A Jester’s Fortune

bliss. Ignorance of how much we let slip through our ignorant little fingers! And thank God for small favours we've seen the last of Mlavic and his cutthroats this voyage! Can't wait t'rush home to his master, Petracic, and show off his pretty new toys!

'God, I absolutely despise this!' he whispered to the empty cabins. 'Mlavic, Petracic, the bloody need of 'em…!'

He hunched forward over the desk, bear-shouldered and miserable. He unfolded the vellum letter further, peeling another sheet away from [the remnants of a wax patch. Labouriously, for his French wasn't that good, either, he made out that he had the second page of a two-page set of instructions from the brig's former ship s-husbands and owners, for her now-former master. Cautions, warnings, a pithy bit here and there, though framed in a tortuous sea-lawyerese, on how her captain had best proceed in the service of both profit and patrie.

'… 'be advised that a British squadron is now known to be found in the Adriatic,' ' he murmured half aloud. 'And, it took you that long t'puzzle that out? No idea of numbers… no idea of operating areas, so… 'sellers' agents have opened marts in those ports'… damme, what the hell does that mean… susdit? Susdit? Never bloody heard of it.' He suddenly felt the lack of a French dictionary.

He rose from his chair and went forward, out to the gun-deck and up the windward ladder to the quarterdeck.

'Cap'um on deck!' Midshipman Spendlove warned the watch.

'Mister Spendlove, how's your Frog?' he demanded.

The lad shrugged. 'Tolerable, sir, I s'pose.'

'Susdit. What's it mean?' Lewrie pressed, sounding urgent.

'Susdit?' Spendlove puzzled. 'Haven't a clue, sir. Sorry.'

'Mister Knolles, do you know what susdit means in French?' Alan glowered, pacing over to the First Officer.

'I, ah… hmmm, sir. Can't recall running afoul of that word, before, Captain.' Knolles frowned in sorrow. And in wonder of why his captain was so all-fired impatient for the meaning of a French word. Or why Commander Lewrie had come up without his hat, though he still wore waistcoat, neck-stock, coat and sword.

'Excuse me, Captain.' The Surgeon Mr. Howse coughed, midstroll with his ever-present assistant, Mr. LeGoff. 'Just taking the air, do you see.'

'Yes, Mister Howse!' Lewrie seethed. If there was one thing he didn't need at the moment, it was Howse and his eternal, mournful carping noises! He'd rather have piles, any day!

'Susdit, did ye say, sir?' Howse asked with a deep, bovine lowing, all but rocking on the balls of his feet, hands behind his back in superiority. 'Why, I do believe susdit means 'the aforementioned,' or 'the aforesaid.' Ain't that right, Mister LeGoff?'

'B'lieve so, sir. 'Aforesaid,' ' that gingery terrier agreed.

'Ah!' Lewrie grimaced suddenly. 'Thankee. Shit!'

And dashed below to his cabins again, leaving them all to cock their heads and wonder what exactly had caused that!

'First bloody page, first bloody page,' Lewrie fumed, shuffling papers in a fury, 'where it bloody was 'aforesaid.' Hah!'

To shorten the voyages, and avoid the greater costs in crew pay and rations (he slowly but breathlessly read) and to avoid the perils of capture by hostile warships, to reduce the turnaround time between deliveries of naval stores and compass-timber vital to the Navy or the private builders' yards, agents for the Directory were urging the suppliers formerly of Venice and other ports far to the north of the Adriatic to transship, in their own, perfectly neutral, bottoms, to…!

'Hah!' Lewrie cried aloud again, in triumph this time.

Into Venetian Durazzo, into Venetian Cattaro; Volona, in Venetian-held Albania, and to Corfu Town, and other ports in the Ionians!

He sat down-plumped down!-into his chair, feeling giddy with sudden knowledge. They'd taken the brig so suddenly, her people hadn't had time to ditch her papers overside. She hadn't been merely halfway through her voyage, she'd nearly been at the end of it! He'd feared her turning Easterly and running into Durazzo as a refuge. A refuge, indeed, for that was probably where she was headed all along.

This revealing letter was recent, dated not two weeks earlier, hand-delivered aboard the morning the brig had sailed, most-like. And left lying out, so the brig's master could refer to it.

Venice! he thought scornfully; up to her ears in trafficking to the very people who'd eat her alive, sooner or later. Fat, faithless rabbits, too used to Spending and Getting, getting by on her ancient laurels and martial fame, but prostituting herself to the French just as bad as the Genoese had the year before. Italians! he groaned.

A word in the right ear, though… didn't the Venetians value their freedom, so they could make this much money from trade, when you got right down to it? Were they to put this to the Doge or the Secret Council of Three, who ran the Doge, couldn't they quietly strangle one ' or two of the largest players, and frighten off the rest? Then, with most of the Adriatic oak and naval stores trade quashed, there'd be no need for reinforcements-not from pirates, certainly!

Lionheart, and Captain Charlton, had they not come foul of some French warships down near the mouth of the Straits of Otranto, might be yet on-station-that is, if she hadn't taken so many prizes she'd been forced to sail for Trieste, for want of hands to sail or fight her.

'No, didn't exactly sweep the seas, last time, did she?' Lewrie muttered to himself with a half-humourous grunt. He thought it likely she was still hunting her patrol area. He decided to sail south, speak to Charlton and show him this evidence of Venetian complicity.

He'd have to move the patrols farther south to cover all the bolt-holes and entrepots for smuggled naval stores and timber, once he'd seen proof-positive that the French and Batavians, along with their avaricious neutral helpers, the Danes and Swedes, were leery of sailing as far north as Venice or Pola any longer.

And, that far to the Suth'rd, Ratko Petracic and Dragan Mlavic were of little use, far below their usual haunts. Were the Venetians employing their own ships for the trade, there would be little the pirates could do, against a 'neutral' nation's merchantmen.

Little good the Royal Navy could do, either, Alan sourly realised, to stem the flow of goods down to Durazzo, Volona, Cattaro, and the isles. Those neutral bottoms of the Serene Republic of Venice were just as off limits to them, and they couldn't touch them without creating an international incident.

Lewrie rose from his desk and prowled his wine-cabinet for drink, to see what he had left after ten days of Rodgers and Kolodzcy aboard. It wasn't much, but he thought he'd earned a pale glass of spiced Austrian geunirxtraminer. Needed one, rather, after the way he'd been taken by

Mlavic. God, that irked!

'Fool me once, shame on you,' Lewrie whispered after a bracing sip. 'But 111 have you, ya smelly beast… you and your master, too. Never wanted a thing t'do with ya in the first place, and now 111 nip this sordid, shitten business in the bud. Get my guinea back, too!

CHAPTER 8

Oh, this is just bloody perverse! Lewrie thought, after days of searching for HMS Lionheart. It wasn't a large area he had to scour-from the sleepy port of Brindisi on the muddy Italian coast, then down the coast to Cape di Otranto and Cape Santa Maria di Leuca, about ninety miles. With a favourable slant of wind, it was only an eighty-mile sail to the Sou'east, to Corfu, to peek in the harbour. Another eighty miles back up the Albanian coast to Volona. Yet, not only was there no sign of her, there were hardly any other sails to be seen, either! A few merchantmen, which he stopped, boarded and inspected, yes; but they were all innocent local traders. And their masters, whatever their nationality, had nothing but puzzled shrugs for answers when he'd questioned them about sighting a British frigate.

'How is it,' Lewrie griped to his First Officer and his midshipmen as he dined them in one evening, 'that when