A King's Commander

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Nozzing grande, mon chou, ” she reassured him, though, half lost in fantasies of domestic perfection. “I non need ze palace, hein? Une leetle appartement, wiz balcony. We go to San Fiorenzo? Bon. So ver’ steep ze hills, mais . . . non ze rent, Alain! Balcony wiz view of ocean. Zo I watch fo’ you’ navire . . . you’ ship. Une domestique, on’y, ’oo eez live zere wiz me . . . une ’oo come for day, to cook an’ clean. Corsica . . . ees ver’ poor. Une peu monnaie go ze long way, zere, you will see, I promesse. An’ zo many émigrés royalistes go zere. You remember, w’en we leave Toulon, zey tak’ away zere good s’ings? ’Ave non monnaie, now. Zey will be sell zose preety s’ings, bon marché. Zat ees ze ‘cheap’!”

  Alan turned to peer at her. For such a sweet, seemingly guileless young fairy girl, Phoebe had suddenly sounded as calculating and pinch-penny, as grasping as a Haymarket horse trader!

  “Be grow up poor as moi, Alain, mon chou.” She chuckled, in answer to his puzzled expression, with a wry tip of her glass in salute to her past. “You fin’ ’ow to shop for bargain!”

  The thought did cross his mind (it must be said), even as he was placing a supportive and comforting arm about her shoulders, that there was still time to cry off their cozy arrangement. He could give her fifty pounds in coin—the Devil with his note-of-hand! Fifty pounds would be more than enough to support her for months, if Corsican living was as cheap as she described it. Certainly, it would be cheaper than establishing an entire new household, with all the requisite furnishings.

  Damme, he thought wryly, I know sailors’re said to have a wife in every port. But nobody said a bloody thing ’bout whole houses!

  “Trus’ moi, Alain,” she whispered, her soft breath close, and promising, near his ear. “As I trus’ you, wiz my ’hole ’eart.”

  Well, that did it!

  I do have a fair lot o’ prize money, he relented, anew. Maybe it won’t be as cheap as it was in Toulon, or aboard Radical after the evacuation. God, that didn’t cost tuppence, really. And the Navy’d paid most of it, didn’t they?

  They looked into each other’s eyes, fond smiles threatening to break out on each other’s lips. Eyes crinkling in remembered delights.

  That, too, did it!

  Right, so she’d had a hard life, he told himself. She was so lost and alone, in a harsh world. Should he spurn her, she’d find a new patron, of course . . . that was the lot of penniless but beautiful young girls, with no family connections, or power to resist. That was the way of the world! If needs must, Phoebe might return to being a courtesan for a dozen, a hundred other men, to make her way. What was it his brother-in-law Burgess Chiswick had said, when they were besieged at Yorktown? A North Carolina folk colloquialism? “Hard times’d make a rat eat red onions!”

  She’d hate doing so, of course. Phoebe had abandoned that life to take up with poor Lieutenant Scott, as her only lover—she his only—not because Barnaby had been any sort of decent toward her, really, or kept her in any sort of style, but because she didn’t want to tumble any farther down that maelstrom spiral to ruin and oblivion that was the lot of most whores, no matter how pretty or clever.

  Aye, Phoebe might be a little “Captain Sharp” when it came to finding a bargain, of wheedling for any edge that might guarantee her another week of safety and security. In that, she might be as grasping as the boldest, most raddled dockside “mutton,” as cunning and sly, and rapacious, as a starving fox by the hen-yard fence. But Phoebe hadn’t yet grown talons and teeth. Or armored herself against exploitable emotions. She was still vulnerable, and somewhat open.

  For the sham, the semblance of true love and affection, Phoebe would offer him . . . dammit, any man who was halfway kind to her! . . . all that she possessed. So she’d never have to surrender herself to servitude in some filthy knocking-shop. So she could think of herself as something more than an easily expendable commodity.

  So she could cling to that longed-for, sometime in the misty future, that “Happy Isles of the West” fantasy of hers that she could rise. That she could be somebody fine before she lost her beauty and it was too late to escape her lot, or her poverty-stricken childhood.

  Not much of a sham at all, really, Alan told himself as he gave her a gentle kiss on her forehead. God help me, I really am fond of her! Can’t ever offer her what she most like wishes of me, but . . . even if I’m a halfway port on her passage, the voyage’ll be great fun. She’s fond enough of me, certainly. And trusting. Rather simple and trusting, when you come right down to it. God help me, again . . . but I’ll not be the one to turn my back on her. I’ll not throw her back into the sordid stew she’s worked so hard to flee!

