Sea of Grey

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Somethin’ t’be said for that, at least,” Cashman commented.

  “Ending bear-baiting, dogfights, cockfightin’, all sorts of country customs. Hell, it’ll be fox huntin’, next! Bad as Cromwell and his Roundhead Puritans, out t’take all joy from life. Marketin’ fairs, gamblin’, even morris dancin’ … the heart and soul of us!”

  “I’ll send them a contribution … to their Abolitionist Society,” Cashman secretly whispered. “And damn the neighbours. Now, do you imagine the reception Wilburforce and More would get, did they ever dare come out here to preach, well … they’d be strung up and hung.”

  “And pray God for it!” Lewrie quickly vowed.

  “Same’d happen t‘me, Alan. Or get pence to the pound when I sell up,” Cashman assured him. “Did they know my true feelings on the matter. I’m not gettin’ any younger, and all I have is tied up in my lands and such. I’d never have the time t‘pile up the ‘blunt’ all over again from scratch. I was lookin’ for an out, and by God, here came a chance to take colours once more and get away from the problem.”

  “And so well-timed it felt dropped from Heaven?” Lewrie asked with a chuckle as he split and buttered one of those luscious rolls. “I see … ‘turne, quod optanti divum promittere nemo auderet, volvenda dies en attulit ultro’ … ’ey wot?”

  “Why, you pretentious … hound, sir!” Cashman erupted in an outburst of hearty laughter, much his old self once more. “That’s about all the Latin that ever got lashed into you, isn’t it? I’ll lay it is!”

  “Sir, I hold commission in the King’s Navy,” Lewrie replied in a false haughtiness, his nose lifted top-lofty. “I am a Post-Captain, therefore eminently superior to any Redcoat. Now, how else may I make you assume the proper humility, was I not pretentious?”

  “One with crumbs on his shirt front,” Cashman drolly rejoined. “Aye, by God. What the gods couldn’t promise, rollin’ time brought, unasked. An apt quote, I’ll grant ye. Never saw that side of you up the Apalachicola. Which reminds me … how is your Muskogee ‘wife,’ Soft Rabbit was her name? And that bastard son she whelped?”

  “Ah, uhm!” was Lewrie’s witty response.

  “I take it you’re married by now, bein’ a captain and all?” Cashman went on, casually enquiring. “And married well, I trust.”

  “Aye, with three ‘gits,’ now.”

  “Capital! But I wager you haven’t said word one to her about your first ‘wife,’ now have you.” Cashman most evilly grinned.

  “I like breathin’,” Lewrie retorted, a tad sharpish, wondering if word of his troubles had gotten to the islands ahead of him somehow. “And what about you? Did you ever wed, Kit?” he countered.

  “The once,” Cashman admitted, quickly losing his jaunty, japing air. “Out here, in ‘91. No children, sorry t’say, before she passed over … back in ’95, just about the time the Maroon War began.”

  Another reason to quit his lands? Lewrie wondered in sympathy. Another reason to take a commission?

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Kit, I …”

  “Oh, don’t be,” Cashman brushed off, swirling his wine aloft as if squinting at it for lees. “Prettier than the morning, she was, aye. But meaner than a snake. Raised out here, d‘ye see, used to managing slaves from her cradle, and her kinfolk some of the harshest. She ran through three or four riding quirts a year, slashin’ and layin’ about at any servant who crossed her. Bought ’em by the half dozen, she did! Fascinatin’ girl, but a beast at heart. Horse threw her, one morning. Broke her neck … snap!”

  “Dear God, but …” Lewrie gawped, appalled.

  “Towards the end, I couldn’t abide the sight or sound of her,” Cashman admitted with a rueful moue and shrug. “Happened whilst I was off in the Blue Mountains, start of the Maroon War. Took colours just t‘be shot o’ her, too. Mean as she was, I always suspected one of our stable boys made her horse shy, perhaps some of the field hands. Left her t’die? Snapped her neck themselves, so it looked accidental? Who knows. Did me a great favour, if they did. You get used to lordin’ it over slaves, you simply have to turn mean and callous. Her, I mean to say. Perhaps me, as well, but …” Be shrugged off once more, smiling disarmingly.

