Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  “So, we split up into singletons, sir,” Lewrie suggested. “The frigates, at least, and pair Jester and Myrmidon. There’s your three groups.” Much as he disliked the idea of sailing with Fillebrowne!

  “And what did our first spell at sea shew us, sir?” Charlton objected right crankily. “That there are ships enough to intercept already . . . without an increase in numbers. And only so many hands we may spare to man them, before we are forced to return to Trieste. Or run the risk of battle so poorly manned we’re barely able to tend sail, much less fight. Do one or the other, but not both, sir!”

  “No chance there would be any help forthcoming from the Fleet, sir?” Fillebrowne prompted, sounding almost wistful.

  “Not with these newly captured Tuscan ports to watch, atop the others we were already thin-stretched to blockade, sir, no,” Charlton assured him. “There are never enough frigates or sloops, sore as their lack is felt in time of war. Even before this Bonaparte marched, we’d gotten all he could spare. Damme, had we twice the force, though . . . !” He sighed, sounding more than a touch wistful, too. “Surely our Lords Commissioners should know this cruel fact, should have laid down ships other than ‘liners,’ by the score!”

  Uh-oh! Lewrie thought. Things must have come to a pretty pass if he’s blamin’ Admiralty for ’is problems!

  Perhaps someone kind should have made a helpful suggestion, said some comforting words of encouragement to him. Lewrie felt the urge to commiserate with the much-put-upon Captain Charlton.

  Onliest trouble was, there wasn’t anything close to clever that could be said, certainly not by Lewrie, nor by the others, even if they had been of a mind to. It was up to Captain Charlton; he was a senior post-captain in charge of an independent squadron. Officers slaved all their lives—toadied and schemed, some of them—sweated round-shot they’d not put a single foot wrong their entire careers, to get where he was at that moment, with that much power, with that much responsibility. And all the recognition, fame, honour, glory, pride and perquisites which came with it.

  Until one chose wrong, o’ course.

  The man’s spitted, Alan thought, keeping his face bland and junior-like. Poor bastard’s got a spit run up his arse, right through to the apple in his mouth! Spitted and broilin’ over a hellish-toasty bed o’ coals. Turnin’ and bastin’, Lewrie could conjure, all but writhing in agony.

  And may I never rise higher than post-captain of a frigate, he further thought; pay’s decent, and there’s always someone t’tell you where t’go, what t’do. Wouldn’t have his responsibility for—

  “Well, sirs,” Captain Charlton said, after a long and uncomfortable silence, during which his dumbstruck inferiors had sat quiet, and as thankfully mute as Lewrie had. “If Austrian or Hungarian help is not to be forthcoming . . . nor is Venice able—or even of a mind!—to help herself, then I do believe that we must explore what is perhaps the only solution open to us. Uhm, that is to say, a possible solution which I and Major Simpson of the Austrian Navy discussed . . . as onerous as it may sound to you. A temporary, uhm . . .”

  Charlton waved a frustrated hand, as if even he didn’t quite hold with it, and already sharing the blame should it not work out.

  “The only local source of reinforcement which could free us of inshore patrolling and allow us to cover all our responsibilities, it seems, gentlemen . . . are the Balkan pirates.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Now, there’s somethin’ I never thought to hear! Lewrie admitted, all but cringing. He darted a quick glance to Ben Rodgers, who looked as if he had been butted in the belly by an underhanded boxer: mouth open, eyes ready to roll and on the verge of sucking air in a frantic “Eeepp!”

  “But sir—” Lewrie began to protest.

  “Said it’d strike you all as onerous,” Charlton snapped, cutting him off, “but what other choices are there, Commander Lewrie? Pray, do place before us another.”

  “Well, sir, I . . .” Lewrie was flummoxed, trying desperately to come up with something—anything!—other than that.

  “Novel, I must say, sir,” Commander Fillebrowne cooed softly, with the sound of grudging admiration in his voice—as if he was yet unconvinced, but could not deny the logic of it. “May I infer, sir, that Major Simpson will issue them Letters of Marque?”

  “We discussed that, Commander Fillebrowne,” Captain Charlton admitted, still fretting. He was still most uneasy with his decision and writhing in his chair in that former roast-pig agony for another moment as he turned to Fillebrowne. “Maritime law is rather touchy ’pon the subject of privateers, however. Did Austria issue a pirate band Letters of Marque and Reprisal, they would have to declare them Austrian subjects, to begin with. Would have to allow them to work from Trieste, since the home port must be stated. And they would have to sail under the national colours of the nation which issued the documents. And, I rather doubt any Balkan pirates could be stood here, do you, sir?”

