CHAPTER SEVEN
It was a 'Make and Mend' afternoon, following the noon meal for the hands. All stores had been laded, the aired sails, hung wind-less and slack, had been furled and gasketed, and an hour's small-arms drill had been performed. Now the crew of HMS
'The sailor and his true love
Even with the duck awnings rigged over the quarterdeck and the waist, it was too warm for chanteys, horn- pipes, or reels, so the hands sang a sad forebitter, with both fiddlers, a boy on the tin whistle, and Liam Desmond droning under them, with his uilleann pipes. Desmond was a cosmopolitan sort, for an Irishman; he'd play the English tunes as readily as any from his own sad island. And 'Pleasant and Delightful' was as teary a ballad of love and loss and long partings as anyone could wish for. He was equally open to Allan Ramsey's version of 'Auld Lang Syne' roared along with 'Hey, Johnny Cope' to sneer at an English general who'd run from Bonnie Prince Charlie back in 1745, with the few Scots aboard, turn up a weepy, lugubrious version of some Welsh dirge, or wheeze out gay horn-pipes with equal ease. He was a treasure.
Lewrie gratefully stripped out of his formal shore-going togs, completely pulled out those offending shirt-tails, and rolled up his sleeves above the elbows. With his neck-stock discarded and the front of his shirt undone, he called for a mug of cool tea from his steward, Aspinall, who brewed it by the half-gallon each dawn on the griddle in the galley; weak, admittedly, given the cost of good leaves, with lots of sugar (which in the Sugar Isles was nigh dirt-cheap) and a generous admixture of the rob of several lemons, also available for next to nothing. Let stand to cool before jugging, it made a fine thirst-quencher.
Though Lewrie did suspect that, once jugged in his large pewter pitcher, his mid-morning libations might be part of the brew from the previous afternoon's. There were some days, such as today, when that decoction could almost stand on its hind legs and toddle.
'Mister Padgett sorted yer paperwork, sir,' Aspinall told him. 'And there's letters, too, off that packet brig come in yesterday.'
'Ah, excellent!' Lewrie enthused, rubbing his hands with false gusto at those tidings. For the last year,
No, his official correspondence
'In good voice, t'day, sir,' Aspinall commented.
'Did they choose something cheerful,' Lewrie grumbled, 'I s'pose so.' He had to admit, though, that the chorus of rough seamen's voices did have a more-pleasing harmony than usual, detecting the shyly, hesitantly offered basses and near falsettos from his 'liberated' ex-slave sailors. The tunes and words were new to them, almost alien, and their command of the King's English marginal, yet his Black sailors had an uncanny ear for harmony. Even their unaccompanied work songs he heard when riding past cane fields ashore had been spot-on, whatever tune it was they'd sung, sometimes hauntingly so.
'Mister Motte, the Quartermaster, you can hear him there doin' the solo part, sir,' Aspinall went on. 'He says it come from the '60s, it did, when our Navy invaded Cuba in the Seven Years' War.'
'Umhmm,' Lewrie said with a nod over his paperwork, a tad irked, and peering owlishly at Aspinall's interrupting maunderings.
Aspinall took the cue, and ambled back into his day-pantry with a damp dish-clout in his hands. There to sing along under his breath, Just loud enough to make Lewrie twitch his lips and furl his brows.
'Bloody hell,' Lewrie muttered. 'Aspinall?' he called.
'Sir?' A small, chastened voice, that.
'It's 'make and mend.' Do you wish t'join the hands up forrud and sing, 'tis your right. I'll have no need of you for a while.'
'Er, thankee, sir, and I'd admire it,' Aspinall cried, hastening out of his pantry, and his apron, to dash forward to the door that led to the main deck, an ever-present notebook and pencil now in hand so he could jot down the words and annotate the tunes' notes. v
'Hmmpfh,' Lewrie sniffed, tetchily relieved. 'Peace an' quiet. Ooff!'
No sooner had Aspinall departed than Toulon, his stalwart black-and-white ram-cat, now grown to a muscular one-and-a-half stone, hopped into his lap.
'Well, damme,' Lewrie softly griped. 'And why ain't you caulkin' the day away… the way your tribe's s'posed to, hmm? Missed me, did ye? There, there, ol' puss, yes, yer a good'un.
Toulon braced himself on his hind legs to get right up against his face and rub cheeks and chin against him,
