A King's Trade (25 page)

The Surgeon, Mr. Hodson, and his Mate, the exiled former French physician, Mr. Maurice Durant, made what attempt they could to determine the women free of venereal, or other communicable, diseases. The Bosun and his mates, the Master-At-Arms, and his Ship's Corporals searched incoming goods, and the whores' underskirtings, for contraband liquour, but
that
was a losing proposition, and small bottles of local rum or arrack always got past them.

Watches would still be stood in harbour, and the cry to rouse a division, a watch, usually was no longer “Wakey wakey, lash up an' stow” but “Show a leg, show a leg.” Hairy-legged men got chivvied out of a hammock; smooth and (mostly) hairless female legs were allowed to sleep in! Everyone got as drunk as they could afford, danced as exuberantly and sang as loud as they could holler, and coupled in hammocks, or on the deck between the guns, whenever they felt the itch, with a blanket hung from the deck-head for only the slightest modicum of privacy. It sometimes required the Master-At-Arms, the Bosun,
and
those Marines who
weren't
whoring or talking-in-tongues-drunk to break up fights over a woman, a parrot, puppy, or kitten, a dram of rum or a suspect run of the cards, dice, or backgammon.

Lewrie slept aboard, but wisely took his gig ashore right after breakfast, and didn't return ‘til after Lights Out round nine o'clock. What he hadn't seen he wouldn't have to punish, and would usually hold a rather lenient Captain's Mast, unless relatively innocent sins turned into crimes against the Articles of War.

The Portuguese were neutral in the war against France, and the people of Recife were friendly towards most visiting seamen. Without wartime taxes, and with the higher value of the Pound Sterling, he had gone on a frenetic shopping spree. Fresh, low-tide sand by the barrel for the cats' “necessary”; jerked meats and sausages for their feeding; hard-skinned citrus fruits by the bushel, co-coanuts for their novelty; both local and imported wines to restore his wine-cabinet and his lazarette stores; fresh ink and paper, new batches of candles and oils to fill his lanthorns; a new shirt or two; Christmas presents to ship to Caroline and his children, Sewallis, Hugh, and Charlotte, for he'd not had enough time to do so in London or Portsmouth, and here it was not only
past
Christmas, but almost two months into both the new year of 1800 and a new century as well!

Lewrie had bought a personal store of Jesuits' Bark,
cinchona,
just in case of Malaria breaking out after a shore call, along with a box of citronella candles in tiny wooden tubs, that Mr. Durant found useful to defeat the sickening tropical miasmas that had engendered an outbreak of Yellow Jack aboard
Proteus
when first in the Caribbean in ‘97. And, when they were anchored near shore, the candles seemed to shoo away the pesky mosquitoes, too, allowing one to sleep at night without diving completely under the bed-covers.

New linen or cotton bedding, too, a spanking-new and more comfortable cotton-stuffed mattress for his hanging bed-cot, since the old one had begun to reek, from both his own sweat and the odd claim laid upon it by Chalky or
Toulon, most especially when Capt. Nicely had supplanted him for a time last year.

And,
laundry!
And hot baths!

At sea, laundry was done in a wood bucket with seawater or part-fresh, part saline, in which the lye soap the Purser, Mr. Coote, sold could barely raise a lather. The freshwater ration was a gallon a day per man, officer or ship's boy, and most of that was used to boil the salt-meat rations or rare duffs or puddings in net bags in steep-tubs in the galley. To rinse, other net bags were used to tow the washing astern in the ship's wake, so clothing smutted and stiff with tar and “slush” stains from the skimmed fat from the galley used on all of the rope rigging to keep it supple, reeking of human sweat and fleshy oils and grease, came back aboard but a
tad
cleaner, and simply stiff with salt crystals, once they'd been dried. After a while, everyone, from the aristocrat to the powder monkeys, erupted in painful, suppurating salt-water boils. Lewrie included.

Laundry done in boiling-hot
fresh
water, though,
oceans
of it, then rinsed and re-rinsed in colder fresh water, churned and paddled, wrung and beaten, then sun-dried on a line of clean rope, could hold the boils at bay for weeks, months, if one carefully rationed changes of underclothes and sheets, and didn't go
too
potty on fastidiousness!

