A King's Trade

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Milady,” Capt. Cowles soothingly intoned, bent over in a bow worthy of St. James’s Palace.

  “Good Captain Cowles,” Lady Treghues cooed back to him, could a vulture actually coo, of course! “And you must be Captain Alan Lewrie, sir!”

  “Milady,” Lewrie rejoined, dipping her an additional bow.

  “My husband has told me all about you, Captain Lewrie,” came a much cooler address. Had she a fan instead of knitting needles, she’d have been whacking it back and forth to fight her “virtuous vapours” like a loose and flagging jib! All that was missing was a scandalised “Hmmph!” and a stamped foot.

  “It was my pleasure to serve aboard his ship, milady,” Lewrie replied, rising upright instead of “grovelling” like a Russian serf.

  “Hmmph!”

  There it is! Lewrie told himself, now sure that an exasperated stamp would soon come.

  “I rather doubt there’ll be much visiting ‘tween ships, dear,” Treghues grumpily said, put out that his wife had intruded upon men’s business…but seemingly at a loss as to how to prevent it. Perhaps the grey hair in his thinning auburn thatch had come from his wife and her “for his own good” interventions?

  “Once the weather calmed, there has been, Treghues,” she objected, “supper invitations, and I don’t know what all. Surely, do circus people, actresses, and base, low-born itinerants get a whiff of money to be made off the better sorts we convoy with their sleights of hand, mountebank antics, and… pick-pocketing, they’ll swarm every ship in a twinkling. Like a Biblical plague of locusts!” she fumed, shifting her knitting needles from Low Guard to Present-Arms.

  Lewrie never could make sense of how “loving couples” addressed each other. Commoners’ wives might refer to “The Mister,” or cry out their husband’s surname to get his attention…perhaps even in the “melting moments” before orgasm! “Oh, Smith, oh, Mister, yes, yes!”?

  Calls him Treghues, not Tobias, does she? Lewrie took quiet note; And it’s our convoy, our crewmen, too? My “husband” or “the captain” says … God spare us! he thought with a shiver.

  Capt. Treghues looked as if he’d like to tell her to mind her own business, put a sock in it, or simply bugger off, but…years in harness with her, years of bleakness, might have already daunted what meek remonstrances he’d made… and the wiles she’d used on the poor bastard to make sure he knew just which of them wore the breeches! A quick perusal of the great-cabin’s bulkheads and partitions revealed an assortment of “art,” but nothing personal, no children, no portrait of Lady Treghues in her younger days. Talk of bleak! Lewrie thought.

  “Of course, I will issue a directive that there will be none of that, dearest,” Treghues announced, stiffening his back and lifting his chin, as if to make his surrender to her will seem all noble. “And, it goes without saying that any chicanery or pilferage on the part of the mountebanks will be severely punished, as such crimes would in fact be were they committed on any street in England.”

  Good luck with that, Lewrie amusedly thought; bored as the passengers and officers aboard the Indiamen already are, t’will be them to swarm Festival. For a peek at the menagerie, o’course. So educational. As improving as Sunday school, ha!

  “Hmmph!,” in a somewhat satisfied sniff, was Lady Treghues’s conditional comment on that.

  “Well, perhaps I should return to Proteus, sir, now that that’s out of the way,” Lewrie offered. Speaking of offering, no one had yet offered him a glass of anything, and he rather doubted they’d trot out the good china and sit him down to supper, in their current snit.

  “Yayss,” Capt. Treghues drawled, turning his forbidding gaze in Lewrie’s direction once more. “Perhaps you should, Lewrie.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  “Tomorrow night, though, sir,” Capt. Cowles said as he gathered up his own things preparatory to departing himself. “Let us say about the end of the First Dog, I would admire did you dine aboard my ship, Canterbury.”

  “I should be absolutely delighted, Captain Cowles, thankee very kindly,” Lewrie answered, most pleasantly surprised that someone would dine him in, at last. “Should I fetch a brace o’ bottles along?”

  “No bother, Captain Lewrie,” Cowles most agreeably replied. “We bear a perfectly ample and varied wine cellar aboard, surplus to the passengers’ personal stores. I dare say a fresh-butchered roast would go down nicely… with fresh butter and piping-hot rolls baked not a quarter-hour before, hey? Can’t beat the victuals of an Indiaman!”

