Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Afore yer dinner, sir.” Aspinall cringed. “Would ya wish a glass o’ somethin’ wet, ’fore yer dinner, sir?”

  “Uhm, no.” Lewrie sighed, sure that spirits—before the sun was well below the main-course yardarm—and his foul mood, would be a bad combination. “Don’t think so, Aspinall. But thankee.” Alan softened.

  “Aye, sir,” Aspinall replied, ducking back into his pantry.

  Toulon padded to the desk after a good yawn and stretch, and a thorough tongue-wash on his favourite sofa cushion, to starboard. A prefacing Grr-murr! of effort to announce his arrival, and he was up on the desktop, to sniff at the quill pen and bat at it hopefully. Lewrie smiled for the first time that morning and teased him with it, holding it over his head. Toulon half reared on his hind legs to bat at it, turned excited pirouettes as Lewrie circled the quill, slashing with both paws at his “birdie.”

  “Deck, there!” came a faint, thin cry from high aloft. “Deck, there! Sign’l fum Myrmidon!”

  Toulon caught his “birdie,” crumpling the spine of the quill in his paws, and bore it to his mouth as Lewrie cocked his head to hear.

  “Two . . . strange . . . sail!” The lookout slowly read off the distant bunting. And Lewrie was out of his chair, shrugging into his coat and hat, halfway to the after ladder to the quarterdeck, before the man finished shrilling “. . . up . . . t’windward!” Toulon remained on the top of the desk, flop-ping onto his side to gnaw and claw his prey with his back feet, oblivious.

  “Masthead!” Knolles was bellowing aloft through a brass deck-officer’s trumpet. “Anything in sight?”

  “Nossir!” the lookout bawled back, after a long moment to scan the weather horizon with his hands shading his eyes like a dray-horse’s blinders. “Nothin’ in sight!”

  “Up to windward of Myrmidon,” Lewrie grunted, joining Knolles by the wheel drum. “Due East, or up to her Nor’east, perhaps?”

  “Aye, sir, I should think so.” Knolles grinned, removing his cocked hat to run his fingers through his blond hair; a sign of joy or agitation, Lewrie had learned by then.

  “Mister Spendlove?” Lewrie called over his shoulder.

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Bend on ‘Acknowledge’ to Myrmidon, then repeat the hoist for Lionheart, astern,” Lewrie instructed.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Mister Spendlove?”

  “Aye, sir?” The lad checked in mid-turn.

  “Make sure you preface the hoist to the squadron commander with ‘From Myrmidon, ’ so he doesn’t think the two strange sail lie windward in sight of us, sir.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Spendlove heartily agreed. It wouldn’t be the first time that signals had been misread or missent between ships since he’d come aboard Jester.

  “Two ships or more, sir!” Knolles enthused, almost clapping his hands together as he swung his arms at the prospect of action or easy prize-money. “Fine weather for a pair of ships to come running off-wind through the Straits of Otranto. French, perhaps, sir?”

  “For Taranto or Calabria, if they’re inshore of Myrmidon; for Malta, too, perhaps,” Lewrie speculated. “Neapolitans, Maltese or God knows what, so far. Come on, Fillebrowne. Tell us a bit more!”

  “Lionheart acknowledges our hoist, sir,” Spendlove told him a moment later. “Nothing more, sir.”

  “Mister Knolles, I’d admire you eased us a point free.” Alan frowned, fighting the urge to chew on a thumbnail. “That will let us sidle more northerly, towards Myrmidon. Within sight of whoever or whatever these strange sail are.”

  “Aye, sir. Quartermaster, ease your helm a’weather, a point free, no more,” Knolles told the helmsman. He opened his mouth to call down to Bosun Cony in the waist, to alert the watch for a sail trim, but thought better of it, for the moment.

  “Aye aye, sir!” Mr. Spenser parroted. “Helm a’weather, one point. Her head’s now Nor’east by North, half East!”

  “Deck, there!” the main mast lookout shrilled. “Sign’l fum Myrmidon! Three strange sail, t’th’ East’rd!”

  “Repeat again, Mister Spendlove.” Lewrie fretted, pacing the deck plankings, head down and scuffing his shoes on the pounded oakum between the joins. “Aloft, there! Where, away . . . Lionheart?”

  “Lar’b’d quarter, sir! Crackin’ on royals!”

  “Sail ho!” the foremast lookout added. “Three sail, d’ye hear, there! One point off t’ larboard bows!”

