She was a 6th Rate, the smallest type of ship-rigged frigate in the fleet, and with Lewrie joining her, was fortunate to be only six hands short of full complement.
Desperate was too light for the line of battle with her four-inch oak scantlings and beams on twenty-inch centers. She was too fast to be tied to a squadron, but also too well armed to waste on despatches like Parrot. Desperate was what was coming to be known as a “cruizer”; she was a huntress on her own in the most likely places to seek out, take, or burn enemy merchantmen, privateers and light naval units.
Lewrie entered the midshipmen’s berth to find his new mess mates lounging about the small compartment, sandwiched in without air by storerooms and the mate’s dog boxes. The total space was about twelve-by-ten, with barely five feet of headroom between the beams. There was a polished table down the center for dining, chests for seats, and pegs for storage of handy items.
“Hullo. I’m Alan Lewrie,” he said to them, reliving that scene long ago when he had reported below in Ariadne. But there was a difference; he had nearly fifteen months in the Navy, and knew what sort of drudgery and folderol to expect now. He was introduced to the others. There was Peter Carey, a ginger-haired boy of thirteen with the usual modest squirearchy background. There was a gotch-gutted sixteen-year-old pig named Francis Forrester. He was quick to point out that it was the Honorable Francis Forrester, and his elegant manners and his drawling, superior voice made it abundantly clear that he looked on Lewrie’s arrival as another mark of the reduction in tone of their mess.
Lewrie’s other companion was also sixteen, a dark and merry Cornish boy that Lewrie had known slightly long before when posted to the Ariadne after it had become a receiving ship. He and David Avery had gone roaming English Harbor together, and had enjoyed each other’s company, before Avery had joined an armed transport.
Alan carefully removed and folded up his fine new uniform. He packed the waistcoat away for Sunday Divisions, slipped out of his snowy breeches and dug out a ragged pair of slop trousers. He exchanged his silk stockings for cotton, wrapped his best shoes and donned a cracked pair. His worst faded and stained coat he hung up on a peg. Sadly, he packed the hanger away in his open chest and fetched out his dirk, now showing signs of wear around that “best gold-plate pommel.”
“Pretty hanger.” Forrester pouted like a sow, picking it up and studying it. “But your parents should have known better.”
“It was a recent gift,” Alan said, meaning to get off to a fair start, if allowed. “For saving my last captain his ship.”
“Yess,” Forrester drawled. “Avery has been regaling us with the heroism of your derring-do.” He sheathed the hanger and tossed it into Lewrie’s chest like a poor discard at a secondhand shop.
“Did you really kill a man in a duel?” Carey asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes. Dead as cold, boiled mutton. He insulted a young lady of my acquaintance,” Alan boasted, even-toned.
“Carey, we must remember to tremble before the anger of our new manslaughtering Hector,” Forrester said. “Even if he is, by length of service, junior to you. How long at sea, Lewrie?”
“A year. Fifteen months total.”
“Then I am still senior,” Forrester said, pleased to hear it. “June of ’76.”
“We’re not lieutenants, Forrester,” Avery replied. “I actually predate you by a whole month, if the truth be known. We’re all equal here.”
“Ah, the rebellious Adamses and Thomas Paines have been after you again,” Forrester said in a way that Lewrie could only think of as greasy. “Remember that I have the signals and you don’t, so that makes me senior. And I trust that any new errant newlies shall remember that.”
“We had a man who said much the same thing in Ariadne,” Lewrie said, taking a pew on his closed chest. “He died.”
“Would be having the gall to threaten me?” Forrester’s piggy eyes were squinted.
“Now why should I do a thing like that? I’m but stating a fact. You remember me mentioning him, don’t you, Avery?”
“Oh, you mean Mister the Honorable … what was his name?”
“Fotheringfop,” Lewrie said. “Ferdinand Fotheringfop.”
“Choked on his beef bones, didn’t he?” Avery said.
“No, that was Mister the Honorable D’Arcy DeBloat.”
“And what, pray, did he die of?” Avery was playing along, to the great delight of young Carey, who was already stifling a grin.
“Fotheringfop was so elevated an individual, with such an airy opinion of himself that his head swelled one morning at dawn Quarters. We tried to save him and got a gantline to him, but he pulled the maint’gallantmast right out of her. Last seen drifting for Panama. Crew did a little hornpipe of despair at his passing. Sad, it was.” Lewrie pretended to grieve.
Forrester snorted at the foolishness and left the midshipmen’s berth for the upper deck, while Carey dared to laugh out loud and Avery pronounced Lewrie a fellow that would do.
“What a fubsy, crusty thing it is,” Lewrie observed of their mess mate. “What does he expect us to do, carry his scepter for him, or just be his fags?”
“Just a puffed-up dilberry.” Avery shrugged. “Probably afraid we know more than him and show him up before his lord and master.”
“Fat pig,” Carey said, softly.
“Carey, what were the other midshipmen like?” Lewrie asked.
“Dodds was twenty or so. But I’ve never seen anyone drink so much all the time. The captain finally threw him out, said he’d never make an officer, or live long enough to take the exam.”
“Good relations to the captain?” Lewrie probed.
“I think he was a cater-cousin.” Carey frowned. “The other … Montgomery, he was real smart, and nice. He was a year older than me but he knew everything. He got washed overboard in a gale last month north of St. Lucia. He was my friend.” Carey sniffled.
Lewrie shared a look with Avery. They could imagine what the mess had been like for Carey, with one raging sponge in his cups all the time, the brutish Forrester lording it over all the others, and only Montgomery to shield the younger boy. Carey gave no sign that he was a mental giant, or in any way assertive. Just a scared and homesick child, mediocre at best when it came to duty and too small and weak to perform like a real sailor.
“Well, there’s a new order here, by God,” Avery told him with a rap on the shoulder. “Just let the cow-arse try to push his weight around…”
“Of which he has considerable,” Lewrie added.
“Aye, and we’ll fix him,” Avery said. “Right, Lewrie?”
“Amen to that,” Lewrie intoned with mock piety.
“You can’t go too far, though,” Carey said. “I mean, Treghues and Forrester … they’re not related, but you’d think Forrester was his brother.”
“Plays the favorite, does your captain?”
“I shouldn’t say it, but he—”