A King`s Commander - Dewey Lambdin

"If it holds, Cap'um," Buchanon cautioned automatically, "aye, if it holds."

"What the hell's that?" Lewrie snapped, of a sudden, disturbed by a tuneful noise. "You, there! Yes, you, sirs! Stop that noise!"

The first-class boys, gentlemen volunteers, were by the mizzen stays, up on the bulwarks and clinging to the inner face of the ropes, starry-eyed little new-comes, rapt in their first exhilarating beat to windward. Richard Josephs, he was only eight, a slight, cherub-faced minnikin. George Rydell was only a year older, a dark-haired pudding. They both turned to peer at him, eyes wide as frightened kittens, and aghast that they'd done something wrong.

"Which of you was whistling on deck, sirs?" Lewrie demanded of them, hands behind his back and scowling a hellish-black glare.

"Mmm… me, sir?" Little Josephs piped back shyly.

"Bosun's mate!" Lewrie howled. "Pass the word for the bosun's mate! And get down from there, the both of you. Mister Josephs, no one, ever, whistles 'board-ship, young sir. Never! It brings storm and winds. Dares the sea to get up!"

"I'm sorry, sir," Josephs quailed, folding up on himself like a bloom at sundown, and already weeping. "I didn't know, and…"

"Damn fool," Mister Buchanon spat. "Pray God, sir…"

Half his life in uniform, half his life at sea so far, and Alan, and Buchanon, knew why men should never tempt Neptune with cockiness.

"Aye, sir?" Cony said, knuckling his brow as he arrived on the quarterdeck.

"Josephs was whistling on deck, Mister Cony," Lewrie explained.

"Aye, sir," Cony rumbled deep in his chest, all his affability gone in an instant. "Half dozen, sir?"

"Aye, and then explain to both of 'em, so they never make such a cod's-head's mistake on my ship again, Mister Cony," Lewrie ordered. "Mister Hyde, you will see to it that Josephs is restricted to biscuit, cheese, and water, all day tomorrow, to drive this lesson home."

"Aye aye, sir," Hyde answered, smug with lore, and distaste for the error. There would be a raisin duff tomorrow at dinner, and that meant a larger portion for both himself and Spendlove.

"You, and Spendlove both," Lewrie snapped, "you're senior below in your mess. Kindly instruct these calf-heads more closely in ship lore, and the fleet's do's, and don'ts. Their future behavior, well… on your bottoms be it."

"Aye aye, sir!" Midshipman Hyde flushed, and gulped. Josephs's whiny mewlings rose above the wind-rush; that, and the sound of rope "starter" strokes, a half dozen, applied to his bottom, bent over the bosun's mate's knee instead of over a gun, to "kiss the gunner's daughter."

Josephs almost yelped like a whipped puppy at the last but one, forcing Cony to stop and shake him by the arm by which he restrained him. "Quiet, lad," he told him, almost gently. "Nothin' personal… but real seamen don't cry out. Else it'll be six more, see? Take the last'un like a man." And Josephs did, though in utter misery, as if everything in life had just betrayed and abandoned him. Which prompted Rydell to purse his lips and inhale.

"Don't!" Lewrie warned. "Find a new way to express yourself!"

"Oh!" Rydell all but swooned, half knocked off his feet by a further warning nudge from Mr. Hyde. "Oh God, sir…!"

"Half dozen d'livered, sir," Cony announced.

"Thankee, Mister Cony. I trust that'll be all," Alan told him sternly; though he could not quite resist a tug at the corner of his mouth, the constriction of one eyelid in a surreptitious wink. Which gesture was answered in kind, as Cony doffed his cocked hat.

From time immemorial, boys had been beaten to make them mind, or learn. Boys at sea, more than most, to drive their lessons home. It was a harsh world at sea, and it was better to be harsh right off, than watch the chubs get themselves maimed or killed, or hazard the ship, through inattention, ignorance, or skylarking. Spare the rod and spoil the child, the Good Book said, after all. And within one hour of reporting aboard his first ship, so long ago, Lewrie'd learned that simple Navy truth. Some days, his entire first year at sea, even as a half-ripe lad of seventeen, they'd been signal days when his own fundament hadn't felt a captain's, or a lieutenant's, wrath.

"You two do come wif me, now," Cony snarled, putting back on his fearsome bosun's face. "Th' more ya cry, th' less ya'll piss… n'r bleed, later. An' mind close t'wot I'm goin' t'tell ya…"

A faint, half-felt drumming against the larboard bows as the sloop of war faltered, as she met a wave instead of cocking her bows gently up and over. A hiss of spray and a cream of foam breaking on the catheads and the forrud gangway. And a disappointed sigh from Mister Spenser on the wheel. There was a grouse-wing beat aloft, a soft, suspiring whisper, as the luffs of fore and main square sails shivered a lazy furling down to the leeches. Headed!

"Damn 'at boy," Buchanon spat as he witnessed the wind's death.

"Damn' quick response from old Aeolus." Lewrie frowned, trying to be philosophical about it. Nothing good lasted forever, after all!

The tiller ropes about the wheel-drum creaked as Spenser and a trainee were forced to ease her off the wind as it faded, as the ship sloughed and sagged to a closer, almost weary companionship to waves and sea. The apparent direction of the wind had veered ahead almost half-a-point, for ships working close to weather made half their own apparent wind, backing the true wind slightly more abaft at speed.

