The King's Commission

by Dewey Lambdin

  “You don’t think they’re legitimate, sir?” Alan perked up.

  “Oh, don’t be that large an ass,” Lilycrop grumbled. “Think just any fool can go aboard a flagship and dream somethin’ like this up on the spur of the moment? No, this’n has so many official wax seals on it it’d float.”

  The ship’s bell chimed three bells; half past one o’clock of the middle watch, and Lilycrop looked weary to the bone, which explained his testiness.

  “Only thing that surprises me is, if Florida’s so bloody important to us, why didn’t we raise the tribes long ago, when we still had the east coast forts? Why leave it this late?”

  “There is that, sir,” Alan agreed, too sleepy to worry much.

  “I’ve seen things like this before,” Lilycrop went on. “War on the cheap, dreamed up by map-gazers’n quill-pushers safe back in London. I don’t know whether our Mister Cowell come up with this himself, or if he’s just a nobody wantin’ to make his name out of it. He might be some lord’s errand boy. And that McGilliveray. A right ‘Captain Sharp,’ too clever by half for the likes of me. Mayhap he knows what he’s talkin’ about, an’ his tame Apalachee’ll treat us like vistin’ royalty, and he’ll sit at the right hand of God once he’s up-river with his people the Creeks. I don’t like leavin’ the sloop up-river. And we’ll have to split our parties again when you transfer to horses.”

  “You should have said something then, sir.”

  “Oh, I did enough carpin’ for their likes. All that praise we got, like we’re Drake’r Anson come back with flamin’ swords … well, talk’s cheap, and so are we. I’m the oldest lieutenant in the Navy, you’re nobody, and Shrike and the sloop are expendable. Damned expendable.”

  “You give me chills, sir,” Alan said, taking a deep sip of his own mug to fortify himself. “But surely, the admiral has already placed his favorites into larger ships than ours. Everything makes sense to choose Shrike. It’s a chance to do something really grand.”

  “And get your name in the Marine Chronicle?” Lilycrop sneered. “Hell, nary a word o’ this’ll ever get out. We’re goin’ to be as anonymous as spies, no matter how it comes out. Oh, maybe our Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty will make a note of it in our records, but I’ll not be made post-captain over it, and you’ll not go higher than you are now. There’s no way to refuse this duty, but if there was a way, I’d consider it. All that talk of how the Spanish don’t patrol. Well, remember, there’s troops and a ship’r two at Pensacola, and sure to be a ship o’ war workin’ outa Tampa Bay. Spies along the coast, some Indian that’ll run to the Dagoes to raise the hue an’ cry. Sell us out for a fuckin’ mirror! Jesus weep! Nobody I knew ever prospered who got tied up with damn foolishness such as this. You be sure to watch your back once you’re ashore. If you learned anythin’ up in the Chesapeake, use it. Take whoever you know is a woodsman an’ a scrapper, ’cause you’ll have need of ’em. And I’ll pray every day for your safety, Mister Lewrie.”

  “Thank you, sir, that was well said, and welcome,” Alan replied with a warm feeling inside for Lilycrop’s regard for him.

  “Hard enough to break in a first officer. No call to do it more’n once a year, ’pon my soul.” Lilycrop scowled, looking away at the antics of his cats on the floor. “I’ve grown used to ya, d’ya see? Show us heel-taps on your glass, and let us get some rest. We’ll need it.”

  Chapter 3

  “‘They are ingenious, witty, cunning, and deceitful; very faithful indeed to their own tribes, but privately dishonest, and mischievous to the Europeans and Christians. Their being honest and harmless to each other may be through fear of resentment and reprisal—which is unavoidable in case of any injury.’” Alan read half aloud from a volume that McGilliveray had recommended to him, James Adair’s History of the American Indians, published in London in 1776. “‘They are very close and retentive of their secrets; never forget injuries; revengeful of blood, to a degree of distraction. They are timorous, and consequently, cautious; very jealous of encroachments from their Christian neighbors; and likewise, content with freedom, in every turn of fortune. They are possessed of a strong comprehensive judgement, can form surprisingly crafty schemes, and conduct them with equal caution, silence and address; they admit none but distinguished warriors and beloved men into their councils.’”

