The King's Marauder (27 page)

Lewrie could at least take a little comfort from the fact that those ships sat cringing at anchor, unable to carry on any trade, for fear of his ship’s presence. And, in performance of the brief that Thomas Mountjoy had given him, to raise chaos and mayhem, he could also feel some satisfaction that he had terrified the Spanish by going after anything that floated, from coasting trader to fishing boats.

None were suitable to qualify as Good Prize, but they could make grand warning pyres, once overawed and forced to surrender, then taken in close to the coast by temporary prize crews, their masters and sailors freed to make their way ashore in their own boats, then set afire, by day or night. Admittedly,
Sapphire
pursued more than she caught, and many Spaniards out-ran them, but at least they ran into port to carry the tale of a merciless
Inglese
warship prowling for prey, which they only escaped by the skin of their teeth, by God’s Mercy. One of their last captures, an old lateen-rigged merchantman that they ran down off Almeria, carried a crew that wailed in terror that
el diablo negro,
“the black devil”, had caught them!

And Lewrie’s cook, Yeovill, had finally discovered the right amount of water and
cous cous
to boil up for an edible dish!

*   *   *

HMS
Sapphire
stood in towards shore yet another morning, just before dawn. The lower decks had been swept, the upper decks sluiced with water and holystoned, and the wash-deck pumps had been stowed as the hands were released for breakfast. The weather had turned rough, the last two days, with strong winds and high seas that had churned and foamed greenish-white, so it was with a sense of relief that the morning presented light winds and long-set rollers not over five or six feet high.

“Near due West, and we’ll make landfall a bit West of Estepona, sir,” Sailing Master Yelland estimated, bent over the chart, working a pair of brass dividers over it. “About … six miles offshore?”

“At least ’til Noon Sights, Mister Yelland, and then we’ll alter course to Sou’west, or thereabouts,” Lewrie agreed, “and make our way toward the Straits, and into port.”

He stifled a yawn, for he’d slept badly as the rough weather had eased, snatching less than an hour between urges to go on deck to respond to the now-and-then lurches, rolls, and louder groans from the hull. He’d only had time for one cup of coffee, too.

“Sail ho!” came an electrifying shout from the mastheads.

“Another fire, huzzah!” said some sailor on the larboard sail-tending gangway forward of the quarterdeck and the chart room laughed aloud.

Lewrie excused himself to go to his great-cabins and fetch his telescope, then trotted up to the starboard side of the poop deck for a look-see.

“One point ahead o’ th’ starb’d bows, hull-down!” a lookout on the foremast cross-trees shouted down. “Nigh bows-on!”

“Bound for Estepona?” Lewrie heard Lt. Harcourt speculate on the quarterdeck below him.

“She won’t live long enough to make it, sir,” Midshipman Leverett boasted. “We’ll cut her off, if she doesn’t go about and run.”

Lewrie’s telescope revealed what appeared to be a two-master under gaff-hung lugs’ls and a large jib, all winged out to starboard to cup the dawn’s shore breeze. He looked aloft past the brailed-up main course to the commissioning pendant and how it streamed, judging the direction of the wind, and thinking that if
Sapphire
came about to Nor’west by West, he could block the two-master’s course for the obvious refuge of Estepona, drive her closer inshore, or force her to go about and attempt to run away to the West, where the only safe haven might be the mouth of a minor river.

Sapphire
was slowly bowling along under tops’ls, fore course, spanker, foretopmast stays’l and inner and outer flying jibs, making an easy six or seven knots.

“Mister Harcourt,” Lewrie called down to the quarterdeck. “I will have the main course spread.”

“Aye, sir!” Harcourt crisply replied, lifting a brass speaking trumpet to call for topmen to go aloft to cast off brails, and for halliards and clews to be manned.

Yelland said true dawn’d be ten minutes past six,
Lewrie told himself, pulling out his pocket watch. He looked aft into the East, just in time for false dawn to depart, and see the first golden blush of sunrise, which painted the horizon and clouds with deep crimson; “Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning”. There would be more dirty weather to come, and he hoped that they captured the stranger in good time, so he could get his ship out into deeper waters before the new bout of foul weather caught up with them.

“Hull-up, there! Deck, there, th’ sail’s hull-up, and bows-on, still one point off th’ starb’d bows!” the foremast lookout cried.

Not tryin’ t’get away?
Lewrie thought, finding that puzzling. If her master had any sense, and there was a single pair of eyes over there, she would have hauled her wind long since.

