A Jester’s Fortune l-8

by Dewey Lambdin

  Manfully fighting the almost irresistible urge to moan, curse or scream aloud, he looked down at the bundle he held once more. There was a small sheaf of notes in a spidery hand, a daily accounting list in the rough, to be transferred to a proper account book later. A ledger that was most-like still aboard the brig, or in her Purser's or First Mate's tender care. Another bloody 3,247 or so livres of working capital, less I what they'd paid some Marseilles chandlers, less a pilot's fees…!

  And what's so bloody wrong with tears, I ask you! Lewrie thought, I stone-bleak at what he'd lost; by God, I've been robbed! Diddled! That's why Mlavic wished to have her, to winkle us off so quick! He suspected I… and got me so "rowed" I'd not think to…!

  "Not a total loss, sir," Spendlove told him as the bow-man took a first stab at the starboard main-chains with his boat-hook. His heel thumped on a bag that lay under his thwart. The bag rustled nicely… could he also conjure a faint chinking sound, a muted metal jingling?

  "Aye, sah, foun' ya some cawfee beans, nigh on fo' poun'," his coxswain assured him between orders to the crew to toss their oars and such. "Frenchies allus have de bes' when it come t'cawfee."

  "Ah. Coffee. I see," Lewrie replied, summoning up some gratitude; or something that sounded approximate. "Well, thankee, Andrews. Mister Spendlove. Thankee right kindly."

  "Some odds and ends, too, sir," Spendlove preened, proud of his scrounging abilities. "Goose quills, right-hand bent. Fresh ink, and some fine vellum paper…"

  "Thoughtful of you both," Lewrie expounded as he stood to make his way to the gunn'l for a well-timed leap to the damp, weed-green and slick bottom steps of the boarding battens. "I'm grateful for your concern."

  The bag did hold coffee beans, and odds and ends; sadly, it held no coins. Lewrie set the ink-bottle and new quills on his desktop, put fifty-odd sheets of vellum in a drawer.

  "Do you stow these away in the pantry, Aspinall," he directed.

  "Aye, sir. Oh, toppin', sir! Fresh beans. Like a cup, sir? I could have some ground an' brewed in ten minute.'

  "Not at the moment, Aspinall, thankee," Lewrie sighed. "Perhaps later. No relish for it now."

  "Right, then, sir," the lad chirped, going forrud and humming to himself in right good cheer, Toulon prancing tail-high with him.

  Goddammit! Lewrie cringed to see anyone happy about anything at that instant! He spread the various documents across the desk and picked through them slowly, catching only a faint impression of import here and there, for his mind was awhirl with other things. Revenge, to be factual! '

  Fool me once, shame on you, he glowered; right then, you fooled me, Mlavic. Not the half-wit you look, are you? Fool me twice, well, I doubt it. Make the bugger pay, I will! Wipe that crafty peasant sneer off his brutish phyz… swear t'God I will, 'fore we're done!

  Something at last leapt out at him, in his distracted state. A fine sheet of vellum in its own right, folded over into an envelope and still sticky with broken wax seals, which clung to the rest.

  There was the crash of a musket-butt without the gun-deck doors, the sound of idle boots being stamped together. "First off cer, SAH!" his Marine sentry bellowed.

  "Enter."

  "Excuse me, sir, but… on which course should I get the ship under way?" Lieutenant Knolles enquired, looking a touch anxious.

  "Ah," Lewrie said, feeling a new flush of anger at himself then. "Sorry, Mister Knolles, for being remiss. I was too rapt in these documents we took from the prize. Looking for an answer to that very question. Our pirates? Where away?"

  "Worn off the wind, sir, and steering Nor'east," Knolles said.

  "And we're fetched to on larboard tack, hmm… get steerageway to the Sou'west, then return to our original course, Sou'east or so, on starboard tack. Close-hauled, as before."

  "Aye aye, sir," Knolles replied chearly, before turning to go.

  Damme, another happy sod! Lewrie groaned, sitting down. Well, ain't ignorance just bliss. Ignorance of how much we let slip through our ignorant little fingers! And thank God for small favours we've seen the last of Mlavic and his cutthroats this voyage! Can't wait t'rush home to his master, Petracic, and show off his pretty new toys!

  "God, I absolutely despise this!" he whispered to the empty cabins. "Mlavic, Petracic, the bloody need of 'em…!"

