Reefs and Shoals

eighteen feet, whilst he draws much less, perhaps only twelve. Now, how quickly do ye think the French-lovin’ local pilots’ guild’d answer my request? At least one hour or maybe two hours later?”

“You would be forced to wait for the next day’s high tide. I see,” Mr. Cotton said with a grimace of sad understanding.

“He’ll take this trick,” Lewrie gloomed. “But, if he wants to keep his crew happy, he’ll have to take prizes t’keep them in food and rum, and put money in their pockets. Privateers are like whalers: They sign on for a share, a ‘lay’, of the profits of a cruise. If he wants prizes from our big ‘sugar trades’, he’ll have t’stay somewhere close to the Florida Straits, and the straits between the Bahamas and Spanish Florida. My contacts in Wilmington told me there’s no privateers working out of North Carolina.”

That Moore and Cashman know of, at any rate! Lewrie cautioned himself, with an urge to cross the fingers of one hand as he said it.

“They’re mostly schooners or two-masted sloops, in the main,” Lewrie continued, his head cocked over in thought. “They can’t remain at sea much more than two months before they run short of everything, and, once our convoys come level with Charleston, they’re catching a wind that’ll carry them Nor’east, further out in the open sea, well to windward of Cape Hatteras, and harder to find, or chase after. This Mollien is most-like working out of Spanish Florida, or Cuba, where he can find shelter and sustenance with his allies, the Dons. Where he can sell his prizes in the open, ’stead of sneakin’ ’em into an American port t’sell ’em on the sly.”

“Why yes, Sir Alan!” Mr. Cotton energetically agreed. “Think of this aspect. Do enemy privateers’ work from American ports, or inlets where unscrupulous traders sell them supplies and purchase their prizes, Mollien and his compatriots would be at the mercy of those traders… and the much-inflated prices they would charge, and the criminally low sums they’d pay to buy captured ships and their cargoes!”

“It’d take a fair parcel of money to cobble up false papers for a prize, aye,” Lewrie said with a genuine laugh. “Perhaps the value of the cargoes, and the later sale of the ships somewhere else would pay for that, but the risk of atracting attention with the Customs or Revenue Services, well! Too much risk to engage upon?”

Then this whole jaunt down the American coast is a goose-chase, Lewrie thought; dreamt up by pen-pushers at Admiralty, who’ve read too many bloody novels!

“Where would a criminal trader get the captains and crews for the captured ships would be my question,” Mr. Cotton said, topping up their glasses without summoning his Black house servant. “That’s too many people in on the secret, and someone’s sure to blab. Now, they could claim that they had sailed down to Havana with money and extra crew so they could pick up condemned vessels and bring them back to America to register them, along with Cuban export goods, which, in the main, are the same export goods one might find in the holds of a captured British ship-sugar, molasses, rum, and tobacco-but too many of such purchases would surely draw suspicions of the authorities. Register them in Savannah or Charleston, say, then hire on yet another captain and crew to sail them north to the Chesapeake, to Philadelphia, New York, or Boston? I hardly think so! It must all unravel, sooner or later,” Mr. Cotton declared, quite sure of his logic.

“Hmm… in the cold light of day, it does seem rather implausible, doesn’t it?” Lewrie admitted. “Perhaps the most risk that some criminal chandlers might run would be to supply privateers in one of the inlets you mentioned… in the dark of night and far out of sight of officials… to extend their time at sea without a long, unprofitabled voyage back to Cuba or Spanish Florida to re-victual.”

“That would be much more feasible, Sir Alan,” Cotton agreed.

“ Hmpf! ” Lewrie said, slouching in his chair, at more ease than a minute before. “I s’pose I still must peek into Savannah. Unless that twaddle about breaking my passage really is a violation of American neutrality.”

“I think that would only apply were you being pursued by the enemy, in strength, and meant to avoid combat, Sir Alan,” Mr. Cotton told him, then laughed out loud, “and I very much doubt that such an intrepid officer as yourself would ever do so, ha ha! It would be an act more suitable to an enemy warship trying to avoid the inevitable, yet unwilling to intern herself. In that case, the warship in question would be ordered out to sea within seventy-two hours or surrender herself to the care of the neutral country. You have orders to speak with the Consul in Savannah, Mister Hereford? Good. Go do so, and Gambon’s screechy objections bedamned.”

“Excellent,” Lewrie said with a sigh of relief.

Mr. Cotton pulled a pocket watch from his waist-coat and opened the lid. “It is nigh Noon, Sir Alan,” he announced, “and I must own to a peckish feeling. Might you wish to dine on the town, or will you trust that I have a very talented cook, who by this hour is usually ready to serve a toothsome dinner?”

“I would be grateful for more of your kind hospitality, Mister Cotton, and dining in would suit, admirably,” Lewrie replied.

“Good, good! Another thing I must own to is a most lazy habit, Sir Alan… happily, one that is as prevalent in South Carolina’s Low Country as it is in Spanish colonies,” Cotton freely confessed. “I speak of siesta -the afternoon nap. Barring official duties, or a caller as upsetting as M’sieur Gambon, I usually put my head down for an hour or two after dinner. Later in the summer in Charleston, the afternoon nap is a necessity, ’til late afternoon, and its coolness. You are welcome to a spare bed-chamber, one which, like my own, faces the prevailing breeze.”

“I’ll take you up on that, too, Mister Cotton, most gladly,” Lewrie assured him, “and perhaps… a cool shore bath before supper.”

“It shall be done, sir!”

Damn whether that Frog sails, Lewrie thought; I’ll have enough fresh water for a proper scrub-down, for a rare once!

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

By half past six that evening, Lewrie was much refreshed by a good nap in a sinfully soft bed, sprawled nude atop the coverlet and cooled by a gentle breeze. He was also much cleaner, after a brass tub full of cool water had been provided in the wash-house behind the house, with enough soap for a thorough scrubbing, behind his ears and between his toes. He’d sudsed his hair and used two whole buckets of water with which to rinse, too. He had shaved himself quite closely, but had submitted to the house servant’s, Amos’s, ministrations when it came to dressing in his best shore-going uniform that had been sponged and brushed free of cat-fur, completely so for a rare once, too. With his neck-stock tied just so, the sprig of hair at the nape of his neck bound with black ribbon, his gold-tasseled Hessian boots newly blacked and buffed, his sash and star over his chest, and his “hundred-guinea” dress sword on his hip, he could take time to stare at himself in the tall cheval mirror and deem himself one Hell of a natty fellow, and a man possessed of an athletic stature and slimness, despite being fourty-two years of age. He still had a full head of mid-brown hair, turned lighter by the sun below the brim of his cocked hat (thankfully closer to dark blond without a hint of grey!) that still showed no sign of receding. His face was bronzed by constant exposure, but it was not yet lined… though he thought that the “raccoon eye” look of squint lines at each outer corner of his eyes, normal flesh colour against the ruddiness, did look a bit comical.

If people wished to laugh at those squint lines, though, there was the faint, vertical scar upon his left cheek, the mark of a long-ago duel on Antigua in his Midshipman days, to belie them.

He flashed his teeth, pleased that they looked whiter against his skin, then puffed his breath into a hand; one more of his ginger pastilles would not go amiss.

Witty and charming? Lewrie thought; I think I’m ready t’please Charleston.

* * *

Mr. Cotton laid on a two-wheeled, one-horse hack for the short trip from his house down to Broad Street, and a hotel which he assured Lewrie had a fine dining room. It would be a small dinner party, assembled at short notice,