Mr. Maurice Durant, the ship’s Surgeon, a rather laconic French emigre finally promoted from Surgeon’s Mate (it helped to be a Protestant Huguenot), had made a guarded comment about Capt. Lewrie’s pending legal troubles anent some dozen “stolen” slaves, seven of whom still survived among Savage’s crew, which resulted in an equally cautious discussion of the how and the when of the matter. And, whether their captain might remain captain for very much longer, or might be relieved to face trial in London, and where would they be, then?
Lt. Urquhart was struck by how fond the others seemed to feel about Capt. Lewrie, despite the notoriety attached to him, the tracts and pamphlets put out by the Abolitionists, and the lurid accounts in the newspapers. The seeming depth of their feelings went beyond the usual dread of serving under a new captain of unknown abilities, temperament, or aggressiveness that might not be equal to Lewrie’s when it came to seeking action, glory, or prize-money. Quite expectedly, they would fear dull, humdrum service or anything that took the gloss off the reputation they had made in HMS Proteus.
Some of it, Urquhart suspected, was the comfort of “old shoes,” and “better the devil you know . . .,” along with their rightful pride.
Together so long, Savage’s wardroom did not exactly follow the traditional narrow strictures on table conversation, either. Captains and senior officers usually were never discussed, except in the most careful, praiseful way. Their foibles and idiosyncracies, “warts and all,” were definitely off-limits, but . . . Savage’s officers knew their captain extremely well by then, and seemed to take a perverse pride in his . . . weaker moments.
A glass more than he’d planned to imbibe had fuzzled Urquhart’s wits just enough to mangle his attempt to quash such improper nattering. It came out as “Well, I dare say that Captain Lewrie has made himself a fair name in the Fleet.” Said with a sober face, at least, and with the merest hint that they treaded on taboo territory as his brow furrowed. “Such is not, usually, a thing junior officers should bandy about. I will allow, however, that I am not cognisant of every deed which has created such a sterling reputation. I was right proud to receive orders into Savage as First Officer, and . . . when I learned that Captain Lewrie commands her, I did, indeed, say to myself, ‘Aha, I’ve heard of him,’ and thought myself quite fortunate . . . as I gather that you gentlemen feel, about serving under him. Though I cannot say that I knew much beyond the fact that I had heard the Captain’s name mentioned at one time or t’other. Whatall have you and the Captain done in your old ship, then? What are the high-water marks you might recall?”
It was off to the races after that.
Alan Lewrie had always been reckoned an extremely lucky fellow, Urquhart was rather eagerly informed by Lt. Adair, the Second Officer, a dark and curlyhaired Scot; by the Third Officer, Mr. D’arcy Gamble, who had been an “upwards of twenty” and capable Midshipman aboard HMS Proteus ‘til their last battle in the South Atlantic off the coast of Africa; by the elegant Marine officer, Lt. Blase Devereux; by Mr. Durant the Surgeon; and by the Purser, the prim little Mr. Coote. Even Sailing Master Mr. Winwood, a most taciturn and sober-sided fellow of the new “Strenuous Christian” bent, lauded cautious praise for Capt. Lewrie . . . though with some reservations anent his “extra-curricular” activities.
Lucky, aye, reckoned so by fellow officers, and especially so by the people who shipped “before the mast,” from the lower deck, for hadn’t Lewrie been blessed with a geas in the Bay of Biscay when he’d captained HMS Jester way back in ‘94? Why, ‘twas rumoured that seals—hundreds of miles from any beach!—had come alongside and spoken to Commander Alan Lewrie at the end of a sea burial of a Midshipman of Cornwall who might’ve, might’ve mind, been born a selkie, one of those ancient cursed souls who had angered the mythic, half-forgotten Celtic sea-god, Lir, and were doomed to live lives in the sea as seals, crying for a life on land, then shedding their skins and becoming human just long enough to suffer longings for a life in the sea, ‘til the end of time. Silly, pagan, and heretical, but Cornish and Irish tars walked in awe of Lewrie as one of Lir’s blessed, to this very day. And how hellish-odd it was that they’d heard other officers eerily recall the barking of seals whenever HMS Jester needed an omen of danger ahead!
