A King's Trade (24 page)

“Milady,” Capt. Cowles soothingly intoned, bent over in a bow worthy of St. James's Palace.

“Good
Captain Cowles,” Lady Treghues cooed back to him, could a vulture
actually
coo, of course! “And
you
must be Captain Alan Lewrie, sir!”

“Milady,” Lewrie rejoined, dipping her an additional bow.

“My husband has told me
all
about
you,
Captain Lewrie,” came a much cooler address. Had she a fan instead of knitting needles, she'd have been whacking it back and forth to fight her “virtuous vapours” like a loose and flagging jib! All that was missing was a scandalised “Hmmph!” and a stamped foot.

“It was my pleasure to serve aboard his ship, milady,” Lewrie replied, rising upright instead of “grovelling” like a Russian serf.

“Hmmph!”

There it is!
Lewrie told himself, now sure that an exasperated stamp would soon come.

“I rather doubt there'll be much visiting ‘tween ships, dear,” Treghues grumpily said, put out that his wife had intruded upon men's business…but seemingly at a loss as to how to prevent it. Perhaps the grey hair in his thinning auburn thatch had come from his wife and her “for his own good” interventions?

“Once the weather calmed, there
has
been, Treghues,” she objected, “supper invitations, and I don't know what all. Surely, do
circus
people,
actresses,
and base, low-born itinerants get a whiff of money to be made off the better sorts we convoy with their sleights of hand, mountebank antics, and…
pick-pocketing,
they'll swarm every ship in a twinkling. Like a Biblical plague of locusts!” she fumed, shifting her knitting needles from Low Guard to Present-Arms.

Lewrie never could make sense of how “loving couples” addressed each other. Commoners' wives might refer to “The Mister,” or cry out their husband's surname to get his attention…perhaps even in the “melting moments” before orgasm! “Oh, Smith, oh, Mister, yes, yes!”?

Calls him Treghues, not Tobias, does she?
Lewrie took quiet note;
And it's
our
convoy,
our
crewmen,
too?
My “husband” or “the captain” says … God spare us!
he thought with a shiver.

Capt. Treghues looked as if he'd like to tell her to mind her own business, put a sock in it, or simply bugger off, but…years in harness with her, years of bleakness, might have
already
daunted what meek remonstrances he'd made… and the wiles she'd used on the poor bastard to make sure he knew just which of them wore the breeches! A quick perusal of the great-cabin's bulkheads and partitions revealed an assortment of “art,” but nothing personal, no children, no portrait of Lady Treghues in her younger days.
Talk of bleak!
Lewrie thought.

“Of course, I will issue a directive that there will be none of that, dearest,” Treghues announced, stiffening his back and lifting his chin, as if to make his surrender to her will seem all noble. “And, it goes without saying that any chicanery or pilferage on the part of the mountebanks will be severely punished, as such crimes would in fact be were they committed on any street in England.”

Good luck with
that, Lewrie amusedly thought;
bored as the passengers and officers aboard the Indiamen already are, t'will be
them
to swarm
Festival.
For a peek at the menagerie, o'course. So educational. As improving as Sunday school, ha!

“Hmmph!,” in a
somewhat
satisfied sniff, was Lady Treghues's conditional comment on that.

“Well, perhaps I should return to
Proteus,
sir, now that that's out of the way,” Lewrie offered. Speaking of offering, no one had yet offered him a glass of
anything,
and he rather doubted they'd trot out the good china and sit him down to supper, in their current snit.

“Yayss,” Capt. Treghues drawled, turning his forbidding gaze in Lewrie's direction once more. “Perhaps you should, Lewrie.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Tomorrow night, though, sir,” Capt. Cowles said as he gathered up his own things preparatory to departing himself. “Let us say about the end of the First Dog, I would admire did you dine aboard my ship,
Canterbury.”

“I should be absolutely delighted, Captain Cowles, thankee very kindly,” Lewrie answered, most pleasantly surprised that
someone
would dine him in, at last. “Should I fetch a brace o' bottles along?”

“No bother, Captain Lewrie,” Cowles most agreeably replied. “We bear a perfectly ample and varied wine cellar aboard, surplus to the passengers' personal stores. I dare say a fresh-butchered roast would go down nicely… with fresh butter and piping-hot rolls baked not a quarter-hour before, hey? Can't beat the victuals of an Indiaman!”

“Before I begin to slaver, sir, let me say that you do me
too
proud,” Lewrie happily told him. “Well, it appears we're both off. Good evening, Sir Tobias, Lady Treghues.”

“Last Sunday, Captain Lewrie …” Lady Treghues said, instead. And Capt. Treghues stiffened in wariness for which bee had got in her bonnet, this time. “We ordered Divine Services, and your frigate was fairly close under our lee. Though, I do
not
recall
Proteus
holding a
proper
service. You lack a chaplain, sir?”

“Now, dearest …” Treghues began, with much “ahemming.”

“We do not, Lady Treghues,” Lewrie told her. “Few ships under the Third Rate ever do. We hold what lay portions of the liturgy as are allowed, without
the presumption of a real chaplain's offices. It would be a touch… sacrilegious to do otherwise, milady.”

“Treghues, this coming Sunday, we simply
must
see that Reverend Proctor is rowed over to them, must we not?” Lady Treghues triumphantly announced.

“Of course, dearest,” he just had to agree.

