Dewey Lambdin - A Jester’s Fortune

"Side-party!" Lewrie bellowed. "Sergeant Bootheby, turn out!"

" 'Tention on th' weather decks! Ship's comp'ny, fall in, face starboard an' off-hats!" Will Cony, the Bosun, was shouting.

"An ill wind, Mister Hyde?" Lewrie sighed, going forrud to meet their strange arrival, as the side-party mustered quickly, with even the Marines in their small-clothes, and no chance to toss on tunics.

"Ill winds never blow anyone any good, sir." The eighteen-year-old frowned.

"My, my, sir! Such pessimism in one so young!" Lewrie teased.

Though he wasn't smiling when he did.

Nor when the Nor'east gust faded, the harbour waters calmed to a brief, glassy-stillness and the sun and the insistent, warmer Sou'east breeze returned.

Palms slapped on Brown Bess muskets, and the Bosun and his new mate, Sadler, trilled their calls as the makeshift side-party assembled to greet the officer who'd clambered up the man-ropes and battens, ascending at last to the starboard gangway. Lt. Ralph Knolles was there, in the proper fig (and thank God for that! Lewrie thought) to present his sword in salute. On-watch crew members doffed their hats, while the off-watch "Make and Menders" stood bareheaded, at some form of attention, anyway, amid all their flopping laundry.

Lewrie scampered forward, stuffing his voluminous shirttails into his casual slop-trousers, scuffing his old shoes as he all but hopped to roll down the trouser legs to his ankles.

"Captain Thomas Charlton, come aboard, sir!" he heard the man in the perfect uniform announce to Knolles. "Your captain?"

"Sir!" Knolles almost barked, distracting Charlton's eye from Lewrie, until he'd gotten somewhat presentable. "Welcome aboard, sir. Allow me to name myself to you-Lieutenant Ralph Knolles, sir, First Officer."

"Captain Charlton, sir?" Lewrie said at last.

"Yer hat, sir!" his cabin-servant/valet Aspinall whispered at his side, proffering his abandoned headgear at the last instant. Alan clapped it on his head quickly, leaving a rebellious rogue's lock of slightly curly hair under the front brim over his forehead. "Commander Lewrie, sir, your servant. Welcome aboard."

"Ah," Charlton replied primly, giving him a head-to-foot once-over, cocking a single sardonic eyebrow at what he beheld, as Lewrie doffed his hat in salute. Slop-trousers! Charlton sniffed to himself. No stockings on his ankles! Man's lucky to shew himself shod! Post-Captain Charlton's gaze went to the penny-whistle that Lewrie held in his left hand, along his side like a truncated small-sword. "Ah," he reiterated. "So you're Lewrie."

"Aye, sir," Lewrie answered. "Beg pardon, Captain Charlton, but we're having 'Make And Mend,' after a quick refit, and I wasn't expecting-"

"Quite." Charlton nodded, seeming to relent a bit. "Pardons to you, sir, for not prefacing my intention to visit with a note before I did so. Or simply sending you a summons aboard Lionheart. My ship, yonder." Charlton pointed to the fine 5th Rate that lay farther out in the harbour. There was a note of pride in his voice. "Well?"

Oh, Christ. Lewrie groaned to himself, feeling the urge to fidget. Bastard wants a glass o' something in my bloody cabins!

"You'll have to excuse the mess, Captain Charlton, but may I offer you a sip of something refreshing?" Lewrie beamed.

"Quite," Gharlton answered, as inscrutable as the Sphinx.

"This way, sir," Lewrie offered, glaring at Knolles, trying to mouth "Full kit!" at him without Charlton being aware. "Aspinall?"

"Aye, sir?" his lank young servant piped up.

"Dash on ahead and get us chairs, glasses and such."

"Aye aye, sir," Aspinall grunted.

Lewrie cursed himself again. He'd gestured with the damned penny-whistle! This was not making a good first impression at all!

