A King's Trade (23 page)

Fredo seemed pleased, giving out a raspy “Whuff” or two.

“So, mightn't ye put in the good word with yer Admiral an' them, Cap'm Lewrie?” Weed asked as Jose mercifully led Fredo away, finally. “‘Bout us joinin' your convoy for a spell?”

“Uh …” Lewrie dazedly reiterated, seeing another keeper come up on the main deck, just done leading a burbling, spitting baby camel into the sunshine, and
damned
if he'd pet that! “Perhaps it's be best did we retire to your cabins, Captain Weed, so I may study your manifests, registries, and such.”

A
bsolutely not!” Capt. Sir Tobias Treghues snapped. “A band of seagoing…
Gypsies!
Might even be pirates in a gaudier garb.”

“Well,
Festival
's papers are all in order, sir,” Lewrie pointed out, with as much deferential patience as he could. “And, while there very well may
be
some Gypsies among the circus folk…fortune tellers and such… I don't b'lieve we've any pots need mending, nor are there any babies aboard our ships to steal, so…”

“Oh, well put, young sir!” Capt. George Clowes hooted, lifting a handkerchief to his mouth as he had himself a good guffaw. Clowes was the senior civilian master of the East India Company “trade,” and therefore the temporary “Commodore,” who would see them all the way to Calcutta or Bombay, perhaps onwards to Canton in China, too. “We indeed are bound for Recife, Captain Lewrie, and I see no valid reason why the circus ship should not be given our protection, seeing as how we're all going the same way. Really, Sir Tobias …” he “tsk-tsked.”

“They could have been lurking off the Cape Verdes, just waiting for a fat convoy to come along, sir,” Capt. Treghues continued to demur. “If not pirates themselves, perhaps they serve as the eyes and ears for enemy privateers, perhaps a small French raiding squadron. Their claim of water shortage might allow them alongside one of Captain Clowes's vessels to be succoured, and…”

“They look slit-eyed dangerous to you, Captain Lewrie?” Clowes asked,
giving Treghues a long up-and-down look as if his patience was long, but not limitless.

“I'd not turn my back on their dancing bears, sir,” Lewrie told him. “But, my boarding party and I searched the entire ship, looking for anything odd… well,
piratical
odd, not outrageous odd…and we found nothing amiss. They've but eight light six-pounders, and those are British Army cast-offs. There are only thirty-odd in her crew, and perhaps an hundred circus and theatrical folk, all told. The
Festival
's master, Captain Weed, possesses but a dozen muskets and fowling pieces, and a dozen rather dubious Sea Pattern pistols, all under lock and key in his great-cabins. Of course, there are boarding pikes and cutlasses in their one arms locker, also locked up securely. Oh, I fancy those sailors of theirs have personal knives, there's a knife-thrower with a small chest full, and a sword-swallower with a small arsenal, and among the ‘artists' one'd find pocket pistols and daggers and such. Hat-pins among the women, but…”

“And she's a slow sailer, this Captain Weed admitted?” the East India Company captain enquired. He was a trim and spare fellow in his late fourties, rather distinguished looking, and, with the salary of a “John Company” master, dressed extremely well, with a vague attempt at a uniform look that emulated Royal Navy fashion, ‘less all the gold lace folderol, and with silver buttons instead of gilt or brass.

“Aye, and there's another reason she should be shunned,” Treghues snapped, fidgeting in his leather-covered chair behind his desk in HMS
Grafton's
great-cabins under her old-fashioned poop. “She'll slow our progress. We'll take
weeks
more to…”

“And my Indiamen
won't,
Sir Tobias?” Capt. Clowes tittered, as he shared an amused look with Lewrie. “You've already made sufficient remonstrances for more sail, and quicker progress, sir, and complained of our customary reduction of sail after sundown. ‘Bare steerage-way' you called it, I seem to recall? It's the Company's
way,
sir, for the comfort of our paying passengers.” Clowes stated more soberly, laying down the law, in a manner of speaking.

