"Aye, Captain McGilliveray," Lewrie replied, just about to preen a bit more and tell them another tale of derring-do, and proper modesty bedamned. "Escorted him inshore, then up the Apalachicola River in our ship's boats, then overland to a Muskogee town, the name escapes me, by a large lake. Me, him, a company of fusiliers, and a Foreign Office-"
"You knew my father, sir?" Midshipman McGilliveray blurted from the foot of the table, startling them all to an uneasy silence.
Lewrie turned to look at him. The lad was gape-mouthed in astonishment and sudden pleasure, the "stain" on the McGilliveray escutcheon best left unsaid or not. Lewrie suspected that the poor lad had never been told very much about his "half-breed" sire, who had served against his own kin during the Revolution, to boot, despite his uncle's declaration that they'd reconciled and put the rift behind them.
"Indeed I did, young sir," Lewrie told him. "And a formidable fellow he was, too. Brave, alert, and clever… skilled in the lore of the forest, and the nicest manners of the drawing room. At home in a chickee or a mansion. A bold horseman, a skilled hunter…"
The simple use of a long-forgotten Indian word for "hut" seemed to please the midshipman no end, for he beamed wider, expectantly, as if starved for information long denied him.
"Of the White Turtle Clan, I recall," Lewrie further reminisced. "Or was it the Wind Clan, on his mother's side? Muskogee royally, as it were, in any event. He stood high in their councils, with their… uhm, mikkos and their… talwas! Their ministers and chiefs, as grand as a peer in the House of Lords," Lewrie told him, the terms springing to the forefront of his memory after all those years. "At his urging I ended up anhissi, myself, toward the end…"
"Made 'of their fire,' " young McGilliveray exclaimed with growing excitement, "to my grandmother's huti. A grand honour, is it not, uncle? Captain, sorry." Young Desmond reddened.
"It was, indeed, Mister McGilliveray," his uncle gravely said.
"And… and were you there, then, Captain Lewrie?" Midshipman McGilliveray hesitantly pressed, his curiosity getting the better of him, and to the great astonishment of Midshipman Grace seated beside him, who had never heard the like back in staid old England. "Then you must have met my mother. They were married, grandfather Robbie always told me, on that trip. You must have seen her!"
"Ah…?" Lewrie hedged, trying not to gawp. The boy's father, he sourly recalled, had been the hugest sort of prig, and he doubted that Cambridge had had a thing to do with it. Desmond McGilliveray, as he knew him, had ranted like a Baptist hedge-priest against fornication 'twixt the English and the Indians, forever lecturing and scolding the live-long day regarding "sensible" Muskogee customs and how stupid and "heathenish" Whites, and Lewrie in particular, were! Frankly, Lewrie had come to quite heartily despise him! Don't even look at an Indian woman, especially when she was in her "courses"; don't even piss in a stream above them! Lewrie couldn't recall Desmond McGilliveray even smiling at one of them. He'd taken no wife, as long as Lewrie had been ashore and inland with him. Perhaps after they'd sailed off, that frail little dandy-prat from the Foreign Office dead and all their plans gone for nought, even after thinking they had a settled agreement that the Muskogee would back England in the war.
Only one marriage I recall, and that was mine… at the point of the knife/ Lewrie thought, working his mouth in silent, resentful, reverie; 'Twos Desmond made me do it, and thought it hilarious.1
"My mother was a visiting Cherokee princess," young McGilliveray stated with a stubborn, piss-me-in-the-eye pride, as if daring anyone to demean his antecedents; probably from long practice. "Her name in Cherokee meant Soft Rabbit, Grandfather Robbie said my father was dumbstruck in his tracks by her, from the very first, and…"
Soft Rabbit, God-DAMN! Lewrie quietly screeched, almost knocking his wineglass over; He ain't that stiff-neck's boy… he's MINE! SHIT!
His mouth dropped open of its own volition; his eyes blared as wide as a new-saddled colt's, as he took note of the lad's eyes. Grey-blue eyes, just like his own. And what had his father Sir Hugo smirked after calling upon Theoni Connor and her new-born bastard, right after the Nore Mutiny? "He's got your eyes, Alan, me son," the old rake-hell had cooed; followed by a gleeful cackle!
His eyes. Soft Rabbit's glossy and thick, raven-black hair; but with a fairer Englishman's complexion that he'd never have gotten from a union 'twixt Soft Rabbit and a half-blood, even were McGilliveray as fair as a Finn! A leaner face, not rounded; a fine nose, not hawkish.
