A Fine Retribution

by Dewey Lambdin

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  This one is for “Colonel Johnathon Singleton Mosby,” or just plain “Mosby,” a spirited little white-furred, ginger-tailed, pink-pawed cat, and a companion for sixteen years. He had one gold eye and one blue eye, and shut them for the last time in late August of 2016. I hope there’s a faucet running for you wherever you are, Mosby, and that you’re rejoined with your brother, “Forrest,” again.

  Haec noster de rege piacula sanguis sumat et heu cunctae quas misit in aequora gents.

  Such be the retribution that my son exacts from the king, and all the nations, alas! whom the king has sent to sea.

  —VALERIUS FLACCUS,

  ARGONAUTICA, BOOK I, LINES 810—811

  PROLOGUE

  Ships are only hulls, high walls are nothing,

  when no life moves in the empty passageways.

  —SOPHOCLES, OEDIPUS REX, LINE 56

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a welcome little breeze cross Algeciras Bay, one that felt refreshingly cool, enough so to alleviate a stultifying Midsummer day under a blazing Iberian sun. Cooling, aye, but not strong enough to waft away the odours of hot pitch being paid over deck seams that had been re-stuffed with hammered-in oakum. The ship was also being painted to cover the repaired hurts, and the large patches of pale, bare wood where smashed planks of her hull scantlings had been stove in with roundshot. Indeed, in the waist there was an impressive pile of deformed iron shot that had lodged in the ship’s timbers but had not penetrated into her vitals. Everything from grapeshot to 24-pounders and even some massive 32-pounders from French carronades; it would all go ashore in dribs and drabs to be sold off to gullible civilians and sailors off other ships as tokens of a signal victory. Or swapped for cheap drink.

  HMS Sapphire, a weary and battered old two-decked 50-gunner of the Fourth Rate, was almost back to normal since her arrival at Gibraltar a month before, and even Sapphire’s Captain had to offer thanks to the dockyard, and the officer in charge of it, Captain William Lobb. Perhaps it was due to the presence of a greater number of warships in Iberian waters since the British Army had opened a campaign over the border into Spain, but His Majesty’s Dockyards at Gibraltar were now bung-full of every sort of supplies that had not been available when the ship had based there two years before. There was even a sufficient store of paint; black for the hull, buff for the gunwales, royal blue for the transom, and white for fanciful carvings that decorated her stern, her quarter gallery window frames, and stern gallery posts.

  Bless Lobb, he even had sheets of glass, which that very instant were being cut to size and puttied into place to restore the captain’s, and wardrooms’, starboard quarter gallery sash windows, so if Sapphire’s officers “took their ease” with their breeches round their ankles, rain and spray would not come dashing in any longer, much less the risk of sitting on the “thunder box” with a large shot-hole right by one’s knee, and the surging ocean close below, as perilous a risk as sailors took when seated on the “heads” in the open air in the bows.

  “Chalky, get out of it,” Captain Alan Lewrie said to his cat, who was interrupting, as usual. Lewrie was writing a fulsome reccomendation of Acting-Lieutenant Hillhouse in hopes that it might help in the fellow’s future promotion. It did not help that Lewrie was not fond of Hillhouse, a bull-headed, sometime sulking lout who, in his late twenties, had yet to pass the oral examinations for an actual promotion. A good sailor, but …

  Mew! from Chalky, more insistently.

  “Oh, here. Chase that,” Lewrie griped, balling up one of the early drafts and heaving it cross the great-cabins, but Chalky, now of an age as cats go, had lost his fondness for toys, and stayed atop the desk. Mrr! punctuated by a lash of his tail.

  “Go find something t’do,” Lewrie muttered, almost sweeping the cat off the desk-top. He returned to his letter, but had lost his train of thought, and grunted in frustration.

  “’Allo, puss,” a sailor from the working-party aft said.

