A King's Commander (55 page)

T
here
had been so few casualties, for which the good doctor on duty had thanked a merciful God, that he and his compatriots had spent mostly an idle day, celebrating an almost bloodless victory over those much-vaunted Austrians. The coast was theirs, now, the entire Genoese Riviera, as far as Voltri, the surgeon had heard boasted, within easy ride of Genoa itself. The Austrians and Piedmontese had fled like so many terrified children, far inland; maybe thirty miles, he'd heard a cavalry
chef du brigade
crow. Once spring came, once the weather was suitable, the Republican
Armée d'ltalie
would march, to complete their conquest of all of the northwest. Paris was sending a new general to put life into things, some newly risen pet of the Directory, with the improbable name of Napoleone Bonaparte. He was reputed to be impatient and aggressive; rare in an artillery officer, the surgeon thought. Till then, though, through the long Ligurian winter, there'd be peace and quiet, some skirmishing but nothing of consequence, nothing that tasked his skills to the utmost. He could drink his wine, smoke his pipe, and sleep peacefully, to ready himself for the horrors to come.

The surgeon made his last rounds among the pitiful, whimpering wounded who lay in the large tents that the Austrians had been so good as to abandon so hastily. French casualties under canvas, of course . . . and the few Piedmontese or Austrians under the stars or the trees. It was almost cozy in the cavernous pavil-lion tents, glowing like so many amber jewels, lit from within by a single lanthorn.

“This one, sir?” his assistant said with a sad
moue.
“The poor fellow's left us, I'm afraid.”

“Both legs.” The surgeon shrugged philosophically. “Too much stress, too quickly, for his humors to restore their balance.
C'est dommage.
And that one?”

“Feverish, but better, sir,” the assistant said, gesturing for orderlies to remove the dead infantry officer.

The surgeon took the lanthorn to peel back the blanket and look at his handiwork. A neat bit of sewing, he grunted with pleasure, as he puffed on his pipe.

“You are with us, sir?” the surgeon whispered as the man opened his eyes and groaned in pain. “I do not recall treating anyone from our Navy before, sir. You came up to headquarters to see the battle,
hein?
And saw too much of it,
quel dommage.
”

“I . . . will I live?” the officer croaked, gritting his teeth to withstand his pain, now that he was awake to feel it roar and gibber.

“A fairly clean wound, sir,” the surgeon assured him, chuckling a little. “Your coat and shirt easily extracted from it. Nothing left behind to cause sepsis. So few casualties, the water still very hot in the instrument pails . . . I have noted that there is less later infection when the water is bloodless, and the water is scalding hot. Why it is, I have no idea, but I think it may be worth a letter to Paris,
hein?
”

“Ahh . . . !” The naval officer grunted, screwing up his horribly disfigured face in torment for a second, then almost seemed to find it amusing. “Ahh . .
.
”
he sighed as that wave of agony subsided. “I have cheated him again. I
beat
him, after all!”

“It does not pay to boast of beating the Angel of Death yet, I suggest, sir.” The surgeon laughed. “A week or more, before we count you free of fever, and able to be moved to the rear, to complete your recovery in nicer surroundings,
hein?
For your stump to drain, to show a laudable, healing pus.”

“Stump?”

“
Certainement, Capitaine,
uhm . . .” The surgeon frowned, not sure if that was even the proper title of rank, and not knowing his patient's name. “Your arm was so completely smashed, the bone in shatters . . .”

Guillaume Choundas tried to raise up, to raise his arm, against the surgeon's entreaties and pressing hands. It was gone! There was a thick wrapped bandage over absorbing batt, the whole once 
white but now pink or dull red, crusted with oozed blood. So short, almost
all . . . !

“Nnnoooo!” Choundas screamed. “Nnnoooo!!! Lewrie! Lewrie! You . . .
Lllewwrieeee!!!
Lugh . . . Lugh's bird! The raven. That bass-tardd!”

“C'est dommage,”
the surgeon sighed minutes later, after giving the distraught fellow a cup of laudanum-laced wine. He took a seat on an upturned crate by the fire, under the flyleaf of his wagon, with the tailgate boards for a rough table. “Bernard, pass the wine,
hein?
So good, this. Real Provence, not that Italian muck.”

