A King's Trade

by Dewey Lambdin

  First had come the sight of her royals and t’gallants above the sea’s sharp-edged horizon; some were pale, jade green, others were such a pale red they seemed pink.

  “Faded, perhaps, sir,” Lt. Catterall had speculated with a leery expression, as if he’d just been presented a bowl of dog-spew at a two-penny ordinary. “Might’ve been dark green and red, once?”

  “Well, we know about fading…” Lt. Adair had commented with a snorty chuckle, obviously referring to his captain’s unfortunate choice of light cotton uniform coats he’d had made by a Kingston, Jamaica, tailor, which had bled for months before fading to a very pale and washed-out blue, even where white fabric or gilt lace had been intended.

  ” Arr, Mister Adair” had been Lewrie’s comment to that sally.

  Next had come full sight of her tops’ls and courses, one of them—her main course—was vertically striped like pillow ticking in a red, white, and blue, all now reduced to pink, parchment, and off-white, whilst her fore course was a more conventional mildewed and sunburned light tan, but bore some large design painted on it.

  “Spanish warship?” the Sailing Master had wondered. “They hoist crucifixes to their cross-trees before battle, sir, and paint crosses on their fighting sails.”

  “Must martyr more than a few sailors, too,” Lewrie had replied, “when someone shoots the big wood crosses free t’drop on their decks.”

  Last had come the sight of her hull, and the very size of her, as long as a First Rate fleet flagship, as towering from waterline to midships cap-rails as the loftiest Indiaman…but from the normally black-tarred gunn’ls upwards painted a vivid blue, all picked out with bright yellow paint on rails, round her entry-port, beakhead rails, and twin stern galleries and quarter-galleries, and decorated along her upperworks with what looked to be yellow-painted rosettes!

  “Gun-ports, sir,” Lt. Langlie had suggested. “Old, Elizabethan style gun-ports, with fancy woodwork framing them. Might even mount a side battery of dragon-mouthed cannon, like the Chinese. What in the world?”

  “Garish,” Catterall dismissed.

  “Tawdry,” Mr. Winwood sneered.

  “Whore transport?” Lewrie whispered, his face creasing broadly into a grin. Which had required him to explain the jape played on the younger officers of the gun-room when he was aboard HMS Cockerel in the Med in ‘93. Though, for a moment, the very strange ship had put him in mind of those “floating emporiums” moored on the South bank of the Mississippi opposite the wharves of New Orleans, the aging hulks that served as nearly duty-free stores for Spanish, British, and American merchants; all of them had been just as gaudily painted, and so plastered with an assortment of signboards or sales’ broadsheets that it had been hard to make out what colour they actually were, underneath.

  “Sir!” Midshipman Grace called from the mizen shrouds, where he had climbed with a telescope. “They’ve boarding nets strung from every yardarm! Nets strung to catch falling blocks and such from aloft, too!”

  “Close enough,” Lewrie snapped, as that outré seagoing joke was within a single mile, his amusement fading. “Mister Langlie, I’d admire did you beat the ship to Quarters!”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Mister Larkin, you’re signals midshipman of the watch?”

  “Aye, sor…sir,” their little Bog-Irish imp soberly replied.

  “Hoist colours,” Lewrie ordered, “and stand by with our Number, and private signal. Does that gaudy fraud try to bluff us, she’ll not have this month’s proper reply.”

  As the crew went about stripping the ship for action, lumbering furniture, sea-chests, and flimsy objects deep below, hanging their own anti-boarding nets and “protectors” aloft across the gangways and the gun positions against falling wreckage, Proteus changed her course to reduce the angle at which she closed the odd “duck” of a ship, baring her larboard broadside to her, and starting to steal a little of the Nor’east Trade from her sails by placing her in the frigate’s “wind shadow.” The course change also gave Proteus’s gunners time to ready their pieces, light the last-ditch slow-match igniters, and open their gun-ports. As the strange ship loomed up within a half a mile of them, gun-captains raised their free arms to indicate that they were prepared in all respects to fire into her the moment the command was given.

  “Colours and private signal, Mister Larkin,” Lewrie snapped, as he fiddled with his sword and brace of double-barreled pistols freshly fetched from his great-cabins by his Cox’n, Andrews. The Royal Navy ensign broke high aft of her spanker sail, with a match on her foremast halliards; a string of five code flags soared up the mizen halliards as bundles, which opened like blossoms at a single twitch on the light binding line. Now we’ll see just who ye are, ye … sonofabitch! Alan Lewrie thought in amazement for…

  At the very last moment, a British merchantman’s Red Ensign shot up her after running stay, and a blue house flag soared to the top of the strange ship’s mainmast, trimmed in bright yellow at every border, and bearing yellow masks of Tragedy and Comedy!