  “I heard such once before, I think,” Lewrie said, after wiping his mouth with the napkin following a dollop of lobster and drawn butter. “Out here, come t‘think on it, oh … ages ago, when I was freshcommisioned, here in Kingston. Lady of my acquaintance … sister of a girl I was wooing? God, they were hellish rich! Anne Beauman, do you know of her? Her youngest sister, Lucy, was the one I was after. Anne said that a slave society gets callous and hard on everyone, once you get used to wallopin’ the Blacks, so why not wallop every … what?”

  “The Beaumans, Alan?” Cashman told him, in answer to the gawpy look on Lewrie’s face, once he’d seen the smirk on Christopher’s. “Who hold great swaths of land … on Portland Bight, do they?”

  “They’re your neighbours, of course! You do know ’em!”

  “Hugh Beauman and his wife Anne are my patrons in the regiment,” Cashman delighted in informing him. “Made up his mind I was the man for him, and he’s used to gettin’ his way.”

  “Aye, just as they were back in ’82,” Lewrie recalled. “So how is Anne? At the time, she was the most exotic-lookin’ woman.”

  “Ah, well … faded, sorry t‘say. Island women mostly do. The climate and the sun, I expect. Shrivel up and go sour and grey much too soon. Do they not perish o’ childbed fever, malaria, or the Yellow Jack.”

  “There was another sister, Floss, I Think?”

  “Died,” Cashman coolly told him.

  “Ah, pity. Poor old thing,” Lewrie said. “But Lucy! Now …

  “Mmmmmm!” Cashman agreed most heartily.

  “My first real love. On my part, at least,” Lewrie confessed. “Ran into her in Venice two years ago. She’d remarried a Sir Malcolm Shockley, baronet. Richer than God. Why, richer than the Beaumans!”

  “She was still here when I bought my lands, in her first marriage,” Cashman reminisced. “Aye, one of the great beauties of her time.”

  “Unfortunately, dumber than dirt, too,” Lewrie pointed out.

  “My dear Alan,” Christopher Cashman leered back at him, “I never asked her to recite!”

  “You never!” Lewrie chortled, catching the sly meaning.

  Always did have the most Philistine of tastes, she did! Lewrie assured himself, trying to picture Lucy taking up with Cashman.

  “Ah, but I did,” Cashman slyly boasted. “Along with half the young swains in Jamaica, I suspect. You?”

  “Uhm … no, actually,” Lewrie had to admit, “but not for want of trying, mind. She was only seventeen, back then, and chaperoned as close as a Spanish convent girl.”

  “Watched like a hawk, aye,” Christopher said with a knowing nod. “’Twas after she wed that she took up her own household, with a young husband on the land, and her here in town. Got a ragin’ hunger for it, and then no man was safe. And too rich to be scandalised, don’t you know. Small world, ain’t it.”

  “Bad as old Mistress Betty Hillwood. My, uhm … replacement,” Lewrie said with a sly boast of his own, “for when I couldn’t get the leg over Lucy. Used to keep rooms uphill, the fountained court …”

  “Oh, my yes!” Cashman said with another knowing purr. “It is a damn’ small world. Been there, too, Alan. She died, though, in ’86.”

  “And a hard’un,” Lewrie said, sighing, and returned to a crab claw with his name on it.

  “Want to guess who the Colonel of the Regiment is, then?”

  “Hugh Beauman?” Lewrie supposed aloud.

  “Lord, no! Much too rich and involved t’be playing soldier.”

  “Hold on, there was another brother …” Lewrie said, frowning as he tried to recall a name to place on a braying horse’s ass.

  “Ledyard Beauman, that’s the one,” Cashman said with distaste.

  “Lord, that fool? That hoorawin’ jackan
apes?” Lewrie cried in utter surprise. “When I met him, he was still limp-wristed ‘Macaroni’ fashion, years after the style’d passed. ’Bout as sharp-witted as his sister Lucy, God help us. Couldn’t pour pee from his boot without a footman’s help!”

  “He’s lost ground, since,” Cashman sombrely assured him.

  “Ledyard Beauman, by God! And he’s your Colonel? Is he actually capable of anything?”

  “He’s been … studying, d‘ye see. Tactics and such,” Cashman grimly said. “Out of books, so please you. Marchin’ wee lead troops ‘cross his dinin’ table, rattlin’ on about Cannae, Hadrianopolis, and double envelopments. Caesar in Gaul, Scipio Africanus, and Hannibal? Turnin’ into a perfect pest.”

