The Captain's Vengeance

by Dewey Lambdin

  A discriminating man with a taste for blades would appreciate that the hanger was a Gill’s and, when drawn, was nearly straight on the back edge, the first eight inches honed razor-sharp, while the lower edge was upswept to the point, so that it gave the impression of a curved-blade hanger.

  A discriminating gentleman would have further “Ah-hummed” over the cut-steel square links of the officer’s watch chain and fob, deeming him a man of good taste, too.

  With the officer’s beaver cocked hat doffed, an outsider would have seen a full head of hair atop his pate, still thick and all his own, of a middle, almost light brown, a tad wavy at his temples, over his ears, and loosely gathered into a trim nautical sprig of a queue atop his coat collar, bound with a bow-knotted black silk ribbon.

  The officer was much too sun-or wind-burned for Fashion in the better sorts’ salons, though. Not completely a gentleman, perhaps, the lofty observer would have sniffed; too much the “sea dog” after all!

  The salute done, Lewrie clapped his hat back on his head and smiled at his First Officer, his darkly, romantically handsome Mr. Anthony Langlie. “Everything’s in order, Mister Langlie?” he asked. “Nothing gone smash since I left the ship?” he gently teased.

  “No, sir, praise God,” Lt. Langlie reported. “The working sail set hung slack and allowed to dry, wood and watering done, and Mister Coote’s requirements stowed below, sir. Did you, ah … find out…”

  “I’ll be below and aft, Mr. Langlie,” Capt. Lewrie told him in a mystifying way. “Give me ten minutes, then do attend me, and I shall tell you all I have learned. Dismiss the hands back to their seeming drowsiness for now, sir.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Lt. Langlie crisply replied, with a hand to his hat and a short sketch of a bow from the waist as Capt. Lewrie went down the starboard ladderway to the gun-deck, then aft past the bulkhead door and the Marine sentry, to his great-cabins.

  “Cool tea, sir?” his cabin servant, Aspinall, enquired after he had helped him out of his coat, sword and baldric, and hat.

  “That’d be handsome, Aspinall, aye,” Lewrie replied, tearing at his neckstock and opening his shirt collar. “Why, hello, catlins … my littles! And what’ve you two imps been up to, hey?”

  There were many glad trills and meows of welcome, much butting of heads on his Hessian boots; perhaps a tad too much standing on hind legs and whetting claws in bienvenue at his white canvas breeches. Those mischievous looks from both Toulon, the stout and well-muscled black-and-white ram-cat, and Chalky, the grey-smudged white yearling tom only half Toulon’s heft, warned Lewrie that they’d be scaling up his thin shirt in their need to be newly adored.

  “Miss me, did you?” Lewrie cooed to them, a hand for each, once he attained the chair behind his desk. “Damn my eyes, ye don’t nip at me, Chalky! Hand that feeds, and all that? You’ll get your ‘wubbies,’ no fear o’ not.”

  “Yer tea, sir,” Aspinall announced after several long minutes of discrete observation, as he sensed the cats’ enthusiasms begin to flag. “Bridgetown didn’t have no ice, though, sir. All used up for the season, I reckon. Cool from th’ orlop, though, sir.”

  “Massachusetts Yankee ice never gets this far south” was Lewrie’s surmise as he accepted the coin-silver commemorative tankard that the crew of his previous ship, the Sloop of War Jester, had given him just before they’d paid off at Portsmouth, and paced aft.

  “Er … no luck, then, sir?” Aspinall dared to ask, when ship’s officers would not. Lewrie flung himself onto the hard settee lashed to the starboard side, almost sprawled with one leg up.

  “Not the answers I was looking for, Aspinall, no,” Lewrie said, busying himself with taking another sip. The rob of lemons and sugar were dirt cheap in the Caribbean and the Sugar Isles, and tea was one of the most popular exports from England, so Aspinall brewed it by the gallon, every day or so, and kept it tepid, at least, in a pewter pitcher. Some days it was fresh, some days it was leftovers, clouded and so stout that it could rouse the deathly ill and make them prance hornpipes. Today it was fresh, and merely refreshing.

  “No fear, though, sir … we’ll find ’em, sooner’r later.”

  “I begin to wonder, Aspinall,” Lewrie wearily said with a sigh, running his free hand over his hair and leaning his head back upon the oak of the hull’s inner scantling and decorative panelling. “‘Pon my soul, I do.”

