Troubled Waters

me or Adair, there, but determined to seize Louisiana back from the Spanish and turn it over to France again. And the way they tried to finance their rebellion was to turn pirate!'

'Play-actors,' Lt. Adair sneered. 'Murderous, cold-blooded, and capricious little bastards. And one bitch.'

'Stole a prize of ours, as far abroad as Dominica!' Lt. Gamble continued. 'Marooned the hands of her Harbour Watch on the Dry Tortugas…'cause they'd yet to do a marooning, so please you! Laughed and hooted, our sailors said once they'd been rescued, like it was a grand game. One shot our Midshipman Mister Burns… poor tyke… just to try his hand at long range, and it took him three days to die. Well, we made them pay, when we finally ran them to earth. Slew the lot of them. 'Twas only the girl that got away, and she nearly slew the Captain for revenge… for scotching their plans.'

'Why are foiled plots always 'scotched'?' Scot Lt. Adair carped.

' 'Cause you Scots plot so bloody much!' Lt. Devereux hooted.

'Per'aps it was more ze wrath of a woman scorned, and betrayed, than mere revenge, sirs,' Surgeon Mr. Durant slyly suggested, wreathed in a cloud of smoke from his clay pipe. 'N'est-cepas? After all, ze Captain 'ad made her acquaintance in New Orleans before rejoining ze ship.'

'In New Orleans?' a puzzled Urquhart gawped. 'But that's more than an hundred miles up the Mississippi, in Spanish Louisiana!'

'Foreign Office doings, that,' Mr. Winwood heavily said, with a sage tap aside his nose. 'The Captain, I gather, has been involved with their agents several times during his career. Something in the Far East 'tween the wars, something that involved that Choundas chap… again in the Mediterranean, I heard, when in Jester. It might've involved Choundas, again. In the West Indies, a pair of Foreign Office agents spent rather a long time aboard Proteus, that James Peel especially. The Captain was temporarily supplanted in command by a more senior Captain Nicely, and sent to New Orleans in civilian disguise as a cashiered British officer looking for employment on the Mississippi, with just a small party of our sailors… three of whom proved false in the end, and ran… guarded by a merchant agent from the Panton, Leslie Company, who was half a spy himself.'

'Charite de Guilleri, she was,' Devereux stuck in. 'And a most hellish-fetching wench of nineteen years or so. The Captain managed to meet her, her brothers and cousins, who were all in on it, and… I gather that he and she even might have conducted an, ah… liaison for a time, before they set off on their last foray, and he rejoined the ship.'

'I'm certain that the Captain would not have, ah…,'-Winwood grumbled with a blush. The others smirked at the Sailing Master and his squeamishness; which led Lt. Urquhart to reckon that his Captain was a man of many parts!

'Saw her only the once, myself,' Marine Lieutenant Devereux said with a rather wistful expression. 'When we assaulted their camp, on Grand Isle. Standing atop an ancient Indian burial mound or something… chestnut hair flowing in the breeze, dressed mannish, in breeches and boots… and shooting at us with a Girandoni air-rifle.'

'And all honours to Lieutenant Devereux and his Marines, and late Lieutenant Catterall and his party of sailors, for conquering them,' the Purser cried, which made them pound fists on the wardroom table.

'A toast, gentlemen… to Mister Catterall,' Devereux called for. 'To 'Bully,' God rest him,' he added when all the glasses were charged. And they drank in remembrance of their old companion.

'The Captain boarded one of their schooners and slew one of the older pirate leaders, sword to sword,' Lt. Adair narrated, after the port bottle had made another round. 'Then, took off in a native boat after the wench, and he almost closed with her, too, before she shot him. Right in the centre of his chest!'

'Shot him?' Lt. Urquhart.marvelled, a tad wall-eyed, by then. 'In the centre of his chest, and he lived} Surely, sir, you're not saying that his… what'd ye call it?… his geas for good fortune made him bullet-proof?'

'All she did was knock him flat, and make a bruise as big as a mush-melon,' the Surgeon, Mr. Durant, said with a wry chuckle.

