Christ, what'll I do with this'un? Lewrie asked himself, aghast.
For inside the hat-box was a stripling kitten, white-furred in the main, with a grey tail and nose, two large dark grey smudges above his eyes and 'twixt his ears. Two huge, impish pale-green eyes peered up at him, goggling in wonder as its head bobbed and cocked, half from curiosity and half from catling-clumsy imbalance. The kitten uttered a wee, shrill but loud "meek!" and a shut-mouthed little trill.
Gawd, Toulon'll kill him! Lewrie sadly thought; he won't last a dog watch! All that white fur, too… there go my uniforms. Play up gladsome, fool. The poor lad meant well.
"Damned if he isn't almost Toulon's exact opposite, white where that little scamp's black, and all! What a thoughtful gift, Desmond, my boy. Most thoughtful, indeed!" he gushed, most insincerely, as he reached into the hat-box and lifted the kitten out.
"After we boarded the French brig o' war, I saw him, cowering and mewing on her boat-tier beams," Desmond happily babbled, "under a smashed-up cutter, and how he survived our broadsides, I can't rightly say, fa-… sir. I took one step in his direction, and he just dashed to me, and almost clawed his way up my boot and breeches, then started in to purring like he'd bust, soon as I took hold of him. Oh, he' s just as smart and clever as a lady's bonnet, he is, father! He took to bed in Midshipman Alston's hat-box, so I had to buy it off him…"
"I'll recompense you for…"
"No, 'twas his old'un, and part of the gift, since he's so fond of it," Desmond objected, "and the little fellow's already figured out the right place to make, isn't that clever?"
"Well, you give any of 'em a nice box o' sand or dirt, a little privacy, and that's pretty-much bred in the bone," Lewrie chuckled as the kitten dug his claws into the gilt-laced lapel of his dress coat and made loud sniffing noises. And purring fit to bust. "Don't know how Toulon'd like a playmate. He's set in his ways, but… I'm sure they'll take to each other."
Sooner or later, he silently hoped; please, Jesus!
"You like him, sir?" Desmond said as Lewrie pried the kitten off his coat and gently set him back in the hat-box. He put the cover on, and he and Lewrie stood back up.
"Absolutely delighted!" Lewrie lied most earnestly. "You could not have bought a better, were you rich as King Midas. You're a grand young lad, Desmond. I'm proud of you, for being so quick aboard your foe. Your uncle tells me you're shaping main-well as a gentleman-in-training… though more attention to your studies'd not go amiss!" he said, playfully making as if to tweak the boy's nose. He hadn't a clue about Desmond as a scholar, but such flummerous words always seemed to hit near the mark where midshipmen, and boys, were concerned. "Proud of your thoughtfulness, too, and your generosity."
"I call him Snowflake," Desmond proudly imparted.
"Well, early days… he might grow up t'be big as Toulon, and who ever heard of a champion, two-stone ram-cat named Snowflake, hey?" Lewrie chortled, then softened, in dread of hurting the lad's feelings. "Mean t'say… ye can't insult a proud, willful creature with a wrong name. Have to observe for a time, before the apt name comes. Might end up a Smudge, a Scamp, or a Rascal, you never can tell. Well… I must go, son. Thankee, again, and soon as I'm back, you'll come aboard and dine with me, and see how little No-Name fares, right?"
"I shall look forward to it… father!" the lad replied, with a covert wink before they did their appropriate goodbyes, dictated by Society and naval etiquette.
Another bloody cat, Lewrie told himself, settling in the stern-sheets of his gig with the hat-box in his lap; first of a curmudgeon's round dozen, like poor old Captain Lilycrop back in '82? Christ, just spare me! Still… the boy meant well by it. I'm sure he did.
CHAPTER THIRTY
HMS Proteus was driven like Jehu had driven his chariot, sails set "all to the royals," stays'ls bellied out between her masts everywhere even the tiniest zephyr of wind could be caught, cupped by heavy flax or cotton and used to impart power. Stuns'ls were boomed out on her course and tops'l yards, and the rarely employed sprits'l beneath her plunging jib-boom and bowsprit had been spread, now stiff with the furious boil and bluster of salt spray flung up from the cutwater and the frigate's fine entry.
Driven though he was, Lewrie did take time to thank Proteuss builders, the Nicholson yards at Frindsbury on the Medway, for "Frenchifying" her and improving on the numerous Thames class frigates. What he knew about ship design could fill a thimble, admittedly, and the new science of hydraulics, as the learned half-English half-Swede director of the Royal Dockyards at Karlskrona, Fredrick af Chapman, wrote of it, was quite beyond him. All he knew was that Proteus was swift.
