The King's Commission

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Drinking games!” Ashburn announced, climbing back onto his chair and striking a pose like a ship’s figurehead. “Electra, name me a ship’s mast.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout ships,” the girl pouted.

  “Wrong answer. Drink a full bumper in punishment! Drink, drink, drink!” he shouted, and they took up the chorus while the girl tipped her wine glass back and poured the stuff down like water, and gave her a great cheer when she showed “heel-taps” and nothing left, and they pounded their approval on the table and stamped their feet as loud as a thirty-two-pounder gun being trundled across a wooden deck.

  “Alan, sing us a song!” Keith shouted. “A good, dirty one!”

  “I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, Keith,” Alan complained. “Look, this is all very well for you, but I have to report to my ship early tomorrow, clear-eyed and somewhat sober, if I know what’s good for me.”

  “Wrong answer! Drink!” Keith ordered, and Alan remembered once again what he had forgotten in long absence; Keith Ashburn was the sort of take-charge bastard who had to have control over everything.

  Wine was slopped into his glass from long-range, and some of it got onto Dolly’s gown. She half-rose to complain, then took her napkin and tried to sponge it out quickly, while Alan stood and, to the thump of fists and feet, and the encouraging shouted chorus, tipped his wine up and drained it, displaying it was empty by balancing it upside down on his head.

  “Song, song!” Mayhew called. “Girls, sing us a song! Serenade us before we strum and serenade you, ha ha!”

  During the dinner, Alan had learned that Dolly was, until three months before, the proper, if somewhat youngish wife of an officer of the infantry named Capt. Roger Fenton. He had left her with no debts when he was carried off by a fever soon after their arrival in the islands, but he had left her no money, either, and so far, there had been no word in answer to her tearful letters back to England to his last living relatives. She did not have the money to pay for a passage back home, and was, no matter how she might try to economize, quickly running out of money, and faced penury in the near future.

  “Heart of oak are our ships heart of oak are our men,”

  “No, no, that’s not the way it starts!” Shirke corrected Hespera after she tried to sing.

  “Would there be some of that sparkling wine left, please?” Dolly asked Alan, her voice almost lost in the sudden din.

  “Come cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer to add something more to this wonderful year; To honor we call you, not press you like slaves, for who are so free as the sons of the waves?”

  “What?” Alan had to shout back at her.

  “I’ve heard sparkling white wine may remove stains,” Dolly said near his ear. “Would there be some left, please?”

  “Oh, certainly. Make free,” Alan said, snaking a half-used bottle off the sideboard. He handed it to her, and was amazed to see that her eyes were full of tears.

  “Heart of oak are our snips,

  heart of oak are our men,

  we always are ready;

  steady, boys, steady;

  We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again!”

  “What’s wrong?” Alan asked, leaning closer.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” a servant called from the door. “And yer ladies, if ya will! We call this tavern the Old Lamb fer a reason, ya know! Would ya please ’old down the noise, sirs, they’s other patrons complainin’, an’ one of ’em’s our magistrate!”

  “It is my last good gown, Mister Lewrie,” Dolly informed him, “I have had to sell the rest, and now it’s spotted, and …”

  “We’ll buy you another,” Alan assured her. “Your guinea from this evening could fill a whole wardrobe.”

  “We ne’er see our foes but we wish ’em to stay,

  They never see us but they wish us away;

  If they run, why we follow, and run ’em ashore,

  For if they won’t fight us, we cannot do more.

  Heart of oak are our ships,

  Heart of oak are our men.”

  “I mean it, gentlemen! We run a clean, sober, house! Any more noise an’ they’ll call the watch on you’ns!” the man shouted in parting and slammed the door. Shirke heaved a breadbasket at the door in salute.

  “Keith, for God’s sake,” Alan intervened before they tried to start another verse. “You’re going to get us arrested. And I don’t think we paid that much for the bloody rooms, to let us caterwaul to our hearts’ content.”