“What was that all about, Jean-Claude
mon ami?
”

“Some poor fellow lost his arm.” The surgeon sighed, bourgeois happy in his bear-skin slippers, at last, instead of those ridiculous boots the army insisted he wear. The tailboard and the fire wasn't as comfortable as his old café back home, once the shops, and his offices, were closed for the night, but it could be rather pleasant, this life of an army surgeon, so far from home. “You know how they can be, once they know it. A fellow scarred as he, you'd expect he's used to pain and loss, but he raved like a madman. Not many unman themselves so.”

“Loss of his looks, anyway,” Bernard snickered.
“Une hideux.”
“Kept ranting about Lugh, Lir, Lewrie, and ravens,” the surgeon muttered over his wine. “Whatever those are. Ever heard the like?”

Surgeon Bernard had not, so he merely shrugged. “Nonsense words, alliterative ravings. Was there a head wound? Hmm. Might keep an eye on the poor fellow, Jean-Claude. Recommend he's kept longer, once he's well enough to transfer. Then he's someone else's worry. Cards?”

Nightfall on the sea, aboard a sloop of war that surged surefooted and secure, serene for once, her young captain pacing the decks bone-weary but unable to contemplate sleep as she made her way among a gaggle of escapees from the anchorage at Vado Bay. A bath, a shave, a clean uniform, and a more than ample supper had gone a long way toward physical recovery, though he could not be sure what the next days might bring him, or his ship.

“Excuse me, sir,” Mountjoy said, interrupting his solitary musings with an apologetic prefatory cough. “Could I speak with you?”

“Aye, Mister Mountjoy?” Lewrie replied pleasantly.

“I, uhm . . . I rather loathe to cause you or your affairs any disruption, or distress, but . . . well, Captain Lewrie,” Mountjoy said with a sheepish gulp, “I'd like to resign my position as your clerk, sir.”

“I'll not put you in danger again, Mister Mountjoy, if that's . . .” “No, sir! Quite the opposite, in fact!” Mountjoy gushed. “Going ashore with you and Mister Peel was the most exciting thing I've ever done, sir! For the first time in my life, I felt active and alive, useful and . . .
doing
something other than scribbling. As if I'd discovered my true calling, do you see, sir. To shed another man's blood . . . strive to shed Choundas's too, well . . . Mister Peel has suggested that his employer, and their, uhm . . . ‘department,' would find my skills very useful. Forgive me, but I intend to hold him to it, and take service with that Mister Silberberg. As an assistant in training, as it were.”

“They'll bloody get you knackered,” Lewrie countered. “Knife in the back some night. It'll be dry, Mountjoy. What we did today isn't the usual. More skulduggery, like whist or chess, creeping . . .”

“God, I hope
so,
sir!” Mountjoy laughed. “Like
that,
I did, as a climax to the intellectual, though I'm not a born soldier. I enjoy both sorts of action, what Mr. Silberberg described? Never make a sea officer, sir, you know that. Have to start very young for that. Not enough money for an Army commission, but . . . this I'd be good at, sir. And be able to make just as grand a contribution. Padgett, Mister Giles's jack-in-the-bread-room, could move up to be your clerk, sir, and he's diligent. More so than I, we both know. Would it be all right, Captain? Do I owe the Admiralty a term of service, or . . .”

“No, you don't, Mister Mountjoy.” Lewrie sighed. “You serve me, at my pleasure. And, eventually, yours. You're
quite
determined . . .”

“I am, sir. Completely,” Mountjoy said, with fervent certainty.

“Very well then, Mister Mountjoy,” Lewrie said, offering a hand to the young man. “I'll accept your letter of resignation. And may God protect you in your new career. You may go ashore with Peel at Genoa.”

“God
always
sends the Right, sir.” Mountjoy beamed. “Thankee.”

Wish I was that certain, Lewrie thought; of anything. With France holding almost all of the Genoese Riviera now,
Jester
could be sent God knew where. There was still the matter of false colors to settle, with Hotham to decide whether it was glory, or infamy and a court.