  He hunched forward over the desk, bear-shouldered and miserable. He unfolded the vellum letter further, peeling another sheet away from [the remnants of a wax patch. Labouriously, for his French wasn't that good, either, he made out that he had the second page of a two-page set of instructions from the brig's former ship s-husbands and owners, for her now-former master. Cautions, warnings, a pithy bit here and there, though framed in a tortuous sea-lawyerese, on how her captain had best proceed in the service of both profit and patrie.

  "… 'be advised that a British squadron is now known to be found in the Adriatic,' " he murmured half aloud. "And, it took you that long t'puzzle that out? No idea of numbers… no idea of operating areas, so… 'sellers' agents have opened marts in those ports'… damme, what the hell does that mean… susdit? Susdit? Never bloody heard of it." He suddenly felt the lack of a French dictionary.

  He rose from his chair and went forward, out to the gun-deck and up the windward ladder to the quarterdeck.

  "Cap'um on deck!" Midshipman Spendlove warned the watch.

  "Mister Spendlove, how's your Frog?" he demanded.

  The lad shrugged. "Tolerable, sir, I s'pose."

  "Susdit. What's it mean?" Lewrie pressed, sounding urgent.

  "Susdit?" Spendlove puzzled. "Haven't a clue, sir. Sorry."

  "Mister Knolles, do you know what susdit means in French?" Alan glowered, pacing over to the First Officer.

  "I, ah… hmmm, sir. Can't recall running afoul of that word, before, Captain." Knolles frowned in sorrow. And in wonder of why his captain was so all-fired impatient for the meaning of a French word. Or why Commander Lewrie had come up without his hat, though he still wore waistcoat, neck-stock, coat and sword.

  "Excuse me, Captain." The Surgeon Mr. Howse coughed, midstroll with his ever-present assistant, Mr. LeGoff. "Just taking the air, do you see."

  "Yes, Mister Howse!" Lewrie seethed. If there was one thing he didn't need at the moment, it was Howse and his eternal, mournful carping noises! He'd rather have piles, any day!

  "Susdit, did ye say, sir?" Howse asked with a deep, bovine lowing, all but rocking on the balls of his feet, hands behind his back in superiority. "Why, I do believe susdit means 'the aforementioned,' or 'the aforesaid.' Ain't that right, Mister LeGoff?"

  "B'lieve so, sir. 'Aforesaid,' " that gingery terrier agreed.

  "Ah!" Lewrie grimaced suddenly. "Thankee. Shit!"

  And dashed below to his cabins again, leaving them all to cock their heads and wonder what exactly had caused that!

  "First bloody page, first bloody page," Lewrie fumed, shuffling papers in a fury, "where it bloody was 'aforesaid.' Hah!"

  To shorten the voyages, and avoid the greater costs in crew pay and rations (he slowly but breathlessly read) and to avoid the perils of capture by hostile warships, to reduce the turnaround time between deliveries of naval stores and compass-timber vital to the Navy or the private builders' yards, agents for the Directory were urging the suppliers formerly of Venice and other ports far to the north of the Adriatic to transship, in their own, perfectly neutral, bottoms, to…!

  "Hah!" Lewrie cried aloud again, in triumph this time.

  Into Venetian Durazzo, into Venetian Cattaro; Volona, in Venetian-held Albania, and to Corfu Town, and other ports in the Ionians!

  He sat down-plumped down!-into his chair, feeling giddy with sudden knowledge. They'd taken the brig so suddenly, her people hadn't had time to ditch her papers overside. She hadn't been merely halfway through her voyage, she'd nearly been at the end of it! He'd feared her turning Easterly and running into Durazzo as a refuge. A refuge, indeed, for that was probably where she was headed all along.

  This rev
ealing letter was recent, dated not two weeks earlier, hand-delivered aboard the morning the brig had sailed, most-like. And left lying out, so the brig's master could refer to it.

  Venice! he thought scornfully; up to her ears in trafficking to the very people who'd eat her alive, sooner or later. Fat, faithless rabbits, too used to Spending and Getting, getting by on her ancient laurels and martial fame, but prostituting herself to the French just as bad as the Genoese had the year before. Italians! he groaned.

  A word in the right ear, though… didn't the Venetians value their freedom, so they could make this much money from trade, when you got right down to it? Were they to put this to the Doge or the Secret Council of Three, who ran the Doge, couldn't they quietly strangle one ' or two of the largest players, and frighten off the rest? Then, with most of the Adriatic oak and naval stores trade quashed, there'd be no need for reinforcements-not from pirates, certainly!

