H. M. S. Cockerel (19 page)

B o o k I V

Quae classe dehinc effusa procorum bella!

Ah, what wars shalt thou see when the
suitors pour forth from the Fleet!

Argonautica
Book I, 551–552
Valerius Flaccus

C H A P T E R 1

I
t
was surprisingly cool in the Mediterranean. So cool that charcoal braziers and a goodly supply of fuel had to be taken aboard once
Cockerel
had victualled at Gibraltar. Though the fires had to be extinguished at 9:00 p.m. each evening, along with all glims or lanthorns, their meek efforts did transform the wardroom to a fair measure of comfort, after a four-hour watch in a raw, chill wind.

Fluky, too, the Mediterranean was, compared to other oceans Lewrie had experienced. First of all, there were no tides to reckon with, which could be a blessing. Otherwise, though, he thought it a perverse bitch of a sea; there were perils enough in the irregular and unpredictable changes of currents that could put them miles out of any reliable “fix” of their position. And the winds were wickedly fickle, backing or veering as confusingly as the Bahamas in high summer. The frigate might beam-reach east with the wind steady to larboard in the forenoon watch, yet be taken aback by a capricious shift, and end the day beating close-hauled on starboard tack to make the same easting.

The beaches they saw when close inshore on patrol were pebbly, rock strewn, with only a thin rime of sand beach, and many anchorages were treacherous, rocky-bottom holding grounds—or the worst sort of semi-liquid mud that swallowed anchors, but gave no secure purchase to the flukes.

And there were the dread Levanters—brisk easterlies arising off Turkey, that could roar down in a twinkling with no high-piled bit of storm-cloud warning. At least the Siroccos out of Moorish Africa down south, which could arise just as quickly, were prefaced by bluffs of hazy, sand-coloured cloud fronts, which appeared as substantial as an arid landfall's mountains.

Positively frigid, not cool, was the most apt word for the ship's mood, though. Following the crew's brief moment of rebellion, and Captain Braxton's return from the flagship with his face suffused as a strangled bullock, floggings had abated, though not ended. Some men still had to go to the gratings for real, not imagined, offences. When they did go, their alloted number of lashes still remained high. But Lieutenant Braxton walked smaller, and morosely bitter, about the other commission and warrant officers, no longer the raging pit bull. Neither did the younger Braxton midshipmen tear through the ship, cackling with glee in their hunt for victims, though victims they still discovered, among the foolhardy and the stupid.

What was most surprising to all was the sea change in Captain Braxton. He was rarely seen on deck, and kept to his great-cabins for the most part. Most mystifyingly, those abundant occasions which had summoned him forth in the past, fretful to supervise the least evolution, looming ominously over junior officers and hands alike until they were done to his satisfaction—those he now waved off, and left to his subordinates, unless it truly was serious enough to endanger the ship.

When Lewrie reported to him now, Captain Braxton seemed careworn and spent, as if command of a King's Ship was something with which he could no longer be bothered. Their relationship, never of the best, had degenerated to a stiff, icily formal and punctilious politeness. A rigid nicety between two men of the merest acquaintance, both with the manners of lords, an observer unfamiliar with the situation might have concluded. Yet Lewrie could sometimes espy the quick-darting resentment of old in his glare, hear the tiniest rasp of abhorrence in the man's tone—as if Captain Braxton were biding his time, waiting for some unguarded moment when he could drop his sham of formal politeness, and get his own back.

And the hands . . . well, they were as efficient as ever they had been, on their best days, that is. They still performed their labours in silence. Yet, in the second dogs before sunset, on the mess deck, some now dared to jape and raise their voices to a somewhat normal level. Lewrie was pleasantly surprised, now and then, to hear the scrape of a fiddle, the peeping of a flageolet, a chorus of rough male voices harmonising over an old song, or a single shaky tenor lilting rhapsodic. Below decks—never on the weather deck—
Cockerel
sometimes softly trembled to the stamp of bare, horny feet, as old hands taught new hands the way to do a true tar's hornpipe.

