The King's Coat

by Dewey Lambdin

  He was transfixed by the burning brig, and a hush fell over the deck as the men turned to see the end, silencing Claghorne as he, too, turned to stare.

  It was a terrifying and heartbreaking sight for sailors to see a ship burn, even an enemy. The brig had been especially pretty, long and lean and fast, golden oak hull with a jaunty red stripe, black wale and bold figurehead, picked out with gold leaf on her rails and entry port and transom carvings. Now she was a smutty lamp-bowl of a hull that served as the vessel of a raging conflagration.

  Men could be seen tossing over kegs and hammocks, coops and hatch gratings, anything that would float … their boats had burned. Crewmen were splashing into the sea and calling out as the heat became unbearable, and a hot glow could be seen through her open gun ports. Over the loud whooshing roar of the fire they could hear thin screams as men were roasted to death, or pleaded for mercy on their souls as they hung on for just a moment more of life before going into the sea—few sailors of any nation could really swim, and Parrot could not approach that raging furnace to save them without risking her own safety.

  The fight drained out of Lewrie, sucked dry now by all the terror and the tension, and Claghorne’s heart-stopping prediction of a court-martial. He had been wild with passion, leaping and screaming obscenities at the French, raving with all his strength in a berserk release. His headache was back with a vengeance, after all the waiting and hoping that the French would come close enough to be hurt, staring hard over the glittering ocean and hurting his eyes trying to see everything at once. His limbs seemed to have turned to water.

  Just like after that fight in Ariadne, he reminded himself, so tired he could barely stay erect. Is it always going to be like this?

  “Well done, my boy,” Lord Cantner said, his voice cracking with emotion as he pumped Lewrie’s hand. “Goddamn wonderful job.”

  “Thank you, milord, thank you.”

  “God bless you, Mister Lewrie,” Lady Cantner added, looking at him with open adoration, that roving look back in her dark eyes. Her chest heaved magnificently.

  Once they were ashore on Anguilla, and her lord asleep some night before they sailed, her eyes told him it could be arranged, but at the moment it didn’t seem to matter much to him.

  He also knew, or felt, or hoped that Lord Cantner’s influence would stop any court-martial. After all, he was alive and still free to sail for England. The less said about Claghorne’s lack of wit at finding a way to avoid or defeat the privateer the better. A court-martial would be as much a condemnation of his striking the colors as Alan’s disobedience, and striking before doing your utmost to fight was also a hanging offense. Had he not learned, even in his short career in the Navy, that victory had a hundred parents, but failure none?

  A rich and influential peer could have things done his own way, as they usually ended up doing. If Claghorne was possessed of any wit at all he would write his report taking credit for the idea, excusing the breach of honor as necessary to save the lord and his lady and all the secrets in his head, giving Lewrie grudging allowance for being a brave little fellow who followed orders well.

  “Mister Lewrie?” Lord Cantner asked in a faraway whisper. Alan could not hear him through the ringing in his ears. Too much noise of the guns, he thought. But he seemed so far away, and it was hard to focus on the lord’s phiz. It also seemed to be getting dark awfully early …

  He realized he was seated on the deck, shivering all over.

  Why are they looking at me like that? he wondered. Haven’t the bastards ever seen a hero? But there was no answer.

  Chapter 10

  There were many strange and awful dreams that bothered him as he swam in the delirium of a raging fever. He and Mrs. Hillwood romped in the maintop while Marines threw buckets of seawater on them by the numbers and Captain Osmonde called the pace with a fugleman’s cane. Tad toasted cheese on burning sails for him and asked if he wanted his shoes blacked. Keith Ashburn and Shirke bought him a half-dozen bottles of claret, but he couldn’t drink with them, for their heads were skulls with clacking jaws and the wine ran down their chests like black ink.

  Lieutenant Harm and Mr. Pilchard and Margaret Haymer danced together, comparing wounds. His sister Belinda was a figurehead on a ship of the line, and the sailors fondled her bare breasts as they sat on the beakhead rails to relieve themselves. Chapman hopped one-legged down the Strand with a beautiful young girl in a blue gown in search of a bookseller’s, and he could not catch them no matter how hard he ran. Sir Hugo and Sir Richard Slade chased him down an endless work gangway, waving their pricks at him.

