She opened her arms, but Lewrie was twice-bitten and thrice shy by then. Yet the woebegone disappointment on her gamin face caused by his refusal made him relent, despite his fear of being pick-pocketed to instant poverty. He smiled, cocked his head, and held out his arms in welcome. She stepped close and, to his considerable alarm… and sudden thrill, it must be admitted… ground her things and groin against him with a puckish twinkle, bestowing a gentle buss near Lewrie's gawping lips.
"So long, Sally Blue," he said, still trying to stay aware where her free hands might roam. "Take ye joy… Have a safe voyage, and a good life after. Thank you again for all you did to get me back my ship. Never forget you, m'dear… there's a sweet young chit."
"You come back to Sheerness, Cap'um Lewrie," Sally Blue whispered hot and alluring in his ear, enveloping him in a faint hint of a fresh-dabbed scent in her hair, "you come look me up at Checquers, th' public house? Sometime at th' Crown an' Anchor, but that's no place fer a fine feller like yerself… Jus' leave a note. La, yer such a kind an' gallant gennleman don't git much chance t'meet such in my line o' work. What ya said ya wrote them swells 'bout me?" she cooed as she fell back a half-step to lay hands on his shoulders and look up searchingly into his eyes. "Don' forgit h'it's Sally Caruthers, not Sally Blue… same as ya wrote down to yer banker man. Send fer me an' I'll come runnin'… an' I'll treat ya to a wondrous time whene'er yer in port. 'Long as ya don't ask me t'come out t'your ship no more. Kinda lost me taste fer that…" Sally said with a frazzled moue and a gentle chuckle.
"I quite understand, Sally… Mistress Caruthers." Lewrie smiled back as he let go of her, stepping back to doff his hat to her as fine as he would to any lady-guest. "We'll see, perhaps…"
He did not say that most-like he'd never seek her out or send her a bidding note… but then, he didn't exactly say that he wouldn't either, for she was a wee, fetching thing, slim and pretty, like a rose grown on a dung-heap, and sure to be as bouncy and exuberant as a half-broke colt.
His hands felt the need to twitch though, to see if he still had his watch, chain, fob, coin-purse, pocket-knife, loose change, his silk handkerchief, his breeches' buckles, or even his horn comb! She laughed again at his strangled look, a quite fetching titter as she looked him up and down as if to fix him in her memory, biting on her lip.
"No fear, Cap'um Lewrie, sir." She beamed. "Didn' take nothin'… Not this time. You're too fine a man t'pilfer. Well… bye, Cap'um Lewrie. Fer now?"
"Adieu, Mistress Caruthers." He bowed. "Milady."
"A… ah-doo, Cap-tain Lewrie," she pronounced more or less correctly, dropping him a deep curtsy and a graceful incline of her head that would not have been out of place on the Strand, or at St. James's Palace. "… 'til we meet again, good sir," she hinted from beneath her bonnet's brim.
Ah, a sweet chit, he thought as he handed her to the entry-port gate, as she swept her skirts to turn outward and lower herself over-side by battens and man-ropes. Tryin t'gain manners and style. I just might look her up…
"Arr, ye keep yer fuckin' eyes awrf me bum, ya googlin' shits!" Mistress Sally "Blue" Caruthers chid the boat-crew below, as she heard their appreciative moans and whistles. "Ain' none o' yew gettin' e'en a 'finger-lark,' so hush yer gobs!"
Then again… perhaps not, he sighed with a wry grin.
At last, the final boat-load of women and sailor's children had gone. The darkening seas were getting up a tiny bit more boisterous, and the wind was backing from due North a wee touch more with each gust… presaging a switch to Nor-Nor'east in an hour or so perhaps. Lewrie was anxious to get underway, make an offing from the shoaling coast before he was caught on a lee shore at night. And it would be safer for the lugger to get into port before the rising, shifting wind raked up rollers over the bars, which might poop her.
The last boat-load, though… he simply had to stay on the gangway to watch Handcocks, Morley, and Rolston go, along with two more of the green-cockaded committeemen. Everyone did, it seemed. No sailor wore their red cockades any longer. Once Proteus had escaped for sure, her wake had blossomed with their discards, and their frigate's creamy stern-froth had resembled a sea-bride's train on a bloom-strewn church aisle.
Bales… he was still unable to call him Rolston! His ancient dislike of the boy he'd been so long ago had been dismissed from Lewrie's ken ages before… he despised the twisted, jealous, radical hell-spite the man had become in his latest guise.
"Once the boat's returned, Mister Wyman, ready the hands to recover the boats and stow them on the cross-deck tiers," Lewrie said.
"Aye, aye, sir," Lt. Wyman piped from the companionable dark. A number of hand-held muscovy-glass lanthorns along the rails threw amber-yellow moon-glades so the hands could see what they were doing, and Captain Vernish's lugger's lights competed to turn the patch of sea between them into a gently heaving, glittering sheet of molten gold.
Him and the others gone, Lewrie decided as the ringleaders got pushed to the open gate of the entry-port, then this ship'll be clean, untainted… like I told the hands, the slate erased. Then we make of her what she should be. What Proteus deserves to be, he mused.
Handcocks went down the battens, chains clinking at every step. Then Private Mollo, stripped of his red tunic, for he didn't deserve to wear a real Marine's jacket. Morley next, complaining and whining, as he descended to a sure death a few days or weeks away, once the Court Martial Jack was hoisted at the Nore.
The crew lined the larboard side, perched in the lower shrouds, or hung half-over the gangway bulwarks for a better view of the departure of their tormentors, their fallen heroes. A few of the stauncher loyalists hooted softly as they left, some of the particularly threatened or browbeat, but most were still just too numb-or too unsettled-to utter a peep.
"Go on then, ya bugger," Corporal Plympton urged Rolston, the last of them. "Think we got all night for th' likes o' you?"
Rolston would go game. He sneered a faint smile of disdain for the gathered seamen, chin-high and clearly disgusted, as if to wonder out loud why he'd ever thought he could make a revolution with such a poor grade of malleable clay, trying to stare individuals down, and make them duck and cringe in shame they'd failed him. Stiffly, he shuffled in leg and wrist chains, his back straight, as if he was determined to face his music with the innate superiority and courage of a Commission Sea Officer, a cultured, educated gentleman-which to his lights he'd always been-but for Admiralty's "Guinea Stamp." He twisted his neck, straining the cords of his throat like a man fighting a tightening noose, and his badly tied gag fell away.
"Damn the lot of you!" Rolston gravelled, silencing what half-hearted jeering there'd been. "Faithless cowards. Weak as water. To think I believed you were men worth saving! But you never were. You will always be sheep… you'll always buss the rich folks' arses."
He turned his back outwards, shuffled his feet so the chains on his ankles wouldn't tangle on the entry-port lip, took hold of the man-ropes, and began to descend, glaring fire-and-brimstone at them. Lewrie stepped closer to the port gate to make sure that Rolston was well and truly going away, happy to see the back of him.
Lewrie felt a brush along his right boot, heard a faint grumble in Toulon 's throat as he moaned and spat, as if even a cat could recognise evil when he saw it.
Clank-shuffle-thud… clank-shuffle-thud, Rolston jangled, taking his eyes off the unfaithful sailors to peer over one shoulder, to see where to place his feet below the gun-ports and wale; and men in the cutter were shuffling to make room for him on a centre thwart. He glared back up once he was sure of his footing, stepping down with an old sailor's expertise, now he'd found a rhythm.