A King's Trade (44 page)

Well, there were letters from Sewallis and Hugh. Both of them almost made him feel much better, for they were frankly
proud
of him, all eager to leave their stultifying school, and go fight the French,
and
the evil “blackbirders”!

His father, Sir Hugo, was also complimentary, noting that his and their ward Sophie's social invitations had increased since word of what he'd done had first appeared in the newspapers, though the old fart
did
complain that he'd have to sell off his shares in a Liverpool slave ship on the
quiet
side, since the price had suddenly sunk so low, and he might not have profitted from it, anyway, and how dare his son associate with such a “wild-eyed and rabid pack of hounds,” sure to be exposed in future in secret league with the most Jacobite and Levelling wing of the Foxites and “French-Lovers” who had lost all credence after King Louis and his Queen had been beheaded in ‘92! Besides, an English gentleman should
not
appear in the papers unless he did something glorious or noteworthy; else, only his birth, his wedding, and his demise should be grist for common reading by the lower sorts!

His daughter, Charlotte, sent a one-page letter, which stated that “Mama told me you did something Heroic, though extremely Foolish and Reckless, over some Black People, but that is your Nature, as Mama has ever said. Thank you for the dolls from heathen Brazil, they are very pretty, though the package contained a large, black, and hairy Spider as big as my hand. Before Governess squished it, it was most awfully good fun to chase about! Mama says the Admiralty told her you are now in Africa or India. If you can find another spider, I would love it. If not a spider, I would very much like a Monkey!”

And, Caroline, herself, well…

Long-suffering, God-only-knows-what-you-have-done-to-shame-us-this-time, though she did note that the vicar of St. George's in Anglesgreen had delivered a rather impassioned (for him) homily about slavery, and why it should be abolished throughout the realm, as it was already in Great Britain. She also noted that her brother, Governour Chiswick, a former slave-owner himself in the Carolinas before the American Revolution, had nearly stormed out in anger, had not his sweet wife, Millicent, restrained him, and that the two of them were now at-loggerheads over the subject. The vicar had praised their own local “Emancipator,” had almost (but not quite!) called him a “True Christian Gentleman” (which might have set off inappropriate laughter, and driven
Caroline
to storm out, Lewrie suspected) so that almost everyone in Anglesgreen now thought him a fine fellow, even the local squire, Sir Romney Embleton. What
his otter-faced son, Harry, thought was not recorded, but then, who cared a damn what Harry Embleton thought!

“… though our lands in the Cape Fear, of such sweet Memory, were, indeed, worked by Negro Labour, never in my mind can I recall an
instant
of such Brutality as the papers describe in the Sugar Islands of the Caribbean, Alan. Why else would Old Mammy and a few others of our household clew to us so fiercely, and kindly, and my old Mammy to Emigrate with us to England, where, ‘til her Passing, she served Mama and Papa and me so Faithfully and Cheerfully, even after Manumission?

“I can only pray that the accounts of the Reformers and Abolitionists are greatly exaggerated to foment their Cause's success, or, should they prove True, that the Reformers
succeed,
for no one of our former acqaintance in North Carolina, a most genteel and refined Society, could ever have even conceived of such fiendishness. Evidently, the planter class in the Sugar Isles are an utterly Depraved lot, bad as the tobacco-chewing dregs who are now, I am told, populating lower portions of the old Georgia colony!”

Am I too cynical, or is she too naive?
he had to wonder at her well-edited remembrances.

“Alan, you have ever been a Puzzlement. Worthy of cursing for an inveterate Rogue and Rake-Hell, a jocular and slothful Lack-A-Day, where an Upright Man would shew Sobriety, Diligence, and Rectitude in his doings. For a man grown, you evince such a Boyish, Indolent face to Life. Surely, such should preclude your Advancement in such a demanding profession as Seafaring, and the Navy, yet, you not only thrive, you are become a great Success, and a Hero.