  He found himself flying low across sparkling wavetops with a crowd of pelicans who knew how to do spherical trigonometry in their heads, and he jeered with them at the seagulls, who had to use slates. Captain Bales was served at dinner by a nude Lady Cantner with an apple in her mouth. Alan was made post, but his ship was a hundred fathoms down off Nevis, and the wind kept shifting all about the compass. Kenyon and some admiral stood together in full uniform but no breeches and told him what a brute he was to harm the French, who were only two inches tall and crawled all over him. He was in a cart on his way to Tyburn to be hanged, and with his jeering friends telling him to die game, there was an elfin face framed in honey gold ringlets staring up at him and telling him to keep his wig on straight, while a fiddler did a bad rendition of “Portsmouth Lass” and Claghorne and seaman Crouch shoved on the capstan bars, and some very ugly old woman sold poking sticks to the gentry who wished to have at him.

  He dreamed he had Yellow Jack and had turned the color of a Quarantine flag, all his hair falling out in his eyes, and a beautiful young girl tenderly bathed his face, softly saying “you sonofabitching bastard” over and over, and he had an erection because her eyes were the color of the ocean in a shallow island harbor, and Cassius rang a tiny silver bell so everyone could come and marvel.

  Then there was a dream of a cool room, dim and quiet and still, with some kind of bars slanting one wall, and that one lasted for a while. The walls looked like plaster instead of the lathed partitions of a ship, and there might have been pictures on the walls but they were hard to make out because there seemed to be some kind of fog about him.

  I’m in a house, he told himself dreamily, after pondering it a long time. I’m in bed in a house. So what happens after that? Slow sort of dream, compared to the others …

  He could not move but he could blink and shift his vision to discover what seemed to be two sets of louvered doors on one wall at the foot of the bed he occupied. The light from outside was what was making the bar patterns on the wall.

  They are not prison bars, he decided, shifting his eyes to a closer vantage of his body. He could see his arms on the sheets, so Boggs had not cut anything off. He tried to raise his arm but it would not move, and he sighed as he realized he had little control over this dream. He tried to shift a leg, and felt cool linen pressing down lightly all over him. I am in bed, in a house, nude, and not in jail. Lots of possibilities to this … hmm.

  It was such a pleasant prospect that he dreamed he went right back to sleep to mull things over. When he dreamed that he awoke, it was much lighter. Then he saw that the fog about him was an insect net of very fine gauze around his bed, that the louvered doors led to some sort of veranda or patio. This time, he could move a hand and reach down to feel his groin. Yep, still got my wedding tackle. Nice room. Nice furnishings. Too good for a debtors’ prison, and it’s too quiet for a hospital. It was cool, and a hint of breeze came through those louvered doors, bringing the sound of surging waves on a beach, and he didn’t think it was Brighton. There was a decided salt-and-iodine tang to that breeze, and it was so bright beyond the louvers that he thought he might be somewhere in the tropics, maybe the West Indies.

  His mouth fell open and a foetid odor rushed out. He tried to make words but all that came out was “gracck.” But he thought, with a joy that was almost sexual, My God! I’m alive!

  He looked at his ha
nds and his arms against the cool white linen sheet, and saw that he was a lot more yellow than he remembered.

  I survived Yellow Jack, he crowed silently, almost weeping in happiness. I’m as yellow as a quince but I’m alive!

  He listened to his heart beat, took deep breaths and rejoiced to the sound of air rushing in and out. The taste in his mouth was positively vile, but he thought it nice to be able to taste anything.

  There was a sound to his right. A door was being opened, a swish of clothing could be heard. He caught a flash of white cloth and thought it might be some sort of mop-squeezer. But he saw that elfin face that was so incredibly young and lovely, those bright blue eyes and the honey gold hair set in ringlets, and he was afraid that he had seen her somewhere before … being hanged or something? If she were here, was he really alive? Was she some tantalizing angel or devil? Did he have his wig on straight?

