Jester's Fortune

by Dewey Lambdin

  He came back to reality, and rocked on the balls of his feet on his quarterdeck, gazing out towards the island. A shrill cry, followed by the patter of feet came, as little Michael and one of the ship’s boy-servants scampered about in the waist; Tag, it looked like, with Bosun Cony watching their every move, grinning a long-absent father’s grin at their antics, and thinking of his own little Will back in Anglesgreen.

  Blocks creaked as the first net of luggage was slung over-side. Lewrie turned to see Sir Malcolm Shockley overseeing its transfer, with his manservant and Midshipman Hyde. And Lucy approaching; smirking!

  “My word, Alan,” she said, standing by the bulwarks, a tad too close for his liking. “Such a gay dog you’ve grown to be, sir. I see you’re a doting father, the way you cosset that poor lad. But not much of a husband, in truth . . . do I read the signs aright?” she simpered as she tapped him with her fan and spread it artfully. “What horrid folk we’ve turned out. A Greek woman, my dear! Taking advantage of her in a fragile moment . . . though I must own she has a certain attractiveness, a . . . c’est-à-dire . . . an animal magnetism, n’est-ce pas? Why, I have a good mind to write your lady-wife to let her know what a lecherous Corinthian she really has for a husband!” She tittered quite gaily.

  “You wouldn’t dare!” Lewrie growled, though shivering; aye, she’d be the sort t’do it, too! All for bloody-minded spite!

  She laughed at his discomfort, matching the pace he took to get a sociably acceptable distance away from her.

  “Mean t’say . . .” he amended. “What signs could you possibly read? Or find t’read? There’s nought between . . .” Should’ve taken that tack first! he told himself.

  “Alan . . .” Lucy cooed, significantly mystifying. “Women know.”

  “I’m certain you’re mistaken in this instance, Lady Lucy. Nor were you ever the sort to cause someone needless grief,” he replied.

  She simpered over her fan for her answer, lashes fluttering.

  “Don’t tease, Lady Lucy.” He frowned. “Such letters are known to go both directions. Where was it? Can’t recall the exact address, but there was this wine-shop on the Calle del Fabri. Right at a cross-street, the Monte delle Ballotte? First-floor balcony, lots of afternoon sun t’see by . . . blond lady and a naval officer the spittin’ im—”

  Her fan whisked to furious life, and her cheeks went crimson. “Point taken, my dear . . . Alan.” She grimaced; quite prettily.

  “Could’ve sworn was Fillebrowne, to the life—”

  “Point taken! Ahem,” Lucy repeated, fanning so vigourously she could have bellied out the furled main-course.

  “Why?” Lewrie had to ask. Long ago, she’d been a brainless chit, a guileless, bedazzling, innocent nymph. “Your husband’s a decent and solid good man. I’d think that’d—”

  “As is your Caroline, I’m certain,” she allowed. “But decent does not always excite. And you know as well as I what drew each together so long ago on Antigua, Alan. You saw my true, passionate nature and I saw . . . a bad’un! One of the damme-boys, who’d risked his life in my honour. I never shall be able to resist the bad’uns. There’s nary a woman can, were they honest with themselves. I’m certain, too, you have profited from it. Oh, you’re such a bad’un, Alan Lewrie. Take ye joy in it. Or . . . have you already, hmm?” She chuckled huskily.

  “People change, we . . .” He shrugged.

  “I’m still of half a mind about you, d’ye see?” she confessed. “There’s unfinished business ’tween us. Someday, I feel sure—”

  “I think not, Lady Lucy. Truly,” he disabused her. “Not even on a lark, not once for curiosity. Imperfect sinner though I be, I’ll never ‘put horns’ on a good man who thinks himself happily wed. We may laugh and jest . . . but we do not play, d’ye get my meanin’?”

  “You fear him?” she asked, gazing at him as if she’d misjudged him all these years.

  “I respect him and like him.”

  “Ah, well, then,” she sighed theatrically. “My regards to your dear wife . . . and to your amour du jour. She really is quite lovely . . . I see why you’re so smitten. Her, too. Of course, you’ll break her heart. I’ll be the soul of decorum at supper, Alan. Adieu!”

  He choked off what he might have said to that, watching her go back to the entry-port, sashaying and smug before once more becoming a lash-battering, innocent minx.

  And he was still fuming, staring out at the island a moment later, when Sir Malcolm Shockley came up to him, striding slow and formal with a long silver-headed ebony walking-stick tapping time on the deck. Lewrie stiffened as he joined him at the bulwarks, wondering had Lucy said something spiteful, put a flea in his ear ’bout them . . .

