Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

  When they rose, he said, “Should you care to take a turn in the air?”

  He had to get to his tasks, but knew the lengths his crew would go to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Mrs. Duncannon. This was the best way to go about it, under his eye.

  She would much rather have retreated to her little cabin, but she was afraid that such behavior might make her look uncooperative, and so she said, “Thank you.” And then remembering her mother’s long-ago admonitions, she added, “I haven’t a bonnet. We have been used to the Spanish custom, wearing mantillas. May I fetch mine?”

  He assented and she sped to the sleeping cabin, where Parrette sat upon one of the trunks, her hands clasped anxiously. “And so?”

  “He was very polite. We talked about music and Spain. But he mentioned a dinner with the admiral. Perhaps that is when I shall be questioned,” Anna whispered in Neapolitan as she whipped her mantilla around her head, and tucked it secure with her decorated comb. “Now I am to take the air.”

  “It is well,” Parrette said, breathing easily at last. Perhaps she could find whoever was in charge of mending and repair, and in offering her aid, learn what she could.

  When Anna reached the outer doors to the captain’s cabin, she stepped back, startled by the sight of a marine standing there in his red coat, a musket at his side. She was going to retreat into her cabin, afraid they were prisoners after all, when the man touched his oddly shaped hat to her, and said, “Gorton, mum, marine sentry. I’m to show you the way to the quarterdeck.”

  She thanked him breathlessly. “Is there always a sentry?” she asked, turning huge brown eyes inquiringly up at him. “Or must you stand there because of us?”

  Gorton chuckled. “Bless you, Mrs. Capting, the skipper of a frigate rates a sentry. Was you to attack him, why, I must come to his defense.” He clashed his musket to the deck.

  Anna peered up into his weather-beaten face, and discovered a broad smile. The man was joking. She uttered a breathless laugh, more relief than humor, and made her way up to the quarterdeck, where she was surprised to find a small number of officers standing about, in addition to seamen busy at their tasks.

  Duncannon had, during the long months of chasing to the West Indies and back, permitted a modicum of informality in the article of dress, but ever since Admiral Nelson had rejoined the fleet, coats and hats were required on deck.

  However, once word had spread that the captain had a missus and that she was coming aboard, a general interest in cleanliness had fired the crew from First Lieutenant Theophilus Sayers to the smallest of the ship’s boys in their watchet-blue jackets, and Master’s Mate d’Ivry had scraped his few blond whiskers off so assiduously that the lower half of his face was quite red.

  The captain presented Lieutenant Sayers first. Anna felt as if she were playing a role on stage to hear herself referred to as Mrs. Duncannon; she peered shyly at the smiling first lieutenant, who doffed his hat with an air, revealing a shock of nearly white hair above tufted white eyebrows. Eyes of a startling blue gazed at her out of a sun-browned face.

  “Mum,” he said, or that’s what the word sounded like.

  She took it as an honorific, and curtseyed. Next was another lieutenant, a thin young man with golden hair neatly queued back, called Lieutenant McGowan. The last introduction was to the blushing d’Ivry, the officer of the deck. His voice cracked horribly on the single word, “Mum,” and she heard a muffled snicker somewhere on the lower deck behind her, and someone else muttered, “Stop your gob, mate.”

  But when the captain glanced that way, there was instant silence, except for the groan and creak of wood and rope, the clatter of blocks, and the wash of water down the sides.

  The captain then said, “I beg to apologize, Madame—” He said it the French way. “—but I have a great many tasks to attend to. With your permission, I shall turn you over to my clerk, Mr. Leuven, who is ready to conduct you on a tour of the ship, if that would please you.”

  Anna was getting used to his speech by now. His words were clear, his voice as deep as she had remembered. She curtseyed again, intuiting what was expected of her, and turned to the sallow-faced fellow with unruly black hair waiting expectantly behind the captain.

  “If you’ll come this way, mum?”

  She took her place beside this young Mr. Leuven, who appeared to be somewhere between boy and man. He launched into a stream of gibberish, delivered with a self-conscious, pompous air. Midway through an impossible-to-understand description of the difference between a sheet and a halyard, the sea gave one of its sudden lurches, nearly pitching her into the waist of the ship.

