the town’s inhabitants, the uninformed.
“You did well today, Jules,” Choundas decided to say.
“Merci, m’sieur,” Hainaut responded, turning so hellishly stern and heroically “modest” that Choundas had to bite down on the lining of his cheek not to laugh in his face at such posturing.
“I must give this frigate a new captain, Jules,” Choundas began.
“M’sieur?” Hainaut asked, as if it were grievous news to him and indeed a mortal pity, hope and greed rising despite his best efforts.
“Griot, I think,” Choundas continued, between sips of his wine. “Lieutenant Houdon to take Griot’s corvette. He could not serve under a new man, when he is senior enough for a ship of his own. He makes a good impression, n’est-ce pas? That fellow Mercier, I think his name is, promoted to First Officer under Griot. He kept a cool head on his shoulders during the worst of our drubbing.”
And me? Hainaut furiously thought; And what for me?
“Griot obviously will wish to bring one of his lieutenants with him, so he has one familiar face in his coterie,” Choundas speculated.
“Quite understandable,” Hainaut allowed, though squirming with expectation.
“Leaving a Lieutenant’s berth open aboard Le Gascon,” Choundas temptingly decided. “Does anyone able spring to mind, Jules?”
“Well…” Hainaut began to say, averse to just blurting out to one and all his aspirations. “If he wasn’t such a failure, there is that Récamier fellow, m’sieur, but…heh, heh.”
“No, he’s commanded a ship, after all. To be made Third Officer under another…that is not the use I eventually intend for him. After he has had enough time to ponder his ‘sins,’” Choundas quibbled.
“Well, if we’re really desperate, m’sieur, I could, ah…that is to say, might a spell of sea-duty continue my nautical education as an officer?” Hainaut finally flummoxed out. “I can already hand, reef, and steer, stand a watch, as Capitaine Desplan allowed me as we sailed to Guadeloupe, and…”
“You do merit some reward, Jules, oui,” Choundas grumbled. “As junior-most officer, well…hmmm. I must think on that. Come. Let us board your ratty little schooner. Take me back to Pointe-à-Pitre. You can show me what a tarry young man you are, hein?”
“But of course, m’sieur,” Hainaut said with an enthusiasm that he did not feel, almost despising the sly bastard for taunting him so cruelly. But with such a cruel ogre, what could he really expect?
“And once in my own bed, after a good supper, I will sleep on it, Jules, I promise,” Choundas vowed.
“You will not visit Capitaine Desplan, before he goes away from us, m’sieur?” Hainaut asked without thinking.
“I think not, Hainaut,” Choundas said, more frostily, as if he had been criticised. “The good Capitaine fell as a true Breton sailor and warrior, without complaint or regret. To paw over him and weep a flood of loss is womanly. I will make a proper oration at his grave. Hurry, now, Jules. It has been a long, long day, and I’m weary.”
“Aye, m’sieur,” Hainaut replied, walking close to Choundas for a prop, should he need it,
as they went to the entry-port.
And after serving you so well, so long, Hainaut mutinously told himself; you wouldn’t even come to say goodbye to me if I fell? Your tool…disposable tool, and nothing more. Just give me even a tiny ship, and I’ll make my own way, from here on.
Book Three
“Rebus semper pudor absit in artis!”
“Away with scruple in adversity!”
—ARGONAUTICA, BOOK V, 324
VALERIUS FLACCUS
Chapter Fourteen
“Mister Peel,” Capt. Lewrie said, alighting from the spavined roan “prad” which he had ridden up to, and back from, Admiralty House on its lofty, airy hilltop overlooking English Harbour. He could not quite disguise a smug expression. He had ridden, whilst Mr. Peel had been forced to take “Shank’s Ponies” for his call upon the Governor-General, that is, to walk; and a long, upward walk it had been. Peel was plucking his coat and waist-coat away from his sopping shirt, and mopping his streaming face as Lewrie sprang down by the boat landing.
“Captain Lewrie,” Peel finally managed to reply from a parched mouth. “Damme, you’d think there’d be a pinch of wind, at the least.”
“Lee-side harbour, Mister Peel,” Lewrie informally informed him. “Absolutely vital in the islands. The East’rd hills block most of it, and Shirley Heights polishes it off, most days.”
“At least we had wind where we anchored,” Peel said, fanning his hat and peering longingly to the outer roads. “Not much, but some, and some’d do for me, ’bout now.”
