The Captain`s Vengeance

Hoy, the boat!' Mr. Midshipman Larkin cried his challenge to the approaching civilian cutter, though he had known who its passengers were as soon as they had stepped down into it on the distant quay ten minutes earlier; had been awaiting those passengers' return for at least the last two hours past.

'Proteus!' the Mulatto bow man shouted back, seated on the very tip of the cutter's bows, legs dangling to either side with a brass-fitted gaff staff across his lap with which to hook onto the chains. He shot one hand in the air for a moment, showing four fingers, proving that a captain was aboard.

'Come alongside, aye!' Mr. Larkin shouted back, then paced over to join the others of the side-party assembled to salute that officer's arrival back aboard. Larkin was a thatch-haired, ill-featured lout of a lad, all out at elbows and knees in his secondhand uniform, and that didn't even take into consideration the growing he'd done since signing ship's articles over a year before. Though it was a useless endeavour, he twitched and tugged his coat, waist-coat, and neck-stock into better order, shifted the hang of his shoddy dirk, and took a second to remove his battered, cocked hat and swipe his unruly hair with a 'Welsh comb,' that is to say, with his fingers.

Marine Lieutenant Devereux fiddled with his own immaculate neck-stock, harumphed to clear his throat, and cocked a brow as he regarded his short line of Marines under arms, in a last-instant inspection.

Though ships' officers did not usually stand harbour watches, the First Officer, Mr. Anthony Langlie, was present, as was the Second Officer, the ever-cynical and recently wakened and yawning Lieutenant Catterall. The younger and cleverer Scot, Lt. Adair, also 'toed the line' of a tar-paid seam in the starboard gangway planking, his sword loose and ready to present. Mr. Winwood, the Sailing Master, and Mr. Grace, the ship's other midshipman, also stood nearby, stiff-backed and chin-up with curiosity.

Thud! went the shabby cutter against the hull; a clatter of untidily 'boated' oars. More, softer thuds as the cutter shouldered the proper captain's gig, and a grunt or two, some mumbles, as money changed hands for the short passage. Midshipman Larkin dared a peek outboard and downwards from his position at the opening of the entry-port, nodded to the neat-uniformed sailors in the side-party, and stiffened.

The Bosun, Mr. Pendarves, began his long, elaborate call as the dog's vane of the arriving officer's gilt-laced cocked hat peeked over the top step. At a whispered word, officers' swords were drawn, then presented before their faces; well-blacked Marine boots stamped on the creamy-pale, fresh-sanded planking; hands slapped glossy- oiled walnut musket buttstocks and fore-ends. At a word of command from Lt. Langlie, all hands present on deck stood erect and doffed their hats.

The arriving officer leaned back a little, gripping the tautly strung man-ropes for the last step of his ascent up the shelflike boarding battens that began level, and a bit aft, of the main chains. A visitor, unused to such ceremony, might have deemed the officer nonplussed to stillness by the elaborateness of his welcome. But it was simply his way… to seize the man-ropes just below their terminations set below the cap-rail of the entry-port's bulwarks, and jerk himself into the last step, instead of groping and fumbling the cap-rails like some stout 'trullibubs' or senior dodderer more in need of hoisting aboard in a bosun's chair. He had barely turned his thirty- sixth year, this January of 1799, and was still almost boyishly spry.

That jerk was accompanied by a nearly playful hop or skip from the last batten to the snowy planks of the starboard gangway. When the officer doffed his hat, though, he did so with solemn gravity, so an uninitiated observer might have doubted his first, playful theory.

Said new-come 'lubber' would have seen a slim man in his early thirties, who stood three inches shy of six feet tall, one who might weigh twelve or thirteen stone; still wider in the shoulders than the waist, a man whose snow-white breeches and waist-coat lay trimly flat, still.

He wore a good, hard-finished blue wool shoregoing coat, laced with butter-yellow gilt trim on the lapels, the stand-up blue collar, the side-pocket flaps, and cuffs, with nine real gilt buttons on each wide turn-back blue lapel. A fringed gilt-lace epaulet sat upon the officer's right shoulder, too, denoting him a Post-Captain, though one of less than three years' seniority.