Lucky in battle, and in prize-money, too, Lewrie was. How had he gotten Jester in the first place? He’d been First Lieutenant into HMS Cockerel, but had ended up seconded ashore—or in charge of a captured French mortar boat, some had heard tell—during the siege of Toulon in ‘93, and had been captured by the bastard Frog Napoleon Bonaparte himself when the mortar vessel blew up, but saved by Spanish cavalry. Blown sky-high, but lived! There’s luck for you.
Days before the evacuation of the First Coalition forces, he’d been put in charge of a leaky, half-armed French frigate, barely manned and crammed with French Royalist refugees. Chased down by a squadron of two corvettes and a frigate, Lewrie’d not only held his own, but hammered one corvette to ruin, then swung cross the bows of the next, boarded her with a scratch assault force of British soldiers and refugee Frenchmen, and took her for his own!
His patron at the time, Vice-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, had made Lewrie a Commander once back at Gibraltar, and re-named her HMS Jester ‘stead of Sans Culottes or something revolutionary.
“No, wasn’t Sans Culottes,” Lt. Gamble chortled. “The way that I heard it was, there were some japes ‘bout how ridiculous some of the French warships’ names were, and Captain Lewrie said that it would not do to have an HMS ‘Bare-Arsed’ in the Fleet, and Admiral Hood thought him too much a wag, and called hex Jester as his own little joke.”
Despite the impropriety of such talk, Lt. Urquhart found that he was quite intrigued—perhaps half a bottle of claret over, but intrigued—and even essayed an appreciative little chuckle, which only encouraged them, for this was miles beyond the usual carefully written official after-action accounts sent to Admiralty and printed in the Marine Chronicle and the Gazette.
Lewrie and Jester had been a terror to the French during the First Italian Campaign, when Napoleon had routed and annihilated the Genoese, Piedmontese, and Savoian armies, and had defeated the might of Austria, too. Raids along the coasts, shelling the few roads that could support supply waggons, capturing coastal shipping, which bore the bulk of French supplies; routing and reaping French vessels sent to support their army on Corsica against British invasion.
“Though I did hear that he did something that angered Nelson, who was in overall command,” Lt. Adair said with a puzzled shrug of incomplete knowledge. “Made him kick furniture and swear, one time, or more.”
“Went ashore and shot some Frenchman he was pursuing, someone told me,” Lt. Gamble offered. “Got caught up in the battle that ran the whole Austrian army twenty miles in a perfect panic, ‘fore noon, but got back to the coast and was picked up by one of our boats that wasn’t even looking for him. Speak of Captain Lewrie’s good fortune!”
“Why, that fellow he shot was the very same Guillaume Choundas we dealt with in the Caribbean,” Adair added. “Shot his arm clean off with that Ferguson breech-loading rifle, from two hundred yards away, or better. Choundas was in charge of all the privateers working out of the isle of Guadeloupe, and ‘twas his frigate we battered to kindling right in the harbour of Bas-Terre before she could get a way on. And that Captain Choundas, the ugly bastard, well . . .’tween the American Revolution and the French’un, Choundas and the Captain crossed hawses somewhere in the Far East, too. We put paid to that ogre . . . even if the Americans did end up capturing him.”
“But ‘twas the Captain’s doing, Mister Adair,” Mr. Winwood stuck in, “that we cooperated so closely . . . yet so carefully . . . with the new American Navy during their brief little not-quite-a-war with the French back in ‘98. Bless me, but we led the Yankee Doodles out of English Harbour, right to that French arms convoy bound for Saint Domingue, and Choundas’s clutch of warships and privateers, too.”
“Don’t forget Saint Vincent,” Lt. Devereux said, after he’d topped up his port and passed it leftwards down the table. “Jester, I’d heard, was on her way home with despatches, in need of a refit at the time, when she stumbled into Admiral Jervis’s fleet. Think of it, Mister Urquhart . . . Nelson in HMS Captain, with the Culloden, daunting a whole wing of the Spanish fleet, up against two-decker, three-decker ships of the line, and the Santissima Trinidad, the world’s only four-decker, before they could assail the rear of our fleet. And, right by their side was Captain Lewrie, and HMS Jesterl A Sixth Rate, by Heaven, which had no business engaging anything bigger than her, especially not a ship of the line, blazing away with her nine-pounders and drawing the fire of the world’s biggest warship!”