His Surgeon's Mate, the scholarly French emigre Mr. Durant, once a university-trained Physician before fleeing the Terror in France, had taken time to read up on his new surroundings in all its contrary, esoteric mysteries, and was the only one who could explain it.
"T'ink of ze seawater as treacle, ze molasses, Capitaine" Durant said over supper in Lewrie's great-cabins, to enlighten his commanding officer's "darkness," exasperated at last, perhaps, by Capt. Lewrie's befuddled look. "Ze faster you go, ze more ze water is compressed by ze bows, but water, any liquid, you cannot compress, comprends? It bash back at you, it makes ze stone wall. You must cut ze water, never try to batter t'rough it. Ze ladle floats on treacle, you cannot submerge it easily. Ah, but ze knife blade, hawn-hawn!" he had triumphantly concluded, replete with that snorting nasal laugh to which Frogs seemed so damnably partial.
Proteus's fore-end frames stood narrower to her keel, sacrificing beaminess and storage capacity, surrendering just a bit of forward buoyancy, rising straighter and more vertically near her stem pieces to narrow her lowest forefoot and entry. Her planking had required more costly steaming and bending to create a rounder and more graceful arc, more of a hemispherical bow moulding than the usual nearly square-cut form. Nowhere near as fine as the bows of a cutter, gig, or fishing boat, for Nicholson's naval architects could but create a compromise… but a highly pleasing, and swift, compromise she was. So, HMS Proteus stood Sou-Sou'west from Antigua, determined to give French-held Guadeloupe a wide berth this time, and with the wind fine on her larboard quarter she was making nearly eleven and a half knots, still "battering" her way against those "treacly," glittering seas, not as fast as the Trades blew, but close, so that hands on deck could get a bit of cooling respite from the afternoon heat and savour the impatient keen and hum of the Trades in the rigging, the drumming and booming of her stout-planked hull as she met the long-set four- or five-foot seas, and the waterfall's, dragon's hiss, of her wake. "Sail ho!" a lookout in the main-mast cross-trees cried. "Two point off th' larb'd quarter! One… two… three sail, astern!"
"Astern of us?" Lt. Langlie said with a puzzled grunt. Lifting his brass speaking-trumpet to his lips, he shouted aloft, "Can you make them out?"
"Tops'ls, t'gallants an' royals t'th' first'un! T'gallants an' royals t'th' second…" the lookout shouted back. "Last'un, I kin see royals, only, sir! Two ships, an' a brig! First'un might be Sumter!"
"Mister Grace, my duty to the Captain, and inform him that the Americans might be out, astern of us, and following," Lt. Langlie said.
"Now now, lads… behave," Lewrie cajoled his cats. "No Name" was inside his hat box, forepaws, eyes, and muzzle peeking playfully at its rim, and madly scrambling to get out for the fifth time, trilling and mouse-squeaking. Toulon stood a foot or so aloof of the box, with his tail bottled up, ears laid flat, his back arched, and his fur stood on end. His comment to such mediations was a long, wrathful moaning, followed by a fang-baring hiss of equal duration, punctuated by a spit, and a testy chop-licking. "No Name," far from being daunted by such a welcome, seemed to regard Toulon's action as a delightful raree-show, and an invitation to play. "Christ Almighty, now…" Lewrie sighed. "Damme, I know he meant well, but… Aye, Mister Grace?"
"Mister Langlie's duty, sir, and I'm to tell you that the American squadron seems to be astern of us, sailing on our same course."
"Oh hell, this could get embarrassing," Lewrie muttered, contemplating what a horse-laugh the Yankee Doodles would have when they got wind of why he'd dashed out of English Harbour so frantically. "Aspinall, er… I'm going on deck. Do you try to keep the littl'un alive 'til I return."
"Aye, sir," Aspinall replied, though regarding such a Herculean task with a dubious, much put-upon expression. "Here, Toulon! Here's yer 'toe-y'! Play 'chase' with yer fav'rite 'toe-y'?"
He dangled a much-clawed and gnawed red wool ball on a length of spun yarn, a toy that usually sent Toulon into transports of joy, and could be counted on for a half-hour of energetic distraction. Today it elicited an edgy hiss-spit, and several crocodile swishes from his bristled-up tail before he returned to his "death watch."
"Sure it's the Yankees, Mister Langlie?" Lewrie asked, once on the quarterdeck.
