The Captain`s Vengeance

good each, to seek out 'Hosier Hall.'

'Mistress Hosier, I presume?' Lewrie had said by way of enquiry. He stood with hat in hand, at the edge of the front gallery to a one-story house made of coral 'tabby' blocks, ballast stones, and weathered scrap lumber. The gallery wasn't a foot off the ground, its planks uneven and sagging, though the long overhang of the roof, thatched from sugarcane stalks or bamboo or whatever fell to hand on Barbados, gave a more than welcome shade, and the raised gallery that spanned the entire house did provide at least ten degrees of relief from the noonday sun. 'Or, should I say, Mistress Jugg?' Lewrie added, keeping a mild and unthreatening smile on his 'phyz.'

'Oh, saints presarve us!' the faded, fubsy woman cried, fanning herself with her stained housewife apron, turning pale and fretful under her tropical island colour. 'Summat's happened t'Toby, are ye come t'tell me? Faith, I…' she said, gulping and collapsing in a rickety porch chair.

Past the open door of the vertical-board house, Lewrie could espy a girl-child in a simple shift, bare-legged and barefoot, coming out to the gallery from the inner gloom holding a squirming puppy. The taxes on windows that London enforced most-like also were imposed on Barbados, Lewrie thought. There was enough light, though, to note that a cradle took pride of place inside, one still rocking, one occupied by a baby in swaddles, and not above a year old.

'Allow me to name myself to you, Mistress,' Lewrie said. 'Captain Alan Lewrie, of the Proteus frigate. I've…'

'Toby's ship!' the woman cried, lips trembling now and both hands lifted to her mouth as if to press back grief or chew her nails. 'Oh, God!' That sounded as if it was wrung from her by a mangle. 'Th' poor man's daid, an't he? Oh, sway-et Jaysus!'

'Uh, no, Mistress Jugg… Hosier,' Lewrie countered. 'He…'

The wife was beginning to sob into her cupped hands; the little girl was beginning to blub, too, though for what reason she had yet to be told- Christ, even the babe in the cradle had wakened and added querulous, hic-coughy wail-ettes of its own!

'He's alive and well… we think,' Lewrie was quick to inform.

'He's 'run,' d'ye mean?' Mistress… Whichever snapped, going squinty-eyed and flinty of a sudden, all grief quite flown her. 'An' ye're here t'take him back, ye are? T'flog 'im? Court-martial 'im?'

'Find him, aye, Mistress… uh,' Lewrie assured her, daring to put one booted foot on the gallery; thanking God that the Juggs/Hosiers could cut off their squawls so quickly. The girl-child still sniffled but hadn't worked up to a full-blown howl and was now almost content to clamber up into her mother's lap, still clasping the long-eared pup to her chest. And the cradled babe (trained to stealthiness, perhaps, by a visiting Muskogee or Seminolee Indian) had gurgled back to drowsiness. 'Find our other missing people, too.'

'Missin', d'ye say, then? Missin'? Missin' how, sir?' Jugg's woman warily enquired. 'Hesh up, now, Tess,' she urged her girl.

Lewrie, daring to step up onto the gallery, even to drag up a second equally rickety chair and seat himself, fanning away the tropic heat and the many insects with his hat, explained about the missing prize ship and the hands he had left aboard to safeguard her.

'La, arrah' the woman said at last with a weary sigh. 'Tess, cooshlin'. Jump down an' see t'yer brother. An' mind yer puppy don' make in th' house. Nor get in th' cradle an' smither 'im.'

She waited 'til the little girl had slid down from her lap and had toddled off inside, dried her eyes for good and all with the hem of her apron, then heaved a long, bitter sigh and stared outwards, unfocussed, on her meagre acreage.

'Be mortal-cairtain yer sins'll find ye out,' she whispered.

'Ma'am?' Lewrie gently asked, sure that the woman would confess Jugg's whereabouts, did he play his cards right a little longer.

'Pore Toby, arrah' she muttered with another long sigh. 'All 'is work and sweat… all 'is good intentions. I told him, I did… I pleaded with 'im not t'go back t'sea. For sure, I knew in me bones, somethin' bad'd happen, and did it not right enough, Cap'm Lewrie? We could o' got by, we could o' made some sort o' crop, e'en did we hire out, th' both of us, but 'e wouldn't hear of it. Took all o' his savin's an' earnin's t'get this wee parcel, an' Toby'd not abide the idee o' losin' it, he didn't, so sure he traipsed down t'Bridgetown an' got hisself signed aboard a Yankee brig. Th' last night, 'e tol' me they was summat queer 'bout her, but they'd give him the two-crown advance he asked f'r, an' what they call a 'lay' o' th' profits that sounded handsome. Toby thought 'twas a slaver, I thought she might o' been a privateer,' Mrs. Jugg or Hosier said with a half-amused shrug.

