The King's Coat

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Jump for it,” he yelled, wondering if he could do the same.

  There followed a series of groans and gunshots as other lashings parted under the tremendous weight they had restrained, and he was on a slide along the timbers toward the jolly-boat as the barge came free.

  One of his men had been sitting on the boat-tier between the two boats. He turned to look at the weight that was about to smear him like a cockroach between a boot and a floor, and screamed wordlessly. Alan leaped over him, one foot touching the man’s posterior, and flung himself across the keel of the jolly-boat. The man grabbed at him and hauled away, which pulled Alan down off the keel and down the rain-slick bottom of the upturned boat. Using Alan as a ladder, he got out of the way and disappeared over the far side.

  The ship now rolled back upright for a moment, snubbed as her bow dug deep into a wave, and came up like a seal blowing foam. The barge shifted back to the starboard side, making a funereal drumming boom against the cutter.

  Rolston came over the top of the barge to check for damage as Alan hoisted himself out of harm’s way, just in time to meet Lieutenant Church and the panicked working party. The ship tucked her stern into the air once more, rolled to larboard, and Rolston fell between the barge and the jolly-boat. He was face-down on the boat-tier as the barge began to slide down on him, a leg dangling on either side of the thick beam.

  Wonderful, Alan thought inanely; I’m about to see a human meat patty and it couldn’t happen to a nicer person …

  Then, without really thinking or calculating the risk, he planted his feet on the boat-tier, leaped forward and grabbed Rolston as he flung himself off the tier to drop to the upper gun deck, which was about eight feet below them. He had the satisfaction of landing on Rolston, who landed on a thick coil of cordage at the foot of the mainmast. Overhead, the barge slammed into the jolly-boat to the sound of splintering timber.

  Now why in hell did I do that? he wondered, trying to get his lungs to work again after taking an elbow in the pit of his stomach. For a moment he thought he was dying, until with a spasm his lungs began to function again and he could suck in fresh air. As for Rolston, he was stretched out like a dead man, but Alan could see his chest heaving.

  “Merciful God, are you alright, young sir?” Lieutenant Roth asked him, kneeling down by both of them.

  “I believe so, sir,” Alan said, trying to sit up, which was about all he thought he could manage at the moment. Roth hoisted Rolston up in his arms and slapped him a couple of times, which cheered Alan a bit. In fact he wished that he could do that to Rolston himself!

  Rolston rolled his eyes and groaned loudly, trying to shrink away from that hard palm.

  “Stupid gits,” Lieutenant Kenyon shouted down from above. “Get your miserable arse up here. Now.”

  “Aye, sir,” Alan shouted back, thinking it was a summons for him, as usual.

  “Both of you,” Kenyon added.

  Lieutenant Swift and the captain were there on the gangway by the time they had ascended to that level by the forecastle ladders and gone aft to join the officers.

  “Silly cack-handed, cunny-thumbed whip-jack of a sailor you are, sir,” Swift howled, spitting saliva into the wind in his fury. “A canting-crew imitation tar would know better than that. There’s a jolly-boat stove in and the barge damaged as well because of you.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Alan said along with Rolston.

  “Oh, not you, Lewrie, at least not this once; it’s Rolston I’m talking to.” Swift’s face was turning red as a turkey cock’s wattles. “Get back to work, Mister Lewrie.”

  “Oh, aye aye, sir,” said a surprised Alan, not on the carpet for the first time since he had joined Ariadne.

  “If it wasn’t for Lewrie you’d be pressed flat as a flounder, and good riddance to bad rubbish…” Swift was going on as Alan scrambled back across the boat-tiers to leeward, out of earshot.

  I should have let him get mashed, damme if I shouldn’t have, Alan thought. But now I’ve done something right for a change, and somebody else is getting grief.

  * * *

  An hour later, they finished lashing down the boats and by then the watch had changed. Alan went down to the lower gun deck and sniffed at the odors of sickness and bodies. Even as bad as the weather was topside, he almost contemplated going back on deck rather than stand the atmosphere down here, but he peeled off the sodden tarpaulin and began to work his way through the swinging hammocks toward the after-ladders to the orlop. He passed the junior midshipmen’s mess, where there was a single glim burning. The master gunner Mr. Tencher had a stone bottle by his elbow on the table, secured by fiddles, and was humming to himself.