Each Sunday after divisions inspections and a perfunctory Divine Service, there was now—if only because the flagship decreed it—a “Make and Mend” in the day watches (weather and duties permitting) and once a month in the dreary three months which had followed, there had been ordained a “Rope-Yarn Sunday,” a whole day in which the crew caulked or yarned, slept or chatted, repaired clothing and hammocks, carved snuff boxes and brooches out of dried chunks of salt meat (which took a high gloss and lasted long as most woods!), made ship models, or intricately woven twine articles—coin purses, belts and bracelets, brooches, rings and knife lanyards.

With such until-then unknown ease, they should have seemed a happier lot, now they were treated like an experienced and trusted ship's company. But they were not. Their grudge against the Navy, and the captain, was by then too deep. The damage done could not be undone in three months, and their resentment would continue to fester. They would serve the ship, yes . . . but nothing could make them glad about it.

As first lieutenant, Alan was alarmed by their continuing bad mood, almost as much as he had been by their earlier, bitter silence. A crew could be cowed into trembling obedience for only so long before an explosion occurred; they had proved that! Yet a crew allowed too much indiscipline by a slack captain was just as bad, and would result in much the same sort of explosion, if they thought they could get away with anything that entered their heads. Look at Bligh after his long idle months at anchor at Otaheiti, Lewrie thought!

Whatever had transpired aboard
Windsor Castle,
whatever reason for Captain Braxton's indifference, and the sudden abatement of his too-harsh taut-handedness, this particular stewpot, lidded too long, had been relieved much too quickly. It had not boiled over, thanks be to God . . . but it still could.

For Braxton's recent aloofness from the ship's company, and the seeming disdain he now had for how his juniors ran
Cockerel,
was sign to the crew that they had won some sort of victory over him. Let them think they had the upper hand, even for a moment, and they would lose respect for all authority.

Even a junior such as Lewrie knew that a man could not command a King's Ship inconsistently, blowing cool one day and hot the next, being harsh and tyrannical one moment and gentle and considerate as a mother with her babe another day. It sowed confusion and disrespect. At the moment, though,
Cockerel
's
captain pretended to command, and the crew pretended to obey him.

Leaving Lewrie and the rest in a worse predicament as the only enforcers of authority, the ones who were forced to use the lash and restrictions to prevent the men from believing that their lot could be changed.

Sadly, Alan concluded that the tiny, too-clever “mutiny-ette” should have been the entire raucous show, complete with brass bands and fireworks, a real cutlass-waving rebellion. Or it should never have happened at all. At least, the first instance would have been put down from without, Braxton court-martialed and found responsible, and no matter the blight on one's career, it would have been over and done with, and he would be in another ship, the hands parcelled out—those not hung in tar and chains from Gibraltar gibbets until their bones fell apart—to other ships as well, where they would find new captains who weren't brutes, and would finally discover what pleasure it could be to serve under someone firm, but fair.

In the second instance, though, there had been no way to avoid it happening, not with—

“Oh, the Devil with it,” Lewrie muttered sadly, taking stock of the world, far aft by the taffrails once again. “Thankee, Jesus! We need a little help here. 'Cause just when I think it can't get any darker, here we are . . . in the darkest!”

C H A P T E R 2

P
enny
postman,” Captain Braxton sneered in disgust once he had clambered back aboard. He bore more packets than those he'd taken with him when he'd departed to the summons of “Captain Repair on Board” from H.M.S.
Victory.
“Here, Mister Lewrie, these, I'm told, will come in handy for cooperation with our new . . .
allies.
See the officers of the watch and the midshipmen have 'em learned, quickly.”

“Our new allies, sir?” Lewrie inquired.

“Signals books,” Braxton harrumphed sourly, “so we may talk with the Goddamned Dons!”