  “Well, that let’s me out,” Captain Cashman of the light company of the 104th Regiment of Foot laughed easily as they sat at table their second day out from Kingston.

  “I quite look forward to our meeting them,” Cowell said. Without his wig, and with his shirt collar open, he looked like a balding club waiter out on holiday. “They are an admirable people, much abused by contact with the white man. As the French philosopher Rousseau said, they have a natural nobility. Read on, Mister Lewrie, do.”

  “‘They are slow but persevering in their undertakings’—Sorry, Mister Cowell, but negotiations may take longer than you think if that’s true—‘commonly temperate in eating, but excessively immoderate in drinking.’ Hmm, sounds like half my relatives. ‘They often transform themselves by liquor into the likeness of mad foaming bears.’”

  “Can’t take someone like that to Covent Garden,” Cashman observed.

  “Ah, here’s the best part. ‘The women in general are of a mild, amiable, soft disposition; exceedingly modest in their behavior, and very seldom noisy either in the single or married state.’ Hmm, well, maybe it’s not the best part at that.”

  “Adair is amusing,” McGilliveray said, looking up from carving his salt beef. “He got that part wrong, at least among the Muskogee.”

  “Oh, are the women better than he said?” Alan asked.

  “Once married, they are subservient to their husbands. That doesn’t mean they cannot nag, or raise their voices. Frankly, the older they get, the more they resemble Billingsgate fishmonger women. Very earthy.” McGilliveray gave them a tight smile.

  “What we’re interested in, my dear sir, is what sort of rattle they are,” Cashman drawled.

  “Lay hands on a married Muskogee, any married Indian woman, and her male relatives will hang you up on the pole and butcher you for three days. One does not even cast a covetous eye on them, for fear of retribution. It’s a blasphemy.”

  “You mean we can’t even bloody look at ’em? Here, Lewrie, this is a rum duty,” said Cashman, frowning.

  “You may notice them, but you can’t ogle them, or follow after them, or try to talk to them. If they’re in their monthly courses, you won’t see them at all.” McGilliveray went on sternly lecturing, as he had since he had come aboard. “They hide themselves away from their families and their village, and anything they touch is polluted. A man who looks on a woman in her courses, gets downstream of one, has to go through severe purification rituals to restore his spirits.”

  “Don’t sound like they run to whores, neither.” Cashman winked at Lewrie, who was as tired of McGilliveray’s pontifications as anyone else aboard.

  “No, we don’t, and you’re becoming tiresome, Captain Cashman,” McGilliveray said, controlling his temper, which Alan had just read was supposed to be “immoderate.”

  “Seriously, Mister McGilliveray, we’re going to have seamen and soldiers running about who haven’t had anything better than a harbor drab or a toothless camp follower since their last payday. There must be some release, surely. The whole tribe can’t live in chastity belts.”

  “Indian men do, you know,” McGilliveray said smugly. “For the good of the harvest, the planting of the crops, good fortune in hunting, success in battle, when someone dies. That’s why sexual relations are so strictured. Also, how do you control the urge to adultery among so many people in such a small village unless the whole thing becomes some form of magic ritual?”

  He gave them a deprecating smile to show that he was human, which did nothing to convince either Lewrie or Cashman that he hadn’t been got at by Baptists.

  “At least, once they become warriors, they do, and o
nce they wed. Before, there is allowed a certain license. Among the younger women as well. They can be rather … enthusiastic about men before they wed.”

  “Well, how do you tell the difference, then?” Cashman demanded. “And what do you do, bring her a plucked chicken? Flip tuppence across the fire? Tell ’em to wash the mehtar’s daughter?”

  “The what?” Lewrie goggled.

  “Sorry, I was in the East Indies once. It was a lot easier there, let me tell you. Cheaper too, if you like nautch girls with burns and legs like farrier sergeants,” Cashman said irrepressibly.

  “There’s a lot of ceremony in village life,” McGilliveray told them, sipping at small-beer, which was all he would allow himself. “At each ceremony, there’s dancing in circles around a central fire, and all the unmarried women sort of cluster together and show off their finery. I shall point them out to you. If they fancy you, you’ll know it right off. They run things, long as they’re single.”

