Fortune's Whelp (Fortune's Whelp Series Book 1)

by Benerson Little

  “You gain nothing by this sham of running!” shouted the naval officer at Edward. “The French will butcher this crew for its resistance! There’s a time to resist, and a time not to! You waste men’s lives!”

  “Including perhaps your own? Had you been on the quarterdeck with me I’d receive your words with more respect. But doubtless your mother paid for your commission,” Edward replied cuttingly. “Pity she didn’t understand what a naval officer’s duty is before she sent a perfumed wisp of a cringing fop to do a man’s job. There’s more to it than smuggling goods, bedding whores, and substituting brandy for courage.” He prodded him with the point of his backsword. “So below, damn you, into the hold where you belong. And curb your tongue or I’ll cut it out!”

  Edward had known army and militia men who, brave enough in a fight on land, had cowered below decks during a sea fight, and had more than once seen notorious duelists flee from battle—in Edward’s mind, the common soldier and naval seaman had far more courage than the common duelist—but he could never forgive a naval officer for retreating from deck.

  The Scotsman pointed at one of the mutinous seamen. “The gunner. Fetch him, now, or when I find him I’ll cut off his balls—and yours—and nail them to the mainmast. You, and you,” he said, pointing at the two seamen who had followed him into the affray, “can you manage to get more small arms on deck and beat any of these curs out of the way as needed?”

  “Aye, Captain!”

  Edward raced up the ladder to the quarterdeck. The closest privateer still gained, but thankfully more slowly. Ahead lay Lundy Island. Edward knew they should be shortening sail, but it was far too dangerous to do so yet. The quarterdeck was still a hail of lead and small splinters. Edward now crouched at the windward side of the quarterdeck with the two helmsmen there. All three men joked nervously and cursed vehemently about the balls passing nearby and overhead, especially after one passed through the stern planking and between one of the helmsman’s legs.

  “You French bugger, you can have anything but those!”

  The helmsman on the opposite side laughed nervously, then turned green and vomited on the deck, wisely not daring to put his head over the gunwale or taffrail. He gave Edward a sheepish look as if to apologize. This was his first action.

  “Many a man below is puking his breakfast,” Edward said. “The difference is that you’re here, not there. That’s all that matters.”

  The helmsman next to Edward smiled and nodded. “I pissed myself in my first action,” he shouted over the sound of wind and thumping musket balls, “but I never left my quarters. Anyone who says he’s never pissed himself in action is a liar, a fool, or a madman!”

  More balls flew past, and all three men hunkered down even lower. Cocklin’s blood was sticky beneath their feet. Edward wished he could stand tall, but it would serve no purpose: he would be killed almost instantly, so thick flew the shot.

  But enough is enough, he thought angrily.

  Keeping his head low, he picked up his long-barreled buccaneer gun from where it rested along the transom.

  “Boy!” he shouted down to the ship’s lad tucked away under cover of a gun carriage on the main-deck. “Bring me a loaded musket! Or two, if you can! Quickly, lad, but keep low!”

  One hundred yards astern was the French corsair, too far on a pitching deck for anything resembling accuracy, but Edward could certainly put a ball or two among the large crew. He took careful aim with the musket, elevating the muzzle well above his target and timing the rise and fall of both the Virginia and the privateer.

  He fired. He swore he saw a man among the many fall. From the main shrouds a French seaman waved a cutlass in angry defiance. Edward passed his now unloaded musket to the ship’s boy and its place received a loaded common English musket of much shorter barrel. He aimed and fired again, this time at the foretop where three musketeers crouched. He hit one, as much by luck as skill, and watched him fall.

  To no one in particular he said, “I’ll be damned if I’ll have it said of me I never fought back against an attacker. Two dead here, no, three, and several wounded—we owe them.”

  Now there was nothing left but to hope a sail did not split, critical rigging did not part, a mast did not spring or go by the board. In Fortune’s hands they lay.