“Captain’d tell ye different,” Mr. Winwood countered, coming as close as he might to an outright laugh. “I mentioned it once whilst we dined, and he swore that Jester was just sailing along alee of Nelson, minding her own business, and acting as a signals-repeating ship, but Nelson suddenly wheeled out of line and nigh would have rammed Jester amidships, had she not hauled her own wind and come about as well. As the Captain told it, it was ‘ram you, or damn you’ . . . that Jester and he were pushed, and courage had nothing to do with it. He did fire on the Santissima Trinidad, since it seemed the thing to do, but that she was far out of range of Jester’s guns, and far out of range of her own, and why the Dons would waste an entire four-deck broadside on his wee ship, he still has no idea. Took ‘em a month to re-load and run out.”
“But Admiral Jervis thought it brave,” Lt. Adair said. “That’s why the Captain wears the gold medal for the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent. Told he was daft as bats, in point of fact, and not to do that sort of thing again, but he did put his name forward for the medal.”
“After that . . . before it, I can’t quite recall,” Lt. Gamble said with a frown of concentration, “Jester was in the Adriatic with a small squadron. A few months before ‘Old Jarvy’ had to fall back on Gibraltar and abandon the Mediterranean. Oh! That was definitely during Napoleon’s Italian Campaign, and the French badly needed Adriatic oak to build new warships, or repair the ones they still had, and the Captain went through their merchantmen like a hot knife through butter. Fought a vicious pack of local pirates . . . Serbian or something . . . to save a bunch of English men and women. Got lured ashore by them, and almost lost his life before his First Lieutenant got leery, and sent a Marine party ashore. The pirates had taken a Venetian ship, just full of Catholics and ‘White Muslims,’ whom they hated worse than anything, and were simply butchering, for fun, ‘fore the Captain got there. That is where Captain Lewrie met Mistress Theoni Connor, widow of a man in the Ionian Islands’ currant trade, and, ahem . . . well, saved her, and her little boy’s, life. The pirates put her up for auction, and the Captain bought time by bidding her price up, I heard.”
Lt. Urquhart raised a brow over that’un, for, while he was not a rakehell, and had been raised in a strict but loving, religiously observant home, still and all, he was a young man of all his parts, and not averse to a “run ashore,” so long as precautions were taken, and pleasures could be taken discreetly. That was one incident that he’d heard about Capt. Lewrie. A Greek woman, a hellish-fetching widow, rich as King Croesus off the currant trade, and Britons’ insatiable desire for them, who lived so flambouyantly in London, had had a child out of wed-lock with a Navy officer, was his mistress during the time he was ashore . . . ? Capt. Alan Lewrie’s name had been linked to her, and the boy-child was, so he’d heard, named Michael Alan Connor! Aha!
“Theoni Kavares Connor, the one you mean, sir?” he asked the only-slightly-discomfited Lt. Gamble. “She and the Captain . . . ?”
“Aye, that’s the one,” Lt. Adair supplied. “She came down to Sheerness and took shore lodgings, once Proteus was repaired after the Battle of Camperdown, and got orders for the West Indies. The Captain did, ah . . . spend a night or two ashore, but . . .”
“Long before that, just as Proteus was fitting out, just before the Nore Mutiny, well . . .,” Mr. Winwood intoned, and heaved a deep sigh. “Now, foolish as it sounds, there was something fey about her, too, a . . . Celtic, pagan thing that was extremely odd and . . . disturbing.”
“Tell it me,” Lt. Urquhart asked of him, even more intrigued.
The Mutiny at the great naval anchorage of the Nore, which was much more dangerous and rebellious against King and Country than ever the more respectful Spithead Mutiny had been, had begun just as demands had been fulfilled among the Channel Fleet. Lewrie had just been “Made Post” into HMS Proteus, fresh from the private yards at Chatham, where she had first tasted water under another captain, and the manner of her launching had, as Mr. Winwood had said, been extremely odd.