Under that expensive coat lay a white leather baldric on which to hang his sword. A discerning observer would have appreciated that sword, a twenty-four-inch hanger, though he would have been puzzled by the scabbard, for it was of dark blue leather, not black, and both throat and drag were of plain brass, not gilded. The hilt, though, was gilded and most ornate; the typical lion's-head pommel that swallowed the back handguard, but the front guard that swelled to protect the user's fist was pierced-steel, like a scallop shell, with a smaller second shell at the hilt's forefront.

A discriminating man with a taste for blades would appreciate that the hanger was a Gill's and, when drawn, was nearly straight on the back edge, the first eight inches honed razor-sharp, while the lower edge was upswept to the point, so that it gave the impression of a curved-blade hanger.

A discriminating gentleman would have further 'Ah-hummed' over the cut-steel square links of the officer's watch chain and fob, deeming him a man of good taste, too.

With the officer's beaver cocked hat doffed, an outsider would have seen a full head of hair atop his pate, still thick and all his own, of a middle, almost light brown, a tad wavy at his temples, over his ears, and loosely gathered into a trim nautical sprig of a queue atop his coat collar, bound with a bow-knotted black silk ribbon.

The officer was much too sun- or wind-burned for Fashion in the better sorts' salons, though. Not completely a gentleman, perhaps, the lofty observer would have sniffed; too much the 'sea dog' after all!

The salute done, Lewrie clapped his hat back on his head and smiled at his First Officer, his darkly, romantically handsome Mr. Anthony Langlie. 'Everything's in order, Mister Langlie?' he asked. 'Nothing gone smash since I left the ship?' he gently teased.

'No, sir, praise God,' Lt. Langlie reported. 'The working sail set hung slack and allowed to dry, wood and watering done, and Mister Coote's requirements stowed below, sir. Did you, ah… find out…'

'I'll be below and aft, Mr. Langlie,' Capt. Lewrie told him in a mystifying way. 'Give me ten minutes, then do attend me, and I shall tell you all I have learned. Dismiss the hands back to their seeming drowsiness for now, sir.'

'Aye, aye, sir,' Lt. Langlie crisply replied, with a hand to his hat and a short sketch of a bow from the waist as Capt. Lewrie went down the starboard ladderway to the gun-deck, then aft past the bulkhead door and the Marine sentry, to his great-cabins.

'Cool tea, sir?' his cabin servant, Aspinall, enquired after he had helped him out of his coat, sword and baldric, and hat.

'That'd be handsome, Aspinall, aye,' Lewrie replied, tearing at his neck-stock and opening his shirt collar. 'Why, hello, catlins… my littles! And what've you two imps been up to, hey?'

There were many glad trills and meows of welcome, much butting of heads on his Hessian boots; perhaps a tad too much standing on hind legs and whetting claws in bienvenue at his white canvas breeches. Those mischievous looks from both Toulon, the stout and well-muscled black-and-white ram-cat, and Chalky, the grey-smudged white yearling torn only half Toulon's heft, warned Lewrie that they'd be scaling up his thin shirt in their need to be newly adored.

'Miss me, did you?' Lewrie cooed to them, a hand for each, once he attained the chair behind his desk. 'Damn my eyes, ye don't nip at me, Chalky! Hand that feeds, and all that? You'll get your 'wubbies,' no fear o' not.'

'Yer tea, sir,' Aspinall announced after several long minutes of discrete observation, as he sensed the cats' enthusiasms begin to flag. ' Bridgetown didn't have no ice, though, sir. All used up for the season, I reckon. Cool from th' orlop, though, sir.'

'Massachusetts Yankee ice never gets this far south' was Lewrie's surmise as he accepted the coin-silver commemorative tankard that the crew of his previous ship, the Sloop of War Jester, had given him just before they'd paid off at Portsmouth, and paced aft.

'Er… no luck, then, sir?' Aspinall dared to ask, when ship's officers would not. Lewrie flung himself onto the hard settee lashed to the starboard side, almost sprawled with one leg up.

'Not the answers I was looking for, Aspinall, no,' Lewrie said, busying himself with taking another sip. The rob of lemons and sugar were dirt cheap in the Caribbean and the Sugar Isles, and tea was one of the most popular exports from England, so Aspinall brewed it by the gallon, every day or so, and kept it tepid, at least, in a pewter pitcher. Some days it was fresh, some days it was leftovers, clouded and so stout that it could rouse the deathly ill and make them prance hornpipes. Today it was fresh, and merely refreshing.