  “And if Indian men restrict themselves as you say, they must have to make up for lost time after they’re married,” Cashman said, grinning. “So if she’s there, she isn’t polluted, and if she fancies a tumble, she’ll come over and flash her poonts?”

  “It’s a bit more subtle than that, Captain,” McGilliveray said with a sigh of the truly long-suffering. “Believe me, you’ll know.”

  “I should think it best if we forswore conjugal relations with the natives,” Cowell said, a bit prim. “It would be easiest.”

  “Hardly possible, I’m afraid, sir,” Alan stated. “You haven’t seen my sailors a’rut.” Or me, Alan qualified to himself. “And if the young unmarried females are so eager for it, I doubt a troop of saints could hold out for long.”

  “You’ll have your rut, sir,” McGilliveray snapped. “Speaking further of pollution, I adjure you and your men from making water into any body of water. Running water is sacred, you see, where some of our gods dwell. You don’t piss in it, or spit into it, or pass excreta into it. No dumping of kitchen scraps, anything like that. You do that on dry land where it won’t drain into running waters. Bury it.”

  “Well, we can go have a wash, can’t we?” Cashman asked.

  “Oh yes. In fact, if you don’t wash daily, first thing in the morning, they’ll look on you strangely. It’s our way. But, never get downstream of a woman. It’s best to conform to our customs for as long as you are with my people, to ease the negotiations, you see. With so many distinguished chiefs gathered together, the slightest upset can make them leery of the whole thing and then they’ll not side with us.”

  “When in Rome, do as the Romans,” Cowell suggested.

  “Now Mister McGilliveray, tell them about the missionary work among the Muskogean. I mind you said once back in London, with the bishop of Chicester as I remember, that only a few of your people have accepted the faith.”

  “I should be delighted to hear of it, sir, but I believe that Captain Cashman and I are already due on deck,” Alan said, referring to his pocket watch. “Musket drill, you know. If you gentlemen shall excuse us? Please stay and indulge yourselves. You have but to ask of my man Cony.”

  “Jesus bloody Christ!” Cashman sighed after they had got on deck. “I’ve about had it with that blackamoor. Like being lectured to by a mastiff. A very unfunny mastiff, at that. Sarn’t! Trot the buggers out for musketry! And if Navy rum is too tasty for proper aimin’, then maybe a Navy cat’ll suit ’em better!”

  “Sir!”

  Cashman was indeed, as Lieutenant Colonel Peacock had said, eccentric. His speech was littered with Army slang, East Indian Hindi expressions, and a pungent sprinkling of profanity that would make a bosun’s mate green with envy. He had come aboard armed to the teeth, wearing an infantry-man’s short, brass-hilted hanger instead of a small-sword, four pistols stuck into his sash and a pair of converted saddle holsters, a short fusil slung over one shoulder and a French musketoon over the other.

  In a world where officers were to be fashion-plates, and the rankers usually clad in rags, Cashman looked as if he had darned his uniform together since he had bought his first set of colors, and once aboard ship, had doffed half of that.

  “Quartermaster, the keg paid out astern?” Alan asked.

  “Aye aye, zir. Hoff a cable,” the blonde hulk named Svensen told him. “Full hundret faddom line, zir.”

  “Let’s get to it, Sarn’t.”

  The men of the light company split off into skirmishing pairs at the stern rail. They pulled their weapons back to half-cock, bit off the twist end of their first cartouches, and primed pans. Poured powder down the barrels, wadded the waxed paper cartridges around the lead balls, and rammed them home, keeping the rammer free in their off hands instead of returning them to their proper place under the barrels.

  The first rank fired, raising froth around the towed keg at one hundred yards range, and stepped back to start reloading while their rear-rank partners stepped up to deliver their shots, not in volley, but within a few seconds of each other.

  “I like the fusil, if I can’t have a jager rifle,” Cashman said, tap-loading his charge and snapping the weapon up to his shoulder. “No one knows exactly why, but a short barrel is just as accurate as a long one.”

  Bam! And down came the piece, drawn back to half-cock on the way to loading position. Alan nodded as he saw that Cashman had chipped the keg, which, half-submerged, would be about the size of a reclining man at one hundred yards.