  “Chalky, get out o’ that, too!” Lewrie snapped, getting to his feet to go retrieve the cat from interfering with the work on his starboard quarter-gallery. He scooped up the cat, who had been poking and pawing at the fresh glass panes before they set, pawing round the empty gaps. There was a newly hung door to the quarter-gallery, and Lewrie shut it. “God, but you’re a trial,” Lewrie said as he carried the cat in his arms to the starboard side settee and dumped him on the padded seat. “I’ll be on deck, Pettus. Keep him out o’ trouble, if that’s possible.”

  “I’ll try, sir,” his cabin steward replied, grinning.

  Hatless and coatless, Lewrie went forward to the door to the quarterdeck and stepped out into the full miasma of repair; paint and hot tar and pitch, with only the faintest sweet tang of fresh-sawn lumber, and the louder din of caulking tools, hammers, and the thuds of hot loggerheads as they paid seams.

  And there, right at the forward edge of the quarterdeck, stood the reason that HMS Sapphire would remain anchored at Gibraltar for some time into the future, and the one item that Captain Lobb could not supply him; the weakened lower mainmast trunk.

  French shot had gnawed and chipped it like so many industrious beavers when Sapphire had lain herself at the head of the squadron’s line of battle to take on the most formidable of the four enemy frigates they had fought a month before. It was a bloody wonder that it hadn’t toppled like a storm-lashed tree right then, which would have spelled disaster. Now, though, the lower mast had been re-enforced with spare anchor stocks to vertically span the damage, then woolded with taut-wrapped kedge anchor cable like a splint on a man’s broken limb. The topmasts above the fighting top still stood, minus royal or t’gallant yards, but Lewrie could not trust it with any sort of canvas spread above the tops’l.

  Whole lower masts, fore, main, or mizen, were not items which lay round loose by the dozens. No, they had to be crafted, scaled to the ship in which they would be installed. Lewrie had discovered that in January of this year when Sapphire had been struck by lightning on-passage from Corunna to Portsmouth, and it had taken the Commissioner of Portsmouth Dockyards weeks to come up with a replacement. Just in time, too, for Admiralty could have ordered Sapphire de-commissioned and turned her over to the Transport Board to serve out her days as a troop or supply ship. Even after finding a replacement lower mast, Lewrie had had to go up to London to plead, cajole, and make some inventive (and suspiciously optimistic) promises to keep his skilled crew together, and his active commission as her Captain.

  Now, here it was again; the same dread of losing her. And how could he explain it away, this time?

  You’re a cack-handed, clumsy bastard, ain’t ya, Lewrie, he imagined Admiralty scolding; What, you’ve broken another? If you can’t play nice with your toys, we’ll have to take them away ’til you learn better! The thought made him smile, if only for an instant.

  He went up the larboard ladderway to the poop deck, his usual perch when at se
a, but a working-party was just gathering their loggerheads and tar pots after sealing the seams in his cabins’ overhead, so a stroll aft to the taffrail lanthorns and flag lockers was out; his shoes would be ruined before the tar cooled. Even his lubberly collapsible wood-and-canvas deck chair, in which he could sprawl high above the bustle of a ship under way, was right out. It was now hung over the iron stanchions which held tight-rolled sailors’ hammocks and bedding, like a jack-knife.

  With a shrug and a sigh, Lewrie settled for a leisurely stroll forward along the larboard sail-tending gangway, apart from the busy starboard side, acknowledging the sailors or Marines that he met with a nod or a cheery “Good morning” which he most certainly did not feel, dredging up names; after two years, he recognised them as well as he would have all his cousins at a family reunion.

  He stopped at the larboard anchor cat-heads and the roundhouse above the forecastle, gave that offending mainmast one more damning glare, then looked out-board at the shore, the high battlements of Gibraltar’s fortifications, and the tiers of the town which arose on the steep slopes of The Rock beyond them.