  Charlton took a sip of wine and almost had himself a chuckle of sardonic amusement in contemplating the sight of illiterate, seagoing peasants and cutthroats in placid Trieste’s beer cellars.

  “And, given the long-standing hostility ’twixt Austrians and the various minorities down south, I equally doubt the pirates would enjoy the association, either, so . . . no, sir. There will be no letters from the Austrians.”

  “Not from us, then, surely, sir!” Lewrie carped.

  “Nor from us, Commander Lewrie,” Charlton told him. “I haven’t that authority in the first instance, and as I said, this arrangement . . . should it even be possible to make such an alliance . . . would be of a temporary, ad hoc nature. Sub rosa, so to speak. Not the sort of thing one wishes bruited about. A rather loose, informal arrangement.”

  For a man who’d been writhing just a second before, Charlton had gone rather calm, Lewrie thought. Now that his decision to co-opt piratical bands was out in the open, and had not immediately been shouted down, Charlton seemed to have firmed the decision in his mind, and it was not going to be a topic for discussion.

  “War on the ‘cheap,’” Lewrie muttered.

  “You said, sir?” Charlton queried most petulantly.

  “Something one of my old captains said, sir,” Lewrie answered, chin up. “When we were trying to talk Red Indians into alliance with the Crown back in ’82. Came up again in the Far East, with South Sea pirates, ’tween the wars. War on the ‘cheap,’ he called it, sir. And no good ever came from either.”

  “S’pose you’d be preferring the Uscocchi, sir?” Fillebrowne said, breezing on as if there’d been no objections.

  “I would, indeed, Commander Fillebrowne,” Charlton mused, patting his unruly hair back in place. “Splendid fighters on land, since they’re Croat. And deuced good seamen, too, as the Austrian officers at our welcoming supper told us. Catholic, don’t ye know. Fiercely devoted to their religion.”

  “Holy war, sir?” Lewrie posed. “There’s a Pandora’s Box we—”

  “Devoted to a religion, sir, that is at least European!” Captain Charlton shot back, glaring him to silence once more. Or at the least trying to. “And I tell you, Commander Lewrie, I begin to tire of your particular sense of humour, forever drolly mocking and—”

  “I’m not japing, sir. Not this time,” Lewrie assured him with a dead-level and dead-sober gaze. “I’ve seen war on the ‘cheap,’ and it’s a blood-red horror, sir. Fought by . . . well, sirs, one can’t call massacre and ambush fighting, exactly. Rape, pillaging, torching and leveling, and once it’s begun, there’s no calling it back, sir. Blood calls for blood, revenge . . . Corsican vendetta, Scottish feud, and there is no European, civilised control over it once it’s got rolling, sir.”

  “War waged by, as you just admitted, Commander Lewrie, savages! Red Indian tribes in the Americas? South Sea islanders and heathens in tattoos and breechclouts?” Charlton boomed, his blood up. “What the heathens do ’mongst themselves, once armed with European weapons, isn’t our concern, I tell you! What the
y can do with them ’gainst our enemies is. What feuds and grievances the Balkan inhabitants suffer are already centuries old, sir, and will still be brewing long after we’re gone. To co-opt, as you put it, a band of coastal pirates of whatever persuasion—temporarily—will make no difference. Whether they are at each others’ throats with Roman short-sword and spear, or flintlock muskets and bayonets— with bloody cannon!—is moot. As odd as they are, the Slavs of the Balkans are Europeans, Commander Lewrie. Cut off from the finer things of life, admittedly, but still Europeans. They’re not your painted Indians.”

  Are they not, sir? Was on Lewrie’s tongue, but he thought it’d be a bit beyond insubordinate to say it. No one had dealt with Balkan peoples yet, other than the odd brush with them off Brac and Bar, so he wasn’t so sure that Charlton was completely wrong, or that he was so completely right, either. He screwed his face up, almost biting at a cheek in purse-lipped frustration, and kept silent, reddening.

