“And bored to death,” Lewrie stuck in.
“Hear, hear,” Fillebrowne seconded.
“Besides, sirs,” Shirke said with a crafty, sly look, shifting in his chair, “Admiral Cotton as good as told me that he doesn’t want us. The French and Russian ships at Lisbon are his, and his alone, and he means to have them, come Hell or high water, and we’d dilute the share-out of the prize money when he takes them!” Shirke barked in laughter as he told them that. “There may be as many as eight Russian ships of the line anchored in the Tagus River, and there’s a fortune just waiting to be reaped.”
“Hmm, would they be Good Prize, though, I wonder?” Lewrie objected. “Russia ain’t exactly at war with us, unless their boy Tsar, Alexander, has gone as mad as his predecessor. Mean t’say, he shut down all trade with us t’make Bonaparte happy, but—”
“The Russians did send London some official note from Saint Petersburg,” Fillebrowne interrupted, sounding superior and dismissive. “Though people I know in Government have assumed that the Tsar is merely posturing to please Bonaparte, without presenting an actual declaration of war. A top-up, if you please,” he said to a servant.
“Just because he and ‘Boney’ met on that raft at Tilsit, in the middle of the river, doesn’t make them bosom companions,” Shirke said, scoffing. “If France didn’t have Spain and Portugal on their plates at the moment, they might have a go at him! And, we all know by now that Napoleon Bonaparte’s word is worthless. If I were the Tsar, I’d sleep with one eye open.”
“He’ll not be satisfied ’til the whole world’s his,” Hayman agreed. “The man’s rapacious!”
“That’s the second time today I’ve heard that word,” Shirke said with good humour. “Admiral Cotton used it referring to you, Captain Lewrie. S’truth! And don’t look so amazed.”
Lewrie was caught with his mouth open.
“He had the most recent copy of Steel’s, so he knew who commanded all our ships, and he cautioned me to keep a close rein on that ‘rapscallion “Ram-Cat” Lewrie’ from having a go at the ships in the Tagus, either, and he said that you’re ‘a relentless, rapacious reaper of prize money,’ hah hah!”
“Well, I have had good fortune over the years, but I haven’t gone … reaping on purpose,” Lewrie rejoined. “I’ve just had good luck.”
“You aren’t known as the ‘Ram-Cat’ for your choice of pets,” Shirke pointed out. “Good God, cats! Can’t abide them!”
“I thought you were better known as ‘Black Alan,’” Fillebrowne fussily added. “For when you stole those dozen Black slaves to crew your ship.”
“Liberated, not stolen,” Lewrie corrected. “Their idea, too.”
“Stood trial for it,” Fillebrowne went on.
“Honourably acquitted,” Lewrie pointed out.
“You saw that French corvette, and that big Spanish frigate at anchor at Gibraltar, Captain Fillebrowne?” Shirke asked him. “Alongside those Spanish xebecs? Those are Sapphire’s prizes, all in the last year. Lord, in the old days, none of us thought you would make a sailor. You were the worst cack-handed, cunny-thumbed lubber we’d ever seen!”
“I think it was all the time I spent ‘kissing the gunner’s daughter,’” Lewrie japed, thankful that Shirke had praised him and defended him. “Though, I must confess that the first time I was warned with that, I thought the girl must be a real dirty puzzle if they meant it as a threat! As little as I knew then, I thought it marvellous that they’d allow girls aboard, and wondered where was mine, and what’s her ‘socket fee’! After a few times, I felt … inspired!”
“We couldn’t recognise him by face, and wondered if he could stand erect, he spent so much time bent over a gun,” Shirke wheezed with glee, “and our Bosun and his Mates could swing a starter so hard, they could have lit off the priming powder at a gun’s touch hole with one blow, hee hee!”
“Raised sparks on my arse,” Lewrie said, laughing along. “You know, I can’t remember either you or Keith Ashburn ever bein’ whipped.”
“That’s because we were never caught out at our duties, Alan,” Shirke reminisced with joy, “nor caught at our games and skylarking, either,” he added with a tap on the side of his nose.
“Excuse me, sir, but supper is laid and ready,” the senior steward announced, and they rose to enter the dining-coach, where Shirke had allowed himself a few more luxuries in good sterling silver and glassware and china.
Lewrie noted that Fillebrowne had merely pretended to laugh along with the others, and he caught his agate-eyed glances as they sat down. He looked almost archly surly, which pleased Lewrie.
What is he, jealous, or irked? he wondered; He keeps that up, and I will tell Hayman one or two o’ my yarns!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
All four ships of the escort returned to Gibraltar, and turned their sailors loose on the town’s taverns and brothels. After a day or two of provisioning, though, Captains Fillebrowne and Hayman took their frigates back to sea to rejoin their commands in the central Mediterranean, and the following day Captain Shirke and Newcastle departed, leaving Sapphire by herself, again, and Lewrie was glad to see the back of them, Fillebrowne especially.
He had treated them all to a shore supper at Pescadore’s, the seafood chop-house in the upper part of town near the Convent, and it went well. The next night, though, he and Maddalena had supped at the Ten Tuns, and who should pop in in the middle of their meal but Captain Fillebrowne and Captain Hayman! It was impossible not to ask them to join them. Hayman was the soul of discretion, but Fillebrowne had skirted the edge of propriety, attempting to flirt mildly and taking over their conversations, as if laying the groundwork to assume possession of another of Lewrie’s mistresses.
“He assumes a lot,” Maddalena had commented on their walk back to her lodgings. “I thought all English gentlemen behaved like gentlemen.” She had even clutched her arms cross her chest and darted glances behind them, as if in fear that she’d see Fillebrowne skulking after them.
“Well, we both know that that ain’t true, Maddalena,” Lewrie had said, trying to cosset her. “There’s Captain Hughes, for a shabby example.” He’d tried to laugh it off, but inside he was fuming, too.
There’s un-finished business ’twixt me and that arrogant shit, Lewrie had thought; Don’t know what it is, but, I just hope we don’t cross hawses again. Is he tryin’ to row me so angry that we’d have to duel?
Fortunately, though, a shared bottle of sparkling wine, and a night with Maddalena, in which she assured him who truly had her affection, was passionate enough to distract him from his qualms.
* * *
“Going anywhere soon, are you, Captain Lewrie?” the Foreign Office’s chief spy, Thomas Mountjoy, asked with mock urgency as they met in the street in front of Mountjoy’s lodgings a morning or two later. “If you are, I’m sorely tempted to go with you.”
“French assassins’re after you?” Lewrie asked. “Or, is it a woman you spurned?”
“There’s a diplomatic disaster just waiting to explode, and I wish to be half a continent away when it does,” Mountjoy told him in what Lewrie recognised by now as real urgency.