  “Before I begin to slaver, sir, let me say that you do me too proud,” Lewrie happily told him. “Well, it appears we’re both off. Good evening, Sir Tobias, Lady Treghues.”

  “Last Sunday, Captain Lewrie …” Lady Treghues said, instead. And Capt. Treghues stiffened in wariness for which bee had got in her bonnet, this time. “We ordered Divine Services, and your frigate was fairly close under our lee. Though, I do not recall Proteus holding a proper service. You lack a chaplain, sir?”

  “Now, dearest …” Treghues began, with much “ahemming.”

  “We do not, Lady Treghues,” Lewrie told her. “Few ships under the Third Rate ever do. We hold what lay portions of the liturgy as are allowed, without the presumption of a real chaplain’s offices. It would be a touch… sacrilegious to do otherwise, milady.”

  “Treghues, this coming Sunday, we simply must see that Reverend Proctor is rowed over to them, must we not?” Lady Treghues triumphantly announced.

  “Of course, dearest,” he just had to agree.

  “Reverend William Wilberforce offered, milady,” Lewrie couldn’t help say in parting. “Sadly, we had to depart Portsmouth before a man of his selection could come down from London and come aboard.”

  “The Reverend… Wilberforce?” Lady Treghues goggled. And it wasn’t pretty.

  “Proteus had just come from the Caribbean, milady,” Lewrie said with his tongue firmly in one cheek. “He and I, and Mistress Hannah More and some others, had a long discussion about chattel slavery that I witnessed overseas. The Abolitionist Society, d’ye see. It was very kind of him to offer a chaplain, but…Admiralty would brook no delay…even for the Lord.” he concluded, giving “pious” a good shot.

  “I… see!” Lady Treghues intoned, much subdued, and sharing a fretful look with “the captain” of hers.

  “Your offer for your Reverend…Proctor, did ye say?…to conduct a proper service aboard is, may I say, equally kind, milady,” Lewrie told her with a reverent bow in congé, and a thankful smile that only Treghues, a long-time Navy officer, might recognise as one of Lewrie’s “shit-eating” grins. “I quite look forward to it. ‘Til then, I s’pose…adieu, all!”

  And what they make of that, the Lord only knows! Lewrie told himself as he stood by the starboard entry-port waiting for a cutter.

  “The Abolitionist Society!” Capt. Cowles snickered at his side in the companionable darkness, looking out on the riding lights of the convoy that glittered on a slow-heaving dark ocean. “My God, Lewrie, but you’re a proper caution, hee hee!”

  BOOK III

  “Fornix tibi et uncta popina incutiunt urbis desiderum, video, et quod anguius iste feret piper et tus ocius uva, nec vicina subest vinum praebere taberna quae possit tibi, nec meretrix tibicina, cuius ad strepitum saiias terrae gravis.”

  “’Tis the brothel, I see, and greasy cookshop that stir in you a longing for the city, and the fact that that poky spot will grow pepper and spice, as soon as grapes, and that there is no tavern hard by that can supply you with wine and flute-playing courtesans to whose strains you can dance and thump the ground.”

  HORACE, EPISTLES I, XIV, 21–26

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lanndd Hhoo!” the lookout on the mainmast cross-trees high aloft shrilled. And this time it wasn’t false. Dark cloud-heads that loomed over the horizon could appear solid, and they had been mistaken several times for the tall mountains of St. Helena…just as thunder heads earlier in the voyage had been mistaken for
the lonely St. Paul’s Rocks, for Cape Roque. One particularly-solid and seemingly-unmoving storm ahead of the trade’s course on-passage for Recife had resembled an island so much that Grafton had despatched HMS Chloe to “smoak” it out, sending her dashing ahead of the convoy, as if Capt. Sir Tobias Treghues might gain undying fame by discovering one of the “long lost” isles described in early Spanish sea-charts, sometimes reported by seafarers ever since…just as “High-Brazil” and its archipelagos were once cartographers’ rumours, yet never found where others had reported them. She’d returned hours later, empty-handed.

  These hills and mountains were real, though, at long last. They solidified as the convoy butted its slow way towards them against both Trades and current; other clouds scudded behind them as they got near, and even at ten miles rough details of rocks and bluffs and greenery (such as it was) could be discerned on barren, windswept St. Helena.

  “Almost done,” Lewrie whispered to himself with mounting, yet wary, enthusiasm, as he studied the isle from a perch on the foremast fighting top. “Almost there!”