  “Catholic, Russian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, those are European religions of a sort, sir,” Charlton rushed on, as if he’d already wrestled the main points of the logic behind his decision to the ground. “Not as rational, I’ll grant you, none of ’em, as the Church of England, nor Protestantism. Yet each has redeeming features of Christianity at bottom. The Dalmatian peoples do not have the Inquisition, as civilised Spain does, after all! As hand-to-mouth as they live, according to the accounts you brought of the few you encountered, they might even be of a placid, bucolic nature. Rustic, poverty-stricken peasants, toiling ’pon a few miserable, rocky acres or less, like so many Irish tenant crofters. Closer to the soil, closer to God, perhaps? Denied the luxuries of civilisation, may they not be closer to that Frog Rousseau’s depiction of ‘noble savages’? But, sir! Christians! Europeans. Capable of—”

  “Turks’re out, I take it, sir?” Rodgers interrupted, posing such a ludicrous notion that Charlton looked fit to lean over and bite him.

  “Right out, Captain Rodgers!” Charlton barked. “As I was about to say, the Dalmatian peoples are, at bottom, European stock. Capable of civilised doings, of forming firm pacts, of disciplining themselves and their behaviour. Look at the many units in the Austrian or Hungarian armies, for God’s sake! Capable of following orders, of knowing a right from a wrong, and acting upon that knowledge with . . . with! . . . Well, if not from a gentlemanly sense of honour and propriety, then with the innate sense of honour and propriety which centuries of Christian dogma’s drummed into them. It’s not as if we’re allying ourselves, even temporarily or expeditiously, with Gibraltar Apes! Nor with any of those swart kings of Dahomey, who sell their own kin to slave-dealers . . . or satanic beasts, after all!”

  “God forbid, sir.” Fillebrowne all but shivered. “It’s quite like what that Scotsman, Burns, said in one of his poems, sir. That a ‘man’s a man, for a’ that’? No matter his land of birth.”

  “Exactly, Fillebrowne!” Charlton smiled thankfully, relieved that at least one of his officers sounded supportive. “Exactly. No matter where one goes, people are people, when you get right down to it, with the same way of thinking, of deciding right from wrong. I’d take issue with your Burns, or anyone else, though, who professes that a day-labourer from the stews might be the equal of a proper gentleman . . . mean t’say, isn’t that why we fought the Colonies? Are now embroiled in war with France, hey? Birth, class, privilege and education, and a sound religious upbringing by sober, dependable parents, make the difference—for European, Christian folk, at least. Just look at us!”

  Oh, aye, look at us! Lewrie felt like groaning aloud; one a toad-eatin’ swindler-to-be, one a feckless womaniser with a hollow leg, and me . . . an adulterous bastard! Fine lot we are, for examples!

  “Wouldn’t that make the French, or the Rebels, decent folk, then . . . at bottom, sir?” Lewrie couldn’t help asking. “Sensible, peaceful Christians, sprung of European stock?”

  “But deluded, sir, by rabble-rousing, leveling Jacobinist cant,” Charlton growled. “No different from us, I will allow. Just dead-wrong in their thinking. And now intent on spreading their creed of the Common Man being the equal of a king, by force of arms. Using guns to settle the question which would be more suited to an intellectual wrangle than a war. And most hypocritically using their pious cant to justify taking territory they’ve always coveted, by conquest!”

  Charlton was huffing hard, in high dudgeon and colour, his wind wheezing in and out through constricted nostrils like a forge-bellows.

  “Now, sir . . .” he demanded, “do you have any other pertinent comments to make, or care to share with us, Commander Lewrie?”

  “Uhm . . .”

  “So you are settled in your mind that we should approach Balkan pirates and attempt to form a temporary arrangement?” Charlton pressed.

  “Well, not completely settled, sir. After all . . .” Lewrie sighed.

  “Fillebrowne?” Charlton snapped, wheeling on him.

  “It’s a most unusual, and as you said yourself, sir,” Fille-browne trimmed, coughing into his fist, “a most onerous proposition. But one I feel is absolutely necessary. And you would not have proposed it had you not given it much difficult consideration, sir. I am at your total disposal. Game for anything you deem worthy, sir. At your orders.”

  Havin’ it both ways, Lewrie thought furiously; objectin’ so meek and mild, but goin’ along, in spite of yer . . . reservations! Damme, he’s askin’, not orderin’! Now’s the time to scotch it!

  “Captain Rodgers, sir?” Charlton gruffed.