  The day wasn’t too hazy, Lewrie noted, laying hands on the top of the windward bulwark and gazing down at the creaming quarter-wave of Jester’s wake; a lookout can see twelve, thirteen miles. Wind’s just strong enough to tempt a body sailin’ large, or broad-reachin’, to hoist t’gallants, at the very least. Maybe royals, too. Put ’em hull-down . . . maybe another six miles off, he calculated deliberately. Seven miles, should we be seein’ royals only? Twenty miles, say, up to windward of us and Myrmidon?

  “Three strange sail, d’ye hear, there!” the foremast lookout added. “Turnin’! Hard’nin’ up t’weather! T’gallants an’ tops’ls!”

  Lewrie smiled to himself, leaning back, gripping the cap-rail, and peering up to the Nor’east, where he imagined Myrmidon might be, though he couldn’t see her from the deck. Three sail, who had just espied a strange ship— Myrmidon, thrashing full-and-by to windward, almost dead on their bows—and swinging further out to sea, turning more Sutherly, to give her a wide berth. Or to avoid being spotted? That didn’t sound much like innocent merchantmen out on their “lawful occasions.” There wasn’t any fighting in the Ionian Sea, not yet. Why would three ships be sailing together, unless for mutual aid and defence? And bearing up to the wind, to slip round the seaward flank of a single strange sail?

  “Mister Knolles?” Lewrie called, turning to face his second-in-command.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Pipe ‘All Hands,’ sir. ‘Stations for Stays,’” Lewrie ordered. “Do they try to reach south on us, we might be able to cut them off. Put the ship about, on the larboard tack.”

  “Aye aye, sir! Mister Cony? Pipe ‘All Hands on Deck’!”

  As the bosuns’ calls, the “Spithead Nightingales,” sang their urgent song, Lewrie turned to gaze out to sea a little more Easterly of Jester’s thrashing bows, riding spring-kneed to her motion, feeling the power in her, the thrum and dance of her—vibrant, alive and onrushing. And closing the distance with each loping, hobbyhorsing bound over the brine.

  “Hungry ’is mornin’, she is, sir,” Mr. Buchanon said from his side, a little inboard in deference to a captain’s sole right to the windward side of the quarterdeck. “He be, too, sir. Yer permission, sir?” At Lewrie’s nod, Buchanon stepped up to the bulwarks, put his own hands on the cap-rail, and stared down into the rushing, creaming wake close-aboard—a wake that was already becoming a sibilant, impatient hissing roar, tumbling in snowfall whiteness. His lips moved, and he smiled.

  Lewrie cocked a wary eye at Buchanon; the Sailing Master was becoming even more superstitious lately. He put it down to Jester being ordered into an alien sea, one Buchanon had never sailed, never studied.

  Surgeon Mr. Howse, saturnine and laconic as ever, came on deck by the larboard ladder from the waist, his terrierlike Surgeon’s Assistant, Mr. LeGoff, in tow, again as ever.

  “Some bustle this morning, sir?” Howse enquired gloomily, as if fearing a justification for his presence aboard. “Should we lay out the surgery? In expectation of battle, Captain?”

  How could a reasonable question rankle him so? Lewrie wondered. Howse always had a way of shading or inflecting even “please pass the port” to sound like a retort, a challenge—a sneer!

  “There’ll be no need, ’til we beat to Quarters, Mister Howse,” Lewrie told him. “We haven’t identified our three strange sail yet.”

  “Sharp scalpels, sir,” Buchanon interjected, frowning, pursing his lips in sadness. “As a caution. ’Ey’s blood-hunger on th’ wind.”

  “Smell it, did you, Mister Buchanon?” Howse
puzzled, cocking his head and all but nudging LeGoff in the ribs to clue him to a jape. “Or did your sea-god Lir speak to you directly?”

  “Hands at stations, sir . . . ready to come about,” Lieutenant Knolles reported.

  “Very well, Mister Knolles. Helm alee, at your discretion.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Quartermasters? . . .”

  “A man’d go through Life so cocksure, sir . . .” Mr. Buchanon was sputtering in frustration, not so educated as to be able to spar with Howse’s droll disdain of what was, to him, a matter of fact and deadly-dangerous bit of sea-lore, “wi’ eyes t’ see, an’ ears t’ hear, but—”

  “I put my faith in Science, sir,” Howse declared. “And, do I put stock in a god, He’d be the Great Jehovah . . . not some creaky old peasants’ legend.”

  “Enough, sir,” Lewrie snapped. “This quarterdeck is not . . . my quarterdeck is not the proper place for philosophical disagreement. The both of you,” he was forced to add. “Attention to duty, sirs.”

