"Not the answers I was looking for, Aspinall, no," Lewrie said, busying himself with taking another sip. The rob of lemons and sugar were dirt cheap in the Caribbean and the Sugar Isles, and tea was one of the most popular exports from England, so Aspinall brewed it by the gallon, every day or so, and kept it tepid, at least, in a pewter pitcher. Some days it was fresh, some days it was leftovers, clouded and so stout that it could rouse the deathly ill and make them prance hornpipes. Today it was fresh, and merely refreshing.
"No fear, though, sir… we'll find 'em, sooner'r later."
"I begin to wonder, Aspinall," Lewrie wearily said with a sigh, running his free hand over his hair and leaning his head back upon the oak of the hull's inner scantling and decorative panelling. " 'Pon my soul, I do."
Not only physically tired from his shore travels, from riding a hired horse far out into the countryside and back, Lewrie was starting to feel spiritually tired. No wonder, since he had done everything he could conceive of, had pursued every possibility no matter how tenuous, and it had all seemingly resulted in a titanic… nullity!
Toulon and Chalky, now that he'd alit, hopped up for a return bout of "pets" for the duration of the first mug of cold tea. By the refill, Toulon stalked off to claim his master's chair behind the desk, leaving Chalky to sling himself against Lewrie's thigh, wriggle and yawn, then stretch out half on his back with his paws in the air and "caulk" down, instantly don't-feel-a-thing asleep.
A forceful knock on the great-cabin door, the sharp thud of a brass musket butt on the deck, and the cry of "First Awf'cer, sah!" didn't even stir Chalky. "Come!" Lewrie responded.
"Sir," Langlie said, hat under his arm.
"You'll pardon me, Mister Langlie, do I not get up, hey?" Lewrie said, with a helpless shrug and a cock of his head in the direction of the fur-bag at his hip. "Take a pew, do. Aspinall, refreshments for Mister Langlie."
"Thankee, sir," Langlie answered, plunking down into a leather-and-wood chair that was ensembled with the settee, his hat in his lap, and fidgeting with expectation, not of the cool tea decoction, but of news, at last.
"Well, we found the mort known as Mistress Jugg," Lewrie told him, once he'd gotten his tea and had had a liberal draught of it. "Her, and the reputed girl-child that Jugg spoke of."
"Capital, sir!" Langlie enthused.
"No, no it ain't," Lewrie gloomed.
Two months before, Lewrie's frigate had taken an easy, and rich, French prize near the enemy-held island of Guadeloupe, in the midst of confounding and capturing Lewrie's old nemesis, the fearsome Guillaume Choundas. Proteus had sailed as an "independent ship" with Admiralty Orders fetched out by Foreign Office secret agents; the Honourable Mr. Grenville Pelham, an officious, over-vaunting twit, and his much abler aide, ex-Captain of Household Cavalry Mr. James Peel. Their mission, which everyone but Pelham could charitably call a "right cock-up" of a scheme, had been to discomfit Choundas and the French, first off; find a way to regain possession of the vast wealth of the French colony of Saint Domingue on Hispaniola from the victorious slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, second; then drag the Americans and their spanking-new Navy hooting and hollering into a declared war with the French. Or, run the Yankees out of the Caribbean if they didn't jump through the right hoops. The prize had been icing on the cake.
Lewrie had left their prize safely at anchor in Prince Rupert Bay, in the hands of the local Admiralty Court, with six crewmembers off Proteus for her Harbour Watch. Not two weeks later, though, their prize had vanished! The dimwits of the Dominica Prize Court had flung up their shoulders and mumbled, "Well, it's a myst'ry!" but the prize, her bonded cargo, and his five sailors and one midshipman were missing with her. Lost, absconded…
Had she been left at Antigua and auctioned off, she might have fetched them all over ?15,000, and would still have safely been there!
The eternally sozzled incompetents of the Dominica Court admitted that a man claiming to be the prize's Quartermaster's Mate had come ashore at the sleepy port of Roseau, sculling a boat by himself, saying that, if a certain time period had elapsed without Proteus's return to Dominica, his captain had left verbal orders to sail her to the court at Antiqua, to which Roseau's court was ancillary. They'd been so lax in their dealings, they couldn't even adequately describe him, but… they'd let him sail, anyway, the thoughtless clods!
Lewrie had left Midshipman Burns, his Bosun's Mate Mr. Towpenny, three other hands, and Quartermaster's Mate Toby Jugg aboard the prize.
And Toby Jugg was a man to be leery of.
After all, they'd pressed him off a Yankee brig engaged in smuggling arms to the French, and rebel slaves on Saint-Domingue, in the Danish Virgins the year before. American certificates of citizenship-either forged, false, or merely purchased from Yankee consuls-bedamned, Jugg had appeared as British as John Bull, and liable to the press, no matter where he was found. Jugg's plaint of an impoverished wife and daughter on Barbados had prompted Lewrie to suggest Jugg take the guinea Joining Bounty, to forward on to support his wife and child. He'd even promoted the man to Able Seaman, then Quartermaster's Mate, but… if Toby Jugg had found a way to overpower, or beguile, the rest of the hands, been glib enough to get them to desert with the prize to an enemy port, where they'd be safe from capture in the future for the crime… sell her off for half her potential value, and "go shares" so each would be rich and idle for life, well!
Had Jugg been aided by former "associates" who'd slunk into the bay to wood and water, or look for an easy capture; had he encountered criminal "jetsam" loafing ashore on Dominica, who'd put him up to it?
Dammit, Jugg had been the only Royal Navy Quartermaster's Mate in port, hadn't he? The court officers said the man had worn a Navy man's uniform, had an easy, gruff air of command about him as a Mate should, and sounded fluent in his English, so who else could it have been?
Waving his Admiralty Orders as an "independent ship" as a license to steal, Lewrie had taken Proteus in search of his missing men (and the value of the prize and her cargo!) with a vengeance. It had been a blow to his pride, to his offered trust, a slap in the face as bad as if his whole crew had mutinied! In point of fact, the missing Toby Jugg was becoming about as huge a bete noire to him as Guillaume Choundas had ever been!
Now, after weeks and weeks of searching, of quartering the sea, it appeared that the trail had gone completely cold, and any hope Lewrie had of rescuing his missing people was completely dashed. His last, best, hope had been here on Barbados, in the hills.
Lewrie, Padgett, and Cox'n Andrews had boated ashore, talked to officials, tradesmen, dock workers, and idlers. His clerk, Padgett, proved most useful in discovering that, for a while, a man named Tobias Hosier, formerly a seaman by trade, had farmed a small patch of land inland, in Saint Thomas parish, near a tiny place called Welsh Hell Gully, south of Mount Hillaby. Said Tobias Hosier had been slightly remiss in the tax collectors' books at Government House here in Bridgetown, but… his shortfall of 6s/8p had been made good about seven months before, which happily coincided with the time it would have taken for the note-of-hand on his Joining Bounty to have arrived by mail-packet from Jamaica, where it had been posted!