A King`s Trade

The bosun's calls twittered in unison as 'Clear Decks, And Up Spirits' was piped. The red-rum keg with the King's seal painted on it in gilt came up from below, and the hands queued up for their sailors' anodyne, loafing and nattering each other in 'matey' camaraderie about sips or gulpers owed, debts already paid, or had they been forgotten. A pair of Lt. Devereux's fully-uniformed Marines, complete with muskets, escorted the keg forrud, behind the young boy drummer beating a jaunty roll to announce its coming. Now that duties were done for a time, and all the hands expected for the following half-hour was their call below to their mid-day meal, it was a welcome bit of idle leisure.

Lewrie paced along the windward quarterdeck bulwarks, from the larboard ladderway to the main deck, to the taffrails and signal flag lockers right aft, his undress coat and hat discarded in his own sort of casual leisure, readying himself for participation in the measure of the sun at Noon Sights, when all his commission officers, and the Sailing Master, and his students, the midshipmen, would ply sextants together, and, at the first chime of Eight Bells ending the Forenoon, record their sums on slates or foolscap paper, then perform the 'mysteries' of navigation.

Proteus was still under all sail, cracking along quite nicely, most pleasingly. This far South, the day even began to feel a touch more tropically warm, moderated by the winds, and Lewrie untied his neck-stock and opened his shirt collars. He leaned on his hands atop the taffrails for a bit of lonely peace from the demands of his ship, and his senior officer's pique, right by the larboard stern lanthorn, slowly shaking his head at the far-off convoy.

The lead 74, HMS Horatius, still plodded along at the convoy's head, with only her sails, at times a sliver of her upperworks, visible when pent atop a rising swell. Astern of her lay the four short columns of Indiamen, two-by-two in line-ahead, with only their beige courses, tops'ls, and t'gallants in sight. The entire gaggle was now about five miles off, as ordered, but an equal five miles off Proteus's larboard quarter, and slowly falling to full astern.

Lewrie didn't relish the idea of interrupting the rum issue, but in the few minutes between the issue's end and the pipe for Dinner, they would have to come about one more time, he decided, before they sailed too far astray of the convoy's mean course. Once settled on a long starboard tack once more, they could then eat in peace.

'Deck, there!' the mainmast lookout shrilled of a sudden. 'Sail, ho! One sail, one point off th' larboard bows!' he sing-songed.

Damn the rum, and victuals, too! Lewrie turned about, looking outward, as if he could spot their mysterious interloper from the deck. 'How… bound?' he cried back, hands cupped round his mouth. 'How… far… away?'

'Tops'ls an' t'gallants, sir, 'tis all I see! Hull-down, she is, an'… bound West!' the lookout decided, after discerning which were the leaches of the stranger's upper sails, and how they were cupped to gather wind.

That'd make her about eight or nine miles off, Lewrie decided to himself, nodding in agreement with the lookout as he pictured a 'plot' in his head. They were sailing Sou'-Sou'east, with the Trades fine on the quarter, which put the stranger due South of them. Bound West, did the lookout say? They were close enough to the Cape Verde Islands for it to be a ship bound for Brazil from there, scudded along by wind and current. It could be an innocent merchantman, even a British-flagged ship, or… it could be a French or Spanish warship or privateer outbound from taking on wood and water, and seeking prey.

'Mister Gamble?' Lewrie shouted, stomping his way forward. 'A signal to Grafton for Horatius to repeat… 'Strange Sail, Due South. Will Investigate.' Mister Langlie? Soon as dammit, put the ship about three points alee to South by West. There's just enough time for our people to eat, but whoever it is down yonder, we will beat to Quarters when we've fetched her hull- up!'

CHAPTER TWELVE

Just what in the name of God is that?' Lt. Langlie asked once they had gotten within hull-up distance of the strange vessel that they had spent most of the afternoon pursuing Westward. The closer they got to her, the odder she'd looked.

First had come the sight of her royals and t'gallants above the sea's sharp-edged horizon; some were pale, jade green, others were such a pale red they seemed pink.

'Faded, perhaps, sir,' Lt. Catterall had speculated with a leery expression, as if he'd just been presented a bowl of dog-spew at a two-penny ordinary. 'Might've been dark green and red, once?'

'Well, we know about fading.. .' Lt. Adair had commented with a snorty chuckle, obviously referring to his captain's unfortunate choice of light cotton uniform coats he'd had made by a Kingston, Jamaica, tailor, which had bled for months before fading to a very pale and washed-out blue, even where white fabric or gilt lace had been intended.

'Arr, Mister Adair' had been Lewrie's comment to that sally.

Next had come full sight of her tops'ls and courses, one of them-her main course-was vertically striped like pillow ticking in a red, white, and blue, all now reduced to pink, parchment, and off-white, whilst her fore course was a more conventional mildewed and sunburned light tan, but bore some large design painted on it.

'Spanish warship?' the Sailing Master had wondered. 'They hoist crucifixes to their cross-trees before battle, sir, and paint crosses on their fighting sails.'

'Must martyr more than a few sailors, too,' Lewrie had replied, 'when someone shoots the big wood crosses free t'drop on their decks.'

Last had come the sight of her hull, and the very size of her, as long as a First Rate fleet flagship, as towering from waterline to midships cap-rails as the loftiest Indiaman… but from the normally black-tarred gunn'ls upwards painted a vivid blue, all picked out with bright yellow paint on rails, round her entry- port, beakhead rails, and twin stern galleries and quarter-galleries, and decorated along her upperworks with what looked to be yellow-painted rosettes!

'Gun-ports, sir,' Lt. Langlie had suggested. 'Old, Elizabethan style gun-ports, with fancy woodwork framing them. Might even mount a side battery of dragon-mouthed cannon, like the Chinese. What in the world?'

'Garish,' Catterall dismissed.

'Tawdry,' Mr. Winwood sneered.

'Whore transport?' Lewrie whispered, his face creasing broadly into a grin. Which had required him to explain the jape played on the younger officers of the gun-room when he was aboard HMS Cockerel in the Med in '93. Though, for a moment, the very strange ship had put him in mind of those 'floating emporiums' moored on the South bank of the Mississippi opposite the wharves of New Orleans, the aging hulks that served as nearly duty-free stores for Spanish, British, and American merchants; all of them had been just as gaudily painted, and so plastered with an assortment of signboards or sales' broadsheets that it had been hard to make out what colour they actually were, underneath.

'Sir!' Midshipman Grace called from the mizen shrouds, where he had climbed with a telescope. 'They've boarding nets strung from every yardarm! Nets strung to catch falling blocks and such from aloft, too!'

'Close enough,' Lewrie snapped, as that outre seagoing joke was within a single mile, his amusement fading. 'Mister Langlie, I'd admire did you beat the ship to Quarters!'

'Aye aye, sir!'

'Mister Larkin, you're signals midshipman of the watch?'

'Aye, sor… sir,' their little Bog-Irish imp soberly replied.

'Hoist colours,' Lewrie ordered, 'and stand by with our Number, and private signal. Does that gaudy fraud try to bluff us, she'll not have this month's proper reply.'

As the crew went about stripping the ship for action, lumbering furniture, sea-chests, and flimsy objects deep below, hanging their own anti-boarding nets and 'protectors' aloft across the gangways and the gun positions against falling wreckage, Proteus changed her course to reduce the angle at which she closed the odd 'duck' of a ship, baring her larboard broadside to her, and starting to steal a little of the Nor'east