“Pray God, it’s someone else,” he whispered, clenching his fists hard and ignoring the arrival of his cold supper.
“Holy shit on a biscuit,” he said bitterly. The man in the coach was the effeminate Sir Richard Slade, down to the very suit. The man departing the coach was Lt. James Kenyon, master and commander of HMS Parrot!
“If yer not wantin’ anythin’ else right away, sor, that’ll be two shillin’s,” the publican repeated.
“Yes,” Lewrie said, fumbling out coins blindly. “Here.”
“Righty-ho, then.”
Lewrie spun away from the window and propped the book up with fumbling hands in front of him. He took a scalding sip of coffee, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He dug into his cold pork and pease pudding, as though he had been at for some time, though each bite threatened to gag him on the way down, and sat queasy as a lump of coal once in his stomach.
Kenyon entered the inn’s public rooms a moment later, sharing a cheery greeting with the other officers of his rank at the other tables. He spotted Lewrie by the window and came over to join him.
“And what are you having, Mister Lewrie?” he asked jovially.
“Spot of cold supper … sir.”
“And a whacking thick book,” Kenyon said, picking it up to read the title. “Peregrine Pickle, is it? Just the thing for you, a roguish adventure, and long as a Welsh mile. Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all, sir,” Alan replied, taking back the book and marking his place at random, as though he had read part of it.
“No sextant, I see?”
“Twenty-five guineas. If they had one, sir.”
“Will you be havin’ anythin’, sor?” the publican asked.
“Brandy for me,” Kenyon said briskly, “and a pint of stingo to wash it down … Other than that, did you enjoy your time ashore?” Kenyon asked casually, flinging a leg over the arm of his chair.
“A cat-lapping party with a lady I made acquaintance of at Sir Richard’s, sir,” Lewrie said, forced to smile at the unintended double-entendre of a tea party and what Mrs. Hillwood had done with her gin and her tongue. “Devilish boring, though. Went all over town looking in the stores, then paid down ‘socket-money’ for an obliging wench.”
He stared at Kenyon directly, not as adoring midshipman to older brother or superior officer, as if daring him with an account of some manly endeavor.
“No, I think Smollett has no lessons to teach you, Mister Lewrie.” But it was a bit more forced than before, his grin.
“And you, sir?” Lewrie asked, getting intent on his meal.
“A gentleman never tells, me lad,” Kenyon said as his brandy and strong beer arrived, and he took time to wet his tongue. “Frankly, there’s a willing enough tit I have been seeing. Just got back from seeing her home. Parents are chaw-bacons made it rich out here and she’d be a good enough rattle, but she’s such a country-put, and her family is so eager for a good match they’re hotter than a false justice with suggestions of marriage.”
“I didn’t think marriage and the Navy went well together, sir,” Lewrie said. “What with the long separations, and all.”
“You’re right there,” Kenyon said, still not tumbling to the fact that Lewrie knew more than he should. “Why tie yourself down to a termagant little mort when you can have a wife in every port for half the cost, eh?”
“Or just take it to sea with you,” Lewrie said, knowing that many ships allowed women aboard all the time, and that there were many captains who traveled with their wives or mistresses.
“Now that’s something I don’t hold with, women at sea,” Kenyon said firmly, thumping down his pint of stingo to exchange it for the glass of brandy. “And there’s many a captain I’ve known that will tell you that it’s bad for morale and discipline.”
I’ll bet you have, Lewrie thought. Here was the man he wished to emulate, the only officer who had been in any way kind to him since he had been forced into the Navy, acting bluff and hearty as the biggest rogering buck, and secretly a sodomite! Was that why he asked for me to join Parrot, because he thought he’d have a go at my backside someday? By God, if he ever lays a finger on me I’ll kill him! Just being around him makes me sick … Sir Richard’s sly wink, Lewrie recalled; did he think I was already Kenyon’s…!
That did not stop him, however, from eating every bite of his rich, sweet figgy-dowdy, knowing there would be nothing like that once they had sailed.
Chapter 9
Friday noon found Parrot due south of Morant Point, beating her way offshore for Antigua. The wind had backed to the sou’east, and with her jibs and gaff sails laid close to the centerline, she clawed for every yard to windward, bowling along with her lee rail slanted close to the bright blue sea, and leaving a creaming wake bone white behind her.
Their passengers were no trouble. Lord Cantner was a minikin of a man, not above five feet tall, but obviously much taller when he sat on his purse. His wife, Lady Cantner, was indeed the raven beauty Alan had seen sneaking down the dark hallway at Sir Richard Slade’s, and she recognized him as well, and blushed prettily when introduced. She was not quite thirty, while Cantner was a stringy sort pushing sixty, and a colt’s tooth for marrying such a younger woman who had such a roving eye. Lewrie was irked that the manservant had his berth space, and was reduced to swaying in a hammock over the wardroom table again. But so far, they had been no bother.
For all the first day, Parrot labored hard to make her easting without losing ground to leeward, but she was putting up a steady eleven knots, and sometimes striking twelve, and it was such a joy to be on deck in the mild winter sunshine, with the wind howling and the rigging humming and crying and spray and foam flying about her like dust from a thundering coach, that Lewrie could find solace from his disappointment in Lieutenant Kenyon. Still, he found it hard to be properly civil to him, so he reduced himself to duty and did not seek out the sort of friendly chats they had enjoyed before.
By the second day the wind had veered more east, and they turned and tacked so they would not be set upon Hispaniola, angling more to the sou-sou’east half east, which would bring them below Antigua but in position for another tack direct for English Harbor, and the waiting winter convoy for England.
It was on the second day that the acting quartermaster went down sick, complaining of severe headaches, and Boggs was at a loss as to the cause. The man quickly got worse, pouring sweat, retching and vomiting, and running a high fever. Boggs began to look worried when the man cried that he was blind and raved in the fever’s delirium.
Bright, the gunner’s mate, was the next man to be struck down. He stumbled to the deck in the middle of gun drill, almost insensible. Next was one of the carpenter’s crew, then a ship’s corporal. After him, it was an older topman, and then the forecastle captain. The acting quartermaster had meanwhile turned the color of a quince pudding, and began to bring up black bile.
“It’s the Yellow Jack,” Boggs told them shakily.
There was no more horrifying name that could have been uttered in the tropics, other than Plague. Yellow Jack was the scourge of the West Indies, and all those scrubby coasts of the Spanish Main and up into the Floridas. Whole regiments could go down sick in a week, and the survivors would not make a corporal’s guard. The most complex objects of the age, the huge and powerful 1st and 2nd Rate line-of-battle ships, could be turned to dead piles of timber and iron as their crews died by the boatload.
“What can we do?” Leonard asked, plainly scared to death.