  “But sir,” Howse deigned to protest, though with much humour, “to render equal by comparison, in the guise of philosophy, a myth of pagan arising and—”

  “Hard of hearing, Mr. Howse?” Lewrie boomed, feeling happy to have a valid reason to vent his spleen on the obstreperous, trimming bastard, who was never happy but when made unhappy, martyred once more by a witless world, an unappreciative Navy. “Damn my eyes, Mr. Howse, get yourself below, if you can’t take a hint and shut up!”

  “Very good, sir,” Howse purred, bowing his way backwards, his hand on his heart, his dark eyes burning with righteous indignation. Lewrie was afraid he’d made the bloody man’s day for him, given him a noble new scar, at which he would most happily pick for weeks!

  “Bloody-minded man, sir,” Buchanon sighed. “Thankee.”

  “Didn’t do it for you, Mr. Buchanon,” Lewrie told him.

  “He’s with us still, Cap’um, sir. Have no fear on ’at score. But, like I said, sir . . . he be hungry,” Buchanon stated slowly. “A fight we’ll have, ’is mornin’ . . . do ’ey have th’ stomach f’r it.”

  “Thankee for telling me, Mr. Buchanon,” Lewrie replied in slow gravity, not quite knowing what to think. Though he’d heard and seen stranger, this commission, aboard this ship.

  This Fate-chosen ship, Lewrie added to himself, to hear old Buchanon tell it! What sign’z he seen, what portent did he . . . ?

  It could have been the quartermasters on the helm, Spenser, and his fellow, the Hamburg-German, Mr. Brauer, easing Jester a half-point free, off the wind a touch, to gather speed to carry her through that difficult thoroughbred-leap of tacking ’cross the power of the winds.

  It could have been a rising of the winds, too, that caused such an eerie keening in the rigging as she increased her pace, as Knolles waited for the perfect moment, the perfect combination of a wave from the quarter-sea under her bows, along with a tiny backing of the wind, to put her about. The deck thrust upward as she set her stiff shoulder to the sea, heeled a bit more and clove it with a dragonlike roar as she neared what felt like eleven knots.

  “Helm alee!” Knolles bellowed at last, and her bows swung up toward the eye of the wind, and Lewrie knew it would be a clean’un. He eyed his hands on the deck below; well drilled— over-drilled—by now, as they leaned to take a strain on weather braces and sheets to cup that power until the very last moment, while others tailed on flaccid lee-side rigging to catch her, meet her, once she’d thundered through stays.

  Fully roused, her upthrust jib-boom and bowsprit speared the horizon as Jester swept round, rising to another lifting wave, canted to the wind’s new direction as she tacked, barely losing a yard leeward or a single beat of her swift pace.

  If there’s to be a feast, he thought, half accepting the superstition as a talisman, she’s ready for it! A good sign, that tack. A good sign, indeed . . . for starters.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Deck, there!” The foremast lookout shouted. “Two Chases . . . go close-hauled! Larb’d tack!”

  They’d seen Myrmidon and Jester first, back when they’d still been “Strange Sail,” and had continued running South, perhaps bearing a bit more to windward as Jester had loomed up over the horizon. The sight, though, of two frigates looming up had settled the matter. A hoist of flags, answered by the strange ships, had shown them to be French. Now they were officially enemy vessels, “Enemies Then Flying,” or Chases. Two of them, at least. The third, which looked to Lewrie like a large frigate, had maintained her Sutherly course, interposing herself between the squadron and the pair on the wing.

  “Might even be one of their big forty-fours,” Lewrie commented after scrambling down the ratlines from the windward mizzen mast. He’d gone at least as high as the cat-harpings for a better view, without playing spider on the futtock-shrouds to gain the mizzen top platform.

  “And that makes whoever she’s escorting damn valuable, sir!” Mr. Knolles chortled with glee. “They wouldn’t waste one of their best for nothing.” Valuable, as in costly for the French to lose in battle. But also valuable as in worth a pretty penny at the Prize-Court, enriching the meagre purse of a lieutenant with large dreams for the future.

  “Deck, there! Myrmidon! Tackin’, sir!”

  Hull-down by now, only five or six miles off, Lewrie could see her from the deck as she altered from a quarter-view to broadside-on.

  “Now let’s see what Monsieur Frog will do, Mister Knolles. A tack to deal with Fillebrowne? Or stand on, to deal with us? Mister Hyde? Mister Spendlove?” Lewrie speculated, prompting his midshipmen to do some tactical thinking.

