Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Aye, Mister Knolles.” Lewrie chuckled. “We’ll ask of her when we go ashore. Ready to let go, forrud! Hands aloft there! Brail up, all!”

  “Hands on the braces . . . back the fore-tops’l, back the main tops’l!” Knolles contributed. “Lower away fores’ls . . . smartly, now!”

  And Jester came to a stop, her sails disappearing quickly, just as the last gun of the salute barked forth, the tops’ls trying to wrap themselves round the masts as they braked her ’gainst the light winds.

  “Let go!” Knolles added, followed by the roar and rumble of the best bower cable thundering through the larboard hawse-hole, the splash of the heaviest anchor as it plummeted into the harbour depths. Boats were being hauled to the entry-ports to larboard or starboard—to row out a kedge anchor from the stern, a slightly lighter cable mated to it. Deck-hands stood by the after capstan-head, the heavy pawls in place, to drum her round once the kedge was set. Jester then faced the town with her starboard side, aligned lengthwise in the long west-to-east harbour channel between shore and breakwater, instead of lying foul of other traffic.

  Gun-port lids were lowered and secured, the guns swabbed out and bowsed secure to the starboard side once more with tompions in. The bower cable was wrapped round the fore bitts, frapped and stoppered to it with lighter line, and the messenger cable to the fore-capstan was put back below on the cable-tiers. Sails were by then completely furled and gasketed, bound neatly to the jib-boom and bowsprit, or the lower boom of the spanker, aft on the mizzen. Sail-tending lines were flaked or flemished, or hung in huge bights along the pin-rails and fife-rails. A quick glance aft showed their cutter returning, with Mr. Hyde waving to signal that it was clear of the sagging bight of the kedge-cable. The men at the after-capstan could begin to haul it in and swing about the stern, which had paid off sou’west and cater-cornered.

  “Well, damme . . .” Mister Buchanon swore. “Again! Slower’n treacle! Where’s our salute, I ask ye?”

  Neither fort—the New Fort nor the Citadel—showed the slightest sign of activity. It was Trieste all over again. Worse. At least at Trieste they’d gotten a reply to their salute—late and clumsy as it had been performed. Corfu, it seemed, couldn’t even be bothered with replying. The only things that stirred atop their walls were the flags!

  “Ship’s proper-anchored, Captain,” Knolles reported about fifteen minutes later. “Your gig’s below the starboard entry-port.”

  “Thankee, Mister Knolles.” Lewrie nodded to him, doffing his hat in salute to Knolles’s lifted hat. “I’ll go ashore, then. Wish I had Mister Mountjoy aboard. At least he could speak some Italian.”

  “All that’s wanting is to rig quarterdeck awnings, sir. And I’ll see to that, soon as you’ve left the deck,” Knolles promised.

  “Very well, Mister Knolles. You are in charge until I return. Whenever that might be. I’ll send word ’bout the prisoners soon as I get permission to land ’em,” Alan told him, tugging his clothes neat. “Assuming there really are some Venetian authorities to talk with.”

  “Might be some saint’s day, sir,” Knolles opined as he walked with him to the entry-port. “Or they extend Carnival longer here.”

  “Might be they’re blind and stupid into the bargain, Mr. Knolles,” Lewrie hooted, doffing his hat to take the departure salute from his men.

  “Oh . . . d’ye mean Venetian, sir?” Knolles japed back.

  ° ° °

  Corfu Town, though, was a most pleasant place, he had to admit: well-wooded, shaded, and park-like, with several wide, open squares and wide, collonaded main thoroughfares. A seeming maze of lanes and narrower streets, nicely stepped and flagstoned, climbed inland and towards either fort—some buildings rising to five or seven stories. They were rather plainly wrought, but well plastered and painted in pastels or natural shades. Perhaps the sea-wind swept most of the noisome stinks of town away before they registered, he thought, for Corfu had a pleasant aroma of countryside dust, olive and fig trees heavy with spring blooms in the hinterlands and jasmine, broom rose, wisteria and orange-trees in the bright little gardens. Pines, scrub oaks and even cypress trees sang a pleasant, continual rustling lullaby.