  Lionheart, and Captain Charlton, had they not come foul of some French warships down near the mouth of the Straits of Otranto, might be yet on-station-that is, if she hadn't taken so many prizes she'd been forced to sail for Trieste, for want of hands to sail or fight her.

  "No, didn't exactly sweep the seas, last time, did she?" Lewrie muttered to himself with a half-humourous grunt. He thought it likely she was still hunting her patrol area. He decided to sail south, speak to Charlton and show him this evidence of Venetian complicity.

  He'd have to move the patrols farther south to cover all the bolt-holes and entrepots for smuggled naval stores and timber, once he'd seen proof-positive that the French and Batavians, along with their avaricious neutral helpers, the Danes and Swedes, were leery of sailing as far north as Venice or Pola any longer.

  And, that far to the Suth'rd, Ratko Petracic and Dragan Mlavic were of little use, far below their usual haunts. Were the Venetians employing their own ships for the trade, there would be little the pirates could do, against a "neutral" nation's merchantmen.

  Little good the Royal Navy could do, either, Alan sourly realised, to stem the flow of goods down to Durazzo, Volona, Cattaro, and the isles. Those neutral bottoms of the Serene Republic of Venice were just as off limits to them, and they couldn't touch them without creating an international incident.

  Lewrie rose from his desk and prowled his wine-cabinet for drink, to see what he had left after ten days of Rodgers and Kolodzcy aboard. It wasn't much, but he thought he'd earned a pale glass of spiced Austrian geunirxtraminer. Needed one, rather, after the way he'd been taken by

  Mlavic. God, that irked!

  "Fool me once, shame on you," Lewrie whispered after a bracing sip. "But 111 have you, ya smelly beast… you and your master, too. Never wanted a thing t'do with ya in the first place, and now 111 nip this sordid, shitten business in the bud. Get my guinea back, too!

  CHAPTER 8

  Oh, this is just bloody perverse! Lewrie thought, after days of searching for HMS Lionheart. It wasn't a large area he had to scour-from the sleepy port of Brindisi on the muddy Italian coast, then down the coast to Cape di Otranto and Cape Santa Maria di Leuca, about ninety miles. With a favourable slant of wind, it was only an eighty-mile sail to the Sou'east, to Corfu, to peek in the harbour. Another eighty miles back up the Albanian coast to Volona. Yet, not only was there no sign of her, there were hardly any other sails to be seen, either! A few merchantmen, which he stopped, boarded and inspected, yes; but they were all innocent local traders. And their masters, whatever their nationality, had nothing but puzzled shrugs for answers when he'd questioned them about sighting a British frigate.

  "How is it," Lewrie griped to his First Officer and his midshipmen as he dined them in one evening, "that when you're anxious to join a friend, one can't find him? And, paradoxically, when you try to shun a pest, you practically trip over him everywhere one goes?"

  "Dragan Mlavic, sir?" Knolles grimaced.

  "Indeed, Mister Knolles," Lewrie allowed with a matching scowl.

  "Father always said, sir," Spendlove piped up from his chair at the end of the table, where he filled the role of Mr. Vice, "that a thing that's lost can't be found by searching."

  "Oh, he does, does he?" Lewrie smiled. "So, what does Mister Spendlove do, younger Spendlove?"

  "Sends his mother to hunt it up, I'd expect, sir." Midshipman Hyde sniggered.

  "Well, sometimes." Clarence Spendlove smiled and shrugged. "I have seen him just sit down and ponder, though, sir. Where he'd seen a thing last. Like walking into a room and forgetting what one went in there to get, sir? One has to retrace one's steps."

  "Back to Trieste and Venice?" Knolles scoffed, signalling for a top-up of wine from Aspinall. Lewrie had at least put in at Corfu, and found a British merchantman or two come for the currant crop, bearing a cargo of wines from London or Lisbon, more suited to the palates of the many expatriate Englishmen who farmed or factored there.

  "That'd be… pleasant, sir," Hyde simpered, sharing a lascivious look with Spendlove, "to stretch one's legs ashore."

  "Ah, but which leg, sir?" Spendlove queried impishly. "Ahem!" Lewrie cautioned with a cough into his fist, riveting their attention. "I'm told a captain is responsible for the education of his midshipmen. Part of that is how to behave at-table. No talk of religion, politics… women!… or business is allowed."

  "Least 'til the port and nuts, sir." Lieutenant Knolles chuckled. "After the ladies have retired to the drawing room."

  "Damme, do I set a poor example?" Lewrie pretended to recoil in shock. "Lowered proper Navy standards, and corrupted you all?"

