Hang Pollock and his junk, Lewrie thought; There's women afoot!
And some of them were quite pretty and fetching; some of mixed race but almost White, some raven-haired but blue-eyed, the majority with sandy or light brown hair, and green, blue, or amber eyes, which put him in mind of Caroline. This gave him a check for an instant but did not deter him from circumspect ogling… fantasising, undressing them with his imagination. He looked down for a moment into a discreet bin back at the rear of a glass display case of medicaments and saw a pile of paper-wrapped cundums, priced at…
Um, pesos to pounds, that's one pound, seven shillings to the dozen, or two shillings thruppence each, and that's highway robbery! he rapidly figured, then felt his mouth almost drop open in astonishment. Amazin' what you can do, do you put yer mind to it! he told himself.
Pepper, salt, and thimble prices might be Chinee chicken tracks to Lewrie, but something prurient ever would spark his interests!
"Help you, sir?" another roving clerk suggested from behind the counter.
"No, no, just looking about," Lewrie tried to reply glibly, languidly, though the interruption almost made him leap from his own skin with an Eep Fresh sweat awoke, he blinked rapidly.
"But of course ya are, sir," the clerk sarcastically accused.
"Ye kin help me, then," Jugg said at his elbow. "I'd admire a half-dozen cigaros, them slim'uns, no bigger'n yer little finger, an' a wee flask o' whisky. Yer payin', are ye not, Mister Willoughby, as ye promised? " Jugg hinted, all but digging him in the ribs with an elbow, all chummy-like.
"Um…" Lewrie stammered, turning to peer bug-eyed at Jugg, who was smiling fit to bust. "Well, this once I s'pose," he said, though feeling the urge to clout the impudent bastard silly, clap him in irons in the cable-tiers, then have him flogged bloody for his egalitarian "sauce"! Sailors and officers, English and Irish, were akin to oil and water-they never mixed.
"Need a deal more of 'em for th' rest o' th' lads, so we will, sor, 'fore we saddle up an' head for th' backcountry," Jugg continued.
"Prospectin' for land, are ya?" the clerk asked in a friendly manner, no longer considering Lewrie a sneak-thief.
"Hopin' t'do some tradin' in the east bank country, ain't we," Jugg confided, as if inspired. "Got th' lads t'gether, got the Cap'm here t'lead, an' only lackin' trade goods t'make a payin' proposition, right, Mister Willoughby?" Why, the bastard had the nerve to wink!
Huh! What? Lewrie silently flummoxed, peering at the bearded rogue as if he'd never clapped eyes on him before.
"Perhaps find some land to claim, as well," Lewrie said at last, as if that was a secret wrung from him; his reply certainly was wrung! "Store or trading post, eventually. Um… might as well let me have a flask of whisky, too."
The clerk fetched out their purchases, then produced a flintlock tinder-box with which to light Jugg's cigaro, making him lean over the counter to do so. With a fiendish little grin, Jugg handed Lewrie one, and he had no choice but to get his lit, too, and puff it into life. The clerk named a figure, Lewrie dug into his coin-purse to show British coins, paid the translated rate, and then, at the clerk's request, went up the civilian-style stairs of the awning weather deck to smoke them.
"Thankee, sor, I owes ya," Jugg gleefully muttered round his lit and glowing cigaro.
"Bloody hell, Jugg! Now see hear, my man…"
"Ain't on th' ship, sor," Jugg idly pointed out, rocking on the balls of his feet and exhaling a jet of smoke before pulling the cork of his quarter-pint flask of whisky with his teeth and spitting it out overside. "An' this ain't play-actin', not 'gainst th' sort o' people wot took th' prize ship an' marooned us, kindly beggin' yer pardon, an' all, Cap'm, sor. You're t'be a cashiered awf'cer, I'm t play an Irish ne'er-do-well, mebbe spent some time among th' Yankees an' caught 'at Democracy fever? Man like me'd never tug 'is forelock, nor scrape an' bow t'him wot just hired me on, d'ye see, sor?"
"I s'pose…" Lewrie muttered, heaving a bitter sigh and still highly irked for the vast gulf to be spanned 'twixt a Commission Sea Officer of the King and a common seaman. Even in a sham!
"Just till we're back aboard good ol' Proteus, Cap'm, sor, then I'm back in yer harness, like," Jugg vowed, turning earnest. "We step outta character, d'ye see my meanin', an' them pirates'll scrag us in a dark alley 'fore we kin say 'nay,' sor. Just playin' parts, we are."