The officers and midshipmen had decided to go shares on fresh livestock, too, and had asked if their captain might wish to join in. They'd hunted up a nanny-goat with two kids, which could be milked for addition to coffee or tea, so sweet that even hot cocoa didn't require too much sugar stirred in. And, a good kid goat was tender eating as well! They bought chickens and new coops, so they could have eggs at least three days a week, along with a lusty rooster to quicken chicks so the flock would prosper, if the noisy little bastard did his duty. A fat duck or two, some pigs, including a pregnant sow sure to birth some roast sucklings sooner or later, and a bullock for consumption in harbour, and one for later fresh beef.

Even a permanent guard had to be put on the manger under the break of the forecastle, to help the ship's boy who tended livestock—genially known as the “Duck Fucker”—keep the Marine's pet, the champion rat-killing mongoose, from stealing chicken eggs. By now, she was
very
well-fed on dead rats (which upset the midshipmen's mess no end for taking
that
source of meat), sleek, and well-groomed, and wore a red leather collar, and the semi-official rank of Corporal, listed in their muster book as Marine M. Cocky.

Then, after a sublime first night ashore's supper of local seafoods, fresh salad, soup, and mango pudding, washed down with a moderate lashing of
wine, Lewrie had decided to toddle over to the plaza to take in the show at the Wigmore's circus.

Capt. Weed of the
Festival
was right; the language problem was insurmountable, so the planned dramas and comedies, and the songs they usually sang in English, had been dropped, but there was still a lot to see, and the performers of Wigmore's Travelling Extravaganza were Jacks and Jills of all trades, able to play any role called for on stage, or flesh out acts in the arena, both aloft and alow.

Lewrie paid his admission, and got a seat several rows back on a shaky set of locally run-up tiers of benches set about an open area at one end of Recife's typically large colonial plaza. Before him, there were two foot-high rings formed by garishly painted wooden boxes, the outer ring about ten feet closer to the audience, the inner ring about sixty feet across. Temporary masts and spars and shear-legs inside the inner ring stood with the aid of rope rigging. Colourful flags flapped in the slight evening breeze, and long strings of cast-off signal flags or small, cheap burgees were hung everywhere a rope could be stretched. Torches or large lanthorns illuminated the inner ring, and the air was heavy with expectation of something out of the ordinary, and the local crowd, half of them children, stirred, squirmed, and chattered. Lewrie made sure that his watch and fob, and his wash-leather coin-purse, were safe in the front pockets of his breeches, for though he wasn't exactly in the “cheap seats,” some of the better-dressed Brazilians nearest to him still bore a shifty, pick-pocket's look. At least he was back far enough to be spared the attentions of the damned clowns and mimes!

All in all, it was rather enjoyable. There were fire-eaters or sword-swallowers, bareback riders who performed acrobatics while their mounts cantered or loped about the inner ring, strongmen billed as Hindoo
jettis
who drove nails with their fists into wood, or broke stacks of bricks. Human pyramids of acrobats, jugglers who threw knives back and forth, people who went aloft above the “boarding net” to twirl on taut vertical ropes, or leap from one swing to another. There was a rope-walking act, followed by dancing and trick-performing bears, Fredo and Paulo of his recent acquaintance.

In the slim outer ring, there were parades of animals, though Lewrie
did
think that the zebras more-resembled the four burros he had seen aboard
Festival,
docked-tailed and mane-shorn, and tarted up with soot and chalk stripes. There were performing dogs, a rooster who did a dance (even if his iron dance
floor
had
been heated beyond endurance, Capt. Weed had told him). There was a horse who could add, subtract, or multiply, a camel race (with the baby camel chasing them, ridden by a monkey in a red vest and turban), followed by an eye-patched scrawny man with a whip who worked a pair of mangy old lions, and went so far as to put his head in one's mouth, which set the locals into paroxyms of fear; followed by trained parrots which could play fetch from children in the crowd, if shown a matching item first.

And, the clowns and mimes, of course, as
entre actes,
whacking each other with pig bladders or whatever fell to hand, who also worked a troop of monkeys for all they were worth, and that right-lewdly, too. Though that seemed to go down better with the mostly Catholic audience than Lewrie might have expected.

