Sea of Grey

'Ah, Colonel… all's ready for you, as promised!' the tailor chirped. A largeish order, or another who paid his reckoning on the nail, Lewrie gathered.

'Well, stab me!' the officer said, with a goggle.

'Damn my eyes!' Lewrie rejoined quite happily. 'Cashman!'

'Young Lewrie! Made 'post'! Hell's Bell 's, who'd have dreamt you'd rise so high!'

They advanced on each other and clasped hands with warmth, all but pounding each other on the back and shoulders.

'And you, a Colonel,' Lewrie marvelled.

'Well, Lieutenant-Colonel,' Christopher Cashman allowed with a becoming modesty in one Lewrie remembered as so brash.

'But with your own regiment, I take it?'

'Aye, the Fifteenth West Indies, just raised last year. A one-battalion, wartime-only regiment, but all mine. Local volunteers, and funded by rich planters. We do have a Colonel of the regiment, but for the most part, he's too busy making money. The odd mess-night boredom, when he shows up to bask, d'ye see.'

'So you may run things as you see fit, at long last!' Alan said.

'Mostly, and thank God for it!' Cashman said with a merry laugh.

'You must tell me all about it.'

'We'll dine you in, and you can see 'em,' Cashman vowed. 'And you've a ship, I s'pose. What is she?'

'HMS Proteus, a Fifth Rate thirty-two gunner. Damn' near new!' 'And been busy, I see,' Cashman said, eyeing Lewrie's medals. 'Tell you all about it over dinner. Is Baltasar's still open?' 'The old Frog's fancy restaurant?' Cashman asked. 'He died of Yellow Jack, ages ago. A Free Black feller dared buy it, and kept the name. Frankly, the food's much better and his prices ain't so high.'

'Let's make it my treat, then,' Lewrie offered. 'Feelin' a tad peckish? Have time for it?'

'Yes, and yes. Let me collect my new articles, and we're off!'

Baltasar's was much as Lewrie recalled it. There was a curtain-wall with a wrought iron gate in front, with a small brass plaque the only sign that it was a commercial establishment and not a residence. Within, there was a cool and shaded courtyard, with a small fountain that plashed and gurgled beneath a pergola, between trellises hanging heavy with fragrant tropical flowering vines. A second curtain-wall split the entry into two clean white gravel or oyster shell paths, by jardiniers filled with even ' more flowers.

Inside was a cool, open room with plaster walls and heavy wood beams, wainscotted to chair-height with gleaming local mahoghany, and the tables covered with clean white cloths. At the rear, there was a slightly raised dining area facing a back wall pierced by large windows and glazed double doors that led out to a back garden overlooking the harbour, where even more wrought iron tables sat under sailcloth awnings for shade, to dine alfresco. The decor was much simpler than what Lewrie remembered, more Caribbean than imitation Versailles or Tuilleries Palace ornate. Most tables were taken, and the intriguing aromas coming from the separate cooking shed told him why.

A fetching Creole or Mulatto wench came to take their orders, a young woman with whom Cashman joshed as though he was a more than regular diner… or an after-hours lover? Like Lewrie's Cox'n Andrews, she was light- skinned and her features were finer and handsomer, than brutish.

'A mere touch o' the tar-brush,' Cashman explained once she had headed for the kitchen shed and had spoken to the barman.

'Fair handsome,' Lewrie amiably agreed. 'A particular friend?'

'Almost pass for white, a fair number of 'em,' Cashman told him, ignoring the query, 'but what may one expect, with so many sailors and soldiers runnin' off and takin' up with the first decent-lookin' wench they see? Planters and overseers, married or no, who can't resist the Cuffie housemaid's charms? Some free girls who turn to whorin' and out pops a mulatto git. And their dialect, did ya hear it? Damn' near an Irish brogue, or a Cockney twang that takes ya back to Bow Bells, with a Creole lilt. Jamaica could be a fine country.'

'Same as India, or Canton in China, anywhere Europeans go,' Alan said, as their wine arrived, taking Cashman's evasion as confirmation.