"The lookout's familiar with their appearance, sir. We believe so, aye," Lt. Langlie replied as they both raised telescopes to study the tiny slivers of sail that barely peeked above the horizon. "They are ten miles or so astern of us, their royals or t'gallants in view, perhaps a sliver of the lead ship's upper tops'ls now and then, when the sea lifts both of us together."
"Making up to us?" Lewrie asked, mentally crossing his fingers.
"But slowly, sir. Sumter, for so the lookout supposes her to be, leads them. They must have cleared harbour not two hours after we did.'
"Well, damn," Lewrie grumbled. "Swift as they've proved in past, they'll most-like be abeam of us by sunset. I'll have to dine 'em in, and never be able t'live it down. We sailed so quickly, they must imagine I'm after Choundas and his convoy and want a piece of the action. Damn-nation!"
Lewrie gloomily speculated that he could just sail the brig o' war USS Oglethorpe under, and might elude the three-masted Sumter, as well, but Hancock and her humourless master Goodell…! He hadn't a hope in Hell of out-footing her, with her taller masts and over-long spars, her larger spread of canvas, and her impressive length of keel. Once she got "the bone in her teeth," USS Hancock could outrun terns!
"Do we not light the taff-rail lanthorns, nor show any binnacle lights, we mask all the stern windows, and your gun-room and I dine in the dark," Lewrie hopefully said, "then add a radical change of course… say due West just after full nightfall, they might stay on their present heading."
"Which would place them ahead of us, to the Suth'rd, sir," Lt. Langlie glumly commented, "and sure we'd stumble over them within the week. And then what'd we say… sorry?"
"Own up that we're a pack o' fools," Lewrie spat, lowering his telescope, "who can't keep proper guard on an anchored ship."
"I simply can't imagine that Mister Jugg turned pirate on us, sir," Langlie said, sighing as he took off his hat and trailed fingers through his dark and curly locks. "A surly, glum bastard he was, but he'd settled in main-well, and was ever in a fair way of performing his duties. Mister Burns, well… there's hen-headed for you, but Mister Towpenny and four reliable hands, even Toffett, to overcome on his own, sir? Idle hands the Devil's workshop or no, Captain, they'd only been becalmed aboard the prize a little more than a week. No, I can't see an uprising. More like, I suspect one of Choundas's small privateers sneaked in and cut her out in the dead of night, when only two or three were awake."
"Supposed t'be awake," Lewrie snidely retorted. "Was it Mister Burns who had the deck, t'other hands could've set fire to her without a harsh word from him, the quakin' dullard. So timid he wouldn't say 'Boh' to a goose!"
"She could be alongside the Basse-Terre quays on Guadeloupe by now, sir," Lt. Langlie went on. "That devil Victor Hugues's valuable cargo back in his hands… that ogre Choundas laughing like a loon at re-taking her from you the best of all to him, sir," Langlie remorselessly fantasised, "getting some of his own back at our expense in more ways than one, d'ye see, buffing up…"
"Yes!" Lewrie finally barked. "I do see, Mister Langlie, clear as a bloody damn' bell!"
"My pardons, sir, I…" Langlie said with a wince.
"Arrr!" Lewrie gave vent to a piratical growl, an expression he was becoming rather fond of; it was brusquely eloquent, in its own inarticulate way.
"At least, sir, the rapidity of our departure spared us Mister Peel's, or Mister Pelham's, presence," Langlie pointed out, trying to salvage something worthwhile from the ongoing fiasco.
"Proving that God is, when it suits Him, just, Mister Langlie."
"We stand on as we are then, sir?" Langlie enquired, happy for a change of topic. "Until dark?"
"Aye," Lewrie grunted. "Little more we can do. We could hang the crew's clothing in the rigging for a quarter-knot more speed. If there was a spare inch o' rigging left. I'll be below."
"Uhm… how is Toulon taking to his new, uhm…?" Lt. Langlie just had to ask.
"Oh, simply bloody fine, Mister Langlie! Like chalk an' cheese they are," Lewrie gravelled, slamming the tubes of his telescope shut. "Oil and vinegar… ham and bloody eggs, thankee for askin'."
Lewrie stomped forrud to the larboard, windward, ladder to the gun-deck, tromped the steps downward and turned at its base, forcing a Marine sentry in full kit by his doors to stiffen, ready to salute.
"Sail ho!" the main-mast lookout cried, again.
"Now, bloody what?" Lewrie grumbled to himself.
" Two sail… four points off th' starb'd bows! Three sail… sailin' athwart, an' bound West-Nor'west!" the lookout further howled, which tweaked Lewrie from his funk and made him scamper to the quarterdeck, again.
