The Captain`s Vengeance l-12

by Dewey Lambdin

  Even more oddly, a wide entryway had been cut into her side, as wide as double doors, down level with her lower deck where a 3rd Rate warship's heaviest guns would be housed. Instead of stairs, though, a wide, long ramp led up to that entryway from another timber-and-log landing stage; and all were so arranged that the stairs and the ramp would float up or down with the tide.

  Bold white lettering on the red gunwale stated that she was the Panton, Leslie Co. Store, with further information in smaller letters announcing her days and hours of operation and touting the significant range of goods readily available. Along the gunwale, near the tops of the stairs and ramp, were giltwork frames tacked on about white bare spaces, which were daubed and littered with both new and old printed broadsheets regarding newly arrived goods for sale.

  The hulk flew a company commissioning pendant, and the red-gold-red crowned merchant flag of Spain, as did their trading brig. Lewrie thought that it would hardly be possible to fly a British flag in this port, not without instant seizure by the Dons… or boarding and burning by the sullen French Creoles, yet, it was another outre wrench to his already-wary sense of vulnerability. So far from British aid!

  "Told you she's a store ship, not a stores-ship, ahem." Mr. Pollock hooted. "Below-decks, we've goods counters, storage shelvings, and glass display cases, good as any emporium in London. Aisles wide enough for the most fashionable ladies' skirts, too."

  "You need to repaint," Lewrie said with a droll grin, pointing at the new-come American hulk that sported red-white-blue on gunwales, lower hull, and bulwarks, and huge white stars on the blue; giant American "grid-iron" flags flew from every mast stump. Astern of Pollock's hulk was a small, dowdy store ship flying a French flag; the American was just upriver of Pollock's, and a fourth that flew a Spanish flag lay beyond.

  "Damn those interlopers to Hell and gone, Lewrie, damn 'em all!" Pollock fumed. "Do I show half the usual profit this time, I will be flat amazed. You, sir! They won't know you, you could go aboard her and see how fine their goods, how low their prices, browse about!"

  Spy? Lewrie drolly thought; Me? He was just about to say it when Jugg ambled up, wringing his wide-brim farmer's hat in his hands, as if loath to intrude, and clearing his throat for attention.

  "Beg pardon, sir, but… 'at th' head o' th' line?" Jugg said. "Can't rightly say from here, sir, but damned if she don't look peculiar like our missing prize. D'ye not think so, Cap'm?"

  Lewrie looked nonplussed for a second, wondering if the task of finding her could possibly be this easy, then spun as quickly as decorum allowed to eye her with his telescope.

  The Azucena del Oeste was edging in nearly alongside her store ship's landing stage, making the viewing angle acute, so he couldn't make out all her details… perhaps half her stern gallery and transom, but a slice of her starboard side, yet… she seemed at least a tad familiar, a ship he'd seen before.

  "Know her, Mister Pollock?" Lewrie asked, his gaze intent upon the strange ship.

  "Never clapped eyes on her before, sir," Pollock glumly stated.

  Lewrie could make out royal blue upperworks and bulwarks; that tweaked his memory. She bore ornate carvings about her stern gallery and sash windows, her arched taff-rail and lanthorn posts, and quarter-galleries; mermaids, cherubs, seahorses, and dolphins, all the work of decent carpenters, and painted in white, pink, and pale blue, decorated with gilt filigrees, and they twanged his chords of memory, too, that last sight he'd seen of her in daylight after her midnight taking as she sailed off for Dominica.

  Her name-boards did not match, though; nothing decorative, but merely rectangular planks that didn't equal the size or shape of those that might have once adorned her, leaving faint bands of pale timbers not darkened by sea, sun, linseed oil, or tar. At his acute angle, he could barely make out a crudely painted-on name, not carved intaglio: Fleur de Sud. That name most definitely did not match his dimmed recollection!

  Her lower hull, her quickwork! His last sight of her, she'd been heeled over heavily, exposing a badly maintained hull below the waterline, and before he'd turned away to deal with Proteus's demands, he could recall thinking that she might not fetch the highest price at auction, for she hadn't been completely coppered against barnacles and ship-killing teredo worms. Along her waterline and for about two or three feet below it, she'd been coated with linseed-soaked felt, tar-paper, and stark white-lead paint, before the proper bronze-greened chequerboard of copper sheets began.