"I knew her," Lewrie confessed. "Met her," he quickly amended.
Damme, didn 't I just! he frantically thought, recalling all the sweet, stolen hours when they went at it like fevered stoats, like… newly-Weds! And the only reason he and Soft Rabbit had been made to "leap the sword" was because she was war booty, a slave taken by a Muskogee war party up near the Tanasi River, far to the north. A girl slave of the haughty Wind Clan couldn 't birth a bastard, and holding a rantipoling "outsider" responsible was amusing to them! The poor deluded lad, Lewrie thought.
"What was she like, sir? " young Midshipman McGilliveray begged
"Oh, wondrous handsome!" Lewrie truthfully said. "Pretty as a picture. Not so very tall, d'ye know, but as slim and graceful as any doe deer. Sorry, but they didn't wed whilst I was at their town. And I never conversed with her. Gad, imagine lettin' an outsider, English sailor such as me, in such exalted company, what?
"Point of fact, the last time I saw your father was when he and his warriors escorted us back to our boats, then downriver to the sea. The Spanish had gotten wind of our presence, and they and the Apalachee attacked us before we started unloading the trade goods and arms we'd promised. It was neck-or-nothing there, for a bit, 'til your father rallied his warriors and ran them off. All I was left to show for it was a bayonet in the thigh, and a tale t'tell. Early spring of '83, it was."
"And he called you imathla lubotskulgi" Captain McGilliveray contributed of a sudden, drawing Lewrie's attention to the top of the table. "In Creek, that's 'little warrior.' Desmond told me that," he declared, seeming to gawp in wonder over such a coincidence happening in regards to his long-dead relative. "All these years, and both gone to their Maker, of the smallpox. I'd quite forgotten, but… well, I am dashed." The other supper guests smiled, but he didn't.
Though McGilliveray didn't sound "gawpish"; quite the opposite, in point of fact, as he squeamishly, uneasily looked away, eyes almost panicked and averted, "harumphing" to reclaim his proper demeanour.
He knows! Lewrie thought, cringing, fighting manfully to keep a calm exterior, himself, and not turn and look at Midshipman McGilliveray; Desmond must have told him who really fathered the lad, he looks so English, he 'd've had to. Indians annul bad marriages at the Green Corn ceremonies… Soft Rabbit must've said ours didn't take when I didn't come back for her, and McGilliveray took her on. Said he'd see to her, and didn 't he just… the bastard.
"Well, gentlemen," Capt. McGilliveray said, balling up his napkin and laying it aside. "Let us have the port, or the whisky, fetched out, and honour our distinguished guests with a hearty toast to the King of England. Charge your glasses, if you will?"
Lewrie again chose whisky; he was badly in need of it.
At a nod, Midshipman McGilliveray at the foot of the table rose and proposed the toast to King George III, with all the fulsome titles including "Defender of the Faith, of the Church of England"; to which Midshipman Grace responded with a shorter toast to the President of the United States-then the serious toasting and imbibing began.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thank God for a quiet day in port," Lewrie muttered to himself as he struggled out of his coat sleeves, with his long-suffering manservant Aspinall trying to help, trying to keep up with his captain's slow, staggering circle of the day-cabin. "Wouldn't trust me with the charge of a row-boat, t'morrow."
"You circle, I pull yer sleeve, sir, that's th' way," Aspinall meekly suggested. "Mind yer kitty…"
Rrrowwr! Toulon bickered, fle
eing the imminent danger from his "beloved" master's clumping feet, wisely taking his tail and paws out of reach in an offended scurry under the settee.
"Who won, Mister Peel?" Lewrie asked, rather loudly. Mr. Peel, temporarily stashed somewhat upright against the deal-and-canvas partition to his cabin, didn't answer. He was too busy contemplating his shoes, arms lankly dangling, just about ready to drool. "Them or us?"
"Uhm? Sir?" Peel finally responded, looking up blearily. "Up, the cavalry! Huzzah! Forward, the King's Own Heavy Horse!"
"Why, the damn fool's drunk as a lord!" Lewrie chortled, as he kicked a constricting shoe toward the dining-coach. He stopped circling long enough for Aspinall to start undoing the buttons of his waist-coat; items which were too "scientific" for him, at the moment.
"Aye, sir… so 'e is," Aspinall agreed, smothering a giggle.
"Aspinall…" Lewrie said, peering at him as if imparting some eternal but urgent verity, "the Yankee Doodles're a hopeless, drunken lot. It'll do for 'em, in the end."
