“Well, sir… the bald facts of our reconnoiters, the escape of the French whilst Cap Francois was blockaded…?” Lewrie hinted. “Do we state… all of us… that, per orders, we discovered that the foe had managed to escape, with no blame laid on anyone…? It might take Admiralty a year or two t’mull it over, but… such reports’d raise a large question, wouldn’t they?”
“Bedad, Lewrie, but you’re a sly one!” Blanding exclaimed, come over all beam-ish of a sudden as he grasped the eventual result.
Bedad? Lewrie thought, almost grimacing to stifle a smile; He will end up with a whole new slate o’ odd curses, ’fore his commission is done!
“And…,” Captain Stroud sagely reminded them, “we’ve our prize-money from the Chandeleurs, and our share of the Commodore’s prizes, to boot. Plus the greater glory.”
“Stout fellow, Stroud! Dam… stap me if you ain’t!” Blanding congratulated.
BOOK I
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
~“IS THERE FOR HONEST POVERTY”
ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796)
CHAPTER EIGHT
Walking the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, or hiring a prad for a bracing ride in the near countryside, was a lot safer for Captain Alan Lewrie since the Beauman clan had dissolved. With Hugh Beauman’s icily beautiful young widow now residing in Portugal, having inherited all, and sold up every last stick of the family’s Jamaican plantations-and all their slaves-there was no one to hire bully-bucks to cut his throat in a dark alley, as they’d once threatened soon after Lewrie and his old friend, former Lieutenant Colonel Christopher “Kit” Cashman, had participated in that scandalous duel with former Colonel Ledyard Beauman, and his cousin Captain George Sellers, over who had been at fault for the shameful showing of their island-raised regiment near Port-Au-Prince, when the British Army was still trying to conquer Saint Domingue. Ledyard and his cousin had cheated; Cashman, Lewrie, and the duel judges had shot them down; and Hugh Beauman had been after Lewrie’s heart’s blood ever since. As a further insult, those slaves that he had… “appropriated”… had come from one of the Beauman plantations on Portland Bight.
With Hugh Beauman drowned in a shipwreck in the Tagus river entrances in Portugal, the parents long-before retired to England with all their wealth, the Beaumans’ little empire had collapsed, absorbed by an host of indifferent others, their newspaper defunct, and their shipping business owned by others. Oh, there were still some distant kin on the island, along with forner employees and business partners, but without Hugh Beauman to direct the hatred, Lewrie was almost as safe as houses; the Beauman “syndicate” had evaporated, so Lewrie could dare to depart Reliant for shopping, and a shore breakfast, as he had this morning in a rare, and brief, respite from blockading duties.
Modeste, Reliant, Cockerel, and Pylades still cruised together as a squadron. There had been a week at anchor following the French surrender at Cap Francois, then a three-month stint at sea, prowling round the isle of Hispaniola, whilst the ships of the line and frigates of the Jamaica Station stayed busy invading more French island colonies, hoping for an encounter with a relieving French squadron.
Christmas and Boxing Day had come and gone, then New Year’s Day of 1804, then Epiphany, Plough Monday, Hilary Term days for courts and colleges, and Candlemas, and, after all the excitement of the previous year, it was all rather pacific, and deadly-boresome. The newly independent Haitians did not try to export their slave rebellion to the rest of the West Indies, the weak French lodgements in the Spanish half of Hispaniola seemed to have given up on any attempt to flee to France, and the Spanish, the Dons, were behaving like their usual selves; that is to say, moribund. After getting stung rather badly as French allies they had drawn in their horns, and showed no signs of wanting any more to do with war.
With hurricane season over, the weather in the West Indies was delightful; with the heat of Summer dissipated, Fever Season was also gone, for a while, and it was all “claret and cruising” through steady Trade Winds, clear, sunny days, and only now and then a half-gale or afternoon squall. It was so very pleasant that Alan Lewrie was of two moods: either bored nigh to tears, or fretful that Dame Fortune would remember that it was her job to kick him in his arse, now and again… every time he felt smug and satisfied. Or had too much idle time.
During such lulls as this, without the heady spur of adventure and action, Lewrie could become, well… distracted. It was said that “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” and well Lewrie knew it! Given a week or so in port for re-victualling, replenishment, and re-arming, with the pleasures of a thriving harbour town a short row off in both ear-shot and eye-shot, and, given how little a frigate captain had to do when said frigate was both at anchor and flying the “Easy” pendant to show that she was Out of Discipline to allow her people to rut with their “temporary wives” or prostitutes… when aboard, able to see it and hear it as sailors and doxies coupled between the guns on the oak deck planks, danced, cavorted, and sang, well!
It did not help Lewrie’s restless feelings to know that Lieutenant Geoffrey Westcott, his First Officer, had indeed discovered for himself a most lissome jeune fille from among the horde of civilian French refugees. Whether she was truly the penniless daughter of one of the most distinguished and wealthiest families of Saint Domingue, as was alleged, a corporal’s widow, or a whore tainted with the one in 128 parts of Negro blood, a sang mele, and still considered Black in the old regime, she was hellish-handsome. Light brown, almost chestnut hair, enormous brown eyes, a fine brow and a swan-like neck, pouty lips, and a face nigh gamin or elfin in its lovelieness… which put Lewrie dangerously in mind of his former mistress in the Mediterranean, Phoebe Aretino, or that murderous pirate-minx Charite de Guilleri. Phoebe had been a teen prostitute in the port city of Toulon during the British invasion of 1794, but was now “Contessa Phoebe” in Paris, the queen of perfumes. Charite de Guilleri had been a French Creole belle who, with her brothers and cousin, and some old privateers, had turned both pirates and revolutionaries with the purpose of freeing New Orleans and Louisiana from the Spanish; she had shot Lewrie in the chest, once, when he’d run them down and ended their game on Grand Terre Isle, at the mouth of Barataria Bay. Before that, they had been lovers… and damned if both of them had not been grand lovers! Which remembrance did Lewrie’s equilibrium no good, at all.
How could one still evince a lusty itch for a young woman who’d hunted him down and tried to kill him for good, and had might as well have fired the shot that had slain his wife, Caroline, during the Peace of Amiens, in France in 1802?
Lewrie returned aboard Reliant just as Three Bells of the Forenoon were struck. The side-party was mostly the fully-uniformed Marines, the requisite number of sailors in shore-going finery, and those Midshipmen unfortunate enough to stand Harbour Watch; officers in port did not, and what Lieutenants Spendlove and Merriman were doing below in the gun-room to while away their idle time, Lewrie could have cared less. The crewmen of the Harbour Watch, those on the gangways and the weather decks, doffed their hats and stood facing him for a minute or so, then went back to their few duties, envying their mates below on the gun-deck, where they sported with their women.