A way of speaking that a Royal Navy captain, a putative “Commodore” in his own right with a triangular red pendant to prove it…even if it did bear the white ball of an officer not
officially
listed in that rank, yet…found both egregious and insufferable, it would appear, from Lewrie's observation this evening, and from his previous service under Treghues.

God knows
he
was always smug and insufferable!
Lewrie thought.

Treghues was the son of a poor but titled family, and had been raised with all the deference given to members of the peerage; he had entered the Navy despite being the eldest, for there was little to inherit but the empty title, with “The
Honourable” following his younger rank, and preceding his Christian name. Even so, people
would
tug at their forelocks and doff and scrape to nobility, and…unless he had proved himself
monumentally
unsuited…would continue to be courted in a midshipmen's mess, the officers' gun-room, or as a captain second but to God. He never
had
been the sort who took disagreement with his notions easily, had ever been sublimely cock-sure of himself, and was primly “strong in the Lord.” Lewrie was certain that Capt. Clowes and his casual nature, and his quick, amusing wit, was a constant trial to Treghues. Treghues was the sort who expected pot-holes to be filled before he crossed them, stairs to flatten themselves, and Clowes, and Lewrie himself, were deep, sloppy road ruts and trip-snares!

“If it makes you any easier in your mind, Sir Tobias, perhaps…since
Festival
will be as slow as my Indiamen,” Clowes suggested, “you could keep her under your guns at the rear of the trade. Where it most certainly appears she will end up.”

Were a long-suffering Christian permitted to snarl, slam fists on the desk, perhaps even aspire to rising and kicking cabin furniture, Capt. Treghues looked more than ready to turn from a Job to a Samson in the pagan temple! Crash-bang, and down come the pillars to bury smarmy “John Company” captains under the rubble!

Lewrie could not help himself; he felt a fit of “smarmy” coming on, and let it take wing.

“Besides, Sir Tobias,” he said with a sober, straight face, “to allow
Festival
to make the best of her way alone would undermine Orders In Council…or was it an Act of Parliament? Can't quite recall its origin, but…Thirty-three George the Third, Cee-Sixty-six of Seventeen Ninety-eight. All British merchant vessels…and the
Festival
demonstrably
is
…must attach themselves to convoys under Royal Navy escort which either go
to
their destination, or as close to it as may be, sir. For a merchant master to do otherwise, he would be subject to a fine of one thousand pounds.”

Sir Tobias Treghues did two things simultaneously; he scowled at Lewrie as if he'd turned into a steaming, gore-dripping Beelzebub liable to ruin an armchair,
and
seemed to perk up at the mention of a substantial fine to levy.

“Of course,
Festival,
on her initial voyage to America,
was
in a Halifax convoy,” Lewrie explained, hiding his delight at what he had read up on once back aboard
Proteus.
“Sailing alone from one Yankee Doodle port to the next, down to Savannah, Georgia, this last year entire, she was not
strictly
on the high seas, and therefore not liable to the Compulsory Convoy Act,
and
departed Nassau alone for the very good reason that no South-bound convoy originates from the
Bahamas. Captain Weed assures me that it was his intent all along to join any convoy he met which could see him to Recife, Saint Helena, or Cape Town,” Lewrie laid out, ticking items off on his fingers. “And, so he has,” he concluded, then folded his hands back in his lap, behind his cocked hat.

Pecuniary interest quite flew Treghues's head, and utter disgust for the beslimed Imp of Satan seated before him rose to the fore. His mouth flapped open, then snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.

“I never expected
you
to become a sea-lawyer, Lewrie,” Treghues sarcastically drawled, fidgeting a deal more in his chair, and uttering a faint, subdued sound that seemed very much like one of Lewrie's own “patented” “Arrs,” perhaps with a slight improvement of Treghues's own devising resembling a parrot's “Rwark!” that he stifled rather well by raising a fist to his lips, as if caught in mid-cough.