“We're allies with Spain . . . I see, sir,” Lewrie replied levelly, though it was hellish hard to fathom how
that
had come about. After so many years of war, mistrust, condemning each other as either heretics to Catholicism or brisket-beating papist devils.

For all we hate 'em, since Drake and Raleigh's days? The Armada and all, Lewrie thought? Englishmen burned at the stake, tortured by the Inquisition, hung as pirates . . . well, some of 'em
were
pirates, o' course . . .

“Is the ship ready in all respects for sea, Mister Lewrie?”

“Aye, sir,” he was relieved to be able to announce.

“Then we shall weigh at once,” Braxton ordained. “We're bound to Naples. Dispatches for the British ambassador. Crack on all sail once round Europa Point, commensurate with the weather. Inform Mr. Dimmock he is to plot us the most direct course, twixt Corsica and Sardinia.”

“Aye aye, sir! Bosun! Pipe ‘All-Hands'! Stations for weighing anchor and getting underway!”

And, he thought sadly, so much for even finding out if we've any mail from home, or getting a chance to explore fabled Gibraltar!

• • •

It was a rough passage. Days of the Mediterranean's usual fluky winds, glowering skies, wind and rain, at least once or twice a day, between tantalising glimmers of sunlight. Butting into Levanters with green seas breaking over their frigate's beakhead and forecastle, and seething in foaming off-white sheets of water on the gangways and gun deck, soaking through the planking joins, soaking through the gaps in pounded oakum insulation and tarred seams, to drizzle clammy and cold on swaying hammocked off-watch sleepers, or the mess tables when men fed. Even the ward-room was not spared. Everyone was chilled and miserable, with no chance to dry out bedding or a change of clothing from one watch to the next. And this was only late June!

Occasionally, though, the winds veered more abeam, the skies cleared somewhat, and the dank below decks and upper works steamed in sunshine, and
Cockerel
laid so thick a mist about her from drying timbers that she fumed as if on fire. Then she could crack on eastward, her shoulder to the sea, and lope like the lean ocean greyhound that she was across what the classic poets called “a wine-dark sea,” power and wind humming in the rigging, her quick-work hissing and drumming as she ploughed impatiently over wavecrests, furrowing ocean to a wide frothing swath on either beam.

That was the kind of sailing that sometimes made it all worthwhile, that furious bustling, that paean to Neptune singing aloft and the dun sails stretched taut as drumheads, perfectly angled—for a time, only a time on any wind and sea—a ship making the best of her way, on her best point of sail, quick-stirring and alive.

Welcoming, warmer (well, to be frank, downright hottish) was the Bay of Naples, where they dropped anchor a week later, in the lee, so to speak, of that fuming ogre of ill repute, Vesuvius, a stone-toss away from the ruins of ancient Roman Pompeii.

As something of a classical scholar in his pre-Navy days, at a myriad of schools (and were one
exceeding
charitable about those scholastic attainments, mind), Lewrie was entranced. Who'd have thought, he asked himself, that he would ever have a chance to actually see the places mentioned in his dull, bone-dry Latin recitations? That Roman imperial translations would ever be anything more than garbled verbs, incorrect genders and tenses . . . and canings on his bottom? Yet here he was . . . here
it
was, before his eyes, a city so Roman . . . ! He half-expected it to be a phantasm, sort of like having an ancient statue in the entry hall become animate and begin carping about the temperature, it didn't seem real. All he had to do was wake, or blink . . .

Even before the best bower had been let go, and the kedge rowed out, even as they sailed into the Bay of Naples on a tops'l breeze, he thought the place magical, innately more inspiriting than any of the other places he'd seen so far in the Mediterranean. Anchored a bare quarter-mile offshore of the main harbour and the quays, Naples seemed to teem with an open, exuberantly cheerful, elbowing and dodging zest.