  What the hell keeps us going? he wondered. Duty? Greed? Or just fear? Does fear send some to action, others to hide? Is it for fear of a French prison? The officers, merchants, and gentlemen would be easily enough ransomed, eventually. The fear of death? Of maiming? Of the loss of hand, eye, arm, foot, finger, leg, testicle? Of the various consequences of futility? Or do they do this for many reasons? No matter, thought Edward, we’ve done what we’ve done, and under Fortune’s gaze.

  “A sail! A sail!”

  By God, thought Edward, the lookout’s still doing his duty!

  He cupped his hands and shouted aloft. “Where?”

  “Dead ahead! At anchor in the lee of Lundy!”

  O Fortune! Please let it be an English cruiser!

  “And another with her!” shouted the lookout.

  Edward stood up, ducked again, much too late, as two musket balls passed by. He stood again and made a crouching run to the quarterdeck rail.

  “You!” he shouted to a seaman. “Pass the ensign up here and help me raise it at the staff—nay, we’ll nail it to the staff, I’ll have no one strike our colors. We’ll let the strangers know who we are!”

  Edward and the seaman rove the flag to the base of the staff then hoisted it aloft, then, braving French fire, nailed the bottom few feet to the staff. The ensign stood erect from the staff in the stiff wind.

  “They bear away!” the lookout shouted.

  And so the privateer astern did, altering to a southwesterly course and signaling to her companions.

  “Men-of-war, I’m sure of them! Fourth rates at least!” shouted the lookout.

  “Huzzah!” shouted those on deck.

  “Aye, huzzah,” Edward muttered under his breath.

  Twice saved by Fortune in as many passages, he thought. But as much by our own efforts as by Fortune, he reminded himself, then remembered something he’d heard someone say: Fortune often aids valor when it’s a bit reckless.

  Yes; he smiled suddenly as he stared at the retreating Frenchman—the words of a French privateer captain.

  The ship’s surgeon lay dead below; his occasional apprentice, to his credit, tried not to mangle his wounded charges until a woman passenger, her brother a surgeon, took over for him. Under her surgery and care for the next two days, none of the wounded died of their wounds, not even the pair who lost limbs. Edward, the ship now in one of the mate’s hands, slipped into his cabin to write a letter to the owners describing the chase. As he took off his coat he noted holes where seven musket balls had passed.

  Late that afternoon the Virginia Galley begged a bower anchor from a merchantman in the lee of Lundy Isle: Bristol Channel was extremely dangerous without a good anchor, or even two, to stem the tides. The kedge she had kept would have served only as a last resort. The next morning, the Virginia came to an anchor in King Road and would wait another day to put herself in order before ascending the Severn. Edward could not afford further delay and went ashore. As soon as he had dealt with the usual officials, he took passage on a ferry up the Avon to Bristol, the tide favoring the short journey.

  He was confident he had escaped Fortune’s last Irish grasp. The road ahead lay straight, and ill-Fortune’s handmaidens lay far behind.

  Chapter 18

  [A] pox of poverty, it makes a man a slave, makes wit and honor sneak, my soul grow lean and rusty for want of credit.

  —Aphra Behn, The Rover, 1677

  Edward, still flush from his second escape from a French privateer while crossing St. George’s Channel, pushed through the door of the Black Swan coffeehouse on Tower Lane near the Old Bowling Green and stepped into a large room busy with the clatter of word and cup.

  Before him were se
a captains and merchant traders growling and grumbling as they smoked their pipes and drank their coffee, about why they could not get enough convoy protection, about how the French were damnifying English shipping, about how it was safer to sail under Swedish or Danish colors. Some quietly puffed at their pipes and read the news posted beneath stained paintings, lottery notices, and various broadsides on smoke-smudged walls.

  In a tobacco-smoke darkened corner, an investor, owner, and captain signed articles of agreement on a table mottled by spilled liquids, ink, and candle wax. A notary public stood by to put his seal on the agreement and sign his name, abbreviating his title as Not’s Pub’cus.

  A wily old investor who had just returned from the Tolzey—the local Exchange or stock market—kept an ear open as he listened both to supercargoes just returned from West India as they discussed goods and profits, and to several members of the West India and Chesapeake Trades as they complained of Scottish and Irish interlopers.