“I also pray that this recent
beau geste
of yours is a sign of you turning from Folderol to Rectitude, that the Navy has forced you to so Discipline yourself in your professional and publick Life that some wee bit of that Discipline has, at last, trickled over into your private life, as well. Had you the ability to apply but a Tithe towards mastering your Amatory Nature, our Marriage would have remained a most Happy One, no matter now many years apart, nor how many thousand miles separate us. If only such were True I could own to Complete Approval and Adoration of an heroic Husband! Though, until such is proven to me, you will understand you have won but a Portion of my Praise, you Incomprehensible, Paradoxical, Ever-Amazing Man!”

Which was certainly a lot more warmth than he'd gotten from her past letters, Lewrie decided. Did all England hail him as “Saint Alan the Emancipator”—and they forgot that horrid “Black Alan” quickly, pray God!— Caroline
might
deign to accept him back, in public, at least. Were they cheered in the London theatres like Horatio Nelson, she
might
stand beside him in their
private box, and even go so far as to wave and smile in appreciation with him… though Lewrie doubted if she'd be gazing up at him in mute adoration, exactly.

Most-like she'd keep her eyes out for the flirty orange-seller wenches,
Lewrie grimly thought;
and rip the lungs out of the first'un who tried t'hug me! Not that I can act'lly
blame
her…

Still, it was a start towards
some
sort of reconciliation, but only the iciest sort, and only if he came out his troubles smelling like Hungary Water. There
was
a chance they might reside under the same roof, again. In the same bedchamber, the same bed, well…he might have to hire-on a food-taster, and sleep with one eye open for a time.

“…Mother Charlotte is failing, Alan, and we despair that we may see her with us by Autumn,” Caroline related by long-distance, in her “homebody”
persona.
“We do hear, though, that, in Response to our informations sent to Burgess in India, he is now of a clear mind to throw up his Commission with the East India Company Army, now that he has achieved a Majority with the 19th Native Infantry, your father's old Bengali regiment, and, with the last remnants of the Tippoo Sultan Uprising quelled, in which Burgess informs us he has amassed quite the “Chicken Nabob” fortune, it his greatest Wish to be home with our Dear Mother whilst she is still well. Who knows, perhaps his Fortune will prove even greater than the one you reaped in the…”

Beyond that news, there was only a formal close, and an
almost
jocular plea that he closely inspect any packages of gifts he sent for the children in future, and under no circumstances was he to send them anything
living.
A formal set-piece of a final sentence, worthy of a letter to a corn-merchant of long, but arm's-length, standing, and she signed herself rather
coolly
simply as “Your Wife, Caroline.”

Lewrie determined to write her back, instanter, to strike while the iron was at least luke-warm. And, he'd write Sir Malcolm Shockley, too, and ask him to delve around Twigg's and the Abolitionists', true motives, and whether he really had been set up as a sacrificable cat's-paw!

I
t is sinkink?” Eudoxia asked with a puzzled look as she used his telescope to study
Proteus
as she sat at her anchors out in Table Bay.

“Everything we could shift is moved forrud,” Lewrie explained, “to lift her stern as high out of the water as possible. The divers have hammered new gudgeons in place, underwater, and we've ‘spliced' the sternpost above the waterline with the timber we fetched back from Simon's Bay. It just
looks
precarious.”

Precarious, indeed, for with all her artillery, round-shot, and victuals casks shifted up near the cable tiers, the frigate sat like a badly-anchored duck decoy on the water. Her bows were immersed as far as her lower gunwale timbers, the sea up almost as high as her hawse-holes and the lowermost beakhead rails, whilst
Proteus
's stern was up as if she was a live duck, ready to bob and feed off the bottom weeds of a pond. It even made Lewrie sweat to see it. But, without a dockyard and a graving dock, this was the best they could do.

