A King`s Trade

hoisting 'Hold Church Service,' 'Location,' and 'Interrogative' flags.'

'Sir?' Mr. Midshipman Gamble dared ask, at last, with a look of a young man ready to be amused by his captain's wit, willing to be the goat who supplied the rhetorical question if the others wouldn't, but not exactly sure where his superior's jest was going.

'Stands for 'Oh God, Where Am I?,' Mister Gamble,' Lewrie quipped with a wry chuckle. 'Very well, Mister Langlie. Secure the sounding gear, get our frozen sailors in-board, and Aspinall?' he bade the lad, who still hovered nearby in his heavy wool-frieze boat, with his white apron dangling below its hem. 'A cup o' hot coffee for all who assisted the Sailing Master. Hands to the braces, and make her course Due South, Mister Langlie. Wear her about.'

'Aye aye, sir!'

Lewrie paced aft to the taffrails to get out of the way while the cross-cocked jibs and foresails were eased over to starboard, and the helm was put over, the hard-angled set of the principal sails was eased from trying to go 'full and by' too close to the winds, to loose-cupping what wind there was, as Proteus's bows swung leeward, the wind came more abeam, then from astern. At the precise proper moment, and with the efficiency of a well-drilled crew with enough experience for two ships, by now, the yards were hauled about, the courses, tops'ls, and t'gallants began to draw, and HMS Proteus began to cleave her way through steel-grey seas, her clean quickwork slipping through the icy waters and gaining speed rapidly.

He left the taffrails and paced up the starboard side of the quarterdeck, which was now the windward side, and a captain's rightful station alone, 'til he was by the mizen shrouds, hooked an arm through them, and oversaw without interfering in such a wonderous display of seamanship from all officers and hands, 'til the last brace, halliard, or jear was coiled, flaked down, and belayed on the pin-rails, and Mr. Langlie released all but the sailors in the Forenoon Watch from their stations. A quick cast of the knot-log proved that even on this light wind, Proteus was loping along at a decent seven knots, easily riding the quartering seas, slow-rocking more than hobby-horsing, and heeled no more than ten degrees according to the new-fangled clinometer, with the winds nearly full abeam.

The next mid-day might prove them level with the Lizard; half a day's sailing after that might, if the winds remained out of the West or Sou'west, move them far enough below England's westernmost headland to turn East, and scud up the Channel to Portsmouth, there to deliver despatches from Halifax to the Port Admiral.

There to be stripped of his sword of honour and bound in irons, then hauled off to an ignominious Fate?

Liam Desmond on his uillean lap-pipes, the ship's fiddler, and a Marine fifer began to play a semi-lively old hymn. Unfortunately for Lewrie's already-fretful nerves, he recognised the title as 'I Want a Principle.' Damned if he didn't, though he might have left it a tad late!

He pursed his lips, frowned heavily, and headed below and aft. Aspinall was still tending to those in need of his coffee-pot; Lewrie tossed off his own boat cloak, hat, and undid his coat, then sat down at his desk and dug his personal log out of the centre drawer, dipped one of his precious steel-nibbed (captured) French pens in the ink, and noted the time and date of Soundings, of shaping a new course; catching up on what the half-a-gale had carried away, what sails had split, and had to be replaced, which Mr. Rayne, their Sailmaker, thought he could repair, and what the cost in materials would be when the time came to pay Proteus off in a home dockyard, the war with France ended…

'… that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

'twas blind, but now, I see!'

Mister Winwood has a sense of humour? Lewrie was forced to gawp. Two years or more, and the Sailing Master couldn't seem to catch even the broadest jape… now this waggish witticism? For the suggestion for a thanksgiving hymn surely had been his. Lewrie knew the words as a poem written by a former Liverpool slave-ship captain, John Newton, who had been shipwrecked and enslaved himself on the African coast; the tune, though, sounded suspiciously close to 'Nottingham Ale,' not a ditty he'd think popular with the fervently religious.*

Apt, though, he decided; now we know where we are. He could understand British tars singing so lustily, this close to home, but his 'Free Black volunteers,' too?

The root of his troubles, those 'volunteers,' a round dozen of them, who'd really been encouraged to meet his ship's boats one night in Portland Bight on

*'Amazing Grace,' also known in hymn books as 'New Britain,' was not set to the tune we know, 'Virginia Harmony,' until 1831.

Jamaica 's south coast, and escape a lifetime of slavery, chains, whips, and cruel misery, to join the Royal Navy under new aliases as 'free men.' Seemed like a great idea, then, when his ship had been so short of hands after so many of his British tars had died of Yellow Jack, but now, though…

'… many dangers, toils, and snares,

I have al-ready come!

'Tis Grace hath bro 't me safe, thus far,

and Grace will lead me home!'

'Something should,' Lewrie muttered; 'lead 'em home, very far from me,' he added under his breath. Listening to the harmonies of his Black sailors, no matter how loyally and stoutly they had served, he could not help but add a fretful 'Damn 'em!'

CHAPTER TWO

In retrospect, perhaps-and one could safely assume that retrospection was an activity at which Alan Lewrie had come to excel over the course of a few months (and just might have been acclaimed as the champion retro-spector of the age… were prizes given for such, of course)-he really should have twigged to the fact that something was 'rotten in Denmark' when he received that extremely odd, dare we say outre, invitation from Capt. Nicely, back in the summer when he was still based out of Kingston, Jamaica, to wit: Capt. Nicely requested that he be dined-in aboard Proteus by Capt. Lewrie, not the other way round.

Well, Nicely was a kindly sort, though a bit of a bull in the china shop, an aggressive, 'but me not buts' sort, so Lewrie had thought little odd about it, at the time. Capt. Nicely had played 'Dutch Uncle' to him since their first meeting at Port-au-Prince in 1797 and had supported his activities, dismissing the vituperative charges that the dyspeptic Capt. Blaylock had tried to lay against Lewrie for not breaking off his bombardment of the rebel-slave army besieging the port of Mole St. Nicholas and giving Blaylock his mooring to try his hand at it. Nicely's dislike for Blaylock might have had a hand in it, for they'd heartily despised each other as hotly as the Devil hates Holy Water since their Midshipmen days.

Ever the encouraging and supportive sort was Nicely, even when he'd as good as 'press-ganged' Lewrie into a knight-errant's crusade against those French Creole pirates who'd stolen one of Lewrie's prizes from the anchorage at Dominica, even when he'd usurped Proteus right out from under him to be Nicely's 'squadron of one' to chase them into Spanish Louisiana, then sending Lewrie up the Mississippi in civilian guise to hunt them on their home ground, shivering and farting with dread, and…

But, no… Lewrie had blithely shrugged it off as just one more quirk of a neck-or-nothing man. After all, he'd survived it, barely, and the expedition had fetched them all ?200,000 to share, gained all participants-the leaders most especially-plaudits in London papers, and the gratitude of their superiors for a job well done. As for Capt. Nicely, it had gotten him out of the dry and thankless post of Staff Captain, ashore in Admiralty House on Kingston Harbour 's Palisades, and gotten him back afloat in command of a mighty 44-gun frigate. And, let Nicely hoist a broad pendant as commander of a wee squadron-even if said broad pendant still bore a white ball to show Nicely was not yet a