  Don't answer that! he thought with a cringe. There's more'n a grain o' truth in that. And why not, when I'm such a sterlin' example to go by! Damme, ashore I'd talk o' nothin' else!

  He'd made a jape. They responded like dutiful juniors should; they showed amusement. Lamely, of course, the jest hadn't been that good.

  "Tsk-tsk, Mister Spendlove," he further pretended to chide. "We can't have you discussing lewd women in front of your mother once you return home!"

  "Only did that with my brother, sir," Spendlove shyly confessed.

  "Ah!" Lewrie chuckled easily.

  How much they'd grown, he thought; Spendlove was now all but full-grown, not the callow stripling from HMS Cockerel. He was eighteen now, and Hyde, whom he'd gotten at Portsmouth, a year older. A pair of young men, no longer boys, more than halfway to their own commissions as Sea Officers.

  "Well, since Mister Spendlove has already broken the ban, so to speak, perhaps we should discuss our… business… as well," he went on, after a forkful of a rather zesty mutton ragout over pasta, and an accompanying sip of red. "We may have to return to Trieste or Venice, after all. Either port, where some may make beasts of themselves, hmm? We've not seen hide nor hair of Lionheart, nor of any French men-o'-war which might have driven her off-station. Now, let's see what we could construe from this evidence. Mister Hyde?"

  "Uhm…" Hyde gulped, trying to swallow a hunk of bread he had almost chewed. "That she's taken three or four prizes, sir. And was forced to sail off, unable to take, or man, any more?"

  "Aye, that's possible," Lewrie granted. "But now she's sailed off… where's our smugglers, where's our Frogs? Shouldn't they be out by now? 'When the cat's away, the mice will play,' right? Sorry, puss," he said to his cat, who was lurking near his chair for dropped morsels.

  "Sir," Spendlove contributed, cautiously sipping wine before he spoke, to do so with an unobstructed palate. "Perhaps they're holed up in those nearby Venetian ports, waiting for their timber. And they're not aware Lionheart has left yet, sir?"

  "Aye, again, sir," Lewrie agreed amiably. "Though I still can't understand them totally abandoning the trade. There's still an urgent need for timber, for the French fleet at Toulon. No, I wasn't speaking to you, greedy-guts. Oh, here, then." He sighed, awarding Toulon some gravy-laden bits of mutton. To keep him quiet and off the table.

  "Perhaps mistakenly, sir," Lieutenant Knolles stuck in, his forehead furrowed in thought. "D
o the Frogs have this new arrangement, ordered by their Ministry of Marine, d'ye see… to use the Venetian harbours. Lionheart arrived just as they were going to earth, and found nothing to seize. After two weeks or so of empty horizons, Captain Charlton might have abandoned the area and gone back north, expecting to discover better pickings in mid-sea. And to speak to Commander Fillebrowne about what Myrmidon might have turned up in her area… Might have been just bad timing on her part, sir."

  "Well, sir…" Hyde wondered aloud, getting into the spirit of things; with an empty maw, this time. "Captain Charlton might wish to meet up with us and Captain Rodgers in Pylades. See how our, uhm… our piratical endeavour was working out, too."

  "Meet the other players, so to speak, sir. Before the cards are dealt?" Spendlove added, forever trying to trump Hyde.

  "All very possible, sirs." Lewrie smiled briefly. "Damme, you know, I rather like this, gentlemen. Discussing shop talk over food. See how clear we think, like a well-stoked hearth? Brighter than ever? And, in private, where one may make a silly comment, with no recriminations. Less a cabin servant or steward tells tales out of school, that is… Aspinall?" Alan teased.

  "Oh, mum's th' word, sir." Aspinall grinned, not a whit abashed. "Top-up, Captain? Gentlemen?"

  "So, our prey is lurking in Venetian ports," Lewrie summarised, once their glasses had been recharged, "waiting for neutrals to come down and load 'em full."

  "Odd, though, sir," Lieutenant Knolles objected softly, holding up his glass to the lanthorn light to admire the ruby glow, or inspect it for lees. "All the Balkans are thick with timber. I'd imagine that, were the French to throw enough gold about, they could get all they wished closer than Venetian-shipped Istrian or Croatian oak. Get the locals to go wood-cutting round Volona, Durazzo and such, and use Montene-gran or Albanian trees."

  "Uhm, sir…" Spendlove threw out, most warily in contradiction. "Would that not be green wood? Unseasoned?"