Earlier on, Jose had made a second appearance as a knife-thrower, with both the brassy wee redhead “actress” and the little blonde as his assistants, or targets on a huge revolving wheel; he could even do it blindfolded—or so it appeared, at least.

And, there was “Eudoxia,” the raven-haired wench who had caught Lewrie's eye the first day aboard
Festival.
She'd assisted with a dog act, been one of the bareback riders, all in garish, revealing costume, but, her final showing put all those in the shade. Out she came in a scanty outfit to do a solo turn. She wore a spiky, glittering tiara of what looked to be old sword tips and too-big-to-be-real paste gems, all that atop both her own hair and a black wig of tight-curled tresses so long they reached her arse, and looked like old ropes. Eu-doxia had on a sheer upper garment, a hip-length, one-shouldered Greek
chlamys,
sheer enough to show off her silver
lamé
corset (that did wonders for lifting her breasts, and Alan Lewrie's libido!), skin-tight breeches, and knee-high suede boots, with a large, recurved Asian horn bow and a sheaf of arrows.

“…
cruelly
h'exiled. Princess Eudoxia, ladies an' gentlemen!” Daniel Wigmore cried by way of introduction, pausing to let a locally-hired gentleman translate for him. Wigmore had more gilt lace, silver chain mail, and brass buttons on his bright red coat than a dozen generals were authorised. “… h'escaped from th' myster' yus steppes o' th' Roosias!…wifth' blood o' h'ancient Parthians, Scythians, an' Cossacks in ‘er ‘ist'ry! Daughter o' th' fabled h'Amazon female warriors wot shot their arrers from th' walls o' Troy, h'itself, fightin' fer ol' King Priam in th'
h'Iliad
! I gives ye that h'archer
par excellence…
that most beautiful an'
deadly,
‘oo revenged ‘erself on them ‘oo slew ‘er own true love wif ‘er silent
steel… h'Eudoxia!”

It started slow, but built right craftily, Lewrie thought. She began with regular straw-stuffed canvas targets, but then progressed to playing cards, candle
flames to snuff, large rings flung aloft, which she snapped a beribboned arrow through. Locally-gathered, expendable, pigeons released from wicker cages didn't stand a chance as they fled towards the far end of the plaza, even right overhead of the audience! The wee blond “actress” turned up with a canteloupe on her head, and that got skewered, too. Then a grapefruit, then an orange, finally an apple,
a la
William Tell!

For the
pièce de résistance,
a gaudily caparisoned white horse trotted out into the inner ring, and Eudoxia gave a great shriek, and ran after him, springing and rolling astride, and proceeded to perform her art on targets from horseback, too: seated upright, kneeling atop her mount,
standing,
even scissor-legged along her horse's side, and shooting from below his belly, from under his neck! “Eudoxia” finally drew rein after squarely hitting the ace of spades on a playing card at the full
gallop,
then reined back her horse so hard that he skidded to a halt on the plaza's stones, to rear and prance, pawing the air with his fore hooves to a tumultuous applause, as the small band did a triumphant fanfare, and, over the roar of the crowd, uttered a howl of victory that the Portuguese
might
mistake for an Amazon or Cossack phrase, but which to Lewrie sounded suspiciously like
“Sic semper tyrannis!,”
before she wheeled away behind the gaudy sailcloth draperies that screened the performers and beasts from view.

As her horse dropped to all-fours, though, she swept the upper tip of her bow across the audience, stiff-armed, and ended aiming at Lewrie! A
salaam
-ish bow from the waist from the back of her horse, then a very wide grin, and she blew kisses to everyone, with a final one again directed at him, and a vixenish, impish smile, to boot!

Well, then!
he thought;
Well, well, well, hmm! Wink's as good as the nod! Though…

As he'd suspected, there
had
been visiting back and forth from one plodding ship to another, on days when the winds and seas weren't up, and
Festival
had indeed drawn more than her fair share of callers.
Proteus
had spent half her time close under
Grafton
's lee, close under the slow
Festival,
too, though unable to partake of an hour of two of diverting amusement, probably so Treghues could keep a damn' wary eye on the both of them! By telescope, Lewrie had noticed that civilians off the Indiamen had gone aboard much tenser than they departed. All callers had been warmly greeted, and the female members of the troupe had always been the first to welcome them, and the last to see them off.