He was just bone-weary enough, though, to suspend disbelief, to feel a small, heretical sense of hope that things would work out, in his, and
Jester
's favor. After what Buchanon had said over supper.

“The sea!” he'd shouted in the heat of pursuit; look at the
sea!
He thought he'd meant that broad, perverse windless river of calm that had doomed Choundas's tartane
.
But Buchanon's real meaning had been a lot more, he'd whispered only one hour ago, over port and biscuit.

“A seal, Cap'um, I
saw
it!” he'd hissed. “Close-aboard. What 'at Mister Peel told, o' th' raven ashore, too? Dear Lord, sir! Made me go ice all over when I heard. 'Twas th' Old'uns, sir. Lugh, and
Lir!
”

“But really, sir . . . mean you really, or just
thought . . . ?
”

“All the way from home t'here, sir,” Buchanon had whispered so reverently, shivering with wonder. “Lir's eye 'pon ya—'pon
her,
sir! An' you, an' me, an' all o' us, in his hand, still. Swear t'Jesus, sir, I think where'er we sail, Lir means t'follow. Mayhap he meant t'use ya, Cap'um . . . t'settle this fellah Choundas's business. Must've rowed Lir sore, over somethin', for him t'grant ya good cess ashore. But once he uses ya, he don't forget his favorites.”

• • •

Me, lucky ashore, Lewrie wryly mused; now
there's
a new'un!

Still, he went to the bulwark to gaze out at the swelling, dark sea, and raise one hand, almost in supplication, as eight bells began to chime up forrud, so blissfully routine, so fragile, thin but brassy-mellow.

“
If
you're out there, thankee,” he whispered. “You've your eye on us, spare a glance for Mountjoy, too. He'll need it. What comes . . . good or ill . . . so be it. But, thankee . . . for
Jester
's
Fortune.”

And the night wind breathed in the shrouds, as if in a soft and sympathetic, assuring response.

It wasn't the usual thing for individuals to be awarded medals in the eighteenth century; those were reserved for successful campaigns or battles, given only to the few. Quite unlike today's “medals for migraines.” So Lewrie wasn't recognized for his small part at The Glorious First of June. Admiral Howe's Flag Captain, Sir Roger Curtis, created a storm of controversy by recommending only those few of his personal favorites who had closed the foe, and the rest of the ship captains went without, which put them into a snit fit. There is a large group portrait of Howe and others at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England, showing Howe (suffering too-tight shoes in asperity), the wounded Captain Sir Edward Snape Douglas with his hand to his head, distracted as if he was hearing some phantasmic voices, and at the extreme left, Sir Roger, who looms like a Nixon White House aide. The Lieutenant Edward Codrington went on to fame with Nelson at Trafalgar, and once he made flag rank, commanded the victory at Navarino, the last sea battle fought completely under sail in 1827.

Yes, Hotham was just about as huge a drooling idiot as I wrote of him. He was one of those people who could literally snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Not that he tried very hard, mind. He was replaced in the Mediterranean by Admiral Sir John Jervis, “Old Jarvy,” the following year. Jervis was a bit on the grumpy side, a disciplinarian whose harshness saved the Mediterranean fleet from the rot of the Great Mutiny in '97, even if he had to hang a few conspirators to keep his fleet functioning. Do you imagine, gentle reader, that Lewrie and Jervis will get along like a house afire? Hmm . . .

As for those shocked that Captain Horatio Nelson could be portrayed as angry, crude in his speech, even blasphemous, or that the man I wrote about isn't the marble demigod atop that pillar in Trafalgar Square (I mean, I've heard of putting people, women especially, on pedestals, but that'un rather takes the cake, doesn't it?) let's remember that it's a long way from his father's rectory at Burnham Thorpe to a harsh life in the Royal Navy, and Nelson spent the greater part of his childhood and all his adult life around . . . sailors.