'The smuggling brig we took in the Danish Virgins, aye,' Lewrie stuck in, in hopes to keep her reminiscing. 'You received his Bounty guinea, I take it?'

'Aye, and sore welcome it was, for it cleared us o' taxes, an' went a fair way t'payin' th' vicar's tithe,' the woman said brightly. 'Covered th' storekeeper's ledger… crop t'crop, season t'season?'

Whatever surname she went by, Jugg's woman had at one time been a tolerably fetching wench, Lewrie judged. She was going stout, after two children, but had the sly eye and vixenish, sway-hipped carriage of a bouncy Irish sort; dark, frazzled red-auburn hair, snappy green eyes, high, merry cheekbones, and a wide and generous mouth. In the Caribbean, she was quite the catch for a man of Jugg's social position.

'What sins, ma'am?' Lewrie pressed. 'The usual young tar's?'

'Privateersman's sins,' Jugg's mate admitted, turning sadder. 'Jumpin' ship sins, deserter's sins, Cap'm Lewrie. Navy ship or merchant. Hard masters an' such? Oh, he done a power in his younger days. But nivver mortal blood sins, I tell ye! Jugg, he said? Hmmf!'

'His real name's Hosier, then, I take it?' Lewrie slyly asked.

'Hah!' was her answer to that, and to Lewrie's mystification she went into the house, leaving him stewing on her porch. Not a minute later, though, she returned bearing a large painted mug much like a German beer stein, along with several tattered letters. She sat, then showed him the mug.

It was large enough for two pints, slightly tapering, with two stout handles and a china lid, like a teapot's. One side was crudely painted with a sailing ship, the other showed a tar-hatted sailor with a sea chest at his feet and a sea bag over his shoulder.

' 'Tis th' jug we keep on th' mantel,' she coyly imparted. 'Some o' th' time 'twas for flowers, summat small change, or sweets up where th' wee'uns couldn't reach. He called it 'Toby's Jug,' so that's where I 'spect he come up with a name for ye when ye pressed him. Hosier… 'twas a mate o' his wot 'slipped his cable' long afore, an' we took it when he lef' th' sea th' last time, and got this land. His real name is Paddy Warder, so 'tis. That's th' one he owned to, he tol' me jus' th' once, an' that I was t'forget it forever. An' so I did.'

'So, he had a shifty past,' Lewrie said cautiously.

'No more'n most wot end up out here!' Mrs. Jugg/Warder huffed.

'Mean t'say,' Lewrie temporised, 'might he have been tempted, then? Left aboard a rich prize, with so few other hands? Might he have kept in touch with mates from his rougher days?'

'Cairt'nly not, sir!' his woman angrily huffed. 'Toby'd mended his ways, I seen t'that, an' 'twas only need that took 'im back t'sea! Look about ye, sir. What-all d'ye see?'

'Uhm, fields and crops… some creatures?' Lewrie flummoxed, sure that he'd blown the gaff to the wide.

'Five pigs an' a dozen chickens, an' them fair hard enough to feed up, Cap'm Lewrie!' his woman carped. 'We bony use of a mule an' plough, then hoe, pull an' weed summat back- breakin', e'en do wee Tess when 'tis needful. Barbados an't like England, wi' nought but th' eldest son inheritin'. Faith, 'tis more like pore Ireland, with dividin' an' dividin' an' dividin', 'til we got but five acres o' mostly stony soil, an' half o' them in truck an' maize t'feed us an' keep body an' soul t'gither!'

'My condolences, Mistress, um… but I must enquire,' Lewrie said, perched on the edge of the rickety caned chair, by then ready to duck or bolt did she feel like slinging something at him.

'Oh, faith, and 'tis th' rich'uns, th' titled squires own most o' th' land, an' keep it, hardhanded English fashion, sure!' she accused. 'Foin gennulmen such's your like, Cap'm Lewrie, who'd press me man, then think ye'd shown 'im Christian favour do ye 'How him volunteer t'be yer slave, 'stead o' whip-pin' 'im to't, sure an' no better'n them Cuffy sailors he said ye'd stolen on Jamaica!'