The King`s Commission

the pleasures of the wardroom.' Damn his blood! Alan added to himself with some heat.

The new master's mate and new midshipman off Barfleur were in the process of unpacking and stirring around the cockpit, so Alan took himself on deck to get away from them.

With all the ships back in harbor, it was a damned busy place with rowing boats working like a plague of water-bugs at all hours and a constant stream of flag signals from shore or the flagship.

'Mister Lewrie, one o' them boats is fer us, looks like,' Cony told him, pointing off to larboard.

'Right. Mister Toliver, gather up your side-party. It looks as if the new first lieutenant may be coming aboard at last. Cony, run aft and inform Commander Railsford.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

Once within hailing distance, Toliver the bosun's mate leaned over the entry port and cupped his hands around his mouth.

'Ahoy, there!'

'Aye aye!' the bowman in the boat shouted back, putting up two fingers in the air to show that a commission officer was aboard and was for them.

'Sergeant, muster Marine party and side-men fer a lieutenant!'

Alan paced back to the quarterdeck nettings overlooking the waist while Marines and seamen formed up to welcome their new first officer, and Alan hoped that he was as equitable a man as Railsford had been in that position. He had seen just a glimpse past the oarsmen to an officer in the stern-sheets, a tanned face under a cocked hat with a dog's vane and buttoned loop of gold lace, a slightly shabby coat bespeaking an officer of lengthy sea duty, and probably bags of experience, a real tarpaulin man.

Pipes trilled as the new officer's hat appeared level with the lip of the entry port, and he finished scrambling up the man-ropes and battens to stand on the gangway, doffing his hat to the side-party. The duty watch and the working parties stopped their labors to doff their own flat, tarred hats in return or touch forelocks.

'Oh, stap me,' Alan muttered. God, he thought sadly, we need to have a little chat someday about frightening the very devil out of me like this. Fashionably a Deist, he was still imbued with the myths of many a governess, who had crooned or beaten a more personal and vengeful God into him from his breeching on, and he spent a futile few seconds trying to discover just what was so bad that he had done, the last few months at least, to deserve such a fate.

Their new first lieutenant, the man who could make or break any warrant or hand, was none other than Alan's former master and commander from the Parrot sloop, Lt. James Kenyon! There was possibly no other officer in the entire Navy, much less the Leewards, who had a lower opinion of Alan Lewrie's honor and morals.

The cruelly ironic thing about it was that it was Alan who had saved the man's command from capture, but had he acted the slightest bit grateful for that act? Hell, no.

Kenyon had been flat on his back with Yellow Jack, lost in his delirium, when they were accosted by a French privateer brig just days from port and safety. Parrot had already struck her colors, her mate at a total loss, and if Alan had not disobeyed him and opened fire into the enemy ship, setting her afire and scything away her jeering boarding party, Kenyon would now be languishing in some prison hulk on Martinique, if not dead as mutton.

But when Alan had emerged from the throes of Yellow Jack himself in Adm. Sir Onsley Matthews' shore establishment on Antigua, he found a galling letter from Lieutenant Kenyon, accusing him of everything low and base that the officer could think of. Kenyon had put out one hundred guineas at least to gift Alan with the lovely sterling-silver trimmed hanger he now wore on his left hip, a parting gift intended for Alan to use to defend what little honor he had left, the next time it was called to question, as Kenyon was sure it would be. The memory of those phrases still rankled; 'firing into an admirable foe after striking the colors,' 'violation of a sanctified usage of the sea,' disobedience, insubordination, 'eternal shame,' and much more in the same vein. Kenyon had sworn on paper that he could no longer stomach having Lewrie anywhere near him, and were it in his power, he would toss him out of the Navy before he befouled it with a loathsome stench.

Kenyon finished taking the salute and began shaking hands with the senior warrants whose lives he would control from that instant, and made his way aft towards the quarterdeck to report to Commander Railsford. Alan doffed his hat to him as respectfully as he could and gauged Lieutenant Kenyon's reaction as he recognized him.

Just a little help here, God? Alan prayed silently as Kenyon squinted hard and turned down the corners of his mouth in distaste.

'You, is it?' he said, mouth working as though sucking on some acid fruit-rind. He tossed off a brief salute in return, which allowed Alan to lower his arm. 'I heard you'd been posted into Desperate last year. Matter of fact, I was hoping you would still be here.'

'Thank you, sir,' Alan replied evenly.

'No no, don't thank me, Lewrie.' Kenyon laughed curtly. 'There was always the chance I would not catch up with you, if you had been behaving to your normal standards, and had been dismissed from the Service for licentiousness or another act of disobedience.'

'Still prospering, sir,' Alan told him, knowing exactly where he stood now, and determined to ride it out with as much dumb civility as the lowest ordinary seaman.

'The Devil's spawn usually do, I fear,' Kenyon said. 'I see you still have the hanger I gave you. Cut anybody lately?'

'Just that one duel, sir, and that over a young lady.'

'What right have you to wear it 'stead of a midshipman's dirk?'

'I am a master's mate, sir, confirmed back in December.'

'Indeed?' Kenyon pondered that for a time. 'Yes, I'd heard some talk of you being brave and efficient. But we know better about you, do we not, Mister Lewrie? What sort of a sham whip-jack you really are.'

'Excuse me, sir, far be it from me to advise my seniors, but the captain is probably expecting you to see him,' Alan suggested softly.

'Oh, how droll, how politic of you,' Kenyon sneered. 'And how unlike you to find this sudden modesty about advising, or disobeying your seniors, as you put it. You were quick enough to disobey Mister Claghorne, weren't you.'

'Damme, sir, I saved our ship!' Alan insisted.

'But at what price, Mister Lewrie?' Kenyon hissed. 'Claghorne's authority, my honor, the honor of the Royal Navy? I shall attend our captain, but then I'll be wanting to talk with you further on this matter. Don't leave the quarterdeck.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

'Claghorne is dead, you know,' Kenyon said over his shoulder.

So bloody what? Alan thought as Kenyon left.

'Old friend, Mister Lewrie?' Sedge asked after the first officer had gone aft to present himself.

'Ah, he was master and commander of Parrot, my previous ship,' Alan replied, feeling weak in the knees. 'And second officer of Ariadne back in '80, sir.'

'What, that old receiving hulk in the inner harbor?' Sedge said. 'You were in her when she was condemned?'

'My first ship, sir,' Alan informed him.

'Well, what sort is he, then?'

'Kenyon's a taut hand, very professional,' Alan went on, putting on a grin and an air of old comradeship that he most definitely did not feel. 'You'll find him a fair man, sir.'

Unless he hates the fucking sight of you, Alan qualified to himself. Then he'll be a raving bastard.

'Was he much of a flogger?'

'No, sir, and neither was our old Captain Bales.'

'All's right, then,' Sedge sniffed in his Jonathon twang and paced away to his own concerns, satisfied that Desperate would be getting a first lieutenant much like her new captain in spirit, and that there would be no unreasonableness to upset his new rating.

Fuck it is, Alan thought, and wondered why these things had to happen to him so continually. First Kenyon's animosity after Parrot, then that bloody duel with that sneering fop of an Army lieutenant.