"Just about due West of us," he said half to himself, deploying his much-abused telescope once more by the barricade of hammock nets.
"Four sail, now!" the lookout shrilled. "Four points off th' starb'd bows!"
"Mister Langlie, hands to stations to wear ship," Lewrie snapped. "Make our new course Nor'west by West. They could be another American convoy, late departin' for home, but… we'd better investigate."
"Ahoy, th' deck!" a lookout called down from USS Sumter's mainmast cross-trees. "Th' frigate's wearin' about t'starb'd tack!"
"Now where's he goin'?" Capt. McGilliveray wondered aloud. "I could o' sworn he was bound for Guadeloupe, but here he goes a'harin' off to th' Nor'west. Most p'culiar."
"Maybe she's spotted something, sir," Lt. Claiborne, his First Officer, supposed. "Or… what intelligence he received that caused him to tear outta port came a day late."
"Aye, and th' onliest thing that'd whip Cap'm Lewrie t'sea that I know of d be news that th' French convoy's sailed," McGilliveray replied, "like we finally decided. Maybe that's why Proteus wasn't bound direct for Guadeloupe in th' first place, that a British spy got word of their departure. Time a boat could get to Antigua, they'd be about this far out, on course for Jacmel on Saint Domingue. Damn my eyes, sir, but I do b'lieve Cap'm Lewrie's got lucky, and espied 'em, after all! Desmond? Mister McGilliveray, mean t'say? Make a hoist to the Hancock, lad, an' make it… Alter,' 'Nor'west,' and 'In Pursuit.' In pursuit o' what, we don't rightly know yet, but there's some-thin' he's caught scent of that's put his tail up. Mister Claiborne! We'll wear ship to Nor'west, if ya please."
"Aye, sir."
"And no wonder Lewrie was so secretive," Captain McGilliveray said, half to himself, slamming a fist on the nearest bulwark. "Dour as ol' 'Thunderation' treated him, he doesn't want t'share 'em. Well, we'll see about that, won't we, ha ha!"
"Sumter signals that Proteus has worn about to the Nor'west and seems to be in pursuit of something over the horizon, sir," Goodell's First Lieutenant related to him with the sombre gravitas their stern captain demanded from men he intended to groom and mould as gentlemen officers… if it killed them.
"Ah, hmm," Capt. Goodell replied, clearing his throat. "Do thee summon the hands to wear about as well, sir. So much undue haste is indicative of something worth chasing, aye, even in one so idle and indolent as Captain Lewrie struck me. Like all the British" he glowered, "Thun-der-ation, what hypocrites are they! Beguile me for cooperation in his quest af
ter one despicable Frenchman, appeal to honour… then dash off to have it all for himself, didst his intelligence smack of too much potential plunder, pah! Hypocrites, liars, and tyrants, every last one of those enervated… Babylonians!"
"Une voile!" the lookout atop Le Gascons main-mast cried. "A sail, to windward! One point aft of the starboard beam! Royals, and topgallants… studding sails on topsail yards, I see!"
"Mon Dieu, merde alors" Capt. Griot said with a grimace. "The enemy has found us, after all." Griot raised his telescope and swept the tubes to their full extension, though there was little chance that he could espy anything from the quarterdeck, yet.
"What course does she steer?" Capt. Guillaume Choundas shouted upward, clump-shuffle-ticking to the starboard side.
"Bows on… no! She shows her larboard bows! Steering North-West!" the lookout responded.
"How many masts?" Choundas cried, his throat rasping harshly in unwonted effort, and with his eye shut in furious contemplation, with an imagined chart of the Caribbean in his mind.
"Twol So much canvas, messieurs, I can only make out two!" the lookout cried, after a long, frustrating pause of half a minute.
"Out of Antigua, for certain, Capitaine" Griot fretted, as he paced, "which lies almost due East of our present position. Shaping course to the North-West…" Griot was hushed by the raising of his master's left hand, for Choundas was still thinking, and would not be distracted.
"Two-masted, flying studding sail booms, hmm… bound out of Antigua to the North-West," Choundas muttered to himself, transferring his left hand to massage his throat, for it had been years since he'd actually commanded at sea where shouting orders had been required. "I think we see a British packet brig, Griot. North-West, perhaps a half-point more Westerly, would be the shortest course to Jamaica. She might be carrying despatches or orders. At speed."
His good eye flew open and transfixed the scowling Griot like a collector would pin a butterfly to a board.
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