  “So this is where it happened,” Sir Malcolm said, though, with a grave sadness, as he rested his hands on the cap-rail to look out.

  “Aye, Sir Malcolm . . . just there,” Lewrie replied.

  They were anchored two cables off this time, distanced from the horror. The brig was sunk to the level of her upper bulwarks, with only her lower mast-trunks standing, her jib-boom thrust-ing upwards from her submerged forecastle, and charred as black and crumbly as last year’s Yule Log splinter. The two smaller boats had been reduced to blackened piles of kindling and ash, just on the edge of the beach. The reek of burning hung on the air from the stockade and the huts they’d fired, as well—but they still hadn’t been quite able to conquer the foetid charnel stench from that abbatoir, that sick-sweet, roasted odour of putrefaction.

  Sir Malcolm had a small pocket-telescope that he brought up to his eye, giving the place about as close an inspection as Alan thought he’d care for. The wheeling gulls and terns, the flutterings . . .

  “Odd emblem, there, Commander Lewrie. That placard on a pole,” Sir Malcolm puzzled, lowering his telescope. “A piratical symbol?”

  “Grave-marker, sir,” Lewrie answered levelly. “For the victims. We couldn’t sort ’em out into Christian or Muslim, Albanian or Croat, Greek or Venetian . . . taken days, had we tried, and the survivors poor help in identifying them. Strangers to each other, and whole families erased? They needed to be in the ground, well . . . you understand.”

  “Yes.” Sir Malcolm groaned. “Horrid. Horrid! And so savage, this part of the world. Wish to never hear of it again, lock-stock-and-barrel. At least Mistress Connor has good memories of living here in the Adriatic, ’til this. She has only the one island she’d wish to forget. Little-traveled as I am, sir . . . I do allow that I could quite easily abhor this region, entire. Get me home to good old England, that’s world enough for me. And with this widening war, the only safe and sane clime I know left! Safe, behind the ‘wooden walls’ of our Navy, what? ’Cross our Narrow Sea?”

  “Wouldn’t mind a bit of that, myself, sir,” Alan allowed.

  “Serving King and Country unrecognised for their valour, their unstinting devotion to hard Duty, yes,” Sir Malcolm sighed. “Nearly three years you’ve been in this ship, now, Commander? Away from home and family, with Duty done and foes confounded your only satisfaction?”

  Well, I wouldn’t say quite that. Lewrie tried not to smirk.

  “About three years, sir . . . next spring.” He nodded gravely.

  “Once home, I mean to speak on the Fleet in Commons,” Shockley pondered aloud. “This squadron, and all the gallant men who went into peril . . . and tedium, I’d imagine.” He chuckled. “Gain for the officers and men some poor bit of acknowledgment for their efforts.”

  Lewrie smiled. “That’d be most welcome, Sir Malcolm, thankee.”

  “Your gallantry, foremost, sir. Your courage and sense of honour. Your quick thinking,” Sir Malcolm prosed on, looking noble.

  “I . . . I did what needed doing, only, Sir Malcolm.” Lewrie all but coughed in honest modesty. And chagrin. “Don’t quite know what t’say, sir . . . t’be so honoured. Though it’s hardly deserved, really . . . ?”

  “Oh, tosh!” Sir Malcolm grinned. “Though your modesty becomes you, in addition t
o your other qualities. Know little of the sea, myself, can’t begin to fathom the intricacies of a Sea Officer’s elaborate lore, but I must say I’m intrigued to learn more of it. Speak to Admiral Jervis, discover his appreciation of our situation, now Spain has come in and the French fleet rules the Mediterranean . . . why, my colleagues may find my information useful, once home, in expanding the Navy.”

  “That’d be right-fine, Sir Malcolm.”

  Shockley lifted his telescope once more and peered at the shore.

  “Rather a lot of birds about, Commander Lewrie. Thousands. I’d think they’d shun such a . . . dare I say a ghastly, haunted place.”

  “They’re uhmm . . . feeding, Sir Malcolm,” Lewrie told him bluntly. “What sea-birds do, when they’re lucky.”

  “Thought you buried . . . ?”

  “The victims, Sir Malcolm,” Lewrie stated. “Not the pirates. We didn’t think they deserved burying, so we let ’em lie.”

  “Ah!” Sir Malcolm gulped, looking queasy. “Well, quite right, too. Murdering bastards. Might put them off this place for good?”

