A King's Commander

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Sentry?” Lewrie called to the Marine at the door. “Pass the word for my clerk. Come at once, tell him.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’um . . . SAH!” the muffled voice shouted back. “ Inconnu, my God,” Twigg mused, slouching in the sofa cushions. “How dramatic. How French! Fellow could have put on a fool’s face and gotten clean away, since he’d purged his own chest so thoroughly. That partner of his, he’s the same stubborn sort. All fired with adoration for his Revolution. Might as well make a Hindu kill a cow, as get him to talk. Bloody amateur, in his own theatric.”

  “What did you learn of him?” Lewrie asked, wincing as he remembered Twigg on a captured Lanun Rover prao, with a wavybladed krees at a pirate prisoner’s throat. Which Twigg had most dispassionately cut, after slicing and torturing what little he could from him. “And how? Up to all your old tricks, Mister Twigg?”

  “And why not, now and again, sir?” Twigg allowed coolly. “I find they more than suffice. No, Lewrie, he lives. Shaken, one may hope, but no permanent harm done. An amateur, as I said. Marks on a pile of dirty linen, with several aliases, from several cities. Some of them most embarrassingly French. And caught red-handed, laden with gold, in a ship laden with military goods. Should have taken another vessel, traveled separately from his dead compatriot, that unlamented romantic, Inconnu. Secret writings . . . the lemon-juice variety ’tween the lines of innocent correspondence. Smell it, by God! A dead giveaway, every time. No, a more elaborate cypher would have served them better, but I doubt the poor fellow in charge of French spies in the region has much to work with yet. And, he’s no Richelieu, himself, exactly. Learnin’ . . . give him that much.” Twigg shrugged again, and took a sip to toast his worthy opponent. “Fellow’ll be turned off in a fortnight, though. Hung for spying, soon as a military court at Corsica has him in.”

  “And the French midshipman?”

  “That clumsy lout, God no, Lewrie! He’s to be exchanged. Too many of our squirearchy’s slack-jawed sons aboard Berwick, those with such a lot of ‘interest,’ are festerin’ in France. Midshipman Hainaut will be reporting back to his masters, and the less said about me the better. Best he suffer an accident on the way, he knows too much already, seen too much, but . . .” Twigg sighed, as if to say “what can you do?” “Knows who you are, Lewrie, he does. Not as thickheaded a peasant as he looks. Scrub him up, dress his hair . . . a proper uniform, and the sky’s the limit for him. His Die Narbe will take care of that, I assure you.”

  “Yer clerk, Mister Mountjoy . . . SAH!” the Marine shouted.

  “Of Die Narbe, more later,” Twigg promised smugly, rising for his introduction. Mountjoy, as usual, disappointed. He’d risen from a deep slumber, dressed haphazardly, and presented himself in a pair of bear-hide carpet slippers, bare ankles, and dark-blue slop trousers, into which he’d crammed the tail of his knee-length nightshirt, with a ratty old drab-brown wool dressing gown atop. Mountjoy still wore a tasseled sleeping cap over his unruly hair, too.

  “You sent for me, sir?” he said, yawning and blinking from the sudden change to lanthorn light in the great-cabins. Scratching a bit, too, it must be admitted.

  “Good God, what’s that?” Twigg growled, stiffening. “Mountjoy, my clerk,” Lewrie puzzled.

  “No, I mean that, Lewrie!” Twigg grumbled, pointing.

  “That, sir . . . is a cat,” Lewrie enlightened him. “You know . . . felis domesticus? Name’s Toulon. He’s the same sort o’ disaster.”

  “I despise cats!” Twigg glowered, hellish-black.

  “We wake you up from a good nap . . . sweetlin’?” Lewrie asked of Toulon, bending down to scratch the top of Toulon’s head, concealing a small smirk of sudden pleasure.

  “Mister Mountjoy, the name that you are to remember, on pain of your life, sir . . . is Silberberg. Simon Silberberg,” Twigg began, and riveting Mountjoy’s attention, turning the beginnings of a yawn into a gape of awe. “From Coutts’s, do you follow? A representative of your captain’s bank, do you understand, sir? But . . . and this you will forget immediately I’m gone . . . damme!”

  Toulon, following the perverse wont of his tribe, had gone for Twigg immediately, purring with secret, malicious delight to discover a cat-hater—to twine around his ankles, sniff at his shoes and silk stockings, which were new, fascinating . . . and perhaps might require a sprayed marking . . . or a few clawed snags to make ’em simply perfect!

