"Very well, Lieutenant Gamble. Seek out Lieutenant Langlie and tell him my decision," Lewrie ordered. "My respects to him, and he is to work you 'til you drop to make both ships fit to sail, again."
"Aye aye, sir," Acting-Lieutenant Gamble said, with sudden pride awakening in his eyes.
"I'll have Andrews see to Mister Larkin, Mister Grace," Lewrie added. "For now, we've need… what?" he asked, feeling a cold chill in his innards as Grace's face screwed up in fresh, shy grief.
"Sorry, sir," Grace all but wailed as he got to his feet. "We saw your man fall. Didn't wish t'be the one t'tell you, sir, but… I s'pose I must. He… was in the main top with the other marksmen and… was shot, and tumbled out, and hit the…" Grace had to pause, and gulp, "the edge of the gangway, sir, and…!"
"He's gone?" Lewrie croaked, suddenly much weaker, and wearier. "Andrews is gone?" All these years, my right-hand man, Cox'n, and…? he thought, squinting his eyes in pain; How many people must I get killed? Strangers, enemies… friends? For he was…
"They… passed him out a starboard gun-port, sir, with the… other dead," Mr. Grace managed to relate. "Sorry, sir. Sorry."
Gone. "Fallen" was the euphemism of the age. It was what was done with Navy casualties in battle. The dead were put over the side, at once, to clear the decks for those who still fought, a brutal necessity to maintain their morale. In many cases, the hopelessly mangled and sure to die were "put out of their misery" by a petty officer with a heavy mallet, then shoved, un-conscious and un-knowing, out the ports, too, as a "mercy" for an old shipmate whom the surgeons couldn't save. It was why the inner sides of the hull, by the guns, were traditionally painted red, as red as fresh-spilled or fresh-splattered blood… in the heat of action, the living might not notice.
Lewrie looked down, not at Larkin, but at a bare patch of deck, willing himself not to weep. Andrews… Matthew Andrews!… a long-time companion, was dead and gone. No matter the gulf between common sailors and officers, how aloof and apart a captain must appear to his hands, Andrews and Aspinall had been his touchstones with reality, a pair of close friends, really, and his loss felt like an abyss, a part of his own years in-company with him, had been cut away and lost. In a way, perhaps it was best that Andrews had been put over the side… best that he was physically gone, for Lewrie didn't think he'd be able to bear to look on many more familiar dead faces. There would surely be enough of them, already.
Blaming himself, too, scathing himself, for Andrews had been the one to go ashore and lead his dozen "Free Black volunteers" aboard the night in Portland Bight on Jamaica when he'd stolen them from one of the Beauman family's plantations… as a cock-snooking lark!
Had he not, would Andrews still live? Without that act, Proteus might still be in the Caribbean, not here, in this hour, engaged with a French frigate of greater firepower. Groome and Bodney might not have run away, were there no circus to lure them, no Africa in which to die. Whitbread, the others, might not be buried at Cape Town.
Yet, had not Andrews run from his own master on Jamaica, first? Bun from the softer chains of a house slave, better fed than the field hands, garbed in wealth-flaunting livery, yet run in spite of all? As the others had run, put everything at risk for a whiff of freedom, even the Royal Navy's harsh version. Andrews, and they, had endured sailors' poverty, plain victuals, and unending, back-breaking work in all sorts of weather, living with the constant risk of death or disablement, the sure coming of rheumatism or arthritis, the sicknesses that arose when hundreds of men were pent together so closely in a foul and reeking wet gun-deck, for… what? To be free men, to live a wild and adventurous life as free deep sea rovers; paid for their suffering, and worthy of their hire! Freely entered into, and, in the Navy, ready to fight the enemy, the ocean itself, to live, and maybe die, free!
"Damme," Lewrie softly spat, raising his head, at last, stiffening his spine after a long, sad sigh. Steeling himself to play-act a role of captain, second only to God. He had two ships to save, perhaps hundreds of men, his own and the enemy's, to succour and tend to, prisoners to keep a wary eye on, and, sometime after the sun rose, another French frigate to be alert for, and possibly fight.
And, he was mortal-certain, the first of many at-sea burials, as early as tomorrow's Forenoon Watch, with more to follow as they sailed into the equatorial heat. There was a convoy to re-join and round back up, should anything have happened to Jamaica . Duty, that grim, demanding bitch, come to call with all her nagsome sisters, would never give a man a moment of his own! There would be a time to grieve Andrews and all his dead… once anchored in a safe harbour.
"Very well, sirs," Lewrie forced himself to rasp, clapping both hands together in the small of his back. "Let's be about it, hmm?"
Stern, now, a facade of grim stoicism back on his face, Lewrie made the shaky crossing back aboard Proteus, though his shuddery limbs threatened to betray him. There was no formal welcome from side-party or bosun's calls, just a bone-weary man clumping awkwardly to the oak planks of the larboard gangway of a shot-to-pieces ship.
"Sir," Sailing Master Winwood said, doffing his hat as he came forward from the quarterdeck, limping from a leg wound upon his right thigh, his breeches cut away to reveal a thick, padded bandage.
"Mister Winwood," Lewrie acknowledged. "Oh. I know." Mr. Winwood held in his hand a coin-silver bosun's call on its chain, Andrews's call, and mark of his post as Coxswain. Crushed… by the musket ball that slew him, or by his fall from high aloft?
"So many, sir," Mr. Winwood said in his usual mournful way. "I am told by Mister Hodson that we've nigh twenty fallen, and ten more in a bad way, with at least thirty others more-or-less lightly wounded."
"Admiralty will be so impressed," Lewrie sarcastically growled.
"Even so, it is a signal victory, sir," Mr. Winwood said in his gravest manner.
"Off to the Nor'east, Jamaica has come to grips with the other Frenchman, or so it would appear. The lights of both ships are close-aboard each other, and all gunfire has ceased, so one might assume that she has conquered her foe, as well, Captain. We have won. And, from what little I saw aboard our foe, before I sustained my own trifling wound," he proudly alluded to his leg, no matter how stoic he wished to appear, "they must have suffered over an hundred fallen, and a like number disabled. Aye, Captain Lewrie, Admiralty should be impressed. Perhaps a quarter, or a third, of the French squadron in the Indian and Southern Oceans eliminated at one blow, too, sir? Well!"
"Forgive me, Mister Winwood, but, at the moment…" Lewrie attempted to apologise.
"I understand completely, sir," Winwood replied with a knowing nod, no matter how much he didn't really understand. "Andrews was your Cox'n for a long time. God save me, I shall even miss Mister Catterall, impious as he was, but… Andrews gave his all. As they all did. Did their best, and we shall miss them all, some more personally, d'ye see."
Lord, don't give me a sermon, you… ! Lewrie silently fumed. "… up to us to do our best to honour their memories, and take comfort from the thought that they passed over doing what they freely agreed to endure," Mr. Winwood was prosing on. "In Andrews' case, and the other Black volunteers, perhaps it is also up to us to shew all of Britain that they could fight, and fall, as bravely as British tars, I do believe, sir. Prove to the world the truth of the tracts from the Evangelical and Abolitionist societies declare…"