Sea of Grey

amazing debacle, even a rake-hell as casually 'churched' as he could shrug and think it God's Will.

That wasn't to say that it didn't rankle, though; the bitter cup of defeat's gall had never been easy for Lewrie to swallow, ever since his first taste of it in 1780. And pondering the disgrace of sailing away after being bested by illiterate Blacks, by hordes of beasts with the musk of over-worked demons and not a jot of Christian mercy, not a jot of civilisation to their souls…! Truce or not, what would keep L'Ouverture's hordes from butchering everyone indiscriminately… when they massacred petits blancs and townsfolk in an orgy of gore, would that be God's Will, too? What would their Inquisition be like?

The voudoun drums in the hills and forests throbbed on as they had since weeks before. Tonight, though, they sounded less funereal, though just as ominous. Now the drums almost had a lilt, a celebratory liveliness, and Lewrie could conjure images of men and women capering and leaping in the savage glare of bonfires, flaunting finery stolen from the dead, brandishing cane knives, spears, and muskets, firing rounds off at the moon and whooping like victorious Muskogee Indians in Spanish Florida.

'Just thank God I'll never have t'set foot on that shore again,' he whispered. 'And you bastards are welcome to it.'

For now, he had a crew to worry about, another debacle blooming on his own decks. Impossible as it might prove to be, to save his men from almost always fatal plagues, he didn't think it God's Will, or a form of punishment from On High that his poor sailors should suffer so for being unwitting pawns against the Saint Domingue Blacks' eventual freedom. Perhaps God would take their innocence into account and spare them… or help him find a way to save them!

BOOK THREE

Sed ti qui vivum casus, age fare vicissim, attulerint.

Pelagine venis erroribus actus an monitu divum?

But come, tell in turn what chance has brought you

here, alive. Come you driven in your ocean-

wanderings, or at Heaven's command?

Aeneid, Book VI 531-538

Publius Virgilios Maro 'Virgil'

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

We may consider ourselves fortunate,' Sailing Master Winwood said, rapping his knuckles lightly on the wheel drum of the idle helm for luck, even so.

'Fortunate… aye, sir,' Lt. Catterall replied with a roll of his eyes. 'Eight dead so far, and thirty helpless with fever below. Why, with a run of luck such as that, I'd stake the family fortune.'

'Consider the lot of those poor devils aboard the other ships,' Win-wood pointed out, gesturing across Kingston Harbour. 'Nigh half of their men down sick or buried. Consider the lot of the soldiers we brought off from Saint Domingue, sir. A full third of them are dead, and now interred ashore. No, sir, for my money, Proteus has come off rather easily, for all the time we spent close to that pestilential shore. Even as a good Christian, which I hope I am, I must confess I find a certain comfort in the tales told about Proteus and her almost inexplicable birthing… and about our captain. Though the tales of his last ship, Jester, and the tales about our own, smack of heathen, pagan old sea-gods, the idea of him, and us with him, being guarded by a benevolent Divine hand are a form of solace in the face of Life's unfairness.'

'Comforting, aye, Mister Winwood, but…' Catterall replied with a faint shrug; it was too warm for wider gestures. Catterall, a happy-go-lucky Deist and cynic, found Mr. Winwood's mysticism amusing. 'The captain may be spoken of as a lucky captain, and his ships lucky by association, but… t'would take a pagan sea-god to deem us worthy in his sight.'

That left unspoken the bald fact of Captain Lewrie's adultery, his recent dalliance with a half-caste Port-Au- Prince whore, the rumour of which had made the rounds belowdecks, usually accompanied by hoots of appreciation and admiration, rather than disapproval or envy.

'Ahem,' Mr. Winwood commented by clearing his throat, blushing at the unsaid reminder of their captain's human frailty.

'But God loved even his King David… Bathsheba notwithstanding,' Catterall drolly posed. 'Something like that, sir?'

'Ahem,' their priggish sailing master reiterated, tongue-tied and unable to respond to such wordly japing without violating his vows not to curse.

'The proof of the statement that God loves a sinner, in hope of his eventual salvation, or has use of him in His majestic plan, stands before me, sir,' Winwood finally answered, glowering a touch.

'Point taken, sir,' Catterall rejoined with a wink and chuckle. He was, in fact, rather proud of his repute as a rake-hell and a pagan, so Mr. Winwood's comment caromed right past him. 'And I will stand in humble abeyance 'til His fated use for me is revealed.'

'Uhm… excuse me, sirs, but the captain is coming off shore,' Midshipman Elwes informed them, approaching them from his vantage point on the starboard bulwarks. Sure enough, the quick use of a glass showed one of the ship's larger boats stroking away from the piers, where it had landed another funeral and burying detail.

'Very well, Mister Elwes. Summon the side-party,' Catterall instructed.

'Permission to mount ze quarterdeck?' Surgeon's Mate Durant, more laconic and weary than ever, requested from the base of the starboard ladder from the waist.

'Aye, come up, sir,' Catterall allowed. 'How's old Wyman?' 'I regret to inform you, sir, zat the poor man 'as just now gone away from us,' Durant told him, wiping his hands on his apron, using a French phrase for departure from Life.

'Well, damme,' Catterall muttered, face creasing in genuine sorrow; though taking an involuntary step away from Mr. Durant, as if to flee Death's miasma… or the noisome reek of the Yellow Jack's last agony, when the victim voided his bowels, after many days of inability, and spewed up dark, bloody vomito negro. The stench of Wyman's dying clung to Durant's apron, bare arms, and very hair, like a whiff off the River Styx.

'That will make you Second Officer, Mister Catterall,' Winwood needlessly pointed out. 'And young Mister Adair an acting lieutenant.'

'Indeed,' Catterall said in a whisper, realising the enormity of their loss, and the onerous weight placed on his shoulders as a result.

'God help us, then,' Winwood sniffed. 'God help us all. 'Tis a horrid toast, 'to a bloody war or a sickly season'… so we may attain our desired promotions.'

'Uhm… yes,' Catterall said to that, turning away and feeling like a weary Atlas, sobered for once from all sarcasm.

God, not another damn' funeral, was Lewrie's first thought, once he had gotten the dismal news of Lt. Wyman's death. The first men who had died had been buried at sea, cleanly and neatly. The last five-no, six, Lewrie had to remind himself-were interred in the military cemetery outside Kingston. They lingered longer in the mind; the plots of mounded earth and simple wood crosses not quite so… forgettable, but more permanent, and seemingly, eternally dispiriting.

In the last few days, administering the Last Rites had become a daily chore, supplanting all the other cares a captain should have for his ship, and the mellifluous prose of the Book of Common Prayer cloying and banal, the litany so familiar that he could almost recite from memory, as if declaiming passages from Caesar's Gallic Wars at school.