  Not only physically tired from his shore travels, from riding a hired horse far out into the countryside and back, Lewrie was starting to feel spiritually tired. No wonder, since he had done everything he could conceive of, had pursued every possibility no matter how tenuous, and it had all seemingly resulted in a titanic … nullity!

  Toulon and Chalky, now that he’d alit, hopped up for a return bout of “pets” for the duration of the first mug of cold tea. By the refill, Toulon stalked off to claim his master’s chair behind the desk, leaving Chalky to sling himself against Lewrie’s thigh, wriggle and yawn, then stretch out half on his back with his paws in the air and “caulk” down, instantly don’t-feel-a-thing asleep.

  A forceful knock on the great-cabin door, the sharp thud of a brass musket butt on the deck, and the cry of “First Awf’cer, sah!” didn’t even stir Chalky. “Come!” Lewrie responded.

  “Sir,” Langlie said, hat under his arm.

  “You’ll pardon me, Mister Langlie, do I not get up, hey?” Lewrie said, with a helpless shrug and a cock of his head in the direction of the fur-bag at his hip. “Take a pew, do. Aspinall, refreshments for Mister Langlie.”

  “Thankee, sir,” Langlie answered, plunking down into a leather-and-wood chair that was ensembled with the settee, his hat in his lap, and fidgeting with expectation, not of the cool tea decoction, but of news, at last.

  “Well, we found the mort known as Mistress Jugg,” Lewrie told him, once he’d gotten his tea and had had a liberal draught of it. “Her, and the reputed girl-child that Jugg spoke of.”

  “Capital, sir!” Langlie enthused.

  “No, no it ain’t,” Lewrie gloomed.

  Two months before, Lewrie’s frigate had taken an easy, and rich, French prize near the enemy-held island of Guadeloupe, in the midst of confounding and capturing Lewrie’s old nemesis, the fearsome Guillaume Choundas. Proteus had sailed as an “independent ship” with Admiralty Orders fetched out by Foreign Office secret agents; the Honourable Mr. Grenville Pelham, an officious, over-vaunting twit, and his much abler aide, ex-Captain of Household Cavalry Mr. James Peel. Their mission, which everyone but Pelham could charitably call a “right cock-up” of a scheme, had been to discomfit Choundas and the French, first off; find a way to regain possession of the vast wealth of the French colony of Saint Domingue on Hispaniola from the victorious slave rebellion led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, second; then drag the Americans and their spanking-new Navy hooting and hollering into a declared war with the French. Or, run the Yankees out of the Caribbean if they didn’t jump through the right hoops. The prize had been icing on the cake.

  Lewrie had left their prize safely at anchor in Prince Rupert Bay, in the hands of the local Admiralty Court, with six crewmembers off Proteus for her Harbour Watch. Not two weeks later, though, their prize had vanished! The dimwits of the Dominica Prize Court had flung up their shoulders and mumbled, “Well, it’s a myst’ry!” but the prize, her bonded cargo, and his five sailors and one midshipman were missing with her. Lost, absconded…

  Had she been left at Antigua and auctioned off, she might have fetched them all over £15,000, and would still have safely been there!

  The eternally sozzled incompetents of the Dominica Court admitted that a man claiming to be the prize’s Quartermaster’s Mate had come ashore at the sleepy port of Roseau, sculling a boat by himself, saying that, if a certain time period had elapsed without Proteus’s return to Dominica, his captain had left verbal orders to sail her to the court at Antiqua, to which Roseau’s court was ancillary. They’d been so lax in their dealings, they couldn’t even adequately
describe him, but … they’d let him sail, anyway, the thoughtless clods!

  Lewrie had left Midshipman Burns, his Bosun’s Mate Mr. Towpenny, three other hands, and Quartermaster’s Mate Toby Jugg aboard the prize.

  And Toby Jugg was a man to be leery of.

  After all, they’d pressed him off a Yankee brig engaged in smuggling arms to the French, and rebel slaves on Saint-Domingue, in the Danish Virgins the year before. American certificates of citizenship—either forged, false, or merely purchased from Yankee consuls—bedamned, Jugg had appeared as British as John Bull, and liable to the press, no matter where he was found. Jugg’s plaint of an impoverished wife and daughter on Barbados had prompted Lewrie to suggest Jugg take the guinea Joining Bounty, to forward on to support his wife and child. He’d even promoted the man to Able Seaman, then Quartermaster’s Mate, but … if Toby Jugg had found a way to overpower, or beguile, the rest of the hands, been glib enough to get them to desert with the prize to an enemy port, where they’d be safe from capture in the future for the crime… sell her off for half her potential value, and “go shares” so each would be rich and idle for life, well!