“Reverend William Wilberforce offered, milady,” Lewrie couldn't help say in parting. “Sadly, we had to depart Portsmouth before a man of his selection could come down from London and come aboard.”

“The Reverend…
Wilberforce?”
Lady Treghues goggled. And it wasn't pretty.

“Proteus
had just come from the Caribbean, milady,” Lewrie said with his tongue firmly in one cheek. “He and I, and Mistress Hannah More and some others, had a long discussion about chattel slavery that I witnessed overseas. The Abolitionist Society, d'ye see. It was very kind of him to offer a chaplain, but…Admiralty would brook no delay…even for the Lord.” he concluded, giving “pious” a good shot.

“I… see!” Lady Treghues intoned, much subdued, and sharing a fretful look with “the captain” of hers.

“Your offer for your Reverend…Proctor, did ye say?…to conduct a proper service aboard is, may I say, equally kind, milady,” Lewrie told her with a reverent bow in
congé,
and a thankful smile that only Treghues, a long-time Navy officer, might recognise as one of Lewrie's “shit-eating” grins. “I quite look forward to it. ‘Til then, I s'pose…
adieu,
all!”

And what they make of that, the Lord only knows!
Lewrie told himself as he stood by the starboard entry-port waiting for a cutter.

“The Abolitionist Society!” Capt. Cowles snickered at his side in the companionable darkness, looking out on the riding lights of the convoy that glittered on a slow-heaving dark ocean. “My
God,
Lewrie, but you're a
proper
caution, hee hee!”

BOOK III

“Fornix tibi et uncta popina incutiunt urbis desiderum, video, et quod anguius iste feret piper et tus ocius uva, nec vicina subest vinum praebere taberna quae possit tibi, nec meretrix tibicina, cuius ad strepitum saiias terrae gravis.”

“'Tis the brothel, I see, and greasy cookshop that stir in you a longing for the city, and the fact that that poky spot will grow pepper and spice, as soon as grapes, and that there is no tavern hard by that can supply you with wine and flute-playing courtesans to whose strains you can dance and thump the ground.”

H
ORACE,
E
PISTLES
I, XIV, 21–26

L
anndd Hhoo!”
the lookout on the mainmast cross-trees high aloft shrilled. And this time it wasn't false. Dark cloud-heads that loomed over the horizon could
appear
solid, and they had been mistaken several times for the tall mountains of St. Helena…just as thunder heads earlier in the voyage had been mistaken for the lonely St. Paul's Rocks, for Cape Roque. One particularly-solid and seemingly-unmoving storm ahead of the trade's course on-passage for Recife had resembled an island so much that
Grafton
had despatched HMS
Chloe
to “smoak” it out, sending her dashing ahead of the convoy, as if Capt. Sir Tobias Treghues might gain undying fame by discovering one of the “long lost” isles described in early Spanish sea-charts, sometimes reported by seafarers ever since…just as “High-Brazil” and its archipelagos were once cartographers' rumours, yet never found where others had reported them. She'd returned hours later, empty-handed.

These hills and mountains were real, though, at long last. They solidified as the convoy butted its slow way towards them against both Trades and current; other clouds scudded
behind
them as they got near, and even at ten miles rough details of rocks and bluffs and greenery (such as it was) could be discerned on barren, windswept St. Helena.

“Almost done,” Lewrie whispered to himself with mounting, yet wary, enthusiasm, as he studied the isle from a perch on the foremast fighting top. “Almost
there!”

Soon to be free of Sir Tobias and Lady Treghues? Pray Jesus! A break in
their long,
very
long passage, and the bulk of the escorting warships would turn about for home. And, was God just,
Proteus
would be one of them.

One more circus performance, then…
! Lewrie thought as he put his brass telescope to his eye. It
was
land, by God; it had to be St. Helena, and not another of those portable mysteries, for this was even in the correct latitude and longitude, for a wonder.

Though he still despised clowns and mimes worse than he ever did cold, boiled mutton, Capt. Alan Lewrie had come to rather like circuses and such. Or, rather,
certain
circus folk.

Recife had been a friendly port, a wondrous place to break their passage, go ashore, and stretch their legs. Well, for “John Company” sailors and paying passengers, for Navy officers or working-parties under the ships' pursers to fetch supplies…but not for Jack tars.

Treghues had ordered his squadron anchored farther out, so that even the strongest swimmers might be daunted from hopes of desertion, with armed and fully-kitted Marines posted at entry-ports, sterns, and bows, round the clock. Once re-victualled, and glutted with firewood and fresh water, Treghues
had
allowed the “Easy” pendants hoisted, the warships put “Out of Discipline” for two whole days and nights;
aboard-ship
liberty, not
shore
liberty, so the local bumboats could swarm out with their wares—shoddy slop-clothing, cheap shoes, exotic parrots and monkeys for sale, fruits and ades, smuggled spirits… and whores.

What had then ensued had not been a pretty sight, and Treghues and his wife and chaplain had taken shore lodgings to spare their finer sensibilities the sights and sounds of the wild ruts that had followed.

Any sailor with the “blunt” could hire a doxy for a tumble, for an hour or so; those who could afford more could declare to the watch officers that his chosen wench was his “wife,” with whom he'd share his food (and whatever extra he could buy from the bumboatmen) and his rum issue with her, plus a fee to her and her “agent” for her loaned charms.