"Damme though, why do I think you enjoy it so bloody much?"
"Went t'plays in Dublin an' London, I did, sor," Jugg happily told him with a droll grin. "Some parts them actors played looked to be more fun than others, Cap'm, sor!"
"Christ! Just… don't develop bad habits you can't break later, Jugg," Lewrie cautioned, unable to do much more to the man, not in public at least, not as long as they were stranded so far from the Navy's discipline.
"Oh, aye, and I won't, on me honour swear it, yer honour, sor!" Jugg vowed quite theatrically, dropping into a deeper "Oirish" brogue. "On me poor mither's eyes, i' 'tis. Faith… and arrah!" Jugg japed. "An' an't these th' foinest sway-et cigaros, Mister Willoughby, and Oi thankee kindly fer 'em, and at'all and at'all."
"Oh, stop yer gob," Lewrie said, slumping in surrender, though ready to turn away, run to the nearest rail, and laugh in spite of all.
He took a puff on his cigaro, but it had almost gone out after being amateurishly neglected. Lewrie hadn't even been tempted to partake of tobacco since he'd hocked up half his lungs among the Muskogee Indians in '83, the last time he'd been involved in a similarly covert expedition. Jugg blew ash off the glowing tip of his own and offered it to relight Lewrie's.
He was bent over and sucking to reignite his when a boisterous pack of shoppers came tramping up the sets of stairs leading from the landing stage, and Lewrie turned his eyes to look at them.
"What the Devil?" he whispered, half coughing, for the pall of fresh smoke had been trapped beneath the wide, drooping front brim of his "wide-awake" hat, making his eyes water.
"Yankees, sor," Jugg muttered from the side of his mouth, "an' a rare lot they are, sure."
Outre might have been a better choice of words for the Yankees, rather than "rare." They were frontiersmen, of a certainty, clad in long-fringed hunting shirts of homespun cloth or supple, but stained, deerskin. They wore homespun trousers stuffed into the tops of knee-high boots, deerskin trousers laced inside calf-length moccasins, or loose and napping over ankle-high beaded moccasins. At every hip was a fighting knife that looked as if it had started life as a double-edged broadsword or Scottish claymore. Some wore nearly civilised coats and shirts, though none of those wore neck-stocks or cravats, and their headgear ran the gamut from tricornes to flat-brim farm hats, shapeless, spreading cone-topped slouch hats, cast-off Army cocked hats, Jacobin-type stocking caps, an assortment of ratty straw… "things," and several masked and tailed fur caps that departed life as honest and upstanding foxes, raccoons, and possums. One man, a particularly blank-looking and pimply malevolence whose eyes almost crossed, had on a black-and-white fur cap that fixed Lewrie's gawping (teary, blinking) attention.
"Whut?" the fur cap wearer truculently said, noticing that he was being ogled like a whirling Persian Dervish in Hyde Park. "Air ye lookin' at me, mister?" Which growl brought the others to a halt.
"I, uh…" Lewrie spluttered back. "I don't believe I've ever seen your species of hat, sir. It isn't… cat, is it?"
"Polecat!" the wearer of that hat snapped back, "Ye wanna make some-thin' o' h'it?"
"Now, Georgie," the much better-dressed apparent leader of the gang cautioned as "Cross-Eyes" thumped closer to Lewrie and the rest sidled behind him to watch the confrontation. He heaved a little sigh as if to say, "here we-go again," as he stayed by Georgie's side, as if to intervene… or referee should it come to blows.
"Polecat is what they call a… skunk?" Lewrie asked, determined to stand his ground and glad for all the weaponry that he bore, of a sudden.
"H'it is," Georgie said, "an' what o/h'it?"
With "Geor
gie" only six feet away from him, Lewrie could note that the skunk's mask had been left on, as well as its long, bushy and luxuriant black tail with two white stripes. Tiny yellow glass beads had been sewn into the eye sockets, and the lips of its long, sharp muzzle had shrunk back from two rows of wee teeth, as if it still grinned.
"Don't they, ah… smell rather bad?" Lewrie enquired, taking what he hoped was a casual but expert puff on his cigaro.
"Yeah, 'ey do. So?" Georgie rumbled from deep in his throat.
"Well, I'd expect it took a deal o' work to skin and tan it," Lewrie replied 'with studied nonchalance. "Upwind all the time, I'd wager." This close to him, the unforgettable odour of skunk, merely a slight tang of it, reawoke Lewrie's memory of the genuine, undiluted article, and he strove not to wrinkle his nose.
