Lewrie… Mistress Theoni Connor… Hyde Park… the Captain and his wife, yes! Urquhart suddenly recalled. A hero with his arm in a sling, a wife with a furled umbrella employing it like a sword after seeing her man's mistress and bastard by-blow at close quarters, making Lewrie hop, duck, and back up briskly! There'd been many salacious snickers in his favourite coffee-house when that tale had been told! He hid his smile as the others touched upon Lewrie's doings in the West Indies, and Lt. Urquhart once more went wide-eyed.
An outbreak of Yellow Jack, that was why Lewrie had needed the dozen Blacks so badly. Was it before, or after, the Captain's friend had duelled Ledyard Beauman and slain him, when the Captain had had to shoot Beauman's second, too? No matter; that was one reason there was so much bad blood. Against the French, though… Proteus had swept the north coast of St. Domingue (what the rebel ex-slaves were now calling Haiti) of any shipping larger than a canoe; had captured American arms smugglers; captured, sank, or burned French merchantmen and privateers; had crippled that Choundas fellow's big, proud frigate as they had already related, and had put paid to that cruel fiend, too!
"And weren't there seals barking," Lt. Adair said, with a face full of wonder (and rather red with claret and port), "the night that our boats went ashore to fetch out our Black fellows? Seals in the West Indies have been hunted nigh to extinction, but I swear I heard them, and their splashings, to boot."
"Some of the lads…," Mr. Coote, the Purser, who had spent the last hour entire in contented and companionable, nodding silence, said. "They swore they saw seals in the water, and even I thought I saw one head, and disturbance in the water. I certainly am sure that I heard them. Mister Langlie's boat crews… our former First, sir… vowed that seals swam to either side of their boats on the way back aboard."
"Saint Nicholas Mole," Lt. Devereux reminded them.
One of ex-slave General Toussaint L'Ouverture's armies tried to oust the British Army garrison at the port on the northwest coast, and Proteus had caught a signal asking for help, and had sailed into the roadstead. Close ashore, with the fighting lines hidden in dense forests, Lewrie had sent a signalling party ashore to aid the Army and wig-wag. With their frigate's guns at extreme elevation, Proteus had fired both solid round-shot and bags of grape-shot, adjusting according to the shore party's signal flags, and allowing their own troops to fall back behind a screen of plunging shot and re-form their lines, and, in the process, decimating the slave army. With springs on her cables, Proteus had swung in a wide arc, firing off nearly all of her grape-shot, cartridge flannels, and a whole tier of powder casks from morning 'til sunset, saving the port, and the British garrison in the process!
"And those French Creole pirates," Lt. Adair suggested with a wry shake of his head. "Had we been quicker about it, there'd have been nigh a million pounds sterling in silver captured, not a mere two hundred thousand!"
" Barataria Bay, d'ye mean?" Lt. Urquhart cried. "Aye, I read of that'un!" Courageous sea-fights, prize-money, and slews of captured enemy specie brought in had ever caught his eye in the Marine Chronicle … especially since Lt. Urquhart had never even come within hailing distance of anything so adventurous, or profitable… yet. Though, under Capt. Alan Lewrie, it sounded better odds that he could be part of such glorious doings. And reaping the monetary benefits.
"Mad as hatters, the lot of them," Lt. Gamble said with a sniff. "Rich, bored young grandees, none older than me or Adair, there, but determined to seize Louisiana back from the Spanish and turn it over to France again. And the way they tried to finance their rebellion was to turn pirate!"
"Play-actors," Lt. Adair sneered. "Murderous, cold-blooded, and capricious little bastards. And one bitch."
"Stole a prize of ours, as far abroad as Dominica!" Lt. Gamble continued. "Marooned the hands of her Harbour Watch on the Dry Tortugas…'cause they'd yet to do a marooning, so please you! Laughed and hooted, our sailors said once they'd been rescued, like it was a grand game. One shot our Midshipman Mister Burns… poor tyke… just to try his hand at long range, and it took him three days to die. Well, we made them pay, when we finally ran them to earth. Slew the lot of them. 'Twas only the girl that got away, and she nearly slew the Captain for revenge… for scotching their plans."
"Why are foiled plots always 'scotched'?" Scot Lt. Adair carped.
" 'Cause you Scots plot so bloody much!" Lt. Devereux hooted.
"Per'aps it was more ze wrath of a woman scorned, and betrayed, than mere revenge, sirs," Surgeon Mr. Durant slyly suggested, wreathed in a cloud of smoke from his clay pipe. "N'est-cepas? After all, ze Captain 'ad made her acquaintance in New Orleans before rejoining ze ship."
"In New Orleans?" a puzzled Urquhart gawped. "But that's more than an hundred miles up the Mississippi, in Spanish Louisiana!"
"Foreign Office doings, that," Mr. Winwood heavily said, with a sage tap aside his nose. "The Captain, I gather, has been involved with their agents several times during his career. Something in the Far East 'tween the wars, something that involved that Choundas chap… again in the Mediterranean, I heard, when in Jester. It might've involved Choundas, again. In the West Indies, a pair of Foreign Office agents spent rather a long time aboard Proteus, that James Peel especially. The Captain was temporarily supplanted in command by a more senior Captain Nicely, and sent to New Orleans in civilian disguise as a cashiered British officer looking for employment on the Mississippi, with just a small party of our sailors… three of whom proved false in the end, and ran… guarded by a merchant agent from the Panton, Leslie Company, who was half a spy himself."
"Charite de Guilleri, she was," Devereux stuck in. "And a most hellish-fetching wench of nineteen years or so. The Captain managed to meet her, her brothers and cousins, who were all in on it, and… I gather that he and she even might have conducted an, ah… liaison for a time, before they set off on their last foray, and he rejoined the ship."
"I'm certain that the Captain would not have, ah…,"-Winwood grumbled with a blush. The others smirked at the Sailing Master and his squeamishness; which led Lt. Urquhart to reckon that his Captain was a man of many parts!
"Saw her only the once, myself," Marine Lieutenant Devereux said with a rather wistful expression. "When we assaulted their camp, on Grand Isle. Standing atop an ancient Indian burial mound or something… chestnut hair flowing in the breeze, dressed mannish, in breeches and boots… and shooting at us with a Girandoni air-rifle."
"And all honours to Lieutenant Devereux and his Marines, and late Lieutenant Catterall and his party of sailors, for conquering them," the Purser cried, which made them pound fists on the wardroom table.
"A toast, gentlemen… to Mister Catterall," Devereux called for. "To 'Bully,' God rest him," he added when all the glasses were charged. And they drank in remembrance of their old companion.
"The Captain boarded one of their schooners and slew one of the older pirate leaders, sword to sword," Lt. Adair narrated, after the port bottle had made another round. "Then, took off in a native boat after the wench, and he almost closed with her, too, before she shot him. Right in the centre of his chest!"