  “Lewrie,” he whispered, not wanting to wake up his sleeping berth mates. “Want a wet?”

  “God, yes, Mister Tencher, sir,” Alan croaked in gratitude. He seated himself on a chest and locked his elbows into place on the table so he wouldn’t slide about. The gummy wetness of his clothing that had been soaked in salt-water for hours almost glued him to the dry wood.

  “Cider-And, boy,” Tencher promised, pouring him a battered tin mug full of something alcoholic-smelling.

  “And what, Mister Tencher?” Alan asked, sniffing at it as it was handed over to him.

  “Good Blue Ruin, Holland gin.” Tencher laughed softly, his leathery face crinkling. In the fitful light of the glim he looked as if he had tar and gunpowder permanently ground into his wrinkles.

  “God in Heaven,” Alan choked after a sip. He had ordered Cider-And in country inns and had usually gotten rum or mulled wine as the additive. Plus, he was never partial to gin, but he took another sip, grateful for the hot flush in his innards.

  “Hear ya done somethin’ right tonight, Mister Lewrie.”

  “It was nice not to be caned or shouted at for a change, Mister Tencher,” Alan said, tears coming to his eyes from the fumes of the gin.

  “No gunner’s daughter fer you, eh?”

  “Until tomorrow.” Alan gave Tencher the ghost of a smile. The man had run him ragged, trying to pound the art of handling artillery into him, and had had him caned more than once when he didn’t have the right answer. He could not feel exactly comfortable with Tencher but he meant to be civil if the man was going to trot out free drink.

  “Rolston should owe you a tot fer saving his life, ya know,” Tencher said, filling his own mug again and taking a deep quaff.

  “Well, we shall see,” Alan said, forcing himself to choke down the rest of the mug. He knew that if he made it to his hammock without passing out he was going to be a lot luckier than he had any right to be. “Thankee kindly, Mister Tencher, that was potent stuff. I shall sleep like a stone if they don’t call all hands again.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Tencher winked. “Earned it.”

  Alan made his way out of the mess, clinging to the top of the half partitions toward the double ladders. Someone took him by the arm in the dark and spun him to a stop.

  “Lewrie.”

  “Rolston?” he asked, thinking he recognized the voice.

  “Think you’re a clever cock, do you?” It was Rolston, alright.

  “I’ll not let you make me look ridiculous like that again—”

  “You don’t need any help from me to be ridiculous.” Alan tried to judge just where Rolston’s head might be so that when he hit him, as he felt he soon must, he could get in a good shot.

  “I’ll settle you.” Rolston’s voice was shaking.

  Alan could barely make out a face, but he knew the fellow must be almost weeping with rage by then. “I’ll square your yards for you for good and all—”

  “No, you won’t,” Alan said, prying the hand from his arm and pressing it back away from him against Rolston’s best effort with an ease he would not have had weeks before. “And if you lay hands on me once more I’ll kick your skinny arse up between your ears, right where it belongs.”

  “Watch and see if I don’t get you, Lewrie.”

  “Watch out for y
ourself.” Alan chuckled. “I might not save your miserable life next time … farmer.”

  Alan took a few cautious steps toward the coaming of the hatch, wary of a sudden shove from Rolston that could send him crashing to the hard deck below, ready to dive flat and let Rolston go arse-over-tit instead. But Mister Tencher came out of the mess area with his glim and a handful of scrap paper for a trip to the warrant officer’s heads in the roundhouse before the focs’l, and Rolston had to turn on his heel and go forward to his own berth space. Alan, relieved, went below to his own, where he slid out of his wet dripping clothes and sat on a chest to towel himself down in the dark.

  His skin was burning with saltwater rash and he could feel the chafe in crotch and limbs, where boils were erupting from the constant immersion and the sandpaper effect of wet wool. He rolled into his hammock nude, wearing a blanket wrapped about him like a cocoon. He tried to inventory what he had dry to wear but was so sleepy, exhausted, battered and drunk that he soon fell into a swoonlike sleep, dreaming once more of getting everyone who had been in any way responsible for his current predicament in the Navy all together in one place, and roasting them over slow fires.

