Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  The old two-decker was en flûte, most of her guns removed, so she could carry a full battalion of British troops. Which troops were still aboard her, Lewrie could see, crammed shouder-to-shoulder upon her upper decks; with all her boats alongside but idle.

  “Damned odd,” Lewrie said aloud, once Lieutenant Knolles informed him that their ship was firmly anchored. “I’d think they’d be ready to go shooting their way ashore by now.”

  “Anything to get off that old scow, sir,” Knolles replied with an agreeing grin. Troopers were more sanitary, less crowded than slave ships—but not by much—and a good officer wouldn’t let his men be penned aboard one a second longer than necessary.

  “Cutter’s alongside, sir,” Bosun Will Cony announced, knuckling his brow. “An’ Mister Spendlove’s mustered wi’ yer Cox’n an’ th’ boat crew. Well-kep’ li’l ship-sloop, she is, sir.”

  Lewrie turned his gaze upon Myrmidon.

  “Not half as handsome as our Jester, though, hey, Will— Mister Cony?” He corrected quickly. Cony had begun as his hammockman when he was a midshipman during the American War, then his manservant, Cox’n, and senior hand during a whole host of adventures. And misadventures.

  “Not ’alf, sir, but . . .” The thatch-haired fellow smiled back.

  “But sleepy, damn ’em,” Mister Buchanon, the laconic Sailing Master, observed in his West Country lilt. Sure enough, Myrmidon hadn’t shown much interest in their arrival.

  Lewrie felt an urge to get some of his own back, to make up for how badly he’d been caught wrong-footed the other day by Captain Charlton. He briefly considered having Mr. Midshipman Hyde hoist “Captain Repair On Board.” This Fillebrowne, Lewrie had learned, was one of Hotham’s Departure Promotions, hence about the least senior on Admiralty List, barely dry from being “wetted down.” He’d have to take a preemptory summons from another warship, even one almost a sister to his own, as Holy Writ! Come aboard half shaved and half dressed?

  I say “Leap!” you ask “How high?” on yer way up, Alan thought. Something to be said for a single shred of seniority, when I’m feelin’ spiteful an’ roguish, he mused most happily over the prospects. Or, better yet, oh dear Lord, yes!

  “Bosun,” he barked, giving Mr. Cony his due this time. “Trot out the jolly-boat and a crew for Mr. Spendlove. He’s to go over to the transport and enquire what the delay in landing is. Respectfully, mind. I’ll go aboard Myrmidon myself.”

  “Oh, aye aye, sir!” Cony grinned, knowing his captain’s moods from a long, and entertaining, association. “Side-party! Muster on th’ starb’d gangway fer th’ cap’um!”

  “Welcome aboard, sir,” a harassed-looking young Lieutenant said after he’d taken Myrmidon’s welcoming salute; a most impressive turnout, that, Lewrie noted. “I am Stroud, sir. First Officer.”

  “And your captain, Mister Stroud?” Lewrie posed, with an eyebrow cocked in what he felt was a most Charlton-esque demand.

  “Uhm, sir, uh . . . Captain Fillebrowne is ashore, sir,” Stroud stammered, having trouble sheathing his sword in fumbling nervousness. He was one of those frank, open, pudding-faced young fellows, a typical naval nonentity who had, most likely, clawed his way up the Navy’s career ladder by sheer perseverance, not wit.

  It was barely gone seven bells of the Morning Watch, about half past seven a.m. Jester had had a lucky slant of wind round the tip of the town and into the anchorage, making landfall at “first-sparrow-fart.”

  Lewrie made a production of extracting his watch from a waistcoat pocket, opening it with a flick of his thumb and peering at its face, as if to confirm the time, his eyebrow even higher.

  “Portoferrajo in the business of early -rising, Mister Stroud?” he asked, masking the cruel glee he felt. This was even better than catching this Fillebrowne with his hair mussed or with shaving soap round his ears! The fellow’d slept ashore the previous evening, Alan was dead certain. “Or is your captain?” he asked in a lazy drawl.

  “I sent a boat, sir,” Stroud replied, sounding about as miserable as he looked under Lewrie’s withering, knowing glare. “Soon’z we saw you rounding the point, er, Commander . . . ?”

  “Lewrie, sir. Alan Lewrie. HMS Jester,” he informed him as archly as he might. From long and embarrassing remembrance of being the butt of such doings in the past, his “arch” was worthy of a round of applause from the theatregoers in Drury Lane. “It really is too bad, Mister Stroud. I bear despatches from Admiral Jervis and Captain Thomas Charlton, who is, I am given to believe, standing off-and-on the western shore this very instant, ordering Myrmidon to put out to sea and join him instanter.”