  “Yes, Keith, let’s have a little dec … hic … decorum or what the devil you c … call it,” Mayhew managed to say. “Potty old men with cudgels always put me off my stroke.”

  “Let’s build a galley, then!”

  “Oh, who’d sit still for that?” Shirke griped. It was a cully’s game for the newlies, to be named figurehead and smeared with shit before the others ran.

  “The galley’s built,” Keith said swaying over the table, thumping it with his heels. “I’m standing on the bloody quarterdeck, but we need a figurehead. A contest to see who’s the best! Pandora, you’ve a huge set o’ cat’s-heads. Hop up here and show us your carvings!”

  The older Pandora was helped up onto the table, allowed Keith to undo her buttons, and shucked her sack-gown down to her ankles, and bared her breasts to the room, kneeling on one end of the table and bracing herself with the tall back of a chair to lean forward like a ship’s figurehead. Candles were fetched to that end of the room so the men could judge better.

  “Marvelous!” Keith said. “I’ll give her points for size, at any rate. Bit low-slung, though.”

  “Not a bit of it,” Mayhew said, kneeling on the floor and looking straight up at them in awe. “Easier to get to whilst doing the blanket horn-pipe! Like … hic … swivel guns!”

  “Alan, trot your piece out next, she looks promising!” Shirke crowed. “Nice swellings, there under her bodice.”

  Alan turned to her, and she shook her head in the negative, rather forcefully; the first sign of any strong reaction she had shown all night. Fresh tears streaked her lovely face.

  “If you’d rather not,” Alan said, putting an arm around her.

  “Thank you.” She almost shuddered. “I’d really … the mistress said it would be a nice supper, and … I’d really like to go, if I may, please? This is so …”

  “Alan, come on!”

  “Try Hespera,” he said over his shoulder. “She looks like better pickings.” He led her to the dark end of the room and sat her down on a chair. “You’ve not been long at this trade, have you, Dolly? Tell me true. I’ve heard enough whore’s lies before to know.”

  She turned away from him and began to sob as quietly as she could, and he knelt down to put an arm around her once more.

  “D … don’t call me a whore,” she wept.

  “Well, what would you call it when you show up at a private party for four men and four women?” Alan asked.

  “I don’t know,” she muttered in a little girl’s timbre. “I was happy to … submit to my husband’s desires, as a … p … proper … wife. I thought it would be no m … more unpleasant than that!”

  “But this is low and common.” Alan softened, pulling her head over to rest on his shoulder, and she submitted easily, though one of her hands took hold of his coat lapel and wrenched it into a knot from the strength of her humiliation as she trembled and wept on his coat.

  “Huzzah for Hespera!” Shirke hooted. “I’ll name my next ship for you, if you’ll pose for the wood-carver, m’dear! Marvelous young poonts you have! Alan, you must come and see. They’re like two in one. Round little darlin’s, with little pink domes atop ’em for dugs. And another little mound of nipple atop that, would you believe? Mm, tasty, too!”

  “Areolae, Shirke,” Ashburn informed him at the other end of the room. “Mm, you’re right, most delectable in form and succulence. From the Latin, you know. Juvenal loved ’em, as do I, better’n oysters!”

  �
�’Ere, wot ’bout mine, then?” Electra complained, slinging her garments to the four winds. “Thort yew wuz sweet h’on me, me chuck!”

  “Hell with it,” Mayhew shouted. “All s … strip fer a boardin’ action!”

  “Let’s get you out of here,” Alan said. Damned if he was going to board any woman in public for someone else’s amusement. And damned if he was going to get anything from Dolly under these circumstances.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” she uttered brokenly as he lifted her to her feet. He led her toward the door, stopping to pick up his hanger and clip it to his belt frog on his left hip.

  “Ought to have some music with this,” Shirke said. He went to the door clad only in a loose shirt and shouted down the stairs at the top of his voice, a quarterdeck voice that could carry forward in at least half a gale of wind, “Any fiddlers down there? Hoy, we want music up here, can’t strum without it! Shake a leg, shake a leg, wakey wakey, lash up and stow! Stir up your dead arses, you farmers!”

