The King

fool enough to partake.' Twigg frowned. 'Water can't be drunk in the East unless it's been boiled and let cool in a clean vessel. Case of wine that'd cost you three shillings the bottle in London will go for five times that, and it's safe to drink. I expect our cargo will pay for the purchase of Telesto, and her outfitting. First cargo to China with Bengali cloth and spices will defray the cost of our first year of operations.'

'My God,' Alan gaped, trying to total that sum in his head. A 3rd Rate ship, even with half the artillery landed ashore, would go for at least twenty-five thousand pounds, and their profits would cover that?

I've been in the wrong bloody profession! he told himself.

'As Captain Ayscough instructed, not a word of this incident with your fellows in the wardroom. Show me your plan of lading after breakfast. I'll have nothing broken, mind.'

'Aye, sir.'

'And keep in mind we'll put in at Oporto or Vigo, maybe touch shore at Madeira as well, for passengers and more spirits. Save some cargo space in the deep hold for that. That'll be all for now, Mister Lewrie. A pleasant night to you.'

'Er, aye, sir,' Alan was forced to say, rising to leave.

'Ajit?' Twigg called out.

'Jeehan, sahib?' the Indian servant said through the closed door.

'Idhar ahiye'! Mujhe' sahib Wythy se' baht karnee hai,' Twigg ordered. 'Have an ear for languages, Mister Lewrie?'

'Not much of one, really,' Alan confessed, wondering if his lack of fluency in anything but English would suddenly, blissfully, disqualify him from this goose-brained voyage.

'You'll pick it up. I just told Ajit to come here, that I wanted him to bring Wythy to talk with me. There's enough bearers in Kalikatta who understand a little English, and if you pick up a word or phrase or two, you can stagger by. Bring this, fetch this, yes, no, too hot, too cold. You'll sound like a monosyllabic barbarian to the Bengalis. But then, that's pretty much what we are to them.'

'Kalikatta,' Alan assayed.

'Bengali name for Calcutta, up the Hooghly River. Where we're going,' Twigg rasped out.

'I thought it was Calicut, sir. That's how Captain Ayscough said it.'

'Then he's as big a noddy as you are,' Twigg snapped.

'Goodnight, sir.'

'Namaste.'

'Um, right. Namaste.'

Whatever the hell that means, he pondered as he got out of Twigg's sight as quickly as dignity allowed.

Fortunately, in the next week, he had little to do with Twigg or his partner. He was busy being the most junior office aboard, working with the master's mates and the purser in stowing cargo in the holds, and on the orlop deck above the bilges. Hundreds of kegs and tuns of spirits, salt-meats, crates of broadcloth and ready-made shirts and breeches. Uniforms for the East India Company's native Bengali troops. Weapons and accoutrements. Books, and a printing press. Blank ledgers for the writers and clerks to fill up with numbers in their counting houses and trading factories. All those items of English life so sorely missed by the English in India, and the luxuries that made life worth living in an alien land.

And there were ship's stores to be piled away as well, to feed and clothe the officers and crew. A second complete set of sails and spars, replacement masts, miles of variously sized cordage for the standing rigging and the running rigging by which the sails and yards were adjusted. Powder and shot for Telesto's guns. Spare hammocks, bag after bag of ship's biscuit, holystones to scrub the decks with. Pikes and muskets, bayonets and cutlasses to repel any pirates hand-to-hand.

It all had to be wedged in tighter than a bung in a barrel, and gravel ballast had to be packed in between the heaviest items lowest in the holds, cut firewood and kindling jammed between, so that nothing could shift an inch once Telesto was out at sea, pitching and tossing and rolling at the whim of the sea. Once out of harbor, it was life or death, and could not be redone if a storm overwhelmed them.

