A King's Trade (50 page)

“Oh, probably,” Lewrie muttered, still fuming. “One gets about. Who knows…worse things happen at
sea.
Burgess, my apologies, but I must cut things short. Things t'see to aboard ship, you understand.”

“And we didn't even get to the main courses, ah well,” Burgess replied, sobering at last as he sprang back from the rail to face him. “In point of fact, here comes your soup and such.”

“Hate t'waste good victuals, but I must,” Lewrie told him, digging for his purse to repay him in part, but Burgess waved his offer away.

“I'll sample a bit of everything, and call it a feast,” Burgess told him. “Perhaps we'll find time enough for a drink or two, before we sail?”

“Of course we shall,” Lewrie promised him, gathering up his hat and sword from their own abandoned table. “Failing that, though, allow me to offer to treat
you
to yer first English supper, once we're back home. We'll go up to London and make a whole night of it, hey?”

“Come to think of it, we'll do both,” Burgess brightened. “And, we may bore each other to tears with our war-stories.”

“Looking forward to it,” Lewrie promised as he clapped his hat on his head and squared it away. “For now, though…
adieu.”

He got to the red-shuttered tavern by the piers and began hunting for a rowboat to hire to take him out to
Proteus,
but, to his utter astonishment, found not one but two gigs waiting at the foot of the wooden stairs that led down to the floating landing stage: a strange gig painted green and picked out with white stripes with a Midshipman just debarking from it, and…his own gig, with his tars and Cox'n Andrews in it. The sight of it made him pause halfway down the narrow stairs as the Midshipman was coming up.

“Pardons, sir,” the lad said, backing down to the landing stage to make way for a senior officer. He doffed his hat as Lewrie finished his descent. “Uhm… might you be Captain Lewrie, of the
Proteus
frigate, sir?”

“I am,” Lewrie replied, at which discovery the strange Midshipman beamed, and reached into his coat to an inner pocket, from which he withdrew a folded-over sheet of paper. “Midshipman Hedgepeth, Captain Lewrie, of HMS
Jamaica,
out yonder?” the boy added, with a sweep of his hat towards the bay, and the anchored 64-gunner. “Captain Leatherwood extends to you his utmost respects, sir, and requests that you attend him aboard, at your earliest convenience. I gather, sir, that
Proteus
will join our ship to escort the East India convoy homeward? And…”

“Thank you, Mister Hedgepeth,” Lewrie replied as he took hold of the
letter, swallowing the impatience he felt with another intrusion into what was already a tempestuous day. “Since my own gig seems so readily available…
surprise,
that …” he added, lifting a leery eyebrow at Andrews, who stood beside the boat, “it seems I may manage mine own conveyance to see your captain, this minute. Do you wait a moment, though.”

“Of course, sir,” Hedgepeth said, doffing his hat once more as Lewrie brushed past him.

“You made quick work of it, Andrews,” Lewrie said, standing at his gig's side. “Out to
Proteus
and back so soon. I
said
I'd engage a bumboatman….”

“Ah, beggin' yah pardon, Cap'm sah, but…we didn't go out to th' ship, sah, not egg-zackly…” Andrews waffled.

“And whyever did you net?” Lewrie harshly snapped.

“Dat Mizz Yew …de Russian gal, sah?” Andrews tried to explain, all but wringing his doffed straw hat in his hands. “She tell us it'd be bettah fuh Rodney was de
circus
surgeon t'see to ‘im, Cap'm sah. We got ‘im heah to de piers, but she an' dhem circus people jus' ‘bout
took
Rodney, sayin' Navy Surgeons don' know nothin' ‘bout men who got clawed up so bad, an'
dheir
‘saw-bones' handle such ever' day, sah.”

“And you just…
let ‘em?”
Lewrie barked. “Mine arse on a…!”

A good rant would have felt so
damned
fine, but right after he drew in a deep breath for his first “broadside,” Lewrie shut his lips with an audible “plop.”