  The girls were shrieking with laughter as they were pursued in mock chase about the room, all of them now totally nude, and the males shedding what little they had left upon their persons as they ran and made the floor shudder.

  Then, there was another wooden sort of thunder; the sound of many heavy feet pounding their way up the stairs.

  “Shirke, your musicians are here,” Alan said, grabbing Dolly’s hand and running for the only other door to the room.

  “Bloody good!” Shirke said, breaking off and opening the door to face an obese (and very outraged) magistrate, his bailiff, and a pack of old gammers from the watch. “The Charlies!” Shirke screamed and slammed the door in their faces. “All hands, prepare to repel boarders!”

  Alan wasn’t prepared to stay and take the consequences. He led Dolly into a small bed-chamber, from which there seemed to be no other mode of escape, unless they wanted to consider shinnying down a drain-pipe from the narrow window to the courtyard below.

  “Damn!” he hissed in the darkness. He felt along the wall with his free hand until he came upon a small door set into the wall facing the hallway, about three feet square. It was the closet for the chamber-pots, so that servants could pick them up from the hallway and empty them without disturbing the lodgers. It had not been used, so it was empty. Alan took the two tin pots to the door to the dining room and slung them onto the table.

  “You’ll need these, I think,” he said, slamming the door again. “Through there, quickly, Dolly.”

  “Oh, God!” she quailed weakly.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, follow me, then.”

  He crawled through, saw that the coast was for the moment clear, and stepped out into the hall, almost dragging the young woman in his wake. They straightened their clothing in the small mirror of a hall table at the bend of the corridor, and he then quickly led her away from the noise.

  “Damn!” he hissed again. There was no outside entrance from this hallway. They would have to go back the other way, which meant running into the disturbance, which by now was beginning to sound like a full-sized melee. “Look, wipe your tears, Dolly, and look serene, or we’re taken for fair.”

  “I’ll try,” she promised, taking a deep, steadying breath and groping in her small bag for a handkerchief. “There, do I look calm enough?”

  “You look lovely,” Alan told her, knowing it would buck up her spirits, and it did. And damme if she don’t, he thought.

  They advanced on the mob in the hall. Old men with cudgels from the watch, a huge bailiff the size of a plow-horse, the magistrate, several tavern servants, and many patrons, who were yelling for either peace and quiet, or more drinks. Shouts could be heard in favor of lynching the riotous heathens in the dining room, or the magistrate and his churls, or both.

  “Excuse us, excuse us, if you please,” Alan said with a fixed smile as he led Dolly through the press, leaning back as the door was finally booted open and the party responded with a shower of crockery, glassware, a chamber-pot, and several gobbets of raisin duff. “Will you let a lady pass, please, there’s a good fellow.”

  The Charlies from the watch were not having it all their own way. They could not use their cudgels, and were knotted in the door like a beer bung, even with the bailiff’s huge shoulder applied to shove them in by force. Alan put his own shoulder to the back of one old man and pushed, and the Charlies finally gained the bulwarks, but it was a bad mistake, for drunken whores and revelers could fight when cornered, better than the poorly paid dodderers.

  Once on the first-floor level, Alan fetched his own hat and led Dolly into the street.

  “’Oy, ain’t you one o’ them?” a servant cried out as they began to walk away. “Yes, you is! Hoy, the watch! ’Er’es another o’ the bastards!”

  “My dear fellow, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alan countered. “But, here’s a guinea on my reckoning, and please inform your cook that it was a splendid supper, thankee very much.”

  The servant bent over to pick up the guinea from the mud, and Alan booted him in the face, which sent him sprawling, out cold.

  “Can’t be too careful, you know,” he said smiling at Dolly. “Now, let’s walk in that direction, as quick as damnit.”

  “But what about your friends back there?” she asked, showing her first signs of amusement all night. “What will happen to them?”