  “Think I can make out her name, sir,” Lt. Catterall commented, busy with his telescope. “There, on her quarter board… Festival.”

  “Mine arse on a …” Lewrie gravelled, as dozens of people suddenly appeared along the Festival’s bulwarks and rails, waving, shouting, and… cheering? Some of them, most skimpily dressed in the tightest garments, scrambled up those “boarding nets” and scampered high aloft…to begin swinging back and forth above their “protector” nets. Lewrie lifted his own telescope to behold a white-painted, and loosely-garbed, Fool, who plucked his large red pom-pom “buttons” down the front of his smock, and hit himself in the head with what appeared to be a pig bladder!

  “God A’mighty, ‘tis a circus!” Ordinary Seaman Liam Desmond, on the larboard gangways, cried. “Look, Pat!” he called to his thicker-witted compatriot, Ordinary Seaman Furfy. “A seagoin’ circus, arrah!”

  “Sonofa…a whole afternoon chasin’ bleedin’, tom-noddy… twits!” Lewrie fumed, slamming the tubes of his glass shut. “Play a jape on me, will ye, ye… clowns!”

  Wonder if anybody’d fuss much if I just sank ‘em, anyway! Lewrie wondered; There’s bound t’be mimes yonder. Mimes, clowns, fools, and “Captain Sharps.” Might be doin’ the world a favour!

  “Gawd, they’s wimmen thar!” a sailor in the afterguard gawped.

  “Deck, there!” the mainmast lookout shouted. “Nekkid wimmen!”

  “Still!” Lewrie howled to shut down the bedlam. It wasn’t his way to run a totally silent warship, as some captains might, where no talking or unnecessary sound beyond the bosuns’ pipes calls passed an order, but… might this be a sly ruse to get him within gun range, all unsuspecting and almost completely “disarmed,” then… ?

  “Silence on deck, silence all!” Lt. Langlie sternly shouted.

  Lewrie jerked the tubes of his telescope open to full extension again, so angrily he could hear the brass grinding against the stops, and lifted it to his eye. There were even more clowns, all prancing about in a dance that looked inspired by St. Vitus, giving each other the odd bash with their pig bladders, turning St. Catherine’s Wheels…the nearly-nude people aloft…no. They wore costumes sewn so snugly that they at first had appeared nude, but he could now see that they wore tights and similar upper garments, with equally-snug wraps about their groins as skimpy as a Hindoo’s underdrawers. And, they were swooping to and fro on swings hung from the masts, leaping from one to the other as agilely as so many squirrels. Two or three twirled horizontally from taut ropes being swung by people on deck, and even a few were playing at sliding down the braces of the sails, riding perilously from the royal yard and the stiff windward edge of the sail to the t’gallant, to the tops’l, then down the edge of the course!

  “Wonder if they’ll charge admission, heh heh,” Lt. Catterall quipped to the helmsmen.

  “I said still!” Lewrie snapped. “Mister Larkin. Do they have this month’s private merchant code?”
r />   “Uh, nossir.” Larkin sobered from being lost in amusement.

  “Then make a hoist,” Lewrie ordered. “Fetch-to at once. Do not use the trade’s private signals…use the common book.”

  “Aye, sor.”

  And damned if a brace of clowns didn’t leap atop the quarterdeck bulwarks, make exaggerated gestures of cupping their ears, then waving large handkerchiefs and shouting, “Yoo-Hoo!,” even blowing kisses!

  “Trumpet!” Lewrie barked, taking the one that Lt. Langlie meekly offered. He turned back to the rails, lifted the speaking-trumpet to his lips, took a deep breath, and bawled across the narrowing range between both ships, “Fetch-to, or I will blow you out of the water!”

  He heard a faint “Yoo-Hoo!” returned, as one of the clowns got his hands on a speaking trumpet, too, though at least some of the men on the Festival’s quarterdeck realised that Lewrie was serious, and tried to claw the fellow back down, and retrieve the brass instrument.

  “Mister Langlie!” Lewrie snarled. “Larboard chase-gun! Put a round-shot under that bastard’s bows. Close under!”

  BANG! The 9-pounder chase-gun on the larboard forecastle went off terrier-sharp, and in the blink of an eye a “feather” of disturbed spray leaped into being right beneath Festival’s jib-boom, collapsing in a salty mist over her own beakhead rails.

