The Captain`s Vengeance

costs like the meanest skinflint, Pollock had issued them all powder horns and deerskin cartridge pouches, long hunting knives to hang on their hips to make them appear more like huntsmen or a pack of bully-bucks he'd hired on to escort his goods into the hinterlands… or protect his new-landed assets in his New Orleans warehouses and store. All of which-the clothing, arms and accoutrements, 'surplus to requirements' infantry hangers and such-had been produced from Pollock's warehouses in Kingston and sold at a so-called discounted price to Capt. Nicely. Lewrie could sourly suspect that he and his handful of disciplined sailors had been charged passengers' fare just to come along, as well!

Lewrie heaved a befuddled sigh and contemplated once again just how he had been finagled into this dubious adventure. Capt. Nicely had proved to be much cleverer than Lewrie would have credited him. And not half so nice as he appeared.

Not a day after their shore supper, Capt. Nicely and Mr. Peel had been rowed out to Proteus at her anchorage and had come aboard in stately manner, with a strange young Lieutenant and Midshipman in tow.

With Nicely wearing a gruff but-me-no-buts expression on his face, and Jemmy Peel cocked-browed with a sardonic you-poor-dense-bastard look, Nicely had introduced the young Lieutenant as one Thaddeus Darling, the Midshipman as one Mr. the Honourable Darcy Gamble.

Since Proteus had lost the unfortunate (and regrettable) young Mr. Burns, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker had decided to appoint the much tarrier and more promising Mr. Gamble into the frigate. He came off the flagship, and such an appointment usually was a signal honour for the recipient captain. The lad was upwards of his majority, eighteen or so, and while attired in a well-to-do lad's best uniform and kit of the finest quality, right down to his ivory-and-gilt trimmed dirk, he was touted as a bright lad who'd been properly seasoned at sea duties since his eleventh birthday; a welcome prize, indeed!

'You're short a Midshipman, Captain Lewrie,' Nicely had almost gushed in seeming sincerity, 'and I prevailed upon Sir Hyde to assign you his very best… and one close to his heart,' Nicely had added in a confidential whisper, with an encouraging wink, 'in reward for your previous good service to the Crown.'

'Honoured, indeed, to welcome him aboard, Captain Nicely, sir,' Lewrie had bowed back, temporarily disarmed, though still a dab leery.

'If you do not mind, then, sir, I will read myself in, and put up my broad pendant, according to Sir Hyde's orders?' Nicely had said further, whipping an official document from his coat's breast pocket.

'Beg pardon?' Lewrie had gawped, all aback. 'Say uh?'

Lieutenant Darling produced a paper-wrapped packet containing a red pendant, much shorter and wider than the coach-whip commissioning pendant that forever flew from Proteus's main-mast. He handed it off to Midshipman Grace and bade him hoist it aloft. And to Lewrie's chagrin, the red broad pendant bore a white ball, indicating that Capt. Nicely would have no flag-captain below him!

There was much too much blood thundering in Lewrie's ears for a clear hearing of Capt. Nicely's bellowing recital of Navy officialese, but the sense of it was that Sir Hyde had temporarily appointed him as a petit Commodore without the actual rank, privileges, or emoluments of a permanent promotion.

'… and take upon yourself accordingly the duties of regulating the details of your squadron, in making the necessary distribution of men, stores, provisions, and in such other duties as you shall think fit to direct!' Nicely had thundered, casting a baleful eye at his 'flagship's' goggling captain. Lewrie had whirled to seek confirmation or aid from Peel, but Peel could do nothing but offer him a side-cocked head and a helpless shrug. That 'distribution… as you shall think fit to direct' sounded hellish-ominous!

To make matters even worse, Proteus'?, crew thought they had been done a great honour in recognition of their prowess, and they had actually cheered Nicely's pronouncement. And his decision to 'splice the main-brace' and trot out the rum keg for a drink free of personal debts, the 'sippers' or 'gulpers' owed among them, had raised an even heartier second! Fickle bloody ingrates! Lewrie had fumed.