  “I do trust you, Phoebe,” he told her at last. And giving her a supportive hug. “I won’t let you down. Do my best by you, hmm?”

  “You’ bes’ eez formidable, mon amour.” She chuckled, shuddering a little with emotion, with perhaps a girlish, childish-pleased trill to her insides. And, perhaps, with some measure of relief, he imagined. “I am you’s, alone. Oh, Alain, you mak’ me so ’appy!”

  Right then he sighed, lost in their mutual embrace; if she makes a fool of me, after all, well . . . I went into it with mine eyes wide open. And, ’least . . . I’m a well-off fool. She means half what she says, ’bout bein’ a careful buyer . . . ’bout bein’ faithful to me, well. ’Tis a folly I can almost afford!

  C H A P T E R 3

  So you never actually saw nor spoke Admiral Montagu’s ships, Lewrie?” Admiral Lord Hood inquired, rather offhandedly, to Alan’s lights.

  “No, milord,” he replied. “A return voyage from Finisterre might have taken him inshore of me, if he’d planned to peek in at any of the French Biscay harbors, or pass close to Ushant.”

  “Damn’ good work, though, on old ‘Black Dick’s’ part.” Hood smiled thinly for a moment. “At least, his Villaret-Joyeuse wished an action. Unlike my opponent, Martin. Well . . . fewer French liners to return to Brest, the fewer they have to send to reinforce against us.”

  Hood seemed preoccupied. A tall sheaf of reports, orders, and fair copies of dispatches mounded upon his desk, and a flag lieutenant and a brace of midshipmen and clerks trundled back and forth with more. And, he’d aged, too. Like Admiral Howe, he appeared worn down by care, far more than he’d looked when Lewrie had last spoken to him back in March. And aren’t he and Howe both almost seventy?

  “And fewer officers and seamen who know what they’re about, milord,” Lewrie offered with a smile. Hood seemed, though, as if he had not heard the comment, so Lewrie blundered on. “Cut the heads off all their senior officers, or turned them into émigrés. Made captains out of bosun’s mates. Command by committee, I’ve heard tell, bad as any Yankee Doodle privateersman during the . . .”

  “Hmm? Aye,” Hood said with a nod, though handing his clerk a freshly signed document for sanding, folding, and delivering: Sounding as if his comment had been directed at the clerk, not Lewrie.

  How many times I know better than to rattle on, and yet. . . . !, he chided himself, trying to find a graceful exit line.

  “What do you draw, Lewrie?” Hood asked, though already intent upon a new document, which intent furrowed his brows dev’lish gloomy.

  “Uhm . . . two fathom, milord.”

  “Ah.” Hood nodded distantly. “Good. That’ll be useful. Well.”

  “Should that be all you require of me, milord, I’ll not take a moment more of your time,” Lewrie offered his major patron. Trying most earnestly to not offend his commander-in-chief, who could make, or break, any officer’s career in an eye-blink. And, Hood had done so before, sometimes over what others might consider to be mere trifles!

  “Orders for Jester will be forthcoming, Lewrie,” Hood told him, with a brief but dismissive grin. “Make good any lacks . . . firewood and water, an’ such . . .” Then Hood turned dour, and away.

  “Aye, milord. Thankee for receiving me, sir,” Lewrie replied, backing toward the door in the day-cabin partitions.

  N
ever know what that man’s thinking, he griped, once he was out in the clear; never know whom you’re dealing with, one day to the next! S’pose I got off fortunate, at that. And got at least one welcoming glass o’ claret off him! It didn’t matter whether Admiral Lord Hood liked you or not; he could be uncommon gracious in the forenoon, then tear a strip off your arse, for all the world to hear, by the First Dog Watch!

  Well, Lewrie had already made arrangements for supplies, with the captain of the fleet, and Mister Giles was off to old HMS Inflexible, the fleet storeship with a working party, to secure fresh livestock and salt rations, to top off what little they had already consumed on-passage. The ship was in good hands, safely anchored in four fathoms of water, “as snug as a bug in a rug,” surrounded by larger frigates and 3rd-Rate line-of-battle ships.

