Trade from her sails by placing her in the frigate's 'wind shadow.' The course change also gave Proteus's gunners time to ready their pieces, light the last-ditch slow-match igniters, and open their gun-ports. As the strange ship loomed up within a half a mile of them, gun-captains raised their free arms to indicate that they were prepared in all respects to fire into her the moment the command was given.
'Colours and private signal, Mister Larkin,' Lewrie snapped, as he fiddled with his sword and brace of double- barreled pistols freshly fetched from his great-cabins by his Cox'n, Andrews. The Royal Navy ensign broke high aft of her spanker sail, with a match on her foremast halliards; a string of five code flags soared up the mizen halliards as bundles, which opened like blossoms at a single twitch on the light binding line. Now we'll see just who ye are, ye… sonofabitch! Alan Lewrie thought in amazement for…
At the very last moment, a British merchantman's Red Ensign shot up her after running stay, and a blue house flag soared to the top of the strange ship's mainmast, trimmed in bright yellow at every border, and bearing yellow masks of Tragedy and Comedy!
'Think I can make out her name, sir,' Lt. Catterall commented, busy with his telescope. 'There, on her quarter board… Festival.'
'Mine arse on a…' Lewrie gravelled, as dozens of people suddenly appeared along the Festival's bulwarks and rails, waving, shouting, and… cheering? Some of them, most skimpily dressed in the tightest garments, scrambled up those 'boarding nets' and scampered high aloft… to begin swinging back and forth above their 'protector' nets. Lewrie lifted his own telescope to behold a white-painted, and loosely-garbed, Fool, who plucked his large red pom-pom 'buttons' down the front of his smock, and hit himself in the head with what appeared to be a pig bladder!
'God A'mighty, 'tis a circus!' Ordinary Seaman Liam Desmond, on the larboard gangways, cried. 'Look, Pat!' he called to his thicker-witted compatriot, Ordinary Seaman Furfy. 'A seagoin' circus, arrah!'
'Sonofa… a whole afternoon chasin' bleedin', tom-noddy… twits!' Lewrie fumed, slamming the tubes of his glass shut. 'Play a jape on me, will ye, ye… clowns!'
Wonder if anybody 'dfuss much if I just sank 'em, anyway I Lewrie wondered; There's bound t'be mimes yonder. Mimes, clowns, fools, and 'Captain Sharps.' Might be doin' the world a favour!
'Gawd, they's wimmen thar!' a sailor in the afterguard gawped.
'Deck, there!' the mainmast lookout shouted. 'Nekkid wimmen!'
'Still!' Lewrie howled to shut down the bedlam. It wasn't his way to run a totally silent warship, as some captains might, where no talking or unnecessary sound beyond the bosuns' pipes calls passed an order, but… might this be a sly ruse to get him within gun range, all unsuspecting and almost completely 'disarmed,' then…?
'Silence on deck, silence all!' Lt. Langlie sternly shouted.
Lewrie jerked the tubes of his telescope open to full extension again, so angrily he could hear the brass grinding against the stops, and lifted it to his eye. There were even more clowns, all prancing about in a dance that looked inspired by St. Vitus, giving each other the odd bash with their pig bladders, turning St. Catherine's Wheels… the nearly-nude people aloft… no. They wore costumes sewn so snugly that they at first had appeared nude, but he could now see that they wore tights and similar upper garments, with equally-snug wraps about their groins as skimpy as a Hindoo's underdrawers. And, they were swooping to and fro on swings hung from the masts, leaping from one to the other as agilely as so many squirrels. Two or three twirled horizontally from taut ropes being swung by people on deck, and even a few were playing at sliding down the braces of the sails, riding perilously from the royal yard and the stiff windward edge of the sail to the t'gallant, to the tops'l, then down the edge of the course!
'Wonder if they'll charge admission, heh heh,' Lt. Catterall quipped to the helmsmen.
'I said still!' Lewrie snapped. 'Mister Larkin. Do they have this month's private merchant code?'
'Uh, nossir.' Larkin sobered from being lost in amusement.
