“Ehm, well, of course not, M’sieur Gambon,” Cotton said with a scowl, and a darting glance at Lewrie, as if to wonder if he had known that beforehand.
Should’ve read up on ’em, first, Lewrie told himself, steaming.
“ En fin, Edward, I present you weeth copies of my protests to ze authorities,” Gambon said. “I take my leave, an’ fin’ my own way out, my duty to ze Emperor complete. Au revoir, M’sieur Cotton, mon vieux! Au revoir, Capitaine Loo-ree. I weesh you a bon voyage… but not too soon, hawn hawn?”
Gambon gave them both a sketchier bow from the waist and a dip of his head before turning to re-enter the house to gather up his hat, gloves, and walking stick.
“ Hmpf! ” Lewrie snorted, once he was sure that Gambon was out of earshot. “What an insufferable little… toad!”
“Insufferable at times, yes,” Mr. Cotton agreed after wheezing out a deep sigh of relief from between puffed lips. “When not on official business, though, he can be quite witty and amusing. Plays a fine game of chess, and dances extremely well. The ladies of Charleston adore him, and invite him to many of their balls and cotillions.”
“And Napoleon Bonaparte is kind to dogs and children!” Lewrie scoffed. “What was that nonsense about stayin’ in port twelve hours after that Frog schooner sails?”
“Stuff and nonsense, indeed,” Cotton said with a snort, sitting down to his tea once more. “My understanding of neutrality laws, as the Americans enforce them, allows you to sail the same time as he does… just so long as you do not engage him inside the Three Mile Limit. In international waters, you may do as you please.
“Though… it might not put our country in a good light, if you did,” Mr. Cotton cautioned a second later. “Do, please sit, Sir Alan. Are you able to bring Mollien to action, it might be best did it happen fifteen or twenty miles offshore… out of sight, so that the patriotic citizens of Charleston have no reason to sour relations between our country and theirs, which are tetchy enough, as it is.”
“And, when did that bastard come to anchor, sir?” Lewrie asked, beginning to suspect a very bad scenario, a pit-fall which he hadn’t seen coming.
“About two days ago,” Mr. Cotton told him, between sips of tea from his glass. “Strictly speaking, he must depart by tomorrow, but that hinges upon Captain Mollien’s ship being deemed a National Ship of the French Navy, or a privateer, a naval auxiliary. If no one will declare the schooner a man o’ war, a merchantman may stay as long as he likes.”
“ I’ll have t’sail, while he can sit at anchor and wave his bare arse at me?” Lewrie gawped. “I could lurk five or six miles offshore and catch him when he comes out.”
“Ehm… that might put a strain on things, Sir Alan,” Cotton warned, slowly shaking his head in the negative.
He can stay a week or two longer, and I’d have t’stay, Lewrie angrily thought; and there goes lookin’ into Savannah, or re-joining the squadron off Saint Augustine!
Lewrie sat, though nowhere near at ease, and took a sip or two of the cool tea. He screwed up his face in thought, realising that he was caught in a cleft stick. The only thing to do was to have a wee laugh.
“Sir Alan?” Mr. Cotton enquired, surprised by Lewrie’s humour.
“I might as well have t’wait twelve hours, Mister Cotton,” Lewrie told him, still with a sour grin on his face. “Were I Mollien, I’d wait ’til within an hour or so of the peak of high tide, and set sail for the Main Ship Channel, timing it so that I’m crossing the Charleston Bar at slack-water of that high tide. Imagine this, sir: As soon as I see him making up to a single bow anchor, I send ashore for a pilot. Reliant draws almost eighteen feet, whilst he draws much less, perhaps only twelve. Now, how quickly do ye think the French-lovin’ local pilots’ guild’d answer my request? At least one hour or maybe two hours later?”
“You would be forced to wait for the next day’s high tide. I see,” Mr. Cotton said with a grimace of sad understanding.
“He’ll take this trick,” Lewrie gloomed. “But, if he wants to keep his crew happy, he’ll have to take prizes t’keep them in food and rum, and put money in their pockets. Privateers are like whalers: They sign on for a share, a ‘lay’, of the profits of a cruise. If he wants prizes from our big ‘sugar trades’, he’ll have t’stay somewhere close to the Florida Straits, and the straits between the Bahamas and Spanish Florida. My contacts in Wilmington told me there’s no privateers working out of North Carolina.”
That Moore and Cashman know of, at any rate! Lewrie cautioned himself, with an urge to cross the fingers of one hand as he said it.
“They’re mostly schooners or two-masted sloops, in the main,” Lewrie continued, his head cocked over in thought. “They can’t remain at sea much more than two months before they run short of everything, and, once our convoys come level with Charleston, they’re catching a wind that’ll carry them Nor’east, further out in the open sea, well to windward of Cape Hatteras, and harder to find, or chase after. This Mollien is most-like working out of Spanish Florida, or Cuba, where he can find shelter and sustenance with his allies, the Dons. Where he can sell his prizes in the open, ’stead of sneakin’ ’em into an American port t’sell ’em on the sly.”
“Why yes, Sir Alan!” Mr. Cotton energetically agreed. “Think of this aspect. Do enemy privateers’ work from American ports, or inlets where unscrupulous traders sell them supplies and purchase their prizes, Mollien and his compatriots would be at the mercy of those traders… and the much-inflated prices they would charge, and the criminally low sums they’d pay to buy captured ships and their cargoes!”
“It’d take a fair parcel of money to cobble up false papers for a prize, aye,” Lewrie said with a genuine laugh. “Perhaps the value of the cargoes, and the later sale of the ships somewhere else would pay for that, but the risk of atracting attention with the Customs or Revenue Services, well! Too much risk to engage upon?”
Then this whole jaunt down the American coast is a goose-chase, Lewrie thought; dreamt up by pen-pushers at Admiralty, who’ve read too many bloody novels!
“Where would a criminal trader get the captains and crews for the captured ships would be my question,” Mr. Cotton said, topping up their glasses without summoning his Black house servant. “That’s too many people in on the secret, and someone’s sure to blab. Now, they could claim that they had sailed down to Havana with money and extra crew so they could pick up condemned vessels and bring them back to America to register them, along with Cuban export goods, which, in the main, are the same export goods one might find in the holds of a captured British ship-sugar, molasses, rum, and tobacco-but too many of such purchases would surely draw suspicions of the authorities. Register them in Savannah or Charleston, say, then hire on yet another captain and crew to sail them north to the Chesapeake, to Philadelphia, New York, or Boston? I hardly think so! It must all unravel, sooner or later,” Mr. Cotton declared, quite sure of his logic.
“Hmm… in the cold light of day, it does seem rather implausible, doesn’t it?” Lewrie admitted. “Perhaps the most risk that some criminal chandlers might run would be to supply privateers in one of the inlets you mentioned… in the dark of night and far out of sight of officials… to extend their time at sea without a long, unprofitabled voyage back to Cuba or Spanish Florida to re-victual.”
“That would be much more feasible, Sir Alan,” Cotton agreed.
“ Hmpf! ” Lewrie said, slouching in his chair, at more ease than a minute before. “I s’pose I still must peek into Savannah. Unless that twaddle about breaking my passage really is a violation of American neutrality.”