  Phoebe had the right of it, he noted—San Fiorenzo was steep-hilled, a wide and sheltered bay on Corsica’s northwestern tip just west of, and below, now-taken Bastia; and about twenty or so miles east of now-besieged Calvi. San Fiorenzo itself wasn’t much of a town, a small and drowsy place before the arrival of the fleet, and the Army, who were now busy farther west. Dusty, rocky, and sere, the color of old canvas, it was; roadways, buildings, soil, and hillsides, and many sheltering walls separating tiny farm fields or olive groves, grazings or residences all of a rocky pale-tan piece, but for the dull-red tile rooves, in ancient Roman fashion. What greenery there was consisted of hardy wind-sculpted trees, gorse-like pines, as matted and tangled as dogwoods or coastal capeland oaklets, as tightly kinked as the hair on a terrier’s back, and that mostly a muted, well-dusted dark olive, even in the verdant month of June. Phoebe had said the forests were called the “maquis,” where only the toughest trees could survive.

  And San Fiorenzo was hot, even for mid-June. Sitting in the stern sheets of his gig, being rowed back to Jester from the flagship, HMS Victory, where one might expect motion to create a cooling breeze, it was beyond balmy warmth. Quite frankly, it was as hot as the hinges of hell! And as stifling and humid as Calcutta on a bad day before the monsoons.

  Orders, he mused; upon Admiral Hood’s promise, and his inquiry as to Jester’ s draught. Whenever senior officers had asked that before, it had meant service very close inshore, feeling his way through unfamiliar waters by lead-line and guess. And soon, he thought. If Admiral Goodall’s blockade of the French fleet in Golfe Jouan was to continue, he’d need scouting vessels to warn of reinforcement or any attempt at resupply by sea. Roads ashore, anywhere in the Mediterranean were so horrid, Hood had intimated, that coasting merchantmen were the fastest and surest conveyors of civilian, or military, commerce. The local road to Calvi was little better than a goat track that wound a serpent’s dance over every hillock and ridge. Coalition troops were better supplied from the sea, as well.

  There was the blockade of Calvi, too; to sink, take, or burn any local vessels, no matter how small or unimportant, which could deliver even a single cask of water to the Frogs.

  Shore service? He rather doubted it, and made an audible sniff of dismissal. Hood already had idled many line-of-battle ships, crews of seamen and Marines sent ashore to help the Army, to man-haul, then man, the heavy lower-deck guns to serve as siege artillery. To strip Jester of even two-dozen hands would leave her useless, swinging around her anchor, just as idly ineffective as any of those decimated liners.

  And, after his most recent bitter spell of shore duty at Toulon, Lewrie would gladly have run on his elbows to Calvi and back, with his thumbs up his arse, before being forced to spend a single day playing at soldiers!

  Out to sea, within the week, he suspected; and with more than a little joy in the doing, too. Perhaps a long, independent cruise, far removed from pettifogging admirals, commodores, and fleet captains, or any of their pestiferous interferences.

  Far removed from Phoebe, too; for a time, at any rate. Sweet though she was, as heady and passionate though their rencontre had been . . . he was aflutter to be out and doing. And, be far removed from whatever horrendous expenses he was certain his heady, passionate, and sweet relationship was going to end up costing him!

  Cost him, perhaps, that very afternoon, he gloomed to himself. Orders surely couldn’t come that quickly, but . . . from what little he had seen of San Fiorenzo from shipboard, and as bustling as the Army traffic and many uniforms in the streets, the prospects of discovering suitable lodgings looked pretty damn’ dismal. He’d have to get Phoebe settled that very day. There might not be time afterward.

  And get her off my ship, instanter, he concluded, frowning just a trifle more, as he looked past Andrews’s shoulder to gaze upon Jester at her anchorage. Gaze almost jealously.

  Swore I’d never carry a wench aboard—to myself, too!—and just look what I’ve gone and done. Caroline to the Bahamas and back, well . . . that was proper doin’s, takin’ the wife along. But Caroline went ashore, and stayed there, when it came time to set out on King’s business! Should have stuck her ’board a packet, paid her passage to Corsica, ’stead of . . . well. What’s done’s done.

  ’Sides, Toulon can’t abide that Joliette of hers, and . . .

  And, dammit, they’re my great-cabins! And I want ’em back!