The Admiralty’s chosen name was to be Proteus, a Greek sea-god, but, came the day when the bands, the crowds, the dignitaries, and the Church representatives had turned out for the celebration, a retired Rear-Admiral who, at the moment, had been filled with more brandy than sense, and at the nagging of his myth-laden wife, who had been simply besotted with the newly popular tales published by the blind Irish poet O’Carolan and an host of others, cried out, “Success to his Majesty’s Ship . . . Merlin!” as he hoisted his glass to her and drained it off, just as the last restraining props had been sawn through, and a gasp had arisen, and the band nigh-stumbled to a cacophonous halt.
One simply didn’t name a Protestant Christian King’s ship, one specifically built to kill Catholic Spaniards and atheistic Frenchmen in the most efficient manner, after a pagan wizard and heathen Druid . . . even if Merlin had been such a boon to fabled old King Arthur!
HMS “Merlin” had begun to slide down the greasy ways into the Medway, ‘til another senior officer in better mental takings, and relative sobriety (perhaps one without a termagant wife in tow!), quickly got to his feet, seized a full glass, and corrected things with a loud cry of “Success to His Majesty’s ship Proteusl”
At the instant, the frigate had stuck quite solidly on the ways!
Talk of greater consternation! It was not until an Irish sawyer who’d helped build her, with his little boy at his side, had gone down the slipway and had stood under the ship’s bows, right beside her cutwater; had whispered something to her to this day unknowable, then the wee lad had given her the tiniest shove, more like a love pat, in point of fact, before Proteus/Merlin had given out a soft groan, then had allowed herself to be launched, sliding into the river, as sweet as anything!
Newly “posted” Alan Lewrie was, in fact, her second captain. A bit after her launch, whilst still completing rigging, her first commanding officer and his cousin, her Chaplain, both Anglo-Irishmen landowners in the big way over hundreds of poor Irish cottagers, rowed back from shore one dead-calm night. Not a breath of wind stirred, with not a ripple to disturb the Medway’s surface, yet Proteus had heaved a slow roll starboard, steepening the boarding battens to dead-vertical, and the first captain and her Chaplain and been heard to utter shouts, as both suddenly lost their grips—both were abstemious, and sober as judges, so it was reported later. The Chaplain well . . .
He fell backwards, striking his head on the gunnel of the ship’s boat. He sank out of sight at once, and his body was never found, and, while her first captain had managed to cling to the boarding batten steps, he had claimed that it felt as if the man-ropes had stung him or bit him as hurtful as wasps!
And, not a week after, said captain was found raving and crying in his night-shirt, dashing about the quarterdeck, or cowering in sheer terror in his cabins, swearing that Proteus had murdered his cousin, and was out to kill him, too! Were his family not rich, he could have ended up in Bedlam in London, supplementing his half-pay (it took rather a bit of doing for a senior officer to be struck off the Navy List for any cause other than dropping stone-cold dead in those days!) off the poking-stick and water-squirt concessions offered those who toured the place and wished to stir the inmates up from catatonia.
At that point, enter Capt. Alan Lewrie, lucky, again, to get himself such a fine, spanking-new frigate. Or, so he had thought, for not a fortnight later, Proteus had fallen down the snaking Medway to the Nore anchorage, right into the heart of the Mutiny! One mutineer in particular, whom Lewrie himself had recruited off the receiving ship (he’d turned out to be a former Midshipman Rolston back in 1780, when Lewrie first donned King’s Coat as a “Mid,” a little fiend who had been responsible for a sailor’s death and broken to Ordinary Seaman), stoked Proteus’s own rebellious cabal of mutineers, and had tried to arrange the murder of all her officers, warrants, and gentlemanly Midshipmen.
In the end, Capt. Lewrie, kept from being sent ashore as the other officers and captains were by the rebellious committee, had won enough loyal sailors and Marines to launch a rebellion of his own . . . with the rather embarrassing help from the roughly two dozen prostitutes fetched out to the ship by the bumboatmen-pimps, who’d usually serve as temporary “wives” by sailors with money for their “socket fees,” supporting them on shares of their rations, rum issues, and smuggled spirits. The mutineer committee had declared that all women must stay aboard the rebelling warships, long after the sailors’ last coins had been, spent, so the doxies had been feeling a touch rebellious themselves!