  Except on official matters, Lewrie had not taken even a brief run ashore yet, and now that Sapphire was finally put to rights, a few hours off the ship would be welcome. There were chop-houses where he could partake in a fresh meal, particularly a seafood house by name of Pescador’s, run by a retired Army Sergeant-Major and his Spanish wife and children, that featured a cool cellar full of imported ales and beers from England. There were more taverns and public houses at Gibraltar than there were soldiers in the garrison, it seemed; one in particular, the Ten Tuns, had an awninged outdoor seating area and piles of newspapers where he could idle some hours away with a glass or two of white wine and some Spanish-style tapas for appetisers.

  Good memories of both places, when his former ship’s clerk, Thomas Mountjoy, and he could scheme raids along the Southern Spanish coast a few years back, and Mountjoy, actually an agent with Foreign Office’s Secret Branch, could slyly impart the latest doings back in London, or the progress of his plans to subvert the Spanish away from being a French ally to one of theirs.

  In his own infuriating “wait for it!” way, Mountjoy had been a fount of inside information, here at Gibraltar, and later in Lisbon, and they had developed a bantering but enjoyable partnership as long as the “skulking set” found him useful.

  Now, though, Mountjoy’s replacement at Gibraltar was a dour sort of sod who hadn’t spared Lewrie two minutes of his time, and had looked askance that some Navy officer had even thought to call upon him at the cover offices of the so-called Falmouth Import & Export Company, Ltd., much less at the top-floor lodgings that Mountjoy had occupied, up near the headquarters of the Army garrison. Lewrie looked up that way briefly, but the awninged outdoor gallery where Mountjoy had set his astronomical telescope to keep an eye on the Spanish Lines was now a blank; even the potted greenery was gone.

  Pescador’s, perhaps? That memory forced Lewrie to shift his gaze southward to the lower town, and an upper-storey balcony with a set of glazed double doors, where he had lodged his mistress, Maddalena Covilhā. There was no joy from that quarter, either, no joyous waving of glad welcome whenever his ship stood in, or departed. Pescador’s was where he had first met her. Would going there be too painful?

  Did I do right by her? he asked himself, again.

  He’d moved her from Gibraltar to Lisbon when he’d returned to Spanish waters as a Commodore with a small squadron meant to scour the dangerous North coast of Spain to interdict French supply convoys, and Maddalena, being Portuguese, had revelled in becoming a real Lisboêta at long last, in the city she’d always longed to see.

  But, when General Sir Arthur Wellesley had driven the French from Oporto, Maddalena’s birthplace, and Lewrie had thought to shift his squadron there to be days closer to their hunting grounds, she’d balked. She had so many reasons she never wanted to return there; her impoverished, illiterate family the foremost, which she’d fled at the first opportunity, to their great outrage.

  It wasn’t even a spat, much less an argument, but his suggestion had been the first omen that what relationship they had was exceedingly temporary, after all. War, the Navy, new orders … chance?

  Lewrie painfully recalled that last night before he had sailed away the final time, and how sad and sombre she had looked as she had whispered, “I will always love you, Alan, meu amor,” before sweeping up the stairs to her lodgings, leaving him standing in a strong rain.

  He had left her an hundred pounds at a Lisbon bank, and left her lodgings paid in full for an entire year, and she had employment with Mountjoy and Secret Branch as a multi-lingual translator; Portuguese, Spanish, English, even French, highly useful in the “war by newsprint” and false information smuggled over the border to infuriate Spanish partisans, and lower the morale of the French who came across the bogus newspapers full of depressing news from home.

  Spilled milk, he groaned to himself; silly, inane … call it what you will. If only I’d kept my fool mouth shut!

  For there had been no shift to Oporto; the city’s dockyards couldn’t support his ships, and there was no guarantee that the French could not come back and re-take the city, with only a small garrison of the Portuguese army to protect it. And now here he was, stuck at Gibraltar with no squadron, no broad pendant, a ship that might be ordered home by the next mail from London, and … no mistress.

  Lewrie heaved a philosophical sigh as he made his way further forward, right to the beakheads to give the newly re-painted figurehead, a crouching crowned lion with a large gem clutched to its chest, a reassuring pat for good luck. That grinning beast had seen them through to a signal victory, even though at great cost.