  He caught her, and blushed furiously as a watching topman whistled high above.

  “One hand for yourself and one for the ship, is what we say, mum,” Mr. Leuven murmured with an anxious air, freeing her and backing a step as if he had been shot. “Clap onto the rail anytime you like, and steady on.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The sea is kicking up a bit,” he offered apologetically, as she experimented with bending her knees slightly, and taking the sway in her hips. That seemed simpler than trying to stand stiffly upright.

  He squinted upward, then observed, “Cap’n will have the royals off her in a shake, see if he don’t. It would never do to encroach on the line, never.”

  They had scarcely taken ten steps when there was an incomprehensible shout from the platform they had recently left, which Mr. Leuven had explained was the quarterdeck, reserved to officers. Mr. Leuven thoughtfully drew Anna back a heartbeat or two before a party of pigtailed sailors stampeded along the gangway past her, and then scrambled aloft so rapidly it made her dizzy to watch.

  Sails flapped with thundering noise, loosened, and were gathered in as Mr. Leuven conducted her to the front of the ship, which he called the forecastle. There he painstakingly instructed her in the differences between starboard (right) and larboard (the left side of the ship), windward and leeward. The mighty spar that slanted up in front was the “jib” and the three masts also had names. The masts were actually in segments, she discovered.

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Leuven said, smiling broadly. “You don’t want t’gallant masts on her in a real blow, without you expect to be dismasted altogether. Why, when we chased off to the West Indies, we all, the frogs too, had to win miles of sea room against one of them hurricanos, which we ride out with only a scrap of sail, and pray we don’t broach to.”

  Anna shivered, which gratified Mr. Leuven mightily, and commented that she could not understand how such a heavy object as a ship did not sink even in relatively benign waters. He thoroughly enjoyed her French accent, and could not suppress a glance of triumph at a pair of midshipmen glaring at him from abaft the mizzen.

  He then took her down the forward hatch and conducted her along the upper deck, pointing out the galley, the midshipmen’s berth in the forepeak, the waist—from which she could look up and see the gangway where she had walked shortly before—and there were the doors to the great cabin. Down they went again to the lower deck, and through the wardroom (which is where the senior officers messed, he said briefly, without explaining who they were or what “mess” meant) and on through to the gunroom, directly below where Anna had slept.

  Here, he pointed out where cutlasses, boarding axes, pikes, and the like were mounted on the bulkheads, between which were stretched canvas walls on which doors had been painted. These minuscule spaces were the cabins of the junior officers, Mr. Leuven explained.

  To her surprise he cast a furtive look about him as if to make certain they were truly alone in the low-ceilinged space, and then uttered a garbled string of words, his expression intent.

  He paused, his expression a comical mix of pride and apprehension. Belatedly Anna caught a badly-pronounced word amid the stream, ‘giorno’, the Italian word for ‘morning.’ She said, “You speak Italian, Mr. Leuven?”

  The apprehension vanished, and Mr. Leuven grinned proudly, his homely face red to the ears. “My gra
ndmother, m’mother’s mother, was Eye-talian. She taught me some things when I was a nipper. This being my first chance to try it out, as it’s my first cruise, on account of my grandfather being the ship’s surgeon.”

  “Your first?” she asked, aware of some disappointment. She had been trying to think of a way to ask about the mutiny, though she did not know what she would do with the information. “And your position one of importance, I see?”

  “Very,” he said, and then quickly, as if he might be overheard showing away, he added in a lower voice, “m’mother sent me to Grandfer Leuven, and thinking I’d be kept safe, conditioned for captain’s clerk, on account I write a neat hand. She would pipe her eye was she to know that, if we come to battle, why, I’m right there next or nigh the skipper, taking down notes.” He laughed heartily. “And don’t I wish we may! Those mids come it the high and mighty, don’t you know it. A brush with the frogs and the dons would put us all square.”