  Stroud, a much-put-upon junior officer, winced as if someone had just trod on his feet. “I sent a boat, sir,” he insisted for a second time. “Captain should be returning . . .”

  Stroud’s face lit up like sunshine after a quick peek shoreward, turning Lewrie’s attention to a gig that was rowing so quick, on a beeline to Myrmidon, that it looked as if all the Hounds of Hell were at her heels. “That’ll be our captain, sir,” Stroud said, and slunk off out of throwing range, should the confrontation come to it; safely behind the fully accoutred Marines of the side-party. Marines who, Lewrie noted, were so bemused by the impending disaster as to go red in the face and sneak cutty-eyed looks at each other. Whether for a martinet’s comeuppance or in commiseration for a good captain who was about to be caught with his breeches down, Lewrie didn’t know.

  “Ahoy, the boat!” Myrmidon’s Bosun shouted the obligatory challenge. “Myrmidon!” the bow-man shouted back with leather-lunged demand, thrusting a hand aloft to show four fingers, no matter how often this ritual would be performed or how familiar her own gig and captain were to them.

  There came the thud of the gig against the hull planking, then a soft curse as the bow-man missed the main-chains with his first try with his boat-hook. The rasp of steps on well-sanded boarding-batten timbers, a faint squeak as the pristine white man-ropes, most neatly served with decorative Turk’s Heads, took a load, and twisted in the entry-port dead-end holes.

  As Commander Fillebrowne’s hat came level with the top batten of the entry-port, bosun’s calls trilled, muskets were presented and the Marines stamped their booted feet in unison. Swords flashed with damascened dawn light on glittering silver fittings, and Myrmidon’s people came to attention, bare-headed, facing starboard.

  The officer who appeared on the gangway, doffing his hat to the crew, was not quite what Alan had expected. That he would be younger, in point of fact even younger than himself, didn’t come as too much of a surprise. Service aboard a flagship, under the fond care of his doting “sea-daddy” and commander of the fleet, was an achingly envied shortcut to the usual years of plodding that most captains-to-be suffered; the sinecure of the very well connected—or immensely talented and promising, Lewrie reminded himself—was allowed to barely an hundredth of the Navy’s junior officers.

  No, the fact that Fillebrowne was so disarmingly not abashed by a career-ender for most others, was in fact all but smirking, was the shocker!

  Fillebrowne was about Lewrie’s height, though leaner, and a touch more elegant, even as hurried and disheveled as he looked. He sported rich, chestnut hair and dark blue eyes. Hair most unseamanlike, that; he’d lopped off the usual plaited long queue at the nape of his collar to wear it blocked over the gold lace, and had shorn it short enough to brush forward over his ears and temples, to lie upon his brow, like the style featured on the busts of Apollo-like Roman youths. It was a modern affectation of the youngbloods, the bucks-ofthe-first-head back home, he’d learned from Charlton. Who’d been just about as leery over this new fad as Lewrie was. Fille-browne was a damned handsome beast, too!

  “Welcome back aboard, sir!” Stroud gushed, interposing between them before Lewrie could even raise a hand. “Sir, this is Commander Lewrie, HMS Jester. With immediate orders, sir.”

  “Commander Lewrie, sir, how do you do? Commander Fillebrowne. But then, you already know that, I
must assume. Your servant, sir. Orders, did you say, Mister Stroud? Then I must also assume it means an immediate departure. Pipe ‘Stations for Getting Under Way,’ Mister Stroud, then report to me aft, once we are ready in all respects.”

  Damn’ smooth, Lewrie thought; a languid tone, a hint of deviltry behind his smile, with his eyes twinkling like the cat that lapped the cream pot! And that bloody “Ox-mumble,” like some-one’d sewed his bloody jaws shut! Lewrie was more than ready to take a great dislike to this idle fop, who sounded as if his papa owned half a shire, with more titles to choose from than a dog had fleas!

  “My abject apologies, Commander Lewrie, for not being aboard to receive you properly,” Fillebrowne smarmed on, “but I had a pressing engagement ashore. Will you take a quick cup of coffee with me, sir? Tea? Whilst you discover to me the nature of these mystifying orders?”