  Lewrie could allow himself a moment of smug satisfaction, even if it was a brief one. It wasn’t every day lately that anyone had a Chinaman’s chance to bring four French warships to battle and defeat them in such a crushing victory.

  They’d been in port long enough for the London papers and The Naval Chronicle to catch up with them, along with the copies that his father, Sir Hugo Willoughby, had sent along.

  Well, The Naval Chronicle re-printed his and his subordinate officers’ dry, sufficiently humble action reports, all of which were carefully written to avoid prideful boasting. No, it was the papers, The Times and The Gazette, that had done the boasting for them, comparing the battle to a miniature Trafalgar, which Lewrie had thought a bit much. The newspaper writers had been positively ghoulish in their descriptions of how many Frenchmen had been slain, mutilated by shot, and surgeons’ treatments, revelling in the “butcher’s bill” and how a Hearty British Tar was the equal of any five or six cowardly Frogs.

  Speeches in Commons and Lord’s were re-printed that declared that, after the shameful showing of the Royal Navy under the hapless command of Admiral James Gambier at Aix Roads—“Dismal Jemmy” to the Navy—where a fine victory had been squandered by Gambier’s dithering, and French ships that should have been taken or burned to the waterline had been allowed to escape, despite the pluck and daring of Captain Lord Thomas Cochrane’s assault with fireships and bombs, it was Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Bt., and his ships that had revived the “tradition of victory” for the Navy, and had won fresh laurels for it!

  There were calls made for commemorative sets of silver plate for all Captains and Commanders present, presentation swords, instant promotions, financial rewards perhaps, coins (not actual medals) for every participant to be minted. Some in the Commons lauded Lewrie as a man just as courageous and daring as Cochrane.

  Lewrie had winced at that, for everyone in the Navy knew that Thomas Cochrane was a too-proud, arrogant, and reckless “neck-or-nothing” madman who’d run roughshod over social inferiors, orders, or superior officers if he thought he knew better! Besides, what had the acclaim gotten Cochrane in the end? Gambier’s court-martial had white-washed the fool, and it was Cochrane who’d resigned and entered the House of Lords to wrangle for justi
ce for himself.

  More personally, Lewrie had gotten yet another packet of newspaper articles, and a welcome letter from his former First Officer, Lieutenant Geoffrey Westcott, who had taken the largest of the prizes home … kicking and screaming to avoid the duty, but he’d gone. Now, he was glad that he had, for he was to be promoted to Commander and put in command of a brig-sloop, most-likely, but he would stride his own quarterdeck, at long last. Westcott had gotten assurances that all four prizes would be “bought in” to Royal Navy service, and that meant that soon there would be lashings, umpteen thousands of pounds due to every ship which had participated, a windfall that Westcott was eager to spend on himself, beginning with wine, women, song, and … women!

  Geoffrey Westcott. Lewrie missed him, too, glad though he was to see a good man advance. Westcott had become the closest friend that Lewrie had allowed himself to have aboard the same ship, in the same crew, slowly abandoning the demanded separation of a Captain from the rest of his ship’s people. Lewrie and Westcott had served together nigh six years, though, first in the Reliant frigate in 1803, then in Sapphire since 1807, and Lewrie had come to rely on Westcott’s good sense in all things, sure that Geoffrey would present him with a ship and crew in good order, and in good spirits, and Lewrie had enjoyed the way they had learned to rub together, and …

  “Just damn my eyes, what do you think you’re doing, Twomey?” Acting-Lieutenant Hillhouse screeched. “There’s paint all over the bloody deck! Master at Arms, here! Pass word for the Master at Arms!”

  Damn, but I miss Westcott! Lewrie thought; Christ, here we go again!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lewrie crossed over the forecastle to the starboard side, then down the ladderway to the waist, where the tirade was continuing, and it had drawn Lieutenant Harcourt, now Sapphire’s First Officer, to boot.