  “With a smooth-bore”—Cashman continued to talk as he bit at his cartridge, blackening his lips—“it’s more a problem of obturation, you see, how snug the ball fits in the barrel.”

  Tap went the fusil on the deck to settle the powder. The right hand had rolled the ball and paper wad together and stuck it in the muzzle as it came up from being rapped. The rammer came up like a fugleman’s cane on parade, and everything was shoved home snug with one firm push. The rammer came out of the muzzle and spun in Cashman’s left-hand fingers as he brought the weapon up, pulling it back to full-cock. A quick breath, and a second shot rang out, the second in half a minute.

  “No parade ground bumf for us, see,” Cashman said, even as he was making a fresh cartouche appear as if by magic. “Just get it done. Three, maybe four rounds a minute, fast as your Ferguson breech-loader. Here.”

  Alan took the fusil. It was a lighter, shorter musket, just a little longer than a cavalryman’s musketoon, with a barrel of about twenty-five inches. As Alan loaded for himself, Cashman went on about it.

  “Smooth-bore, takes a bayonet, heavy enough stock to knock some poor bastard into next week, but only .54 caliber. Lighter ball carriers farther with a standard Brown Bess powder measure. And if you use the waxed cartridge as a greased patch, like you would in a rifled piece, the bugger carries farther and straighter. Battalion companies with the Brown Bess average eighty or ninety yards for a killing shot, but the fusil will go a bit farther. One hundred twenty, perhaps one hundred fifty yards. Nothing like a rifle. But it only drops about ten inches in two hundred yards. Frankly, I couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a carronade at two hundred yards.”

  Alan brought up the weapon, pulled it back to full-cock, took aim and squeezed the trigger, and was pleased to see his ball raise a splash just short of the keg.

  “Load, quick now! The Indians are breathin’ on you!”

  “Respectable kick,” Alan said, fumbling through the loading procedure and taking a lot longer than Cashman or his men did.

  “Lighter piece, same powder charge as a regular’s musket. Masters, you poxy spastic, pick up your bloody rammer, man! Don’t drop it!”

  “Take ’is name, sir?” the sergeant offered.

  “No, take his pulse. See if he’s dead,” Cashman quipped, and his men laughed easily.

  After half an hour, with their mouths and faces blackened by the powder they had eaten and the flash from the pans, they took a short rest while the keg was paid out to one hundred fifty yards.

  Alan had finally
managed to get off three shots a minute, and had hit the keg twice in that period, though the fusil had pummeled his shoulder almost numb. He walked over to the water butt and dipped the long, narrow sipper down through the small scuttle to draw out a measure.

  “Your men seem to know what they’re about, I must say,” Alan commented.

  “They’re damned good, aye. Best thing about the bloody 104th Regiment,” Cashman spat, wiping his mouth and face clean and making a face at the taste of nitre on his lips. “A war-raised single-battalion unit. No home depot, you see. Peacock raised it himself. Tory patriot, don’t ya know. Cheap at the price, too, them that survived the fevers and the slave revolt campaignin’. They’ll deactivate us, if they even remember we’re bloody here, soon’s the bloody treaty’s signed.”

  “You were part of it, originally?”

  “Hell, no. My light company’s all that’s left of a fusilier battalion. Got tagged onto them after most of us went under to Yellow Jack. Came off the ship four hundred seventy-seven men and officers strong, and two weeks later, we made roughly two companies. Now I’ve barely forty left. These are the best of ’em, though it was hard to choose.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Peacock and Captain Eccles seemed a little put off that I suggested light infantry, or that you would be the one to go on this adventure of ours,” Alan said smiling.

  “This was your doing?” Cashman brightened. “Blessings upon ye, then. Anything to get away from those buggers. What did they say?”

  “That you were eccentric, but a hard fighter.”

  “I’m not their sort,” Cashman admitted chearly. “Thank God. I’m amazed they reckoned me a good soldier. I didn’t know they’d recognize one if he crawled up and bit ’em on the arse. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, and they needed a light company to flesh ’em out. If they had a choice, I’d not have been able to purchase a commission with ’em. I was only a lieutenant with my old battalion. A captaincy was a brevet promotion, but if the loot’s good, or the cards run right, I might be able to purchase a real captaincy one of these days.”