'Fortunately for the Captain, the butt-flask of compressed air which provides the motive force was nearly spent,' Lt. Devereux related, with a chuckle of his own. 'I put it down to extreme good fortune, no more, Mister Urquhart, for, had Mademoiselle de Guilleri had a spare flask, we'd have lost him, certain.'

'You should have been there to see the pirates' captured Spanish treasure ship explode, sir!' Lt. Adair told Urquhart. 'She took light somehow, as she drifted off, and when her powder magazine went up, she was blown to kindling. And God knows how many new-minted silver coins went flying sky-high… bright as a royal fireworks, and plopping in the bay in a circle a mile across, and lost forever!'

'After that, 'twas a rather, dull year, though.' Gamble frowned. 'Off to Halifax last summer with despatches…'

He was interrupted by the lone chime of One Bell in the Evening Watch- half past eight, leaving them another half hour before a call for Lights Out at nine, observed in harbour or at sea.

'… a partial refit, and a full re-coppering, there,' Gamble went on. 'To Portsmouth, then orders to join the escort of an East India Company trade.'

'We might have gone as far as Bombay, Calcutta, or Canton, but for getting our rudder shot clean off by a French frigate one night off Cape Town,' Adair supplied with a pouty look. 'Though we did touch at Recife and Saint Helena on the way, and that was enjoyable.'

'And there was the circus,' Lt. Gamble said with a twinkle.

'Circus?' Urquhart, by then rather bleary, enquired, at a loss once more.

'Why, Mister Daniel Wigmore's Travelling Extravaganza, sir!' Lt. Adair replied. 'Surely, you've heard of it, the most famous circus in all the British Isles!'

'Circus, menagerie of exotic beasts, and theatrical troupe, in one,' Lt. Gamble happily mused. 'Comedies, dramas, aerial acts, knife throwers, dancing bears, and lion taming… clowns, mimes, and bareback riders. Some barer than others, hmm?' He leered.

'Oh, 'Princess' Eudoxia!' Adair gaily joined in. 'Bow and arrows, and never missed, standing bareback, from under the belly of her huge white stallion, facing aft like a Parthian, what a wonder she was!'

'Billed as Scythian, Circassian royalty, but really a Roosian Cossack,' Gamble stated with equal enthusiasm. 'An absolutely stunning, dark-haired beauty, slim and tall, with the most cunning long legs, in skin-tight breeches, knee-high moccasin boots, a corsety thing, and see-through gauze… what-ye-may-call- it long shirt. And wasn't she hot after the Captain! Threw herself at him…'til she learned he was married, o' course.'

'He did pick up a smattering of Roosian, though.' Adair leered suggestively. 'Curse-words, mostly, from that vicious old lion tamer father of hers.'

'Their slow old tub, the Festival, was bound for Cape Town to capture new beasts, and attached itself to our convoy on our way for Recife,' Lt. Devereux explained. 'She sailed with our home-bound trade, too, once we'd replaced our rudder and set the ship to rights, and was there the night we fought and made prize of the L 'Uranie frigate. The second Frenchman went after the slowest ship in the convoy… the Festival… but, when they tried to board her, they ran into a hornet's nest of trained, bears, baboons, and a loosed lion. Knife throwers, sharpshooters, and Mistress Eudoxia's bow and arrows, too. The Frogs were so terrified, they tumbled back aboard their ship and sheered off, just as the other escort, the old Jamaica sixty-four, got about and closed with them, and I doubt they fired more than a single broadside for honour's sake before they struck, as well.

'Why, Wigmore's Circus received Thanks of the Crown, Thanks of Parliament and 'John Company,' and even did a command performance for King George,' Devereux said with a laugh, 'and now Wigmore's future is made forever. I must own surprise, Mister Urquhart, that you haven't heard of them.'

'I was at sea aboard Albion , and out of reach of the papers,' Urquhart had to admit. 'Though I did read the official account about Proteus's defence of the convoy. Well, gentlemen…,' he said, with a glance upwards to the stubs of the candles in the overhead lamps, instead of drawing out his pocket-watch. ¹ 'This had been a most enlightening evening, one which assures me that as Savage's First Lieutenant I run no risk of lacking excitement, hey? And I look forward eagerly to whatever new adventures our gallant Captain Lewrie