  “Get that . . . that . . . beast away from me, Lewrie!” Mister Twigg demanded, skittering as if he were going to do a dance to Saint Vitus—or hop atop the sofa like a lady who’d seen a mouse.

  “Here, Toulon. Mousey,” Lewrie tempted, fetching out the wool scrap toy on a length of small-stuff. “Leave the bad old man alone.” He sing-songed to his ram-cat, which was a perfect excuse to expose a childlike smile of fiendish glee.

  Think I really love you, puss, he thought quite warmly.

  Twigg, in his guise of Simon Silberberg from Coutts’s, had been in Leghorn and Porto Especia, with an occasional jog inland to Florence, as a commercial representative ought, when Mister Drake had sent a messenger to him, regarding the seizures of Il Furioso and Il Briosco. He’d not found ships registered as Tuscan under those names, indeed, had not discovered any public record of a trading company calling itself the Compagnia di Commercia Mare di Liguria.

  “No public stock offer on what passes for their exchange, sirs,” Twigg/Silberberg told them over an eye-opening glass of brandy. “Nor any articles of corporation filed with their government. Pretty much the same murky situation as obtains here in Genoa that so puzzled Mister Drake. It was helpful in the extreme, though, Mister Mountjoy, to receive a fair-hand copy of the entries in that small ledger book you found. Cryptic as the headings were, still I was able to form an educated guess as to the identities of the principals.”

  “Guilio Gallacio, sir?” Mountjoy inquired eagerly, quite awake by then, though they’d been at it for at least an hour.

  “To the tee, young sir,” Twigg replied quickly, with an admiring smile, though a damn’ thin’un, as was his wont. “Unfortunately, I cannot ‘front’ him in any fashion, and he’s much too prominent for me to . . . uhm, spirit away, for a probing interrogation. Though, I’m told he was quite upset, and shaken, by his capture so early on in the life of their venture. I have arranged for his correspondence to be intercepted, and read. More of the vinegar or lemon-juice secret writing, as I mentioned earlier, you recall, Lewrie?”

  “Uhm,” Alan commented, feet up on his desk and slouched down in a padded chair, with Toulon now quietly napping in his lap.

  “Unfortunately, too,” Twigg went on, as if he, and ergo them, had all the time in the world, though it was growing quite late. “I cannot substitute correspondence, either overt or covert, to cause confusion. Indeed, until we are certain of all the principals, we cannot strike at any of them.”

  “There is the niggling problem that they’re neutrals, citizens of a sovereign Tuscany,” Lewrie pointed out. “But that never stopped you much before.”

  “My Lord, this is fascinating, sir!” Mountjoy cried, wriggling in his chair with excitement.

  “You do me too much injustice, Lewrie, ’deed you do, sir,” the old spy carped. “Why, were I a passionate man, I’d take a grave exception to it. Though, fencing words with you is amusing, at times . . .” He tossed Lewrie a beatific smile; another damn’ brief ’un. “No, I fear I can do little, for the nonce. It will be up to you, and your Nelson, to . . . how did Captain Ayscough put it, Lewrie? That I should hold his coat, and let another batsman have his innings? No, to lop off conspiracy at the root may be beyond us, but I shall be quite content should your squadron take as many of their ships as possible, cutting profits to nil . . . and disabusing the conspirators of the notion that they may aid France and prosper. Or that France will aid them in their plans.”

  “So it goes beyond profit, sir?” Mountjoy gushed.

  “Indeed it does, Mister Mountjoy. Lewrie, I’m told you have a wag
er with Captain Cockburn? He’ll buy you that shore dinner. May I suggest roast crow for him? No, sirs. This exceeds humanity, or care for their fellows, from the Genoese. Or for the neutrality, the very sovereignty of Tuscany. Signore Gallacio, I have learned, is part of a salon group of like-minded progressives, quite taken with the American Revolution, and with its ideals. Overeducated, overwealthy dilettantes and intellectual wastrels. Idealists, some of them.”

  “Perhaps they see in French occupation a new order, sir?” Alan asked, reminded of his talk with Senator di Silvano earlier. Or, with his besotting mistress, at the least. “Mean to say, surely there are some benighted fools who believe all this Democratic, Mob-ocracy cant. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity . . . the franchise given to just anybody.”