  C H A P T E R 4

  Happily, the first place was the perfect place; a walled house halfway up a straggling cobbled street from the waterfront. From the outside, it had seemed a blank-faced enigma, a warehouse, perhaps, on a corner, about five streets up and back. Only the propped-out wood shutters of the upper-floor windows revealed it to be a residence. A heavy iron-bound wooden gate in the outer wall, which towered almost nine feet above the street, was the only break in the lower level’s fortresslike exterior on the cross street. As was a narrower iron-strapped doorway that faced the uphill street the only entrance upon that side; a doorway, they discovered later, which was the kitchen and servants’ entrance.

  Upon entering the larger gateway, though, they’d been delighted to find a miniature Eden. There was a small courtyard, sheltered from the harsh sunlight by an expansive wood-slat pergola, adrip with ivies or climbing, flowering vines. The courtyard was ringed with planters full of flowering bushes; round, amphoraelike planters, tropical and adobe-colored, or pale stone rectangular box planters. There was the luxury of a fountain and pool in the middle—tiny but refreshing—as a cherubic winged Pan poured an endless plashing trickle of water from a tipped jar. There were patches of carefully tended grass, verdantly green and tender, compared to the harshness outside. Though most of the courtyard was sandy soil over which square paving stones had been laid.

  There was a door off the courtyard to the kitchens, a covered walkway wide enough to shelter a small table and two chairs whenever the residents felt like breakfasting en famille, and a larger round stone table with curved stone benches near the street-side wall, to seat a larger party.

  Off the courtyard on the house side, there was a pair of tall glazed windows, and shutter panels, a wide doorway that led into the parlor. There was a proper dining room behind that, just off that kitchen. Pantry, stillroom, butler’s closets, and a “jakes” completed the downstairs. A rather larger than necessary “necessary,” he noted with amusement which also held the splendor of a large copper hip bath. Perhaps that “necessary closet” had once been a first-floor bedchamber, he thought; though one done all of stone, which he deemed rather an odd choice. And with a trough set into the floor for outflow of effluents and used bathwater that looked intentional.

  The agent, a wary old tub of a puffing, panting padrone, done up in velvet and satin finery—as unctuously leering and “Beau-Trap” as a Covent Garden pimp—had insisted upon cash payments, and only in gold, preferably.

  “What’s he sayin’, now, hey?” Lewrie had asked, over and over again, as their negotiations proceeded; and those, mostly in extremely rapid French, far too fast for Lewrie to follow, or in Italian, which was another of the world’s languages he most definitely lacked. She did all the negotiating, switching easily from
French to Italian, then an aside, now and again, in fractured English. Which had become even more tortuous and fractured as the afternoon drew on, as Phoebe’s brow furrowed in frustration. Now and again, too, there were shouts, some hand gestures more easily understood by Mediterranean peoples.

  “Ah, billioni!” the well-larded agent had once exclaimed, in a worse-than-usual snit, “Poo!” He’d pretended to spit upon the tile floor of the parlor.

  “Alain, ve ’ave arriv-ed on ze price,” Phoebe had then informed him. “’E tak’ no less zan ze five doppia per mont’, ze feelt’y peeg!” For emphasis, she had then pretended to spit upon the floor. And put her thumbnail to her teeth and flicked her hand at him for good measure!

  “Billion?” he’d been forced to ask rather tremulously. Wait half a minute, he’d thought in alarm. There’s people invested with “John Company” in the Far East, some’re said to be worth a million pounds, by now! I ain’t buyin’ the whole damn’ island, just payin’ rent on a single house, by God, I ain’t!

  “Eez pauvre silver coin, Alain, non to be worry, mon coeur? ”

  There had followed a bewildering tirade, from both sides, it must be admitted, as to the relative merits of florins, zecchinos, scudos, and doppia, in comparison to the value of livres, liri, and the ducat. Savoian lira, versus the Papal States, or the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Where Alan had learned (whether he’d really wished to or not!) 12 denieri made one soldi, 20 soldi made one lira, or 6 lira equaled 1 scudo. But, as good Catholics, should they obey the Pope’s decrees that 30 baiocchi made 6 grossi, or 3 guilio, or one testone, and 100 baiocchi equaled a scudo? Or, more closely attuned to English measure (perhaps!) 6 Sicilian cavalli made 1 tornasi, and 240 tornesi equalled 12 carlinis, or 1 piastre. No, no, “ piastre, zat eez trop ’igh,” Alan dimly recalled her stating. Although 200 tornesi, which was only one ducat, would be preferable.