  “Well, sir . . . Lewrie an’ me,” Ben wheedled, “we’ve had dealin’s with pirates, an’ like Lewrie said, sir . . . no good ever came of it. In the Bahamas . . . once we set one pack atop th’ rest? Have t’arm ’em, I’d expect? Give ’em an advantage o’er th’ others, sir? An’ what they’ll do to each other with decent numbers o’ modern arms after, well . . .”

  “The only reason the Balkans haven’t thrown off their Turkish masters, sir, is lack of arms,” Charlton purred. “That, and the utter brutality of Turkish repression. Even were there not a revolt brewing, I’m told the Turks roam their territories and slaughter a village or a region just to keep ’em cowed! Chosen by sheer caprice, sir! To show them what’d happen should they even think of rising up. I’d expect they would turn on their oppressors first, Captain Rodgers, not each other. Serbs, Croats, whoever . . . they’ve seen the Ottoman Empire weaken. Seen the Barbary States, the Mamelukes of Egypt, strike out on their own . . . that Pasha of Scutari as the closest-to-home example. The Greek people in the Morea . . . good God, sir! Founders of Western civilisation, of all we hold dear—politics, poetry, logic, debate. Ground under the heel of brutal, un-Christian conquerors. Do we light a powder-train in the Balkans, Captain Rodgers, perhaps it may be a train which leads to the long-buried powder-keg of rebellion. They may throw off the Turks and drive them out, make of themselves what they will afterwards. And sirs, mark me well,” Charlton cautioned, close to a sly smile of pleasure, “once free of the Turks, might they recall and be thankful to England? Resulting in British control of the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas? Of the profitable Eastern trade, hah?”

  “Well, there’s that, sir . . .” Rodgers admitted, glancing down in a sheepish, confounded way. “Might be a fine thing, that.”

  Lord, Ben! Lewrie all but cried aloud. Peyton Boudreau at Nassau had the right of it, you always were a slender reed. God knows, back then I talked you into enough shit. You always espoused the loudest argument . . . or the last’un you heard! Do be a man, for once, though. Stand up on yer own hind legs, an’ . . . !

  “We could try, sir,” Ben Rodgers allowed. “Feel ’em out down south. Contact several bands. It may be they’d have no part of it, or none’d prove usable. Then, if nothing comes of it . . .” He tailed off with a helpless shrug. And, Lewrie noted, Captain Charlton gave him a glad, rewarding nod of approval.

  “Very well, then,” Charlton sniffed. “Lewrie, we know what you think of this.”r />
  Not ’til I’ve had a real rant, you don’t, Lewrie left unspoken. A real rant, though . . . say what I really wish to say, and I’d be clapped in irons.

  He looked round, to Commander Fillebrowne, who wore a smug look on his face, as if he’d herded Lewrie to the edge of a cliff and would most happily goad him to leap, and bedamned. To Rodgers, who was most pointedly sipping wine and staring off into the nether-regions, unable to meet his gaze. Then to Charlton, who was . . . waiting. Smirking?

  “I don’t like pirates much, sir,” Lewrie began to respond, slowly and cautiously. “Never have. They don’t play by civilised rules, sir, even the ‘well-schooled’ ones. The Rackhams, Bonnets, Teaches and Morgans . . . English gentlemen all, sir, yet . . .” He shrugged.

  Charlton’s firm expression faltered, whether to Lewrie’s jibe or to an innate loathing for his own plan, some deep-down caution.

  No, he ain’t smirkin’, Lewrie decided; at bottom, he knows what a horror we might start, and no way t’end it. Bothers him as much as me. No wonder he didn’t just scribble us some orders and have done. He’s a decent man, caught on the prongs of a shitten cleft stick. God help him . . . us!

  “Needs must, I s’pose, though, sir,” Lewrie grunted, deep from his gut, and tossed off another shrug to express reluctant acceptance. “Do you order it so, then we’ll do the best we’re able.”

  “I never considered anything less from you, Commander Lewrie,” Charlton softly replied, relenting from his grim glower, and tossing him a bone of approbation. Though there was still a hesitancy to him, as if he’d relish being argued out of his decision. It was rare, but not completely unheard-of, for a quorum of captains to weight their options and come to a mutually agreed decision, when very far from higher authorities. He could have been as dictatorial, as domineering and irrationally unreasonable as the last post-captain who had had command over Lewrie—Howard Braxton of the ill-starred Cockerel frigate. For not being such a toplofty tyrant, Lewrie felt at least a slight bit of gratitude towards Charlton.