When they had handed little Rodney down from that Boer waggon, the lad had been shirtless, for the first time in Lewrie's memory, and he had
seen
the old whip scars that his former masters, the Beaumans on Jamaica, had cut into him. And Lewrie had felt queasy to think that he would have had to, under the rigid requirements of the Articles of War when dealing with recaptured deserters, put Rodney to the gratings for several dozen lashes. He would have had no other choice, else his men would have gotten the idea that he was softer on his “Black Pets” than his other crewmen; that he could wink at desertion; that he was turning into a “Popularity Dick,” or a soft touch! Lewrie couldn't think of a
better
way to split his crew into grumbling factions, and destroy what
esprit
they had. Without fear of consequences… without fear of
him…
he would lose
all
his authority, and his officers, warrants, petty officers, and midshipmen would lose theirs along with him.

Might be best, after all,
Lewrie grimly told himself, knowing that allowing this to stand only
delayed
what he'd
have
to do.

“Uhm …” Lewrie grunted, instead. “Might be something
to
that, Andrews. I doubt either Mister Hodson, or Mister Durant, has ever run across a lion's clawing…and the sepsis sure to follow such. Very well, we'll leave him
aboard the
Festival…
for a short time at the least…to see what their surgeon may do for him.”

“Aye, sah!” his Cox'n cried with both relief and pleasure, and Lewrie could
hear
the tension whooshing out of his tense boat crew.

“Return to the ship,” Lewrie ordered.
“Jamaica
's gig may bear me out to her, and back aboard
Proteus
once we're done. My respects to Mister Langlie, and he is to see that our injured men in the cottage up above the bay, along with Mister Durant and his sick-berth attendants, are fetched back aboard.”

“I tell him, sah,” Andrews replied, knuckling his brow.

“Mister Hedgepeth?” Lewrie called, whirling about. “Might you indulge me with a boat ride out to your ship?”

H
MS
Jamaica
was a hard-worked ship and looked it as Lewrie was rowed to her starboard entry-port, noting the much-faded paintwork on her side, the dribbles of tar and oakum showing between the outermost planking of her gunwales and bulwarks. A laconic rural American would have said of her that “she'd been rode hard, and put up wet,” Lewrie could imagine. If there had been shiny gilt to brighten her, it had been worn off long before; and it appeared that there wasn't enough of a supply of linseed oil, tar, or pitch to spruce up her hull to Navy standards, especially the standards of admirals closer to Europe. But, Lewrie also noted that
Jamaica
's yards were mathematically squared, her standing and running rigging well set up and tautly blocked or belayed. Her gun-ports stood open for a cooling breeze on both decks, red paint faded, too, on the inboard faces, but the cannon muzzles' tompions were still bright, and every piece squatted in the same exact position as its mate. Up alongside,
Jamaica
's boarding battens, main-chain platform, and dead-eyes for the main-stays were sound, and her man-ropes strung shallowly through the outboard ends of the batten steps were white and fresh, served with Turk's Head knots. The battens were clean, sanded, though the two-decker's waterline was a gently waving garden of weed, despite her coppering.

And, despite her obvious long and hard service, Lewrie could, on his way up to the starboard gangway, note that the smell of her that wafted from those opened gun-ports on both decks wasn't the reeky fug that one could expect aboard such a small line-of-battle ship, crewed by several hundred men pent in
such close quarters for so long, either. Her captain surely put a great stock in cleanliness, Lewrie imagined.

He attained the gangway, taking the salute from clean and well-dressed Marines and sailors, from hands scattered about her decks who doffed shiny black tarred hats, pausing from their labours for a bit.

“Lewrie, of the
Proteus
frigate,” he said to a sober, gangly officer. “Your captain requested me to attend him, and why waste time on notes back and forth.”

“Of course, Captain Lewrie,” the man replied. “Welcome aboard, sir. Allow me to name myself. Suddarth…First Lieutenant.”

“Glad t'make your acquaintance, Lieutenant Suddarth.”