  Had Jugg been aided by former “associates” who’d slunk into the bay to wood and water, or look for an easy capture; had he encountered criminal “jetsam” loafing ashore on Dominica, who’d put him up to it?

  Dammit, Jugg had been the only Royal Navy Quartermaster’s Mate in port, hadn’t he? The court officers said the man had worn a Navy man’s uniform, had an easy, gruff air of command about him as a Mate should, and sounded fluent in his English, so who else could it have been?

  Waving his Admiralty Orders as an “independent ship” as a license to steal, Lewrie had taken Proteus in search of his missing men (and the value of the prize and her cargo!) with a vengeance. It had been a blow to his pride, to his offered trust, a slap in the face as bad as if his whole crew had mutinied! In point of fact, the missing Toby Jugg was becoming about as huge a bête noire to him as Guillaume Choundas had ever been!

  Now, after weeks and weeks of searching, of quartering the sea, it appeared that the trail had gone completely cold, and any hope Lewrie had of rescuing his missing people was completely dashed. His last, best, hope had been here on Barbados, in the hills.

  Lewrie, Padgett, and Cox’n Andrews had boated ashore, talked to officials, tradesmen, dock workers, and idlers. His clerk, Padgett, proved most useful in discovering that, for a while, a man named Tobias Hosier, formerly a seaman by trade, had farmed a small patch of land inland, in Saint Thomas parish, near a tiny place called Welsh Hell Gully, south of Mount Hillaby. Said Tobias Hosier had been slightly remiss in the tax collectors’ books at Government House here in Bridgetown, but … his shortfall of 6s/8p had been made good about seven months before, which happily coincided with the time it would have taken for the note-of-hand on his Joining Bounty to have arrived by mail-packet from Jamaica, where it had been posted!

  Any more information, especially a physical description of this Tobias (or Toby), as opposed to the two or three hundred other settlers anointed with that Christian name, any further information about him, would be the preserve of the parish authorities, Padgett was told.

  That further search had involved runty hired horses, the roads being almost impossible for a more comfortable coach, and nearly six miserable miles upwards and inland, with nary a hope of even a mean dinner or potable refreshments along the way.

  The local magistrate, your typical bluff squire, was not available (though his recumbent form could be espied, sprawled on a settee in his parlour, through the open double doors facing the front gallery of his imposing manor, and his snores were loud enough to unnerve the horses!). Both the vicar and his assisting curate were off “tending to good works”—though they had trotted off on their best hunters, clad in field clothing, bearing fowling guns, and animatedly conversing about “ring-necked peasants” or something such like, as the dour housekeeper of the vicar’s manse told them, rather brusquely, between yawns. Evidently, folk did a deal of napping in Welsh Hell Gully.

  Trust to Cox’n Andrews, though, to chat up the Cuffies who worked at the hamlet’s tumbledown public house, where they dined, to learn that “Missah Tobias” matched the physical description of Toby Jugg to a tee, and where his acreage could be found. Off they’d gone, after an indifferent dinner, but two tankards of rather good ale to the good each, to seek out “Hosier Hall.”

  “Mistress Hosier, I presume?” Lewrie had said by way of enquiry. He stood with hat in hand, at the edge of the front gallery to a one-story house made of coral “tabby” blocks, ballast stones, and weathered scrap lumber. The gallery wasn’t a foot off the ground, its planks uneven and sagging, though the long overhang of the roof, thatched from sugarcane stalks or bamboo or whatever fell to hand on Barbados, gave a more than welcome shade, and the raised gallery that spanned the entire house did provide at least ten degrees of relief from the noonday sun. “Or, should I say, Mistress Jugg?” Lewrie added, keeping a mild and unthreatening smile on his “phyz.”

  “Oh, saints presarve us!” the faded, fubsy woman cried, fanning herself with her stained housewife apron, turning pale and fretful under her tropical island colour. “Summat’s happened t’Toby, are ye come t’tell me? Faith, I …” she said, gulping and collapsing in a rickety porch chair.

  Past the open door of the vertical-board house, Lewrie could espy a girl-child in a simple shift, bare-legged and barefoot, coming out to the gallery from the inner gloom holding a squirming puppy. The taxes on windows that London enforced most-like also were imposed on Barbados, Lewrie thought. There was enough light, though, to note that a cradle took pride of place inside, one still rocking, one occupied by a baby in swaddles, and not above a year old.