“We’ll have you under the quarterdeck awnings, soakin’ yer feet in a pan of cool water, ’fore you can say ‘Jack Ketch,’” Lewrie vowed. “So. How was your reception with your, uhm…co-conspirators in the Governor-General’s office?”
“Oh, not too horrid, considering, sir,” Peel wryly said, with a grimace, “given our use of French private signals, which, I gather, are thought too valuable to use at all, unless we spotted Jesus and a band of angels descending for the Second Coming. Shrieks of consternation, ‘viewing with alarm’…all the proper forms of disapproval of which officialdom is possible. But for the fact that Mister Pelham holds superior position to them, and might have authorised me to employ them, at my discretion…a view from which I did not disabuse them. Might I enquire what sort of warm reception you received, sir? And that is not a pun upon today’s weather.” Peel grinned, regaining his breath and his equanimity after such a torrid “stroll.”
“Ginger beer, sirs! Ginger beer!” a street vendor cried, as he wheeled a hand-cart down the stone quay near the boat landing. “Best fer tang, best fer th’ bilious! Cool ginger beer! Who’ll buy…?”
“The local admiral was of much the same mind, Mister Peel. Got cobbed rather well,” Lewrie confessed. “Your confederates in the Governor-General’s mansion just did release them to him. He just distributed them to his captains, and now they’re all for nought, so there’ll be no gullible prizes brought in by guile. Hence, no admiral’s share. Damme, I do hope he hasn’t spent his expected windfall already! And we ‘poached’ on his private ‘game park’ without declaring ourselves first. And, damn our eyes, we didn’t fetch him in even a row-boat to show for our raid. He could care less was Guillaume Choundas the Anti-Christ himself, he’s never heard of him, so…you may imagine all the rest. If we do have some form of ‘Admiralty Orders,’ then sail independent, instanter! Just get out of his harbour, and his sight.”
“Could we?” Peel asked. “Sail instanter? Do we need anything?”
“Firewood and water, the usual plaint,” Lewrie told him with a shrug. “You?”
“Not really,” Peel admitted. “There were some rather intriguin’ hints that I garnered…’twixt the howls, and such. Hints which we just might wish to follow up,” he suggested, tapping his noggin with a conspiratorial air, and that maddening smirk of private information.
“Best we add livestock to our requests, then,” Lewrie supposed. “It sounds as if we’ll be cruising longer than our fresh meat holds out. Or poking our bows into waters where we couldn’t buy a goat.”
“Ginger beer, sir? Ginger beer fer yer cabin stores, Cap’um?” the vendor tempted. “Keeps longer’n ship’s water, h’it do, an’ won’t go flat an’ tasteless like small-beer.”
“Sailor, were you, my man?” Peel enquired, taking in the ragged “ticken” striped slop-trousers the man wore, those from a much earlier issue, each leg as wide as the waistband and ending below his knees.
“Aye, sir. Th’ ol’ Ariadne, in th’ last war,” the man proudly said, “afore she woz hulked. Right yonder, she were, fer years an’—”
“Scrapped her, did they?” Lewrie asked, peering closely at the grizzled fellow, trying to place him, or to determine that his claims were false. Where poor old Ariadne had lain, stripped down to a gant-line as a receiving and stores ship, perhaps later a sheer hulk rigged to pull lower masts like bad teeth, there was now an equally sad-looking, bluff-bowed 74-gun Third Rate.
“’Er bottom woz ’bout rotted out, Cap’um. Beached her, yonder, an’ burned ’er for ’er fittings an’ ’er nails,” the man said. “In ’89 it woz. Come out in ’80, she did. I were main-mast cap’m, then. She got laid up, I went aboard th’ ol’ Jamaica, but I lost me ratin’, then got ruptured an’ discharged, just ’fore the war ended, in ’82. Stayed out here h’ever since. Here, sir…I know ye, Cap’um?”
“Edgemon!” Lewrie exclaimed, suddenly dredging the man’s name up from the distant past. “You taught me handin’ and reefin’!”
“Mister…Ashburn, sir?” The man beamed.
“No. Lewrie,” he told him, a tad abashed to be mistaken for a much tarrier, more promising, and handsomer midshipman of those times.
“Oh Lord, Mister Lewrie, aye!” Edgemon cried. “’Twas you tried t’catch ’at poor topman wot got pushed off the main tops’l yard, wot was ’is name?”
