By the time the weather moderated, and the top-masts could be hoisted back into place and the standing rigging re-mounted to secure them, Lewrie was more than ready to head back to a secure harbour.
* * *
“I’ll have the twenty-five-foot cutter for my needs, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie told the First Officer, turned out in his best shore-going uniform. “You can use the pinnace and the launch t’fetch water and firewood, then the Purser’s fresh supplies.”
“With so little expended since our last port call, I expect we can have everything needful aboard by sundown,” Geoffrey Westcott said as he pulled out his watch to check the time. “And with any luck, that will include a Moroccan bullock and a couple of Spanish hogs for fresh meat, too, sir.”
“Some of those heavenly cured hams that they sell across The Lines, yes!” Lewrie enthused. He looked round the deck and found his cabin-steward, Pettus, and his cook, Yeovill, turned out in their own shore-going best, Yeovill in a civilian hat, a waist-length white-taped and brass-buttoned sailor’s jacket with a red waist-coat underneath, a clean pair of tailored white trousers, and good buckled shoes, with a pair of gaudy-coloured stockings peeking from the trousers’ hem. He had his list, and a purse of Lewrie’s passage money. Pettus was also looking very dashing and nautical, with a laundry bag at his feet. It seemed that the old laundress near Mountjoy’s lodgings had an attractive daughter, so Pettus had taken extreme care with his appearance.
“Wish we had one of those, sir,” Lt. Elmes, who had had the watch as they’d entered harbour, wistfully said, jutting his chin at several merchantmen lying at anchor up by the Old Mole, one of them flying the plain blue flag of the Agent Afloat from the Transport Board. A convoy had come in from England, supply ships bearing shot and powder, salt rations and foodstuffs, and at least two large ships that looked like the right size for troop transports.
“Wish away, Mister Elmes,” Lewrie said, giving them a covetous leer. “Pray, cross yer fingers, spit and whirl about thrice … whatever works.”
“Aye, sir,” Elmes replied in good humour.
“Carry on, Mister Westcott, I’ll be…” Lewrie began.
“Boat ahoy!” Midshipman Spears cried, hailing an approaching rowboat with only one oarsman aboard.
“Letter fer yer Cap’m!” the oarsman yelled back, letting go his oars for a moment to cup his hands round his mouth.
“Come alongside!” Spears shouted, then went through the opened entry-port and down the battens to the mainmast chain platform to take the letter, then scramble back up and deliver it to the quarterdeck.
“Ah, hmm,” Lewrie muttered as he broke the wax seal, unfolded it, and read the quick and cryptic note. “Indeed!”
“Good news, sir?” Westcott asked.
“Could be,” Lewrie said, with a sly smile. “Carry on, sir. I’ll be ashore.”
* * *
Mister Deacon, the bodyguard, answered the door at Mountjoy’s lodgings and let Lewrie in, offering a terse “welcome back, sir” with no hint of a smile, despite the good news in Mountjoy’s note.
“Mister Deacon, well met, again,” Lewrie replied before going up the several flights of stairs. “There’ll be a couple of my men calling, my cabin-steward, and my cook. Don’t break them.”
“I stand warned, sir,” Deacon replied, with a tight grin.
At the top of the stairs, the heavy iron-bound oak door to the lodgings stood half-open, for a change. Lewrie stepped through, giving out a “hallo”, and found Mister Thomas Mountjoy at a desk in his shirtsleeves, flipping through a sheaf of papers and a thick ledger.
“Lewrie!” Mountjoy cried, leaping to his feet and rushing over to welcome him in with a wide grin on his face. “We’ve done it! Well, part of it, or at least one more stop forward.”
“‘A large turnip added to the soup’, your note said?” Lewrie asked with a brow up in query.
“An hellish-big ‘turnip’, yes,” Mountjoy boasted. “Sir, we’ve gotten ourselves a ship! Come out to the rooftop gallery and have a squint at her with my telescope!”
Lewrie tossed his hat on the cushioned settee outside, rushing to the telescope. It was already fixed upon the ship in question, and all he had to do was bend down a bit and put his eye to the ocular.
“She’s the Harmony,” Mountjoy eagerly told him. “Three-masted, as you suggested, so she can load troops into all six boats at once from her chain platforms and shrouds, though she’s not a trooper, but carries general cargo. She’s a touch under two hundred fifty tons, but she was recently re-coppered, I was assured.”
Mountjoy’s telescope was powerful enough to show Lewrie that even still fully laden, Harmony had a strip of new-penny clean copper at her waterline. Her furled and brailed-up sails were as white as if they had just come from a sailmaker’s loft, and her paint had been touched up recently.
“Two tons per man, that’d let us put at least one hundred and twenty-five officers and men aboard her, all told, right?” Mountjoy pressed.
“No more than ninety to one hundred,” Lewrie had to tell him, still studying her. “We’ll have to make room below for about fifty or more sailors to handle the boats, and the rations t’feed ’em all, too. I don’t see a single gun in sight. She sails unarmed?”
Whether a merchant ship could really mount a decent defence if attacked by pirates, an enemy privateer, or a warship, given how few crewmen that cheese-paring owners and captains hired, it was Lewrie’s experience that most of them carried some armament.
Must count on muskets, pikes, cutlasses, and a few swivel guns, Lewrie thought, looking for the forked iron stanchions along the tops of Harmony’s bulwarks in which swivel guns, usually light 2-pounders, would be set if threatened. He saw a grand total of six.
No doubt they’re stowed far below, and haven’t been brought up in ages, Lewrie told himself with a wry grimace; Most-like gone completely to rust, and I doubt if there’s a man in her crew who knows a damned thing about usin’ ’em!
“Well, perhaps she always sails in convoy, under escort, and her owners don’t feel the need for guns,” Mountjoy lamely tried to explain. “Does she really need artillery?” he asked.
“No,” Lewrie said with a shrug, standing back up and turning to face him. “Not as long as she sails with us, Sapphire can protect her. She looks like she has swivel guns, and anything heavier, 6-pounders on wheeled carriages, would just take up deck space.”
“Well, that’s all fine, then,” Mountjoy said, brightening over his new acquisition, and Lewrie’s seeming satisfaction with her. “I’ve found this marvellous sparkling white wine from Portugal, it just came in. Not exactly a champagne, but it gives a fair approximation. Let’s open a bottle and toast our addition to ‘Rock Soup’, hey? Now, where the Devil did I leave that bloody cork puller?”
The search for the requisite implement took several minutes, and it was finally found under a decorative pillow on the upholstered settee in the small salon adjacent to the outdoor gallery.
“Ah, that is spritely!” Lewrie commented after a sip, “not too sweet, either, not like a sparkling German white. Costly? I may go buy a case, if there’s any left t’be had.”
“I’ll show you where,” Mountjoy promised. “Or, as you sailors say, ‘I’ll give you a fair wind’ to it, hah! And no, not dear at all. Nothing like what the ship’s cost me. Well, Peel, and Secret Branch. Harmony is two hundred and thirty tons, but her owners insisted that if she’s to be used in an active military role, they rounded her burthen up to two hundred and fifty tons … evidently, they love round numbers … and demanded twenty-five shillings per ton.”
“Damme!” Lewrie exclaimed. “All our troopers that carried the army to Cape Town last January only cost nineteen!”