  “I’d tack, sir,” Spendlove declared quickly. “Force him to go about, to show us his stern and deal with Myrmidon.”

  “Before our frigates come up, sir, aye,” Hyde stuck on, put out that he hadn’t been the first to speak.

  “Before those prizes get too far up to windward, sirs?” Lewrie japed, looking astern. Pylades was leading the two-ship column, closing to within nine miles. Beating to weather always took such a long time that a ship too far upwind was usually as safe as houses, with a hopelessly long lead against any pursuit. It was a mere five miles, perhaps, to those escorted vessels beyond, which had just gone hard on the wind; and it might take Jester the rest of the daylight to catch them up. The French frigate was boxed, and if she didn’t shift herself and run in the wake of her two charges, soon she’d have Jester off her starboard bows, with Myrmidon off her larboard quarter.

  Might have twenty-eight 18-pounders on her gun-deck, Lewrie told himself; another ten 8-pounders on the quarter-deck, and chase-guns at bow and stern—might even have some carronades to match ours. But she can’t run the risk of fighting us too long. Her rigging gets cut up, and the frigates’ll finish her, sure as Fate!

  Much as he disliked the notion of facing 18-pounder broadsides with Jester’s frailer flanks, it might come to it. Mr. Buchanon might get his “bloody” morning, after all. And Mr. Howse, one more reason to despair at the futility of war. As if death and dying were Lewrie’s willful doing!

  “Deck, there! Frigate’s tackin’!”

  “Stations for Stays, Mr. Knolles, quick as you can!” Alan snapped. “So we don’t lose a single yard on her!”

  Once more, Jester came about, heading a touch east of Nor’East. Pointed almost dagger-like at Myrmidon, which was on the opposing tack and crossing her bows. Lewrie went aloft once more with his telescope.

  Shammin’ it, are you? he asked the distant French captain. Do a sloppy tack, just then, to reel us into gun-range? Make us cocky?

  The big frigate hadn’t been well handled, had luffed about as she’d come up to Stays, and had slowed to a crawl. They’d gained a full half mile on her before she was back up to speed bound Nor’east.

  Myrmidon would still pass astern of her, though, slant-wise; and Pylades and Lionheart were still too far alee to matter much for the time being. Close enough to worry her, though?

  “Mister Knolles!” he shouted down.
“Hoist the main and mizzen t’gallant stays’ls! Get every stitch of canvas on her she’ll bear!”

  And the winds . . . still out of the Sou’east, a backing Levanter. A sign of a weather-change, perhaps, he thought, lowering the telescope for a moment. He turned to look a’weather, over the arm threaded into the mizzen shrouds to maintain his perch. It was a clear horizon with no high-piled clouds to become thunder-heads, no haze of a squall line. But there were cat’s-paws and seahorses out there, faint wispy white irregularities that presaged a stronger breeze, winking at him from a slowly rolling sea.

  “More wind coming, Mister Knolles!” he called down, then swung about to descend, to end up jumping from the bulwarks to the deck, and go to the wheel to peer into the compass binnacle. “Might back on us, half a point, pray Jesus. We might be able to carry those t’gallant stays’ls. And half-reefed royals, too!”

  “Aye, pray God, sir,” Knolles echoed.

  Half an hour more, and Myrmidon had crossed the French frigate’s stern, still two tantalising miles shy, even as Jester had gained one. The frigate was slowly slipping to larboard of Jester’s bows, becoming hidden from the quarterdeck by the heads’ls and forecourse. Jester was weathering her, pointing a precious half or quarter point closer to the wind, even with all that sail aloft.

  “She’s heeled too much, sir,” Buchanon noted. “ ’Ey all three are, you’ll note. Sailin’ too much on th’ shoulder, not th’ keel. A long chase, but ’less she does somethin’ . . .”

  “Deck, there! Myrmidon’s firin’!”

  The pristine outline of the other ship-rigged sloop was smudged by a ragged haze of powder smoke, which ragged astern in a spreading, thinning pall, ragged alee and almost hid her from sight before they heard the faint, dull foomph of firing over the keen and roar of the wind and sea. It was a hopeless, impatient gesture at two miles or more distance. Even with the quoins full out from beneath the gun-barrels, they could never elevate high enough, not even with all the heel of Myrmidon going close-hauled.

  Then, as Myrmidon sailed clear of her gun-smoke, she turned to show Jester her stern, turning up onto the wind to tack. And all that smoke, which was now reaching them, was flying ’cross Jester’s bows at a faster rate.