A King's Trade

by Dewey Lambdin

  “I also pray that this recent beau geste of yours is a sign of you turning from Folderol to Rectitude, that the Navy has forced you to so Discipline yourself in your professional and publick Life that some wee bit of that Discipline has, at last, trickled over into your private life, as well. Had you the ability to apply but a Tithe towards mastering your Amatory Nature, our Marriage would have remained a most Happy One, no matter now many years apart, nor how many thousand miles separate us. If only such were True I could own to Complete Approval and Adoration of an heroic Husband! Though, until such is proven to me, you will understand you have won but a Portion of my Praise, you Incomprehensible, Paradoxical, Ever-Amazing Man!”

  Which was certainly a lot more warmth than he’d gotten from her past letters, Lewrie decided. Did all England hail him as “Saint Alan the Emancipator”—and they forgot that horrid “Black Alan” quickly, pray God!— Caroline might deign to accept him back, in public, at least. Were they cheered in the London theatres like Horatio Nelson, she might stand beside him in their private box, and even go so far as to wave and smile in appreciation with him… though Lewrie doubted if she’d be gazing up at him in mute adoration, exactly.

  Most-like she’d keep her eyes out for the flirty orange-seller wenches, Lewrie grimly thought; and rip the lungs out of the first’un who tried t’hug me! Not that I can act’lly blame her…

  Still, it was a start towards some sort of reconciliation, but only the iciest sort, and only if he came out his troubles smelling like Hungary Water. There was a chance they might reside under the same roof, again. In the same bedchamber, the same bed, well…he might have to hire-on a food-taster, and sleep with one eye open for a time.

  “…Mother Charlotte is failing, Alan, and we despair that we may see her with us by Autumn,” Caroline related by long-distance, in her “homebody” persona. “We do hear, though, that, in Response to our informations sent to Burgess in India, he is now of a clear mind to throw up his Commission with the East India Company Army, now that he has achieved a Majority with the 19th Native Infantry, your father’s old Bengali regiment, and, with the last remnants of the Tippoo Sultan Uprising quelled, in which Burgess informs us he has amassed quite the “Chicken Nabob” fortune, it his greatest Wish to be home with our Dear Mother whilst she is still well. Who knows, perhaps his Fortune will prove even greater than the one you reaped in the…”

  Beyond that news, there was only a formal close, and an almost jocular plea that he closely inspect any packages of gifts he sent for the children in future, and under no circumstances was he to send them anything living. A formal set-piece of a final sentence, worthy of a letter to a corn-merchant of long, but arm’s-length, standing, and she signed herself rather coolly simply as “Your Wife, Caroline.”

  Lewrie determined to write her back, instanter, to strike while the iron was at least luke-warm. And, he’d write Sir Malcolm Shockley, too, and ask him to delve around Twigg’s and the Abolitionists’, true motives, and whether he really had been set up as a sacrificable cat’s-paw!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It is sinkink?” Eudoxia asked with a puzzled look as she used his telescope to study Proteus as she sat at her anchors out in Table Bay.

  “Everything we could shift is moved forrud,” Lewrie explained, “to lift her stern as high out of the water as possible. The divers have hammered new gudgeons in place, underwater, and we’ve ‘spliced’ the sternpost above the waterline with the timber we fetched back from Simon’s Bay. It just looks precarious.”

  Precarious, indeed, for with all her artillery, round-shot, and victuals casks shifted up near the cable tiers, the frigate sat like a badly-anchored duck decoy on the water. Her bows were immersed as far as her lower gunwale timbers, the sea up almost as high as her hawse-holes and the lowermost beakhead rails, whilst Proteus’s stern was up as if she was a live duck, ready to bob and feed off the bottom weeds of a pond. It even made Lewrie sweat to see it. But, without a dockyard and a graving dock, this was the best they could do.

  Andries de Witt’s multiple oxen team and his timber waggon had rumbled down to the piers with the new rudder, where Lt. Catterall and the Bosun, Mr. Pendarves, had erected a shear-legs to hoist it off the timber waggon’s supports, then sway it out and down into a large barge…another of Mr. Goosen’s “quite reasonable” hirings. It was as ungainly and squat as a fat-bellied Dutch coaster in the Scheldte or the canals, nearly fifty-four feet long and over sixteen feet in beam, the scruffy sort of thing that usually bore cargo or an entire six months’ supply of water in vast casks in her belly; low freeboard, fitted with a dozen sweeps… a cockroach scuttling ‘cross a harbour in full daylight, and just about as handsome.