  * * *

  Two days later, once the weather had moderated, they only found twenty ships of their convoy at first light. Perhaps fifteen more came straggling back into sight over the next few days. It was likely that the five missing merchantmen would never be seen by anyone again. At first Alan was a bit irked that no one said anything about his saving Rolston, then realized that it was just one of those things that was, after all, expected from a midshipman or a sailor, with no thanks needed or expected.

  What a shitten outlook they have in this Navy, he sighed.

  Chapter 4

  Dawn was a rosy hint rising over the humps of the sea astern, lost in the grey gloom of another spring morning in the windswept North Atlantic. The taffrail lanterns and the candles in the wheel binnacle lost their strength, and one could begin to recognize people on watch by their faces instead of their voices. Like wraiths the ships in convoy began to loom as dark shadows ahead of them to leeward on either side of their bows now that another long voyage was almost over.

  Alan clung to the starboard shrouds halfway up to the main top, shivering with chill and trying to steady a heavy telescope to count ships. Lieutenant Kenyon was below him at the quarterdeck ladder, his eyes flying from one vantage to the next, judging the strength of the wind, the set of the sails, Ariadne’s position to the rest of the convoy, a first reassuring sight of Dauntless out to leeward and far ahead of the convoy, eyeing his watch to see they were awake and alert. Lewrie wondered if he was making nautical plans for all eventualities … or merely sniffing the aromas that occasionally swirled back from the smoking galley funnel. Today was a meat-issue day following a Wednesday “Banyan Day” on which the crew was served beer, cheese, gruel, soup and biscuit.

  Lewrie clambered down to the rail and jumped the last few feet to the deck. “Twenty-five sail to starboard, sir. Some very far out of position, but all taffrail lanterns burning.”

  “Very good, Mister Lewrie,” Kenyon replied, referring to his pocket watch. “Almost five bells. Prepare to rotate the watch.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Five bells did indeed chime from up forward—two pairs of quick chimes, and a last single one that echoed on and on. Or was it merely the sound of so many ships around them raising a chorus of bells later than Ariadne? Lewrie kicked awake one of the ratty little ship’s boys so he could turn the half-hour glass at the binnacle. Wash-deck pumps were stowed away—hands stood erect from buffing the deck with bibles and holystones to remove the filth of the day before—others boiled up from below with their rolled-up hammocks for stowing. The pipes shrilled for the lower deck to be swept clean. Pump chains clanked as the bilges were emptied of their accumulated seepage.

  “Twenty-two ships to larboard and ahead, sir,” Midshipman Rolston reported to Kenyon, “and Dauntless is shaking out her night reefs, sir.”

  That was the main wrench of being in Kenyon’s watch; having to share it with Rolston. Even after two round voyages Rolston still gave off a hatred so deep and abiding that he positively glowed, and Lewrie found himself walking stiff-legged about him, waiting for the knife in the back, or the studiedly awkward push at the wrong moment.

  “Very good, Mister Rolston,” Kenyon replied. “My respects to the captain and inform him that all ships in convoy are in sight, spread out from the night, and that Dauntless is making sail.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Rolston answered, giving Lewrie a haughty look as if to say that he could never be entrusted with carrying a message aft to their lord and master, as Rolston could.

  Alan’s belly rumbled.

  “Hungry, Mister Lewrie?” Kenyon grinned.

  “Always, sir.” He never got enough to eat, not like back home in London, and ship’s fare was plain commons. He could spend half the watch dreaming of all the spicy substance of the buffets he had seen at drums, the hour-upon-hour dinner parties of course after course, even the hearty filling nature of a twopenny ordinary, or the choices available at a cold midnight supper after the theatre. The midshipmen’s mess always exhausted their livestock quickly, and had to settle for biscuit hard as lumber and alive with weevils; joints of salt-pork or salt-beef that had been in-cask so long, one could carve them into combs; thick pea soup; cheeses gone rancid, and that only twice a week; an ounce of butter now and then; and a fruit duff only on Sundays. He no longer looked askance at the hands who offered him rats that had been caught and killed in the bread room. They were three-a-penny, fat as tabbies, and surprisingly tasty; “sea squirrel,” they called them.