"Huh! Soaked h'it near two weeks in a cold, fast crick a'fore I could touch h'it," Georgie boasted, partially disarmed from his anger.
"Wisht Georgie'd spent 'at long soakin' in wawter," another of his buck-skinned companions hooted.
"Whyever did you kill it, if it took so long and smelt so bad?" Lewrie further enquired.
"H'it piss me awf!" Georgie said with an affronted snort. "Got inna m'chicken coop, a'stealin' ay'ggs, an' 'en hayud th' gall t'spray at me. Huh! 'At's th' las' thayng he ever done."
Lewrie couldn't tell which reek was worse, the skunk-fur cap or Georgie in general. Both shared a sour-corpse musk, mixed with wood smoke, crudely brain-tanned leather, old sweat and wet tobacco, sour-wet wool and felt, mud-soiled feet and toes, and scrofulous crotch and armpits. Taken altogether, the frontiersman was a positive melange of aromas and could have kept his cats, Toulon and Chalky, sniffing in sheer ecstacy for hours, their little jaws as agape as miniature lions to savour the subtlest effluvia!
"Stout fellow!" Lewrie exclaimed to further disarm him, holding out his unopened flask of whisky. "Capital work!"
Georgie stared at him, glareful, as if wondering if he was being twitted, then at the offered flask, eyes aswim as if having trouble in focussing on anything that close. Georgie finally took the flask, bit down on the cork, pulled it with his brown teeth (those remaining, that is) and spat it to the deck. He shifted a quid of "chaw-baccy" to the other side of his mouth, tipped the flask up, and drained it in two or three long gulps.
"I don't s'pose there's a market for skunk-fur caps," Lewrie wondered aloud to the better-dresed fellow who seemed to be their leader. "During the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin's coonskins were all the rage in Paris. The Frogs were mad for 'em."
"No, I doubt they is." The man chuckled as the tension evaporated. Georgie ripped off a stentorian belch, then beamed at Lewrie with a dank, quid-dribbly smile. "You're a tradin' fellah, are you, Mister ah…"
"Alan Willoughby," Lewrie said, extending his hand; and pleased that despite Peel's cynical sneer, he had no trouble recalling it.
"Jim Hawk Ellison," the other said, shaking hands. "We're down from Tennessee. Say 'thankee' for the whisky, Georgie."
"Thankee, mister," Georgie said, almost bobbing now.
"So, what line o' goods ya handle, then, Mister Willoughby?"
"Oh, this and that, what sells best upriver or on the eastern bank." Lewrie shrugged off. "We're asking about first, before we buy any goods, Jugg and I… This is Toby Jugg, one of my men. Say hello to Mister Ellison, Jugg," he smirkily suggested, getting a bit of his own back after Jugg had twigged him.
"Mister Jugg," Ellison offered. "How do?"
"Mister Ellison, sor?" Jugg said, knuckling the wide brim of his hat first, then hesitantly taking Ellison's hand, as if that congenial social convention was only for gentlemen, outside his experience.
"British, and Irish, ya sound, sirs," Ellison decided, his face tweaked up into a wry expression. "A long way from home, are you?"
"Well, weren't you British before the Revolution, as well, sir?" Lewrie posed, about ready to hock up another lung in dread that they'd been found out not an hour after setting off on their own. "In a manner of speaking, that is?"
"Hah!" Mr. Jim Hawk Ellison hooted with mirth, flinging his head back for a second. "I s'pose we were, at that. And some of our rich folk from the coasts… the first states… sometime act as if they still were, at times."
"From Tennessee," Lewrie speculated, "that makes you a long way from home, yourself, Mister Ellison. What, uh… line do you follow?"
"Land speculatin'," Ellison replied, as if it was of no matter. "On the eastern banks," he added, as if to mystify, with a shrug and a wink.
"Oh, you're with the Yazoo Company, then?" Lewrie asked.
"No, they're too big a fish for me." Ellison chuckled. "Call it a private venture. Some friends and associates of mine in Nashborough… that's our new state capital, ya know… thought to put a company of their own t'gether. The Robertsons, Donelsons, and Overtons got the real power, but they're lookin' west to the Mississippi, t'other side o' the Tennessee River, now they got the middle of the state sewed up. I come from North Carolina first off, right after the war ended. I read for the law in Salisbury, but sorta followed our militia over-mountain t'East Tennessee, liked it better, an' never left. Had a hand in startin' the state o' Franklin, with John Sevier and them, 'til Virginia an' both Carolinas run it under. Drifted on over t'Nash-borough just before Tennessee got statehood, an' ya know what, Mister Willougby? Not a bit o' credit, nor profit, ever come from any of it."