  “Once under our counter, we’ll moor the barge snug against the stern,” Lewrie went on with his explanation, wishing he could cross a finger or two, for the reality could not go as easily as his breezily glib exposition. “The long, thinner part is the upper stock, and that will slide up through a large hole under the transom. The bottom end will swing, even float, but, with the kedge capstan and the hoisting chains, we’ll lift her ‘til she’s almost hangin’ right, then use brute force, aloft and a’low, to get the bronze pins of the pintle fittings into the holes of the gudgeon fittings, and she’ll ride all her weight on ‘em, once we’ve let out slack on the hoisting chains and cables.”

  “You do speak Engliski, Alan?” Eudoxia asked with a crease in her forehead as she lowered the heavy glass. “Half of what you say is… shumashetshi… how you are sayink…?”

  “Daft? Mad babbling?” Lewrie supplied with a snicker. “That’s sailors for you. Our own language, even our own dictionary.”

  “Da… daft,” Eudoxia said with a giggle, testing the word a few more times, and finding “daft” right pleasing.

  “Lower away…handsomely!” Lt. Catterall bawled to the work-party, as the massive, and heavy, new rudder finally was swayed off the side of the pier, above the barge. He was echoed by Goosens, spouting a flood of Dutch, the local variety some called Afrikaans, Javanese, or Hottentot, for all Lewrie knew. Now and then came an English phrase having to do with “damn your eyes, don’t sink my boat!” or some such.

  “So …” Eudoxia further said, with a playful, teasing note to her voice as she stepped closer to hand him his telescope back. “You get the…rudder… on, you sail for England right away, Alan?”

  “That’d be up to Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Curtis, Eudoxia. Once we’re seaworthy again, he may tell us to escort that new-come convoy to Saint Helena, or all the way to the Pool of London, I truly don’t know. It may take days to get us set-to-rights, proper, and they may sail without us, and we’ll have to do a short patrol cruise round the Cape, instead, ‘til Captain Treghues comes in with another homebound trade,” he told her.

  “Hmmm,” was her pleased, purring comment to that news. “If you wait that long, we go shootink together? You give me tour on frigate?”

  “Be delighted to, m’dear,” Lewrie vowed, taking a second of his attention from watching the rudder being lowered into the barge, and, yes, with his cack-hand fingers crossed along the seam of his breeches. “A shore supper, what the Frogs call a ‘pique-nique’ …a basket of food and wine one eats outdoors, that is….”

  “We shoot food, roast on sticks!” Eudoxia cheerfully enthused, all but bouncing on the toes of her moccesins. “Build fire, take big blanket…cut poles, and put up palatka, uhm, dammit… tent! Hunt springbok, duck, and grouse…! Eat wit’ fingers, get greasy…!”

  Damme, but it does sound temptin’! Lewrie thought, one eye on the swaying rudder, one ear cast for Eudoxia’s patter, the other ear cocked for pierside sounds, like snapping or groaning ropes, squeaky or jammed blocks in the hoisting tackle, trying to sort them out of a constant intrusion from the comings-and-goings of rowing boats along the pier from the newly-arrived Indiamen, and the clatter of coaches and carriages either dropping off passengers or arriving to pick them up. A tent. Hell yes! Night in the wilds,
he fervidly imagined; one of those bomas du Toit mentioned, ring the camp with thornbush to keep lions out of the …what was it? Kraal, that’s it! Kraal! Just me and her? He almost had to shake himself to stay focussed. Well, some natives t’hew an’ tote, but off in their own little… kraal, once the sun goes down, and…

  “My word! Lewrie! It is you!” a sharp voice intruded.

  “Uhm? Hah?” Lewrie gawped, whipping his head about to find a source, irked that his urgent attention on the doings with his rudder, and his fantasies, were so rudely interrupted at possibly the most inopportune instant. He espied a quartet of people just attaining a firm footing on the pier from the wooden stairs that led from the floating landing stage on the south side of the pier. There was an older Reverend in the all-black “ditto” and white bands that were Church “uniform” the world over, a stout woman of equal age in dark and drab grey silk, sporting a grim little bonnet atop her tautly drawn-back hair under a parasol worthy of a rainy funeral, a young lady gowned much the same who bore a fair sort of resemblance to the older people, though quite pretty, in a prim way, and a sun-darkened man in the red and scarlet of an officer of the East India Company army, right down to the bright silver chain-mail epaulets on each shoulder, aiding the girl.