"I 'spect so, sir," Aspinall said, peeling the waist-coat off, setting Lewrie to circling, again. Aspinall threw a helpless look at Cox'n Andrews, who was doing for Mr. Peel and his coat and things.
"Damme, I've lost a perfectly good shoe!" Lewrie complained.
" 'Tis here someplace, sir… honest," Aspinall told him. "Do slip t'other off, and I'll mate 'em up. Now fer yer stock an' shirt, sir, and I'll fetch yer dressin' gown. Lean on this, sir, will ye?"
Lewrie kicked the second off; this one skittered underneath the settee, causing Toulon to yowl once more and scuttle off for someplace safer, where people didn't shoot things at him.
"Dry, dry, dry…" Lewrie carped, noting (rather squiffily in point of fact) that he'd been leant against his wine-cabinet. He felt in need of liquid refreshment, but the flimsy latch appeared too elaborate a safeguard for his fingers, too.
"Ginger beer, sah," Cox'n Andrews suggested, plumping Mr. Peel into a chair so he could remove his shoes. "Good fo' settlin' a riled stomach. I'll fetch some from yo' lazarette."
"Capital!" Lewrie crowed, swaying. "We have any?"
"Ten gallon, sir, fetched aboard this mornin'," Aspinall said, coming back to lumber Lewrie into a chair, as well.
"Poor Kershaw… the clown!" Lewrie commented, tittering over what he'd heard aboard the Sumter, once the dinner party had gotten so soaked that gossip had flowed as freely as the liquors.
Capt. Kershaw of the Hancock frigate had made a total muck of his new command, he'd been told. Lewrie had thought she carried too much artillery, and he was right. She'd been caught in a blow windward of Dominica, and with too much end-weight fore and aft had bucked and reared, had hobby-horsed and rolled so precipitously, that her upper masts and spars had nearly carried away, and her lower masts had been strained almost to breaking.
Capt. McGilliveray had intimated (rather slurringly in-his-cups-gleeful) that Kershaw had refused to lower top-masts 'til far too late. Then, without telling anyone at Prince Rupert Bay, he'd sailed off for Havana to make repairs, despite their Secretary of the Navy, Stoddert's, strict caution to avoid entering such a pestilential harbour! Within a week, a fifth of Kershaw's crew had gone down with Yellow Jack. Once repaired, Capt. Kershaw had taken Hancock back to sea, though not back to his assigned cruising ground. No, he'd taken her all the way home, cutting his tour in the Caribbean far too short. And to make matters even worse, whilst on-passage up the Chesapeake to moor Hancock in the pratique, or quarantine, anchorage below Baltimore, had stranded her on a shoal above York River, which grounding had finally sprung her indifferently repaired foremast!
The last stroke had come when the Secretary of the Navy, Mister Benjamin Stoddert, on an inspection trip to Baltimore's dock facilities and new naval construction, had gone aboard her once she had cleared pratique and had come into Baltimore. Irked that a whole vital month of usefulness had been lost whilst quarantined (the result of ignoring his orders regarding Havana!) Stoddert had discovered Capt. Kershaw's… "quirks."
McGilliveray and his officers had jeeringly pointed out how sybaritic and luxurious Kershaw's cabins had been furnished, as grandiose as an Ottoman Pasha's harem, and in complete disregard of the plainer usages of "spare and simple" American virtue… and how Kershaw's own ideas of a fashionable naval uniform (bought from that grandee's purse for himself and his officers once they'd called at Kingston, Jamaica!) was too "Frenchified," as Lewrie had judged them when first he'd seen them.
The unfortunate Kershaw was too well connected in both Senate and House of Representatives, and too bloody rich, to sack. Stoddert could, however, "reward" him with command of a proposed two-decker 74 to be built in New York (some day when pigs could fly, perhaps) sending Kershaw to the chilly, Spartan-souled, "thou shalt not" North, and relieving him (with all due respect and ceremony) with another officer. Kershaw had been welcome to take along those of his officers who were his favourites, which "kind consideration" most-like pulled up several more cack-handed "weeds" by the roots as well.
Well, no wonder Lewrie had been confused by the plainness he'd found aboard Sumter. Suddenly, he supposed he'd have to strip his own great-cabins of half his furnishings, did he return the favour and dine USS Sumter's officers aboard… that, or be taken for an indolent Sybarite!