  Now that his once-fine palate had been jaded, he had to admit that the food wasn’t all that bad. He had seen coaching inns and low dives in the East End of London that served worse. It was the unremitting sameness of boiled everything. And once the gristle and bone had been subtracted, there was never enough on his plate to leave him comfortably stuffed.

  “Captain, sir,” Lewrie whispered, catching sight of Captain Bales coming on deck from his great cabins aft. He and the mate of the watch, Byers, went down to leeward, leaving the starboard side of the quarterdeck for Bales to pace in solitary splendor. And after making his report, Kenyon joined them.

  What would he have done if he had not gotten into Kenyon’s watch? he wondered. The captain was so remote and aloof, and rarely seen. The first lieutenant, Mr. Swift, was a testy butler who always found a power of fault—no one could please him. The third officer, Lieutenant Church, was cold as charity and silent, while Roth, their fourth, and Lieutenant Harm, the fifth, were both full of harshly impatient bile. Kenyon was the only one he could remember who actually smiled now and then, who didn’t deal out floggings and canings and viper-tongued screeches against one and all. Kenyon went out of his way to teach, to admonish his failures as faults to be corrected and not catastrophes that called for humiliating tirades. He would go to the heads aft off the wardroom in the middle of the watch, leaving Lewrie and Byers alone on the quarterdeck, totally in charge of twelve-hundred tons of ship plunging along in the dark of night. While Kenyon did not court favorites, and disliked being toadied to, Lewrie had a sneaking feeling that Kenyon liked him. When his part of the watch stood on the quarterdeck, he got quizzed by the second lieutenant. And there was time to talk softly in the black hours of the morning; Alan found himself confiding in Kenyon, as he never could with the others, even Ashburn. Had it not been for the difference in rank, Kenyon could have become much like an older brother to him. He did not think Kenyon and Rolston shared the same regard.

  “As soon as the hands have eat, we’ll endeavor to round up this flock of silly sheep once more, Lieutenant Kenyon,” he heard the captain say. It was the same each morning of every convoy; the masters of the merchant ships would never trust the station-keeping of their own kind and would scatter like chickens going for seed corn every night, which required Ariadne to sp
end half the day chasing after them, herding them back toward the pack and chivvying them into order. And merchant captains did not take kindly to sharp commands from the Navy. More than once they had fired a blank charge to draw a moody merchantman’s attention to their signals.

  Under the captain’s sharp eye, Lewrie tried to appear busy. He went up into the larboard shrouds of the mizzen to use his telescope on the convoy, now that the gloom was being chased to the west by the watery rising sun behind them. He also noticed, with some amusement, that Lieutenant Kenyon was trying to appear intent on his duties as well.

  He turned his glass on Dauntless. There were flags soaring up a halyard on her mizzen, and he dug into his pocket to consult a sheet of paper that contained the meager signals for day or night. “Strange sail … south!

  “At last!” he crowed, leaping down and dashing to report to Lieutenant Kenyon. This close to New York, strange sail could be those Frenchies from their base in Newport, or rebel privateers. We’re going to see some action, he exulted.

  “Strange sail, is it?” Captain Bales said, hearing the report. “Aloft with you to the maintop, Mister Lewrie, and spy them out!”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Mister Kenyon, my respects to the master gunner and I’ll have a signal gun fired to starboard. Day signal for the convoy to close up, followed by ‘strange sail to the south.’”

  “Shall we beat to Quarters, sir?” Kenyon asked.

  “No, let the hands be fed first. Time enough for that.”

  Lewrie made it to the mainmast crosstrees to join the lookout already there, his heart beating from the exertion, and the excitement.

  “Seen anything to the south?”

  “No, sir,” the lookout replied. “Not yet, sir.”

  Lewrie scrambled up onto the topmast cap and hugged the quivering t’gallant mast, unslinging his glass which had hung over his shoulder, as heavy as a sporting gun. He steadied his hands and peered to the south.

  “Aloft there!” came a leather-lunged shout from the deck. “What do you see?”