  “Burgess Chiswick?” Lewrie yelped in glad surprise. “Damn my eyes, Burgess. Caroline just wrote me you were on yer way home! Give ye joy, lad! Give ye joy!” he whooped, forgetting everything else for a moment to step forward and offer his hand. “Ye’ll pardon me, but I have a wee situation here, Burgess. M’new rudder. The Frogs shot the old’un off, a couple of weeks ago, just out yonder,” he added, waving a hand seaward.

  “Mother hasn’t…?” Burgess uneasily asked him as he not only shook hands with him, but threw his arms about him, too.

  “Caroline wrote that Mother Charlotte’s poorly, but as of four months ago, was still with us, though as for autumn …” Lewrie told him, pounding him on the back. The diffident lad that Lewrie had met during the siege of Yorktown so long ago, who had seemed so ill-suited and sometimes naive for a soldier’s life in the harshness of India, had turned into a well-weathered man, and a confident and seasoned veteran of nearly fourteen years of command in the field.

  “Hellish-good t’see you, Burge!” Lewrie loudly told him.

  “Ah, hum …” Burgess cautioned, with a subdued cough to remind Lewrie that he wasn’t on his quarterdeck, that a churchman was nearby.

  “Yer pardons,” Lewrie said, blushing. “Oops! I’ll see to the last of our lowering away, then…”

  “Vast, the God-damned larboard snub-lines, ye idle duck-fuckers!” Lt. Catterall bellowed, all unknowing, fully into his task, and in ripe Catterall form. “Belay ev’ry inch of that shite!”

  Eudoxia found that outburst hilarious, even if such Billingsgate language made her blush. She laughed right out loud, obliviously, and repeated the “duck-fucker” part to herself several times, savouring it in wicked glee. Lewrie could practically hear scandalised heads snapping from him, to the unseen Catterall below the edge of the pier, and to Eudoxia, could hear stiff faces crackling into scowls!

  “Uhm, hah …” Lewrie mumbled, going to the edge of the pier to stand by the shear-legs. “Rev’rend on deck, Mister Catterall!” he said in warning.

  “Arr, fook th’ preacher!” Ordinary Seaman Slocombe growled back in a voice just loud enough to be heard.

  “I’ve a’ready done that, ‘usband,” Landsman Sugden cackled in a female falsetto, providing the end of the old jape about the habits of some circuit-riding ministers, and their doings. “Now, ‘e warnts ye t’ kill ‘im a chicken!”

  Can it get any worse? Lewrie sadly asked himself.

  “God Almighty!” he yelled down to the barge without thinking, in his quarterdeck voice. “Belay that language, or there’ll be people at the gratings, come morning!”

  “Vaht is meanink ‘to kill him a chicken,’pajalsta?” a giggly Eudoxia just had to enquire, stalking up to Lewrie’s side. It didn’t help matters that today she sported a new pair of buff breeches as snug as a second skin, her knee-length moccasins with all the fringes, a tan linen shirt unbuttoned halfway to her navel, a bright yellow sash tied about her waist, and that damned hat with the long egret feather plume, to boot, and most-like looked about as outlandish and savage to the Reverend and his family as a Muskogee war chief.

  “I’ll explain later,” Lewrie muttered from the side of his mouth, and trying to shush her with a hidden gesture.

  “Alan, you knowink this fine soldier, da?” she blithely asked.

  He couldn’t snub her, could he? Well, he considered giving her a shove off the pier into the water, or the barge, but by then, every eye, every brow lifted in prim expectation, was on him, and her, just ready to pounce, and Lewrie had to follow through.

  “Burgess, allow me to name to you Mistress Eudoxia Durschenko,” Lewrie managed to get out, just knowing it would all turn to shit, no matter what he did. “Mistress Eudoxia, this is Major Burgess Chiswick of the East India Company Army, an old comrade of mine from the American Revolution, and my…brother-in-law.”

  “Mistress Eudoxia,” Burgess smoothly replied, as if such things happened every day; perhaps he’d seen odder in India. He doffed his hat to her and made a presentable “leg.” Eudoxia stuck out a hand, at first, before remembering the finer customs, and dipped him a shallow curtsy, which, in boots and breeches, looked perfectly scandalous, as she murmured, “Your servant, Major Cheese … sir!”

  “You are, ah…of local Cape Dutch extraction, Miss Eudoxia?” Burgess brightly enquired, in hopes of explaining her outré clothing to his travelling companions, perhaps to himself, as well.