“Captain Weed and Mister Wigmore have put up the bond for their passage, sir,” Lewrie further explained, reaching into an inner pocket of his coat and withdrawing a letter. “I laid out to them the penalty of failing to obey escort instructions, lagging behind, or departing a convoy without proper leave, sir, and the fines liable for disobeying. As well as the one hundred pounds penalty for not making all efforts to avoid boarding by a foe, or failing to alert the rest of the convoy to such incident, by night or day. Now, as of this hour,
Festival
doesn't possess our private signals book which you devised, nor have they posted the pertinent articles of Thirty-three George the Third, Cee-Sixty-six on a board on their quarterdeck, but…perhaps did you send an officer aboard her in the morning with those, one who could ascertain how much they have done to be in compliance with Thirty-three George, and the Compulsory Convoy Act…perhaps go yourself, Sir Tobias? To satisfy your worries, for yourself? And, they're circus and theatre folk, sir, so you're bound to be amused.”

“Grr-umph!” Treghues thundered into his fist, louder and more acidic than before, fidgeting forward in his chair as if he wished that he could leap across it, take Lewrie by the lapels, and shake him back to subordinate sobriety. That, or slap him senseless!

“Would that suit you, Sir Tobias?” Capt. Clowes innocently asked, though he had a slight trouble with his own throat, it seemed, for he had need for a fist at his lips, too.

“If!”
Capt. Treghues barked. “If, ah …” he repeated in calmer takings after a moment, “the law
requires
us, requires
them,
rather…and, given Commodore Cowles's assent to this
des …
!this particular, ah…vessel's joining the convoy, then, well… hmm,” he flummoxed, trailing off whilst trying to
put the best face on abject surrender, or humiliating defeat. “I s'pose we must allow it, though…”

“And will they keep
strictly
to themselves, sirs?” came a harsh voice from aft, from Treghues's sleeping space, which was screened off by some rather nice glossy deal partitions and “homey” chintz drapes. “Or, will such low and
amoral
people be allowed to contaminate us
all?”

It was a female voice, which made Lewrie start and swivel about in his chair (made easier by the slug-trail of satanic slime he'd left in it, perhaps?) to seek the identity of the speaker.

Thought
I saw a woman on the quarterdeck, the first day,
Lewrie told himself;
Damme, did Treghues marry, at last? And does he carry her aboard?

Long, long ago, when the old HMS
Desperate
had helped evacuate the last British garrison and American Loyalists from Wilmington, North Carolina, Treghues had been rather taken by Caroline Chiswick, had even very clumsily and embarassingly sniffed about her; even more embarassingly trolled about Lewrie to see if the girl might prove willing for him to sling a tentative “woo” at her. Damned near grovelling, he had been, blushing as if it nigh-killed his prim soul to discover what he could of the girl from such a
low
source!

And, did he ever hear that she married
me
in
‘
86, I wonder?

The heavy draperies were pulled back, and the lady in question appeared, with her knitting still in her hands, and both bone needles clutched in a white-knuckled grip like all-conquering Brittania ready to heave spears or cross swords with the foe.

Yoicks, what a bloody horror!
Lewrie silently gawped, keeping a level expression on his phyz as he rose from his chair at her entrance. Lady Treghues was the
severe
sort!
Wouldn't care t'run into
her
in a dark alley!
was his thought as he clasped his hat to his breast, and made a “leg” to her, as did Capt. Cowles, which nicety she ignored in her pique. Hair which might have once been lustrous and fetching was now a drab mousey-brown, and drawn back from her face; her face, of a particularly-pale complexion, bore not a trace of fashionable cosmetic artifice. A firm square jaw, lips so thinly pursed that she could be mistaken for one of Zachariah Twigg's kinfolk; harshly high,
knotty
cheekbones, and the only feature that might draw favourable comment was her light, jade-green eyes, which were now spitting glittering Arctic icicles like a shower of cross-bow bolts. Despite the lingering warmth of an evening near the 20th Latitude, in a stuffy, closed great-cabin, Lady Treghues was simply
swaddled
in a Puritan-dark heavy gown, covered from scrawny throat to her wrists,
and
draped in a wool shawl of her own making, to boot! Oh, she was a long and lanky gawk!