Drawing principally upon Oliver Warner's
Portrait of Lord Nelson,
I found that yes, Signorina Adelaide Correglia of Leghorn existed, that she was as goose-brained as I described, and that Nelson was just as silly over her as I wrote. More to the point, what Captain Thomas Fremantle wrote, in his laconically terse entries in his diary, which mentions dining aboard
Agamemnon
several times, the mort was present. Fremantle was so terse he wrote of his marriage to Mistress Betsy Wynne later in one rather spare sentence! He refers to the “happy couple” as “Nelson and his doxy.” Though there is a letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot from Nelson that cites “one old lady” who tells Nelson everything
they
wish to know. So it is possible that Adelaide Correglia was someone in Twigg's line of work, with whom, like Lewrie, Nelson could combine the business of intelligence, and pleasure.

To further cite Oliver Warner's work on Nelson, Warner used the earlier work of James Harrison, who wrote a biography with the Lady Emma Hamilton (“That Woman!”) as his source, who claimed that:

Nelson . . . only had two faults; venery and swearing. Harrison said of him that “it is not to be dissembled, though by no means ever an unprincipled seducer of the wives and daughters of his friends, he was always well known to maintain rather more partiality for the fair sex than is quite consistent with the highest degree of Christian purity.”

Hmm . . . sounds rather like Lewrie, in that respect. Further,

“Such improper indulgences, with some slight addition to that other vicious habit of British seamen, the occasional use of a few thoughtlessly profane expletives in speech, form the only dark specks ever yet discovered in the bright blaze of his moral character.”

And, I'd imagine that Lewrie was the sort who could get so “up his nose,” as to rouse a saint, much less a Nelson, to intemperance.

The Lieutenant Thomas Hardy of
Meleager
was indeed the man whom Commodore Nelson would risk battle with Spanish frigates to rescue,
that
Hardy of Trafalgar fame. At the time, he was a junior officer aboard
Meleager,
later following Captain Cockburn into the
Minerve
frigate.

Cockburn, hmm . . . There may be some who could say that I have not been exactly charitable to him. He
was
one of Nelson's favorite officers, held up as a paragon. Nelson even forgave him for shouldering
Agamemnon
aside, and putting his commodore aground under fire, later at Oneglia, in his zeal to close the foe. He was the diligent sort who'd not have cared very much for Lewrie's sort, though—never married till he was forty-seven, and that to a cousin, and died without issue—and I think, for the reasons stated in the book, that Lewrie wouldn't have cared for him very much, either. More to the point, I don't, since he was that bugger who invaded the Chesapeake and burned Washington, D.C., and the White House to the ground during the War of 1812!

There was no raid on Bordighera that I know of. I made it all up. That's what writers tend to do when things get slow. Same as “Surfs Up!” when the plot broke down in all those old “beach movies” with Annette Funicello; “Beat To Quarters!” do twenty or so rather easier pages and let the good guys slaughter a s——load of Frogs.

Yes, the Austrians did win the Vado Sweepstakes. General de Vins acted like Confederate General Braxton Bragg and came down with vapors, a migraine, or something, turning things over to his second- in-command the morning of his battle. They ran like the Yankees at both Battles of Manassas. Nelson lost a lieutenant, a midshipman, and sixteen men at Vado, and his purser was forced to stagger eighteen miles with the fleeing Austrians. There were some units
thirty miles
from any French outposts, who took off like greased lightning without ever having
seen
an enemy, without a shot being fired—by them, or at them.

Was
that
Lewrie's fault? Could a single rifle shot (deuced
good
'un, you have to admit!) have been the cause of such a rout? Stranger things have happened. Ask the Yankees again, at that bridge at First Manassas, as we unreconstructed Confederates call it. Yeeeeh-hahhh!

Besides, I think we all know by now that whenever Lewrie turns up, things just sorta kinda happen, and not always for the best. Nor, intentionally. After all, he
means
well, but . . . !

So what will happen next? Will Lewrie reconcile with Phoebe? Will Twigg throw him and Claudia Mastandrea together? Will Guillaume Choundas be a raving one-armed lunatic in some French Bedlam, or will he return to plague Lewrie once more? Will Alan settle him, once and for all? Or will he face that court-martial?

Tune in tomorrow . . . same station, to discover what comes amiss with Lewrie's, and
Jester
's,
Fortune. In the meantime, I will be at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, pondering these matters and trying to find some radical feminist bullies in thong bikinis who wish to kick sand at me.