  Penny-pinching ship's husbands, a miserly master, or a dearth of sheet-copper in the French Antilles, where she'd departed after her last slap-dash beaching to burn off seaweed and chip away barnacles… forced to make do with all the copper that could be had outside a European port, tacked on down where it mattered most, on the hope that if she got weeded, it might be where it could be gotten at by her sailors when still under way, heeled well over to leeward as her people hung in bosun's chairs on her windward side?

  "Damn my eyes," Lewrie exclaimed at last, taking his telescope from his eye. "I do b'lieve you're right, Mister Jugg. That's her, to the life. Damme, we found her, right off? Why, this all could turn out simpler than we first thought!"

  Uh-oh! Lewrie thought a second later; Fate, forget I said it! Saying such hopeful things, he had learned from hard experience, was about as bad as whistling on deck, a dare to Dame Fortune to come boot him up the arse… as she usually did… again!

  CHAPTER TEN

  Silks, satins, cambrics, and lace; cards of steel sewing needles and pins from Sheffield; bolts of cloth, from sheerest cotton or linen to winter-weight, hard-finished broadcloth and kerseymere wools. Dolls so lifelike one expected them to move or speak, dressed in miniature to exhibit the latest styles from Paris, for one of which Lewrie greedily spoke up, as a gift for his daughter, Charlotte. There were stacks of gentlemen's hats in every style, gloves for gentlemen and ladies, from canvas duck or deerskin work gloves to the thinnest, snuggest kidskin.

  There were cases of elegant shoes and boots, ready-made, ready-to-wear, that went swaying up on a yardarm from Azucena del Oeste to the stout landing stage, thence by ramp or yardarm into the emporium hulk. Wooden casks and straw-packed crates bearing gin, sherry, fine clarets, ports, Madeiras, and aged brandies emerged, followed by bales of ready-made shirts, boxes of neck-stocks, boxes of spooled ribbons and flouncings. Ornate penknives, workaday jackknives, needle-thin smallswords and scabbards, slim hunting hangers, old-style swept hilt rapiers and matching daggers… pocket watches, fobs, and chains; ormulu clocks, mantel clocks, and hallway clocks. Duelling pistols cased, dragoon pistols by the dozen to the box, pocket pistols, rifled German Jaegers and Pennsylvania hunters, fowling pieces, blunderbusses, coach-guns… flints, powder flasks, bullet moulds and lead nippers and vent picks. Spices, sealing waxes, tallow and beeswax candles for entertaining, thick votives, and short, stubby prayer candles!

  And coffee beans, sugar cones, and licorice whips, cinnamon sticks, bitter blocks of chocolate, teas and tea caddies, mote spoons; everyday tableware, sterling silver compotes and candelabras, coffee and tea services, complete sets of silverware… and the trading brig was only half unloaded!

  "The rest will be landed on the quays, the rougher goods," Mr. Pollock announced as they took a break for supper aboard. "Ready-made slop clothing, cruder shoes and such for the planters' slaves, rough muskets and Indian trade goods. The sort of junk our agents will fob off among the Yankee settlers, too. Another day, and we'll empty her of the quality goods, then slant over to the docks to unload the rest."

  "Then what do I do?" Lewrie asked as they shared a succulent supper aboard ship. "Do I just loaf about, go ashore and prowl, or… "

  "Don the guise that your Mister Peel chose for you, Mister… Willoughby," Pollock said, winking craftily as he reached for a bottle of hock. Being back on his home turf had cheered up the little fellow most disgustingly wondrous, Lewrie thought. "Stand with a tally as the cargo is broken from the hold. You are ostensibly in charge of my new-
hired protective force, ahem. Temporarily employed in support of our dowdy commercial doings. Such a dangerous-lookin' chap, really…"

  Pollock stroked a finger down his left cheek to sketch Lewrie's teen-years duelling scar on his own face. Lewrie knew he was being twitted, paid back for all the bloodthirsty teasing he'd used upon the unsettled Pollock on the voyage.

  "I still don't know as I care much for-" Lewrie objected.

  " Willoughby 's a common name, after all," Pollock breezily said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "You might even claim to be American, it's so common on both sides of the Atlantic. And your accent isn't so Oxonion or top-lofty that you could not play the part of a new-come American, to the Spanish and Creoles at least. An emigre from old England to the New World, as are so many. And it is your sire's name, so… "

  "Well," Lewrie replied, sulkily accepting a glass. "For a bit, I thought Peel was having too much fun building me a persona, without a thought as to whether it'd be plausible."

  "In a private moment, ahem!… Mister Peel might have said to me that Willoughby was a name you'd not forget, were you ever flustered," Pollock twinkled, barely concealing a grin. Aye, Pollock was enjoying himself at last, and that, right maliciously, too!