  She crossed to the double doors and threw the first set open. A flood of painfully brilliant sunlight exploded into the room. The second set opened, and he blinked in pain, until he could make out a bar of cerulean blue framed by intensely green bushes, bright green grass and the hint of dune-grass and sandy soil beyond the green. Was that a ship out there, a three-masted Indiaman? The girl took a moment to stand in the second door, arms still holding the doors apart like a figure on a crucifix in some Romish church.

  Once his eyes had adjusted and been blinked clean of tears he could surmise that it was early morning, for there was a hint of sun just at the top of the door, and the girl was silhouetted against the bright light. She must have been wearing a morning gown instead of a more formal sack-gown, and without stays or corset, because he could see how slim her back was through the fabric, how tiny her waist, how slim her hips, almost like a boy’s but for the gentle continuation to the curve of her behind.

  With the doors open the breeze hit him with a gentle rush, and it was cool and clean, heavy with tropical flowers, the astringent tang of deep ocean that came to him as lustily as the steam from a smoking joint of meat. He could hear birds singing, birds he did not recognize.

  The girl still stood against the light, and he could see that her shoulders were not too broad. She had long legs, slim thighs that left a gap between them at her cleft, shapely calves and trim ankles. She turned and did something in the shadows on tiptoe, and he could see how full and high her young breasts were above a flat belly, how snug and trim her buttocks were. Then she stepped out of the light into the shadows, and a bird was singing quite loudly.

  There was another rustle of cloth in the room, and he shifted his eyes to that direction. He saw an incredibly ugly woman in a mobcap and morning gown. She bore something with her. Where had he seen her before, selling something at Tyburn or Bedlam? She brought something forward; long, thin, made of wood and … Poking stick! I’M DEAD!

  “Hanggankk,” he said, eyes wide in fright, and the woman gave out a harpy’s shriek and disappeared in a twinkling.

  “Mister Lewrie,” the woman said, reappearing with a glass of something in her hand. “You spoke! Lucy, he spoke!”

  “I heard him, yes, thank God, oh thank God,” a young voice cried.

  “Agghk,” he went on, his heart pounding hard enough to shake the bed. The woman’s shriek, and the sight of that broom handle he had thought was a poking stick had nearly frightened him out of what few wits he still possessed. And he had not made much inventory yet as to that.

  Hands were there to lift him up in bed and pile pillows behind him until he was almost sitting up. A black maid appeared to help out. A glass was thrust under his nose and he opened his sticky lips to accept whatever was offered. It was water: not stale ship’s water, but fresh and sparkling clear water, and he gulped it down greedily, hoping to sluice away the vile taste in his mouth. He wasn’t much for water if one could get beer or ale or wine, but at the moment he thought the water a marvelous discovery.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” he rasped, licking his dry lips.

  “We feared the fever had curdled your brains, Mister Lewrie.”

  “Thought I was dead. Dreaming. Where?”

  “Antigua,” the soft young voice said, and he looked into that elfin face, at those high cheekbones, that narrow chin and high forehead and still felt like he was dreaming.

  “You are on the Atlantic side, Mister Lewrie,” the old woman told him. “We brought you here when the surgeons had despaired of your recovery in hospital in English Harbor. After the brave thing you did, it was the least we could do for you.”

  “God bless you, ma’am,” he breathed in her direction. Here, did she say I’d done something brave? That sounds promising …

  “This is the shore residence of Admiral Sir Onsley Matthews. I am Lady Maude and this is the admiral’s niece, Miss Lucy Beauman, from Jamaica.”

  “God bless,” he said, gazing at the girl. “She was there.”

  “Lucy?” Lady Maude snorted. “Where?”

  “Tyburn. The Strand. I saw her. I think I did.”

  “Just dreams, Mister Lewrie,” Lady Maude said. “Fevers do that to you.”

  “Followed her,” he insisted weakly, “couldn’t catch up.”

  “Auntie, he’s still so weak,” the girl whispered, concerned.

  “Aye, and will be for some time longer. Mister Lewrie, could you take a portion of a nourishing broth?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Andromeda, go tell Cook to prepare a thin meat broth and be quick about it,” Lady Maude told the mop-squeezer, “and put some red wine in it for stoutness.”