Fishing smacks, oddly rigged and exotic, looking as if they had not changed one iota since their like had been carved in Greco-Roman bas-reliefs, ghosted about
Cockerel.
At the quays, fantastic Arabic-looking merchantmen and coastal traders lay stern-to to the piers, almost ashore on the harbourfront roadways, sporting short masts and long lateener booms, garishly painted, with eyes below their bows to guide them home.

Music, hubble-bubble, the screaks and clangs of wheeled commerce, and soft, liquid foreign jabber drifted offshore from the many open-air wine bars and cook shops, from chandlers' stores and warehouses.

So, too, did enticingly alien aromas of cooking, of unknown but beguiling, savoury spices and dishes he'd never tasted. He felt his saliva froth, after six months of plain-commons ship's fare. He could almost hear eggs sizzling as they first struck a hot pan, the succulent juices dripping from fresh meat onto coals . . . the cheery gurgle of wine, aromatic and purply red, as it was poured. Fresh wines that hadn't been jogged about on the orlop deck; and were Neapolitan wines cheap, well . . . they probably were still fresher and more appetizing than the wardroom's cheap clarets and bumboat ports from Lisbon, or the purser's thin and sour by-thekeg issue wines they'd been forced to buy—Black Strap (a bilious, tannery-tasting red) and Miss Taylor (a hocklike white that could stun barnacles). And they would be clearer than ship's wine, all cloudy with wave-stirred lees.

Food! Fresh, hot food! An entire new cuisine that had nothing to do with bland English ordinaries, something beyond the regimen of overboiled or overroasted salt meat, rank from a brine cask. Or the desiccated, reconstituted “portable” Navy soup!

“Boat, sir?” Mister Fairclough asked, breaking his gastronomic fantasies. “Row 'bout an' square th' yards, sir?”

“Aye, Bosun. And keep the bumboats off us. Captain's gig?”

“Unner th' starboard mainmast chains, sir, ready t' go.”

“Very well, carry on.”

The local bumboats, aswarm already, hovering to either beam. The jobbers and pimps were shouting their wares, waving straw-covered jugs or long, thin stone bottles, bragging on their doxies, waiting for the “Easy” pendant to be hoisted.

And what fetchin' doxies, too, Lewrie thought, after a peek at his watch, and a frown at what might be keeping Captain Braxton below.

Bountiful, sloe-eyed, raven-tressed young girls in almost every boat . . . not an artificial blonde in sight! Smooth, dusky olive shoulders bared by low-cut peasant blouses, shapely (mostly) lower legs in view below the hems of bright-satin-shiny and elaborately embroidered skirts, clad in white cotton or silk hose. Some were tricked out with parasols, garish hats, tarted up in castoff sack gowns, but in hues never seen in staid old England. They waved, too, giggling and cooing at
Cockerel
's
love-starved hands, hawking their own delights with all the open and amourous airs such as Lewrie imagined the ancient Romans might, at one of their pagan fertility festivals!

“Christ!” Lewrie moaned softly, in a half-strangled and heartfelt
cheep
of lust. And shuddering with how intense that sudden bout of lust felt! Six long months at sea, six long months apart from home and hearth, from bedding and . . .

No, I dasn't, he cautioned himself; I cannot! Seven years I'm wed, and damn'
well,
too. Father of three, for God's sake. Times are diff'rent now, besides . . . I'm first officer, there's an example to set for . . . I'm an example to . . .

To just bloody
whom?
his passions countered querulously.

No, I'm past thirty, I'm past all that. The others'd talk, and it'd get back to . . . well, maybe it
wouldn't.
Ah, but the captain, damn 'is eyes! Hates me worse than cold, boiled mutton. I doubt he'd give me leave to set a single
foot
ashore, this commission, just to be bastardly about it . . . Well, damme, where is the old turd, after all?

Captain Braxton had been on deck all during their foul weather, as spooky as Saint Elmo's ghost in his white tarpaulins, a grim, brooding spectre, far aft of the helm. Fair weather times, though, and most happily the last day or two, he'd all but abandoned the quarterdeck to his juniors, which had made their brisk passage even more joyous. Pop his head up over the coaming of his private, after companionway ladder now and again, between day-sleeps to snore off his silent foul-weather vigils, perhaps . . . like his son Hugh coyly playing “Peep-Eye.”