  “Nyet, Major Cheese…Week,” Eudoxia proudly stated. “I am Russki! Russian. Vith Vigmore’s Travellink Extravaganaa. I do bareback ridink, expert archery ‘turn,’ and some acting in comedies, and dramas! Is pity we finish our run of shows before you arrive. Now, Vigmore and Papa, who is beink lion tamer, are away on hunt for new beasts, but I learn African elephant is not good for performink. But, you come from India?” she gushed, all agog and feckless. “Land of tiger and ridink elephant? You see them? Hunt them? Oh, you must tell me all, Major Ch…sir! Your friends? Family?” Eudoxia asked, pointing to the churchman and his brood, unaware of how gauche it was. “They see elephant and tiger, too? You introduce me, da?”

  “Uhm, ah …” Burgess dithered, caught in Lewrie’s trap, after all. From the instant Eudoxia had opened her mouth, there had come a series of prim gasps; circus person! Bareback anything! And, horror of horrors, actress? If she’d said she rode a broomstick, boiled up potions to cast spells, ate children, and stuck hat-pins through all her cheeks whilst bussing Satan’s fundament, she couldn’t have given them a worse case of the “fantods”!

  “Reverend Brothers, allow me to name to you Mistress Eudoxia… uhm, Durschenko. Mistress Eudoxia, may I name to you the Reverend Brothers… his wife, Mistress Brothers, and their daughter, Mistress Alicia Brothers. My fellow passengers on the Lord Stormont.”

  I don’t know which of us is worse-fucked! Lewrie grimly thought as he watched the Brotherses’ reaction to that! Him, or me, ‘tis about equal shares! I could trot out knowing Wilberforce, Clarkson, and old Hannah More, but I doubt it’d cosset ‘em. No, they’d never believe it!

  “Your servant, sir…madam…miss,” Eudoxia said, smiling in anticipation of tales of India, her curtsies to each deeper, and more graceful, as if she was finally catching on. Then…

  “Oh, but you are so pretty, Mistress Alicia!” she exclaimed, all but clapping her hands. “You comink from India, too? Did you ever ride elephant? Hunt tiger vith noble rajahs?”

  “Why, thank you, but…!” the young lady stammered.

  “Certainly not!” and “Never!” her parents huffed.

  “I’d also like to name to you my brother-in-law, sir, ma’am…Miss Alicia,” Burgess interjected, about ready to tug at his shirt collar and suddenly too-tight neck-stock. “Captain
Alan Lewrie, of the Royal Navy.”

  “Reverend Brothers…Mistress Brothers …Miss Brothers,” Lewrie purred, doffing his cocked hat and dipping a formal “leg.” “Your servant.”

  “Sir!” from the husband. “Hmmph!” from the stodgy wife.

  “Brother-in-law?” from Eudoxia, in a hellish-sharp tone.

  Oh, shit! Lewrie miserably thought; I’m in the quag, now!

  “Alan, you not tell me tiy jenati zamujem! You are married?”

  “Aah …” was Lewrie’s “spiffy” reply.

  “Schto?” Eudoxia snapped, her colour up and her breasts heaving. “Chort! Hell-and-damn! Tiy gryazni sikkim siyn! Lying… peesa!”*

  And where’ve I heard that before? Lewrie sadly asked himself as she glowered at him, hands on her hips, and probably wondering where she’d left her horsewhip, or her papa’s daggers. A stamp of a boot on the pier, a gesture that involved flicking her thumb off her upper teeth (perfectly white and lovely, he noted!), followed by a last one she must have picked up in her travels, her forearm thrust at him, bent skyward, and a hand slapped into the crook of her elbow.

  “Dosvidanya… viy sabaka!”+ and she stomped off, gathered the reins of her waiting white gelding, and swung up into the saddle with a lithe spring and roll. She sawed the reins to turn “Lightning,” and gave him her heels, drumming him into an instant mad gallop into town.

  “Well, hmm,” Burgess commented in the stricken silence that ensued. “Perhaps we’ll see each other about town, before we sail, Alan, old fellow. For now, though…”

  “Aye, before we sail, of a certainty,” Lewrie gloomily replied. “Rev-erend…ma’am…miss,” he intoned, doffing his hat again. The Brothers family gave him the “cut sublime” in return, suddenly intent on the clouds, the bay, and tidy little Cape Town.

  Well… that’s torn it. Lewrie bleakly thought as he watched them toddle off…rather more rapidly than properly languid; And here I didn’t think it could get any worse. Fool, me! If Caroline hears o’ this…which sure-to-God she will, ‘less I can bribe Burgess t’keep mum!… I’m back sleepin’ in the stables. Lord, is that “dominee do-little” in with Wilberforce an’ his crowd, I’m in the quag up t’my eyebrows with them, too!