Andries de Witt's multiple oxen team and his timber waggon had rumbled down to the piers with the new rudder, where Lt. Catterall and the Bosun, Mr. Pendarves, had erected a shear-legs to hoist it off the timber waggon's supports, then sway it out and down into a large barge…
another
of Mr. Goosen's “quite reasonable” hirings. It was as ungainly and squat as a fat-bellied Dutch coaster in the Scheldte or the canals, nearly fifty-four feet long and over sixteen feet in beam, the scruffy sort of thing that usually bore cargo or an entire six months' supply of water in vast casks in her belly; low freeboard, fitted with a dozen
sweeps… a cockroach scuttling ‘cross a harbour in full daylight, and just about as handsome.

“Once under our counter, we'll moor the barge snug against the stern,” Lewrie went on with his explanation, wishing he could cross a finger or two, for the reality could
not
go as easily as his breezily glib exposition. “The long, thinner part is the upper stock, and that will slide up through a large hole under the transom. The bottom end will swing, even
float,
but, with the kedge capstan and the hoisting chains, we'll lift her ‘til she's almost hangin' right, then use brute force, aloft and a'low, to get the bronze pins of the pintle fittings into the holes of the gudgeon fittings, and she'll ride all her weight on ‘em, once we've let out slack on the hoisting chains and cables.”

“You
do
speak
Engliski,
Alan?” Eudoxia asked with a crease in her forehead as she lowered the heavy glass. “Half of what you say is…
shumashetshi…
how you are sayink…?”

“Daft? Mad babbling?” Lewrie supplied with a snicker. “That's sailors for you. Our own language, even our own dictionary.”

“Da…
daft,” Eudoxia said with a giggle, testing the word a few more times, and finding “daft” right pleasing.

“Lower away…handsomely!” Lt. Catterall bawled to the work-party, as the massive, and heavy, new rudder finally was swayed off the side of the pier, above the barge. He was echoed by Goosens, spouting a flood of Dutch, the local variety some called Afrikaans, Javanese, or Hottentot, for all Lewrie knew. Now and then came an English phrase having to do with “damn your eyes, don't sink my boat!” or some such.

“So …” Eudoxia further said, with a playful, teasing note to her voice as she stepped closer to hand him his telescope back. “You get the…rudder… on, you sail for England right away, Alan?”

“That'd be up to Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Curtis, Eudoxia. Once we're seaworthy again, he may tell us to escort that new-come convoy to Saint Helena, or all the way to the Pool of London, I truly don't know. It may take days to get us set-to-rights, proper, and they may sail without us, and we'll have to do a short patrol cruise round the Cape, instead, ‘til Captain Treghues comes in with another homebound trade,” he told her.

“Hmmm,” was her pleased, purring comment to that news. “If you wait that long, we go shootink together? You give me tour on frigate?”

“Be delighted to, m'dear,” Lewrie vowed, taking a second of his attention from watching the rudder being lowered into the barge, and, yes, with his cack-hand fingers crossed along the seam of his breeches. “A shore supper, what the Frogs call a
‘pique-nique'
…a basket of food and wine one eats outdoors, that is….”

“We
shoot
food, roast on sticks!” Eudoxia cheerfully enthused, all but bouncing on the toes of her moccesins. “Build fire, take big blanket…cut poles, and put up
palatka,
uhm, dammit…
tent!
Hunt springbok, duck, and grouse…! Eat wit' fingers, get greasy…!”

Damme, but it
does
sound temptin'!
Lewrie thought, one eye on the swaying rudder, one ear cast for Eudoxia's patter, the other ear cocked for pierside sounds, like snapping or groaning ropes, squeaky or jammed blocks in the hoisting tackle, trying to sort them out of a constant intrusion from the comings-and-goings of rowing boats along the pier from the newly-arrived Indiamen, and the clatter of coaches and carriages either dropping off passengers or arriving to pick them up.
A tent. Hell yes! Night in the wilds,
he fervidly imagined;
one of those
bomas
du Toit mentioned, ring the camp with thornbush to keep lions out of the …what was it?
Kraal,
that's it!
Kraal!
Just me and her?
He almost had to shake himself to stay focussed.
Well, some natives t'hew an' tote, but off in their own little…
kraal,
once the sun goes down, and…