'Same as Saint Domingue,' Cashman pointed out with a frown. 'If you think Jamaica 's a hodgepodge, wait'll you get ashore, over there.'

'Wasn't plannin' on it, Christopher,' Lewrie scoffed after tasting the hock. 'From all I've heard, a mile or two safe offshore'll do me fine. Do they ice this, by God? Marvelous!'

' Massachusetts ice, packed in straw and wood chips, down in the storm cellars,' Cashman informed him, beaming. 'Americans can even turn shite t'money, s'truth! Whole shiploads of dried manure to dung thin island soils. Saint Domingue, though… you know the French. Put the leg over a monkey did someone shave the face first. Saint Domingue's a bloody pot-mess when it comes t'race. Dozens of terms for how black or white a person is… mulatto, quadron, octoroon, griffe, dependin' on whether the father or mother was black or white, and what shade, if the mother was slave or free, house-servant or field hand, how rich or important the sire. Most confusin' bloody war ever ya did see, and I doubt if the Blacks over there can sort it out. They're comin' to call it the 'War of The Skin.' Everybody's terrified of the real dark Blacks, the half-castes with nothing side with this fella L'Ouverture, the half-castes with anything t'lose side with Rigaud, or the whites.'

'The petits blancs side with the grande blancs.. .' Lewrie added.

'Someone fill you in, then?'

'Written advisories,' Lewrie told him, scowling. 'But you must know how little those're worth, and how out of date by now.'

'We're going there, soon,' Cashman said. 'General Maitland has been run pretty-much ragged, whenever he sends battalions out into the countryside. Lucky he hasn't been butchered and hung up by his heels, suffered total massacres, so far. Like the Frogs. Poor bastards.'

'So what is this, the Last Supper?' Lewrie asked. 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die?'

'Been there, before. Call it a preventive dose of civilisation, so I don't go mad quite as quickly,' Cashman snickered.

'How did you get your own regiment?' Lewrie enquired. 'Last we saw of each other back in '83, you were a brevet-captain in a fusilier regiment.'

'Ah, well… long story,' Christopher said, winking.

'We'll take a long dinner,' Lewrie assured him.

'Well, once the Revolution ended, what was left of us were sent back to England. Recall, I told you how much I despise cold climates? Damn-all raw and rainy, and damn-all dreary, too… peacetime soldiering. I had picked up a little loot, here and there. Lots of officers in the regiment were selling up their commissions, but I still couldn't afford t'be more than a lieutenant, with a fifteen-year-old over me as captain, damn his eyes! Cost of a commission always goes up in peacetime, in regiments that won't get sent overseas for a long spell. But I found a daddy, needed a place for his slack-jawed young imbecile, so I sold up and resigned. Then turned round and bought a captaincy in a kutch-pultan* (*kutch-pultan=a poor, undistinguished regiment.) with the bad luck t'be ordered to India. Could've bought it for the price of coach fare, with so many young fools worried about their thin, pale skins, of a sudden! And I'd been there before, as ye knew, and it hadn't killed me yet, so…'

Cashman sketched a neck-or-nothing career of heat and flies, of bad water and food, nigh-poisonous native 'guzzle,' surely poisonous serpents, spiders, and scorpions for bed companions, the sun murderous.

'To a bloody war, or a sickly season,' Lewrie proposed, raising his glass with one of the Royal Navy's toasts. 'Ah, India, the land of loot and lust! I take it you were fortunate in both, hmm?'

'Brevet-major in six months, as officers keeled over like nine-pins. Some kerfuffles with a native prince or two, and I'd amassed me enough t'buy a permanent majority,' Cashman boasted, 'and laid enough aside t'come home a chicken-nabob, and then I had me a think. Never in this life would I make lieutenant-colonel, not even in a shoddy battalion such as mine. Home depot in England picks those who suit the Colonel of the Regiment, or Horse Guards, when there's no war, and they've no need of my harum-scarum sort. Things got quiet after a few years, so I sold up and took passage here. Not quite as hot, a tad less dangerous, and a tad less