  With a graceful wave of one hand, a faint touch near Lewrie’s arm that invaded his personal space without actually touching —which was an absolute taboo for proper English gentlemen, to actually touch each other unless it was a handshake or they’d known each other for years—Fillebrowne tried to propel Lewrie aft, towards the portal to his great-cabins. As if ordering him to join him aft, as if Lewrie were his junior!

  “There’ll be no time for that, sir,” Lewrie snapped, turning mulish and stubborn, almost ready to plant his feet before allowing himself to be moved. “Your ship has been detached from the Fleet to a new squadron, under Captain Thomas Charlton. He’s on his way here right now, and we’re to meet with him off to the west, soon as—”

  “Old Thomas?” Fillebrowne smiled. “How wonderful!”

  Damme, I should have known, Lewrie chid himself; junior or no, I’ll have to watch this bastard. He’s more lines out than a raveled fothering-patch! Wonder who he doesn’t know?

  “— as soon as you can scrub her rouge off yer ears, Commander Fillebrowne,” Lewrie concluded, putting a telling shot ’twixt his wind and water. “Costly piece, was she?”

  Oh, God, that was a good’un, Lewrie exulted to himself; reproof, and a caution ’bout “costly.” As in, costly to one’s career. His own eyes twinkled, in spite of his best efforts to appear stern.

  “Not tuppence, Commander Lewrie,” Fillebrowne confessed, quite proudly. “I never pay. Not when there’s so many obligin’ sorts for free. Must confess I’m much obliged to you for arriving with new orders. Now I may escape this witch’s cauldron, without a political scalding.”

  “Well connected, was she?” Lewrie enquired, thinking that some aristocratic papa would come looking for Fillebrowne with sword in his hand, and family honour and Mediterranean vendetta in his heart.

  “God, no, sir, nothing like that.” Fillebrowne chuckled. “A vintner’s ‘grass widow.’ Quite tasty morsel, with him off to prune a vine or two on Mount Orello. Nossir, I refer to the lashes Old Jarvy would put on me once he learned the locals don’t want us here.”

  “That’s why our troops are still aboard the transport, then?” Lewrie asked, arching a brow again at how nonchalant Fillebrowne was.

  “Damme, will you look at that!” Fillebrowne snapped, leaning back with his hands on his hips to peer aloft at the commissioning pendant, which had gone fretful and all but slack. “It’s happened just about every bloody morning since we came to anchor here. Winds off the sea die, and these hills block the land breeze ’til two bells of the Forenoon, or so. It appears I can offer you that coffee, after all, sir.” Fillebrowne sighed exasperatedly. “I’ll scrub off her rouge, aye, and her perfume, and have time for a shave, into the bargain. Better yet, have you eat your breakfast yet, sir?”

  “A moment,” Lewrie decided. Oxonian fop or not—a shameless rakehell rogue—Fillebrowne at least sounded like a sailor, not some Whip-Jack sham. He crossed to the entry-port to look down on his boat crew. “Andrews?”

  “Aye, sah,” the onetime Jamaican house servant, who’d traded actual slavery by running away from his masters and accepted informal servitude in the Royal Navy, replied, looking up with a sunny smile.

  “Row back to Jester and instruct the First Lieutenant to stand ready to hoist anchor and set sail as soon as the wind returns. Then come back here and wait for me.”

  “Aye aye, sah. Up, me bucks. Unship ya oahs . . .”

  “B’lieve I will take that coffee, Commander Fillebrowne,” Lewrie agreed, sharing a smile with his host. A smile of discovery, Lewrie realized ruefully.

  The bastard’s me —he all but gasped to himself—if you took off five years and kept me a bachelor! Or not, he further qualified.

  “Bloody awful place, Elba,” Fillebrowne drawled as he grimaced so his cabin servant could shave a spot under his jaws. “The Dons hold Porto Longone, on the sou’east coast. Governor-general and all, since the oared galley days. Matter of fact, the Frogs took it once, but Don Juan of Austria—won Lepanto, you’ll recall?—got it back for Spain. The Medicis held Portoferrajo till the War of Austrian Succession, when the last’un died, and Austria got this port. Easy, there, Gwinn! I’m too young and pretty to die of a cut throat. And what’d the ladies do without me, I ask you?”

  “Pardon, sir.” His manservant chuckled. “I wouldna wish to deprive nobody.”

  “Rest of the island’s supposedly Tuscan, under the Princes of Piombino. But they’ll dance to any strong party’s tune. They’ve a government here, too. Of a sort,” Fillebrowne rattled on. Fearful of a cut throat or marred handsomeness or not, he was cheerfully at a thick slice of toast and jam between razor swipes.

