"And I tell you that all I've done, I've done with a cold-eyed appreciation for the way things truly stand," Lewrie said, teeth gritted in response to such an insult, "not for a need to impress a young man. I can't help it if our superiors back in London are idiots, that you got sent out by lordly sots addled with delirium tremens, on their good days, like that Colonel of yours who thought we could starve America of emigrants if we just had Saint Domingue! What I see is a chance to rid the New World of French influence forever, do we do this right, and to Hell with Saint Domingue! We'd have a grand ally 'twixt our Canadian holdings and the Caribbean, with rich trade, cross a British lake called the Atlantic Ocean, Peel! And who's t'say Saint Domingue can't rot on the vine a few more years 'til its putrid corpse rots to the bones, then begs us and the Yankees for peace!"
"My God, sir, I did not…!" Peel spluttered.
"Good God, but they're at it again," Lt. Langlie whispered to the Sailing Master near the helm, amidships of the quarterdeck.
"Aye," Mr. Windwood took sorrowful note. "And it does not help hopes of conciliation that you blaspheme, Mister Langlie."
"Ah, oops. Sorry."
"We never get Saint Domingue, who bloody cares, Peel!" Captain Lewrie was going on, with as much heat as before. "Filthy damn' place, in the main. American trade takes up the slack, not just in sugar and rum, cocoa and coffee. Prices for those goods go up 'cause demand is just as great, and our Sugar Isles fill it, at greater profit. Don't know much of trade, frankly, but… second-hand goods through Yankee merchants, in partnership with English companies, might be arranged.
"Now, do you really think I'd go off half-cocked like a two-shilling musket, upset your precious Mister Pelham's impossible scheme for nothing? Believe me, Mister Peel, I'd not risk my command and my career on the off-chance a boy, damn' near a stranger, goes in awe o' me. And I resent having my motives being portayed that way."
Lewrie took a deep breath and calmed himself at last, frowning quizzically to see that Peel wasn't fuming like a slow-match sizzling down to ignite a bombshell.
"A lad whose existence will most-like ruin my life, anyway, if my wife ever learns of him," Lewrie concluded, his resentment spent at last, forced to grin in self-deprecating confirmation of his parentage. "And why ain't you howling, by now?" he simply had to ask.
"Because I had to know for certain," Peel mystifyingly replied. "With you, in truth, sir, who knows what goes on in your head!"
"Now, that's not strictly…" Lewrie flummoxed.
"See here, sir… no, forgive that," Peel said at last, after Lewrie let him get a word in edgewise, that is. "All you say is more plausible, and possible, than anything I heard in London, or since we arrived in the Caribbean."
"It is?" Lewrie gawped back, expecting a verbal knife-fight.
"I must own, sir," Peel most reluctantly said, "that I see the eminent sense, the rationale of your thoughts, and as far as I see it… God help me!… I can do naught but agree with your assessments."
"Mine arse on a band-box, you do?" Lewrie blurted out, with a whoosh of relief. "At long last," he could not help but add. "May I assume that your next letter to Mister Pelham will tell him of your, uhm… change of heart, then?"
Damme, have I actually done something clever? Lewrie asked himself, for once in my miserable life?
"It will, sir," Peel vowed, though looking a tad beleaguered as he pondered the personal consequences of defying the prevailing opinion of his superiors in London, not to mention the hurricane of anger that would come, from the high-nosed, not-to-be-outshone Mr. Grenville Pelham. "All else is so much moonshine, wishful thinking, grossly in error or… hopelessly out of date."
"Well… excellent, Mister Peel!" Lewrie crowed.
"Well, not completely!" Peel could not help retorting, "It'll be mine arse on the chopping-block. Might as well be French… off with my head!" he sourly grumbled, wrapping his wide lapels over his chest as if a fell wind blew, not a tropic one. "This turns out badly, we'd best emulate your friend Colonel Cashman and flee to South Carolina. Find us a safe place to hide from the Crown's displeasure."
"Of course, does it work out," Lewrie cynically pointed out in much gladder takings, almost playfully now, "your Pelham is the fellow gets knighted for quick and clever thinkin'. I suspect our names will never be mentioned."
"But of course," Peel answered with one of his accustomed wry smirks, as if he was almost back to normal.
"Pity there can't be at least a wee shred o' credit for us, to improve our standing back home, though," Lewrie alluringly hinted. "It ain't every day I come up with a good idea. 'Tis a good day I come with an idea, at all."
"You're fishing for compliments, you can forget it," Peel told him turning bleak once more, and with his hands fiddling at his coat collars as if to armour himself against vicissitude. "I'm the one has to tell Pelham. What you get won't be a jot on my cobbing. God, he expected folly from you, but not from me!"
"Aye, I'm such a corrupting influence," Lewrie said, bowing his head in mock contrition. "Put it down to the old Navy excuse, 'drink, and bad companions!' Won't 'app'n, agin, yer honour, sir. Oh, well. No thanks, no credit…"
Peel's answer to that was an inarticulate gargle.
"Sorry, didn't quite catch that?" Lewrie playfully enquired with a hand cupped to one ear. It had sounded hellish-like a cranky bear-growl. Peel turned his back and stomped rather bleakly away, towards the taff-rails, where, Lewrie had little doubt, he would seize the cap-rails in white-knuckled hands as if to strangle oak in lieu of a human throat. Lord knew, as a junior officer Lewrie had done the same in the face of utter frustration.
Lewrie turned his attention out-board, lifting his glass to see the USS Oglethorpe brig engage the large French three-masted schooner. The schooner had swung off the Nor'east winds to present her starboard battery, using the wind-forced heel to elevate her cannon for the customary crippling shots at Oglethorpe's rigging and sails, and Lewrie took a deep breath and held it in dread expectation as the two vessels' bowsprits came level with each other on opposite courses, as the American brig blocked the schooner from view.
Their broadsides, at what he estimated as about a hundred yards, lit off as one in the instant that both ships' hulls lay exactly opposite each other, as if docked side-by-side, one bows-out and the other bows-in. A massive cloud of spent powder smoke burst into existence between them in the blink of an eye. Oglethorpe, up to windward, was only partially befogged, with the smoke quickly clearing as it was blown alee; the French schooner was the one thoroughly wreathed in it, completely blotted out from view.
Oglethorpe's masts shivered, and her forecourse yard canted and dropped, to be caught by the chain-slings rigged to prevent its total loss. Her sails were pocked and fluttered like carpets or bedding on a clothesline for dusting by very stout-armed maids-of-all-work. A bare royal spar on her main-mast went winging away, along with about three feet of the slim upper mast that supported it, and both standing and running rigging came snaking down as it was severed by chain-shot, star-shot, and expanding bar-shot.