A King's Commander

by Dewey Lambdin

  And then had come these last four days of slack-weather pursuit, to end up off Toulon, letting Martin get away again. Toothless hounds too feeble to bark; chasing each other back and forth without even a nip on the hindquarters to show for it, as if making a show for the young dogs in the neighborhood; that they still knew how to beat the hounds. Even if neither one couldn’t have cared less if they’d actually caught the other. Or remembered what it was a dog really did with a rival dog.

  “Piss on the gatepost,” Alan snickered with dismal amusement, “and toddle off with yer tail high.”

  “Sir?” Midshipman Spendlove inquired, close at hand.

  “Just maundering, Mister Spendlove. Pay me no mind,” Alan said, blushing to have been overheard, and glowering hellish-black.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Spendlove replied meekly, scuttling away from his captain’s possible wrath.

  As if serving under Hotham were not plague enough, as if a pagan god had decided to muck about with his life of a sudden, everything he held dear seemed to be tumbling down like a house of cards.

  Prize Court, Phoebe . . . Caroline!

  He shook himself and shrugged deeper into his coat, turned his face to the dubious freshness of the wind to blank his thoughts of how near he’d come to being a widower.

  After Calvi had surrendered, as if a floodgate had been opened, letters from home had begun to arrive on an almost monthly schedule to keep him informed of hearth and family. Caroline was a highly intelligent woman, witty and expressive, and her many letters well-crafted and filled with newsy, chatty gossip, local lore, the farm’s doings, what his children had got up to. And how much she loved him.

  All of which had made him squirm, but only a little, with shame of his betrayal. Yet it was a socially acceptable betrayal, was it not? Most English gentlemen of his stripe married more for connections or land than love, in the beginning. One had to be careful; it took a rich man’s purse to attain a Bill of Divorcement from some unsuitable mort, so they weighed their options, and the girl, and the material benefits she could bring to the marriage, with care. Beauty was valued, as was a pleasant and agreeable demeanor. Mean t’say, if one were stuck forever-more . . . !

  But once at least one male heir was assured of living to adulthood—two or three was much better—it was expected by both parties in the better sort of Society that the man would keep a mistress for his pleasure, sparing his wife the perils of further childbirth. They might be civil, sociable, and agreeable to each other, still. But it was understood, and tacitly accepted; as long as one had discretion. Many wives even welcomed such an arrangement, and felt a sense of relief. Some few men with the purse, and the ton, for it, kept more than one mistress. A man had his needs, after all! Especially one facing such a lengthy separation, in time and distance.

  But Caroline’s letters had stopped arriving toward the end of January. Gales and storms in the Channel, the Bay of Biscay? A packet ship lost on-passage, and her latest missive with it? The risk of correspondence over such a long distance that every Navy man faced, Lewrie could have thought. Yet there were letters from London that still arrived, letters from Burgess Chiswick, and his father, in India.

  Finally, in April, just after the first indecisive set-to against the French fleet, a letter had come from his brother-in-law Governor in Anglesgreen. And worry, and longing, coupled with his lingering sense of guilt, in spite of being such a smug hound with purse, needs, and ton, had chilled him to the bone as soon as it was in his hands.

  Alan, I most sadly take pen in hand to discover unto you, and most strictly against my dear Sister Caroline’s Wishes, and most rigorous Instructions, that both she, and your Children, have been on the very verge of Death.

  There’d been wave after wave of illness in the parish, beginning sometime after the harvests were in, and continuing into the new year. Flux, grippe, the influenza and fevers. Many of the elderly and weak, the very old and very young about Anglesgreen had been taken to their beds, and a fair number never rose from them, but had joined what the vicar at St. George’s termed The Great Majority.

  First to succumb had been little Charlotte, then Hugh, lastly Sewallis, all within two days and nights. First sniffles, headaches and fevers, followed by incontinent bowels, vomiting, chills and the most heartrendingly wet, racking coughs.

  No cordials, no herbal teas or purchased nostrums or folklore remedies had helped, not even warming pans, hot and dry flannels, or hot and steamy flanneling. The local surgeon-apothecary was an idiot. They’d sent at last to Guildford for a gentleman-physician educated at Edinburgh, whose Jesuit’s bark, opium, and antimonies had broken their fevers, whose bleeding had restored the balance of their humors, and whose pills and drops had quieted their coughs, and allowed them to draw breath once more.

