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"Oh… joy," Lewrie growled in a monotone, looking at Peel.

"I promise I'll be gentle, captain, sir!" Peel chuckled, voice pitched high and virginally sing-song, drawing Lewrie's wry amusement.

"And Choundas," Lewrie insisted, wary of oral instructions from such a man as Pelham. "What of him, for now? Do I just watch, stand aloof 'til we get what we want from his efforts, or…?"

"As Mister Zachariah Twigg once instructed you, in the Mediterranean I believe it was, sir," Pelham intoned, high-nosed and for once in deadly earnest, "you are, sir, given opportunity, no matter how early or late in our plans, 'to kill him dead,' and put paid to his noxious existence."

"Well, good God, why didn't ye just say so!" Lewrie exclaimed in great relief, forced to laugh out loud at such long-delayed end to such [a tortuous preamble. "Could've saved us all the palaver."

"Guillaume Choundas, sir," Pelham piously declared, "is still possessed of such demonic cleverness that, despite his monstrous soul, and his ogreish appearance, he was not sent out here by his masters as an exile. Mister Twigg, and Captain Peel, both have stressed just how dangerous he remains. Most-like, does he fail out here, that's an end to his usefulness to them, but… we cannot take the risk of him popping up somewhere else, in future. His head on a platter might mean a knighthood to the one who fetches it. As Salome was rewarded when she brought King Herod the head of John the Baptist."

"B'lieve she's the one demanded Saint John's head, after Herod saw her dance, sir," Mr. Peel corrected, coughing into his fist.

"Quibble, quibble, quibble," Pelham groused, waving off petty, inconsequential facts, and laughing at his mistake. "It don't signify, Mister Peel. Lewrie gets my meaning."

"Indeed I do, sir," Lewrie vowed, though irked by Pelham's iffy lure and mixed messages, as if he needed any further incentives to pursue Choundas, or was so venal as to fall for such a faithless promise.

"Working together, again, after all this time, sir," Peel said, feigning fond reverie, making Lewrie stifle a lewd comment and a snort of sarcasm. They'd gotten on much like mating hedgehogs, really; testy and spiky. "What jolly times they were!"

"Well, there you are, then!" Pelham concluded, pleased that their pairing, and their plot, was off on a good footing. Or so he blithely assumed. "Let us not waste a single hour."

"Uhm… best let me avail myself of that 'Miss Taylor,' after all, Mister Pelham," Lewrie said, changing the subject before he broke out in peels of laughter at just how dense Pelham really was.

"That horrid stuff, Captain Lewrie?" Pelham asked, aghast.

Lewrie soaked his handkerchief from the decanter and began to sponge his hat. "I told you the Navy finds it useful."

CHAPTER SEVEN

"It was pleasant and delightful,

one midsummer's morn,

when the green fields and the meadows

were buried in corn.

The blackbirds and thrushes

sang in every tree.

And the larks they sang melodious

at the dawning of the day …"

It was a "Make and Mend" afternoon, following the noon meal for the hands. All stores had been laded, the aired sails, hung wind-less and slack, had been furled and gasketed, and an hour's small-arms drill had been performed. Now the crew of HMS Proteus could "caulk or yarn" and tend to their own devices, tailor their issue clothing, shave, wash, and scrub to be presentable at Sunday Divisions, play board games, have an on-decks smoke, do carvings or mere whittling whilst they nattered of this and that, nap or sing, as suited their too-brief freedom.

"The sailor and his true love

were out walking one day.

Said the sailor to his true love,

I am bound far away.

I am bound for the Indies

where the loud cannons roar,

and I'm going to leave my Nancy,

she 's the girl that I adore…

And I'm going to leave my Nancy,

and I'm going to leave my Nancy …"

Even with the duck awnings rigged over the quarterdeck and the waist, it was too warm for chanteys, horn-pipes, or reels, so the hands sang a sad forebitter, with both fiddlers, a boy on the tin whistle, and Liam Desmond droning under them, with his uilleann pipes. Desmond was a cosmopolitan sort, for an Irishman; he'd play the English tunes as readily as any from his own sad island. And "Pleasant and Delightful" was as teary a ballad of love and loss and long partings as anyone could wish for. He was equally open to Allan Ramsey's version of "Auld Lang Syne" roared along with "Hey, Johnny Cope" to sneer at an English general who'd run from Bonnie Prince Charlie back in 1745, with the few Scots aboard, turn up a weepy, lugubrious version of some Welsh dirge, or wheeze out gay horn-pipes with equal ease. He was a treasure.

Lewrie gratefully stripped out of his formal shore-going togs, completely pulled out those offending shirt-tails, and rolled up his sleeves above the elbows. With his neck-stock discarded and the front of his shirt undone, he called for a mug of cool tea from his steward, Aspinall, who brewed it by the half-gallon each dawn on the griddle in the galley; weak, admittedly, given the cost of good leaves, with lots of sugar (which in the Sugar Isles was nigh dirt-cheap) and a generous admixture of the rob of several lemons, also available for next to nothing. Let stand to cool before jugging, it made a fine thirst-quencher.

Though Lewrie did suspect that, once jugged in his large pewter pitcher, his mid-morning libations might be part of the brew from the previous afternoon's. There were some days, such as today, when that decoction could almost stand on its hind legs and toddle.

"Mister Padgett sorted yer paperwork, sir," Aspinall told him. "And there's letters, too, off that packet brig come in yesterday."

"Ah, excellent!" Lewrie enthused, rubbing his hands with false gusto at those tidings. For the last year, no letters from home were good news. And damme, but wasn't there a tidy pile of them, though, all thick and thumb-stained, the outer sheets whereupon the addresses were enscribed, the stamps affixed, and the wax seals poured, were now sepiaed with handling and sea transportation.

No, his official correspondence always took precedence. It was safer that way. The personal could abide for a piece more, after the long passage that fetched them. Whatever new disaster, insult, or calumny they contained were at least five or six weeks old, and any reply to them would take even longer, no matter how scream-inducing.

"Said the sailor to his true love,

well I must be on my way.

For the tops'ls they are hoisted,

and the anchor's aweigh.

Our warship stands waiting,

for the next flowing tide,

but if ev-ver I return, again,

I would make you my bride…

But if ever I return again,

but if ever I return again. …"

"In good voice, t'day, sir," Aspinall commented.

"Did they choose something cheerful," Lewrie grumbled, "I s'pose so." He had to admit, though, that the chorus of rough seamen's voices did have a more-pleasing harmony than usual, detecting the shyly, hesitantly offered basses and near falsettos from his "liberated" ex-slave sailors. The tunes and words were new to them, almost alien, and their command of the King's English marginal, yet his Black sailors had an uncanny ear for harmony. Even their unaccompanied work songs he heard when riding past cane fields ashore had been spot-on, whatever tune it was they'd sung, sometimes hauntingly so.