Dewey Lambdin - Havoc`s Sword

"Morning, Nimrod," Lewrie bade his host, standing bare-headed by a whitewashed column on the veranda, balancing cup and saucer, and savouring his second refill of coffee, heavily laced with local-made brown sugar, and thick cream fresh-stripped from the teat. The smell of burned gunpowder lay heavy on the air, and a small cumulus cloud of nitres and exploded sulfurs mingled with the predawn fog.

"Ah, good morning, Alan me old," Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Cashman answered right gaily for such an ungodly hour, turning to face him as his man-servant quickly reloaded the pair of duelling pistols. A scarecrow figure of straw stuffed into white nankeen slop-trousers and loose shirt, already holed with long practice, stood beyond the shell-and-sand drive, the requisite fifteen paces from Cashman's line in the sand, and the rickety folding field-table that bore his arsenal.

"Sleep well?" Lewrie enquired as he lifted a thick slice of hot, toasted bread, slathered with fresh butter and mango jam, to his lips.

"As peaceful, and as undisturbed, as a babe," Cashman boasted, with a chuckle and a wide grin, and Lewrie had to admit that he seemed in fine fettle, clear-eyed and "tail's-up" with gleeful anticipation, not dread, of facing another man's levelled pistol not an hour hence. "Not Nimrod, though… that's huntin'. Nay, rather I fancy meself an Achilles this mornin'. Ready to slay my Hector and be done."

He was dressed for it, of a certainty, with the care and forethought required of a man who'd shortly "blaze." Silk shirts were de rigueur, more easily drawn, in whole patches, from bullet wounds. Kit wore white cotton breeches, freshly boiled in lye soap, thoroughly rinsed in clean well-water and air-dried on a line strung on the upper balcony, above the miasmas and smuts of the daily traffic to the house, and the risk of tropical "infusions" that came from damp soils. Tall black-and-brown-topped riding boots completed his ensemble; thick'uns, almost proof against a stray ball, or a snakebite, too.

"And I'm…?" Lewrie asked with a small, approving laugh, never the greatest of Greek scholars.

"My Ulysses, Alan… ever the crafty bastard, haha!"

"Didn't he make off with most of the loot in the end?" Lewrie wondered aloud.

"Lost it all by shipwreck, then went home to his wife, at the last," Cashman said, picking up a newly loaded pistol and taking his stance, side-on to the target, to present the slimmest right profile to a return ball, pistol cocked and his forearm vertical, the long barrel in perfect alignment with his forearm, mortally intent…

Bloody bastard! Lewrie cringed; just had t'remind me o' bein' on the outs with the wife back home! He rather doubted that Caroline was pining away and spinning wool as faithfully as… Penelope, was it? Not that Caroline, a paragon of virtue to his "crow-cock" Corinthian nature, would ever cuckold him… would she?

Down went the right arm, hinging like a heavy gate beam, and the pistol and forearm were as straight and steady as a sword blade, and, Bang! Another.63 calibre lead ball plumbed the red wool Valentine's heart pinned to the straw man, now almost punched or clipped into the form of a many-layered cockade, or a rose blossom.

"Steady, is it? There's a wonder… after last night," Alan said, thinking that even one as cocksure as Cashman could use a little encouraging toadying, that hour of the morning.

"Three shared bottles, and a brandy night-cap? Mere piffle," Cash-man scoffed. "Nought t'fuddle a soldier's constitution. Though you look a tad 'foxed,' still. Thought sailors could hold their wine, b'God! Game enough for't, I trust?"

"Oh, I'll toe up proper, Kit, no worries," Lewrie answered, an angry second from a harsher retort. Cashman was not the same man he'd been over supper. Today, he had his "battle-face" on, and friendship, or another's feelings, could be go-to-hell. He had a foe to kill, and consideration had little to do with it. Now, did he survive, and succeed, he'd be puffed full of relief and joy, and breakfast would be a nigh-hysterically blissful explosion of high-cockalorum. But that was for later.

Lewrie polished off his toast and took a sip of his coffee, as Cash-man snatched up the second pistol of a sudden, back to the target, pistol and forearm vertical again but close to his chest, to quickly spin on the balls of his feet, take stance, and fire. Another cloud of gun-smoke wreathed him, but he was smiling. His snap-shot had hit.

"Awake enough now, are ye?" Cashman snapped. "Let's be about it, then. Here comes the coach. And God help Ledyard Beauman!"

C ashman's feud, his almost Corsican vendetta versus ex-Colonel Ledyard Beauman had been going on for months, Lewrie sourly thought as the coach-and-four jounced and rumbled over the irregularities in the sand-and-shell road, with both pairs of pistols in boxes in his lap. He sat facing aft, while Cashman took the rear seat facing forward, arms folded across his chest, chin down, and his face made of ruddy granite, centred on the rear bench with no need of support from the coach's padded sides or window sills. Lewrie was crammed into the fore-left corner, more than willing to wilt against leather and an open window sill. Not a word had passed between them in the quarter-hour since they'd entered the coach.

End o ' my relations with the Beaumans, root an ' branch, Lewrie told himself in the uncomfortable silence; and by God but they're rich and influential! Should've begged off, but… a friend's a friend, a promise is a promise.

Odds were, Kit would blast Ledyard Beauman's heart clean out of his chest, drop him like a pole-axed heifer for veal, and the Beaumans would blame him, damn' em! for agreeing to be Cashman's second, whichever way it went. The father was retired back in England, the sort of huntin', shootin', tenant-whippin', crop-tramplin' fool of the squirearchy… but with so much money to sling around, he appeared so much more civilised when he sat on his coin-purse, and surely was

more than welcome round Whitehall, the Admiralty, Board of Trade, the Court, and Parliament, with half a dozen "bought" Members from his own Rotten Boroughs to do his bidding in Commons, mayhap even a "skint" peer dependent upon his largesse to look out for his interests in Lords, too!

One letter from his son Hugh, now in charge of their plantings and enterprises here in Jamaica, and they could ruin him! Not that he stood in particularly "good odour," already, for all his successes at sea. The longer the war against Revolutionary France and her unlikely ally Spain continued, the more "priggish" people were getting, he had noticed. Smallish peccadilloes and indiscretions so easily dismissed back in the '70s and '80s were now nearly the stuff of scandal.

Lewrie blamed the Wesley brothers, the Hannah Moores, and the William Wilberforces, and all their goose-eyed, slack-jawed tribe, for meddling, sermonising… Reformers… for mucking things up with all their "shalt-nots" and "viewing with alarm," their evangelising, their… revivalising! Why, did they keep their mass-crowd preaching up, not only would fox-hunting and steeple-chasing go by the board, there'd be an end to bear-baiting, dog or cock-fighting, boys beating the bounds every spring, morris dancing, and cricket, too!

And fucking and adultery would be right-out, of course.

It was a mortal pity. Here he was, a True Blue Heart of Oak, a bold Sea Officer of the Crown, and just because he'd kept a courtesan for a year or so, had an affair with a young widow who'd produced him a child on the wrong side of the blanket… Even the two medals tinkling together on his chest for Saint Vincent and Camperdown meant nothing.