  “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Alan shrugged. “To the devil with ’em. Hurry!”

  Her lodgings were in English Harbor, so they took a coach over the ridge, and Alan paid the driver to carry a note to his own inn to his man Cony, telling him not to wait up, but to come fetch him at first light.

  Dolly’s room was in a ratty, cheap inn halfway up the hill overlooking the harbor. There was one small window, a set of sprung chairs and a small round table under it, a wardrobe which contained only a pair of dresses and a morning bedgown, two large chests, one of which she used for a table for her toilet with a tiny mirror propped up on it, and a high, narrow, curtained bed-stead and nightstand.

  “I must apologize for this,” she said modestly as she lit the one foul candle on the table below the window. “When Captain Fenton was still alive, we had a set of rooms, in a better lodging house. I tried to keep them for a while, but they were simply too dear. This is all I can afford for now, though Mistress Olivett tells me I may stay in her establishment for very little.”

  “That’s the Mother Abbess you started working for?” Alan asked, removing his coat.

  “Yes, she is,” Dolly replied, calm enough about it.

  “And how long have you been working for her?”

  “Only a fortnight,” Dolly sighed. “It hasn’t been so bad, not until tonight, at least. I go with the others to call upon gentlemen who wish companionship. Oh, God. I suppose I shan’t get my money for tonight, after all. A whole crown I’ve lost, and I’ve nothing left.”

  “You’re getting only a crown out of the guinea we were charged for your services?” Alan gaped. “What a gyp!”

  “A guinea?” she gasped. “And I thought you were japing me when you said that earlier! Oh, how cruel she is, when she knows my need!”

  “I’ll give you a guinea, and it’s all yours, Dolly,” Alan promised her. “The night’s still young.” He pulled out his watch and took a peek at the face—barely gone nine. “Let’s get into bed.”

  An expression of disagreement appeared on her features for a moment, then she sighed and acquiesced, and turned away to undo her gown. Alan shucked his clothing quickly and flung himself onto the lumpy mattress. She came to him after carefully hanging up her gown in the wardrobe. She turned her back and he unlaced her stays for her, then she sat on the edge of the bed and undid the silk ribands that held her knee-length silk stockings up and she folded them as though they were precious gems. He watched her slim back while she worked, and admired the Venus dimples of her lower back. She reached up and took the pins from her hair, letting it fall thick and lustrous down
her back almost to her waist.

  “Could we lay under the sheet, please, Alan?” she asked in her meek little voice again. “I know it’s a rather warm night, but …”

  “If you wish, dear,” he said gently, finding himself in thrall at the sight of a woman undressing for him, and feeling unwilling sympathy for her. She was too … nice … a woman to be forced to prostitute herself, far above the regular girls who entered the trade, and he felt for her.

  She slid under the sheet with him and lay stiff as a board by his side as he slid over to her. He put an arm behind her head and drew her to him so that they lay facing each other, and he ran his free hand up and down her ribs and her hip. Reluctantly, she put an arm over him as well.

  “This is what I liked best with the Captain,” she whispered, and the catch in her voice told him she was about to cry again. “The being close in the night, when he had … that part was sometimes almost enjoyable, but … I’m sorry.”

  She almost sprang from the bed, but he restrained her and took her in both arms to let her weep on his bare chest, thinking himself such a bloody fool.

  “What was he like?” Alan asked minutes later after she had quieted.

  “He was much older, in his forties,” she sighed. “Such a kind, good man! So patient with my frailties and my ignorance. I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a catch for him. No dowry, no lands or rents. His family called him a fool to his face, a foolish colt’s-tooth to take a younger wife with no prospects.”

  “And your own family?”

  “They passed over. I was earning my way as a housekeeper in Woolwich when the dear Captain came to visit my people. Not a month later, we were married and at sea on the way here to Antigua. And six months after that, he died of the fever. Ah well, at least we had almost a year of peaceful existence together before …”