“I will inform Captain Leatherwood you've come aboard, sir. He is aft, at the moment …” Lt. Suddarth offered, but such task was not necessary, for his own captain emerged from his great-cabins beneath the poop to the aft end of the quarterdeck, still shrugging his way into a rather shabby undress coat and hat, without summons. Suddarth made the introductions as Leatherwood approached.

“Yer servant, sir,” Lewrie said, doffing his hat in salute.

“And welcome you are, Captain Lewrie,” Leatherwood genially said in reply, waving an arm aft in invitation. “Do join me in my cabins, where we may get down to business, sir.”

Capt. Leatherwood's private quarters were a lot more spacious than Lewrie's, the painted canvas deck chequer as bright as the true tile that it imitated. Only 6-pounders marred its interior to give it a martial air. And, whilst his deal partitions and panelling gleamed with paint or polish, Leatherwood's furnishings were rather plain and spartan, and well-used. Instead of a formal interview with Leatherwood seated behind his desk, and Lewrie in a chair before it, he was led to a folding settee on the larboard side of the day-cabin, with Capt. Leatherwood taking a padded wood-frame chair on the other side of the ivory-inlaid low table between, which rested on a brass-trimmed ebony folding frame. The small carpets which livened both the day-cabin and the dining-coach were of a set, both of Hindoo manufacture, and most-likely bargains obtained in Bombay or Calcutta. Within a few breaths, a cabin servant in nattily tailored sailors' togs appeared with a tray that held a bottle of hock, and two short-stemmed glasses.

“I trust you don't mind hock, Captain Lewrie,” Leatherwood said with an easy smile on his weathered face, “but I've always been partial to white wines, ‘stead of claret. This one's what the Germans call the
spaetlese
variety. A touch sweet, but spicy. And, we will
not
ask how it was exported past the French, hmm?”

“Honoured, sir,” Lewrie replied as he accepted a glass and took an appreciative sip, liking it rather well. Appreciative, too, of Capt. Leatherwood's welcome. Many captains senior to him, he'd found,
would
play their little games of self-importance, forcing him to wait on the quarterdeck in foul weather, or stand and stew before their desks while they pretended to frown sternly over charts or paperwork, kneading their brows as if the war's turning hinged completely on them, alone. Others, Lewrie thought with a hidden grimace, who knew him, would act much the same, but their motive was mostly personal dislike!

Leatherwood
looked
to be a pleasant sort. He was about an inch taller than Lewrie, in his early fourties or so, sunburned to a mellow colour by years under tropic skies, care-worn and over-worked, but with merry brown eyes. He wore his own hair, with a short beribboned queue atop his collar, his hair salt-and-pepper and receding at his temples; slimly framed, and perhaps the victim of some tropic illness, for his uniform fit rather looser than his tailor might have originally sewed it.

“Quite good,
and
spicy,” Lewrie adjudged.

“The Cape Squadron informs me that your frigate is free to join me,” Leatherwood began, after a few sips of his own, and a shift in his chair to a more comfortable nigh-slouch. “Haven't much to spare, else. They also told me you've just finished some repairs? Ready for sea?”

“In all respects, sir,” Lewrie assured him, giving Leatherwood a thumbnail sketch of the convoy battle, his rudder problems, his reduced and altered gun battery, along with being a few hands short.

“Sounds about as good as we can expect,” Capt. Leatherwood said with a resigned grunt and nod. “I should have six hundred and fifty-odd aboard
Jamaica,
but what with sickness, accidents, and desertions, we're about fifty people short, as well. And, badly in need of refit. You noted my ‘decorative water garden' as you came alongside, sir?”

“Your, ah…weed, sir?” Lewrie agreeably said.

“Damned tropics,” Leatherwood said with a sigh. “The seas are so rich with marine growth, and whatever they feed upon, that I might as well have dunged and fertilised, deliberately. Four years, we have spent out here, Captain Lewrie. Saint Helena to Calcutta or Bombay, and back again, with but two careenings when we could be spared to fire and scrape her clean in all that time. Too few warships, too much of a threat from the French, too many convoys, and never enough time off.