They met again, blades still ringing, but softer now.
Wyndham thrust low, using the point to come up with a ripping slash at Lewrie’s stomach, but he beat it aside at the last instant, driving Wyndham’s guard low, met the next blow with a two-handed swing that forced Wyndham’s blade wide to the left and almost into the sand. Lewrie stepped forward into his guard sideways and swung back to the right two-handed again with all his flagging might. He felt a thud like sinking an axe into a chopping block, and leaped back, centering his guard against a reply. But it was over.
Wyndham stood before him with his feet together, his face as white as his snowy breeches. They both looked down at the sand to see Lieutenant Wyndham’s right arm lying there, still clutching the cutlass and the nerveless fingers curling and drumming an irregular tatoo on the hilt!
Wyndham looked back to him in surprise, before his eyes rolled back into his head and he pitched forward to the sand, a fountain of blood gushing from what remained of his shoulder with each beat of his heart.
Lewrie stumbled backward, unable to feature it, the tip of his blade dragging a furrow through the sand. Ashburn came up to him and he dropped his cutlass and turned away from him. Wyndham’s party came forward, and both surgeons worked on the infantry officer, cauterizing a great cut in Wyndham’s side, and hands slipped in gore as they tried to seize the spurting arteries and sear them shut, while the seabirds cried and wheeled at the smell of blood steaming on the beach.
Lewrie sat down on the step of his coach, watching the drama below. The naval coachee gave him a large glass of brandy to drink.
“Gawd almighty, sir…”
“Indeed.” Alan nodded in shock. “Another please.”
This brandy he sipped more slowly, becoming aware of how sore he was all over after being so tensed up for God knew how long, how his arms arched and throbbed, and the pain pulsed in his ravaged cheek. His thigh muscles were jumping and his calves and ankles hurt as though he had strolled twenty miles across country.
Captain Osmonde climbed up the sand slope from the beach to him. “I believe you shall make a dangerous man, after all, Mister Lewrie.”
“I meant but to cut him…” Lewrie dazedly protested.
“I believe you should consider that intent most successful,” the Marine officer said most dryly.
“Will he live?”
“Lieutenant Warren Wyndham is now late of His Majesty’s 12th Regiment of Foot,” Osmonde said. “Totally exsanguined of his life’s blood and dead on the field of … honor. Was it worth it?”
“At the moment, aye, sir,” Lewrie said, studying his shoes. “I don’t know about tomorrow.”
“An honest answer, at any rate,” Osmonde said, kneeling down in front of him. “Don’t develop a taste for this, boy. War is gloriously obscene enough, without turning into a man-killer.”
“I want no more of it,” Alan confessed.
“Best have the surgeon sew that up,” Osmonde said, touching his cheek to examine his wound. “Won’t spoil your looks for the ladies, I doubt. Hungry?”
“Yes,” Alan realized.
“Ashburn had the good faith in you to reserve rooms for us for a late breakfast at an inn on the way back. I, for one, am famished.”
“There’s one good that will come out of this,” Lewrie said as he got to his feet at the approach of the surgeon with his bag. “There is no way they’ll keep me as a messenger and errand boy ashore after this. If I’m not at sea within a week, there’s a dozen of good claret for you and Ashburn on it…”
Chapter 11
“You were fortunate, Mister Lewrie,” Commander the Honorable Tobias Treghues said, seated behind his glossy mahogany desk in the day cabins of the 20-gun frigate Desperate. “I am told the officers of the 12th Foot detachment have talked of a syndicate to challenge you one at a time until you are bested. They were not enamored of your choice of weapons, or how you won.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Lewrie said, studying his new lord and master. Treghues was in his late twenties, slim and brown-haired with grey eyes. His uniform was impeccable, as were his cabin furnishings. He showed no signs of poverty, though it had been rumored he was the eldest son of a lord gone to sea to improve the family fortunes with prizes.
“Fortunate also that I had a suitable berth, after losing one young gentleman drowned, and another to the bottle,” Treghues went on.
“Aye aye, sir.” When a midshipman had no better answer, that usually struck the right obedient note without committing to anything.
“You are, for your own safety, to remain aboard until we have sailed. You are not even to place foot in a rowing boat. By the time we return from a cruising patrol, the 12th will have gone to St. Kitts and the problem will have been resolved.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Lewrie said, trying to find a new way to do it.
“I do not hold with dueling,” Treghues warned. “Or hotheaded bucks who cannot resist taking offense at the slightest reproach, like some swaggering Frog duke, Mister Lewrie. Usually bad officers, too.”
“I do not wish to give that impression, sir, but I had—”
Treghues waved off the rest of his answer. “Spare me your innocent and honorable motives. Sir Onsley informed me as to the circumstance. He also gives you a glowing report, so I am aware of your services to the Crown of late. You may be useful to this ship, but all I want to see from you is duty done in a cheerful and efficient manner. Spare us your blood-lust for the foe.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Lewrie parroted himself.
“Admiral Sir George Rodney has taken over from Admiral Byron, thanks be to God, so we should see some action soon. Hood and Rodney together, and we’ll see an end to these French and Spanish combinations. So, you see what is needed. Get below and into your working rig. I allow you to forgo the waistcoat in these climes, but I expect a midshipman to look like a proper officer at all times, no matter how junior you may be. That means a regulation dirk instead of that pretty hanger of yours. And I prefer a cocked hat to the round one. I took you on sufferance—don’t give me reason to regret it.”
Lewrie nodded and left the cabins, emerging on the upper deck. Desperate had no poop but a long quarterdeck over the captain’s cabin. Her first (and only) lieutenant had quarters below the captain with the surgeon, purser, Marine lieutenant and suchlike worthies. The wheel stood over the captain’s cabins on the long quarterdeck, unprotected by binnacle bulwarks. The lower deck was not a gun deck at all, the artillery being sited on the upper deck where the captain lived in solitary splendor. Hands berthed forward on the lower deck, then petty officers, Marines, warrants and midshipmen, and then the officer’s gun room right aft. The orlop and hold were too crammed with supplies to let anyone berth there.
“What a crosspatch he is.” Lewrie sighed. From the way Treghues regarded Rodney, he must be one of his—not a good sign. Rodney was famed for incredibly bad judgement in appointments.
But the cobbing he had received could not dampen his joy to be aboard any sort of ship once more, and Desperate was magnificent. She was 110 feet on the range of the lower deck, a bit over 30 in beam, of 450 tons burthen. Piercing her upper deck bulwarks were eighteen six-pounder cannon, with two of the new eighteen-pounder carronades on her foc’s’l, short guns mounted on swivelling slides that fired bursting shot to no great range—“Smashers”—he was dying to try them out.
Desperate carried Treghues, a first lieutenant named Railsford, Mr. Monk the sailing master and two mates, one bosun and mate, one warrant gunner, one gunner’s mate and a yeoman of the powder room, a surgeon named Dorne and a mate, five quartergunners, one carpenter and mate, one armorer, one master-at-arms, two quartermasters and mates, a yeoman of the sheets, one coxswain, four carpenter’s crew, one ship’s corporal, a sailmaker and one sailmaker’s assistant, one captain’s clerk, the young purser named Cheatham and his steward, four midshipmen, four young boy fifers and drummers, eighteen boyservants, and fifty-six men rated as either ordinary or able seamen, or landsmen. She also carried Marines; a lieutenant named Peck, one sergeant, one corporal, and thirty private soldiers.