“Mister Harcourt,” Lewrie said, returning to the quarterdeck. “You may get us under way, slowly. Once their vessel is around five miles off, we will put about and pretend to chase her past Estepona.”

“Pretend, sir?” Harcourt asked, all a’sea.

“Under-handed, secret Crown doings, sir,” Lewrie sternly told him, “and pray the Good Lord keeps you at arm’s length from such.”

“Aye aye, sir. Get under way, then come about in chase,” Lieutenant Harcourt replied, his curiosity piqued.

“Gallegos, that’s funny,” Midshipman Kibworth said to one of his mates, Midshipman Carey, in a tittery mutter.

“What’s funny, Mister Kibworth?” Lewrie demanded.

“I was told that one of Columbus’s ships was named the Gallegos, sir,” Kibworth cringingly explained. “It means ‘dirty whore’, and to avoid embarassing Queen Isabella, they changed it to Santa Maria.” He could not help blushing red and snickering to dare say a bad word.

“Ah, the further benefits of an education,” Lewrie bemoaned. “I think that’s enough slang Spanish for one day, don’t you?”

“Ehm, aye aye, sir,” Kibworth said, with an audible gulp.

“Carry on, Mister Harcourt,” Lewrie said. “I’ll be aft ’til the change of watch.”

Moppin’ tea off my waist-coat, Lewrie thought; And airin’ the stench o’ spies from my cabins.

BOOK THREE

Be frolic then

Let cannon roar

Frighting the wide heaven.

“TO THE VIRGINIAN VOYAGE”

MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563–1631)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Just where in the bloody world did ye dredge him up?” Lewrie asked Thomas Mountjoy a few days later as they sat in the lush bower of greenery on Mountjoy’s roof gallery.

“It does take all kinds,” Mountjoy said, with a sigh, “doesn’t it? Personally, I don’t think Mister Romney Marsh will last a week on the road to Madrid, but I had no say in it. Cummings, I requested, for I know he’s good, for an amateur ‘yachtsman’. People senior to me and Mister Peel pushed Marsh on me, despite Peel’s misgivings.”

“Dammit, Mountjoy, as soon as the Spanish arrest the fool, the authorities’ll suspect everyone who doesn’t shout praise for France, and start roundin’ them up, too,” Lewrie groused. “They’ll be seein’ British spies in their toilets. And what the hell’s a ‘yachtsman’?”

“Idle rich, and titled dilettantes who muck about in sea-going boats,” Mountjoy explained. “Or race each other in small ones.”

“They go t’sea for fun?” Lewrie gawped in amazement.

“There’s some ‘New Men’ of industry who’d cruise the world if there wasn’t a war on, in their own ships the size of trading brigs or schooners,” Mountjoy went on, finding it amusing, and an example of how people wasted their new-made fortunes. As far as he and Lewrie knew, only the King had an official Royal Yacht, which never left the Thames, and had rarely ever been used.

“Of all people t’give lessons on cloak and dagger play-acting, the Foreign Office chose Pulteney Plumb! Jesus!” Lewrie carped.

“Without Mister Twigg’s cunning, now he’s retired and doesn’t even consult any longer,” Mountjoy said with a glum shrug. “There are all sorts of hen-headed men in charge, who have their own ideas about fieldcraft. At least, Cummings and Marsh also brought along lashings of money for me to work with. Give London long enough, or become too desperate for results, and I expect they’ll be ordering me to dress up in women’s clothing, with lessons on how to flutter a fan!”

“Now there’s an ugly picture!” Lewrie joshed, making a face.

He had a mental image of Thomas Mountjoy in a flounced red gown with tall hair combs, a black lace mantilla, with a rose in his teeth, doing the flamenco all the way to Madrid, and it wasn’t pretty!

Mountjoy had been sprawled on the cushioned settee, wineglass in hand. He sat the glass down and rose to cross the gallery to his telescope, bent, and scanned the harbour.