  He’d gotten a tour of the place from the provveditore, a man who fortunately possessed some English, and an aide from Zante who was very fluent. Atop one of the defensive land-side walls, he’d seen greater bucolic splendours, as if some great lord of the realm had decreed long before that the entire island become a decorative park. The hills were bright green with budding olive groves, vineyards and orchards. Every holding he could see from atop the wall, whether a great-house or a more modest country farm villa, was as well landscaped as any estate back in England. The cypresses paraded alongside the dusty roads, while on the hills were silver fir, myrtle, holly-leaved kermes oaks, silver poplar and God only knew what else. And where the fields were not yet tilled or were left fallow for a season, they swayed fragrant with blue or white thistles or asphodels.

  Now, standing on the stones of the harbour jetty, his clothing and hair ruffled by a scant but refreshing wind, he could admire every fine but plain aspect of Corfu Town: the wispy, cloud-laced sky against the ivory hues and faint weather-washed pastels of the houses and apartment blocks, the Venetian-style belltowers and church spires, or those forts made of Istrian limestone of a darker, rosier hue. Northward lay the rugged little island of Lazaretto, an ivory and green jumble. And all surrounded by a sea that was almost a peacock’s wing blue. Even farther off on the Turk-held mainland were the Albanian mountains, shading off to a distant purple, capped here and there with stark white snow.

  The provveditore had assured him that all the Isoli del Levant —or Ionians, to their Greek inhabitants—were almost as pretty, though none as fair as Corfu, and Lewrie wished he could stay longer than twenty-four hours to savour their beauty.

  He almost wished, for a fond moment, that a man could settle there! The Navy and his wars had taken him to an hundred places that most Englishmen would never see except in black-and-white woodcuts or charcoal etchings, all grander, more exotic, more beguiling than a foggy, rainy and grimy England. He marveled to imagine that, were the world not besotted with hacking away at each other in this war, he’d still be captive upon 160 acres of Surrey smallholding—a rented smallholding!—in wee Anglesgreen, where nothing exciting would ever happen. Well . . . ! There was a pang, to think how deprived was a sailor’s lot, how seldom a man of the sea had a chance to savour such lush, well-ordered beauty. He felt another pang—this one of disloyalty not only to England, but to Caroline and the children—that he could contemplate escaping all that waited for him at home for this.

  But, by God, he thought, we could all come here! Establish a decent school, o’ course! Or fetch in a good tutor. A farm, well . . . much as he hated farming (or his lack of knowledge about farming!), an estate with a good overseer could work out. And the sea was so close . . . right at one’s doorstep, really . . .

  It should have been a happy thought. But Lewrie wore a distinct scowl, instead. And whispered for his own ears, “This is a place I’d fight to keep. Like that fellow Schulenburg they put up a statue for. By God, somebody should, ’fore the Frogs . . .”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Midshipman Hyde reported, with his companion Midshipman Clarence Spendlove with him. “That’s the last of them, sir. All the prisoners ashore now, and Sergeant Bootheby’s Marines ready to embark.”

  “Ah, thankee, Mister Hyde.” Lewrie nodded, still staring out to sea, turning to inhale the gardens’ sweetnesses before being forced back to Jester’s stale and rancid reeks.

  “Sir, do you think, since we’re allowed 24 hours . . .”

  “No shore-leave, Mister Hyde. Sorry,” Lewrie moodily grunted.

  “No sorrier than I, sir,” Spendlove groaned. “It’s a fine town, it appears. Very attractive, indeed.”

  Lewrie noted that Spendlove’s gaze was riveted upon the bevy of local beauties who’d come down to see the excitement of a warship
come to call, and the spectacle of the prisoners being landed. Girls whose angelic features stood out in stark contrast to the black or goat-brown gowns they wore.

  Gowns, Lewrie took note, that were very low-cut in the bodice and promised a beguiling vista themselves, barely covered with stiff points of the headclothes that lanced down from their hair. As well, they wore white, embroidered aprons, overskirts turned back and tied behind and tiny waistcoats as vestigial as what Greek dancing girls had worn on those ancient jars, more colourful or more ornately embroidered. Some of the girls were clad in loose flax or linen peasant blouses and long satiny skirts, those blouses artfully tied to bare lissome olive-complexioned and inviting shoulders. Only the noblest of the Corfiots, recorded in their Venetian-inspired Golden Book of ancient aristocracy, wore the high hair, the huge hats or the bauto, or the lacier mainland fineries.