  As he spoke, he conducted her along the length of the lower deck, showing her where the crew’s hammocks swung in the night watches, and where they messed. Next was the manger and sickbay, and then down again to the main hold. She tried to hold her breath against the oppressive air, as Mr. Leuven rapidly pointed out the magazine, the shot lockers, the spirit room, and the stores. She peered obediently at dimly lit barrels and boxes, as little light from the gratings reached this far below.

  By the time they attained the sweet air of the deck once more, the sky had changed dramatically, a low layer of clouds turning the blue sea to grayish green. There was no sign of land in any direction.

  The swell rolled deliberately, but she found that if she loosened her knees in a manner that reminded her of certain dance motions, she was able to balance more easily.

  She was so absorbed with remaining on her feet that she had no time to think about how she looked, and of course she was unaware of the intense interest of men who had been long months away from the company of women. The only female on deck, she drew the eye with her straight back, her curls blowing under the frothy lace mantilla, and the thin gown outlining her form. But she was the captain’s wife—a fact that had pretty much stunned the entire crew—as well as a lady, and so she moved about in a kind of invisible shield, the avid gazes sliding away if she approached.

  Over the remainder of the day, it seemed that every time she turned around she glimpsed crew members busy with some task. She was not to know that the midshipmen and the junior officers all—with a wary eye captainward—found some sort of work in the vicinity of the captain’s lady so they could get a good look.

  To each introduction, from Midshipman Corcoran’s hideous stammer to Second Lieutenant McGowan’s mellifluous, and rather studied, French, she returned a polite, friendly greeting. How did each wish to be perceived? Royalty will take what they want to support their dignity, but others, like you, if you give respect freely, they will like as not give it back, her mother had said. In Paris, ‘dignity’ had still been a dangerous concept to those who could remember the mob and summary hangings. With these English, she was cast back to her mother’s quiet morning lessons.

  The framed sporting prints she had glimpsed in the great cabin, the weapons mounted as decoration in the gunroom, the continual rumble of boots, the deep voices hallooing—this was a man’s world. She was an intruder, not just because of her sex, but because of her origins. She was not English in the way they understood. But they used the English rules of behavior, and she did her best to respond in kind.

  Before the sun set, the midshipman in charge of the flag signals presented himself to the officer of the watch, and thence to the captain, conveying the expected invitation to dine aboard the flagship on the following day.

  16

  Anna had a night to dread the prospect of being brought before Admiral Lord Nelson, about whom she had heard so much over the past six years: wild admiration from the English at Naples, wild hatred from the French.

  She had seen him from afar just once, the day she sang at Lady Hamilton’s fete. She remembered little beyond a slim figure of medium height with a sleeve pinned up, diamonds flashing on his medals and in his hat.

  After intense discussion, she and Parrette settled on the gown she had worn upon the stage in Seville. It was her finest, made up of watered silk with a bodice of lace applique, with a Greek tunic over-dress in eggshell blue, caught under the bosom with embroidered laurel leaves. Since she had no hat, she wore her longest lace on her head, Spanish-style, anchored with a filigree comb. The top corners of the lace attached to her wrists in flowing drapes, the rest hanging down to the back of her skirt.

  “I have made this over into a boat cloak,” Parrette added, producing a voluminous garment with a triumphant air. “You must do The Captain credit on Admiral Nelson’s ship. Here are your mother’s gloves. You see I have kept them. They ought to fit. You are much of a size.”

  “Gloves! It is not cold enough for gloves,” Anna protested.

  “It is English custom,” Parrette said. “You will wear these gloves, but not to eat in. At least, I remember your mother used to leave off her gloves at meals.”

  “Where do I put them?”

  “In your reticule.”

  “I did not think I had to take one, for I am not shopping, am I?”

  “You must have a handkerchief in it, and you put your gloves in it until you need them.”

  Anna sighed, then inwardly chuckled. ‘The Captain’ was back. She wondered what Parrette would call him once he turned them off in Gibraltar like so much unwanted lumber. And it cannot be too soon, she thought, looking at those white gloves, which she knew would be a bother to keep clean.