  At least the clowns stopped crying, “Yoo-Hoo!”

  “God’s sake!” a man Lewrie took to be the ship’s master cried in alarm from her quarterdeck. “We’re British! Hold yer fire for the love o’ God, sir!” He lowered his “recovered” speaking-trumpet, and took off his old-style tricorne hat, mopping his forehead on his free sleeve. “Merchantman Festival, three days outta the Cape Verdes, and bound for Recife!” he continued, with a fresher breath.

  “Fetch-to, Festival}” Lewrie yelled back. “I will inspect your papers!” To his officers, he ordered in a softer voice, “Lower away a cutter, and muster a boarding party.”

  Lewrie completed his climb up the battens and man-ropes to the Festival’s starboard entry-port, once both ships had fetched-to, cocked up into the Trades at a relative halt. Sailors, acrobats, and women in scanty casual clothing stood about her decks awaiting him, as did her master and mates. A man in a battered old tricorne doffed his hat, and Lewrie began to doff his in return, but…

  Three white-garbed clowns ran up to “toe the line” along a plank seam; one widely salaamed in Arabic fashion, a second banged his head on the deck in a Chinee kow-tow, whilst the third parodied bosuns’ calls on a nose flute.

  “Don’t make me shoot you!” Lewrie harshly warned the flutist as he gathered a fistful of pom-pommed smock in one hand, and tapped the butt of one of his sashed pistols with the other.

  “Gerroutofit!” the ship’s master angrily shouted. “Jesus!” he added half under his breath as he came from his quarterdeck to shoo them away. “I’m that sorry for that, sir. That sorry, too, to be such a bother, but we had no idea you were Royal Navy, and ran from you. I am Amos Weed, master of the Festival, and you’d be bein’…?”

  “Captain Alan Lewrie, sir, of the Proteus frigate,” Lewrie said, his humours still unsettled by the jeering amusement the circus people expressed as they congratulated the clowns on their jape.

  Smells like the cats’ sand box, Lewrie told himself as he got a good first whiff of the air aboard the merchantman.

  “Our owner, Captain Lewrie,” Capt. Weed said, waving at a portly fellow tromping up the starboard ladderway from the waist. “Mister Dan Wigmore, of Wigmore’s Travelling Extravangaza.”

  ” ‘Ow do, sir, ‘ow do!” Mr. Wigmore cried as if Lewrie was a long lost brother as he joined them. He was garbed in a bilious green wool tweed coat and loudly-embroidered tan waist-coat, a pair of taupe-grey corduroy breeches, and top-boots. He bobbed from the waist jerkily as he doffed a very fashionable, narrow-brimmed “thimble” hat. “An’ werry glad we are t’see ye, Cap’m! Daniel Wigmore…but I ‘spects ye know o’ our Extravaganza a’ready. Th’ finest, most h’amazin’ portable show h’ever ye did see!” Wigmore declared in a pronounced Cockney accent. “Circus! Bareback riders … h’acrobats an’ h’an-imal h’acts. Dramas s’tragic they’ll make ye blub, comedies s’funny ye’ll split yer sides laughin’! Jugglers, fortune tellin’, death-defyin’ h’aerialists, an’ feats o’ magic done by mystic gurus o’ th’ fabled Far h’East, a li’l bit o’ h’ev’rythin’ under th’ sun, and a men-ag-erie gathered from th’ four corners o’ th’ world, aha!”

  “Lewrie, Royal Navy,” he said in stiff reply. “We have—”

  “An’ ‘aven’t ye come in Puddin’ Time, Cap’m Lewrie!” Mr. Wigmore energetically prattled on. “Wot a wonder, h’arrivin’ h’at th’ werry instant in our ‘our o’ need!”

  “Need, sir?” Lewrie asked with a snort. “What need?” Damned if he’d give up spare spars and canvas to this… circus!

  “Why, pertection, Cap’m Lewrie, pertection!” Wigmore exclaimed. “We’re h’all h’alone out ‘ere, an’ th’ wide ocean full o’ two-legged sharks o’ th’ French an’ Spanish persuasion, like. Now ye’re ‘ere, we kin sail t’Recife in comp’ny wif a stout British frigate, so…”

  “You’ve seen enemy warships, Captain Weed?” Lewrie demanded of the soberer merchant master, trying to ignore Wigmore’s patter.