  Passing quiet, restful nights seemed to restore them wondrous well, though they were for days afterward listless and languorous, quite febrile and weak, with but the most delicate digestions or appetites, as you may well imagine.

  Caroline had been too busy to write, Governor further imagined he might understand; later, worn down and too exhausted by her valiant struggle to preserve her dear children’s very lives. So, at the very instant that the family could feel relief, and give thanks to a merciful God, Caroline had also come down with chills and fever, headaches and sniffles, then collapsed over supper, pale as Death itself!

  Before she took to her bed, she enjoined us all, dear brother-in-law, that we were, under the sternest threats, not to communicate to you any of their travails, so that you, so nobly and honorably in Arduous Service for King and Country, should have no distracting Worries, no additional Burden that might affect that Service. I thought it quite daft but demurred, for the nonce. However, now that . . .

  They’d despaired so much of her life, as Caroline suffered very much more than the children had, that they’d sent to Guildford for the physician once more, and he had all but thrown up his hands, and told them to expect the worst.

  Governor Chiswick was also a skilled writer, much too damned skilled! Like some droning bore who relished describing every agony of his own surgery for a stone, Governor had gone to wretched, terrifying and overly excessive details, painting a picture so vivid and ghastly of Caroline’s, and the children’s every moan, of how haggard and bedraggled, how skeletal her visage had appeared as she’d sunk to the last extremes. How scant her breath, how thready her pulse . . . !

  Christ, if he was here now, I’d strangle him, Lewrie thought in once-more impotently distanced rage; and quite damn’ gladly, too! By God, he’s done me no favors!

  Yet, miracle of miracles, and with the unstinting, damned near ferociously tender care of Sophie de Maubeuge, Caroline had rallied . . . she’d lived! The crisis was over, sometime in late February, and since Caroline was well on her way to a full restoration of her health, but still too weak to pen much more than spidery hen-scratches, Governor thought it was time he was told. In morbidly excruciating detail.

  • • •

  And what the hell was I doin’ in late February, Lewrie sneered to himself, scathing himself again with self-loathing? Why, I was on top of a Corsican whore, dickerin’ with criminal prize agents . . . too full o’lust for Mammon . . . an’ just plain old lust! . . . t’give family more’n the idle, passin’ thought!

  When did I get his damned letter? Late April. Just after a night ashore with Phoebe, damn my blood! Feelin’ like the Devil’s Own Buck-of-the-First-Head, with nothin’ on my mind but more quim, and breakfast! Noble, honorable . . . Arduous Service, mine arse!

  He felt guilt, a shipload of raging, bellowing Guilt. Not just for his dalliances, for his venal concerns placed ahead of family, but for his smugness, his conceit, his blithe disregard for life’s lessons.

  How fortunate he’d been so far, and how cocksure he’d breezed through. Battle, wounds . . . that he’d not lost an eye like Nelson, or a limb like Lilycrop; that he’d been exposed to the most hellish fevers in both the Indies, China
, that he hadn’t come down with sepsis or lockjaw fever from a cut in battle, or those two unspeakably daft duels he’d fought in his callow, feckless youth. That it was such a wonder he’d lived this long was some assurance that he always would!

  Or that those close to him would be just as fortunate, and that he could pay them no mind, dismiss them from his thoughts once he had sailed them under the horizon—and gaily assume that they’d be there at home, unchanged, pristine and untouched, like porcelain gewgaws he might collect, like marionettes stashed in a glass-front cabinet until the next performance. Which would occur whenever it suited his lights!

  Sobering, to think he could have lost them all. Wife, children, heir, love, and joy . . . shameful and sobering, to consider what he’d been up to while all this near-horror had happened.

  Hadn’t he seen it? How many couples birthed ten, twelve babes, and ended burying all but two? A man with means, and the best physicians on retainer, might lose two, three wives to child-bed fever before they interred him, as well, at the “ripe old age” of fifty!