The odour of fresh paint predominated; fresh paint, linseed oil and varnish. All the deal-and-canvas partitions had been struck below, as if the cabins had been stripped for battle. Dining furniture, the sideboard, wine cabinet, desk, sofa and chairs had been shunted over to the larboard side and covered with scrap tarpaulins. The sleeping coach and that damnable big-enough-for-two hanging bed-cot were in plain view. Captain Charlton took in the clutter, the sight of a Free Black tricked out as Cox'n, chivvying the working-party out, up the narrow companionway ladder to the after quarterdeck, so he and this… this Lewrie could speak in private. A weedy young valet, too weak-looking to draw breath, was trotting out two good armchairs in the middle of the deck, a collapsible tea-tray between them, and a pair of glasses. As far as possible from any still-wet surface.

"Will you take claret, sir? Brandy? Hock?" Lewrie offered, crossing to his desk to throw up a paint-splotched tarpaulin cover, open a drawer and hide that silly penny-whistle from further view. "Or we have most of a pitcher of lemon and orange water, sir. Sweet and tangy. With a weak admixture of Italian spumante, o' course."

"Like a cold gin punch without the gin, sir?" Captain Charlton enquired, with what to Lewrie felt like immense forbearance and patience. "Aye, that sounds refreshing."

Aspinall poured from a pewter pitcher so cool, compared to the heat trapped belowdecks, that it almost frosted. "Bit o' winter ice from shore, sir," he explained shyly to their visitor. He topped up those glasses with an opened bottle of sparkling white wine.

"Remarkably refreshing," Charlton allowed after a sip or two. "Now, sir. Reason for my unannounced call 'pon you."

"Oof," Lewrie grunted again, as Toulon the two-year-old ram-cat leaped into his lap. He'd grown considerably and had filled out to be quite a lapful, all sinew and sleek fur. He stretched out upon Lewrie's thigh, head out towards Charlton, paws hanging atop Lewrie s knee, tail slightly bottled and the tip thrashing below his master's chin. His yellow eyes were half slit, coolly regarding this possibly hostile newcomer, unblinking, with his ears half flat and his whiskers forward on guard. " Toulon, sir. Where I got him, so it seemed…"

No, this ain't goin' well at all! Lewrie thought with a sigh.

"Uhm, yahyss… quite," Charlton rejoined, with a sigh of his own; that sort of sigh Lewrie had heard often in his school-days, the sort associated with tutors or instructors he'd let down badly.

' 'Bout the same sort of disaster, Toulon is, too, sir," Alan said, for want of something cleverer, and instantly regretting it.

Charlton fixed him with a dead-level glare for a moment, nigh the same sort he'd been getting from the ram-cat, as if he couldn't quite believe his eyes. A Commission Sea Officer, a full Commander of the Royal Navy, sitting cross-legged with a twelve-pound feline in his lap- half-empty glass in hand-amid a barking shambles of a great-cabin, dressed as out-at-the-heels as a dockyard drunk and stroking the damn beast as if nothing much were amiss!

"Just came from Victory, Lewrie," Charlton said at last. "Had a word with Admiral Jervis. I am charged with command of a new squadron. And you, and Jester, are to be a part of it."

"Good, sir." Lewrie brightened.

"Good?" Charlton queried sharply. "Why 'good'?"

"Because there's little value in blockading the Genoese Riviera any longer, sir. We've lost it," Lewrie replied straightaway. "The French now have the good coastal roads-Marseilles to Genoa -open year-round. Less coastal shipping to intercept, d'ye see, sir."

There, that sounds sensible, Alan thought; so he won't think he's dealing with a hen-head, after all. He wouldn't have to be the one to admit that to Captain Horatio Nelson, his present squadron commander, or to his favourite, that toplofty earnest prig Captain Cockburn, he and Jester's presence were about as welcome as wasps at an outdoor wedding.