"Some hot coffee, then yer supper, sir. Make a new man o' ya."
"Not up to solids, Aspinall. Don't think."
"Soup an' toast, sir. Get somethin' on yer stomach. Soak up-"
"Aye, we have, ain't we?" Lewrie at last grinned as he was led into his great-cabins and dumped onto the starboard-side settee, sprawling like a loose bale of rag-picker's goods. "Soaked up."
"Be back in a tick, sir," Aspinall assured him.
Crossly, Lewrie managed to get one boot off, got the hilt of his sword out from under his left buttock and kidney, but that was about as much as he could manage on his own.
Lord, what've we gotten ourselves into? he wondered to himself as he began to drift forrud, towards the edge of the settee, with his legs feeling as if they belonged to someone else; and an uncooperative swine, at that. Pirates, for Gods sake. Bloody lunatick pirates! Holy sacrifice… vengeance. Holy war, 'gainst ev'rybody else on God's green o? earth! Lord, what've we bloody started?
His fundament met the turkey carpet and the chequered deckcloth, legs sprawled at a wide angle, with his head now resting so far back on the settee cushions a sober observer might think him neck-broke.
His gaze swam about, cockeyed as if Jester were heaving, pitching, yawing and rolling in a hurricane under bare poles. There, in the dining coach, over the table on the forrud bulkhead, he found something to focus on. His wife Caroline's portrait. All sunny and radiant in a wide-brim straw bonnet, smiling so eye-crinklin' pleased, before their first house in the Bahamas, with East Bay and the shipping behind her.
He screwed one eye shut, to peer more intently.
"Needs o' th' Service, m'dear," he apologised. "Ne'er seen me bung-full, I know. Bloody barbarians… in f r dinner an' drink. Had t'keep up th' side, don' ysee? King an' Country…?"
He thought of crawling over for a closer, fonder look. Damme, though; was that a frown in her forehead… right where she wrinkled in those times she was vexed with him? Or was she laughing at him, at his ludicrous condition?
"Ben's fault, damn yer eyes," he whispered. Peering took too much [out of him, so he shut the other eye, too, and let his head loll.
Aspinall returned with a mug of soup and some piping-hot toast, but he was too late. His captain's top-lights had been extinguished for the evening. With Andrews s help, they removed his coat, sword-belt and stock, the other fancy Hessian boot, and slung him gently into bed, with a swaddling coverlet atop.
Where he dreamed the most vivid and disturbing plum-brandy dreams. Of blood and crows, of a vast plain of bones, of biblical patriarchs with swinging swords, red-eyed vengeance, rapine and slaughter.
And of whispering seals whose voices were too soft to understand, or be heeded.
CHAPTER 6
South of the isle of Susak, smack in the middle of the Adriatic, lay a small cluster of rocky, barely inhabited islets round a larger, which was named Palagruza. Pylades and Petracic s galliot sailed there, to establish a camp, from which they would then go back to the Balkan mainland so Petracic could have a chance to raise his fellow Serbs. Ben Rodgers would capture him that suitable European ship, too.
Dividing their forces once again, Lewrie and Jester were sent off toward the Straits of Otranto. He was free of Rodgers, but most especially was he free at last of Leutnant Conrad Kolodzcy. Forced to beat against a persistent Sutherly, the Sirocco, for several days, he zigzagged his way down the Adriatic, quartering it thoroughly on-passage and hunting for prey once more.
The weather was hot, now it was late July, and the sere wind up from Africa was no refreshing relief, sometimes hazed with gathered dust or sand particles, reducing visibility. The seas, forced up the narrows into the cul-de-sac of the Adriatic, humped long, folding waves of seven or eight feet. Jester bowled over them surefooted, though, swooping on their faces and cleaving them in delightful bursts of spray with a quick, lively and satisfied motion. As if their warship felt as free as they-as liberated from their dubious dealings, and fresh-washed in proper Royal Navy business.
No, the only fly in their ointment was the presence of the dhow on their larboard quarters, for Dragan Mlavic had been sent off by his master Petracic to glean what pickings he could from Jester's successes. He'd fade back whenever they stood on larboard tack towards Italy. But, like a nemesis, they'd espy her again when forced over to starboard tack and angle for the Albanian or Montenegran shores.
Uncanny, it was. Surely, Lewrie thought, the Adriatic, narrow as it was, still held room enough to lose the bitch in! But no. There she was, hull-down to the East'rd. Could she be any other dowdy two-masted coaster, since the Adriatic teemed with them? Time and again, though, and hope against hope, they'd recognise her dun brown sails with the odd patches of new canvas they'd been forced to give Mlavic, which ; formed a stylised lightning-bolt pattern on her foresail! Until the very sight of that accidental emblem made every man-jack groan with disgust, as if a penniless relation had shown up to sponge off them, just after they had been paid in coin, for a rare once.
"Damme, how does he do it, Captain?" Lieutenant Knolles spat, lifting his hat for dne of his irritated blond hair-rufflings.
"Luck o' th' Devil, he, Mister Knolles," Buchanon decided. "An' th' Devil's Brood has 'eir master's luck."
"Thought we'd sailed him under, the last Sou'west tack, sir," Lieutenant Knolles carped on. "He hasn't the 'nutmegs' to sail over to Italy. He'd get his silly arse knackered over there. Does he idle in the middle? Do a dash down to where he thinks we'll be, and wait?"
"Aloft, there!" Lewrie demanded of the lookouts. "She alone?"
"Aye, sir!"
"Hasn't tried to take a ship himself, then." Lewrie frowned.
"Like a kite, sir. Waitin' 'til braver beasts'z made 'eir kill," the Sailing Master harrumphed. " 'En he'll have a bite'r two."
"Deck, there!" Came another shout from the lookouts. "Sail ho!"
"Where away?" Knolles howled impatiently.
"Four point off th' starb'd bows! Brig! Runnin' free!"
Lewrie scrambled aloft to the cat-harpings of the mizzen to have a gander. There was no more than seven miles' visibility with all that wind-borne African haze on the Sutherly horizon, and the strange vessel was already showing a hint of tops'ls as well as all of her t'gallants. Sailing dead off the wind, he took note, with "both sheets aft." She'd pass astern of Jester should they both stand on as they were, perhaps a good two miles apart. He could tack right away, he schemed, go back to larboard tack headed Sou'west, and cut her off as she loped North, fat, dumb and happy. Running as she was, she could sail no faster than the winds blew, and that felt like only a ten- to twelve-knot breeze today, he reckoned. Less, for she'd surely be heavily laden, snuffling bows-down with a breeze right up her transom, even with the fore-course reduced, and the lifting effect of the fore-tops'l to ease her. And she didn't look particularly big, either, an average brig of about eighty-five feet overall, with a chunky seventy-foot waterline.
Yet, should she take fright, she'd alter course, just on general principles, and claw up to the wind and beat inshore for safety in the neutral Venetian port of Durazzo. She was now about six miles a'weather of them. Make it five, he plotted in his head, once we've tacked, losing way… same for her. Dammit, she could just barely make it in, one step ahead!
Lewrie clambered down and stowed his telescope in the rack by the binnacle cabinet. "We'll stand on as we are for now, Mister Knolles. I don't wish to scare her off 'til she's come down closer to us, within a mile or two. Then, do we haul our wind or tack, we'll fall down on her, and keep ourselves 'tween her and the safety of a neutral port."