"Oh, what a pity," Lewrie commiserated, though it was disconcerting to be the recipient of such a tale of woe right off. English gentlemen would never blurt out the details of their lives so early in a passing acquaintanceship, nor nigh-brag upon their failures in life to anyone, English or not, close kin or not. Though he could recall a unique Colonial American trait in the Loyalists he'd met when serving with them during the Revolution; ask what day it was, and he'd get a full hour's discourse. He put it down to Yankees springing from a much smaller circle of society, their rusticity and isolation resulting in a belief that everyone they met was almost kin. Besides, he could sneer, when you came down to it, Americans had no other diverting amusements!
"So, you've come south in Hopes of better?" Lewrie asked.
"And ya know what they say… 'hope springs eternal,' " Ellison almost gaily admitted. "Oh, I had a land grant, from servin' with the Army for a spell. Sixty-four hundred acres, the Continental Congress and the state o' North Carolina said I was t'have. But by the time they got through squabblin' over who could issue my grant-Congress an' three states!-and all of it in Franklin, I hadta sell up for ten cent an acre. Not much t'show for four years o' fightin', the Cow Pens and King's Mountain, Camden and-"
"You whipped Banastre Tarleton?" Lewrie exclaimed. "And King's Mountain… I still own one of Major Patrick Ferguson's breech-loader rifles, that-" He clapped his mouth shut, but a sorrowful second too late. Trying to be congenial and sociable, he was betrayed by his dislike for Tarleton and his enthusiasm for fine firearms.
"Do tell," Ellison cagily said, almost peeking from beneath the brim of his hat. "Thought we'd captured 'em all at King's Mountain."
"Well, some few'd been bought before…" Lewrie flummoxed. He could almost feel Jugg's eyes rolling behind his back, perhaps hear a sotto voce "Christ, you're hopeless!" movement of his lips!
"So you were a Loyalist, then?" Ellison enquired. "A Tory?"
"Royal Navy," Lewrie confessed with a grunting sound. "Got it from some Cape Fear Loyalists before they went north with Cornwallis to York-town. They put it up on a bad wager when we put into Wilmington. And thankee for whipping Tarleton, too. Met him there briefly… when he was stabling his cavalry mounts in the pew boxes of Saint James's Church, the haughty bastard. And I ran into him in England, too. At Bath, it was, in the Long Rooms one night," Lewrie continued, and most of it true, whilst he'd been at sixes and sevens on half-pay, after paying off his first temporary command, the Shrike brig. "He and Benedict Arnold both, the same night, in point of fact. Still wearin' their uniforms, as if they'd ever be e
mployed again!
Lewrie felt that some un-English loquaciousness was called for, so he prosed on. "Tarleton was the same top-lofty, arrogant shit, but Arnold, well… I s'pose it was because his wife, Peggy, was with him at the time, but he was almost pleasant. Skint and miserly with his poor stack o' coin, but pleasant. When he wasn't frettin' over what he had lost at the tables, and doin' sums in his head t'see could they afford another bottle o' wine, that is."
"And how'd a British Navy officer and his man get into Spanish New Orleans? Don't ya know they'd throw ya under the calabozo if they learn you're here?" Ellison asked with a cynical snort.
"Ah, but I'm not British any longer, d'ye see!" Lewrie rejoined with a sudden burst of inspiration. "And Jugg, well… what Irishman would claim that, if America 's open to one and all looking for a fresh start, I ask you?"
"Amen t'that, sor," Jugg seconded with enthusiasm. "An' after wot Admiralty did to ya, an' all, arrah."
"Jugg, for God's sake," Lewrie spat, spinning to blow Jugg's ears off, but stopping a rant at the sight of the man's sly look. "It is not a subject I bandy about to just…" he spluttered. Admittedly, he didn't know where Jugg was going with it, nor did he have a single clue what else he should say to reestablish his manufactured identity.
Knew I'd muck this up! he scathed himself, the very details of his false background a sweat-soaked, confusing muddle in his own head.
"Just got here, did ya, Mister Willoughby?" Ellison probed.
"Ah… two days ago, aye," Lewrie told him. Dare he say that they'd come on the Panton, Leslie ship Azucena del Oeste? Would its Spanish registry save him from exposing the whole enterprise? Or was it widely known as a spy ship, the company that owned it deep in the Crown's pocket? "On the Azucena del Oeste," he cautiously added.
The Captain`s Vengeance l-12 Page 13