  Soon to be free of Sir Tobias and Lady Treghues? Pray Jesus! A break in their long, very long passage, and the bulk of the escorting warships would turn about for home. And, was God just, Proteus would be one of them.

  One more circus performance, then… ! Lewrie thought as he put his brass telescope to his eye. It was land, by God; it had to be St. Helena, and not another of those portable mysteries, for this was even in the correct latitude and longitude, for a wonder.

  Though he still despised clowns and mimes worse than he ever did cold, boiled mutton, Capt. Alan Lewrie had come to rather like circuses and such. Or, rather, certain circus folk.

  Recife had been a friendly port, a wondrous place to break their passage, go ashore, and stretch their legs. Well, for “John Company” sailors and paying passengers, for Navy officers or working-parties under the ships’ pursers to fetch supplies…but not for Jack tars.

  Treghues had ordered his squadron anchored farther out, so that even the strongest swimmers might be daunted from hopes of desertion, with armed and fully-kitted Marines posted at entry-ports, sterns, and bows, round the clock. Once re-victualled, and glutted with firewood and fresh water, Treghues had allowed the “Easy” pendants hoisted, the warships put “Out of Discipline” for two whole days and nights; aboard-ship liberty, not shore liberty, so the local bumboats could swarm out with their wares—shoddy slop-clothing, cheap shoes, exotic parrots and monkeys for sale, fruits and ades, smuggled spirits… and whores.

  What had then ensued had not been a pretty sight, and Treghues and his wife and chaplain had taken shore lodgings to spare their finer sensibilities the sights and sounds of the wild ruts that had followed.

  Any sailor with the “blunt” could hire a doxy for a tumble, for an hour or so; those who could afford more could declare to the watch officers that his chosen wench was his “wife,” with whom he’d share his food (and whatever extra he could buy from the bumboatmen) and his rum issue with her, plus a fee to her and her “agent” for her loaned charms.

  The Surgeon, Mr. Hodson, and his Mate, the exiled former French physician, Mr. Maurice Durant, made what attempt they could to determine the women free of venereal, or other communicable, diseases. The Bosun and his mates, the Master-At-Arms, and his Ship’s Corporals searched incoming goods, and the whores’ underskirtings, for contraband liquour, but that was a losing proposition, and small bottles of local rum or arrack always got past them.

  Watches would still be stood in harbour, and the cry to rouse a division, a watch, usually was no longer “Wakey wakey, lash up an’ stow” but “Show a leg, show a leg.” Hairy-legged men got chivvied out of a hammock; smooth and (mostly) hairless female legs were allowed to sleep in! Everyone got as drunk as they could afford, danced as exuberantly and sang as loud as they could holler, and coupled in hammocks, or on the deck between the guns, whenever they felt the itch, with a blanket hung from the deck-head for only the slightest modicum of privacy. It sometimes required the Master-At-Arms, the Bosun, and those Marines who weren’t whoring or talking-in-tongues-drunk to break up fights over a woman, a parrot, puppy, or kitten, a dram of rum or a suspect run of the cards, dice, or backgammon.

  Lewrie slept aboard, but wisely took his gig ashore right after breakfast, and didn’t return ‘til after Lights Out round nine o’clock. What he hadn’t seen he wouldn’t have to punish, and would usually hold a rather lenient Captain’s Mast, unless relatively innocent sins turned into crimes against the Articles of War.

  The Portuguese were neutral in the war against France, and the people of Recife were friendly towards most visiting seamen. Without wartime taxes, and with the higher value of the Pound Sterling, he had gone on a frenetic shopping spree. Fresh, low-tide sand by the barrel for the cats’ “necessary”; jerked meats and sausages for their feeding; hard-skinned citrus fruits by the bushel, co-coanuts for their novelty; both local and imported wines to restore his wine-cabinet and his lazarette stores; fresh ink and paper, new batches of candles and oils to fill his lanthorns; a new shirt or two; Christmas presents to ship to Caroline and his children, Sewallis, Hugh, and Charlotte, for he’d not had enough time to do so in London or Portsmouth, and here it was not only past Christmas, but almost two months into both the new year of 1800 and a new century as well!

  Lewrie had bought a personal store of Jesuits’ Bark, cinchona, just in case of Malaria breaking out after a shore call, along with a box of citronella candles in tiny wooden tubs, that Mr. Durant found useful to defeat the sickening tropical miasmas that had engendered an outbreak of Yellow Jack aboard Proteus when first in the Caribbean in ‘97. And, when they were anchored near shore, the candles seemed to shoo away the pesky mosquitoes, too, allowing one to sleep at night without diving completely under the bed-covers.