Indeed, HMS Proteus was one of the few warships that had managed to escape, under fire from mutinous ships of the line, to join up with Adm. Duncan’s much-reduced squadron, which kept watch on the Batavian Dutch Republic’s coasts to daunt the Dutch Navy from leaving port to join with a French fleet . . . after dropping off the whores, and those mutineers they’d made prisoners. It had been reckoned notorious that Capt. Lewrie had sent letters to both Admiralty and Parliament asking that the women receive monetary rewards and letters of thanks for the patriotic and courageous aid they’d offered!
The Captain had also sent a note-of-hand to his London solicitor, ordering that each of the prostitutes be paid a more-than-decent sum “for services rendered!” and what the Crown, Society, and Capt. Lewrie’s wife thought of that, well. . . .
And when that Rolston had died, now that was eerie, too . . .
A transfer from Proteus to a coaster they’d met, hired to take prisoners to the authorities at Sheerness; Pvolston coming on deck in chains and shackles, cursing Lewrie for his luck—there it was, again—for how else could one explain how Rolston could swing his cutlass for a killing, beheading blow, but damme if the Captain hadn’t deflected it with his tin penny-whistle! and if the Good Lord, or the pagan sea-god Lir, hadn’t been looking out for him, then please explain it!
Then, when Rolston had started down the boarding battens, with man-ropes in hand, damme if Proteus hadn’t heaved a slow roll to windward, and Rolston had cried out, hands springing open as if something had stung his palms, and had fallen into a round pool of lanthorn light ‘tween both vessels, surfacing one last time, and looking as if he was floating in a circle of odd yellow-green light, as if sinking into the very eye of a great sea-monster, then had seemed to be sucked down, and howling a final shriek of utter horror!
After a collective shudder of recalled awe, the bottle of port made another quick circuit of the table, all of them feeling as dry as dust, of a sudden.
“After that, we played the Dutch a merry jape, sir,” Lt. Devereux of the Marines told Urquhart. “We spent weeks close inshore of the Texel, hoisting false flag signals to the fleet they feared was just over the horizon, and pretending to reply to questions . . . even if Admiral Duncan had barely a handful of old sixty-four gunners present, ‘til the Nore Mutiny was settled, and he was re-enforced.”
Urquhart certainly knew what had happened, once the winds had come fair; the Dutch fleet had sailed, but had been caught upon a lee shore and nearly annihilated, and Proteus, it seemed, had played her own significant part in the battle, engaging a larger Dutch frigate and forcing her to strike after a boarding action. Capt. Lewrie had been seriously wounded in the arm, but had lived. His uncanny luck had held once more, for his arm had not required amputation, as most broken-bone wounds would have done. And that was why the gold medal for the Battle of Camperdown hung on his chest alongside the one for Cape St. Vincent!
Lewrie . . . Mistress Theoni Connor . . . Hyde Park . . . the Captain and his wife, yes! Urquhart suddenly recalled. A hero with his arm in a sling, a wife with a furled umbrella employing it like a sword after seeing her man’s mistress and bastard by-blow at close quarters, making Lewrie hop, duck, and back up briskly! There’d been many salacious snickers in his favourite coffee-house when that tale had been told! He hid his smile as the others touched upon Lewrie’s doings in the West Indies, and Lt. Urquhart once more went wide-eyed.
An outbreak of Yellow Jack, that was why Lewrie had needed the dozen Blacks so badly. Was it before, or after, the Captain’s friend had duelled Ledyard Beauman and slain him, when the Captain had had to shoot Beauman’s second, too? No matter; that was one reason there was so much bad blood. Against the French, though . . . Proteus had swept the north coast of St. Domingue (what the rebel ex-slaves were now calling Haiti) of any shipping larger than a canoe; had captured American arms smugglers; captured, sank, or burned French merchantmen and privateers; had crippled that Choundas fellow’s big, proud frigate as they had already related, and had put paid to that cruel fiend, too!