  “Well, I’d allow he might look crackin’ fine on a charger, at a parade,” Lewrie snickered some more. “Just so long as he knows his limitations … and his place.”

  “Well, that’s the rub, Alan,” Cashman said, sighing a tad more and wriggling uneasily in his chair as if ants were inside his breeches. He unconsciously crossed his legs as if to protect his “nutmegs” from harm. “Lately, he’s of a mind—a fervid mind—t’go over t’Saint Domingue with us, when we sail. Bring us his … insights, or so he says. How best to employ and manouevre troops and such?”

  “God help your poor arse, you must be joking!” Lewrie gawped.

  But he wasn’t, of course.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Eager to show off his command, Christopher Cashman insisted that Lewrie accompany him a mile or two towards Spanish Town, to the encampment, and would not take no for an answer. After a quick row out to Proteus to see if orders had come aboard, or if members of the liberty party had created some havoc—the orders had not, and only a few of the hands had been returned “paralytic-drunk” by the shore provosts—Lewrie felt sanguine enough to go along.

  “Kit” laid on a fine equipage, a silk-topped coach-and-four of gleaming wood and fragrant leather, bright coral-red wheel spokes that raised the faintest cloud of dust from the sandy track, and drawn by a team of matched roans of fairly impressive conformation; horses raised on Cashman’s lands, he was smugly informed.

  There was a florid letter B on the doors, though, encircled by oak wreaths. “Well, o’ course, Alan old son,” Cashman crowed, “this is a Beauman coach. Nothin’ but the best for their ‘hired’ colonel!”

  The 15th West Indies Regiment was under canvas, their company tents pitched in neat streets, with duckboards between in case of rain and mud, laid out to mathematical perfection, as laid down in the infantry manuals. Across a wide parade ground, still “stobby” with sugar cane stubble (for a cane field it had been ’til lately) stood a giant green-and-white striped pavillion tent large enough to shelter them all if stood shoulder-toshoulder. Assuming anyone would allow any of the 435 rankers inside, that is; it had been erected for a special occasion, and was now filled with preening officers from the island garrison, with uniformed visitors from both Army and Navy, and with civilians in their finest, come to watch a parade. The ground above the pavillion teemed with carriages just as sumptuous as the one in which Lewrie and Cashman arrived, with nodding teams of horses being tended by slave grooms, and a long roped row of saddled riding horses in the shade of the trees.

  “Think of graduation day, Alan,” Cashman said as a black coachman came to fold down the metal steps and open the door for them, “and all the beamin’ parents come t’see their sprogs pass out into Life.”

  “And you took yourself into town, ‘stead of sittin’ on ’em like a broody hen?” Lewrie wondered as he alit. “Good God, I can see three generals from where I stand! A hellish risk, Kit.”

  “I know they can drill, Alan,” Cashman confidently boasted, “so what’s the point of actin’ like I don’t trust ’em? Have to, sooner or later, won’t I? Let the officers find their feet, too, ’thout ‘mother’ standin’ over ’em and makin’ ’em so nervous they wouldn’t trust their own arses with their farts. That’s the problem with your typical Army regiments … either too rich and casual, hopin’ to muddle through, or they’re lashed, drilled, and browbeat so bad, no one from majors down to corporals dare have a thought in their heads ’til a colonel puts it there. Same aboard yer ships, I expect … the way a captain can ruin a good ship, and make her officers spend all their time lookin’ over a shoulder, too scared t’put a foot wrong.”

  “Well, there is that,” Lewrie allowed.

  “Not much to work with, I’ll tell ya true,” Cashman said as they strolled the short distance to the pavillion, and its wide, welcoming flies and awnings, “the dregs of the island, the scrapin’s from Home regiments gone down from fevers … rich boy-officers, who had a mind t‘soldier ’cause the uniform pleased the young ladies. Educated men who clerked, or finished their apprenticeships, but aren’t from rich or even squire families—oh, a dense lot in the beginnin’, but we set ’em straight. Sent ‘em off on company marches and skirmish drill, all by themselves for two, three days, with no one t’wipe their arses for ’em. Shed a few, promoted a few, hang their pedigrees … and ya know I’d teach ‘em t’shoot, Alan! By line, by platoon, by regimental volley … and in teams of four, two loadin’ and watchin’ whilst two deliver aimed fire out in the bushes. Nothin’ like your classic set-piece battle, nossir, all flags and gallopers, and such.”