  New linen or cotton bedding, too, a spanking-new and more comfortable cotton-stuffed mattress for his hanging bed-cot, since the old one had begun to reek, from both his own sweat and the odd claim laid upon it by Chalky or Toulon, most especially when Capt. Nicely had supplanted him for a time last year.

  And, laundry! And hot baths!

  At sea, laundry was done in a wood bucket with seawater or part-fresh, part saline, in which the lye soap the Purser, Mr. Coote, sold could barely raise a lather. The freshwater ration was a gallon a day per man, officer or ship’s boy, and most of that was used to boil the salt-meat rations or rare duffs or puddings in net bags in steep-tubs in the galley. To rinse, other net bags were used to tow the washing astern in the ship’s wake, so clothing smutted and stiff with tar and “slush” stains from the skimmed fat from the galley used on all of the rope rigging to keep it supple, reeking of human sweat and fleshy oils and grease, came back aboard but a tad cleaner, and simply stiff with salt crystals, once they’d been dried. After a while, everyone, from the aristocrat to the powder monkeys, erupted in painful, suppurating salt-water boils. Lewrie included.

  Laundry done in boiling-hot fresh water, though, oceans of it, then rinsed and re-rinsed in colder fresh water, churned and paddled, wrung and beaten, then sun-dried on a line of clean rope, could hold the boils at bay for weeks, months, if one carefully rationed changes of underclothes and sheets, and didn’t go too potty on fastidiousness!

  The officers and midshipmen had decided to go shares on fresh livestock, too, and had asked if their captain might wish to join in. They’d hunted up a nanny-goat with two kids, which could be milked for addition to coffee or tea, so sweet that even hot cocoa didn’t require too much sugar stirred in. And, a good kid goat was tender eating as well! They bought chickens and new coops, so they could have eggs at least three days a week, along with a lusty rooster to quicken chicks so the flock would prosper, if the noisy little bastard did his duty. A fat duck or two, some pigs, including a pregnant sow sure to birth some roast sucklings sooner or later, and a bullock for consumption in harbour, and one for later fresh beef.

  Even a permanent guar
d had to be put on the manger under the break of the forecastle, to help the ship’s boy who tended livestock—genially known as the “Duck Fucker”—keep the Marine’s pet, the champion rat-killing mongoose, from stealing chicken eggs. By now, she was very well-fed on dead rats (which upset the midshipmen’s mess no end for taking that source of meat), sleek, and well-groomed, and wore a red leather collar, and the semi-official rank of Corporal, listed in their muster book as Marine M. Cocky.

  Then, after a sublime first night ashore’s supper of local seafoods, fresh salad, soup, and mango pudding, washed down with a moderate lashing of wine, Lewrie had decided to toddle over to the plaza to take in the show at the Wigmore’s circus.

  Capt. Weed of the Festival was right; the language problem was insurmountable, so the planned dramas and comedies, and the songs they usually sang in English, had been dropped, but there was still a lot to see, and the performers of Wigmore’s Travelling Extravaganza were Jacks and Jills of all trades, able to play any role called for on stage, or flesh out acts in the arena, both aloft and alow.

  Lewrie paid his admission, and got a seat several rows back on a shaky set of locally run-up tiers of benches set about an open area at one end of Recife’s typically large colonial plaza. Before him, there were two foot-high rings formed by garishly painted wooden boxes, the outer ring about ten feet closer to the audience, the inner ring about sixty feet across. Temporary masts and spars and shear-legs inside the inner ring stood with the aid of rope rigging. Colourful flags flapped in the slight evening breeze, and long strings of cast-off signal flags or small, cheap burgees were hung everywhere a rope could be stretched. Torches or large lanthorns illuminated the inner ring, and the air was heavy with expectation of something out of the ordinary, and the local crowd, half of them children, stirred, squirmed, and chattered. Lewrie made sure that his watch and fob, and his wash-leather coin-purse, were safe in the front pockets of his breeches, for though he wasn’t exactly in the “cheap seats,” some of the better-dressed Brazilians nearest to him still bore a shifty, pick-pocket’s look. At least he was back far enough to be spared the attentions of the damned clowns and mimes!