“Lewrie,” he said over his shoulder, “if all else fails, what does it cost to hire a ship? How does Admiralty do it, and how much might it set me back?”

“Hmm, something large enough for trooping?” Lewrie mused, feet up on a hassock and slumped into a deep padded chair. “They usually run about three hundred fifty tons, and if their bottoms are properly coppered, the Transport Board pays their owners nineteen shillings a month, maybe a full pound per ton, these days. Skin-flint owners try to get by with wood-sheathed bottoms, or no protection at all, and they go for less. But, I wouldn’t recommend ’em. Copper sheathing’s your man, even if they’re hard t’find. Expensive, though.”

“That’s … four thousand two hundred pounds a year,” Mountjoy said with a groan. “Damn! And the upkeep and pay for master and crew atop that? Damn.”

“Well, Admiralty usually pays the owners and ship’s husbands, the investors,” Lewrie explained, idly wondering if there was enough of that light white Spanish wine left in the bottle for a top-up, or did they need to open a new one. “So the pay, rations, and necessary ship’s stores come out of that, and if they get damaged, the Navy will repair them. From that sum, the master gets his passage money for unexpected expenses, and re-victualling.”

“How many troops can they cram aboard a ship that big, a three hundred fifty-tonner?” Mountjoy pressed, coming back to the sitting area to take a squint at the bottle, too, and dribble a bit into both their glasses.

“The goin’ rate’s one soldier for every two tons, ah thankee,” Lewrie told him. “Now if we only had some Swedish ice for this wine.”

“No more to be had, and it isn’t even high summer, yet, there’s a pity,” Mountjoy said, looking gloomy. “Something smaller, say, about three hundred tons, that’d be one hundred fifty soldiers … three companies? Just about what we planned for, and the lease would cost less.”

“London didn’t send you that much, did they?” Lewrie asked.

“No, they didn’t,” Mountjoy groused. “If you can’t capture one that’s suitable, and if Middleton at the yards can’t contract with a ship under Transport Board authorisation, then I suppose we’re stuck.”

“Well, don’t look longingly at me!” Lewrie said with a laugh. “I can’t speak for Admiralty, either.”

For a moment, Mountjoy had looked at Lewrie with a gleam of inspiration in his eyes, just as quickly dashed.

“I’ll have another go at it, then,” Lewrie promised. “Take on stores, re-victual, and give my crew a day of liberty, and I’ll head out to sea, again. El diablo negro might find better pickings further East, nearer Cartagena, Valencia, maybe even Barcelona.”

“El diablo negro?” Mountjoy asked.

“That’s what the people in the last vessel I burned called us,” Lewrie said, tossing the last of his wine to “heel-taps” and getting to his feet. “I’d best go see Captain Middleton at the dockyard, too, and see how he’s coming with my boats and nets.”

“Rock Soup,” Mountjoy glumly mused, then got to his feet to see Lewrie down to the street. “I suppose I should go to my offices, too.”

*   *   *

When first Lewrie spoke with Captain Robert Middleton about his boats, he had requested them to be over thirty feet long, more like his launch, or the wider-bodied 32-foot barges that he’d used in the Channel in 1804 when experimenting with “catamaran torpedoes”, and which he had kept (since HM Dockyards had never officially asked for them to be returned!) and used on raids along the coast of Spanish Florida in 1805, and to ferry Marines and sailors ashore at Cape Town and Buenos Aires the year before.

To get soldiers out of the boats and onto the beach quickly, he had wondered if there might be some way to square off the bows and make some sort of ramps, but Middleton and his shipwrights had laughed that to scorn. The sketches that Lewrie and Geoffrey Westcott, a dab-hand artist in his own right, brought which limned boats with high gunn’ls behind which the oarsmen would row through square ports, like ancient Greek or Roman ships, with ramps like gangways that could be extended over the bows, had made the shipwrights shiver in dread of even trying to build boats which could drown everyone aboard in a twinkling.