  • • •

  That letter, and the ones that had followed from Governor and his mother-in-law Charlotte, finally a shaky one from his dearest Caroline herself, had brought him relief, but little joy. Perhaps this was what the reverends called an epiphany. Perhaps it had occurred in some ironic conjunction with seeing a stern, tarry-handed fire-eater such as Horatio Nelson spoon and coo over his mort, Adelaide Correglia, making an utter fool of himself, even though he still spoke of his dear Fanny back in Norfolk as some sort of household goddess. Or of seeing the dour, taciturn, and inarticulate Captain Thomas Fremantle chortle and blush as he tried to play the gallant with his Greek doxy at the opera in Leghorn.

  How much of a purblind fool do I look? he’d wondered. How huge the quim-struck cully have I been? Hmm . . .

  Whatever. As drenched as a dog doused with a bucket of water to get him off a bitch in season, he’d cooled to Phoebe. Turned surly and short. Made excuses, invented duties that kept him aboard Jester until he could hide from her no more.

  And what a muck I made o’ that, he squirmed, working his mouth on his weakness as the squadron stood on nor’west toward Cape Sepet.

  He’d gone to break it off, cut swift and clean. To make amends to Caroline, even if she never learned of it. Pray God she never learned of it! But, in explaining himself, and his reasons . . . And it hadn’t helped that Phoebe that day had looked so fetching, so damned handsome! Neither had it helped that her huge brown eyes had filled with tears so readily at his sudden, and inexplicable, dismissal and betrayal.

  Frankly, their rencontre had not been one of his shining moments.

  “Pauvre homme,” she’d muttered brokenly, her face crammed into a lace handkerchief, and she’d rushed to throw herself into his arms—to comfort him! Crying and clucking, stroking and soothing, as if he was the one to worry about!

  “Phoebe, I do love them all, more than my own life, d’ye see . . .” he’d muttered. “And nearly lost them, so . . . mean t’say . . . this. We . . .”

  “But, zey are recover’, Alain mon amour, merci à Dieu! ” Phoebe had shushed. “’Ow ’orrid eet mus’ ’ave been fo’ you. ’Ow thankful you mus’ be, mon coeur! An’ no one, you may tell. But, you tell me. ”

  There had been that; what captain could unbend, let his tears flow, show weakness before his inferiors. Oh, he’d had Cony and Cox’n Andrews in, given them the bald facts, with hopes that Maggy Cony, and their infant son might be weathering it. But, how long he’d pondered, fretted, wished to weep, to scream, to beg God to spare ’em . . .

  “Surely, you must see, dear Phoebe . . .” he’d stammered. “Mademoiselle Aretino, rather, hahumm!—that this, that our . . .”

  “You mus’ tell me ev’rysing, dear Alain!” she’d insisted.

  So he had. Sitting together on a sofa. Embraced. And his own tears had, at last, come, no matter that he’d held them in control this long, and what was another hour of a sad duty?

  Wept on her damn’ tits, Lewrie railed at himself! Went to end it, and I ended up toppin’ her! Again! Yorktown . . . Toulon . . . there’d been a power of rogerin’, the days before the end o’ both, ’twixt soldiers an’ camp followers. Like tellin’ Death t’go bugger himself. Long as we’re playin’ at life-makin’, you can just piss off!

  He’d taken his comfort with Phoebe, the comfort and sympathy she had been so eager to offer. And he’d been so grateful to receive. But it had felt so perverse a thing to do, even more worthy of guilt than before, when he’d been unaware, that he’d ended despising her to her face. Which was to say, that he’d despised himself, and had simply found a suitable target.

  They’d had a high old row; shouting, cursing, flinging expensive gewgaws at each other. And damn his blood, if they hadn’t gone right back to ranti-polin’ in the heat of the moment! He’d spent the night. And had awakened even more confused, even more dithering than when he’d climbed the hill-street to her . . . no, “their” house.

  The sudden transfer to Nelson’s squadron had come as a godsend. If he couldn’t make up his own bloody-weak mind, he thought, then the Navy would make it up for him. If he hadn’t the “nutmegs” to tell Phoebe off proper, then perhaps time and distance from San Fiorenzo’d do it for him.

  God, y’er such a bloody coward, me lad, Alan told himself; such a weak, venal, spineless . . . but, damme, why’s she have to be so sweet about it, so . . . ?

  “Still no signal for a change of course, sir,” Lieutenant Knolles said at his side. “We’re standing in rather close to Cape Sepet, and those batteries.”