'Then make a hoist,' Lewrie ordered. 'Fetch-to at once. Do not use the trade's private signals… use the common book.'
'Aye, sor.'
And damned if a brace of clowns didn't leap atop the quarterdeck bulwarks, make exaggerated gestures of cupping their ears, then waving large handkerchiefs and shouting, 'Yoo-Hoo!,' even blowing kisses!
'Trumpet!' Lewrie barked, taking the one that Lt. Langlie meekly offered. He turned back to the rails, lifted the speaking-trumpet to his lips, took a deep breath, and bawled across the narrowing range between both ships, 'Fetch-to, or I will blow you out of the water!'
He heard a faint 'Yoo-Hoo!' returned, as one of the clowns got his hands on a speaking trumpet, too, though at least some of the men on the Festival's quarterdeck realised that Lewrie was serious, and tried to claw the fellow back down, and retrieve the brass instrument.
'Mister Langlie!' Lewrie snarled. 'Larboard chase-gun! Put a round-shot under that bastard's bows. Close under!'
BANG! The 9-pounder chase-gun on the larboard forecastle went off terrier-sharp, and in the blink of an eye a 'feather' of disturbed spray leaped into being right beneath Festival's jib-boom, collapsing in a salty mist over her own beakhead rails.
At least the clowns stopped crying, 'Yoo-Hoo!'
'God's sake!' a man Lewrie took to be the ship's master cried in alarm from her quarterdeck. 'We're British). Hold yer fire for the love o' God, sir!' He lowered his 'recovered' speaking-trumpet, and took off his old-style tricorne hat, mopping his forehead on his free sleeve. 'Merchantman Festival, three days outta the Cape Verdes, and bound for Recife!' he continued, with a fresher breath.
'Fetch-to, Festival!' Lewrie yelled back. 'I will inspect your papers!' To his officers, he ordered in a softer voice, 'Lower away a cutter, and muster a boarding party.'
Lewrie completed his climb up the battens and man-ropes to the Festival's starboard entry-port, once both ships had fetched-to, cocked up into the Trades at a relative halt. Sailors, acrobats, and women in scanty casual clothing stood about her decks awaiting him, as did her master and mates. A man in a battered old tricorne doffed his hat, and Lewrie began to doff his in return, but…
Three white-garbed clowns ran up to 'toe the line' along a plank seam; one widely salaamed in Arabic fashion, a second banged his head on the deck in a Chinee kow-tow, whilst the third parodied bosuns' calls on a nose flute.
'Don't make me shoot you!' Lewrie harshly warned the flutist as he gathered a fistful of pom-pommed smock in one hand, and tapped the butt of one of his sashed pistols with the other.
'Gerroutofit!' the ship's master angrily shouted. 'Jesus!' he added half under his breath as he came from his quarterdeck to shoo them away. 'I'm that sorry for that, sir. That sorry, too, to be such a bother, but we had no idea you were Royal Navy, and ran from you. I am Amos Weed, master of the Festival, and you'd be bein'…?'
'Captain Alan Lewrie, sir, of the Proteus frigate,' Lewrie said, his humours still unsettled by the jeering amusement the circus people expressed as they congratulated the clowns on their jape.
Smells like the cats' sand box, Lewrie told himself as he got a good first whiff of the air aboard the merchantman.
'Our owner, Captain Lewrie,' Capt. Weed said, waving at a portly fellow tromping up the starboard ladderway from the waist. 'Mister Dan Wigmore, of Wigmore's Travelling Extravangaza.'
' 'Ow do, sir, W do!' Mr. Wigmore cried as if Lewrie was a long lost brother as he joined them. He was garbed in a bilious green wool tweed coat and loudly-embroidered tan waist-coat, a pair of taupe-grey corduroy breeches, and top-boots. He bobbed from the waist jerkily as he doffed a very fashionable, narrow-brimmed 'thimble' hat. 'An' werry glad we are t'see ye, Cap'm! Daniel Wigmore… but I 'spects ye know o' our Extravaganza a'ready. Th' finest, most h'amazin' portable show h'ever ye did see!' Wigmore declared in a
