A King's Trade (21 page)

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!”

J
ust 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
outré
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 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'd fuss much if I just sank ‘em, anyway! 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…