  Trying, too, to ignore the semi-exposed charms of the women the Festival carried: flaming-hennaed redheads, lithe little blondes, and an assortment of brunette or auburn wenches, who were slowly drifting over to starboard to listen to the conversation…or flirt with the file of Marines and the sailors from his boat crew. One of ‘em…

  “Seen sev’ral odd sail, sir,” Capt. Weed told him, “and we ran from a few that gave me the odd itch. Festival’s not a swift sailer, laden as we are, but a sure ol’ girl. Can’t rightly say they were warships, but none pursued us too long. And, we’ve nought but eight old pieces, and them but puny, converted Army six-pounders, as like as not t’burst, and none o’ my hands what ye’d call proper gunners …”

  “Mmhmm,” Lewrie said with a sage nod, more than half-distracted.

  “Frets me critters somethin’ ‘orrid, sir!” Wigmore bemoaned at his elbow. “Oh, ‘tis ‘ard, shippin’ ‘orses an’ such, an’ them a pitch away from broken legs, an’ h’after years o’ trainin’ that’d be wasted. ‘Cept on wot Cap’m Weed calls a ‘reach,’ th’ h’upset… damme! There they go, again. An’ h’after we just got ‘em settled, too.”

  Evidently, lying fetched-to didn’t suit his “menagerie,” either, for Lewrie heard a sudden cacophony of grunts, roars, bleating goats, burbling somethings, fierce moos or hee-haws, yelps, bugles, and enough dog barks for a whole hunting pack. One set off the others, then some parrot squawks and shrill peacock cries arose, too.

  “Might ye be good h’enough t’ h’excuse me, Cap’m Lewrie. I’ve beasts t’settle, damn ‘em,” Wigmore griped, then scampered down to the main deck and down a midships hatchway, bawling for his keepers.

  “Tell me ye’re bound for Recife, sir,” Capt. Weed nigh-implored.

  “We’re, ah …” Lewrie temporised, loath to tell Weed too much. “Perhaps, sir. Bound South, at any rate. But, let me ask you, sir…what took you to the Cape Verdes, and from where did you sail, before you fetched ‘em?”

  “As to yer second question first, sir,” Weed explained, “we’d just done a whole year o’ shows all up and down the coast of the United States of America, ev’ry seaport city from Maine to Savannah, down in Georgia. Right successful, too, and huge crowds ev’rywhere we lit. The Yankee Doodles are starved for entertainment, I expect. We did a show or two in the Bahamas, then planned to head South, ourselves, for Cape Town and the Far East. Could’ve fetched Recife, but Wigmore was leery of how the dramas’d go over in Brazil, with so few folk speakin’ English, there, for none of our folk speak Portuguese, e’en the fortune tellers, and, bein’ a Catholic country, they might not’ve taken kindly to our costumes, neither. A bit…scant, for som
e tastes, ah…”

  Lewrie could see the sense in that worry, as he let himself be distracted by the women clad in muslin or sheer cambric underskirts and chemises, exchanging recited lines from slim booklets he took for the scripts of a new dramatic work. One of ‘em that particularly caught his eye was an exotic, foreign-looking girl with raven-dark and long curling hair, high-cheeked features, and a complexion that put him in mind of Spain or the New World. Bright amber-brown eyes, or were they hazel, but very attractive, and firm young breasts straining against her loose chemise, damned impressive and full “poonts”…!

  “As to yer first question,” Capt. Weed continued, dragging him back to reality, “we hit the Equatorial Current, and the passage turned longish…so much so we were runnin’ low on water for the critters, Cap’m Lewrie.”

  “There’s been drought in the Cape Verdes, the last fourty years, Captain Weed,” Lewrie scoffed, his un-formed suspicions of such an odd ship revived, and took a moment to glance over his shoulder to see if his Marines or sailors had found anything piratical in their searches.

  “Aye, and so there is, sir,” Capt. Weed sadly agreed. “I told Mister Wigmore it’d be iffy, but…The few folk still livin’ on those isles were damn’ tight with what they had, too. Sold us barely enough t’fetch Recife, after all, then shooed us outta port, nigh at cannon-point. Wouldn’t even let us land the beasts for exercise, nor any of our people, either! Got a low opinion o’ circus and theatre people in the Cape Verdes! I hope we can make it all the way to Recife, and we just may, do we not meet slack winds, or have to run from any more of those strange sail. We’d much appreciate escort, Cap’m Lewrie, do ye be bound that way,” he almost pleadingly stated.

  “We, ah …” Lewrie hedged once more, then finally had to spill it. “That would be up to my senior officer, sir, and the East India Company’s civilian ‘Commodore.’ We’re part of a rather large escort to a ‘John Company’ trade. Should the winds suit, those gentlemen may even plan for us to beat our way direct to Saint Helena.”