  The steward scratched. She left her cabin, and found The Captain in his best coat, waiting with a gold-laced hat clasped under his arm. It was going to be a longish journey past two or three other ships of the line, and they must not be late to the flag.

  She shrouded herself in her new boat cloak, and pulled the gloves on. They were tight, but fit, and the old thrill of sorrow purled through her at the idea of her mother’s fingers once warming them.

  She was startled from her reverie by the clash and stamp of the red-coated marines and the bosun’s wailing signal. Captain Duncannon escorted her to the side. She held her breath as she was lowered carefully in the bosun’s chair. The captain clambered nimbly down the side and stepped into the boat, watching as his coxswain assisted her as gently as if she were made of glass.

  The gig’s crew all wore jackets they had made themselves, their caps embroidered with Aglaea on the fronts, the seams of their trousers worked with ribbon.

  “We all look very fine,” Anna said, smiling around at them.

  The sailors vouchsafed nary a word—she did not know that they were to row in strict silence—but she caught smiles and becks from them, before Captain Duncannon gave the nod to his coxswain, who roared, “Stretch out!”

  They left the ship behind them. Captain Duncannon cast his eyes from long habit at the set of Aglaea’s sails, the clouds, the color of the ocean, and the motion of the current as they rowed away. It gave him time to think.

  It was not her fault that this false wife of his had turned up in his life again at the worst possible moment. He glanced at her tightly gripped hands. This situation could be no easier for her. “Are you comfortable, ma’am?”

  “I am become accustomed, thank you,” she said, proud of the remembered phrase.

  He nodded. At least she tried to make the best of things, unlike some he could mention. Perhaps he ought to mention? “There are scarce suitable women for you to meet in company, but what we have, I am to tell you that the admiral has invited on your behalf, to be better company at dinner and so you will not be alone in withdrawing after the covers are removed.”

  Covers? Anna thought, groping mentally for meaning. Was that the cloth upon the table that she recollected from childhood, or the items set upon the cloth?

  “There is Lady Lydia Neville, daughter
of the Marquess of Oversley,” Captain Duncannon went on, hoping to convey a sense of the honor Lord Nelson was doing her, without being oppressive. “She recently married George Neville. You might recognize the family—they are very distinguished, long service, though he’s a third son. Captain Neville of the sloop-of-war Mermaid, very fast in stays, will run dispatches if we come to battle. Then there’s the wife of Lieutenant Fellowes, from Polyphemus, of 64 guns. Mrs. Fellowes has charge of the ship’s boys; her father was a headmaster of some northern school, and she is famous for her shining parts. She has been sailing with him these three years. And finally, though perhaps in respect to age I ought to have mentioned her first, there is Mrs. Porter, wife of the premier of Sirius, 36…”

  He was acutely conscious that he was chattering. Did she comprehend any of what he said? Though she kept glancing at the ships they passed, and at the mild sea, the cant of her head, her tightly gripped hands seemed to indicate her listening closely.

  And she was. 64? 36? Why these numbers, after he named a ship? She did her best to distract herself from how very close by he sat. He was so very, oh, so very tall, his legs in their white breeches so much longer than hers. She looked away from the curve of his thigh as if she had been caught in personal trespass; her clearest emotion was a dread of severity. Would not a mutiny be caused by a very great degree of tyrannical behavior?

  “. . . He is even older than Captain Prowse, but a fine officer. It is a vast shame that he has little in the way of influence, and so he is still a lieutenant at sixty. However he is much cherished by captains who know him, so there is no danger of him languishing on the beach with half-pay. I understand she’s crossed the Line some eighteen times, in course of following him. It is understood in the service that they always sail together.”

  As he spoke, they bumped and jolted past a ship larger even than the Aglaea. It was imposing, with its gleaming black hull layered by row upon row of yellow bands, which were in their turn broken by gun ports in black squares. The effect was a great checkerboard of menace. Anna stared past the sinister round mouths of the cannons, and glimpsed people moving about. Incomprehensible hails passed between someone high on the ship and the coxswain, and then they left that ship behind.