  “Allow me to name myself to you, Mistress,” Lewrie said. “Captain Alan Lewrie, of the Proteus frigate. I’ve…”

  “Toby’s ship!” the woman cried, lips trembling now and both hands lifted to her mouth as if to press back grief or chew her nails. “Oh, God!” That sounded as if it was wrung from her by a mangle. “Th’ poor man’s daid, an’t he? Oh, sway-et Jaysus!”

  “Uh, no, Mistress Jugg … Hosier,” Lewrie countered. “He…”

  The wife was beginning to sob into her cupped hands; the little girl was beginning to blub, too, though for what reason she had yet to be told—Christ, even the babe in the cradle had wakened and added querulous, hiccoughy wail-ettes of its own!

  “He’s alive and well… we think,” Lewrie was quick to inform.

  “He’s ‘run,’ d’ye mean?” Mistress… Whichever snapped, going squinty-eyed and flinty of a sudden, all grief quite flown her. “An’ ye’re here t’take him back, ye are? T’flog ‘im? Court-martial ‘im?”

  “Find him, aye, Mistress… uh,” Lewrie assured her, daring to put one booted foot on the gallery; thanking God that the Juggs/Hosiers could cut off their squawls so quickly. The girl-child still sniffled but hadn’t worked up to a full-blown howl and was now almost content to clamber up into her mother’s lap, still clasping the long-eared pup to her chest. And the cradled babe (trained to stealthiness, perhaps, by a visiting Muskogee or Seminolee Indian) had gurgled back to drowsiness. “Find our other missing people, too.”

  “Missin’, d’ye say, then? Missin’? Missin’ how, sir?” Jugg’s woman warily enquired. “Hesh up, now, Tess,” she urged her girl.

  Lewrie, daring to step up onto the gallery, even to drag up a second equally rickety chair and seat himself, fanning away the tropic heat and the many insects with his hat, explained about the missing prize ship and the hands he had left aboard to safeguard her.

  “La, arrah,” the woman said at last with a weary sigh. “Tess, cooshlin’. Jump down an’ see t’yer brother. An’ mind yer puppy don’ make in th’ house. Nor get in th’ cradle an’ smither ‘im.”

  She waited ’til the little girl had slid down from her lap and had toddled off inside, dried her eyes for good and all with the hem of her apro
n, then heaved a long, bitter sigh and stared outwards, unfocussed, on her meagre acreage.

  “Be mortal-cairtain yer sins’ll find ye out,” she whispered.

  “Ma’am?” Lewrie gently asked, sure that the woman would confess Jugg’s whereabouts, did he play his cards right a little longer.

  “Pore Toby, arrah,” she muttered with another long sigh. “All ‘is work and sweat… all ‘is good intentions. I told him, I did… I pleaded with ‘im not t’go back t’sea. For sure, I knew in me bones, somethin’ bad’d happen, and did it not right enough, Cap’m Lewrie? We could o’ got by, we could o’ made some sort o’ crop, e’en did we hire out, th’ both of us, but ‘e wouldn’t hear of it. Took all o’ his savin’s an’ earnin’s t’get this wee parcel, an’ Toby’d not abide the idee o’ losin’ it, he didn’t, so sure he traipsed down t’Bridgetown an’ got hisself signed aboard a Yankee brig. Th’ last night, ‘e tol’ me they was summat queer ‘bout her, but they’d give him the two-crown advance he asked f’r, an’ what they call a ‘lay’ o’ th’ profits that sounded handsome. Toby thought ’twas a slaver, I thought she might o’ been a privateer,” Mrs. Jugg or Hosier said with a half-amused shrug.

  “The smuggling brig we took in the Danish Virgins, aye,” Lewrie stuck in, in hopes to keep her reminiscing. “You received his Bounty guinea, I take it?”

  “Aye, and sore welcome it was, for it cleared us o’ taxes, an’ went a fair way t’payin’ th’ vicar’s tithe,” the woman said brightly. “Covered th’ storekeeper’s ledger … crop t’crop, season t’season?”

  Whatever surname she went by, Jugg’s woman had at one time been a tolerably fetching wench, Lewrie judged. She was going stout, after two children, but had the sly eye and vixenish, sway-hipped carriage of a bouncy Irish sort; dark, frazzled red-auburn hair, snappy green eyes, high, merry cheekbones, and a wide and generous mouth. In the Caribbean, she was quite the catch for a man of Jugg’s social position.