  A sea surgeon and a captain-owner discussed sailing a slaver from Guinea to West India independently of the Royal Africa Company, and thereby illegally. The captain-owner delayed discussing wages, and instead cursed high insurance rates and bottomree, how they were keeping him from making a profit.

  “Damn, a good surgeon would help me keep a few more slaves alive and so make the voyage more profitable. Are you a good surgeon?” the captain-owner asked. “I warn you, though: when the war’s over I won’t be able to interlope on the Africa Company’s territory, the goddamn navy will start protecting the Company again. An honest man can’t hardly make a living while the Company has a monopoly on slaves to the West Indies. So, are you a good surgeon?”

  Nearby, a reasonably well-dressed young man—or he would never have been granted entrance—pretending to be a merchant’s son but revealed by eventual admission as a member of the strolling trade and a penniless poet, sat with a foppish old gentleman and told him he was tired of playing roles written by others and wanted, so he said, “to his own self be true.” At the old gentleman’s suggestion, the young man made his way to a tavern on the quay to meet a woman who could, so the old gentleman said, help him. A day and several bottles of wine later, he found himself trepanned, spirited, and indentured aboard a pink bound for Virginia, having learned just how mystical wine, woman, and a cudgel can be.

  All had come to the coffeehouse to conduct business: most of them sober men making sober transactions, reading and discussing yesterday’s post, and generally conducting themselves as men were coming to do in the nascent Protestant ethic world of trade. Coffee now reigned as the drink of worldly men conducting business, although some suggested that coffeehouses turned men into womanly gossips, and that the brown Turkish water dried men up and left them limp, and if not limp then still unable to give fire. Wine, beer, and strong spirits were not served here, and neither loud dispute nor lover’s woe were tolerated, or so the posted rules stated. Here all men were considered equal; here common merchant might engage nobleman without begging leave to do so. And here women, other than those serving, were commonly refused entrance in order to avoid distracting men from the business at hand, or so the argument went.

  Edward wended his way through tobacco smoke and loud but not boisterous conversation.

  “Pardon me, sir!” said a serving woman carrying a wooden tray loaded with cups and pint coffee pots as she gently brushed him aside.

  “Ah, Captain MacNaughton!” called a merchant trader and acquaintance, who then turned to his companion and spoke in a low voice. “This man is a buccaneer, duelist, and occasional lawyer—three rogues in one! And never, unless you know him well, as I do, call him a lawyer if you value a whole skin. You don’t want to get his Scots blood up. His father was a roving Highland man who sailed with Henry Morgan, so there’s a streak of savage blood in him as terrible as a West India harrycane.”

  Edward drew near and nodded his greeting.

  The merchant captain continued more loudly, now directing his voice as much to the room in general as to Edward. “We heard about your duel in Teagueland from Captain Cronow, and he heard about it in Cork, or was it Waterford? It even merited a line in the Gazette! At any rate, my congratulations, sir, on your survival, and on your two successful rancounters with the French. I’ve heard you intend to be away to sea again, and I wish you luck on your venture, whatever it may be. Have you heard? Seager is likely to have his commission for the Danby Galley as a private man-of-war. One hundred tons, ten guns, forty men.”

  Edward frowned. The news annoyed him, although Seager was not truly a rival. What really annoyed him was that the man had the support of the peer Thomas Osborne, First Duke of Leeds, and of his son, the peer Peregrine Osborne, Earl of Danby, Marquess of Carmarthen. Both men had rejected Edward’s petitions, albeit politely. No matter, it still might be months before Seager had a signed commission and could head to sea. This reality, the time it took to get commissions granted, made Edward frown again.

  “Come,” the man continued, “sit with us if you have the time.”

  “Thank you, I will later if I can, but business first.”

  “Of course, sir, I understand. Business first always, unless your pleasures be business also.”

  Edward walked to an enclosed counter projecting into the main room. On it sat candles and candlesticks, cups without handles, and a box filled with long churchwarden pipes.