  “Yassum.”

  “Parrot,” Lewrie asked, wondering what he had done that was so brave and wonderful, and concerned about his ship … “Is she safe?”

  “Indeed she is, Mister Lewrie!” Lady Maude beamed down at him. “Lord and Lady Cantner have sailed to Tortola to meet the winter convoy, and Parrot still swims proudly. And you can be proud of doing such a brave duty for the Crown, young man. Very resourceful indeed…”

  “The privateer brig,” Lewrie said as the memory of what he had done came back in a rush. And a dread, too.

  “As Sir Onsley said, ‘burnt to the waterline and Frogs’ legs in a flambé,’” Lady Maude tittered.

  “Serve ’em right,” Lewrie muttered, ready to fall asleep once more.

  “Still thirsty, Mister Lewrie?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, realizing that he was.

  “Lucy, fetch a bottle of brandy from the wine cabinet,” Lady Maude instructed. “A pinch of that in his water will put color in his cheeks.”

  “Any color but quince,” he said with a happy sigh, and they began to laugh heartily, a giddy sound of relief, and Lewrie drifted off to the sound of it.

  * * *

  When he was adjudged strong enough to hear the news, Rear Admiral Sir Onsley Matthews stopped by to visit him. Lewrie had been sitting up in bed, bemoaning the loss of his hair and eyebrows to the fever when the man entered. Sir Onsley was corpulent, big all over, balding and looking strangled in his neckcloth.

  “Sir Onsley.” He nodded in lieu of a bow.

  “You look like death’s head on a mopstick, but I hear you’re going to recover, lad,” Sir Onsley began, sitting down on the edge of the table by the bed, which fortunately was square and heavy enough to support his considerable bulk.

  “I am feeling much better, Sir Onsley. Still weak as a kitten, but better.”

  “Damn close thing, you and the Yellow Jack. Not many survive, but if you do, you stand a good chance of being acclimated to it and won’t come down with it again.” Sir Onsley crossed his arms on his chest. “Have some news for you.”

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Your captain recovered as well, and about a third of your sick.”

  “I am gratified to hear that, Sir Onsley,” Lewrie said automatically, but thinking that he wasn’t so sure, after discovering that Lieutenant Kenyon preferred “the windward passage.”

  “Parrot is under another officer an
d has departed for Nassau. We needed her badly. Had to appoint two new midshipmen to her, so I’m afraid you’re without a berth for a while.”

  “Oh,” Lewrie said, feeling a sadness that he would not have expected six months before at such news. What would become of him? What sort of berth would he get once he recovered, fit to stand duties? Would he have to go back to the sullen abuse of the regular Fleet once more? “I understand, Sir Onsley.”

  “I understand, too, lad,” the admiral said, clearing his throat. “Happened to me once, my first time in the Indies, for the same reason. Now look here, you’re not to worry about anything but getting well for now. You shall be my wife and Lucy’s project until you’re well enough to get around, and I’ll find something for you to do.”

  “You are too kind to me, Sir Onsley.”

  “Until then, you have the hospitality of my house.”

  “I am most grateful to you, Sir Onsley. But I am probably well enough to go back to hospital to recover,” Lewrie offered, hoping that it was pro forma for him to say that and be denied. He liked it there, and the girl was gorgeous …

  “Nonsense. Healthier over here on the windward side, anyway. If a ship could tack out of what passes for a harbor here, I’d move the entire dockyard. That’s your chest over there, by the way. And I have some of your things, pay-certificates and such. There’re some letters for you, when you feel up to reading them. And a present or two.”

  “Presents?” Lewrie perked up, finding it hard to believe.

  “Andromeda,” Sir Onsley bellowed in his best quarterdeck voice. “Fetch those packages for Mister Lewrie.”

  The girl entered the room with them and placed them on the bed. There was a small ivory box, the sort used in gambling houses like White’s or the Cocoa Tree to hold guineas in set amounts. Lewrie opened it and beheld a double row of glittering guineas. He dug one out and discovered that it was real. A hundred guineas, at the very least!