Alan had to admit Telesto was an impressive ship. Compared to any other he had served in, she was massive-1,585 tons of oak and iron, 180 feet long on the range of the gun deck, 155 feet long at the keel and in the hold, and that hold was 20 feet deep, and 50 feet wide at her widest point, with a pronounced tumble-home to her upper deck that narrowed the quarterdeck and poop. Broad and bluff in the bows, gently tapering narrower aft like the head and tail of a fish, that shape adjudged best by naval architects to swim the seas of the world. An eighty-gunned 3rd Rate was the biggest ship in the Navy that could mount two decks of guns and not 'hog' or strain down at both ends and break her back. The Royal Navy had not been lucky with them, since they were too light in the upper works to keep them from snapping like a twig in heavy seas, but Telesto was patterned upon the French Foudroyant after it was taken as prize in battle and had its lines taken off by the Admiralty to study and copy.

She was as long and beamy as a one-hundred-gunned 1st Rate flagship of three decks, as if she had been 'razeed,' shaved down by one deck to make her faster and lighter. And as with French ships, in Alan's experience, she was a little finer around the cutwater at the bow, and in her entry. She promised speed, and with so much cargo aboard, would ride out a gale of wind without as much angle of heel as other ships, even counting the wide span of her yards and upper masts for propulsion.

New as Telesto was, her hull was still golden under the preserving oils, not yet baked almost black. Her two rows of gun-ports were painted with twin stripes of bright red paint. No one was going to spring good money to fancy her up like a flagship, so the usual gilt trim around the entry-port gates, beak-head, taffrail carvings and the walkways and windows of her three stern galleries had been omitted, and a light yellow lead paint had been substituted.

'She'll fly like a seagull,' Artemus Choate, her first officer predicted happily. 'You take passage on a 'John Company' In-diaman, it's six knots when the sun's up, and they reef in and wallow slow as church-work, sundown to sunrise. Don't want to upset the passengers, I suppose.' The tow-headed man in his middle thirties grimaced at the habits of civilian seamen. 'Four months to round Good Hope and another three to the Bay of Bengal, if the seasonal winds are with you.'

'It's five shillings a day for an officer, too, sir,' Alan pointed out. 'Who'd be in a hurry at that rate of pay?'

'Ha, you've a point, Mister Lewrie, 'deed you do. But we'll drive this ship like Jehu drove his chariot, weather permitting.'

Telesto sometimes felt Navy in the way things were run even in harbor. But of an evening, she was as much a merchantman as any Indiaman. Ayscough and Choate, and Tom Wythy, the other partner, liked music, so Telesto had a good selection of bandsmen: fifers, fiddlers, drummers and the unheard of luxury of a bellows pump-organ-that mostly for the passengers' amusement. She also had six men in the crew who doubled as bagpipers, and most evenings would perform a concert on the upper gun deck up forward by the forecastle and the belfry. Alan wished they wouldn't, but Ayscough was some sort of Lowland Scot, and doted on them. It irritated Lewrie, and put the milk cow off production. The sheep, pigs, goats and chickens in the manger didn't care for them much, either.

As for passengers, there wasn't much joy there. Alan had fantasized about a few English females taking passage to India, but no such luck. Their forty or so paying guests were all solidly male, all fairly young and just a trifle seedy in appearance. Clerks and writers-to-be, young tradesmen who'd finished their apprenticeships and were heading out where the competition wasn't so fierce. Some men like Burgess of limited means who would take military service in 'John Company' as subalterns. Not one sign of a 'Mother Abbess' and her brood of whores to service all that emigre masculinity out in the Indies, either. God help him, they all looked so 'skint' and short of money even a card game would be unproductive.

They warped Telesto away from the stone docks on 4 February, sent the temporary 'wives' ashore the next day and put the crew back into discipline. Alan got to go ashore just the once, to pick up his last personal stores and purchases to com-pJete his kit, and almost drowned in the rough harbor waters out and back in a ship's boat under lug-sail that tried its best to capsize or pitch him out.

On the dawn of 7 February, the winds came fair, and the weather moderated. Telesto sailed.