  Lewrie couldn’t help nodding and smiling at one or two, for they were exotically lovely. British sailors, British officers and redcoat Marines were a rare novelty, and these enticing girls seemed intrigued with them. Lewrie saw a half dozen open and approving glances, demure coquetries . . . or arrant, hip-rolling “come-hithers,” within musket-shot.

  “No, no shore-leave,” Lewrie repeated himself. Partly for his own caution. Lord, lookee . . . I’m tryin’ t’be decent, for a change, see? It was hard, though, to imagine not diving right in and making a swine of himself. “Not a good liberty port, young sirs,” he explained. “It’s hard enough to get the Venetian authorities to let us stay in port for 24 hours. Or land the noncombatant prisoners. And with that Frog merchantman here, too, well . . . there’d surely be a brawl, do you see? A knifing or a murder ’fore midnight, and we’d never be let in harbour again— Jester or any other ship of the squadron. And the authorities’d . . .”

  He tailed off, sourly irritated, as Marine Sergeant Bootheby put on a short display of close-order drill to march his small Marine contingent down the quay from the town gaol, to the delight of the Corfiots and the sneers of the French sailors off that merchantman.

  Whether the Venetian authorities on Corfu disapproved of brawls or not, there would be precious little they could actually do about them, he thought. During his tour of the town, and a rather good midday meal, he had learned several disturbing things about Corfu and the rest of the isles.

  Such as the fact that the largest, oldest fort on the eastern point—the Citadel—was pretty much an empty shell after a powder magazine explosion a few years back in ’89, which had leveled half the Old Town under its walls.

  Such as the fact that the New Fort didn’t have a garrison, either. There was a colonel and two captains, their manservants, cook and stable-hands. And that was the entire garrison of Corfu! The colonel and his officers still sent in musters to Venice, though, which showed a battalion, and were billing the Serene Republic for men who’d deserted, died or resigned at the end of their enlistments.

  Such as the fact that the few ships of the Venetian Navy were laid up in harbour or drawn up on the strand for storage, and were as rotten as any he’d seen in the famed Arsenal at Venice itself. The sole officer of their navy couldn’t put together a harbour-watch for a single galley or small xebec, though he still indented for their pay, ration allocations and funds for upkeep. And a fine living he had of that charade, too!

  Even if there had been a military garrison worth the name, when he’d strolled on those land-side walls, Lewrie had found the artillery scattered at the embrasures almost “Will He, Nill He,” many of them empty. The guns were so long unused that the carriages were half eaten by termites, as worm-holed as cheese; the guns themselves were gleaming under fresh black paint or soot blacking. But under the disguise they were almost rusted immovably to the stone ramparts!

  And even the provveditore’s residence had turned out to be quite small—most pointedly not the impressive palazzio down one of the main collonaded streets, which gaped empty and run-down. To save money, or to pocket the difference, Lewrie suspected, the provveditore rented a place just barely suitable. He hadn’t even owned his own plates or glassware, but had had to send out to his landlord for extra to feed a foreign visitor!

  How could anyone let himself slip so deep in sloth and graft, and become so corrupt he’d threaten the safety of such a blissful island? Lewrie asked himself with mounting anger. Such a lovely place, so strategic! And he actually spat upon the stones of the quay.

  “Very well, then, young sirs,” Lewrie decided, after taking one last, longing look to fix Corfu Town in his memory. “Let’s get back aboard Jester. I wish to clear harbour by sundown.”

  Hyde and Spendlove lagged behind their captain on the way to the waiting boats, taking what brief joy they could of an idle quarter hour ashore after unending months at sea. Even the sight of the Frenchmen who cursed them—the recent captives or the ones off the anchored merchantman or the foreign sailors in France’s pay—couldn’t dissuade them from sighing with a longing of their own to be let free for a spell of idleness, shore-cooked foods, strange new wines and those alluring girls!

  “’Tain’t like him, by God, it ain’t,” Hyde muttered to his compatriot. “Deuced bloody odd, Clarence. I expected him to sleep ashore this evening. Do you get my meaning?” he drawled suggestively.

  “Must be something which comes with middle age, Martin,” Mister Spendlove whispered back with a sneaky grin. “After all, he’s thirty-three and a bit, now. Past it, d’ye expect?”

  “God save us if that’s true,” Hyde breathed softly, casting such an aching glance at another angelic Corfiot chit in the doorway of some dockside chandlery. “And here we are, with so few years left to us ’fore we suffer the same affliction.”