  "In my cups? A 'melting' moment?" Lewrie gravelled. "Were I stuck for an answer to 'hello'? Damn that smarmy bastard!"

  "You can't pose as anything but a former serving officer." Mr. Pollock pretended to commiserate, losing his grin. "You're much too weathered and roguish-looking to play a clerk, after all, sir. Even the way you walk will cry 'Sailor,' soon as you step ashore. To be a cashiered Royal Navy officer, fled to the United States in search of a seafaring post to remake your fortune, is frankly perfect. Ahem."

  "And so easy for my dim wits to remember?" Lewrie groused. "I see the sense of it. Aye, I think I know how to play it."

  "Assure me, pray do," Pollock entreated.

  "I'm an overaged Lieutenant," Lewrie almost sing-songed what Peel had had the gall to write down for him to study on the voyage. "Was, rather. Little patronage or 'interest,' lived mostly on my pay and never had a speck of luck with prize-money… one command, early on. A despatch cutter. Glorious fun, but then I was advanced aboard a Third Rate seventy-four, and that was boresome blockading, with no chance to advance. And no adventure or fun, either."

  "Mmm-hmm," Pollock encouraged 'tween sips of pepper-pot soup.

  "Competent, but no one's pet," Lewrie impatiently recited his false biography, one slightly borrowed from his own past aboard the 64-gun HMS Ariadne as a Midshipman, the despatch schooner HMS Parrot. "Started in the American Revolution, second or third son of a freehold family, but nothing grand. I'm thirty-six, so I spent a lot of time 'tween the wars on half-pay, knocking about in the merchant service, so I can bore people to death with tales about the Far East, Canton in China, Calcutta… and know what I'm saying. Mate aboard a 'country' ship, not with the East India Company… that'd be too grand for me."

  "Quite," Pollock primly simpered over the bowl of his spoon.

  "Back in the Navy in '93, when the war broke out," Lewrie went on, by then bored with repeated recitations. "Impress Service, not sea duty, though. Deptford, 'cause my old Captain Lilycrop held that district…"

  "As were you, for a time," Pollock pointed out.

  "Aye, I did, damn yer eyes. Then," Lewrie muttered, taking time to sample his soup and take a drink of wine. "Um… I learned one could make a 'shower o' tin' crimping merchant sailors even with legitimate protections, farm lads. Fiddled the books, too, over the costs of recruiting, claimed more than I brought in… took bribes from merchant captains t'look the other way, and-"

  "And you ended out here, in my employ," Pollock concluded for him, as if laying a permanent claim upon him. "The very sort of tar-handed fellow we need, who knows his way with artillery, good with an assortment of weapons… knows how to lead men. Useful but ruthless, none too squeamish if heads need knocking together? Hmm, though…" Pollock stopped of a sudden and gave Lewrie a skeptical appraising, up and down like a disbelieving London tailor presented with a crude, "Country-Put" ape to garb. "What you now wear will do aboard ship, but…" he speculated for a long moment. "Before I turn you loose on the city to do whatever it is you'll do to seek your pirates, I fancy you should adopt better togs. Now employed, you might be accepted all the more as a flash dandy, now you have the 'chink.' New Orleans is hip-deep in dandies. Think of it as a way of, ah… blending in. Do you own shore-going attire, Mister Willoughby… ahem?"

  "Never had need of 'em," Lewrie gruffly replied, wondering what new horror might be foisted upon him. "Ev'ry stitch o' 'long clothes' I own are back in England."

  "Then we must come up with something suitable, mustn't we?" Mr. Pollock decided with a lazy, feral smile and a chuckle worthy of a Covent Garden pimp. "Can't have you looking too elegant, but… I think that a bit of the gentleman, with a bit of the 'Captain Sharp' will suit your needs right down to your toes, heh heh."

  "Oh, bloody joy," Lewrie warily groaned, sure he'd despise Mr. Pollock's choices, even if he did know his home ground and its tastes to a tee; and half worried that the wretched little man would charge him for new clothing!

  "Couldn't I lurk about in what I'm wearing?" Lewrie asked him.

  "You'd look like a costumed spy right off," Pollock warned him. "Best to appear as close to the locals' style as you may and be taken for what the town expects to see from a man of your new station. As for lurking …"

  "How else do we find the pirates who-"

  "Time enough for that," Pollock assured him. "All in good time."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  C hrist, I'm a Covent Garden pimp! Lewrie sourly thought, taking in his new "suitings" in a wavy, speckled old cheval mirror aboard the emporium hulk. One o' the canting crew, a pickpocket… an Amuser!