“Gibbs,” Lewrie supplied. “Mister Rolston pushed him…”
“Aye, sir, ’at li’l bastard!” Edgemon snarled, the memory still sour. “Beggin’ yer pardon, Cap’um. ’Spect he’s a Cap’um hisself, by now, an’ God ’elp pore sailormen.”
“No, he’s dead,” Lewrie happily related. “Died at the Nore, a common seaman and mutineer, under a new name.”
“Hung, sir? ’Is sort’s bound fer th’ gibbet,” Edgemon beamed.
“No, I killed him,” Lewrie flatly said.
“Have a free piggin o’ ginger beer on me then, sir!”
“I’ll have a whole barricoe, sir,” Lewrie declared of a sudden. “What’s your charge for five gallons?”
“Lor’, sir! Uhm…eight shillin’s, sorry t’say.”
“Make it ten gallons, and here’s a guinea,” Lewrie said, going for his purse to produce an actual gold coin, not the usual scrip that had even made its way to the Caribbean as “war replacement” for specie. “Will that buy a piggin for me, Mister Peel, and my boat crew?”
“Cover most ’andsome, Cap’um Lewrie!” Edgemon swore. “Thankee right kindly. Alluz knew you’d make a right-tarry awf’cer, sir.”
Oh, don’t trowel it on! Lewrie thought, though smiling all the while; the way I remember it, you despaired I’d ever master running bowlines!
“I’ll take, oh…one five-gallon barricoe, myself,” Mr. Peel stated. “That’d be eight, did you say?”
“Ten, sir,” Edgemon slyly said, tipping his former “favourite” midshipman a sly wink. Peel rolled his eyes, but paid as well.
“Mister Peel’s treat, lads,” Lewrie lied to his boat-crew. “He thought you looked half-strangled, sittin’ out in the sun so long.” As extra piggins were fetched and filled from the hand-cart, the three requisite barricoes were laid between the thwarts of Lewrie’s gig.
“Do I owe more?” Peel whispered to Lewrie as they stood in what little shade there was, apart from the boat-crew. “And why say it was done in my name, Captain Lewrie?”
“You’re not Navy, Mister Peel,” Lewrie said in an equally
soft snicker. “There’s only so much jollity ’twixt a captain and his hands that is allowed, else he appears t’be playin’ favourites, or goes too slack and ‘Popularity Dick.’ Then he erodes his own authority. Done in your name, though, and nought o’ mine…d’ye see? What a civilian does, ignorant o’ Navy ways, don’t signify, for you ain’t in the line of command, Mister Peel.”
“You cannot seem to care for their comfort or welfare, sir?”
“Care, aye, Mister Peel. But cosset or pamper? Never.”
“You’ll recompense me my two shillings, then, Captain Lewrie?” Peel snickered. “’Twas in a good cause, after all,” he pointed out.
“Should o’ bid quicker, Mister Peel,” Lewrie chuckled back with sly glee. “You can’t keep up with risin’ prices, that’s your own lookout. Ahh! That was refreshing! Let’s get under way. Coming, sir?”
“Aye…coming,” Peel said, snorting at his “diddlement.”
“Coming…so is Christmas,” Lewrie said with a laugh.
Peel was, indeed, sitting in the shade of the quarterdeck awning with his bare feet stuck into a wide-ish pan of cool seawater, sleeves rolled to the elbow and shirt opened to mid-chest, when Captain Lewrie came on deck, again, at the first challenging shout from the midshipman of the harbour watch, the unfortunate Mr. Burns. A rowing boat was at the starboard entry-port, and Peel sat down his mug of ginger beer.
“Boat ahoy!” Burns croaked, his pubescent voice cracking. “Who goes there?”
“Hoy, the ship!” an equally teenaged voice cried back. “Barge to the United States Armed Ship Thomas Sumter, with an invitation for your captain and officers!”
“Mister Burns?” Lewrie snapped from behind the gawky scarecrow, making him almost leap out of his shoes in sudden alarm.
“Boat coming alongside, sir,” Burns stammered. “From the, uhm…that Jonathon ship lying over yonder, with an invitation, sir.”
“Let ’em lay alongside and come up, Mister Burns,” Lewrie decided. “Since they’re almost hooked onto the main-chains already!”
Havoc's Sword Page 18