  “And so few opportunities,” Spendlove agreed with a faint moan.

  “Why, ever since he saw off that kept mutton o’ his, that Aretino creature, he’s lived the life of a bloody saint!” Hyde carped. “And so have we! Least, when he still had all his humours—”

  “’Fore he spent ’em . . . spending with the ladies,” the seventeen-year-old Spendlove japed.

  “Were he off carousing, then there was a chance we’d be free to, aye.” Hyde sighed in the very heat of an eighteen-year-old’s frustration; that of a callow, brimful of “vital humours” cully. “Let me tell you, Clarence, ’tis been so long, I’ve . . . considered, mind . . . considered taking up ‘Boxing the Jesuit.’ Just to ease myself, d’ye see.”

  “Considered,” Spendlove posed, tongue-in-cheek. He had ears . . . he’d heard Hyde’s hammock-ropes squeak against the end-rings, late in the evening after Lights Out, as Hyde amused himself. Eased himself; though wasting one’s limited and fixed allocation of humours led to lunacy and consumptionlike laxity of wit, body and spirit, too soon in life. Such as Captain Lewrie’s new state. “With real girls . . .”

  “Oh, you vile young seducer, you!” Hyde scoffed. “You scourge of a thousand chambermaids! As if you could advise me, ’bout women!”

  “Not for want of experience, sir!” Spendlove shot back, louder. After all, had there not been a willing young tavern girl at San Fiorenzo Bay, at that little waterfront osteria, hard by the boat-landing? And had there not been both a boardinghouse chambermaid, and an actual whore at Leghorn, where even the dead could “put the leg over” a fetching mort for the price of a scone? No, Clarence Spendlove didn’t think his few years on this mortal coil had been a complete waste of chances.

  “You, Clarence? Little ‘hop o’ my thumb’?” Hyde went on, louder as well. “You’ve not a jot on the experiences I’ve had. Can’t serve aboard Jester this long, without. Can’t serve under the ‘Ram-Cat’—”

  “Sshh!” Spendlove cautioned.

  “You wish to be just like him . . . when you grow up, that is,” Hyde shot back, a bit more quietly.

  “And who wouldn’t, I ask you?” Spendlove shot back, ignoring his own warning. “Least, the early years, mind. ’Fore—”

  “You gentlemen done skylarking?” their captain snapp
ed from the edge of the dock, ready to enter his gig. “Shake a leg, then.”

  “Well, erm . . .” Hyde replied. “Don’t we both, rather. Before we get too long in tooth for it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The squadron lay at rest, once more anchored in the millpond-quiet port of Trieste. On this visit, with the coming of summer, it was a much nicer-seeming place, no longer buried under gloomy skies, with all that drizzly, seeping rain and misty fogs. Securely anchored in an allied harbour, behind a breakwater fortified and armed against a raid, and with a walled town that was well patrolled by Austrian soldiers or city watchmen, Captain Charlton had allowed as how the crews could be let ashore, watch by watch, for some precious shore liberty. Those steady warrants and hands, of course. With not one man per ship able to speak German, it would be almost impossible for anyone to change his clothes and desert. And they had cause for celebration, after a month or more on patrol down south.

  Pylades and Jester had managed to fetch in four prize-ships, and had been forced to burn three more, swept up farther south of the Ionian Isles; outbound carrying cargoes of timber and naval stores. Lionheart and Myrmidon had had a less productive patrol—they’d only brought in a pair of ships. Over on the Italian side of the straits, or the Adriatic Sea, it had been rare to run into a merchant vessel with improper, Colourable, papers and manifests. They’d encountered far more Neapolitans, Papal State, Venetian, or neutral traffick. They’d stopped thirty or more ships, and, while there had been some they’d suspected of being engaged in smuggling for France, their papers had either been legitimate and unimpeachable—or the very best forgeries they’d ever seen. More cautious than Rodgers and Lewrie, perhaps, they’d been forced to allow them to proceed on their voyages. Better that than being hauled into an Admiralty Court for unlawful seizure and sued to their eyebrows!

  “Uhm . . .” Lewrie smiled with pleasure. “Sprightly, indeed, sir. And rather spicy, too. Hint of floral, to the nose? What did you say it was, again, sir?”