  “Didn’t we almost buy the damn place, back in ’86?” Alan asked between bites of his own and swigs of piping-hot strong coffee—the sort he really liked, and which few Englishmen seemed to brew, if one didn’t clout them alongside their skulls to remind them every so often. “Same as we almost got Minorca and Corsica?”

  “There was talk of it, sir,” Fillebrowne agreed, with a more cautious nod as Gwinn laid on with his razor afresh. “But, again, the French—Louis the Umpteenth . . . the one got guillotined?—scotched it. They’ve always had their eyes on this place. Why, I can’t—”

  “So, in spite of their jealousies, all three parties have banded together to reject a British garrison?” Lewrie surmised.

  “Well, sir . . . as for the Spanish, I doubt anyone’s bothered to tell them yet,” Fillebrowne hooted in derision, flinging off Gwinn’s towel and rubbing his fresh-shaved chin. He came to the sideboard to pour himself more coffee. “Poor old buggers haven’t a clue which day it is, ’less it’s a festival on their church calendar! And nobody is telling the Boncampagni family, either. They’re the Tuscan royalty on the island—whelp out the new Prince of Piombino every generation. Long as the peasants aren’t revolting and the iron mines make money for them, they couldn’t give a tinker’s damn. No, it’s the Austrians. Baron Knesevich, the stubborn old bastard, he’s their governor-general. He’s the one holds the whip-hand round here. And he doesn’t want a British garrison, ’less there’s certain ‘guarantees.’”

  “And we must be so very kind to the Austrians, mustn’t we, Commander Fillebrowne?” Lewrie singsonged a sneer. “Wouldn’t do for them to be upset with us, God forbid.”

  “Might take their toys and go home,” Fillebrowne grunted, digging into his half-completed breakfast dishes with almost a carnal abandon. “And we’d have no one left to play with. Mean t’say, sir, are we actually allies, or not?”

  “There’s Spain, like to come in against us . . . and why they were ever with us, I still can’t fathom,” Lewrie wondered aloud. “This Baron Knesevich could use the help, should a Spanish squadron show up with reinforcements for their garrison. Or the Tuscans send one before we do, to enforce what passes for their neutrality.”

  “Like I said, sir”—Fillebrowne shrugged, with knife and fork at poise position over a chop—“if he’d stood us off another day, I’d have to be the one to sail back to San Fiorenzo and tell Old Jarvy. And you can imagine the filleting I’d get as the result of that.
Senior Navy officer on the scene? Pity you even came to anchor, too, sir. That makes you senior man, temporarily.”

  “When in trouble, when in doubt—” Lewrie began to quote the old lower-deck adage.

  “— hoist your main, and fuck-off out.” Fillebrowne ended it for him with a wicked grin. “Aye, sir, exactly.”

  “Leaving the colonel of that infantry battalion, and the captain of the transport—” Lewrie again began.

  “— holding the most honourable bag, so to speak, Commander Lewrie,” Fillebrowne interrupted again, with a devilish grin and wink.

  “And that, as soon as ‘dammit,’” Lewrie concluded.

  “Now you’ve delivered these orders to me, sir,” Fillebrowne asked as he wiped his lips and chin, “would it be telling, were you to let me know where it is we’re going, under old Thomas?”

  “The Adriatic, sir,” Lewrie informed him. “Trieste, the Ionian Islands. Maybe even Venice.”

  “Venice, my word, sir!” Fillebrowne gasped in sudden delight, his face lighting up a like a child’s at a country fair. “The architecture! The music, sculptures and paintings!”

  “The what?” Lewrie asked, rather surprised by Fillebrowne’s odd first choices for enthusiasm.

  “Tintoretto, Canova, Titian . . . that whole talented Dago lot, sir.”

  “And Casanova, sir?” Lewrie smirked, thinking that he had formed an accurate first impression of his man.

  “Well, that, too, o’ course, Commander Lewrie,” Fille-browne told him with a man-of-the-world shrug. “Once you get the Carnival costume, or her seed-pearled gown off, though, Venetian mutton is sure to be the same as Portsmouth mutton. God only made so many types, didn’t He, sir? Your pardons for saying so, sir, but you’ve gained your name in the Fleet—the ‘Ram-Cat’—for your fondness for the fair sex, not so?”

  “I will own to my share of youthful . . uhm,” Lewrie replied with a worldly shrug of his own, quite at ease with Fillebrowne—and more than a bit pleased to note how far his repute had spread.