  Mr. Pollock had suggested a touch of "Captain Sharp" and by God he'd delivered: a tawdry ensemble usually sported by "buttock brokers" and confidence men, professional gamblers and ne'er-do-wells, or those who blew snuff in a cully's eyes in a dark street, then robbed him of all he had-the Amusers of ill repute.

  He'd been given a tightly woven and wide-brimmed planter's hat made of the slimmest straw or cane fibres from Cuba, nigh as big about as a washtub, what local settlers called a "wide-awake," since it was nearly impossible to see whether the wearer was asleep or awake underneath its cooling shade if one had one's head down. Below that, he now was clad in an exaggerated tailcoat, assured that it was "all the go" in Paris, London, or Madrid. The lapels were extremely wide, the square cut-aways didn't come down to his waist, there was no way it could button together over his chest, and its long scissor-tails fell to the backs of his knees. The sleeves were almost excruciatingly snug, and puffed up where they joined the shoulders, putting Lewrie in mind of a gown his wife, Caroline, was partial to. The tailcoat was bottle green, but made from an extremely glittery fabric.

  Under that, he wore a shiny, nubby-silk waist-coat weaved in vertical stripes-salmon, burgundy, white, and tan, with lapels of its own, best displayed overlaid upon the coat lapels, so very snug, short-waisted and double-breasted that he found it hard to breathe.

  Sensible neck-stocks were no longer the ton; no, one had to wear a florid paisley Frog invention, the cravat, which even tied could do double duty as a child's bib or a diner's napkin, and tickled his chin every time he moved, it was so big, wide, and puffy.

  Pollock let him keep his own watch, fob, and chain, but tricked him out in trousers, much snugger and more stylish than his accustomed slop trousers at sea; they were white, and fitted so close to his calves that he had no trouble donning a horseman's top-boots.

  A small pistol fit into his coat's breast pocket, its twin in the small of his back. He could wear his own Gills' hanger, but on a flashier snake-clasp waist belt. Finally, with a cherry-ebony walking stick to fend off riffraff and mendicants-it hid a slim eighteen-inch sword as well-he was simply "the crack," and "all the go"!

 
Before Pollock trusted him to survive on his own versus suspected pirates, though, that worthy sent Lewrie and Jugg, still dressed as an idle bully-buck, aboard the Yankee emporium hulk to check out their wares and prices. "Think of it as a dress rehearsal!" Mr. Pollock had chirped. Jugg also went well armed; his clothes were so loose he could carry a whole armory, so much so that Lewrie feared he'd give himself away by the clanking!

  Damn Pollock, and Commerce! Lewrie thought after only a few minutes aboard, in the main display area on the lower deck. The prices were chalked on slate or penned on brown paper scraps atop the baskets or bins, altogether a mind-boggling array of international currencies and exchange rates. Louisiana should ask payment in centavos, escudos, or silver dollars, even old pieces-of-eight, but, like the rest of the Caribbean and the New World, local currency amounted to whatever was at hand, including Austrian Maria Theresas (all dated 1780!) as well as Dutch, Danish, French, or Portuguese coinage. Try as he might to make the calculations in his head, to recall prices and what sold the quickest, Lewrie couldn't keep things straight without a surreptitious jotting with a pencil stub and a folded-over sheet of foolscap. With his nervousness over being caught out, and without any decent ventilation belowdecks, and a winter's day in New Orleans sullenly hot and muggily humid, he was quickly reduced to a muddle-headed puddle.

  People always said I was too dense t'make change, but Lord! he fretted. And whenever sales clerks looked his way, he broke out in a fresh sweat, reducing his original sour opinion of his appearance from "pimp" to a "whore in church" or a guilty-looking, potential shoplifter! And Pollock's list of prime items to be compared in price, which he thought he'd mostly memorised, had quite flown his head. What he'd do when spying-out pirates, he couldn't imagine!

  The American emporium seemed to be doing a thriving business at that somewhat early hour, in spite of the closeness. Elegantly gowned Creole ladies and their ever-present slave maids swished about slowly, more sashaying or parading than shopping, as if borrowing the Spanish custom of strolling the city squares each evening, eligible young ladies circulating clockwise and the young men strutting in the opposite direction. They tittered behind their fans, and they softly giggled and peered over the lace fan-tops.