  “I doubt it, sir,” Lewrie countered. “A year or two, someone will put in for wood and water. Knock the placard down, ’cause they hate what country, religion or people the dead were. Scavenge rusted weapons we missed and didn’t toss in the sea. Pick round the bones . . .”

  “Scare them off, by way of example, ah. Quite right.”

  Lewrie rather doubted that. Some might even find it majestic!

  “Hard to say, Sir Malcolm, hard to say,” Lewrie allowed. “Now we’ve created a Field of Sea-birds . . . a Kossovo . . . however it’s said in Serbian. They’d understand this, d’ye see . . .”

  He turned outboard to look at his field of slaughter.

  “‘Now all is holy,’” he chanted softly. “‘Now all is honourable . . . and the goodness of God is’—again—‘fulfilled.’”

  “What’s that, Commander Lewrie?” Sir Malcolm asked, giving him an odd look.

  “Old Balkan . . . ‘love-poem,’ sir,” Lewrie replied with a quirky grin. “Just an old local poem.”

  AFTERWORD

  It’s doubtful if Napoleon ever exhorted his troops from the crag as I described. And that speech about leading the Army of Italy into a fertile plain of rich cities for honour, glory— and loot—was actually dictated by Bonaparte during his exile on St. Helena and inserted into his memoirs. The splendid three-part silent black-and-white film about Napoleon, though, shows it . . . the young boy-general, the hungry, ragged troops below, the mountains, and the sea. Napoleon would have approved, I think, since he’d aspired to be a dramatist or novelist in his school days. He knew what made a better tale; mean t’say, he was French, after all, knew how to spell the word panache, and proved time and again that he knew how to make an entrance! In light of that, how could anyone resist depicting it his way? Hey, not moi!

  Admiral Sir John Jervis did send a squadron of six frigates into the Adriatic in early 1796, under a Captain Taylor. And yes, the authorities at Trieste supplied a major portion of the Imperial Austrian Navy its seagoing budget. They did reduce it, ’round the time I cited, and Captain Taylor’s squadron was there, probably doing their work for them. After all, why buy the cow when you can get the milk free? That Major Simpson, by the way, was a real person, with a thankless chore, and abysmal career prospects. I reduced the number to four, to make the task assigned even harder to accomplish; and it’s easier to deal with three other captain characters than five, especially characters who have been saddled with Commander Alan Lewrie’s antics for more than a Dog-Watch.

  Venice and the Serene Republic went under soon after this novel ends. The Silver Age of Venice by Maurice Rowdon depicts a state gone numb, feeble, toothless, and self-absorbedly sybaritic, depending on its past glories, the hollow shells of naval supremacy and their thoroughly professional army. In later years, Venice hired its armies from the Dutch, at exorbitant costs, which had already bankrupted the Republic. It was as if everyone in Venice was stumbling ’round on Prozac or Ecstasy.

  The garrison at Corfu with its two officers, their servants and a sergeant or two was fact; as was the shoddy state of the islands’ governor when Lewrie was dined in. Those anecdotes were in Martin Young’s The Traveller’s Guide to Corfu. The useless state of the once powerful Venetian Navy, the conditions at the Arsenal, the laid-up ships on foreign stations, were also true.

  Through late 1796 and early 1797, Napoleon had defeated Wurmser a third and last time, conquering all of Austrian Italy. He then beat the stuffing out of another “brilliant” Austrian General, Alvinscy, got through the Alpine passes in December, marched through Leoben and got to Semmering, right on the outskirts of Vienna, which was helpless with her main armies still on the Rhine. His back was covered, just as he’d covered his rear before this offensive, by reducing the Papal States one more time, and destroying the only army left below the Adige River.

  Napoleon marched into mainland Venetian territories. Citizens in Verona rose up and rioted, killing French troops. Napoleon sent ships to the port of Quieto, to attack a few timidly sheltering Austrian vessels, violating Venetian neutrality. The Venetians were still comatose, and didn’t even make a peep of complaint. Mainland citizens, and nobles who hated the French, offered to raise thousands of eager volunteers if given arms. The Senate, the Council of Three, and the poor last Doge refused them. Finally, Napoleon sent a frigate into the Lagoon itself, behind the Lido where foreign warships were banned. The Venetians, at last, opened fire on her and took her, killing her captain among others. And Napoleon had his “legitimate” casus belli to march in and take over.

  The Doge’s ornate gilded barge, Bucintoro, from which he married the city to the sea each year, was hauled into St. Mark’s and torched, along with that ancient roll of aristocratic lineages, the Golden Book.