Lewrie would have put more thought into that, but he was interrupted by the harsh noise of a chair being dragged cross his black-and-white painted canvas deck covering. Mr. Peel-evidently not able to walk, but still of a mind to gab-was hauling up to him by fits and starts, hands clasped on the chair arms attempting Hindoo mystic levitation, bump by hopping bump, whilst employing his heels as oars to drag forward by main force.
"Americans're quite upset, Lewrie," Peel slurringly said, though trying to over-enunciate. He had one eye open, and was obviously having some trouble focussing that'un.
"And who wouldn't be, I ask you," Lewrie replied, without a clue as to what it was that Peel wished to maunder about.
"Kershaw… South Carolinian… one of them. Bad form, bein' relieved, even f'r cause," Peel tried to explain. "Massachu-mmm… a 'Down East' Yankee replacin' 'im hic. Useful… that." Belch/
"Sss-sectional bitterness-ss," Lewrie replied, so liking the sound of it that he tilted his head and hissed like a serpent for a few more moments. "Dear God, but we're foxed." Numb lips… hmmm!
"And who wouldn't be, I ask you," Peel heartily agreed, as their ginger beer came. "Hellish brew, corn-whisky… hic! Hellish stuff! Can't see how… Jonathons stay upright… past dinner. Hic! Worse than… the plague o' gin, back home. Blue Ruin."
"Tasty… Belch!… though," Lewrie commented.
"Oh, ahrr!" Mr. Peel vigourously said, nodding.
"So. We learn anything t'night?" Lewrie thought to enquire.
"Oh, bags, sir!" Peel enthusiastically claimed. He then paused, though, open-mouthed and cock-headed, his silence broken by a few more hiccoughs, and the odd eructation. "It'll come t'me…"
"Spanish Bitters, sah," Cox'n Andrews suggested, presenting them with a smallish, glass-stoppered vial, and a plate of sliced lemons, on which he liberally sprinkled the vial's contents. "Mistah Durant, sah, he say bitters an' lemons be dah grand specific fer 'hiccin's.' Settle yer bile-ish humours good as gingah beer, t'boot. Bite down, Cap'm."
"Whyever'd we come here, I wonder… God damn my eyes!" Lewrie grumbled as he gnawed on a quarter of lemon, then quickly blared his eyes and grimaced at the taste and smell. "Turd water'd be…" Belch!
Quickly followed by Mr. Peel's similar sentiment after he'd bit down on his quarter-lemon. He sucked in great gulps of air and drained his mug of ginger beer to erase the foul taste.
"Deep breath an' hold her fo' a full minute, Mistah Peel, sah," Andrews solicitously instructed, "an' yah 'hiccin's' be gone."
"Gack!" Peel replied, cheeks bulging and a hand pressed to his mouth, and the good eye floundering about for the welcome sight of any receptacle in which to "cast his accounts."
Christ,
don't puke on my deck chequer, Lewrie sourly thought as he held his own breath and watched; you 've already ruined it, enough! He ran out of wind slightly before Peel, and began to gasp, his lungs and chest gulping air like a wash-deck pump sucked spillage.
"Lord God," Peel said with a miserable groan, after a last, and stentorian and prolonged belch. "Think I've been purged!"
"Bettah, though, sah?" Andrews enquired.
"Yes… matter o' fact, I am, thankee. You were sayin'?"
"Huh? Oh. What did we learn," Lewrie reiterated. "And why'd we come to Antigua?"
"Why, we came here to introduce ourselves to the powers that be, Captain Lewrie," Peel told him, head drooping as if suddenly spent by his "dosing" with bitters. "Learn how rife are the Frog privateers… sightings of French men o' war… oh! And where Yankee merchant ships are trading. That's what Sumter's people told me! South o' here, for the most part. Where you find one, you find the other."
"Sharks an' pilot fish," Lewrie seemed to agree.
"But some go into Jacmel," Peel added, finally looking up; and looking as bedraggled as Death's Head On A Mop-Stick. "Didn't mean to reveal that, but… in whisky, Veritas, what?"
"Ah!" Lewrie exclaimed, as if grasping an Eternal Verity or Solid Geometry. "Never mind, then. But, Mister Peel, that means that we must be two ships. Cover Jacmel, up north, or cruise far down along the Leewards, to Aruba and Spanish New Granada. Kill Choundas and his captains with one hand… blockade Rigaud with t'other."
To demonstrate, he held up first the left hand, then the right, and wiggled his fingers… of which he seemed to have twice, perhaps thrice, the requisite number. Rather fascinatin', really, and…
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