“Damned if I don’t think she is making straight for us, sir!” Lt. Harcourt called up to Lewrie from his post below, looking eager, but perplexed. “Shall we alter course, sir?”

“No, stand on as we are, Mister Harcourt,” Lewrie decided. “If she’s that blind, I’ll oblige the fool.” He closed the tubes of his telescope and descended the starboard ladderway. “I’ll be aft. Keep me informed, while I have some more coffee, and a bit of breakfast.”

“Aye, sir.”

Once in the great-cabin’s dining-coach, Pettus poured him a fresh cup of coffee. There was a plain white china creampot filled with a few fresh squirts from the nanny goat up forward in the manger, and Pettus had shaved off some sugar from the cone kept in Lewrie’s locking caddy. Yeovill swept in with his food barge even as Lewrie took his first sip, apologising for the sparseness of breakfast, seeing that it was a Banyan Day and all, but he did set out a steaming bowl of oatmeal with a plop of stale butter and treacle, and a boiled egg on the side.

The Marine sentry who guarded the cabin doors stamped boots, slammed his musket butt on the deck, and bawled, “Midshipman Harvey, SAH!”

“Enter!” Lewrie called back.

“Ehm, Mister Harcourt’s duty, sir, and I am to say that the strange sail is still bows-on to us, and shows no sign of fleeing us.”

“My compliments to Mister Harcourt, and he is to stand on. Have the hands eat, Mister Harvey?” Lewrie asked the young Mid.

“I believe they have, sir,” Harvey replied.

“The last look I had of our odd stranger, she’d didn’t appear t’be much of a threat, but I’d admire did Mister Harcourt lead and prepare the six-pounders on forecastle and quarterdeck, and have the Marines turned out under arms.”

“Very good, sir!”

“Bless me, Mister Harvey,” Lewrie brightened, peering closely at the Midshipman’s face, “but do I note that you are in need of a
shave?
”

“Ehm, yes, sir!” Harvey proudly admitted, stroking his upper lip with a finger.

“A trim of your locks might not go amiss, either, Harvey,” Lewrie said. “Carry on.”

“Aye, sir!”

“Ye wouldn’t have one o’ Chalky’s wee sausages t’spare, do ye, Yeovill?” Lewrie asked, enviously eying the cat at the foot of the table with his head deep in his food bowl.

“Always, sir,” Yeovill said with a twinkle in his eyes.

Happily chewing away, Lewrie returned to the quarterdeck with his telescope to look outboard at their strange, fearless oddity which was now only about two miles off, and still coming on as bold as a dog in a doublet.

“Damn my eyes, but I could
swear
she looks familiar,” the First Officer, Lt. Westcott, who had come up from the wardroom, vowed. “Now where…?” he wondered.

“She appears just another of the typical coasters hereabouts, Mister Westcott,” Lt. Harcourt said with a shrug, “though her wish to be captured is odd.”

But, by the time that both ships had closed to within one mile of each other, Lewrie had a sneaking feeling that they had seen her once before, too.

“What’s that?” Harcourt barked, lifting his glass to give her another close look. “God’s Teeth, there’s someone waving a British Jack over yonder!”

In Lewrie’s ocular, there
was
a Red Ensign being wig-wagged at them by someone amidships of her starboard rails, and other people on her decks were waving hats, coats, and shirts at them as if very glad to see them! A moment later, and the strange vessel handed her foresail and began to round up into the wind, hauling her mainsail taut and setting her jib cross-sheeted to fetch-to.

“Damned if we
haven’t
seen her before,” Lewrie exclaimed. “We took her a month ago. It’s that same filthy old grain barge! Close her near as you may, Mister Harcourt, and prepare to fetch-to.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Harcourt replied, sounding even more perplexed.

*   *   *

Within a quarter of an hour, both ships were cocked up into the wind, and a rowboat manned by two oarsmen and a tillerman, with two passengers aboard, was stroking for
Sapphire
’s starboard entry-port.

“Side-party to render honours, sir?” Lt. Harcourt enquired.

“They don’t exactly look Navy t’me, sir,” Lewrie said, looking the newcomers over. “Let’s wait ’til we know who they are.”

The rowboat hooked onto the mainmast channel platform and two men scrambled up the boarding battens to the open entry-port, making Lewrie wonder if King Neptune’s scruffy court had come to call, for both were most oddly dressed, and looked more like itinerant Gypsies.