“And weren’t there seals barking,” Lt. Adair said, with a face full of wonder (and rather red with claret and port), “the night that our boats went ashore to fetch out our Black fellows? Seals in the West Indies have been hunted nigh to extinction, but I swear I heard them, and their splashings, to boot.”
“Some of the lads . . .,” Mr. Coote, the Purser, who had spent the last hour entire in contented and companionable, nodding silence, said. “They swore they saw seals in the water, and even I thought I saw one head, and disturbance in the water. I certainly am sure that I heard them. Mister Langlie’s boat crews . . . our former First, sir . . . vowed that seals swam to either side of their boats on the way back aboard.”
“Saint Nicholas Mole,” Lt. Devereux reminded them.
One of ex-slave General Toussaint L’Ouverture’s armies tried to oust the British Army garrison at the port on the northwest coast, and Proteus had caught a signal asking for help, and had sailed into the roadstead. Close ashore, with the fighting lines hidden in dense forests, Lewrie had sent a signalling party ashore to aid the Army and wig-wag. With their frigate’s guns at extreme elevation, Proteus had fired both solid round-shot and bags of grape-shot, adjusting according to the shore party’s signal flags, and allowing their own troops to fall back behind a screen of plunging shot and re-form their lines, and, in the process, decimating the slave army. With springs on her cables, Proteus had swung in a wide arc, firing off nearly all of her grape-shot, cartridge flannels, and a whole tier of powder casks from morning ‘til sunset, saving the port, and the British garrison in the process!
“And those French Creole pirates,” Lt. Adair suggested with a wry shake of his head. “Had we been quicker about it, there’d have been nigh a million pounds sterling in silver captured, not a mere two hundred thousand!”
“Barataria Bay, d’ye mean?” Lt. Urquhart cried. “Aye, I read of that’unl” Courageous sea-fights, prize-money, and slews of captured enemy specie brought in had ever caught his eye in the Marine Chronicle . . . especially since Lt. Urquhart had never even come within hailing distance of anything so adventurous, or profitable . . . yet. Though, under Capt. Alan Lewrie, it sounded better odds that he could be part of such glorious doings. And reaping the monetary benefits.
“Mad as hatters, the lot of them,” Lt. Gamble said with a sniff. “Rich, bored young grandees, none older than me or Adair, there, but determined to seize Louisiana back from the Spanish and turn it over to France again. And the way they tried to finance their rebellion was to turn pirate!”
“Play-actors,” Lt. Adair sneered. “Murderous, cold-blooded, and capricious little bastards. And one bitch.”
“Stole a prize of ours, as far abroad as Dominica!” Lt. Gamble continued. “Marooned the hands of her Harbour Watch on the Dry Tortugas . . .’cause they’d yet to do a marooning, so please you! Laughed and hooted, our sailors said once they’d been rescued, like it was a grand game. One shot our Midshipman Mister Burns . . . poor tyke . . . just to try his hand at long range, and it took him three days to die. Well, we made them pay, when we finally ran them to earth. Slew the lot of them. ‘Twas only the girl that got away, and she nearly slew the Captain for revenge . . . for scotching their plans.”
“Why are foiled plots always ‘scotched’?” Scot Lt. Adair carped.
“ ‘Cause you Scots plot so bloody much!” Lt. Devereux hooted.
“Per’aps it was more ze wrath of a woman scorned, and betrayed, than mere revenge, sirs,” Surgeon Mr. Durant slyly suggested, wreathed in a cloud of smoke from his clay pipe. “N’est-ce pas? After all, ze Captain ‘ad made her acquaintance in New Orleans before rejoining ze ship.”
“In New Orleans?” a puzzled Urquhart gawped. “But that’s more than an hundred miles up the Mississippi, in Spanish Louisiana!”
“Foreign Office doings, that,” Mr. Winwood heavily said, with a sage tap aside his nose. “The Captain, I gather, has been involved with their agents several times during his career. Something in the Far East ‘tween the wars, something that involved that Choundas chap . . . again in the Mediterranean, I heard, when in Jester. It might’ve involved Choundas, again. In the West Indies, a pair of Foreign Office agents spent rather a long time aboard Proteus, that James Peel especially. The Captain was temporarily supplanted in command by a more senior Captain Nicely, and sent to New Orleans in civilian disguise as a cashiered British officer looking for employment on the Mississippi, with just a small party of our sailors . . . three of whom proved false in the end, and ran . . . guarded by a merchant agent from the Panton, Leslie Company, who was half a spy himself.”