  “Granted, Lewrie,” Twigg allowed. “Rather perceptive of you, I must say. Yes, sirs . . . even at home, well. Priestley and those of his ilk, the gimlet-eyed . . . Reformers. Fortunately, they’re not rich enough to afford private armies and mobs of thugs, nor do they possess constitutions of an active nature that might allow them to conspire . . . beyond printing a few odd penny tracts. And we’ve shut all that down, quite successfully. In Ireland, there are more worrisome combinations . . . but then in Ireland, there bloody always are! Gallacio is, for his rather advanced age, very active in certain societies . . .”

  “So, do you know his associations, Mister . . . Silberberg,” Thomas Mountjoy interrupted, “you may discover the principal conspirators in Tuscany. And I suppose you have already done that, or are in the way of doing it?”

  “Quite so, young sir,” Twigg said with relish. “Though it is rather like playing a good hand of whist, with no cooperation from a partner you’ve never met, right after the first distribution of the cards. Knowing the deck has been arranged beforehand . . . but in whose favor, hmm? One discovers information as to who holds what, one bid or lay-down at a time. An intellectual passion. Rather, a most cold and logical dis passion. But, hugely enjoyable, even so.”

  “I should quite imagine it is, sir!” Mountjoy enthused. “So . . . you know who the others are, some of them?”

  “I fear I must play my cards close to my chest, Mister Mountjoy,” Twigg said, disappointing him. “Though I have found the identity of another large financial risk-taker. The others, I suspect, are talkers, rather than doers. In Tuscany, there was . . . ‘B-R’ . . . do you recall?”

  “Aye, sir . . . ‘B-R’ was owed twenty percent, do we believe what was in the small ledger, and not the captain’s.”

  “Bruno Randazzo . . . a very prominent young fellow. Educated in Paris, not so long ago. Travels widely,” Twigg ticked off. “Was in the south of France, overland, about the time of Toulon. From what I believe to be correct, three other sets of initials belong to men from Tuscany, five-percenters. They fit, they match the names . . . they are in Randazzo’s, and Gallacio’s, social circles. A few, however, conform to no one.”

  “Those, you believe are Genoan, I take it,” Lewrie said, as his cat shifted about, settling back to sleep with a little grunt. “Which is why you’re here?”

  “That, sir,” Twigg said, turning in his chair to face him, “and the fact that, as you suspected, this combination of ships’ owners, and ardent conspirators, have good intelligence of our squadron’s arrival . . . in the first instance . . . and of its movements in the second . . . three of the sets of initials, I have come to believe, reside in Genoa. Two of them are five-percenters . . . while the last commands . . .”

  “Thirty percent, sir,” Mountjoy announced. “The lion’s share. He must be a player even bigger than Gallacio. A richer man, perhaps. Or, one more devoted to Genoa’s conquest, and the coming of a French-enforced new order.”

  “Or a cabal of three, or six, or thirty . . .” Lewrie shrugged. “And I suppose our captive Frog spy told you nothing in that regard.”

  “Absolutely nothing, I’m afraid.” Twigg sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. “There’s a very good possibility that the wretch never dealt face-to-face with any of the larger principals, at all. I strongly suspect it was done through anonymous representatives, agents, or ships’ captains. Solicitors or mistresses, that sort of thing. A good conspirator never tips his own hand . . . when he may use some poor cully more expendable as a go-between. I had hopes my noble opponent, being so new and unused to the ‘trade,’ might not have developed the sophistication as of yet, but it appears he has. The French have always been good at spy-craft. In their damn’ blood, worse than Italian schemers.”

  “It may be, sir, that one of the five-percenters from Tuscany may be more important to their plot than Signore Gallacio,” Mountjoy posed with a puzzled look. “Gallacio may be in full sympathy, and in complete accord with one more political. And is throwing his wealth, his ships and money into it. The same may obtain in Genoa.”

  “Oh, very good, sir. Yes, I’d thought of that,” Twigg complimented. “But . . . one must consider that for a wealthy man to expend a considerable part of his fortune ’pon a conspiracy against his native people, he’d wish more say than the rest in the outcome. More so than a coffeehouse schemer, or a street-corner ranter. There are revolutionaries, with scythes in their hands . . . and, there are the political animals, who pull the strings of the puppet show. The ones who end up top dog when the others have faded back to their ineffectual ditherings, once the revolution’s accomplished.”