  “Mrs. Williams,” he asked, as he put a coin into a small box to pay for his coffee, “do I have any mail?”

  “You’ve returned, sir! And alive! Heard all sorts of tales about a duel in Ireland, how you’d lost your foot and were running around on a wooden leg, even that you might be dead, not to mention tales of taunting and then escaping French privateers. We heard this morning of your adventure aboard the Virginia Galley; it’s all anyone is talking about. And it’s still rumored you fought a duel here in Bristol, too, the day before you left!”

  Edward was accustomed to hearing tales of his adventures upon arriving home or abroad. A man who gloried in his own image would be pleased with such foreknowledge and attention, but for Edward it was a curse. Two trials for piracy, along with various misadventures, several of which had been noted in newspapers, printed single sheets, and the occasional broadside, had made him variously famous and infamous. If he fought a public duel in the morning, the deed was on everyone’s lips by afternoon. If he fought a private duel—and most were—and wounded his adversary in the morning, by afternoon he was suspected of being involved. News traveled as fast as man or woman could talk, walk, ride, or sail. And men, he had found, gossiped at least as much as women, although they pretended such speech had a manly purpose and therefore could not be gossip. All of this made his pursuit of a commission much more difficult, for the facts and exaggerated fictions of Edward MacNaughton, privateer and pirate, invariably preceded him, siring far too many preconceptions.

  “Whatever my adventures, I’m not yet dead, nor do I even have a wooden leg,” he replied with a smile.

  “You’ve a limp, though—you’ve been up to some mischief!” she said, her eyes twinkling.

  “Will you never stop flirting with me?”

  “Captain MacNaughton, sir! You seem to think every woman in the world would lie with you, likely because you’ve had more than your fair share of success with women. But some of us have principles,” she said, and laughed.

  “Mrs. Williams, you’d make a better wife than lover, I think. If you and your husband ever tire of each other, let me know—I might let you make an honest man of me.”

  “Oh, Captain, Captain,” she clucked as she shook her head and rummaged through bundles of letters, each small bundle tied with a string. “Here you are, sir, seven letters.”

  “Thank you,” he said as he paid her twelve shillings five pence for the postage. “But mind what I said.”

  “Go away now and read your letters, my young friend! And you call me a flirt!”

  In return Edward handed her the pack of lett
ers Molly had left with him in Ireland, some to be delivered to the royal post office at the Dolphin Inn, others to merchant traders and factors here at the Black Swan, and also gave her a note to have made into a notice for the wall, to wit: Capt. Edw. MacNaughton is Available Once More to Give Lessons to All True Sword-Men.

  “Have you seen Jonathan Graham today?” he asked.

  “Aye, he was here this morning, said he was going to meet someone at the Three Cranes and then must ride to Bath, something about a meeting to arrange. I’m to tell you he’ll meet you at your apartments tomorrow before noon, said it’s important. So you’ll be having coffee, sir? Oh, forgive me, I watched you pay already, of course you’ll have coffee.”

  “Yes, thank you, and a pipe and tobacco—sacerdotes or Oroonoko if you have it, otherwise some good Virginia.”

  Edward took his letters, pipe, and tobacco and sat down in a high-backed bench chair near the coal fire, one of the few chairs in the room. Most men sat on long benches at long tables.

  A serving boy came by with an ember to light his pipe, then a serving woman with a pint coffeepot of rich, dark liquid and a cup to drink it from. Another lad roasted beans at the hearth, tended the copper kettle over the fire, and ground the roast beans into coffee powder which, as this was a reputable establishment, was never reused. As called for, the boy ladled coffee from the kettle into the coffeepots.

  Edward opened his letters. No good news, but no bad either. No word from Spain. There was an offer from some members of the Bristol Merchant Venturers, of assistance at a steep interest rate, larger than he was willing to agree to. Edward snorted. These were the investors who had once tried to throw him in debtors’ prison after he returned from imprisonment in France, having lost ship and cargo to a French privateer. His share of the ship’s cargo had been uninsured—he could not afford the fourteen percent the insurers wanted—and this had left him deeply in debt.