  “Like we were, in Spanish Florida,” Lewrie said with a smile of reverie, twinging to what Cashman had been driving at, “fighting Red Indian fashion. Like Yankee Doodle skulkers, with rifles.”

  “Hunters,” Cashman amended. “’Cept here, we hunt men. Half the regiment’ll be in skirmish order all the time, able to fall back upon the rest if they get in trouble. Can’t parade battalion-front in three lines in a jungle. Saint Domingue ain’t like Europe, all orderly and neat. Crops , gone wild, grown horse-eye tall, wild shrubs grown back up as thick as dog-hair … aah, General Lazenby, and your lovely lady!”

  Lewrie got introduced, then tipped Cashman the wink and wandered off to fetch himself a glass of something, leaving Kit to play host to his “guests.” It didn’t take long; a liveried slave in a white tie-wig produced a silver tray bearing long flutes of champagne—again iced—and Lewrie took a brace of them. It was a hot day for April, dash it all!

  He then wandered, circulating and bowing, or doffing his hat to the other guests as he encountered them; as they encountered him, really. His was a new face in a rather insular society, he suspected (and forgave himself for the pun!) much like Anglesgreen of a Sunday, with nought but the usual neighbours to see ’til the London Season ended and absentee landowners came down to their properties, fetching along a raft of houseguests for a week or two in the country or the coach that brought the mails also brought in a clutch of passengers. Every day, folk would gather before the Olde Ploughman or the Red Swan Inn, just for a sight of them, even were they merely alighting for a shot at the “jakes,” a quick half-pint of ale with a cold beef pie before “Whip Up And Away.” And certainly, he smugly grinned to himself, the sight of two gold medals dangling on his chest didn’t hurt when it came to a lure for the curious, either!

  As men shook his hand with almost an admiring briskness, and the ladies curtsied or inclined their heads, with fans rustling faster in what he took for approval, he was pumped dry for information about the doings “at home” in England, the latest titillating scandals at Court, the prices of goods, the progress of the war. He also got a chance to enquire about people he had met in Jamaica in his early days.

  “Mistress Margaret Haymer and her husband … name escapes me?”

  “Dead, oh years ago, alas!”

  “The Hillwoods?”

  “Both passed over, unfortunatly.”

  “Feller who invited my commanding officer and several of us from the midshipmens’ mess to a supper and ball once … Sir Richard Slade?”

  “Joined the Great Majority in ‘86,” was the shifty-eyed reply. “And good riddance, frankly. A back-gammoner, sir, d’ye get my …”
r />   “Thought there was somethin’ a tad … off about him, myself,” Lewrie could say with a frown of pleasure. “A man o’ the ‘windward passage,’ ey? Hid it well, he did, but … his house servants were a young bunch, and all boys. Well, well …”

  “Alan Lewrie, is it you, sir?”

  “Ma’am?” he replied, turning in the direction of the query. “I say! Mistress Beauman, a great pleasure after all these … after all this time.”

  Years, ye gods! he chid himself, don’t remind her of her years!

  Cashman had the right of it; Anne Beauman had aged badly. Only her lively brown eyes reminded him of the lass she used to be. She had shriveled like one of those apple-headed dolls the Rebels made that he had seen in Charleston or Wilmington; stout as a salt-beef cask, as well. Though still done up in the best apparel money could buy—and Beaumans could afford the best—she more resembled a weary harridan who had not been blessed by Life, the sort of shop-woman one could see in London, out on a Sunday stroll since that was better than desponding up in an airless garret lodging.

  “Congratulations, sir,” she said as if recalling maidenly coos and styles. “Lucy wrote us, once she was safely back in England. But she told us you were merely a Commander, at the time.”

  “She and Sir Malcolm keep well, I trust, Mistress Anne?”

  “Oh, indeed! With you to thank for their lives.”

  “I did nothing more than warn them to flee Venice and get home, before the French took the place, ma’am, nothing like …” Lewrie said with his brow creased in confusion, wondering what spindrift the minx had invented to improve her tale.

  “Oh, but was there not some adventure at some island along the Dalmatian coast, with pirates and …?” Anne frowned in turn.

  “We put in there for a bit, once she and Sir Malcolm took passage with us, but that was after we’d—”