Yet the ship was anchored bow and stern, her sails furled, and the quarterdeck awnings were strung for cooling shade, and his boat was waiting, with still no sign of him. The glazed panels of the skylight coach-top aft of the wheel were still closed snug. It would be stuffy in the great-cabins, Lewrie knew for certain; stuffy as Sunday dinner with the in-laws. What could be keeping him?

“I wish to see the captain, Corporal Scarrett.”

“Aye, sir,” the Marine sentry nodded, slamming his musket butt on the deck and barking out, “Fuhst awfcer, SAH!”

No reply from within the gun deck entry. Lewrie and Corporal Scarrett exchanged puzzled frowns.

“Captain, sir?” Lewrie called again. Still no answer. Lewrie opened the doorway and stepped into the shuttered gloom of the narrow passage between the chartroom and the dining coach.

“Mister Lewrie, really, sir . . .” Mr. Boutwell, the captain's clerk, snapped fussily, as he came bustling forrud to confront him.

“Mister Boutwell, the ship is moored, and the captain's gig is in the water, ready to carry him ashore,” Lewrie waved off impatiently. “He's dispatches for the British Ambassador, letters to—”

“Ahem,” Boutwell coughed into a plump fist. “Sir, How . . . Captain Braxton is not well.”

Thankee, Jesus, Alan delighted to himself!

“You've summoned Mister Pruden, the surgeon?” he asked, though, with seeming, and becoming, sudden concern. “Is it . . . serious?”

“Well, sir . . . 'tis hardly a matter for a ship's surgeon, Mister Lewrie,” Boutwell countered, blocking his way as Alan tried to get past him, laying a civilian-soft writer's fist on his chest.

“Unhand me, sir!” Lewrie hissed. “Damn your blood, what ails him that's not serious enough for the surgeon, but keeps him from his duty? I have to see for myself. To ascertain how bad it is, and how long he may be incapacitated.”

“Really, Mister Lewrie . . .” Boutwell whined, all but wringing his hands as Lewrie shouldered him aside. He, in desperation, seized Lewrie's arm to impede him.

“I warned you to keep your hands off me, sir!” Lewrie snapped, though stopped for another moment. “I'm an English gentleman,
and
a sea officer. People've been flogged for less. 'Specially aboard this ship! Now, what ails him, sir?”

“Uh . . .” Boutwell deflated, withering in stature, without the partition to the day cabin. “Sir, Captain Braxton served many years in the Far East. There, I fear, he once contracted malaria. It comes upon him now and again, as an ever-recurring fever. Once took, you know . . . of
course,
you do, Mister Lewrie!
You
were in the East, too. You've seen how it takes a man.”

“I have to see him, Mister Boutwell,” Lewrie insisted. “Fever or no.”

“Very well,” Boutwell surrendered, opening the partition door.

A fetid, sick-bed odour struck his senses at once. There lay Captain Braxton, swaddled in every blanket he possessed, tucked in as snug as a baby's swaddles in the thick coverlet, with his dark blue watchcloak and foul-weather tarpaulin atop. Shivering like a drowning victim fresh plucked from an icy shipwreck. His steward was setting out a fresh cedar bucket by the side of the hanging cot, and grimacing manfully as he lifted the used one at arm's length to dump its gruesome contents out the transom sash window, the only one that was left open, and that only for the length of his duty. A sea-coal fire was fuming in a brazier nearby, making the great-cabin's bed space a breath from Hell itself.

“M . . . more coals!” Braxton managed to say between chattering teeth. “Bloody Jesus, I'm so cold!”

“Sir?”

“W . . . what . . . Devil you want, s . . . sir! Ge . . . get out! This instant!” Braxton growled from wobbly jaws.