  “Hmm?” Lewrie grunted in alarm, certain his quavery musings had been spoken aloud, in even a tiny mutter or whisper. That just bloody everyone knew his business; or soon would.

  “Standing on, sir,” Knolles repeated, with a quizzical expression. He took off his hat, ran his fingers through his blond hair, and clapped it on again, in a gesture Lewrie had come to know as concern.

  “Why, for spite, I s’pose, Mister Knolles,” Lewrie allowed, now he was back in the real world. “To trail our coats right to their doorstep. Rub their cowardly noses in it.”

  “I see, sir.” Knolles nodded, with a slight, wolfish grin. “Though, just what it is we’re rubbing their noses in is beyond me, at the moment.” Lewrie shrugged, damned by his irresolute dithering beyond all glee of his own witticism. Knolles, though, and those on the quarterdeck nearest them, rewarded him with a tiny, appreciative chuckle, even so. As if to mollify the mourner.

  The word had surely spread through the ship, as the word always will, in an eye-blink, Lewrie was certain. Since then, the people had been walking on eggshells around him. Though they certainly sympathized with his plight, they couldn’t commiserate until he allowed it, till he even mentioned his family. He was approached like a new widower who was barely launched into his period of mourning; cosseted gently, without actually broaching the subject of what he needed cosseting for!

  Hellish challenge, Lewrie thought; to be captain of a ship, and thought lucky. Sure, they’re wond’rin’ . . . if I’m not blessed, if I can have a near-fatal sickness back home, am I suddenly just a runof-the-mill captain? Jester still a lucky ship, or . . .

  To their north, the French fleet was entering harbor, just as he had predicted, without even trying to turn and show their fangs. Their van was already inside the bay, only their topmasts showing above the rugged heights of Cape Sepet, and the main body around their flagship brailing up square sails to slow as they entered the Bay of Toulon.

  “’Ere’s a sloop o’ war, fetched to, sir,” Mister Buchanon pointed out to their left. “Just below th’ batt’ries at Cape Sepet. One o’ ’eir corvettes, like us. ’Bout our size, sir. Twenty—twenty-two guns, I make her.”

  A most sleek and jaunty corvette she was, too, presenting her larboard profile to them, about two miles off and about an equal distance from the sheltering guns. New, Lewrie thought, noting her yellow pale upperwo
rks, still pristine and virginal under a fresh-from-the-yards first coat of linseed oils. A black lower chain wale that set off her saucily curved sheer line, and a broad white gunwale. Though her sails belied that newness; they were of a more-worn dun than most French ships sported, from spending more time at sea since her launching,

  “Signal, from Agamemnon, sir!” Hyde interrupted at last. “The squadron . . .” he read off slowly, “Wear . . . to starboard tack. Course easterly. And, make all sail conformable with the weather, sir.”

  “For Genoa.” Lewrie nodded, suddenly feeling a weight depart his weary shoulders. Dither enough, and someone else’ll make your decision for you; and have sense enough to be damn’ grateful when they do, Alan almost snickered in relief. “With the Frogs run back to their pond, I trust we’ll have a much quieter passage, this time, hey, Mister Knolles?”

  “Indeed, sir,” Knolles replied, chuckling.

  “Very well, Mister Hyde. Hoist the Affirmative. Mister Knolles, pipe Hands to Stations to Wear Ship.”

  A glance astern to Agamemnon, then past her to Hotham’s line of battle, which had already begun to turn east in rigid line-ahead order; the lead ship hardening up across what little wind there was, and the one next astern of her sheeting home and bracing in to turn in her wake, once the lead ship’s stern galleries were mid-ships abeam. Going back to San Fiorenzo Bay, he supposed, their dubiously performed duties done, for the time being. And another fine chance for a victory lost.

  “Signal’s down, sir!” Hyde shouted.

  “Wear-ho, Mister Knolles,” Lewrie directed moodily. “Put the ship about to the starboard tack.”

  There was a thin warlike sound down to leeward that turned his attention north once more, a flat, slamming thud of a gun. That French corvette had just shot off a lee gun, the traditional challenge to combat! The misty single bloom of gun smoke rose over her decks, obscured by her hull and sails.