  The nobles complained but were helpless. For a city-state that declared itself a republic, it wasn’t very republican. Rich men made the rules, nobles held all offices, and the common folk had sunk into nonvoting, “bread-and-circuses” sloth long before. Within days of the French takeover, and the later cession of Venice to Austria in the Treaty of Campo Formio, the ridottos were just as gay, the musicians just as dulcet, the gondoliers just as busy serenading lovers, and the love affairs just as tedious. Ruled by their own nobility, or by foreign overlords, most Venetians probably didn’t even take notice of a change. They still had their operas, comedies, balls, festas, their carnivals; still had their mythic history of greatness for consolation. There were left their musicians, poets, painters, sculptors, singers or actors, their masks and wine. And, of course, they were already used to hordes of foreign tourists!

  Austria got mainland Venice and the city itself as a sop for the loss of Milan and Lombardy. France took Venetian Dalmatia and the Ionian Islands; a stretch from Hungarian Fiume at the Istrian Peninsula down as far south as Ragusa and Cattaro. In point of fact, after he’d dealt with Italians for over a year, Napoleon wrote that the Ionian Islands were his best bargain, and that all the rest of Italy wasn’t worth the life of a single French grenadier!

  The Directory in Paris was in its “classical hero” mania, aping Rome and Greece, so they called their new conquests in the Balkans the Illyrian Provinces, in the old Roman style. What Napoleon made of having to squat on all those termagant Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and such is not recorded. He sent engineers to build them some roads, but sooner or later they turned ungrateful, naturally. Good roads made it easier for enemies to trundle over and give their enemies a good bash— or vice versa.

  ° ° °

  There are no true, continual villains in the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia. Equally stupid would be to think that there are true, perpetual and long-suffering victims with clean hands deserving of sympathy, either. Allow me to recommend Balkan Ghosts by Robert D. Kaplan, now in paperback (Vintage Press). It was there I found the tortures and unique methods of murder which Dragan Mlavic employed during his “gam
es.” Kaplan traveled the entire region, as well as Romania, Bulgaria, Moldovia, Macedonia, and Greece. Talleyrand, Metternich, Bismarck . . . they all called it “the powder keg of Europe.” Still is, have you noticed? It was ruled in large part by every ethnic or religious contender at one time, its every potato-patch squabbled over by the descendants of somebody’s umpteenth great-grandfather, back when “we had an empire,” ’til those (fill in the blank) bastards come an’ stole it! The peoples of the area have quite cheerfully despised their neighbours, time out of mind, and have delighted in taking a holy whack at ’em whenever they thought they could get away with it. And I doubt a millennium of U.N. overseeing, a thousand years of “sweetness, light and Jeffersonian Democracy” lectures will change things. The only times the strife is at a low simmer is when they’ve been sat upon (rather brutally, too!) by a king who took as little guff as a Vlad the Impaler, Ottoman Turk generalissimos like Sultan Murad or his successor after Kossovo—the one known as Bayezit “The Thunderer”—a Marshal Tito or a would-be Stalin.

  In World War I, it was the Serbian Secret Service who arranged the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife at Sarajevo. They were rightly portrayed as villains and murderers. But, when the Serbs took the first invading Austro-Hungarian army apart like a rottweiler on a diet, they were then praised by the West as valiant, patriotic little heroes! Lately, they’re villains again, neo-Nazi thugs resurrecting genocide to “ethnically cleanse” every last potato-patch they could lay claim to by any stretch of the imagination.

  But it’s awfully easy to forget World War II, when the Serbs were Tito’s partisans, lauded in the world press as hardy mountain and forest fighters (no matter many were inconveniently Communist), and the Croatian Ustashe gleefully hunted them down, as German auxiliaries, to “kill a Commie-Serb for Christ” and eliminate all “South Slavs” not of the Catholic faith. Awfully easy to forget, too, that Himmler bent a few of his own ethnic rules and enlisted (wonder of wonders!) Slavic Muslims. There were the 13th Gebirgs (mountain) Division “Handschar,” and 23rd Gebirgsdivision “Kama” made from Bosnians or Herzegovinians—as well as the 21st Division “Skanderberg” (Albanische #1) of Albanian Muslim stock—in the Waffen SS! While never approaching the efficiency of an Auschwitz, the concentration camps in Yugoslavia exterminated more than their fair share of men, women and children from both sides—“just so they could go to heaven”—including Jews and Gypsies, and pretty much anybody else they didn’t like.