'Ah, sir, um…' Lewrie attempted once Nicely had turned to face him. 'You speak highly of your First Officer, Mister Langlie,' Nicely had said sweetly, 'nearly ready for a command of his own, as I recall you praising, so… perhaps a spell of actual command, with me as his advisor, as it were, will properly season him for better things in the near future, hey? No fear, Captain, your Order Book shall not be supplanted or amended while I'm aboard as, ah… 'super-cargo' or acting Commodore. I shall not interfere in your officers' habitual direction of your ship. Though I did bring along Lieutenant Darling to stand as a temporary Third Lieutenant, I assure you that he shall strictly adhere to your way of doing things and will be subordinate to Lieutenant Langlie, not me.'

'What squadron?' Lewrie had baldly asked, after jerking his chin upwards to indicate the broad pendant.

'We, ah… stand upon it,' Nicely had had the gall to confess, with what seemed a dab of chagrin to 'press- gang' him out of his command, so he'd be available to fulfill the rest of his scheme.

'Christ on a…' Lewrie had spluttered, close to babbling. 'We may add two cutters later on, once you've reported…' 'Mine arse on a…' Lewrie had fumed, nigh to mutiny. 'So, you're free, d'ye see, Captain Lewrie. Needs must-' 'Black!' Lewrie had squawked, shaking his head in ashen awe at how deftly he'd been made 'available'; he hadn't seen this coming!

'Sir Hyde and Lord Balcarres insisted, d'ye see,' Nicely hurriedly added, 'once I'd laid our enterprise's sketch before 'em, so you must adopt the old Navy adage, 'growl ye may, but go ye must.' '

'Mine… Arr!' Lewrie tongue-tangled. 'Gahh!'

'So glad you understand,' Nicely had cajoled. 'Well, I'm dry as dust, and I fetched off a half-dozen of my best claret. Shall we go aft and toast the success of our venture, sirs?'

And, damned if, after the wine had been opened and Lewrie had sloshed down two impatient glasses, his cats hadn't come out of hiding and had made an instant head-rubbing, twining fuss over Captain Nicely, as if they'd been just waiting for his arrival their whole little lives!

Damned traitors/ Lewrie could but accuse in rebellious silence. And Nicely had been so maddeningly, bloody nice that he'd cooed, 'mewed,' and conversed with Toulon and Chalky, to their evident delight, even suffering Chalky to clamber up his breeches, roll about in his lap to bare his belly for 'wubbies,' and scale Nicely's heavily gilt-trimmed lapels to play with his epaulet tassels, touch noses with him, shiver his tail to mark him, and grope behind his neck with a paw at his ribbon-bound queue.

Christ, what a … He sighed to himself, sagging weary on the bulwarks, on his elbows and crossed forearms. What an eerie place this is!

He'd been up the Hooghly to Calcutta and had thought that lush and exotic; he'd been to Canton in trading season 'tween the wars and had goggled at the many sights of the inaptly named Pearl River below Jack-Ass Point. Both had been Asian, crowded, teeming with noise, and anthill busy with seeming millions of strange people intent on their labours. Louisiana, though…

First had come the barren shoals, bars, and mud flats of the Mississippi River delta, so far out at sea, the silted-up banks on either hand of the pass and the lower-most channels' desolate ribbons of barrier islands, with the Gulf of Mexico stretching to horizons when seen from the main-top platform, just a few miles beyond them. Skeins made from dead trees, silent and uninhabited, only heightened the sense of utter desolation.

Once past the Head of the Passes, the land spread out east and west to gobble up the seas, the salt marshes and 'quaking prairies' impossibly green and glittering, framed by far-distant hints of woods; yet still devoid of humankind, and abandoned.

Now, here almost within two hours' sail of the English Turn and Fort Saint Leon, the river was darkly, gloomily shadowed by too many trees, all wind-sculpted into eldritch shapes, adrape with the Spanish moss that could look like the last rotting shreds of ancient winding sheets or burial shrouds after the ghosts of the dead had clawed their way from their lost-forgotten graves to the sunlight once again. The cypresses standing in green-scummed, death- still ponds, the hammocks of higher land furry with scrub pines, bearing fringes of saw-grasses like bayonets planted to slice foolish intruders…

Oh, here and there were tall levees heaped up to protect fields and pastureland, rough entrenchments of earth that put him in uneasy mind of Yorktown during the Franco-American siege, raised as if to hide whatever lurked