"West-nor'west, half north'z close as she'll lay, sir," the quartermaster said, with the frustrated air of a man who'd still won small on his horse that placed, but had lost almost as much on the one he'd backed to win.

"West-nor'west, half north it is, then, Spenser. Full-and-by," Lewrie agreed, just as frustrated. He leaned into the orb of candlelight from the compass binnacle lanthorn. Both their faces were distinct in the growing gloom, as if separated from their bodies.

Still, Alan supposed, with a petulant grunt; we'll weather the Scillies, and Land's End. Few leagues closer inshore, but…

"Grand while it lasted, though, was it not, Mister Spenser?" Alan commented easily. "A glorious, dev'lish-fine afternoon's sail."

"Oh, aye… 'twoz, Cap'um," the older man replied, his eyes all aglow deep under a longtime sailor's cat's feet and gullied wrinkles. With the sound of a gammer's longing for a lost-lost youthful love, he ventured to comment further. "A right rare'un, sir. Damn 'at lad."

"Another cast of the log, if you please, Mister Hyde," Lewrie called aft, stepping into the gloom. Eight Bells chimed up forward; the end of the Second Dog, and the start of the Evening Watch. "Mr. Buchanon, you have the watch, I believe, sir?"

"Aye, sir. Send th' hands below, then?"

"Aye. Nothing more to savor tonight." Lewrie sighed, moving to the windward bulwarks.

"I'll call, should…" Buchanon began, then wrenched his mouth in a nervous twitch, to keep from speaking aloud a dread that should best remain unspoken. Aeolus, Poseidon, Erasmus, Neptune, Davy Jones… by whatever name sailors knew them, the pagan gods of the wild sea and wind had, like e'en the littlest pitchers, exceedingly big ears! And like mischievous and capricious children, could sometimes deliver up from their deeps what sailors said they feared most.

Uncanny, it was, though-whistling on deck usually fetched a surplus of wind, rather than the lack. Gales and storm that blew out canvas, split reefed and "quick-savered" sails from luff to leech in a twinkling, leaving nothing but braces and boltropes. Never a fade, though, never a dying away. Nor one so rapid.

Perhaps tomorrow, Lewrie fretted; comeuppance comes tomorrow!

"Sir, we now log eight and one-quarter knots," Hyde reported at last, sprinkled with spray and damp from the knot log's line.

"Thankee, Mister Hyde." Lewrie nodded, keeping his gaze ahead, toward the west. Aye, we had ourselves a rare old thrash to weather, he thought; nigh two hours at ten to eleven knots! That's at least twenty more sea miles made good, due west, till… damn that boy!

At sundown, winds usually faded, replaced by night winds that might not be so stout, but usually remained steady in both vigor and direction. Clear weather winds did, at least.

And pray Jesus, that holds true, he grimaced. Stays like this the rest of the night… fade around sunrise, of course, for a bit, but that's nine hours at eight knots-say another seventy or so to the good. And only half a point to loo'rd of the best course I can hope to make, if the wind didn't get up, and make us reef in. If we don't get headed! Comes westerly again tomorrow, we'll either fall afoul of Ushant down south, or Land's End or the Scillies up north!

He decided to do his further pondering over charts in his great-cabins, where he could worry and smolder in private.

"Good evening to you, Mister Buchanon," Alan said, touching the brim of his hat in salute. "I wish you joy of the evening, sir."

"And a peace… ahem! And a good night to you, too, sir."

Lewrie nodded firmly at Buchanon's sensible reticence, and his rephrasing, then took himself to the larboard ladder to the gun deck.

Dispatches aboard, too valuable to lose, he mused; Frogs out in fleet strength… wind most like to die away to nothin', head us again… or come up by the bloody barge load, and…

Damn that boy!

CHAPTER

4

Surprisingly, the winds did no such thing, the third day upon passage. There was mist, to be sure, light sunrise winds that slatted sails for a while, but most cooperatively backing to the SW or SSW again. Clouds stayed low and cream-jug pale for most of the day. At the end of the Middle Watch, when the crew was summoned to scrub and sluice, then stand Dawn Quarters, there was a lot of dew, the mists riming everything with damp. Sunrise wasn't ominously red. The fog and mist dispersed, but never quite disappeared, limiting visibility to a scant four miles around Jester, even from the crosstrees. Noon sights were educated guesses of how high that diffuse, cloud-covered sun ball was, but the consensus of results on the quarterdeck, except for Mister Spendlove's, which placed them somewhere on the same latitude as Iceland, showed them weathering the Scillies and Land's End. And dead reckoning, and the record of the knot log, suggested a position beyond the Scillies- almost 100 nautical miles west of the Lizard since yesterday noon.

And, with the wind backing southerly, Jester could come back to due west again, though only at seven or so knots on a light, tantalizing wind, and stand even farther out into the Atlantic.

And the sea. It was almost calm, mashed flat by a humid, and rather pleasant warmth, glittering and rolling, folding and curling not over three to four feet, more mirrorlike, more oily and without ripples; though the long Atlantic rollers made themselves felt. The ship rose and fell slowly and grandly, lifted, her entire length, by the long period of the scend, instead of hobbyhorsing. When pitch she did, or roll, it was a slow, creaky procedure, quite predictable and almost pleasant for all but the landsmen and new-come Marines, who "cast their accounts to Neptune " over the leeward rails. Faint wake astern, barely a bustle of disturbance down her flanks as water churned sudsy close aboard, and her forefoot cut clean and sure into the round-topped rollers, to part them with hardly any fuss at all.