“Charite de Guilleri, she was,” Devereux stuck in. “And a most hellish-fetching wench of nineteen years or so. The Captain managed to meet her, her brothers and cousins, who were all in on it, and . . . I gather that he and she even might have conducted an, ah . . . liaison for a time, before they set off on their last foray, and he rejoined the ship.”
“I’m certain that the Captain would not have, ah . . .,” Winwood grumbled with a blush. The others smirked at the Sailing Master and his squeamishness; which led Lt. Urquhart to reckon that his Captain was a man of many parts!
“Saw her only the once, myself,” Marine Lieuterent Devereux said with a rather wistful expression. “When we assaulted their camp, on Grand Isle. Standing atop an ancient Indian burial mound or something . . . chestnut hair flowing in the breeze, dressed mannish, in breeches and boots . . . and shooting at us with a Girandoni air-rifle.”
“And all honours to Lieuterent Devereux and his Marines, and late Lieutenant Catterall and his party of sailors, for conquering them,” the Purser cried, which made them pound fists on the wardroom table.
“A toast, gentlemen . . . to Mister Catterall,” Devereux called for. “To ‘Bully,’ God rest him,” he added when all the glasses were charged. And they drank in remembrance of their old companion.
“The Captain boarded one of their schooners and slew one of the older pirate leaders, sword to sword,” Lt. Adair narrated, after the port bottle had made another round. “Then, took off in a native boat after the wench, and he almost closed with her, too, before she shot him. Right in the centre of his chest!”
“Shot him?” Lt. Urquhart marvelled, a tad wall-eyed, by then. “In the centre of his chest, and he lived} Surely, sir, you’re not saying that his . . . what’d ye call it? . . . his geas for good fortune made him bullet-proof?”
“All she did was knock him flat, and make a bruise as big as a mush-melon,” the Surgeon, Mr. Durant, said with a wry chuckle.
“Fortunately for the Captain, the butt-flask of compressed air which provides the motive force was nearly spent,” Lt. Devereux related, with a chuckle of his own. “I put it down to extreme good fortune, no more, Mister Urquhart, for, had Mademoiselle de Guilleri had a spare flask, we’d have lost him, certain.”
“You should have been there to see the pirates’ captured Spanish treasure ship explode, sir!” Lt. Adair told Urquhart. “She took light somehow, as she drifted off, and when her powder magazine went up, she was blown to kindling. And God knows how many new-minted silver coins went flying sky-high . . . bright as a royal fireworks, and plopping in the bay in a circle a mile across, and lost forever!”
“After that, ‘twas a rather, dull year, though.” Gamble frowned. “Off to Halifax last summer with despatches . . .”
He was interrupted by the lone chime of One Bell in the Evening Watch—half past eight, leaving them another half hour before a call for Lights Out at nine, observed in harbour or at sea.
“. . . a partial refit, and a full re-coppering, there,” Gamble went on. “To Portsmouth, then orders to join the escort of an East India Company trade.”
“We might have gone as far as Bombay, Calcutta, or Canton, but for getting our rudder shot clean off by a French frigate one night off Cape Town,” Adair supplied with a pouty look. “Though we did touch at Recife and Saint Helena on the way, and that was enjoyable.”
“And there was the circus,” Lt. Gamble said with a twinkle.
“Circus?” Urquhart, by then rather bleary, enquired, at a loss once more.
“Why, Mister Daniel Wigmore’s Travelling Extravaganza, sir!” Lt. Adair replied. “Surely, you’ve heard of it, the most famous circus in all the British Isles!”
“Circus, menagerie of exotic beasts, and theatrical troupe, in one,” Lt. Gamble happily mused. “Comedies, dramas, aerial acts, knife throwers, dancing bears, and lion taming . . . clowns, mimes, and bareback riders. Some barer than others, hmm?” He leered.