“
Hola, señores!
” the first aboard gaily called out, sweeping off a shapeless felt hat to make an exaggerated low bow. He wore a cracked pair of buckled shoes with no stockings, grease-stained and tar-stained slop-trousers, an equally-dirty shirt and a waist-coat made of tan leather. “
Hola, amigos!
I, Vicente Rodriguez … better known as John Cummings … greet you. I am master of the
Gallegos,
the splendid ship you seized for me!” He did so in a Spanish accent, then in an accent that put Lewrie in mind of Kent. “And you there on the quarterdeck, I assume would be the gallant Captain Lewrie? Greetings from Mister Thomas Mountjoy, who also expresses his thanks for his fine new vessel!”

“Has the circus come to town?” Lt. Westcott grumbled under his breath.

“I’d wait for the jugglers, first,” Lewrie muttered back, then stepped forward to greet Rodriguez/Cummings. “Welcome aboard, sir. However you name yourself,” he said, offering a hand.

“Allow me to name to you my compatriot, sir,” Rodriguez/Cummings announced, turning to the other new arrival, who had held back behind the loquacious Cummings, peering about with a top-lofty air as if he was amused by it all, or found
Sapphire
a low-class pigsty. “Mister Romney Marsh, a man of so many identities that they are impossible to enumerate. Romney, this is Captain Sir Alan Lewrie, Baronet.”

“Honoured t’make your acquaintance, sir,” Mr. Marsh said in a clench-jawed Etonian accent, the sort that usually got right up Lewrie’s nose. Marsh offered his hand, then quickly switched to a Bow Bell’s Cockney, “an’ ’aven’t I ’eard o’ you, your ’onour, sir, hah hah!”

“Mister Mountjoy sent for assistance to expand the reach of his posting, sir,” Cummings elaborated. “We arrived at Gibraltar only one day after you left port.”

Lewrie only half-heard that; he was still goggling at Marsh, who had just as quickly turned Spanish and was singing some song with a daft grin on his face, lisping away like the haughtiest Castilian.

Bloody lunaticks, the both of ’em!
Lewrie thought.

“Ehm … shouldn’t we be discussing such in private, Mister Cummings?” Lewrie asked. “‘Under the rose’, all that?”

“Well, we shouldn’t stay too long in company with your ship, lest watchers ashore associate
Gallegos
with the Royal Navy,” Cummings said, “but, perhaps a few minutes, over a glass of something?”

“That great American, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote that ‘wine is God’s way of telling us that he loves us, and wishes us to be happy’,” Romney Marsh cited, turning his face angelic. “Yes, make us happy, please do, Sir Alan!”

“This way, then, gentlemen,” Lewrie bade. “Mister Harcourt, we will remain fetched-to a while longer. Alert me does a strange sail turn up.”

“Aye, sir,” Lt. Harcourt replied, trying not to laugh at the continuing antics of the mysterious Mr. Marsh, who was practising some dance steps, and humming to himself.

*   *   *

“Wine, Pettus,” Lewrie requested once they were all seated in the starboard-side settee area. “Tea for me.”

“Oh, but the sun
is
below the yardarm, Sir Alan,” Marsh said, “since it has just arisen. Ah, you have a cat! Hallo, puss.
Venir, el gato bonito!
” he crooned with his head over to one side.

Chalky would have none of it; he crouched down with his tail tucked round his front paws near the wine-cabinet.

Someone in here’s got some sense,
Lewrie amusedly thought.

“You’re re-enforcing Mountjoy, you said, Mister Cummings? He said he had a man coming to command his boat, should I be able to get him one,” Lewrie asked, by way of beginning, and getting their meeting over quickly, so he wouldn’t have to deal with them for long.

“And, you did a splendid job of it, sir,” Cummings replied as Pettus fetched a bottle and two glasses of a smuggled Spanish white. “Yes, I’m to play-act a local trader, bearing goods smuggled out of Gibraltar, which as you know, thrives despite the regulations against it. I’ve always played around boats, I’ve always had a good ear for languages, and especially for Spanish and Portuguese, and the regional dialects. Nowhere near Marsh’s talents at it, but I cope. We’re to enter Spanish ports all along the Andalusian, Murcian, and Catalan coasts, ostensibly to trade, but also to pick up reports from agents in place, along with tavern talk. Carry instructions from Mountjoy, that sort of thing, find answers to questions, and fill in the gaps in what we know, and don’t know.”

“A dangerous business,” Lewrie commented as Pettus brought him a tall glass of cool tea with lemon and sugar.