  “So, who do you suspect, Mister Twigg?” Lewrie asked, yawning. “The initials in the ledger, as your Mountjoy could have told you, Lewrie, are . . . ‘U-R’,” Twigg announced, though barely above his most ominous whisper. “Our French spy knew no one by any name, which might coincide. He’s not a practiced liar, but intractably mute upon almost every subject. Nor does our Mister Drake, who is familiar with all the merchant class, or ruling class, who might have a deep-enough purse to be our ‘U-R.’ Nor do any of the romantically idealist young men of Genoa match. He has suspicions among those, as to the identity of our ‘sardines’ . . . but nothing of the biggest of fish, whom we seek. Nor do I. But I shall, in time,” Twigg prophesied with a cunning leer of eventual, almost foreordained triumph. With the great pleasure it would be to see this mysterious “U-R” ruined, once he was revealed.

  “Now, as to the matter of the French knowing our ship movements so quickly, Lewrie . . .” Twigg snapped, turning brusque once more.

  “Easily solved, sir.” Lewrie yawned again, recrossing his legs so one foot didn’t fall asleep, too. “Every bloody Genoese would sell his mother for a groat. Might as well try to eradicate cockroaches, as dam up the flood of information.”

  “I expected no less, sir.” Twigg glared. “’Tis not the first time I’ve been in this part of the world, d’ye know. What I was about to say . . . before your blithe dismissal, sir . . . was that while we cannot hope, indeed, to limit, much less totally eliminate, the many informers along the Riviera, who do it out of spite for our embargo, love of Frog radical Republicanism, money, or a love of intrigue . . . we may turn it to our advantage. This Midshipman Hainaut, for example, who’s to be exchanged. Mister Mountjoy might be quite useful, in planting with that young man some false scents, some superficially convincing truth, along with a hard kernel of falsehood, to confuse them. Feel up to playing a part, Mister Mountjoy?”

  “Aye, sir. Sounds intriguing,” Mountjoy replied, barely able to contain himself at the prospect of being “useful.”

  “Mister Drake and I have some . . . uhm, associates,” Twigg said, his death skull of a face creasing in malicious good humor. “We are privy to certain information about the French, as well. For instance, there is to be a convoy, soon. The presence of this squadron has cost the French the ability to supply their army with coasters sailing independently. You’ll know it when you hear it, not before, Lewrie. We are told that several small warships of a counterpart French coastal squadron will guard them to their destination. But were the Frogs to believe that our squadron would be off at sea, under the horizon, out to stage an
other raid such as yours on

  Bordighera, to descend upon a larger Savoian port, well . . . there you are, then. A weakening of the convoy escort, a dispersion of force to the wrong place, at the wrong time . . . yet an important convoy full of supplies taken.”

  “And the French unable to trust in the complete accuracy of all they hear, in future, I take it, Mister Tw . . . Silberberg?” Mountjoy exclaimed with a giggle.

  “He’s smart, Lewrie. Smart as paint, as you sea dogs say.” Mister Twigg beamed again. “I will give you the particulars, Mister Mountjoy. Hainaut will carry it to his master. I will arrange for his immediate exchange, to speed things along, since they do need speeding, given . . .”

  “The timing of the convoy’s arrival, wherever,” Lewrie gathered. “That, and a few more important items,” Twigg agreed.

  “I am at your complete disposal, sir,” Mountjoy volunteered. “Then let us repair to yon dining area, for a moment or two,” Twigg decided. “So I may coach you on what it is you need to say for Hainaut to repeat. And how it might be best discovered to him. May I prevail upon you, Lewrie . . . to borrow your dining room, and your clerk for a further time?”

  “Have at it, sir,” Lewrie said, unable to say much opposed. He was certain Twigg had risen considerably in the Foreign Office’s secret bureaus since the Far East, and had the ear and patronage of people who could crush a pipsqueak naval commander if Twigg wished it. There was spite enough, of the lingering kind, between them already.

  “And I will thank you, on your honor, sir,” Twigg cautioned him with a sternly risen finger. “To go aft. There are matters you are not to know yet. Or at the least, be able truthfully to deny knowing.”

  “You . . . !” Lewrie spluttered, getting to his feet in anger. “I swear, you’re too full of yourself, sir, to row me, in my own cabins . . . !”