“Oh, ‘Princess’ Eudoxial” Adair gaily joined in. “Bow and arrows, and never missed, standing bareback, from under the belly of her huge white stallion, facing aft like a Parthian, what a wonder she was!”
“Billed as Scythian, Circassian royalty, but really a Roosian Cossack,” Gamble stated with equal enthusiasm. “An absolutely stunning, dark-haired beauty, slim and tall, with the most cunning long legs, in skin-tight breeches, knee-high moccasin boots, a corsety thing, and see-through gauze . . . what-ye-may-call-it long shirt. And wasn’t she hot after the Captain! Threw herself at him . . .’til she learned he was married, o’ course.”
“He did pick up a smattering of Roosian, though.” Adair leered suggestively. “Curse-words, mostly, from that vicious old lion tamer father of hers.”
“Their slow old tub, the Festival, was bound for Cape Town to capture new beasts, and attached itself to our convoy on our way for Recife,” Lt. Devereux explained. “She sailed with our home-bound trade, too, once we’d replaced our rudder and set the ship to rights, and was there the night we fought and made prize of the L ‘Uranie frigate. The second Frenchman went after the slowest ship in the convoy . . . the Festival . . . but, when they tried to board her, they ran into a hornet’s nest of trained, bears, baboons, and a loosed lion. Knife throwers, sharpshooters, and Mistress Eudoxia’s bow and arrows, too. The Frogs were so terrified, they tumbled back aboard their ship and sheered off, just as the other escort, the old Jamaica sixty-four, got about and closed with them, and I doubt they fired more than a single broadside for honour’s sake before they struck, as well.
“Why, Wigmore’s Circus received Thanks of the Crown, Thanks of Parliament and ‘John Company,’ and even did a command performance for King George,” Devereux said with a laugh, “and now Wigmore’s future is made forever. I must own surprise, Mister Urquhart, that you haven’t heard of them.”
“I was at sea aboard Albion, and out of reach of the papers,” Urquhart had to admit. “Though I did read the official account about Proteus’s defence of the convoy. Well, gentlemen . . .,” he said, with a glance upwards to the stubs of the candles in the overhead lamps, instead of drawing out his pocket-watch. “This had been a most enlightening evening, one which assures me that as Savages First Lieutenant I run no risk of lacking excitement, hey? And I look forward eagerly to whatever new adventures our gallant Captain Lewrie may lead us in future.”
“We will follow him anywhere,” Lt. Gamble said with a taut grin, and his tongue firmly in cheek, “if only to see what he’ll get into, next, ha ha!” Which jest raised a general round of laughter from all the men at-table, but for the dour Mr. Winwood.
“I, ah . . .,” Urquhart flummoxed, his now-fuzzy thoughts put off pace by Lt. Gamble’s smirky comment. “A toast, may I be so bold . . . a last one, for the Captain assured me that tomorrow will be a strenuous day . . . to the gallant Captain Alan Lewrie, and to further Glory and Fame for HMS Savagel”
He raised his glass on high, as did the others, but . . .
“And to ‘Mother’ Green’s best, sirs!” Lt. Devereux amended. “And our Captain’s favourites!”
Urquhart gawped once more, mouth agape for a moment, for Mother Green (God rest her patriotic soul!) had made and sold the finest and safest sheep-gut cundums from the Green Lantern in Half Moon Street in London for years, had come out of retirement at the urging of her old clients when the American Revolution had erupted in 1776 to make “protections” for their officer sons, so they could “rantipole” Yankee Doodle wenches in perfect assurance of safety, too.
Urquhart also blushed, for did he not have a round dozen from that selfsame source, now manufactured by Mother Green’s heirs, down in the bottom of his sea-chest, ‘cause one never knew when the chance might arise . . . not with women of the better sort, certainly, but . . . ?
“The Captain . . . Savage . . . and Mother Green!” he proposed.
“Boat ahoy!” came a muffled cry from the unfortunate Midshipman who stood Harbour Watch in the officers’ stead. The reply could not be made out as they tossed back their last glass-fuls to “heel-taps,” but moments later came the faint thud of a boat coming alongside the entry-port, and at such a late hour, too.