Except for one hand, speaking for a pack of whispering mess-mates. "Er, 'scuse me, Cap'um, but… er… beggin' yer pardon an' all, sir, don't mean ter… uhm…"
One of his mates gave him a nudge. "D'zat mean we goes back ter Navy pay, Cap'um?" he finally stammered out.
"It does not!" Ayscough smiled. "Merchantman pay-rate until we pay off back home in old England!"
If anything, that raised an even greater chorus of cheering. "Mister Abernathy, we shall splice the mainbrace!" Ayscough said in conclusion. "Mister Choate? Dismiss the hands."
"Ship's company, on hats and, dismiss!" Choate yelled. "All hands forward to splice the mainbrace!"
Abernathy and his Jack in the Bread Room, the assistant purser, went below with a bosun's mate, master-at-arms and ship's corporals to fetch out a keg of rum. There would be no debts due on this issue. No "sippers" for sewing another man's kit back up, for taking a watch, or for a favor or debt. All would get full, honest measure in addition to whatever issue came at seven bells of the forenoon watch at "clear decks and up spirits."
"Still there, Mister Hogue?" Ayscough shouted up to the cross-trees of the main-mast.
"Still there, sir!" Hogue assured him with an answering yell. "Mister Percival, I'd admire you hoisted the cutter off the midships tiers in the day watch. And dismount the taffrail lanterns."
"Aye, sir," Percival replied.
"Mister Choate, gun drill in the day. watch as well. Sharpen 'em up. Say, an hour and a half on the great guns, and then rig out boarding nettings along the bulwarks, and chain slings aloft on the yards. Strike useless furniture below once it's dark."
"Aye, sir."
"Mister McTaggart, fetch a spare stuns'l boom and a boat compass to install in the cutter, if you'd be so good, sir."
"Aye aye, captain."
"Before dawn, gentlemen, this bastard Sicard will wish he never laid eyes on our Telesto" Ayscough predicted grimly. "We'll begin to get some of our own back with these poxy Frogs!"
It was a nacky ruse, Lewrie had to admit as he saw it put into service. The heaviest ship's boat, the thirty-six-foot cutter, was swayed off the tiers and lowered over the side around three in the afternoon. A studding sail boom about twenty feet long and six inches thick was lashed across her sternposts. At each end of the boom, a heavy glass lantern had been lashed. The captain's cox'n was put in charge of her, given a boat compass and a small crew to set sails, a barricoe of water and some dry rations in case they were away from the ship for longer than planned, and then they were paid out to be towed astern. They were given muskets, pistols, cutlasses and a small boat-gun mounted in the bows, partly to counteract the weight of the lanterns and boom. The cox'n was entrusted with slow-match, flint and tinder, and a hope they could find them in the morning.
As the late afternoon progressed, and the armorer's whetstone competed with the fifers, fiddlers and pipers, Telesto's lower courses were reduced, taken in by one reef. The stays'ls between the fore and main-mast, and the stays'l between main and mizzen, were lowered. The ship soughed a little less lively in the sea, slowing by perhaps half a knot. Just enough to allow La Malouine to draw a few miles closer to them before full dark, so that any lookout from her cross-trees or upper royal mast cap could just barely, with a strong telescope, make Telesto out as riding a slight bit higher above the horizon- enough to make out her tops'Is in full and reassure them she was still there.
Chiswick and Lewrie paced the quarterdeck, from nettings on the starboard side to the taffrail and back, each time pausing by the stern to raise a telescope, though seeing anything from the deck was a forlorn hope. The sun was westering rapidly, and the skies to the east were already gloomy, the skies to their starboard side going amber and the high-piled billows of clouds beginning to take on the colors of sunset in one of those magnificent tropical displays.
"I would suppose the timing of this is rather tricky," Burgess opined, staring down at the cox'n and his crew, lazing happily in the cutter being towed about one decent musket-shot astern in their wake. With time on their hands, one definite job to do and sheer, blessed idleness until they were let slip, they were napping or skylarking to their hearts' content.
"I've heard of it done, mind," Alan admitted. "Never thought I'd see it attempted. Like club-hauling off a lee shore. At least the moon's going to cooperate. Be dark as a cow's arse by eight of the clock. What little is left before the new moon'll get hidden by those clouds, too, I trust."
"What if this Frog sails up too close?" Burgess asked.
"Then we might go about and give him a sharp knock, anyway."
"God in Heaven, what if it's not him, after all?" Burgess fretted. "I mean, it could be any ship, couldn't it? This Sicard could have slacked off once he saw we were headed south, let another ship pass him, and gone off to play silly buggers with his pirate friends."
"If that happens, Burge," Lewrie assured him with a wry grin, "we'll look like no end of idiots. Or Captain Ayscough will."
That would kick the spine out of the crew, Alan thought, taking on some of Burgess' fretfulness and turning to stare at the captain and Mr. Twigg up forward by the wheel binnacle. All the spine he'd put in them that morning. It made the hands easier to control if they knew what they were about, he realized, and he'd seen enough examples of captains who explained things to their crews. Contrariwise, there was the risk of saying too much of one's expectations. And when those expectations or predictions turned out false, a captain could expect to lose renown in his own ship, making the seamen and mates, even the officers, suspect his abilities the next time.
If the ship astern of them turned out to be something other than La Malouine, it would be disastrous for morale. Not to mention the no-end-of-shit wrangling if they fired into a stranger, or loomed up on her beam like… well, like a pirate, themselves!
"Could be just about anybody back there," Burgess reiterated.
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Alan harrumphed. "Let's not go borrowing trouble, Burge. It has to be La Malouine. She chanced the taifun weather to keep an eye on us. She's been there big as life and twice as ugly, every hour since we left Macao. Why would Sicard go off east now, when he's just as loaded as we are with profitable cargo? He has to get it to Pondichery and send it home in one of their Indiamen or lose money. I doubt King Louis could pay the bastard that much, else."
"I've been wondering…" Burgess began again, sounding a bit more tremulous and doubting.
"Ye-ess?" Lewrie drawled lazily.
"If Sicard is dogging our heels like this, that must mean that Choundas is somewhere up ahead. Where they could combine against us," Burgess mused as Lewrie turned to go forward again, leading the Army man with him wordlessly. "He left Canton the end of November last year. Time enough to get back to wherever he's based, re-man his ship, clean her bottom to make her faster. What did you call it?"
"Careen and bream," Alan replied. "Yes, I'd expect him in the Malacca Straits, if that's what he was doing. Narrow waters, where we have to pass. But remember, it's patrolled out of Bencoolen, and other ships'd be about. Perhaps too many for what he has in mind. He can't let anyone see him fighting us. He's supposed to remain as covert as we are, mind. Maybe farther north, on the eastern side of the Malay peninsula. Closer to the Johore Strait."
"Among the native princes," Burgess grimaced. "And pirates."
"Never let it be said that you don't give a world of joy to your companions, Burge," Alan moaned sarcastically.
"I only speculated to pass the time," Burgess replied, a trifle archly. '"Tis not my nature to get the wind up over nothing. Like some sailors of my acquaintance. Or is that the result of a pea-soup diet?"